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 Fundamentals of
Charged Particle
Transport in Gases and
Condensed Matter
Monograph Series in Physical Sciences
Recent books in the series:
Exchange Bias: From Thin Film to Nanogranular and Bulk Systems
Surender Kumar Sharma

Fundamentals of Charged Particle Transport in Gases and

Condensed Matter
Robert Robson, Ronald White, and Malte Hildebrandt
 Fundamentals of
Charged Particle
Transport in Gases and
Condensed Matter

By
Robert E. Robson, Ronald D. White and
Malte Hildebrandt
Cover Image: Simulations of energy deposition of positrons in liquid water, often used in modeling as a
surrogate for human tissue. Points of higher (lower) energy deposition are indicated by blue (red) spheres,
while trajectories of positrons between collisions, represented by black lines, are biased towards the direc-
tion of an applied electric field. Eventually the positrons slow down sufficiently to annihilate with the elec-
trons of the medium, producing two back-to-back gamma rays, as in PET (positron emission tomography)
investigations. (Courtesy of Wade Tattersall)
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Robson, R. (Robert), 1946- author. | White, Ronald, author. |
Hildebrandt, Malte, author.
Title: Fundamentals of charged particle transport in gases and condensed
matter / Robert Robson, Ronald White, Malte Hildebrandt.
Description: Boca Raton, FL : CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group, [2017] |
Series: Monograph series in physical sciences
Identifiers: LCCN 2017011666| ISBN 9781498736367 (hardback ; alk. paper) |
ISBN 149873636X (hardback ; alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Kinetic theory of gases. | Transport theory. | Fluid
dynamics. | Condensed matter.
Classification: LCC QC175.13 .R63 2017 | DDC 533/.7–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017011666

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 This book is dedicated to Carola,
Marcella and Isabelle,
and
to the memory of Bhala Paranjape,
Edward A. Mason, Kurt Suchy
and Peter Nicoletopoulos
 Contents

Monograph Series in Physical Sciences ................................................. xvii

Preface ............................................................................................ xix

About the Authors............................................................................. xxi

Glossary of Symbols and Acronyms..................................................... xxiii

1 Introduction ............................................................................... 1
1.1 Boltzmann’s Equation .................................................... 1
1.1.1 A little history .................................................... 1
1.1.2 From the “golden” era of gas discharges to
modern times..................................................... 1
1.1.3 Transport processes: Traditional and modern
descriptions ....................................................... 3
1.1.4 Theme of this book ............................................. 4
1.2 Solving Boltzmann’s Equation ........................................ 4
1.2.1 The path to solution............................................ 4
1.2.2 A complementary approach: Fluid modelling ....... 6
1.3 Experiment and Simulation ............................................ 6
1.3.1 An idealized apparatus ....................................... 6
1.4 About this Book ............................................................ 9
Additional General Reading Materials ..................................... 9

I Kinetic Theory Foundations 13

2 Basic Theoretical Concepts: Phase and Configuration Space........... 15

2.1 Preliminaries ................................................................. 15
2.1.1 Configuration and velocity space ......................... 15
2.1.2 Distribution function and averaging .................... 16
2.1.3 Polar coordinates and symmetries ....................... 18
2.2 Phase Space and Kinetic Equation ................................... 20
2.2.1 Trajectories in phase space .................................. 20
2.2.2 Kinetic equation in phase space ........................... 21
2.2.3 Equilibrium ....................................................... 23

vii
viii Contents

2.3 Kinetic Equations for a Mixture ....................................... 23

2.3.1 The general kinetic equation................................ 23
2.3.2 Dilute particles in a neutral medium .................... 23
2.3.3 Locality, instantaneity, and linearity ..................... 24
2.4 Moment Equations ........................................................ 24
2.4.1 The general moment equation ............................. 24
2.4.2 Equation of continuity ........................................ 25
2.5 Concluding Remarks ..................................................... 25

3 Boltzmann Collision Integral, H-Theorem, and Fokker–Planck

Equation ................................................................................... 27
3.1 Classical Collision Dynamics .......................................... 27
3.1.1 Conservation laws .............................................. 27
3.1.2 Transformation of coordinates ............................. 28
3.2 Differential Cross Section ............................................... 28
3.2.1 Basic collision parameters ................................... 28
3.2.2 Symmetries in space and time ............................. 30
3.2.3 Partial cross sections ........................................... 32
3.2.4 Calculation of cross sections ................................ 32
3.3 Boltzmann Collision Integral .......................................... 33
3.3.1 Collision moment ............................................... 33
3.3.2 Fundamental assumptions .................................. 34
( )(1,2)
∂f
3.3.3 Calculating ∂t ............................................ 35
col
3.4 Simple Gas .................................................................... 36
3.4.1 Classical Boltzmann kinetic equation ................... 36
3.4.2 Summational invariants ...................................... 36
3.4.3 H-theorem, equilibrium, and the Maxwellian
distribution........................................................ 37
3.5 Fokker–Planck Kinetic Equation ...................................... 39
3.5.1 Small deflection collisions ................................... 39
3.5.2 Coulomb scattering ............................................ 40
3.6 Concluding Remarks ..................................................... 41

4 Interaction Potentials and Cross Sections ..................................... 43

4.1 Introduction .................................................................. 43
4.2 Classical Scattering Theory ............................................. 43
4.2.1 Differential and partial cross sections ................... 43
4.2.2 Inverse power law potentials............................... 45
4.3 Inverse Fourth-Power Law Potential ............................... 47
4.3.1 Polarization potential ......................................... 47
4.3.2 Constant collision frequency ............................... 48
4.4 Realistic Interaction Potentials ........................................ 48
4.4.1 The Mason–Schamp potential.............................. 48
4.4.2 Momentum transfer collision frequency ............... 49
Contents ix

4.5 Calculation of Cross Sections for a General Interaction

Potential ....................................................................... 50
4.5.1 Transformation of variables ................................. 50
4.5.2 Orbiting, critical energy, and cross sections ........... 51
4.5.3 Determination of ϵc ............................................ 52
4.6 Cross Sections for Specific Interaction Potentials ............... 53
4.6.1 Numerical methods and techniques ..................... 53
4.6.2 Power law potentials .......................................... 54
4.6.3 Mason–Schamp (12-6-4) potential ........................ 55
4.7 Concluding Remarks ..................................................... 58

5 Kinetic Equations for Dilute Particles in Gases.............................. 59

5.1 Low Density Charged Particles in Gases .......................... 59
5.1.1 Free diffusion or swarm limit .............................. 59
5.1.2 The linear Boltzmann kinetic equation ................. 59
5.1.3 Moment equations ............................................. 61
5.2 Charge Exchange ........................................................... 61
5.2.1 Collision model.................................................. 61
5.2.2 Polarization potential and
Bhatnagar–Gross–Krook equation ........................ 62
5.3 Collision Term for Extremes of Mass Ratio ....................... 63
5.3.1 Fractional energy exchange ................................. 63
5.3.2 Heavy ions and Rayleigh limit............................. 64
5.3.3 Light charged particles and Lorentz gas ............... 66
5.4 Inelastic Collisions ......................................................... 71
5.4.1 Wang Chang–Uhlenbeck–de Boer collision
term .................................................................. 71
5.4.2 Semi-classical and quantum collision operators..... 73
5.4.3 Inelastic collision term for light particles............... 75
5.5 Non-Conservative, Reactive Collisions ............................ 76
5.5.1 Classification of reactive collisions ....................... 76
5.5.2 Notation ............................................................ 77
5.5.3 Particle loss collision term ................................... 78
5.5.4 Electron impact ionization................................... 79
5.6 Two-Term Kinetic Equations for a Lorentz Gas ................. 79
5.7 Concluding Remarks ..................................................... 80

6 Charged Particles in Condensed Matter ....................................... 81

6.1 Charge Carriers in Crystalline Semiconductors ................. 81
6.2 Amorphous Materials .................................................... 81
6.2.1 Trapping and the relaxation function.................... 81
6.2.2 The kinetic equation for amorphous materials....... 82
6.3 Coherent Scattering in Soft-Condensed Matter ................. 84
6.3.1 A model of coherent scattering ............................ 84
x Contents

6.3.2 Scattering theory ................................................ 86

6.3.3 Structure function .............................................. 88
6.3.4 Non-polar molecules .......................................... 91
6.3.5 Cross sections .................................................... 92
6.4 Kinetic Equation for Charged Particles in Soft-Condensed
Matter .......................................................................... 93
6.4.1 The general expression for collisional rate of
change .............................................................. 93
6.4.2 Kinetic and moment equations ............................ 95
6.4.3 Dilute gas limit .................................................. 96
6.4.4 Light particles .................................................... 97
6.5 Concluding Remarks ..................................................... 104

II Fluid Modelling in Configuration Space 105

7 Fluid Modelling: Foundations and First Applications.................. 107

7.1 Moment Equations for Gases .......................................... 107
7.1.1 General moment equation ................................... 107
7.1.2 Equation of continuity ........................................ 108
7.1.3 Momentum balance equation .............................. 108
7.1.4 Energy balance equation ..................................... 110
7.1.5 External force terms............................................ 111
7.1.6 Notation and terminology ................................... 111
7.1.7 The problem of closure ....................................... 112
7.2 Constant Collision Frequency Model ............................... 112
7.2.1 The fundamental equations ................................. 112
7.2.2 Convective time derivative.................................. 113
7.2.3 Alternate form of the fluid equations.................... 113
7.3 Momentum Transfer Approximation ............................... 114
7.4 Stationary, Spatially Uniform Case .................................. 115
7.4.1 Drift velocity and Wannier relation ...................... 115
7.5 Transport in an Electric Field .......................................... 116
7.5.1 Mobility coefficient............................................. 116
7.5.2 Solution of the moment equations........................ 117
7.5.3 Scaling .............................................................. 118
7.5.4 Sample calculations ............................................ 118
7.5.5 Higher order moments ....................................... 121
7.5.6 Simplifications for very light particles .................. 122
7.5.7 A short note on tensor representation ................... 123
7.6 Spatial Variations, Hydrodynamic Regime, and Diffusion
Coefficients ................................................................... 123
7.6.1 Linearized moment equations, generalized
Einstein relations................................................ 123
7.6.2 Example for light particles .................................. 126
Contents xi

7.6.3 Anisotropy in configuration and velocity

spaces ............................................................... 126
7.6.4 Fick’s law and the diffusion equation ................... 127
7.6.5 Local field approximation ................................... 128
7.7 Diffusion of Charge Carriers in Semiconductors ............... 128

8 Fluid Models with Inelastic Collisions ....................................... 129

8.1 Introduction .................................................................. 129
8.2 Moment Equations with Inelastic Collisions ..................... 129
8.2.1 The general moment equation ............................. 129
8.2.2 Equation of continuity ........................................ 130
8.2.3 Momentum balance ............................................ 130
8.2.4 Energy balance equation ..................................... 132
8.3 Representation of the Average Inelastic Collision
Frequencies ................................................................... 135
8.3.1 Definition of averages ......................................... 135
8.3.2 Relationship between inelastic and superelastic
collision frequencies ........................................... 135
8.3.3 The smoothing function ...................................... 136
8.4 Hydrodynamic Regime .................................................. 138
8.4.1 Weak-gradient fluid equations ............................. 138
8.4.2 Spatially uniform case ........................................ 138
8.4.3 Light particles, cold gas ...................................... 139
8.5 Negative Differential Conductivity .................................. 140
8.5.1 NDC criterion .................................................... 140
8.5.2 Model calculation ............................................... 141
8.5.3 GERs in the presence of NDC .............................. 142

9 Fluid Modelling with Loss and Creation Processes...................... 143

9.1 Sources and Sinks of Particles ......................................... 143
9.1.1 Non-conservative collisions in gases .................... 143
9.1.2 Non-conservative processes in condensed
matter ............................................................... 144
9.2 Reacting Particle Swarms in Gases .................................. 145
9.2.1 Balance equation including non-conservative
collisions ........................................................... 145
9.2.2 Basic balance equations....................................... 147
9.2.3 Approximation of the reactive terms .................... 147
9.2.4 Full set of fluid equations .................................... 149
9.2.5 Closing the moment equations ............................ 149
9.3 Spatially Homogeneous Systems ..................................... 150
9.3.1 Notation ............................................................ 150
9.3.2 Hot atom chemistry ............................................ 151
9.3.3 Reactive heating and cooling ............................... 152
xii Contents

9.4 Reactive Effects and Spatial Variation .............................. 156

9.4.1 Hydrodynamic regime........................................ 156
9.4.2 Diffusion equation and the two types of transport
coefficients......................................................... 157
9.4.3 Light particles .................................................... 160

10 Fluid Modelling in Condensed Matter ....................................... 163

10.1 Introduction .................................................................. 163
10.2 Moment Equations Including Coherent and Incoherent
Scattering Processes ....................................................... 163
10.2.1 Basic fluid equations........................................... 163
10.2.2 Structure-modified momentum transfer collision
frequency .......................................................... 164
10.3 Structure-Modified Empirical Relationships ..................... 166
10.3.1 Mobility and Wannier energy relations ................ 167
10.3.2 Structure-modified GERs .................................... 169

III Solutions of Kinetic Equations 173

11 Strategies and Regimes for Solution of Kinetic Equations............. 175
11.1 The Kinetic Theory Program ........................................... 175
11.1.1 General statement of the problem ........................ 175
11.1.2 Fluid analysis versus rigorous solution................. 176
11.1.3 Strategies for reducing complexity ....................... 177
11.1.4 Roadmap to solution of the kinetic equation ......... 177
11.2 Identifying Symmetries .................................................. 177
11.2.1 Plane-parallel geometry ...................................... 178
11.2.2 Spherical geometry............................................. 179
11.2.3 Cylindrical geometry .......................................... 179
11.3 Kinetic Theory Operators ............................................... 180
11.3.1 The collision operator and its adjoint.................... 180
11.3.2 Phase space operator and adjoint ......................... 182
11.4 Boundary Conditions and Uniqueness ............................. 183
11.4.1 Uniqueness theorem ........................................... 183
11.4.2 Approximations ................................................. 185
11.5 Eigenvalue Problems in Kinetic Theory ........................... 186
11.6 Hydrodynamic Regime .................................................. 188
11.6.1 Weak fields and Chapman–Enskog
approximation scheme........................................ 188
11.6.2 Beyond weak fields ............................................ 188
11.6.3 The hierarchy of velocity space equations ............. 189
11.6.4 Diffusion equation and transport coefficients ........ 191
11.6.5 Limitations of the density gradient expansion ....... 192
11.7 Benchmark Models ........................................................ 192
11.7.1 Constant collision frequency (Maxwell) model .... 193
Contents xiii

11.7.2 Light particles (quasi-Lorentz gas) ...................... 193

11.7.3 Relaxation time model ....................................... 193

12 Numerical Techniques for Solution of Boltzmann’s Equation ....... 195

12.1 Introduction .................................................................. 195
12.2 The Burnett Function Representation ............................... 195
12.2.1 Representation of the directional dependence in
velocity space .................................................... 196
12.2.2 Representation in speed space ............................. 196
12.2.3 Decomposition in velocity space .......................... 197
12.2.4 Moments of the Boltzmann equation in the
Burnett representation ........................................ 198
12.2.5 Burnett function representation of Boltzmann’s
equation ............................................................ 199
12.3 Summary of Solution Procedure ...................................... 201
12.4 Convergence and the Choice of Weighting Function ......... 202
12.4.1 Convergence in the l-index ................................. 202
12.4.2 Choice of weighting function............................... 202
12.5 Ion Transport in Gases ................................................... 203
12.5.1 Convergence in the l-index .................................. 203
12.5.2 Convergence in the mass ratio expansion ............. 207

13 Boundary Conditions, Diffusion Cooling, and a Variational

Method................................................................................... 209
13.1 Influence of Boundaries .................................................. 209
13.1.1 Boundary effects, diffusion cooling, and
heating .............................................................. 209
13.1.2 Pressure variation and practical considerations ..... 210
13.1.3 Theoretical considerations................................... 211
13.2 Plane-Parallel Geometry ................................................. 212
13.3 The Cavalleri Experiment ............................................... 214
13.3.1 Influence of boundaries ...................................... 214
13.3.2 Kinetic theory .................................................... 214
13.3.3 Diffusion coefficient as an eigenvalue................... 216
13.4 Variational Method ........................................................ 217
13.4.1 Kinetic equation and variational principle ............ 217
13.4.2 Minimizing the functional ................................... 218
13.4.3 Model calculations and diffusion cooling.............. 219
13.5 Diffusion Cooling in an Alternating Electric Field ............. 221
13.5.1 Variational principle for the time-averaged kinetic
equation ............................................................ 221
13.5.2 Model calculations and diffusion cooling in an
alternating field.................................................. 223
13.6 Concluding Remarks ..................................................... 225
xiv Contents

14 An Analytically Solvable Model ................................................ 227

14.1 Introduction .................................................................. 227
14.2 Relaxation Time Model .................................................. 227
14.3 Weak Gradients and the Diffusion Equation ..................... 228
14.3.1 Near-equilibrium case ........................................ 228
14.3.2 Arbitrary fields, density gradient expansion ......... 229
14.3.3 Solution of the diffusion equation ........................ 230
14.4 Solution of the Kinetic Equation ...................................... 230
14.4.1 Transformed equation......................................... 230
14.4.2 Asymptotic expressions ...................................... 233
14.4.3 Calculation of averages ....................................... 234
14.4.4 Validity of the diffusion equation ......................... 235
14.5 Relaxation Time Model and Diffusion Equation for an
Amorphous Medium ..................................................... 236
14.5.1 Modified BGK kinetic equation with memory ....... 236
14.5.2 Solution for the time-of-flight experiment ............. 237
14.6 Concluding Remarks ..................................................... 240

IV Special Topics 241

15 Temporal Non-Locality ............................................................ 243

15.1 Introduction .................................................................. 243
15.2 Symmetries and Harmonics ............................................ 243
15.3 Solution of Boltzmann’s Equation for Electrons in AC
Electric Fields ................................................................ 246
15.4 Moment Equations for Electrons in AC Electric Fields ....... 248
15.5 Transport Properties in AC Electric Fields ........................ 250
15.5.1 Anomalous anisotropic diffusion ......................... 251
15.6 Concluding Remarks ..................................................... 253

16 The Franck–Hertz Experiment .................................................. 255

16.1 Introduction .................................................................. 255
16.2 The Experiment and Its Interpretation ............................. 255
16.2.1 The original arrangement.................................... 255
16.2.2 Traditional model ............................................... 257
16.2.3 Results and interpretation ................................... 258
16.3 Periodic Structures—The Essence of the Experiment ......... 263
16.4 Fluid Model Analysis ..................................................... 264
16.5 Kinetic Theory .............................................................. 265
16.5.1 The kinetic equation ........................................... 265
16.5.2 Eigenvalue analysis ............................................ 266
16.6 Numerical Results ......................................................... 269
16.6.1 Numerical procedure.......................................... 269
16.6.2 Mercury ........................................................... 269
Contents xv

16.6.3 Neon ................................................................. 271

16.7 Concluding Remarks ..................................................... 271

17 Positron Transport in Soft-Condensed Matter with Application

to PET .................................................................................... 273
17.1 Why Anti-Matter Matters ............................................... 273
17.2 Positron Emission Tomography ...................................... 274
17.2.1 The nature of PET .............................................. 274
17.2.2 Calculation of positron range .............................. 275
17.3 Kinetic Theory for Light Particles in Soft Matter ............... 276
17.3.1 Structure-modified cross sections ......................... 276
17.3.2 Two-term analysis .............................................. 276
17.3.3 Multi-term analysis ............................................ 277
17.3.4 Fluid analysis .................................................... 277
17.4 Kinetic Theory of Positrons in a PET Environment ............ 277
17.4.1 The model ........................................................ 277
17.4.2 Two-term equations............................................ 278
17.4.3 Solution for spherical symmetry .......................... 280
17.4.4 Complete solution .............................................. 283
17.5 Calculation of the Positron Range ................................... 284
17.5.1 Definition of positron range ................................ 284
17.5.2 Evaluation of the summation............................... 284
17.5.3 Numerical example ............................................ 286
17.5.4 Concluding remarks ........................................... 287

18 Transport in Electric and Magnetic Fields and Particle Detectors .. 289

18.1 Introduction .................................................................. 289
18.2 Single, Free Particle Motion in Electric and Magnetic
Fields ........................................................................... 289
18.3 Transport Theory in 𝐄 and 𝐁 Fields ................................. 290
18.4 Symmetries ................................................................... 292
18.4.1 Hydrodynamic regime: Transport coefficients ....... 292
18.4.2 Symmetries in velocity space: A numerical
example ............................................................ 293
18.5 The Fluid Approach ....................................................... 296
18.5.1 Spatially homogeneous conditions: Wannier
relation, extended Tonk’s theorem, and
equivalent field concept ...................................... 298
18.5.2 Spatially inhomogeneous conditions: GERs,
gradient energy vector ........................................ 300
18.6 Gaseous Radiation Detectors .......................................... 302
18.6.1 Basic processes ................................................... 302
18.6.2 Choice of gas filling ............................................ 303
18.6.3 Working principle of a drift chamber.................... 308
xvi Contents

19 Muons in Gases and Condensed Matter ..................................... 311

19.1 Muon versus Electron Transport ..................................... 311
19.2 Muon Beam Compression .............................................. 312
19.3 Aliasing of Muon Transport Data .................................... 313
19.3.1 Why aliasing is necessary.................................... 313
19.3.2 The general prescription for aliasing .................... 314
19.3.3 Calculation of the mobility of μ+ in H2 ................. 315
19.4 Muon-Catalyzed Fusion ................................................. 316
19.4.1 Cold versus hot fusion ........................................ 316
19.4.2 μCF cycle ........................................................... 317
19.4.3 Factors limiting the efficiency of μCF.................... 318
19.4.4 Kinetic and fluid analysis ................................... 319
19.4.5 Observations and challenges for μCF.................... 321

20 Concluding Remarks................................................................ 323

20.1 Summary ...................................................................... 323
20.2 Further Challenges ........................................................ 324
20.2.1 Heavy particles in soft matter .............................. 324
20.2.2 Beyond point particles ........................................ 325
20.2.3 Relativistic kinetic theory .................................... 325
20.2.4 Partially ionized plasmas .................................... 326
20.3 Unresolved Issues .......................................................... 327
20.3.1 The (e, H2 ) controversy........................................ 327
20.3.2 Striations ........................................................... 328

V Exercises and Appendices 331

Exercises ........................................................................................ 333

Appendix A Comparison of Kinetic Theory and Quantum Mechanics ........ 361

Appendix B Inelastic and Ionization Collision Operators for Light

Particles....................................................................... 363

Appendix C The Dual Eigenvalue Problem ........................................... 369

Appendix D Derivation of the Exact Expression for n̂ p (k) ........................ 373

Appendix E Physical Constants and Useful Formulas ............................ 375

References....................................................................................... 377

Index ............................................................................................. 393

Monograph Series in Physical Sciences

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xvii
 Preface

The foundations of modern transport theory were laid 150 years ago in
a seminal paper presented to the Royal Society of London by J. Clerk
Maxwell. He formulated the equations of change for the physical prop-
erties of a gas, represented as moments or averages over a velocity distri-
bution function and paid particular attention to the influence of collisions.
Six years later, Ludwig Boltzmann, undoubtedly influenced by Maxwell’s
results, presented a kinetic equation to the German Physical Society in
Berlin, whose solution furnished the required distribution function. In
spite of early criticism and subsequent intense scrutiny, Boltzmann’s equa-
tion has withstood the test of time and has gone on to become a main-
stay in the field of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, in general, and
charged particle transport, in particular, the subject of this book. The key
to the success and longevity of Boltzmann’s equation is not only its ability
to furnish accurate theoretical values of experimentally measured quan-
tities, but also its remarkable flexibility and adaptability to systems and
physics that Boltzmann could not possibly have foreseen. Thus, there are
generalizations of the kinetic equation to condensed matter, as discussed
in this book, and to quantum and relativistic systems, discussed elsewhere.
In addition, there are many adaptations and applications of Boltzmann’s
equation to traditional and contemporary areas of basic physics research
and technology. To take just one example of cutting edge science: laser
acceleration of particles to very high energies over distances several orders
of magnitude smaller than conventional accelerators has been modelled
through methods which are similar, at least in principle, to the ideas of
Boltzmann and Maxwell. It would take several volumes to do justice to
all of the fields on which the Boltzmann equation has had an impact and
any single exposition, like the present, is necessarily circumscribed. Nev-
ertheless, the scope of this book is broad and, moreover, the treatment is
unique in that we provide a unified approach to the transport theory of
particles of various types (electrons, ions, atoms, positrons, and muons) in
various media (gases, soft-condensed matter, and amorphous materials).
The applications are many and diverse, ranging from traditional drift tube
experiments, positron emission tomography, and muon-catalyzed fusion,
through to recent developments in materials physics.
One of the problems in writing a book such as this has been to over-
come the perception that transport theory, beyond the simplistic mean free
path arguments of some undergraduate books and courses, is somehow

xix
xx Preface

excessively difficult. On the one hand, it is true that a rigorous solution

of the Boltzmann kinetic equation in phase space requires sophisticated
mathematics and numerical procedures, and even the senior author of a
well-known, formidable treatise on kinetic theory is reputed to have com-
pared the exercise to “chewing glass.” On the other hand, the original
approach of Maxwell, using moment or “fluid” equations in configuration
space, provides a complementary, semi-quantitative picture from which
it is possible to obtain physical understanding while maintaining rigour.
Both methods are employed in this book to provide a comprehensive treat-
ment of charged particle transport phenomena.
The material has formed the basis of lecture courses given over the
past 10 years in Australia and the United States at the senior undergradu-
ate and graduate student level.
We thank Professor Michael Morrison of the University of Oklahoma;
Professor Zoran Petrovic of the Institute of Physics, Belgrade; Professor
Toshiaki Makabe of Keio University; and Dr. Bernhard Schmidt, orig-
inally at the University of Heidelberg and nowadays at DESY, Ham-
burg, for stimulating discussions and encouragement over many years.
The dedication and contributions of the past and current staff, post-
doctoral researchers, and post-graduate students at James Cook Univer-
sity cannot be understated. Particular thanks go to Kevin Ness, Bo Li,
Sasa Dujko, Daniel Cocks, Gregory Boyle, Bronson Philippa, Wade Tat-
tersall, Peter Stokes, Madalyn Casey, and Nathan Garland. The support of
the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Paul Scherrer Institut, the
Australian Research Council, and James Cook and Griffith Universities is
gratefully acknowledged.
The authors thank the publishers of “Introductory Transport Theory
for Charged Particles in Gases,” by R.E. Robson, Copyright 2006, World
Scientific Publishing Company Pty. Ltd, for granting us permission to
adapt and reproduce parts of this publication in the present book.
 About the Authors

Robert Robson obtained his PhD in theoretical

physics in 1972 at the Australian National University,
Canberra. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Uni-
versity of Alberta, Canada, he went on to lecture and
research in physics and meteorology in Australia,
the United States, Japan, and Europe. He was an
Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University
of Düsseldorf, Germany and held the Hitachi Chair
of Electrical Engineering at Keio University, Japan.
His most recent research has been on soft-condensed
matter and amorphous semiconductors at James Cook University, Aus-
tralia, and modelling relativistic electron beams in plasma-based accelera-
tors at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), Hamburg. He is a dis-
tinguished member of the Australian Association of von Humboldt Fel-
lows, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Royal Mete-
orological Society.
Ronald White obtained his PhD in theoretical
physics in 1997 with a study of electron transport in
gases relevant to plasma processing studies at James
Cook University. After research appointments in
Australia, Japan, and the United States, he returned
to James Cook University where he took up a lec-
tureship in 2002 in the Mathematics Department. He
was promoted to full Professor in 2015 and is cur-
rently the Head of Physical Sciences at James Cook University, which
encompasses the Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry Departments. His
research interests are focused on the non-equilibrium transport of charged
particles in gases, soft-condensed matter, liquids, and organic matter.

xxi
xxii About the Authors

Malte Hildebrandt studied physics at the University

of Heidelberg, Germany, and worked for his diploma
thesis on electron swarm experiments. In 1999, he
completed his PhD on the development of particle
detectors for high energy physics experiments. He
went on to a postdoctoral position at the University
of Zürich, Switzerland, and moved later to the Paul
Scherrer Institut, Switzerland. Since 2009, he has been
Head of the Detector Group of the Laboratory for Par-
ticle Physics at the Paul Scherrer Institut. His work focuses on particle
detectors, in particular, gaseous detectors, for charged particles and neu-
trons.
 Glossary of Symbols and Acronyms

Symbol Meaning

𝐚 external force per unit mass

√
α scaling factor for velocity kmT
B
b impact parameter
χ scattering angle in centre of mass
𝖣 diffusion tensor (starred quantities are “flux” while
non-starred are “bulk”)
ϵ energy
ε spatially uniform energy
Ee or Eeff equivalent of effective electric field
f (𝐯), f0 (𝐯0 ) particle and neutral velocity distribution functions
ϕ(τ) relaxation function for de-trapping
ϕ(ν,l)
m (𝐯) Burnett function
𝐠, 𝐆 relative and centre-of-mass velocities
γ gradient energy parameter
Γ particle flux
I, U electric current and applied voltage
J, J† collision operator and its adjoint
𝐉q heat flux vector
K,  mobility and reduced mobility coefficients
Kj spectral wave number
λD Debye length
m, m0 particle and neutral molecular masses
n, n0 particle and neutral number densities
N total particle number
νm , νe momentum and energy-transfer collision frequencies
ν⃖⃗i , ν⃖⃖i inelastic and superelastic collision frequencies
νI ionization collision frequency
ν∗ reactive loss collision frequency
νm
̃ structure-modified collision frequency
ω, ΩL angular frequency of applied electric field, gyrofrequency of
magnetic field
Ω inelastic collision transfer term
𝖯 pressure tensor
σ(g, χ) differential cross section

xxiii
xxiv Glossary of Symbols and Acronyms

Symbol Meaning

σ(l) , σm lth partial and momentum-transfer cross sections

S(K, Ω) structure function
T, T0 , Tb particle, neutral, and basis temperatures
𝐯, 𝐯0 velocities of particles and neutrals
⟨⟩ , ⟨⟩0 averages over particle and neutral velocities
⟨𝐯⟩ average particle velocity
𝐯d , 𝐯∗ d
bulk and flux drift velocities
𝐯̂ unit vector in direction of 𝐯 ⟨ ⟩
⟨𝐯𝐯⟩ second rank tensor with components vi vj
V(r) interaction potential
w(α, v) Maxwellian distribution function
(l)
Ym (̂
𝐯) spherical harmonic
Z plasma dispersion function

BGK Bhatnagar–Gross–Krook
μCF muon-catalyzed fusion
PET positron emission tomography
MTT momentum transfer theory
GER generalized Einstein relation
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

1.1 Boltzmann’s Equation

1.1.1 A little history
In 1872, Ludwig Boltzmann proposed a kinetic equation of the form
( ) ( )
∂ ∂f
+L f = (1.1)
∂t ∂t col

for the velocity distribution function f of a low density

( ) gas, where L is a lin-
∂f
ear “streaming” operator in phase space, and ∂t accounts for binary,
col
elastic collisions between the constituent atoms [1]. The expression for the
latter was formulated on the basis of an Ansatz (or hypothesis), which
effectively introduces an arrow of time into the evolution of the system,
leading to the H-theorem and establishing a connection with the second
law of thermodynamics. Although Boltzmann suffered criticism from his
contemporaries, and the Ansatz has been the subject of considerable crit-
ical scrutiny since then, no satisfactory alternative has emerged, and the
Boltzmann equation, modified by Wang Chang et al. to include inelastic
collisions [2,3] remains to this day the preferred means of investigating
gases in a non-equilibrium state.
Boltzmann’s equation and the distribution function f play the same
role in kinetic theory as do Schrödinger’s equation and the wave function
ψ in quantum mechanics. Once f is obtained from solution of Equation 1.1
all quantities of physical interest can be obtained as appropriate velocity
“moments,” similar to expectation values formed with |ψ|2 in quantum
physics (see Appendix A).
The centenary of Boltzmann’s work was marked by a special publi-
cation [4] of both a biographical and scientific nature, which illustrated
the extent of the influence that this remarkable equation has had on many
areas of physics, involving both gases and condensed matter. Indeed,
Boltzmann’s contributions to the wider field of statistical mechanics are
profound and are remembered in a special way (see Figure 1.1).

1.1.2 From the “golden” era of gas discharges to modern times

The emergence of Boltzmann’s equation in the latter part of the nineteenth
century coincided with an era of great interest in electrical discharges

1
2 Fundamentals of Charged Particle Transport in Gases and Condensed Matter

Figure 1.1 The equation S = k log W linking entropy S with the number of
microstates W of a system appears on Boltzmann’s memorial headstone in Vienna.

in gases, though mutual recognition took some time. These investiga-

tions were motivated by the earlier observation of striations (alternating
light and dark bands in the discharge) by Abria [5] (and more recently
[6]), and culminated in the seminal drift tube experiments around the
turn of the century and in the early 1900s. For example, Kaufmann and
Thomson independently determined the elementary charge-to-mass ratio,
e∕m, which in turn led to Thomson’s discovery of the electron, while the
seminal experiment of Franck and Hertz confirmed Bohr’s predictions
of the quantized nature of atoms. As a result, there has been tremen-
dous progress in science and technology, and it is not surprising that
in the first three decades of the twentieth century, the field produced
more than its fair share of Nobel laureates. Historical surveys of the
“golden era” of drift tube experiments have been given by a number
of authors, including Brown [7], Müller [8], Loeb [9], and Huxley and
Crompton [10].
Introduction 3

Investigations of gaseous discharges also spawned the field of plasma

physics, with applications ranging from hot, fusion plasmas (T ∼ 106 K or
more), with the promise of virtually limitless clean energy, to low temper-
ature (T ∼ 104 K) plasmas, of such importance in the microchip fabrication
industry [11–13] and finally through to low density, low energy “swarms”
of electrons and ions in gases [14], with applications in such diverse areas
as fundamental atomic and molecular physics [15] and gaseous radia-
tion detectors [16]. In the course of time, Equation 1.1 has come to be
regarded as de rigueur for analyzing experiments involving charged par-
ticles in gases and condensed matter [17], along with applications of both
a technological and scientific nature.

1.1.3 Transport processes: Traditional and modern descriptions

In general, non-equilibrium systems are characterized by non-uniformity
and gradients in properties which result in an irreversible flow or “flux”
of these properties in such a direction as to restore uniformity and equilib-
rium. Such transport processes are traditionally represented by well-known
empirical linear flux-gradient relations, such as Fourier’s law of heat con-
duction, and Fick’s law of diffusion of matter, in which the constants of
proportionality define transport coefficients, namely, the thermal conduc-
tivity and diffusion coefficient tensor, respectively. These coefficients can
be calculated theoretically from approximate solution of the Boltzmann’s
equation, through linearizing in temperature and density gradient, respec-
tively. However, one should be cautious in applying these traditional ideas
to interpret drift tube experiments, for two reasons:

• Experiments are traditionally analyzed using the diffusion equa-

tion, which represents overall particle balance in the bulk of the
system, and the coefficients in the diffusion equation differ from
those defined by Fick’s law when particles are created or lost, for
example, by ionization and attachment, respectively. In these cir-
cumstances, experiments do not measure the traditional transport
coefficients.
• Flux-gradient relations and the diffusion equation are valid only
for systems which have attained a state called the hydrody-
namic regime. Some systems never get to that state and are
intrinsically non-hydrodynamic, for example, the steady state
Townsend and Franck-Hertz experiments. Neither Fick’s law
nor the diffusion equation are physically tenable in these cases,
and neither is description in terms of transport coefficients
(however defined) possible. Measurable properties can be calcu-
lated theoretically only by solving Boltzmann’s equation without
approximation.
4 Fundamentals of Charged Particle Transport in Gases and Condensed Matter

1.1.4 Theme of this book

In essence, Boltzmann’s equation takes us from the laws of physics govern-
ing behaviour on the microscopic (atomic) scale, collisions in particular,
to the level of macroscopically measurable quantities. The microscopic–
macroscopic connection is the theme of our discussion, and explaining
just how the connection is made provides the substance of this book.
Put succinctly, the program is to solve Equation 1.1 for f , and then
form velocity averages to find the macroscopic quantities of interest, for
example, electric currents, or total particle number, which are measured in
experiment.

1.2 Solving Boltzmann’s Equation

1.2.1 The path to solution
• Chapman–Enskog method: The Chapman–Enskog method [18] is a
perturbative procedure which was developed about 100 years ago
to solve Boltzmann’s equation for systems close to equilibrium. It
was applied to gaseous ions in the 1950s by Kihara [19] and Mason
and Schamp [20] but, by virtue of the limitations of the procedure,
results could be obtained for only the weak field regime. Given
that the systems of interest are often driven far from equilibrium
by strong fields, this procedure is inadequate for most purposes.
• Light(particles,
) Lorentz approximation: It was recognized early on
∂f
that ∂t could be approximated in differential form for elec-
col
trons undergoing elastic collisions in gases [18,21]. This simplifica-
tion, together with an assumption of near-isotropy of f in velocity
space, originally attributed to Lorentz [22], enables Boltzmann’s
equation to be solved, sometimes analytically, without any restric-
tion on the magnitude of the field. These ideas underpin the field
of gaseous electronics [23], which has maintained a distinct iden-
tity over many decades.
• Light (
particles
) in liquids and soft matter: Cohen and Lekner [24] mod-
∂f
ified ∂t to account for coherent scattering of electrons in liq-
col
uids and, as for gaseous media, f was also assumed to be nearly
isotropic in velocity space. Nevertheless, Cohen and Lekner’s
results have become well established in the literature and provide
the basis for more sophisticated transport analysis of both elec-
trons and positrons in liquids and soft-condensed matter.
• Light particles, inelastic processes: In many cases of interest, elec-
trons also undergo inelastic( collisions
) with the molecules of the
∂f
medium, and consequently ∂t no longer assumes a simplified
col
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 THE MYSTIC AND THE CORPORATE LIFE

One of the commonest of the criticisms which are brought against

the mystics is that they represent an unsocial type of religion; that
their spiritual enthusiasms are personal and individual, and that they
do not share or value the corporate life and institutions of the church
or community to which they belong. Yet, as a matter of fact, the
relation that does and should exist between personal religion and
the corporate life of the church frequently appears in them in a
peculiarly intense, a peculiarly interesting form; and in their lives,
perhaps, more easily than elsewhere, we may discern the principles
which do or should govern the relation of the individual to the
community.
In the true mystic, who is so often and so wrongly called a “religious
individualist,” we see personal religion raised to its highest power. If
we accept his experience as genuine, it involves an intercourse with
the spiritual world, an awareness of it, which transcends the normal
experience, and appears to be independent of the general religious
consciousness of the community to which he belongs. The mystic
speaks with God as a person with a Person, and not as a member of
a group. He lives by an immediate knowledge far more than by
belief; by a knowledge achieved in those hours of direct, unmediated
intercourse with the Transcendent when, as he says, he was “in
union with God.” The certitude then gained—a certitude which he
cannot impart, and which is not generally diffused—governs all his
reactions to the Universe. It even persists and upholds him in those
terrible hours of darkness when all his sense of spiritual reality is
taken away.
Such a personality as this seems at first sight to stand in little need
of the support which the smaller nature, the more languid religious
consciousness, receives from the corporate spirit. By the very term
“mystic” we indicate a certain aloofness from the crowd, suggest
that he is in possession of a secret which the community as a whole
does not and cannot share; that he lives at levels to which they
cannot rise. I think that much of the distrust with which he is often
regarded comes from this sense of his independence of the herd; his
apparent separation from the often clumsy and always symbolic
methods of institutional religion, and the further fact that his own
methods and results cannot be criticized or checked by those who
have not shared them. “I spake as I saw,” said David; and those who
did not see can only preserve a respectful or an exasperated silence.
Yet this common opinion that the mystic is a lonely soul wholly
absorbed in his vertical relation with God, that his form of religious
life represents an opposition to, and an implicit criticism of, the
corporate and institutional form of religious life; this is decisively
contradicted by history; which shows us, again and again, the great
mystics as the loyal children of the great religious institutions, and
forces us to admit that here as in other departments of human
activity the corporate and the individual life are intimately plaited
together. Even those who have broken away from the churches that
reared them, have quickly drawn to themselves disciples, and
become the centres of new groups. Surely, therefore, it is worth
while to examine, if we can, the nature of the connection between
these two factors: to ask, on the one hand, what it is that the
corporate life and the group-consciousness which it develops give
the mystic; on the other, what is the real value of the mystic to the
corporate life of his church?
As to the first question: What is it that the corporate life does for the
great spiritual genius?—for I think that we may allow the great
mystic to be that. First, and most obviously, it gives him a favourable
environment. He must have an environment: he must be affected by
it. That is a certainty in the case of any living thing; a certainty so
obvious that it would hardly be worth stating were it not that those
who talk about the mystic craving for solitude—his complete
aloofness from human life—seem often to ignore it. The idea of
solitude in any complete sense is, of course, an illusion. We are
bound, if we live at all, to accept the fact of a living world outside
ourselves, to have social relations with something; and it only
remains to decide what these relations shall be. The yogi or the
hermit who retreats to the forest in order to concentrate his mind
more utterly upon the quest of God, only exchanges the society of
human beings for the society of other living things. Did he eliminate
all else, the parasites of his own body, the bacterial populations of
his alimentary system, would be there to remind him that man
cannot live alone. He may shift his position in the web of life, but its
strands will enmesh him still. So, too, the monk or nun “buried alive”
in the cloister is still living a family life; only it is a family life that is
governed by special ideals.
Now it is plainly better for the mystic, whose aim is the
establishment of special relations with the spiritual order, that the
social consciousness in which he is immersed, and from which he is
taking colour all the time, should have a spiritual and religious
tendency; that the social acts in which he takes part should
harmonize rather than conflict with his own deep intuition of reality.
The difference in degree between that deep intuition and the
outward corporate acts—the cult—which he thus shares, may be
enormous: for the cult is an expression of the crowd consciousness,
and manifests its spiritual crudity, its innate conservatism, its
primitive demands for safety and personal rewards. The inadequacy
or unreality of the forms, the low level of the adoration which they
evoke, may distress and even disgust him. Yet, even so, it is better
for him that he should be within a church than outside it. Compared
with this one fact—that he is a member of a social group which
recognizes spiritual values, and therefore lives in an environment
permeated by religious concepts—the accuracy in detail of the creed
which that group professes, the adequacy of its liturgical acts, is
unimportant.
Next, the demands made and restrictions imposed by the community
on the individual are good for the mystic. Man is social right
through; in spirit as well as in body and mind. His most sublime
spiritual experiences are themselves social in type. Intercourse of a
person with a Person, the merging of his narrow consciousness in a
larger consciousness, the achievement of a divine sonship, a spiritual
marriage: these are the highest things that he can say concerning
his achievement of Divine Reality. And they all entail, not a narrow
self-realization, but the breaking-down of barriers; the setting-up of
wider relationships. It follows that self-mergence in the common life
is an education for that self-mergence in the absolute life at which
the mystic aims. Such self-mergence, and the training in humility,
self-denial, obedience, suppleness, which is involved in it, is held by
all ascetic teachers to be essential to the education of the human
soul. Union with, and to a certain extent submission to, the church,
to the family—to life, in fact—an attitude of self-giving surrender:
this is the best of preparations for that total self-naughting of the
soul which is involved in union with God; that utter doing-away of
the I, the Me, and the Mine, till it becomes one will and one love
with the divine will and love.
On these two counts alone—harmonious environment and salutary
discipline—we shall expect, other things being equal, that the richest
and most fruitful types of mystical experience will arise within
religious institutions rather than outside them; and as a matter of
fact this is what we do find. The Hindu ascetic has his recognized
place in the Hindu system. He has but reached the summit of a
pyramid which is firmly based on earth. The Sūfi is a good Moslem,
and commonly the member of a religious confraternity which
imposes a strict rule of life. The Christian mystic, too, grows up from
the Christian society. His roots strike deep down into that favouring
soil. Though his branches may shoot up to the heavens, and seem to
draw thence all the light and heat by which he lives, yet he is really
fed from below as well as from above. When he refuses to
acknowledge this principle, when he abjures the discipline, the
authority, the support of the corporate life, and regards himself as a
separate individual, dependent on direct inspiration alone; how
quickly he becomes unbalanced and eccentric, how difficult it is for
him to avoid the disease of spiritual megalomania. Refusing the
support and discipline of organized religion, he becomes like a poet
who refuses to be controlled by the laws of prosody; which seem to
limit, but really strengthen and beautify, his work.
It is true that right through the history of Christian mysticism there
has been a line of insurgent mystics who have made this refusal;
whose direct vision of spiritual perfection has brought with it so
overwhelming a sense of the imperfection, formalism, unreality, the
dreadfulness of religious institutions, that it has forced them into a
position of more or less acute revolt from the official church. So clear
has been their own consciousness of the spiritual world that the
soul’s life and growth, its actual and individual rebirth, have shone
out for them as the only things that matter. Hence the dramatization
of these things in ceremonial religion, the effort to give spiritual
values a concrete form, has seemed to them like a blasphemous
parody. Unable to harmonize the inward and the outward—the all-
penetrating reality of religion as they understand it, with its crude
outward expression in the external cult, where formal acts and
intellectual assents so often seem to take the place of inward
changes—in the end they solve the problem by repudiating the
external and visible church. This rebel-type, victims of exaggerated
individualism, which would make the special experiences of a few
the standard for the whole race, has persisted side by side with the
law-abiding type; who have preserved, if not always a perfect
balance between liberty and obedience, at any rate a more
reasonable proportion between them. Often the corruption of the
times in which he lived has seemed to the mystic to make such
rebellion inevitable. This is particularly true in the case of George
Fox, whose ragings were directed far less against organized religion
than against unreal religion; and who might, had he lived in
fourteenth-century Germany, have found a congenial career as one
of the Friends of God. Yet, even so, the careers of these rebels have
been on the whole unfruitful, compared with those who remained
within the institutional framework and effected their reforms from
inside. They seldom quite escape the taint of arrogance. There is apt
to be a touch of self-consciousness in their sanctity. We have only to
compare the influence exerted by the outstanding figures of the two
groups, to realize which type of spiritual life has had the best and
most enduring influence on the spiritual history of the race; which, in
fact, best stands the pragmatic test.
On the rebel side we have, of course, the leaders of many dead
heresies and sects. The Montanists of the second century, with their
claim to direct inspiration, their cult of ecstatic phenomena and
prophetic speech; the numerous mystical heretics and illuminati of
the Middle Ages, often preaching the most extravagant doctrines and
always claiming for them divine authority—for instance, the Brethren
of the Free Spirit, who claimed the possession of the Holy Ghost as
an excuse not only for theological, but also for moral aberrations.
Later, there are the Quietists, a particularly poisonous brand of
unbalanced contemplatives; and, contemporary with their revolt
against Catholic forms and authorities, innumerable mystical revolts
against Protestant forms and authorities, the very names of whose
originators are now almost forgotten. Amongst these two mighty
figures stand up: Jacob Boehme and George Fox. But we must
remember as regards Boehme that, although he certainly spoke with
great violence against the error of confusing external acceptance of
religion with internal adherence to God, “historical Christians” with
“new men,” he never disowned the Lutheran Church within which he
was born. On the contrary, it was that church which persecuted and
finally disowned him. As to that great and strange genius, George
Fox, who aimed at nothing less than a world religion of a mystical
type, the free and conscious contact of every soul with the Spirit of
God, I believe that any unbiassed student of his Journal must allow
that, enormous as his achievement was, it might have been far
greater had his violent sense of vocation, his remarkable spiritual
gifts, been disciplined and controlled by the corporate consciousness
as expressed in institutional religion. Then some of the energy which
he expended in denunciations of steeple-houses might have been
employed in healing the disharmony between the visible and
invisible church; helping that vision of the Eternal by which he was
possessed to find concrete expression within traditional forms. Here,
as elsewhere, the Inner Light would have burned with a better and a
truer flame had it submitted to the limitations of a lamp.
I do not suggest that these people, even the most extravagant of
them, were not truly spiritual or truly mystical. The sort of criticism
which divides mystics into two groups—the orthodox, who are
inspired by God, and the heretical, who are inspired by Satan—of
course belongs to the dark ages of theology. On the contrary, these
rebel-mystics most often possessed—sometimes in a highly
developed form—the sharp direct consciousness of the Divine Life
which is the essential quality of the mystic. This was to them the
central fact; by comparison with it they judged all other things. What
they did not possess was the balancing, equivalent consciousness of,
and reverence for, corporate human life; that group-personality
which is the church, and its value and authority. They lacked the
sense that the whole organism, the whole herd, with all its
imperfections, is yet interdependent, and has got to move together,
urged from within by its more vivid spirits, not stung from without,
as if by some enthusiastic spiritual mosquito. To a greater or lesser
extent they failed in effect because they tried to be mystical in a
non-human instead of a human way; were “other-worldly” in the bad
sense of the word. They have not always remembered that Christ
Himself, the supreme pattern of all mystics, lived a balanced life of
clear personal vision, unmediated intercourse with God on the one
hand, and gentle and patient submission to the corporate
consciousness on the other hand. Though severely critical of the
unrealities and hypocrisy of current institutionalism, he yet sought to
form the group, the “little flock,” in which His ideas should be
incorporated within, and not over against, the official Jewish Church;
and thus gradually to leaven the whole.
Put now against these vigorous individualists the names of the
mystics who have never felt that their passionate correspondences
with the Eternal Order—their clear vision of the adorable Perfection
of God and the imperfection, languor, and corruption of man—need
involve a break with the corporate religious life. Observe how these
have continued for centuries to be fruitful personalities, often not
merely within their own communion, but outside it too; how they
have acted as salt, as leaven, permeating and transmuting the
general consciousness of the Body of Christ. Often these, too, have
been reformers—drastic, unrelenting disturbers of the established
order of things. St. Bernard, St. Hildegarde, Mechthild, Jacopone da
Todi, St. Catherine of Siena, Tauler, were passionate in their
denunciations of slackness, corruption, and disorder. But they made
their protests, and brought back the general consciousness to a
closer contact with reality, from within, and not from without, the
Christian church. Consider St. Bernard and Richard of St. Victor,
whose writings influenced for centuries the whole of the religious
literature of Europe; St. Hildegarde, St. Gertrude, Mechthild of
Magdeburg, great mystics, good churchwomen, but severe
denouncers of formalism and unreality; St. Francis of Assisi, who
removed evangelical poverty from the sphere of notion to the sphere
of fact; St. Catherine of Siena, who changed Italian politics; St. Joan
of Arc, who altered European history; the soaring transcendentalism
of Ruysbroeck, who was yet content to be a humble parish priest;
the great mystical movement of the Friends of God, ardent Catholics
and ardent reformers too. Even our own great mystical poets,
Donne, Crashaw, Vaughan, Herbert, Traherne, Coventry Patmore and
Francis Thompson, were one and all convinced institutionalists.
Finally, look at some of the great cloistered mystics, of whom St.
Teresa and St. John of the Cross are types; and see how, though
they seem in the eyes of the world to be “buried alive,” they are and
remain the ardent centres of a spreading light, which perpetually
stimulates and revivifies not only members of their own order or
communion, but spiritually sensitive souls outside.
Perhaps it is in those contemplatives who lived within and were
obedient to the rule of the great monastic orders, that we can see
most easily the nature of the link between the individual soul and
the religious group within which it does or should develop; the
enormous value to it of tradition, that huge accumulation of
tendencies, ideals, systems, wisdom both speculative and practical,
which is preserved in the corporate consciousness. Here the
influence of the religious family, the rule of life, the ideal held out,
the severe education in self-control administered to every novice,
can always be traced; conditioning, and, I believe, helping and
bracing the character of that communion with the Transcendent
which the individual mystic enjoys. As the baby at birth enters into a
civilization prepared for him, and is at once supported, educated,
even clothed by a tradition prepared by countless generations of the
past; so the novice, whose spiritual childhood begins within a great
monastic family, receives—supposing, of course, that the order is
true to its ideals—the support and benefits of a tradition evolved
during previous generations in response to the needs of other similar
souls; and he is by so much the better off than he would be were he
a solitary, or a deliberate rebel who refuses to accept the heritage of
the past. He finds a life beautifully adjusted to his needs; yet which,
being greater and older than his own, keeps his rampant
individualism in check, nurtures and cultivates his growing spiritual
consciousness, and opposes—by its perpetual demands on humility,
obedience, and unselfishness—the vice of pride which the mystical
individualist seldom escapes. Such a mystical consciousness would
not necessarily die without the support of this corporate tradition,
any more than the baby would necessarily die did it emerge into the
conditions of the paleolithic cave instead of into those of the modern
nursery. But in both cases the environment would be unfavourable,
and the effort required to attain that position into which the child of
tradition enters at birth would be an enormous drain upon the
powers of the organism.
The instinct of many mystics for a certain measure of solitude is no
contradiction of this. The hermits and the anchorites, even such rare
and extreme types as St. Anthony of Egypt, who is said to have lived
in perfect solitude for twenty years, did not withdraw from the
Christian society; nor did they disown the validity of its external and
institutional life. They sought to construct or find within the Christian
church an environment within which their special tendencies could
develop in a normal way; and this not merely for themselves, but
also for the sake of other souls. Such a period of withdrawal was felt
by them to be a necessary condition of their full effectiveness for
life. So, too, the poet or the artist must retreat from his fellows if he
is to commune with the eternal loveliness and interpret her to other
men: for a total concentration upon reality is the condition under
which it is revealed. The Catholic Church has always recognized, and
does still in the continued existence of the cloistered orders, the
reasonableness of this demand. We do not as a rule say bitter things
when a person of artistic or speculative genius leaves the family
group and goes to Paris or Oxford in order that his special powers
may be educated and become effective for life; nor should we feel
resentment because the mystical genius sometimes feels that the life
of the home circle, or even the normal life of the community, cannot
give the special training which he requires. In a few cases the
mystics have felt a long period of complete isolation to be necessary
to them; but most often they have been accessible to those who
really needed them, and helped these all the more because of the
long periods of silence in which they listened to the Voice of God,
too often inaudible for them, as for us, in the general bustle of the
world. Their point of view has been beautifully stated by a young
French mystic, Elizabeth de la Trinité, who died a few years ago. “I
want,” she says, “to be all silence, all adoration, that I may penetrate
more and more deeply into God; and become so full of Him that I
can give Him in my prayers to those poor souls still ignorant of His
gift.” She wants to be a channel, a duct, by which the love and
power of God, of which she is so strongly conscious, can flow out to
other souls. It is not for herself that she is working; it is for the
world. Do we not find expressed there both the individual longing
and the corporate responsibility of the mystic? And do we not touch
here the intimate connection which should exist between the
separate life of the great mystic and the corporate life of the church?
On the one hand, the highly organized society, making it possible for
the contemplative to develop his special powers in a harmonious
environment and preventing the frittering of his energies; on the
other, that contemplative, like a special organ developed by the Body
of Christ, gaining for the whole community contacts and certitudes,
which it could not gain in any other way. News of God can only enter
the temporal order through some human consciousness. Is it
unreasonable that for so great an office certain individuals should be
set apart—within the community, not over against it—and should live
in a special way?
As a matter of fact, the church has gained a thousandfold by her
acquiescence in the special vocation of the mystics; for the treasures
they won were never kept for themselves, but always showered
upon her. True, she has not hesitated to scrutinize and control them;
sometimes her attitude has seemed to the enthusiasts for liberty to
be deliberately obscurantist and tyrannical. Yet, even here—and
although in many cases there has clearly been ignorance, injustice,
and persecution—the mystic gains more than he loses by submission
to the collective judgment. Even in their harshest form, discipline
and tradition are still priceless for him. First, they school him in the
virtue of humility, the very foundation of the Christian character;
which is seldom possessed by the spiritual genius who always leads
and never submits, and whose triumphant formula, “God and
myself!” too often ends by becoming “Myself and God!”

“O caritate, vita, ch’ ogn’ altro amor è morto;

non vai rompendo legge; nante, l’observe tutto.”

said Jacopone da Todi; that natural rebel who deliberately submitted

himself to an uncongenial religious authority, and there found
perfect freedom.
Next, the solid sense of the community, the mere fact that it always
lags behind the more vivid spirits, that the forward-moving shepherd
who sees new pastures has got to take account of the slowest sheep
—all this is a valuable safeguard against the notorious extravagances
of a mysticism unfettered by authority. It is significant that the
greatest mystics in all communions have ever raised up their voices
most earnestly against spiritual license; have been most eager to
submit their soaring intuitions to the witness of their Scriptures or
the corporate feeling of their church. They realize the fact that they
owe to this church the huge debt which every individual owes to the
tradition of his art or of his trade. The church represents a complete
spiritual civilization, a conserver of values; were it not for her, every
new spiritual genius who arose would have to begin at the
beginning, at the Stone Age of the soul. Instead of that, he finds
himself placed within a social order enriched by all the contributions
of his great predecessors. The bridges are built; the roads are made
and named; his own experiences and discoveries are made more
valid, less terrifying, more comprehensible to him, because others
have been this way before. Compare the clarity, the sure-footedness
as one may say, of Ruysbroeck, of St. Catherine of Siena, of St.
Teresa, with the entanglements, the sense of wandering in beautiful
but trackless places, which one feels when reading even Boehme,
Fox, or Blake; and others are far less coherent than they. Man needs
a convention, a tradition, a limitation, if he is not to waste his
creative powers; and this convention the mystics find best and most
easily in the forms of the church to which they belong.
So we see that the corporate life of his church gives the mystic a
good deal. What does he, on his part, give to it?
Those who see in the mystic chiefly one who rebels against, or has
no use for, the corporate religious life, and acknowledges no
authority but that of his own spiritual intuitions, usually conceive of
his experiences as having value for himself alone. He cannot, they
say, communicate them or teach others to share them. Often,
therefore, he is spoken of as useless, selfish, other-worldly: a “lonely
soul.” These phrases suggest that those who use them have a very
narrow view of usefulness, a very materialistic view of the Body of
Christ, and a very unevangelical view of the relative positions of
Mary and Martha. As a matter of fact, the mystic, instead of being
useless, selfish, and other-worldly, is useful, unselfish, and this-
worldly. He is a creative personality, consecrated to the great
practical business of actualizing the eternal order within the
temporal; and although the pursuit of this business brings him hours
of exquisite joy, it brings him hours of great suffering too—suffering
which is gladly and patiently endured. He does it, or tries to do it,
not because he seeks the joy, but solely for love—love of God, love
of his fellow-men—for he is perpetuating in a certain sense the work
of Christ, mediating between his brethren and Divine Reality. Hence,
where he is fully developed, he will, as Ruysbroeck tells us, swing
like a pendulum between contemplation and action, between
adoration of God and service of man. In him life has evolved her
most powerful spiritual engine; and she uses it not for the next
world, but for this world, for the eternalization of the here and now,
the making of it more real and more divine, more fully charged with
the grandeur of God. Often the mystic’s special work is done in a
positive and obvious fashion which should satisfy the most practical
mind, and which is yet wholly actuated by his central intention, that
of raising up—as he sometimes says—new children of the Eternal
Goodness, bringing back the corporate life to a closer contact with
God. “My little children, of whom I travail,” says St. Paul to his
converts. There is a typical mystic speaking of his life-work. Can we
call St. Francis of Assisi, the most devoted and original of
missionaries; St. Joan of Arc, re-making the consciousness of France
by the most active of methods; St. Catherine of Siena, purifying the
Italian Church; St. Teresa, regenerating the whole Carmelite Order,
and leaving upon it a stamp it has never lost; “lazy contemplatives”?
Or St. Catherine of Genoa, the devoted superintendent of a great
hospital, who never permitted her hours of ecstatic communion with
God to interfere with her duty to the sick?
Taken as a class, the Christian mystics are distinguished by nothing
so much as by their heroic and unselfish activities; by their varied
and innumerable services to the corporate life of the church. From
their ranks have come missionaries, preachers, prophets, social
reformers, poets, founders of institutions, servants of the poor and
the sick, patient guides and instructors of souls. We sometimes
forget that even those known chiefly by the writings they have left
behind them have sacrificed to the difficult task of reducing their
transcendent experience to words, hours in which—were the popular
idea of the mystic a true one—they might have been idly basking in
the Divine Light. But these practical activities, though often great,
are only a part of the mystic’s contribution to the corporate life. If
his special claim to communion with the Transcendent be true at all
—and this argument is based on the assumption that there is at
least some truth in it—then he does really tap a source of vitality
higher than that with which other men have contact. In the
language of theology, he has not merely “efficient” but also
“extraordinary” grace; a larger dower of life, directly dependent on
his larger, more generous love. This is a claim to which his strange
triumphs over circumstance, his conquests over ill-fortune, ill-health,
oppositions and deprivations of every kind, give weight. Not many
strong and normal persons would willingly face, or indeed endure,
the hardships which St. Paul, St. Francis, St. Joan of Arc, St. Teresa,
gladly and successfully embraced.
This larger and intenser vitality the mystic does not and cannot keep
to himself. He infects with it all with whom he comes in contact,
kindles the latent fire in them: for the spiritual consciousness is
caught, not taught. Under his influence—sometimes from the mere
encounter with his personality—other men begin to live a more real,
a more eternal life. Ruysbroeck says that the Spirit of God, when it is
truly received into a soul, becomes a spreading light; and history
confirms this. Corporate experience of God always begins in a
personal experience of God. The rise of Christianity is the classic
illustration of this truth; but Hindu and Moslem religious history also
declare it. Round each of the great unitive mystics little groups of
ardent disciples, of spiritual children, have grown up. This is true
both of those who remained within and those who seceded from the
official Church—for instance, St. Bernard, Eckhart, St. Francis, Tauler,
Ruysbroeck, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Catherine of Genoa, St.
Teresa, Boehme, Fox. Nor did their influence cease with death.
Further, in reckoning up the value of the mystics to the church as a
whole, we sometimes forget the extent to which that church is
indebted to mystic intuition for the actual data upon which her
corporate life is based. Christianity, it is true, is fundamentally a
historical religion; but it is also a religion of experience, and its very
history deals quite as much with the events which attend human
intercourse with the Transcendent and Eternal as with concrete and
visible happenings in space and time. The New Testament is thick
with reports of mystical experiences. The Fourth Gospel and the
Epistles of St. Paul depend for their whole character on the soaring
mystical genius their writers possessed. Had St. Paul never been
caught up to the third heaven, he would have had a very different
outlook on the world, and Christianity would have been a different
religion in consequence. Had the Fourth Evangelist never known
what it was to feel the sap of the Mystic Vine flow through him, his
words would have lacked their overwhelming certitude. So, too, the
liturgies bear the stamp of mystical feeling, and most of the great
religious concepts which the church has gradually added to her store
come from the same source. If we ask ourselves what the history of
the church would be without the history of her mystics, then we
begin to see how much of her light and colour emanates from them;
how much of her doctrine represents their experience translated into
dogmatic form. That communion with—that feeding on—the Divine
Life which she offers to every believer in the Eucharist is the central
fact of their existence. From Clement of Alexandria downwards,
again and again they appeal to Eucharistic images in order to
express what it is that really happens to the soul immersed in
contemplative prayer. “I am the food of the full-grown,” said the
voice of God to St. Augustine. “Every time we think with love of the
Well-beloved, He is anew our meat and drink,” says Ruysbroeck. So,
too, the church’s language concerning new birth, divine sonship,
regeneration, union with Christ, and the whole concept of grace,
regarded as a transcendent life and love perpetually pressing in on
humanity—all this is of mystical origin, and represents not the
speculations but the concrete experience of the great mystics. They
are pushed out, as it were, by the visible church like tentacles, to
explore the unseen world which surrounds her, and drawn back
again to her bosom that they may impart to the whole body the
more abundant life which they have found. Were it not for the
unfailing family of the mystics, thus perpetually pushing out beyond
the protective edges of the organism, and bringing back official
Christianity into direct touch with the highest spiritual values, and so
constantly reaffirming the fact—by them felt and experienced—of
the intimate correspondence, the regenerating contact of God with
the soul, the church would long ago have fallen victim to that
tendency to relapse into the mechanical which dogs all organized
groups. Then the resistance which she has sometimes offered to the
freshness and novelty, the adventurous quality of the mystical
impulse, where it has appeared without preparation and sought to
correct by its own overwhelming certitude the spiritual conventions
of the day, would have become that hopeless inertia which is the
precursor of death.
So we may best look upon the great Christian mystic as a special
organ developed within the Christian body for a special use. His
peculiar sensibilities, like those which condition artistic genius, are
the gates through which messages from the Transcendent come to
man. He is finding and feeling the Infinite; not for himself, but for
us. His achievement, bridging the gap which lies between the normal
mind and the supersensuous world, makes more valid and more
actual to us the assumptions upon which external religion is built;
vindicating the church’s highest claim, and hence the soul’s highest
claim—the claim that achievement of Eternal Life, communion with
ultimate reality, is possible to the spirit of man. More, since all
human lives interpenetrate, and isolation is impossible save in death,
the more we, the social group, are willing to accept the claim of the
mystic, and receive what he tells us in a spirit of humility instead of
a spirit of criticism; the more completely he will be able to share his
treasure with us, the more deeply we shall be able to enter into that
consciousness which he represents, which he brings in his own
person into the human scheme.
This, of course, the Christian church has said far more beautifully
and exactly in her doctrine of the Communion of Saints; and that
doctrine, rightly understood, is indeed the key to the connection
between the great mystics and the corporate life within which they
arise. Were the activities of these more vital spirits wholly hidden
from us, wholly silent and supersensual—as they are not—it would
be a grossly materialistic and violently un-Christian judgment which
concluded from this that their lives were useless save to themselves.
How can a life which aims at God be useless, if we believe that
achievement of Him is the final destiny and only satisfaction of every
soul? It would be an implicit denial of the efficacy of prayer, of the
“prevailing merits” of sanctity, its value to the society which
produces it—the power of a great and loving spirit to help, infect and
reinforce more languid souls—did we agree that the life of the most
strictly enclosed contemplative was wasted. Christians, who believe
that the world was redeemed from within the narrow limits of
Palestine, should not thus confuse space with power, or character
with the manner of its self-expression. Without the ardent prayers of
the mystics, the vivid spiritual life they lead, what would the sum of
human spirituality be? How can we tell what we owe to the power
which they liberate, the currents which they set up, the contacts
which they make? The land they see, and of which they report to us,
is the land towards which humanity is going. They are like the look-
out men upon the cross-trees, assuring us from time to time that we
are still upon our course. Tear asunder their peculiar power and
office from the office of the whole, and you will have on one side a
society deprived of the guides which God has raised up for it; on the
other, an organ deprived of its real perfection and beauty, because
severed from the organism which it was intended to serve.
 MYSTICISM AND THE DOCTRINE OF ATONEMENT

Amongst the problems which have to be met by those who incline to

a mystical view of Christianity—that view which lays special
emphasis on the growth and experience of the individual soul, its
ascent to union with God, as the very aim and object of religion—
one of the most pressing is that which centres on the doctrine of the
Atonement. It is clear that many people feel that such a mystical and
empirical view of religion leaves no room for this doctrine, or for the
idea which it represents; that they are convinced that there is here a
real conflict between two incompatible views of the Christian faith.
On the one hand, they see orthodox Christianity still centred on the
“atoning act” of Christ, with its implications of reconciliation and
vicarious suffering, of the divine life humiliating itself, in order to do
within the temporal order something for man which man cannot do
for himself; a doctrine which retains its attraction and value, because
so full of hope and mercy for the sinful and the weak. On the other
hand, they see that demand of personal and individual growth,
purification, life-enhancement, progressive union with God—helped
doubtless by grace, but no less dependent on will—as the condition
of attaining Eternal Life, which seems to be made by mystical
theology. The opposition, in fact, is supposed to be between a
concept of spiritual life in which each man must himself do and be,
achieve and actualize in his own person, and not merely as the
acceptor of a creed or the member of a Church—must not only
accept the gift, but must set himself to be an imitator, so far as he
may, of the Giver—and one in which a special manifestation in time
and space of the divine power and love, for Christians the sacrifice
of Christ on the Cross, does something for the man accepting it,
which he cannot do for himself. In the one case, we are saved one
by one, by effort, response, growth; in the other, we are saved as
members of a group. Here the individual and the corporate ideals in
their most intense forms face one another.
It does, then, seem at first as though we had here an irreconcilable
opposition. Yet before we discard either of these ideas, it is worth
while to enquire whether they need really entail conflict, or can be
regarded as two sides of a greater whole. It is true that there are
certain extreme views of the Atonement which do appear to be
hopelessly irreconcilable with the mystical view of religion: especially
those which lay peculiar stress, not on the latent powers, but on the
essential impotence of man; centring the soul’s salvation on
“imputed righteousness,” and finding the whole meaning and reason
of the Incarnation in the one historical “propitiatory act” of Calvary.
There is real conflict between such a creed, centred on the idea of
something done once for all to the soul—to the world—from outside,
and that which is centred on the idea of a life perpetually welling up
in the soul, on growth, movement, organic change. Yet, on the other
hand, is there not a curious similarity between these two apparently
opposite views of salvation? Is not the drama of the divine life
incarnate, humbling and limiting itself to the human life to save it,
essentially a dramatic representation of that other experience, of the
divine life limiting itself and mysteriously emerging within each soul,
to transmute, regenerate, infinitize it, which the mystics describe to
us? Is not what theologians call “grace”—that essential factor of the
mystic life-process—a making good by the addition of a new dower
of transcendent vitality, of the shortcomings of the merely human
creature regarded as an “inheritor of Eternal Life”; just as the
historical surrender of Calvary is conceived by orthodox Christianity
to make good the shortcomings of the whole race, regarded as heirs
of the Kingdom? And if this be so, then can the opposition between
these two ideas of salvation—the vital and the theological—be as
real as it sometimes appears? Are they not both plans in which
atonement plays a part?
After all, both these views of the Christian scheme have emerged
and diverged from the same source. St. Paul, the greatest of all
Christian mystics—soaked, too, in the idea of grace and of growth in
grace, and deeply impressed with the fact of the soul’s individual
responsibility—is also supremely the theologian of the Atonement.
Though no doubt his teaching on the subject was first called forth by
the practical need of finding some meaning in the tragedy of the
crucifixion, it is yet a development of that profound conception of
His own death as a filling up to the brim of the cup of sacrifice and
surrender, which seems to have inspired Christ Himself. If there were
indeed a fundamental inconsistency between these two ideas in their
pure and original form, then St. Paul would be inconsistent; for he
certainly held them both. We all know that the usual way of studying
St. Paul’s “doctrines” for purposes of edification has been to isolate
each of his ardent and poetic utterances, place it, as it were, in cold
storage till it is no longer reminiscent of the living mobile body from
which it came, and then subject it to analysis. We are also beginning
to know that this method is not quite fair to a man who was a poet,
an artist, a lover, as well as a constructive genius of unequalled
power. The Pauline utterances are mostly impassioned efforts to
express something which Paul knows in his own person; descriptions
of the way in which the Christian revelation has met his own needs,
regenerated his own nature. They are closely connected with the
interior adventures which have attended on his new spiritual
existence “in Christ.” To adopt a well-known phrase of St.
Bonaventura, they come “of grace, not of doctrine; of desire, not of
intellect; of the ardours of prayer, not of the teaching of the
schools.” To put it in another way, they are the fruits of his mystical
consciousness, which he is trying to express in artistic or intellectual
terms. If we accept this statement then the fact of Paul’s mystical
experience and all that it means to him must never be absent from
our minds when we are trying to understand his declarations. He
lives in that supernal atmosphere which he calls “Christ-Spirit”; he
speaks to us from that sphere. Nothing outside of it is real to him.
Whatever its other bearings may be, his doctrine of Atonement is
solidly real on that plane—the mystic’s plane, the plane of union—or
not at all. When he says he is “crucified with Christ,” “hid in God with
Christ,” he means these things. They are not vaguely pious
utterances, but desperate attempts towards the communication of a
real state, really felt and known. Paul does feel himself welded
together with that Transcendent Life, at once so intimate and
personal, so infinite and universal, which he identifies with the
glorified Jesus. Because of this union—and only because of it—the
acts, powers, holiness, adventures of that life avail for him, Paul. He
is a bit of its Body, in his own bold metaphor. So that the first great
factor of salvation, as he sees it, is the essentially mystical factor of
the “union” of the soul with Christ; the “doing away of the flame of
separation.” The Atonement follows, as it were almost logically, from
this.
The general content of his letters makes us feel that St. Paul had an
extremely rich, deep view of life; so great, indeed, that it refuses to
be hammered into a consistent system, and we can never manage
to embrace it all at once. Always bits get left out, and hence there is
apt to be a certain distortion in all our views of the Pauline universe.
There was a wonderful wholeness, a strongly affirmative quality
about his sense of existence; subtractions and negations were
unnatural to him. Any paradoxes and inconsistencies which we find
in his statements are the inevitable result of an effort to express the
enormous sweep, the living multiplicity, and (to borrow a word from
William James) the thickness of his vision of Reality. Hence it follows
that he was able to see and treat the soul of man, both as intensely
individual and responsible, and at the same time as a part of the
body of all life; that “mystical body of many members” of which the
head is Christ-Spirit, the Divine Humanity which appeared in Jesus—
a corporation actualized in the Christian Church, but potentially co-
extensive with the whole of mankind. These two—the separate and
the corporate—are aspects of one whole. They seem to us to
conflict, only because the totality to which they contribute is beyond
the focus of the mind. Thus Paul could and did demand of the
individual, on the one hand the self-mergence of faith, the corporate
sense, the humble acknowledgment of personal impotence; and on
the other hand, could demand of that same man the personal
industry and self-dependence which “works out its own salvation,”
“runs for an imperishable garland,” and “presses on towards the
goal.”
All through those passages in the Epistle to the Romans on which
the doctrine of the Atonement was afterwards built, Paul seems to
be trying to express—often by the use of traditional images, which
of course revenge themselves upon his free handling of them, as
imagery so often revenges itself upon poets—his vision of something
supreme, some enormous uplift to eternal levels, some fundamental
change, achieved by, for, in the human race. He has this vision just
because, and in so far as, this supreme thing has been achieved by,
for, in him, the mystic Paul. Behind the formula, we feel the first-
hand experience. What is this crucial change? Surely it is the
fundamental mystical achievement, the fundamental religious fact;
the human soul’s conscious attainment of God. At bottom,
atonement is wanted simply and solely to help man to do that; to
enable the spirit of life to reach its goal. If we did not want God, we
should be very well satisfied as we are: but we are not satisfied
—“Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts shall find no rest
save in Thee.” No doubt Paul’s eschatological views, the whole
tendency of his time, made him connect this achievement, which he
knew at first hand, with the imminent coming of a Liberator. For him,
it was part of the preparation, the new vitality already given to those
who were destined to live the new life. Achieved in one, it
permeated the whole “new race” of spiritual men; but this is only the
interpretation which a complex of causes made him put upon the
transcendent fact. The prominence given to Paul’s legal imagery, its
isolation from the general trend of his life and thought, has made us
inclined to forget all this. But if we try to see Reality from his angle,
to catch the wild accents of his enthusiasm and his love, the theory
that he seriously held anything approaching what would be called a
“commercial” theory of atonement falls to the ground at once. That
he should sometimes have argued in this sense when cornered by
Judaizing opponents, is likely enough: and it is characteristic of the
mystical temperament to ignore the discrepancy between such
intellectual exercises and the fundamental intuition by which it lives.
Life and love are as much the key-words of Paul’s system as they are
of the Fourth Gospel itself. He was the noblest of souls; and we
cannot imagine a soul with a spark of nobility wanting atonement as
a buying-off of penalty incurred, as a paying by another of a debt
which it owes, a mere saving of it from pain or any other retribution.
The living, loving soul can only want atonement as a road-making
act; a bridge thrown out to the infinite, on which man can travel to
his home in God. Now, Paul had made that journey in the spirit. He
knew already, at first hand, that Divine Reality was accessible to
him, and that this contact was the greatest thing in life. But he knew
and felt, too, that however much he, Paul, had really achieved this
new state, this fruition of Eternity, by difficult growth from within;
yet first, he could never have done it at all without the enormous
uplift of enhancing grace, that new dower of energy which was
poured in on him from beyond the confines of his own nature; and
secondly, great though the change had been, yet it was nothing
compared with the immeasurable human possibilities achieved in
Christ.
For Paul, these two achievements—the victory of Christ and the
victory of the Christian soul—are intimately connected. True, one is
infinitely great, the other very little. Except Christ, “all have fallen
short of the glory”; have failed to grow up to the “fullness of the
stature,” to actualize the immense spiritual possibilities of man. Still,
we are all in the same line; partakers of the same kind of life,
“grace” or immanent Spirit, and aiming, consciously or
unconsciously, at the same goal—union with God. Now, total
dependence on God, the centring of our whole interest and attention
on the Spiritual Order, is the very essence of union with Him.
Everything short of that total dependence, that supreme rightness of
relation, is trespass; a backing of the finite against the infinite. In
the death of Jesus, that total dependence, that perfect relation, was
completely achieved at last: the supreme mystic act, the self-
donation of love, was done perfectly, and in this sense “once for all.”
Aleph, it is enough. The spirit of man, in this “new man,” had
overcome its limitations, the downward drag of instinct, and had
leapt to the heights. This was the “redemption that is in Christ
Jesus.” In this unique vindication of humanity, this exhibition of
regnant spirit overcoming the world, Christ-Spirit crowned with
splendour all the tentative efforts of man, and, because of the
corporate nature of humanity, conferred that splendour on the race.
But there is far more in it than this. And first, the Christian’s
achievement of God, such as it is—from that of the least of believers
to that of the greatest of the mystical saints—is really and practically
conditioned by the known fact and known character of the
achievement of Christ. It is the addition of this fact, this distinct
historic happening, to the racial consciousness, which makes
possible the specially Christian apprehension of God; differentiates it,
say, from that of a Hindu or a Neoplatonic saint. A reference to the
phenomena of apperception will help us to understand this. As in the
world of nature or art our perception of each new object is governed
by the images and ideas already dominant within the mind, so, too,
in the religious sphere. If Christians had not got the idea of Calvary
in their consciousness—if the image of the surrender of Jesus, His
sublime exhibition of love and faith, were not there first as a clue,
something about which to group and arrange their spiritual intuitions
—it would make a vital difference to their interpretation of the
relation of the soul to God; and this means that the relation itself
would be quite different for the conscious self, other elements would
be stressed, and different results would flow from it. It is only
because the sacrifice of Jesus is now part of the Christian’s
“apperceiving mass”—because, coming to the contemplation of the
spiritual world, he inevitably brings the Cross with him—that he is
able to make the characteristically Christian contact with God. That
Christian contact is a direct gift to him, from the historic Person and
the historic act. We approach the Transcendent Order with that, or,
as Paul tersely puts it, “in Christ”; and our fruition of Reality results,
not, as some extreme mystics have liked to think, from any “naked
apprehension”—for naked apprehension has no meaning, no
content, for the mind—but from a fusion of that which we bring with
us and that to which we ascend; tradition and experience, the past
and the present. Through love of Christ the Christian comes to the
Cross, and through the Cross he enters a spiritual region he could
not reach in any other way. So we find that even for the most
transcendental of Christian contemplatives, still “in the Cross all doth
consist.” It has for him a terror and a rapture which the judicious
philosopher can never know; and reveals to him strange secrets
beyond the province of philosophy.

“Vocce legendo, en croce legendo

nel libro che c’è ensanguinato
Ca essa scrittura me fa en natura
ed en filosofia conventato;
O libro signato che dentro se’ aurato,
e tutto fiorito d’amore!”

That Cross gives the Infinite a colour which it did not have before.
So, even from the point of view of the most hardened and thorough-
going psychologist, Paul’s statement that “through one act of
righteousness, the free gift came unto all men” is literally accurate.
It is true—and that not in any conjuring-trick sense, but in a sense
which fulfils on highest levels life’s basic laws—that “by the grace of
one man” “the gift has abounded to the many,” entincturing and
altering the whole universe, and hence the whole experience, of
every receptive soul; atoning for the faulty attitude, the imperfect
love, of average man.
But still this is not all. There are other laws of life gathered up in,
and redistributed from, this great lens. Essentially the idea which the
Christ of the Gospels seems to have had of His own death is the idea
of a making good of some general falling-short on life’s part: a
“filling-up of the cup” of sacrifice and surrender, to balance the other
overflowing cup of error and sin. It is not only man’s unaccomplished
aim, but God’s unaccomplished aim in life, which He is represented
as fulfilling; and the fact that this conception owes a good deal to
Old Testament prophecy need not invalidate its mystical truth. If we
accept this idea, then, as well as showing individual man the way to
perfect union with God—“building the bridge and reforming the road
which leads to the Father’s heart,” as St. Catherine of Siena has it—
Christ in His willing death is somehow performing the very object of
life, in the name of the whole race. The true business of an atoner is
a constructive one. He is called upon to heal a disharmony; bridge a
gap between two things which, though separate, desire to be one.
Even the sacrificed animal of primitive religions seems most often to
be a reconciling victim, the medium of union between the
worshipper and his deity. In religions of a mystical type, then, the
Atoner or Redeemer will surely be one who makes patent those
latent possibilities of man which are at once the earnests of his
future blessedness and the causes of his present unrest. He will
achieve the completion and sublimation of our vague instinct for
sacrifice and love, and thus bridge the space between that which is
most divine in humanity and that which is most human in divinity;
filling up the measure of that “glory,” that real and divine life, of
which we all fall short, yet without which we can never be content.
Is not this again what St. Paul feels that Christ did? What he seems,
at bottom, to see in the Passion—though the imagery by which he
tries to communicate it often sounds harsh in our ears—is, the
mysterious fulfilment of all cosmic meanings; the perfect surrender
to infinite ideals of Man, the compound inhabitant of two possible
orders of reality, who by this painful self-loss achieves perfect
identification with the Divine will. This fulfilment was, as he distinctly
says, the duty and destiny of the human soul. All creation looks for it
“with outstretched neck.” But all have fallen short. Christ, the perfect
man, does it, does what man was always meant to do; and because
of the corporate character of humanity, in His utter transcendence of
self-hood and of all finite categories He inevitably lifts up, to share
His union with God, all who are in union with Him. The essence of
the Atonement, then, would not lie so much in the sacrificial act as
in the lift-up of the human spirit which that act guarantees; the new
levels of life which it opens for the race. “Much more, being
reconciled, shall we be saved in his life,” says Paul.
“In his life” a new summit has been conquered by humanity. But are
we to stop there? Is not the attainment of that same summit, the
achievement of that life-giving surrender to the Universal Spirit—“a
life-giving life,” Ruysbroeck calls it—just what the great mystics,
following as well as they can the curve of the life of Christ, try to do
according to their measure? Theirs, after all, is the vision which sees
that “there is no other way to life but the way of the Cross,” and that
the human life of Christ is “the door by which all must come in.”
Thus the spiritual victory of the Cross is for them not so much a
unique, as a pioneer act. It is the first heroic cutting of a road on
which they are to travel as far as they can; not merely the vicarious
setting-right of the balance between God and man, upset by man’s
wilful sin. In their ascent towards union with God, are not they road-
makers, or at any rate road-menders, too? Are they not forging new
links between two orders of reality, which are separate for the once-
born consciousness? If so, then we may regard each one of them as
a bit of the slowly achieved atonement of the race; that gradual
pressing-on of humanity into the heart of the Transcendent Order.
For Christians, this movement was initiated by Christ. But surely it is
continued and helped by every soul in union with Him, even those
who knew not His Name; and Julian of Norwich was right when she
said that she knew she was “in the Cross with Him.”
Two things are perpetually emphasized in modern presentations of
religion. First, the stress tends more and more to be upon
experience. Nothing which authority tells us is done for us truly
counts, unless we feel and realize it as done in us. In so far as this is
so, the tendency is to a mystical concept of religion; and, speaking
generally, to just the concept of religion which is supposed to conflict
with the idea of atonement as usually understood. But, secondly, the
social and corporate character of Christianity is strongly emphasized;
and, where this corporate character is admired more than it is
understood, mysticism is harshly criticized as the religion of the
spiritual individualist, a “vertical relation,” the “flight of the alone to
the Alone.” St. Paul’s “completing opposites,” in fact, are still in the
foreground of our religious life; and so perhaps some re-statement
of the solution by which he found room for both of them, and hence
both for personal responsibility and atonement, may be possible and
fruitful for us, too.
And first we notice that those enthusiasts for the corporate idea who
condemn the mystics as religious egoists seem to forget that they
are contradicting themselves; that if their vision of the Church of
Christ as a mystical body be true, then the mystic’s ascent to God
cannot be a flight of the Alone. The poisonous implication of that
phrase—true in its context but always misunderstood—has stuck like
mud to the white robes of the saints. But the mystic is not merely a
self going out on a solitary quest of Reality. He can, must, and does
go only as a member of the whole body, performing as it were the
function of a specialized organ. What he does, he does for all. He is,
in fact, an atoner pure and simple: something stretched out to
bridge a gap, something which makes good in a particular direction
the general falling-short. The special kind of light or life which he
receives, he receives for the race; and, conversely, the special
growth which he is able to achieve comes from the race. He depends
on it for his past; it depends on him for its future. All are part of life’s
great process of becoming; there are no breaks. Although there is
perfect individualization, there is interpenetration too. His attainment
is the attainment of the whole, pressing on behind him, supporting
him. Thus—to take an obvious example—the achievement of
peculiar sanctity by the member of a religious order is the
achievement of that order in him; and this not in a fantastic and
metaphorical sense. The support of the Rule, the conditions of the
life, the weight of tradition, the special characters which each
religious family inherits from its Patriarch, have all contributed
something to make the achievement possible; and are factors
governing the type which that achievement assumes. We recognize
the Cistercian stamp upon St. Bernard, the Dominican on Suso and
Tauler, the Carmelite on St. John of the Cross. Each such case
vindicates once more the incarnational principle; it is the true spirit
of the community, flowering in this representative of theirs, which
we see. Thus, as we may regard Christ from one point of view as
supremely ideal Man incarnate—the “heavenly man” as Paul calls
Him—summing up, fulfilling, lifting to new heights all that came
before, and therefore actualizing all that humanity was ever intended
to do, and changing for ever more the character of its future
achievements; so, in a small way, we may regard St. Teresa as
Carmel, the ideal Carmel, incarnate. Each is a concrete fact which
atones for the falling-short of a whole type, and yet is conditioned by
that type. The thought of what the Carmelite life was meant to do,
the pressure of that idea seeking manifestation, did condition
Teresa’s achievement. Are we not also bound to say that the thought
of the Jewish visions of an ideal humanity, of the Son of Man and
the Suffering Servant, did condition the external accidents of the life
and death of Christ?
So as to the past. Still more as to the future are the corporate and
individual aspects of spiritual life inextricably twined together. As that
done by one is an outbirth of the whole, so that done to one may
avail for the whole. Only by staying within the circle of this thought—
a thought which surely comes very close to the doctrine of
Atonement—can we form a sane and broad idea of what the mystic,
and the mystic’s experience, mean for the race. Consider again the
case of Teresa. As, even in a time and place of considerable
monastic corruption—for no one who has read her life and letters
can regard the Convent of the Incarnation as a forcing-house of the
spiritual life—still the idea of her order conditioned her great and
Godward-tending soul, and her dedicated life filled up the measure
of its glory; yet more has Teresa’s own, separate, unique
achievement conditioned the spirit of her order ever since. All the
saints which it has nourished have been salted with her salt. All that
she won has flowed out from her in life-giving streams to others.
She has been a regenerator of the religious life, has achieved the
ideal of Richard Rolle, and become a “pipe of life” through which the
living water can pass from God to man. Is not this, too, rather near
the idea of Atonement, a curiously close and faithful imitation of
Christ; especially when we consider the amount of unselfish
suffering which such a career entails?
The objective of the Christian life, we say, is union with God: that
paradoxical victory-in-surrender of love which translates us from
finite to infinite levels. Most of us in this present life and in our own
persons fall short of the glory of this. We are not all equally full of
grace; we do not all grow up to the full stature of the Sons of God;
and it is no use pretending that we do. But the mystical saint does
achieve this, and by this act of mediation—this “vicarious”
achievement, if you like to put it so—performed by a member of our
social organism, the gift does really “abound unto the many.” For
what other purpose, indeed, are these apparently elect souls bred
up? What other social value can we attribute to them than that
which we see them actually possessing in history—the value, that is,
of special instruments put forth by the race, to do or suffer
something which the average self cannot do, but which humanity as
a whole, in its Godward ascent, must, can, and shall do; ducts, too,
whereby fresh spiritual energy flows in to mankind; eyes, open to
visions beyond the span of average sight; parents of new life. Carlyle
said that a hero was “a man sent hither to make the divine mystery
more impressively known to us”—to atone, in fact, for the
inadequacy of our own perception of Reality, our perpetual relapses
to lower levels of life; to make a bridge between us and the
Transcendent Order. And when the hero as mystic does this, is he
not in a special sense a close imitator of Christ?
We seem to have here the highest example of a principle which is
operative through the whole of the seething complex of life, for
there is a sense on which every great personality fulfils the function
of an atoner. On the one hand he does something towards the
making good of humanity’s “falling short” in one direction or
another; on the other hand, he gives to his fellow-men—adds to
their universe—something which they did not possess before. Burke,
speaking of the social contract, has said that society is a partnership
in all science, all art, every virtue, and all perfection; and, since the
ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained but in many
generations, it is a partnership between the living, the dead, and the
unborn. “Each contract of each particular state,” he says, “is but a
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