SOURCE: “Mysticism and Atheism in ‘To the Lighthouse,’” in Studies in the Novel, Vol. 13, Winter, 1981, pp. 408–23.

[In the following essay, Corner discusses what he sees as Woolf's intersection of atheism and mysticism in To the Lighthouse, finding that the characters come to have faith in a greater pattern but still recognize the universe as other.]

I

Virginia Woolf was an atheist: she was also a mystic. Both the mysticism and the atheism are there in some words that she wrote not long before her death. She is talking about the sudden shocks that life delivers, and of how she no longer finds in them “an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life”; instead, they are “a token of some real thing behind appearances. … From this I reach what I might call a philosophy … that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art. … But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God. …”¹ The point of this article is to consider her atheism and her mysticism together; only in this way does it seem to me possible to understand either. I shall concentrate on To the Lighthouse, though this is not to imply that these issues are ignored elsewhere in her work. The Waves, in particular, touches on both. But the important connections and distinctions are at the center of To the Lighthouse; they enter vitally into Virginia Woolf's discriminations of character, as into her appraisal of the world that those characters inhabit.

II

The starting-point for discussions of mysticism in To the Lighthouse has usually been Mrs. Ramsay. This is understandable in that it is certain experiences of hers which are most immediately recognizable as mystical. But to concentrate on Mrs. Ramsay has the effect of emphasizing a kind of mysticism which, I shall try to show, Virginia Woolf mistrusts and perhaps even rejects. Instead I shall start with Lily Briscoe; in her experience, and indirectly in Mr. Ramsay's as well, Virginia Woolf can be seen to trace a strain of mysticism of a quite different kind, one for which she has a much deeper sympathy.

When Lily sets about finishing her picture in the third part of To the Lighthouse she thinks about what she is doing through one image in particular: it is an image that expresses both what her art requires of her and what life as a whole demands. The image grows out of her feeling of risk as she confronts the “uncompromising white stare” of the blank canvas. As always when she turns from life to painting “she had a few moments of nakedness when she seemed like an unborn soul, a soul reft of body, hesitating on some windy pinnacle and exposed without protection to all the blasts of doubt.”² The figure on the pinnacle seems to be hesitating before a leap, and the leap is the making of the first mark on the canvas. That this is indeed what is intended is confirmed a little later, though here the reference is more inclusive and takes in life as a whole as well as painting: “Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air?” (TL, p. 277). It is clear that the “leaping” image expresses for Lily the essence of her relationship with the world. The readiness to leap is the precondition of everything; without the leap of the brush there can be no picture, and without the leap away from safe understandings of the world, no life.

What is it that makes this desperate leap inevitable? Lily's understanding of painting offers an approach to the answer, though—like the leaping image itself—the point is generalized to take in all of life. For Lily, to face the blank canvas is also to confront “this formidable ancient enemy of hers—this other thing, this truth, this reality, which suddenly laid hands on her, emerged stark at the back of appearances and commanded her attention” (TL, p. 245). “This other thing”: Lily sees it most directly in the objects in front of her, in “this form, were it only the shape of a white lamp-shade looming on a wicker table” which “roused one to perpetual combat” (TL, p. 245). Yet it is clearly more than form; it emerges “at the back of appearances” and it asks to be described in words such as “truth” and “reality.” Nor is it something that passively allows itself to be observed: it suddenly lays hands on her and commands the disciplined attention of her art.

Lily has a similar experience a little later, but this time it has nothing directly to do with the painting of the picture. As she stands on the lawn she feels as though everything is approaching a point of comprehensibility. The world seems “dissolved … into a pool of thought, a deep basin of reality” (TL, p. 275), and Lily feels that she is within reach of some conclusive revelation. Perhaps if Mr. Carmichael were to join her in demanding an explanation of everything “something would emerge. A hand would be shoved up, a blade would be flashed” (TL, p. 276). But Mr. Carmichael does not speak, and she dismisses all this as nonsense: the great revelation never comes. Then, involuntarily and inexplicably and with a sense of shock, she finds herself weeping: “Was she crying then for Mrs. Ramsay, without being aware of any unhappiness? She addressed old Mr. Carmichael again. What was it then? What did it mean? Could things thrust their hands up and grip one; could the blade cut; the fist grasp? Was there no safety?” (TL, p. 277), and she goes on that all is “miracle” and “leaping from the pinnacle.” What she hoped for has happened, but not in the way she wished. In her sudden painful awareness that there is no evading time and change, and that not even art provides a refuge, a hand is once again laid on her: the sword is thrust up, but not as a sign or explanation. Instead it cuts, and the fist grasps; whatever is “at the back of appearances” issues a summons that makes the leap inevitable.

This discussion has led into an area that can only be described as mystical. But it is important to be clear about the kind of mysticism that is involved here, and to see how it differs from that other kind which is familiarly associated with To the Lighthouse and in particular with Mrs. Ramsay. Varieties of mystical experience have sometimes been categorized as “introvertive” and “extravertive”: one turning inwards to the pure self, and the other outwards to the world, so that the mystic blends into a union with natural objects or with “Nature” as a whole.³ Broadly, the mystical experiences which Virginia Woolf describes in her fiction and her personal reminiscences are of the extravertive kind; as with Lily on the lawn, they occur as part of the interchange between an individual and the world around. The important distinction for Virginia Woolf is between two varieties of extravertive experience. On the one hand, there are moments that fit the definition just given, in which the self blends into unity with something else, a single object or the world as a whole. On the other there are experiences in which the self faces a reality which is of a different order from that given in commonplace awareness, something supremely worth attention, but yet remains quite distinct: no blending or merging takes place. One might call them, respectively, “fusing” and “facing” experiences.

Mrs. Ramsay's moments are predominantly of the “fusing” kind. When she is released from the pressure of activity an undifferentiated self emerges which absorbs or blends into certain objects (as, for example, the lighthouse); on other occasions she forges such a unity among those around her that she feels herself and them absorbed into a unity which is more than human, embraced and surrounded by a transcendental stability, “the still space that lies about the heart of things” (TL, p. 163). Virginia Woolf accepts the reality and importance of such experiences, but she also sees danger in them. In the first place, they are momentary and involuntary: they fix points, but they do not mark out a path. As Lily comes to realize in Part III, “matches struck unexpectedly in the dark” do not cast their light very far (TL, p. 249). Secondly, and this is more decisive, these “fusing” experiences do not readily reveal their true nature; they are delusive, not in the sense of being unreal, but in that they tend to impose false interpretations. This can best be seen in Mrs. Ramsay when she sits down after the children have gone to bed. She looks toward the beam of the lighthouse, and feels that she is dissolved into it: “watching them in this mood always at this hour one could not help attaching oneself to one thing especially of the things one saw; and this thing, the long steady stroke, was her stroke. Often she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking, with her work in her hands until she became the thing she looked at—that light for example” (TL, pp. 100–101). This blending of self and not-self gives Mrs. Ramsay an immense sense of security; there is no longer an opposing world set over against the self and threatening it. And it is out of this sense of security that the unexpected words well up into her mind: “We are in the hands of the Lord.” But there is an immediate reaction: “instantly she was annoyed with herself for saying that. Who had said it? not she; she had been trapped into saying something she did not mean” (TL, p. 101). She has been trapped partly by the traditional language for such experiences, but partly also by the experience itself. For these moments of “fusing,” in which the gulf between man and the world disappears and the human blends with the nonhuman, have the effect of humanizing the world: nothing seems alien any more. And the step from this to the use of theistic language is an easy one, but one that Virginia Woolf refuses to take. Thus when in the passage quoted earlier she suggests that “the whole world is a work of art,” she explicitly refuses to talk about an artist: “but there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God” (MB, p. 72).

Mrs. Ramsay is equally emphatic: “How could any Lord have made this world?” It denies all the qualities that make us human: “there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for the world to commit; she knew that” (TL, p. 102). The world constantly reminds us of its otherness, and it is this that makes theistic language impossible for Mrs. Ramsay. She is caught in a deep conflict here. On the one hand, her most vivid experiences are of a mystical unity with the world around her; on the other, she is forced into an atheist position by her awareness of an impassable gulf between the human and the nonhuman. But if this gulf is really quite impassable (and the rest of the novel, particularly Part II, seems to insist that it is), then how are these “fusing” experiences to be understood? There is no clear answer in To the Lighthouse. But a glance ahead to The Waves is helpful here. As he looks at the willow-tree, Bernard has an experience in certain respects similar to Mrs. Ramsay's as she looks at the lighthouse. He too attaches himself with peculiar intimacy to one object among many, and he finds in it the stability which Mrs. Ramsay also feels. The tree has a radiance which lifts it out of the everyday order of being and ensures that Bernard will remember it for the rest of his life: it is mystically perceived and it becomes a part of himself. But Bernard is able by the end of the novel to understand the intimacy of this experience more fully than Mrs. Ramsay understands hers. In retrospect he can give this account of his experience: “as I looked in autumn at the fiery and yellow branches, some sediment formed; I formed; a drop fell; I fell—that is, from some completed experience I had emerged.”⁴ These moments are not, Bernard realizes, moments in which the self is diffused into other things; they are occasions of precipitation or condensation, in which the self uses other things to form itself. The object, tree or lighthouse, works as a symbol of this formation, and it is only through the discovery of the appropriate symbol that the formation occurs. They are moments when the self is “with sudden accretions of being built up, in a beech wood, sitting by a willow on a bank, leaning over a parapet at Hampton Court” (TW, p. 310). She does not consciously make this analysis, but it is implicit in the way that Mrs. Ramsay comes to see the beam of the lighthouse after she has rejected “the hands of the Lord.” It symbolizes herself, and in particular her honesty: “it seemed to her like her own eyes meeting her own eyes, searching as she alone could search into her mind and her heart, purifying out of existence that lie, any lie. She praised herself in praising the light” (TL, p. 101). In these moments of “fusing” the self is merged with the object only insofar as the object becomes an enabling symbol of what the self now knows itself to be. The fusion is that of the symbol with its meaning.

In both To the Lighthouse and The Waves Virginia Woolf allows great importance to such experiences. But to have known moments in which objects become symbols and catalysts of our own meaning can feed a desire for the whole world “out there” to become symbolic and to repeat to us our own humanity; and to give way to this desire is, for Virginia Woolf, the mistake of theism. In To the Lighthouse this is made plain through the unnamed mystic of Part II. Summer brings him the promise of “cliff, sea, cloud, and sky brought purposely together to assemble outwardly the scattered parts of the vision within” (TL, p. 204), and at such moments everything seems on the brink of becoming symbol. But the final clarifying fusion of world with human meaning never takes place; the mystic can never “read in the littered pieces the clear words of truth” (TL, p. 199). What the anonymous mystic is trying to do is to extend momentary experiences of a “fusing” kind to the point of inclusive completeness, at which point the gulf between the human and nonhuman would disappear. But Nature fails to “supplement what man advanced,” to “complete what he began” (TL, pp. 207–8). In the end the nonhumanity of the world is as terrifyingly apparent in its beauty as in its violence. “Violets came and daffodils. But the stillness and the brightness of the day were as strange as the chaos and tumult of night, with the trees standing there, and the flowers standing there, looking before them, looking up, yet beholding nothing, eyeless, and thus terrible” (TL, p. 209). Such reminders of the world's irreducible strangeness and otherness constantly defeat the attempt to build an inclusive truth out of moments in which man and the world seem fused in a single meaning; and Virginia Woolf's atheism is, in essence, her determination to be faithful to that otherness. She is compelled, therefore, to distrust a variety of mysticism which tends always to cast over the world a reassuring tinge of human meaning.

III

Outside of the novels, though, most of Virginia Woolf's descriptions of mystical experiences are of the “facing,” not the “fusing” kind; these, I shall argue, are intrinsically more compatible with her atheism, and bring us back to Lily on the lawn. Here is Virginia Stephen as a child in the garden of Talland House: “I was looking at the flower bed by the front door; ‘That is the whole,’ I said. I was looking at a plant with a spread of leaves; and it seemed suddenly plain that the flower itself was a part of the earth; that a ring enclosed what was the flower; and that was the real flower; part earth; part flower” (MB, p. 71). Here there is no blending of subject with object, human with nonhuman; the child remains distinct, looking at the “real” flower which has suddenly become apparent to her. And though fuller and more consciously developed, Virginia Woolf's adult experiences take the same form. In February 1926 (while working on To the Lighthouse) she records that, as she walks through Russell Square, “I see the mountains in the sky: the great clouds; and the moon which is risen over Persia; I have a great and astonishing sense of something there, which is ‘it.’”⁵ In September of the same year she talks about the object of her attention as an artist in a way that recalls Lily's frightening antagonist “at the back of appearances”: “it is not oneself but something in the universe that one's left with. It is this that is frightening and exciting in the midst of my profound gloom, depression, boredom, whatever it is. One sees a fin passing far out” (WD, p. 101). In both instances the stress is on something “out there,” apart from herself; there is no hint of “fusing,” nor is the language at all theistic. Even when, as in the following passage from September 1928, there is a suggestion of union with the “something,” the union is prospective only, and not known in the moment of vision. She has come to Rodmell, and “got then to a consciousness of what I call ‘reality’: a thing I see before me: something abstract; but residing in the downs or sky; beside which nothing matters; in which I shall rest and continue to exist” (WD, p. 132). In this, Virginia Woolf's clearest expression of the “facing” variety of mystical experience, there is a strong affinity with what Lily sees as she confronts her canvas. She too is aware of something not herself, “this other thing,” which is “truth” and “reality”; which is there in the white lampshade, but yet is abstracted from it to emerge “at the back of appearances”; which more than anything else is worth her attention.

Yet there is one striking difference. Lily's “reality” challenges her to combat: hands are laid upon her, and the sword-blade cuts. She has no choice but to leap into a dangerous engagement. Virginia Woolf's “reality,” on the other hand, stands quietly and unaggressively before her, promising not struggle and risk but rest and permanence. By the time that the picture is finished, however, the difference has become very much less. Lily's “vision” does in the end reach a point of rest and stability; how this comes about is best seen by looking at what happens in the completion of the painting.

As Lily begins to paint the sense of engagement with something commanding and uncompromising is very strong; her brush “was now heavier and went slower, as if it had fallen in with some rhythm which was dictated to her (she kept looking at the hedge, at the canvas) by what she saw” (TL, p. 246). The image of the leap reappears, though this time instead of the tower Lily is walking the plank: “It was an odd road to be walking, this of painting. Out and out one went, further and further, until at last one seemed to be on a narrow plank, perfectly alone, over the sea” (TL, p. 265). The sudden surge of feeling for Mrs. Ramsay seems to carry her off into the waves; but luckily no one has noticed, “no one had seen her step off her strip of board into the waters of annihilation” (TL, p. 278). Once again, what is true of painting is true of life as a whole: it is all danger and risk.

As the picture develops, Lily's struggle is to keep two things in balance. She has a moment quite late on when she is convinced that her morning has been wasted: “she could not achieve that razor edge of balance between two opposite forces; Mr. Ramsay and the picture; which was necessary” (TL, p. 296). Mr. Ramsay embodies something which is a condition of artistic success, but which her picture all too easily obscures and denies; and in this the picture is like Mrs. Ramsay. “What was the problem then? She must try to get hold of something that evaded her. It evaded her when she thought of Mrs. Ramsay; it evaded her now when she thought of her picture. Phrases came. Visions came. Beautiful pictures. Beautiful phrases. But what she wished to get hold of was that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it had been made anything. Get that and start afresh” (TL, pp. 296–97). Mrs. Ramsay and the picture have this in common, that they try to blend subject and object into a moment of vision, and by so doing they soften the otherness of the world. But Mr. Ramsay is an unwavering witness to the nonhumanity of the world; he therefore represents to Lily that otherness which must somehow be got into the picture if it is not to be false.

“Beautiful pictures. Beautiful phrases.” The last words point ahead, once again, to Bernard in The Waves. Like him, Lily is made to see that there is something suspect in the power of any art—whether through paint or through words—to beautify the world and to translate it into human terms. She recognizes that her painting ought to preserve an awareness of the gulf between vision and the thing itself untransmuted; only by achieving this does art remain faithful to the distance between man and the world. Some artists, of course, neglect this; like Mr. Paunceforte they cultivate a reassuring idiom which they impose indiscriminately, so that the picture admits no distance between vision and object. But the true artist does not retreat into false humanization: Lily understands the need to work on the razor edge of balance between art and what precedes art, with all the risk that this involves. Any stroke of the brush may betray the vision or the world: every stroke is a leap into the gulf between the one and the other.

But it turns out that the leap is rewarded. The impossible happens: Lily discovers that by risking both vision and world she glimpses at least the possibility of securing both. Her picture is finished and she has her vision. But through the fidelity of attention which this demands of her she also sees the world with a directness and immediacy which calls from her the word “miracle.” Just before the picture is finally resolved she feels that:

One must keep on looking without for a second relaxing the intensity of emotion, the determination not to be put off, not to be bamboozled. One must hold the scene—so—in a vice and let nothing come in and spoil it. One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that’s a chair, that’s a table, and yet at the same time, It’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy. The problem might be solved after all.

(TL, pp. 309–10).

The possibility of seeing the world as miracle and ecstasy is Lily's reward for the leap and the struggle. The miracle is not, however, a miracle of the extraordinary but of the ordinary. It springs from the attempt to see the world as it is in itself, unmolded to our humanity: “the thing itself before it has been made anything.” It is toward this that Lily concentrates all her effort, and by the end of the morning she has come somewhere near achieving it.

Lily is striving for a perfect transparency of perception: “let nothing come in and spoil it.” Insofar as she attains this she passes beyond the struggle and conflict to a moment of rest and stability which recalls Virginia Woolf at Rodmell. But in what sense can this be said still to be mystical? Earlier I related mystical perception to “a reality … of a different order from that given in commonplace awareness”; Lily, surely, is stressing the very reverse, the desire “to be on a level with ordinary experience.” But this is not to be ordinary experience ordinarily experienced. The whole discipline and concentration of the morning have been directed toward that transparency of perception in which commonplace things are what they are and yet are miracle and ecstasy, and so prove to be of a different order from that which ordinary experience imposed on them. This, and the supreme worth of the world so seen, establishes Lily's perception as genuinely mystical.

Lily's moment of vision is less a satisfactory ordering of the world than a discovery of the world as ordinary and yet transformed; it is this that makes art's ordering possible and truthful. What is revealed in that last moment of sudden clarity and intensity is supremely worth attention and the occasion of great joy, but the perceiver remains conscious of the distance between herself and what is perceived, does not blend or fuse with the world around her, and is not tempted to talk of it in theistic terms. Lily is, I would suggest, Virginia Woolf's fullest expression in this novel of the “facing” variety of mystical experience, a kind that is much closer to the heart of her view of the world than that with which we are familiar from discussions of Mrs. Ramsay.

IV

There are, then, two kinds of mystical experience in To the Lighthouse, one suggesting security and the other risk, one “the hands of the Lord” and the other the lonely figure on the pinnacle of a tower. There are also two kinds of atheism, and, as with mysticism, Virginia Woolf reveals a preference for one rather than the other. Mr. Ramsay's atheism is implied from the start; but, interestingly, it approaches explicit expression only at the very end of the novel, and then in connection with a “leap” which recalls Lily's as she stands before her canvas. The boat is about to reach the lighthouse: Mr. Ramsay “rose and stood in the bow of the boat, very straight and tall, for all the world, James thought, as if he were saying, ‘There is no God,’ and Cam thought, as if he were leaping into space” (TL, p. 318). In this moment the children see their father more clearly than ever before: to James, Mr. Ramsay's whole being proclaims its deepest truth. Why does Virginia Woolf wait so long before connecting Mr. Ramsay with an explicit declaration of atheism, and why does she make it so central a part of what he is at this culminating moment? It is, I would suggest, because she wishes us to see his atheism as something fully achieved only in this moment: something toward which his whole life has been a preparation.

The point is made clearer by a contrast, and one that is established very early in the novel. The only other explicit mention of atheism is to do with Charles Tansley, as he talks to James at the beginning of the book:

“It’s due west,” said the atheist Tansley, holding his bony fingers spread so that the wind blew through them, for he was sharing Mr. Ramsay's evening walk up and down, up and down the terrace. That is to say, the wind blew from the worst possible direction for landing at the Lighthouse. Yes, he did say disagreeable things, Mrs. Ramsay admitted; it was odious of him to rub this in, and make James still more disappointed; but at the same time, she would not let them laugh at him. “The atheist,” they called him; “the little atheist”

(TL, pp. 14–15)

Tansley's atheism, suggested by the gesture of his skeletal hand, is made to seem petty, meager, almost sadistic; it is presented as a label, and consequently it seems superficial and assumed. And though Mrs. Ramsay is given a sympathy for Tansley which prevents her from condoning the children's mockery, there is in the passage a sense that Virginia Woolf is distancing herself from his intellectual position. For her, as for the children, he is “the atheist Tansley”: his atheism is such that he can be stamped and categorized within three pages of the novel's opening, whereas it is not until two pages from its end that Mr. Ramsay's position is made explicit.

From this it is fair to conclude that Virginia Woolf's intention is to discriminate between atheisms just as she discriminates between mysticisms. There is the atheism of the “little atheist,” a ready-made intellectual position which can be slipped into like an overcoat by a young man with his way to make in the world, which James and the other children instinctively mock; and there is the atheism which declares itself only at the end of a life, and with such dignity that it transfigures the father in the eyes of his children. Mr. Ramsay's life is an achievement of atheism; and the nature of this achievement brings his atheism into relation with the “facing” variety of mysticism that is there in Lily's completion of her picture.

Cam sees her father (before he springs from the boat) “as if he were leaping into space.” The meaning of this is best understood by looking back over Mr. Ramsay's development as Virginia Woolf traces it in the third part of the novel. Mr. Ramsay's “leap” starts from a point quite different from Lily's. Hers begins as creative risk; it is what the “truth,” the “reality” of art require of her. From that it broadens into a response to something “out there” which is aggressive and demanding, but which rewards those who do not attempt evasion with the miracle of ordinariness transfigured. Mr. Ramsay's leap, however, is essentially moral; it takes place not on a level of aesthetic attention but in his overcoming of certain moral limitations that are partly cause and partly consequence of an evasion of the world outside of himself. He is in no sense a mystic, and he never reaches the point at which a different order of being emerges. But though the word “mystical” is no longer appropriate, the idea of “facing” still is. Just as the “fusing” mystic may turn the world into a mirror of himself and so deny its otherness, in a parallel way atheism may be a form of egoistic lament, a preoccupation with a private despair which stands between the individual and the world. Mr. Ramsay has to learn to face the world and his position in it, and in particular to overcome the egoistic preoccupations that stand in the way of such a confrontation. His experience is a nonmystical analogue of the “facing” mysticism implicit in Lily's art.

“Has to learn to face the world”: but surely Mr. Ramsay stands out from the start for his complete honesty in recognizing the otherness of the world and its nonhumanity? This is true; this is apparent on the second page of the novel, when he tells James that it will not be fine enough to go to the lighthouse. He cannot bear that people should deceive themselves about the world, and he suspects that his wife sometimes encourages self-deception. Intellectually, his atheist honesty and rigor are not in doubt. But morally the situation is different; here his atheism is at first not fully achieved. In his emotional life, and consequently in the way that he treats others, there are signs that he does not altogether accept what he admits intellectually. In his craving for reassurance and sympathy, and in his self-pity, there is a hidden outcry against the fact that he, directly and personally, should be a victim of the situation which he has, generally and theoretically, described. And in the assertiveness, at times almost the sadism, of his insistence on the inhumanity of the world, there is more than a trace of resentment that things should be as they are. It would not be altogether misleading to say that Mr. Ramsay begins as the kind of atheist who has not forgiven God for not existing; and such an atheism is incomplete.

He needs, then, to get beyond this stage and to accept the world as it is with everything that follows for his own position. Virginia Woolf hints at this early on when she makes Mr. Ramsay, for all his intellectual penetration, scarcely aware of the physical world around him. To Mrs. Ramsay it is as though he were “born blind, deaf, and dumb to the ordinary things, but to the extraordinary things, with an eye like an eagle's” (TL, p. 111). He is not, in Lily's words, “on a level with ordinary experience”; he cannot say “that’s a chair, that’s a table” because his table is an abstraction, the object of the subject-and-object problem. He must learn to attend to the ordinary, and it is here that Scott helps him. What he enjoys in The Antiquary is above all “this man's strength and sanity, his feeling for straightforward simple things, these fishermen, the poor old crazed creature in Mucklebackit's cottage” (TL, p. 185). But the learning cannot be done at second hand. Steenie's drowning is one thing: the death of Mrs. Ramsay, the drowning of the sailors in the bay, his own death and the obliteration of his works (anticipated in the drowning of Cowper's castaway), these are something else, and it requires a hard-won moral transformation to face an ordinary world which contains all this.

At the beginning of Part III Mr. Ramsay's horizon is filled, understandably, with his grief at the death of his wife. As he stands with Lily on the lawn, he can see the bay and the lighthouse only as trivial distractions from the real matter in hand, his need of sympathy: “Why, thought Mr. Ramsay, should she look at the sea when I am here? She hoped it would be calm enough for them to land at the Lighthouse, she said. The Lighthouse! The Lighthouse! What’s that got to do with it? he thought impatiently” (TL, p. 234). For Lily, his very presence seems to drain ordinary things of their color and substance: “his gaze seemed to fall dolefully over the sunny grass and discolour it” (TL, pp. 235–36). But release comes, and it comes for both of them through an everyday object, Mr. Ramsay's boots. He notices untied laces, she the boots themselves, and she praises them, but with an immediate fear that she has committed the unforgivable triviality. She expects “complete annihilation,” but “instead, Mr. Ramsay smiled. His pall, his draperies, his infirmities fell from him. Ah yes, he said, holding his foot up for her to look at, they were first-rate boots” (TL, pp. 237–38). To Lily, the boots are Mr. Ramsay; she is struck by how well they express the man. But to Mr. Ramsay they are simply boots, and in that entirely fascinating; and he delivers a brief lecture on boot-making, quite free for the moment from grief and self-pity. It is not just that he has been given something else to think about: in a small way he has discovered Scott's directness and ease with the ordinary world.

The effect of this is that, as he sets off with the children to the boat, Mr. Ramsay is transformed in Lily's eyes. To her “it seemed as if he had shed worries and ambitions, and the hope of sympathy and the desire for praise, had entered some other region, was drawn on, as if by curiosity, in dumb colloquy, whether with himself or another, at the head of that little procession out of one's range” (TL, p. 242). He seems now to be looking outwards; to Lily it is at least a possibility that he is engaged with some reality apart from himself, “drawn on” in a way that parallels Lily's “exacting intercourse” with the reality “at the back of appearances.” If Lily's intuition is right (and in Part III the intuitions of other characters about Mr. Ramsay seem generally to be authoritative), a “dumb colloquy” has begun with something beyond his grief that is real and worth attention; Mr. Ramsay is beginning to move, though quite nonmystically, into a position which parallels that of the “facing” variety of mysticism.

But Mr. Ramsay still has a long way to go. Once in the boat he falls back into self-pity; he sees himself in imagination walking on the terrace of the house, alone: “he seemed to himself very old, and bowed. Sitting in the boat he bowed, he crouched himself, acting instantly his part—the part of a desolate man, widowed, bereft; and so called up before him in hosts people sympathizing with him; staged for himself as he sat in the boat, a little drama” (TL, pp. 256–57). He declaims, to Cam's significant embarrassment, “But I beneath a rougher sea. …” Gradually, though, he turns outwards again, and resumes the colloquy which Lily sensed on the lawn. Part of this is a continued approach toward the ordinary world, sometimes clumsy and scarcely disinterested (as when he asks about Cam's puppy) but sometimes natural and successful (as when he eats bread and cheese with the fishermen). It is most striking when he talks to Macalister about the great storm. James notices how “he leant forward, how he brought his voice into tune with Macalister's voice,” and Cam hears “the little tinge of Scottish accent which came into his voice, making him seem like a peasant himself” (TL, p. 254). His assimilation to the ordinary world is here almost physical.

But another aspect of this development, and one that Virginia Woolf links to this acceptance of the ordinary, is Mr. Ramsay's growing ability to face death without self-pity and the demand for others' sympathy. This is conveyed most forcefully at the moment when the boat crosses the spot where, in the great storm, three men were drowned. The children dread another self-pitying outburst, but instead “to their surprise all he said was ‘Ah’ as if he thought to himself, But why make a fuss about that? Naturally men are drowned in a storm, but it is a perfectly straightforward affair, and the depths of the sea (he sprinkled the crumbs from his sandwich paper over them) are only water after all” (TL, p. 316). The sprinkling of the crumbs is particularly suggestive of acceptance; in its casualness it might seem cold and inappropriate, but yet it is a gesture which by its very casualness accepts the ordinariness of death.

In the last chapter of the crossing there are several details which emphasize in Mr. Ramsay a new openness and a new readiness to step outside the refuges of reassurance and sympathy. He lowers the book which has protected him from the turbulent emotions of the children; he sits there “bareheaded with the wind blowing his hair about, extraordinarily exposed to everything. He looked very old” (TL, p. 311). To James, he seems like “some old stone lying on the sand,” unprotected but strong enough now to need no shelter. He glances back toward the island which they have left, and we see him suspended between the “dwindled leaf-like shape” which is his past life and the unknown which lies ahead of him. He is drawing himself free of egoism and the accretions of personality, and in words that go beyond the physical situation Virginia Woolf tells us of his “complete readiness to land” (TL, p. 317). There is in this an unflinching directness with the world and with death which is more than intellectual, which is reflected in the changed quality of his relations with the children, and which, in its own way, parallels Lily's desire to be “on a level with ordinary experience.”

For Lily, the reward of success was to know the ordinary as miracle; for Mr. Ramsay too his new openness to “the thing itself” has its reward. We see him in these pages only through the eyes of James and Cam, but there are suggestions that their minds are increasingly in tune with their father's. Now that egoism and self-pity have abated, James's thoughts fall quite naturally into step with Mr. Ramsay's: for both of them “loneliness” is the truth of things (TL, p. 311). And at one point James almost echoes the “Castaway” outburst: “‘We are driving before a gale—we must sink,’ he began saying to himself, half aloud exactly as his father said it” (TL, p. 312). The same intuitive understanding seems to be there in the last moments of the crossing: “they both wanted to say, Ask us anything and we will give it to you. But he did not ask them anything. He sat and looked at the island and he might be thinking, We perished, each alone, or he might be thinking, I have reached it. I have found it, but he said nothing” (TL, p. 318). “We perished …,” offered without any of the earlier self-pity, is now a true recognition and not a complaint. “I have reached it” is corroborated by Lily in the last chapter, when she says “He must have reached it” (TL, p. 318). Mr. Ramsay has had his reward. But what has he reached? It is not what he was struggling toward, the “Z” at the end of his philosophical argument. It is, however, presented as something equivalent, a matter of experience and not of philosophy; and it is clear that he could not have reached it if he had not been able to make himself “extraordinarily exposed to everything.” Its nature is partly suggested by its coincidence with Lily's attainment of her vision: the two moments of fulfillment are sufficiently akin to be offered in parallel. Virginia Woolf is suggesting that here Mr. Ramsay reaches his vision (the vision of a mind very unlike her own, and so seen always from the outside), and the content of that moment is tentatively indicated in the last paragraph of Chapter 13: “He rose and stood in the bow of the boat, very straight and tall, for all the world, James thought, as if he were saying, ‘There is no God,’ and Cam thought, as if he were leaping into space, and they both rose to follow him as he sprang, lightly like a young man, holding his parcel, on to the rock” (TL, p. 318). In the eyes of his children Mr. Ramsay reaches a moment of transfiguration, from extreme age to youth, from dominance and coercion to a natural authority; and this has to do with the dignity and completeness, emotional as well as intellectual, of his atheism, which now for the first time finds clear expression. For Mr. Ramsay himself it is as though the truth of his life is now securely possessed: he discovers a new lightness and freedom in his release from egoism, and, once the leap has been taken and the “dwindled leaf-like shape” left behind, he finds an unexpected firmness in that nonhuman reality toward which the leap is directed. His feet land on the rock.

V

In the light of Mr. Ramsay's development, what is Virginia Woolf saying about atheism and its relationship to mysticism? As far as atheism is concerned, her central insight is that if it is to progress beyond the stage of the “little atheist” it must be a faithfulness, moral as well as theoretical, to the nonhumanity of the world. She presents it as a training of the whole person toward a comprehended truth, a truth which must be grasped emotionally as well as intellectually. And this is a process which involves risk; only when a person is able to leap from the pinnacle of the tower, away from whatever limited certainties are available—the self-protective ego, the familiar life—does the process achieve its fulfillment. And here a paradox appears which connects Mr. Ramsay with Lily, the atheist with the mystic. Without God, the leap ought to end in disaster, in the chaos of that void which Virginia Woolf evokes so powerfully in Part II of To the Lighthouse. But those of her characters who succeed in facing the world nakedly and without evasion are shown to discover, mystically or otherwise, that they are not leaping into a void. Something emerges to meet them—the rock beneath Mr. Ramsay's feet, the reality “at the back of appearances,” the ordinary world transfigured into miracle and ecstasy, and for Virginia Woolf herself that abstraction which nevertheless resided in the downs near Rodmell and beside which nothing mattered. This is the key to her atheist mysticism. For her, atheism was the renunciation of inappropriate expectations toward the nonhuman world; but it was also a condition of that purified perception which would reveal the world as ordinary and yet miraculous, as nonhuman in its otherness and yet beyond everything worth our attention.

Notes

1. Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being, ed. J. Schulkind (Sussex: The Univ. Press, 1976), p. 72. Hereafter referred to as MB.

2. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, Uniform Edition (London: The Hogarth Press, 1930), p. 245. Hereafter referred to as TL.

3. E.g., W. T. Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1960), p. 60.

4. Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Uniform Edition (London: The Hogarth Press, 1933), p. 277. Hereafter referred to as TW.

5. Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953), p. 86. Hereafter referred to as WD.