Hours with the Mystics: A Contribution to the History of Religious Opinion

HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS

Uniform with this volume, crown 8vo, cloth.

I.

THE SYMBOLISM OF CHURCHES
AND
CHURCH ORNAMENTS

A TRANSLATION OF THE FIRST BOOK
OF THE
RATIONALE DIVINORUM OFFICIORUM
OF WILLIAM DURANDUS

_With Introductory Essay and Notes by the_
REV. J. M. NEALE AND REV. B. WEBB

II.

SYMBOLISM, OR EXPOSITION
OF THE
DOCTRINAL DIFFERENCES
BETWEEN
CATHOLICS AND PROTESTANTS
As evidenced by their Symbolical Writings

BY JOHN ADAM MOEHLER, D.D.

HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS

A Contribution to the History of
Religious Opinion

BY

ROBERT ALFRED VAUGHAN, B.A.

SIXTH EDITION

TWO VOLUMES IN ONE

VOL. I

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
743 & 745 BROADWAY
1893

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.

The work which is now again published was the result of too many years’ steady application, and has served too great an intellectual use in the special department of thought of which it treats, to be allowed to fall into oblivion. Certainly the reading which the author thought it necessary to accomplish before he presented his conclusions to the public was vast, and varied. That the fruit of his labours was commensurate may be gathered from the honest admiration which has been expressed by men knowing what hard study really means. The first edition of the ‘Hours with the Mystics’ appeared in 1856; the second was, to a great extent, revised by the author, but it did not appear until after his death. It was edited by his father, though most of the work of correction and verification was done by the author’s widow.

There is no intention of writing a memoir here. That has already been done. But it has been suggested that it might be interesting to trace how Mysticism gradually became the author’s favourite study. To do that it may be well to give a very short sketch of his literary career.

From the time he was quite a child he had the fixed idea that he must be a literary man. In his twenty-first year (1844) he published a volume of poems, entitled ‘The Witch of Endor, and other Poems.’ The poetry in this little volume—long since out of print—was held to give promise of genius. It was, of course, the production of youth, and in after years the author was fully conscious of its defects. But even though some critics (and none could be a harder critic of his own work than himself) might point out an ‘overcrowding of metaphor’ and a ‘want of clearness,’ others could instance evidences of ‘high poetical capability’ and ‘happy versification.’ But at the time it was thought desirable that the young poet should turn his attention to prose composition with the same earnestness. With that object his father proposed to him the study of the writings of Origen, with a view to an article on the subject in the British Quarterly Review. When just twenty-two the author finished this task, his first solid contribution to the literature of the day. The article showed signs of diligence and patient research in gaining a thorough knowledge of the opinions of the great thinker with whom it dealt. ‘It is nobly done,’ Judge Talfourd wrote. ‘If there is some exuberance of ornament in the setting forth of his (Origen’s) brilliant theories, it is only akin to the irregular greatness and the Asiatic splendour of the mind that conceived them.’ And the words of the late Sir James Stephen were not less flattering: ‘If I had been told that the writer of it (the article) was a grandfather, I should have wondered only that the old man had retained so much spirit and been able to combine it with a maturity of judgment so well becoming his years.’ We believe it is no presumption to say that the article has not ceased to be useful to those who wish to gain an idea of the character of one whose name has often been the subject of bitter wordy war between Christian men.

In 1846, a dramatic piece by Alfred Vaughan, entitled ‘Edwin and Elgiva,’ appeared in the London University Magazine. The subject was one of a most sensational character, and was treated accordingly. Dunstan and his companions are painted in very black colours, and any doubts as to the reality of the cruelties alleged to have been practised on the unhappy Queen are not entertained. Two poems, the ‘Masque of Antony’ and ‘Disenchantment,’ though not published until later, were written about the same date.

At this time, the author was attending the theological course at Lancashire Independent College, of which his father was the president. Having completed his term of residence there, he went over to Halle in order to spend a year in a German University, before entering upon any fixed pastoral work. There he had a good opportunity of studying the state of German religious thought. The following extract from his journal shows the effect produced on his mind:—‘If I am spared to return, I will preach more of what is called the Gospel than I did before. The talk about adapting religion to the times which is prevalent here, even among the religious, appears to me a miserable mistake. It never needed adapting so much as when the apostles preached it, but they made no such effort.’ It was, too, while studying German speculations that the author adopted the system of philosophy, distinct alike from sceptical and mystical, which is apparent in this his chief work.

It is, we believe, impossible for an earnest mind to go through life without periods of sad and painful doubt. The author was no exception to this rule, and while at Halle he seems to have suffered bitterly. But he knew the one refuge for the doubting heart, and turned to it. In the ‘Dream of Philo,’ written at this time and published in the volumes of ‘Essays and Remains,’ we see some reflection of his own feelings, and the following verses which we venture to quote must, we think, strike a responsive chord in many a heart yearning for peace amidst the turmoil of the world:—

Not a pathway in life’s forest,
Not a pathway on life’s sea;
Who doth heed me, who doth lead me,
Ah, woe is me!

Vain the planting and the training,
For life’s tree on every side
Ever launches useless branches,
Springs not high but spreadeth wide.

Ah, my days go not together
In an earnest solemn train,
But go straying for their playing,
Or are by each other slain.

Listen, listen, thou forgettest
Thou art one of many more;
All this ranging and this changing
Has been law to man of yore.

And thou canst not in life’s city
Rule thy course as in a cell
There are others, all thy brothers,
Who have work to do as well.

Some events that mar thy purpose
May light _them_ upon their way;
Our sun-shining in declining
Gives earth’s other side the day.

Every star is drawn and draweth
Mid the orbits of its peers;
And the blending thus unending
Makes the music of the spheres.

If thou doest one work only,
In that one work thou wilt fail;
Use thou many ropes if any
For the shifting of thy sail.

Then will scarce a wind be stirring
But thy canvas it shall fill;
Not the near way as thou thoughtest,
But through tempest as thou oughtest,
Though not straightly, not less greatly,
Thou shalt win the haven still.

These verses have been called ‘Alfred Vaughan’s Psalm of Life.’ The lessons taught may be an encouragement to others, as they have been to the author’s son, in times of trial and disappointment.

But it must not be supposed that at this time the author’s thoughts were all devoted to painful doubts and yearnings. He determined while in Germany to unite the labours of a literary man to the work of a pastor. His first plan was to take special periods of Church History and lay them before his readers in the form of dramas. He thus describes his idea:—‘I shall commence the series with Savonarola. I think it will not be necessary to pay regard to chronological order in the order of composition. I may afterwards take up Chrysostom, perhaps Hildebrand, endeavouring in all not merely to develop the character of the principal personage, but to give an exact picture of the religious and political spirit of the times. They must be dramas on the principles of King John or Henry IV., rather than those of Hamlet or Macbeth.’ With this scheme his father did not entirely agree, and the consequence was a considerable correspondence. Dr. Vaughan never doubted the genius of his son, or that something definite would come of his literary tastes, but he appears to have thought that the dramatic form was not a good way in which to bring the result of genuine hard work before the public. As it happened, none of these dramas saw the light, though the plan of the ‘Hours with the Mystics’ shows the strong attachment the author felt for that kind of writing, and it also shows the way in which he could overcome any difficulties arising from its peculiarities. The notion of gentlemen discussing the Mystics, over their wine and walnuts, or in the garden with the ladies in the twilight of a summer evening, has had to encounter the sneers of some harsh critics, but we cannot help thinking that advantage is gained by the device of these conversations, because the talking by various speakers affords an easy opportunity of glancing over many varying theories upon any subject at the same time, while the essayist would find it difficult to keep his line of argument clear, and at the same moment state the divergent lines of thought necessary for the right understanding of the position generally.

The author began definite ministerial work at Bath in 1848. The thoroughness with which he performed his pastoral duties did not give him much time for literary work. The articles written during his stay in that city were those on Schleiermacher and Savonarola. The materials for both essays were collected while at Halle. When writing to inform his father of the completion of the first of the articles, he refers to the Mystics in the following way:—

‘I shall not begin to write another article at once. But I should like to fix on one to have more-or-less in view. There are three subjects on which I should like to write some time or other—(1) Savonarola, for which I have much material; (2) on Mysticism, tracing it in the East, in the Greek Church, in the German Mystics of the 14th century, in the French Mystics, and lastly in those most recent; (3) Leo the Great and his stirring times. I should like to do the Savonarola next. But I should also like to know what you think on these subjects, or on any other you would perhaps like better. The first and third would consist largely of interesting narrative. The second would be rather less popular but more novel.’

The ‘second’ subject was worked up into the two volumes now republished. As it gradually became his favourite study, he felt that the field was expanding before him, and that it would be necessary, if he did justice to his theme, to treat it at a greater length than could be allowed to a magazine article. In the British Quarterly Review articles appeared on ‘Madame Guyon,’ and ‘The Mystics and the Reformers,’ which were simply the first results of his reading for the great work. It was at Birmingham that most of this writing was done: while there he was an indefatigable student. ‘There,’ says a writer in the Eclectic Review, Nov. 1861, p. 508, ‘he made himself familiar with many languages—the old German, the Spanish, even the Dutch, adding these to the Italian, French, Latin, and Greek in the classical and later forms, and all as preparations to the History of Mysticism to which he had pledged himself. The Mystics had thrown a spell upon him. Seldom have they wrought their charms without seducing to their bewildering self-abandonment.... In the case of Alfred Vaughan it was not so; he continued faithful to the high duties of life. He trod the sphere of action and compelled the ghostly band he visited, or who visited him, to pay tribute to the highest religious teaching of Christian truth and life.’ But the body would not keep pace with his mind. In 1855 he was obliged to resign his pastoral charge at Birmingham, and from that time he devoted himself entirely to literature. He wrote several articles and criticisms, chiefly in the British Quarterly amongst these, one on Kingsley’s ‘Hypatia,’ which we believe was much appreciated by the future Canon of Westminster. An article on ‘Art and History’ appeared in Fraser’s Magazine about the same time. And now we reach the first publication of his greater achievement, the ‘Hours with the Mystics.’ In August, 1855, the printing of the original edition began, and was completed in the February of the following year. The author lived long enough afterwards to witness its success, and then swiftly came the end. In October, 1857, Alfred Vaughan passed away into another world where he has doubtless found many of those on whose characters he loved to muse. We will not attempt any analysis of his character, but we cannot resist the impulse to insert one loving tribute to his memory, which appeared in a Birmingham paper (Aris’ Gazette, Nov. 27th, 1857). ‘It has seemed fit to the All-Wise Disposer of events to withdraw from this world one of its holiest and most gifted inhabitants, one who, had his life been prolonged, bade fair to have taken rank among its brightest lights and most distinguished ornaments.... The strength and sweetness, so happily blended in his character, were apparent in his preaching; he was tender enough for the most womanly heart, he was intellectual enough for the most masculine mind. As a writer he had already attained considerable reputation, and promised to become one of the chief luminaries of the age. As a Christian, he was sound in faith, benignant in spirit, and most holy in life; a delighter in the doctrine of God, his Saviour, and an eminent adorner of that doctrine.’

Before venturing on any remarks upon the subject-matter of the book itself, we may be allowed to make a slight reference to opinions expressed upon it at the time of its publication. In Fraser’s Magazine for September, 1856, there was a long review by Canon Kingsley. In this article weak points are shown and sometimes the criticisms are rather severe; but there was too much real sympathy between the two men (though they never knew each other personally) for the reviewer not fully to appreciate the good qualities in the work before him. Now that Charles Kingsley’s name is such a household word in England, no apology is needed for quoting two passages from the above-mentioned essay. ‘There is not a page,’ it says in one place, ‘nor a paragraph in which there is not something worth recollecting, and often reflections very wise and weighty indeed, which show that whether or not Mr. Vaughan has thoroughly grasped the subject of Mysticism, he has grasped and made part of his own mind and heart many things far more practically important than Mysticism, or any other form of thought; and no one ought to rise up from the perusal of his book without finding himself, if not a better, at least a more thoughtful man, and perhaps a humbler one also, as he learns how many more struggles and doubts, discoveries, sorrows and joys, the human race has passed through, than are contained in his own private experience.’ In another place, while pointing out various improvements which he would like to see in another edition, Mr. Kingsley adds, ‘But whether our hope be fulfilled or not, a useful and honourable future is before the man who could write such a book as this is in spite of all defects.’ The reviewer adds later in a reprint of this essay, ‘Mr. Vaughan’s death does not, I think, render it necessary for me to alter any of the opinions expressed here, and least of all that in the last sentence, fulfilled now more perfectly than I could have foreseen.’

With the mention of Charles Kingsley’s name we are reminded of others of the same school of thought, and therefore the following comparison in an article in the Eclectic Review (November, 1861) may prove interesting. The reader must judge of its truth. ‘While Robertson of Brighton,’ says the reviewer, ‘was preaching his sermons, and Archer Butler was preparing his Lectures on Philosophy, Alfred Vaughan about the same age, but younger than either, was accumulating material for, and putting into shape, the “Hours with the Mystics.” He died within a year or two of their departure, and still nearer to the period of youth than those extraordinary men. His name suggests their names to the mind—all victims to the fatal thirty-four and thirty-seven. He had not the wonderful touch of Robertson’s “vanished hand”; he had not the tenacity of muscle and fibre of Archer Butler; but he combined many of the characteristics of both, and added that which gave individuality to his genius. He had not the fine subtle sense of insight possessed by Robertson; he had not the rapid and comprehensive power of Butler. They again had not his large and generous culture.’ More of such favourable criticisms and kindly words from men of learning might be quoted, but we forbear. The task of referring to such sentiments is not unnaturally attractive to the son of such a man; but it is simply desired to put forward this book once again on its own merits, in the hope that there are still many who will rightly appreciate the labour and genius to which it bears witness.

About the work itself it will be necessary to say only a few words.

When the ‘Hours with the Mystics’ first appeared it traversed ground which was to a great extent untrodden, at any rate in England. Mysticism, though a favourite study of the author, was not then, and can scarcely be said to be now, a popular subject. A matter-of-fact age puts such ideas on one side, as something too weak for serious consideration. The majority indeed have but a very hazy notion as to what Mysticism is; they only have an idea that something is meant which is very inferior, and they pass it by. Well has Mr. Maurice said that such terms (Mediæval Phil. p. 143) ‘are the cold formal generalisations of a late period, commenting on men with which it has no sympathy.’ In the minds of thoughtful men the name of mystic points to a special and recognisable tendency, and the history given in this book shows that the same tendency has been working in the world for ages;—Hindus and Persians, Neoplatonists and Schoolmen, Anabaptists and Swedenborgians, have all felt its force. The main principle of all their doctrine was the necessity of a closer union with the Deity. Among Christians,—with whom we are chiefly concerned,—this close connection, it was thought, could only be gained after passing through stages of illumination and purification; and progress in the way of perfection was to be made not by labour and study, but by solitude, and asceticism. In these volumes this doctrine is exhibited; especially we trace the influence which the pseudo-Dionysius had in the fourth century; how, under his guidance, these ideas spread in the East, and thence to the West; the position taken up by Mystics against the Schoolmen, and the condition of Mysticism at the time of the Reformation. These topics are interesting, and to the questions which must be raised in connection with them in every thoughtful mind, it is hoped that the reader will find satisfactory answers in the following pages.

It will be seen that the field over which the reader is taken by the author is very large. It is believed that though there have been during recent years various contributions made to the literature on this subject, no writer has attempted to take in all the various phases which are pictured in this book. In German Mystics some writers have found a congenial theme; others have taught us more about the mysterious religions of the East. It is, we think, to be regretted that more attention has not been paid to the Mystics of the Scholastic period. The position held by Hugo of S. Victor and his followers was by no means insignificant. As a mystic, Hugo showed that it was possible to combine contemplation with common sense and learning. In an age when Scholasticism was submitting religion to cold and exact logic, it was like turning from some dusty road into a quiet grass-grown lane, to hear of devout contemplation leading up to perfect holiness and spiritual knowledge. Most of us are ready to agree with these men when they maintain that there are mysteries of Divine Truth which cannot be analysed by the understanding, but which can be embraced by thoughtful and reverent contemplation. So long as the use of both learning and devotion was admitted, we are able to sympathise with them. But it is a truism to say that the tendency of any movement is to go to extremes. The Mystics of this period appear to have recoiled horror-struck from what seemed to them rationalistic or materialistic ideas. In that, they might be right enough. But starting from the true standpoint that there are mysteries in the Infinite which we finite creatures cannot fathom with our finite minds, they proceeded to the extreme of putting devotion before knowledge. Next, they thought there was nothing to which they could not attain by devout yearning, even to absorption into the Deity. The logical conclusion of these theories tended to pantheism: those who discarded logic yielded to fanaticism. Into that error fell most of the disciples of the great Scholastic Mystics. And has not the like occurred elsewhere in history? Putting religion out of the question, Wycliffe may have been a socialist, but he was far behind his followers. But as such a falling away on the part of the disciple cannot justly take from the character of the master, so we would still say a word for Hugo of S. Victor. A man whose aim in life was the knowledge of God, and who worked for that end with courage and diligence, is not a character to be neglected. ‘His name,’ says Mr. Maurice (Mediæval Phil. p. 148), ‘has been less remembered in later times than it deserves, because it has been overshadowed by those of other men who met some of the tastes of the age more successfully, though their actual power was not greater than his, perhaps not equal to it.’

In Hugo of S. Victor and his predecessors, Bernard and Anselm, we see the combination of Scholasticism and Mysticism. To some extent they were able to keep a middle course. They would not allow their reason to run riot over sacred mysteries, and their firm hold on the articles of the Catholic faith prevented them from sinking into vague pantheism.

Among the Mystics of Germany who come next in the hasty survey we are here attempting, there does not appear to have been so much steadiness. We do not mean to say that the Scholastic Mystics were perfect; they were not free from exaggerations, but their extravagances appear to us less dangerous than were those of the old German Mystics. The names of the leading German Mystics are more familiar to most people than are any others. Who has not heard of Tauler? What the influence of his teaching was is shown in the following pages. He may be exonerated from all charge of pantheism, as may, also, be Ruysbroek and Suso; but it is very doubtful whether the writings left by Eckart acquit him of all connection with these errors. He has been claimed as orthodox by churchmen, and as a pantheist by many pantheists; and extracts can be quoted from his works in support of either theory. Eckart’s position was difficult. The general temper of the world at the time was restless; the errors and abuses of the Church drove earnest men to look within. They turned their attention to personal holiness, to the neglect of the fact that they had any duties towards the Christian brotherhood at large. To urge his hearers to a closer union with God was a noble subject for a preacher. But must it not be confessed that Eckart had gone too far when he could utter such words as these, ‘a truly divine man has been so made one with God that henceforth he does not think of God or look for God outside himself?’ His teaching certainly approached often towards the brink of the abyss of pantheism, and as Archbishop Trench says (Med. Ch. Hist., p. 348), ‘sometimes it does not stop short of the brink.’

Between these two schools, the Scholastic and the German, many comparisons may be made. The effect of them on the Catholic Church as it then existed was very different: the teaching of Anselm and Bernard was calculated to strengthen the Church, while that of the later school was not. Anselm and his friends were aware of the necessity for personal holiness, but they were always willing for their disciples to climb the road to perfection by the help of the means of grace held out in the Church, as well as by devout contemplation. The Germans, on the contrary, felt there was something wrong with the existing ecclesiastical arrangements, and through indifference to them drew their disciples away from many practices which were then accounted necessary to salvation. By this disregard for rites and ceremonies, and by their use of the German language in their teaching, they paved the way for the Reformers, and that is a great claim on our respect. At the same time, we cannot help thinking their hazy ideas rather chilling. Surely the highest point in the history of Mysticism had been reached and passed when the struggle to make reason and imagination work together gave way to mere ecstatic rhapsody.

Quietism is discussed in the second volume at considerable length; the familiar names of Madame Guyon, Bossuet and Fénélon are brought before us. The story is a sad one. There may be some who think that Madame Guyon was not worthy of the friendship of such a saint as Fénélon,—that must be a matter of opinion; but on one point all will agree, the conduct of Bossuet under the circumstances was not very creditable. Those who have a high opinion of the piety of Bossuet will confess that he does not appear in the narrative to advantage, even though they may not be able to agree with all the statements the author of this work makes about the Bishop of Meaux. Fénélon was tender, gentle, loving, and Bossuet was firm, stern, and strict, but they both did their best to serve God in their relative positions, and He, whose servants they were, will judge them.

Glancing, then, through the entire length of this history, we see that the great principle which appears to have actuated all Mystics was a desire for union with God. This they tried to cultivate by seclusion and asceticism. They neglected social duties and fled away into monasteries and deserts; and sometimes their practical life was not equal in holiness to the reported spirituality of their ecstasies. Their excesses of mortification appear almost ludicrous when they themselves alone are concerned, but when their mad conduct is seen affecting others our feelings grow stronger. But let us speak gently of such eccentricities. These good people, for good they certainly were, could not appreciate the fact that God was in the busy town as well as in the lonely desert. They heard no voice within them urging them to treat a beggar kindly for the sake of the Son of God. Some of them were very charitable, but what was the nature of their charity? Was it not simply done for their own advantage? Did they really think of charity as an act done to God, not meritorious, but as being an offering to their Heavenly Father of His own? It is to be feared that that was not the general idea. The more extravagant Mystics appear really to have been horribly selfish. They had yet to learn that the closer union for which they longed is not attained by efforts to ‘faire son salut,’ or by sitting still in the comfortable assurance of an imputed righteousness. Then it must be remembered that all these frantic efforts or dreamy ecstasies were made with a view to union with God. And this ‘union’ was of a novel kind—in many cases there was a notion of an absorption into the Deity, together with other ideas which clearly involved erroneous views of God. It was the old story of carrying one particular article of faith or pious opinion to extremes, and this to the disregard, more or less complete, of all else. The same thing had happened before in the history of the Christian Church. It is not for us to lay down a definition of what is true union with God; but we may say that the fellowship which all true believers enjoy with the Father through the Son was not enough for the Mystic. He struggled and panted for more. How each one succeeded or failed the individual reader of the work must judge, and decide for himself.

Before going further, it may be well to refer to an attack which was made on the author for his treatment of mediæval saints and of the stories connected with them. Obviously, a man who sympathises with an emotional form of religion would not be inclined to confine these enthusiasts within such narrow limits as would one of a colder temperament. This may explain the feelings of the critics in question. There can be little doubt that the ascetic and the nun, with their mortifications and trances, had not for the author much attraction. Even the style in which the book was written may have led him to write too lightly on some details of this period; but if such were the case, he knew, as well as any critic, that these people were trying to do their duty, even if they failed. The ascetic who thought he had no duty in the world, and therefore ran away and refused to ‘fight a battle for the Lord,’ and the ‘hysterical sister,’ are rather subjects for pity than for jest; and contrary as all the author’s convictions may have been to asceticism, he would rather have wept over their strange acts and mad fancies than scoffed at them. We feel convinced that any harsh remarks should be taken as referring to the system which brought its victims into such a condition, and not to the victims themselves. Though disapproving of the system, the author would never have withheld his admiration from any individual act of self-sacrifice, when it was done from a right motive and was the offering of a loving heart.

The fact that this book is again published by request is a sign that the author’s labours have been appreciated and that his name is not forgotten. ‘Some men,’ he once wrote in a letter, ‘who have died young, have lived far longer than others who have outpassed their three-score years and ten. Life consists not in the abundance of things a man possesseth, nor in the abundance of things a man doeth, but in the abundance of thoughts he thinks leading toward some special result in this world or the next.’ So, again, he writes in his diary, ‘Reputation—consider it, soul of mine, not as an end, but as a means of sowing right thoughts and feelings among thy fellows. Strive towards power over the thoughts of men—power that may be solemnly used in God’s sight as being a faithful steward for His glory. Have I a brain that must be busy, a will in this direction which—with all my vacillation elsewhere—has been and is unconquerable? Let me pray to use it with reverent lowliness of heart as a talent committed to me, fearing to misuse it, to allow any corner of the estate to be waste, or any wain of the harvest to fall into the enemy’s hand.’

If it now be asked, what are the uses of this book, we may answer that it has proved helpful as a history of religious thought. Further, it is hoped that it has been, and still will be, useful on account of the moral lessons to be drawn from the historical facts. It may also be used as showing how necessary it is to associate Christianity with our daily lives; how desirable it is that preachers should avoid confining their hearers’ attention to their own individual souls. And then it further teaches that, while we take religion into the world, we may learn also to value more the privileges of quiet and retired communion with God. In these practical modern days the idea of contemplation appears out of place; and yet it was our Divine Master who said, ‘Come apart into a desert place and rest awhile.’ Perhaps the world would have been better if the hermits had paid more attention to the little word ‘awhile.’ But the bustle of the present day is just as likely to make us forget the injunction altogether.

The book’s republication now seems to have a special opportuneness, for in much of the more spiritual progress going on around us there is a good deal of Mysticism. As in times past men sought refuge in devout contemplation from Materialism, so now a horror of Rationalism and a sense of injustice are likely to drive many to the same extreme. Whether or not there has been any undue extravagance developed as yet, it is not for us to decide. But this history will show how easy and possible it is to carry a good principle beyond its proper limits.

* * *

Before concluding, one further personal word must be permitted. No preface to this book, however short, would be complete without at least a reference to her who helped the author in his labours as only a good wife can, and who has taught his son to love God and reverence his father’s memory as only a good mother can. To her, the reappearance of this work causes a ray of light amidst a life darkened by much trouble and suffering.

It need scarcely be added that the writer of these words esteems it an honour to be in any way connected with his father’s labours. What the loss of such a father has been to him cannot be described in words. The following remarks of a clerical friend of the author may partly express the writer’s present feelings: ‘He is gone, young in years—but for him we may not lament the dispensation—since assuredly he was not only mature in intellect but rich in grace. I delight to think of him as one of that “blessed company,” the Church above—to the perfect love and friendship of some members of which I love to look forward, if by God’s grace I may be found worthy to attain to it.’

This book never had any public dedication. It was the work of the best years of a life offered to God. What was not done for the first edition will not be done now; but let these few lines of the author’s son be an offering to the glory of God—to the memory of his father—to the self-devotion of his mother.

In one of the author’s poems is the following verse which is strangely appropriate at this place:—

Let us toil on—the work we leave behind us,
Though incomplete, God’s hand will yet embalm,
And use it some way; and the news will find us
In heaven above, and sweeten endless calm.

WYCLIFFE VAUGHAN.

LITTLEMORE, NEAR OXFORD,

November, 1879.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

The subject of the present work is one which will generally be thought to need some words of explanation, if not of apology. Mysticism is almost everywhere synonymous with what is most visionary in religion and most obscure in speculation. But a history of Mysticism—old visions and old obscurities—who is bold enough to expect a hearing for that? Is the hopeful present, struggling toward clear intelligence, to pause and hear how, some hundreds of years ago, men made themselves elaborately unintelligible? Is our straining after action and achievement to be relaxed while you relate the way in which Mystics reduced themselves to utter inactivity? While we are rejoicing in escape from superstitious twilight, is it well to recall from Limbo the phantasms of forgotten dreamers, and to people our sunshine with ghostly shadows? And since Mysticism is confessedly more or less a mistake, were it not better to point out to us, if you can, a something true and wise, rather than offer us your portrait of an exaggeration and a folly?

Such are some of the questions which it will be natural to ask. The answer is at hand. First of all, Mysticism, though an error, has been associated, for the most part, with a measure of truth so considerable, that its good has greatly outweighed its evil. On this ground alone, its history should be judged of interest. For we grow more hopeful and more charitable as we mark how small a leaven of truth may prove an antidote to error, and how often the genuine fervour of the spirit has all but made good the failures of the intellect.

In the religious history of almost every age and country, we meet with a certain class of minds, impatient of mere ceremonial forms and technical distinctions, who have pleaded the cause of the heart against prescription, and yielded themselves to the most vehement impulses of the soul, in its longing to escape from the sign to the thing signified—from the human to the divine. The story of such an ambition, with its disasters and its glories, will not be deemed, by any thoughtful mind, less worthy of record than the career of a conqueror. Through all the changes of doctrine and the long conflict of creeds, it is interesting to trace the unconscious unity of mystical temperaments in every communion. It can scarcely be without some profit that we essay to gather together and arrange this company of ardent natures; to account for their harmony and their differences, to ascertain the extent of their influence for good and evil, to point out their errors, and to estimate even dreams impossible to cold or meaner spirits.

These Mystics have been men of like passions and in like perplexities with many of ourselves. Within them and without them were temptations, mysteries, aspirations like our own. A change of names, or an interval of time, does not free us from liability to mistakes in their direction, or to worse, it may be, in a direction opposite. To distinguish between the genuine and the spurious in their opinion or their life, is to erect a guide-post on the very road we have ourselves to tread. It is no idle or pedantic curiosity which would try these spirits by their fruits, and see what mischief and what blessing grew out of their misconceptions and their truth. We learn a lesson for ourselves, as we mark how some of these Mystics found God within them after vainly seeking Him without—hearkened happily to that witness for Him which speaks in our conscience, affections, and desires; and, recognising love by love, finally rejoiced in a faith which was rather the life of their heart than the conclusion of their logic. We learn a lesson for ourselves, as we see one class among them forsaking common duties for the feverish exaltation of a romantic saintship, and another persisting in their conceited rejection of the light without, till they have turned into darkness their light within.

But the interest attaching to Mysticism is by no means merely historic. It is active under various forms in our own time. It will certainly play its part in the future. The earlier portion of this work is occupied, it must be confessed, with modes of thought and life extremely remote from anything with which we are now familiar. But only by such inquiry into those bygone speculations could the character and influence of Christian Mysticism be duly estimated, or even accounted for. Those preliminaries once past, the reader will find himself in contact with opinions and events less removed from present experience.

The attempt to exhibit the history of a certain phase of religious life through the irregular medium of fiction, dialogue, and essay, may appear to some a plan too fanciful for so grave a theme. But it must be remembered, that any treatment of such a subject which precluded a genial exercise of the imagination would be necessarily inadequate, and probably unjust. The method adopted appeared also best calculated to afford variety and relief to topics unlikely in themselves to attract general interest. The notes which are appended have been made more copious than was at first designed, in order that no confusion may be possible between fact and fiction, and that every statement of importance might be sustained by its due authority. It is hoped that, in this way, the work may render its service, not only to those who deem secondary information quite sufficient on such subjects, but also to the scholar, who will thus be readily enabled to test for himself my conclusions, and who will possess, in the extracts given, a kind of anthology from the writings of the leading Mystics. To those familiar with such inquiries it may perhaps be scarcely necessary to state that I have in no instance allowed myself to cite as an authority any passage which I have not myself examined, with its context, in the place to which I refer. In the Chronicle of Adolf Arnstein the minimum of invention has been employed, and no historical personage there introduced utters any remark bearing upon Mysticism for which ample warrant cannot be brought forward. Wherever, in the conversations at Ashfield, any material difference of opinion is expressed by the speakers, Atherton may be understood as setting forth what we ourselves deem the truth of the matter. Some passages in these volumes, and the substance of the chapters on Quietism, have made their appearance previously in the pages of one of our quarterly periodicals.

It should be borne in mind that my design does not require of me that I should give an account of all who are anywhere known to have entertained mystical speculation, or given themselves to mystical practice. I have endeavoured to portray and estimate those who have made epochs in the history of Mysticism, those who are fair representatives of its stages or transitions, those whose enthusiasm has been signally benign or notoriously baneful. I have either mentioned by name only, or passed by in silence, the followers or mere imitators of such men, and those Mystics also whose obscure vagaries neither produced any important result nor present any remarkable phænomena. Only by resolute omission on this principle has it been possible to preserve in any measure that historical perspective so essential to the truth of such delineations.

The fact that the ground I traverse lies almost wholly unoccupied, might be pleaded on behalf of my undertaking. The history of Mysticism has been but incidentally touched by English writers. Germany possesses many monographs of unequal value on detached parts of the subject. Only recently has a complete account of Christian Mysticism appeared, at all on a level with the latest results of historical inquiry.[1] This laborious compilation presents the dry bones of doctrinal opinion, carefully separated from actual life—a grave defect in any branch of ecclesiastical history, absolutely fatal to intelligibility and readableness in this. If we except the researches of the Germans into their own mediæval Mysticism, it may be truly said that the little done in England has been better done than the much in Germany. The Mysticism of the Neo-Platonists has found a powerful painter in Mr. Kingsley. The Mysticism of Bernard meets with a wise and kindly critic in Sir James Stephen.

If, then, the subject of this book be neither insignificant in itself, nor exhausted by the labours of others, my enterprise at least is not unworthy, however questionable its success.

THE AUTHOR.

February 1st, 1856.

Footnote 1:

Die Christliche Mystik. Von Dr. Ludwig Noack. Königsberg.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

This work has been some time out of print. It was my hope that the Second Edition might have been brought within a single volume. But that has not been practicable.

The present edition has been revised by the Author, and some fifty pages of new matter have been introduced. This new matter will be found mainly in the Sixth Chapter of the Sixth Book. In that enlarged treatment of the topic of “German Mysticism in the Fourteenth Century” the reader will meet with a slight recurrence of former trains of thought, which the Author might have been inclined to suppress, but with which I have not deemed it well to intermeddle. It will be seen that the design of the supplementary matter is, in part, as a reply to criticisms which seemed to call for some such explanation; and, in part, that points touched upon elsewhere might be given with more fulness.

To see this Second Edition through the press has been the work of one whose intelligent sympathy and patient effort assisted and encouraged the Author, in many ways, in the prosecution of his studies, and who now finds the solace of her loneliness in treasuring up the products of his mind, and in cherishing the dear ones he has left to her wise love and oversight.

If Mysticism be often a dream, it is commonly a dream in the right direction. Its history presents one of the most significant chapters in the story of humanity.

ROBERT VAUGHAN.

September 7th, 1860.

CONTENTS OF VOL I.

BOOK I.—INTRODUCTION.

CHAPTER I.

Henry Atherton 3
Lionel Gower 5
Frank Willoughby 7

CHAPTER II.

Connection of the Arts 9
Mysticism in an Emblem 11
History 15

CHAPTER III.

Etymology 17
Definitions 21
Christian Mysticism 22

CHAPTER IV.

Causes of Mysticism 27
Reaction against Formalism 28
Weariness of the World 30
The Fascination of Mystery 31

CHAPTER V.

Classification of Mystics 35
Theopathetic Mysticism 37
Theosophy 39
Theurgy 45

BOOK II.—EARLY ORIENTAL MYSTICISM.

CHAPTER I.

The Bagvat-Gita 51

CHAPTER II.

Characteristics of Hindoo Mysticism 54
The Yogis 57

BOOK III.—THE MYSTICISM OF THE NEO-PLATONISTS.

CHAPTER I.

Philo 64
The Therapeutæ 66
Asceticism 67

CHAPTER II.

Plotinus 71
Alexandria 72
Eclecticism 75
Platonism and Neo-Platonism 76
Plotinus on Ecstasy 81

CHAPTER III.

Neo-Platonism in the Christian Church 85
Analogies between Ancient and Modern Speculation 87
Intuition 89
Theurgy 91

CHAPTER IV.

Porphyry 94
Philosophy seeks to rescue Polytheism 96
Theurgic Mysticism of Iamblichus 100
Proclus 105

BOOK IV.—MYSTICISM IN THE GREEK CHURCH.

CHAPTER I.

Saint Anthony 109
The Pseudo-Dionysius 111

CHAPTER II.

The Hierarchies of Dionysius 114
The Via Negativa and the Via Affirmativa 115
Virtues human and superhuman 121
Stagnation 122

BOOK V.—MYSTICISM IN THE LATIN CHURCH.

CHAPTER I.

Intellectual Activity of the West 130
The Services of Platonism 132
Clairvaux 132
The Mysticism of Bernard 136
Mysticism opposed to Scholasticism 141
Moderation of Bernard 144

CHAPTER II.

Hugo of St Victor 153
Mysticism combined with Scholasticism 154
The Eye of Contemplation 157
Richard of St Victor 159
The Six Stages of Contemplation 162
The Truth and the Error of Mystical Abstraction 164
The Inner Light and the Outer 166
The Faculty of Intuition 169

BOOK VI.—GERMAN MYSTICISM IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.

CHAPTER I.

The Chronicle of Adolf Arnstein of Strasburg 181
Hermann of Fritzlar and his Legends 182
The Heretics of the Rhineland 184
The Preaching of Master Eckart 188
From the Known God to the Unknown 189
Disinterested Love 193
Eckart’s Story of the Beggar 197
Ju-ju 199
The Nameless Wild 201

CHAPTER II.

The Doctrine of Eckart discussed 204
Resemblance to Hegel 206
Pantheism Old and New 209

CHAPTER III.

The Interdict 214
Henry of Nördlingen 216
Insurrection in Strasburg 218
The Friends of God 224
Tauler on the Image of God 226

CHAPTER IV.

Tauler’s Disappearance 230
His Disgrace 233
His Restoration 234
The People comforted and the Pope defied 236

CHAPTER V.

Nicholas of Basle and Tauler 239
The Theology of Tauler 244
His Advice to Mystics 248
Estimate of his Doctrine 251

CHAPTER VI.

Further Thoughts on Tauler and Middle-Age Mysticism 260
Tests of Mysticism 268
Spiritual Influence 272
Views of God and the Universe 277
Immanence of God 280
Montanism 284
Ground of the Sou 291
Origen and Tauler 302
Luther and Tauler 304
Teufelsdröckh 307

CHAPTER VII.

The Black Death 313
The Flagellants 316
A Visit to Ruysbroek at Grünthal 325
Ruysbroek on Mystical Union 328
Heretical Mystics 330
Ecclesiastical Corruption 332

CHAPTER VIII.

Heinrich Suso 341
His Austerities 343
His Visions 345
His Adventures 348
The Monks of Mount Athos 356

CHAPTER IX.

Nicholas of Basle 359
Brigitta 361
Angela de Foligni 362
Catharine of Siena 364
The “German Theology” 366
The “Imitation of Christ” 367
Gerson 368

BOOK THE FIRST INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I.

Wie fruchtbar ist der kleinste Kreis,
Wenn man ihn wohl zu pflegen weiss.[2]

GOETHE.

It was on the evening of a November day that three friends sat about their after-dinner table, chatting over their wine and walnuts, while the fire with its huge log crackled and sparkled, and the wind without moaned about the corners of the house.

Everyone is aware that authors have in their studies an unlimited supply of rings of Gyges, coats of darkness, tarn-caps, and other means of invisibility,—that they have the key to every house, and can hear and see words and actions the most remote. Come with me, then, kindly reader, and let us look and listen unseen; we have free leave; and you must know these gentlemen better.

First of all, the host. See him leaning back in his chair, and looking into the fire, one hand unconsciously smoothing with restless thumb and finger the taper stem of his wineglass, the other playing with the ears of a favourite dog. He appears about thirty years of age, is tall, but loses something of his real height by a student’s stoop about the shoulders. Those decided almost shaggy eyebrows he has would lead you to expect quick, piercing eyes,—the eyes of the observant man of action. But now that he looks towards us, you see instead eyes of hazel, large, slow-rolling, often dreamy in their gaze,—such for size and lustre as Homer gives to ox-eyed Juno. The mouth, too, and the nose are delicately cut. Their outline indicates taste rather than energy. Yet that massive jaw, again, gives promise of quiet power,—betokens a strength of that sort, most probably, which can persevere in a course once chosen with indomitable steadiness, but is not an agile combative force, inventive in assaults and rejoicing in adventurous leadership. Men of his species resemble fountains, whose water-column a sudden gust of wind may drive aslant, or scatter in spray across the lawn, but—the violence once past—they play upward as truly and as strong as ever.

Perhaps it is a pity that this Henry Atherton is so rich as he is,—owns his Ashfield House, with its goodly grounds, and has never been forced into active professional life, with its rough collisions and straining anxieties. Abundance of leisure is a trial to which few men are equal. Gray was in the right when he said that something more of genius than common was required to teach a man how to employ himself. My friend became early his own task-master, and labours harder from choice than many from necessity. To high attainment as a classical scholar he has added a critical acquaintance with the literature and the leading languages of modern Europe. Upstairs is a noble library, rich especially in historical authorities, and there Atherton works, investigating now one historic question, now another, endeavouring out of old, yellow-faced annals to seize the precious passages which suggest the life of a time, and recording the result of all in piles of manuscript.

How often have I and Gower—that youngest of the three, on the other side, with the moustache—urged him to write a book. But he waits, and, with his fastidiousness, will always wait, I am afraid, till he has practically solved this problem;—given a subject in remote history, for which not ten of your friends care a straw; required such a treatment of it as shall at once be relished by the many and accredited as standard by the few. So, thinking it useless to write what scarcely anyone will read, and despairing of being ever erudite and popular at the same time, he is content to enquire and to accumulate in most happy obscurity. Doubtless the world groans under its many books, yet it misses some good ones that would assuredly be written if able men with the ambition were oftener possessed of the time required, or if able men with the time were oftener possessed of the ambition.

You ask me, ‘Who is this Gower?’

An artist. Atherton met with him at Rome, where he was tracing classic sites, and Gower worshipping the old masters. Their pathway chanced on one or two occasions to coincide, and by little and little they grew fast friends. They travelled through Germany together on their way home, and found their friendship robust enough to survive the landing on our British shore. Unquestionably the pictured Vatican, sunny Forum, brown Campagna, garlanded baths of Caracalla, with quaint, ingenious Nuremberg, and haunted Hartz, made common memories for both. But this was not all. Atherton had found the young painter in a sentimental fever. He raved about Shelley; he was full of adoration for the flimsiest abstractions—enamoured of impersonations the most impalpable; he discoursed in high strain on the dedication of life as a Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. The question of questions with him concerned not Truth or Fable, but the Beautiful or the Not-Beautiful. Whatever charmed his taste was from Ormuzd, the Good: whatever revolted it, from Ahriman, the Evil; and so the universe was summarily parted. He fancied he was making art religious, while, in fact, he made religion a mere branch of art,—and that branch, of all others, the most open to individual caprice.

From these wanderings Atherton reclaimed him, wisely, and therefore almost insensibly. Gower never forgot the service. In his admiration for Atherton, when fully conscious of it, he little suspected that he, too, had conferred a benefit in his turn. Atherton had looked too much within, as Gower too exclusively without. A certain imaginative, even poetical element, dormant in the mind of the former, was resuscitated by this friendship.

Gower rejoices in the distressingly novelish Christian name of Lionel. Why will parents give names to their offspring which are sure to entail ridicule during the most susceptible period of existence? No sooner did young Lionel enter school, with that delicate red-and-white complexion, and long curling hair, than he was nicknamed Nelly. But he fought his way stoutly till he won a title from the first part of his name rather than the last, and in school traditions figures still as Lion, royally grim and noble. That open countenance and high forehead, with the deep piercing eyes set rather far apart, constitute not merely a promising physiognomy for the artist, they bear faithful witness to mental power and frankness of character, to practical sagacity and force. In one respect only can he be charged with asserting in his person his professional pretensions,—his hair is parted in the middle, falling in natural waves on either side; long enough, as your eye tells you, for grace; too short for affectation.

One quality in Gower I have always especially liked,—his universality. Not that he sets up for Encyclopædism; on the contrary, he laments more than he need the scantiness of his knowledge and his want of time for its enlargement. What I mean is that with every kind of enquiry, every province of culture, he seems to have intuitively the readiest sympathy. Though his notion of the particular art or science may be only cursory and general, his imagination puts him in some way in the place of its exclusive devotees, and he enters into their feelings till their utmost worship appears scarcely excessive to him. I have heard such votaries pour out unreservedly into his ear, as into that of a brother enthusiast, all those delightful details of adventure, of hope and fear, of research and of conjecture, which make the very life of the most minute or the most arid pursuits, and which books impart to us so rarely. And all this (making the world to him such a wide one) without taking aught from his allegiance to painting. Already have his genius and his diligence achieved success—you will find his pictures realizing high prices—and that snug little box of his, only ten minutes’ walk from Ashfield, is furnished much too handsomely to accord with the popular idea of what must be the residence of a young artist, five-and-twenty, but newly started in his profession, and with all his ‘expectations’ gathered up within his brush.

The third member of the trio, Mr. Author, has not certainly the personal advantages of our friend Gower. I suppose you expect me to say ‘our’ now, if only as a compliment. Yet stay—a very expressive face, with a genial hearty look about it;—there! now he is smiling, that rather clumsy mouth is quite pleasant; but he lets too much beard grow for my taste.

Bearded Willoughby, O Reader, is a literary man, a confirmed bachelor, they say; and encrusted with some roughnesses and oddities which conceal from the eyes of strangers his real warmth of heart and delicacy of feeling. His parents destined him for the Church from those tender years wherein the only vocation manifest is that which summons boyhood to peg-top and jam tart. When the time drew near in which he should have taken orders, Willoughby went up to London, brimful of eager philanthropy, of religious doubts, and of literary ambition, to become one of the High-priests of Letters. His first work was a novel to illustrate the mission of the literary Priesthood, a topsy-turvy affair, but dashingly clever—by the way, you can scarcely offend him more than to mention it now;—with this book he succeeded in producing a sensation, and the barrier thus passed, his pen has found full employment ever since. He has now abandoned the extravagances of hero-worship, and I have even heard him intimate a doubt as to whether ‘able editors’ were, after all, the great, divinely-accredited hierophants of the species.

At present Willoughby is occupied, as time allows, with a philosophical romance, in which are to be embodied his views of society as it is and as it should be. This desperate enterprise is quite a secret; even Atherton and Gower know nothing of it; so you will not mention it, if you please, to more than half-a-dozen of your most intimate friends.

Willoughby was first introduced to Atherton as the author of some articles in favour of certain social reforms in which the latter had deeply interested himself. So remarkable were these papers for breadth, discrimination, and vivacity of style, that the admiring Atherton could not rest till he had made the acquaintance of the writer. The new combatant awakened general attention, and Frank Willoughby was on the point of becoming a lion. But his conversational powers were inconsiderable. His best thoughts ran with his ink from the point of the pen. So Atherton, with little difficulty, carried him off from the lion-hunters.

The three friends were agreed that the crowning locality of all for any mortal was a residence a few miles from town, with congenial neighbours close at hand,—a house or two where one might drop in for an evening at any time. As was their theory so was their practice, and the two younger men are often to be found in the evening at Atherton’s, sometimes in the library with him, sometimes in the drawing-room, with the additional enjoyment afforded by the society of his fair young wife and her sister.

But while I have been Boswellizing to you about the past history of these friends of mine, you cannot have heard a word they have been saying. Now I will be quiet,—let us listen.

Footnote 2:

How fruitful may the smallest circle grow,
If we the secret of its culture know.

CHAPTER II.

Philosophy itself
Smacks of the age it lives in, nor is true
Save by the apposition of the present.
And truths of olden time, though truths they be,
And living through all time eternal truths,
Yet want the seas’ning and applying hand
Which Nature sends successive. Else the need
Of wisdom should wear out and wisdom cease,
Since needless wisdom were not to be wise.

EDWIN THE FAIR.

ATHERTON. A pleasant little knot to set us, Gower,—to determine the conditions of your art.

WILLOUGHBY. And after dinner, too, of all times.

GOWER. Why not? If the picture-critics would only write their verdicts after dinner, many a poor victim would find his dinner prospects brighter. This is the genial hour; the very time to discuss æsthetics, where geniality is everything.

WILLOUGHBY. Do you remember that passage in one of our old plays (I think it was in Lamb I saw it), where the crazed father asks all sorts of impossible things from the painter. He wants him to make the tree shriek on which his murdered son hangs ghastly in the moonlight.

GOWER. Salvator has plenty of them, splintered with shrieking.

WILLOUGHBY. But this man’s frenzy demands more yet:—make me cry, make me mad, make me well again, and in the end leave me in a trance,—and so forth.

ATHERTON. Fortunate painter—a picture gallery ordered in a breath!

WILLOUGHBY. By no means. Now does this request, when you come to think of it, so enormously violate the conditions of the art? Seriously, I should state the matter thus:—The artist is limited to a moment only, and yet is the greater artist in proportion as he can not only adequately occupy, but even transcend that moment.

GOWER. I agree with you. Painting reaches its highest aim when it carries us beyond painting; when it is not merely itself a creation, but makes the spectator creative, and prompts him with the antecedents and the consequents of the represented action.

ATHERTON. But all are not equal to the reception of such suggestions.

GOWER. And so, with unsusceptible minds, we must be satisfied if they praise us for our imitation merely.

WILLOUGHBY. Yet even they will derive more pleasure, though unable to account for it, from works of this higher order. Those, assuredly, are the masterpieces of art, in any branch, which are, as it were, triumphal arches that lead us out into the domain of some sister art. When poetry pourtrays with the painter,—

GOWER. My favourite, Spenser, to wit.—

WILLOUGHBY. When painting sings its story with the minstrel, and when music paints and sings with both, they are at their height. Take music, for instance. What scenes does some fine overture suggest, even when you know nothing of its design, as you close your eyes and yield to its influence. The events, or the reading of the previous day, the incidents of history or romance, are wrought up with glorious transfigurations, and you are in the land of dreams at once. Some of them rise before me at this moment, vivid as ever:—now I see the fair damosels of the olden time on their palfreys, prancing on the sward beside a castle gate, while silver trumpets blow; then, as the music changes, I hear cries far off on forlorn and haunted moors; now it is the sea, and there sets the sun, red, through the ribs of a wrecked hull, that cross it like skeleton giant bars. There is one passage in the overture to Fra Diavolo, during which I always emerge, through ocean caves, in some silken palace of the east, where the music rises and rains in the fountains, and ethereally palpitates in their wavering rainbows. But dream-scenery of this sort is familiar to most persons at such times.

GOWER. I have often revelled in it.

WILLOUGHBY. And what is true for so many with regard to music, may sometimes be realized on seeing pictures.

ATHERTON. Only, I think, in a way still more accidental and arbitrary. An instance, however, of the thing you mention did happen to me last week. I had been reading a German writer on mysticism, searching, after many disappointments, for a satisfactory definition of it. Page after page of metaphysical verbiage did I wade through in vain. At last, what swarms of labouring words had left as obscure as ever, a picture seemed to disclose to me in a moment. I saw that evening, at a friend’s house, a painting which revealed to me, as I imagined, the very spirit of mysticism in a figure; it was a visible emblem or hieroglyph of that mysterious religious affection.

WILLOUGHBY. Your own subjectivity forged both lock and key together, I suspect.

GOWER. What in the world did the piece represent?

ATHERTON. I will describe it as well as I can. It was the interior of a Spanish cathedral. The most prominent object in the foreground below was the mighty foot of a staircase, with a balustrade of exceeding richness, which, in its ascent, crosses and recrosses the picture till its highest flight is lost in darkness,—for on that side the cathedral is built against a hill. A half-light slanted down—a sunbeam through the vast misty space—from a window without the range of the picture. At various stages of the mounting stairway figures on pillars, bearing escutcheons, saints and kings in fretted niches, and painted shapes of gules and azure from the lofty window in the east, looked down on those who were ascending, some in brightness, some in shadow. At the foot of the stairs were two couchant griffins of stone, with expanded spiny wings, arched necks fluted with horny armour, and open threatening jaws.

GOWER. Now for the interpretation of your parable in stone.

ATHERTON. It represented to me the mystic’s progress—my mind was full of that—his initiation, his ascent, his consummation in self-loss. First of all the aspirant, whether he seeks superhuman knowledge or superhuman love, is confronted at the outset by terrible shapes—the Dwellers of the Threshold, whether the cruelty of asceticism, the temptations of the adversary, or the phantoms of his own feverish brain. This fiery baptism manfully endured, he begins to mount through alternate glooms and illuminations; now catching a light from some source beyond the grosser organs of ordinary men, again in darkness and barren drought of soul. The saintly memories of adepts and of heroes in these mystic labours are the faithful witnesses that cheer him at each stage, whose far glories beacon him from their place of high degree as he rises step by step. Are not those first trials fairly symbolized by my griffins, those vicissitudes of the soul by such light and shadow, and those exalted spectators by the statues of my stairway and the shining ones of my oriel window? Then for the climax. The aim of the mystic, if of the most abstract contemplative type, is to lose himself in the Divine Dark[3]—to escape from everything definite, everything palpable, everything human, into the Infinite Fulness; which is, at the same time, the ‘intense inane.’ The profoundest obscurity is his highest glory; he culminates in darkness; for is not the deathlike midnight slumber of the sense, he will ask us, the wakeful noonday of the spirit? So, as I looked on the picture, I seemed to lose sight of him where the summit of the stair was lost among the shadows crouched under the roof of that strange structure.

GOWER. I perceive the analogy. I owe you thanks for enabling me to attach at least some definite idea to the word mysticism. I confess I have generally used the term mystical to designate anything fantastically unintelligible, without giving to it any distinct significance.

WILLOUGHBY. I have always been partial to the mystics, I must say. They appear to me to have been the conservators of the poetry and heart of religion, especially in opposition to the dry prose and formalism of the schoolmen.

ATHERTON. So they really were in great measure. They did good service, many of them, in their day—their very errors often such as were possible only to great souls. Still their notions concerning special revelation and immediate intuition of God were grievous mistakes.

WILLOUGHBY. Yet without the ardour imparted by such doctrines, they might have lacked the strength requisite to withstand misconceptions far more mischievous.

ATHERTON. Very likely. We should have more mercy on the one-sidedness of men, if we reflected oftener that the evil we condemn may be in fact keeping out some much greater evil on the other side.

WILLOUGHBY. I think one may learn a great deal from such erratic or morbid kinds of religion. Almost all we are in a position to say, concerning spiritual influence, consists of negatives—and what that influence is not we can best gather from these abnormal phases of the mind. Certainly an impartial estimate of the good and of the evil wrought by eminent mystics, would prove a very instructive occupation; it would be a trying of the spirits by their fruits.

GOWER. And all the more useful as the mistakes of mysticism, whatever they may be, are mistakes concerning questions which we all feel it so important to have rightly answered; committed, too, by men of like passions with ourselves, so that what was danger to them may be danger also to some of us, in an altered form.

ATHERTON. Unquestionably. Rationalism overrates reason, formalism action, and mysticism feeling—hence the common attributes of the last, heat and obscurity. But a tendency to excess in each of these three directions must exist in every age among the cognate varieties of mind. You remember how Pindar frequently introduces into an ode two opposite mythical personages, such as a Pelops or a Tantalus, an Ixion or a Perseus, one of whom shall resemble the great man addressed by the poet in his worse, the other in his better characteristics; that thus he may be at once encouraged and deterred. Deeper lessons than were drawn for Hiero from the characters of the heroic age may be learnt by us from the religious struggles of the past. It would be impossible to study the position of the old mystics without being warned and stimulated by a weakness and a strength to which our nature corresponds;—unless, indeed, the enquiry were conducted unsympathizingly; with cold hearts, as far from the faith of the mystics as from their follies.

GOWER. If we are likely to learn in this way from such an investigation, suppose we agree to set about it, and at once.

ATHERTON. With all my heart. I have gone a little way in this direction alone; I should be very glad to have company upon the road.

WILLOUGHBY. An arduous task, when you come to look it in the face,—to determine that narrow line between the genuine ardour of the Christian and the overwrought fervours of the mystical devotee,—to enter into the philosophy of such a question; and that with a terminology so misleading and so defective as the best at our service. It will be like shaping the second hand of a watch with a pair of shears, I promise you. We shall find continually tracts of ground belonging to one of the rival territories of True and False inlaid upon the regions of the other, like those patches from a distant shire that lie in the middle of some of our counties. Many of the words we must employ to designate a certain cast of mind or opinion are taken from some accidental feature or transitory circumstance,—express no real characteristic of the idea in question. They indicate our ignorance, like the castles with large flags, blazoned with the arms of sovereigns, which the old monkish geographers set down in their maps of Europe to stand instead of the rivers, towns, and mountains of an unknown interior.

ATHERTON. True enough; but we must do the best we can. We should never enter on any investigation a little beneath the surface of things if we consider all the difficulties so gravely. Besides, we are not going to be so ponderously philosophical about the matter. The facts themselves will be our best teachers, as they arise, and as we arrange them when they accumulate.

History fairly questioned is no Sphinx. She tells us what kind of teaching has been fruitful in blessing to humanity, and why; and what has been a mere boastful promise or powerless formula. She is the true test of every system, and the safeguard of her disciples from theoretical or practical extravagance. Were her large lessons learned, from how many foolish hopes and fears would they save men! We should not then see a fanatical confidence placed in pet theories for the summary expulsion of all superstition, wrongfulness, and ill-will,—theories whose prototypes failed ages back: neither would good Christian folk be so frightened as some of them are at the seemingly novel exhibitions of unbelief in our time.

WILLOUGHBY. A great gain—to be above both panic and presumption. I have never heartily given myself to a historic study without realizing some such twofold advantage. It animated and it humbled me. How minute my power; but how momentous to me its conscientious exercise! I will hunt this mystical game with you, or any other, right willingly; all the more so, if we can keep true to a historic rather than theoretical treatment of the subject.

GOWER. As to practical details, then:—I propose that we have no rules.

WILLOUGHBY. Certainly not; away with formalities; let us be Thelemites, and do as we like. We can take up this topic as a bye-work, to furnish us with some consecutive pursuit in those intervals of time we are so apt to waste. We can meet—never mind at what intervals, from a week to three months—and throw into the common stock of conversation our several reading on the questions in hand.

ATHERTON. Or one of us may take up some individual or period; write down his thoughts: and we will assemble then to hear and talk the matter over.

GOWER. Very good. And if Mrs. Atherton and Miss Merivale will sometimes deign to honour our evenings with their society, our happiness will be complete.

This mention of the ladies reminds our friends of the time, and they are breaking up to join them.

The essays and dialogues which follow have their origin in the conversation to which we have just listened.

Footnote 3:

The writer, who goes by the name of Dionysius Areopagita, teaches that
the highest spiritual truth is revealed only to those ‘who have
transcended every ascent of every holy height, and have left behind
all divine lights and sounds and heavenly discoursings, and have
passed into that Darkness where He really is (as saith the Scripture)
who is above all things.’—_De Mysticâ Theologiâ_, cap. i. § 3.

CHAPTER III.

If we entertain the inward man in the purgative and illuminative
way, that is, in actions of repentance, virtue, and precise duty,
that is the surest way of uniting us to God, whilst it is done by
faith and obedience; and that also is love; and in these peace and
safety dwell. And after we have done our work, it is not discretion
in a servant to hasten to his meal, and snatch at the refreshment of
visions, unions, and abstractions; but first we must gird ourselves,
and wait upon the master, and not sit down ourselves, till we all be
called at the great supper of the Lamb.—JEREMY TAYLOR.

‘So, we are to be etymological to-night,’ exclaimed Gower, as he stepped forward to join Willoughby in his inspection of a great folio which Atherton had laid open on a reading desk, ready to entertain his friends.

‘What says Suidas about our word mysticism?’

WILLOUGHBY. I see the old lexicographer derives the original word from the root mu, to close: the secret rites and lessons of the Greek mysteries were things about which the mouth was to be closed.[4]

GOWER. We have the very same syllable in our language for the same thing—only improved in expressiveness by the addition of another letter,—we say, ‘to be mum.’

ATHERTON. Well, this settles one whole class of significations at once. The term mystical may be applied in this sense to any secret language or ritual which is understood only by the initiated. In this way the philosophers borrowed the word figuratively from the priests, and applied it to their inner esoteric doctrines. The disciple admitted to these was a philosophical ‘myst,’ or mystic.

WILLOUGHBY. The next step is very obvious. The family of words relating to mystery, initiation, &c., are adopted into the ecclesiastical phraseology of the early Christian world,—not in the modified use of them occasionally observable in St. Paul, but with their old Pagan significance.

GOWER. So that the exclusive and aristocratic spirit of Greek culture re-appears in Christianity?

ATHERTON. Just so. Thus you see the church doors shutting out the catechumens from beholding ‘the mystery’ (as they came to call the Eucharist, par excellence) quite as rigidly as the brazen gates of Eleusis excluded the profane many. You hear Theodoret and Ambrose speaking freely before the uninitiated on moral subjects, but concerning the rites they deemed of mysterious, almost magical efficacy, they will deliver only obscure utterances to such auditors; their language is purposely dark and figurative,—suggestive to the initiated, unintelligible to the neophyte. How often on approaching the subject of the sacrament, does Chrysostom stop short in his sermon, and break off abruptly with the formula,—‘the initiated will understand what I mean.’ So Christianity, corrupted by Gentile philosophy, has in like manner its privileged and its inferior order of votaries,—becomes a respecter of persons, with arbitrary distinction makes two kinds of religion out of one, and begins to nourish with fatal treachery its doctrine of reserve.[5]

WILLOUGHBY. But Suidas has here, I perceive, a second meaning in store for us. This latter, I suspect, is most to our purpose,—it is simply an extension of the former. He refers the word to the practice of closing as completely as possible every avenue of perception by the senses, for the purpose of withdrawing the mind from everything external into itself, so as to fit it (raised above every sensuous representation) for receiving divine illumination immediately from above.

GOWER. Platonic abstraction, in fact.

ATHERTON. So it seems. The Neo-Platonist was accustomed to call every other branch of science the ‘lesser mysteries:’ this inward contemplation, the climax of Platonism, is the great mystery, the inmost, highest initiation. Withdraw into thyself, he will say, and the adytum of thine own soul will reveal to thee profounder secrets than the cave of Mithras. So that his mysticus is emphatically the enclosed, self-withdrawn, introverted man.[6] This is an initiation which does not merely, like that of Isis or of Ceres, close the lips in silence, but the eye, the ear, every faculty of perception, in inward contemplation or in the ecstatic abstraction of the trance.

WILLOUGHBY. So then it is an effort man is to make—in harmony with the matter-hating principles of this school—to strip off the material and sensuous integuments of his being, and to reduce himself to a purely spiritual element. And in thus ignoring the follies and the phantasms of Appearance—as they call the actual world—the worshipper of pure Being believed himself to enjoy at least a transitory oneness with the object of his adoration?

ATHERTON. So Plotinus would say, if not Plato. And now we come to the transmission of the idea and the expression to the Church. A writer, going by the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, ferries this shade over into the darkness visible of the ecclesiastical world in the fifth century. The system of mystical theology introduced by him was eminently adapted to the monastic and hierarchical tendencies of the time. His ‘Mystic’ is not merely a sacred personage, acquainted with the doctrines and participator in the rites called mysteries, but one also who (exactly after the Neo-Platonist pattern) by mortifying the body, closing the senses to everything external, and ignoring every ‘intellectual apprehension,’[7] attains in passivity a divine union, and in ignorance a wisdom transcending all knowledge.

GOWER. Prepared to say, I suppose, with one of old George Chapman’s characters—

I’ll build all inward—not a light shall ope
The common out-way.—
I’ll therefore live in dark; and all my light,
Like ancient temples, let in at my top.

WILLOUGHBY. Not much light either. The mystic, as such, was not to know anything about the Infinite, he was ‘to gaze with closed eyes,’ passively to receive impressions, lost in the silent, boundless ‘Dark’ of the Divine Subsistence.

ATHERTON. This, then, is our result. The philosophical perfection of Alexandria and the monastic perfection of Byzantium belong to the same species. Philosophers and monks alike employ the word mysticism and its cognate terms as involving the idea, not merely of initiation into something hidden, but, beyond this, of an internal manifestation of the Divine to the intuition or in the feeling of the secluded soul. It is in this last and narrower sense, therefore, that the word is to be understood when we speak of mystical death, mystical illumination, mystical union with God, and, in fact, throughout the phraseology of what is specially termed Theologia Mystica.[8]

GOWER. I have often been struck by the surprising variety in the forms of thought and the modes of action in which mysticism has manifested itself among different nations and at different periods. This arises, I should think, from its residing in so central a province of the mind—the feeling. It has been incorporated in theism, atheism, and pantheism. It has given men gods at every step, and it has denied all deity except self. It has appeared in the loftiest speculation and in the grossest idolatry. It has been associated with the wildest licence and with the most pitiless asceticism. It has driven men out into action, it has dissolved them in ecstasy, it has frozen them to torpor.

ATHERTON. Hence the difficulty of definition. I have seen none which quite satisfies me. Some include only a particular phase of it, while others so define its province as to stigmatise as mystical every kind of religiousness which rises above the zero of rationalism.

WILLOUGHBY. The Germans have two words for mysticism—mystik and mysticismus. The former they use in a favourable, the latter in an unfavourable, sense.—

GOWER. Just as we say piety and pietism, or rationality and rationalism; keeping the first of each pair for the use, the second for the abuse. A convenience, don’t you think?

ATHERTON. If the adjective were distinguishable like the nouns—but it is not; and to have a distinction in the primitive and not in the derivative word is always confusing. But we shall keep to the usage of our own language. I suppose we shall all be agreed in employing the word mysticism in the unfavourable signification, as equivalent generally to spirituality diseased, grown unnatural, fantastic, and the like.

GOWER. At the same time admitting the true worth of many mystics, and the real good and truth of which such errors are the exaggeration or caricature.

ATHERTON. I think we may say thus much generally—that mysticism, whether in religion or philosophy, is that form of error which mistakes for a divine manifestation the operations of a merely human faculty.

WILLOUGHBY. There you define, at any rate, the characteristic misconception of the mystics.

GOWER. And include, if I mistake not, enthusiasts, with their visions; pretended prophets, with their claim of inspiration; wonder-workers, trusting to the divine power resident in their theurgic formulas; and the philosophers who believe themselves organs of the world-soul, and their systems an evolution of Deity.

ATHERTON. Yes, so far; but I do not profess to give any definition altogether adequate. Speaking of Christian mysticism, I should describe it generally as the exaggeration of that aspect of Christianity which is presented to us by St. John.

GOWER. That answer provokes another question. How should you characterize John’s peculiar presentation of the Gospel?

ATHERTON. I refer chiefly to that admixture of the contemplative temperament and the ardent, by which he is personally distinguished,—the opposition so manifest in his epistles to all religion of mere speculative opinion or outward usage,—the concentration of Christianity, as it were, upon the inward life derived from union with Christ. This would seem to be the province of Christian truth especially occupied by the beloved disciple, and this is the province which mysticism has in so many ways usurped.

GOWER. Truly that unction from the Holy One, of which John speaks, has found some strange claimants!

WILLOUGHBY. Thus much I think is evident from our enquiry—that mysticism, true to its derivation as denoting a hidden knowledge, faculty, or life (the exclusive privilege of sage, adept, or recluse), presents itself, in all its phases, as more or less the religion of internal as opposed to external revelation,—of heated feeling, sickly sentiment, or lawless imagination, as opposed to that reasonable belief in which the intellect and the heart, the inward witness and the outward, are alike engaged.

Note to page 21.

Numerous definitions of ‘Mystical Theology’ are supplied by Roman Catholic divines who have written on the subject. With all of them the terms denote the religion of the heart as distinguished from speculation, scholasticism, or ritualism; and, moreover, those higher experiences of the divine life associated, in their belief, with extraordinary gifts and miraculous powers. Such definitions will accordingly comprehend the theopathetic and theurgic forms of mysticism, but must necessarily exclude the theosophic. Many of them might serve as definitions of genuine religion. These mystical experiences have been always coveted and admired in the Romish Church; and those, therefore, who write concerning them employ the word mysticism in a highly favourable sense. That excess of subjectivity—those visionary raptures and supernatural exaltations, which we regard as the symptoms of spiritual disease, are, in the eyes of these writers, the choice rewards of sufferings and of aspirations the most intense,—they are the vision of God and things celestial enjoyed by the pure in heart,—the dazzling glories wherewith God has crowned the heads of a chosen few, whose example shall give light to all the world.

Two or three specimens will suffice. Gerson gives the two following definitions of the Theologia Mystica:—‘Est animi extensio in Deum per amoris desiderium.’ And again: ‘Est motio anagogica in Deum per purum et fervidum amorem.’ Elsewhere he is more metaphorical, describing it as the theology which teaches men to escape from the stormy sea of sensuous desires to the safe harbour of Eternity, and shows them how to attain that love which snatches them away to the Beloved, unites them with Him, and secures them rest in Him. Dionysius the Carthusian (associating evidently mystica and mysteriosa) says,—‘Est autem mystica Theologia secretissima mentis cum Deo locutio.’ John à Jesu Maria calls it, ‘cœlestis quædam Dei notitia per unionem voluntatis Deo adhærentis elicita, vel lumine cœlitus immisso producta.’ This mystical theology, observes the Carthusian Dionysius, farther, (commentating on the Areopagite), is no science, properly so called; even regarded as an act, it is simply the concentration (defixio) of the mind on God—admiration of his majesty—a suspension of the mind in the boundless and eternal light—a most fervid, most peaceful, transforming gaze on Deity, &c.

All alike contrast the mystical with the scholastic and the symbolical theology. The points of dissimilarity are thus summed up by Cardinal Bona:—‘Per scholasticam discit homo recte uti intelligibilibus, per symbolicam sensibilibus, per hanc (mysticam) rapitur ad supermentales excessus. Scientiæ humanæ in valle phantasiæ discuntur, hæc in apice mentis. Illæ multis egent discursibus, et erroribus subjectæ sunt: hæc unico et simplici verbo docetur et discitur, et est mere supernaturalis tam in substantiâ quam in modo procedendi.’—Via Compendii ad Deum, cap. iii. 1-3.

The definition given by Corderius in his introduction to the mystical theology of Dionysius is modelled on the mysticism of John de la Cruz:—‘Theologia Mystica est sapientia experimentalis, Dei affectiva, divinitus infusa, quæ mentem ab omni inordinatione puram, per actus supernaturales fidei, spei, et charitatis, cum Deo intime conjungit.’—Isagoge, cap. ii.

The most negative definition of all is that given by Pachymeres, the Greek paraphrast of Dionysius, who has evidently caught his master’s mantle, or cloak of darkness. ‘Mystical theology is not perception or discourse, not a movement of the mind, not an operation, not a habit, nothing that any other power we may possess will bring to us; but if, in absolute immobility of mind we are illumined concerning it, we shall know that it is beyond everything cognizable by the mind of man.’—Dion. Opp. vol. i. p. 722.

In one place the explanations of Corderius give us to understand that the mysticism he extols does at least open a door to theosophy itself, i.e. to inspired science. He declares that the mystical theologian not only has revealed to him the hidden sense of Scripture, but that he can understand and pierce the mysteries of any natural science whatsoever, in a way quite different from that possible to other men—in short, by a kind of special revelation.—Isagoge, cap. iv.

The reader will gather the most adequate notion of what is meant, or thought to be meant, by mystical theology from the description given by Ludovic Blosius, a high authority on matters mystical, in his Institutio Spiritualis. Corderius cites him at length, as ‘sublimissimus rerum mysticarum interpres.’

Happy, he exclaims, is that soul which steadfastly follows after purity of heart and holy introversion, renouncing utterly all private affection, all self-will, all self-interest. Such a soul deserves to approach nearer and ever nearer to God. Then at length, when its higher powers have been elevated, purified, and furnished forth by divine grace, it attains to unity and nudity of spirit—to a pure love above representation—to that simplicity of thought which is devoid of all thinkings. Now, therefore, since it hath become receptive of the surpassing and ineffable grace of God, it is led to that living fountain which flows from everlasting, and doth refresh the minds of the saints unto the full and in over-measure. Now do the powers of the soul shine as the stars, and she herself is fit to contemplate the abyss of Divinity with a serene, a simple, and a jubilant intuition, free from imagination and from the smallest admixture of the intellect. Accordingly, when she lovingly turns herself absolutely unto God, the incomprehensible light shines into her depths, and that radiance blinds the eye of reason and understanding. But the simple eye of the soul itself remains open—that is thought, pure, naked, uniform, and raised above the understanding.

Moreover, when the natural light of reason is blinded by so bright a glory, the soul takes cognizance of nothing in time, but is raised above time and space, and assumes as it were a certain attribute of eternity. For the soul which has abandoned symbols and earthly distinctions and processes of thought, now learns experimentally that God far transcends all images—corporeal, spiritual, or divine, and that whatsoever the reason can apprehend, whatsoever can be said or written concerning God, whatsoever can be predicated of Him by words, must manifestly be infinitely remote from the reality of the divine subsistence which is unnameable. The soul knows not, therefore, what that God is she feels. Hence, by a foreknowledge which is exercised without knowledge, she rests in the nude, the simple, the unknown God, who alone is to be loved. For the light is called dark, from its excessive brightness. In this darkness the soul receives the hidden word which God utters in the inward silence and secret recess of the mind. This word she receives, and doth happily experience the bond of mystical union. For when, by means of love, she hath transcended reason and all symbols, and is carried away above herself (a favour God alone can procure her), straightway she flows away from herself and flows forth into God (a se defluens profluit in Deum), and then is God her peace and her enjoyment. Rightly doth she sing, in such a transport, ‘I will both lay me down in peace and sleep.’ The loving soul flows down, I say, falls away from herself, and, reduced as it were to nothing, melts and glides away altogether into the abyss of eternal love. There, dead to herself, she lives in God, knowing nothing, perceiving nothing, except the love she tastes. For she loses herself in that vastest solitude and darkness of Divinity: but thus to lose is in fact to find herself. There, putting off whatsoever is human, and putting on whatever is divine, she is transformed and transmuted into God, as iron in a furnace takes the form of fire and is transmuted into fire. Nevertheless, the essence of the soul thus deified remains, as the glowing iron does not cease to be iron....

The soul, thus bathed in the essence of God, liquefied by the consuming fire of love, and united to Him without medium, doth, by wise ignorance and by the inmost touch of love, more clearly know God than do our fleshly eyes discern the visible sun....

Though God doth sometimes manifest himself unto the perfect soul in most sublime and wondrous wise, yet he doth not reveal himself as he is in his own ineffable glory, but as it is possible for him to be seen in this life.—Isagoge Cord. cap. vii.

Footnote 4:

On the word μύησις Suidas says, Εἴρηται δὲ παρὰ τὸ τὰ μυστήρια καὶ
ἀπόρῥητα τελεῖσθαι· ἤ διὰ τὸ μυόντας τὰς αἰσθήσεις καὶ ἐπέκεινα
σωματικῆς φαντασίας νενομένους, τὰς θείας εἰσδέχεσθαι ἐλλάμψεις.

Suicer also cites Hesychius: _Etym. Mag._—Μύστης, παρὰ τὸ μύω, τὸ
καμμύω. μύοντες γὰρ τὰς αἰσθήσεις καὶ ἔξω τῶν σαρκικῶν φροντίδων
γινόμενοι, οὕτω τὰς θείας ἀναλάμψεις ἐδέχοντο.

Footnote 5:

See Bingham, _Antiq. of the Christian Church_, vol. ix. pp. 96-105.
Clement of Alexandria abounds in examples of the application to
Christian doctrine of the phraseology in use concerning the heathen
mysteries;—_e.g._ _Protrept._ cap. xii. § 120.

Footnote 6:

Both Plotinus and Proclus speak of the highest revelation concerning
divine things as vouchsafed to the soul which withdraws into itself,
and, dead to all that is external, ‘gazes with closed eyes’ (μύσασαν).
See Tholuck’s _Blüthensammlung aus der Morgenlandischen Mystik_;
_Einleitung_, § I, p. 6. Dr. Tholuck is the only German writer I have
seen who throws light on the word in question by accurately
investigating its etymology and successive meanings; and I readily
acknowledge my debt to his suggestions on this point.

Footnote 7:

Dionysius thus describes the mystical adept who has reached the summit
of union:—‘Then is he delivered from all seeing and being seen, and
passes into the truly mystical darkness of ignorance, where he
excludes all intellectual apprehensions (τὰς γνωστικὰς ἀντιλήηψεις),
and abides in the utterly Impalpable and Invisible; being wholly His
who is above all, with no other dependence, either on himself or any
other; and is made one, as to his nobler part, with the utterly
Unknown, by the cessation of all knowing; and at the same time, in
that very knowing nothing, he knows what transcends the mind of
man.’—_De Mysticâ Theologiâ_, cap. i. p. 710. _S. Dion. Areop. Opp._
Paris, 1644.

So again he exhorts Timothy ‘by assiduous practice in mystical
contemplations to abandon the senses and all operations of the
intellect; all objects of sense and all objects of thought, all things
non-existent and existent (αἰσθητὰ = οὐκ ὄντα, νοητὰ = ὄντα), and
ignorantly to strive upwards towards Union as close as possible with
Him who is above all essence and knowledge:—inasmuch as by a pure,
free, and absolute separation (ἐκστάσει) of himself from all things,
he will be exalted (stripped and freed from everything) to the
superessential radiance of the divine darkness.’—p. 708.

About the words rendered ‘intellectual apprehensions’ commentators
differ. The context, the antithesis, and the parallel passage in the
earlier part of the chapter, justify us in understanding them in their
strict sense, as conveying the idea of cessation from all mental
action whatsoever.

Footnote 8:

See Note, p. 23.

CHAPTER IV.

The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow.

SHELLEY.

WILLOUGHBY. Here’s another definition for you:—Mysticism is the romance of religion. What do you say?

GOWER. True to the spirit—not scientific, I fear.

WILLOUGHBY. Science be banished! Is not the history of mysticism bright with stories of dazzling spiritual enterprise, sombre with tragedies of the soul, stored with records of the achievements and the woes of martyrdom and saintship? Has it not reconciled, as by enchantment, the most opposite extremes of theory and practice? See it, in theory, verging repeatedly on pantheism, ego-theism, nihilism. See it, in practice, producing some of the most glorious examples of humility, benevolence, and untiring self-devotion. Has it not commanded, with its indescribable fascination, the most powerful natures and the most feeble—minds lofty with a noble disdain of life, or low with a weak disgust of it? If the self-torture it enacts seems hideous to our sobriety, what an attraction in its reward! It lays waste the soul with purgatorial pains—but it is to leave nothing there on which any fire may kindle after death. What a promise!—a perfect sanctification, a divine calm, fruition of heaven while yet upon the earth!

ATHERTON. Go on, Willoughby, I like your enthusiasm. Think of its adventures, too.

WILLOUGHBY. Aye, its adventures—both persecuted and canonized by kings and pontiffs; one age enrolling the mystic among the saints, another committing him to the inquisitor’s torch, or entombing him in the Bastille. And the principle indestructible after all—some minds always who must be religious mystically or not at all.

ATHERTON. I thought we might this evening enquire into the causes which tend continually to reproduce this religious phenomenon. You have suggested some already. Certain states of society have always fostered it. There have been times when all the real religion existing in a country appears to have been confined to its mystics.

WILLOUGHBY. In such an hour, how mysticism rises and does its deeds of spiritual chivalry——

GOWER. Alas! Quixotic enough, sometimes.

WILLOUGHBY. How conspicuous, then, grows this inward devotion!—even the secular historian is compelled to say a word about it——

ATHERTON. And a sorry, superficial verdict he gives, too often.

WILLOUGHBY. How loud its protest against literalism, formality, scholasticism, human ordinances! what a strenuous reaction against the corruptions of priestcraft!

ATHERTON. But, on the other side, Willoughby—and here comes the pathetic part of its romance—mysticism is heard discoursing concerning things unutterable. It speaks, as one in a dream, of the third heaven, and of celestial experiences, and revelations fitter for angels than for men. Its stammering utterance, confused with excess of rapture labouring with emotions too huge or abstractions too subtile for words, becomes utterly unintelligible. Then it is misrepresented: falls a victim to reaction in its turn; the delirium is dieted by persecution, and it is consigned once more to secrecy and silence.

GOWER. There, good night, and pleasant dreams to it!

WILLOUGHBY. It spins still in its sleep its mingled tissue of good and evil.

ATHERTON. A mixture truly. We must not blindly praise it in our hatred of formalism. We must not vaguely condemn it in our horror of extravagance.

GOWER. What you have both been saying indicates at once three of the causes we are in search of,—indeed, the three chief ones, as I suppose: first of all, the reaction you speak of against the frigid formality of religious torpor; then, heart-weariness, the languishing longing for repose, the charm of mysticism for the selfish or the weak; and, last, the desire, so strong in some minds, to pierce the barriers that hide from man the unseen world—the charm of mysticism for the ardent and the strong.

ATHERTON. That shrinking from conflict, that passionate yearning after inaccessible rest, how universal is it; what wistful utterance it has found in every nation and every age; how it subdues us all, at times, and sinks us into languor.

WILLOUGHBY. Want of patience lies at the root—who was it said that he should have all eternity to rest in?

ATHERTON. Think how the traditions of every people have embellished with their utmost wealth of imagination some hidden spot upon the surface of the earth, which they have pourtrayed as secluded from all the tumult and the pain of time—a serene Eden—an ever-sunny Tempe—a vale of Avalon—a place beyond the sterner laws and rougher visitations of the common world—a fastness of perpetual calm, before which the tempests may blow their challenging horns in vain—they can win no entrance. Such, to the fancy of the Middle Age, was the famous temple of the Sangreal, with its dome of sapphire, its six-and-thirty towers, its crystal crosses, and its hangings of green samite, guarded by its knights, girded by impenetrable forest, glittering on the onyx summit of Mount Salvage, for ever invisible to every eye impure, inaccessible to every failing or faithless heart. Such, to the Hindoo, was the Cridavana meadow, among the heights of Mount Sitanta, full of flowers, of the song of birds, the hum of bees—‘languishing winds and murmuring falls of waters.’ Such was the secret mountain Kinkadulle, celebrated by Olaus Magnus, which stood in a region now covered only by moss or snow, but luxuriant once, in less degenerate days, with the spontaneous growth of every pleasant bough and goodly fruit. What places like these have been to the popular mind, even such a refuge for the Ideal from the pursuit of the Actual—that the attainment of Ecstasy, the height of Contemplation, the bliss of Union, has been for the mystic.

GOWER. So those spiritual Lotos-eaters will only

——hearken what the inner spirit sings,
There is no joy but calm;

or, in their ‘fugitive and cloistered virtue,’ as Milton calls it, say,

——let us live and lie reclined
On the hills like gods together, careless of mankind.

ATHERTON. Some; not all, however. Neither should we suppose that even those who have sunk to such a state——

WILLOUGHBY. They would say—risen—

ATHERTON. Be it by sinking or rising, they have not been brought to that pass without a conflict. From life’s battle-field to the hospital of the hermitage has been but a step for a multitude of minds. Hiding themselves wounded from the victor (for the enemy they could not conquer shall not see and mock their sufferings), they call in the aid of an imaginative religionism to people their solitude with its glories. The Prometheus chained to his rock is comforted if the sea nymphs rise from the deep to visit him, and Ocean on his hippogriff draws near. And thus, let the gliding fancies of a life of dreams, and Imagination, the monarch of all their main of thought, visit the sorrow of these recluses, and they think they can forget the ravages of that evil which so vexed them once. Hence the mysticism of the visionary. He learns to crave ecstasies and revelations as at once his solace and his pride.

GOWER. Is it not likely, too, that some of these mystics, in seasons of mental distress of which we have no record, tried Nature as a resource, and found her wanting? Such a disappointment would make that ascetic theory which repudiates the seen and actual, plausible and even welcome to them. After demanding of the natural world what it has not to bestow, they would hurry to the opposite extreme, and deny it any healing influence whatever. Go out into the woods and valleys, when your heart is rather harassed than bruised, and when you suffer from vexation more than grief. Then the trees all hold out their arms to you to relieve you of the burthen of your heavy thoughts; and the streams under the trees glance at you as they run by, and will carry away your trouble along with the fallen leaves; and the sweet-breathing air will draw it off together with the silver multitudes of the dew. But let it be with anguish or remorse in your heart that you go forth into Nature, and instead of your speaking her language, you make her speak yours. Your distress is then infused through all things, and clothes all things, and Nature only echoes, and seems to authenticate, your self-loathing or your hopelessness. Then you find the device of your sorrow on the argent shield of the moon, and see all the trees of the field weeping and wringing their hands with you, while the hills, seated at your side in sackcloth, look down upon you prostrate, and reprove you like the comforters of Job.

ATHERTON. Doubtless, many of these stricken spirits suffered such disappointment at some early period of their history. Failure was inevitable, and the disease was heightened. How Coleridge felt this when he says so mournfully in his Ode to Dejection,—

It were a vain endeavour
Though I should gaze for ever
On that green light that lingers in the west:
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life whose fountains are within.

WILLOUGHBY. The feeling of the other class we spoke of—the men of bolder temperament—has been this: ‘I am a king and yet a captive; submit I cannot; I care not to dream; I must in some way act.’

GOWER. And, like Rasselas, a prince and yet a prisoner in the narrow valley, such a man, in his impatience, takes counsel of a philosopher, who promises to construct a pair of wings wherewith he shall overfly the summits that frown around him. The mystagogue is a philosopher such as Rasselas found, with a promise as large and a result as vain.

ATHERTON. Hence the mysticism of the theurgist, who will pass the bounds of the dreaded spirit-world; will dare all its horrors to seize one of its thrones; and aspires—a Manfred or a Zanoni—to lord it among the powers of the air.

WILLOUGHBY. And of the mysticism of the theosophist, too, whose science is an imagined inspiration, who writes about plants and minerals under a divine afflatus, and who will give you from the resources of his special revelation an explanation of every mystery.

GOWER. The explanation, unhappily, the greatest mystery of all.

ATHERTON. Curiously enough, the Bible has been made to support mysticism by an interpretation, at one time too fanciful, at another too literal.

WILLOUGHBY. We may call it, perhaps, the innocent cause of mysticism with one class, its victim with another: the one, running into mysticism because they wrongly interpreted the Bible; the other interpreting it wrongly because they were mystics. The mystical interpreters of school and cloister belong to the latter order, and many a Covenanter and godly trooper of the Commonwealth to the former.

GOWER. Not an unlikely result with the zealous Ironside—his reading limited to his English Bible and a few savoury treatises of divinity—pouring over the warlike story of ancient Israel, and identifying himself with the subjects of miraculous intervention, divine behest, and prophetic dream. How glorious would those days appear to such a man, when angels went and came among men; when, in the midst of his husbandry or handicraft, the servant of the Lord might be called aside to see some ‘great sight:’ when the fire dropped sudden down from heaven on the accepted altar, like a drop spilt from the lip of an angel’s fiery vial full of odours; when the Spirit of the Lord moved men at times, as Samson was moved in the camp of Dan, between Zorah and Eshtaol; and when the Lord sent men hither and thither by an inward impulse, as Elijah was sent from Gilgal to Bethel, and from Bethel back to Jericho, and from Jericho on to Jordan. Imagination would reproduce those marvels in the world within, though miracles could no longer cross his path in the world without. He would believe that to him also words were given to speak, and deeds to do; and that, whether in the house, the council, or the field, he was the Spirit’s chosen instrument and messenger.

ATHERTON. This is the practical and active kind of mysticism so prevalent in that age of religious wars, the seventeenth century.

WILLOUGHBY. The monks took the opposite course. While the Parliamentarian soldier was often seen endeavouring to adapt his life to a mistaken application of the Bible, the ascetic endeavoured to adapt the Bible to his mistaken life.

GOWER. The New Testament not authorising the austerities of a Macarius or a Maximus, tradition must be called in——

WILLOUGHBY. And side by side with tradition, mystical interpretation. The Bible, it was pretended, must not be understood as always meaning what it seems to mean.

ATHERTON. It then becomes the favourite employment of the monk to detect this hidden meaning, and to make Scripture render to tradition the same service which the mask rendered to the ancient actor, not only disguising the face, but making the words go farther. To be thus busied was to secure two advantages at once; he had occupation for his leisure, and an answer for his adversaries.

CHAPTER V.

Oh! contemplation palls upon the spirit,
Like the chill silence of an autumn sun:
While action, like the roaring south-west wind,
Sweeps, laden with elixirs, with rich draughts
Quickening the wombed earth.

_Guta._ And yet what bliss,
When, dying in the darkness of God’s light,
The soul can pierce these blinding webs of nature,
And float up to the nothing, which is all things—
The ground of being, where self-forgetful silence
Is emptiness,—emptiness fulness,—fulness God,—
Till we touch Him, and, like a snow-flake, melt
Upon his light-sphere’s keen circumference!

THE SAINT’S TRAGEDY.

GOWER. Thanks, if you please, not reproaches. I was calling help for you, I was summoning the fay to your assistance, to determine the best possible order of your mystics.

WILLOUGHBY. The fay?

GOWER. The fay. Down with you in that arm-chair, and sit quietly. Know that I was this morning reading Andersen’s Märchen—all about Ole-Luk-Oie, his ways and works—the queer little elf. Upstairs he creeps, in houses where children are, softly, softly, in the dusk of the evening, with what do you think under his arm?—two umbrellas, one plain, the other covered with gay colours and quaint figures. He makes the eyes of the children heavy, and when they are put to bed, holds over the heads of the good children the painted umbrella, which causes them to dream the sweetest and most wonderful dreams imaginable; but over the naughty children he holds the other, and they do not dream at all. Now, thought I, let me emulate the profundity of a German critic. Is this to be treated as a simple child’s tale? Far from it. There is a depth of philosophic meaning in it. Have not the mystics been mostly childlike natures? Have not their lives been full of dreams, manifold and strange—and they therefore, if any, especial favourites of Ole-Luk-Oie? They have accounted their dreams their pride and their reward. They have looked on the sobriety of dreamlessness as the appropriate deprivation of privilege consequent on carnality and ignorance; in other words, the non-dreamers have been with them the naughty children. To learn life’s lessons well is, according to them, to enjoy as a recompence the faculty of seeing visions and of dreaming dreams. Here then is the idea of mysticism. You have its myth, its legend. Ole-Luk-Oie is its presiding genius. Now, Atherton, if you could but get hold of his umbrella, the segments of that silken hemisphere, with its painted constellations, would give you your divisions in a twinkling. That was why I wanted him. But I do not see him letting himself down the bellrope, or hear his tap at the door. I am afraid we must set to work without him.

WILLOUGHBY. So be it. A local or historical classification of the mystics is out of the question. I scarcely think you can find a metaphysical one that will bear the test of application and be practically serviceable. Then the division some adopt, of heterodox and orthodox, saves trouble indeed, but it is so arbitrary. The Church of Rome, from whom many of these mystics called heretical, dared to differ, is no church at all in the true sense, and assuredly no standard of orthodoxy. In addition to this I have a nervous antipathy to the terms themselves; for, as I have a liking for becoming the champion of any cause which appears to be borne down by numbers, I find my friends who are somewhat heterodox, frequently charging me with what is called orthodoxy, and those again who are orthodox as often suspecting me of heterodoxy.

ATHERTON. Hear my proposed division. There are three kinds of mysticism, theopathetic, theosophic, and theurgic. The first of these three classes I will subdivide, if needful, into transitive and intransitive.

GOWER. Your alliteration is grateful to my ear; I hope you have not strained a point to secure us the luxury.

ATHERTON. Not a hair’s breadth, I assure you.

WILLOUGHBY. Etymologically such a division has the advantage of showing that all the forms of mysticism are developments of the religious sentiment; that in all its varieties the relationship, real or imaginary, which mysticism sustains to the Divine, is its primary element;—that its widely differing aspects are all phases it presents in its eccentric orbit about the central luminary of the Infinite.

GOWER. Your theopathetic mysticism must include a very wide range. By the term theopathetic you denote, of course, that mysticism which resigns itself, in a passivity more or less absolute, to an imagined divine manifestation. Now, one man may regard himself as overshadowed, another as impelled by Deity. One mystic of this order may do nothing, another may display an unceasing activity. Whether he believes himself a mirror in whose quiescence the Divinity ‘glasses himself;’ or, as it were, a leaf, driven by the mighty rushing wind of the Spirit, and thus the tongue by which the Spirit speaks, the organ by which God works—the principle of passivity is the same.

ATHERTON. Hence my subdivision of this class of mystics into those whose mysticism assumes a transitive character, and those with whom mysticism consists principally in contemplation, in Quietism, in negation, and so is properly called intransitive.

WILLOUGHBY. Yet some of those whose mysticism has been pre-eminently negative, who have hated the very name of speculation, and placed perfection in repose and mystical death, have mingled much in active life. They appear to defy our arrangement.

ATHERTON. It is only in appearance. They have shrunk from carrying out their theory to its logical consequences. Their activity has been a bye-work. The diversities of character observable in the mysticism which is essentially intransitive arise, not from a difference in the principle at the root, but from varieties of natural temperament, of external circumstances, and from the dissimilar nature or proportion of the foreign elements incorporated.

GOWER. It is clear that we must be guided by the rule rather than the exception, and determine, according to the predominant element in the mysticism of individuals, the position to be assigned them. If we were to classify only those who were perfectly consistent with themselves, we could include scarcely half-a-dozen names, and those, by the way, the least rational of all, for the most thorough-going are the madmen.

ATHERTON. The mysticism of St. Bernard, for example, in spite of his preaching, his travels, his diplomacy, is altogether contemplative—the intransitive mysticism of the cloister. His active labours were a work apart.

GOWER. Such men have been serviceable as members of society in proportion to their inconsistency as devotees of mysticism. A heavy charge this against their principle.

WILLOUGHBY. In the intransitive division of the theopathetic mysticism you will have three such names as Suso, Ruysbrook, Molinos, and all the Quietists, whether French or Indian.

ATHERTON. And in the transitive theopathy all turbulent prophets and crazy fanatics. This species of mysticism usurps the will more than the emotional part of our nature. The subject of it suffers under the Divine, as he believes, but the result of the manifestation is not confined to himself, it passes on to his fellows.

GOWER. If you believe Plato in the Ion, you must range here all the poets, for they sing well, he tells us, only as they are carried out of themselves by a divine madness, and mastered by an influence which their verse communicates to others in succession.

WILLOUGHBY. We must admit here also, according to ancient superstition, the Pythoness on her tripod, and the Sibyl in her cave at Cumæ, as she struggles beneath the might of the god:—

Phœbi nondum patiens immanis in antro
Bacchatur vates, magnum si pectore possit
Excussisse Deum: tanto magis ille fatigat
Os rabidum, fera corda domans, fingitque premendo.

ATHERTON. I have no objection. According to Virgil’s description, the poor Sibyl has earned painfully enough a place within the pale of mysticism. But those with whom we have more especially to do in this province are enthusiasts such as Tanchelm, who appeared in the twelfth century, and announced himself as the residence of Deity; as Gichtel, who believed himself appointed to expiate by his prayers and penance the sins of all mankind; or as Kuhlmann, who traversed Europe, the imagined head of the Fifth monarchy, summoning kings and nobles to submission.

GOWER. Some of these cases we may dismiss in a summary manner. The poor brainsick creatures were cast on evil times indeed. What we should now call derangement was then exalted into heresy, and honoured with martyrdom. We should have taken care that Kuhlmann was sent to an asylum, but the Russian patriarch burned him, poor fellow.

ATHERTON. We must not forget, however, that this species of mysticism has sometimes been found associated with the announcement of vital truths. Look at George Fox and the early Quakers.

WILLOUGHBY. And I would refer also to this class some of the milder forms of mysticism, in which it is seen rather as a single morbid element than as a principle avowed and carried out. Jung Stilling is an instance of what I mean. You see him, fervent, earnest, and yet weak; without forethought, without perseverance; vain and irresolute, he changes his course incessantly, seeing in every variation of feeling and of circumstance a special revelation of the Divine will.

ATHERTON. Add to this modification a kindred error, the doctrine of a ‘particular faith’ in prayer, so much in vogue in Cromwell’s court at Whitehall. Howe boldly preached against it before the Protector himself.

WILLOUGHBY. Now, Atherton, for your second division, theosophic mysticism. Whom do you call theosophists?

ATHERTON. Among the Germans I find mysticism generally called theosophy when applied to natural science. Too narrow a use of the word, I think. We should have in that case scarcely any theosophy in Europe till after the Reformation. The word itself was first employed by the school of Porphyry. The Neo-Platonist would say that the priest might have his traditional discourse concerning God (theology), but he alone, with his intuition, the highest wisdom concerning him.

GOWER. I can’t say that I have any clear conception attached to the word.

ATHERTON. You want examples? Take Plotinus and Behmen.

GOWER. What a conjunction!

ATHERTON. Not so far apart as may appear. Their difference is one of application more than of principle. Had Plotinus thought a metal or a plant worth his attention, he would have maintained that concerning that, even as concerning the infinite, all truth lay stored within the recesses of his own mind. But of course he only cared about ideas. Mystical philosophy is really a contradiction in terms, is it not?

GOWER. Granted, since philosophy must build only upon reason.

ATHERTON. Very good. Then when philosophy falls into mysticism I give it another name, and call it theosophy. And, on the other side, I call mysticism, trying to be philosophical, theosophy likewise. That is all.

WILLOUGHBY. So that the theosophist is one who gives you a theory of God, or of the works of God, which has not reason, but an inspiration of his own for its basis.

ATHERTON. Yes; he either believes, with Swedenborg and Behmen, that a special revelation has unfolded to him the mystery of the divine dispensations here or hereafter—laid bare the hidden processes of nature, or the secrets of the other world; or else, with Plotinus and Schelling, he believes that his intuitions of those things are infallible because divine—subject and object being identical,—all truth being within him. Thus, while the mystic of the theopathetic species is content to contemplate, to feel, or to act, suffering under Deity in his sublime passivity, the mysticism I term theosophic aspires to know and believes itself in possession of a certain supernatural divine faculty for that purpose.

GOWER. You talk of mysticism trying to be philosophical; it does then sometimes seek to justify itself at the bar of reason?

ATHERTON. I should think so—often: at one time trying to refute the charge of madness and prove itself throughout rational and sober; at another, using the appeal to reason up to a certain point and as far as serves its purpose, and then disdainfully mocking at demands for proof, and towering above argument, with the pretence of divine illumination.

WILLOUGHBY. Some of these mystics, talking of reason as they do, remind me of Lysander at the feet of Helena, protesting (with the magic juice scarce dry upon his eyelids) that the decision of his spell-bound faculties is the deliberate exercise of manly judgment—

The mind of man is by his reason swayed,
And _reason_ says you are the worthier maid.

GOWER. Now you come to Shakspeare, I must cap your quotation with another: I fit those mystics Atherton speaks of as using reason up to a certain point and then having done with it, with a motto from the Winter’s Tale—much at their service. They answer, with young enamoured Florizel, when Reason, like a grave Camillo, bids them ‘be advised’—

I am; and by my fancy: if my reason
Will thereto be obedient, I have reason;
If not, my senses better pleased with madness
Do bid it welcome.

ATHERTON. To classify the mystics adequately, we should have a terminology of dreams rich as that of Homer, and distinguish, as he does, the dream-image of complete illusion from the half-conscious dream between sleeping and waking;—ὄναρ from ὔπαρ. How unanimous, by the way, would the mystics be in deriving ὄνειρον from ὄνειαρ—dream from enjoyment.

WILLOUGHBY. To return from the poets to business; was not all the science of the Middle Age theosophic rather than philosophic? Both to mystical schoolmen and scholastic mystics the Bible was a book of symbols and propositions, from which all the knowable was somehow to be deduced.

ATHERTON. Most certainly. The mystical interpretation of Scripture was their measuring-reed for the temple of the universe. The difference, however, between them and Behmen would be this—that, while both essayed to read the book of nature by the light of grace, Behmen claimed a special revelation, a divine mission for unfolding these mysteries in a new fashion; schoolmen, like Richard of St. Victor, professed to do so only by the supernatural aid of the Spirit illuminating the data afforded by the Church. And again, Behmen differs from Schelling and modern theosophy in studying nature through the medium of an external revelation mystically understood, while they interpret it by the unwritten inward revelation of Intellectual Intuition. I speak only of the difference of principle, not of result. But no one will dispute that nearly every scientific enquiry of the Middle Age was conducted on mystical principles, whether as regarded our source of knowing or its method.

WILLOUGHBY. And what wonder? Does not Milton remind us that Julian’s edict, forbidding Christians the study of heathen learning, drove the two Apollinarii to ‘coin all the seven liberal sciences’ out of the Bible? The jealous tyranny of the Papacy virtually perpetuated the persecution of the Apostate. Every lamp must be filled with church oil. Every kind of knowledge must exist only as a decoration of the ecclesiastical structure. Every science must lay its foundation on theology. See a monument attesting this, a type of the times, in the cathedral of Chartres, covered with thousands of statues and symbols, representing all the history, astronomy, and physics of the age—a sacred encyclopædia transferred from the pages of Vincent of Beauvais to the enduring stone, so to bid all men see in the Church a Mirror of the Universe—a speculum universale. Who can be surprised that by the aid of that facile expedient, mystical interpretation, many a work of mortal brain should have been bound and lettered as ‘HOLY BIBLE,’ or that research should have simulated worship, as some Cantab, pressed for time, may study a problem at morning chapel?

ATHERTON. What interminable lengths of the fine-spun, gay-coloured ribbons of allegory and metaphor has the mountebank ingenuity of that mystical interpretation drawn out of the mouth of Holy Writ!

GOWER. And made religion a toy—a tassel on the silken purse of the spendthrift Fancy.

WILLOUGHBY. Granting, Atherton, your general position that the undue inference of the objective from the subjective produces mysticism, what are we to say of a man like Descartes, for example? You will not surely condemn him as a mystic.

ATHERTON. Certainly, not altogether; reason holds its own with him—is not swept away by the hallucinations of sentiment, or feeling, or special revelation; but none of our powers act quite singly—nemo omnibus horis sapit—a mystical element crops out here and there. I think he carried too far the application of a principle based, in great part at least, on truth. In his inference of the objective from the subjective, I think he was so far right that our ability to conceive of a Supreme Perfection affords a strong presumption that such a God must exist. It is not to be supposed that the conception can transcend the reality. His argument from within is a potent auxiliary of the argument from without, if not by itself so all-sufficient as he supposes. There are, too, I think, certain necessary truths which, by the constitution of our mind, we cannot conceive as possibly other than they are, when once presented to us from without. But we surely should not on this account be justified in saying with the mystic Bernard, that each soul contains an infallible copy of the ideas in the Divine Mind, so that the pure in heart, in proportion as they have cleansed the internal mirror, must in knowing themselves, know also God. It must be no less an exaggeration of the truth to say, with the philosopher Descartes, that certain notions of the laws of Nature are impressed upon our minds, so that we may, after reflecting upon them, discover the secrets of the universe. On the strength of this principle he undertakes to determine exactly how long a time it must have required to reduce chaos to order. The effort made by Descartes to insulate himself completely from the external world and the results of experience, was certainly similar in mode, though very different in its object, from the endeavours after absolute self-seclusion made by many of the mystics. The former sought to detect by abstraction the laws of mind; the latter, to attain the vision of God.

GOWER. There is much more of mysticism discernible in some of the systems which have followed in the path opened by Descartes. What can be more favourable than Schelling’s Identity principle to the error which confounds, rather than allies, physics and metaphysics, science and theology?

ATHERTON. Behmen himself is no whit more fantastical in this way than Oken and Franz Baader.

GOWER. These theosophies, old and new, with their self-evolved inexplicable explanations of everything, remind me of the Frenchman’s play-bill announcing an exhibition of the Universal Judgment by means of three thousand five hundred puppets. The countless marionette figures in the brain of the theosophist—Elements, Forms, Tinctures, Mothers of Nature, Fountain-spirits, Planetary Potencies, &c., are made to shift and gesticulate unceasingly, through all possible permutations and combinations, and the operator has cried ‘Walk in!’ so long and loudly, that he actually believes, while pulling the wires in his metaphysical darkness, that the great universe is being turned and twitched after the same manner as his painted dolls.

WILLOUGHBY. I must put in a word for men like Paracelsus and Cornelius Agrippa. They helped science out of the hands of Aristotle, baptized and spoiled by monks. Europe, newly-wakened, follows in search of truth, as the princess in the fairy-tale her lover, changed into a white dove; now and then, at weary intervals, a feather is dropped to give a clue; these aspirants caught once and again a little of the precious snowy down, though often filling their hands with mere dirt, and wounding them among the briars. Forgive them their signatures, their basilisks and homunculi, and all their restless, wrathful arrogance, for the sake of that indomitable hardihood which did life-long battle, single-handed, against enthroned prescription.

ATHERTON. With all my heart. How venial the error of their mysticism (with an aim, at least, so worthy), compared with that of the enervating Romanist theopathy whose ‘holy vegetation’ the Reformers so rudely disturbed. On the eve of the Reformation you see hapless Christianity, after vanquishing so many powerful enemies, about to die by the hand of ascetic inventions and superstitions, imaginary sins and imaginary virtues,—the shadowy phantoms of monastic darkness; like the legendary hero Wolf-Dietrich, who, after so many victories over flesh-and-blood antagonists, perishes at last in a night-battle with ghosts.

GOWER. The later mystical saints of the Romish calendar seem to me to exhibit what one may call the degenerate chivalry of religion, rather than its romance. How superior is Bernard to John of the Cross! It is easy to see how, in a rough age of fist-law, the laws of chivalry may inculcate courtesy and ennoble courage. But when afterwards an age of treaties and diplomacy comes in—when no Charles the Bold can be a match for the Italian policy of a Louis XI.—then these laws sink down into a mere fantastic code of honour. For the manly gallantry of Ivanhoe we have the euphuism of a Sir Piercie Shafton. And so a religious enthusiasm, scarcely too fervent for a really noble enterprise (could it only find one), gives birth, when debarred from the air of action and turned back upon itself, to the dreamy extravagances of the recluse, and the morbid ethical punctilios of the Director.

WILLOUGHBY. The only further question is about your third division, Atherton,—theurgic mysticism. We may let the Rabbinical Solomon—mastering the archdæmon Aschmedai and all his host by the divine potency of the Schemhamporasch engraven on his ring, chaining at his will the colossal powers of the air by the tremendous name of Metatron,—stand as an example of theurgy.

GOWER. And Iamblichus, summoning Souls, Heroes, and the Principalities of the upper sphere, by prayer and incense and awful mutterings of adjuration.

ATHERTON. All very good; but hear me a moment. I would use the term theurgic to characterize the mysticism which claims supernatural powers generally,—works marvels, not like the black art, by help from beneath, but as white magic, by the virtue of talisman or cross, demi-god, angel, or saint. Thus theurgic mysticism is not content, like the theopathetic, with either feeling or proselytising; nor, like the theosophic, with knowing; but it must open for itself a converse with the world of spirits, and win as its prerogative the power of miracle. This broad use of the word makes prominent the fact that a common principle of devotional enchantment lies at the root of all the pretences, both of heathen and of Christian miracle-mongers. The celestial hierarchy of Dionysius and the benign dæmons of Proclus, the powers invoked by Pagan or by Christian theurgy, by Platonist, by Cabbalist, or by saint, alike reward the successful aspirant with supernatural endowments; and so far Apollonius of Tyana and Peter of Alcantara, Asclepigenia and St. Theresa, must occupy as religious magicians the same province. The error is in either case the same—a divine efficacy is attributed to rites and formulas, sprinklings or fumigations, relics or incantations, of mortal manufacture.

WILLOUGHBY. It is not difficult to understand how, after a time, both the species of mysticism we have been discussing may pass over into this one. It is the dream of the mystic that he can elaborate from the depth of his own nature the whole promised land of religious truth, and perceive (by special revelation) rising from within, all its green pastures and still waters,—somewhat as Pindar describes the sun beholding the Isle of Rhodes emerging from the bottom of the ocean, new-born, yet perfect, in all the beauty of glade and fountain, of grassy upland and silver tarn, of marble crag and overhanging wood, sparkling from the brine as after a summer shower. But alas, how tardily arises this new world of inner wonders! It must be accelerated—drawn up by some strong compelling charm. The doctrine of passivity becomes impossible to some temperaments beyond a certain pass. The enjoyments of the vision or the rapture are too few and far between—could they but be produced at will! Whether the mystic seeks the triumph of superhuman knowledge or that intoxication of the feeling which is to translate him to the upper world, after a while he craves a sign. Theurgy is the art which brings it. Its appearance is the symptom of failing faith, whether in philosophy or religion. Its glory is the phosphorescence of decay.

ATHERTON. Generally, I think it is; though it prevailed in the age of the Reformation—borrowed, however, I admit, on the revival of letters, from an age of decline.

BOOK THE SECOND EARLY ORIENTAL MYSTICISM

CHAPTER I.

From worldly cares himselfe he did esloyne,
And greatly shunned manly exercise;
From everie worke he chalenged essoyne,
For contemplation sake: yet otherwise
His life he led in lawlesse riotise;
By which he grew to grievous maladie:
For in his lustlesse limbs through evill guise,
A shaking fever raignd continually;
Such one was Idlenesse, first of this company.

SPENSER.

Having free access to the Commonplace Book of my friend Atherton, I now extract therefrom a few notes, written after reading Wilkins’ translation of the Bagvat-Gita. This episode in a heroic poem of ancient India is considered the best exponent of early oriental mysticism. I give these remarks just as I find them, brief and rough-hewn, but not, I think, hasty.

Observations on Indian mysticism, à propos of the Bagvat-Gita.

This poem consists of a dialogue between the god Crishna and the hero Arjoun. Crishna, though wearing a human form, speaks throughout as Deity. Arjoun is a young chieftain whom he befriends. A great civil war is raging, and the piece opens on the eve of battle. Crishna is driving the chariot of Arjoun, and they are between the lines of the opposing armies. On either side the war-shells are heard to sound—shells to which the Indian warriors gave names as did the paladins of Christendom to their swords. The battle will presently join, but Arjoun appears listless and sad. He looks on either army; in the ranks of each he sees preceptors whom he has been taught to revere, and relatives whom he loves. He knows not for which party to desire a bloody victory: so he lays his bow aside and sits down in the chariot. Crishna remonstrates, reminds him that his hesitation will be attributed to cowardice, and that such scruples are, moreover, most unreasonable. He should learn to act without any regard whatever to the consequences of his actions. At this point commence the instructions of the god concerning faith and practice.

So Arjoun must learn to disregard the consequences of his actions. I find here not a ‘holy indifference,’ as with the French Quietists, but an indifference which is unholy. The sainte indifférence of the west essayed to rise above self, to welcome happiness or misery alike as the will of Supreme Love. The odious indifference of these orientals inculcates the supremacy of selfishness as the wisdom of a god. A steep toil, that apathy towards ourselves; a facilis descensus, this apathy toward others. One Quietist will scarcely hold out his hand to receive heaven: another will not raise a finger to succour his fellow.

Mysticism, then, is born armed completely with its worst extravagances. An innocent childhood it never had; for in its very cradle this Hercules destroys, as deadly serpents, Reason and Morality. Crishna, it appears, can invest the actions of his favourites with such divineness that nothing they do is wrong. For the mystical adept of Hindooism the distinction between good and evil is obliterated as often as he pleases. Beyond this point mysticism the most perverted cannot go; since such emancipation from moral law is in practice the worst aim of the worst men. The mysticism of a man who declares himself the Holy Ghost constitutes a stage more startling but less guilty; for responsibility ends where insanity begins.

The orientals know little of a system of forces. They carry a single idea to its consequences. The dark issue of the self-deifying tendency is exhibited among them on a large scale,—the degrees of the enormity are registered and made portentously apparent as by the movement of a huge hand upon its dial. Western mysticism, checked by many better influences, has rarely made so patent the inherent evil even of its most mischievous forms. The European, mystic though he be, will occasionally pause to qualify, and is often willing to allow some scope to facts and principles alien or hostile to a favourite idea.

It should not be forgotten that the doctrine of metempsychosis is largely answerable for Crishna’s cold-blooded maxim. He tells Arjoun that the soul puts on many bodies, as many garments, remaining itself unharmed: the death of so many of his countrymen—a mere transition, therefore—need not distress him.

CHAPTER II.

Quel diable de jargon entends-je ici? Voici bien du haut style.

MOLIÈRE.

Mysticism has no genealogy. It is no tradition conveyed across frontiers or down the course of generations as a ready-made commodity. It is a state of thinking and feeling, to which minds of a certain temperament are liable at any time or place, in occident and orient, whether Romanist or Protestant, Jew, Turk, or Infidel. It is more or less determined by the positive religion with which it is connected. But though conditioned by circumstance or education, its appearance is ever the spontaneous product of a certain crisis in individual or social history.

A merely imitative mysticism, as exemplified by some Tractarian ecclesiastics, is an artificial expedient, welcome to ambitious minds as an engine, to the frivolous as a devotional diversion, to the weak and servile as a softly-cushioned yoke.

Were mysticism a transmitted principle we should be able to trace it through successive translations to a form which might be termed primitive. We might mark and throw off, as we ascended, the accretions with which it has been invested, till we reached its origin—the simple idea of mysticism, new-born. The mysticism of India, the earliest we can find, shows us that nothing of this sort is possible. That set of principles which we repeatedly encounter, variously combined, throughout the history of mysticism, exhibits itself in the Bagvat-Gita almost complete. The same round of notions, occurring to minds of similar make under similar circumstances, is common to mystics in ancient India and in modern Christendom. The development of these fundamental ideas is naturally more elevated and benign under the influence of Christianity.

Summarily, I would say, this Hindoo mysticism—

(1.) Lays claim to disinterested love, as opposed to a mercenary
religion;

(2.) Reacts against the ceremonial prescription and pedantic
literalism of the Vedas;

(3.) Identifies, in its pantheism, subject and object, worshipper
and worshipped;

(4.) Aims at ultimate absorption in the Infinite;

(5.) Inculcates, as the way to this dissolution, absolute passivity,
withdrawal into the inmost self, cessation of all the powers,—giving
recipes for procuring this beatific torpor or trance;

(6.) Believes that eternity may thus be realized in time;

(7.) Has its mythical miraculous pretentions, _i.e._, its theurgic
department;

(8.) And, finally, advises the learner in this kind of religion to
submit himself implicitly to a spiritual guide,—his Guru.

With regard to (1), it is to be observed that the disinterestedness of the worship enjoined by Crishna is by no means absolute, as Madame Guyon endeavoured to render hers. The mere ritualist, buying prosperity by temple-gifts, will realise, says Crishna, only a partial enjoyment of heaven. Arjoun, too, is encouraged by the prospect of a recompence, for he is to aspire to far higher things. ‘Men who are endowed with true wisdom are unmindful of good or evil in this world,—wise men who have abandoned all thought of the fruit which is produced from their actions are freed from the chains of birth, and go to the regions of eternal happiness.’

In some hands such doctrine might rise above the popular morality; in most it would be so interpreted as to sink below even that ignoble standard.

(3.) ‘God,’ saith Crishna, ‘is the gift of charity; God is the offering; God is in the fire of the altar; by God is the sacrifice performed; and God is to be obtained by him who maketh God alone the object of his works.’ Again, ‘I am moisture in the water, light in the sun and moon, ... human nature in mankind, ... the understanding of the wise, the glory of the proud, the strength of the strong,’ &c.

(4.) This eternal absorption in Brahm is supposed to be in some way consistent with personality, since Crishna promises Arjoun enjoyment. The mystic of the Bagvat-Gita seeks at once the highest aim of the Hindoo religion, the attainment of such a state that when he dies he shall not be born again into any form on earth. Future birth is the Hindoo hell and purgatory.

So with Buddhism, and its Nirwana.

But the final absorption which goes by the name of Nirwana among the Buddhists is described in terms which can only mean annihilation. According to the Buddhists all sentient existence has within it one spiritual element, homogeneous in the animal and the man,—Thought, which is a divine substance. This ‘Thought’ exists in its highest degree in man, the summit of creation, and from the best among men it lapses directly out of a particular existence into the universal. Thus the mind of man is divine, but most divine when nearest nothing. Hence the monastic asceticism, inertia, trance, of this kindred oriental superstition. (See Spence Hardy’s Eastern Monachism.)

(5.) ‘Divine wisdom is said to be confirmed when a man can restrain his faculties from their wonted use, as the tortoise draws in his limbs.’

The devotees who make it their principal aim to realise the emancipation of the spirit supposed to take place in trance, are called Yogis.

‘The Yogi constantly exerciseth the spirit in private. He is recluse, of a subdued mind and spirit, free from hope and free from perception. He planteth his own seat firmly on a spot that is undefiled, neither too high nor too low, and sitteth upon the sacred grass which is called Koos, covered with a skin and a cloth. There he whose business is the restraining of his passions should sit, with his mind fixed on one object alone; in the exercise of his devotion for the purification of his soul, keeping his head, his neck, and body steady, without motion; his eyes fixed on the point of his nose, looking at no other place around.’

The monks of Mount Athos, whose mysticism was also of this most degraded type, substituted, as a gazing-point, the navel for the nose.

Ward, in describing the Yogi practice, tells us that at the latest stage the eyes also are closed, while the fingers and even bandages are employed to obstruct almost completely the avenues of respiration. Then the soul is said to be united to the energy of the body; both mount, and are as it were concentrated in the skull; whence the spirit escapes by the basilar suture, and, the body having been thus abandoned, the incorporeal nature is reunited for a season to the Supreme.[9]

Stupefying drugs were doubtless employed to assist in inducing this state of insensibility.

Crishna teaches that ‘the wisely devout’ walk in the night of time when all things rest, and sleep in the day of time when all things wake. In other words, the escape from sense is a flight from illusion into the undeceiving condition of trance. So the Code of Menu pronounces the waking state one of deceptive appearances—a life among mere phantasmata; that of sleep a little nearer reality; while that of ecstasy, or trance, presents the truth—reveals a new world, and enables the inner eye (which opens as the outer one is closed) to discern the inmost reality of things.

These are pretensions which mysticism has often repeated. This notion underlies the theory and practice of spiritual clairvoyance.

(6.) ‘The learned behold him (Deity) alike in the reverend Brahmin perfected in knowledge; in the ox and in the elephant; in the dog, and in him who eateth the flesh of dogs. Those whose minds are fixed on this equality gain eternity even in this world’ (transcend the limitation of time).

(7.) The following passage, given by Ward, exhibits at once the nature of the miraculous powers ascribed to the highest class of devotees, and the utter lawlessness arrogated by these ‘god-intoxicated’ men:—

‘He (the Yogi) will hear celestial sounds, the songs and conversation of celestial choirs. He will have the perception of their touch in their passage through the air. He is able to trace the progress of intellect through the senses, and the path of the animal spirit through the nerves. He is able to enter a dead or a living body by the path of the senses, and in this body to act as though it were his own.

‘He who in the body hath obtained liberation is of no caste, of no sect, of no order; attends to no duties, adheres to no shastras, to no formulas, to no works of merit; he is beyond the reach of speech; he remains at a distance from all secular concerns; he has renounced the love and the knowledge of sensible objects; he is glorious as the autumnal sky; he flatters none, he honours none; he is not worshipped, he worships none; whether he practises and follows the customs of his country or not, this is his character.’

In the fourteenth century, mystics were to be found among the lower orders, whose ignorance and sloth carried negation almost as far as this. They pretended to imitate the divine immutability by absolute inaction. The dregs and refuse of mysticism along the Rhine are equal in quality to its most ambitious produce on the banks of the Ganges.

(8.) The Guru is paralleled by the Pir of the Sufis, the Confessor of the Middle Age, and the Directeur of modern France.[10]

A mysticism which rests ultimately on the doctrine that the human soul is of one substance with God, is fain to fall down and worship at the feet of a man. Such directorship is, of course, no essential part of mysticism—is, in fact, an inconsistency; but, though no member, or genuine outgrowth, it is an entozoon lamentably prevalent. The mystic, after all his pains to reduce himself to absolute passivity, becomes not theopathetic, but anthropopathetic—suffers, not under God, but man.

Footnote 9:

See Wilkins’ _Bagvat-Gita_, pp. 63-65. _Ward_, ii. 180. Also, _Asiatic
Researches_, vol. xvii. pp. 169-313, containing an account of these
Yogis, by Horace Hayman Wilson. One sect, we are told, have a way of
contemplating Vishnu in miniature, by imagining the god in their
heart, about the size of an open hand, and so adoring him from top to
toe. In this gross conception of an indwelling deity these Hindoos do
indeed exceed St. Theresa, who after swallowing the wafer conceives of
Christ as prisoner in her inwards, and, making her heart a
doll’s-house, calls it a temple. But beyond her, and beyond the
Indians, too, in sensuousness, are the Romanist stories of those
saints in whom it is declared that a _post-mortem_ examination has
disclosed the figure of Christ, or the insignia of his passion,
miraculously modelled in the chambers of the heart.

Footnote 10:

_Asiatic Researches_, _loc. cit._ The worshipped principle of
Hindooism is not love, but power. Certain objects are adored as
containing divine energy. The Guru is a representative and vehicle of
divine power—a Godful man, and accordingly the most imperious of
task-masters. The prodigies of asceticism, so abundant in Indian
fable, had commonly for their object the attainment of superhuman
powers. Thus Taraki, according to the Siva Puran, stood a hundred
years on tip-toe, lived a hundred years on air, a hundred on fire, &c.
for this purpose.—Notes to _Curse of Kehama_, p. 237.

The following passage, cited by Ward, exhibits the subjective idealism
of these Hindoos in its most daring absurdity. ‘Let every one meditate
upon himself; let him be the worshipper and the worship. Whatever you
see is but yourself, and father and mother are nonentities; you are
the infant and the old man, the wise man and the fool, the male and
the female; it is you who are drowned in the stream—you who pass over;
you are the sensualist and the ascetic, the sick man and the strong;
in short, whatsoever you see, that is you, as bubbles, surf, and
billows are all but water.’

Now, there is an obvious resemblance between this idealism and that of
Fichte. The Indian and the German both ignore the notions formed from
mere sensible experience; both dwell apart from experience, in a world
fashioned for themselves out of ‘pure thought;’ both identify thought
and being, subject and object. But here the likeness ends. The points
of contrast are obvious. The Hindoo accepts as profoundest wisdom what
would be an unfair caricature of the system of Fichte. The idealism of
the Oriental is dreamy and passive; it dissolves his individuality; it
makes him a particle, wrought now into this, now into that, in the
ever-shifting phantasmagoria of the universe; he has been, he may be,
he, therefore, in a sense is, anything and everything. Fichte’s
philosophy, on the contrary, rests altogether on the intense
activity—on the autocracy of the Ego, which posits, or creates, the
Non-Ego. He says, ‘The activity and passivity of the Ego are one and
the same. For in as far as it does _not_ posit a something in itself,
it posits that something in the Non-Ego. Again, the activity and
passivity of the Non-Ego are one and the same. In as far as the
Non-Ego works upon the Ego, and will absorb a something in it, the Ego
posits that very thing in the Non-Ego.’ (_Grundlage der gesammten
Wissenschaftslehre_, § 3. _Sämmtliche Werke_, v. i. p. 177.) Action is
all in all with him. God he calls ‘a pure Action’ (_reines Handeln_),
the life and principle of a supersensuous order of the world—just as I
am a pure Action, as a link in that order. (_Gerichtliche
Verantwortung gegen die Anklage des Atheismus, Werke_, v. p. 261.)
Charged with denying personality to God, Fichte replies that he only
denied him that conditioned personality which belongs to ourselves—a
denial, I suppose, in which we should all agree. The only God in his
system which is not an uninfluential abstraction is manifestly the
Ego—that is dilated to a colossal height, and deified. Pre-eminently
anti-mystical as was the natural temperament of Fichte, here he opens
a door to the characteristic misconception of mysticism—the
investiture of our own notions and our own will with a divine
authority or glory. He would say, ‘The man of genius _does_ think
divine thoughts. But the man who is unintelligible, who, in the very
same province of pure thought as that occupied by the true
philosopher, thinks only at random and incoherently; _he_ is mistaken,
I grant, in arrogating inspiration—_him_ I call a mystic.’ But of
unintelligibility or incoherence what is to be the test,—who is to be
the judge? In this anarchy of gods, numerous as thinkers, one deity
must have as much divine right as another. There can be no appeal to
experience, which all confessedly abandon; no appeal to facts, which
each Ego creates after its own fashion for itself.

BOOK THE THIRD THE MYSTICISM OF THE NEO-PLATONISTS

CHAPTER I.

——a man is not as God,
But then most godlike being most a man.

TENNYSON.

KATE. What a formidable bundle of papers, Henry.

ATHERTON. Don’t be alarmed, I shall not read all this to you; only three Neo-Platonist letters I have discovered.

MRS. ATHERTON. We were talking just before you came in, Mr. Willoughby, about Mr. Crossley’s sermon yesterday morning.

WILLOUGHBY. Ah, the Tabernacle in the Wilderness; did you not think his remarks on the use and abuse of symbolism in general very good? Brief, too, and suggestive; just what such portions of a sermon should be.

ATHERTON. He overtook me on my walk this morning, and I alluded to the subject. He said he had been dipping into Philo last week, and that suggested his topic. I told him I had paid that respectable old gentleman a visit or two lately, and we amused ourselves with some of his fancies. Think of the seven branches of the candlestick being the seven planets—the four colours employed, the four elements—the forecourt symbolizing the visible, the two sanctuaries the ideal world—and so on.

GOWER. At this rate the furniture in one of Hoffmann’s tales cannot be more alive with spirit than Philo’s temple apparatus. An ingenious trifler, was he not?

ATHERTON. Something better, I should say.

GOWER. Not, surely, when his great characteristic is an unsurpassed facility for allegorical interpretation. Is not mystical exegesis an invariable symptom of religious dilettantism?

ATHERTON. With the successors and imitators—yes; not with the more earnest originals,—such names as Philo, Origen, Swedenborg.

GOWER. But, at any rate, if this spiritualizing mania be Philo’s great claim to distinction, head a list of mystical commentators with him, and pass on to some one better.

ATHERTON. He need not detain us long. For our enquiry he has importance chiefly as in a sort the intellectual father of Neo-Platonism—the first meeting-place of the waters of the eastern and the western theosophies. This is his great object—to combine the authoritative monotheism of his Hebrew Scriptures with the speculation of Plato.

GOWER. Absurd attempt!—to interpret the full, clear utterance of Moses, who has found, by the hesitant and conflicting conjectures of Plato, who merely seeks.

WILLOUGHBY. Yet a very natural mistake for a Jew at Alexandria, reared in Greek culture, fascinated by the dazzling abstractions of Greek philosophy. He belonged less to Jerusalem, after all, than to Athens.

ATHERTON. There lies the secret. Philo was proud of his saintly ancestry, yet to his eye the virtues of the Old Testament worthy wore a rude and homely air beside the refinement of the Grecian sage. The good man of Moses and the philosopher of Philo represent two very different ideals. With the former the moral, with the latter the merely intellectual, predominates. So the Hebrew faith takes with Philo the exclusive Gentile type,—despises the body, is horrified by matter, tends to substitute abstraction for personality, turns away, I fear, from the publican and the sinner.

GOWER. So, then, Platonism in Philo does for Judaism what it was soon to do for Christianity,—substitutes an ultra-human standard—an ascetic, unnatural, passively-gazing contemplation—an ambitious, would-be-disembodied intellectualism, for the all-embracing activities of common Christian life, so lowly, yet so great.

WILLOUGHBY. Yet Alexandrian Platonism was the gainer by Philo’s accommodation. Judaism enfeebled could yet impart strength to heathendom. The infusion enabled the Neo-Platonists to walk with a firmer step in the religious province; their philosophy assumed an aspect more decisively devout. Numenius learns of Philo, and Plotinus of Numenius, and the ecstasy of Plotinus is the development of Philo’s intuition.

GOWER. Let me sum up; and forgive an antithesis. Philo’s great mistake lay in supposing that the religion of philosophy was necessarily the philosophy of religion. But we have forgotten your letter, Atherton.

ATHERTON. Here is the precious document—a letter written by Philo from Alexandria, evidently just after his journey to Rome. (Reads.)

PHILO TO HEPHÆSTION.

I am beginning to recover myself, after all the anxiety and peril of
our embassy to Caligula. Nothing shall tempt me to visit Rome again
so long as this Emperor lives. Our divine Plato is doubly dear after
so long an absence. Only an imperative sense of duty to my
countrymen could again induce me to take so prominent a part in
their public affairs. Except when our religion or our trade is
concerned, the government has always found us more docile than
either the Greeks or the Egyptians, and we enjoy accordingly large
privileges. Yet when I saw the ill turn our cause took at Rome, I
could not but sigh for another Julius Cæsar.

I am sorry to find you saying that you are not likely to visit
Alexandria again. This restless, wicked city can present but few
attractions, I grant, to a lover of philosophic quiet. But I cannot
commend the extreme to which I see so many hastening. A passion for
ascetic seclusion is becoming daily more prevalent among the devout
and the thoughtful, whether Jew or Gentile. Yet surely the attempt
to combine contemplation and action should not be so soon abandoned.
A man ought at least to have evinced some competency for the
discharge of the social duties before he abandons them for the
divine. First the less, then the greater.

I have tried the life of the recluse. Solitude brings no escape from
spiritual danger. If it closes some avenues of temptation, there are
few in whose case it does not open more. Yet the Therapeutæ, a sect
similar to the Essenes, with whom you are acquainted, number many
among them whose lives are truly exemplary. Their cells are
scattered about the region bordering on the farther shore of the
Lake Mareotis. The members of either sex live a single and ascetic
life, spending their time in fasting and contemplation, in prayer or
reading. They believe themselves favoured with divine
illumination—an inner light. They assemble on the Sabbath for
worship, and listen to mystical discourses on the traditionary lore
which they say has been handed down in secret among themselves. They
also celebrate solemn dances and processions, of a mystic
significance, by moonlight on the shore of the great mere.
Sometimes, on an occasion of public rejoicing, the margin of the
lake on our side will be lit with a fiery chain of illuminations,
and galleys, hung with lights, row to and fro with strains of music
sounding over the broad water. Then the Therapeutæ are all hidden in
their little hermitages, and these sights and sounds of the world
they have abandoned, make them withdraw into themselves and pray.

Their principle at least is true. The soul which is occupied with
things above, and is initiated into the mysteries of the Lord,
cannot but account the body evil, and even hostile. The soul of man
is divine, and his highest wisdom is to become as much as possible a
stranger to the body with its embarrassing appetites. God has
breathed into man from heaven a portion of his own divinity. That
which is divine is invisible. It may be extended, but it is
incapable of separation. Consider how vast is the range of our
thought over the past and the future, the heavens and the earth.
This alliance with an upper world, of which we are conscious, would
be impossible, were not the soul of man an indivisible portion of
that divine and blessed Spirit (εἰ μὴ τῆς θείας καὶ εὐδαίμονος ψυχῆς
ἐκείνης ἀπόσπασμα ἦν οὐ διαιρετόν). Contemplation of the Divine
Essence is the noblest exercise of man; it is the only means of
attaining to the highest truth and virtue, and therein to behold God
is the consummation of our happiness here.

The confusion of tongues at the building of the tower of Babel
should teach us this lesson. The heaven those vain builders sought
to reach, signifies symbolically the mind, where dwell divine
powers. Their futile attempt represents the presumption of those who
place sense above intelligence—who think that they can storm the
Intelligible by the Sensible. The structure which such impiety would
raise is overthrown by spiritual tranquillity. In calm retirement
and contemplation we are taught that we know like only by like, and
that the foreign and lower world of the sensuous and the practical
may not intrude into the lofty region of divine illumination.

I have written a small treatise on the Contemplative Life, giving an
account of the Therapeutæ. If you will neither visit me nor them, I
will have a copy of it made, and send you.[11] Farewell.

GOWER. How mistaken is Philo in maintaining that the senses cannot aid us in our ascent towards the supersensuous;—as though the maltreatment of the body, the vassal, by the soul, the suzerain, were at once the means and the proof of mastery over it. Duly care for the body, and the thankful creature will not forget its place, and when you wish to meditate, will disturb you by no obtrusive hint of its presence. I find that I can rise above it only by attention to its just claims. If I violate its rights I am sued by it in the high court of nature, and cast with costs.

MRS. ATHERTON. And certainly our most favoured moments of ascent into the ideal world have their origin usually in some suggestion that has reached us through the senses. I remember a little song of Uhland’s called The Passing Minstrel—a brief parable of melody, like so many of his pieces,—which, as I understood it, was designed to illustrate this very truth. The poet falls asleep on a ‘hill of blossoms’ near the road, and his soul flutters away in dream to the golden land of Fable. He wakes, as one fallen from the clouds, and sees the minstrel with his harp, who has just passed by, and playing as he goes, is lost to sight among the trees. ‘Was it he,’ the poet asks, ‘that sang into my soul those dreams of wonder?’ Another might inform the fancy with another meaning, according to the mood of the hour. It appeared to me an emblem of the way in which we are often indebted to a sunset or a landscape, to a strain of music or a suddenly-remembered verse, for a voyage into a world of vision of our own, where we cease altogether to be aware of the external cause which first transported us thither.

ATHERTON. That must always be true of imagination. But Platonism discards the visible instead of mounting by it. Considered morally, too, this asceticism sins so grievously. It misuses the iron of the will, given us to forge implements withal for life’s husbandry, to fashion of it a bolt for a voluntary prison. At Alexandria, doubtless, Sin was imperious in her shamelessness, at the theatre and at the mart, in the hall of judgment and in the house of feasting, but there was suffering as well as sin among the crowds of that great city, with all their ignorance and care and want, and to have done a something to lessen the suffering would have prepared the way for lessening the sin.

Footnote 11:

Philo gives an account of the Therapeutæ referred to in the letter, in
his treatise _De Vitâ Contemplativâ_.

Passages corresponding with those contained in the letter contributed
by Atherton, concerning the enmity of the flesh and the divine nature
of the soul, are to be found in the works of Philo, _Sacr. Leg.
Alleg._ lib. iii. p. 101 (ed. Mangey); lib. ii. p. 64; _De eo quod
det. potiori insid. soleat_, pp. 192, 208.

Philo’s interpretation of the scriptural account concerning Babel is
contained in the _De Confus. Linguarum_, p. 424. His exposition of
Gen. i. 9, illustrates the same principle, _Sacr. Leg. Alleg._ lib. i.
p. 54; so of Gen. xxxvii. 12; _De eo quod pot._ p. 192.

Eusebius shows us how Eleazar and Aristobulus must have prepared the
way for Philo in this attempt to harmonize Judaism with the letters
and philosophy of Greece. _Præp. Evang._ lib. viii. 9, 10.

CHAPTER II.

La philosophie n’est pas philosophie si elle ne touche à l’abîme;
mais elle cesse d’être philosophie si elle y tombe.—COUSIN.

GOWER. I hope you are ready, Atherton, to illumine my darkness concerning Neo-Platonism, by taking up that individual instance you were speaking of last Monday.

ATHERTON. I have something ready to inflict; so prepare to listen stoutly. (Reads.)

Plato pronounces Love the child of Poverty and Plenty—the
Alexandrian philosophy was the offspring of Reverence and Ambition.
It combined an adoring homage to the departed genius of the age of
Pericles with a passionate, credulous craving after a supernatural
elevation. Its literary tastes and religious wants were alike
imperative and irreconcilable. In obedience to the former, it
disdained Christianity; impelled by the latter, it travestied Plato.
But for that proud servility which fettered it to a glorious past,
it might have recognised in Christianity the only satisfaction of
its higher longings. Rejecting that, it could only establish a
philosophic church on the foundation of Plato’s school, and,
forsaking while it professed to expound him, embrace the
hallucinations of intuition and of ecstasy, till it finally vanishes
at Athens amid the incense and the hocus-pocus of theurgic
incantation. As it degenerates, it presses more audaciously forward
through the veil of the unseen. It must see visions, dream dreams,
work spells, and call down deities, demi-gods, and dæmons from their
dwellings in the upper air. The Alexandrians were eclectics, because
such reverence taught them to look back; mystics, because such
ambition urged them to look up. They restore philosophy, after all
its weary wanderings, to the place of its birth; and, in its second
childhood, it is cradled in the arms of those old poetic faiths of
the past, from which, in the pride of its youth, it broke away.

The mental history of the founder best illustrates the origin of the
school. Plotinus, in A.D. 233, commences the study of philosophy in
Alexandria, at the age of twenty-eight. His mental powers are of the
concentrative rather than the comprehensive order. Impatient of
negation, he has commenced an earnest search after some truth which,
however abstract, shall yet be positive. He pores over the Dialogues
of Plato and the Metaphysics of Aristotle, day and night. To promote
the growth of his ‘soul-wings,’ as Plato counsels, he practises
austerities his master would never have sanctioned. He attempts to
live what he learns to call the ‘angelic life;’ the ‘life of the
disembodied in the body.’ He reads with admiration the life of
Apollonius of Tyana, by Philostratus, which has recently appeared.
He can probably credit most of the marvels recorded of that strange
thaumaturgist, who, two hundred years ago, had appeared—a revived
Pythagoras, to dazzle nation after nation through which he passed,
with prophecy and miracle; who had travelled to the Indus and the
Ganges, and brought back the supernatural powers of Magi and
Gymnosophists, and who was said to have displayed to the world once
more the various knowledge, the majestic sanctity, and the
superhuman attributes, of the sage of Crotona. This portraiture of a
philosophical hierophant—a union of the philosopher and the priest
in an inspired hero, fires the imagination of Plotinus. In the
New-Pythagoreanism of which Apollonius was a representative,
Orientalism and Platonism were alike embraced.[12] Perhaps the
thought occurs thus early to Plotinus—could I travel eastward I
might drink myself at those fountain-heads of tradition whence
Pythagoras and Plato drew so much of their wisdom. Certain it is,
that, with this purpose, he accompanied, several years subsequently,
the disastrous expedition of Gordian against the Parthians, and
narrowly escaped with life.

At Alexandria, Plotinus doubtless hears from orientals there some
fragments of the ancient eastern theosophy—doctrines concerning the
principle of evil, the gradual development of the Divine Essence,
and creation by intermediate agencies, none of which he finds in his
Plato. He cannot be altogether a stranger to the lofty theism which
Philo marred, while he attempted to refine, by the help of his
‘Attic Moses.’ He observes a tendency on the part of philosophy to
fall back upon the sanctions of religion, and on the part of the
religions of the day to mingle in a Deism or a Pantheism which might
claim the sanctions of philosophy. The signs of a growing toleration
or indifferentism meet him on every side. Rome has long been a
Pantheon for all nations, and gods and provinces together have found
in the capitol at once their Olympus and their metropolis. He cannot
walk the streets of Alexandria without perceiving that the very
architecture tells of an alliance between the religious art of Egypt
and of Greece. All, except Jews and Christians, join in the worship
of Serapis.[13] Was not the very substance of which the statue of
that god was made, an amalgam?—fit symbol of the syncretism which
paid him homage. Once Serapis had guarded the shores of the Euxine,
now he is the patron of Alexandria, and in him the attributes of
Zeus and of Osiris, of Apis and of Pluto, are adored alike by East
and West. Men are learning to overlook the external differences of
name and ritual, and to reduce all religions to one general
sentiment of worship. For now more than fifty years, every educated
man has laughed, with Lucian’s satire in his hand, at the gods of
the popular superstition. A century before Lucian, Plutarch had
shown that some of the doctrines of the barbarians were not
irreconcilable with the philosophy in which he gloried as a Greek.
Plutarch had been followed by Apuleius, a practical eclectic, a
learner in every school, an initiate in every temple, at once
sceptical and credulous, a sophist and a devotee.

Plotinus looks around him, and inquires what philosophy is doing in
the midst of influences such as these. Peripateticism exists but in
slumber under the dry scholarship of Adrastus and Alexander of
Aphrodisium, the commentators of the last century.[14] The New
Academy and the Stoics attract youth still, but they are neither of
them a philosophy so much as a system of ethics. Speculation has
given place to morals. Philosophy is taken up as a branch of
literature, as an elegant recreation, as a theme for oratorical
display. Plotinus is persuaded that philosophy should be
worship—speculation, a search after God—no amusement, but a prayer.
Scepticism is strong in proportion to the defect or weakness of
everything positive around it. The influence of Ænesidemus, who, two
centuries ago, proclaimed universal doubt, is still felt in
Alexandria. But his scepticism would break up the foundations of
morality. What is to be done? Plotinus sees those who are true to
speculation surrendering ethics, and those who hold to morality
abandoning speculation.

In his perplexity, a friend takes him to hear Ammonius Saccas. He
finds him a powerful, broad-shouldered man, as he might naturally be
who not long before was to be seen any day in the sultry streets of
Alexandria, a porter, wiping his brow under his burden. Ammonius is
speaking of the reconciliation that might be effected between Plato
and Aristotle. This eclecticism it is which has given him fame. At
another time it might have brought on him only derision; now there
is an age ready to give the attempt an enthusiastic welcome.

‘What,’ he cries, kindling with his theme, ‘did Plato leave behind
him, what Aristotle, when Greece and philosophy had waned together?
The first, a chattering crew of sophists: the second, the lifeless
dogmatism of the sensationalist. The self-styled followers of Plato
were not brave enough either to believe or to deny. The successors
of the Stagyrite did little more than reiterate their denial of the
Platonic doctrine of ideas. Between them morality was sinking fast.
Then an effort was made for its revival. The attempt at least was
good. It sprang out of a just sense of a deep defect. Without
morality, what is philosophy worth? But these ethics must rest on
speculation for their basis. The Epicureans and the Stoics, I say,
came forward to supply that moral want. Each said, we will be
practical, intelligible, utilitarian. One school, with its hard
lesson of fate and self-denial; the other, with its easier doctrine
of pleasure, more or less refined, were rivals in their profession
of ability to teach men how to live. In each there was a certain
truth, but I will honour neither with the name of a philosophy. They
have confined themselves to mere ethical application—they are
willing, both of them, to let first principles lie unstirred. Can
scepticism fail to take advantage of this? While they wrangle, both
are disbelieved. But, sirs, can we abide in scepticism?—it is death.
You ask me what I recommend? I say, travel back across the past. Out
of the whole of that by-gone and yet undying world of thought,
construct a system greater than any of the sundered parts. Repudiate
these partial scholars in the name of their masters. Leave them to
their disputes, pass over their systems, already tottering for lack
of a foundation, and be it yours to show how their teachers join
hands far above them. In such a spirit of reverent enthusiasm you
may attain a higher unity, you mount in speculation, and from that
height ordain all noble actions for your lower life. So you become
untrue neither to experience nor to reason, and the genius of
eclecticism will combine, yea, shall I say it, will surpass while it
embraces, all the ancient triumphs of philosophy!‘[15]

Such was the teaching which attracted Longinus, Herennius, and
Origen (not the Father). It makes an epoch in the life of Plotinus.
He desires now no other instructor, and is preparing to become
himself a leader in the pathway Ammonius has pointed out. He is
convinced that Platonism, exalted into an enthusiastic illuminism,
and gathering about itself all the scattered truth upon the field of
history,—Platonism, mystical and catholic, can alone preserve men
from the abyss of scepticism. One of the old traditions of Finland
relates how a mother once found her son torn into a thousand
fragments at the bottom of the River of Death. She gathered the
scattered members to her bosom, and rocking to and fro, sang a magic
song, which made him whole again, and restored the departed life.
Such a spell the Alexandrian philosophy sought to work—thus to
recover and re-unite the relics of antique truth, dispersed and
drowned by time.

Plotinus occupied himself only with the most abstract questions
concerning knowledge and being. Detail and method—all the stitching
and clipping of eclecticism, he bequeathed as the handicraft of his
successors. His fundamental principle is the old _petitio principii_
of idealism. Truth, according to him, is not the agreement of our
apprehension of an external object with the object itself—it is
rather the agreement of the mind with itself. The objects we
contemplate and that which contemplates, are identical for the
philosopher. Both are thought; only like can know like; all truth is
within us. By reducing the soul to its most abstract simplicity, we
subtilise it so that it expands into the infinite. In such a state
we transcend our finite selves, and are one with the infinite; this
is the privileged condition of ecstasy. These blissful intervals,
but too evanescent and too rare, were regarded as the reward of
philosophic asceticism—the seasons of refreshing, which were to make
amends for all the stoical austerities of the steep ascent towards
the abstraction of the primal unity.

Thus the Neo-Platonists became ascetics and enthusiasts: Plato was
neither. Where Plato acknowledges the services of the earliest
philosophers—the imperfect utterances of the world’s first
thoughts,—Neo-Platonism (in its later period, at least) undertakes
to detect, not the similarity merely, but the identity between
Pythagoras and Plato, and even to exhibit the Platonism of Orpheus
and of Hermes. Where Plato is hesitant or obscure, Neo-Platonism
inserts a meaning of its own, and is confident that such, and no
other, was the master’s mind. Where Plato indulges in a fancy, or
hazards a bold assertion, Neo-Platonism, ignoring the doubts Plato
may himself express elsewhere, spins it out into a theory, or bows
to it as an infallible revelation.[16] Where Plato has the doctrine
of Reminiscence, Neo-Platonism has the doctrine of Ecstasy. In the
Reminiscence of Plato, the ideas the mind perceives are without it.
Here there is no mysticism, only the mistake incidental to
metaphysicians generally, of giving an actual existence to mere
mental abstractions. In Ecstasy, the ideas perceived are within the
mind. The mystic, according to Plotinus, contemplates the divine
perfections in himself; and, in the ecstatic state, individuality
(which is so much imperfection), memory, time, space, phenomenal
contradictions, and logical distinctions, all vanish. It is not
until the rapture is past, and the mind, held in this strange
solution, is, as it were, precipitated on reality, that memory is
again employed. Plotinus would say that Reminiscence could impart
only inferior knowledge, because it implies separation between the
subject and the object. Ecstasy is superior—is absolute, being the
realization of their identity. True to this doctrine of absorption,
the Pantheism of Plotinus teaches him to maintain, alike with the
Oriental mystic at one extreme of time, and with the Hegelian at the
other, that our individual existence is but phenomenal and
transitory. Plotinus, accordingly, does not banish reason, he only
subordinates it to ecstasy where the Absolute is in question.[17] It
is not till the last that he calls in supernatural aid. The wizard
king builds his tower of speculation by the hands of human workmen
till he reaches the top story, and then summons his genii to fashion
the battlements of adamant, and crown them with starry fire.

GOWER. Thanks. These Neo-Platonists are evidently no mere dreamers. They are erudite and critical, they study and they reason, they are logicians as well as poets; they are not mystics till they have first been rationalists, and they have recourse at last to mysticism only to carry them whither they find reason cannot mount.

ATHERTON. Now, I have a letter by Plotinus. It is without a date, but from internal evidence must have been written about A.D. 260.

PLOTINUS TO FLACCUS.

I applaud your devotion to philosophy; I rejoice to hear that your
soul has set sail, like the returning Ulysses, for its native
land—that glorious, that only real country—the world of unseen
truth. To follow philosophy, the senator Rogatianus, one of the
noblest of my disciples, gave up the other day all but the whole of
his patrimony, set free his slaves, and surrendered all the honours
of his station.

Tidings have reached us that Valerian has been defeated, and is now
in the hands of Sapor. The threats of Franks and Allemanni, of Goths
and Persians, are alike terrible by turns to our degenerate Rome. In
days like these, crowded with incessant calamities, the inducements
to a life of contemplation are more than ever strong. Even my quiet
existence seems now to grow somewhat sensible of the advance of
years. Age alone I am unable to debar from my retirement. I am weary
already of this prison-house, the body, and calmly await the day
when the divine nature within me shall be set free from matter.

The Egyptian priests used to tell me that a single touch with the
wing of their holy bird could charm the crocodile into torpor; it is
not thus speedily, my dear friend, that the pinions of your soul
will have power to still the untamed body. The creature will yield
only to watchful, strenuous constancy of habit. Purify your soul
from all undue hope and fear about earthly things, mortify the body,
deny self,—affections as well as appetites, and the inner eye will
begin to exercise its clear and solemn vision.

You ask me to tell you how we know, and what is our criterion of
certainty. To write is always irksome to me. But for the continual
solicitations of Porphyry, I should not have left a line to survive
me. For your own sake and for your father’s, my reluctance shall be
overcome.

External objects present us only with appearances. Concerning them,
therefore, we may be said to possess opinion rather than knowledge.
The distinctions in the actual world of appearance are of import
only to ordinary and practical men. Our question lies with the ideal
reality that exists behind appearance. How does the mind perceive
these ideas? Are they without us, and is the reason, like sensation,
occupied with objects external to itself? What certainty could we
then have, what assurance that our perception was infallible? The
object perceived would be a something different from the mind
perceiving it. We should have then an image instead of reality. It
would be monstrous to believe for a moment that the mind was unable
to perceive ideal truth exactly as it is, and that we had not
certainty and real knowledge concerning the world of intelligence.
It follows, therefore, that this region of truth is not to be
investigated as a thing external to us, and so only imperfectly
known. It is _within_ us. Here the objects we contemplate and that
which contemplates are identical,—both are thought. The subject
cannot surely _know_ an object different from itself. The world of
ideas lies within our intelligence. Truth, therefore, is not the
agreement of our apprehension of an external object with the object
itself. It is the agreement of the mind with itself. Consciousness,
therefore, is the sole basis of certainty. The mind is its own
witness. Reason sees in itself that which is above itself as its
source; and again, that which is below itself as still itself once
more.

Knowledge has three degrees—Opinion, Science, Illumination. The
means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic;
of the third, intuition. To the last I subordinate reason. It is
absolute knowledge founded on the identity of the mind knowing with
the object known.[18]

There is a raying out of all orders of existence, an external
emanation from the ineffable One (πρόοδος). There is again a
returning impulse, drawing all upwards and inwards towards the
centre from whence all came (ἐπιστροφή). Love, as Plato in the
_Banquet_ beautifully says, is the child of Poverty and Plenty.[19]
In the amorous quest of the soul after the Good, lies the painful
sense of fall and deprivation. But that Love is blessing, is
salvation, is our guardian genius; without it the centrifugal law
would overpower us, and sweep our souls out far from their source
toward the cold extremities of the Material and the Manifold. The
wise man recognises the idea of the Good within him. This he
develops by withdrawal into the Holy Place of his own soul. He who
does not understand how the soul contains the Beautiful within
itself, seeks to realize beauty without, by laborious production.
His aim should rather be to concentrate and simplify, and so to
expand his being; instead of going out into the Manifold, to forsake
it for the One, and so to float upwards towards the divine fount of
being whose stream flows within him.

You ask, how can we know the Infinite?[20] I answer, not by reason.
It is the office of reason to distinguish and define. The Infinite,
therefore, cannot be ranked among its objects. You can only
apprehend the Infinite by a faculty superior to reason, by entering
into a state in which you are your finite self no longer, in which
the Divine Essence is communicated to you. This is Ecstasy. It is
the liberation of your mind from its finite consciousness. Like only
can apprehend like; when you thus cease to be finite, you become one
with the Infinite. In the reduction of your soul to its simplest
self (ἅπλωσις), its divine essence, you realize this Union, this
Identity (ἔνωσιν).

But this sublime condition is not of permanent duration. It is only
now and then that we can enjoy this elevation (mercifully made
possible for us) above the limits of the body and the world. I
myself have realized it but three times as yet, and Porphyry
hitherto not once. All that tends to purify and elevate the mind
will assist you in this attainment, and facilitate the approach and
the recurrence of these happy intervals. There are, then, different
roads by which this end may be reached. The love of beauty which
exalts the poet; that devotion to the One and that ascent of science
which makes the ambition of the philosopher; and that love and those
prayers by which some devout and ardent soul tends in its moral
purity towards perfection. These are the great highways conducting
to that height above the actual and the particular, where we stand
in the immediate presence of the Infinite, who shines out as from
the deeps of the soul.[21]

Note to page 75.

This imaginary fragment from Ammonius Saccas is, I believe, true to what seems fairly inferred concerning his teaching. See Brucker, ii. p. 211; and Jules Simon, i. 205; ii. 668.

Plotinus appears to have been indebted to Numenius even more than to Ammonius or Potamon for some of the ideas peculiar to his system. The modicum of information concerning Numenius which Eusebius has handed down shows that this Platonist anticipated the characteristic doctrine of Neo-Platonism concerning the Divine Being. Like the Neo-Platonist, he pursued philosophical inquiry in a religious spirit, imploring, as Plotinus does, divine illumination. He endeavoured to harmonize Pythagoras and Plato, to elucidate and confirm the opinions of both by the religious dogmas of the Egyptians, the Magi, and the Brahmins, and, like many of the Christian Fathers, he believed that Plato stood indebted to the Hebrew as well as to the Egyptian theology for much of his wisdom. He was pressed by the same great difficulty which weighed upon Plotinus. How could the immutable One create the Manifold without self-degradation? He solved it in a manner substantially the same. His answer is—by means of a hypostatic emanation. He posits in the Divine Nature three principles in a descending scale. His order of existence is as follows:—

I. God, the Absolute.

II. The Demiurge; he is the Artificer, in a sense, the imitator of the former. He contemplates matter, his eye ordains and upholds it, yet he is himself separate from it, since matter contains a concupiscent principle,—is fluctuating, and philosophically non-existent. The Demiurge is the ἄρχὴ γενέσεως, and good; for goodness is the original principle of Being. The second Hypostasis, engaged in the contemplation of matter, does not attain the serene self-contemplation of the First.

III. Substance or Essence, of a twofold character, corresponding to the two former.

The Universe is a copy of this third Principle.

This not very intelligible theory, which of course increases instead of lessening the perplexity in which the Platonists were involved, though differing in detail from that of Plotinus, proceeds on the same principle;—the expedient, namely, of appending to the One certain subordinate hypostases to fill the gap between it and the Manifold. (See, on his opinions, Euseb. Præp. Evang. lib. viii. p. 411 (ed. Viger); lib. xi. c. 18, p. 537; capp. 21, 22, and lib. xv. c. 17.)

Note to page 81.

Plotinus and his successors are the model of the Pseudo-Dionysius in his language concerning the Deity. Of his abstract primal principle neither being nor life can be predicated; he is above being and above life. Enn. iii. lib. 8, c. 9. But man by simplifying his nature to the utmost possible extent may become lost in this Unity. In Enn. v. lib. 5, c. 8, the mind of the contemplative philosopher is described as illumined with a divine light. He cannot tell whence it comes, or whither it goes. It is rather he himself who approaches or withdraws. He must not pursue it (οὐ χρὴ διώκειν) but abide (a true Quietist) in patient waiting, as one looking for the rising of the sun out of the ocean. The soul, blind to all beside, gazes intently on the ideal vision of the Beautiful, and is glorified as it contemplates it—ἐκεῖ ἑαυτὸν πᾶς τρέπων καὶ διδοὺς στας δὲ καὶ οἷον πληρωθεὶς μένους, εἶδε μὲν τὰ πρῶτα καλλίω γενόμενον ἑαυτὸν, καὶ ἐπιστίλβοντα ὡς ἐγγὺς ὄντος αὐτοῦ.

But this is only a preliminary stage of exaltation. The Absolute or the One, has no parts; all things partake of him, nothing possesses him; to see impartially is an impossibility, a contradiction,—if we imagine we recognise a portion he is far from us yet,—to see him mediately (δι᾽ ἑτέρων) is to behold his traces, not himself. Ὅταν μὲν ὁρᾶς ὁλον βλέπε. But, asks Plotinus, is not seeing him wholly identity with him? cap. 10.

The mystical aspirant is directed therefore to leave the glorified image of himself, radiant with the transforming effulgence of Beauty, to escape from his individual self by withdrawing into his own unity, wherein he becomes identified with the Infinite One—εἰς ἓν αὑτῷ ἐλθὼυ, καὶ μήκετι σχίσας, ἓν ὁμοῦ πάντα ἐστὶ μετ᾽ ἐκείνου τοῦ θεοῦ, ἀψοφητὶ παρόντος. Retreating into the inmost recesses of his own being, he there ἔχει πᾶν, καὶ ἀφεὶς τὴν αἴσθησιν εἰς τ᾽ οὐπίσω, τοῦ ἕτερος εἶναι φόβῳ, εἶς ἐστίν ἐκεῖ. No language could more clearly express the doctrine of identity—the object seen and the subject seeing are one. Plotinus triumphantly asks—πῶς οὖν ἕσται τί; ἐν καλῷ, μὴ ὁρμῶν αὐτό· ἤ ὁρῶν αὐτὸ ὡς ἕτερον, οὐδέπω ἐν καλῷ· γενόμενος δὲ αὐτὸ, οὕτω μάλιστα ἐν καλῷ εἰ οὖν ὅρασις τοῦ ἔξο, ὅρασιν μὺν οὐ δεῖ εἶναι, ἢ οὔτως ὡς ταὺτὸν τῷ ὁρατῷ. Ibid. pp. 552-3.

Footnote 12:

The testimony of Cicero and Iamblichus may be received as indicating
truly the similarity of spirit between Pythagoras and Plato,—their
common endeavour to escape the sensuous, and to realize in
contemplative abstraction that tranquillity, superior to desire and
passion, which assimilated men to gods. The principles of both
degenerated, in the hands of their latest followers, into the
mysteries of a theurgic freemasonry. The scattered Pythagoreans were,
many of them, incorporated in the Orphic associations, and their
descendants were those itinerant vendors of expiations and of
charms—the ἀγύρται of whom Plato speaks (_Repub._ ii. p. 70)—the
Grecian prototypes of Chaucer’s Pardonere. Similarly, in the days of
Iamblichus, the charlatans glorified themselves as the offspring of
Plato.

Footnote 13:

Clement of Alexandria gives a full account of the various stories
respecting this idol, _Protrept._ c. iv. p. 42 (ed. Potter); moreover
an etymology and legend to match, _Strom._ lib. i. p. 383.

Certain sorts of wood and metal were supposed peculiarly appropriate
to certain deities. The art of the theurgist consisted partly in
ascertaining the virtues of such substances; and it was supposed that
statues constructed of a particular combination of materials,
correspondent with the tastes and attributes of the deity represented,
possessed a mysterious influence attracting the Power in question, and
inducing him to take up his residence within the image. Iamblichus
lays down this principle of sympathy in the treatise _De Mysteriis_,
v. 23, p. 139 (ed. Gale, 1678). Kircher furnishes a description of
this statue of Serapis, _Œdip. Ægypt._ i. 139.

Footnote 14:

See _Histoire de l’Ecole d’Alexandrie_, par M. Jules Simon, tom. i. p.
99.

Footnote 15:

See Note, p. 82.

Footnote 16:

See Jules Simon, ii. pp. 626, &c.

Footnote 17:

See Note to Chap. III. p. 92.

Footnote 18:

The statements made in this and the preceding paragraph, and the
reasons adduced by Plotinus in support of them, will be found in the
fifth Ennead, lib. v. c. i. He assumes at once that the mind must be,
from its very nature, the standard of certitude. He asks (p. 519) Πῶς
γὰρ ἄν ἔτι νοῦς, ἀνοηταίνων εἴη· δεῖ ἄρα αὐτὸν ἀεὶ εἰδέναι καὶ· μὴ
δ᾽ἂν ἐπιλαθέσθαί πότε. He urges that if Intelligibles were without the
mind it could possess but images of them; its knowledge, thus mediate,
would be imperfect, p. 521. Truth consists in the harmony of the mind
with itself. Καὶ γὰρ αὖ, οὔτως οὐδ᾽ ἀποδείξεως δεῖ, οὐδὲ πίστεως ὅτι
οὕτως αὐτὸς γὰρ οὕτως. καὶ ἐναργὴς αὐτὸς αυτῷ. καὶ εἴ τι πρὸ αὐτοῦ,
ὅτι ἐξ αὐτοῦ. καὶ εἴ τι μετ᾽ ἐκεῖνο, ὅτι αὐτός. καὶ οὐδεὶς πιστότερος
αὐτῷ περὶ αὐτοῦ. καὶ ὅτι, ἐκεῖ τοῦτο, καὶ ὄντως. ὥστε καὶ ἡ ὄντως
ἀλήθεια, οὺ συμφωνοῦσα ἄλλῳ, ἄλλ᾽ ἑαυτῆ. καὶ οὐδὲν παρ αὑτὴν ἄλλο
λέγει καὶ ἔστι. καὶ ὅ ἔστι τοῦτο καὶ λέγει, p. 522.

Footnote 19:

_Enn._ iii. lib. v. capp. 2 & 7. There the gardens of Jove, and Porus,
with his plenty, are said to be allegorical representations of the
intellectual food of a soul nourished and delighted by the truths of
Reason. Poverty, again, with its sense of need, is the source of
intellectual desire. Comp. Plato, _Symp._ p. 429 (_Bekk_).

Footnote 20:

See Note 2, p. 82.

Footnote 21:

Enn. i. lib. 3, c. 1.

CHAPTER III.

Lume è lassù che visibile face
Lo creatore a quella creatura
Che solo in lui vedere ha la sua pace.[22]

DANTE.

MRS. ATHERTON. I confess I cannot understand what that state of mind can be which Plotinus calls ecstasy in the letter you read us last night, and about which most of your mystical fraternity talk so mysteriously.

KATE. I think I shall have myself mesmerised some day to form an idea.

WILLOUGHBY. I suppose the mystic, by remaining for many hours (enfeebled, perhaps, by fast and vigil), absolutely motionless, ceasing to think of anything—except that he thinks he is successful in thinking of nothing, and staring pertinaciously at vacancy, throws himself at last into a kind of trance. In this state he may perceive, even when the eyes are closed, some luminous appearance, perhaps the result of pressure on the optic nerve—I am not anatomist enough to explain; and if his mind be strongly imaginative, or labouring with the ground-swell of recent excitement, this light may shape itself into archetype, dæmon, or what not. In any case, the more distinct the object seen, the more manifestly is it the projection of his own mind—a Brocken-phantom, the enlarged shadow of himself moving on some shifting tapestry of mist.

KATE. Like the woodman described by Coleridge as beholding with such awe an appearance of the kind, when he

Sees full before him gliding without tread
An image with a glory round its head,
This shade he worships for its golden hues,
And _makes_ (not knowing) that which he pursues.

ATHERTON. Such has been the god of many a mystic. He will soar above means, experience, history, external revelation, and ends by mistaking a hazy reflex of his own image for Deity.

GOWER. But we must not forget that, according to Plotinus, all sense of personality is lost during ecstasy, and he would regard any light or form whatever (presented to what one may call his cerebral vision) as a sign that the trance was yet incomplete. He yearns to escape from everything that can be distinguished, bounded, or depicted, into the illimitable inane.

ATHERTON. Very true. And it is this extreme of negation and abstraction for which Plotinus is remarkable, that makes it alone worth our while to talk so much about him. His philosophy and that of his successors, mistaken for Platonism, was to corrupt the Christian Church. For hundreds of years there will be a succession of prelates, priests, or monks, in whose eyes the frigid refinements of Plotinus will be practically, though not confessedly, regarded as representing God far more worthily than the grand simplicity and the forcible figurativeness of Scripture language. For the Christian’s God will be substituted that sublime cypher devised by Plotinus—that blank something, of which you cannot say that it exists, for it is above existence.

Stop a moment—let me tell my beads, and try to count off the doctrines we shall meet with again and again in those forms of Christian mysticism where the Neo-Platonist element prevails—the germs of all lie in Plotinus.

There is, first of all, the principle of negation; that all so-called manifestations and revelations of God do in fact veil him; that no affirmative can be predicated of him, because he is above all our positive conceptions; that all symbols, figures, media, partial representations, must be utterly abandoned because, as finite, they fall infinitely short of the Infinite.

Here we are sunk below humanity—our knowledge consists in ignorance—our vision in darkness.

The next step raises us in an instant from this degrading limitation up to Deity—‘sets our feet in a large room,’ as the later mystics phrased it—even in infinity, and identifies us for a time with God.

Since the partial finite way of knowing God is so worthless, to know him truly we must escape from the finite, from all processes, all media, from the very gifts of God to God himself, and know him immediately, completely, in the infinite way—by receiving, or being received into, him directly.

To attain this identity, in which, during a brief space of rapture at least, the subject and object, the knower and the known, are one and the same, we must withdraw into our inmost selves, into that simple oneness of our own essence which by its very rarity is susceptible of blending with that supreme attenuation called the Divine Essence. So doing, we await in passivity the glory, the embrace of Union. Hence the inmost is the highest—introversion is ascension, and introrsum ascendere the watchword of all mystics. God is found within, at once radiating from the depths of the soul, and absorbing it as the husk of personality drops away.

WILLOUGHBY. And so the means and faculties God has given us for knowing him are to lie unused.

ATHERTON. Certainly; night must fall on reason, imagination, memory—on our real powers—that an imaginary power may awake. This is what the mystics call the absorption of the powers in God, leaving active within us nothing natural, in order that God may be substituted for ourselves, and all operations within be supernatural, and even divine.

GOWER. Then mysticism is a spiritual art whereby the possible is forsaken for the impossible—the knowable for the unknowable.

WILLOUGHBY. Or a contrivance, say, for reaching Divinity which realizes only torpor.

GOWER. A sorry sight this misdirection and disappointment of spiritual aspiration. Does it not remind you of that ever-suggestive legend of Psyche—how she has to carry the box of celestial beauty to Venus, and by the way covets some of this loveliness for herself. She lifts the lid, and there steals out a soporific vapour, throwing her into a deep slumber on the edge of a dizzy precipice. There she lies entranced till Eros comes to waken and to rescue her.

ATHERTON. I should grow very tiresome if I were now to attempt to indicate the likeness and the difference between ancient and modern speculation on these questions, and where I think the error lies, and why. But you must bear with me, Kate, if I hang some dry remarks on what you said just now.

KATE. I am sure I—

ATHERTON. You quoted Coleridge a minute since. He first, and after him Carlyle, familiarized England with the German distinction between reason and understanding. In fact, what the Epicureans and the Stoics were to Plotinus in his day, that were Priestley and Paley to Coleridge. The spiritualist is the sworn foe of your rationalist and pleasures-of-virtue man. Romance must loathe utilitarianism, enthusiasm scorn expediency. Hence the reaction which gives us Schelling as the Plotinus of Berlin, and Coleridge as the Schelling of Highgate. The understanding had been over-tasked—set to work unanimated and unaided by the conscience and the heart. The result was pitiable—lifeless orthodoxy and sneering scepticism. Christianity was elaborately defended on its external evidences; the internal evidence of its own nature overlooked.

What was needful at such a juncture? Surely that both should be employed in healthful alliance—the understanding and the conscience—the faculty which distinguishes and judges, and the faculty which presides over our moral nature, deciding about right and wrong. These are adequate to recognise the claims of Revelation. The intellectual faculty can deal with the historic evidence, the moral can pronounce concerning the tendency of the book, righteous or unrighteous. In those features of it unexplained and inexplicable to the understanding, if we repose on faith, we do so on grounds which the understanding shows to be sound. Hence the reception given to Christianity is altogether reasonable.

But no such moderate ground as this would satisfy the ardour which essayed reform; the understanding, because it could not do everything—could not be the whole mind, but only a part—because it was proved unequal to accomplish alone the work of all our faculties together, was summarily cashiered. We must have for religion a new, a higher faculty. Instead of reinforcing the old power, a novel nomenclature is devised which seems to endow man with a loftier attribute. This faculty is the intuition of Plotinus, the Intellectuelle Anschauung of Schelling; the Intuitive Reason, Source of Ideas and Absolute Truths, the Organ of Philosophy and Theology, as Coleridge styles it. It is a direct beholding, which, according to Plotinus, rises in some moments of exaltation to ecstasy. It is, according to Schelling, a realization of the identity of subject and object in the individual, which blends him with that identity of subject and object called God; so that, carried out of himself, he does, in a manner, think divine thoughts—views all things from their highest point of view—mind and matter from the centre of their identity.[23] He becomes recipient, according to Emerson, of the Soul of the world. He loses, according to Coleridge, the particular in the universal reason; finds that ideas appear within him from an internal source supplied by the Logos or Eternal Word of God—an infallible utterance from the divine original of man’s highest nature.[24]

WILLOUGHBY. One aim in all—to escape the surface varieties of our individual (or more properly dividual) being, and penetrate to the universal truth—the absolute certainty everywhere the same:—a shaft-sinking operation—a descent into our original selves—digging down, in one case from a garden, in another from a waste, here from the heart of a town, there from a meadow, but all the miners are to find at the bottom a common ground—the primæval granite—the basis of the eternal truth-pillars. This I take to be the object of the self-simplification Plotinus inculcates—to get beneath the finite superficial accretions of our nature.

ATHERTON. And what comes of it after all? After denuding ourselves of all results of experience, conditioned distinctions, &c., we are landed in a void, we find only hollow silence, if we may accept a whisper or two, saying that ingratitude, treachery, fraud, and similar crimes, are very wrong.

GOWER. And even these dictates are those of our moral sense, not of an intellectual power of insight. For surely to call conscience practical Reason, as Kant does, is only to confound our moral and intellectual nature together.

ATHERTON. Very well, then. Seclude and simplify yourself thoroughly, and you do not find data within you equal to your need—equal to show you what God is, has done, should do, &c.

WILLOUGHBY. But all these intuitionalists profess to evolve from their depths very much more than those simplest ethical perceptions.

ATHERTON. By carrying down with them into those depths the results of the understanding, of experience, of external culture, and then bringing them up to light again as though they had newly emerged from the recesses of the Infinite. This intuitional metal, in its native state, is mere fluent, formless quicksilver; to make it definite and serviceable you must fix it by an alloy; but then, alas! it is pure Reason no longer, and, so far from being universal truth, receives a countless variety of shapes, according to the temperament, culture, or philosophic party, of the individual thinker. So that, in the end, the result is merely a dogmatical investiture of a man’s own notions with a sort of divine authority. You dispute with Schelling, and he waves you away as a profane and intuitionless laic. What is this but the sacerdotalism of the philosopher? The fanatical mystic who believes himself called on to enforce the fantasies of his special revelation upon other men, does not more utterly contemn argument than does the theosophist, when he bids you kick your understanding back into its kennel, and hearken in reverend awe to his intuitions.

WILLOUGHBY. Telling you, too, that if your inward witness does not agree with his, you are, philosophically speaking, in the gall of bitterness and the bond of iniquity.

ATHERTON. You are catching the approved style of expression so much in vogue with our modern religious infidelity. This is the artifice—to be scriptural in phrase, and anti-scriptural in sense: to parade the secret symbols of Christianity in the van of that motley army which marches to assail it.

GOWER. The expedient reminds me of the device of Cambyses, who, when he drew out his forces against the Egyptians, placed a row of ibises in front of his line, and the Egyptians, it is said, suffered defeat rather than discharge an arrow which might wound the birds they worshipped.

WILLOUGHBY. To go back to Plotinus.[25] That doctrine of the Epistrophe—the return of all intelligence by a law of nature to the divine centre—must inevitably be associated with the unhealthy morality always attendant on pantheism. It is an organic process godward, ending in loss of personal existence, no moral or spiritual elevation.

GOWER. His abstract Unity has no character, only negation of all conceivable attributes—so will and character can have no place in his theory of assimilation to God. Self-culture is self-reduction. What a plan of the universe!—all intelligence magnetically drawn to the Centre, like the ships to the Mountain of the Loadstone in the Arabian Nights—as they approach, the nails which hold them together are withdrawn, they fall apart, and all the fabric is dissolved.

WILLOUGHBY. It is curious to observe how rapidly the mind gives way under the unnatural strain of this super-essential abstraction, and indemnifies itself by imaginative and fantastical excesses for the attempt to sojourn in an atmosphere so rare. At first, ecstasy is an indescribable state—any form or voice would mar and materialize it. The vague boundlessness of this exaltation, in which the soul swoons away, is not to be hinted at by the highest utterance of mortal speech. But a degenerate age or a lower order of mind demands the detail and imagery of a more tangible marvel. The demand creates supply, and the mystic, deceiver or deceived, or both, begins to furnish forth for himself and others a full itinerary of those regions in the unseen world which he has scanned or traversed in his moments of elevation. He describes the starred baldrics and meteor-swords of the aërial panoply; tells what forlorn shapes have been seen standing dark against a far depth of brightness, like stricken pines on a sunset horizon; what angelic forms, in gracious companies, alight about the haunts of men, thwarting the evil and opening pathways for the good; what genii tend what mortals, and under what astral influences they work weal or woe; what beings of the middle air crowd in embattled rows the mountain side, or fill some vast amphitheatre of silent and inaccessible snow,—how some encamp in the valley, under the pennons of the summer lightning, and others find a tented field where the slow wind unrolls the exhalations along the marsh, and builds a billowy canopy of vapours: all is largely told,—what ethereal heraldry marshals with its blazon the thrones and dominions of the unseen realm; what giant powers and principalities darken with long shadow, or illumine with a winged wake of glory, the forms of following myriads,—their ranks and races, wars and destiny, as minutely registered as the annals of some neighbour province, as confidently recounted as though the seer had nightly slipped his bonds of flesh, and mingled in their council or their battle.

ATHERTON. A true portraiture. Observe how this mysticism pretends to raise man above self into the universal, and issues in giving us only what is personal. It presents us, after all, only with the creations of the fancy, the phenomena of the sensibility peculiar to the individual,—that finite, personal idiosyncrasy which is so despised. Its philosophy of the universe subsides into a morbid psychology. Man is persuaded that he is to traverse the realms of fire and air, where the intelligible essences and archetypes of all things dwell; and, like the Knight of La Mancha, he never stirs in reality from the little grass-plot of individual temperament on which his wondrous wooden horse stands still. This theosophy professes to make man divine, and it fails at last to keep him even rational. It prevents his becoming what he might be, while it promises to make him what he never can become.

Note to page 90.

M. Simon has shown, with much acuteness, in what way the exigencies of the system of Plotinus compelled him to have recourse to a new faculty, distinct from reason. Plotinus perceived that Plato had not been true to the consequences of his own dialectics. When he had reached the summit of his logical abstraction,—had passed through definition after definition, each more intangible than the last, on his way upward towards the One, he arrived at last at a God who was above Being itself. From this result he shrank, and so ceased to be consistent. How could such a God be a God of Providence, such a shadow of a shade a creator? Plato was not prepared, like Plotinus, to soar so completely above experience and the practical as to accept the utmost consequences of his logical process. So, that his God might be still the God of Providence, he retained him within the sphere of reason, gave him Being, Thought, Power, and called him the Demiurge. When Plotinus, like a true eclectic, carried still farther his survey of what history afforded him, he found Aristotle postulating a Deity so restricted by his own abstraction and immutability as to render it impossible to associate with his nature the idea of superintendence. It was feared that to represent God as the God of Creation and of Providence would be to dualize him. And yet the world did exist. How were the serene and remote Unity demanded by logic, and that activity and contact with matter no less imperatively demanded for God by experience, to be reconciled with each other? It is scarcely necessary to observe that there was no real difficulty. The whole problem was the result of the notion, so universal, concerning the evil of matter, and of the wrong answer given by ancient philosophy to the vexed question—Does the Supreme work τῷ εἶναι, or τῷ βούλεσθαι? Philosophy maintained the former; the Christian Church the latter. To remove this obstacle which philosophy had itself constructed, Plotinus proposed his theory of these hypostases, in the Divine Nature. Above and beyond a God such as that of Plato, he places another like that of Aristotle, and above him a simple Unity, like the God of the Eleatics. The last was the ultimatum of the process of logical simplification—a something above being. But the hypothesis was destitute of proof—it was, in fact, contrary to reason. Plotinus must therefore either surrender his theory or bid farewell to reason. He chose the latter course. He does not deny the important services of reason, but he professes to transcend its limits. He calls in mysticism to substantiate, by the doctrines of Illumination and Identity, his imaginary God. He affirms a God beyond reason, and then a faculty beyond reason to discern that God withal.

This attempt to solve the problem in question is of course a failure. It is still more open than the system of Plato to Aristotle’s objection, that it resembled the expedient of an arithmetician who should endeavour to simplify a calculation he found perplexing by taking still higher figures. Plotinus does not explain what he means by a Hypostasis. If the Hypostases in his Trinity have reality, the ideal unity he is so anxious to preserve in the Divine Nature is after all destroyed. If they have not, the gap between the One and the Manifold is still without a bridge, and the difficulty they are introduced to remove remains in effect where it was. If this hypothesis had made no part of the system of Plotinus, the great occasion for the doctrine of Ecstasy and the most powerful internal inducement to mysticism would have been wanting. The philosopher escapes from his labyrinth by borrowing the wings of the mystic.—See Jules Simon, tom. i. pp. 63, 84; ii. 462.

Footnote 22:

There is above a light which makes visible the Creator to that
creature who finds his peace only in the vision of Him.

Footnote 23:

See Schelling’s _System des Trancendentalen Idealismus_, pp. 19-23
(Tübingen, 1800), and Chalybæus, _Hist. Entw. d. Spec. Phil._ p. 244.

Footnote 24:

_Aids to Reflection_, pp. 225, 249. The reader is referred to a
discriminating criticism of this doctrine in the _British Quarterly
Review_, No. xxxvii.

Footnote 25:

See Note, p. 92.

CHAPTER IV.

_Stargaze._ ’Tis drawn, I assure you, from the aphorisms of the old
Chaldeans, Zoroaster the first and greatest magician; Mercurius
Trismegistus, the later Ptolemy, and the everlasting prognosticator,
old Erra Pater.—MASSINGER.

WILLOUGHBY. We have now about done, I suppose, with the theosophic branch of the Neo-Platonist school; with its latest leaders it degenerates into theurgic mysticism.

KATE. I hope it is going to degenerate into something one can understand.

GOWER. The great metaphysician, Plotinus, is off the stage, that is some comfort for you, Miss Merivale. Magic is less wearisome than metaphysics.

ATHERTON. The change is marked, indeed. Plotinus, wrapt in his proud abstraction, cared little for fame. His listening disciples were his world. Porphyry entered his school fresh from the study of Aristotle. At first the daring opponent of the master, he soon became the most devoted of his scholars. With a temperament more active and practical than that of Plotinus, with more various ability and far more facility in adaptation, with an erudition equal to his fidelity, blameless in his life, pre-eminent in the loftiness and purity of his ethics, he was well fitted to do all that could be done towards securing for the doctrines he had espoused that reputation and that wider influence to which Plotinus was so indifferent. His aim was twofold. He engaged in a conflict hand to hand with two antagonists at once, by both of whom he was eventually vanquished. He commenced an assault on Christianity without, and he endeavoured to check the progress of superstitious usage within the pale of Paganism. But Christianity could not be repulsed, and heathendom would not be reformed. In vain did he attempt to substitute a single philosophical religion which should be universal, for the manifold and popular Polytheism of the day. Christian truth repelled his attack on the one side, and idolatrous superstition carried his defences on the other.

WILLOUGHBY. A more false position could scarcely have been assumed. Men like Porphyry constituted themselves the defenders of a Paganism which did but partially acknowledge their advocacy. Often suspected by the Emperors, they were still oftener maligned and persecuted by the jealousy of the priests. They were the unaccredited champions of Paganism, for they sought to refine while they conserved it. They defended it, not as zealots, but as men of letters.[26] They defended it because the old faith could boast of great names and great achievements in speculation, literature, and art, and because the new appeared novel and barbarian in its origin, and humiliating in its claims. They wrote, they lectured, they disputed, in favour of the temple and against the church, because they dreamed of the days of Pericles under the yoke of the Empire: not because they worshipped idols, but because they worshipped Plato.

MRS. ATHERTON. And must not that very attempt, noticed just now, to recognise all religions, have been as fatal to them as the causes you mention?

ATHERTON. Certainly. Mankind does not require a revelation to give them a religion, but to give them one which shall be altogether true. These Neo-Platonists were confronted by a religion intolerant of all others. They attempted, by keeping open house in their eclectic Pantheon, to excel where they thought their antagonist deficient. They failed to see in that benign intolerance of falsehood, which stood out as so strange a characteristic in the Christian faith, one of the credentials of its divine origin. No theory of the universe manufactured by a school can be a gospel to man’s soul. They forgot that lip-homage paid to all religions is the virtual denial of each.

GOWER. Strange position, indeed, maintaining as their cardinal doctrine the unity and immutability of the divine nature, and entering the lists as conservators of polytheism; teaching the most abstract and defending the most gross conceptions of deity; exclaiming against vice, and solicitous to preserve all the incentives to it which swarm in every heathen mythology. Of a truth, no clean thing could be brought out of that unclean,—the new cloth would not mend the old garment. Men know that they ought to worship; the question is, Whom? and How?

WILLOUGHBY. Then, again, their attempt to combine religion and philosophy robbed the last of its only principle, the first of its only power. The religions lost in the process what sanctity and authoritativeness they had to lose, while speculation abandoned all scientific precision, and deserted its sole consistent basis in the reason. This endeavour to philosophise superstition could only issue in the paradoxical product of a philosophy without reason, and a superstition without faith. To make philosophy superstitious was not difficult, and they did that; but they could not—do what they would—make superstition philosophical.

ATHERTON. Add, too, that Greek philosophy, which had always repelled the people, possessed no power to seclude them from the Christianity that sought them out. In vain did it borrow from Christianity a new refinement, and receive some rays of light from the very foe which fronted it——

WILLOUGHBY. As is very visible in the higher moral tone of Porphyry’s Treatise on Abstinence.

ATHERTON. The struggles of heathendom to escape its doom only the more display its weakness and the justice of the sentence.

GOWER. Like the man in the Gesta Romanorum, who came to the gate where every humpbacked, one-eyed, scald-headed passenger had to pay a penny for each infirmity: they were going only to demand toll for his hunch, but he resisted, and in the struggle was discovered to be amenable for every deformity and disease upon the table. So, no doubt, it must always be with systems, states, men, and dogs, that won’t know when they have had their day. The scuffle makes sad work with the patched clothes, false teeth, wig, and cosmetics.

ATHERTON. Life is sweet.

As to Porphyry it was doubtless his more practical temperament that led him to modify the doctrine of Plotinus concerning ecstasy. With Porphyry the mind does not lose, in that state of exaltation, its consciousness of personality. He calls it a dream in which the soul, dead to the world, rises to an activity that partakes of the divine. It is an elevation above reason, above action, above liberty, and yet no annihilation, but an ennobling restoration or transformation of the individual nature.[27]

GOWER. One of Porphyry’s notions about the spirits of the air, of which you told me in our walk yesterday, quite haunted me afterwards. It contains a germ of poetry.

KATE. By all means let us have it.

GOWER. Our philosopher believed in a certain order of evil genii who took pleasure in hunting wild beasts,—dæmons, whom men worshipped by the title of Artemis and other names, falsely attributing their cruelty to the calm and guiltless gods, who can never delight in blood. Some of these natures hunted another prey. They were said to chase souls that had escaped from the fetters of a body, and to force them to re-enter some fleshly prison once more. How I wish we could see a design of this by David Scott! Imagine the soul that has just leaped out of the door of that dungeon of ignorance and pain, the body, as Porphyry would term it, fluttering in its new freedom in the sunshine among the tree-tops, over wild and town—all the fields of air its pleasure-ground for an exulting career on its upward way to join the journeying intelligences in their cars above. But it sees afar off, high in mid-air, a troop of dark shapes; they seem to approach, to grow out of the airy recesses of the distance—they come down the white precipices of the piled clouds, over the long slant of some vapour promontory—forms invisible to man, and, with them, spectre-hounds, whose baying spirits alone can hear. As they approach, the soul recognises its enemies. In a moment it is flying away, away, and after it they sweep—pursuers and pursued, shapes so ethereal that the galleries of the ant are not shaken as hunters and quarry glide into the earth, and not a foam-bell is broken or brushed from the wave when they emerge upon the sea, and with many a winding and double mount the air. At last hemmed in, the soul is forced—spite of that desperate sidelong dart which had all but eluded them—down into a body, the frame of a beggar’s babe or of a slave’s; and, like some struggling bird, drawn with beating wings beneath the water, it sinks into the clay it must animate through many a miserable year to come.

WILLOUGHBY. I wish you would paint it for us yourself. You might represent, close by that battle of the spirits, a bird singing on a bough, a labourer looking down, with his foot upon his spade, and peasants dancing in their ‘sunburnt mirth’ and jollity—wholly unconscious, interrupted neither in toil nor pleasure by the conflict close at hand. It might read as a satire on the too common indifference of men to the spiritual realities which are about them every hour.

MRS. ATHERTON. The picture would be as mysterious as an Emblem by Albert Durer.

GOWER. It is that suggestiveness I so admire in the Germans. For the sake of it I can often pardon their fantastic extravagances, their incongruous combinations, their frequent want of grace and symmetry.

ATHERTON. So can I, when an author occupies a province in which such indirectness or irony, such irregularity, confusion, or paradox, are admissible. Take, as a comprehensive example, Jean Paul. But in philosophy it is abominable. There, where transparent order should preside, to find that under the thick and spreading verbiage meaning is often lacking, and, with all the boastful and fire-new nomenclature, if found, is old and common,—that the language is commonly but an array of what one calls

Rich windows that exclude the light,
And passages that lead to nothing;—

This puts me out of all patience.

GOWER. The fault you object to reminds me of some Flemish landscape-pieces I have seen; there are trees, so full of grand life, they seem with their outstretched arms to menace the clouds, and as though, if they smote with their many hundred hands, they could beat away the storm instead of being bowed by it; and underneath these great ones of the forest, which should shadow nothing less than a woodland council of Titans or a group of recumbent gods, the painter places only a rustic with a cow or two, an old horse, a beggar, or some other most every-day of figures.

MRS. ATHERTON. And you mean that the German words are large-looking as the trees, and the ideas worn and ordinary as the figures? What will Mr. Willoughby say to that?

ATHERTON. I think Willoughby will agree with me that it is high time that we should go back to our theurgic mysticism and Iamblichus. Here is a letter of his:—

IAMBLICHUS TO AGATHOCLES.

I assure you, my friend, that the efforts of Porphyry, of whom you
appear disposed to think so highly, will be altogether in vain. He
is not the true philosopher you imagine. He grows cold and sceptical
with years. He shrinks with a timid incredulity from reaping in that
field of supernatural attainment which theurgy has first opened, and
now continually enlarges and enriches. Theurgy, be sure of it, is
the grand, I may say, the sole path to the exaltation we covet. It
is the heaven-given organum, in the hands of the wise and holy, for
obtaining happiness, knowledge, power.

The pomp of emperors becomes as nothing in comparison with the glory
that surrounds the hierophant. The priest is a prophet full of
deity. The subordinate powers of the upper world are at his bidding,
for it is not a man, but a god who speaks the words of power. Such a
man lives no longer the life common to other men. He has exchanged
the human life for the divine. His nature is the instrument and
vehicle of Deity, who fills and impels him (ὄργανον τοῖς ἐπιπνέουσι
θεοῖς.) Men of this order do not employ, in the elevation they
experience, the waking senses as do others (οὔτε κατ᾽ αἴσθησιν
ἐνεργοῦσιν οὔτε ἐγρηγόρασι). They have no purpose of their own, no
mastery over themselves. They speak wisdom they do not understand,
and their faculties, absorbed in a divine power, become the
utterance of a superior will.

Often, at the moment of inspiration, or when the afflatus has
subsided, a fiery Appearance is seen,—the entering or departing
Power. Those who are skilled in this wisdom can tell by the
character of this glory the rank of the divinity who has seized for
the time the reins of the mystic’s soul, and guides it as he will.
Sometimes the body of the man subject to this influence is violently
agitated, sometimes it is rigid and motionless. In some instances
sweet music is heard, in others, discordant and fearful sounds. The
person of the subject has been known to dilate and tower to a
superhuman height; in other cases, it has been lifted up into the
air. Frequently, not merely the ordinary exercise of reason, but
sensation and animal life would appear to have been suspended; and
the subject of the afflatus has not felt the application of fire,
has been pierced with spits, cut with knives, and been sensible of
no pain. Yea, often, the more the body and the mind have been alike
enfeebled by vigil and by fasts, the more ignorant or mentally
imbecile a youth may be who is brought under this influence, the
more freely and unmixedly will the divine power be made manifest. So
clearly are these wonders the work, not of human skill or wisdom,
but of supernatural agency! Characteristics such as these I have
mentioned, are the marks of the true inspiration.

Now, there are, O Agathocles, four great orders of spiritual
existence,—Gods, Dæmons, Heroes or Demi-gods, and Souls. You will
naturally be desirous to learn how the apparition of a God or a
Dæmon is distinguished from those of Angels, Principalities, or
Souls. Know, then, that their appearance to man corresponds to their
nature, and that they always manifest themselves to those who invoke
them in a manner consonant with their rank in the hierarchy of
spiritual natures. The appearances of Gods are uniform (μονοειδῆ),
those of Dæmons various (ποικίλα). The Gods shine with a benign
aspect. When a God manifests himself, he frequently appears to hide
sun or moon, and seems as he descends too vast for earth to contain.
Archangels are at once awful and mild; Angels yet more gracious;
Dæmons terrible. Below the four leading classes I have mentioned are
placed the malignant Dæmons, the Anti-gods (ἀντιθέους).

Each spiritual order has gifts of its own to bestow on the initiated
who evoke them. The Gods confer health of body, power and purity of
mind, and, in short, elevate and restore our natures to their proper
principles. Angels and Archangels have at their command only
subordinate bestowments. Dæmons, however, are hostile to the
aspirant,—afflict both body and mind, and hinder our escape from the
sensuous. Principalities, who govern the sublunary elements, confer
temporal advantages. Those of a lower rank, who preside over matter
(ὑλικά), display their bounty in material gifts. Souls that are pure
are, like Angels, salutary in their influence. Their appearance
encourages the soul in its upward efforts. Heroes stimulate to great
actions. All these powers depend, in a descending chain, each
species on that immediately above it. Good Dæmons are seen
surrounded by the emblems of blessing, Dæmons who execute judgment
appear with the instruments of punishment.

There is nothing unworthy of belief in what you have been told
concerning the sacred sleep, and divination by dreams. I explain it
thus:—

The soul has a twofold life, a lower and a higher. In sleep that
soul is freed from the constraint of the body, and enters, as one
emancipated, on its divine life of intelligence. Then, as the noble
faculty which beholds the objects that truly are—the objects in the
world of intelligence—stirs within, and awakens to its power, who
can be surprised that the mind, which contains in itself the
principles of all that happens, should, in this its state of
liberation, discern the future in those antecedent principles which
will make that future what it is to be? The nobler part of the soul
is thus united by abstraction to higher natures, and becomes a
participant in the wisdom and foreknowledge of the Gods.

Recorded examples of this are numerous and well authenticated;
instances occur, too, every day. Numbers of sick, by sleeping in the
temple of Æsculapius, have had their cure revealed to them in dreams
vouchsafed by the god. Would not Alexander’s army have perished but
for a dream in which Dionysus pointed out the means of safety? Was
not the siege of Aphutis raised through a dream sent by Jupiter
Ammon to Lysander? The night-time of the body is the day-time of the
soul.

What I have now said—with little method, I confess—sets before you
but a portion of the prerogatives in which the initiated glory.
There is much behind for which words are too poor. I have written
enough, I am sure, to kindle your ambition, to bid you banish doubt,
and persevere in the aspirations which so possessed you when I saw
you last.[28] Farewell.

GOWER. That explanation of prophetic dreams and the temple sleep is very curious and characteristic. No doubt the common phenomena of mesmerism may have been among the sacred secrets preserved by the priests of Egypt and of Greece.

KATE. The preference for young and weakly persons, who would possess an organization more susceptible of such influences, makes it look very likely.

ATHERTON. Observe how completely the theurgic element, with Iamblichus, supersedes the theosophic. In the process of time the philosophical principles on which the system of Plotinus rested are virtually surrendered, little by little, while divination and evocations are practised with increasing credulity, and made the foundation of the most arrogant pretensions. Plotinus declared the possibility of an absolute identification of the divine with the human nature. Here was the broadest basis for mysticism possible. Porphyry retired from this position, took up narrower ground, and qualified the great mystical principle of his master. He contended that in the union which takes place in ecstasy, we still retain the consciousness of personality. Iamblichus, the most superstitious of all in practice, diminished the real principle of mysticism still farther in theory. He denied that man has a faculty inaccessible to passion, and eternally active.[29]

WILLOUGHBY. And so the metaphysics and the marvels of mysticism stand in an inverse ratio to each other. But it is not unnatural that as the mystic, from one cause or another, gives up those exaggerated notions of the powers of man and those mistaken views of the relationship between man and God, which went together to make up a mystical system of philosophy, he should endeavour to indemnify himself by the evocations of theurgy, so as to secure, if possible, through a supernatural channel, what speculation had unsuccessfully attempted.

ATHERTON. True; but in this case I should invert the order, and say that as the promise of theurgy exercised an attraction of growing strength on an order of mind less fitted for speculation, such temperaments would readily drop the speculative principle of mysticism in their eagerness to grasp the illusive prize—apparently so practical—which a commerce with superior natures held out.

WILLOUGHBY. And so the intellectual ambition and the poetical spirit, so lofty in Plotinus, subside, among the followers of Iamblichus, into the doggrel of the necromancer’s charm.

GOWER. Much such a descent as the glory of Virgil has suffered, whose tomb at Pausilipo is now regarded by the populace of degenerate Naples less with the reverence due to the poet than with the awe which arises from the legendary repute of the mediæval magician.

ATHERTON. So the idealism of strong minds becomes superstition in the weak. In the very shrine where culture paid its homage to art or science, feebleness and ignorance, in an age of decline, set up the image-worship of the merely marvellous.

MRS. ATHERTON. I think you mentioned only one other of these worthies.

ATHERTON. Proclus. He is the last great name among the Neo-Platonists. He was the most eclectic of them all, perhaps because the most learned and the most systematic. He elaborated the trinity of Plotinus into a succession of impalpable Triads, and surpassed Iamblichus in his devotion to the practice of theurgy. Proclus was content to develop the school in that direction which Iamblichus—(successful from his very faults)—had already given it. With Proclus, theurgy was the art which gives man the magical passwords that carry him through barrier after barrier, dividing species from species of the upper existences, till, at the summit of the hierarchy, he arrives at the highest. According to him, God is the Non-Being who is above all being. He is apprehended only by negation. When we are raised out of our weakness, and on a level with God, it seems as though reason were silenced, for then we are above reason. We become intoxicated with God, we are inspired as by the nectar of Olympus. He teaches philosophy as the best preparation for Quietism. For the scientific enquirer, toiling in his research, Proclus has a God to tell of, supreme, almighty, the world-maker and governor of Plato. For him who has passed through this labour, a God known only by ecstasy—a God who is the repose he gives—a God of whom the more you deny the more do you affirm.

WILLOUGHBY. And this is all! After years of austerity and toil, Proclus—the scholar, stored with the opinions of the past, surrounded by the admiration of the present—the astronomer, the geometrician, the philosopher,—learned in the lore of symbols and of oracles, in the rapt utterances of Orpheus and of Zoroaster—an adept in the ritual of invocations among every people in the world—he, at the close, pronounces Quietism the consummation of the whole, and an unreasoning contemplation, an ecstasy which casts off as an incumbrance all the knowledge so painfully acquired, the bourne of all the journey.

MRS. ATHERTON. As though it were the highest glory of man, forgetting all that his enquiry has achieved, hidden away from the world,—to gaze at vacancy, inactive and infantine;—to be like some peasant’s child left in its cradle for a while in the furrow of a field, shut in by the little mound of earth on either side, and having but the blue æther above, dazzling and void, at which to look up with smiles of witless wonder.

Note to page 103.

Iamblichus, de Mysteriis, sect. x. cc. 1, 4, 6; iii. 4, 8, 6, 24; i. 5, 6; ii. 3; iii. 31; ii. 4, 6, 7; iii. 1, 3. These passages, in the order given, will be found to correspond with the opinions expressed in the letter as those of Iamblichus.

The genuineness of the treatise De Mysteriis has been called in question, but its antiquity is undoubted. It differs only in one or two very trivial statements from the doctrines of Iamblichus as ascertained from other sources, and is admitted by all to be the production, if not of Iamblichus himself, of one of his disciples, probably writing under his direction. Jules Simon, ii. 219.

For the opinions ascribed to Porphyry in this letter, see his Epistola ad Anebonem, passim. He there proposes a series of difficult questions, and displays that sceptical disposition, especially concerning the pretensions of Theurgy, which so much scandalized Iamblichus. The De Mysteriis is an elaborate reply to that epistle, under the name of Abammon.

In several passages of the De Mysteriis (ii. 11; v. 1, 2, 3, 7; vi. 6) Iamblichus displays much anxiety lest his zeal for Theurgy should lead him to maintain any position inconsistent with the reverence due to the gods. He was closely pressed on this weak point by the objections of Porphyry. (Ep. ad Anebon. 5, 6.) His explanation in reply is, that the deities are not in reality drawn down by the mere human will of the Theurgist, but that man is raised to a participation in the power of the gods. The approximation is real, but the apparent descent of divinity is in fact the ascent of humanity. By his long course of preparation, by his knowledge of rites and symbols, of potent hymns, and of the mysterious virtues of certain herbs and minerals, the Theurgist is supposed to rise at last to the rank of an associate with celestial powers; their knowledge and their will become his, and he controls inferior natures with the authority of the gods themselves.

Iamblichus supposes, moreover, that there is an order of powers in the world, irrational and undiscerning, who are altogether at the bidding of man when by threats or conjurations he chooses to compel them. De Myst. vi. 5.

Footnote 26:

J. Simon, i. 154; ii. 173.

Footnote 27:

J. Simon, liv. iii. chap. 4.

Footnote 28:

See Note, p. 106.

Footnote 29:

Jules Simon, ii. 218.

BOOK THE FOURTH MYSTICISM IN THE GREEK CHURCH

CHAPTER I.

Questi ordini di su tutti s’ammirano
E di giù vincon si che verso Iddio
Tutti tirati sono e tutti tirano.
E Dionisio con tanto disio
A contemplar questi ordini si mise,
Che li nomò e distinse com’ io.[30]

DANTE.

KATE. I have been looking at the pictures in Mrs. Jameson’s Sacred and Legendary Art, of those strange creatures, the hermit saints—the Fathers of the desert. Only see this one, what a mane and claws! The two lions digging the grave there are own brothers to the holy men themselves.

ATHERTON. Yet they claimed powers as much above humanity as, to look at them, you would think them beneath it.

GOWER. Religious Nebuchadnezzars.

WILLOUGHBY. No shavelings, at any rate, like the smooth-faced sanctities of the later calendar.

ATHERTON. You will find among these anchorites almost all the wonder-working pretensions of mediæval mysticism in full development, thus early;—the discernment of spirits, gift of prophecy, miraculous powers of various kinds, ecstasy, exorcism, &c. &c. I should take St. Antony as a fair specimen of the whole class.[31]

MRS. ATHERTON. Look, here is his picture; there he stands, with crutch and bell and pig.

ATHERTON. The bell denotes his power over evil spirits, and the pig the vanquished dæmon of sensuality. In his life, by Athanasius, there is a full account of his battle with many dæmons in the shape of lions, bulls, and bears. He passed twenty years in an old castle which he found full of serpents. The power of the saint expelled those unpleasant aborigines. That nose, you see there, was supposed to possess the faculty of detecting by its miraculous keenness of scent the proximity of an evil spirit. There is an odour of iniquity, you must know, as well as an odour of sanctity. This disposition to literalize metaphors gave currency to the monkish stories of after times concerning the refreshing fragrance found to arise from the remains of disinterred saints. In fact, the materialization of the spiritual, or what passes for such, is the characteristic principle of the theurgic mysticism within the Roman Catholic Church. St. Antony, on one occasion, sees his own soul, separated from the body, carried through the air.

GOWER. A striking instance, I should say, of the objectivity of the subject.

ATHERTON. One of his visions is not without grandeur. The brethren had been questioning him one day concerning the state of departed spirits. The following night he heard a voice saying, ‘Antony, get up; go out and look!’ He obeyed, and saw a gigantic figure, whose head was in the clouds, and whose outstretched arms extended far across the sky. Many souls were fluttering in the air, and endeavouring, as they found opportunity, to fly upward past this dreadful being. Numbers of them he seized in the attempt, and dashed back upon the earth. Some escaped him and exulted above, while he raged at their success. Thus sorrowing and rejoicing were mingled together, as some were defeated and others triumphant. This, he was given to understand, was the rise and fall of souls.

WILLOUGHBY. That picture would be really Dantesque, if only a little more definite. Macarius is another great name, too, among these Christian ascetics and theurgists—the one who retired to the deserts of Nitria in the fourth century.

ATHERTON. He is not only famous for his measure of the supernatural powers ascribed to his brethren, but his homilies have been appealed to by modern theopathetic mystics as an authority for Quietism. He teaches perfectionist doctrine, certainly, but I do not think his words will bear the construction Poiret and others would give them. He was at least innocent of the sainte indifférence.[32]

MRS. ATHERTON. You said we were to discuss Dionysius the Areopagite this evening.

KATE. Pray introduce me first. I know nothing about him.

ATHERTON. No one does know who really wrote the books which passed under that name. It is generally admitted that the forgery could not have been committed earlier than the middle of the fifth century, probably somewhat later. So all I can tell you is, that somewhere or other (it is not unlikely at Constantinople, but there is no certainty), about the time when Theodoric was master of Italy—when the Vandal swarms had not yet been expelled from northern Africa—while Constantinople was in uproar between the greens and the blues, and rival ecclesiastics headed city riots with a rabble of monks, artizans, and bandit soldiery at their heels—while orthodoxy was grappling with the Monophysite and Eutychian heresies on either hand, and the religious world was rocking still with the groundswell that followed those stormy synods in which Palestine and Alexandria, Asia and Constantinople, from opposite quarters, gathered their strength against each other—a monk or priest was busy, in his quiet solitude, with the fabrication of sundry treatises and letters which were to find their way into the Church under the all-but apostolic auspices of that convert made by the Apostle of the Gentiles when he spoke on Mars Hill. The writings would seem to have been first appealed to as genuine in the year 533. As heretics cited them, their authority was disputed at the outset; but being found favourable to the growing claims of the hierarchy, and likely to be useful, they were soon recognised and employed accordingly.[33]

WILLOUGHBY. Proclus could not have been long dead, and his reputation must have been still at its height, when this anonymous—let us call him Dionysius at once—was writing his Platonized theology.

ATHERTON. With the divines of Byzantium Proclus represented the grand old world of Greek thought. Even those who wrote against him as a heathen betray the influence he exercised on their doctrines. The object of Dionysius evidently was to accommodate the theosophy of Proclus to Christianity. Another aim, not less conspicuous, was to strengthen all the pretensions of the priesthood, and to invest with a new traditionary sanction the ascetic virtues of the cloister.

Footnote 30:

All these orders gaze admiring upward, and exert an influence downward
(each on that immediately beneath it), so that they all together
reciprocally draw and are drawn toward God. Dionysius gave himself
with such zeal to the contemplation of them that he named and
distinguished them as I have done.

Footnote 31:

_Athanasii Opp. Vita S. Antonii._ The vision alluded to is related p.
498.

Footnote 32:

Poiret, _Bibliotheca Mysticorum_, p. 95. Macarius gives great
prominence to the doctrine of Union—describes the streaming in of the
Hypostatic Light—how the spiritual nature is all-pervaded by the
glory, and even the body is not so gross as to be impenetrable by the
divine radiance. Some centuries later we find the monks of Mount Athos
professing to discern this supernatural effulgence illuminating their
stomachs. Gass, _Die Mystik des N. Cabasilas_, p. 56.

Footnote 33:

In the year 533 the books of Dionysius were cited by the Severians,
and their genuineness called in question by the bishop because neither
Athanasius nor Cyril had made any allusion to them. _Acta Concil.
Hard._ ii. p. 1159.

CHAPTER II.

They that pretend to these heights call them the secrets of the
kingdom; but they are such which no man can describe; such which God
hath not revealed in the publication of the Gospel; such for the
acquiring of which there are no means prescribed, and to which no
man is obliged, and which are not in any man’s power to obtain; nor
such which it is lawful to pray for or desire; nor concerning which
we shall ever be called to account.—JEREMY TAYLOR.

‘I have here,’ said Atherton on the next evening, ‘some notes on the doctrine of this pretended Areopagite—a short summary; shall I read it?’

‘By all means.’

So the following abstract was listened to—and with creditable patience.[34]

(1.) All things have emanated from God, and the end of all is return to God. Such return—deification, he calls it—is the consummation of the creature, that God may finally be all in all. A process of evolution, a centrifugal movement in the Divine Nature, is substituted in reality for creation. The antithesis of this is the centripetal process, or movement of involution, which draws all existence towards the point of the Divine centre. The degree of real existence possessed by any being is the amount of God in that being—for God is the existence in all things. Yet He himself cannot be said to exist, for he is above existence. The more or less of God which the various creatures possess is determined by the proximity of their order to the centre.

(2.) The chain of being in the upper and invisible world, through which the Divine Power diffuses itself in successive gradations, he calls the Celestial Hierarchy. The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy is a corresponding series in the visible world. The orders of Angelic natures and of priestly functionaries correspond to each other. The highest rank of the former receive illumination immediately from God. The lowest of the heavenly imparts divine light to the highest of the earthly hierarchy. Each order strives perpetually to approximate to that immediately above itself, from which it receives the transmitted influence; so that all, as Dante describes it, draw and are drawn, and tend in common towards the centre—God.

The three triads of angelic existences, to whom answer the ranks of the terrestrial hierarchy, betrays the influence of Proclus, whose hierarchy of ideas corresponds, in a similar manner, to his hierarchy of hypostases.

GOWER. The system reminds one of those old pictures which are divided into two compartments, the upper occupied by angels and cherubs on the clouds, and the lower by human beings on the earth, gazing devoutly upward at their celestial benefactors.

ATHERTON. The work of Christ is thrown into the background to make room for the Church. The Saviour answers, with Dionysius, rather to the Logos of the Platonist than to the Son of God revealed in Scripture. He is allowed to be, as incarnate, the founder of the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy; but, as such, he is removed from men by the long chain of priestly orders, and is less the Redeemer, than remotely the Illuminator, of the species.

Purification, illumination, perfection,—the three great stages of ascent to God (which plays so important a part in almost every succeeding attempt to systematise mysticism) are mystically represented by the three sacraments,—Baptism, the Eucharist, and Unction. The Church is the great Mystagogue: its liturgy and offices a profound and elaborate system of symbolism.

(3.) The Greek theory, with its inadequate conception of the nature of sin, compels Dionysius virtually to deny the existence of evil. Everything that exists is good, the more existence the more goodness, so that evil is a coming short of existence. He hunts sin boldly from place to place throughout the universe, and drives it at last into the obscurity of the limbo he contrives for it, where it lies among things unreal.

All that exists he regards as a symbolical manifestation of the super-existent. What we call creation is the divine allegory. In nature, in Scripture, in tradition, God is revealed only in figure. This sacred imagery should be studied, but in such study we are still far from any adequate cognizance of the Divine Nature. God is above all negation and affirmation: in Him such contraries are at once identified and transcended. But by negation we approach most nearly to a true apprehension of what He is.

Negation and affirmation, accordingly, constitute the two opposed and yet simultaneous methods he lays down for the knowledge of the Infinite. These two paths, the Via Negativa (or Apophatica) and the Via Affirmativa (or Cataphatica) constitute the foundation of his mysticism. They are distinguished and elaborated in every part of his writings. The positive is the descending process. In the path downward from God, through inferior existences, the Divine Being may be said to have many names;—the negative method is one of ascent; in that, God is regarded as nameless, the inscrutable Anonymous. The symbolical or visible is thus opposed, in the Platonist style, to the mystical or ideal. To assert anything concerning a God who is above all affirmation is to speak in figure, to veil him. The more you deny concerning Him, the more of such veils do you remove. He compares the negative method of speaking concerning the Supreme to the operation of the sculptor, who strikes off fragment after fragment of the marble, and progresses by diminution.

(4.) Our highest knowledge of God, therefore, is said to consist in mystic ignorance. In omni-nescience we approach Omniscience. This Path of Negation is the highway of mysticism. It is by refraining from any exercise of the intellect or of the imagination—by self-simplification, by withdrawal into the inmost, the divine essence of our nature—that we surpass the ordinary condition of humanity, and are united in ecstasy with God. Dionysius does not insist so much on Union as the later mystics, but he believes, at all events, that the eminent saint may attain on earth an indescribable condition of soul—an elevation far transcending the reach of our natural faculties—an approach towards the beatific vision of those who are supposed to gaze directly on the Divine Essence in heaven. His disciple is perpetually exhorted to aspire to this climax of abstraction—above sight, and thought, and feeling, as to the highest aim of man.

WILLOUGHBY. What contradictions are here! With one breath he extols ineffable ignorance as the only wisdom; with the next he pretends to elucidate the Trinity, and reads you off a muster-roll of the heavenly hierarchies.

GOWER. And are not these, supplemented by the hierarchy of ecclesiastics, his real objects of worship? No man could make an actual God of that super-essential ultimatum, that blank Next-to-Nothingness which the last Neo-Platonists imagined as their Supreme. Proclus could not; Dionysius could not. What then? A reaction comes, which, after refining polytheism to an impalpable unity, restores men to polytheism once more. Up mounts speculation, rocket-like: men watch it, a single soaring star with its train of fire, and, at the height, it breaks into a scattering shower of many-coloured sparks. From that Abstraction of which nothing can be predicated, nothing can be expected. The figment above being is above benignity. So the objects of invocation are gods, demi-gods, dæmons, heroes; or, when baptized, cherubim, seraphim, thrones, dominions, powers, archangels, angels, saints; in either case, whether at Athens or at Constantinople, the excessive subtilisation of the One contributes toward the worship of the Manifold.

ATHERTON. The theology of the Neo-Platonists was always in the first instance a mere matter of logic. It so happened that they confounded Universals with causes. The miserable consequence is clear. The Highest becomes with them, as he is with Dionysius, merely the most comprehensive, the universal idea, which includes the world, as genus includes species.[35]

MRS. ATHERTON. The divinity of this old Father must be a bleak affair indeed—Christianity frozen out.

GOWER. I picture him to myself as entering with his philosophy into the theological structure of that day, like Winter into the cathedral of the woods (which an autumn of decline has begun to harm already);—what life yet lingers, he takes away,—he untwines the garlands from the pillars of the trees, extinguishes the many twinkling lights the sunshine hung wavering in the foliage, silences all sounds of singing, and fills the darkened aisles and dome with a coldly-descending mist, whose silence is extolled as above the power of utterance,—its blinding, chill obscureness lauded as clearer than the intelligence and warmer than the fervour of a simple and scriptural devotion.

ATHERTON. You have described my experience in reading him, though I must say he suggested nothing to me about your cathedral of the woods, &c. His verbose and turgid style, too, is destitute of all genuine feeling.[36] He piles epithet on epithet, throws superlative on superlative, hyperbole on hyperbole, and it is but log upon log,—he puts no fire under, neither does any come from elsewhere. He quotes Scripture—as might be expected—in the worst style, both of the schoolman and the mystic. Fragments are torn from their connexion, and carried away to suffer the most arbitrary interpretation, and strew his pages that they may appear to illustrate or justify his theory.

GOWER. How forlorn do those texts of Scripture look that you discern scattered over the works of such writers, so manifestly transported from a region of vitality and warmth to an expanse of barrenness. They make the context look still more sterile, and while they say there must be life somewhere, seem to affirm, no less emphatically, that it is not in the neighbourhood about them. They remind me of those leaves from the chestnut and the birch I once observed upon a glacier. There they lay, foreign manifestly to the treeless world in which they were found; the ice appeared to have shrunk from them, and they from the ice; each isolated leaf had made itself a cup-like cavity, a tiny open sarcophagus of crystal, in which it had lain, perhaps for several winters. Doubtless, a tempest, which had been vexing some pleasant valley far down beneath, and tearing at its trees, must have whirled them up thither. Yet the very presence of the captives reproached the poverty of the Snow-King who detained them, testifying as they did to a genial clime elsewhere, whose products that ice-world could no more put forth, than can such frozen speculations as this of Dionysius, the ripening ‘fruits of the Spirit.’

WILLOUGHBY. His lurking fatalism and his pantheism were forgiven him, no doubt, on consideration of his services to priestly assumption. He descends from his most cloudy abstraction to assert the mysterious significance and divine potency of all the minutiæ of the ecclesiastical apparatus and the sacerdotal etiquette. What a reputation these writings had throughout the middle age!

ATHERTON. Dionysius is the mythical hero of mysticism. You find traces of him everywhere. Go almost where you will through the writings of the mediæval mystics, into their depths of nihilism, up their heights of rapture or of speculation, through their over-growth of fancy, you find his authority cited, his words employed, his opinions more or less fully transmitted, somewhat as the traveller in the Pyrenees discerns the fame of the heroic Roland still preserved in the names and in the legends of the rock, the valley, or the flower. Passages from the Areopagite were culled, as their warrant and their insignia, by the priestly ambassadors of mysticism, with as much care and reverence as the sacred verbenæ that grew within the enclosure of the Capitoline by the Feciales of Rome.

MRS. ATHERTON. ‘Oh, sweet Fancy, let her loose,’ as Keats says. I think my husband has been learning in Mr. Gower’s school. How far he went to fetch that simile!

GOWER. Perhaps he has my excuse in this case, that he could not help it.

WILLOUGHBY. Or he may at once boldly put in the plea of Sterne, who in one place lays claim to the gratitude of his readers for having voyaged to fetch a metaphor all the way to the Guinea coast and back.

ATHERTON. It contributed greatly to the influence of the Areopagite that he became confounded with the Dionysius, or St. Denys, who was adopted as the patron-saint of France.

KATE. A singular fortune, indeed: so that he was two other people besides himself;—like Mrs. Malaprop’s Cerberus, three gentlemen at once.

GOWER. I think we have spent time enough upon him. Grievously do I pity the miserable monks his commentators, whose minds, submerged in the mare tenebrosum of the cloister, had to pass a term of years in the mazy arborescence of his verbiage,—like so many insects within their cells in the branches of a great coral.[37]

ATHERTON. Don’t throw away so much good compassion, I dare say it kept them out of mischief.

WILLOUGHBY. I cannot get that wretched abstraction out of my head which the Neo-Platonists call deity. How such a notion must have dislocated all their ethics from head to foot! The merest anthropomorphism had been better;—yes, Homer and Hesiod are truer, after all.

ATHERTON. I grant the gravity of the mischief. But we must not be too hard on this ecclesiastical Neo-Platonism. It does but follow Aristotle here. You remember he considers the possession of virtues as quite out of the question in the case of the gods.

GOWER. Is it possible? Why, that is as though a man should lame himself to run the faster. Here is a search after God, in which, at starting, all moral qualities are removed from him; so that the testimony of conscience cannot count for anything;—the inward directory is sealed; the clue burnt. Truly the world by wisdom knew not God!

WILLOUGHBY. This unquestionably is the fatal error of Greek speculation—the subordination of morals to the intellectual refinements of an ultra-human spiritualism. Even with Numenius you have to go down the scale to a subordinate god or hypostasis before you arrive at a deity who condescends to be good.

GOWER. How much ‘salt’ there must still have been in the mediæval Christianity to survive, as far as it did, the reception of these old ethical mistakes into the very heart of its doctrine!

ATHERTON. Aristotle reasons thus: how can the gods exhibit fortitude, who have nothing to fear—justice and honesty, without a business—temperance, without passions? Such insignificant things as moral actions are beneath them. They do not toil, as men. They do not sleep, like Endymion, ‘on the Latmian hill.’ What remains? They lead a life of contemplation;—in contemplative energy lies their blessedness.[38] So the contemplative sage who energises directly toward the central Mind—the intellectual source and ultimatum, is the true imitator of the divine perfections.

GOWER. Transfer this principle to Christianity, and the monk becomes immediately the highest style of man.

WILLOUGHBY. And you have a double morality at once: heroic or superhuman virtues, the graces of contemplation for the saintly few,—glorious in proportion to their uselessness; and ordinary virtues for the many,—social, serviceable, and secondary.

ATHERTON. Not that the schoolman would release his saint altogether from the obligations of ordinary morality; but he would say, this ordinary morality does not fit the contemplatist for heaven—it is but a preliminary exercise—a means to an end, and that end, the transcendence of everything creaturely, a superhuman exaltation, the ceasing from his labours, and swooning as it were into the divine repose.

WILLOUGHBY. Then I must put in a word for our mystics. It is not they who corrupted Christian morals by devising this divorce between the virtues of daily life and certain other virtues which are unhuman, anti-terrestrial, hypercreaturely—forgive the word—they drive us hard for language. They found the separation already accomplished; they only tilled with ardour the plot of ground freely allotted them by the Church.

ATHERTON. Just so; in this doctrine of moral dualism—the prolific mother of mystics—Aquinas is as far gone as Bernard.

GOWER. The mention of Bernard’s name makes one impatient to get away from the Greek Church, westward.

ATHERTON. We may say farewell to Byzantium now. That Greek Church never grew beyond what it was in the eighth and ninth centuries.

GOWER. I have always imagined it a dwarf, watching a Nibelungen hoard, which after all never enriches anybody. Nothing but that tedious counting, and keeping tidy, and standing sentinel, for ages.

ATHERTON. See what good a little fighting does. The Greek Church had its scholastic element—witness John of Damascus; it had its mystical—as we have seen; but neither the one nor the other was ever developed to such vigour as to assert itself against its rival, and struggle for mastery. In the West the two principles have their battles, their armistices, their reconciliations, and both are the better. In the East they are coupled amicably in the leash of antiquity, and dare not so much as snarl.

WILLOUGHBY. I suppose the mysticism of the Greek Church was more objective, as the Germans would say,—dependent on its sacramental media and long trains of angelic and human functionaries, handing down illumination; that of the West, subjective.

ATHERTON. That will be generally true. The eastern mysticism creeps under the sacerdotal vestments, is never known to quit the precincts of church and cloister, clings close to the dalmatica, and lives on whiffs of frankincense. The western is often to be found far from candle, book, and bell, venturing to worship without a priest.

In short, as Gower would antithetically say, the mystic of the East is always a slave, the mystic of the West often a rebel; Symbolism is the badge of the one, Individualism the watch-word of the other.

GOWER. How spiteful you are to-night, Atherton. I propose that we break up, and hear nothing more you may have to say.

Note to Page 121.

Aristotle extols contemplation, because it does not require means and opportunity, as do the social virtues, generosity, courage, &c. Plotinus lays still more stress on his distinction between the mere political virtues—which constitute simply a preparatory, purifying process, and the superior, or exemplary—those divine attainments whereby man is united with God. Aquinas adopts this classification, and distinguishes the virtues as exemplares, purgatoriæ and politicæ. He even goes so far as to give to each of the cardinal virtues a contemplative and ascetic turn; designating Prudence, in its highest exercise, as contempt for all things worldly; Temperance is abstraction from the sensuous; Fortitude, courage in sustaining ourselves in the aerial regions of contemplation, remote from the objects of sense; Justice, the absolute surrender of the spirit to this law of its aspiration. He argues that, as man’s highest blessedness is a beatitude surpassing the limits of human nature, he can be prepared for it only by having added to that nature certain principles from the divine;—such principles are the theological or superhuman virtues, Faith, Hope, and Charity. See Münscher’s Dogmengeschichte, 2 Abth. 2 Absch. § 136.

In consequence of the separation thus established between the human and the divine, we shall find the mystics of the fourteenth century representing regeneration almost as a process of dehumanization, and as the substitution of a divine nature for the human in the subject of grace. No theologians could have been further removed from Pelagianism; few more forgetful than these ardent contemplatists that divine influence is vouchsafed, not to obliterate and supersede our natural capacities by some almost miraculous faculty, but to restore and elevate man’s nature, to realise its lost possibilities, and to consecrate it wholly, in body and soul—not in spirit, merely—to the service of God.

With one voice both schoolmen and mystics would reason thus:—‘Is not heaven the extreme opposite of this clouded, vexed, and sensuous life? Then we approach its blessedness most nearly by a life the most contrary possible to the secular,—by contemplation, by withdrawment, by total abstraction from sense.’

This is one view of our best preparation for the heavenly world. At the opposite pole stands Behmen’s doctrine, far less dangerous, and to be preferred if we must have an extreme, viz., that the believer is virtually in the heavenly state already—that eternity should be to us as time, and time as eternity.

Between these two stands the scriptural teaching. St. Paul does not attempt to persuade himself that earth is heaven, that faith is sight, that hope is fruition. He groans here, being burdened; he longs to have done with shortcoming and with conflict; to enter on the vision face to face, on the unhindered service of the state of glory. But he does not deem it the best preparation for heaven to mimic upon earth an imaginary celestial repose,—he will rather labour to-day his utmost at the work to-day may bring,—he will fight the good fight, he will finish his course, and then receive the crown.

Footnote 34:

For the passages authenticating this account, see _Dion. Areop. Opp._
as follows:—

(1.) _De Div. Nom._ c. iv. § 1; v. 3, 6, 8; vi. 2, 3; i. 1. _De Eccl.
Hier._ i. 3.

(2.) _De Cœl. Hier._ i. 2, 3; v. 3, 4; vii. _De Eccl. Hier._ i. 1; x.
3. The resemblance of this whole process to the Pröodos and Epistrophe
of Plotinus is sufficiently obvious.

(3.) _De Div. Nom._ iv. 20, p. 488. The chase after evil runs through
sections 24-34. He sums up in one place thus:—‘In a word, good springs
from the sole and complete cause, but evil from many and partial
defects. God knows the evil as good, and with him the causes of things
evil are beneficent powers.’ Proclus seeks escape from the hopeless
difficulty in precisely the same way.

Concerning the _Via negativa_ and _affirmativa_, see _De Div. Nom._ i.
1, 5, 4; _De Cœl. Hier._ xv.; and _De Myst. Theol._ i. 2, 3.

(4.) _Ibid._ Also, _Ep. ad. Dorotheum_, _De Myst. Theol._ iii. pp.
714, 721.

Footnote 35:

See Meier, ‘_Dionysii Areop. et Mysticorum sæculi_ xiv. _doctrinæ
inter se comparantur_.’ He remarks justly ‘causæ ad Causatum
relationem cum relatione generis ad speciem confudit’, p. 13.

Footnote 36:

The _hyper_ and the _a_ privative are in constant requisition with
Dionysius. He cannot suffer any ordinary epithet to go alone, and many
of his adjectives march pompously, attended by a _hyper_ on one side,
and a superlative termination on the other.

Footnote 37:

The later Greek theology modified the most objectionable parts of the
Dionysian doctrine, while continuing to reverence him as a Father. See
Ullmann’s _Nicholas von Methone_.

Footnote 38:

Aristot. Eth. Nic. lib. x. c. 8.—See Note, Page 123.

BOOK THE FIFTH MYSTICISM IN THE LATIN CHURCH

CHAPTER I.

Look up, my Ethel!
When on the glances of the upturned eye
The plumed thoughts take travel, and ascend
Through the unfathomable purple mansions,
Threading the golden fires, and ever climbing
As if ’twere homewards winging—at such time
The native soul, distrammelled of dim earth,
Doth know herself immortal, and sits light
Upon her temporal perch.

VIOLENZIA.

The winter had now broken up his encampment, and was already in full retreat. With the approach of spring the mystical conversations of our friends entered on the period of the Middle Ages. The lengthening mornings found Atherton early at his desk, sipping a solitary and preliminary cup of coffee, and reading or writing. Willoughby felt his invention quickened by the season, and a new elasticity pervade him. His romance advanced with fewer hindrances from that cross-grained dissatisfaction which used so frequently to disfigure his manuscript with the thorny scratches and interlineations of an insatiable correction.

Gower, too, could enter once more on the enjoyment of his favourite walk before breakfast. In wandering through the dewy meadows, in ‘the slanting sunlight of the dawn,’ he felt, as we all must, that there is truth in what the chorus of mystics have ever said or sung about the inadequacy of words to express the surmise and aspiration of the soul. In a morning solitude there seems to lie about our fields of thought an aerial wealth too plenteous to be completely gathered into the granary of language.

O who would mar the season with dull speech,
That must tie up our visionary meanings
And subtle individual apprehensions
Into the common tongue of every man?
And of the swift and scarce detected visitants
Of our illusive thoughts seek to make prisoners,
And only grasp their garments.

It is one of the pleasant pastimes of the spring to watch day by day the various ways in which the trees express, by a physiognomy and gesture of their own, their expectation of the summer. Look at those young and delicate ones, alive with impatience to the tip of every one of the thousand sprays that tremble distinct against the sky, swaying uneasily to and fro in the sharp morning breeze. They seem longing to slip their rooted hold upon the earth, and float away to embrace their bridegroom sun in the air. And see those veterans—what a gnarled, imperturbable gravity in those elder citizens of park or wood: they are used to it; let the day bring new weatherstains or new buds, they can bide their time. And are they not already wrapped, many of them, in hood and habit of dark glossy ivy—woodland senatorial fur—they can afford to wait. Here, look, close beside us, the eyes of the buds are even now peeping through the black lattice of the boughs, and those amber-coloured clouds overhead are looking them promises of kindly showers as they sail by. What is that sparkling on yonder hill? Only the windows of a house with eastern aspect: the sun lights his beacon-fire regularly there, to signal to his children down in the hollow that he is coming, though they cannot see him yet, and will roll away the cloud from the valley mouth, and make the place of their night-sepulchre glorious with his shining raiment.

Amidst these delights of nature, and the occupation of his art, Gower thought sometimes of the mystics who enjoy such things so little. He had even promised to write a short paper on the mystical schoolmen of St. Victor, Hugo and Richard, and was himself surprised to find how soon he warmed to the subject—with what zest he sought for glimpses of cloister-life in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

When next our friends met in the library, Gower expressed his hearty and unceremonious satisfaction at their having done, as he hoped, with that ‘old bore,’ Dionysius Areopagita. By none was the sentiment echoed with more fervour than by Atherton, whose conscience perhaps smote him for some dry reading he had inflicted on his auditors. But he made no apology, that Gower might not think he took his remark to himself, and return him a compliment.

WILLOUGHBY. To see how this world goes round! Only think of Proclus having his revenge after all,—he and his fellows ruling from their urns when dead the Christianity which banished them while living.

ATHERTON. Not altogether satisfactory, either, could he have looked in upon the world, and seen the use to which they put him. It was true that, under the name of Dionysius, his ideas were reverenced and expounded by generations of dreaming monks,—that under that name he contributed largely to those influences which kept stagnant the religious world of the East for some nine hundred years. But it was also true that his thoughts were thus conserved only to serve the purpose of his ancient enemies; so that he assisted to confer omnipotence on those Christian priests whom he had cursed daily in his heart while lecturing, sacrificing, and conjuring at Athens.

GOWER. Again I say, let us turn from the stereotyped Greek Church to the West,—I want to hear about St. Bernard.

ATHERTON. Presently. Let us try and apprehend clearly the way in which Neo-Platonism influenced mediæval Europe.

WILLOUGHBY. A trifling preliminary! Atherton means us to stay here all night. You may as well resign yourself, Gower.

ATHERTON. Never fear; I only want to look about me, and see where we are just now. Suppose ourselves sent back to the Middle Age—what will be our notion of Platonism? We can’t read a line of Greek. We see Plato only through Plotinus, conserved by Augustine, handed down by Apuleius and Boethius. We reverence Aristotle, but we care only for his dialectics. We only assimilate from antiquity what seems to fall within the province of the Church. Plato appears to us surrounded by that religious halo with which Neo-Platonism invested philosophy when it grew so devotional. We take Augustine’s word for it that Plotinus really enunciated the long-hidden esoteric doctrine of Plato. The reverent, ascetic, ecstatic Platonism of Alexandria seems to us so like Christianity, that we are almost ready to believe Plato a sort of harbinger for Christ. We are devoted Realists; and Realism and Asceticism make the common ground of Platonist and Christian. If scholastic in our tendencies, Aristotle may be oftener on our lips; if mystical, Plato; but we overlook their differences. We believe, on Neo-Platonist authority, that the two great ones were not the adversaries which had been supposed. Aristotle is in the forecourt, and through study of him we pass into that inner shrine where the rapt Plato (all but a monk in our eyes) is supposed to exemplify the contemplative life.

Dionysius in the East, then, is soporific. Mysticism, there, has nothing to do save drowsily to label all the Church gear with symbolic meanings of wondrous smallness.

Dionysius in the West has come into a young world where vigorous minds have been long accustomed to do battle on the grandest questions; grace and free-will—how they work together; sin and redemption—what they really are; faith and reason—what may be their limits.

GOWER. Compare those great controversies with that miserable Monophysite and Monothelite dispute for which one can never get up an interest. How much we owe still to that large-souled Augustine.[39]

ATHERTON. Well, for this very reason, they might worship Dionysius as a patron saint to their hearts’ content at St. Denis, but he could never be in France the master mystagogue they made him at Byzantium. His name, and some elements in his system, became indeed an authority and rallying point for the mystical tendency of the West, but the system as a whole was never appropriated. He was reverentially dismembered, and so mixed up with doctrines and questions foreign to him, by a different order of minds, with another culture, and often with another purpose, that I would defy his ghost to recognise his own legacy to the Church.

GOWER. Good Hugo of St. Victor, in his Commentary on the Hierarchies, does certainly wonderfully soften down the pantheism of his original. Dionysius comes out from under his hands almost rational, quite a decent Christian.

ATHERTON. And before Hugo, if you remember, John Scotus Erigena translated him, and elaborated on his basis a daring system of his own, pantheistic I fear, but a marvel of intellectual power—at least two or three centuries in advance of his age. And these ideas of Erigena’s, apparently forgotten, filter through, and reappear once more at Paris in the free-thinking philosophy of such men as David of Dinant and Amalric of Bena.[40]

WILLOUGHBY. Strange enough: so that, could Dionysius have returned to the world in the thirteenth century, he, the worshipper of the priesthood, would have found sundry of his own principles in a new livery, doing service in the ranks of the laity against the clergy, and strengthening the hands of that succession of heretics so long a thorn in the side of the corrupt hierarchy of France.

ATHERTON. In Germany, a century later, many of the mystics put Platonist doctrine to a similar use. In fact, I think we may say generally that the Neo-Platonist element, which acted as a mortal opiate in the East, became a vivifying principle in the West. There the Alexandrian doctrine of Emanation was abandoned, its pantheism nullified or rejected, but its allegorical interpretation, its exaltation, true or false, of the spirit above the letter,—all this was retained, and Platonism and mysticism together created a party in the Church the sworn foes of mere scholastic quibbling, of an arid and lifeless orthodoxy, and at last of the more glaring abuses which had grown up with ecclesiastical pretension.

GOWER. Now for Bernard. I see the name there on that open page of your note-book. Read away—no excuses.

ATHERTON. Some old notes. But before I read them, look at this rough plan of the valley of Clairvaux, with its famous abbey. I made it after reading the Descriptio Monasterii Claræ-Vallensis, inserted in the Benedictine edition of Bernard’s works. It will assist us to realize the locality in which this great church-father of the twelfth century passed most of his days. It was once called the Valley of Wormwood—was the ill-omened covert of banditti; Bernard and his monks come clearing and chanting, praying and planting; and lo! the absinthial reputation vanishes—the valley smiles—is called, and made, Clairvaux, or Brightdale.

KATE. Transformed, in short, into ‘a serious paradise,’ as Mr. Thackeray would say.

ATHERTON. Yes, you puss. Here, you see, I have marked two ranges of hills which, parting company, enclose the broad sweep of our Brightdale, or Fairvalley. Where the hills are nearest together you see the one eminence covered with vines, the other with fruit trees; and on the sides and tops dusky groups of monks have had many a hard day’s work, getting rid of brambles and underwood, chopping and binding faggots, and preparing either slope to yield them wherewithal to drink, from the right hand, and to eat, from the left. Not far from this entrance to the valley stands the huge pile of the abbey itself, with its towers and crosses, its loop-hole windows and numerous outbuildings. That is the river Aube (Alba) running down between the heights; here, you see, is a winding channel the monks have dug, that a branch of it may flow in under the convent walls. Good river! how hard it works for them. No sooner under the archway than it turns the great wheel that grinds their corn, fills their caldarium, toils in the tannery, sets the fulling-mill agoing. Hark to the hollow booming sound, and the regular tramp, tramp of those giant wooden feet; and there, at last, out rushes the stream at the other side of the building, all in a fume, as if it had been ground itself into so much snowy foam. On this other side, you see it cross, and join the main course of its river again. Proceeding now along the valley, with your back to the monastery, you pass through the groves of the orchard, watered by crossing runnels from the river, overlooked by the infirmary windows—a delightful spot for contemplative invalids. Then you enter the great meadow—what a busy scene in hay-making time, all the monks out there, helped by the additional hands of donati and conductitii, and the country folk from all the region round about,—they have been working since sunrise, and will work till vespers; when the belfry sounds for prayers at the fourth hour after sunrise, they will sing their psalms in the open air to save time, and doubtless dine there too—a monastic pic-nic. On one side of the meadow is a small lake, well stored with fish. See some of the brethren angling on its bank, where those osiers have been planted to preserve the margin; and two others have put off in a boat and are throwing their net, with edifying talk at whiles perhaps, on the parallel simplicity of fish and sinners. At the extremity of the meadow are two large farm-houses, one on each side the river; you might mistake them for monasteries from their size and structure, but for the ploughs and yokes of oxen you see about.

MRS. ATHERTON. Thank you; so much for the place; and the man—his personal appearance—is anything known about that?

ATHERTON. You must imagine him somewhat above the middle height, very thin, with a clear, transparent, red-and-white complexion; always retaining some colour on his hollow cheeks; his hair light; his beard inclining to red—in his later years, mixed with white; his whole aspect noble and persuasive, and when he speaks under excitement losing every trace of physical feebleness in the lofty transformation of a benign enthusiasm.[41]

Now I shall trouble you with some of my remarks, on his mysticism principally. You will conceive what a world of business he must have had upon his shoulders, even when at home at Clairvaux, and acting as simple abbot; so much detail to attend to,—so many difficulties to smooth, and quarrels to settle, and people to advise, in connexion with his own numerous charge and throughout all the surrounding neighbourhood; while to all this was added the care of so many infant monasteries, springing up at the rate of about four a year, in every part of Europe, founded on the pattern of Clairvaux, and looking to him for counsel and for men. I scarcely need remind you how struggling Christendom sent incessant monks and priests, couriers and men-at-arms, to knock and blow horn at the gate of Clairvaux Abbey; for Bernard, and none but he, must come out and fight that audacious Abelard; Bernard must decide between rival Popes, and cross the Alps time after time to quiet tossing Italy; Bernard alone is the hope of fugitive Pope and trembling Church; he only can win back turbulent nobles, alienated people, recreant priests, when Arnold of Brescia is in arms at Rome, and when Catharists, Petrobrusians, Waldenses, and heretics of every shade, threaten the hierarchy on either side the Alps; and at the preaching of Bernard the Christian world pours out to meet the disaster of a new crusade.

GOWER. And accomplishing a work like this with that emaciated, wretchedly dyspeptic frame of his!—first of all exerting his extraordinary will to the utmost to unbuild his body; and then putting forth the same self-control to make the ruins do the work of a sound structure.

ATHERTON. Could we have seen him at home at Clairvaux, after one of those famous Italian journeys, no look or word would have betrayed a taint of spiritual pride, though every rank in church and state united to do him honour—though great cities would have made him almost by force their spiritual king—though the blessings of the people and the plaudits of the council followed the steps of the peacemaker—and though, in the belief of all, a dazzling chain of miracles had made his pathway glorious. We should have found him in the kitchen, rebuking by his example some monk who grumbled at having to wash the pots and pans; on the hill-side, cutting his tale and bearing his burthen with the meanest novice; or seen him oiling his own boots, as they say the arch-tempter did one day; we should have interrupted him in the midst of his tender counsel to some distressed soul of his cloistered flock, or just as he had sat down to write a sermon on a passage in Canticles against the next church-festival.[42] But now to my notes. (Atherton reads.)

In considering the religious position of Bernard, I find it not at
all remarkable that he should have been a mystic,—very remarkable
that he should not have been much more the mystic than he was. This
moderation may be attributed partly to his constant habit of
searching the Scriptures—studying them devotionally for himself,
unencumbered with the commentaries reverenced by tradition.[43]
Rigid exemplar and zealous propagator of monasticism as he was,
these hours with the Bible proved a corrective not unblessed, and
imparted even to the devotion of the cloister a healthier tone. Add
to this his excellent natural judgment, and the combination, in his
case, of the active with the contemplative life. He knew the world
and men; he stood with his fellows in the breach, and the shock of
conflict spoiled him for a dreamer. The distractions over which he
expended so much complaint were his best friends. They were a
hindrance in the way to the monastic ideal of virtue—a help toward
the Christian. They prevented his attaining that pitch of
uselessness to which the conventual life aspires, and brought him
down a little nearer to the meaner level of apostolic labour. They
made him the worse monk, and by so much the better man.

With Bernard the monastic life is the one thing needful. He began
life by drawing after him into the convent all his kindred; sweeping
them one by one from the high seas of the world with the
irresistible vortex of his own religious fervour. His incessant cry
for Europe is—Better monasteries, and more of them. Let these
ecclesiastical castles multiply; let them cover and command the
land, well garrisoned with men of God, and then, despite all heresy
and schism, theocracy will flourish, the earth shall yield her
increase, and all people praise the Lord. Who so wise as Bernard to
win souls for Christ—that is to say, recruits for the cloister? With
what eloquence he paints the raptures of contemplation, the vanity
and sin of earthly ambition or of earthly love! Wherever in his
travels Bernard may have preached, there, presently, exultant monks
must open wide their doors to admit new converts. Wherever he goes
he bereaves mothers of their children, the aged of their last solace
and last support; praising those the most who leave most misery
behind them. How sternly does he rebuke those Rachels who mourn and
will not be comforted for children dead to them for ever! What
vitriol does he pour into the wounds when he asks if they will drag
their son down to perdition with themselves by resisting the
vocation of heaven! whether it was not enough that they brought him
forth sinful to a world of sin, and will they now, in their insane
affection, cast him into the fires of hell?[44] Yet Bernard is not
hard-hearted by nature. He can pity this disgraceful weakness of the
flesh. He makes such amends as superstition may. I will be a father
to him, he says. Alas! cold comfort. You, their hearts will answer,
whose flocks are countless, would nothing content you but our ewe
lamb? Perhaps some cloister will be, for them too, the last resource
of their desolation. They will fly for ease in their pain to the
system which caused it. Bernard hopes so. So inhuman is the humanity
of asceticism; cruel its tender mercies; thus does it depopulate the
world of its best in order to improve it.

To measure, then, the greatness of Bernard, let me clearly apprehend
the main purpose of his life. It was even this convent-founding,
convent-ruling business. This is his proper praise, that, though
devoted body and soul, to a system so false, he himself should have
retained and practised so much of truth.

The task of history is a process of selection. The farther we recede
from a period, the more do we eliminate of what interests us no
longer. A few leading events stand clearly out as characteristic of
the time, and about them all our details are clustered. But when
dealing with an individual, or with the private life of any age, the
method must be reversed, and we must encumber ourselves again with
all the cast-off baggage that strews the wayside of time’s march.

So with Bernard. The Abelard controversy, the schism, the quarrels
of pope and emperor, the crusade, are seen by us—who know what
happened afterwards—in their true importance. These facts make the
epoch, and throw all else into shade. But we could not so have
viewed them in the press and confusion of the times that saw them
born. Bernard and his monks were not always thinking of Abelard or
Anaclet, of Arnold of Brescia, Roger of Sicily, or Lothaire. In the
great conflicts which these names recal to our minds, Bernard bore
his manful part as a means to an end. Many a sleepless night must
they have cost him, many a journey full of anxiety and hardship,
many an agonizing prayer, on the eve of a crisis calling for all his
skill and all his courage. But these were difficulties which he was
summoned to encounter on his road to the great object of his
life—the establishment of ecclesiastical supremacy by means of the
conventual institute. The quarrels within the Church, and between
the Church and the State, must be in some sort settled before his
panacea could be applied to the sick body of the time. In the midst
of such controversies a host of minor matters would demand his
care,—to him of scarcely less moment, to us indifferent. There would
be the drawing out of convent charters and convent rules, the
securing of land, of money, of armed protection for the rapidly
increasing family of monasteries; election of abbots and of bishops;
guidance of the same in perplexity; holding of synods and councils,
with the business thereto pertaining; delinquencies and spiritual
distresses of individuals; jealous squabbles to be soothed between
his Cistercian order and them of Cluny; suppression of clerical
luxury and repression of lay encroachment, &c. &c. Thus the year
1118 would be memorable to Bernard and his monks, not so much
because in it Gelasius ascended the chair of St. Peter, and the
Emperor Henry gave him a rival, or even because then the order of
Knights Templars took its rise, so much as from their joy and labour
about the founding of two new monasteries,—because that year saw the
establishment of the first daughter of Clairvaux, the Abbey of
Fontaines, in the diocese of Chalons; and of a sister, Fontenay,
beside the Yonne;—the one a growth northward, among the dull plains
of Champagne, with their lazy streams and monotonous poplars; the
other a southern colony, among the luscious slopes of vine-clad
Burgundy.[45]

Bernard had his wish. He made Clairvaux the cynosure of all
contemplative eyes. For any one who could exist at all as a monk,
with any satisfaction to himself, that was the place above all
others. Brother Godfrey, sent out to be first abbot of Fontenay,—as
soon as he has set all things in order there, returns, only too
gladly, from that rich and lovely region, to re-enter his old cell,
to walk around, delightedly revisiting the well-remembered spots,
among the trees or by the waterside, marking how the fields and
gardens have come on, and relating to the eager brethren (for even
Bernard’s monks have curiosity) all that befel him in his work. He
would sooner be third prior at Clairvaux than abbot of Fontenay. So,
too, with brother Humbert, commissioned in like manner to regulate
Igny Abbey (fourth daughter of Clairvaux). He soon comes back, weary
of the labour and sick for home, to look on the Aube once more, to
hear the old mills go drumming and droning, with that monotony of
muffled sound—the associate of his pious reveries—often heard in his
dreams when far away; to set his feet on the very same flagstone in
the choir where he used to stand, and to be happy. But Bernard,
though away in Italy, toiling in the matter of the schism, gets to
hear of his return, and finds time to send him across the Alps a
letter of rebuke for this criminal self-pleasing, whose terrible
sharpness must have darkened the poor man’s meditations for many a
day.[46]

Bernard had farther the satisfaction of improving and extending
monasticism to the utmost; of sewing together, with tolerable
success, the rended vesture of the papacy; of suppressing a more
popular and more scriptural Christianity, for the benefit of his
despotic order; of quenching for a time, by the extinction of
Abelard, the spirit of free inquiry; and of seeing his ascetic and
superhuman ideal of religion everywhere accepted as the genuine type
of Christian virtue.

At the same time the principles advocated by Bernard were deprived,
in his hands, of their most noxious elements. His sincere piety, his
large heart, his excellent judgment, always qualify, and seem
sometimes to redeem, his errors. But the well-earned glory and the
influence of a name achieved by an ardour and a toil almost passing
human measure, were thrown into the wrong scale. The mischiefs
latent in the teaching of Bernard become ruinously apparent in those
who entered into his labours. His successes proved eventually the
disasters of Christendom. One of the best of men made plain the way
for some of the worst. Bernard, while a covert for the fugitive
pontiff, hunted out by insurgent people or by wrathful emperor,
would yet impose some rational limitations on the papal
authority.[47] But the chair upheld by Bernard was to be filled by
an Innocent III., whose merciless arrogance should know no bounds.
Bernard pleaded nobly for the Jews, decimated in the crusading
fury.[48] Yet the atrocities of Dominic were but the enkindling of
fuel which Bernard had amassed. Disciple of tradition as he was, he
would allow the intellect its range; zealous as he might be for
monastic rule, the spontaneous inner life of devotion was with him
the end—all else the means. Ere long, the end was completely
forgotten in the means. In succeeding centuries, the Church of Rome
retained what life it could by repeating incessantly the remedy of
Bernard. As corruption grew flagrant, new orders were devised.
Bernard saw not, nor those who followed in his steps, that the evil
lay, not in the defect or abuse of vows and rules, but in the
introduction of vows and rules at all,—that these unnatural
restraints must always produce unnatural excesses.

What is true concerning the kind of religious impulse imparted to
Europe by the great endeavour of Bernard’s life is no less so as
regards the character of his mysticism.

In the theology of Bernard reason has a place, but not the right
one. His error in this respect is the primary source of that
mystical bias so conspicuous in his religious teaching. Like Anselm,
he bids you believe first, and understand, if possible, afterwards.
He is not prepared to admit the great truth that if Reason yields to
Faith, and assigns itself anywhere a limit, it must be on grounds
satisfactory to Reason. To any measure of Anselm’s remarkable
speculative ability, Bernard could lay no claim. He was at home only
in the province of practical religion. But to enquiries and
reasonings such as those in which Anselm delighted, he was ready to
award, not blame, but admiration. Faith, with Bernard, receives the
treasure of divine truth, as it were, wrapped up (_involutum_);
Understanding may afterwards cautiously unfold the envelope, and
peep at the prize, but may never examine the contents first, to
determine whether it shall be received or not.[49] If the chase be
so dear to that mighty hunter, Intellect, he shall have his sport,
on certain conditions. Let him admit that the Church has caught and
killed the quarry of truth, and brought it to his door. That
granted, he may, if he will, cry boot and saddle, ride out to see
where the game broke cover, or gallop with hounds, and halloo over
hill and dale, pursuing an imaginary object, and learning how truth
_might_ have been run down. Great, accordingly, was Bernard’s horror
when he beheld Abelard throwing open to discussion the dogmas of the
Church; when he saw the alacrity with which such questions were
taken up all over France, and learnt that not the scholars of Paris
merely, but an ignorant and stripling laity were discussing every
day, at street corners, in hall, in cottage, the mysteries of the
Trinity and the Immaculate Conception. Faith, he cried, believes;
does not discuss; Abelard holds God in suspicion, and will not
believe even Him without reason given.[50] At the same time, the
_credo ut intelligam_ of Bernard is no indolent or constrained
reception of a formula. Faith is the divine persuasion of the pure
in heart and life. Bernard would grant that different minds will
apprehend the same truth in different aspects; that an absolute
uniformity is impossible. But when faith is made to depend so
entirely on the state of the heart, such concessions are soon
withdrawn. A difference in opinion from the acknowledged standard of
piety is regarded as a sure sign of a depraved heart. A divine
illumination as to doctrine is assumed for those whose practical
holiness caused them to shine as lights in the Church.[51]

Thus, on the elementary question of faith, the mystical tendency of
Bernard is apparent; the subjective and even the merely emotional
element assumes undue prominence; and a way is opened for the error
incident to all mysticism—the unwarrantable identification of our
own thoughts with the mind of God. But if, in his starting-point,
Bernard be a mystic, much more so is he in the goal he strains every
power to reach.

The design of Christianity is, in his idea, not to sanctify and
elevate all our powers, to raise us to our truest manhood,
accomplishing in every excellence all our faculties both of mind and
body, but to teach us to nullify our corporeal part, to seclude
ourselves, by abstraction, from its demands, and to raise us, while
on earth, to a super-human exaltation above the flesh,—a vision and
a glory approaching that of the angelic state. Thus he commences his
analysis of meditation by describing the felicity of angels. They
have not to study the Creator in his works, slowly ascending by the
media of sense. They behold all things in the Word—more perfect
there, by far, than in themselves. Their knowledge is immediate—a
direct intuition of the primal ideas of things in the mind of the
Creator. To such measure of this immediate intuition as mortals may
attain he exhorts the devout mind to aspire. They do well who
piously employ their senses among the things of sense for the divine
glory and the good of others. Happier yet are they who, with a true
philosophy, survey and explore things visible, that they may rise
through them to a knowledge of the Invisible. But most of all does
he extol the state of those who, not by gradual stages of ascent,
but by a sudden rapture, are elevated at times, like St. Paul, to
the immediate vision of heavenly things. Such favoured ones are
adepts in the third and highest species of meditation. Totally
withdrawn into themselves, they are not only, like other good men,
dead to the body and the world, and raised above the grosser
hindrances of sense, but even beyond those images and similitudes
drawn from visible objects which colour and obscure our ordinary
conceptions of spiritual truths.[52]

But if, so far, Bernard betrays the mystic, in this ambition to
transcend humanity and to anticipate the sight and fruition of the
celestial state, let him have full credit for the moderation which
preserved him from going farther. Compared with that of many
subsequent mystics, the mysticism of Bernard is sobriety itself.
From the practical vice of mysticism in his Church,—its tendency to
supersede by extraordinary attainments the humbler and more arduous
Christian virtues—Bernard was as free as any one could be in those
times. Against the self-indulgence which would sacrifice every
active external obligation to a life of contemplative sloth he
protested all his days, by word and by example. He is equally
removed from the pantheistic extreme of Eckart and the imaginative
extravagances of St. Theresa. His doctrine of Union with God does
not surrender our personality or substitute God for the soul in man.
When he has occasion to speak, with much hesitation and genuine
humility, of the highest point of his own experience, he has no
wonderful visions to relate. The visit of the Saviour to his soul
was unattended by visible glory, by voices, tastes, or odours; it
vindicated its reality only by the joy which possessed him, and the
new facility with which he brought forth the practical fruits of the
Spirit.[53] He prays God for peace and joy and charity to all men,
and leaves other exaltations of devotion to apostles and apostolic
men,—‘the high hills to the harts and the climbing goats.’ The
fourth and highest stage of love in his scale,—that transformation
and utter self-loss in which we love ourselves only for the sake of
God, he believes unattainable in this life,—certainly beyond his own
reach. To the mystical death, self-annihilation, and holy
indifference of the Quietists, he is altogether a stranger.[54]

It is worth while at least to skim and dip among his sermons on the
Canticles. The _Song of Solomon_ is a trying book for a man like
Bernard, and those expositions do contain much sad stuff,
interspersed, however, with many fine reaches of thought and
passages of consummate eloquence. Mystical interpretation runs riot.
Everything is symbolized. Metaphors are elaborated into allegories,
similitudes broken up into divers branches, and about each
ramification a new set of fancies clustered. The sensuous imagery
borrowed from love and wine—the kisses, bedchambers, and winecellars
of the soul, remind us at every page of that luscious poetry in
which the Persian Sufis are said to veil the aspirations of the
spirit of man after its Maker. Yet, with all the faults of a taste
so vicious there is no affectation, no sentimentality, nothing
intentionally profane. It was with Bernard a duty and a delight to
draw as much meaning as possible from the sacred text, by the aid of
an inexhaustible fancy and an inventive ingenuity in that way, which
only Swedenborg has surpassed. Even in his letters on comparatively
ordinary topics, he always gives a certain largeness to his subject
by his lofty imaginative style of handling it. He seldom confines
himself to the simple point in hand, but starts off to fetch for it
adornments, illustrations, or sanctions from quarters the most
remote, or heights the most awful. Always in earnest, yet always the
rhetorician, he seems to write as though viewing, not the subject
itself, but some vast reflection of it projected on the sky. In
those sermons on _Solomon’s Song_, it is generally rather the
glowing and unseemly diction, than the thought, we have to blame.
With such allowance, it is not difficult to discern, under that
luxuriance of flowers and weeds, many a sentiment true and dear to
the Christian heart in every age.

Bernard appears to have believed himself invested on some occasions
with miraculous powers. So far he has a place in the province of
theurgic mysticism. Perhaps the worst thing of this sort to be laid
to his charge is his going so far as he did towards endorsing the
prophecies of the Abbess Hildegard.[55]

Note to page 131.

The writings of Augustine handed Neo-Platonism down to posterity as the original and esoteric doctrine of the first followers of Plato. He enumerates the causes which led, in his opinion, to the negative position assumed by the Academics, and to the concealment of their real opinions. He describes Plotinus as a resuscitated Plato. Contra Academ. iii. 17-20.

He commends Porphyry for his measure of scepticism as regards Theurgy, and bestows more than due praise on the doctrine of Illumination held by Plotinus, for its similarity to the Christian truth concerning divine grace. De Civitate Dei, x. 10; x. 2.

He gives a scale of the spiritual degrees of ascent to God, formed after the Platonist model (the ἐπαναβαθμοὶ of the Symposium), and so furnished a precedent for all the attempts of a similar kind in which scholastic mysticism delighted to exercise its ingenuity. De Quantitate Animæ, c. 35.

He enumerates three kinds of perception,—corporeal, intellectual (scientia) and spiritual (sapientia); and in describing the last uses the words introrsum ascendere (De Trin. xii. 15; and comp. De Lib. Arbit. ii. 12). But this phrase does not appear to have carried, with Augustine, the sense it bore when gladly adopted by mystical divines of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. He says elsewhere that man, like the prodigal, must come to himself before he can arise and go to his Father. (Retract. i. 8.) Here what the wanderer finds within is the voice of conscience, and in this sense it is quite true that the step inward is a step upward. But it is not true that the inmost is the highest in the sense that man is able by abstraction and introspection to discover within himself a light which shall supersede, or supplement, or even supply the place of external Revelation.

Note to page 131.

JOHN SCOTUS ERIGENA.—This remarkable man began to teach in the ‘School of the Palace,’ under Charles the Bald, about the middle of the ninth century. He translated Dionysius, took part in the Gottschalk controversy, and, at last, when persecuted for the freedom of his opinions, found a refuge with Alfred the Great.

Erigena idolizes Dionysius and his commentator Maximus. He believes in their hierarchies, their divine Dark, and supreme Nothing. He declares, with them, that God is the essence of all things. Ipse namque omnium essentia est qui solus vere est, ut ait Dionysius Areopagita. Esse, inquit, omnium est Superesse Divinitatis.—De Div. Nat. i. 3, p. 443. (Jo. Scoti Opp., Paris, 1853.)

But though much of the language is retained, the doctrine of Dionysius has assumed a form altogether new in the brain of the Scotchman. The phraseology of the emanation theory is, henceforth, only metaphor. What men call creation is, with Erigena, a necessary and eternal self-unfolding (analysis, he calls it) of the divine nature. As all things are now God, self-unfolded, so, in the final restitution, all things will be resolved into God, self-withdrawn. Not the mind of man merely, as the Greek thought, but matter and all creatures will be reduced to their primordial causes, and God be manifested as all in all. De Div. Nat. i. 72. Postremo universalis creatura Creatori adunabitur, et erit in ipso et cum ipso unum. Et hic est finis omnium visibilium et invisibilium, quoniam omnia visibilia in intelligibilia, et intelligibilia in ipsum Deum transibunt, mirabili et ineffabili adunatione, non autem, ut sæpe diximus, essentiarum aut substantiarum confusione aut interitu—v. 20, p. 894. In this restitution, the elect are united to God with a degree of intimacy peculiar to themselves—v. 39. The agent of this restoration, both for beings above and below mankind, is the Incarnate Word—v. 25, p. 913. Erigena regards our incarceration in the body, and the distinction of sex, as the consequence of sin. He abandons the idea of a sensuous hell. What is termed the fire of hell is with him a principle of law to which both the good and evil are subject, which wickedness assimilates and makes a torment; goodness a blessing. So, he says, the light is grateful to the sound eye, painful to the diseased; and the food which is welcome to health is loathed by sickness. De Predestinatione, cap. xvii. p. 428. This idea, in which there lies assuredly an element of truth, became a favourite one with the mystics, and re-appears in many varieties of mysticism. Erigena, farther, anticipates Kant in regarding time and space as mere modes of conception peculiar to our present state. He himself is much more rationalist than mystic (except in the fanciful interpretations of Scripture to which he is compelled to resort); but his system was developed, three centuries later, into an extreme and revolutionary mysticism.

The combination of Platonism and Christianity, so often attempted, abandoned, and renewed, assumes five distinct phases.

I. In the East, with Dionysius; dualistic, with real and ideal worlds apart, removing man far from God by an intervening chain of hierarchic emanations.

II. In the West, with Scotus Erigena; abandoning emanation for ever, and taking up instead the idea to which the Germans give the name of Immanence. God regarded more as the inner life and vital substratum of the universe, than as radiating it from a far-off point of abstraction.

III. In the thirteenth century, at Paris, with Amalric of Bena and David of Dinant. They pronounce God the material, essential cause of all things,—not the efficient cause merely. The Platonic identification of the velle and the esse in God. David and his sect blend with their pantheism the doctrine that under the coming new dispensation—that of the Holy Ghost—all believers are to regard themselves as incarnations of God, and to dispense (as men filled with the Spirit) with all sacraments and external rites. They carry the spiritualizing tendency of Erigena to a monstrous extreme, claim special revelation, declare the real resurrection accomplished in themselves, and that they are already in heaven, which they regard as a state and not a place. They maintain that the good are sufficiently rewarded and the bad adequately punished by the blessedness or the privation they inwardly experience in time,—in short, that retribution is complete on this side the grave, and heavy woes, accordingly, will visit corrupt Christendom. The practical extravagance of this pantheism was repeated, in the fourteenth century, by fanatical mystics among the lower orders.

IV. With Eckart, who reminds us of Plotinus. The ‘Intuition’ of Plotinus is Eckart’s ‘Spark of the Soul,’ the power whereby we can transcend the sensible, the manifold, the temporal, and merge ourselves in the changeless One. At the height of this attainment, the mystic of Plotinus and the mystic of Eckart find the same God,—that is, the same blank abstraction, above being and above attributes. But with Plotinus such escape from finite consciousness is possible only in certain favoured intervals of ecstasy. Eckart, however (whose very pantheism is the exaggeration of a Christian truth beyond the range of Plotinus), will have man realize habitually his oneness with the Infinite. According to him, if a man by self-abandonment attains this consciousness, God has realized Himself within him—has brought forth his Son—has evolved his Spirit. Such a man’s knowledge of God is God’s knowledge of Himself. For all spirit is one. To distinguish between the divine ground of the soul and the Divinity is to disintegrate the indivisible Universal Spirit—is to be far from God—is to stand on the lower ground of finite misconception, within the limits of transitory Appearance. The true child of God ‘breaks through’ such distinction to the ‘Oneness.’ Thus, creation and redemption are resolved into a necessary process—the evolution and involution of Godhead. Yet this form of mediæval pantheism appears to advantage when we compare it with that of ancient or of modern times. The pantheism of the Greek took refuge in apathy from Fate. The pantheism of the present day is a plea for self-will. But that of Eckart is half redeemed by a sublime disinterestedness, a confiding abnegation of all choice or preference, which betrays the presence of a measure of Christian element altogether inconsistent with the basis of his philosophy.

V. With Tauler and the ‘German Theology.’ This is the best, indisputably, of all the forms assumed by the combination in question. The Platonism is practically absorbed in the Christianity. Tauler speaks of the ideal existence of the soul in God—of the loss of our nameless Ground in the unknown Godhead, and we find language in the Theologia Germanica concerning God as the substance of all things—concerning the partial and the Perfect, the manifold and the One, which might be pantheistically construed. But such interpretation would be most unfair, and is contradicted by the whole tenour both of the sermons and the treatise. An apprehension of the nature of sin so searching and profound as that in the ‘Theology,’ is impossible to pantheism. Luther could see therein only most Christian theism. These mystics still employed some of the terms transmitted by a revered philosophy. Tauler cites with deference the names of Dionysius, Proclus, and Plotinus. This mysticism clothes its thought with fragments from the old philosopher’s cloak—but the heart and body belong to the school of Christ. With Dionysius, and even with Erigena, man seems to need but a process of approximation to the divine subsistence—a rise in the scale of being by becoming quantitatively rather than qualitatively more. With the German mystics he must be altogether unmade and born anew. To shift from one degree of illumination to another somewhat higher, is nothing in their eyes, for the need lies not in the understanding, but in heart and will. According to them, man must stand virtually in heaven or hell—be God’s or the devil’s. The Father of our spirits is not relegated from men by ecclesiastical or angelic functionaries, but nearer to every one, clerk or lay, gentle or simple, than he is to himself. So the exclusiveness and the frigid intellectualism so characteristic of the ancient ethnic philosophy, has vanished from the Teutonic mysticism. Plato helps rather than harms by giving a vantage ground and defence to the more true and subjective, as opposed to a merely institutional Christianity.

Both Eckart and the Theologia Germanica would have man ‘break through’ and transcend ‘distinction.’ But it is true, with slight exception, that the distinctions Eckart would escape are natural; those which the ‘Theology’ would surpass, for the most part artificial. The asceticism of both is excessive. The self-reduction of Eckart is, however, more metaphysical than moral; that of the ‘Theology’ moral essentially. Both would say, the soul of the regenerate man is one with God—cannot be separated from Him. But only Eckart would say, such soul is not distinct from God. Both would essay to pass from the Nature to the Being of God—from his manifested Existence to his Essence, and they both declare that our nature has its being in the divine. But such assertion, with Tauler and the Theologia Germanica, by no means deifies man. It is but the Platonic expression of a great Christian doctrine—the real Fatherhood of God.

Note to page 142.

Itaque tum per totam fere Galliam in civitatibus, vicis, et castellis, a scholaribus, non solum intra scholas, sed etiam triviatim; nec a litteratis, aut provectis tantum, sed a pueris et simplicibus, aut certe stultis, de sancta Trinitate, quæ Deus est, disputaretur, &c.—Epist. 337, and comp. Epist. 332. Bernard at first refused to encounter Abelard, not simply because from his inexperience in such combats he was little fitted to cope with that dialectic Goliath—a man of war from his youth—but because such discussions were in themselves, he thought, an indignity to the faith.—Epist. 189. Abelard he denounces as wrong, not only in his heretical results, but in principle,—Cum ea ratione nititur explorare, quæ pia mens fidei vivacitate apprehendit. Fides piorum credit, non discutit. Sed iste Deum habens suspectum, credere non vult, nisi quod prius ratione discusserit.—Epist. 338.

Note to page 143.

In the eyes both of Anselm and Bernard, to deny the reality of Ideas is to cut off our only escape from the gross region of sense. Neither faith nor reason have then left them any basis of operation. We attain to truth only through the medium of Ideas, by virtue of our essential relationship to the Divine Source of Ideas—the Infinite Truth. That Supreme Truth which gives to existing things their reality is also the source of true thoughts in our minds. Thus our knowledge is an illumination dependent on the state of the heart towards God. On this principle all doubt must be criminal, and every heresy the offspring, not of a bewildered brain, but of a wicked heart.

The fundamental maxim of the mediæval religio-philosophy—Invisibilia non decipiunt, was fertile in delusions. It led men to reject, as untrustworthy, the testimony of sense and of experience. Thus, in the transubstantiation controversy of the ninth century, Realism and Superstition conquered together. It taught them to deduce all knowledge from certain mental abstractions, Platonic Ideas and Aristotelian Forms. Thus Bonaventura (who exhibits this tendency at its height) resolves all science into union with God. The successive attainment of various kinds of knowledge is, in his system, an approximation, stage above stage, to God—a scaling of the heights of Illumination, as we are more closely united with the Divine Word—the repertory of Ideas. Thus, again, the Scriptures were studied by the schoolmen less as a practical guide for the present life than as so much material whence they might deduce metaphysical axioms and propositions—discover more of those divine abstractions which they regarded as the seminal principles of all thought and all existence. They were constantly mistaking results which could only have been attained by revelation or tradition from without, for truth evolved from within the depths of the finite mind, by virtue of its immediate commerce with the Infinite. Anselm found no difficulty in assuming that the God of his ontological proof was identical with the God of the Bible.

Note to page 144.

Thus, speaking of the angelic state, he says,—Creatura cœli illa est, præsto habens per quod ista intueatur. Videt Verbum, et in Verbo facta per Verbum. Nec opus habet ex his quæ facta sunt, factoris notitiam mendicare.—De Consid. V. i., and comp. Serm. in Cantica, v. 4.

The three kinds of meditation, or stages of Christian proficiency, referred to in the text, Bernard calls consideratio dispensativa, æstimativa, and speculativa. The last is thus defined:—Speculativa est consideratio se in se colligens, et, quantum divinitus adjuvatur, rebus humanis eximens ad contemplandum Deum. He who reaches it is among the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven. At omnium maximus, qui spreto ipso usu rerum et sensuum, quantum quidem humanæ fragilitati fas est, non ascensoriis gradibus, sed inopinatis excessibus, avolare interdum contemplando ad illa sublimia consuevit. Ad hoc ultimum genus illos pertinere reor excessus Pauli. Excessus non ascensus: nam raptum potius fuisse, quam ascendisse ipse se perhibet.—De Consid. v. ii. In one of the Sermons on the Canticles, Bernard discourses at more length on this kind of exaltation. Proinde et ego non absurde sponsæ exstasim vocaverim mortem, quæ tamen non vita, sed vitæ eripiat laqueis.... Excedente quippe anima, etsi non vita certe vitæ sensu, necesse est etiam ut nec vitæ tentatis sentiatur.... Utinam hac morte frequenter cadam.... Bona mors, quæ vitam non aufert, sed transfert in melius; bona, qua non corpus cadit, sed anima sublevatur. Verum hæc hominum est. Sed moriatur anima mea morte etiam si dici potest, Angelorum, ut presentium memoria excedens rerum se inferiorum corporearumque non modo cupiditatibus, sed et similitudinibus exuat.... Talis, ut opinor, excessus, aut tantum, aut maxime contemplatio dicitur. Rerum etenim cupiditatibus vivendo non teneri, humanæ virtutis est; corporum vero similitudinibus speculando non involvi, angelicæ puritatis est.... Profecisti, separasti te; sed nondum elongasti, nisi et irruentia undique phantasmata corporearum similitudinum transvolare mentis puritate prævaleas. Hucusque noli tibi promittere requiem.—In Cantica, Serm. lii. 4, 5.

Note to page 144.

Fateor et mihi adventasse Verbum, in insipientia dico, et pluries. Cumque sæpius intraverit ad me, non sensi aliquoties cum intravit. Adesse sensi, adfuisse recordor, interdum et præsentiæ potui introitum ejus, sentire nunquam, sed ne exitum quidem.... Qua igitur introivit? An forte nec introivit quidem, quia non deforis venit? Neque enim est unum aliquid ex iis que foris sunt. Porro nec deintra me venit quoniam bonum est, et scio quoniam non est in me bonum. Ascendi etiam superius meum: et ecce supra hoc Verbum eminens. Ad inferius quoque meum curiosus explorator descendi: et nihilominus infra inventum est. Si foras aspexi, extra omne exterius meum comperi illud esse: si vero intus, et ipsum interius erat.... Ita igitur intrans ad me aliquoties Verbum sponsus, nullis unquam introitum suum indiciis innotescere fecit, non voce, non specie, non incessu. Nullis denique suis motibus compertum est mihi, nullis meis sensibus illapsum penetralibus meis: tantum ex motu cordis, sicut præfatus sum, intellexi præsentiam ejus; et ex fuga vitiorum carnaliumque compressione affectuum, &c.—In Cantica, Serm. lxxiv. 5, 6. The metaphors of Bernard are actual sounds, sights, and fragrances with St. Theresa. From this sensuous extreme his practical devotion is as far removed, on the one side, as from the cold abstraction of Dionysius on the other. His contemplation is no staring at the Divine Essence till we are blind—no oblivion or disdain of outward means. We see God, he says, not as He is, but as He wills—sicuti vult non sicuti est. So when describing that ascent of the soul to God, or descent of God into the soul, which constitutes Union, he says,—In Spiritu fit ista conjunctio.... Non ergo sic affecta et sic dilecta (anima) contenta erit omnino vel illa, quæ multis per ea quæ facta sunt; vel, illa quæ paucis per visa et somnia facta est manifestatio sponsi, nisi et speciali prærogativa intimis illum affectibus atque ipsis medullis cordis cœlitus illapsum suscipiat, habeatque præsto quem desiderat non figuratum, sed infusum: non apparentem sed afficientem; nec dubium quin eo jucundiorem, quo intus, non foris. Verbum nempe est, non sonans, sed penetrans; non loquax, sed efficax; non obstrepens auribus, sed affectibus blandiens, &c.—In Cantica, Serm. xxxi. 6 and 1. Comp. also his remarks at the close of the sermon, on the difference between faith and sight, p. 2868.

Bernard describes three kisses of the soul,—the kiss of the feet of God, of the hand, and of the mouth. (Serm. de diversis, 87, and In Cantica, Serm. iv.) This is his fanciful way of characterising, by the elaboration of a single figurative phrase of Scripture, the progress of the soul through conversion and grace to perfection. Here, as in so many instances, his meaning is substantially correct; it is the expression which is objectionable. He is too much in earnest for the artificial gradations and metaphysical refinements of later mysticism. Compare him, in this respect, with John of the Cross. Bernard would have rejected as unprofitable those descriptions of the successive absorption of the several faculties in God; those manifold kinds of prayer—prayers of quiet, prayers of union, prayers of ecstasy, with their impalpable distinctions; that analysis, miraculously achieved, of miraculous ravishments, detailed at such length in the tedious treatises of the Spanish mystics. The doctrine taught by John of the Cross, that God compensates the faithful for the mortification of the senses by sensuous gratifications of a supernatural kind, would have revolted the more pure devotion of the simple-minded Abbot of Clairvaux.—See La Montée du Mont Carmel, livre ii. chapp. 16, 17; pp. 457, &c.

It should be borne in mind that the highest kind of Consideratio is identical, in Bernard’s phraseology, with Contemplatio; and the terms are thus often used interchangeably. Generally, Consideratio is applied to inquiry, Contemplatio to intuition. De Consid. lib. ii. cap. 2.

Note to page 146.

See Vita, ii. cap. 27, where his biographer gives Bernard’s own modest estimate of these wonders.

Wide, indeed, is the difference between the spiritual mysticism of Bernard and the gross materialism and arrogant pretension which characterise the vision and the prophecy to which Hildegard laid claim. The morbid ambition of theurgic mysticism received a new impulse from the sanction afforded her by Bernard and the contemporary popes. Bernard makes no doubt of the reality of her gifts, and desires a place in her prayers. (Epist. 366.) He did not foresee that the most extravagant and sensuous mysticism must soon of necessity displace the simpler and less dazzling. He would be afraid of taking his place with Rationalist mockers, and a superstitious awe would readily persuade him that it was better to believe than to doubt. When emperors and popes corresponded on familiar terms with the seeress; when haughty nobles and learned ecclesiastics sought counsel at her oracle concerning future events, and even for the decision of learned questions; when all she said in answer was delivered as subject to and in the interest of the Church Catholic—was often the very echo of Bernard’s own warnings and exhortations—who was he, that he should presume to limit the operations of the Spirit of God? Many of Hildegard’s prophecies, denouncing the ecclesiastical abuses of the day, were decidedly reformatory in their tendency. In this respect she is the forerunner of the Abbot Joachim of Calabria, and of St. Brigitta, whose prophetic utterances startled the corrupt Church in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In her supernatural gift of language, her attendant divine radiance, and her fantastic revelations, she, like her friend Elizabeth of Schonau (who had an angel to wait upon her, and saw the eleven thousand virgins), prepares the way for Catharine of Siena, Angela of Foligni, and St. Theresa.

Footnote 39:

See Note 1, p. 146.

Footnote 40:

See Note 2, p. 146.

Footnote 41:

Vita, ii. cap. v.

Footnote 42:

See the account of his diet, and of the feebleness and sickness
consequent on his austerities, by the same biographer (Alanus),
_Vita_, ii. cap. x., in the Paris reprint of 1839, from the
Benedictine edition of Bernard, tom. ii. p. 2426. John Eremita
describes the devil’s visit to Bernard, ‘ut ungeret sandalia sua
secundum consuetudinem,’ and relates the rebuke of the proud monk who
would not wash the _scutellæ_ in the kitchen.—_Vita_, iv. p. 2508.

Footnote 43:

Vita, ii. cap. x. 32.

Footnote 44:

Epp. cx., cxi.

Footnote 45:

Chronologia Bernardina, Opp. tom. i. p. 83.

Footnote 46:

Epist. cxli.

Footnote 47:

De Consideratione, IV. iii. 7, and II. vi. 11, pp. 1028 and 1060.

Footnote 48:

_Epist._ ccclxv. to the Archbishop of Mayence, against the fanatic
Rudolph.

Footnote 49:

He thus distinguishes Faith, Intellection, and Opinion:-Fides est
voluntaria quædam et certa prælibatio necdum propalatæ veritatis.
Intellectus est rei cujuscumque invisibilis certa et manifesta
notitia. Opinio est quasi pro vero habere aliquid; quod falsum esse
nescias.... Quid igitur distat (fides) ab intellectu? Nempe quod etsi
non habet incertum non magis quam intellectus, habet tamen involucrum,
quod non intellectus.... Nil autem malumus scire, quam quæ fide jam
scimus. Nil supererit ad beatitudinem, cum quæ jam certa sunt nobis,
erunt æque et nuda.—_De Consideratione_, V. 4, p. 1075.

Footnote 50:

See Note, p. 149.

Footnote 51:

See Note, p. 149.

Footnote 52:

See Note 1, p. 150.

Footnote 53:

See Note 2, p. 150.

Footnote 54:

Sane in hoc gradu (tertio) diu statur: et nescio si a quoquam hominum
quartus in hac vita perfecte apprehenditur, ut se scilicet diligat
homo tantum propter Deum. Asserant hoc si qui experti sunt: mihi,
fateor, impossibile videtur.—_De diligendo Deo_, xv. and _Epist._ xi.
8. And, again, in the same treatise (vii. 17),—Non enim sine præmio
diligitur Deus, etsi absque præmii intuitu diligendus sit.... Verus
amor se ipso contentus est. Habet præmium, sed id quod amatur.

Footnote 55:

See Note, p. 151.

CHAPTER II.

Licht und Farbe.

Wohne, du ewiglich Eines, dort bei dem ewiglich Einen!
Farbe, du wechselnde, komm’ freundlich zum Menschen herab![56]

SCHILLER.

On the next evening of meeting, Gower commenced as follows his promised paper on Hugo and Richard of St. Victor.

Hugo of St. Victor.

The celebrated School of St. Victor (so called from an ancient
chapel in the suburbs of Paris) was founded by William of Champeaux
at the commencement of the twelfth century. This veteran
dialectician assumed there the habit of the regular canons of
Augustine, and after an interval, began to lecture once more to the
students who flocked to his retirement. In 1114, king and pope
combined to elevate the priory to an abbacy. Bishops and nobles
enriched it with their gifts. The canons enjoyed the highest repute
for sanctity and learning in that golden age of the canonical
institute. St. Victor colonized Italy, England, Scotland, and Lower
Saxony, with establishments which regarded as their parent the
mighty pile of building on the outskirts of Paris. Within a hundred
years from its foundation it numbered as its offspring thirty abbeys
and more than eighty priories.

Hugo of St. Victor was born in 1097, of a noble Saxon family. His
boyhood was passed at the convent of Hamersleben. There he gave
promise of his future eminence. His thirst after information of
every kind was insatiable. The youth might often have been seen
walking alone in the convent garden, speaking and gesticulating,
imagining himself advocate, preacher, or disputant. Every evening he
kept rigid account of his gains in knowledge during the day. The
floor of his room was covered with geometrical figures traced in
charcoal. Many a winter’s night, he says, he was waking between
vigils in anxious study of a horoscope. Many a rude experiment in
musical science did he try with strings stretched across a board.
Even while a novice, he began to write. Attracted by the reputation
of the abbey of St. Victor, he enrolled his name among the regular
canons there. Not long after his arrival, the emissaries of an
archdeacon, worsted in a suit with the chapter, murdered the prior,
Thomas. Hugo was elected to succeed him in the office of instructor.
He taught philosophy, rhetoric, and theology. He seldom quitted the
precincts of the convent, and never aspired to farther preferment.
He closed a peaceful and honoured life at the age of forty-four,
leaving behind him those ponderous tomes of divinity to which
Aquinas and Vincent of Beauvais acknowledge their obligations, and
which gained for their author the name of a second Augustine.[57]

Hitherto mysticism, in the person of Bernard, has repudiated
scholasticism. In Hugo, and his successor Richard, the foes are
reconciled. Bonaventura in the thirteenth, and Gerson in the
fifteenth century, are great names in the same province. Indeed,
throughout the middle ages, almost everything that merits the title
of mystical _theology_ is characterized by some such endeavour to
unite the contemplation of the mystic with the dialectics of the
schoolman. There was good in the attempt. Mysticism lost much of its
vagueness, and scholasticism much of its frigidity.

Hugo was well fitted by temperament to mediate between the extreme
tendencies of his time. Utterly destitute of that daring originality
which placed Erigena at least two centuries in advance of his age,
his very gentleness and caution would alone have rendered him more
moderate in his views and more catholic in sympathy than the intense
and vehement Bernard. Hugo, far from proscribing science and
denouncing speculation, called in the aid of the logical gymnastics
of his day to discipline the mind for the adventurous enterprise of
the mystic. If he regarded with dislike the idle word-warfare of
scholastic ingenuity, he was quite as little disposed to bid common
sense a perpetual farewell among the cloudiest realms of mysticism.
His style is clear, his spirit kindly, his judgment generally
impartial. It is refreshing in those days of ecclesiastical
domination to meet with at least a single mind to whom that Romanist
ideal—an absolute uniformity in religious opinion—appeared both
impossible and undesirable.[58]

A few words may present the characteristic outlines of his
mysticism. It avails itself of the aid of speculation to acquire a
scientific form—in due subjection, of course, to the authority of
the Church. It will ground its claim on a surer tenure than mere
religious emotion or visionary reverie. Hugo, with all his
contemporaries, reverenced the Pseudo-Dionysius. His more devout and
practical spirit laboured at a huge commentary on the _Heavenly
Hierarchy_, like a good angel, condemned for some sin to servitude
under a paynim giant. In the hands of his commentator, Dionysius
becomes more scriptural and human—for the cloister, even edifying,
but remains as uninteresting as ever.

Hugo makes a threefold division of our faculties. First, and lowest,
_Cogitatio_. A stage higher stands _Meditatio_: by this he means
reflection, investigation. Third, and highest, ranges
_Contemplatio_: in this state the mind possesses in light the truth
which, in the preceding, it desired and groped after in
twilight.[59]

He compares this spiritual process to the application of fire to
green wood. It kindles with difficulty; clouds of smoke arise; a
flame is seen at intervals, flashing out here and there; as the fire
gains strength, it surrounds, it pierces the fuel; presently it
leaps and roars in triumph—the nature of the wood is being
transformed into the nature of fire. Then, the struggle over, the
crackling ceases, the smoke is gone, there is left a tranquil,
friendly brightness, for the master-element has subdued all into
itself. So, says Hugo, do sin and grace contend; and the smoke of
trouble and anguish hangs over the strife. But when grace grows
stronger, and the soul’s eye clearer, and truth pervades and
swallows up the kindling, aspiring nature, then comes holy calm, and
love is all in all. Save God in the heart, nothing of self is
left.[60]

Looking through this and other metaphors as best we may, we discover
that Contemplation has two provinces—a lower and a higher. The lower
degree of contemplation, which ranks next above Meditation, is
termed Speculation. It is distinct from Contemplation proper, in its
strictest signification. The attribute of Meditation is Care. The
brow is heavy with inquiring thought, for the darkness is mingled
with the light. The attribute of Speculation is Admiration—Wonder.
In it the soul ascends, as it were, a watch-tower (_specula_), and
surveys everything earthly. On this stage stood the Preacher when he
beheld the sorrow and the glory of the world, and pronounced all
things human Vanity. To this elevation, whence he philosophizes
concerning all finite things, man is raised by the faith, the
feeling, and the ascetic practice of religion. Speculative
illumination is the reward of devotion. But at the loftiest
elevation man beholds all things in God. Contemplation, in its
narrower and highest sense, is immediate intuition of the Infinite.
The attribute of this stage is Blessedness.

As a mystic, Hugo cannot be satisfied with that mediate and
approximate apprehension of the Divine Nature which here on earth
should amply satisfy all who listen to Scripture and to Reason.
Augustine had told him of a certain spiritual sense, or eye of the
soul. This he makes the organ of his mysticism. Admitting the
incomprehensibility of the Supreme, yet chafing as he does at the
limitations of our finite nature, Faith—which is here the natural
resource of Reason—fails to content him. He leaps to the conclusion
that there must be some immediate intuition of Deity by means of a
separate faculty vouchsafed for the purpose.

You have sometimes seen from a hill-side a valley, over the
undulating floor of which there has been laid out a heavy mantle of
mist. The spires of the churches rise above it—you seem to catch the
glistening of a roof or of a vane—here and there a higher house, a
little eminence, or some tree-tops, are seen, islanded in the white
vapour, but the lower and connecting objects, the linking lines of
the roads, the plan and foundation of the whole, are completely
hidden. Hugo felt that, with all our culture, yea, with Aristotle to
boot, revealed truth was seen by us somewhat thus imperfectly. No
doubt certain great facts and truths stand out clear and prominent,
but there is a great deal at their basis, connecting them, attached
to them, which is impervious to our ordinary faculties. We are, in
fact, so lamentably far from knowing all about them. Is there not
some power of vision to be attained which may pierce these clouds,
lay bare to us these relationships, nay, even more, be to us like
the faculty conferred by Asmodeus, and render the very roofs
transparent, so that from topstone to foundation, within and
without, we may gaze our fill? And if to realize this wholly be too
much for sinful creatures, yet may not the wise and good approach
such vision, and attain as the meed of their faith, even here, a
superhuman elevation, and in a glance at least at the Heavenly Truth
unveiled, escape the trammels of the finite?

Such probably was the spirit of the question which possessed, with a
ceaseless importunity, the minds of men, ambitious alike to define
with the schoolman and to gaze with the seer. Hugo answers that the
eye of Contemplation—closed by sin, but opened more or less by
grace—furnishes the power thus desiderated.[61] But at this, his
highest point, he grasps a shadow instead of the substance.
Something within the mind is mistaken for a manifestation from
without. A mental creation is substituted for that Divine Existence
which his rapture seems to reveal. He asserts, however, that this
Eye beholds what the eye of sense and the eye of reason cannot see,
what is both within us and above us—God. Within us, he cries, is
both _what_ we must flee and _whither_ we must flee. The highest and
the inmost are, so far, identical.[62] Thus do the pure in heart see
God. In such moments the soul is transported beyond sense and
reason, to a state similar to that enjoyed by angelic natures. The
contemplative life is prefigured by the ark in the deluge. Without
are waves, and the dove can find no rest. As the holy ship narrowed
toward the summit, so doth this life of seclusion ascend from the
manifold and changeful to the Divine Immutable Unity.

The simplification of the soul he inculcates is somewhat analogous
to the Haplosis of the Neo-Platonists. All sensuous images are to be
discarded; we must concentrate ourselves upon the inmost source, the
nude essence of our being. He is careful, accordingly, to guard
against the delusions of the imagination.[63] He cautions his
readers lest they mistake a mere visionary phantasm—some shape of
imaginary glory, for a supernatural manifestation of the Divine
Nature to the soul. His mysticism is intellectual, not sensuous. Too
practical for a sentimental Quietism or any of its attendant
effeminacies, and, at the same time, too orthodox to verge on
pantheism, his mystical doctrine displays less than the usual
proportion of extravagance, and the ardent eloquence of his ‘Praise
of Love’ may find an echo in every Christian heart.

Richard of St. Victor.

Now, let us pass on to Richard of St. Victor. He was a native of
Scotland, first the pupil and afterwards the successor of Hugo.
Richard was a man whose fearless integrity and energetic character
made themselves felt at St. Victor not less than the intellectual
subtilty and flowing rhetoric which distinguished his prelections.
He had far more of the practical reformer in him than the quiet
Hugo. Loud and indignant are his rebukes of the empty disputation of
the mere schoolman,—of the avarice and ambition of the prelate. His
soul is grieved that there should be men who blush more for a false
quantity than for a sin, and stand more in awe of Priscian than of
Christ.[64] Alas! he exclaims, how many come to the cloister to seek
Christ, and find lying in that sepulchre only the linen clothes of
your formalism! How many mask their cowardice under the name of
love, and let every abuse run riot on the plea of peace! How many
others call their hatred of individuals hatred of iniquity, and
think to be righteous cheaply by mere outcry against other men’s
sins! Complaints like these are not without their application nearer
home.[65]

His zeal did not confine itself to words. In the year 1162 he was
made prior. Ervisius the abbot was a man of worldly spirit, though
his reputation had been high when he entered on his office. He
gradually relaxed all discipline, persecuted the God-fearing
brethren, and favoured flatterers and spies; he was a very Dives in
sumptuousness, and the fair name of St. Victor suffered no small
peril at his hands. The usual evils of broken monastic rule were
doubtless there, though little is specified—canons going in and out,
whither they would, without inquiry, accounts in confusion, sacristy
neglected, weeds literally and spiritually growing in holy places,
wine-bibbing and scandal carried on at a lamentable rate, sleepy
lethargy and noisy brawl, the more shameful because unpunished.
Ervisius was good at excuses, and of course good for nothing else.
If complaints were made to him, it was always that cellarer, that
pittanciar, or that refectorarius—never his fault. These abuses must
soon draw attention from without. Richard and the better sort are
glad. The pope writes to the king about the sad accounts he hears.
Bishops bestir themselves. Orders come from Rome forbidding the
abbot to take any step without the consent of the majority of the
chapter. Richard’s position is delicate, between his vow of
obedience to his superior and the good of the convent. But he plays
his part like a man. An archbishop is sent to St. Victor to hold a
commission of inquiry. All is curiosity and bustle, alarm and hope
among the canons, innocent and guilty. At last, Ervisius, after
giving them much trouble, is induced to resign. They choose an able
successor, harmony and order gradually return, and Richard, having
seen the abbey prosperous once more, dies in the following year.[66]

In the writings of Richard, as compared with those of Hugo, I find
that what belongs to the schoolman has received a more elaborate and
complex development, while what belongs to the mystic has also
attained an ampler and more prolific growth. All the art of the
scholastic is there—the endless ramification and subdivision of
minute distinctions; all the intellectual fortification of the
time—the redoubts, ravelins, counterscarps, and bastions of dry,
stern logic; and among these, within their lines and at last above
them all, is seen an almost oriental luxuriance of fancy and of
rhetoric—palm and pomegranate, sycamore and cypress, solemn cedar
shadows, the gloom in the abysses of the soul,—luscious fruit and
fragrant flowers, the triumphs of its ecstasy, all blissful with the
bloom and odours of the upper Paradise. He is a master alike in the
serviceable science of self-scrutiny, and in the imaginary one of
self-transcendence. His works afford a notable example of that
fantastic use of Scripture prevalent throughout the Middle Age. His
psychology, his metaphysics, his theology, are all extracted from
the most unlikely quarters in the Bible by allegorical
interpretation. Every logical abstraction is attached to some
personage or object in the Old Testament history, as its authority
and type. Rachel and Leah are Reason and Affection. Bilhah and
Zilpah are Imagination and Sense. His divinity is embroidered on the
garments of Aaron, engraven on the sides of the ark, hung on the
pins and rings of the tabernacle. His definitions and his fancies
build in the eaves of Solomon’s temple, and make their ‘pendent bed
and procreant cradle’ in the carved work of the holy place. To
follow the thread of his religious philosophy, you have to pursue
his agile and discursive thoughts, as the sparrow-hawk the sparrow,
between the capitals, among the cedar rafters, over the gilded roof,
from court to court, column to column, and sometimes after all the
chase is vain, for they have escaped into the bosom of a cloud.[67]

On a basis similar to that of Hugo, Richard erects six stages of
Contemplation. The two first grades fall within the province of
Imagination; the two next belong to Reason; the two highest to
Intelligence. The objects of the first two are _Sensibilia_; of the
second pair, _Intelligibilia_ (truths concerning what is invisible,
but accessible to reason); of the third, _Intellectibilia_ (unseen
truth above reason). These, again, have their subdivisions, into
which we need not enter.[68] Within the depths of thine own soul, he
would say, thou wilt find a threefold heaven—the imaginational, the
rational, and the intellectual. The third heaven is open only to the
eye of Intelligence—that Eye whose vision is clarified by divine
grace and by a holy life. This Eye enjoys the immediate discernment
of unseen truth, as the eye of the body beholds sensible objects.
His use of the word Intelligence is not always uniform. It would
seem that this divinely-illumined eye of the mind is to search first
into the deeps of our own nature (_inferiora invisibilia nostra_),
and then upward into the heights of the divine (_superiora
invisibilia divina_).[69]

For the highest degrees of Contemplation penitence avails more than
science; sighs obtain what is impossible to reason. This exalted
intuition begins on earth, and is consummated in heaven. Some, by
divine assistance, reach it as the goal of long and arduous effort.
Others await it, and are at times rapt away unawares into the heaven
of heavens. Some good men have been ever unable to attain the
highest stage; few are fully winged with all the six pinions of
Contemplation. In the ecstasy he describes, there is supposed to be
a dividing asunder of the soul and the spirit as by the sword of the
Spirit of God. The body sleeps, and the soul and all the visible
world is shut away. The spirit is joined to the Lord, and one with
Him,—transcends itself and all the limitations of human thought. In
such a moment it is conscious of no division, of no change; all
contraries are absorbed, the part does not appear less than the
whole, nor is the whole greater than a part; the universal is seen
as particular, the particular as universal; we forget both all that
is without and all that is within ourselves; all is one and one is
all; and when the rapture is past the spirit returns from its trance
with a dim and dizzy memory of unutterable glory.[70]

This account presents in some parts the very language in which
Schelling and his disciples are accustomed to describe the privilege
of Intellectual Intuition.

ATHERTON. I move thanks to Gower.

WILLOUGHBY. Which I second. It has been strange enough to see our painter turn bookworm, and oscillating, for the last fortnight or more, between the forest sunset on his easel and Atherton’s old black-letter copy of Richard of St. Victor.

GOWER. The change was very pleasant. As grateful, I should think, as the actual alternation such men as Hugo and Richard must have enjoyed when they betook themselves, after the lassitude that followed an ecstasy, to a scholastic argumentation; or again refreshed themselves, after the dryness of that, by an imaginative flight into the region of allegory, or by some contemplative reverie which carried them far enough beyond the confines of logic. The monastic fancy found this interchange symbolized in the upward and downward motion of the holy bell. Is it not in Longfellow’s Golden Legend that a friar says—

And the upward and downward motions show
That we touch upon matters high and low;
And the constant change and transmutation
Of action and of contemplation;
Downward, the Scripture brought from on high,
Upward, exalted again to the sky;
Downward, the literal interpretation,
Upward, the Vision and Mystery!

WILLOUGHBY. Much as a miracle-play must have been very refreshing after a public disputation, or as the most overwrought and most distinguished members of the legal profession are said to devour with most voracity every good novel they can catch.

ATHERTON. It is remarkable to see the mystical interpreters of that day committing the two opposite mistakes, now of regarding what is symbolical in Scripture as literal, and again of treating what is literal as symbolical.

GOWER. Somewhat like the early travellers, who mistook the hybrid figures of the hieroglyphic sculptures they saw for representations of living animals existing somewhere up the country, and then, at other times, fancied they found some profound significance in a simple tradition or an ordinary usage dictated by the climate.

WILLOUGHBY. Yet there lies a great truth in the counsel they give us to rise above all sensuous images in our contemplation of the Divine Nature.

ATHERTON. No doubt. God is a spirit. The Infinite Mind must not be represented to our thought through the medium of any material image, as though in that we had all the truth. We must not confound the medium with the object. But the object is in fact inaccessible without a medium. The Divine Nature is resolved into a mere blank diffusion when regarded as apart from a Divine Character. We are practically without a God in the presence of such an abstraction. To enable us to realize personality and character there must be a medium, a representation, some analogy drawn from relationships or objects with which we are acquainted.

The fault I find with these mystics is, that they encourage the imagination to run riot in provinces where it is not needed, and prohibit its exercise where it would render the greatest service. Orthodox as they were in their day, they yet attempt to gaze on the Divine Nature in its absoluteness and abstraction, apart from the manifestation of it to our intellect, our heart, and our imagination, which is made in the incarnate Christ Jesus. God has supplied them with this help to their apprehension of Him, but they hope by His help to dispense with it. They neglect the possible and practical in striving after a dazzling impossibility which allures their spiritual ambition. This is a natural consequence of that extravagance of spirituality which tells man that his highest aim is to escape from his human nature—not to work under the conditions of his finite being, but to violate and escape them as far as possible in quest of a superhuman elevation. We poor mortals, as Schiller says, must have colour. The attempt to evade this law always ends in substituting the mind’s creation for the mind’s Creator.

WILLOUGHBY. I cannot say that I clearly understand what this much-extolled introspection of theirs is supposed to reveal to them.

ATHERTON. Neither, very probably, did they. But though an exact localization may be impossible, I think we can say whereabout they are in their opinion on this point. Their position is intermediate. They stand between the truth which assigns to an internal witness and an external revelation their just relative position, and that extreme of error which would deny the need or possibility of any external revelation whatever. They do not ignore either factor; they unduly increase one of them.

WILLOUGHBY. Good. Will you have the kindness first to give me the truth as you hold it? Then we shall have the terminus a quo.

ATHERTON. There is what has been variously termed an experimental or moral evidence for Christianity, which comes from within. If any one reverently searches the Scriptures, desiring sincerely to know and do the will of God as there revealed, he has the promise of Divine assistance. He will find, in the evil of his own heart, a reality answering to the statements of the Bible. He will find, in repentance and in faith, in growing love and hope, that very change taking place within which is described in the book without. His nature is being gradually brought into harmony with the truth there set forth. He has experienced the truth of the Saviour’s words, ‘If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God.’

But in this experimental evidence there is nothing mystical. It does not at all supersede or infringe on the evidence of testimony,—the convincing argument from without, which may at first have made the man feel it his duty to study a book supported by a claim so strong. Neither does he cease to use his reason, when looking within, any more than when listening to witness from without. In self-observation, if in any exercise, reason must be vigilant. Neither is such inward evidence a miraculous experience peculiar to himself. It is common to multitudes. It is open to all who will take the same course he has done. He does not reach it by a faculty which transcends his human nature, and leaves in the distance every power which has been hitherto in such wholesome exercise. There is here no special revelation, distinct from and supplementary to the general. Such a privilege would render an appeal from himself to others impossible. It would entrench each Christian in his individuality apart from the rest. It would give to conscientious differences on minor points the authority of so many conflicting inspirations. It would issue in the ultimate disintegration of the Christian body.

The error of the mystics we are now considering consists in an exaggeration of the truth concerning experimental evidence. They seem to say that the Spirit will manifest to the devout mind verities within itself which are, as it were, the essence and original of the truths which the Church without has been accustomed to teach; so that, supposing a man to have rightly used the external revelation, and at a certain point to suspend all reference to it, and to be completely secluded from all external influences, there would then be manifest to him, in God, the Ideas themselves which have been developed in time into a Bible and a historical Christianity. The soul, on this Platonist principle, enjoys a commerce once more with the world of Intelligence in the depth of the Divine Nature. She recovers her wings. The obliterations on the tablet of Reminiscence are supplied. A theosophist like Paracelsus would declare that the whole universe is laid up potentially in the mind of man—the microcosm answering to the macrocosm. In a similar way these mystics would have us believe that there is in man a microdogma within, answering to the macrodogma of the Church without. Accordingly they deem it not difficult to discover a Christology in psychology, a Trinity in metaphysics. Hence, too, this erroneous assertion that if the heathen had only known themselves, they would have known God.

GOWER. If some of our modern advocates of the theory of Insight be right, they ought to have succeeded in both.

ATHERTON. That ‘Know thyself’ was a precept which had its worth in the sense Socrates gave it. In the sense of Plotinus it was a delusion. Applied to morals,—regarded as equivalent to a call to obey conscience, it might render service. And yet varying and imperfect consciences—conflicting inner laws, could give men as an inference no immutable and perfect Lawgiver. Understood as equivalent to saying that the mind is in itself an all-sufficient and infallible repertory of spiritual truth, history in every page refutes it. The monstrosities of idolatry, the disputes of philosophical schools, the aspirations among the best of the sages of antiquity after a divine teaching of some sort—all these facts are fatal to the notion. It is one thing to be able in some degree to appreciate the excellence of revealed truth, and quite another to be competent to discover it for ourselves. Lactantius was right when he exclaimed, as he surveyed the sad and wasteful follies of heathendom, O quam difficilis est ignorantibus veritas, et quam facilis scientibus!

WILLOUGHBY. I must say I can scarcely conceive it possible to exclude from the mind every trace and result of what is external, and to gaze down into the depths of our simple self-consciousness as the mystic bids us do. It is like forming a moral estimate of a man exclusive of the slightest reference to his character.

GOWER. I think that as the result of such a process, we should find only what we bring. Assuredly this must continually have been the case with our friends Hugo and Richard. The method reminds me of a trick I have heard of as sometimes played on the proprietor of a supposed coal-mine in which no coal could be found, with a view to induce him to continue his profitless speculation. Geologists, learned theoretical men, protest that there can be no coal on that estate—there is none in that part of England. But the practical man puts some lumps slyly in his pocket, goes down with them, and brings them up in triumph, as fresh from the depths of the earth.

ATHERTON. Some German writers, even of the better sort have committed a similar mistake in their treatment of the life of Christ. First they set to work to construct the idea of Christ (out of the depths of their consciousness, I suppose), then they study and compare the gospels to find that idea realized. They think they have established the claim of Evangelists when they can show that they have found their idea developed in the biography they give us. As though the German mind could have had any idea of Christ at all within its profundities, but for the fishermen in the first instance.

GOWER. This said Eye of Intelligence appears to me a pure fiction. What am I to make of a faculty which is above, and independent of, memory, reason, feeling, imagination,—without cognizance of those external influences (which at least contribute to make us what we are), and without organs, instruments, or means of any kind for doing any sort of work whatever? Surely this complete and perpetual separation between intuition and everything else within and without us, is a most unphilosophical dichotomy of the mind of man.

ATHERTON. Equally so, whether it be regarded as natural to man or as a supernatural gift. Our intuitions, however rapid, must rest on the belief of some fact, the recognition of some relationship or sense of fitness, which rests again on a judgment, right or wrong.

WILLOUGHBY. And in such judgment the world without must have large share.

GOWER. For the existence of such a separate faculty as a spiritual gift we have only the word of Hugo and his brethren. The faith of Scripture, instead of being cut off from the other powers of the mind, is sustained by them, and strengthens as we exercise them.

ATHERTON. President Edwards, in his Treatise on the Affections, appears to me to approach the error of those mystics, in endeavouring to make it appear that regeneration imparts a new power, rather than a new disposition, to the mind. Such a doctrine cuts off the common ground between the individual Christian and other men. According to the Victorines it would seem to be the glory of Christianity that it enables man, at intervals at least, to denude himself of reason. To me its triumph appears to consist in this, that it makes him, for the first time, truly reasonable, who before acted unreasonably because of a perverted will.

Note to page 158.

The treatise by Hugo, entitled De Vanitate Mundi, is a dialogue between teacher and scholar, in which, after directing his pupil to survey the endless variety and vicissitude of life, after showing him the horrors of a shipwreck, the house of Dives, a marriage feast, the toils and disputes of the learned, the instructor bids him shelter himself from this sea of care in that ark of God, the religious life. He proceeds to describe that inner Eye, that oculus cordis, whose vision is so precious. ‘Thou hast another eye,’ he says (lib. i. p. 172), ‘an eye within, far more piercing than the other thou speakest of,—one that beholds at once the past, the present, and the future; which diffuses through all things the keen brightness of its vision; which penetrates what is hidden, investigates what is impalpable; which needs no foreign light wherewith to see, but gazes by a light of its own, peculiar to itself (luce aliena ad videndum non indigens, sed sua ac propria luce prospiciens).

Self-collection is opposed (p. 175) to distraction, or attachment to the manifold,—is declared to be restauratio, and at the same time elevatio. The scholar inquires, ‘If the heart of man be an ark or ship, how can man be said to enter into his own heart, or to navigate the universe with his heart? Lastly, if God, whom you call the harbour, be above, what can you mean by such an unheard-of thing as a voyage which carries the ship upwards, and bears away the mariner out of himself?’ The teacher replies, ‘When we purpose elevating the eye of the mind to things invisible, we must avail ourselves of certain analogies drawn from the objects of sense. Accordingly, when, speaking of things spiritual and unseen, we say that anything is highest, we do not mean that it is at the top of the sky, but that it is the inmost of all things. To ascend to God, therefore, is to enter into ourselves, and not only so, but in our inmost self to transcend ourselves. (Ascendere ergo ad Deum hoc est intrare ad semet ipsum, et non solum ad se intrare, sed ineffabili quodam modo in intimis etiam se ipsum transire, p. 176.)

Hugo, like Richard, associates this illumination inseparably with the practices of devotion. The tree of Wisdom within is watered by Grace. It stands by Faith, and is rooted in God. As it flourishes, we die to the world, we empty ourselves, we sigh over even the necessary use of anything earthly. Devotion makes it bud, constancy of penitence causes it to grow. Such penitence (compunctio) he compares to digging in search of a treasure, or to find a spring. Sin has concealed this hoard—buried this water-source down beneath the many evils of the heart. The watching and the prayer of the contrite spirit clears away what is earthly, and restores the divine gift. The spirit, inflamed with heavenly desire, soars upward—becomes, as it ascends, less gross, as a column of smoke is least dense towards its summit, till we are all spirit; are lost to mortal ken, as the cloud melts into the air, and find a perfect peace within, in secret gazing on the face of the Lord. De Arca morali, lib. iii. cap. 7.

Note to page 162.

See the introductory chapters of the Benjamin Minor, or De prep. anim. ad contemp. fol. 34, &c.—Richard rates this kind of interpretation very highly, and looks for success therein to Divine Illumination. (De eruditione interioris hominis, cap. vi. fol. 25.) A passage or two from an appendix to his Treatise on Contemplation, may serve, once for all, as a specimen of his mystical interpretation. It is entitled Nonnullæ allegoriæ tabernaculi fœderis. ‘By the tabernacle of the covenant understand the state of perfection. Where perfection of the soul is, there is the indwelling of God. The nearer we approach perfection, the more closely are we united with God. The tabernacle must have a court about it. Understand by this the discipline of the body; by the tabernacle itself, the discipline of the mind. The one is useless without the other. The court is open to the sky, and so the discipline of the body is accessible to all. What was within the tabernacle could not be seen by those without. None knows what is in the inner man save the spirit of man which is in him. The inner man is divided into rational and intellectual; the former represented by the outer, the latter by the inner part of the tabernacle. We call that rational perception by which we discern what is within ourselves. We here apply the term intellectual perception to that faculty by which we are elevated to the survey of what is divine. Man goes out of the tabernacle into the court in the exercise of works. He enters the first tabernacle when he returns to himself. He enters the second when he transcends himself. Self-transcendence is elevation into Deity. (Transcendendo sane seipsum elevatur in Deum.) In the former, man is occupied with the consideration of himself; in the latter, with the contemplation of God.

‘The ark of the covenant represents the grace of contemplation. The kinds of contemplation are six, each distinct from the rest. Two of them are exercised with regard to visible creatures, two are occupied with invisible, the two last with what is divine. The first four are represented in the ark, the two others are set forth in the figures of the cherubim. Mark the difference between the wood and the gold. There is the same difference between the objects of imagination and the objects of reason. By imagination we behold the forms of things visible, by ratiocination we investigate their causes. The three kinds of consideration which have reference to things, works, and morals, belong to the length, breadth, and height of the ark respectively. In the consideration of form and matter, our knowledge avails a full cubit. (It is equivalent to a cubit when complete.) But our knowledge of the nature of things is only partial. For this part, therefore, we reckon only half a cubit. Accordingly, the length of the ark is two cubits and a half.’... And thus he proceeds concerning the crown, the rings, the staves, the mercy-seat, the cherubim, &c.—Fol. 63, &c.

Note to page 163.

The three heavens within the mind are described at length. (De Contemp. lib. iii. cap. 8.) In the first are contained the images of all things visible; in the second lie the definitions and principles of things seen, the investigations made concerning things unseen; in the third are contemplations of things divine, beheld as they truly are—a sun that knows no going down,—and there, and there alone, the kingdom of God within us in its glory.—Cap. x. fol 52.

The eye of Intelligence is thus defined (cap. ix.):—Intelligentiæ siquidem oculus est sensus ille quo invisibilia videmus: non sicut oculo rationis quo occulta et absentia per investigationem quærimus et invenimus; sicut sæpe causas per effectus, vel effectus per causas, et alia atque alia quocunque ratiocinandi modo comprehendimus. Sed sicut corporalia corporeo sensu videre solemus visibiliter potentialiter et corporaliter; sic utique intellectualis ille sensus invisibilia capit invisibiliter quidem, sed potentialiter, sed essentialiter. (Fol. 52.) He then goes on to speak of the veil drawn over this organ by sin, and admits that even when illuminated from above, its gaze upon our inner self is not so piercing as to be able to discern the essence of the soul. The inner verities are said to be within, the upper, beyond the veil. ‘It may be questioned, however, whether we are to see with this same eye of Intelligence the things beyond the veil, or whether we use one sense to behold the invisible things which are divine, and another to behold the invisible things of our own nature. But those who maintain that there is one sense for the intuition of things above and another for those below, must prove it as well as they can. I believe that in this way they introduce much confusion into the use of this word Intelligence,—now extending its signification to a speculation which is occupied with what is above, and now confining it to what is below, and sometimes including both senses. This twofold intuition of things above and things below, whether we call it, as it were, a double sense in one, or divide it, is yet the instrument of the same sense, or a twofold effect of the same instrument, and whichever we choose, there can be no objection to our saying that they both belong to the intellectual heaven.’ There is certainly much of the confusion of which he complains in his own use of the word,—a confusion which is perhaps explained by supposing that he sometimes allows Intelligence to extend its office below its proper province, though no other faculty can rise above the limits assigned to it. Intelligence may sometimes survey from her altitude the more slow and laborious processes of reason, though she never descends to such toil.

He dwells constantly on the importance of self-knowledge, self-simplification, self-concentration, as essential to the ascent of the soul.—De Contemp. lib. iii. c. 3, c. 6; and on the difficulty of this attainment, lib. iv. c. 6.

Note to page 163.

De Contemp. lib. iv. cap. 6. Ibid. cap. 23, and comp. lib. v. cap. 1. Also iv. cap. 10. He calls it expressly a vision face to face:—Egressus autem quasi facie ad faciem intuetur, qui per mentis excessus extra semetipsum ductus summæ sapientiæ lumen sine aliquo involucro figurarum ve adumbratione; denique non per speculum et in enigmate, sed in simplici (ut sic dicam) veritate contemplatur.—Fol. 56. See also lib. v. cœpp. 4, 5, where he enters at large on the degrees and starting-points of self-transcendence. Comp. iv. c. 2, fol. 60.

De Contemp. i. cap. 10, describes the six wings, and declares that in a future state we shall possess them all. Speaking of ecstasy, he says:—‘Cum enim per mentis excessum supra sive intra nosmetipsos in divinorum contemplationem rapimur exteriorum omnium statim immo non solum eorum quæ extra nos verum etiam eorum quæ in nobis sunt omnium obliviscimur.’ When explaining the separation of soul and spirit, he exclaims,—‘O alta quies, O sublimis requies, ubi omnis quod humanitus moveri solet motum omnem amittit; ubi omnis qui tunc est motus divinitus fit et in Deum transit. Hic ille spiritus efflatus in manus patris commendatur, non (ut ille somniator Jacob) scala indiget ut ad tertium (ne dicam ad primum) cœlum evolet. Quid quæso scala indigeat quem pater inter manus bajulat ut ad tertii cœli secreta rapiat intantum ut glorietur, et dicat, Dextera tua suscepit me.... Spiritus ab infimis dividitur ut ad summa sublimetur. Spiritus ab anima scinditur ut Domino uniatur. Qui enim adhæret Domino unus spiritus est.—De extermin. mali et promotione boni, cap. xviii. Again (De Contemp. lib. iv. c. 4), In hac gemina speculatione nihil imaginarium, nihil fantasticum debet occurrere. Longe enim omnem corporeæ similitudinis proprietatem excedit quicquid spectaculi tibi hæc gemina novissimi operis specula proponit.... Ubi pars non est minor suo toto, nec totum universalius suo individuo; immo ubi pars a toto non minuitur, totum ex partibus non constituitur; quia simplex est quod universaliter proponitur et universale quod quasi particulare profertur; ubi totum singula, ubi omnia unum et unum omnia. In his utique absque dubio succumbit humana ratio, et quid faciat ibi imaginatio? Absque dubio in ejusmodi spectaculo officere potest; adjuvare omnino non potest. Elsewhere he describes the state as one of rapturous spiritual intoxication. Magnitudine jocunditatis et exultationis mens hominis a seipsa alienatur, quum intima illa internæ suavitatis abundantia potata, immo plene inebriata, quid sit, quid fuerit, penitus obliviscitur; et in abalienationis excessum tripudii sui nimietate traducitur; et in supermundanum quendam affectum sub quodam miræ felicitatis statu raptim transformatur.—Ibid. lib. v. c. 5, fol. 60.

Footnote 56:

_Light and Colour._—Light, thou eternally one, dwell above by the
great One Eternal; Colour, thou changeful, in love come to Humanity
down!

Footnote 57:

Liebner’s _Hugo of St. Victor_, p. 21.—This account of his early
studies is given by Hugo in his _Didascalion_.

Footnote 58:

Schmid, Der Mysticismus des M. A., p. 303.

Footnote 59:

Comp. _De Sacramentis_, lib. v. p. x. c. 4. (tom. iii. p. 411.
Garzon’s edition of his works, Cologne, 1617.)

Footnote 60:

See Liebner, p. 315.

Footnote 61:

_De Sacramentis_, lib. i. p. i. cap. 12.—Quisquis sic ordinatus est,
dignus est lumine solis: ut mente sursum erecta et desiderio in
superna defixo lumen summæ veritatis contemplanti irradiet: et jam non
per speculum in ænigmate, _sed in seipsa ut est_ veritatem agnoscat et
sapiat.

Footnote 62:

See Note, p. 170.

Footnote 63:

Tom. iii. p. 356.—In speaking of the days of creation and of the
analogous seasons in the new creation within man, he says that as God
first saw the light, that it was good, and then divided it from the
darkness, so we must first try the spirit and examine our light with
care, ere we part it from what we call darkness, since Satan can
assume the garb of an angel of light.

For an elaborate account of his entire theology, the reader is
referred to Liebner’s _Hugo von St. Victor und die Theologischen
Richtungen seiner Zeit_; one of the best of the numerous monographs
German scholarship has produced.

Footnote 64:

_Richardi S. Victoris Opp._ (Lyons, 1534), _De Preparatione animi ad
contemplationem_, fol. 39.

Footnote 65:

Ibid. cap. xli.

Footnote 66:

Engelhardt, Richard von St. Victor, p. 6.

Footnote 67:

See Note, p. 171.

Footnote 68:

The six degrees of contemplation are as follows (_De Contemp._ i. 6,
fol. 45):

1 In imaginatione secundum solam imaginationem.
2 In imaginatione secundum rationem.
3 In ratione secundum imaginationem.
4 In ratione secundum rationem.
5 Supra rationem sed non præter rationem.
6 Supra rationem videtur esse præter rationem.

The office of Imagination to which the first two belong is Thought
(_Cogitatio_); the office of Reason, Investigation (_Meditatio_); that
of Intelligence, Contemplation (_Contemplatio_).—_Ibid._ cap. 3. These
three states are distinguished with much care, and his definition of
the last is as follows:—Contemplatio est perspicax et liber animi
contuitus in res perspiciendas undequaque diffusus.—_Ibid._ cap. 4. He
draws the distinction between intelligibilia and intellectibilia in
cap. 7; the former = invisibilia ratione tamen comprehensibilia; the
latter = invisibilia et humanæ rationi incomprehensibilia. The four
lower kinds are principally occupied, he adds, with created objects,
the two last with what is uncreated and divine.—Fol. 45.

Footnote 69:

See Note, p. 171.

Footnote 70:

See Note, p. 172.

BOOK THE SIXTH GERMAN MYSTICISM IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY

CHAPTER I.

I pray thee, peace; I will be flesh and blood,
For there was never yet philosopher,
That could endure the toothache patiently;
However they have writ the style of gods,
And made a pish at chance and sufferance.

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

It is more healthful and nutritive to dig the earth, and to eat of
her fruits, than to stare upon the greatest glories of the heavens,
and live upon the beams of the sun: so unsatisfying a thing is
rapture and transportation to the soul; it often distracts the
faculties, but seldom does advantage piety, and is full of danger in
the greatest of its lustre.—JEREMY TAYLOR.

The approach of summer separated the members of the Ashfield circle for a time. Atherton purposed spending a few weeks in Germany, and Willoughby consented to accompany him. They were to visit once more Bonn, Heidelberg, and Frankfort, then to make Strasburg their head quarters, and thence to ramble about Alsace.

As soon as Atherton had left them, Mrs. Atherton and Kate Merivale set out for the West of England, to visit their friends Mr. and Mrs. Lowestoffe. Gower projected a sketching excursion along the banks of the Wye. He knew the Lowestoffes, and gladly bound himself by the promise they exacted, that he would make Summerford House his home for a day or two now and then, in the course of his wanderings. The beauty of the grounds and neighbourhood would have rendered such visits eminently delightful, even had the hospitable host and hostess been less accomplished admirers of art, or had Gower found no irresistible attraction in one of their guests.

The days at Summerford glided by in the enjoyment of those innumerable minor satisfactions which, far more than highly pleasurable excitements, make up the happiness of existence. If you doubt it, consult Abraham Tucker on the matter. To many persons, life at the Lowestoffes’ would have been intolerably dull. There were few visitors. The family seldom emerged from their retirement to visit the neighbouring city. Their amusements and their occupations, though varied, were confined within limits which some would find lamentably narrow. Lowestoffe himself was an early man and a punctual. It cost him something to smile a courteous forgiveness when even a favourite guest transgressed any of the family regulations on which his comfort so much depended. His horses and dogs, his grounds and his flowers, everything about him and all dependent upon him, were methodically cared for, inspected, or commanded by himself in person. In one respect only was there irregularity,—no servant, labourer, or workman could be sure of any moment in which the master might not suddenly appear to see that all went rightly. Though scrupulously just, and of a generous nature, Lowestoffe was only too subject to a nervous dread of being defrauded by those he employed, and used often to declare that men were ruined, not so much by what they spent themselves, as by what they allowed others to spend for them. In his early days he had contented himself with the mere necessaries of his position in life, to discharge the debts which he inherited. He would actually have gone into business (to the horror of his aristocratic friends, but with the applause of every impartial conscience), had there been no other way whereby to emancipate his property and honour. All declared he would have made a fortune if he had. A few years of self-denial, and a few more of frugality and industrious vigilance, realized the full accomplishment of his most cherished desire. His care and activity enabled him to deal very liberally whatever his confidence was at last bestowed, and to expend in discriminating charity a large annual sum. He was a connoisseur and a liberal patron of art, but no solicitation could induce him to purchase an old master. He knew well how skilfully imitations of antiquity are prepared, and had he bought a reputed Titian or Correggio, he would have fidgeted himself into a fever in a fortnight, by ruminating on the probabilities of deception. He spent his money far more wisely on choice pieces by living artists. When the morning was over, the afternoon and evening found him a cheerful and fascinating companion. His cares were thrown off, and he was restless and anxious no longer about little things. Literature and art, even mere frolic, play with a child, or a game of any kind, were welcome. Gower whispered an antithesis one day, to the effect that Lowestoffe gave one half the day to childish wisdom and the other to wise childishness.

We have mentioned what was not to be found at Summerford. What the two sisters did find there was amply sufficient for enjoyment. There was a long avenue winding up to the house, so beset with ancient trees, that it seemed a passage through the heart of a wood. The lawn on which it opened was dotted with islands and rings of flower-bed,—perfect magic circles of horticulture, one all blue, another red, another yellow. There was the house itself, with its old-fashioned terraces, urns, and balustrades, and behind it—oh, joy—a rookery! A conservatory shot out its transparent glittering wing on one side of the edifice. At the foot of a slope of grass descending from the flower-palace lay a pool, shut in by a mound and by fragments of rock overgrown with flowers, and arched above by trees. On the surface spread the level leaves of the water-lilies, with the sparkling bubbles here and there upon their edges, and everywhere the shadowed water was alive with fish, that might be seen darting, like little ruddy flames, in and out among the arrowy sheaves of reeds. Then farther away there were old irregular walks, richly furred with moss, wandering under trees through which the sunbeams shot, now making some glossy evergreen far in among the stems and underwood shine with a startling brightness (so that the passer-by turned to see if there were not running water there, and fancied Undine had been at her tricks again),—now rendering translucent some plume of fern, now kindling some rugged edge of fir, and again glistening on some old tree-trunk, mailed with its circular plates of white lichen. These wood pathways—often broken into natural steps by the roots of the trees which ran across their course—led up a steep hill. From the summit were seen, in front, opposite heights, thickly covered with foliage, through which it was only here and there that a jutting point of rock could show itself to be reddened by the setting sun. Beneath, at a great depth, a shallow brook idled on its pebbles, and you looked down on the heads of those who crossed its rustic bridge. On the one hand, there stretched away to the horizon a gentle sweep of hills, crossed and re-crossed with hedgerows and speckled with trees and sheep, and, on the other, lay the sea, in the haze of a sultry day, seen like a grey tablet of marble veined with cloud-shadows.

All this without doors, and books, pictures, prints, drawing, chess, chat, so choice and plentiful within, made Summerford ‘a dainty place’—

Attempred goodly well for health and for delight.

Meanwhile Atherton in Germany was reviving old acquaintanceships and forming new, studying the historic relics of old Strasburg under the shadow of its lofty minster, and relieving his research by rides and walks, now with student and now with professor. Early in August he and Willoughby returned to England, and repaired straightway to Summerford. There, accordingly, the mystical circuit was complete once more. In a day or two the discovery was made, through some mysterious hints dropped by Willoughby, that Atherton had brought home a treasure from the Rhine. Cross-examination elicited the fact that the said treasure was a manuscript. Something to do with mysticism? Partly so. Then we must hear it. Atherton consented without pretending reluctance. The document purported to be his translation of a narrative discovered among the Strasburg archives, written by one Adolf Arnstein, an armourer of that city,—a personage who appears to have lived in the fourteenth century, and kept some record of what he saw and heard.

So the manuscript was read at intervals, in short portions, sometimes to the little circle grouped on the grass under the trees, sometimes as they sat in the house, with open windows, to let in the evening song of the birds.

Atherton commenced his first reading as follows:—

THE CHRONICLE OF ADOLF ARNSTEIN OF STRASBURG.

_This book was begun in the year after the birth of our Lord, one
thousand three hundred and twenty. Whosoever readeth this book, let
him pray for the soul of Adolf Arnstein, a poor sinful man, who
wrote it. And to all who read the same, or hear it read, may God
grant everlasting life. Amen._

1320. _September. St. Matthew’s Day._—Three days ago I was surprised
by a visit from Hermann of Fritzlar,[71] who has travelled hither
from Hesse to hear Master Eckart preach. How he reminded me of what
seem old times to me now—ay, old times, though I am but twenty this
day—of the days when my honoured father lived and I was a merry boy
of fifteen, little thinking that I should so soon be left alone to
play the man as I best might.

Hermann is the cause of my writing this. We were talking together
yesterday in this room, while the workmen were hammering in the yard
below, and the great forge-bellows were groaning away as usual. I
told him how I envied his wonderful memory. He replied by reminding
me that I could write and he could not. ‘Ah,’ said I, ‘but your mind
is full of things worth writing down. You scarcely hear or read a
legend, a hymn, or a godly sermon, but it is presently your own, and
after it has lain working in your brain for some time, you produce
it again, and say or sing it after a way you have, so that it is
quite delightful to hear.’

[The night before last I had taken him down into the work-shop, and
told the men to stop their clatter for awhile, and hear something to
do them good—none of your Latin mumbling, but a godly history in
their mother-tongue. And then did my friend tell them the Legend of
Saint Dorothea, with such a simple tenderness that my rough fellows
stood like statues till he had done. I saw a tear run down Hans’
sooty face, making a white channel over his cheek. He would have it
afterwards that some dust had blown into his eye.]

‘My good friend,’ said Hermann, ‘I am a dozen years at least older
than you; let me counsel you not to set light by your gift, and let
it lie unused. Had I that same scrivening art at my service, I
should write me a book setting forth what I heard and observed while
it was fresh in my mind. I know many good men who would hold such a
book, written by a God-fearing man, as great treasure. They would
keep it with care and hand it down to those who came after them, so
that the writer thereof should be thought on when his hand was cold.
I have it in my thoughts to dictate one day or other to some cunning
scribe, some of the legends I so love. Haply they may not be the
worse for their passage through the mind of a plain man with a
loving heart, who has carried them about with him whithersoever he
went, lived in them and grown one with them. But you can do much
more if you list. I know, moreover, that you, Adolf, are not the man
to turn away from your father’s old friends because the great ones
despise and daily vex them.’

This evening I do herewith begin to act on the resolution his words
awakened. I am but a layman, and so is he, but for that matter I
have hearkened to teachers who tell me that the layman may be nearer
to heaven than the clerk, and that all such outer differences are of
small account in the eye of God.

* * *

My father was an armourer and president of the guild. All looked up
to him as the most fearless and far-seeing of our counsellors. He
taught us how to watch and to resist the encroachments of the bishop
and the nobles. We have to thank his wisdom mainly that our position
has been not a little strengthened of late. Still, how much wrong
have we oftentimes to suffer from the senate and their presidents!
Strasburg prospers—marvellously, considering the dreadful pestilence
seven years back; but there is much to amend, Heaven knows! My
father fell on a journey to Spires, in an affray with Von Otterbach
and his black band. He could use well the weapons he made, and
wounded Von Otterbach well nigh to the death before he was
overpowered by numbers. The Rhenish League was strong enough, and
for once bold enough, to avenge him well. That castle of Otterbach,
which every traveller and merchant trembled to pass, stands now
ruinous and empty. I, alas! was away the while, on my
apprentice-travels. The old evil is but little abated, though our
union has, I doubt not, prevented many of the worst mischiefs of the
fist-law. Every rock along the Rhine is castled. They espy us
approaching from far off, and at every turn have we to wrangle, and
now and then, if strong enough, to fight, with these vultures about
their robber-toll. Right thankful am I that my father died a man’s
death, fighting—that I have not to imagine his fate as like that of
some, who, falling alive into their hands, have been horribly
tortured, and let down by a windlass, with dislocated limbs, into
the loathsome dog-hole of a keep, to writhe and die by inches in
putrid filth and darkness. Yet our very perils give to our calling
an enterprise and an excitement it would otherwise lack. The
merchant has his chivalry as well as the knight. Moreover, as rich
old Gersdorf says, risk and profit run together—though, as to money,
I have as much already as I care for. We thrive, despite
restrictions and extortions innumerable, legal and illegal. My
brother Otto sends me word from Bohemia that he prospers. The
Bohemian throats can never have enough of our wines, and we are good
customers for their metal. Otto was always a rover. He talks of
journeying to the East. It seems but yesterday that he and I were
boys together, taking our reading and writing lessons from that poor
old Waldensian whom my father sheltered in our house. How we all
loved him! I never saw my father so troubled at anything as at his
death. Our house has been ever since a refuge for such persecuted
wanderers.

The wrath of Popes, prelates, and inquisitors hath been especially
kindled of late years against sundry communities, sects, and
residues of sects, which are known by the name of Beghards,
Beguines, Lollards, Kathari, Fratricelli, Brethren of the Free
Spirit,[72] &c. Councils, they tell me, have been held at Cologne,
Mayence, and Narbonne, to suppress the Beghards. Yet their numerous
communities in the Netherlands and the Rhineland are a blessing to
the poor folk, to whom the hierarchy are a curse. The clergy are
jealous of them. They live single, they work with their hands, they
nurse the sick, they lay out the dead, they lead a well-ordered and
godly life in their Beguinasia, under the Magister or Magistra; but
they are bound by no vows, fettered by no harassing minutiæ of
austerity, and think the liberty of the Spirit better than monkish
servitude. Some of them have fallen into the notions of those
enthusiastic Franciscans who think the end of the world at hand, and
that we live in, or near, the days of Antichrist. And no wonder,
when the spiritual heads of Christendom are so unchristian. There
are some sturdy beggars who wander about the country availing
themselves of the name of Beghard to lead an idle life. These I
excuse not. They say some of these Beghards claim the rank of
apostles—that they have subterranean rooms, where both sexes meet to
hear blasphemous preachers announce their equality with God. Yea,
worse charges than these—even of grossest lewdness—do they bring. I
know many of them, both here and at Cologne, but nothing of this
sort have I seen, or credibly heard of. They are the enemies of
clerical pomp and usurpation, and some, I fear, hold strange
fantastical notions, coming I know not whence. But the churchmen
themselves are at fault, and answerable for it all. They leave the
artisans and labourers in besotted ignorance, and when they do get a
solitary religious idea that comes home to them, ten to one but it
presently confounds or overthrows what little sense they have. Many
deeply religious minds among us, both of laity and clergy, are at
heart as indignant at the crimes of the hierarchy as can be the
wildest mob-leading fanatic who here and there appears for a moment,
haranguing the populace, denouncing the denouncers, and bidding men
fight sin with sin. We who sigh for reform, who must have more
spiritual freedom, have our secret communications, our meetings now
and then for counsel, our signs and counter-signs. Folks call the
Rhineland the Parsons’ Walk—so full is it of the clergy, so enjoyed
and lorded over by them. Verily, it is at least as full of those
hidden ones, who, in various wise which they call heresy, do worship
God without man coming in between.

The tide of the time is with us.[73] Our once famous Godfrey of
Strasburg is forgotten. Wolfram von Eschenbach is the universal
model. His _Parzival and Titurel_ live on the lips of the many
rhymesters and minstrels who wander from town to town now, as once
they did from court to court and castle to castle. It is the
religiousness and the learning of Wolfram that finds favour for him
and countless imitators. This is the good sign I mean. Our singers
have turned preachers. They are practical, after their fashion. They
are a Book of Proverbs, and give us maxims, riddles, doctrines,
science, in their verses. If they sing of chivalry, it is to
satirize chivalry—such knighthood as now we have. They are spreading
and descending towards the people. Men may have their songs of
chivalry in Spain, where, under the blessed St. Iago, good knights
and true have a real crusade against those heathen hounds the Moors,
whom God confound. But here each petty lord in his castle has
nothing to do but quarrel with his neighbour and oppress all weaker
than himself. What to such men, robbing, drinking, devouring their
living with harlots, are Arthur and the Round Table, or Oliver and
Roland? So the singers come to us. In good sooth, the old virtues of
knighthood—its truth and honour, its chastity and courage—are found
far more among the citizens than with the nobles. We relish the sage
precepts and quaint abstruseness of Reimar of Zweter, though he be
somewhat of a pedant. Albertus Magnus is the hero with him, instead
of Charlemagne. His learning is a marvel, and he draws all morality
by allegory out of the Seven Sciences in most wondrous wise.
Frauenlob himself (alas! I heard last year that he was dead) could
not praise fair ladies more fairly. He assails, in the boldest
fashion, the Pope and Rome, and their daughters Cologne and Mayence.
The last time he was over here from Bohemia, we laughed nigh to
bursting at his caricature of a tournament, and applauded till the
rafters rang again when he said that not birth, but virtue, made
true nobleness. Then our ballads and popular fables are full of
satire on the vices of ecclesiastics. All this tends to keep men
awake to the abuses of the day, and to deepen their desire for
reform. We shall need all the strength we can gather, political and
religious, if in the coming struggle the name of German is not to be
a shame. Our Holy Father promises to indemnify himself for the
humiliation he suffers at Avignon by heaping insults upon Germany.
If Louis of Bavaria conquers Frederick, I should not wonder if we
Strasburgers wake up some morning and find ourselves excommunicate.
All true hearts must be stirring—we shall have cowards and sluggards
enow on all hands.

Last month the Emperor Louis was here with his army for a few days.
Our bishop Ochsenstein and the Zorn family espouse the cause of his
rival Frederick the Fair. Louis has on his side, however, the best
of us—the family of the Müllenheim, the chief burghers, and the
people generally. Every true German heart, every hater of foreign
domination, must be with him. Many a skirmish has there been in our
streets between the retainers of the two great houses of Zorn and
Müllenheim, and now their enmity is even more bitter than
heretofore. The senate received Louis with royal honours. When
Frederick was here five years ago, we would only entertain him as a
guest. The clergy and most of the nobles hailed him as Emperor. Now,
when Louis came, it was their turn to stand aloof. There were few of
them in the cathedral the other day, when he graciously confirmed
our privileges. The bishop issued orders to put a stop to the
performance of all church offices while Louis was here; whereupon,
either from prudence or consideration for our souls, he shortened
his visit.[74]

1320. _September. St. Maurice’s Day._—A long conversation with
Hermann to-day. He has heard Eckart repeatedly, and, as I looked
for, is both startled and perplexed. Of a truth it is small marvel
that such preaching as his stirred up all Cologne, gathered crowds
of wondering hearers, made him fast friends and deadly enemies, and
roused the wrath of the heretic-hunting archbishop. Hermann brought
me home some of the things this famous doctor said which most struck
him. I wrote them down from his lips, and place them here.

‘He who is at all times alone is worthy of God. He who is at all
times at home, to him is God present. He who standeth at all times
in a present Now, in him doth God the Father bring forth his son
without ceasing.[75]

‘He who finds one thing otherwise than another—to whom God is dearer
in one thing than another, that man is carnal, and still afar off
and a child. But he to whom God is alike in all things hath become a
man.[76]

‘All that is in the Godhead is one. Thereof can we say nothing. It
is above all names, above all nature. The essence of all creatures
is eternally a divine life in Deity. God works. So doth not the
Godhead. Therein are they distinguished,—in working and not working.
The end of all things is the hidden darkness of the eternal Godhead,
unknown and never to be known.[77]

‘I declare, by good truth and truth everlasting, that in every man
who hath utterly abandoned self, God must communicate Himself
according to all His power, so completely that he retains nothing in
His life, in His essence, in His Nature, and in His Godhead—He must
communicate all to the bringing forth of fruit.[78]

‘When the Will is so united that it becometh a One in oneness, then
doth the Heavenly Father produce his only-begotten Son in Himself
and in me. Wherefore in Himself and in me? I am one with Him—He
cannot exclude me. In the self-same operation doth the Holy Ghost
receive his existence, and proceeds from me as from God. Wherefore?
I am in God, and if the Holy Ghost deriveth not his being from me,
He deriveth it not from God. I am in nowise excluded.[79]

‘There is something in the soul which is above the soul, divine,
simple, an absolute Nothing, rather unnamed than named, unknown than
known. So long as thou lookest on thyself as a _Something_, so long
thou knowest as little what this is as my mouth knows what colour
is, or as my eye knows what taste is. Of this I am wont to speak in
my sermons, and sometimes I have called it a Power, sometimes an
uncreated Light, sometimes a divine Spark. It is absolute and free
from all names and forms, as God is free and absolute in Himself. It
is higher than knowledge, higher than love, higher than grace. For
in all these there is still distinction. In this power doth blossom
and flourish God, with all His Godhead, and the Spirit flourisheth
in God. In this power doth the Father bring forth His only-begotten
Son, as essentially as in Himself, and in this light ariseth the
Holy Ghost. This Spark rejects all creatures, and will have only
God, simply as he is in Himself. It rests satisfied neither with the
Father, nor the Son, nor the Holy Ghost, nor with the three Persons,
as far as each exists in its respective attributes. I will say what
will sound more marvellous yet. This Light is satisfied only with
the super-essential essence. It is bent on entering into the simple
Ground, the still Waste, wherein is no distinction, neither Father,
Son, nor Holy Ghost,—into the Unity where no man dwelleth. There is
it satisfied in the light, there it is one; then is it in itself, as
this Ground is a simple stillness in itself, immoveable; and yet by
this Immobility are all things moved.[80]

‘God in himself was not God—in the creature only hath He become God.
I ask to be rid of God—that is, that God, by his grace, would bring
me into the Essence—that Essence which is above God and above
distinction. I would enter into that eternal Unity which was mine
before all time, when I was what I would, and would what I was;—into
a state above all addition or diminution;—into the Immobility
whereby all is moved.[81]

‘Folks say to me often—“Pray God for me.” Then I think with myself,
“Why go ye out? Why abide ye not in your own selves, and take hold
on your own possession? Ye have all truth essentially within
you?.”[82]

‘God and I are one in knowing. God’s Essence is His knowing, and
God’s knowing makes me to know Him. Therefore is His knowing my
knowing. The eye whereby I see God is the same eye whereby He seeth
me. Mine eye and the eye of God are one eye, one vision, one
knowledge, and one love.[83]

‘If any man hath understood this sermon, it is well for him. Had not
a soul of you been here, I must have spoken the very same words. He
who hath not understood it, let him not trouble his heart therewith,
for as long as a man is not himself like unto this truth, so long
will he never understand it, seeing that it is no truth of
reflection, to be thought out, but is come directly out of the heart
of God without medium.’[84]

Of all this I can understand scarcely anything. The perpetual
incarnation of God in good Christians, the nameless Nothing, the
self-unfolding and self-infolding of God (I know not what words to
use) are things too high for my grosser apprehension. I shall let
the sayings lie here; some one else who reads may comprehend them. I
am content to be a child in such matters. I look with awe and
admiration on men who have attained while yet in the flesh heights
of wisdom which will be, perhaps to all eternity, beyond the reach
of such as I am.

1320. _October. St. Francis’ Day._—Went with Hermann this morning to
hear mass. Master Eckart preached again. Dr. Tauler in the church.
How every one loves that man! As several of his brethren made their
way to their places, I saw the people frown on some of them, and
laugh and leer to each other as two or three of them passed. They
had reason, I know, to hate and to despise certain among them. But
to Tauler all bowed, and many voices blessed him. He has a kind
heart to feel for us, the commonalty. He and his sermons are one and
the same. He means all he says, and we can understand much, at
least, of what he means. There is a cold grandeur about Master
Eckart. He seems above emotion: his very face, all intellect, says
it is a weakness to feel. At him we wonder; with Master Tauler we
weep. How reverently did Tauler listen, as a son to a father, to the
words of the great Doctor. No doubt he understood every syllable. He
is and shall be my sole confessor. I will question him, some day,
concerning these lofty doctrines whereby it would seem that the
poorest beggar may outpass in wisdom and in blessedness all the
Popes of Christendom.

Master Eckart said to-day:—‘Some people are for seeing God with
their eyes, as they can see a cow, and would love God as they love a
cow (which thou lovest for the milk and for the cheese, and for
thine own profit). Thus do all those who love God for the sake of
outward riches or of inward comfort; they do not love aright, but
seek only themselves and their own advantage.[85]

‘God is a pure good in Himself, and therefore will He dwell nowhere
save in a pure soul. There He may pour Himself out; into that He can
wholly flow. What is Purity? It is that man should have turned
himself away from all creatures, and have set his heart so entirely
on the pure good, that no creature is to him a comfort, that he has
no desire for aught creaturely, save as far as he may apprehend
therein the pure good which is God. And as little as the bright eye
can endure aught foreign in it, so little can the pure soul bear
anything in it, any stain, aught between it and God. To it all
creatures are pure to enjoy, for it enjoyeth all creatures in God,
and God in all creatures. Yea, so pure is that soul that she seeth
through herself, she needeth not to seek God afar off, she finds him
in herself, when, in her natural purity, she hath flowed out into
the super-natural of the pure Godhead. And thus is she in God and
God in her, and what she doeth that she doeth in God and God doeth
it in her.[86]

‘Then shall a man be truly poor when he is as free from his creature
will as he was before he was born. And I say to you, by the eternal
truth, that so long as ye desire to fulfil the will of God, and have
any desire after eternity and God, so long are ye not truly poor. He
alone hath true spiritual poverty who wills nothing, knows nothing,
desires nothing.[87]

‘For us, to follow truly what God willeth, is to follow that whereto
we are most inclined,—whereto we feel most frequent inward
exhortation and strongest attraction. The inner voice is the voice
of God.’[88]

After the service, Hermann left me to go and see a sick friend. I
mingled with the crowd. There was a knot of people gathered before
All-Saints, discussing what they had heard. A portly, capon-lined
burgomaster declared he had first been hungry, then sleepy, and that
was all he knew. He had verily, as a wag presently told him, obeyed
the master, and lost consciousness of all external things. Whereat
the jolly citizen was so tickled that he took the joker home to dine
with him, promising mountains of pickled pork, a whole Black Forest
of sauer kraut, and boundless beakers of hippocras.

An innocent novice from the country (looking fresh as a new-caught
trout) began to say, ‘Well, it doth seem to me that though Doctor
Eckart received his Doctorate from Rome, at the hands of our Holy
Father, though he hath studied and taught at Paris, though he hath
been Provincial of our order in Saxony, and Vicar-General in
Bohemia—where he played the cat with the mice, I can tell you—yet
that some things he said were——’

‘Hold your tongue for a jackass,’ quoth a senior brother, who liked
not, methinks, to hear a whisper against the orthodoxy of the order,
by whomsoever or against whomsoever uttered.

‘He is a blasphemer,’ said a friar. ‘Good people, did not you hear
him say that what burned in hell was the Nothing?[89] Then nothing
burns; _ergo_, there is no hell.’

‘I don’t think he believes in God at all,’ cried one:—‘Did he not
say something about caring no more for God than for a stone?’

‘Ay, but,’ urged the friar, ‘no hell, and so no purgatory—think of
that. Why, he has swept the universe as clean of the devil as a
housewife’s platter at a christening.’

Some one in the crowd shouted out, ‘That fellow cares not what
becomes of God, but he can’t give up his devil.’ Whereon the friar
grew very red in the face, as we all laughed, but could not bethink
him of any answer, and went capped with the name of Brother
Brimstone ever after.

‘What was that he said,’ asked a slip-shod, sottish-looking tailor,
‘about doing what you like, and that is what God likes?’

‘Friends,’ cries next a rainbow-coloured, dandified puppy, a
secretary of the bishop’s, stroking the down of a would-be
moustache, evidently as yet only in a state of Becoming
(_Werden_)—‘I would fain have moderately kicked him,——

‘My friends’ (smiling with a patronizing blandness at the tailor),
‘you are right; the public morals are in danger. Evil men and
seducers wax worse and worse. But the Holy Church will protect her
children. We have heard pestilent heresy this day. To hear that man
talk, you would fancy he thought there was as much divinity in his
little finger as in the whole body of the Virgin Mother of God.’

Whereupon up starts a little man whom I knew for one of the brethren
of the Free Spirit—takes his place on a stone that lay in the mud of
the middle of the street, and begins—‘Good people, did you not hear
the doctor say that those who cannot understand his doctrine are to
hold by the common faith? Did not Saint Peter say of the Epistles of
the blessed Saint Paul that there were some things therein hard to
be understood, which the ignorant would wrest to their own
destruction? I’ll tell you the ignorance he means and the knowledge
he means. Friend Crispin there, whom you carried home drunk in a
barrow last night, and Master Secretary here, who transgresses in
like wise and worse in a daintier style, and hath, by the way, as
much perfumery about him as though the scent thereof, rising towards
heaven, were so much incense for the taking away of his many
sins—they are a couple of St. Paul’s ignoramuses. The knowledge St.
Paul means is the thoughtful love of doing the right thing for the
love of Christ. But the Pope himself may be one of these witless
ones, if the love of sin be stronger in him than the love of
holiness. The preaching of all the twelve Apostles would be turned
to mischief and to licence by such as you, you feather-brained,
civet-tanned puppet of a man, you adulterous, quill-driving
hypocrite.’

‘Seize him,’ shouts my Secretary, and darted forward; but an
apprentice put out his foot, and over he rolled into the mire,
grievously ruffling and besmutching all his gay feathers, while the
little man mingled with the laughing people, and made his escape. I
hope he is out of Strasburg, or he may be secluded in a darkness and
a solitude anything but divine. He was a trifle free of tongue,
assuredly; I suppose that makes a part of the freedom of the Spirit
with him. He had right, however, beyond question.

The confusion created by this incident had scarcely ceased, when I
saw advancing towards us the stately form of Master Eckart himself.
He looked with a calm gravity about upon us, as he paused in the
midst—seemed to understand at once of what sort our talk had been,
and appeared about to speak. There was a cry for silence—‘Hear the
Doctor! hear him!’ Whereon he spoke as follows:—

‘There was once a learned man who longed and prayed full eight years
that God would show him some one to teach him the way of truth. And
on a time, as he was in a great longing, there came unto him a voice
from heaven, and said, “Go to the front of the church, there wilt
thou find a man that shall show thee the way to blessedness.”

‘So thither he went, and found there a poor man whose feet were
torn, and covered with dust and dirt, and all his apparel scarce
three hellers worth. He greeted him, saying, “God give thee good
morrow.” Thereat made he answer, “I never had an ill morrow.” Again
said he, “God prosper thee.” The other answered, “Never had I aught
but prosperity.”

‘“Heaven save thee,” said the scholar, “how answerest thou me so?”

‘“I was never other than saved.”

‘“Explain to me this, for I understand not.”

‘“Willingly,” quoth the poor man. “Thou wishest me good morrow. I
never had an ill morrow, for, am I an hungered, I praise God; am I
freezing, doth it hail, snow, rain, is it fair weather or foul, I
praise God; and therefore had I never ill morrow. Thou didst say,
God prosper thee. I have been never unprosperous, for I know how to
live with God; I know that what he doth is best, and what God giveth
or ordaineth for me, be it pain or pleasure, that I take cheerfully
from Him as the best of all, and so I had never adversity. Thou
wishest God to bless me. I was never unblessed, for I desire to be
only in the will of God, and I have so given up my will to the will
of God, that what God willeth I will.”

‘“But if God were to cast thee into hell,” said the scholar, “what
wouldst thou do then?”

‘“Cast me into hell? His goodness holds him back therefrom. Yet if
he did, I should have two arms to embrace him withal. One arm is
true Humility, and therewith am I one with his holy humanity. And
with the right arm of Love, that joineth his holy Godhead, I would
embrace him, so He must come with me into hell likewise. And even
so, I would sooner be in hell, and have God, than in heaven, and not
have Him.”

‘Then understood this Master that true Abandonment, with utter
Abasement, was the nearest way to God.

‘Moreover the Master asked: “From whence comest thou?”

‘“From God.”

‘“Where hast thou found God?”

‘“Where I abandoned all creatures. I am a king. My kingdom is my
soul. All my powers, within and without, do homage to my soul. This
kingdom is greater than any kingdom on the earth.”

‘“What hath brought thee to this perfection?”

‘“My silence, my heavenward thoughts, my union with God. For I could
rest in nothing less than God. Now I have found God, and have
everlasting rest and joy in Him.”[90]

With that Master Eckart ceased, and went on his way again, leaving
us in wonderment; and I watched him, as far as I could see along the
winding street, walking on under the over-hanging gables, with his
steady step and abstract air, and his silver locks fluttering out in
the wind from under his doctor’s hat. When I looked round, I found
myself almost alone. He is a holy man, let what will be said about
heresy.

I set down here a new hymn Hermann sang me—sweet, as he sang it—with
a ringing repetition that chimes right pleasantly, and makes amends
for some lack of meaning in the words.[91]

Oh be glad, thou Zion’s daughter,
Joyous news to thee are sent;
Thou shalt sing a strain of sweetness,
Sing it to thy heart’s content.
Now the friend of God thou art,
Therefore shalt thou joy at heart,
Therefore know no sorrow-smart.
Lo! ’tis ju-ju-jubilation,
Meditation;
Ju-ju-ju-ju-jubilation,
Contemplation;
Ju-ju-ju-jubilation;
Ju-ju-ju-jubilation;
Speculation;
Ju-ju-ju-jubilation,
Conciliation!

Meditation, that is goodly,
When a man on God will muse;
Jubilation worketh wonder,
’Tis the harp the soul doth use.
Speculation, that is sheen,
Contemplation crowns, I ween,
Concord leads, the dance’s queen,
Lo! ju-ju-ju-
Conciliation!
’Tis jubilation
At the sweets of contemplation!

Have been haunted by this ju-ju, in-doors and out, whatever I have
been doing for the last three days, and I hear it in every stroke
upon the anvil.

1320. _Second week in October._—A ride over to Fegersheim about Sir
Rudolf’s new bascinet with the beaked ventaille. As I reached the
castle the ladies were just coming out for hawking, with a brave
company of knights and squires. They were fair to see, with their
copes and kirtles blue and white, and those fanciful new-fashioned
crowns on their heads, all glittering with gold and jewels. Sir
Rudolf stayed for me awhile and then followed them.

On my way back, rested at noon at a little hostelry, where I sat
before the door at a table, chatting with mine host. There ride up a
priest and monk with attendants. Holy Mary, what dresses! The monk
with bells on his horse’s bridle, his hood fastened with a great
golden pin, wrought at the head into a true-love knot, his hair
growing long so as to hide his tonsure, his shoes embroidered and
cut lattice-wise.[92] There was the priest with broad gold girdle,
gown of green and red, slashed after the newest mode, and a long
sword and dagger, very truly militant. I marvelled at the variety
and unction of the oaths they had at their service. The advantage of
a theological training was very manifest therein.

Scarcely were these worthies, with bag and baggage, well on their
way again when I espied, walking towards the inn, a giant of a
man—some three inches higher than I am (a sight I have not often
seen), miserably attired, dusty and travel-worn. When he came to
where I was he threw down his staff and bundle, cast his huge limbs
along the bench, gave a careless, surly glance at me, and, throwing
back his shaggy head of black hair, seemed about to sleep. Having
pity on his weariness I said, ‘Art thirsty, friend? the sun hath
power to-day.’ Thereupon he partly raised himself, looked fixedly at
me, and then drank off the tankard I pushed towards him, grunting
out a something which methought was meant for thanks. Being now
curious, I asked him straight, ‘Where he came from?’

He. I never came from anywhere.

I. What are you?

He. I am not.

I. What will you?

He. I will not.

I. This is passing strange. Tell me your name.

He. Men call me the Nameless Wild.

_I._ Not far off the mark either; you talk wildly enough. Where do
you come from? whither are you bound?

He. I dwell in absolute Freedom.

I. What is that?

_He._ When a man lives as he list, without distinction (Otherness,
_Anderheit_), without before or after. The man who hath in his
Eternal Nothing become nothing knows nought of distinctions.

_I._ But to violate distinction is to violate order, and to break
that is to be a slave. That is not the freedom indeed, which the
truth gives. He that committeth sin is the servant of sin. No man
can be so utterly self-annihilated and lost in God,—can be such a
very nothing that there remains no remnant of the original
difference between creature and Creator. My soul and body are one,
are not separate; but they are distinct. So is it with the soul
united to God. Mark the difference, friend, I prithee, between
separation and distinction (_Geschiedenheit und Unterschiedenheit_).

_He._ The teacher saith that the saintly man is God’s son, and what
Christ doth, that doth he.

_I._ He saith that such man followeth Christ in righteousness. But
our personality must ever abide. Christ is son of God by nature, we
by grace. Your pride blinds you. You are enlightened with a false
light, coming whence I know not. You try and ‘break through’ to the
Oneness, and you break through reason and reverence.

He replied by telling me that I was in thick darkness, and the boy
coming with my horse, I left him.[93]

As I rode homeward I thought on the contrast I had seen. This man
who came last is the natural consequent on the two who preceded him.
So doth a hypocritical, ghostly tyranny produce lawlessness. I have
seen the Priest and the Levite, and methinks one of the
thieves,—where is our good Samaritan? I know not which extreme is
the worst. One is selfish absoluteness, the other absolute
selfishness. Oh, for men among us who shall battle with each in the
strength of a truth above them both! Poor Alsace!

Here Atherton laid aside his manuscript, and conversation commenced.

Footnote 71:

The _Heiligenleben_ of Hermann von Fritslar has been recently edited
by Franz Pfeiffer, in his _Ausgabe der Deutschen Mystiker_ (Leipsig,
1845). Hermann says himself repeatedly that he had caused his book to
be written (_schreiben lassen_) and there is every reason to believe
that he was, like Rulman Merswin and Nicholas of Basle, his
contemporaries, a devout layman,—one of a class among the laity
characteristic of that age and neighbourhood, who, without entering
into an order, spent the greater part of their time in the exercises
of religion, and of their fortune on religious objects. Though he
could not write, he could read, and his book is confessedly a
compilation from many books and from the sermons and the sayings of
learned and godly men. He says, Diz buch ist zu sammene gelesen ûzze
vile anderen bucheren und ûzze vile predigâten und ûzze vil
lêrêren.—_Vorrede._

Footnote 72:

Concerning these sects, see Ullmann, _Reformatoren vor der
Reformation_, vol. ii. pp. 1-18. The fullest account is given of them
in a masterly Latin treatise by Mosheim, _De Beghardis et Beguinabus_.
He enters at length into the discussion of their name and origin;
details the various charges brought against them, and gives the bulls
and acts issued for their suppression. See especially the circular of
John Ochsenstein, Bishop of Strasburg, cap. iv. § xi. p. 255.

Footnote 73:

Authority for these statements concerning the literature of the
period, will be found in Gervinus, _Geschichte der poetischen
National-Literatur der Deutschen_, part vi. §§ 1, 2, 5.

Footnote 74:

_Johannes Tauler von Strasburg_, by Dr. Carl Schmidt, pp. 8-10; and
Laguille’s _Histoire d’Alsace_, liv. xxiv.

Footnote 75:

Meister Eghart spricht: wer alle cit allein ist, der ist gottes
wirdige; vnt wer alliu cit do heimenen ist, dem ist got gegenwürtig;
vnt wer alliu cit stat in einem gegenwürtigen nu, in dem gebirt got
der vatter sinen sune an vnderlas.—_Sprüche Deutscher Mystiker_, in
Wackernagel’s _Altdeutsches Lesebuch_, p. 889.

Footnote 76:

Meister Eghart sprach: vnt wem in einem anders ist denne in dem
andern, vnt dem got lieber ist in einem denne in dem andern, der
mensche ist grobe, vnt noch verre vnt ein kint. Aber dem got gelich
ist in allen, der ist ce man worden.—_Ibid._

Both this saying and the foregoing are expressions for that total
indifference and self-abandonment so strenuously inculcated by the
mystics. He who lives weaned from the world, alone with God, without
regrets, without anticipations, ‘stands in a present Now,’ and sees
the divine love as clearly in his sorrows as in his joys,—does not
find ‘one thing other than another.’ There is exaggeration in
suppressing, as Eckart would do, the instinct of thanksgiving for
special benefaction; but in his strong language lies couched a great
truth,—that only in utter self-surrender can man find abiding peace.

Footnote 77:

Alles das in der gottheyt ist, das ist ein, vnd davon ist nicht zu
sprechen. Got der würcket, die gotheyt nit, sy hat auch nicht zu
würckende, in ir ist auch kein werck. Got vnt gotheyt hat underscheyd,
an würcken vnd an nit würcken.

Was ist das letst end? Es ist die verborgen finsternusz der ewigen
gotheit, vnd ist unbekant, vnd wirt nymmerme bekant. (See a paper on
Eckart, by Dr. Carl Schmidt in the _Theol. Stud. u. Kritiken_, 1839,
3, p. 693.) Comp. the following:—Got ist noch gut noch besser, noch
allerbest, vnd ick thue also unrecht, wenn ick Got gut heisse, rechte
ase ob ick oder er etwas wiz weiss und ick es schwarz heisse.—_Ibid._
p. 675. This last assertion was one of the counts of accusation in the
bull of 1330.

Footnote 78:

Martensen’s _Meister Eckart_ (Hamburg, 1842), p. 22.—The divine
communication assumes with Eckart the form of philosophical necessity.
The man emptied of Self is infallibly full of Deity, after the fashion
of the old principle, ‘Nature abhors a vacuum.’ Yet even this doctrine
is not wholly false. It is the misrepresentation of a Christian truth.
Its correlative verity is this,—that the kingdom of grace, like the
kingdom of nature, has its immutable laws. He who seeks shall find; as
we sow we reap, with unerring certainty. Gravitation is not more sure
than the announcement, ‘With that man will I dwell who is of a meek
and contrite spirit.’

Footnote 79:

Martensen, p. 23. Comp. _Stud. u. Krit._ _loc. cit._ Alles das denn
got yn gegab seinem eingebornen sun, das hat er mir gegeben.... _Was
got würcket, das ist ein_, darumb gebiret er mich seinen sun, on aller
underscheyd.—These words exhibit the pantheistic principle on which
this assumption is based. All spirit (whether in so called creature or
Creator) is substantially one and the same. It cannot be divided; it
can have no distinctive operations. Our dividual personal
consciousness is, as it were, a temporary accretion on the Universal
Soul with which we are in contact. Escaping this consciousness, we
merge in—that is, we become—the Universal Soul. We are brought into
the Essence,—the calm, unknown oneness beyond all manifestation, above
creation, providence, or grace. This is Eckart’s escape from
distinction,—lapse into the totality of spirit. This doctrine he
teaches, not in opposition to the current Christian doctrine, but as a
something above it,—at once its higher interpretation and its climax.

Footnote 80:

These statements concerning the ‘füncklin der vernunfft’ are the
substance of passages given by Martensen, pp. 26, 27, and Schmidt
(_Stud. u. Krit._ _l. c._), pp. 707, 709.—Ich sprich es bey gutter
warheit, und bey yemmerwerender warheit, und bey ewiger warheit, das
disem liechte nit benüget an dem einfaltigem stilstanden götlichen
wesen, von wannen disz wesen harkommet, es will in den einfaltigen
grundt in die stillen wüste, das nye underscheyd ingeluget, weder
vatter noch sun noch heiliger geist, in dem einichen, da niemant
daheim ist, da benüget es im liechte, und da ist es einicher, denn
es sey in im selber, wann diser grundt ist ein einfeltig stille die
in ir selber unbeweglich ist, und von diser Unbeweglichkeit werdent
beweget alle ding, &c. Hermann von Fritslar, in a remarkable
passage, enumerates the various and conflicting names given to this
organ of mysticism. ‘Und das leben was daz licht der lûte.’ Daz
meinet, daz di sêle einen funken in ir hât, der ist in gote
êwiclîchen gewest leben und licht. Und dirre funke ist mit der sêle
geschaffen in allen menschen und ist ein lûter licht in ime selber
und strafet allewege umme sunde und hat ein stête heischen zu der
tugende und kriget allewege wider in sînen ursprung.... Dar umme
heizen in etlîche meistere einen wechter der sêle. Also sprach
Daniêl: ‘der wechter ûf dem turme der rufet gar sêre. Etliche heizen
disen funken einen haven der sêle. Etlîche heizen in di worbele
(axis, or centre) der sêle. Etelîche heizen in ein gotechen in der
sêle. Etelîche heizen in ein antlitze der sêle. Eteliche heizen
_intellectus_, daz ist ein instênde kraft in der sêle. Etlîche
heizen _in sinderisis_. Etliche heizen in daz wô der sêle. Etlîche
heizen in daz nirgen der sêle.—_Heiligenleben. Di dritte messe_, p.
32.

Footnote 81:

Martensen, p. 27. Schmidt, loc. cit.

Footnote 82:

The passage in Martensen, p. 20.

Footnote 83:

Martensen, pp. 19, 29.

Footnote 84:

Ibid. p. 29.

Footnote 85:

Etlich leut wöllent got mit den ougen ansehn, als sy ein ku ansent
unnd wöllent gott liebhan, als sy ein ku liebhaben (die hastu lieb umb
die milch, und umb den kätz, und umb dein eigen nutz). Also thund alle
die leut die got liebhand, um uszwendigen reichtum, oder umb
inwendigen trost, und die hand gott nit recht lieb, sunder sy suchent
sich selbs und ir eigen nutz.—_Schmidt_, p. 712.

Footnote 86:

Got ist ein luter guot an ime selben, vnt do von wil er nienen wonen
denne in einer lutern sele: in die mag er sich ergiessen vnt
genzeclichen in si fliessen. was ist luterkeit? das ist das sich der
mensche gekeret habe von allen creaturen, vnt sin herce so gar uf
gerichtet habe gen dem lutern guot, das ime kein creature trœstlichen
si, vnt ir ouch nit begere denne als vil als si das luter guot, das
got ist, darinne begriffen mag. vnt also wenig das liechte ouge icht
in ime erliden mag, also wenig mag diu luter sele icht an ir erliden
keine vermasung vnt das si vermitlen mag. ir werdent alle creaturen
luter ce niessen: wanne si niusset alle creaturen in got vnt got in
allen creaturen. Denne si ist also luter, das si sich selben
durschowet, denne endarf si got nit verre suochen: si vindet in ir
selben, wanne si in ir natiurlichen luterkeit ist geflossen in das
übernatiurliche der lutern gotheit. vnt also ist si in got, vnt got in
ir; vnt was si tuot, das tuot si in got, vnt tuot es got in
ir.—_Wackernagel_, p. 891.

Footnote 87:

Wann sol der mensch warlich arm sein, so soll er seynes geschaffnen
willes also ledig sein, als er was do er noch nit was. Und ich sag
euch bey der ewigen warheit, _als lang ir willen hand zu erfüllend den
willen gottes, vnd icht begerung hand der ewigkeit und gottes, also
lang seind ir nitt recht arm_, wann das ist ein arm mensch der nicht
wil, noch nicht bekennet, noch nicht begeret—_Schmidt_, p. 716. Here
again is the most extravagant expression possible of the doctrine of
_sainte indifférence_, in comparison with which Madame Guyon is
moderation itself.

Footnote 88:

See Schmidt, p. 724.

Footnote 89:

He was charged with denying hell and purgatory, because he defined
future punishment as deprivation,—‘Das Nicht in der helle
brinnet.’—_Schmidt_, p. 722.

Footnote 90:

The narrative here put into the mouth of Eckart is found in an
appendix to Tauler’s _Medulla animæ_. There is every reason to believe
that it is Eckart’s. Martensen gives it, p. 107.

Footnote 91:

A literal translation of a curious old hymn in Wackernagel’s
collection, p. 896.

Footnote 92:

C. Schmidt (_Johannes Tauler von Strasburg_, p. 42) gives examples of
the extravagant display in dress common among the clergy at that time.

Footnote 93:

The substance of this dialogue will be found in the works of Heinrich
Suso (ed. Melchior Diepenbrock, Regensburg, 1837), Book iii. chap.
vii. pp. 310-14. Suso represents himself as holding such a
conversation with ‘ein vernunftiges Bilde, das war subtil an seinen
Worten und war aber ungeübt an seinen Werken und war ausbrüchig in
florirender Reichheit,’ as he sat lost in meditation on a summer’s
day. Atherton has ventured to clothe this ideal of the enthusiast of
those times in more than a couple of yards of flesh and blood, and
supposed Arnstein to have picked up divinity enough in his
sermon-hearing to be able to reason with him just as Suso does in his
book.

The wandering devotees, who at this time abounded throughout the whole
region between the Netherlands and Switzerland, approximated, some of
them, to Eckart’s portraiture of a religious teacher, others to Suso’s
ideal of the Nameless Wild. In some cases the enthusiasm of the same
man may have approached now the nobler and now the baser type.

CHAPTER II.

For as though there were metempsychosis, and the soul of one man
passed into another; opinions do find, after certain revolutions,
men and minds like those that first begat them.—SIR THOMAS BROWNE.

WILLOUGHBY. What struck me most as novel in the mysticism of this strange Master Eckart was the stress he laid on our own consciousness of being the sons of God. Neither the ecclesiastical nor the scholastic gradations and preparatives for mysticism, so important with his predecessors, seem of much moment with him in comparison with the attainment, per saltum, as it were, of this blessed certainty. Perhaps the secret of his reaction against the orthodoxy of his day lay here. He craves a firm resting-place for his soul. The Church cannot satisfy the want. He will supply it for himself, and, to do so, builds together into a sort of system certain current notions that suit his purpose, some new and others old, some in tolerable harmony with Christianity, others more hostile to it than he was altogether aware. These pantheistic metaphysics may have seemed to him his resource and justification—may have been the product of the brain labouring to assure the heart.

ATHERTON. A very plausible conjecture. Amalric of Bena, who had been famous as a teacher in Paris nearly a hundred years before Eckart went to study there, maintained that a personal conviction of our union to Christ was necessary to salvation. He was condemned for the doctrine, but it survived.

WILLOUGHBY. Thank you. That fact supports me. Might not Eckart have desired to assert for our inward religious life a worthier and more independent place, as opposed to the despotic externalism of the time—to make our access to Christ more immediate, and less subject to the precarious mercies of the Church?

ATHERTON. A grand aim, if so: but to reach it he unfortunately absorbs the objective in the subjective element of religion—rebounds from servility to arrogance, and makes humanity a manifestation of the Divine Essence.

GOWER. In order to understand his position, the question to be first asked appears to me to be this. If Eckart goes to the Church, and says, ‘How can I be assured that I am in a state of salvation?’ what answer will the Holy Mother give him? Can you tell me, Atherton?

ATHERTON. She confounds justification and sanctification together, you will remember. So she will answer, ‘My son, as a Christian of the ordinary sort, you cannot have any such certainty—indeed, you are much better without it. You may conjecture that you are reconciled to God by looking inward on your feelings, by assuring yourself that at least you are not living in any mortal sin. If, indeed, you were appointed to do some great things for my glory, you might find yourself among the happy few who are made certain of their state of grace by a special and extra revelation, to hearten them for their achievements.’

GOWER. Shameful! The Church then admits the high, invigorating influence of such certainty, but denies it to those who, amid secular care and toil, require it most.

WILLOUGHBY. While discussing Eckart, we have lighted on a doctrine which must have produced more mysticism than almost any other you can name. On receiving such reply, how many ardent natures will strain after visions and miraculous manifestations, wrestling for some token of their safety!

GOWER. And how many will be the prey of morbid introspections, now catching the exultant thrill of confidence, and presently thrown headlong into some despairing abyss.

ATHERTON. As for the mass of the people, they will be enslaved for ever by such teaching, trying to assure themselves by plenty of sacraments, believing these the causes of grace, and hanging for their spiritual all on the dispensers thereof.

WILLOUGHBY. Then, to apply the result of your question, Gower, to Eckart,—as he has in him nothing servile, and nothing visionary, he resolves to grasp certainty with his own hand—wraps about him relics of the old Greek pallium, and retires to his extreme of majestic isolation.

GOWER. Pity that he could not find the scriptural Via Media—that common truth which, while it meets the deepest wants of the individual, yet links him in wholesome fellowship with others—that pure outer light which nurtures and directs the inner.

WILLOUGHBY. No easy way to find in days when Plato was installed high priest, and the whole biblical region a jungle of luxuriant allegoric conceits or thorny scholastic formulas.

GOWER. This daring Eckart reminds me of that heroic leader in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Bonduca. I think I hear him cry with Caratach,

Cease your fretful prayers,
Your whinings, and your tame petitions;
The gods love courage armed with confidence,
And prayers fit to pull them down: weak tears
And troubled hearts, the dull twins of cold spirits,
They sit and smile at. Hear how I salute ’em.

LOWESTOFFE. Did you not say yesterday, Atherton, that Eckart’s system had received high praise from Hegel?

ATHERTON. Oh yes, he calls it ‘a genuine and profound philosophy.’ Indeed the points of resemblance are very striking, and, setting aside for the moment some redeeming expressions and the more religious spirit of the man, Eckart’s theosophy is a remarkable anticipation of modern German idealism. That abstract ground of Godhead Eckart talks about, answers exactly to Hegel’s Logische Idee. The Trinity of process, the incarnation ever renewing itself in men, the resolution of redemption almost to a divine self-development, constitute strong features of family likeness between the Dominican and both Hegel and Fichte.[94]

GOWER. One may fancy that while Hegel was teaching at Heidelberg it must have fared with poor Eckart as with the dead huntsman in the Danish ballad, while a usurper was hunting with his hounds over his patrimony,—

With my dogs so good,
He hunteth the wild deer in the wood;
And with every deer he slays on the mould,
He wakens me up in the grave so cold.

ATHERTON. Nay, if we come to fancying, let us call in Pythagoras at once, and say that the soul of Eckart transmigrated into Hegel.

GOWER. With all my heart. The Portuguese have a superstition according to which the soul of a man who has died, leaving some duty unfulfilled or promised work unfinished, is frequently known to enter into another person, and dislodging for a time the rightful soul-occupant, impel him unconsciously to complete what was lacking. On a dreamy summer day like this, we can imagine Hegel in like manner possessed by Eckart in order to systematize his half-developed ideas.

WILLOUGHBY. It is certainly very curious to mark the pathway of these pantheistic notions through successive ages. Seriously, I did not know till lately how venerably antique were the discoveries of absolute idealism.

LOWESTOFFE. I confess that the being one in oneness, the nothing, the soul beyond the soul, the participation in the all-moving Immobility of which Eckart speaks, are to me utterly unintelligible.

GOWER. Do not trouble yourself. No one will ever be able to get beyond the words themselves, any more than Bardolph could with the phrase which so tickled the ear of Justice Shallow. ‘Accommodated; that is, when a man is, as they say, accommodated: or, when a man is,—being,—whereby,—he may be thought to be accommodated; which is an excellent thing.’

ATHERTON. Yet, to do Eckart justice, he has his qualifications and his distinctions in virtue of which he imagines himself still within the pale of orthodoxy, and he strongly repudiates the Antinomian consequences to which his doctrines were represented as tending.

GOWER. Ay, it is just in this way that the mischief is done. These distinctions many a follower of his could not or would not understand, and so his high philosophy produced in practice far oftener such men as the Nameless Wild than characters resembling the more pure and lofty ideal he drew himself in his discourse to the good people of Strasburg. These philosophical edge-tools are full perilous. Modern Germany is replete with examples of that fatal facility in the common mind for a practical application of philosophic paradox which our friend Adolf lamented at Fegersheim. When a philosophy which weakens the embankments that keep licence out has once been popularized, the philosopher cannot stop the inundation by shouting from his study-window. De Wette himself at last became aware of this, and regretted it in vain. Such speculation resembles the magic sword of Sir Elidure—its mysterious virtue sometimes filled even its owner with a furor that hurried him to an indiscriminate slaughter, but wielded by any other hand its thirst could be satisfied only with the blood of every one around, and at last with the life of him who held it.

LOWESTOFFE. Still there is far more excuse for Eckart than for our nineteenth century pantheists. Even the desperation of some of those poor ignorant creatures, who exaggerated Eckart’s paradoxes till they grew a plea for utter lawlessness, is not so unnatural, however lamentable. Who can wonder that some should have overwrought the doctrine of Christ in us and neglected that of Christ for us, when the opus operatum was in its glory, ghostly comfort bought and sold, and Christ our sacrifice pageanted about in the mass, as Milton says,—a fearful idol? Or that the untaught many, catching the first thought of spiritual freedom from some mystic, should have been intoxicated instantly. The laity, forbidden so long to be Christians on their own account, rise up here and there, crying, ‘We will be not Christians merely, but so many Christs.’ They have been denied what is due to man, they will dreadfully indemnify themselves by seizing what is due to God. Has not the letter been slaying them by inches all their days? The spirit shall give them life!

GOWER. Like the peasant in the apologue;—religion has been so long doled out to them in a few pitiful drops of holy water, till in their impatience they must have a whole Ganges-flood poured into their grounds, obliterating, with a vengeance, ‘all distinctions,’ and drowning every logical and social landmark under the cold grey level—the blank neutral-tint of a stoical indifference which annihilates all order and all law.

ATHERTON. By a strange contradiction, Eckart employs Revelation at one moment only to escape it the next—and uses its beacon-lights to steer from, not to the haven. He pays homage to its authority, he consults its record, but presently leaves it far behind to lose himself in the unrevealed Godhead—floats away on his ‘sail-broad vans’ of speculation through the vast vacuity in search of

——a dark
Illimitable ocean, without bound,
Without dimension, where length, breadth, and height,
And time and place are lost.

When there, he finds his cloudy seat soon fails him; he returns once more to the realities of revelation, only to forsake this lower ground again when he has renewed his strength. This oscillation betrays a fatal contradiction. To shut behind us the gate on this inferior world is not necessarily to open the everlasting doors of the upper one.

GOWER. I very much admire the absolute resignation of that devout mendicant described by Eckart. He is a Quietist of the very best sort—his life a ‘Thy will be done.’ He is a Fénelon in rags.

ATHERTON. After all, make what allowance we will,—giving Eckart all the benefit due from the fact that his life was pure, that he stood in no avowed antagonism to Christian doctrine or institute, that devout men like Tauler and Suso valued his teaching so highly,—still, he stands confessed a pantheist; no charity can explain that away.

GOWER. I am afraid not. What else can we call him when he identifies himself and all Christian men with the Son, as we have heard, makes himself essential to God, will share with him in the evolution of the Holy Ghost, and, forbidding you to regard yourself as a something distinct from God, exhorts you (if you would be a justified person and child of God indeed) to merge the ground of your own nature in the divine, so that your knowledge of God and his of you are the same thing,—i.e., you and He one and the same? But can you conjecture, Atherton, by what process he arrived at such a pass?

ATHERTON. Perhaps in this way:—John Scotus Erigena (with whose writings Eckart could scarcely have failed to make acquaintance at Paris) asserts the identity of Being and Willing, of the Velle and the Esse in God; also the identity of Being and Knowing. Applying this latter proposition to the relationship between God and man, he comes logically enough to this conclusion,—‘Man, essentially considered, may be defined as God’s knowledge of him; that is, man reduced to his ultimate—his ground, or simple subsistence—is a divine Thought. But, on the same principle, the thoughts of God are, of course, God. Hence Eckart’s doctrine—the ground of your being lies in God. Reduce yourself to that simplicity, that root, and you are in God. There is no longer any distinction between your spirit and the divine,—you have escaped personality and finite limitation. Your particular, creature self, as a something separate and dependent on God, is gone. So also, obviously, your creaturely will. Henceforth, therefore, what seems an inclination of yours is in fact the divine good pleasure. You are free from law. You are above means. The very will to do the will of God is resolved into that will itself. This is the Apathy, the Negation, the Poverty, he commends.

With Eckart personally this self-reduction and deification is connected with a rigorous asceticism and exemplary moral excellence. Yet it is easy to see that it may be a merely intellectual process, consisting in a man’s thinking that he is thinking himself away from his personality. He declares the appearance of the Son necessary to enable us to realize our sonship; and yet his language implies that this realization is the perpetual incarnation of that Son—does, as it were, constitute him. Christians are accordingly not less the sons of God by grace than is Christ by nature. Believe yourself divine, and the Son is brought forth in you. The Saviour and the saved are dissolved together in the blank absolute Substance.

WILLOUGHBY. So then, Eckart would say,—‘To realize himself, God must have Christians;’ and Hegel,—‘To realize him self, He must have philosophers.’

ATHERTON. Miserable inversion! This result of Eckart’s speculation was expressed with the most impious enormity by Angelus Silesius, in the seventeenth century. In virtue of the necessity God is under (according to this theory) of communicating himself, bon gré, mal gré, to whomsoever will refine himself down to his ‘Nothing,’ he reduces the Almighty to dependence, and changes places with Him upon the eternal throne on the strength of his self-transcending humility!

Note to page 207.

Both Hegel and Eckart regard Thought as the point of union between the human nature and the divine. But the former would pronounce both God and man unrevealed, i.e., unconscious of themselves, till Thought has been developed by some Method into a philosophic System. Mysticism brings Eckart nearer to Schelling on this matter than to the dry schoolman Hegel. The charge which Hegel brings against the philosophy of Schelling he might have applied, with a little alteration, to that of Eckart. Hegel says, ‘When this knowledge which claims to be essential and ignores apprehension (is begrifflose), professes to have sunk the peculiarity of Self in the Essence, and so to give forth the utterance of a hallowed and unerring philosophy,[95] men quite overlook the fact that this so-called wisdom, instead of being yielded up to the influence of Divinity by its contempt of all proportion and definiteness, does really nothing but give full play to accident and to caprice. Such men imagine that by surrendering themselves to the unregulated ferment of the Substance (Substanz), by throwing a veil over consciousness, and abandoning the understanding, they become those favourites of Deity to whom he gives wisdom in sleep; verily, nothing was ever produced by such a process better than mere dreams.’—Vorrede zur Phænomenologie, p. 6.

These are true and weighty words: unfortunately Hegel’s remedy proves worse than the disease.

We seem to hear Eckart speak when Fichte exclaims, ‘Raise thyself to the height of religion, and all veils are removed; the world and its dead principle passes away from thee, and the very Godhead enters thee anew in its first and original form, as Life, as thine own life which thou shalt and oughtest to live.—Anweisung zum sel. Leben, p. 470.

And again, ‘Religion consists in the inward consciousness that God actually lives and acts in us, and fulfils his work.’—Ibid. p. 473.

But Eckart would not have affirmed with Fichte (a few pages farther on) that, were Christ to return to the world, he would be indifferent to the recognition or the denial of his work as a Saviour, provided a man were only united to God somehow!

Footnote 94:

See Note, p. 212.

Footnote 95:

Eckart does not make use of his lapse into the Essence to philosophise
withal; it is simply his religious _ultimatum_.

CHAPTER III.

With that about I tourned my hedde,
And sawe anone the fifth rout
That to this lady gan lout,
And doune on knees, anone, to fall,
And to her tho besoughten all,
To hiden hir good workes eke,
And said, they yeve not a leke
For no fame, ne soch renoun,
For they for contemplacioun,
And Goddes love had it wrought,
Ne of fame would they nought.

CHAUCER: THE HOUSE OF FAME.

On the next occasion when our little Summerford circle was ready to hear some more of Arnstein’s Chronicle, they were informed by Atherton that four years of the manuscript were missing,—that such intervals were only too frequent,—in fact, the document was little more than a collection of fragments.

‘The next entry I find,’ said he, ‘is in 1324, and the good armourer, in much excitement, begins with an exclamation.

1324. _July. St. Kylian’s Day._—What a day this has been! Strasburg,
and all the states which adhere to Louis, are placed under the bann.
The bells were ringing merrily at early morning; now, the Interdict
is proclaimed, and every tongue of them is silent. As the news flew
round, every workman quitted his work. The busy stalls set out on
either side of the streets were left empty. The tools and the wares
lay unlooked at and untouched. The bishop and the clergy of his
party, and most of the Dominicans, keep out of sight. My men are
furious. I have been all day from house to house, and group to
group, telling the people to keep a good heart. We shall have a sad
time of it, I see. It is so hard for the poor creatures to shake off
a fear in which they have been cradled.

The clergy and the monks will pour out of Strasburg, as out of a
Sodom, in shoals. A mere handful will stay behind,—not nearly enough
to christen those who will be born and to shrive those who will die
in this populous city. They may name their price: the greedy of gain
may make their fortunes. The miserable poor will die, numbers of
them, in horror, unable to purchase absolution. And then, out of the
few priests who do remain, scarcely any will have the courage to
disobey the pope, and, despite the Interdict, say mass.

’Tis an anxious time for either party. Louis has most of the states
on his side, and the common voice, in all the towns of the
Rhineland—(in the princely Cologne most of all), is, I hear, loud in
his favour. The Minorites will be with him, and all of that sort
among the friars, who have little favour to lose with his Holiness.
But France is with the Pope against him; Duke Leopold is a doughty
adversary; John of Bohemia restless and fickle, and no doubt the
Pope will set on the Polacks and pagan Lithuanians to waste most
horribly all the north and eastern frontiers. Since the victory of
Mühldorf, Frederick has lain in prison. That battle is the
grievance. The enemies of the Emperor are more full of rancour than
ever. Yet, with all the mischief it may bring in the present, what
lover of the Fatherland can sorrow therefor? Gallant little
Schweppermann, with his lame foot and grey hair, and his glorious
two eggs, long may he live to do other such deeds![96] Louis holds a
high spirit at present, and goes about under the bann with a brave
heart. But it is only the outset as yet. I much fear me he may lack
the staunchness to go through as he has begun. There is store of
thunder behind at Avignon. Methinks he hankers, like a child, mainly
after the lance and sword and crown of Charlemagne, to dress him out
perfectly withal King of the Romans, and seeth not the full bearing
of the very war he wages.

We shall not be idle. It is already proposed to send off troops to
the aid of Louis. I have half a mind to go myself; but home can ill
spare me now, and I render the Emperor more service by such little
influence as I have in Strasburg. To-morrow, to consult about the
leagues to be formed with neighbouring towns and with the Swiss
burghers, to uphold the good cause together.

* * *

1326. _March. St. Gregory’s Day._—Duke Leopold died here yesterday,
at the Ochsenstein Palace.[97] After ravaging the suburbs of Spires,
he came hither in a raging fever to breathe his last. The bishop
told him he must pardon the Landgrave of Lower Alsace from the
bottom of his heart. They say he struggled long and wrathfully
against the condition, till, finding the bishop firm in refusing
absolution on other terms, he gave way. But, just as he was about to
receive the host, a fit of vomiting came on, wherein he presently
expired, without the sacrament after all.

Frederick has been now at liberty some months. Louis visited him in
his prison. To think of their having been together all their
boyhood, and loving each other so, to meet thus! Frederick the
Handsome, haggard with a three years’ imprisonment—his beard down to
his waist; and Louis, successful and miserable. They say Frederick
cut off his beard at first, and sent it, by way of memorial, to John
of Bohemia, and that when he went back to his castle he found his
young wife had wept herself blind during his captivity. He swore on
the holy wafer to renounce his claim to the empire. The Pope
released him from his oath soon after, but he keeps his word like
knight, not like priest, and holds to it yet. It is whispered that
they have agreed to share the throne. But that can never be brought
to pass.

Heard to-day, by a merchant, of Hermann.[98] He is travelling
through Spain. I miss him much. Before he left Strasburg he was full
of Eckart’s doctrine, out of all measure admiring the wonderful man,
and hoarding every word that dropped from his lips. Eckart is now
sick at Cologne, among his sorrowing disciples. Grieved to hear that
the leeches say he hath not long to live.

A long conversation with Henry of Nördlingen.[99] He has journeyed
hither, cast down and needy, to ask counsel of Tauler. Verily he
needs counsel, but hath not strength of mind to take it when given.
Tauler says Henry has many friends among the excellent of the earth;
all love him, and he is full of love, but sure a pitiful sight to
see. His heart is with us. He mourns over the trouble of the time.
He weeps for the poor folk, living and dying without the sacraments.
But the Interdict crushes his soul. Now he has all but gathered
heart to do as Tauler doth—preach and labour on, unmoved by all this
uproar, but anon his courage is gone, and he falls back into his
fear again as soon as he is left alone. He sits and pores over those
letters of spiritual consolation which Margaret Ebner has written to
him. He says sometimes she alone retains him on the earth. Verily I
fear me that, priest as he is, some hopeless earthly love mingles
with his friendship for that saintly woman. He has had to flee from
his home for refusing to perform service. Strasburg, in that case,
can be no abiding place for him. I see nothing before him but a
wretched wandering, perhaps for years. I cannot get him to discern
the malice of Pope John, rather than the wrath of heaven, in the
curse that withers us. I gave him a full account of what the Pope’s
court at Avignon truly is, as I gathered from a trusty eye-witness,
late come from thence, whom I questioned long the other day.[100] I
told him that gold was the one true god there—our German wealth,
wrung out from us, and squandered on French courtiers, players,
buffoons, and courtezans—Christ sold daily for it—the palace full of
cardinals and prelates, grey-haired debauchees and filthy mockers,
to a man—accounting chastity a scandal, and the soul’s immortality
and coming judgment an old wife’s fable;—yea, simony, adultery,
murder, incest, so frequent and unashamed, that the Frenchmen
themselves do say the Pope’s coming hath corrupted them. I asked him
if these were the hands to take up God’s instruments of wrath to
bruise with them his creatures? But all in vain. There is an
awfulness in the very name of Pope which blinds reason and strikes
manhood down, in him, as in thousands more.

A.D. 1332. _Fourth week after Easter._—But now awaked from the first
sleep I have had for the last three days and nights. I set down in a
word or two what hath happened, then out to action again. Last
Wednesday, at the great festival, the nobles, knights, and senators,
with a brave show of fair ladies, banqueted at the grand house in
the Brandgasse.[101] Within, far into the night, minstrelsy and
dancing; without, the street blocked up with a crowd of serving men
and grooms with horses, torch-bearers, and lookers-on of all
sorts—when, suddenly, the music stopped—they heard shouts and the
clash of swords and shrill screams. There had been a quarrel between
a Zorn and a Müllenheim—they drew—Von Hunefeld was killed on the
spot, another of the Zorns avenged him by cutting down Wasselenheim;
the conflict became general, in hall, in the antechambers, down the
great staircase, out on the steps, the retainers took part on either
side, and the fray ended in the flight of the Zorns, who left six
slain in the house and in the street. Two were killed on the side of
the Müllenheims. All who fell were of high rank, and several of
either faction are severely wounded. They draw off to their
quarters, each breathing vengeance, preparing for another conflict
at daybreak. All the rest of the night the Landvogt and Gotzo von
Grosstein were riding to and fro to pacify them—to no purpose. Each
party declared they would send for the knights and gentry of their
side from the country round about. I was with Burckard Zwinger when
we heard this. ‘Now,’ said I, ‘or all is lost. Off, and harangue the
people. I will get the best of the burghers together.’ We parted.
All the city was astir. As I made my way from house to house, I sent
the people I met off to the market place to hear Zwinger. I could
hear their shouts, summons enough now, without any other. When I got
back to the Roland’s pillar, I found that his plain, home-thrust
speech had wrought the multitude to what we would, and no more.
Snatches of it flew from mouth to mouth, like sparks of fire,—he had
struck well while the iron was hot. ‘To the Stadtmeister!’ was the
cry. ‘The keys! The seal! The standard! We will have our standard.
Let the citizens defend their own!’ Most of the burghers were of one
mind with Zwinger, and we went in a body (the crowd shouting behind
us, a roaring sea of heads, and the bell on the townhouse ringing as
never before) to demand the keys of young Sieck. He yielded all with
trembling. By daybreak we had dispersed; the several corporations
repaired armed to their quarters; the gates were shut; the bridges
guarded; the walls manned. All was in our hands. So far safe. The
nobles, knights, and gentry of the neighbourhood came up in the
morning in straggling groups, approaching the city from various
quarters, with as many of their men as could be hastily gathered,
but drew off again when they saw our posture of defence. It was
truly no time for them. This promptitude has saved Strasburg from
being a field of battle in every street for counts and men at arms,
who despise and hate the citizens—whose victory, on whatever side,
would have been assured pillage and rapine, and, in the end, the
loss of our privilege to deal solely for ourselves in our own
affairs. Well done, good Zwinger, thou prince of bakers, with thy
true warm heart, and cool head, and ready tongue! To our praise be
it said, no deed of violence was done; there was no
blood-thirstiness, no spoiling, but a steady purpose in the vast
crowd that, hap what would, no strangers should come in to brawl and
rob in Strasburg.

While the gates have been closed and the Town Hall guarded, we have
been deliberating on a new senate. Four new Stadtmeisters elected.
Zwinger made Amtmeister. The magistracy taken out of the exclusive
hands of the great families and open to the citizens generally,
gentlemen, burghers, and artizans, side by side. The workmen no
longer to be slaves to the caprice of the gentry. The nobles are
disarmed for a time, to help them settle their quarrel more quickly.
I go the rounds with the horse patrol every night. The gates are
never to be opened except when the great bell has rung to give
permission. We sit in the Town Hall with our swords. I took my place
there this morning, armed to the teeth, and verily my Margarita
seemed proud enough when she sent me forth, with a kiss, to my new
dignity, clad in good steel instead of senatorial finery. We have
every prospect of peace and prosperousness. The nobles see our
strength, and must relinquish with as good a grace as they may a
power they have usurped. The main part of the old laws will abide as
before. All is perfectly quiet. There has been no mere vengeance or
needless rigour. I hear nothing worse than banishment will be
inflicted upon any—that only on a few. The bishop’s claws will be
kept shorter.

1338. _August. St. Bartholomew’s Day._—Now is the rent between clerk
and layman, pope and emperor, wider even than heretofore. Last month
was held the electorial diet at Rhense. The electors, by far the
greater part, with Louis; and their bold doings now apparent.
Yesterday was issued, at Frankfort, a manifesto of the Emperor’s,
wherein Benedict, he and all his curses, are set at nought, and the
mailed glove manfully hurled in his teeth. Thereby he declares, that
whomsoever the electors choose they will have acknowledged rightful
emperor, whether the pope bless or bann, and all who gainsay this
are traitors;—that the emperor is not, and will not be, in anywise
dependent on the pope. All good subjects are called on to disregard
the Interdict, and such towns or states as obey the same are to
forfeit their charters.[102]

It was indeed high time to speak out. Louis, losing heart, tried
negotiation, and made unworthy concessions to the pope, whereon he
(impatient, they say, to get back to Italy) would have come to an
agreement, but the French cardinals took care to cross and undo all.
The emperor even applied to Philip personally—asking the King of
France, forsooth, to suffer him to be king of the Romans—then,
finding that vain, is leagued with the English king, and war
declared against France. This sounds bravely. Shame on the electors
if they hold not to their promise now.

As to our Strasburg, we stand by the emperor, as of old, despite our
bishop Berthold, who, with sword instead of crook, has done battle
with the partisans of Louis for now some years, gathering help from
all parts among the nobles and the gentry, burning villages,
besieging and being besieged, spoiling and being spoiled; moreover,
between whiles, thinking to win himself the name of a zealous pastor
by issuing decrees against long hair growing on clerks’ heads, and
enforcing fiercely all the late bulls against the followers of
Eckart, the Beghards, and others.[103] Last year he tasted six
weeks’ imprisonment, having quarrelled with the heads of the
chapter. Rudolph von Hohenstein and others of the opposite party,
surrounded one night the house of the Provost of Haselach, where he
lay, and carried him off in his shirt to the Castle of Vendenti; and
smartly did they make him pay before he came out. We have full
authority to declare war against him, if he refuses now to submit to
Louis, as I think not likely, seeing how matters go at present. He
had the conscience to expect that we magistrates would meddle in his
dispute and take his part. Even the senators, who adhere mainly to
the Zorn family, were against him, and methinks after all he has
done to harass and injure us, we did in a sort return good for evil
in being merely lookers-on.

Tauler is away on a visit to Basle, where the state of parties is
precisely similar to our own, the citizens there, as in Friburg,
joining our league for Louis and for Germany; and the bishop against
them, tooth and nail.[104] My eldest boy (God bless him, he is
fifteen this day, and a lad for a father to be proud of) hath
accompanied the Doctor thither, having charge of sundry matters of
business for me there. Had word from him last week. They have
somehow procured a year’s remission of the Interdict for Basle. He
says Suso came to see Tauler, and that they had long talk together
for two days. Henry of Nördlingen is there likewise, and now that
the pope hath kennelled his barking curse for a twelvemonth,
preaches, to the thronging of the churches, wherever he goes.

A.D. 1339. _January._—The new year opens gloomily. Without loss of
time, fresh-forged anathemas are come, and coming, against the
outspoken emperor and this troublesome Germany. Some of the
preachers, and the bare-footed friars especially, have yet remained
to say mass and perform the offices; now, even these are leaving the
city. Some cloisters have stood for now two or three years quite
empty. Many churches are deserted altogether, and the doors nailed
up. The magistracy have issued orders to compel the performance of
service. The clerks are fairly on the anvil; the civil hammer
batters them on the one side, and the ecclesiastical upon the other
with alternate strokes.

Bitter wind and sleet this morning. Saw three Dominicans creeping
back into the town, who had left it a month ago, refusing to say
mass. Poor wretches, how starved and woe-begone they looked, after
miserable wanderings about the country in the snow, winter showing
them scant courtesy, and sure I am the boors less; and now coming
back to a deserted convent and to a city where men’s faces are
towards them as a flint. Straight, as I saw them, there came into my
mind that goodly exhortation of Dr. Tauler’s, that we should show
mercy, as doth God, unto all, enemies and friends alike, for he that
loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God, whom
he hath not seen?[105] Ran after them, called them in, thawed them,
fed them, comforted them with kind words and good ale by the great
fire,—then argued with them. They thought it a cruel thing that they
must starve because pope and emperor are at feud. ‘And is it not,’
urged I, ‘a crueller that thousands of innocent poor folk should
live without sacrament, never hear a mass, perhaps die unshriven,
for the very same reason? Is not God’s law higher than the
pope’s,—do to others as ye would they should do unto you? Could you
look for other treatment at the hands of our magistrates, and expect
to be countenanced and sustained by them in administering the
malediction of their enemies?‘ Thought it most courteous, however,
to ply them more pressingly with food than with arguments.

While they were there, in comes my little Otto, opens his eyes wide
with wonder to see them, and presently breaks out with the words,
now on the tongue of every Strasburger, a rhyming version of the
decree:—

They shall still their masses sing,
Or out of the city we’ll make them spring.[106]

Told him he should not sing that just then, and, when he was out of
the room, bade them mark by that straw which way the wind blew.

I record here a vision vouchsafed to that eminent saint the abbess
Christina Ebner, of Engelthal, near Nurnberg. She beheld the Romish
Church in the likeness of a great minster, fair to see, but with
doors closed by reason of the bann. Priestly voices, solemn and
sweet, were heard to chant within; and, without, stood a multitude
waiting and hearkening, but no man dared enter. Then came there to
the nun one in the habit of a preacher, and told her that he would
give her words to speak to comfort the poor folk withal that stood
outside,—and that man was the Lord Christ.

And verily, in some sort, so hath God done, having pity upon us, for
through all Rhineland hath he moved godly men, both clerks and
laity, to draw nearer the one to the other, forming together what we
call the association of the _Friends of God_, for the better tending
of the inward life in these troublous times, for wrestling with the
Almighty on behalf of his suffering Christendom, and for the succour
of the poor people, by preaching and counsel and sacrament, that are
now as sheep without a shepherd, and perishing for lack of spiritual
bread.[107] Tauler is of the foremost among them, and with his
brethren, Egenolph of Ehenheim and Dietrich of Colmar, labours
without ceasing, having now the wider field and heavier toil, as so
few are left in Strasburg who will perform any church service for
love or money. Ah! well might the Abbess Christina say of him that
the Spirit of God dwelt within him as a sweet harping. He has
travelled much of late, and wherever he goes spreads blessing and
consolation; the people flock to hear him; the hands of the Friends
of God are strengthened; and a savour of heavenly love and wisdom is
left behind. His good name hath journeyed, they say, even beyond the
Alps, and into the Low Countries. Neither are there wanting many
like-minded, though none equal to him. He found at Cologne Henry of
Löwen, Henry, and Franke, and John of Sterngasse,[108] brother
Dominicans all of them, preaching constantly, with much of his own
fervour, if with a doctrine more like that of Eckart. In Switzerland
there is Suso, and I hear much of one Ruysbroek, in the Netherlands,
a man younger than Tauler, and a notable master in the divine art of
contemplation.

Among the Friends of God are numbers both of men and women of every
rank, abbots and farmers, knights and nuns, monks and artizans.
There is Conrad, Abbot of Kaisersheim: there are the nuns of
Unterlinden and Klingenthal, at Colmar and Basle, as well as the
holy sisters of Engelthal; the knights of Rheinfeld, Pfaffenheim,
and Landsberg; our rich merchant here, Rulman Merswin, and one,
unworthy of so good a name, that holds this pen. Our law is that
universal love commanded by Christ, and not to be gainsaid by his
vicar. Some have joined themselves to us for awhile, and gone out
from us because they were not of us; for we teach no easy road to
heaven for the pleasing of the flesh. Many call us sectaries,
Beghards, brethren of the Free Spirit, or of the New Spirit, and
what not. They might call us by worse names, but we are none of
these. The prophecies of some among us, concerning judgments to be
looked for at the hands of God, and the faithful warnings of others,
have made many angry. Yet are not such things needed, when, as Dr.
Tauler saith, the princes and prelates are, too many of them, worse
than Jews and infidels, and mere horses for the devil’s riding.[109]
So far from wishing evil, we mourn as no others over the present
woe, and the Friends of God are, saith Dr. Tauler again, pillars of
Christendom, and holders off for awhile of the gathered cloud of
wrath. Beyond all question, if all would be active as they are
active in works of love to their fellows, the face of the times
would brighten presently, and the world come into sunshine.

It was but yesterday that in his sermon Tauler repeated the saying
of one—an eminent Friend of God—‘I cannot pass my neighbour by
without wishing for him in my heart more of the blessedness of
heaven than for myself;‘—‘and that,’ said the good Doctor, ‘I call
true love.’ Sure I am that such men stand between the living and the
dead.[110]

1339. _March._—Much encouraged on hearing Dr. Tauler’s sermon on
‘Whose is the image and superscription?‘[111] It was the last part
that gladdened me more especially, when he was enforcing
watchfulness and self-examination, and yet showed that the command
might be obeyed by men such as I am, in the midst of a worldly
calling. Many, said he, complain that they are so busied with
outward things as to have no time to look inward. But let such, for
every six steps they have to take outward in their daily duty, take
one step inward, and observe their hearts, and their business will
be to them no stumbling-block. Many are cloistered in body while
thought and desire wander to and fro over the earth. But many others
do, even amid the noise and stir of the market-place and the shop,
keep such watch over their hearts, and set such ward on their
senses, that they go unharmed, and their inner peace abides
unbroken. Such men are much more truly to be called monks than those
who, within a convent wall, have thought and senses so distraught
that they can scarce say a single Paternoster with true devotion.

He said that God impressed his image and superscription on our souls
when he created us in his image. All true Christians should
constantly retire into themselves, and examine throughout their
souls wherein this image of the Holy Trinity lieth, and clear away
therefrom such images and thoughts as are not of God’s
impressing,—all that is merely earthly in love and care, all that
hath not God purely for its object. It must be in separateness from
the world, withdrawal from all trust and satisfaction in what is
creaturely, that we present God the image he hath engraven, clear
and free from rust. This image and superscription lies in the inmost
inmost of the soul, whither God only cometh, and neither men nor
angels, and where he delights to dwell. He will share it with no
other. He hath said, ‘My delight is in the sons of men.’ Thus is the
inmost of our soul united to the inmost of the very Godhead, where
the eternal Father doth ever speak and bring forth his eternal
essential Word, his only-begotten Son, equal in honour, power, and
worthiness, as saith the Apostle—‘He is the brightness of his glory
and the express image of his person.’ By him hath the Father made
all things. As all things have their beginning and source from the
Godhead, by the birth of the eternal Word out of the Father, so do
all creatures in their essence subsist by the same birth of the Son
out of the Father, and therefore shall they all return in the same
way to their source, to wit, through the Son to the Father. From
this eternal birth of the Son ariseth the love of God the Father to
his divine Son, and that of the Son to his divine Father, which love
is the Holy Ghost—an eternal and divine Bond, uniting the Father and
the Son in everlasting Love. These three are essentially one—one
single pure essential unity, as even the heathen philosophers bear
witness. Therefore, saith Aristotle, ‘There is but one Lord who
ordaineth all things.’

He, therefore, that would be truly united to God must dedicate the
penny of his soul, with all its faculties, to God alone, and join it
unto Him. For if the highest and most glorious Unity, which is God
himself, is to be united to the soul, it must be through oneness
(_Einigkeit_). Now when the soul hath utterly forsaken itself and
all creatures, and made itself free from all manifoldness, then the
sole Unity, which is God, answers truly to the oneness of the soul,
for then is there nothing in the soul beside God. Therefore between
such a soul and God (if a man be so prepared that his soul hangs on
nothing but God himself) there is so great a oneness that they
become one, as the Apostle saith, ‘He that is joined to the Lord is
one spirit.’

But there are some who will fly before they have wings, and pluck
the apples before they are ripe, and, at the very outset of the
Divine life, be so puffed up that it contents them not to enter in
at the door and contemplate Christ’s humanity, but they will
apprehend his highness and incomprehensible Deity only. So did once
a priest, and fell grievously, and bitterly mourned his folly, and
had to say, ‘Ah, most Merciful! had I followed truly the pattern of
thy holy humanity, it had not been thus with me!’ Beware of such
perilous presumption—your safe course is to perfect yourselves first
in following the lowly life of Christ, and in earnest study of the
shameful cross.

Methinks this is true counsel, and better, for our sort at least,
than Master Eckart’s exhortation to break through into the essence,
and to exchange God made manifest for the absolute and inscrutable
Godhead.

1339. _March 20._—Finished to-day a complete suit of armour for
young Franz Müllenheim. The aristocratic families bear the change of
government more good-humouredly than I looked for. Their influence
is still great, and they can afford to make a virtue of necessity.
Most of them now, too, are on the right side.

A great improvement—locking our doors at night.[112] This is the
first time I have thought to record it, though the custom has been
introduced these nine years. Before, there was not a lock to a
house-door in Strasburg, and if you wanted to shut it, on ever so
great a need, you had to work with spade and shovel to remove a
whole mountain of dirt collected about the threshold. Several new
roads, too, made of late by the merchant-league of the Rhineland.

Footnote 96:

Louis was indebted for this important victory to the skill of
Schweppermann. After the battle the sole supply of the imperial table
was found to consist of a basket of eggs, which the emperor
distributed among his officers, saying, ‘To each of you one egg—to our
gallant Schweppermann two.’—_Menzel._

Footnote 97:

See Laguille, Histoire d’Alsace, liv. xxiii. p. 271.

Footnote 98:

Many passages in his _Heiligenleben_ are altogether in the spirit of
Eckart, and have their origin, beyond question, in his sayings, or in
those of his disciples.—See pp. 114, 125, 150, 187 (_Pfeiffer_), and
also the extracts in Wackernagel, _Altd. Leseb._ p. 853.

Footnote 99:

See Schmidt’s Tauler, Appendix, p. 172, &c., where such information as
can be obtained concerning Henry of Nördlingen is given.

Footnote 100:

Compare Petrarch’s account in his letters, cited by Gieseler: ‘Mitto
stupra, raptus, incestus, adulteria, qui jam pontificalis lasciviæ
ludi sunt: mitto raptarum viros, ne mutire audeant, non tantum avitis
laribus, sed finibus patriis exturbatos, quæque contumeliarum
gravissima est, et violatas conjuges et externo semine gravidas rursus
accipere, et post partum reddere ad alternam satietatem abutentium
coactos.’

Footnote 101:

Laguille gives an account of this revolution, _Hist. d’Alsace_, p.
276.

Footnote 102:

Schmidt’s Tauler, p. 12.

Footnote 103:

Laguille, liv. xxiv. p. 280.

Footnote 104:

Schmidt, p. 22.

Footnote 105:

Tauler’s _Sermon on the Twenty-second Sunday after Trinity_ contains
an exhortation to Christian love, remarkable for beauty and
discrimination. Tauler’s _Predigten_, vol ii. p. 591 (Berlin, 1841).

Footnote 106:

Schmidt, p. 14:—

‘do soltent sü ouch fürbas singen
oder aber us der statt springen.’

Footnote 107:

Schmidt’s Tauler, Anhang über die Gottesfreunde.

Footnote 108:

Passages from two of these mystics, Heinrich von Löwen and Johannes
von Sterngasse, are given among the _Sprüche Deutscher Mystiker_, in
Wackernagel, p. 890.

Footnote 109:

See Tauler’s _Predigten_, vol. ii. p. 584; and also, concerning the
charge of sectarianism, p. 595; and the services of the Friends of
God, vol. i. pred. xxvi. p. 194; pred. xi. p. 85.

Footnote 110:

Ibid., vol. ii. pred. lxvi. p. 594.

Footnote 111:

The sermon referred to is that on the _Twenty-third Sunday after
Trinity_, vol. ii. p. 598.

While he is careful to warn his hearers against the presumption of
attempting at once to contemplate Deity apart from its manifestation
in the humanity of Christ, he yet seems to admit that when the soul
has been thoroughly exercised in the imitation of Christ,—has become
conformed, as far as man can be, to his spirit and his sufferings,
then there commences a period of repose and joy in which there is an
extraordinary intuition of Deity, which approximates to that perfect
vision promised hereafter, when we shall see, not ‘through a glass
darkly,’ but face to face.—Vol. ii. p. 609.

Footnote 112:

Meiners, _Hist. Vergleichung der Sitten, &c., des Mittelalters_, vol.
ii. p. 117.

CHAPTER IV.

If you would be pleased to make acquaintance with a solid theology
of the good old sort in the German tongue, get John Tauler’s
sermons; for neither in Latin nor in our own language have I ever
seen a theology more sound or more in harmony with the
Gospel.—LUTHER (_to Spalatin_).

Die Sehnsucht und der Traüme Weben
Sie sind der weichen Seele süss,
Doch edler ist ein starkes Streben
Und macht den schönen Traum gewiss.[113]

UHLAND.

On another evening, after Kate had played a plaintive air on the piano as an overture; when Atherton had praised it as expressive of the upward fluttering struggle of the Psyche of Mysticism, and Gower had quoted Jean Paul’s fancy, where he says that sweet sounds are the blue waves that hide the sea-monsters which lurk in the deeps of life—Adolf’s journal was continued, as follows:—

1339. _December. St. Barbara’s Day._—Three days ago, at the close of
his sermon, Doctor Tauler said he would preach to-day on the highest
perfection attainable in this life. Went to hear him. The
cloister-chapel crowded long before the time. He began by telling us
that he had much to say, and so would not to-day preach from the
gospel according to his wont, and moreover would not put much Latin
into his sermon, but would make good all he taught with Holy Writ.
Then he went on to preach on the necessity of dying utterly to the
world and to our own will, and to yield ourselves up, ‘dying-wise,’
into the hands of God. He gave further four-and-twenty marks,
whereby we may discern who are the true, righteous, illuminated,
contemplative men of God.[114]

Observed close under the pulpit a stranger (by his dress, from the
Oberland) who did diligently write down, from time to time, what the
Doctor said—a man of notable presence, in the prime of life, with
large piercing eyes under shaggy brows, eagle nose, thoughtful
head—altogether so royal a man as I never before saw. He mingled
with the crowd after sermon, and I could not learn who he was.
Several others, as curious, and no wiser than myself. This
mysterious personage may perhaps be one of the Friends of God, who
are numerous in the Oberland. Methought he wished to escape notice.
Perhaps he is a Waldensian, and dreads the evil eye of the
inquisitor.

1340. _January. Eve of St. Agnes._—Strange; nothing has been seen of
the Doctor for this whole month. His penitents are calling
continually at the convent, craving admittance to their confessor,
but he will see no one. He is not ill, they say, and takes his part
in the convent services with the rest, but never stirs beyond the
walls. None of his many friends can tell us what is the matter.

1340. _July. St. Alexius’ Day._—All things much as aforetime, that
is, ill enough. Business slack generally, but our hammers going. The
worst is this loss of Tauler, our comfort in our trouble. Many
reports, no certainty. Some say he has committed some crime, and
sits now in the convent prison. This I everywhere contradict. Others
will have it that he is gone mad. Many of his former friends are now
turned against him, and his enemies make them merry. Went again to
the convent to get what news I could. Enquired of the porter why the
Doctor had shut himself up. He replied, ‘Indeed, sir, and I cannot
know.’ Methought a wonderful close answer for a porter. Went into
the locutory. In the passage the cook ran by me, having just
received twenty-five cuffs on the head for leaving the vessels and
linen dirty on Saturday night. Much laughter thereat. Several monks
in the locutory, among them brother Bernard, the cellarer, an
acquaintance of mine—a bustling, shrewd little man, provider of the
monastic prog[115] to general satisfaction, talking often of
pittances and profound in beeves,—a brave blade, and seen swaggering
now and then on holidays with sword at his side, affecting, more
than beseems, secular gallantry. Said, when I asked him concerning
Tauler, ‘Oh, poor fellow, the devil’s clawing him a bit, that’s
all.’ Another said, ‘We always knew it would be this way.’ A third,
‘I said so from the first—spiritual pride, Lucifer’s sin, Lucifer’s
sin!’ Looked at the rascal’s paunch—thought he ran little danger of
such sin from any over-mortifying of the flesh. His flesh ought to
have mortified _him_, the brazen-face. Spake up for Tauler as I
could, but saw that he was the jest of his brethren—having doubtless
to bear cruelty and mocking along with some melancholy inward fight
of afflictions—and came away home with a heavy heart. Could not get
speech with the abbot, who was busy looking to the monks’ beds, that
they were not too soft.

1342. _New Year’s Day._—Public notice given, that in three days
Tauler will preach once more. The news makes great talk. My heart
sings jubilate thereat. I look back on two weary years that he has
now been hidden from those who so need him. I have confessed to no
one the while—somehow, could not to any other—yet I fear me such
neglect is a sin. Those like-minded with Tauler have been busy among
us in their work of love, but the master-spirit is sorely missed,
notwithstanding. One Ludolph of Saxony, who was a Dominican, and has
come over hither from Cologne lately, to be prior of the new
Carthusian convent, has been a great blessing unto us. He speaks out
boldly against abuses, and persuades men tenderly to follow Christ
carrying the cross.

Bishop Berthold quieter of late; finds it prudent to keep on better
terms at present with the emperor.

Little Hans a month old to-day. A household of now five children.
Henry of great service to me. Think sometimes of leaving the
business with him almost altogether, if only to have him near.
Margarita not again ill since the first times of the interdict. A
great mercy! Getting richer yet, and tremble sometimes lest it
should ensnare my soul, therefore, I disencumber myself at intervals
of considerable sums for sick and poor folk. Must bear in mind
Tauler’s counsel to use and enjoy everything intending God therein.
Find my affections go forth much—I hope not too much—towards this
last babe. He thrives well; verily, no child could be more unlike
the blessed St. Nicholas, of whom I have heard a friar say that,
when hanging on his mother’s breast, he fasted Wednesdays and
Fridays, and could not be brought to suck more than once a day. But
if I stay to number up my blessings, I shall have a list longer than
the curse-roll of the Pope. God give me an unworldly, thankful,
watchful spirit!

1342. _January 6._—Alas! that I should have to write what now I
must! I forced a way into the crowded church—every part filled with
people, wedged in below so that they could not move, clustered like
bees where they had climbed above into every available place, and a
dense mass in the porch besides. The Doctor came, looking woefully
ill, changed as I scarce ever saw a man, to live. He mounted the
lectorium, held his cap before his eyes, and said:

‘O merciful and eternal God, if it be thy will, give me so to speak
that thy divine name may be praised and honoured, and these men
bettered thereby.’

With that he began to weep. We waited, breathless. Still he wept,
and could speak no word, his sobs audible in the stillness, and the
tears making their way through his fingers as he hid his face in his
hands. This continued till the people grew restless. Longer yet,
with more manifest discontent. At last a voice cried out from among
the people (I think it was that roughspoken Carvel, the butcher),
‘Now then, Sir, how long are we to stop here? It is getting late, if
you don’t mean to preach, let us go home.’

I saw that Tauler was struggling to collect himself by prayer, but
his emotion became only the more uncontrollable, and at last he
said, with a broken voice,—

‘Dear brethren, I am sorry from my heart to have kept you so long,
but at this time I cannot possibly speak to you. Pray God for me
that he would help me, and I may do better at another time.’

So we went away, and the report thereof was presently all over
Strasburg. The snowball had plenty of hands to roll it, and lost
nothing by the way. The people, numbers of them, seemed to me with a
wicked glee to delight in showing how the learned Doctor had made a
fool of himself. Those who had counted him mad before reckoned
themselves now little short of prophets. Many such whom I met in the
streets looked and spoke with such a hateful triumph of the matter
as well nigh put me beside myself. Not so long ago, no one could
satisfy them but Tauler; not the name of the most popular of saints
oftener on their lips; the very ground he trod on was blessed; a
kindly word from his lips food for days—and now the hands stretched
out almost in adoration, throw mire on the fallen idol, and not a
‘prentice lad behind his stall but hugs himself in his superior
sanity. Had he been a hunter after popularity, what a judgment!
Verily that man has the folly of a thousand fools who lives for the
applause of the multitude. But I know how Tauler’s heart bled for
them.

Friar Bernard came over this evening. He says the superiors are
wroth beyond measure with Tauler for the scandal he has brought upon
the order, and will forbid him to preach more. Entertained my jovial
gauger of monks’ bellies with the best cheer I had—he has a good
heart after all, and is unfeignedly sorry for Tauler’s disgrace.
Says he thinks the Doctor has fasted and done penance beyond his
strength, that the sudden coming out from his cell to preach to such
numbers was too much for his weakness,—that he will get over it and
be himself again, and much more,—to the hope whereof he pledged me
in another glass, and left me not a little comforted.

1342. _January. St. Vincent’s Day._—Saw Bernard again, who gives me
the good news that Dr. Tauler obtained permission from the prior to
deliver a Latin address in the school, and did acquit himself to
such admiration, that he is to be allowed to preach in public when
he will.

1342. _January 23._—Tauler preached to-day in the chapel of the
nunnery of St. Agatha, on ‘Behold the bridegroom cometh; go ye out
to meet him.’ A wondrous discourse—a torrent that seems to make me
dizzy yet. As he was describing, more like an angel than a man, the
joy of the bride at the approach of the bridegroom, a man cried out,
‘It is true!’ and fell senseless on the floor. As they were about
him to bring him to himself, a woman among them shrieked, ‘Oh, stop,
sir, stop! or he will die in our arms!’ Whereat he said calmly, and
with his face lighted up as though he saw the heavens opened, ‘Ah,
dear children, and if the bridegroom will call home the bride, shall
we not willingly suffer him? But nevertheless I will make an end.’
Then after sermon he read mass again, and, as I came out, I saw the
people gathered about several persons in the court who lay on the
ground, as though dead, such had been the power of his words.

1342. _February. St. Blasius’ Day._—Now Tauler is continually
preaching, not only in the church of his convent, but in those of
various monasteries and nunneries, in the Beguinasia, and in the
cells wherein little companies of pious women have gathered
themselves together to hide from the dangers of the world. He never
cited so much Latin as some, now less than heretofore. More alive
than ever, it would seem, to our wants, he addresses himself
mightily to heart and conscience, which he can bind up or smite at
will. His love and care, for the laity most of all, is a marvel; he
lives for us, and yet appears to hold himself no greater than the
least. Before, there was none like him, now we feel that in
heavenliness of nature he has gone beyond his former self. So
earnestly does he exhort to active love to man, as well as to
perfect resignation to God, that already a new spirit seems to
pervade many, and they begin to care for others, as he tells us the
first Christians did. He tells them mere prayers, and mass, and
alms, and penance, will help them nothing unless the Holy Spirit
breathes life into them. He says the priests are not of necessity
better men because they oftener taste the Lord’s body, that outward
things such as those profit nothing alone, and that those who love
their fellows most are the truest instructors, and teach more wisely
than all the schools.

1344. _March._—Tauler hath of late, besides preaching constantly as
ever, begun to send forth from time to time sundry small books, full
of consolation and godly counsel for these days. Copies of them are
fast multiplied, and people gather to hear them read at each other’s
houses. This is a new thing, and works powerfully.

The greatest stir has been made by two letters issued by Tauler,
Ludolph the Carthusian, and others, and sent out, not only through
Strasburg, but all the region round about.[116] The bishop is very
angry thereat; though, before, he had come several times to hear
Tauler, and had professed no small admiration of him. One of these
letters is to comfort the people, and exhorts all priests to
administer the sacraments to all who shall desire, the bann
notwithstanding. ‘For,’ it saith, ‘ye are bound to visit and console
the sick, remembering the bitter pain and death of Christ, who hath
made satisfaction, not for your sins only, but also for those of the
whole world, who doth represent us all before God, so that if one
falleth innocently under the bann, no Pope can shut him out of
heaven. Ye should, therefore, give absolution to such as wish
therefor—giving heed rather to the bidding of Christ and his
Apostles than to the bann, which is issued only out of malice and
avarice.’

Thus truly have these good men done, and many with them, so that
numbers have died in peace, fearing the bann not a whit, whereas
before, many thousands, unshriven, gave up the ghost in the horrors
of despair.

The other letter is addressed to the learned and great ones among
the clergy. It saith that there are two swords—a spiritual, which is
God’s word, and the temporal, the secular power:—that these two are
to be kept distinct; both are from God, and ought not to be contrary
the one to the other. The spiritual power should fulfil its proper
duty and uphold the temporal, while that again should protect the
good and be a terror to evil-doers. If temporal princes sin, such as
are spiritual should exhort them, in love and humility, to amend
their ways. It is against the law of Christ that the shepherds, when
one of these falls beneath their displeasure, should for that reason
presume to damn a whole country, with all its cities, towns, and
villages, where dwell the poor innocent folk who are no partakers in
the sin. It cannot be proved from Scripture that all those who will
not kiss the Pope’s foot, or receive a certain article of faith, or
who hold by an emperor duly elected and well fulfilling his office,
and do him service as set over them by God, do therein sin against
the Church and are heretics. God will not demand of vassals an
account of the sins of their lords, and neither should subjects,
bound to obey the emperor as the highest temporal power, be given
over to damnation as though answerable for the faults of their
rulers. Therefore all who hold the true Christian faith, and sin
only against the person of the Pope, are no heretics. Those, rather,
are real heretics who obstinately refuse to repent and forsake their
sins; for let a man have been what he may, if he will so do, he
cannot be cast out of the Church. Through Christ, the truly penitent
thief, murderer, traitor, adulterer, all may have forgiveness. Such
as God beholdeth under an unrighteous bann, he will turn for them
the curse into a blessing. Christ himself did not resist the
temporal power, but said, My kingdom is not of this world. Our souls
belong unto God, our body and goods to Cæsar. If the emperor sins,
he must give account to God therefor—not to a poor mortal man.

Footnote 113:

To long and weave a woof of dreams is sweet unto the feeble soul, but
nobler is stout-hearted striving, and makes the dream reality.

Footnote 114:

This sermon is given entire in the second chapter of the
_Lebenshistorie des ehrwürdigen Doctors Johann Tauler_, prefixed to
his sermons. The succeeding incidents are all related by the same
authority. The cellarer only and the family affairs of Adolf, appear
to be invented by Atherton.

Footnote 115:

Atherton defends this word by the usage of Thomas Fuller.

Footnote 116:

These letters are preserved in substance in Specklin’s _Collectanea_,
and are inserted, from that source, in the introduction by Görres to
Diepenbrock’s edition of Suso’s works; pp. xxxv. &c.

CHAPTER V.

The meanes, therefore, which unto us is lent
Him to behold, is on his workes to looke,
Which he hath made in beautie excellent,
And in the same, as in a brasen booke,
To read enregistred in every nooke
His goodnesse, which his beautie doth declare;
For all that’s good is beautifull and faire.

Thence gathering plumes of perfect speculation,
To impe the wings of thy high-flying mynd,
Mount up aloft through heavenly contemplation,
From this darke world, whose damps the soule do blynd,
And, like the native brood of eagles kynd,
On that bright Sunne of Glorie fixe thine eyes,
Cleared from grosse mists of fraile infirmities.

SPENSER: HYMNE OF HEAVENLY BEAUTIE.

WILLOUGHBY. I did not think Atherton had so much artifice in him. He broke off his last reading from Arnstein’s Chronicle with a mystery unexplained, quite in the most approved feuilleton style.

GOWER. You have excited the curiosity of the ladies most painfully, I assure you. I believe I am empowered to say that they cannot listen to any more of the armourer’s journal until you have accounted for Tauler’s singular disappearance.

KATE. One word for us and two for yourself, Mr. Gower.

ATHERTON. Ungrateful public! You all know I haven’t a particle of invention in my nature. It is just because I am not a novelist that I have not been able to explain everything. Arnstein is, like me, a matter-of-fact personage, and could not be in two places at once.

However, to relieve you, I am ready to acknowledge that I am in possession of information about these incidents quite independent of the irregular entries in his record. There is no secret; it is all matter of sober history. The facts are these—

One day there came a stranger to Tauler, desiring to confess to him. It was the remarkable man who had so attracted the attention of Adolf in the church. He was called Nicholas of Basle, and was well known in the Oberland as an eminent ‘Friend of God.’ He was one of those men so characteristic of that period—a layman exercising a wider spiritual influence than many a bishop. He was perhaps a Waldensian, holding the opinions of that sect, with a considerable infusion of visionary mysticism. The Waldenses, and the Friends of God, were drawn nearer to each other by opposition, and the disorders of the time, as well as by the more liberal opinions they held in common, and it is not always easy to distinguish them.

After confession, the layman requested, much to the Doctor’s surprise, that he would preach a sermon on the highest spiritual attainment a man may reach in time. Tauler yielded at length to his importunity, and fulfilled his promise. Nicholas brought his notes of the sermon to Tauler, and in the course of their conversation, disclosed the object of his visit. He had travelled those thirty miles, he said, not merely to listen to the doctor, of whom he had heard so much, but, by God’s help, to give him some counsel that should do him good. He told him plainly that the sermon, though excellent in its way, could teach him nothing—the Great Teacher could impart to him more knowledge in an hour than Tauler and all his brethren, preaching till the day of doom. Tauler was first astonished, then indignant, to hear a mere layman address him in such language. Nicholas appealed to that very anger as a proof that the self-confidence of the Pharisee was not yet cleansed away, that the preacher trusted with unbecoming pride in his mastership and great learning.

You must remember the vast distance which at that day separated the clerk from the layman, to give to the candour and humility of Tauler its due value. The truth flashed across his mind. Deeply affected, he embraced the layman, saying, ‘Thou hast been the first to tell me of my fault. Stay with me here. Henceforth I will live after thy counsel; thou shalt be my spiritual father, and I thy sinful son.’

Nicholas acceded to his request, and gave him, to begin with, a kind of spiritual A B C,—a list of moral rules, commencing in succession with the letters of the alphabet, which he was to commit to memory and to practise, together with sundry bodily austerities, for five weeks, in honour of the five wounds of Christ. But the discipline which followed was yet more severe. Tauler was directed to abstain from hearing confession, from study and from preaching, and to shut himself up in his cell, that, in solitary contemplation of the sufferings and death of Christ, he might attain true humility and complete renewal. The anticipated consequences ensued. His friends and penitents forsook him; he became the by-word of the cloister; his painful penances brought on a lingering sickness. Borne down by mental and bodily sufferings together, he applied to his friend for relief. The layman told him that he was going on well—it would be better with him ere long—he might remit his severer self-inflictions, and should recruit the body by a more generous diet.

Nicholas was now called away by important business, he said, and Tauler was left to himself. His parting advice to his spiritual scholar was, that if he came to want, he should pawn his books, but sell them on no account, for the day would come when he would need them once more.

Tauler continued in this trying seclusion for nearly two years, contemned by the world without as one beside himself, oppressed within by distress of mind and feebleness of body. It had been forbidden him to desire, even when thus brought low, any special communication from God that might gladden him with rapture or consolation. Such a request would spring from self and pride. He was there to learn an utter self-abandonment—to submit himself without will or choice to the good pleasure of God—to be tried with this or any other affliction, if need were, till the judgment day.

Now it came to pass, when he had become so ill that he could not attend mass or take his place in the choir as he had been wont, that, as he lay on his sickbed, he meditated once more on the sufferings and love of our Lord and Saviour, and thought on his own life, what a poor thing it had been, and how ungrateful. With that he fell into a marvellous great sorrow, says the history, for all his lost time and all his sins, and spake, with heart and mouth, these words:—

‘O merciful God, have mercy upon me, a poor sinner; have mercy in thine infinite compassion, for I am not worthy to live on the face of the earth.’

Then as he sat up waking in his sickness and sorrow, he heard a voice saying, ‘Stand fast in thy peace, trust God, remember that he was once on the earth in human nature, healing sick bodies and sick souls.’ When he heard these words he fell back fainting, and knew no more. On coming to himself, he found that both his inward and outward powers had received new life. Much that had before been strange now seemed clear. He sent for his friend, who heard with joy what he had to tell.

‘Now,’ said Nicholas, ‘thou hast been for the first time moved by the Highest, and art a partaker of the grace of God, and knowest that though the letter killeth, the Spirit giveth life. Now wilt thou understand the Scripture as never before—perceive its harmony and preciousness, and be well able to show thy fellow Christians the way to eternal life. Now one of thy sermons will bring more fruit than a hundred aforetime, coming, as it will, from a simple, humbled, loving heart; and much as the people have set thee at nought, they will now far more love and prize thee. But a man with treasure must guard against the thieves. See to it that thou hold fast thy humility, by which thou wilt best keep thy riches. Now thou needest my teaching no longer, having found the right Master, whose instrument I am, and who sent me hither. Now, in all godly love, thou shalt teach me in turn.’

Tauler had pledged his books for thirty gulden. The layman went immediately and redeemed them at his own cost, and by his advice Tauler caused it to be announced that in three days he would preach once more. You have already heard how our good friend Adolf records the unhappy result of this first attempt. Tauler went with his trouble to Nicholas, who comforted him by the assurance that such farther trial was but a sign of the careful love which carried on the work within. There must have been some remnant of self-seeking which was still to be purged away. He advised him to wait awhile, and then apply for permission to deliver a Latin address to the brethren in the school. This he at last received, and a better sermon they never heard. So the next preacher, at the close of his discourse, made the following announcement to the congregation: ‘I am requested to give notice that Doctor Tauler will preach here to-morrow. If he succeeds no better than before, the blame must rest with himself. But this I can say, that he has read us in the school a prelection such as we have not heard for many a day; how he will acquit himself now, I know not, God knoweth.’

Then followed the overpowering discourse, of whose effects you have heard; and from this time forward commenced a new æra in Tauler’s public life. For full eight years he laboured unremittingly, with an earnestness and a practical effect far surpassing his former efforts, and in such esteem with all classes that his fellow-citizens would seem to have thought no step should be taken in spiritual matters, scarcely in temporal, without first seeking counsel of Tauler.

LOWESTOFFE. A most singular story. But how have all these minute circumstances come down to us?

ATHERTON. When Tauler was on his death-bed he sent for Nicholas, and gave him a manuscript, in which he had written down their conversations, with some account of his own life and God’s dealings towards him, His unworthy servant, requesting him to make thereof a little book. The layman promised to do so. ‘But see to it,’ continued the Doctor, ‘that you can conceal our names. You can easily write ‘The Man and the Doctor’—for the life and words and works which God hath wrought through me, an unworthy, sinful man, are not mine, but belong unto Almighty God for ever. So let it be, for the edifying of our fellow men; but take the writing with thee into thy country, and let no man see it while I live.’ This narrative has been preserved, and there is no difficulty in discerning in the Doctor and the man, Tauler and Nicholas of Basle.[117]

You will now let me resume my reading, I suppose.

Chronicle of Adolf Arnstein, continued.

1344. _Eve of St. Dionysius._—I here set down passages from sermons
I have at sundry times heard Doctor Tauler preach. I have made it my
wont to go straight home as soon as the service has been ended, and
write what I could best remember. The goodly sayings which follow
are copied from those imperfect records, and placed here for my
edification and that of my children and others after me.

From a sermon on Christ’s teaching the multitude out of the
ship.—The soul of the believing man, wherein Christ is, doth find
its representation in that ship. Speaking of the perpetual peace
such souls may have, despite what storm and commotion soever, he
added (not a little to my comfort): ‘But some of you have not felt
all this; be not ye dismayed. There are poor fishers as well as
rich; yea, more poor than rich. Hold this as unchangeably sure, that
the trials and struggle of no man are of small account. If a man be
but in right earnest, longeth to be a true lover of God, and
perseveres therein, and loves those he knows or deems to be
such,—doth heartily address himself to live fairly after Job’s
pattern, and intend God unfeignedly in his doing or not doing, such
a man will assuredly enter into God’s peace, though he should tarry
for it till his dying day. Even those true friends and lovers of God
who enjoy so glorious a peace have disquiet and trouble of their own
in that they cannot be towards their faithful God all they would,
and in that even what God giveth is less large than their desires.’

‘In the highest stage of divine comfort is that peace which is said
to pass all understanding. When that noblest part of the soul to
which no name can be given is completely turned to God and set on
Him, it takes with it all those faculties in man to which we can
give names. This conversion involves both that in God which is
Nameless and that in the consciousness of man which can be named.
These are they whom St. Dionysius calls godly-minded men. As Paul
saith, ‘That ye may be rooted and grounded in love; and understand
with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and height, and
depth.’ For the height and depth which are revealed in such men can
be apprehended by no human sense or reason; they reach beyond all
sense out into a deep abyss. This great good, light, and comfort, is
inwardly revealed only to those who are outwardly sanctified and
inwardly illuminated, and who know how to dwell inwardly within
themselves. To such, heaven and earth and all creatures are as an
absolute Nothing, for they themselves are a heaven of God, inasmuch
as God dwelleth and rests in them.’

‘God draweth these men in such wise into Himself, that they become
altogether pleasing unto Him, and all that is in them becomes, in a
super-essential way, so pervaded and transformed, that God himself
doeth and worketh all their works. Wherefore, clearly, such persons
are called with right—Godlike (_Gottformige_). For if we could see
such minds as they truly are, they would appear to us like God,
being so, however, not by nature, but by grace. For God lives,
forms, ordaineth, and doeth in them all his works, and doth use
Himself in them.’

‘It fares with such men as with Peter, when, at the miraculous
draught of fishes, he exclaimed, ‘Depart from me, for I am a sinful
man, O Lord!’ See! he can find no words, no way of utterance, for
that within. So is it, I say, with such men—they find themselves
empty of fit words and works. And that is the first mode. The other
is that they fall utterly into their own groundless Nothing (_in ihr
grundloses Nichts_), and become so small and utterly nothing in God
as quite to forget all gifts they have received before, and do, as
it were, pour themselves back again absolutely into God (whose they
properly are) as though such bestowments had never been theirs. Yea,
they are withal as barely nothing as though they had never been. So
sinks the created Nothing in the Uncreated, incomprehensibly,
unspeakably. Herein is true what is said in the Psalter, ‘Deep
calleth unto deep.’ For the uncreated Deep calls the created, and
these two deeps become entirely one. Then hath the created spirit
lost itself in the spirit of God, yea, is drowned in the bottomless
sea of Godhead. But how well it is with such a man passeth all
understanding to comprehend. Such a man becomes, thirdly, essential,
virtuous, godly; in his walk, loving and kindly, condescending and
friendly towards all men, so that no man can detect in him any fault
or transgression, any vice or crime. Moreover, he is believing and
trustful towards all men, hath mercy and sympathy for every man
without distinction; is not austere and stern, but friendly, gentle,
and good, and it is not possible that such men should ever be
separated from God. Unto such perfectness may all we be graciously
helped of God our Saviour, unto whom be praise for ever. Amen.’[118]

‘The ground or centre of the soul is so high and glorious a thing,
that it cannot properly be named, even as no adequate name can be
found for the Infinite and Almighty God. In this ground lies the
image of the Holy Trinity. Its kindred and likeness with God is such
as no tongue can utter. Could a man perceive and realize how God
dwelleth in this ground, such knowledge would be straightway the
blessedness of salvation. The apostle saith, ‘be renewed in the
spirit of your mind (_Gemüthes_).’ When the mind is rightly
directed, it tendeth towards this ground whose image is far beyond
its powers. In this mind we are to be renewed, by a perpetual
bringing of ourselves into this ground, truly loving and intending
God immediately. This is not impossible for the mind itself, though
our inferior powers are unequal to such unceasing union with God.
This renewal must take place also in the spirit. For God is a
spirit, and our created spirit must be united to and lost in the
uncreated, even as it existed in God before its creation. Every
moment in which the soul so re-enters into God, a complete
restoration takes place. If it be done a thousand times in a day,
there is, each time, a true regeneration: as the Psalmist
saith,—‘This day have I begotten thee.’ This is when the inmost of
the spirit is sunk and dissolved in the inmost of the Divine Nature,
and thus new-made and transformed. God pours Himself out thus into
our spirit, as the sun rays forth its natural light into the air,
and fills it with sunshine, so that no eye can tell the difference
between the sunshine and the air. If the union of the sun and air
cannot be distinguished, how far less this divine union of the
created and the uncreated Spirit! Our spirit is received and utterly
swallowed up in the abyss which is its source. Then the spirit
transcends itself and all its powers, and mounts higher and higher
towards the Divine Dark, even as an eagle towards the sun.’

‘Yet let no man in his littleness and nothingness think of himself
to approach that surpassing darkness,—rather let him draw nigh to
the darkness of his ignorance of God, let him simply yield himself
to God, ask nothing, desire nothing, love and mean only God, yea,
and such an unknown God. Let him lovingly cast all his thoughts and
cares, and his sins too, as it were, on that unknown Will. Beyond
this unknown will of God he must desire and purpose nothing, neither
way, nor rest, nor work, neither this nor that, but wholly subject
and offer himself up to this unknown will. Moreover, if a man, while
busy in this lofty inward work, were called by some duty in the
Providence of God to cease therefrom and cook a broth for some sick
person, or any other such service, he should do so willingly and
with great joy. This I say that if it happened to me that I had to
forsake such work and go out to preach or aught else, I should go
cheerfully, believing not only that God would be with me, but that
He would vouchsafe me it may be even greater grace and blessing in
that external work undertaken out of true love in the service of my
neighbour than I should perhaps receive in my season of loftiest
contemplation.’

‘The truly enlightened man—alas! that they should be so few—scarce
two or three among a thousand—sinks himself the deeper in his Ground
the more he recognises his honour and his blessedness, and of all
his gifts ascribes not even the least unto himself. Our
righteousness and holiness, as the prophet saith, is but filthiness.
Therefore must we build, not on our righteousness, but on the
righteousness of God, and trust, not in our own words, works, or
ways, but alone in God. May this God give us all power and grace to
lose ourselves wholly in Him, that we may be renewed in truth, and
found to His praise and glory. Amen.’[119]

Speaking of the publican in the temple, he put up a prayer that God
would give him such an insight as that man had into his own Nothing
and unworthiness;—‘That,’ said he, ‘is the highest and most
profitable path a man can tread. For that way brings God continually
and immediately into man. Where God appears in His mercy, there is
He manifest also with all His nature—with Himself.’[120]

I understand the Doctor as teaching three states or conditions
wherein man may stand; that of nature, by the unaided light of
reason, which in its inmost tends Godward, did not the flesh hinder;
that of grace; and a higher stage yet, above grace, where means and
medium are as it were superseded, and God works immediately within
the transformed soul. For what God doeth that He is. Yet that in
this higher state, as in the second, man hath no merit; he is
nothing and God all. In the course of this same sermon he described
humility as indispensable to such perfectness, since the loftiest
trees send their roots down deepest. He said that we should not
distress ourselves if we had not detailed to our confessor all the
short-coming and sin of our hearts, but confess to God and ask His
mercy. No ecclesiastical absolution can help us unless we are
contrite for our sin before God. We are not to keep away from the
Lord’s body because we feel so deeply our unworthiness to partake of
the sacrament, seeing that they who are whole need not a physician,
but they that are sick.[121]

‘There are some who can talk much and eloquently of the incarnation
and bitter sufferings of Christ, who do with tears apostrophise him
from head to foot as they present him to their imagination. Yet is
there often in this more of sense and self-pleasing than of true
love to God. They look more to the means than to the end. For my
part, I would rather there were less of such excitement and
transport, less of mere sweet emotion, so that a man were diligent
and right manful in working and in virtue, for in such exercise do
we learn best to know ourselves. These raptures are not the highest
order of devotion, though would that many a dull heart had more of
such sensibility! There are, as St. Bernard hath said, three kinds
of love, the sweet, the wise, and the strong. The first is as a
gilded image of wood, the second as a gilded image of silver, the
third an image of pure gold. One to whom God hath vouchsafed such
sweetness should receive it with lowliness and thankfulness,
discerning therein his weakness and imperfection, in that God has to
allure and entice him as a little child. He should not rest at this
point, but press on, through images, above all image and figure;
through the outward exercise of the senses to the inward ground of
his soul, where properly the kingdom of God is. There are many
altogether at home amid sensuous imagery, and having great joy
therein, whose inner ground is as fast shut to them as a mountain of
iron through which there is no way.’

‘Dionysius writeth how God doth far and superessentially surpass all
images, modes, forms, or names that can be applied to Him. The true
fulness of divine enlightenment is known herein that it is an
essential illumination, not taking place by means of images or in
the powers of the soul, but rather in the ground itself of the soul,
when a man is utterly sunk in his own Nothing. This I say against
the ‘free spirits,’ who persuade themselves that by means of certain
appearances and glances of revelation they have discerned the truth,
and please themselves with their own exaltation, knowledge, and
wisdom; going about in a false emptiness (_Ledigkeit_) of their own;
and speaking to others as though they were not yet advanced beyond
the use of forms and images; bringing, with their frivolous
presumption, no small dishonour upon God. But know ye, Christians
beloved, that no truly pious and God-fearing man gives himself out
as having risen above all things, for things in themselves utterly
insignificant and mean are yet, in the truth, right and good; and
though any one may be in reality elevated above such lesser matters,
yet doth he love and honour them not less than heretofore; for the
truly pious account themselves less than all things, and boast not
that they have surpassed or are lifted above them.’[122]

‘O, dear child, in the midst of all these enmities and dangers, sink
thou into thy ground and thy Nothingness, and let the tower with all
its bells fall on thee, yea, let all the devils in hell storm out
upon thee, let heaven and earth with all their creatures assail
thee, all shall but marvellously serve thee—sink thou only into thy
Nothingness, and the better part is thine!‘[123]

‘Yet some will ask what remains after a man hath thus lost himself
in God? I answer, nothing but a fathomless annihilation of himself,
an absolute ignoring of all reference to himself personally, of all
aims of his own in will and heart, in way, in purpose, or in use.
For in this self-loss man sinks so deep into the ground that if he
could, out of pure love and lowliness, sink himself deeper yet, and
become absolutely nothing, he would do so right gladly. For such a
self-annihilation hath been brought to pass within him that he
thinketh himself unworthy to be a man, unfit to enter God’s house
and temple, and to look upon a crucifix painted on the wall; yea,
such a man deemeth himself not so good by far as the very worst.
Nevertheless, as far as regards the sufferings and death of the
Lord—the birth and incarnation of the Son of God—His holy and
perfect life that He lived on earth among sinful men, all this such
a man did never before so heartily and strongly love as now he doth;
yea, now his care is how he may order his life right Christianly,
and fashion it anew, and out of fervent love toward his Lord and
Saviour, exercise himself without ceasing in all good work and
virtue.’[124]

‘There are those who thoughtlessly maim and torture their miserable
flesh, and yet leave untouched the inclinations which are the root
of evil in their hearts. Ah, my friend, what hath thy poor body done
to thee, that thou shouldst so torment it? Oh folly! mortify and
slay thy sins, not thine own flesh and blood.’[125]

WILLOUGHBY. My dear Atherton, this is grand doctrine. May I never be farther from the kingdom of heaven than such a mystic. Surely Luther’s praise is just. Compare such theology as this with the common creed and practice of that day. The faults are nearly all those of the time—the excellence his own.

ATHERTON. It is wonderful to see how little harm his Platonism can do to a man so profoundly reverent, so fervent in his love to Christ. How often he seems to tread the verge of Eckart’s pantheistic abyss, but never falls into it! His heart is true; he walks uprightly, and so, surely. That conception of sin as selfishness—that doctrine of self-abandonment, death in ourselves and life in God—these are convictions with him so deep and blessed—so far beyond all Greek philosophy—so fatal to the intellectual arrogance of pantheism, that they bear him safe through every peril.

GOWER. His sermons cannot fail to do one good—read with the heart and imagination. But if you coldly criticise, and can make no allowance for the allegories and metaphors and vehement language of the mystic, you may shut the book at once.

ATHERTON. And shut out blessing from your soul. It is not difficult to see, however, where Tauler’s danger lies. There is an excess of negation in his divinity. He will ignore, deny, annihilate almost everything you can name,—bid you be knowledgeless, desireless, motionless,—will enjoin submission to the unknown God (when it is our triumph in Christ that we submit to the Revealed and Known)—and, in short, leaves scarcely anything positive save the mysterious lapse of the soul’s Ground, or Spark, into the Perfect, the Essential One. He seems sometimes to make our very personality a sin, as though the limitations of our finite being were an element in our guilt. The separation of a particular faculty or higher power of the soul which unites with God, while the inferior powers are either absorbed or occupied in the lower sphere, this is the great metaphysical mistake which lies at the root of so many forms of mysticism. With Tauler the work of grace consists too much of extremes—it dehumanizes in order to deify.

WILLOUGHBY. But that, remember, is no fault of Tauler’s especially. He does but follow here the ascetic, superhuman aspiration of a Church which, trying to raise some above humanity, sinks myriads below it.

ATHERTON. Granted. That error does not lessen my love and admiration for the man.

GOWER. Your extracts show, too, that the Nothingness towards which he calls men to strive is no indolent Quietism, nor, as with Eckart, a kind of metaphysical postulate, but in fact a profound spiritual self-abasement and the daily working out of a self-sacrificing Christ-like character.

ATHERTON. Blessed are his contradictions and inconsistencies! Logic cannot always reconcile Tauler with himself—our hearts do.[126]

WILLOUGHBY. Never surely was a theory so negative combined with an action more fervently intense—a positiveness more benign.

GOWER. In his life we understand him,—that is at once the explanation and vindication of what his mysticism means.

ATHERTON. Few, however, of his fellow-mystics rose, so far as Tauler, above the peculiar dangers of mysticism. Even the good layman, Nicholas of Basle, was a man of vision, and assumed a kind of prophecy. Tauler and the Theologia Germanica stand almost alone in rejecting the sensuous element of mysticism—its apparitions, its voices, its celestial phantasmagoria. With many of his friends mysticism became secluded, effeminate, visionary, because uncorrected, as in his case, by benevolent action, by devoted conflict against priestly wrong.

KATE. Tauler, then, was a Protestant in spirit—a genuine forerunner of the Reformation?

ATHERTON. Unquestionably.

MRS. ATHERTON. But what could the common people make of this high ideal he sets before them? Could they be brought heartily to care about that kind of ultra-human perfectness? Beautiful it must have been to hear this eloquent man describe the divine passion of the soul, how—

Love took up the harp of life and smote on all the chords with
might,
Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, passed in music out of
sight,

—but bewildering, rather?

ATHERTON. I am afraid so. Yet there was much they evidently did understand and relish.

GOWER. In fact the Reformers were wanted, with their Bible, with their simpler, homelier teaching—so much less ascetic, so much more human—and with their written word, interpreted more soundly; coming, not to extinguish that inner light, but to enclose, as in a glass, the precious flame, otherwise fitfully blown about by the gusts of circumstance and feeling.

WILLOUGHBY. But none the less let us praise the man who lived so nobly by the light he had—who made human works as nothing, that God might be all—who took the heavenly kingdom from the hands of the priest, and proclaimed it in the heart of every spiritual worshipper.

GOWER. Though Tauler adopts at times the language of Eckart, no one can fail to discern a very different spirit. How much more profound his apprehension of sin—his sense of need; how much more prominent Christ, rescuing and purifying the stricken soul. Tauler lays man in the dust, and keeps him there. Eckart suffers him to expand from Nothing to Infinity. Summarily, I would put the difference thus:—With Eckart the language of Christianity becomes the metaphorical expression for pantheism; with Tauler, phraseology approaching pantheism is the metaphorical expression of a most truly Christian conviction. If the former sins even more in the spirit than in the letter, in the case of the latter the sins of the letter are redeemed by the excellence of the spirit.

Note to page 246.

The passages in the text are from the second Sermon on Fifth Sunday after Trinity, Predigten, ii. pp. 353, &c. The spiritual conflict and desolation which had shaken Tauler’s nature to its depths bears fruit in this profound humility. Self-abasement is the cardinal doctrine of all his sermons; his lowliness of spirit the safeguard of his theology from all dangerous error. The troubles through which he and Suso were made to pass, gave them an antidote to the poison of the current ecclesiastical doctrine. Consciences so stirred were not to be cast into a sleep by the mesmeric passes of a priestly hand. He only who had hurt could heal; they fled from man to God—from means to the End, and so, like the patriarch, their eye saw God, and they repented and abhorred themselves as in dust and ashes. Never after that could they believe in salvation by works, and so they became aliens from the spirit of that Church whose pale retained them to the last.

Tauler and his brethren will ‘escape distinction;‘—not that which is between creature and Creator, or between good and evil—that rather which the Pharisee makes when he says, ‘I am holier than thou.’ It is their very anxiety to escape all assumption of merit which partly vitiates the letter of their theology, and makes them speak as though grace substituted God for man within the renewed nature. They will escape the dry and fruitless distinctions of the schoolman. They will escape the distinction which selfish comfort-worshippers make so broad between ease and hardship. Sorrow and joy, pain and pleasure, are trustfully accepted as alike coming from the hand of love.

Even when Tauler speaks of self-surrender to an ‘unknown Will,’ we must not press his words too far. It is very evident that he who reaches this coveted abandonment is not supposed to have forgotten that gracious character under which God has made Himself known—of which Christ is the manifestation. In casting his care on an unknown Will, Tauler acts on the conviction that he is cared for,—this fact he knows; but precisely what that care may deem best for him he does not know. He surrenders, in true self-distrust, his personal notion of what may be the Divine good pleasure in any particular case. Few lessons were more needed than this in Tauler’s day, when superstition found signs and wonders everywhere, and fanaticism so recklessly identified human wrath and Divine righteousness.

Tauler’s ‘state above grace,’ and ‘transformed condition of the soul, in which God worketh all its works,’ are perhaps little more than injudicious expressions for that more spontaneous and habitual piety characteristic of the established Christian life,—that religion which consists so much more in a pervading spirit of devotion than in professed and special religious acts. He certainly inculcates no proud and self-complacent rejection and depreciation of any means. Rather would the man who learnt Tauler’s doctrine well find all persons, objects, and circumstances, made more or less ‘means of grace’ to him. In a landscape or a fever, an enemy or an accident, his soul would find discipline and blessing, and not in mass and penance and paternoster merely;—for is not God in all things near us, and willing to make everything minister to our spiritual growth? Such teaching was truly reformatory, antagonistic as it was to that excessive value almost everywhere attached in those days to works and sacraments.

So again with Tauler’s exhortation to rise above symbol, image, or figure. He carries it too far, indeed. Such asceticism of the soul is too severe a strain for ordinary humanity. It is unknown to His teaching, who spake as never man spake. Yet there lay in it a most wholesome protest against religious sentimentalism, visionary extravagance, hysterical inoperative emotions,—against the fanciful prettinesses of superstitious ritual and routine.

Tauler’s ‘Nothing,’ or ‘Ground’ of the soul, may be metaphysically a fiction—religiously it indicates the sole seat of inward peace. Only as we put no trust in things earthly,—only as amidst our most strenuous action the heart saith ever, ‘Thy will be done,’—only as we strive to reduce our feverish hopes and fears about temporal enjoyment as nearly as we can to Nothing,—are we calm and brave, whatever may befal. This loving repose of Faith is Eternal Life, as sin is so much present death;—it is a life lived, in harmony with the everlasting, above the restlessness of time;—it is (in Eckart’s phrase, though not in Eckart’s sense) a union with the Allmoving Immobility—the divine serenity of Love Omnipotent, guiding and upholding all without an effort.

Note to page 248.

The above is from the Sermon on the Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity, ii. p. 546. He says in this discourse that the soul has various names, according to the different operations and attributes belonging to it. It is called Anima, or soul; Spirit; and Disposition (gemüth), a marvellous and very lovely thing—for the memory, the understanding, and the will of man are all collected therein. The Disposition hath an objectum above the other powers, and as it follows or forsakes that aim so is it well or ill with the rest of man’s nature. Fourthly, the soul is called mens or mensch (man), and that is the ground which is nameless, and wherein dwells hidden the true image of the Holy Trinity. (Compare Third Serm. on Third Sunday after Trin., ii. p. 305, and Serm. on Eleventh Sunday after Trin., ii. p. 435.) By the synteresis, or synderesis, Tauler appears to mean the native tendency of the soul towards God. With Tauler and the mystics generally this tendency is an original capacity for knowing God immediately. The term is not peculiar to the mystics, but it bears in their writings a signification which non-mystical theologians refuse to admit. The distinction usually made between συντήρησις and συνείδησις is simply this: the former expresses that constitution of our nature whereby we assent at once to the axioms of morality, while the latter denotes that judgment which man passes on himself in conformity with such constitution of his moral nature. The second is related to the first somewhat as recollection is to memory.

On this divine centre or substratum of the soul rests the fundamental doctrine of these mystics. So Hermann of Fritslar says, speaking of—di kraft in der sêle di her heizit sinderisis. In dirre kraft mac inkein krêatûre wirken noch inkein krêatûrlîch bilde, sunder got der wirket dar in âne mittel und âne underlâz. Heiligenleben, p. 187. Thus, he says elsewhere, that the masters speak of two faces of the soul, the one turned toward this world, the other immediately to God. In the latter God doth flow and shine eternally, whether man knoweth it or not. It is, therefore, according to man’s nature as possessed of this divine ground, to seek God, his original; it must be so for ever, and even in hell the suffering there has its source in the hopeless contradiction of this indestructible tendency.

Note to page 251.

This passage is from the Third Serm. on Thirteenth Sun. after Trin., ii. p. 480. The same remarkable combination of inward aspiration and outward love and service is urged with much force and beauty in the Sermon on Fifth Sunday after Trinity, and in that on the Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity, ii. p. 512.

Tauler speaks of this Ground of the soul as that which is inseparable from the Divine nature, and wherein man hath by Grace what God is by nature. Predigten, ii. p. 199. He quotes Proclus as saying that, while man is busied with images, which are beneath us, and clings to such, he cannot possibly return into his Ground or Essence. ‘If thou wilt know by experience that such a Ground truly is, thou must forsake all the manifold and gaze thereon with thine intellectual eye alone. But wouldst thou come nearer yet, turn thine intellectual eyesight therefrom—for even the intellect is beneath thee—and become one with the One—that is, unite thyself with Unity.’ This unity Proclus calls the ‘calm, silent, slumbering, and incomprehensible divine Darkness.’ ‘To think, beloved in the Lord, that a heathen should understand so much and go so far, and we be so behind, may well make us blush for shame. To this our Lord Jesus Christ testifies when he says the kingdom of God is within you. That is, this kingdom is born in the inmost Ground of all, apart from all that the powers of the mind can accomplish.... In this Ground the eternal heavenly Father doth bring forth his only-begotten Son, a hundred thousand times quicker than an instant, according to our apprehension,—ever anew in the light of Eternity, in the glory and unutterable brightness of his own Self. He who would experience this must turn himself inward far away from all working of his outward and inward powers and imaginations—from all that ever cometh from without, and then sink and dissolve himself in the Ground. Then cometh the power of the Father, and calls the man into Himself through his only-begotten Son; and so the Son is born out of the Father and returneth unto the Father, and such a man is born in the Son of the Father, and floweth back with the Son into the Father again, and becomes one with them’ (p. 203, and Schmidt, p. 127). Yet, with all this, Tauler sincerely repudiates any pantheistic confusion of the Divine and human, and is always careful to state that this highest attainment—the vanishing point of Humanity, is the work of Grace. Some of his expressions in describing this union are almost as strong as those of Eckart (Third Serm. on Third Sun. after Trin., ii. p. 310), but his general tone far more lowly, practical, and true.

Note to page 253.

We best ascertain the true meaning of Tauler’s mystical phraseology, and discover the point at which he was desirous that mysticism should arrest its flight, by listening to the rebukes he administers to the unrighteous, pantheistic, or fantastical mystics of the day. A sermon of his on Psalm xci. 5 (Pred. vol. i. p. 228) is of great importance in this respect.

Speaking of such as embrace a religious life, without any true vocation, he points out how, as they follow only their own inclinations, they naturally desire rest, but are satisfied with a merely natural inaction instead of that spiritual calm which is the gift of God. Consequently, while the devout mind (as Gregory saith) cannot tolerate self-seeking, or be content with any such mere negation, these men profess to have attained the elevation of true peace while they have done nothing more than abstain from all imagination and action. Any man, remarks Tauler, very sensibly, may do this, without any especial grace from God. Such persons live in indolence, become self-complacent and full of pride. True love ever longs to love more; the more of God it hath the more it covets. God is never to be found in the pretended quiet of such men, which any Turk or heathen could find in the same way, as easily as they. They are persuaded by the devil that devout exercises and works of charity will only disturb their inward quiet, and do, in fact, disobey and resist God in their self-satisfied delusion.

He next exposes the error of those who undergo great austerities to be thought holy,—suffering for their own glory rather than that of God; and who think their penance and their works give them an extraordinary claim on the Most High. He shows how often they fall into temptation by their wayward and passionate desire after special spiritual manifestations, and by their clamorous importunity for particular bestowments on which their unmortified self-will has been obstinately set. Divine love, he says, offers itself up without reserve to God—seeks His glory alone, and can be satisfied with nothing short of God Himself. Natural love seeks itself in all things, and falls ere long, as Adam did, into mortal sin—into licence, pride, and covetousness.

Then he proceeds to describe an error, ‘yet more dangerous than this,’ as follows:—‘Those who compose this class call themselves God-seeing (Gott schauende) men. You may know them by the natural rest they profess to experience, for they imagine themselves free from sin and immediately united to God. They fancy themselves free from any obligation to obey either divine or human laws, and that they need no longer be diligent in good works. They believe the quiet to which they have devoted themselves so lofty and glorious a thing that they cannot, without sin, suffer themselves to be hindered or disturbed therein. Therefore will they be subject to no man—will work not at all, either inwardly or outwardly, but lie like an idle tool awaiting its master’s hand. They think, if they were to work, God’s operation within them would be hindered; so they sit inactive, and exercise themselves in no good work or virtue. In short, they are resolved to be so absolutely empty and idle that they will not so much as praise and thank God—will not desire or pray for anything—will not know or learn anything. All such things they hold to be mischievous—persuade themselves that they possess already all that can be requested, and that they have the true spiritual poverty because, as they flatter themselves, they live without any will of their own, and have abandoned all choice. As to the laws and ordinances of the Church, they believe that they have not only fulfilled them, but have advanced far beyond that state for which such institutions were designed. Neither God nor man (they say) can give or take from them aught, because they suffered all that was to be suffered till they passed beyond the stage of trial and virtue, and finally attained this absolute Quiet wherein they now abide. For they declare expressly that the great difficulty is not so much to attain to virtue as to overcome or surpass it, and to arrive at the said Quiet and absolute emptiness of all virtue. Accordingly they will be completely free and submit to no man,—not to pope or bishops, or to the priests and teachers set over them; and if they sometimes profess to obey, they do not in reality yield any obedience either in spirit or in practice. And just as they say they will be free from all laws and ordinances of the Holy Church, so they affirm, without a blush, that as long as a man is diligently striving to attain unto the Christian virtues he is not yet properly perfect, and knows not yet what spiritual poverty and spiritual freedom or emptiness really are. Moreover, they believe that they are exalted above the merits of all men and angels; that they can neither add to their virtues nor be guilty of any fault or sin, because (as they fancy) they live without will, have brought their spirit into Quiet and Emptiness, are in themselves nothing, and veritably united unto God. They believe, likewise, madly enough, that they may fulfil all the desires of their nature without any sin, because, forsooth, they have arrived at perfect innocence, and for them there is no law. In short, that the Quiet and freedom of their spirit may not be hindered, they do whatsoever they list. They care not a whit for fasts, festivals, or ordinances, but what they do is done on account of others, they themselves having no conscience about any such matters.’

A fourth class brought under review are less arrogant than these enthusiasts, and will admit that they may progress in grace. They are ‘God-suffering (Gottesleidende) men’—in fact, mystics of the intransitive theopathetic species par excellence. Their relation toward God is to be one of complete passivity, and all their doings (of whatever character) are His work. Tauler acknowledges duly the humility and patient endurance of these men. Their fault lies, he says, in their belief that every inward inclination they feel is the movement of the Holy Ghost, and this even when such inclinations are sinful, ‘whereas the Holy Spirit worketh in no man that which is useless or contrary to the life of Christ and Holy Scriptures.’ In their constancy as well as in their doctrine they nearly resemble the early Quakers. They would sooner die, says Tauler, than swerve a hair’s breadth from their opinion or their purpose.

Tauler’s reprobation of these forms of mysticism—which his own expressions, too literally understood, might appear sometimes to approach—shows clearly that he was himself practically free from such extremes. His concluding remarks enforce very justly the necessity of good works as an evidence to our fellow-men of our sincerity. He dwells on the indispensableness of religious ordinance, worship, and thanksgiving, as at once the expression and the nourishment of devout affection. He precludes at the same time, in the strongest language, all merit in the creature before God. ‘I say that if it were possible for our spiritual nature to be deprived of all its modes of operation, and to be as absolutely inactive as it was when it lay yet uncreated in the abyss of the Divine Nature,—if it were possible for the rational creature to be still as it was when in God prior to creation,—neither the one nor the other could even thus merit anything, yea, not now any more than then; it would have no more holiness or blessedness in itself than a block or a stone’ (p. 243). He points to the example of Christ as the best refutation of this false doctrine of Quiet, saying, ‘He continued without ceasing to love and desire, to bless and praise his Heavenly Father, and though his soul was joined to and blessed in the Divine Essence, yet he never arrived at the Emptiness of which these men talk.’

Footnote 117:

The substance of the foregoing narrative concerning Tauler and the
laymen will be found in the _Lebenshistorie des ehrwürdigen Doctors
Joh. Tauler_. See also C. Schmidt’s account of Nicholas in his
monograph on Tauler (p. 28), and a characteristic letter by Nicholas
concerning visions of coming judgment given in the Appendix.

Footnote 118:

See Note, p. 254.

Footnote 119:

See first Note, p. 256.

Footnote 120:

Serm. on Eleventh Sun. after Trinity, ii. p. 436.

Footnote 121:

_Serm. on Eleventh Sun. after Trin._, ii. pp. 442, 443. Also,
_Predigten_, vol. iii. p. 19, and _Schmidt_, p. 125.

Footnote 122:

Third Serm. on Thirteenth Sun. after Trin., ii. pp. 474-478.

Footnote 123:

First Serm. on Thirteenth Sun. after Trin., ii. p. 459.

Footnote 124:

See second Note, p. 256.

Footnote 125:

Twenty-first Sun. after Trin., ii. p. 584.

Footnote 126:

See Note, p. 257.

CHAPTER VI.

Keep all thy native good, and naturalize
All foreign of that name; but scorn their ill.
Embrace their activeness, not vanities;
Who follows all things forfeiteth his will.

HERBERT.

The day after the conversation recorded in the last chapter, Atherton was called to a distance from Summerford on legal business. Before leaving, he had some further talk with Willoughby on several topics suggested by what had passed on the previous day. The lawyers did not release him so promptly as he had expected, and as he had taken a copy of Tauler’s sermons with him, and had time at his disposal, he wrote more than once to his friend in the course of the next week. This chapter will consist of extracts from the letters thus written, and will form a fitting supplement to matters dealt with in several preceding conversations.

* * *

I scarcely need remind you that there are great practical advantages to be derived from a course of mental travel among forms of Christian belief in many respects foreign to our own. Nothing so surely arrests our spiritual growth as a self-complacent, insular disdain of other men’s faith. To displace this pride by brotherly-kindness—to seek out lovingly the points whereon we agree with others, and not censoriously those wherein we differ, is to live in a clearer light, as well as a larger love. Then again, the powers of observation and of discrimination called into exercise by such journeyings among brethren of another speech will greatly benefit us. The very endeavour to distinguish between the good in others which we should naturalize and assimilate for ourselves, and the error which could be profitable neither for them nor for us, is most wholesome. Such studies lead us to take account of what we already have and believe; so that we come to know ourselves better by the comparison both in what we possess and in what we lack. Every section of the Church of Christ desires to include in its survey the whole fabric of revealed truth. What party will admit to an antagonist that its study of the divine edifice has been confined to a single aspect? And yet the fact is beyond all candid questioning that each group of worshippers, with whatever honesty of intention they may have started to go round about the building, and view it fairly from every side, have, notwithstanding, their favourite point of contemplation—one spot where they are most frequently to be found, intent on that side of truth to which, from temperament or circumstance, they are most attached. There is both good and evil in this inevitable partiality; but the good will be most happily realized, and the evil most successfully avoided, if we have liberality enough now and then to take each other’s places. It is possible, in this way, both to qualify and to enrich our own impressions from the observations of those who have given themselves, with all the intensity of passion, to some aspect of truth, which, while it may be the opposite, is yet the complement of the view preferred by ourselves. How often, as the result of an acquaintance made with some such diverse (and yet kindred) species of devotion, are we led to ask ourselves—‘Is there not a fuller meaning than I had supposed in this passage, or that other, of Holy Writ? Have I not, because certain passages have been abused, allowed myself unconsciously to slight or to defraud them of their due significance?’ And, in this way both those parts of Scripture we have most deeply studied, and those which we have but touched with our plummet, may disclose their blessing to us, and fill higher the measure of our joy.

Nor is this all. We gather both instruction and comfort from the spiritual history of others who have passed through the same darkness, doubt, or sorrow, which we ourselves have either encountered, or may be on our way to meet. How glad was Christian when he heard the voice of a fellow-pilgrim in the Valley of the Shadow of Death! And when suns are bright, and the waters calm, and the desired wind blows steadily, he is the wise mariner who employs his leisure in studying the records of others who have made voyage already in those latitudes; who learns from their expedients, their mishaps, or their deliverances, how best to weather the storms, or to escape the quicksands that await him. Of all who have sailed the seas of life, no men have experienced a range of vicissitude more wide than has fallen to the lot of some among the mystics. Theirs have been the dazzling heights; the lowest depths also have been theirs. Their solitary vessels have been swept into the frozen North, where the ice of a great despair has closed about them like the ribs of death, and through a long soul’s winter they have lain hidden in cold and darkness, as some belated swallow in the cleft of a rock. It has been theirs, too, to encounter the perilous fervours of that zone where never cooling cloud appears to veil insufferable radiance, and to glow beneath those glories with an ardour so intense that some men, in their pity, have essayed to heal it as a fever, and others, in their wrath, to chain it as a frenzy. Now afflicted, tossed with tempest, and not comforted, ere long there hath been built for them at once a palace and a place of rest; their foundations have been laid with sapphires, their windows have been made of agates, and their gates of carbuncles, and all their borders of pleasant stones.

A place of rest! Yes, in that one word REST lies all the longing of the mystic. Every creature in heaven above, and in the earth beneath, saith Master Eckart, all things in the height and all things in the depth, have one yearning, one ceaseless, unfathomable desire, one voice of aspiration: it is for rest; and again, for rest; and ever, till the end of time, for rest! The mystics have constituted themselves the interpreters of these sighs and groans of the travailing creation; they are the hierophants to gather, and express, and offer them to heaven; they are the teachers to weary, weeping men of the way whereby they may attain, even on this side the grave, a serenity like that of heaven. What the halcyon of fable is among the birds, that are the mystics among their kind. They essay to build them a marvellous nest, which not only floats upon the waves of life, but has the property of charming those waves to a glassy stillness, so that in mid-winter, and the very heart of storms, their souls enjoy, for a season, what the ancients called ‘the halcyon days,’—that wondrous week of calm ordained for the favoured bird when the year is roughest. ’Tis pity, murmurs old Montaigne, that more information hath not come down to us concerning the construction of these nests. Tradition has it, that the halcyon first of all fashions the said nest by interlacing the bones of some fish. When it is put together she takes it, like a boat ready for launching, and lays it on the beach: the waves come up: they lift it: they let it fall: they toss it gently among the rocks and pebbles; what is faultily made their play breaks, or makes to gape, so that the bird discovers the weak places, and what parts must be more duly finished; what is well knit together already, their strokes only season and confirm. Now when we read the lives of the mystics—each of whom has a method, more or less his own, of weaving such a nest, in other words, his Theory and Practice of Quietude—we see the structure on trial. Experience, with its buffeting, tests each man’s method for the attainment of Rest. If we watch carefully, we shall see that some things in the doctrine of many of them break away under trial, while others are rendered only more compact and buoyant thereby. The examination of the appliances and the processes adopted by these searchers after the Divine Stillness, ought to be very helpful to ourselves. As far as we have their history before us, we can try them by their fruits. We ask, in the case of one man, by what divine art was it that his ark was so skilfully framed as to out-ride those deluges of trouble as though they had been the waters of some windless mere? We ask, in the case of another, by what fault came it in the structure of his sailing nest, that the waters entered, and he sank, or seemed to sink, finding not the rest of soul he sought, but the vexation of soul he fled? We ask, in the several most signal examples of the class, how far did their mysticism help them to realize true manhood—make them strong to bear and strong to do? How far did it tend, or did it not tend, towards the complete development and consecration of their nature?

To derive from such inquiries their full benefit, two qualifications are indispensable:—the judgment must be clear, the sympathies must be warm. The inquirer must retain self-possession enough not to be too readily fascinated, or too soon offended, by certain strange and startling forms of expression; he must not suppose, that because, for a long time, the mystics have been unduly depreciated, it is wisdom now to cover them with thoughtless and indiscriminate praise. He must not suppose that the mystics are an exception to the ordinary limitations of mortals—that the glorious intensity of some among them was realized without any diminution of breadth, and that their view embraced, with equal fondness and with equal insight, every quarter in the heaven of truth. And, on the other hand, let him beware how he seeks to understand these men without fellow-feeling and without love. The weak and volatile nature is smitten, on a first interview with the mystics, with a rage for mysticism—is for turning mystic straightway, and is out of patience, for six weeks, with every other form of Christianity. The cold and proud nature scorns their ardour as a phantasy, and (to its own grievous injury) casts out the warmth they bring. The loving nature and the wise says not, ‘I will be blind to their errors,’ but, ‘I will always look at those errors in the light of their excellences.’

‘The critic of Tauler no man has a right to become, who has not first ascertained that he is a better man than Tauler.’[127] What are we to understand by these words? If such an assertion be true at all, it cannot be true for Tauler only. Would Mr. Kingsley say that no man has a right to become the critic of Augustine, of Luther, of Calvin, of Wesley, of George Fox, who has not first ascertained himself a better man? Ought every biographer, who is not a mere blind eulogist, to start with the presumption that he is a better man than he of whom he writes? Ought the historian, who forms his critical estimate of the qualities possessed or lacking—of the service rendered in this direction or in that, by the worthies of the Church, to suppose himself superior to each in turn? As in art he who estimates the worth of a poem is not required to write better poetry, so in morals, he who estimates the worth of a character is not required to display superior virtue. Or is it the opinions, rather than the character of Tauler, which only a better man than Tauler may criticise? Any one who, on being made acquainted with certain opinions, differs from them, is supposed to have criticised them. In as far as Mr. Kingsley may not agree with some of the well-known opinions of Augustine, Luther, or Fox, so far has he ventured to be their critic; yet he does not suppose himself a better man. Why should Tauler alone be thus fenced about with a statement that virtually prohibits criticism? Such advocacy harms a client’s cause. People are apt to suspect that their scrutiny is feared, when such pains are taken to keep them at a distance. So confident am I that the dross in Tauler is as nothing beside the gold, that I would invite, rather than deter, the most candid and sober exercise of the critical judgment with regard to him. Perhaps Mr. Kingsley may be, in reality, much of the same mind; if so, he should not write as though he thought quite otherwise.

I cannot suppose that Mr. Kingsley would seriously maintain that the mystic ought, from the very nature of his claims, to be exempt from that scrutiny to which history continually subjects the fathers, the schoolmen, and the reformers. Yet there are those who would have us hearken to every voice professing to speak from the ‘everlasting deeps’ with a reverence little more discriminating than that which the Mussulman renders to idiocy and madness. Curiously ignorant concerning the very objects of their praise, these admirers would seem to suppose that every mystic repudiates the exercise of understanding, is indifferent to the use of language, and invariably dissolves religious opinion in religious sentiment. These eulogists of mysticism imagine that they have found in the virtues of a Tauler, a platform whence to play off with advantage a volley of commonplaces against ‘literalisms,’ ‘formulas,’ ‘creeds,’ ‘shams,’ and the like. It is high time to rescue the mystics from a foolish adoration, which the best among them would be the most eager to repudiate. So far from forbidding men to try the spirits, the most celebrated among the mystics lead the way in such examination. It is the mystics themselves who warn us so seriously that mysticism comprises an evil tendency as well as a good, and has had its utterances from the nether realms as well as from the upper. The great mystics of the fourteenth century would have been indignant with any man who had confounded, in a blind admiration, their mysticism with the self-deifying antinomianism that prevailed among the ‘Brethren of the Free Spirit.’ In many of Tauler’s sermons, in the Theologia Germanica, in the writings of Suso and of Ruysbroek, care is taken to mark, with all the accuracy possible to language, the distinction between the False Light and the True. There is not a confession of faith in the world which surpasses in clearness and precision the propositions in Fénelon’s Maxims of the Saints, whereby it is proposed to separate the genuine Quietism from the spurious. The mystic Gerson criticises the mystic Ruysbroek. Nicholas of Strasburg criticises Hildegard and Joachim; Behmen criticises Stiefel and Meth; Henry More criticises the followers of George Fox. So far are such mystics from that indifference to the true or the false in doctrine, which constitutes, with some, their highest claim to our admiration. It is absurd to praise men for a folly: it is still more absurd to praise them for a folly of which they are guiltless.

But here I can suppose some one ready to interrupt me with some such question as this:—Is it not almost inevitable, when the significance of the word mysticism is so broad and ill-defined, that those who speak of it should misunderstand or be misunderstood? What two persons can you meet with who will define the term in precisely the same way? The word is in itself a not less general and extensive one than revolution, for instance. No one speaks of revolution in the abstract as good or evil. Every one calls this or that revolution glorious or disastrous, as they conceive it to have overthrown a good government or a bad. But the best among such movements are not without their evil, nor are the worst perhaps absolutely destitute of good. Does not mysticism, in like manner, sometimes rise up against a monstrous tyranny, and sometimes violate a befitting order? Has there been no excess in its triumphs? Has there been no excuse for its offences? See, then, what opposites are coupled under this single word! Is it not mainly for this reason that you hear one man condemning and another extolling mysticism? He who applauds is thinking of such mystics as Bernard, or Tauler, or Fénelon; he who denounces is thinking of the Carlstadts, the Münzers, or the Southcotes. He who applauds is thinking of men who vanquished formalism; he who denounces is thinking of men who trampled on reason or morality. Has not each his right? Are not your differences mere disputes about nomenclature, and can you ever come to understanding while you employ so ambiguous a term?

So it seems to me that Common Sense might speak, and very forcibly, too. It is indeed to be regretted that we have not two words—one to express what may be termed the true, and another for the false, mysticism. But regret is useless. Rather let us endeavour to show how we may employ, least disadvantageously, a term so controverted and unfortunate.

On one single question the whole matter turns:—Are we or are we not to call St. John a mystic? If we say ‘Yes,’ then of course all those are mystics whose teaching is largely impregnated with the aspect of Christianity presented in the writings of that Apostle. Then he is a mystic who loves to dwell on the union of Christians with Christ; on His abode in us, and our abiding in Him; on the identity of our knowledge of God with our likeness to Him; of truth with love; of light with life; on the witness which he who believes hath within himself. Then he is a mystic who regards the Eternal Word as the source of whatever light and truth has anywhere been found among men, and who conceives of the Church of Christ as the progressive realization of the Redeemer’s prayer—‘I in them and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one.’

Now, I think that, in the strict use of language, the word mystic should be applied, not to St. John, but to those who more or less exaggerate his doctrine concerning spiritual influence and life in God. The Scripture is the standard whereby alone the spirits are to be tried, in all candour and charity. To those who repudiate this authority I do not write. But if any one, understanding by ‘mystics’ simply those who give full force to the language of St. John, shall praise them, however highly, I am perfectly at one with him in his admiration—my only difference is about the use of the mere word.

So much then is settled. It will be obvious, however, that the historian of mysticism will scarcely find it possible always to confine his use of the word to the exaggeration just specified. For he must take up, one after the other, all those personages who have at any time been reckoned by general consent among the mystics. But an age which has relapsed into coldness will inevitably stigmatize as a mystic any man whose devout ardour rises a few degrees above its own frigidity. It is as certain as anything can be that, if a German had appeared among the Lutherans of the seventeenth century, teaching in his own way just as St. John taught, without one particle of exaggeration, he would have been denounced as a mystic from a hundred pulpits. Hence it has come to pass that some men, who have figured largely as mystics in the history of the Church, have in them but a comparatively small measure of that subjective excess which we would call mysticism, in the strict sense. Tauler is one of these.

But it may be said,—You talk of testing these men by Scripture; yet you can only mean, by your interpretation of Scripture. How are you sure that your interpretation is better than theirs? Such an objection lies equally against every appeal to Scripture. For we all appeal to what we suppose to be the meaning of the sacred writers, ascertained according to the best exercise of our judgment. The science of hermeneutics has established certain general principles of interpretation which are acknowledged by scholars of every creed. But if any one now-a-days resolves the New Testament into allegory, and supposes, for example, that by the five husbands of the woman of Samaria we are to understand the five Senses, I cannot of course try my cause with him before a Court where he makes the verdict what he pleases. I can only leave him with his riddles, and request him to carry my compliments to the Sphinx.

There is, then, a twofold test by which Tauler and other mystics are to be judged, if their teaching is to profit rather than to confuse and mislead us. We may compare the purport of his discourses with the general tenor and bearing of the New Testament, as far as we can apprehend it as a whole. Are some unquestionable truths but rarely touched, and others pushed to their utmost limits? If we think we see a certain disproportionateness—that there is a joyousness, and freedom, and warm humanity about the portraiture of Christian life in St. John, which we lack in his very sincere disciple, the ascetic and the mystic,—we trifle with truth if we do not say so. The other test is the historical. Was a certain mystic on the side of the truth and onwardness of his time, or against it? Did he rise above its worst errors, or did he aggravate them? And here Tauler stands with a glory round his head. Whatever exaggeration there may have been of the inward as against the outward, it was scarcely more than was inevitable in the case of a man who had to maintain the inmost verities of Christian life amidst almost universal formality and death.

What then, it may be asked, is that exaggeration of which you speak? For hitherto your account of mysticism proper is only negative—it is a something which St. John does not teach.

I will give a few examples. If a man should imagine that his inward light superseded outward testimony, so that the words of Christ and his inspired disciples became superfluous to him; if he regarded indifference to the facts and recorded truths of the New Testament as a sign of eminent spirituality, such a man would, I think, abuse the teaching of St. John concerning the unction from the Holy One. The same Apostle who declares that he who hateth his brother abideth in darkness, refuses to bid God speed to him who brings not the doctrine of Christ, and inseparably associates the ‘anointing’ which his children had received, with their abiding in the truth they had heard from his lips. (1 John ii. 24.) If, again, any man were to pretend that a special revelation exempted him from the ordinary obligations of morality—that his union with God was such as to render sinless in him what would have been sin in others, he would be condemned, and not supported, by conscience and Scripture. Neither could that mystic appeal to St. John who should teach, instead of the discipline and consecration of our faculties, such an abandonment of their use, in favour of supernatural gifts, as should be a premium on his indolence, and a discouragement to all faithful endeavour to ascertain the sense of Holy Writ. Nor, again, does any mystic who disdains hope as a meanness abide by the teaching of St. John. For the Apostle regards the hope of heaven as eminently conducive to our fitness for it, and says—‘He that hath this hope purifieth himself.’ The mystical ascetic who refuses to pray for particular or temporal bestowments is wrong in his practice, however elevated in his motive. For St. John can write,—‘I pray (εὔχομαι) above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.’ (3 John 2.) Nowhere does that Apostle prescribe absolute indifference, or absolute passivity. Lastly, John is not so afraid of anthropomorphism as to discourage or refine away the symbol and the figure. It is evident that he regards the fatherhoods and the brotherhoods of this earthly life, not as fleshly ideas which profane things spiritual, but as adumbrations, most fit (however inadequate) to set forth the divine relationship to us,—yea, farther, as facts which would never have had place in time, had not something like their archetype from the first existed in that Eternal Mind who has made man in his own image.

I remember hearing of an old lady, a member of the Society of Friends, who interrupted a conversation in which the name of Jerusalem had been mentioned, by the exclamation, ‘Jerusalem—umph—Jerusalem—it has not yet been revealed to me that there is such a place!’ Now I do not say that our friend the Quakeress might not have been an excellent Christian; but I do venture to think her far gone in mysticism. Her remark puts the idea of mysticism, in its barest and most extreme form, as a tendency which issues in refusing to acknowledge the external world as a source of religious knowledge in any way, and will have every man’s Christianity evolved de novo from the depths of his own consciousness, as though no apostle had ever preached, or evangelist written, or any Christian existed beside himself. It is not, therefore, the holding the doctrine of an inward light that makes a mystic, but the holding it in such a way as to ignore or to diminish the proper province of the outer.

I should certainly like to see some one settle for us definitively the questions which lie at the root of mysticism, such as these, for example:—Is there an immediate influence exerted by the Spirit of God on the spirit of man? And if so, under what conditions? What are those limits which, once passed, land us in mysticism? But the task, I fear, is beyond all hope of satisfactory execution. Every term used would have to be defined, and the words of the definition defined again, and every definition and subdefinition would be open to some doubt or some objection. Marco Polo tells us that the people of Kin-sai throw into the fire, at funerals, pieces of painted paper, representing servants, horses, and furniture; believing that the deceased will enjoy the use of realities corresponding to these in the other world. But, alas, for our poor definition-cutter, with his logical scissors! Where shall he find a faith like that of the Kin-sai people, to believe that there actually exist, in the realm of spirit and the world of ideas, realities answering to the terms he fashions? No; these questions admit but of approximate solution. The varieties of spiritual experience defy all but a few broad and simple rules. Hath not One told us that the influence in which we believe is as the wind, which bloweth as it listeth, and we cannot tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth?

For my own part, I firmly believe that there is an immediate influence exerted by the Divine Spirit. But is this immediate influence above sense and consciousness, or not? Yes, answers many a mystic. But, if it be above consciousness, how can any man be conscious of it? And what then becomes of the doctrine—so vital with a large class of mystics—of perceptible guidance, of inward impulses and monitions? Speaking with due caution on a matter so mysterious, I should say that, while the indwelling and guidance of the Spirit is most real, such influence is not ordinarily perceptible. It would be presumption to deny that in certain cases of especial need (as in some times of persecution, sore distress, or desolation) manifestations of a special (though not miraculous) nature may have been vouchsafed.

With regard to the witness of the Spirit, I think that the language of St. John warrants us in believing that the divine life within us is its own evidence. Certain states of physical or mental distemper being excepted, in so far as our life in Christ is vigorously and watchfully maintained, in so far will the witness of the Spirit with our spirit give us direct conviction of our sonship. How frequently, throughout his first Epistle, does the Apostle repeat that favourite word, οἴδαμεν, ‘we know!’

Again, as to the presence of Christ in the soul. Says the Lutheran Church, ‘We condemn those who say that the gifts of God only, and not God himself, dwell in the believer.’ I have no wish to echo any such condemnation, but I believe that the Lutheran affirmation is the doctrine of Scripture. Both Christ himself and the Spirit of Christ are said to dwell within the children of God. We may perhaps regard the indwelling of Christ as the abiding source or principle of the new life, and the indwelling of the Spirit as that progressive operation which forms in us the likeness to Christ. The former is vitality itself; the latter has its degrees, as we grow in holiness.

Once more, as to passivity. If we really believe in spiritual guidance, we shall agree with those mystics who bid us abstain from any self-willed guiding of ourselves. When a good man has laid self totally aside that he may follow only the leading of the Spirit, is it not essential to any practical belief in Divine direction that he should consider what then appears to him as right or wrong to be really such, in his case, according to the mind of the Spirit? Yet to say thus much is not to admit that the influences of the Spirit are ordinarily perceptible. The motion of a leaf may indicate the direction of a current of air; it does not render the air visible. The mystic who has gathered up his soul in a still expectancy, perceives at last a certain dominant thought among his thoughts. He is determined, in one direction or another. But what he has perceived is still one of his own thoughts in motion, not the hand of the Divine Mover. Here, however, some mystics would say, ‘You beg the question. What we perceive is a something quite separate from ourselves—in fact, the impelling Spirit.’ In this case the matter is beyond discussion. I can only say, my consciousness is different. I shall be to him a rationalist, as he to me a mystic; but let us not dispute.

Obviously, the great difficulty is to be quite sure that we have so annihilated every passion, preference or foregone conclusion as to make it certain that only powers from heaven can be working on the waters of the soul. That ripple, which has just stirred the stillness! Was it a breath of earthly air? Was it the leaping of a desire from within us? Or was it indeed the first touch, as it were, of some angelic hand, commissioned to trouble the pool with healing from on high? If such questions are hard to answer, when judging ourselves, how much more so when judging each other!

When we desire to determine difficult duty by aid of the illumination promised, self must be abandoned. But what self? Assuredly, selfishness and self-will. Not the exercise of those powers of observation and judgment which God has given us for this very purpose. A divine light is promised, not to supersede, but to illuminate our understanding. Greatly would that man err who should declare those things only to be his duty to which he had been specially ‘drawn,’ or ‘moved,’ as the Friends would term it. What can be conceived more snug and comfortable, in one sense, and more despicable, in another, than the easy, selfish life which such a man might lead, under pretence of eminent spirituality? Refusing to read and meditate on the recorded example of Christ’s life—for that is a mere externalism—he awaits inertly the development of an inward Christ. As he takes care not to expose himself to inducements to unpleasant duty—to any outward teachings calculated to awaken his conscience and elevate his standard of obligation—that conscience remains sluggish, that standard low. He is honest, respectable, sober, we will say. His inward voice does not as yet urge him to anything beyond this. Others, it is true, exhaust themselves in endeavours to benefit the souls and bodies of men. They are right (he says), for so their inward Christ teaches them. He is right (he says), for so does not his inward Christ teach him. It is to be hoped that a type of mysticism so ignoble as this can furnish but few specimens. Yet such is the logical issue of some of the extravagant language we occasionally hear concerning the bondage of the letter and the freedom of the spirit. When the letter means what God chooses, and the spirit what we choose, Self is sure to exclaim, ‘The letter killeth.’ If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!

Such, then, in imperfect outline, is what I hold to be true on this question concerning the reality and extent of the Spirit’s influence. As there are two worlds—the seen and the unseen—so have there been ever two revelations—an inward and an outward—reciprocally calling forth and supplementing each other. To undervalue the outward manifestation of God, in nature, in providence, in revelation, because it is outward—because it is vain without the inward manifestation of God in the conscience and by the Spirit, is the great error of mysticism. Hence it has often disdained means because they are not—what they were never meant to be—the end. An ultra-refinement of spirituality has rejected, as carnal and unclean, what God has commended to men as wholesome and helpful. It is not wise to refuse to employ our feet because they are not wings.

But it is not mysticism to believe in a world of higher realities, which are, and ever will be, beyond sight and sense; for heaven itself will not abrogate manifestation, but substitute a more adequate manifestation for a less. What thoughtful Christian man supposes that in any heaven of heavens, any number of millenniums hence, the Wisdom, Power, or Goodness of God will become manifest to him, as so many visible entities, with form, and hue, and motion? It is not mysticism to believe that the uncreated underlies all created good. Augustine will not be suspected of pantheism; and it is Augustine who says—‘From a good man, or a good angel, take away angel, take away man—and you find God.’ We may be realists (as opposed to the nominalist) without being mystics. For the surmise of Plato, that the world of Appearance subsisted in and by a higher world of Divine Thoughts is confirmed (while it is transcended) by Christianity, when it tells us of that Divine Subsistence, that Eternal Word, by whom and in whom, all things consist, and without whom was not anything made that is made. And herein lies that real, though often exaggerated, affinity between Platonism and Christianity, which a long succession of mystics have laboured so lovingly to trace out and to develop. In the second and third centuries, in the fourteenth, and in the seventeenth; in the Christian school at Alexandria, in the pulpits of the Rhineland, at Bemerton, and at Cambridge, Plato has been the ‘Attic Moses’ of the Clements and the Taulers, the Norrises and the Mores.

But when mysticism, in the person of Plotinus, declares all thought essentially one, and refuses to Ideas any existence external to our own minds, it has become pantheistic. So, also, when the Oriental mystic tells us that our consciousness of not being infinite is a delusion (maya) to be escaped by relapsing ecstatically into the universal Life. Still more dangerous does such mysticism become when it goes a step farther and says—That sense of sin which troubles you is a delusion also; it is the infirmity of your condition in this phantom world to suppose that right is different from wrong. Shake off that dream of personality, and you will see that good and evil are identical in the Absolute.

In considering the German mysticism of the fourteenth century it is natural to inquire, first of all, how far it manifests any advance beyond that of preceding periods. An examination of its leading principles will show that its appearance marks an epoch of no mean moment in the history of philosophy. These monks of the Rhineland were the first to break away from a long-cherished mode of thought, and to substitute a new and profounder view of the relations subsisting between God and the universe. Their memorable step of progress is briefly indicated by saying that they substituted the idea of the immanence of God in the world for the idea of the emanation of the world from God. These two ideas have given rise to two different forms of pantheism; but they are neither of them necessarily pantheistic. To view rightly the relationship of God to the universe it is requisite to regard Him as both above it and within it. So Revelation taught the ancient Hebrews to view their great ‘I am.’ On the one hand, He had His dwelling in the heavens, and humbled Himself to behold the affairs of men; on the other, He was represented as having beset man behind and before, as giving life to all creatures by the sending forth of His breath, as giving to man understanding by His inspiration, and as dwelling, in an especial sense, with the humble and the contrite. But philosophy, and mysticism, frequently its purest aspiration, have not always been able to embrace fully and together these two conceptions of transcendence and of immanence. We find, accordingly, that from the days of Dionysius Areopagita down to the fourteenth century, the emanation theory, in one form or another, is dominant. The daring originality of John Scotus could not escape from its control. It is elaborately depicted in Dante’s Paradiso. The doctrine of immanence found first utterance with the Dominican Eckart; not in timid hints, but intrepid, reckless, sounding blasphemous. What was false in Eckart’s teaching died out after a while; what was true, animated his brother mystics, transmigrated eventually into the mind of Luther, and did not die.

To render more intelligible the position of the German mystics it will be necessary to enter into some farther explanation of the two theories in question. The theory of emanation supposes the universe to descend in successive, widening circles of being, from the Supreme—from some such ‘trinal, individual’ Light of lights, as Dante seemed to see in his Vision. In the highest, narrowest, and most rapid orbits, sing and shine the refulgent rows of Cherubim and Seraphim and Thrones. Next these, in wider sweep, the Dominations, Virtues, Powers. Below these, Princedoms, Archangels, Angels, gaze adoring upwards. Of these hierarchies the lowest occupy the largest circle. Beneath their lowest begins our highest sphere—the empyrean, enfolding within its lesser and still lesser spheres, till we reach the centre—‘that dim spot which men call earth.’ Through the hierarchies of heaven, and the corresponding hierarchies of the church, the grace of God is transmitted, stage by stage, each order in its turn receiving from that above, imparting to that below. This descent of divine influence from the highest point to the lowest is designed to effect a similar ascent of the soul from the lowest to the highest. Of such a theory John Scotus Erigena is the most philosophical exponent. With him the restitution of all things consists in their resolution into their ideal sources (causæ primordiales). Man and nature are redeemed in proportion as they pass from the actual up to the ideal; for in his system, the actual is not so much the realization of the ideal as a fall from it. So, in the spirit of this theory, the mounting soul, when it anticipates in imagination the redemption of the travailing universe, will extract from music the very essence of its sweetness, and refine that again (far above all delight of sense) into the primal idea of an Eternal Harmony. So likewise, all form and colour—the grace of flowers, the majesty of mountains, the might of seas, the red of evening or of morning clouds, the lustre of precious stones and gold in the gleaming heart of mines—all will be concentrated and subtilized into an abstract principle of Beauty, and a hueless original of Light. All the affinities of things, and instincts of creatures, and human speech and mirth, and household endearment, he will sublimate into abstract Wisdom, Joy, or Love, and sink these abstractions again into some crystal sea of the third heaven, that they may have existence only in their fount and source—the superessential One.

Very different is the doctrine of Immanence, as it appears in the Theologia Germanica, in Eckart, in Jacob Behmen, and afterwards in some forms of modern speculation. The emanation theory supposes a radiation from above; the theory of immanence, a self-development, or manifestation of God from within. A geometrician would declare the pyramid the symbol of the one, the sphere the symbol of the other. The former conception places a long scale of degrees between the heavenly and the earthly: the latter tends to abolish all gradation, and all distinction. The former is successive; the latter, immediate, simultaneous. A chemist might call the former the sublimate, the latter the diluent, of the Actual. The theory of immanence declares God everywhere present with all His power—will realize heaven or hell in the present moment—denies that God is nearer on the other side the grave than this—equalizes all external states—breaks down all steps, all partitions—will have man at once escape from all that is not God, and so know and find only God everywhere. What are all those contrasts that make warp and woof in the web of time; what are riches and poverty, health and sickness; all the harms and horrors of life, and all its joy and peace,—what past and future, sacred and secular, far and near? Are they not the mere raiment wherewith our narrow human thought clothes the Ever-present, Ever-living One? Phantoms, and utter nothing—all of them! The one sole reality is even this—that God through Christ does assume flesh in every Christian man; abolishes inwardly his creature self, and absorbs it into the eternal stillness of His own ‘all-moving Immobility.’ So, though the storms of life may beat, or its suns may shine upon his lower nature, his true (or uncreated) self is hidden in God, and sits already in the heavenly places. Thus, while the Greek Dionysius bids a man retire into himself, because there he will find the foot of that ladder of hierarchies which stretches up to heaven; the Germans bid man retire into himself because, in the depths of his being, God speaks immediately to him, and will enter and fill his nature if he makes Him room.

In spite of some startling expressions (not perhaps unnatural on the first possession of men by so vast a truth), the advance of the German mysticism on that of Dionysius or Erigena is conspicuous. The Greek regards man as in need only of a certain illumination. The Celt saves him by a transformation from the physical into the metaphysical. But the Teuton, holding fast the great contrasts of life and death, sin and grace, declares an entire revolution of will—a totally new principle of life essential. It is true that the German mystics dwell so much on the bringing forth of the Son in all Christians now, that they seem to relegate to a distant and merely preliminary position the historical incarnation of the Son of God. But this great fact is always implied, though less frequently expressed. And we must remember how far the Church of Rome had really banished the Saviour from human sympathies, by absorbing to the extent she did, his humanity in his divinity. Christ was by her brought really near to men only in the magical transformation of the Sacrament, and was no true Mediator. The want of human sympathy in their ideal of Him, forced them to have recourse to the maternal love of the Virgin, and the intercession of the saints. Unspeakable was the gain, then, when the Saviour was brought from that awful distance to become the guest of the soul, and vitally to animate, here on earth, the members of his mystical body. Even Eckart, be it remembered, does not say, with the Hegelian, that every man is divine already, and the divinity of Christ not different in kind from our own. He attributes a real divineness only to a certain class of men—those who by grace are transformed from the created to the uncreated nature. It is not easy to determine the true place of Christ in his pantheistic system; but this much appears certain, that Christ and not man—grace, and not nature, is the source of that incomprehensible deification with which he invests the truly perfect and poor in spirit.

On the moral character of Eckart, even the malice of persecution has not left a stain. Yet that unknown God to which he desires to escape when he says ‘I want to be rid of God,’ is a being without morality. He is above goodness, and so those who have become identical with Him ‘are indifferent to doing or not doing,’ says Eckart. I can no more call him good, he exclaims, than I can call the sun black. In his system, separate personality is a sin—a sort of robbery of God: it resembles those spots on the moon, which the angel describes to Adam as ‘unpurged vapours, not yet into her substance turned.’ I am not less than God, he will say, there is no distinction: if I were not, He would not be. ‘I hesitate to receive anything from God—for to be indebted to Him would imply inferiority, and make a distinction between Him and me; whereas, the righteous man is, without distinction, in substance and in nature, what God is.’ Here we see the doctrine of the immanence of God swallowing up the conception of his transcendence. A pantheism, apparently apathetic and arrogant as that of the Stoics, is the result. Yet, when we remember that Eckart was the friend of Tauler and Suso, we cannot but suppose that there may have lain some meaning in such language less monstrous than that which the words themselves imply. Eckart would probably apply such expressions, not to his actual self;—for that he supposes non-existent, and reduced to its true nothing—but to the divine nature which, as he thought, then superseded within him the annihilated personality. Tauler (and with him Ruysbroek and Suso) holds in due combination the correlative ideas of transcendence and of immanence.

Such, then, is one of the most important characteristics of German mysticism in the fourteenth century. I have next to ascertain in which of the leading orders of mystics Tauler should be assigned a place.

‘Divination,’ saith Bacon, ‘is of two kinds—primitive, and by influxion.’ The former is founded on the belief that the soul, when by abstinence and observances it has been purified and concentrated, has ‘a certain extent and latitude of pre-notion.’ The latter is grounded on the persuasion that the foreknowledge of God and of spirits may be infused into the soul when rendered duly passive and mirror-like. Of these two kinds of divining the former is characterized by repose and quiet, the latter by a fervency and elevation such as the ancients styled furor. Now our mystical divines have this in common with the diviners, that they chiefly aim to withdraw the soul within itself. They may be divided most appropriately after a like manner. A cursory inspection will satisfy any one that theopathetic mysticism branches into two distinct, and often contrasted, species. There is the serene and contemplative mysticism; and over against it, the tempestuous and the active. The former is comparatively self-contained and intransitive; the latter, emphatically transitive. Its subject conceives himself mastered by a divine seizure. Emotions well-nigh past the strain of humanity, make the chest to heave, the frame to tremble; cast the man down, convulsed, upon the earth. Or visions that will not pass away, burn into his soul their glories and their terrors. Or words that will not be kept down, force an articulation, with quaking and with spasms, from organs no longer under his control. The contemplative mystic has most commonly loved best that side of Christian truth which is nearest to Platonism; the enthusiastic or practical mystic, that which connects it with Judaism. The former hopes to realize within himself the highest ascents of faith and hope—nay, haply, to surpass them, even while here below. The latter comes forth from his solitude, with warning, apocalyptic voice, to shake a sleeping Church. He has a word from the Lord that burns as a fire in his bones till it be spoken. He lifts up his voice, and cries, exhorting, commanding, or foretelling, with the authority of inspiration.

The Phrygian mountaineer, Montanus, furnishes the earliest example, and a very striking one, of this enthusiastic or prophetic kind of mysticism. He and his followers had been cradled in the fiercest and most frantic superstitions of heathendom. Terrible was Cybele, the mountain mother, throned among the misty fastnesses of Ida. Maddest uproar echoed through the glens on her great days of festival. There is beating of drum and timbrel, clashing of cymbals, shrill crying of pipes; incessant the mournful sound of barbarous horns; loud, above all, the groans and shrieks and yells from frenzied votaries whom the goddess has possessed. They toss their heads; they leap; they whirl; they wallow convulsed upon the rocks, cutting themselves with knives; they brandish, they hurl their weapons; their worship is a foaming, raving, rushing to-and-fro, till the driving deity flings them down exhausted, senseless. Among these demoniacs—sanguine fleti, Terrificas capitum quatientes numine cristas, as Lucretius has described them—these Corybantes, or head-tossers, Christianity made its way, exorcising a legion of evil spirits. But the enthusiastic temperament was not expelled. These wild men, become Christians, carried much of the old fervour into the new faith. Violent excitement, ecstatic transport, oracular utterance, were to them the dazzling signs of the divine victory—of the forcible dislodgment of the power of Darkness by the power of Light. So Montanus readily believes, and finds numbers to believe, that he is the subject of a divine possession. Against the bloodthirsty mob in the villages and towns—against a Marcus Aurelius, ordaining massacre from the high places of the Cæsars—had not God armed his own with gifts beyond the common measure—with rapture—with vision—with prophecy? Yes! the promised Paraclete was indeed among them, and it was not they, but He, who spake. So thought the Montanists, as they announced new precepts to the Church; as they foretold the gathering judgment of Antichrist and the dawning triumph of the saints; as they hastened forth, defiant and sublime, to provoke from their persecutors the martyr’s crown. Let us not overlook the real heroism of these men, while touching on their errors. But their conception of the Church of Christ, so analogous, in many respects, to that of the early Quakers—was it the right one? According to Montanus, the Church was to be maintained in the world by a succession of miraculous interventions. From time to time, fresh outpourings of the Spirit would inspire fresh companies of prophets to ordain ritual, to confute heresy, to organize and modify the Church according to the changing necessities of each period. He denied that the Scripture was an adequate source, whence to draw the refutation of error and the new supplies of truth demanded by the exigencies of the future. As Romanism sets up an infallible Pope to decide concerning truth, and in fact to supplement revelation, as the organ of the Divine Spirit ever living in the Church; so these mystics have their inspired teachers and prophets, raised up from time to time, for the same purpose. But the contemplative mystics, and indeed Christians generally, borne out, as we think, by Scripture and by history, deny any such necessity, and declare this doctrine of supplementary inspiration alien from the spirit of Christianity. While Montanus and his prophetesses, Maximilla and Priscilla, were thus speaking, in the name of the Lord, to the country-folk of Phrygia or to the citizens of Pepuza, Clement at Alexandria was teaching, on the contrary, that we have the organ requisite for finding in the Scriptures all the truth we need—that they are a well of depth sufficient, nay inexhaustible; and that the devout exercise of reason in their interpretation and application is at once the discipline and prerogative of the manhood proper to the Christian dispensation. We are no longer Jews, he would say, no longer children. The presence of the Spirit with us is a part of the ordinary law of the economy under which we live. It is designed that the supernatural shall gradually vindicate itself as the natural, in proportion as our nature is restored to its allegiance to God. It is not necessary that we should be inspired in the same way as the sacred writers were, before their writings can be adequately serviceable to us.

Such was the opposition in the second century, and such has it been in the main ever since, between these two kinds of mystical tendency. The Montanist type of mysticism, as we see it in a Hildegard, among the Quakers, among the Protestant peasantry of the Cevennes, and among some of the ‘Friends of God,’ usually takes its rise with the uneducated, is popular, sometimes revolutionary. Animated by its spirit, Carlstadt filled Wittenberg with scandal and confusion; and the Anabaptist mob reddened the sky with the burning libraries of Osnaburg and Munster. The Alexandrian mysticism, so far from despising scholarship and philosophy, as so much carnal wisdom, desires to appropriate for Christianity every science and every art. It is the mysticism of theologians, of philosophers, and scholars. It exists as an important element in the theology of Clement, of Origen, and of Augustine. It assumes still greater prominence in a Hugo or a Richard of St. Victor. It obtained its fullest proportions in these German mystics of the fourteenth century. It refined and elevated the scholarship of Reuchlin, Ficinus, and Mirandola. It is at once profound and expansive in our English Platonists.

Yet let it not be supposed that the extravagance of the enthusiastic mysticism has not its uses, or that the serenity of the contemplative is always alike admirable. Both have, in their turn, done goodly service. Each has had a work given it to do in which its rival would have failed. The eccentric impetuosity of Montanism, ancient and modern, has done good, directly and indirectly, by breaking through traditional routine—by protesting against the abuses of human authority—by stirring many a sleeping question, and daring many an untried path of action. On the other hand, the contemplative mysticism has been at times too timid, too fond of an elegant or devout, but still unworthy, ease. The Nicodemuses of the sixteenth century, the Briçonnets and the Gerard Roussels, were nearly all of them Platonists. They were men whose mysticism raised them above the wretched externalism of Rome, and at the same time furnished them with an ingenious excuse for abiding safely in her communion. ‘What,’ they would say, ‘are the various forms of the letter, to the unity of the Spirit? Can we not use the signs of Romanism in the spirit of Protestantism—since, to the spiritual and the wise, this outward usage or that, is of small matter?’ The enthusiastic mysticism tends to multiply, and the contemplative to diminish, positive precept and ordinance. The former will sometimes revolt against one kind of prescription only to devise a new one of its own. So the followers of Fox exchanged surplice and ‘steeple-house’ for a singularity of hat, coat, and pronouns. The contemplative mystic loves to inform his common life with the mysterious and the divine. Certain especial sanctities he has, but nothing unsanctified; and he covers his table with an altar-cloth, and curtains his bed with a chasuble, and drinks out of a chalice every day of his life. A Montanus commends celibacy; an Origen sees typified in marriage the espousals of the Church. The zeal of the enthusiastic mysticism is ever on the watch for signs—expects a kingdom coming with observation—is almost always Millenarian. The contemplatist regards the kingdom of heaven as internal, and sees in the history of souls a continual day of judgment. The one courts the vision and hungers after marvel: the other strives to ascend, above all form and language, from the valley of phantasmata to the silent heights of ‘imageless contemplation.’ The one loves violent contrasts, and parts off abruptly the religious world and the irreligious, the natural and the supernatural. The other loves to harmonize these opposites, as far as may be—would win rather than rebuke the world—would blend, in the daily life of faith, the human with the divine working: and delights to trace everywhere types, analogies, and hidden unity, rather than diversity and strife. The Old Testament has been always the favourite of the prophetic mysticism: the contemplative has drunk most deeply into the spirit of the New.

Mysticism, as exhibited in Tauler’s sermons, is much more likely to win appreciation at the hands of English readers than mysticism in the Theologia Germanica. The principles which were there laid down as bare abstractions are here warmed by sunshine and clothed with verdure. To the theory of mysticism we find added many a suggestive hint concerning its practice. There were general statements in the Theologia Germanica so dim, so vast, so ultra-human, that many readers would be at a loss to understand how they could possibly become a practice or a joy in any soul alive. In the sermons, a brother mystic supplies the requisite qualification, and shows that the old Teutonic knight had, after all, a meaning not so utterly remote from all the ways and wants of flesh and blood.

Brought out to view by Tauler’s fervour, his invisible ink becomes a legible character. The exhortations of the pulpit thus interpret the soliloquy of the cell; and when the preacher illuminates mysticism with the many-coloured lights of metaphor and passion—when he interrogates, counsels, entreats, rebukes, we seem to return from the confines of the nameless, voiceless Void to a region within the rule of the sun, and to beings a little lower than the angels. It will reassure many readers to discover from these sermons that the mystics whom Tauler represents are by no means so infatuated as to disdain those external aids which God has provided, or which holy men of old have handed down—that they do not call history a husk, social worship a vain oblation, or decent order bondage to the letter—that when they speak of transcending time and place, they pretend to no new commandment, and do but repeat a truth old as all true religion—that they are on their guard, beyond most men, against that spiritual pride which some think inseparable from the mystical aspiration—that so far from encouraging the morbid introspection attributed to them, it is their first object to cure men of that malady—that instead of formulating their own experience as a test and regimen for others, they tell men to sit down in the lowest place till God calls them to come up higher—and finally, that they are men who have mourned for the sins, and comforted the sorrows of their fellows, with a depth and compass of lowly love such as should have disarmed every unfriendly judgment, had their errors been as numerous as their excellence is extraordinary.

Any one who has attentively read Tauler’s discourses as now accessible may consider himself familiar with the substance of Tauler’s preaching. From whatever part of Scripture history, prophecy, song, or precept, his text be taken, the sermons, we may be sure, will contain similar exhortations to self-abandonment, the same warnings against a barren externalism, the same directions to prepare the way for the inward Advent of the Lord in the Ground of the Soul. The allegorical interpretation, universal in those days, rendered easy such an ever-varied presentation of a single theme. Did the multitude go out into the wilderness to the preaching of John? We are to go forth into the wilderness of the spiritual life. Did Joseph and Mary seek their son in vain among their friends and acquaintance, and find him in his Father’s house? We also must retire to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, and be found no more in the company of those hindering associates, our own Thoughts, Will, and Understanding. Did Christ say to Mary Magdalen, ‘I have not yet ascended to my Father?’ He meant, ‘I have not yet been spiritually raised within thy soul;’ for he himself had never left the Father.

From the sermon on the fifteenth Sunday after Trinity I select a passage which contains in two sentences the kernel of Tauler’s doctrine—the principle which, under a thousand varieties of illustration and application, makes the matter of all his sermons. ‘When, through all manner of exercises the outward man has been converted into the inward, reasonable man, and thus the two, that is to say, the powers of the senses and the powers of the reason, are gathered up into the very centre of the man’s being—the unseen depths of his spirit wherein lies the image of God,—and thus he flings himself into the divine abyss, in which he dwelt eternally before he was created; then when God finds the man thus simply and nakedly turned towards Him, the Godhead bends down and descends into the depths of the pure, waiting soul, and transforms the created soul, drawing it up into the uncreated essence, so that the spirit becomes one with Him. Could such a man behold himself, he would see himself so noble that he would fancy himself God, and see himself a thousand times nobler than he is in himself, and would perceive all the thoughts and purposes, words and works, and have all the knowledge of all men that ever were.’

An explanation of this extract will be a summary of Tauler’s theology. First of all, it is obvious that he regards human nature as tripartite—it is a temple in three compartments: there is the outer court of the senses; there is the inner court of the intellectual nature, where the powers of the soul, busy with the images of things, are ever active, where Reason, Memory, Will, move to and fro, as a kind of mediating priests; there is, lastly, and inmost, a Holy of Holies—the Ground of the Soul, as the mystics term it.

‘Yes!’ exclaims some critic, ‘this Ground, of which we hear so much, which the mystics so labour to describe, what is it, after all?’ Let Tauler answer. He here calls it ‘the very centre of man’s being’—‘the unseen depths of his spirit, wherein lies the image of God.’ I believe that he means to indicate by these and other names that element in our nature by virtue whereof we are moral agents, wherein lies that idea of a right and a wrong which finds expression (though not always adequate) in the verdicts of conscience—that Synderesis (to use an Aristotelian word) of which the Syneidesis is the particular action and voice—that part of our finite nature which borders on the infinite—that gate through which God enters to dwell with man. Nor is the belief in such a principle by any means peculiar to the mystics; men at the farthest remove, by temperament and education, from mysticism, are yet generally found ready to admit that we can only approach a solution of our great difficulties concerning predestination and free will, by supposing that there is a depth in our nature where the divine and human are one. This is Tauler’s spark and potential divinity of man—that face of man’s soul wherein God shineth always, whether the man be aware thereof or not. This, to speak Platonically, is the ideal part of man—that part of him whereby, as a creature, he participates in the Word by whose thought and will all creatures exist. It is the unlost and inalienable nobleness of man—that from which, as Pascal says, his misery as well as his glory proceeds—that which, according to Tauler, must exist even in hell, and be converted into the sorrow there. The Christian Platonist expresses his conception of the consummated redemption of man by saying that he is restored to his original idea—becomes what he was designed to be before sin marred him—puts off the actual sinful self, and puts on the truer primal self which exists only in God. In this sense Eckart says, ‘I shall be sorry if I am not younger to-morrow than I am to-day—that is, a step nearer to the source whence I came’—away from this Eckart to the Divine Idea of man.

Such, then, is this Ground. Next, how is the lapse, or transit into it, effected? Tauler reminds us that many men live as though God were not in this way nearer to them than they are to themselves. They possess inevitably this image—this immediate receptivity of God, but they never think of their prerogative, never seek Him in whom they live and move. Such men live in the outside of themselves—in the sensuous or intellectual nature; but never lift the curtain behind which are the rays of the Shekinah. It will profit me nothing, says Tauler, to be a king, if I know it not. So the soul must break away from outward things, from passion and self, and in abandonment and nothingness seek God immediately. When God is truly found, then indeed the simplified, self-annihilated soul, is passive. But the way thereto, what action it demands, what strong crying and tears, what trampling out of subtle, seemly, darling sins!

First of all, the senses must be mastered by, and absorbed in, the powers of the soul. Then must these very powers themselves—all reasonings, willings, hopings, fearings, be absorbed in a simple sense of the Divine presence—a sense so still, so blissful, as to annihilate before and after, obliterate self, and sink the soul in a Love, whose height and depth, and length and breadth, passing knowledge, shall fill it with all the fulness of God.

‘What!’ it may be said, ‘and is this death—not of sin merely, but of nature—the demand of your mysticism? Is all peace hollow which is not an utter passivity—without knowledge, without will, without desire—a total blank?’

Not altogether so, the mystic will reply. These powers of the soul must cease to act, in as far as they belong to self; but they are not destroyed: their absorption in the higher part of our nature is in one sense a death; in another, their truest life. They die; but they live anew, animated by a principle of life that comes directly from the Father of lights, and from the Light who is the life of men. That in them which is fit to live, survives. Still are they of use in this lower world, and still to be employed in manifold service; but, shall I say it? they are no longer quite the same powers. They are, as it were, the glorified spirits of those powers. They are risen ones. They are in this world, but not of it. Their life has passed into the life which, by slaying, has preserved and exalted them. So have I heard of a nightingale, challenged by a musician with his lute; and when all nature’s skill was vain to rival the swift and doubling and redoubling mazes and harmonies of mortal science, the bird, heart-broken, dropt dead on the victorious lute;—and yet, not truly dead, for the spirit of music which throbbed in that melodious throat had now passed into the lute; and ever afterward breathed into its tones a wild sweetness such as never Thessalian valley heard before—the consummate blending of the woodland witchery with the finished height of art.

‘You see,’ our mystic continues—and let us hear him, for he has somewhat more to say, and to the purpose, as it seems—‘you see that we are no enemies to the symbol and the figure in their proper place, any more than we are to the arguments of reason. But there are three considerations which I and my brethren would entreat you to entertain. First of all, that logical distinctions, and all forms of imagery, must of necessity be transcended when we contemplate directly that Being who is above time and space, before and after,—the universal Presence,—the dweller in the everlasting Now. In the highest states of the soul, when she is concentrated on that part of her which links her with the infinite, when she clings most immediately to the Father of spirits, all the slow technicalities, and the processes and the imaginations of the lower powers, must inevitably be forgotten. Have you never known times when, quite apart from any particular religious means, your soul has been filled, past utterance, with a sense of the divine presence,—when emotion has overflowed all reasoning and all words, and a certain serene amazement—a silent gaze of wonder—has taken the place of all conclusions and conceptions? Some interruption came, or some reflex act dissolved the spell of glory and recalled you to yourself, but could not rob you of your blessing. There remained a divine tranquillity, in the strength whereof your heaviest trouble had grown lighter than the grasshopper, and your hardest duty seemed as a cloud before the winds of the morning. In that hour, your soul could find no language; but looking back upon it, you think if that unutterable longing and unutterable rest could have found speech, it would have been in words such as these—“Whom have I in heaven but Thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee.”

‘Then again, we would have you consider that the mere conclusions of the intellect, the handiwork of imagination, the effervescence of sentiment, yea, sensible delight in certain religious exercises—all these things, though religion’s hand-maidens, are not religion herself. Sometimes they are delusive; always are they dangerous, if they, rather than God, become in any way our dependence. If the heart—the central fount of life’s issues—be not God’s, what avail the admitted propositions, and touching pictures, and wafts of sweetness—the mere furniture, adornment, and incense, of the outer courts of thy nature? Christ in thy soul, and not the truth about Him in thy brain, is thy life’s life; and his agony of love must pierce thee somewhat deeper than the pathos of a tragedy. There are those who live complacently on the facilities and enjoyments they have in certain practices of devotion, when all the while it is rather they themselves, as thus devout, and not their Lord, whom they love. Some such are not yet Christians at all. Others, who are, have yet to learn that those emotions they set such store by, belong, most of them, to the earliest and lowest stages of the Christian life. The lotus-flowers are not the Nile. There are those who violently excite the imagination and the feeling by long gazing on the crucifix—by picturing the torments of martyrs—by performing repeated acts of Contrition,—by trying to wish to appropriate to themselves, for Christ’s sake, all the sufferings of all mankind—by praying for a love above that of all seraphim, and do often, in wrestling after such extraordinary gifts, and harrowing their souls with such sensuous horrors, work out a mere passion of the lower nature, followed by melancholy collapse, and found pitiably wanting in the hour of trial.[128] In these states does it oftenest happen that the phantoms of imagination are mistaken for celestial manifestations; and forms which belong to middle air, for shiny ones from the third heaven. I have been told that astronomers have sometimes seen in the field of their glass, floating globes of light—as it seemed, new planets swimming within their ken; and these were but flying specks of dust, hovering in the air; but magnified and made luminous by the lenses through which they looked, and by the reflection of the light. The eye of the mind may be visited by similar illusions. I counsel all, therefore, that they ask only for grace sufficient against present evil, and covet not great things, but be content with such measures of assurance and sensible delight as God shall think safe for them; and that, above all, they look not at His gifts in themselves, but out of themselves, to Him, the Giver.

‘The third consideration I have to urge, in justification of precepts which appear to you unnatural, is this:—there are certain trials and desolations of soul, to which the best are exposed, wherein all subordinate acts are impossible; and then happy is he who has never exalted such helps above their due place. I scarcely know how to make myself understood to any save those who have been at some time on the edge, at least, of those unfathomable abysses. Good men of prosperous and active life may scarcely know them. Few who have lived much in retirement, with temperament meditative, and perhaps melancholy, have altogether escaped. There are times when, it may be that some great sorrow has torn the mind away from its familiar supports, and laid level those defences which in prosperity seemed so stable—when the most rooted convictions of the reason seem rottenness, and the blossom of our heavenward imaginations goes up before that blast as dust—when our works and joys and hopes, with all their multitude and pomp and glory, seem to go down together into the pit, and the soul is left as a garden that hath no water, and as a wandering bird cast out of the nest—when, instead of our pleasant pictures, we have about us only doleful creatures among ruins—when a spirit of judgment and a spirit of burning seem to visit the city of the heart, and in that day of trouble and of treading down and of perplexity, the noise of viols, and the mirth of the tabret, and the joy of the harp, are silent as the grave. Now, I say, blessed is the man who, when cast into this utter wretchedness, far away from all creatures and from all comfort, can yet be willing, amidst all his tears and anguish, there to remain as long as God shall please—who seeks help from no creature—who utters his complaint to the ear of God alone—who still, with ever-strengthening trust, is ready to endure till self shall have been purged out by the fires of that fathomless annihilation—who, crying out of the depths, while the Spirit maketh intercession within him with groanings that cannot be uttered, shall presently be delivered when the right time hath come, and rejoice in that glorious liberty of the children of God, wherein they are nothing and He is all!’

Now, somewhat thus, I think, would that class of mystics whom Tauler represents, reply to the very natural objections urged by many in our times. Nor does such reply, so far, seem to me either unsatisfactory in itself, or in any way contrary to Scripture. It is with the aim, and under the qualifications, I have endeavoured to set forth, that these mystics would refuge the soul in a height above reasonings, outward means and methods, in a serenity and an abstraction wherein the subtlest distinctions and most delicate imaginations would seem too gross and sensuous—where (as in Endymion’s ecstasy)

‘Essences
Once spiritual, are like muddy lees,
Meant but to fertilize our earthly root,
And make our branches lift a golden fruit
Into the bloom of heaven.’

On the latter part of the extract given just now I have not yet commented. It suggests a question of no small moment. What, it will be asked, is the relation sustained by the Saviour of mankind to this mystical process—this drawing up of the created soul into the uncreated essence? Is not a blank abstraction—an essential nothing, substituted for the Son of man? How does the abstract Essence in which Tauler would sink the soul, differ from the abstract Essence or super-essential Unity in which a Plotinus would lose himself, or from that Divine substance in which the pantheistic Sufis sought to dissolve their personality? In this region (confessedly above distinction), the mystic cannot, by his own admission, distinguish one abstraction from the other. There is a story of a lover who, Leander-like, swam nightly across a strait to visit the lady of his heart. A light which she exhibited on the shore was the beacon of the adventurous swimmer. But two brothers (cruel as those who murdered Isabella’s lover in the wood) removed the light one dark and stormy night, and placed it in a boat anchored not near shore, but in mid-waters, where the strait was broadest. Their victim struggled as long as mortal strength might endure, towards the treacherous light—farther and farther out—into the ocean which engulphed him. Have not the mystics, in like manner, shifted the beacon and substituted an expanse—an abyss, as the object of man’s effort, instead of that love and sympathy which await him in the heart of the Son of man?

Can it be possible that the best thing to do with a revelation of God, now we have one, is to throw it behind our backs? Now that the light the wisest heathen longed for has come, are we to rid ourselves of it, with all speed, and fly, like Eckart, from the known to the old, unknown God? To do this, is to account as foolishness the wisdom of God manifest in the flesh. Is it not all—as the enemies of Quietism used to say—a device of the Devil? Does it not look as though the Arch-enemy, unable to undo the work of redemption, had succeeded, by a master-stroke of policy, in persuading men to a false spirituality, which should consist in obliterating the facts of that redemption from their own minds as completely as though it had never been wrought?

Now it is much better, I think, to put objections like these in all their strength, and to give them fair hearing. They will occur to many persons in the reading of these sermons. They will awaken a distrust and a perplexity which are not to be talked down by high words, or by telling men that if they do not sufficiently admire these mystics, so much the worse for them. One of the objections thus urged is logically unanswerable. If Eckart and Plotinus both succeed in reducing their minds to a total emptiness of all memory, knowledge, and desire, in order to contemplate a super-essential Void, equally blank, the Christian and the heathen pantheist are indistinguishable. Vacuum A, would be a vacuum no longer if it contained anything to distinguish it from vacuum B; and to escape, in the most absolute sense, all distinction, is Eckart’s highest ambition. But it is to be remembered, first of all, that Tauler does not go so far as Eckart in his impatience of everything intelligible, conceivable, or utterable. And next, that, happily, neither Eckart, Tauler, nor any man, can really reduce himself to that total nescience and apathy demanded by the theory which makes personality a sin, knowledge an infirmity, imagination a folly. Humanity is still too strong for any such de-humanizing ideal. The Absolute of Tauler is not, like the Absolute of Plotinus, an abstraction above morality. His link between finite and infinite—his image of God, is moral, not metaphysical merely. It is his knowledge, first of all, of God in Christ which enables him to contemplate the Infinite, not as boundless being, but as unfathomable love. So he stands firm on the grand Christian foundation, and the Son is his way to the Father. Following Dionysius, that arch-mystagogue, he does indeed invite the trembling soul into the shadows of a Divine darkness, wherein no specific attribute or act is perceptible to the baffled sight. But across that profound obscure and utter silence, there floats, perceptible, some incense from the censer, of the Elder Brother—the eternal High Priest. It is a darkness, but such an one as we have when we close our eyes after spectacles of glory—a darkness luminous and living with the hovering residue of splendours visible no longer. It is a silence, but such an one as we have after sweet music—a silence still stirred by inward echoes, and repetitions, and floating fragments of melodies that have ceased to fall upon the ear. It seems a chilling purity, a hueless veil—but such a veil as the snowfall lays upon an Alpine church-yard, hiding all colour but not all form, and showing us still where the crosses are. By their fruits we know these mystics. No men animated by a love so Christ-like as was theirs, could have put an abstraction in the place of Christ.

With regard to the work of Christ, Tauler acknowledges (more readily than George Fox) that the divine element or inward light in man must remain a mere surmise or longing, apart from the historic manifestation of God in the flesh. It is Jesus of Nazareth who at once interprets to the soul, while He satisfies, its own restless heavenward desire. It is His grace alone which makes a mere capacity of God, a possession—a mere potentiality, actual. The view of Christ which Tauler loves to present most frequently is that expressed by those passages of Scripture which speak of Him as the first-born among many brethren, and which remind us that both He that sanctifieth and they that are sanctified are all of one. He would say that the Saviour now lives upon the earth, in the person of all true believers; and that, in a subordinate sense, the Word is being continually made flesh, as Christ is formed in the hearts of Christians. With one voice Eckart and Tauler, Ruysbroek and Suso, exclaim—‘Arise, O man! realize the end of thy being: make room for God within thy soul, that he may bring forth his Son within thee.’

The Saviour’s obedience unto death is regarded by Tauler, rather in its exemplary, than in its propitiatory aspect. Very important, as characteristic of his theology, is the distinction he makes between our union to the humanity of Christ, and our union to his divinity. As man, He is the ideal of humanity—the exemplar of self-surrender. All that He received from the Father was yielded up to Him in that absolute devotedness which all His brethren imitate. We are united to His humanity in proportion as we follow the obedience and self-sacrifice of His earthly life. But above this moral conformity to His example, Tauler sets another and a higher union to His divinity. And this union with the Godhead of the Son is not a superior degree of moral likeness to Him, it is rather an approximation to another mode of existence. It is an inward transit from our actual to our ideal self—not to the moral ideal (for that is already realized in proportion as we are united to His humanity), but to our Platonic archetypal ideal. This higher process of union to the Word, or return to our ideal place in Him, consists in escaping from all that distinguishes us as creatures on this earth—in denuding ourselves of reasonings, imaginations, passions,—humanities, in fact, and reducing ourselves to that metaphysical essence or germ of our being, which lay from eternity—not a creature, but the thought of a creature, in the Divine Word.

Now it appears to me that this self-spiritualizing process which seeks by a refined asceticism to transcend humanity and creatureliness, is altogether a mistake. An ideal sufficiently high, and ever beyond us, is already given in the moral perfection of Christ Jesus. This desire to escape from all the modes and means of our human existence came not from Paul, but from Plato. It revives the impatience of that noble but one-sided, Greek ideal, which despised the body and daily life, abhorred matter as a prison-house, instead of using it as a scaffolding, and longed so intensely to become pure, passionless intellect. I know no self-transcendence, and I desire none, higher than the self-sacrifice of the good Shepherd, who laid down his life for the sheep. You will probably be reminded here of another great Platonist. Origen, also, makes a distinction between those who know Christ, according to the flesh, as he terms it, i.e., in his sufferings, death, and resurrection, and that higher class of the perfect, or Gnostici, who, on the basis of that fundamental knowledge, rise from the historical Christ to the spiritual essence of the Word. Origen, however, supposed that this communion with the Logos, or eternal Reason, might become the channel of a higher knowledge, illumining the Gnosticus with a divine philosophy. With Tauler, on the contrary, the intellectual ambition is less prominent; and he who has ascended into the uncreated essence cannot bring down from thence any wisdom for this lower world. Thus, in our extract, he says that if the soul united to the word could perceive itself, it would seem altogether like God, and would appear possessed of all knowledge that ever was. Such is the ideal; but the first reflex act would dissolve that trance of absolute, immediate oneness, and restore the mystic to the humbling consciousness of a separate, actual self; and here lies the great difference between Tauler and Eckart. Tauler, Suso, and Ruysbroek say, that in these moments of exaltation the soul (above distinctions) is not conscious of its distinction as a separate, creature entity. Eckart says, not that the soul has, for a moment, forgotten all that is personal, and that parts it off from God, but that the distinction does not exist at all,—not that we do not know ourselves as separate, but that God does not. To draw the line between theism and pantheism, is not always easy; but I think it must lie somewhere hereabout.

With regard to the doctrines of holy indifference and disinterested love, the German mystics are by no means so extreme as the French. Their views of the divine character were more profound and comprehensive; their heaven and hell were less external and realistic. A mysticism like theirs could not concentrate itself, as Quietism did, on the degrees and qualities of one particular affection. Their God was one who, by a benign necessity of nature, must communicate Himself in blessing, one whose love lay at the root of His being. ‘If men would only believe,’ cries Tauler, in one of his sermons, ‘how passionately God longs to save, and bring forth His Son in them!’ They care little for being themselves accused of making matter eternal, and creatures necessary to God, if they can free Him from the imputation of selfishness or caprice. And so they have no scruples as to whether it be not selfish and criminal to pray for our own salvation. In the sense of Tauler—a true and deep one—no man can say, ‘Thy will be done,’ and ‘Thy kingdom come,’ without praying for his own salvation. When Tauler seems to demand a self-abnegation which consents to perdition itself, he is to be understood in one of two ways: either he would say that salvation should be desired for the sake of God, above our own, and that we should patiently submit, when He sees fit to try us by withdrawing our hope of it; or that the presence and the absence of God make heaven and hell—that no conceivable enjoyment ought to be a heaven to us without Him, no conceivable suffering a hell with Him. But how different is all this from teaching, with some of the Quietists, that, since (as they say) God is equally glorified in our perdition and in our salvation, we should have no preference (if our love be truly disinterested) for the one mode of glorifying Him above the other. That any human being ever attained such a sublime indifference I shall not believe, until it is attested by a love for man as much above ordinary Christian benevolence, as this love for God professes to be above ordinary Christian devotion; for what is true of the principle of love, is true of its degrees—‘He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath not seen?’

The strongly ascetic language of Tauler and his brethren, their almost Manichean contempt of the world, must be read by the light of their times, so full of misery and corruption; and by the light, also, of those fearful furnaces of trial through which they had personally passed. What soul, into which the iron has entered, will say, while the pain is still fresh, that the words of Tauler, or of Thomas à Kempis, are intemperate? It is probable that Tauler would have been less impatient to abolish his very personality, in order to give place to God, had he been able, like Luther, to regard salvation, in greater measure, as consisting in a work done for, as well as wrought in him. But his justification is a progressive, approximate process. It is not a something he accepts, but a something he has to work out; and seeing, as, with his true humility, he was sure to do, how unsatisfactory was his likeness to God, how great the distance still, the only resource open to him is to ignore or annihilate that sorry and disappointing personality altogether, that God, instead of it, may perform his actions, and be, in fact, the substitute for his soul. Both Tauler and Luther believe in substitution. The substitution of Tauler is internal—God takes his place within himself. The substitution of Luther is external—when he believed in Christ, the Saviour associated him with Himself, and so brought him into sonship. So inevitable is the idea of some substitution, where the sense of sin is deep. Luther believes as profoundly as Tauler in a present, inward, living Saviour, as opposed to a remote historic personage, intellectually acknowledged. In the theology of both the old dualism is broken down, and God is brought near to man, yea, within him. But the Son to whom Tauler is united, is the uncreated essence, the super-essential Word, from the beginning with the Father. The Son to whom Luther is united is emphatically the Godman, as truly human, in all sympathy and nearness, as when He walked the Galilean hills. The humanity of Christ is chiefly historic with Tauler, and for any practical purpose can scarcely be said to have survived His exaltation; but with Luther that humanity is so vital and so perpetual that he will even transfer to it the attributes of Deity. So far from desiring to pass upward from the man Christ Jesus to the Logos, as from a lower to a higher, Luther calls ‘that sinking himself so deep in flesh and blood,’ the most glorious manifestation of Godhead. He does not, with the Platonists, see degradation in the limitations of our nature; that nature has been honoured unspeakably, and is glorified, not annihilated, by the Incarnate One. According to Luther, the undivine consists in sin, and sin alone; not in our human means and modes, and processes of thought. Thus with him the divine and human are intimately associated, not merely in the religious life, as it is termed, but in our temporal hopes and fears, in every part of our complicated, struggling, mysterious humanity. The theology of Luther is more free, joyous, and human, partly because the serene and superhuman ideal of Tauler did not appear to him either possible or desirable, partly because sanctification was, with him, a change of state consequent on a change of relation—the grateful service of one who, by believing, has entered into rest; and partly, also, because he does not lose sight of the humanity of Christ, in His divinity, to the extent which Tauler does. Both Luther and Tauler say—the mere history alone will not profit: Christ must be born in you. Luther adds—Christ begins to be born in you as soon as you heartily believe upon Him. Tauler adds—Christ is born in you as soon as you have become nothing.

It would be very unfair to make it a matter of blame to Tauler that he did not see with Luther’s eyes, and do Luther’s work. Luther in one century, and Tauler in another, had their tasks appointed, and quitted themselves like men. It was for Tauler to loosen the yoke of asceticism: it was for Luther to break it in pieces. But it would be just as culpable to disguise the real differences between Tauler and Luther, and to conceal the truth, from a desire to make Tauler appear a more complete reformer than he really was. Our High Churchmen, in their insular self-complacency, love to depreciate Luther and the Continental reformers. Idolaters of the past as they are, we do not think that they will be better pleased with that noblest product of the Middle Age—the German mysticism of the fourteenth century, now placed within their reach. These sermons of Tauler assert so audaciously against sacerdotalism, the true priesthood of every Christian man. There is so little in them of the ‘Church about us,’ so much of the ‘Christ within us.’

It would have moved the scorn of some of the mystics, and the sorrow of others, could they have been made aware of the strange uses to which some persons were to turn them in this nineteenth century. The Emersonian philosophy, for example, is grieved that one series of writings should arrogate inspiration to themselves alone. It is obvious that a ready credence given to professed inspiration in other quarters, and later times, must tend to lower the exclusive prestige of the Scriptures. Thus the mystics may be played off against the Apostles, and all that is granted to mysticism may be considered as so much taken from the Bible. A certain door has been marked with a cross. Emerson, like the sly Abigail of the Forty Thieves, proceeds to mark, in like manner, all the doors in the street. Very gratifying truly, and comic in the highest degree, to witness the perplexity of mankind, going up and down, seeking some indication of the hoped-for guidance from above! I do not believe that the inspired writers were (to use Philo’s comparison) as passive as a lyre under the hand of a musician. But some, who are much shocked at this doctrine in their case, would have us be awe-stricken, rather than offended, by similar pretension on the part of certain mystics. Then, they tell us to tread delicately—to remember how little the laws of our own nature are known to us—to abstain from hasty judgment. In this way, it is supposed that Bibliolatry may be in some measure checked, and one of the greatest religious evils of the time be happily lessened. Criticise, if you will, John’s history, or Paul’s letters, but let due reverence restrain you from applying the tests of a superficial common sense to the utterances of the Montanuses, the Munzers, the Engelbrechts, the Hildegards, the Theresas. But what saith History as to mysticism? Very plainly she tells us that the mystics have been a power in the world, and a power for good, in proportion as their teaching has been in accordance with the Bible;—that the instances wherein they have failed have been precisely those in which they have attempted (whether wittingly, or not) to substitute another and a private revelation for it. They have come as a blessing to their age, just in proportion as they have called the attention of men to some of the deepest lessons of that book—to lessons too commonly overlooked. The very men who might seem, to superficial observers, to bear witness against the Bible, do in reality utter the most emphatic testimony for it. A fact of this nature lends additional importance to the history of mysticism at the present time.

Again, there are some who may suppose there is a real resemblance between the exhortations of Tauler, and the counsel given men by such philosophers as Fichte or Herr Teufelsdröckh. Do not both urge men to abandon introspections—to abstain from all self-seeking—to arise and live in the transcendental world, by abandoning hope and fear, and by losing our finite in an Infinite Will? Some similarity of sound there may occasionally be, but the antipathy of principle between the two kinds of teaching is profound and radical.

I will suppose that there comes to our Teufelsdröckh some troubled spirit, full of the burden of ‘this unintelligible world,’ questioning,—as to an oracle. The response is ready. ‘What do you come whining to me about your miserable soul for? The soul-saving business is going down fast enough now-a-days, I can tell you. So you want to be happy, do you? Pining after your Lubberland, as usual,—your Millennium of mere Ease and plentiful supply. Poor wretch! let me tell you this,—the very fact of that hunger of yours proves that you will never have it supplied. Your appetite, my friend, is too enormous. In this wild Universe of ours, storming-in, vague-menacing, it is enough if you shall find, not happiness, but existence and footing to stand on,—and that only by girding yourself for continual effort and endurance. I was wretched enough once—down in the “Everlasting Nay,” thinking this a Devil’s-world, because, in the universal scramble of myriads for a handful, I had not clutched the happiness I set my heart on. Now, here I am in the “Everlasting Yea,” serene as you see me. How? Simply by giving up wanting to be happy, and setting to work, and resigning myself to the Eternities, Abysses, or whatsoever other name shall be given to the fontal Vortices of the inner realms.... Miracles! Fiddlestick! Are not you a miracle to your horse? What can they prove?... Inspiration!—Try and get a little for yourself, my poor friend. Work, man: go work, and let that sorry soul of thine have a little peace.’

‘Peace,’ repeats our ‘poor friend,’ as he goes discomfited away. ‘Peace! the very thing this soul of mine will not let me have, as it seems. I know I am selfish. I dare say this desire of happiness is very mean and low, and all that; but I would fain reach something higher. Yet the first step thereto he does not show me. To leap into those depths of stoical apathy which that great man has reached, is simply impossible to poor me. His experience is not mine. He tells a bedridden man to climb the mountains, and he will straightway be well. Let him show me the way to a little strength, and in time I may. I will not hunger any more after mere “lubberly enjoyment,” if he will offer my affections something more attractive. But Infinite Will, and Law, and Abysses, and Eternities, are not attractive—nay, I am not sure that they are intelligible to me or any mortal.’

Now the doctrine of Tauler is nowhere more in contrast with that just uttered than in its tenderness of Christian sympathy and adaptation, as compared with the dreary and repellent pride of the philosopher. Instead of overwhelming the applicant by absurdly demanding, as the first step, a sublimity of self-sacrifice which only the finished adept may attain, Tauler is not too proud to begin at the beginning. Disinterested love is, with him, a mountain to which he points in the distance, bright with heavenly glory. Disinterested love, with Teufelsdröckh, is an avalanche hurled down right in the path of the beginner. Tauler does not see, in the unhappiness of the man, so much mere craven fear, or thwarted selfishness. He sees God’s image in him; he believes that that hunger of his soul, which he vainly tries to satisfy with things earthly, is a divine craving, a proof that he was born to satisfy it with things heavenly. He does not talk grandiloquently about Duty, and the glory of moral Freedom. He tells him that the same Saviour who died upon the cross is pleading and knocking at his heart, and doth passionately long to bless him. He sends him away to think over this fact, till it shall become more real to him than house and home, or sun and stars. He does not think that he can improve on ‘the low morality’ of the gospel by disdaining to appeal to hope and fear in order to snatch men from their sins. If so to plead be to speak after the flesh, after the flesh he will speak, to save a brother. There will be time enough, he thinks, if God sees fit to lead the man to the heights of absolute self-loss; and God will take His own way to do it. All Tauler has to do is to declare to him the truth concerning a Saviour, not to prescribe out of his own experience a law beyond that which is written. In this way, instead of striking him into despair, or bidding him bury care in work, he comforts and strengthens him. He does not despise him for keeping the law simply out of love to Him who gave it. He does not think it unmanly, but true manhood rather, when he sees him living, a suppliant, dependent on a life higher than his own—on a Person, whose present character and power were attested of old by history and miracle, as well as now by the ‘witness of the Spirit.’

I think the candid reader of Tauler’s sermons, and of Sartor Resartus, will admit that a difference in substance such as I have pointed out, does exist between them. If so, those who follow the philosophy of Teufelsdröckh cannot claim Tauler—have no right to admire him, and ought to condemn in him that which they condemn in the Christianity of the present day.

Footnote 127:

Preface to Tauler’s Life and Sermons by Susanna Winkworth.

Footnote 128:

Nicole, in his _Traité de la Prière_, describes and criticises this
style of devotion. It must always be borne in mind that the warnings
of Tauler with regard to the image and the symbol are addressed, not
to us sober Protestant folk, but especially to the devotees of the
cloister. Those who have some acquaintance with the fantastic excesses
he combats, will not think his language too strong.

CHAPTER VII.

Alas poor country;
Almost afraid to know itself! It cannot
Be called our mother, but our grave. Where nothing,
But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile;
Where sighs, and groans, and shrieks that rend the air,
Are made, not mark’d; where violent sorrow seems
A modern ecstasy; the dead man’s knell
Is there scarce asked, for who; and good men’s lives
Expire before the flowers in their caps,
Dying or ere they sicken.

MACBETH.

The day after Atherton’s return, Willoughby and Gower met about noon, at Lowestoffe’s lodge gate, the one returning from a piscatory expedition of six hours, with fish, the other from a pictorial ramble of four days, with sketches. Willoughby had to tell of the escapades of tricksy trout, and of the hopes and fears which were suspended on his line. But not a word, of course, had he to say of the other thoughts which busied him the while,—how his romance was in his head, as he carried those credentials of idleness, the fishing-tackle, and how, while he was angling for fish, he was devising the fashion in which Blanche should throw the fly for Florian. Gower had seen such glades and uplands—such wondrous effects of light and shadow—he, too, had had his adventures, and could show his trophies.

Dinner was succeeded by that comparatively somnolent period which preceded the early tea so dear to Lowestoffe. Atherton found that a book of Schubert’s, which had interested him in the morning, was, in the afternoon, only a conducting-rod to lure down the subtile influence of sleep. Lowestoffe, lulled by the buzzing flies, dropped off into an arm-chair doze, without apology or disguise. He had been early up, and had been riding about all day on a new chestnut mare. Violently had he objurgated that wretch of a groom for giving her too many beans, thereby rendering her in danger of flying at the heels; and what was worse, the monster had put on a gag snaffle with the martingale, and narrowly escaped getting her into mischief. But the flying storm had long since swept away. Before tea, Lowestoffe was in his good-humoured, irrational humour; after tea he would be in his good-humoured rational one. As for Gower and Kate, they had quietly withdrawn together to see a water-lily that had just blown, and were not heard of till tea-time.

After tea, when certain sleepy people had again become responsible creatures, conversation began.

GOWER. Don’t you think Atherton has a very manuscriptural air to-night?

KATE. There is a certain aspect of repletion about him.

MRS. ATHERTON. We must bleed him, or the consequences may be serious. What’s this? (Pulls a paper out of his pocket.)

KATE. And this! (Pulls out another.)

WILLOUGHBY. He seems better now.

ATHERTON (abstractedly). I was thinking of the difference between Gower’s studies and mine for the last few days. I have been reading a dark, miserable chapter in the history of man. He has been the chronicler of pleasant passages in the history of rocks and trees,—his great epochs, a smile of sun-shine or sudden chill of shadow,—the worst disasters, a dull neutral-tint kind of day, or a heavy rain,—his most impracticable subjects, beauties too bright or evanescent to be caught. It is sad to think how every subject of our study deepens in sorrow as it rises in dignity.

WILLOUGHBY. And yet it is only by the manful struggles of past generations through calamity and against wrong, that we have bequeathed to us the leisure, the liberty, and the knowledge essential to the highest enjoyment of nature. Atherton, in fact, studies the chequered and intricate causes which issue in the taste of Gower as one of their effects. I should think it must be no small gain for an artist to be placed beyond the mediæval idea which set the Inferno in the centre of the earth, and imagined, far below the roots of the mountains and the channels of the sea, eternal flames as the kernel of the world.

GOWER. I have sometimes endeavoured, while lying on the grass, to realise in my own way the conception of the world by the light-hearted Greeks as an animal, or as a robe or peplus. I have imagined the clouds the floating breath of the great creature, rising against the crystal sphere of the sky, under which it lies as in an enchanter’s glass;—the seas, some delicate surfaces of the huge organism, that run wrinkled into a quick shiver at the cold touch of wind;—the forests, a fell of hair which is ruffled by the chafing hand of the tempest. Then, when I look at the earth in the other aspect, as a variegated woven robe, I see it threaded silverly with branching rivers spangled with eyes of lakes; where the sleek meadows lie, it is rich with piled velvet, and where the woods are, tufted with emerald feathers. But now I want to hear something more about our Strasburg people.

ATHERTON. Bad news. There is a great hiatus in Arnstein’s journal, which history fills up with pestilence and bloodshed. I have drawn up a few notes of this interval which must serve you as an outline. (Reads.)

In the year 1348 that terrible contagion, known as the Black Death,
which journeyed from the East to devastate the whole of Europe,
appeared at Strasburg.[129] Everywhere famine, floods, the inversion
of the seasons, strange appearances in the sky, had been its
precursors. In the Mediterranean Sea, as afterwards in the Baltic,
ships were descried drifting masterless, filled only by
plague-stricken corpses. Every man dreaded, not merely the touch and
the breath of his neighbour, but his very eye, so subtile and so
swift seemed the infection. In many parts of France it was computed
that only two out of every twenty inhabitants were left alive. In
Strasburg sixteen thousand perished; in Avignon sixty thousand. In
Paris, at one time, four or five hundred were dying in a day. In
that city, in the midst of a demoralization and a selfish horror
like that Thucydides has painted, the Sisters of Mercy were seen
tending the sufferers who crowded the Hôtel-Dieu; and, as death
thinned their martyr-ranks, numbers more were ready to fill the same
office of perilous compassion. Pausanias says that in Athens alone
out of all Greece there was raised an altar to mercy. But it was an
altar almost without a ministry. Heathendom, at its best, might
glory in the shrine; Christianity, at its worst, could furnish the
priesthood.

In Strasburg Tauler laboured fearlessly, with Thomas and Ludolph,
among the panic-stricken people—doubly cursed by the Interdict and
by the plague. Great fires of vine-wood, wormwood, and laurel were
kept burning in the squares and market-places to purify the air,
lighting up the carved work of the deserted town-hall, and
flickering aslant the overhanging gables of the narrow crooked
streets and the empty tradesmen’s stalls. The village was ravaged as
fatally as the town. The herds grew wild in the fields of the dead
peasants, or died strangely themselves—victims, apparently, to the
universal blight of life. The charlatans of the day drove for awhile
a golden traffic with quintessences and distillations, filthy and
fantastic medicines, fumigation of shirts and kerchiefs, charms and
invocations, only at last to perish in their turn. Even the monks
had lost their love for gold, since every gift was deadly. In vain
did trembling men carry their hoards to the monastery or the church.
Every gate was barred, and the wealthy might be seen tossing their
bags of bezants over the convent walls. In the outskirts of towns
and cities, huge pits were opened, whose mouths were daily filled
with hideous heaps of dead. The pope found it necessary to
consecrate the river Rhone, and hundreds of corpses were cast out at
Avignon, from the quays and pleasant gardens by the water-side, to
be swept by the rapid stream under the silent bridges, past the
forgotten ships and forsaken fields and mourning towns, livid and
wasting, out into the sea.

In a frenzy of terror and revenge the people fell upon the miserable
Jews. They were accused of poisoning the wells, and every heart was
steeled against them. Fear seemed to render all classes more
ferocious, and the man who might sicken and die to-morrow found a
wretched compensation in inflicting death to-day on the imagined
authors of his danger. Toledo was supposed to be the centre of an
atrocious scheme by which the Jews were to depopulate Christendom.
At Chillon several Jews, some after torture and some in terror of
it, confessed that they had received poison for that purpose. It was
a black and red powder, made partly from a basilisk, and sent in the
mummy of an egg. The deposition of the Jews arrested at Neustadt was
sent by the castellan of Chillon to Strasburg. Bishops, nobles, and
chief citizens held a diet at Binnefeld in Alsace, to concert
measures of persecution. The deputies of Strasburg, to their honour
be it spoken, declared that nothing had been proved against the
Jews. Their bishop was the most pitiless advocate of massacre. The
result was a league of priests, lords, and people, to slay or banish
every Jew. In some places the senators and burgomasters were
disposed to mercy or to justice. The pope and the emperor raised
their voices, alike in vain, in behalf of the victims. Some
Christians, who had sought from pity or from avarice to save them,
perished in the same flames. The noble of whom they bought
protection was stigmatised as a Jew master, execrated by the
populace, at the mercy of his enemies. No power could stem the
torrent. The people had tasted blood; the priest had no mercy for
the murderers of the Lord; the baron had debts easily discharged by
the death of his creditor. At Strasburg a monster scaffold was
erected in the Jewish burial ground, and two thousand were burnt
alive. At Basle all the Jews were burnt together in a wooden edifice
erected for the purpose. At Spires they set their quarter in flames,
and perished by their own hands. A guard kept out the populace while
men commissioned by the senate hunted for treasure among the smoking
ruins. The corrupting bodies of those slain in the streets were put
up in empty wine casks, and trundled into the Rhine. When the rage
for slaughter had subsided, hands, red with Hebrew blood, were
piously employed in building belfries and repairing churches with
Jewish tombstones and the materials of Jewish houses.

The gloomy spirit of the time found fit expression in the fanaticism
of the Flagellants.[130] Similar troops of devotees had in the
preceding century carried throughout Italy the mania of the scourge;
but never before had the frenzy of penance been so violent or so
contagious. It was in the summer of 1349 that they appeared in
Strasburg. All the bells rang out as two hundred of them, following
two and two many costly banners and tapers, entered the city,
singing strange hymns. The citizens vied with each other in opening
to them their doors and seating them at their tables. More than a
thousand joined their ranks. Whoever entered their number was bound
to continue among them thirty-four days, must have fourpence of his
own for each day, might enter no house unasked, might speak with no
woman. The lash of the master awaited every infraction of their
rule. The movement partook of the popular, anti-hierarchical spirit
of the day. The priest or friar could hold no rank, as such, among
the Flagellants. The mastership was inaccessible to him, and he was
precluded from the secret council. The scourging took place twice a
day. Every morning and evening they repaired in procession to the
place of flagellation outside the city. There they stripped
themselves, retaining only a pair of linen drawers. They lay down in
a large circle, indicating by their posture the particular sin of
which each penitent was principally guilty. The perjured lay on his
side, and held up three fingers; the adulterer on his face. The
master then passed round, applying his lash to each in succession,
chanting the rhyme—

Stand up in virtue of holy pain,
And guard thee well from guilt again.

One after the other, they rose and followed him, singing and
scourging themselves with whips in which were great knots and nails.
The ceremony closed with the reading of a letter, said to have been
brought by an angel from heaven, enjoining their practice, after
which they returned home in order as they came. The people crowded
from far and near to witness the piteous expiation, and to watch
with prayers and tears the flowing blood which was to mingle with
that of Christ. The pretended letter was reverenced as another
gospel, and the Flagellant was already believed before the priest.
The clergy grew anxious as they saw the enthusiasm spreading on
every side. But the unnatural furor could not last; its own
extravagance prepared its downfall. An attempt made by some
Flagellants in Strasburg to bring a dead child to life was fatal to
their credit. The Emperor, the Pope, and the prelates took measures
against them simultaneously, in Germany, in France, in Sicily, and
in the East. The pilgrimage of the scourge was to have lasted
four-and-thirty years. Six months sufficed to disgust men with the
folly, to see their angelic letter laughed to scorn, their
processions denounced, their order scattered.

Meanwhile the enemies of Tauler were not idle. Louis of Bavaria was
dead. The new Emperor Charles IV. was of the papal party, and called
the Parsons’ Kaiser, but a man of vigour and enlightenment; so weary
Germany, broken by so many calamities, was generally inclined to
acknowledge his claim. About the year 1348 he visited Strasburg, and
the clergy brought Tauler and his two friends before him. They were
to answer for their hard words against priests and princes. Charles
listened attentively to the statement of their principles, and to
their spirited defence of what they had said and done. At last he
said (conceive the dismay of the prelates!) that, after all, ‘he was
very much of their mind.’ But the ecclesiastics did not rest till
they had procured a condemnatory sentence. The accused were
commanded to publish a recantation, and to promise to refrain for
the future from such contumacious language concerning the Church and
the Interdict, on pain of excommunication. It is said that, in spite
of this decision, they did but speak and write the more in the same
spirit. This, however, is not certain. It is known that Tauler
shortly afterwards left his native city, and fixed his residence in
Cologne, where he mostly spent the remainder of his life, actively
engaged as a preacher in endeavouring to promote a deeper
spirituality, and in combating the enthusiasm of the pantheistic
Beghards who abounded in that city.[131]

Chronicle of Adolf Arnstein, continued.

STRASBURG. 1354. _January._—In the comparative leisure of the winter
time, I set down in order (from such fragmentary notes as I then
made) records of a journey undertaken last year to Flanders.

When I left Strasburg, to sail down the Rhine, our city had enjoyed
at last nearly two years’ prosperity. We could scarcely believe the
respite real. First of all, after so many troubles and dissensions,
the Black Death had laid us waste. Then came the Flagellants,
turning all things upside down—the irresistible infection of their
fury—the thirst for blood they stirred up everywhere—the slaughter
of the miserable Jews. Then we had the Emperor among us, demanding
unrighteous imposts. Our old spirit rose. For two years and a half
our chains and guard-ships barred the passage of the Rhine.[132] We
would endure any extremity rather than submit, and our firmness won
the day. Now, for the last three years,—the pestilence and its
horrors over; blockaded business free again;—our little world has
been gambolling like children let loose from school. Never such
rapid and fruitful buying and selling, such marrying and giving in
marriage, such feasting, pageantry, and merriment, among high and
low alike.[133] All the year is May for the morris-dancers. No one
remembers now the scourge or the torch.

The clergy might have learnt a lesson from the outbreak of the
Flagellants. It should have shown them how hateful their vices and
their pride had made them to the people. But the universal levity
now pardons clerical crime and folly as it does every other. The
odious exaggeration of the Flagellants has given men a pretext for
licence, and ruined the hopes of reform. The cause of emperor
against pope exists no longer. In the hour of conflict and of
sorrow, men hailed the help and listened to the teaching of the
Friends of God. Tauler himself, were he among us, would find it
another Strasburg.

Landed at Cologne, I hastened to the cloister of St. Gertrude to
find Dr. Tauler. With what delight did I see him once more! I
thought him looking much older, and, indeed, he said he thought the
same of me. The time has been long but a stepmother to merry faces
and ruddy cheeks. He told me that he had met with great kindness in
this city, which he had always loved. His friends were numerous; his
preaching, he hoped not without fruit, and he had succeeded in
reforming much that had been amiss.[134] I had many messages for him
from his old friends in Strasburg, and he had so many questions to
ask, he knew not where to begin.

He inquired particularly after Rulman Merswin. This rich merchant
had withdrawn from the world (with the consent of his wife) and
devoted himself altogether to the contemplative life, a short time
previous to the coming of the Black Death. His austerities had been
almost fatal. Tauler’s last counsel to him was to lessen their
severity. I saw him before I left, and he desired me to tell Tauler
that the Layman had visited him more than once, and was now his
spiritual guide. I informed the Doctor, moreover, that during the
last year Merswin had been privately busied in writing a book, to be
called _The Nine Rocks_, of which he did me the honour of reading to
me a part.[135] The Doctor asking what I thought, I said it seemed
to be the work of a powerful and sombre imagination, excited by the
sufferings he had inflicted on himself, yet containing many solemn
and most just rebukes of the vices prevalent. Tauler said that such
excessive mortification in all classes, and especially among the
clergy, often weakened, instead of exalting the intellect. He feared
that the good Rulman would always lean too much on visions, voices,
ecstasies, and the like, and never rise to the higher calm of
unsensuous, imageless contemplation.

The second time I visited Tauler, I found him reading—he told me for
the fourth time—a book called _The Spiritual Nuptials_, by John
Ruysbroek.[136] The Doctor praised it highly, and as I questioned
him about it, offered to lend it me to read. I had heard of
Ruysbroek as a master in spiritual mysteries, often holding
intercourse by letter with the Friends of God in Cologne, Alsace,
and even in the Oberland. I took the book home to my inn, and shut
myself up to read it. Many parts of it I copied out. Not a few
things in it I found hard to be understood, and consulting with the
Doctor about them, he told me he purposed setting out in a few days
to visit the author. Should I like to accompany him? I said ‘Yes,
with all my heart.’ So we left Cologne to travel to the convent of
Grünthal, in the heart of the forest of Soigne, not far from
Louvain, whither the holy man, now sixty years of age, had of late
retired.[137]

From Cologne we journeyed direct to Aix-la-Chapelle. There we saw
the chair in which the emperors sit when they are crowned. Its sides
are of ivory, and the bottom is made of a piece of wood from Noah’s
Ark. Tasted the water in the famous hot springs there. It is
saltish; the physicians say of singular virtue, whether taken
inwardly or outwardly. Saw near the town a water which is lukewarm,
by reason of one of the hot springs which passes under it. There are
bred in it fine fish, they say, which must be put in cold water two
months before they are eaten.

From Aix-la-Chapelle we went to Maestricht, and thence through
Tirlemont, to Louvain. This last is a wealthy city, with a fine
town-hall. The Flemings seem very fond of bells, which are always
chiming, and the great multitude of storks was a strange thing to
me; they make their nests on the tops of the chimneys. The country
round is very fertile, and the great guilds exceeding prosperous.
The small handicrafts have more power there than with us at
Strasburg. At Ypres, I hear, they lately mustered five thousand
strong in the market-place, and headed by their deacons, engaged and
routed the knights and men-at-arms who wished to hold the town
against the men of Ghent.[138] They are very brave and determined,
and keep better together, as it seems to me, than our folk. I found
no small excitement in the city, on account of the war then carrying
on between the men of Ghent and their allies, on the one side, and
the Earl of Flanders on the other. It began with the old rivalry
between Ghent and Bruges—some dispute about a canal from the Lys.
The real struggle is between lords and commons. What Bishop Berthold
and his party have been to us, that is the Count de Male to these
Flemings. The popular side has lost a brave leader in John Lyon. He
revived the White Hoods, and stirred up all Flanders against the
earl. But two at least of the new captains, John Boule and Peter du
Bois, bid fair to fill his place. When I was at Louvain, the troops
of the earl were besieged in Oudenarde by upwards of a hundred
thousand men, gathered out of all the principal towns, well
provisioned and appointed. The besiegers were very strong in
cross-bow men, and had with them some great guns, which did no small
damage. Many hot assaults were made, both by land and water, and on
both sides many brave men slain (Heaven rest their souls!) for the
Flemings were no whit behind the knights in foolhardiness. When I
left Brabant, report said that a peace was, or soon would be
concluded, to be ratified, according to their wont there, by
enormous dinners. Certain it is that neither Oudenarde nor
Dendermonde were carried after all.[139]

They still talked at Louvain about that flower of chivalry Edward
III. of England, who was there for a season some few years
back.[140] His princely entertainments to lords and ladies left the
country full of golden traditions about him. The islanders won all
hearts by their unparalleled magnificence and generosity. They say
the English king called James von Artaveld—brewer of metheglin as he
was—his cousin, and was passing wroth when he heard of his murder.
Yet methinks he cares but little after all for the Flemish weavers,
save as they may help him and his knights against France.
Nevertheless, the weaker France, the better for Germany. I think I
understand why our emperor Charles so flatters the pope. If his
Holiness could confide in Germany he would fain break with France.
Be this as it may, not a word now is heard about the claims of the
empire. The Ghibelline cause finds no leader. The spirit of the
Hohenstaufen lives only in the rhymes of the minstrel. No doubt
times are changed. There may be policy in the submission, but I love
it not. The Doctor interpreted to me the other day the emperor’s
Latin motto, which set me thinking. It means—the best use you can
make of your own wits is to turn to good account the follies of
other people.[141] So cardinals and envoys riding to and fro,
plotting and treaty-making, will manage Christendom now, not strong
arms and sword-strokes. Whether, in the end, this change will lead
to better or to worse, it baffles my poor brain to decide.

We set out from Louvain for Grünthal, quite a troop of us. There was
a noble widow-lady, with her attendants, who was going to crave
ghostly counsel from the prior. She had lost her husband by the
plague, three years since, and appeared still overwhelmed with
grief, speaking to no one, and never suffering her face to be seen.
Her women, when not near her, were merry enough with the followers
of a young Frenchman of family who carried letters to Ruysbroek from
his uncle, an abbot in Paris. We had with us besides two Minorite
friars from Guelders. The head dresses of the women were fit for
giantesses, rising up like a great horn, with long ribbons
fluttering from the top. One of them had a little dagger in her
girdle, and managed a spirited horse to admiration. The Frenchman,
with whom I had much talk, was an arrant fop, yet a shrewd fellow
withal. He jingled like a jester with his many silver bells, his
hair was tied behind in a tail, the points of his shoes turned up,
his parti-coloured doublet cut short round (a new fashion, adopted
for greater swiftness in flying from an enemy), and his beard, long
and bushy, trimmed with a sort of studied negligence. He gave me a
melancholy account of the state of France, divided within, overrun
by the English invaders, nobles plundering and burning—here to-day
and there to-morrow, without pity, law, or loyalty; knights
destroying, not helping the weak: troops of robbers surprising
castles and even taking towns; and the wretched peasantry fain often
to hide themselves and their cattle for weeks and months in great
caves hollowed out underneath the ground.

One of the friars told me a story current about Prior Ruysbroek,
how, one day, he was absent longer than usual in the forest, whither
he was accustomed to retire for meditation, and as some of the
brethren went to seek him they saw a tree at a distance which
appeared surrounded by fiery glory. The holy man was sitting at its
foot, lost in contemplation! The Saviour and our Blessed Lady
herself are said to have appeared to him more than once.[142]

We reached Grünthal—a great building of exceeding plainness—soon
after nightfall. Found there visitors from Brussels, so that,
between us, nearly all the guest chambers were filled. The good
Ruysbroek has been there but a year, yet if he is always to be thus
sought unto, methinks he is as far from his longed-for seclusion as
ever.[143]

We remained three weeks at Grünthal, for whenever the Doctor would
be going, the good Prior so besought him to tarry longer that he
could not in courtesy say him nay. Often Ruysbroek and Tauler would
spend all the summer morning in the forest, now walking, now sitting
under the trees, talking of the concerns of the soul, or of the
fears and hopes awakened by these doubtful times. I was permitted
repeatedly to accompany them, and afterwards wrote down some of the
more remarkable things I heard said. These two saintly men, prepared
to love each other as brothers in a common experience, seemed at
once to grow together into a friendship as strong as though many
years had been employed in the building thereof. Neither of them
vain, neither jealous, each was for humbling himself beneath the
other, and seemed desirous rather to hear and learn than to talk
about himself.

Speaking about the Son of God and the soul of man, Ruysbroek
said—‘I believe that the Son is the Image of the Father, that in
the Son have dwelt from all eternity, foreknown and contemplated
by the Father, the prototypes of all mankind. We existed in the
Son before we were born—He is the creative ground of all
creatures—the eternal cause and principle of their life. The
highest essence of our being rests therefore in God,—exists in his
image in the Son. After our creation in time, our souls are
endowed with these properties, which are in effect one; the first,
the Imageless Nudity, (_die bildlose Nacktheit_)—by means of this
we receive and are united to the Father; the second, the Higher
Reason of the Soul (_die höhere Vernunft der Seele_), the mirror
of brightness, by which we receive the Son; the third, the Spark
of the Soul (_Funken der Seele_) by which we receive the love of
God the Holy Ghost. These three faculties are in us all the ground
of our spiritual life, but in sinners they are obscured and buried
under their transgressions.[144]

‘The office of the Son in time was to die for us, fulfil the law,
and give us a divine pattern of humility, love, and patience. He is
the fountain whence flows to us all needed blessing, and with him
works the Holy Spirit. What the Son did he did for all—is
Light-bringer for all mankind, for the Catholic Church especially,
but also for every devoutly-disposed mind. Grace is common, and
whoever desires it has it. Without it no natural powers or merits
can save us. The will is free by nature, it becomes by grace more
free; yea, a king, lord of every lower power, crowned with Love,
clad in the might of the Holy Ghost. There is a natural will towards
good (_Synderesis_) implanted in us all, but damped by sin. We can
will to follow this better impulse, and of ourselves desire the help
of divine grace, without which we can never overcome sin and rise
above ourselves. Everything depends on will. A man must will right
strongly. Will to have humility and love, and they are thine. If any
man is without the spirit of God, it is his own fault, for not
seeking that without which he cannot please Him.[145]

‘True penitence is of the heart; bodily suffering is not essential.
No one is to think he is shut out from Christ because he cannot bear
the torturing penance some endure. We must never be satisfied with
any performance, any virtue—only in the abyss, the Nothingness of
Humility, do we rise beyond all heavens. True desire after God is
not kept back by the sense of defect. The longing soul knows only
this, that it is bent on God. Swallowed up in aspiration, it can
take heed of nothing more.’[146] (A very weighty saying this,
methinks, and helpful.)

Speaking of the inner life, and the union of the soul with God,
Ruysbroek said—

‘God dwells in the highest part of the soul. He who ascends this
height has all things under his feet. We are united to God when, in
the practice of the virtues, we deny and forsake ourselves, loving
and following God above all creatures. We cannot compel God by our
love to love us, but He cannot sanctify us unless we freely
contribute our effort. There is a reciprocal desire on our part and
that of God. The free inspiration of God is the spring of all our
spiritual life. Thence flows into us knowledge—an inner revelation
which preserves our spirit open, and, lifting us above all images
and all disturbance, brings us to an inward silence. Here the divine
inspiration is a secret whispering in the inner ear. God dwells in
the heart pure and free from every image. Then first, when we
withdraw into the _simplicitas_ of our heart, do we behold the
immeasurable glory of God, and our intellect is as clear from all
considerations of distinction and figurative apprehensions, as
though we had never seen or heard of such things. Then the riches of
God are open to us. Our spirit becomes desireless, as though there
were nothing on earth or in heaven of which we stood in need. Then
we are alone with God, God and we—nothing else. Then we rise above
all multiplicity and distinction into the simple nakedness of our
essence, and in it become conscious of the infinite wisdom of the
Divine Essence, whose inexhaustible depths are as a vast waste, into
which no corporeal and no spiritual image can intrude. Our created
is absorbed in our uncreated life, and we are as it were transformed
into God. Lost in the abyss of our eternal blessedness, we perceive
no distinction between ourselves and God. As soon as we begin to
reflect and to consider what that is we feel, we become aware of
such distinction, and fall back to the level of reason.’[147]

Here Tauler asked whether such language was not liable to abuse by
the heretics who confound man and God? He referred to a passage in
the _Spiritual Nuptials_, in which Ruysbroek said that we became
identical, in this union, with the glory by which we are
illumined.[148]

Ruysbroek answered, that he had designed to qualify duly all such
expressions. ‘But you know, Doctor,’ continued he, ‘I have not your
learning, and cannot at all times say so accurately as I would what
I mean. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings!—I would say that
in such a state all our powers are in repose, not that they are
annihilated. If so, we should lose our existence as creatures. We
are one with God, but yet always creature existences distinct from
God. I do humbly believe, let my enemies say what they may, that I
wrote no word of that book save at the impulse of the Holy Ghost,
and with a peculiar and most blessed presence to my soul of the Holy
Trinity. But what shall I call this blessedness? It includes peace,
inward silence, affectionate hanging on the source of our joy, sleep
in God, contemplation of the heaven of darkness, far above
reason.‘[149]

The conversation then turned on the heresies of the time, the
corruptions of the Church and of the State, and other practical
matters more within my compass. Ruysbroek said that the great sin
and error of these heretics lay in their aspiring to union with God
by a summary and arrogant method of their own. They persuaded
themselves that, merely by ceasing to think and distinguish, they
could withdraw themselves into the essence of their nature, and so,
without the help of grace or the practice of virtue, attain by bare
nature the rest and blessedness of absolute simplicity and
superiority to all modes and images.

‘Verily,’ quoth Tauler, ‘though they give themselves out for the
wisest and the holiest, it is only themselves, not God, they enjoy.
Yet mischievous as they are, often as I have preached against them,
I never have taken, nor shall I take, any part in their
persecution.’[150]

‘I have had plentiful opportunity,’ continued Ruysbroek, ‘for
observing these men. I would divide them into four classes.[151]
First of all there are those whose doctrine sins especially against
the Holy Ghost. They say the essential Godhead works not, but the
Holy Ghost doth: that they belong to that Divine Essence, and will
rest in like manner;—that they are, therefore, above the Spirit of
God. They hold that, after time, all things will be God, one
absolute Quiescence, without distinction and without change. So they
will neither know nor act, neither think nor thank, but be free from
all desire, all obligation. This they call Poverty of Spirit. I say
it is a devilish poverty, and such souls must be poor as hell in
divine love and knowledge.

‘The second class say, with like blasphemy, ‘We are divine by
nature. There is one God, and we are identical with Him. We with Him
have created all things; if we had not chosen, we had not been born.
It was our own choice to exist as we do. God can do nothing without
us, and we give Him therefore no preference, pay Him no homage.
Honour to Him is honour to us. What we are we would be, what we
would be we are; with God we have created ourselves and all things;
heaven and earth hang on our will.’ This insane spiritual pride is
flatly contrary to all catholic doctrine.

‘The third class sin not less against the Son. They say, we are as
much incarnate as Christ was, and, in the same sense, divine sons of
God. Had He lived long enough, He would have attained to the same
contemplative quiet we enjoy. Retired into our inmost selves, we
find ourselves the same Wisdom of God which Christ is. When He is
honoured, we are honoured, for we are identical with Him.

‘The fourth class declare that neither God nor themselves,
heaven nor hell, action nor rest, good nor evil, have any real
existence. They deny God and the work of Christ, Scripture,
sacraments,—everything. God is nothing; they are nothing; the
universe is nothing.

‘Some hold doctrines such as these in secret, and conform outwardly,
for fear. Others make them the pretext for every kind of vice and
insolent insubordination. Of a truth we should cross ourselves when
we but speak of them, as in the neighbourhood of spirits from the
pit.’

‘And what hope,’ said Tauler, ‘of better things, while the Church is
crowded with hirelings, and, with lust and bravery, everywhere leads
on the world in sin?’

‘What hope, indeed!’ mournfully responded Ruysbroek. ‘The grace of
the sacraments is shamefully bought and sold. Rich transgressors may
live as they list. The wealthy usurer is buried before the altar,
the bells ring, the priest declares him blessed. I declare that if
he died in unrighteousness, not all the priests in Christendom, not
all his hoards lavished to feed the poor, could save him from
perdition. See, too, the monks, mendicants and all, what riches!
what sumptuous fare! what licence, in violation of every vow! what
odious distinctions! Some have four or five garments, another
scarcely one. Some revel with the prior, the guardian, and the
lector in the refectory, at a place of their own. Others must be
content with herring and cabbage, washed down with sour beer. Little
by little the habit is changed, black becomes brown, grey is
exchanged for blue, the white must be of the finest stuff, the shape
of the newest cut.’

‘This,’ said Tauler, ‘is what I so much admire in your little
community here. You have practically abolished those mischievous
distinctions, the cause of so much bitterness in our religious
houses. Every one has his place, but no one is degraded. You
yourself will perform the meanest offices, as the other morning,
when Arnstein found you sweeping the lectorium. Yours is the true
canonical life—the life of a family. Every one is ready to do kind
offices for his brethren, and your own example teaches daily
forgetfulness of self.’

Ruysbroek looked uneasy under these praises, and they spoke again of
the prevalent evils in the Church.[152]

‘How many nuns have I seen,’ said Ruysbroek, ‘daintily attired, with
silver bells to their girdles, whose prison was the cloister and
their paradise the world! A retinue of forty reiters is a moderate
attendance for a prelate out on a visitation. I have known some
priests who engaged themselves as business agents to laymen; others
who have entered the service of ladies of rank, and walked behind
them as footmen into church. A criminal has but to pay money down,
and he may serve the devil for another year. A trim reckoning, and
satisfaction for all parties! The bishop gets the gold, the devil
gets the soul, and the miserable fool the moment’s pleasure of his
lust.’[153]

When, one day, they were conversing on future rewards and
punishments, I remember hearing Ruysbroek say—‘I trust I am ready
for all God sends me, life or death, or even hell-pains themselves.’
An attainment of virtue inconceivable to me.[154]

At Grünthal I saw much of a lay brother named John Affliginiensis,
the cook of the community.[155] He accompanied Ruysbroek thither.
Though wholly unlettered, he serves daily as a goodly ensample of
the active and contemplative life united. It is his calling to see
to the dinners of the brethren; he is scarce less helpful to their
devotions. That he is a good plain cook I can bear witness, and to
the edifying character of the discourses he sometimes delivers to
the canons, all testify. He scarcely sleeps at all, goes meanly
clad, and eats the veriest refuse of the convent fare. He is one of
the meekest and most humble of men—has had his sore fights of
temptation, fierce inward purgations, and also his favoured hours
and secret revelations. Ruysbroek loves him like a brother. The
esteem in which he is held, and the liberty of speech allowed him,
is characteristic of the simple and brotherly spirit which dwells
among these worthy canons. Grünthal is not, like so many religious
houses, a petty image of the pettiest follies of the world. There
they do seem to have withdrawn in spirit from the strife and pomp of
secular life. Gladly would I spend my last years among the beeches
and the oaks that shut in their holy peace. But while I may I must
be doing; had my call been to the contemplative life I should have
been moulded in another fashion.

On our journey back from Louvain I had rare entertainment. We had
scarcely passed out beyond the gates, when Tauler rode forward, in
deep discourse with an ecclesiastic of the party. A hasty glance at
our fellow-travellers, as we mustered at the door of the hostelry,
had not led me to look for any company likely to eke out a day’s
travel with aught that was pleasant or of profit. But I was
mistaken. I espied ere long, a neat, merry-looking little man, in a
minstrel’s habit, with a gittern slung at his back. To him I joined
himself, and he, pleased evidently with the notice I took of him,
sang me songs and told me stories all the way. He said his name was
Muscatblut, and I was not sorry to be able to gratify him by
answering that his fame had already reached my ears.[156] He had
store of songs, with short and long lines curiously interwoven in a
way of his own, a very difficult measure to write, as he assured
me—the very triumph of his heart. These love-lays he interspersed
with riddles and rhyming proverbs, with quaint allegories, satires
on clerks and monks, and stories about husbands and wives, making
all within hearing roll in their saddles with laughter. He had
likewise certain coarse songs, half amatory, half devotional, tagged
with bits of slang and bits of Latin, about the wooing of our Lady.
I told him, to his surprise, to stop; it was flat blasphemy. He said
the voluptuous passages of his lay were after Frauenlob’s best
manner, and as to the sacred personages, by St. Bartholomew! many a
holy clerk had praised that part most of all, calling it a deep
allegory, most edifying to the advanced believer.

At Cologne I parted from the Doctor with many embraces. On my way
back to Strasburg I took boat up the Mayne to Frankfurt, whither
business called me. We passed a little woody island in the midst of
the river, which was pointed out to me as the residence of the
leprous barefooted friar, whose songs and airs are so popular
throughout the Rhineland. I looked with reverence at the melancholy
spot. There he dwells alone, shut out from mankind, yet delighting
and touching every heart. His songs are sweet as the old knightly
lays of love, full of courtly grace and tenderness, and yet they are
songs for the people from one truly of themselves. The burgher has
his minstrelsy now, as well as the noble. This at least is a good
sign.

Note to page 321.

From this time forward, Rulman Merswin gave himself up to the spiritual guidance of Nicholas the layman—taking him to be to him ‘in God’s stead.’ He took no step without his direction, and wrote at his command his book entitled Von den vier ioren sins anevohenden lebendes—a record of what may be called his spiritual apprenticeship. Nicholas took a copy of it back with him to the Oberland. Schmidt has brought together what is known of Merswin, in the Appendix to his life of Tauler, pp. 177, &c.

The Book of the Nine Rocks was commenced in 1352. It has been published in Diepenbrock’s edition of the works of Suso, to whom it was, till recently, attributed. The claim of Merswin to its authorship is established beyond question—(Schmidt, 180). The work opens by relating how, early one morning in Advent, a man (the author) was warned of God to prepare himself, by inward retirement, for that which He should show him. He was made to behold a vision full of strange and alarming appearances. He cried out, ‘Ah, my heart’s Love! what meanest thou with these mysterious symbols?’ He struggled hard against the phantoms of his trance, but the marvellous forms only multiplied the more. He was constrained by a divine voice to gaze, and commanded, in spite of his humble remonstrances, to write in a book what he saw—the image of the corruptions of Christendom, for the warning of the guilty and the edification of the faithful. The dialogues are given at length between him and God—‘the Man’ and ‘the Answer.’ For eleven weeks, in sickness and spiritual distress, he wavered. He was but a poor, ignorant layman; how should he presume to exhort the Church? ‘The Voice of the Answer’ is heard saying, ‘Came not thy reluctance from humility, I would consign thee to the pit. I see I must compel thee. In the name of the Holy Trinity, I command thee to begin to write this day.’

The souls of men proceeding from God, but few of them returning to their Original, are shown him under the similitude of multitudes of fish, brought down by the descent of great waters from the summit of a mountain. Men in the valley are catching them in nets. Scarce half of them reach the sea below. There the remnant swim in all directions, and at length endeavour to leap back, up to the source whence they came. Numbers are taken in the nets; only a few reach even the base of the mountain. Some who ascend higher fall back upon the rocks and die. A very few, springing from rock to rock, reach exhausted, the fountain at the top, and there forget their pains.

The twenty following chapters are occupied with a dialogue, in which the divine Voice enumerates the characteristic sins of all classes of mankind, from the pope to the begging friar—from the emperor to the serf.

Then commences the vision of the Nine Rocks. A mountain, enormous in breadth and height, fills all the scene. As the eye travels up the ascent, it beholds nine steep rocks, each loftier than that which preceded it,—the highest lost in the heavens. From the lowest the whole surface of the earth is visible. A net is spread over all the region beneath, but it does not reach the mountain. The multitudes seen beneath it are men in mortal sin. The men standing on the first and lowest rock are religious persons, but such as are lukewarm, defective in aspiration and in zeal. They dwell dangerously near the net—(cap. xxiii.). Some, from the first rock, are seen making their way up the precipice, and reaching the second, where they become of dazzling brightness. Those on the second rock have heartily forsaken the world; they will suffer less in purgatory, enjoy more in heaven, than those beneath; but they, too, are far from their Origin yet, and in danger of spiritual pride, self-seeking, and of growing faint and remiss in their painful progress—(cap. xxiv.). Those on the third rock, fewer in number, suffering far more severely in time, are nearer to God, will suffer little in purgatory, and are of yet more glorious aspect than their predecessors—(cap. xxv.). Such is the process to the summit. All the nine rocks must be surmounted, would we return to our Divine Source. But few attain the last, which is indeed the Gate of the Origin—the consummate blessedness, in which the believer, fearless of hell and purgatory, has annihilated self, and hath no wish or will save that of God. One of these true worshippers brings more blessing to Christendom than thousands of such as live after their own will, and know not that they are nothing.

Finally, ‘the man’ is permitted a moment’s glance into the Divine ‘Origin.’ The rapture of that moment he attempted in vain to describe;—no reflection, no image, could give the least hint of it.

Both Rulman and ‘the Friend of God in the Oberland’ believed themselves repeatedly warned of God in visions, that they should build a house for him in Strasburg. The merchant purchased a ruined cloister on a little island in the river Ill, without the city walls. He restored the church, and erected a stone belfry. Nicholas advised him to bestow it on the Johannites, in preference to any other Order,—for there had been no little rivalry among the monks as to who was to enjoy the gift. The conditions of the deed for which he stipulated with the Master of the Order are indicative of the new and more elevated position which mysticism had taught the laity to claim. The government of the house was to rest entirely with a lay triumvirate; the two survivors always to choose a third. The first three governors were Rulman himself, Heinzmann Wetzel, knight, and John Merswin, burg-graf. The admission of brethren rested with these heads of the house, and they were free to receive any one, clerk or layman, knight or serving man, whether belonging to the order of St. John or not, requiring only that he should bring with him the moderate sum requisite to render his residence no burden on the convent. (Schmidt, p. 189.)

Note to page 329.

The passage to which Tauler is made to refer is contained in the third book of the Spiritual Nuptials, chap. 5:—‘Ind alle die minschen die bouen ir geschaffenheit verhauen sin in eyn schauwende leuen, die synt eyn mit deser gotlicher clairheit, ind sij sint die clairheit selver. Ind sy sien ind gevoilen ind vynden sich selver ouermitz dit gotliche licht, dat sy sin der selue eynveldige gront na wijse irre ungeschaffenheit, da de clairheit sonder mias vs schynt in gotlicher wijsen ind na sympelheit des wesens eynueldich binnen blijfft ewelich sonder wise. Ind hervm soilen die innyge schauwende minschen vsgayn na wijse des schauwens bouen reden ind bouen vnderscheit ind bouen ir geschaffen wesen mit ewigen instarren ouermitz dat ingeboiren licht, soe werden sy getransformeirt ind eyn mit desem seluen licht da sy mede sien ind dat sy sien. Ind also vervolgen die schauwende minschen ir ewich bilde da si zo gemacht sin ind beschauwen got ind alle dinck sonder vnderscheit in eyme eynveldigen sien in gotlicher clairheit. In dat is dat edelste ind dat vrberlichste schauwen da men zo komen mach in desem leuen.’—Vier Schriften, p. 144.

[And all men who are exalted above their creatureliness into a contemplative life are one with this divine glory,—yea, are that glory. And they see, and feel, and find in themselves, by means of this divine light, that they are the same simple Ground as to their uncreated nature (i.e., in respect of their ideal pre-existence in the Son), since the glory shineth forth without measure, after the divine manner, and abideth within them simply and without mode (particular manifestation or medium), according to the simplicity of the essence. Wherefore interior contemplative men should go forth in the way of contemplation above reason and distinction, beyond their created substance, and gaze perpetually by the aid of their inborn light, and so they become transformed, and one with the same light, by means of which they see, and which they see. Thus do contemplative men arrive at that eternal image after which they were created, and contemplate God and all things without distinction in a simple beholding, in divine glory. And this is the loftiest and most profitable contemplation whereto men may attain in this life.]

This passage, and others like it, gave rise to the charge of pantheism brought by Gerson against Ruysbroek in the following century. The prior of Grünthal found a defender in Schönhoven, who pointed with justice to numerous expressions in the writings of the accused, altogether incompatible with the heresy alleged. Quite inconsistent with any confusion of the divine and human is Ruysbroek’s fine description of the insatiable hunger of the soul—growing by that it feeds on,—the consciousness that all possessed is but a drop to the illimitable undeemed Perfection yet beyond. (‘Wi leren in waerheit sijns aenschijns dat al dat wi gesmaken tegen dat ons ontblijft dat en is niet een draep tegen al die zee, dit verstormt onsen geest in hetten ende in ongeduer van mynnen.’—Von dem funkelnden Steine, x. p. 194.) So again he says, ‘Want wy enmogen te mael niet got werden ende onse gescapenheit verliesen, dat is onmoegelic’—p. 190; and similarly that we become one with God in love, not in nature, (‘ouerformet ende een mit hem in sijnre minnen, niet in sijnre naturen.’)—Spiegel der Seligkeit, xxiv.

Note to page 329.

Ruysbroek expressed to Gerard Groot, in these very words, his belief in the special guidance of the Holy Spirit vouchsafed for the composition of his books on these ‘deep things’ of the kingdom. (Engelhardt, p. 168.)

The doctrine of Ruysbroek is substantially the same with that of his friend and brother-mystic, Tauler. Whether speaking the high German of the upper Rhine or the low German of the Netherlands, mysticism gives utterance to the same complaint and the same aspiration. Ruysbroek is individually less speculative than Eckart, less practical than Tauler. The Flemish mystic is a more submissive son of the Church than the stout-hearted Dominican of Strasburg, and lays proportionally more stress on what is outward and institutional. He is fond of handling his topics analytically. His numerous divisions and subdivisions remind us of the scholastic Richard of St. Victor, but Ruysbroek, less methodical by nature, and less disciplined, more frequently loses sight of his own distinctions. The subject itself, indeed, where it possesses the writer, repudiates every artificial treatment. While he specifies with minuteness the stages of the mystical ascent, Ruysbroek does not contend that the experience of every adept in the contemplative life must follow the precise order he lays down. (Geistl. Hochzeit, ii. § 30, p. 71.) He loves to ally the distinctions he enumerates in the world of nature, in the operations of grace, in the heavenly state, and in the Divine Being, by a relationship of correspondence. Thus the seven planets and the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit answer to each other. The Empyrean in the external world corresponds to Pure Being in the divine nature, to the Spark of the soul in man, and to the Contemplative stage of his spiritual experience. This scheme of analogies, incidental in Ruysbroek and the earlier mystics, makes up almost the whole system of mystics like Behmen and Swedenborg. His elaborate comparison of the operations of grace to a fountain with three streams (one of which refreshes the memory, another clarifies the understanding, while a third invigorates the will), resembles strikingly the fanciful method of Madame Guyon in her Torrents, and of St. Theresa in her Degrees of Prayer. (Geistl. Hochzeit, xvii. § 36, p. 80.) The mysticism of Ruysbroek is less sensuous than that of the poetical Suso. Beyond question the higher elevation of the contemplative life must have been a welcome refuge to many devout minds wearied with vain ritual, penance, and routine. As acknowledged contemplatists, they could escape without scandal from contact with the grosser machinery of their religion. Accordingly, to claim superiority to means and modes was by no means always the arrogant pretension it may seem to us. Tauler’s ‘state above grace’ was the ark of an unconscious Protestantism. Where the means were made the end, wisdom forsook them, and rejoiced to find that the name of mystic could shelter spirituality from the dangers of the suspected heretic. Ruysbroek, however, felt the want of such a protection for freer thought, much less than did Tauler and some of his more active followers.

Footnote 129:

See Hecker’s _Black Death_ (trans. by Dr. Babington, 1853).—Hecker
gives the documents relating to the trial of the Neustadt Jews in an
appendix, from the _Chronicle_ of Jacob of Königshoven. See also pp.
103-127.

Footnote 130:

These fanatics were everywhere foremost among the instigators of the
cruelties perpetrated on the Jews. Women, and even children, joined
their ranks in great numbers, wearing the hats with red crosses,
carrying flags, and scourging themselves with the rest. The
particulars given are taken from the account in Jacob von
Königshoven’s _Elsassische u. Strassburgische Chronik_, inserted
entire in Wackernagel,—(p. 931). The chronicler says:—‘Zuo Strôsburg
kam mê denne tûsent manne in ire geselleschaft, und siu teiltent sich
zuo Strôsburg: eine parte der geischelaere gieng das lant abe, die
ander parte das lant ûf. und kam sô vil volkes in ire bruoderschaft,
das es verdrôs den bôbest und den keiser und die phafheit. und der
keiser verschreip dem bôbeste das er etwas hie zuo gedaechte: anders
die geischeler verkêrtent alle die welt.’ The Flagellants claimed
power to confess and give absolution. The thirty-four days’ scourging
among them was to make a man as innocent as a babe—the virtue of the
lash was above all sacraments. Thus the people took religion into
their own hands, blindly and savagely,—no other way was then possible.
It was a spasmodic movement of the mass of life beneath, when the
social disorder that accompanied the pestilence had loosened the grasp
of the power temporal and spiritual which held them down so long.

Footnote 131:

See Schmidt’s Tauler, p. 58.

Footnote 132:

Laguille’s Histoire d'Alsace, liv. xxv. p. 290.

Footnote 133:

Hecker, p. 81.

Footnote 134:

Schmidt’s Tauler, p. 59.

Footnote 135:

See Note, p. 336.

Footnote 136:

Ruysbroek sent a copy of his book, _De ornatu spiritualium nuptiarum_,
to the Friends of God in the Oberland. He had many friends in Cologne,
and it is very likely that the work may have reached Tauler there,
either through them or from the author, who must have heard of him.

Footnote 137:

See Johannes Ruysbroek, by Engelhardt, p. 168.

Footnote 138:

Froissart, book ii. chap. 40.

Footnote 139:

Froissart, chapp. 41, 42.

Footnote 140:

Ibid., book i. chap. 34.

Footnote 141:

Optimum aliena insania frui.

Footnote 142:

Engelhardt, p. 326.

Footnote 143:

It is certain that Ruysbroek was visited during the many years of his
residence in Grünthal, much after the manner described, and also that
Tauler was among the visitors, though the exact time of his journey is
not known.

Footnote 144:

See Engelhardt, pp. 189, 288.—According to Ruysbroek, the Trinitarian
process lies at the basis of the kingdoms both of Nature and of Grace.
There is a flowing forth and manifestation in the creative Word,—a
return and union of love by the Holy Ghost. This process goes on
continually in the providential government of the universe, and in the
spiritual life of believers. The upholding of the world, and the
maintenance of the work of grace in the heart, are both in different
ways a perpetual bringing forth of the Son, by whom all things
consist, and who is formed in every devout soul. Ruysbroek is careful
to state (as a _caveat_ against pantheism) that such process is no
necessary development of the divine nature,—it is the good pleasure of
the Supreme. (See _Vier Schriften von J. Ruysbroek, in niederdeutscher
Sprache_, by A. v. Arnswaldt; Hanover, 1848.) ‘Wi hebben alle boven
onse ghescapenheit een ewich leuen in gode als in onse leuende sake
die ons ghemaect ende ghescapen heest van niete, maer wi en sijn niet
god noch wi en hebben ons seluen niet ghemaeckt. _Wi en sijn ooc niet
wt gode ghevloten van naturen_, maer want ons god ewelijc ghevoelt
heest ende bekent in hem seluen, so heest hi ons ghemaeckt, niet van
naturen noch van node, _maer van vriheit sijns willen_,’—p. 291.
(_Spiegel der Seligkeit_, xvii.)

The bosom of the Father, he says, is our proper ground and origin (der
schois des vaders is onse eygen gront ind onse oirsprunck); we have
all, therefore, the capacity for receiving God, and His grace enables
us to recognise and realise this latent possibility (offenbairt ind
brengit vort die verboirgenheit godes in wijsen),—p. 144.

Footnote 145:

Engelhardt, pp. 183, 186. Ruysbroek speaks as follows of that
fundamental tendency godward of which he supposes prevenient grace
(vurloiffende gracie) to lay hold:—‘Ouch hait der mynsche eyn
naturlich gront neygen zo gode overmitz den voncken der sielen ind die
overste reden die altzijt begert dat goide ind hasset dat quaide. Mit
desen punten voirt got alle mynschen na dat sijs behoeven ind
ecklichen na sinre noit,’ &c.—_Geistl. Hochzeit_, cap. 3.

Ruysbroek lays great stress on the exercise of the will. ‘Ye are as
holy as ye truly will to be holy,’ said he one day to two
ecclesiastics, inquiring concerning growth in grace. It is not
difficult to reconcile such active effort with the passivity of
mysticism. The mystics all say, ‘We strive towards virtue by a
strenuous use of the _gifts_ which God communicates, but when God
communicates _Himself_, then we can be only passive—we repose, we
enjoy, but all operation ceases.’

Footnote 146:

Engelhardt, pp. 195, 199.

Footnote 147:

Engelhardt, pp. 201, 213. In the season of spiritual exaltation, the
powers of the soul are, as it were, absorbed in absolute essential
enjoyment (staen ledich in een weselic gebrucken). But they are not
annihilated, for then we should lose our creatureliness.—Mer si en
werden niet te niete, want soe verloeren wy onse gescapenheit. Ende
alsoe lange als wy mit geneichden geeste ende mit apen ogen sonder
merken ledich staen, alsoe lange moegen wy schouwen ende gebruken. Mer
in den seluen ogenblijc dat wy proeven ende merken willen wat dat is
dat wy geuoelen, so vallen wy in reden, ende dan vynden wy onderscheit
ende anderheit tusschen ons ende gade, ende dan vynden wy gade buten
ons in onbegripelicheiden.—_Von dem funkelnden Steine_, x.

Footnote 148:

See first Note, p. 338.

Footnote 149:

See second Note, p. 338.

Footnote 150:

Engelhardt, p. 225. Schmidt’s _Tauler_, p. 61.—The same doctrine which
furnished a sanctuary for the devotion of purer natures supplied also
an excuse for the licence of the base. Wilful perversion, or mere
ignorance, or some one of the manifold combinations of these two
factors, would work the mystical exhortation into some such result as
that denounced by Ruysbroek. We may imagine some bewildered man as
speaking thus within himself:—‘So we are to covet ignorance, to
surmount distinctions, to shun what is clear or vivid as mediate and
comparatively carnal, to transcend means and bid farewell to the
wisdom of the schools. Wise and devout men forsake all their learning,
forget their pious toil and penance, to lose themselves in that ground
in which we are united to God,—to sink into vague abstract confusion.
But may I not do at first what they do at last? Why take in only to
take out? I am empty already. Thank heaven! I haven’t a distinct idea
in my head.’

It is so that the popular mind is sure to travesty the
ultra-refinements of philosophy.

Footnote 151:

Engelhardt, pp. 224-228.—Eckart, like Hegel, would seem to have left
behind him a right-hand and a left-hand party,—admirers like Suso and
Tauler, who dropped his extreme points and held by such saving clauses
as they found; and headstrong spirits, ripe for anarchy, like these
New-Lights or High-Fliers, the representatives of mysticism run to
seed. Ruysbroek’s classification of them is somewhat artificial;
fanaticism does not distribute itself theologically. In the treatise
entitled _Spiegel der Seligkeit_, § 16, he describes them generally as
follows:—‘Ander quade duulische menschen vint men, die segghen dat si
selue Cristus sijn of dat si god sijn, ende dat haer hant hemel ende
erde ghemaect heest, ende dat an haer hant hanghet hemel ende erde
ende alle dinc, ende dat si verheuen sijn boven alle die sacramenten
der heiligher kerken, ende dat si der niet en behoeuen noch si en
willen der ooc niet.’ He represents their claim to identity with God
as leading to a total moral indifference (§ 17):—‘Ende sulke wanen god
sijn, ende si en achten gheen dinc goet noch quaet, in dien dat si hem
ontbeelden connen ende in bloter ledicheit haer eighen wesen vinden
ende besitten moghen.’ Their idea of the consummation of all things
savours of the Parisian heresy—the offspring of John Scotus,
popularised by David of Dinant and his followers. The final
restitution is to consist in the resolution of all creatures into the
Divine Substance:—‘So spreken si voort dat in den lesten daghe des
ordels enghele ende duuele, goede ende quade, dese sullen alle werden
_een eenvoudighe substancie der godheit_ ... ende na dan, spreken si
voort, en sal god bekennen noch minnen hem seluen noch ghene
creature’—(§ 16).

Footnote 152:

Engelhardt, pp. 326-336.—Good Ruysbroek was fully entitled to the
encomium placed in the mouth of Tauler. He himself, like Bernard,
would frequently perform the meanest offices of the cloister. The
happy spirit of brotherhood which prevailed among the canons of
Grünthal made a deep impression on that laborious practical reformer,
Gerard Groot, when, in 1378, he visited the aged prior. What he then
saw was not without its influence in the formation of that community
with which his name is associated—the Brethren of the Common Life.—See
Ullmann, _Reformatoren vor der Reformation_, vol. ii.

Footnote 153:

Engelhardt, p. 330.—Ruysbroek inveighs with much detail against the
vanities of female dress—as to those hair-pads, sticking up like great
horns, they are just so many ‘devil’s nests.’

Footnote 154:

Ruysbroek expressed himself in these words to Gerard Groot
(Engelhardt, p. 168). In his touching description of the ‘desolation’
endured by the soul on its way upward toward the ‘super-essential
contemplation,’ he makes the sufferer say,—‘O Lord, since I am thine
(want ich din eygen bin), I would as soon be in hell as in heaven, if
such should be thy good pleasure; only do thy glorious will with me, O
Lord!‘—_Geistl. Hochzeit_, § 30. Ruysbroek, like Fénelon, abandons
himself thus only on the supposition that even in hell he should still
retain the divine favour;—so impossible after all is the absolute
disinterestedness toward which Quietism aspires. The Flemish mystic
distinguishes between the servants of God, the friends, and the sons.
Those worshippers who stand in the relation of friends have still
something of their own (besitten oer inwendichkeit mit eygenscap) in
their love to God. The sons ascend, ‘dying-wise,’ to an absolute
emptiness. The friends still set value on divine bestowments and
experiences; the sons are utterly dead to self, in bare modeless love
(in bloeter, wiseloeser mynnen). Yet, very inconsistently, he
represents the sons as more assured of eternal life than the friends.
(_Von dem funkelnden Steine_, § 8.)

Footnote 155:

A veritable personage. He died in 1377, and left behind him a book
recording the conflicts he underwent and the revelations vouchsafed
him. (Engelhardt, p. 326.)

Footnote 156:

The lyrics of Muscatblut are characterised by Gervinus (ii. p. 225),
and the same authority gives some account, from the _Limburg
Chronicle_, of the famous friar, leper, and poet mentioned by
Arnstein.

CHAPTER VIII.

Unde planctus et lamentum?
Quid mentem non erigis?
Quid revolvis monumentum?
Tecum est quem diligis;
Jesum quæris, et inventum
Habes, nec intelligis.

Unde gemis, unde ploras?
Verum habes gaudium.
In te latet quod ignoras
Doloris solatium.
Intus habes, quæris foras
Languoris remedium.[157]

HYMN OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.

Vivo sin vivir mi,
Y tan alta vida espero
Que muero porque no muero.[158]

ST. THERESA.

On the next evening Atherton resumed his reading as follows:—

Chronicle of Adolph Arnstein, continued.

1354. _March. St. Brigitta’s Day._—A fortnight ago this day, there
came to me, to buy as goodly a battle-axe as could be made, young
Sir Ulric—the same who, at the tourney the other day, graced his
new-won spurs by such gallant feats of arms. We fell into talk about
the great floods which have everywhere wrought of late such loss of
life, and cattle, and husbandry. He said he had but the day before
saved the life of a monk who, with his companion, had been carried
beyond his depth by the force of the water, as they were wading
across the fields.

‘The one most in danger,’ said Ulric, ‘had a big book in his bosom.
As he flounders about, out tumbles the book; he lets go his staff,
and makes after it; and souse he goes, over head and ears in a
twinkling. The other stands stock still, and bawls out to me for
help. I, just sworn to succour the distressed and be true to the
Church, spur Roland, plunge in, and lift out the draggled, streaming
father by the hood, half throttled and half drowned, but clutching
the book in his frozen fingers as though it were a standard or a
fair lady’s token. I lay him before me across my horse; his fellow
catches hold of my stirrup, and we land on the rising ground. When
my monk had somewhat come to himself, he pours as many blessings on
my head as there were drops running from his habit; not, he said,
for saving his poor life merely, but that the book was safe. He had
just finished writing it—there was not another copy in the world—the
devil had an especial spite against it—no doubt the fiend had raised
the waters to destroy the seed which fed men’s souls as well as the
grain which nourished their bodies; but the faithful God had sent
me, like his angel, just in time for rescue. I saw them in safety,
and he promised to remember me in his orisons. His name, I think he
said, was Seusse or Suso.’[159]

So Suso is in Strasburg, thought I,—the man I have long wished to
see. I lost no time in inquiring after him at the Dominican convent.
There I found, with no small satisfaction, that he was none the
worse for his mishap; saw him several times, and persuaded him, at
last, to honour for a few days my unworthy roof. He has been with us
for a week, but must pursue his journey to-morrow. On my part, I
could tell him news about Ruysbroek, and Tauler, and some of his old
friends at Cologne. On his, he has won the love of all the household
by his gentle, affectionate nature, blessed us by his prayers, and
edified every heart by his godly conversation. My good wife would
love him, if for nothing else, because he so loves the little ones.
They love him because he always goes with them to feed the old
falcon, and to throw out crumbs for the sparrows, because he joins
them in petting Argus, and talks so sweetly about the Virgin and
Child, and the lilies and violets and roses, and the angels with
gold-bright wings that live in heaven. Those three tall fellows, my
boys, fonder of sword-play, wrestling, and camping the bar, than of
churchmen or church-going, will listen to him by the hour, while he
tells of his visions, his journeys, his dangers, and his
deliverances. Rulman Merswin also came over and spent two evenings
with us. He talked much with Suso about Master Eckart. Suso was full
of reminiscences and anecdotes about him. In his youthful days he
had been his disciple at Cologne.

‘At one time,’ said Suso, ‘I was for ten years in the deepest
spiritual gloom. I could not realize the mysteries of the faith. A
decree seemed to have gone forth against me, and I thought I was
lost. My cries, my tears, my penance,—all were vain. I bethought me
at last of consulting my old teacher, left my cell, sailed down the
Rhine, and at Cologne the Lord gave to the words of the master such
power that the prison-doors were opened, and I stepped out into the
sunshine once more. Neither did his counsel cease with life. I saw
him in a vision, not long after his death. He told me that his place
was in the ineffable glory, and that his soul was divinely
transformed in God. I asked him, likewise, several questions about
heavenly things, which he graciously answered, strengthening me not
a little in the arduous course of the inner life of
self-annihilation. I have marvelled often that any, having tasted of
the noble wine of his doctrine, should desire any of my poor
vintage.’[160]

In talking with the brethren at the convent, while Suso was their
guest, I heard many things related concerning him altogether new to
me. I was aware that he had been greatly sought after as a preacher
in German throughout the Rhineland, and stood high in the esteem of
holy men as a wise and tender-hearted guide of souls. That he was an
especial friend of the Friends of God wherever he found them, I
knew. When at Cologne I heard Tauler praise a book of his which he
had in his possession, called the _Horologe of Wisdom_.[161]
Something of the fame of his austerities, conflicts, and
revelations, had come to my ears, but the half had not been told me.

It seems that his life, from his eighteenth to his fortieth year,
was one long self-torture. The Everlasting Wisdom (who is a tree of
life to them that lay hold upon her, more precious than rubies, and
with whom are durable riches and righteousness) manifested herself
to him. This was his call to the spiritual life. He seemed to behold
her—a maiden, bright as the sun,—her crown, eternity;—her raiment,
blessedness;—her words, sweetness; unknown, and yet well known;
near, and yet afar off; smiling on him, and saying, ‘My son, give me
thine heart!’ From that time forth he dedicated his life to her
service. He called himself the servant of the Eternal Wisdom, armed
his soul as her knight, wooed her as his heart’s queen, bore without
a murmur the lover’s pangs of coyness, doubt, and distance, with all
the hidden martyrdom of spiritual passion.[162]

But the rose of his love, as he is wont to term it, had fearful
thorns. I heard with a shudder of what he underwent that he might
crush to death his naturally active, buoyant, impulsive temperament.
Day and night he wore a close-fitting shirt in which were a hundred
and fifty sharp nails, the points turned inward on the flesh. In
this he lay writhing, like a mangled worm; and lest in his sleep he
should find some easier posture, or relieve with his hands in any
way the smart and sting that, like a nest of vipers, gnawed him
everywhere, he had leather gloves made, covered with sharp blades,
so that every touch might make a wound. Time after time were the old
scars opened into new gashes. His body appeared like that of one who
has escaped, half dead, from the furious clutches of a bear. This
lasted sixteen years, till a vision bade him cease.

Never satisfied with suffering, he devised a new kind of discipline.
He fashioned a wooden cross, with thirty nails whose points stood
out beyond the wood, and this he wore between his shoulders
underneath his garments, till his back was one loathly sore. To the
thirty nails he added afterwards seven more, in honour of the
sorrows of the Mother of God. When he would administer the
discipline, he struck a blow on this cross with his fist, driving
the points into his wounded flesh. He made himself, moreover, a
scourge, one of the iron tags of which was bent like a fisher’s
hook, and with this he lashed himself till it broke in his hand. For
many years he lay at nights in a miserable hole he called his cell,
with an old door for his bed, and in the depth of winter thought it
sin to approach the stove for warmth. His convent lay on a little
island where the Rhine flows out of the Lake of Constance. He could
see the sparkling water on every side. His wounds filled him with
feverish thirst; yet he would often pass the whole day without
suffering a drop to moisten his lips. His recompence was the vision
in which, at one time, the Holy Child brought him a vessel of
spring-water; and, at another, Our Blessed Lady gave him to drink
from her own heart. Such, they tell me, was his life till his
fortieth year, when it was signified to him that he should remit
these terrible exercises. He is now, I believe, little more than
fifty years old—the mere wreck of a man to look at; but with such
life and energy of spirit that, now he hath begun to live more like
other people, he may have a good thirty years before him still.[163]

I questioned him about his book called the _Horologe of Wisdom_, or
_Book of the Eternal Wisdom_, for it hath gone abroad under both
names. He said it was finished in the year 1340, since which time he
hath written sundry other pieces. He declared to me that he wrote
that treatise only in his most favoured moments, himself ignorant
and passive, but under the immediate impulse and illumination of the
Divine Wisdom. He afterwards carefully examined all he had written,
to be sure that there was nothing in his pages other than the holy
Fathers had taught, and the Church received.[164] Methought, if he
was sure of his inspiration, he might have spared himself this pain,
unless the Holy Spirit could in some sort gainsay his own words.

He is strongly moved by music,—but what must have been his rapture
to hear the hymns of the heavenly host! He has seen himself
surrounded by the choir of seraphim and cherubim. He has heard a
voice of thrilling sweetness lead the response, ‘Arise and shine,
Jerusalem,’ and has wept in his cell with joy to hear from angels’
lips, at early dawn, the soaring words, ‘Mary, the morning star, is
risen to-day.’ Many a time has he seen a heavenly company sent down
to comfort him. They have taken him by the hand, and he has joined
in spirit in their dance,—that celestial dance, which is a blissful
undulation to and fro in the depths of the divine glory. One day,
when thus surrounded in vision, he asked a shining prince of heaven
to show him the mode in which God had His secret dwelling in his
soul. Then answered the angel, ‘Take a gladsome look into thine
inmost, and see how God in thy loving soul playeth His play of
love.’ Straightway (said Suso to me) I looked, and behold the body
about my heart was clear as crystal, and I saw the Eternal Wisdom
calmly sitting in my heart in lovely wise: and, close by that form
of beauty, my soul, leaning on God, embraced by His arm, pressed to
His heart, full of heavenly longing, transported, intoxicated with
love![165]

We were talking one evening of May-day eve, and asking Suso wherein
their custom of celebrating that festival differed from our own. He
said that in Suabia the youths went out, much in our fashion,
singing songs before the houses of the maidens they loved, and
craving from them garlands in honour of the May. He told us how he,
in like manner, besought Our Lady with prayers and tears that he
might have a garland from her Son, the Eternal Wisdom. It was his
wont, he said, to set up a spiritual May-pole—the holy cross, that
May-bough of the soul, blossoming with grace and beauty. ‘Before
this,’ he continued, ‘I performed six venias,[166] and sung the
hymn, ‘Hail, holy cross!’ thereafter praising God somewhat thus:—

‘Hail! heavenly May of the Eternal Wisdom, whose fruit is
everlasting joy. First, to honour thee, I bring thee, to-day, for
every red rose a heart’s love; then, for every little violet a lowly
inclination; next, for every tender lily, a pure embrace; for every
bright flower ever born or to be born of May, on heath or grassplot,
wood or field, tree or meadow, my heart doth bring thee a spiritual
kiss; for every happy song of birds that ever sang in the kindly
May, my soul would give thee praises inexhaustible; for every grace
that ever graced the May, my heart would raise thee a spiritual
song, and pray thee, O thou blest soul’s May! to help me so to
glorify thee in my little time below, that I may taste thy living
fruit for evermore above!‘[167]

The beginning of a new stage of trial was made known to him by the
appearance, in a vision, of an angel, bringing him the attire and
the shoes of a knight. With these he was to gird himself for new and
yet more terrible conflicts. Concerning his own austerities he never
speaks, nor does he show to any one the letters of the name of
Jesus, which he is said to have cut with a style upon his bosom. But
of the sufferings which came upon him from without, he talks freely.
At one time, when in Flanders, he was brought before the chapter on
a charge of heresy; but his enemies gained not their wicked
end.[168] He was in greatest danger of his life shortly before the
coming of the plague, when the fearful rumour was abroad about the
poisoning of the wells. He himself told me the story, as follows:—

‘I was once despatched on a journey in the service of the convent,
and they gave me as my companion a half-witted lay-brother. We had
not been many days on the road, when, one morning, having early left
our quarters for the night, we arrived, after a long, hungry walk
through the rain, at a village on the banks of the Rhine. It
happened to be the fair-time. The street was full of booths and
stalls, horses and cattle, country-folk, players, pedlers, and idle
roystering soldiers. My fellow-traveller, Peter, catches sight of a
sign, and turns in straightway to warm himself at the fire, telling
me I can go on, do what I have to do, and I shall find him there. As
I learnt after, he sits himself down to table with a ruffianly set
of drovers and traders that had come to the fair, who first of all
make him half-drunk, and then seize him, and swear he has stolen a
cheese. At this moment there come in four or five troopers, hardened
fellows, ripe for any outrage, who fall on him also, crying, ‘The
scoundrel monk is a poisoner.’ The clamour soon gathers a crowd.

‘When Peter sees matters at this pass, he piteously cries out to
them to loose him, and stand still and listen: he will confess
everything. With that they let go their hold, and he, standing
trembling in the midst of them, begins: ‘Look at me, sirs,—you see I
am a fool; they call me silly, and nobody cares for what I say: but
my companion, he is a wise man, so our Order has given him the
poison-bag, and he is to poison all the springs between here and
Alsace. He is gone now to throw some into the spring here, to kill
every one that is come to the fair. That is why I stayed here, and
would not go with him. You may be sure that what I say is true, for
you will see him when he comes with a great wallet full of bags of
poison and gold pieces, which he and the Order have received from
the Jews for this murderous business.’

‘At these words they all shouted, ‘After the murderer! Stop him!
Stop him!’ One seized a spear, another an axe, others the first tool
or weapon they could lay hands on, and all hurried furiously from
house to house, and street to street, breaking open doors,
ransacking closets, stabbing the beds, and thrusting in the straw
with their swords, till the whole fair was in an uproar. Some
friends of mine, who heard my name mentioned, assured them of my
innocence of such an abominable crime, but to no purpose. At last,
when they could nowhere find me, they carried Peter off to the
bailiff, who shut him up in the prison.

‘When I came back to the inn, knowing nothing of all this, the host
told me what had befallen Peter, and how this evil rumour had
stirred up the whole fair against me. I hastened off to the bailiff
to beg Peter’s release. He refused. I spent nearly the whole day in
trying to prevail with him, and in going about in vain to get bail.
At last, about vesper time, with a heavy sum of gulden I opened the
heart of the bailiff and the doors of the jail.

‘Then my greatest troubles began. As I passed through the village,
hoping to escape unknown, I was recognised by some of the mob, and
in a moment they were swarming about me. ‘Down with the poisoner!’
they cried. ‘His gold shall not serve him with us as it did with the
bailiff.’ I ran a little way, but they closed me in again, some
saying, ‘Drown him in the Rhine;’ others answering, ‘No, burn him!
he’ll poison the whole river if you throw him in.’ Then I saw
(methinks I see him now) a gigantic peasant in a russet jerkin,
forcing his way through the crowd, with a pike in his hand. Seizing
me by the throat with one hand, and flourishing the pike in the
other, he shouted, ‘Hear me, all of you. Let me spit him with my
long pike, like a poisonous toad, and then plant it in this stout
hedge here, and let the caitiff howl and twist in the air till his
soul goes home to the devil. Then every one that goes by will see
his withered carcass, rotting and wasting, and sink him deeper down
in hell with curses. Come on,—it serves him right.’

‘My brain swam round. I closed my eyes. I expected the next instant
to feel the iron. By some merciful interposition, the wretch was not
suffered to execute his purpose. I thought I saw some of the better
sort looking on with horror-stricken faces, but they dared not
interfere. The women shrieked and wrung their hands. I made my way
from one to another of those who seemed least pitiless, beseeching
them to save me. Heaven must have heard my cries, though man did
not. They stood round watching me, disputing with horrid oaths among
themselves what they should do. At length—as I had sunk on my knees
under the hedge, praying for deliverance—I saw a priest, more like
an angel than a man, mightily thrusting them from side to side, and
when he reached me, laying his hand on my arm, he looked round on
the ring of savage faces, and threatened them with the hottest
curses of the Church if they harmed a hair upon the head of her
servant; outvoiced their angry cries with loud rebukes of their
cowardice, cruelty, and sacrilege, and led me out safely through
them all. He brought me to his house, made fast the doors, refreshed
and sheltered me for the night, and by the earliest dawn I was away
and safe upon my journey, while that abode of the wicked was sunk in
its drunken sleep. I keep the anniversary of that dreadful day, and
never shall I cease to praise the goodness which answered my prayer
in the hour of need, and delivered me as a bird from the snare of
the fowler.[169]

‘On one other occasion only,’ continued Suso, ‘did I taste so nearly
the bitterness of death.’

We begged him to tell us the adventure, and so he did, somewhat
thus—

‘I was once on my way home from Flanders, travelling up the Rhine. A
great feebleness and sickness had been upon me for some days, so
that I could not walk fast, and my companion, young and active, had
gone on about two miles ahead. I entered an old forest whose trees
overhung the steep river bank. It was evening, and it seemed to grow
dark in a moment as I entered the chilling shadow of a wood, in
which many a defenceless passenger had been robbed and slain. I had
gone on deeper and deeper into the growing gloom, the wind among the
pines sounding like a hungry sea. The fall of my own footsteps
seemed like the tread of one coming after me. I stood still and
hearkened. It was no one; when suddenly I saw, not far off among the
trees, two persons, a man and a woman, talking together and watching
me. I trembled in every limb, but I made the sign of the cross, and
passed on. Soon I heard quick footsteps behind me. I turned—it was
the woman. She was young and fair to look on. She asked my name, and
when she learnt it, said she knew and reverenced me greatly, told me
how that robber with whom I saw her had forced her to become his
wife, and prayed me there and then to hear her confession.

‘When I had shriven her, think how my fear was heightened to see her
go back and talk long and earnestly with the robber, whose brow grew
dark, as he left her without a word, and advanced gloomily towards
where I stood. It was a narrow pathway; on the one side the forest,
on the other the precipice, sheer down to the rapid river. Alas,
thought I, as my heart sank within me, now I am lost. I have not
strength to flee: no one will hear a cry for help: he will slay me,
and hide the body in the wood. All was still. I listened in vain for
the sound of a boat, a voice, or even the bark of a dog. I only
heard the feet of the outlaw and the violent beating of my own
heart. But, lo! when he approached me, he bowed his knee, and began
to confess. Blessed Mary, what a black catalogue! While he spake I
heard, motionless, every word of the horrible recital, and yet I was
all the time listening for rescue, watching his face, and minutely
noting every little thing about his person. I remember the very
graining of the wood of his lance which he laid aside on the grass
when he knelt to me—the long knife in his belt—his frayed black
doublet—his rough red hair, growing close down to his shaggy
eyebrows—two great teeth that stood out like tusks—and his hands
clasped, covered with warts, and just the colour of the roots of the
tree by which I stood. Even during those fearful moments, I can call
to mind distinctly how I marked a little shining insect that was
struggling among the blades of grass, climbing over a knot of wood,
and that got upon a fir-cone and fell off upon its back.

‘After revealing to me crimes that made my blood run cold, he went
on to say, ‘I was once in this forest, just about this hour of the
day, on the look-out for booty as I was this evening, when I met a
priest, to whom I confessed myself. He was standing just where you
are now, and when my shrift was ended, I drew out this knife,
stabbed him to the heart, and rolled his body down there into the
Rhine.’ When I heard this, the cold sweat burst out upon my face; I
staggered back giddy, almost senseless, against the tree. Seeing
this, the woman ran up, and caught me in her arms, saying, ‘Good
sir, fear nothing, he will not kill you.’ Whereat the murderer said,
‘I have heard much good of you, and that shall save your life
to-day. Pray for me, good father, that, through you, a miserable
sinner may find mercy in his last hour.’ At this I breathed again,
and promised to do as he would have me. Then we walked on some way
together, till they parted from me, and I reached the skirts of the
wood, where sat my companion waiting. I could just stagger up to
him, and then fell down at his side, shivering like a man with the
ague. After some time I arose, and we went on our way. But I failed
not, with strong inward groaning, to plead with the Lord for the
poor outlaw, that he might find grace and escape damnation. And, in
sooth, I had so strong an assurance vouchsafed to me of God, that I
could not doubt of his final salvation.’

With stories such as these of what befel himself, and many others,
whom he knew in Suabia and the Oberland, or met with on his
journeys, the holy man whiled away our windy March nights by the
ingle. Very edifying it was to hear him and Rulman Merswin talk
together about the higher experiences of the inward life.

Concerning the stages thereof, Suso said that the first consisted in
turning away from the world and the lusts of the flesh to God: the
second, in patient endurance of all that is contrary to flesh and
blood, whether inflicted of God or man: the third, in imitating the
sufferings of Christ, and forming ourselves after his sweet
doctrine, gracious walk, and pure life. After this, the soul must
withdraw itself into a profound stillness, as if the man were dead,
willing and purposing nought but the glory of Christ and our
heavenly Father, and with a right lowly demeanour toward friend and
foe. Then the spirit, thus advanced in holy exercise, arriveth at
freedom from the outward senses, before so importunate; and its
higher powers lose themselves in a supernatural sensibility. Here
the spirit parts with its natural properties, presses within the
circle which represents the eternal Godhead, and reaches spiritual
perfection. It is made free by the Son in the Son.

‘This I call,’ he said, ‘the transit of the soul,—it passes beyond
time and space, and is, with an amorous inward intuition, dissolved
in God. This entrance of the soul banishes all forms, images, and
multiplicity; it is ignorant of itself and of all things; it hovers,
reduced to its essence, in the abyss of the Trinity. At this
elevation there is no effort, no struggle; the beginning and the end
are one.[170] Here the Divine Nature doth, as it were, embrace, and
inwardly kiss through and through, the soul; that they may be for
ever one.[171] He who is thus received into the Eternal Nothing is
in the Everlasting Now, and hath neither before nor after. Rightly
hath St. Dionysius said that God is Non-being—that is, above all our
notions of being.[172] We have to employ images and similitudes, as
I must do in seeking to set forth these truths, but know that all
such figures are as far below the reality as a blackamoor is unlike
the sun.[173] In this absorption whereof I speak, the soul is still
a creature, but, at the time, hath no thought whether it be creature
or no.’[174]

Suso repeated several times this saying—‘A man of true
self-abandonment must be _un_built from the creature, _in_-built
with Christ, and _over_-built into the Godhead.’[175]

We bid adieu with much regret to this excellent man, and his visit
will abide long in our memory. We drew from him a half promise that
he would come to see us yet again.

_May, 1354._—Oh, most happy May! My brother Otto hath returned,
after trading to and fro so long in foreign parts. He is well and
wealthy, and will venture forth no more. What store of marvellous
tales hath he about the East! What hairs-breadth escapes to relate,
and what precious and curious things to show! Verily, were I to
write down here all he hath to tell of, I might be writing all my
days.

Only one thing will I note, while I think of it. He visited Mount
Athos, now fourteen years ago: he described to me the beauty of the
mountain, with its rich olives and lovely gardens, and the whole
neighourhood studded with white convents and hermitages of holy men.
Some of the monasteries were on rocks so steep that he had to be
drawn up by a rope in a basket to enter them. The shrines were
wondrous rich with gold and silver and precious stones. But nowhere,
he said, was he more martyred by fleas. When he was there, a new
doctrine or practice which had sprung up among the monks (taught, it
is said, by a certain Abbot Simeon), was making no small stir. There
was to be a synod held about it at that time in Constantinople. It
seems that some of the monks (called, if I mistake not, Hesychasts)
held that if a man shut himself up in a corner of his cell, with his
chin upon his breast, turning his thoughts inward, gazing towards
his navel, and centering all the strength of his mind on the region
of the heart; and, not discouraged by at first perceiving only
darkness, held out at this strange inlooking for several days and
nights, he would at length behold a divine glory, and see himself
luminous with the very light which was manifested on Mount Tabor.
They call these devotees Navel-contemplators. A sorry business! All
the monks, for lack of aught else to do, were by the ears about
it,—either trying the same or reviling it.[176]

Methought if our heretics have their extravagances and utmost
reaches of mystical folly here, there are some worse still among
those lazy Greeks.

KATE. And is that the end of Arnstein’s journal?

ATHERTON. No more has come down to posterity.

MRS. ATHERTON. That last piece of news from Mount Athos seems quite familiar to me. I have just been reading Curzon’s Monasteries of the Levant, and thanks to him, I can imagine the scenery of the mountain and its neighourhood: the Byzantine convents, with their many little windows rounded at the top, the whole structure full of arches and domes,—the little farms interspersed, with their white square towers and cottages of stone at the foot,—the forests of gigantic plane trees, with an underwood of aromatic evergreens,—flowers like those in the conservatory everywhere growing wild,—waterfalls at the head of every valley, dashing down over marble rocks,—and the bells, heard tinkling every now and then, to call the monks to prayer.

WILLOUGHBY. The crass stupidity of those Omphalopsychi shows how little mere natural beauty can contribute to refine and cultivate,—at any rate when the pupils are ascetics. The contemporary mysticism of the East looks mean enough beside the speculation, the poetry, and the action of the German mystics of the fourteenth century. It is but the motionless abstraction of the Indian Yogi over again.

ATHERTON. Yet you will be unjust to the Greek Church (which has little enough to boast of) if you reckon this gross materialist Quietism as the only specimen of mysticism she has to show during this period. There was a certain Cabasilas, Archbishop of Thessalonica,[177] a contemporary of our German friends, an active man in the political and religious movements of the time, whose writings exhibit very fairly the better characteristics of Byzantine mysticism. His earnest practical devotion rests on the basis of the traditional sacerdotalism, but he stands between the extremes of the objective and the subjective mysticism, though naturally somewhat nearer to the former. He presents, however, nothing original to detain us;—so let us away to supper.

Note to page 354.

The following passage, placed in the mouth of the Everlasting Wisdom may serve as a further specimen of the sensuous and florid cast of Suso’s language:—

‘I am the throne of joy, I am the crown of bliss. Mine eyes are so bright, my mouth so tender, my cheeks so rosy-red, and all my form so winning fair, that were a man to abide in a glowing furnace till the Last Day, it would be a little price for a moment’s vision of my beauty. Behold! I am so beauteously adorned with a robe of glory, so delicately arrayed in all the blooming colours of the living flowers—red roses, white lilies, lovely violets, and flowers of every name, that the fair blossoms of all Mays, and the tender flowerets of all sunny fields, and the sweet sprays of all bright meadows, are but as a rugged thistle beside my loveliness.’ (Then he breaks into verse):—

‘I play in the Godhead the play of joy,
And gladden the angel host on high
With a sweetness such that a thousand years
Like a vanishing hour of time run by.

‘... Happy he who shall share the sweet play, and tread at my side the joy-dance of heaven for ever in gladsome security. One word from my sweet mouth surpasses all the songs of angels, the sound of all harps, and all sweet playing on stringed instruments.... Lo! I am a good so absolute that he who hath in time but one single drop thereof finds all the joy and pleasure of this world a bitterness,—all wealth and honour worthless. Those dear ones who love me are embraced by my sweet love, and swim and melt in the sole Unity with a love which knows no form, no figure, no spoken words, and are borne and dissolved into the Good from whence they sprang,’ &c.—Leben, cap. vii. p. 199.

The following is a sample of Suso’s old Suabian German, from the extracts given by Wackernagel, p. 885:—

‘Entwürt der ewigen wisheit. Zuo uallende lon lit an sunderlicher frœd. die diu sel gewinnet von sunderlichen vnd erwirdigen werken mit dien si hie gesiget hat. alz die hohen lerer, die starken marterer. Vnd die reinen iungfrowen. Aber wesentliche lon. lit an schöwlicher ver einung der sele mit der blossen gotheit. Wan e geruowet si niemer, e si gefueret wirt über alle ir krefte vnd mugentheit. vnd gewiset wirt in der personen naturlich wesentheit. Vnd in dez wesens einvaltig blosheit. Vnd in dem gegenwurf vindet si denn genuegde vnd ewige selikeit. Vnd ie ab gescheidener lidiger usgang. ie frier uf gang., Vnd ie frier uf gang. ie neher in gang. in die wilden wuesti. vnd in daz tief ab gründe der wiselosen gotheit in die siu versenket ver swemmet vnd uer einet werdent. daz siu nit anderz mugen wellen denn daz got wil, vnd daz ist daz selb wesen daz do got ist. daz ist daz siu selig sint. von genaden. als er selig ist von nature. [Answer of the Everlasting Wisdom.—Adventitious reward consists in a particular joy which souls receive for particular worthy deeds wherein they have here been conquerors,—such, for example, are the lofty teachers, the stout martyrs, and the pure virgins. But essential reward consists in contemplative union of the soul with the bare Godhead: for she resteth not until she be carried above all her own powers and possibility, and led into the natural essentiality of the Persons, and into the simple absoluteness of the Essence. And in the reaction she finds satisfaction and everlasting bliss. And the more separate and void the passage out (of self), the more free the passage up; and the freer the passage up, the nearer the passage into the wild waste and deep abyss of the unsearchable Godhead, in which the souls are sunk and dissolved and united, so that they can will nothing but what God wills, and become of one nature with God,—that is to say, are blessed by grace as He is blessed by nature.]

Footnote 157:

Why smite thy breast and lament? why not lift up thy soul? why
meditate for ever on the sign? He thou lovest is within thee. Thou
seekest Jesus—thou hast him; he is found, and thou perceivest it not.
Why these groans, this weeping? The true joy is thine; hidden within
thee, though thou knowest it not, lies the solace of thine anguish;
thou hast within, thou seekest without, the cure for thy languishing
soul.

Footnote 158:

I live, but with no life of mine, and long towards a life so high—I
die because I do not die.

Footnote 159:

The _Life of Suso_, published in Diepenbrock’s edition of his works,
was written by his spiritual daughter, Elsbet Stäglin, according to
the account she received at various intervals from his own lips. He
sprang from a good family,—his name, originally Heinrich vom Berg. The
name of Suso he adopted from his mother, a woman remarkable for her
devotion. The secret name of Amandus, concealed till after his death,
was supposed to have been conferred by the Everlasting Wisdom himself
on his beloved servant.

The incident of the rescue of himself and his book from the floods, by
the timely intervention of a knight passing that way, is related in
the twenty-ninth chapter of the _Life_, p. 68.

Footnote 160:

Heinrich Suso’s _Leben und Schriften_, von M. Diepenbrock (1837), pp.
15, 51, 86. Diepenbrock’s book is an edition of the biography by
Stäglin, and of the _Book of the Everlasting Wisdom_, &c., from the
oldest manuscripts and editions, and rendered into modern German.

Footnote 161:

_Leben_, cap. 48,—where it is also said that, on one occasion, as ‘the
servant was preaching at Cologne, one of his auditors beheld his face
luminous with a supernatural effulgence.’ It is known that Tauler
possessed a copy of the _Horologium Sapientiæ_.

See also Schmidt’s _Tauler_, p. 169. Comp. _Leben_, cap. xxxi. p. 72,
and cap. xlix.

Footnote 162:

Leben, cap. iv.

Footnote 163:

_Leben_, cap. xvii.-xx. Suso died in 1385 at Ulm; he was born about
the commencement of the century.

Footnote 164:

Suso sent a Latin version of the book of the Everlasting Wisdom, under
the title _Horologium Sapientiæ_, to Hugo von Vaucemain, Master of the
Order, for his approval. The date of the work is fixed between 1333
and 1342. The prologue contains the account of the ‘_inspiratio
superna_’ under which the work was written.—(_Diepenb. Vorbericht_, p.
6.) It was translated ere long into French, Dutch, and English, and
appears to have been in the fourteenth century almost what the
_Imitatio Christi_ became in the fifteenth.—_Ibid._, p. 15.

Footnote 165:

Leben, cap. vi.

Footnote 166:

Reverences or prostrations.

Footnote 167:

Leben, capp. x. and xiv.

Footnote 168:

Leben, cap. xxii. p 5; and xxv.

Footnote 169:

This incident is related at length in the twenty-seventh chapter of
the _Life_; and the adventure with the robber, which follows, in the
succeeding. The account given in the text follows closely in all
essential particulars the narrative in the biography.

Footnote 170:

_Leben_, cap. lvii. Suso speaks to this effect in a dialogue with his
spiritual daughter. She describes in another place (p. 74) how she
drew Suso on to talk on these high themes, and then wrote down what
follows.

Footnote 171:

_Ibid._, cap. xxxiv. p. 80; and comp. _Buch. d. E. Weisheit_, cap.
vii. p. 199.

Footnote 172:

_Buchlein von d. E. Weisheit_, Buch. iii. cap. ii.; and _Leben_, cap.
lvi. p. 168, and p. 302.

Footnote 173:

Leben, p. 171.

Footnote 174:

Extravagant as are his expressions concerning the absorption in God,
Suso has still numerous passages designed to preclude pantheism;
declaring that the distinction between the Creator and the creature is
nowise infringed by the essential union he extols. The dialogue with
the ‘nameless Wild,’ already alluded to, is an example.—Comp. _Leben_,
cap. lvi. pp. 166, 167, and _Buch. d. E. W._, Buch. iii. cap. vi.

Footnote 175:

Leben, cap. liii. p. 148. See Note, p. 357.

Footnote 176:

Schröckh’s Kirchengeschichte, vol. xxxiv. pp. 431-450.

Footnote 177:

See _Die Mystik des Nikolaus Cabasilas vom Leben in Christo_, von Dr.
W. Gass (1849).—In this work, Dr. Gass publishes, for the first time,
the Greek text of the seven books, _De Vita in Christo_, with an able
introduction. The authority for this summary of the theological
tendency of Cabasilas will be found, pp. 210-224.

CHAPTER IX.

Di Meistere sprechen von zwein antlitzen der sêle. Daz eine antlitze
ist gekart in dise werlt. Daz ander antlitze ist gekart di richte in
got. In diseme antlitze lûchtet und brennet got êwiclîchen, der
mensche wizzes oder enwizzes nicht.[178]—HERMANN VON FRITZLAR.

KATE. I should like to know what became of our mysterious ‘Layman,’ Nicholas of Basle.

ATHERTON. He lived on many years, the hidden ubiquitous master-spirit of the Friends of God; expending his wealth in restless rapid travels to and fro, and in aiding the adherents of the good cause; suddenly appearing, now in the north and now in the south, to encourage and exhort, to seek out new disciples and to confirm the old; and again vanishing as suddenly, concealing his abode even from his spiritual children, while sending them frequent tracts and letters by his trusty messenger Ruprecht; growing ever more sad and earnest under repeated visions of judgment overhanging Christendom; studying the Scriptures (which had opened his eyes to so much of Romanist error) somewhat after the old Covenanter fashion, with an indiscriminate application of Old Testament history, and a firm belief that his revelations were such as prophets and apostles enjoyed,—till, at last, at the close of the century, he was overtaken at Vienna by the foe he had so often baffled, and the Inquisition yet more ennobled a noble life by the fiery gift of martyrdom.[179]

GOWER. I can well imagine what a basilisk eye the Inquisition must have kept on these lay-priests—these indefatigable writers and preachers to the people in the forbidden vernacular—these Friends of God, Beghards, and Waldenses; and on those audacious Ishmaels, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, most of all. I fancy I see it, lurking always on the edge of any light, watching and watching, as they say the Indian lizard does, crouched in the shadow just outside the circle of light a lamp makes upon the ceiling, to snatch up with its arrowy tongue the moths which fly toward the fascinating brightness.

WILLOUGHBY. And do not let us forget that even those pantheistic Brethren of the Free Spirit, with all their coarseness and violence of exaggeration, held at least some little truth, and might plead a large excuse. If some of them broke blindly through all restraint, they made at any rate a breach in priestcraft better used by better men.—

GOWER.—Just as the track where buffaloes have made their huge crashing way through the forest, has often guided the hunter of the backwoods.

ATHERTON. We must not think that the efforts of such a man as Nicholas were fruitless, whatever the apparent success of his persecutors.—

GOWER.—Though history has paid him too little attention, and though the Inquisition paid him too much. How I love to find examples of that consoling truth that no well-meant effort for God and man can ever really die—that the relics of vanished, vanquished endeavours are gathered up and conserved, and by the spiritual chemistry of Providence transformed into a new life in a new age, so that the dead rise, and mortality puts on immortality. The lessons such men scattered, though they might seem to perish, perpetuated a hidden life till Luther’s time;—like the dead leaves about the winter tree, they preserved the roots from the teeth of the frost, and covered a vitality within, which was soon to blossom on every bough in the sunshine of the Reformation.

ATHERTON. Our fourteenth century, so full of mysticism both in East and West, has some other mystical products to show, principally of the visionary, theurgic species. There is St. Brigitta, a widow of rank, leaving her Swedish pine forests to visit Palestine, and after honouring with a pilgrimage every shrine and relic in southern Europe, fixing her residence at Rome, to the great pecuniary advantage of the faithful there. She writes a discourse on the Blessed Virgin at the dictation of an angel, who visited her punctually for the purpose: indites bombastic invocations to the eyes, ears, hair, chin, &c., of the Saviour; and ditto to ditto of the Virgin; and, what was not quite so bad, gives to the world a series of revelations and prophecies, in which the vices of popes and prelates are lashed unsparingly, and threatened with speedy judgment.[180]

WILLOUGHBY. It would be interesting to trace this series of reformatory prophets, male and female. From the twelfth to the close of the fifteenth century there is a succession of them, called forth by the hideousness of ecclesiastical corruption—Hildegard, Joachim, Brigitta, Savonarola.

GOWER. Do not forget Dante.

ATHERTON. You hear them all executing variations, plaintive or indignant, menacing or despairing, on the old and never antiquated theme—

Curia Romana non petit ovem sine lanâ,
Dantes exaudit, non dantibus ostia claudit.

GOWER. And, to silence these complaints, the Church found inquisitors and censors of service, but most of all—her pattern children—those enthusiasts whose painful labours were employed to quiet the croaking, much as the lord in old feudal times would often exercise his right of compelling a vassal to spend a night or two in beating the waters of the ponds, to stop the frog-chorus there, and procure his master an easy sleep. Obedient enthusiasm toils all night that cardinals may snore.

ATHERTON. Angela de Foligni, who made herself miserable—I must say something the converse of flourished—about the beginning of the fourteenth century, was a fine model pupil of this sort, a genuine daughter of St. Francis. Her mother, her husband, her children dead, she is alone and sorrowful. She betakes herself to violent devotion—falls ill—suffers incessant anguish from a complication of disorders—has rapturous consolations and terrific temptations—is dashed in a moment from a seat of glory above the empyrean to a depth so low that the floor of hell might be its zenith. She tells us how, on her way to Assisi, the Saviour addressed her, called her his love, his sweet, his joy; and manifested himself within her soul as he had never done to evangelist or apostle. On one occasion, her face shone with a divine glory, her eyes were as flaming lamps; on another, a star proceeded from her side, broke into a thousand beautiful colours, and glided upwards into the sky.[181]

WILLOUGHBY. A notable example of mystical pyrotechny.

ATHERTON. Her etherialised olfactories were gratified by odours of indescribable fragrance; and to her exalted taste, the consecrated wafer became almost insupportably delicious. Visions and ecstasies by scores are narrated from her lips in the wretched Latin of Arnold the Minorite. All is naught! The flattest and most insipid reading in the world—from first to last a repetition of the old stock phrase, ‘feelings more readily imagined than described.’ She concludes every account by saying, ‘No words can describe what I enjoyed;’ and each rapture is declared to surpass in bliss all the preceding.

LOWESTOFFE. Enough! enough!

ATHERTON. Catharine of Siena——

WILLOUGHBY. No more, pray.

ATHERTON. Only this one. Catharine of Siena closes the century. She is a specimen somewhat less wretched, of this delirious mysticism. Her visions began when she was six years old, and a solemn betrothal to our Lord was celebrated, with ring and vow, not very long after. She travelled through the cities and hamlets of Italy, teaching, warning, expostulating, and proclaiming to assembled crowds the wonders she had seen in heaven and hell during that trance in which all had thought her dead. She journeyed from Florence to Avignon, and back to Florence again, to reconcile the Pope and Italy; she thrust herself between the spears of Guelph and Ghibelline—a whole Mediæval Peace-Society in her woman’s heart—and when she sank at last, saw all her labour swept away, as the stormy waters of the Great Schism closed over her head.[182]

GOWER. What a condemning comment on the pretended tender mercies of the Church are those narratives which Rome delights to parade of the sufferings, mental and bodily, which her devotees were instructed to inflict upon themselves! I am reminded of the thirsting mule, which has, in some countries, to strike with its hoof among the spines of the cactus, and drink, with lamed foot and bleeding lips, the few drops of milk which ooze from the broken thorns. Affectionate suffering natures came to Rome for comfort; but her scanty kindness is only to be drawn with anguish from the cruel sharpness of asceticism. The worldly, the audacious, escape easily; but these pliant excitable temperaments, so anxiously in earnest, may be made useful. The more dangerous, frightful, or unnatural their performances, the more profit for their keepers. Men and women are trained by torturing processes to deny their nature, and then they are exhibited to bring grist to the mill—like birds and beasts forced to postures and services against the laws of their being—like those who must perform perilous feats on ropes or with lions, nightly hazarding their lives to fill the pockets of a manager. The self-devotion of which Rome boasts so much is a self-devotion she has always thus made the most of for herself. Calculating men, who have thought only of the interest of the priesthood, have known well how best to stimulate and to display the spasmodic movements of a brainsick disinterestedness. I have not the shadow of a doubt that, once and again, some priest might have been seen, with cold grey eye, endeavouring to do a stroke of diplomacy by means of the enthusiastic Catharine, making the fancied ambassadress of heaven in reality the tool of a schemer. Such unquestionable virtues as these visionaries may some of them have possessed, cannot be fairly set down to the credit of the Church, which has used them all for mercenary or ambitious purposes, and infected them everywhere with a morbid character. Some of these mystics, floating down the great ecclesiastical current of the Middle Age, appear to me like the trees carried away by the inundation of some mighty tropical river. They drift along the stream, passive, lifeless, broken; yet they are covered with gay verdure, the aquatic plants hang and twine about the sodden timber and the draggled leaves, the trunk is a sailing garden of flowers. But the adornment is not that of nature—it is the decoration of another and a strange element; the roots are in the air; the boughs, which should be full of birds, are in the flood, covered by its alien products, swimming side by side with the alligator. So has this priestcraft swept its victims from their natural place and independent growth, to clothe them in their helplessness, with a false spiritual adornment, neither scriptural nor human, but ecclesiastical—the native product of that overwhelming superstition which has subverted and enslaved their nature. The Church of Rome takes care that while simple souls think they are cultivating Christian graces, they shall be forging their own chains; that their attempts to honour God shall always dishonour, because they disenfranchise themselves. To be humble, to be obedient, to be charitable, under such direction, is to be contentedly ignorant, pitiably abject, and notoriously swindled.

ATHERTON. Strong language, Lionel,—yet not unjust to the spirit of the Romanist system. The charity which pities the oppressed is bound to denounce the oppressor.

WILLOUGHBY. Rem acu tetigisti. If you call priestcraft by smooth names, your spurious charity to the tyrant is uncharitableness to the slave. It is sickening to hear the unctuous talk with which now-a-days ultra-liberalism will sometimes stretch out a hand to spiritual tyranny.

ATHERTON. Not surprising. It is just like the sentimental sympathy got up for some notorious criminal, which forgets the outrage to society and the sufferings of the innocent, in concern for the interesting offender.

And now let us bid adieu to that fourteenth century which has occupied us so long. I shall only afflict you with one more paper,—to-morrow, Lowestoffe, if we don’t go to Hawksfell. Some notes I have drawn up on the contemporary Persian mysticism.

WILLOUGHBY. Stay—do not let us forget that little book, so much read in the fifteenth century, and praised and edited by Luther,—the German Theology.[183] I have read it with great interest. It seems to me to stand alone as an attempt to systematise the speculative element in the more orthodox mysticism of the age.

ATHERTON. We may call it a summary of Tauler’s doctrine, without his fancy and vehement appeal; it is a treatise philosophic in its calmness, deservedly popular for its homely, idiomatic diction. What we were saying about Tauler applies substantially to the Theologia Germanica.

MRS. ATHERTON. I have been waiting to hear something about Thomas à Kempis,[184]—certainly the best known of all your mystics.

ATHERTON. Right. Who could forget the comforter of the fifteenth century? It is curious to compare the third book of his Imitation of Christ, with its dialogue between Christ and the disciple, and Suso’s conversation, in his Book of the Eternal Wisdom, between Wisdom and the Servant.

GOWER. There is less genius, less abandon, if one may so say, about Thomas.

ATHERTON. Decidedly. That original and daring spirit which carried mysticism to such a height in the fourteenth century, could not survive in the fifteenth,—an age tending towards consolidation and equilibrium, bent on the softening down of extremes. Suso, a poet as much as an ascetic, is continually quitting his cell to admire nature and to mix with men. He mingles speculation borrowed from his master, Eckart, with the luxuriant play of his own inexhaustible fancy. Thomas à Kempis is exclusively the ascetic. His mysticism ranges in a narrower sphere. Hence, to a great extent, his wider influence. He abjures everything that belongs to the thought of the philosopher or the fine feeling of the artist. He appeals neither to the intellect nor to the imagination—simply to the heart. He could be understood without learning, appreciated without taste, and so thousands, in castle and in cloister, prayed and wept over his earnest page. ‘See!’ said he, ‘this life is filled with crosses.’ And multitudes, in misery, or fear of misery, made answer, ‘It is true.’—‘Then,’ urged the comforter, ‘be thyself crucified to it, and it cannot harm thee. Cease to have any care, any aim, any hope or fear, save Christ. Yield thyself, utterly passive and dead to this life, into his hands who is Lord of a better.’ Then the sufferers dried their tears, and strove hard to forget time and self in contemplating Christ.

GOWER. And, let us hope, not always quite in vain.

ATHERTON. I have one more name yet upon my list, with which the mediæval mysticism reaches its conclusion. It is the great Frenchman, Chancellor Gerson.[185] His figure stands out prominently among the confusions of the time, half-way between the old age and the new. Up to a certain point, he is a reformer; beyond it, the enemy of reform. He is active in the deposition of John XXII., yet he does not hesitate to burn John Huss. He looks on, with a smile of satisfaction, when the royal secretaries stab with their penknives the papal bulls, and the rector tears the insolent parchment into shreds. He sees, half with pity and half with triumph, the emissaries of the Pope, crowned in mockery with paper tiaras, and hung with insulting scrolls, dragged through the streets in a scavenger’s tumbril, to be pilloried by angry Paris. But he stands aloof in disdain when the University, deserted by the Parliament, fraternizes with the mob to enforce reform,—when threadbare students come down from their garrets in the Pays Latin to join the burly butchers of St. Jacques la Boucherie,—when grave doctors shake hands with ox-fellers, and Franciscans and White-hoods shout together for the charter.

WILLOUGHBY. And very wrong he was, too, for those butchers, rough as they were, were right in the main,—honest, energetic fellows, with good heads on their shoulders. Could they but have raised money, they would have saved France. But Gerson would rather be plundered than pay their tax, and had to hurry down for hiding to the vaults of Notre Dame. I remember the story. And when the princes came back to power, the moderates were pillaged like the rest,—and serve them right.

ATHERTON. Yes, the reform demanded was just and moderate, and even the rioters lost none of their respect for royalty, feeling still in their rude hearts no little of that chivalrous loyalty which animated Gerson himself when he bent low before the poor idiot king, and with oriental reverence exclaimed, ‘O King, live for ever!’ Gerson was a radical in the Church and a conservative in the State—the antagonist of the political republicanism, the champion of the ecclesiastical. His sanguine hopes of peace for his country and of reform for his Church, were alike doomed to disappointment.

His great work on the theory and practice of mysticism was composed during the stormy period of his public life. Imagine how happily he forgot popes and councils, Cabochiens and Armagnacs, during those brief intervals of quiet which he devoted to the elaboration of a psychology that should give to mysticism a scientific basis. Nominalist as he was, and fully conscious of the defects of scholasticism, then tottering to its fall, he differs little in his results from Richard of St. Victor. He closes the series of those who have combined mysticism with scholasticism, and furnishes in himself a summary and critical resumé of all that had previously been accomplished in this direction. He was desirous at once of making mysticism definite and intelligible, and of rendering the study of theology as a science more practical, devout, and scriptural. Hence his opposition to the extravagance of Ruysbroek on the one side, and to the frigid disputation of the schools on the other. He essays to define and investigate the nature of ecstasy and rapture. He even introduces into mysticism that reflection which its very principle repudiates. He recommends an inductive process, which is to arrange and compare the phenomena of mysticism as manifest in the history of saintly men, and thence to determine the true and legitimate mystical experience, as opposed to the heterodox and the fantastic. He maintains that man rises to the height of abstract contemplation, neither by the intellectual machinery of Realism, nor by the flights of Imagination. If he attempts the first, he becomes a heretic; if the second, a visionary. The indispensable requisite is what he calls ‘rapturous love.’ Yet even this is knowledge in the truest sense, and quite compatible with a rational, though impassioned self-consciousness. His doctrine of union is so temperate and guarded as almost to exclude him from the genuine mystical fellowship. He has no visions or exaltations of his own to tell of. Resembling Richard in this respect, to whom he is so much indebted, he elaborates a system, erects a tabernacle, and leaves it to others to penetrate to the inmost sanctuary. Like Bernard, he thinks those arduous and dazzling heights of devotion are for ‘the harts and climbing goats,’ not for active practical men such as the Chancellor. Above all, urges this reformer both of the schoolmen and the mystics, clear your mind of phantasms—do not mistake the creations of your own imagination for objective spiritual realities. In other words, ‘Be a mystic, but do not be what nine mystics out of every ten always have been.’

But now let us have a walk in the garden.

* * *

Thither all repaired. They entered the conservatory to look at the flowers.

‘Which will you have, Mr. Atherton,’ asked Kate, ‘to represent your mystics? These stiff, apathetic cactuses and aloes, that seem to know no changes of summer and winter, or these light stemless blossoms, that send out their delicate roots into the air?’

‘Those Aroideæ, do you mean?’ replied Atherton. ‘I think we must divide them, and let some mystics have those impassive plants of iron for their device, while others shall wear the silken filaments of these aërial flowers that are such pets of yours.’

As they came out, the sun was setting in unusual splendour, and they stood in the porch to admire it.

‘I was watching it an hour ago,’ said Gower. ‘Then the western sky was crossed by gleaming lines of silver, with broken streaks of grey and purple between. It was the funeral pyre not yet kindled, glittering with royal robe and arms of steel, belonging to the sun-god. Now, see, he has descended, and lies upon it—the torch is applied, the glow of the great burning reaches over to the very east. The clouds, to the zenith, are wreaths of smoke, their volumes ruddily touched beneath by the flame on the horizon, and those about the sun are like ignited beams in a great conflagration, now falling in and lost in the radiance, now sending out fresh shapes of flashing fire: that is not to be painted!’

LOWESTOFFE (starting). The swan, I declare! How can he have got out? That scoundrel, John!

ATHERTON. Never mind. I know what he comes for. He is a messenger from Lethe, to tell us not to forget good Tauler.

LOWESTOFFE. Lethe! Nonsense.

MRS. ATHERTON. My love, how can you?

ATHERTON. The creature reminded me of an allegorical fancy recorded by Bacon,—that is all. At the end of the thread of every man’s life there is a little medal containing his name. Time waits upon the shears, and as soon as the thread is cut, catches the medals, and carries them to the river of Lethe. About the bank there are many birds flying up and down, that will get the medals and carry them in their beak a little while, and then let them fall into the river. Only there are a few swans, which, if they get a name, will carry it to a temple, where it is consecrated. Let the name of Tauler find a swan!

END OF VOL. I.

Footnote 178:

The Masters speak of two faces the soul hath. The one face is turned
towards this world. The other face is turned direct toward God. In
this latter face shineth and gloweth God eternally, whether man is
ware or unaware thereof.

Footnote 179:

Schmidt’s _Tauler_, pp. 205, &c.—Mosheim gives the passage in Nieder
relating the apprehension and death of Nicholas:—‘Acutissimus enim
erat (says this authority) et idcirco manus Inquisitorum diu
evaserat.’—_Mosheim de Beghardis et Beguinabus_, cap. iv. § 42, p.
454.

Footnote 180:

See _Revelationes Selectæ S. Brigittæ_ (Heuser, 1851).—This is a
selection for the edification of good Catholics, and contains
accordingly the most Mariolatrous and least important of her writings.
Rudelbach gives some specimens of her spirited rebuke of papal
iniquity in his _Savonarola_, pp. 300, &c. In her prophetic capacity
she does not hesitate to call the pope a murderer of souls, and to
declare him and his greedy prelates forerunners of Antichrist. She
says,—‘If a man comes to them with four wounds, he goes away with
five.’ Like Savonarola, she placed her sole hope of reform in a
general council.

A common mode of self-mortification with her found an imitator in
Madame Guyon:—the Swede dropped the wax of lighted tapers on her bare
flesh, and carried gentian in her mouth—_Vita_, p. 6. The Frenchwoman
burned herself with hot sealing-wax in the same manner, and chewed a
quid of coloquintida.

The _Revelationes de Vitâ et Passione Jesu Christi et gloriosæ
Virginis_, contain a puerile and profane account of the birth,
childhood, and death of our Lord, in the style of the apocryphal
_Gospel of the Infancy_, professedly conveyed in conversations with
the authoress by the Mother and her Son. The Virgin tells her, in
reference to her Son,—‘quomodo neque aliqua immunditia ascendit super
eum;’ and that his hair was never in a tangle—(nec perplexitas in
capillise jus apparuit).

Footnote 181:

‘_Angela de Foligni._’ See _Beatæ Angelæ Fulginio Visionum et
Instructionum Liber_; (recens. J. H. Lammertz; Cologne, 1851.)—The
account of the wonderful star is given by Arnold in his _Prologue_, p.
12. At one time it is promised by the Lord that the ‘whole Trinity
shall enter into her,’ (capit. xx.); at another, she is transported
into the midst of the Trinity.—(Capit. xxxii.) In chapter after
chapter of monotonous inflation, she wearies and disappoints the
curious reader by declaring her ‘abysses of delectation and
illumination’ altogether unutterable,—such as language profanes rather
than expresses—‘inenarrabiles,’ ‘indicibiles,’ &c. So the miraculous
taste of the host to her favoured palate was not like bread or flesh,
but a ‘sapor sapidissimus,’—like nothing that can be named.—Capit. xl.

The following act of saintship we give in the original, lest in
English it should act on delicate readers as an emetic. She speaks of
herself and a sister ascetic:—‘Lavimus pedes feminarum ibi existentium
pauperum, et manus hominum, et maxime cujusdam leprosi, qui habebat
manus valde fœtidas et marcidas et præpeditas et corruptas; _et
bibimus de illâ loturâ_. Tantam autem dulcedinem sensimus in illo
potu, quod per totam viam venimus in magnâ suavitate, et videbatur
mihi per omnia quod ego gustassem mirabilem dulcedinem, quantum ad
suavitatem quam ibi inveni. Et quia quædam squamula illarum plagarum
erat interposita in gutture meo, conata sum ad diglutiendum eam, sicut
si communicassem, donec deglutivi eam. Unde tantam suavitatem inveni
in hoc, quod eam non possum exprimere.’—Capit. l. p. 176.

In her ‘Instructions,’ she lays it down as a rule that none can ever
be deceived in the visions and manifestations vouchsafed them who are
truly poor in spirit,—who have rendered themselves as ‘dead and
putrid’ into the hands of God. (Capp. liv. lv.) She says that when God
manifests Himself to the soul, ‘it sees Him, without bodily form,
indeed, but more distinctly than one man can see another man, for the
eyes of the soul behold a spiritual plenitude, not a corporeal,
whereof I can say nothing, since both words and imagination fail
here.’ (Capit. lii. p. 192.) Angela died in 1309.

Footnote 182:

‘_Catharine of Siena._’ Görres gives a short account of her in his
Introduction to Diepenbrock’s edition of _Suso_, p. 96.

Footnote 183:

The theology of this remarkable little book is substantially the same
with that already familiar to us in the sermons of Tauler. Luther,
writing to Spalatin, and praising Tauler’s theology, sends with his
letter what he calls an epitome thereof,—cujus totius velut epitomen
ecce hic tibi mitto. (_Epp. De Wette_, No. xxv.) He refers, there can
be little doubt, to his edition of the _Deutsche Theologie_, which
came out that year.

Footnote 184:

See, especially, the twelfth chapter of the second book, _On the
Necessity of bearing the Cross_. Compare Michelet’s somewhat overdrawn
picture of the effects of the _Imitation_ in his _History of France_.

The _Ignitum cum Deo Soliloquium_ of Gerlacus Petrus is a contemporary
treatise belonging to the same school. (Comp. capp. xxxix. and xxvi.;
ed. Strange, 1849.) It is less popular, less impassioned than the
_Imitation_, and more thoroughly impregnated with the spirit of
mysticism. Gerlach would seem to have studied Suso: in one place he
imitates his language. The cast of his imagery, as well as the
prominence given to mystical phraseology, more peculiar to the
Germans, shows that he addresses himself to an advanced and
comparatively esoteric circle.—Comp. capp. xxii, xxiv, p. 78.

Footnote 185:

‘_Gerson._‘—See an article by Liebner (Gerson’s _Mystische Theologie_)
in the _Theologische Studien und Kritiken_; 1835, ii.

HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS
VOL. II.

CONTENTS OF VOL. II.

BOOK VII.—PERSIAN MYSTICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGE.

CHAPTER I.

The Sufis; their Mystical Poetry 3
Mystical Poetry in the West; Angelus Silesius 5
R. W. Emerson 8

CHAPTER II.

Rabia 10
The Oriental and the Western Mysticism compared 12

BOOK VIII.—THEOSOPHY IN THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION.

CHAPTER I.

The Position of the Mystics as regards the Reformation 31
The Advantage of the Ground occupied by Luther 32
Menacing Character of the Revolutionary Mysticism 35
The Anabaptists of Munster 37

CHAPTER II.

Luther and the Mystics 41
The Prophets of Zwickau 44
Carlstadt 44
Sebastian Frank 47
Schwenkfeld 50
Weigel 51

CHAPTER III.

Mysticism and Science 53
The Cabbala 55
Nature studied by the Light of Grace 57
Alchemy 58
Theurgy 59

CHAPTER IV.

Cornelius Agrippa 61
The Science of Sympathies 63
Redemption, Natural and Spiritual 67

CHAPTER V.

Theophrastus Paracelsus 71
Signatures 76
Theological Chemistry 77

CHAPTER VI.

Jacob Behmen and his _Aurora_ 79
Illumination 82
Troubles 86

CHAPTER VII.

Jacob Behmen, his Materials, and Style of Workmanship 90
The Theory of Development by Contraries 92
The Three Gates 95
The _Aurora_ 97

CHAPTER VIII.

Jacob Behmen—Sketch and Estimate of his System 103
The Mysterium Magnum 104
The Seven Fountain-Spirits 104
Examination of his Doctrine concerning the Origin of Evil 109
The Fall 115
Merits of his Theosophy 119

CHAPTER IX.

The Rosicrucians 128
Romance and Reality 129
Valentine Andreä and his _Fama Fraternitatis_ 134
Secret Societies 136
The Creatures of the Elements 138
Magical Words 140
Pordage and the Philadelphian Society 142
Joanna Leade 144

BOOK IX.—THE SPANISH MYSTICS.

CHAPTER I.

Neo-Platonism revived in Italy 147
Its Weakness, opposed to the Reformation 148
The Counter-reformation 150
Headed by Spain 150
Character of its Mysticism 151
St. Theresa 153
Her Autobiography 156
The Director 158
Visions 160

CHAPTER II.

Theresa’s Four Degrees of Prayer 167
Her Quietism 171

CHAPTER III.

St. John of the Cross 182
His Asceticism 183
His Mystical Night 185
More elevated Character of his Mysticism 193

BOOK X.—QUIETISM.

CHAPTER I.

Queen Quietude 201
The Doctrine of ‘Pure Love’ discussed 205
Madame Guyon 207
Her Unhappy Marriage 208
The Kingdom of God within us 211
Efforts to Annihilate Self 213
Interior Attraction 216
Madame Guyon and the Romish Saints 218
Confessors and Small-pox 222
The Seven Years of Famine 224
Self-loss in God 227
Mistakes concerning the Nature of Spiritual Influence 230
Reformatory Character of her Mysticism 233
Activity and Persecution 234

CHAPTER II.

The Quietist Controversy 242
Molinos 242
Madame Guyon at Paris 245
St. Cyr 248
Fénélon and Madame Guyon 250
Signs of Danger 252
The Conferences at Issy 255
The Quietism of Fénélon 258
His Critical Position 262
Writes the _Maxims of the Saints_ 263
Appeals to Rome 265
Bossuet’s _Account of Quietism_ 268
Fénélon’s _Reply_ 269
Infallibility submits to Louis 271
Fénélon submits to Infallibility 272
The Controversy reviewed 273
Mysticism in France and in Germany 275

CHAPTER III.

Disinterested Love 283
Antoinette Bourignon 286
Peter Poiret 287
Madame de Krüdener 288

BOOK XI.—MYSTICISM IN ENGLAND.

CHAPTER I.

Britain poor in Mystics 301
George Fox 303
The Early Friends 305
Asceticism 309
Doctrine of the Universal Light 309

CHAPTER II.

Doctrine of Perceptible Guidance 313
The English Platonists 315
Henry More; Norris of Bemerton 315

BOOK XII.—EMANUEL SWEDENBORG.

CHAPTER I.

Comprehensive Character of his Mysticism 321
Doctrine of Correspondences 323
Stands alone among the Mystics 326

CHAPTER II.

His _Memorable Relations_ 329
His Heaven and Hell 330
Moderation of his Doctrine concerning Spiritual Influence 331
Defects of his Doctrine concerning the Work of Christ 332
The Church of the New Jerusalem 335

BOOK XIII.—CONCLUSION.

CHAPTER I.

Mystical Tendencies of our own Time 340
The Faith-Philosophy 341
Schleiermacher 341
The Romantic School 343
Novalis 348
Revival of antiquated Error 350
The Modern Mysticism a Repetition of the Old 351
The Services of Mysticism 352
Its Dangers 352
Its Lessons 356

CHAPTER II.

Mysticism fostered by the Supposition of a Separate Religious
Faculty 361
Reason, how far amenable to Understanding 362
Historic Reality not opposed to Spirituality 365

CHAPTER III.

A Vision of Mystics 368

BOOK THE SEVENTH PERSIAN MYSTICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGE

CHAPTER I.

Also, there is in God
Which being seen would end us with a shock
Of pleasure. It may be that we should die
As men have died of joy, all mortal powers
Summed up and finished in a single taste
Of superhuman bliss; or, it may be
That our great latent love, leaping at once
A thousand years in stature—like a stone
Dropped to the central fires, and at a touch
Loosed into vapour—should break up the terms
Of separate being, and as a swift rack,
Dissolving into heaven, we should go back
To God.

DOBELL.

The next day was fine, as well it might be after such a sunset; to Hawksfell all the party went, and there was no reading. But on the following (sunnier yet, if possible) they assembled immediately after breakfast in the summer-house, Lowestoffe not excepted, for even he grew inactive with the heat, and declared himself content to lie on the grass by the hour. Atherton congratulated his hearers that they would not for some time be troubled with more lucubrations of his—not till they came, in due course, to Madame Guyon. For Willoughby was to take up Jacob Behmen, and Gower, who possessed (as the fruit of an artist’s tour) some acquaintance with Spanish, St. Theresa. Then, unrolling his manuscript, he began.

THE SUFIS, OR MYSTICAL POETRY IN THE EAST AND WEST.

Among all the religions of civilized man, it would be difficult to
find one more unfriendly to the growth of mysticism than that of
Mohammed. Yet in no religion has mysticism spread more widely or
raised its head with greater pride. The cold rationalism of the
Koran, its ritual minutiæ, its formal self-righteousness, its
prohibition of the monastic order,—all combined to warn the mystic
from the religious domain of the Crescent. But stronger than
Mohammedan orthodoxy or the dying commands of the Prophet were the
wants of the human heart and the spirit of an eastern people. The
generation which laid Mohammed in the holy earth of Medina saw
monastic institutions arise and multiply on every side. Mystical
interpretation could with ease elude the less favourable passages of
the Koran, and turn others into a warrant. With a single touch of
this dexterous pencil, the mystic could make the Prophet’s
portraiture all he desired, and turn the frown into a smile. The
fatalism of the creed of Islam would furnish a natural basis for the
holy indifference of Quietism.

Each succeeding century of the Hegira was found more abundant than
the last in a class of men who revolted against the letter in the
name of the spirit, and who aspired to a converse and a unity with
God such as the Koran deemed unattainable on this side heaven. The
names of the saints and martyrs, the poets and philosophers, of
mysticism, are among the brightest in the hagiography and the
literature of the Mohammedan world. The achievements of the former
class are adorned with legendary extravagances such as those with
which the Prophet delighted to invest himself. The philosophy of the
latter (whether sung or said) was not a little aided, in its contest
with rigid orthodoxy, by the Grecian learning of that Alexandria
which fell, in the first outbreak of Moslem zeal, before the hosts
of Amrou. In later times (under the names of Plato and of Aristotle)
mysticism and method did battle with each other, in the East as in
the West,—at Shiraz, at Bagdad, or at Cordova, even as in the
University of Paris or the academies of Italy.

The term Sufism appears to be a general designation for the mystical
asceticism of the Mohammedan faith. The Sufis cannot be said to
constitute a distinct sect, or to embrace any particular
philosophical system. Their varieties are endless; their only common
characteristics a claim of some sort to a superhuman commerce with
the Supreme,—mystical rapture, mystical union, mystical identity, or
theurgic powers;—and a life of ascetic observance. The name is given
to mystics of every shade, from the sage to the quack, from poets
like Saadi or philosophers like Algazzali, to the mendicant dervise
or the crazy fanatic.

Persia has been for several centuries the great seat of Sufism. For
two hundred years (during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of
our era) the descendants of a Sufi occupied the throne,—governing,
however, as may be supposed, not like mystics, but as men of the
world.[186] It is with Sufism as exhibited principally by the Sufi
poets of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, that I propose now
to occupy your attention.

It will be found worth our while, as we proceed, to compare the
mystical poetry of the East and West. Oriental mysticism has become
famous by its poets; and into poetry it has thrown all its force and
fire. The mysticism of the West has produced prophecies and
interpretations of prophecy; soliloquies, sermons, and treatises of
divinity;—it has found solace in autobiography, and breathed out its
sorrow in hymns;—it has essayed, in earnest prose, to revive and to
reform the sleeping Church;—but it has never elaborated great poems.
In none of the languages of Europe has mysticism achieved the
success which crowned it in Persia, and prevailed to raise and rule
the poetic culture of a nation. Yet the occidental mysticism has not
been wholly lacking in poets of its own order. The seventeenth
century can furnish one, and the nineteenth another,—Angelus
Silesius and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The latest research has succeeded only in deciding who Angelus
Silesius was _not_. Some Roman Catholic priest or monk, assuming the
name of Angelus, did, in the seventeenth century, send forth sundry
hymns and religious poems,—among others, one most euphuistically
entitled _The Cherubic Wanderer_. The author of this book has been
generally identified, on grounds altogether inadequate, with a
contemporary named John Scheffler,—a renegade from Jacob Behmen to
the Pope. Suffice it to say that no two men could be more unlike
than the virulent fagotty-minded pervert Scheffler, and the
contemplative pantheistic Angelus—be he who he may.[187]

_The Cherubic Wanderer_ is a collection of religious epigrams or
rhyming sentences, most of them smart and pithy enough as to
expression, not a few as destitute of sense as they all are of
poetry. The Wanderer travelled a little way into the eighteenth
century, and then, lighting upon one of those oblivious arbours so
fatal to pilgrims, sat down, and slept long. A few years ago some
Romanticist littérateurs of Germany woke him up, and announced to
the world, with much sounding of brass and tinkling of cymbals, that
they had resuscitated a paragon of saintship and philosophy.

The Silesian’s book reiterates the customary utterances of
mysticism. But a harsher tone is audible, and the doctrines with
which we are familiar appear in a more startling and paradoxical
form. The more dangerous elements are intensified. Pantheism is
latent no longer. Angelus loves to play at a kind of intellectual
seesaw with the terms Finite and Infinite, and their subject or
kindred words. Now mounts one side, now the other, of the restless
antithesis. Each factor is made to share with its rival every
attribute of height or lowness. His favourite style of talking may
run as follows:—‘I cannot do without God, nor He without me; He is
as small as I, and I as great as He:—let time be to thee as
eternity, and eternity as time; the All as nothing, and nothing as
the All; then thou hast solved life’s problem, and art one with God,
above limit and distinction.’ We matter-of-fact folk feel
irresistibly inclined to parody such an oracle, and say,—‘Let whole
and part, black and white, be convertible terms;—let thy head be to
thee as thy heels, and thy heels as thy head; and thou hast
transcended the conditions of vulgar men, and lapsed to Limbo
irretrievably.’ Silesius, as a good churchman, repudiates, of
course, the charge of pantheism. He declares that the dissolution in
Deity he contemplates does not necessitate the loss of personality,
or confound the Maker and the made. His distinction is
distinguishable ‘as water is in water.’ He appeals to the strong
language he hunts out from Bernard, Tauler, and Ruysbroek. But the
cold-blooded epigram cannot claim the allowance due to the fervid
sermon or the often rhapsodical volume of devotion. Extravagant as
the Sufi, he cannot plead like him a spiritual intoxication.
Crystals and torrents must have separate laws. And which, moreover,
of the mystical masters to whom Angelus refers us would have indited
such presumptuous doggrel as this?

God in my nature is involved,
As I in the divine;
I help to make his being up,
As much as he does mine.

As much as I to God owes God to me
His blissfulness and self-sufficiency.

I am as rich as God, no grain of dust
That is not mine too,—share with me he must.
More than his love unto himself,
God’s love to me hath been;
If more than self I too love him,
We twain are quits, I ween.[188]

On the other hand, there are many terse and happy couplets and
quatrains in the _Wanderer_, which express the better spirit of
mysticism. Angelus insists constantly on the vanity of mere
externals,—the necessity of a Christ formed within, as opposed to a
dead, unsanctifying faith,—the death of self-will, as the seat of
all sin,—the reality of the hell or heaven already wrought in time
by sin or holiness. These were the maxims and ejaculations which
religious minds, mystically inclined, found so edifying. The
arrogant egotheism of some passages they took in another sense, or
deemed the sense beyond them. Moreover, the high-flown devotion
affected by Rome has always familiarized her children with
expressions which (as Thomas Fuller has it) ‘do knock at the door of
blasphemy, though not always with intent to enter in thereat.’

The second representative of the West, who must assist towards our
comparative estimate of pantheistic mysticism in its poetical form,
is Mr. Emerson, the American essayist. Whether in prose or verse he
is chief singer of his time at the high court of Mysticism. He
belongs more to the East than to the West—true brother of those
Sufis with whose doctrine he has so much in common. Luxuriant in
fancy, impulsive, dogmatic, darkly oracular, he does not reason. His
majestic monologue may not be interrupted by a question. His
inspiration disdains argument. He delights to lavish his varied and
brilliant resources upon some defiant paradox—and never more than
when that paradox is engaged in behalf of an optimism extreme enough
to provoke another Voltaire to write another _Candide_. He displays
in its perfection the fantastic incoherence of the ‘God-intoxicated’
man.

In comparing Emerson with the Sufis, it may be as well to state that
he does not believe in Mohammed and receive the Koran in a manner
which would satisfy an orthodox Mussulman. Yet he does so (if words
have meaning) much after the same fashion in which he believes in
Christ and receives the Bible. Mohammed and Jesus are both, to him,
extraordinary religious geniuses—the Bible and the Koran both
antiquated books. He looks with serene indifference on all the forms
of positive religion. He would agree perfectly with those Sufis who
proclaimed the difference between the Church and the Mosque of
little moment. The distance between the Crescent and the Cross is,
with him, one of degree—their dispute rather a question of
individual or national taste than a controversy between a religion
with evidence and a religion without.

In the nineteenth century, and in America, the doctrine of emanation
and the ascetic practice of the East can find no place. But the
pantheism of Germany is less elevated than that of Persia, in
proportion as it is more developed. The tendency of the latter is to
assign reality only to God; the tendency of the former is to assign
reality only to the mind of man. The Sufi strove to lose humanity in
Deity; Emerson dissolves Deity in humanity. The orientals are nearer
to theism, and the moderns farther from it, than they sometimes
seem. That primal Unity which the Sufi, like the Neo-Platonist,
posits at the summit of all things, to ray forth the world of
Appearance, may possibly retain some vestige of personality. But the
Over-Soul of Emerson, whose organs of respiration are men of genius,
can acquire personality only in the individual man. The Persian
aspired to reach a divinity above him by self-conquest; the American
seeks to realize a divinity within him by self-will.
Self-annihilation is the watchword of the one; self-assertion that
of the other.

Footnote 186:

Malcolm’s Persia, vol. ii., p. 383.

Footnote 187:

See Schrader’s _Angelus Silesius und seine Mystik_; Halle, 1853. This
author shows, that the supposition identifying Scheffler with Angelus
(copied too readily by one writer from another) may be traced up to a
source of very slight authority. Scheffler repudiated mysticism after
entering the Romish communion. Furious polemical treatises by
Scheffler, and sentimental religious poems by Angelus appeared
contemporaneously during a considerable interval. Had Scheffler
published anything mystical during his controversy, his Protestant
antagonists would not have failed to charge him with it. With
Scheffler the Church is everything. In the _Wanderer_ of Angelus the
word scarcely occurs. The former lives in externalisms; the latter
covets escape from them. The one is an angry bigot; the other, for a
Romanist, serenely latitudinarian. Characteristics so opposite, urges
Dr. Schrader, could not exist in the same man at the same time.

The epithet ‘_Cherubic_’ indicates the more speculative character of
the book; as contrasted, in the language of the mystics, with the
devotion of feeling and passion—_seraphic_ love.

Footnote 188:

Cherubinischer Wandersmann, i. 100, 9, 18; Schrader, p. 28.

CHAPTER II.

Und so lang du das nicht hast
Dieses: Stirb und werde!
Bist du nur ein trüber Gast
Auf der dunkeln Erde.[189]

GOETHE.

‘Let us proceed, then,’ resumed Atherton, smoothing his manuscript, ‘on our Persian expedition. Dr. Tholuck, with his German translation, shall act as interpreter, and we may pause now and then on our way to listen to the deliverances of the two men of vision who accompany us from Breslau and from Boston.’

The first century of the Hegira has scarcely expired when a
mysticism, strikingly similar to that of Madame Guyon, is seen to
arise spontaneously in the devout ardours of a female saint named
Rabia.[190] There is the same straining after indifference and
self-abnegation—after a love absolutely disinterested—after a
devotion beyond language and above means.

By the sick-bed of Rabia stood two holy men. One of them said, ‘The
prayers of that man are not sincere who refuses to bear the
chastening strokes of the Lord.’ The other went beyond him, saying,
‘He is not sincere who does not rejoice in them.’ Rabia, detecting
something of self in that very joy, surpassed them both as she
added, ‘He is not sincere who does not, beholding his Lord, become
totally unconscious of them.’ The Mohammedan _Lives of the Saints_
records that, on another occasion, when questioned concerning the
cause of a severe illness, she replied, ‘I suffered myself to think
on the delights of Paradise, and therefore my Lord hath punished
me.’ She was heard to exclaim, ‘What is the Kaaba to me? I need God
only.’ She declared herself the spouse of Heaven,—described her will
and personality as lost in God. When asked how she had reached this
state, she made the very answer we have heard a German mystic
render, ‘I attained it when everything which I had found I lost
again in God.’ When questioned as to the mode, she replied, ‘Thou,
Hassan, hast found Him by reason and through means; I immediately,
without mode or means.’

The seeds of Sufism are here. This mystical element was fostered to
a rapid growth through succeeding centuries, in the East as in the
West, by the natural reaction of religious fervour against
Mohammedan polemics and Mohammedan scholasticism.

In the ninth century of our era, Sufism appears divided between two
distinguished leaders, Bustami and Juneid. The former was notorious
chiefly for the extravagance of his mystical insanity. The men of
genius who afterwards made the name of Sufism honourable, and the
language of its aspiration classical, shrank from such coarse
excess. It was not enough for Bustami to declare that the
recognition of our personal existence was an idolatry, the worst of
crimes. It was not enough for him to maintain that when man adores
God, God adores himself. He claimed such an absorption in his
pantheistic deity as identified him with all the power, the wisdom,
and the goodness of the universe. He would say, ‘I am a sea without
bottom, without beginning, without end. I am the throne of God, the
word of God. I am Gabriel, Michael, Israfil; I am Abraham, Moses,
Jesus.’

If Epiphanius is to be believed, the Messalians were a sect
chargeable with the very same folly. If asked, he says, concerning a
patriarch, a prophet, an angel, or Christ, they would reply, ‘I am
that patriarch, that prophet, that angel; I am Christ.’

A reference to Emerson’s Essay on History renders such professions
perfectly credible. Bustami and the Messalians could not have made
them in the literal, but (by anticipation) in the Emersonian sense.
They believed, with him, that ‘there is one mind common to all
individual men.’ They find in him their interpreter, when he says,
‘Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or
can be done, for this is the only sovereign agent.’ Emerson couches
their creed in modern rhymes, as he sings exultant,—

I am owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Cæsar’s hand and Plato’s brain,
Of Lord Christ’s heart, and Shakspeare’s strain.

In the spirit of the same philosophy, Angelus Silesius hints at the
possibility of such an empire. He reminds his readers that there is
no greatness which makes the glory of the past that may not be
realized by themselves in the present. Thus he asks—

Dost prize alone King Solomon as wisest of the wise?
Thou also canst be Solomon, and all his wisdom thine.[191]

But what is only potential with him is claimed as actual by mystical
brethren bolder yet than he.

The first endeavour of the Sufi (as of so many Christian mystics) is
to achieve that simplifying, purifying process which shall remove
from the mind everything earthly and human—all its creaturely
accidents, and reduce it to that abstract essence which mirrors
Deity, and is itself ultimately divine. An apologue in the Mesnevi
of Jelaleddin Rumi (a Sufi poet who wrote in the first half of our
thirteenth century) teaches this doctrine quite in the oriental
manner.

The Greeks and the Chinese dispute before a certain sultan as to
which of the two nations is the more skilful in the art of
decoration. The sultan assigns to the rival painters two structures,
facing each other, on which they shall exercise their best ability,
and determine the question of precedence by the issue:—

The Chinese ask him for a thousand colours,
All that they ask he gives right royally;
And every morning from his treasure-house
A hundred sorts are largely dealt them out.
The Greeks despise all colour as a stain—
Effacing every hue with nicest care.
Brighter and brighter shines their polished front,
More dazzling, soon, than gleams the floor of heaven.
This hueless sheen is worth a thousand dyes,—
This is the moon—they but her cloudy veil;
All that the cloud is bright or golden with
Is but the lending of the moon or sun.
And now, at length, are China’s artists ready.
The cymbals clang—the sultan hastens thither,
And sees enrapt the glorious gorgeousness—
Smit nigh to swooning by those beamy splendours.—
Then, to the Grecian palace opposite.
Just as the Greeks have put their curtain back,
Down glides a sunbeam through the rifted clouds,
And, lo, the colours of that rainbow house
Shine, all reflected on those glassy walls
That face them, rivalling: the sun hath painted
With lovelier blending, on that stony mirror
The colours spread by man so artfully.
Know then, O friend! such Greeks the Sufis are,
Owning nor book nor master; and on earth
Having one sole and simple task,—to make
Their hearts a stainless mirror for their God.
Is thy heart clear and argent as the moon?
Then imaged there may rest, innumerous,
The forms and hues of heaven.[192]

So, too, says Angelus Silesius,—

Away with accidents and false appearance,
Thou must be essence all, and colourless.

And again,—

Man! wouldst thou look on God, in heaven or while yet here,
Thy heart must first of all become a mirror clear.[193]

Jelaleddin Rumi describes the emancipation of the soul from
intellectual distinctions—the laws of finite thought, the
fluctuations of hope and fear, the consciousness of
personality,—under the image of night. This has been the favourite
and appropriate symbol of all the family of mystics, from Dionysius,
with his ‘Divine Darkness,’ to John of the Cross, in his _De Nocte
Obscurâ_, and on to Novalis, in his _Hymnen an die Nacht_. In the
following vigorous passage, Night is equivalent to the state of
self-abandonment and self-transcendence:—

Every night God frees the host of spirits—
Makes them clear as tablets smooth and spotless—
Frees them every night from fleshy prison.
Then the soul is neither slave nor master,
Nothing knows the bondman of his bondage,
Nothing knows the lord of all his lordship,
Gone from such a night is eating sorrow,
Gone the thoughts that question good and evil.
Then, without distraction or division,
In the One the spirit sinks and slumbers.

Silesius has the same thought, cold and dry, after the poetic
Persian, yet in words that would furnish no inapt motto to express
in a sentence this species of mysticism:—

Ne’er sees man in this life, the Light above all light,
As when he yields him up to darkness and to night.[194]

The ascetic Sufi bids the mystical aspirant close the senses against
every external impression—for the worlds of sense and of
contemplation reciprocally exclude each other. We have seen how the
Hindoos and the Hesychasts endeavoured literally to obey this
counsel, reiterated so often by so many mystagogues:—

Put wool within the ear of flesh, for that
Makes deaf the inner hearing, as with wool;
If that can hear, the spirit’s ear is deaf.
Let sense make blind no more the spirit’s eye.
Be without ear, without a sense or thought,
Hark only to the voice, ‘Home, wanderer, home!’

It is quite in accordance with such precepts that the judging
faculty should be abandoned by the Sufi for the intuitive, and the
understanding sacrificed to the feeling. According to the Koran,
Mohammed once soared heavenwards, to such a height that Gabriel
could not overtake him, and far off below, appeared to the Prophet
no larger than a sparrow. Jelaleddin compares the heart, the divine
principle in man (the spirit, in his psychology), to Mohammed, and
the understanding to Gabriel. Names and words, he says, are but
‘nets and shackles.’ With justice, in one sense, he bids men pass
from the sign to the thing signified, and asks,—

Didst ever pluck a rose from R and O and S?
Names thou mayst know: go, seek the truth they name;
Search not the brook, but heaven, to find the moon.

The senses and the lower powers, nourished by _forms_, belong to
earth, and constitute the mere foster-mother of our nature. The
intuitive faculty is a ray of Deity, and beholds Essence. The soul
which follows its divine parent is therefore a wonder, and often a
scandal to that which recognises only the earthly. Jelaleddin
compares the rapturous plunge of the soul into its divine and native
element to the hastening of the ducklings into the water, to the
terror of the hen that hatched them.[195]

While exulting in a devotion above all means and modes, we find the
Sufi (in nearly every stage of his ascension save the last) yielding
implicit obedience to some human guide of his own choice. The
Persian Pir was to him what the Director was to the Quietist or
semi-Quietist of France; what the experienced Friend of God was to
the mystic of Cologne or Strasburg; what Nicholas of Basle was so
long to Tauler. That a voluntary submission to such authority was
yielded is certain. Yet we find scarcely an allusion to these
spiritual guides among the chief bards of Sufism. Each singer claims
or seeks a knowledge of God which is immediate, and beyond the need
of at least the orthodox and customary aids and methods. Thus Rumi
says—

He needs a guide no longer who hath found
The way already leading to the Friend.
Who stands already on heaven’s topmost dome
Needs not to search for ladders. He that lies,
Folded in favour on the sultan’s breast,
Needs not the letter or the messenger.

So Emerson,—

‘The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it
is profane to seek to interpose helps.... Whenever a mind is simple,
and receives a divine wisdom, then old things pass away,—means,
teachers, texts, temples, fall; it lives now and absorbs past and
future into the present hour.’[196]

Hence, in both cases, the indifference before noticed to all the
various forms of positive religion. The Persian describes all
religions as the same liquor in different glasses—all are poured by
God into one mighty beaker.

The self-abandonment and self-annihilation of the Sufis rest on the
basis of their pantheism. Personal existence is with them the great
illusion of this world of appearance—to cling to it is to be blind
and guilty. Mahmud (a Sufi of the fourteenth century) says, in the
_Gulschen Ras_,—

All sects but multiply the I and Thou;
This I and Thou belong to partial being;
When I and Thou and several being vanish,
Then Mosque and Church shall bind thee never more.
Our individual life is but a phantom:
Make clear thine eye, and see Reality!

Again, (though here the sense may be moral rather than philosophic,
and selfishness, not personality, abjured)—

Go, soul! with Moses to the wilderness,
And hear with him that grand ‘I am the Lord!’
While, like a mountain that shuts out the sun,
Thine _I_ lifts up its head, thou shalt not see Me.
The lightning strikes the mountain into ruins,
And o’er the levelled dust the glory leaps!

Jelaleddin says of the Sufi in his self-abnegation,—

His love of God doth, like a flame of hell,
Even in a moment swallow love of self.

Mahmud, to express the same thought, employs the image used by
Thomas à Kempis:—

The path from _Me_ to God is truly found,
When pure that _Me_ from Self as clearest flame from smoke.

Angelus Silesius bids men lose, in utter Nihilism, all sense of any
existence separate from the Divine Substance—the Absolute:—

While aught thou art or know’st or lov’st or hast,
Not yet, believe me, is thy burden gone.

Who is as though he were not—ne’er had been—
That man, oh joy! is made God absolute.

Self is surpassed by self-annihilation;
The nearer nothing, so much more divine.[197]

Thus individuality must be ignored to the utmost; by mystical death
we begin to live; and in this perverted sense he that loseth his
life shall find it. Hence, by a natural consequence, the straining
after a sublime apathy almost as senseless as the last abstraction
of the Buddhist. The absolutely disinterested love, to which the
Sufi aspires, assumes, however, an aspect of grandeur as opposed to
the sensuous hopes and fears of Mohammed’s heaven and hell. Rumi
thus describes the blessedness of those whose will is lost in the
will of God:—

They deem it crime to flee from Destiny,
For Destiny to them brings only sweetness.
Welcome is all that ever can befal them,
For were it fire it turns to living waters.
The poison melts to sugar on their lip;
The mire they tread is lustrous diamond,
And weal and woe alike, whatever comes.
They and their kingdom lie in God’s divineness.
To pray, ‘O Lord, turn back this trouble from me,’
They count an insult to the hand that sent it.

Faithful they are, but not for Paradise;
God’s will the only crowning of their faith:
And not for seething hell, flee they from sin,
But that their will must serve the Will Divine.
It is not struggle, ’tis not discipline,
Wins them a will so restful and so blest;—
It is that God from his heart-fountain ever
Fills up their jubilant souls.

So, again, Angelus Silesius, sometimes pushing his negation to
unconscious caricature:—

True hero he that would as readily
Be left without God as enjoy him near.

Self-loss finds God—to let God also go,
That is the real, most rare abandonment.

Man! whilst thou thankest God for this or that,
Yet art thou slave to finite feebleness.

Not fully God’s is he who cannot live,
Even in hell, and find in hell no hell.

Nought so divine as to let nothing move thee,
Here or hereafter (could’st thou only reach it).

Who loves without emotion, and without knowledge knows,
Of him full fitly say we—he is more God than man.

Compare Emerson, discoursing of Intuition and the height to which it
raises men:—

‘Fear and hope are alike beneath it. It asks nothing. There is
somewhat low even in hope. We are then in vision. There is nothing
that can be called gratitude nor properly joy. The soul is raised
over passion,’ &c. So, again: ‘Prayer as a means to effect a private
end is theft and meanness. It supposes dualism in nature and
consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God he will not
beg. He will then see prayer in all action.’[198]

This elevation above petition and above desire, towards which many a
Sufi toiled, watching, fasting, solitary, through the ‘seven
valleys’ of mystic discipline, is cheaply accomplished now-a-days by
mere nonchalance, and is hit off by a flourish of the pen. It is the
easy boast of any one who finds prayer distasteful and scoffs at
psalm singing—who chooses to dub his money-getting with the title of
worship, and fancies that to follow instinct is to follow God. The
most painful self-negation and the most facile self-indulgence meet
at the same point and claim the same pre-eminence.

The eastern mystic ignores humanity to attain divinity. The ascent
and the descent are proportionate, and the privileges of nothingness
are infinite. We must accompany the Sufi to his highest point of
deification, and in that transcendental region leave him. His escape
from the finite limitations of time and space is thus described,—

On earth thou seest his outward, but his spirit
Makes heaven its tent and all infinity.
Space and Duration boundless do him service,
As Eden’s rivers dwell and serve in Eden.

Again, Said, the servant, thus recounts one morning to Mohammed the
ecstasy he has enjoyed:—

My tongue clave fever-dry, my blood ran fire,
My nights were sleepless with consuming love,
Till night and day sped past—as flies a lance
Grazing a buckler’s rim; a hundred faiths
Seemed then as one; a hundred thousand years
No longer than a moment. In that hour
All past eternity and all to come
Was gathered up in one stupendous _Now_,—
Let understanding marvel as it may.
Where men see clouds, on the ninth heaven I gaze,
And see the throne of God. All heaven and hell
Are bare to me and all men’s destinies,
The heavens and earth, they vanish at my glance:
The dead rise at my look. I tear the veil
From all the worlds, and in the hall of heaven
I set me central, radiant as the sun.
Then spake the Prophet:—‘Friend, thy steed is warm;
Spur him no more. The mirror in thy breast
Did slip its fleshly case, now put it up—
Hide it once more, or thou wilt come to harm.’

This magniloquence of Said’s is but the vehement poetic expression
for the ‘absolute intuition’ of modern Germany—that identity of
subject and object in which all limitations and distinctions vanish,
and are absorbed in an indescribable transcendental intoxication. If
the principle be true at all, its most lofty and unqualified
utterance must be the best, and what seems to common-sense the
thorough-going madness of the fiery Persian is preferable to the
colder and less consistent language of the modern Teutonic
mysticism. Quite in the spirit of the foregoing extracts, Emerson
laments that we do not oftener realize this identity, and transcend
time and space as we ought.—

‘We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles.
Meantime within man is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the
universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally
related,—the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and
whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing
and perfect every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen,
the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.’
And again:—‘Time and space are but inverse measures of the force of
the soul. A man is capable of abolishing them both. The spirit
sports with time—

‘Can crowd eternity into an hour
Or stretch an hour to eternity.’

So Angelus Silesius:—

Rise above Space and Time, and thou canst be
At any moment in Eternity.[199]

The following passage from Jelaleddin exhibits the kind of identity
with God claimed by the more extravagant devotees of Sufism:—

Are we fools, we’re God’s captivity;
Are we wise, we are his promenade;
Are we sleeping, we are drunk with God;
Are we waking, then we are his heralds;
Are we weeping, then his clouds of wrath;
Are we laughing, flashes of his love.

Some among them carried their presumption to a practical extreme
which did away with all distinction between good and evil. They
declared the sins of the Sufi dearer to God than the obedience of
other men, and his impiety more acceptable than their faith.[200]

Two extracts more will suffice to show the mode in which this
pantheistic mysticism confounds, at its acme, the finite and the
infinite. They are from Feridoddin Attar, who died in the second or
third decade of the fourteenth century.—

Man, what thou art is hidden from thyself.
Know’st not that morning, mid-day, and the eve,
All are within thee? The ninth heaven art thou;
And from the spheres into this roar of time
Didst fall erewhile. Thou art the brush that painted
The hues of all this world—the light of life,
That rayed its glory on the nothingness.

Joy! joy! I triumph! Now no more I know
Myself as simply me, I burn with love
Unto myself, and bury me in love.
The Centre is within me, and its wonder
Lies as a circle everywhere about me.
Joy! joy! no mortal thought can fathom me.
I am the merchant and the pearl at once.
Lo, time and space lie crouching at my feet.
Joy! joy! when I would revel in a rapture,
I plunge into myself and all things know.

The poet then introduces Allah, as saying that he had cast Attar
into a trance, and withdrawn him into his own essence, so that the
words he uttered were the words of God.[201]

Both with Emerson and Angelus, he who truly apprehends God becomes a
part of the divine nature,—is a son, a god in God, according to the
latter; and according to the former, grows into an organ of the
Universal Soul. This notion of identity Emerson seems to arrive at
from the human, Angelus from the divine side. The salvation of man
is reduced with the German, very much to a process of divine
development. With the American, every elevated thought merges man
for a time in the Oversoul. The idealism of Emerson is more
subjective, his pantheism more complete and consequent. Angelus is
bold on the strength of a theory of redemption which makes man
necessary to God. Emerson is bolder yet, on his own account, for he
makes his own God. This he does when he adores his own ideal, and,
expanding Self to Universality, falls down and worships.

Hear him describe this transcendental devotion:—

‘The simplest person, who in his integrity worships God, becomes
God; yet for ever and ever the influx of this better and universal
self is new and unsearchable.’ Again: ‘I, the imperfect, adore my
own Perfect. I am somehow receptive of the great soul, and thereby I
do overlook the sun and the stars, and feel them to be but the fair
accidents and effects which change and pass.’ So, speaking of the
contemplation of Nature:—‘I become a transparent eyeball. I am
nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate
through me; I am part or particle of God,’ &c.

Angelus says, in virtue of his ideal sonship,—

I am as great as God, and he as small as I;
He cannot me surpass, or I beneath him lie.

God cannot, without me, endure a moment’s space,
Were I to be destroyed, he must give up the ghost.

Nought seemeth high to me, I am the highest thing;
Because e’en God himself is poor deprived of me.[202]

The central idea of the Persian mysticism is _Emanation_. The soul
is to escape from the manifold to the One. Its tendency (in
proportion as its votary believes that return accomplished) is to
confound man with the Father. The leading principle in the mysticism
of Eckart and Angelus Silesius is _Incarnation_. Angelus is never
weary of reiterating the doctrine that God became man in order that
man might become God. He does not labour, like the orientals, to
attain deification by ascetic efforts of his own. He has a kind of
Mediator. He seems to believe that through Christ, in some way,
every man is a divine Son of God, if he will only think so. All he
has to do is to realize this sonship; then he becomes, by _Grace_,
all that the Son of God is by _Nature_. The obvious result of this
mysticism is to identify man with the Son.

In that order of modern mysticism represented by Emerson, the
central doctrine is _Inspiration_. In the creative efforts of the
poet, in the generalizations of the philosopher, the man of genius
speaks as he is moved by the Oversoul. An influx of the universal
spirit floods his being and carries him beyond himself. In intuition
the finite Ego is identified with the absolute Ego. Humanity is a
divine evolution, and each true man (to use Emerson’s apt
illustration)—a _façade_ of Deity. Even Angelus would have
acknowledged that it was in some sort through Christ that his
boastful sonship became possible. But the believer in the Oversoul
will admit no such medium, and owns a debt to Christ much as he owns
a debt to Shakspeare. Mysticism of this order usurps the office of
the Holy Ghost, and directly identifies the spirit of man with the
Spirit of God.

Mysticism has always been accustomed to express the transports of
its divine passion by metaphors borrowed from the amorous
phraseology of earth. It has done this with every variety of taste,
from the grossness of some of the most eminent Romanist saints, to
the beautiful Platonism of Spenser’s Hymns of ‘Heavenly Love’ and
‘Heavenly Beautie.’ But nowhere has metaphor branched so luxuriantly
into allegory as in the East, and nowhere in the East with such
subtilty and such freedom as among the Persian mystics. The admiring
countrymen of Hafiz, Saadi, and Jami, interpret mystically almost
everything they wrote. They underlay these poems everywhere with a
system of correspondence whose ingenuity would have done no
discredit to Swedenborg himself. Sir William Jones furnishes some
specimens of a sort of mystical glossary, by aid whereof their
drinking songs may be read as psalms, and their amatory effusions
transformed into hymns full of edification for the faithful.[203]
Never, since the days of Plotinus, was a deity imagined more
abstract than the Unity toward which the Sufi aspires. Yet never was
religious language more florid and more sensuous. According to the
system alluded to, wine is equivalent to devotion; the tavern is an
oratory; kisses and embraces, the raptures of piety; while
wantonness, drunkenness, and merriment, are religious ardour and
abstraction from all terrestrial thoughts.

The following passage from Mahmud’s _Gulschen Ras_ may suffice as a
specimen of these devout Bacchanalia. It has the advantage of
exhibiting the key in the lock:—

Know’st thou who the Host may be who pours the spirit’s wine
Know’st thou what his liquor is whose taste is so divine?
The Host is thy Beloved One—the wine annihilation,
And in the fiery draught thy soul drinks in illumination.
Up, soul! and drink with burning lip the wine of ecstasy,
The drop should haste to lose itself in His unbounded sea.
At such a draught mere intellect swims wildered and grows wild;
Love puts the slave-ring in his ear and makes the rebel mild.
Our Friend holds out the royal wine and bids us drink it up;
The whole world is a drinking-house and everything a cup.
Drunken even Wisdom lies—all in revel sunken;
Drunken are the earth and heaven; all the angels drunken.
Giddy is the very sky, round so often hasting,
Up and down it staggers wide, with but a single tasting.
Such the wine of might they drink in blest carouse above.
So the angels higher lift their flaming height of love.
Now and then the dregs they fling earthward in their quaffing,
And where’er a drop alights, lo, an Eden laughing![204]

Footnote 189:

And if thy heart know nought of this—‘Die that thou mayest be born;’
then walkest thou the darksome earth a sojourner forlorn.

Footnote 190:

Tholuck, _Ssufismus, sive Theosophia Persarum pantheistica_ (Berlin,
1822), pp. 51-54.

Footnote 191:

Tholuck, Ssufismus, p. 63. Cherub. Wand., ii. 18.

Footnote 192:

Tholuck, _Blüthensammlung aus der Morgenländischen Mystik_ (Berlin,
1825), p. 114.

Footnote 193:

Cherub. Wand., i. 274; v. 81.

Footnote 194:

Blüthen., p. 61. Cherub. Wand., iv. 23.

Footnote 195:

Blüthen., pp. 64, 71, 113, 156.

Footnote 196:

Blüthen., p. 167. Emerson’s Essays (1848), p. 35.

Footnote 197:

Blüthen., pp. 204-206. Cherub. Wand., i. 24, 92, 140.

Footnote 198:

_Blüthen._, pp. 180, 181. _Cherub. Wand._, v. 367; ii. 92; i. 91, 39;
ii. 152, 59. Emerson, pp. 37, 42.

Footnote 199:

_Blüthen._, pp. 85, 116. Emerson, pp. 141, 143. _Cherub. Wand._, i.
12. Compare _Richard of St. Victor_, cited above, vol. i., p. 172,
Note to p. 163.

Footnote 200:

_Blüthen._, pp. 82, 84.—The truth, of which the licentious doctrine
alluded to is the abuse, is well put by Angelus,—

‘Dearer to God the good man’s very sleep
Than prayers and psalms of sinners all night long.’—(v. 334.)

Footnote 201:

_Blüthen._, pp. 266, 260.—Never does this soaring idealism become so
definite and apprehensible as when it speaks with the ‘large
utterance’ of the Sufis. Angelus has here and there somewhat similar
imagery for the same thought. What is with him a dry skeleton acquires
flesh and blood among the Orientals.

‘Sit in the centre, and thou seest at once
What is, what was; all here and all in heaven.

‘Is my will dead? Then what I will God must,
And I prescribe his pattern and his end.

‘I must be sun myself, and with my beams
Paint all the hueless ocean of the Godhead.’—(ii. 183; i. 98,
115.)

Footnote 202:

Emerson, pp. 154, 156, 196. _Cherub. Wand._, i. 10, 8, 204.—Angelus
has various modes of expressing the way in which God realizes his
nature in the salvation of men.

‘I bear God’s image. Would he see himself?
He only can in me, or such as I.

‘Meekness is velvet whereon God takes rest:
Art meek, O man?—God owes to thee his pillow.

‘I see in God both God and man,
He man and God in me;
I quench his thirst, and he, in turn,
Helps my necessity.’—(i. 105, 214, 224.)

Footnote 203:

Works, vol. iv., On the Mystical Poetry of the Persians and Hindoos.

Footnote 204:

Blüthen., p. 218.

BOOK THE EIGHTH THEOSOPHY IN THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION

CHAPTER I.

Amongst them all sate he that wonned there,
That hight _Phantastes_ by his nature trew;
A man of years yet fresh, as mote appere,
Of swarth complexion and of crabbed hew,
That him full of melancholy did shew;
Bent hollow beetle brows, sharpe staring eyes
That mad or foolish seemed: one by his view
Mote deeme him born with ill disposed skyes,
When oblique Saturne sate in th’ house or agonyes.

SPENSER.

The autumn is already advanced, and our friends who met at Summerford have returned to the neighbourhood of London. The days of damp and fog have arrived. All nature looks sullen and lustreless. As Gower gazes through the streaming pane on the narrowed dripping landscape, he sometimes tries, as sunny Persia and the Sufis recur to him, to transform the slope before his windows into an eastern valley. Fancy shall sow it thick with poppies, and daisies, and hyacinths of brilliant red;—a thymy smell breathes up the pass;—and there the ungainly stork, and gaily painted quails flutter away at the sound of his horse’s hoofs. Or those house-tops at the foot of the hill, among their trees, shall be a Persian town, on which he looks from an eminence. There are the flat-roofed white houses, enclosing in their courts those twinkling silver lights, the fountains; the green of trees among the shining walls relieves the eye; the domes and minarets look down into the narrow streets; there sleeps the burial-ground, under the shadow of its sentinel cypresses; and there blows the garland of gardens, surrounding the whole with its wavy line of many colours. But the weather is a water-monster, and swallows up too-venturous Fancy. For a few moments imagination can lay light behind the clouds; bright hues flush out on the surface of familiar forms, and the magic power prevails to change them into creatures of the Orient. But the rainy reality is too potent, and the wilderness of vapour will receive no form, retain no colour. So Gower turns away from the windows—pokes the fire—feels idle and fit for nothing—struggles with himself—conquers, and finally achieves a morning’s work.

Willoughby has laid aside his romance for a time and taken to the theosophists—to Jacob Behmen more especially. In fact, he had come to an exciting point in his story. He thought he had found a kind of seething turbulence in his thoughts, like that which certain rivers are said to manifest, when in parts of their course they pass over beds of subterranean fire. Afraid of becoming morbid and unnatural, he stopped work at once, and had recourse to Behmen as a refrigerant and sedative. The remedy succeeded to admiration. Within a day or two the patient could pronounce himself out of poetical danger; and Atherton found him, when he dropped in one morning, enjoying, with Behmen in his hand, that most promising token of convalescence—a profound sleep.

Gower resolved to make himself amends for that uncongenial morning, by spending the evening at Ashfield. Thither also Willoughby had found his way. A considerable part of the evening was passed in Atherton’s library, and conversation turned, before very long, upon the mystics, once more, and their position as regards the Reformation.

* * *

WILLOUGHBY. Those Teutonic worthies of the fourteenth century are noble specimens of the mystic.

GOWER. Truly, with them, Mysticism puts on her beautiful garments. See her standing, gazing heavenward; ‘her rapt soul sitting in her eyes,’ and about her what a troop of shining ones! There is Charity, her cheek wet with tears for the dead Christ and pale with love for the living; carrying, too, the oil and the wine—for Mysticism was the good Samaritan of the time, and succoured bleeding Poverty, when priest passed by and Levite;—there is Truth, withdrawing worship from the form and superstitious substitute, transferring it from priest and pageantry to the heart alone with God, and pressing on, past every channel, toward the Fount Himself;—there Humility, pointing to the embers of consumed good works, while she declares that man is nothing and that God is all;—and there, too, Patriotism, and awakening Liberty—for Mysticism appealed to the people in their native tongue; fashioned the speech and nerved the arms of the German nation; gave heart to the Fatherland (bewildered in a tempest of fiery curses) to withstand, in the name of Christ, the vicar of Christ; led on the Teutonic lion of her popular fable to foil the plots of Italian Reynard; and dared herself to set at nought the infuriate Infallibility.

ATHERTON. Go on, Gower.

GOWER. It seems to me that the doctrine of justification by faith, is practically involved in a theology like that of Tauler, so deep in its apprehension of sin as selfishness, so thorough in renouncing all merit on the part of man.

ATHERTON. Yes, practically. What was needful in addition was, that this doctrine should take its due central place in the system of Christian truth, as the principle, if I may so speak, of salvation for all men. It was not enough to arrive at it as the upshot of individual mystical experience.

WILLOUGHBY. There I think you indicate the weak point of this mysticism—it is so individual—so much a matter of the personal inward life.

GOWER. That surely is the very secret of its strength.

WILLOUGHBY. Yes, of its strength up to a certain limit; beyond that limit, of its weakness. It lacked facility of impartation. Its sympathies were broad and humane; its doctrine too narrow and ascetic. Speaking from the depths of a soul that had known the nether darkness and the insufferable glory, its utterance was broken and obscure. It must be lived through to be understood. It might attract, but could only partially retain, the many. Its message, after all, was to the few.

GOWER. But those few, master-minds, remember.

ATHERTON. True, yet what powers could compensate for the want of clear speech—of a ready vehicle for transference of thought? A deep saying that of Jeremy Taylor’s, where he remarks concerning mystical elevations and abstractions, that, while in other sciences the terms must first be known and then the rules and conclusions, the whole experience of mysticism must first be obtained before we can so much as know what it is, and the end acquired first—the conclusion before the premises.

WILLOUGHBY. When Luther appears, appealing to the Bible in the hands of the people, the defect is supplied, and we have the Reformation. That visible and venerable externalism, the Romish Church, could not be successfully assailed on merely internal grounds. The testimony of the individual heart against it was variable and uncertain, because more or less isolated. But where the Scriptures are set free, and they can be made the basis of assault, an externalism quite as visible, and more venerable, brings the outward to bear against the outward; while the power of an inward life, pure and deep and ardent as the best of the mystics ever knew, animates the irresistible onset.

GOWER. The testimony of History, then, is decidedly against our modern spiritualism, which complains that we make too much of the book, and sacrifice the subjective religious development to an outward authority. Luther—a true man of the spirit—conquered because he could point to a letter. The fire of his own inward life could kindle so grand a flame, because he was sustained by an authority which no individual mystic could arrogate. The Scriptures were the common ground for the Reformer who had the truth, and the inquirer who sought it. The excessive subjectivity of the mystic deprived him of that advantage.

WILLOUGHBY. But are we not overlooking other causes which enabled Luther to accomplish so much, and precluded the mystics from carrying further their reforming tendency?

ATHERTON. By all means let the influence of the interval between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries be duly taken into account. To do so will only make good Gower’s remark. During the fifteenth century you find no fresh development of mysticism. The genuine religion of the period was still mystical in its complexion, but characterised by a much larger infusion of the scriptural element. This was the real advance of that interim. At the Universities the Bible began to displace the schoolmen. A better system of interpretation prevailed. Even with the mystics St. Paul was already taking the place of Dionysius, and mysticism began to lose its nature, merging in a true spirituality, sober-minded while fervent. In the theology of such men as John Wessel and Staupitz (who with Tauler and the German theology nourished the early religious life of Luther), we see a clearer apprehension of the nature of Christ’s work for us—a better balancing of the outward and the inward. In fact, the great step necessary to produce a reformation, after the mystics had made their preparation, was this very bringing into prominence of the word of God. Then, to the ardour and the power of mysticism in its noblest form, was added the authority, the guidance, and the divine adaptation of that message of salvation announced to all mankind.

WILLOUGHBY. Then, again, the doctrine of Luther directed men at once to the attainment of that clear hope concerning their spiritual safety which, say what we will, is the craving of our nature. We have seen how an Eckart would become pantheist to extort from philosophy that assurance which was denied him by the Church.

GOWER. Yet does not the strength and attraction of Romanism lie in this very characteristic—its tempting facility of comfort? Most men prefer a sleeping conscience to a tender one; and for such the Romish Church offers a perpetual siesta.

WILLOUGHBY. Granted; for this very reason, however, she cannot satisfy the deeper wants of the class I speak of—those men out of whom may be made mystics, reformers, heretics,—but religious Helots never. I am not speaking of mere comfort, but of true peace,—of that entrance into a new relationship towards God which gives us the heart to aspire towards a new nature.

GOWER. Agreed, then. Bunyan follows Paul when he makes Christian lose his burden early in the pilgrimage, so that he treads the onward path thenceforward with a lighter step.

ATHERTON. And can front Apollyon better. Look round at the Christendom of that age. You see only two classes who escape the condition of the hired servant—who are the sons of God and not his bondsmen. These are the mystics and the reformers. The mystic realizes adoption through appalling griefs and toils; the reformer is led thither straightway, as he exclaims with St. Paul, ‘Being therefore justified by faith, we have peace with God.’

WILLOUGHBY. How strongly does Luther urge men to believe on Christ as a Saviour for them—to receive in lowly simplicity the peace divinely offered. How triumphantly does he show that such a faith is victory—that all other is a mere historic belief about Christ, not a belief in an ever-present Deliverer, who lives within, and redeems us daily from ourselves. Thus did his followers helm them speedily with hope, and escape, in great measure, the fearful strain of those alternations between rapture and despair, for which mysticism did not even seek a remedy. The distinction between justification and sanctification is no mere theological refinement. Its practical recognition, at least, is essential to that solemn joyousness which is the strength and glory of the Christian life.

ATHERTON. That is, after all, the true escape from Self which delivers you from bondage to the shifting frames and feelings of the hour—the mere accidents of personal temperament, by making clear the external ground of hope. Mysticism had not light enough to find the way to its own ideal of rest. Luther, with his Bible, realized in soberness the longed-for repose of its intense passion.

WILLOUGHBY. We must confess too, I think, that the representatives of the better mysticism were not strong enough to cope with the fanatical or lawless leaders of the worse. How Tauler, Suso, Ruysbroek, and the author of the Theologia Germanica, lift up their voices against the ‘false lights’—against men who deified every impulse, who professed to have transcended all virtue, who renounced all moral obligation and outward authority, or who resigned themselves to a stupid apathy which they called poverty of spirit.

GOWER. Those who constituted this last class must have been men who found in the false doctrine only an excuse for remaining as they were:—hard, indeed, to raise them to anything better. I imagine them poor ignorant hinds, the undermost victims of feudalism. One thinks of Tennyson’s portraiture of the serf,—

The staring eye glazed o’er with sapless days,
The long mechanic pacings to and fro,
The set gray life and apathetic end.

WILLOUGHBY. Be that as it may, this bastard mysticism, whether rapacious as King Stork, or passive as King Log, multiplies among men. Want and oppression seize on the sacred pretext of an inward light, and mysticism is fast growing fierce and revolutionary. Good men, speaking words of spiritual freedom, have unawares awakened licence. They themselves slew Self with vigil and with tears; and, lo! a Hydra-headed Self, rampant and ruthless, stalks abroad, and they have been unwittingly his creators.

ATHERTON. What could they do, as mystics, but mourn and rebuke? The inward testimony would not render an unvarying verdict in every case. Their appeal must be, either to an amount of right moral discernment already in the individual, or to the social judgment of a certain religious circle. Beyond these limits their very consistency is their weakness. For the thorough-going mystic, who is resolved to be in all things a light and law unto himself, replies that his inward light is quite as divinely authoritative for him as is that of the moderate man, reproving his excesses, for himself. He will answer, ‘Friend, walk thou by thy light, as I by mine. The external is nothing to the internal. “What is the chaff to the wheat?” saith the Lord. Thou art external to me, I listen therefore to the voice within me, not to thine.’

WILLOUGHBY. We have, too, the express testimony of Melanchthon to the fact, that had not Luther appeared when he did, to divert the under-current of popular indignation into the middle course of the Reformation, a fearful outbreak must have desolated Europe from the fury kindled by the intolerable oppressions of Church and State.

GOWER. Certainly mysticism could never have spoken with power enough to turn aside such a long-gathered tempest.

WILLOUGHBY. Where the revolutionary spirit had once broken out, only the strong hand could avail.

ATHERTON. And how ruthlessly was that remedy applied! But—what in the world—Gower, I say, open your eyes. Are you going to sleep?

GOWER. I was trying to recall a dream I had after reading about the Anabaptists of Munster.

WILLOUGHBY. A dream! Let us have it.

GOWER. Wait a moment—ah, now I remember. First of all, I saw numbers of people toiling across the fields or along miry roads; weary mothers, delicately nurtured, carrying their babes, and followed by their crying little ones; the fathers laden, it would seem, with such property as they were allowed to take away. They look back mournfully towards the walls of a city, out of whose gates more of their friends are being thrust. These are the magistrates, the rich, the unbelievers, driven forth by the populace to find what shelter they may among the boors, or in the nearest towns. Then I am suddenly inside the city. I see, in one place, a crowd gathered about a shaggy, wild-eyed preacher, spluttering, screaming, foaming at the mouth; in another is a circle surrounding two men in rags, whirling round like spinning dervishes. One man, with face ghastly pale, and bandaged head, who seems to have escaped from a hospital, moans and wrings his hands, predicting universal ruin. Now, with a yell, he has fallen down in convulsions. There a burly brute has pushed down a weeping woman from the door-steps of a great house, that he may stand on the spot to roar out his prophecy and exhortation. All this was somehow mingled with hosannas to Mathieson, the baker; and at the end of the high street they were dancing about a bonfire made of all the books in the town, save the Bible only. Then the crowd made way for the favourite wife of John Bokelson, the tailor, riding in a great coach, resplendent in silks and costly stuffs torn from the churches. Methought I entered the Town Hall. There, on a throne, in a suit of silver tissue, slashed and lined with crimson, fastened with buckles of gold, sat John Bokelson himself.[205]

WILLOUGHBY. A Mormon elder, ‘all of the olden time!’

ATHERTON. Be quiet. He had only eight wives.

GOWER. There he sat, with his triple crown, his globe, and cross of gold, his silver and golden swords, and above his head I could read, ‘King of Righteousness over the whole World.’ Then came a long succession of petitioners, thrice kneeling and prostrating themselves before him. A bell rang. The audience was over. Now he was sending out ambassadors, calling on the neighbouring towns to rise and establish the Kingdom of the Holy Ghost,—‘for the meek are to inherit the earth, and the time for spoiling the Egyptians is come.’ After this I saw long tables spread in the market-place, with fine linen cloths, whereat four thousand people partook of the sacrament, and afterwards riotously feasted; the grey towers of the cathedral looking down upon them. I passed in at the church doors. All was confusion there, drunken shouts, and running to and fro of boys from cook-shops. The great oriel window had been broken by stones, and on the pavement, with its time-worn epitaphs, lay the many-coloured fragments of glass, among broken flagons and pools of beer. A mad musician had seized upon the organ, and above the uproar rolled the mighty volumes of sound, shaking the old dusty banners. Now came a crash of unearthly music—quite unheeded,—and then the melody melted and trembled away, dying down with a far-off wail of unutterable pathos. In the midst of his ecstasy the crazed performer was hurled away by a swarm of ‘prentice lads who had found their way up the staircase. One among them struck up the well-known air of a wanton song. There was an outcry and sound of struggling, and I saw the madman leap from the clerestory down into the middle of the nave,——

WILLOUGHBY. And you woke?

GOWER. No. There came over me a kind of blank bewilderment, and all was changed. The sides of the church had become mountains. I was in a winding rocky glen, and the moon was rising over the black fantastic peaks that shut in the valley. I saw what made me think of Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones. Along the hollow of the gorge, and in the great furrows of the heights on each side, where should have been mountain streams and pebbles, were the glistening bones; and on the rock-ledges where the moonlight fell I could see them strewn; and on every boulder, skeleton-heaps; and at the mouth of every cavern, like icicles hanging from the stony jaws. I heard a rising wind sweep up the pass,—another blast, and another; and then, coming nearer and nearer, a sound as though withered boughs of innumerable trees were snapping in a tempest. All was whirling, darting motion among the white rattling fragments, above, beneath, around; till every clanking bone had been locked to its fellow, and a skeleton sat on every crag and lay in every hollow. The sinews and the flesh then came up upon them; after that, the breath; and they arose, an exceeding great army. I heard a muttering near me, and turning, I saw one gazing on the multitude, having in his hand a torch. His wild, eager look startled me. Now I thought he was Carlstadt, and then he changed into Thomas Münzer. Then again I was sure I recognized Spenser’s Phantastes. He flung his torch into a cleft, whence it breathed out its last sparks into the windy night, and bowing his head, turned slowly away. I heard him say, ‘Dead Church! Dead Church! How shalt thou live? I have learnt it. Flesh and blood first—then breath. Truth for a body, then Love for a soul. The spirit must have a form—must quicken a letter. First a fact for motive; then let the young life work. The soul must have its sinews; the spirit its instrument, its means, its words. Lie there, fire that destroyest; come hither, fire that warmest,—that warmest to good, and that warnest from evil.’ Then I saw that he had a new book in his hand,—the last part then published of Luther’s German New Testament. He vanished. The hills rolled away in smoke, and I awoke with a start.

ATHERTON. I wish Phantastes and his kindred had really learnt the lesson of your dream. But such hot-brained enthusiasts cannot be taught, not even by sore stripes of adversity in the school of fools.

Footnote 205:

A reference to Raumer’s _History of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries_ will satisfy the reader that this dream ‘was not all a
dream.’ Most minute details are given in a letter from the MSS. of
Dupuy.

CHAPTER II.

He that misbelieves and lays aside clear and cautious reason in
things that fall under the discussion of Reason, upon the pretence
of hankering after some higher principle, (which, a thousand to one,
proves but the infatuation of Melancholy and a superstitious
hallucination), is as ridiculous as if he would not use his natural
eyes about their proper object till the presence of some
supernatural light, or till he had got a pair of Spectacles made of
the Crystalline Heaven, or of the Cœlum Empyreum, to hang upon his
nose for him to look through.—HENRY MORE.

ATHERTON. I ought to acknowledge, I suppose, that I have by me a rough draught, made some time since, representing the first strife between Mysticism and Reformation. But, as to reading it, I scarcely think——

WILLOUGHBY. You will not do so, I beg.

ATHERTON. Willoughby, you shall suffer for that. I’ll begin.

WILLOUGHBY. Pelt away. I thought I should get a cocoa-nut for my stone. (Atherton reads.)

Luther and the Mystics.

The estimate to be formed of the mystics who lived before the
Reformation differs very widely from that which is due to those who
appeared after it. Previous to the Reformation, there was a far
larger amount of truth with the mystics than with any other party in
the Romish Church. They were, in reality, men of progress, and
belonged to the onward element in their day and generation. For
reform of some sort many of them laboured—all of them sighed. They
protested against the corruptions of religion. Many an Augean stable
would they have cleansed, could they but have found their Hercules.
In France, Briconnet, Gerard, and Roussel were men of this class—not
so outspoken as Luther and his followers, but led by mysticism to
sympathy with reforming views, and enabled by that very mysticism to
retain their connexion with Rome, regarding externals as
indifferent.

When Luther comes with his doctrine of justification by faith, and
his announcement that the Scriptures are the sufficient standard of
Christian truth, a great change takes place. Mystics of the more
thoughtful, rightly earnest sort, are among the first to embrace the
new doctrines. Here they have the guide they longed for—here they
find what mysticism could never give. They are, some of them, like
Justin Martyr, who waited long among the schools of the Platonists
for their promised immediate intuition of Deity, and then discovered
among Christians that God was to be known in another way far
better—through the medium of his written Word, by the teaching of
his Spirit. But those who when a fuller light came, refused to quit
for its lustre that isolated and flickering torch, about which men
had gathered for lack of anything brighter, such were given over to
the veriest absurdity, or speedily consigned to utter forgetfulness.
By the mystic of the fourteenth century, the way of the Reformation
was in great part prepared. By the mystic of the sixteenth century
it was hindered and imperilled. In that huge ship of the state
ecclesiastic, which all true hearts and hands in those troublous
times were concerned to work to their very best, a new code of
regulations had been issued. Such rule came in with Luther. Now some
of those who would have been among the very best sailors under the
old management, proved useless, or worse than useless under the new.
One set of them were insolent and mutinous—had a way of reviling the
captain in strange gibberish—and a most insane tendency to look into
the powder-room with a light. Another class lay about useless, till
having been tumbled over many times by their more active comrades,
they got kicked into corners, whence they were never more to emerge.
So fared it with mysticism, attempting to persist in existence when
its work for that time was done. The mystic so situated was either a
caricature of reform or a cipher, either a fanatical firebrand or an
unheeded negation.

We need not go far for examples. Dr. Bodenstein of Carlstadt (best
known as simple Carlstadt) is professor at Wittenberg, and a
thorough reformer. He is a little, swarthy, sunburnt man, crotchety
to the last degree. He follows his intuitions—now this whim, now
that—right to-day, wrong to-morrow—a man whom you never know where
to find. He must spring to his conclusion at once; he will not first
pause for satisfying reasons,—for clear ideas on the various
bearings of his thought or deed. So his life is a series of starts;
his actions incongruous and spasmodic, unlinked, unharmonized by any
thoughtful plan or principle.

But Carlstadt is a man of books as well as of action. He writes
treatises, repeating the doctrines of Tauler and the German
Theology, all about abandonment, and not seeing God or enjoying Him
more in this than in that event or employment; about the sin of
enjoying ordinances and media, rather than God immediately; about
the blessed self-loss in the One; about the reduction of ourselves
to nothing. Ah, Dr. Bodenstein, thou mayest write for ever that way,
and no one now will read! Men have left all this behind. A ripe full
vintage invites their thirst; thine acrid and ascetic grape is now
deserted. Gladly do they, for the most part, exchange the refined
and impracticable requirements of mysticism, its vagueness, its
incessant prohibition, for the genial, simple truth of that German
New Testament which Luther is giving them.

At the juncture of which we are about to speak, Luther lay hidden in
the Wartburg. In the small town of Zwickau, in the Erzgebirge, there
arose a knot of enthusiasts for whom Luther did not go half far
enough. There was Storch, a weaver, to whom Gabriel had made very
wonderful communications one night; another weaver, named Thomas,
and a student, Stübner, who had forsaken the toil of study for the
easier method of supernatural illumination. To these should be added
the more notorious Thomas Münzer, who has been erroneously regarded
as the founder of the party. ‘Why such a slavish reverence for what
the Bible says?’ cry these mystics. ‘What is a mere book?’ ‘Have we
not immediate voices, impulses, revelations from the Holy Spirit,
dictating all we should do? Better this than your Bible reading and
college work.’ Then, next, they prophesy terrible woes and judgments
to come on Christendom, mainly through the Turks; they themselves,
perhaps, in fitting time, may draw the sword of the Lord and of
Gideon, and win the land for the saints.

These worthies were put down by the magistrates of Zwickau. Shaking
off the Zwickau dust against their enemies, several of them seek a
‘larger sphere of usefulness’ in Wittenberg. They found the city
already in no small excitement concerning certain reforms which
Carlstadt was making at full speed. He fraternizes with the Zwickau
prophets at once. Indeed, he had been heard to say of the whole body
of Scripture what divines were accustomed to say of the law only,
that it was a killing letter, leading to nothing more than a sense
of guilt and deserved condemnation. Faster and faster come his
changes, so well-meant, but so ill-advised. With a few strokes he
abolishes auricular confession, makes it incumbent to violate the
fast days, and renders it customary to come to the sacrament without
preparation. Next an iconoclast riot is raised. Carlstadt declares
that the magistrates have power to render criminal those observances
which the popular voice declares contrary to the Word of God; that
if they refuse, the community may take the law into its own hands.

A scholar like Carlstadt, a professor of established repute,
surrenders at last to the vulgar error of the very coarsest
mysticism. He advises his students to go home; human learning is
vain; Hebrew and Greek an idle toil; inspiration is far above
scholarship. Were there not prophets among them, wiser than all the
doctors, who had never studied anything or anywhere for half an
hour? He himself went about among the poor people, asking them the
meaning of Scripture passages, and believing that the hap-hazard
notions they put forth were a special revelation from Him who hideth
from the wise and prudent what is revealed unto babes. Imagine the
Professor bawling a text into the ear of some deaf old crone who
cowers beside the stove, and awaiting the irrelevant mumblings of
ignorant decrepitude as the oracle of God! Fancy him accosting the
shoemaker at his stall, and getting his notion of the text in
question, noting it down as infallible, and going his way rejoicing;
while Crispin, who knows him, thinks over and over again what a far
cleverer answer he might have given, and wishes unsaid what
Carlstadt believes inspired!

Is there no one in Wittenberg to unmask these follies, and to quiet
the smouldering excitement dangerously spreading among townspeople
and students? Melanchthon is young. The loud browbeating volubility
of the prophets overpowers his gentle nature. He is undecided—he
fancies he sees some force in what they say about baptism. He is
timid—he will do nothing.

Friends write to Luther. Back comes an answer from a man who sees to
the heart of the matter in a moment—a standing confutation of the
mystic’s ambition, in three sentences. Thus replies Luther—‘Do you
wish to know the place, the time, the manner in which God holds
converse with men? Hear then—‘As a lion so hath he crushed all my
bones;’ and again, ‘I am cast out from before thy face;’ and again,
‘My soul is filled with plagues, and my life draweth nigh unto the
gates of hell.’ The Divine Majesty does not speak to men
immediately, as they call it, so that they have vision of God, for
He saith, ‘No flesh shall see me and live.’ Human nature could not
survive the least syllable of the Divine utterance. So God addresses
man through men, because we could not endure His speaking to us
without medium.’

And the mystics could not say (as mystics so commonly plead) that
Luther was a man unable, from defective experience, to understand
them. If any man had sounded the depths of the soul’s ‘dim and
perilous way,’ it was he. Nay, it is for him to question _their_
experience. ‘Inquire,’ he says to Melanchthon, ‘if they know aught
of those spiritual distresses, those divine births, and deaths, and
sorrows, as of hell.’[206]

Luther receives day by day more alarming intelligence. He fears the
spread of false doctrine—insurrection in the name of reform. He is
anxious lest the elector should persecute the new lights—a step
which the fat, amiable, children-with-sugar-plums-feeding Frederick,
was not very likely to take. He forms the heroic resolve of quitting
his refuge, and suddenly reappears in Wittenberg. He preaches
sermons marvellous for moderation and wisdom—sermons which
accomplish what is so hard, the calming of heated passion, the
reconciliation of adversaries. At his voice Violence and Tumult
slink away—their hounds still in the leash; and Charity descends,
waving her wand of peace, and shedding the light of her heavenly
smile on every face. So triumphs Religion over Fanaticism.

Finally, Luther was called on to hold a discussion with two of the
prophets, Stübner, and one Cellarius, a schoolmaster. The latter,
when called upon by Luther to substantiate his positions from the
Scripture, stamps, strikes the table with his fist, and declares it
an insult to speak so to a man of God. Luther, at last, seeing this
man foaming, roaring, leaping about like one possessed, comes to
believe that there _is_ a spirit in these men—but an unclean one
from beneath. He cries out finally, after his homely fashion, ‘I
smack that spirit of yours upon the snout.’ Howls of indignation
from the Zwickauer side—universal confusion—dissolution of assembly.
The prophets after this find themselves moved to quit Wittenberg
without delay—their occupation gone. Let prosaic or sceptical folk
regard this discussion as they may, to those who look beneath the
surface, it is manifest that there really was a conflict of spirits
going on then and there—the unclean spirit of Arrogance and Misrule
quailing before that of Truth and Soberness.[207]

Carlstadt and his allies of Zwickau exhibit mysticism rampant,
making reformation look questionable. A very fair representative of
the other class of mystic is found in Sebastian Frank. This man,
born at the close of the fifteenth century, seems to have lived a
wandering life in different parts of Germany (often brought into
trouble by his doctrines, probably) for some forty or fifty years.
He was early enamoured of the German Theology, the writings of
Tauler, above all, of Eckart’s speculations. The leading principles
contained in the books he regarded with such veneration, he
elaborated into a system of his own. Starting with the doctrine of
the _Theologia Germanica_, that God is the _substans_ of all things,
he pushes it to the verge of a dreamy pantheism—nay, even beyond
that uncertain frontier. He conceives of a kind of divine
life-process (_Lebens-prozess_) through which the universe has to
pass. This process, like the Hegelian, is threefold. _First_, the
divine substance, the abstract unity which produces all existence.
_Second_, said substance appearing as an opposite to itself—making
itself object. _Third_, the absorption of this opposition and
antithesis—the consummate realization whereof takes place in the
consciousness of man when restored to the supreme unity and rendered
in a sense divine. The fall of man is, in his system, a fall from
the Divinity within him—that Reason which is the Holy Ghost, in
which the Divine Being is supposed first to acquire will and
self-consciousness. Christ is, with him, the divine element in man.
The work of the historic Saviour is to make us conscious of the
ideal and inward, and we thus arrive at the consciousness of that
fundamental divineness in us which knows and is one with the Supreme
by identity of nature.[208] Such doctrine is a relapse upon Eckart,
and also an anticipation of modern German speculation.

Yet, shall we say on this account that Sebastian Frank was before
his age or behind it? The latter unquestionably. He stood up in
defence of obsolescent error against a truth that was blessing
mankind. He must stand condemned, on the sole ground of judgment we
modern judges care to take, as one of the obstructives of his day
who put forth what strength he had to roll back the climbing wheel
of truth. We pardon Tauler’s allegorical interpretations—those
freaks of fancy, so subtile, so inexhaustible, so curiously
irrelevant in one sense, yet so sagaciously brought home in
another—we assent to Melanchthon’s verdict, who calls him the German
Origen; but we remember that every one in his times interpreted the
Bible in that arbitrary style. The Reformers, aided by the revival
of letters, were successful in introducing those principles of
interpretation with which we are ourselves familiar. But for this
more correct method of exegesis, the benign influence of the
Scriptures themselves had been all but nullified; for any one might
have found in them what he would. Yet against this good thing,
second only to the Word itself, Sebastian Frank stands up to fight
in defence of arbitrary fancy and of lifeless pantheistic theory
with such strength as he may. So has mysticism, once so eager to
press on, grown childishly conservative, and is cast out
straightway. Luther said he had written nothing against Frank, he
despised him so thoroughly. ‘Unless my scent deceive me,’ says the
reformer, ‘the man is an enthusiast or spiritualist (_Geisterer_),
for whom nothing will do but spirit! spirit!—and not a word of
Scripture, sacrament, or ministry.’

So Frank, contending for the painted dreams of night against the
realities of day—for fantasy against soberness—and falling,
necessarily, in the fight, has been curtained over in his sleep by
the profoundest darkness. Scarcely does any one care to rescue from
their oblivion even the names of his many books. What is his _Golden
Ark_, or _Seven Sealed Book_, or collection of most extravagant
interpretations, called _Paradoxa_, to any human creature?

For a Chronicle he left behind, the historian has sometimes to thank
him. He had a near-sighted mind. Action immediately about him he
could limn truly. But he had not the comprehensiveness to see
whither the age was tending.

WILLOUGHBY. How admirable is that reply of Luther’s;—an unanswerable rebuke of that presumptuous mysticism which would boastfully tear aside the veil and dare a converse face to face with God. Semele perishes. That the fanatic survives is proof that he has but embraced a cloud.

ATHERTON. A rebuke, rather, of that folly, in all its forms, which imagines itself the subject of a special revelation that is no fearful searching of the soul, but merely a flattering reflection of its own wishes.

GOWER. And what can most men make of that milder form of the same ambition—I mean the exhortation to escape all image and figure? How else can we grasp spiritual realities? The figurative language in which religious truth is conveyed to us seems to me to resemble that delicate membrane gummed to the back of the charred papyrus-roll, which otherwise would crumble to pieces in unwinding. The fragile film alone would drop to dust, but by this means it coheres, and may be unfolded for inspection.

WILLOUGHBY. And when a scripture figure is pressed too far (the besetting sin of systematising divines), it is as though your gold-beater’s skin, or whatever it be, had been previously written on, and the characters mistaken for those of the roll to which it was merely the support and lining.

GOWER. I can readily conceive how provoking a man like Sebastian Frank must have been to Luther, with his doctrines of passivity and apathy, his holy contempt for rule, for rationality, or practicability, and his idle chaotic system-spinning, when every hand was wanted for the goodly cause of Reform.

ATHERTON. Then there was Schwenkfeld, too, who went off from Luther as pietist in one direction, while Frank departed as pantheist in the other.

GOWER. A well-meaning man, though; a kind of sixteenth-century Quaker, was he not?

ATHERTON. Yes. Compound a Quaker, a Plymouth Brother, and an Antipædo Baptist, and the result is something like a Schwenkfeldian.

WILLOUGHBY. For my enquiries concerning Jacob Behmen, I find that the most important of the Lutheran mystics was a quiet man of few words, pastor at Tschopau during the latter half of the sixteenth century, by name Valentine Weigel.

GOWER. You will give us more information about him when you read your essay on Jacob Behmen. For the present I confess myself tired of these minor mystics.

WILLOUGHBY. I shall have to do with him only in as far as he was a forerunner of Jacob. Weigel’s treatises were published posthumously, and a very pretty quarrel there was over his grave. He bases his theology on the Theologia Germanica, adds a modification of Sebastian Frank, and introduces the theosophy of Paracelsus. In this way he brings us near to Behmen, who united in himself the two species of mysticism—the theopathetic, represented by Schwenkfeld, on the one side, and the theosophic, by Paracelsus, on the other.

ATHERTON. As Lutheranism grew more cold and rigid, mysticism found more ground of justification, and its genial reaction rendered service to the Church once more.

WILLOUGHBY. I think the sword of the Thirty Years’ War may be said to have cleared legitimate space for it. In that necessary strife for opinion the inward life was sorely perilled. It was inevitable, I suppose, that multitudes should at least have sought, not only spirituality in mysticism and purity in separation, but wisdom in the stars, wealth in alchemy, and the communion of saints in secret societies.

Note to page 46.

Luther writes:—Jam vero privatum spiritum explores etiam, quæras, num experti sint spirituales illas angustias et nativitates divinas, mortes, infernosque. Si audieris blanda, tranquilla, devota (ut vocant) et religiosa, etiamsi in tertium cœlum sese raptos dicant, non approbabis. Tenta ergo et ne Iesum quidem audias gloriosum, nisi videris prius crucifixum. A golden rule.—Luth. Epist. De Wette, No. 358. Jan. 13, 1522. The language he uses elsewhere concerning such fanatics is strong, but not stronger than the occasion demanded. It was indeed no time for compliment—for hesitant, yea-nay utterance upon the question. The freedom claimed by Carlstadt’s followers led straightway to a lawless pride, which was so much servitude to Satan—was the death-wound, not the crown, of spiritual life. It was from the fulness of his charity—not in lack of it—that Luther uttered his manly protest against that perilous lie. Michelet selects a passage which shows in a very instructive manner how the strong mind (in this quarrel, as in so many more) breaks in pieces, with a touch, the idols which seduce the weak. ‘If you ask Carlstadt’s people,’ says Luther, ‘how this sublime spirit is arrived at, they refer you, not to the Gospel, but to their reveries, to their vacuum. ‘Place thyself,’ say they, ‘in a state of void tedium as we do, and then thou wilt learn the same lesson; the celestial voice will be heard, and God will speak to thee in person.’ If you urge the matter further, and ask what this void tedium of theirs is, they know as much about it as Dr. Carlstadt does about Greek and Hebrew.... Do you not in all this recognize the Devil, the enemy of divine order? Do you not see him opening a huge mouth, and crying, ‘Spirit, spirit, spirit!’ and all the while he is crying this, destroying all the bridges, roads, ladders,—in a word, every possible way by which the spirit may penetrate into you; that is to say, the external order established by God in the holy baptism, in the signs and symbols, and in his own Word. They would have you learn to mount the clouds, to ride the wind; but they tell you neither how, nor when, nor where, nor what; all these things you must learn of yourself, as they do.’

Footnote 206:

See Note, p. 51.

Footnote 207:

See the account in Ranke’s History of the Reformation.

Footnote 208:

See Carriere, _Die philosophische Weltanschauung der Reformationzeit_
(1847), pp. 196-203.

CHAPTER III.

Subtle. Your lapis philosophicus?

_Face._ ’Tis a stone,
And not a stone; a spirit, a soul, and a body;
Which if you do dissolve, it is dissolved;
If you coagulate, it is coagulated;
If you make it to fly, it flieth.

THE ALCHEMIST.

ATHERTON. We are to call on Willoughby to-night, I believe, to conduct us to Jacob Behmen—or Boehme, more correctly.

WILLOUGHBY. I shall scarcely bring you so far this evening. I have to trouble you with some preliminary paragraphs on the theosophic mysticism which arose with the Reformation, some remarks on the theurgic superstitions of that period, and a word or two about Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus. A very formidable preamble,—yet necessary, I assure you.

And herewith, Willoughby, after solacing himself with a goodly bunch of grapes, began to read his essay.

ON THE THEOSOPHY OF JACOB BEHMEN.

§ 1. Mysticism and Science.

I have to trace the advance of mysticism into a new world. Prior to
the Reformation the mystic sought escape in God from all that was
not God. After that epoch he is found seeking at the hands of his
Maker a supernatural acquaintance with all that He has made. Once
his highest knowledge was that surpassing ignorance which swoons in
the glory of the Infinite. Now he claims a familiarity passing that
of common mortals with the mysteries of sea and land, of stars and
elements. Escaping that monastic dualism which abandoned the world
to Satan, mysticism will now dispute the empire of the prince of
this world. Inspired from above, and haply not unaided by angelic
ministries, the master of the hidden wisdom will devoutly elicit the
benign potencies of the universe, and repel the malevolent. No
longer a mere contemplatist—gazing up at the heights of the divine
nature, or down into the depth of the human—the mystic of the new
age will sweep, with all-piercing vision, the whole horizon of
things visible. The theosophist covets holiness still, but knowledge
scarcely less. Virtue (as aforetime) may be regarded by such mystics
too much as the means to an end. But the end is no longer the same.
With the theopathetic mysticism the exercise of the Christian graces
and the discipline of fiery spiritual purgations were the road to a
superhuman elevation—a vision and repose anticipating heaven. With
the theosophic, Faith and Charity and Hope were the conditions of
the higher knowledge. For never to the proud, the greedy, the
impure, would heaven vouchsafe the keys of mystery and hazardous
prerogative in the unseen world. To the contemplative mystic the
three heavenly sisters brought a cloud of glory; for the theosophist
they unclasped nature’s ‘infinite book of secrecy;’ in the hand of
the theurgist they placed an enchanter’s wand.

The sphere of mysticism was not thus extended by any expansive force
of its own. The spirit of a new and healthier age had ventured to
depreciate the morbid seclusion of the cloister. Men began to feel
that it was at once more manly and more divine to enquire and to
know than to gaze and dream. After the servitude of the schools and
the collapse of the cloister, the ambition of the intellect would
acknowledge no limit, would accept of no repose. The highest
aspirations of religion and the most daring enterprise of science
were alike mystical. They coalesced in theosophy. Changes such as
these were wrought by a power from without. Mysticism was awakened
from its feverish dream by the spirit of the time—as Milton’s Eve by
Adam from her troubled morning sleep—and invited to go forth and see
‘nature paint her colours.’

As the revival of letters spread over Europe the taste for
antiquity, and natural science began to claim its share in the
freedom won for theology, the pretensions of the Cabbala, of Hermes,
of the Neo-Platonist theurgy, became identified with the cause of
progress.

That ancient doctrine, familiar to the school of Plotinus, according
to which the world was a huge animal—a living organism united in all
its parts by secret sympathies,—received some fresh development in
the fancy of every adept. The student of white magic believed, with
Iamblichus, in the divine power inherent in certain words of
invocation, whereby the aspirant might hold intercourse with powers
of the upper realm. With the modern, as with the ancient
Neo-Platonists, religion bore an indispensable part in all such
attempts. Proclus required of the theurgist an ascetic purity.
Campanella demands a _fides intrinseca_,—that devout simplicity of
heart which should qualify the candidate at once to commune with
holy spirits and to baffle the delusive arts of the malign.[209]

But the theosophists of Germany were not, like the Alexandrians,
slavish worshippers of the past. They did not resort to theurgy in
order to prop a falling faith. They did not wield that instrument to
prolong, by the spasmodic action of superstitious practice, the life
of an expiring philosophy. Those formulæ of incantation, those
‘symbola’ and ‘synthemata,’ which were everything with Iamblichus,
were with many of them only a bye-work, and by others utterly
abjured. They believed devoutly in the genuineness of the Cabbala.
They were persuaded that beneath all the floods of change this oral
tradition had perpetuated its life unharmed from the days of Moses
downward,—even as Jewish fable taught them that the cedars alone, of
all trees, had continued to spread the strength of their
invulnerable arms below the waters of the deluge. They rejoiced in
the hidden lore of that book as in a treasure rich with the germs of
all philosophy. They maintained that from its marvellous leaves man
might learn the angelic heraldry of the skies, the mysteries of the
divine nature, the means of converse with the potentates of
heaven.[210] But such reverence, so far from oppressing, seemed
rather to enfranchise and excite their imagination. In the tradition
before which they bowed, the majesty of age and the charm of youth
had met together. Hierocles brought to them Pythagoras out of an
immemorial past; and there was no novelty more welcome in that
restless wonder-loving present. Thus the theosophists could oppose
age to age, and reverently impugn the venerable. Antiquity, in the
name of Aristotle, so long absolute, had imposed a shameful bondage.
Antiquity, in the name of Plato, newly disinterred, imparted a
glorious privilege. The chains of the past were being filed away by
instruments which the past had furnished. Ancient prescription
became itself the plea for change when one half of its demands was
repudiated in honour of the other.

This theosophy was a strange mixture of the Hellenic, the Oriental,
and the Christian styles of thought. I shall assume as its emblem
the church of St. John, at Rhodes, which, full of statues of saints
and tombs of knights, broken, or rounded into mounds of sullied snow
by the hand of time, is surmounted by a crescent, and echoes to the
voice of the muezzin, while sheltering beneath its porch the altar
of a Grecian God. But our incongruous theosophic structure, ever
open and ever changing, enlarged its precincts continually. A
succession of eccentric votaries enriched it ceaselessly with quaint
devices, fresh flowers of fancy, new characters in mystical mosaic,
and intricate arabesques of impenetrable significance.

Plotinus, indifferent to the material universe, had been content to
inherit and transmit the doctrine of the world’s vitality. That
notion now became the nucleus of a complex system of sympathies and
antipathies. It suggested remedies for every disease, whether of
mind or body. It prompted a thousand fantastic appliances and
symbols. But at the same time it rendered the enquirer more keenly
observant of natural phenomena. Extolling Trismegistus to the skies,
and flinging his Galen into the fire, Paracelsus declared the world
his book.[211] The leaves of that volume were continents and
seas—provinces, its paragraphs—the plants, the stones, the living
things of every clime, its illuminated letters.

In the dawn of science hovered a meteor, which at once lured onward
and led astray the seekers after truth,—it was the hope of special
illumination. They hastened to generalize on a medley of crude
fancies and of partial facts. For generalization was with them a
sudden impulse, not a slow result. It was an exalted act prompted by
a Divine light that flashed on intuition from without, or radiated
from the wondrous depths of the microcosm within. Hence (as with
bees in dahlias) their industry was their intoxication. It is of the
essence of mysticism to confound an internal creation or process
with some external manifestation. Often did the theosophist rejoice
in the thought that nature, like the rock in the desert, had been
made to answer to his compelling rod,—that a divinely-given stream
welled forth to satisfy his thirst for knowledge. As we look back
upon his labours we can perceive that the impulse was by no means a
wonder, and often anything but a blessing. It was in reality but as
the rush of the water into the half-sunk shaft of his research,
flooding the region of his first incautious efforts, and sooner or
later arresting his progress in every channel he might open. In
fact, the field of scientific enquiry, which had withered under the
schoolman, was inundated by the mystic,—so facile and so copious
seemed the knowledge realized by heaven-born intuition. It was
reserved for induction to develop by a skilful irrigation that
wonder-teeming soil. No steady advance was possible when any
hap-hazard notion might be virtually invested with the sanction of
inspiration.

The admixture of light and darkness during that twilight period
reached precisely the degree of shadow most favourable to the
vigorous pursuit of natural science by supernatural means.

It is true that the belief in witchcraft everywhere prevalent did,
ever and anon, throw people and rulers alike into paroxysms of fear
and fury. But an accomplished student of occult art was no longer in
much danger of being burnt alive as a fair forfeit to Satan. The
astrologer, the alchemist, the adept in natural magic, were in
universal demand. Emperors and nobles, like Rudolph and Wallenstein,
kept each his star-gazer in a turret chamber, surrounded by
astrolabes and alembics, by ghastly preparations and mysterious
instruments, and listened, with ill-concealed anxiety, as the
zodiac-zoned and silver-bearded counsellor, bent with study and
bleared with smoke, announced, in oracular jargon, the junction of
the planets or his progress toward projection. The real perils of
such pretenders now arose from the very confidence they had
inspired. Such was the thirst for gold and the faith in alchemy,
that no man supposed to possess the secret was secure from
imprisonment and torture to compel its surrender. Setonius was
broken on the wheel because the cruel avarice of the great could not
wring out of him that golden process which had no existence. The few
enquirers whose aim was of a nobler order were mortified to find
their science so ill appreciated. They saw themselves valued only as
casters of horoscopes and makers of cunning toys. Often, with a
bitter irony, they assumed the airs of the charlatan for their daily
bread. Impostors knavish as Sir Arthur Wardour’s Dousterswivel,
deceived and deceiving like Leicester’s Alasco, swarmed at the petty
court of every landgrave and elector.

Theurgic mysticism was practically admitted even within the Lutheran
Church, while the more speculative or devotional mysticism of
Sebastian Frank, Schwenkfeld, and Weigel, was everywhere proscribed.
Lutheran doctors, believers in the Cabbala, which Reuchlin had
vindicated against the monks, were persuaded that theurgic art could
draw the angels down to mortals. Had not the heaven-sent power of
the Cabbala wrought the marvels of Old Testament history? Had not
the power of certain mystic words procured for Hebrew saints the
privilege of converse with angelic natures? Had not the Almighty
placed all terrestrial things under the viceregency of the starry
influences? Had He not united all things, animate and inanimate, by
a subtle network of sympathies, and was not man the leading chord in
this system of harmony—the central heart of this circulating
magnetic force? Thus much assumed, a devout man, wise in the laws of
the three kinds of vincula between the upper and lower worlds, might
be permitted to attract to himself on earth those bright
intelligences who were to be his fellows in heaven. Theurgy rested,
therefore, on the knowledge of the _intellectual vinculum_ (the
divine potency inherent in certain words), the _astral_ (the
favourable conjunction of the planets), and the _elementary_ (the
sympathy of creatures). In the use of these was, of course, involved
the usual hocus-pocus of magical performance—talismans, magic
lights, incense, doves’ blood, swallows’ feathers, _et hoc genus
omne_.[212]

Footnote 209:

Horst’s Zauberbibliothek, vol. iii. p. 21.

Footnote 210:

Agrippa’s Vanity of Arts and Sciences, chap. 47.

Footnote 211:

See M. B. Lessing, Paracelsus, sein Leben und Denken, p. 60.

Footnote 212:

The third and fourth volumes of Horst’s _Zauberbibliothek_ contain a
very full account of all these vincula. The vincula of the
Intellectual World are principally formulas of invocation; secret
names of God, of celestial principalities and spirits; Hebrew, Arabic,
and barbarous words; magical figures, signs, diagrams, and circles.
Those of the Elementary World consist in the sympathetic influence of
certain animals and plants, such as the mole, the white otter, the
white dove, the mandrake; of stones and metals, ointments and
suffumigations. Those of the Astral or Celestial World depend on the
aspects and dispositions of the heavenly bodies, which, under the sway
of planetary spirits, infuse their influences into terrestrial
objects. This is the astrological department of theurgy. Meinhold’s
_Sidonia_ contains a truthful exhibition of this form of theurgic
mysticism, as it obtained in Protestant Germany. See Paracelsus, _De
Spiritibus Planetarum_, passim. (Ed. Dorn., 1584.)

CHAPTER IV.

For I am siker that there be sciences,
By which men maken divers apparences,
Swiche as thise subtil tregetoures play.
For oft at festes have I well herd say,
That tregetoures, within an halle large,
Have made come in a water and a barge,
And in the halle rowen up and down.
Sometime hath semed come a grim leoun,
And sometime floures spring as in a mede,
Sometime a vine and grapes white and rede,
Sometime a castel all of lime and ston,
And whan hem liketh voideth it anon.
Thus semeth it to every mannes sight.

CHAUCER.

Give me thy hand, terrestrial; so:—Give me thy hand, celestial; so.

MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.

WILLOUGHBY’S ESSAY—SECOND EVENING.

§ 2. Cornelius Agrippa.

Cornelius Agrippa, of Nettesheim, is a favourable specimen of that
daring and versatile order of mind which, in the sixteenth century,
sought adventure and renown in every province of philosophy. His
restless life is picturesque with the contrast of every imaginable
vicissitude. A courtier and a scholar, a soldier and a mystic, he
made the round of the courts of Europe. Patronized and persecuted
alternately, courted as a prodigy and hunted down as a heretic, we
see him to-day a Plato, feasted by the Sicilian tyrant, to-morrow a
Diogenes, crawling with a growl into his tub. He lectures with
universal applause on the _Verbum Mirificum_ of Reuchlin. He forms a
secret association for the promotion of occult science. He is
besieged by swarming boors in some Garde Douloureuse, and escapes
almost by miracle. He enters the service of Margaret, Regent of the
Netherlands, then that of the Emperor, and is knighted on the field
for heroic gallantry in the campaign against the Venetians. He is
next to be heard of as a teacher of theology at Pavia. Plunged into
poverty by the reverses of war, he writes for comfort a mystical
treatise _On the Threefold Way of Knowing God_. The hand of the
Marquis of Montferrat plucks him from his slough of despond, but ere
long he is again homeless, hungering, often after bread, ever after
praise and power. At the court of France, the Queen Mother shows him
favour, but withholds the honour to which such gifts might well
aspire. Then appears the famous book _On the Vanity of Arts and
Sciences_.

It was wormwood to the proud spirit of Agrippa to be treated as a
mere astrologer. To think that he must toil in obscurity like a
gnome, calculating aspects, sextile and quartile, reckoning the
cusps and hours of the houses of heaven, to subserve the ambition of
an implacable intriguante, when his valour might adorn the tourney
and his wisdom sway the council! He would fain have been in France
what that great astrologer of the previous century, Martius
Galeotti, had been in Hungary, to whom the Czar of Russia and the
Khan of Tartary were said to have sent respectful presents of more
than royal magnificence; who was ambassador alike of monarchs and
the stars; who bore a share in the statecraft of the court at Buda,
and charging abreast with the crowned helm of Matthias, rode down
the ranks of the turbaned infidel. So the gallant knight and the
‘courtier of most elegant thread,’ the archimage, the philosopher,
the divine, became for awhile a sceptic and a Timon. The _De
Vanitate Scientiarum_ ravages, with a wild Berserker fury, the whole
domain of knowledge. The monk Ilsan of mediæval fable did not more
savagely trample the roses in the enchanted garden of
Worms,—Pantagruel did not more cruelly roast with fire his six
hundred and nine and fifty vanquished horsemen, than did Agrippa
consume with satire every profession and every calling among men.
With reason might he say in his preface, ‘The grammarians will rail
at me—the etymologists will derive my name from the gout—the
obstreperous rhetoricians will plague me with their big words and
inimical gestures—the intricate geometrician will imprison me in his
triangles and tetragonals—the cosmographer will banish me among the
bears to Greenland.’ Scholastic fanaticism could never pardon the
man whose sarcasm had left nothing standing, save the Holy
Scriptures. The monks and doctors of Lyons hurled back his
tongue-bolts with the dreaded cry of heresy. His disgrace and exile
they could compass, but they could not arrest those winged words or
bow that dauntless spirit.

The treatise _On the Threefold Way of Knowing God_, shows how, by
Divine illumination, the Christian may discern the hidden meanings
of the New Testament, as the Cabbalist evolves those of the Old. It
teaches the way in which the devout mind may be united to God, and,
seeing all things in Him, and participating in His power, may even
now, according to the measure of faith, foretell the future and
controul the elements.

The _De Occulta Philosophia_[213] (a youthful work re-written in his
later years) treats of the three kinds of magic—the _Natural_ (the
science of sympathies and antipathies, whereby the adept accelerates
or modifies the process of nature so as to work apparent miracles);
the _Celestial_, or Mathematical (astrology); and the _Religious_,
or ceremonial (theurgy).

Once on a time, the savans were sorely puzzled by certain irregular
holes on the front of an ancient temple. One, more sagacious than
the rest, suggested that these indentations might be the marks of
nails used to fasten to the stone metallic plates representing Greek
characters. And, in fact, lines drawn from one point to the next
were found to form letters, and the name of the deity stood
disclosed. In like manner, the student of natural magic sought to
decipher the secret language of the universe, by tracing out those
lines of sympathy which linked in a mysterious kindred objects the
most remote. It was believed that the fields of space were threaded
in every direction by the hidden highways of magnetic influence;
traversed from all points by an intricate network of communication
uniting the distant and the near—the celestial and terrestrial
worlds. Science was charged with the office of discovering and
applying those laws of harmony and union which connect the
substances of earth with each other and with the operation of the
stars. Through all the stages of creation men thought they saw the
inferior ever seeking and tending towards the higher nature, and the
order above shedding influence on that below. The paternal sun laid
a hand of blessing on the bowed head of the corn. The longing dews
passed heavenward, up the Jacob’s ladder of the sunbeams, and
entering among the bright ministeries of the clouds, came down in
kindly showers. Each planet, according to its mind or mood, shed
virtues healing or harmful into minerals and herbs. All sweet
sounds, moving by the mystic laws of number, were an aspiration
towards the music of the spheres—a reminiscence of the universal
harmonies. The air was full of phantasms or images of material
objects. These, said Agrippa, entering the mind, as the air the
body, produce presentiments and dreams. All nature is oracular. A
cloudy chill or sultry lull are the Delphi and Dodona of birds and
kine and creeping things. But the sense of sinful man is dull. The
master of the hidden wisdom may facilitate the descent of benign
influences, and aid the travailing creation, sighing for renewal. It
is for him to marry (in the figurative language of the time) the
‘lower and the higher potencies, the terrestrial and the astral, as
doth the husbandman the vine unto the elm.’ The sage can make
himself felt in the upper realm, as on the earth, by touching some
chord whose vibration extends into the skies. From the law of
sympathy comes the power of amulets and philtres, images and
ointments, to produce love or hate, health or sickness, to arrest
the turning arms of the distant mill, or stay the wings of the
pinnace on the Indian seas. Such was Agrippa’s world.

According to Baptista Porta, a certain breath of life, or soul of
the world, pervades the whole organism of the universe, determines
its sympathies, and imparts, when received into the soul of the
inquirer, the capacity for magical research. Similarly, in the
theory of Agrippa, the fifth element, or æther, is the breath of
this World-Soul. Within the spirit thus animating the body of the
world lie those creative powers, or qualities, which are the
producers of all things visible. The instruments of this universal
plastic Power are the stars and the spirits of the elements.

With all the theosophists man is a microcosm—the harmonized epitome
of the universe: a something representative of all that is contained
in every sphere of being, is lodged in his nature. Thus he finds
sympathies everywhere, and potentially knows and operates
everywhere. Since, therefore, the inmost ground of his being is in
God, and the rest of his nature is a miniature of the universe,—a
true self-knowledge is, proportionately, at once a knowledge of God
and of creation. The sources of Religion and of Science are alike
within him.

Agrippa borrows from the Phædrus four kinds of inspiration,—the
Poetic, the Dionysian (revealing visions), the Apollinian (imparting
hidden wisdom), and that of which ascendant Venus is the pure
patroness—Rapturous Love, which carries us to heaven in ecstasy, and
in the mystic union with Deity discloses things unutterable. He
compares the soul, as ordinarily in the body, to a light within a
dark lantern. In moments of mystical exaltation, it is taken out of
its prison-house, the divine element is emancipated, and rays forth
immeasurably, transcending space and time. His Platonism, like that
of so many, led him from the sensual and the formal to the ideal.
Greek was, with reason, accounted dangerous. Plato was a reformer
side by side with Luther among the Germans. How loathsome was
clerkly vice beside the contemplative ideal of Plato.

In those days almost every great scholar was also a great traveller.
The wanderings of Agrippa and his theosophic brethren contributed
not a little to the progress and diffusion of occult science. These
errant professors of magic, like those aërial travellers the
insects, carried everywhere with them the pollen of their mystic
Lily, the symbol of theosophy, and sowed the fructifying particles
in minds of kindred growth wherever they came. Their very crosses
and buffetings, if they marred their plans of study, widened their
field of observation; were fertile in suggestions; compelled to new
resources, and multiplied their points of view,—as a modern
naturalist, interrupted during his observant morning’s walk, and
driven under a tree by a shower, may find unexpected compensation in
the discovery of a new moss upon its bark, or a long-sought fly
among its dropping-leaves.

GOWER. Agrippa’s philosophy gives us a highly imaginative view of the world.

ATHERTON. A beautiful romance,—only surpassed by the actual results of modern discovery.

WILLOUGHBY. In those days every fancied likeness was construed into a law of relationship: every semblance became speedily reality;—somewhat as the Chinese believe that sundry fantastic rocks in one of their districts, which are shaped like rude sculptures of strange beasts, do actually enclose animals of corresponding form. And as for the links of connexion supposed to constitute bonds of mysterious sympathy, they are about as soundly deduced as that connexion which our old popular superstition imagined, between a high wind on Shrove Tuesday night, and mortality among learned men and fish.

GOWER. And yet how fascinating those dreams of science. What a charm, for instance, in a botany which essayed to read in the sprinkled or veined colours of petals and of leaves, in the soft-flushing hues, the winding lines, the dashes of crimson, amethyst, or gold, in the tracery of translucent tissues empurpled or incarnadine,—the planetary cipher, the hieroglyph of a star, the secret mark of elementary spirits—of the gliding Undine or the hovering Sylph.

WILLOUGHBY. So too, in great measure, with anatomy and psychology; for man was said to draw life from the central sun, and growth from the moon, while imagination was the gift of Mercury, and wrath burned down to him out of Mars. He was fashioned from the stars as well as from the earth, and born the lord of both.

ATHERTON. This close connexion between the terrestrial and sidereal worlds was to aid in the approximation of man to God. The aim was noble—to marry Natural Science, the lower, to Revealed Religion, the higher; elevating at once the world and man—the physical and the spiritual; drawing more close the golden chain which binds the world to the footstool of the eternal throne. While a spirit dwelt in all nature, transforming and restoring, and benign influences, entering into the substances and organisms of earth, blessed them according to their capacities of blessing (transforming some with ease to higher forms of beauty, labouring long, and almost lost in the grossness and stubbornness of others), so also in the souls of men wrought the Divine Spirit, gladly welcomed by the lowly-hearted, darkly resisted by the proud, the grace of God here an odour of life, and there made a deepening of death upon death.

WILLOUGHBY. How close their parallel between the laws of receptivity in the inner world and in the outer. They brought their best, faithfully—these magi,—gold and frankincense and myrrh.

GOWER. Talking of sympathies, I have felt myself for the last quarter of an hour rapidly coming into rapport with those old poet-philosophers. I seem to thirst with them to pierce the mysteries of nature. I imagine myself one of their aspiring brotherhood. I say, to the dead let nature be dead; to me she shall speak her heart. The changeful expression, the speechless gestures of this world, the languors and convulsions of the elements, the frowns and smiles of the twin firmaments, shall have their articulate utterance for my ear. With the inward eye I see—here more dim, there distinct—the fine network of sympathetic influences playing throughout the universe, as the dancing meshes of the water-shadows on the sides of a basin of marble——

WILLOUGHBY, (to Atherton, with a grotesque expression of pity.) He’s off! Almost out of sight already.

GOWER, (apparently unconscious of the interruption.) Yes, I will know what legends of the old elemental wars are stored within yon grey promontory, about whose grandsire knees the waves are gambolling; and what is the story of the sea—what are the passions of the deep that work those enamoured sleeps and jealous madnesses; and what the meaning of that thunder-music which the hundred-handed surf smites out from the ebon or tawny keys of rock and of sand along so many far-winding solitary shores. I will know what the mountains dream of when, under the summer haze, they talk in their sleep, and the common ear can perceive only the tinkle of the countless rills sliding down their sides. There shall be told me how first the Frost-King won his empire, and made the vanquished heights of earth to pass under those ice-harrows which men call glaciers.

ATHERTON. ‘The truant Fancy was a wanderer ever!’

GOWER. On the commonest things I see astral influences raining brightness—no homeliness without some sparkle of the upper glory;—as the wain and shoon of the peasant on some autumn night grow phosphorescent, and are sown with electric jewellery. With purged eyesight I behold the nascent and unfledged virtues of herbs and minerals that are growing folded in this swaying nest named earth, look hungering up to their parent stars that hover ministering above, radiant in the topmost boughs of the Mundane Tree. I look into the heart of the Wunderberg, and see, far down, the palaces and churches of an under-world, see branching rivers and lustrous gardens where gold and silver flow and flower; I behold the Wild women, and the jealous dwarfs, and far away, the forlorn haunts of the cairn-people, harping under their mossy stones; while from the central depths sounds up to me the rolling litany of those giants who wait and worship till the Great Restitution-Day. There among those wilderness rocks I discern, under a hood of stone, a hermit Potency, waiting for one to lead him up to the sunny multitudinous surface-world, and send him forth to bless mankind. O long-tarrying Virtue, be it mine to open the doors of thy captivity! Thou mineral Might, thou fragment from the stones of the New Jerusalem, thou shalt lodge no more in vain among us! I have felt thy secret growing up within my soul, as a shoot of the tree of life, and therewithal will I go forth and heal the nations![214]

ATHERTON. No, not till you have had some supper. I hear the bell.

GOWER. It is the nineteenth century, then? Ah, yes, I remember.

WILLOUGHBY. Away, you rogue!

Footnote 213:

See Carriere (pp. 89-114), to whom I am indebted as regards the
character of this and the preceding work, having had access to
neither.

Footnote 214:

This distressing outbreak on the part of Gower will scarcely seem
extravagant to those who remember how intensely poetical were many of
the theosophic hypotheses. Analogies which would only occur to
imaginative men in their hours of reverie were solidified into
principles and enrolled in the code of nature. Nothing could be more
opposite to the sifting process of modern investigation than the
fanciful combination and impersonation of those days,—more akin, by
far, to mythology than to science. Conceits such as the following are
those of the poet,—and of the poet as far gone in madness as Plato
could wish him.

The waters of this world are mad; it is in their raving that they rush
so violently to and fro along the great channels of the earth.

Fire would not have burned, darkness had not been, but for Adam’s
fall. There is a hot fire and a cold. Death is a cold fire.—_Behmen._

All things—even metals, stones, and meteors—have sense and
imagination, and a certain ‘fiducial’ knowledge of God in them.

The arctic pole draws water by its axle-tree, and these waters break
forth again at the axle-tree of the antarctic pole.

Earthquakes and thunder are the work of dæmons or angels.

The lightnings without thunder are, as it were, the falling flowers of
the ‘æstival’ (or summer) stars.—_Paracelsus._

Hail and snow are the fruits of the stars, proceeding from them as
flowers and blossoms from herb or tree.—_Paracelsus._

Night is, in reality, brought on by the influence of _dark stars_,
which ray out darkness, as the others light.—_Paracelsus._

The final fires will transform the earth into crystal. (A summary
expression for one of Behmen’s doctrines.)

The moon, planets, and stars are of the same quality with the lustrous
precious stones of our earth, and of such a nature, that wandering
spirits of the air see in them things to come, as in a magic mirror;
and hence their gift of prophecy.

In addition to the terrestrial, man has a sidereal body, which stands
in connexion with the stars. When, as in sleep, this sidereal body is
more free than usual from the elements, it holds converse with the
stars, and may acquire a knowledge of future events.—_Paracelsus._ See
Henry More’s _Enthusiasmus Triumphatus_, § 44.

CHAPTER V.

The reason that Men do not doubt of many things, is, that they never
examine common Impressions; they do not dig to the Root, where the
Faults and Defects lye; they only debate upon the Branches: They do
not examine whether such and such a thing be true, but if it has
been so and so understood. It is not inquir’d into, whether _Galen_
has said anything to purpose, but whether he has said so or
so.—MONTAIGNE.

WILLOUGHBY’S ESSAY—THIRD EVENING.

§ 3. Theophrastus Paracelsus.

Due place must be given to the influence of that medical Ishmael,
Paracelsus. Born in 1493 at Einsiedeln, near Zurich, he studied
medicine at Basle, and travelled Europe for fourteen years from
Sweden to Naples, and from France to Poland. The jealous hatred
awakened by a most reasonable project of reform drove him from Basle
soon after his return. Vituperated and vituperating, he became a
wanderer throughout Germany, everywhere forming, or followed by,
successive groups of disciples. He died at the age of forty-eight,
in a little inn—but not, as report has long said, drunk on the
taproom floor;—a victim, more probably, to the violence of
assailants despatched against him by some hostile physicians.[215]

Paracelsus found the medical profession of those days more
disastrously incompetent, if possible, than we see it in the pages
of Le Sage and Molière. It was so easy of entrance, he complains, as
to become the tempting resource of knavery and ignorance everywhere.
With a smattering of Greek a doctor might be finished and famous. A
dead language was to exorcise deadly maladies. Diseases were
encountered by definitions, and fact and experiment unheeded amidst
disputes about the sense of Galen, Hippocrates, and Avicenna. When a
new life began to struggle to the light from beneath the ruins of
scholasticism, the fearless vehemence of such a nature became its
appropriate organ. Paracelsus was the first to lecture in the
vernacular. Instead of reading and commenting on the text of Galen,
or extracting fanciful specifics from Raymond Lully, or John de
Rupecissa, he resolved to observe and judge for himself wherever the
ravages of disease or war might furnish him with facts. Preposterous
as many of his own remedies may have been, he merits the title of a
reformer in effect as well as purpose. He applied, with great
success, mineral preparations before unknown, or little used;
performed celebrated cures by the use of opium, and exposed the
fraudulent pretensions of the alchemist and the astrologer. To the
persecution and gross abuse of the profession he replied in torrents
of undiluted and inexhaustible Billingsgate. While his
velvet-cloaked brethren, with faces blandly inane or portentously
inscrutable, mounted, with step of cat-like softness, to the chamber
of the obese burgomaster or the fashionable lady, Paracelsus gloried
in grandiloquent shabbiness and boisterous vulgarity. He boasted
that he had picked up many a hint while chatting as an equal with
pedlars, waggoners, and old women. He loved to drain his can on the
ale-bench before wayside hostelries with boors such as Ostade has
painted. Ragged and dusty, footing it with his knapsack on his back
under a broiling sun, he would swear that there lay more wisdom in
his beard than in all the be-doctored wiseacres of all the
universities of Europe.

On the basis of principles substantially the same with those
represented by Agrippa, Paracelsus developed, in his own way, the
doctrine of signatures, and the relationships of the macrocosm and
the microcosm.

The special illumination of the Holy Ghost was not more essential to
the monastic perfection of preceding mystics, than to the success of
the theosophist in that devout pursuit of science inculcated by
Paracelsus. The true Physician—he who would be wise indeed in the
mysteries of nature, must seek with ceaseless importunity the light
that cometh from above. In the Scriptures, and in the Cabbala, lies
the key to all knowledge. Medicine has four pillars: (1)
_Philosophy_, generally equivalent, as he uses it, to
physiology,—the study of the true nature of material substances in
their relation to the microcosm, man; (2) _Astronomy_, embracing
especially the influences of the heavenly bodies on the human frame;
(3) _Alchemy_, not gold-making, but the preparation of
specifics—chemistry applied to medicine; (4) _Religion_, whereby the
genuine professor of the healing art is taught of God, and works in
reliance on, and union with, Him.[216] In the spirit of the ancient
mystics he describes the exaltation of one whose soul is inwardly
absorbed, so that the ordinary operation of the external senses is
suspended. A man thus divinely intoxicated, lost in thoughts so
profound, may seem, says Paracelsus, a mere fool to the men of this
world, but in the eyes of God he is the wisest of mankind, a
partaker of the secrecy of the Most High.[217] Like Agrippa (and
with as good reason) Paracelsus lays great stress on Imagination,
using the term, apparently, to express the highest realization of
faith. Bacon observes that Imagination is with Paracelsus almost
equivalent to Fascination. He speaks of the Trinity as imaged in
man, in the Heart, (_Gemüth_), in Faith, and in Imagination,—the
three forms of that spiritual nature in us which he declares a fiery
particle from the Divine Substance. By the disposition of the Heart
we come to God; by Faith to Christ; and by Imagination we receive
the Holy Spirit. Thus blessed (did we but truly know our own hearts)
nothing would be impossible to us. This is the true magic, the gift
of Faith, which, were its strength sufficient, might even now cast
out devils, heal the sick, raise the dead, and remove
mountains.[218]

In the sixteenth century we still trace the influence of that
doctrine, so fertile in mysticism, which Anselm bequeathed to the
schoolmen of the middle age. We are to know by ascending to the
fount of being, and in the primal Idea, whence all ideas flow, to
discern the inner potency of all actual existence. But in
Paracelsus we see especial prominence given to two new ideas which
greatly modify, and apparently facilitate the researches of
theosophy. One of these is the theory of divine manifestation by
_Contraries_,—teaching (instead of the old division of Being and
Non-being) the development of the primal ground of existence by
antithesis, and akin, in fact, to the principle of modern
speculative philosophy, according to which the Divine Being is the
absorption (_Aufhebung_) of those contraries which his
self-evolution, or _lusus amoris_, has posited. This doctrine is
the key-note in the system of Jacob Behmen. The other is the
assumption that man—the micro-cosm, is, as it were, a miniature of
the macro-cosm—the great outer world,—a little parliament to which
every part of the universe sends its deputy,—his body a compound
from the four circles of material existence,—his animal nature
correspondent to, and dependent on, the upper firmament,—and his
spirit, a divine efflux wherein, though fallen, there dwells a
magnetic tendency towards its source, which renders redemption
possible through Christ. There is nothing, accordingly, in the
heavens above, or in the earth beneath, which may not be found in
the minor world of man. On this principle, further, depends the
whole system of signatures in its application to the cure of human
malady.[219]

Paracelsus defines true magic as the knowledge of the hidden virtues
and operations of natural objects. The Cabbala imparts instruction
concerning heavenly mysteries, and teaches the loftiest
approximation to the Supreme. By the combination of these sources of
knowledge we come to understand, and can partially produce, that
marriage between heavenly influences and terrestrial objects,
called, in the language of theosophy, Gamahea.[220] True magic is
founded solely ‘on the Ternary and Trinity of God,’ and works in
harmony with that universal life which, under the influence of the
Holy Spirit, animates all nature,—even the granite, the ocean, and
the flower. The magic of Paracelsus disclaims the use of all
ceremonies, conjurations, bannings, and blessings, and will rest
solely on the power of that faith to which the promise was given,
that spirits should be subject to it, and mountains plucked up at
its fiat.[221] We are here far enough from the theurgic ritual of
Iamblichus. But large room still remained for superstitious
practice, and Paracelsus could not refuse his faith to the potency
of certain magical words, of waxen images, and of pentacula
inscribed with magic characters. The universal life of nature was
mythologically personified in the sylphs and gnomes, the salamanders
and undines, somewhat as the thought of supernatural presence found
its representation in the nymphs, the nereids, and the hamadryads,
of ancient Grecian fable.[222]

In the chemistry of Paracelsus all matter is composed, in varying
proportions, of salt—the firm coherent principle, of quicksilver—the
fluid, and of sulphur—the fiery, or combustible.[223]

The theory of signatures proceeded on the supposition that every
creature bears, in some part of its structure or outward
conformation, the indication of the character or virtue inherent in
it—the representation, in fact, of its idea or soul. Southey
relates, in his _Doctor_, a legend, according to which he who should
drink the blood of a certain unknown animal would be enabled to hear
the voice and understand the speech of plants. Such a man might
stand on a mountain at sunrise, and hearken to their language, from
the delicate voices of wild flowers and grass blades in the dew, to
the large utterance of the stately trees making their obeisance in
the fresh morning airs;—might hear each enumerating its gifts and
virtues, and blessing the Creator for his bestowments. The knowledge
thus imparted by a charm, the student of sympathies sought as the
result of careful observation. He essayed to read the character of
plants by signs in their organization, as the professor of palmistry
announced that of men by the lines of the hand. Such indications
were sometimes traced from the resemblance of certain parts of a
plant to portions of the human frame, sometimes they were sought in
the more recondite relations of certain plants to certain stars.
Thus citrons, according to Paracelsus, are good for heart affections
because they are heart-shaped; and because, moreover, they have the
colour of the sun, and the heart is, in a sort, the sun of the body.
Similarly, the _saphena riparum_ is to be applied to fresh wounds,
because its leaves are spotted as with flecks of blood. A species of
_dentaria_, whose roots resemble teeth, is a cure for toothache and
scurvy.[224]

The theosophists, working on principles very similar to those of the
alchemists, though with worthier and larger purpose, inherited the
extraordinary language of their predecessors. That wisdom of
Gamahea, which was to explain and facilitate the union of the
celestial and terrestrial in the phenomena and processes of nature,
naturally produced a phraseology which was a confused mixture of
theological, astrological, and chemical terms. To add to the
obscurity, every agent or process was veiled under symbolic names
and fantastic metaphors, frequently changing with the caprice of the
adept. Thus the white wine of Lully is called by Paracelsus the glue
of the eagle; and Lully’s red wine is, with Paracelsus, the blood of
the Red Lion. Often the metaphor runs into a kind of parable, as
with Bernard of Treviso. He describes what is understood to be the
solution of gold in quicksilver, under the regimen of Saturn,
leaving a residuum of black paste, in the following oriental style:—

‘The king, when he comes to the fountain, leaving all strangers
behind him, enters the bath alone, clothed in golden robes, which he
puts off, and gives to Saturn, his first chamberlain, from whom he
receiveth a black velvet suit.’[225]

In like manner, in the _Secretum Magicum_ attributed (to
Paracelsus), we find mention of the chemical Virgin Mary, of
chemical deaths and resurrections, falls and redemptions, adopted
from theological phraseology. We read of the union of the
philosophic Sol,—Quintessentia Solis, or Fifth Wisdom of Gold, with
his Father in the Golden Heaven, whereby imperfect substances are
brought to the perfection of the Kingdom of Gold.[226]

The conclusion of Weidenfeld’s treatise on the Green Lion of
Paracelsus may suffice as a specimen of this fanciful mode of
expression, which can never speak directly, and which, adopted by
Jacob Behmen, enwraps his obscure system in sevenfold darkness:—

‘Let us therefore desist from further pursuit of the said Green Lion
which we have pursued through the meads and forest of Diana, through
the way of philosophical Saturn, even to the vineyards of
Philosophy. This most pleasant place is allowed the disciples of
this art to recreate themselves here, after so much pains and sweat,
dangers of fortune and life, exercising the work of women and the
sports of children, being content with the most red blood of the
Lion, and eating the white or red grapes of Diana, the wine of which
being purified, is the most secret secret of all the more secret
Chymy; as being the white or red wine of Lully, the nectar of the
ancients, and their only desire, the peculiar refreshment of the
adopted sons, but the heart-breaking and stumblingblock of the
scornful and ignorant.’[227]

Footnote 215:

See Lessing’s Paracelsus, p. 18.

Footnote 216:

Lessing’s Paracelsus, § 26.

Footnote 217:

Language to this effect is cited among the copious extracts given by
Godfrey Arnold, _Unpartheyische Kirchen- und Ketzer-Historie_, Th. ii.
p. 309.

Footnote 218:

_De Occulta Philosophia, Prologus_, p. 30, and p. 58. This is one of
the three treatises edited by Gerard Dorn, and published together in a
small volume, Basle, 1584. Comp. also Arnold, Th. iv. p. 145.

Footnote 219:

Dorn’s _Dictionarium Paracelsi_ (Frankfort, 1583), Art. Microcosmus.
Also the _Secretum Magicum_ of Paracelsus, entire in Arnold, p. 150.
The implanted image of the Trinity, and the innate tendency in man
toward his Divine Origin, are familiar to us as favourite doctrines
with the mystics of the fourteenth century.

Footnote 220:

_De Occ. Phil._ cap. iv. p. 45, and cap. xi. p. 78. Also, _Dict.
Paracels._ Art. Magia. Talis influentiarum cœlestium conjunctio vel
impressio qua operantur in inferiora corpora cœlestes vires, _Gamahea_
Magis, vel matrimonium virium et proprietatum cœlestium cum
elementaribus corporibus, dicta fuit olim.—Paracelsi _Aurora
Philosophorum_, cap. iv. p. 24 (ed. Dorn).

Footnote 221:

Aurora Phil. loc. cit.; De Occ. Phil. i. ii.; and xi. p. 79.

Footnote 222:

See _De Occ. Phil._ cap. v. Magical powers are ascribed to images, p.
85. A collection of talismanic figures is appended to the treatise. In
the _Thesaurus Philosophorum_ is to be found (p. 145) the arcanum of
the Homunculus and the Universal Tincture. The Homunculus is said to
be a mannikin, constructed by magic, receiving his life and substance
from an artificial principle, and able to communicate to his
fabricator all manner of secrets and mysteries of science.

Footnote 223:

The three continents—Europe, Asia, and Africa—were said to represent
these three constituent principles respectively; the stars contain
them, as in so many vials; the Penates (a race of sapient but mortal
spirits) employ them for the manufacture of thunder.

Footnote 224:

Lessing’s _Paracelsus_, § 58. This fanciful kind of physiognomy
displaces theurgy, among these inquirers. It led, at least, to much
accurate observation. It was a sign of health when the chafing-dish
and conjuring-book were forsaken for the woods and fields. Cardan, who
repudiates the charge of having ever employed incantations or sought
intercourse with dæmons, endeavours to establish chiromancy on what
were then called astronomical principles. Thus, Mars rules the thumb,
wherein lies strength; Jupiter, the forefinger, whence come auguries
of fame and honour, &c.

Footnote 225:

See _Lives of the Alchemistical Philosophers_. This book contains a
collection of the most celebrated treatises on the theory and practice
of the Hermetic Art. The passage from Bernard is in _The Book of
Eirenæus Philalethes_, p. 166.

Footnote 226:

Thus, Cardan declared that the law of Moses was from Saturn; that of
Christ, from Jupiter and Mercury. Over that of Mahomet presided, in
conjunction, Sol and Mars; while Mars and the Moon ruled idolatry. It
was thought no impiety—only a legitimate explanation, to attribute the
supernatural wisdom and works of our Lord to the divinely-ordained
influences of the planetary system.

Footnote 227:

This passage is from the Annotations of Weidenfeld on the _Green Lion_
of Paracelsus; _Lives of the Alchem. Phil._ p. 201. The _Thesaurus
Thesaurorum_ contains another choice specimen of the same sort, p.
124.

CHAPTER VI.

_Men._ I pray thee tell me,
For thou art a great dreamer—

_Chi._ I can dream, sir,
If I eat well and sleep well.

_Men._ Was it never by dream or apparition opened to thee—
What the other world was, or Elysium?
Didst never travel in thy sleep?

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER: The Mad Lover.

WILLOUGHBY’S ESSAY—FOURTH EVENING.

§ 4. Jacob Behmen and his Aurora.

Let us now crave acquaintance with that most notable theosophist,
Jacob Behmen.

It is evening, and in the little town of Görlitz the business of the
day is over. The shopkeepers are chatting together before their
doors, or drinking their beer at tables set out in the open air; and
comfortable citizens are taking wife and children for a walk beyond
the town. There is a shoe-maker’s shop standing close to the bridge,
and under its projecting gable, among the signs and samples of the
craft, may be read the name of Jacob Boehme. Within this house, in a
small and scantily-furnished room, three men are seated at a table
whereon lie a few books and papers and a great heap of
newly-gathered plants and wild-flowers. The three friends have just
returned from a long ramble in the fields which lie without the
Neissethor. That little man, apparently about forty years of age, of
withered, almost mean, aspect, with low forehead, prominent temples,
hooked nose, short and scanty beard, and quick blue eyes, who talks
with a thin, gentle voice, is Jacob.[228] On one side of him sits
Dr. Kober, a medical man of high repute in Görlitz. He it is who
gathered in their walk these flowers, and now he takes up one of
them from time to time, and asks Behmen to conjecture, from its form
and colour, its peculiar properties. Often has he to exchange looks
of wonder with his learned friend on the other side the table, at
the marvellous insight of their uneducated host. This third member
of the trio is Dr. Balthasar Walter, the Director of the Laboratory
at Dresden, a distinguished chemist, who has travelled six years in
the East, has mastered all the scientific wisdom of the West, and
who now believes that his long search after the true philosophy has
ended happily at last, beneath the roof of the Görlitz shoemaker.
He, too, will sometimes pronounce a Greek or an Oriental word, and
is surprised to find how nearly Behmen divines its significance,
from the mere sound and the movement of the lips in the formation of
its syllables.[229] When Walter utters the word _Idea_, Behmen
springs up in a transport, and declares that the sound presented to
him the image of a heavenly virgin of surpassing beauty. The
conversation wanders on—about some theosophic question, it may be,
or the anxious times, or the spread of Behmen’s writings through
Silesia and Saxony, with the persecutions or the praises following;
while good Frau Behmen, after putting a youngster or two to bed, is
busy downstairs in the kitchen, preparing a frugal supper.

Jacob Behmen was born at the village of Alt-Seidenberg, near
Görlitz, in the year 1575. As a child, he was grave and thoughtful
beyond his years. The wonders of fairy tradition were said to have
become objects of immediate vision to the boy, as were the mysteries
of religion, in after years, to the man. Among the weather-stained
boulders of a haunted hill, the young herd-boy discovered the golden
hoard of the mountain folk—fled in terror, and could never again
find out the spot.[230]

While not yet twenty, Behmen saw life as a travelling apprentice.
The tender conscience and the pensive temperament of the village
youth shrank from the dissolute and riotous companionship of his
fellow-craftsmen. Like George Fox, whom at this period he strongly
resembled, he found the Church scarcely more competent than the
world to furnish the balm which should soothe a spirit at once
excited and despondent. Among the clergy, the shameful servility of
some, the immoral life of others, the bigotry of almost all,
repelled him on every hand. The pulpit was the whipping-post of
imaginary Papists and Calvinists. The churches were the fortified
places in the seat of war. They were spiritually what ours were
literally in King Stephen’s days, when the mangonel and the
cross-bow bolts stood ready on the battlemented tower, when military
stores were piled in the crypt, and a moat ran through the
churchyard. The _Augsburg Confession_ and the _Formula Concordiæ_
were appealed to as though of inspired authority. The names of
Luther and Melanchthon were made the end of controversy and of
freedom. The very principle of Protestantism was forsaken when
ecclesiastics began to prove their positions, not by Scripture, but
by Articles of Faith. So Behmen wandered about, musing, with his
Bible in his hand, and grieved sore because of the strife among
Christian brethren, because evil everywhere was spreading and
fruitful, and goodness so rare and so distressed; because he saw,
both near and far away, such seeming waste and loss of human souls.
A profound melancholy took possession of him—partly that the truth
which would give rest was for himself so hard to find, but most for
the sight of his eyes which he saw, when he looked abroad upon God’s
rational creatures. On his return from his travels he settled in
Görlitz, married early, and worked hard at his trade. Everywhere
these anxious questing thoughts about life’s mystery are with him,
disquieting. He reads many mystical and astrological books, not
improbably, even thus early, Schwenkfeld and Paracelsus.[231] But
the cloudy working of his mind is not soon to give place to sunshine
and clear sky. He is to be found still with the pelican and the
bittern in the desolate places where the salt-pits glisten, and the
nettles breed, and the wild beasts lie down, and the cedar work is
uncovered,—among the untimely ruins of that City of Hope which had
almost won back Christendom in the resistless prime of Luther.

At last, upon an ever-memorable day, as he sat meditating in his
room, he fell, he knew not how, into a kind of trance. The striving,
climbing sorrows of his soul had brought him to this luminous
table-land. A halcyon interval succeeded to the tempest. He did not
seek, he gazed; he was surrounded by an atmosphere of glory. He
enjoyed for seven days an unruffled soul-sabbath. He looked into the
open secret of creation and providence. Such seemed his ecstasy. In
Amadis of Greece an enchanter shuts up the heroes and princesses of
the tale in the Tower of the Universe, where all that happened in
the world was made to pass before them, as in a magic glass, while
they sat gazing, bound by the age-long spell. So Behmen believed
that the principles of the Universal Process were presented to his
vision as he sat in his study at Görlitz. We may say that it was the
work of all his after days to call to mind, to develop for himself,
and to express for others, the seminal suggestions of that and one
following glorious dream.

Behmen was twenty-five years of age when the subject of this first
illumination. He stated that he was thrown into his trance while
gazing on the dazzling light reflected from a tin vessel, as the
rays of the sun struck into his room. Distrusting at first the
nature of the vision, he walked out into the fields to dissipate the
phantasmagoria; but the strange hues and symbols were still present,
and seemed to point him to the heart and secret of the universe. For
several years his gift lay hidden. Behmen was known as a quiet,
meditative, hard-working man, fond of books; otherwise scarcely
distinguishable from other cobblers. Ten years after the first
manifestation he believed himself the recipient of a second, not,
like the former, mediated by anything external; and revealing, with
greater fulness and order, what before lay in comparative confusion.
To fix this communication in a form which might be of abiding
service to him, he began to write his _Aurora_.

But he shall tell his own story, as he did tell it, one-and-twenty
years later, to his friend Caspar Lindern.

‘I saw and knew,’ he says, ‘the Being of all Beings, the Byss
(_Grund_) and the Abyss: _item_, the birth of the Holy Trinity; the
origin and primal state of this world and of all creatures through
the Divine Wisdom. I knew and saw in myself all the three
worlds,—_i.e._ (1) the divine angelic or paradisiacal world; then,
(2) the dark world, as the original of nature, as to the fire; and
(3) this external visible world, as a creation and out-birth, or as
a substance spoken forth out of the two inner spiritual worlds.
Moreover, I saw and had cognizance of the whole Being in good and in
evil—how each had its origin in the other, and how the Mother did
bring forth;—and this all moved me not merely to the height of
wonder, but made me to rejoice exceedingly. (Incredible as it may
appear, this passage _has_ a meaning, which may become apparent to
some readers after a perusal of what is said farther on, in
explanation of Behmen’s system.)

‘Soon it came strongly into my mind that I should set the same down
in writing, for a memorial, albeit I could hardly compass the
understanding thereof in my external man, so as to write it on
paper. I felt that with such great mysteries I must set to work as a
child that goes to school. In my inward man I saw it well, as in a
great deep, for I saw right through as into a chaos in which
everything lay wrapped, but the unfolding thereof I found
impossible.

‘Yet from time to time it opened itself within me, as in a growing
plant. For the space of twelve years I carried it about within
me—was, as it were, pregnant therewith, feeling a mighty inward
impulse, before I could bring it forth in any external form; till
afterwards it fell upon me, like a bursting shower that hitteth
wheresoever it lighteth, as it will. So it was with me, and
whatsoever I could bring into outwardness that I wrote down.

‘Thereafter the sun shone on me a good while, yet not steadily and
without interval, and when that light had withdrawn itself I could
scarce understand my own work. And this was to show man that his
knowledge is not his own, but God’s, and that God in man’s soul
knoweth what and how he will.

‘This writing of mine I purposed to keep by me all my life, and not
to give it into the hands of any man. But it came to pass in the
providence of the Most High, that I entrusted a person with part of
it, by whose means it was made known without my knowledge. Whereupon
my first book, the _Aurora_, was taken from me, and because many
wondrous things were therein revealed, not to be comprehended in a
moment by the mind of man, I had to suffer no little at the hands of
the worldly-wise—(_von den Vernunft-weisen_).

‘For three years I saw no more of this said book, and thought it
verily clean dead and gone, till some learned men sent me copies
therefrom, exhorting me not to bury my talent. To this counsel my
outward reason was in no wise willing to agree, having suffered so
much already. My reason was very weak and timorous at that time, the
more so as the light of grace had then been withdrawn from me some
while, and did but smoulder within, like a hidden fire. So I was
filled with trouble. Without was contempt, within, a fiery driving;
and what to do I knew not, till the breath of the Most High came to
my help again, and awoke within me a new life. Then it was that I
attained to a better style of writing, likewise to a deeper and more
thorough knowledge. I could reduce all better to outward form—as,
indeed, my book concerning _The Threefold Life through the Three
Principles_ doth fully show, and as the godly reader whose heart is
opened will see.

‘So, therefore, have I written, not from book-learning, or the
doctrine and science of men, but from my own book which was opened
within me,—the book of the glorious image of God, which it was
vouchsafed to me to read: ’tis therein I have studied—as a child in
its mother’s house, that sees what its father doth, and mimics the
same in its child’s-play. I need no other book than this.

‘My book has but three leaves—the three principles of Eternity.
Therein I find all that Moses and the prophets, Christ and his
apostles, have taught. Therein I find the foundation of the world
and all mystery,—yet, not I, but the Spirit of the Lord doth it, in
such measure as He pleaseth.

‘For hundreds of times have I prayed him that if my knowledge were
not for his glory and the edifying of my brethren, he will take it
from me, only keeping me in his love. But I have found that with all
my earnest entreaty the fire within me did but burn the more, and it
is in this glow, and in this knowledge, that I have produced my
works....

‘Let no man conceive of me more highly than he here seeth, for the
work is none of mine; I have it only in that measure vouchsafed me
of the Lord; I am but his instrument wherewith he doeth what he
will. This, I say, my dear friend, once for all, that none may seek
in me one other than I am, as though I were a man of high skill and
intellect, whereas I live in weakness and childhood, and the
simplicity of Christ. In that child’s work which he hath given me is
my pastime and my play; ’tis there I have my delight, as in a
pleasure-garden where stand many glorious flowers; therewith will I
make myself glad awhile, till such time as I regain the flowers of
Paradise in the new man.’[232]

This letter alludes to the way in which the _Aurora_ was made public
without the knowledge of its author. The friend to whom he showed it
was Karl von Endern, who, struck by its contents, caused a copy to
be taken, from which others were rapidly multiplied. The book fell
into the hands of Gregory Richter, the chief pastor in Görlitz. Well
may Behmen say that the _Aurora_ contained some things not readily
apprehended by human reason. A charitable man would have forgiven
its extravagances, catching some glimpses of a sincere and religious
purpose; a wise man would have said nothing about it; a man the
wisest of the wise would have been the last to pretend to understand
it. But Richter—neither charitable nor wise exceedingly, nor even
moderately stocked with good sense—fell into a blundering passion,
and railed at Behmen from the pulpit, as he sat in his place at
church, crimson, but patient, the centre of all eyes.

Behmen had already rendered himself obnoxious to Richter by a
temperate but firm remonstrance against an act of ecclesiastical
oppression. Now, his pretensions seem openly to militate against
that mechanical religious monopoly with which Richter imagined
himself endowed,—a privilege as jealously watched and as profitably
exercised by such men as that of the muezzins of the mosque of
Bajazet, who are alone entitled to supply the faithful with the
praying compasses that indicate the orthodox attitude. The insolent,
heretical, blasphemous cobbler shall find no mercy. Richter loudly
calls for the penalties of law, to punish a fanatic who has taught
(as he declares) that the Son of God is Quicksilver! Görlitz
magistrates, either of the Shallow family, or, it may be, overborne
by the blustering Rector, pronounce Behmen ‘a villain full of
piety,’ and banish him the town. But by the next day the tide would
appear to have turned, and the exile is brought back with honour.
The shoemaker’s booth is the scene of a little ovation, while
Richter fumes at the parsonage. Behmen, however, must give up the
manuscript of the _Aurora_, and is required for the future to stick
to his last.

His book, as it became known, procured him many influential friends
among men of learning and men of rank throughout Lusatia. He was
exhorted not to hide his talent, and the ensuing five years became a
period of incessant literary activity.[233] The scholarship of
friends like Kober and Walther assisted him to supply some of the
defects of his education; the liberality of others provided for his
moderate wants, and enabled him to forsake his business for his
books.[234] Once more did his old enemy, the primarius Richter,
appear against him, with a pamphlet of virulent pasquinades in Latin
verse. Behmen issued an elaborate reply, entering minutely into
every charge, sending the clerical curses ‘home to roost,’ and
praying for the enlightenment of his persecutor with exasperating
good temper.[235] The magistrates, fluttered and anxious, requested
him to leave Görlitz. Knightly friends opened their castle gates to
him; he preferred retirement at Dresden. There, a public disputation
he held with some eminent divines and men of science, was said to
have excited general admiration. He returned to Görlitz in his last
illness, to die in the midst of his family. He expired early on
Sunday morning, on the twenty-first of November, 1624, in his
fiftieth year. He asked his son Tobias if he heard the beautiful
music, and bade those about him set the doors open that the sounds
might enter. After receiving the sacrament, he breathed his last, at
the hour of which a presentiment of dissolution had warned him. His
last words were, ‘Now I am going to Paradise!‘[236]

Note to page 80.

Behmen’s learned friends were accustomed thus to test the insight they so revered, and would occasionally attempt to mislead his sagacity by wrong terms and entrapping questions; but always, we are assured, without success. See Ein Schreiben von einem vornehmen Patritio und Rathsverwandten zu Görlitz wegen seel. Jac. Behmen’s Person und Schriften, appended to Franckenberg’s Life of Behmen.

The rationale of this peculiar significance of letters and syllables he gives in the following passage:—

When man fell into sin, he was removed from the inmost birth and set in the other two, which presently encompassed him, and mingled their influences with him and in him (inqualireten mit ihme und in ihme), as in their own peculiar possession; and man received the spirit and the whole generation of the sidereal, and also of the external birth. Therefore he now speaks all words according to the indwelling generative principle of nature. For the spirit of man, which stands in the sidereal birth, and combines with all nature, and is as all nature itself, shapes the word according to the indwelling principle of birth. When he sees anything he gives it a name answering to its peculiar property or virtue; and if he does this he must fashion the word in the form, and generate it with his voice in the way in which the thing he names generates; and herein lies the kernel of the whole understanding of the Godhead.—Aurora, cap. xix. §§ 74-76. On this principle he examines, syllable by syllable, the opening words of Genesis—not those of the Hebrew, but the German version (!), as follows:—‘Am Anfang schuff Gott,’ &c. These words we must very carefully consider. The word AM takes its rise in the heart, and goes as far as the lips. There it is arrested, and goes sounding back to whence it came. Now, this shows that the sound went forth from the heart of God, and encompassed the entire locus of the world; but when it was found to be evil, then the sound returned to its place again. The word AN pushes forth from the heart to the mouth, and has a long stress. But when it is pronounced, it closes in its sedes in the midst with the roof of the mouth, and is half without and half within. This signifies that the heart of God felt repugnance at the corruption of the world, and cast the corrupt nature from him, but again seized and stayed it in the midst by his heart. Just as the tongue arrests the word, and retains it half without and half within, so the heart of God would not utterly reject the enflamed Salitter, but would defeat the schemes and malice of the Devil, and finally restore the other.—Aurora, cap. xviii. §§ 48-52. A similar precious piece of nonsense is to be found, cap. xviii. §§ 72, &c. of which Barmherzig is the thema. He declares, in another place, that when the spiritual Aurora shall shine from the rising of the sun to the going-down of the same, RA. RA. R.P. shall be driven into banishment, and with him AM. R. P. These are secret words, he says, only to be understood in the language of nature.—Aurora, xxvi. 120.

Behmen was indebted to his conversations with men like Kober and Walther for much of his terminology, and probably to the suggestions awakened by such intercourse for much of the detailed application of his system. See Lebens-lauff, § 20; and compare the Clavis, or Schlüssel etlicher vornehmen Puncten, &c.

Footnote 228:

The personal appearance of Behmen is thus described by his friend and
biographer, Abraham von Franckenberg, in the biography prefixed to his
Works, § 27.

Footnote 229:

See Note on p. 88.

Footnote 230:

Lebens-lauff, § 4.

Footnote 231:

See his own account of his mental conflict and melancholy, issuing in
the rapturous intuition which solved all his doubts, _Aurora_, cap.
xix. §§ 1-13. He acknowledges having read many astrological books.
_Aurora_, cap. xxv. § 43: Ja, lieber, Leser, ich verstehe der
Astrologorum Meinung auch wol, ich habe auch ein paar zeilen in ihren
Schrifften gelesen, und weiss wol wie sie den Lauf der Sonnen und
Sternen schreiben, ich verachte es auch nicht, sondern halte es
meisten Theil für gut und recht. Compare also cap. x. § 27: Ich habe
viel hoher Meister Schrifften gelesen, in Hoffnung den Grund und die
rechte Tieffe darinnen zu finden, aber ich habe nichts funden als
einen halb-todten Geist, &c. In a letter to Caspar Lindern he mentions
sundry mystical writers concerning whom his correspondent appears to
have desired his opinion,—admits that several of them were men of high
spiritual gifts, not to be despised, though in many respects capable
of amendment,—says that they were of good service in their time, and
would probably express themselves otherwise did they write now,—shows
where he thinks Schwenkfeld wrong in affirming Christ’s manhood to be
no creature, and speaks of Weigel as erring in like manner by denying
the Saviour’s true humanity.—_Theosoph. Sendbr._ §§ 52-60.

Footnote 232:

Theosoph. Sendbr. xii. §§ 8-20.

Footnote 233:

A full account of the persecution raised by Gregory Richter against
Behmen, was drawn up by Cornelius Weissner, a doctor of medicine, and
is appended by Franckenberg to his biography. A young man, who had
married a relative of Behmen’s, had been so terrified by the
threatenings of divine wrath launched at him by Richter, about some
trifling money matter, that he fell into a profound melancholy. Behmen
comforted the distressed baker, and ventured to remonstrate with the
enraged primarius, becoming ever after a marked man. For seven years
after the affair of the Aurora, in 1612, Behmen refrained from
writing. Everything he published subsequently was produced between the
years 1619 and 1624, inclusive.

Footnote 234:

Thus he thanks Christian Bernard for a small remittance of
money.—_Theos. Sendbr._ ix. Sept. 12, 1620.

Footnote 235:

_Apologia wider den Primarium zu Görlitz Gregorium Richter_, written
in 1624.

Footnote 236:

Vide Corn. Weissner’s _Wahrhafte Relation_, &c., and Franckenberg’s
account of his last hours, § 29.

CHAPTER VII.

When I myself from mine own self do quit,
And each thing else; then all-spreaden love
To the vast Universe my soul doth fit,
Makes me half equall to all-seeing Jove.
My mighty wings high stretch’d then clapping light,
I brush the stars and make them shine more bright.

Then all the works of God with close embrace
I dearly hug in my enlarged arms,
All the hid pathes of heavenly love I trace,
And boldly listen to his secret charms.
Then clearly view I where true light doth rise,
And where eternal Night low-pressed lies.

HENRY MORE.

WILLOUGHBY’S ESSAY—FIFTH EVENING.

§ 5. Jacob Behmen—his Materials and Style of Workmanship.

It has been too much the custom to regard Jacob Behmen as a kind of
speculative Melchisedek—a prodigy without doctrinal father or
mother. Let us endeavour to form a correct estimate of the debt he
owes to his mystical predecessors.

The much-pondering shoemaker consulted the writings of Schwenkfeld
and Weigel in his distress. He found these authors crying
unceasingly, ‘Barren are the schools; barren are all forms;
barren—worse than barren, these exclusive creeds, this deadly
polemic letter.’ Weigel bids him withdraw into himself and await, in
total passivity, the incoming of the divine Word, whose light
reveals unto the babe what is hidden from the wise and prudent. By
the same writer he is reminded that he lives in God, and taught that
if God also dwell in him, then is he even here in Paradise—the state
of regenerate souls. Paracelsus extols the power of faith to
penetrate the mysteries of nature, and shows him how a plain man,
with his Bible only, if he be filled with the Spirit and carried out
of himself by divine communication, may seem to men a fool, but is
in truth more wise than all the doctors. Weigel says that man, as
body, soul, and spirit, belongs to three worlds—the terrestrial, the
astral, and the celestial. Both Weigel and Paracelsus teach him the
doctrine of the microcosm. They assure him that as divine
illumination reveals to him the mysteries of his own being, he will
discern proportionately the secrets of external nature. They teach
that all language, art, science, handicraft, exists potentially in
man; that all apparent acquisition from without is in reality a
revival and evolution of that which is within.

These instructors furnish the basis of Behmen’s mysticism. Having
drunk of this somewhat heady vintage, he is less disposed than ever
to abandon his search. He will sound even those abysmal questions so
often essayed, and so often, after all, resigned, as beyond the
range of human faculties. If, according to the promise, importunate
prayer can bring him light, then shall light be his. When he asks
for an answer from above to his speculative enquiry into the nature
of the Trinity, the processes of creation, the fall of angels, the
secret code of those warring forces whose conflict produces the
activity and vicissitudes of life, he does not conceive that he
implores any miraculous intervention. Provision was made, he
thought, for knowledge thus beyond what is written, in the very
constitution of man’s nature. Such wisdom was but the realization,
by the grace of God, of our inborn possibilities. It was making
actual what had otherwise been only potential. It was bringing into
consciousness an implicit acquaintance with God and nature which was
involved in the very idea of man as the offspring of the Creator and
the epitome of creation.

But of what avail is light on any minor province of enquiry, while
the fundamental perplexity is unsolved,—Whence and what is evil, and
why so masterful? How could King Vortigern build his great fortress
upon Salisbury Plain, when every day’s work was overthrown in the
night by an earthquake—the result of that nocturnal combat in the
bowels of the earth between the blood-red and the milk-white
dragons? And how, pray, was Behmen to come to rest about his own
doubts—far less erect a system,—till he had reconciled the
contradiction at the root of all? The eternal opposites must
harmonize in some higher unity. Here Paracelsus is Behmen’s Merlin.
The doctrine of Development by Contraries was passed, in the
torch-race of opinion, from Sebastian Frank to Paracelsus, and from
him to Weigel. According to this theory, God manifests himself in
opposites. The peace of Unity develops into the strife of the
Manifold. All things consist in Yea and Nay. The light must have
shadow, day night, laughter tears, health sickness, hope fear, good
evil, or they would not be what they are. Only by resistance, only
in collision, is the spark of vitality struck out, is power
realized, and progress possible. Of this hypothesis I shall have
more to say hereafter. It is the chief estate of Behmen’s
inheritance. Theosophy bequeathed him, in addition, sundry lesser
lands;—namely, the Paracelsian Triad of Sulphur, Salt, and Mercury;
the doctrine of the vitality of the world, with the ‘Fifth Element,’
or ‘Breath of Life,’ for Mundane Soul; the theory of sympathies,
stellar influence, signatures; and the alchemico-astrotheologico
jargon of the day.

Such, then, were Behmen’s principal materials. His originality is
displayed in a most ingenious arrangement and development of them;
especially in their application to theology and the interpretation
of Scripture.

The description furnished us by Behmen himself of the deciding epoch
of his life, indicates the kind of illumination to which he laid
claim. The light thus enjoyed was not shed upon a mind from which
all the inscriptions of memory had been effaced, to produce that
blank so coveted by the mystics of a former day. The cloud of glory
magnified and refracted the results of those theosophic studies to
which he confesses himself addicted.

The topographer of Fairyland, Ludwig Tieck, tells us that when the
Elf-children scatter gold-dust on the ground, waving beds of roses
or of lilies instantly spring up. They plant the seed of the pine,
and in a moment mimic pine-trees rise under their feet, carrying
upward, with the growth of their swaying arms, the laughing little
ones. So swiftly, so magically—not by labouring experiment and
gradual induction, but in the blissful stillness of one ecstatic and
consummate week,—arose the Forms and Principles of Behmen’s system,
and with them rose the seer. But how, when the season of vision is
over, shall he retain and represent the complex intricacies of the
Universal Organism in the heart of which he found himself? Memory
can only recal the mystery in fragments. Reflection can with
difficulty supplement and harmonize those parts. Language can
describe but superficially and in succession what the inner eye
beheld throughout and at once. The fetters of time and space must
fall once more on the recovered consciousness of daily life. We have
heard Behmen describe the throes he underwent, the difficulties he
overcame, as he persevered in the attempt to give expression to the
suggestions he received.[237] How long it is before he sees

The lovely members of the mighty whole—
Till then confused and shapeless to his soul,—
Distinct and glorious grow upon his sight,
The fair enigmas brighten from the Night.

To us, who do not share Behmen’s delusion, who see in his condition
the extraordinary, but nowise the supernatural, it is clear that
this difficulty was so great, not from the sublime character of
these cosmical revelations, but because of the utter confusion his
thoughts were in. Glimpses, and snatches, and notions of possible
reply to his questions, raying through as from holes in a shutter,
reveal the clouds of dust in that unswept brain of his, where
medical recipes and theological doctrines, the hard names of alchemy
and the super-subtile fancies of theosophy, have danced a whirlwind
saraband. Yet he believed himself not without special divine aid in
his endeavours to develop into speech the seed of thought deposited
within him. He apologises for bad spelling, bad grammar,
abbreviations, omissions, on the ground of the impetuosity with
which the divine impulse hurried forward his feeble pen.[238]
Unfortunately for a hypothesis so flattering, he improves visibly by
practice, like ordinary folk.

It is scarcely necessary to observe that Behmen and the mystics are
partly right and partly wrong in turning from books and schools to
intuition, when they essay to pass the ordinary bounds of knowledge
and to attain a privileged gnosis. It is true that no method of
human wisdom will reveal to men the hidden things of the divine
kingdom. But it is also true that dreamy gazing will not disclose
them either. Scholarship may not scale the heights of the
unrevealed, and neither assuredly may ignorance. There is nothing to
choose between far-seeing Lynceus and a common sailor of the Argo,
when the object for which they look out together is not yet above
the horizon. The latter, at all events, should not regard the
absence of superior endowment as an advantage.

In the more high-wrought forms of theopathetic mysticism we have
seen reason regarded as the deadly enemy of rapture. The surpassing
union which takes place in ecstasy is dissolved on the first
movement of reflection. Self-consciousness is the lamp whereby the
ill-fated Psyche at once discerns and loses the celestial lover,
whose visits cease with secrecy and night. But Behmen devoutly
employs all the powers of a most active mind to combine, to order,
to analyse, to develop, the heavenly data.

Protestant mysticism generally is, like Behmen’s, communicative. The
mysticism of the Reformation and of the Counter-Reformation afford,
in this respect, a striking contrast. That of the Romanists is, for
the most part, a veiled thing, not to be profaned by speech. It is
an ineffable privilege which description would deprive of its awe.
It is commonly a contrivance employed for effect—a flash, and
darkness. It is a distinction, in some cases, for services past; an
individual preparation, in others, for services to come. The special
revelation of the Protestant is a message to some man for his
fellow-men. It at least contemplates something practical. It is
generally reformatory. The vision of the Romish saint is a private
token of favour, or a scar of honour, or a decoration from the court
of heaven, like a cross or star.

The illumination of Behmen differs, again, from that of Swedenborg,
in that he does not profess to have held communication with spirits,
or to have passed into other worlds and states of being. While his
doctrine is, in many respects, less subjective than that of
Swedenborg, his mode of vision, so entirely internal, is more so.

The three-leaved book, says Behmen, is within me; hence all my
teaching. In man are the three gates opening on the three worlds.
Behmen’s heaven is not wholly above the sky. The subterranean
regions cannot contain his hell. The inner and spiritual sphere
underlies everywhere the material and outward.[239] As with those
hollow balls of carved ivory that come to us from the East, one is
to be discerned within the other through the open tracery. The world
is like some kinds of fruit—a plum or apple, for instance,—and has
its rind-men, its pulp-men, and its core, or kernel-men; yet all
with the same faculties,—only the first live merely on the surface
of things; the last perceive how the outer form is determined by the
central life within. Man intersects the spiritual, sidereal, and
terrestrial worlds, as a line from the centre to the outermost of
three concentric circles. Behmen would say that his insight arose
from his being aided by Divine Grace to live along the whole line of
his nature, with a completeness attained by few. He travels to and
fro on his radius. When recipient of celestial truth he is near the
centre; when he strives to give utterance and form to such
intimations, he approaches the circumference. When asked how he came
to know so much about our cosmogony, and about the origin and
œconomy of the angelic world, he would answer, ‘Because I have lived
in that region of myself which opens out upon those regions. I need
not change my place to have entrance into the heavenly sphere. I
took no Mahomet’s flight. The highest and the inmost, in the deepest
sense, are one.’[240] So it is as though man stood at a spot where
three rivers are about to join; as though to drink of the water of
each was to give him knowledge of the kind of country through which
each had passed; how one ran embrowned out of marshy lakes—through
wealthy plains—under the bridges of cities,—washing away the refuse
of manufactures; while the second came ruddy from rocks, red with
their iron rust,—came carrying white blossoms and silver-grey willow
leaves from glens far up the country, deepfolded in hanging woods;
and the water of the third, ice-cold and hyaline, presented to the
soul, as it touched the lips, visions of the glacier-portcullis from
under whose icicles it leaped at first, and of those unsullied
tracts of heavenward snow which fed its childhood at the bidding of
the sun, and watched it from the heights of eternal silence.

* * *

The _Aurora_ was the firstfruit of the illumination thus realized.
He composed it, he reminds us, for himself alone, to give him a hold
against any refluent doubt that might threaten to sweep him back
into the waves. It is the worst written of all his treatises. With
respect to it, the answer of Shakspeare’s Roman shoemaker gives to
Marullus may be adopted by our Teuton—‘Truly, sir, in respect of a
fine workman, I am but, as you would say, a cobbler.’ Yet this
botched performance best renders us the genuine Behmen, as he was
when first the afflatus came, before greater leisure for reading and
study, and intercourse with men of station or scholarship had given
him culture. This _Aurora_, then, over which Karl von Endern pored
in his simplicity till he rose therefrom with a bewildered
admiration and a sense of baffled amazement, physically expressed by
a feverish headache,—over whose pages Gregory Richter galloped with
scornful hoof, striking out pishes and pshaws and bahs over its
flinty ruggedness,—this _Aurora_—a dawn opening for Behmen with such
threatening weather within and without—what kind of book does it
appear to us?

It is at first with curiosity, then with impatience, and ere long
with the irritation of inevitable fatigue, that we read those wordy
pages Behmen wrote with such a furious impetus. How wide the
distance between him and his readers now! Behold him early in his
study, with bolted door. The boy must see to the shop to-day; no
sublunary cares of awl and leather, customers and groschen, must
check the rushing flood of thought. The sunshine streams in—emblem,
to his ‘high-raised phantasy,’ of a more glorious light. As he
writes, the thin cheeks are flushed, the grey eye kindles, the whole
frame is damp and trembling with excitement. Sheet after sheet is
covered. The headlong pen, too precipitate for calligraphy, for
punctuation, for spelling, for syntax, dashes on. The lines which
darken down the waiting page are, to the writer, furrows into which
heaven is raining a driven shower of celestial seed. On the chapters
thus fiercely written the eye of the modern student rests, cool and
critical, wearily scanning paragraphs digressive as Juliet’s nurse,
and protesting with contracted eyebrow, that this easy writing is
abominably hard to read. We survey this monument of an extinct
enthusiasm,—this structure, many-chambered, intricate, covering so
broad a space,—as does the traveller the remains of the Pompeian
baths;—there are the cells and channels of the hypocaust, dusty and
open to the day, the fires long since gone out, and all that made
the busy echoing halls and winding passages so full of life—the
laughter, the quarrel, the chatter of the vestibule, imagination
must supply, while Signor Inglese, beneath a large umbrella and a
straw hat, doth gaze and muse, with smarting eyes and liquefying
body.

Behmen does not suffer much more in this respect than all minds of
his class must suffer. Imagination, with its delicate sympathy, will
know how to make allowance for him; but reason will not attempt to
rescue him from condign sentence of unreadableness. It is obvious,
after all, that the good man’s inspiration was not born of the mania
Plato describes as ‘divine transport;’ that it was akin rather to
that morbid activity which is but ‘human distemper.’ It is the
prerogative of genius to transmit through the dead page, with a glow
that can never become quite cold, some rays of that central heat of
heart which burned when the writer held the pen. The power of Behmen
does not reach so far. That rapidity which was to him the witness of
the Spirit, leaves for us only the common signs of unpardonable
haste,—is tediously visible in negligence, disorder, repetitions,
and diffuseness.

As might be expected, Behmen is often best in those parts of his
writings to which he himself would have assigned less value. In many
of his letters, in some of his prefaces, and interspersed throughout
all his works, exhortations are to be found which in their pungency
and searching force recal the burning admonitions of Richard Baxter.
These appeals, summoning to religious simplicity and thoroughness,
exposing the treacheries of the heart, encouraging the
feeble-minded, awakening the sleeper, would be as eloquent and
pathetic as they are earnest and true, did he oftener know where to
stop. Such passages, however, are preludes or interludes neighboured
by heavy monologue, monotonous and protracted beyond all patience.
We descend from those serene uplands, where the air is redolent of
the cedars of Lebanon, and the voices we hear recal the sounds of
Hebrew prophecy or psalm, to the poor flats of his mortal
speculation—muddy, we must say it, in the finest weather, where
chalky streams wind their slow length by stunted pollards, over
levels of interminable verbiage.

The same ideas incessantly recur, sometimes almost in the same
words. Such repetition contributes not a little to the
discouragement and perplexity of the reader, even when most
pertinaciously bent on exploring these recesses,—as in threading his
dim way through the catacombs, the investigator loses count by the
resemblance of so many passages to each other, and seems to be
returning constantly to the same spot. With all his imagination,
Behmen has little power of elucidation, scarcely any original
illustration. The analogies suggested to him are seldom apt to his
purpose, or such as really throw light on his abstractions. To a
mind active in such direction illustrative allusions are like the
breed of ponies celebrated in the _Pirate_, that graze wild on the
Shetland hills, from among which the islander catches, as he needs,
the first that comes to hand, puts on the halter, canters it his
journey, and lets it go, never to know it more. But Behmen, when he
has laid hold of a similitude, locks the stable door upon it—keeps
it for constant service—and at some times rides the poor beast to
death. The obscurity of his writings is increased by his arbitrary
chemico-theological terminology, and the hopeless confusion in which
his philosophies of mind and matter lie entangled. His pages
resemble a room heaped in disorder, with the contents of a library
and laboratory together. In this apartment you open a folio divine,
and knock over a bottle of nitric acid;—you go to look after the
furnace, and you tumble over a pile of books. You cannot divest
yourself of the suspicion that when you have left the place and
locked the door behind you, these strange implements will assume an
unnatural life, and fantastically change places,—that the books will
some of them squeeze themselves into the crucible, and theology will
simmer on the fire, and that the portly alembic will distil a sermon
on predestination.

The _Aurora_ is broken every here and there by headings in capital
letters—promising and conspicuous sign-posts, on which are written,
‘MARK!‘—‘NOW MARK!‘—‘UNDERSTAND THIS ARIGHT!‘—‘THE GATE OF THE GREAT
MYSTERY!‘—‘MARK NOW THE HIDDEN MYSTERY OF GOD!‘—‘THE DEEPEST
DEPTH!‘—and similar delusive advertisements, pointing the wayfarer,
alas! to no satisfactory path of extrication,—places rather of
deeper peril,—spots like those in the lowlands of Northern Germany,
verdurous and seemingly solid, but concealing beneath their
trembling crust depths of unfathomable mire, whence (like fly from
treacle-jar) the unwary traveller is happy to emerge, miserably
blinded and besmeared, with a hundred-weight of mud weighing down
either limb. Often does it seem as though now, surely, a goodly
period were at hand, and Behmen were about to say something summary
and transparent: the forest opens—a little cleared land is
discernible—a solitary homestead or a charcoal-burner’s hut appears
to indicate the verge of this interminable Ardennes forest of
words—but only a little further on, the trees shut out the sky
again; it was but an interstice, not the limit; and the wild
underwood and press of trunks embarrass and obscure our course as
before. It is some poor relief when Behmen pauses and fetches breath
to revile the Devil, and in homely earnest calls him a damned
stinking goat, or asks him how he relishes his prospects; when he
stops to anticipate objections and objurgate the objectors,
dogmatizing anew with the utmost _naïveté_, and telling them to take
care, for they will find him right to a certainty at the last day;
or, finally, when he refreshes himself by a fling at the Papists,
quite Lutheran in its heartiness. For in Behmen’s mysticism there
was nothing craven, effeminate, or sentimental. He would contend to
the death for the open Bible. All spiritual servitude was his
abhorrence. Very different was the sickly mysticism for a short time
in vogue in Germany at a later period of the seventeenth century.
Behmen was no friend to what was narrow or corrupt in the
Lutheranism of his day. But a Lutheran he remained, and a genuine
Protestant. Sickly and servile natures could only sigh over the
grand religious battle of those days, and would have made away their
birthright—liberty, for that mess of pottage—peace. They began by
regarding the strife between tyranny and freedom with unmanly
indifference. They ended by exercising for the last time their
feeble private judgment, and securing themselves with obsequious
haste in the shackles of the infallible Church.

Footnote 237:

While regarding as infallibly certain the main features of the
doctrine communicated to him, Behmen is quite ready to admit the
imperfect character both of his knowledge and his setting forth
thereof. Light was communicated to him, he said, by degrees, at
uncertain intervals, and never un-mingled with obscurity.—_Aurora_,
cap. vii. § 11; cap. x. § 26, and often elsewhere.

Footnote 238:

Aurora, x. §§ 44, 45.

Footnote 239:

See Aurora, cap. xix. §§ 26-45; cap. xxiii. § 86.

After speaking of the revolt of Lucifer as the cause of the present
imperfection and admixture of natural evil in the world, by corrupting
the influence of the Fountain-Spirits throughout our department of the
universe, and of the blind and endangered condition of man consequent
thereon, he adds,—‘But thou must not suppose that on this account the
heavenly light in the Fountain-Spirits of God is utterly extinct. No;
it is but a darkness which we, with our corrupt eyesight, cannot
apprehend. But when God removes the darkness which thus broods above
the light, and thine eyes are opened, then thou seest even on the spot
where thou sittest, standest, or dost lie in thy room, the lovely face
of God, and all the gates that open upon heaven. Thou needest not
first lift thine eyes upwards to heaven, for it is written, ‘The word
is near thee, even on thy lips and in thine heart;’ Deut. xxx. 14;
Rom. x. 8. So near thee, indeed, is God, that the birth of the Holy
Trinity takes place in thine heart also, and there all three persons
are born,—Father, Son and Holy Ghost.’—_Aurora_, cap. x. §§ 57, 58.

Footnote 240:

‘The spirit of man,’ says Behmen, ‘contains a spark from the power and
light of God.’ The Holy Ghost is ‘creaturely’ within it when renewed,
and it can therefore search into the depths of God and nature, as a
child in its father’s house. In God, past, present, and future;
breadth, depth, and height; far and near, are apprehended as one, and
the holy soul of man sees them in like manner, although (in the
present imperfect state) but partially. For the devil sometimes
succeeds in smothering the seed of inward light.—_Aurora_, _Vorrede_,
§§ 96-105.

According to Behmen, Stephen, when he saw the heavens opened, and
Christ at the right hand of God, was not spiritually translated into
any distant upper region,—‘he had penetrated into the inmost
birth—into the heaven which is everywhere.’—_Aurora_, cap. xix. § 48.
Similarly, he declares that he had not ascended into heaven, and seen
with the eye of the flesh the creative processes he describes, but
that his knowledge comes from the opening within him of the gate to
the inner heavenly world, so that the divine sun arose and shone
within his heart, giving him infallible inward certainty concerning
everything he announces. If an angel from heaven had told him such
things, he must have doubted. It might have been Satan in a garb of
light: it would have been an external testimony: it would have been
beyond his comprehension; but this light and impulse from within
precludes all doubt. The holy Soul is one spirit with God, though
still a creature; sees as the angels see, and far more, since they
discern only heavenly things, but man has experience both of heaven
and hell, standing as he does midway between the two.—_Aurora_, cap.
xi. §§ 68-72 and cap. xii. § 117. Comp. also cap. xxv. §§ 46-48.

CHAPTER VIII.

Μύστας δὲ νόος
Τά τε καὶ τά λέγει,
Βυθὸν ἄρῥητον
Ἀμφιχορεύων.
Σὺ τὸ τίκτον ἔφυς,
Σὺ τὸ τικτόμενον,
Σὺ τὸ φωτίζον,
Σὺ τὸ λαμπόμενον.
Σὺ τὸ φαινόμενον,
Σὺ τὸ κρυπτόμενον
Ἰδιαις α γαῖς.
Ἐν καὶ πάντα
Ἐν καθ᾽ ἑαυτὸ,
Κα διὰ πάντων.[241]

SYNESIUS.

WILLOUGHBY’S ESSAY—SIXTH EVENING.

§ 6. Jacob Behmen.—Sketch and Estimate of his System.

So our Behmen, rejoicing in his supernatural light, is prepared to
answer more questions than ever the Northern hero, Ganglar, put to
the throned phantoms in the palace roofed with golden shields. Let
us listen to some of his replies. We have been long in the
penumbra—now for the depth of the shadow.

To begin with, Behmen must have an ‘immanent,’ as distinguished from
the revealed Trinity. He attempts to exhibit the _principle_ of that
threefold mode of the divine existence, concerning which we could
have known nothing, apart from Revelation, and which Revelation
discloses only in its practical connexion with the salvation of man.
His theory of the Trinity is not one whit more unsubstantial than
many suggested by modern philosophical divines of high repute. In
the Abyss of the divine nature, the Nothing of unrevealed Godhead,
Behmen supposes that there exists Desire—a going forth, on the part
of what is called the Father. The object and realization of such
tendency is the Son. The bond and result of this reciprocal love is
the Holy Spirit.[242]

Here a marked difference must be noted between Behmen and recent
German speculation. With Hegel, for example, humanity is an
indispensable link in the Trinitarian process. God depends on man
for his self-consciousness and development. The deity of Behmen, on
the contrary, is self-sufficing, and the circle of the divine
blessedness does not stand indebted to man for its completion.

But does not every inward suppose an outward? As, therefore, there
is an Eternal Spirit, so also is there an Eternal Nature. God is not
mere being; He is Will. This Will manifests itself in an external
universe.

The Eternal Nature, or _Mysterium Magnum_, may be described as the
external correlative of the divine Wisdom. In other words, what are
Ideas in the divine Wisdom, assume external form, as natural
properties, in the Eternal Nature. Suso and Spenser sing the praises
of the heavenly Wisdom. Behmen, too, personifies this attribute as
the eternal Virgin. But Nature is distinguished from the maiden
Wisdom as the prolific Mother of the Universe.

In the Eternal Nature, are seven ‘Forms of Life,’ or ‘Active
Principles,’ or ‘Fountain-Spirits’ (_Quellgeister_), or ‘Mothers of
Existence,’—typified in the seven golden candlesticks of the
Apocalypse, and in the many examples of that significant number.
These Forms reciprocally generate and are generated by each other.
Each one of them is at once the parent and offspring of all the
rest. As King Arthur for his knights, so Behmen has a kind of round
table for them, that no one may hold precedence. He compares them to
a skeleton globe, or a system of wheels revolving about a common
centre. This heart or centre is the Son of God, as the sun is the
heart and lord of the seven planets. The antitheses which these
various qualities present to each other, in their action and
reaction, are harmonized in the Supreme Unity. The opposition and
reconciliation of ideal principles manifest the divine
fulness,—constitute a play of love and life in the Divine Nature,
the blessedness of Godhead. But the simultaneous action of these
qualities becomes concrete in the visible universe. On our planet
their operation has been corrupted by moral evil, and is therefore
accompanied by painful strife; so that, with harsh clangour, the
great wheel of life is turned by hostile forces.

The shortest method will be at once to catalogue the mighty
Seven—the besiegers of that Thebes, your patience.

I. The Astringent Quality.

This first Fountain-Spirit is the principal of all contractive
force. It is desire, and draws, producing hardness, solidity, &c.
Rocks are hard because this quality is dominant, or _primus_ in
them, as Behmen phrases it. In organic nature it produces the woody
fibre. It predominates in the planet Saturn, in salt, in bone, in
wolves.

II. The Sweet Quality.

The second is the antagonist of the first,—the principle of
expansion and movement. The pliant forms of plants, fluids,
quicksilver,—and, among animals, the subtle fox, are examples of its
characteristic supremacy.

III. The Bitter Quality.

This is the principle generated from the conflict of those two
contraries, the first and second. It is manifest in the anguish and
strife of being,—in the alterations of the revolving wheel of life.
It may become heavenly rapture or hellish torment. Its influence is
dominant in sulphur, in the planet Mars, in war, in dogs. It
produces red colours, and reigns in choleric temperaments.

IV. The Quality of Fire.

The first three qualities belong more especially to the kingdom of
the Father—of wrath, necessity, death. The last three to the kingdom
of the Son—of love, freedom, life. The fourth quality is the
intermediate or transition point between the two members of this
antithesis of evolution. In the quality of Fire, light and darkness
meet; it is the root of the soul of man; the source, on either side,
of heaven and hell, between which our nature stands. In this lower
material world, it is manifest in the principle of growth. In the
sidereal world, its planet is the central sun. It produces yellow
colours; reigns, among metals, in gold,—among animals, in the lion.

V. The Quality of Love.

This principle, in its higher operations, is the source of wisdom
and glory. It predominates in all sweet things, in birds, in the
intercourse of the sexes; and its star is Venus. Behmen, in some
places, assigns this quality especially to the gracious Son.

VI. The Quality of Sound.

Hence, in heaven, the songs of the angels, the harmony of the
spheres; in man, the five senses, understanding, and the gift of
speech. This quality is _primus_ in jovial temperaments, and
produces blue colours.

VII. The Quality of Corporeity, or Essential Substance.

This is the quality by which all the rest come to manifestation. It
falls, with the preceding, more peculiarly under the province of the
Holy Spirit, as the searching and formative principle. It is the
source in the heavenly world of the beautiful forms of Paradise, as
the preceding is of its sweet sounds. On earth it is the plastic
power ruling matter—the operative spirit of nature.[243]

* * *

It is curious to observe how Behmen’s theory takes hold of Chemistry
with one hand, and Theology with the other. Paracelsus pronounced
all matter composed of salt, mercury, and sulphur. Behmen adds, ‘It
is even so, considering salt as the representative of the astringent
or attractive principle—mercury, of the fluent or separative,—and
sulphur, of nature’s pain in the resultant process of production.’
Again, the Father is the dark or fiery principle; the Son, the
principle of light or grace; and the Holy Ghost, the creative,
formative, preserving principle—the outbirth or realization of the
two former. There are no materials so incongruous that a dexterous
use of imaginative or superficial analogies cannot combine them. In
this way, a medley of terms from the nomenclature of every science
may be catalogued and bracketed in symmetrical groups of twos and
threes. Behmen was too much in earnest, however, to carry such
artificial method very far. He was more concerned about thought than
orderly form. He could not postulate a fact to fill a gap in a
synopsis. Though he mingles in much confusion the sciences of mind
and matter, he does not confound their subjects, and regard them as
different states of one substance. He would not affirm, with
Schelling, that matter was mind dormant; and mind, matter realized
and self-conscious.

We have seen that Behmen assigns the first three principles to the
dark kingdom of the Father. When he describes that as a realm of
wrath and darkness, he speaks chiefly from the human point of view.
God is love. The Father regarded as the wrath-principle, cannot
strictly be called God. But the very principle which makes love what
it is, becomes, in respect to sin, so much wrath.

Yet, independently of man, and of such wrath as he may know, God
would still have manifested himself in contraries. The divine One,
the unmanifested Subject, seeking an object—desiring, as it were, to
find himself, becomes what, for lack of better terms, Behmen has to
call a craving darkness, or burning sense of want. Not that Deity
suffers pain; but a certain passion must form the base of action.
Realizing that object, the darkness becomes light. That light—the
Son—had not been, but for the darkness—the Father. Then from the
two, which are one, arise, in the Holy Spirit, the archetypal Forms
of the universe. Thus, from the depth of the divine nature itself
spring these opposites, Power and Grace, Wrath and Love, Darkness
and Light; and thence, by a combination of forces, the manifestation
of God in the quickened, changeful universe. But for such antithesis
God had remained unrevealed. Without so much of antagonism as is
essential to action, the Divine Being had not realized the glory of
his nature.

At the same time, Behmen carefully excludes the notion of modern
pantheism, that the Divine Idea develops itself by a process, and
grows as the world grows.[244] ‘I have to relate in succession,’ he
would say, ‘what takes place simultaneously in God,—to describe
separately what is one in Him. He needs no method, no medium. The
Eternal Nature is not his instrument for creating the visible
universe. Thought and realization, with God, take place together,
and are in Him identical.’ So, in describing a landscape, we have to
relate severally the sounds and appearances of birds and clouds,
hills and waters. But to him who is on the spot, the birds sing, the
waters shine, the clouds fly, the trees bow on the hill, and the
corn waves along the valley, at one and the same time. His senses
are the focus of the whole: he sits in the centre. But description
must travel the circumference.

We now arrive once more at Behmen’s ‘Yea and Nay’—that theory of
antithesis before noticed: his explanation of the origin of Evil.
These Contraries are his trade-winds, whereby he voyages to and fro,
and traverses with such facility the whole system of things. He
teaches that the Divine Unity, in its manifestation or
self-realization, parts into two principles, variously called Light
and Darkness, Joy and Sorrow, Fire and Light, Wrath and Love, Good
and Evil. Without what is termed the Darkness and the Fire, there
would be no Love and Light. Evil is necessary to manifest Good. Not
that anything is created by God for evil. In everything is both good
and evil: the predominance decides its use and destiny. What is so
much pain and evil in hell, is, in heaven, so much joy and goodness.
The bitter fountain and the sweet flow originally from one divine
Source. The angels and the devils are both in God, of whom, and in
whom, all live and move. But from their divine basis, or root, the
former draw joy and glory, the latter shame and woe. The point of
collision is the gate of anguish and of bliss.

Thus Behmen, from far away, echoes Heraclitus, and declares Strife
the father of all things. What were Virtue, he would ask, without
temptation? In life’s warfare lies its greatness. Our full wealth of
being is only realized by a struggle for very life. Not till the
height of the conflict between Siegfried and the dragon—not till the
mountain is all flames and earthquake with that fearful fight, do
the dwarfs bring out their hoard, and untold riches glitter round
the victor.

Behmen was by no means the first to devise a hypothesis so
plausible. We meet with it in quarters widely remote—in the
pantheism of Jelaleddin Rumi and of John Scotus Erigena. But nowhere
does it occupy so central a place, undergo such full development,
receive such copious illustration, as in the theosophy of the
Görlitz shoemaker.

Like most of those attempts to explain the inexplicable which have
proved more than usually attractive, this theory has its truth and
its falsehood. It is true that the harmonious development of life is
neither more nor less than a successive reconciliation of
contraries. The persistent quality, representing our individuality
and what is due to the particular self, must not exist alone. The
diffusive quality, or fluent, having regard only to others, must not
exist alone. The extreme of either defeats itself. Each is necessary
to, or, as Behmen would say, lies in the other. The two factors are
reconciled, and consummated in a higher unity when the command is
obeyed—‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’ Towards this
standard all moral development must tend. Pairs of principles, like
the Personal and the Relative, the Ideal and the Actual, &c.—at once
twin and rival—where each is the complement of the other, are very
numerous. They are designed for union, as heat and cold combine to
produce a temperate or habitable clime. Had Behmen confined his
theory of contraries within such limits, we might have questioned
his expressions;—we must, I think, have admitted his principle.

But when he takes good and evil as the members of such an
antithesis, he is deceived by an apparent likeness. It would be a
strange thing should any one declare courage and meekness, lowliness
and aspiration, the work of God and the work of man, incapable of
harmony. It is still more strange to hear any man pronounce any
harmony possible between good and evil, sin and holiness. The former
set of terms belong to one family, the latter are reciprocally
destructive, totally incompatible. Here lies Behmen’s fallacy.

To regard goodness as a quality which would remain inert and
apathetic were it not endowed with individuality and consistence by
evil, and goaded to activity by temptation, is altogether to mistake
its nature. An adequate conception of Virtue must require that it be
benignly active within its allotted range.

The popular saying that a man should have enough of the devil in him
to keep the devil from him, expresses Behmen’s doctrine. But the
proverb has truth only as it means that of two evils we should
choose the less: supposing imperfection inevitable, better too much
self-will than too much pliability. It is true that greatness of
soul is never so highly developed or so grandly manifest as amid
surrounding evils. But it is not true that the good is intrinsically
dependent on the evil for its very being as goodness. No one will
maintain that He in whom there was no sin lacked individuality and
character, or that he was indebted to the hostility of scribes and
Pharisees for his glorious perfectness. Indeed, such a position
would subvert all our notions of right and wrong; for Evil—the
awakener of dormant virtue—would be the great benefactor of the
universe. Sin would be the angel troubling that stagnant
Bethesda—mere goodness, and educing hidden powers of blessing.

Moreover, we must not argue from the present to the original
condition of man. Nor can any one reasonably rank among the causes
by which he professes to account for sin, that which God has seen
fit to do in order to obviate its consequences. To say, ‘where sin
abounded, grace did much more abound,’ is not to explain the origin
of evil.

Once more, if evil be a necessary factor in our development, that
world from which all evil will be banished cannot be an object of
desire. Heaven seems to grow wan and insipid. To exhort us to root
out the evil of our nature is to enjoin a kind of suicide. It is to
bid us annihilate the animating, active seed of moral progress. So
death is life, and life death. Again, if man’s nature be progressive
and immortal, his immortality must be one of unending conflict.
Modern Pantheism escapes this conclusion by annihilating
personality, and by resolving the individual into the All. A poor
solution, surely—_dis_-solution. To Behmen, no consequence could
have been more repugnant. No man could hold more strongly than did
he, the doctrine of a future and eternal state, determined by the
deeds done in the body. Yet such a cessation of personality might be
logically urged from the theory which seemed to him triumphantly to
remove so much perplexity.[245]

A tale of chivalry relates how fair Astrid wandered in the
moonlight, seeking flowers for the wreath she was twining, but
always, when the last had just been woven in, the garland would drop
asunder in her hands, and she must begin again her sad endeavour,
ever renewed and ever vain. Human speculation resembles that ghostly
maiden. Each fresh attempt has all but completed the circuit of our
logic. But one link remains, and in the insertion of that the whole
fabric falls to pieces. It is a habit with fevered Reason to dream
that she has solved the great mystery of life. And when Reason does
so dream, her wild-eyed sister, Imagination, is sober and
self-distrustful in comparison.

Neither the theist nor the pantheist can claim Behmen as exclusively
his own. He would perhaps have reckoned their dispute among those
which he could reconcile. Certain it is, that he holds, in
combination, the doctrine which teaches a God _within_ the world,
and the doctrine which proclaims a God _above_ it.

Says the pantheist, ‘Do you believe in a God who is the heart and
life of the universe, the soul of that vast body, the world?’ Behmen
answers, ‘Yes; but I do not believe in a God who is a mere vital
force—a God of necessary process—a God lost in the matter He has
evolved.’

Says the theist, ‘Do you believe in a God who has Personality and
Character; who creates of self-conscious free-will; who rules, as He
pleases, the work of his hands?’ Behmen answers, ‘Yes; but I do not
relegate my Deity beyond the skies. I believe that He is the life of
all creatures, all substance; that He dwelleth in me; that I am in
His heaven, if I love Him, wherever I go; that the universe is born
out of Him and lives in Him.’

Like Erigena, Behmen supposed that the ‘Nothing,’ out of which God
made all things, was his own unrevealed abstract nature, called,
more properly, Non-being.

And, now, to Behmen’s version of the story of our world. He tells us
how God created three circles, or kingdoms of spirits, corresponding
to the three persons of the Trinity. To each a monarch and seven
princes were assigned, corresponding to the seven Qualities or
Fountain-Spirits. One of these angelic sovereigns, Lucifer, fell,
through pride, and all his kingdom with him. Straightway, as the
inevitable consequence of sin, the operation of all the seven
Qualities throughout his dominion became perverted and corrupt. The
Fiery principle, instead of being the root of heavenly glory, became
a principle of wrath and torment. The Astringent quality, instead of
ministering due stability, or coherence, became hard and stubborn;
the Sweet, foul and putrescent; the Bitter, fierce and raging. So
with all the rest. Now, it so happened that the seventh Quality of
Lucifer’s realm coincided, in space, with this world of ours. This
earth, therefore,—once a province of the heavenly world,—was broken
up into a chaos of wrath and darkness, roaring with the hubbub of
embattled elements. Before man was created, nature had fallen. The
creative word of God brought order into the ruins of this devastated
kingdom. Out of the chaos He separated sun and planets, earth and
elements.[246]

In the Black Forest lies a lake, bordered deep with lilies. As the
traveller gazes on that white waving margin of the dark waters, he
is told that those lilies, on the last moonlighted midnight, assumed
their spirit-forms,—were white-robed maidens, dancing on the mere;
till, at a warning voice, they resumed, ere daybreak, the shape of
flowers. Similarly, on Behmen’s strange theory, all our natural has
been previously spiritual beauty. The material of this world was,
erewhile, the fine substance of an angel realm. All our fair scenes
are as much below the higher forms of celestial fairness, as are the
material flowers of lower rank in loveliness than the phantom
dancers of that haunted lake. The ‘Heavenly Materiality,’ or ‘Glassy
Sea,’ of the angelic kingdom, was a marvellous mirror of perfect
shapes and colours, of sounds and virtues. Therein arose, in endless
variety, the ideal Forms of heaven—jubilant manifestations of the
divine fulness, gladdening the spirits of the praising angels with a
blessedness ever new. All the growth and productive effort of our
earth is an endeavour to bring forth as then it brought forth. Every
property of nature, quickened from its fall by the divine
command—‘Be fruitful and multiply,’ strives to produce in time as it
did in eternity.[247] But for that fall, this earth had never held
perilous sands nor cruel rocks; never put forth the poisonous herb,
nor bred the ravenous beast; and never would earthquake, pestilence,
or tempest, the deadly outbreaks of water or of fire, have
accompanied the warfare of disordered elements. The final fires will
redeem nature, purging away the dross, and closing the long strife
of time.

Adam was created to be the restoring angel of this world. His nature
was twofold. Within, he had an angelic soul and body, derived from
the powers of heaven. Without, he had a life and body derived from
the powers of earth. The former was given him that he might be
separate from, and superior to the world. He was endowed with the
latter, that he might be connected with, and operative in the world.
His external nature sheltered his inner from all acquaintance with
the properties of our corrupted earth. His love and his obedience
surrounded him with a perpetual paradise of his own. He could not
feel the fierceness of fire, the rigour of cold; he was inaccessible
to want or pain. He was designed to be the father of a like
angelic-human race, who should occupy and reclaim the earth for
God,—keeping down the ever-emerging Curse, and educing and
multiplying the Blessing which God had implanted.

But the will of Adam gradually declined from the inward paradisiacal
life towards the life of this world. He commenced his downward
course by desiring to know the good and evil of the world about him.
Then Eve was fashioned out of him, and the distinction of sex
introduced. This was a remedial interposition to check his descent.
It was deemed better that he should love the feminine part of his
own nature rather than the external world.[248] Each step of decline
was mercifully met by some new aid on the part of God, but all in
vain. He ate of the earthly tree, and the angelic life within him
became extinct.

Behmen contends stoutly that no arbitrary trial or penalty was
imposed on Adam. No divine wrath visited his sin on his descendants.
His liability to suffering and death was the natural consequence
(according to the divine order) of his breaking away from God, and
falling from the angel to the animal life. It is characteristic of
Behmen’s theology to resolve acts of judgment, or of sovereign
intervention, as much as possible, into the operation of law. Thus,
he will not believe that God inflicts suffering on lost souls or
devils. Their own dark and furious passions are their chain and
flame. He shares this tendency in common with most of the Protestant
mystics. And I am by no means prepared to say that our mystics are
altogether wrong on this matter.

No sooner had man fallen, than the mercy of God implanted in him the
seed of redemption. He lodged in the depths of our nature a hidden
gift of the Spirit, the inner light, the internal ‘serpent-bruiser,’
the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. All
our beginnings of desire towards God and heaven are the working of
this indwelling seed of life. Thus, salvation is wholly of grace. At
the same time, it rests with us whether we will realize or smother
the nascent blessing. Man is the arbiter of his own destiny, and
voluntarily develops, from the depths of his nature, his heaven or
his hell.

Lessons of self-abandonment, similar to those of the _Theologia
Germanica_, are reiterated by Jacob Behmen. We are never to forget
the ‘Nothingness’ of man, the ‘All’ of God. He pronounces means and
ordinances good only as they lead us directly to God,—as they
prepare us to receive the divine operation. With Behmen, as with the
mystics of the fourteenth century, redemption is our deliverance
from the restless isolation of Self, or Ownhood, and our return to
union with God. It is a new birth, a divine life, derived from
Christ, the true vine.[249]

But to this idea the theosophists add another. They have a physical
as well as a spiritual regeneration, and believe in the revival,
within the regenerate, of a certain internal or angelic body. The
Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation gave much encouragement to
such fancies. According to Weigel, Christ had a twofold body—one
truly human; another, called the heavenly, a procession from the
divine nature. Furthermore, theosophy extends the influence of
redemption to external nature. In the latter-day, ‘the time of the
Lilies,’ all men will be the true servants of Christ, our race will
have recovered its lost lordship over nature, and the Philosopher’s
Stone will be discovered. That is, man will be able to extract from
every substance its hidden perfectness and power.

The strongly subjective bent of Behmen’s mind has its good as well
as its evil. He never long loses sight of his great aim—the
awakening and sustenance of the inward life. That life was
imperilled by formalism, by fatalism, by dogmatical disputes, by the
greedy superstition of the gold-seeker. So Behmen warns men
incessantly, that no assent to orthodox propositions can save
them.[250] He argues against the Hyper-Calvinist, and against what
he regarded as the Antinomian consequence of the doctrine of
‘imputed righteousness.’[251] He was a man of peace,—little disposed
to add one more to so many controversies; seldom entering the lists
unless challenged.[252] He justly condemned as profitless the
Millenarian speculations in which some about him were
entangled.[253] He had no sympathy with those who endeavoured to
make ancient Jewish prophecy the fortune-teller of the present day.
He declared that the true Philosopher’s Stone, to be coveted by all,
was ‘the new life in Christ Jesus.’[254] Only by victory over Self
could any win victory over nature. To the selfish and the godless no
secrets would be revealed. Such men were continually within reach of
wonders they might not grasp. So the sinful Sir Launcelot slept by
the ruined chapel, and had neither grace nor power to awake, though
before him stood the holy vessel of the Sangreall on its table of
silver. The treatise on the _Three Principles_ abounds in counsels
and exhortation designed to promote practical holiness. The
_Büchlein vom heiligen Gebet_ is a collection of prayers for the
private use of ‘awakened and desirous souls,’ somewhat after the
manner of those in Doddridge’s _Rise and Progress of Religion_.

When Behmen finds that Scripture contradicts his scheme, on some
minor point, he will frequently, instead of resorting to a forced
allegorical interpretation, break away without disguise from the
authority of its text. Thus, he says more than once, concerning
passages in the Mosaic account of the creation, ‘It is evident that
the dear man Moses did not write this, for it is contrary to,’ &c.,
&c.[255]

Such, then, is the track of Behmen’s journeying across the
speculative wilderness, following the fiery pillar of an imaginary
illumination—a pillar, be it observed, much like that column of
glory which, as we stand upon the sea-shore, descends to us from the
setting sun,—a luminous line which moves as we move, and which,
whatever point we occupy, glows from the ripples at our feet up to
the fiery horizon beneath which day is sinking. Behmen’s work was
done chiefly among the educated. Had his mission been to the lower
orders, we should probably have heard of him as the founder of a
sect. His object was, however, at once to awaken the life and
expound the philosophy of religion, within the Lutheran Church. He
called attention to aspects of Christian truth which the systematic
theology of that day had too much overlooked. The extensive
circulation of his books, and the general welcome given to the main
positions of his doctrine, show that his teaching supplied a real
want in those times. There can be little doubt that one considerable
class of minds, repelled by the assumption or the harshness of the
current orthodoxy, was attracted once more to religion under the
more genial form in which Behmen presented it. Others were shaken
from the sleep of formalism by his vehement expostulations. When the
Creed had so largely superseded the Word,—when Protestants were more
embittered against each other than brave against the common foe, the
broader, deeper doctrine of Behmen would offer to many a blessed
refuge. For gold and precious stones shine among his wood and
stubble. The darker aspect which some theologians had given to the
Divine Sovereignty seemed to pass away, as the trembler studied
Behmen’s reassuring page. Apart from scientific technicalities, and
the nomenclature of his system, Behmen’s style and spirit were
mainly moulded upon Luther’s _German Bible_. Any one who will take
the trouble to look, not into the Aurora, but into the _Book of the
Three Principles_, will find, along with much clouded verbosity and
a certain crabbed suggestiveness, a racy idiomatic cast of
expression, a hearty manliness of tone, indicating very plainly that
Behmen had studied man, and the book which manifests man.

Though his voice is, for us, so faint and distant, we feel how near
he must have come to the hearts of his time. Through volumes of
speculative vapour, glance and glow the warm emotions of the man, in
his apostrophes, appeals, and practical digressions. His philosophy
is never that of the artificial abstraction-monger, or the pedantic
book-worm. He writes of men and for them as though he loved them.
Modern idealism expresses itself with a grace to which the
half-educated craftsman was a total stranger. But its rhetorical
adornment is a painted flame compared with Behmen’s fire. Unlike the
earlier mystics, his theosophy embraces the whole of man. Unlike so
much recent speculation, it is wrought out more by the aspiration of
the soul than the ambition of the intellect. Amidst the fantastic
disorder of his notions, and the strange inequalities of his
insight—now so clear and piercing, now so puerile or perverse,—a
single purpose stands unquestionable,—he desired to justify the ways
of God to men. His life was a waking dream; but never did mystical
somnambulist more sincerely intend service to man and praise to God.

Note to page 107.

Behmen derives Qualität from quallen, or quellen (our well), and understands by it the characteristic virtue or operation of anything. Thus the seven Qualities are the seven Fountain-Spirits—the prolific sources of their several species of influence. Aurora, i. § 3. The notion of pain (qual) in giving birth enters also into his conception of Quality.

The description of these seven Qualities occupies (amidst many digressions) a considerable portion of the Aurora, and is repeated, with additions and varieties of expression, throughout all his larger works. The summary here given is derived principally from the account in the Aurora, and the Tabula Principiorum, Wercke, vol. iv. p. 268. Similar classifications and definitions are contained in the three first chapters of the Drei Principien, and with more clearness and precision in the Mysterium Magnum, cap. vi. Compare also especially Aurora, cap. iv. §§ 8, 9; xiv. §§ 89, &c.; and xiii. 70-78.

These seven Fountain-Spirits, or Mothers of Nature, are a contrivance really novel. Paracelsus bequeathed to Behmen the term Mysterium Magnum, applying it to the Chaos whence he supposed light and darkness, heaven and hell, to derive their origin. But Behmen’s furniture or fitting-up of the idea is wholly original. Of the early Gnostics he could know nothing, and his Heptarchy of Nature is totally distinct from theirs. Basilides has seven intellectual and moral impersonations,—the first rank of successive emanations of seven, comprised in his mystical Abraxas. Saturninus has seven star-spirits—the lowest emanations in his scheme, and bordering on matter. Ancient Gnosticism devised these agencies to bridge the space between the supreme Spirit and Hyle. But Behmen recognises no such gulph, and requires no such media. With him, the thought becomes at once the act of God. Matter is not a foreign inert substance, on which God works, like a sculptor. The material universe exhibits, incorporate, those very attributes which constitute the divine glory. Nature is not merely of, but out of, God. Did there lie no divineness in it, the Divine Being would (on Behmen’s theory) be cut off from contact with it. With the Sephiroth of the Cabbala Behmen may possibly have had acquaintance. But, in the Cabbala, each Sephira is dependent on that immediately above it, as in the hierarchies of Proclus and Dionysius Areopagita. Behmen’s seven equal Qualities, reciprocally producing and produced, are not links in a descending chain,—they are expressions for the collective possibilities of being. Compare with them the seven lower Sephiroth of the Cabbala, called Might, Beauty, Triumph, Glory, Foundation, and Kingdom. Here we have mere arbitrary personifications of the magnificence displayed in creation. Behmen’s qualities are arbitrary, it is true. They might have been different in name, in nature, in number, and the fundamental principles of the system still retained. But who could have resisted the obvious advantages of the sacred planetary number, seven? Behmen, however, goes much deeper than the Cabbalists. He does not idly hypostatise visible attributes. His attractive and diffusive Qualities are the results of generalisation. His Fountain-Spirits are the seminal principles of all being. They are, he believes, the vital laws of universal nature. They are Energies operative, through innumerable transformations, in every range of existence,—in heaven, on earth, and under the earth.

Note to page 108.

In the following passage, Behmen endeavours to explain himself, and repels the charge of material pantheism.

‘I know the sophist will accuse me for saying that the power of God is in the fruits of the earth, and identifies itself with the generative processes of nature. But, harkye, friend, open thine eyes a moment. I ask thee—How hath Paradise existence in this world?.... Is it in this world or without it? In the power of God, or in the elements? Is the power of God revealed or hidden?.... Tell me, doth not God live in time also? Is He not all in all? Is it not written, “Am not I He that filleth all things,” and “Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, for ever?”

‘Here I bethink myself. I would stand clear of all blame from your misconception. I say not that Nature is God, far less that the fruits of the earth are He. I say God gives to all life its power—be that power used for good or evil,—gives power to every creature according to its desire. He Himself is all, yet is not in all natures to be called God, but only where there is light, in respect of that (nach dem Liechte) wherein He Himself dwells, and shines with power throughall his nature. He communicates his power to all his nature and works (allen seinen Wesen und Wercken), and everything appropriates that power of his according to its property. One appropriates darkness, another light: the appetite of each demands what is proper to it, and the whole substance is still all of God, whether good or evil. For from Him, and through Him, are all things; and what is not of his love is of his wrath.

‘Paradise is still in the world, but man is not in Paradise, unless he be born again of God; in that case he stands therein in his new birth, and not with the Adam of the four elements,’ &c., &c.—De Signatura Rerum, cap. viii. §§ 45-47.

Note to page 117.

In his practical writings, and especially in his letters, Behmen handles well the great theme of the life of Christ in us. The prayer of salutation in most of his letters is—‘The open fountain in the heart of Christ Jesus refresh and illumine us ever.’

Hear him, on this matter, in a letter to N. N., dated 1623:—

‘That man is no Christian who doth merely comfort himself with the suffering, death, and satisfaction of Christ, and doth impute it to himself as a gift of favour, remaining still himself a wild beast, and unregenerate.... I say, therefore, that no show of grace imputed from without can make a true Christian. Sin is not forgiven him by the speaking of a word once for all from without, as a lord of this world may give a murderer his life by an outward act of favour. No, this availeth nothing with God.

‘There is no grace whereby we can come to adoption, save simply in the blood and death of Christ. For Him alone hath God appointed to be a throne of grace in His own love, which He hath set in Him, in the sweet name Jesus (from Jehovah). He is the only sacrifice God accepteth to reconcile His anger.

‘But if this said sacrifice is to avail for me, it must be wrought in me. The Father must communicate or beget His Son in my desire-of-faith (Glaubensbegierde), so that my faith’s hunger may apprehend Him in His word of promise. Then I put Him on, in His entire process of justification, in my inward ground; and straightway there begins in me the killing of the wrath of the devil, death, and hell, from the inward power of Christ’s death.

‘For I can do nothing; I am dead to myself; but Christ worketh in me when He ariseth within. So am I inwardly dead, as to my true man; and He is my life; the life I live, I live in Him, and not in mine-hood (Meinheit), for grace slays my will and establisheth itself lord in place of my self-hood (Ichheit), so that I am an instrument of God wherewith He doth what He will.

‘Henceforth I live in two kingdoms;—with my outward mortal man, in the vanity of time, wherein the yoke of sin yet liveth, which Christ taketh on Himself in the inward kingdom of the divine world, and helpeth my soul to bear it.... The Holy Scripture everywhere testifieth that we are justified from sin, not by meritorious works of ours, but through the blood and death of Christ. Many teach this, but few of them rightly understand it.’

The other kingdom which, in his haste, Behmen forgot to specify, is the inward world of spiritual and eternal life, which he calls Paradise.—Theosophische Sendbriefe, xlvi. §§ 7, &c. He inveighs frequently against an antinomian Calvinism. But if any one will compare this letter with Calvin’s Institutes III. i. and III. ii. 24, he will find that, on the doctrine of union with Christ, Calvin and Behmen, in spite of all their differences, hold language precisely similar.

Note to page 117.

Behmen was well entitled to teach that lesson of tolerance which his age had so forgotten. In one of his letters he says, ‘I judge no man; that anathematizing one of another is an empty prating. The Spirit of God Himself judgeth all things. If He be in us, why need we trouble ourselves about such idle chatter? On the contrary, I rejoice much rather in the gifts of my brethren, and if any of them have received another gift to utter than have I, why should I therefore condemn them? Doth one herb, or flower, or tree, say to another, Thou art sour and dark; I cannot stand in thy neighbourhood? Have they not all one common Mother, whence they grow? Even so do all souls, all men, proceed from One. Why boast we of ourselves as the children of God, if we are no wiser than the flowers and herbs of the field,’ &c.—Theos. Sendbr. 12, §§ 35, 36. Again, in the same letter (§ 61), ‘Doth not a bee gather honey out of many flowers; and though some flowers be far better than others, what cares the bee for that? She takes what serves her purpose. Should she leave her sting in the flower, if its juices are not to her taste, as man doth in his disdainfulness? Men strive about the husk, but the noble life-juice they forsake.’

Exhortations to try the spirits, and warnings like those adverted to, not lightly to take whatever fancies may enter the brain, for special revelation, are given in Theos. Send. xi. § 64. The test he gives for decision between a true and a false claim to revelation, is the sincerity of desire for the divine—not self-glory; a genuine charity towards man; a true hunger, ‘not after bread, but God.’-Compare Aurora, cap. xix. § 77.

Note to page 118.

Carriere, in an excellent summary of Behmen’s doctrine, is inclined to idealize his expressions on this point. He would regard Behmen’s language concerning the fall and restitution of nature as symbolical, and understand him only in a subjective sense. But such, I feel persuaded, was not Behmen’s meaning. The idea that man, himself disordered, sees nature and the world as out of joint,—that the restoration of light within him will glorify the universe without, is comparatively modern. The original design of man, in Behmen’s system, requires a restitution in which man shall be once more the angelic lord of life,—the summoner and monarch of all its potencies. Carriere has pointed out, with just discrimination, the distinction between Behmen’s position and that of German pantheism in our times. But on some points he seems to me to view him too much with the eyes of the nineteenth century, and his judgment is, on the whole, too favourable. See his Phil. Weltanschauung der Reformationzeit, chap. xi.

The De Signatura Rerum abounds in examples of that curious admixture of chemical or astrological processes and phenomena with the facts of the gospel narrative, to which allusion has been made. The following specimen may suffice:—

‘Adam had brought his will into the poison of the external Mercury. So, then, must Christ, as Love, yield up his will also in the venomous Mercury. Adam ate of the evil tree; Christ must eat of the wrath of God; and as it came to pass inwardly in the spirit, so must it also outwardly in the flesh. And even thus is it in the philosophic work. Mercury, in the philosophic work, signifieth the Pharisees, who cannot endure the dear child. When he sees it, it gives him trembling and anguish. Thus trembles Venus also, before the poison of the wrathful Mercury: they are, one with the other, as though a sweat went from them, as the Artista will see. Mars saith, ‘I am the fire-heart in the body: Saturn is my might, and Mercury is my life: I will not endure Love. I will swallow it up in my wrath.’ He signifies the Devil, in the wrath of God; and because he cannot accomplish his purpose, he awakens Saturn, as the Impression, who signifies the secular government, and therewith seeks to seize Venus, but cannot succeed; for she is to him a deadly poison. Mercury can still less bear the prospect of losing his dominion,—as the high priests thought Christ would take away their dominion, because He said He was the Son of God. So Mercury is greatly troubled about the child of Venus,’ &c., &c.—De Signatura Rerum, cap. xi. §§ 18-22.

Note to page 118.

A word or two should find place here concerning the fate of Behmen’s doctrine. His friends, Balthasar Walther and Abraham von Franckenberg, were indefatigably faithful to his memory. The son of the very Richter who had so persecuted him, became their fellow-labourer in the dissemination of his writings. Throughout the latter half of the seventeenth century, Germans, Swiss, Hollanders, Englishmen, were busy with translations, commentaries, or original works, in exposition and development of his philosophy. Gichtel published the first complete edition of his writings in 1682, and afterwards went off on his own account into one of the craziest phases of mysticism. Orthodox Lutheranism long continued to assail the doctrine, as it had assailed the man. But the genial piety of Spener, and the large charity of Arnold—that generous advocate of ecclesiastical outcasts—did justice to the devout earnestness of the theosophist. In France, St. Martin became at once a translator and a disciple. His best representative in England is William Law. That nonjuring clergyman was elevated and liberalised by his intercourse with the mind of the German mystic, and well did he repay the debt. Law may be said to have introduced Behmen to the English public, both by his services as a translator, and by original writings in advocacy of his leading principles. As might be expected, the educated and more practical Englishman frequently expresses the thoughts of the Teuton with much more force and clearness than their originator could command. Several other Englishmen, then and subsequently, speculated in the same track. But they met with small encouragement, and their names are all but forgotten. Here and there some of their books are to be found among literary curiosities, whose rarity is their only value. If any would make acquaintance with Behmen’s theology, unvexed by the difficulties of his language or the complexity in which he involves his system, let them read Law. The practical aspect of Behmen’s doctrines concerning the fall and redemption are well exhibited in his lucid and searching treatise entitled The Spirit of Prayer; or, The Soul rising out of the Vanity of Time into the Riches of Eternity.

In Germany Behmen became the great mystagogue of the Romantic school. Novalis and Tieck are ardent in their admiration; but they are cold to Frederick Schlegel. This unconscious caricature of Romanticism (always in some frantic extreme or other) places Behmen above Luther and beside Dante. A plain translation of the Bible, like that of Luther, he could scarcely account a benefit. But a symbolical interpretation, like that of Behmen, was a Promethean gift. Christian art was defective, he thought, because it wanted a mythology. In Behmen’s theosophy he saw that want supplied. Alas, that Thorwaldsen did not execute a statue of the Astringent Quality—that Cornelius did not paint the Fiery—that Tieck has never sung the legend of the Mysterium Magnum—and that a Gallery of the Seven Mothers should be still the desideratum of Europe! Hegel condescends to throw to Behmen some words of patronising praise, as a distant harbinger of his own philosophical Messiahship. Carriere declares that Schelling borrowed many choice morsels from his terminology without acknowledgment. Franz Baader published a course of lectures on Behmen—revived and adapted him to modern thought, and developed a theosophy, among the most conspicuous of recent times, altogether upon Behmen’s model. Baader assures us that had Schelling thought less of Spinosa and more deeply studied Behmen, his philosophy would have been far more rich in valuable result than we now find it. Carriere, pp. 721-725.—Hegel’s Encyclopædie, Vorr. z. zweiten Aufl. p. 22. Hoffman’s Franz Baader im Verhältnisse zu Spinosa, &c. p. 23.

The judgment of Henry More concerning Behmen is discriminating and impartial. ‘But as for Jacob Behmen I do not see but that he holds firm the fundamentals of the Christian religion, and that his mind was devoutly united to the Head of the Church, the crucified Jesus, to whom he breathed out this short ejaculation with much fervency of spirit upon his death-bed,—Thou crucified Lord Jesus, have mercy on me, and take me into thy kingdom....

‘But the case seems to me to stand thus:—There being two main ways whereby our mind is won off to assent to things: viz., the guidance of reason, or the strength and vigour of fancy; and according to the complexion or constitution of the body, we being led by this faculty rather than by that, suppose, by the strength or fulness of fancy rather than the closeness of reason (neither of which faculties are so sure guides that we never miscarry under their conduct; insomuch that all men, even the very best of them that light upon truth, are to be deemed rather fortunate than wise), Jacob Behmen, I conceive, is to be reckoned in the number of those whose imaginative faculty has the pre-eminence above the rational; and though he was an holy and good man, his natural complexion, notwithstanding, was not destroyed, but retained its property still; and therefore his imagination being very busy about divine things, he could not without a miracle fail of becoming an enthusiast, and of receiving divine truths upon the account of the strength and vigour of his fancy: which being so well qualified with holiness and sanctity, proved not unsuccessful in sundry apprehensions, but in others it fared with him after the manner of men, the sagacity of his imagination failing him, as well as the anxiety of reason does others of like integrity with himself.

‘Which things I think very worthy of noting, that no man’s writings may be a snare to any one’s mind; that none may be puzzled in making that true which of itself is certainly false; nor yet contemn the hearty and powerful exhortations of a zealous soul to the indispensable duties of a Christian, by any supposed deviations from the truth in speculations that are not so material nor indispensable. Nay, though something should fall from him in an enthusiastic hurricane that seems neither suitable to what he writes elsewhere, nor to some grand theory that all men in their wits hitherto have allowed for truth, yet it were to be imputed rather to that pardonable disease that his natural complexion is obnoxious to, than to any diabolical design in the writer; which rash and unchristian reproach is as far from the truth, if not further, as I conceive, than the credulity of those that think him in everything infallibly inspired.—Mastix, his Letter to a private Friend, appended to the Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, &c., p. 294 (1656).

It will be sufficient to enumerate the mere names of several minor mystics, whose fancies are of little moment in the history of mystical doctrine. In the sixteenth century appeared David Joris, a Dutchman, who had almost fatal ecstasies and visions, and wrote and exhorted men, in mystical language, to purity and self-abandonment. Also Postel, a Frenchman, more mad than the former, who believed in a female devotee, named Johanna, as the second Eve, through whom humanity was to be regenerated. Guthmann, Lautensack, and Conrad Sperber, were theosophists who mingled, in hopeless confusion, religious doctrine and alchemic process, physics and scripture, tradition, vision, fancy, fact. During the first half of the seventeenth century, Brunswick was agitated by one Engelbrecht, a sickly hypochondriacal weaver, who imagined himself translated to heaven and hell, and commissioned to expound and preach incessantly. During the latter part of the same century, the madman Kuhlmann roved and raved about Europe, summoning sovereigns to his bar: Conrad Dippel improvised a medley of Paracelsus, Schwenkfeld, and Behmen; and John George Gichtel, a fanatical Quietist, bathed his soul in imaginary flames, believed himself destined to illumine all mankind, founded the sect of the Angel-Brethren, and seems to have ended in sheer madness. An account of these and other mystics, even less notable, will be found in Arnold’s Kirchen-undKetzergeschichte, Th. iii.

Footnote 241:

The initiate mind saith this and saith that, as it circles around the
unspeakable Depth. Thou art the bringer-forth, thou too the offspring;
thou the illuminer, thou the illuminate; thou art the manifest, thou
art the hidden one,—hid by thy glories. One, and yet all things, one
in thyself alone, yet throughout all things!

Footnote 242:

_Von den drei Principien des Göttlichen Wesens_, cap. vii. §§ 22, &c.,
cap. ix. 30, _et passim_. _Aurora_, cap. ii. § 41; cap. xxiii. 61-82.
Compare _Aurora_, cap. xx. §§ 49, &c. _Drei Princip._ cap. vii. 25.
_Aurora_, cap. x. § 58. Also cap. iii. throughout. There he describes
the way in which every natural object—wood, stone, or plant, contains
three principles,—the image, or impress of the divine Trinity; first,
the Power (_Krafft_) whereby it possesses a body proper to itself;
secondly, the sap (_Safft_) or heart; thirdly, the peculiar virtue,
smell, or taste proceeding from it; this is its _spirit_ (§ 47). So,
in the soul of man, do Power, and Light, and a Spirit of
Understanding—the offspring of both—correspond to the three persons of
the Trinity (§ 42).

Footnote 243:

See Note on p. 120.

Footnote 244:

See Note on p. 121.

Footnote 245:

Here I am much indebted to the masterly discussion of the theory in
question, contained in Müller’s _Lehre von der Sünde_, Buch ii. cap.
4.

Footnote 246:

_Aurora_, cap. ix. § 42; cap. xviii. § 10-15; cap. xxiii. §§ 92, &c.
The remarks in the text, concerning Behmen’s position as between
theism and pantheism, are only true if the word theism be there
understood as equivalent to deism. For theism, understanding by it
belief in a personal deity, does not remove God from the universe.
Theism ought to represent the true mean between the deism which
relegates a divine Mechanician far from the work of his hands, and the
pantheism which submerges him beneath it.

Footnote 247:

Aurora, cap. iv. §§ 10, 11. Comp. § 15, and also cap. xxi. § 37.

Footnote 248:

Aurora, cap. v. § 4; cap. xvii. § 16.

Footnote 249:

Aurora., § 27; cap. xiv. § 104; cap. x. §§ 42, 65; xix. § 50.

Footnote 250:

For example, in the _Drei Principien_, cap. xxvi. §§ 13-34, and in the
_Aurora_, cap. xii. § 65.

Footnote 251:

See Note on p. 121.

Footnote 252:

Theos. Sendbr. 46, §§ 51-54. See also Note on page 122.

Footnote 253:

Behmen supposed the latter day not far distant (_Aurora_, iv. 2), but
his remarks on the vanity of eschatological speculations generally
might be read with advantage by some of our modern interpreters of
prophecy. See the letters to Paul Kaym, _Theos. Send._ viii. and xi.

Footnote 254:

Theos. Sendbr. x. § 20. See also Note on page 123.

Footnote 255:

Aurora, cap. xx. § 1; xxii. 26. See also second Note on page 123.

CHAPTER IX.

O sola, mica, rama lamahi,
Volase, cala, maja, mira, salame,
Viemisa molasola, Rama, Afasala.
Mirahel, Zorabeli, Assaja!

Citation for all Spirits, from the BLACK RAVEN.

A strict regard for historical accuracy compels me to state that the following conversation took place in the drawing-room, and not in the library. By such an arrangement, that bright feminine presence was secured which, according to Gower, deprived mysticism itself of half its obscurity.

‘Did Jacob Behmen frighten you away?’ asked Willoughby of Mrs. Atherton, somewhat remorsefully. ‘I think Atherton and Gower will bear me out in saying that it was not easy to render the worthy shoemaker entertaining.’

MRS. ATHERTON. Mr. Gower was telling us just before you came in, that he found him, from your account, a much more imaginative personage than he had supposed—quite a poetical philosopher.

GOWER. Behmen holds a poet’s doctrine, surely, when he represents all nature as struggling towards an ideal,—striving to bring forth now, as it once did—ere Lucifer had fallen,—longing and labouring, in fellowship with our human aspiration.

WILLOUGHBY. Such a notion must tend to remove from the mind that painful sense we sometimes have of the indifference of nature to our thoughts and doings.

ATHERTON. To remove that feeling from the imagination, at least.

WILLOUGHBY. And that is enough; for only in imagination can it have existence. Man is so much greater than nature.

GOWER. It does, indeed, make all the difference to poets and artists, whether they read sympathy or apathy in the face of creation. Think of the various forms and agencies of nature—of the swart Cyclopean forces under the earth—of the deftly-woven threadwork of the tissues—of vapour-pageantries, and cloud-cupolas, and fairy curls of smoke—of the changeful polity of the seasons, advancing and disgracing frost or sunshine—of the waves lashing at the land, and the land growing into the waves,—of all these ministries as working, like thoughtful man, toward a divine standard; as rejoicing, in their measure, through every descending range of being, under the restoring hand of the Divine Artificer, and panting to recover the order and the beauty of the Paradise which shines above,—of the Eden which once blossomed here below. Think of the earth, resigning herself each winter to her space of sleep, saying inwardly, ‘I have wrought another year to bring the offspring of my breast nearer to the heavenly pattern hidden in my heart. I rest, another circuit nearer to the final consummation.’ Then there is that upper Paradise—substantial, yet ethereal,—as full of beauty, for finer senses, as earth’s fairest spots for more gross, without aught that is hurtful or discordant. Fill up Behmen’s outline. Picture the heavenly hills and valleys, whispering one to another in odorous airs,—a converse only broken sweetly, from time to time, by the floating tones of some distant angel-psalm, as the quiet of a lake by a gliding swan. There run rivers of life—the jubilant souls of the meditative glens through which they wend. There are what seem birds, gorgeous as sunset clouds, and less earthly,—animal forms, graceful as the antelope, leaping among crags more lustrous than diamond,—creatures mightier than leviathan; and mild-eyed as the dove couching among immortal flowers, or bathing in the crystal sea. The very dust is dazzling and priceless, intersown with the sapphire, the sardonyx, the emerald of heaven; and all the ground and pavement of that world branching with veins as of gold and silver, an arborescent glory, instinct with mysterious life.

WILLOUGHBY. Thank you, Gower.

GOWER. Thank you, Willoughby. You are my informant. I never read a line of Behmen on my own account, and, what is more, never will.

KATE. Helen and I want you very much to tell us something about the Rosicrucians.

ATHERTON. You have read Zanoni——

KATE. And we are all the more curious in consequence. How much of such a story may I think true?

ATHERTON. As an ideal portraiture of that ambition which seeks lordship within the marches of the unseen world, I think Zanoni perfect.

MRS. ATHERTON. The Rosicrucians pretended, did they not, that they could prolong life indefinitely,—laid claim to all sorts of wonderful power and knowledge? Have you not once or twice met with a person, or heard of one, who would certainly have been suspected of being a Rosicrucian by superstitious people? I mean, without any pretence on his part, merely from a singular appearance, or a mysterious manner, or uncommon cleverness.

ATHERTON. Oh, yes; such men would keep up the Rosicrucian tradition bravely among the common folk.

WILLOUGHBY. And among great folk, too, if they took the pains.

MRS. ATHERTON. I was thinking of Colonel Napier’s description of George Borrow, which we were reading the other day. He pictures him youthful in figure, yet with snow-white hair; inscrutable, therefore, as to age, as the Wandering Jew; he has deep-black mesmeric eyes, terrible to dogs and Portuguese; he is silent about himself to the most tantalizing height of mystery, no man knowing his whence or whither; he is master of information astoundingly various, speaks with fluency English, French, German, Spanish, Greek, Hindee, Moultanee, the gipsy tongue, and more beside, for aught I know. So equipped, within and without, he might have set up for a Zanoni almost anywhere, and succeeded to admiration.

ATHERTON. How small the charlatans look beside such a specimen of true manhood. But where shall we find the distance wider between the ideal and the actual than in this very province of supernatural pretension? What a gulf between the high personage our romance imagines and that roving, dare-devil buccaneer of science, or that shuffling quacksalver which our matter-of-fact research discovers. Don’t you agree with me, Willoughby?

WILLOUGHBY. Altogether. Only compare the two sets of figures—what we fancy, and what we find. On the one side you picture to yourself a man Platonically elevated above the grossness and entanglement of human passions, disdaining earth, dauntlessly out-staring the baleful eyes of that nameless horror—the Dweller on the Threshold; commanding the prescience and the power of mightiest spirits; and visited, like Shelley’s Witch of Atlas, as he reads the scrolls of some Saturnian Archimage, by universal Pan, who comes with homage ‘out of his everlasting lair,’—

‘Where the quick heart of the great world doth pant.’

This is the theurgist, as imagination paints him. Now turn, on the other side, to the actual gallery of theosophic and theurgic worthies, as history reveals them. Baptista Porta dwells in a house which is the triumph of legerdemain,—the palace of Puck, the most intricate nest of traps, surprises, optical delusions, grotesque transformations,—throwing host and guests into paroxysms of laughter or of fear. You see Cornelius Agrippa, in threadbare bravery, with his heart upon his sleeve, and every expression by turns upon his brow, save that of the Platonic serenity. Paracelsus swears worse than my uncle Toby’s comrades in Flanders, and raves about his Homunculus. But from such men we cannot withhold sympathy, respect, even a certain admiration. In that eighteenth century, behold that grand magnet for all the loose and dupable social particles in every class and country—the soi-disant Count Cagliostro, with his Seraphina, his Egyptian Lodge, his elixirs and red powder, his magical caraffes, his phosphorous glories, his Pentagon and Columbs, his Seven Planetary Spirits, his Helios, Mene, Tetragrammaton. In that age of professed Illuminism, in the times of Voltaire and Diderot, when universal Aufklärung was to banish every mediæval phantasm, you see Father Gassner, with his miraculous cures, followed by crowds through Swabia and Bavaria;—Mesmer attracting Paris and Vienna to his darkened rooms and hidden music, to be awe-stricken by the cataleptic horrors there achieved;—the Count St. Germain declaring himself three hundred years old, and professing the occult science of diamond-manufacturing Brahmins;—the coffee-house keeper, Schröpfer, deluding Leipsic and Frankfort with his pretended theurgic art;—and St. Maurice, swindling the sceptical wits and roués who flutter in the drawing-rooms of Mesdames Du Maine and De Tencin, pretending to open converse for them with sylphs and Salamanders, invoking the genius Alaël, and finally subsiding into the Bastille. Such are some among the actual caricatures of the artistic conception embodied in the character of Zanoni.

ATHERTON. Truly a bad symptom of the general disease, when men grow unable to see that the highest dignity lies close at hand.

WILLOUGHBY. As though man could never exhibit magnanimity unless in some thrilling dramatic ‘situation.’

GOWER. Or could not believe in the unseen world save by help of necromancers, miracle-mongers, and clairvoyantes.

ATHERTON. The ancient saying abides true,—He that ruleth his own spirit is greater than he that taketh a city,—greater than even he who should carry the cloud-capital of the whole world of spirits, pull down its meteor-flag, and make all the weird garrison his thralls. I think, if I were a preacher, I should some day take up the phase of man’s mental history we have now reviewed as a practical exposition of Christ’s words—‘Nevertheless, in this rejoice not that the spirits are subject unto you, but rather that your names are written in heaven.’

KATE. I should like to know, after all, precisely who and what these Rosicrucians were. When did they make their first appearance?

WILLOUGHBY. They were originally neither more nor less than the ‘Mrs. Harris’ of a Lutheran pastor.

MRS. ATHERTON. Mr. Willoughby!

ATHERTON. Fact, Lily. Willoughby never said anything truer.

WILLOUGHBY. Allow me to tell you the story.—About the year 1610, there appeared anonymously a little book, which excited great sensation throughout Germany. It was entitled, The Discovery of the Brotherhood of the Honourable Order of the Rosy Cross, and dedicated to all the scholars and magnates of Europe.[256]

It commenced with an imaginary dialogue between the Seven Sages of Greece, and other worthies of antiquity, on the best method of accomplishing a general reform in those evil times. The suggestion of Seneca is adopted, as most feasible, namely, a secret confederacy of wise philanthropists, who shall labour everywhere in unison for this desirable end. The book then announces the actual existence of such an association. One Christian Rosenkreuz, whose travels in the East had enriched him with the highest treasures of occult lore, is said to have communicated his wisdom, under a vow of secresy, to eight disciples, for whom he erected a mysterious dwelling-place called The Temple of the Holy Ghost. It is stated further, that this long-hidden edifice had been at last discovered, and within it the body of Rosenkreuz, untouched by corruption, though, since his death, one hundred and twenty years had passed away. The surviving disciples of the institute call on the learned and devout, who desire to co-operate in their projects of reform, to advertise their names. They themselves indicate neither name nor place of rendezvous. They describe themselves as true Protestants. They expressly assert that they contemplate no political movement in hostility to the reigning powers. Their sole aim is the diminution of the fearful sum of human suffering, the spread of education, the advancement of learning, science, universal enlightenment, and love. Traditions and manuscripts in their possession have given them the power of gold-making, with other potent secrets; but by their wealth they set little store. They have arcana, in comparison with which the secret of the alchemist is a trifle. But all is subordinate, with them, to their one high purpose of benefiting their fellows both in body and soul.

MRS. ATHERTON. No wonder the book made some noise.

WILLOUGHBY. I could give you conclusive reasons, if it would not tire you to hear them, for the belief that this far-famed book was written by a young Lutheran divine named Valentine Andreä. He was one of the very few who understood the age, and had the heart to try and mend it. You see him, when his college days are over, starting on his travels—his old mother giving him her tearful ‘God bless you,’ as she puts into his hand all the treasure of her poverty,—a rusty old coin, and twelve kreuzer. From the cottage-door her gaze follows with many a prayer the good son, whose beloved form lessens along the country road. Years after, he comes back, bringing with him the same old coin, and with it several hundred gulden. He has seen the world, toiling, with quick observant eye and brave kindly heart, through south and western Germany, among the Alps, through Italy and France. He has been sometimes in clover as a travelling tutor, sometimes he has slept and fared hard, under vine-hedges, in noisy, dirty little inns, among carriers, packmen, and travelling apprentices. The candidate becomes pastor, and proves himself wise in men as well as books. A philanthropist by nature, he is not one of those dreamers who hate all that will not aid their one pet scheme, and cant about a general brotherhood which exempts them from particular charity. Wherever the church, the school, the institute of charity have fallen into ruin or disorder by stress of war, by fraud, or selfish neglect, there the indefatigable Andreä appears to restore them. He devises new plans of benevolence,—appealing, persuading, rebuking. He endures the petulence of disturbed indolence, the persecution of exposed abuse; bearing with, and winning over, all sorts of hopeless crabbed people, thrusting men’s hands into their pockets, they know not how. He is an arch bore in the eyes of miserly burgomasters and slumberous brother clergy—a very patron-saint for the needy and distressed, the orphan and the widow. To this robust practical benevolence was added a genial humour, not uncommon in minds of strength like his, and a certain trenchant skill in satirical delineation which renders some of his writings among the most serviceable to the historian of those times.

GOWER. Oh, how I love that man!

WILLOUGHBY. Well, this Andreä writes the Discovery of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood, a jeu-d’esprit with a serious purpose, just as an experiment to see whether something cannot be done by combined effort to remedy the defect and abuses—social, educational, and religious, so lamented by all good men. He thought there were many Andreäs scattered throughout Europe—how powerful would be their united systematic action!

KATE. But why mix up with his proposal all this idle fabling about Rosenkreuz and his fraternity?

WILLOUGHBY. But for that spice of romance, this notion of his could never have done more than chip the shell or sprawl helpless in the nest. The promise of supernatural powers awakened universal attention—fledged, and gave it strength to fly through Europe.

MRS. ATHERTON. But the hoax could not last long, and would, after all, encourage those idle superstitions which were among the most mischievous of the errors he was trying to put down.

WILLOUGHBY. So indeed it proved. But his expectation was otherwise. He hoped that the few nobler minds whom he desired to organize would see through the veil of fiction in which he had invested his proposal; that he might communicate personally with some such, if they should appear; or that his book might lead them to form among themselves a practical philanthropic confederacy, answering to the serious purpose he had embodied in his fiction. Let the empty charlatan and the ignoble gold-seeker be fooled to the top of their bent, their blank disappointment would be an excellent jest; only let some few, to whom humanity was more dear than bullion, be stimulated to a new enterprise.

GOWER. The scheme was certain, at any rate, to procure him some amusement.

WILLOUGHBY. Many a laugh, you may be sure, he enjoyed in his parsonage with his few friends who were in the secret, when they found their fable everywhere swallowed greedily as unquestionable fact. On all sides they heard of search instituted to discover the Temple of the Holy Ghost. Printed letters appear continually, addressed to the imaginary brotherhood, giving generally the initials of the candidate, where the invisibles might hear of him, stating his motives and qualifications for entrance into their number, and sometimes furnishing samples of his cabbalistic acquirements. Still, no answer. Not a trace of the Temple. Profound darkness and silence, after the brilliant flash which had awakened so many hopes. Soon the mirth grew serious. Andreä saw with concern that shrewd heads of the wrong sort began to scent his artifice, while quacks reaped a rogue’s harvest from it. The reality was ridiculed as fiction, and the fiction hailed as reality. Society was full of the rotten combustible matter which his spark had kindled into a conflagration he could not hope to stay. A cloud of books and pamphlets issued from the press, for and against the fraternity, whose actual house lay beneath the Doctor’s hat of Valentine Andreä. Medical practitioners of the old school, who denounced the spagiric method, and to whom the name of Paracelsus was an abomination, ridiculed the Rosicrucian secrets, and scoffed at their offer of gratuitous cures. Orthodox divines, like Libavius, swinging a heavy club, cruelly demolished the little book,—which, of a truth, was not fit to sustain rough handling. They called down fire from heaven on its unknown authors, and declared that their rosa should be rota—their rose, the wheel. Meanwhile a number of enthusiasts became volunteer expositors of the principle and aim of this undiscoverable brotherhood. Andreä saw his scheme look as ridiculous in the hands of its credulous friends as it seemed odious in those of its enemies. A swarm of impostors pretended to belong to the Fraternity, and found a readier sale than ever for their nostrums. Andreä dared not reveal himself. All he could do was to write book after book to expose the folly of those whom his handiwork had so befooled, and still to labour on, by pen and speech, in earnest aid of that reform which his unhappy stratagem had less helped than hindered.

MRS. ATHERTON. And was no society ever actually formed?

WILLOUGHBY. I believe not; nothing, at least, answering in any way to Andreä’s design. Confederacies of pretenders appear to have been organized in various places; but Descartes says he sought in vain for a Rosicrucian lodge in Germany. The name Rosicrucian became by degrees a generic term, embracing every species of occult pretension,—arcana, elixirs, the philosopher’s stone, theurgic ritual, symbols, initiations. In general usage the term is associated more especially with that branch of the secret art which has to do with the creatures of the elements.

ATHERTON. And from this deposit of current mystical tradition sprang, in great measure, the Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism of the eighteenth century,—that golden age of secret societies. Then flourished associations of every imaginable kind, suited to every taste. The gourmand might be sure of a good dinner in one; the alchemist might hope to catch his secret in a second; the place-hunter might strengthen his interest in the brotherhood of a third; and, in all, the curious and the credulous might be fleeced to their hearts’ content. Some lodges belonged to Protestant societies, others were the implements of the Jesuits. Some were aristocratic, like the Strict Observance; others democratic, seeking in vain to escape an Argus-eyed police. Some—like the Illuminati under Weishaupt, Knigge, and Von Zwackh, numbering (among many knaves) not a few names of rank, probity, and learning—were the professed enemies of mysticism and superstition. Others existed only for the profitable juggle of incantations and fortune-telling. The lodges contended with each other and among themselves; divided and subdivided; modified and remodified their constitutions; blended and dispersed; till, at last, we almost cease to hear of them. The best perished at the hands of the Jesuits, the worst at the hands of the police.

WILLOUGHBY. At Vienna, the Rosicrucians and Freemasons were at one time so much the rage that a modification of the mason’s apron became a fashionable part of female dress, and chatelaines were made of miniature hammers, circles, and plumblines.

KATE. Very pretty, some of them, I dare say.

ATHERTON. Do you remember, Gower, that large old house we saw at Vienna, called the Stift?

GOWER. Perfectly, and the Stift-gasse, too, leading to it, for there I got wet through.

ATHERTON. That building is the relic of a charity founded by a professed Rosicrucian. He took the name of Chaos (after their fashion)—every brother changing his name for some such title as Sol, Aureus, Mercurius, and so on, according to his taste. He came to Vienna in the seventeenth century, and somehow, whether by his alchemy or not I cannot say, acquired both fortune and nobility. Ferdinand III. made him Hofkammerath, and prefixed a Von to the Chaos. This good man founded an institution for orphans, who were once educated in that house, since converted into a military academy, and bearing still, in its name and neighbourhood, traces of the original endowment.

MRS. ATHERTON. Andreä would have taken some comfort could he but have seen at least that practical fruit of his Rosicrucian whim. How his heart would have rejoiced to hear the hum of the orphan school-room, and to see their smoking platters!

KATE. My curiosity is not yet satisfied. I should like to know something more about those most poetical beings, the creatures of the elements,—Sylph, Undine, and Co.

ATHERTON. On this subject, Kate, I am happy to be able to satisfy you. I can conduct you at once to the fountain-head. I will read you the process enjoined in the Comte de Gabalis for attaining to converse with some of these fanciful creations. (Taking down a little book.) Here is the passage.[257] (Reads.)

‘If we wish to recover our empire over the salamanders, we must purify and exalt the element of fire we have within us, and restore the tone of this chord which desuetude has so relaxed. We have only to concentrate the fire of the world, by concave mirrors, in a globe of glass. This is the process all the ancients have religiously kept secret; it was revealed by the divine Theophrastus. In such a globe is formed a solar powder, and this, self-purified from the admixture of other elements, and prepared according to the rules of art, acquires, in a very short time, a sovereign virtue for the exaltation of the fire within us, and renders us, so to speak, of an igneous nature. Henceforth the inhabitants of the fiery sphere become our inferiors. Delighted to find our reciprocal harmony restored, and to see us drawing near to them, they feel for us all the friendship they have for their own species, all the respect they owe to the image and vicegerent of their Creator, and pay us every attention that can be prompted by the desire of obtaining at our hands that immortality which does not naturally belong to them. The salamanders, however, as they are more subtile than the creatures of the other elements, live a very long time, and are therefore less urgent in seeking from the sage that affection which endows them with immortality....

‘It is otherwise with the sylphs, the gnomes, and the nymphs. As they live a shorter time, they have more inducement to court our regard, and it is much easier to become intimate with them. You have only to fill a glass vessel with compressed air, with earth, or with water, close it up, and leave it exposed to the sun’s rays for a month. After that time, effect a scientific separation of the elements, which you will easily accomplish, more especially with earth or water. It is wonderful to see what a charm each of the elements thus purified possesses for attracting nymphs, sylphs, and gnomes. After taking the smallest particle of this preparation every day for a few months, you see in the air the flying commonwealth of the sylphs, the nymphs coming in crowds to the waterside, and the guardians of hidden treasure displaying their stores of wealth. Thus, without magical figures, without ceremonies, without barbarous terms, an absolute power is acquired over all these people of the elements. They require no homage from the philosopher, for they know well that he is their superior.... Thus does man recover his natural empire, and become omnipotent in the region of the elements, without aid of dæmon, without illicit art.’

Of course you have all learnt from Undine that the creatures of the elements are supposed to obtain a soul, and become immortal by alliance with one of our race. There is a double advantage, too, for these happy philosophers may not only raise their nymph or sylphide to a share with them in the happiness of heaven, if they reach it, but if the sage should be so unfortunate as not to be predestined to an immortality of blessedness, his union with one of these beings will operate on himself conversely,—that is, will render his soul mortal, and deliver him from the horrors of the endless second death. So Satan misses his prey in either sphere.

WILLOUGHBY. I never knew before that these cabbalists were Calvinists.

ATHERTON. This touch of Jansenism excites the same astonishment in the author of the Comte de Gabalis. A delightful wag, that Abbé Villars!

The philosophers are described by the Count as the instructors and the saviours of the poor elementary folk, who, but for their assistance in forming liaisons with mortals, would inevitably at last fall into the hands of their enemy, the devil. As soon, he says, as a sylph has learnt from us how to pronounce cabbalistically the potent name NEHMAHMIHAH,[258] and to combine it, in due form, with the delicious name ELIAEL, all the powers of darkness take to flight, and the sylph enjoys, unmolested, the love he seeks!

WILLOUGHBY. How universal seems to have been the faith in the magical efficacy of certain words, from the earliest to the latest times, among the more sober as well as the most extravagant theurgists. A long list of them might be drawn up. There is the Indian O-U-M; there are the Ephesian letters; with Demogorgon, ‘dreaded name,’ as Milton reminds us; the barbarous words, too, which the Chaldean oracles and Psellus declare must on no account be Hellenised.

GOWER. And the word AGLA, I remember, in Colin de Plancy, which, when duly pronounced, facing the east, makes absent persons appear, and discovers lost property.[259] I suppose the potency is in proportion to the unintelligibility of the terms.

ATHERTON. The Comte de Gabalis tells us how the Salamander Oramasis enabled Shem and Japhet to restore the patriarch Noah to his former vigour by instructing them how to pronounce six times alternately, walking backward, the tremendous name JABAMIAH.

But the word above every word is the SHEMHAMPHORASH of the Talmud.[260] The latter rabbins say that Moses was forty days on Mount Sinai, to learn it of the angel Saxael. Solomon achieved his fiend-compelling wonders by its aid. Jesus of Nazareth, they say, stole it from the Temple, and was enabled by its virtue to delude the people. It is now, alas! lost; but could any one rightly and devoutly pronounce it, he would be able to create therewith a world. Even approximate sounds and letters, supplied by rabbinical conjecture, give their possessor power over the spirit-world, from the first-class archangel to the vulgar ghost: he can heal the sick, raise the dead, and destroy his enemies.

WILLOUGHBY. It is curious to see some of these theosophists, who cry out so against the letter, becoming its abject bondsmen among the puerilities of the Cabbala. They protest loudly that the mere letter is an empty shell—and then discover stupendous powers lying intrenched within the curves and angles of a Hebrew character.

ATHERTON. Our seventeenth century mystics, even when most given to romancing, occupied but a mere corner of that land of marvel in which their Jewish contemporaries rejoiced. The Jews, in their dæmonology, leave the most fantastic conceptions of all other times and nations at an immeasurable distance. Their affluence of devils is amazing. Think of it!—Rabbi Huna tells you that every rabbi has a thousand dæmons at his left hand, and ten thousand at his right: the sensation of closeness in a room of Jewish assembly comes from the press of their crowding multitudes: has a rabbi a threadbare gabardine and holes in his shoes, it is from the friction of the swarming devilry that everywhere attends him.[261]

GOWER. To return to societies—did you ever hear, Willoughby, of the Philadelphian Association?[262]

WILLOUGHBY. That founded by Pordage, do you mean—the doctor who fought the giant so stoutly one night?

GOWER. The same. I picked up a book of his at a stall the other day.

KATE. Who was he? Pray tell us the story of the battle.

GOWER. A Royalist clergyman who took to medicine under the Protectorate. The story is simply this.—Pordage, whose veracity even his enemies do not impugn, declares that he woke from sleep one night, and saw before his bed a giant ‘horrible and high,’ with an enormous sword drawn in one hand, and an uprooted tree in the other. The monster evidently means mischief. The Doctor seizes his walking-stick. Round swings the lumbering tree-trunk, up goes the nimble staff——

ATHERTON. What became of the bedposts?

GOWER. Hush, base materialist! The weapons were but the symbols of the conflict, and were symbolically flourished. The real combat was one of spirit against spirit—wholly internal; what would now be called electro-biological. Each antagonist bent against his foe the utmost strength of will and imagination.

WILLOUGHBY. Somewhat after the manner of the Astras which the Indian gods hurled at each other—spells of strong volition, which could parch their object with heat, freeze him with cold, lash him with hail, shut him up in immobility, though hundreds of miles away.

ATHERTON. Surpassing powers those, indeed; not even requiring the present eye and will of the operator to master the imagination of the subject mind.

KATE. And the battle in the bedroom?

GOWER. Lasted half an hour; when the giant, finding Dr. Pordage a tough customer, took his departure.

WILLOUGHBY. Pordage was a great student and admirer of Behmen; but, unlike his master, an inveterate spirit-seer. I dare say he actually had a dream to the effect you relate.

GOWER. But he and the whole Philadelphian Society—a coterie of some twenty ghost-seers—profess to have seen apparitions of angels and devils, in broad daylight, every day, for nearly a month.

MRS. ATHERTON. What were they like?

GOWER. The chief devils drove in chariots of black cloud, drawn by inferior dæmons in the form of dragons, bears, and lions. The spirits of wicked men were the ugliest of all,—cloven-footed, cats-eared, tusked, crooked-mouthed, bow-legged creatures.

ATHERTON. Did the Philadelphians profess to see the spirits with the inward or the bodily eye?

GOWER. With both. They saw them in whole armies and processions, gliding in through wall or window-pane—saw them as well with the eyes shut as open. For, by means of the sympathy between soul and body, the outer eye, says Pordage, is made to share the vision of the inner. When we cease to use that organ, the internal vision is no less active. I should add that the members were conscious of a most unpleasant smell, and were troubled with a sulphurous taste in the mouth while such appearances lasted.

WILLOUGHBY. Mrs. Leade is one of the most conspicuous of their number,—a widow of good family from Norfolk, who forsook the world and retired into her inmost self, holding intercourse with spirits and writing her revelations.

GOWER. She, I believe, carried to its practical extreme the Paracelsian doctrine concerning the magical power of faith.

WILLOUGHBY. That is her one idea. By union with the divine will, she says, the ancient believers wrought their miracles. Faith has now the same prerogative: the will of the soul, wholly yielded to God, becomes a resistless power, can bind and loose, bless and ban, throughout the universe. Had any considerable number among men a faith so strong, rebellious nature would be subdued by their holy spells, and Paradise restored.

ATHERTON. Some of the German Romanticists have revived this idea—never, perhaps, wholly dead. Some stir was made for awhile by the theory that the power of miracle was native in man—and haply recoverable.

WILLOUGHBY. Such a doctrine is but one among the many retrogressions of the mediæval school.

Footnote 256:

See, concerning the history of this book, and its author, Valentine
Andreä, J. G. Buhle, _Ueber den Ursprung und die Vornehmsten Schiksale
der Orden der Rosenkreuzer und Freymaurer_ (Göttingen, 1804), chapp.
iii. and iv. Arnold gives a full account of the controversy, and
extracts, which appear to indicate very fairly the character of the
Fama Fraternitatis, _Kirchen-und-Ketzergeschichte_, Th. ii. Buch xvii.
cap. 18.

The derivation of the name Rosicrucian from _ros_ and _crux_, rather
than _rosa_ and _crux_, to which Brucker alludes (_Hist. Phil._ Per.
III. Pars i. lib. 3, cap. 3), is untenable. By rights, the word, if
from _rosa_, should no doubt be Rosacrucian; but such a malformation,
by no means uncommon, cannot outweigh the reasons adduced on behalf of
the generally-received etymology. See Buhle, pp. 174, &c.

Footnote 257:

_Le Comte de Gabalis, ou Entretiens sur les Sciences Secrètes_ (Metz,
an cinq. républicain), pp. 53-56.

The following passage is a sample of those high-sounding promises with
which the pretenders to the Rosicrucian science allured the neophyte:—

‘You are about to learn (says the Count to the author) how to command
all nature: God alone will be your master; the philosophers alone your
equals. The highest intelligences will be ambitious to obey your
desire; the demons will not dare to approach the place where you are;
your voice will make them tremble in the depths of the abyss, and all
the invisible populace of the four elements will deem themselves happy
to minister to your pleasures.... Have you the courage and the
ambition to serve God alone, and to be lord over all that is not God?
Have you understood what it is to be a man? Are you not weary of
serving as a slave,—you, who were born for dominion?‘—(p. 27.)

Footnote 258:

_Comte de Gabalis_, p. 185. See the story of Noah’s calamity, and the
salamander Oromasis, p. 140.

Footnote 259:

See Colin de Plancy’s _Dictionnaire Infernal_, Art. Cabale. Horst
furnishes a number of such words, _Zauberbibliothek_, vol. III. xvi.
2.

Footnote 260:

Horst inserts in his _Zauberbibliothek_ the whole of a once famous
cabbalistic treatise, entitled _Semiphoras et Shemhamphoras Salomonis
Regis_, a medley of astrological and theurgic doctrine and
prescription. The word Shemhamphorash is not the real word of power,
but an expression or conventional representative of it. The Rabbis
dispute whether the genuine word consisted of twelve, two-and-forty,
or two-and seventy-letters. Their Gematria or cabbalistic arithmetic,
endeavours partially to reconstruct it. They are agreed that the
prayers of Israel avail now so little because this word is lost, and
they know not ‘the _name_ of the Lord.’ But a couple of its real
letters, inscribed by a potent cabbalist on a tablet, and thrown into
the sea, raised the storm which destroyed the fleet of Charles V. in
1542. Write it on the person of a prince (a ticklish business,
surely), and you are sure of his abiding favour. Eisenmenger gives a
full account of all the legends connected therewith, _Entdecktes
Judenthum_, vol. i. pp. 157, 424, 581, &c. (Ed. 1711).

The rationale of its virtue, if we may so call it, affords a
characteristic illustration of the cabbalistic principle. The Divine
Being was supposed to have commenced the work of creation by
concentrating on certain points the primal universal Light. Within the
region of these was the appointed place of our world. Out of the
remaining luminous points, or foci, he constructed certain letters—a
heavenly alphabet. These characters he again combined into certain
creative words, whose secret potency produced the forms of the
material world. The word Shemhamphorash contains the sum of these
celestial letters, with all their inherent virtue, in its mightiest
combination.—Horst, _Zauberbibliothek_, vol. iv. p. 131.

Footnote 261:

See _Das transcendentale magie und magische Heilarten im Talmud_, von
Dr. G. Brecher, p. 52. Eisenmenger, _Entdecktes Judenthum_, ii. pp.
445, &c.

The _Tractat Berachoth_ says the devils delight to be about the
Rabbis, as a wife desireth her husband, and a thirsty land longeth
after water,—because their persons are so agreeable. Not so, rejoins
Eisenmenger, but because both hate the gospel and love the works of
darkness.—(p. 447.)

Footnote 262:

See Horst’s Zauberbibliothek, vol. i. pp. 314-327.

BOOK THE NINTH THE SPANISH MYSTICS

CHAPTER I.

It is no flaming lustre, made of light,
No sweet concert nor well-timed harmony,
Ambrosia, for to feast the appetite,
Of flowery odour mixed with spicery,—
No soft embrace, or pleasure bodily;
And yet it is a kind of inward feast,
A harmony that sounds within the breast,
An odour, light, embrace, in which the soul doth rest.

A heavenly feast no hunger can consume;
A light unseen yet shines in every place;
A sound no time can steal; a sweet perfume
No winds can scatter; an entire embrace
That no satiety can e’er unlace;
Engraced into so high a favour there,
The saints with all their peers whole worlds outwear,
And things unseen do see, and thing unheard do hear.

GILES FLETCHER.

Gower fulfilled his promise, and read, on two successive evenings, the following paper on the Mysticism of the Counter-Reformation, as illustrated principally by its two Spanish champions, St. Theresa and St. John of the Cross:—

I. Saint Theresa.

On the revival of letters the mysticism of Alexandria reappeared in
Florence. That lamp which, in the study of Ficinus, burnt night and
day before the bust of Plato, proclaimed, in reality, the worship of
Plotinus. The erudite feebleness of Alexandrian eclecticism lived
again in Gemisthus Pletho,—blended, as of old, Platonic ideas,
oriental emanations, and Hellenic legend,—dreamed of a philosophic
worship, emasculated and universal, which should harmonize in a
common vagueness all the religions of the world. Nicholas of Cusa
re-adapted the allegorical mathematics which had flourished beneath
the Ptolemies and restored the Pythagoras of the Neo-Platonists.
Pico of Mirandola (the admirable Crichton of his time) sought to
reconcile the dialectics of Aristotle with the oracles of Chaldæa,
and to breathe into withered scholasticism the mysterious life of
Cabbalistic wisdom. An age so greedy of antiquity was imposed on by
the most palpable fabrications; and Greece beheld the servile
product of her second childhood reverenced as the vigorous promise
of her first. Patricius sought the sources of Greek philosophy in
writings attributed to Hermes and Zoroaster. He wrote to Gregory
XIV. proposing that authors such as these should be substituted for
Aristotle in the schools, as the best means of advancing true
religion and reclaiming heretical Germany.

The position of these scholars with regard to Protestantism
resembles, not a little, that of their Alexandrian predecessors when
confronted by Christianity. They were the philosophic advocates of a
religion in which they had themselves lost faith. They attempted to
reconcile a corrupt philosophy and a corrupt religion, and they made
both worse. The love of literature and art was confined to a narrow
circle of courtiers and literati. While Lutheran pamphlets in the
vernacular set all the North in a flame, the philosophic refinements
of the Florentine dilettanti were aristocratic, exclusive, and
powerless. Their intellectual position was fatal to sincerity; their
social condition equally so to freedom. The despotism of the Roman
emperors was more easily evaded by a philosopher of ancient times
than the tyranny of a Visconti or a D’Este, by a scholar at Milan or
Ferrara. It was the fashion to patronise men of letters. But the
usual return of subservience and flattery was rigorously exacted.
The Italians of the fifteenth century had long ceased to be familiar
with the worst horrors of war, and Charles VIII., with his ferocious
Frenchmen, appeared to them another Attila. Each Italian state
underwent, on its petty scale, the fate of Imperial Rome. The
philosophic and religious conservatism of Florence professed
devotion to a church which reproduced, with most prolific abundance,
the superstitions of by-gone Paganism,—of that very Paganism in
whose behalf the Neo-Platonist philosopher entered the lists against
the Christian father. To such men, the earnest religious movement of
the North was the same mysterious, barbaric, formidable foe which
primitive Christianity had been to the Alexandrians. The old
conflict between Pagan and Christian—the man of taste and the man of
faith—the man who lived for the past, and the man who lived for the
future, was renewed, in the sixteenth century, between the Italian
and the German. The Florentine Platonists, moreover, not only shared
in the weakness of their prototypes, as the occupants of an attitude
radically false; they failed to exhibit in their lives that
austerity of morals which won respect for Plotinus and Porphyry,
even among those who cared nothing for their speculations. Had
Romanism been unable to find defenders more thoroughly in earnest,
the shock she then received must have been her deathblow. She must
have perished as Paganism perished. But, wise in her generation, she
took her cause out of the hands of that graceful and heartless
Deism, so artificial and so self-conscious,—too impalpable and too
refined for any real service to gods or men. She needed men as full
of religious convictions as were these of philosophical and poetic
conceits. She needed men to whom the bland and easy incredulity of
such symposium-loving scholars was utterly inconceivable—abhorrent
as the devil and all his works. And such men she found. For by
reason of the measure of truth she held, she was as powerful to
enslave the noblest as to unleash the vilest passions of our nature.
It was given her, she said, to bind and to loose. It was time, she
knew, to bind up mercy and to loose revenge. A succession of
ferocious sanctities fulminated from the chair of St. Peter. Science
was immured in the person of Galileo. The scholarship, so beloved by
Leo, would have been flung into the jaws of the Inquisition by
Caraffa. Every avenue, open once on sufferance, to freer thought and
action, was rigorously blocked up. Princes were found willing to cut
off the right hand, pluck out the right eye of their people, that
Rome might triumph by this suicide of nations. But nowhere did she
find a prince and a people alike so swift to shed blood at her
bidding, as among that imperious race of which Philip II. was at
once the sovereign and the type. In Spain was found, in its
perfection, the chivalry of persecution: there dwelt the aristocracy
of fanaticism. It was long doubtful whether the Roman or the Spanish
Inquisition was the more terrible for craft, the more ingenious in
torments, the more glorious with blood.

But Spain was not merely the political and military head of the
Counter-Reformation. She contributed illustrious names to relume the
waning galaxy of saints. Pre-eminent among these luminaries shine
Ignatius Loyola, Theresa, and John of the Cross. The first taught
Rome what she had yet to learn in the diplomacy of superstition.
Education and intrigue became the special province of his order: it
was the training school of the teachers: it claimed and merited the
monopoly of the vizard manufacture. Rome found in Theresa her most
famous seeress; in John, her consummate ascetic. It was not in the
upper region of mysticism that the narrow intellect and invincible
will of Loyola were to realize distinction. He had his revelations,
indeed,—was rapt away to behold the mystery of the Trinity made
manifest, and the processes of creation detailed. But such favours
are only the usual insignia so proper to the founder of an order.
Compared with St. Francis the life of Ignatius is poor in vision and
in miracle. But his relics have since made him ample amends. Bartoli
enumerates a hundred miraculous cures.[263] John and Theresa were
mystics _par excellence_: the former, of the most abstract
theopathetic school; the latter, with a large infusion of the
theurgic element, unrivalled in vision—angelic and dæmoniacal.

But one principle is dominant in the three, and is the secret of the
saintly honours paid them. In the alarm and wrath awakened by the
Reformation, Rome was supremely concerned to enforce the doctrine of
blind obedience to ecclesiastical superiors. These Spanish saints
lived and laboured and suffered to commend this dogma to the Church
and to all mankind. Summoned by the Rule of Obedience, they were
ready to inflict or to endure the utmost misery. Their natures were
precisely of the kind most fitted to render service and receive
promotion at that juncture. They were glowing and ductile. Their
very virtues were the dazzle of the red-hot brand, about to stamp
the brow with slavery. Each excellence displayed by such
accomplished advocates of wrong, withered one of the rising hopes of
mankind. Their prayers watered with poisoned water every growth of
promise in the field of Europe. Their Herculean labours were
undertaken, not to destroy, but to multiply the monsters which
infested every highway of thought. Wherever the tears of Theresa
fell, new weeds of superstition sprang up. Every shining austerity
endured by John gilded another link in the chain which should bind
his fellows. The jubilant bells of their devotion rang the knell of
innumerable martyrs.

In the fourteenth century, mysticism was often synonymous with
considerable freedom of thought. In the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, it was allowed to exist only as it subserved the
ecclesiastical scheme. The problem was,—how to excite the feeling
and imagination of the devotee to the highest pitch, and yet to
retain him in complete subjection to the slightest movement of the
rein. Of this problem John and Theresa are the practical and
complete solution. All their fire went off by the legitimate
conducting-rod: every flash was serviceable: not a gleam was wasted.
Once mysticism was a kind of escape for nature. The mystic left
behind him much of the coarse externalism necessary to his Church,
and found refuge in an inner world of feeling and imagination. But
now the Church, by means of the confessor, made mysticism itself the
innermost dungeon of her prison-house. Every emotion was
methodically docketed; every yearning of the heart minutely
catalogued. The sighs must always ascend in the right place: the
tears must trickle in orthodox course. The prying calculations of
the casuist had measured the sweep of every wave in the heaving
ocean of the soul. The instant terrible knife cut off the first
spray of love that shot out beyond the trimly-shaven border of
prescription. Strong feelings were dangerous guests, unless they
knew (like the old Romans) when to go home and slay themselves, did
that Tiberius, the director, but bestow on them a frown.

In France, too, mysticism was to fall under the same yoke; but the
Frenchman could never reach the hard austerity of the Spaniard. The
sixteenth century produced St. Francis de Sales on the north, and
St. John of the Cross on the south, of the Pyrénées. With the
former, mysticism is tender, genial, graceful; it appeals to every
class; it loves and would win all men. With the latter, it is a dark
negation—a protracted suffering—an anguish and a joy known only to
the cloister. De Sales was to John, as a mystic, what Henry IV. was
to Philip as a Catholic King. Even in Italy, the Counter-Reformation
was comparatively humane and philanthropic with Carlo Borromeo. In
Spain alone is it little more, at its very best, than a fantastic
gloom and a passionate severity.

But everywhere the principle of subserviency is in the ascendant.
The valetudinarian devotee becomes more and more the puppet of his
spiritual doctor. The director winds him up. He derives his
spiritless semblance of life wholly from the priestly mechanism. It
may be said of him, as of the sick man in Massinger’s play,

That he lives he owes
To art, not Nature; she has given him o’er.
He moves, like the fairy king, on screws and wheels
Made by his doctor’s recipes, and yet still
They are out of joint, and every day repairing.

Theresa was born at Avila, in the year 1515, just two years (as
Ribadeneira reminds us) before ‘that worst of men,’ Martin
Luther.[264] The lives of the saints were her nursery tales.
Cinderella is matter of fact; Jack and the Beanstalk commonplace,
beside the marvellous stories that must have nourished her infantine
faculty of wonder. At seven years old she thinks eternal bliss
cheaply bought by martyrdom; sets out with her little brother on a
walk to Africa, hoping to be despatched by the Moors, and is
restored to her disconsolate parents by a cruel matter-of-fact
uncle, who meets them at the bridge. Her dolls’ houses are
nunneries. These children construct in the garden, not dirt pies,
but mud-hermitages; which, alas! will always tumble down.

As she grows up, some gay associates, whose talk is of ribbons,
lovers, and bull-fights, secularise her susceptible mind. She reads
many romances of chivalry, and spends more time at the glass. Her
father sends her, when fifteen, to a convent of Augustinian nuns in
Avila, to rekindle her failing devotion. A few days reconcile her to
the change, and she is as religious as ever.

Then, what with a violent fever, Jerome’s Epistles, and a
priest-ridden uncle, she resolves on becoming a nun. Her father
refuses his consent; so she determines on a pious elopement, and
escapes to the Carmelite convent. There she took the vows in her
twentieth year.[265]

We find her presently vexed, like so many of the Romanist female
saints, with a strange complication of maladies,—cramps,
convulsions, catalepsies, vomitings, faintings, &c. &c. At one time
she lay four days in a state of coma; her grave was dug, hot wax had
been dropped upon her eyelids, and extreme unction administered; the
funeral service was performed; when she came to herself, expressed
her desire to confess, and received the sacrament.[266] It is not
improbable that some of the trances she subsequently experienced,
and regarded as supernatural, may have been bodily seizures of a
similar kind. But at this time she was not good enough for such
favours; so the attacks are attributed to natural causes. It is
significant that the miraculous manifestations of the Romish Church
should have been vouchsafed only to women whose constitution (as in
the case of the Catharines and Lidwina) was thoroughly broken down
by years of agonizing disease. After three years (thanks to St.
Joseph) Theresa was restored to comparative health, but remained
subject all her life, at intervals, to severe pains.[267]

On her recovery, she found her heart still but too much divided
between Christ and the world. That is to say, she was glad when her
friends came to see her, and she enjoyed witty and agreeable chat,
through the grating, with ladies whose conversation was not always
confined to spiritual topics. Grievously did her conscience smite
her for such unfaithfulness, and bitterly does she regret the laxity
of her confessors, who failed to tell her that it was a heinous
crime.

In her twenty-fourth year she resumed the practice of mental prayer,
and for the next twenty years continued it, with many inward
vicissitudes, and alternate tendernesses and desertions on the part
of the Divine Bridegroom. Her forty-fourth year is memorable as the
season of her entrance on those higher experiences, which have made
her name famous as the great revivalist of supernatural prayer and
mystical devotion in the sixteenth century.

The Saint Bartholomew’s day of 1562 was a day of glory for our
saint. Then was consecrated the new Convent of St. Joseph, at Avila,
established in spite of so much uproar and opposition; that convent
wherein the primitive austerity of the Carmelite Order was to be
restored,—where Theresa is presently appointed prioress (against her
will, as usual),—where there shall be no chats at the grating, no
rich endowment; but thirteen ‘fervent virgins’ shall dwell there,
discalceated (that is sandalled not shod), serge-clad,
flesh-abhorring, couched on straw, and all but perpetually
dumb.[268] The remainder of her life, from about her fiftieth year,
would appear to have been somewhat less fertile in marvellous
experiences. She was now recognised as the foundress of the Reformed
Carmelites, and could produce warrant from Rome, authorizing her to
found as many convents of the Bare-footed as she pleased. She was
harassed by the jealous intrigues of the old ‘mitigated’ Order, but
indefatigably befriended by John of the Cross, and other
thorough-going ascetics. She lived to see established sixteen
nunneries of the Reformed, and fourteen monasteries for friars of
the same rule. She has left us a long history of her foundations, of
all the troubles and difficulties she overcame; showing how funds
were often not forthcoming, but faith was; how apathy and opposition
were done away; and how busy she must have been (too busy for many
visions); all of which let whomsoever read that can.

* * *

In the year 1562, when Theresa had successfully commenced the
reformation of her Order, she wrote her life, at the bidding of her
confessor. In this autobiography her spiritual history is laid bare
without reserve. The narrative was published by her superiors, and
therein the heretic may listen to what she whispered in the ear of
her director during the years most prolific in extravagance. We can
thus discern the working of the confessional. Commanded to disclose
her most secret thoughts, we see her nervously afraid of omitting to
indicate the minutest variations of the religious thermometer, of
approaching the committal of that sin which Romanist devotees only
can commit—concealment from a confessor. She searches for evil in
herself, and creates it by the search. The filmiest evanescence of
the feeling has to be detained and anatomized, and changes into
something else under the scrutiny. It is as though she had let into
her crucifix a piece of looking-glass, that she might see reflected
every transport of devotion, and faithfully register the same in her
memory against the next shrift. After some excess of rapture, she
must set to work at her technical analysis; observe what faculties
were dormant, and what still active—what regions of the mind were
tenanted by divinity, and what still left to the possession of her
sinful self. Her intellect was never strong. She confesses that she
found her understanding rather in the way than otherwise.[269] Under
this omnipresent spiritual despotism it fell prostrate utterly. When
she has been favoured with a vision, she is not to know whether it
has steamed up from hell or been let down from heaven, until the
decision of her confessor fills her with horror or delight. The
cloister is her universe. Her mind, unformed, and uninformed, is an
empty room, papered with leaves from her breviary. She knew little
of that charity which makes gracious inroads on the outer world;
which rendered human so many of her sister-saints; which we admire
and pity in Madame de Chantal, admire and love in Madame Guyon. No
feet-washing do we read of, open or secret; no hospital-tending, no
ministry among the poor. The greater activity of her later years
brought her in contact with scarcely any but ‘religious’ persons.
Her ascetic zeal was directed, not for, but against, the mitigation
of suffering. It made many monks and nuns uncomfortable; but I am
not aware that it made any sinners better, or any wretched happy.
Peter of Alcantara is her admiration; he who for forty years never
slept more than one hour and a half in the twenty-four, and then in
a sitting posture, with his head against a wooden peg in the wall;
who ate in general only every third day; and who looked, she says,
as if he were made of the roots of trees (_hecho de reyzes de
arboles_[270]). Lodged in her monastic cranny of creation, she
convulses herself with useless fervours, absolutely ignorant of all
things and persons non-ecclesiastical. Her highest ambition is to
reduce the too-palpable reality of herself to the minutest possible
compass, and to hide herself—a kind of parasitical insect or
entozoön—in the personality of her confessor. Yet, complete as is
this suicide, she is never sure that she is sufficiently dead, and
incessantly asks him if _he_ is quite sure that she is sincere. Such
a life is an object of compassion more than blame. She was herself
the victim of the wicked system to which her name was to impart a
new impulse. The spasmodic energy she at last displays about her
Reformation is not native strength. She was surrounded from the
first by those who saw clearly what Rome needed at that time, who
beheld in her first almost accidental effort the germ of what they
desired, and in herself a fit instrument. A whisper from one of
these guides would be translated by such an imagination into a
direct commission from heaven. They had but to touch a spring, and
her excitable nature was surrounded with the phantasmagoria of
vision; one scene produced another, and that unfolded into more—all,
the reiteration and expansion of the bent once given to her fixed
idea.

Theresa experienced her first rapture while reciting the _Veni
Creator_, when she heard these words spoken in the interior of her
heart—‘I will have thee hold converse, not with men, but
angels.‘[271] She had been conscious, on several previous occasions,
of supernatural excitements in prayer, and was much perplexed
thereby, as indeed were several of her confessors. Here were
irresistible devotional seizures for which they had no rule ready.
They suspected an evil spirit, advised a struggle against such
extraordinary influences. But the more she resists, the more does
the Lord cover her with sweetnesses and glories, heap on her favours
and caresses. At last the celebrated Francis Borgia comes to Avila.
The Jesuit bids her resist no more; and she goes on the mystical way
rejoicing. The first rapture took place shortly after her interviews
with the future General of the Society of Jesus.

A word on this system of spiritual directorship. It is the vital
question for mystics of the Romish communion. Nowhere is the duty of
implicit self-surrender to the director or confessor more constantly
inculcated than in the writings of Theresa and John of the Cross,
and nowhere are the inadequacy and mischief of the principle more
apparent. John warns the mystic that his only safeguard against
delusion lies in perpetual and unreserved appeal to his director.
Theresa tells us that whenever our Lord commanded her in prayer to
do anything, and her confessor ordered the opposite, the Divine
guide enjoined obedience to the human; and would influence the mind
of the confessor afterwards, so that he was moved to counsel what he
had before forbidden![272] Of course. For who knows what might come
of it if enthusiasts were to have visions and revelations on their
own account? The director must draw after him these fiery and
dangerous natures, as the lion-leaders of an Indian pageantry
conduct their charge, holding a chain and administering opiates. The
question between the orthodox and the heterodox mysticism of the
fourteenth century was really one of theological doctrine. The same
question in the sixteenth and seventeenth was simply one of
ecclesiastical interests.[273] The condemned quietists were merely
mystics imperfectly subservient—unworkable raw material, and as such
flung into the fire. Out of the very same substance, duly wrought
and fashioned, might have come a saint like Theresa. By the great
law of Romish policy, whatever cannot be made to contribute to her
ornament or defence is straightway handed over to the devil.
Accordingly, the only mysticism acknowledged by that Church grows up
beneath her walls, and invigorates, with herbs of magic potency, her
garrison,—resembles the strip of culture about some eastern frontier
town, that does but fringe with green the feet of the ramparts; all
the panorama beyond, a wilderness;—for Bedouin marauders render
tillage perilous and vain. Thus, O mystic, not a step beyond that
shadow; or hell’s black squadrons, sweeping down, will carry thee
off captive to their home of dolour!

The confessions of Theresa are a continual refutation of her
counsels. She acknowledges that she herself had long and grievously
suffered from the mistakes of her early directors. She knew others
also who had endured much through similar incompetency. The judgment
of one conductor was reversed by his successor. She exhorts her nuns
to the greatest care in the selection of a confessor,—on no account
to choose a vain man or an ignorant. She vindicates their liberty to
change him when they deem it desirable.[274] John of the Cross, too,
dilates on the mischief which may be done by an inexperienced
spiritual guide. At one time Theresa was commanded to make the sign
of the cross when Christ manifested Himself to her, as though the
appearance had been the work of some deceiving spirit.[275] Her next
guide assured her that the form she beheld was no delusion. Dreadful
discovery, yet joyful! She had attempted to exorcise her Lord; but
the virtue of obedience had blotted out the sin of blasphemy. Thus
does each small infallibility mould her for his season, and then
pass her on to another. Her soul, with despair stamped on one side
and glory imaged on the other, spins dizzy in the air; and whether,
when it comes down, heaven or hell shall be uppermost, depends
wholly upon the twist of the ecclesiastical thumb.

But to return to her marvellous relations; and, first of all, to
those of the infernal species. On one occasion, she tells us, she
was favoured with a brief experience of the place she merited in
hell:—a kind of low oven, pitch dark, miry, stinking, full of
vermin, where sitting and lying were alike impossible; where the
walls seemed to press in upon the sufferer—crushing, stifling,
burning; where in solitude the lost nature is its own tormentor,
tearing itself in a desperate misery, interminable, and so intense,
that all she had endured from racking disease was delightful in
comparison.[276]

At another time, while smitten for five hours together with
intolerable pains, the Lord was pleased to make her understand that
she was tempted by the devil; and she saw him at her side like a
very horrible little negro, gnashing his teeth at her. At last she
contrived to sprinkle some holy water on the place where he was.
That moment he and her pains vanished together, and her body
remained as though she had been severely beaten. It is as well to
know that holy water will be found incomparably your best weapon in
such cases. The devils will fly from the cross, but may presently
return. The drops the Church has blest, do their business
effectually. Two nuns, who came into the room after the victory just
related, snuffed up the air of the apartment with manifest disgust,
and complained of a smell of brimstone. Once the sisters heard
distinctly the great thumps the devil was giving her, though she, in
a ‘state of recollection,’ was unconscious of his belabouring. The
said devil squatted one day on her breviary, and at another time had
all but strangled her.[277] She once saw, with the eye of her soul,
two devils, encompassing, with their meeting horns, the neck of a
sinful priest; and at the funeral of a man who had died without
confession, a whole swarm of devils tearing and tossing the body and
sporting in the grave.

But much more numerous, though as gross as these, are her visions of
celestial objects. ‘Being one day in prayer,’ she tells us, ‘our
Lord was pleased to show me his sacred hands, of excessive and
indescribable beauty; afterwards his divine face, and finally, at
mass, all his most sacred humanity.’ At one of his appearances, he
drew out with his right hand, the nail which transfixed his left,
some of the flesh following it. Three times did she behold in her
raptures the most sublime of all visions—the humanity of Christ in
the bosom of the Father; very clear to her mind, but impossible to
explain. While reciting the Athanasian Creed the mystery of the
Trinity was unfolded to her, with unutterable wonderment and
comfort. Our Lord paid her, one day, the compliment of saying, that
if He had not already created heaven, He would have done so for her
sake alone.[278]

Some of her ‘Memorable Relations’ are among the most curious
examples on record of the materialization of spiritual truth. With
all the mystics, she dwells much on the doctrine of Christ in us.
But while some of them have exaggerated this truth till they bury
under it all the rest, and others have authenticated by its plea
every vagary of special revelation, in scarcely any does it assume a
form so puerile and so sensuous as with St. Theresa. Repeatedly does
she exhort religious persons to imagine Christ as actually within
the interior part of their soul. The superstition of the mass
contributed largely in her case to render this idea concrete and
palpable. In a hymn, composed in a rapturous inspiration after
swallowing the consecrated wafer, she describes God as her
prisoner.[279] She relates in the following passage how she saw the
figure of Christ in a kind of internal looking-glass.

‘When reciting the hours one day with the nuns, my soul suddenly
lapsed into a state of recollection, and appeared to me as a bright
mirror, every part of which, back and sides, top and bottom, was
perfectly clear. In the centre of this was represented to me Christ
our Lord, as I am accustomed to see him. I seemed to see him in all
the parts of my soul also, distinctly as in a mirror, and at the
same time this mirror (I do not know how to express it) was all
engraven in the Lord himself, by a communication exceeding amorous
which I cannot describe. I know that this vision was of great
advantage to me, and has been every time I have called it to mind,
more especially after communion. I was given to understand, that
when a soul is in mortal sin, this mirror is covered with a great
cloud, and grows very dark, so that the Lord cannot be seen or
represented in us, though he is always present as the Author of our
being. In heretics, this mirror is as it were broken, which is much
worse than to have it obscured.’[280]

Here the _simplicitas_ and _nuditas_ of other mystics become a kind
of concrete crystal, inhabited by a divine miniature. In a Clara de
Montfaucon, this sensuous supra-naturalism goes a step further, and
good Catholics read with reverence, how a Lilliputian Christ on the
cross, with the insignia of the passion, was found, on a
_post-mortem_ examination, completely formed inside her heart.[281]

Similar in its character was a vision with which Theresa was
sometimes favoured, of a pretty little angel, with a golden dart,
tipped with fire, which he thrust (to her intolerable pain) into her
bowels, drawing them out after it, and when thus eviscerated, she
was inflamed with a sweet agony of love to God.[282]

A multitude more of such favours might be related:—how the Lord gave
her a cross of precious stones—a matchless specimen of celestial
jewellery to deck his bride withal; how, after communion one day,
her mouth was full of blood, that ran out over her dress, and Christ
told her it was his own—shed afresh, with great pain, to reward her
for the gratification her devotion had afforded him; how (doubtless
in imitation of Catherine of Siena) she saw and heard a great white
dove fluttering above her head; and how, finally, she repays the
attentions of the Jesuit Borgia, by repeated praises of the Order;
by recording visions of Jesuits in heaven bearing white banners,—of
Jesuits, sword in hand, with resplendent faces, gloriously hewing
down heretics; and by predicting the great things to be accomplished
through the zeal of that body.[283] Enough!

Note to page 159.

The dispute which agitated the Romish Church for more than half a century (1670-1730), concerning the Mistica Ciudad de Dios, attributed to Maria d’Agreda, furnishes a striking instance in proof of the character here ascribed to the controversies of the period. This monstrous book was given to the world as the performance of a Spanish nun, at the dictation of the Virgin, or of God;—both assertions are made, and the difference is not material. Its object is to establish, by pretended special revelation, all the prerogatives assigned to the Queen of Heaven, on the basis of her Immaculate Conception. It is replete with the absurdities and indecencies of prurient superstition. Dufresnoy applies to it, with justice, the words of John of Salisbury,—‘Erumpit impudens et in facie erubescentium populorum genialis thori revelat et denudat arcana.’ It states that the embryo of the Virgin was formed on a Sunday, seventeen days before the ordinary time,—relates how, at eighteen months, the infant demands a nun’s habit from St. Anna, of the colour worn by the Franciscans,—how she sweeps the house, and has nine hundred angels to wait upon her. The partizans of the book maintained, not only that the work itself was a miracle from beginning to end, but that its translation was miraculous also,—a French nun receiving instantaneously the gift of the Spanish tongue, that these disclosures from heaven might pass the Pyrenees. Such was the mass of corruption about which the gadflies and the ‘shard-borne beetles’ of the Church settled in contending swarms. This was the book on whose wholesomeness for the flock of Christ his Vicars could not venture to decide—eventually, rather evading reply than pronouncing sentence. No such scruple concerning the unwholesomeness of the Bible.

The Abbé Dufresnoy handles the question broadly, but most of the combatants are furious, this side or that, from some small party motive. The French divines censure the book, for fear it should encourage Quietism—their great bugbear at that time. The Spanish ecclesiastics, jealous of the honour done their countrywoman, retorted with a Censura Censuræ. But about the habit the battle was hottest. Every Carmelite must reject the book with indignation, for had they not always believed, on the best authority, that the Virgin wore a dress of their colour? The Franciscans again, and the religious of St. Clare, would defend it as eagerly, for did not its pages authorize anew from heaven their beloved ashen hue? Again, did not these revelations represent the Almighty as adopting the Scotist doctrine? On this great question, of course, Scotist and Thomist would fight to the death. Some account of the controversy, and an examination of the book, will be found in Dufresnoy, Traité Historique et Dogmatique sur les Apparitions, les Visions et les Révélations particulières, tom. II. chap. xi. (1751).

The same spirit betrays itself in the instance of Molinos. Even after he had written his Guida Spirituale, he was patronized by the Jesuits because he had employed his pen against Jansenism, and the Franciscans approved his book, while the Dominicans rejected it, because he had delighted the one party and disgusted the other by speaking somewhat disparagingly of Thomas Aquinas.

Footnote 263:

Alban Butler, July 31.

Footnote 264:

Ribadeneira, Flos Sanctorum, Appendix, p. 35 (Ed. 1659).

Footnote 265:

_Los Libros de la B. M. Teresa de Jesus_, _Vida_, capp. i. iii. This
edition of 1615 contains the _Camino de la Perfecion_, and the
_Castillo espiritual_, with the _Life_. The _Foundations_, at which I
have only glanced in the French, are devoted to business, not
mysticism.

Footnote 266:

Vida, cap. v. p. 26.

Footnote 267:

Teresa confesses that during the first year of her seizure her
disorder was such as sometimes completely to deprive her of her
senses:—Tan grave, que casi me privava el sentido siempre, y algunas
vezes del todo quedava sin el.—Pp. 17.

Footnote 268:

Vida, cap. xxxvi.

Footnote 269:

Vida, p. 83.

Footnote 270:

Vida, cap. xxvii. p. 196.

Footnote 271:

Vida, cap. xxiv. p. 171.

Footnote 272:

_Vida_, cap. xxvi. p. 186. Siempre que el Señor me mandava alguna cosa
en la oracion, si el confessor me dezia otra, me tornava el Señor a
dezir que le obedeciesse: despues su Magestad le bolvia para que me lo
tornasse a mandar. She speaks in the very same page of bad advice
given her by one of her confessors.

Footnote 273:

See Note on p. 164.

Footnote 274:

Vida, p. 85; Camino de Perfecion, capp. 4 and 5.

Footnote 275:

Vida, cap. xxix., p. 209.

Footnote 276:

Vida, cap. xxxii.

Footnote 277:

Ibid., cap. xxxi.

Footnote 278:

_Vida_, pp. 198, 301, 209, 321. This last communication is not related
by herself: we have it on the authority of Ribadeneira:—Itidem ei
rursus apparens dixit: Cœlum nisi creassem, ob te solam crearem.—_Vita
Teresiæ_, p. 41.

Footnote 279:

Originally:

Mas causa en mi tal passion
Ver à Dios mi prisionero
Que muero porque no muero.

Footnote 280:

Vida, cap. xl. p. 324.

Footnote 281:

The biographers of the saints differ both as to the time of her death
(1308, 1299, 1393, are dates assigned), and as to the number and
nature of the miraculous formations discovered within her heart.
Ribadeneira’s account is by no means the most extravagant. He
says:—Aperto ejus corde amplo et concavo, eidem repererunt impressa
Dominicæ passionis insignia, nempe crucifixum cum tribus clavis,
lancea, spongia, et arundine hinc, et illinic flagris, virgis,
columna, corona spinea; atque hæc insignia Dominicæ Passionis, nervis
validis durisque constabant.—_Vida S. Claræ_, p. 161.

Footnote 282:

_Vida_, cap. xxix, p. 213. Speaking of the delicious anguish, she
says:—No es dolor corporal, sino espiritual, aunque no dexa de
participar el cuerpo algo, y aun harto. Es un requiebro tan suave que
passa entre el almo y Dios que suplico yo a su bondad lo dè a gustar a
quien pensare que miento.

Footnote 283:

Vida, cap. xxxviii. pp. 300, 301; and xl. 328.

CHAPTER II.

Indeed, when persons have been long softened with the continual
droppings of religion, and their spirits made timorous and apt for
impression by the assiduity of prayer, and perpetual alarms of
death, and the continual dyings of mortification,—the fancy, which
is a very great instrument of devotion, is kept continually warm,
and in a disposition and aptitude to take fire, and to flame out in
great ascents; and when they suffer transportations beyond the
burdens and support of reason, they suffer they know not what, and
call it what they please.—JEREMY TAYLOR.

I. Saint Theresa—(CONTINUED).

What disinterested love is to the mysticism of Fénelon, that is
supernatural passive prayer to the mysticism of St. Theresa. She
writes to describe her experience in the successive stages of
prayer; to distinguish them, and to lay down directions for those
who are their subjects. She professes no method whereby souls may be
conducted from the lowest to the highest degree. On the contrary,
she warns all against attempting to attain, by their own efforts,
that blissful suspension of the powers which she depicts in colours
so glowing. Unlike Dionysius, she counsels no effort to denude the
soul of thought: she does not, with Tauler, bid the mystic
laboriously sink into the ground of his being. She is emphatically a
Quietist; quite as much so as Molinos, far more so than Fénélon.
Spiritual consolation and spiritual desertion are to be alike
indifferent. By a singular inconsistency, while tracing out the way
of perfection, she forbids the taking of a step in that path.[284]
You will be borne along, she would say, if you wait, as far as is
fitting. Her experience receives its complexion, and some of her
terminology is borrowed from the _Lives of the Saints_. Of the past
career of Mystical Theology she is utterly ignorant. She hears,
indeed, of a certain time-honoured division of the mystical process
into Purgative, Illuminative, and Unitive; but she does not adopt
the scheme. The Platonic and philosophic element is absent
altogether from her mysticism. Her metaphysics are very simple:—the
soul has three powers—Understanding, Memory, and Will. Now one, now
another, now all of these, are whelmed and silenced by the incoming
flood of Divine communication.

In addition to sundry chapters in her _Life_ on the various kinds of
prayer, she has left two treatises, _The Way of Perfection_ (Camino
de Perfecion) and _The Castle of the Soul_ (Castillo
Interior)—verbose, rambling, full of repetitions. For the conventual
mind there is no rotation of crops; and the barrenness which limits
such monotonous reproduction supervenes very soon. From these
sources, then, we proceed to a brief summary of her theopathy.

There are in her scale four degrees of prayer. The first is _Simple
Mental Prayer_,—fervent, inward, self-withdrawn; not exclusive of
some words, nor unaided by what the mystics called discursive acts,
_i.e._, the consideration of facts and doctrines prompting to
devotion. In this species there is nothing extraordinary. No
mysticism, so far.

SECOND DEGREE:—_The Prayer of Quiet_ called also _Pure
Contemplation_. In this state the Will is absorbed, though the
Understanding and Memory may still be active in an ordinary way.
Thus the nun may be occupied for a day or two in the usual religious
services, in embroidering an altar-cloth, or dusting a chapel; yet
without the Will being engaged. That faculty is supposed to be, as
it were, bound and taken up in God. This stage is a supernatural
one. Those who are conscious of it are to beware lest they suffer
the unabsorbed faculties to trouble them. Yet they should not exert
themselves to protract this ‘recollection.’ They should receive the
wondrous sweetness as it comes, and enjoy it while it lasts,
absolutely passive and tranquil. The devotee thus favoured often
dreads to move a limb, lest bodily exertion should mar the
tranquillity of the soul. But happiest are those who, as in the case
just mentioned, can be Marys and Marthas at the same time.[285]

THIRD DEGREE:—_The Prayer of Union_, called also _Perfect
Contemplation_. In this prayer, not the Will only, but the
Understanding and Memory also, are swallowed up in God. These powers
are not absolutely inactive; but we do not work them, nor do we know
how they work. It is a kind of celestial frenzy—‘a sublime madness,’
says Theresa. In such a transport she composed her ecstatic hymn,
without the least exercise of the understanding on her part. At this
stage the contemplatist neither thinks nor feels as a human being.
The understanding is stunned and struck dumb with amazement. The
heart knows neither why it loves, nor what. All the functions of the
mind are suspended. Nothing is seen, heard, or known. And wherefore
this sudden blank? That for a brief space (which seems always
shorter than it really is) the Living God may, as it were, take the
place of the unconscious spirit—that a divine vitality may for a
moment hover above the dead soul, and then vanish without a trace;
restoring the mystic to humanity again, to be heartened and edified,
perhaps for years to come, by the vague memory of that glorious
nothingness.[286]

Some simple nun might ask, ‘How do you know that God did so
plenarily enter into you, if you were conscious of nothing
whatever?’

‘My daughter,’ replies the saint, ‘I know it by an infallible
certainty (_una certidumbre_) that God alone bestows.’[287]

After this nothing remains to be said.

FOURTH DEGREE:—_The Prayer of Rapture, or Ecstasy_. This estate is
the most privileged, because the most unnatural of all. The bodily
as well as mental powers are sunk in a divine stupor. You can make
no resistance, as you may possibly, to some extent, in the Prayer of
Union. On a sudden your breath and strength begin to fail; the eyes
are involuntarily closed, or, if open, cannot distinguish
surrounding objects; the hands are rigid; the whole body cold.

Alas! what shall plain folk do among the rival mystics! Swedenborg
tells us that bodily cold is the consequence of defective faith:
Theresa represents it as the reward of faith’s most lofty exercise.

Were you reading, meditating, or praying, previous to the seizure,
the book, the thought, the prayer, are utterly forgotten. For that
troublesome little gnat, the memory (_esta maraposilla importuna de
la memoria_), has burnt her wings at the glory. You may look on
letters—you cannot read a word; hear speech—you understand nothing.
You cannot utter a syllable, for the strength is gone. With intense
delight, you find that all your senses are absolutely useless—your
spiritual powers inoperative in any human mode. The saint is not
quite certain whether the understanding, in this condition,
understands; but she is sure that, if it does, it understands
without understanding, and that its not understanding cannot be
understood. Time of this beatific vacuum,—very long, if half an
hour; though obviously a difficult point to decide, as you have no
senses to reckon by.

Remarkable were the effects of the rapture on the body of the saint.
An irrepressible lifting force seemed to carry her off her feet
(they preserve the right foot in Rome to this day): it was the swoop
of an eagle; it was the grasp of a giant. In vain, she tells us, did
she resist. Generally the head, sometimes the whole body, was
supernaturally raised into the air! On one occasion, during a sermon
on a high day, in the presence of several ladies of quality, the
reckless rapture took her. For in vain had she prayed that these
favours might not be made public. She cast herself on the ground.
The sisters hastened to hold her down; yet the upward struggling of
the divine potency was manifest to all. Imagine the rush of the
sisterhood, the screams of the ladies of quality, the pious
ejaculations from the congregation,—watching that knot of swaying
forms, wrestling with miracle, and the upturned eyes, or
open-mouthed amazement, of the interrupted preacher![288]

The state of rapture is frequently accompanied by a certain ‘great
pain’ (_gran pena_), a sweet agony and delicious torment, described
by Theresa in language as paradoxical as that which Juliet in her
passion applies to the lover who has slain her cousin—

Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!
Dove-feathered raven! wolfish-ravening lamb!

After some two or three hours’ endurance of this combined spiritual
and corporeal torture, the sisters would find her almost without
pulsation, the bones of the arms standing out (_las canillas muy
abiertas_), her hands stiff and extended: in every joint were the
pains of dislocation: she was apparently at the point of death.[289]

This mysterious ‘pain’ is no new thing in the history of mysticism.
It is one of the trials of mystical initiation. It is the depth
essential to the superhuman height. With St. Theresa, the physical
nature contributes towards it much more largely than usual; and in
her map of the mystic’s progress it is located at a more advanced
period of the journey. St. Francis of Assisi lay sick for two years
under the preparatory miseries. Catharine of Siena bore five years
of privation, and was tormented by devils beside. For five years,
and yet again for more than three times five, Magdalena de Pazzi
endured such ‘aridity,’ that she believed herself forsaken of God.
Balthazar Alvarez suffered for sixteen years before he earned his
extraordinary illumination.[290] Theresa, there can be little doubt,
regarded her fainting-fits, hysteria, cramps, and nervous seizures,
as divine visitations. In their action and reaction, body and soul
were continually injuring each other. The excitement of
hallucination would produce an attack of her disorder, and the
disease again foster the hallucination. Servitude, whether of mind
or body, introduces maladies unknown to freedom. Elephantiasis and
leprosy—the scourge of modern Greece—were unknown to ancient Hellas.
The cloister breeds a family of mental distempers, elsewhere unheard
of.

The mystics generally, from Dionysius downward, inculcate earnest
endeavours to denude the mind of images, to suspend its reflex or
discursive operations. Theresa goes a step farther, and forbids her
pupils to strive towards such a state. If such a favour is to be
theirs, it will be wrought in them as by enchantment. Passivity here
reaches its extreme. On this ground a charge of Quietism might have
been brought against Theresa with more justice than against Fénélon,
or even Molinos. The _Guida Spirituale_ of Molinos was designed to
assist the mystic in attaining that higher contemplation of God
which rises above the separate consideration of particular
attributes. This indistinct and dazzled apprehension of all the
perfections together is the very characteristic of Theresa’s _Prayer
of Rapture_. Molinos cites her very words. The introduction to his
condemned manual contains some very strong expressions. But nothing
of his own is so extravagant as the passages from Dionysius and
Theresa.

Who then is the Quietist—Molinos or Theresa? Both write books to
mark out the mystic’s pathway. Theresa adds the caution, ‘Sit
still.’ Manifestly, then, the excess of passivity lies with her. The
oars of Molinos are the sails of Theresa,—erected, like the broad
paddles of the Indian, to catch the breeze, and urge onward the
canoe without an effort.[291] But the followers of Molinos were
found guilty of neglecting ceremonial gewgaws for devout
abstraction,—of escaping those vexatious observances so harassing to
patients and so lucrative to priests. So Rome condemned him, and not
Theresa, as the Quietist heretic. For his head the thundercloud; for
hers the halo.[292]

Here the reader may naturally ask, ‘How do these mystics reconcile
such extremes of abstraction and such extremes of sensuousness? If
the state above symbols and above reasoning—above all conscious
mental operations, distinctions, or figures, be so desirable (as
they all admit),—must not crucifixes, images, and pictures of
saints, yea, the very conception of our Saviour’s humanity itself,
be so many hindrances?’

To this Theresa would answer, ‘I thought so once. But I was happily
led to see my error ere long. In the _Prayer of Rapture_, all
recognition of Christ’s humanity—as, indeed, of everything else—is
doubtless obliterated. But, then, _we_ do not effect this. There is
no effort on our part to remove from our minds the conception of
Christ’s person. The universal nescience of Rapture is
supernaturally wrought, without will of ours.’[293] John of the
Cross, who carries his negative, imageless abstraction so far, is
fain (as a good son of the Church) to insert a special chapter in
commendation of images, pictures, and the sensuous aids to devotion
generally. It was unfortunate for the flesh and blood of Molinos
that he failed to do the same.[294]

In the seventeenth century the Quietists were accused of rejecting
the idea of Christ’s humanity, as a corporeal image which would only
mar their supersensuous contemplation of abstract deity. Bossuet
attempted to fasten the charge on Fénélon: it was one of the hottest
points of their controversy. Fénélon completely clears himself. From
the evidence within my reach, I am disposed to acquit Molinos
also.[295]

Theresa relates with peculiar pleasure those passages in the
marvellous history of the soul in which surpassing heights of
knowledge, or of virtue, are supposed to be realized, on the
instant, without processes or media. No transition is too violent
for her faith. She is impatient of all natural growth; will
acknowledge no conditions of development. The sinner turns into a
seraph in the twinkling of an eye. The splendid symmetry of all the
Christian virtues can arise, like the palace of Aladdin, in a single
night. In one particular kind of Rapture—the Flight of the Soul
(_Buelo del Espiritu_), the soul is described by her as, in a
manner, blown up. It is discharged heavenwards by a soundless but
irresistible explosive force from beneath, swift as a bullet (_con
la presteza que sale la pelota de un arcabuz_). Thus transported the
spirit is taught without the medium of words, and understands
mysteries which long years of search could not even have
surmised.[296]

Visions are intellectual or representative. The former is a
consciousness of spiritual proximity, indescribable, unaccompanied
by any appearances. The representative or imaginative vision,
presents some definite form or image.[297]

There is a kind of supernatural tuition, she tells us, in which the
Lord suddenly places in the centre of the soul, what he wishes it to
understand, without words or representation of any kind. This
privilege Theresa compares very truly to an ability to read without
having learnt letters, or to nutriment derived from food without
eating it.[298] In other instances certain efficacious words (the
‘substantial words’ of John), are spoken divinely in the centre of
the soul, and immediately produce there the actual effects proper to
their significance.[299] If something is thus inwardly spoken about
humility, for example, the subject of such words is that moment
completely humble. So the soul is supplied with virtues as the
_tables volantes_ of Louis XV. with viands,—a spring is touched, and
presto! the table sinks and re-appears—spread.

Note to page 168.

Theresa compares the four degrees of prayer to four ways of watering the soul-garden: the first, to drawing water out of a well; the second, to raising it by means of a rope with buckets (less laborious and more plentiful); the third, to the introduction of a rivulet; and the fourth, to a copious shower, whereby God Himself abundantly waters the garden, without any effort of ours.—Cap. xi. p. 67. The second degree is fully described in the fourteenth chapter of her life, and in the thirty-first of the Camino de Perfecion.

The difference between the first degree and the three others is simply that generic distinction between Meditation and Contemplation with which the earlier mystics have made us familiar. Theresa’s second, third, and fourth degrees of prayer are her more loose and practical arrangement of the species of contemplation. She identifies Mystical Theology with Prayer, employing the latter term in a very comprehensive sense. So also does St. Francis de Sales:—En somme, l’oraison et théologie mystique n’est autre chose qu’une conversation par laquelle l’âme s’entretient amoureusement avec Dieu de sa très-aimable bonté pour s’unir et joindre à icelle.—Traité de l’Amour de Dieu, livre vi. chap. i. He likens the soul in the prayer of Quiet when the will is engaged but the other powers free, to an infant which can see and hear and move its arms, while adhering to the breast. The babe which removes its little mouth from the bosom to see where its feet are, resembles those who are distracted in the prayer of Quiet by self-consciousness, and disturb their repose by curiosity as to what the mind is doing the while.—Ibid. chap. x.

Note to page 170.

Vida, capp. xviii. xix.:—Estandoassi el alma buscando a Dios, siente con un deleyte grandissimo y suave casi desfallecerse toda con una manera de desmayo, que le va faltando el huelgo, y todas las fuerças corporales, demanera que sino es con mucha pena, no puede aun menear las manos; los ojos se le cierran sin querer, los cerrar, y si los tiene abiertos no vee casi nada; ni si lee, acierta a dezir letra ni casi atina a conocerla bien; vee que ay letra, mas como el entendimiento no ayuda, no sabe leer, aunque quiera. Oye, mas no entiende lo que oye. Assi que de los sentidos no se aprovecha nada, sino es para no la acabar de dexar a su plazer, y assi antes la dañan. Hablar, es por de mas, que no atina a formar palabra; ni ay fuerça ya que atinasse, para poderla pronunciar: porque toda la fuerça exterior se pierde, y se aumenta en las del alma, para mejor poder gozar de su gloria. El deleyte exterior que se siente es grande, y muy conocido.—P. 118.

As to the elevation of the body in the air during rapture, it is common enough in the annals of Romish saintship, and a goodly page might be filled with the mere names of the worthies who are represented as overcoming not only sin, but gravitation. Maria d’Agreda was seen, times without number, poised on nothing in a recumbent attitude, in an equilibrium so delicate, that by blowing, even at a distance, she was made to waft this way or that, like a feather. Dominic of Jesu Maria had the honour of being blown about, while in this soap-bubble condition, by the heretic-slaying breath of Philip II. Görres furnishes a long list of examples, and believes them all; Die Christliche Mystik, Buch. v. iv. § 2.

It is curious to see how Francis de Sales, who follows Theresa somewhat closely in his chapter on the Prayer of Quietude, grows wisely cautious as he treats of Rapture, softens down extravagance, avoids theurgy, and keeps to piety, and admirably substitutes practical devotion for the unintelligibility and the materialism of the Spanish saint. He enumerates three kinds of Rapture or ecstasy (ravissement and extase are identical),—that of the intellect, that of the affection, and that of action,—manifested, respectively, by glory, by fervour, and by deed,—realized by admiration, by devotion, and by operation. On the last he dwells most fully; on that he concentrates all his exhortations. To live without profaneness, he says, without falsehood, without robbery, to honour parents, to obey law, to reverence God,—this is to live according to the natural reason of man. But to embrace poverty, to hail reproach and persecution as blessings, and martyrdom as joy, by unceasing self-renunciation, to forsake the world, surmount its opinion, deny its rule,—this is to live, not humanly, but superhumanly;—to live out of ourselves and above ourselves, by supernatural energy,—this is to enjoy the noblest ecstasy, not of a moment, but of a life-time. Many saints have died without enjoying ecstatic trance—all have lived the ecstatic life.—Traité de l’Amour de Dieu, livre vii. chapp. iii. and vii.

Note to page 170.

This pain is described by Theresa in the twentieth chapter of the Life, and in the Castillo Interior, Morada vi. capp. 1 and 2. In the former place she gives a kind of rationale thereof, in the following words:—Parece me que esta assi el alma, que ni del cielo le viene consuelo, ni esta en el; ni de la tierra le quiere, ni esta en ella; sino como crucificada entre el cielo y la tierra, padeciendo sin venirle socorro di ningun cabo. Porque el que le viene del cielo (que es como he dicho una noticia de Dios tan admirable, muy sobre todo lo que podemos dessear) es para mas tormento, porque acreciento el desseo de manera que a mi parecer la gran pena algunas vezes quita el sentido, sino que dura poco sin el. Parecen unos transitos de la muerte, salvo que trae consigo un tan contento este padecer, que no se yo a que lo comparar.—P. 135.

The Castillo Interior describes the mystic’s progress under the emblem of a Castle, divided into seven apartments; the inmost, where God resides, representing the centre of the soul (termed the apex by some; the Ground by others); and each of these successive abodes, from the outermost to the central, corresponding to the advancing stages of discipline and privilege through which the mystic passes. The liability to the pain in question supervenes at the sixth apartment, prior to the last and most glorious stage attainable on earth.

Victor Gelenius of Treves (writing 1646) has seven degrees, and places this stage of misery and privation in the fourth, as the transition between the human and superhuman kinds of devotion. It is the painful weaning-time, wherein the soul passes (in an agony of strange bewilderment) from a religion which employs the faculties we possess, to that which is operated in us in a manner altogether incomprehensible and divine. Whatever division be adopted, such alone is the legitimate locality for this portion of the mystical experience. Here Gelenius and John of the Cross are perfectly agreed, though their graduation and nomenclature are different.

Note to page 171.

This pain is the ‘pressura interna’ of Tauler: the ‘horribile et indicibile tormentum’ of Catharine of Genoa; the ‘purgatory’ of Thomas à Jesu; the ‘languor infernalis’ of Harphius; the ‘terrible martyrium’ of Maria Vela, the Cistercian; the ‘divisio naturæ ac spiritus’ of Barbanson; the ‘privation worse than hell’ of Angela de Foligni. See Card. Bona’s Via Compendii ad Deum, cap. 10. Angelæ de Fulginio Visiones, cap. xix.

These sufferings are attributed by the mystics to the surpassing nature of the truths manifested to our finite faculties (as the sun-glare pains the eye),—to the anguish involved in the surrender of every ordinary religious support or enjoyment, when the soul, suspended (as Theresa describes it) between heaven and earth, can derive solace from neither,—to the intensity of the aspirations awakened, rendering those limitations of our condition here which detain us from God an intolerable oppression,—and to the despair by which the soul is tried, being left to believe herself forsaken by the God she loves.

On this subject John of the Cross and Theresa are most extravagant. In contrast with their folly stands the good sense of Fénélon. The middle ground is occupied by the comparative moderation of Francis de Sales. The privation described by John is preparatory to a state of complete de-humanization, in which we shall know, feel, do, nothing in the mortal manner, as our whole nature suffers a divine transformation. The privation of which Fénélon speaks is simply a refining process, to purify our love more thoroughly from self. The causes and the various species of this pain are detailed at length by John of the Cross in the Nuit Obscure, liv. ii. chapp. v. vi. vii.

De Sales says speaking of the ‘blessure d’amour:‘—Mais, Theotrine, parlant de l’amour sacré, il y a en la practique d’iceluy une sorte de blesseure que Dieu luy-meme faict quelquesfois pour sa souveraine bonté, comme la pressant et solicitant de l’aymer; et lors elle s’eslance de force comme pour voler plus haut vers son divin object; mais demeurant courte parce qu’elle ne peut pas tant aymer comme elle desire, o Dieu! elle sent une douleur qui n’a point d’esgale.... La voilà donc rudement tourmentée entre la violence de ses eslans et celle de son impuissance.—Traité de l’Amour de Dieu, liv. vi. ch. xiii.

Theresa declares that the intensity of this delicious agony is such as frequently to endanger life.—Castillo Int. vi. c. xi.

Francis de Sales, in whom the sufferings in question assume a highly sentimental character, adduces instances in which they proved fatal. The soul, springing forward to obey the attraction of the Well-beloved, sooner than be detained by the body amid the miseries of this life, tears herself away, abandons it, and mounts alone, like a lovely little dove, to the bosom of her celestial spouse. St. Theresa herself, he says, made it known, after her departure, that she died of an impetuous assault of love, too violent for nature to sustain.—Traité de l’Amour de Dieu, liv. vii. chapp x.-xii.

We may contrast the obscure and feverish utterances of Theresa, and the amorous phraseology of De Sales, on this topic, with the lucid and cautious language of Fénélon.

La sainte indifférence, qui n’est jamais que le désintéressement de l’amour, devient dans les plus extrêmes épreuves ce que les saints mystiques ont nommé abandon, c’est-à-dire, que l’âme désintéressée s’abandonne totalement et sans réserve à Dieu pour tout ce qui regarde son intérêt propre; mais elle ne renonce jamais ni à aucune des choses qui intéressent la gloire et le bon plaisir du bien-aimé.... Cette abnégation de nous-mêmes n’est que pour l’intérêt propre, et ne doit jamais empêcher l’amour désintéressé que nous nous devons à nous-mêmes comme au prochain, pour l’amour de Dieu. Les épreuves extrêmes où cet abandon doit être exercé sont les tentations par lesquelles Dieu jaloux veut purifier l’amour, en ne lui faisant voir aucune ressource ni aucune espérance pour son intérêt même éternel. Ces épreuves sont représentées par un très-grand nombre des saints comme un purgatoire terrible, qui peut exempter du purgatoire de l’autre vie les âmes qui le souffrent avec une entière fidélité.... Ces épreuves ne sont que pour un temps. Plus les âmes y sont fidèles à la grâce pour se laisser purifier de tout intérêt propre par l’amour jaloux, plus ces épreuves sont courtes. C’est d’ordinaire la résistance secrète des âmes à la grâce sous des beaux prétextes, c’est leur effort intéressé et empressé pour retenir les appuis sensibles dont Dieu veut les priver, qui rend leurs épreuves si longues et si douloureuses: car Dieu ne fait point souffrir sa créature pour la faire souffrir sans fruit, ce n’est que pour la purifier et pour vaincre ses résistances.—Explic. des Maximes des Saints, Art. VIII.

Note to page 172.

See the passage already cited (page 166, note), where Theresa expressly forbids any attempt on our part to suspend the powers of the mind. Effort to produce inaction appears to her a contradiction in terms. Yet such effort Dionysius expressly enjoins; and, indeed, without it, how can the swarming words or images that float about the mind be excluded? The ‘phantasmata irruentia,’ to be barred out, are the images of sensible objects, according to the old theory of perception—the ‘imagines rerum sensibilium et corporearum.’ Bona expresses the spirit of the old Platonist mysticism in the Romish Church, when he says, ‘Hæc omnia abdicanda et extirpanda prorsus sunt, ut Deum inveniamus.’—Via Compendii ad Deum, p. 26. Theresa is quite agreed with all the mystics as to the previous heart-discipline, and the ascetic process essential to the higher forms of contemplation.

The mystics generally rank the ‘contemplatio caliginosa’ much above the ‘contemplatio pura:’ the more indistinct our apprehensions, the more divine. John of the Cross comes next, in this respect, after Dionysius. Molinos borrows his doctrine, that as the distance between the Infinite and all our sensuous images, conclusions, and finite conceptions must be infinite after all, such things embarrass rather than aid our contemplation. But even he does not soar into a darkness so absolute as that of Dionysius. He says expressly, in the introduction to his Spiritual Guide:—‘In answer to the objection that the will must be inactive where no clear conception is given to the understanding,—that a man cannot love what he can take no cognizance of, my reply is this: Although the understanding does not distinctively recognise certain images and conceptions, by a discursive act or mental conclusion, it apprehends, nevertheless, by a dim and comprehensive faith. And though this knowledge be very cloudy, vague, and general, yet it is far more clear and perfect than any sensuous or scientific apprehensions that man can devise in this life, since all corporeal images must be immeasurably remote from God.’ See Arnold’s Kirchen-und-Ketzergeschichte, th. III. ch. xvii., where the Introduction is inserted entire.

Theresa also admits that during the ecstatic pain the soul adores no particular attribute of God, but, as it were, all his perfections collectively. Bien entiende que no quiere sino a su Dios, mas no ama cosa particular del, sino todo junto lo quiere, y no sabe lo que quiere.—Vida, cap. xx. p. 135. But it is a sore trial to her when her fancy is limed, and the key to her chamber of vision, for a season, lost.

When we leave Dionysius and John, and come to the French mystics, how great the difference! The soul hangs no longer in a lightless void, trembles no more on the verge of swooning ecstacy. This ‘Visio caliginosa’ becomes, not merely a comprehensible thing, but so clarified, humanized, and we may say Christianized, as to come within the range of every devout consciousness. The ‘indistinct contemplation’ of St. Francis de Sales is a summary and comprehensive view of Divine truth or the Divine Nature,—simple, emotional, jubilant, as distinguished from the detailed and partial views of searching Meditation. As he fancifully expresses it, this simplicity of contemplation does not pluck the rose, the thyme, the jessamine, the orange-flower, inhaling the scent of each separately,—this the flower-gatherer Meditation does;—Contemplation rejoices in the fragrance distilled from them all. An example perfectly explains his meaning. O que bien-heureux sont ceux qui, après avoir discouru (the discursive acts above spoken of) sur la multitude des motifs qu’ils ont d’aymer Dieu, reduisans tous leurs regards en une seule veuë et toutes leurs pensées en une seule conclusion, arrestant leur esprit en l’unité de la contemplation, à l’exemple de S. Augustin ou de S. Bruno, prononçant secrettement en leur ame, par une admiration permanente, ces paroles amoureuses: O bonté! bonté! bonté! tousjours ancienne et tousjours nouvelle!—Traité de l’Amour de Dieu, liv. vi. chap. v.

Every religious man must remember times when he was the subject of some such emotion, when the imagination bodied forth no form, the reason performed no conscious process, but, after some train of thought, at the sight of some word, or while gazing on some scene of beauty, an old truth seemed to overwhelm him (as though never seen till then) with all its grandeur or endearment,—times when he felt the poverty of words, and when utterance, if left at all, could only come in the fervid, broken syllables of reiterated ejaculation. In such melting or such tumult of the soul, there is no mysticism. Even Deism, in a susceptible Rousseau, cannot escape this passion. He speaks of a bewildering ecstasy awakened by nature, which would overcome him with such force, that he could but repeat, in almost delirious transport, ‘O Great Being! O Great Being!’ Neither is it mystical to prefer the kindling masterful impulse of a faith which possesses us, rather than we it, to the frigid exactitude of lifeless prescription. The error of the mystics lay in the undue value they attached to such emotions, and their frequent endeavours to excite them for their own sake; in transferring what was peculiar to those seasons to the other provinces of life; and in the constant tendency of their religionism to underrate the balanced exercise of all our faculties, neglecting knowledge and action in a feverish craving for evanescent fervours.

Fénélon, speaking of the negative character of pure and direct contemplation, teaches a doctrine widely different from that of Dionysius, even while referring with reverence to his name. He is careful to state that the attributes of God do not, at such times, cease to be present to the mind, though no sensible image be there, no discursive act performed; that the essence, without the attributes, would be the essence no longer; that, in the highest contemplation, the truths of revelation do not cease to be admissible to the mind; that the humanity of Christ, and all his mysteries, may then be distinctly present,—seen simply, lovingly, as faith presents them, only that there is no systematic effort to impress the several details on the imagination, or to draw conclusions from them.—Explic. des Maximes des Saints, art. xxvii.

Note to page 173.

See the clear and guarded language of the twenty-eighth article in the Maximes des Saints, and the Troisième Lettre en réponse à divers Ecrits, Seconde Partie.

The language of Molinos on this point is as follows:—‘Although the humanity of Christ is the most perfect and most holy mean of access to God, the highest mean of our salvation, yea the channel through which alone we receive every blessing for which we hope, yet is the humanity not the supreme good, for that consists in the contemplation of God. But as Jesus Christ is what he is more through his divine nature than his human, so that man contemplates Christ continually and thinks of Him, who thinks on God, and hath regard constantly to Him. And this is the case more especially with the contemplative man, who possesses a faith more purified, clear, and experimental.’—Arnold, loc. cit., p. 183.

Such a passage proves merely thus much, that Molinos shared in the general tendency of the authorised mediæval mysticism,—a tendency leading the contemplatist to see Christ in God, rather than God in Christ, and placing him in danger of resolving Redemption into self-loss in the abstract Godhead. Similar expressions are frequent in Tauler, in Ruysbroek, in Suso, in the German theology. Now we know by what these same men say at other times, that it was not their intention to disparage or discard the humanity of Christ. Similar allowance must be made for Molinos—quite as far from such practical Docetism as they were. The words just quoted should be compared with the title of the sixteenth chapter in his first book: ‘How in the inward recollection, or drawing in of our powers, we may enter into the internal Ground, through the most holy Humanity of Jesus Christ.’ A gross and materialised apprehension of the bodily sufferings of the Saviour had become general in the Romish Church. They were dramatized in imagination and in fact, into a harrowing spectacle of physical anguish. The end was lost sight of in the means. To such sensible representations—such excesses of over-wrought sentiment, Molinos was doubtless unfriendly; and so, also, the more refined and elevated mysticism of that communion has generally been. Molinos is nearer to the spiritual Tauler than to the sensuous Theresa. Where he speaks of passivity and acquiescence in desertion (§ 5), of contemplation (§§ 17, 18), of self-abandonment (§ 30), of the divine vocation and elevation necessary to the attainment of the contemplative heights, where he says that we must not, without the direction of an experienced adviser, seek to raise ourselves from one stage to a higher (§ 24), he does but repeat what the most orthodox mystics had said before him. Holy indifference to spiritual enjoyments and manifestations, and complete passivity, are not more earnestly enjoined by John of the Cross than by Molinos. Yet one main charge against the Quietists was, that they made mysticism a human method, and proposed to raise to mystical perfection all who were ready to go through their process. The accusations brought against Quietism by Berthier in his Discours sur le Non-Quiétisme de S. Theresa, and in his tenth letter on the works of John of the Cross, are self-destructive. In one place he finds the Quietists guilty of making ‘their pretended spiritual man’ an insensible kind of being, who remains always apathetic—dans une inaltération et une inaction entiere en la présence de Dieu. In another, he represents them as offering to teach contemplation to all (irrespective of the director’s consent, he fears) by reducing it to a method. Either way the unhappy Quietists cannot escape: they must always do too much or too little. It was against the artificial methods of devotion, so much in vogue, that Molinos protested, when he called his readers away from the puerile manuals and bead-counting of the day, to direct and solitary communion with God. Several of the articles of condemnation are such as would have been drawn out against a man suspected of Protestantism. On the question of the humanity of Christ, the proposition professedly deduced from the doctrines of Molinos, and censured accordingly, runs thus—‘We must do no good works of our own motion, and render no homage to Our Lady, the Saints, or Christ’s humanity,’ &c.—Art. xxxv.

Footnote 284:

_Vida_, pp. 71 and 75. In the latter passage, Theresa says
expressly:—En la mystica Teologia, que comence a dezir, pierde de
obrar el entendimiento, porque le suspende Dios, como despues
declararè mas, si supiere, y el me diere para el lo su favor.
Presumir, ni pensar de suspenderle nosotros, es lo que digo no se
haga, ni se dexe de obrar con el, porque nos quedaremos bouos y frios,
y ni haremos lo uno ni lo otro. Que quando el Señor le suspende, y
haze parar, dale de que se espante, y en que se ocupe, y que sin
discurrir entienda mas en un credo que nosotros podemos entendir con
todas nuestras diligencias de tierra en muchos años.

Footnote 285:

See Note on p. 175.

Footnote 286:

Vida, cap. xvii. and Castillo Interior, Moradas Quintas, cap. i.

Footnote 287:

Castillo Interior, p. 580.

Footnote 288:

See second Note on p. 175.

Footnote 289:

See Note on p. 176.

Footnote 290:

See Note on p. 177.

Footnote 291:

See Note on p. 178.

Footnote 292:

See the account of the proceedings against Molinos and his followers,
in Arnold, th. III., c. xvii., and more fully in an Appendix to the
English translation of Madame Guyon’s Autobiography.

Footnote 293:

_Vida_, chap. xxii.:—Quando Dios quiere suspender todas las potencias
(como en los modos de oracion que quedan dichos hemos visto) claro
estâ que aunque no queramos se quita esta presencia.... Mas que
nosotros de maña y con cuydado nos acostumbremos a no procurar con
todas nuestras fuerças traer delante siempre (y pluguiesse al Señor
fuesse siempre) esta sacratissima humanidad esto digo que no me parece
bien, y que es andar el alma en ayre, como dizen: porque parece no
trae arrimo, por mucho que la parezca anda llena de Dios.—P. 154.

Footnote 294:

The words of John are:—Mais il faut remarquer que quand je dis qu’il
est à propos d’oublier les espèces et les connaissances des objets
matériels, je ne prétends nullement parler de Jésus-Christ ni de son
humanité sacrée. Quoique l’âme n’en ait pas quelquefois la mémoire
dans sa plus haute contemplation et dans le simple regard de la
divinité, parce que Dieu élève l’esprit à cette connaissance confuse
et surnaturelle, néanmoins il ne faut jamais négliger exprès la
représentation de cette adorable humanité ni en effacer le souvenir ou
l’idée, ni en affaiblir la connaissance.—_La Montée du Mont Carmel_,
liv. III. chap. 1. I have used the French translation of his works,
edited by the Abbé Migne, in his _Bibliothèque Universelle du Clergé_.
1845.

The chapter on images is the fourteenth of the same book.

Father Berthier (_Lettres sur les Œuvres de S. Jean de la Croix_)
attempts to show the difference between the mysticism of his author
and that of the false mystics. He succeeds only in pointing out a
manifest disagreement between the opinions of John and those which he
himself believes (or pretends to believe) are those of Quietism—the
accusations, in fact, against the Quietists—the exaggerated
conclusions drawn by their enemies.

Footnote 295:

See Note on p. 180.

Footnote 296:

Castillo Interior. Morada vi., c. v.

Footnote 297:

Ibid., capp. viii., ix., x.

Footnote 298:

_Vida_, cap. xxvii., pp. 191, &c. Here the supernatural illumination
without means or mode, longed for by so many mystics, is professedly
realised. Molinos puts forward no claim so dangerous as this special
revelation. Theresa is confident that this most inexplicable species
of communication is beyond the reach of any delusion, and inaccessible
altogether to the father of lies. Her language concerning the absolute
passivity of those who are its subjects, is as strong as it could be.
No Quietist could push it farther. It so happens that the saint, in
his chapter, contravenes expressly the three criteria, afterwards laid
down by Fénélon, to distinguish the true mysticism from the false. The
genuine contemplation according to him is not purely infused, not
purely gratuitous (_i.e._, without correspondence on the part of the
soul to the grace vouchsafed), not miraculous. With Theresa this form
of passive contemplation _is_ all three. So much more Quietist was the
mysticism authorised than the mysticism condemned by Rome. See
_Maximes des Saints_, art. xxix. What Fénélon rejects in the following
section as false, answers exactly to the position of Theresa. Fénélon
supports his more refined and sober mysticism by the authority of
preceding mystics. He finds among them ample credentials, and indeed
more than he wants. Their extravagances he tacitly rejects. Not that,
as a good Catholic, he could venture openly to impugn their
statements, but their fantastic extremes, and choice wonders, find a
place with him rather as so much religious tradition, or extraordinary
history, than as forming any essential part of the mysticism he
himself represents and commends.

Footnote 299:

Vida, cap. xxv.

CHAPTER III.

And those that endeavour after so still, so silent, and demure
condition of minde, that they would have the sense of nothing there
but peace and rest, striving to make their whole nature desolate of
all _Animal Figurations_ whatsoever, what do they effect but a clear
Day, shining upon a barren Heath, that feeds neither Cow nor
Horse,—neither Sheep nor Shepherd is to be seen there, but only a
waste, silent Solitude, and one uniform parchednesse and vacuity.
And yet while a man fancies himself thus wholly divine, he is not
aware how he is even then held down by his _Animal Nature_; and that
it is nothing but the stillnesse and fixednesse of _Melancholy_ that
thus abuses him, instead of the true divine Principle.—HENRY MORE.

II. St. John of the Cross.

Little John of the Cross—a hero, like Tydeus, small in body, but
great in soul—was in the prime of life when Theresa was growing old.
Early distinguished by surpassing austerity and zeal, he was
selected by the Saint as her coadjutor in the great work of
Carmelite reform. The task was no easy one, though sanctioned by the
highest spiritual authority. This troculus service—the picking the
teeth of the gorged ecclesiastical crocodile—has always been a
somewhat delicate and dangerous affair. The great jaws closed with a
horrible crash one day on poor Madame Guyon, as she was working away
with her solitary bill and the best intentions. On John, too, busy
at a little scavenger’s work, those jaws had once almost met, and at
least knocked him fluttering into a hollow tooth,—in other words, a
dark and noisome dungeon at Toledo. But what between St. Theresa’s
intercession and that of the Mother of God, he is let fly again.
Vicar-provincial of Andalusia, he plies his task anew, with
admirable intrepidity and self-devotion; courts hatred and
opprobrium on every side; flourishes his whip; overturns
secularities; and mouses for flaws of regulation. He succeeds in
excavating in every direction spiritual catacombs and mummy-caves,
where, swathed up in long rows, the religious dumb and withered line
the cloister-walls—motionless—satisfactorily dead. Next to Ignatius
Loyola, he was, perhaps, the greatest soul-sexton that ever handled
shovel.

John of the Cross obtained this distinctive name through his love of
crosses. He was consumed by an insatiable love of suffering. It was
his prayer that not a day of his life might pass in which he did not
suffer something. Again and again does he exhort the monk,
saying—‘Whatsoever you find pleasant to soul or body, abandon;
whatsoever is painful, embrace it.’ ‘Take pains,’ he says, ‘to give
your name an ill savour; burrow deep and deeper under heaped
obloquy, and you are safe.’[300] Thus is the odour of sanctity best
secured; and the disguised saint resembles that eastern prince who
concealed himself from his pursuers beneath a heap of onions, lest
the fragrance of his perfumes should betray him. The man who is
truly dead and self-abandoned will not only thus disguise his
virtues before others; he will be unconscious of them himself. The
whole life of John was an attempt towards a practical fulfilment of
such precepts. The party of his enemies gained the upper hand in the
chapter, and the evening of his days was clouded by the disgrace of
which he was covetous. He passed existence in violent extremes, now
gazing with delight on some celestial mirage, swimming in seas of
glory that waft him to the steps of the burning throne,—and anon
hurled down into the abyss, while vampyre wings of fiends ‘darken
his fall, with victory,’ and his heart itself is a seething
hell-cauldron, wherein demon talons are the raking fleshhooks.

The piety of John is altogether of the Romanist type. In his
doctrine of humility, truth is not to be considered, but
expediency,—that is, an edifying display of self-vilification. On
his own principles, John ought to have persuaded himself, and
assured others, that he was a self-indulgent, pleasure-loving
drone,—though perfectly aware of the contrary. St. Paul is content
to bid men think of themselves not more highly than they ought to
think. John of the Cross is not satisfied unless they think worse
than they ought,—unless they think untruly, and labour to put a
pious fraud upon themselves. John disturbs the equilibrium of
Quietism. There is quite as much self-will in going out of the way
of a blessing to seek a misery, as in avoiding a duty for the sake
of ease. Many men will readily endure a score of mortifications of
their own choosing, who would find it hard to display tolerable
patience under a single infliction from a source beyond their
control. This extreme of morbid asceticism is more easy, because
more brilliant in its little world, than the lowly fortitude of
ordinary Christian life. How many women, at this hour, in poverty,
in pain, in sorrow of heart, are far surpassing St. Theresa in their
self-sacrifice and patience, unseen and unpraised of men.

Banished to the little Convent of Pegnuela, he completed among the
crags of the Sierra Morena his great mystical treatises, _The
Obscure Night_, and _The Ascent of Carmel_. He follows in the steps
of the Pseudo-Dionysius. He describes the successive denudations of
the soul as it passes,—the shadow of itself, into the infinite shade
of the Divine Dark.[301] We have seen how instantaneously Theresa
could attain at times this oblivious self-reduction. Her soul falls
prostrate, with the ordinary attire of faculties, but rises,
stripped of all in a moment. Not more dexterously was the fallen
Andrew Fairservice stripped in a twinkling by the Highlanders, so
that he who tumbled down a well-clothed, decent serving-man, stood
up ‘a forked, uncased, bald-pated, beggarly-looking scarecrow.’ John
of the Cross describes with almost scientific method the process of
spiritual unclothing,—preaches a series of sermons on the successive
removal of each integument,—and perorates on the blessed reduction
of the soul to a supernatural state of nature.

The ‘Obscure Night,’ would be the most fitting title for both
treatises; for the night of mysticism is their sole subject, and
Mount Carmel does but figure as a frontispiece, in compliment to the
Order probably. Sundry verses head the works as texts; the first of
these, with its exposition, will sufficiently indicate the character
of the whole.

En una noche escura
Con ansias en amores inflammada
¡O dichosa ventura!
Salí sin ser notada
Estando ya mi casa sosegada.

‘’Twas in a darksome night, inflamed with restless love, O fortune
full of bliss, I ventured forth unmarked, what time my house was
still.’

The Saint interprets his stanza, in substance, as follows:—

Here the soul says, ‘I went out unhindered by sensuality or the
devil. I went out, that is, of myself—out from my own poor and
feeble manner of knowing, loving, and tasting God. I went out,
unassisted by any action of my own powers; while my understanding
was wrapped in darkness; while will and memory were overwhelmed by
affliction. I went out, abandoning myself in pure faith to
darkness—that is, to the night of my spirit and my natural powers.

‘This going forth has crowned me with happiness; for I have been
straightway elevated to operations entirely divine—to most familiar
intercourses with God; in other words, my understanding has passed
from a human to a divine condition. Uniting myself to God by this
purgation, my knowledge is no longer weak and limited as formerly;
but I know by the divine wisdom, to which I am conjoined.

‘My will also has gone out of itself, and become in a sort divine;
for being united to the Divine Love, it does not love any longer by
its own former powers, but by the powers of the Divine Spirit. Thus,
its acts of love towards the Creator are rendered no more in a human
manner.

‘My memory is filled with images of heavenly glory. All my powers,
in short, and all my affections, are renovated by the Night of the
spirit and the despoliation of the old man, in such sort that their
very nature seems changed, and they can relish only spiritual and
divine delights.’[302]

Thus, the soul is to resemble the wondrous eastern tree of the old
travellers, which by daylight stands leafless and flowerless, but
after sundown puts forth countless white blossoms, shining in the
darkness like the drops of a silver fountain; and when the sun is
risen again, sheds all its beauty, and stands bare and barren as
before. When all our natural powers, slain and buried, lie dead
under the midnight;—then arise, instead of them, certain divine
substitutes, which will, and love, and know, as the Infinite does,
not as men.

The FIRST NIGHT is that of the _Sense_: the long process of vigil
and austerity which, with the caduceus of asceticism, tames and
lulls to slumber the Argus-eyed monster of the flesh.[303] A painful
work, but not without meet recompence. New pleasures, even of the
sense, are supernaturally vouchsafed to the steadfast votary. The
wearied eye and the unvisited ear are regaled by glorious visions
and seraphic melody; yea, the parched tongue, and haggard, bleeding
flesh, are made to know delights of taste and touch, that melt with
most delicious pleasure through the frame, and beggar with their
transport all the joys of banquets or of love.

But rejoice not, O mystic! for even now, lest thou shouldst grow
greedy of these high luxuries, there strides towards thee the
darkness of—

The SECOND NIGHT—the Night of the _Spirit_. Here all caresses are
withdrawn. The deserted soul cannot think, or pray, or praise, as of
old. The great pains are to begin. Pitiless purgation and privation
absolute are about to make the second night not night only, but
midnight. You seem to descend, God-abandoned, alive into hell. Make
no resistance: utter no cry for comfort. Solace is a Tantalus’
bough, which will wave itself away as you stretch forth your hand.
Acquiesce in all: be in your desertion as absolutely passive as in
your rapture. So, from the bright glassy edge and summit of this
awful fall, you shoot down helpless, blind, and dizzy,—down through
the surging cataract, among the giant vapour columns, amid the
eternal roar, to awake at the boiling foot, and find that you yet
live, in your tossing shallop,—or rather, you no longer, for you
yourself are dead—so much mere ballast in the bottom of the boat: a
divine and winged Radiance has taken your place, who animates rather
than steers, guiding, in your stead, by mysterious impulse.[304]

To the higher faculty, then, there are already visible, after the
first horrors, breaking gleams of a super-celestial dawn. Visions
are seen; forms of glory come and go: gifts of subtlest discernment
are vouchsafed: substantial words are spoken within, which make you,
in that moment, all they mean.[305]

But all such particular and special manifestations you are
peremptorily to reject, come they from God or come they from the
Devil;—not even to reflect upon and recall them afterwards, lest
grievous harm ensue. For the philosophy of John is summary. Two
ideas alone have room there—All and Nothing. Whatsoever is created
is finite: whether actual or ideal, it bears no proportion to the
All,—it cannot therefore be helpful to any on their way to the All.
The Something is no link between the opposites of All and Nothing.
Therefore, if any view of a particular divine perfection, any
conception of Deity, or image of saint or angel, be even
supernaturally presented to the mind, reject it. You are aiming at
the highest—at loss in the All. Everything definite and
particular—all finite apprehension, must be so much negation of the
Infinite,—must limit that All. You should pass beyond such things to
blend immediately with the Universal,—to attain that view of God
which is above means—is unconditioned—is, from its illimitable
vastness, an anguish of bliss,—a glory which produces the effect of
darkness.[306]

But why, it will be asked, does God grant these favours of vision to
the saints at all, if it is their duty to disregard them?

John answers, ‘Because some transition stage is unavoidable. But the
higher you attain, the less of such manifestation will you meet
with. This portion of your progress is a grand stair-case hung with
pictures;—hurry up the steps, that you may enter the darkened
chamber above, where divine ignorance and total darkness shall make
you blest. If in doubt about a vision, there is always your
confessor, to whom, if you have not constant resort, woe be to you!
But you are safe, at any rate, in not receiving and cherishing such
inferior bestowments. To reject them will be no sin—no loss. For the
beneficial effects they are designed to produce will be wrought by
God internally, if you only abide passive, and refuse to exert about
such signs those lower faculties which can only hinder your
advance.’[307]

Such a reply is but a fence of words against a serious difficulty.
He should be the last to talk of necessary intermediate steps who
proclaims the rejection of everything mediate,—who will have the
mystic be reduced to the Nothing and rapt to the All, by a single
entrancing touch.[308]

But much higher than any visions of the picture-gallery are certain
manifestations (sometimes granted in this state) of divine truth in
its absolute nakedness. These are glimpses of the _veritas
essentialis nude in se ipsa_, beyond all men, and angels, and
heavenly splendours, which Tauler bids the mystic long for. John
forbids us to seek them—for effort would unseal our slumber. They
come altogether without consent of ours. Though we are not to hold
ourselves so negative towards them as we should towards more
palpable and inferior favours.

The Quietists were charged with excluding all human co-operation in
the mystical progress. John must plead guilty on this count. His
writings abound with reiterated declarations that the soul does
absolutely nothing in its night,—with prohibitions against seeking
any supernatural favour or manifestation whatever.[309]

Urganda the fairy could find no way of raising the paladins she
loved above the common lot of mortals, save that of throwing them
into an enchanted sleep. So Galaor, Amadis, and Esplandian, sink
into the image of death beneath her kindly wand. Such is the device
of John—and so does he lull and ward venturous Understanding,
learned Memory, and fiery Will. Faith is the night which
extinguishes Understanding; Hope, Memory; and Love, Will. The very
desire after supernatural bestowments, (though for no other purpose
has everything natural been doomed to die) would be a stirring in
the torpor—a restless, not a perfect sleep. The serenest Quiet may
be ruffled by no such wish.

This, therefore, is John’s fundamental principle. All faculties and
operations not beyond the limits of our nature must cease, that we
may have no natural knowledge, no natural affection; but find,
magically substituted, divine apprehensions and divine sentiments
quite foreign to ourselves. Then, still farther, we are desired to
ignore even supernatural manifestations, if they represent to us
anything whatever; that we may rise, or sink (it is the same), to
that swooning gaze on the Infinite Ineffable, wherein our dissolving
nature sees, hears, knows, wills, remembers nothing.[310]

The THIRD NIGHT—that of the _Memory_ and the _Will_.[311] Here, not
only do all the ‘trivial fond records’ that may have been inscribed
upon remembrance vanish utterly, but every trace of the divinest
tokens and most devout experience. The soul sinks into profound
oblivion. The flight of time is unmarked, bodily pain unfelt, and
the place of Memory entirely emptied of its stored ‘species and
cognitions,’—of everything particular and distinct. The patient
forgets to eat and drink,—knows not whether he has done or not done,
said or not said, heard or not heard this or that.

‘Strange exaltation this,’ cries the objector, ‘which imbrutes and
makes a blank of man—sinks him below idiotic ignorance of truth and
virtue!’

John is ready with his answer. This torpor, he replies, is but
transitory. The perfect mystic, the adept established in union, has
ceased to suffer this oblivion. Passing through it, he acquires a
new and divine facility for every duty proper to his station. He is
in the supernatural state, and his powers have so passed into God
that the Divine Spirit makes them operate divinely,—all they do is
divine. The Spirit makes such a man constantly ignorant of what he
ought to be ignorant; makes him remember what he ought to remember;
and love what is to be loved—God only. Transformed in God, these
powers are human no more.[312]

In the same way the night of will extinguishes joy,—joy in sensible
good, in moral excellence, in supernatural gifts, that the soul may
soar to a delight above delight, be suspended as in a limitless
expanse of calm, far beyond that lower meteoric sky which is figured
over with wonders and with signs.

Thus John’s desired _contemplatio infusa_ is always, at the same
time, a _contemplatio confusa_.

At his culminating point the mystic is concealed as ‘on the secret
top of Horeb;’ he ascends by a hidden scale, cloaked with darkness
(_por la secreta escala—a escuras y enzelada_).

Mark the advantage of this enclouded state. The Devil, it is said,
can only get at what is passing in our mind by observing the
operations of the mental powers. If, therefore, these are inactive
and absorbed, and a divine communication goes on, in which they have
no part whatever, Satan is baffled. These highest manifestations,
absolutely pure, nude, and immediate he cannot counterfeit or
hinder. The soul is then blissfully incognito and anonymous. This
secrecy preserves the mystic from malign arts, as the concealment of
their real names was thought the safeguard of ancient cities, since
hostile sooth-sayers, ignorant of the true name to conjure by, could
not then entice away their tutelary gods.[313]

Such then is the teaching of the _Mount Carmel_ and the _Obscure
Night_, starred with numerous most irrelevant quotations from the
psalms and the prophecies, as though David and Isaiah were
Quietists, and spent their days in trying to benumb imagination,
banish the sensuous images which made them poets, and tone down all
distinct ideas to a lustreless, formless neutral tint. The Spanish
painters have not more anachronisms than the Spanish mystics; and I
think of Murillo’s ‘Moses striking the Rock,’ where Andalusian
costumes make gay the desert, Andalusian faces stoop to drink, and
Andalusian crockery is held out to catch the dashing streams.

In John of the Cross we behold the final masterpiece of Romanist
mysticism, and the practice (if here the term be applicable) of
supernatural theopathy is complete. The Art of Sinking in
Religion—the divinity of diving, could go no deeper. The natives of
South America say that the lobo or seal has to swallow great stones
when he wishes to sink to the river-bed—so little natural facility
has he that way. We sinners, too, have no native alacrity for the
mystical descent: our gravitation does not tend towards that depth
of nothing; and huge and hard are the stones (not bread) with which
this mystagogue would lade us to bring us down. And when, in
imagination at least, at the bottom, we are smothered in an obscure
night of mud. What a granite boulder is this to swallow,—to be told
that the faintest film of attachment that links you with any human
being or created thing will frustrate all your aim, and be stout as
a cable to hold back your soul,—that with all your mind, and soul,
and strength, you must seek out and adore the Uncomfortable, for its
own sake—that, drowned and dead, you must lie far down, hidden, not
from the pleasant sunshine only, but from all sweet gladness of
faith and hope and love—awaiting, in obstruction, an abstraction.
This resurrection to a supersensuous serenity, wherein divine powers
supersede your own, is a mere imagination—a change of words; the old
hallucination of the mystic. After going through a certain amount of
suffering, the devotee chooses to term whatever thoughts or feelings
he may have, his own no longer: he fancies them divine. It is the
same man from first to last.

Admitting its great fundamental error—this unnaturalness,—as though
grace came in to make our flesh and blood a senseless puppet pulled
by celestial wires,—it must be conceded that the mysticism of John
takes the very highest ground. It looks almost with contempt upon
the phantoms, the caresses, the theurgic toys of grosser mystics. In
this respect, John is far beyond Theresa. He has a purpose; he
thinks he knows a way to it; and he pursues it, unfaltering, to the
issue. He gazes steadily on the grand impalpability of the
Areopagite, and essays to mount thither with a holy ardour of which
the old Greek gives no sign. And this, too, with the vision-craving
sentimental Theresa at his side, and a coarsely sensuous Romanism
all around him. No wonder that so stern a spiritualism was little to
the taste of some church-dignitaries in soft raiment. It is
impossible not to recognize a certain grandeur in such a man.
Miserably mistaken as he was, he is genuine throughout as mystic and
ascetic. Every bitter cup he would press to the lips of others he
had first drained himself. His eagerness to suffer was no bravado—no
romancing affectation, as with many of his tribe. In his last
illness at Pegnuela he was allowed his choice of removal between two
places. At one of them his deadly enemy was prior. He bade them
carry him thither, for there he would have most to endure. That
infamous prior treated with the utmost barbarity the dying saint, on
whom his implacable hatred had already heaped every wrong within his
power.[314] Let, then, a melancholy admiration be the meed of
John—not because the mere mention of the cross was sufficient,
frequently, to throw him into an ecstasy,—not because his face was
seen more than once radiant with a lambent fire from heaven,—these
are the vulgar glories of the calendar,—but because, believing in
mystical death, he did his best to die it, and displayed in
suffering and in action a self-sacrificing heroism which could only
spring from a devout and a profound conviction. We find in him no
sanctimonious lies, no mean or cruel things done for the honour of
his Church—perhaps he was not thus tempted or commanded as others
have been,—and so, while he must have less merit with Rome as a
monk, let him have the more with us as a man.

Note to page 188.

Montée du Carmel, liv. II. ch. ii. and iv.; also La Nuit Obscure, I. viii. and II. ch. v.-ix. This night is far more dark and painful than the first and third; and while the first is represented as common to many religious aspirants, the second is attained but by a few.

Si quelqu’un demande pourquoi l’âme donne le nom de nuit obscure à la lumière divine qui dissipe ses ignorances, je réponds que cette divine sagesse est non-seulement la nuit de l’âme, mais encore son supplice, pour deux raisons: la première est, parce que la sublimité de la sagesse divine surpasse de telle sorte la capacité de l’âme, que ce n’est que nuit et ténèbres pour elle; la seconde, la bassesse et l’impureté de l’âme sont telles, que cette sagesse la remplit de peines et d’obscurités.—P. 593.

Mais le plus grand supplice de l’âme est de croire que Dieu la hait, la délaisse, et la jette pour cette raison dans les ténèbres.... En effet, lorsque la contemplation dont Dieu se sert pour purifier l’âme la mortifie en la dépouillant de tout, l’âme éprouve, avec une vivacité pénétrante, toute l’horreur que cause la mort, et toutes les douleurs et tous les gémissements de l’enfer, &c.... On peut dire avec probabilité, qu’une âme qui a passé par ce purgatoire spirituel, ou n’entrera pas dans le purgatoire de l’autre monde, ou n’y demeurera pas longtemps.—P. 597.

But the most characteristic passage on this subject is the following: it contains the essence of his mysticism:—Les affections et les connaissances de l’esprit purifié et élevé à la perfection sont d’un rang supérieur aux affections et aux connaissances naturelles, elles sont surnaturelles et divines; de sorte que, pour en acquérir les actes ou les habitudes, il est nécessaire que celles qui ne sortent point des bornes de la nature soient éteintes. C’est pourquoi il est d’une grande utilité en cette matière que l’esprit perde dans cette nuit obscure ses connaissances naturelles, pour être revêtu de cette lumière très-subtile et toute divine, et pour devenir lui-même, en quelque façon, tout divin dans son union avec la sagesse de Dieu. Cette nuit ou cette obscurité doit durer autant de temps qu’il en faut pour contracter l’habitude dans l’usage qu’on fait de cette lumière surnaturelle. On doit dire la même chose de la volonté: elle est obligée de se défaire de toutes ses affections qui l’attachent aux objets naturels, pour recevoir les admirables effets de l’amour qui est extrêmement spirituel, subtil, délicat, intime, qui surpasse tous les sentiments naturels et toutes les affections de la volonté, qui est enfin tout divin; et afin qu’elle soit toute transformée en cette amour par l’union qui lui est accordée dans la perte de tous ses biens naturels.

Il faut encore que la mémoire soit dénuée des images qui lui forment les connaissances douces et tranquilles des choses dont elle se souvient, afin qu’elle les regarde comme des choses étrangères, et que ces choses lui paraissent d’une manière différente de l’idée qu’elle en avait auparavant. Par ce moyen, cette nuit obscure retirera l’esprit du sentiment commun et ordinaire qu’il avait des objets créés, et lui imprimera un sentiment tout divin, qui lui semblera étranger; en sorte que l’âme vivra comme hors d’elle-même, et élevée au-dessus de la vie humaine; elle doutera quelquefois si ce qui se passe en elle n’est point un enchantement, ou une stupidité d’esprit; elle s’étonnera de voir et d’entendre des choses qui lui semblent fort nouvelles, quoiqu’elles soient les mêmes que celles qu’elle avait autrefois entre les mains. La cause de ce changement est parce que l’âme doit perdre entièrement ses connaissances et ses sentiments humains, pour prendre des connaissances et des sentiments divins; ce qui est plus propre de la vie future que de la vie présente.—P. 601.

Note to page 191.

‘Pour répondre à cette objection, je dis que plus la mémoire est unie à Dieu, plus elle perd ses connaissances distinctes et particulières, jusqu’à ce qu’elle les oublie entièrement: ce qui arrive lorsque l’âme est établie dans l’union parfaite. C’est pourquoi elle tombe d’abord dans un grand oubli, puisque le souvenir des espèces et des connaíssances s’évanouit en elle. Ensuite elle se comporte à l’égard des choses extérieures avec une négligence si notable et un si grand mépris d’elle-même, qu’étant toute abîmée en Dieu, elle oublie le boire et le manger, et elle ne sait si elle a fait quelque chose ou non, si elle a vu ou non; si on lui a parlé ou non. Mais lorsqu’elle est affermie dans l’habitude de l’union, qui est son souverain bien, elle ne souffre plus ces oubliances dans les choses raisonnables, dans les choses morales, ni dans les choses naturelles: au contraire, elle est plus parfaite dans les opérations convenables à son état, quoiqu’elle les produise par le ministère des images et des connaissances que Dieu excite d’une façon particulière dans la mémoire. Car lorsque l’habitude de l’union, qui est un état surnaturel, est formée, la mémoire et les autres puissances quittent leurs opérations naturelles et passent jusqu’à Dieu, qui est à leur égard un terme surnaturel. En sorte que la mémoire étant toute transformée en Dieu, ses opérations ne lui sont plus imprimées, et ne demeurent plus attachées à elle. La mémoire et les autres facultés de l’âme sont occupées de Dieu avec un empire si absolu, qu’elles semblent être toutes divines, et que c’est lui-même qui les meut par son esprit et par sa volonté divine, et qui les fait opérer en quelque façon divinement: “Puisque celui,” dit l’Apôtre, “qui s’unit au Seigneur, devient un même esprit avec lui” (1 Cor. vi. 17). Il est donc véritable que les opérations de l’âme, étant unies totalement à Dieu, sont toutes divines.’—Montée du Carmel, liv. III. ch. i.

Note to page 192.

La Nuit Obscure, liv. II. ch. xvii. xviii.:—‘L’esprit malin ne peut connaître ce qui se passe dans la volonté que par les opérations de ces puissances. Ainsi, plus les communications de Dieu son spirituelles, intérieures, et éloignées des sens, moins il peut découvrir et les pénétrer’.—P. 621.

Evil angels may counterfeit those supernatural communications which are vouchsafed through the agency of the good. But the infused passive contemplation, in which neither the understanding, the imagination, nor the sense, exercise their representative office, is secret and safe. ‘Quand Dieu la (l’âme) comble immédiatement par lui-même de ses grâces spirituelles, elle se dérobe entièrement à la vue de son adversaire, parce que Dieu, qui est son souverain Seigneur, demeure en elle, et ni les bons ni les mauvais anges ne peuvent y avoir entrée, ni découvrir les communications intimes et secrètes qui se font entre Dieu et l’âme. Elles sont toutes divines, elles sont infiniment élevées, elles sont en quelque sorte les sacrés attouchements des deux extrémités qui se trouvent entre Dieu et l’âme dans leur union: et c’est là où l’âme reçoit plus de biens spirituels qu’en tous les autres degrés de la contemplation (Cant. I. 1). C’est aussi ce que l’épouse demandait, quand elle priait l’Epoux divin de lui donner un saint baiser de sa bouche’.—Chap. xxiii. p. 623.

Thus, this culminating point of negation is at least, to some extent, a safeguard. The extinction of knowledge, by confining ourselves to the incomprehensible (Lettres Spirituelles, p. 724), and of joy, by renouncing spiritual delights, the refusal to entertain any extraordinary manifestations that assume a definite form or purport, does at the same time shut out all that region of visionary hallucination in which many mystics have passed their days. It is indisputably true that the more the mystic avoids, rather than craves, the excitements of imagination, sentiment, and miracle, the safer must he be from the delusions to which he is exposed, if not by the juggle of lying spirits, by the fever of his own distempered brain. No one who obeys John’s great maxim, ‘Il ne faut pas voyager pour voir, mais pour ne pas voir,’ will trouble the holy darkness of his church by any erratic novelties of light. Indeed, against such danger careful provision is made by that law which is with him the sine quâ non of mystical progress,—Ne regardez jamais votre supérieur, quel qu’il soit, que comme Dieu même, puisqu’il vous est donné comme lieutenant de Dieu.’—Précautions Spirituelles, p. 734.

Footnote 300:

His exhortations here carry ascetic self-abnegation far beyond the
Quietist indifference of Fénélon or Madame Guyon. They were
satisfied—he, always, and she throughout her later life—to seek a
state of calm, to hail joy or sorrow alike, with the trustful
equanimity of perfect resignation. John is too violent—too much
enamoured of miseries, to await the will of Providence. His ambition
will command events, and make them torments.

‘Au reste, le meilleur moyen, le plus méritoire et le plus propre pour
acquérir les vertus; le moyen, dis-je, le plus sûr pour mortifier la
joie, l’espérance, la crainte et la douleur, est de se porter toujours
aux choses non pas les plus faciles, mais les plus difficiles; non pas
les plus savoureuses, mais les plus insipides; non pas les plus
agréables, mais les plus désagréables; non pas à celles qui consolent,
mais à celles qui causent de la peine; non pas aux plus grandes, mais
aux plus petites; non pas aux plus sublimes et aux plus précieuses,
mais aux plus basses et aux plus méprisables. Il faut enfin désirer et
rechercher ce qu’il y a de pire, et non ce qu’il y a de meilleur, afin
de se mettre, pour l’amour de Jésus Christ, dans la privation de
toutes les choses du monde, et d’entrer dans l’esprit d’une nudité
parfaite....

‘Premièrement, il faut que celui qui veut réprimer cette passion tâche
de faire les choses qui tournent à son déshonneur, et il aura soin de
se faire mépriser aussi par le prochain.

‘Secondement, il dira lui-même et fera dire aux autres les choses qui
lui attirent du mépris.’—_Montée du Carmel_, liv. II. ch. xiii.

Footnote 301:

Dionysius is very clearly followed into his darkness in _La Montée du
Carmel_, liv. II. chap. viii.; and his Hierarchies reappear in _La
Nuit Obscure_, liv. II. ch. xii.

Footnote 302:

La Nuit Obscure, liv. II. ch. iv.; et passim.

Footnote 303:

This first Night is treated of at length in the first book of the
_Montée du Carmel_, and in the first of the _Nuit Obscure_. The
supernatural sensuous enjoyments, alluded to, are described in the
_Montée du Carmel_, liv. II. ch. xi. They are placed in the second
Night,—the compensation not taking place immediately; and their
recipient is on no account to rely on them, or desire their
continuance (p. 444). By ‘sense,’ John understands, not the body
merely, but the least disorder of the passions, and all those
imperfections so common to beginners which arise from an undue
eagerness for religious enjoyments, such, for example, as what he
calls spiritual avarice, spiritual luxury, spiritual _gourmandise_,
&c.

Footnote 304:

See Note on p. 195.

Footnote 305:

Montée du Carmel, liv. II. ch. xxv.-xxxii.

Footnote 306:

Ibid. ch. viii. and vi.

Footnote 307:

Ibid. ch. xvii. and liv. III. ch. xii.

Footnote 308:

What a scope for the indignant eloquence of Bossuet, had Fénélon
proclaimed as possible such a sudden equipment with all imaginable
virtues as this:—Quelques-unes de ces connaissances et de ces touches
intérieures que Dieu répand dans l’âme l’enrichissent de telle sorte
qu’une seule suffit, non-seulement pour la délivrer tout d’un coup des
imperfections qu’elle n’avait pu vaincre durant tout le cours de sa
vie, mais aussi pour l’orner des vertus chrétiennes et des dons
divins.—_Montée du Carmel_, liv. II. ch. xxvi. p. 484.

Footnote 309:

In the chapter just cited, John says expressly, ‘Elle ne saurait
cependant s’élever à ces connaissances et à ces touches divines par sa
co-opération,’ and describes these gifts as coming from God,
‘subitement et sans attendre le consentement de la volonté.’—P. 485.
So again, quite as strongly, liv. II. chap. xi. p. 445. He
discountenances the attempt to seek perfection by the ‘voies
surnaturelles,’ yet his books are an introduction to the mystical
evening, and a guide through the mystical midnight.

Footnote 310:

_La Nuit Obscure_, liv. II. ch. ix.; especially the passage cited in
note on p. 195.

Footnote 311:

This night occupies the third book of the Montée du Carmel.

Footnote 312:

See Note on p. 196.

Footnote 313:

See second Note on p. 196.

Footnote 314:

See the life of the saint in Alban Butler, Nov. 24.

BOOK THE TENTH QUIETISM.

CHAPTER I.

Love! if thy destined sacrifice am I,
Come, slay thy victim, and prepare thy fires;
Plunged in thy depths of mercy let me die
The death which every soul that lives desires!

MADAME GUYON.

‘Do you remember,’ said Atherton to Willoughby, when he had called to see him one morning, ‘the hunt we once had after that passage in Jeremy Taylor, about Bishop Ivo’s adventure? Coleridge relates the story without saying exactly where it is, and his daughter states in a note that she had been unable to find the place in Taylor.’

‘I recollect it perfectly; and we discovered it, I think, in the first part of his sermon On the Mercy of the Divine Judgments. Ivo, going on an embassy for St. Louis, meets by the way a grave, sad woman, doesn’t he?—with fire in one hand, and water in the other; and when he inquires what these symbols may mean, she answers, “My purpose is with fire to burn Paradise, and with my water to quench the flames of hell, that men may serve God without the incentives of hope and fear, and purely for the love of God.”

‘Well, Gower has painted her portrait for us,—Queen Quietude, he calls her: and it is to be hung up here over my chimney-piece, by the next evening we meet together.’

* * *

The evening came. Atherton was to read a paper on ‘Madame Guyon and the Quietist Controversy,’ and Gower was to exhibit and explain his allegorical picture.

This painting represented a female figure, simply clad in sombre garments, sitting on a fragment of rock at the summit of a high hill. On her head hung a garland, half untwined, from neglect, which had been fantastically woven of cypress, bound about with heart’s-ease. Many flowers of the heart’s-ease had dropped off, withered; some were lying unheeded in her lap. Her face was bent downward; its expression perfectly calm, and the cast of sadness it wore rather recorded a past, than betrayed a present sorrow. Her eyes were fixed pensively, and without seeming to see them, on the thin hands which lay folded on her knees. No anxious effort of thought contracted that placid brow; no eager aspiration lifted those meekly-drooping eyelids.

At her feet lay, on her right, the little brazier in which she had carried her fire, still emitting its grey curls of smoke; and, on her left, the overturned water-urn—a Fortunatus-purse of water,—from whose silver hollow an inexhaustible stream welled out, and leaping down, was lost to sight among the rocks.

Behind her lay two wastes, stretching from east to west. The vast tracts, visible from her far-seeing mountain, were faintly presented in the distance of the picture. But they were never looked upon; her back was toward them; they belonged to a past never remembered. In the east stretched level lands, covered far as the eye could reach with cold grey inundation. Here and there coal-black ridges and dots indicated the highest grounds still imperfectly submerged; and in some places clouds of steam, water-spouts, and jets of stones and mire,—even boulders of rock, hurled streaming out of the waters into the air,—betrayed the last struggles of the Fire-Kingdom with the invasion of those illimitable tides. So have her enchantments slain the Giant of Fire, and laid him to rest under a water-pall. The place of dolours and of endless burning—so populous with Sorrows—is to be a place of great waters, where the slow vacant waves of the far-glittering reaches will come and go among the channels and the pools, and not even the bittern shall be there, with his foot to print the ooze, with his wing to shadow the sleeping shallows, with his cry to declare it all a desolation.

In the western background, the saintly art of Queen Quietude has made a whole burnt-offering of the cedar shades, and flowery labyrinths, and angel-builded crystal domes of Paradise. Most fragrant holocaust that ever breathed against the sky! Those volumes of cloud along the west, through which the sun is going down with dimmed and doubtful lustre (as though his had been the hand which put the torch to such a burning)—they are heavy with spicy odours. Such sweet wonders of the Eden woodlands cannot but give out sweetness in their dying. The heavens grow dusk and slumbrous with so much incense. A dreamy faintness from the laden air weighs down the sense. It seems time to sleep—for us, for all nature, to sleep, weary of terrestrial grossness and of mortal limitation,—to sleep, that all may awake, made new; and so, transformed divinely to the first ideal, have divine existence only, and God be all and in all. For God is love, and when hope and fear are dead, then love is all.

Somewhat thus did Gower describe his picture; whereon, in truth, he had expended no little art,—such a haze of repose, and likewise of unreality, had he contrived to throw over this work of fancy; and such a tone had he given, both to the work of the fire on the one side, and to that of the water on the other. The fire did not seem a cruel fire, nor the water an inhospitable water. Golden lines of light from the sun, and rose-red reflections from clouds whose breasts were feathered with fire, rested on the heads of the waves, where the great flood lay rocking. The very ruins of Paradise,—those charred tree-trunks—those dusty river-beds—that shrivelled boskage and white grass,—did not look utterly forlorn. Some of the glassy walls still stood, shining like rubies in the sunset, and glittering at their basements and their gateways with solid falls and pools of gold and silver, where their rich adornment had run down molten to their feet. The Destroyer was the Purifier; and the waiting sigh for renewal was full of trust.

‘A better frontispiece,’ said Atherton, ‘I could not have for my poor paper. I might have been raised to a less prosaic strain, and omitted some less relevant matter, had I been able to place your picture before me while writing. For upon this question of disinterested love, and so of quietude, our mysticism now mainly turns. With Fénélon and Madame Guyon, mysticism hovers no longer on the confines of pantheism. It deals less with mere abstractions. It is less eager to have everything which is in part done away, that the perfect may come, even while we are here. It is more patient and lowly, and will oftener use common means. Its inner light is not arrogant—for submissive love is that light; and it flames forth with no pretension to special revelations and novel gospels; neither does it construct any inspired system of philosophy. It is less feverishly ecstatic, less grossly theurgic, than in the lower forms of its earlier history. Comparative health is indicated by the fact that it aspires chiefly to a state of continuous resignation,—covets less starts of transport and instantaneous transformations. It seeks, rather, a long and even reach of trustful calm, which shall welcome joy and sorrow with equal mind,—shall live in the present, moment by moment, passive and dependent on the will of the Well-Beloved.

WILLOUGHBY. With Madame Guyon, too, I think the point of the old antithesis about which the mystics have so much to say is shifted;—I mean that the contrast lies, with her, not between Finite and Infinite—the finite Affirmation, the infinite Negation,—between sign and thing signified—between mode and modelessness—mediate and immediate,—but simply between God and Self.

ATHERTON. And so mysticism grows somewhat more clear, and reduces itself to narrower compass.

GOWER. And, just as it does so, is condemned by Rome.

ATHERTON. No doubt the attempt to reach an unattainable disinterestedness was less dangerous and less unwholesome than the strain after superhuman knowledge and miraculous vision.

MRS. ATHERTON. I have just opened on one of her verses in Cowper here, which exactly expresses what Mr. Willoughby was suggesting:—

The love of Thee flows just as much
As that of ebbing self subsides;
Our hearts, their scantiness is such,
Bear not the conflict of two rival tides.

Stay; here is one I marked, which goes farther still. It is an allegorical poem. Love has bidden her embark, and then withdraws the vessel,—leaves her floating on the rushes and water-flowers, and spreads his wings for flight, heedless of her cries and prayers. At last she says,—

Be not angry; I resign
Henceforth all my will to thine:
I consent that thou depart,
Though thine absence breaks my heart;
Go then, and for ever too;
All is right that thou wilt do.

This was just what Love intended,
He was now no more offended;
Soon as I became a child,
Love returned to me and smiled:
Never strife shall more betide
’Twixt the bridegroom and his bride.

ATHERTON. Yes, this is the pure love, the holy indifference of Quietism.

WILLOUGHBY. May not this imaginary surrender of eternal happiness—or, at least, the refusal to cherish ardent anticipations of heaven, really invigorate our spiritual nature, by concentrating our religion on a present salvation from sin?

ATHERTON. I think it possibly may, where contemplation of heaven is the resource of spiritual indolence or weariness in well-doing,—where the mind is prone to look forward to the better world, too much as a place of escape from the painstaking, and difficulty, and discipline of time. But where the hope of heaven is of the true sort—to put it out of sight is grievously to weaken, instead of strengthening, our position. I think we should all find, if we tried, or were unhappily forced to try, the experiment of sustaining ourselves in a religion that ignored the future, that we were lamentably enfeebled in two ways. First of all, by the loss of a support—that heart and courage which the prospect of final victory gives to every combatant; and then, secondly, by the immense drain of mental energy involved in the struggle necessary to reconcile ourselves to that loss. There can be no struggle so exhaustive as this, for it is against our nature,—not as sin has marred (so Madame Guyon thought), but as God has made it. Fearful must be the wear and tear of our religious being, in its vital functions,—and this, not to win, but to abandon an advantage. ‘He that hath this hope purifieth himself.’ So far from being able to dispense with it, we find in the hope of salvation, the helmet of our Christian armour. It is no height of Christian heroism, but presumption rather, to encounter, bare-headed, the onslaughts of sin and sorrow—even though the sword of the Spirit may shine naked in our right hand. But we should, at the same time, remember that our celestial citizenship is realised by present heavenly-mindedness:—a height and purity of temper, however, which grows most within as we have the habit of humbly regarding that kingdom as a place prepared for us. We should not limit our foretastes of heaven to intervals of calm. We may often be growing most heavenly amid scenes most unlike heaven.

WILLOUGHBY. In persecution, for example.

ATHERTON. We should not think that we catch its glory only in happy moments of contemplation, though such musing may well have its permitted place. Let us say also that every victory over love of ease, over discontent, over the sluggish coldness of the heart, over reluctance to duty, over unkindly tempers, is in fact to us an earnest and foretaste of that heaven, where we shall actively obey with glad alacrity, where we shall be pleased in all things with all that pleases God, where glorious powers shall be gloriously developed, undeadened by any lethargy, unhindered by any painful limitation; and where that Love, which here has to contend for very life, and to do battle for its rightful enjoyments, shall possess us wholly, and rejoice and reign among all the fellowships of the blest throughout the everlasting day.

GOWER. But all this while we have been very rude. Here is Madame Guyon come to tell us her story, and we have kept her, I don’t know how long, standing at the door.

KATE. Yes, let us hear your paper first, Mr. Atherton: we can talk afterwards, you know.

So Atherton began to read.

QUIETISM.

Part I.—Madame Guyon.

I.

Jeanne Marie Bouvières de la Mothe was born on Easter-eve, April
13th, 1648, at Montargis. Her sickly childhood was distinguished by
precocious imitations of that religious life which was held in
honour by every one around her. She loved to be dressed in the habit
of a little nun. When little more than four years old, she longed
for martyrdom. Her school-fellows placed her on her knees on a white
cloth, flourished a sabre over her head, and told her to prepare for
the stroke. A shout of triumphant laughter followed the failure of
the child’s courage. She was neglected by her mother, and knocked
about by a spoiled brother. When not at school, she was the pet or
the victim of servants. She began to grow irritable from
ill-treatment, and insincere from fear. When ten years old, she
found a Bible in her sick room, and read it, she says, from morning
to night, committing to memory the historical parts. Some of the
writings of St. Francis de Sales, and the Life of Madame de Chantal,
fell in her way. The latter work proved a powerful stimulant. There
she read of humiliations and austerities numberless, of charities
lavished with a princely munificence, of visions enjoyed and
miracles wrought in honour of those saintly virtues, and of the
intrepidity with which the famous enthusiast wrote with a red-hot
iron on her bosom, the characters of the holy name Jesus. The girl
of twelve years old was bent on copying these achievements on her
little scale. She relieved, taught, and waited on the poor; and, for
lack of the red-hot iron or the courage, sewed on to her breast with
a large needle a piece of paper containing the name of Christ. She
even forged a letter to secure her admission to a conventual
establishment as a nun. The deceit was immediately detected; but the
attempt shows how much more favourable was the religious atmosphere
in which she grew up, to the prosperity of convents than to the
inculcation of truth.

With ripening years, religion gave place to vanity. Her handsome
person and brilliant conversational powers fitted her to shine in
society. She began to love dress, and feel jealous of rival
beauties. Like St. Theresa, at the same age, she sat up far into the
night, devouring romances. Her autobiography records her experience
of the mischievous effects of those tales of chivalry and passion.
When nearly sixteen, it was arranged that she should marry the
wealthy M. Guyon. This gentleman, whom she had seen but three days
before her marriage, was twenty-two years older than herself.

The faults she had were of no very grave description, but her
husband’s house was destined to prove for several years a pitiless
school for their correction. He lived with his mother, a vulgar
and hard-hearted woman. Her low and penurious habits were
unaffected by their wealth; and in the midst of riches, she was
happiest scolding in the kitchen about some farthing matter. She
appears to have hated Madame Guyon with all the strength of her
narrow mind. M. Guyon loved his wife after his selfish sort. If
she was ill, he was inconsolable; if any one spoke against her, he
flew into a passion; yet, at the instigation of his mother, he was
continually treating her with harshness. An artful servant girl,
who tended his gouty leg, was permitted daily to mortify and
insult his wife. Madame Guyon had been accustomed at home to
elegance and refinement,—beneath her husband’s roof she found
politeness contemned and rebuked as pride. When she spoke, she had
been listened to with attention,—now she could not open her mouth
without contradiction. She was charged with presuming to show them
how to talk, reproved for disputatious forwardness, and rudely
silenced. She could never go to see her parents without having
bitter speeches to bear on her return. They, on their part,
reproached her with unnatural indifference towards her own family
for the sake of her new connexions. The ingenious malignity of her
mother-in-law filled every day with fresh vexations. The high
spirit of the young girl was completely broken. She had already
gained a reputation for cleverness and wit—now she sat nightmared
in company, nervous, stiff, and silent, the picture of stupidity.
At every assemblage of their friends she was marked out for some
affront, and every visitor at the house was instructed in the
catalogue of her offences. Sad thoughts would come—how different
might all this have been had she been suffered to select some
other suitor! But it was too late. The brief romance of her life
was gone indeed. There was no friend into whose heart she could
pour her sorrows. Meanwhile, she was indefatigable in the
discharge of every duty,—she endeavoured by kindness, by cheerful
forbearance, by returning good for evil, to secure some kinder
treatment—she was ready to cut out her tongue that she might make
no passionate reply—she reproached herself bitterly for the tears
she could not hide. But these coarse, hard natures were not so to
be won. Her magnanimity surprised, but did not soften minds to
which it was utterly incomprehensible.[315]

Her best course would have been self-assertion and war to the very
utmost. She would have been justified in demanding her right to be
mistress in her own house—in declaring it incompatible with the
obligations binding upon either side, that a third party should be
permitted to sow dissension between a husband and his wife—in
putting her husband, finally, to the choice between his wife and his
mother. M. Guyon is the type of a large class of men. They stand
high in the eye of the world—and not altogether undeservedly—as men
of principle. But their domestic circle is the scene of cruel wrongs
from want of reflection, from a selfish, passionate
inconsiderateness. They would be shocked at the charge of an act of
barbarity towards a stranger, but they will inflict years of mental
distress on those most near to them, for want of decision,
self-control, and some conscientious estimate of what their home
duties truly involve. Had the obligations he neglected, the
wretchedness of which he was indirectly the author, been brought
fairly before the mind of M. Guyon, he would probably have
determined on the side of justice, and a domestic revolution would
have been the consequence. But Madame Guyon conceived herself bound
to suffer in silence. Looking back on those miserable days, she
traced a father’s care in the discipline she endured. Providence had
transplanted Self from a garden where it expanded under love and
praise, to a highway where every passing foot might trample it in
the dust.

A severe illness brought her more than once to the brink of the
grave. She heard of her danger with indifference, for life had no
attraction. Heavy losses befel the family—she could feel no concern.
To end her days in a hospital was even an agreeable anticipation.
Poverty and disgrace could bring no change which would not be more
tolerable than her present suffering. She laboured, with little
success, to find comfort in religious exercises. She examined
herself rigidly, confessed with frequency, strove to subdue all care
about her personal appearance, and while her maid arranged her
hair—how, she cared not—was lost in the study of Thomas à Kempis. At
length she consulted a Franciscan, a holy man, who had just emerged
from a five years’ solitude. ‘Madame,’ said he, ‘you are
disappointed and perplexed because you seek without what you have
within. Accustom yourself to seek God in your heart, and you will
find Him.’

II.

These words of the old Franciscan embody the response which has been
uttered in every age by the oracle of mysticism. It has its truth
and its falsehood, as men understand it. There is a legend of an
artist, who was about to carve from a piece of costly sandal-wood an
image of the Madonna; but the material was intractable—his hand
seemed to have lost its skill—he could not approach his ideal. When
about to relinquish his efforts in despair, a voice in a dream bade
him shape the figure from the oak-block which was about to feed his
hearth. He obeyed, and produced a masterpiece. This story represents
the truth which mysticism upholds when it appears as the antagonist
of superstitious externalism. The materials of religious happiness
lie, as it were, near at hand—among affections and desires which are
homely, common, and of the fireside. Let the right direction, the
heavenly influence, be received from without; and heaven is regarded
with the love of home, and home sanctified by the hope of heaven.
The far-fetched costliness of outward works—the restless, selfish
bargaining with asceticism and with priestcraft for a priceless
heaven, can never redeem and renew a soul to peace. But mysticism
has not stopped here; it takes a step farther, and that step is
false. It would seclude the soul too much from the external; and, to
free it from a snare, removes a necessary help. Like some
overshadowing tree, it hides the rising plant from the force of
storms, but it also intercepts the appointed sunshine—it protects,
but it deprives—and beneath its boughs hardy weeds have grown more
vigorously than precious grain. Removing, more or less, the
counterpoise of the letter, in its zeal for the spirit, it promotes
an intense and morbid self-consciousness. Roger North tells us that
when he and his brother stood on the top of the Monument, it was
difficult for them to persuade themselves that their weight would
not throw down the building. The dizzy elevation of the mystic
produces sometimes a similar overweaning sense of personality.

Often instead of rising above the infirmities of our nature, and the
common laws of life, the mystic becomes the sport of the idlest
phantasy, the victim of the most humiliating reaction. The excited
and overwrought temperament mistakes every vibration of the fevered
nerves for a manifestation from without; as in the solitude, the
silence, and the glare of a great desert, travellers have seemed to
hear distinctly the church bells of their native village. In such
cases an extreme susceptibility of the organ, induced by
peculiarities of climate, gives to a mere conception or memory the
power of an actual sound; and, in a similar way, the mystic has
often both tempted and enraptured himself—his own breath has made
both the ‘airs from heaven,’ and the ‘blasts from hell;’ and the
attempt to annihilate Self has ended at last in leaving nothing but
Self behind. When the tide of enthusiasm has ebbed, and the channel
has become dry, simply because humanity cannot long endure a strain
so excessive, then that magician and master of legerdemain, the
Fancy, is summoned to recal, to eke out, or to interpret the
mystical experience; then that fantastic acrobat, Affectation, is
admitted to play its tricks—just as, when the waters of the Nile are
withdrawn, the canals of Cairo are made the stage on which the
jugglers exhibit their feats of skill to the crowds on either bank.

III.

To return to Madame Guyon. From the hour of that interview with the
Franciscan she was a mystic. The secret of the interior life flashed
upon her in a moment. She had been starving in the midst of fulness;
God was near, not far off; the kingdom of heaven was within her. The
love of God took possession of her soul with an inexpressible
happiness. Beyond question, her heart apprehended, in that joy, the
great truth that God is love—that He is more ready to forgive, than
we to ask forgiveness—that He is not an austere being whose regard
is to be purchased by rich gifts, tears, and penance. This
emancipating, sanctifying belief became the foundation of her
religion. She raised on this basis of true spirituality a mystical
superstructure, in which there was some hay and stubble, but the
corner stone had first been rightly laid, never to be removed from
its place.

Prayer, which had before been so difficult, was now delightful and
indispensable; hours passed away like moments—she could scarcely
cease from praying. Her trials seemed great no longer; her inward
joy consumed, like a fire, the reluctance, the murmur, and the
sorrow, which had their birth in self. A spirit of confiding peace,
a sense of rejoicing possession, pervaded all her days. God was
continually present with her, and she seemed completely yielded up
to God. She appeared to feel herself, and to behold all creatures,
as immersed in the gracious omnipresence of the Most High. In her
adoring contemplation of the Divine presence, she found herself
frequently unable to employ any words, or to pray for any particular
blessings.[316] She was then little more than twenty years of age.
The ardour of her devotion would not suffer her to rest even here.
It appeared to her that self was not yet sufficiently suppressed.
There were some things she chose as pleasant, other things she
avoided as painful. She was possessed with the notion that every
choice which can be referred to self is selfish, and therefore
criminal.

On this principle, Æsop’s traveller, who gathered his cloak about
him in the storm, and relinquished it in the sunshine, should be
stigmatized as a selfish man, because he thought only of his own
comfort, and did not remember at the moment his family, his country,
or his Maker. It is not regard for self which makes us selfish, but
regard for self to the exclusion of due regard for others. But the
zeal of Madame Guyon blinded her to distinctions such as these. She
became filled with an insatiable desire of suffering.[317] She
resolved to force herself to what she disliked, and deny herself
what was gratifying, that the mortified senses might at last have no
choice whatever. She displayed the most extraordinary power of will
in her efforts to annihilate her will. Every day she took the
discipline with scourges pointed with iron. She tore her flesh with
brambles, thorns, and nettles. Her rest was almost destroyed by the
pain she endured. She was in very delicate health, continually
falling ill, and could eat scarcely anything. Yet she forced herself
to eat what was most nauseous to her; she often kept wormwood in her
mouth, and put coloquintida in her food, and when she walked she
placed stones in her shoes. If a tooth ached she would bear it
without seeking a remedy; when it ached no longer, she would go and
have it extracted. She imitated Madame Chantal in dressing the sores
of the poor, and ministering to the wants of the sick. On one
occasion she found that she could not seek the indulgence offered by
her Church for remitting some of the pains of purgatory. At that
time she felt no doubt concerning the power of the priest to grant
such absolution, but she thought it wrong to desire to escape any
suffering. She was afraid of resembling those mercenary souls, who
are afraid not so much of displeasing God, as of the penalties
attached to sin. She was too much in earnest for visionary
sentimentalism. Her efforts manifest a serious practical endeavour
after that absolute disinterestedness which she erroneously thought
both attainable and enjoined. She was far from attaching any
expiatory value to these acts of voluntary mortification, they were
a means to an end. When she believed that end attained, in the
entire death of self, she relinquished them.

IV.

Situated as Madame Guyon was now, her mind had no resource but to
collapse upon itself, and the feelings so painfully pent up became
proportionately vehement. She found a friend in one Mère Granger;
but her she could see seldom, mostly by stealth. An ignorant
confessor joined her mother-in-law and husband in the attempt to
hinder her from prayer and religious exercises. She endeavoured in
everything to please her husband, but he complained that she loved
God so much she had no love left for him. She was watched day and
night; she dared not stir from her mother-in-law’s chamber or her
husband’s bedside. If she took her work apart to the window, they
followed her there, to see that she was not in prayer. When her
husband went abroad, he forbade her to pray in his absence. The
affections even of her child were taken from her, and the boy was
taught to disobey and insult his mother. Thus utterly alone, Madame
Guyon, while apparently engaged in ordinary matters, was constantly
in a state of abstraction; her mind was elsewhere, rapt in devout
contemplation. She was in company without hearing a word that was
said. She went out into the garden to look at the flowers, and could
bring back no account of them, the eye of her reverie could mark
nothing actually visible. When playing at piquet, to oblige her
husband, this ‘interior attraction’ was often more powerfully felt
than even when at church. In her _Autobiography_ she describes her
experience as follows:—

‘The spirit of prayer was nourished and increased from their
contrivances and endeavours to disallow me any time for practising
it. I loved without motive or reason for loving; for nothing passed
in my head, but much in the innermost of my soul. I thought not
about any recompence, gift, or favour, or anything which regards the
lover. The Well-beloved was the only object which attracted my heart
wholly to Himself. I could not contemplate His attributes. I knew
nothing else but to _love_ and to _suffer_. Oh, ignorance more truly
learned than any science of the Doctors, since it so well taught me
Jesus Christ crucified, and brought me to be in love with His holy
cross! In its beginning I was attracted with so much force, that it
seemed as if my head was going to join my heart. I found that
insensibly my body bent in spite of me. I did not then comprehend
from whence it came; but have learned since, that as all passed in
the will, which is the sovereign of the powers, _that_ attracted the
others after it, and reunited them in God, their divine centre and
sovereign happiness. And as these powers were then unaccustomed to
be united, it required the more violence to effect that union.
Wherefore it was the more perceived. Afterwards it became so
strongly riveted as to seem to be quite natural. This was so strong
that I could have wished to die, in order to be inseparably united
without any interstice to Him who so powerfully attracted my heart.
As all passed in the will, the imagination and the understanding
being absorbed in it, in a union of enjoyment, I knew not what to
say, having never read or heard of such a state as I experienced;
for, before this, I had known nothing of the operations of God in
souls. I had only read _Philothea_ (written by St. Francis de
Sales), with the _Imitation of Christ_ (by Thomas à Kempis), and the
Holy Scriptures; also the _Spiritual Combat_, which mentions none of
these things.’[318]

In this extract she describes strange physical sensations as
accompanying her inward emotion. The intense excitement of the soul
assumes, in her over-strained and secluded imagination, the
character of a corporeal seizure. The sickly frame, so morbidly
sensitive, appears to participate in the supernatural influences
communicated to the spirit. On a subsequent occasion, she speaks of
herself as so oppressed by the fulness of the Divine manifestations
imparted to her, as to be compelled to loosen her dress. More than
once some of those who sat next her imagined that they perceived a
certain marvellous efflux of grace proceeding from her to
themselves. She believed that many persons, for whom she was
interceding with great fervour, were sensible at the time of an
extraordinary gracious influence instantaneously vouchsafed, and
that her spirit communicated mysteriously, ‘in the Lord,’ with the
spirits of those dear to her when far away. She traced a special
intervention of Providence in the fact, that she repeatedly ‘felt a
strong draught to the door’ just when it was necessary to go out to
receive a secret letter from her friend, Mère Granger; that the rain
should have held up precisely when she was on her road to or from
mass; and that at the very intervals when she was able to steal out
to hear it, some priest was always found performing, or ready to
perform the service, though at a most unusual hour.[319]

V.

Imaginary as all this may have been, the Church of Rome, at least,
had no right to brand with the stigma of extravagance any such
transference of the spiritual to the sensuous, of the metaphysical
to the physical. The fancies of Madame Guyon in this respect are
innocent enough in comparison with the monstrosities devised by
Romish marvel-mongers to exalt her saints withal. St. Philip Neri
was so inflamed with love to God as to be insensible to all cold,
and burned with such a fire of devotion that his body, divinely
feverish, could not be cooled by exposure to the wildest winter
night. For two-and-fifty years he was the subject of a supernatural
palpitation, which kept his bed and chair, and everything moveable
about him, in a perpetual tremble. For that space of time his breast
was miraculously swollen to the thickness of a fist above his heart.
On a post-mortem examination of the holy corpse, it was found that
two of the ribs had been broken, to allow the sacred ardour of his
heart more room to play! The doctors swore solemnly that the
phenomenon could be nothing less than a miracle. A divine hand had
thus literally ‘enlarged the heart’ of the devotee.[320] St. Philip
enjoyed, with many other saints, the privilege of being miraculously
elevated into the air by the fervour of his heavenward aspirations.
The _Acta Sanctorum_ relates how Ida of Louvain—seized with an
overwhelming desire to present her gifts with the Wise Men to the
child Jesus—received, on the eve of the Three Kings, the
distinguished favour of being permitted to swell to a terrific size,
and then gradually to return to her original dimensions. On another
occasion, she was gratified by being thrown down in the street in an
ecstacy, and enlarging so that her horror-stricken attendant had to
embrace her with all her might to keep her from bursting. The noses
of eminent saints have been endowed with so subtile a sense that
they have detected the stench of concealed sins, and enjoyed, as a
literal fragrance, the well-known odour of sanctity. St. Philip Neri
was frequently obliged to hold his nose and turn away his head when
confessing very wicked people. In walking the streets of some
depraved Italian town, the poor man must have endured all the pains
of Coleridge in Cologne, where, he says,

‘I counted two-and-seventy stenches,
All well-defined, and several stinks!’

Maria of Oignys received what theurgic mysticism calls the gift of
jubilation. For three days and nights upon the point of death, she
sang without remission her ecstatic swan-song, at the top of a voice
whose hoarseness was miraculously healed. She felt as though the
wing of an angel were spread upon her breast, thrilling her heart
with the rapture, and pouring from her lips the praises, of the
heavenly world. With the melodious modulation of an inspired
recitative, she descanted on the mysteries of the Trinity and the
incarnation—improvised profound expositions of the Scripture—invoked
the saints, and interceded for her friends.[321] A nun who visited
Catharina Ricci in her ecstasy, saw with amazement her face
transformed into the likeness of the Redeemer’s countenance. St.
Hildegard, in the enjoyment and description of her visions, and in
the utterance of her prophecies, was inspired with a complete
theological terminology hitherto unknown to mortals. A glossary of
the divine tongue was long preserved among her manuscripts at
Wiesbaden.[322] It is recorded in the life of St. Veronica of
Binasco, that she received the miraculous gift of tears in a measure
so copious, that the spot where she knelt appeared as though a jug
of water had been overset there. She was obliged to have an earthen
vessel ready in her cell to receive the supernatural efflux, which
filled it frequently to the weight of several Milan pounds! Ida of
Nivelles, when in an ecstasy one day, had it revealed to her that a
dear friend was at the same moment in the same condition. The friend
also was simultaneously made aware that Ida was immersed in the same
abyss of divine light with herself. Thenceforward they were as one
soul in the Lord, and the Virgin Mary appeared to make a third in
the saintly fellowship. Ida was frequently enabled to communicate
with spiritual personages, without words, after the manner of
angelic natures. On one occasion, when at a distance from a priest
to whom she was much attached, both she and the holy man were
entranced at the same time; and, when wrapt to heaven, he beheld her
in the presence of Christ, at whose command she communicated to him,
by a spiritual kiss, a portion of the grace with which she herself
had been so richly endowed. To Clara of Montfaucon allusion has
already been made. In the right side of her heart was found,
completely formed, a little figure of Christ upon the cross, about
the size of a thumb. On the left, under what resembled the bloody
cloth, lay the instruments of the passion—the crown of thorns, the
nails, &c. So sharp was the miniature lance, that the Vicar-General
Berengarius, commissioned to assist at the examination by the Bishop
of Spoleto, pricked therewith his reverend finger. This marvel was
surpassed in the eighteenth century by a miracle more piquant still.
Veronica Giuliani caused a drawing to be made of the many forms and
letters which she declared had been supernaturally modelled within
her heart. To the exultation of the faithful—and the everlasting
confusion of all Jews, Protestants, and Turks—a post-mortem
examination disclosed the accuracy of her description, to the
minutest point. There were the sacred initials in a large and
distinct Roman character, the crown of thorns, two flames, seven
swords, the spear, the reed, &c.—all arranged just as in the diagram
she had furnished.[323] The diocese of Liège was edified, in the
twelfth century, by seeing, in the person of the celebrated
Christina Mirabilis, how completely the upward tendency of
protracted devotion might vanquish the law of gravitation. So
strongly was she drawn away from this gross earth, that the
difficulty was to keep her on the ground. She was continually flying
up to the tops of lonely towers and trees, there to enjoy a rapture
with the angels, and a roost with the birds. In the frequency, the
elevation, and the duration of her ascents into the air, she
surpassed even the high-flown devotion of St. Peter of Alcantara,
who was often seen suspended high above the fig-trees which
overshadowed his hermitage at Badajos—his eyes upturned, his arms
outspread—while the servant sent to summon him to dinner, gazed with
open mouth, and sublunary cabbage cooled below. The limbs of
Christina lost the rigidity, as her body lost the grossness, common
to vulgar humanity. In her ecstasies she was contracted into the
spherical form—her head was drawn inward and downward towards her
breast, and she rolled up like a hedgehog. When her relatives wished
to take and secure her, they had to employ a man to hunt her like a
bird. Having started his game, he had a long run across country
before he brought her down, in a very unsportsmanlike manner, by a
stroke with his bludgeon which broke her shin. When a few miracles
had been wrought to vindicate her aërostatic mission, she was
allowed to fly about in peace.[324] She has occupied, ever since,
the first place in the ornithology of Roman-catholic saintship. Such
are a few of the specimens which might be collected in multitudes
from Romanist records, showing how that communion has bestowed its
highest favour on the most coarse and materialised apprehensions of
spiritual truth. Extravagant inventions such as these—monstrous as
the adventures of Baron Münchausen, without their wit—have been
invested with the sanction and defended by the thunder of the Papal
chair. Yet this very Church of Rome incarcerated Molinos and Madame
Guyon as dangerous enthusiasts.

VI.

Madame Guyon had still some lessons to learn. On a visit to Paris,
the glittering equipages of the park, and the gaieties of St. Cloud,
revived the old love of seeing and being seen. During a tour in the
provinces with her husband, flattering visits and graceful
compliments everywhere followed such beauty, such accomplishments,
and such virtue, with a delicate and intoxicating applause.
Vanity—dormant, but not dead—awoke within her for the last time. She
acknowledged, with bitter self-reproach, the power of the world, the
weakness of her own resolves. In the spiritual desertion which
ensued, she recognised the displeasure of her Lord, and was
wretched. She applied to confessors—they were miserable comforters,
all of them. They praised her while she herself was filled with
self-loathing. She estimated the magnitude of her sins by the
greatness of the favour which had been shown her. The bland
worldliness of her religious advisers could not blind so true a
heart, or pacify so wakeful a conscience. She found relief only in a
repentant renewal of her self-dedication to the Saviour, in
renouncing for ever the last remnant of confidence in any strength
of her own.

It was about this period that she had a remarkable conversation with
a beggar, whom she found upon a bridge, as, followed by her footman,
she was walking one day to church. This singular mendicant refused
her offered alms—spoke to her of God and divine things—and then of
her own state, her devotion, her trials, and her faults. He declared
that God required of her not merely to labour as others did to
secure their salvation, that they might escape the pains of hell,
but to aim at such perfection and purity in this life, as to escape
those of purgatory. She asked him who he was. He replied, that he
had formerly been a beggar, but now was such no more;—mingled with
the stream of people, and she never saw him afterwards.[325]

The beauty of Madame Guyon had cost her tender conscience many a
pang. She had wept and prayed over that secret love of display which
had repeatedly induced her to mingle with the thoughtless amusements
of the world. At four-and-twenty the virulence of the small-pox
released her from that snare. M. Guyon was laid up with the gout.
She was left, when the disorder seized her, to the tender mercies of
her mother-in-law. That inhuman woman refused to allow any but her
own physician to attend her, yet for him she would not send. The
disease, unchecked, had reached its height, when a medical man,
passing that way, happened to call at the house. Shocked at the
spectacle Madame Guyon presented, he was proceeding at once to bleed
her, expressing, in no measured terms, his indignation at the
barbarity of such neglect. The mother-in-law would not hear of such
a thing. He performed the operation in spite of her threats and
invectives, leaving her almost beside herself with rage. That lancet
saved the life of Madame Guyon, and disappointed the relative who
had hoped to see her die. When at length she recovered, she refused
to avail herself of the cosmetics generally used to conceal the
ravages of the disorder. Throughout her suffering she had never
uttered a murmur, or felt a fear. She had even concealed the cruelty
of her mother-in-law. She said, that if God had designed her to
retain her beauty, He would not have sent the scourge to remove it.
Her friends expected to find her inconsolable—they heard her speak
only of thankfulness and joy. Her confessor reproached her with
spiritual pride. The affection of her husband was visibly
diminished; yet the heart of Madame Guyon overflowed with joy. It
appeared to her, that the God to whom she longed to be wholly given
up had accepted her surrender, and was removing everything that
might interpose between Himself and her.[326]

VII.

The experience of Madame Guyon, hitherto, had been such as to teach
her the surrender of every earthly source of gratification or ground
of confidence. Yet one more painful stage on the road to
self-annihilation remained to be traversed. She must learn to give
up cheerfully even spiritual pleasures. In the year 1674, according
to the probable calculation of Mr. Upham, she was made to enter what
she terms a state of desolation, which lasted, with little
intermission, for nearly seven years.[327] All was emptiness,
darkness, sorrow. She describes herself as cast down, like
Nebuchadnezzar, from a throne of enjoyment, to live among the
beasts. ‘Alas!’ she exclaimed, ‘is it possible that this heart,
formerly all on fire, should now become like ice?’ The heavens were
as brass, and shut out her prayers; horror and trembling took the
place of tranquillity; hopelessly oppressed with guilt, she saw
herself a victim destined for hell. In vain for her did the church
doors open, the holy bells ring, the deep-voiced intonations of the
priest arise and fall, the chanted psalm ascend through clouds of
azure wandering incense. The power and the charm of the service had
departed. Of what avail was music to a burning wilderness athirst
for rain? Gladly would she have had recourse to the vow, to the
pilgrimage, to the penance, to any extremity of self-torture. She
felt the impotence of such remedies for such anguish. She had no ear
for comfort, no eye for hope, not even a voice for complaint.

During this period the emotional element of religion in her mind
appears to have suffered an almost entire suspension. Regarding the
loss of certain feelings of delight as the loss of the divine
favour, she naturally sank deeper and deeper in despondency. A
condition by no means uncommon in ordinary Christian experience
assumed, in her case, a morbid character. Our emotions may be
chilled, or kindled, in ever-varying degrees, from innumerable
causes. We must accustom ourselves to the habitual performance of
duty, whether attended or not with feelings of a pleasurable nature.
It is generally found that those powerful emotions of joy which
attend, at first, the new and exalting consciousness of peace with
God, subside after awhile. As we grow in religious strength and
knowledge, a steady principle supplies their place. We are
refreshed, from time to time, by seasons of heightened joy and
confidence, but we cease to be dependent upon feeling. At the same
time, there is nothing in Scripture to check our desire for
retaining as constantly as possible a sober gladness, for finding
duty delightful, and the ‘joy of the Lord’ our strength. These are
the truths which the one-sided and unqualified expressions of Madame
Guyon at once exaggerate and obscure.

During this dark interval M. Guyon died. His widow undertook the
formidable task of settling his disordered affairs. Her brother gave
her no assistance; her mother-in-law harassed and hindered to her
utmost; yet Madame Guyon succeeded in arranging a chaos of papers,
and bringing a hopeless imbroglio of business matters into order,
with an integrity and a skill which excited universal admiration.
She felt it was her duty; she believed that Divine assistance was
vouchsafed for its discharge. Of business, she says, she knew as
little as of Arabic; but she knew not what she could accomplish till
she tried. Minds far more visionary than hers have evinced a still
greater aptitude for practical affairs.

The 22nd of July, 1680, is celebrated by Madame Guyon as the happy
era of her deliverance. A letter from La Combe was the instrument of
a restoration as wonderful, in her eyes, as the bondage. This
ecclesiastic had been first introduced by Madame Guyon into the path
of mystical perfection. His name is associated with her own in the
early history of the Quietist movement. He subsequently became her
Director, but was always more her disciple than her guide. His
admiration for her amounted to a passion. Incessant persecution and
long solitary imprisonment combined, with devotional extravagance,
to cloud with insanity at last an intellect never powerful. This
feeble and affectionate soul perished, the victim of Quietism, and
perhaps of love. It should not be forgotten, that before the inward
condition of Madame Guyon changed thus remarkably for the better,
her outward circumstances had undergone a similar improvement. She
lived now in her own house, with her children about her. That
Sycorax, her mother-in-law, dropped gall no longer into her daily
cup of life. Domestic tormentors, worse than the goblins which
buffeted St. Antony, assailed her peace no more. An outer sky grown
thus serene, an air thus purified, may well have contributed to
chase away the night of the soul, and to give to a few words of
kindly counsel from La Combe the brightness of the day-star. Our
simple-hearted enthusiast was not so absolutely indifferent as she
thought herself to the changes of this transitory world.

VIII.

Madame Guyon had now triumphantly sustained the last of those
trials, which, like the probation of the ancient mysteries, made the
porch of mystical initiation a passage terrible with pain and peril.
Henceforward, she is the finished Quietist: henceforward, when she
relates her own experience, she describes Quietism. At times, when
the children did not require her care, she would walk out into a
neighbouring wood, and there, under the shade of the trees, amidst
the singing of the birds, she now passed as many happy hours as she
had known months of sorrow. Her own language will best indicate the
thoughts which occupied this peaceful retirement, and exhibit the
principle there deepened and matured. She says here in her
Autobiography—

‘When I had lost all created supports, and even divine ones, I then
found myself happily necessitated to fall into the pure divine, and
to fall into it through all which seemed to remove me farther from
it. In losing all the gifts, with all their supports, I found the
Giver. Oh, poor creatures, who pass along all your time in feeding
on the gifts of God, and think therein to be most favoured and
happy, how I pity you if ye stop here, short of the true rest, and
cease to go forward to God, through resignation of the same gifts!
How many pass all their lives this way, and think highly of
themselves therein! There are others who, being designed of God to
die to themselves, yet pass all their time in a dying life, and in
inward agonies, without ever entering into God through death and
total loss, because they are always willing to retain something
under plausible pretexts, and so never lose _self_ to the whole
extent of the designs of God. Wherefore, they never enjoy God in his
fulness,—a loss that will not perfectly be known until another
life.’[328]

She describes herself as having ceased from all self-originated
action and choice. To her amazement and unspeakable happiness, it
appeared as though all such natural movement existed no longer,—a
higher power had displaced and occupied its room. ‘I even perceived
no more (she continues) the soul which He had formerly conducted by
His rod and His staff, because now He alone appeared to me, my soul
having given up its place to Him. It seemed to me as if it was
wholly and altogether passed into its God, to make but one and the
same thing with Him; even as a little drop of water cast into the
sea receives the qualities of the sea.’ She speaks of herself as now
practising the virtues no longer _as virtues_—that is, not by
separate and constrained efforts. It would have required effort
_not_ to practise them.[329]

Somewhat later she expresses herself as follows:—

‘The soul passing out of itself by dying to itself necessarily
passes into its divine object. This is the law of its transition.
When it passes out of self, which is limited, and therefore is not
God, and consequently is _evil_, it necessarily passes into the
unlimited and universal, which is God, and therefore is the true
good. My own experience seemed to me to be a verification of this.
My spirit, disenthralled from selfishness, became united with and
lost in God, its Sovereign, who attracted it more and more to
Himself. And this was so much the case, that I could seem to see and
know God only, and not myself.... It was thus that my soul was lost
in God, who communicated to it His qualities, having drawn it out of
all that it had of its own.... O happy poverty, happy loss, happy
nothing, which gives no less than God Himself in his own
immensity,—no more circumscribed to the limited manner of the
creation, but always drawing it out of that to plunge it wholly into
His divine Essence. Then the soul knows that all the states of
self-pleasing visions, of intellectual illuminations, of ecstasies
and raptures, of whatever value they might once have been, are now
rather obstacles than advancements; and that they are not of service
in the state of experience which is far above them; because the
state which has props or supports, which is the case with the merely
illuminated and ecstatic state, rests in them in some degree, and
has pain to lose them. But the soul cannot arrive at the state of
which I am now speaking, without the loss of all such supports and
helps.... The soul is then so submissive, and perhaps we may say so
passive,—that is to say, is so disposed equally to receive from the
hand of God either good or evil,—as is truly astonishing. It
receives both the one and the other without any selfish emotions,
letting them flow and be lost as they came.’[330]

These passages convey the substance of the doctrine which,
illustrated and expressed in various ways, pervades all the writings
of Madame Guyon. This is the principle adorned by the fancy of her
_Torrents_ and inculcated in the practical directions of her _Short
Method of Prayer_. Such is the state to which Quietism proposes to
conduct its votaries. In some places, she qualifies the strength of
her expressions,—she admits that we are not at all times equally
conscious of this absolute union of the soul with its centre,—the
lower nature may not be always insensible to distress. But the
higher, the inmost element of the soul is all the while profoundly
calm, and recollection presently imparts a similar repose to the
inferior nature. When the soul has thus passed, as she phrases it,
out of the Nothing into the All, when its feet are set in ‘a large
room’ (nothing less, according to her interpretation, than the
compass of Infinity), ‘a substantial or essential word’ is spoken
there. It is a continuous word—potent, ineffable, ever uttered
without language. It is the immediate unchecked operation of
resident Deity. What it speaks, it effects. It is blissful and
mysterious as the language of heaven. With Madame Guyon, the events
of Providence are God, and the decisions of the sanctified judgment
respecting them are nothing less than the immediate voice of God in
the soul. She compares the nature thus at rest in God to a tablet on
which the divine hand writes,—it must be held perfectly still, else
the characters traced there will be distorted or incomplete. In her
very humility she verges on the audacity which arrogates
inspiration. If she, passive and helpless, really acts no more, the
impulses she feels, her words, her actions, must all bear the
impress of an infallible divine sanction. It is easy to see that her
speech and action—always well-meant, but frequently ill-judged,—were
her own after all, though nothing of her own seemed left. She
acknowledges that she was sometimes at a loss as to the course of
duty. She was guided more than once by random passages of the Bible,
and the casual expressions of others, somewhat after the fashion of
the _Sortes Virgilianæ_ and the omens of ancient Rome. Her knowledge
of Scripture, the native power of her intellect, and the tenderness
of her conscience, preserved her from pushing such a view of the
inward light to its worst extreme.

IX.

The admixture of error in the doctrine which Madame Guyon was
henceforward to preach with so much self-denying love, so much
intrepid constancy, appears to us to lie upon the surface. The
passages we have given convey, unquestionably, the idea of a
practical substitution of God for the soul in the case of the
perfectly sanctified. The soul within the soul is Deity. When all is
desolate, silent, the divine Majesty arises, thinks, feels, and
acts, within the transformed humanity. It is quite true that, as
sanctification progresses, Christian virtue becomes more easy as the
new habit gains strength. In many respects it is true, as Madame
Guyon says, that effort would be requisite to neglect or violate
certain duties or commands rather than to perform them. But this
facility results from the constitution of our nature. We carry on
the new economy within with less outcry, less labour, less confusion
and resistance than we did when the revolution was recent, but we
carry it on still—working with divine assistance. God works _in_
man, but not _instead_ of man. It is one thing to harmonize, in some
measure, the human will with the divine, another to substitute
divine volitions for the human. Every man has within him
Conscience—the judge often bribed or clamoured down; Will—the
marshal; Imagination—the poet; Understanding—the student; Desire—the
merchant, venturing its store of affection, and gazing out on the
future in search of some home-bound argosy of happiness. But all
these powers are found untrue to their allegiance. The ermine—the
baton—the song—the books—the merchandize, are at the service of a
usurper—Sin. When the Spirit renews the mind, there is no
massacre—no slaughterous sword filling with death the streets of the
soul’s city, and making man the ruin of his former self. These
faculties are restored to loyalty, and reinstated under God. Then
Conscience gives verdict, for the most part, according to the divine
statute-book, and is habitually obeyed. Then the lordly Will assumes
again a lowly yet noble vassalage. Then the dream of Imagination is
a dream no longer, for the reality of heaven transcends it. Then the
Understanding burns the magic books in the market-place, and breaks
the wand of its curious arts—but studies still, for eternity as well
as time. The activity of Desire amasses still, according to its
nature,—for _some_ treasure man must have. But the treasure is on
earth no longer. It is the advantage of such a religion that the
very same laws of our being guide our spiritual and our natural
life. The same self-controul and watchful diligence which built up
the worldly habits towards the summits of success, may be applied at
once to those habits which ripen us for heaven. The old experience
will serve. But the mystic can find no common point between himself
and other men. He is cut off from them, for he believes he has
another constitution of being, inconceivable by them—not merely
other tastes and a higher aim. The _object_ of Christian love may be
incomprehensible, but the affection itself is not so. It is
dangerous to represent it as a mysterious and almost unaccountable
sentiment, which finds no parallel in our experience elsewhere. Our
faith in Christ, as well as our love to Christ, are similar to our
faith and love as exercised towards our fellow-creatures.
Regeneration imparts no new faculty, it gives only a new direction
to the old.

X.

Quietism opposed to the mercenary religion of the common and
consistent Romanism around it, the doctrine of disinterested love.
Revolting from the coarse machinery of a corrupt system, it took
refuge in an unnatural refinement. The love inculcated in Scripture
is equally remote from the impracticable indifference of Quietism
and the commercial principle of Superstition. Long ago, at
Alexandria, Philo endeavoured to escape from an effete and carnal
Judaism to a similar elevation. The Persian Sufis were animated with
the same ambition in reaction against the frigid legalism of the
creed of Islam. Extreme was opposed to extreme, in like manner, when
Quietism, disgusted with the unblushing inconsistencies of nominal
Christianity, proclaimed its doctrine of _perfection_—of complete
sanctification by faith. This is not a principle peculiar to
mysticism. It is of little practical importance. It is difficult to
see how it can be applied to individual experience. The man who has
reached such a state of purity must be the last to know it. If we do
not, by some strange confusion of thought, identify ourselves with
God, the nearer we approach Him the more profoundly must we be
conscious of our distance. As, in a still water, we may see
reflected the bird that sings in an overhanging tree, and the bird
that soars towards the zenith—the image deepest as the ascent is
highest—so it is with our approximation to the Infinite Holiness.
Madame Guyon admits that she found it necessary jealously to guard
humility, to watch and pray—that her state was only of
‘_comparative_ immutability.’ It appears to us that perfection is
prescribed as a goal ever to be approached, but ever practically
inaccessible. Whatever degree of sanctification any one may have
attained, it must always be possible to conceive of a state yet more
advanced,—it must always be a duty diligently to labour towards it.

Quietist as she was, few lives have been more busy than that of
Madame Guyon with the activities of an indefatigable benevolence. It
was only self-originated action which she strove to annihilate. In
her case, especially, Quietism contained a reformatory principle.
Genuflexions and crossings were of little value in comparison with
inward abasement and crucifixion. The prayers repeated by rote in
the oratory, were immeasurably inferior to that Prayer of Silence
she so strongly commends—that prayer which, unlimited to times and
seasons, unhindered by words, is a state rather than an act, a
sentiment rather than a request,—a continuous sense of submission,
which breathes, moment by moment, from the serene depth of the soul,
‘Thy will be done.’[331]

As contrasted with the mysticism of St. Theresa, that of Madame
Guyon appears to great advantage. She guards her readers against
attempting to form any image of God. She aspires to an intellectual
elevation—a spiritual intuition, above the sensuous region of
theurgy, of visions, and of dreams. She saw no Jesuits in heaven
bearing white banners among the heavenly throng of the redeemed. She
beheld no Devil, ‘like a little negro,’ sitting on her breviary. She
did not see the Saviour in an ecstasy, drawing the nail out of His
hand. She felt no large white dove fluttering above her head. But
she did not spend her days in founding convents—a slave to the
interests of the clergy. So they made a saint of Theresa, and a
confessor of Madame Guyon.

XI.

In the summer of 1681, Madame Guyon, now thirty-four years of age,
quitted Paris for Gex, a town lying at the foot of the Jura, about
twelve miles from Geneva. It was arranged that she should take some
part in the foundation and management of a new religious and
charitable institution there. A period of five years was destined to
elapse before her return to the capital. During this interval, she
resided successively at Gex, Thonon, Turin, and Grenoble. Wherever
she went, she was indefatigable in works of charity, and also in the
diffusion of her peculiar doctrines concerning self-abandonment and
disinterested love. Strong in the persuasion of her mission, she
could not rest without endeavouring to influence the minds around
her. The singular charm of her conversation won a speedy ascendency
over nearly all with whom she came in contact. It is easy to see how
a remarkable natural gift in this direction contributed both to the
attempt and the success. But the Quietest had buried nature, and to
nature she would owe nothing,—these conversational powers could be,
in her eyes, only a special gift of utterance from above. This
mistake reminds us of the story of certain monks upon whose cloister
garden the snow never lay, though all the country round was buried
in the rigour of a northern winter. The marvellous exemption, long
attributed by superstition to miracle, was discovered to arise
simply from certain thermal springs which had their source within
the sacred inclosure. It is thus that the warmth and vivacity of
natural temperament has been commonly regarded by the mystic, as
nothing less than a fiery impartation from the altar of the
celestial temple.

At Thonon her apartment was visited by a succession of applicants
from every class, who laid bare their hearts before her, and sought
from her lips spiritual guidance or consolation. She met them
separately and in groups, for conference and for prayer. At
Grenoble, she says she was for some time engaged from six o’clock in
the morning till eight at evening in speaking of God to all sorts of
persons,—‘friars, priests, men of the world, maids, wives, widows,
all came, one after another, to hear what I had to say.’[332] Her
efforts among the members of the House of the Novitiates in that
city, were eminently successful, and she appears to have been of
real service to many who had sought peace in vain, by the
austerities and the routine of monastic seclusion. Meanwhile, she
was active, both at Thonon and Grenoble, in the establishment of
hospitals. She carried on a large and continually increasing
correspondence. In the former place she wrote her _Torrents_, in the
latter, she published her _Short Method of Prayer_, and commenced
her _Commentaries on the Bible_.[333]

But alas! all this earnest, tireless toil is unauthorized. Bigotry
takes the alarm, and cries the Church is in danger. Priests who were
asleep—priests who were place-hunting—priests who were
pleasure-hunting, awoke from their doze, or drew breath in their
chase, to observe this woman whose life rebuked them—to observe and
to assail her; for rebuke, in their terminology, was scandal.
Persecution hemmed her in on every side; no annoyance was too petty,
no calumny too gross, for priestly jealousy. The inmates of the
religious community she had enriched were taught to insult
her—tricks were devised to frighten her by horrible appearances and
unearthly noises—her windows were broken—her letters were
intercepted. Thus, before a year had elapsed, she was driven from
Gex. Some called her a sorceress; others, more malignant yet,
stigmatized her as half a Protestant. She had indeed recommended the
reading of the Scriptures to all, and spoken slightingly of mere
bowing and bead-counting. Monstrous contumacy—said, with one voice,
spiritual slaves and spiritual slave-owners—that a woman desired by
her bishop to do one thing, should discover an inward call to do
another. At Thonon the priests burnt in the public square all the
books they could find treating of the inner life, and went home
elated with their performance. One thought may have embittered their
triumph—had it only been living flesh instead of mere paper! She
inhabited a poor cottage that stood by itself in the fields, at some
distance from Thonon. Attached to it was a little garden, in the
management of which she took pleasure. One night a rabble from the
town were incited to terrify her with their drunken riot,—they
trampled down and laid waste the garden, hurled stones in at the
windows, and shouted their threats, insults, and curses, round the
house the whole night. Then came an episcopal order to quit the
diocese. When compelled subsequently, by the opposition she
encountered, to withdraw secretly from Grenoble, she was advised to
take refuge at Marseilles. She arrived in that city at ten o’clock
in the morning, but that very afternoon all was in uproar against
her, so vigilant and implacable were her enemies.

Note to page 214.

Autobiography, chapp. viii. and x. In describing her state of mind at this time, she says,—‘This immersion in God immerged all things. I could no more see the saints, nor even the blessed Virgin, out of God; but I beheld them all in Him. And though I tenderly loved certain saints, as St. Peter, St. Paul, St. Mary Magdalen, St. Theresa, with all those who were spiritual, yet I could not form to myself images of them, nor invoke any of them out of God.’ Here a genuine religious fervour, described in the language of mystical theology, has overcome superstition, and placed her, unconsciously, in a position similar to that of Molinos with regard to these professedly subordinate objects of Romanist worship. It may be observed, in passing, that while Rome pretends to subordinate saint-worship, she denounces those of her children who really do so, as heretical, i.e., reformatory, in their tendency.

Madame Guyon was enabled at this period to enjoy a habitual inward prayer,—‘a prayer of rejoicing and possession, wherein the taste of God was so great, so pure, unblended, and uninterrupted, that it drew and absorbed the powers of the soul into a profound recollection, without act or discourse. For I had now no sight but of Jesus Christ alone. All else was excluded, in order to love with the greater extent, without any selfish motives or reasons for loving.’ With much good sense, she declares this continual and immediate sense of the Divine presence far safer and higher than the sensible relish of ecstasies and ravishments,—than distinct interior words or revelations of things to come,—so often imaginary, so apt to divert our desires from the Giver to the gifts;—this is the revelation of Jesus Christ, which makes us new creatures, the manifestation of the Word within us, who cannot deceive,—the life of true and naked faith, which darkens all self-pleasing lights, and reveals the minutest faults, that pure love may reign in the centre of the soul. Thus, while inheriting the phraseology of the mystics (and we discern in these accounts of her early experience the influence of her later readings in mystical theology), she is less sensuous than Theresa, less artificial than John. Like the latter, she assigns to love the office of annihilating the will, to faith that of absorbing the understanding, ‘so as to make it decline all reasonings, all particular brightnesses and illustrations.’ The Annihilation of the Will, or the Union in the Will of God, consists, with her, simply in a state of complete docility, the soul yielding itself up to be emptied of all which is its own, till it finds itself by little and little detached from every self-originated motion, and placed ‘in a holy indifference for willing;—wishing nothing but what God does and wills.’—P. 70.

Note to page 218.

She describes herself, when at Thonon, as causing sundry devils to withdraw with a word. But the said devils, like some other sights and sounds which terrified her there, were probably the contrivance of the monks who persecuted her, with whom expertness in such tricks was doubtless reckoned among the accomplishments of sanctity. When at the same place (she was then a little past thirty), Madame Guyon believed that a certain virtue was vouchsafed her—a gift of spiritual and sometimes of bodily healing, dependent, however, for its successful operation, on the degree of susceptibility in the recipients.—Autobiography, part II. c. xii.

There also she underwent some of her most painful and mysterious experiences with regard to Father La Combe. She says,—‘Our Lord gave me, with the weaknesses of a child, such a power over souls, that with a word I put them in pain or in peace, as was necessary for their good. I saw that God made Himself to be obeyed, in and through me, like an absolute Sovereign. I neither resisted Him nor took part in anything.... Our Lord had given us both (herself and La Combe) to understand that He would unite us by faith and by the cross. Ours, then, has been a union of the cross in every respect, as well as by what I have made him suffer, as by what I have suffered for him.... The sufferings which I have had on his account were such as to reduce me sometimes to extremity, which continued for several years. For though I have been much more of my time far from him than near him, that did not relieve my suffering, which continued till he was perfectly emptied of himself, and to the very point of submission which God required of him.... He hath occasioned me cruel pains when I was near a hundred leagues from him. I felt his disposition. If he was faithful in letting SELF be destroyed, I was in a state of peace and enlargement. If he was unfaithful in reflection or hesitation, I suffered till that was passed over. He had no need to write me an account of his condition, for I knew it; but when he did write, it proved to be such as I had felt it.’—Ibid. p. 51.

She says that frequently, when Father La Combe came to confess her, she could not speak a word to him; she felt take place within her the same silence toward him, which she had experienced in regard to God. I understood, she adds, that God wished to teach me that the language of angels might be learnt by men on earth,—that is, converse without words. She was gradually reduced to this wordless communication alone, in her interviews with La Combe; and they imagined that they understood each other, ‘in a manner ineffable and divine.’ She regarded the use of speech, or of the pen, as a kind of accommodation on her part to the weakness of souls not sufficiently advanced for these internal communications.

Here Madame Guyon anticipates the Quakers. Compare Barclay’s Apology, Prop. xi. §§ 6, 7.

Shortly after her arrival in Paris, she describes herself as favoured, from the plenitude which filled her soul, with ‘a discharge on her best-disposed children to their mutual joy and comfort, and not only when present, but sometimes when absent.’ ‘I even felt it,’ she adds, ‘to flow from me into their souls. When they wrote to me, they informed me that at such times they had received abundant infusions of divine grace.’—Ibid. part III. c. i.

Note to page 223.

Autobiography, part I. c. xiii. Here Madame Guyon has found confessors blind guides, and confessions profitless; and furthermore, she is encouraged and instructed in the inward life by a despised layman. There is every reason to believe that the experience of Madame Guyon, and the doctrines of the beggar, were shared to some extent by many more. Madame Guyon speaks as Theresa does of the internal pains of the soul as equivalent to those of purgatory. (c. xi.) The teaching of the quondam mendicant concerning an internal and present instead of a future purgatory, was not in itself contrary to the declarations of orthodox mysticism. But many were beginning to seek in this perfectionist doctrine a refuge from the exactions of the priesthood. With creatures of the clergy like Theresa, or with monks like John of the Cross, such a tenet would be retained within the limits required by the ecclesiastical interest. It might stimulate religious zeal—it would never intercept religious obedience. But it was not always so among the people—it was not so with many of the followers of Molinos. The jealous vigilance of priestcraft saw that it had everything to fear from a current belief among the laity, that a state of spiritual perfection, rendering purgatory needless, was of possible attainment—might be reached by secret self-sacrifice, in the use of very simple means. If such a notion prevailed, the lucrative traffic of indulgences might totter on the verge of bankruptcy. No devotee would impoverish himself to buy exemption hereafter from a purifying process which he believed himself now experiencing, in the hourly sorrows he patiently endured. It was at least possible—it had been known to happen, that the soul which struggled to escape itself—to rise beyond the gifts of God, to God—to ascend, beyond words and means, to repose in Him,—which desired only the Divine will, feared only the Divine displeasure,—which sought to ignore so utterly its own capacity and power, might come to attach paramount importance no longer to the powers of the priesthood and the ritual of the Church. Those aspirations which had been the boast of Rome in the few, became her terror in the many. The Quietest might believe himself sincere in orthodoxy, might choose him a director, and might reverence the sacraments. But such abasement and such ambition—distress so deep, and aims so lofty—would often prove alike beyond the reach of the ordinary confessional. The oily syllables of absolution would drop in vain upon the troubled waves of a nature thus stirred to its inmost depths. And if it could receive peace only from the very hand of God, priestly mediation must begin with shame to take a lower place. The value of relics and of masses, of penances and paternosters, would everywhere fall. An absolute indifference to self-interest would induce indifference also to those priestly baits by which that self-interest was allured. Such were the presentiments which urged the Jesuits of Rome to hunt down Molinos, with all the implacability of fear. The craft was in danger. Hinc illæ lachrymæ.

Note to page 224.

See the Life and Religious Opinions and Experience of Madame de la Mothe Guyon, &c., by Thomas C. Upham (New York, 1851); vol. i. p. 153. Mr. Upham, in this and in some other parts of his excellent biography, appears to me to have fallen into the same error with Madame Guyon. He perceives her mistake in regarding the absence of joy as evidence of the absence of the divine favour. But he contrasts the state in which we are conscious of alacrity and joy in religion—as one in which we still live comparatively by sight, with that condition of privation in which all such enjoyment is withdrawn—a state wherein we are called to live, not by sight, but by pure and naked faith. Now, faith and sight are not thus opposed in Scripture. In the New Testament, faith is always practical belief in what God has revealed; and sight, as the opposite course of life, always so much unbelief—undue dependence on things seen and temporal. It is quite true that too much stress should not be laid by us on the intensity or the displays of mere emotion,—since religion is a principle rather than a sentiment. But not a few have been nursed in dangerous delusion by supposing that when they feel within them scarce a trace of any of those desires or dispositions proper to every Christian heart—when they have no glimpse of what they incorrectly term ‘sight’—then is the time to exercise what they suppose to be faith,—that is, to work themselves up to the obstinate persuasion that they personally are still the children of God.

It may well be questioned, moreover, whether we have any scriptural ground for believing that it is usual with the Almighty, for the growth of our sanctification, to withdraw Himself,—the only source of it. To these supposed hidings of His face Madame Guyon, and every Quietist, would patiently submit, as to the sovereign and inscrutable caprice of the divine Bridegroom of the soul. Rather should we regard such obscurations as originating with ourselves and not with Him, and at once make the lost sense of His gracious nearness the object of humble and earnest search. ‘Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation!’

Madame Guyon describes her ‘state of total privation’ in the twenty-first chapter of the Autobiography, part I.

Footnote 315:

See the first six chapters of her _Autobiography_. This life was
published posthumously at Cologne, in 1720. I have used an anonymous
English translation, published at Bristol, in 1772.

Footnote 316:

See Note on p. 238.

Footnote 317:

Autobiography, chap. x.

Footnote 318:

Autobiography, chap. xii. p. 87.

Footnote 319:

See second Note on p. 238.

Footnote 320:

Görres, Die Christliche Mystik, b. IV. c. i.

Footnote 321:

Görres, Die Christliche Mystik, pp. 70-73.

Footnote 322:

Specimens of the language may be seen in Görres, p. 152.

Footnote 323:

Görres, Die Christliche Mystik, pp. 465, &c.

Footnote 324:

Ibid. pp. 532, &c.

Footnote 325:

See Note on p. 239.

Footnote 326:

Autobiography, part I. c. xv.

Footnote 327:

See Note on p. 240.

Footnote 328:

Autobiography, part I. c. xxviii. p. 163.

Footnote 329:

This spontaneity she likens to a fountain, as compared with a pump;
love in the heart prompts every issue of life: outward occasions and
stimulants are no longer awaited; and a glad inward readiness gives
facility in every duty, patience under every trial. Such also is the
teaching of Fénélon here—the genuine doctrine of spiritual life. But
the enemies of Quietism were not slow to represent this ‘practising
the virtues no longer as virtues,’ as a dangerous pretence for evading
the obligations of virtue altogether.

Footnote 330:

Upham, vol. I. pp. 262, 263.

Footnote 331:

This Prayer of Silence became hers at an early period in her religious
career, not as the result of direct effort in pursuance of a theory,
but simply as the consequence of overpowering emotion. She says, ‘I
had a secret desire given me from that time to be wholly devoted to
the disposal of my God, let it be what it would. I said, ‘What couldst
Thou demand of me, that I would not willingly sacrifice or offer Thee?
Oh, spare me not.’ I could scarce hear speak of God, or our Lord Jesus
Christ, without being almost ravished out of myself. What surprised me
the most, was the great difficulty I had to say the vocal prayers I
had been used to say. As soon as I opened my lips to pronounce them,
the love of God seized me so strongly that I was swallowed up in a
profound silence, and a peace not to be expressed. I made fresh
essays, but still in vain. I began, but could not go on. And as I had
never before heard of such a state, I knew not what to do. My
inability therein still increased, because my love to God was still
growing more strong, more violent, and more overpowering. There was
made in me, without the sound of words, a continual prayer, which
seemed to me to be the prayer of our Lord Jesus Christ Himself; a
prayer of the Word, which is made by the Spirit, which, according to
St. Paul, ‘asketh for us that which is good, perfect, and conformable
to the will of God.’—_Autobiography_, part I. c. xiii.

Here we find genuine devout fervour, emancipating itself, very
naturally in private, from allotted forms of prayer; but no mysticism,
till we come to the last sentence—even that, admitting a favourable
explanation.

Footnote 332:

_Autobiography_, part II. c. xvii. ‘God supplied me,’ she adds, ‘with
what was pertinent and satisfactory to them all, after a wonderful
manner, without any share of my study or meditation therein. Nothing
was hid from me of their interior state, and of what passed within
them. Here, O my God! thou madest an infinite number of conquests,
known to Thyself only. They were instantly furnished with a wonderful
facility of prayer. God conferred on them His grace plentifully, and
wrought marvellous changes in them. The most advanced of these souls
found, when with me, in silence, a grace communicated to them, which
they could neither comprehend nor cease to admire. The others found an
unction in my words, and that they operated in them what I said to
them. They said they had never experienced anything like it. Friars of
different orders, and priests of merit, came to see me, to whom our
Lord granted very great favours, as indeed he did to all without
exception, who came in sincerity. One thing was surprising, and that
was, that I had not a word to say to such as came only to watch my
words and to criticise them. Even when I thought to try to speak to
them, I felt that I could not, and that God would not have me do
it.... I felt that what I spoke flowed from the fountain, and that I
was only the instrument of Him who made me speak.’—P. 86.

Footnote 333:

The little book to which she gave the name of _The Torrents_, was
written, she tells us, at the suggestion of La Combe. When she took up
her pen she knew not what she was to say, but soon came thoughts and
words abundantly—as, indeed, they were sure to do. She compares the
different kinds of spiritual progress to the mountain streams she had
seen hurrying down the sides of the Alps. She describes the varieties
in the gravitation of devout souls toward God—the ocean which they
seek. Some proceed slowly, by means of meditations, austerities, and
works of charity,—dependent mostly on outward appliances,—deficient in
spontaneity and ardour,—little exercised by inward experience. Another
class flow in a fuller stream,—grow into laden rivers—haste with more
strength and speed; but these are apt to dwell, with too much
complacence, on those rich gifts for which they are conspicuous. A
third order (and to these she herself belonged) dash out from the
poverty of the rocks, impetuous, leaping over every obstacle,
unburdened by wealthy freightage, inglorious in the eyes of men, but
simple, naked, self-emptied, with resistless eagerness foaming up out
of abysmal chasms that seemed to swallow them, and finding, soonest of
all, that Sea divine, wherein all rivers rest.

Her commentaries on Scripture were written with extraordinary
rapidity. The fact that she consulted no book except the Bible in
their composition must doubtless have contributed to their speed:
certainly not, as she fancied, to their excellence. No writers are so
diffuse as the mystics, because no others have written so fast,
imagining headlong haste an attribute of inspiration. The transcriber
could not copy in five days what she had written in one night. We may
conjecture that the man must have been paid by the day. The commentary
on the Canticles was written in a day and a half, and several visits
received beside.—_Autobiography_, part II. c. xxi.

CHAPTER II.

O Mensch wiltu geimpffet werdn,
Und sein versetzt in d’himlisch erdn!
So mustu vor dein ästen wilt,
Gantz hawen ab, das früchte milt
Fürkommen nach Gotts ebenbildt.[334]

HYMN OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.

Part II.—The Quietist Controversy.

I.

In the year 1686, Madame Guyon returned to Paris, and entered the
head-quarters of persecution. Rumours reached her, doubtless, from
beyond the Alps, of cruel measures taken against opinions similar to
her own, which had spread rapidly in Italy. But she knew not that
all these severities originated with Louis XIV. and his Jesuit
advisers,—that her king, while revoking the Edict of Nantes, and
dispatching his dragoons to extirpate Protestantism in France, was
sending orders to D’Estrées, his ambassador at Rome, to pursue with
the utmost rigour Italian Quietism—and that the monarch, who shone
and smiled at Marly and Versailles, was crowding with victims the
dungeons of the Roman Inquisition.

The leader of Quietism in Italy was one Michael de Molinos, a
Spaniard, a man of blameless life, of eminent and comparatively
enlightened piety. His book, entitled _The Spiritual Guide_, was
published in 1675, sanctioned by five famous doctors, four of them
Inquisitors, and one a Jesuit, and passed, within six years, through
twenty editions in different languages. His real doctrine was
probably identical in substance with that of Madame Guyon.[335] It
was openly favoured by many nobles and ecclesiastics of
distinguished rank; by D’Etrees among the rest. Molinos had
apartments assigned him in the Vatican, and was held in high esteem
by Infallibility itself. But the Inquisition and the Jesuits,
supported by all the influence of France, were sure of their game.
The audacity of the Inquisitors went so far as to send a deputation
to examine the orthodoxy of the man called Innocent XI.; for even
the tiara was not to shield the patron of Molinos from suspicions of
heresy. The courtier-cardinal D’Etrees found new light in the
missives of his master. He stood committed to Quietism. He had not
only embraced the opinions of Molinos, but had translated into
Italian the book of Malaval, a French Quietist, far more extreme
than Molinos himself.[336] Yet he became, at a moment’s notice, the
accuser of his friend. He produced the letter of Louis rebuking the
faithless sloth of the pontiff who could entertain a heretic in his
palace, while he, the eldest son of the Church, toiled incessantly
to root out heresy from the soil of France. He read before the
Inquisitorial Tribunal extracts from the papers of Molinos. He
protested that he had seemed to receive, in order at the proper
juncture more effectually to expose, these abominable mysteries. If
these professions were false, D’Etrees was a heretic; if true, a
villain. The Inquisitors, of course, deemed his testimony too
valuable to be refused. In the eyes of such men, the enormous crime
which he pretended was natural, familiar, praiseworthy. Depths of
baseness beyond the reach of ordinary iniquity, are heights of
virtue with the followers of Dominic and Loyola. Guilt, which even a
bad man would account a blot upon his life, becomes, in the annals
of their zeal, a star. The Spanish Inquisitor-General, Valdes, who
raised to the highest pitch his repute for sanctity, secured the
objects of his ambition, averted the dangers which threatened him,
and preserved his ill-gotten wealth from the grasp of the crown,
simply by his activity as a persecutor, made a practice of sending
spies to mix (under pretence of being converts or inquirers) among
the suspected Lutherans of Valladolid and Seville. Desmarets de St.
Sorlin denounced, and caused to be burnt, a poor harmless madman,
named Morin, who fancied himself the Holy Ghost. Counselled by the
Jesuit confessor of Louis, Father Canard, he pretended to become his
disciple, and then betrayed him. This Desmarets, be it remembered,
had written a book called _Les Délices de l’Esprit_, happily
characterised by a French wit, when he proposed for _délices_ to
read _délires_. Those immoral consequences which the enemies of
Madame Guyon professed to discern in her writings are drawn openly
in the sensual and blasphemous phraseology of this religious
extravaganza. But because Desmarets was a useful man to the
Jesuits—because he had drawn away some of the nuns of the Port
Royal—because he had given the flames a victim—because he was
protected by Canard,—the same Archbishop of Paris who imprisoned
Madame Guyon, honoured with his sanction the ravings of the
licentious visionary.[337] So little had any sincere dread of
spiritual extravagance to do with the hostility concentrated on the
disciples of Quietism. The greater portion of the priesthood feared
only lest men should learn to become religious on their own account.
The leaders of the movement against Madame Guyon were animated by an
additional motive. They knew they should delight his Most Christian
Majesty by affording him another opportunity of manifesting his zeal
for orthodoxy; and they wished to strike at the reputation of
Fénélon through Madame Guyon. The fate of Molinos decided hers, and
hers that of the Archbishop of Cambray.

The only crime brought home to the followers of Molinos was a
preference for the religion of the heart to that of the rosary; the
substitution of a devout retirement for the observance of certain
superstitious forms and seasons. His condemnation was determined.
After an imprisonment of two years he was exhibited in the Temple of
Minerva, his hands bound, and a lighted taper between them. A
plenary indulgence was granted to all who should be present; a vast
concourse listened to the sentence; hired voices cried, ‘To the
fire! to the fire!’ the mob was stirred to a frenzy of fanaticism.
His last gaze upon the world beheld a sea of infuriate faces, the
pomp of his triumphant adversaries,—then to the gloom and solitude
of the dungeon in which he was to languish till death bestowed
release.[338]

II.

At Paris, Madame Guyon became the centre of a small but illustrious
circle, who listened with delight to her exposition of that Quietism
to which the tender earnestness of her language, and her manner lent
so indescribable a charm. There were the Duke and Duchess of
Beauvilliers, the Duke and Duchess of Chevreuse, the Duchess of
Bethune, and the Countess of Guiche. The daughters of Colbert and of
Fouquet forgot the long enmity of their fathers in a religious
friendship, whose tie was yet more closely drawn by their common
admiration for Madame Guyon.[339] But letters filled with complaints
against La Combe and Madame Guyon poured in upon Harlay, Archbishop
of Paris.[340] He procured the arrest of La Combe, who spent the
remainder of his days in various prisons. A little calumny and a
forged letter obtained from the king a _lettre de cachet_ confining
Madame Guyon to an apartment in the Convent of St. Marie. The
sisters were strongly prejudiced against her, but her gentle
patience won all hearts, and her fair jailors soon vied with each
other in praises of their fascinating prisoner. An examination
elicited nothing decidedly unfavourable. Not a stain could be
detected in her character; she offered to submit all her papers and
her writings to investigation. The intercession of Madame Miramion
and other friends with Madame de Maintenon, procured her release,
after a captivity of eight months.

The most dangerous enemy Madame Guyon had as yet was her own
half-brother, Père La Mothe. He had calumniated her in secret while
in Switzerland; he was still more active now she was in Paris. He
wished to become her Director, but La Combe was in the way. The
artifices of La Mothe procured his arrest. He advised Madame Guyon,
with hypocritical protestations of friendship, to flee to Montargis
from the scandalous reports he himself had circulated, and from
adversaries he himself had raised up. Then she would have been at
his mercy—he would have pointed to her flight as a proof of guilt,
and her own property and the guardianship of her children might have
been secured for himself. He injured her as a relation only could.
People said her cause must be a bad one, since her own brother was
constrained, from regard to the credit of religion, to bear witness
against her. A woman who had committed sacrilege at Lyons, and had
run away from the Convent of Penitents at Dijon, was employed by him
to forge letters which should damage the character of Madame Guyon;
to personate one of her maids, and to go from confessor to confessor
throughout Paris, asserting that after living sixteen or seventeen
years with her mistress, she had quitted her at last, in disgust at
her abominable life.

III.

Released from the Convent of St. Marie, Madame Guyon was conducted
by her court friends to express her thanks to Madame de Maintenon at
St. Cyr. This institution had been founded, ten years previously,
for the education of the daughters of noble but impoverished
families. The idea originated with Madame de Maintenon: it was
executed with royal speed and magnificence by Louis, and St. Cyr
became her favourite resort. In fifteen months two thousand six
hundred workmen raised the structure, on a marshy soil, about half a
league from Paris. The genius of Mansart presided over the
architecture. The style of the ordinances was revised by Boileau and
Racine. There three hundred young ladies of rank, dressed in gowns
of brown crape, with white quilted caps, tied with ribbons whose
colour indicated the class to which they belonged in the school,
studied geography and drawing, heard mass, sang in the choir, and
listened to preachments from the lips of Madame Brinon—who
discoursed, so swore some of the courtiers, as eloquently as
Bourdaloue himself. Tired out with the formal splendours of
Versailles, Madame de Maintenon was never so happy as when playing
the part of lady abbess at St. Cyr. Often she would be there by six
in the morning, would herself assist at the toilette of the pupils,
would take a class throughout the day, would give the novices
lessons on spiritual experience; nothing in its routine was dull,
nothing in its kitchen was mean. She hated Fontainebleau, for it
tore her from her family at St. Cyr. For the private theatricals of
St. Cyr, Racine wrote _Esther_, at the request of Madame de
Maintenon. Happy was the courtier who could obtain permission to
witness one of these representations, who could tell with triumph to
envious groups of the excluded, what an admirable Ahasuerus Madame
de Caylus made, what a spirited Mordecai was Mademoiselle de
Glapion, how the graceful Mademoiselle de Veillenne charmed the
audience in the prayer of Esther—in short, how far the Esther
surpassed the Phedra; and the actresses excelled the Raisins and the
Chammelés of the Parisian boards. Louis himself drew up the list of
admissions, as though it were for a journey to Marly—he was the
first to enter—and stood at the door, with the catalogue of names in
one hand and his cane held across as a barrier in the other, till
all the privileged had entered.[341] But the fashion of asceticism
which grew with every year of Maintenon’s reign threw its gloom over
St. Cyr. The absolute vows were introduced, and much of the
monotonous austerity of conventual life. Religious excitement was
the only resource left to the inmates if they would not die of
ennui. This relief was brought them by Madame Guyon.

Madame de Maintenon was touched with pity for the misfortunes of
Madame Guyon, with admiration for such patience, such forgetfulness
of self,—she found in the freshness and fervour of her religious
conversation, a charm which recalled the warmer feelings of youth;
which was welcome, for its elevation, after the fatigue and anxiety
of state, for its sweetness, as contrasted with the barren minutiæ
of rigid formalism. She invited her constantly to her table—she
encouraged her visits to St. Cyr—she met with her, and with Fénélon,
at the Hôtels de Chevreuse and Beauvilliers, where a religious
coterie assembled three times a week to discuss the mysteries of
inward experience. Thus, during three or four years of favour with
Madame de Maintenon, Madame Guyon became in effect the spiritual
instructress of St. Cyr, and found herself at Paris surrounded by
disciples whose numbers daily increased, and whom she withdrew from
the licentious gaieties of the capital. At St. Cyr the young ladies
studied her books, and listened to her as an oracle—the thoughtless
grew serious—the religious strained every faculty to imitate the
attainments of one in whom they saw the ideal of devotion. In Paris,
mystical terminology became the fashionable language—it was caught
up and glibly uttered by wits and roués—it melted from the lips of
beauties who shot languishing glances at their admirers, while they
affected to be weary of the world, and who coquetted while they
talked significantly of holy indifference or pure love. Libertines,
like Treville, professed reform, and wrote about mysticism,—atheists
turned Christians, like Corbinelli, now became Quietists, and might
be seen in the salon of Madame le Maigre, where Corbinelli shone,
the brilliant expositor of the new religious romanticism.[342]

IV.

During this period, Madame Guyon became acquainted with Fénélon. At
their first interview she was all admiration, he all distrust. ‘Her
mind,’ she says, ‘had been taken up with him with much force and
sweetness;’ it seemed to be revealed to her that he should become
one of her spiritual children. Fénélon, on his part, thought she had
neglected her duty to her family for an imaginary mission. But he
had inquired concerning her life at Montargis, and heard only
praise. After a few conversations his doubts vanished: he had
proposed objections, requested explanations, pointed out unguarded
expressions in her books—she was modest, submissive,
irresistible.[343] There was a power in her language, her manner,
her surviving beauty, which mysteriously dissipated prejudice; which
even Nicole, Bossuet, Boileau, Gaillard, could not withstand when
they conversed with her,—which was only overcome when they had
ceased to behold her face, when her persuasive accents sounded no
longer in their ears. She recalled to the thoughts of Fénélon his
youthful studies at St. Sulpice;—there he had perused the mystical
divines in dusty tomes, clasped and brazen-cornered,—now he beheld
their buried doctrine raised to life in the busy present, animating
the untaught eloquence of a woman, whom a noble enthusiasm alone had
endowed with all the prerogatives of genius, and all the charms of
beauty. This friendship, which events rendered afterwards so
disastrous for himself, was beneficial to Madame Guyon. Fénélon
taught her to moderate some of her spiritual excesses. Her
extravagance reached its culminating point at Thonon. At Paris,
influenced doubtless by Fénélon, as well as by more frequent
intercourse with the world, she no longer enjoys so many picturesque
dreams, no more heals the sick and casts out devils with a word, and
no longer—as in her solitude there—suffers inward anguish consequent
on the particular religious condition of Father La Combe when he is
three hundred miles off.[344] It is curious to observe how the
acquaintance of Fénélon with Madame Guyon began with suspicion and
ripened into friendship, while that of Bossuet, commencing with
approval, and even admiration, ended in calumny and persecution.
Bossuet declared to the Duc de Chevreuse that while examining her
writings, for the first time, he was astonished by a light and
unction he had never before seen, and, for three days, was made to
realize the divine Presence in a manner altogether new. Bossuet had
never, like Fénélon, studied the mystics.[345]

V.

The two most influential Directors at St. Cyr were Godet des Marais,
Bishop of Chartres, and Fénélon. These two men form a striking
contrast. Godet was disgusting in person and in manners—a sour
ascetic—a spiritual martinet—devoted to all the petty austerities of
the most formal discipline. Fénélon was dignified and gentle,
graceful as a courtier, and spotless as a saint—the most pure, the
most persuasive, the most accomplished of religious guides. No
wonder that most of the young inmates of St. Cyr adored Fénélon, and
could not endure Godet. Madame de Maintenon wavered between her two
confessors; if Fénélon was the more agreeable, Godet seemed the more
safe. Godet was miserably jealous of his rival. He was not sorry to
find that the new doctrines had produced a little insubordination
within the quiet walls of St. Cyr—that Fénélon would be compromised
by the indiscretion of some among his youthful admirers. He brought
a lamentable tale to Madame de Maintenon. Madame du Peron, the
mistress of the novices, had complained that her pupils obeyed her
no longer. They neglected regular duties for unseasonable prayers.
They had illuminations and ecstasies. One in the midst of sweeping
her room would stand, leaning on her broom, lost in contemplation:
another, instead of hearing lessons, became inspired, and resigned
herself to the operation of the Spirit. The under-mistress of the
classes stole away the enlightened from the rest, and they were
found in remote corners of the house, feasting in secret on the
sweet poison of Madame Guyon’s doctrine. The precise and methodical
Madame de Maintenon was horrified. She had hoped to realize in her
institute the ideal of her Church, a perfect uniformity of opinion,
an unerring mechanism of obedience. We wished, said she, to promote
intelligence, we have made orators; devotion, we have made
Quietists; modesty, we have made prudes; elevation of sentiment, and
we have pride. She commissioned Godet to reclaim the wanderers, to
demand that the books of Madame Guyon should be surrendered, setting
herself the example by publicly delivering into his hand her own
copy of the _Short Method_. She requested Madame Guyon to refrain
from visiting St. Cyr. She began to doubt the prudence or the
orthodoxy of Fénélon.[346] What would the king say, if he heard of
it—he, who had never liked Fénélon—who hated nothing so much as
heresy—who had but the other day extinguished the Quietism of
Molinos? She had read to him some of Madame Guyon’s exposition of
the Canticles; and he called it dreamy stuff. Doctrines really
dangerous to purity were insinuated by some designing monks, under
the name of Quietism. The odium fell on the innocent Madame Guyon;
and her friends would necessarily share it. Malicious voices charged
her with corrupting the principles of the Parisian ladies. Madame
Guyon replied with justice,—‘When they were patching, and painting,
and ruining their families by gambling and by dress, not a word was
said against it; now that they have withdrawn from such vanities,
the cry is, that I have ruined them.’ Rumour grew more loud and
scandalous every day: the most incredible reports were most
credited. The schools, too, had taken up the question of mysticism,
and argued it with heat. Nicole and Lami had dissolved an ancient
friendship to quarrel about it,—as Fénélon and Bossuet were soon to
do. No controversy threatened to involve so many interests, to fan
so many passions, to kindle so many hatreds, as this variance about
disinterestedness, about indifference, about love.

The politic Madame de Maintenon watched the gathering storm, and
became all caution. At all costs, she must free herself from the
faintest suspicion of fellowship with heresy. She questioned, on the
opinions of Madame Guyon, Bossuet and Noailles, Bourdaloue, Joly,
Tiberge, Brisacier, and Tronson; and the replies of these esteemed
divines, uniformly unfavourable, decided her. It would be necessary
to disown Madame Guyon: her condemnation would become inevitable.
Fénélon must be induced to disown her too, or his career was at a
close; and Madame de Maintenon could smile on him no longer.[347]

Madame Guyon, alarmed by the growing numbers and vehemence of her
adversaries, had recourse to the man who afterwards became her
bitterest enemy. She proposed to Bossuet that he should examine her
writings. He complied; held several private interviews with her, and
expressed himself, on the whole, more favourably than could have
been expected. But these conferences, which did not altogether
satisfy Bossuet, could do nothing to allay the excitement of the
public.[348]

VI.

Madame Guyon now requested the appointment of commissioners, who
should investigate, and pronounce finally concerning her life and
doctrine.[349] Three were chosen—Bossuet; Noailles, Bishop of
Chalons; and Tronson, Superior of St. Sulpice. Noailles was a
sensible, kind-hearted man; Tronson, a worthy creature, in poor
health, with little opinion of his own; Bossuet, the accredited
champion of the Gallican Church, accustomed to move in an atmosphere
of flattery—the august dictator of the ecclesiastical world—was
absolute in their conferences. They met, from time to time, during
some six months, at the little village of Issy, the country
residence of the Superior of St. Sulpice. When Madame Guyon appeared
before them, Bossuet alone was harsh and rude; he put the worst
construction on her words; he interrupted her; now he silenced her
replies, now he burlesqued them; now he affected to be unable to
comprehend them; now he held up his hands in contemptuous amazement
at her ignorance; he would not suffer to be read the justification
which had cost her so much pains; he sent away her friend, the Duke
of Chevreuse. This ominous severity confused and frightened
her.[350] She readily consented to retire to a convent in the town
of Meaux, there to be under the surveillance of Bossuet. She
undertook this journey in the depth of the most frightful winter
which had been known for many years; the coach was buried in the
snow, and she narrowly escaped with life. The commissioners remained
to draw up, by the fireside, certain propositions, which should
determine what was, and what was not, true mysticism. These
constitute the celebrated Articles of Issy.

Bossuet repeatedly visited Madame Guyon at Meaux. The great man did
not disdain to approach the sick-bed of his victim, as she lay in
the last stage of exhaustion, and there endeavour to overreach and
terrify her. He demanded a submission, and promised a favourable
certificate. The submission he received, the certificate he
withheld. He sought to force her, by threats, to sign that she did
not believe in the Incarnation. The more timid she appeared, the
more boisterous and imperative his tone. One day, he would come with
words of kindness, on another, with words of fury; yet, at the very
time, this Pilate could say to some of his brethren, that he found
no serious fault in her. He declared, on one occasion, that he was
actuated by no dislike—he was urged to rigorous measures by others;
on another, that the submission of Madame Guyon, and the suppression
of Quietism, effected by his skill and energy, would be as good as
an archbishopric or a cardinal’s hat to him. Justice and ambition
contended within him; for a little while the battle wavered, till
presently pride and jealousy brought up to the standard of the
latter, reinforcements so overwhelming, that justice was beaten for
ever from the field. After six months’ residence at Meaux, Madame
Guyon received from Bossuet a certificate attesting her filial
submissiveness to the Catholic faith, his satisfaction with her
conduct, authorizing her still to participate in the sacrament of
the Church, and acquitting her of all implication in the heresy of
Molinos.[351]

Meanwhile, Fénélon had been added to the number of the commissioners
at Issy. He and Bossuet were still on intimate terms; but Bossuet,
like all vain men, was a dangerous friend. He knew how to inspire
confidence which he did not scruple to betray. Madame Guyon,
conscious of the purity of her life, of the orthodoxy of her
intention, persuaded that such a man must be superior to the meaner
motives of her persecutors, had placed in the hands of Bossuet her
most private papers, not excluding the _Autobiography_, which had
not been submitted even to the eye of Fénélon. To Bossuet, Fénélon
had, in letters, unfolded his most secret thoughts—the conflicts and
aspirations of his spiritual history, so unbounded was his reliance
on his honour, so exalted his estimate of the judgment of that
powerful mind in matters of religion. The disclosures of both were
distorted and abused to crush them; both had to rue the day when
they trusted one who could sacrifice truth to glory. At Issy, the
deference and the candour of Fénélon were met by a haughty reserve
on the part of Bossuet. The meekness of Fénélon and the timidity of
Madame Guyon only inflamed his arrogance; to bow to him was to be
overborne; to confront him was at once to secure respect, if not
fairness. The Articles were already drawn up when the signature of
Fénélon was requested. He felt that he should have been allowed his
fair share in their construction; as they were, he could not sign
them; he proposed modifications; they were acceded to; and the
thirty-four Articles of Issy appeared in March, 1695, with the name
of Fénélon associated with the other three.[352]

VII.

To any one who reads these Articles, and the letter written by
Fénélon to Madame de la Maisonfort, after signing them, it will be
obvious that the Quietism of Fénélon went within a moderate compass.
When he comes to explain his meaning, the controversy is very much a
dispute about words. He did not, like Madame Guyon, profess to
conduct devout minds by a certain method to the attainment of
perfect disinterestedness. He only maintained the possibility of
realizing a love to God, thus purified from self. He was as fully
aware as his opponents, that to evince our love to God by
willingness to endure perdition, was the same thing as attesting our
devotion to Him by our readiness to hate Him for ever. This is the
standing objection against the doctrine of disinterested love. The
great Nonconformist divine, John Howe, urges it with force. It is
embodied in the thirty-second of the Articles in question. But it
does not touch Fénélon’s position. His assertion is, that we should
will our own salvation only because God wills it; that, supposing it
possible for us to endure hell torments, retaining the grace of God
and our consciousness that such suffering was according to His will,
and conducive to His glory, the soul, animated by pure love, would
embrace even such a doom.[353] It is but the supposition of an
impossible case,—a supposition, moreover, which involves a very
gross and external conception of hell. It could find no place in a
mysticism like that of Behmen or Swedenborg, where hell is regarded,
much more truly, less as an infliction from without, than as the
development of dominant evil from within. The Quietism of Fénélon
does not preclude the reflex actions of the mind, or confine the
spirit of the adept to the sphere of the immediate. It forbids only
the introspection of self-complacency.[354] It does not merge
distinct acts in a continuous operation, nor discourage effort for
self-advancement in holiness, or for the benefit of others—it only
teaches us to moderate that impatience which has its origin in self,
and declares that our own co-operation becomes, in certain cases,
unconscious—is, as it were, lost in a ‘special facility.’[355] The
indefatigable benevolence of his life abundantly repudiates the
slanderous conclusion of his adversaries, that the doctrine of
indifference concerning the future, involves indifference likewise
to moral good and evil in the present. Bossuet himself is often as
mystical as Fénélon, sometimes more so.[356] St. Francis de Sales
and Madame de Chantal said the very same things,—not to mention the
unbridled utterances of the earlier and the mediæval mystics
canonized by the Church of Rome. Could the controversy have been
confined to the real question, no harm would have been done. It
would have resembled the duel, in Ben Jonson’s play, between
Fastidious Brisk and Signor Puntarvolo, where the rapiers cut
through taffeta and lace, gold embroidery and satin doublets, but
nowhere enter the skin. Certain terms and certain syllogisms, a
well-starched theory, or an argument trimmed with the pearls of
eloquence—might have been transfixed or rent by a dexterous pen, on
this side or on that, but the prize of the conqueror would not have
been court favour, nor the penalty of the conquered, exile.
Theologians might have written, for a few, the learned history of a
logical campaign, but the eyes of Europe would never have been
turned to a conflict for fame and fortune raging in the Vatican and
at Versailles, enlisting every religious party throughout
Roman-catholic Christendom, and involving the rise or fall of some
of the most illustrious names among the churchmen and nobility of
France.

VIII.

The writings of Madame Guyon had now been condemned, though without
mention of her name; Bossuet had intimated that he required nothing
further from her; she began to hope that the worst might be over,
and returned with her friends from Meaux to Paris, to live there as
much retired as possible. This flight, which he chose to call
dishonourable, irritated Bossuet. She had suffered him to see that
she could trust him no longer. He endeavoured to recover the
certificate he had given. An order was procured for her arrest. The
police observed that a house in the Faubourg St. Antoine was always
entered by a pass-key. They made their way in, and found Madame
Guyon. They brought away their prisoner, ill as she was, and the
king was induced, with much difficulty, to sign an order for her
incarceration at Vincennes. The despot thought a convent might
suffice,—not so the persecutors.[357]

Bossuet had been for some time occupied in writing a work which
should demolish with a blow the doctrine of Madame Guyon, and hold
her up to general odium. It consisted of ten books, and was entitled
_Instructions on the States of Prayer_. He showed the manuscript to
Fénélon, desiring him to append a statement, approving all it
contained, which should accompany the volume when published. Fénélon
refused. Six months ago he had declared that he could be no party to
a personal attack on Madame Guyon: the _Instructions_ contained
little else. That tremendous attack was no mere exposure of
unguarded expressions—no mere deduction of dangerous consequences,
possibly unforeseen by a half-educated writer; it charged Madame
Guyon with having for her sole design the inculcation of a false
spirituality, which abandoned, as an imperfection, faith in the
divine Persons and the humanity of Christ; which disowned the
authority of Scripture, of tradition, of morality; which dispensed
with vocal prayer and acts of worship; which established an impious
and brutal indifference between vice and virtue, between everlasting
hate of God and everlasting love; which forbade resistance to
temptation as an interruption to repose; which taught an imaginary
perfection extinguishing the nobler desires only to inflame the
lower, and clothing the waywardness of self-will and passion with
the authority of inspiration and of prophecy. Fénélon knew that this
accusation was one mass of falsehood. If Bossuet himself believed
it, why had he suffered such a monster still to commune; why had he
been so faithless to his high office in the Church, as to give his
testimonials declaring the purity of her purpose and the soundness
of her faith, when he had not secured the formal retraction of a
single error? To sign his approval of that book, would be not merely
a cowardly condemnation of a woman whom he knew to be innocent—it
would be the condemnation of himself. His acquaintance with Madame
Guyon was matter of notoriety. It would be to say that he—a student
of theology, a priest, an archbishop, the preceptor of princes—had
not only refrained from denouncing, but had honoured with his
friendship, the teacher of an abominable spiritualism which
abolished the first principles of right and wrong. It would be to
declare, in fact, such a prelate far more guilty than such a
heretic. And Bossuet pretended to be his friend—Bossuet, who had
laid the snare which might have been the triumph of the most
malignant enemy. It was not a mere question of persons—Madame Guyon
might die in prison—he himself might be defamed and disgraced—he did
not mean to become her champion—surely that was enough, knowing what
he knew,—let her enemies be satisfied with his silence—he could not
suffer another man to take his pen out of his hand to denounce as an
emissary of Satan one whom he believed to be a child of God.[358]

Such was Fénélon’s position. He wished to be silent concerning
Madame Guyon. To assent to the charges brought against her would not
have been even a serviceable lie, if such a man could have desired
to escape the wrath of Bossuet at so scandalous a price. Every one
would have said that the Archbishop of Cambray had denounced his
accomplice out of fear. Neither was he prepared to embrace the
opposite extreme and to defend the personal cause of the accused,
many of whose expressions he thought questionable, orthodox as might
be her explanation, and many of whose extravagances he disapproved.
His enemies wished to force him to speak, and were prepared to
damage his reputation whether he appeared for or against the
prisoner at Vincennes. At length it became necessary that he should
break silence; and when he did, it was not to pronounce judgment
concerning the oppressed or her oppressors, it was to investigate
the abstract question,—the teaching of the Church on the doctrine of
pure love. He wrote the _Maxims of the Saints_.

IX.

This celebrated book appeared in January, 1697, while Fénélon was at
Cambray, amazing the Flemings of his diocese by affording them, in
their new archbishop, the spectacle of a church dignitary who really
cared for his flock, who consigned the easier duties to his vicars,
and reserved the hardest for himself; who entered their cottages
like a father, listened with interest to the story of their
hardships or their griefs; who consoled, counselled, and relieved
them; who partook of their black bread as though he had never shared
the banquets of Versailles, and as though Paris were to him, as to
themselves, a wonderful place far away, whose streets were paved
with gold. Madame Guyon was in confinement at the village of
Vaugirard, whither the compassion of Noailles had transferred her
from Vincennes, resigned and peaceful, writing poetry and singing
hymns with her pious servant-girl, the faithful companion of her
misfortunes. Bossuet was visiting St. Cyr—very busy in endeavouring
to purify the theology of the young ladies from all taint of
Quietism—but quite unsuccessful in reconciling Madame de la
Maisonfort to the loss of her beloved Fénélon.

The _Maxims of the Saints_ was an exposition and vindication of the
doctrines of pure love, of mystical union, and of perfection, as
handed down by some of the most illustrious and authoritative names
in the Roman-catholic Church, from Dionysius, Clement, and
Augustine, to John of the Cross and Francis de Sales;—it explained
their terminology;—it placed in juxtaposition with every article of
legitimate mysticism its false correlative—the use and the
abuse;—and was, in fact, though not expressly, a complete
justification (on the principles of his Church) of that moderate
Quietism held by himself, and in substance by Madame Guyon.[359] The
book was approved by Tronson, by Fleury, by Hébert, by Pirot, a
doctor of the Sorbonne, by Père La Chaise, the King’s Confessor, by
the Jesuits of Clermont,—but it was denounced by Bossuet; it was
nicknamed the Bible of the Little Church; Pontchartrain, the
comptroller-general, and Maurice Le Tellier, Archbishop of Reims,
told the King that it was fit only for knaves or fools. Louis sent
for Bossuet. The Bishop of Meaux cast himself theatrically at the
feet of majesty, and, with pretended tears, implored forgiveness for
not earlier revealing the heresy of his unhappy brother. A
compromise was yet possible; for Fénélon was ready to explain his
explanations, and to suppress whatever might be pronounced dangerous
in his pages. But the eagle of Meaux had seen the meek and dove-like
Fénélon—once almost more his disciple than his friend—erect the
standard of independence, and assume the port of a rival. His pride
was roused. He was resolved to reign alone on the ecclesiastical
Olympus of the Court, and he would not hear of a peace that might
rob him of a triumph. Did Fénélon pretend to shelter himself by
great names,—he, Bossuet, would intrench himself within the awful
sanctuary of the Church; he represented religion in France; he would
resent every attack upon his own opinions as an assault on the
Catholic faith; he had the ear of the King, with whom heresy and
treason were identical; success was all but assured, and, if so, war
was glory. Such tactics are not peculiar to the seventeenth century.
In our own day, every one implicated in religious abuses identifies
himself with religion,—brands every exposure of his misconduct as
hostility to the cause of God,—invests his miserable personality
with the benign grandeur of the Gospel,—and stigmatizes as troublers
in Israel all who dare to inquire into his procedure,—while
innumerable dupes or cowards sleepily believe, or cautiously pretend
to do so, that those who have management in a good object must
themselves be good.

X.

Fénélon now requested the royal permission to appeal to Rome; he
obtained it, but was forbidden to repair thither to plead in person
the cause of his book, and ordered to quit the Court and confine
himself to his diocese. The King went to St. Cyr, and expelled
thence three young ladies, for an offence he could not in reality
comprehend,—the sin of Quietism.[360] Intrigue was active, and the
Duke de Beauvilliers was nearly losing his place in the royal
household because of his attachment to Fénélon. The Duke—noble in
spirit as in name, and worthy of such a friendship,—boldly told _Le
Grand Monarque_ that he was ready to leave the palace rather than to
forsake his friend. Six days before the banishment of Fénélon, Louis
had sent to Innocent XII. a letter, drawn up by Bossuet, saying in
effect that the _Maxims_ had been condemned at Paris, that
everything urged in its defence was futile, and that the royal
authority would be exerted to the utmost to execute the decision of
the pontifical chair. Bossuet naturally calculated that a missive,
thus intimating the sentence Infallibility was expected by a great
monarch to pronounce,—arriving almost at the same time with the news
of a disgrace reserved only for the most grave offences,—would
secure the speedy condemnation of Fénélon’s book.

At Rome commenced a series of deliberations destined to extend over
a space of nearly two years. Two successive bodies of adjudicators
were impanelled and dissolved, unable to arrive at a decision. A new
congregation of cardinals was selected, who held scores of long and
wearisome debates, while rumour and intrigue alternately heightened
or depressed the hopes of either party.[361] To write the _Maxims of
the Saints_ was a delicate task. It was not easy to repudiate the
mysticism of Molinos without impugning the mysticism of St. Theresa.
But the position of these judges was more delicate yet. It was still
less easy to censure Fénélon without rendering suspicious, at the
least, the orthodoxy of the most shining saints in the Calendar. On
the one hand, there might be risk of a schism; on the other pressed
the urgency and the influence of a powerful party, the impatience,
almost the menaces of a great king.

The real question was simply this,—Is disinterested love possible?
Can man love God for His own sake alone, with a love, not excluding,
but subordinating all other persons and objects, so that they shall
be regarded only in God who is All in All? If so, is it dangerous to
assert the possibility, to commend this divine ambition, as Fénélon
has done? But the discussion was complicated and inflamed by daily
slander and recrimination, by treachery and insinuation, and by the
honest anger they provoke; by the schemes of personal ambition, by
the rivalry of religious parties, by the political intrigues of the
State, by the political intrigues of the Church; by the interests of
a crew of subaltern agents, who loved to fish in muddy waters; and
by the long cherished animosity between Gallican and Ultramontanist.
Couriers pass and repass continually between Rome and Cambray,
between Rome and Paris. The Abbé Bossuet writes constantly from Rome
to the Bishop of Meaux; the Abbé de Chanterac from the same city to
the Archbishop of Cambray. Chanterac writes like a faithful friend
and a good man; he labours day and night in the cause of Fénélon; he
bids him be of good cheer and put his trust in God. The letters of
the Abbé Bossuet to his uncle are worthy a familiar of the
Inquisition. After circulating calumnies against the character of
Madame Guyon, after hinting that Fénélon was a partaker of her
immoralities as well as of her heresy, and promising, with each
coming post, to produce fresh confessions and new discoveries of the
most revolting licentiousness, he sits down to urge Bossuet to
second his efforts by procuring the banishment of every friend whom
Fénélon yet has at Court; and to secure, by a decisive blow in
Paris, the ruin of that ‘wild beast,’ Fénélon, at Rome. Bossuet lost
no time in acting on the suggestion of so base an instrument.[362]

XI.

At Paris a hot war of letters, pamphlets, and treatises, was
maintained by the leaders, whose quarrel everywhere divided the city
and the court into two hostile encampments. Fénélon offered a
resistance Bossuet had never anticipated, and the veteran polemic
was deeply mortified to see public opinion doubtful, whether he or a
younger rival had won the laurels in argument and eloquence. In an
evil hour for his fame he resolved to crush his antagonist at all
costs; he determined that the laws of honourable warfare should be
regarded no more, that no confidence should be any longer sacred. In
the summer of 1698 the storm burst upon the head of the exile at
Cambray. Early in June, Fénélon heard that the Abbé de Beaumont, his
nephew, and the Abbé de Langeron, his friend, had been dismissed in
disgrace from the office of sub-preceptors to the young Duke of
Burgundy; that Dupuy and De Leschelles, had been banished the Court
because of their attachment to him; that his brother had been
expelled from the marine, and a son of Madame Guyon from the guards;
that the retiring and pacific Fleury had narrowly escaped ignominy
for a similar cause: that the Dukes of Beauvilliers, Chevreuse, and
Guiche, were themselves menaced, and the prospect of their downfall
openly discussed; and that to correspond with him was hereafter a
crime against the State. Within a month, another Job’s messenger
brought him tidings that Bossuet had produced a book entitled _An
Account of Quietism_—an attack so terrible that the dismay of his
remaining friends had almost become despair. Bossuet possessed three
formidable weapons—his influence as a courtier, his authority as a
priest, his powers as an author. He wielded them all at once, and
all of them dishonourably. If he was unfair in the first capacity,
when he invoked the thunders of royalty to ruin the cause of a
theological opponent—if he was unfair in the second, when he
denounced forbearance and silenced intercession as sins against
God,—he was yet more so in the third, when he employed all his
gifts, to weave into a malignant tissue of falsehood and
exaggeration the memoirs of Madame Guyon, the correspondence of
Fénélon with Madame de Maintenon, and his former confidential
letters to himself—letters on spiritual matters to a spiritual
guide—letters which should have been sacred as the secresy of the
Confessional. The sensation created by the _Account of Quietism_ was
prodigious. Bossuet presented his book to the King, whose approval
was for every parasite the authentication of all its slanders.
Madame de Maintenon, with her own hand, distributed copies among the
courtiers; in the salon of Marly nothing else was talked of; in the
beautiful gardens groups of lords and ladies, such as Watteau would
have loved to paint, were gathered on the grass, beside the
fountains, beneath the trees, to hear it read; it was begged,
borrowed, stolen, greedily snatched, and delightedly devoured; its
anecdotes were so piquant, its style so sparkling, its bursts of
indignant eloquence so grand; gay ladies, young and old, dandies,
wits, and libertines, found its scandal so delicious,—Madame Guyon
was so exquisitely ridiculous,—La Combe, so odious a
Tartuffe,—Fénélon, so pitiably displumed of all his shining virtues;
and, what was best of all, the insinuations were worse than the
charges,—the book gave much and promised more,—it hinted at
disclosures more disgraceful yet, and gave free scope to every
malicious invention and every prurient conjecture.[363]

XII.

The generous Fénélon, more thoughtful for others than for himself,
at first hesitated to reply even to such a provocation, lest he
should injure the friends who yet remained to him at Versailles. But
he was soon convinced that their position, as much as his, rendered
an answer imperative. He received Bossuet’s book on the 8th of July,
and by the 13th of August his defence had been written, printed, and
arrived at Rome, to gladden the heart of poor Chanterac, to stop the
mouth of the enemy, and to turn the tide once more in behalf of his
failing party. This refutation, written with such rapidity, and
under such disadvantages, was a masterpiece,—it redeemed his
character from every calumny,—it raised his reputation to its
height,—it would have decided a fair contest completely in his
favour. It was composed when his spirit was oppressed by sorrow for
the ruin of his friends, and darkened by the apprehension of new
injuries which his justification might provoke,—by a proscribed man
at Cambray, remote from the assistance and appliances most
needful,—without a friend to guide or to relieve the labour of
arranging and transcribing documents and of verifying dates, where
scrupulous accuracy was of vital importance,—when it was difficult
to procure correct intelligence from Paris, and hazardous to write
thither lest he should compromise his correspondents,—when even his
letters to Chanterac were not safe from inspection,—when it would be
difficult to find a printer for such a book, and yet more so to
secure its circulation in the metropolis. As it was, D’Argenson, the
lieutenant of police,—a functionary pourtrayed by his contemporaries
as at once the ugliest and most unprincipled of men,—seized a
package of seven hundred copies at the gates of Paris. The _Reply_
appeared, however, and was eagerly read. Even the few who were
neutral, the many who were envious, the host who were prejudiced,
could not withhold their admiration from that lucid and elegant
style—that dignified and unaffected eloquence; numbers yielded, in
secret, at least, to the force of such facts and such arguments;
while all were astonished at the skill and self-command with which
the author had justified his whole career without implicating a
single friend; and leaving untouched the shield of every other
adversary, had concentrated all his force on exposing the
contradictions, the treachery, and the falsehood of Bossuet’s
accusation.[364]

The controversy now draws to a close. Bossuet published _Remarks_ on
the _Reply_ of Fénélon, and Fénélon rejoined with _Remarks_ on the
_Remarks_ of Bossuet. Sixty loyal doctors of the Sorbonne censured
twelve propositions, in the _Maxims_, while Rome was yet undecided.
Towards the close of the same year (1698) Louis wrote a letter to
the Pope, yet more indecently urgent than his former one, demanding
a thorough condemnation of so dangerous a book; and this epistle he
seconded by depriving Fénélon, a few weeks afterwards, of the title
and pension of preceptor—that pension which Fénélon had once nobly
offered to return to a treasury exhausted by ambitious wars.[365]

Innocent XII. had heard, with indignant sorrow, of the arbitrary
measures adopted against Fénélon and his friends. He was mortified
by the arrogance of Louis, by the attempts so openly made to
forestall his judgment. He was accustomed to say that Cambray had
erred through excess of love to God; Meaux, by want of love to his
neighbour. But Louis was evidently roused, and it was not safe to
provoke him too far. After a last effort at a compromise, the Pope
yielded; and the cardinals pronounced a condemnation, far less
complete, however, than the vehemence of the accusers had hoped to
secure. Twenty-three propositions extracted from the _Maxims_, were
censured, but the Pontiff openly declared that such censure did not
extend to the explanations which the Archbishop of Cambray had given
of his book. This sentence was delivered on the 12th of March, 1699.
The submission of Fénélon is famous in history. He received the
intelligence as he was about to ascend the pulpit; he changed his
subject, and preached a sermon on the duty of submission to
superiors.[366] Bossuet endeavoured, in vain, to represent the
obedience which was the first to pronounce the sentence of
self-condemnation, as a profound hypocrisy.

XIII.

Madame Guyon lingered for four years a solitary prisoner in the
dungeons of the Bastille. In the same tower was confined the Man of
the Iron Mask, and she may have heard, in her cell, the melancholy
notes of the guitar with which her fellow-prisoner beguiled a
captivity whose horrors had then lasted seven-and-thirty years.
There, a constitution never strong, was broken down by the stony
chill of rigorous winters, and by the noxious vapours which steamed
from the stagnant moat in summer.[367] She was liberated in 1702,
and sent to Blois,—a picturesque old city, whose steep and narrow
streets, cut into innumerable steps, overlook the Loire,—crowned on
the one side by its fine church, and on the other by the royal
chateau, memorable for the murder of the Guises; its massive
proportions adorned by the varying tastes of successive generations,
then newly beautified after the designs of Mansart, and now a ruin,
the delight of every artist. There she lived in quiet, sought out
from time to time by visitors from distant provinces and other
lands,—as patient under the infirmity of declining age as beneath
the persecutions of her earlier years,—finding, as she had always
done, some sweet in every bitter cup, and a theme for praise in
every trial, purified by her long afflictions, elevated by her hope
of glory, full of charity and full of peace, resigned and happy to
the last. Her latest letter is dated in 1717,—Bossuet had departed,
and Fénélon,—and before the close of that year, she also, the
subject of such long and bitter strife, had been removed beyond all
the tempests of this lower world.

In the judicial combats of ancient Germany, it was the custom to
place in the centre of the lists a bier, beside which stood the
accuser and the accused, at the head and at the foot, leaning there
for some time in solemn silence before they laid lance in rest and
encountered in the deadly shock. Would that religious
controversialists had oftener entered and maintained their combat as
alike in view of that final appeal in the unseen world of truth—with
a deeper and more abiding sense of that supreme tribunal before
which so many differences vanish, and where none but he who has
striven lawfully can receive a crown. Bossuet was regarded as the
champion of Hope, and drew his sword, it was said, lest sacrilegious
hands should remove her anchor. Fénélon girded on his arms to defend
the cause of Charity. Alas! said the Pope—heart-sick of the
protracted conflict—they forget that it is Faith who is in danger.
Among the many witty sayings which the dispute suggested to the
lookers-on, perhaps one of the most significant is that attributed
to the daughter of Madame de Sévigné. ‘M. de Cambray,’ said she,
‘pleads well the cause of God, but M. de Meaux yet better that of
religion, and cannot fail to win the day at Rome.’ Fénélon undertook
to show that his semi-Quietism was supported by the authority of
ecclesiastical tradition, and he was unquestionably in the right. He
might have sustained, on Romanist principles, a doctrine much less
moderate, by the same argument. But it was his wish to render
mysticism as rational and as attractive as possible; and no other
advocate has exhibited it so purified from extravagance, or secured
for it so general a sympathy. The principle of ‘holy indifference,’
however, must be weighed, not by the virtues of Fénélon, but
according to the standard of Scripture,—and such an estimate must,
we believe, pronounce it mistaken.

XIV.

The attempt to make mysticism definite and intelligible must always
involve more or less of inconsistency. Nevertheless, the enterprise
has been repeatedly undertaken; and it is a remarkable fact, that
such efforts have almost invariably originated in France. Mysticism
and scholasticism—the spirit of the cloud and the spirit of the
snow—reign as rivals throughout the stormy region of the Middle Age.
The reaction against the extreme of each nourished its antagonist.
Hugo and Richard of St. Victor endeavoured to effect a union, and to
reconcile these contending products of the heart and brain. In that
ascetic abstraction, which hides in darkness all the objects of
sense, they sought to develop, from the dull and arid stem of school
divinity, the most precious blossoms of the feeling; and their
mysticism resembles those plants of the cactus-tribe which unfold,
from their lustreless and horny leaves, gorgeous flowers, that
illumine, with phosphoric radiance, the darkness of the tropical
night. The Victorines were succeeded in the same path by
Bonaventura, a Frenchman by education, if not by birth, more a
schoolman than a mystic; and, in the fifteenth century, by Gerson.
These are mystics who have no tales to tell of inspiration and of
vision—their aim is to legitimize rapture, to define ecstasy, to
explain the higher phenomena of the spirit on the basis of an
elaborate psychology, to separate the delusive from the real in
mysticism, and to ascertain the laws of that mystical experience, of
which they acknowledged themselves to be but very partially the
subjects. With this view, Gerson introduced into mysticism, strange
to say, the principle of induction; and proposed, by a collection
and comparison of recorded examples, to determine its theory, and
decide its practice. In the _Maxims of the Saints_, Fénélon carries
out the idea of Gerson, as far as was requisite for his immediate
purpose. Both are involved in the same difficulty, and fall into the
same contradiction. What Molinos was to Fénélon, Ruysbroek was to
Gerson. Fénélon wished to stop short of the spiritualism condemned
as heretical in Molinos; Gerson, to avoid the pantheism he thought
he saw in Ruysbroek. Both impose checks, which, if inefficacious,
amount to nothing; if effective, are fatal to the very life of
mysticism,—both hold doctrines, to which they dare not give scope;
and both are, to some extent, implicated in the consequences they
repudiate by the principles they admit.

Mysticism in France contrasts strikingly, in this respect, with
mysticism in Germany. Speaking generally, it may be said that
France exhibits the mysticism of sentiment, Germany the mysticism
of thought. The French love to generalize and to classify. An
arrangement which can be expressed by a word, a principle which
can be crystallized into a sparkling maxim, they will applaud. But
with them conventionalism reigns paramount—society is ever present
to the mind of the individual—their sense of the ludicrous is
exquisitely keen. The German loves abstractions for their own
sake. To secure popularity for a visionary error in France, it
must be lucid and elegant as the language—it must be at least an
ingenious and intelligible falsehood; but in Germany, the most
grotesque inversions of thought and of expression will be found no
hindrance to its acceptability, and the most hopeless obscurity
may be pronounced its highest merit. In this respect, German
philosophy sometimes resembles Lycophron, who was so convinced
that unintelligibility was grandeur, as to swear he would hang
himself if a man were found capable of understanding his play of
_Cassandra_. Almost every later German mystic has been a secluded
student—almost every mystic of modern France has been a brilliant
conversationalist. The genius of mysticism rises, in Germany, in
the clouds of the solitary pipe; in France, it is a fashionable
Ariel, who hovers in the drawing-room, and hangs to the pendants
of the glittering chandelier. If Jacob Behmen had appeared in
France, he must have counted disciples by units, where in Germany
he reckoned them by hundreds. If Madame Guyon had been born in
Germany, rigid Lutheranism might have given her some annoyance;
but her earnestness would have redeemed her enthusiasm from
ridicule, and she would have lived and died the honoured precursor
of modern German Pietism. The simplicity and strength of purpose
which characterize so many of the German mystics, appear to much
advantage beside the vanity and affectation which have so
frequently attended the manifestations of mysticism in France. In
Germany, theosophy arose with the Reformation, and was as much a
theology as a science. In France, where the Reformation had been
suppressed, and where superstition had been ridiculed with such
success, the same love of the marvellous was most powerful with
the most irreligious—it filled the antechamber of Cagliostro with
impatient dandies and grandees, trembling, and yet eager to pry
into the future—too enlightened to believe in Christ, yet too
credulous to doubt the powers of a man before whose door fashion
drew, night after night, a line of carriages which filled the
street.

Note to page 245.

A full account of the proceedings against the Quietists will be found in the narrative above referred to and in Arnold’s Kirchen-und-Ketzer Geschichte, th. III. cap. xvii.

The motive of Père La Chaise in urging this prosecution appears to have been twofold: partly, to start heretics whom his Most Christian Majesty might magnificently hunt, and still more to weaken the Spanish party and embarrass the Pope, who was suspected of leaning toward the house of Austria. The audacity of the Jesuits—so formidable always, from their numbers, their union, their unscrupulousness, and now emboldened by support so powerful, struck all Rome with terror. A man widely reputed for sanctity, throughout a period of twenty years—an honoured guest within the walls of the Vatican—who had long enjoyed, and not yet forfeited, the warm friendship of the Head of the Church—was suddenly declared the most dangerous enemy to the faith of Christendom. To accomplish the ruin of this victim, a venerable pontiff was threatened with the most grievous insult which infallibility could suffer. Within a month, two hundred persons were thrown into the dungeons of the Inquisition,—and many of these were eminent for rank, for learning, or for piety. Only the grossly stupid or the scandalously dissolute could feel themselves secure. To hint a question concerning the justice of a single step in prosecutions remarkable, even at Rome, for the baseness and illegality of their agents and their acts—to live a quiet and retiring life—to appear infrequently at confession or at mass,—these were circumstances sufficient to render any man suspected of Quietism; and if the informer were hungry, or a private enemy alert, from suspicion to conviction was but a step.

But the persecutors were destined to meet with many mortifications in their course. Molinos and his friend Petrucci—a bishop, and afterwards a cardinal—defended themselves, on their first summons, with such skill and intrepidity, that the writings which had been circulated against them were condemned as libellous. The case of Petrucci represents that of the great majority against whom the charge of Quietism was brought. Not an accusation could be substantiated, save this,—that blameless as his life might be, he had grown remiss in some of those outward observances which are the pride of Pharisaic sanctity. Thus defeated at the outset, the Jesuits were reinforced and rendered victorious by the falsehoods of D’Etrees, who refused to hear a word Molinos had to say in defence of his own writings. The Count and Countess Vespiniani were arrested, with other persons, to the number of seventy. They were accused of omitting the exterior practices of religion, and of giving themselves to solitude and prayer. The Countess bravely answered, that she had discovered her manner of devotion only to her confessor; he must have betrayed her; who but idiots would confess, if confession was made the engine of the persecutor—if no secret was sacred—if to confess might be to lie at the mercy of a villain? Henceforward she would confess to God alone. A rank so high must be respected. Words so bold were dangerous. So the Vespiniani were set free. The circular letter sent out against the Quietists was treated with indifference by most of the Italian bishops—not unleavened, many of them, by this obnoxious kind of piety. Nay, worse! for once, an epistle from the Inquisition was published. The unfortunate letter escaped somehow—was translated into Italian—all Rome was reading it. The world looked in on the procedure of the Holy Office, to the shame and bitter vexation of its holy men. It was said that the Inquisition collected some twenty thousand letters, or copies of letters, sent and received by Molinos, and that when he was arrested, twenty crowns’ worth of letters addressed to him were seized at the post-office. So extended was the influence of the heretic—so little likely, therefore, to perish with him. Some ecclesiastics had the candour to admit that most of the Quietists showed themselves better instructed than their accusers, and confronted their judges so ably, with passages, authorities, and arguments, that they could only be silenced by authority and force.

The letter of Cardinal Caraccioli to Innocent, about the Quietists, represents them as persons who attempt passive mental prayer and ‘contemplatio,’ without the previous preparation of the ‘via purgativa.’ Dreadful to relate, some of them had been known to leave their rosaries unfingered, to refuse to make the sign of the cross, to declare crucifixes rather in their way than otherwise! They trusted rather to their inward attraction than to directors. Some, though laymen, and though married, communed daily—an ominous sign—for it betokened the lowering (in their minds, at least) of that high partition wall, which Rome had made so strong, between clergy and laity—between the religious par excellence and the vulgar herd of Christians, who were to be saved only through the former. See Bausset’s Histoire de Fénélon, liv. ii.; Pièces Justificatives, No. II.

Note to page 259.

Fénélon could with ease bring from the arsenal of tradition even more proofs than he needed for the establishment of his doctrine. No prevarication or sophistry could conceal the fact that Bernard, Albertus Magnus, Francis de Sales, Theresa, Catharine of Genoa, and other saints, had used language concerning pure love, authenticating more than all that Fénélon was solicitous to defend. Thus much was proven,—even subtracting those passages which Fénélon unwittingly cited from an edition of De Sales’ Entretiens, said to be full of interpolations. The spiritual history of Friar Laurent and of Francis de Sales furnished actual examples of the most extreme case Fénélon was willing to put. Bossuet’s true answer was the reply he gave on the question to Madame de la Maisonfort,—such rare and extraordinary cases should be left out of our consideration, they should not be drawn within the range of possible experience, even for Christians considerably advanced. (Phelipeaux, liv. i. pp. 165-176.) In dispute with Fénélon, instead of admitting the fact, as with La Maisonfort, the polemic gets uppermost, and he tries very dishonestly to explain away the language of De Sales, while he misrepresents and garbles that of Fénélon. See Cinquième Lettre en Réponse à divers Ecrits; Première Lettre en Réponse à celle de M. L’Evêque de Meaux; Maximes des Saints, art. v.

Fénélon draws a subtile distinction between the object of love and the motive of love. That love in God which renders him our eternal blessedness, is among the objects of our love—for God has so revealed himself, but is not the motive of it. (Max. des Saints, art. iv.) Do we desire happiness less, he asks, because we desire it from a worthy motive,—i.e., as desired by God? Do we extinguish hope by exalting and regulating it? (Entretiens sur la Religion; Œuvres, tom. i. p. 35.) If any one of us knew that he should be annihilated at death, ought he less to love the infinitely Good? Is not eternal life a gift which God is free to grant or to withhold? Shall the love of the Christian who is to have eternal life be less than that of him who anticipates annihilation, just because the love of God to him is so much more? Shall such a gift serve only to make love interested? (Sur le Pur Amour, xix. Compare also Max. des Saints, art. 10, 11, 12; Correspondance, let. 43.)

Fénélon is very careful to state that disinterested love is put to its most painful proof only in rare and extreme cases,—that the love which is interested is not a sin, only a lower religious stage, and that he who requires that staff is to beware how he throws it aside prematurely, ambitious of a spiritual perfection which may be beyond his reach. Bossuet endeavoured to show that if Fénélon’s doctrine were true, any love except the disinterested was a crime. (Instructions et Avis, &c., xx.; Sur le Pur Amour, p. 329; Max. des Saints, art. iii., and sundry qualifications of importance, concerning self-abandonment in the ‘épreuves extrêmes,’ art. ix.)

Note to page 259.

Such is the explanation in the letter to La Maisonfort. But Fénélon is not always—perhaps, could not possibly be—quite consistent with himself on this most delicate of questions. Beyond a doubt, the attempt practically to apply this doctrine concerning reflex acts constitutes the morbid element in his system—is the one refinement above all others fatally unnatural. There is great truth in Fénélon’s warnings against nervous, impatient introspection. Against an evil so prevalent, and so constantly fostered by the confessional and the directors, it was high time that some one should protest. But, alas! not only does Fénélon himself uphold, most zealously, that very directorship, but this strain after a love perfectly disinterested tempts the aspirant to be continually hunting inwardly after traces of the hated self, which will never quite vanish. Happy, according to Fénélon, is that religionist who can sacrifice, not only himself, but the sacrifice of himself—who burns the burnt offering—who gives up the consciousness of having given himself up—and who has reached, without knowing it, the pinnacle of Christian perfection. The reader will find specimens of his more guarded language in the letter referred to in the Instructions et Avis, &c. xx.; Max. des Saints, art. xiii.; Lettres Spirituelles, xiii. This last, a letter to Sœur Charlotte de St. Cyprien, is of importance, as containing definitions of mystical terms, similar in substance to those given in the Maximes, and moreover, highly approved by Bossuet, a year after the conferences at Issy. The strongest expressions are found in the Instructions et Avis, xxii. xxiii. He says,—Pour consommer le sacrifice de purification en nous des dons de Dieu, il faut donc achever de détruire l’holocauste; il faut tout perdre, même l’abandon aperçu par lequel on se voit livré à sa perte.—P. 342. Compare the allusion to the unconscious prayer of St. Anthony, Max. des Saints, art. xxi.

Note to page 259.

L’activité que les mystiques blâment n’est pas l’action réelle et la co-opération de l’âme à la grâce; c’est seulement une crainte inquiète, ou une ferveur empressée qui recherche les dons de Dieu pour sa propre consolation.—Lettres Spirituelles, xiii. So also, in the letter to La Maisonfort, he shows that the state of passivity does not preclude a great number of distinct acts. This is what the mystics call co-operating with God without activity of our own—a subtlety which those may seek to understand who care. Fénélon means to forbid a selfish isolation, which, on pretence of quietude, neglects daily duty. True repose in God calmly discharges such obligations as they come. We have seen an example of this in St. Theresa. Fénélon is not prepared to go the length of John of the Cross, who denies our co-operation altogether.—Maximes des Saints, art. xxx. and xxix. Ils ne font plus d’actes empressés et marqués par une secousse inquiète: ils font des actes si paisibles et si uniformes, que ces actes, quoique très-réels, très-successifs, et même interrompus, leur paraissent ou un seul acte sans interruption, ou un repos continuel.

Fénélon is at any time ready to endorse all the counsels of John of the Cross, as to the duty of leaving behind (outre-passer) all apparitions, sounds, tastes, everything visionary, sensuous, or theurgic. With the grosser forms of mysticism he has no sympathy. He even endeavours to represent St. Theresa as an advocate of the purer and more refined mysticism, adducing the scarce-attainable seventh Morada, and overlooking the sensuous character of the preceding six. Theresa might, in the abstract, rate the visionless altitude above the valley of vision; but she preferred, for herself, unquestionably, the valley to the mountain. (Max. des Saints, xix.; Lettres Spirituelles, xiv. xvi. xvii.) In a letter on extraordinary gifts, he repeats the precept of John—‘Aller toujours par le non-voir;’ and ‘outre-passer les grands dons, et marcher dans la pure foi comme si on ne les avait pas reçus.’ He consigns the soul, in like manner, to a blank abstraction—to what Luther would have called ‘a void tedium.’ Tout ce qui est goût et ferveur sensible, image créée, lumière distincte et aperçue, donne une fausse confiance, et fait une impression trop vive; on les reçoit avec joie, et on les quitte avec peine. Au contraire, dans la nudité de la pure foi, on ne doit rien voir; on n’a plus en soi ni pensée ni volonté; on trouve tout dans cette simplicité générale, sans s’arrêter à rien de distinct; on ne possède rien, mais on est possédé.—Lettre xxiii. The very acts of which Contemplation is made up, are, says Fénélon—‘Si simples, si directs, si paisibles, si uniformes, qu’ils n’ont rien de marqué par où l’âme puisse les distinguer.’—Max. des Saints, art. xxi. What such acts can be, must remain for ever a mystery unfathomable. It is for these inexplicable ‘actes distincts’ that the convenient ‘facilité spéciale’ is provided. (Correspondance, lettre 43; comp. Lettres Spirituelles, xiii. 448.)

Fénélon is also careful to guard his mysticism against the pretences of special revelation and any troublesome insubordination on the part of the ‘inner light,’ or l’attrait intérieur. The said ‘attrait,’ he justly observes, ‘n’est point une inspiration miraculeuse et prophétique, qui rende l’âme infaillible, ni impeccable, ni indépendante, de la direction des pasteurs; ce n’est que la grâce, qui est sans cesse prévenante dans tous les justes, et qui est plus spéciale dans les âmes élevées par l’amour désintéressé,’ &c.—Loc. cit. p. 450; Max. des Saints, art. xxix. and vii.

Note to page 262.

Fénélon gives his reasons for refusing to affix his approval to Bossuet’s book, in letters to Tronson and Madame de Maintenon, and in the Réponse. (Correspondance, lettres 52, 53, 57; Réponse à la Relation, chap, v.) It was a strong point for Fénélon against Bossuet that the latter had administered to Madame Guyon the sacraments, and granted her a favourable certificate, after reading the very books in which he professed afterwards to discover the most flagitious designs. In thinking better, therefore, of her intentions than of her language, Fénélon was no more her partisan or defender than Bossuet himself had been, up to that point. The act of submission Bossuet made her sign was not a retractation of error, but simply a declaration that she had never held any of the errors condemned in the pastoral letter,—that she always meant to write in a sense altogether orthodox, and had no conception that any dangerous interpretation could be put upon the terms which, in her ignorance, she had employed. (Réponse à la Relation, chap. i.) Phelipeaux sees in everything Fénélon wrote—the notes for the Maxims—the memoranda he sent to Bossuet, only one purpose—an insane resolve to defend Madame Guyon at all costs. He chooses to imagine that every step taken by her was secretly dictated by Fénélon. In fact, however, from the time the first suspicions arose, Fénélon began to withdraw from Madame Guyon his former intimacy. Nothing could exceed his caution in the avoidance of all implication with one whose language was susceptible of such fatal misconstruction. He could probably have taken no better course. He endeavoured to retain the controversy about the real question, that she might be forgotten. But it soon became evident that he himself was the party attacked, and with a virulence for which the scandals attributed to Madame Guyon furnished an instrument too tempting to be neglected. The charges against Madame Guyon increased in magnitude—not with her resistance, for she made none—but with that of Fénélon. (Réponse, xxiii. lxxxiv. lx.)

Note to page 264.

The motives with which Fénélon wrote and published the Maxims are fully stated by himself. It was not to defend Madame Guyon, but to rescue the doctrine of pure love, threatened with destruction by the growing prejudice against the religion of the ‘inward way.’ It was not to excuse the Quietists, but to preserve, by due distinctions, souls attached to the true mysticism, from the illusions of the false. It was to give their full and legitimate scope to those venerable principles which a heretical Quietism was said to have abused. Mysticism was not to be extinguished by denying the truth it contained. Let, then, the true be separated from the false. The Maxims were believed by Fénélon to contain no position contrary to the articles of Issy. The passages which cannot be reconciled with the limitations imposed by those articles are not his own, but quotations from De Sales and others. The Andalusian Illuminati had rendered the greatest saints suspected. Theresa, Alvarez, John of the Cross, stood in need of defenders. Ruysbroek, whom Bellarmine called the great contemplatist; Tauler, the Apostle of Germany, had required and had found champions, the one in Dionysius the Carthusian, the other in Blosius. The Cardinal Berulle felt compelled to enter the lists on behalf of St. Francis de Sales, for suspicions had been cast upon the wisdom of that eminent saint. Such examples might well alarm all those whose religion was embued with mysticism,—all those to whom a faith of that type was a necessity. Let it be openly declared where the path of safety lies, and where the dangers commence. The Maxims were to furnish a via media between the extreme of those who repudiated mystical theology altogether, and the excesses of the false mystics. The doctrines stigmatized as false throughout the Maxims, are what Fénélon supposed to be the tenets of Molinos, judging from the sixty-eight propositions condemned at Rome. The Faux, therefore, which opposes to the Vrai is, for the most part, a mere chimera—made up of doctrines really believed by scarcely any one,—only taught, perhaps, now and then, by designing priests to women, for the purposes of seduction. See the ‘Avertissement’ to the Maxims; Première Lettre en Réponse, &c. p. 111; Correspondance, lettre 59; and the letter on the Maxims, to the Pope, Phelipeaux, p. 239.

Note to page 265.

Among the expelled was the brilliant, unmanageable Madame de la Maisonfort—the last woman in the world to have been shut up in the small monotony of St. Cyr. The history of mysticism at St. Cyr is a miniature of its history at large. The question by which it is tried is simply practical. Will it subordinate itself? If so, let it flourish. If not, root it out. Jean d’Avila, in his Audi, Filia, et Vide, has a section entitled Des Fausses Révélations. The whole question turns on this point. Is the visionary obedient to director, superior, &c.? If so, the visions are of God. If not, the visions are of the Devil. (Œuvres du B. Jean D’Avila, Audi, Filia, et Vide, chapp. 50-55.)

Madame Guyon, in becoming a religious instructress, as she did, only followed examples honoured by the Romish Church. Angela de Foligni, the two Catharines of Siena and of Genoa, St. Theresa, and others, had become the spiritual guides of numbers, both men and women, lay and ecclesiastic. At another juncture the kind of revival introduced by Madame Guyon might have met with encouragement. But her tendency was precisely that of which the times were least tolerant, and her disposition to follow her inward attraction rather than the counsels of prelates was magnified to proportions so portentous as to exclude all hope. The mysticism of Fénélon, judged by the test of obedience, should certainly have been spared. With an anxiety almost nervous, he inculcates wherever he can, those precepts of abject servility towards the director which are so agreeable to his Church. Wherever the director is in question, we lose sight of Fénélon, we see only the priest. But neither his own sincere professions of submission, nor his constant effort to place every one else under the feet of some ecclesiastic or other, could save him from a condemnation pronounced, not on religious, but political grounds.

In this respect Fénélon was anything but the esprit fort which the scepticism of a later age so fervently admired. His letters on religious subjects abound in directions for absolute obedience, and in warnings against the exercise of thought and judgment on our own account. Though Madame de la Maisonfort knew herself utterly unfit for the religious vocation which Madame de Maintenon wished her to embrace, Fénélon could tell her that her repugnance, her anguish, her tears, were nothing, opposed to the decision of five courtly ecclesiastics, affirming that she had the vocation. He writes to say, La vocation ne se manifeste pas moins par la décision d’autrui que par notre propre attrait.—Correspondance, lettre 19. See also Lettres Spirituelles, 18, 19, 169. The inward attraction presents some perplexity. In one instance it is only another word for taste (Ibid. 35), and in another place the attraction of grace is equivalent to an act of observation and judgment (Ibid. 176). Here, with so many mystics, Fénélon can only follow the ‘moi,’ from which he fancies he escapes (441). The knot of these interior difficulties is cut by the directorship.

If Fénélon speaks uncertainly as to what is the inward attraction, and what is not, much more would the majority of mystics be sorely perplexed in their own case. The mystic, bewildered and wearied with intense self-scrutiny, sees all swim before his eyes. He can be sure of nothing. Whatever alternative he chooses, he has no sooner acted on the choice than he finds self in the act, and fancies the other road the right one. He is distressed by finding inclination and inward attraction changing, while he gazes, into each other, and back again, times without number. He is afraid to do what he likes—this may be self-pleasing. He is afraid to do what he does not like—for this may be perverseness—some culpable self-will, at least. The life of a devotee, so conscientious and so unfortunate, is rendered tolerable only by the director. The man who can put an end to this inward strife about trifles—which are anything but trifles to the sufferer—is welcomed as an angel from heaven. Casuistry, the creature of the confessional, renders its parent a necessity. Fénélon laments the abuses of the system, but he will rather believe that miracles will be continually wrought, to rescue the faithful from such mischiefs, than question (as bolder mystics, like Harphius had done) the institution itself. Even the mistakes and bad passions of superiors will be wrought into blessings for the obedient. (Sur la Direction, pp. 677, 678.)

Footnote 334:

O man, wouldst thou be grafted, and to the heavenly soil transplanted?
then must thou first thy branches wild hew quite away, that kindly
fruits may come forth in God’s image.

Footnote 335:

As far as his doctrine differs from that of Madame Guyon, it is for
the worse, because he approaches more nearly the extreme language of
some of the orthodox mystics in his communion.

Footnote 336:

This Dialogue of Malaval’s, which goes much beyond the mysticism of
Molinos, was approved by the Sorbonne, and found so conformable to the
teachings of St. Theresa, that the translation of it was dedicated to
the bare-footed Carmelites. The unobtrusive and not unqualified
mysticism of Molinos was stigmatised by the new epithet of Quietism,
and condemned as deadly error. The extravagant and wonder-working
mysticism of Theresa was extolled as the angelic life. See the
_Account of Molinos and the Quietists_, appended to the
_Autobiography_ of Madame Guyon: translated, I believe, from a French
work, entitled, _Recueil de Diverses Pièces concernant le Quiétisme et
les Quiétistes_.

Footnote 337:

Michelet, Priests, Women, and Families, p. 74.

Footnote 338:

See Note on p. 276.

Footnote 339:

_Upham_, vol. ii. pp. 3, &c. We find among these persons of rank a
religion of some vitality—no court-fashion merely. It was to the
_Introduction à la Vie Dévote_ (1608) of St. Francis de Sales that
Romanism was indebted for such hold as it really had on the upper
classes. None of the great ecclesiastical writers of France—not even
that darling of the fifteenth century, the _Imitatio Christi_, could
win the ears of people of the world. In the _Introduction_, however,
religion appeared neither ruthlessly stern, nor hopelessly
fantastical. It was not, on the one side, scowling, unkempt, sordid,
morose; it was not, on the other, impalpable, supersensuous, utterly
unintelligible, as well as undesirable, to worldly common sense.
Fashion and devotion met; piety and politeness embraced each other.
The _Introduction_ leaves to others the pains and raptures of the
mystic. It is written for the Marthas, not the Marys. Its readers,
personified in Philothea, are not supposed to be covetous of any
extraordinary gifts. De Sales possessed a lively fancy, and the tender
religious sentiment of his book, graced and lightened by its rainbow
illustrations, was a bright-winged Psyche, welcome everywhere. These
illustrations are drawn, sometimes from the farms, the flower-valleys,
and the snow-peaks of his native Savoy; sometimes from fabulous
natural history, from classic story, from the legends of the Church,
or the forms and usages of the world,—oftenest of all, from the ways
of infants and children, and from the love of mothers. St. Beuve
happily characterises the work, as ‘un livre qui, sur la table d’une
femme comme il faut ou d’un gentilhomme poli de ce temps-là, ne
chassait pas absolument le volume de Montaigne, et, attendait, sans le
fuir, le volume d’Urfé.’—_Causeries du Lundi_, tom. vii. p. 216.

Footnote 340:

This Harlay had owed his archbishopric to his libertinism in the days
of Madame de Montespan. His sun was now setting, ingloriously enough,
under the decent régime of the Maintenon, and there was nothing for it
but to atone for the scandals of his life and diocese by exemplary
rigour in matters of doctrine. The letters sent, and the documents
shown him, were the fabrication of La Mothe and his creature the
scrivener Gautier. They forged a letter from Marseilles, pretending
that La Combe had slept in the same chamber with Madame Guyon—and also
eaten meat in Lent. La Combe was further accused of having embraced
and taught the heresy of Molinos.

The real letters which followed Madame Guyon from the scenes of her
former activity breathe no suspicion of her character or motives. The
Bishop of Geneva, in a letter quoted by Fénélon, declared that his
only complaint against her was the indiscreet zeal with which she
everywhere propagated truths which she believed serviceable to the
Church. With that exception, ‘he esteemed her infinitely, and
entertained for her the highest imaginable regard.’ This was in 1683.
In 1688 he prohibited her books. But even in 1695, the same bishop
repeats his praise of her piety and morals, and declares that his
conscience never would have suffered him to speak of her in other than
respectful language.—See _Memoirs for the History of Madame de
Maintenon_ (London, 1757), vol. III. bk. xi. c. 2. _Autobiography_,
part III. chapp. i. ii. iii. Fénélon’s _Réponse à la Relation sur le
Quiétisme_, chap. i.

Footnote 341:

_Memoirs for the History of Madame de Maintenon_, bk. ix. Madame
Guyon’s doctrine entered St. Cyr while the absolute vows were yet
under discussion.

Footnote 342:

Memoirs for the History of Madame de Maintenon, bk. xi. chap. v.

Footnote 343:

_Autobiography_, part III. chap. ix. Fénélon declares that her
explanations at these interviews were such as to satisfy him of the
harmlessness and orthodoxy of her intention. She appeared to him often
extravagant or questionable in expression, from her ignorance; but so
favoured of God, that the most learned divine might gather spiritual
wisdom from her lips. She told him of certain instantaneous
supernatural communications, which came and vanished, she knew not
how. Yet, like John of the Cross, she did not rest on these, but
passed on into the obscure path of pure faith. For this he praised
her, and believed that though these experiences were illusory, a
spirit so lowly and so obedient had been faithful to grace throughout,
such involuntary deception notwithstanding.—_Réponse à la Relation sur
le Quiétisme_, chap. i. 10-13.

Footnote 344:

She still speaks, however, of the ‘_sense_’ vouchsafed her of the
state of the souls given to her, even when they were at a distance;
and of communication in God with those to whom the Lord united her by
the tie of spiritual maternity. _Autobiography_, part III. ch. viii.
Nothing was more likely to open her eyes to the questionable character
of some of her experiences, and to the unguarded nature of many of her
expressions, than the kindly yet searching inquiries of a man like
Fénélon, qualified by temperament to enter into her feelings, and a
master in mystical theology. Mr. Upham seems to me greatly to overrate
the influence of Madame Guyon on Fénélon. To her fancy, her
imagination might at times depict him as a spiritual son: he was, in
fact, a friendly judge.

Footnote 345:

When called to separate the true mysticism from the false in the
writings of Madame Guyon, Bossuet was not only ignorant of Tauler,
Ruysbroek, Harphius, and others; he had not even read Francis de Sales
or John of the Cross. Fénélon, at his request, sent him a collection
of passages from Suso, Harphius, Ruysbroek, Tauler, Catharine of
Genoa, St. Theresa, John of the Cross, Alvarez, De Sales, and Madame
de Chantal. With just indignation does Fénélon expose the artifice by
which Bossuet afterwards attempted to turn this confidence against
him.—_Réponse à la Relation sur le Quiétisme_, chap. ii. 18-27.

Footnote 346:

History of Madame de Maintenon, bk. XI. chap. vii.

Footnote 347:

_History of Madame de Maintenon_, bk. XI. chap. vii. Bausset,
_Histoire de Fénélon_, liv. ii. p. 295. The high opinion entertained
of Fénélon by Madame de Maintenon was, as yet, unshaken. She knew that
though the friend of Madame Guyon, he was not her advocate. But she
was called to side with the man of charity or the man of zeal—the
liberal man or the bigot; and the issue could not long be doubtful.
Fénélon early saw the signs of danger. We find him striving to
moderate the enthusiasm of Madame de la Maisonfort—to reconcile her to
the regulations of Godet—to repress her indiscreet zeal in behalf of
her cousin, Madame Guyon.—_Correspondance de Fénélon_, Lettres 24, 26,
29, 30.

Footnote 348:

_Autobiography_, part III. chap. xiii. Phelipeaux gives in full the
correspondence on both sides, _Relation de l’Origine, du Progrès et de
la Condamnation du Quiétisme répandu en France_ (1732), liv. i. pp.
73, &c. His account abounds in misrepresentations, and does little
more, in the first part, than echo the _Relation sur le Quiétisme_ of
Bossuet, to whom the abbé was devoted. But his minuteness of detail,
and the copious insertion of important letters and documents on either
side, give to the heavy narrative considerable value. In a subsequent
interview between Bossuet and Madame Guyon, she declared herself
unable to pray for any particular thing—the forgiveness of her sins,
for instance. To do so was to fail in absolute abandonment and
disinterestedness. Bossuet was shocked. Madame Guyon promised and
meant, to be all submission; but conscience would be unmanageable at
times. Bossuet writes her long, sensible, hard-headed letters, in
which, without much difficulty, he exposes her error, and leaves her
no ground to stand on. She, however, must still humbly suggest that
the exercise of love embraces all petitions, and that as there is a
love without reflexion, so there may be a prayer without reflexion—a
substantial prayer, comprehending all others.—_Phelipeaux_, p. 111.

Footnote 349:

Her request was made to Madame de Maintenon for commissioners, half
clerical, half lay, to examine into the scandals which had been set
afloat against her character.—_Phelipeaux_, liv. i. p. 114.
_Autobiography_, part III. chap. xv.

Footnote 350:

_Autobiography_, chapp. xvi. xvii. See also her letter to the three
commissioners, in _Phelipeaux_, p. 117. Harlay heard with indignation
of this Conference at Issy, to decide upon a heresy which had been
unearthed in his diocese. He endeavoured to rouse the suspicions of
Louis, but in vain. He determined himself to condemn the writings of
Madame Guyon, before the Commissioners could come to a decision.
Madame de Maintenon informed Bossuet, who paid a visit without loss of
time to his metropolitan, complimented him on the censure he was about
to fulminate, gave every explanation, and took his departure with
polite assurances that the verdict of Issy would but reiterate the
condemnation pronounced by the vigilant Archbishop of Paris. So
completely was the cause of Madame Guyon prejudged.—_Phelipeaux_, p.
125.

Footnote 351:

_Autobiography_, part III. chapp. xviii. xix. _Réponse à la Relation_,
&c., I. ii. 3. _Upham_, vol. II. chapp. x. and xi.

Footnote 352:

The articles at first proposed to Fénélon for his signature were
thirty in number. The 12th and 13th, the 33rd and 34th, were wanting.
He said that he could only sign these thirty articles _as they were_,
‘_par déférence_,’ and against his persuasion. Two days afterwards,
when the four additional articles were laid before him, he declared
himself ready to sign them with his blood. The 34th article is the
most important of the four, as bearing directly on the most critical
question arising from the doctrine of disinterested love. It allows
that doctrine expressly, if words have meaning, and occupies all the
ground Fénélon himself was concerned to maintain in its defence.
(_Entretiens sur la Religion_, Fén. Œuvres, tom. i. p. 34.) The
article is in substance as follows:—On peut inspirer aux âmes peinées
et vraiment humbles un consentement à la volonté de Dieu, quand même,
par une supposition très-fausse, au lieu des biens éternels promis aux
justes, il les tiendrait dans les tourments éternels, sans néanmoins
les priver de sa grâce et de son amour.—_Réponse à la Relation_, &c.,
chap. iii. _Phelipeaux_, liv. i. pp. 131, 135-137.

Footnote 353:

See Note on p. 278.

Footnote 354:

See second Note on p. 278.

Footnote 355:

See Note on p. 279.

Footnote 356:

Witness the panegyrics of Bossuet on Theresa and John of the Cross.
Compare also their different verdicts on the former. Fénélon says,
writing to Madame de Maintenon, ‘Quelque respect et quelque admiration
que j’aie pour Sainte Thérèse, je n’aurais jamais voulu donner au
public tout ce qu’elle a écrit.’—_Correspondance_, 31. Bossuet,
writing to Madame Guyon, says, ‘Je n’ai jamais hésité un seul moment
sur les états de Sainte Thérèse, parceque je n’y ai rien trouvé, que
je ne trouvasse aussi dans l’Ecriture,’ &c.—_Phelipeaux_, liv. i. p.
104. In the _Instructions sur les Etats d’Oraison_, Bossuet, in
speaking of the passive state, had allowed of certain miraculous
suspensions (impuissances) from which Fénelon shrinks—which he would
have located in some section _Faux_ of his _Maxims_—and to which
Noailles refused his approval.—_Réponse à la Relation_, xxviii. and
lxii.

Footnote 357:

Her letter to Bossuet furnishes a fair justification of this retreat
to Paris.—_Phelipeaux_, liv. i. p. 152. It gratifies our curiosity to
learn from this authority what books were seized when Desgrès, the
detective, entered the little house in the Faubourg St. Antoine, in
the name of the king. There were some plays of Molière, some romances,
such as _John of Paris_ and _Richard Lion-heart_, but these, said
Madame Guyon, belonged to the lacqueys of her son, a lieutenant in the
guards. But she acknowledged a _Griseldis_ and _Don Quixote_ as her
books. It is pleasing to find our fair saint, so far of like passions
with ourselves, amused with Sancho, and pitying Griseldis,—herself a
patient sufferer at the hands of blinded, pitiless men.

Footnote 358:

See Note on p. 280.

Footnote 359:

See second Note on p. 280.

Footnote 360:

Bausset, _Histoire de Fénélon_, liv. iii. p. 45. See also Note on p.
281.

Footnote 361:

Bausset, _Hist. de Fénélon_, liv. iii. 47. A minute, though very
partial account of all the squabbles and intrigues at Rome, from first
to last, may be read in _Phelipeaux_.—See also _Memoirs of Madame de
Maintenon_, xi. 19. _Corr. de Fénélon_, lettre 108.

Footnote 362:

Bausset, iii. 48-50; Aimé-Martin, _Etudes sur la Vie de Fénélon_, p.
14.

Footnote 363:

Bausset, 53-4; Mem. of Maintenon, XI. 20; Aimé-Martin, 15.

Footnote 364:

Bausset, 59-61. The means to which Bossuet could stoop—the falsehoods
he could coolly repeat, after detection, as though nothing had
happened—the misquotation, and misrepresentation—the constant reply to
awkwardly pressing arguments by malicious personalities—all these
things are exposed in Fénélon’s _Lettres en Réponse_, and in the
_Réponse_ itself. They are bad enough; but the student of controversy
is accustomed to this imperturbable lying, to these arts of
insinuation. The most detestable feature of all in the part played by
Bossuet, lies in that sleek cant and tearful unction with which he
calumniates—as though it almost broke his heart to write what he
exults in writing. Well might Fénélon request that he would not weep
over him so profusely while he tore him in pieces, and desire fewer
tears and more fair play! See the Preface to the _Réponse_; _Réponse_,
59; and _Réponse aux Remarques_, § vi.

Footnote 365:

Bausset, iii. 68, 69; Upham, vol. ii. p. 289.

Footnote 366:

Bausset, 77, 78.

Footnote 367:

Upham, vol. ii. ch. 18.

CHAPTER III.

All opinions and notions, though never so true, about things
spiritual, may be the very matter of heresy, when they are adhered
to as the principle and end, with obstinacy and acquiescence; and,
on the contrary, opinions and speculations, however false, may be
the subject of orthodoxy, and very well consist with it, when they
are not stiffly adhered to, but only employed in the service of
disposing the soul to the faith of entire resignation, which is the
only true orthodoxy wherein there can be no heresy nor capital
errours.—POIRET.

WILLOUGBY. I think, Atherton, you have been somewhat too indulgent on that question of disinterested love. To me it appears sheer presumption for any man to pretend that he loves God without any regard to self, when his very being, with its power to know and love, is a gift—when he has nothing that he did not receive,—when his salvation is wholly of favour, and not of merit,—and when, from the very first, he has been laid under an ever-increasing weight of obligation beyond all estimate. On this matter Oliver Cromwell appears to me a better divine than Fénélon, when he writes, ‘I have received plentiful wages beforehand, and I know that I shall never earn the least mite.’

GOWER. Yet Fénélon bases disinterested love on the doctrine which denies to man all possibility of merit.

ATHERTON. I think Willoughby looks at Fénélon’s teaching concerning disinterested love too much apart from his times and his Church. Grant that this disinterestedness is a needless and unattainable refinement, savouring of that high-flown, ultra-human devotion so much affected by Romish saintship—still it has its serviceable truth, as opposed to the servile and mercenary religionism which the Romanist system must ordinarily produce.

WILLOUGHBY. It is the less of two evils, perhaps; but, let divines say what they will, men cannot abjure self as such a doctrine requires. Man may ask it of his fellow-men, but God does not require it of them, when he tells them He would have all men to be saved. That inalienable desire of individual well-being, to which God appeals, these theologians disdain.

GOWER. But man comes into this world to live for something higher than happiness.

WILLOUGHBY. That depends on what you mean by the word. Of course, life has a purpose far above that snug animalism which some men call happiness. In opposition to that, the outcry revived of late against happiness, as a motive, has its full right. But I mean by happiness, man’s true well-being—that of his higher, not his lower nature—that of his nature, not for a moment, but for ever. With such happiness, duty, however stern, must always ultimately coincide. I say, man was formed to desire such a realisation of the possibilities of his nature, that to bid him cease or slacken in this desire is a cruelty and a folly, and that the will of God ought never for an instant to be conceived as hostile to such well-being. If He were, why hear we of Redemption? And I may point with reverence to the Incarnate Perfectness, ‘who, for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross;’ he would die to know the blessedness of restoring to us our life. Only the most sublime self-sacrifice could account such a result a recompense; and that recompense he did not refuse to keep constantly in view.

ATHERTON. Your dispute is very much a question of words. True self-annihilation certainly does not consist in being without a personal aim, but in suppressing all that within us which would degrade that aim below the highest.

GOWER. The Quietists are right in undervaluing, as they do, mere pleasurable feeling in religion.

ATHERTON. Quite so: in as far as they mean to say by such depreciation that God may be as truly near and gracious in spiritual sorrow as in spiritual joy,—that inward delights and blissful states of mind are not to be put virtually in the place of Christ, as a ground of trust—that the witness of the Spirit does not evince itself in the emotional nature merely, but is realised in the general consciousness of a divine life, which is its own evidence. But I think the Quietists too much overlook the fact that peace, rising at times to solemn joy, is after all, the normal state of the Christian life, and as such, always a legitimate object of desire.

GOWER. As to disinterested love, once more, may we not take Bunyan as a good example of the mean between our two extremes? When in prison, and uncertain whether he might not soon be condemned to die, the thought came into his mind:—Suppose God should withdraw Himself at the very last moment—fail to support me at the gallows—abandon me. But he resisted the temptation like a man. He tells how he said within himself, ‘If God doth not come in (to comfort me), I will leap off the ladder even blindfold into eternity, sink or swim, come heaven, come hell. It was my duty,’ he declared, ‘to stand to His word, whether He would ever look upon me, or save me at the last, or not.’

WILLOUGHBY. I can understand Bunyan. He was driven to that self-abandonment, and his faith made its brave stand there; he did not seek it. But the Quietists would have us cultivate, as the habit of Christian perfection, that self-oblivion which is, in fact, only our resource in the hottest moment of temptation. Why shut ourselves up in the castle-keep, if not an outwork has been carried?

ATHERTON. What a torrent of cant and affectation must have been set a flowing when Quietism became the fashion for awhile! What self-complacent chatter about self-annihilation; and how easily might the detail of spiritual maladies and imaginary sins be made to minister to display! Is it not thus Pope describes Affectation?—how she

Faints into airs, and languishes with pride,
On the rich quilt sinks with becoming woe
Wrapt in a gown for sickness, and for show.

GOWER. That reminds me of Zoilus, pretending to be ill, that he might exhibit to his friends the new purple counterpane just come from Alexandria.

WILLOUGHBY. But I can imagine some, in earnest, seeking refuge in Quietism—doing so rather in desperation than in aspiration—heart sick, weary of the world. Such would find but cold comfort. In vain would they be surrounded with offers of supersensible manifestations, divine touches, tastes, illapses—ethereal, super-angelic—not to say superhuman, fare. Craving some tangible consolation, some food adapted to their nature, they would be mocked with these pictures of a feast,—with promise of the sustenance proper only to some other race of creatures.

ATHERTON. As though one should feed a sick lion on gingerbread and liqueurs.

GOWER. Or one might liken such poor disappointed creatures to the lamb brought into the churches on St. Agnes’ day, reclined on its cushion fringed with gold, its ears and tail decked with gay ribbon,—bleating to church music—petted and adorned, in a manner to it most unintelligible and unsatisfying—and seeming, to the ear of the satirist, to cry all the while,—

Alack, and alas!
What’s all this white damask to daisies and grass!

KATE. Helen and I were much interested in that old book you lent us, Mr. Atherton, The Life of Mistress Antonia Bourignon,[368] an excellent woman, shamefully persecuted.

ATHERTON. I think so. She took upon herself, you see, to rebuke the Church as well as the world.

MRS. ATHERTON. And had large property left her, which excited the cupidity of those Fathers of the Oratory, who gave her such trouble.

GOWER. I never heard of her before.

ATHERTON. Her Quietism was very similar to that of Madame Guyon, but she was not, like her, mixed up with a controversy famous in history. She found, however, a faithful Fénélon in her accomplished disciple, Peter Poiret,[369] a liberal and large-minded Quietist, whose mysticism may be said to occupy a position between that of the German Theology and our English Platonists.

WILLOUGHBY. I greatly enjoyed reading some parts of his Divine Œconomy. Tennyson’s stanza expresses the spirit of his theology:—

Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be:
They are but broken lights of Thee,
And Thou, O Lord, art more than they.

ATHERTON. Yet his six volumes add one more to our many systems. The vitiating element, in a theology otherwise very fairly balanced, is the extreme to which he carries the doctrine of passivity. In religion, he will have the understanding utterly inert.[370]

WILLOUGHBY. Yet he uses, very effectively, in his writings, the faculty he calls on us to resign.

ATHERTON. It is very common with mysticism to demand, in that way, a sacrifice which it does not make itself. With Poiret, Philosophy, Criticism, and Rhetoric, are the curse of the Church—the sources of all false theology.

WILLOUGHBY. Still there is much truth in his assertion that all positive religion accomplishes its purpose only as it leads to a filial subjection of the soul to God—as it conducts men, beyond itself, to immediate intercourse with Deity.

ATHERTON. William Law has the same idea: it constitutes, with him, the natural basis of all revealed religion.

WILLOUGHBY. It is mainly on this ground, I suppose, that Poiret adopts an eschatology more mild than that of the Calvinism which he forsook. He is not without his hopes concerning heathens hereafter. He believes in a state of purification after death, for those who departed, in a state of grace, but not yet ripe for the full enjoyment of heaven.

ATHERTON. It is significant that the first step taken by Protestant Mysticism, after departing from Calvinistic, Lutheran, or Anglican orthodoxy, should always be an endeavour to mitigate the gloom which hangs over the doctrine of the future state.

MRS. ATHERTON. I have also been reading M. Eynard’s Life of Madame de Krüdener. She appears to me an inferior Madame Guyon—falling very short of her predecessor in real elevation of soul and power of mind, and decidedly more credulous.

ATHERTON. She was never chastened by trials so severe as those which befel Madame Guyon or Antoinette Bourignon. I do not think her insincere altogether,—she meant well, and often deceived herself; but she never thoroughly conquered her inordinate vanity and love of display. When her novel of Valerie had outlived its day of puffery—when she had ceased to shine in the world of fashion, she achieved distinction as a seeress and guide of souls at the Hotel Montchenu.

WILLOUGHBY. A tuft-hunting sort of Quietism, hers. What a picture Talleyrand gives of the evening religious service in her drawing-room, when the allies were in Paris. The Emperor Alexander was a frequent visitor, prominent among notabilities from every court in Europe. M. Empeytaz, in his gown, prayed and preached; Madame de Krüdener, with her blue eyes and long dark locks, would converse on the interior life, with guest after guest, in the inner apartment, or haply come forward and deliver a prophecy.[371]

ATHERTON. She had all the tact of a woman of the world, an impressive manner, and a fascinating gift of utterance. Her mysticism received its prophetic impulse chiefly from the predictions of a pretended clairvoyante, managed by a knave.[372]

MRS. ATHERTON. Jung Stilling and Swedenborg had also their share in giving that bent to her enthusiasm. I think she may have done good in some quarters.

ATHERTON. Very likely. The world is seldom the worse for the shock it receives when some one speaks out a strong belief in unseen realities, even though not always in the wisest way.

Note to page 286.

An anonymous work, entitled An Apology for Me. Antonia Bourignon (Lond. 1699), contains an account of her life. It was not her design to found a sect, for she taught that of sects there were too many: exclusive formulas and hostile systems had corrupted Christendom, and made it a very Babel. She wished to forsake the world, with a few associates, bound by no vows, distinguished by no habit, working with their hands, and giving themselves to prayer and meditation. She was much resorted to by religious persons of every communion, as a guide to the higher degrees of the Christian life. She believed that special light was granted her for the interpretation of Scripture, and that it was her mission to recall the Church from formalism and human notions to spirituality and Quietist devotion. She appears to have been truly successful in awakening and stimulating religious aspiration in very many minds, till the storm of persecution, raised by her sweeping censure of the ecclesiastical world, drove her from one hiding-place to another, throughout Schleswig and Holstein. She died, at last, impoverished and deserted, concealed in a wretched lodging at Amsterdam. Her letters are those of a pious and sensible woman, clear-headed, precise, and decided in vexatious business details, and singularly free from all obscureness or rhapsody. Swammerdam, the naturalist, was one of her disciples. Her Quietism was a welcome doctrine to many among Romanists, Lutherans, and Calvinists. Her bitterest persecutors were found among the clergy of every denomination. The Jesuits of Frederickstadt wished for fuel to burn her. The priests of the Oratory at Mechlin defrauded her of her property. Lutheran and Calvinist pastors alike, wrote, spoke, and preached against her with such virulence that the zealous populace of Flensburg were ready to tear her in pieces for the glory of God. (Life, pp. 310-313. Comp. Letters, xxii. xxiii. xxiv.: A Collection of Letters written by Mrs. A. Bourignon, Lond. 1708.)

Note to page 287.

Poiret was a Calvinistic clergyman, who, after his acquaintance with Antoinette Bourignon, and much reading of mystical writers, relinquished his office. In his retirement he wrote a number of theological works, of which the best known is his system of divinity, entitled The Divine Œconomy. He possessed a goodly measure of that scholarship and philosophic culture which, as a mystic, he at once uses and depreciates.

Our higher faculty—the understanding, or intellect, he calls it—is not (like what he terms ‘reason’) a limited capability; but ‘being made for God is in a manner infinite, so as to be able to exert infinite acts, that is, to raise itself up to the contemplation of God as incomprehensible, infinite, and above all particular forms of conceiving him.’ If, therefore, we make an absolute surrender of this faculty to God, and so, by a passive ‘implicit faith,’ yield ourselves up to whatsoever He may be pleased to communicate to us, we receive Him ‘in a manner worthy of Him, above all particular and bounded conception, light, and sentiment.’ Then, he says, we practically own this fundamental truth, ‘that God is infinite and incomprehensible; that he is a Light, a Good, a Wisdom, a Power, a Justice,—in a word, a Being above all comprehension and thought.’ He bids us remember that our apprehensions of God, however true, as derived from his own word and from particular communications of his own, are necessarily partial and imperfect, so that ‘a true and pure faith, while embracing the particular divine lights, will not regard chiefly the particular forms, but the infinite God that is annexed to them, and comprehends in himself infinitely more than the particulars he has disclosed to us.’ (Div. Œcon. vol. v. chap. iv. §§ 37-41.)

What is true in this doctrine has seldom been denied—viz. that beyond our highest apprehension of God, his nature extends infinitely. We know but parts of his ways. We know that infinity lies behind all our ‘bounded conceptions;’ but what that infinity is, no surrender of the Intellect can disclose to us.

Note to page 287.

Here Poiret shall speak for himself:—

‘The Understanding, to pass into the order of faith, must have these two conditions; the first, that it be empty, and shut to all ideas of worldly things, both heavenly and earthly; the second, that it keep itself open before God after an indeterminate and general manner, not particularly fixing upon anything. This being supposed, with the faith of desire afore-mentioned, God causes to rise in the soul his divine light, which is his eternal substantial word, which does himself modify (if I may so say), or rather fills and quickens the understanding of the soul, and enlightens it as he pleases.’—Div. Œcon. p. 93.

‘It will be objected, it may be, to what has been said, that this second condition required here of the intellect that means to be enlightened by Faith, is a state of idleness—time lost; and that it is an absurd thing not to make use of the understanding and faculties God has given us, nor so much as endeavour to excite in our minds good and bright thoughts. Here are several things tacked together, and most of them beside the purpose. For at present I am not treating of the means by which one may be introduced, or rather brought, as it were, to the threshold of faith, as I may say; nor of that imperfect and beginning faith, by me styled active. Nor yet do I say, that when one has been enlightened by the light of God, one is not to fix one’s mind to the consideration of the lights held out by God: but what I say is this: I suppose a man has already had some glimpse of the divine light by the call of preventing grace, and that he has actively co-operated with it, by turning his understanding towards it, with particular desires of such and such lights; and, moreover, that, to confirm himself therein, he has deduced in his reason and his other inferior faculties, notions, ratiocinations, images, and words, and other particular exercises wherein he has been exercised long enough to be capable of ascending to the state of pure and altogether divine faith. Upon this supposition, the question is, whether one whose faith has as yet been but weak, and the small light he has had clouded and mixed with great darkness, prejudices, and errors, designing to clear the principles of the fight he has from the aforesaid mixture, and desiring to see this divine light in its purity and more fully,—whether, I say, to this end he ought to apply thereto the activity of his understanding, of his meditations, reflections, and reasonings; or else, whether, all this apart, he ought to offer his understanding in vacuity and silence to the Son of God, the Sun of Righteousness, and the true Light of Souls? And this last is what we affirm, and against which the objections alleged are of no force.’—P. 100.

‘Thus have I shown what God requires of the intellect in matters of faith—viz. a fund of mind wherein neither reason nor imagination do at all act, but where God only may be, and act brightly as He pleases, the soul meanwhile not adhering to the particular manners of God’s acting, but merely because it is God acting, and God infinite and incomprehensible, who can dispose of His infinite ways above our understanding.’—P. 104.

Antoinette Bourignon found in Poiret a learned and philosophical disciple. He was to her, in some respects, what Robert Barclay was to George Fox. But her writings appear also to have awakened a response, of a more practical kind, in many devout minds of whom the world knew nothing. Throughout Germany and Holland, France and Switzerland, and in England also, were scattered little groups of friends who nourished a hidden devotion by the study of pietist or mystical writers. Arndt and Spener, Bourignon and Guyon, Labadie and Yvon, Thomas à Kempis, De Sales, or translations from the Spanish mystics, furnished the oil for their inward flame. Some withdrew altogether from the more active duties of life; others were separatists from the religion established around them. In some cases they held meetings for worship among themselves; in others, the struggles of a soul towards the higher life were only revealed to one or two chosen intimates. Whenever we can penetrate behind the public events which figure in history at the close of the seventeenth and the opening of the eighteenth century, indications are discernible which make it certain that a religious vitality of this description was far more widely diffused than is commonly supposed. A single example will be sufficiently suggestive. One M. de Marsay, who threw up his ensign’s commission in the French army, and retired, with two friends, into seclusion, after the manner recommended by Antoinette Bourignon, left behind him an unpublished Autobiography. A copy from a translation of this curious narrative, in the possession of Mr. Tindall Harris, has been kindly placed at my disposal by that gentleman. The copy was executed in 1773, by some one who had known De Marsay personally.

M. de Marsay was born at Paris, in 1688, of Protestant parents. A taste for devotional reading was fostered, in early youth, by the piety of his mother. Jurieu’s well-known work on Divine Love found its place among such studies; but none of the mystical writers. When he had entered the army, sometimes half the day, and often half the night also, was devoted to reading, meditation, and prayer. At one time he maintained an inward prayer for three or four days without intermission, though the regiment was on the march, and the troops under arms day and night. He fondly imagined that such a state would continue all his life. When the reaction came, his efforts to overcome the natural exhaustion and regain his spiritual joy were so strenuous and painful that his delicate frame gave way, and symptoms of consumption appeared. His distress at this time was similar to that of Madame Guyon, and of many others, at the earlier period of their entrance on the ‘inward way.’ Thomas à Kempis was in his hand; but he could not yet understand the lesson which the more experienced mystics so earnestly inculcate,—that spiritual pleasures may be sought too greedily,—that we should persevere and trust, whether in sensible delight or obscuration, whether in fulness or ‘aridity.’ He lay sick at Lisle for three months, calmly looking for death, and then, to the surprise of all, recovered.

Meanwhile his friend, Lieutenant Cordier, has been reading Bourignon’s Lux in Tenebris, in the camp before Bethune. He writes to De Marsay, saying that he was now convinced the devotion they had hitherto practised together was as nothing; that he had resolved to quit the army and retire to some desert, there to live a life of poverty and devotion. M. Barratier, the chaplain of their regiment, was of like mind; if De Marsay would read Madame Bourignon, he would probably arrive at the conclusion, and join them. So indeed it proved. De Marsay bought her nineteen volumes, and determined to live her ‘poor and evangelical life.’

After many delays, he succeeded in obtaining his discharge (diligently reading, meanwhile, Theresa’s Life, and John of the Cross); and at last, behold the three friends, in the spring of 1711, settled in a solitude such as they desired, at Schwartzenau, on the estate of the Countess Witgenstein. They rise at four, and begin the day by reading a chapter in the Bible. Cordier and De Marsay work in the field, and Barratier has breakfast ready for them at seven o’clock,—dry bread, of their own baking, and cold water. Till noon they spin, card, or knit wool; Cordier goes out on some errand; or De Marsay collects leaves, instead of straw, for their beds. At noon they dine, and Barratier (the cook and housekeeper) boils them the same food all the week through. One week it is pease, with bread; another week, barley; next, wheat, groats, or oatmeal pap; and for drink sometimes, ‘as a special treat,’ boiled groats, in milk. After dinner one of them reads aloud from Bourignon’s writings. Work again till four, and in the field till seven, when they sit down to supper, before a dish of pulse or salad, groats or turnips. Work again, in-doors, till nine, and then to bed. It was a rule that they should only speak to each other when it was absolutely necessary. They had no regular hours for prayer, but endeavoured (as Bourignon counsels) to do everything in a spirit of prayer, by living consciously in the presence of God, and referring all ceaselessly to Him.

Yet in this Paradise of asceticism De Marsay is not happy. The endeavour to retain constantly a general sense of the divine presence was far less unnatural and arduous than those protracted prayers and meditations at which he used to labour. But he has little enjoyment, and the clamorous demands of a large appetite sorely disturb his pious thoughts. See him, one day, sitting on the stump of a tree—the picture of despair. His soul is in the abyss. God seems to have abandoned him to himself. What has he done? He has eaten a potato between meals! Only by the most ample confession, the most contrite self-abasement, can he recover peace. Terrible tyranny of the misguided conscience over the feeble judgment! Here was a moral power that might have made a hero; and it only drives a slave.

But the revulsion must come; and simultaneously the three anchorites remit their silence and their introversion, and (the spell once broken) chatter incessantly; now one, and now another, bursting into fits of unmeaning, involuntary laughter. Yet, through all such mortifying discouragement, all terror and temptation, De Marsay makes his way. He does but yield himself, in his helplessness, the more absolutely to God, to be delivered from his spiritual adversaries, if He wills, or to be abandoned to the countless possibilities of evil, within him and about him. Bourignon brought him to this point. So far she essays to guide souls in the ‘interior way;’ after that, the Divine Conductor leads them each as He will.

With poor Cordier it fared not so well. They had relaxed their rule, he said: he would leave them, and live entirely alone. So he was carried from extreme to extreme, till he reached a spurious resignation—a passivity which did not resist evil—a self-forgetfulness which ceased to recognise in himself his most dangerous enemy. From the height of spiritual pride he was precipitated into licence. A woman living near, with great affectation of sanctity, beguiled him into marriage. This female Tartuffe stood afterwards revealed in her real iniquity; and Cordier eventually returned to the world and a godless libertinism.

The Countess Witgenstein gave shelter, about this time, to a Lady Clara de Callenberg, who had suffered much domestic unhappiness on account of her pietism. This lady, considerably his senior, De Marsay saw, wooed, and won. Our pair of ascetics resolved to live a life of absolute continence, and De Marsay renders hearty thanks that (in spite of many temptations) they received grace to adhere to their determination. The good man’s manner of reasoning is curious. The first thought of a change of life occurred to him one day, when sitting, ‘in great calmness of mind,’ under a tree, with his knitting-tackle. ‘It was shown to me,—if it was true that I was willing to be the property of God without exception, it was his will that I should give Him the first proof thereof, in marrying the Lady Clara de Callenberg.’ Barratier married them, and so the original association was finally dissolved.[373] The marriage was a very happy one, their principal outward trial arising from the frequent indisposition of his wife, who ruined her constitution by the miserable austerity of her diet. They were all but penniless; yet in this they rejoiced, as so much exercise of faith; and, indeed, such moderate means as they required were generally found forthcoming from one quarter or another.

De Marsay did not always remain in their hut at Schwartzenau; he journeyed to Switzerland to visit his mother, and again to Paris to see his brother, passing through Blois with letters to Madame Guyon, who died shortly before he reached that city. He travelled also repeatedly, in company with his wife, everywhere finding little circles of devout persons who received them with open arms. His narrative is full of the difficulties he found in ascertaining the divine will. Again and again does he discover, after an interval of years, that steps taken in the full persuasion that they were divinely directed, were, in reality, self-moved and erroneous. He fears to relax a severity, lest it should be self-indulgence; he fears to prolong it, lest it should be self-righteousness. After making one sacrifice, an additional one suggests itself as possible, and the longer the thought is entertained, the more hopeless is peace of mind, till conscience has compelled that also; and all this, sometimes from first to last, in fear and darkness. After dividing most of their little store among the poor, and selling their cottage as too large, Madame de Marsay can know no rest from her fears till the greater part of the money received has been also given away,—that the command may be obeyed, ‘Sell all that thou hast.’ Yet, through all self-made troubles, the genuineness of their religion shines out. He is ever humble, thankful, trustful. The reading of Madame Guyon weans him still farther from ‘sensible religious delights;’ he enters calmly into the state of ‘dark faith;’ begins to attach less importance to austerities; loses much of his stiffness; will attend public worship, and commune.

It is instructive to mark how few of those concerning whom he writes as having entered on the higher religious life, are found holding on in that course. After an interval of absence, he returns to a neighbourhood where he had known several such. He finds most of them in darkness and disappointment. They know not where their souls are, or what has come to them. Some are sunk in apathy. There are those who retain the form, though their fire has gone out long ago. Others have plunged from high profession into vices the most shameless. Yet a remnant are preserved through all the dangers of the way. Those perplexities and doubts which so frequently clouded the pathway of De Marsay, were probably his safeguard. In a life of such excessive introspection, a proper self-distrust must almost necessarily take the form of morbid scrupulosity. Even he had some narrow escapes, for which he does well to sing his lowly Non nobis Domine! He came afterwards to see how injurious was that withdrawment from all public worship (habitual with himself and his wife), in the case of those who had children. The offspring of such parents either grew up with a contempt for the ordinances of religion, or, finding their position as separatists hurtful to their advancement in the world, conformed, from interested motives.

In 1731, Count Zinzendorf came to Schwartzenau, and fascinated the De Marsays for a time. But De Marsay—so melancholy, and so given to solitude—was not one long ‘to find good for his soul’ in connexion with any religious community whatever. The Moravian converts met at first at his house, and he preached to them two or three times, with remarkable acceptance. But he detected pleasure to sense and self in such exercise of his gifts, and left them, resolving to yield himself up to the way of dark faith—to ‘die off from all the creatures’—to be as one excommunicate, and perishing in the wilderness of spiritual desertion for his unfaithfulness.

His difficulties were not diminished by mystical metaphysics. There is the Ground of his soul, and its inward attraction, to be followed, whatever reason, prudence, reflection, and even that which seems conscience, may urge or thunder against it. Whether the attraction be false or true, is exceedingly hard to determine;—the issue frequently proves it the former, and that the common-sense folk about him were right after all. He arrives at a state—the wished-for state, in fact—free from all form, image, object of hope, &c.—a total blank of the senses and powers, and yet complains bitterly of the misery of that condition. Reason, internal sense, hope,—all have been abandoned, and yet, out of the internal ground there arises nothing in the shape of light or encouragement. The most harassing secular life, in which he would have been driven to look out of himself to Christ, had been truer and happier than this morbid introversion.

A single passage in his history (and there are several like it) is better than a treatise in illustration of the dangers which beset the notion of perceptible spiritual guidance. He is at Berleberg (1726), and hears of emigration thence to Pennsylvania. As he lies awake one night, it is strongly impressed upon his mind that he ought to go: he and his wife might realize a complete solitude in that land of cheapness and freedom. For there was too much of the creature for him, even at Schwartzenau. They resolve, despite the earnest dissuasion of their friends, to join the next band of emigrants. News arrives that the greater part of those who last went out, died on the voyage, of disease or want. De Marsay finds nothing here to stagger him—for should he shrink from any such hazard? Again, it is shown him clearly that his wife will die if they sail—he seems to see her dead. They resolve, nevertheless, to yield themselves up to death; and spend wretched tearful days, nerved to that determination. At last, when again alone and in stillness, he receives an impression that it is not the will of God that he should go. He communicates the joyful tidings to his wife. She replies that she will go without him, unless she also receives a similar inward monition for herself. Such impression she happily obtains, and they remain. The sacrifice had been made, however, said De Marsay, the Isaac offered—but the victim was not to be actually slain. Finally, he discovers that his original impulse to go to America was ‘muddy and impure,’ arising from his excessive attachment to seclusion. So is it continually where men’s whims and fancies are identified with the oracles of an imagined perceptible guidance.

After many alternations—now rising to a love that casts out fear, and anon receding into gloom—his mind is mellowed and liberalized with advancing years. He no longer conceives it necessary to die to the creature by forsaking his religious friends. He lives at Wolfenbüttel, with Major Botticher, the husband of his niece, and has abandoned every ascetic singularity. He believes in the mystical states (for he has lived them), but he is no longer in any one of them. He looks away from himself only to Christ. He no longer identifies the mysteries of the interior way with spirituality. He has friendly intercourse with ministers—attends church—rejoices in the good work doing among Reformed and Lutherans everywhere.

Madame de Marsay died in 1742, in great mental distress; throughout several weeks previously having imagined herself abandoned and condemned. But her husband rejoiced in his assurance of her glorious rest. His end was a contrast to his distressful life. ‘I swim and bathe in joy,’ said he, ‘that I shall now soon obtain what, through the grace of our Saviour, I have so long and ardently wished and hoped for.’

Footnote 368:

See Note on p. 289.

Footnote 369:

See Note on p. 290.

Footnote 370:

See Second Note on p. 290.

Footnote 371:

See _Revelations from the Life of Prince Talleyrand_; and compare
Eynard, _Vie de Madame de Krüdener_, chap. xvii. Madame de Genlis
writes of her, ‘M^e. de Krüdener disait les choses les plus
singulières avec un calme qui les rendait persuasives; elle était
certainement de très bonne foi; elle me parut être aimable,
spirituelle et d’une originalité très piquante.’—P. 30.

Footnote 372:

See the whole story of the pastor Fontaine and Maria Kummerin, in
Eynard.

Footnote 373:

Barratier subsequently became minister to the French church in Halle.

BOOK THE ELEVENTH MYSTICISM IN ENGLAND

CHAPTER I.

Is virtue then, unless of Christian growth,
Mere fallacy, or foolishness, or both?
Ten thousand sages lost in endless woe,
For ignorance of what they could not know?
That speech betrays at once a bigot’s tongue;
Charge not a God with such outrageous wrong.
Truly not I—the partial light men have,
My creed persuades me, well employed, may save;
While he that scorns the noonday beam, perverse,
Shall find the blessing, unimproved, a curse.

COWPER.

One morning, Willoughby, calling on Atherton, found him and Gower looking over an old-fashioned little volume.

WILLOUGHBY. What have you there, Atherton?

ATHERTON. A curious old book—The History of Hai Ebn Yokhdan, by Abu Jaafer Ebn Tophail—an Arabian philosopher of Spain, writing in the twelfth or thirteenth century: ‘done into English’ by Simon Ockley.

GOWER (to Willoughby). I happened to be looking through Barclay’s Apology—found him referring to this History of Yokhdan; and, behold, Atherton fetches me down, from one of his topmost dust-of-erudition strata there, the very book. It appears that good Barclay was so hard put to it, to find examples for the support of his doctrine concerning the Universal and Saving Light, that he has pressed this shadowy philosophical romance into the service, as an able-bodied unexceptionable fact:—sets up a fanciful ornament from the Moorish arabesques of Toledo as a bulwark for his theory.

WILLOUGHBY. Who, then, may this Hai Ebn Yokhdan be?

ATHERTON. Simply a mystical Robinson Crusoe. The book relates how a child was exposed in an ark upon the sea, drifted to a Fortunate Island in the Indian Ocean, was there suckled by a roe, dresses himself with skins and feathers, builds a hut, tames a horse, rises to the discovery of ‘One supreme and necessarily self-existent Being,’ and does, at last, by due abstinence and exclusion of all external objects, attain to a mystical intuition of Him—a contemplation of the divine essence, and a consciousness that his own essence, thus lost in God, is itself divine:—all this, by the unaided inner Light. A Mussulman hermit who is landed on the island, there to retire from mankind, finds him; teaches him to speak; and discovers, to his devout amazement, that this Ebn Yokhdan has attained, first by deduction from the external world, and then, abandoning that, by immediate intuition, to the very truth concerning God which he has learnt through the medium of the Koran—the tee-totum mysticism of spinning dervishes included.[374]

GOWER. Barclay, citing his Arab, points the moral as teaching ‘that the best and most certain knowledge of God, is not that which is attained by premises premised, and conclusions deduced; but that which is enjoyed by conjunction of the Mind of Man with the Supreme Intellect, after the mind is purified from its corruption and is separated from all bodily images, and is gathered into a profound stillness.’[375]

WILLOUGHBY. And the simple-hearted apologist of the Friends never suspected that this story was a philosopher’s conjecture—Abu Tophail’s ideal of what the inner light might be supposed to teach a man, in total seclusion?

ATHERTON. Not he. At any rate, Yokhdan figures in the first half-dozen editions of the Apology. I believe, in none later.

GOWER. A curious sight, to see the Arabian Sufi and the English Quaker keeping company so lovingly.

WILLOUGHBY. And yet how utterly repugnant to our English natures, that contemplative Oriental mysticism.

GOWER. In practice, of course. But in the theory lies a common ground.

ATHERTON. Our island would be but a spare contributor to a general exhibition of mystics. The British cloister has not one great mystical saint to show. Mysticism did not, with us, prepare the way for the Reformation. John Wycliffe and John Tauler are a striking contrast in this respect. In the time of the Black Death, the Flagellants could make no way with us. Whether coming as gloomy superstition, as hysterical fervour, or as pantheistic speculation, mysticism has found our soil a thankless one.

GOWER. I should like to catch a Hegelian, in good condition, well nourished with the finest of thrice-bolted philosophic grain, duly ignorant of England, and shut him up to determine, from the depths of his consciousness, what would be the form which mysticism must necessarily assume among us.

ATHERTON. He would probably be prepared to prove to us à priori that we could not possibly evolve such a product at all.

GOWER. Most likely. The torches of the Bacchantes, flung into the Tiber, were said still to burn; but what whirling enthusiast’s fire could survive a plunge into the Thames? There could be nothing for it but sputtering extinction, and then to float—a sodden lump of pine and pitch, bobbing against the stolid sides of barges.

WILLOUGHBY. The sage might be pardoned for prophesying that our mysticism would appear in some time of religious stagnation—a meteoric flash spasmodically flinging itself this way and that, startling with its radiance deep slimy pools, black rich oozing reaches of plurality and sinecure. Remembering the very practical mysticism of the Munster Anabaptists, he might invest our mystical day-star with such ‘trains of fire and dews of death;’ or depict it as a shape of terror, like his who ‘drew Priam’s curtain at the dead of night;’ heralding horrors; and waking every still cathedral close to dread the burning fate that befell, ‘the topless towers of Ilium.’

ATHERTON. It certainly would have been hard to foresee that mysticism in England would arise just when it did—would go so far, and no farther:—that in the time of the Commonwealth, when there was fuller religious freedom by far, and, throughout the whole middle class, a more earnest religious life than at any former period of our history,—when along the ranks of triumphant Puritanism the electric light of enthusiasm played every here and there upon the steel which won them victory, and was beheld with no ominous misgiving, but hailed rather as Pentecostal effluence,—that, at such a juncture, Quakerism should have appeared to declare this liberty insufficiently free, this spirituality too carnal, this enthusiasm too cold,—to profess to eject more thoroughly yet the world, the flesh, and the devil,—to take its place in the confused throng contending about the ‘bare-picked bone’ of Hierarchy, and show itself not to be tempted for a moment by wealth, by place, by power,—to commit many follies, but never a single crime,—to endure enumerable wrongs, but never to furnish one example of resistance or revenge.

WILLOUGHBY. Well done, old England! It is gratifying to think that, on our shores, mysticism itself is less fantastic than its wont,—labours benignly, if not always soberly; and is represented, not by nightmared visionaries, or fury-driven persecutors, but by the holy, tender-hearted, much-enduring George Fox. The Muggletonians, Fifth-Monarchy men, and Ranters of those days were the exceptional mire and dirt cast up by the vexed times, but assuredly not the representatives of English mysticism.

ATHERTON. The elements of Quakerism lie all complete in the personal history of Fox; and the religious sect is, in many respects, the perpetuation of his individual character;—the same intellectual narrowness, incident to an isolated, half-disciplined mind, and the same large, loving heart of charity for all men. Remember how he describes himself as ‘knowing pureness and righteousness at eleven years of age;’ carefully brought up, so that from his childhood all vice and profaneness were an abomination to him. Then there were his solitary musings and sore inward battles, as he walked about his native Drayton many nights by himself: his fastings oft; his much walking abroad in solitary spots many days; his sitting, with his Bible, in hollow trees and lonesome places, till night came on. Because the religious teachers to whom he applied in his temptations to despair were unhappily incompetent to administer relief, he concludes too hastily that the system of ministerial instruction is more often a hindrance than a help to ‘vital godliness.’ Because ‘priest Stevens’ worked up some of his remarks in conversation into his next Sunday’s sermon,—because the ‘ancient priest’ at Mansetter, to whom he next applied, could make nothing of him, and in despair recommended tobacco and psalm-singing (furthermore violating his confidence, and letting young George’s spiritual distresses get wind among a bevy of giggling milk-lasses),—because, after travelling seven miles to a priest of reputed experience at Tamworth, he found him after all ‘but like an empty hollow cask,’—because horticultural Dr. Cradock of Coventry fell into a passion with him for accidentally trampling on the border of his flower-bed,—because one Macham, a priest in high account, offered him physic and prescribed blood-letting,—therefore the institution of a clerical order was an error and a mischief, mainly chargeable with the disputings of the church, and the ungodliness of the world. So, in his simplicity, he regarded it as a momentous discovery to have it opened to him ‘that being bred at Oxford or Cambridge was not enough to fit and qualify men to be ministers of Christ.’[376]

GOWER. We may hold that without joining the Society of Friends.

ATHERTON. In like manner he argues that because believers are the temple of the Spirit, and many venerate places superstitiously, or identify church-going with religion, therefore ‘steeple-houses’ are a sinful innovation, diffusing, for the most part, darkness rather than light. Because it appeared to him that in his study of the Scriptures he knew Christ ‘only as the light grew’—by inward revelation—‘as he that hath the key did open,’ therefore the doctrine of the inward Light is proclaimed to all as the central principle of Redemption.

GOWER. True. This proneness to extremes has led his followers often to attach undue importance to the mere externals of a protest against externalism. Those peculiarities of dress and speech are petty formalities unworthy of their main principle. In his ‘Epistle to gathered Churches into outward forms upon the Earth,’ Fox can see scarce a vestige of spiritual religion anywhere beyond the pale of the Society of Friends.

ATHERTON. Yet ascetic and narrow on many points as he unquestionably was, and little disposed to make concession to human weakness, in practical charity he was most abundant. Oppression and imprisonment awakened the benevolent, never the malevolent impulses of his nature,—only adding fervour to his plea for the captive and the oppressed. His tender conscience could know no fellowship with the pleasures of the world; his tender heart could know no weariness in seeking to make less its sum of suffering. He is a Cato-Howard. You see him in his early days, refusing to join in the festivities of the time called Christmas; yet, if a stranger to the mirth, never to the mercy, of that kindly season. From house to house he trudges in the snow, visiting poor widows, and giving them money. Invited to marriage merry-makings, he will not enter the house of feasting; but the next day, or soon after, we find him there, offering, if the young couple are poor, the effectual congratulation of pecuniary help. In the prison-experiences of George Fox are to be found the germs of that modern philanthropy in which his followers have distinguished themselves so nobly. In Derby Jail he is ‘exceedingly exercised’ about the proceedings of the judges and magistrates—concerning their putting men to death for cattle, and money, and small matters,—and is moved to write to them, showing the sin of such severity; and, moreover, ‘what an hurtful thing it was that prisoners should lie so long in jail; how that they learned badness one of another in talking of their bad deeds; and therefore speedy justice should be done.’[377]

WILLOUGHBY. How the spirit of benevolence pervades all the Journals of the early Friends. Look at John Woolman, who will neither write nor have letters written to him by post, because the horses are overwrought, and the hardships of the postboys so great. When farthest gone in rhapsody, this redeeming characteristic was never wanting to the Quakers. It may be said of some of them, as was said of dying Pope—uttering, between his wanderings, only kindness—‘humanity seems to have outlasted understanding.’

ATHERTON. As to doctrine, again, consider how much religious extravagance was then afloat, and let us set it down to the credit of Fox that his mystical excesses were no greater. At Coventry he finds men in prison for religion who declared, to his horror, that they were God. While at Derby, a soldier who had been a Baptist, comes to him from Nottingham, and argues that Christ and the prophets suffered no one of them externally, only internally. Another company, he says, came to him there, who professed to be triers of spirits, and when he questioned them, ‘were presently up in the airy mind,’ and said he was mad. The priests and magistrates were not more violent against him than the Ranters, who roved the country in great numbers, professing to work miracles, forbidding other enthusiasts to preach, on pain of damnation; and in comparison with whom, Fox was soberness itself. Rice Jones, the Ranter, from Nottingham, prophesies against him with his company. At Captain Bradford’s house, Ranters come from York to wrangle with him. In the Peak country they oppose him, and ‘fall a-swearing.’ At Swanington, in Leicestershire, they disturb the meeting—hound on the mob against the Friends; they sing, whistle, and dance; but their leaders are confounded everywhere by the power of the Lord, and many of their followers, says the Journal, ’were reached and convinced, and received the Spirit of God; and are come to be a pretty people, living and walking soberly in the truth of Christ.’[378] Such facts should be remembered in our estimate. Fox’s inner light does not profess to supersede, nor does it designedly contradict, the external light of Revelation.

But hand me his Journal a moment. Here is a curious passage. It shows what a narrow escape Fox had of being resolved into an English Jacob Behmen.

He says, ‘Now (he was about four-and-twenty at the time) was I come up in spirit, through the flaming sword, into the paradise of God. All things were new; and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter. I knew nothing but pureness and innocency and righteousness, being renewed up into the image of God by Christ Jesus; so that I say I was come up to the state of Adam which he was in before he fell. The creation was opened to me; and it was showed me how all things had their names given them, according to their nature and virtue. And I was at a stand in my mind whether I should practise physic for the good of mankind, seeing the nature and virtues of the creatures were so opened to me by the Lord. But I was immediately taken up in spirit to see into another or more stedfast state than Adam’s in innocency, even into a state in Christ Jesus, that should never fall. And the Lord showed me that such as were faithful to Him in the power and light of Christ, should come up into that state in which Adam was before he fell; in which the admirable works of the creation, and the virtues thereof may be known, through the openings of that divine word of wisdom and power by which they were made. Great things did the Lord lead me into, and wonderful depths were opened unto me, beyond what can by words be declared; but as people come into subjection to the Spirit of God, and grow up in the image and power of the Almighty, they may receive the word of wisdom that opens all things, and come to know the hidden unity in the Eternal Being.‘[379]

Here he has arrived on life’s road where two ways meet;—had he taken the wrong alternative, and wandered down that shadowy and mysterious theosophic avenue, ignorant that it was no thoroughfare, what a different history! Imagine the intrepid, heart-searching preacher—the redoubted ‘man in leather breeches’—transformed into the physician, haply peruked and habited in black, dispensing inspired prescriptions, and writing forgotten treatises on Qualities and Signatures, Sympathies and Antipathies. What a waste of that indomitable energy!

WILLOUGHBY. How destructive to human life might his very benevolence have proved.

GOWER. Whatever direction the mysticism of a man like Fox might have taken, it must have been always actively benevolent. His mysticism is simple—no artificial stages of abstraction, mounting step by step above the finite, to a solitary superhuman sanctity. It is beneficent—his many and various spiritual distresses were permitted by God, he tells us, ‘in order that he might have a sense of all conditions—how else should he speak to all conditions?‘[380]

WILLOUGHBY. Truly, metaphysical refinements and Platonic abstraction could have no charm for this most practical of mystics. What a contrast here is his pietism to that of Zinzendorf—as abundant in sentiment as Fox is devoid of it.

GOWER. Nicholas of Basle is more like Fox than any of the German mystics—much more so than Tauler.

ATHERTON. Fox is, as you say, eminently practical in one sense, yet not enough so in another. In one respect Behmen and Law are more practical than he, because more comprehensive. They endeavour to infuse a higher spiritual life into forms and communities already existing. Fox will have no steeple-houses, vestments, forms of prayer, no ministry, regularly paid and highly educated. Such a code is not practical, for it rests on an abstraction: it does not legislate for men as they are. Formalism does not lie in these outward things themselves—it consists in the spirit in which they are used. Here, you see, the mystic, who will always go beneath the surface to the reality, is too superficial. Formalism cannot be expelled by any such summary process. The evil lies deeper.

WILLOUGHBY. So with the asceticism of the Friends. The worldly spirit is too subtile to be exorcised by a strict outward separation between church and world. How much easier is total abstinence from scenes of amusement than temperance in money-getting.

GOWER. Yet I know men and women who pique themselves on their separateness from the world, because they were never seen at a concert, whose covetousness, insincerity, or censorious speech, proclaim them steeped in worldliness to the very lips.

WILLOUGHBY. What say you, Atherton, to the doctrine of the Universal Light? In their theory on this matter the mystics seem to divide into two classes. With the mystics of the fourteenth century there is still left in fallen man a native tendency Godward, on which grace lays hold. With Behmen and Fox, on the contrary, the inward Seed is a supernatural gift, distinct from conscience, reason, or any relics of natural goodness—the hidden word of promise, inspoken into all men, in virtue of the redeeming work of Christ.[381]

ATHERTON. I do not believe that fallen man required a divine bestowment of this kind—a supernatural soul within the soul, to give him a moral sense, and make him responsible. But I am so far a believer in the doctrine that I would not go beyond what is written, and rigidly confine all the benefits of Christ’s redemption to those only who have had access to the Christian Scriptures. The words of the Apostle are still applicable,—‘Is he the God of the Jews only, is he not of the Gentiles also?’ I cannot suppose that all Pagan minds, past and present, have been utterly and for ever abandoned by the Divine Spirit, because the dispensation under which they have been placed is so much less privileged than our own. God has light enough to be Himself, in the twilight, even as in the noonday. Did He rule the rising and falling of ancient nations, working all things toward the fulness of time;—did He care for the bodies of those heathen, with seedtime and harvest for his witness, and shall we suppose that He debarred Himself from all access to their souls?

WILLOUGHBY. Yet no doctrine we can hold on this question materially lessens the mystery of that dark fact—the prevalence of Evil.

ATHERTON. I am afraid not. Whether we call that better part of man the light of nature, conscience, or the internal Word, we must admit that it accomplished next to nothing for the restoration of the vast majority. We must not judge of the moral effects of heathendom by the philosophic few merely; we must remember the state of the superstitious many. And mysticism will be the first to admit that an inoperative Christ (like that of the Antinomian, for example) is a deceptive phantom or a vain formula.

Our own position, however, is the same, let our theory or our hope, concerning others, be what it may. Whatever it may be possible (under the constitution of our nature) for the Spirit of God to make known inwardly to that man who is shut out from external teaching, it is quite certain that we shall receive no inward communications of gracious influence, while we neglect those outward means which are of divine appointment.

Note to page 300.

The full title of the work referred to runs as follows: The Improvement of Human Reason, exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokhdan: written in Arabick about 500 years ago, by Abn Jaafer Ebn Tophail. In which is demonstrated by what methods one may, by the mere Light of Nature, attain the knowledge of things Natural and supernatural; more particularly the knowledge of God and the affairs of another Life. Newly translated from the original Arabick by Simon Ockley, &c. 1708.

Ockley adds an Appendix, to guard the book from abuse by the Quakers, wherein he proposes to examine ‘the fundamental error’ of his author—viz. that ‘God has given such a power or faculty to man whereby he may, without any external means, attain to the knowledge of all things necessary to salvation, and even to the Beatifick Vision itself, whilst in the state.’

The following is a specimen of the mystical progress which our Arabian Defoe describes his Crusoe as making,—precisely that with which Ebn Tophail was well acquainted, but which no real solitary Ebn Yokhdan could ever have struck out for himself.

‘He began, therefore, to strip himself of all bodily properties, which he had made some progress in before, during the time of the former exercise, when he was employed in the imitation of the heavenly bodies; but there still remained a great many relicks, as his circular motion (motion being one of the most proper attributes of body), and his care of animals and plants, compassion upon them, and industry in removing whatever inconvenienced them. Now, all these things belong to corporeal attributes, for he could not see these things at first, but by corporeal faculties; and he was obliged to make use of the same faculties in preserving them. Therefore he began to reject and remove all those things from himself, as being in nowise consistent with that state which he was now in search of. So he continued, after confining himself to rest in the bottom of his cave, with his head bowed down and his eyes shut, and turning himself altogether from all sensible things and the corporeal faculties, and bending all his thoughts and meditations upon the necessarily self-existent Being, without admitting anything else besides him; and if any other object presented itself to his imagination, he rejected it with his utmost force; and exercised himself in this, and persisted in it to that degree, that sometimes he did neither eat nor stir for a great many days together. And whilst he was thus earnestly taken up in contemplation, sometimes all manner of beings whatsoever would be quite out of his mind and thoughts, except his own being only.

‘But he found that his own being was not excluded from his thoughts; no, not at such times when he was most deeply immersed in the contemplation of the first, true, necessarily self-existent Being; which concerned him very much,—for he knew that even this was a mixture in this simple vision, and the admission of an extraneous object in that contemplation. Upon which he endeavoured to disappear from himself, and be wholly taken up in the vision of that true Being; till at last he attained it; and then both the heavens and the earth, and whatsoever is between them, and all spiritual forms, and corporeal faculties, and all those powers which are separate from matter, and all those beings which know the necessarily self-existent Being, all disappeared and vanished, and were as if they had never been; and amongst these his own being disappeared too, and there remained nothing but this one, true, perpetually self-existent Being, who spoke thus in that saying of his (which is not a notion superadded to his essence):—“To whom now belongs the kingdom? To this One, Almighty God.”[382] Which words of his Hai Ebn Yokhdan understood and heard his voice; nor was his being unacquainted with words, and not being able to speak, any hindrance at all to the understanding him. Wherefore he deeply immersed himself into this state, and witnessed that which neither eye hath seen nor ear heard, nor hath it ever entered into the heart of man to conceive.’—§§ 83, 84.

Footnote 374:

See Note on p. 310.

Footnote 375:

_Barclay’s Apology_, propp. v. and vi. § 27, p. 194. Fourth Edition,
1701.

Footnote 376:

Fox’s Journal, pp. 76-83.

Footnote 377:

Fox’s Journal, vol. i. p. 130.

Footnote 378:

Fox’s _Journal_, vol. i. pp. 109, 129, 232. Vaughan’s _Hist. of
England under the House of Stuart_, p. 539.

Footnote 379:

Journal, vol. i. p. 95.

Footnote 380:

_Journal_, p. 89. This theopathetic mysticism is emphatically
transitive. Every inward manifestation speedily becomes a something to
be done, a testimony to be delivered. The Quaker is ‘exercised,’ not
that he may deck himself in the glory of saintship, but to fit him for
rendering service, as he supposes, to his fellows. The early followers
of Fox often caricatured the acted symbolism of the Hebrew prophets
with the most profane or ludicrous unseemliness. Yet stark-mad as
seemed the fashion of their denunciations, their object was very
commonly some intelligible and actual error or abuse.

Footnote 381:

Barclay’s _Apology_, propp. v. and vi. 16. Sewell’s _History_, p. 544.
(Barclay’s _Letter to Paets_); also p. 646 (_The Christian Doctrine of
the People called Quakers_, &c., published 1693). Compare J. J.
Gurney’s _Observations on the Distinguishing Views and Practices of
the Society of Friends_, chap. i. p. 59.

Footnote 382:

Koran.

CHAPTER II.

And to such Enthusiasm as is but the triumph of the soul of man,
inebriated, as it were, with the delicious sense of the divine life,
that blessed Root, and Original of all holy wisdom and virtue, I am
as much a friend as I am to the vulgar fanatical Enthusiasm a
professed enemy.—HENRY MORE.

WILLOUGHBY. There is no mysticism in the doctrine of an immediate influence exercised by the Spirit of God on the spirit of man.

ATHERTON. Certainly not. It would be strange if the Creator, in whom we live and move, should have no direct access to the spirits of his own creatures.

GOWER. Does not your admission indicate the line between the true and the false in that aspiration after immediate knowledge, intercourse, or intuition, so common among the mystics? It is true that the divine influence is exerted upon us directly. But it is not true that such influence dispenses with rather than demands—suspends rather than quickens, the desires and faculties of our nature. So it appears to me at least.

ATHERTON. And to me also.

WILLOUGHBY. And again (to continue your negatives, Gower) it is not true, as some of the mystics tell us, that we can transcend with advantage the figurative language of Scripture; or gaze directly on the Divine Subsistence,—that we can know without knowledge, believe without a promise or a fact, and so dispense, in religious matters, with modes and media.

ATHERTON. Agreed. For ourselves, I believe we shall always find it true that the letter and the spirit do reciprocally set forth and consummate each other,—

‘Like as the wind doth beautify a sail,
And as a sail becomes the unseen wind.’

We see truth in proportion as we are true. The outward written word in our hands directs us to the unseen Word so high above us, yet so near. The story of Christ’s life and death is our soul’s food. We find that we may—we must, sit in spirit at his feet, who so spake, so lived, so died. And, having been with him, we find a new power and attraction in the words; we are led by the Spirit of Christ in the keeping of those commandments, concerning which he said, ‘The words I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.’

WILLOUGHBY. So Plotinus is right, in a sense, after all;—like only can know like. Our likeness to Christ is our true knowledge of him.

ATHERTON. Yes. But we become partakers of the unseen life and light of God only through the manifestation of that life and light, Christ Jesus. It is on this point that the theology of Fox is so defective.

WILLOUGHBY. His doctrine that the influence of the Spirit is perceptible, as well as immediate, is still more questionable, surely?

GOWER. Perceptible! aye, and physically perceptible, he will have it, in some cases,—manifested in a tremulous agitation of the frame.

WILLOUGHBY. True. The convulsive movements among the Protestant peasantry of the Cevennes are a similar instance. This spasmodical religious excitement is in a high degree infectious when many are assembled together.

ATHERTON. Yet we should not reject the doctrine of perceptible spiritual guidance because it is so liable to abuse. My objection is that I have never seen satisfactory proof adduced. Do not let us think, however, that we escape from the danger of self-delusion by denying this doctrine, and can afford to be careless accordingly. You often see persons who would think the Quaker belief a dangerous superstition, unscrupulously identifying their personal or party interests with the cause of God, as though they believed themselves divinely commissioned, and could not possibly be liable to deception.

WILLOUGHBY. Here you see the value of the Quaker doctrine concerning stillness and quiet. The soul must be withdrawn in a silent waiting, and so hearken for the divine voice. The impulses which stir in the unallayed tumult of the feelings are the promptings of passion or of self, not of God. Wherever the belief in perceptible guidance is entertained, this practice of tranquil tarrying should accompany it, as its proper safeguard.

ATHERTON. The Quakers are wrong, I think, in separating particular movements and monitions as divine. But, at the same time, the ‘witness of the Spirit,’ as regards our state before God, is something more, I believe, than the mere attestation to the written word.

WILLOUGHBY. The traditional asceticism of the Friends is their fatal defect as a body.

ATHERTON. And their proneness to hazard good principles by pushing them to some repulsive extreme. Thus, they propose to abolish physical force by yielding everything to it;—to put an end to war by laying Europe at the feet of a great military power,—by apologizing for the oppressor and reviling those who resist him.

GOWER. I believe the man who says to me, I am trying to love my neighbour as myself: I suspect him who professes to love him better. His profession is worse than worthless unless he be consistent, and will allow himself to be swindled with impunity.

ATHERTON. We may well be suspicious when we see this super-Christian morality defended by arguments which can only be valid with the meanest and most grovelling selfishness. Such ethics are, in promise, more than human; in performance—less.

WILLOUGHBY. But, leaving this question, I am sure no sect which systematically secludes itself from every province of philosophy, literature, and art, can grow largely in numbers and in influence in a state of society like ours.

GOWER. Our English Platonists contrast strongly, in this respect, with George Fox and his followers.

WILLOUGHBY. How incomprehensible must have been the rude fervour and symbolic prophesyings of the Quakers to the refined scholarship and retiring devotion of men like More and Norris, Gale and Cudworth. But can you call them mystics?

ATHERTON. Scarcely so, except in as far as Platonism is always in a measure mystical. A vein of mysticism peeps out here and there in their writings. Cold rationalism they hate. They warm, with a ready sympathy, to every utterance of the tender and the lofty in the aspirations of the soul. But their practical English sense shows itself in their instant rejection of sentimentalism, extravagance, or profanity. This is especially the case with More—as shrewd in some things as he was credulous in others, and gifted with so quick an eye for the ridiculous.

GOWER. Delightful reading, those racy pages of his, running over with quaint fancies.

ATHERTON. More’s position as regards mysticism is, in the main, that of a comprehensive and judicial mind. He goes a considerable distance with the enthusiast,—for he believes that love for the supreme Beautiful and Good may well carry men out of themselves; but for fanatical presumption he has no mercy.[383]

WILLOUGHBY. The Romanist type of mysticism would be the most repugnant of all, I should think, to these somewhat free-thinking English scholars.

ATHERTON. So I have found. More has no notion of professing to give up his reason, like Poiret; still less of awaiting a suspension of our powers, like John of the Cross. He believes that ‘the Spirit doth accomplish and enlarge our humane faculties.’[384]

GOWER. Yet Norris is less remote than More from the Romish mysticism, is he not? I mean that his Platonism seemed to me a little more monastic, and less philosophical.

ATHERTON. He has, it must be confessed, his four gradations of love—akin to the class-religion of the Romish Church;—as though a certain degree were incumbent on all Christians, but higher stages of devout affection (above mere duty) were set before the eminently religious.[385] Yet let us do full justice to the good sense of that excellent man. The Quietist doctrine of unconsciousness appears to him an unnatural refinement. He cannot conceive how it should be expected that a man was to be ‘such an America to himself,’ as not to know what his own wishes and attainments are. The infused virtue of the Spanish mystics appears to his discriminating eye ‘as great a paradox in divinity, as occult qualities in philosophy.‘[386]

WILLOUGHBY. And none of them, I think, distress themselves, as did Fénélon, about purely disinterested love.

ATHERTON. They are too close followers of Plato to do that. They do not disguise their impatience of the bodily prison-house. Neither have they any love for the divine ignorance and holy darkness of Dionysius. They are eager to catch every ray of knowledge—to know and to rejoice, to the utmost that our mortality may, upon its heavenward pilgrimage.[387]

Footnote 383:

Let the reader consult his _Enthusiasmus Triumphatus_, or read his
caustic observations upon the _Anima Magica Abscondita_, and his
_Second Lash of Alazonomastix_. Among the high-flyers of his day,
there appear to have been some who spoke of being ‘godded with God,’
and ‘Christed with Christ,’ much after the manner of some of Eckart’s
followers.

Footnote 384:

‘But now seeing the _Logos_ or steady comprehensive wisdom of God, in
which all Ideas and their respects are contained, is but _universal
stable reason_, how can there be any pretence of being so highly
inspired as to be blown above reason itself, unlesse men will fancy
themselves wiser than God, or their understandings above the natures
and reasons of things themselves.’—Preface to the _Conjectura
Cabbalistica_.

Footnote 385:

See Norris’s Miscellanies (1699):

_An Idea of Happiness: enquiring wherein the greatest happiness
attainable by Man in this Life does consist_, pp. 326-341.

Footnote 386:

Miscellanies, p. 276 (in a Discourse on Rom. xii. 3), and p. 334.

Footnote 387:

Norris says, in his Hymn to Darkness—

‘The blest above do thy sweet umbrage prize,
When cloyed with light, they veil their eyes.
The vision of the Deity is made
More sweet and beatific by thy shade.
But we poor tenants of this orb below
Don’t here thy excellencies know,
Till death our understandings does improve,
And then our wiser ghosts thy silent night-walks love.’

In the writings of Henry More we can see, by a notice here and there,
how Quakerism looked in the eyes of a retired scholar, by no means
indiscriminately adverse to enthusiasm. The word enthusiasm itself, he
always uses more in the classical than the modern sense. ‘To tell you
my opinion of that sect which are called Quakers, though I must allow
that there may be some amongst them good and sincere-hearted men, and
it may be nearer to the purity of Christianity for the life and power
of it than many others, yet I am well assured that the generality of
them are prodigiously melancholy, and some few perhaps possessed with
the devil.’ He thinks their doctrine highly dangerous, as mingling
with so many good and wholesome things an abominable ‘slighting of the
history of Christ, and making a mere allegory of it,—tending to the
utter overthrow of that warrantable though more external frame of
Christianity which Scripture itself points out to us.’ Yet he takes
wise occasion, from the very existence of such a sect, to bid us all
look at home, and see that we do not content ourselves with the mere
Tabernacle without the Presence and Power of God therein.—_Mastix, his
Letter to a Friend_, p. 306.

BOOK THE TWELFTH EMANUEL SWEDENBORG

CHAPTER I.

What if earth
Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein
Each to other like, more than on earth is thought.

MILTON.

Here follow extracts from a section in Atherton’s Note-book, entitled ‘Remarks on Swedenborg.’

The doctrine of Correspondence is the central idea of Swedenborg’s
system. Everything visible has belonging to it an appropriate
spiritual reality. The history of man is an acted parable; the
universe, a temple covered with hieroglyphics. Behmen, from the
light which flashes on certain exalted moments, imagines that he
receives the key to these hidden significances,—that he can
interpret the _Signatura Rerum_. But he does not see spirits, or
talk with angels. According to him, such communications would be
less reliable than the intuition he enjoyed. Swedenborg takes
opposite ground. ‘What I relate,’ he would say, ‘comes from no such
mere inward persuasion. I recount the things I have seen. I do not
labour to recall and to express the manifestation made me in some
moment of ecstatic exaltation. I write you down a plain statement of
journeys and conversations in the spiritual world, which have made
the greater part of my daily history for many years together. I take
my stand upon experience. I have proceeded by observation and
induction as strict as that of any man of science among you. Only it
has been given me to enjoy an experience reaching into two
worlds—that of spirit, as well as that of matter.’

A mysticism like that of Tauler strives, and strives in vain, to
escape all image and ‘figuration.’ A mysticism like that of
Swedenborg clothes every spiritual truth in some substantial
envelope, and discerns a habitant spirit in every variety of form.
The follower of Plato essays to rise from the visible to the
invisible. But he spurns each ladder in succession by which he has
ascended. The follower of Swedenborg seeks a similar ascent; but he
never flings away, as common, the husk which guards the precious
spiritual kernel. He will not shun the material, or diminish his
relations to it. Rather will he surround himself by those objects
and those ties of earth which, spiritually regarded, speak
constantly of heaven. To look thus on life, I need not enter the
school of Swedenborg.

But in this freedom from asceticism,—this tendency to see the
spiritual, not beyond, but in, the natural,—the mysticism of
Swedenborg, like that of Behmen, has advanced far beyond its
mediæval type. Religion no longer plays the despot toward science;
the flesh is no longer evil; this beautiful world no longer yielded
over to that father of lies who called it his.

As regards the scriptures, I find Swedenborg less one-sided than
mystics like Frank, Weigel, or the more extreme among the Quakers.
He displays no inclination to depreciate the letter of scripture in
favour of the inward teaching of the Word. Without this
‘book-revelation,’ he tells us, man would have remained in gross
ignorance concerning his Maker and his future destinies. The literal
sense of the word is the basis of the spiritual and celestial sense;
and the word, for this very reason, holy in every syllable. He sets
up no doctrine based on arbitrary or fantastical interpretations.
His doctrinal system is drawn from the literal sense, and calmly, if
not always satisfactorily deduced, by citation, exegesis, and
comparison of passages, without any mysticism whatever. Thus the
balance between the letter and the spirit is maintained in his
theology with a fairness almost unparalleled in the history of
mysticism.[388]

According to Swedenborg, all the mythology and the symbolisms of
ancient times were so many refracted or fragmentary
correspondences—relics of that better day when every outward object
suggested to man’s mind its appropriate divine truth. Such desultory
and uncertain links between the seen and the unseen are so many
imperfect attempts toward that harmony of the two worlds which he
believed himself commissioned to reveal. The happy thoughts of the
artist, the imaginative analogies of the poet, are exchanged with
Swedenborg for an elaborate system. All the terms and objects in the
natural and spiritual worlds are catalogued in pairs. This method
appears so much formal pedantry. Our fancies will not work to order.
The meaning and the life with which we continually inform outward
objects,—those suggestions from sight and sound, which make almost
every man at times a poet,—are our own creations, are determined by
the mood of the hour, cannot be imposed from without, cannot be
arranged like the nomenclature of a science. As regards the inner
sense of scripture, at all events, Swedenborg introduces some such
yoke. In that province, however, it is perhaps as well that those
who are not satisfied with the obvious sense should find some
restraint for their imagination, some method for their ingenuity,
some guidance in a curiosity irresistible to a certain class of
minds. If an objector say, ‘I do not see why the ass should
correspond to scientific truth, and the horse to intellectual
truth,’ Swedenborg will reply, ‘This analogy rests on no fancy of
mine, but on actual experience and observation in the spiritual
world. I have always seen horses and asses present and
circumstanced, when, and according as, those inward qualities were
central.’[389] But I do not believe that it was the design of
Swedenborg rigidly to determine the relationships by which men are
continually uniting the seen and unseen worlds. He probably
conceived it his mission to disclose to men the divinely-ordered
correspondences of scripture, the close relationship of man’s
several states of being, and to make mankind more fully aware that
matter and spirit were associated, not only in the varying analogies
of imagination, but by the deeper affinity of eternal law. In this
way, he sought to impart an impulse rather than to prescribe a
scheme. His consistent followers will acknowledge that had he lived
in another age, and occupied a different social position, the forms
under which the spiritual world presented itself to him would have
been different. To a large extent, therefore, his _Memorable
Relations_ must be regarded as true for him only,—for such a
character, in such a day, though containing principles independent
of personal peculiarity and local colouring. It would have been
indeed inconsistent, had the Protestant who (as himself a Reformer)
essayed to supply the defects and correct the errors of the
Reformation,—had he designed to prohibit all advance beyond his own
position.

There is great depth and beauty in that idea of Dante’s, according
to which he represents himself as conscious of ascending from heaven
to heaven in Paradise, not by perception of a transit through space,
but by seeing his Beatrice grow more and more lovely:—

Io non m’accorsi del salire in ella;
Ma d’esserv’ entro mi fece assai fede
La donna mia ch’ io vidi far più bella.

What is an imagination with Dante, acquires, in the theosophy of
Swedenborg, the constancy of law. According to him, the more I have
of goodness in me, the more shall I discern of the loveliness
belonging to the form of a good angel. If I am evil, the hideous
forms of evil natures will not be repulsive to me; and if I were
placed in heaven, the glory would afflict me with pain. To three
persons, in three different states of holiness and knowledge, a
fourth would present three several aspects in the spiritual world.
Thus, spirits see as they themselves are; their character modifies
their vision; their nature creates for them their world. All this
seems so much mere idealism, extended from this life into the next.
I ask, Where is the absolute truth, then? My German neighbour
quietly inquires, ‘Is there, or is there not, any _Ding an sich_?’
The Swedenborgian replies, ‘Swedenborg is no idealist, as you
suspect. The absolute truth is with God; and the more goodness and
wisdom the creatures have from him, the more truly do they see. The
reality external to self, I do not take away; yea, rather I
establish it on a divine basis. For the reality is even this divine
order, which the Omniscient hath established and maintains,—that
form and vision shall answer exactly to spirit and insight. Such
correspondence is but partial in this masquerading world of ours, so
full of polite pretences and seemly forms. But in the spiritual
world every one appears by degrees only what he is. He gravitates
towards that circle or association of spirits where all see as much
as he does. His character is written, past all disguise, in his
form; and so ‘the things spoken in the ear in closets are proclaimed
upon the housetops.’

Humanity stands high with Behmen, higher yet with Swedenborg. The
Divine Humanity is at once the Lord and pattern of all creation. The
innumerable worlds of space are arranged after the human form. The
universe is a kind of constellation _Homo_. Every spirit belongs to
some province in Swedenborg’s ‘Grand Man,’ and affects the
correspondent part of the human body. A spirit dwelling in those
parts of the universe which answer to the heart or the liver, makes
his influx felt in the cardiac or hepatic regions of Swedenborg’s
frame before he becomes visible to the eye. Evil spirits, again,
produced their correspondent maladies on his system, during the time
of his intercourse with them. Hypocrites gave him a pain in the
teeth, because hypocrisy is spiritual toothache. The inhabitants of
Mercury correspond to a province of memory in the ‘grand man:’ the
Lunarians to the ensiform cartilage at the bottom of the
breast-bone. With Swedenborg likeness is proximity: space and time
are states of love and thought. Hence his journeys from world to
world;—passing through states being equivalent to travelling over
spaces. Thus it took him ten hours to reach one planet, while at
another he arrived in two, because a longer time was required to
approximate the state of his mind to that of the inhabitants of the
former.[390]

The thoughts of Swedenborg have never to struggle for expression,
like those of the half-educated Behmen. The mind of the Swedish seer
was of the methodical and scientific cast. His style is calm and
clear. He is easily understood in detail. The metaphors of poets are
objects of vision with him: every abstraction takes some concrete
form: his illustrations are incessant. He describes with the graphic
minuteness of Defoe. Nothing is lost in cloud. With a distinct and
steady outline he pourtrays, to the smallest circumstance, the
habitations, the amusements, the occupations, the penalties, the
economy, the marriages of the unseen world. He is never amazed, he
never exaggerates. He is unimpassioned, and wholly careless of
effect. Those of his followers with whom I have come in contact,
partake of their master’s philosophy. They are liberal in spirit,
and nowise impatient of unbelief in others. Swedenborg never pants
and strives—has none of the tearful vehemence and glowing emotion
which choke the utterance of Behmen. He is never familiar in this
page, and rhapsodical in that. Always serene, this imperturbable
philosopher is the Olympian Jove of mystics. He writes like a man
who was sufficient to himself; who could afford to wait. He lived
much alone; and strong and deep is the stream of this mysticism
which carries no fleck of foam.

Other mystics seem to know times of wavering, when enthusiasm burns
low. To Swedenborg sunrise and sunset are not more constant and
familiar than the divine mission which he claims. Other mystics are
overpowered by manifestations from the unseen world. Horror seizes
them, or a dizzy joy, or the vision leaves them faint and trembling.
They have their alternations; their lights and shadows are in
keeping; they will topple headlong from some sunny pinnacle into an
abysmal misery. But Swedenborg is ‘in the spirit’ for near two score
years, and in his easy chair, or at his window, or on his walks,
holds converse, as a matter of course, with angels and departed
great ones, with patriarchs and devils. He can even instruct some of
the angels, who have had experience only of their own world, and are
guileless accordingly.

Footnote 388:

See Swedenborg’s True Christian Religion, chap. iv.

Footnote 389:

See _E. Swedenborg, a Biography_, by J. G. Wilkinson, p. 99; a
succinct and well-written account of the man, and the best
introduction to his writings I have met with.

Footnote 390:

Wilkinson, pp. 187, 118.

CHAPTER II.

We have but faith: we cannot know;
For knowledge is of things we see;
And yet we trust it comes from Thee,
A beam in darkness: let it grow.

Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell;
That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music as before,

But vaster.

TENNYSON.

I find Swedenborg, in the midst of his spiritual interviews and
voluminous authorship, taking his part for some time in the Diet of
1761, and presenting three memorials with high repute for practical
sagacity. He publishes ‘_A New Method of finding the Longitude_,’
simultaneously with the ‘_Apocalypse Revealed_.’

He appears to have possessed a remarkable power of inward
respiration. He says that he received from the Lord a conformation
enabling him to breathe inwardly for a long time, without the aid of
the external air, while his outward senses continued their
operation.[391]

Swedenborg is strongly opposed to ascetic practice in every form. He
contradicts all the cloistered contemplative mystics, when he
declares that ‘man cannot be formed for heaven except by means of
the world.’ He represents the ‘religious,’ and devotees who have
renounced the world for pious meditation, as by no means agreeable
or enviable personages in the other life. They are of a sorrowful
temper, despising others, discontented at not having been honoured
with superior happiness, selfish, turning away from offices of
charity (the very means of conjunction with heaven), soon betaking
themselves to solitary places. Truly, many of the first in the
heaven of the Romish calendar are the last in the heaven of
Swedenborg. And I doubt not that his arrangement is, in such cases,
the more near the truth of the two. For, as he justly says, ‘a life
of charity towards our neighbour (which consists in doing what is
just and right in every employment) can only be exercised in general
as man is engaged in some employment.’ Such a life, he declares,
tends heavenward,—not so a life of piety without a life of
charity.[392]

‘In heaven,’ says Swedenborg, ‘instruction is committed, not to
memory, but to _life_;‘—a goodly saying.

Swedenborg’s ‘Christian Religion’ is a system of theology, calm and
orderly throughout, illustrated with plates—the _Memorable
Relations_. I interpret these marvellous narratives much as
Swedenborg does the Mosaic record. I do not question their historic
truth, _for Swedenborg_. Such things he saw and heard; for to such a
mind all abstraction takes substantial form. His mental transitions
are journeys. Every proposition has its appropriate scenery; every
group of verities incorporates itself in a drama, and becomes a
speech and action. But I put an inner sense into these _Relations_,
and so reading them, find charming allegories, just in moral and
elegant in style.

What Swedenborg tells us about a future state I am certainly not in
a position to contradict, for I know nothing about such matters. The
general conviction of the Christian world seems to me true in the
main,—that the silence of the scriptures concerning such details is
an argument for their inspiration—was wisely designed to check
curiosity and to exercise faith. Yet it cannot be denied that after
all Swedenborg’s disclosures, the Christian conflict, and the
motives to that holy warfare, remain very much as the Bible presents
them. Selfishness is still the root of evil; God the sole foundation
of truth and goodness; faith alone, working by love, can overcome
the world. If the arrangements he relates as finding place in heaven
and hell, be regarded as the unconscious creation of his own brain,
an extraordinary genius for legislature must be allowed him by all.
There is generally an obvious fitness in the economy he describes.
Here and there he is whimsical and Quevedo-like. Sometimes a certain
grim satire peeps out. As regards individuals, we suspect prejudice
or caprice. He represents Melanchthon as faring but poorly, for a
long time, in the other world, because he would not let go his
doctrine of justification by faith. He elevates Mahomet in his
heaven, and lowers Paul. Who does not think of Dante, carrying the
feud of Guelph and Ghibelline beyond the grave?[393]

It shocks such preconceived ideas as we may most of us have formed
concerning heaven, to find it represented as so like earth. That in
the spiritual world there should be towns and cities, gymnasia and
theological discussions, sermons and book-writing, courts of law,
and games, yea marriage, of a refined species, the progeny whereof
are inward joys and virtues;—all this is novel.[394] Our notions
here are mostly taken from Milton, and his, in considerable measure,
from ecclesiastical and scholastic tradition. After the sublimity of
the poet, the homely circumstantialities of the theosophist appear
cruelly prosaic. Yet Swedenborg’s view of the future state may be
regarded as, in many respects, a wholesome corrective to the popular
conception. The truth, I should dimly surmise, may lie between the
two. The general apprehension does perhaps make the transition at
death too abrupt; forgets too much the great variety of degrees and
societies of spirits which must distinguish the inhabitants of hell
and heaven,—how completely the inward tendency will make the grief
or the joy,—how little mere change of scene and mode of existence
can constitute the bliss or woe,—and how various must be the
occupations and enjoyments of a world which is to consummate, not
our adoration merely, but active love and knowledge.

Very beautiful is Swedenborg’s description of infants in heaven, and
the instruction they receive ‘from angels of the female sex, who in
the life of the body, loved infants tenderly, and at the same time
loved God.’[395]

Even wicked men, immediately after death, are kindly received by
good angels—such mercy is there for our poor mortality at the last
trying hour. But the evil nature of such persons soon resumes its
former ascendancy. The society of those pure associates grows
irksome, and is forsaken by the sinful for evil companionship
similar to themselves.

Swedenborg cannot be considered mystical in his doctrine concerning
spiritual influence—that customary seat of mysticism. Such influence
he pronounces immediate on the divine part, but not perceptible on
ours, nor such as to exclude the necessity of instruction and the
use of means. The good we do, God alone worketh in us; but we are
conscious only of effort on our own part, though believing that we
receive divine assistance. There is to be no tarrying, he says, for
magical grace; no crying ‘Wash me!’ while the divinely given means
of purification lie unused at our side. The _proprium_, or own-hood
of every angel, spirit, or man, is only evil. (All angels and devils
were once good and bad men.) To live only from God and not from
self, is the true purity. Every man is an organ of life, deriving
his life and free-will from God, and receptive of the Divine
influx—enjoying more or less, as he opens or closes his nature
thereto. If the lower regions of his spiritual nature be closed
against this influx, God is still in him, but he is not in God.[396]

Swedenborg declares that the Church has been corrupted by the
doctrine of three divine persons existing from eternity. He
maintains that such a belief must in reality involve the conception
of three several gods, however loudly those who hold it may profess
to acknowledge the Divine Unity. In his theology, the Father, Son,
and Spirit, are ‘the three essentials of one God, which make One,
like Soul, Body, and Operation in man.’

The doctrine of Swedenborg concerning the work of Christ appears to
have received its peculiar complexion, at least in great measure,
from his repugnance to Calvinism. He saw that the theology of the
Reformation had unduly elaborated into doctrine, the forensic and
pecuniary metaphors of Scripture, concerning justification and
redemption. In his reaction, he is too much inclined to give to
those figures a meaning considerably short of that which a
consistent interpretation must assign them. Yet the results at which
he arrives are not so decidedly opposed to those reached by the
theology usually termed evangelical, as might have been anticipated.
But the process of redemption in Swedenborg’s system differs widely.
He says he cannot believe that the Father, in his wrath, condemned
the human race, and in his mercy sent his Son to bear their curse;
that out of love for his suffering Son he cancelled the sentence of
damnation, yet only in favour of those for whom the Son should
intercede, who was thus to be a perpetual Mediator in the presence
of the Father.[397] He declares it a fundamental error of the Church
to believe the passion of the Cross to be redemption itself. He
pronounces imputed righteousness a subversion of the divine
order.—So much for what he denies. On the other hand, he affirms
that in the fulness of time, Jehovah assumed humanity to redeem and
save mankind. Both in the spiritual regions and among men, evil had
been gradually outgrowing and threatening to overpower good. The
equilibrium between the heavenly and hellish worlds was lost. It was
as though a dyke had been broken down, and sin were about to
overflow the universe. Then God took to himself our nature, to
subjugate the hells and to restore to order the heavens. Every
victory gained by Christ over the temptations which assailed Him,
distanced and enfeebled the powers of evil everywhere. It was the
driving back of ravenous beasts to their dens,—the delivery and
feeding of his flock, both men and angels. This victory of the
Saviour is our victory, is that redemption in virtue of which we are
able, believing in Him, to resist and vanquish evil. Mediation,
Intercession, Atonement, Propitiation, are forms of speech
‘expressive of the approach which is opened to God, and of the grace
communicated from God, by means of His Humanity.’ Thus Swedenborg
also believes in a violated order and an impending perdition; in the
redemption of the race from such a fate by the incarnate One; in the
vindication or restoration of the divine law and order by his
conflict and victory on our behalf; and in a life lived _for_ us,
which becomes also a life quickened _in_ us. He appears to object to
the idea of sacrifice as necessarily concentrating the work of
redemption in the shedding of the Saviour’s blood. Such may have
been the limited conception of sacrifice in the theology he opposed;
but that error could be no good reason for explaining away the idea
of sacrifice altogether. The language of Christ concerning himself
must be strangely misinterpreted if no such idea is to be found
there. But that sacrifice was constituted by his whole life, as well
as by its last act—the laying down thereof. The distinction drawn by
some divines between the active and passive obedience—as though the
death alone were our atonement, and the life alone our example—is a
most unhappy refinement.

In Swedenborg’s doctrine concerning union with Christ there is
nothing mystical. From the passionate and sensuous union of some
mystics, and from the pantheistic confusion of others, he is
completely free.

It is to be regretted that the work of redemption should still be so
partially regarded by opposing sections of the Church. On the one
side are those who hold the doctrine of an exact satisfaction (the
commercial theory); who suppose that, in virtue of imputed
righteousness, God sees in his people no sin; and who would say that
men _may_, rather than that they _must_, be exhorted to maintain
good works. This covert and generally theoretical antinomianism is
happily rare. Yet there are some well-meaning men, desirous of doing
a reforming work among us, who actually imagine such an extreme as
this to be the ordinary evangelical doctrine. On the other side are
those whose tendency is to resolve the historical into the inward
Christ. From any such leaning Swedenborg is more free than George
Fox. On this side, too, stand those with whom Christ’s work is
rather a first sample of restored humanity than the way of
restoration, and who seem to suppose that in admitting God to be
just, they make Him cruel. In this extreme aversion to acknowledge
an external law, and an external danger consequent on its violation,
Swedenborg does not share. But, like most of the mystics, he
conceives of redemption as wrought for us only as it is wrought in
us; takes justification for granted, if we have but sanctification;
and regards our sins as remitted just in proportion as we are
reclaimed from them. If we must lean towards some extreme, this is
the more safe, because containing the larger measure of truth. It
appears to me that the ‘divine order’ requires that man be accepted
of God in a way consistent with the divine righteousness; and so
also as, at the very same time, to become conformed to that
righteousness. The sacred writers constantly combine those two
aspects of redemption which our systems are so prone to separate. On
the one side, Christ’s example is pressed upon us, even in those
very acts which are peculiar to Himself as divine. On the other, the
blood of Christ is represented as sanctifying us—purging our
consciences from dead works to serve the living God; while it is
also stated expressly that He died, the just for the unjust.

Similar as Swedenborg’s theology is in its spirit to that of Behmen,
I find him expressly stating that he had never read the German
theosophist.

Concerning the Church of the New Jerusalem, Swedenborg says, ‘Since
the Lord cannot manifest himself in person (to the world), which has
just been shown to be impossible, and yet He has foretold that He
would come and establish a New Church, which is the New Jerusalem,
it follows that He will effect this by the instrumentality of a man,
who is able not only to receive the doctrines of that Church in his
understanding, but also to make them known by the press. That the
Lord manifested Himself before me His servant, that He sent me on
this office, and afterwards opened the sight of my spirit, and so
let me into the spiritual world, permitting me to see the heavens
and the hells, and also to converse with angels and spirits; and
this now continually for many years, I attest in truth; and farther,
that from the first day of my call to this office, I have never
received anything appertaining to the doctrines of that Church from
any angel, but from the Lord alone, whilst I was reading the
Word.’—_True Christian Religion_, § 779.

Footnote 391:

Wilkinson, pp. 79, 130.

Footnote 392:

Heaven and Hell, § 360.

Footnote 393:

True Christian Religion, § 796.

Footnote 394:

See the description of the heavenly palaces, of divine worship in
heaven, and of the angelic employments, _Heaven and Hell_, §§ 183,
221, 387. _True Christian Religion_, §§ 694, 697. Also concerning
marriages in heaven, _Heaven and Hell_, §§ 366-386.

Footnote 395:

Heaven and Hell, §§ 329-345.

Footnote 396:

True Christian Religion, chap. vi. 6, 7; Heaven and Hell, § 592.

Footnote 397:

_True Christian Religion_, chap. ii. 1-7. I give here Swedenborg’s
idea of the evangelical theology. See especially §§ 132-135, where he
represents himself as correcting the false doctrine of certain spirits
in the other world concerning the Divine Nature.

BOOK THE THIRTEENTH CONCLUSION

CHAPTER I.

Wär nicht das Auge sonnenhaft,
Wie könnten wir zur Sonne blicken?
Wär nicht in uns des Gottes eigne Kraft,
Wie könnt uns Göttliches entzücken?[398]

GOETHE.

Early in December, Atherton was called away from Ashfield by some matters of business. His solitary evenings were spent in the chief inn of a quiet cathedral town, and solaced by the drawing up of a kind of summary, which was to indicate the main results arrived at by so much reading and talking about the mystics. This final review was despatched in a letter to Gower,—was read aloud by him to a full auditory (comprising, beside its ordinary members, Mr. and Mrs. Lowestoffe, who had come up to spend Christmas),—and is here inserted.

Old Red Dragon, Snorumbury.

MY DEAR GOWER,

I had purposed keeping this concluding paper, which you asked of me,
till I could rejoin you once more, and we might read and talk over
it together. But I cannot say how long I may be detained here: so I
send it you at once, that our mystical inquiries may be wound up
before the Christmas merry-makings begin.

In the present day, there are few who will acknowledge the name of
mystic. Indeed, Mysticism is now held in combination with so many
modifying or even counteracting elements, that a very
strongly-marked or extreme expression of it is scarcely possible.
Yet in many and very diverse forms of religious opinion, a mystical
tendency may be discerned. It is apparent in the descendant of
Irving, with his supernatural gifts; among some of the followers of
Fox, where the inner light eclipses the outer; in the disciple of
Swedenborg, so familiar with the world of spirits. The mystical
tendency is present, also, wherever the subjective constituent of
religion decidedly overbalances the objective. It is to be found
whereever the religionist (under whatever pretence) refuses to allow
the understanding to judge concerning what falls within its proper
province. Thus, I tend toward mysticism, if I invest either my
religious intuitions or my particular interpretation of scripture,
with a divine halo—with a virtual infallibility—and charge with
profanity the man whose understanding is dissatisfied with my
conclusions. The ‘evangelical’ is wrong, if he hastily condemns, as
‘carnal,’ him who does not find his express doctrines in the
Bible;—if, instead of attempting to satisfy the understanding of the
objector with reasons, he summarily dismisses it, by misquoting the
passage, ‘the natural man discerneth not the things of the spirit.’
The ‘spiritualist’ errs, in precisely the same way, when he assumes
that his intuitions are too holy to be questioned by the logical
faculty,—proclaims his religious sentiment above criticism, and
pronounces every objection the utterance of a pedantic formalism, or
a miserable conventionality. So to do, is to confound the childlike
and the childish,—to forget that we should be, in malice, children;
but in understanding, men. If the intuition of the one man, or the
faith of the other, be removed from the sphere of knowing, and the
court of evidence,—be an impulse or an instinct, rather than a
conviction, and be rendered inaccessible utterly to the
understanding, then is the bridge broken down between them and their
fellows. The common tongue of interpretation and the common ground
of argument are taken altogether away. For such faith no reason can
be rendered to him who has it not.

In Germany, it may be questioned whether the efforts of the
‘faith-philosophers’ were not more injurious than helpful to the
cause which they espoused. They endeavoured to shelter religion from
Rationalism by relegating it to the province of feeling or
sentiment. Hamann and Jacobi[399] might have withstood Rationalism
on its own ground. But these defenders abandoned, without a blow,
the fortifications of an impregnable argument, and shut themselves
up in the citadel—faith. Both were soon eclipsed by the deservedly
great name of Schleiermacher. His position was a stronger one than
theirs, and more comprehensive; yet, in the issue, scarcely more
satisfactory. In Schleiermacher’s theology, the individual
‘Christian consciousness’ is made the test according to which more
or less of the recorded history of the Saviour is to be received.
The supposed facts of Christianity contract or expand according to
the supposed spiritual wants of the individual Christian. Thus, if
any say, ‘Certain of the miracles, the resurrection and ascension of
Christ, do not make a part of my Christian consciousness,—I can
realize spiritual communion with Christ, independently of these
accessories,’—Schleiermacher tells him he may dispense with
believing them. Here, again, too much is conceded: portions of the
very heart are set aside as non-essentials. Christianity is a
_living_ whole, and cannot be thus dismembered without peril to
life. This baptism of Schleiermacher is rapid and sweeping, and the
veriest sceptics are Christianized in spite of themselves. Men whose
Christianity is historic, much as Mahommedanism is historic, turn
out excellent Christians, notwithstanding.

Such a theory is, after all, ignoble, because it does not seek Truth
alone, at all costs. The first object of religious inquiry is not
moral expediency, not edification, not what we may deem productive
of the most wholesome impressions, not what we wish to find true;
but what _is_ true. Let us seek the Truth, and if faithful to what
we can find of _that_, these other things will be added to us. Mere
good nature is a spurious charity. The cause of religion can never
be served by acquiescence in a falsehood. The Christianity offered
by Schleiermacher is a glass which mirrors every man—a source of
motive, never beyond our own level—a provision which is always what
we like and expect. Now, it may so happen that the kind of religion
we should like is not that which is the true—not that, therefore,
which is good for us. We need a religion adapted to us, but yet high
above us, to raise us up. The untrained eye does not at the first
view appreciate the old masters of art. If we are sincere in seeking
God’s truth, we must count on having to receive some things that do
not at once commend themselves to our judgment, but into which we
shall grow up, in the process of spiritual education. Now, for this
kind of self-transcendence Schleiermacher makes no preparation, and
his easy entrance does, in reality, preclude progress. We are not
surprised to see the Romish priest considering first, not what is
truth or fact, but what statement will bring the greatest number
within the pale of the Church, what will produce the most edifying
impression, what will do least violence to the current
preconceptions. The children of the day should disdain the slightest
approach to such facile complaisance. If Christ did not rise from
the dead, Christianity is a lie. On this question no inquiry must be
spared—our minds must be thoroughly made up. But to allow the name
of Christian to men who do not regard this fact as established,
looks as though we were afraid of inquiry,—as politic governments
will seem hot to see offences which it would be dangerous to punish.
I justify my means by my end—I am wanting in truth and manhood, if,
having myself rejected some doctrine, I yet appear to hold it,
because I think it morally expedient that it should be generally
received. I am guilty of a similar pious fraud if I yield up as
non-essential some fact on which the Christian faith must hang, in
order to recall certain wanderers to the fold of a nominal
Christianity. Schleiermacher’s sincerity can only be saved at the
expense of his judgment. This was the weak point of his accomplished
intellect—a weakness shared by many a German divine,—he regarded
external facts as of small moment compared with inward feeling. The
continual evaporation of outward reality in sentiment is the
vitiating principle in his system.[400]

Side by side with the advocates of faith and feeling in the
religious province, appeared German Romanticism in the field of
art and literature. The Romanticists were the enthusiastic
champions of the Ideal against Realism, the assailants of all
artificial method and servile conventionality, the sworn foes
everywhere of that low-minded, prosaic narrowness which Germany
calls Philistinism.[401]

Schelling gave them a poetical philosophy, and young
Schleiermacher’s _Discourses on Religion_ were, for a time, their
Bible. French Encyclopedism and German Rationalism had professed a
summary explanation for every mystery, had exiled the supernatural,
and ridiculed the Middle Age. In the pages of the _Athenæum_ and the
_Europa_, Romanticism undertook the defence of mediæval
superstition, extolled its fist-law, its wager by battle, its
‘earnest’ religious wars; and confounding clear thought and definite
expression with the pert self-complacence of Rationalism, announced
itself enamoured of every mystical obscurity, for the very shadow’s
sake.

The evils against which the Romanticists contended were many of them
real; much they laughed at, well deserving ridicule; but with their
truth they mingled a world of fantastic folly. Voltaire was, in many
things, as shallow as he was transparent,—_therefore_ the muddy
obscurity of every visionary who rhapsodized about the All, must be
profound as the ‘everlasting deeps.’ Conventionalism,
utilitarianism, logic-grinding, old formulas,—all were to be
dethroned by the inspired votaries of intellectual intuition. The
most startling extravagance or desperate paradox of opinion was
hailed with the loudest plaudits, as most surely fraught with the
divine afflatus. The Romanticists essayed to harmonize the ideal and
the real. For the most part, they succeeded only in confounding
their spheres; and ending by absorbing the real in the ideal. In
their hands, philosophy became imaginative and rhetorical,—a very
garden of gay fancies; while poetry grew metaphysical and analytic.
Where they should have created, they dissect; where they should have
inquired, they imagine.[402]

It is a cardinal doctrine with Romanticism that the common should be
regarded as the wondrous, and the wondrous as the common. The land
of faëry is to be our beaten business track; its dreamy speech, a
household language; its spirit-glances, our familiar looks. At the
same time, the objects and appliances of everyday existence are to
be informed with supernatural significance, and animated with a
mysterious life. So, in _Sartor Resartus_ (a book which is simply
the Evangel of Romanticism, in its more vigorous form), Mr. Carlyle
reminds the reader that his ‘daily life is girt with Wonder,’ and
that his ‘very blankets and breeches are Miracles.’ Thus our life is
to be at once a trophy and a bazaar; like old Westminster Hall,
where the upper story was gorgeous with blazonry and proud with the
ensigns of chivalrous romance, and the ground-floor laid out in
shops.

Ere long, Romanticists like Creuzer and Görres, began to resolve the
old mythologies into allegorical science: while Romanticists like
Frederick Schlegel, were resolving religion into poetry, and
morality into æsthetics. Dante and Tasso, Camoens and Goethe, had
intermingled classic and romantic myths as a poetic decoration, or a
fanciful experiment. With the Romanticists (so frequently mastered
by their own materials), such admixture became actual earnest. They
announced the approach of a new Religion of Humanity and Art. They
summoned flower-spirits from the Ganges, braceleted crocodiles from
the Nile, monstrous forms from the Talmud and the Koran, to fill its
incongruous pantheon of symbols. The novel wonders of animal
magnetism were to constitute its miracles. Thus, like Proclus, they
could make philosophy superstitious, they could not make
superstition philosophical. They attempted the construction of a
true and universal religion, by heaping together the products of
every recorded religious falsity, and bowing at all shrines in turn.
Like Iamblichus, they sought in theurgy for a sign; and in their
credulous incredulity, grew greedy of every supranaturalism except
the scriptural. In a moment of especial inspiration, Frederick
Schlegel, writing in the _Athenæum_, declared that the only
opposition which the new religion of philanthropy and good taste was
likely to encounter, would spring from the few Christians proper
still in existence; but even they, when the Aurora actually shone,
would fling aside their prejudice, fall down, and worship.[403]

Such anticipations appear ridiculous enough. But against ridicule,
to which they were peculiarly sensitive, the Romanticists possessed
a ready safeguard. This resource consisted in their doctrine of
Irony. After advancing a paradox, or pushing a fancy to the edge of
absurdity, let the author turn round, and abandon his own creation;
or dissipate it, with a serene smile; or assuming another tone, look
down upon it, as questionable, from some new and superior height.
Thus, if any dullard begins gravely to criticise, he shall have only
laughter for his pains, as one too gross for the perception of
humour; while at the same time, the reader is given to understand
that beneath that jest there _does_ lie, nevertheless, a kernel of
most earnest and momentous truth. According to the Ironic theory,
such saying and unsaying is not convenient merely (as a secret door
of escape behind the tapestry), but in the highest degree artistic.
For what is Art, but a sublime play? Does not loftiest genius ever
sport, godlike, with its material, remote and riddling to the lower
apprehension of common minds? In _Sartor Resartus_ the English
public have been familiarized with this ingenious device. After
professing to translate, from the paper-bags of Teufelsdröckh, some
ultra-transcendental sally, Mr. Carlyle makes a practice of
addressing the reader, admits that he may well feel weary and
perplexed, confesses that he himself does not always see his way in
these ‘strange utterances,’ calls them a farrago whose meaning must
be mainly conjectured, and finally leaves it pleasantly uncertain
how much is delirium, how much inspiration.

But no artifice could save Romanticism, in the hands of its most
extravagant representatives, from the condign catastrophe. This
sensuous æsthetic religion, this effeminate symbolism, with its
gallery of arbitrary and incongruous types from the dreams of all
time,—this worship of Art as Deity, could tend but in one direction.
The men who began with sentimental admiration for the Church of
Rome, ended by passing their necks beneath her yoke; and the artist
terminates miserably in the bigot. They had contemned the
Reformation, on æsthetic grounds, as unromantic: they came to dread
it on superstitious grounds as unsafe. Romanticism, so sanguine and
so venturous in its revolutionary youth, grew anile in its premature
decrepitude; mumbled its _credos_; cursed its heretics—and died.

It was at the opening of the present century that the great rush to
Rome took place: a significant lesson, indicating the constant issue
of that subjective poetical religionism which divorces Truth from
Beauty, which craves religious fancies and neglects religious facts,
till it falls a victim to the greatest religious fallacy. Then was
celebrated the perversion of Frederick Schlegel, of Adam Müller, of
Zachariah Werner—‘a born mystic,’ as Carlyle rightly styles him.
Tieck, who must stand acquitted of the follies of the school; and
August Wilhelm Schlegel (despite some crotchets, immeasurably
superior to Frederick) retained their Protestantism.

Novalis, for by this name Friedrich von Hardenberg is most known, is
perhaps as fair a representative of Romanticism as can be found. He
had no occasion, like some of the party, to affect, as so much art,
the language of the mystics whom he studied with such devotion.
Novalis was to the manner born. To none was the realm of reverie and
fable—visited by most of us only at intervals—more completely a
familiar, daily dwelling-place. Scarcely to the morbid phantasy of
Hoffmann was the ordinary life more visibly inwrought with the
mysterious. Poetry was his practical staff of every-day existence;
and practical life, to him, all poetry. The creations of his fancy
were his Holy Writ; and Holy Writ the most divine creation of the
fancy. Werner regretted that men should ever have employed two
distinct terms to designate Art and Religion. With Novalis they are
perfectly identical. It is his wont to deal with spiritual truth by
analogies drawn from physics, and to investigate physics by his
mystical axioms concerning spiritual truth. A mind so desultory and
discursive was quite unequal to the formation of a system. But to
what sort of system such a confusion of thought must lead, if ever
methodically elaborated, has not patient, hard-working Jacob Behmen
already shown us? Where other men are satisfied with tracing a
resemblance, Novalis announces an identity. What others use as an
illustration, he will obey as a principle. With him, as with the old
theosophists, the laws of the universe are the imaginative analogies
which link together all its regions, seen and unseen,—analogies bred
in his own heated brain.

Thus, according to Novalis, he is the true Archimage of Idealism,
‘who can transform external things into thoughts, and thoughts into
external things.’ ‘The poet,’ he says, ‘is the true enchanter: by
identifying himself with an object he compels it to become what he
will.’ ‘Experience is magical, and only magically explicable.’
‘Physics is the theory of imagination.’ ‘Religion, Love, Nature,
Politics, all must be treated mystically.’ On such a principle alone
can we account for the ultra-Neoplatonist rodomontade he utters in
praise of mathematics. He declares the genuine mathematician the
enthusiast _par excellence_—mathematics is the life of the gods—it
is religion—it is virtual omniscience. Mathematical books are to be
read devoutly, as the word of God.[404]

The suggestive and sparkling aphorisms of Novalis should be read
with due allowance. Some contain admirable thoughts, pointedly
expressed; others are curiously perverse or puerile. Now they
breathe the lofty stoical spirit we find in Schleiermacher’s
monologues. Presently, Fichte seems forgotten; the strain of Titanic
self-assertion is relaxed, and Novalis languidly reclines with the
Lotos-eaters among the flowers. In one page life is but ‘a battle
and a march,’ in another, the soul’s activity is an eating poison;
love, a sickness; life, the disease of the spirit—a brief fever, to
be soothed by the slumber of mystical repose, and healed at last by
healthful, restful death. In this latter mood he woos the sleepy
abstraction of the oriental mysticism. Action is morbid, in his
eyes; to dream is to overcome. All activity ceases, he says, when
Knowledge enters. The condition of Knowlege is Eudæmonia—saintly
calm of contemplation.[405] Such is the aspiration dimly discernible
through the florid obscurity of his _Hymns to Night_. Shutting out
the garish outer world of the Actual, forgetting all its tinsel
glories and its petty pains, the enthusiast seems to rise into that
mystic meditative Night, whose darkness reveals more truth than the
searching brightness of the daylight, and in whose recesses his
transported spirit celebrates its bridal with the Queen of
Heaven—the æsthetic Mary, the Eternal Beauty.

Now that the assailants of Revelation have grown so extremely pious,
we find them zealously enlisting certain modifications of mysticism
on their side. Modern spiritualism revives the tactics of ancient
philosophy. It borrows from Christianity (as did Porphyry) a higher
moral tone than it could otherwise have reached, and then pretends
to look down upon the ethics of the scriptures. The religious
sentiment so variously evolved in every age and country, is brought
forth to overwhelm the religious truth revealed in Christ. A
philosophic church is set up. The hope full of immortality is
depreciated as low and selfish. Quietism abased itself so profoundly
that it would scarcely lift its eyes toward that hope. Spiritualism
exalts itself so ambitiously, that it will not stoop to make that
hope its own. In the seventeenth century, mysticism was in sad
earnest on this question of disinterestedness: in the nineteenth,
such indifference is the pretence of a preposterous
self-sufficiency.

But the device which failed so signally, some fourteen centuries
ago, cannot now prevail, though the hostile approach is more
artfully contrived. That antichristian sentimentalism which is too
refined for the medium of a book, and for the morality of the Bible,
was discomfited as soon as seen, and received its _coup de grace_
from the ‘_Eclipse of Faith_,’ amidst universal laughter. But this
repetition of old ideas is, after all, the most mortifying and
damnatory fact. To think; that the advocates of a philosophic
religious sentiment, in opposition to the old Book, should exhibit
as little novelty as their enemies,—that even after throwing off the
Biblical fetters, no progress should be visible,—that the haunting
Past should be with them still,—that after making their escape from
antiquated Paul and John, they should find themselves in company
with antiquated Proclus and Plotinus!

The theosophy of Swedenborg was original. Mysticism has produced
nothing really new in that direction since his day, and the northern
seer still walks alone within his circle. Franz Baader re-clothes
the bones of Behmen’s system from the materials of modern science;
and Oetinger, a student both of Behmen and of Swedenborg, attempts
to arrange a divine system of science by the mystical interpretation
of scripture. Even the ‘holy vegetation’ of oriental mysticism has
been reproduced. Schelling bids man know God ‘in silent
not-knowing,’ as the plant reveals eternal beauty in ‘stillest
existence and without reflection.’ Such counsel means much more than
the maxim, ‘Il ne faut pas voyager pour voir, mais pour ne pas
voir,’ so frequent with John of the Cross and Fénélon. Laurence
Oken, a physiologist of note and a disciple of Schelling, sees in
the snail an exalted symbol of mind slumbering deeply within itself.
He beholds in that creature an impersonation of majestic wisdom: it
is ‘the prophesying goddess sitting on the tripod.’ What reflection,
what earnestness, what timidity, what confidence! The same Oken
travesties Behmen, when he makes red = fire, love, Father; blue =
air, truth, belief, Son; green = water, formation, hope, Ghost;
yellow = earth, Satan. He imagined that he wrote his
Physio-philosophy in a kind of inspiration. Here, again, we see that
this intellectual intuition, professedly so keen, so spontaneous, so
free from every formula, does yet continually repeat itself.

Great and various have been the services rendered by mysticism
throughout the history of the Christian Church. It has exposed
pretence, it has demanded thoroughness. It has sought, amidst
surrounding formalism, what was deemed the highest form of
spirituality. Its strain has been sometimes of a mood so high as to
‘create a soul within the ribs of death.’

But it has been influential for good in proportion to its temperance
in the doctrine concerning the outward rule and the inner light.
Wherever it has been extravagant in this respect—has thrown off
common sense or decency—been turbulent, licentious, or ‘high
fantastical,’ there good men and thoughtful have stood mournfully
aloof from it, while formal men or designing have made its follies a
plea for tightening the cords of spiritual oppression. It has won
acceptance from men when it has been sufficiently moderate to urge
intelligible arguments, and to appeal sincerely (if not always
warrantably) to that outward Revelation which is commonly received.
But the world has rarely been disposed to receive boastful
professions of spirituality or freedom, vague declamation and
rhapsodical denunciation of reason or the schools, in the place of
those definite expressions of opinion which, though sometimes
narrow, are at least readily apprehensible. Incalculable must be the
advantage of any man or party who can manifest a clear meaning over
those who cannot.

There is danger in the present day, lest in the reaction against
logical formalism and prescription, an extravagant value should be
set on faith for its own sake. The Romanist makes mere faith, blind
and implicit, a saving virtue. The spiritualist falls into the same
error when he says, ‘Only be in earnest—get faith in an idea—in
something, at any rate—and all will be well.’ But faith is a
principle, not an instinct. Among the many claimants for my belief,
I must make an intelligent choice. It is of some consequence whether
the ‘idea’ on which I am mounted be false or true. It can be good
for no man to be recklessly earnest in the devil’s work.

Mysticism has generally apprehended religion rather on its divine
than on its human side. It makes haste to lose humanity, and to be
glorified. Grievous afflictions have reminded some of the mystical
aspirants that they were human still. The spiritual pride of others
has betrayed them, first to ostentatious sanctity, and then to
shameful sin. Among those who would surpass humanity, some have
fallen disgracefully, others ludicrously, below it. There have been
those whose transformation proved to be downward to a lower sphere,
not upward to an element more rare. They fare like Lucius in the
_Golden Ass_ to whom Fotis has given the wrong witch-salve. He
extends his arms, he sways himself to and fro, he expects the next
moment to find himself changing into a bird. But his hands and feet
grow horny, his thickening, irritated skin shoots forth hairs, and
behold him metamorphosed into an ass. The theatrical devotion, so
frequent among the ornaments of Roman saintship, overlooks common
duties, sometimes despises necessary helps, generally mistakes
altogether the nature of true greatness. The Christianity exhibited
in the New Testament differs most conspicuously from the Mystical
Theology in being so much more human. It addresses man as he is; it
addresses all; it appeals to the whole nature of every man. It knows
nothing of class-religion. It does not bid men exhaust themselves in
efforts to live only in the _apex_ of their being—that ἄνθος νόου of
which Plotinus speaks.

The history of mysticism shows us, farther, that the attempt to
escape all figure or symbol, in our apprehensions of divine truth,
is useless, or worse than useless. Such endeavour commonly ends in
substituting for a figure which, though limited and partial, has
life and heart in it, some vague abstraction, cold and lifeless,—and
itself, perhaps, ultimately a figure, after all. It is one thing to
remember that language is _but_ language,—that behind all the
expressions of love or power lies an infinity that cannot be
expressed. It is another to leave behind (as many mystics have
striven to do) even the vital breathing metaphors of Holy Writ, and
restlessly to peer beyond, into the Unutterable—the Illimitable.
Surely the words ‘King,’ ‘Shepherd,’ ‘Father,’ express more truth
concerning God than the ‘pure Act’ of philosophy. When I speak of
God as near or distant, pleased or displeased, the change may be in
me rather than in Him. But in practical result—in the effects I
feel—it is to me _as though_ such change of disposition were real.
And mysticism must freely grant me this, if it would not play into
the hands of scholasticism, its hereditary foe. There is a sickly
dread of anthropomorphism abroad among us, which is afraid of
attributing to God a heart.

Mysticism has often spoken out bravely and well against those who
substitute barren propositions for religious life,—who reject the
kindly truth to make a tyrant of some rigid theory or system. But
there is danger also on the other side. An imaginative, brainsick
man, may substitute religious vagaries, whims, conceits, for
religious truth. Men may be led as far astray by mere feeling as by
mere logic. While the man of method makes an idol of his theory, the
enthusiast may make an idol of his passion or his fancy. To this
latter snare we have seen mysticism repeatedly fall a prey. The
fanatic and the formalist both essay to build a temple to the Holy
Spirit. The formalist is satisfied with raising the structure; and a
sorry taper, here and there, makes darkness visible. The fanatic
kindles so many lights, and with so little care, that he burns his
edifice to the ground, as did the Florentines their Church of the
San Spirito, from excessive illumination.

Anatomists tell us of what they term vicarious secretion in the
bodies of men. One organ is found, in some cases of injury, to
produce the secretion proper to another; and so we survive the hurt.
I think some process of the kind must supervene for the benefit of
our minds. With many of the mystics, I doubt not, the heart
performed, in their spiritual œconomy, the functions of the head. A
careful scrutiny of the mystical theology will show, I am confident,
that several of its prominent doctrines are, in fact, most valuable
correctives, and probably took or maintained their place as such.
These doctrines, some of which by no means commend themselves to the
non-mystical mind, are the preservatives of the mystic from his
peculiar dangers. Mysticism leads to an excessive and morbid
introspection. How necessary, then, that doctrine of
‘unconsciousness’ reiterated by John of the Cross and
Fénélon,—itself an extreme, but indispensable to counteract its
opposite. Mysticism has taught many to expect a perceptible inward
guidance. How necessary, then, the doctrine of ‘quiet,’—that the
soul should be abstracted in a profound stillness, lest the hasty
impulses of self should be mistaken for a divine monition. Mysticism
exalts the soul to a fervour and a vision, fraught with strange
sweetnesses and glories. How necessary, then, that doctrine of the
more elevated Quietism which bids the mystic pass beyond the
sensible enjoyments and imaginative delights of religion—escape from
the finer senses of the soul, as well as the grosser senses of the
body, into that state of pure and imageless contemplation which has
no preference or conception of its own. If Quietism is not to become
a fantastic selfishness, a sensuous effeminacy, a voice must cry,
‘Haste through the picture-gallery—haste through the
rose-garden—dare the darkness, wherein the glory hides!’

The lawless excesses of which mysticism has been occasionally guilty
should not serve to commend spiritual despotism. The stock
alternative with the Church of Rome has been—‘Accept these fanatical
outbreaks as divine, or submit to our rule.’ Unfortunately for this
very palpable sophism, the most monstrous mystical extravagance,
whether of pantheism, theurgy, or miracle, is to be found in the
Romish Church. Angelus Silesius, Angela de Foligni, and Christina
Mirabilis, are nowhere surpassed in their respective extremes. The
best of the Romish mystics are questionable Romanists. Tauler and
Madame Guyon were more Protestant than they were aware. Even the
submissive Fénélon is but a half-hearted son of the Church, beside
that most genuine type of her saintship—the zealous Dominic.
Innocent folk are sometimes inclined to think better of a system
which could produce a man like Fénélon. They forget that, as a
product of the system, Fénélon was a very inferior specimen—little
better than a failure.

There is a considerable class, in these restless, hurrying, striving
days, who would be much the better for a measure of spiritual
infusion from the Quietism of Madame Guyon. She has found an
excellent expositor and advocate in Mr. Upham. The want of leisure,
the necessity for utmost exertion, to which most of us are subject,
tends to make us too anxious about trifles, presumptuously eager and
impatient. We should thank the teacher who aids us to resign
ourselves, to be nothing, to wait, to trust. But it is to be feared
that such lessons will have the greatest charm for those who need
them least—for pensive, retiring contemplatists, who ought rather to
be driven out to action and to usefulness. There is a danger lest
passivity should be carried too far—almost as though man were the
helpless object about which light and darkness were contending,
rather than himself a combatant, armed by God against the powers of
night. It seems to me, too, better to watch against, and suppress as
they arise, our selfish tendencies and tempers—our envy, pride,
indifference, hate, covetousness—than to be always nervously trying
(as Fénélon does) to catch that Proteus, SELF, in the abstract.

Finally, in the mischievous or unsuccessful forms of mysticism we
have the recorded result of a series of attempts to substitute the
inner light for the outer. When mysticism threw off external
authority altogether, it went mad—as we have seen in the
revolutionary pantheism of the Middle Age. When it incorporated
itself more and more in revealed truth, it became a benign power—as
on the eve of the Reformation. The testimony of history, then, is
repeatedly and decisively uttered against those who imagine that to
set aside the authority of Scripture would be to promote the
religious life of men. The Divine Spirit is with us yet; and the
healing, elevating wisdom of the inspired page unexhausted still.
The hope of our age lies, not in a conceited defiance of controul,
but in our ability more fully to apprehend the counsels God Himself
has given us. Argument may be evaded. To speak in the name of
religion may seem to beg the question. But to resist the verdict of
the past is not the part of any thoughtful man. He who hopes to
succeed in superseding letter by spirit—in disseminating a gospel
more spiritual than that of scripture, by somehow dispensing with
the vehicle which all truth requires for its conveyance,—who hopes
to succeed in any attempt approaching this, where more powerful
minds, sometimes more favourably situated, have met only with
defeat—such a fanatic must be dismissed with pity as totally
incurable.

It grows late. Good night all. If I can get back earlier I will.

Yours,
HENRY ATHERTON.

Footnote 398:

Goethe:

Held our eyes no sunny sheen,
How could sunshine e’er be seen?
Dwelt no power divine within us,
How could God’s divineness win us?

Footnote 399:

See F. H. Jacobi, _Von den Göttlichen Dingen und ihrer Offenbarung_
(1811), where the principles of the Faith-Philosophy are expounded,
though after a desultory, disjointed manner:—more especially pp.
70-93.

Footnote 400:

To Schleiermacher the theology of his country owes great and lasting
obligation for having led the intellectual promise of his time to a
momentous crisis of transition. His genius at once kindled the
enthusiasm of youth, and allowed a space to its scepticism. As much
opposed as Hamann or Jacobi to the contemptuous Rationalism which then
held the scorner’s chair, he did not, like them, couch a polemic lance
against philosophy. But real and important as was his advance beyond
the low and superficial anti-supranaturalism which preceded him, the
followers of Schleiermacher found it impossible to rest where he did.
From among his pupils have sprung the greatest names in this
generation of German divines, and they have admitted, with scarcely an
exception, that he conceded so much for the sake of peace as to render
his position untenable. Their master led them to an elevation whence
they discerned a farther height and surer resting-place than he
attained. For a more detailed account of Schleiermacher and his
theological position, the reader is referred to an article by the
Author in the _British Quarterly Review_ for May, 1849.

Footnote 401:

The principles of the genuine Romanticism (as distinguished from its
later and degenerate form) are ably enunciated by Tieck, in a comic
drama, entitled _Prince Zerbino; or, Travels in Search of Good Taste_.
One Nestor, a prosaic pedant, who piques himself on understanding
everything, and on his freedom from all enthusiasm and imaginative
nonsense, is introduced into the wondrous garden of the Goddess of
Poesy. There he sees, among others, Dante and Ariosto, Cervantes and
Sophocles. He complains of not finding Hagedorn, Gellert, Gesner,
Kleist, or Bodmer; and the Goddess then points him out—as a true
German bard—stout old Hans Sachs. Dante appears to him a crusty old
fogie; Tasso, a well-meaning man, but weak; and Sophocles, whom he was
disposed to respect as a classic, when blamed for the obscurity of his
choruses, turns upon him like a bear. The conceited impertinence, the
knowing air, and the puzzle-headedness of the Philistine, are hit off
to admiration. This Garden of Poesy seems to him a lair of savages, an
asylum for lunatics, where all his smug conventionalisms are trampled
on, and every canon of his criticism suffers flagrant violation. Genii
take him away, and give him something substantial to eat—earth to
earth. The tables and chairs begin to talk to him. They congratulate
themselves on being delivered from their old free life in the woods,
and cut out into _useful_ articles of furniture, so fulfilling the
purpose of their being. He gets on much better with them than with the
poets, and thinks them (himself excepted) the most sensible creatures
in the world.

Footnote 402:

See Julian Schmidt, _Geschichte der Deutschen National Literatur im
19n Jahrhundert_, th. I. c. vi.

Footnote 403:

Schmidt, p. 60.

Footnote 404:

Novalis, Schriften, th. ii. pp. 152, 159, 221.

Footnote 405:

Ibid., p. 158.

CHAPTER II.

La raison, dit saint Augustin, ne se soumettroit jamais, si elle ne
jugeoit qu’il y a des occasions où elle doit se soumettre. Il est
donc juste qu’elle se soumette quand elle juge qu’elle doit se
soumettre; et qu’elle ne se soumette pas, quand elle juge avec
fondement qu’elle ne doit pas le faire: mais il faut prendre garde à
ne pas se tromper.—PASCAL.

Gower ceased reading. A few irregular remarks and questions followed the short silence. Willoughby expressed his wish that Atherton were with them, and was echoed by the lady of Ashfield. Kate received Atherton’s bulky letter from Gower’s hands, and began to look it over for herself, as we always do with newspapers, however fully read aloud. Mrs. Lowestoffe was cutting out some ingenious paper figures, destined to throw little Kate into rapturous glee, and her husband had just petitioned for music, when the deep bark of Lion was heard in the court-yard; then the muffled sound of hoofs and wheels over the snow, and a tearing peal of the bell.

It was Atherton, who, released sooner than he had hoped, had followed his epistle at speed, sweeping with the wind, through the whitening hills, for two-thirds of the December day.

In half an hour he was among his guests—had refreshed him after his journey—been upstairs to kiss his sleeping child—and now appeared, blithesome and ruddy, diffusing smiles. Enthroned in his favourite arm-chair, he amused them with the story of what he had seen, and heard, and done; nothing uncommon, certainly, but full of life and humour in his style of telling. On his way home that, day he had met with an entertaining companion in the railway carriage, a little spherical old gentleman, exhibiting between upper and nether masses of fur a narrow segment of face,—gruff and abrupt in speech—ferocious about stoppages and windows,—who had been in India, and knew everybody who was ‘anybody’ there.

‘We talked,’ said Atherton, ‘about Brahmins and Buddhists, about the Bhilsa Topes and Major Cunningham, about the civil service, and what not. On every topic he was surprisingly well informed, and gave me, in his brief way, just the facts I wanted to know. A propos of Ceylon and the famous cinnamon breezes, he said that when he was on board the Bungagunga Indiaman, they stood one day out at sea, some miles off the island, when the wind was blowing, mark you, right on the land. A group among the passengers began to dispute about these said breezes—were they a poetic fiction, or an olfactory fact? With that, my old gentleman slips away slyly, rubs a little oil of cinnamon on the weather hammock nettings, and has the satisfaction of presently seeing the pro-cinnamon party in full triumph, crying, with distended nostrils and exultant sniffs, ‘There! don’t you smell them now?’ One of them, he told me (his multitudinous envelopes shaking the while), actually published an account when he got home, relating his own experience of those spicy gales, said to perfume the ocean air so far away.’

GOWER. Amusing enough. Just the blunder, by the way, of our mystics,—mistaking what exists only on board their own personality for something real that operates from without. Their pleasurable emotions can be nothing less than precious odours—miraculous benisons, breathed from some island of the blest.

LOWESTOFFE. They seem to me a most monotonous set of gentry—those same mystics. Accept my congratulations on your having nearly done with them. As far as I understand them, they go round one old circuit for ever, in varying forms,—just like your gold fish there, Mrs. Atherton, now looking so big about it, and the next moment tapered off to a mere tail. See that fellow now, magnified almost to the size of his glass world, with his huge eyes, like a cabbage rose in spectacles; and now, gone again on his way round and round,—always the same, after all.

ATHERTON. And yet religious extravagances, with all their inordinate Quixotism, or worse, are full of instruction. Your favourite botanical books should hint that much to you; for the vegetable physiologists all say that no little light has been thrown on the regularly developed organism by the study of monstrous and aberrant forms of growth.

LOWESTOFFE. There is something in that. But these irregularities you speak of have repeatedly broken out in the conduct, have they not, as well as in imagination or opinion?

ATHERTON. They have. The dazzling splendour of a superhuman knowledge or a superhuman fervour, has often distorted the common rule of right and wrong,——

GOWER. As they say the Northern Lights disturb the direction of the needle.

KATE. Yet those glimmers and flashes are of service in the arctic night,—better than total darkness.

LOWESTOFFE. Right, Miss Merivale. I fully admit the plea.

WILLOUGHBY. I think we must allow the substantial justice of Mr. Lowestoffe’s complaint. There is a sameness in these mystics. Each one starts, to so large an extent, on his own account, with the same bias and the same materials. He reiterates, after his manner, the same protest, and the same exaggeration. The same negations, the same incoherence, the same metaphors, have attempted in every age the utterance of the unutterable.

ATHERTON. So science began to make steady progress as soon as it confined itself within the limits of the knowable, and ceased to publish fancy maps of the terra incognita. Theosophy was perpetually transgressing those limits, and hence its waste of ingenuity in vain gyrations.

GOWER. There is one point, Atherton, on which I could wish you had dwelt more at large in your letter. Do we not find, the most prolific source of mysticism in the idea that there is a special faculty for the discernment of spiritual truth,—that there is a kind of soul within the soul which may unite with God, leaving behind it all the ordinary powers of the mind,—a potency, in fact, altogether independent of knowledge, understanding, judgment, imagination, &c., and never amenable to any of them? We have encountered this doctrine over and over again, sometimes in a qualified, sometimes in an uncontrollable form. Hugo’s ‘Eye of Contemplation’ is such a faculty. Tauler adopts the principle when he separates the Ground of the Soul from all its acts and powers. It lies at the root of the inexpressible experiences so precious to the Spanish mystics, when every function of the soul underwent divine suspension. It appears again in the divorce declared (by Coleridge, for example) between the Understanding—the reasoning faculty, which deliberates and judges, and the Intuitive Reason, which discerns religious and philosophic truth directly.

ATHERTON. You make out a strong case, certainly. Declare intuition absolute, with an undivided irresponsible prerogative of this kind, and what check is provided against any possible vagary of mysticism?

MRS. ATHERTON. I do not clearly understand the question at issue. Pray explain before you go farther.

GOWER. Allow me to make the attempt. I am afraid we are growing prosy—speaking for myself, at least. Old travellers used to report that the Danube, near its conjunction with the Drave, flowed in a stream quite separate from its tributary, though the same banks confined them both. The two currents were said to be perfectly distinct in colour, and their waters of quality so opposite, that the fish caught in the one were never to be found in the other. Now the question is, whether Reason and Understanding in the mind of man, do, in a similar way, reciprocally exclude each other.

ATHERTON. Gower says no; and the failures of mysticism powerfully support his position. I agree with him. I think we have all within us what I may call Intuition, the poetical, and Understanding, the practical man; but that each of the two is the better for close fellowship with his brother. Let not Intuition disdain common-sense, and think irrationality a sign of genius. And you, Gower, would be the last to give the reins to logic only, and live by expediency, arithmetic, and mensuration.

MRS. ATHERTON. Thank you.

WILLOUGHBY. But there was occasion, surely, for Coleridge’s exhortation to rise above the dividual particular notions we have gathered about us, to the higher region of the Universal Reason.

ATHERTON. By all means, let us clear our minds of prejudice, and seek the True for its own sake.

LOWESTOFFE. But I do not find that those who profess to have ascended to the common ground of Universal Reason, are one whit more agreed among themselves, than those who are disputing in the lists of logic about evidence.

WILLOUGHBY. They are not, I grant. They would attribute their want of unanimity, however, to the fact that some of them have not sufficiently purged their intuitional eyesight from everything personal and particular.

LOWESTOFFE. Who is to be judge in the matter? Who will say how much purging will suffice to assure a man that he has nowhere mistaken a ‘wholesome Prejudice’ for a divine intuition?

WILLOUGHBY. He must exercise his judgment——

GOWER. Exactly so; his critical, sifting faculty—his understanding. But that is contrary to the theory in question, which represents Understanding as utterly incapable in the Intuitional sphere. According to Jacobi, it is the instinct of the logical faculty to contradict the intuitional—as the bat repudiates the sunshine.

ATHERTON. If the Christianity of mere logic hardens into a formula, the Christianity of mere intuition evaporates in a phantom.

WILLOUGHBY. But do not let us forget how limited is the logical faculty.

GOWER. So, for that matter, is the intuitional. Undeveloped by culture from without, its voice is incoherent, various, scarce audible oftentimes.

WILLOUGHBY. What logic can prove to me the Eternity of the Divine Nature? Is not that a transcendental truth?

ATHERTON. I grant it. But my understanding, observing and reasoning, has shown me convincingly that I must receive that truth on pain of believing an absurdity. In this way, the Understanding is satisfied (as Pascal observes it always should be), and acquiesces in a truth beyond itself. But if I have not thus used my Understanding as far as it will go, I am traversing the transcendental region without the passport it should give me,—I cannot render a reason—I only oracularly affirm—I am fast turning mystic.

LOWESTOFFE. But how this Intuition sees to work, or finds means to work, without contact with the other faculties of the mind, I cannot conceive. Has it a set of finer senses of its own? Has no one ever defined it?

GOWER. Several definitions have been attempted. I think Mark Antony’s the best. He delivered it when he gave drunken Lepidus that hoaxing description of the crocodile. A mind with any depth of insight will understand at once the fine symbolism of Shakspeare, and see that he is depicting Intuition. ‘It is shaped, sir, like itself; and it is as broad as it hath breadth; it is just so high as it is, and moves with its own organs; it lives by that which nourishes it; and, the elements once out of it, it transmigrates.’

ATHERTON. In fact, Intuition is not to be termed one among or above the faculties of the mind. It is rather, like consciousness, related to them as species to individuals. As the man is, so are his intuitions. Previous observation, training, judgment, all combine to bring the mind to that point from which Intuition takes its survey, more or less extended.

LOWESTOFFE. Good. Our inner and our outer world contradict that separatist theory every day, by their action and reaction on each other. The man who dreads the internal light as an illusive Will-o’-the-Wisp, has often consulted his own inward bent, far more than he supposes, in choosing what authority he shall receive. The man who professes to transcend the external altogether is still moulded by it in a thousand unimagined modes.

WILLOUGHBY. The imperfect character of our recollection should make us very cautious, I admit. So much that has been imported into the mind looks native and spontaneous after a lapse of time. Many an idea, promulged as the dictum of Intuition—as having its source in the immemorial depths of our being, has been subsequently traced, even by its own author, to the external world.

GOWER. That gaberlunzie, Memory (whose wallet has so many holes), would step in oftener, if he did his duty, and say, like Edie Ochiltree, ‘I mind the biggin o’ it.’

ATHERTON. It seems to me so unfair and ungrateful that after having been so largely indebted, from the first, to the outer world, any man should pretend, at a certain point, to deny utterly that indispensable coadjutor in his inward development.

GOWER. You remind me of the affectation of the author in Humphrey Clinker, who professed such an antipathy to green fields as made him careful to sit with his back to the window all dinner-time,—though he had, in fact, passed his childhood with the asses on the village common.

LOWESTOFFE. Let us, then, celebrate the reconciliation of the pair—Reason and Understanding, if the terms are to be retained. So only can our nature realize its full productiveness,—as the richest mines lie always near the junction of two dissimilar rocks.

ATHERTON. I think spiritualism, which complains that religion is separated too widely from common life, will scarcely mend the matter by teaching men that they use one faculty, or set of faculties, about their week-day business, and a quite distinct one in their worship.

GOWER. As though we were to leave our understandings—like the sandals of old—at the door of our holy places.

ATHERTON. Enough on this question, I have only one remark to add. We have seen mysticism endeavouring to exclude all distinct form or expression, all vivid figure, from its apprehensions of spiritual truth; as if such clearness and warmth belonged to our meaner nature—were low and sensuous.

GOWER. Confounding spirituality with abstraction.

ATHERTON. Spiritualism now repeats the same error—is the revival of an old mistake in a new form. It shrinks from distinctness, mistaking it, I suppose, for so much gross materialism, or artificial formalism. It shuns, as far as possible, actual outward persons and events—as though reality were carnality—as though the fewer facts we acknowledged, the less formal we were sure to be—as though we were spiritual in proportion as we resolved sacred narrative into symbols of inward states or emotions, forsook history for reverie, and evidence for hazy sentiment. The Spanish Quietists were well nigh enjoining the exclusion of the conception of Christ’s humanity from their higher contemplation, as an image too substantial and earthy. Spiritualism, in its tendency to escape from objective facts to subjective experience, displays a similarly unnatural timidity—a morbid aversion to that manly exercise of our whole nature on religious questions which we put forth on others.

GOWER. Thinking, I conclude, that the opposite to spirituality is, not sensuality or earthliness—but external reality.

WILLOUGHBY. Why look at me? You don’t suppose I have a word to say in defence of such a curious confusion of thought?

LOWESTOFFE (who has been turning over the leaves of a Shakspeare while listening.) If any one of you should ever take it into his head to write a book about mysticism——

ATHERTON. Forbid it, my good genius!

LOWESTOFFE. I have a motto for him—a motto by ‘sweet Bully Bottom,’ quite in the past-all-utterance mystical strain.

‘I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream—past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was, there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had. But man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen; man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called Bottom’s Dream, because it hath no bottom.

CHAPTER III.

What pale dictatress in the air
Feeds, smiling sadly, her fine ghostlike form,
With earth’s real blood and breath, the beauteous life
She makes despised for ever?

BROWNING.

These lines hovered in Gower’s memory that night, as he walked home after the conversation just recorded. He thought how applicable they were to asceticism,—especially to that intense asceticism of the mind which, not content with wasting the body and searing the sense, prides itself on starving Reason and blinding Imagination,—which eschews all form and figure, and affects naked truth, without a medium or an envelope. His was a nature which saw everything in figure. His mind moved everywhere among pictures. For him to dispense with metaphor and parable—with significant raiment and dramatic action for his ideas, would have been almost equivalent to dispensing with ideas altogether. So he quickened his steps; for the starless, unfeatured night seemed to him too much to resemble the blank and bleak Abstraction of the severer mystics,—that tyrannous curfew of warm natural life and of all bright thoughts.

He soon reached his abode, where a blithe fire awaited him, radiating its almost animated welcome over easel, busts, and books. Assuming light study vesture, he leaned back in his arm-chair, enjoying slippered ease. He would not light his lamp, but reclining in the very mood for reverie, watched the fire—now the undisputed magician of his studio,—as it called up or dismissed, with its waving flame, the distorted shadows of familiar things on wall and ceiling. He himself was soon occupied in like manner, waywardly calling forth, linking, severing, a company of shadows out of the past.

In a half-waking, half-dreaming twilight, Gower seemed to see the dusky form of the Indian, crouched on his mat beside a holy river, awaiting divine insensibility. There was the Yogi, gathered up in his patch of shade, like an insect rolled under a leaf; while, above, the beating sun-glare trampled over the plains, strewn with his reflected rays, as over an immeasurable threshing-floor.

Then he dreamed that he stood in a Persian garden, and before him were creeping plants, trained on wires slanting upward to a point, and in and out and up and down this flower-minster, hung with bells, darted those flying jewels, the humming-birds: the sun’s rays as they slanted on their glancing coats seemed to dash off in a spray of rainbow colours. Some pierced the nectaries of the flowers with their fine bills; others soared upward, and as they were lost in the dazzling air, the roses swung their censers, and the nightingales sang an assumption-hymn for them. Yet this scene changed incessantly. Every now and then the pinnacle of flowers assumed giant size,—was a needle of rock, shooting up out of a chasm of hanging vegetation; and innumerable spirits—winged souls of Sufis, were striving to reach the silent glistening peak. There was a flutter and a pulsing in the sky—as with summer lightning at night,—and the palpitation of some vast eyelid made light and darkness succeed each other with quick throbs. Now it was the pyramid of flowers, now the star-crowned point of rock. So time and space were surpassed—sported with. Instants were ages, he thought, and cycles ran their round in a moment. The vault of heaven was now a hanging flower-cup; and presently the feather of a humming-bird expanded to a sunset of far-streaming gold and purple.

A leaping flame caused these alternations in Dreamland, as it lit or left in shadow his closed eyes.

Then he stood on the desolate Campagna, where before him stretched the ruins of the Roman aqueducts. The broken arches, dotting at intervals the far waste of withered green, drew no more water from the hills for the million-mouthed City in the horizon. Their furrowed, beaten age held in its wrinkles only roots of maidenhair, and sometimes little rain-pools along the crevices,—the scornful charity of any passing shower. In a moment the wilderness grew populous with the sound of voices and the clangour of tools.—A swarm of workmen, clustered about the broken links of the chain, were striving to piece them together again—to bind up the mighty artery, and set it flowing as of old. But an insatiable morass sucked down the stones they brought. Waggons full of gods (such as moved in the old triumphs), of statues monstrous, bestial, many-limbed, from all the temples of the nations, were unladen, with sacrifice and augury, and the idols deposited on the treacherous quagmire, only to sink down, a drowning mass, with bowing heads and vainly-lifted arms. Then the whole undulating plain appeared to roll up in vapour, and a wind, carrying in it a sound of psalms, and driving before it a snowy foam of acacia blossoms, swept clear the field of vision. No; the old influence was to flow no more from the Olympian Houses above that blue line of hills. Great Pan was dead. The broken cisterns would hold no water.

He stood next before the mouth of a cavern, partly overhung with a drooping hair of tropical plants. At his side was a nun, who changed, as is the wont of dreams, into a variety of persons. At one time, she was St. Theresa, then Christina Mirabilis, and presently Gower thought he recognised Theresa once more. He followed his conductress into the cavern, in the gloom of which a hermit rivulet was pattering along, telling its pebble beads. As they passed on, the night-birds in the black recesses of the rock shrieked and hooted at them. As he touched the dank sides of the passage, from time to time his hand would rest on some loathly wet lump, shuffling into a cranny, or some nameless, gelid shape fell asunder at his touch, opening gashes in itself where lay, in rows, seeds of great tarantula eye-balls, that ran away dissolved in venomous rheum. Bat-like things flapped down from funnel-shaped holes: polypi felt after his face with slimy fingers: crabs, with puffed human faces, slid under his tread; and skinny creatures, as it were featherless birds, with faces like a horse’s skull, leaned over and whinnied at him. ‘These,’ said Theresa, ‘are the obscene hell-brood whose temptations make so terrible the entrance on the Higher Life.’

The long cavern had not yet made a single winding, and he turned, as the darkness increased, to have a last look at the entrance, whence the outer sunshine still twinkled after them. He could see a green hill that faced the mouth, lying off like a bright transparency. Or was it a spot brought into the disc of his great rock-telescope, from some planet of perpetual summer—one of those that play in the hair of the sun? Christina, impatient of this sinful looking back, urged him onward. A palm-branch she carried grew luminous, and its plume of flame dropping sparks, became their torch. She paused to point out to him some plants growing in a black mould. Birds had carried in thus far the seeds from which they sprang; but there had been no sun-light to give them colour, and their form was uncertain and defectively developed. ‘Behold,’ said she, ‘these saintly flowers. Mark that holy pallor! The sun never stained their pureness with those gaudy hues men admire. Yon garish world can show no such perfectness: see them, they are hueless, scentless, well-nigh formless!’ ‘Sickly, blanched abortions!’ exclaimed the dreamer, so loudly that he almost awoke. ‘We want more life, not less—fuller—sunnier!’ Christina crossed herself piously to hear abstraction thus blasphemed. And now the passage, widening, opened on the central hall of rock, that branched out into depths of darkness every way, and was fretted with gleaming stalactites. There were amber volutes and brittle clusters of tawny bubbles; lily-bells of stone, flowers with sparry thorns and twining stream-like stems; creamy falls from slabs of enamel, motionless, yet seeming ever to drop from ledge to ledge; membranous curtains, and net-work, and traceries; tissues and lawnlike folds of delicate marble; while in the centre, reaching to the misty summit of the dome, stood a huge sheaf of pillars, like alabaster organ-pipes. A solemn music trembled and swelled, and as its rising volume shook the air, voices sang—‘Weep for the sins of men!’ There was a wild burst of sound; then sudden silence; and, above and around, nothing was audible but a universal trickling and running, a dripping and dropping and plashing, while the palm-torch flashed on innumerable tear-drops, hanging on every pendant point and jutting ledge, or sliding down the glistening rock.

After a while, it seemed to be Theresa who spoke to him and said, ‘Here in these depths is warmth, when the world above is locked in ice; and when the surface is parched, here dwells chaste coolness, safe encelled. Our fire seems numbness to a blinded world; and we are frost to its dog-day rages.’ With that a spell seemed to come over her hearer. The spirit of the words became his spirit. The fate of an empire seemed as nothing in his eyes beside his next prospect of rapture, or his success in straining out another half-pint of tears. In a moment he was turned to stone. He had become a gargoyle high up on Strasburg Cathedral, and was spouting water from his lolling tongue at the circling birds.

Gower next found himself, on a cold grey morning in spring, in a vine country, where men and women were toiling up the steep hills on either side a river, carrying baskets of earth. Last winter’s rain had swept away the thin soil to the bone, and they must lay a new one about their vine-sticks. In the midst of their miserable labour, these poor people saw standing among them a majestic stranger, wrapped in a robe. Gower thought he recognised Swedenborg at once. ‘Stay,’ cried the seer, ‘God hath made a soil already for you. Build no other. Your own stony hearts have made the hill seem to you as iron.’ They heard: each seemed to take a stone out of his bosom, and hurl it down the steep; when straightway every foot sank deep into a rich and kindly earth, and a shout of joy broke forth, echoed far among the cloudy gorges.

Once more Gower thought he stood upon the shoulder of a volcano, among the clinking scoriæ. It was growing dark. A strange shape of fire was suddenly at his side, helmed with a flaring cresset, under the light of which the rocky projections around glowed like the burnished beaks of galleys. Over his shoulders hung a mantle of azure flame, fringed with sparks and tasselled with brushes of fire. On his breast was what seemed a hauberk of some emerald incandescence, that brightened or paled with every sinuous motion of the lithe frame, as when the wind comes and goes about an ignited tree-trunk in a burning forest. The form said—‘I am the Flame-king: behold a vision of my works’—and passed his hand before the eyes of the dreamer. Gower saw columns of steam shot up from an Indian sea, with stones and mire, under a great canopy of smoke. Then all was calm: a new island had been born; and the waves licked the black fire-cub. Next he saw a burning mountain, lighting, at the dead of night, glaciers and snowy precipices—as the fire-cross of a great festival lights the shafts and arches of some darkened cathedral. Avalanches fell, looking, under the glare, like sliding continents of ruby, and were shut down in their chasm-caskets with a noise of thunder. He beheld the burning of brave palaces, of captured cities, of prairies where the fire hunts alone, and the earth shakes with the trample of a myriad hoofs flying from the destroyer.

Then he stood on the mountain side, as before; but it was broad day, and beneath him lay in the sun a sky-like bay, white houses, and the parti-coloured fields under the haze, like a gay escutcheon, half-hidden by a gauzy housing. Beside him, in place of the Flame-king, stood a shining One fantastically clad in whatsoever the sunshine loves best to inform and turn to glory. The mantle slanting from his shoulders shone like a waterfall which runs gold with sunlight; his breast mirrored a sunset; and translucent forest-leaves were woven for his tunic. His cheek glowed, delicate as the finely-cut camelia, held against the sun. ‘I am King Sunlight,’ he said. ‘Mine is the even kindliness of the summer-time. I make ready harvest-home and vintage. I triumph in the green-meshed tropic forests, with their fern-floors, and garland-galleried tree-tops, where stand the great trunks which, interlaced with their thick twining underwood, are set like fishers’ stakes with their nets, in those aerial tides of heavy fragrance. There I make all things green threaten to shoot faster than the cumbered river can run through the wilds of verdure. I drive Winter away, as though I were his shepherd, and he leaves fragments of his fleece in snow-patches among the hills, when I pursue him. I love no flaming ascents, no tossing meteoric splendours. I overgrow the strife-scars and fire-rents, which my Titan brother makes, with peace-breathing green. I urge thee to no glittering leap against the rapids of thy natural mortal element. With my shining in thy heart, thou shalt have peace, whether thine outward life raise or sink thee,—as he who rows in the glory-wake under a sunrise, is bright and golden whether on the crest of the wave or in the hollow. I put courage into the heart of the Lady in Comus, when alone in the haunted wood.—A quite true story, by the way,’ continued the Phantom, with a sudden familiarity, ‘for those of you mortals who can receive it. Wilt thou come with me, and work humbly at what lies next thy hand, or wait to surpass humanity, or go travelling to find Michael’s sword to clear thy land withal? With my shining in thy heart, every flinty obstacle shall furnish thee with new fire; and in thine affliction I will bring thee from every blasted pine an Ariel swift to do thee service: so shall thy troubles be thy ministers. Shall it be the splendour, or the inward sunshine?’

As Gower turned from the approaching Flame-king, he clasped the hand of Sunlight with such vehemence that he awoke.

It was one o’clock. He hastened to bed, and there slept soundly: I am sure he had dreamed more than enough for one night.

From the very church-tower which struck one that winter morning, the ensuing spring heard a merry peal of bells,—such a rocking and a ringing as never since has shaken those old stones. I daresay Willoughby would tell you that the bells made so merry because he had just finished his romance. Don’t believe him: suspect rather, with your usual sagacity, that Lionel Gower and Kate Merivale had something to do with it.

INDEX.

Abelard, i. 142, 149.

Absorption, Mystical, i. 86.

Abstraction, Doctrine of Hugo concerning, i. 157; of Ruysbroek, 328; of the Quietists, ii. 172; not to be mistaken for spirituality, 365.

Adolf Arnstein, his Chronicle, i. 181, 213, 243, 319, 340.

Affliginiensis, John, i. 334.

Agrippa, Cornelius, i. 44; ii. 61; his Vanity of Arts and Sciences, 62; his doctrine of the Microcosm, 65.

Alcantara, Peter of, ii. 157, 221.

Alchemy in the sixteenth century, ii. 58; Theological, 77.

Alexandria, Rise of its Philosophic School, i. 66, 74; Fusion of Religions there, 72; Eclecticism, 75; its Mysticism revived at Florence, ii. 147.

Algazzali, ii. 5.

Alvarez, Balthazar, ii. 171.

Amalric of Bena, i. 131.

Ammonius Saccas, his Eclecticism, i. 74.

Anabaptists of Munster, ii. 37.

Andreä, Valentine, ii. 132.

Angela de Foligni, i. 362.

Angelus Silesius, ii. 5; his Pantheism, 6; his Extravagance of Negation, 18; Analogies with Emerson, 22.

Anselm, i. 141, 149.

Antony, St., i. 109.

Apathy, i. 58; styled Poverty of Spirit, 331.

Apollonius of Tyana, i. 71.

Aquinas, Thomas, his Classification of Virtues, i. 123.

Areopagita, Dionysius, see Dionysius.

Aristotle, Mischievous Influence of his Ethics, i. 120.

Asceticism, Oriental, i. 56; of Plotinus, 71; of Neo-Platonism, 76; of the Fathers of the Desert, 109; mistakes the Design of Christianity, 143; its services to Priestcraft, 365; of the Friends, ii. 309; discouraged by the Mysticism of Swedenborg, 328.

Astras, Indian, ii. 143.

Athos, Mount, Monks of, i. 355.

Atonement, Swedenborg’s doctrine of, ii. 332.

Augustine, i. 131, 146.

Aurora of Behmen, ii. 97.

Baader, Franz, ii. 351.

Bagvat-Gita, i. 51.

Barclay, his Apology, ii. 300.

Beghards, i. 184.

Behmen, Jacob, i. 39; his early life, ii. 80; his illumination, 83, 93, 95; his Aurora, 86; his debt to predecessors, 90; his style, 99; genial and manly character of his Mysticism, 102; his Fountain-Spirits, 104, 120; his Theory of Contraries, 109; his doctrine of the Fall, 115; estimate of his position, 118; compared with Swedenborg, 326.

Bernard, his personal appearance, i. 134; life at Clairvaux, 135; moderation of his Mysticism, 136; character and extent of his influence, 140; undue limitation of Reason in his Theology, 141; definition of Faith, 142; doctrine concerning Contemplation, 143; concerning Disinterested Love, 144; definition of Union, 144; Sermons on Canticles, 145; his mystical Interpretation, 145.

Berulle, Cardinal, defends St. Francis de Sales, ii. 281,

Black Death, in the fourteenth century, i. 313.

Blosius, Ludovic, passage from his Institutio spiritualis, i. 24; ii. 281.

Bokelson, John, ii. 38.

Bona, Cardinal, i. 24; ii. 178.

Bonaventura, i. 149, 154.

Bossuet, his ignorance of Mysticism, ii. 252, note; appointed to the Commission of Inquiry concerning Mme. Guyon, 255; prejudges the cause of Mme. Guyon, 256, note; his treatment of Fénélon, 257; his panegyric on the Spanish Mystics, 259; his Instructions on the States of Prayer, 261; his jealousy of Fénélon, 264; his treachery, 268; his Account of Quietism, 268; his hypocrisy, 270, note; his misrepresentations, 278.

Bourignon, Antoinette, ii. 286, 289.

Brigitta, St., i. 361.

Buddhism, its Mysticism, i. 56; its Monasticism, 56.

Bustami, ii. 11.

Cabasilas, Archbishop of Thessalonica, i. 356.

Cabbala, ii. 55, 142.

Cagliostro, ii. 130.

Callenberg, Lady Clara von, ii. 293; her death, 295.

Canticles, Bernard’s Sermons on the, i. 145.

Carlstadt, ii. 43; opposed by Luther, 51.

Carmel, Mount, the Ascent of, by John of the Cross, ii. 185, 192.

Catherine of Siena, i. 364; ii. 171.

Cevennes, Protestants of the, ii. 313.

Christina Ebner, of Engelthal, i. 223.

Christina Mirabilis, ii. 221.

City of God, Mystical, of Maria d’Agreda, ii. 164.

Clairvaux, Monastery of, described, i. 132.

Coleridge, i. 87; Analogies of Plotinus with, 87; his intuitive reason, 88.

Contemplation, doctrine of Philo concerning, i. 66; of Bernard, 143; of Hugo, 156; Richard’s six stages of, 162; the ‘indistinct’ of St. Frances de Sales, ii. 179; of Fénélon, 280.

Contraries, Behmen’s Theory of, ii. 109.

Cornelius Agrippa, see Agrippa.

Correspondences, Swedenborg’s doctrine of, ii. 321.

Counter-Reformation, ii. 149; character of its Mysticism, 151.

Cross, John of the, see John.

Cyr, St., ii. 248.

David of Dinant, i. 131.

Denys, St., of France, identified with the Pseudo-Dionysius, i. 120.

Descartes, i. 43.

Desert, Fathers of the, i. 109.

Desmarets, de St. Sorlin, ii. 244.

D’Etrées, ii. 243.

Dionysius Areopagita, first appearance of the writings under that name, i. 111; Theology of the Pseudo-Dionysius, 113-115, 278; influence of his Mysticism on the Middle Ages, 119; in the East and in the West contrasted, 130; identified with St. Denys of France, 120; followed by Molinos, ii. 171; by John of the Cross, 185.

Dionysius the Carthusian, his definition of mystical theology, i. 24; ii. 281.

Dippel, ii. 125.

Director, the Spiritual, ii. 158.

Dominic of Jesu Maria, his miraculous elevation, ii, 176.

Dominicans, Reformatory Preachers among the, i. 224.

Ebner, Christina, of Engelthal, i. 223; Margaret, 216.

Eckart, his preaching, i. 188, 193; compared with Tauler, 192, 254, 282, 302; his story of the beggar, 197; probable motive of his heresy, 204; analogies with Hegel, 206, 212; sources of his Pantheism, 210, 282; compared with Fichte, 212; two classes of followers, 330, note.

Eclecticism. Alexandrian, i. 74.

Ecstasy, doctrine of Plotinus concerning, i. 77, 78; of Porphyry, 97; of Iamblichus, 104; of Richard of St. Victor, 163; described by Said, ii. 19; Theresa’s prayer of, 169; corporeal effects of, 169; the ‘ecstatic life’ of Francis de Sales, 176.

Edwards, President, i. 169.

Egotheism, i. 331.

Emanation, Neo-Platonist doctrine of, i. 80; in the theology of Dionysius, 113; in the teaching of Eckart, 278; in the Persian Mysticism, ii. 23.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, i. 306; ii. 8; analogies with Angelus Silesius and the Sufis, 9, 20, 22; his doctrine of Intuition, 18.

Endern, Karl von, ii. 98.

Engelbrecht, ii. 125.

England, Mysticism in, ii. 301.

English Platonists, see Platonism.

Erigena, John Scotus, i. 131, 146, 279; ii. 110, 113.

Ethics, of Aristotle, i. 121; of Monasticism, 122.

Faith, how defined by Bernard, i. 142; justification by, ii. 31; to what extent apprehended by the Mystics, 31; to be distinguished from sanctification, 35; Paracelsian doctrine of, 73, 90, 144; how opposed to Sight, 240; Error of Spiritualism concerning, 352.

Faith-Philosophy in Germany, ii. 341.

Fénélon, ii. 173; his first interview with Mme. Guyon, 250; signs the Articles of Issy, 258; his Quietism, 258; difficulties of his position, 263; his Maxims of the Saints, 263; appeals to Rome, 265; his friends disgraced, 268; his reply to Bossuet’s Account of Quietism, 270; his submission, 272.

Feridoddin Attar, ii. 21.

Fichte, his Idealism compared with that of the East, i. 60; his definition of a Mystic, 60; compared with Eckart, 212.

Flagellants, i. 316.

Florence, Revival of Neo-Platonism in, ii. 149.

Foligni, Angela de, i. 362.

Fountain-Spirits of Behmen, ii. 104, 120.

Fox, George, his early history, ii. 303; his narrowness and his benevolence, 304; his asceticism, 309; principal defect of his Theology, 313.

Francis, St., de Sales, ii. 152; his ‘indistinct contemplation,’ 179; his Introduction à la Vie Dévote, 246, note.

Francis, St., of Assisi, ii. 171.

Franciscans, Millenarian, i. 185.

Frank, Sebastian, ii. 47.

Fratricelli, i. 184.

Free Spirit, Brethren of the, i. 184.

Friends, Journal of the Early, ii. 305.

Friends of God, i. 224.

Gabalis, Comte de, ii. 138.

Gamahea, ii. 75, 77.

Gassner, ii. 130.

Gelenius, Victor, his Mystical Degrees, ii. 177.

Gematria, ii. 141, note.

Gerlacus, Petrus, i. 367, note.

Germain, Count St., ii. 130.

Gerson, Chancellor, charges Ruysbroek with Pantheism, i. 338; his Mystical Theology, 369.

Gichtel, i. 38; ii. 123, 125.

Gnomes, ii. 139.

God, distinguished from Godhead, by Eckart, i. 190; Friends of, 224.

Godet des Marias, ii. 252.

Greek Church, Mysticism in, i. 109; stereotyped character of its Theology, 122.

Groot, Gerard, i. 334, note.

Guru, i. 59.

Guthmann, ii. 125.

Guyon, Madame, early religious life, ii. 207; spiritual desertion, 222; self-loss in God, 227; Prayer of Silence, 233; compared with St. Theresa, 234; her activity, 235; her Torrents, 236, note; persecution, 237; first interview with Fénélon, 250; her doctrine at St. Cyr, 253; Bossuets conduct to her, 255; Flight from Meaux, and imprisonment, 260; at Vaugirard, 263; in the Bastille, 272; dies at Blois, 272.

Hamann, ii. 341.

Hardenberg, Friedrich von, see Novalis.

Harlay, Archbishop of Paris, ii. 246.

Harphius, ii. 177, 282.

Heaven, described by Swedenborg, ii, 330.

Hegel, analogies with Eckart, i. 206, 212; opinion of Eckart, 206.

Heresies, Mystical, in the fourteenth century, i. 201, 209, 257, 329.

Hermann of Fritzlar, i. 181; his Heiligenleben, 181, note.

Hesychasts, i. 355.

Hierarchies, of Iamblichus, i. 101; of Proclus, 105; of Dionysius, 114; Hugo’s Commentary on, 155.

Hildegard, Abbess, i. 146; ii. 219.

Hindooism, its Mysticism, i. 55.

Hugo of St. Victor, character of his Mysticism, i. 154; his Commentary on the Hierarchies of Dionysius, 155; defines Meditation, 155; his Eye of Contemplation, 158; defines Abstraction, 158.

Iamblichus, his Theurgy, i. 100; his Hierarchies, 101; his twofold life of the Soul, 102; his doctrine concerning Ecstasy, 104; his mistakes repeated by Romanticism, ii. 346.

Ida of Louvain, ii. 218.

Ida of Nivelles, ii, 220.

Identity, Schelling’s Philosophy of, i. 44.

Illuminati, ii. 136, 281.

Imitatio Christi, The, i. 367.

India, Pantheism of, i. 55.

Indifference, Eckart’s Doctrine of, i. 188, 194; of Quietism, ii. 205, 239.

Intelligence, use of the word by Richard of St. Victor, i. 162.

Interpretation, mystical, i. 33; of Philo, 64; of Bernard, 145; of Richard of St. Victor, 161; of Swedenborg, ii. 323.

Intuition, ‘intellectual,’ Schelling’s doctrine of, i. 88; resemblance to that of Richard, 163.

Intuition, exaggeration of its claims by the Mystics, i. 168; doctrine of Emerson concerning, ii. 18; not an isolated faculty, 364.

Irony, Romanticist doctrine of, ii. 346.

Issy, the Conferences at, ii. 255; the articles of, 256, 258.

Jacobi, ii. 341.

Jean d’Avila, ii. 281.

Jelaleddin Rumi, ii. 12, 14, 15, 17, 110.

Jerusalem, Church of the New, ii. 335.

Jews, persecution of the, i. 315; their demonology, ii. 142.

John of the Cross, ii. 182; his asceticism, 183; his Dark Night, 185; estimate of his Mysticism, 192.

Joris, David, ii. 125.

Jubilation, the gift of, ii. 219.

Juneid, ii. 11.

Justin Martyr, ii. 42.

Kant, his practical Reason, i. 89.

Kathari, i. 184.

Kober, ii. 80.

Krüdener, Madame de, ii. 288; opinion of Madame de Genlis concerning, 289, note.

Kuhlmann, i. 38; ii. 125.

Labadie, ii. 291.

La Combe, ii. 226.

Lautensack, ii. 125.

Law, William, ii. 124, 288.

Leade, Joanna, ii. 144.

Light, doctrine of the Universal, ii. 309.

Louis the Fourteenth at St. Cyr, ii. 249, 265; urges the Pope to condemn Fénélon, 271.

Love, disinterested, doctrine of Bernard, concerning, i. 145; of Eckart, 193; of Tauler, 303, 309; of Ruysbroek, 334, note; of the Sufis, ii. 10, 17; the central doctrine of Quietism, 204; Fénélon’s doctrine of, 258; its truth and its exaggeration, 283.

Loyola, Ignatius, ii. 150.

Ludolph, the Carthusian, i. 232, 235.

Luther, Martin, his vantage ground as compared with the Mystics, i. 304; ii. 32-35; his reply concerning the Zwickau Fanatics, 45; his encounter with them, 47; his protest against the Mysticism of Carlstadt, 51.

Macarius, i. 111.

Mahmud, passage from his Gulschen Ras, ii. 24.

Maintenon, Madame de, at St. Cyr, ii. 248; her interest in Mme. Guyon, 249; her caution, 254.

Maisonfort, Madame de la, ii. 258, 282.

Malaval, ii. 243.

Margaret Ebner, i. 216.

Maria d’Agreda, controversy concerning her Mystical City of God, ii. 164; her elevations in the air, 176.

Maria of Oignys, ii. 219.

Marsay, de, ii. 291; his retirement to Schwartzenau, 292; his marriage, 293; his asceticism and melancholy, 294; his last years, 295.

Maurice, St., ii. 130.

Maxims of the Saints, ii. 263, 280.

Meditation, how defined by Hugo, i. 155.

Merswin, Rulman, his Book of the Nine Rocks, i. 321, 336.

Mesmer, ii. 130.

Messalians, ii. 11.

Microcosm, ii. 65.

Molinos, his Guida Spirituale, ii. 171, 242; charges against him, 180; his fate, 245.

Monasticism, Buddhist, i. 56; its Ethics, 121; promoted by Bernard, 140.

Montanus, i. 284.

Montfaucon, Clara de, ii. 163, 220.

More, Henry, his opinion of Behmen, ii. 124; his mysticism, 315; his opinion of the Quakers, 317, note.

Morin, ii. 244.

Münzer, ii. 44.

Muscatblut, i. 335.

Mysticism, the instructive character of its history, i. 13, 260; derivation and history of the word, 17; definitions, 21; its causes, 27-33; its classifications, 35; theopathetic, 36; theosophic, 39; theurgic, 45; in the early East, 51; of the Neo-Platonists, 63; in the Greek Church, 109; in the Latin Church, 127; opposed to Scholasticism, 142; reconciled, 154; Truth at its root, 164; its exaggeration of the truth concerning experimental evidence, 167; German, in the fourteenth century, 235; ii. 30; Persian, in the Middle Ages, 3; Theosophic, in the Age of the Reformation, 29; revolutionary, 37; before and after the Reformation, 41; in Spain, 147; of the Counter-Reformation, 150; of Madame Guyon, 207; in France and in Germany compared, 275; in England, 299; of Swedenborg, 321; its recent modifications, 339; its services to Christianity, 351; its prevalent misconceptions, 353; its correctives, 355.

Names, of magical virtue, ii. 140.

Neo-Platonism, eclectic and mystical, i. 70; difference between it and Platonism proper, 76; its doctrine of Emanation, 80; influence on Christianity, 85; process of degeneration, 91; its Theurgy, 103; expires with Proclus, 105; introduced into the Church by Dionysius, 113; confounds Universals with Causes, 117; its power in the Middle Ages, 129; its reformatory influence in the West, 132; Persian, ii. 4; revived on the eve of the Reformation, 55; at Florence, 149.

Neri, St. Philip, ii. 218.

Nicholas of Basle, i. 239; becomes the spiritual guide of Tauler, 240; his labours and fate, 359.

Night, mystical, of the Sufis, ii. 14; of John of the Cross, 185, 195; of Novalis, 349.

Nihilism, i. 332; of Angelus Silesius, ii. 17.

Nirwana, Buddhist Absorption, i. 56.

Nördlingen, Henry of, i. 216.

Norris of Bemerton, ii. 315.

Novalis, his Aphorisms, ii. 349; his Hymns to Night, 349.

Numenius, i., 65, 121; his hypostatic emanations, 82.

Nymphs, ii. 139.

Oetinger, ii. 351.

Oken, ii. 351.

Omphalopsychi, i. 356.

Origen, i. 302.

Pachymeres, his definition of mystical Theology, i. 24.

Pains, the mystical, ii. 170, 176.

Pantheism, Indian, i. 55; Buddhist, 56; Neo-Platonist, 78; its necessitarian Ethics, 91; of Dionysius Areopagita, 119; of Erigena, 131; of Eckart, 157, 160, 217; among the people in the fourteenth century, 201, 209, 257, 278, 331; of Angelus Silesius, ii. 6; of Emerson, 8, 22; of the Sufis, 20; cannot claim Behmen, 112, 121.

Paracelsus, i. 44; ii. 71; his four pillars of Medicine, 73; his Theory of Contraries, 74; of Signatures, 76; his Green Lion, 78; influence on Behmen, 91.

Parzival and Titurel, i. 186.

Passivity, i. 274; ii. 166, 190, 195.

Pazzi, Magdalena de, ii, 171.

Perfection, doctrine of, ii. 232; awakens the alarm of the priesthood, 240.

Persia, Neo-Platonism in, ii. 4; the seat of Sufism, 5; its mystical poetry, 16, 24.

Petrucci, Cardinal, ii, 277.

Philadelphian Association, the, ii. 142.

Philo, i. 63; his views on the Contemplative Life, 66; his mystical interpretation, 67.

Pico of Mirandola, ii. 148.

Platonism, distinguished from Neo-Platonism, i. 76; combined with Christianity assumes five distinct phases, 147; in England, ii. 315.

Plotinus, his early history and asceticism, i. 71; hears Ammonius Saccas, 74; object and character of his philosophy, 76; doctrine concerning knowledge, 80; concerning Ecstasy, 81; influence on Christianity, 85; analogies with Schelling and Coleridge, 87; necessitarian character of his Ethics, 91; his Trinity, 93.

Poiret, Peter, ii. 287, 290.

Pordage, ii. 142.

Porphyry, his position, i. 94; moderates the doctrine of Plotinus concerning Ecstasy, 97; his modern imitators, ii. 350.

Postel, ii. 125.

Prayer, Theresa’s Four Degrees of, ii. 167; of Silence, Mme. Guyon’s, 233.

Proclus, i. 105; influence of his philosophy on Dionysius, 112, 114; his endeavour renewed by Romanticism, ii. 346.

Protestantism, its Mystics compared with those of Rome, ii. 95, 308, note.

Quakers, see George Fox; their asceticism, ii. 309; their doctrine of the Universal and Saving Light, 309; of perceptible spiritual influence, 313; of Silence and Quiet, 314; opinion of Henry More concerning, 317.

Quiet, Theresa’s prayer of, ii. 167.

Quietism, licentious form of it in the fourteenth century, i. 258; of Molinos and Theresa, ii. 172; charged with excluding the conception of Christ’s Humanity, 172; misrepresentations of its enemies, 173, note; of John of the Cross, 190; its doctrine of pure love, 204; its holy indifference, 205; its reaction against mercenary religion, 232; of Fénélon, 258; in the hands of the Inquisition, 276; its doctrine of disinterested Love discussed, 283; practical, among the Quakers, 314; in the present day, 356.

Rabia, ii. 10.

Ranters, ii. 306.

Rapture, see Ecstasy.

Realism, i. 130, 149.

Reason, how enlisted in the service of Mysticism, i. 40; how far forsaken by Plotinus, 80; Intuitive, of Coleridge, 88; Practical, of Kant, 89; unduly subordinated by Bernard 141; erroneously divorced from Understanding, ii. 361.

Redemption, doctrine of Behmen concerning, ii. 116; of Swedenborg, 332; misconceptions of, 334.

Reformation, relation of Mysticism to the, ii. 33.

Reformers, their relation to the Mystics, ii. 41.

Regeneration, Tauler’s doctrine of, i. 246; mistake of Mme. Guyon concerning, ii. 230.

Reimar of Zweter, i. 186.

‘Relations, Memorable,’ of Swedenborg, ii. 329.

Reminiscence, Platonic, i. 77.

Ricci, Catherine, ii. 219.

Richard of St. Victor, his Mystical Interpretation, i. 161; his Degrees of Contemplation, 162; his Doctrine of Ecstasy, 163.

Richter, Primarius, at Görlitz, ii. 86, 98.

Romanism, turns Mysticism to account, i. 365; ii. 355.

Romanticism, Tieck, its best representative, ii. 343, note; opposes Rationalism, 344; its philosophy of life, 345; its doctrine of Irony, 346; subsides in Superstition, 347.

Rome, Church of, her Mystics compared with those of Protestantism, ii. 95; her debt to Mysticism, 149; Fénélon no fair sample of her Mystics, 356.

Rosenkreuz, ii. 132.

Rosicrucians, ii. 128; pretended discovery of the, 132, 136.

Rousseau, J. J., ii. 179.

Ruysbroek, his Spiritual Nuptials, i. 321; visited by Tauler at the Convent of Grünthal, 325; his doctrines concerning the Trinity, Abstraction, Union, 326, 329; his protest against false Mystics, 330, note; his doctrine concerning disinterested Love, 334, note; charged by Gerson with Pantheism, 338; compared with contemporary Mystics, 338.

Salamanders, ii. 138.

Schelling, compared with Behmen, i. 41; his Philosophy of Identity, 44; analogies of Plotinus with, 87; indebted to Behmen, ii. 124; his doctrine of Unconsciousness, 351.

Schlegel, Frederick, his admiration of Behmen, ii. 124; his Romanticism, 345; his extravagance, 346.

Schlegel, A. W., ii. 348.

Schleiermacher, ii. 341, 343, note.

Scholasticism, opposed to Mysticism, i. 142; reconciled, 154.

Schröpfer, ii. 130.

Schwenkfeld, ii. 50.

Science, its mystical character in the Middle Age, i. 41; in the Age of the Reformation, ii. 53; union with Religion, 67.

Self-annihilation, Tauler concerning, i. 250; of the Sufis and Angelus Silesius, ii. 16.

Self-love, ii. 214.

Shemhamphorash, ii. 141.

Silence, Quaker practice of, ii. 314; Mme. Guyon’s Prayer of, 233.

Sleep, sacred, i. 102.

Societies, secret, ii. 136.

Soul, its twofold life, according to Iamblichus, i. 102; Spark of the, 190; Ground of the, Tauler’s doctrine concerning, 246, 255, 291; Theresa’s Flight of the, ii. 174.

Spain, Mysticism in, ii. 150, 152.

Spark of the Soul, i. 190.

Sperber, ii. 125.

Spirit, perceptible Influence of the, i. 272; as taught by the Quakers, ii. 313; witness of the, 314; Swedenborg’s doctrine concerning the, 331.

Spiritualism, its revival of antiquated errors, ii. 350; its morbid dread of historic reality, 365.

Staupitz, ii. 33.

Stilling, Jung, i. 39; ii. 289.

Strasburg, Godfrey of, i. 186; rival houses in, 187; under the Interdict, 213; Revolution in, 218; Black Death in, 313; the Flagellants in, 317; resists the Imperial Impost, 319.

Sufis, the, ii. 3; their early leaders, 11; analogies with Emerson, 16; with Angelus Silesius, 17; their doctrine concerning disinterested love, 17; their allegorical lyrics, 24.

Suso, Heinrich, i. 341; his austerities, 344; his Horologe of Wisdom, 345; pursued as a poisoner, 348; his adventure with the robber, 351.

Swedenborg, Emanuel, ii. 321; comprehensive character of his Mysticism, 322; his doctrine of correspondences, 323; position of Man in his System, 325; scientific character of his Mysticism, 326; opposed to Asceticism, 328; his Memorable Relations, 329; his descriptions of the unseen World, 330; his doctrine of Spiritual Influence, 331; of the Work of Christ, 332; of the New Jerusalem, 335.

Sylphs, ii. 139.

Symbolism, of Philo, i. 64; of Dionysius, 114; of Richard of St. Victor, 161; how far necessary, ii. 353.

Sympathies, Science of, ii. 63.

Synderesis, i. 256, 327.

Talmud, its Theurgy, ii. 141.

Tanchelm, i. 38.

Tauler, i. 192, 216, 224, 265; Sermon on the Image of God, 226; his cautions to Mystics, 228; disappearance for two years, 230; his restoration, 234; he issues circulars and treatises comforting the excommunicated, 236; passages from his Sermons, 244-251, 290; concerning the ‘Ground’ of the Soul, 246, 255, 291; excellences and defects of his Theology, 251; elevated character of his Mysticism, 253; prepares the way for the Reformation, 253; compared with Eckart, 254, 302; his doctrine of Abandonment, and the state above Grace, 255; his internal Trinity, 255; on Work of Christ, 300; summoned before the Emperor, 318; retires to Cologne, 319.

Tears, gift of, ii. 220.

Theologia Germanica, i. 148, 288, 367.

Theologia Mystica, i. 21; definitions, 23.

Theosophy, i. 40; in the age of the Reformation, ii. 29, 69, note; of Swedenborg, 321.

Therapeutæ, i. 66, 67.

Theresa, St., her early life, ii. 153; her reform of the Carmelite order, 155; sensuous character of her Mysticism, 162; her four degrees of Prayer, 167; her Raptures, 170; her Torments, 170; compared with Madame Guyon, 234.

Theurgy, i. 46; of Neo-Platonism, 105; Lutheran, ii. 59; Modern, 130; Rabbinical, 141.

Thomas à Kempis, i. 367.

Tieck, ii. 343, note, 348.

Tophail, Abu Jaafer Ebn, ii. 299.

Trinity, of Plotinus, i. 93; Tauler’s doctrine of the internal, 256, 291; doctrine of Ruysbroek concerning, 326; of Behmen, ii. 103, 104, note; of Swedenborg, 332.

Understanding, its relation to Reason, ii. 361; not to be discarded in religion, 365.

Undine, ii. 138.

Union, doctrine of Plotinus concerning, i. 81; of Bernard, 144; of Richard of St. Victor, 163; of Ruysbroek, 329; Prayer of, ii. 168; Swedenborg’s doctrine concerning, 334.

Universals, confounded with Causes, by Neo-Platonism, i. 171.

Valdes, ii. 244.

Veronica of Binasco, ii. 220.

Vespiniani, Countess, ii. 277.

Victor, St., see Hugo and Richard.

Victor, St., the school of, i. 153.

Vincula, Theurgic, ii. 59.

Virtues, divided into human and superhuman, i. 121; how classified by Aquinas, 123.

Visions, intellectual and representative, ii. 174; doctrine of John of the Cross concerning, 189.

‘Visio caliginosa,’ ii. 179.

Walter, Balthasar, ii. 80.

Weigel, Valentine, ii. 51; studied by Behmen, 90, 92, 117.

Werner, Zachariah, ii. 347.

Wessel, John, ii. 33.

Wolfram von Eschenbach, i. 186.

Woolman, John, ii. 305.

Words, ‘substantial,’ ii. 175, 229.

Yogis, the, i. 57.

Yokhdan, Hai Ebn, history of, ii. 299; his practice of contemplation, 311.

Yvon, ii. 291.

Zanoni, ii. 128.

Zerbino, Prince, by Tieck, ii. 343, note.

Zinzendorf, ii. 308.

Zwickau, the fanatics of, ii. 44.

THE END.

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● Transcriber’s Notes: ○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (italics). ○ Footnotes have been moved to follow the chapters in which they are referenced.