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.h1
HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS
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<i>Uniform with this volume, crown 8vo, cloth.</i>
.sp 2
I.
.sp 2
THE SYMBOLISM OF CHURCHES
AND
CHURCH ORNAMENTS

A TRANSLATION OF THE FIRST BOOK
OF THE
RATIONALE DIVINORUM OFFICIORUM
<sc>Of</sc> WILLIAM DURANDUS

<i>With Introductory Essay and Notes by the</i>
<sc>Rev. J. M. NEALE and Rev. B. WEBB</sc>
.sp 2
II.
.sp 2
SYMBOLISM, OR EXPOSITION
OF THE
DOCTRINAL DIFFERENCES
BETWEEN
CATHOLICS AND PROTESTANTS
As evidenced by their Symbolical Writings

<sc>By</sc> JOHN ADAM MOEHLER, D.D.
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<xxl><B>HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS</B></xxl>

<xl><B>A Contribution to the History of
Religious Opinion</B></xl>

<l><B>BY</B></l>

<xxl><B>ROBERT ALFRED VAUGHAN, B.A.</B></xxl>

<l><i>SIXTH EDITION</i></l>

<xl><B>TWO VOLUMES IN ONE</B></xl>

<xl><B>VOL. I</B></xl>


NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
743 & 745 BROADWAY
1893
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.h2
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.
.sp 2
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
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.pn 1-vi
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
<i>British Quarterly Review</i>. 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
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.pn 1-vii
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 <i>London University
Magazine</i>. 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. <i>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.</i>’ 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.
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.pn 1-viii

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:—

.pm verse-start
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.
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.pn 1-ix

Some events that mar thy purpose
  May light <i>them</i> 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.
.pm verse-end

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
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.pn 1-x
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 <i>King John</i> or <i>Henry IV.</i>, rather than those of <i>Hamlet</i>
or <i>Macbeth</i>.’ 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
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.pn 1-xi
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 <i>British Quarterly
Review</i> 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 <i>Eclectic Review</i>, Nov. 1861,
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.pn 1-xii
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 <i>British Quarterly</i> 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 <i>Fraser’s
Magazine</i> 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 <i>his</i> character, but we cannot resist the impulse
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.pn 1-xiii
to insert one loving tribute to his memory, which
appeared in a Birmingham paper (<i>Aris’ Gazette</i>,
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 <i>Fraser’s Magazine</i> 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,
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.pn 1-xiv
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 <i>Eclectic Review</i> (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.”
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.pn 1-xv
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
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.pn 1-xvi
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
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.pn 1-xvii
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
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.pn 1-xviii
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?
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.pn 1-xix
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
// File: 020.png
.pn 1-xx
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
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.pn 1-xxi
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
// File: 022.png
.pn 1-xxii
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
// File: 023.png
.pn 1-xxiii
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.
// File: 024.png
.pn 1-xxiv
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 ‘<i>awhile</i>.’ 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.

.tb

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
// File: 025.png
.pn 1-xxv
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:—

.pm verse-start
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.

<sc>Wycliffe Vaughan.</sc>

<sc>Littlemore, near Oxford</sc>,

<i>November, 1879</i>.
.pm verse-end
// File: 026.png
// File: 027.png
.pn 1-xxvii
.sp 4
.h2
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.
.sp 2
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 <i>history</i>
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
// File: 028.png
.pn 1-xxviii
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
// File: 029.png
.pn 1-xxix
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.
// File: 030.png
.pn 1-xxx

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 <i>Chronicle
of Adolf Arnstein</i> 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
// File: 031.png
.pn 1-xxxi
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.[#] This
laborious compilation presents the dry bones of doctrinal
opinion, carefully separated from actual life—a grave
// File: 032.png
.pn 1-xxxii
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.

<sc>The Author.</sc>

<i>February 1st, 1856.</i>

.fn #
<i>Die Christliche Mystik.</i> Von Dr. Ludwig Noack. Königsberg.
.fn-
.sp 4
.h2
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
.sp 2
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
// File: 033.png
.pn 1-xxxiii
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.

<sc>Robert Vaughan.</sc>

<i>September 7th, 1860.</i>
// File: 034.png
// File: 035.png
.pn 1-xxxv
.sp 4
.h2
CONTENTS OF VOL  I.
.sp 2
.in +4
.nf l
#BOOK I.—INTRODUCTION.:book1-1#

#CHAPTER I.:chap1-1-1#

Henry Atherton      #3:Page_1-3#
Lionel Gower      #5:Page_1-5#
Frank Willoughby      #7:Page_1-7#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER II.:chap1-1-2#

Connection of the Arts      #9:Page_1-9#
Mysticism in an Emblem      #11:Page_1-11#
History      #15:Page_2-15#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER III.:chap1-1-3#

Etymology      #17:Page_1-17#
Definitions      #21:Page_1-21#
Christian Mysticism      #22:Page_1-22#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER IV.:chap1-1-4#

Causes of Mysticism      #27:Page_1-27#
Reaction against Formalism      #28:Page_1-28#
Weariness of the World      #30:Page_1-30#
The Fascination of Mystery      #31:Page_1-31#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER V.:chap1-1-5#

Classification of Mystics      #35:Page_1-35#
Theopathetic Mysticism      #37:Page_1-37#
// File: 036.png
.pn 1-xxxvi
Theosophy      #39:Page_1-39#
Theurgy      #45:Page_1-45#
.sp 2

#BOOK II.—EARLY ORIENTAL MYSTICISM.:book1-2#

#CHAPTER I.:chap1-2-1#

The Bagvat-Gita      #51:Page_1-51#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER II.:chap1-2-2#

Characteristics of Hindoo Mysticism      #54:Page_1-54#
The Yogis      #57:Page_1-57#
.sp 2
#BOOK III.—THE MYSTICISM OF THE NEO-PLATONISTS.:book1-3#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER I.:chap1-3-1#
.sp 2
Philo      #64:Page_1-64#
The Therapeutæ      #66:Page_1-66#
Asceticism      #67:Page_1-67#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER II.:chap1-3-2#
.sp 2
Plotinus      #71:Page_1-71#
Alexandria      #72:Page_1-72#
Eclecticism      #75:Page_1-75#
Platonism and Neo-Platonism      #76:Page_1-76#
Plotinus on Ecstasy      #81:Page_1-81#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER III.:chap1-3-3#
.sp 2
Neo-Platonism in the Christian Church      #85:Page_1-85#
Analogies between Ancient and Modern Speculation      #87:Page_1-87#
Intuition      #89:Page_1-89#
Theurgy      #91:Page_1-91#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER IV.:chap1-3-4#
.sp 2
Porphyry      #94:Page_1-94#
Philosophy seeks to rescue Polytheism      #96:Page_1-96#
Theurgic Mysticism of Iamblichus      #100:Page_1-100#
Proclus      #105:Page_1-105#
// File: 037.png
.pn 1-xxxvii
.sp 2
#BOOK IV.—MYSTICISM IN THE GREEK CHURCH.:book1-4#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER I.:chap1-4-1#
.sp 2
Saint Anthony      #109:Page_1-109#
The Pseudo-Dionysius      #111:Page_1-111#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER II.:chap1-4-2#
.sp 2
The Hierarchies of Dionysius      #114:Page_1-114#
The Via Negativa and the Via Affirmativa      #115:Page_1-115#
Virtues human and superhuman      #121:Page_1-121#
Stagnation      #122:Page_1-122#
.sp 2
#BOOK V.—MYSTICISM IN THE LATIN CHURCH.:book1-5#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER I.:chap1-5-1#
.sp 2
Intellectual Activity of the West      #130:Page_1-130#
The Services of Platonism      #132:Page_1-132#
Clairvaux      #132:Page_1-132#
The Mysticism of Bernard      #136:Page_1-136#
Mysticism opposed to Scholasticism      #141:Page_1-141#
Moderation of Bernard      #144:Page_1-144#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER II.:chap1-5-2#
.sp 2
Hugo of St Victor      #153:Page_1-153#
Mysticism combined with Scholasticism      #154:Page_1-154#
The Eye of Contemplation      #157:Page_1-157#
Richard of St Victor      #159:Page_1-159#
The Six Stages of Contemplation      #162:Page_1-162#
The Truth and the Error of Mystical Abstraction      #164:Page_1-164#
The Inner Light and the Outer      #166:Page_1-166#
The Faculty of Intuition      #169:Page_1-169#
.sp 2
#BOOK VI.—GERMAN MYSTICISM IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.:book1-6#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER I.:chap1-6-1#
.sp 2
The Chronicle of Adolf Arnstein of Strasburg      #181:Page_1-181#
Hermann of Fritzlar and his Legends      #182:Page_1-182#
The Heretics of the Rhineland      #184:Page_1-184#
The Preaching of Master Eckart      #188:Page_1-188#
// File: 038.png
.pn 1-xxxviii
From the Known God to the Unknown      #189:Page_1-189#
Disinterested Love      #193:Page_1-193#
Eckart’s Story of the Beggar      #197:Page_1-197#
Ju-ju      #199:Page_1-199#
The Nameless Wild      #201:Page_1-201#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER II.:chap1-6-2#
.sp 2
The Doctrine of Eckart discussed      #204:Page_1-204#
Resemblance to Hegel      #206:Page_1-206#
Pantheism Old and New      #209:Page_1-209#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER III.:chap1-6-3#
.sp 2
The Interdict      #214:Page_1-214#
Henry of Nördlingen      #216:Page_1-216#
Insurrection in Strasburg      #218:Page_1-218#
The Friends of God      #224:Page_1-224#
Tauler on the Image of God      #226:Page_1-226#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER IV.:chap1-6-4#
.sp 2
Tauler’s Disappearance      #230:Page_1-230#
His Disgrace      #233:Page_1-233#
His Restoration      #234:Page_1-234#
The People comforted and the Pope defied      #236:Page_1-236#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER V.:chap1-6-5#
.sp 2
Nicholas of Basle and Tauler      #239:Page_1-239#
The Theology of Tauler      #244:Page_1-244#
His Advice to Mystics      #248:Page_1-248#
Estimate of his Doctrine      #251:Page_1-251#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER VI.:chap1-6-6#
.sp 2
Further Thoughts on Tauler and Middle-Age Mysticism      #260:Page_1-260#
Tests of Mysticism      #268:Page_1-268#
Spiritual Influence      #272:Page_1-272#
Views of God and the Universe      #277:Page_1-277#
Immanence of God      #280:Page_1-280#
Montanism      #284:Page_1-284#
Ground of the Sou      #291:Page_1-291#
Origen and Tauler      #302:Page_1-302#
// File: 039.png
.pn xxxix
Luther and Tauler      #304:Page_1-304#
Teufelsdröckh      #307:Page_1-307#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER VII.:chap1-6-7#
.sp 2
The Black Death      #313:Page_1-313#
The Flagellants      #316:Page_1-316#
A Visit to Ruysbroek at Grünthal      #325:Page_1-325#
Ruysbroek on Mystical Union      #328:Page_1-328#
Heretical Mystics      #330:Page_1-330#
Ecclesiastical Corruption      #332:Page_1-332#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER VIII.:chap1-6-8#
.sp 2
Heinrich Suso      #341:Page_1-341#
His Austerities      #343:Page_1-343#
His Visions      #345:Page_1-345#
His Adventures      #348:Page_1-348#
The Monks of Mount Athos      #356:Page_1-356#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER IX.:chap1-6-9#
.sp 2
Nicholas of Basle      #359:Page_1-359#
Brigitta      #361:Page_1-361#
Angela de Foligni      #362:Page_1-362#
Catharine of Siena      #364:Page_1-364#
The “German Theology”      #366:Page_1-366#
The “Imitation of Christ”      #367:Page_1-367#
Gerson      #368:Page_1-368#
.nf-
.in -4
// File: 040.png
// File: 041.png
.pn 1-1
.sp 4
.h2 id=book1-1
BOOK THE FIRST | INTRODUCTION
// File: 042.png
// File: 043.png
.pn 1-3
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap1-1-1
CHAPTER I.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
Wie fruchtbar ist der kleinste Kreis,
Wenn man ihn wohl zu pflegen weiss.[#]

<sc>Goethe.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
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,
// File: 044.png
.pn 1-4
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
// File: 045.png
.pn 1-5
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.
// File: 046.png
.pn 1-6
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
// File: 047.png
.pn 1-7
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
// File: 048.png
.pn 1-8
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.

.fn #

.pm verse-start
How fruitful may the smallest circle grow,
If we the secret of its culture know.
.pm verse-end
.fn-
// File: 049.png
.pn 1-9
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap1-1-2
CHAPTER II.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
                    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.

<sc>Edwin the Fair.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
<sc>Atherton.</sc> A pleasant little knot to set us, Gower,—to
determine the conditions of your art.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> And after dinner, too, of all times.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> Salvator has plenty of them, splintered with shrieking.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Fortunate painter—a picture gallery ordered in
a breath!

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> By no means. Now does this request, when
you come to think of it, so enormously violate the conditions
// File: 050.png
.pn 1-10
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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> But all are not equal to the reception of such
suggestions.

<sc>Gower.</sc> And so, with unsusceptible minds, we must be
satisfied if they praise us for our imitation merely.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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,—

<sc>Gower.</sc> My favourite, Spenser, to wit.—

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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,
// File: 051.png
.pn 1-11
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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> I have often revelled in it.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> And what is true for so many with regard to
music, may sometimes be realized on seeing pictures.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> Your own subjectivity forged both lock and
key together, I suspect.

<sc>Gower.</sc> What in the world did the piece represent?

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
// File: 052.png
.pn 1-12
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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> Now for the interpretation of your parable in stone.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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[#]—to escape from everything definite,
everything palpable, everything human, into the Infinite Fulness;
// File: 053.png
.pn 1-13
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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> Yet without the ardour imparted by such doctrines,
they might have lacked the strength requisite to withstand
misconceptions far more mischievous.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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 <i>not</i> we can best gather from these
abnormal phases of the mind. Certainly an impartial estimate
// File: 054.png
.pn 1-14
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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> If we are likely to learn in this way from such an
investigation, suppose we agree to set about it, and at once.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> An arduous task, when you come to look it
// File: 055.png
.pn 1-15
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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
// File: 056.png
.pn 1-16
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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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 <i>me</i> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> As to practical details, then:—I propose that we
have no rules.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

.fn #
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.’—<i>De Mysticâ
Theologiâ</i>, cap. i. § 3.
.fn-
// File: 057.png
.pn 1-17
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap1-1-3
CHAPTER III.
.sp 2
.pm letter-start
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.—<sc>Jeremy Taylor.</sc>
.pm letter-end
.sp 2
‘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?’

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> I see the old lexicographer derives the original
word from the root <i>mu</i>, to close: the secret rites and lessons
of the Greek mysteries were things about which the mouth was
to be closed.[#]

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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 <i>mum</i>.’

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
// File: 058.png
.pn 1-18
doctrines. The disciple admitted to these was a philosophical
‘myst,’ or mystic.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> So that the exclusive and aristocratic spirit of Greek
culture re-appears in Christianity?

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Just so. Thus you see the church doors shutting
out the catechumens from beholding ‘the mystery’ (as they
came to call the Eucharist, <i>par excellence</i>) 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.[#]

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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
// File: 059.png
.pn 1-19
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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> Platonic abstraction, in fact.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
<i>great</i> 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 <i>mysticus</i> is emphatically the enclosed, self-withdrawn,
introverted man.[#] 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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?

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
// File: 060.png
.pn 1-20
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
‘<i>Mystic</i>’ 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,’[#] attains in passivity a divine
union, and in ignorance a wisdom transcending all knowledge.

<sc>Gower.</sc> Prepared to say, I suppose, with one of old George
Chapman’s characters—

.pm verse-start
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.
.pm verse-end

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> Not much light either. The mystic, as such,
was not to <i>know</i> 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.
// File: 061.png
.pn 1-21

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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 <i>Theologia Mystica</i>.[#]

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> The Germans have two words for mysticism—<i>mystik</i>
and <i>mysticismus</i>. The former they use in a favourable,
the latter in an unfavourable, sense.—

<sc>Gower.</sc> Just as we say piety and pietism, or rationality and
// File: 062.png
.pn 1-22
rationalism; keeping the first of each pair for the use, the
second for the abuse. A convenience, don’t you think?

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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 <i>spirituality
diseased</i>, grown unnatural, fantastic, and the like.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> There you define, at any rate, the characteristic
misconception of the mystics.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

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

<sc>Gower.</sc> That answer provokes another question. How
should you characterize John’s peculiar presentation of the
Gospel?

<sc>Atherton.</sc> I refer chiefly to that admixture of the contemplative
temperament and the ardent, by which he is personally
// File: 063.png
.pn 1-23
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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> Truly that unction from the Holy One, of which
John speaks, has found some strange claimants!

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> Thus much I think is evident from our enquiry—that
mysticism, true to its derivation as denoting a <i>hidden</i> 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.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-1-21
Note to page #21:Page_1-21#.
.sp 2
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 <i>Theologia Mystica</i>:—‘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
// File: 064.png
.pn 1-24
them away to the Beloved, unites them with Him, and secures them rest in
Him. Dionysius the Carthusian (associating evidently <i>mystica</i> and <i>mysteriosa</i>)
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.’—<i>Via
Compendii ad Deum</i>, 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.’—<i>Isagoge</i>, 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.’—<i>Dion. Opp.</i> 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>i.e.</i> 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.—<i>Isagoge</i>, 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 <i>Institutio Spiritualis</i>.
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
// File: 065.png
.pn 1-25
blinds the eye of reason and understanding. But the simple eye of the soul
itself remains open—that is <i>thought</i>, 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 <i>dark</i>, 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 (<i>a se defluens profluit in Deum</i>), 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 <i>as he is</i> in his
own ineffable glory, but as it is possible for him to be seen in this life.—<i>Isagoge
Cord.</i> cap. vii.

.fn #
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: <i>Etym.
Mag.</i>—Μύστης, παρὰ τὸ μύω, τὸ καμμύω.
μύοντες γὰρ τὰς αἰσθήσεις καὶ ἔξω τῶν
σαρκικῶν φροντίδων γινόμενοι, οὕτω τὰς
θείας ἀναλάμψεις ἐδέχοντο.
.fn-
.fn #
See Bingham, <i>Antiq. of the Christian
Church</i>, 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;—<i>e.g.</i>
<i>Protrept.</i> cap. xii. § 120.
.fn-
.fn #
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
<i>Blüthensammlung aus der Morgenlandischen
Mystik</i>; <i>Einleitung</i>,
§ 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.
.fn-
.fn #
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.’—<i>De
Mysticâ Theologiâ</i>, cap. i. p. 710.
<i>S. Dion. Areop. Opp.</i> 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.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-1-21#, p. #23:Page_1-23#.
.fn-
// File: 066.png
.pn 1-26
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap1-1-4
CHAPTER IV.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
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.

<sc>Shelley.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
<sc>Willoughby.</sc> Here’s another definition for you:—Mysticism
is <i>the romance of religion</i>. What do you say?

<sc>Gower.</sc> True to the spirit—not scientific, I fear.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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!

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Go on, Willoughby, I like your enthusiasm.
Think of its adventures, too.
// File: 067.png
.pn 1-27

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> In such an hour, how mysticism rises and does
its deeds of spiritual chivalry——

<sc>Gower.</sc> Alas! Quixotic enough, sometimes.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> How conspicuous, then, grows this inward
devotion!—even the secular historian is compelled to say a
word about it——

<sc>Atherton.</sc> And a sorry, superficial verdict he gives, too
often.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> How loud its protest against literalism, formality,
scholasticism, human ordinances! what a strenuous
reaction against the corruptions of priestcraft!

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.
// File: 068.png
.pn 1-28

<sc>Gower.</sc> There, good night, and pleasant dreams to it!

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> It spins still in its sleep its mingled tissue of
good and evil.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> Want of patience lies at the root—who was
it said that he should have all eternity to rest in?

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
// File: 069.png
.pn 1-29
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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> So those spiritual Lotos-eaters will only

.pm verse-start
        ——hearken what the inner spirit sings,
There is no joy but calm;
.pm verse-end

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

.pm verse-start
        ——let us live and lie reclined
On the hills like gods together, careless of mankind.
.pm verse-end

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Some; not all, however. Neither should we
suppose that even those who have sunk to such a state——

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> They would say—risen—

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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,
// File: 070.png
.pn 1-30
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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
// File: 071.png
.pn 1-31
Coleridge felt this when he says so mournfully in his Ode to
Dejection,—

.pm verse-start
    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.
.pm verse-end

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.’

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> The explanation, unhappily, the greatest mystery
of all.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Curiously enough, the Bible has been made to
support mysticism by an interpretation, at one time too fanciful,
at another too literal.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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
// File: 072.png
.pn 1-32
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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> This is the practical and active kind of mysticism
so prevalent in that age of religious wars, the seventeenth
century.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.
// File: 073.png
.pn 1-33

<sc>Gower.</sc> The New Testament not authorising the austerities
of a Macarius or a Maximus, tradition must be called in——

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.
// File: 074.png
.pn 1-34
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap1-1-5
CHAPTER V.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
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.

<i>Guta.</i>     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!

<sc>The Saint’s Tragedy.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> The fay?

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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
// File: 075.png
.pn 1-35
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 <i>idea</i> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.
// File: 076.png
.pn 1-36

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

<sc>Gower.</sc> Your alliteration is grateful to my ear; I hope you
have not strained a point to secure us the luxury.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Not a hair’s breadth, I assure you.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> Etymologically such a division has the advantage
of showing that all the forms of mysticism are developments
of the <i>religious</i> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> Yet some of those whose mysticism has been
pre-eminently negative, who have hated the very name of
// File: 077.png
.pn 1-37
speculation, and placed perfection in repose and mystical
death, have mingled much in active life. They appear to defy
our arrangement.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
// File: 078.png
.pn 1-38
of the manifestation is not confined to himself, it passes on to
his fellows.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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:—

.pm verse-start
  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.
.pm verse-end

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.
// File: 079.png
.pn 1-39

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

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

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> Now, Atherton, for your second division,
theosophic mysticism. Whom do you call theosophists?

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
<i>discourse</i> concerning God (theology), but he alone, with his
intuition, the highest <i>wisdom</i> concerning him.

<sc>Gower.</sc> I can’t say that I have any clear conception attached
to the word.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> You want examples? Take Plotinus and
Behmen.

<sc>Gower.</sc> What a conjunction!

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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?
// File: 080.png
.pn 1-40

<sc>Gower.</sc> Granted, since philosophy must build only upon
reason.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> You talk of mysticism trying to be philosophical;
it does then sometimes seek to justify itself at the bar of
reason?

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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
// File: 081.png
.pn 1-41
decision of his spell-bound faculties is the deliberate exercise
of manly judgment—

.pm verse-start
The mind of man is by his reason swayed,
And <i>reason</i> says you are the worthier maid.
.pm verse-end

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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 <i>Winter’s Tale</i>—much at their service.
They answer, with young enamoured Florizel, when Reason,
like a grave Camillo, bids them ‘be advised’—

.pm verse-start
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.
.pm verse-end

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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—<i>dream</i> from <i>enjoyment</i>.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
// File: 082.png
.pn 1-42
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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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 <i>speculum universale</i>.
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 ‘<sc>Holy Bible</sc>,’ or
that research should have simulated worship, as some Cantab,
pressed for time, may study a problem at morning chapel?

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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!

<sc>Gower.</sc> And made religion a toy—a tassel on the silken
purse of the spendthrift Fancy.
// File: 083.png
.pn 1-43

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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—<i>nemo omnibus horis sapit</i>—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
// File: 084.png
.pn 1-44
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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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
<i>Identity</i> principle to the error which confounds, rather than
allies, physics and metaphysics, science and theology?

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Behmen himself is no whit more fantastical in
this way than Oken and Franz Baader.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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,
// File: 085.png
.pn 1-45
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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> The only further question is about your third
division, Atherton,—theurgic mysticism. We may let the Rabbinical
Solomon—mastering the archdæmon Aschmedai and all
// File: 086.png
.pn 1-46
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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> And Iamblichus, summoning Souls, Heroes, and the
Principalities of the upper sphere, by prayer and incense and
awful mutterings of adjuration.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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)
// File: 087.png
.pn 1-47
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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.
// File: 088.png
// File: 089.png
.pn 1-49
.sp 4
.h2 id=book1-2
BOOK THE SECOND | EARLY ORIENTAL MYSTICISM
// File: 090.png
// File: 091.png
.pn 1-51
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap1-2-1
CHAPTER I.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
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.

<sc>Spenser.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
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.
.sp 2
.h4
Observations on Indian mysticism, à propos of the Bagvat-Gita.
.sp 2
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;
// File: 092.png
.pn 1-52
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 <i>sainte
indifférence</i> 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 <i>facilis descensus</i>, 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
// File: 093.png
.pn 1-53
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.
// File: 094.png
.pn 1-54
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap1-2-2
CHAPTER II.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
Quel diable de jargon entends-je ici? Voici bien du haut style.

<sc>Molière.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
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
// File: 095.png
.pn 1-55
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—

.pm letter-start
(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>i.e.</i>, its theurgic
department;

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

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.’
// File: 096.png
.pn 1-56

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. (<i>See</i> Spence Hardy’s <i>Eastern
Monachism</i>.)

(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
// File: 097.png
.pn 1-57
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.[#]
// File: 098.png
.pn 1-58

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,
// File: 099.png
.pn 1-59
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.[#]

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 <i>anthropopathetic</i>—suffers, not under God, but man.
// File: 100.png
.pn 1-60

.fn #
See Wilkins’ <i>Bagvat-Gita</i>, pp.
63-65. <i>Ward</i>, ii. 180. Also, <i>Asiatic
Researches</i>, 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 <i>post-mortem</i> examination has
disclosed the figure of Christ, or the
insignia of his passion, miraculously
modelled in the chambers of the heart.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Asiatic Researches</i>, <i>loc. cit.</i> 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 <i>Curse of Kehama</i>, 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 <i>not</i> 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.’ (<i>Grundlage der gesammten
Wissenschaftslehre</i>, § 3. <i>Sämmtliche Werke</i>, v. i. p. 177.) Action is all in all
with him. God he calls ‘a pure Action’ (<i>reines Handeln</i>), the life and principle
of a supersensuous order of the world—just as I am a pure Action, as a
link in that order. (<i>Gerichtliche Verantwortung gegen die Anklage des Atheismus,
Werke</i>, 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 <i>does</i> 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; <i>he</i> is mistaken, I grant, in arrogating inspiration—<i>him</i> 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.
.fn-
// File: 101.png
.pn 1-61
.sp 4
.h2 id=book1-3
BOOK THE THIRD | THE MYSTICISM OF THE NEO-PLATONISTS
// File: 102.png
// File: 103.png
.pn 1-63
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap1-3-1
CHAPTER I.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
  ——a man is not as God,
But then most godlike being most a man.

<sc>Tennyson.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
<sc>Kate.</sc> What a formidable bundle of papers, Henry.

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

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> We were talking just before you came
in, Mr. Willoughby, about Mr. Crossley’s sermon yesterday
morning.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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?

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Something better, I should say.
// File: 104.png
.pn 1-64

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

<sc>Atherton.</sc> With the successors and imitators—yes; not
with the more earnest originals,—such names as Philo, Origen,
Swedenborg.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

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

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> So, then, Platonism in Philo does for Judaism what
// File: 105.png
.pn 1-65
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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Here is the precious document—a letter written
by Philo from Alexandria, evidently just after his journey to
Rome. (<i>Reads.</i>)
.sp 2
.pm letter-start
<sc>Philo to Hephæstion.</sc>
.sp 2
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
// File: 106.png
.pn 1-66
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
// File: 107.png
.pn 1-67
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.[#]
Farewell.
.pm letter-end
// File: 108.png
.pn 1-68

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> 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 <i>The Passing Minstrel</i>—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
// File: 109.png
.pn 1-69
vision of our own, where we cease altogether to be aware of the
external cause which first transported us thither.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

.fn #
Philo gives an account of the
Therapeutæ referred to in the letter,
in his treatise <i>De Vitâ Contemplativâ</i>.

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, <i>Sacr. Leg. Alleg.</i> lib. iii. p. 101
(ed. Mangey); lib. ii. p. 64; <i>De eo
quod det. potiori insid. soleat</i>, pp.
192, 208.

Philo’s interpretation of the scriptural
account concerning Babel is contained
in the <i>De Confus. Linguarum</i>,
p. 424. His exposition of Gen. i. 9,
illustrates the same principle, <i>Sacr.
Leg. Alleg.</i> lib. i. p. 54; so of Gen.
xxxvii. 12; <i>De eo quod pot.</i> 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. <i>Præp. Evang.</i>
lib. viii. 9, 10.
.fn-
// File: 110.png
.pn 1-70
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap1-3-2
CHAPTER II.
.sp 2
.pm letter-start
La philosophie n’est pas philosophie si elle ne touche à l’abîme; mais elle
cesse d’être philosophie si elle y tombe.—<sc>Cousin.</sc>
.pm letter-end
.sp 2
<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> I have something ready to inflict; so prepare to
listen stoutly. (<i>Reads.</i>)

.pm letter-start
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
// File: 111.png
.pn 1-71
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 <sc>A.D.</sc> 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
// File: 112.png
.pn 1-72
alike embraced.[#] 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.[#] Was not
// File: 113.png
.pn 1-73
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.[#] 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
// File: 114.png
.pn 1-74
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
// File: 115.png
.pn 1-75
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!‘[#]

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
// File: 116.png
.pn 1-76
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 <i>petitio principii</i> 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,
// File: 117.png
.pn 1-77
Neo-Platonism, ignoring the doubts Plato may himself express
elsewhere, spins it out into a theory, or bows to it as an infallible
revelation.[#] 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.[#] 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.
.pm letter-end

<sc>Gower.</sc> Thanks. These Neo-Platonists are evidently no
mere dreamers. They are erudite and critical, they study and
// File: 118.png
.pn 1-78
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.

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

.pm letter-start
<sc>Plotinus to Flaccus.</sc>

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
// File: 119.png
.pn 1-79
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 <i>within</i> us. Here the objects
we contemplate and that which contemplates are identical,—both
are thought. The subject cannot surely <i>know</i> 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;
// File: 120.png
.pn 1-80
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.[#]

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 <i>Banquet</i> beautifully says, is the child of Poverty and
Plenty.[#] 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
// File: 121.png
.pn 1-81
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?[#] 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.[#]
.pm letter-end
// File: 122.png
.pn 1-82
.h4 id=note-1-75
Note to page 75.
.sp 2
This imaginary fragment from Ammonius Saccas is, I believe, true to
what seems fairly inferred concerning his teaching. See <i>Brucker</i>, ii. p. 211;
and <i>Jules Simon</i>, 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. <i>God</i>, the Absolute.

II. <i>The Demiurge</i>; 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. <i>Substance</i> 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, <i>Euseb. Præp. Evang.</i> lib.
viii. p. 411 (ed. Viger); lib. xi. c. 18, p. 537; capp. 21, 22, and lib. xv. c. 17.)
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-1-81
Note to page 81.
.sp 2
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. <i>Enn.</i> iii. lib. 8,
c. 9. But man by simplifying his nature to the utmost possible extent may
become lost in this Unity. In <i>Enn.</i> 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
// File: 123.png
.pn 1-83
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. <i>Ibid.</i> pp. 552-3.

.fn #
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 (<i>Repub.</i> 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.
.fn-
.fn #
Clement of Alexandria gives a full
account of the various stories respecting this idol, <i>Protrept.</i> c. iv. p. 42 (ed.
Potter); moreover an etymology and
legend to match, <i>Strom.</i> 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 <i>De Mysteriis</i>, v. 23, p. 139
(ed. Gale, 1678). Kircher furnishes a
description of this statue of Serapis,
<i>Œdip. Ægypt.</i> i. 139.
.fn-
.fn #
See <i>Histoire de l’Ecole d’Alexandrie</i>,
par M. Jules Simon, tom. i. p. 99.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-1-75#, p. #82:Page_1-82#.
.fn-
.fn #
See <i>Jules Simon</i>, ii. pp. 626, &c.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-1-90# to Chap. III. p. #92:Page_1-92#.
.fn-
.fn #
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.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Enn.</i> 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, <i>Symp.</i> p. 429 (<i>Bekk</i>).
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note 2:note-1-81#, p. #82:Page_1-82#.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Enn.</i> i. lib. 3, c. 1.
.fn-
// File: 124.png
.pn 1-84
.h3 id=chap1-3-3
CHAPTER III.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
Lume è lassù che visibile face
Lo creatore a quella creatura
Che solo in lui vedere ha la sua pace.[#]

<sc>Dante.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Kate.</sc> I think I shall have myself mesmerised some day to
form an idea.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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 <i>thinks</i>
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.

<sc>Kate.</sc> Like the woodman described by Coleridge as beholding
with such awe an appearance of the kind, when he
// File: 125.png
.pn 1-85

.pm verse-start
Sees full before him gliding without tread
An image with a glory round its head,
This shade he worships for its golden hues,
And <i>makes</i> (not knowing) that which he pursues.
.pm verse-end

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
// File: 126.png
.pn 1-86
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 <i>introrsum ascendere</i> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> And so the means and faculties God has given
us for knowing him are to lie unused.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.
// File: 127.png
.pn 1-87

<sc>Gower.</sc> Then mysticism is a spiritual art whereby the
possible is forsaken for the impossible—the knowable for the
unknowable.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> Or a contrivance, say, for reaching Divinity
which realizes only torpor.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Kate.</sc> I am sure I—

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.
// File: 128.png
.pn 1-88

What was needful at such a juncture? Surely that <i>both</i>
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 <i>Intellectuelle Anschauung</i> 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.[#]
He becomes recipient, according to Emerson, of the Soul of
the world. He loses, according to Coleridge, the particular in
// File: 129.png
.pn 1-89
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.[#]

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> But all these intuitionalists profess to evolve
from their depths very much more than those simplest ethical
perceptions.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> By carrying down with them into those depths
// File: 130.png
.pn 1-90
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 <i>pure</i> 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 <i>his</i> intuitions.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> To go back to Plotinus.[#] That doctrine of
// File: 131.png
.pn 1-91
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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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 <i>Arabian Nights</i>—as they approach,
the nails which hold them together are withdrawn, they fall
apart, and all the fabric is dissolved.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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
// File: 132.png
.pn 1-92
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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-1-90
Note to page 90.
.sp 2
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.
// File: 133.png
.pn 1-93
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 <i>Jules Simon</i>, tom. i.
pp. 63, 84; ii. 462.

.fn #
There is above a light which
makes visible the Creator to that
creature who finds his peace only in
the vision of Him.
.fn-
.fn #
See Schelling’s <i>System des Trancendentalen
Idealismus</i>, pp. 19-23
(Tübingen, 1800), and Chalybæus,
<i>Hist. Entw. d. Spec. Phil.</i> p. 244.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Aids to Reflection</i>, pp. 225, 249.
The reader is referred to a discriminating
criticism of this doctrine in the
<i>British Quarterly Review</i>, No. xxxvii.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-1-90#, p. #92:Page_1-92#.
.fn-
// File: 134.png
.pn 1-94
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap1-3-4
CHAPTER IV.
.sp 2
.pm letter-start
<i>Stargaze.</i> ’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.—<sc>Massinger.</sc>
.pm letter-end
.sp 2
<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Kate.</sc> I hope it is going to degenerate into something one
can understand.

<sc>Gower.</sc> The great metaphysician, Plotinus, is off the stage,
that is some comfort for you, Miss Merivale. Magic is less
wearisome than metaphysics.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
// File: 135.png
.pn 1-95
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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.[#] 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.

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> And must not that very attempt, noticed
just now, to recognise all religions, have been as fatal to them
as the causes you mention?

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
// File: 136.png
.pn 1-96
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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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 <i>ought</i> to worship; the question is, Whom?
and How?

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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——
// File: 137.png
.pn 1-97

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> As is very visible in the higher moral tone of
Porphyry’s <i>Treatise on Abstinence</i>.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> The struggles of heathendom to escape its doom
only the more display its weakness and the justice of the
sentence.

<sc>Gower.</sc> Like the man in the <i>Gesta Romanorum</i>, 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.[#]

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Kate.</sc> By all means let us have it.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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,
// File: 138.png
.pn 1-98
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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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
// File: 139.png
.pn 1-99
satire on the too common indifference of men to the spiritual
realities which are about them every hour.

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> The picture would be as mysterious as an
Emblem by Albert Durer.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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

.pm verse-start
Rich windows that exclude the light,
And passages that lead to nothing;—
.pm verse-end

This puts me out of all patience.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> 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?
// File: 140.png
.pn 1-100

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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:—

.pm letter-start
<sc>Iamblichus to Agathocles.</sc>

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
// File: 141.png
.pn 1-101
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
// File: 142.png
.pn 1-102
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
// File: 143.png
.pn 1-103
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.[#]
Farewell.
.pm letter-end

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

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

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
// File: 144.png
.pn 1-104
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.[#]

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> So the idealism of strong minds becomes superstition
// File: 145.png
.pn 1-105
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.

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> I think you mentioned only one other of
these worthies.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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
// File: 146.png
.pn 1-106
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.

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> 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.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-1-103
Note to page 103.
.sp 2
<i>Iamblichus, de Mysteriis</i>, 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 <i>De Mysteriis</i> 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. <i>Jules Simon</i>, ii. 219.

For the opinions ascribed to Porphyry in this letter, see his <i>Epistola ad
Anebonem</i>, 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 <i>De Mysteriis</i> is an elaborate reply
to that epistle, under the name of Abammon.

In several passages of the <i>De Mysteriis</i> (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. (<i>Ep. ad Anebon.</i>
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. <i>De Myst.</i> vi. 5.

.fn #
<i>J. Simon</i>, i. 154; ii. 173.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>J. Simon</i>, liv. iii. chap. 4.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-1-103#, p. #106:Page_1-106#.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Jules Simon</i>, ii. 218.
.fn-
// File: 147.png
.pn 1-107
.sp 4
.h2 id=book1-4
BOOK THE FOURTH | MYSTICISM IN THE GREEK CHURCH
// File: 148.png
// File: 149.png
.pn 1-109
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap1-4-1
CHAPTER I.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
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.[#]

<sc>Dante.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
<sc>Kate.</sc> I have been looking at the pictures in Mrs.
Jameson’s <i>Sacred and Legendary Art</i>, 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Yet they claimed powers as much above humanity
as, to look at them, you would think them beneath it.

<sc>Gower.</sc> Religious Nebuchadnezzars.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> No shavelings, at any rate, like the smooth-faced
sanctities of the later calendar.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.[#]
// File: 150.png
.pn 1-110

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> Look, here is his picture; there he stands,
with crutch and bell and pig.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> A striking instance, I should say, of the objectivity
of the subject.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.
// File: 151.png
.pn 1-111
This, he was given to understand, was the rise and fall
of souls.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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 <i>sainte indifférence</i>.[#]

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> You said we were to discuss Dionysius the
Areopagite this evening.

<sc>Kate.</sc> Pray introduce me first. I know nothing about him.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
// File: 152.png
.pn 1-112
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.[#]

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

.fn #
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.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Athanasii Opp. Vita S. Antonii.</i>
The vision alluded to is related p. 498.
.fn-
.fn #
Poiret, <i>Bibliotheca Mysticorum</i>,
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,
<i>Die Mystik des N. Cabasilas</i>, p. 56.
.fn-
.fn #
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. <i>Acta Concil. Hard.</i> ii.
p. 1159.
.fn-
// File: 153.png
.pn 1-113
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap1-4-2
CHAPTER II.
.sp 2
.pm letter-start
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.—<sc>Jeremy
Taylor.</sc>
.pm letter-end
.sp 2
‘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.[#]

(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,
// File: 154.png
.pn 1-114
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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
// File: 155.png
.pn 1-115
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 <i>Via Negativa</i>
(or Apophatica) and the <i>Via Affirmativa</i> (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,
// File: 156.png
.pn 1-116
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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> And are not these, supplemented by the hierarchy
of ecclesiastics, his real objects of worship? No man could
// File: 157.png
.pn 1-117
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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.[#]

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> The divinity of this old Father must be a
bleak affair indeed—Christianity frozen out.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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,
// File: 158.png
.pn 1-118
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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.[#] 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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 <i>somewhere</i>,
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
// File: 159.png
.pn 1-119
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.’

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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!

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> ‘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!

<sc>Gower.</sc> Perhaps he has my excuse in this case, that he
could not help it.
// File: 160.png
.pn 1-120

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

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

<sc>Gower.</sc> I think we have spent time enough upon him.
Grievously do I pity the miserable monks his commentators,
whose minds, submerged in the <i>mare tenebrosum</i> 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.[#]

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Don’t throw away so much good compassion,
I dare say it kept them out of mischief.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> Is it possible? Why, that is as though a man
should lame himself to run the faster. Here is a search after
// File: 161.png
.pn 1-121
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!

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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 <i>good</i>.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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!

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.[#] So the contemplative
sage who <i>energises</i> directly toward the central Mind—the
intellectual source and ultimatum, is the true imitator of
the divine perfections.

<sc>Gower.</sc> Transfer this principle to Christianity, and the monk
becomes immediately the highest style of man.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Not that the schoolman would release his saint
altogether from the obligations of ordinary morality; but he
// File: 162.png
.pn 1-122
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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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 <i>un</i>human, 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Just so; in this doctrine of moral dualism—the
prolific mother of mystics—Aquinas is as far gone as Bernard.

<sc>Gower.</sc> The mention of Bernard’s name makes one impatient
to get away from the Greek Church, westward.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> We may say farewell to Byzantium now. That
Greek Church never grew beyond what it was in the eighth and
ninth centuries.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> I suppose the mysticism of the Greek Church
// File: 163.png
.pn 1-123
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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> How spiteful you are to-night, Atherton. I propose
that we break up, and hear nothing more you may have
to say.
.sp 2
.h4
Note to Page 121.
.sp 2
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 <i>exemplares</i>, <i>purgatoriæ</i> and
<i>politicæ</i>. 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 <i>Dogmengeschichte</i>, 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
// File: 164.png
.pn 1-124
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, <i>viz.</i>, 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.

.fn #
For the passages authenticating
this account, see <i>Dion. Areop. Opp.</i>
as follows:—

(1.) <i>De Div. Nom.</i> c. iv. § 1; v. 3,
6, 8; vi. 2, 3; i. 1. <i>De Eccl. Hier.</i>
i. 3.

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

(3.) <i>De Div. Nom.</i> 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 <i>Via negativa</i> and
<i>affirmativa</i>, see <i>De Div. Nom.</i> i. 1,
5, 4; <i>De Cœl. Hier.</i> xv.; and <i>De Myst.
Theol.</i> i. 2, 3.

(4.) <i>Ibid.</i> Also, <i>Ep. ad. Dorotheum</i>,
<i>De Myst. Theol.</i> iii. pp. 714, 721.
.fn-
.fn #
See Meier, ‘<i>Dionysii Areop. et
Mysticorum sæculi</i> xiv. <i>doctrinæ inter
se comparantur</i>.’ He remarks justly
‘causæ ad Causatum relationem cum
relatione generis ad speciem confudit’,
p. 13.
.fn-
.fn #
The <i>hyper</i> and the <i>a</i> 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
<i>hyper</i> on one side, and a superlative
termination on the other.
.fn-
.fn #
The later Greek theology modified
the most objectionable parts of the
Dionysian doctrine, while continuing
to reverence him as a Father. See
Ullmann’s <i>Nicholas von Methone</i>.
.fn-
.fn #
Aristot. <i>Eth. Nic.</i> lib. x. c. 8.—See Note, Page #123:Page_1-123#.
.fn-
// File: 165.png
.pn 1-125
.sp 4
.h2 id=book1-5
BOOK THE FIFTH | MYSTICISM IN THE LATIN CHURCH
// File: 166.png
// File: 167.png
.pn 1-127
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap1-5-1
CHAPTER I.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
                      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.

<sc>Violenzia.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
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.
// File: 168.png
.pn 1-128

.pm verse-start
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.
.pm verse-end

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,
// File: 169.png
.pn 1-129
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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> Again I say, let us turn from the stereotyped Greek
Church to the West,—I want to hear about St. Bernard.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Presently. Let us try and apprehend clearly
the way in which Neo-Platonism influenced mediæval Europe.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> A trifling preliminary! Atherton means us
to stay here all night. You may as well resign yourself, Gower.
// File: 170.png
.pn 1-130

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> Compare those great controversies with that miserable
Monophysite and Monothelite dispute for which one can
// File: 171.png
.pn 1-131
never get up an interest. How much we owe still to that
large-souled Augustine.[#]

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

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

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.[#]

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.
// File: 172.png
.pn 1-132

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> Now for Bernard. I see the name there on that
open page of your note-book. Read away—no excuses.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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 <i>Descriptio Monasterii
Claræ-Vallensis</i>, 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.

<sc>Kate.</sc> Transformed, in short, into ‘a serious paradise,’ as
Mr. Thackeray would say.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
// File: 173.png
.pn 1-133
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 <i>donati</i> and <i>conductitii</i>,
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.
// File: 174.png
.pn 1-134
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.

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> Thank you; so much for the place; and
the man—his personal appearance—is anything known about
that?

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.[#]

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
// File: 175.png
.pn 1-135
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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.[#] But now to my notes.
(<i>Atherton reads.</i>)
// File: 176.png
.pn 1-136

.pm letter-start
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.[#] 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
// File: 177.png
.pn 1-137
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?[#] 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
// File: 178.png
.pn 1-138
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
// File: 179.png
.pn 1-139
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.[#]

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
// File: 180.png
.pn 1-140
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.[#]

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.[#]
But the chair upheld by Bernard was to be filled by an
Innocent III., whose merciless arrogance should know no
// File: 181.png
.pn 1-141
bounds. Bernard pleaded nobly for the Jews, decimated in
the crusading fury.[#] 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 (<i>involutum</i>);
Understanding may afterwards cautiously unfold the envelope,
and peep at the prize, but may never examine the contents first,
// File: 182.png
.pn 1-142
to determine whether it shall be received or not.[#] 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 <i>might</i> 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.[#] At the
same time, the <i>credo ut intelligam</i> 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
// File: 183.png
.pn 1-143
is assumed for those whose practical holiness caused them to
shine as lights in the Church.[#]

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.
// File: 184.png
.pn 1-144
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.[#]

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.[#] 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
// File: 185.png
.pn 1-145
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.[#]

It is worth while at least to skim and dip among his sermons
on the Canticles. The <i>Song of Solomon</i> 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
// File: 186.png
.pn 1-146
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 <i>Solomon’s
Song</i>, 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.[#]
.pm letter-end
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-1-131-a
Note to page 131.
.sp 2
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. <i>Contra Academ.</i> 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.
<i>De Civitate Dei</i>, 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. <i>De Quantitate Animæ</i>, c. 35.

He enumerates three kinds of perception,—corporeal, intellectual (<i>scientia</i>)
and spiritual (<i>sapientia</i>); and in describing the last uses the words <i>introrsum
ascendere</i> (<i>De Trin.</i> xii. 15; and comp. <i>De Lib. Arbit.</i> 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. (<i>Retract.</i> 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.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-1-131-b
Note to page 131.
.sp 2
<sc>John Scotus Erigena.</sc>—This remarkable man began to teach in the
‘School of the Palace,’ under Charles the Bald, about the middle of the ninth
// File: 187.png
.pn 1-147
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. <i>Esse</i>, inquit, <i>omnium est
Superesse Divinitatis</i>.—<i>De Div. Nat.</i> i. 3, p. 443. (<i>Jo. Scoti Opp.</i>, 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
(<i>analysis</i>, 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. <i>De Div. Nat.</i> 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. <i>De Predestinatione</i>, 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 <i>Immanence</i>.
God regarded more as the inner life and vital <i>substratum</i> 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 <i>efficient</i> cause merely. The Platonic identification of the <i>velle</i> and the <i>esse</i>
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
// File: 188.png
.pn 1-148
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 <i>Theologia Germanica</i> 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 <i>quantitatively</i> rather than <i>qualitatively</i> 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
// File: 189.png
.pn 1-149
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 <i>Theologia Germanica</i> 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 <i>distinct</i> 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 <i>Theologia
Germanica</i>, by no means deifies man. It is but the Platonic expression of a
great Christian doctrine—the real Fatherhood of God.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-1-142
Note to page 142.
.sp 2
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.—<i>Epist.</i> 337, and comp. <i>Epist.</i> 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.—<i>Epist.</i> 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.—<i>Epist.</i> 338.
.sp 2
.h4
Note to page 143.
.sp 2
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,
// File: 190.png
.pn 1-150
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.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-1-144-a
Note to page 144.
.sp 2
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.—<i>De Consid.</i>
V. i., and comp. <i>Serm. in Cantica</i>, v. 4.

The three kinds of meditation, or stages of Christian proficiency, referred to
in the text, Bernard calls <i>consideratio dispensativa</i>, <i>æstimativa</i>, and <i>speculativa</i>.
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.—<i>De Consid.</i> v. ii. In one
of the <i>Sermons on the Canticles</i>, 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, <i>sed et similitudinibus</i> 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.—<i>In Cantica</i>, <i>Serm.</i> lii. 4, 5.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-1-144-b
Note to page 144.
.sp 2
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
// File: 191.png
.pn 1-151
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.—<i>In Cantica,
Serm.</i> 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.—<i>In Cantica, Serm.</i> 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. (<i>Serm. de diversis</i>, 87, and <i>In Cantica, Serm.</i> 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 <i>La Montée
du Mont Carmel</i>, 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. <i>De Consid.</i> lib. ii. cap. 2.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-1-146
Note to page 146.
.sp 2
See <i>Vita</i>, 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. (<i>Epist.</i> 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
// File: 192.png
.pn 1-152
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.

.fn #
See #Note 1:note-1-131-a#, p. #146:Page_1-146#.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note 2:note-1-131-b#, p. #146:Page_1-146#.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Vita</i>, ii. cap. v.
.fn-
.fn #
See the account of his diet, and
of the feebleness and sickness consequent
on his austerities, by the same
biographer (Alanus), <i>Vita</i>, 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
<i>scutellæ</i> in the kitchen.—<i>Vita</i>, iv.
p. 2508.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Vita</i>, ii. cap. x. 32.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Epp.</i> cx., cxi.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Chronologia Bernardina, Opp.</i> tom. i. p. 83.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Epist.</i> cxli.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>De Consideratione</i>, IV. iii. 7, and II. vi. 11, pp. 1028 and 1060.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Epist.</i> ccclxv. to the Archbishop of Mayence, against the fanatic Rudolph.
.fn-
.fn #
 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.—<i>De Consideratione</i>, V. 4, p.
1075.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-1-142#, p. #149:Page_1-149#.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-1-142#, p. #149:Page_1-149#.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note 1:note-1-144-a#, p. #150:Page_1-150#.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note 2:note-1-144-b#, p. #150:Page_1-150#.
.fn-
.fn #
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.—<i>De diligendo Deo</i>,
xv. and <i>Epist.</i> 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.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-1-146#, p. #151:Page_1-151#.
.fn-
// File: 193.png
.pn 1-153
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap1-5-2
CHAPTER II.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
<i>Licht und Farbe.</i>

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

<sc>Schiller.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
On the next evening of meeting, Gower commenced as
follows his promised paper on Hugo and Richard of
St. Victor.
.sp 2
.pm letter-start
<i>Hugo of St. Victor.</i>
.sp 2
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.
// File: 194.png
.pn 1-154
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.[#]

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 <i>theology</i> is characterized by some
such endeavour to unite the contemplation of the mystic with
the dialectics of the schoolman. There was good in the
// File: 195.png
.pn 1-155
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.[#]

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 <i>Heavenly Hierarchy</i>, 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, <i>Cogitatio</i>. A stage higher stands <i>Meditatio</i>: by this
// File: 196.png
.pn 1-156
he means reflection, investigation. Third, and highest, ranges
<i>Contemplatio</i>: in this state the mind possesses in light the
truth which, in the preceding, it desired and groped after in
twilight.[#]

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.[#]

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 (<i>specula</i>), 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,
// File: 197.png
.pn 1-157
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
// File: 198.png
.pn 1-158
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.[#]
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 <i>what</i>
we must flee and <i>whither</i> we must flee. The highest and the
inmost are, so far, identical.[#] 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
// File: 199.png
.pn 1-159
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.[#] 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.
.pm letter-end
.sp 2
.pm letter-start
<i>Richard of St. Victor.</i>
.sp 2
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.[#] Alas! he exclaims, how many come to the cloister to
// File: 200.png
.pn 1-160
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.[#]

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
// File: 201.png
.pn 1-161
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.[#]

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,
// File: 202.png
.pn 1-162
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.[#]

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 <i>Sensibilia</i>;
of the second pair, <i>Intelligibilia</i> (truths concerning what is
invisible, but accessible to reason); of the third, <i>Intellectibilia</i>
(unseen truth above reason). These, again, have their subdivisions,
into which we need not enter.[#] 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 (<i>inferiora invisibilia nostra</i>), and then
// File: 203.png
.pn 1-163
upward into the heights of the divine (<i>superiora invisibilia
divina</i>).[#]

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.[#]

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

<sc>Atherton.</sc> I move thanks to Gower.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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 <i>Richard of St. Victor</i>.
// File: 204.png
.pn 1-164

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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 <i>Golden Legend</i> that a friar says—

.pm verse-start
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!
.pm verse-end

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.
// File: 205.png
.pn 1-165

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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 <i>all</i> 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 <i>colour</i>.
The attempt to evade this law always ends in substituting the
mind’s creation for the mind’s Creator.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> I cannot say that I clearly understand what
this much-extolled introspection of theirs is supposed to reveal
to them.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Neither, very probably, did they. But though
// File: 206.png
.pn 1-166
an exact localization may be impossible, I think we can say
<i>whereabout</i> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> Good. Will you have the kindness first to
give me the truth as you hold it? Then we shall have the
<i>terminus a quo</i>.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
// File: 207.png
.pn 1-167
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
<i>microdogma</i> within, answering to the <i>macrodogma</i> 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.
// File: 208.png
.pn 1-168

<sc>Gower.</sc> If some of our modern advocates of the theory of
Insight be right, they ought to have succeeded in both.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> That ‘<i>Know thyself</i>’ 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, <i>O quam difficilis est ignorantibus
veritas, et quam facilis scientibus!</i>

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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 <i>character</i>.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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 <i>practical</i> man puts some lumps
// File: 209.png
.pn 1-169
slyly in his pocket, goes down with them, and brings them up
in triumph, as fresh from the depths of the earth.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> And in such judgment the world without
must have large share.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> President Edwards, in his <i>Treatise on the Affections</i>,
// File: 210.png
.pn 1-170
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.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-1-158
Note to page 158.
.sp 2
The treatise by Hugo, entitled <i>De Vanitate Mundi</i>, 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 <i>oculus cordis</i>, 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 <i>restauratio</i>, and at the same time <i>elevatio</i>. 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
// File: 211.png
.pn 1-171
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. <i>De Arca morali</i>, lib. iii. cap. 7.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-1-162
Note to page 162.
.sp 2
See the introductory chapters of the <i>Benjamin Minor</i>, or <i>De prep. anim.
ad contemp.</i> fol. 34, &c.—Richard rates this kind of interpretation very highly,
and looks for success therein to Divine Illumination. (<i>De eruditione interioris
hominis</i>, 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 <i>Nonnullæ allegoriæ tabernaculi fœderis</i>. ‘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
<i>form</i> and <i>matter</i>, our knowledge avails a full cubit. (It is equivalent to a
cubit when complete.) But our knowledge of the <i>nature</i> 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.
.sp 2
.h4
Note to page 163.
.sp 2
The three heavens within the mind are described at length. (<i>De Contemp.</i>
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
// File: 212.png
.pn 1-172
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 <i>essence</i> 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.—<i>De Contemp.</i> lib. iii.
c. 3, c. 6; and on the difficulty of this attainment, lib. iv. c. 6.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-1-163
Note to page 163.
.sp 2
<i>De Contemp.</i> lib. iv. cap. 6. <i>Ibid.</i> 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.

<i>De Contemp.</i> 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
// File: 213.png
.pn 1-173
summa sublimetur. Spiritus ab anima scinditur ut Domino uniatur. Qui enim
adhæret Domino unus spiritus est.—<i>De extermin. mali et promotione boni</i>,
cap. xviii. Again (<i>De Contemp.</i> 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.—<i>Ibid.</i>
lib. v. c. 5, fol. 60.

.fn #
<i>Light and Colour.</i>—Light, thou
eternally one, dwell above by the great
One Eternal; Colour, thou changeful,
in love come to Humanity down!
.fn-
.fn #
Liebner’s <i>Hugo of St. Victor</i>, p. 21.—This
account of his early studies
is given by Hugo in his <i>Didascalion</i>.
.fn-
.fn #
Schmid, <i>Der Mysticismus des M. A.</i>, p. 303.
.fn-
.fn #
Comp. <i>De Sacramentis</i>, lib. v. p.
x. c. 4. (tom. iii. p. 411. Garzon’s edition
of his works, Cologne, 1617.)
.fn-
.fn #
See Liebner, p. 315.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>De Sacramentis</i>, 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, <i>sed in seipsa ut est</i> veritatem
agnoscat et sapiat.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-1-158#, p. #170.:Page_1-170#
.fn-
.fn #
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 <i>Hugo von St. Victor und die
Theologischen Richtungen seiner Zeit</i>;
one of the best of the numerous monographs
German scholarship has produced.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Richardi S. Victoris Opp.</i> (Lyons,
1534), <i>De Preparatione animi ad contemplationem</i>,
fol. 39.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Ibid.</i> cap. xli.
.fn-
.fn #
Engelhardt, <i>Richard von St. Victor</i>, p. 6.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-1-162#, p. #171:Page_1-171#.
.fn-
.fn #
The six degrees of contemplation
are as follows (<i>De Contemp.</i> i. 6, fol. 45):

.pm verse-start
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.
.pm verse-end

The office of Imagination to which
the first two belong is Thought (<i>Cogitatio</i>);
the office of Reason, Investigation
(<i>Meditatio</i>); that of Intelligence,
Contemplation (<i>Contemplatio</i>).—<i>Ibid.</i>
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.—<i>Ibid.</i> 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.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-1-162#, p. #171:Page_1-171#.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-1-163#, p. #172:Page_1-172#.
.fn-
// File: 214.png
// File: 215.png
.pn 1-175
.sp 4
.h2 id=book1-6
BOOK THE SIXTH | GERMAN MYSTICISM IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY
// File: 216.png
// File: 217.png
.pn 1-177
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap1-6-1
CHAPTER I.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
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.

<sc>Much Ado about Nothing.</sc>
.pm verse-end

.pm letter-start
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.—<sc>Jeremy Taylor.</sc>
.pm letter-end
.sp 2
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
// File: 218.png
.pn 1-178
those innumerable minor <i>satisfactions</i> 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
// File: 219.png
.pn 1-179
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
// File: 220.png
.pn 1-180
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’—

.pm verse-start
Attempred goodly well for health and for delight.
.pm verse-end

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
// File: 221.png
.pn 1-181
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:—
.sp 2
.pm letter-start
<sc>The Chronicle of Adolf Arnstein of Strasburg.</sc>

<i>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.</i>

1320. <i>September. St. Matthew’s Day.</i>—Three days ago I
was surprised by a visit from Hermann of Fritzlar,[#] 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
// File: 222.png
.pn 1-182
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,
// File: 223.png
.pn 1-183
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.

.tb

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
// File: 224.png
.pn 1-184
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,[#] &c. Councils, they tell me, have been held at
Cologne, Mayence, and Narbonne, to suppress the Beghards.
// File: 225.png
.pn 1-185
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
// File: 226.png
.pn 1-186
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.[#] Our once famous Godfrey
of Strasburg is forgotten. Wolfram von Eschenbach is the
universal model. His <i>Parzival and Titurel</i> 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
// File: 227.png
.pn 1-187
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
// File: 228.png
.pn 1-188
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.[#]

1320. <i>September. St. Maurice’s Day.</i>—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.[#]

‘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.[#]
// File: 229.png
.pn 1-189

‘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.[#]

‘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.[#]

‘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?
// File: 230.png
.pn 1-190
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.[#]

‘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 <i>Something</i>, 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
// File: 231.png
.pn 1-191
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.[#]

‘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.[#]

‘Folks say to me often—“Pray God for me.” Then I think
// File: 232.png
.pn 1-192
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?.”[#]

‘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.[#]

‘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.’[#]

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. <i>October. St. Francis’ Day.</i>—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,
// File: 233.png
.pn 1-193
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.[#]

‘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
// File: 234.png
.pn 1-194
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.[#]

‘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.[#]

‘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.’[#]
// File: 235.png
.pn 1-195

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?[#]
Then nothing burns; <i>ergo</i>, 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.’
// File: 236.png
.pn 1-196

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
(<i>Werden</i>)—‘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
// File: 237.png
.pn 1-197
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
// File: 238.png
.pn 1-198
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?”
// File: 239.png
.pn 1-199

‘“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.”[#]

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.[#]

.pm verse-start
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!
// File: 240.png
.pn 1-200

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!
.pm verse-end

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. <i>Second week in October.</i>—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.[#] 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.
// File: 241.png
.pn 1-201

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?’

<i>He.</i> I never came from anywhere.

<i>I.</i> What are you?

<i>He.</i> I am not.

<i>I.</i> What will you?

<i>He.</i> I will not.

<i>I.</i> This is passing strange. Tell me your name.

<i>He.</i> Men call me the Nameless Wild.

<i>I.</i> Not far off the mark either; you talk wildly enough.
Where do you come from? whither are you bound?

<i>He.</i> I dwell in absolute Freedom.

<i>I.</i> What is that?

<i>He.</i> When a man lives as he list, without distinction
(Otherness, <i>Anderheit</i>), without before or after. The man who
hath in his Eternal Nothing become nothing knows nought of
distinctions.

<i>I.</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
// File: 242.png
.pn 1-202
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 (<i>Geschiedenheit
und Unterschiedenheit</i>).

<i>He.</i> The teacher saith that the saintly man is God’s son,
and what Christ doth, that doth he.

<i>I.</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.[#]

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,
// File: 243.png
.pn 1-203
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!
.pm letter-end

Here Atherton laid aside his manuscript, and conversation
commenced.

.fn #
The <i>Heiligenleben</i> of Hermann von
Fritslar has been recently edited by
Franz Pfeiffer, in his <i>Ausgabe der
Deutschen Mystiker</i> (Leipsig, 1845).
Hermann says himself repeatedly that
he had caused his book to be written
(<i>schreiben lassen</i>) 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.—<i>Vorrede.</i>
.fn-
.fn #
Concerning these sects, see Ullmann,
<i>Reformatoren vor der Reformation</i>,
vol. ii. pp. 1-18. The fullest
account is given of them in a masterly
Latin treatise by Mosheim, <i>De Beghardis
et Beguinabus</i>. 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.
.fn-
.fn #
Authority for these statements concerning
the literature of the period,
will be found in Gervinus, <i>Geschichte
der poetischen National-Literatur der
Deutschen</i>, part vi. §§ 1, 2, 5.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Johannes Tauler von Strasburg</i>,
by Dr. Carl Schmidt, pp. 8-10; and Laguille’s
<i>Histoire d’Alsace</i>, liv. xxiv.
.fn-
.fn #
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.—<i>Sprüche Deutscher Mystiker</i>,
in Wackernagel’s <i>Altdeutsches Lesebuch</i>,
p. 889.
.fn-
.fn #
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.—<i>Ibid.</i>

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.
.fn-
.fn #
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
<i>Theol. Stud. u. Kritiken</i>, 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.—<i>Ibid.</i> p. 675. This
last assertion was one of the counts of
accusation in the bull of 1330.
.fn-
.fn #
Martensen’s <i>Meister Eckart</i> (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.’
.fn-
.fn #
Martensen, p. 23. Comp. <i>Stud.
u. Krit.</i> <i>loc. cit.</i> Alles das denn got
yn gegab seinem eingebornen sun, das
hat er mir gegeben.... <i>Was got
würcket, das ist ein</i>, 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.
.fn-
.fn #
These statements concerning the
‘füncklin der vernunfft’ are the substance
of passages given by Martensen,
pp. 26, 27, and Schmidt (<i>Stud. u.
Krit.</i> <i>l. c.</i>), 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 <i>intellectus</i>, daz ist ein
instênde kraft in der sêle. Etlîche heizen
<i>in sinderisis</i>. Etliche heizen in
daz wô der sêle. Etlîche heizen in daz
nirgen der sêle.—<i>Heiligenleben. Di
dritte messe</i>, p. 32.
.fn-
.fn #
Martensen, p. 27. Schmidt, <i>loc.
cit.</i>
.fn-
.fn #
The passage in Martensen, p. 20.
.fn-
.fn #
Martensen, pp. 19, 29.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Ibid.</i> p. 29.
.fn-
.fn #
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.—<i>Schmidt</i>, p. 712.
.fn-
.fn #
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.—<i>Wackernagel</i>, p.
891.
.fn-
.fn #
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, <i>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</i>, wann das ist ein arm
mensch der nicht wil, noch nicht bekennet,
noch nicht begeret—<i>Schmidt</i>,
p. 716. Here again is the most extravagant
expression possible of the
doctrine of <i>sainte indifférence</i>, in comparison
with which Madame Guyon is
moderation itself.
.fn-
.fn #
See <i>Schmidt</i>, p. 724.
.fn-
.fn #
He was charged with denying
hell and purgatory, because he defined
future punishment as deprivation,—‘Das
Nicht in der helle brinnet.’—<i>Schmidt</i>,
p. 722.
.fn-
.fn #
The narrative here put into the
mouth of Eckart is found in an appendix
to Tauler’s <i>Medulla animæ</i>.
There is every reason to believe that
it is Eckart’s. Martensen gives it, p. 107.
.fn-
.fn #
A literal translation of a curious
old hymn in Wackernagel’s collection,
p. 896.
.fn-
.fn #
C. Schmidt (<i>Johannes Tauler von
Strasburg</i>, p. 42) gives examples of the
extravagant display in dress common
among the clergy at that time.
.fn-
.fn #
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.
.fn-
// File: 244.png
.pn 1-204
.h3 id=chap1-6-2
CHAPTER II.
.sp 2
.pm letter-start
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.—<sc>Sir Thomas Browne.</sc>
.pm letter-end
.sp 2
<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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,
<i>per saltum</i>, 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> Thank you. That fact supports me. Might
// File: 245.png
.pn 1-205
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?

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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?

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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 <i>extra</i> revelation, to hearten them for their achievements.’

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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!
// File: 246.png
.pn 1-206

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> Pity that he could not find the scriptural <i>Via
Media</i>—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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> This daring Eckart reminds me of that heroic leader
in Beaumont and Fletcher’s <i>Bonduca</i>. I think I hear him cry
with Caratach,

.pm verse-start
                      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.
.pm verse-end

<sc>Lowestoffe.</sc> Did you not say yesterday, Atherton, that
Eckart’s system had received high praise from Hegel?

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Oh yes, he calls it ‘a genuine and profound
philosophy.’ Indeed the points of resemblance are very striking,
// File: 247.png
.pn 1-207
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 <i>Logische Idee</i>. 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.[#]

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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,—

.pm verse-start
          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.
.pm verse-end

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Nay, if we come to fancying, let us call in
Pythagoras at once, and say that the soul of Eckart transmigrated
into Hegel.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.
// File: 248.png
.pn 1-208

<sc>Lowestoffe.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.’

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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
// File: 249.png
.pn 1-209
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.

<sc>Lowestoffe.</sc> 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 <i>in</i> us
and neglected that of Christ <i>for</i> us, when the <i>opus operatum</i>
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!

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> By a strange contradiction, Eckart employs
Revelation at one moment only to escape it the next—and uses
its beacon-lights to steer <i>from</i>, 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
// File: 250.png
.pn 1-210
away on his ‘sail-broad vans’ of speculation through
the vast vacuity in search of

.pm verse-start
                    ——a dark
Illimitable ocean, without bound,
Without dimension, where length, breadth, and height,
And time and place are lost.
.pm verse-end

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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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>i.e.</i>,
you and He one and the same? But can you conjecture,
Atherton, by what process he arrived at such a pass?

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Perhaps in this way:—John Scotus Erigena
(with whose writings Eckart could scarcely have failed to make
// File: 251.png
.pn 1-211
acquaintance at Paris) asserts the identity of Being and Willing,
of the <i>Velle</i> and the <i>Esse</i> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> So then, Eckart would say,—‘To realize himself,
// File: 252.png
.pn 1-212
God must have Christians;’ and Hegel,—‘To realize him
self, He must have philosophers.’

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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, <i>bon gré, mal gré</i>, to whomsoever will refine
himself down to his ‘<i>Nothing</i>,’ he reduces the Almighty to
dependence, and changes places with Him upon the eternal
throne on the strength of his self-transcending humility!
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-1-207
Note to page 207.
.sp 2
Both Hegel and Eckart regard <i>Thought</i> as the point of union between the
human nature and the divine. But the former would pronounce both God and
man unrevealed, <i>i.e.</i>, 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
<i>begrifflose</i>), professes to have sunk the peculiarity of Self in the <i>Essence</i>, and so
to give forth the utterance of a hallowed and unerring philosophy,[#] 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
(<i>Substanz</i>), 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.’—<i>Vorrede zur Phænomenologie</i>, 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.—<i>Anweisung
zum sel. Leben</i>, p. 470.

And again, ‘Religion consists in the inward consciousness that God actually
lives and acts in us, and fulfils his work.’—<i>Ibid.</i> 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
<i>somehow</i>!

.fn #
See #Note:note-1-207#, p. #212:Page_1-212#.
.fn-
.fn #
Eckart does not make use of his lapse
into the Essence to philosophise withal; it
is simply his religious <i>ultimatum</i>.
.fn-
// File: 253.png
.pn 1-213
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap1-6-3
CHAPTER III.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
  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.

<sc>Chaucer: The House of Fame.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
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.

.pm letter-start
1324. <i>July. St. Kylian’s Day.</i>—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
// File: 254.png
.pn 1-214
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![#] Louis holds a high spirit
// File: 255.png
.pn 1-215
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.

.tb

1326. <i>March. St. Gregory’s Day.</i>—Duke Leopold died
here yesterday, at the Ochsenstein Palace.[#] 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
// File: 256.png
.pn 1-216
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.[#] 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.[#] 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
// File: 257.png
.pn 1-217
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.[#] 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.

.tb

<sc>A.D.</sc> 1332. <i>Fourth week after Easter.</i>—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,
// File: 258.png
.pn 1-218
banqueted at the grand house in the Brandgasse.[#] 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
// File: 259.png
.pn 1-219
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
// File: 260.png
.pn 1-220
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.

.tb

1338. <i>August. St. Bartholomew’s Day.</i>—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.[#]

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
// File: 261.png
.pn 1-221
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.[#]
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.[#] 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
// File: 262.png
.pn 1-222
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.

<sc>A.D.</sc> 1339. <i>January.</i>—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?[#] Ran after them, called them in, thawed them, fed
// File: 263.png
.pn 1-223
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:—

.pm verse-start
They shall still their masses sing,
Or out of the city we’ll make them spring.[#]
.pm verse-end

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.
// File: 264.png
.pn 1-224

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 <i>Friends of God</i>,
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.[#] 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,[#] 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,
// File: 265.png
.pn 1-225
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.[#] 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.[#]
// File: 266.png
.pn 1-226

1339. <i>March.</i>—Much encouraged on hearing Dr. Tauler’s
sermon on ‘Whose is the image and superscription?‘[#] 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
// File: 267.png
.pn 1-227
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 (<i>Einigkeit</i>). 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
// File: 268.png
.pn 1-228
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. <i>March 20.</i>—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.[#] 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.
.pm letter-end

.fn #
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.’—<i>Menzel.</i>
.fn-
.fn #
See Laguille, <i>Histoire d’Alsace</i>, liv. xxiii. p. 271.
.fn-
.fn #
Many passages in his <i>Heiligenleben</i>
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 (<i>Pfeiffer</i>), and also the extracts in
Wackernagel, <i>Altd. Leseb.</i> p. 853.
.fn-
.fn #
See Schmidt’s Tauler, Appendix,
p. 172, &c., where such information as
can be obtained concerning Henry of
Nördlingen is given.
.fn-
.fn #
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.’
.fn-
.fn #
Laguille gives an account of this revolution, <i>Hist. d’Alsace</i>, p. 276.
.fn-
.fn #
Schmidt’s Tauler, p. 12.
.fn-
.fn #
Laguille, liv. xxiv. p. 280.
.fn-
.fn #
Schmidt, p. 22.
.fn-
.fn #
Tauler’s <i>Sermon on the Twenty-second
Sunday after Trinity</i> contains
an exhortation to Christian love, remarkable
for beauty and discrimination.
Tauler’s <i>Predigten</i>, vol ii. p.
591 (Berlin, 1841).
.fn-
.fn #
Schmidt, p. 14:—

.pm verse-start
‘do soltent sü ouch fürbas singen
oder aber us der statt springen.’
.pm verse-end
.fn-
.fn #
Schmidt’s Tauler, <i>Anhang über
die Gottesfreunde</i>.
.fn-
.fn #
Passages from two of these mystics,
Heinrich von Löwen and Johannes
von Sterngasse, are given among the
<i>Sprüche Deutscher Mystiker</i>, in Wackernagel,
p. 890.
.fn-
.fn #
See Tauler’s <i>Predigten</i>, 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.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Ibid.</i>, vol. ii. pred. lxvi. p. 594.
.fn-
.fn #
The sermon referred to is that
on the <i>Twenty-third Sunday after
Trinity</i>, 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.
.fn-
.fn #
Meiners, <i>Hist. Vergleichung der Sitten, &c., des Mittelalters</i>, vol. ii. p. 117.
.fn-
// File: 269.png
.pn 1-229
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap1-6-4
CHAPTER IV.
.sp 2
.pm letter-start
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.—<sc>Luther</sc> (<i>to Spalatin</i>).
.pm letter-end

.pm verse-start
Die Sehnsucht und der Traüme Weben
  Sie sind der weichen Seele süss,
Doch edler ist ein starkes Streben
  Und macht den schönen Traum gewiss.[#]

<sc>Uhland.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
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:—

.pm letter-start
1339. <i>December. St. Barbara’s Day.</i>—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
// File: 270.png
.pn 1-230
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.[#]

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. <i>January. Eve of St. Agnes.</i>—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. <i>July. St. Alexius’ Day.</i>—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
// File: 271.png
.pn 1-231
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[#] 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 <i>him</i>, 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. <i>New Year’s Day.</i>—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.
// File: 272.png
.pn 1-232
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. <i>January 6.</i>—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
// File: 273.png
.pn 1-233
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
// File: 274.png
.pn 1-234
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. <i>January. St. Vincent’s Day.</i>—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. <i>January 23.</i>—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
// File: 275.png
.pn 1-235
the court who lay on the ground, as though dead, such had
been the power of his words.

1342. <i>February. St. Blasius’ Day.</i>—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. <i>March.</i>—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
// File: 276.png
.pn 1-236
only through Strasburg, but all the region round about.[#] 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
// File: 277.png
.pn 1-237
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.
.pm letter-end

.fn #
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.
.fn-
.fn #
This sermon is given entire in the
second chapter of the <i>Lebenshistorie
des ehrwürdigen Doctors Johann
Tauler</i>, 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.
.fn-
.fn #
Atherton defends this word by the usage of Thomas Fuller.
.fn-
.fn #
These letters are preserved in substance
in Specklin’s <i>Collectanea</i>, and
are inserted, from that source, in the
introduction by Görres to Diepenbrock’s
edition of Suso’s works; pp.
xxxv. &c.
.fn-
// File: 278.png
.pn 1-238
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap1-6-5
CHAPTER V.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
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.

<sc>Spenser: Hymne of Heavenly Beautie.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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 <i>feuilleton</i> style.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Kate.</sc> One word for us and two for yourself, Mr. Gower.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
// File: 279.png
.pn 1-239
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
// File: 280.png
.pn 1-240
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
// File: 281.png
.pn 1-241
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,
// File: 282.png
.pn 1-242
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
// File: 283.png
.pn 1-243
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.

<sc>Lowestoffe.</sc> A most singular story. But how have all
these minute circumstances come down to us?

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.[#]

You will now let me resume my reading, I suppose.

.pm letter-start
Chronicle of Adolf Arnstein, continued.

1344. <i>Eve of St. Dionysius.</i>—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
// File: 284.png
.pn 1-244
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
// File: 285.png
.pn 1-245
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
(<i>Gottformige</i>). 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 (<i>in ihr grundloses Nichts</i>), 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
// File: 286.png
.pn 1-246
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.’[#]

‘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
(<i>Gemüthes</i>).’ 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
// File: 287.png
.pn 1-247
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
// File: 288.png
.pn 1-248
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.’[#]

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.’[#]

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
// File: 289.png
.pn 1-249
the sacrament, seeing that they who are whole need not a
physician, but they that are sick.[#]

‘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
// File: 290.png
.pn 1-250
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 (<i>Ledigkeit</i>) 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.’[#]

‘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!‘[#]

‘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
// File: 291.png
.pn 1-251
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.’[#]

‘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.’[#]
.pm letter-end

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
// File: 292.png
.pn 1-252
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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
<i>unknown</i> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Granted. That error does not lessen my love
and admiration for the man.

<sc>Gower.</sc> Your extracts show, too, that the Nothingness
towards which he calls men to strive is no indolent Quietism,
// File: 293.png
.pn 1-253
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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Blessed are his contradictions and inconsistencies!
Logic cannot always reconcile Tauler with himself—our
hearts do.[#]

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> Never surely was a theory so negative combined
with an action more fervently intense—a positiveness
more benign.

<sc>Gower.</sc> In his life we understand him,—that is at once the
explanation and vindication of what his mysticism means.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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 <i>Theologia Germanica</i>
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.

<sc>Kate.</sc> Tauler, then, was a Protestant in spirit—a genuine
forerunner of the Reformation?

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Unquestionably.

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> 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—

.pm verse-start
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,
.pm verse-end

—but bewildering, rather?
// File: 294.png
.pn 1-254

<sc>Atherton.</sc> I am afraid so. Yet there was much they
evidently did understand and relish.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-1-246
Note to page 246.
.sp 2
The passages in the text are from the second <i>Sermon on Fifth Sunday after
Trinity</i>, <i>Predigten</i>, 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
// File: 295.png
.pn 1-255
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 <i>distinction</i>;‘—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 ‘<i>unknown</i> 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.
// File: 296.png
.pn 1-256
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-1-248
Note to page 248.
.sp 2
The above is from the <i>Sermon on the Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity</i>, 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 (<i>gemüth</i>), a marvellous and very lovely thing—for
the memory, the understanding, and the will of man are all collected
therein. The Disposition hath an <i>objectum</i> 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 (<i>man</i>), and that is the
ground which is nameless, and wherein dwells hidden the true image of the
Holy Trinity. (Compare <i>Third Serm. on Third Sunday after Trin.</i>, ii. p. 305,
and <i>Serm. on Eleventh Sunday after Trin.</i>, 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 <i>sinderisis</i>. In dirre kraft mac inkein krêatûre wirken noch inkein
krêatûrlîch bilde, sunder got der wirket dar in âne mittel und âne underlâz.
<i>Heiligenleben</i>, 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.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-1-251
Note to page 251.
.sp 2
This passage is from the <i>Third Serm. on Thirteenth Sun. after Trin.</i>, ii. p. 480.
The same remarkable combination of inward aspiration and outward love and
service is urged with much force and beauty in the <i>Sermon on Fifth Sunday after
Trinity</i>, and in that on the <i>Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity</i>, 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. <i>Predigten</i>,
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
// File: 297.png
.pn 1-257
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 (<i>Third Serm. on Third Sun.
after Trin.</i>, ii. p. 310), but his general tone far more lowly, practical, and true.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-1-253
Note to page 253.
.sp 2
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 (<i>Pred.</i> 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 (<i>Gott
schauende</i>) 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
// File: 298.png
.pn 1-258
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
(<i>Gottesleidende</i>) men’—in fact, mystics of the intransitive theopathetic species
<i>par excellence</i>. 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
// File: 299.png
.pn 1-259
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.’

.fn #
The substance of the foregoing
narrative concerning Tauler and the
laymen will be found in the <i>Lebenshistorie
des ehrwürdigen Doctors
Joh. Tauler</i>. 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.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-1-246#, p. #254:Page_1-254#.
.fn-
.fn #
See first #Note:note-1-248#, p. #256:Page_1-256#.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Serm. on Eleventh Sun. after Trinity</i>, ii. p. 436.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Serm. on Eleventh Sun. after
Trin.</i>, ii. pp. 442, 443. Also, <i>Predigten</i>,
vol. iii. p. 19, and <i>Schmidt</i>,
p. 125.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Third Serm. on Thirteenth Sun.
after Trin.</i>, ii. pp. 474-478.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>First Serm. on Thirteenth Sun.
after Trin.</i>, ii. p. 459.
.fn-
.fn #
See second #Note:note-1-251#, p. #256:Page_1-256#.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Twenty-first Sun. after Trin.</i>, ii. p. 584.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-1-253#, p. #257:Page_1-257#.
.fn-
// File: 300.png
.pn 1-260
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap1-6-6
CHAPTER VI.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
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.

<sc>Herbert.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
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.

.tb

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
// File: 301.png
.pn 1-261
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
// File: 302.png
.pn 1-262
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.
// File: 303.png
.pn 1-263

A place of rest! Yes, in that one word <sc>REST</sc> 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 <i>Theory and Practice of
Quietude</i>—we see the structure on trial. Experience, with
// File: 304.png
.pn 1-264
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
// File: 305.png
.pn 1-265
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.’[#]
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 <i>opinions</i>, 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
// File: 306.png
.pn 1-266
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
// File: 307.png
.pn 1-267
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 <i>Theologia Germanica</i>, 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 <i>Maxims of the Saints</i>, 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 <i>revolution</i>,
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
// File: 308.png
.pn 1-268
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.’
// File: 309.png
.pn 1-269

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 <i>historian</i> 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 <i>your interpretation</i> 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
// File: 310.png
.pn 1-270
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 <i>historical</i>. 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 <i>not</i> teach.

I will give a few examples. If a man should imagine that
// File: 311.png
.pn 1-271
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
// File: 312.png
.pn 1-272
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 <i>de novo</i> 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.

.tb

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
// File: 313.png
.pn 1-273
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
// File: 314.png
.pn 1-274
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,
‘<i>we know!</i>’

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 <i>is</i> a something quite separate
from ourselves—in fact, the impelling Spirit.’ In this case the
// File: 315.png
.pn 1-275
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
// File: 316.png
.pn 1-276
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 <i>not</i> 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 <i>we</i> 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 <i>is</i> 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.

.tb

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,
// File: 317.png
.pn 1-277
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 (<i>maya</i>) 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
// File: 318.png
.pn 1-278
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 <i>immanence</i> of God in the world for the idea of the <i>emanation</i>
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 <i>Paradiso</i>. 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.
// File: 319.png
.pn 1-279

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 (<i>causæ primordiales</i>). 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 <i>fall</i> 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
// File: 320.png
.pn 1-280
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 <i>Theologia Germanica</i>, 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
// File: 321.png
.pn 1-281
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 <i>now</i>,
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
// File: 322.png
.pn 1-282
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 <i>unknown</i> God to which
he desires to escape when he says ‘I want to be rid of God,’
is a being without morality. He is <i>above</i> 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.
// File: 323.png
.pn 1-283
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.

.tb

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 <i>furor</i>. 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
// File: 324.png
.pn 1-284
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—<i>sanguine fleti, Terrificas capitum
quatientes numine cristas</i>, 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,
// File: 325.png
.pn 1-285
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
// File: 326.png
.pn 1-286
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 <i>have</i> 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 <i>ordinary</i> 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 <i>not</i> 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
// File: 327.png
.pn 1-287
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
// File: 328.png
.pn 1-288
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.

.tb

Mysticism, as exhibited in Tauler’s sermons, is much more
likely to win appreciation at the hands of English readers than
mysticism in the <i>Theologia Germanica</i>. 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 <i>Theologia Germanica</i>
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,
// File: 329.png
.pn 1-289
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,
// File: 330.png
.pn 1-290
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
// File: 331.png
.pn 1-291
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 <i>Ground</i>, 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
<i>Synderesis</i> (to use an Aristotelian word) of which the <i>Syneidesis</i>
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
// File: 332.png
.pn 1-292
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
// File: 333.png
.pn 1-293
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
// File: 334.png
.pn 1-294
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
// File: 335.png
.pn 1-295
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.[#] 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
// File: 336.png
.pn 1-296
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,
// File: 337.png
.pn 1-297
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)

.pm verse-start
                        ‘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.’
.pm verse-end

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
// File: 338.png
.pn 1-298
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, <i>unknown</i> 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
// File: 339.png
.pn 1-299
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
// File: 340.png
.pn 1-300
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
// File: 341.png
.pn 1-301
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 <i>moral</i> 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 <i>thought</i> 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,
// File: 342.png
.pn 1-302
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>i.e.</i>, in his sufferings, death, and resurrection, and
that higher class of the perfect, or <i>Gnostici</i>, 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 <i>Gnosticus</i> 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
<i>ideal</i>; 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 <i>we</i> do not know ourselves as separate, but that <i>God</i>
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
// File: 343.png
.pn 1-303
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
// File: 344.png
.pn 1-304
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 <i>for</i>, as well as wrought
<i>in</i> 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 <i>some</i> 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
// File: 345.png
.pn 1-305
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
// File: 346.png
.pn 1-306
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.’

.tb

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
// File: 347.png
.pn 1-307
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. <i>Then</i>, 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
<i>against</i> the Bible, do in reality utter the most emphatic testimony
<i>for</i> 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
// File: 348.png
.pn 1-308
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
// File: 349.png
.pn 1-309
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
// File: 350.png
.pn 1-310
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 <i>Sartor
Resartus</i>, 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 <i>him</i> that
which they condemn in the Christianity of the present day.

.fn #
Preface to Tauler’s <i>Life and Sermons</i> by Susanna Winkworth.
.fn-
.fn #
Nicole, in his <i>Traité de la Prière</i>,
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.
.fn-
// File: 351.png
.pn 1-311
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap1-6-7
CHAPTER VII.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
                                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.

<sc>Macbeth.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
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
// File: 352.png
.pn 1-312
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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> Don’t you think Atherton has a very manuscriptural
air to-night?

<sc>Kate.</sc> There is a certain aspect of repletion about him.

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> We must bleed him, or the consequences
may be serious. What’s this? (<i>Pulls a paper out of his pocket.</i>)

<sc>Kate.</sc> And this! (<i>Pulls out another.</i>)

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> He seems better now.

<sc>Atherton</sc> (<i>abstractedly</i>). 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> And yet it is only by the manful struggles of
// File: 353.png
.pn 1-313
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 <i>Inferno</i> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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. (<i>Reads.</i>)

.pm letter-start
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.[#] Everywhere famine, floods,
// File: 354.png
.pn 1-314
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
// File: 355.png
.pn 1-315
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
// File: 356.png
.pn 1-316
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.[#] Similar troops of devotees had
// File: 357.png
.pn 1-317
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—

.pm verse-start
Stand up in virtue of holy pain,
And guard thee well from guilt again.
.pm verse-end

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
// File: 358.png
.pn 1-318
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
// File: 359.png
.pn 1-319
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.[#]
.sp 2
<i>Chronicle of Adolf Arnstein, continued.</i>
.sp 2
<sc>Strasburg.</sc> 1354. <i>January.</i>—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.[#] 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.[#] All the
// File: 360.png
.pn 1-320
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.[#] 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
// File: 361.png
.pn 1-321
been privately busied in writing a book, to be called <i>The Nine
Rocks</i>, of which he did me the honour of reading to me a part.[#]
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 <i>The Spiritual
Nuptials</i>, by John Ruysbroek.[#] 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.[#]

From Cologne we journeyed direct to Aix-la-Chapelle. There
we saw the chair in which the emperors sit when they are
// File: 362.png
.pn 1-322
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.[#] 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
// File: 363.png
.pn 1-323
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.[#]

They still talked at Louvain about that flower of chivalry
Edward III. of England, who was there for a season some few
years back.[#] 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
// File: 364.png
.pn 1-324
wits is to turn to good account the follies of other people.[#] 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.
// File: 365.png
.pn 1-325

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.[#]

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.[#]

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
// File: 366.png
.pn 1-326
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, (<i>die bildlose Nacktheit</i>)—by
means of this we receive and are united to the Father;
the second, the Higher Reason of the Soul (<i>die höhere Vernunft
der Seele</i>), the mirror of brightness, by which we receive the
Son; the third, the Spark of the Soul (<i>Funken der Seele</i>) 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.[#]

‘The office of the Son in time was to die for us, fulfil the
// File: 367.png
.pn 1-327
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 (<i>Synderesis</i>)
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.[#]

‘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
// File: 368.png
.pn 1-328
bent on God. Swallowed up in aspiration, it can take heed of
nothing more.’[#] (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
<i>simplicitas</i> 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
// File: 369.png
.pn 1-329
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.’[#]

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 <i>Spiritual Nuptials</i>, in which Ruysbroek
said that we became identical, in this union, with the
glory by which we are illumined.[#]

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.‘[#]

The conversation then turned on the heresies of the time, the
// File: 370.png
.pn 1-330
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.’[#]

‘I have had plentiful opportunity,’ continued Ruysbroek, ‘for
observing these men. I would divide them into four classes.[#]
// File: 371.png
.pn 1-331
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
// File: 372.png
.pn 1-332
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.’
// File: 373.png
.pn 1-333

‘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.[#]

‘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.’[#]

When, one day, they were conversing on future rewards and
punishments, I remember hearing Ruysbroek say—‘I trust I am
// File: 374.png
.pn 1-334
ready for all God sends me, life or death, or even hell-pains
themselves.’ An attainment of virtue inconceivable to me.[#]

At Grünthal I saw much of a lay brother named John
Affliginiensis, the cook of the community.[#] 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.
// File: 375.png
.pn 1-335
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.[#] 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.
// File: 376.png
.pn 1-336

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.
.pm letter-end
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-1-321
Note to page 321.
.sp 2
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 <i>Von den vier ioren sins anevohenden lebendes</i>—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 <i>Book of the Nine Rocks</i> 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
// File: 377.png
.pn 1-337
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.)
// File: 378.png
.pn 1-338
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-1-329-1
Note to page 329.
.sp 2
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.’—<i>Vier Schriften</i>, p. 144.

[And all men who are exalted above their creatureliness into a contemplative
life are <i>one with this divine glory,—yea, are that glory</i>. 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>i.e.</i>, 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 <i>one with the same light, by means of which they see, and which they see</i>.
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.’—<i>Von dem funkelnden Steine</i>, 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.’)—<i>Spiegel
der Seligkeit</i>, xxiv.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-1-329-2
Note to page 329.
.sp 2
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
// File: 379.png
.pn 1-339
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. (<i>Geistl. Hochzeit</i>, 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 <i>Torrents</i>, and of
St. Theresa in her <i>Degrees of Prayer</i>. (<i>Geistl. Hochzeit</i>, 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.

.fn #
See Hecker’s <i>Black Death</i> (trans. by Dr. Babington, 1853).—Hecker
gives the documents relating to the
trial of the Neustadt Jews in an appendix,
from the <i>Chronicle</i> of Jacob
of Königshoven. See also pp. 103-127.
.fn-
.fn #
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 <i>Elsassische u. Strassburgische
Chronik</i>, 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.
.fn-
.fn #
See Schmidt’s <i>Tauler</i>, p. 58.
.fn-
.fn #
Laguille’s <i>Histoire d'Alsace</i>, liv. xxv. p. 290.
.fn-
.fn #
Hecker, p. 81.
.fn-
.fn #
Schmidt’s <i>Tauler</i>, p. 59.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-1-321#, p. #336:Page_1-336#.
.fn-
.fn #
Ruysbroek sent a copy of his book,
<i>De ornatu spiritualium nuptiarum</i>,
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.
.fn-
.fn #
See <i>Johannes Ruysbroek</i>, by
Engelhardt, p. 168.
.fn-
.fn #
Froissart, book ii. chap. 40.
.fn-
.fn #
Froissart, chapp. 41, 42.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Ibid.</i>, book i. chap. 34.
.fn-
.fn #
Optimum aliena insania frui.
.fn-
.fn #
Engelhardt, p. 326.
.fn-
.fn #
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.
.fn-
.fn #
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 <i>caveat</i>
against pantheism) that such process
is no necessary development of the
divine nature,—it is the good pleasure
of the Supreme. (See <i>Vier Schriften
von J. Ruysbroek, in niederdeutscher
Sprache</i>, 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. <i>Wi en sijn ooc niet wt
gode ghevloten van naturen</i>, maer
want ons god ewelijc ghevoelt heest
ende bekent in hem seluen, so heest hi
ons ghemaeckt, niet van naturen noch
van node, <i>maer van vriheit sijns
willen</i>,’—p. 291. (<i>Spiegel der Seligkeit</i>,
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.
.fn-
.fn #
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.—<i>Geistl.
Hochzeit</i>, 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 <i>gifts</i>
which God communicates, but when
God communicates <i>Himself</i>, then we
can be only passive—we repose, we
enjoy, but all operation ceases.’
.fn-
.fn #
Engelhardt, pp. 195, 199.
.fn-
.fn #
 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.—<i>Von
dem funkelnden Steine</i>, x.
.fn-
.fn #
See first #Note:note-1-329-1#, p. #338:Page_1-338#.
.fn-
.fn #
See second #Note:note-1-329-2#, p. #338:Page_1-338#.
.fn-
.fn #
Engelhardt, p. 225. Schmidt’s
<i>Tauler</i>, 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.
.fn-
.fn #
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 <i>Spiegel der Seligkeit</i>, § 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 <i>een eenvoudighe substancie der
godheit</i> ... ende na dan, spreken si
voort, en sal god bekennen noch minnen
hem seluen noch ghene creature’—(§
16).
.fn-
.fn #
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, <i>Reformatoren vor der
Reformation</i>, vol. ii.
.fn-
.fn #
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.’
.fn-
.fn #
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!‘—<i>Geistl. Hochzeit</i>,
§ 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.
(<i>Von dem funkelnden Steine</i>, § 8.)
.fn-
.fn #
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.)
.fn-
.fn #
The lyrics of Muscatblut are
characterised by Gervinus (ii. p. 225),
and the same authority gives some
account, from the <i>Limburg Chronicle</i>,
of the famous friar, leper, and poet
mentioned by Arnstein.
.fn-
// File: 380.png
.pn 1-340
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap1-6-8
CHAPTER VIII.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
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.[#]

<sc>Hymn of the Fifteenth Century.</sc>

Vivo sin vivir mi,
Y tan alta vida espero
Que muero porque no muero.[#]

<sc>St. Theresa.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
On the next evening Atherton resumed his reading as
follows:—
.sp 2
.pm letter-start
<i>Chronicle of Adolph Arnstein, continued.</i>
.sp 2
1354. <i>March. St. Brigitta’s Day.</i>—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
// File: 381.png
.pn 1-341
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.’[#]
// File: 382.png
.pn 1-342

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
// File: 383.png
.pn 1-343
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.’[#]

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 <i>Horologe of Wisdom</i>.[#] 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
// File: 384.png
.pn 1-344
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.[#]

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.
// File: 385.png
.pn 1-345
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.[#]

I questioned him about his book called the <i>Horologe of Wisdom</i>,
or <i>Book of the Eternal Wisdom</i>, 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.[#] Methought, if he was
// File: 386.png
.pn 1-346
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![#]

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
// File: 387.png
.pn 1-347
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,[#] 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!‘[#]

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.[#] 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:—
// File: 388.png
.pn 1-348

‘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
// File: 389.png
.pn 1-349
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
// File: 390.png
.pn 1-350
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.[#]

‘On one other occasion only,’ continued Suso, ‘did I taste so
nearly the bitterness of death.’
// File: 391.png
.pn 1-351

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
// File: 392.png
.pn 1-352
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.
// File: 393.png
.pn 1-353
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
// File: 394.png
.pn 1-354
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.[#] Here the Divine Nature
doth, as it were, embrace, and inwardly kiss through and
through, the soul; that they may be for ever one.[#] 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.[#] 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.[#] 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.’[#]

Suso repeated several times this saying—‘A man of true
self-abandonment must be <i>un</i>built from the creature, <i>in</i>-built
with Christ, and <i>over</i>-built into the Godhead.’[#]

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.

<i>May, 1354.</i>—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
// File: 395.png
.pn 1-355
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.[#]

Methought if our heretics have their extravagances and
utmost reaches of mystical folly here, there are some worse still
among those lazy Greeks.
.pm letter-end
// File: 396.png
.pn 1-356

<sc>Kate.</sc> And is that the end of Arnstein’s journal?

<sc>Atherton.</sc> No more has come down to posterity.

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> That last piece of news from Mount
Athos seems quite familiar to me. I have just been reading
Curzon’s <i>Monasteries of the Levant</i>, 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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,[#] 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
// File: 397.png
.pn 1-357
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.
.sp 2
.h4
Note to page 354.
.sp 2
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):—

.pm verse-start
‘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.
.pm verse-end

‘... 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.—<i>Leben</i>, cap. vii. p. 199.

The following is a sample of Suso’s old Suabian German, from the extracts
given by Wackernagel, p. 885:—

‘<i>Entwürt der ewigen wisheit.</i> 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.
[<i>Answer of the Everlasting Wisdom.</i>—<i>Adventitious</i> reward consists in a particular
// File: 398.png
.pn 1-358
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 <i>essential</i> 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.]

.fn #
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.
.fn-
.fn #
I live, but with no life of mine, and
long towards a life so high—I die because
I do not die.
.fn-
.fn #
The <i>Life of Suso</i>, 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 <i>Life</i>, p. 68.
.fn-
.fn #
Heinrich Suso’s <i>Leben und Schriften</i>,
von M. Diepenbrock (1837), pp.
15, 51, 86. Diepenbrock’s book is
an edition of the biography by
Stäglin, and of the <i>Book of the Everlasting
Wisdom</i>, &c., from the oldest
manuscripts and editions, and rendered
into modern German.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Leben</i>, 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 <i>Horologium Sapientiæ</i>.

See also Schmidt’s <i>Tauler</i>, p. 169.
Comp. <i>Leben</i>, cap. xxxi. p. 72, and
cap. xlix.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Leben</i>, cap. iv.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Leben</i>, cap. xvii.-xx. Suso died in
1385 at Ulm; he was born about the
commencement of the century.
.fn-
.fn #
Suso sent a Latin version of the
book of the Everlasting Wisdom, under
the title <i>Horologium Sapientiæ</i>, 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 ‘<i>inspiratio superna</i>’
under which the work was written.—(<i>Diepenb.
Vorbericht</i>, p. 6.) It was
translated ere long into French, Dutch,
and English, and appears to have been
in the fourteenth century almost what
the <i>Imitatio Christi</i> became in the
fifteenth.—<i>Ibid.</i>, p. 15.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Leben</i>, cap. vi.
.fn-
.fn #
Reverences or prostrations.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Leben</i>, capp. x. and xiv.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Leben</i>, cap. xxii. p 5; and xxv.
.fn-
.fn #
This incident is related at length
in the twenty-seventh chapter of the
<i>Life</i>; 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.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Leben</i>, 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.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Ibid.</i>, cap. xxxiv. p. 80; and
comp. <i>Buch. d. E. Weisheit</i>, cap. vii.
p. 199.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Buchlein von d. E. Weisheit</i>,
Buch. iii. cap. ii.; and <i>Leben</i>, cap. lvi.
p. 168, and p. 302.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Leben</i>, p. 171.
.fn-
.fn #
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.
<i>Leben</i>, cap. lvi. pp. 166, 167,
and <i>Buch. d. E. W.</i>, Buch. iii. cap. vi.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Leben</i>, cap. liii. p. 148. See
Note, p. 357.
.fn-
.fn #
Schröckh’s <i>Kirchengeschichte</i>, vol. xxxiv. pp. 431-450.
.fn-
.fn #
See <i>Die Mystik des Nikolaus
Cabasilas vom Leben in Christo</i>, von
Dr. W. Gass (1849).—In this work, Dr.
Gass publishes, for the first time, the
Greek text of the seven books, <i>De
Vita in Christo</i>, with an able introduction.
The authority for this summary
of the theological tendency of
Cabasilas will be found, pp. 210-224.
.fn-
// File: 399.png
.pn 1-359
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap1-6-9
CHAPTER IX.
.sp 2
.pm letter-start
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.[#]—<sc>Hermann
von Fritzlar.</sc>
.pm letter-end
.sp 2
<sc>Kate.</sc> I should like to know what became of our mysterious
‘Layman,’ Nicholas of Basle.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
// File: 400.png
.pn 1-360
Inquisition yet more ennobled a noble life by the fiery gift of
martyrdom.[#]

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.—

<sc>Gower.</sc>—Just as the track where buffaloes have made their
huge crashing way through the forest, has often guided the
hunter of the backwoods.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> We must not think that the efforts of such a
man as Nicholas were fruitless, whatever the apparent success
of his persecutors.—

<sc>Gower.</sc>—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
// File: 401.png
.pn 1-361
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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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 <i>ditto</i> to <i>ditto</i> 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.[#]

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> It would be interesting to trace this series of
// File: 402.png
.pn 1-362
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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> Do not forget Dante.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> You hear them all executing variations, plaintive
or indignant, menacing or despairing, on the old and never
antiquated theme—

.pm verse-start
Curia Romana non petit ovem sine lanâ,
Dantes exaudit, non dantibus ostia claudit.
.pm verse-end

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
// File: 403.png
.pn 1-363
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.[#]

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> A notable example of mystical pyrotechny.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
// File: 404.png
.pn 1-364
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.

<sc>Lowestoffe.</sc> Enough! enough!

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Catharine of Siena——

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> No more, pray.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.[#]

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.
// File: 405.png
.pn 1-365
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.
// File: 406.png
.pn 1-366
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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> <i>Rem acu tetigisti.</i> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> Stay—do not let us forget that little book, so
much read in the fifteenth century, and praised and edited by
Luther,—the <i>German Theology</i>.[#] I have read it with great
// File: 407.png
.pn 1-367
interest. It seems to me to stand alone as an attempt to
systematise the speculative element in the more orthodox
mysticism of the age.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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 <i>Theologia Germanica</i>.

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> I have been waiting to hear something
about Thomas à Kempis,[#]—certainly the best known of all your
mystics.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Right. Who could forget the comforter of the
fifteenth century? It is curious to compare the third book of
his <i>Imitation of Christ</i>, with its dialogue between Christ and
the disciple, and Suso’s conversation, in his <i>Book of the Eternal
Wisdom</i>, between Wisdom and the Servant.

<sc>Gower.</sc> There is less genius, less <i>abandon</i>, if one may so say,
about Thomas.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
// File: 408.png
.pn 1-368
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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> And, let us hope, not always quite in vain.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> I have one more name yet upon my list, with
which the mediæval mysticism reaches its conclusion. It is the
great Frenchman, Chancellor Gerson.[#] 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
// File: 409.png
.pn 1-369
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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
// File: 410.png
.pn 1-370
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 <i>resumé</i> 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 <i>reflection</i>
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
// File: 411.png
.pn 1-371
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.

.tb

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!’
// File: 412.png
.pn 1-372

<sc>Lowestoffe</sc> (<i>starting</i>). The swan, I declare! How can he
have got out? That scoundrel, John!

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Never mind. I know what he comes for. He
is a messenger from Lethe, to tell us not to forget good Tauler.

<sc>Lowestoffe.</sc> Lethe! Nonsense.

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> My love, how can you?

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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!
.sp 2
END OF VOL. I.

.fn #
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.
.fn-
.fn #
Schmidt’s <i>Tauler</i>, 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.’—<i>Mosheim de
Beghardis et Beguinabus</i>, cap. iv. § 42,
p. 454.
.fn-
.fn #
See <i>Revelationes Selectæ S. Brigittæ</i>
(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 <i>Savonarola</i>, 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—<i>Vita</i>,
p. 6. The Frenchwoman burned
herself with hot sealing-wax in the
same manner, and chewed a quid of
coloquintida.

The <i>Revelationes de Vitâ et Passione
Jesu Christi et gloriosæ Virginis</i>, contain
a puerile and profane account of
the birth, childhood, and death of our
Lord, in the style of the apocryphal
<i>Gospel of the Infancy</i>, 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).
.fn-
.fn #
‘<i>Angela de Foligni.</i>’ See <i>Beatæ
Angelæ Fulginio Visionum et Instructionum
Liber</i>; (recens. J. H.
Lammertz; Cologne, 1851.)—The account
of the wonderful star is given by
Arnold in his <i>Prologue</i>, 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; <i>et bibimus de illâ loturâ</i>.
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.
.fn-
.fn #
‘<i>Catharine of Siena.</i>’ Görres
gives a short account of her in his Introduction
to Diepenbrock’s edition of
<i>Suso</i>, p. 96.
.fn-
.fn #
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.
(<i>Epp. De Wette</i>, No. xxv.) He refers,
there can be little doubt, to his edition
of the <i>Deutsche Theologie</i>, which came
out that year.
.fn-
.fn #
See, especially, the twelfth chapter
of the second book, <i>On the Necessity
of bearing the Cross</i>. Compare Michelet’s
somewhat overdrawn picture of
the effects of the <i>Imitation</i> in his
<i>History of France</i>.

The <i>Ignitum cum Deo Soliloquium</i>
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 <i>Imitation</i>, 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.
.fn-
.fn #
‘<i>Gerson.</i>‘—See an article by Liebner
(Gerson’s <i>Mystische Theologie</i>) in
the <i>Theologische Studien und Kritiken</i>;
1835, ii.
.fn-
// File: 413.png
.sp 4
.h2
HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS  | VOL. II.
// File: 414.png
// File: 415.png
.sp 4
.h2
CONTENTS OF VOL. II.
.sp 2
.in +4
.nf l
#BOOK VII.—PERSIAN MYSTICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGE.:book2-7#

#CHAPTER I.:chap2-7-1#

The Sufis; their Mystical Poetry      #3:Page_2-3#
Mystical Poetry in the West; Angelus Silesius      #5:Page_2-5#
R. W. Emerson      #8:Page_2-8#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER II.:chap2-7-2#

Rabia      #10:Page_2-10#
The Oriental and the Western Mysticism compared      #12:Page_2-12#
.sp 2
#BOOK VIII.—THEOSOPHY IN THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION.:book2-8#

#CHAPTER I.:chap2-8-1#

The Position of the Mystics as regards the Reformation      #31:Page_2-31#
The Advantage of the Ground occupied by Luther      #32:Page_2-32#
Menacing Character of the Revolutionary Mysticism      #35:Page_2-35#
The Anabaptists of Munster      #37:Page_2-37#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER II.:chap2-8-2#

Luther and the Mystics      #41:Page_2-41#
The Prophets of Zwickau      #44:Page_2-44#
Carlstadt      #44:Page_2-44#
// File: 416.png
Sebastian Frank      #47:Page_2-47#
Schwenkfeld      #50:Page_2-50#
Weigel      #51:Page_2-51#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER III.:chap2-8-3#

Mysticism and Science      #53:Page_2-53#
The Cabbala      #55:Page_2-55#
Nature studied by the Light of Grace      #57:Page_2-57#
Alchemy      #58:Page_2-58#
Theurgy      #59:Page_2-59#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER IV.:chap2-8-4#

Cornelius Agrippa      #61:Page_2-61#
The Science of Sympathies      #63:Page_2-63#
Redemption, Natural and Spiritual      #67:Page_2-67#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER V.:chap2-8-5#

Theophrastus Paracelsus      #71:Page_2-71#
Signatures      #76:Page_2-76#
Theological Chemistry      #77:Page_2-77#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER VI.:chap2-8-6#

Jacob Behmen and his <i>Aurora</i>      #79:Page_2-79#
Illumination      #82:Page_2-82#
Troubles      #86:Page_2-86#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER VII.:chap2-8-7#

Jacob Behmen, his Materials, and Style of Workmanship      #90:Page_2-90#
The Theory of Development by Contraries      #92:Page_2-92#
The Three Gates      #95:Page_2-95#
The <i>Aurora</i>      #97:Page_2-97#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER VIII.:chap2-8-8#

Jacob Behmen—Sketch and Estimate of his System      #103:Page_2-103#
The Mysterium Magnum      #104:Page_2-104#
The Seven Fountain-Spirits      #104:Page_2-104#
Examination of his Doctrine concerning the Origin of Evil      #109:Page_2-109#
The Fall      #115:Page_2-115#
Merits of his Theosophy      #119:Page_2-119#
// File: 417.png
.sp 2
#CHAPTER IX.:chap2-8-9#

The Rosicrucians      #128:Page_2-128#
Romance and Reality      #129:Page_2-129#
Valentine Andreä and his <i>Fama Fraternitatis</i>      #134:Page_2-134#
Secret Societies      #136:Page_2-136#
The Creatures of the Elements      #138:Page_2-138#
Magical Words      #140:Page_2-140#
Pordage and the Philadelphian Society      #142:Page_2-142#
Joanna Leade      #144:Page_2-144#
.sp 2
#BOOK IX.—THE SPANISH MYSTICS.:book2-9#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER I.:chap2-9-1#

Neo-Platonism revived in Italy      #147:Page_2-147#
Its Weakness, opposed to the Reformation      #148:Page_2-148#
The Counter-reformation      #150:Page_2-150#
Headed by Spain      #150:Page_2-150#
Character of its Mysticism      #151:Page_2-151#
St. Theresa      #153:Page_2-153#
Her Autobiography      #156:Page_2-156#
The Director      #158:Page_2-158#
Visions      #160:Page_2-160#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER II.:chap2-9-2#

Theresa’s Four Degrees of Prayer      #167:Page_2-167#
Her Quietism      #171:Page_2-171#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER III.:chap2-9-3#

St. John of the Cross      #182:Page_2-182#
His Asceticism      #183:Page_2-183#
His Mystical Night      #185:Page_2-185#
More elevated Character of his Mysticism      #193:Page_2-193#
.sp 2
#BOOK X.—QUIETISM.:book2-10#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER I.:chap2-10-1#

Queen Quietude      #201:Page_2-201#
The Doctrine of ‘Pure Love’ discussed      #205:Page_2-205#
// File: 418.png
Madame Guyon      #207:Page_2-207#
Her Unhappy Marriage      #208:Page_2-208#
The Kingdom of God within us      #211:Page_2-211#
Efforts to Annihilate Self      #213:Page_2-213#
Interior Attraction      #216:Page_2-216#
Madame Guyon and the Romish Saints      #218:Page_2-218#
Confessors and Small-pox      #222:Page_2-222#
The Seven Years of Famine      #224:Page_2-224#
Self-loss in God      #227:Page_2-227#
Mistakes concerning the Nature of Spiritual Influence      #230:Page_2-230#
Reformatory Character of her Mysticism      #233:Page_2-233#
Activity and Persecution      #234:Page_2-234#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER II.:chap2-10-2#

The Quietist Controversy      #242:Page_2-242#
Molinos      #242:Page_2-242#
Madame Guyon at Paris      #245:Page_2-245#
St. Cyr      #248:Page_2-248#
Fénélon and Madame Guyon      #250:Page_2-250#
Signs of Danger      #252:Page_2-252#
The Conferences at Issy      #255:Page_2-255#
The Quietism of Fénélon      #258:Page_2-258#
His Critical Position      #262:Page_2-262#
Writes the <i>Maxims of the Saints</i>      #263:Page_2-263#
Appeals to Rome      #265:Page_2-265#
Bossuet’s <i>Account of Quietism</i>      #268:Page_2-268#
Fénélon’s <i>Reply</i>      #269:Page_2-269#
Infallibility submits to Louis      #271:Page_2-271#
Fénélon submits to Infallibility      #272:Page_2-272#
The Controversy reviewed      #273:Page_2-273#
Mysticism in France and in Germany      #275:Page_2-275#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER III.:chap2-10-3#

Disinterested Love      #283:Page_2-283#
Antoinette Bourignon      #286:Page_2-286#
Peter Poiret      #287:Page_2-287#
Madame de Krüdener      #288:Page_2-288#
// File: 419.png
.sp 2
#BOOK XI.—MYSTICISM IN ENGLAND.:book2-11#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER I.:chap2-11-1#

Britain poor in Mystics      #301:Page_2-301#
George Fox      #303:Page_2-303#
The Early Friends      #305:Page_2-305#
Asceticism      #309:Page_2-309#
Doctrine of the Universal Light      #309:Page_2-309#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER II.:chap2-11-2#

Doctrine of Perceptible Guidance      #313:Page_2-313#
The English Platonists      #315:Page_2-315#
Henry More; Norris of Bemerton      #315:Page_2-315#
.sp 2
#BOOK XII.—EMANUEL SWEDENBORG.:book2-12#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER I.:chap2-12-1#

Comprehensive Character of his Mysticism      #321:Page_2-321#
Doctrine of Correspondences      #323:Page_2-323#
Stands alone among the Mystics      #326:Page_2-326#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER II.:chap2-12-2#

His <i>Memorable Relations</i>      #329:Page_2-329#
His Heaven and Hell      #330:Page_2-330#
Moderation of his Doctrine concerning Spiritual Influence      #331:Page_2-331#
Defects of his Doctrine concerning the Work of Christ      #332:Page_2-332#
The Church of the New Jerusalem      #335:Page_2-335#
.sp 2
#BOOK XIII.—CONCLUSION.:book2-13#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER I.:chap2-13-1#

Mystical Tendencies of our own Time      #340:Page_2-340#
The Faith-Philosophy      #341:Page_2-341#
Schleiermacher      #341:Page_2-341#
The Romantic School      #343:Page_2-343#
Novalis      #348:Page_2-348#
Revival of antiquated Error      #350:Page_2-350#
The Modern Mysticism a Repetition of the Old      #351:Page_2-351#
The Services of Mysticism      #352:Page_2-352#
// File: 420.png
Its Dangers      #352:Page_2-352#
Its Lessons      #356:Page_2-356#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER II.:chap2-13-2#

Mysticism fostered by the Supposition of a Separate Religious Faculty      #361:Page_2-361#
Reason, how far amenable to Understanding      #362:Page_2-362#
Historic Reality not opposed to Spirituality      #365:Page_2-365#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER III.:chap2-13-3#

A Vision of Mystics      #368:Page_2-368#
.nf-
.in -4
// File: 421.png
.pn 2-1
.sp 4
.h2 id=book2-7
BOOK THE SEVENTH | PERSIAN MYSTICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGE
// File: 422.png
// File: 423.png
.pn 2-3
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap2-7-1
CHAPTER I.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
                  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.

<sc>Dobell.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
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.
.sp 2
.pm letter-start
<sc>The Sufis, or Mystical Poetry in the East and West.</sc>
.sp 2
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
// File: 424.png
.pn 2-4
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
// File: 425.png
.pn 2-5
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.[#] 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 <i>not</i>. Some Roman Catholic priest or monk,
assuming the name of Angelus, did, in the seventeenth century,
// File: 426.png
.pn 2-6
send forth sundry hymns and religious poems,—among others,
one most euphuistically entitled <i>The Cherubic Wanderer</i>. 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.[#]

<i>The Cherubic Wanderer</i> 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
// File: 427.png
.pn 2-7
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?

.pm verse-start
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.
// File: 428.png
.pn 2-8
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.[#]
.pm verse-end

On the other hand, there are many terse and happy couplets
and quatrains in the <i>Wanderer</i>, 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
<i>Candide</i>. He displays in its perfection the fantastic incoherence
of the ‘God-intoxicated’ man.
// File: 429.png
.pn 2-9

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.
.pm letter-end

.fn #
Malcolm’s <i>Persia</i>, vol. ii., p. 383.
.fn-
.fn #
See Schrader’s <i>Angelus Silesius
und seine Mystik</i>; 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 <i>Wanderer</i>
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 ‘<i>Cherubic</i>’ indicates the
more speculative character of the
book; as contrasted, in the language
of the mystics, with the devotion of
feeling and passion—<i>seraphic</i> love.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Cherubinischer Wandersmann</i>, i. 100, 9, 18; Schrader, p. 28.
.fn-
// File: 430.png
.pn 2-10
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap2-7-2
CHAPTER II.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
Und so lang du das nicht hast
  Dieses: Stirb und werde!
Bist du nur ein trüber Gast
  Auf der dunkeln Erde.[#]

<sc>Goethe.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
‘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.’

.pm letter-start
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.[#] 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 <i>Lives of the Saints</i> records that, on another
occasion, when questioned concerning the cause of a severe illness,
// File: 431.png
.pn 2-11
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
// File: 432.png
.pn 2-12
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,—

.pm verse-start
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.
.pm verse-end

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—

.pm verse-start
Dost prize alone King Solomon as wisest of the wise?
Thou also canst be Solomon, and all his wisdom thine.[#]
.pm verse-end

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.
// File: 433.png
.pn 2-13

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:—

.pm verse-start
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.[#]
.pm verse-end

So, too, says Angelus Silesius,—

.pm verse-start
Away with accidents and false appearance,
Thou must be essence all, and colourless.
.pm verse-end

And again,—

.pm verse-start
Man! wouldst thou look on God, in heaven or while yet here,
Thy heart must first of all become a mirror clear.[#]
.pm verse-end
// File: 434.png
.pn 2-14

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 <i>De Nocte Obscurâ</i>,
and on to Novalis, in his <i>Hymnen an die Nacht</i>. In the
following vigorous passage, Night is equivalent to the state of
self-abandonment and self-transcendence:—

.pm verse-start
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.
.pm verse-end

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:—

.pm verse-start
Ne’er sees man in this life, the Light above all light,
As when he yields him up to darkness and to night.[#]
.pm verse-end

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:—

.pm verse-start
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!’
.pm verse-end

It is quite in accordance with such precepts that the judging
// File: 435.png
.pn 2-15
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,—

.pm verse-start
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.
.pm verse-end

The senses and the lower powers, nourished by <i>forms</i>, 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.[#]

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
// File: 436.png
.pn 2-16
least the orthodox and customary aids and methods. Thus
Rumi says—

.pm verse-start
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.
.pm verse-end

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.’[#]

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 <i>Gulschen Ras</i>,—

.pm verse-start
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!
.pm verse-end

Again, (though here the sense may be moral rather than
philosophic, and selfishness, not personality, abjured)—

.pm verse-start
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>I</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!
.pm verse-end
// File: 437.png
.pn 2-17

Jelaleddin says of the Sufi in his self-abnegation,—

.pm verse-start
His love of God doth, like a flame of hell,
Even in a moment swallow love of self.
.pm verse-end

Mahmud, to express the same thought, employs the image
used by Thomas à Kempis:—

.pm verse-start
The path from <i>Me</i> to God is truly found,
When pure that <i>Me</i> from Self as clearest flame from smoke.
.pm verse-end

Angelus Silesius bids men lose, in utter Nihilism, all sense
of any existence separate from the Divine Substance—the
Absolute:—

.pm verse-start
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.[#]
.pm verse-end

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:—

.pm verse-start
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.
// File: 438.png
.pn 2-18

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.
.pm verse-end

So, again, Angelus Silesius, sometimes pushing his negation
to unconscious caricature:—

.pm verse-start
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.
.pm verse-end

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.’[#]

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
// File: 439.png
.pn 2-19
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,—

.pm verse-start
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.
.pm verse-end

Again, Said, the servant, thus recounts one morning to
Mohammed the ecstasy he has enjoyed:—

.pm verse-start
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 <i>Now</i>,—
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.’
.pm verse-end

This magniloquence of Said’s is but the vehement poetic
expression for the ‘absolute intuition’ of modern Germany—that
// File: 440.png
.pn 2-20
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 <sc>ONE</sc>. 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—

.pm verse-start
‘Can crowd eternity into an hour
Or stretch an hour to eternity.’
.pm verse-end

So Angelus Silesius:—

.pm verse-start
Rise above Space and Time, and thou canst be
At any moment in Eternity.[#]
.pm verse-end

The following passage from Jelaleddin exhibits the kind of
identity with God claimed by the more extravagant devotees of
Sufism:—

.pm verse-start
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.
.pm verse-end
// File: 441.png
.pn 2-21

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.[#]

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.—

.pm verse-start
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.
.pm verse-end

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.[#]
// File: 442.png
.pn 2-22

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,—

.pm verse-start
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.[#]
.pm verse-end
// File: 443.png
.pn 2-23

The central idea of the Persian mysticism is <i>Emanation</i>.
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
<i>Incarnation</i>. 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 <i>Grace</i>,
all that the Son of God is by <i>Nature</i>. 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 <i>Inspiration</i>. 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 <i>façade</i> 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
// File: 444.png
.pn 2-24
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.[#] 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 <i>Gulschen Ras</i> may
suffice as a specimen of these devout Bacchanalia. It has the
advantage of exhibiting the key in the lock:—

.pm verse-start
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?
// File: 445.png
.pn 2-25
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![#]
.pm verse-end
.pm letter-end

.fn #
And if thy heart know nought of
this—‘Die that thou mayest be born;’
then walkest thou the darksome earth
a sojourner forlorn.
.fn-
.fn #
Tholuck, <i>Ssufismus, sive Theosophia
Persarum pantheistica</i> (Berlin,
1822), pp. 51-54.
.fn-
.fn #
Tholuck, <i>Ssufismus</i>, p. 63. <i>Cherub. Wand.</i>, ii. 18.
.fn-
.fn #
Tholuck, <i>Blüthensammlung aus der Morgenländischen Mystik</i> (Berlin,
1825), p. 114.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Cherub. Wand.</i>, i. 274; v. 81.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Blüthen.</i>, p. 61. <i>Cherub. Wand.</i>, iv. 23.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Blüthen.</i>, pp. 64, 71, 113, 156.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Blüthen.</i>, p. 167. Emerson’s <i>Essays</i> (1848), p. 35.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Blüthen.</i>, pp. 204-206. <i>Cherub. Wand.</i>, i. 24, 92, 140.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Blüthen.</i>, pp. 180, 181. <i>Cherub. Wand.</i>, v. 367; ii. 92; i. 91, 39; ii.
152, 59. Emerson, pp. 37, 42.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Blüthen.</i>, pp. 85, 116. Emerson,
pp. 141, 143. <i>Cherub. Wand.</i>, i. 12.
Compare <i>Richard of St. Victor</i>, cited
above, vol. i., p. #172:Page_1-172#, #Note:note-1-163# to p. 163.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Blüthen.</i>, pp. 82, 84.—The truth,
of which the licentious doctrine alluded
to is the abuse, is well put by
Angelus,—

.pm verse-start
‘Dearer to God the good man’s very sleep
Than prayers and psalms of sinners all night long.’—(v. 334.)
.pm verse-end
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Blüthen.</i>, 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.

.pm verse-start
‘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.)
.pm verse-end
.fn-
.fn #
Emerson, pp. 154, 156, 196. <i>Cherub. Wand.</i>, i. 10, 8, 204.—Angelus has
various modes of expressing the way in which God realizes his nature in the
salvation of men.

.pm verse-start
‘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.)
.pm verse-end
.fn-
.fn #
Works, vol. iv., <i>On the Mystical Poetry of the Persians and Hindoos</i>.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Blüthen.</i>, p. 218.
.fn-
// File: 446.png
// File: 447.png
.pn 2-27
.sp 4
.h2 id=book2-8
BOOK THE EIGHTH | THEOSOPHY IN THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION
// File: 448.png
// File: 449.png
.pn 2-29
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap2-8-1
CHAPTER I.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
Amongst them all sate he that wonned there,
That hight <i>Phantastes</i> 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.

<sc>Spenser.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
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
// File: 450.png
.pn 2-30
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.

.tb

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> Those Teutonic worthies of the fourteenth
century are noble specimens of the mystic.

<sc>Gower.</sc> Truly, with them, Mysticism puts on her beautiful
garments. See her standing, gazing heavenward; ‘her rapt
// File: 451.png
.pn 2-31
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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Go on, Gower.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> There I think you indicate the weak point of
this mysticism—it is <i>so</i> individual—so much a matter of the
personal inward life.

<sc>Gower.</sc> That surely is the very secret of its strength.
// File: 452.png
.pn 2-32

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> But those few, master-minds, remember.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> The testimony of History, then, is decidedly against
our modern spiritualism, which complains that we make too
// File: 453.png
.pn 2-33
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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> But are we not overlooking other causes
which enabled Luther to accomplish so much, and precluded
the mystics from carrying further their reforming tendency?

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
// File: 454.png
.pn 2-34
adaptation of that message of salvation announced to all
mankind.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.’

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> How strongly does Luther urge men to believe
on Christ as a Saviour for <i>them</i>—to receive in lowly simplicity
// File: 455.png
.pn 2-35
the peace divinely offered. How triumphantly does he
show that such a faith is victory—that all other is a mere
historic belief <i>about</i> Christ, not a belief <i>in</i> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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 <i>Theologia Germanica</i>,
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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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,—
// File: 456.png
.pn 2-36

.pm verse-start
The staring eye glazed o’er with sapless days,
The long mechanic pacings to and fro,
The set gray life and apathetic end.
.pm verse-end

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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 <i>for him</i> 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.’

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> Certainly mysticism could never have spoken with
power enough to turn aside such a long-gathered tempest.
// File: 457.png
.pn 2-37

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> Where the revolutionary spirit had once
broken out, only the strong hand could avail.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> And how ruthlessly was that remedy applied!
But—what in the world—Gower, I say, open your eyes. Are
you going to sleep?

<sc>Gower.</sc> I was trying to recall a dream I had after reading
about the Anabaptists of Munster.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> A dream! Let us have it.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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
// File: 458.png
.pn 2-38
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.[#]

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> A Mormon elder, ‘all of the olden time!’

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Be quiet. He had only eight wives.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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, ‘<i>King of Righteousness over the whole World</i>.’
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
// File: 459.png
.pn 2-39
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,——

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> And you woke?

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.
// File: 460.png
.pn 2-40
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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

.fn #
A reference to Raumer’s <i>History
of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries</i>
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.
.fn-
// File: 461.png
.pn 2-41
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap2-8-2
CHAPTER II.
.sp 2
.pm letter-start
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.—<sc>Henry More.</sc>
.pm letter-end
.sp 2
<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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——

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> You will not do so, I beg.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Willoughby, you shall suffer for that. I’ll
begin.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> Pelt away. I thought I should get a cocoa-nut
for my stone. (<i>Atherton reads.</i>)

.pm letter-start
<i>Luther and the Mystics.</i>

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.
// File: 462.png
.pn 2-42
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
// File: 463.png
.pn 2-43
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
// File: 464.png
.pn 2-44
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
// File: 465.png
.pn 2-45
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
// File: 466.png
.pn 2-46
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 <i>their</i> experience. ‘Inquire,’ he
says to Melanchthon, ‘if they know aught of those spiritual
distresses, those divine births, and deaths, and sorrows, as of
hell.’[#]

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
// File: 467.png
.pn 2-47
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 <i>is</i> 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.[#]

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 <i>Theologia Germanica</i>, that God is the <i>substans</i>
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 (<i>Lebens-prozess</i>) through which the
// File: 468.png
.pn 2-48
universe has to pass. This process, like the Hegelian, is
threefold. <i>First</i>, the divine substance, the abstract unity
which produces all existence. <i>Second</i>, said substance appearing
as an opposite to itself—making itself object. <i>Third</i>, 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.[#]
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
// File: 469.png
.pn 2-49
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 (<i>Geisterer</i>), 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 <i>Golden Ark</i>, or <i>Seven Sealed Book</i>, or collection of
most extravagant interpretations, called <i>Paradoxa</i>, 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.
.pm letter-end

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> A rebuke, rather, of that folly, in all its forms,
// File: 470.png
.pn 2-50
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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Then there was Schwenkfeld, too, who went off
from Luther as pietist in one direction, while Frank departed
as pantheist in the other.

<sc>Gower.</sc> A well-meaning man, though; a kind of sixteenth-century
Quaker, was he not?

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Yes. Compound a Quaker, a Plymouth
Brother, and an Antipædo Baptist, and the result is something
like a Schwenkfeldian.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> For my enquiries concerning Jacob Behmen,
I find that the most important of the Lutheran mystics was a
// File: 471.png
.pn 2-51
quiet man of few words, pastor at Tschopau during the latter
half of the sixteenth century, by name Valentine Weigel.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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 <i>Theologia Germanica</i>,
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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> As Lutheranism grew more cold and rigid, mysticism
found more ground of justification, and its genial reaction
rendered service to the Church once more.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-46
Note to page 46.
.sp 2
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.—<i>Luth. Epist.</i> 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
// File: 472.png
.pn 2-52
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.’

.fn #
See #Note:note-2-46#, p. #51:Page_2-51#.
.fn-
.fn #
See the account in Ranke’s <i>History of the Reformation</i>.
.fn-
.fn #
See Carriere, <i>Die philosophische Weltanschauung der Reformationzeit</i>
(1847), pp. 196-203.
.fn-
// File: 473.png
.pn 2-53
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap2-8-3
CHAPTER III.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
<i>Subtle.</i> Your <i>lapis philosophicus</i>?

<i>Face.</i> ’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.

<sc>The Alchemist.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
<sc>Atherton.</sc> We are to call on Willoughby to-night, I
believe, to conduct us to Jacob Behmen—or Boehme,
more correctly.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.
.sp 2
.pm letter-start
<sc>On the Theosophy of Jacob Behmen.</sc>
.sp 2
§ 1. <i>Mysticism and Science.</i>
.sp 2
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.
// File: 474.png
.pn 2-54
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
// File: 475.png
.pn 2-55
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 <i>fides
intrinseca</i>,—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.[#]

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
// File: 476.png
.pn 2-56
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.[#] 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,
// File: 477.png
.pn 2-57
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.[#] 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
// File: 478.png
.pn 2-58
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
// File: 479.png
.pn 2-59
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 <i>intellectual vinculum</i> (the divine
potency inherent in certain words), the <i>astral</i> (the favourable
conjunction of the planets), and the <i>elementary</i> (the sympathy
of creatures). In the use of these was, of course, involved the
// File: 480.png
.pn 2-60
usual hocus-pocus of magical performance—talismans, magic
lights, incense, doves’ blood, swallows’ feathers, <i>et hoc genus
omne</i>.[#]
.pm letter-end

.fn #
Horst’s <i>Zauberbibliothek</i>, vol. iii. p. 21.
.fn-
.fn #
Agrippa’s <i>Vanity of Arts and Sciences</i>, chap. 47.
.fn-
.fn #
See M. B. Lessing, <i>Paracelsus, sein Leben und Denken</i>, p. 60.
.fn-
.fn #
The third and fourth volumes of
Horst’s <i>Zauberbibliothek</i> 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
<i>Sidonia</i> contains a truthful
exhibition of this form of theurgic
mysticism, as it obtained in Protestant
Germany. See Paracelsus, <i>De Spiritibus
Planetarum</i>, passim. (Ed. Dorn.,
1584.)
.fn-
// File: 481.png
.pn 2-61
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap2-8-4
CHAPTER IV.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
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.

<sc>Chaucer.</sc>

Give me thy hand, terrestrial; so:—Give me thy hand, celestial; so.

<sc>Merry Wives of Windsor.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
.pm letter-start
<sc>Willoughby’s Essay—Second Evening.</sc>
.sp 2
§ 2. <i>Cornelius Agrippa.</i>
.sp 2
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 <i>Verbum Mirificum</i> of Reuchlin.
He forms a secret association for the promotion of occult
// File: 482.png
.pn 2-62
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 <i>On the Threefold Way of Knowing God</i>. 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 <i>On the Vanity of Arts and Sciences</i>.

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 <i>De Vanitate Scientiarum</i> ravages, with a wild
Berserker fury, the whole domain of knowledge. The monk
Ilsan of mediæval fable did not more savagely trample the roses
// File: 483.png
.pn 2-63
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 <i>On the Threefold Way of Knowing God</i>, 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 <i>De Occulta Philosophia</i>[#] (a youthful work re-written in
his later years) treats of the three kinds of magic—the <i>Natural</i>
(the science of sympathies and antipathies, whereby the adept
accelerates or modifies the process of nature so as to work
apparent miracles); the <i>Celestial</i>, or Mathematical (astrology);
and the <i>Religious</i>, or ceremonial (theurgy).

Once on a time, the savans were sorely puzzled by certain
// File: 484.png
.pn 2-64
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
// File: 485.png
.pn 2-65
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
// File: 486.png
.pn 2-66
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.
.pm letter-end

<sc>Gower.</sc> Agrippa’s philosophy gives us a highly imaginative
view of the world.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> A beautiful romance,—only surpassed by the
actual results of modern discovery.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> In those days every fancied likeness was construed
into a law of relationship: every semblance became
// File: 487.png
.pn 2-67
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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
// File: 488.png
.pn 2-68
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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> Talking of sympathies, I have felt myself for the
last quarter of an hour rapidly coming into <i>rapport</i> 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——

<sc>Willoughby</sc>, (<i>to Atherton, with a grotesque expression of
pity</i>.) He’s off! Almost out of sight already.

<sc>Gower</sc>, (<i>apparently unconscious of the interruption</i>.) 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
// File: 489.png
.pn 2-69
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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> ‘The truant Fancy was a wanderer ever!’

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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![#]
// File: 490.png
.pn 2-70

<sc>Atherton.</sc> No, not till you have had some supper. I hear
the bell.

<sc>Gower.</sc> It is the nineteenth century, then? Ah, yes, I
remember.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> Away, you rogue!

.fn #
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.
.fn-
.fn #
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.—<i>Behmen.</i>

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.—<i>Paracelsus.</i>

Hail and snow are the fruits of the stars, proceeding from them as flowers and
blossoms from herb or tree.—<i>Paracelsus.</i>

Night is, in reality, brought on by the influence of <i>dark stars</i>, which ray out
darkness, as the others light.—<i>Paracelsus.</i>

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.—<i>Paracelsus.</i> See Henry More’s <i>Enthusiasmus
Triumphatus</i>, § 44.
.fn-
// File: 491.png
.pn 2-71
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap2-8-5
CHAPTER V.
.sp 2
.pm letter-start
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 <i>Galen</i> has said anything to purpose, but whether
he has said so or so.—<sc>Montaigne.</sc>
.pm letter-end

.pm letter-start
<sc>Willoughby’s Essay—Third Evening.</sc>
.sp 2
§ 3. <i>Theophrastus Paracelsus.</i>
.sp 2
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.[#]

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
// File: 492.png
.pn 2-72
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,
// File: 493.png
.pn 2-73
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) <i>Philosophy</i>, 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) <i>Astronomy</i>, embracing especially the influences of the
heavenly bodies on the human frame; (3) <i>Alchemy</i>, not gold-making,
but the preparation of specifics—chemistry applied to
medicine; (4) <i>Religion</i>, whereby the genuine professor of the
healing art is taught of God, and works in reliance on, and
union with, Him.[#] 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.[#] 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, (<i>Gemüth</i>), in Faith,
and in Imagination,—the three forms of that spiritual nature in
// File: 494.png
.pn 2-74
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.[#]

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 <i>Contraries</i>,—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 (<i>Aufhebung</i>) of those contraries
which his self-evolution, or <i>lusus amoris</i>, 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.
// File: 495.png
.pn 2-75
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.[#]

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.[#]
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.[#] 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
// File: 496.png
.pn 2-76
in the nymphs, the nereids, and the hamadryads, of ancient
Grecian fable.[#]

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.[#]

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 <i>Doctor</i>, 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
// File: 497.png
.pn 2-77
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 <i>saphena riparum</i> is
to be applied to fresh wounds, because its leaves are spotted
as with flecks of blood. A species of <i>dentaria</i>, whose roots
resemble teeth, is a cure for toothache and scurvy.[#]

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.’[#]
// File: 498.png
.pn 2-78

In like manner, in the <i>Secretum Magicum</i> 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.[#]

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.’[#]
.pm letter-end

.fn #
See Lessing’s <i>Paracelsus</i>, p. 18.
.fn-
.fn #
Lessing’s <i>Paracelsus</i>, § 26.
.fn-
.fn #
Language to this effect is cited
among the copious extracts given by
Godfrey Arnold, <i>Unpartheyische Kirchen- und Ketzer-Historie</i>,
Th. ii. p. 309.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>De Occulta Philosophia, Prologus</i>,
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.
.fn-
.fn #
Dorn’s <i>Dictionarium Paracelsi</i>
(Frankfort, 1583), Art. Microcosmus.
Also the <i>Secretum Magicum</i> 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.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>De Occ. Phil.</i> cap. iv. p. 45, and
cap. xi. p. 78. Also, <i>Dict. Paracels.</i>
Art. Magia. Talis influentiarum
cœlestium conjunctio vel impressio qua
operantur in inferiora corpora cœlestes
vires, <i>Gamahea</i> Magis, vel matrimonium
virium et proprietatum cœlestium
cum elementaribus corporibus,
dicta fuit olim.—Paracelsi <i>Aurora
Philosophorum</i>, cap. iv. p. 24 (ed.
Dorn).
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Aurora Phil.</i> loc. cit.; <i>De Occ.
Phil.</i> i. ii.; and xi. p. 79.
.fn-
.fn #
See <i>De Occ. Phil.</i> cap. v. Magical
powers are ascribed to images, p. 85.
A collection of talismanic figures is
appended to the treatise. In the
<i>Thesaurus Philosophorum</i> 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.
.fn-
.fn #
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.
.fn-
.fn #
Lessing’s <i>Paracelsus</i>, § 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.
.fn-
.fn #
See <i>Lives of the Alchemistical
Philosophers</i>. 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 <i>The Book of Eirenæus
Philalethes</i>, p. 166.
.fn-
.fn #
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.
.fn-
.fn #
This passage is from the Annotations
of Weidenfeld on the <i>Green Lion</i>
of Paracelsus; <i>Lives of the Alchem.
Phil.</i> p. 201. The <i>Thesaurus Thesaurorum</i>
contains another choice
specimen of the same sort, p. 124.
.fn-
// File: 499.png
.pn 2-79
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap2-8-6
CHAPTER VI.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
<i>Men.</i> I pray thee tell me,
For thou art a great dreamer—

<i>Chi.</i> I can dream, sir,
If I eat well and sleep well.

<i>Men.</i> Was it never by dream or apparition opened to thee—
What the other world was, or Elysium?
Didst never travel in thy sleep?

<sc>Beaumont and Fletcher</sc>: <i>The Mad Lover</i>.
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
.pm letter-start
<sc>Willoughby’s Essay—Fourth Evening.</sc>
.sp 2
§ 4. <i>Jacob Behmen and his Aurora.</i>
.sp 2
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,
// File: 500.png
.pn 2-80
is Jacob.[#] 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.[#]
When Walter utters the word <i>Idea</i>, 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.
// File: 501.png
.pn 2-81
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.[#]

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 <i>Augsburg Confession</i> and the <i>Formula
Concordiæ</i> 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
// File: 502.png
.pn 2-82
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.[#] 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
// File: 503.png
.pn 2-83
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 <i>Aurora</i>.

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
(<i>Grund</i>) and the Abyss: <i>item</i>, 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>i.e.</i> (1) the divine angelic or paradisiacal world;
then, (2) the dark world, as the original of nature, as to the
// File: 504.png
.pn 2-84
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
<i>has</i> 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,
// File: 505.png
.pn 2-85
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 <i>Aurora</i>,
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—(<i>von den Vernunft-weisen</i>).

‘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 <i>The
Threefold Life through the Three Principles</i> 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,
// File: 506.png
.pn 2-86
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.’[#]

This letter alludes to the way in which the <i>Aurora</i> 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 <i>Aurora</i> 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
// File: 507.png
.pn 2-87
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 <i>Aurora</i>, 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.[#]
// File: 508.png
.pn 2-88
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.[#] 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.[#] 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!‘[#]
.pm letter-end
// File: 509.png
.pn 2-89
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-80
Note to page 80.
.sp 2
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
<i>Ein Schreiben von einem vornehmen Patritio und Rathsverwandten zu
Görlitz wegen seel. Jac. Behmen’s Person und Schriften</i>, 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 (<i>inqualireten mit ihme und in ihme</i>), 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.—<i>Aurora</i>, 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:—‘<i>Am
Anfang schuff Gott</i>,’ &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 <i>locus</i>
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 <i>sedes</i> 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.—<i>Aurora</i>,
cap. xviii. §§ 48-52. A similar precious piece of nonsense is to be
found, cap. xviii. §§ 72, &c. of which <i>Barmherzig</i> 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.—<i>Aurora</i>, 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 <i>Lebens-lauff</i>,
§ 20; and compare the <i>Clavis</i>, or <i>Schlüssel etlicher vornehmen Puncten</i>, &c.

.fn #
The personal appearance of
Behmen is thus described by his
friend and biographer, Abraham von
Franckenberg, in the biography prefixed
to his Works, § 27.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-2-80# on p. #88:Page_2-88#.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Lebens-lauff</i>, § 4.
.fn-
.fn #
See his own account of his mental
conflict and melancholy, issuing in the
rapturous intuition which solved all his
doubts, <i>Aurora</i>, cap. xix. §§ 1-13.
He acknowledges having read many
astrological books. <i>Aurora</i>, 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.—<i>Theosoph. Sendbr.</i> §§
52-60.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Theosoph. Sendbr.</i> xii. §§ 8-20.
.fn-
.fn #
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.
.fn-
.fn #
Thus he thanks Christian Bernard
for a small remittance of money.—<i>Theos.
Sendbr.</i> ix. Sept. 12, 1620.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Apologia wider den Primarium
zu Görlitz Gregorium Richter</i>, written
in 1624.
.fn-
.fn #
Vide Corn. Weissner’s <i>Wahrhafte
Relation</i>, &c., and Franckenberg’s
account of his last hours, § 29.
.fn-
// File: 510.png
.pn 2-90
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap2-8-7
CHAPTER VII.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
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.

<sc>Henry More.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
.pm letter-start
<sc>Willoughby’s Essay—Fifth Evening.</sc>
.sp 2
§ 5. <i>Jacob Behmen—his Materials and Style of Workmanship.</i>
.sp 2
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
// File: 511.png
.pn 2-91
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
// File: 512.png
.pn 2-92
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
// File: 513.png
.pn 2-93
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.[#]
How long it is before he sees

.pm verse-start
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.
.pm verse-end
// File: 514.png
.pn 2-94

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.[#] 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
// File: 515.png
.pn 2-95
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
// File: 516.png
.pn 2-96
and spiritual sphere underlies everywhere the material and
outward.[#] 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
// File: 517.png
.pn 2-97
inmost, in the deepest sense, are one.’[#] 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.

.tb

The <i>Aurora</i> was the firstfruit of the illumination thus
// File: 518.png
.pn 2-98
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 <i>Aurora</i>, 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
<i>Aurora</i>—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
// File: 519.png
.pn 2-99
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
// File: 520.png
.pn 2-100
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
<i>Pirate</i>, 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
// File: 521.png
.pn 2-101
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 <i>Aurora</i> is broken every here and there by headings in
capital letters—promising and conspicuous sign-posts, on which
are written, ‘<sc>Mark!</sc>‘—‘<sc>Now mark!</sc>‘—‘<sc>Understand this
aright!</sc>‘—‘<sc>The gate of the great mystery!</sc>‘—‘<sc>Mark
now the hidden mystery of God!</sc>‘—‘<sc>The deepest
depth!</sc>‘—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
// File: 522.png
.pn 2-102
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 <i>naïveté</i>, 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.
.pm letter-end

.fn #
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.—<i>Aurora</i>, cap.
vii. § 11; cap. x. § 26, and often elsewhere.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Aurora</i>, x. §§ 44, 45.
.fn-
.fn #
See <i>Aurora</i>, 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.’—<i>Aurora</i>, cap. x. §§ 57,
58.
.fn-
.fn #
‘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.—<i>Aurora</i>, <i>Vorrede</i>, §§ 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.’—<i>Aurora</i>,
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.—<i>Aurora</i>, cap. xi. §§
68-72 and cap. xii. § 117. Comp.
also cap. xxv. §§ 46-48.
.fn-
// File: 523.png
.pn 2-103
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap2-8-8
CHAPTER VIII.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
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.[#]

<sc>Synesius.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
.pm letter-start
<sc>Willoughby’s Essay—Sixth Evening.</sc>
.sp 2
§ 6. <i>Jacob Behmen.—Sketch and Estimate of his System.</i>
.sp 2
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 <i>principle</i> 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
// File: 524.png
.pn 2-104
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.[#]

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 <i>Mysterium Magnum</i>, 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’ (<i>Quellgeister</i>), or ‘Mothers
of Existence,’—typified in the seven golden candlesticks of the
// File: 525.png
.pn 2-105
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.
.sp 2
I. <i>The Astringent Quality.</i>
.sp 2
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 <i>primus</i> 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.
.sp 2
II. <i>The Sweet Quality.</i>
.sp 2
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.
// File: 526.png
.pn 2-106
.sp 2
III. <i>The Bitter Quality.</i>
.sp 2
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.
.sp 2
IV. <i>The Quality of Fire.</i>
.sp 2
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.
.sp 2
V. <i>The Quality of Love.</i>
.sp 2
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.
.sp 2
VI. <i>The Quality of Sound.</i>
.sp 2
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 <i>primus</i> in jovial temperaments,
and produces blue colours.
// File: 527.png
.pn 2-107
.sp 2
VII. <i>The Quality of Corporeity, or Essential Substance.</i>
.sp 2
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.[#]

.tb

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.
// File: 528.png
.pn 2-108

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.[#] ‘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
// File: 529.png
.pn 2-109
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
// File: 530.png
.pn 2-110
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
// File: 531.png
.pn 2-111
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.
// File: 532.png
.pn 2-112

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—<i>dis</i>-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.[#]

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,
// File: 533.png
.pn 2-113
that he holds, in combination, the doctrine which teaches a
God <i>within</i> the world, and the doctrine which proclaims a God
<i>above</i> 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
// File: 534.png
.pn 2-114
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.[#]

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.[#] But for that fall, this
// File: 535.png
.pn 2-115
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.[#] 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
// File: 536.png
.pn 2-116
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 <i>Theologia
Germanica</i>, 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.[#]
// File: 537.png
.pn 2-117

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.[#] He argues against the Hyper-Calvinist, and
against what he regarded as the Antinomian consequence of the
doctrine of ‘imputed righteousness.’[#] He was a man of peace,—little
disposed to add one more to so many controversies;
seldom entering the lists unless challenged.[#] He justly condemned
as profitless the Millenarian speculations in which some
about him were entangled.[#] 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
// File: 538.png
.pn 2-118
Stone, to be coveted by all, was ‘the new life in Christ Jesus.’[#]
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 <i>Three Principles</i> abounds in counsels and
exhortation designed to promote practical holiness. The <i>Büchlein
vom heiligen Gebet</i> is a collection of prayers for the private
use of ‘awakened and desirous souls,’ somewhat after the
manner of those in Doddridge’s <i>Rise and Progress of Religion</i>.

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.[#]

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
// File: 539.png
.pn 2-119
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
<i>German Bible</i>. Any one who will take the trouble to look,
not into the Aurora, but into the <i>Book of the Three Principles</i>,
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
// File: 540.png
.pn 2-120
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.
.pm letter-end
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-107
Note to page 107.
.sp 2
Behmen derives <i>Qualität</i> from <i>quallen</i>, or <i>quellen</i> (our <i>well</i>), and understands
by it the characteristic virtue or operation of anything. Thus the seven
Qualities are the seven <i>Fountain</i>-Spirits—the prolific sources of their several
species of influence. <i>Aurora</i>, i. § 3. The notion of pain (<i>qual</i>) 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 <i>Aurora</i>, 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 <i>Aurora</i>, and the <i>Tabula
Principiorum</i>, <i>Wercke</i>, vol. iv. p. 268. Similar classifications and definitions
are contained in the three first chapters of the <i>Drei Principien</i>, and with more
clearness and precision in the <i>Mysterium Magnum</i>, cap. vi. Compare also
especially <i>Aurora</i>, 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 <i>Mysterium Magnum</i>,
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.
// File: 541.png
.pn 2-121
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.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-108
Note to page 108.
.sp 2
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 (<i>nach dem Liechte</i>) wherein He Himself dwells, and shines with power
throughall his nature. He communicates his power to all his nature and
works (<i>allen seinen Wesen und Wercken</i>), 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.—<i>De Signatura Rerum</i>, cap. viii. §§ 45-47.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-117-1
Note to page 117.
.sp 2
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.
// File: 542.png
.pn 2-122
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 <i>in</i> me. The
Father must communicate or beget His Son in my desire-of-faith (<i>Glaubensbegierde</i>),
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 (<i>Meinheit</i>), for grace
slays my will and establisheth itself lord in place of my self-hood (<i>Ichheit</i>), 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.—<i>Theosophische
Sendbriefe</i>, xlvi. §§ 7, &c. He inveighs frequently against an antinomian
Calvinism. But if any one will compare this letter with Calvin’s
<i>Institutes</i> <sc>III.</sc> i. and <sc>III.</sc> 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.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-117-2
Note to page 117.
.sp 2
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.—<i>Theos. Sendbr.</i> 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 <i>Theos. Send.</i> 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
// File: 543.png
.pn 2-123
self-glory; a genuine charity towards man; a true hunger, ‘not after bread,
but God.’-Compare <i>Aurora</i>, cap. xix. § 77.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-118-1
Note to page 118.
.sp 2
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 <i>Phil. Weltanschauung der Reformationzeit</i>,
chap. xi.

The <i>De Signatura Rerum</i> 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.—<i>De Signatura Rerum</i>, cap. xi. §§ 18-22.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-118-2
Note to page 118.
.sp 2
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
// File: 544.png
.pn 2-124
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 <i>The
Spirit of Prayer</i>; or, <i>The Soul rising out of the Vanity of Time into the
Riches of Eternity</i>.

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 <i>Encyclopædie, Vorr. z. zweiten
Aufl.</i> p. 22. Hoffman’s <i>Franz Baader im Verhältnisse zu Spinosa</i>, &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
// File: 545.png
.pn 2-125
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.—<i>Mastix,
his Letter to a private Friend</i>, appended to the <i>Enthusiasmus Triumphatus</i>,
&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 <i>Kirchen-undKetzergeschichte</i>,
Th. iii.

.fn #
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!
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Von den drei Principien des
Göttlichen Wesens</i>, cap. vii. §§ 22, &c.,
cap. ix. 30, <i>et passim</i>. <i>Aurora</i>, cap.
ii. § 41; cap. xxiii. 61-82. Compare
<i>Aurora</i>, cap. xx. §§ 49, &c. <i>Drei
Princip.</i> cap. vii. 25. <i>Aurora</i>, 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 (<i>Krafft</i>) whereby it possesses
a body proper to itself; secondly,
the sap (<i>Safft</i>) or heart; thirdly, the
peculiar virtue, smell, or taste proceeding
from it; this is its <i>spirit</i>
(§ 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).
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-2-107# on p. #120:Page_2-120#.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-2-108# on p. #121:Page_2-121#.
.fn-
.fn #
Here I am much indebted to the
masterly discussion of the theory in
question, contained in Müller’s <i>Lehre
von der Sünde</i>, Buch ii. cap. 4.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Aurora</i>, 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.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Aurora</i>, cap. iv. §§ 10, 11. Comp.
§ 15, and also cap. xxi. § 37.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Aurora</i>, cap. v. § 4; cap. xvii. § 16.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Aurora.</i>, § 27; cap. xiv. § 104; cap. x. §§ 42, 65; xix. § 50.
.fn-
.fn #
For example, in the <i>Drei Principien</i>,
cap. xxvi. §§ 13-34, and in the
<i>Aurora</i>, cap. xii. § 65.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-2-117-1# on p. #121:Page_2-121#.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Theos. Sendbr.</i> 46, §§ 51-54. See
also #Note:note-2-117-2# on page #122:Page_2-122#.
.fn-
.fn #
Behmen supposed the latter day
not far distant (<i>Aurora</i>, 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, <i>Theos. Send.</i>
viii. and xi.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Theos. Sendbr.</i> x. § 20. See also
#Note:note-2-118-1# on page #123:Page_2-123#.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Aurora</i>, cap. xx. § 1; xxii. 26.
See also second #Note:note-2-118-2# on page #123:Page_2-123#.
.fn-
// File: 546.png
.pn 2-126
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap2-8-9
CHAPTER IX.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
O sola, mica, rama lamahi,
Volase, cala, maja, mira, salame,
Viemisa molasola, Rama, Afasala.
Mirahel, Zorabeli, Assaja!

<i>Citation for all Spirits, from the</i> <sc>Black Raven</sc>.
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
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.’

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> To remove that feeling from the imagination, at
least.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> And that is enough; for only in imagination
can it have existence. Man is so much greater than nature.
// File: 547.png
.pn 2-127

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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
// File: 548.png
.pn 2-128
ground and pavement of that world branching with veins as of
gold and silver, an arborescent glory, instinct with mysterious
life.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> Thank you, Gower.

<sc>Gower.</sc> Thank you, Willoughby. You are my informant.
I never read a line of Behmen on my own account, and, what
is more, never will.

<sc>Kate.</sc> Helen and I want you very much to tell us something
about the Rosicrucians.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> You have read <i>Zanoni</i>——

<sc>Kate.</sc> And we are all the more curious in consequence.
How much of such a story may I think true?

<sc>Atherton.</sc> As an ideal portraiture of that ambition which
seeks lordship within the marches of the unseen world, I think
<i>Zanoni</i> perfect.

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Oh, yes; such men would keep up the Rosicrucian
tradition bravely among the common folk.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> And among great folk, too, if they took the
pains.

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> 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,
// File: 549.png
.pn 2-129
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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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?

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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,’—

.pm verse-start
‘Where the quick heart of the great world doth pant.’
.pm verse-end

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
// File: 550.png
.pn 2-130
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 <i>Aufklärung</i> 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 <i>roués</i>
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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Truly a bad symptom of the general disease,
when men grow unable to see that the highest dignity lies close
at hand.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> As though man could never exhibit magnanimity
unless in some thrilling dramatic ‘situation.’

<sc>Gower.</sc> Or could not believe in the unseen world save by
help of necromancers, miracle-mongers, and clairvoyantes.
// File: 551.png
.pn 2-131

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.’

<sc>Kate.</sc> I should like to know, after all, precisely who and
what these Rosicrucians were. When did they make their first
appearance?

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> They were originally neither more nor less
than the ‘Mrs. Harris’ of a Lutheran pastor.

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> Mr. Willoughby!

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Fact, Lily. Willoughby never said anything
truer.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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,
<i>The Discovery of the Brotherhood of the Honourable Order of the
Rosy Cross</i>, and dedicated to all the scholars and magnates of
Europe.[#]

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.
// File: 552.png
.pn 2-132
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
<i>arcana</i>, 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.

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> No wonder the book made some noise.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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
// File: 553.png
.pn 2-133
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.
// File: 554.png
.pn 2-134

<sc>Gower.</sc> Oh, how I love that man!

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> Well, this Andreä writes the <i>Discovery of the
Rosicrucian Brotherhood</i>, a <i>jeu-d’esprit</i> 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!

<sc>Kate.</sc> But why mix up with his proposal all this idle
fabling about Rosenkreuz and his fraternity?

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> The scheme was certain, at any rate, to procure him
some amusement.
// File: 555.png
.pn 2-135

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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 <i>rosa</i> should be <i>rota</i>—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
// File: 556.png
.pn 2-136
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.

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> And was no society ever actually formed?

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.
// File: 557.png
.pn 2-137
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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Kate.</sc> Very pretty, some of them, I dare say.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Do you remember, Gower, that large old house
we saw at Vienna, called the Stift?

<sc>Gower.</sc> Perfectly, and the Stift-gasse, too, leading to it, for
there I got wet through.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> 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!
// File: 558.png
.pn 2-138

<sc>Kate.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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 <i>Comte de Gabalis</i>
for attaining to converse with some of these fanciful creations.
(<i>Taking down a little book.</i>) Here is the passage.[#] (<i>Reads.</i>)

‘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
// File: 559.png
.pn 2-139
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
// File: 560.png
.pn 2-140
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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> I never knew before that these cabbalists
were Calvinists.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> This touch of Jansenism excites the same
astonishment in the author of the <i>Comte de Gabalis</i>. 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 <i>liaisons</i> 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 <sc>Nehmahmihah</sc>,[#] and to combine
it, in due form, with the delicious name <sc>Eliael</sc>, all the
powers of darkness take to flight, and the sylph enjoys, unmolested,
the love he seeks!

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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 <sc>O-U-M</sc>; 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> And the word <sc>Agla</sc>, I remember, in Colin de
Plancy, which, when duly pronounced, facing the east, makes
absent persons appear, and discovers lost property.[#] I suppose
the potency is in proportion to the unintelligibility of the terms.
// File: 561.png
.pn 2-141

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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 <sc>Jabamiah</sc>.

But the word above every word is the <sc>Shemhamphorash</sc> of
the Talmud.[#] 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> It is curious to see some of these theosophists,
// File: 562.png
.pn 2-142
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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.[#]

<sc>Gower.</sc> To return to societies—did you ever hear, Willoughby,
of the Philadelphian Association?[#]

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> That founded by Pordage, do you mean—the
doctor who fought the giant so stoutly one night?

<sc>Gower.</sc> The same. I picked up a book of his at a stall the
other day.

<sc>Kate.</sc> Who was he? Pray tell us the story of the battle.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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
// File: 563.png
.pn 2-143
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——

<sc>Atherton.</sc> What became of the bedposts?

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Surpassing powers those, indeed; not even requiring
the present eye and will of the operator to master the
imagination of the subject mind.

<sc>Kate.</sc> And the battle in the bedroom?

<sc>Gower.</sc> Lasted half an hour; when the giant, finding Dr.
Pordage a tough customer, took his departure.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> What were they like?

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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,
// File: 564.png
.pn 2-144
cats-eared, tusked, crooked-mouthed, bow-legged
creatures.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Did the Philadelphians profess to see the spirits
with the inward or the bodily eye?

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> She, I believe, carried to its practical extreme the
Paracelsian doctrine concerning the magical power of faith.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> Such a doctrine is but one among the many
retrogressions of the mediæval school.

.fn #
See, concerning the history of this
book, and its author, Valentine Andreä,
J. G. Buhle, <i>Ueber den Ursprung und
die Vornehmsten Schiksale der Orden
der Rosenkreuzer und Freymaurer</i>
(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,
<i>Kirchen-und-Ketzergeschichte</i>, Th. ii.
Buch xvii. cap. 18.

The derivation of the name Rosicrucian
from <i>ros</i> and <i>crux</i>, rather than
<i>rosa</i> and <i>crux</i>, to which Brucker
alludes (<i>Hist. Phil.</i> Per. <sc>III.</sc> Pars i.
lib. 3, cap. 3), is untenable. By rights,
the word, if from <i>rosa</i>, 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.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Le Comte de Gabalis, ou Entretiens
sur les Sciences Secrètes</i> (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.)
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Comte de Gabalis</i>, p. 185. See the
story of Noah’s calamity, and the
salamander Oromasis, p. 140.
.fn-
.fn #
See Colin de Plancy’s <i>Dictionnaire
Infernal</i>, Art. Cabale. Horst furnishes
a number of such words, <i>Zauberbibliothek</i>,
vol. <sc>III.</sc> xvi. 2.
.fn-
.fn #
Horst inserts in his <i>Zauberbibliothek</i>
the whole of a once famous cabbalistic
treatise, entitled <i>Semiphoras et
Shemhamphoras Salomonis Regis</i>, 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 <i>name</i> 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, <i>Entdecktes Judenthum</i>, 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,
<i>Zauberbibliothek</i>, vol. iv. p. 131.
.fn-
.fn #
See <i>Das transcendentale magie
und magische Heilarten im Talmud</i>,
von Dr. G. Brecher, p. 52. Eisenmenger,
<i>Entdecktes Judenthum</i>, ii. pp.
445, &c.

The <i>Tractat Berachoth</i> 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.)
.fn-
.fn #
See Horst’s <i>Zauberbibliothek</i>, vol.
i. pp. 314-327.
.fn-
// File: 565.png
.pn 2-145
.sp 4
.h2 id=book2-9
BOOK THE NINTH | THE SPANISH MYSTICS
// File: 566.png
// File: 567.png
.pn 2-147
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap2-9-1
CHAPTER I.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
  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.

<sc>Giles Fletcher.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
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:—
.sp 2
.pm letter-start
I. <i>Saint Theresa.</i>

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
// File: 568.png
.pn 2-148
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.
// File: 569.png
.pn 2-149
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
// File: 570.png
.pn 2-150
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
// File: 571.png
.pn 2-151
a hundred miraculous cures.[#] John and Theresa were mystics
<i>par excellence</i>: 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
// File: 572.png
.pn 2-152
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.
// File: 573.png
.pn 2-153
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,

.pm verse-start
                    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.
.pm verse-end

Theresa was born at Avila, in the year 1515, just two years
(as Ribadeneira reminds us) before ‘that worst of men,’ Martin
Luther.[#] 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
// File: 574.png
.pn 2-154
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.[#]

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.[#] 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.[#]

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
// File: 575.png
.pn 2-155
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.[#] 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
// File: 576.png
.pn 2-156
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.

.tb

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.[#]
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
// File: 577.png
.pn 2-157
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 (<i>hecho de
reyzes de arboles</i>[#]). 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 <i>he</i> 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
// File: 578.png
.pn 2-158
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 <i>Veni
Creator</i>, when she heard these words spoken in the interior of
her heart—‘I will have thee hold converse, not with men, but
angels.‘[#] 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
// File: 579.png
.pn 2-159
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![#] 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.[#] 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!
// File: 580.png
.pn 2-160

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.[#] 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.[#] 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,
// File: 581.png
.pn 2-161
and so intense, that all she had endured from racking
disease was delightful in comparison.[#]

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.[#] 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
// File: 582.png
.pn 2-162
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.[#]

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.[#]
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,
// File: 583.png
.pn 2-163
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.’[#]

Here the <i>simplicitas</i> and <i>nuditas</i> 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 <i>post-mortem</i> examination, completely formed
inside her heart.[#]

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.[#]

A multitude more of such favours might be related:—how
// File: 584.png
.pn 2-164
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.[#]
Enough!
.pm letter-end
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-159
Note to page 159.
.sp 2
The dispute which agitated the Romish Church for more than half a
century (1670-1730), concerning the <i>Mistica Ciudad de Dios</i>, 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
// File: 585.png
.pn 2-165
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 <i>Censura Censuræ</i>. 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 <i>their</i> 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, <i>Traité
Historique et Dogmatique sur les Apparitions, les Visions et les Révélations
particulières</i>, tom. <sc>II.</sc> chap. xi. (1751).

The same spirit betrays itself in the instance of Molinos. Even after he had
written his <i>Guida Spirituale</i>, 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.

.fn #
Alban Butler, July 31.
.fn-
.fn #
Ribadeneira, <i>Flos Sanctorum</i>, Appendix, p. 35 (Ed. 1659).
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Los Libros de la B. M. Teresa de
Jesus</i>, <i>Vida</i>, capp. i. iii. This edition
of 1615 contains the <i>Camino de la Perfecion</i>,
and the <i>Castillo espiritual</i>,
with the <i>Life</i>. The <i>Foundations</i>, at
which I have only glanced in the
French, are devoted to business, not
mysticism.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Vida</i>, cap. v. p. 26.
.fn-
.fn #
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.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Vida</i>, cap. xxxvi.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Vida</i>, p. 83.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Vida</i>, cap. xxvii. p. 196.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Vida</i>, cap. xxiv. p. 171.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Vida</i>, 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.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-2-159# on p. #164:Page_2-164#.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Vida</i>, p. 85; <i>Camino de Perfecion</i>, capp. 4 and 5.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Vida</i>, cap. xxix., p. 209.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Vida</i>, cap. xxxii.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Ibid.</i>, cap. xxxi.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Vida</i>, 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.—<i>Vita Teresiæ</i>,
p. 41.
.fn-
.fn #
Originally:

.pm verse-start
Mas causa en mi tal passion
Ver à Dios mi prisionero
Que muero porque no muero.
.pm verse-end
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Vida</i>, cap. xl. p. 324.
.fn-
.fn #
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.—<i>Vida
S. Claræ</i>, p. 161.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Vida</i>, 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.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Vida</i>, cap. xxxviii. pp. 300, 301; and xl. 328.
.fn-
// File: 586.png
.pn 2-166
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap2-9-2
CHAPTER II.
.sp 2
.pm letter-start
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.—<sc>Jeremy Taylor.</sc>
.sp 2
I. <i>Saint Theresa</i>—(<sc>CONTINUED</sc>).
.sp 2
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.[#] You will be borne along, she would say, if
// File: 587.png
.pn 2-167
you wait, as far as is fitting. Her experience receives its complexion,
and some of her terminology is borrowed from the
<i>Lives of the Saints</i>. 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 <i>Life</i> on the various
kinds of prayer, she has left two treatises, <i>The Way of Perfection</i>
(Camino de Perfecion) and <i>The Castle of the Soul</i> (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
<i>Simple Mental Prayer</i>,—fervent, inward, self-withdrawn; not
exclusive of some words, nor unaided by what the mystics
called discursive acts, <i>i.e.</i>, the consideration of facts and
doctrines prompting to devotion. In this species there is
nothing extraordinary. No mysticism, so far.

<sc>Second Degree</sc>:—<i>The Prayer of Quiet</i> called also <i>Pure
Contemplation</i>. 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
// File: 588.png
.pn 2-168
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.[#]

<sc>Third Degree</sc>:—<i>The Prayer of Union</i>, called also <i>Perfect
Contemplation</i>. 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.[#]

Some simple nun might ask, ‘How do you know that God
did so plenarily enter into you, if you were conscious of nothing
whatever?’
// File: 589.png
.pn 2-169

‘My daughter,’ replies the saint, ‘I know it by an infallible
certainty (<i>una certidumbre</i>) that God alone bestows.’[#]

After this nothing remains to be said.

<sc>Fourth Degree</sc>:—<i>The Prayer of Rapture, or Ecstasy</i>. 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 (<i>esta maraposilla
importuna de la memoria</i>), 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
// File: 590.png
.pn 2-170
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![#]

The state of rapture is frequently accompanied by a certain
‘great pain’ (<i>gran pena</i>), 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—

.pm verse-start
Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!
Dove-feathered raven! wolfish-ravening lamb!
.pm verse-end

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 (<i>las
canillas muy abiertas</i>), her hands stiff and extended: in every
joint were the pains of dislocation: she was apparently at the
point of death.[#]

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
// File: 591.png
.pn 2-171
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.[#] 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
<i>Guida Spirituale</i> 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 <i>Prayer of Rapture</i>.
Molinos cites her very words. The introduction to his condemned
// File: 592.png
.pn 2-172
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.[#] 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.[#]

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 <i>Prayer of
Rapture</i>, all recognition of Christ’s humanity—as, indeed, of
everything else—is doubtless obliterated. But, then, <i>we</i> 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
// File: 593.png
.pn 2-173
ours.’[#] 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.[#]

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.[#]

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
// File: 594.png
.pn 2-174
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 (<i>Buelo del Espiritu</i>), 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 (<i>con la presteza que sale la pelota
de un arcabuz</i>). Thus transported the spirit is taught without
the medium of words, and understands mysteries which long
years of search could not even have surmised.[#]

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.[#]

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.[#] In other instances
// File: 595.png
.pn 2-175
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.[#] 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 <i>tables volantes</i> of
Louis XV. with viands,—a spring is touched, and presto! the
table sinks and re-appears—spread.
.pm letter-end
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-168
Note to page 168.
.sp 2
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 <i>Camino de Perfecion</i>.

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.—<i>Traité de l’Amour de Dieu</i>,
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.—<i>Ibid.</i> chap. x.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-170-1
Note to page 170.
.sp 2
<i>Vida</i>, 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
// File: 596.png
.pn 2-176
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; <i>Die Christliche
Mystik</i>, 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.—<i>Traité de l’Amour de Dieu</i>, livre vii. chapp. iii. and vii.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-170-2
Note to page 170.
.sp 2
This pain is described by Theresa in the twentieth chapter of the <i>Life</i>, and
in the <i>Castillo Interior, Morada</i> 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 <i>Castillo Interior</i> 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 <i>apex</i> by some; the <i>Ground</i> 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
// File: 597.png
.pn 2-177
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.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-171
Note to page 171.
.sp 2
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 <i>Via Compendii ad Deum</i>,
cap. 10. <i>Angelæ de Fulginio Visiones</i>, 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 <i>Nuit Obscure</i>, 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.—<i>Traité de l’Amour de Dieu</i>, liv. vi. ch. xiii.

Theresa declares that the intensity of this delicious agony is such as frequently
to endanger life.—<i>Castillo Int.</i> 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.—<i>Traité
de l’Amour de Dieu</i>, liv. vii. chapp x.-xii.
// File: 598.png
.pn 2-178

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.—<i>Explic.
des Maximes des Saints</i>, Art. <sc>VIII.</sc>
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-172
Note to page 172.
.sp 2
See the passage already cited (page #166:Page_2-166#, 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.’—<i>Via
Compendii ad Deum</i>, 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 <i>Spiritual Guide</i>:—‘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
// File: 599.png
.pn 2-179
be immeasurably remote from God.’ See Arnold’s <i>Kirchen-und-Ketzergeschichte</i>,
th. <sc>III.</sc> 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.—<i>Vida</i>, 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!—<i>Traité de l’Amour de Dieu</i>,
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,
// File: 600.png
.pn 2-180
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.—<i>Explic. des
Maximes des Saints</i>, art. xxvii.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-173
Note to page 173.
.sp 2
See the clear and guarded language of the twenty-eighth article in the
<i>Maximes des Saints</i>, and the <i>Troisième Lettre en réponse à divers Ecrits,
Seconde Partie</i>.

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.’—<i>Arnold</i>, <i>loc. cit.</i>,
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, <i>through the most
holy Humanity of Jesus Christ</i>.’ 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
<i>Discours sur le Non-Quiétisme de S. Theresa</i>, 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
// File: 601.png
.pn 2-181
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.

.fn #
<i>Vida</i>, 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.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-2-168# on p. #175:Page_2-175#.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Vida</i>, cap. xvii. and <i>Castillo Interior, Moradas Quintas</i>, cap. i.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Castillo Interior</i>, p. 580.
.fn-
.fn #
See second #Note:note-2-170-1# on p. #175:Page_2-175#.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-2-170-2# on p. #176:Page_2-176#.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-2-171# on p. #177:Page_2-177#.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-2-172# on p. #178:Page_2-178#.
.fn-
.fn #
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.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Vida</i>, 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.
.fn-
.fn #
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.—<i>La Montée du Mont
Carmel</i>, liv. <sc>III.</sc> chap. 1. I have used
the French translation of his works,
edited by the Abbé Migne, in his <i>Bibliothèque
Universelle du Clergé</i>. 1845.

The chapter on images is the fourteenth
of the same book.

Father Berthier (<i>Lettres sur les
Œuvres de S. Jean de la Croix</i>) 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.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-2-173# on p. #180:Page_2-180#.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Castillo Interior. Morada</i> vi., c. v.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Ibid.</i>, capp. viii., ix., x.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Vida</i>, 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>i.e.</i>,
without correspondence on the part of
the soul to the grace vouchsafed), not
miraculous. With Theresa this form
of passive contemplation <i>is</i> all three.
So much more Quietist was the mysticism
authorised than the mysticism condemned
by Rome. See <i>Maximes des
Saints</i>, 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.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Vida</i>, cap. xxv.
.fn-
// File: 602.png
.pn 2-182
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap2-9-3
CHAPTER III.
.sp 2
.pm letter-start
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 <i>Animal Figurations</i> 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 <i>Animal Nature</i>; and that it is nothing but the
stillnesse and fixednesse of <i>Melancholy</i> that thus abuses him, instead of the true
divine Principle.—<sc>Henry More.</sc>
.sp 2
II. <i>St. John of the Cross.</i>

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
// File: 603.png
.pn 2-183
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.’[#] 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
// File: 604.png
.pn 2-184
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
// File: 605.png
.pn 2-185
among the crags of the Sierra Morena his great mystical
treatises, <i>The Obscure Night</i>, and <i>The Ascent of Carmel</i>. 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.[#]
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.

.pm verse-start
  En una noche escura
Con ansias en amores inflammada
¡O dichosa ventura!
Salí sin ser notada
Estando ya mi casa sosegada.
.pm verse-end

‘’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:—
// File: 606.png
.pn 2-186

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.’[#]

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
// File: 607.png
.pn 2-187
of them, certain divine substitutes, which will, and love, and
know, as the Infinite does, not as men.

The <sc>First Night</sc> is that of the <i>Sense</i>: 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.[#]
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 <sc>Second Night</sc>—the Night of the <i>Spirit</i>. 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
// File: 608.png
.pn 2-188
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.[#]

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.[#]

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.[#]
// File: 609.png
.pn 2-189

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.’[#]

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.[#]

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
<i>veritas essentialis nude in se ipsa</i>, 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
// File: 610.png
.pn 2-190
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.[#]

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
// File: 611.png
.pn 2-191
(it is the same), to that swooning gaze on the Infinite Ineffable,
wherein our dissolving nature sees, hears, knows, wills, remembers
nothing.[#]

The <sc>Third Night</sc>—that of the <i>Memory</i> and the <i>Will</i>.[#]
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.[#]

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
// File: 612.png
.pn 2-192
meteoric sky which is figured over with wonders and with
signs.

Thus John’s desired <i>contemplatio infusa</i> is always, at the same
time, a <i>contemplatio confusa</i>.

At his culminating point the mystic is concealed as ‘on the
secret top of Horeb;’ he ascends by a hidden scale, cloaked
with darkness (<i>por la secreta escala—a escuras y enzelada</i>).

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.[#]

Such then is the teaching of the <i>Mount Carmel</i> and the
<i>Obscure Night</i>, 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
// File: 613.png
.pn 2-193
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
// File: 614.png
.pn 2-194
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.[#] 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.
.pm letter-end
// File: 615.png
.pn 2-195
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-188
Note to page 188.
.sp 2
<i>Montée du Carmel</i>, liv. <sc>II.</sc> ch. ii. and iv.; also <i>La Nuit Obscure</i>, <sc>I.</sc> viii. and
<sc>II.</sc> 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 <i>qui ne
sortent point des bornes de la nature</i> 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 <i>un sentiment tout divin</i>, 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. <i>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.</i>—P. 601.
// File: 616.png
.pn 2-196
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-191
Note to page 191.
.sp 2
‘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.’—<i>Montée du Carmel</i>, liv. <sc>III.</sc> ch. i.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-192
Note to page 192.
.sp 2
<i>La Nuit Obscure</i>, liv. <sc>II.</sc> 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 (<i>Cant.</i> <sc>I.</sc> 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
(<i>Lettres Spirituelles</i>, 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
// File: 617.png
.pn 2-197
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 <i>sine quâ non</i>
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.’—<i>Précautions
Spirituelles</i>, p. 734.

.fn #
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.’—<i>Montée du Carmel</i>,
liv. <sc>II.</sc> ch. xiii.
.fn-
.fn #
Dionysius is very clearly followed
into his darkness in <i>La Montée du Carmel</i>,
liv. <sc>II.</sc> chap. viii.; and his Hierarchies
reappear in <i>La Nuit Obscure</i>,
liv. <sc>II.</sc> ch. xii.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>La Nuit Obscure</i>, liv. <sc>II.</sc> ch. iv.; <i>et passim</i>.
.fn-
.fn #
This first Night is treated of at
length in the first book of the <i>Montée
du Carmel</i>, and in the first of the <i>Nuit
Obscure</i>. The supernatural sensuous
enjoyments, alluded to, are described
in the <i>Montée du Carmel</i>, liv. <sc>II.</sc> 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 <i>gourmandise</i>, &c.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-2-188# on p. #195:Page_2-195#.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Montée du Carmel</i>, liv. <sc>II.</sc> ch. xxv.-xxxii.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Ibid.</i> ch. viii. and vi.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Ibid.</i> ch. xvii. and liv. <sc>III.</sc> ch. xii.
.fn-
.fn #
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.—<i>Montée
du Carmel</i>, liv. <sc>II.</sc> ch. xxvi.
p. 484.
.fn-
.fn #
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. <sc>II.</sc> 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.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>La Nuit Obscure</i>, liv. <sc>II.</sc> ch.
ix.; especially the passage cited in
note on p. #195:Page_2-195#.
.fn-
.fn #
This night occupies the third book
of the <i>Montée du Carmel</i>.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-2-191# on p. #196:Page_2-196#.
.fn-
.fn #
See second #Note:note-2-192# on p. #196:Page_2-196#.
.fn-
.fn #
See the life of the saint in Alban Butler, Nov. 24.
.fn-
// File: 618.png
// File: 619.png
.pn 2-199
.sp 4
.h2 id=book2-10
BOOK THE TENTH | QUIETISM.
// File: 620.png
// File: 621.png
.pn 2-201
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap2-10-1
CHAPTER I.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
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!

<sc>Madame Guyon.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
‘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 <i>On the Mercy of the Divine
Judgments</i>. 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.’

.tb

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
// File: 622.png
.pn 2-202
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
// File: 623.png
.pn 2-203
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
// File: 624.png
.pn 2-204
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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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
// File: 625.png
.pn 2-205
and modelessness—mediate and immediate,—but simply between
God and Self.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> And so mysticism grows somewhat more clear,
and reduces itself to narrower compass.

<sc>Gower.</sc> And, just as it does so, is condemned by Rome.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> No doubt the attempt to reach an unattainable
disinterestedness was less dangerous and less unwholesome than
the strain after superhuman knowledge and miraculous vision.

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> I have just opened on one of her verses
in Cowper here, which exactly expresses what Mr. Willoughby
was suggesting:—

.pm verse-start
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.
.pm verse-end

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,—

.pm verse-start
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.
.pm verse-end

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Yes, this is the pure love, the holy indifference
of Quietism.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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 <i>present</i> salvation from sin?
// File: 626.png
.pn 2-206

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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 <i>present</i> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> In persecution, for example.
// File: 627.png
.pn 2-207

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Kate.</sc> Yes, let us hear your paper first, Mr. Atherton: we
can talk afterwards, you know.

So Atherton began to read.
.sp 2
.pm letter-start
<i>QUIETISM.</i>
.sp 2
<i>Part I.—Madame Guyon.</i>
.sp 2
I.
.sp 2
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
// File: 628.png.
.pn 2-208
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.
// File: 629.png
.pn 2-209

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.
// File: 630.png
.pn 2-210
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.[#]

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
// File: 631.png
.pn 2-211
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.’
.sp 2
II.
.sp 2
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
// File: 632.png
.pn 2-212
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
// File: 633.png
.pn 2-213
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.
.sp 2
III.
.sp 2
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,
// File: 634.png
.pn 2-214
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.[#] 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.[#] 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
// File: 635.png
.pn 2-215
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.
.sp 2
IV.
.sp 2
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
// File: 636.png
.pn 2-216
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 <i>Autobiography</i>
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 <i>love</i> and to <i>suffer</i>. 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, <i>that</i> attracted the others after it, and reunited them
in God, their divine centre and sovereign happiness. And as
// File: 637.png
.pn 2-217
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 <i>Philothea</i> (written by
St. Francis de Sales), with the <i>Imitation of Christ</i> (by Thomas
à Kempis), and the Holy Scriptures; also the <i>Spiritual Combat</i>,
which mentions none of these things.’[#]

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
// File: 638.png
.pn 2-218
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.[#]
.sp 2
V.
.sp 2
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.[#] St. Philip enjoyed, with many other
saints, the privilege of being miraculously elevated into the air
by the fervour of his heavenward aspirations. The <i>Acta Sanctorum</i>
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
// File: 639.png
.pn 2-219
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,

.pm verse-start
‘I counted two-and-seventy stenches,
All well-defined, and several stinks!’
.pm verse-end

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.[#] 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
// File: 640.png
.pn 2-220
was long preserved among her manuscripts at Wiesbaden.[#] 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
// File: 641.png
.pn 2-221
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.[#] 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.[#]
She has occupied, ever since, the first place in the ornithology
// File: 642.png
.pn 2-222
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.
.sp 2
VI.
.sp 2
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.
// File: 643.png
.pn 2-223
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.[#]

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
// File: 644.png
.pn 2-224
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.[#]
.sp 2
VII.
.sp 2
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.[#] 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
// File: 645.png
.pn 2-225
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;
// File: 646.png
.pn 2-226
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.
.sp 2
VIII.
.sp 2
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
// File: 647.png
.pn 2-227
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 <i>self</i> 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.’[#]

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
// File: 648.png
.pn 2-228
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 <i>as virtues</i>—that is, not by
separate and constrained efforts. It would have required effort
<i>not</i> to practise them.[#]

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 <i>evil</i>, 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
// File: 649.png
.pn 2-229
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.’[#]

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 <i>Torrents</i> and inculcated in the practical directions
of her <i>Short Method of Prayer</i>. 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
// File: 650.png
.pn 2-230
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 <i>Sortes
Virgilianæ</i> 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.
.sp 2
IX.
.sp 2
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
// File: 651.png
.pn 2-231
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 <i>in</i> man, but not
<i>instead</i> 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 <i>some</i>
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
// File: 652.png
.pn 2-232
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 <i>object</i> 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.
.sp 2
X.
.sp 2
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 <i>perfection</i>—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,
// File: 653.png
.pn 2-233
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 ‘<i>comparative</i> 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.’[#]
// File: 654.png
.pn 2-234

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.
.sp 2
XI.
.sp 2
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
// File: 655.png
.pn 2-235
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.’[#] Her efforts among the members of
// File: 656.png
.pn 2-236
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 <i>Torrents</i>, in the latter, she
published her <i>Short Method of Prayer</i>, and commenced her
<i>Commentaries on the Bible</i>.[#]

But alas! all this earnest, tireless toil is unauthorized.
// File: 657.png
.pn 2-237
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
// File: 658.png
.pn 2-238
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.
.pm letter-end
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-214
Note to page 214.
.sp 2
<i>Autobiography</i>, 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>i.e.</i>, 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.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-218
Note to page 218.
.sp 2
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
// File: 659.png
.pn 2-239
of spiritual and sometimes of bodily healing, dependent, however, for its successful
operation, on the degree of susceptibility in the recipients.—<i>Autobiography</i>,
part <sc>II.</sc> 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 <sc>Self</sc> 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.’—<i>Ibid.</i>
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 <i>Apology</i>,
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.’—<i>Ibid.</i> part <sc>III.</sc> c. i.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-223
Note to page 223.
.sp 2
<i>Autobiography</i>, part <sc>I.</sc> 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
// File: 660.png
.pn 2-240
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. <i>Hinc illæ lachrymæ.</i>
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-224
Note to page 224.
.sp 2
See the <i>Life and Religious Opinions and Experience of Madame de la Mothe
Guyon</i>, &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 <i>sight</i>, 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 <i>faith</i>. 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
// File: 661.png
.pn 2-241
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 <i>Autobiography</i>, part <sc>I.</sc>

.fn #
See the first six chapters of her
<i>Autobiography</i>. This life was published
posthumously at Cologne, in
1720. I have used an anonymous
English translation, published at Bristol,
in 1772.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-2-214# on p. #238:Page_2-238#.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Autobiography</i>, chap. x.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Autobiography</i>, chap. xii. p. 87.
.fn-
.fn #
See second #Note:note-2-218# on p. #238:Page_2-238#.
.fn-
.fn #
Görres, <i>Die Christliche Mystik</i>, b. <sc>IV.</sc> c. i.
.fn-
.fn #
Görres, <i>Die Christliche Mystik</i>, pp. 70-73.
.fn-
.fn #
Specimens of the language may be seen in Görres, p. 152.
.fn-
.fn #
Görres, <i>Die Christliche Mystik</i>, pp. 465, &c.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Ibid.</i> pp. 532, &c.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-2-223# on p. #239:Page_2-239#.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Autobiography</i>, part <sc>I.</sc> c. xv.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-2-224# on p. #240:Page_2-240#.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Autobiography</i>, part <sc>I.</sc> c. xxviii. p. 163.
.fn-
.fn #
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.
.fn-
.fn #
Upham, vol. <sc>I.</sc> pp. 262, 263.
.fn-
.fn #
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.’—<i>Autobiography</i>, part <sc>I.</sc> 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.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Autobiography</i>, part <sc>II.</sc> 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.
.fn-
.fn #
The little book to which she gave
the name of <i>The Torrents</i>, 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.—<i>Autobiography</i>,
part <sc>II.</sc> c. xxi.
.fn-
// File: 662.png
.pn 2-242
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap2-10-2
CHAPTER II.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
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.[#]

<sc>Hymn of the Fourteenth Century.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
.pm letter-start
<i>Part II.—The Quietist Controversy.</i>
.sp 2
I.
.sp 2
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 <i>The Spiritual
Guide</i>, 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.
// File: 663.png
.pn 2-243
His real doctrine was probably identical in substance with that
of Madame Guyon.[#] 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.[#] 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.
// File: 664.png
.pn 2-244
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 <i>Les Délices de
l’Esprit</i>, happily characterised by a French wit, when he proposed
for <i>délices</i> to read <i>délires</i>. 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.[#] 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
// File: 665.png
.pn 2-245
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.[#]
.sp 2
II.
.sp 2
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
// File: 666.png
.pn 2-246
Madame Guyon.[#] But letters filled with complaints against La
Combe and Madame Guyon poured in upon Harlay, Archbishop
of Paris.[#] He procured the arrest of La Combe, who
spent the remainder of his days in various prisons. A little
// File: 667.png
.pn 2-247
calumny and a forged letter obtained from the king a <i>lettre de
cachet</i> 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.
// File: 668.png
.pn 2-248
.sp 2
III.
.sp 2
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 <i>Esther</i>, 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
// File: 669.png
.pn 2-249
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.[#] 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
// File: 670.png
.pn 2-250
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.[#]
.sp 2
IV.
.sp 2
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.[#]
// File: 671.png
.pn 2-251
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.[#] 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
// File: 672.png
.pn 2-252
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.[#]
.sp 2
V.
.sp 2
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,
// File: 673.png
.pn 2-253
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 <i>Short Method</i>. She requested Madame Guyon to refrain
from visiting St. Cyr. She began to doubt the prudence or the
orthodoxy of Fénélon.[#] 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
// File: 674.png
.pn 2-254
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.[#]

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.[#]
// File: 675.png
.pn 2-255
.sp 2
VI.
.sp 2
Madame Guyon now requested the appointment of commissioners,
who should investigate, and pronounce finally concerning
her life and doctrine.[#] 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
// File: 676.png
.pn 2-256
confused and frightened her.[#] 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
// File: 677.png
.pn 2-257
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.[#]

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 <i>Autobiography</i>, 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
// File: 678.png
.pn 2-258
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.[#]
.sp 2
VII.
.sp 2
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
// File: 679.png
.pn 2-259
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.[#] 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.[#]
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.’[#] 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.[#] St.
// File: 680.png
.pn 2-260
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.
.sp 2
VIII.
.sp 2
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
// File: 681.png
.pn 2-261
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.[#]

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 <i>Instructions on the States of Prayer</i>.
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 <i>Instructions</i> 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
// File: 682.png
.pn 2-262
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.[#]
// File: 683.png
.pn 2-263

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 <i>Maxims
of the Saints</i>.
.sp 2
IX.
.sp 2
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
// File: 684.png
.pn 2-264
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 <i>Maxims of the Saints</i> 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.[#] 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
// File: 685.png
.pn 2-265
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.
.sp 2
X.
.sp 2
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.[#]
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 <i>Le Grand Monarque</i>
that he was ready to leave the palace rather than to forsake his
friend. Six days before the banishment of Fénélon, Louis had
// File: 686.png
.pn 2-266
sent to Innocent XII. a letter, drawn up by Bossuet, saying in
effect that the <i>Maxims</i> 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.[#] To write the <i>Maxims of the Saints</i> 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
// File: 687.png
.pn 2-267
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.[#]
.sp 2
XI.
.sp 2
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
// File: 688.png
.pn 2-268
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 <i>An Account of Quietism</i>—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
// File: 689.png
.pn 2-269
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 <i>Account of Quietism</i>
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.[#]
.sp 2
XII.
.sp 2
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,
// File: 690.png
.pn 2-270
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 <i>Reply</i> 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.[#]
// File: 691.png
.pn 2-271

The controversy now draws to a close. Bossuet published
<i>Remarks</i> on the <i>Reply</i> of Fénélon, and Fénélon rejoined with
<i>Remarks</i> on the <i>Remarks</i> of Bossuet. Sixty loyal doctors of
the Sorbonne censured twelve propositions, in the <i>Maxims</i>,
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.[#]

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 <i>Maxims</i>,
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
// File: 692.png
.pn 2-272
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.[#]
Bossuet endeavoured, in vain, to represent the obedience which
was the first to pronounce the sentence of self-condemnation, as
a profound hypocrisy.
.sp 2
XIII.
.sp 2
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.[#] 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
// File: 693.png
.pn 2-273
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
// File: 694.png
.pn 2-274
of Fénélon, but according to the standard of Scripture,—and
such an estimate must, we believe, pronounce it mistaken.
.sp 2
XIV.
.sp 2
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
// File: 695.png
.pn 2-275
practice. In the <i>Maxims of the Saints</i>, 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
<i>Cassandra</i>. Almost every later German mystic has been a
secluded student—almost every mystic of modern France has
// File: 696.png
.pn 2-276
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.
.pm letter-end
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-245
Note to page 245.
.sp 2
A full account of the proceedings against the Quietists will be found in the
narrative above referred to and in Arnold’s <i>Kirchen-und-Ketzer Geschichte</i>, th.
<sc>III.</sc> 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
// File: 697.png
.pn 2-277
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
// File: 698.png
.pn 2-278
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
<i>par excellence</i> and the vulgar herd of Christians, who were to be saved
only through the former. See <i>Bausset’s Histoire de Fénélon</i>, liv. ii.; <i>Pièces
Justificatives</i>, No. <sc>II.</sc>
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-259-1
Note to page 259.
.sp 2
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’ <i>Entretiens</i>, 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. (<i>Phelipeaux</i>, 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 <i>Cinquième Lettre en Réponse à divers Ecrits</i>; <i>Première Lettre en Réponse
à celle de M. L’Evêque de Meaux</i>; <i>Maximes des Saints</i>, 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 <i>objects</i> of our love—for God has so revealed himself, but is not the <i>motive</i>
of it. (<i>Max. des Saints</i>, art. iv.) Do we desire happiness less, he asks, because
we desire it from a worthy motive,—<i>i.e.</i>, as desired by God? Do we extinguish
hope by exalting and regulating it? (<i>Entretiens sur la Religion</i>; 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 <i>less</i> than that of him who anticipates annihilation, just because
the love of God to him is so much <i>more</i>? Shall such a gift serve only to make
love interested? (<i>Sur le Pur Amour</i>, xix. Compare also <i>Max. des Saints</i>,
art. 10, 11, 12; <i>Correspondance</i>, 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.
(<i>Instructions et Avis</i>, &c., xx.; <i>Sur le Pur Amour</i>, p. 329; <i>Max. des Saints</i>,
art. iii., and sundry qualifications of importance, concerning self-abandonment
in the ‘épreuves extrêmes,’ art. ix.)
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-259-2
Note to page 259.
.sp 2
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
// File: 699.png
.pn 2-279
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 <i>Instructions et Avis</i>, &c.
xx.; <i>Max. des Saints</i>, art. xiii.; <i>Lettres Spirituelles</i>, 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 <i>Maximes</i>, and moreover,
highly approved by Bossuet, a year after the conferences at Issy. The
strongest expressions are found in the <i>Instructions et Avis</i>, 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, <i>Max. des Saints</i>, art. xxi.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-259-3
Note to page 259.
.sp 2
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.—<i>Lettres
Spirituelles</i>, 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.—<i>Maximes
des Saints</i>, 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, <i>leur paraissent</i>
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 (<i>outre-passer</i>) 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 <i>Morada</i>, 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.
(<i>Max. des Saints</i>, xix.; <i>Lettres Spirituelles</i>, 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
// File: 700.png
.pn 2-280
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.—<i>Lettre</i> 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.’—<i>Max. des Saints</i>, art. xxi.
What such acts can be, must remain for ever a mystery unfathomable. It is for
these inexplicable ‘<i>actes distincts</i>’ that the convenient ‘<i>facilité spéciale</i>’ is provided.
(<i>Correspondance</i>, lettre 43; comp. <i>Lettres Spirituelles</i>, 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.—<i>Loc. cit.</i> p. 450; <i>Max. des Saints</i>, art.
xxix. and vii.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-262
Note to page 262.
.sp 2
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 <i>Réponse</i>. (<i>Correspondance</i>,
lettres 52, 53, 57; <i>Réponse à la Relation</i>, 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.
(<i>Réponse à la Relation</i>, chap. i.) Phelipeaux sees in everything Fénélon wrote—the
notes for the <i>Maxims</i>—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. (<i>Réponse</i>, xxiii. lxxxiv. lx.)
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-264
Note to page 264.
.sp 2
The motives with which Fénélon wrote and published the <i>Maxims</i> 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,
// File: 701.png
.pn 2-281
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 <i>Maxims</i> 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 <i>Maxims</i> were to furnish a <i>via media</i> between the extreme of those who
repudiated mystical theology altogether, and the excesses of the false mystics.
The doctrines stigmatized as false throughout the <i>Maxims</i>, are what Fénélon
supposed to be the tenets of Molinos, judging from the sixty-eight propositions
condemned at Rome. The <i>Faux</i>, therefore, which opposes to the <i>Vrai</i> 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 <i>Maxims</i>; <i>Première
Lettre en Réponse</i>, &c. p. 111; <i>Correspondance</i>, lettre 59; and the letter
on the <i>Maxims</i>, to the Pope, <i>Phelipeaux</i>, p. 239.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-265
Note to page 265.
.sp 2
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 <i>Audi, Filia, et
Vide</i>, has a section entitled <i>Des Fausses Révélations</i>. 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. (<i>Œuvres du B.
Jean D’Avila, Audi, Filia, et Vide</i>, 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
// File: 702.png
.pn 2-282
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 <i>esprit fort</i> 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.—<i>Correspondance</i>,
lettre 19. See also <i>Lettres Spirituelles</i>, 18, 19, 169. The inward
attraction presents some perplexity. In one instance it is only another word for
taste (<i>Ibid.</i> 35), and in another place the attraction of grace is equivalent to an
act of observation and judgment (<i>Ibid.</i> 176). Here, with so many mystics,
Fénélon can only follow the ‘<i>moi</i>,’ 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. (<i>Sur la Direction</i>,
pp. 677, 678.)

.fn #
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.
.fn-
.fn #
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.
.fn-
.fn #
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 <i>Account of Molinos and the Quietists</i>,
appended to the <i>Autobiography</i>
of Madame Guyon: translated, I believe,
from a French work, entitled,
<i>Recueil de Diverses Pièces concernant
le Quiétisme et les Quiétistes</i>.
.fn-
.fn #
Michelet, <i>Priests, Women, and Families</i>, p. 74.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-2-245# on p. #276:Page_2-276#.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Upham</i>, 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 <i>Introduction
à la Vie Dévote</i> (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 <i>Imitatio Christi</i>, could
win the ears of people of the world.
In the <i>Introduction</i>, 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
<i>Introduction</i> 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.’—<i>Causeries du
Lundi</i>, tom. vii. p. 216.
.fn-
.fn #
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
<i>Memoirs for the History of
Madame de Maintenon</i> (London,
1757), vol. <sc>III.</sc> bk. xi. c. 2. <i>Autobiography</i>,
part <sc>III.</sc> chapp. i. ii. iii.
Fénélon’s <i>Réponse à la Relation sur le
Quiétisme</i>, chap. i.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Memoirs for the History of Madame
de Maintenon</i>, bk. ix. Madame Guyon’s
doctrine entered St. Cyr while the absolute
vows were yet under discussion.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Memoirs for the History of Madame
de Maintenon</i>, bk. xi. chap. v.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Autobiography</i>, part <sc>III.</sc> 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.—<i>Réponse
à la Relation sur le Quiétisme</i>,
chap. i. 10-13.
.fn-
.fn #
She still speaks, however, of the
‘<i>sense</i>’ 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. <i>Autobiography</i>, part <sc>III.</sc> 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.
.fn-
.fn #
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.—<i>Réponse à la Relation
sur le Quiétisme</i>, chap. ii. 18-27.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>History of Madame de Maintenon</i>, bk. <sc>XI.</sc> chap. vii.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>History of Madame de Maintenon</i>,
bk. <sc>XI.</sc> chap. vii. Bausset, <i>Histoire de
Fénélon</i>, 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.—<i>Correspondance de
Fénélon</i>, Lettres 24, 26, 29, 30.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Autobiography</i>, part <sc>III.</sc> chap. xiii.
Phelipeaux gives in full the correspondence
on both sides, <i>Relation de l’Origine,
du Progrès et de la Condamnation
du Quiétisme répandu en France</i> (1732),
liv. i. pp. 73, &c. His account abounds
in misrepresentations, and does little
more, in the first part, than echo the
<i>Relation sur le Quiétisme</i> 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.—<i>Phelipeaux</i>,
p. 111.
.fn-
.fn #
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.—<i>Phelipeaux</i>,
liv. i. p. 114. <i>Autobiography</i>, part <sc>III.</sc>
chap. xv.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Autobiography</i>, chapp. xvi. xvii.
See also her letter to the three commissioners,
in <i>Phelipeaux</i>, 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.—<i>Phelipeaux</i>,
p. 125.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Autobiography</i>, part <sc>III.</sc> chapp. xviii. xix. <i>Réponse à la Relation</i>, &c., <sc>I.</sc>
ii. 3. <i>Upham</i>, vol. <sc>II.</sc> chapp. x. and xi.
.fn-
.fn #
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 <i>as they were</i>, ‘<i>par déférence</i>,’
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. (<i>Entretiens sur la Religion</i>,
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.—<i>Réponse à la Relation</i>,
&c., chap. iii. <i>Phelipeaux</i>, liv. i.
pp. 131, 135-137.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-2-259-1# on p. #278:Page_2-278#.
.fn-
.fn #
See second #Note:note-2-259-2# on p. #278:Page_2-278#.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-2-259-3# on p. #279:Page_2-279#.
.fn-
.fn #
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.’—<i>Correspondance</i>, 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.—<i>Phelipeaux</i>,
liv. i. p. 104. In the <i>Instructions sur
les Etats d’Oraison</i>, 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 <i>Faux</i> of his <i>Maxims</i>—and to
which Noailles refused his approval.—<i>Réponse
à la Relation</i>, xxviii. and lxii.
.fn-
.fn #
Her letter to Bossuet furnishes a
fair justification of this retreat to Paris.—<i>Phelipeaux</i>,
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 <i>John of Paris</i> and <i>Richard
Lion-heart</i>, but these, said Madame
Guyon, belonged to the lacqueys of
her son, a lieutenant in the guards.
But she acknowledged a <i>Griseldis</i> and
<i>Don Quixote</i> 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.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-2-262# on p. #280:Page_2-280#.
.fn-
.fn #
See second #Note:note-2-264# on p. #280:Page_2-280#.
.fn-
.fn #
Bausset, <i>Histoire de Fénélon</i>, liv. iii. p. 45. See also #Note:note-2-265# on p. #281:Page_2-281#.
.fn-
.fn #
Bausset, <i>Hist. de Fénélon</i>, 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 <i>Phelipeaux</i>.—See also <i>Memoirs of
Madame de Maintenon</i>, xi. 19. <i>Corr.
de Fénélon</i>, lettre 108.
.fn-
.fn #
Bausset, iii. 48-50; Aimé-Martin, <i>Etudes sur la Vie de Fénélon</i>, p. 14.
.fn-
.fn #
Bausset, 53-4; <i>Mem. of Maintenon</i>, <sc>XI.</sc> 20; Aimé-Martin, 15.
.fn-
.fn #
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 <i>Lettres en
Réponse</i>, and in the <i>Réponse</i> 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 <i>Réponse</i>; <i>Réponse</i>, 59;
and <i>Réponse aux Remarques</i>, § vi.
.fn-
.fn #
Bausset, iii. 68, 69; Upham, vol.
ii. p. 289.
.fn-
.fn #
Bausset, 77, 78.
.fn-
.fn #
Upham, vol. ii. ch. 18.
.fn-
// File: 703.png
.pn 2-283
.h3 id=chap2-10-3
CHAPTER III.
.sp 2
.pm letter-start
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.—<sc>Poiret.</sc>
.pm letter-end
.sp 2
<sc>Willougby.</sc> 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.’

<sc>Gower.</sc> Yet Fénélon bases disinterested love on the
doctrine which denies to man all possibility of merit.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.
// File: 704.png
.pn 2-284

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> But man comes into this world to live for something
higher than happiness.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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
<i>that</i>, 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, <i>for the joy that
was set before him</i>, 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> The Quietists are right in undervaluing, as they do,
mere pleasurable feeling in religion.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Quite so: in as far as they mean to say by such
// File: 705.png
.pn 2-285
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 <i>normal</i> state of the Christian life, and as such, always a
legitimate object of desire.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.’

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> I can understand Bunyan. He was <i>driven</i>
to that self-abandonment, and his faith made its brave stand
there; he did not <i>seek</i> 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?

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
// File: 706.png
.pn 2-286
imaginary sins be made to minister to display! Is it not thus
Pope describes Affectation?—how she

.pm verse-start
Faints into airs, and languishes with pride,
On the rich quilt sinks with becoming woe
Wrapt in a gown for sickness, and for show.
.pm verse-end

<sc>Gower.</sc> That reminds me of Zoilus, pretending to be ill, that
he might exhibit to his friends the new purple counterpane just
come from Alexandria.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> As though one should feed a sick lion on gingerbread
and liqueurs.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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,—

.pm verse-start
                              Alack, and alas!
What’s all this white damask to daisies and grass!
.pm verse-end

<sc>Kate.</sc> Helen and I were much interested in that old book
you lent us, Mr. Atherton, <i>The Life of Mistress Antonia
Bourignon</i>,[#] an excellent woman, shamefully persecuted.
// File: 707.png
.pn 2-287

<sc>Atherton.</sc> I think so. She took upon herself, you see, to
rebuke the Church as well as the world.

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> And had large property left her, which
excited the cupidity of those Fathers of the Oratory, who gave
her such trouble.

<sc>Gower.</sc> I never heard of her before.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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,[#] 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> I greatly enjoyed reading some parts of his
<i>Divine Œconomy</i>. Tennyson’s stanza expresses the spirit of
his theology:—

.pm verse-start
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.
.pm verse-end

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.[#]

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> Yet he uses, very effectively, in his writings,
the faculty he calls on us to resign.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> Still there is much truth in his assertion that
// File: 708.png
.pn 2-288
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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> William Law has the same idea: it constitutes,
with him, the <i>natural</i> basis of all revealed religion.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> I have also been reading M. Eynard’s
<i>Life of Madame de Krüdener</i>. 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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 <i>Valerie</i>
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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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
// File: 709.png
.pn 2-289
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.[#]

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.[#]

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-286
Note to page 286.
.sp 2
An anonymous work, entitled <i>An Apology for Me. Antonia Bourignon</i> (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.
// File: 710.png
.pn 2-290
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. (<i>Life</i>, pp. 310-313. Comp. <i>Letters</i>, xxii. xxiii. xxiv.: <i>A Collection of
Letters written by Mrs. A. Bourignon</i>, Lond. 1708.)
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-287-1
Note to page 287.
.sp 2
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 <i>Divine Œconomy</i>. 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.’ (<i>Div. Œcon</i>. 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 <i>that</i> infinity lies behind all our ‘bounded conceptions;’
but <i>what</i> that infinity is, no surrender of the Intellect can disclose to us.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-287-2
Note to page 287.
.sp 2
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.’—<i>Div. Œcon.</i> p. 93.
// File: 711.png
.pn 2-291

‘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
// File: 712.png
.pn 2-292
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 <i>Divine Love</i> 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 <i>Lux
in Tenebris</i>, 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
// File: 713.png
.pn 2-293
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.[#] 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
// File: 714.png
.pn 2-294
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 <i>Non
nobis Domine!</i> 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 <i>perceptible</i>
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
// File: 715.png
.pn 2-295
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 <i>not</i> 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.’

.fn #
See #Note:note-2-286# on p. #289:Page_2-289#.
.fn-
.fn #
See #Note:note-2-287-1# on p. #290:Page_2-290#.
.fn-
.fn #
See Second #Note:note-2-287-2# on p. #290:Page_2-290#.
.fn-
.fn #
See <i>Revelations from the Life of
Prince Talleyrand</i>; and compare Eynard,
<i>Vie de Madame de Krüdener</i>,
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.
.fn-
.fn #
See the whole story of the pastor
Fontaine and Maria Kummerin, in
Eynard.
.fn-
.fn #
Barratier subsequently became minister to the French church in Halle.
.fn-
// File: 716.png
// File: 717.png
.pn 2-297
.sp 4
.h2 id=book2-11
BOOK THE ELEVENTH | MYSTICISM IN ENGLAND
// File: 718.png
// File: 719.png
.pn 2-299
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap2-11-1
CHAPTER I.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
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.

<sc>Cowper.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
One morning, Willoughby, calling on Atherton, found him
and Gower looking over an old-fashioned little volume.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> What have you there, Atherton?

<sc>Atherton.</sc> A curious old book—<i>The History of Hai Ebn
Yokhdan</i>, by Abu Jaafer Ebn Tophail—an Arabian philosopher
of Spain, writing in the twelfth or thirteenth century: ‘done
into English’ by Simon Ockley.

<sc>Gower</sc> (<i>to Willoughby</i>). I happened to be looking through
Barclay’s <i>Apology</i>—found him referring to this <i>History of
Yokhdan</i>; 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> Who, then, may this Hai Ebn Yokhdan be?

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Simply a mystical Robinson Crusoe. The book
relates how a child was exposed in an ark upon the sea, drifted
// File: 720.png
.pn 2-300
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.[#]

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.’[#]

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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?

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Not he. At any rate, Yokhdan figures in the
first half-dozen editions of the <i>Apology</i>. I believe, in none
later.

<sc>Gower.</sc> A curious sight, to see the Arabian Sufi and the
English Quaker keeping company so lovingly.
// File: 721.png
.pn 2-301

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> And yet how utterly repugnant to our English
natures, that contemplative Oriental mysticism.

<sc>Gower.</sc> In practice, of course. But in the theory lies a
common ground.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> He would probably be prepared to prove to us
<i>à priori</i> that we could not possibly evolve such a product
at all.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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
// File: 722.png
.pn 2-302
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.’

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.
// File: 723.png
.pn 2-303

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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,—<i>therefore</i> 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
// File: 724.png
.pn 2-304
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.’[#]

<sc>Gower.</sc> We may hold that without joining the Society of
Friends.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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 ‘<i>Epistle to gathered Churches into outward forms
upon the Earth</i>,’ Fox can see scarce a vestige of spiritual
religion anywhere beyond the pale of the Society of Friends.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
// File: 725.png
.pn 2-305
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.’[#]

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.’

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
// File: 726.png
.pn 2-306
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 <i>Journal</i>, ’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.’[#] 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 <i>Journal</i> 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
// File: 727.png
.pn 2-307
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.‘[#]

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 <i>no thoroughfare</i>, 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!

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> How destructive to human life might his
very benevolence have proved.
// File: 728.png
.pn 2-308

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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?‘[#]

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> Nicholas of Basle is more like Fox than any of the
German mystics—much more so than Tauler.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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 <i>spirit</i> 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.
// File: 729.png
.pn 2-309

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.[#]

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
// File: 730.png
.pn 2-310
been placed is so much less privileged than our own. God has
light enough to be <i>Himself</i>, 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?

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> Yet no doctrine we can hold on this question
materially lessens the mystery of that dark fact—the prevalence
of Evil.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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 <i>we</i> shall receive
no inward communications of gracious influence, while we
neglect those outward means which are of divine appointment.
.sp 2
.h4 id=note-2-300
Note to page 300.
.sp 2
The full title of the work referred to runs as follows: <i>The Improvement of
Human Reason, exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokhdan</i>: written in Arabick
about 500 years ago, by Abn Jaafer Ebn Tophail. In which is demonstrated
by what methods one may, by the mere <i>Light of Nature</i>, attain the knowledge
of things <i>Natural</i> and <i>supernatural</i>; more particularly the knowledge of God
// File: 731.png
.pn 2-311
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.”[#] 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.

.fn #
See #Note:note-2-300# on p. #310:Page_2-310#.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Barclay’s Apology</i>, propp. v. and vi. § 27, p. 194. Fourth Edition, 1701.
.fn-
.fn #
Fox’s <i>Journal</i>, pp. 76-83.
.fn-
.fn #
Fox’s <i>Journal</i>, vol. i. p. 130.
.fn-
.fn #
Fox’s <i>Journal</i>, vol. i. pp. 109, 129, 232. Vaughan’s <i>Hist. of England under
the House of Stuart</i>, p. 539.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Journal</i>, vol. i. p. 95.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Journal</i>, 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.
.fn-
.fn #
Barclay’s <i>Apology</i>, propp. v. and
vi. 16. Sewell’s <i>History</i>, p. 544. (Barclay’s
<i>Letter to Paets</i>); also p. 646
(<i>The Christian Doctrine of the People
called Quakers</i>, &c., published 1693).
Compare J. J. Gurney’s <i>Observations
on the Distinguishing Views and Practices
of the Society of Friends</i>, chap. i.
p. 59.
.fn-
.fn #
Koran.
.fn-
// File: 732.png
.pn 2-312
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap2-11-2
CHAPTER II.
.sp 2
.pm letter-start
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.—<sc>Henry More.</sc>
.pm letter-end
.sp 2
<sc>Willoughby.</sc> There is no mysticism in the doctrine of
an immediate influence exercised by the Spirit of God on
the spirit of man.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> Does not your admission indicate the line between
the true and the false in that aspiration after <i>immediate</i> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> And to me also.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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,—

.pm verse-start
‘Like as the wind doth beautify a sail,
And as a sail becomes the unseen wind.’
.pm verse-end
// File: 733.png
.pn 2-313

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.’

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> So Plotinus is right, in a sense, after all;—like
only can know like. Our likeness to Christ is our true
knowledge of him.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Yes. But we become partakers of the unseen
life and light of God only through the <i>manifestation</i> of that life
and light, Christ Jesus. It is on this point that the theology of
Fox is so defective.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> His doctrine that the influence of the Spirit
is <i>perceptible</i>, as well as immediate, is still more questionable,
surely?

<sc>Gower.</sc> Perceptible! aye, and physically perceptible, he will
have it, in some cases,—manifested in a tremulous agitation of
the frame.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
// File: 734.png
.pn 2-314
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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> The traditional asceticism of the Friends is
their fatal defect as a body.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.
// File: 735.png
.pn 2-315

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> Our English Platonists contrast strongly, in this
respect, with George Fox and his followers.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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?

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> Delightful reading, those racy pages of his, running
over with quaint fancies.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.[#]
// File: 736.png
.pn 2-316

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> The Romanist type of mysticism would be the
most repugnant of all, I should think, to these somewhat free-thinking
English scholars.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.’[#]

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.[#] 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.‘[#]

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> And none of them, I think, distress themselves,
as did Fénélon, about purely disinterested love.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> They are too close followers of Plato to do that.
They do not disguise their impatience of the bodily prison-house.
// File: 737.png
.pn 2-317
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.[#]

.fn #
Let the reader consult his <i>Enthusiasmus
Triumphatus</i>, or read his
caustic observations upon the <i>Anima
Magica Abscondita</i>, and his <i>Second
Lash of Alazonomastix</i>. 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.
.fn-
.fn #
‘But now seeing the <i>Logos</i> or steady
comprehensive wisdom of God, in
which all Ideas and their respects are
contained, is but <i>universal stable reason</i>,
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 <i>Conjectura Cabbalistica</i>.
.fn-
.fn #
See Norris’s <i>Miscellanies</i> (1699):

<i>An Idea of Happiness: enquiring
wherein the greatest happiness attainable
by Man in this Life does consist</i>,
pp. 326-341.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Miscellanies</i>, p. 276 (in a Discourse
on Rom. xii. 3), and p. 334.
.fn-
.fn #
Norris says, in his <i>Hymn to Darkness</i>—

.pm verse-start
‘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.’
.pm verse-end

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.—<i>Mastix, his Letter to
a Friend</i>, p. 306.
.fn-
// File: 738.png
// File: 739.png
.pn 2-319
.sp 4
.h2 id=book2-12
BOOK THE TWELFTH | EMANUEL SWEDENBORG
// File: 740.png
// File: 741.png
.pn 2-321
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap2-12-1
CHAPTER I.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
                        What if earth
Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein
Each to other like, more than on earth is thought.

<sc>Milton.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
Here follow extracts from a section in Atherton’s Note-book,
entitled ‘Remarks on Swedenborg.’

.pm letter-start
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 <i>Signatura Rerum</i>. 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
// File: 742.png
.pn 2-322
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.[#]
// File: 743.png
.pn 2-323

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.’[#]
But I do not believe that it was the design of Swedenborg
rigidly to determine the relationships by which men are continually
// File: 744.png
.pn 2-324
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 <i>Memorable Relations</i> 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:—

.pm verse-start
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.
.pm verse-end

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
// File: 745.png
.pn 2-325
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 <i>Ding an sich</i>?’ 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
<i>Homo</i>. 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
// File: 746.png
.pn 2-326
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.[#]

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.
// File: 747.png
.pn 2-327

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.
.pm letter-end

.fn #
See Swedenborg’s <i>True Christian Religion</i>, chap. iv.
.fn-
.fn #
See <i>E. Swedenborg, a Biography</i>,
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.
.fn-
.fn #
Wilkinson, pp. 187, 118.
.fn-
// File: 748.png
.pn 2-328
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap2-12-2
CHAPTER II.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
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.

<sc>Tennyson.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
.pm letter-start
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 ‘<i>A New
Method of finding the Longitude</i>,’ simultaneously with the
‘<i>Apocalypse Revealed</i>.’

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.[#]

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,
// File: 749.png
.pn 2-329
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.[#]

‘In heaven,’ says Swedenborg, ‘instruction is committed, not
to memory, but to <i>life</i>;‘—a goodly saying.

Swedenborg’s ‘Christian Religion’ is a system of theology,
calm and orderly throughout, illustrated with plates—the
<i>Memorable Relations</i>. I interpret these marvellous narratives
much as Swedenborg does the Mosaic record. I do not question
their historic truth, <i>for Swedenborg</i>. 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 <i>Relations</i>, 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
// File: 750.png
.pn 2-330
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?[#]

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.[#] 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
// File: 751.png
.pn 2-331
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.’[#]

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 <i>proprium</i>, 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
// File: 752.png
.pn 2-332
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.[#]

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.[#] He declares
it a fundamental error of the Church to believe the passion of
// File: 753.png
.pn 2-333
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 <i>for</i> us, which
becomes also a life quickened <i>in</i> 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
// File: 754.png
.pn 2-334
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 <i>may</i>, rather than that
they <i>must</i>, 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,
// File: 755.png
.pn 2-335
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.’—<i>True Christian Religion</i>,
§ 779.
.pm letter-end

.fn #
Wilkinson, pp. 79, 130.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Heaven and Hell</i>, § 360.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>True Christian Religion</i>, § 796.
.fn-
.fn #
See the description of the heavenly
palaces, of divine worship in heaven,
and of the angelic employments,
<i>Heaven and Hell</i>, §§ 183, 221, 387.
<i>True Christian Religion</i>, §§ 694, 697.
Also concerning marriages in heaven,
<i>Heaven and Hell</i>, §§ 366-386.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Heaven and Hell</i>, §§ 329-345.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>True Christian Religion</i>, chap. vi.
6, 7; <i>Heaven and Hell</i>, § 592.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>True Christian Religion</i>, 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.
.fn-
// File: 756.png
// File: 757.png
.pn 2-337
.sp 4
.h2 id=book2-13
BOOK THE THIRTEENTH | CONCLUSION
// File: 758.png
// File: 759.png
.pn 2-339
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap2-13-1
CHAPTER I.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
Wär nicht das Auge sonnenhaft,
Wie könnten wir zur Sonne blicken?
Wär nicht in uns des Gottes eigne Kraft,
Wie könnt uns Göttliches entzücken?[#]

<sc>Goethe.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
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.

.pm letter-start
<i>Old Red Dragon, Snorumbury.</i>

<sc>My dear Gower</sc>,

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
// File: 760.png
.pn 2-340
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
// File: 761.png
.pn 2-341
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[#] 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 <i>living</i> 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
// File: 762.png
.pn 2-342
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 <i>is</i> true. Let us seek the Truth,
and if faithful to what we can find of <i>that</i>, 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
// File: 763.png
.pn 2-343
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.[#]

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.[#]
// File: 764.png
.pn 2-344

Schelling gave them a poetical philosophy, and young
Schleiermacher’s <i>Discourses on Religion</i> 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 <i>Athenæum</i> and the <i>Europa</i>, 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,—<i>therefore</i> 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
// File: 765.png
.pn 2-345
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.[#]

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
<i>Sartor Resartus</i> (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
// File: 766.png
.pn 2-346
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 <i>Athenæum</i>, 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.[#]

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 <i>does</i> 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
// File: 767.png
.pn 2-347
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 <i>Sartor Resartus</i>
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 <i>credos</i>; 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
// File: 768.png
.pn 2-348
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
// File: 769.png
.pn 2-349
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 <i>par excellence</i>—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.[#]

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.[#] Such is the aspiration dimly discernible
through the florid obscurity of his <i>Hymns to Night</i>. 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
// File: 770.png
.pn 2-350
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 <i>coup de grace</i> from the ‘<i>Eclipse of Faith</i>,’ 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
// File: 771.png
.pn 2-351
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.’
// File: 772.png
.pn 2-352

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
// File: 773.png
.pn 2-353
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 <i>Golden Ass</i>
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 <i>apex</i> 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 <i>but</i> 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,’
// File: 774.png
.pn 2-354
‘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 <i>as though</i> 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
// File: 775.png
.pn 2-355
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
// File: 776.png
.pn 2-356
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, <sc>Self</sc>, 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
// File: 777.png
.pn 2-357
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.

.pm verse-start
Yours,
<sc>Henry Atherton</sc>.
.pm verse-end
.pm letter-end

.fn #
Goethe:

.pm verse-start
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?
.pm verse-end
.fn-
.fn #
See F. H. Jacobi, <i>Von den Göttlichen
Dingen und ihrer Offenbarung</i>
(1811), where the principles of the
Faith-Philosophy are expounded,
though after a desultory, disjointed
manner:—more especially pp. 70-93.
.fn-
.fn #
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 <i>British Quarterly
Review</i> for May, 1849.
.fn-
.fn #
The principles of the genuine
Romanticism (as distinguished from
its later and degenerate form) are ably
enunciated by Tieck, in a comic
drama, entitled <i>Prince Zerbino; or,
Travels in Search of Good Taste</i>. 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 <i>useful</i> 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.
.fn-
.fn #
See Julian Schmidt, <i>Geschichte der Deutschen National Literatur im 19n
Jahrhundert</i>, th. <sc>I.</sc> c. vi.
.fn-
.fn #
Schmidt, p. 60.
.fn-
.fn #
Novalis, <i>Schriften</i>, th. ii. pp. 152, 159, 221.
.fn-
.fn #
<i>Ibid.</i>, p. 158.
.fn-
// File: 778.png
.pn 2-358
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap2-13-2
CHAPTER II.
.sp 2
.pm letter-start
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.—<sc>Pascal.</sc>
.pm letter-end
.sp 2
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
// File: 779.png
.pn 2-359
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 <i>on</i> 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.’

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Lowestoffe.</sc> 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
// File: 780.png
.pn 2-360
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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Lowestoffe.</sc> 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?

<sc>Atherton.</sc> They have. The dazzling splendour of a superhuman
knowledge or a superhuman fervour, has often distorted
the common rule of right and wrong,——

<sc>Gower.</sc> As they say the Northern Lights disturb the direction
of the needle.

<sc>Kate.</sc> Yet those glimmers and flashes are of service in the
arctic night,—better than total darkness.

<sc>Lowestoffe.</sc> Right, Miss Merivale. I fully admit the
plea.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.
// File: 781.png
.pn 2-361

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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 <i>terra incognita</i>.
Theosophy was perpetually transgressing those limits, and
hence its waste of ingenuity in vain gyrations.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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?

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> I do not clearly understand the question
at issue. Pray explain before you go farther.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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
// File: 782.png
.pn 2-362
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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Mrs. Atherton.</sc> Thank you.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> By all means, let us clear our minds of prejudice,
and seek the True for its own sake.

<sc>Lowestoffe.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Lowestoffe.</sc> Who is to be judge in the matter? Who will
say how much purging will suffice to assure a man that he
// File: 783.png
.pn 2-363
has nowhere mistaken a ‘wholesome Prejudice’ for a divine
intuition?

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> He must exercise his judgment——

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> If the Christianity of mere logic hardens into a
formula, the Christianity of mere intuition evaporates in a
phantom.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> But do not let us forget how limited is the
logical faculty.

<sc>Gower.</sc> So, for that matter, is the intuitional. Undeveloped
by culture from without, its voice is incoherent, various, scarce
audible oftentimes.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> What logic can prove to me the Eternity of
the Divine Nature? Is not that a transcendental truth?

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Lowestoffe.</sc> 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?

<sc>Gower.</sc> Several definitions have been attempted. I think
// File: 784.png
.pn 2-364
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.’

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Lowestoffe.</sc> 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.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> 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.’

<sc>Atherton.</sc> It seems to me so unfair and ungrateful that
// File: 785.png
.pn 2-365
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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> You remind me of the affectation of the author in
<i>Humphrey Clinker</i>, 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.

<sc>Lowestoffe.</sc> 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.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> As though we were to leave our understandings—like
the sandals of old—at the door of our holy places.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> Confounding spirituality with abstraction.

<sc>Atherton.</sc> 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
// File: 786.png
.pn 2-366
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.

<sc>Gower.</sc> Thinking, I conclude, that the opposite to spirituality
is, not sensuality or earthliness—but external reality.

<sc>Willoughby.</sc> Why look at me? You don’t suppose I have
a word to say in defence of such a curious confusion of
thought?

<sc>Lowestoffe</sc> (<i>who has been turning over the leaves of a
Shakspeare while listening</i>.) If any one of you should ever
take it into his head to write a book about mysticism——

<sc>Atherton.</sc> Forbid it, my good genius!

<sc>Lowestoffe.</sc> 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.
// File: 787.png
.pn 2-367
.sp 4
.h3 id=chap2-13-3
CHAPTER III.
.sp 2
.pm verse-start
                      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?

<sc>Browning.</sc>
.pm verse-end
.sp 2
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
// File: 788.png
.pn 2-368
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.
// File: 789.png
.pn 2-369

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
// File: 790.png
.pn 2-370
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
// File: 791.png
.pn 2-371
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,
// File: 792.png
.pn 2-372
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
// File: 793.png
.pn 2-373
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
// File: 794.png
.pn 2-374
heart of the Lady in <i>Comus</i>, 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.
.sp 4
.h2
INDEX.
.sp 2
.ix
Abelard, i. #142:Page_1-142#, #149:Page_1-149#.

Absorption, Mystical, i. #86:Page_1-86#.

Abstraction, Doctrine of Hugo concerning, i. #157:Page_1-157#;
  of Ruysbroek, #328:Page_1-328#;
  of the Quietists, ii. #172:Page_2-172#;
  not to be mistaken for spirituality, #365:Page_2-365#.

Adolf Arnstein, his Chronicle, i. #181:Page_1-181#, #213:Page_1-213#, #243:Page_1-243#, #319:Page_1-319#, #340:Page_1-340#.

Affliginiensis, John, i. #334:Page_1-334#.

<target id='index-agrippa'>
Agrippa, Cornelius, i. #44:Page_1-44#; ii. #61:Page_2-61#;
  his <i>Vanity of Arts and Sciences</i>, #62:Page_2-62#;
  his doctrine of the Microcosm, #65:Page_2-65#.

Alcantara, Peter of, ii. #157:Page_2-157#, #221:Page_2-221#.

Alchemy in the sixteenth century, ii. #58:Page_2-58#;
  Theological, #77:Page_2-77#.

Alexandria, Rise of its Philosophic School, i. #66:Page_1-66#, #74:Page_1-74#;
  Fusion of Religions there, #72:Page_1-72#;
  Eclecticism, #75:Page_1-75#;
  its Mysticism revived at Florence, ii. #147:Page_2-147#.

Algazzali, ii. #5:Page_2-5#.

Alvarez, Balthazar, ii. #171:Page_2-171#.

Amalric of Bena, i. #131:Page_1-131#.

Ammonius Saccas, his Eclecticism, i. #74:Page_1-74#.

Anabaptists of Munster, ii. #37:Page_2-37#.

Andreä, Valentine, ii. #132:Page_2-132#.

Angela de Foligni, i. #362:Page_1-362#.

Angelus Silesius, ii. #5:Page_2-5#;
  his Pantheism, #6:Page_2-6#;
  his Extravagance of Negation, #18:Page_2-18#;
  Analogies with Emerson, #22:Page_2-22#.

Anselm, i. #141:Page_1-141#, #149:Page_1-149#.

Antony, St., i. #109:Page_1-109#.

Apathy, i. #58:Page_1-58#;
  styled Poverty of Spirit, #331:Page_1-331#.

Apollonius of Tyana, i. #71:Page_1-71#.

Aquinas, Thomas, his Classification of Virtues, i. #123:Page_1-123#.

Areopagita, Dionysius, see #Dionysius:index-dionysius#.

Aristotle, Mischievous Influence of his Ethics, i. #120:Page_1-120#.

Asceticism, Oriental, i. #56:Page_1-56#;
  of Plotinus, #71:Page_1-71#;
  of Neo-Platonism, #76:Page_1-76#;
  of the Fathers of the Desert, #109:Page_1-109#;
  mistakes the Design of Christianity, #143:Page_1-143#;
  its services to Priestcraft, #365:Page_1-365#;
  of the Friends, ii. #309:Page_2-309#;
  discouraged by the Mysticism of Swedenborg, #328:Page_2-328#.

Astras, Indian, ii. #143:Page_2-143#.

Athos, Mount, Monks of, i. #355:Page_1-355#.

Atonement, Swedenborg’s doctrine of, ii. #332:Page_2-332#.

Augustine, i. #131:Page_1-131#, #146:Page_1-146#.

<i>Aurora</i> of Behmen, ii. #97:Page_2-97#.


Baader, Franz, ii. #351:Page_2-351#.

Bagvat-Gita, i. #51:Page_1-51#.

Barclay, his <i>Apology</i>, ii. #300:Page_2-300#.

Beghards, i. #184:Page_1-184#.

Behmen, Jacob, i. #39:Page_1-39#;
  his early life, ii. #80:Page_2-80#;
  his illumination, #83:Page_2-83#, #93:Page_2-93#, #95:Page_2-95#;
  his <i>Aurora</i>, #86:Page_2-86#;
  his debt to predecessors, #90:Page_2-90#;
  his style, #99:Page_2-99#;
  genial and manly character of his Mysticism, #102:Page_2-102#;
  his Fountain-Spirits, #104:Page_2-104#, #120:Page_2-120#;
  his Theory of Contraries, #109:Page_2-109#;
  his doctrine of the Fall, #115:Page_2-115#;
  estimate of his position, #118:Page_2-118#;
  compared with Swedenborg, #326:Page_2-326#.

Bernard, his personal appearance, i. #134:Page_1-134#;
  life at Clairvaux, #135:Page_1-135#;
  moderation of his Mysticism, #136:Page_1-136#;
  character and extent of his influence, #140:Page_1-140#;
  undue limitation of Reason in his Theology, #141:Page_1-141#;
  definition of Faith, #142:Page_1-142#;
  doctrine concerning Contemplation, #143:Page_1-143#;
  concerning Disinterested Love, #144:Page_1-144#;
  definition of Union, #144:Page_1-144#;
  Sermons on Canticles, #145:Page_1-145#;
  his mystical Interpretation, #145:Page_1-145#.

Berulle, Cardinal, defends St. Francis de Sales, ii. #281:Page_2-281#,

Black Death, in the fourteenth century, i. #313:Page_1-313#.

Blosius, Ludovic, passage from his <i>Institutio spiritualis</i>, i. #24:Page_1-24#; ii. #281:Page_2-281#.

Bokelson, John, ii. #38:Page_2-38#.

Bona, Cardinal, i. #24:Page_1-24#; ii. #178:Page_2-178#.

Bonaventura, i. #149:Page_1-149#, #154:Page_1-154#.

Bossuet, his ignorance of Mysticism, ii. #252:Page_2-252#, <i>note</i>;
  appointed to the Commission of Inquiry concerning Mme. Guyon, #255:Page_2-255#;
  prejudges the cause of Mme. Guyon, #256:Page_2-256#, <i>note</i>;
  his treatment of Fénélon, #257:Page_2-257#;
  his panegyric on the Spanish Mystics, #259:Page_2-259#;
  his <i>Instructions on the States of Prayer</i>, #261:Page_2-261#;
  his jealousy of Fénélon, #264:Page_2-264#;
  his treachery, #268:Page_2-268#;
  his <i>Account of Quietism</i>, #268:Page_2-268#;
  his hypocrisy, #270:Page_2-270#, <i>note</i>;
  his misrepresentations, #278:Page_2-278#.

Bourignon, Antoinette, ii. #286:Page_2-286#, #289:Page_2-289#.

Brigitta, St., i. #361:Page_1-361#.

Buddhism, its Mysticism, i. #56:Page_1-56#;
  its Monasticism, #56:Page_1-56#.

Bustami, ii. #11:Page_2-11#.


Cabasilas, Archbishop of Thessalonica, i. #356:Page_1-356#.

Cabbala, ii. #55:Page_2-55#, #142:Page_2-142#.

Cagliostro, ii. #130:Page_2-130#.

Callenberg, Lady Clara von, ii. #293:Page_2-293#;
  her death, #295:Page_2-295#.

Canticles, Bernard’s Sermons on the, i. #145:Page_1-145#.

Carlstadt, ii. #43:Page_2-43#;
  opposed by Luther, #51:Page_2-51#.

<i>Carmel, Mount, the Ascent of</i>, by John of the Cross, ii. #185:Page_2-185#, #192:Page_2-192#.

Catherine of Siena, i. #364:Page_1-364#; ii. #171:Page_2-171#.

Cevennes, Protestants of the, ii. #313:Page_2-313#.

Christina Ebner, of Engelthal, i. #223:Page_1-223#.

Christina Mirabilis, ii. #221:Page_2-221#.

<i>City of God, Mystical</i>, of Maria d’Agreda, ii. #164:Page_2-164#.

Clairvaux, Monastery of, described, i. #132:Page_1-132#.

Coleridge, i. #87:Page_1-87#;
  Analogies of Plotinus with, #87:Page_1-87#;
  his intuitive reason, #88:Page_1-88#.

Contemplation, doctrine of Philo concerning, i. #66:Page_1-66#;
  of Bernard, #143:Page_1-143#;
  of Hugo, #156:Page_1-156#;
  Richard’s six stages of, #162:Page_1-162#;
  the ‘indistinct’ of St. Frances de Sales, ii. #179:Page_2-179#;
  of Fénélon, #280:Page_2-280#.

Contraries, Behmen’s Theory of, ii. #109:Page_2-109#.

Cornelius Agrippa, see #Agrippa:index-agrippa#.

Correspondences, Swedenborg’s doctrine of, ii. #321:Page_2-321#.

Counter-Reformation, ii. #149:Page_2-149#;
  character of its Mysticism, #151:Page_2-151#.

Cross, John of the, see #John:index-john#.

Cyr, St., ii. #248:Page_2-248#.


David of Dinant, i. #131:Page_1-131#.

Denys, St., of France, identified with the Pseudo-Dionysius, i. #120:Page_1-120#.

Descartes, i. #43:Page_1-43#.

Desert, Fathers of the, i. #109:Page_1-109#.

Desmarets, de St. Sorlin, ii. #244:Page_2-244#.

D’Etrées, ii. #243:Page_2-243#.

<target id='index-dionysius'>
Dionysius Areopagita, first appearance of the writings under that name, i. #111:Page_1-111#;
  Theology of the Pseudo-Dionysius, #113:Page_1-113#-115, #278:Page_1-278#;
  influence of his Mysticism on the Middle Ages, #119:Page_1-119#;
  in the East and in the West contrasted, #130:Page_1-130#;
  identified with St. Denys of France, #120:Page_1-120#;
  followed by Molinos, ii. #171:Page_2-171#;
    by John of the Cross, #185:Page_2-185#.

Dionysius the Carthusian, his definition of mystical theology, i. #24:Page_1-24#; ii. #281:Page_2-281#.

Dippel, ii. #125:Page_2-125#.

Director, the Spiritual, ii. #158:Page_2-158#.

Dominic of Jesu Maria, his miraculous elevation, ii, #176:Page_2-176#.

Dominicans, Reformatory Preachers among the, i. #224:Page_1-224#.


Ebner, Christina, of Engelthal, i. #223:Page_1-223#;
  Margaret, #216:Page_1-216#.

Eckart, his preaching, i. #188:Page_1-188#, #193:Page_1-193#;
  compared with Tauler, #192:Page_1-192#, #254:Page_1-254#, #282:Page_1-282#, #302:Page_1-302#;
  his story of the beggar, #197:Page_1-197#;
  probable motive of his heresy, #204:Page_1-204#;
  analogies with Hegel, #206:Page_1-206#, #212:Page_1-212#;
  sources of his Pantheism, #210:Page_1-210#, #282:Page_1-282#;
  compared with Fichte, #212:Page_1-212#;
  two classes of followers, #330:Page_1-330#, <i>note</i>.

Eclecticism. Alexandrian, i. #74:Page_1-74#.

<target id='index-ecstasy'>
Ecstasy, doctrine of Plotinus concerning, i. #77:Page_1-77#, #78:Page_1-78#;
    of Porphyry, #97:Page_1-97#;
    of Iamblichus, #104:Page_1-104#;
    of Richard of St. Victor, #163:Page_1-163#;
  described by Said, ii. #19:Page_2-19#;
  Theresa’s prayer of, #169:Page_2-169#;
  corporeal effects of, #169:Page_2-169#;
  the ‘ecstatic life’ of Francis de Sales, #176:Page_2-176#.

Edwards, President, i. #169:Page_1-169#.

Egotheism, i. #331:Page_1-331#.

Emanation, Neo-Platonist doctrine of, i. #80:Page_1-80#;
  in the theology of Dionysius, #113:Page_1-113#;
  in the teaching of Eckart, #278:Page_1-278#;
  in the Persian Mysticism, ii. #23:Page_2-23#.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, i. #306:Page_1-306#; ii. #8:Page_2-8#;
  analogies with Angelus Silesius and the Sufis, #9:Page_2-9#, #20:Page_2-20#, #22:Page_2-22#;
  his doctrine of Intuition, #18:Page_2-18#.

Endern, Karl von, ii. #98:Page_2-98#.

Engelbrecht, ii. #125:Page_2-125#.

England, Mysticism in, ii. #301:Page_2-301#.

English Platonists, see #Platonism:index-platonism#.

Erigena, John Scotus, i. #131:Page_1-131#, #146:Page_1-146#, #279:Page_1-279#; ii. #110:Page_2-110#, #113:Page_2-113#.

Ethics, of Aristotle, i. #121:Page_1-121#;
  of Monasticism, #122:Page_1-122#.


Faith, how defined by Bernard, i. #142:Page_1-142#;
  justification by, ii. #31:Page_2-31#;
  to what extent apprehended by the Mystics, #31:Page_2-31#;
  to be distinguished from sanctification, #35:Page_2-35#;
  Paracelsian doctrine of, #73:Page_2-73#, #90:Page_2-90#, #144:Page_2-144#;
  how opposed to Sight, #240:Page_2-240#;
  Error of Spiritualism concerning, #352:Page_2-352#.

Faith-Philosophy in Germany, ii. #341:Page_2-341#.

Fénélon, ii. #173:Page_2-173#;
  his first interview with Mme. Guyon, #250:Page_2-250#;
  signs the Articles of Issy, #258:Page_2-258#;
  his Quietism, #258:Page_2-258#;
  difficulties of his position, #263:Page_2-263#;
  his <i>Maxims of the Saints</i>, #263:Page_2-263#;
  appeals to Rome, #265:Page_2-265#;
  his friends disgraced, #268:Page_2-268#;
  his reply to Bossuet’s <i>Account of Quietism</i>, #270:Page_2-270#;
  his submission, #272:Page_2-272#.

Feridoddin Attar, ii. #21:Page_2-21#.

Fichte, his Idealism compared with that of the East, i. #60:Page_1-60#;
  his definition of a Mystic, #60:Page_1-60#;
  compared with Eckart, #212:Page_1-212#.

Flagellants, i. #316:Page_1-316#.

Florence, Revival of Neo-Platonism in, ii. #149:Page_2-149#.

Foligni, Angela de, i. #362:Page_1-362#.

Fountain-Spirits of Behmen, ii. #104:Page_2-104#, #120:Page_2-120#.

<target id='index-george-fox'>
Fox, George, his early history, ii. #303:Page_2-303#;
  his narrowness and his benevolence, #304:Page_2-304#;
  his asceticism, #309:Page_2-309#;
  principal defect of his Theology, #313:Page_2-313#.

Francis, St., de Sales, ii. #152:Page_2-152#;
  his ‘indistinct contemplation,’ #179:Page_2-179#;
  his <i>Introduction à la Vie Dévote</i>, #246:Page_2-246#, <i>note</i>.

Francis, St., of Assisi, ii. #171:Page_2-171#.

Franciscans, Millenarian, i. #185:Page_1-185#.

Frank, Sebastian, ii. #47:Page_2-47#.

Fratricelli, i. #184:Page_1-184#.

Free Spirit, Brethren of the, i. #184:Page_1-184#.

Friends, Journal of the Early, ii. #305:Page_2-305#.

Friends of God, i. #224:Page_1-224#.


Gabalis, Comte de, ii. #138:Page_2-138#.

Gamahea, ii. #75:Page_2-75#, #77:Page_2-77#.

Gassner, ii. #130:Page_2-130#.

Gelenius, Victor, his Mystical Degrees, ii. #177:Page_2-177#.

Gematria, ii. #141:Page_2-141#,  <i>note</i>.

Gerlacus, Petrus, i. #367:Page_1-367#, <i>note</i>.

Germain, Count St., ii. #130:Page_2-130#.

Gerson, Chancellor, charges Ruysbroek with Pantheism, i. #338:Page_1-338#;
  his Mystical Theology, #369:Page_1-369#.

Gichtel, i. #38:Page_1-38#; ii. #123:Page_2-123#, #125:Page_2-125#.

Gnomes, ii. #139:Page_2-139#.

God, distinguished from Godhead, by Eckart, i. #190:Page_1-190#;
  Friends of, #224:Page_1-224#.

Godet des Marias, ii. #252:Page_2-252#.

Greek Church, Mysticism in, i. #109:Page_1-109#;
  stereotyped character of its Theology, #122:Page_1-122#.

Groot, Gerard, i. #334:Page_1-334#, <i>note</i>.

Guru, i. #59:Page_1-59#.

Guthmann, ii. #125:Page_2-125#.

Guyon, Madame, early religious life, ii. #207:Page_2-207#;
  spiritual desertion, #222:Page_2-222#;
  self-loss in God, #227:Page_2-227#;
  Prayer of Silence, #233:Page_2-233#;
  compared with St. Theresa, #234:Page_2-234#;
  her activity, #235:Page_2-235#;
  her <i>Torrents</i>, #236:Page_2-236#, <i>note</i>;
  persecution, #237:Page_2-237#;
  first interview with Fénélon, #250:Page_2-250#;
  her doctrine at St. Cyr, #253:Page_2-253#;
  Bossuets conduct to her, #255:Page_2-255#;
  Flight from Meaux, and imprisonment, #260:Page_2-260#;
  at Vaugirard, #263:Page_2-263#;
  in the Bastille, #272:Page_2-272#;
  dies at Blois, #272:Page_2-272#.


Hamann, ii. #341:Page_2-341#.

Hardenberg, Friedrich von, see #Novalis:index-novalis#.

Harlay, Archbishop of Paris, ii. #246:Page_2-246#.

Harphius, ii. #177:Page_2-177#, #282:Page_2-282#.

Heaven, described by Swedenborg, ii, #330:Page_2-330#.

Hegel, analogies with Eckart, i. #206:Page_1-206#, #212:Page_1-212#;
  opinion of Eckart, #206:Page_1-206#.

Heresies, Mystical, in the fourteenth century, i. #201:Page_1-201#, #209:Page_1-209#, #257:Page_1-257#, #329:Page_1-329#.

Hermann of Fritzlar, i. #181:Page_1-181#;
  his <i>Heiligenleben</i>, #181:Page_1-181#, <i>note</i>.

Hesychasts, i. #355:Page_1-355#.

Hierarchies, of Iamblichus, i. #101:Page_1-101#;
    of Proclus, #105:Page_1-105#;
    of Dionysius, #114:Page_1-114#;
  Hugo’s Commentary on, #155:Page_1-155#.

Hildegard, Abbess, i. #146:Page_1-146#; ii. #219:Page_2-219#.

Hindooism, its Mysticism, i. #55:Page_1-55#.

<target id='index-hugo'>
Hugo of St. Victor, character of his Mysticism, i. #154:Page_1-154#;
  his Commentary on the Hierarchies of Dionysius, #155:Page_1-155#;
  defines Meditation, #155:Page_1-155#;
  his Eye of Contemplation, #158:Page_1-158#;
  defines Abstraction, #158:Page_1-158#.


Iamblichus, his Theurgy, i. #100:Page_1-100#;
  his Hierarchies, #101:Page_1-101#;
  his twofold life of the Soul, #102:Page_1-102#;
  his doctrine concerning Ecstasy, #104:Page_1-104#;
  his mistakes repeated by Romanticism, ii. #346:Page_2-346#.

Ida of Louvain, ii. #218:Page_2-218#.

Ida of Nivelles, ii, #220:Page_2-220#.

Identity, Schelling’s Philosophy of, i. #44:Page_1-44#.

Illuminati, ii. #136:Page_2-136#, #281:Page_2-281#.

<i>Imitatio Christi</i>, The, i. #367:Page_1-367#.

India, Pantheism of, i. #55:Page_1-55#.

Indifference, Eckart’s Doctrine of, i. #188:Page_1-188#, #194:Page_1-194#;
  of Quietism, ii. #205:Page_2-205#, #239:Page_2-239#.

Intelligence, use of the word by Richard of St. Victor, i. #162:Page_1-162#.

Interpretation, mystical, i. #33:Page_1-33#;
  of Philo, #64:Page_1-64#;
  of Bernard, #145:Page_1-145#;
  of Richard of St. Victor, #161:Page_1-161#;
  of Swedenborg, ii. #323:Page_2-323#.

Intuition, ‘intellectual,’ Schelling’s doctrine of, i. #88:Page_1-88#;
  resemblance to that of Richard, #163:Page_1-163#.

Intuition, exaggeration of its claims by the Mystics, i. #168:Page_1-168#;
  doctrine of Emerson concerning, ii. #18:Page_2-18#;
  not an isolated faculty, #364:Page_2-364#.

Irony, Romanticist doctrine of, ii. #346:Page_2-346#.

Issy, the Conferences at, ii. #255:Page_2-255#;
  the articles of, #256:Page_2-256#, #258:Page_2-258#.


Jacobi, ii. #341:Page_2-341#.

Jean d’Avila, ii. #281:Page_2-281#.

Jelaleddin Rumi, ii. #12:Page_2-12#, #14:Page_2-14#, #15:Page_2-15#, #17:Page_2-17#, #110:Page_2-110#.

Jerusalem, Church of the New, ii. #335:Page_2-335#.

Jews, persecution of the, i. #315:Page_1-315#;
  their demonology, ii. #142:Page_2-142#.

<target id='index-john'>
John of the Cross, ii. #182:Page_2-182#;
  his asceticism, #183:Page_2-183#;
  his <i>Dark Night</i>, #185:Page_2-185#;
  estimate of his Mysticism, #192:Page_2-192#.

Joris, David, ii. #125:Page_2-125#.

Jubilation, the gift of, ii. #219:Page_2-219#.

Juneid, ii. #11:Page_2-11#.

Justin Martyr, ii. #42:Page_2-42#.


Kant, his practical Reason, i. #89:Page_1-89#.

Kathari, i. #184:Page_1-184#.

Kober, ii. #80:Page_2-80#.

Krüdener, Madame de, ii. #288:Page_2-288#;
  opinion of Madame de Genlis concerning, #289:Page_2-289#, <i>note</i>.

Kuhlmann, i. #38:Page_1-38#; ii. #125:Page_2-125#.


Labadie, ii. #291:Page_2-291#.

La Combe, ii. #226:Page_2-226#.

Lautensack, ii. #125:Page_2-125#.

Law, William, ii. #124:Page_2-124#, #288:Page_2-288#.

Leade, Joanna, ii. #144:Page_2-144#.

Light, doctrine of the Universal, ii. #309:Page_2-309#.

Louis the Fourteenth at St. Cyr, ii. #249:Page_2-249#, #265:Page_2-265#;
  urges the Pope to condemn Fénélon, #271:Page_2-271#.

Love, disinterested, doctrine of Bernard, concerning, i. #145:Page_1-145#;
    of Eckart, #193:Page_1-193#;
    of Tauler, #303:Page_1-303#, #309:Page_1-309#;
    of Ruysbroek, #334:Page_1-334#, <i>note</i>;
    of the Sufis, ii. #10:Page_2-10#, #17:Page_2-17#;
  the central doctrine of Quietism, #204:Page_2-204#;
  Fénélon’s doctrine of, #258:Page_2-258#;
  its truth and its exaggeration, #283:Page_2-283#.

Loyola, Ignatius, ii. #150:Page_2-150#.

Ludolph, the Carthusian, i. #232:Page_1-232#, #235:Page_1-235#.

Luther, Martin, his vantage ground as compared with the Mystics, i. #304:Page_1-304#; ii. #32:Page_2-32#-35;
  his reply concerning the Zwickau Fanatics, #45:Page_2-45#;
  his encounter with them, #47:Page_2-47#;
  his protest against the Mysticism of Carlstadt, #51:Page_2-51#.


Macarius, i. #111:Page_1-111#.

Mahmud, passage from his <i>Gulschen Ras</i>, ii. #24:Page_2-24#.

Maintenon, Madame de, at St. Cyr, ii. #248:Page_2-248#;
  her interest in Mme. Guyon, #249:Page_2-249#;
  her caution, #254:Page_2-254#.

Maisonfort, Madame de la, ii. #258:Page_2-258#, #282:Page_2-282#.

Malaval, ii. #243:Page_2-243#.

Margaret Ebner, i. #216:Page_1-216#.

Maria d’Agreda, controversy concerning her <i>Mystical City of God</i>, ii. #164:Page_2-164#;
  her elevations in the air, #176:Page_2-176#.

Maria of Oignys, ii. #219:Page_2-219#.

Marsay, de, ii. #291:Page_2-291#;
  his retirement to Schwartzenau, #292:Page_2-292#;
  his marriage, #293:Page_2-293#;
  his asceticism and melancholy, #294:Page_2-294#;
  his last years, #295:Page_2-295#.

Maurice, St., ii. #130:Page_2-130#.

<i>Maxims of the Saints</i>, ii. #263:Page_2-263#, #280:Page_2-280#.

Meditation, how defined by Hugo, i. #155:Page_1-155#.

Merswin, Rulman, his <i>Book of the Nine Rocks</i>, i. #321:Page_1-321#, #336:Page_1-336#.

Mesmer, ii. #130:Page_2-130#.

Messalians, ii. #11:Page_2-11#.

Microcosm, ii. #65:Page_2-65#.

Molinos, his <i>Guida Spirituale</i>, ii. #171:Page_2-171#, #242:Page_2-242#;
  charges against him, #180:Page_2-180#;
  his fate, #245:Page_2-245#.

Monasticism, Buddhist, i. #56:Page_1-56#;
  its Ethics, #121:Page_1-121#;
  promoted by Bernard, #140:Page_1-140#.

Montanus, i. #284:Page_1-284#.

Montfaucon, Clara de, ii. #163:Page_2-163#, #220:Page_2-220#.

More, Henry, his opinion of Behmen, ii. #124:Page_2-124#;
  his mysticism, #315:Page_2-315#;
  his opinion of the Quakers, #317:Page_2-317#, <i>note</i>.

Morin, ii. #244:Page_2-244#.

Münzer, ii. #44:Page_2-44#.

Muscatblut, i. #335:Page_1-335#.

Mysticism, the instructive character of its history, i. #13:Page_1-13#, #260:Page_1-260#;
  derivation and history of the word, #17:Page_1-17#;
  definitions, #21:Page_1-21#;
  its causes, #27:Page_1-27#-33;
  its classifications, #35:Page_1-35#;
  theopathetic, #36:Page_1-36#;
  theosophic, #39:Page_1-39#;
  theurgic, #45:Page_1-45#;
  in the early East, #51:Page_1-51#;
  of the Neo-Platonists, #63:Page_1-63#;
  in the Greek Church, #109:Page_1-109#;
  in the Latin Church, #127:Page_1-127#;
  opposed to Scholasticism, #142:Page_1-142#;
  reconciled, #154:Page_1-154#;
  Truth at its root, #164:Page_1-164#;
  its exaggeration of the truth concerning experimental evidence, #167:Page_1-167#;
  German, in the fourteenth century, #235:Page_1-235#; ii. #30:Page_2-30#;
  Persian, in the Middle Ages, #3:Page_2-3#;
  Theosophic, in the Age of the Reformation, #29:Page_2-29#;
  revolutionary, #37:Page_2-37#;
  before and after the Reformation, #41:Page_2-41#;
  in Spain, #147:Page_2-147#;
  of the Counter-Reformation, #150:Page_2-150#;
  of Madame Guyon, #207:Page_2-207#;
  in France and in Germany compared, #275:Page_2-275#;
  in England, #299:Page_2-299#;
  of Swedenborg, #321:Page_2-321#;
  its recent modifications, #339:Page_2-339#;
  its services to Christianity, #351:Page_2-351#;
  its prevalent misconceptions, #353:Page_2-353#;
  its correctives, #355:Page_2-355#.


Names, of magical virtue, ii. #140:Page_2-140#.

Neo-Platonism, eclectic and mystical, i. #70:Page_1-70#;
  difference between it and Platonism proper, #76:Page_1-76#;
  its doctrine of Emanation, #80:Page_1-80#;
  influence on Christianity, #85:Page_1-85#;
  process of degeneration, #91:Page_1-91#;
  its Theurgy, #103:Page_1-103#;
  expires with Proclus, #105:Page_1-105#;
  introduced into the Church by Dionysius, #113:Page_1-113#;
  confounds Universals with Causes, #117:Page_1-117#;
  its power in the Middle Ages, #129:Page_1-129#;
  its reformatory influence in the West, #132:Page_1-132#;
  Persian, ii. #4:Page_2-4#;
  revived on the eve of the Reformation, #55:Page_2-55#;
  at Florence, #149:Page_2-149#.

Neri, St. Philip, ii. #218:Page_2-218#.

Nicholas of Basle, i. #239:Page_1-239#;
  becomes the spiritual guide of Tauler, #240:Page_1-240#;
  his labours and fate, #359:Page_1-359#.

Night, mystical, of the Sufis, ii. #14:Page_2-14#;
  of John of the Cross, #185:Page_2-185#, #195:Page_2-195#;
  of Novalis, #349:Page_2-349#.

Nihilism, i. #332:Page_1-332#;
  of Angelus Silesius, ii. #17:Page_2-17#.

Nirwana, Buddhist Absorption, i. #56:Page_1-56#.

Nördlingen, Henry of, i. #216:Page_1-216#.

Norris of Bemerton, ii. #315:Page_2-315#.

<target id='index-novalis'>
Novalis, his Aphorisms, ii. #349:Page_2-349#;
  his <i>Hymns to Night</i>, #349:Page_2-349#.

Numenius, i., #65:Page_1-65#, #121:Page_1-121#;
  his hypostatic emanations, #82:Page_1-82#.

Nymphs, ii. #139:Page_2-139#.



Oetinger, ii. #351:Page_2-351#.

Oken, ii. #351:Page_2-351#.

Omphalopsychi, i. #356:Page_1-356#.

Origen, i. #302:Page_1-302#.


Pachymeres, his definition of mystical Theology, i. #24:Page_1-24#.

Pains, the mystical, ii. #170:Page_2-170#, #176:Page_2-176#.

Pantheism, Indian, i. #55:Page_1-55#;
  Buddhist, #56:Page_1-56#;
  Neo-Platonist, #78:Page_1-78#;
  its necessitarian Ethics, #91:Page_1-91#;
  of Dionysius Areopagita, #119:Page_1-119#;
  of Erigena, #131:Page_1-131#;
  of Eckart, #157:Page_1-157#, #160:Page_1-160#, #217:Page_1-217#;
  among the people in the fourteenth century, #201:Page_1-201#, #209:Page_1-209#, #257:Page_1-257#, #278:Page_1-278#, #331:Page_1-331#;
  of Angelus Silesius, ii. #6:Page_2-6#;
  of Emerson, #8:Page_2-8#, #22:Page_2-22#;
  of the Sufis, #20:Page_2-20#;
  cannot claim Behmen, #112:Page_2-112#, #121:Page_2-121#.

Paracelsus, i. #44:Page_1-44#; ii. #71:Page_2-71#;
  his four pillars of Medicine, #73:Page_2-73#;
  his Theory of Contraries, #74:Page_2-74#;
    of Signatures, #76:Page_2-76#;
  his Green Lion, #78:Page_2-78#;
  influence on Behmen, #91:Page_2-91#.

Parzival and Titurel, i. #186:Page_1-186#.

Passivity, i. #274:Page_1-274#; ii. #166:Page_2-166#, #190:Page_2-190#, #195:Page_2-195#.

Pazzi, Magdalena de, ii, #171:Page_2-171#.

Perfection, doctrine of, ii. #232:Page_2-232#;
  awakens the alarm of the priesthood, #240:Page_2-240#.

Persia, Neo-Platonism in, ii. #4:Page_2-4#;
  the seat of Sufism, #5:Page_2-5#;
  its mystical poetry, #16:Page_2-16#, #24:Page_2-24#.

Petrucci, Cardinal, ii, #277:Page_2-277#.

Philadelphian Association, the, ii. #142:Page_2-142#.

Philo, i. #63:Page_1-63#;
  his views on the Contemplative Life, #66:Page_1-66#;
  his mystical interpretation, #67:Page_1-67#.

Pico of Mirandola, ii. #148:Page_2-148#.

<target id='index-platonism'>
Platonism, distinguished from Neo-Platonism, i. #76:Page_1-76#;
  combined with Christianity assumes five distinct phases, #147:Page_1-147#;
  in England, ii. #315:Page_2-315#.

Plotinus, his early history and asceticism, i. #71:Page_1-71#;
  hears Ammonius Saccas, #74:Page_1-74#;
  object and character of his philosophy, #76:Page_1-76#;
  doctrine concerning knowledge, #80:Page_1-80#;
  concerning Ecstasy, #81:Page_1-81#;
  influence on Christianity, #85:Page_1-85#;
  analogies with Schelling and Coleridge, #87:Page_1-87#;
  necessitarian character of his Ethics, #91:Page_1-91#;
  his Trinity, #93:Page_1-93#.

Poiret, Peter, ii. #287:Page_2-287#, #290:Page_2-290#.

Pordage, ii. #142:Page_2-142#.

Porphyry, his position, i. #94:Page_1-94#;
  moderates the doctrine of Plotinus concerning Ecstasy, #97:Page_1-97#;
  his modern imitators, ii. #350:Page_2-350#.

Postel, ii. #125:Page_2-125#.

Prayer, Theresa’s Four Degrees of, ii. #167:Page_2-167#;
  of Silence, Mme. Guyon’s, #233:Page_2-233#.

Proclus, i. #105:Page_1-105#; influence of his philosophy on Dionysius, #112:Page_1-112#, #114:Page_1-114#;
  his endeavour renewed by Romanticism, ii. #346:Page_2-346#.

Protestantism, its Mystics compared with those of Rome, ii. #95:Page_2-95#, #308:Page_2-308#, <i>note</i>.


Quakers, see #George Fox:index-george-fox#;
  their asceticism, ii. #309:Page_2-309#;
  their doctrine of the Universal and Saving Light, #309:Page_2-309#;
  of perceptible spiritual influence, #313:Page_2-313#;
  of Silence and Quiet, #314:Page_2-314#;
  opinion of Henry More concerning, #317:Page_2-317#.

Quiet, Theresa’s prayer of, ii. #167:Page_2-167#.

Quietism, licentious form of it in the fourteenth century, i. #258:Page_1-258#;
  of Molinos and Theresa, ii. #172:Page_2-172#;
  charged with excluding the conception of Christ’s Humanity, #172:Page_2-172#;
  misrepresentations of its enemies, #173:Page_2-173#, <i>note</i>;
  of John of the Cross, #190:Page_2-190#;
  its doctrine of pure love, #204:Page_2-204#;
  its holy indifference, #205:Page_2-205#;
  its reaction against mercenary religion, #232:Page_2-232#;
  of Fénélon, #258:Page_2-258#;
  in the hands of the Inquisition, #276:Page_2-276#;
  its doctrine of disinterested Love discussed, #283:Page_2-283#;
  practical, among the Quakers, #314:Page_2-314#;
  in the present day, #356:Page_2-356#.


Rabia, ii. #10:Page_2-10#.

Ranters, ii. #306:Page_2-306#.

Rapture, see #Ecstasy:index-ecstasy#.

Realism, i. #130:Page_1-130#, #149:Page_1-149#.

Reason, how enlisted in the service of Mysticism, i. #40:Page_1-40#;
  how far forsaken by Plotinus, #80:Page_1-80#;
  Intuitive, of Coleridge, #88:Page_1-88#;
  Practical, of Kant, #89:Page_1-89#;
  unduly subordinated by Bernard #141:Page_1-141#;
  erroneously divorced from Understanding, ii. #361:Page_2-361#.

Redemption, doctrine of Behmen concerning, ii. #116:Page_2-116#;
  of Swedenborg, #332:Page_2-332#;
  misconceptions of, #334:Page_2-334#.

Reformation, relation of Mysticism to the, ii. #33:Page_2-33#.

Reformers, their relation to the Mystics, ii. #41:Page_2-41#.

Regeneration, Tauler’s doctrine of, i. #246:Page_1-246#;
  mistake of Mme. Guyon concerning, ii. #230:Page_2-230#.

Reimar of Zweter, i. #186:Page_1-186#.

‘Relations, Memorable,’ of Swedenborg, ii. #329:Page_2-329#.

Reminiscence, Platonic, i. #77:Page_1-77#.

Ricci, Catherine, ii. #219:Page_2-219#.

<target id='index-richard'>
Richard of St. Victor, his Mystical Interpretation, i. #161:Page_1-161#;
  his Degrees of Contemplation, #162:Page_1-162#;
  his Doctrine of Ecstasy, #163:Page_1-163#.

Richter, Primarius, at Görlitz, ii. #86:Page_2-86#, #98:Page_2-98#.

Romanism, turns Mysticism to account, i. #365:Page_1-365#; ii. #355:Page_2-355#.

Romanticism, Tieck, its best representative, ii. #343:Page_2-343#, <i>note</i>;
  opposes Rationalism, #344:Page_2-344#;
  its philosophy of life, #345:Page_2-345#;
  its doctrine of Irony, #346:Page_2-346#;
  subsides in Superstition, #347:Page_2-347#.

Rome, Church of, her Mystics compared with those of Protestantism, ii. #95:Page_2-95#;
  her debt to Mysticism, #149:Page_2-149#;
  Fénélon no fair sample of her Mystics, #356:Page_2-356#.

Rosenkreuz, ii. #132:Page_2-132#.

Rosicrucians, ii. #128:Page_2-128#;
  pretended discovery of the, #132:Page_2-132#, #136:Page_2-136#.

Rousseau, J. J., ii. #179:Page_2-179#.

Ruysbroek, his <i>Spiritual Nuptials</i>, i. #321:Page_1-321#;
  visited by Tauler at the Convent of Grünthal, #325:Page_1-325#;
  his doctrines concerning the Trinity, Abstraction, Union, #326:Page_1-326#, #329:Page_1-329#;
  his protest against false Mystics, #330:Page_1-330#, <i>note</i>;
  his doctrine concerning disinterested Love, #334:Page_1-334#, <i>note</i>;
  charged by Gerson with Pantheism, #338:Page_1-338#;
  compared with contemporary Mystics, #338:Page_1-338#.


Salamanders, ii. #138:Page_2-138#.

Schelling, compared with Behmen, i. #41:Page_1-41#;
  his Philosophy of Identity, #44:Page_1-44#;
  analogies of Plotinus with, #87:Page_1-87#;
  indebted to Behmen, ii. #124:Page_2-124#;
  his doctrine of Unconsciousness, #351:Page_2-351#.

Schlegel, Frederick, his admiration of Behmen, ii. #124:Page_2-124#;
  his Romanticism, #345:Page_2-345#;
  his extravagance, #346:Page_2-346#.

Schlegel, A. W., ii. #348:Page_2-348#.

Schleiermacher, ii. #341:Page_2-341#, #343:Page_2-343#, <i>note</i>.

Scholasticism, opposed to Mysticism, i. #142:Page_1-142#;
  reconciled, #154:Page_1-154#.

Schröpfer, ii. #130:Page_2-130#.

Schwenkfeld, ii. #50:Page_2-50#.

Science, its mystical character in the Middle Age, i. #41:Page_1-41#;
  in the Age of the Reformation, ii. #53:Page_2-53#;
  union with Religion, #67:Page_2-67#.

Self-annihilation, Tauler concerning, i. #250:Page_1-250#;
  of the Sufis and Angelus Silesius, ii. #16:Page_2-16#.

Self-love, ii. #214:Page_2-214#.

Shemhamphorash, ii. #141:Page_2-141#.

Silence, Quaker practice of, ii. #314:Page_2-314#;
  Mme. Guyon’s Prayer of, #233:Page_2-233#.

Sleep, sacred, i. #102:Page_1-102#.

Societies, secret, ii. #136:Page_2-136#.

Soul, its twofold life, according to Iamblichus, i. #102:Page_1-102#;
  Spark of the, #190:Page_1-190#;
  Ground of the, Tauler’s doctrine concerning, #246:Page_1-246#, #255:Page_1-255#, #291:Page_1-291#;
  Theresa’s Flight of the, ii. #174:Page_2-174#.

Spain, Mysticism in, ii. #150:Page_2-150#, #152:Page_2-152#.

Spark of the Soul, i. #190:Page_1-190#.

Sperber, ii. #125:Page_2-125#.

Spirit, perceptible Influence of the, i. #272:Page_1-272#;
  as taught by the Quakers, ii. #313:Page_2-313#;
  witness of the, #314:Page_2-314#;
  Swedenborg’s doctrine concerning the, #331:Page_2-331#.

Spiritualism, its revival of antiquated errors, ii. #350:Page_2-350#;
  its morbid dread of historic reality, #365:Page_2-365#.

Staupitz, ii. #33:Page_2-33#.

Stilling, Jung, i. #39:Page_1-39#; ii. #289:Page_2-289#.

Strasburg, Godfrey of, i. #186:Page_1-186#;
  rival houses in, #187:Page_1-187#;
  under the Interdict, #213:Page_1-213#;
  Revolution in, #218:Page_1-218#;
  Black Death in, #313:Page_1-313#;
  the Flagellants in, #317:Page_1-317#;
  resists the Imperial Impost, #319:Page_1-319#.

Sufis, the, ii. #3:Page_2-3#;
  their early leaders, #11:Page_2-11#;
  analogies with Emerson, #16:Page_2-16#;
    with Angelus Silesius, #17:Page_2-17#;
  their doctrine concerning disinterested love, #17:Page_2-17#;
  their allegorical lyrics, #24:Page_2-24#.

Suso, Heinrich, i. #341:Page_1-341#;
  his austerities, #344:Page_1-344#;
  his <i>Horologe of Wisdom</i>, #345:Page_1-345#;
  pursued as a poisoner, #348:Page_1-348#;
  his adventure with the robber, #351:Page_1-351#.

Swedenborg, Emanuel, ii. #321:Page_2-321#;
  comprehensive character of his Mysticism, #322:Page_2-322#;
  his doctrine of correspondences, #323:Page_2-323#;
  position of Man in his System, #325:Page_2-325#;
  scientific character of his Mysticism, #326:Page_2-326#;
  opposed to Asceticism, #328:Page_2-328#;
  his Memorable Relations, #329:Page_2-329#;
  his descriptions of the unseen World, #330:Page_2-330#;
  his doctrine of Spiritual Influence, #331:Page_2-331#;
    of the Work of Christ, #332:Page_2-332#;
    of the New Jerusalem, #335:Page_2-335#.

Sylphs, ii. #139:Page_2-139#.

Symbolism, of Philo, i. #64:Page_1-64#;
  of Dionysius, #114:Page_1-114#;
  of Richard of St. Victor, #161:Page_1-161#;
  how far necessary, ii. #353:Page_2-353#.

Sympathies, Science of, ii. #63:Page_2-63#.

Synderesis, i. #256:Page_1-256#, #327:Page_1-327#.


Talmud, its Theurgy, ii. #141:Page_2-141#.

Tanchelm, i. #38:Page_1-38#.

Tauler, i. #192:Page_1-192#, #216:Page_1-216#, #224:Page_1-224#, #265:Page_1-265#;
  Sermon on the Image of God, #226:Page_1-226#;
  his cautions to Mystics, #228:Page_1-228#;
  disappearance for two years, #230:Page_1-230#;
  his restoration, #234:Page_1-234#;
  he issues circulars and treatises comforting the excommunicated, #236:Page_1-236#;
  passages from his Sermons, #244:Page_1-244#-251, #290:Page_1-290#;
  concerning the ‘Ground’ of the Soul, #246:Page_1-246#, #255:Page_1-255#, #291:Page_1-291#;
  excellences and defects of his Theology, #251:Page_1-251#;
  elevated character of his Mysticism, #253:Page_1-253#;
  prepares the way for the Reformation, #253:Page_1-253#;
  compared with Eckart, #254:Page_1-254#, #302:Page_1-302#;
  his doctrine of Abandonment, and the state above Grace, #255:Page_1-255#;
  his internal Trinity, #255:Page_1-255#;
  on Work of Christ, #300:Page_1-300#;
  summoned before the Emperor, #318:Page_1-318#;
  retires to Cologne, #319:Page_1-319#.

Tears, gift of, ii. #220:Page_2-220#.

Theologia Germanica, i. #148:Page_1-148#, #288:Page_1-288#, #367:Page_1-367#.

Theologia Mystica, i. #21:Page_1-21#;
  definitions, #23:Page_1-23#.

Theosophy, i. #40:Page_1-40#;
  in the age of the Reformation, ii. #29:Page_2-29#, #69:Page_2-69#, <i>note</i>;
  of Swedenborg, #321:Page_2-321#.

Therapeutæ, i. #66:Page_1-66#, #67:Page_1-67#.

Theresa, St., her early life, ii. #153:Page_2-153#;
  her reform of the Carmelite order, #155:Page_2-155#;
  sensuous character of her Mysticism, #162:Page_2-162#;
  her four degrees of Prayer, #167:Page_2-167#;
  her Raptures, #170:Page_2-170#;
  her Torments, #170:Page_2-170#;
  compared with Madame Guyon, #234:Page_2-234#.

Theurgy, i. #46:Page_1-46#;
  of Neo-Platonism, #105:Page_1-105#;
  Lutheran, ii. #59:Page_2-59#;
  Modern, #130:Page_2-130#;
  Rabbinical, #141:Page_2-141#.

Thomas à Kempis, i. #367:Page_1-367#.

Tieck, ii. #343:Page_2-343#, <i>note</i>, #348:Page_2-348#.

Tophail, Abu Jaafer Ebn, ii. #299:Page_2-299#.

Trinity, of Plotinus, i. #93:Page_1-93#;
  Tauler’s doctrine of the internal, #256:Page_1-256#, #291:Page_1-291#;
  doctrine of Ruysbroek concerning, #326:Page_1-326#;
  of Behmen, ii. #103:Page_2-103#, #104:Page_2-104#, <i>note</i>;
  of Swedenborg, #332:Page_2-332#.


Understanding, its relation to Reason, ii. #361:Page_2-361#;
  not to be discarded in religion, #365:Page_2-365#.

Undine, ii. #138:Page_2-138#.

Union, doctrine of Plotinus concerning, i. #81:Page_1-81#;
    of Bernard, #144:Page_1-144#;
    of Richard of St. Victor, #163:Page_1-163#;
    of Ruysbroek, #329:Page_1-329#;
  Prayer of, ii. #168:Page_2-168#;
  Swedenborg’s doctrine concerning, #334:Page_2-334#.

Universals, confounded with Causes, by Neo-Platonism, i. #171:Page_1-171#.


Valdes, ii. #244:Page_2-244#.

Veronica of Binasco, ii. #220:Page_2-220#.

Vespiniani, Countess, ii. #277:Page_2-277#.

Victor, St., see #Hugo:index-hugo# and #Richard:index-richard#.

Victor, St., the school of, i. #153:Page_1-153#.

Vincula, Theurgic, ii. #59:Page_2-59#.

Virtues, divided into human and superhuman, i. #121:Page_1-121#;
  how classified by Aquinas, #123:Page_1-123#.

Visions, intellectual and representative, ii. #174:Page_2-174#;
  doctrine of John of the Cross concerning, #189:Page_2-189#.

‘Visio caliginosa,’ ii. #179:Page_2-179#.


Walter, Balthasar, ii. #80:Page_2-80#.

Weigel, Valentine, ii. #51:Page_2-51#;
  studied by Behmen, #90:Page_2-90#, #92:Page_2-92#, #117:Page_2-117#.

Werner, Zachariah, ii. #347:Page_2-347#.

Wessel, John, ii. #33:Page_2-33#.

Wolfram von Eschenbach, i. #186:Page_1-186#.

Woolman, John, ii. #305:Page_2-305#.

Words, ‘substantial,’ ii. #175:Page_2-175#, #229:Page_2-229#.



Yogis, the, i. #57:Page_1-57#.

Yokhdan, Hai Ebn, history of, ii. #299:Page_2-299#;
  his practice of contemplation, #311:Page_2-311#.

Yvon, ii. #291:Page_2-291#.


Zanoni, ii. #128:Page_2-128#.

Zerbino, Prince, by Tieck, ii. #343:Page_2-343#, <i>note</i>.

Zinzendorf, ii. #308:Page_2-308#.

Zwickau, the fanatics of, ii. #44:Page_2-44#.
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THE END.


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