HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS
Uniform with this volume, crown 8vo, cloth.
I.
THE SYMBOLISM OF CHURCHES
AND
CHURCH ORNAMENTS
A TRANSLATION OF THE FIRST BOOK
OF THE
RATIONALE DIVINORUM OFFICIORUM
Of WILLIAM DURANDUS
With Introductory Essay and Notes by the
Rev. J. M. NEALE and Rev. B. WEBB
II.
SYMBOLISM, OR EXPOSITION
OF THE
DOCTRINAL DIFFERENCES
BETWEEN
CATHOLICS AND PROTESTANTS
As evidenced by their Symbolical Writings
By JOHN ADAM MOEHLER, D.D.
HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS
A Contribution to the History of
Religious Opinion
BY
ROBERT ALFRED VAUGHAN, B.A.
SIXTH EDITION
TWO VOLUMES IN ONE
VOL. I
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
743 & 745 BROADWAY
1893
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.
The work which is now again published was the result of too many years’ steady application, and has served too great an intellectual use in the special department of thought of which it treats, to be allowed to fall into oblivion. Certainly the reading which the author thought it necessary to accomplish before he presented his conclusions to the public was vast, and varied. That the fruit of his labours was commensurate may be gathered from the honest admiration which has been expressed by men knowing what hard study really means. The first edition of the ‘Hours with the Mystics’ appeared in 1856; the second was, to a great extent, revised by the author, but it did not appear until after his death. It was edited by his father, though most of the work of correction and verification was done by the author’s widow.
There is no intention of writing a memoir here. That has already been done. But it has been suggested that it might be interesting to trace how Mysticism gradually became the author’s favourite study. To do that it may be well to give a very short sketch of his literary career.
From the time he was quite a child he had the fixed idea that he must be a literary man. In his twenty-first year (1844) he published a volume of poems, entitled ‘The Witch of Endor, and other Poems.’ The poetry in this little volume—long since out of print—was held to give promise of genius. It was, of course, the production of youth, and in after years the author was fully conscious of its defects. But even though some critics (and none could be a harder critic of his own work than himself) might point out an ‘overcrowding of metaphor’ and a ‘want of clearness,’ others could instance evidences of ‘high poetical capability’ and ‘happy versification.’ But at the time it was thought desirable that the young poet should turn his attention to prose composition with the same earnestness. With that object his father proposed to him the study of the writings of Origen, with a view to an article on the subject in the British Quarterly Review. When just twenty-two the author finished this task, his first solid contribution to the literature of the day. The article showed signs of diligence and patient research in gaining a thorough knowledge of the opinions of the great thinker with whom it dealt. ‘It is nobly done,’ Judge Talfourd wrote. ‘If there is some exuberance of ornament in the setting forth of his (Origen’s) brilliant theories, it is only akin to the irregular greatness and the Asiatic splendour of the mind that conceived them.’ And the words of the late Sir James Stephen were not less flattering: ‘If I had been told that the writer of it (the article) was a grandfather, I should have wondered only that the old man had retained so much spirit and been able to combine it with a maturity of judgment so well becoming his years.’ We believe it is no presumption to say that the article has not ceased to be useful to those who wish to gain an idea of the character of one whose name has often been the subject of bitter wordy war between Christian men.
In 1846, a dramatic piece by Alfred Vaughan, entitled ‘Edwin and Elgiva,’ appeared in the London University Magazine. The subject was one of a most sensational character, and was treated accordingly. Dunstan and his companions are painted in very black colours, and any doubts as to the reality of the cruelties alleged to have been practised on the unhappy Queen are not entertained. Two poems, the ‘Masque of Antony’ and ‘Disenchantment,’ though not published until later, were written about the same date.
At this time, the author was attending the theological course at Lancashire Independent College, of which his father was the president. Having completed his term of residence there, he went over to Halle in order to spend a year in a German University, before entering upon any fixed pastoral work. There he had a good opportunity of studying the state of German religious thought. The following extract from his journal shows the effect produced on his mind:—‘If I am spared to return, I will preach more of what is called the Gospel than I did before. The talk about adapting religion to the times which is prevalent here, even among the religious, appears to me a miserable mistake. It never needed adapting so much as when the apostles preached it, but they made no such effort.’ It was, too, while studying German speculations that the author adopted the system of philosophy, distinct alike from sceptical and mystical, which is apparent in this his chief work.
It is, we believe, impossible for an earnest mind to go through life without periods of sad and painful doubt. The author was no exception to this rule, and while at Halle he seems to have suffered bitterly. But he knew the one refuge for the doubting heart, and turned to it. In the ‘Dream of Philo,’ written at this time and published in the volumes of ‘Essays and Remains,’ we see some reflection of his own feelings, and the following verses which we venture to quote must, we think, strike a responsive chord in many a heart yearning for peace amidst the turmoil of the world:—
Not a pathway in life’s forest,
Not a pathway on life’s sea;
Who doth heed me, who doth lead me,
Ah, woe is me!
Vain the planting and the training,
For life’s tree on every side
Ever launches useless branches,
Springs not high but spreadeth wide.
Ah, my days go not together
In an earnest solemn train,
But go straying for their playing,
Or are by each other slain.
Listen, listen, thou forgettest
Thou art one of many more;
All this ranging and this changing
Has been law to man of yore.
And thou canst not in life’s city
Rule thy course as in a cell
There are others, all thy brothers,
Who have work to do as well.
Some events that mar thy purpose
May light them upon their way;
Our sun-shining in declining
Gives earth’s other side the day.
Every star is drawn and draweth
Mid the orbits of its peers;
And the blending thus unending
Makes the music of the spheres.
If thou doest one work only,
In that one work thou wilt fail;
Use thou many ropes if any
For the shifting of thy sail.
Then will scarce a wind be stirring
But thy canvas it shall fill;
Not the near way as thou thoughtest,
But through tempest as thou oughtest,
Though not straightly, not less greatly,
Thou shalt win the haven still.
These verses have been called ‘Alfred Vaughan’s Psalm of Life.’ The lessons taught may be an encouragement to others, as they have been to the author’s son, in times of trial and disappointment.
But it must not be supposed that at this time the author’s thoughts were all devoted to painful doubts and yearnings. He determined while in Germany to unite the labours of a literary man to the work of a pastor. His first plan was to take special periods of Church History and lay them before his readers in the form of dramas. He thus describes his idea:—‘I shall commence the series with Savonarola. I think it will not be necessary to pay regard to chronological order in the order of composition. I may afterwards take up Chrysostom, perhaps Hildebrand, endeavouring in all not merely to develop the character of the principal personage, but to give an exact picture of the religious and political spirit of the times. They must be dramas on the principles of King John or Henry IV., rather than those of Hamlet or Macbeth.’ With this scheme his father did not entirely agree, and the consequence was a considerable correspondence. Dr. Vaughan never doubted the genius of his son, or that something definite would come of his literary tastes, but he appears to have thought that the dramatic form was not a good way in which to bring the result of genuine hard work before the public. As it happened, none of these dramas saw the light, though the plan of the ‘Hours with the Mystics’ shows the strong attachment the author felt for that kind of writing, and it also shows the way in which he could overcome any difficulties arising from its peculiarities. The notion of gentlemen discussing the Mystics, over their wine and walnuts, or in the garden with the ladies in the twilight of a summer evening, has had to encounter the sneers of some harsh critics, but we cannot help thinking that advantage is gained by the device of these conversations, because the talking by various speakers affords an easy opportunity of glancing over many varying theories upon any subject at the same time, while the essayist would find it difficult to keep his line of argument clear, and at the same moment state the divergent lines of thought necessary for the right understanding of the position generally.
The author began definite ministerial work at Bath in 1848. The thoroughness with which he performed his pastoral duties did not give him much time for literary work. The articles written during his stay in that city were those on Schleiermacher and Savonarola. The materials for both essays were collected while at Halle. When writing to inform his father of the completion of the first of the articles, he refers to the Mystics in the following way:—
‘I shall not begin to write another article at once. But I should like to fix on one to have more-or-less in view. There are three subjects on which I should like to write some time or other—(1) Savonarola, for which I have much material; (2) on Mysticism, tracing it in the East, in the Greek Church, in the German Mystics of the 14th century, in the French Mystics, and lastly in those most recent; (3) Leo the Great and his stirring times. I should like to do the Savonarola next. But I should also like to know what you think on these subjects, or on any other you would perhaps like better. The first and third would consist largely of interesting narrative. The second would be rather less popular but more novel.’
The ‘second’ subject was worked up into the two volumes now republished. As it gradually became his favourite study, he felt that the field was expanding before him, and that it would be necessary, if he did justice to his theme, to treat it at a greater length than could be allowed to a magazine article. In the British Quarterly Review articles appeared on ‘Madame Guyon,’ and ‘The Mystics and the Reformers,’ which were simply the first results of his reading for the great work. It was at Birmingham that most of this writing was done: while there he was an indefatigable student. ‘There,’ says a writer in the Eclectic Review, Nov. 1861, p. 508, ‘he made himself familiar with many languages—the old German, the Spanish, even the Dutch, adding these to the Italian, French, Latin, and Greek in the classical and later forms, and all as preparations to the History of Mysticism to which he had pledged himself. The Mystics had thrown a spell upon him. Seldom have they wrought their charms without seducing to their bewildering self-abandonment.... In the case of Alfred Vaughan it was not so; he continued faithful to the high duties of life. He trod the sphere of action and compelled the ghostly band he visited, or who visited him, to pay tribute to the highest religious teaching of Christian truth and life.’ But the body would not keep pace with his mind. In 1855 he was obliged to resign his pastoral charge at Birmingham, and from that time he devoted himself entirely to literature. He wrote several articles and criticisms, chiefly in the British Quarterly amongst these, one on Kingsley’s ‘Hypatia,’ which we believe was much appreciated by the future Canon of Westminster. An article on ‘Art and History’ appeared in Fraser’s Magazine about the same time. And now we reach the first publication of his greater achievement, the ‘Hours with the Mystics.’ In August, 1855, the printing of the original edition began, and was completed in the February of the following year. The author lived long enough afterwards to witness its success, and then swiftly came the end. In October, 1857, Alfred Vaughan passed away into another world where he has doubtless found many of those on whose characters he loved to muse. We will not attempt any analysis of his character, but we cannot resist the impulse to insert one loving tribute to his memory, which appeared in a Birmingham paper (Aris’ Gazette, Nov. 27th, 1857). ‘It has seemed fit to the All-Wise Disposer of events to withdraw from this world one of its holiest and most gifted inhabitants, one who, had his life been prolonged, bade fair to have taken rank among its brightest lights and most distinguished ornaments.... The strength and sweetness, so happily blended in his character, were apparent in his preaching; he was tender enough for the most womanly heart, he was intellectual enough for the most masculine mind. As a writer he had already attained considerable reputation, and promised to become one of the chief luminaries of the age. As a Christian, he was sound in faith, benignant in spirit, and most holy in life; a delighter in the doctrine of God, his Saviour, and an eminent adorner of that doctrine.’
Before venturing on any remarks upon the subject-matter of the book itself, we may be allowed to make a slight reference to opinions expressed upon it at the time of its publication. In Fraser’s Magazine for September, 1856, there was a long review by Canon Kingsley. In this article weak points are shown and sometimes the criticisms are rather severe; but there was too much real sympathy between the two men (though they never knew each other personally) for the reviewer not fully to appreciate the good qualities in the work before him. Now that Charles Kingsley’s name is such a household word in England, no apology is needed for quoting two passages from the above-mentioned essay. ‘There is not a page,’ it says in one place, ‘nor a paragraph in which there is not something worth recollecting, and often reflections very wise and weighty indeed, which show that whether or not Mr. Vaughan has thoroughly grasped the subject of Mysticism, he has grasped and made part of his own mind and heart many things far more practically important than Mysticism, or any other form of thought; and no one ought to rise up from the perusal of his book without finding himself, if not a better, at least a more thoughtful man, and perhaps a humbler one also, as he learns how many more struggles and doubts, discoveries, sorrows and joys, the human race has passed through, than are contained in his own private experience.’ In another place, while pointing out various improvements which he would like to see in another edition, Mr. Kingsley adds, ‘But whether our hope be fulfilled or not, a useful and honourable future is before the man who could write such a book as this is in spite of all defects.’ The reviewer adds later in a reprint of this essay, ‘Mr. Vaughan’s death does not, I think, render it necessary for me to alter any of the opinions expressed here, and least of all that in the last sentence, fulfilled now more perfectly than I could have foreseen.’
With the mention of Charles Kingsley’s name we are reminded of others of the same school of thought, and therefore the following comparison in an article in the Eclectic Review (November, 1861) may prove interesting. The reader must judge of its truth. ‘While Robertson of Brighton,’ says the reviewer, ‘was preaching his sermons, and Archer Butler was preparing his Lectures on Philosophy, Alfred Vaughan about the same age, but younger than either, was accumulating material for, and putting into shape, the “Hours with the Mystics.” He died within a year or two of their departure, and still nearer to the period of youth than those extraordinary men. His name suggests their names to the mind—all victims to the fatal thirty-four and thirty-seven. He had not the wonderful touch of Robertson’s “vanished hand”; he had not the tenacity of muscle and fibre of Archer Butler; but he combined many of the characteristics of both, and added that which gave individuality to his genius. He had not the fine subtle sense of insight possessed by Robertson; he had not the rapid and comprehensive power of Butler. They again had not his large and generous culture.’ More of such favourable criticisms and kindly words from men of learning might be quoted, but we forbear. The task of referring to such sentiments is not unnaturally attractive to the son of such a man; but it is simply desired to put forward this book once again on its own merits, in the hope that there are still many who will rightly appreciate the labour and genius to which it bears witness.
About the work itself it will be necessary to say only a few words.
When the ‘Hours with the Mystics’ first appeared it traversed ground which was to a great extent untrodden, at any rate in England. Mysticism, though a favourite study of the author, was not then, and can scarcely be said to be now, a popular subject. A matter-of-fact age puts such ideas on one side, as something too weak for serious consideration. The majority indeed have but a very hazy notion as to what Mysticism is; they only have an idea that something is meant which is very inferior, and they pass it by. Well has Mr. Maurice said that such terms (Mediæval Phil. p. 143) ‘are the cold formal generalisations of a late period, commenting on men with which it has no sympathy.’ In the minds of thoughtful men the name of mystic points to a special and recognisable tendency, and the history given in this book shows that the same tendency has been working in the world for ages;—Hindus and Persians, Neoplatonists and Schoolmen, Anabaptists and Swedenborgians, have all felt its force. The main principle of all their doctrine was the necessity of a closer union with the Deity. Among Christians,—with whom we are chiefly concerned,—this close connection, it was thought, could only be gained after passing through stages of illumination and purification; and progress in the way of perfection was to be made not by labour and study, but by solitude, and asceticism. In these volumes this doctrine is exhibited; especially we trace the influence which the pseudo-Dionysius had in the fourth century; how, under his guidance, these ideas spread in the East, and thence to the West; the position taken up by Mystics against the Schoolmen, and the condition of Mysticism at the time of the Reformation. These topics are interesting, and to the questions which must be raised in connection with them in every thoughtful mind, it is hoped that the reader will find satisfactory answers in the following pages.
It will be seen that the field over which the reader is taken by the author is very large. It is believed that though there have been during recent years various contributions made to the literature on this subject, no writer has attempted to take in all the various phases which are pictured in this book. In German Mystics some writers have found a congenial theme; others have taught us more about the mysterious religions of the East. It is, we think, to be regretted that more attention has not been paid to the Mystics of the Scholastic period. The position held by Hugo of S. Victor and his followers was by no means insignificant. As a mystic, Hugo showed that it was possible to combine contemplation with common sense and learning. In an age when Scholasticism was submitting religion to cold and exact logic, it was like turning from some dusty road into a quiet grass-grown lane, to hear of devout contemplation leading up to perfect holiness and spiritual knowledge. Most of us are ready to agree with these men when they maintain that there are mysteries of Divine Truth which cannot be analysed by the understanding, but which can be embraced by thoughtful and reverent contemplation. So long as the use of both learning and devotion was admitted, we are able to sympathise with them. But it is a truism to say that the tendency of any movement is to go to extremes. The Mystics of this period appear to have recoiled horror-struck from what seemed to them rationalistic or materialistic ideas. In that, they might be right enough. But starting from the true standpoint that there are mysteries in the Infinite which we finite creatures cannot fathom with our finite minds, they proceeded to the extreme of putting devotion before knowledge. Next, they thought there was nothing to which they could not attain by devout yearning, even to absorption into the Deity. The logical conclusion of these theories tended to pantheism: those who discarded logic yielded to fanaticism. Into that error fell most of the disciples of the great Scholastic Mystics. And has not the like occurred elsewhere in history? Putting religion out of the question, Wycliffe may have been a socialist, but he was far behind his followers. But as such a falling away on the part of the disciple cannot justly take from the character of the master, so we would still say a word for Hugo of S. Victor. A man whose aim in life was the knowledge of God, and who worked for that end with courage and diligence, is not a character to be neglected. ‘His name,’ says Mr. Maurice (Mediæval Phil. p. 148), ‘has been less remembered in later times than it deserves, because it has been overshadowed by those of other men who met some of the tastes of the age more successfully, though their actual power was not greater than his, perhaps not equal to it.’
In Hugo of S. Victor and his predecessors, Bernard and Anselm, we see the combination of Scholasticism and Mysticism. To some extent they were able to keep a middle course. They would not allow their reason to run riot over sacred mysteries, and their firm hold on the articles of the Catholic faith prevented them from sinking into vague pantheism.
Among the Mystics of Germany who come next in the hasty survey we are here attempting, there does not appear to have been so much steadiness. We do not mean to say that the Scholastic Mystics were perfect; they were not free from exaggerations, but their extravagances appear to us less dangerous than were those of the old German Mystics. The names of the leading German Mystics are more familiar to most people than are any others. Who has not heard of Tauler? What the influence of his teaching was is shown in the following pages. He may be exonerated from all charge of pantheism, as may, also, be Ruysbroek and Suso; but it is very doubtful whether the writings left by Eckart acquit him of all connection with these errors. He has been claimed as orthodox by churchmen, and as a pantheist by many pantheists; and extracts can be quoted from his works in support of either theory. Eckart’s position was difficult. The general temper of the world at the time was restless; the errors and abuses of the Church drove earnest men to look within. They turned their attention to personal holiness, to the neglect of the fact that they had any duties towards the Christian brotherhood at large. To urge his hearers to a closer union with God was a noble subject for a preacher. But must it not be confessed that Eckart had gone too far when he could utter such words as these, ‘a truly divine man has been so made one with God that henceforth he does not think of God or look for God outside himself?’ His teaching certainly approached often towards the brink of the abyss of pantheism, and as Archbishop Trench says (Med. Ch. Hist., p. 348), ‘sometimes it does not stop short of the brink.’
Between these two schools, the Scholastic and the German, many comparisons may be made. The effect of them on the Catholic Church as it then existed was very different: the teaching of Anselm and Bernard was calculated to strengthen the Church, while that of the later school was not. Anselm and his friends were aware of the necessity for personal holiness, but they were always willing for their disciples to climb the road to perfection by the help of the means of grace held out in the Church, as well as by devout contemplation. The Germans, on the contrary, felt there was something wrong with the existing ecclesiastical arrangements, and through indifference to them drew their disciples away from many practices which were then accounted necessary to salvation. By this disregard for rites and ceremonies, and by their use of the German language in their teaching, they paved the way for the Reformers, and that is a great claim on our respect. At the same time, we cannot help thinking their hazy ideas rather chilling. Surely the highest point in the history of Mysticism had been reached and passed when the struggle to make reason and imagination work together gave way to mere ecstatic rhapsody.
Quietism is discussed in the second volume at considerable length; the familiar names of Madame Guyon, Bossuet and Fénélon are brought before us. The story is a sad one. There may be some who think that Madame Guyon was not worthy of the friendship of such a saint as Fénélon,—that must be a matter of opinion; but on one point all will agree, the conduct of Bossuet under the circumstances was not very creditable. Those who have a high opinion of the piety of Bossuet will confess that he does not appear in the narrative to advantage, even though they may not be able to agree with all the statements the author of this work makes about the Bishop of Meaux. Fénélon was tender, gentle, loving, and Bossuet was firm, stern, and strict, but they both did their best to serve God in their relative positions, and He, whose servants they were, will judge them.
Glancing, then, through the entire length of this history, we see that the great principle which appears to have actuated all Mystics was a desire for union with God. This they tried to cultivate by seclusion and asceticism. They neglected social duties and fled away into monasteries and deserts; and sometimes their practical life was not equal in holiness to the reported spirituality of their ecstasies. Their excesses of mortification appear almost ludicrous when they themselves alone are concerned, but when their mad conduct is seen affecting others our feelings grow stronger. But let us speak gently of such eccentricities. These good people, for good they certainly were, could not appreciate the fact that God was in the busy town as well as in the lonely desert. They heard no voice within them urging them to treat a beggar kindly for the sake of the Son of God. Some of them were very charitable, but what was the nature of their charity? Was it not simply done for their own advantage? Did they really think of charity as an act done to God, not meritorious, but as being an offering to their Heavenly Father of His own? It is to be feared that that was not the general idea. The more extravagant Mystics appear really to have been horribly selfish. They had yet to learn that the closer union for which they longed is not attained by efforts to ‘faire son salut,’ or by sitting still in the comfortable assurance of an imputed righteousness. Then it must be remembered that all these frantic efforts or dreamy ecstasies were made with a view to union with God. And this ‘union’ was of a novel kind—in many cases there was a notion of an absorption into the Deity, together with other ideas which clearly involved erroneous views of God. It was the old story of carrying one particular article of faith or pious opinion to extremes, and this to the disregard, more or less complete, of all else. The same thing had happened before in the history of the Christian Church. It is not for us to lay down a definition of what is true union with God; but we may say that the fellowship which all true believers enjoy with the Father through the Son was not enough for the Mystic. He struggled and panted for more. How each one succeeded or failed the individual reader of the work must judge, and decide for himself.
Before going further, it may be well to refer to an attack which was made on the author for his treatment of mediæval saints and of the stories connected with them. Obviously, a man who sympathises with an emotional form of religion would not be inclined to confine these enthusiasts within such narrow limits as would one of a colder temperament. This may explain the feelings of the critics in question. There can be little doubt that the ascetic and the nun, with their mortifications and trances, had not for the author much attraction. Even the style in which the book was written may have led him to write too lightly on some details of this period; but if such were the case, he knew, as well as any critic, that these people were trying to do their duty, even if they failed. The ascetic who thought he had no duty in the world, and therefore ran away and refused to ‘fight a battle for the Lord,’ and the ‘hysterical sister,’ are rather subjects for pity than for jest; and contrary as all the author’s convictions may have been to asceticism, he would rather have wept over their strange acts and mad fancies than scoffed at them. We feel convinced that any harsh remarks should be taken as referring to the system which brought its victims into such a condition, and not to the victims themselves. Though disapproving of the system, the author would never have withheld his admiration from any individual act of self-sacrifice, when it was done from a right motive and was the offering of a loving heart.
The fact that this book is again published by request is a sign that the author’s labours have been appreciated and that his name is not forgotten. ‘Some men,’ he once wrote in a letter, ‘who have died young, have lived far longer than others who have outpassed their three-score years and ten. Life consists not in the abundance of things a man possesseth, nor in the abundance of things a man doeth, but in the abundance of thoughts he thinks leading toward some special result in this world or the next.’ So, again, he writes in his diary, ‘Reputation—consider it, soul of mine, not as an end, but as a means of sowing right thoughts and feelings among thy fellows. Strive towards power over the thoughts of men—power that may be solemnly used in God’s sight as being a faithful steward for His glory. Have I a brain that must be busy, a will in this direction which—with all my vacillation elsewhere—has been and is unconquerable? Let me pray to use it with reverent lowliness of heart as a talent committed to me, fearing to misuse it, to allow any corner of the estate to be waste, or any wain of the harvest to fall into the enemy’s hand.’
If it now be asked, what are the uses of this book, we may answer that it has proved helpful as a history of religious thought. Further, it is hoped that it has been, and still will be, useful on account of the moral lessons to be drawn from the historical facts. It may also be used as showing how necessary it is to associate Christianity with our daily lives; how desirable it is that preachers should avoid confining their hearers’ attention to their own individual souls. And then it further teaches that, while we take religion into the world, we may learn also to value more the privileges of quiet and retired communion with God. In these practical modern days the idea of contemplation appears out of place; and yet it was our Divine Master who said, ‘Come apart into a desert place and rest awhile.’ Perhaps the world would have been better if the hermits had paid more attention to the little word ‘awhile.’ But the bustle of the present day is just as likely to make us forget the injunction altogether.
The book’s republication now seems to have a special opportuneness, for in much of the more spiritual progress going on around us there is a good deal of Mysticism. As in times past men sought refuge in devout contemplation from Materialism, so now a horror of Rationalism and a sense of injustice are likely to drive many to the same extreme. Whether or not there has been any undue extravagance developed as yet, it is not for us to decide. But this history will show how easy and possible it is to carry a good principle beyond its proper limits.
Before concluding, one further personal word must be permitted. No preface to this book, however short, would be complete without at least a reference to her who helped the author in his labours as only a good wife can, and who has taught his son to love God and reverence his father’s memory as only a good mother can. To her, the reappearance of this work causes a ray of light amidst a life darkened by much trouble and suffering.
It need scarcely be added that the writer of these words esteems it an honour to be in any way connected with his father’s labours. What the loss of such a father has been to him cannot be described in words. The following remarks of a clerical friend of the author may partly express the writer’s present feelings: ‘He is gone, young in years—but for him we may not lament the dispensation—since assuredly he was not only mature in intellect but rich in grace. I delight to think of him as one of that “blessed company,” the Church above—to the perfect love and friendship of some members of which I love to look forward, if by God’s grace I may be found worthy to attain to it.’
This book never had any public dedication. It was the work of the best years of a life offered to God. What was not done for the first edition will not be done now; but let these few lines of the author’s son be an offering to the glory of God—to the memory of his father—to the self-devotion of his mother.
In one of the author’s poems is the following verse which is strangely appropriate at this place:—
Let us toil on—the work we leave behind us,
Though incomplete, God’s hand will yet embalm,
And use it some way; and the news will find us
In heaven above, and sweeten endless calm.
Wycliffe Vaughan.
Littlemore, near Oxford,
November, 1879.
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.
The subject of the present work is one which will generally be thought to need some words of explanation, if not of apology. Mysticism is almost everywhere synonymous with what is most visionary in religion and most obscure in speculation. But a history of Mysticism—old visions and old obscurities—who is bold enough to expect a hearing for that? Is the hopeful present, struggling toward clear intelligence, to pause and hear how, some hundreds of years ago, men made themselves elaborately unintelligible? Is our straining after action and achievement to be relaxed while you relate the way in which Mystics reduced themselves to utter inactivity? While we are rejoicing in escape from superstitious twilight, is it well to recall from Limbo the phantasms of forgotten dreamers, and to people our sunshine with ghostly shadows? And since Mysticism is confessedly more or less a mistake, were it not better to point out to us, if you can, a something true and wise, rather than offer us your portrait of an exaggeration and a folly?
Such are some of the questions which it will be natural to ask. The answer is at hand. First of all, Mysticism, though an error, has been associated, for the most part, with a measure of truth so considerable, that its good has greatly outweighed its evil. On this ground alone, its history should be judged of interest. For we grow more hopeful and more charitable as we mark how small a leaven of truth may prove an antidote to error, and how often the genuine fervour of the spirit has all but made good the failures of the intellect.
In the religious history of almost every age and country, we meet with a certain class of minds, impatient of mere ceremonial forms and technical distinctions, who have pleaded the cause of the heart against prescription, and yielded themselves to the most vehement impulses of the soul, in its longing to escape from the sign to the thing signified—from the human to the divine. The story of such an ambition, with its disasters and its glories, will not be deemed, by any thoughtful mind, less worthy of record than the career of a conqueror. Through all the changes of doctrine and the long conflict of creeds, it is interesting to trace the unconscious unity of mystical temperaments in every communion. It can scarcely be without some profit that we essay to gather together and arrange this company of ardent natures; to account for their harmony and their differences, to ascertain the extent of their influence for good and evil, to point out their errors, and to estimate even dreams impossible to cold or meaner spirits.
These Mystics have been men of like passions and in like perplexities with many of ourselves. Within them and without them were temptations, mysteries, aspirations like our own. A change of names, or an interval of time, does not free us from liability to mistakes in their direction, or to worse, it may be, in a direction opposite. To distinguish between the genuine and the spurious in their opinion or their life, is to erect a guide-post on the very road we have ourselves to tread. It is no idle or pedantic curiosity which would try these spirits by their fruits, and see what mischief and what blessing grew out of their misconceptions and their truth. We learn a lesson for ourselves, as we mark how some of these Mystics found God within them after vainly seeking Him without—hearkened happily to that witness for Him which speaks in our conscience, affections, and desires; and, recognising love by love, finally rejoiced in a faith which was rather the life of their heart than the conclusion of their logic. We learn a lesson for ourselves, as we see one class among them forsaking common duties for the feverish exaltation of a romantic saintship, and another persisting in their conceited rejection of the light without, till they have turned into darkness their light within.
But the interest attaching to Mysticism is by no means merely historic. It is active under various forms in our own time. It will certainly play its part in the future. The earlier portion of this work is occupied, it must be confessed, with modes of thought and life extremely remote from anything with which we are now familiar. But only by such inquiry into those bygone speculations could the character and influence of Christian Mysticism be duly estimated, or even accounted for. Those preliminaries once past, the reader will find himself in contact with opinions and events less removed from present experience.
The attempt to exhibit the history of a certain phase of religious life through the irregular medium of fiction, dialogue, and essay, may appear to some a plan too fanciful for so grave a theme. But it must be remembered, that any treatment of such a subject which precluded a genial exercise of the imagination would be necessarily inadequate, and probably unjust. The method adopted appeared also best calculated to afford variety and relief to topics unlikely in themselves to attract general interest. The notes which are appended have been made more copious than was at first designed, in order that no confusion may be possible between fact and fiction, and that every statement of importance might be sustained by its due authority. It is hoped that, in this way, the work may render its service, not only to those who deem secondary information quite sufficient on such subjects, but also to the scholar, who will thus be readily enabled to test for himself my conclusions, and who will possess, in the extracts given, a kind of anthology from the writings of the leading Mystics. To those familiar with such inquiries it may perhaps be scarcely necessary to state that I have in no instance allowed myself to cite as an authority any passage which I have not myself examined, with its context, in the place to which I refer. In the Chronicle of Adolf Arnstein the minimum of invention has been employed, and no historical personage there introduced utters any remark bearing upon Mysticism for which ample warrant cannot be brought forward. Wherever, in the conversations at Ashfield, any material difference of opinion is expressed by the speakers, Atherton may be understood as setting forth what we ourselves deem the truth of the matter. Some passages in these volumes, and the substance of the chapters on Quietism, have made their appearance previously in the pages of one of our quarterly periodicals.
It should be borne in mind that my design does not require of me that I should give an account of all who are anywhere known to have entertained mystical speculation, or given themselves to mystical practice. I have endeavoured to portray and estimate those who have made epochs in the history of Mysticism, those who are fair representatives of its stages or transitions, those whose enthusiasm has been signally benign or notoriously baneful. I have either mentioned by name only, or passed by in silence, the followers or mere imitators of such men, and those Mystics also whose obscure vagaries neither produced any important result nor present any remarkable phænomena. Only by resolute omission on this principle has it been possible to preserve in any measure that historical perspective so essential to the truth of such delineations.
The fact that the ground I traverse lies almost wholly unoccupied, might be pleaded on behalf of my undertaking. The history of Mysticism has been but incidentally touched by English writers. Germany possesses many monographs of unequal value on detached parts of the subject. Only recently has a complete account of Christian Mysticism appeared, at all on a level with the latest results of historical inquiry.[[1]] This laborious compilation presents the dry bones of doctrinal opinion, carefully separated from actual life—a grave defect in any branch of ecclesiastical history, absolutely fatal to intelligibility and readableness in this. If we except the researches of the Germans into their own mediæval Mysticism, it may be truly said that the little done in England has been better done than the much in Germany. The Mysticism of the Neo-Platonists has found a powerful painter in Mr. Kingsley. The Mysticism of Bernard meets with a wise and kindly critic in Sir James Stephen.
If, then, the subject of this book be neither insignificant in itself, nor exhausted by the labours of others, my enterprise at least is not unworthy, however questionable its success.
The Author.
February 1st, 1856.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
This work has been some time out of print. It was my hope that the Second Edition might have been brought within a single volume. But that has not been practicable.
The present edition has been revised by the Author, and some fifty pages of new matter have been introduced. This new matter will be found mainly in the Sixth Chapter of the Sixth Book. In that enlarged treatment of the topic of “German Mysticism in the Fourteenth Century” the reader will meet with a slight recurrence of former trains of thought, which the Author might have been inclined to suppress, but with which I have not deemed it well to intermeddle. It will be seen that the design of the supplementary matter is, in part, as a reply to criticisms which seemed to call for some such explanation; and, in part, that points touched upon elsewhere might be given with more fulness.
To see this Second Edition through the press has been the work of one whose intelligent sympathy and patient effort assisted and encouraged the Author, in many ways, in the prosecution of his studies, and who now finds the solace of her loneliness in treasuring up the products of his mind, and in cherishing the dear ones he has left to her wise love and oversight.
If Mysticism be often a dream, it is commonly a dream in the right direction. Its history presents one of the most significant chapters in the story of humanity.
Robert Vaughan.
September 7th, 1860.
CONTENTS OF VOL I.
Henry Atherton [3]
Lionel Gower [5]
Frank Willoughby [7]
Connection of the Arts [9]
Mysticism in an Emblem [11]
History [15]
Etymology [17]
Definitions [21]
Christian Mysticism [22]
Causes of Mysticism [27]
Reaction against Formalism [28]
Weariness of the World [30]
The Fascination of Mystery [31]
Classification of Mystics [35]
Theopathetic Mysticism [37]
Theosophy [39]
Theurgy [45]
[BOOK II.—EARLY ORIENTAL MYSTICISM.]
The Bagvat-Gita [51]
Characteristics of Hindoo Mysticism [54]
The Yogis [57]
[BOOK III.—THE MYSTICISM OF THE NEO-PLATONISTS.]
Philo [64]
The Therapeutæ [66]
Asceticism [67]
Plotinus [71]
Alexandria [72]
Eclecticism [75]
Platonism and Neo-Platonism [76]
Plotinus on Ecstasy [81]
Neo-Platonism in the Christian Church [85]
Analogies between Ancient and Modern Speculation [87]
Intuition [89]
Theurgy [91]
Porphyry [94]
Philosophy seeks to rescue Polytheism [96]
Theurgic Mysticism of Iamblichus [100]
Proclus [105]
[BOOK IV.—MYSTICISM IN THE GREEK CHURCH.]
Saint Anthony [109]
The Pseudo-Dionysius [111]
The Hierarchies of Dionysius [114]
The Via Negativa and the Via Affirmativa [115]
Virtues human and superhuman [121]
Stagnation [122]
[BOOK V.—MYSTICISM IN THE LATIN CHURCH.]
Intellectual Activity of the West [130]
The Services of Platonism [132]
Clairvaux [132]
The Mysticism of Bernard [136]
Mysticism opposed to Scholasticism [141]
Moderation of Bernard [144]
Hugo of St Victor [153]
Mysticism combined with Scholasticism [154]
The Eye of Contemplation [157]
Richard of St Victor [159]
The Six Stages of Contemplation [162]
The Truth and the Error of Mystical Abstraction [164]
The Inner Light and the Outer [166]
The Faculty of Intuition [169]
[BOOK VI.—GERMAN MYSTICISM IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.]
The Chronicle of Adolf Arnstein of Strasburg [181]
Hermann of Fritzlar and his Legends [182]
The Heretics of the Rhineland [184]
The Preaching of Master Eckart [188]
From the Known God to the Unknown [189]
Disinterested Love [193]
Eckart’s Story of the Beggar [197]
Ju-ju [199]
The Nameless Wild [201]
The Doctrine of Eckart discussed [204]
Resemblance to Hegel [206]
Pantheism Old and New [209]
The Interdict [214]
Henry of Nördlingen [216]
Insurrection in Strasburg [218]
The Friends of God [224]
Tauler on the Image of God [226]
Tauler’s Disappearance [230]
His Disgrace [233]
His Restoration [234]
The People comforted and the Pope defied [236]
Nicholas of Basle and Tauler [239]
The Theology of Tauler [244]
His Advice to Mystics [248]
Estimate of his Doctrine [251]
Further Thoughts on Tauler and Middle-Age Mysticism [260]
Tests of Mysticism [268]
Spiritual Influence [272]
Views of God and the Universe [277]
Immanence of God [280]
Montanism [284]
Ground of the Sou [291]
Origen and Tauler [302]
Luther and Tauler [304]
Teufelsdröckh [307]
The Black Death [313]
The Flagellants [316]
A Visit to Ruysbroek at Grünthal [325]
Ruysbroek on Mystical Union [328]
Heretical Mystics [330]
Ecclesiastical Corruption [332]
Heinrich Suso [341]
His Austerities [343]
His Visions [345]
His Adventures [348]
The Monks of Mount Athos [356]
Nicholas of Basle [359]
Brigitta [361]
Angela de Foligni [362]
Catharine of Siena [364]
The “German Theology” [366]
The “Imitation of Christ” [367]
Gerson [368]
BOOK THE FIRST
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I.
Wie fruchtbar ist der kleinste Kreis,
Wenn man ihn wohl zu pflegen weiss.[[2]]
Goethe.
It was on the evening of a November day that three friends sat about their after-dinner table, chatting over their wine and walnuts, while the fire with its huge log crackled and sparkled, and the wind without moaned about the corners of the house.
Everyone is aware that authors have in their studies an unlimited supply of rings of Gyges, coats of darkness, tarn-caps, and other means of invisibility,—that they have the key to every house, and can hear and see words and actions the most remote. Come with me, then, kindly reader, and let us look and listen unseen; we have free leave; and you must know these gentlemen better.
First of all, the host. See him leaning back in his chair, and looking into the fire, one hand unconsciously smoothing with restless thumb and finger the taper stem of his wineglass, the other playing with the ears of a favourite dog. He appears about thirty years of age, is tall, but loses something of his real height by a student’s stoop about the shoulders. Those decided almost shaggy eyebrows he has would lead you to expect quick, piercing eyes,—the eyes of the observant man of action. But now that he looks towards us, you see instead eyes of hazel, large, slow-rolling, often dreamy in their gaze,—such for size and lustre as Homer gives to ox-eyed Juno. The mouth, too, and the nose are delicately cut. Their outline indicates taste rather than energy. Yet that massive jaw, again, gives promise of quiet power,—betokens a strength of that sort, most probably, which can persevere in a course once chosen with indomitable steadiness, but is not an agile combative force, inventive in assaults and rejoicing in adventurous leadership. Men of his species resemble fountains, whose water-column a sudden gust of wind may drive aslant, or scatter in spray across the lawn, but—the violence once past—they play upward as truly and as strong as ever.
Perhaps it is a pity that this Henry Atherton is so rich as he is,—owns his Ashfield House, with its goodly grounds, and has never been forced into active professional life, with its rough collisions and straining anxieties. Abundance of leisure is a trial to which few men are equal. Gray was in the right when he said that something more of genius than common was required to teach a man how to employ himself. My friend became early his own task-master, and labours harder from choice than many from necessity. To high attainment as a classical scholar he has added a critical acquaintance with the literature and the leading languages of modern Europe. Upstairs is a noble library, rich especially in historical authorities, and there Atherton works, investigating now one historic question, now another, endeavouring out of old, yellow-faced annals to seize the precious passages which suggest the life of a time, and recording the result of all in piles of manuscript.
How often have I and Gower—that youngest of the three, on the other side, with the moustache—urged him to write a book. But he waits, and, with his fastidiousness, will always wait, I am afraid, till he has practically solved this problem;—given a subject in remote history, for which not ten of your friends care a straw; required such a treatment of it as shall at once be relished by the many and accredited as standard by the few. So, thinking it useless to write what scarcely anyone will read, and despairing of being ever erudite and popular at the same time, he is content to enquire and to accumulate in most happy obscurity. Doubtless the world groans under its many books, yet it misses some good ones that would assuredly be written if able men with the ambition were oftener possessed of the time required, or if able men with the time were oftener possessed of the ambition.
You ask me, ‘Who is this Gower?’
An artist. Atherton met with him at Rome, where he was tracing classic sites, and Gower worshipping the old masters. Their pathway chanced on one or two occasions to coincide, and by little and little they grew fast friends. They travelled through Germany together on their way home, and found their friendship robust enough to survive the landing on our British shore. Unquestionably the pictured Vatican, sunny Forum, brown Campagna, garlanded baths of Caracalla, with quaint, ingenious Nuremberg, and haunted Hartz, made common memories for both. But this was not all. Atherton had found the young painter in a sentimental fever. He raved about Shelley; he was full of adoration for the flimsiest abstractions—enamoured of impersonations the most impalpable; he discoursed in high strain on the dedication of life as a Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. The question of questions with him concerned not Truth or Fable, but the Beautiful or the Not-Beautiful. Whatever charmed his taste was from Ormuzd, the Good: whatever revolted it, from Ahriman, the Evil; and so the universe was summarily parted. He fancied he was making art religious, while, in fact, he made religion a mere branch of art,—and that branch, of all others, the most open to individual caprice.
From these wanderings Atherton reclaimed him, wisely, and therefore almost insensibly. Gower never forgot the service. In his admiration for Atherton, when fully conscious of it, he little suspected that he, too, had conferred a benefit in his turn. Atherton had looked too much within, as Gower too exclusively without. A certain imaginative, even poetical element, dormant in the mind of the former, was resuscitated by this friendship.
Gower rejoices in the distressingly novelish Christian name of Lionel. Why will parents give names to their offspring which are sure to entail ridicule during the most susceptible period of existence? No sooner did young Lionel enter school, with that delicate red-and-white complexion, and long curling hair, than he was nicknamed Nelly. But he fought his way stoutly till he won a title from the first part of his name rather than the last, and in school traditions figures still as Lion, royally grim and noble. That open countenance and high forehead, with the deep piercing eyes set rather far apart, constitute not merely a promising physiognomy for the artist, they bear faithful witness to mental power and frankness of character, to practical sagacity and force. In one respect only can he be charged with asserting in his person his professional pretensions,—his hair is parted in the middle, falling in natural waves on either side; long enough, as your eye tells you, for grace; too short for affectation.
One quality in Gower I have always especially liked,—his universality. Not that he sets up for Encyclopædism; on the contrary, he laments more than he need the scantiness of his knowledge and his want of time for its enlargement. What I mean is that with every kind of enquiry, every province of culture, he seems to have intuitively the readiest sympathy. Though his notion of the particular art or science may be only cursory and general, his imagination puts him in some way in the place of its exclusive devotees, and he enters into their feelings till their utmost worship appears scarcely excessive to him. I have heard such votaries pour out unreservedly into his ear, as into that of a brother enthusiast, all those delightful details of adventure, of hope and fear, of research and of conjecture, which make the very life of the most minute or the most arid pursuits, and which books impart to us so rarely. And all this (making the world to him such a wide one) without taking aught from his allegiance to painting. Already have his genius and his diligence achieved success—you will find his pictures realizing high prices—and that snug little box of his, only ten minutes’ walk from Ashfield, is furnished much too handsomely to accord with the popular idea of what must be the residence of a young artist, five-and-twenty, but newly started in his profession, and with all his ‘expectations’ gathered up within his brush.
The third member of the trio, Mr. Author, has not certainly the personal advantages of our friend Gower. I suppose you expect me to say ‘our’ now, if only as a compliment. Yet stay—a very expressive face, with a genial hearty look about it;—there! now he is smiling, that rather clumsy mouth is quite pleasant; but he lets too much beard grow for my taste.
Bearded Willoughby, O Reader, is a literary man, a confirmed bachelor, they say; and encrusted with some roughnesses and oddities which conceal from the eyes of strangers his real warmth of heart and delicacy of feeling. His parents destined him for the Church from those tender years wherein the only vocation manifest is that which summons boyhood to peg-top and jam tart. When the time drew near in which he should have taken orders, Willoughby went up to London, brimful of eager philanthropy, of religious doubts, and of literary ambition, to become one of the High-priests of Letters. His first work was a novel to illustrate the mission of the literary Priesthood, a topsy-turvy affair, but dashingly clever—by the way, you can scarcely offend him more than to mention it now;—with this book he succeeded in producing a sensation, and the barrier thus passed, his pen has found full employment ever since. He has now abandoned the extravagances of hero-worship, and I have even heard him intimate a doubt as to whether ‘able editors’ were, after all, the great, divinely-accredited hierophants of the species.
At present Willoughby is occupied, as time allows, with a philosophical romance, in which are to be embodied his views of society as it is and as it should be. This desperate enterprise is quite a secret; even Atherton and Gower know nothing of it; so you will not mention it, if you please, to more than half-a-dozen of your most intimate friends.
Willoughby was first introduced to Atherton as the author of some articles in favour of certain social reforms in which the latter had deeply interested himself. So remarkable were these papers for breadth, discrimination, and vivacity of style, that the admiring Atherton could not rest till he had made the acquaintance of the writer. The new combatant awakened general attention, and Frank Willoughby was on the point of becoming a lion. But his conversational powers were inconsiderable. His best thoughts ran with his ink from the point of the pen. So Atherton, with little difficulty, carried him off from the lion-hunters.
The three friends were agreed that the crowning locality of all for any mortal was a residence a few miles from town, with congenial neighbours close at hand,—a house or two where one might drop in for an evening at any time. As was their theory so was their practice, and the two younger men are often to be found in the evening at Atherton’s, sometimes in the library with him, sometimes in the drawing-room, with the additional enjoyment afforded by the society of his fair young wife and her sister.
But while I have been Boswellizing to you about the past history of these friends of mine, you cannot have heard a word they have been saying. Now I will be quiet,—let us listen.
CHAPTER II.
Philosophy itself
Smacks of the age it lives in, nor is true
Save by the apposition of the present.
And truths of olden time, though truths they be,
And living through all time eternal truths,
Yet want the seas’ning and applying hand
Which Nature sends successive. Else the need
Of wisdom should wear out and wisdom cease,
Since needless wisdom were not to be wise.
Edwin the Fair.
Atherton. A pleasant little knot to set us, Gower,—to determine the conditions of your art.
Willoughby. And after dinner, too, of all times.
Gower. Why not? If the picture-critics would only write their verdicts after dinner, many a poor victim would find his dinner prospects brighter. This is the genial hour; the very time to discuss æsthetics, where geniality is everything.
Willoughby. Do you remember that passage in one of our old plays (I think it was in Lamb I saw it), where the crazed father asks all sorts of impossible things from the painter. He wants him to make the tree shriek on which his murdered son hangs ghastly in the moonlight.
Gower. Salvator has plenty of them, splintered with shrieking.
Willoughby. But this man’s frenzy demands more yet:—make me cry, make me mad, make me well again, and in the end leave me in a trance,—and so forth.
Atherton. Fortunate painter—a picture gallery ordered in a breath!
Willoughby. By no means. Now does this request, when you come to think of it, so enormously violate the conditions of the art? Seriously, I should state the matter thus:—The artist is limited to a moment only, and yet is the greater artist in proportion as he can not only adequately occupy, but even transcend that moment.
Gower. I agree with you. Painting reaches its highest aim when it carries us beyond painting; when it is not merely itself a creation, but makes the spectator creative, and prompts him with the antecedents and the consequents of the represented action.
Atherton. But all are not equal to the reception of such suggestions.
Gower. And so, with unsusceptible minds, we must be satisfied if they praise us for our imitation merely.
Willoughby. Yet even they will derive more pleasure, though unable to account for it, from works of this higher order. Those, assuredly, are the masterpieces of art, in any branch, which are, as it were, triumphal arches that lead us out into the domain of some sister art. When poetry pourtrays with the painter,—
Gower. My favourite, Spenser, to wit.—
Willoughby. When painting sings its story with the minstrel, and when music paints and sings with both, they are at their height. Take music, for instance. What scenes does some fine overture suggest, even when you know nothing of its design, as you close your eyes and yield to its influence. The events, or the reading of the previous day, the incidents of history or romance, are wrought up with glorious transfigurations, and you are in the land of dreams at once. Some of them rise before me at this moment, vivid as ever:—now I see the fair damosels of the olden time on their palfreys, prancing on the sward beside a castle gate, while silver trumpets blow; then, as the music changes, I hear cries far off on forlorn and haunted moors; now it is the sea, and there sets the sun, red, through the ribs of a wrecked hull, that cross it like skeleton giant bars. There is one passage in the overture to Fra Diavolo, during which I always emerge, through ocean caves, in some silken palace of the east, where the music rises and rains in the fountains, and ethereally palpitates in their wavering rainbows. But dream-scenery of this sort is familiar to most persons at such times.
Gower. I have often revelled in it.
Willoughby. And what is true for so many with regard to music, may sometimes be realized on seeing pictures.
Atherton. Only, I think, in a way still more accidental and arbitrary. An instance, however, of the thing you mention did happen to me last week. I had been reading a German writer on mysticism, searching, after many disappointments, for a satisfactory definition of it. Page after page of metaphysical verbiage did I wade through in vain. At last, what swarms of labouring words had left as obscure as ever, a picture seemed to disclose to me in a moment. I saw that evening, at a friend’s house, a painting which revealed to me, as I imagined, the very spirit of mysticism in a figure; it was a visible emblem or hieroglyph of that mysterious religious affection.
Willoughby. Your own subjectivity forged both lock and key together, I suspect.
Gower. What in the world did the piece represent?
Atherton. I will describe it as well as I can. It was the interior of a Spanish cathedral. The most prominent object in the foreground below was the mighty foot of a staircase, with a balustrade of exceeding richness, which, in its ascent, crosses and recrosses the picture till its highest flight is lost in darkness,—for on that side the cathedral is built against a hill. A half-light slanted down—a sunbeam through the vast misty space—from a window without the range of the picture. At various stages of the mounting stairway figures on pillars, bearing escutcheons, saints and kings in fretted niches, and painted shapes of gules and azure from the lofty window in the east, looked down on those who were ascending, some in brightness, some in shadow. At the foot of the stairs were two couchant griffins of stone, with expanded spiny wings, arched necks fluted with horny armour, and open threatening jaws.
Gower. Now for the interpretation of your parable in stone.
Atherton. It represented to me the mystic’s progress—my mind was full of that—his initiation, his ascent, his consummation in self-loss. First of all the aspirant, whether he seeks superhuman knowledge or superhuman love, is confronted at the outset by terrible shapes—the Dwellers of the Threshold, whether the cruelty of asceticism, the temptations of the adversary, or the phantoms of his own feverish brain. This fiery baptism manfully endured, he begins to mount through alternate glooms and illuminations; now catching a light from some source beyond the grosser organs of ordinary men, again in darkness and barren drought of soul. The saintly memories of adepts and of heroes in these mystic labours are the faithful witnesses that cheer him at each stage, whose far glories beacon him from their place of high degree as he rises step by step. Are not those first trials fairly symbolized by my griffins, those vicissitudes of the soul by such light and shadow, and those exalted spectators by the statues of my stairway and the shining ones of my oriel window? Then for the climax. The aim of the mystic, if of the most abstract contemplative type, is to lose himself in the Divine Dark[[3]]—to escape from everything definite, everything palpable, everything human, into the Infinite Fulness; which is, at the same time, the ‘intense inane.’ The profoundest obscurity is his highest glory; he culminates in darkness; for is not the deathlike midnight slumber of the sense, he will ask us, the wakeful noonday of the spirit? So, as I looked on the picture, I seemed to lose sight of him where the summit of the stair was lost among the shadows crouched under the roof of that strange structure.
Gower. I perceive the analogy. I owe you thanks for enabling me to attach at least some definite idea to the word mysticism. I confess I have generally used the term mystical to designate anything fantastically unintelligible, without giving to it any distinct significance.
Willoughby. I have always been partial to the mystics, I must say. They appear to me to have been the conservators of the poetry and heart of religion, especially in opposition to the dry prose and formalism of the schoolmen.
Atherton. So they really were in great measure. They did good service, many of them, in their day—their very errors often such as were possible only to great souls. Still their notions concerning special revelation and immediate intuition of God were grievous mistakes.
Willoughby. Yet without the ardour imparted by such doctrines, they might have lacked the strength requisite to withstand misconceptions far more mischievous.
Atherton. Very likely. We should have more mercy on the one-sidedness of men, if we reflected oftener that the evil we condemn may be in fact keeping out some much greater evil on the other side.
Willoughby. I think one may learn a great deal from such erratic or morbid kinds of religion. Almost all we are in a position to say, concerning spiritual influence, consists of negatives—and what that influence is not we can best gather from these abnormal phases of the mind. Certainly an impartial estimate of the good and of the evil wrought by eminent mystics, would prove a very instructive occupation; it would be a trying of the spirits by their fruits.
Gower. And all the more useful as the mistakes of mysticism, whatever they may be, are mistakes concerning questions which we all feel it so important to have rightly answered; committed, too, by men of like passions with ourselves, so that what was danger to them may be danger also to some of us, in an altered form.
Atherton. Unquestionably. Rationalism overrates reason, formalism action, and mysticism feeling—hence the common attributes of the last, heat and obscurity. But a tendency to excess in each of these three directions must exist in every age among the cognate varieties of mind. You remember how Pindar frequently introduces into an ode two opposite mythical personages, such as a Pelops or a Tantalus, an Ixion or a Perseus, one of whom shall resemble the great man addressed by the poet in his worse, the other in his better characteristics; that thus he may be at once encouraged and deterred. Deeper lessons than were drawn for Hiero from the characters of the heroic age may be learnt by us from the religious struggles of the past. It would be impossible to study the position of the old mystics without being warned and stimulated by a weakness and a strength to which our nature corresponds;—unless, indeed, the enquiry were conducted unsympathizingly; with cold hearts, as far from the faith of the mystics as from their follies.
Gower. If we are likely to learn in this way from such an investigation, suppose we agree to set about it, and at once.
Atherton. With all my heart. I have gone a little way in this direction alone; I should be very glad to have company upon the road.
Willoughby. An arduous task, when you come to look it in the face,—to determine that narrow line between the genuine ardour of the Christian and the overwrought fervours of the mystical devotee,—to enter into the philosophy of such a question; and that with a terminology so misleading and so defective as the best at our service. It will be like shaping the second hand of a watch with a pair of shears, I promise you. We shall find continually tracts of ground belonging to one of the rival territories of True and False inlaid upon the regions of the other, like those patches from a distant shire that lie in the middle of some of our counties. Many of the words we must employ to designate a certain cast of mind or opinion are taken from some accidental feature or transitory circumstance,—express no real characteristic of the idea in question. They indicate our ignorance, like the castles with large flags, blazoned with the arms of sovereigns, which the old monkish geographers set down in their maps of Europe to stand instead of the rivers, towns, and mountains of an unknown interior.
Atherton. True enough; but we must do the best we can. We should never enter on any investigation a little beneath the surface of things if we consider all the difficulties so gravely. Besides, we are not going to be so ponderously philosophical about the matter. The facts themselves will be our best teachers, as they arise, and as we arrange them when they accumulate.
History fairly questioned is no Sphinx. She tells us what kind of teaching has been fruitful in blessing to humanity, and why; and what has been a mere boastful promise or powerless formula. She is the true test of every system, and the safeguard of her disciples from theoretical or practical extravagance. Were her large lessons learned, from how many foolish hopes and fears would they save men! We should not then see a fanatical confidence placed in pet theories for the summary expulsion of all superstition, wrongfulness, and ill-will,—theories whose prototypes failed ages back: neither would good Christian folk be so frightened as some of them are at the seemingly novel exhibitions of unbelief in our time.
Willoughby. A great gain—to be above both panic and presumption. I have never heartily given myself to a historic study without realizing some such twofold advantage. It animated and it humbled me. How minute my power; but how momentous to me its conscientious exercise! I will hunt this mystical game with you, or any other, right willingly; all the more so, if we can keep true to a historic rather than theoretical treatment of the subject.
Gower. As to practical details, then:—I propose that we have no rules.
Willoughby. Certainly not; away with formalities; let us be Thelemites, and do as we like. We can take up this topic as a bye-work, to furnish us with some consecutive pursuit in those intervals of time we are so apt to waste. We can meet—never mind at what intervals, from a week to three months—and throw into the common stock of conversation our several reading on the questions in hand.
Atherton. Or one of us may take up some individual or period; write down his thoughts: and we will assemble then to hear and talk the matter over.
Gower. Very good. And if Mrs. Atherton and Miss Merivale will sometimes deign to honour our evenings with their society, our happiness will be complete.
This mention of the ladies reminds our friends of the time, and they are breaking up to join them.
The essays and dialogues which follow have their origin in the conversation to which we have just listened.
CHAPTER III.
If we entertain the inward man in the purgative and illuminative way, that is, in actions of repentance, virtue, and precise duty, that is the surest way of uniting us to God, whilst it is done by faith and obedience; and that also is love; and in these peace and safety dwell. And after we have done our work, it is not discretion in a servant to hasten to his meal, and snatch at the refreshment of visions, unions, and abstractions; but first we must gird ourselves, and wait upon the master, and not sit down ourselves, till we all be called at the great supper of the Lamb.—Jeremy Taylor.
‘So, we are to be etymological to-night,’ exclaimed Gower, as he stepped forward to join Willoughby in his inspection of a great folio which Atherton had laid open on a reading desk, ready to entertain his friends.
‘What says Suidas about our word mysticism?’
Willoughby. I see the old lexicographer derives the original word from the root mu, to close: the secret rites and lessons of the Greek mysteries were things about which the mouth was to be closed.[[4]]
Gower. We have the very same syllable in our language for the same thing—only improved in expressiveness by the addition of another letter,—we say, ‘to be mum.’
Atherton. Well, this settles one whole class of significations at once. The term mystical may be applied in this sense to any secret language or ritual which is understood only by the initiated. In this way the philosophers borrowed the word figuratively from the priests, and applied it to their inner esoteric doctrines. The disciple admitted to these was a philosophical ‘myst,’ or mystic.
Willoughby. The next step is very obvious. The family of words relating to mystery, initiation, &c., are adopted into the ecclesiastical phraseology of the early Christian world,—not in the modified use of them occasionally observable in St. Paul, but with their old Pagan significance.
Gower. So that the exclusive and aristocratic spirit of Greek culture re-appears in Christianity?
Atherton. Just so. Thus you see the church doors shutting out the catechumens from beholding ‘the mystery’ (as they came to call the Eucharist, par excellence) quite as rigidly as the brazen gates of Eleusis excluded the profane many. You hear Theodoret and Ambrose speaking freely before the uninitiated on moral subjects, but concerning the rites they deemed of mysterious, almost magical efficacy, they will deliver only obscure utterances to such auditors; their language is purposely dark and figurative,—suggestive to the initiated, unintelligible to the neophyte. How often on approaching the subject of the sacrament, does Chrysostom stop short in his sermon, and break off abruptly with the formula,—‘the initiated will understand what I mean.’ So Christianity, corrupted by Gentile philosophy, has in like manner its privileged and its inferior order of votaries,—becomes a respecter of persons, with arbitrary distinction makes two kinds of religion out of one, and begins to nourish with fatal treachery its doctrine of reserve.[[5]]
Willoughby. But Suidas has here, I perceive, a second meaning in store for us. This latter, I suspect, is most to our purpose,—it is simply an extension of the former. He refers the word to the practice of closing as completely as possible every avenue of perception by the senses, for the purpose of withdrawing the mind from everything external into itself, so as to fit it (raised above every sensuous representation) for receiving divine illumination immediately from above.
Gower. Platonic abstraction, in fact.
Atherton. So it seems. The Neo-Platonist was accustomed to call every other branch of science the ‘lesser mysteries:’ this inward contemplation, the climax of Platonism, is the great mystery, the inmost, highest initiation. Withdraw into thyself, he will say, and the adytum of thine own soul will reveal to thee profounder secrets than the cave of Mithras. So that his mysticus is emphatically the enclosed, self-withdrawn, introverted man.[[6]] This is an initiation which does not merely, like that of Isis or of Ceres, close the lips in silence, but the eye, the ear, every faculty of perception, in inward contemplation or in the ecstatic abstraction of the trance.
Willoughby. So then it is an effort man is to make—in harmony with the matter-hating principles of this school—to strip off the material and sensuous integuments of his being, and to reduce himself to a purely spiritual element. And in thus ignoring the follies and the phantasms of Appearance—as they call the actual world—the worshipper of pure Being believed himself to enjoy at least a transitory oneness with the object of his adoration?
Atherton. So Plotinus would say, if not Plato. And now we come to the transmission of the idea and the expression to the Church. A writer, going by the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, ferries this shade over into the darkness visible of the ecclesiastical world in the fifth century. The system of mystical theology introduced by him was eminently adapted to the monastic and hierarchical tendencies of the time. His ‘Mystic’ is not merely a sacred personage, acquainted with the doctrines and participator in the rites called mysteries, but one also who (exactly after the Neo-Platonist pattern) by mortifying the body, closing the senses to everything external, and ignoring every ‘intellectual apprehension,’[[7]] attains in passivity a divine union, and in ignorance a wisdom transcending all knowledge.
Gower. Prepared to say, I suppose, with one of old George Chapman’s characters—
I’ll build all inward—not a light shall ope
The common out-way.—
I’ll therefore live in dark; and all my light,
Like ancient temples, let in at my top.
Willoughby. Not much light either. The mystic, as such, was not to know anything about the Infinite, he was ‘to gaze with closed eyes,’ passively to receive impressions, lost in the silent, boundless ‘Dark’ of the Divine Subsistence.
Atherton. This, then, is our result. The philosophical perfection of Alexandria and the monastic perfection of Byzantium belong to the same species. Philosophers and monks alike employ the word mysticism and its cognate terms as involving the idea, not merely of initiation into something hidden, but, beyond this, of an internal manifestation of the Divine to the intuition or in the feeling of the secluded soul. It is in this last and narrower sense, therefore, that the word is to be understood when we speak of mystical death, mystical illumination, mystical union with God, and, in fact, throughout the phraseology of what is specially termed Theologia Mystica.[[8]]
Gower. I have often been struck by the surprising variety in the forms of thought and the modes of action in which mysticism has manifested itself among different nations and at different periods. This arises, I should think, from its residing in so central a province of the mind—the feeling. It has been incorporated in theism, atheism, and pantheism. It has given men gods at every step, and it has denied all deity except self. It has appeared in the loftiest speculation and in the grossest idolatry. It has been associated with the wildest licence and with the most pitiless asceticism. It has driven men out into action, it has dissolved them in ecstasy, it has frozen them to torpor.
Atherton. Hence the difficulty of definition. I have seen none which quite satisfies me. Some include only a particular phase of it, while others so define its province as to stigmatise as mystical every kind of religiousness which rises above the zero of rationalism.
Willoughby. The Germans have two words for mysticism—mystik and mysticismus. The former they use in a favourable, the latter in an unfavourable, sense.—
Gower. Just as we say piety and pietism, or rationality and rationalism; keeping the first of each pair for the use, the second for the abuse. A convenience, don’t you think?
Atherton. If the adjective were distinguishable like the nouns—but it is not; and to have a distinction in the primitive and not in the derivative word is always confusing. But we shall keep to the usage of our own language. I suppose we shall all be agreed in employing the word mysticism in the unfavourable signification, as equivalent generally to spirituality diseased, grown unnatural, fantastic, and the like.
Gower. At the same time admitting the true worth of many mystics, and the real good and truth of which such errors are the exaggeration or caricature.
Atherton. I think we may say thus much generally—that mysticism, whether in religion or philosophy, is that form of error which mistakes for a divine manifestation the operations of a merely human faculty.
Willoughby. There you define, at any rate, the characteristic misconception of the mystics.
Gower. And include, if I mistake not, enthusiasts, with their visions; pretended prophets, with their claim of inspiration; wonder-workers, trusting to the divine power resident in their theurgic formulas; and the philosophers who believe themselves organs of the world-soul, and their systems an evolution of Deity.
Atherton. Yes, so far; but I do not profess to give any definition altogether adequate. Speaking of Christian mysticism, I should describe it generally as the exaggeration of that aspect of Christianity which is presented to us by St. John.
Gower. That answer provokes another question. How should you characterize John’s peculiar presentation of the Gospel?
Atherton. I refer chiefly to that admixture of the contemplative temperament and the ardent, by which he is personally distinguished,—the opposition so manifest in his epistles to all religion of mere speculative opinion or outward usage,—the concentration of Christianity, as it were, upon the inward life derived from union with Christ. This would seem to be the province of Christian truth especially occupied by the beloved disciple, and this is the province which mysticism has in so many ways usurped.
Gower. Truly that unction from the Holy One, of which John speaks, has found some strange claimants!
Willoughby. Thus much I think is evident from our enquiry—that mysticism, true to its derivation as denoting a hidden knowledge, faculty, or life (the exclusive privilege of sage, adept, or recluse), presents itself, in all its phases, as more or less the religion of internal as opposed to external revelation,—of heated feeling, sickly sentiment, or lawless imagination, as opposed to that reasonable belief in which the intellect and the heart, the inward witness and the outward, are alike engaged.
Note to page [21].
Numerous definitions of ‘Mystical Theology’ are supplied by Roman Catholic divines who have written on the subject. With all of them the terms denote the religion of the heart as distinguished from speculation, scholasticism, or ritualism; and, moreover, those higher experiences of the divine life associated, in their belief, with extraordinary gifts and miraculous powers. Such definitions will accordingly comprehend the theopathetic and theurgic forms of mysticism, but must necessarily exclude the theosophic. Many of them might serve as definitions of genuine religion. These mystical experiences have been always coveted and admired in the Romish Church; and those, therefore, who write concerning them employ the word mysticism in a highly favourable sense. That excess of subjectivity—those visionary raptures and supernatural exaltations, which we regard as the symptoms of spiritual disease, are, in the eyes of these writers, the choice rewards of sufferings and of aspirations the most intense,—they are the vision of God and things celestial enjoyed by the pure in heart,—the dazzling glories wherewith God has crowned the heads of a chosen few, whose example shall give light to all the world.
Two or three specimens will suffice. Gerson gives the two following definitions of the Theologia Mystica:—‘Est animi extensio in Deum per amoris desiderium.’ And again: ‘Est motio anagogica in Deum per purum et fervidum amorem.’ Elsewhere he is more metaphorical, describing it as the theology which teaches men to escape from the stormy sea of sensuous desires to the safe harbour of Eternity, and shows them how to attain that love which snatches them away to the Beloved, unites them with Him, and secures them rest in Him. Dionysius the Carthusian (associating evidently mystica and mysteriosa) says,—‘Est autem mystica Theologia secretissima mentis cum Deo locutio.’ John à Jesu Maria calls it, ‘cœlestis quædam Dei notitia per unionem voluntatis Deo adhærentis elicita, vel lumine cœlitus immisso producta.’ This mystical theology, observes the Carthusian Dionysius, farther, (commentating on the Areopagite), is no science, properly so called; even regarded as an act, it is simply the concentration (defixio) of the mind on God—admiration of his majesty—a suspension of the mind in the boundless and eternal light—a most fervid, most peaceful, transforming gaze on Deity, &c.
All alike contrast the mystical with the scholastic and the symbolical theology. The points of dissimilarity are thus summed up by Cardinal Bona:—‘Per scholasticam discit homo recte uti intelligibilibus, per symbolicam sensibilibus, per hanc (mysticam) rapitur ad supermentales excessus. Scientiæ humanæ in valle phantasiæ discuntur, hæc in apice mentis. Illæ multis egent discursibus, et erroribus subjectæ sunt: hæc unico et simplici verbo docetur et discitur, et est mere supernaturalis tam in substantiâ quam in modo procedendi.’—Via Compendii ad Deum, cap. iii. 1-3.
The definition given by Corderius in his introduction to the mystical theology of Dionysius is modelled on the mysticism of John de la Cruz:—‘Theologia Mystica est sapientia experimentalis, Dei affectiva, divinitus infusa, quæ mentem ab omni inordinatione puram, per actus supernaturales fidei, spei, et charitatis, cum Deo intime conjungit.’—Isagoge, cap. ii.
The most negative definition of all is that given by Pachymeres, the Greek paraphrast of Dionysius, who has evidently caught his master’s mantle, or cloak of darkness. ‘Mystical theology is not perception or discourse, not a movement of the mind, not an operation, not a habit, nothing that any other power we may possess will bring to us; but if, in absolute immobility of mind we are illumined concerning it, we shall know that it is beyond everything cognizable by the mind of man.’—Dion. Opp. vol. i. p. 722.
In one place the explanations of Corderius give us to understand that the mysticism he extols does at least open a door to theosophy itself, i.e. to inspired science. He declares that the mystical theologian not only has revealed to him the hidden sense of Scripture, but that he can understand and pierce the mysteries of any natural science whatsoever, in a way quite different from that possible to other men—in short, by a kind of special revelation.—Isagoge, cap. iv.
The reader will gather the most adequate notion of what is meant, or thought to be meant, by mystical theology from the description given by Ludovic Blosius, a high authority on matters mystical, in his Institutio Spiritualis. Corderius cites him at length, as ‘sublimissimus rerum mysticarum interpres.’
Happy, he exclaims, is that soul which steadfastly follows after purity of heart and holy introversion, renouncing utterly all private affection, all self-will, all self-interest. Such a soul deserves to approach nearer and ever nearer to God. Then at length, when its higher powers have been elevated, purified, and furnished forth by divine grace, it attains to unity and nudity of spirit—to a pure love above representation—to that simplicity of thought which is devoid of all thinkings. Now, therefore, since it hath become receptive of the surpassing and ineffable grace of God, it is led to that living fountain which flows from everlasting, and doth refresh the minds of the saints unto the full and in over-measure. Now do the powers of the soul shine as the stars, and she herself is fit to contemplate the abyss of Divinity with a serene, a simple, and a jubilant intuition, free from imagination and from the smallest admixture of the intellect. Accordingly, when she lovingly turns herself absolutely unto God, the incomprehensible light shines into her depths, and that radiance blinds the eye of reason and understanding. But the simple eye of the soul itself remains open—that is thought, pure, naked, uniform, and raised above the understanding.
Moreover, when the natural light of reason is blinded by so bright a glory, the soul takes cognizance of nothing in time, but is raised above time and space, and assumes as it were a certain attribute of eternity. For the soul which has abandoned symbols and earthly distinctions and processes of thought, now learns experimentally that God far transcends all images—corporeal, spiritual, or divine, and that whatsoever the reason can apprehend, whatsoever can be said or written concerning God, whatsoever can be predicated of Him by words, must manifestly be infinitely remote from the reality of the divine subsistence which is unnameable. The soul knows not, therefore, what that God is she feels. Hence, by a foreknowledge which is exercised without knowledge, she rests in the nude, the simple, the unknown God, who alone is to be loved. For the light is called dark, from its excessive brightness. In this darkness the soul receives the hidden word which God utters in the inward silence and secret recess of the mind. This word she receives, and doth happily experience the bond of mystical union. For when, by means of love, she hath transcended reason and all symbols, and is carried away above herself (a favour God alone can procure her), straightway she flows away from herself and flows forth into God (a se defluens profluit in Deum), and then is God her peace and her enjoyment. Rightly doth she sing, in such a transport, ‘I will both lay me down in peace and sleep.’ The loving soul flows down, I say, falls away from herself, and, reduced as it were to nothing, melts and glides away altogether into the abyss of eternal love. There, dead to herself, she lives in God, knowing nothing, perceiving nothing, except the love she tastes. For she loses herself in that vastest solitude and darkness of Divinity: but thus to lose is in fact to find herself. There, putting off whatsoever is human, and putting on whatever is divine, she is transformed and transmuted into God, as iron in a furnace takes the form of fire and is transmuted into fire. Nevertheless, the essence of the soul thus deified remains, as the glowing iron does not cease to be iron....
The soul, thus bathed in the essence of God, liquefied by the consuming fire of love, and united to Him without medium, doth, by wise ignorance and by the inmost touch of love, more clearly know God than do our fleshly eyes discern the visible sun....
Though God doth sometimes manifest himself unto the perfect soul in most sublime and wondrous wise, yet he doth not reveal himself as he is in his own ineffable glory, but as it is possible for him to be seen in this life.—Isagoge Cord. cap. vii.
CHAPTER IV.
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow.
Shelley.
Willoughby. Here’s another definition for you:—Mysticism is the romance of religion. What do you say?
Gower. True to the spirit—not scientific, I fear.
Willoughby. Science be banished! Is not the history of mysticism bright with stories of dazzling spiritual enterprise, sombre with tragedies of the soul, stored with records of the achievements and the woes of martyrdom and saintship? Has it not reconciled, as by enchantment, the most opposite extremes of theory and practice? See it, in theory, verging repeatedly on pantheism, ego-theism, nihilism. See it, in practice, producing some of the most glorious examples of humility, benevolence, and untiring self-devotion. Has it not commanded, with its indescribable fascination, the most powerful natures and the most feeble—minds lofty with a noble disdain of life, or low with a weak disgust of it? If the self-torture it enacts seems hideous to our sobriety, what an attraction in its reward! It lays waste the soul with purgatorial pains—but it is to leave nothing there on which any fire may kindle after death. What a promise!—a perfect sanctification, a divine calm, fruition of heaven while yet upon the earth!
Atherton. Go on, Willoughby, I like your enthusiasm. Think of its adventures, too.
Willoughby. Aye, its adventures—both persecuted and canonized by kings and pontiffs; one age enrolling the mystic among the saints, another committing him to the inquisitor’s torch, or entombing him in the Bastille. And the principle indestructible after all—some minds always who must be religious mystically or not at all.
Atherton. I thought we might this evening enquire into the causes which tend continually to reproduce this religious phenomenon. You have suggested some already. Certain states of society have always fostered it. There have been times when all the real religion existing in a country appears to have been confined to its mystics.
Willoughby. In such an hour, how mysticism rises and does its deeds of spiritual chivalry——
Gower. Alas! Quixotic enough, sometimes.
Willoughby. How conspicuous, then, grows this inward devotion!—even the secular historian is compelled to say a word about it——
Atherton. And a sorry, superficial verdict he gives, too often.
Willoughby. How loud its protest against literalism, formality, scholasticism, human ordinances! what a strenuous reaction against the corruptions of priestcraft!
Atherton. But, on the other side, Willoughby—and here comes the pathetic part of its romance—mysticism is heard discoursing concerning things unutterable. It speaks, as one in a dream, of the third heaven, and of celestial experiences, and revelations fitter for angels than for men. Its stammering utterance, confused with excess of rapture labouring with emotions too huge or abstractions too subtile for words, becomes utterly unintelligible. Then it is misrepresented: falls a victim to reaction in its turn; the delirium is dieted by persecution, and it is consigned once more to secrecy and silence.
Gower. There, good night, and pleasant dreams to it!
Willoughby. It spins still in its sleep its mingled tissue of good and evil.
Atherton. A mixture truly. We must not blindly praise it in our hatred of formalism. We must not vaguely condemn it in our horror of extravagance.
Gower. What you have both been saying indicates at once three of the causes we are in search of,—indeed, the three chief ones, as I suppose: first of all, the reaction you speak of against the frigid formality of religious torpor; then, heart-weariness, the languishing longing for repose, the charm of mysticism for the selfish or the weak; and, last, the desire, so strong in some minds, to pierce the barriers that hide from man the unseen world—the charm of mysticism for the ardent and the strong.
Atherton. That shrinking from conflict, that passionate yearning after inaccessible rest, how universal is it; what wistful utterance it has found in every nation and every age; how it subdues us all, at times, and sinks us into languor.
Willoughby. Want of patience lies at the root—who was it said that he should have all eternity to rest in?
Atherton. Think how the traditions of every people have embellished with their utmost wealth of imagination some hidden spot upon the surface of the earth, which they have pourtrayed as secluded from all the tumult and the pain of time—a serene Eden—an ever-sunny Tempe—a vale of Avalon—a place beyond the sterner laws and rougher visitations of the common world—a fastness of perpetual calm, before which the tempests may blow their challenging horns in vain—they can win no entrance. Such, to the fancy of the Middle Age, was the famous temple of the Sangreal, with its dome of sapphire, its six-and-thirty towers, its crystal crosses, and its hangings of green samite, guarded by its knights, girded by impenetrable forest, glittering on the onyx summit of Mount Salvage, for ever invisible to every eye impure, inaccessible to every failing or faithless heart. Such, to the Hindoo, was the Cridavana meadow, among the heights of Mount Sitanta, full of flowers, of the song of birds, the hum of bees—‘languishing winds and murmuring falls of waters.’ Such was the secret mountain Kinkadulle, celebrated by Olaus Magnus, which stood in a region now covered only by moss or snow, but luxuriant once, in less degenerate days, with the spontaneous growth of every pleasant bough and goodly fruit. What places like these have been to the popular mind, even such a refuge for the Ideal from the pursuit of the Actual—that the attainment of Ecstasy, the height of Contemplation, the bliss of Union, has been for the mystic.
Gower. So those spiritual Lotos-eaters will only
——hearken what the inner spirit sings,
There is no joy but calm;
or, in their ‘fugitive and cloistered virtue,’ as Milton calls it, say,
——let us live and lie reclined
On the hills like gods together, careless of mankind.
Atherton. Some; not all, however. Neither should we suppose that even those who have sunk to such a state——
Willoughby. They would say—risen—
Atherton. Be it by sinking or rising, they have not been brought to that pass without a conflict. From life’s battle-field to the hospital of the hermitage has been but a step for a multitude of minds. Hiding themselves wounded from the victor (for the enemy they could not conquer shall not see and mock their sufferings), they call in the aid of an imaginative religionism to people their solitude with its glories. The Prometheus chained to his rock is comforted if the sea nymphs rise from the deep to visit him, and Ocean on his hippogriff draws near. And thus, let the gliding fancies of a life of dreams, and Imagination, the monarch of all their main of thought, visit the sorrow of these recluses, and they think they can forget the ravages of that evil which so vexed them once. Hence the mysticism of the visionary. He learns to crave ecstasies and revelations as at once his solace and his pride.
Gower. Is it not likely, too, that some of these mystics, in seasons of mental distress of which we have no record, tried Nature as a resource, and found her wanting? Such a disappointment would make that ascetic theory which repudiates the seen and actual, plausible and even welcome to them. After demanding of the natural world what it has not to bestow, they would hurry to the opposite extreme, and deny it any healing influence whatever. Go out into the woods and valleys, when your heart is rather harassed than bruised, and when you suffer from vexation more than grief. Then the trees all hold out their arms to you to relieve you of the burthen of your heavy thoughts; and the streams under the trees glance at you as they run by, and will carry away your trouble along with the fallen leaves; and the sweet-breathing air will draw it off together with the silver multitudes of the dew. But let it be with anguish or remorse in your heart that you go forth into Nature, and instead of your speaking her language, you make her speak yours. Your distress is then infused through all things, and clothes all things, and Nature only echoes, and seems to authenticate, your self-loathing or your hopelessness. Then you find the device of your sorrow on the argent shield of the moon, and see all the trees of the field weeping and wringing their hands with you, while the hills, seated at your side in sackcloth, look down upon you prostrate, and reprove you like the comforters of Job.
Atherton. Doubtless, many of these stricken spirits suffered such disappointment at some early period of their history. Failure was inevitable, and the disease was heightened. How Coleridge felt this when he says so mournfully in his Ode to Dejection,—
It were a vain endeavour
Though I should gaze for ever
On that green light that lingers in the west:
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life whose fountains are within.
Willoughby. The feeling of the other class we spoke of—the men of bolder temperament—has been this: ‘I am a king and yet a captive; submit I cannot; I care not to dream; I must in some way act.’
Gower. And, like Rasselas, a prince and yet a prisoner in the narrow valley, such a man, in his impatience, takes counsel of a philosopher, who promises to construct a pair of wings wherewith he shall overfly the summits that frown around him. The mystagogue is a philosopher such as Rasselas found, with a promise as large and a result as vain.
Atherton. Hence the mysticism of the theurgist, who will pass the bounds of the dreaded spirit-world; will dare all its horrors to seize one of its thrones; and aspires—a Manfred or a Zanoni—to lord it among the powers of the air.
Willoughby. And of the mysticism of the theosophist, too, whose science is an imagined inspiration, who writes about plants and minerals under a divine afflatus, and who will give you from the resources of his special revelation an explanation of every mystery.
Gower. The explanation, unhappily, the greatest mystery of all.
Atherton. Curiously enough, the Bible has been made to support mysticism by an interpretation, at one time too fanciful, at another too literal.
Willoughby. We may call it, perhaps, the innocent cause of mysticism with one class, its victim with another: the one, running into mysticism because they wrongly interpreted the Bible; the other interpreting it wrongly because they were mystics. The mystical interpreters of school and cloister belong to the latter order, and many a Covenanter and godly trooper of the Commonwealth to the former.
Gower. Not an unlikely result with the zealous Ironside—his reading limited to his English Bible and a few savoury treatises of divinity—pouring over the warlike story of ancient Israel, and identifying himself with the subjects of miraculous intervention, divine behest, and prophetic dream. How glorious would those days appear to such a man, when angels went and came among men; when, in the midst of his husbandry or handicraft, the servant of the Lord might be called aside to see some ‘great sight:’ when the fire dropped sudden down from heaven on the accepted altar, like a drop spilt from the lip of an angel’s fiery vial full of odours; when the Spirit of the Lord moved men at times, as Samson was moved in the camp of Dan, between Zorah and Eshtaol; and when the Lord sent men hither and thither by an inward impulse, as Elijah was sent from Gilgal to Bethel, and from Bethel back to Jericho, and from Jericho on to Jordan. Imagination would reproduce those marvels in the world within, though miracles could no longer cross his path in the world without. He would believe that to him also words were given to speak, and deeds to do; and that, whether in the house, the council, or the field, he was the Spirit’s chosen instrument and messenger.
Atherton. This is the practical and active kind of mysticism so prevalent in that age of religious wars, the seventeenth century.
Willoughby. The monks took the opposite course. While the Parliamentarian soldier was often seen endeavouring to adapt his life to a mistaken application of the Bible, the ascetic endeavoured to adapt the Bible to his mistaken life.
Gower. The New Testament not authorising the austerities of a Macarius or a Maximus, tradition must be called in——
Willoughby. And side by side with tradition, mystical interpretation. The Bible, it was pretended, must not be understood as always meaning what it seems to mean.
Atherton. It then becomes the favourite employment of the monk to detect this hidden meaning, and to make Scripture render to tradition the same service which the mask rendered to the ancient actor, not only disguising the face, but making the words go farther. To be thus busied was to secure two advantages at once; he had occupation for his leisure, and an answer for his adversaries.
CHAPTER V.
Oh! contemplation palls upon the spirit,
Like the chill silence of an autumn sun:
While action, like the roaring south-west wind,
Sweeps, laden with elixirs, with rich draughts
Quickening the wombed earth.
Guta. And yet what bliss,
When, dying in the darkness of God’s light,
The soul can pierce these blinding webs of nature,
And float up to the nothing, which is all things—
The ground of being, where self-forgetful silence
Is emptiness,—emptiness fulness,—fulness God,—
Till we touch Him, and, like a snow-flake, melt
Upon his light-sphere’s keen circumference!
The Saint’s Tragedy.
Gower. Thanks, if you please, not reproaches. I was calling help for you, I was summoning the fay to your assistance, to determine the best possible order of your mystics.
Willoughby. The fay?
Gower. The fay. Down with you in that arm-chair, and sit quietly. Know that I was this morning reading Andersen’s Märchen—all about Ole-Luk-Oie, his ways and works—the queer little elf. Upstairs he creeps, in houses where children are, softly, softly, in the dusk of the evening, with what do you think under his arm?—two umbrellas, one plain, the other covered with gay colours and quaint figures. He makes the eyes of the children heavy, and when they are put to bed, holds over the heads of the good children the painted umbrella, which causes them to dream the sweetest and most wonderful dreams imaginable; but over the naughty children he holds the other, and they do not dream at all. Now, thought I, let me emulate the profundity of a German critic. Is this to be treated as a simple child’s tale? Far from it. There is a depth of philosophic meaning in it. Have not the mystics been mostly childlike natures? Have not their lives been full of dreams, manifold and strange—and they therefore, if any, especial favourites of Ole-Luk-Oie? They have accounted their dreams their pride and their reward. They have looked on the sobriety of dreamlessness as the appropriate deprivation of privilege consequent on carnality and ignorance; in other words, the non-dreamers have been with them the naughty children. To learn life’s lessons well is, according to them, to enjoy as a recompence the faculty of seeing visions and of dreaming dreams. Here then is the idea of mysticism. You have its myth, its legend. Ole-Luk-Oie is its presiding genius. Now, Atherton, if you could but get hold of his umbrella, the segments of that silken hemisphere, with its painted constellations, would give you your divisions in a twinkling. That was why I wanted him. But I do not see him letting himself down the bellrope, or hear his tap at the door. I am afraid we must set to work without him.
Willoughby. So be it. A local or historical classification of the mystics is out of the question. I scarcely think you can find a metaphysical one that will bear the test of application and be practically serviceable. Then the division some adopt, of heterodox and orthodox, saves trouble indeed, but it is so arbitrary. The Church of Rome, from whom many of these mystics called heretical, dared to differ, is no church at all in the true sense, and assuredly no standard of orthodoxy. In addition to this I have a nervous antipathy to the terms themselves; for, as I have a liking for becoming the champion of any cause which appears to be borne down by numbers, I find my friends who are somewhat heterodox, frequently charging me with what is called orthodoxy, and those again who are orthodox as often suspecting me of heterodoxy.
Atherton. Hear my proposed division. There are three kinds of mysticism, theopathetic, theosophic, and theurgic. The first of these three classes I will subdivide, if needful, into transitive and intransitive.
Gower. Your alliteration is grateful to my ear; I hope you have not strained a point to secure us the luxury.
Atherton. Not a hair’s breadth, I assure you.
Willoughby. Etymologically such a division has the advantage of showing that all the forms of mysticism are developments of the religious sentiment; that in all its varieties the relationship, real or imaginary, which mysticism sustains to the Divine, is its primary element;—that its widely differing aspects are all phases it presents in its eccentric orbit about the central luminary of the Infinite.
Gower. Your theopathetic mysticism must include a very wide range. By the term theopathetic you denote, of course, that mysticism which resigns itself, in a passivity more or less absolute, to an imagined divine manifestation. Now, one man may regard himself as overshadowed, another as impelled by Deity. One mystic of this order may do nothing, another may display an unceasing activity. Whether he believes himself a mirror in whose quiescence the Divinity ‘glasses himself;’ or, as it were, a leaf, driven by the mighty rushing wind of the Spirit, and thus the tongue by which the Spirit speaks, the organ by which God works—the principle of passivity is the same.
Atherton. Hence my subdivision of this class of mystics into those whose mysticism assumes a transitive character, and those with whom mysticism consists principally in contemplation, in Quietism, in negation, and so is properly called intransitive.
Willoughby. Yet some of those whose mysticism has been pre-eminently negative, who have hated the very name of speculation, and placed perfection in repose and mystical death, have mingled much in active life. They appear to defy our arrangement.
Atherton. It is only in appearance. They have shrunk from carrying out their theory to its logical consequences. Their activity has been a bye-work. The diversities of character observable in the mysticism which is essentially intransitive arise, not from a difference in the principle at the root, but from varieties of natural temperament, of external circumstances, and from the dissimilar nature or proportion of the foreign elements incorporated.
Gower. It is clear that we must be guided by the rule rather than the exception, and determine, according to the predominant element in the mysticism of individuals, the position to be assigned them. If we were to classify only those who were perfectly consistent with themselves, we could include scarcely half-a-dozen names, and those, by the way, the least rational of all, for the most thorough-going are the madmen.
Atherton. The mysticism of St. Bernard, for example, in spite of his preaching, his travels, his diplomacy, is altogether contemplative—the intransitive mysticism of the cloister. His active labours were a work apart.
Gower. Such men have been serviceable as members of society in proportion to their inconsistency as devotees of mysticism. A heavy charge this against their principle.
Willoughby. In the intransitive division of the theopathetic mysticism you will have three such names as Suso, Ruysbrook, Molinos, and all the Quietists, whether French or Indian.
Atherton. And in the transitive theopathy all turbulent prophets and crazy fanatics. This species of mysticism usurps the will more than the emotional part of our nature. The subject of it suffers under the Divine, as he believes, but the result of the manifestation is not confined to himself, it passes on to his fellows.
Gower. If you believe Plato in the Ion, you must range here all the poets, for they sing well, he tells us, only as they are carried out of themselves by a divine madness, and mastered by an influence which their verse communicates to others in succession.
Willoughby. We must admit here also, according to ancient superstition, the Pythoness on her tripod, and the Sibyl in her cave at Cumæ, as she struggles beneath the might of the god:—
Phœbi nondum patiens immanis in antro
Bacchatur vates, magnum si pectore possit
Excussisse Deum: tanto magis ille fatigat
Os rabidum, fera corda domans, fingitque premendo.
Atherton. I have no objection. According to Virgil’s description, the poor Sibyl has earned painfully enough a place within the pale of mysticism. But those with whom we have more especially to do in this province are enthusiasts such as Tanchelm, who appeared in the twelfth century, and announced himself as the residence of Deity; as Gichtel, who believed himself appointed to expiate by his prayers and penance the sins of all mankind; or as Kuhlmann, who traversed Europe, the imagined head of the Fifth monarchy, summoning kings and nobles to submission.
Gower. Some of these cases we may dismiss in a summary manner. The poor brainsick creatures were cast on evil times indeed. What we should now call derangement was then exalted into heresy, and honoured with martyrdom. We should have taken care that Kuhlmann was sent to an asylum, but the Russian patriarch burned him, poor fellow.
Atherton. We must not forget, however, that this species of mysticism has sometimes been found associated with the announcement of vital truths. Look at George Fox and the early Quakers.
Willoughby. And I would refer also to this class some of the milder forms of mysticism, in which it is seen rather as a single morbid element than as a principle avowed and carried out. Jung Stilling is an instance of what I mean. You see him, fervent, earnest, and yet weak; without forethought, without perseverance; vain and irresolute, he changes his course incessantly, seeing in every variation of feeling and of circumstance a special revelation of the Divine will.
Atherton. Add to this modification a kindred error, the doctrine of a ‘particular faith’ in prayer, so much in vogue in Cromwell’s court at Whitehall. Howe boldly preached against it before the Protector himself.
Willoughby. Now, Atherton, for your second division, theosophic mysticism. Whom do you call theosophists?
Atherton. Among the Germans I find mysticism generally called theosophy when applied to natural science. Too narrow a use of the word, I think. We should have in that case scarcely any theosophy in Europe till after the Reformation. The word itself was first employed by the school of Porphyry. The Neo-Platonist would say that the priest might have his traditional discourse concerning God (theology), but he alone, with his intuition, the highest wisdom concerning him.
Gower. I can’t say that I have any clear conception attached to the word.
Atherton. You want examples? Take Plotinus and Behmen.
Gower. What a conjunction!
Atherton. Not so far apart as may appear. Their difference is one of application more than of principle. Had Plotinus thought a metal or a plant worth his attention, he would have maintained that concerning that, even as concerning the infinite, all truth lay stored within the recesses of his own mind. But of course he only cared about ideas. Mystical philosophy is really a contradiction in terms, is it not?
Gower. Granted, since philosophy must build only upon reason.
Atherton. Very good. Then when philosophy falls into mysticism I give it another name, and call it theosophy. And, on the other side, I call mysticism, trying to be philosophical, theosophy likewise. That is all.
Willoughby. So that the theosophist is one who gives you a theory of God, or of the works of God, which has not reason, but an inspiration of his own for its basis.
Atherton. Yes; he either believes, with Swedenborg and Behmen, that a special revelation has unfolded to him the mystery of the divine dispensations here or hereafter—laid bare the hidden processes of nature, or the secrets of the other world; or else, with Plotinus and Schelling, he believes that his intuitions of those things are infallible because divine—subject and object being identical,—all truth being within him. Thus, while the mystic of the theopathetic species is content to contemplate, to feel, or to act, suffering under Deity in his sublime passivity, the mysticism I term theosophic aspires to know and believes itself in possession of a certain supernatural divine faculty for that purpose.
Gower. You talk of mysticism trying to be philosophical; it does then sometimes seek to justify itself at the bar of reason?
Atherton. I should think so—often: at one time trying to refute the charge of madness and prove itself throughout rational and sober; at another, using the appeal to reason up to a certain point and as far as serves its purpose, and then disdainfully mocking at demands for proof, and towering above argument, with the pretence of divine illumination.
Willoughby. Some of these mystics, talking of reason as they do, remind me of Lysander at the feet of Helena, protesting (with the magic juice scarce dry upon his eyelids) that the decision of his spell-bound faculties is the deliberate exercise of manly judgment—
The mind of man is by his reason swayed,
And reason says you are the worthier maid.
Gower. Now you come to Shakspeare, I must cap your quotation with another: I fit those mystics Atherton speaks of as using reason up to a certain point and then having done with it, with a motto from the Winter’s Tale—much at their service. They answer, with young enamoured Florizel, when Reason, like a grave Camillo, bids them ‘be advised’—
I am; and by my fancy: if my reason
Will thereto be obedient, I have reason;
If not, my senses better pleased with madness
Do bid it welcome.
Atherton. To classify the mystics adequately, we should have a terminology of dreams rich as that of Homer, and distinguish, as he does, the dream-image of complete illusion from the half-conscious dream between sleeping and waking;—ὄναρ from ὔπαρ. How unanimous, by the way, would the mystics be in deriving ὄνειρον from ὄνειαρ—dream from enjoyment.
Willoughby. To return from the poets to business; was not all the science of the Middle Age theosophic rather than philosophic? Both to mystical schoolmen and scholastic mystics the Bible was a book of symbols and propositions, from which all the knowable was somehow to be deduced.
Atherton. Most certainly. The mystical interpretation of Scripture was their measuring-reed for the temple of the universe. The difference, however, between them and Behmen would be this—that, while both essayed to read the book of nature by the light of grace, Behmen claimed a special revelation, a divine mission for unfolding these mysteries in a new fashion; schoolmen, like Richard of St. Victor, professed to do so only by the supernatural aid of the Spirit illuminating the data afforded by the Church. And again, Behmen differs from Schelling and modern theosophy in studying nature through the medium of an external revelation mystically understood, while they interpret it by the unwritten inward revelation of Intellectual Intuition. I speak only of the difference of principle, not of result. But no one will dispute that nearly every scientific enquiry of the Middle Age was conducted on mystical principles, whether as regarded our source of knowing or its method.
Willoughby. And what wonder? Does not Milton remind us that Julian’s edict, forbidding Christians the study of heathen learning, drove the two Apollinarii to ‘coin all the seven liberal sciences’ out of the Bible? The jealous tyranny of the Papacy virtually perpetuated the persecution of the Apostate. Every lamp must be filled with church oil. Every kind of knowledge must exist only as a decoration of the ecclesiastical structure. Every science must lay its foundation on theology. See a monument attesting this, a type of the times, in the cathedral of Chartres, covered with thousands of statues and symbols, representing all the history, astronomy, and physics of the age—a sacred encyclopædia transferred from the pages of Vincent of Beauvais to the enduring stone, so to bid all men see in the Church a Mirror of the Universe—a speculum universale. Who can be surprised that by the aid of that facile expedient, mystical interpretation, many a work of mortal brain should have been bound and lettered as ‘Holy Bible,’ or that research should have simulated worship, as some Cantab, pressed for time, may study a problem at morning chapel?
Atherton. What interminable lengths of the fine-spun, gay-coloured ribbons of allegory and metaphor has the mountebank ingenuity of that mystical interpretation drawn out of the mouth of Holy Writ!
Gower. And made religion a toy—a tassel on the silken purse of the spendthrift Fancy.
Willoughby. Granting, Atherton, your general position that the undue inference of the objective from the subjective produces mysticism, what are we to say of a man like Descartes, for example? You will not surely condemn him as a mystic.
Atherton. Certainly, not altogether; reason holds its own with him—is not swept away by the hallucinations of sentiment, or feeling, or special revelation; but none of our powers act quite singly—nemo omnibus horis sapit—a mystical element crops out here and there. I think he carried too far the application of a principle based, in great part at least, on truth. In his inference of the objective from the subjective, I think he was so far right that our ability to conceive of a Supreme Perfection affords a strong presumption that such a God must exist. It is not to be supposed that the conception can transcend the reality. His argument from within is a potent auxiliary of the argument from without, if not by itself so all-sufficient as he supposes. There are, too, I think, certain necessary truths which, by the constitution of our mind, we cannot conceive as possibly other than they are, when once presented to us from without. But we surely should not on this account be justified in saying with the mystic Bernard, that each soul contains an infallible copy of the ideas in the Divine Mind, so that the pure in heart, in proportion as they have cleansed the internal mirror, must in knowing themselves, know also God. It must be no less an exaggeration of the truth to say, with the philosopher Descartes, that certain notions of the laws of Nature are impressed upon our minds, so that we may, after reflecting upon them, discover the secrets of the universe. On the strength of this principle he undertakes to determine exactly how long a time it must have required to reduce chaos to order. The effort made by Descartes to insulate himself completely from the external world and the results of experience, was certainly similar in mode, though very different in its object, from the endeavours after absolute self-seclusion made by many of the mystics. The former sought to detect by abstraction the laws of mind; the latter, to attain the vision of God.
Gower. There is much more of mysticism discernible in some of the systems which have followed in the path opened by Descartes. What can be more favourable than Schelling’s Identity principle to the error which confounds, rather than allies, physics and metaphysics, science and theology?
Atherton. Behmen himself is no whit more fantastical in this way than Oken and Franz Baader.
Gower. These theosophies, old and new, with their self-evolved inexplicable explanations of everything, remind me of the Frenchman’s play-bill announcing an exhibition of the Universal Judgment by means of three thousand five hundred puppets. The countless marionette figures in the brain of the theosophist—Elements, Forms, Tinctures, Mothers of Nature, Fountain-spirits, Planetary Potencies, &c., are made to shift and gesticulate unceasingly, through all possible permutations and combinations, and the operator has cried ‘Walk in!’ so long and loudly, that he actually believes, while pulling the wires in his metaphysical darkness, that the great universe is being turned and twitched after the same manner as his painted dolls.
Willoughby. I must put in a word for men like Paracelsus and Cornelius Agrippa. They helped science out of the hands of Aristotle, baptized and spoiled by monks. Europe, newly-wakened, follows in search of truth, as the princess in the fairy-tale her lover, changed into a white dove; now and then, at weary intervals, a feather is dropped to give a clue; these aspirants caught once and again a little of the precious snowy down, though often filling their hands with mere dirt, and wounding them among the briars. Forgive them their signatures, their basilisks and homunculi, and all their restless, wrathful arrogance, for the sake of that indomitable hardihood which did life-long battle, single-handed, against enthroned prescription.
Atherton. With all my heart. How venial the error of their mysticism (with an aim, at least, so worthy), compared with that of the enervating Romanist theopathy whose ‘holy vegetation’ the Reformers so rudely disturbed. On the eve of the Reformation you see hapless Christianity, after vanquishing so many powerful enemies, about to die by the hand of ascetic inventions and superstitions, imaginary sins and imaginary virtues,—the shadowy phantoms of monastic darkness; like the legendary hero Wolf-Dietrich, who, after so many victories over flesh-and-blood antagonists, perishes at last in a night-battle with ghosts.
Gower. The later mystical saints of the Romish calendar seem to me to exhibit what one may call the degenerate chivalry of religion, rather than its romance. How superior is Bernard to John of the Cross! It is easy to see how, in a rough age of fist-law, the laws of chivalry may inculcate courtesy and ennoble courage. But when afterwards an age of treaties and diplomacy comes in—when no Charles the Bold can be a match for the Italian policy of a Louis XI.—then these laws sink down into a mere fantastic code of honour. For the manly gallantry of Ivanhoe we have the euphuism of a Sir Piercie Shafton. And so a religious enthusiasm, scarcely too fervent for a really noble enterprise (could it only find one), gives birth, when debarred from the air of action and turned back upon itself, to the dreamy extravagances of the recluse, and the morbid ethical punctilios of the Director.
Willoughby. The only further question is about your third division, Atherton,—theurgic mysticism. We may let the Rabbinical Solomon—mastering the archdæmon Aschmedai and all his host by the divine potency of the Schemhamporasch engraven on his ring, chaining at his will the colossal powers of the air by the tremendous name of Metatron,—stand as an example of theurgy.
Gower. And Iamblichus, summoning Souls, Heroes, and the Principalities of the upper sphere, by prayer and incense and awful mutterings of adjuration.
Atherton. All very good; but hear me a moment. I would use the term theurgic to characterize the mysticism which claims supernatural powers generally,—works marvels, not like the black art, by help from beneath, but as white magic, by the virtue of talisman or cross, demi-god, angel, or saint. Thus theurgic mysticism is not content, like the theopathetic, with either feeling or proselytising; nor, like the theosophic, with knowing; but it must open for itself a converse with the world of spirits, and win as its prerogative the power of miracle. This broad use of the word makes prominent the fact that a common principle of devotional enchantment lies at the root of all the pretences, both of heathen and of Christian miracle-mongers. The celestial hierarchy of Dionysius and the benign dæmons of Proclus, the powers invoked by Pagan or by Christian theurgy, by Platonist, by Cabbalist, or by saint, alike reward the successful aspirant with supernatural endowments; and so far Apollonius of Tyana and Peter of Alcantara, Asclepigenia and St. Theresa, must occupy as religious magicians the same province. The error is in either case the same—a divine efficacy is attributed to rites and formulas, sprinklings or fumigations, relics or incantations, of mortal manufacture.
Willoughby. It is not difficult to understand how, after a time, both the species of mysticism we have been discussing may pass over into this one. It is the dream of the mystic that he can elaborate from the depth of his own nature the whole promised land of religious truth, and perceive (by special revelation) rising from within, all its green pastures and still waters,—somewhat as Pindar describes the sun beholding the Isle of Rhodes emerging from the bottom of the ocean, new-born, yet perfect, in all the beauty of glade and fountain, of grassy upland and silver tarn, of marble crag and overhanging wood, sparkling from the brine as after a summer shower. But alas, how tardily arises this new world of inner wonders! It must be accelerated—drawn up by some strong compelling charm. The doctrine of passivity becomes impossible to some temperaments beyond a certain pass. The enjoyments of the vision or the rapture are too few and far between—could they but be produced at will! Whether the mystic seeks the triumph of superhuman knowledge or that intoxication of the feeling which is to translate him to the upper world, after a while he craves a sign. Theurgy is the art which brings it. Its appearance is the symptom of failing faith, whether in philosophy or religion. Its glory is the phosphorescence of decay.
Atherton. Generally, I think it is; though it prevailed in the age of the Reformation—borrowed, however, I admit, on the revival of letters, from an age of decline.
BOOK THE SECOND
EARLY ORIENTAL MYSTICISM
CHAPTER I.
From worldly cares himselfe he did esloyne,
And greatly shunned manly exercise;
From everie worke he chalenged essoyne,
For contemplation sake: yet otherwise
His life he led in lawlesse riotise;
By which he grew to grievous maladie:
For in his lustlesse limbs through evill guise,
A shaking fever raignd continually;
Such one was Idlenesse, first of this company.
Spenser.
Having free access to the Commonplace Book of my friend Atherton, I now extract therefrom a few notes, written after reading Wilkins’ translation of the Bagvat-Gita. This episode in a heroic poem of ancient India is considered the best exponent of early oriental mysticism. I give these remarks just as I find them, brief and rough-hewn, but not, I think, hasty.
Observations on Indian mysticism, à propos of the Bagvat-Gita.
This poem consists of a dialogue between the god Crishna and the hero Arjoun. Crishna, though wearing a human form, speaks throughout as Deity. Arjoun is a young chieftain whom he befriends. A great civil war is raging, and the piece opens on the eve of battle. Crishna is driving the chariot of Arjoun, and they are between the lines of the opposing armies. On either side the war-shells are heard to sound—shells to which the Indian warriors gave names as did the paladins of Christendom to their swords. The battle will presently join, but Arjoun appears listless and sad. He looks on either army; in the ranks of each he sees preceptors whom he has been taught to revere, and relatives whom he loves. He knows not for which party to desire a bloody victory: so he lays his bow aside and sits down in the chariot. Crishna remonstrates, reminds him that his hesitation will be attributed to cowardice, and that such scruples are, moreover, most unreasonable. He should learn to act without any regard whatever to the consequences of his actions. At this point commence the instructions of the god concerning faith and practice.
So Arjoun must learn to disregard the consequences of his actions. I find here not a ‘holy indifference,’ as with the French Quietists, but an indifference which is unholy. The sainte indifférence of the west essayed to rise above self, to welcome happiness or misery alike as the will of Supreme Love. The odious indifference of these orientals inculcates the supremacy of selfishness as the wisdom of a god. A steep toil, that apathy towards ourselves; a facilis descensus, this apathy toward others. One Quietist will scarcely hold out his hand to receive heaven: another will not raise a finger to succour his fellow.
Mysticism, then, is born armed completely with its worst extravagances. An innocent childhood it never had; for in its very cradle this Hercules destroys, as deadly serpents, Reason and Morality. Crishna, it appears, can invest the actions of his favourites with such divineness that nothing they do is wrong. For the mystical adept of Hindooism the distinction between good and evil is obliterated as often as he pleases. Beyond this point mysticism the most perverted cannot go; since such emancipation from moral law is in practice the worst aim of the worst men. The mysticism of a man who declares himself the Holy Ghost constitutes a stage more startling but less guilty; for responsibility ends where insanity begins.
The orientals know little of a system of forces. They carry a single idea to its consequences. The dark issue of the self-deifying tendency is exhibited among them on a large scale,—the degrees of the enormity are registered and made portentously apparent as by the movement of a huge hand upon its dial. Western mysticism, checked by many better influences, has rarely made so patent the inherent evil even of its most mischievous forms. The European, mystic though he be, will occasionally pause to qualify, and is often willing to allow some scope to facts and principles alien or hostile to a favourite idea.
It should not be forgotten that the doctrine of metempsychosis is largely answerable for Crishna’s cold-blooded maxim. He tells Arjoun that the soul puts on many bodies, as many garments, remaining itself unharmed: the death of so many of his countrymen—a mere transition, therefore—need not distress him.
CHAPTER II.
Quel diable de jargon entends-je ici? Voici bien du haut style.
Molière.
Mysticism has no genealogy. It is no tradition conveyed across frontiers or down the course of generations as a ready-made commodity. It is a state of thinking and feeling, to which minds of a certain temperament are liable at any time or place, in occident and orient, whether Romanist or Protestant, Jew, Turk, or Infidel. It is more or less determined by the positive religion with which it is connected. But though conditioned by circumstance or education, its appearance is ever the spontaneous product of a certain crisis in individual or social history.
A merely imitative mysticism, as exemplified by some Tractarian ecclesiastics, is an artificial expedient, welcome to ambitious minds as an engine, to the frivolous as a devotional diversion, to the weak and servile as a softly-cushioned yoke.
Were mysticism a transmitted principle we should be able to trace it through successive translations to a form which might be termed primitive. We might mark and throw off, as we ascended, the accretions with which it has been invested, till we reached its origin—the simple idea of mysticism, new-born. The mysticism of India, the earliest we can find, shows us that nothing of this sort is possible. That set of principles which we repeatedly encounter, variously combined, throughout the history of mysticism, exhibits itself in the Bagvat-Gita almost complete. The same round of notions, occurring to minds of similar make under similar circumstances, is common to mystics in ancient India and in modern Christendom. The development of these fundamental ideas is naturally more elevated and benign under the influence of Christianity.
Summarily, I would say, this Hindoo mysticism—
(1.) Lays claim to disinterested love, as opposed to a mercenary religion;
(2.) Reacts against the ceremonial prescription and pedantic literalism of the Vedas;
(3.) Identifies, in its pantheism, subject and object, worshipper and worshipped;
(4.) Aims at ultimate absorption in the Infinite;
(5.) Inculcates, as the way to this dissolution, absolute passivity, withdrawal into the inmost self, cessation of all the powers,—giving recipes for procuring this beatific torpor or trance;
(6.) Believes that eternity may thus be realized in time;
(7.) Has its mythical miraculous pretentions, i.e., its theurgic department;
(8.) And, finally, advises the learner in this kind of religion to submit himself implicitly to a spiritual guide,—his Guru.
With regard to (1), it is to be observed that the disinterestedness of the worship enjoined by Crishna is by no means absolute, as Madame Guyon endeavoured to render hers. The mere ritualist, buying prosperity by temple-gifts, will realise, says Crishna, only a partial enjoyment of heaven. Arjoun, too, is encouraged by the prospect of a recompence, for he is to aspire to far higher things. ‘Men who are endowed with true wisdom are unmindful of good or evil in this world,—wise men who have abandoned all thought of the fruit which is produced from their actions are freed from the chains of birth, and go to the regions of eternal happiness.’
In some hands such doctrine might rise above the popular morality; in most it would be so interpreted as to sink below even that ignoble standard.
(3.) ‘God,’ saith Crishna, ‘is the gift of charity; God is the offering; God is in the fire of the altar; by God is the sacrifice performed; and God is to be obtained by him who maketh God alone the object of his works.’ Again, ‘I am moisture in the water, light in the sun and moon, ... human nature in mankind, ... the understanding of the wise, the glory of the proud, the strength of the strong,’ &c.
(4.) This eternal absorption in Brahm is supposed to be in some way consistent with personality, since Crishna promises Arjoun enjoyment. The mystic of the Bagvat-Gita seeks at once the highest aim of the Hindoo religion, the attainment of such a state that when he dies he shall not be born again into any form on earth. Future birth is the Hindoo hell and purgatory.
So with Buddhism, and its Nirwana.
But the final absorption which goes by the name of Nirwana among the Buddhists is described in terms which can only mean annihilation. According to the Buddhists all sentient existence has within it one spiritual element, homogeneous in the animal and the man,—Thought, which is a divine substance. This ‘Thought’ exists in its highest degree in man, the summit of creation, and from the best among men it lapses directly out of a particular existence into the universal. Thus the mind of man is divine, but most divine when nearest nothing. Hence the monastic asceticism, inertia, trance, of this kindred oriental superstition. (See Spence Hardy’s Eastern Monachism.)
(5.) ‘Divine wisdom is said to be confirmed when a man can restrain his faculties from their wonted use, as the tortoise draws in his limbs.’
The devotees who make it their principal aim to realise the emancipation of the spirit supposed to take place in trance, are called Yogis.
‘The Yogi constantly exerciseth the spirit in private. He is recluse, of a subdued mind and spirit, free from hope and free from perception. He planteth his own seat firmly on a spot that is undefiled, neither too high nor too low, and sitteth upon the sacred grass which is called Koos, covered with a skin and a cloth. There he whose business is the restraining of his passions should sit, with his mind fixed on one object alone; in the exercise of his devotion for the purification of his soul, keeping his head, his neck, and body steady, without motion; his eyes fixed on the point of his nose, looking at no other place around.’
The monks of Mount Athos, whose mysticism was also of this most degraded type, substituted, as a gazing-point, the navel for the nose.
Ward, in describing the Yogi practice, tells us that at the latest stage the eyes also are closed, while the fingers and even bandages are employed to obstruct almost completely the avenues of respiration. Then the soul is said to be united to the energy of the body; both mount, and are as it were concentrated in the skull; whence the spirit escapes by the basilar suture, and, the body having been thus abandoned, the incorporeal nature is reunited for a season to the Supreme.[[9]]
Stupefying drugs were doubtless employed to assist in inducing this state of insensibility.
Crishna teaches that ‘the wisely devout’ walk in the night of time when all things rest, and sleep in the day of time when all things wake. In other words, the escape from sense is a flight from illusion into the undeceiving condition of trance. So the Code of Menu pronounces the waking state one of deceptive appearances—a life among mere phantasmata; that of sleep a little nearer reality; while that of ecstasy, or trance, presents the truth—reveals a new world, and enables the inner eye (which opens as the outer one is closed) to discern the inmost reality of things.
These are pretensions which mysticism has often repeated. This notion underlies the theory and practice of spiritual clairvoyance.
(6.) ‘The learned behold him (Deity) alike in the reverend Brahmin perfected in knowledge; in the ox and in the elephant; in the dog, and in him who eateth the flesh of dogs. Those whose minds are fixed on this equality gain eternity even in this world’ (transcend the limitation of time).
(7.) The following passage, given by Ward, exhibits at once the nature of the miraculous powers ascribed to the highest class of devotees, and the utter lawlessness arrogated by these ‘god-intoxicated’ men:—
‘He (the Yogi) will hear celestial sounds, the songs and conversation of celestial choirs. He will have the perception of their touch in their passage through the air. He is able to trace the progress of intellect through the senses, and the path of the animal spirit through the nerves. He is able to enter a dead or a living body by the path of the senses, and in this body to act as though it were his own.
‘He who in the body hath obtained liberation is of no caste, of no sect, of no order; attends to no duties, adheres to no shastras, to no formulas, to no works of merit; he is beyond the reach of speech; he remains at a distance from all secular concerns; he has renounced the love and the knowledge of sensible objects; he is glorious as the autumnal sky; he flatters none, he honours none; he is not worshipped, he worships none; whether he practises and follows the customs of his country or not, this is his character.’
In the fourteenth century, mystics were to be found among the lower orders, whose ignorance and sloth carried negation almost as far as this. They pretended to imitate the divine immutability by absolute inaction. The dregs and refuse of mysticism along the Rhine are equal in quality to its most ambitious produce on the banks of the Ganges.
(8.) The Guru is paralleled by the Pir of the Sufis, the Confessor of the Middle Age, and the Directeur of modern France.[[10]]
A mysticism which rests ultimately on the doctrine that the human soul is of one substance with God, is fain to fall down and worship at the feet of a man. Such directorship is, of course, no essential part of mysticism—is, in fact, an inconsistency; but, though no member, or genuine outgrowth, it is an entozoon lamentably prevalent. The mystic, after all his pains to reduce himself to absolute passivity, becomes not theopathetic, but anthropopathetic—suffers, not under God, but man.
BOOK THE THIRD
THE MYSTICISM OF THE NEO-PLATONISTS
CHAPTER I.
——a man is not as God,
But then most godlike being most a man.
Tennyson.
Kate. What a formidable bundle of papers, Henry.
Atherton. Don’t be alarmed, I shall not read all this to you; only three Neo-Platonist letters I have discovered.
Mrs. Atherton. We were talking just before you came in, Mr. Willoughby, about Mr. Crossley’s sermon yesterday morning.
Willoughby. Ah, the Tabernacle in the Wilderness; did you not think his remarks on the use and abuse of symbolism in general very good? Brief, too, and suggestive; just what such portions of a sermon should be.
Atherton. He overtook me on my walk this morning, and I alluded to the subject. He said he had been dipping into Philo last week, and that suggested his topic. I told him I had paid that respectable old gentleman a visit or two lately, and we amused ourselves with some of his fancies. Think of the seven branches of the candlestick being the seven planets—the four colours employed, the four elements—the forecourt symbolizing the visible, the two sanctuaries the ideal world—and so on.
Gower. At this rate the furniture in one of Hoffmann’s tales cannot be more alive with spirit than Philo’s temple apparatus. An ingenious trifler, was he not?
Atherton. Something better, I should say.
Gower. Not, surely, when his great characteristic is an unsurpassed facility for allegorical interpretation. Is not mystical exegesis an invariable symptom of religious dilettantism?
Atherton. With the successors and imitators—yes; not with the more earnest originals,—such names as Philo, Origen, Swedenborg.
Gower. But, at any rate, if this spiritualizing mania be Philo’s great claim to distinction, head a list of mystical commentators with him, and pass on to some one better.
Atherton. He need not detain us long. For our enquiry he has importance chiefly as in a sort the intellectual father of Neo-Platonism—the first meeting-place of the waters of the eastern and the western theosophies. This is his great object—to combine the authoritative monotheism of his Hebrew Scriptures with the speculation of Plato.
Gower. Absurd attempt!—to interpret the full, clear utterance of Moses, who has found, by the hesitant and conflicting conjectures of Plato, who merely seeks.
Willoughby. Yet a very natural mistake for a Jew at Alexandria, reared in Greek culture, fascinated by the dazzling abstractions of Greek philosophy. He belonged less to Jerusalem, after all, than to Athens.
Atherton. There lies the secret. Philo was proud of his saintly ancestry, yet to his eye the virtues of the Old Testament worthy wore a rude and homely air beside the refinement of the Grecian sage. The good man of Moses and the philosopher of Philo represent two very different ideals. With the former the moral, with the latter the merely intellectual, predominates. So the Hebrew faith takes with Philo the exclusive Gentile type,—despises the body, is horrified by matter, tends to substitute abstraction for personality, turns away, I fear, from the publican and the sinner.
Gower. So, then, Platonism in Philo does for Judaism what it was soon to do for Christianity,—substitutes an ultra-human standard—an ascetic, unnatural, passively-gazing contemplation—an ambitious, would-be-disembodied intellectualism, for the all-embracing activities of common Christian life, so lowly, yet so great.
Willoughby. Yet Alexandrian Platonism was the gainer by Philo’s accommodation. Judaism enfeebled could yet impart strength to heathendom. The infusion enabled the Neo-Platonists to walk with a firmer step in the religious province; their philosophy assumed an aspect more decisively devout. Numenius learns of Philo, and Plotinus of Numenius, and the ecstasy of Plotinus is the development of Philo’s intuition.
Gower. Let me sum up; and forgive an antithesis. Philo’s great mistake lay in supposing that the religion of philosophy was necessarily the philosophy of religion. But we have forgotten your letter, Atherton.
Atherton. Here is the precious document—a letter written by Philo from Alexandria, evidently just after his journey to Rome. (Reads.)
Philo to Hephæstion.
I am beginning to recover myself, after all the anxiety and peril of our embassy to Caligula. Nothing shall tempt me to visit Rome again so long as this Emperor lives. Our divine Plato is doubly dear after so long an absence. Only an imperative sense of duty to my countrymen could again induce me to take so prominent a part in their public affairs. Except when our religion or our trade is concerned, the government has always found us more docile than either the Greeks or the Egyptians, and we enjoy accordingly large privileges. Yet when I saw the ill turn our cause took at Rome, I could not but sigh for another Julius Cæsar.
I am sorry to find you saying that you are not likely to visit Alexandria again. This restless, wicked city can present but few attractions, I grant, to a lover of philosophic quiet. But I cannot commend the extreme to which I see so many hastening. A passion for ascetic seclusion is becoming daily more prevalent among the devout and the thoughtful, whether Jew or Gentile. Yet surely the attempt to combine contemplation and action should not be so soon abandoned. A man ought at least to have evinced some competency for the discharge of the social duties before he abandons them for the divine. First the less, then the greater.
I have tried the life of the recluse. Solitude brings no escape from spiritual danger. If it closes some avenues of temptation, there are few in whose case it does not open more. Yet the Therapeutæ, a sect similar to the Essenes, with whom you are acquainted, number many among them whose lives are truly exemplary. Their cells are scattered about the region bordering on the farther shore of the Lake Mareotis. The members of either sex live a single and ascetic life, spending their time in fasting and contemplation, in prayer or reading. They believe themselves favoured with divine illumination—an inner light. They assemble on the Sabbath for worship, and listen to mystical discourses on the traditionary lore which they say has been handed down in secret among themselves. They also celebrate solemn dances and processions, of a mystic significance, by moonlight on the shore of the great mere. Sometimes, on an occasion of public rejoicing, the margin of the lake on our side will be lit with a fiery chain of illuminations, and galleys, hung with lights, row to and fro with strains of music sounding over the broad water. Then the Therapeutæ are all hidden in their little hermitages, and these sights and sounds of the world they have abandoned, make them withdraw into themselves and pray.
Their principle at least is true. The soul which is occupied with things above, and is initiated into the mysteries of the Lord, cannot but account the body evil, and even hostile. The soul of man is divine, and his highest wisdom is to become as much as possible a stranger to the body with its embarrassing appetites. God has breathed into man from heaven a portion of his own divinity. That which is divine is invisible. It may be extended, but it is incapable of separation. Consider how vast is the range of our thought over the past and the future, the heavens and the earth. This alliance with an upper world, of which we are conscious, would be impossible, were not the soul of man an indivisible portion of that divine and blessed Spirit (εἰ μὴ τῆς θείας καὶ εὐδαίμονος ψυχῆς ἐκείνης ἀπόσπασμα ἦν οὐ διαιρετόν). Contemplation of the Divine Essence is the noblest exercise of man; it is the only means of attaining to the highest truth and virtue, and therein to behold God is the consummation of our happiness here.
The confusion of tongues at the building of the tower of Babel should teach us this lesson. The heaven those vain builders sought to reach, signifies symbolically the mind, where dwell divine powers. Their futile attempt represents the presumption of those who place sense above intelligence—who think that they can storm the Intelligible by the Sensible. The structure which such impiety would raise is overthrown by spiritual tranquillity. In calm retirement and contemplation we are taught that we know like only by like, and that the foreign and lower world of the sensuous and the practical may not intrude into the lofty region of divine illumination.
I have written a small treatise on the Contemplative Life, giving an account of the Therapeutæ. If you will neither visit me nor them, I will have a copy of it made, and send you.[[11]] Farewell.
Gower. How mistaken is Philo in maintaining that the senses cannot aid us in our ascent towards the supersensuous;—as though the maltreatment of the body, the vassal, by the soul, the suzerain, were at once the means and the proof of mastery over it. Duly care for the body, and the thankful creature will not forget its place, and when you wish to meditate, will disturb you by no obtrusive hint of its presence. I find that I can rise above it only by attention to its just claims. If I violate its rights I am sued by it in the high court of nature, and cast with costs.
Mrs. Atherton. And certainly our most favoured moments of ascent into the ideal world have their origin usually in some suggestion that has reached us through the senses. I remember a little song of Uhland’s called The Passing Minstrel—a brief parable of melody, like so many of his pieces,—which, as I understood it, was designed to illustrate this very truth. The poet falls asleep on a ‘hill of blossoms’ near the road, and his soul flutters away in dream to the golden land of Fable. He wakes, as one fallen from the clouds, and sees the minstrel with his harp, who has just passed by, and playing as he goes, is lost to sight among the trees. ‘Was it he,’ the poet asks, ‘that sang into my soul those dreams of wonder?’ Another might inform the fancy with another meaning, according to the mood of the hour. It appeared to me an emblem of the way in which we are often indebted to a sunset or a landscape, to a strain of music or a suddenly-remembered verse, for a voyage into a world of vision of our own, where we cease altogether to be aware of the external cause which first transported us thither.
Atherton. That must always be true of imagination. But Platonism discards the visible instead of mounting by it. Considered morally, too, this asceticism sins so grievously. It misuses the iron of the will, given us to forge implements withal for life’s husbandry, to fashion of it a bolt for a voluntary prison. At Alexandria, doubtless, Sin was imperious in her shamelessness, at the theatre and at the mart, in the hall of judgment and in the house of feasting, but there was suffering as well as sin among the crowds of that great city, with all their ignorance and care and want, and to have done a something to lessen the suffering would have prepared the way for lessening the sin.
CHAPTER II.
La philosophie n’est pas philosophie si elle ne touche à l’abîme; mais elle cesse d’être philosophie si elle y tombe.—Cousin.
Gower. I hope you are ready, Atherton, to illumine my darkness concerning Neo-Platonism, by taking up that individual instance you were speaking of last Monday.
Atherton. I have something ready to inflict; so prepare to listen stoutly. (Reads.)
Plato pronounces Love the child of Poverty and Plenty—the Alexandrian philosophy was the offspring of Reverence and Ambition. It combined an adoring homage to the departed genius of the age of Pericles with a passionate, credulous craving after a supernatural elevation. Its literary tastes and religious wants were alike imperative and irreconcilable. In obedience to the former, it disdained Christianity; impelled by the latter, it travestied Plato. But for that proud servility which fettered it to a glorious past, it might have recognised in Christianity the only satisfaction of its higher longings. Rejecting that, it could only establish a philosophic church on the foundation of Plato’s school, and, forsaking while it professed to expound him, embrace the hallucinations of intuition and of ecstasy, till it finally vanishes at Athens amid the incense and the hocus-pocus of theurgic incantation. As it degenerates, it presses more audaciously forward through the veil of the unseen. It must see visions, dream dreams, work spells, and call down deities, demi-gods, and dæmons from their dwellings in the upper air. The Alexandrians were eclectics, because such reverence taught them to look back; mystics, because such ambition urged them to look up. They restore philosophy, after all its weary wanderings, to the place of its birth; and, in its second childhood, it is cradled in the arms of those old poetic faiths of the past, from which, in the pride of its youth, it broke away.
The mental history of the founder best illustrates the origin of the school. Plotinus, in A.D. 233, commences the study of philosophy in Alexandria, at the age of twenty-eight. His mental powers are of the concentrative rather than the comprehensive order. Impatient of negation, he has commenced an earnest search after some truth which, however abstract, shall yet be positive. He pores over the Dialogues of Plato and the Metaphysics of Aristotle, day and night. To promote the growth of his ‘soul-wings,’ as Plato counsels, he practises austerities his master would never have sanctioned. He attempts to live what he learns to call the ‘angelic life;’ the ‘life of the disembodied in the body.’ He reads with admiration the life of Apollonius of Tyana, by Philostratus, which has recently appeared. He can probably credit most of the marvels recorded of that strange thaumaturgist, who, two hundred years ago, had appeared—a revived Pythagoras, to dazzle nation after nation through which he passed, with prophecy and miracle; who had travelled to the Indus and the Ganges, and brought back the supernatural powers of Magi and Gymnosophists, and who was said to have displayed to the world once more the various knowledge, the majestic sanctity, and the superhuman attributes, of the sage of Crotona. This portraiture of a philosophical hierophant—a union of the philosopher and the priest in an inspired hero, fires the imagination of Plotinus. In the New-Pythagoreanism of which Apollonius was a representative, Orientalism and Platonism were alike embraced.[[12]] Perhaps the thought occurs thus early to Plotinus—could I travel eastward I might drink myself at those fountain-heads of tradition whence Pythagoras and Plato drew so much of their wisdom. Certain it is, that, with this purpose, he accompanied, several years subsequently, the disastrous expedition of Gordian against the Parthians, and narrowly escaped with life.
At Alexandria, Plotinus doubtless hears from orientals there some fragments of the ancient eastern theosophy—doctrines concerning the principle of evil, the gradual development of the Divine Essence, and creation by intermediate agencies, none of which he finds in his Plato. He cannot be altogether a stranger to the lofty theism which Philo marred, while he attempted to refine, by the help of his ‘Attic Moses.’ He observes a tendency on the part of philosophy to fall back upon the sanctions of religion, and on the part of the religions of the day to mingle in a Deism or a Pantheism which might claim the sanctions of philosophy. The signs of a growing toleration or indifferentism meet him on every side. Rome has long been a Pantheon for all nations, and gods and provinces together have found in the capitol at once their Olympus and their metropolis. He cannot walk the streets of Alexandria without perceiving that the very architecture tells of an alliance between the religious art of Egypt and of Greece. All, except Jews and Christians, join in the worship of Serapis.[[13]] Was not the very substance of which the statue of that god was made, an amalgam?—fit symbol of the syncretism which paid him homage. Once Serapis had guarded the shores of the Euxine, now he is the patron of Alexandria, and in him the attributes of Zeus and of Osiris, of Apis and of Pluto, are adored alike by East and West. Men are learning to overlook the external differences of name and ritual, and to reduce all religions to one general sentiment of worship. For now more than fifty years, every educated man has laughed, with Lucian’s satire in his hand, at the gods of the popular superstition. A century before Lucian, Plutarch had shown that some of the doctrines of the barbarians were not irreconcilable with the philosophy in which he gloried as a Greek. Plutarch had been followed by Apuleius, a practical eclectic, a learner in every school, an initiate in every temple, at once sceptical and credulous, a sophist and a devotee.
Plotinus looks around him, and inquires what philosophy is doing in the midst of influences such as these. Peripateticism exists but in slumber under the dry scholarship of Adrastus and Alexander of Aphrodisium, the commentators of the last century.[[14]] The New Academy and the Stoics attract youth still, but they are neither of them a philosophy so much as a system of ethics. Speculation has given place to morals. Philosophy is taken up as a branch of literature, as an elegant recreation, as a theme for oratorical display. Plotinus is persuaded that philosophy should be worship—speculation, a search after God—no amusement, but a prayer. Scepticism is strong in proportion to the defect or weakness of everything positive around it. The influence of Ænesidemus, who, two centuries ago, proclaimed universal doubt, is still felt in Alexandria. But his scepticism would break up the foundations of morality. What is to be done? Plotinus sees those who are true to speculation surrendering ethics, and those who hold to morality abandoning speculation.
In his perplexity, a friend takes him to hear Ammonius Saccas. He finds him a powerful, broad-shouldered man, as he might naturally be who not long before was to be seen any day in the sultry streets of Alexandria, a porter, wiping his brow under his burden. Ammonius is speaking of the reconciliation that might be effected between Plato and Aristotle. This eclecticism it is which has given him fame. At another time it might have brought on him only derision; now there is an age ready to give the attempt an enthusiastic welcome.
‘What,’ he cries, kindling with his theme, ‘did Plato leave behind him, what Aristotle, when Greece and philosophy had waned together? The first, a chattering crew of sophists: the second, the lifeless dogmatism of the sensationalist. The self-styled followers of Plato were not brave enough either to believe or to deny. The successors of the Stagyrite did little more than reiterate their denial of the Platonic doctrine of ideas. Between them morality was sinking fast. Then an effort was made for its revival. The attempt at least was good. It sprang out of a just sense of a deep defect. Without morality, what is philosophy worth? But these ethics must rest on speculation for their basis. The Epicureans and the Stoics, I say, came forward to supply that moral want. Each said, we will be practical, intelligible, utilitarian. One school, with its hard lesson of fate and self-denial; the other, with its easier doctrine of pleasure, more or less refined, were rivals in their profession of ability to teach men how to live. In each there was a certain truth, but I will honour neither with the name of a philosophy. They have confined themselves to mere ethical application—they are willing, both of them, to let first principles lie unstirred. Can scepticism fail to take advantage of this? While they wrangle, both are disbelieved. But, sirs, can we abide in scepticism?—it is death. You ask me what I recommend? I say, travel back across the past. Out of the whole of that by-gone and yet undying world of thought, construct a system greater than any of the sundered parts. Repudiate these partial scholars in the name of their masters. Leave them to their disputes, pass over their systems, already tottering for lack of a foundation, and be it yours to show how their teachers join hands far above them. In such a spirit of reverent enthusiasm you may attain a higher unity, you mount in speculation, and from that height ordain all noble actions for your lower life. So you become untrue neither to experience nor to reason, and the genius of eclecticism will combine, yea, shall I say it, will surpass while it embraces, all the ancient triumphs of philosophy!‘[[15]]
Such was the teaching which attracted Longinus, Herennius, and Origen (not the Father). It makes an epoch in the life of Plotinus. He desires now no other instructor, and is preparing to become himself a leader in the pathway Ammonius has pointed out. He is convinced that Platonism, exalted into an enthusiastic illuminism, and gathering about itself all the scattered truth upon the field of history,—Platonism, mystical and catholic, can alone preserve men from the abyss of scepticism. One of the old traditions of Finland relates how a mother once found her son torn into a thousand fragments at the bottom of the River of Death. She gathered the scattered members to her bosom, and rocking to and fro, sang a magic song, which made him whole again, and restored the departed life. Such a spell the Alexandrian philosophy sought to work—thus to recover and re-unite the relics of antique truth, dispersed and drowned by time.
Plotinus occupied himself only with the most abstract questions concerning knowledge and being. Detail and method—all the stitching and clipping of eclecticism, he bequeathed as the handicraft of his successors. His fundamental principle is the old petitio principii of idealism. Truth, according to him, is not the agreement of our apprehension of an external object with the object itself—it is rather the agreement of the mind with itself. The objects we contemplate and that which contemplates, are identical for the philosopher. Both are thought; only like can know like; all truth is within us. By reducing the soul to its most abstract simplicity, we subtilise it so that it expands into the infinite. In such a state we transcend our finite selves, and are one with the infinite; this is the privileged condition of ecstasy. These blissful intervals, but too evanescent and too rare, were regarded as the reward of philosophic asceticism—the seasons of refreshing, which were to make amends for all the stoical austerities of the steep ascent towards the abstraction of the primal unity.
Thus the Neo-Platonists became ascetics and enthusiasts: Plato was neither. Where Plato acknowledges the services of the earliest philosophers—the imperfect utterances of the world’s first thoughts,—Neo-Platonism (in its later period, at least) undertakes to detect, not the similarity merely, but the identity between Pythagoras and Plato, and even to exhibit the Platonism of Orpheus and of Hermes. Where Plato is hesitant or obscure, Neo-Platonism inserts a meaning of its own, and is confident that such, and no other, was the master’s mind. Where Plato indulges in a fancy, or hazards a bold assertion, Neo-Platonism, ignoring the doubts Plato may himself express elsewhere, spins it out into a theory, or bows to it as an infallible revelation.[[16]] Where Plato has the doctrine of Reminiscence, Neo-Platonism has the doctrine of Ecstasy. In the Reminiscence of Plato, the ideas the mind perceives are without it. Here there is no mysticism, only the mistake incidental to metaphysicians generally, of giving an actual existence to mere mental abstractions. In Ecstasy, the ideas perceived are within the mind. The mystic, according to Plotinus, contemplates the divine perfections in himself; and, in the ecstatic state, individuality (which is so much imperfection), memory, time, space, phenomenal contradictions, and logical distinctions, all vanish. It is not until the rapture is past, and the mind, held in this strange solution, is, as it were, precipitated on reality, that memory is again employed. Plotinus would say that Reminiscence could impart only inferior knowledge, because it implies separation between the subject and the object. Ecstasy is superior—is absolute, being the realization of their identity. True to this doctrine of absorption, the Pantheism of Plotinus teaches him to maintain, alike with the Oriental mystic at one extreme of time, and with the Hegelian at the other, that our individual existence is but phenomenal and transitory. Plotinus, accordingly, does not banish reason, he only subordinates it to ecstasy where the Absolute is in question.[[17]] It is not till the last that he calls in supernatural aid. The wizard king builds his tower of speculation by the hands of human workmen till he reaches the top story, and then summons his genii to fashion the battlements of adamant, and crown them with starry fire.
Gower. Thanks. These Neo-Platonists are evidently no mere dreamers. They are erudite and critical, they study and they reason, they are logicians as well as poets; they are not mystics till they have first been rationalists, and they have recourse at last to mysticism only to carry them whither they find reason cannot mount.
Atherton. Now, I have a letter by Plotinus. It is without a date, but from internal evidence must have been written about A.D. 260.
Plotinus to Flaccus.
I applaud your devotion to philosophy; I rejoice to hear that your soul has set sail, like the returning Ulysses, for its native land—that glorious, that only real country—the world of unseen truth. To follow philosophy, the senator Rogatianus, one of the noblest of my disciples, gave up the other day all but the whole of his patrimony, set free his slaves, and surrendered all the honours of his station.
Tidings have reached us that Valerian has been defeated, and is now in the hands of Sapor. The threats of Franks and Allemanni, of Goths and Persians, are alike terrible by turns to our degenerate Rome. In days like these, crowded with incessant calamities, the inducements to a life of contemplation are more than ever strong. Even my quiet existence seems now to grow somewhat sensible of the advance of years. Age alone I am unable to debar from my retirement. I am weary already of this prison-house, the body, and calmly await the day when the divine nature within me shall be set free from matter.
The Egyptian priests used to tell me that a single touch with the wing of their holy bird could charm the crocodile into torpor; it is not thus speedily, my dear friend, that the pinions of your soul will have power to still the untamed body. The creature will yield only to watchful, strenuous constancy of habit. Purify your soul from all undue hope and fear about earthly things, mortify the body, deny self,—affections as well as appetites, and the inner eye will begin to exercise its clear and solemn vision.
You ask me to tell you how we know, and what is our criterion of certainty. To write is always irksome to me. But for the continual solicitations of Porphyry, I should not have left a line to survive me. For your own sake and for your father’s, my reluctance shall be overcome.
External objects present us only with appearances. Concerning them, therefore, we may be said to possess opinion rather than knowledge. The distinctions in the actual world of appearance are of import only to ordinary and practical men. Our question lies with the ideal reality that exists behind appearance. How does the mind perceive these ideas? Are they without us, and is the reason, like sensation, occupied with objects external to itself? What certainty could we then have, what assurance that our perception was infallible? The object perceived would be a something different from the mind perceiving it. We should have then an image instead of reality. It would be monstrous to believe for a moment that the mind was unable to perceive ideal truth exactly as it is, and that we had not certainty and real knowledge concerning the world of intelligence. It follows, therefore, that this region of truth is not to be investigated as a thing external to us, and so only imperfectly known. It is within us. Here the objects we contemplate and that which contemplates are identical,—both are thought. The subject cannot surely know an object different from itself. The world of ideas lies within our intelligence. Truth, therefore, is not the agreement of our apprehension of an external object with the object itself. It is the agreement of the mind with itself. Consciousness, therefore, is the sole basis of certainty. The mind is its own witness. Reason sees in itself that which is above itself as its source; and again, that which is below itself as still itself once more.
Knowledge has three degrees—Opinion, Science, Illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition. To the last I subordinate reason. It is absolute knowledge founded on the identity of the mind knowing with the object known.[[18]]
There is a raying out of all orders of existence, an external emanation from the ineffable One (πρόοδος). There is again a returning impulse, drawing all upwards and inwards towards the centre from whence all came (ἐπιστροφή). Love, as Plato in the Banquet beautifully says, is the child of Poverty and Plenty.[[19]] In the amorous quest of the soul after the Good, lies the painful sense of fall and deprivation. But that Love is blessing, is salvation, is our guardian genius; without it the centrifugal law would overpower us, and sweep our souls out far from their source toward the cold extremities of the Material and the Manifold. The wise man recognises the idea of the Good within him. This he develops by withdrawal into the Holy Place of his own soul. He who does not understand how the soul contains the Beautiful within itself, seeks to realize beauty without, by laborious production. His aim should rather be to concentrate and simplify, and so to expand his being; instead of going out into the Manifold, to forsake it for the One, and so to float upwards towards the divine fount of being whose stream flows within him.
You ask, how can we know the Infinite?[[20]] I answer, not by reason. It is the office of reason to distinguish and define. The Infinite, therefore, cannot be ranked among its objects. You can only apprehend the Infinite by a faculty superior to reason, by entering into a state in which you are your finite self no longer, in which the Divine Essence is communicated to you. This is Ecstasy. It is the liberation of your mind from its finite consciousness. Like only can apprehend like; when you thus cease to be finite, you become one with the Infinite. In the reduction of your soul to its simplest self (ἅπλωσις), its divine essence, you realize this Union, this Identity (ἔνωσιν).
But this sublime condition is not of permanent duration. It is only now and then that we can enjoy this elevation (mercifully made possible for us) above the limits of the body and the world. I myself have realized it but three times as yet, and Porphyry hitherto not once. All that tends to purify and elevate the mind will assist you in this attainment, and facilitate the approach and the recurrence of these happy intervals. There are, then, different roads by which this end may be reached. The love of beauty which exalts the poet; that devotion to the One and that ascent of science which makes the ambition of the philosopher; and that love and those prayers by which some devout and ardent soul tends in its moral purity towards perfection. These are the great highways conducting to that height above the actual and the particular, where we stand in the immediate presence of the Infinite, who shines out as from the deeps of the soul.[[21]]
Note to page 75.
This imaginary fragment from Ammonius Saccas is, I believe, true to what seems fairly inferred concerning his teaching. See Brucker, ii. p. 211; and Jules Simon, i. 205; ii. 668.
Plotinus appears to have been indebted to Numenius even more than to Ammonius or Potamon for some of the ideas peculiar to his system. The modicum of information concerning Numenius which Eusebius has handed down shows that this Platonist anticipated the characteristic doctrine of Neo-Platonism concerning the Divine Being. Like the Neo-Platonist, he pursued philosophical inquiry in a religious spirit, imploring, as Plotinus does, divine illumination. He endeavoured to harmonize Pythagoras and Plato, to elucidate and confirm the opinions of both by the religious dogmas of the Egyptians, the Magi, and the Brahmins, and, like many of the Christian Fathers, he believed that Plato stood indebted to the Hebrew as well as to the Egyptian theology for much of his wisdom. He was pressed by the same great difficulty which weighed upon Plotinus. How could the immutable One create the Manifold without self-degradation? He solved it in a manner substantially the same. His answer is—by means of a hypostatic emanation. He posits in the Divine Nature three principles in a descending scale. His order of existence is as follows:—
I. God, the Absolute.
II. The Demiurge; he is the Artificer, in a sense, the imitator of the former. He contemplates matter, his eye ordains and upholds it, yet he is himself separate from it, since matter contains a concupiscent principle,—is fluctuating, and philosophically non-existent. The Demiurge is the ἄρχὴ γενέσεως, and good; for goodness is the original principle of Being. The second Hypostasis, engaged in the contemplation of matter, does not attain the serene self-contemplation of the First.
III. Substance or Essence, of a twofold character, corresponding to the two former.
The Universe is a copy of this third Principle.
This not very intelligible theory, which of course increases instead of lessening the perplexity in which the Platonists were involved, though differing in detail from that of Plotinus, proceeds on the same principle;—the expedient, namely, of appending to the One certain subordinate hypostases to fill the gap between it and the Manifold. (See, on his opinions, Euseb. Præp. Evang. lib. viii. p. 411 (ed. Viger); lib. xi. c. 18, p. 537; capp. 21, 22, and lib. xv. c. 17.)
Note to page 81.
Plotinus and his successors are the model of the Pseudo-Dionysius in his language concerning the Deity. Of his abstract primal principle neither being nor life can be predicated; he is above being and above life. Enn. iii. lib. 8, c. 9. But man by simplifying his nature to the utmost possible extent may become lost in this Unity. In Enn. v. lib. 5, c. 8, the mind of the contemplative philosopher is described as illumined with a divine light. He cannot tell whence it comes, or whither it goes. It is rather he himself who approaches or withdraws. He must not pursue it (οὐ χρὴ διώκειν) but abide (a true Quietist) in patient waiting, as one looking for the rising of the sun out of the ocean. The soul, blind to all beside, gazes intently on the ideal vision of the Beautiful, and is glorified as it contemplates it—ἐκεῖ ἑαυτὸν πᾶς τρέπων καὶ διδοὺς στας δὲ καὶ οἷον πληρωθεὶς μένους, εἶδε μὲν τὰ πρῶτα καλλίω γενόμενον ἑαυτὸν, καὶ ἐπιστίλβοντα ὡς ἐγγὺς ὄντος αὐτοῦ.
But this is only a preliminary stage of exaltation. The Absolute or the One, has no parts; all things partake of him, nothing possesses him; to see impartially is an impossibility, a contradiction,—if we imagine we recognise a portion he is far from us yet,—to see him mediately (δι᾽ ἑτέρων) is to behold his traces, not himself. Ὅταν μὲν ὁρᾶς ὁλον βλέπε. But, asks Plotinus, is not seeing him wholly identity with him? cap. 10.
The mystical aspirant is directed therefore to leave the glorified image of himself, radiant with the transforming effulgence of Beauty, to escape from his individual self by withdrawing into his own unity, wherein he becomes identified with the Infinite One—εἰς ἓν αὑτῷ ἐλθὼυ, καὶ μήκετι σχίσας, ἓν ὁμοῦ πάντα ἐστὶ μετ᾽ ἐκείνου τοῦ θεοῦ, ἀψοφητὶ παρόντος. Retreating into the inmost recesses of his own being, he there ἔχει πᾶν, καὶ ἀφεὶς τὴν αἴσθησιν εἰς τ᾽ οὐπίσω, τοῦ ἕτερος εἶναι φόβῳ, εἶς ἐστίν ἐκεῖ. No language could more clearly express the doctrine of identity—the object seen and the subject seeing are one. Plotinus triumphantly asks—πῶς οὖν ἕσται τί; ἐν καλῷ, μὴ ὁρμῶν αὐτό· ἤ ὁρῶν αὐτὸ ὡς ἕτερον, οὐδέπω ἐν καλῷ· γενόμενος δὲ αὐτὸ, οὕτω μάλιστα ἐν καλῷ εἰ οὖν ὅρασις τοῦ ἔξο, ὅρασιν μὺν οὐ δεῖ εἶναι, ἢ οὔτως ὡς ταὺτὸν τῷ ὁρατῷ. Ibid. pp. 552-3.
CHAPTER III.
Lume è lassù che visibile face
Lo creatore a quella creatura
Che solo in lui vedere ha la sua pace.[[22]]
Dante.
Mrs. Atherton. I confess I cannot understand what that state of mind can be which Plotinus calls ecstasy in the letter you read us last night, and about which most of your mystical fraternity talk so mysteriously.
Kate. I think I shall have myself mesmerised some day to form an idea.
Willoughby. I suppose the mystic, by remaining for many hours (enfeebled, perhaps, by fast and vigil), absolutely motionless, ceasing to think of anything—except that he thinks he is successful in thinking of nothing, and staring pertinaciously at vacancy, throws himself at last into a kind of trance. In this state he may perceive, even when the eyes are closed, some luminous appearance, perhaps the result of pressure on the optic nerve—I am not anatomist enough to explain; and if his mind be strongly imaginative, or labouring with the ground-swell of recent excitement, this light may shape itself into archetype, dæmon, or what not. In any case, the more distinct the object seen, the more manifestly is it the projection of his own mind—a Brocken-phantom, the enlarged shadow of himself moving on some shifting tapestry of mist.
Kate. Like the woodman described by Coleridge as beholding with such awe an appearance of the kind, when he
Sees full before him gliding without tread
An image with a glory round its head,
This shade he worships for its golden hues,
And makes (not knowing) that which he pursues.
Atherton. Such has been the god of many a mystic. He will soar above means, experience, history, external revelation, and ends by mistaking a hazy reflex of his own image for Deity.
Gower. But we must not forget that, according to Plotinus, all sense of personality is lost during ecstasy, and he would regard any light or form whatever (presented to what one may call his cerebral vision) as a sign that the trance was yet incomplete. He yearns to escape from everything that can be distinguished, bounded, or depicted, into the illimitable inane.
Atherton. Very true. And it is this extreme of negation and abstraction for which Plotinus is remarkable, that makes it alone worth our while to talk so much about him. His philosophy and that of his successors, mistaken for Platonism, was to corrupt the Christian Church. For hundreds of years there will be a succession of prelates, priests, or monks, in whose eyes the frigid refinements of Plotinus will be practically, though not confessedly, regarded as representing God far more worthily than the grand simplicity and the forcible figurativeness of Scripture language. For the Christian’s God will be substituted that sublime cypher devised by Plotinus—that blank something, of which you cannot say that it exists, for it is above existence.
Stop a moment—let me tell my beads, and try to count off the doctrines we shall meet with again and again in those forms of Christian mysticism where the Neo-Platonist element prevails—the germs of all lie in Plotinus.
There is, first of all, the principle of negation; that all so-called manifestations and revelations of God do in fact veil him; that no affirmative can be predicated of him, because he is above all our positive conceptions; that all symbols, figures, media, partial representations, must be utterly abandoned because, as finite, they fall infinitely short of the Infinite.
Here we are sunk below humanity—our knowledge consists in ignorance—our vision in darkness.
The next step raises us in an instant from this degrading limitation up to Deity—‘sets our feet in a large room,’ as the later mystics phrased it—even in infinity, and identifies us for a time with God.
Since the partial finite way of knowing God is so worthless, to know him truly we must escape from the finite, from all processes, all media, from the very gifts of God to God himself, and know him immediately, completely, in the infinite way—by receiving, or being received into, him directly.
To attain this identity, in which, during a brief space of rapture at least, the subject and object, the knower and the known, are one and the same, we must withdraw into our inmost selves, into that simple oneness of our own essence which by its very rarity is susceptible of blending with that supreme attenuation called the Divine Essence. So doing, we await in passivity the glory, the embrace of Union. Hence the inmost is the highest—introversion is ascension, and introrsum ascendere the watchword of all mystics. God is found within, at once radiating from the depths of the soul, and absorbing it as the husk of personality drops away.
Willoughby. And so the means and faculties God has given us for knowing him are to lie unused.
Atherton. Certainly; night must fall on reason, imagination, memory—on our real powers—that an imaginary power may awake. This is what the mystics call the absorption of the powers in God, leaving active within us nothing natural, in order that God may be substituted for ourselves, and all operations within be supernatural, and even divine.
Gower. Then mysticism is a spiritual art whereby the possible is forsaken for the impossible—the knowable for the unknowable.
Willoughby. Or a contrivance, say, for reaching Divinity which realizes only torpor.
Gower. A sorry sight this misdirection and disappointment of spiritual aspiration. Does it not remind you of that ever-suggestive legend of Psyche—how she has to carry the box of celestial beauty to Venus, and by the way covets some of this loveliness for herself. She lifts the lid, and there steals out a soporific vapour, throwing her into a deep slumber on the edge of a dizzy precipice. There she lies entranced till Eros comes to waken and to rescue her.
Atherton. I should grow very tiresome if I were now to attempt to indicate the likeness and the difference between ancient and modern speculation on these questions, and where I think the error lies, and why. But you must bear with me, Kate, if I hang some dry remarks on what you said just now.
Kate. I am sure I—
Atherton. You quoted Coleridge a minute since. He first, and after him Carlyle, familiarized England with the German distinction between reason and understanding. In fact, what the Epicureans and the Stoics were to Plotinus in his day, that were Priestley and Paley to Coleridge. The spiritualist is the sworn foe of your rationalist and pleasures-of-virtue man. Romance must loathe utilitarianism, enthusiasm scorn expediency. Hence the reaction which gives us Schelling as the Plotinus of Berlin, and Coleridge as the Schelling of Highgate. The understanding had been over-tasked—set to work unanimated and unaided by the conscience and the heart. The result was pitiable—lifeless orthodoxy and sneering scepticism. Christianity was elaborately defended on its external evidences; the internal evidence of its own nature overlooked.
What was needful at such a juncture? Surely that both should be employed in healthful alliance—the understanding and the conscience—the faculty which distinguishes and judges, and the faculty which presides over our moral nature, deciding about right and wrong. These are adequate to recognise the claims of Revelation. The intellectual faculty can deal with the historic evidence, the moral can pronounce concerning the tendency of the book, righteous or unrighteous. In those features of it unexplained and inexplicable to the understanding, if we repose on faith, we do so on grounds which the understanding shows to be sound. Hence the reception given to Christianity is altogether reasonable.
But no such moderate ground as this would satisfy the ardour which essayed reform; the understanding, because it could not do everything—could not be the whole mind, but only a part—because it was proved unequal to accomplish alone the work of all our faculties together, was summarily cashiered. We must have for religion a new, a higher faculty. Instead of reinforcing the old power, a novel nomenclature is devised which seems to endow man with a loftier attribute. This faculty is the intuition of Plotinus, the Intellectuelle Anschauung of Schelling; the Intuitive Reason, Source of Ideas and Absolute Truths, the Organ of Philosophy and Theology, as Coleridge styles it. It is a direct beholding, which, according to Plotinus, rises in some moments of exaltation to ecstasy. It is, according to Schelling, a realization of the identity of subject and object in the individual, which blends him with that identity of subject and object called God; so that, carried out of himself, he does, in a manner, think divine thoughts—views all things from their highest point of view—mind and matter from the centre of their identity.[[23]] He becomes recipient, according to Emerson, of the Soul of the world. He loses, according to Coleridge, the particular in the universal reason; finds that ideas appear within him from an internal source supplied by the Logos or Eternal Word of God—an infallible utterance from the divine original of man’s highest nature.[[24]]
Willoughby. One aim in all—to escape the surface varieties of our individual (or more properly dividual) being, and penetrate to the universal truth—the absolute certainty everywhere the same:—a shaft-sinking operation—a descent into our original selves—digging down, in one case from a garden, in another from a waste, here from the heart of a town, there from a meadow, but all the miners are to find at the bottom a common ground—the primæval granite—the basis of the eternal truth-pillars. This I take to be the object of the self-simplification Plotinus inculcates—to get beneath the finite superficial accretions of our nature.
Atherton. And what comes of it after all? After denuding ourselves of all results of experience, conditioned distinctions, &c., we are landed in a void, we find only hollow silence, if we may accept a whisper or two, saying that ingratitude, treachery, fraud, and similar crimes, are very wrong.
Gower. And even these dictates are those of our moral sense, not of an intellectual power of insight. For surely to call conscience practical Reason, as Kant does, is only to confound our moral and intellectual nature together.
Atherton. Very well, then. Seclude and simplify yourself thoroughly, and you do not find data within you equal to your need—equal to show you what God is, has done, should do, &c.
Willoughby. But all these intuitionalists profess to evolve from their depths very much more than those simplest ethical perceptions.
Atherton. By carrying down with them into those depths the results of the understanding, of experience, of external culture, and then bringing them up to light again as though they had newly emerged from the recesses of the Infinite. This intuitional metal, in its native state, is mere fluent, formless quicksilver; to make it definite and serviceable you must fix it by an alloy; but then, alas! it is pure Reason no longer, and, so far from being universal truth, receives a countless variety of shapes, according to the temperament, culture, or philosophic party, of the individual thinker. So that, in the end, the result is merely a dogmatical investiture of a man’s own notions with a sort of divine authority. You dispute with Schelling, and he waves you away as a profane and intuitionless laic. What is this but the sacerdotalism of the philosopher? The fanatical mystic who believes himself called on to enforce the fantasies of his special revelation upon other men, does not more utterly contemn argument than does the theosophist, when he bids you kick your understanding back into its kennel, and hearken in reverend awe to his intuitions.
Willoughby. Telling you, too, that if your inward witness does not agree with his, you are, philosophically speaking, in the gall of bitterness and the bond of iniquity.
Atherton. You are catching the approved style of expression so much in vogue with our modern religious infidelity. This is the artifice—to be scriptural in phrase, and anti-scriptural in sense: to parade the secret symbols of Christianity in the van of that motley army which marches to assail it.
Gower. The expedient reminds me of the device of Cambyses, who, when he drew out his forces against the Egyptians, placed a row of ibises in front of his line, and the Egyptians, it is said, suffered defeat rather than discharge an arrow which might wound the birds they worshipped.
Willoughby. To go back to Plotinus.[[25]] That doctrine of the Epistrophe—the return of all intelligence by a law of nature to the divine centre—must inevitably be associated with the unhealthy morality always attendant on pantheism. It is an organic process godward, ending in loss of personal existence, no moral or spiritual elevation.
Gower. His abstract Unity has no character, only negation of all conceivable attributes—so will and character can have no place in his theory of assimilation to God. Self-culture is self-reduction. What a plan of the universe!—all intelligence magnetically drawn to the Centre, like the ships to the Mountain of the Loadstone in the Arabian Nights—as they approach, the nails which hold them together are withdrawn, they fall apart, and all the fabric is dissolved.
Willoughby. It is curious to observe how rapidly the mind gives way under the unnatural strain of this super-essential abstraction, and indemnifies itself by imaginative and fantastical excesses for the attempt to sojourn in an atmosphere so rare. At first, ecstasy is an indescribable state—any form or voice would mar and materialize it. The vague boundlessness of this exaltation, in which the soul swoons away, is not to be hinted at by the highest utterance of mortal speech. But a degenerate age or a lower order of mind demands the detail and imagery of a more tangible marvel. The demand creates supply, and the mystic, deceiver or deceived, or both, begins to furnish forth for himself and others a full itinerary of those regions in the unseen world which he has scanned or traversed in his moments of elevation. He describes the starred baldrics and meteor-swords of the aërial panoply; tells what forlorn shapes have been seen standing dark against a far depth of brightness, like stricken pines on a sunset horizon; what angelic forms, in gracious companies, alight about the haunts of men, thwarting the evil and opening pathways for the good; what genii tend what mortals, and under what astral influences they work weal or woe; what beings of the middle air crowd in embattled rows the mountain side, or fill some vast amphitheatre of silent and inaccessible snow,—how some encamp in the valley, under the pennons of the summer lightning, and others find a tented field where the slow wind unrolls the exhalations along the marsh, and builds a billowy canopy of vapours: all is largely told,—what ethereal heraldry marshals with its blazon the thrones and dominions of the unseen realm; what giant powers and principalities darken with long shadow, or illumine with a winged wake of glory, the forms of following myriads,—their ranks and races, wars and destiny, as minutely registered as the annals of some neighbour province, as confidently recounted as though the seer had nightly slipped his bonds of flesh, and mingled in their council or their battle.
Atherton. A true portraiture. Observe how this mysticism pretends to raise man above self into the universal, and issues in giving us only what is personal. It presents us, after all, only with the creations of the fancy, the phenomena of the sensibility peculiar to the individual,—that finite, personal idiosyncrasy which is so despised. Its philosophy of the universe subsides into a morbid psychology. Man is persuaded that he is to traverse the realms of fire and air, where the intelligible essences and archetypes of all things dwell; and, like the Knight of La Mancha, he never stirs in reality from the little grass-plot of individual temperament on which his wondrous wooden horse stands still. This theosophy professes to make man divine, and it fails at last to keep him even rational. It prevents his becoming what he might be, while it promises to make him what he never can become.
Note to page 90.
M. Simon has shown, with much acuteness, in what way the exigencies of the system of Plotinus compelled him to have recourse to a new faculty, distinct from reason. Plotinus perceived that Plato had not been true to the consequences of his own dialectics. When he had reached the summit of his logical abstraction,—had passed through definition after definition, each more intangible than the last, on his way upward towards the One, he arrived at last at a God who was above Being itself. From this result he shrank, and so ceased to be consistent. How could such a God be a God of Providence, such a shadow of a shade a creator? Plato was not prepared, like Plotinus, to soar so completely above experience and the practical as to accept the utmost consequences of his logical process. So, that his God might be still the God of Providence, he retained him within the sphere of reason, gave him Being, Thought, Power, and called him the Demiurge. When Plotinus, like a true eclectic, carried still farther his survey of what history afforded him, he found Aristotle postulating a Deity so restricted by his own abstraction and immutability as to render it impossible to associate with his nature the idea of superintendence. It was feared that to represent God as the God of Creation and of Providence would be to dualize him. And yet the world did exist. How were the serene and remote Unity demanded by logic, and that activity and contact with matter no less imperatively demanded for God by experience, to be reconciled with each other? It is scarcely necessary to observe that there was no real difficulty. The whole problem was the result of the notion, so universal, concerning the evil of matter, and of the wrong answer given by ancient philosophy to the vexed question—Does the Supreme work τῷ εἶναι, or τῷ βούλεσθαι? Philosophy maintained the former; the Christian Church the latter. To remove this obstacle which philosophy had itself constructed, Plotinus proposed his theory of these hypostases, in the Divine Nature. Above and beyond a God such as that of Plato, he places another like that of Aristotle, and above him a simple Unity, like the God of the Eleatics. The last was the ultimatum of the process of logical simplification—a something above being. But the hypothesis was destitute of proof—it was, in fact, contrary to reason. Plotinus must therefore either surrender his theory or bid farewell to reason. He chose the latter course. He does not deny the important services of reason, but he professes to transcend its limits. He calls in mysticism to substantiate, by the doctrines of Illumination and Identity, his imaginary God. He affirms a God beyond reason, and then a faculty beyond reason to discern that God withal.
This attempt to solve the problem in question is of course a failure. It is still more open than the system of Plato to Aristotle’s objection, that it resembled the expedient of an arithmetician who should endeavour to simplify a calculation he found perplexing by taking still higher figures. Plotinus does not explain what he means by a Hypostasis. If the Hypostases in his Trinity have reality, the ideal unity he is so anxious to preserve in the Divine Nature is after all destroyed. If they have not, the gap between the One and the Manifold is still without a bridge, and the difficulty they are introduced to remove remains in effect where it was. If this hypothesis had made no part of the system of Plotinus, the great occasion for the doctrine of Ecstasy and the most powerful internal inducement to mysticism would have been wanting. The philosopher escapes from his labyrinth by borrowing the wings of the mystic.—See Jules Simon, tom. i. pp. 63, 84; ii. 462.
CHAPTER IV.
Stargaze. ’Tis drawn, I assure you, from the aphorisms of the old Chaldeans, Zoroaster the first and greatest magician; Mercurius Trismegistus, the later Ptolemy, and the everlasting prognosticator, old Erra Pater.—Massinger.
Willoughby. We have now about done, I suppose, with the theosophic branch of the Neo-Platonist school; with its latest leaders it degenerates into theurgic mysticism.
Kate. I hope it is going to degenerate into something one can understand.
Gower. The great metaphysician, Plotinus, is off the stage, that is some comfort for you, Miss Merivale. Magic is less wearisome than metaphysics.
Atherton. The change is marked, indeed. Plotinus, wrapt in his proud abstraction, cared little for fame. His listening disciples were his world. Porphyry entered his school fresh from the study of Aristotle. At first the daring opponent of the master, he soon became the most devoted of his scholars. With a temperament more active and practical than that of Plotinus, with more various ability and far more facility in adaptation, with an erudition equal to his fidelity, blameless in his life, pre-eminent in the loftiness and purity of his ethics, he was well fitted to do all that could be done towards securing for the doctrines he had espoused that reputation and that wider influence to which Plotinus was so indifferent. His aim was twofold. He engaged in a conflict hand to hand with two antagonists at once, by both of whom he was eventually vanquished. He commenced an assault on Christianity without, and he endeavoured to check the progress of superstitious usage within the pale of Paganism. But Christianity could not be repulsed, and heathendom would not be reformed. In vain did he attempt to substitute a single philosophical religion which should be universal, for the manifold and popular Polytheism of the day. Christian truth repelled his attack on the one side, and idolatrous superstition carried his defences on the other.
Willoughby. A more false position could scarcely have been assumed. Men like Porphyry constituted themselves the defenders of a Paganism which did but partially acknowledge their advocacy. Often suspected by the Emperors, they were still oftener maligned and persecuted by the jealousy of the priests. They were the unaccredited champions of Paganism, for they sought to refine while they conserved it. They defended it, not as zealots, but as men of letters.[[26]] They defended it because the old faith could boast of great names and great achievements in speculation, literature, and art, and because the new appeared novel and barbarian in its origin, and humiliating in its claims. They wrote, they lectured, they disputed, in favour of the temple and against the church, because they dreamed of the days of Pericles under the yoke of the Empire: not because they worshipped idols, but because they worshipped Plato.
Mrs. Atherton. And must not that very attempt, noticed just now, to recognise all religions, have been as fatal to them as the causes you mention?
Atherton. Certainly. Mankind does not require a revelation to give them a religion, but to give them one which shall be altogether true. These Neo-Platonists were confronted by a religion intolerant of all others. They attempted, by keeping open house in their eclectic Pantheon, to excel where they thought their antagonist deficient. They failed to see in that benign intolerance of falsehood, which stood out as so strange a characteristic in the Christian faith, one of the credentials of its divine origin. No theory of the universe manufactured by a school can be a gospel to man’s soul. They forgot that lip-homage paid to all religions is the virtual denial of each.
Gower. Strange position, indeed, maintaining as their cardinal doctrine the unity and immutability of the divine nature, and entering the lists as conservators of polytheism; teaching the most abstract and defending the most gross conceptions of deity; exclaiming against vice, and solicitous to preserve all the incentives to it which swarm in every heathen mythology. Of a truth, no clean thing could be brought out of that unclean,—the new cloth would not mend the old garment. Men know that they ought to worship; the question is, Whom? and How?
Willoughby. Then, again, their attempt to combine religion and philosophy robbed the last of its only principle, the first of its only power. The religions lost in the process what sanctity and authoritativeness they had to lose, while speculation abandoned all scientific precision, and deserted its sole consistent basis in the reason. This endeavour to philosophise superstition could only issue in the paradoxical product of a philosophy without reason, and a superstition without faith. To make philosophy superstitious was not difficult, and they did that; but they could not—do what they would—make superstition philosophical.
Atherton. Add, too, that Greek philosophy, which had always repelled the people, possessed no power to seclude them from the Christianity that sought them out. In vain did it borrow from Christianity a new refinement, and receive some rays of light from the very foe which fronted it——
Willoughby. As is very visible in the higher moral tone of Porphyry’s Treatise on Abstinence.
Atherton. The struggles of heathendom to escape its doom only the more display its weakness and the justice of the sentence.
Gower. Like the man in the Gesta Romanorum, who came to the gate where every humpbacked, one-eyed, scald-headed passenger had to pay a penny for each infirmity: they were going only to demand toll for his hunch, but he resisted, and in the struggle was discovered to be amenable for every deformity and disease upon the table. So, no doubt, it must always be with systems, states, men, and dogs, that won’t know when they have had their day. The scuffle makes sad work with the patched clothes, false teeth, wig, and cosmetics.
Atherton. Life is sweet.
As to Porphyry it was doubtless his more practical temperament that led him to modify the doctrine of Plotinus concerning ecstasy. With Porphyry the mind does not lose, in that state of exaltation, its consciousness of personality. He calls it a dream in which the soul, dead to the world, rises to an activity that partakes of the divine. It is an elevation above reason, above action, above liberty, and yet no annihilation, but an ennobling restoration or transformation of the individual nature.[[27]]
Gower. One of Porphyry’s notions about the spirits of the air, of which you told me in our walk yesterday, quite haunted me afterwards. It contains a germ of poetry.
Kate. By all means let us have it.
Gower. Our philosopher believed in a certain order of evil genii who took pleasure in hunting wild beasts,—dæmons, whom men worshipped by the title of Artemis and other names, falsely attributing their cruelty to the calm and guiltless gods, who can never delight in blood. Some of these natures hunted another prey. They were said to chase souls that had escaped from the fetters of a body, and to force them to re-enter some fleshly prison once more. How I wish we could see a design of this by David Scott! Imagine the soul that has just leaped out of the door of that dungeon of ignorance and pain, the body, as Porphyry would term it, fluttering in its new freedom in the sunshine among the tree-tops, over wild and town—all the fields of air its pleasure-ground for an exulting career on its upward way to join the journeying intelligences in their cars above. But it sees afar off, high in mid-air, a troop of dark shapes; they seem to approach, to grow out of the airy recesses of the distance—they come down the white precipices of the piled clouds, over the long slant of some vapour promontory—forms invisible to man, and, with them, spectre-hounds, whose baying spirits alone can hear. As they approach, the soul recognises its enemies. In a moment it is flying away, away, and after it they sweep—pursuers and pursued, shapes so ethereal that the galleries of the ant are not shaken as hunters and quarry glide into the earth, and not a foam-bell is broken or brushed from the wave when they emerge upon the sea, and with many a winding and double mount the air. At last hemmed in, the soul is forced—spite of that desperate sidelong dart which had all but eluded them—down into a body, the frame of a beggar’s babe or of a slave’s; and, like some struggling bird, drawn with beating wings beneath the water, it sinks into the clay it must animate through many a miserable year to come.
Willoughby. I wish you would paint it for us yourself. You might represent, close by that battle of the spirits, a bird singing on a bough, a labourer looking down, with his foot upon his spade, and peasants dancing in their ‘sunburnt mirth’ and jollity—wholly unconscious, interrupted neither in toil nor pleasure by the conflict close at hand. It might read as a satire on the too common indifference of men to the spiritual realities which are about them every hour.
Mrs. Atherton. The picture would be as mysterious as an Emblem by Albert Durer.
Gower. It is that suggestiveness I so admire in the Germans. For the sake of it I can often pardon their fantastic extravagances, their incongruous combinations, their frequent want of grace and symmetry.
Atherton. So can I, when an author occupies a province in which such indirectness or irony, such irregularity, confusion, or paradox, are admissible. Take, as a comprehensive example, Jean Paul. But in philosophy it is abominable. There, where transparent order should preside, to find that under the thick and spreading verbiage meaning is often lacking, and, with all the boastful and fire-new nomenclature, if found, is old and common,—that the language is commonly but an array of what one calls
Rich windows that exclude the light,
And passages that lead to nothing;—
This puts me out of all patience.
Gower. The fault you object to reminds me of some Flemish landscape-pieces I have seen; there are trees, so full of grand life, they seem with their outstretched arms to menace the clouds, and as though, if they smote with their many hundred hands, they could beat away the storm instead of being bowed by it; and underneath these great ones of the forest, which should shadow nothing less than a woodland council of Titans or a group of recumbent gods, the painter places only a rustic with a cow or two, an old horse, a beggar, or some other most every-day of figures.
Mrs. Atherton. And you mean that the German words are large-looking as the trees, and the ideas worn and ordinary as the figures? What will Mr. Willoughby say to that?
Atherton. I think Willoughby will agree with me that it is high time that we should go back to our theurgic mysticism and Iamblichus. Here is a letter of his:—
Iamblichus to Agathocles.
I assure you, my friend, that the efforts of Porphyry, of whom you appear disposed to think so highly, will be altogether in vain. He is not the true philosopher you imagine. He grows cold and sceptical with years. He shrinks with a timid incredulity from reaping in that field of supernatural attainment which theurgy has first opened, and now continually enlarges and enriches. Theurgy, be sure of it, is the grand, I may say, the sole path to the exaltation we covet. It is the heaven-given organum, in the hands of the wise and holy, for obtaining happiness, knowledge, power.
The pomp of emperors becomes as nothing in comparison with the glory that surrounds the hierophant. The priest is a prophet full of deity. The subordinate powers of the upper world are at his bidding, for it is not a man, but a god who speaks the words of power. Such a man lives no longer the life common to other men. He has exchanged the human life for the divine. His nature is the instrument and vehicle of Deity, who fills and impels him (ὄργανον τοῖς ἐπιπνέουσι θεοῖς.) Men of this order do not employ, in the elevation they experience, the waking senses as do others (οὔτε κατ᾽ αἴσθησιν ἐνεργοῦσιν οὔτε ἐγρηγόρασι). They have no purpose of their own, no mastery over themselves. They speak wisdom they do not understand, and their faculties, absorbed in a divine power, become the utterance of a superior will.
Often, at the moment of inspiration, or when the afflatus has subsided, a fiery Appearance is seen,—the entering or departing Power. Those who are skilled in this wisdom can tell by the character of this glory the rank of the divinity who has seized for the time the reins of the mystic’s soul, and guides it as he will. Sometimes the body of the man subject to this influence is violently agitated, sometimes it is rigid and motionless. In some instances sweet music is heard, in others, discordant and fearful sounds. The person of the subject has been known to dilate and tower to a superhuman height; in other cases, it has been lifted up into the air. Frequently, not merely the ordinary exercise of reason, but sensation and animal life would appear to have been suspended; and the subject of the afflatus has not felt the application of fire, has been pierced with spits, cut with knives, and been sensible of no pain. Yea, often, the more the body and the mind have been alike enfeebled by vigil and by fasts, the more ignorant or mentally imbecile a youth may be who is brought under this influence, the more freely and unmixedly will the divine power be made manifest. So clearly are these wonders the work, not of human skill or wisdom, but of supernatural agency! Characteristics such as these I have mentioned, are the marks of the true inspiration.
Now, there are, O Agathocles, four great orders of spiritual existence,—Gods, Dæmons, Heroes or Demi-gods, and Souls. You will naturally be desirous to learn how the apparition of a God or a Dæmon is distinguished from those of Angels, Principalities, or Souls. Know, then, that their appearance to man corresponds to their nature, and that they always manifest themselves to those who invoke them in a manner consonant with their rank in the hierarchy of spiritual natures. The appearances of Gods are uniform (μονοειδῆ), those of Dæmons various (ποικίλα). The Gods shine with a benign aspect. When a God manifests himself, he frequently appears to hide sun or moon, and seems as he descends too vast for earth to contain. Archangels are at once awful and mild; Angels yet more gracious; Dæmons terrible. Below the four leading classes I have mentioned are placed the malignant Dæmons, the Anti-gods (ἀντιθέους).
Each spiritual order has gifts of its own to bestow on the initiated who evoke them. The Gods confer health of body, power and purity of mind, and, in short, elevate and restore our natures to their proper principles. Angels and Archangels have at their command only subordinate bestowments. Dæmons, however, are hostile to the aspirant,—afflict both body and mind, and hinder our escape from the sensuous. Principalities, who govern the sublunary elements, confer temporal advantages. Those of a lower rank, who preside over matter (ὑλικά), display their bounty in material gifts. Souls that are pure are, like Angels, salutary in their influence. Their appearance encourages the soul in its upward efforts. Heroes stimulate to great actions. All these powers depend, in a descending chain, each species on that immediately above it. Good Dæmons are seen surrounded by the emblems of blessing, Dæmons who execute judgment appear with the instruments of punishment.
There is nothing unworthy of belief in what you have been told concerning the sacred sleep, and divination by dreams. I explain it thus:—
The soul has a twofold life, a lower and a higher. In sleep that soul is freed from the constraint of the body, and enters, as one emancipated, on its divine life of intelligence. Then, as the noble faculty which beholds the objects that truly are—the objects in the world of intelligence—stirs within, and awakens to its power, who can be surprised that the mind, which contains in itself the principles of all that happens, should, in this its state of liberation, discern the future in those antecedent principles which will make that future what it is to be? The nobler part of the soul is thus united by abstraction to higher natures, and becomes a participant in the wisdom and foreknowledge of the Gods.
Recorded examples of this are numerous and well authenticated; instances occur, too, every day. Numbers of sick, by sleeping in the temple of Æsculapius, have had their cure revealed to them in dreams vouchsafed by the god. Would not Alexander’s army have perished but for a dream in which Dionysus pointed out the means of safety? Was not the siege of Aphutis raised through a dream sent by Jupiter Ammon to Lysander? The night-time of the body is the day-time of the soul.
What I have now said—with little method, I confess—sets before you but a portion of the prerogatives in which the initiated glory. There is much behind for which words are too poor. I have written enough, I am sure, to kindle your ambition, to bid you banish doubt, and persevere in the aspirations which so possessed you when I saw you last.[[28]] Farewell.
Gower. That explanation of prophetic dreams and the temple sleep is very curious and characteristic. No doubt the common phenomena of mesmerism may have been among the sacred secrets preserved by the priests of Egypt and of Greece.
Kate. The preference for young and weakly persons, who would possess an organization more susceptible of such influences, makes it look very likely.
Atherton. Observe how completely the theurgic element, with Iamblichus, supersedes the theosophic. In the process of time the philosophical principles on which the system of Plotinus rested are virtually surrendered, little by little, while divination and evocations are practised with increasing credulity, and made the foundation of the most arrogant pretensions. Plotinus declared the possibility of an absolute identification of the divine with the human nature. Here was the broadest basis for mysticism possible. Porphyry retired from this position, took up narrower ground, and qualified the great mystical principle of his master. He contended that in the union which takes place in ecstasy, we still retain the consciousness of personality. Iamblichus, the most superstitious of all in practice, diminished the real principle of mysticism still farther in theory. He denied that man has a faculty inaccessible to passion, and eternally active.[[29]]
Willoughby. And so the metaphysics and the marvels of mysticism stand in an inverse ratio to each other. But it is not unnatural that as the mystic, from one cause or another, gives up those exaggerated notions of the powers of man and those mistaken views of the relationship between man and God, which went together to make up a mystical system of philosophy, he should endeavour to indemnify himself by the evocations of theurgy, so as to secure, if possible, through a supernatural channel, what speculation had unsuccessfully attempted.
Atherton. True; but in this case I should invert the order, and say that as the promise of theurgy exercised an attraction of growing strength on an order of mind less fitted for speculation, such temperaments would readily drop the speculative principle of mysticism in their eagerness to grasp the illusive prize—apparently so practical—which a commerce with superior natures held out.
Willoughby. And so the intellectual ambition and the poetical spirit, so lofty in Plotinus, subside, among the followers of Iamblichus, into the doggrel of the necromancer’s charm.
Gower. Much such a descent as the glory of Virgil has suffered, whose tomb at Pausilipo is now regarded by the populace of degenerate Naples less with the reverence due to the poet than with the awe which arises from the legendary repute of the mediæval magician.
Atherton. So the idealism of strong minds becomes superstition in the weak. In the very shrine where culture paid its homage to art or science, feebleness and ignorance, in an age of decline, set up the image-worship of the merely marvellous.
Mrs. Atherton. I think you mentioned only one other of these worthies.
Atherton. Proclus. He is the last great name among the Neo-Platonists. He was the most eclectic of them all, perhaps because the most learned and the most systematic. He elaborated the trinity of Plotinus into a succession of impalpable Triads, and surpassed Iamblichus in his devotion to the practice of theurgy. Proclus was content to develop the school in that direction which Iamblichus—(successful from his very faults)—had already given it. With Proclus, theurgy was the art which gives man the magical passwords that carry him through barrier after barrier, dividing species from species of the upper existences, till, at the summit of the hierarchy, he arrives at the highest. According to him, God is the Non-Being who is above all being. He is apprehended only by negation. When we are raised out of our weakness, and on a level with God, it seems as though reason were silenced, for then we are above reason. We become intoxicated with God, we are inspired as by the nectar of Olympus. He teaches philosophy as the best preparation for Quietism. For the scientific enquirer, toiling in his research, Proclus has a God to tell of, supreme, almighty, the world-maker and governor of Plato. For him who has passed through this labour, a God known only by ecstasy—a God who is the repose he gives—a God of whom the more you deny the more do you affirm.
Willoughby. And this is all! After years of austerity and toil, Proclus—the scholar, stored with the opinions of the past, surrounded by the admiration of the present—the astronomer, the geometrician, the philosopher,—learned in the lore of symbols and of oracles, in the rapt utterances of Orpheus and of Zoroaster—an adept in the ritual of invocations among every people in the world—he, at the close, pronounces Quietism the consummation of the whole, and an unreasoning contemplation, an ecstasy which casts off as an incumbrance all the knowledge so painfully acquired, the bourne of all the journey.
Mrs. Atherton. As though it were the highest glory of man, forgetting all that his enquiry has achieved, hidden away from the world,—to gaze at vacancy, inactive and infantine;—to be like some peasant’s child left in its cradle for a while in the furrow of a field, shut in by the little mound of earth on either side, and having but the blue æther above, dazzling and void, at which to look up with smiles of witless wonder.
Note to page 103.
Iamblichus, de Mysteriis, sect. x. cc. 1, 4, 6; iii. 4, 8, 6, 24; i. 5, 6; ii. 3; iii. 31; ii. 4, 6, 7; iii. 1, 3. These passages, in the order given, will be found to correspond with the opinions expressed in the letter as those of Iamblichus.
The genuineness of the treatise De Mysteriis has been called in question, but its antiquity is undoubted. It differs only in one or two very trivial statements from the doctrines of Iamblichus as ascertained from other sources, and is admitted by all to be the production, if not of Iamblichus himself, of one of his disciples, probably writing under his direction. Jules Simon, ii. 219.
For the opinions ascribed to Porphyry in this letter, see his Epistola ad Anebonem, passim. He there proposes a series of difficult questions, and displays that sceptical disposition, especially concerning the pretensions of Theurgy, which so much scandalized Iamblichus. The De Mysteriis is an elaborate reply to that epistle, under the name of Abammon.
In several passages of the De Mysteriis (ii. 11; v. 1, 2, 3, 7; vi. 6) Iamblichus displays much anxiety lest his zeal for Theurgy should lead him to maintain any position inconsistent with the reverence due to the gods. He was closely pressed on this weak point by the objections of Porphyry. (Ep. ad Anebon. 5, 6.) His explanation in reply is, that the deities are not in reality drawn down by the mere human will of the Theurgist, but that man is raised to a participation in the power of the gods. The approximation is real, but the apparent descent of divinity is in fact the ascent of humanity. By his long course of preparation, by his knowledge of rites and symbols, of potent hymns, and of the mysterious virtues of certain herbs and minerals, the Theurgist is supposed to rise at last to the rank of an associate with celestial powers; their knowledge and their will become his, and he controls inferior natures with the authority of the gods themselves.
Iamblichus supposes, moreover, that there is an order of powers in the world, irrational and undiscerning, who are altogether at the bidding of man when by threats or conjurations he chooses to compel them. De Myst. vi. 5.
BOOK THE FOURTH
MYSTICISM IN THE GREEK CHURCH
CHAPTER I.
Questi ordini di su tutti s’ammirano
E di giù vincon si che verso Iddio
Tutti tirati sono e tutti tirano.
E Dionisio con tanto disio
A contemplar questi ordini si mise,
Che li nomò e distinse com’ io.[[30]]
Dante.
Kate. I have been looking at the pictures in Mrs. Jameson’s Sacred and Legendary Art, of those strange creatures, the hermit saints—the Fathers of the desert. Only see this one, what a mane and claws! The two lions digging the grave there are own brothers to the holy men themselves.
Atherton. Yet they claimed powers as much above humanity as, to look at them, you would think them beneath it.
Gower. Religious Nebuchadnezzars.
Willoughby. No shavelings, at any rate, like the smooth-faced sanctities of the later calendar.
Atherton. You will find among these anchorites almost all the wonder-working pretensions of mediæval mysticism in full development, thus early;—the discernment of spirits, gift of prophecy, miraculous powers of various kinds, ecstasy, exorcism, &c. &c. I should take St. Antony as a fair specimen of the whole class.[[31]]
Mrs. Atherton. Look, here is his picture; there he stands, with crutch and bell and pig.
Atherton. The bell denotes his power over evil spirits, and the pig the vanquished dæmon of sensuality. In his life, by Athanasius, there is a full account of his battle with many dæmons in the shape of lions, bulls, and bears. He passed twenty years in an old castle which he found full of serpents. The power of the saint expelled those unpleasant aborigines. That nose, you see there, was supposed to possess the faculty of detecting by its miraculous keenness of scent the proximity of an evil spirit. There is an odour of iniquity, you must know, as well as an odour of sanctity. This disposition to literalize metaphors gave currency to the monkish stories of after times concerning the refreshing fragrance found to arise from the remains of disinterred saints. In fact, the materialization of the spiritual, or what passes for such, is the characteristic principle of the theurgic mysticism within the Roman Catholic Church. St. Antony, on one occasion, sees his own soul, separated from the body, carried through the air.
Gower. A striking instance, I should say, of the objectivity of the subject.
Atherton. One of his visions is not without grandeur. The brethren had been questioning him one day concerning the state of departed spirits. The following night he heard a voice saying, ‘Antony, get up; go out and look!’ He obeyed, and saw a gigantic figure, whose head was in the clouds, and whose outstretched arms extended far across the sky. Many souls were fluttering in the air, and endeavouring, as they found opportunity, to fly upward past this dreadful being. Numbers of them he seized in the attempt, and dashed back upon the earth. Some escaped him and exulted above, while he raged at their success. Thus sorrowing and rejoicing were mingled together, as some were defeated and others triumphant. This, he was given to understand, was the rise and fall of souls.
Willoughby. That picture would be really Dantesque, if only a little more definite. Macarius is another great name, too, among these Christian ascetics and theurgists—the one who retired to the deserts of Nitria in the fourth century.
Atherton. He is not only famous for his measure of the supernatural powers ascribed to his brethren, but his homilies have been appealed to by modern theopathetic mystics as an authority for Quietism. He teaches perfectionist doctrine, certainly, but I do not think his words will bear the construction Poiret and others would give them. He was at least innocent of the sainte indifférence.[[32]]
Mrs. Atherton. You said we were to discuss Dionysius the Areopagite this evening.
Kate. Pray introduce me first. I know nothing about him.
Atherton. No one does know who really wrote the books which passed under that name. It is generally admitted that the forgery could not have been committed earlier than the middle of the fifth century, probably somewhat later. So all I can tell you is, that somewhere or other (it is not unlikely at Constantinople, but there is no certainty), about the time when Theodoric was master of Italy—when the Vandal swarms had not yet been expelled from northern Africa—while Constantinople was in uproar between the greens and the blues, and rival ecclesiastics headed city riots with a rabble of monks, artizans, and bandit soldiery at their heels—while orthodoxy was grappling with the Monophysite and Eutychian heresies on either hand, and the religious world was rocking still with the groundswell that followed those stormy synods in which Palestine and Alexandria, Asia and Constantinople, from opposite quarters, gathered their strength against each other—a monk or priest was busy, in his quiet solitude, with the fabrication of sundry treatises and letters which were to find their way into the Church under the all-but apostolic auspices of that convert made by the Apostle of the Gentiles when he spoke on Mars Hill. The writings would seem to have been first appealed to as genuine in the year 533. As heretics cited them, their authority was disputed at the outset; but being found favourable to the growing claims of the hierarchy, and likely to be useful, they were soon recognised and employed accordingly.[[33]]
Willoughby. Proclus could not have been long dead, and his reputation must have been still at its height, when this anonymous—let us call him Dionysius at once—was writing his Platonized theology.
Atherton. With the divines of Byzantium Proclus represented the grand old world of Greek thought. Even those who wrote against him as a heathen betray the influence he exercised on their doctrines. The object of Dionysius evidently was to accommodate the theosophy of Proclus to Christianity. Another aim, not less conspicuous, was to strengthen all the pretensions of the priesthood, and to invest with a new traditionary sanction the ascetic virtues of the cloister.
CHAPTER II.
They that pretend to these heights call them the secrets of the kingdom; but they are such which no man can describe; such which God hath not revealed in the publication of the Gospel; such for the acquiring of which there are no means prescribed, and to which no man is obliged, and which are not in any man’s power to obtain; nor such which it is lawful to pray for or desire; nor concerning which we shall ever be called to account.—Jeremy Taylor.
‘I have here,’ said Atherton on the next evening, ‘some notes on the doctrine of this pretended Areopagite—a short summary; shall I read it?’
‘By all means.’
So the following abstract was listened to—and with creditable patience.[[34]]
(1.) All things have emanated from God, and the end of all is return to God. Such return—deification, he calls it—is the consummation of the creature, that God may finally be all in all. A process of evolution, a centrifugal movement in the Divine Nature, is substituted in reality for creation. The antithesis of this is the centripetal process, or movement of involution, which draws all existence towards the point of the Divine centre. The degree of real existence possessed by any being is the amount of God in that being—for God is the existence in all things. Yet He himself cannot be said to exist, for he is above existence. The more or less of God which the various creatures possess is determined by the proximity of their order to the centre.
(2.) The chain of being in the upper and invisible world, through which the Divine Power diffuses itself in successive gradations, he calls the Celestial Hierarchy. The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy is a corresponding series in the visible world. The orders of Angelic natures and of priestly functionaries correspond to each other. The highest rank of the former receive illumination immediately from God. The lowest of the heavenly imparts divine light to the highest of the earthly hierarchy. Each order strives perpetually to approximate to that immediately above itself, from which it receives the transmitted influence; so that all, as Dante describes it, draw and are drawn, and tend in common towards the centre—God.
The three triads of angelic existences, to whom answer the ranks of the terrestrial hierarchy, betrays the influence of Proclus, whose hierarchy of ideas corresponds, in a similar manner, to his hierarchy of hypostases.
Gower. The system reminds one of those old pictures which are divided into two compartments, the upper occupied by angels and cherubs on the clouds, and the lower by human beings on the earth, gazing devoutly upward at their celestial benefactors.
Atherton. The work of Christ is thrown into the background to make room for the Church. The Saviour answers, with Dionysius, rather to the Logos of the Platonist than to the Son of God revealed in Scripture. He is allowed to be, as incarnate, the founder of the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy; but, as such, he is removed from men by the long chain of priestly orders, and is less the Redeemer, than remotely the Illuminator, of the species.
Purification, illumination, perfection,—the three great stages of ascent to God (which plays so important a part in almost every succeeding attempt to systematise mysticism) are mystically represented by the three sacraments,—Baptism, the Eucharist, and Unction. The Church is the great Mystagogue: its liturgy and offices a profound and elaborate system of symbolism.
(3.) The Greek theory, with its inadequate conception of the nature of sin, compels Dionysius virtually to deny the existence of evil. Everything that exists is good, the more existence the more goodness, so that evil is a coming short of existence. He hunts sin boldly from place to place throughout the universe, and drives it at last into the obscurity of the limbo he contrives for it, where it lies among things unreal.
All that exists he regards as a symbolical manifestation of the super-existent. What we call creation is the divine allegory. In nature, in Scripture, in tradition, God is revealed only in figure. This sacred imagery should be studied, but in such study we are still far from any adequate cognizance of the Divine Nature. God is above all negation and affirmation: in Him such contraries are at once identified and transcended. But by negation we approach most nearly to a true apprehension of what He is.
Negation and affirmation, accordingly, constitute the two opposed and yet simultaneous methods he lays down for the knowledge of the Infinite. These two paths, the Via Negativa (or Apophatica) and the Via Affirmativa (or Cataphatica) constitute the foundation of his mysticism. They are distinguished and elaborated in every part of his writings. The positive is the descending process. In the path downward from God, through inferior existences, the Divine Being may be said to have many names;—the negative method is one of ascent; in that, God is regarded as nameless, the inscrutable Anonymous. The symbolical or visible is thus opposed, in the Platonist style, to the mystical or ideal. To assert anything concerning a God who is above all affirmation is to speak in figure, to veil him. The more you deny concerning Him, the more of such veils do you remove. He compares the negative method of speaking concerning the Supreme to the operation of the sculptor, who strikes off fragment after fragment of the marble, and progresses by diminution.
(4.) Our highest knowledge of God, therefore, is said to consist in mystic ignorance. In omni-nescience we approach Omniscience. This Path of Negation is the highway of mysticism. It is by refraining from any exercise of the intellect or of the imagination—by self-simplification, by withdrawal into the inmost, the divine essence of our nature—that we surpass the ordinary condition of humanity, and are united in ecstasy with God. Dionysius does not insist so much on Union as the later mystics, but he believes, at all events, that the eminent saint may attain on earth an indescribable condition of soul—an elevation far transcending the reach of our natural faculties—an approach towards the beatific vision of those who are supposed to gaze directly on the Divine Essence in heaven. His disciple is perpetually exhorted to aspire to this climax of abstraction—above sight, and thought, and feeling, as to the highest aim of man.
Willoughby. What contradictions are here! With one breath he extols ineffable ignorance as the only wisdom; with the next he pretends to elucidate the Trinity, and reads you off a muster-roll of the heavenly hierarchies.
Gower. And are not these, supplemented by the hierarchy of ecclesiastics, his real objects of worship? No man could make an actual God of that super-essential ultimatum, that blank Next-to-Nothingness which the last Neo-Platonists imagined as their Supreme. Proclus could not; Dionysius could not. What then? A reaction comes, which, after refining polytheism to an impalpable unity, restores men to polytheism once more. Up mounts speculation, rocket-like: men watch it, a single soaring star with its train of fire, and, at the height, it breaks into a scattering shower of many-coloured sparks. From that Abstraction of which nothing can be predicated, nothing can be expected. The figment above being is above benignity. So the objects of invocation are gods, demi-gods, dæmons, heroes; or, when baptized, cherubim, seraphim, thrones, dominions, powers, archangels, angels, saints; in either case, whether at Athens or at Constantinople, the excessive subtilisation of the One contributes toward the worship of the Manifold.
Atherton. The theology of the Neo-Platonists was always in the first instance a mere matter of logic. It so happened that they confounded Universals with causes. The miserable consequence is clear. The Highest becomes with them, as he is with Dionysius, merely the most comprehensive, the universal idea, which includes the world, as genus includes species.[[35]]
Mrs. Atherton. The divinity of this old Father must be a bleak affair indeed—Christianity frozen out.
Gower. I picture him to myself as entering with his philosophy into the theological structure of that day, like Winter into the cathedral of the woods (which an autumn of decline has begun to harm already);—what life yet lingers, he takes away,—he untwines the garlands from the pillars of the trees, extinguishes the many twinkling lights the sunshine hung wavering in the foliage, silences all sounds of singing, and fills the darkened aisles and dome with a coldly-descending mist, whose silence is extolled as above the power of utterance,—its blinding, chill obscureness lauded as clearer than the intelligence and warmer than the fervour of a simple and scriptural devotion.
Atherton. You have described my experience in reading him, though I must say he suggested nothing to me about your cathedral of the woods, &c. His verbose and turgid style, too, is destitute of all genuine feeling.[[36]] He piles epithet on epithet, throws superlative on superlative, hyperbole on hyperbole, and it is but log upon log,—he puts no fire under, neither does any come from elsewhere. He quotes Scripture—as might be expected—in the worst style, both of the schoolman and the mystic. Fragments are torn from their connexion, and carried away to suffer the most arbitrary interpretation, and strew his pages that they may appear to illustrate or justify his theory.
Gower. How forlorn do those texts of Scripture look that you discern scattered over the works of such writers, so manifestly transported from a region of vitality and warmth to an expanse of barrenness. They make the context look still more sterile, and while they say there must be life somewhere, seem to affirm, no less emphatically, that it is not in the neighbourhood about them. They remind me of those leaves from the chestnut and the birch I once observed upon a glacier. There they lay, foreign manifestly to the treeless world in which they were found; the ice appeared to have shrunk from them, and they from the ice; each isolated leaf had made itself a cup-like cavity, a tiny open sarcophagus of crystal, in which it had lain, perhaps for several winters. Doubtless, a tempest, which had been vexing some pleasant valley far down beneath, and tearing at its trees, must have whirled them up thither. Yet the very presence of the captives reproached the poverty of the Snow-King who detained them, testifying as they did to a genial clime elsewhere, whose products that ice-world could no more put forth, than can such frozen speculations as this of Dionysius, the ripening ‘fruits of the Spirit.’
Willoughby. His lurking fatalism and his pantheism were forgiven him, no doubt, on consideration of his services to priestly assumption. He descends from his most cloudy abstraction to assert the mysterious significance and divine potency of all the minutiæ of the ecclesiastical apparatus and the sacerdotal etiquette. What a reputation these writings had throughout the middle age!
Atherton. Dionysius is the mythical hero of mysticism. You find traces of him everywhere. Go almost where you will through the writings of the mediæval mystics, into their depths of nihilism, up their heights of rapture or of speculation, through their over-growth of fancy, you find his authority cited, his words employed, his opinions more or less fully transmitted, somewhat as the traveller in the Pyrenees discerns the fame of the heroic Roland still preserved in the names and in the legends of the rock, the valley, or the flower. Passages from the Areopagite were culled, as their warrant and their insignia, by the priestly ambassadors of mysticism, with as much care and reverence as the sacred verbenæ that grew within the enclosure of the Capitoline by the Feciales of Rome.
Mrs. Atherton. ‘Oh, sweet Fancy, let her loose,’ as Keats says. I think my husband has been learning in Mr. Gower’s school. How far he went to fetch that simile!
Gower. Perhaps he has my excuse in this case, that he could not help it.
Willoughby. Or he may at once boldly put in the plea of Sterne, who in one place lays claim to the gratitude of his readers for having voyaged to fetch a metaphor all the way to the Guinea coast and back.
Atherton. It contributed greatly to the influence of the Areopagite that he became confounded with the Dionysius, or St. Denys, who was adopted as the patron-saint of France.
Kate. A singular fortune, indeed: so that he was two other people besides himself;—like Mrs. Malaprop’s Cerberus, three gentlemen at once.
Gower. I think we have spent time enough upon him. Grievously do I pity the miserable monks his commentators, whose minds, submerged in the mare tenebrosum of the cloister, had to pass a term of years in the mazy arborescence of his verbiage,—like so many insects within their cells in the branches of a great coral.[[37]]
Atherton. Don’t throw away so much good compassion, I dare say it kept them out of mischief.
Willoughby. I cannot get that wretched abstraction out of my head which the Neo-Platonists call deity. How such a notion must have dislocated all their ethics from head to foot! The merest anthropomorphism had been better;—yes, Homer and Hesiod are truer, after all.
Atherton. I grant the gravity of the mischief. But we must not be too hard on this ecclesiastical Neo-Platonism. It does but follow Aristotle here. You remember he considers the possession of virtues as quite out of the question in the case of the gods.
Gower. Is it possible? Why, that is as though a man should lame himself to run the faster. Here is a search after God, in which, at starting, all moral qualities are removed from him; so that the testimony of conscience cannot count for anything;—the inward directory is sealed; the clue burnt. Truly the world by wisdom knew not God!
Willoughby. This unquestionably is the fatal error of Greek speculation—the subordination of morals to the intellectual refinements of an ultra-human spiritualism. Even with Numenius you have to go down the scale to a subordinate god or hypostasis before you arrive at a deity who condescends to be good.
Gower. How much ‘salt’ there must still have been in the mediæval Christianity to survive, as far as it did, the reception of these old ethical mistakes into the very heart of its doctrine!
Atherton. Aristotle reasons thus: how can the gods exhibit fortitude, who have nothing to fear—justice and honesty, without a business—temperance, without passions? Such insignificant things as moral actions are beneath them. They do not toil, as men. They do not sleep, like Endymion, ‘on the Latmian hill.’ What remains? They lead a life of contemplation;—in contemplative energy lies their blessedness.[[38]] So the contemplative sage who energises directly toward the central Mind—the intellectual source and ultimatum, is the true imitator of the divine perfections.
Gower. Transfer this principle to Christianity, and the monk becomes immediately the highest style of man.
Willoughby. And you have a double morality at once: heroic or superhuman virtues, the graces of contemplation for the saintly few,—glorious in proportion to their uselessness; and ordinary virtues for the many,—social, serviceable, and secondary.
Atherton. Not that the schoolman would release his saint altogether from the obligations of ordinary morality; but he would say, this ordinary morality does not fit the contemplatist for heaven—it is but a preliminary exercise—a means to an end, and that end, the transcendence of everything creaturely, a superhuman exaltation, the ceasing from his labours, and swooning as it were into the divine repose.
Willoughby. Then I must put in a word for our mystics. It is not they who corrupted Christian morals by devising this divorce between the virtues of daily life and certain other virtues which are unhuman, anti-terrestrial, hypercreaturely—forgive the word—they drive us hard for language. They found the separation already accomplished; they only tilled with ardour the plot of ground freely allotted them by the Church.
Atherton. Just so; in this doctrine of moral dualism—the prolific mother of mystics—Aquinas is as far gone as Bernard.
Gower. The mention of Bernard’s name makes one impatient to get away from the Greek Church, westward.
Atherton. We may say farewell to Byzantium now. That Greek Church never grew beyond what it was in the eighth and ninth centuries.
Gower. I have always imagined it a dwarf, watching a Nibelungen hoard, which after all never enriches anybody. Nothing but that tedious counting, and keeping tidy, and standing sentinel, for ages.
Atherton. See what good a little fighting does. The Greek Church had its scholastic element—witness John of Damascus; it had its mystical—as we have seen; but neither the one nor the other was ever developed to such vigour as to assert itself against its rival, and struggle for mastery. In the West the two principles have their battles, their armistices, their reconciliations, and both are the better. In the East they are coupled amicably in the leash of antiquity, and dare not so much as snarl.
Willoughby. I suppose the mysticism of the Greek Church was more objective, as the Germans would say,—dependent on its sacramental media and long trains of angelic and human functionaries, handing down illumination; that of the West, subjective.
Atherton. That will be generally true. The eastern mysticism creeps under the sacerdotal vestments, is never known to quit the precincts of church and cloister, clings close to the dalmatica, and lives on whiffs of frankincense. The western is often to be found far from candle, book, and bell, venturing to worship without a priest.
In short, as Gower would antithetically say, the mystic of the East is always a slave, the mystic of the West often a rebel; Symbolism is the badge of the one, Individualism the watch-word of the other.
Gower. How spiteful you are to-night, Atherton. I propose that we break up, and hear nothing more you may have to say.
Note to Page 121.
Aristotle extols contemplation, because it does not require means and opportunity, as do the social virtues, generosity, courage, &c. Plotinus lays still more stress on his distinction between the mere political virtues—which constitute simply a preparatory, purifying process, and the superior, or exemplary—those divine attainments whereby man is united with God. Aquinas adopts this classification, and distinguishes the virtues as exemplares, purgatoriæ and politicæ. He even goes so far as to give to each of the cardinal virtues a contemplative and ascetic turn; designating Prudence, in its highest exercise, as contempt for all things worldly; Temperance is abstraction from the sensuous; Fortitude, courage in sustaining ourselves in the aerial regions of contemplation, remote from the objects of sense; Justice, the absolute surrender of the spirit to this law of its aspiration. He argues that, as man’s highest blessedness is a beatitude surpassing the limits of human nature, he can be prepared for it only by having added to that nature certain principles from the divine;—such principles are the theological or superhuman virtues, Faith, Hope, and Charity. See Münscher’s Dogmengeschichte, 2 Abth. 2 Absch. § 136.
In consequence of the separation thus established between the human and the divine, we shall find the mystics of the fourteenth century representing regeneration almost as a process of dehumanization, and as the substitution of a divine nature for the human in the subject of grace. No theologians could have been further removed from Pelagianism; few more forgetful than these ardent contemplatists that divine influence is vouchsafed, not to obliterate and supersede our natural capacities by some almost miraculous faculty, but to restore and elevate man’s nature, to realise its lost possibilities, and to consecrate it wholly, in body and soul—not in spirit, merely—to the service of God.
With one voice both schoolmen and mystics would reason thus:—‘Is not heaven the extreme opposite of this clouded, vexed, and sensuous life? Then we approach its blessedness most nearly by a life the most contrary possible to the secular,—by contemplation, by withdrawment, by total abstraction from sense.’
This is one view of our best preparation for the heavenly world. At the opposite pole stands Behmen’s doctrine, far less dangerous, and to be preferred if we must have an extreme, viz., that the believer is virtually in the heavenly state already—that eternity should be to us as time, and time as eternity.
Between these two stands the scriptural teaching. St. Paul does not attempt to persuade himself that earth is heaven, that faith is sight, that hope is fruition. He groans here, being burdened; he longs to have done with shortcoming and with conflict; to enter on the vision face to face, on the unhindered service of the state of glory. But he does not deem it the best preparation for heaven to mimic upon earth an imaginary celestial repose,—he will rather labour to-day his utmost at the work to-day may bring,—he will fight the good fight, he will finish his course, and then receive the crown.
BOOK THE FIFTH
MYSTICISM IN THE LATIN CHURCH
CHAPTER I.
Look up, my Ethel!
When on the glances of the upturned eye
The plumed thoughts take travel, and ascend
Through the unfathomable purple mansions,
Threading the golden fires, and ever climbing
As if ’twere homewards winging—at such time
The native soul, distrammelled of dim earth,
Doth know herself immortal, and sits light
Upon her temporal perch.
Violenzia.
The winter had now broken up his encampment, and was already in full retreat. With the approach of spring the mystical conversations of our friends entered on the period of the Middle Ages. The lengthening mornings found Atherton early at his desk, sipping a solitary and preliminary cup of coffee, and reading or writing. Willoughby felt his invention quickened by the season, and a new elasticity pervade him. His romance advanced with fewer hindrances from that cross-grained dissatisfaction which used so frequently to disfigure his manuscript with the thorny scratches and interlineations of an insatiable correction.
Gower, too, could enter once more on the enjoyment of his favourite walk before breakfast. In wandering through the dewy meadows, in ‘the slanting sunlight of the dawn,’ he felt, as we all must, that there is truth in what the chorus of mystics have ever said or sung about the inadequacy of words to express the surmise and aspiration of the soul. In a morning solitude there seems to lie about our fields of thought an aerial wealth too plenteous to be completely gathered into the granary of language.
O who would mar the season with dull speech,
That must tie up our visionary meanings
And subtle individual apprehensions
Into the common tongue of every man?
And of the swift and scarce detected visitants
Of our illusive thoughts seek to make prisoners,
And only grasp their garments.
It is one of the pleasant pastimes of the spring to watch day by day the various ways in which the trees express, by a physiognomy and gesture of their own, their expectation of the summer. Look at those young and delicate ones, alive with impatience to the tip of every one of the thousand sprays that tremble distinct against the sky, swaying uneasily to and fro in the sharp morning breeze. They seem longing to slip their rooted hold upon the earth, and float away to embrace their bridegroom sun in the air. And see those veterans—what a gnarled, imperturbable gravity in those elder citizens of park or wood: they are used to it; let the day bring new weatherstains or new buds, they can bide their time. And are they not already wrapped, many of them, in hood and habit of dark glossy ivy—woodland senatorial fur—they can afford to wait. Here, look, close beside us, the eyes of the buds are even now peeping through the black lattice of the boughs, and those amber-coloured clouds overhead are looking them promises of kindly showers as they sail by. What is that sparkling on yonder hill? Only the windows of a house with eastern aspect: the sun lights his beacon-fire regularly there, to signal to his children down in the hollow that he is coming, though they cannot see him yet, and will roll away the cloud from the valley mouth, and make the place of their night-sepulchre glorious with his shining raiment.
Amidst these delights of nature, and the occupation of his art, Gower thought sometimes of the mystics who enjoy such things so little. He had even promised to write a short paper on the mystical schoolmen of St. Victor, Hugo and Richard, and was himself surprised to find how soon he warmed to the subject—with what zest he sought for glimpses of cloister-life in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
When next our friends met in the library, Gower expressed his hearty and unceremonious satisfaction at their having done, as he hoped, with that ‘old bore,’ Dionysius Areopagita. By none was the sentiment echoed with more fervour than by Atherton, whose conscience perhaps smote him for some dry reading he had inflicted on his auditors. But he made no apology, that Gower might not think he took his remark to himself, and return him a compliment.
Willoughby. To see how this world goes round! Only think of Proclus having his revenge after all,—he and his fellows ruling from their urns when dead the Christianity which banished them while living.
Atherton. Not altogether satisfactory, either, could he have looked in upon the world, and seen the use to which they put him. It was true that, under the name of Dionysius, his ideas were reverenced and expounded by generations of dreaming monks,—that under that name he contributed largely to those influences which kept stagnant the religious world of the East for some nine hundred years. But it was also true that his thoughts were thus conserved only to serve the purpose of his ancient enemies; so that he assisted to confer omnipotence on those Christian priests whom he had cursed daily in his heart while lecturing, sacrificing, and conjuring at Athens.
Gower. Again I say, let us turn from the stereotyped Greek Church to the West,—I want to hear about St. Bernard.
Atherton. Presently. Let us try and apprehend clearly the way in which Neo-Platonism influenced mediæval Europe.
Willoughby. A trifling preliminary! Atherton means us to stay here all night. You may as well resign yourself, Gower.
Atherton. Never fear; I only want to look about me, and see where we are just now. Suppose ourselves sent back to the Middle Age—what will be our notion of Platonism? We can’t read a line of Greek. We see Plato only through Plotinus, conserved by Augustine, handed down by Apuleius and Boethius. We reverence Aristotle, but we care only for his dialectics. We only assimilate from antiquity what seems to fall within the province of the Church. Plato appears to us surrounded by that religious halo with which Neo-Platonism invested philosophy when it grew so devotional. We take Augustine’s word for it that Plotinus really enunciated the long-hidden esoteric doctrine of Plato. The reverent, ascetic, ecstatic Platonism of Alexandria seems to us so like Christianity, that we are almost ready to believe Plato a sort of harbinger for Christ. We are devoted Realists; and Realism and Asceticism make the common ground of Platonist and Christian. If scholastic in our tendencies, Aristotle may be oftener on our lips; if mystical, Plato; but we overlook their differences. We believe, on Neo-Platonist authority, that the two great ones were not the adversaries which had been supposed. Aristotle is in the forecourt, and through study of him we pass into that inner shrine where the rapt Plato (all but a monk in our eyes) is supposed to exemplify the contemplative life.
Dionysius in the East, then, is soporific. Mysticism, there, has nothing to do save drowsily to label all the Church gear with symbolic meanings of wondrous smallness.
Dionysius in the West has come into a young world where vigorous minds have been long accustomed to do battle on the grandest questions; grace and free-will—how they work together; sin and redemption—what they really are; faith and reason—what may be their limits.
Gower. Compare those great controversies with that miserable Monophysite and Monothelite dispute for which one can never get up an interest. How much we owe still to that large-souled Augustine.[[39]]
Atherton. Well, for this very reason, they might worship Dionysius as a patron saint to their hearts’ content at St. Denis, but he could never be in France the master mystagogue they made him at Byzantium. His name, and some elements in his system, became indeed an authority and rallying point for the mystical tendency of the West, but the system as a whole was never appropriated. He was reverentially dismembered, and so mixed up with doctrines and questions foreign to him, by a different order of minds, with another culture, and often with another purpose, that I would defy his ghost to recognise his own legacy to the Church.
Gower. Good Hugo of St. Victor, in his Commentary on the Hierarchies, does certainly wonderfully soften down the pantheism of his original. Dionysius comes out from under his hands almost rational, quite a decent Christian.
Atherton. And before Hugo, if you remember, John Scotus Erigena translated him, and elaborated on his basis a daring system of his own, pantheistic I fear, but a marvel of intellectual power—at least two or three centuries in advance of his age. And these ideas of Erigena’s, apparently forgotten, filter through, and reappear once more at Paris in the free-thinking philosophy of such men as David of Dinant and Amalric of Bena.[[40]]
Willoughby. Strange enough: so that, could Dionysius have returned to the world in the thirteenth century, he, the worshipper of the priesthood, would have found sundry of his own principles in a new livery, doing service in the ranks of the laity against the clergy, and strengthening the hands of that succession of heretics so long a thorn in the side of the corrupt hierarchy of France.
Atherton. In Germany, a century later, many of the mystics put Platonist doctrine to a similar use. In fact, I think we may say generally that the Neo-Platonist element, which acted as a mortal opiate in the East, became a vivifying principle in the West. There the Alexandrian doctrine of Emanation was abandoned, its pantheism nullified or rejected, but its allegorical interpretation, its exaltation, true or false, of the spirit above the letter,—all this was retained, and Platonism and mysticism together created a party in the Church the sworn foes of mere scholastic quibbling, of an arid and lifeless orthodoxy, and at last of the more glaring abuses which had grown up with ecclesiastical pretension.
Gower. Now for Bernard. I see the name there on that open page of your note-book. Read away—no excuses.
Atherton. Some old notes. But before I read them, look at this rough plan of the valley of Clairvaux, with its famous abbey. I made it after reading the Descriptio Monasterii Claræ-Vallensis, inserted in the Benedictine edition of Bernard’s works. It will assist us to realize the locality in which this great church-father of the twelfth century passed most of his days. It was once called the Valley of Wormwood—was the ill-omened covert of banditti; Bernard and his monks come clearing and chanting, praying and planting; and lo! the absinthial reputation vanishes—the valley smiles—is called, and made, Clairvaux, or Brightdale.
Kate. Transformed, in short, into ‘a serious paradise,’ as Mr. Thackeray would say.
Atherton. Yes, you puss. Here, you see, I have marked two ranges of hills which, parting company, enclose the broad sweep of our Brightdale, or Fairvalley. Where the hills are nearest together you see the one eminence covered with vines, the other with fruit trees; and on the sides and tops dusky groups of monks have had many a hard day’s work, getting rid of brambles and underwood, chopping and binding faggots, and preparing either slope to yield them wherewithal to drink, from the right hand, and to eat, from the left. Not far from this entrance to the valley stands the huge pile of the abbey itself, with its towers and crosses, its loop-hole windows and numerous outbuildings. That is the river Aube (Alba) running down between the heights; here, you see, is a winding channel the monks have dug, that a branch of it may flow in under the convent walls. Good river! how hard it works for them. No sooner under the archway than it turns the great wheel that grinds their corn, fills their caldarium, toils in the tannery, sets the fulling-mill agoing. Hark to the hollow booming sound, and the regular tramp, tramp of those giant wooden feet; and there, at last, out rushes the stream at the other side of the building, all in a fume, as if it had been ground itself into so much snowy foam. On this other side, you see it cross, and join the main course of its river again. Proceeding now along the valley, with your back to the monastery, you pass through the groves of the orchard, watered by crossing runnels from the river, overlooked by the infirmary windows—a delightful spot for contemplative invalids. Then you enter the great meadow—what a busy scene in hay-making time, all the monks out there, helped by the additional hands of donati and conductitii, and the country folk from all the region round about,—they have been working since sunrise, and will work till vespers; when the belfry sounds for prayers at the fourth hour after sunrise, they will sing their psalms in the open air to save time, and doubtless dine there too—a monastic pic-nic. On one side of the meadow is a small lake, well stored with fish. See some of the brethren angling on its bank, where those osiers have been planted to preserve the margin; and two others have put off in a boat and are throwing their net, with edifying talk at whiles perhaps, on the parallel simplicity of fish and sinners. At the extremity of the meadow are two large farm-houses, one on each side the river; you might mistake them for monasteries from their size and structure, but for the ploughs and yokes of oxen you see about.
Mrs. Atherton. Thank you; so much for the place; and the man—his personal appearance—is anything known about that?
Atherton. You must imagine him somewhat above the middle height, very thin, with a clear, transparent, red-and-white complexion; always retaining some colour on his hollow cheeks; his hair light; his beard inclining to red—in his later years, mixed with white; his whole aspect noble and persuasive, and when he speaks under excitement losing every trace of physical feebleness in the lofty transformation of a benign enthusiasm.[[41]]
Now I shall trouble you with some of my remarks, on his mysticism principally. You will conceive what a world of business he must have had upon his shoulders, even when at home at Clairvaux, and acting as simple abbot; so much detail to attend to,—so many difficulties to smooth, and quarrels to settle, and people to advise, in connexion with his own numerous charge and throughout all the surrounding neighbourhood; while to all this was added the care of so many infant monasteries, springing up at the rate of about four a year, in every part of Europe, founded on the pattern of Clairvaux, and looking to him for counsel and for men. I scarcely need remind you how struggling Christendom sent incessant monks and priests, couriers and men-at-arms, to knock and blow horn at the gate of Clairvaux Abbey; for Bernard, and none but he, must come out and fight that audacious Abelard; Bernard must decide between rival Popes, and cross the Alps time after time to quiet tossing Italy; Bernard alone is the hope of fugitive Pope and trembling Church; he only can win back turbulent nobles, alienated people, recreant priests, when Arnold of Brescia is in arms at Rome, and when Catharists, Petrobrusians, Waldenses, and heretics of every shade, threaten the hierarchy on either side the Alps; and at the preaching of Bernard the Christian world pours out to meet the disaster of a new crusade.
Gower. And accomplishing a work like this with that emaciated, wretchedly dyspeptic frame of his!—first of all exerting his extraordinary will to the utmost to unbuild his body; and then putting forth the same self-control to make the ruins do the work of a sound structure.
Atherton. Could we have seen him at home at Clairvaux, after one of those famous Italian journeys, no look or word would have betrayed a taint of spiritual pride, though every rank in church and state united to do him honour—though great cities would have made him almost by force their spiritual king—though the blessings of the people and the plaudits of the council followed the steps of the peacemaker—and though, in the belief of all, a dazzling chain of miracles had made his pathway glorious. We should have found him in the kitchen, rebuking by his example some monk who grumbled at having to wash the pots and pans; on the hill-side, cutting his tale and bearing his burthen with the meanest novice; or seen him oiling his own boots, as they say the arch-tempter did one day; we should have interrupted him in the midst of his tender counsel to some distressed soul of his cloistered flock, or just as he had sat down to write a sermon on a passage in Canticles against the next church-festival.[[42]] But now to my notes. (Atherton reads.)
In considering the religious position of Bernard, I find it not at all remarkable that he should have been a mystic,—very remarkable that he should not have been much more the mystic than he was. This moderation may be attributed partly to his constant habit of searching the Scriptures—studying them devotionally for himself, unencumbered with the commentaries reverenced by tradition.[[43]] Rigid exemplar and zealous propagator of monasticism as he was, these hours with the Bible proved a corrective not unblessed, and imparted even to the devotion of the cloister a healthier tone. Add to this his excellent natural judgment, and the combination, in his case, of the active with the contemplative life. He knew the world and men; he stood with his fellows in the breach, and the shock of conflict spoiled him for a dreamer. The distractions over which he expended so much complaint were his best friends. They were a hindrance in the way to the monastic ideal of virtue—a help toward the Christian. They prevented his attaining that pitch of uselessness to which the conventual life aspires, and brought him down a little nearer to the meaner level of apostolic labour. They made him the worse monk, and by so much the better man.
With Bernard the monastic life is the one thing needful. He began life by drawing after him into the convent all his kindred; sweeping them one by one from the high seas of the world with the irresistible vortex of his own religious fervour. His incessant cry for Europe is—Better monasteries, and more of them. Let these ecclesiastical castles multiply; let them cover and command the land, well garrisoned with men of God, and then, despite all heresy and schism, theocracy will flourish, the earth shall yield her increase, and all people praise the Lord. Who so wise as Bernard to win souls for Christ—that is to say, recruits for the cloister? With what eloquence he paints the raptures of contemplation, the vanity and sin of earthly ambition or of earthly love! Wherever in his travels Bernard may have preached, there, presently, exultant monks must open wide their doors to admit new converts. Wherever he goes he bereaves mothers of their children, the aged of their last solace and last support; praising those the most who leave most misery behind them. How sternly does he rebuke those Rachels who mourn and will not be comforted for children dead to them for ever! What vitriol does he pour into the wounds when he asks if they will drag their son down to perdition with themselves by resisting the vocation of heaven! whether it was not enough that they brought him forth sinful to a world of sin, and will they now, in their insane affection, cast him into the fires of hell?[[44]] Yet Bernard is not hard-hearted by nature. He can pity this disgraceful weakness of the flesh. He makes such amends as superstition may. I will be a father to him, he says. Alas! cold comfort. You, their hearts will answer, whose flocks are countless, would nothing content you but our ewe lamb? Perhaps some cloister will be, for them too, the last resource of their desolation. They will fly for ease in their pain to the system which caused it. Bernard hopes so. So inhuman is the humanity of asceticism; cruel its tender mercies; thus does it depopulate the world of its best in order to improve it.
To measure, then, the greatness of Bernard, let me clearly apprehend the main purpose of his life. It was even this convent-founding, convent-ruling business. This is his proper praise, that, though devoted body and soul, to a system so false, he himself should have retained and practised so much of truth.
The task of history is a process of selection. The farther we recede from a period, the more do we eliminate of what interests us no longer. A few leading events stand clearly out as characteristic of the time, and about them all our details are clustered. But when dealing with an individual, or with the private life of any age, the method must be reversed, and we must encumber ourselves again with all the cast-off baggage that strews the wayside of time’s march.
So with Bernard. The Abelard controversy, the schism, the quarrels of pope and emperor, the crusade, are seen by us—who know what happened afterwards—in their true importance. These facts make the epoch, and throw all else into shade. But we could not so have viewed them in the press and confusion of the times that saw them born. Bernard and his monks were not always thinking of Abelard or Anaclet, of Arnold of Brescia, Roger of Sicily, or Lothaire. In the great conflicts which these names recal to our minds, Bernard bore his manful part as a means to an end. Many a sleepless night must they have cost him, many a journey full of anxiety and hardship, many an agonizing prayer, on the eve of a crisis calling for all his skill and all his courage. But these were difficulties which he was summoned to encounter on his road to the great object of his life—the establishment of ecclesiastical supremacy by means of the conventual institute. The quarrels within the Church, and between the Church and the State, must be in some sort settled before his panacea could be applied to the sick body of the time. In the midst of such controversies a host of minor matters would demand his care,—to him of scarcely less moment, to us indifferent. There would be the drawing out of convent charters and convent rules, the securing of land, of money, of armed protection for the rapidly increasing family of monasteries; election of abbots and of bishops; guidance of the same in perplexity; holding of synods and councils, with the business thereto pertaining; delinquencies and spiritual distresses of individuals; jealous squabbles to be soothed between his Cistercian order and them of Cluny; suppression of clerical luxury and repression of lay encroachment, &c. &c. Thus the year 1118 would be memorable to Bernard and his monks, not so much because in it Gelasius ascended the chair of St. Peter, and the Emperor Henry gave him a rival, or even because then the order of Knights Templars took its rise, so much as from their joy and labour about the founding of two new monasteries,—because that year saw the establishment of the first daughter of Clairvaux, the Abbey of Fontaines, in the diocese of Chalons; and of a sister, Fontenay, beside the Yonne;—the one a growth northward, among the dull plains of Champagne, with their lazy streams and monotonous poplars; the other a southern colony, among the luscious slopes of vine-clad Burgundy.[[45]]
Bernard had his wish. He made Clairvaux the cynosure of all contemplative eyes. For any one who could exist at all as a monk, with any satisfaction to himself, that was the place above all others. Brother Godfrey, sent out to be first abbot of Fontenay,—as soon as he has set all things in order there, returns, only too gladly, from that rich and lovely region, to re-enter his old cell, to walk around, delightedly revisiting the well-remembered spots, among the trees or by the waterside, marking how the fields and gardens have come on, and relating to the eager brethren (for even Bernard’s monks have curiosity) all that befel him in his work. He would sooner be third prior at Clairvaux than abbot of Fontenay. So, too, with brother Humbert, commissioned in like manner to regulate Igny Abbey (fourth daughter of Clairvaux). He soon comes back, weary of the labour and sick for home, to look on the Aube once more, to hear the old mills go drumming and droning, with that monotony of muffled sound—the associate of his pious reveries—often heard in his dreams when far away; to set his feet on the very same flagstone in the choir where he used to stand, and to be happy. But Bernard, though away in Italy, toiling in the matter of the schism, gets to hear of his return, and finds time to send him across the Alps a letter of rebuke for this criminal self-pleasing, whose terrible sharpness must have darkened the poor man’s meditations for many a day.[[46]]
Bernard had farther the satisfaction of improving and extending monasticism to the utmost; of sewing together, with tolerable success, the rended vesture of the papacy; of suppressing a more popular and more scriptural Christianity, for the benefit of his despotic order; of quenching for a time, by the extinction of Abelard, the spirit of free inquiry; and of seeing his ascetic and superhuman ideal of religion everywhere accepted as the genuine type of Christian virtue.
At the same time the principles advocated by Bernard were deprived, in his hands, of their most noxious elements. His sincere piety, his large heart, his excellent judgment, always qualify, and seem sometimes to redeem, his errors. But the well-earned glory and the influence of a name achieved by an ardour and a toil almost passing human measure, were thrown into the wrong scale. The mischiefs latent in the teaching of Bernard become ruinously apparent in those who entered into his labours. His successes proved eventually the disasters of Christendom. One of the best of men made plain the way for some of the worst. Bernard, while a covert for the fugitive pontiff, hunted out by insurgent people or by wrathful emperor, would yet impose some rational limitations on the papal authority.[[47]] But the chair upheld by Bernard was to be filled by an Innocent III., whose merciless arrogance should know no bounds. Bernard pleaded nobly for the Jews, decimated in the crusading fury.[[48]] Yet the atrocities of Dominic were but the enkindling of fuel which Bernard had amassed. Disciple of tradition as he was, he would allow the intellect its range; zealous as he might be for monastic rule, the spontaneous inner life of devotion was with him the end—all else the means. Ere long, the end was completely forgotten in the means. In succeeding centuries, the Church of Rome retained what life it could by repeating incessantly the remedy of Bernard. As corruption grew flagrant, new orders were devised. Bernard saw not, nor those who followed in his steps, that the evil lay, not in the defect or abuse of vows and rules, but in the introduction of vows and rules at all,—that these unnatural restraints must always produce unnatural excesses.
What is true concerning the kind of religious impulse imparted to Europe by the great endeavour of Bernard’s life is no less so as regards the character of his mysticism.
In the theology of Bernard reason has a place, but not the right one. His error in this respect is the primary source of that mystical bias so conspicuous in his religious teaching. Like Anselm, he bids you believe first, and understand, if possible, afterwards. He is not prepared to admit the great truth that if Reason yields to Faith, and assigns itself anywhere a limit, it must be on grounds satisfactory to Reason. To any measure of Anselm’s remarkable speculative ability, Bernard could lay no claim. He was at home only in the province of practical religion. But to enquiries and reasonings such as those in which Anselm delighted, he was ready to award, not blame, but admiration. Faith, with Bernard, receives the treasure of divine truth, as it were, wrapped up (involutum); Understanding may afterwards cautiously unfold the envelope, and peep at the prize, but may never examine the contents first, to determine whether it shall be received or not.[[49]] If the chase be so dear to that mighty hunter, Intellect, he shall have his sport, on certain conditions. Let him admit that the Church has caught and killed the quarry of truth, and brought it to his door. That granted, he may, if he will, cry boot and saddle, ride out to see where the game broke cover, or gallop with hounds, and halloo over hill and dale, pursuing an imaginary object, and learning how truth might have been run down. Great, accordingly, was Bernard’s horror when he beheld Abelard throwing open to discussion the dogmas of the Church; when he saw the alacrity with which such questions were taken up all over France, and learnt that not the scholars of Paris merely, but an ignorant and stripling laity were discussing every day, at street corners, in hall, in cottage, the mysteries of the Trinity and the Immaculate Conception. Faith, he cried, believes; does not discuss; Abelard holds God in suspicion, and will not believe even Him without reason given.[[50]] At the same time, the credo ut intelligam of Bernard is no indolent or constrained reception of a formula. Faith is the divine persuasion of the pure in heart and life. Bernard would grant that different minds will apprehend the same truth in different aspects; that an absolute uniformity is impossible. But when faith is made to depend so entirely on the state of the heart, such concessions are soon withdrawn. A difference in opinion from the acknowledged standard of piety is regarded as a sure sign of a depraved heart. A divine illumination as to doctrine is assumed for those whose practical holiness caused them to shine as lights in the Church.[[51]]
Thus, on the elementary question of faith, the mystical tendency of Bernard is apparent; the subjective and even the merely emotional element assumes undue prominence; and a way is opened for the error incident to all mysticism—the unwarrantable identification of our own thoughts with the mind of God. But if, in his starting-point, Bernard be a mystic, much more so is he in the goal he strains every power to reach.
The design of Christianity is, in his idea, not to sanctify and elevate all our powers, to raise us to our truest manhood, accomplishing in every excellence all our faculties both of mind and body, but to teach us to nullify our corporeal part, to seclude ourselves, by abstraction, from its demands, and to raise us, while on earth, to a super-human exaltation above the flesh,—a vision and a glory approaching that of the angelic state. Thus he commences his analysis of meditation by describing the felicity of angels. They have not to study the Creator in his works, slowly ascending by the media of sense. They behold all things in the Word—more perfect there, by far, than in themselves. Their knowledge is immediate—a direct intuition of the primal ideas of things in the mind of the Creator. To such measure of this immediate intuition as mortals may attain he exhorts the devout mind to aspire. They do well who piously employ their senses among the things of sense for the divine glory and the good of others. Happier yet are they who, with a true philosophy, survey and explore things visible, that they may rise through them to a knowledge of the Invisible. But most of all does he extol the state of those who, not by gradual stages of ascent, but by a sudden rapture, are elevated at times, like St. Paul, to the immediate vision of heavenly things. Such favoured ones are adepts in the third and highest species of meditation. Totally withdrawn into themselves, they are not only, like other good men, dead to the body and the world, and raised above the grosser hindrances of sense, but even beyond those images and similitudes drawn from visible objects which colour and obscure our ordinary conceptions of spiritual truths.[[52]]
But if, so far, Bernard betrays the mystic, in this ambition to transcend humanity and to anticipate the sight and fruition of the celestial state, let him have full credit for the moderation which preserved him from going farther. Compared with that of many subsequent mystics, the mysticism of Bernard is sobriety itself. From the practical vice of mysticism in his Church,—its tendency to supersede by extraordinary attainments the humbler and more arduous Christian virtues—Bernard was as free as any one could be in those times. Against the self-indulgence which would sacrifice every active external obligation to a life of contemplative sloth he protested all his days, by word and by example. He is equally removed from the pantheistic extreme of Eckart and the imaginative extravagances of St. Theresa. His doctrine of Union with God does not surrender our personality or substitute God for the soul in man. When he has occasion to speak, with much hesitation and genuine humility, of the highest point of his own experience, he has no wonderful visions to relate. The visit of the Saviour to his soul was unattended by visible glory, by voices, tastes, or odours; it vindicated its reality only by the joy which possessed him, and the new facility with which he brought forth the practical fruits of the Spirit.[[53]] He prays God for peace and joy and charity to all men, and leaves other exaltations of devotion to apostles and apostolic men,—‘the high hills to the harts and the climbing goats.’ The fourth and highest stage of love in his scale,—that transformation and utter self-loss in which we love ourselves only for the sake of God, he believes unattainable in this life,—certainly beyond his own reach. To the mystical death, self-annihilation, and holy indifference of the Quietists, he is altogether a stranger.[[54]]
It is worth while at least to skim and dip among his sermons on the Canticles. The Song of Solomon is a trying book for a man like Bernard, and those expositions do contain much sad stuff, interspersed, however, with many fine reaches of thought and passages of consummate eloquence. Mystical interpretation runs riot. Everything is symbolized. Metaphors are elaborated into allegories, similitudes broken up into divers branches, and about each ramification a new set of fancies clustered. The sensuous imagery borrowed from love and wine—the kisses, bedchambers, and winecellars of the soul, remind us at every page of that luscious poetry in which the Persian Sufis are said to veil the aspirations of the spirit of man after its Maker. Yet, with all the faults of a taste so vicious there is no affectation, no sentimentality, nothing intentionally profane. It was with Bernard a duty and a delight to draw as much meaning as possible from the sacred text, by the aid of an inexhaustible fancy and an inventive ingenuity in that way, which only Swedenborg has surpassed. Even in his letters on comparatively ordinary topics, he always gives a certain largeness to his subject by his lofty imaginative style of handling it. He seldom confines himself to the simple point in hand, but starts off to fetch for it adornments, illustrations, or sanctions from quarters the most remote, or heights the most awful. Always in earnest, yet always the rhetorician, he seems to write as though viewing, not the subject itself, but some vast reflection of it projected on the sky. In those sermons on Solomon’s Song, it is generally rather the glowing and unseemly diction, than the thought, we have to blame. With such allowance, it is not difficult to discern, under that luxuriance of flowers and weeds, many a sentiment true and dear to the Christian heart in every age.
Bernard appears to have believed himself invested on some occasions with miraculous powers. So far he has a place in the province of theurgic mysticism. Perhaps the worst thing of this sort to be laid to his charge is his going so far as he did towards endorsing the prophecies of the Abbess Hildegard.[[55]]
Note to page 131.
The writings of Augustine handed Neo-Platonism down to posterity as the original and esoteric doctrine of the first followers of Plato. He enumerates the causes which led, in his opinion, to the negative position assumed by the Academics, and to the concealment of their real opinions. He describes Plotinus as a resuscitated Plato. Contra Academ. iii. 17-20.
He commends Porphyry for his measure of scepticism as regards Theurgy, and bestows more than due praise on the doctrine of Illumination held by Plotinus, for its similarity to the Christian truth concerning divine grace. De Civitate Dei, x. 10; x. 2.
He gives a scale of the spiritual degrees of ascent to God, formed after the Platonist model (the ἐπαναβαθμοὶ of the Symposium), and so furnished a precedent for all the attempts of a similar kind in which scholastic mysticism delighted to exercise its ingenuity. De Quantitate Animæ, c. 35.
He enumerates three kinds of perception,—corporeal, intellectual (scientia) and spiritual (sapientia); and in describing the last uses the words introrsum ascendere (De Trin. xii. 15; and comp. De Lib. Arbit. ii. 12). But this phrase does not appear to have carried, with Augustine, the sense it bore when gladly adopted by mystical divines of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. He says elsewhere that man, like the prodigal, must come to himself before he can arise and go to his Father. (Retract. i. 8.) Here what the wanderer finds within is the voice of conscience, and in this sense it is quite true that the step inward is a step upward. But it is not true that the inmost is the highest in the sense that man is able by abstraction and introspection to discover within himself a light which shall supersede, or supplement, or even supply the place of external Revelation.
Note to page 131.
John Scotus Erigena.—This remarkable man began to teach in the ‘School of the Palace,’ under Charles the Bald, about the middle of the ninth century. He translated Dionysius, took part in the Gottschalk controversy, and, at last, when persecuted for the freedom of his opinions, found a refuge with Alfred the Great.
Erigena idolizes Dionysius and his commentator Maximus. He believes in their hierarchies, their divine Dark, and supreme Nothing. He declares, with them, that God is the essence of all things. Ipse namque omnium essentia est qui solus vere est, ut ait Dionysius Areopagita. Esse, inquit, omnium est Superesse Divinitatis.—De Div. Nat. i. 3, p. 443. (Jo. Scoti Opp., Paris, 1853.)
But though much of the language is retained, the doctrine of Dionysius has assumed a form altogether new in the brain of the Scotchman. The phraseology of the emanation theory is, henceforth, only metaphor. What men call creation is, with Erigena, a necessary and eternal self-unfolding (analysis, he calls it) of the divine nature. As all things are now God, self-unfolded, so, in the final restitution, all things will be resolved into God, self-withdrawn. Not the mind of man merely, as the Greek thought, but matter and all creatures will be reduced to their primordial causes, and God be manifested as all in all. De Div. Nat. i. 72. Postremo universalis creatura Creatori adunabitur, et erit in ipso et cum ipso unum. Et hic est finis omnium visibilium et invisibilium, quoniam omnia visibilia in intelligibilia, et intelligibilia in ipsum Deum transibunt, mirabili et ineffabili adunatione, non autem, ut sæpe diximus, essentiarum aut substantiarum confusione aut interitu—v. 20, p. 894. In this restitution, the elect are united to God with a degree of intimacy peculiar to themselves—v. 39. The agent of this restoration, both for beings above and below mankind, is the Incarnate Word—v. 25, p. 913. Erigena regards our incarceration in the body, and the distinction of sex, as the consequence of sin. He abandons the idea of a sensuous hell. What is termed the fire of hell is with him a principle of law to which both the good and evil are subject, which wickedness assimilates and makes a torment; goodness a blessing. So, he says, the light is grateful to the sound eye, painful to the diseased; and the food which is welcome to health is loathed by sickness. De Predestinatione, cap. xvii. p. 428. This idea, in which there lies assuredly an element of truth, became a favourite one with the mystics, and re-appears in many varieties of mysticism. Erigena, farther, anticipates Kant in regarding time and space as mere modes of conception peculiar to our present state. He himself is much more rationalist than mystic (except in the fanciful interpretations of Scripture to which he is compelled to resort); but his system was developed, three centuries later, into an extreme and revolutionary mysticism.
The combination of Platonism and Christianity, so often attempted, abandoned, and renewed, assumes five distinct phases.
I. In the East, with Dionysius; dualistic, with real and ideal worlds apart, removing man far from God by an intervening chain of hierarchic emanations.
II. In the West, with Scotus Erigena; abandoning emanation for ever, and taking up instead the idea to which the Germans give the name of Immanence. God regarded more as the inner life and vital substratum of the universe, than as radiating it from a far-off point of abstraction.
III. In the thirteenth century, at Paris, with Amalric of Bena and David of Dinant. They pronounce God the material, essential cause of all things,—not the efficient cause merely. The Platonic identification of the velle and the esse in God. David and his sect blend with their pantheism the doctrine that under the coming new dispensation—that of the Holy Ghost—all believers are to regard themselves as incarnations of God, and to dispense (as men filled with the Spirit) with all sacraments and external rites. They carry the spiritualizing tendency of Erigena to a monstrous extreme, claim special revelation, declare the real resurrection accomplished in themselves, and that they are already in heaven, which they regard as a state and not a place. They maintain that the good are sufficiently rewarded and the bad adequately punished by the blessedness or the privation they inwardly experience in time,—in short, that retribution is complete on this side the grave, and heavy woes, accordingly, will visit corrupt Christendom. The practical extravagance of this pantheism was repeated, in the fourteenth century, by fanatical mystics among the lower orders.
IV. With Eckart, who reminds us of Plotinus. The ‘Intuition’ of Plotinus is Eckart’s ‘Spark of the Soul,’ the power whereby we can transcend the sensible, the manifold, the temporal, and merge ourselves in the changeless One. At the height of this attainment, the mystic of Plotinus and the mystic of Eckart find the same God,—that is, the same blank abstraction, above being and above attributes. But with Plotinus such escape from finite consciousness is possible only in certain favoured intervals of ecstasy. Eckart, however (whose very pantheism is the exaggeration of a Christian truth beyond the range of Plotinus), will have man realize habitually his oneness with the Infinite. According to him, if a man by self-abandonment attains this consciousness, God has realized Himself within him—has brought forth his Son—has evolved his Spirit. Such a man’s knowledge of God is God’s knowledge of Himself. For all spirit is one. To distinguish between the divine ground of the soul and the Divinity is to disintegrate the indivisible Universal Spirit—is to be far from God—is to stand on the lower ground of finite misconception, within the limits of transitory Appearance. The true child of God ‘breaks through’ such distinction to the ‘Oneness.’ Thus, creation and redemption are resolved into a necessary process—the evolution and involution of Godhead. Yet this form of mediæval pantheism appears to advantage when we compare it with that of ancient or of modern times. The pantheism of the Greek took refuge in apathy from Fate. The pantheism of the present day is a plea for self-will. But that of Eckart is half redeemed by a sublime disinterestedness, a confiding abnegation of all choice or preference, which betrays the presence of a measure of Christian element altogether inconsistent with the basis of his philosophy.
V. With Tauler and the ‘German Theology.’ This is the best, indisputably, of all the forms assumed by the combination in question. The Platonism is practically absorbed in the Christianity. Tauler speaks of the ideal existence of the soul in God—of the loss of our nameless Ground in the unknown Godhead, and we find language in the Theologia Germanica concerning God as the substance of all things—concerning the partial and the Perfect, the manifold and the One, which might be pantheistically construed. But such interpretation would be most unfair, and is contradicted by the whole tenour both of the sermons and the treatise. An apprehension of the nature of sin so searching and profound as that in the ‘Theology,’ is impossible to pantheism. Luther could see therein only most Christian theism. These mystics still employed some of the terms transmitted by a revered philosophy. Tauler cites with deference the names of Dionysius, Proclus, and Plotinus. This mysticism clothes its thought with fragments from the old philosopher’s cloak—but the heart and body belong to the school of Christ. With Dionysius, and even with Erigena, man seems to need but a process of approximation to the divine subsistence—a rise in the scale of being by becoming quantitatively rather than qualitatively more. With the German mystics he must be altogether unmade and born anew. To shift from one degree of illumination to another somewhat higher, is nothing in their eyes, for the need lies not in the understanding, but in heart and will. According to them, man must stand virtually in heaven or hell—be God’s or the devil’s. The Father of our spirits is not relegated from men by ecclesiastical or angelic functionaries, but nearer to every one, clerk or lay, gentle or simple, than he is to himself. So the exclusiveness and the frigid intellectualism so characteristic of the ancient ethnic philosophy, has vanished from the Teutonic mysticism. Plato helps rather than harms by giving a vantage ground and defence to the more true and subjective, as opposed to a merely institutional Christianity.
Both Eckart and the Theologia Germanica would have man ‘break through’ and transcend ‘distinction.’ But it is true, with slight exception, that the distinctions Eckart would escape are natural; those which the ‘Theology’ would surpass, for the most part artificial. The asceticism of both is excessive. The self-reduction of Eckart is, however, more metaphysical than moral; that of the ‘Theology’ moral essentially. Both would say, the soul of the regenerate man is one with God—cannot be separated from Him. But only Eckart would say, such soul is not distinct from God. Both would essay to pass from the Nature to the Being of God—from his manifested Existence to his Essence, and they both declare that our nature has its being in the divine. But such assertion, with Tauler and the Theologia Germanica, by no means deifies man. It is but the Platonic expression of a great Christian doctrine—the real Fatherhood of God.
Note to page 142.
Itaque tum per totam fere Galliam in civitatibus, vicis, et castellis, a scholaribus, non solum intra scholas, sed etiam triviatim; nec a litteratis, aut provectis tantum, sed a pueris et simplicibus, aut certe stultis, de sancta Trinitate, quæ Deus est, disputaretur, &c.—Epist. 337, and comp. Epist. 332. Bernard at first refused to encounter Abelard, not simply because from his inexperience in such combats he was little fitted to cope with that dialectic Goliath—a man of war from his youth—but because such discussions were in themselves, he thought, an indignity to the faith.—Epist. 189. Abelard he denounces as wrong, not only in his heretical results, but in principle,—Cum ea ratione nititur explorare, quæ pia mens fidei vivacitate apprehendit. Fides piorum credit, non discutit. Sed iste Deum habens suspectum, credere non vult, nisi quod prius ratione discusserit.—Epist. 338.
Note to page 143.
In the eyes both of Anselm and Bernard, to deny the reality of Ideas is to cut off our only escape from the gross region of sense. Neither faith nor reason have then left them any basis of operation. We attain to truth only through the medium of Ideas, by virtue of our essential relationship to the Divine Source of Ideas—the Infinite Truth. That Supreme Truth which gives to existing things their reality is also the source of true thoughts in our minds. Thus our knowledge is an illumination dependent on the state of the heart towards God. On this principle all doubt must be criminal, and every heresy the offspring, not of a bewildered brain, but of a wicked heart.
The fundamental maxim of the mediæval religio-philosophy—Invisibilia non decipiunt, was fertile in delusions. It led men to reject, as untrustworthy, the testimony of sense and of experience. Thus, in the transubstantiation controversy of the ninth century, Realism and Superstition conquered together. It taught them to deduce all knowledge from certain mental abstractions, Platonic Ideas and Aristotelian Forms. Thus Bonaventura (who exhibits this tendency at its height) resolves all science into union with God. The successive attainment of various kinds of knowledge is, in his system, an approximation, stage above stage, to God—a scaling of the heights of Illumination, as we are more closely united with the Divine Word—the repertory of Ideas. Thus, again, the Scriptures were studied by the schoolmen less as a practical guide for the present life than as so much material whence they might deduce metaphysical axioms and propositions—discover more of those divine abstractions which they regarded as the seminal principles of all thought and all existence. They were constantly mistaking results which could only have been attained by revelation or tradition from without, for truth evolved from within the depths of the finite mind, by virtue of its immediate commerce with the Infinite. Anselm found no difficulty in assuming that the God of his ontological proof was identical with the God of the Bible.
Note to page 144.
Thus, speaking of the angelic state, he says,—Creatura cœli illa est, præsto habens per quod ista intueatur. Videt Verbum, et in Verbo facta per Verbum. Nec opus habet ex his quæ facta sunt, factoris notitiam mendicare.—De Consid. V. i., and comp. Serm. in Cantica, v. 4.
The three kinds of meditation, or stages of Christian proficiency, referred to in the text, Bernard calls consideratio dispensativa, æstimativa, and speculativa. The last is thus defined:—Speculativa est consideratio se in se colligens, et, quantum divinitus adjuvatur, rebus humanis eximens ad contemplandum Deum. He who reaches it is among the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven. At omnium maximus, qui spreto ipso usu rerum et sensuum, quantum quidem humanæ fragilitati fas est, non ascensoriis gradibus, sed inopinatis excessibus, avolare interdum contemplando ad illa sublimia consuevit. Ad hoc ultimum genus illos pertinere reor excessus Pauli. Excessus non ascensus: nam raptum potius fuisse, quam ascendisse ipse se perhibet.—De Consid. v. ii. In one of the Sermons on the Canticles, Bernard discourses at more length on this kind of exaltation. Proinde et ego non absurde sponsæ exstasim vocaverim mortem, quæ tamen non vita, sed vitæ eripiat laqueis.... Excedente quippe anima, etsi non vita certe vitæ sensu, necesse est etiam ut nec vitæ tentatis sentiatur.... Utinam hac morte frequenter cadam.... Bona mors, quæ vitam non aufert, sed transfert in melius; bona, qua non corpus cadit, sed anima sublevatur. Verum hæc hominum est. Sed moriatur anima mea morte etiam si dici potest, Angelorum, ut presentium memoria excedens rerum se inferiorum corporearumque non modo cupiditatibus, sed et similitudinibus exuat.... Talis, ut opinor, excessus, aut tantum, aut maxime contemplatio dicitur. Rerum etenim cupiditatibus vivendo non teneri, humanæ virtutis est; corporum vero similitudinibus speculando non involvi, angelicæ puritatis est.... Profecisti, separasti te; sed nondum elongasti, nisi et irruentia undique phantasmata corporearum similitudinum transvolare mentis puritate prævaleas. Hucusque noli tibi promittere requiem.—In Cantica, Serm. lii. 4, 5.
Note to page 144.
Fateor et mihi adventasse Verbum, in insipientia dico, et pluries. Cumque sæpius intraverit ad me, non sensi aliquoties cum intravit. Adesse sensi, adfuisse recordor, interdum et præsentiæ potui introitum ejus, sentire nunquam, sed ne exitum quidem.... Qua igitur introivit? An forte nec introivit quidem, quia non deforis venit? Neque enim est unum aliquid ex iis que foris sunt. Porro nec deintra me venit quoniam bonum est, et scio quoniam non est in me bonum. Ascendi etiam superius meum: et ecce supra hoc Verbum eminens. Ad inferius quoque meum curiosus explorator descendi: et nihilominus infra inventum est. Si foras aspexi, extra omne exterius meum comperi illud esse: si vero intus, et ipsum interius erat.... Ita igitur intrans ad me aliquoties Verbum sponsus, nullis unquam introitum suum indiciis innotescere fecit, non voce, non specie, non incessu. Nullis denique suis motibus compertum est mihi, nullis meis sensibus illapsum penetralibus meis: tantum ex motu cordis, sicut præfatus sum, intellexi præsentiam ejus; et ex fuga vitiorum carnaliumque compressione affectuum, &c.—In Cantica, Serm. lxxiv. 5, 6. The metaphors of Bernard are actual sounds, sights, and fragrances with St. Theresa. From this sensuous extreme his practical devotion is as far removed, on the one side, as from the cold abstraction of Dionysius on the other. His contemplation is no staring at the Divine Essence till we are blind—no oblivion or disdain of outward means. We see God, he says, not as He is, but as He wills—sicuti vult non sicuti est. So when describing that ascent of the soul to God, or descent of God into the soul, which constitutes Union, he says,—In Spiritu fit ista conjunctio.... Non ergo sic affecta et sic dilecta (anima) contenta erit omnino vel illa, quæ multis per ea quæ facta sunt; vel, illa quæ paucis per visa et somnia facta est manifestatio sponsi, nisi et speciali prærogativa intimis illum affectibus atque ipsis medullis cordis cœlitus illapsum suscipiat, habeatque præsto quem desiderat non figuratum, sed infusum: non apparentem sed afficientem; nec dubium quin eo jucundiorem, quo intus, non foris. Verbum nempe est, non sonans, sed penetrans; non loquax, sed efficax; non obstrepens auribus, sed affectibus blandiens, &c.—In Cantica, Serm. xxxi. 6 and 1. Comp. also his remarks at the close of the sermon, on the difference between faith and sight, p. 2868.
Bernard describes three kisses of the soul,—the kiss of the feet of God, of the hand, and of the mouth. (Serm. de diversis, 87, and In Cantica, Serm. iv.) This is his fanciful way of characterising, by the elaboration of a single figurative phrase of Scripture, the progress of the soul through conversion and grace to perfection. Here, as in so many instances, his meaning is substantially correct; it is the expression which is objectionable. He is too much in earnest for the artificial gradations and metaphysical refinements of later mysticism. Compare him, in this respect, with John of the Cross. Bernard would have rejected as unprofitable those descriptions of the successive absorption of the several faculties in God; those manifold kinds of prayer—prayers of quiet, prayers of union, prayers of ecstasy, with their impalpable distinctions; that analysis, miraculously achieved, of miraculous ravishments, detailed at such length in the tedious treatises of the Spanish mystics. The doctrine taught by John of the Cross, that God compensates the faithful for the mortification of the senses by sensuous gratifications of a supernatural kind, would have revolted the more pure devotion of the simple-minded Abbot of Clairvaux.—See La Montée du Mont Carmel, livre ii. chapp. 16, 17; pp. 457, &c.
It should be borne in mind that the highest kind of Consideratio is identical, in Bernard’s phraseology, with Contemplatio; and the terms are thus often used interchangeably. Generally, Consideratio is applied to inquiry, Contemplatio to intuition. De Consid. lib. ii. cap. 2.
Note to page 146.
See Vita, ii. cap. 27, where his biographer gives Bernard’s own modest estimate of these wonders.
Wide, indeed, is the difference between the spiritual mysticism of Bernard and the gross materialism and arrogant pretension which characterise the vision and the prophecy to which Hildegard laid claim. The morbid ambition of theurgic mysticism received a new impulse from the sanction afforded her by Bernard and the contemporary popes. Bernard makes no doubt of the reality of her gifts, and desires a place in her prayers. (Epist. 366.) He did not foresee that the most extravagant and sensuous mysticism must soon of necessity displace the simpler and less dazzling. He would be afraid of taking his place with Rationalist mockers, and a superstitious awe would readily persuade him that it was better to believe than to doubt. When emperors and popes corresponded on familiar terms with the seeress; when haughty nobles and learned ecclesiastics sought counsel at her oracle concerning future events, and even for the decision of learned questions; when all she said in answer was delivered as subject to and in the interest of the Church Catholic—was often the very echo of Bernard’s own warnings and exhortations—who was he, that he should presume to limit the operations of the Spirit of God? Many of Hildegard’s prophecies, denouncing the ecclesiastical abuses of the day, were decidedly reformatory in their tendency. In this respect she is the forerunner of the Abbot Joachim of Calabria, and of St. Brigitta, whose prophetic utterances startled the corrupt Church in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In her supernatural gift of language, her attendant divine radiance, and her fantastic revelations, she, like her friend Elizabeth of Schonau (who had an angel to wait upon her, and saw the eleven thousand virgins), prepares the way for Catharine of Siena, Angela of Foligni, and St. Theresa.
CHAPTER II.
Licht und Farbe.
Wohne, du ewiglich Eines, dort bei dem ewiglich Einen!
Farbe, du wechselnde, komm’ freundlich zum Menschen herab![[56]]
Schiller.
On the next evening of meeting, Gower commenced as follows his promised paper on Hugo and Richard of St. Victor.
Hugo of St. Victor.
The celebrated School of St. Victor (so called from an ancient chapel in the suburbs of Paris) was founded by William of Champeaux at the commencement of the twelfth century. This veteran dialectician assumed there the habit of the regular canons of Augustine, and after an interval, began to lecture once more to the students who flocked to his retirement. In 1114, king and pope combined to elevate the priory to an abbacy. Bishops and nobles enriched it with their gifts. The canons enjoyed the highest repute for sanctity and learning in that golden age of the canonical institute. St. Victor colonized Italy, England, Scotland, and Lower Saxony, with establishments which regarded as their parent the mighty pile of building on the outskirts of Paris. Within a hundred years from its foundation it numbered as its offspring thirty abbeys and more than eighty priories.
Hugo of St. Victor was born in 1097, of a noble Saxon family. His boyhood was passed at the convent of Hamersleben. There he gave promise of his future eminence. His thirst after information of every kind was insatiable. The youth might often have been seen walking alone in the convent garden, speaking and gesticulating, imagining himself advocate, preacher, or disputant. Every evening he kept rigid account of his gains in knowledge during the day. The floor of his room was covered with geometrical figures traced in charcoal. Many a winter’s night, he says, he was waking between vigils in anxious study of a horoscope. Many a rude experiment in musical science did he try with strings stretched across a board. Even while a novice, he began to write. Attracted by the reputation of the abbey of St. Victor, he enrolled his name among the regular canons there. Not long after his arrival, the emissaries of an archdeacon, worsted in a suit with the chapter, murdered the prior, Thomas. Hugo was elected to succeed him in the office of instructor. He taught philosophy, rhetoric, and theology. He seldom quitted the precincts of the convent, and never aspired to farther preferment. He closed a peaceful and honoured life at the age of forty-four, leaving behind him those ponderous tomes of divinity to which Aquinas and Vincent of Beauvais acknowledge their obligations, and which gained for their author the name of a second Augustine.[[57]]
Hitherto mysticism, in the person of Bernard, has repudiated scholasticism. In Hugo, and his successor Richard, the foes are reconciled. Bonaventura in the thirteenth, and Gerson in the fifteenth century, are great names in the same province. Indeed, throughout the middle ages, almost everything that merits the title of mystical theology is characterized by some such endeavour to unite the contemplation of the mystic with the dialectics of the schoolman. There was good in the attempt. Mysticism lost much of its vagueness, and scholasticism much of its frigidity.
Hugo was well fitted by temperament to mediate between the extreme tendencies of his time. Utterly destitute of that daring originality which placed Erigena at least two centuries in advance of his age, his very gentleness and caution would alone have rendered him more moderate in his views and more catholic in sympathy than the intense and vehement Bernard. Hugo, far from proscribing science and denouncing speculation, called in the aid of the logical gymnastics of his day to discipline the mind for the adventurous enterprise of the mystic. If he regarded with dislike the idle word-warfare of scholastic ingenuity, he was quite as little disposed to bid common sense a perpetual farewell among the cloudiest realms of mysticism. His style is clear, his spirit kindly, his judgment generally impartial. It is refreshing in those days of ecclesiastical domination to meet with at least a single mind to whom that Romanist ideal—an absolute uniformity in religious opinion—appeared both impossible and undesirable.[[58]]
A few words may present the characteristic outlines of his mysticism. It avails itself of the aid of speculation to acquire a scientific form—in due subjection, of course, to the authority of the Church. It will ground its claim on a surer tenure than mere religious emotion or visionary reverie. Hugo, with all his contemporaries, reverenced the Pseudo-Dionysius. His more devout and practical spirit laboured at a huge commentary on the Heavenly Hierarchy, like a good angel, condemned for some sin to servitude under a paynim giant. In the hands of his commentator, Dionysius becomes more scriptural and human—for the cloister, even edifying, but remains as uninteresting as ever.
Hugo makes a threefold division of our faculties. First, and lowest, Cogitatio. A stage higher stands Meditatio: by this he means reflection, investigation. Third, and highest, ranges Contemplatio: in this state the mind possesses in light the truth which, in the preceding, it desired and groped after in twilight.[[59]]
He compares this spiritual process to the application of fire to green wood. It kindles with difficulty; clouds of smoke arise; a flame is seen at intervals, flashing out here and there; as the fire gains strength, it surrounds, it pierces the fuel; presently it leaps and roars in triumph—the nature of the wood is being transformed into the nature of fire. Then, the struggle over, the crackling ceases, the smoke is gone, there is left a tranquil, friendly brightness, for the master-element has subdued all into itself. So, says Hugo, do sin and grace contend; and the smoke of trouble and anguish hangs over the strife. But when grace grows stronger, and the soul’s eye clearer, and truth pervades and swallows up the kindling, aspiring nature, then comes holy calm, and love is all in all. Save God in the heart, nothing of self is left.[[60]]
Looking through this and other metaphors as best we may, we discover that Contemplation has two provinces—a lower and a higher. The lower degree of contemplation, which ranks next above Meditation, is termed Speculation. It is distinct from Contemplation proper, in its strictest signification. The attribute of Meditation is Care. The brow is heavy with inquiring thought, for the darkness is mingled with the light. The attribute of Speculation is Admiration—Wonder. In it the soul ascends, as it were, a watch-tower (specula), and surveys everything earthly. On this stage stood the Preacher when he beheld the sorrow and the glory of the world, and pronounced all things human Vanity. To this elevation, whence he philosophizes concerning all finite things, man is raised by the faith, the feeling, and the ascetic practice of religion. Speculative illumination is the reward of devotion. But at the loftiest elevation man beholds all things in God. Contemplation, in its narrower and highest sense, is immediate intuition of the Infinite. The attribute of this stage is Blessedness.
As a mystic, Hugo cannot be satisfied with that mediate and approximate apprehension of the Divine Nature which here on earth should amply satisfy all who listen to Scripture and to Reason. Augustine had told him of a certain spiritual sense, or eye of the soul. This he makes the organ of his mysticism. Admitting the incomprehensibility of the Supreme, yet chafing as he does at the limitations of our finite nature, Faith—which is here the natural resource of Reason—fails to content him. He leaps to the conclusion that there must be some immediate intuition of Deity by means of a separate faculty vouchsafed for the purpose.
You have sometimes seen from a hill-side a valley, over the undulating floor of which there has been laid out a heavy mantle of mist. The spires of the churches rise above it—you seem to catch the glistening of a roof or of a vane—here and there a higher house, a little eminence, or some tree-tops, are seen, islanded in the white vapour, but the lower and connecting objects, the linking lines of the roads, the plan and foundation of the whole, are completely hidden. Hugo felt that, with all our culture, yea, with Aristotle to boot, revealed truth was seen by us somewhat thus imperfectly. No doubt certain great facts and truths stand out clear and prominent, but there is a great deal at their basis, connecting them, attached to them, which is impervious to our ordinary faculties. We are, in fact, so lamentably far from knowing all about them. Is there not some power of vision to be attained which may pierce these clouds, lay bare to us these relationships, nay, even more, be to us like the faculty conferred by Asmodeus, and render the very roofs transparent, so that from topstone to foundation, within and without, we may gaze our fill? And if to realize this wholly be too much for sinful creatures, yet may not the wise and good approach such vision, and attain as the meed of their faith, even here, a superhuman elevation, and in a glance at least at the Heavenly Truth unveiled, escape the trammels of the finite?
Such probably was the spirit of the question which possessed, with a ceaseless importunity, the minds of men, ambitious alike to define with the schoolman and to gaze with the seer. Hugo answers that the eye of Contemplation—closed by sin, but opened more or less by grace—furnishes the power thus desiderated.[[61]] But at this, his highest point, he grasps a shadow instead of the substance. Something within the mind is mistaken for a manifestation from without. A mental creation is substituted for that Divine Existence which his rapture seems to reveal. He asserts, however, that this Eye beholds what the eye of sense and the eye of reason cannot see, what is both within us and above us—God. Within us, he cries, is both what we must flee and whither we must flee. The highest and the inmost are, so far, identical.[[62]] Thus do the pure in heart see God. In such moments the soul is transported beyond sense and reason, to a state similar to that enjoyed by angelic natures. The contemplative life is prefigured by the ark in the deluge. Without are waves, and the dove can find no rest. As the holy ship narrowed toward the summit, so doth this life of seclusion ascend from the manifold and changeful to the Divine Immutable Unity.
The simplification of the soul he inculcates is somewhat analogous to the Haplosis of the Neo-Platonists. All sensuous images are to be discarded; we must concentrate ourselves upon the inmost source, the nude essence of our being. He is careful, accordingly, to guard against the delusions of the imagination.[[63]] He cautions his readers lest they mistake a mere visionary phantasm—some shape of imaginary glory, for a supernatural manifestation of the Divine Nature to the soul. His mysticism is intellectual, not sensuous. Too practical for a sentimental Quietism or any of its attendant effeminacies, and, at the same time, too orthodox to verge on pantheism, his mystical doctrine displays less than the usual proportion of extravagance, and the ardent eloquence of his ‘Praise of Love’ may find an echo in every Christian heart.
Richard of St. Victor.
Now, let us pass on to Richard of St. Victor. He was a native of Scotland, first the pupil and afterwards the successor of Hugo. Richard was a man whose fearless integrity and energetic character made themselves felt at St. Victor not less than the intellectual subtilty and flowing rhetoric which distinguished his prelections. He had far more of the practical reformer in him than the quiet Hugo. Loud and indignant are his rebukes of the empty disputation of the mere schoolman,—of the avarice and ambition of the prelate. His soul is grieved that there should be men who blush more for a false quantity than for a sin, and stand more in awe of Priscian than of Christ.[[64]] Alas! he exclaims, how many come to the cloister to seek Christ, and find lying in that sepulchre only the linen clothes of your formalism! How many mask their cowardice under the name of love, and let every abuse run riot on the plea of peace! How many others call their hatred of individuals hatred of iniquity, and think to be righteous cheaply by mere outcry against other men’s sins! Complaints like these are not without their application nearer home.[[65]]
His zeal did not confine itself to words. In the year 1162 he was made prior. Ervisius the abbot was a man of worldly spirit, though his reputation had been high when he entered on his office. He gradually relaxed all discipline, persecuted the God-fearing brethren, and favoured flatterers and spies; he was a very Dives in sumptuousness, and the fair name of St. Victor suffered no small peril at his hands. The usual evils of broken monastic rule were doubtless there, though little is specified—canons going in and out, whither they would, without inquiry, accounts in confusion, sacristy neglected, weeds literally and spiritually growing in holy places, wine-bibbing and scandal carried on at a lamentable rate, sleepy lethargy and noisy brawl, the more shameful because unpunished. Ervisius was good at excuses, and of course good for nothing else. If complaints were made to him, it was always that cellarer, that pittanciar, or that refectorarius—never his fault. These abuses must soon draw attention from without. Richard and the better sort are glad. The pope writes to the king about the sad accounts he hears. Bishops bestir themselves. Orders come from Rome forbidding the abbot to take any step without the consent of the majority of the chapter. Richard’s position is delicate, between his vow of obedience to his superior and the good of the convent. But he plays his part like a man. An archbishop is sent to St. Victor to hold a commission of inquiry. All is curiosity and bustle, alarm and hope among the canons, innocent and guilty. At last, Ervisius, after giving them much trouble, is induced to resign. They choose an able successor, harmony and order gradually return, and Richard, having seen the abbey prosperous once more, dies in the following year.[[66]]
In the writings of Richard, as compared with those of Hugo, I find that what belongs to the schoolman has received a more elaborate and complex development, while what belongs to the mystic has also attained an ampler and more prolific growth. All the art of the scholastic is there—the endless ramification and subdivision of minute distinctions; all the intellectual fortification of the time—the redoubts, ravelins, counterscarps, and bastions of dry, stern logic; and among these, within their lines and at last above them all, is seen an almost oriental luxuriance of fancy and of rhetoric—palm and pomegranate, sycamore and cypress, solemn cedar shadows, the gloom in the abysses of the soul,—luscious fruit and fragrant flowers, the triumphs of its ecstasy, all blissful with the bloom and odours of the upper Paradise. He is a master alike in the serviceable science of self-scrutiny, and in the imaginary one of self-transcendence. His works afford a notable example of that fantastic use of Scripture prevalent throughout the Middle Age. His psychology, his metaphysics, his theology, are all extracted from the most unlikely quarters in the Bible by allegorical interpretation. Every logical abstraction is attached to some personage or object in the Old Testament history, as its authority and type. Rachel and Leah are Reason and Affection. Bilhah and Zilpah are Imagination and Sense. His divinity is embroidered on the garments of Aaron, engraven on the sides of the ark, hung on the pins and rings of the tabernacle. His definitions and his fancies build in the eaves of Solomon’s temple, and make their ‘pendent bed and procreant cradle’ in the carved work of the holy place. To follow the thread of his religious philosophy, you have to pursue his agile and discursive thoughts, as the sparrow-hawk the sparrow, between the capitals, among the cedar rafters, over the gilded roof, from court to court, column to column, and sometimes after all the chase is vain, for they have escaped into the bosom of a cloud.[[67]]
On a basis similar to that of Hugo, Richard erects six stages of Contemplation. The two first grades fall within the province of Imagination; the two next belong to Reason; the two highest to Intelligence. The objects of the first two are Sensibilia; of the second pair, Intelligibilia (truths concerning what is invisible, but accessible to reason); of the third, Intellectibilia (unseen truth above reason). These, again, have their subdivisions, into which we need not enter.[[68]] Within the depths of thine own soul, he would say, thou wilt find a threefold heaven—the imaginational, the rational, and the intellectual. The third heaven is open only to the eye of Intelligence—that Eye whose vision is clarified by divine grace and by a holy life. This Eye enjoys the immediate discernment of unseen truth, as the eye of the body beholds sensible objects. His use of the word Intelligence is not always uniform. It would seem that this divinely-illumined eye of the mind is to search first into the deeps of our own nature (inferiora invisibilia nostra), and then upward into the heights of the divine (superiora invisibilia divina).[[69]]
For the highest degrees of Contemplation penitence avails more than science; sighs obtain what is impossible to reason. This exalted intuition begins on earth, and is consummated in heaven. Some, by divine assistance, reach it as the goal of long and arduous effort. Others await it, and are at times rapt away unawares into the heaven of heavens. Some good men have been ever unable to attain the highest stage; few are fully winged with all the six pinions of Contemplation. In the ecstasy he describes, there is supposed to be a dividing asunder of the soul and the spirit as by the sword of the Spirit of God. The body sleeps, and the soul and all the visible world is shut away. The spirit is joined to the Lord, and one with Him,—transcends itself and all the limitations of human thought. In such a moment it is conscious of no division, of no change; all contraries are absorbed, the part does not appear less than the whole, nor is the whole greater than a part; the universal is seen as particular, the particular as universal; we forget both all that is without and all that is within ourselves; all is one and one is all; and when the rapture is past the spirit returns from its trance with a dim and dizzy memory of unutterable glory.[[70]]
This account presents in some parts the very language in which Schelling and his disciples are accustomed to describe the privilege of Intellectual Intuition.
Atherton. I move thanks to Gower.
Willoughby. Which I second. It has been strange enough to see our painter turn bookworm, and oscillating, for the last fortnight or more, between the forest sunset on his easel and Atherton’s old black-letter copy of Richard of St. Victor.
Gower. The change was very pleasant. As grateful, I should think, as the actual alternation such men as Hugo and Richard must have enjoyed when they betook themselves, after the lassitude that followed an ecstasy, to a scholastic argumentation; or again refreshed themselves, after the dryness of that, by an imaginative flight into the region of allegory, or by some contemplative reverie which carried them far enough beyond the confines of logic. The monastic fancy found this interchange symbolized in the upward and downward motion of the holy bell. Is it not in Longfellow’s Golden Legend that a friar says—
And the upward and downward motions show
That we touch upon matters high and low;
And the constant change and transmutation
Of action and of contemplation;
Downward, the Scripture brought from on high,
Upward, exalted again to the sky;
Downward, the literal interpretation,
Upward, the Vision and Mystery!
Willoughby. Much as a miracle-play must have been very refreshing after a public disputation, or as the most overwrought and most distinguished members of the legal profession are said to devour with most voracity every good novel they can catch.
Atherton. It is remarkable to see the mystical interpreters of that day committing the two opposite mistakes, now of regarding what is symbolical in Scripture as literal, and again of treating what is literal as symbolical.
Gower. Somewhat like the early travellers, who mistook the hybrid figures of the hieroglyphic sculptures they saw for representations of living animals existing somewhere up the country, and then, at other times, fancied they found some profound significance in a simple tradition or an ordinary usage dictated by the climate.
Willoughby. Yet there lies a great truth in the counsel they give us to rise above all sensuous images in our contemplation of the Divine Nature.
Atherton. No doubt. God is a spirit. The Infinite Mind must not be represented to our thought through the medium of any material image, as though in that we had all the truth. We must not confound the medium with the object. But the object is in fact inaccessible without a medium. The Divine Nature is resolved into a mere blank diffusion when regarded as apart from a Divine Character. We are practically without a God in the presence of such an abstraction. To enable us to realize personality and character there must be a medium, a representation, some analogy drawn from relationships or objects with which we are acquainted.
The fault I find with these mystics is, that they encourage the imagination to run riot in provinces where it is not needed, and prohibit its exercise where it would render the greatest service. Orthodox as they were in their day, they yet attempt to gaze on the Divine Nature in its absoluteness and abstraction, apart from the manifestation of it to our intellect, our heart, and our imagination, which is made in the incarnate Christ Jesus. God has supplied them with this help to their apprehension of Him, but they hope by His help to dispense with it. They neglect the possible and practical in striving after a dazzling impossibility which allures their spiritual ambition. This is a natural consequence of that extravagance of spirituality which tells man that his highest aim is to escape from his human nature—not to work under the conditions of his finite being, but to violate and escape them as far as possible in quest of a superhuman elevation. We poor mortals, as Schiller says, must have colour. The attempt to evade this law always ends in substituting the mind’s creation for the mind’s Creator.
Willoughby. I cannot say that I clearly understand what this much-extolled introspection of theirs is supposed to reveal to them.
Atherton. Neither, very probably, did they. But though an exact localization may be impossible, I think we can say whereabout they are in their opinion on this point. Their position is intermediate. They stand between the truth which assigns to an internal witness and an external revelation their just relative position, and that extreme of error which would deny the need or possibility of any external revelation whatever. They do not ignore either factor; they unduly increase one of them.
Willoughby. Good. Will you have the kindness first to give me the truth as you hold it? Then we shall have the terminus a quo.
Atherton. There is what has been variously termed an experimental or moral evidence for Christianity, which comes from within. If any one reverently searches the Scriptures, desiring sincerely to know and do the will of God as there revealed, he has the promise of Divine assistance. He will find, in the evil of his own heart, a reality answering to the statements of the Bible. He will find, in repentance and in faith, in growing love and hope, that very change taking place within which is described in the book without. His nature is being gradually brought into harmony with the truth there set forth. He has experienced the truth of the Saviour’s words, ‘If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God.’
But in this experimental evidence there is nothing mystical. It does not at all supersede or infringe on the evidence of testimony,—the convincing argument from without, which may at first have made the man feel it his duty to study a book supported by a claim so strong. Neither does he cease to use his reason, when looking within, any more than when listening to witness from without. In self-observation, if in any exercise, reason must be vigilant. Neither is such inward evidence a miraculous experience peculiar to himself. It is common to multitudes. It is open to all who will take the same course he has done. He does not reach it by a faculty which transcends his human nature, and leaves in the distance every power which has been hitherto in such wholesome exercise. There is here no special revelation, distinct from and supplementary to the general. Such a privilege would render an appeal from himself to others impossible. It would entrench each Christian in his individuality apart from the rest. It would give to conscientious differences on minor points the authority of so many conflicting inspirations. It would issue in the ultimate disintegration of the Christian body.
The error of the mystics we are now considering consists in an exaggeration of the truth concerning experimental evidence. They seem to say that the Spirit will manifest to the devout mind verities within itself which are, as it were, the essence and original of the truths which the Church without has been accustomed to teach; so that, supposing a man to have rightly used the external revelation, and at a certain point to suspend all reference to it, and to be completely secluded from all external influences, there would then be manifest to him, in God, the Ideas themselves which have been developed in time into a Bible and a historical Christianity. The soul, on this Platonist principle, enjoys a commerce once more with the world of Intelligence in the depth of the Divine Nature. She recovers her wings. The obliterations on the tablet of Reminiscence are supplied. A theosophist like Paracelsus would declare that the whole universe is laid up potentially in the mind of man—the microcosm answering to the macrocosm. In a similar way these mystics would have us believe that there is in man a microdogma within, answering to the macrodogma of the Church without. Accordingly they deem it not difficult to discover a Christology in psychology, a Trinity in metaphysics. Hence, too, this erroneous assertion that if the heathen had only known themselves, they would have known God.
Gower. If some of our modern advocates of the theory of Insight be right, they ought to have succeeded in both.
Atherton. That ‘Know thyself’ was a precept which had its worth in the sense Socrates gave it. In the sense of Plotinus it was a delusion. Applied to morals,—regarded as equivalent to a call to obey conscience, it might render service. And yet varying and imperfect consciences—conflicting inner laws, could give men as an inference no immutable and perfect Lawgiver. Understood as equivalent to saying that the mind is in itself an all-sufficient and infallible repertory of spiritual truth, history in every page refutes it. The monstrosities of idolatry, the disputes of philosophical schools, the aspirations among the best of the sages of antiquity after a divine teaching of some sort—all these facts are fatal to the notion. It is one thing to be able in some degree to appreciate the excellence of revealed truth, and quite another to be competent to discover it for ourselves. Lactantius was right when he exclaimed, as he surveyed the sad and wasteful follies of heathendom, O quam difficilis est ignorantibus veritas, et quam facilis scientibus!
Willoughby. I must say I can scarcely conceive it possible to exclude from the mind every trace and result of what is external, and to gaze down into the depths of our simple self-consciousness as the mystic bids us do. It is like forming a moral estimate of a man exclusive of the slightest reference to his character.
Gower. I think that as the result of such a process, we should find only what we bring. Assuredly this must continually have been the case with our friends Hugo and Richard. The method reminds me of a trick I have heard of as sometimes played on the proprietor of a supposed coal-mine in which no coal could be found, with a view to induce him to continue his profitless speculation. Geologists, learned theoretical men, protest that there can be no coal on that estate—there is none in that part of England. But the practical man puts some lumps slyly in his pocket, goes down with them, and brings them up in triumph, as fresh from the depths of the earth.
Atherton. Some German writers, even of the better sort have committed a similar mistake in their treatment of the life of Christ. First they set to work to construct the idea of Christ (out of the depths of their consciousness, I suppose), then they study and compare the gospels to find that idea realized. They think they have established the claim of Evangelists when they can show that they have found their idea developed in the biography they give us. As though the German mind could have had any idea of Christ at all within its profundities, but for the fishermen in the first instance.
Gower. This said Eye of Intelligence appears to me a pure fiction. What am I to make of a faculty which is above, and independent of, memory, reason, feeling, imagination,—without cognizance of those external influences (which at least contribute to make us what we are), and without organs, instruments, or means of any kind for doing any sort of work whatever? Surely this complete and perpetual separation between intuition and everything else within and without us, is a most unphilosophical dichotomy of the mind of man.
Atherton. Equally so, whether it be regarded as natural to man or as a supernatural gift. Our intuitions, however rapid, must rest on the belief of some fact, the recognition of some relationship or sense of fitness, which rests again on a judgment, right or wrong.
Willoughby. And in such judgment the world without must have large share.
Gower. For the existence of such a separate faculty as a spiritual gift we have only the word of Hugo and his brethren. The faith of Scripture, instead of being cut off from the other powers of the mind, is sustained by them, and strengthens as we exercise them.
Atherton. President Edwards, in his Treatise on the Affections, appears to me to approach the error of those mystics, in endeavouring to make it appear that regeneration imparts a new power, rather than a new disposition, to the mind. Such a doctrine cuts off the common ground between the individual Christian and other men. According to the Victorines it would seem to be the glory of Christianity that it enables man, at intervals at least, to denude himself of reason. To me its triumph appears to consist in this, that it makes him, for the first time, truly reasonable, who before acted unreasonably because of a perverted will.
Note to page 158.
The treatise by Hugo, entitled De Vanitate Mundi, is a dialogue between teacher and scholar, in which, after directing his pupil to survey the endless variety and vicissitude of life, after showing him the horrors of a shipwreck, the house of Dives, a marriage feast, the toils and disputes of the learned, the instructor bids him shelter himself from this sea of care in that ark of God, the religious life. He proceeds to describe that inner Eye, that oculus cordis, whose vision is so precious. ‘Thou hast another eye,’ he says (lib. i. p. 172), ‘an eye within, far more piercing than the other thou speakest of,—one that beholds at once the past, the present, and the future; which diffuses through all things the keen brightness of its vision; which penetrates what is hidden, investigates what is impalpable; which needs no foreign light wherewith to see, but gazes by a light of its own, peculiar to itself (luce aliena ad videndum non indigens, sed sua ac propria luce prospiciens).
Self-collection is opposed (p. 175) to distraction, or attachment to the manifold,—is declared to be restauratio, and at the same time elevatio. The scholar inquires, ‘If the heart of man be an ark or ship, how can man be said to enter into his own heart, or to navigate the universe with his heart? Lastly, if God, whom you call the harbour, be above, what can you mean by such an unheard-of thing as a voyage which carries the ship upwards, and bears away the mariner out of himself?’ The teacher replies, ‘When we purpose elevating the eye of the mind to things invisible, we must avail ourselves of certain analogies drawn from the objects of sense. Accordingly, when, speaking of things spiritual and unseen, we say that anything is highest, we do not mean that it is at the top of the sky, but that it is the inmost of all things. To ascend to God, therefore, is to enter into ourselves, and not only so, but in our inmost self to transcend ourselves. (Ascendere ergo ad Deum hoc est intrare ad semet ipsum, et non solum ad se intrare, sed ineffabili quodam modo in intimis etiam se ipsum transire, p. 176.)
Hugo, like Richard, associates this illumination inseparably with the practices of devotion. The tree of Wisdom within is watered by Grace. It stands by Faith, and is rooted in God. As it flourishes, we die to the world, we empty ourselves, we sigh over even the necessary use of anything earthly. Devotion makes it bud, constancy of penitence causes it to grow. Such penitence (compunctio) he compares to digging in search of a treasure, or to find a spring. Sin has concealed this hoard—buried this water-source down beneath the many evils of the heart. The watching and the prayer of the contrite spirit clears away what is earthly, and restores the divine gift. The spirit, inflamed with heavenly desire, soars upward—becomes, as it ascends, less gross, as a column of smoke is least dense towards its summit, till we are all spirit; are lost to mortal ken, as the cloud melts into the air, and find a perfect peace within, in secret gazing on the face of the Lord. De Arca morali, lib. iii. cap. 7.
Note to page 162.
See the introductory chapters of the Benjamin Minor, or De prep. anim. ad contemp. fol. 34, &c.—Richard rates this kind of interpretation very highly, and looks for success therein to Divine Illumination. (De eruditione interioris hominis, cap. vi. fol. 25.) A passage or two from an appendix to his Treatise on Contemplation, may serve, once for all, as a specimen of his mystical interpretation. It is entitled Nonnullæ allegoriæ tabernaculi fœderis. ‘By the tabernacle of the covenant understand the state of perfection. Where perfection of the soul is, there is the indwelling of God. The nearer we approach perfection, the more closely are we united with God. The tabernacle must have a court about it. Understand by this the discipline of the body; by the tabernacle itself, the discipline of the mind. The one is useless without the other. The court is open to the sky, and so the discipline of the body is accessible to all. What was within the tabernacle could not be seen by those without. None knows what is in the inner man save the spirit of man which is in him. The inner man is divided into rational and intellectual; the former represented by the outer, the latter by the inner part of the tabernacle. We call that rational perception by which we discern what is within ourselves. We here apply the term intellectual perception to that faculty by which we are elevated to the survey of what is divine. Man goes out of the tabernacle into the court in the exercise of works. He enters the first tabernacle when he returns to himself. He enters the second when he transcends himself. Self-transcendence is elevation into Deity. (Transcendendo sane seipsum elevatur in Deum.) In the former, man is occupied with the consideration of himself; in the latter, with the contemplation of God.
‘The ark of the covenant represents the grace of contemplation. The kinds of contemplation are six, each distinct from the rest. Two of them are exercised with regard to visible creatures, two are occupied with invisible, the two last with what is divine. The first four are represented in the ark, the two others are set forth in the figures of the cherubim. Mark the difference between the wood and the gold. There is the same difference between the objects of imagination and the objects of reason. By imagination we behold the forms of things visible, by ratiocination we investigate their causes. The three kinds of consideration which have reference to things, works, and morals, belong to the length, breadth, and height of the ark respectively. In the consideration of form and matter, our knowledge avails a full cubit. (It is equivalent to a cubit when complete.) But our knowledge of the nature of things is only partial. For this part, therefore, we reckon only half a cubit. Accordingly, the length of the ark is two cubits and a half.’... And thus he proceeds concerning the crown, the rings, the staves, the mercy-seat, the cherubim, &c.—Fol. 63, &c.
Note to page 163.
The three heavens within the mind are described at length. (De Contemp. lib. iii. cap. 8.) In the first are contained the images of all things visible; in the second lie the definitions and principles of things seen, the investigations made concerning things unseen; in the third are contemplations of things divine, beheld as they truly are—a sun that knows no going down,—and there, and there alone, the kingdom of God within us in its glory.—Cap. x. fol 52.
The eye of Intelligence is thus defined (cap. ix.):—Intelligentiæ siquidem oculus est sensus ille quo invisibilia videmus: non sicut oculo rationis quo occulta et absentia per investigationem quærimus et invenimus; sicut sæpe causas per effectus, vel effectus per causas, et alia atque alia quocunque ratiocinandi modo comprehendimus. Sed sicut corporalia corporeo sensu videre solemus visibiliter potentialiter et corporaliter; sic utique intellectualis ille sensus invisibilia capit invisibiliter quidem, sed potentialiter, sed essentialiter. (Fol. 52.) He then goes on to speak of the veil drawn over this organ by sin, and admits that even when illuminated from above, its gaze upon our inner self is not so piercing as to be able to discern the essence of the soul. The inner verities are said to be within, the upper, beyond the veil. ‘It may be questioned, however, whether we are to see with this same eye of Intelligence the things beyond the veil, or whether we use one sense to behold the invisible things which are divine, and another to behold the invisible things of our own nature. But those who maintain that there is one sense for the intuition of things above and another for those below, must prove it as well as they can. I believe that in this way they introduce much confusion into the use of this word Intelligence,—now extending its signification to a speculation which is occupied with what is above, and now confining it to what is below, and sometimes including both senses. This twofold intuition of things above and things below, whether we call it, as it were, a double sense in one, or divide it, is yet the instrument of the same sense, or a twofold effect of the same instrument, and whichever we choose, there can be no objection to our saying that they both belong to the intellectual heaven.’ There is certainly much of the confusion of which he complains in his own use of the word,—a confusion which is perhaps explained by supposing that he sometimes allows Intelligence to extend its office below its proper province, though no other faculty can rise above the limits assigned to it. Intelligence may sometimes survey from her altitude the more slow and laborious processes of reason, though she never descends to such toil.