rendering to itself an account of what it does, of what it perceives, of
what it feels. But, with the faculty of thinking, of feeling, it has
also that of willing; it possesses the liberty of returning to itself,
of reflecting on its own thought and sentiment, of consenting to this,
or of resisting it, of abstaining from it, or of reproducing its thought
and sentiment, while stamping them with a new character. Spontaneity,
reflection,--these are the two great forms of intelligence.[71] One is
not the other; but, after all, the latter does little more than develop
the former; they contain at bottom the same things:--the point of view
alone is different. Every thing that is spontaneous is obscure and
confused; reflection carries with it a clear and distinct view.
Reason does not begin by reflection; it does not at first perceive the
truth as universal and necessary; consequently, when it passes from idea
to being, when it refers truth to the real being that is its subject, it
has not sounded, it even has no suspicion of the depth of the chasm it
passes; it passes it by means of the power which is in it, but it is not
astonished at what it has done. It is subsequently astonished, and
undertakes by the aid of the liberty with which it is endowed, to do the
opposite of what it has done, to deny what it has affirmed. Here
commences the strife between sophism and common sense, between false
science and natural truth, between good and bad philosophy, both of
which come from free reflection. The sad and sublime privilege of
reflection is error; but reflection is the remedy for the evil it
produces. If it can deny natural truth, usually it confirms it, returns
to common sense by a longer or shorter circuit; it opposes in vain all
the tendencies of human nature, by which it is almost always overcome,
and brought back submissive to the first inspirations of reason,
fortified by this trial. But there is nothing more in the end than there
was at the beginning; only in primitive inspiration there was a power
which was ignorant of itself, and in the legitimate results of
reflection there is a power which knows itself:--one is the triumph of
instinct, the other, that of true science.
Sentiment which accompanies intelligence in all its proceedings presents
the same phenomena.
The heart, like reason, pursues the infinite, and the only difference
there is in these pursuits is, that sometimes the heart seeks the
infinite without knowing that it seeks it, and sometimes it renders to
itself an account of the final end of the need of loving what disturbs
it. When reflection is added to love, if it finds that the object loved
is in fact worthy of being loved, far from enfeebling love, it
strengthens it; far from clipping its divine wings, it develops them,
and nourishes them, as Plato[72] says. But if the object of love is only
a symbol of the true beauty, only capable of exciting the desire of the
soul without satisfying it, reflection breaks the charm which held the
heart, dissipates the chimera that enchained it. It must be very sure in
regard to its attachments, in order to dare to put them to the proof of
reflection. O Psyche! Psyche! preserve thy good fortune; do not sound
the mystery too deeply. Take care not to bring the fearful light near
the invisible lover with whom thy soul is enamored. At the first ray of
the fatal lamp love is awakened, and flies away. Charming image of what
takes place in the soul, when to the serene and unsuspecting confidence
of sentiment succeeds reflection with its bitter train. This is perhaps
also the meaning of the biblical account of the tree of knowledge.[73]
Before science and reflection are innocence and faith. Science and
reflection at first engender doubt, disquietude, distaste for what one
possesses, the disturbed pursuit of what one knows not, troubles of mind
and soul, sore travail of thought, and, in life, many faults, until
innocence, forever lost, is replaced by virtue, simple faith by true
science, until love, through so many vanishing illusions, finally
succeeds in reaching its true object.
Spontaneous love has the native grace of ignorance and happiness.
Reflective love is very different; it is serious, it is great, even in
its faults, with the greatness of liberty. Let us not be in haste to
condemn reflection: if it often produces egotism, it also produces
devotion. What, in fact, is self-devotion? It is giving ourselves
freely, with full knowledge of what we are doing. Therein consists the
sublimity of love, love worthy of a noble and generous creature, not an
ignorant and blind love. When affection has conquered selfishness,
instead of loving its object for its own sake, the soul gives itself to
its object, and miracle of love, the more it gives the more it
possesses, nourishing itself by its own sacrifices, and finding its
strength and its joy in its entire self-abandonment. But there is only
one being who is worthy of being thus loved, and who can be thus loved
without illusions, and without mistakes, at once without limits, and
without regret, to wit, the perfect being who alone does not fear
reflection, who alone can fill the entire capacity of our heart.
Mysticism corrupts sentiment by exaggerating its power.
Mysticism begins by suppressing in man reason, or, at least, it
subordinates and sacrifices reason to sentiment.
Listen to mysticism: it says that by the heart alone is man in relation
with God. All that is great, beautiful, infinite, eternal, love alone
reveals to us. Reason is only a lying faculty. Because it may err, and
does err, it is said that it always errs. Reason is confounded with
every thing that it is not. The errors of the senses, and of reasoning,
the illusions of the imagination, even the extravagances of passion,
which sometimes give rise to those of mind, every thing is laid to the
charge of reason. Its imperfections are triumphed over, its miseries are
complacently exhibited; the most audacious dogmatical system--since it
aspires to put man and God in immediate communication--borrows against
reason all the arms of skepticism.
Mysticism goes farther: it attacks liberty itself; it orders liberty to
renounce itself, in order to identify itself by love with him from whom
the infinite separates us. The ideal of virtue is no longer the
courageous perseverance of the good man, who, in struggling against
temptation and suffering, makes life holy; it is no longer the free and
enlightened devotion of a loving soul; it is the entire and blind
abandonment of ourselves, of our will, of our being, in a barren
contemplation of thought, in a prayer without utterance, and almost
without consciousness.
The source of mysticism is in that incomplete view of human nature,
which knows not how to discern in it what therein is most profound,
which betakes itself to what is therein most striking, most seizing,
and, consequently, also most seizable. We have already said that reason
is not noisy, and often is not heard, whilst its echo of sentiment
loudly resounds. In this compound phenomenon, it is natural that the
most apparent element should cover and dim the most obscure.
Moreover, what relations, what deceptive resemblances between these two
faculties! Without doubt, in their development, they manifestly differ;
when reason becomes reasoning, one easily distinguishes its heavy
movement from the flight of sentiment; but spontaneous reason is almost
confounded with sentiment,--there is the same rapidity, the same
obscurity. Add that they pursue the same object, and almost always go
together. It is not, then, astonishing that they should be confounded.
A wise philosophy distinguishes[74] them without separating them.
Analysis demonstrates that reason precedes, and that sentiment follows.
How can we love what we are ignorant of? In order to enjoy the truth, is
it not necessary to know it more or less? In order to be moved by
certain ideas, is it not necessary to have possessed them in some
degree? To absorb reason in sentiment is to stifle the cause in the
effect. When one speaks of the light of the heart, he designates,
without knowing it, that light of the spontaneous reason which discovers
to us truth by a pure and immediate intuition entirely opposite to the
slow and laborious processes of the reflective reason and reasoning.
Sentiment by itself is a source of emotion, not of knowledge. The sole
faculty of knowledge is reason. At bottom, if sentiment is different
from sensation, it nevertheless pertains on all sides to general
sensibility, and it is, like it, variable; it has, like it, its
interruptions, its vivacity, and its lassitude, its exaltation and its
short-comings. The inspirations of sentiment, then, which are
essentially mobile and individual, cannot be raised to a universal and
absolute rule. It is not so with reason; it is constantly the same in
each one of us, the same in all men. The laws that govern its exercise
constitute the common legislation of all intelligent beings. There is no
intelligence that does not conceive some universal and necessary truth,
and, consequently, the infinite being who is its principle. These grand
objects being once known excite in the souls of all men the emotions
that we have endeavored to describe. These emotions partake of the
dignity of reason and the mobility of imagination and sensibility.
Sentiment is the harmonious and living relation between reason and
sensibility. Suppress one of the two terms, and what becomes of the
relation? Mysticism pretends to elevate man directly to God, and does
not see that in depriving reason of its power, it really deprives him of
that which makes him know God, and puts him in a just communication with
God by the intermediary of eternal and infinite truth.
The fundamental error of mysticism is, that it discards this
intermediary, as if it were a barrier and not a tie: it makes the
infinite being the direct object of love. But such a love can be
sustained only by superhuman efforts that end in folly. Love tends to
unite itself with its object: mysticism absorbs love in its object.
Hence the extravagances of that mysticism so severely and so justly
condemned by Bossuet and the Church in quietism.[75] Quietism lulls to
sleep the activity of man, extinguishes his intelligence, substitutes
indolent and irregular contemplation for the seeking of truth and the
fulfilment of duty. The true union of the soul with God is made by truth
and virtue. Every other union is a chimera, a peril, sometimes a crime.
It is not permitted man to reject, under any pretext, that which makes
him man, that which renders him capable of comprehending God, and
expressing in himself an imperfect image of God, that is to say, reason,
liberty, conscience. Without doubt, virtue has its prudence, and if we
must never yield to passion, there are diverse ways of combating it in
order to conquer it. One can let it subside, and resignation and silence
may have their legitimate employment. There is a portion of truth, of
utility even, in the _Spiritual Letters_, even in the _Maxims of the
Saints_. But, in general, it is unsafe to anticipate in this world the
prerogatives of death, and to dream of sanctity when virtue alone is
required of us, when virtue is so difficult to attain, even imperfectly.
The best quietism can, at most, be only a halt in the course, a truce in
the strife, or rather another manner of combating. It is not by flight
that battles are gained; in order to gain them it is necessary to come
to an engagement, so much the more as duty consists in combating still
more than in conquering. Of the two opposite extremes--stoicism and
quietism--the first, taken all in all, is preferable to the second; for
if it does not always elevate man to God, it maintains, at least, human
personality, liberty, conscience, whilst quietism, in abolishing these,
abolishes the entire man. Oblivion of life and its duties, inertness,
sloth, death of soul,--such are the fruits of that love of God, which is
lost in the sterile contemplation of its object, provided it does not
cause still sadder aberrations! There comes a moment when the soul that
believes itself united with God, puffed up with this imaginary
possession, despises both the body and human personality to such an
extent that all its actions become indifferent to it, and good and evil
are in its eyes the same. Thus it is that fanatical sects have been seen
mingling crime and devotion, finding in one the excuse, often even the
motive, of the other, and prefacing infamous irregularities or
abominable cruelties with mystic transports,--deplorable consequences of
the chimera of pure love, of the pretension of sentiment to rule over
reason, to serve alone as a guide to the human soul, and to put itself
in direct communication with God, without the intermediary of the
visible world, and without the still surer intermediary of intelligence
and truth.
But it is time to pass to another kind of mysticism, more singular, more
learned, more refined, and quite as unreasonable, although it presents
itself in the very name of reason.
We have seen[76] that reason, if one of the principles which govern it
be destroyed, cannot lay hold of truth, not even absolute truths of the
intellectual and moral order; it refers all universal, necessary,
absolute truths, to the being that alone can explain them, because in
him alone are necessary and absolute existence, immutability, and
infinity. God is the substance of uncreated truths, as he is the cause
of created existences. Necessary truths find in God their natural
subject. If God has not arbitrarily made them,--which is not in
accordance with their essence and his,--he constitutes them, inasmuch as
they are himself. His intelligence possesses them as the manifestations
of itself. As long as our intelligence has not referred them to the
divine intelligence, they are to it an effect without cause, a
phenomenon without substance. It refers them, then, to their cause and
their substance. And in that it obeys an imperative need, a fixed
principle of reason.
Mysticism breaks in some sort the ladder that elevates us to infinite
substance: it regards this substance alone, independently[77] of the
truth that manifests it, and it imagines itself to possess also the
pure absolute, pure unity, being in itself. The advantage which
mysticism here seeks, is to give to thought an object wherein there is
no mixture, no division, no multiplicity, wherein every sensible and
human element has entirely disappeared. But in order to obtain this
advantage, it must pay the cost of it. It is a very simple means of
freeing theodicea from every shade of anthropomorphism; it is reducing
God to an abstraction, to the abstraction of being in itself. Being in
itself, it is true, is free from all division, but upon the condition
that it have no attribute, no quality, and even that it be deprived of
knowledge and intelligence; for intelligence, if elevated as it might
be, always supposes the distinction between the intelligent subject and
the intelligible object. A God from whom absolute unity excludes
intelligence, is the God of the mystic philosophy.
How could the school of Alexandria, how could Plotinus, its
founder,[78] in the midst of the lights of the Greek and Latin
civilization, have arrived at such a strange notion of the Divinity? By
the abuse of Platonism, by the corruption of the best and severest
method, that of Socrates and Plato.
The Platonic method, the dialectic process, as its author calls it,
searches in particular, variable, contingent things, for what they also
have general, durable, one, that is to say, their Idea, and is thus
elevated to Ideas, as to the only true objects of intelligence, in order
to be elevated still from these Ideas, which are arranged in an
admirable hierarchy, to the first of all, beyond which intelligence has
nothing more to conceive, nothing more to seek. By rejecting in finite
things their limit, their individuality, we attain genera, Ideas, and,
by them, their sovereign principle. But this principle is not the last
of genera, nor the last of abstractions; it is a real and substantial
principle.[79] The God of Plato is not called merely unity, he is called
the Good; he is not the lifeless substance of the Eleatics;[80] he is
endowed with _life and movement_;[81] strong expressions that show how
much the God of the Platonic metaphysics differs from that of mysticism.
This God is the _father of the world_.[82] He is also the father of
truth, that light of spirits.[83] He dwells in the midst of Ideas _which
make him a true God inasmuch as he is with them_.[84] He possesses
_august and holy intelligence_.[85] He has made the world without any
external necessity, and for the sole reason that he is good.[86] In
fine, he is beauty without mixture, unalterable, immortal, that makes
him who has caught a glimpse of it disdain all earthly beauties.[87] The
beautiful, the absolute good, is too dazzling to be looked on directly
by the eye of mortal; it must at first be contemplated in the images
that reveal it to us, in truth, in beauty, in justice, as they are met
here below, and among men, as the eye of one who has been a chained
captive from infancy, must be gradually habituated to the light of the
sun.[88] Our reason, enlightened by true science, can perceive this
light of spirits; reason rightly led can go to God, and there is no
need, in order to reach him, of a particular and mysterious faculty.
Plotinus erred by pushing to excess the Platonic dialectics, and by
extending them beyond the boundary where they should stop. In Plato they
terminate at ideas, at the idea of the good, and produce an intelligent
and good God; Plotinus applies them without limit, and they lead him
into an abyss of mysticism. If all truth is in the general, and if all
individuality is imperfection, it follows, that as long as we are able
to generalize, as long as it is possible for us to overlook any
difference, to exclude any determination, we shall not be at the limit
of dialectics. Its last object, then, will be a principle without any
determination. It will not spare in God being itself. In fact, if we say
that God is a being, by the side of and above being, we place unity, of
which being partakes, and which it cannot disengage, in order to
consider it alone. Being is not here simple, since it is at once being
and unity; unity alone is simple, for one cannot go beyond that. And
still when we say unity, we determine it. True absolute unity must,
then, be something absolutely indeterminate, which is not, which,
properly speaking, cannot be named, the _unnamable_, as Plotinus says.
This principle, which exists not, for a still stronger reason, cannot
think, for all thought is still a determination, a manner of being. So
being and thought are excluded from absolute unity. If Alexandrianism
admits them, it is only as a forfeiture, a degradation of unity.
Considered in thought, and in being, the supreme principle is inferior
to itself; only in the pure simplicity of its indefinable essence is it
the last object of science, and the last term of perfection.
In order to enter into communication with such a God, the ordinary
faculties are not sufficient, and the theodicea of the school of
Alexandria imposes upon it a quite peculiar psychology.
In the truth of things, reason conceives absolute unity as an attribute
of absolute being, but not as something in itself, or, if it considers
it apart, it knows that it considers only an abstraction. Does one wish
to make absolute unity something else than an attribute of an absolute
being, or an abstraction, a conception of human intelligence? Reason
could accept nothing more on any condition. Will this barren unity be
the object of love? But love, much more than reason, aspires after a
real object. One does not love substance in general, but a substance
that possesses such or such a character. In human friendships, suppress
all the qualities of a person, or modify them, and you modify or
suppress the love. This does not prove that you do not love this person;
it only proves that the person is not for you without his qualities.
So neither reason nor love can attain the absolute unity of mysticism.
In order to correspond to such an object, there must be in us something
analogous to it, there must be a mode of knowing that implies the
abolition of consciousness. In fact, consciousness is the sign of the
_me_, that is to say, of that which is most determinate: the being who
says, _me_, distinguishes himself essentially from every other; that is
for us the type itself of individuality. Consciousness should degrade
the ideal of dialectic knowledge, or every division, every determination
must be wanting, in order to respond to the absolute unity of its
object. This mode of pure and direct communication with God, which is
not reason, which is not love, which excludes consciousness, is ecstasy
([Greek: ekstasis]). This word, which Plotinus first applied to this
singular state of the soul, expresses this separation from ourselves
which mysticism exacts, and of which it believes man capable. Man, in
order to communicate with absolute being, must go out of himself. It is
necessary that thought should reject all determinate thought, and, in
falling back within its own depths, should arrive at such an oblivion of
itself, that consciousness should vanish or seem to vanish. But that is
only an image of ecstasy; what it is in itself, no one knows; as it
escapes all consciousness, it escapes memory, escapes reflection, and
consequently all expression, all human speech.