Few readers of this magazine probably know anything about "Mystics;"
know even what the term means: but as it is plainly connected with
the adjective "mystical" they probably suppose it to denote some sort
of vague, dreamy, sentimental, and therefore useless and undesirable
personage. Nor can we blame them if they do so; for mysticism is a
form of thought and feeling now all but extinct in England. There
are probably not ten thorough mystics among all our millions; the
mystic philosophers are very little read by our scholars, and read
not for, but in spite of, their mysticism; and our popular theology
has so completely rid itself of any mystic elements, that our divines
look with utter disfavour upon it, use the word always as a term of
opprobrium, and interpret the mystic expressions in our liturgy--
which mostly occur in the Collects--according to the philosophy of
Locke, really ignorant, it would seem, that they were written by
Platonist mystics.
We do not blame them either, save in as far as teachers of men are
blameworthy for being ignorant of any form of thought which has ever
had a living hold upon good and earnest men, and may therefore take
hold of them again. But the English are not now a mystic people, any
more than the old Romans were; their habit of mind, their destiny in
the world, are like those of the Romans, altogether practical; and
who can be surprised if they do not think about what they are not
called upon to think about?
Nevertheless, it is quite a mistake to suppose that mysticism is by
its own nature unpractical. The greatest and most prosperous races
of antiquity--the Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindoos, Greeks--had the
mystic element as strong and living in them as the Germans have now;
and certainly we cannot call them unpractical peoples. They fell and
came to ruin--as the Germans may do--when their mysticism became
unpractical: but their thought remained, to be translated into
practice by sounder-hearted races than themselves. Rome learnt from
Greece, and did in some confused imperfect way that which Greece only
dreamed; just as future nations may act hereafter, nobly and
usefully, on the truths which Germans discover, only to put in a book
and smoke over. For they are terribly practical people, these
mystics, quiet students and devotees as they may seem. They go, or
seem to go, down to the roots of things, after a way of their own;
and lay foundations on which--be they sound or unsound--those who
come after them cannot choose but build; as we are building now. For
our forefathers were mystics for generations; they were mystics in
the forests of Germany and in the dales of Norway; they were mystics
in the convents and the universities of the Middle Ages; they were
mystics, all the deepest and noblest minds of them, during the
Elizabethan era.
Even now the few mystic writers of this island are exercising more
influence on thought than any other men, for good or for evil.
Coleridge and Alexander Knox have changed the minds, and with them
the acts, of thousands; and when they are accused of having
originated, unknowingly, the whole "Tractarian" movement, those who
have watched English thought carefully can only answer, that on the
confession of the elder Tractarians themselves, the allegation is
true: but that they originated a dozen other "movements" beside in
the most opposite directions, and that free-thinking Emersonians will
be as ready as Romish perverts and good plain English churchmen to
confess that the critical point of their life was determined by the
writings of the fakeer of Highgate. At this very time too, the only
real mystic of any genius who is writing and teaching is exercising
more practical influence, infusing more vigorous life into the minds
of thousands of men and women, than all the other teachers of England
put together; and has set rolling a ball which may in the next half
century gather into an avalanche, perhaps utterly different in form,
material, and direction, from all which he expects.
So much for mystics being unpractical. If we look faithfully into
the meaning of their name, we shall see why, for good or for evil,
they cannot be unpractical; why they, let them be the most self-
absorbed of recluses, are the very men who sow the seeds of great
schools, great national and political movements, even great
religions.
A mystic--according to the Greek etymology--should signify one who is
initiated into mysteries, one whose eyes are opened to see things
which other people cannot see. And the true mystic in all ages and
countries, has believed that this was the case with him. He believes
that there is an invisible world as well as a visible one--so do most
men: but the mystic believes also that this same invisible world is
not merely a supernumerary one world more, over and above the earth
on which he lives, and the stars over his head, but that it is the
cause of them and the ground of them; that it was the cause of them
at first, and is the cause of them now, even to the budding of every
flower, and the falling of every pebble to the ground; and therefore,
that having been before this visible world, it will be after it, and
endure just as real, living, and eternal, though matter were
annihilated to-morrow.
"But, on this showing, every Christian, nay, every religious man, is
a mystic; for he believes in an invisible world?" The answer is
found in the plain fact, that good Christians here in England do not
think so themselves; that they dislike and dread mysticism; would not
understand it if it were preached to them; are more puzzled by those
utterances of St. John, which mystics have always claimed as
justifying their theories, than by any part of their bibles. There
is a positive and conscious difference between popular metaphysics
and mysticism; and it seems to lie in this: the invisible world in
which Englishmen in general believe, is one which happens to be
invisible now, but which will not be so hereafter. When they speak
of the other world they mean a place which their bodily eyes will see
some day, and could see now if they were allowed; when they speak of
spirits they mean ghosts who could, and perhaps do, make themselves
visible to men's bodily eyes. We are not inquiring here whether they
be right or wrong; we are only specifying a common form of human
thought.
The mystic, on the other hand, believes that the invisible world is
so by its very nature, and must be so for ever. He lives therein
now, he holds, and will live in it through eternity: but he will see
it never with any bodily eyes, not even with the eyes of any future
"glorified" body. It is ipso facto not to be seen, only to be
believed in; never for him will "faith be changed for sight," as the
popular theologians say that it will; for this invisible world is
only to be "spiritually discerned."
This is the mystic idea, pure and simple; of course there are various
grades of it, as there are of the popular one; for no man holds his
own creed and nothing more; and it is good for him, in this piecemeal
and shortsighted world, that he should not. Were he over-true to his
own idea, he would become a fanatic, perhaps a madman. And so the
modern evangelical of the Venn and Newton school, to whom mysticism
is neology and nehushtan, when he speaks of "spiritual experiences,"
uses the adjective in its purely mystic sense; while Bernard of
Cluny, in his once famous hymn, "Hic breve vivitur," mingles the two
conceptions of the unseen world in inextricable confusion. Between
these two extreme poles, in fact, we have every variety of thought;
and it is good for us that we should have them; for no one man or
school of men can grasp the whole truth, and every intermediate
modification supplies some link in the great cycle of facts which its
neighbours have overlooked.
In the minds who have held this belief, that the unseen world is the
only real and eternal one, there has generally existed a belief, more
or less confused, that the visible world is in some mysterious way a
pattern or symbol of the invisible one; that its physical laws are
the analogues of the spiritual laws of the eternal world: a belief
of which Mr. Vaughan seems to think lightly; though if it be untrue
we can hardly see how that metaphoric illustration in which he
indulges so freely, and which he often uses in a masterly and
graceful way, can be anything but useless trifling. For what is a
metaphor or a simile but a mere paralogism--having nothing to do with
the matter in hand, and not to be allowed for a moment to influence
the reader's judgment, unless there be some real and objective
analogy--homology we should call it--between the physical phenomenon
from which the symbol is taken, and the spiritual truth which it is
meant to illustrate? What divineness, what logical weight, in our
Lord's parables, unless He was by them trying to show his hearers
that the laws which they saw at work in the lilies of the field, in
the most common occupations of men, were but lower manifestations of
the laws by which are governed the inmost workings of the human
spirit? What triflers, on any other ground, were Socrates and Plato.
What triflers, too, Shakespeare and Spenser. Indeed, we should say
that it is the belief, conscious or unconscious, of the eternal
correlation of the physical and spiritual worlds, which alone
constitutes the essence of a poet.
Of course this idea led, and would necessarily lead, to follies and
fancies enough, as long as the phenomena of nature were not carefully
studied, and her laws scientifically investigated; and all the dreams
of Paracelsus or Van Helmont, Cardan or Crollius, Baptista Porta or
Behmen, are but the natural and pardonable errors of minds which,
while they felt deeply the sanctity and mystery of Nature, had no
Baconian philosophy to tell them what Nature actually was, and what
she actually said. But their idea lives still, and will live as long
as the belief in a one God lives. The physical and spiritual worlds
cannot be separated by an impassable gulf. They must, in some way or
other, reflect each other, even in their minutest phenomena, for so
only can they both reflect that absolute primeval unity, in whom they
both live and move and have their being. Mr. Vaughan's object,
however, has not been to work out in his book such problems as these.
Had he done so, he would have made his readers understand better what
Mysticism is; he would have avoided several hasty epithets, by the
use of which he has, we think, deceived himself into the notion that
he has settled a matter by calling it a hard name; he would have
explained, perhaps, to himself and to us, many strange and seemingly
contradictory facts in the annals of Mysticism. But he would also
not have written so readable a book. On the whole he has taken the
right course, though one wishes that he had carried it out more
methodically.
A few friends, literate and comfortable men, and right-hearted
Christians withal, meet together to talk over these same mystics, and
to read papers and extracts which will give a general notion of the
subject from the earliest historic times. The gentlemen talk about
and about a little too much; they are a little too fond of
illustrations of the popular pulpit style; they are often apt to say
each his say, with very little care of what the previous speaker has
uttered; in fact these conversations are, as conversations, not good,
but as centres of thought they are excellent. There is not a page
nor a paragraph in which there is not something well 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 humble 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.
The true value of the book is, that though not exhaustive of the
subject, it is suggestive. It affords the best, indeed the only
general, sketch of the subject which we have in England, and gives
therein boundless food for future thought and reading; and the
country parson, or the thoughtful professional man, who has no time
to follow out the question for himself, much less to hunt out and
examine original documents, may learn from these pages a thousand
curious and interesting hints about men of like passions with
himself, and about old times, the history of which--as of all times--
was not the history of their kings and queens, but of the creeds and
deeds of the "masses" who worked, and failed, and sorrowed, and
rejoiced again, unknown to fame. Whatsoever, meanwhile, their own
conclusions may be on the subject-matter of the book, they will
hardly fail to admire the extraordinary variety and fulness of Mr.
Vaughan's reading, and wonder when they hear--unless we are wrongly
informed--that he is quite a young man--
How one small head could compass all he knew.
He begins with the mysticism of the Hindoo Yogis. And to this, as we
shall hereafter show, he hardly does justice; but we wish now to
point out in detail the extended range of subjects, of each of which
the book gives some general notion. From the Hindoos he passes to
Philo and the neo-Platonists; from them to the pseudo-Dionysius, and
the Mysticism of the early Eastern Church. He then traces, shrewdly
enough, the influence of the pseudo-Areopagite and the Easterns on
the bolder and more practical minds of the Western Latins, and gives
a sketch of Bernard and his Abbey of Clairvaux, which brings
pleasantly enough before us the ways and works of a long-dead world,
which was all but inconceivable to us till Mr, Carlyle disinterred it
in his picture of Abbot Sampson, the hero of "Past and Present."
We are next introduced to the mystic schoolmen--Hugo and Richard of
St. Victor; and then to a far more interesting class of men, and one
with which Mr. Vaughan has more sympathy than with any of his
characters, perhaps because he knows more about them. His chapters
on the German Mysticism of the fourteenth century; his imaginary, yet
fruitful chronicle of Adolf of Arnstein, with its glimpses of Meister
Eckart, Suso, the "Nameless Wild," Ruysbroek, and Tauler himself, are
admirable, if merely as historic studies, and should be, and we doubt
not will be, read by many as practical commentaries on the "Theologia
Germanica," and on the selection from Tauler's "Sermons," now in
course of publication. Had all the book been written as these
chapters are, we should not have had a word of complaint to make,
save when we find the author passing over without a word of comment,
utterances which, right or wrong, contain the very keynote and
central idea of the men whom he is holding up to admiration, and as
we think, of Mysticism itself. There is, for instance, a paragraph
attributed to Ruysbroek, in p. 275, vol. i., which, whether true or
false--and we believe it to be essentially true--is so inexpressibly
important, both in the subject which it treats, and in the way in
which it treats it, that twenty pages of comment on it would not have
been misdevoted. Yet it is passed by without a word.
Going forward to the age of the Reformation, the book then gives us a
spirited glimpse of John Bokelson and the Munster Anabaptists, of
Carlstadt and the Zurichian prophets, and then dwells at some length
on the attempt of that day to combine physical and spiritual science
in occult philosophy. We have enough to make us wish to hear more of
Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Behmen, with their alchemy, "true
magic," doctrines of sympathies, {309} signatures of things, Cabbala,
and Gamahea, and the rest of that (now fallen) inverted pyramid of
pseudo-science. His estimate of Behmen and his writings, we may
observe in passing, is both sound and charitable, and speaks as much
for Mr. Vaughan's heart as for his head. Then we have a little about
the Rosicrucians and the Comte de Gabalis, and the theory of the
Rabbis, from whom the Rosicrucians borrowed so much, all told in the
same lively manner, all utterly new to ninety-nine readers out of a
hundred, all indicating, we are bound to say, a much more extensive
reading than appears on the page itself.
From these he passes to the Mysticism of the counter-Reformation,
especially to the two great Spanish mystics, St. Theresa and St. John
of the Cross. Here again he is new and interesting; but we must
regret that he has not been as merciful to Theresa as he has to poor
little John.
He then devotes some eighty pages--and very well employed they are--
in detailing the strange and sad story of Madame Guyon and the
"Quietist" movement at Louis Quatorze's Court. Much of this he has
taken, with all due acknowledgment, from Upham; but he has told the
story most pleasantly, in his own way, and these pages will give a
better notion of Fenelon, and of the "Eagle" (for eagle read vulture)
"of Meaux," old Bossuet, than they are likely to find elsewhere in
the same compass.
Following chronological order as nearly as he can, he next passes to
George Fox and the early Quakers, introducing a curious--and in our
own case quite novel--little episode concerning "The History of Hai
Ebn Yokhdan," a medieval Arabian romance, which old Barclay seems to
have got hold of and pressed into the service of his sect, taking it
for literal truth.
The twelfth book is devoted to Swedenborg, and a very valuable little
sketch it is, and one which goes far to clear up the moral character,
and the reputation for sanity also, of that much-calumniated
philosopher, whom the world knows only as a dreaming false prophet,
forgetting that even if he was that, he was also a sound and severe
scientific labourer, to whom our modern physical science is most
deeply indebted.
This is a short sketch of the contents of a book which is a really
valuable addition to English literature, and which is as interesting
as it is instructive. But Mr. Vaughan must forgive us if we tell him
frankly that he has not exhausted the subject; that he has hardly
defined Mysticism at all--at least, has defined it by its outward
results, and that without classifying them; and that he has not
grasped the central idea of the subject. There were more things in
these same mystics than are dreamt of in his philosophy; and he has
missed seeing them, because he has put himself rather in the attitude
of a judge than of an inquirer.
He has not had respect and trust enough for the men and women of whom
he writes; and is too much inclined to laugh at them, and treat them
de haut en bas. He has trusted too much to his own great power of
logical analysis, and his equally great power of illustration, and is
therefore apt to mistake the being able to put a man's thoughts into
words for him, for the being really able to understand him. To
understand any man we must have sympathy for him, even affection. No
intellectual acuteness, no amount even of mere pity for his errors,
will enable us to see the man from within, and put our own souls into
the place of his soul. To do that, one must feel and confess within
oneself the seed of the same errors which one reproves in him; one
must have passed more or less through his temptations, doubts, hunger
of heart and brain; and one cannot help questioning, as one reads Mr.
Vaughan's book, whether he has really done this in the case of those
of whom he writes. He should have remembered too how little any
young man can have experienced of the terrible sorrows which branded
into the hearts of these old devotees the truths to which they clung
more than to life, while they too often warped their hearts into
morbidity, and caused alike their folly and their wisdom. Gently
indeed should we speak even of the dreams of some self-imagined
"Bride of Christ," when we picture to ourselves the bitter agonies
which must have been endured ere a human soul could develop so
fantastically diseased a growth. "She was only a hysterical nun."
Well, and what more tragical object, to those who will look patiently
and lovingly at human nature, than a hysterical nun? She may have
been driven into a convent by some disappointment in love. And has
not disappointed affection been confessed, in all climes and ages, to
enshroud its victim ever after in a sanctuary of reverent pity? If
sorrow "broke her brains," as well as broke her heart, shall we do
aught but love her the more for her capacity of love? Or she may
have entered the convent, as thousands did, in girlish simplicity, to
escape from a world she had not tried, before she had discovered that
the world could give her something which the convent could not. What
more tragical than her discovery in herself of a capacity for love
which could never be satisfied within that prison? And when that
capacity began to vindicate itself in strange forms of disease,
seemingly to her supernatural, often agonising, often degrading, and
at the same time (strange contradiction) mixed itself up with her
noblest thoughts, to ennoble them still more, and inspire her not
only with a desire of physical self-torture, which would seem holy
both in her own eyes and her priest's, but with a love for all that
is fair and lofty, for self-devotion and self-sacrifice--shall we
blame her--shall we even smile at her if, after the dreadful
question: "Is this the possession of a demon?" had alternated with,
"Is this the inspiration of a god?" she settled down, as the only
escape from madness and suicide, into the latter thought and believed
that she found in the ideal and perfect manhood of One whom she was
told to revere and love as a God, and who had sacrificed His own life
for her, a substitute for that merely human affection from which she
was for ever debarred? Why blame her for not numbering that which
was wanting, or making straight that which was crooked? Let God
judge her, not we: and the fit critics of her conduct are not the
easy gentlemanlike scholars, like Mr. Vaughan's Athertons and Gowers,
discussing the "aberrations of fanaticism" over wine and walnuts; or
the gay girl, Kate; hardly even the happy mother, Mrs. Atherton; but
those whose hairs are gray with sorrow; who have been softened at
once and hardened in the fire of God; who have cried out of the
bottomless deep like David, while lover and friend were hid away from
them, and laid amid the corpses of their dead hopes, dead health,
dead joy, as on a ghastly battle-field, "stript among the dead, like
those who are wounded, and cut away from God's hands;" who have
struggled drowning in the horrible mire of doubt, and have felt all
God's billows and waves sweep over them, till they were weary of
crying, and their sight failed for waiting so long upon God; and all
the faith and prayer which was left was "Thou wilt not leave my soul
in hell, nor suffer thy Holy One to see corruption." Be it
understood, however, for fear of any mistake, that we hold Mr.
Vaughan to be simply and altogether right in his main idea. His one
test for all these people, and all which they said or did, is--Were
they made practically better men and women thereby? He sees clearly
that the "spiritual" is none other than the "moral"--that which has
to do with right and wrong; and he has a righteous contempt for
everything and anything, however graceful and reverent, and artistic
and devout, and celestial and super-celestial, except in as far as he
finds it making better men and women do better work at every-day
life.
But even on this ground we must protest against such a sketch as
this; even of one of the least honourable of the Middle-age saints:
ATHERTON. Angela de Foligni, who made herself miserable--I must say
something the converse of flourished--about the beginning of the
fourteenth century, was a fine model pupil of this sort, a genuine
daughter of St. Francis. Her mother, her husband, her children dead,
she is alone and sorrowful. She betakes herself to violent devotion-
-falls ill--suffers incessant anguish from a complication of
disorders--has rapturous consolations and terrific temptations--is
dashed in a moment from a seat of glory above the empyrean . . .
Very amusing, is it not? To have one's mother, husband, children
die--the most commonplace sort of things--what (over one's wine and
walnuts) one describes as being "alone and sorrowful." Men who
having tasted the blessings conveyed in those few words, have also
found the horror conveyed in them, have no epithets for the state of
mind in which such a fate would leave them. They simply pray that if
that hour came, they might just have faith enough left not to curse
God and die. Amusing, too, her falling ill, and suffering under a
complication of disorders, especially if those disorders were the
fruit of combined grief and widowhood. Amusing also her betaking
herself to violent devotion! In the first place, if devotion be a
good thing, could she have too much of it? If it be the way to make
people good (as is commonly held by all Christian sects), could she
become too good? The more important question which springs out of
the fact we will ask presently. "She has rapturous consolations and
terrific temptations." Did the consolations come first, and were the
temptations a revulsion from "spiritual" exaltation into "spiritual"
collapse and melancholy? or did the temptations come first, and the
consolations come after, to save her from madness and despair?
Either may be the case; perhaps both were: but somewhat more of care
should have been taken in expressing so important a spiritual
sequence as either case exhibits.
It is twelve years and more since we studied the history of the "B.
Angela de Foligni," and many another kindred saint; and we cannot
recollect what were the terrific temptations, what was the floor of
hell which the poor thing saw yawning beneath her feet. But we must
ask Mr. Vaughan, has he ever read Boccaccio, or any of the Italian
novelists up to the seventeenth century? And if so, can he not
understand how Angela de Foligni, the lovely Italian widow of the
fourteenth century, had her terrific temptations, to which, if she
had yielded, she might have fallen to the lowest pit of hell, let
that word mean what it may; and temptations all the more terrific
because she saw every widow round her considering them no temptations
at all, but yielding to them, going out to invite them in the most
business-like, nay, duty-like, way? What if she had "rapturous
consolations"? What if she did pour out to One who was worthy not of
less but of more affection than she offered in her passionate
southern heart, in language which in our colder northerns would be
mere hypocrisy, yet which she had been taught to believe lawful by
that interpretation of the Canticles which (be it always remembered)
is common to Evangelicals and to Romanists? What if even, in reward
for her righteous belief, that what she saw all widows round her
doing was abominable and to be avoided at all risks, she were
permitted to enjoy a passionate affection, which after all was not
misplaced? There are mysteries in religion as in all things, where
it is better not to intrude behind the veil. Wisdom is justified of
all her children: and folly may be justified of some of her children
also.
Equally unfair it seems to us is the notice of St. Brigitta--in our
eyes a beautiful and noble figure. A widow she, too--and what worlds
of sorrow are there in that word, especially when applied to the pure
deep-hearted Northern woman, as she was--she leaves her Scandinavian
pine-forests to worship and to give wherever she can, till she
arrives at Rome, the centre of the universe, the seat of Christ's
vicegerent, the city of God, the gate of Paradise. Thousands of
weary miles she travels, through danger and sorrow--and when she
finds it, behold it is a lie and a sham! not the gate of Paradise,
but the gate of Sodom and of hell. Was not that enough to madden
her, if mad she became? What matter after that her "angel dictated
discourses on the Blessed Virgin," "bombastic invocations to the
Saviour's eyes, ears, hair?"--they were at least the best objects of
worship which the age gave her. In one thing she was right, and kept
her first love. "What was not quite so bad, she gives to the world a
series of revelations, in which the vices of popes and prelates are
lashed unsparingly and threatened with speedy judgment." Not quite
so bad? To us the whole phenomenon wears an utterly different
aspect. At the risk of her life, at the risk of being burned alive--
did anyone ever consider what that means?--the noble Norse-woman,
like an Alruna maid of old, hurls out her divine hereditary hatred of
sin and filth and lies. At last she falls back on Christ Himself, as
the only home for a homeless soul in such an evil time. And she is
not burnt alive. The hand of One mightier than she is over her, and
she is safe under the shadow of His wings till her weary work is done
and she goes home, her righteousness accepted for His sake: her
folly, hysterics, dreams--call them by what base name we will--
forgiven and forgotten for the sake of her many sorrows and her
faithfulness to the end.
But whatever fault we can find with these sketches, we can find none
with Mr. Vaughan's reflections on them:
What a condemning comment on the pretended tender mercies of the
Church are those narratives which Rome delights to parade of the
sufferings, mental and bodily, which her devotees were instructed to
inflict upon themselves! I am reminded of the thirsting mule, which
has, in some countries, to strike with his hoof among the spines of
the cactus, and drink, with lamed foot and bleeding lips, the few
drops of milk which ooze from the broken thorns. Affectionate,
suffering natures came to Rome for comfort; but her scanty kindness
is only to be drawn with anguish from the cruel sharpness of
asceticism. The worldly, the audacious, escape easily; but these
pliant excitable temperaments, so anxiously in earnest, may be made
useful. The more dangerous, frightful, or unnatural their
performances, the more profit for their keepers. Men and women are
trained by torturing processes to deny their nature, and then they
are exhibited to bring grist to the mill--like birds and beasts
forced to postures and services against the laws of their being--like
those who must perform perilous feats on ropes or with lions, nightly
hazarding their lives to fill the pockets of a manager. The self-
devotedness of which Rome boasts so much is a self-devotion she has
always thus made the most of for herself. Calculating men who have
thought only of the interest of the priesthood, have known well how
best to stimulate and to display the spasmodic movements of a
brainsick disinterestedness. I have not the shadow of a doubt that,
once and again, some priest might have been seen, with cold gray eye,
endeavouring to do a stroke of diplomacy by means of the enthusiastic
Catherine, making the fancied ambassadress of Heaven in reality the
tool of a schemer. Such unquestionable virtues as these visionaries
may some of them have possessed cannot be fairly set down to the
credit of the Church, which has used them all for mercenary or
ambitious purposes, and infected them everywhere with a morbid
character. Some of these mystics, floating down the great
ecclesiastical current of the Middle Age, appear to me like the trees
carried away by the inundation of some mighty tropical river. They
drift along the stream, passive, lifeless, broken; yet they are
covered with gay verdure, the aquatic plants hang and twine about the
sodden timber and the draggled leaves, the trunk is a sailing garden
of flowers. But the adornment is that of Nature--it is the
decoration of another and a strange element: the roots are in the
air; the boughs which should be full of birds, are in the flood,
covered by its alien products, swimming side by side with the
alligator. So has this priestcraft swept its victims from their
natural place and independent growth, to clothe them in their
helplessness with a false spiritual adornment, neither scriptural nor
human, but ecclesiastical--the native product of that overwhelming
superstition which has subverted and enslaved their nature. The
Church of Rome takes care that while simple souls think they are
cultivating Christian graces they shall be forging their own chains;
that their attempts to honour God shall always dishonour, because
they disenfranchise themselves. To be humble, to be obedient, to be
charitable, under such direction, is to be contentedly ignorant,
pitiably abject, and notoriously swindled.
Mr. Vaughan cannot be too severe upon the Romish priesthood. But it
is one thing to dismiss with summary contempt men, who, as they do,
keep the keys of knowledge, and neither enter in themselves nor
suffer others to enter, and quite another thing to apply the same
summary jurisdiction to men who, under whatsoever confusions, are
feeling earnestly and honestly after truth. And therefore we regret
exceedingly the mock trial which he has introduced into his
Introduction. We regret it for his own sake; for it will drive away
from the book--indeed it has driven--thoughtful and reverent people
who, having a strong though vague inclination toward the Mystics,
might be very profitably taught by the after pages to separate the
evil from the good in the Bernards and Guyons whom they admire, they
scarce know why; and will shock, too, scholars, to whom Hindoo and
Persian thoughts on these subjects are matters not of ridicule but of
solemn and earnest investigation.
Besides, the question is not so easily settled. Putting aside the
flippancy of the passage, it involves something very like a petitio
principii to ask offhand: "Does the man mean a living union of heart
to Christ, a spiritual fellowship or converse with the Father, when
he talks of the union of the believer with God--participation in the
Divine nature?" For first, what we want to know is, the meaning of
the words--what means "living"? what "union"? what "heart"? They are
terms common to the Mystic and to the popular religionist, only
differently interpreted; and in the meanings attributed to them lies
nothing less than the whole world-old dispute between Nominalist and
Realist not yet to be settled in two lines by two gentlemen over
their wine, much less ignored as a thing settled beyond all dispute
already. If by "living union of heart with"--Mr. Vaughan meant
"identity of morals with"--he should have said so: but he should
have borne in mind that all the great evangelicals have meant much
more than this by those words; that on the whole, instead of
considering--as he seems to do, and we do--the moral and the
spiritual as identical, they have put them in antithesis to each
other, and looked down upon "mere morality" just because it did not
seem to them to involve that supernatural, transcendental, "mystic"
element which they considered that they found in Scripture. From
Luther to Owen and Baxter, from them to Wesley, Cecil, and Venn,
Newton, Bridges, the great evangelical authorities would (not very
clearly or consistently, for they were but poor metaphysicians, but
honestly and earnestly) have accepted some modified form of the
Mystic's theory, even to the "discerning in particular thoughts,
frames, impulses, and inward witnessings, immediate communications
from heaven." Surely Mr. Vaughan must be aware that the majority of
"vital Christians" on this ground are among his mystic offenders; and
that those who deny such possibilities are but too liable to be
stigmatised as "Pelagians," and "Rationalists." His friend Atherton
is bound to show cause why those names are not to be applied to him,
as he is bound to show what he means by "living union with Christ,"
and why he complains of the Mystic for desiring "participation in the
Divine nature." If he does so, he only desires what the New
Testament formally, and word for word, promises him; whatsoever be
the meaning of the term, he is not to be blamed for using it. Mr.
Vaughan cannot have forgotten the many expressions, both of St. Paul
and St. John, which do at first sight go far to justify the Mystic,
though they are but seldom heard, and more seldom boldly commented
on, in modern pulpits--of Christ being formed in men, dwelling in
men; of God dwelling in man and man in God; of Christ being the life
of men; of men living, and moving, and having their being in God; and
many another passage. If these be mere metaphors let the fact be
stated, with due reason for it. But there is no sin or shame in
interpreting them in that literal and realist sense in which they
seem at first sight to have been written. The first duty of a
scholar who sets before himself to investigate the phenomena of
"Mysticism" so called, should be to answer these questions: Can
there be a direct communication, above and beyond sense or
consciousness, between the human spirit and God the Spirit? And if
so, what are its conditions, where its limits, to transcend which is
to fall into "mysticism"?
And it is just this which Mr. Vaughan fails in doing. In his sketch,
for instance, of the Mysticism of India, he gives us a very clear and
(save in two points) sound summary of that "round of notions,
occurring to minds of similar make under similar circumstances,"
which is "common to Mystics in ancient India and in modern
Christendom."