objective religion, we come to the belief in _magic_, which in
primitive peoples is closely associated with their first attempts at
experimental science. What gives magic its peculiar character is that
it is based on fanciful, and not on real correspondences. The
uneducated mind cannot distinguish between associations of ideas which
are purely arbitrary and subjective, and those which have a more
universal validity. Not, of course, that all the affinities seized
upon by primitive man proved illusory; but those which were not so
ceased to be magical, and became scientific. The savage draws no
distinction between the process by which he makes fire and that by
which his priest calls down rain, except that the latter is a
professional secret; drugs and spells are used indifferently to cure
the sick; astronomy and astrology are parts of the same science. There
is, however, a difference between the magic which is purely
naturalistic and that which makes mystical claims. The magician
sometimes claims that the spirits are subject to him, not because he
has learned how to wield the forces which they must obey, but because
he has so purged his higher faculties that the occult sympathies of
nature have become apparent to him. His theosophy claims to be a
spiritual illumination, not a scientific discovery. The error here is
the application of spiritual clairvoyance to physical relations. The
insight into reality, which is unquestionably the reward of the pure
heart and the single eye, does not reveal to us in detail how nature
should be subdued to our needs. No spirits from the vasty deep will
obey our call, to show us where lies the road to fortune or to ruin.
Physical science is an abstract inquiry, which, while it keeps to its
proper subject--the investigation of the relations which prevail in
the phenomenal world--is self-sufficient, and can receive nothing on
external authority. Still less can the adept usurp Divine powers, and
bend the eternal laws of the universe to his puny will.
The turbid streams of theurgy and magic flowed into the broad river
of Christian thought by two channels--the later Neoplatonism, and
Jewish Cabbalism. Of the former something has been said already. The
root-idea of the system was that all life may be arranged in a
descending scale of potencies, forming a kind of chain from heaven to
earth. Man, as a microcosm, is in contact with every link in the
chain, and can establish relations with all spiritual powers, from the
superessential One to the lower spirits or "dæmons." The
philosopher-saint, who had explored the highest regions of the
intelligence, might hope to dominate the spirits of the air, and
compel them to do his bidding. Thus the door was thrown wide open for
every kind of superstition. The Cabbalists followed much the same
path. The word Cabbala means "oral tradition," and is defined by
Reuchlin as "the symbolic reception of a Divine revelation handed down
for the saving contemplation of God and separate forms.[338]" In
another place he says, "The Cabbala is nothing else than symbolic
theology, in which not only are letters and words symbols of things,
but things are symbols of other things." This method of symbolic
interpretation was held to have been originally communicated by
revelation,[339] in order that persons of holy life might by it
attain to a mystical communion with God, or deification. The
Cabbalists thus held much the same relation to the Talmudists as the
mystics to the scholastics in the twelfth century. But, as Jews, they
remained faithful to the two doctrines of an inspired tradition and an
inspired book, which distinguish them from Platonic mystics.[340]
Pico de Mirandola (born 1463) was the first to bring the Cabbala into
Christian philosophy, and to unite it with his Neoplatonism. Very
characteristic of his age is the declaration that "there is no natural
science which makes us so certain of the Divinity of Christ as Magic
and the Cabbala.[341]" For there was at that period a curious
alliance of Mysticism and natural science against scholasticism, which
had kept both in galling chains; and both mystics and physicists
invoked the aid of Jewish theosophy. Just as Pythagoras, Plato, and
Proclus were set up against Aristotle, so the occult philosophy of the
Jews, which on its speculative side was mere Neoplatonism, was set up
against the divinity of the Schoolmen. In Germany, Reuchlin
(1455-1522) wrote a treatise, _On the Cabbalistic Art_, in which a
theological scheme resembling those of the Neoplatonists and
speculative mystics was based on occult revelation. The book
captivated Pope Leo X. and the early Reformers alike.
The influence of Cabbalism at this period was felt not only in the
growth of magic, but in the revival of the science of _allegorism_,
which resembles magic in its doctrine of occult sympathies, though
without the theurgic element. According to this view of nature,
everything in the visible world has an emblematic meaning. Everything
that a man saw, heard, or did--colours, numbers, birds, beasts, and
flowers, the various actions of life--was to remind him of something
else.[342] The world was supposed to be full of sacred cryptograms,
and every part of the natural order testified in hieroglyphics[343] to
the truths of Christianity. Thus the shamrock bears witness to the
Trinity, the spider is an emblem of the devil, and so forth. This
kind of symbolism was and is extensively used merely as a
picture-language, in which there is no pretence that the signs are
other than artificial or conventional. The language of signs may be
used either to instruct those who cannot understand words, or to
baffle those who can. Thus, a crucifix may be as good as a sermon to
an illiterate peasant; while the sign of a fish was used by the early
Christians because it was unintelligible to their enemies. This is not
symbolism in the sense which I have given to the word in this
Lecture.[344] But it is otherwise when the type is used as a _proof_
of the antitype. This latter method had long been in use in biblical
exegesis. Pious persons found a curious satisfaction in turning the
most matter of fact statements into enigmatic prophecies. Every verse
must have its "mystical" as well as its natural meaning, and the
search for "types" was a recognised branch of apologetics. Allegorism
became authoritative and dogmatic, which it has no right to be. It
would be rash to say that this pseudo-science, which has proved so
attractive to many minds, is entirely valueless. The very absurdity of
the arguments used by its votaries should make us suspect that there
is a dumb logic of a more respectable sort behind them. There is,
underlying this love of types and emblems, a strong conviction that
if "one eternal purpose runs" through the ages, it must be discernible
in small things as well as in great. Everything in the world, if we
could see things as they are, must be symbolic of the Divine Power
which made it and maintains it in being. We cannot believe that
anything in life is meaningless, or has no significance beyond the
fleeting moment. Whatever method helps us to realise this is useful,
and in a sense true. So far as this we may go with the allegorists,
while at the same time we may be thankful that the cobwebs which they
spun over the sacred texts have now been cleared away, so that we can
at last read our Bible as its authors intended it to be read.[345]
Theosophical and magical Mysticism culminated in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Just as the idealism of Plotinus lost itself in
the theurgic system of Iamblichus, so the doctrine of Divine immanence
preached by Eckhart and his school was followed by the Nature-Mysticism
of Cornelius Agrippa[346] and Paracelsus.[347] The "negative road" had
been discredited by Luther's invective, and Mysticism, instead of
shutting her eyes to the world of phenomena, stretched forth her hands
to conquer and annex it. The old theory of a World-Spirit, the
pulsations of whose heart are felt in all the life of the universe, came
once more into favour. Through all phenomena, it was believed, runs an
intricate network of sympathies and antipathies, the threads of which,
could they be disentangled, would furnish us with a clue through all the
labyrinths of natural and supernatural science. The age was impatient to
enter on the inheritance from which humanity had long been debarred; the
methods of experimental science seemed tame and slow; and so we find,
especially in Germany, an extraordinary outburst of Nature-Mysticism--
astrology, white magic, alchemy, necromancy, and what not--such as
Christianity had not witnessed before. These pseudo-sciences (with which
was mingled much real progress in medicine, natural history, and kindred
sciences) were divided under three provinces or "vincula"--those of the
Spiritual World, which were mainly magical invocations, diagrams, and
signs; those of the Celestial World, which were taught by astrology; and
those of the Elemental World, which consisted in the sympathetic
influence of material objects upon each other. These secrets (it was
held) are all discoverable by man; for man is a microcosm, or epitome of
the universe, and there is nothing in it with which he cannot claim an
affinity. In knowing himself, he knows both God and all the other works
that God has made.
The subject of Nature-Mysticism is a fascinating one; but I must here
confine myself to its religious aspects. An attempt was soon made, by
Valentine Weigel (1533-1588), Lutheran pastor at Tschopau, to bring
together the new objective Mysticism--freed from its superstitious
elements--and the traditional subjective Mysticism which the Middle
Ages had handed down from Dionysius and the Neoplatonists. Weigel's
cosmology is based on that of Paracelsus; and his psychology also
reminds us of him. Man is a microcosm, and his nature has three
parts--the outward material body, the astral spirit, and the immortal
soul, which bears the image of God. The three faculties of the soul
correspond to these three parts; they are sense, reason (_Vernunft_),
and understanding (_Verstand_). These are the "three eyes" by which we
get knowledge. The sense perceives material things; the reason,
natural science and art; the understanding, which he also calls the
spark, sees the invisible and Divine. He follows the scholastic
mystics in distinguishing between natural and supernatural knowledge,
but his method of distinguishing them is, I think, original. Natural
knowledge, he says, is not conveyed by the object; it is the
percipient subject which creates knowledge out of itself. The object
merely provokes the consciousness into activity. In natural knowledge
the subject is "active, not passive"; all that appears to come from
without is really evolved from within. In supernatural knowledge the
opposite is the case. The eye of the "understanding," which sees the
Divine, is the spark in the centre of the soul where lies the Divine
image. In this kind of cognition the subject must be absolutely
passive; its thoughts must be as still as if it were dead. Just as in
natural knowledge the object does not co-operate, so in supernatural
knowledge the subject does not co-operate. Yet this supernatural
knowledge does not come from without. The Spirit and Word of God are
_within_ us. God is Himself the eye and the light in the soul, as well
as the object which the eye sees by this light. Supernatural knowledge
flows from within outwards, and in this way resembles natural
knowledge. But since God is both the eye that sees and the object
which it sees, it is not we who know God, so much as God who knows
Himself in us. Our inner man is a mere instrument of God.
Thus Weigel, who begins with Paracelsus, leaves off somewhere near
Eckhart--and Eckhart in his boldest mood. But his chief concern is to
attack the Bibliolaters (_Buchstabentheologen_) in the Lutheran
Church, and to protest against the unethical dogma of imputed
righteousness. We need not follow him into either of these
controversies, which give a kind of accidental colouring to his
theology. Speculative Mysticism, which is always the foe of formalism
and dryness in religion, attacks them in whatever forms it finds them;
and so, when we try to penetrate the essence of Mysticism by
investigating its historical manifestations, we must always consider
what was the system which in each case it was trying to purify and
spiritualise. Weigel's Mysticism moves in the atmosphere of Lutheran
dogmatics. But it also marks a stage in the general development of
Christian Mysticism, by giving a positive value to scientific and
natural knowledge as part of the self-evolution of the human soul.
"Study nature," he says, "physics, alchemy, magic, etc.; for _it is
all in you, and you become what you have learnt_." It is true that his
religious attitude is rigidly quietistic; but this position is so
inconsistent with the activity which he enjoins on the "reason," that
he may claim the credit of having exhibited the contradiction between
the positive and negative methods in a clear light; and to prove a
contradiction is always the first step towards solving it.
A more notable effort in the same direction was that of Jacob Böhme,
who, though he had studied Weigel, brought to his task a philosophical
genius which was all his own.
Böhme was born in 1575 near Görlitz, where he afterwards settled as a
shoemaker and glover. He began to write in 1612, and in spite of
clerical opposition, which silenced him for five years, he produced a
number of treatises between that date and his death in 1624.
Böhme professed to write only what he had "seen" by Divine
illumination. His visions are not (with insignificant exceptions)
authenticated by any marvellous signs; he simply asserts that he has
been allowed to see into the heart of things, and that the very Being
of God has been laid open to his spiritual sight.[348] His was that
type of mind to which every thought becomes an image, and a logical
process is like an animated photograph. "I am myself my own book," he
says; and in writing, he tries to transcribe on paper the images which
float before his mind's eye. If he fails, it is because he cannot find
words to describe what he is seeing. Böhme was an unlearned man; but
when he is content to describe his visions in homely German, he is
lucid enough. Unfortunately, the scholars who soon gathered round him
supplied him with philosophical terms, which he forthwith either
personified--for instance the word "Idea" called forth the image of a
beautiful maiden--or used in a sense of his own. The study of
Paracelsus obscured his style still more, filling his treatises with a
bewildering mixture of theosophy and chemistry. The result is
certainly that much of his work is almost unreadable; the nuggets of
gold have to be dug out from a bed of rugged stone; and we cannot be
surprised that the unmystical eighteenth century declared that
"Behmen's works would disgrace Bedlam at full moon.[349]" But German
philosophers have spoken with reverence of "the father of Protestant
Mysticism," who "perhaps only wanted learning and the gift of clear
expression to become a German Plato"; and Sir Isaac Newton shut
himself up for three months to study Böhme, whose teaching on
attraction and the laws of motion seemed to him to have great
value.[350]
For us, he is most interesting as marking the transition from the
purely subjective type of Mysticism to Symbolism, or rather as the
author of a brilliant attempt to fuse the two into one system. In my
brief sketch of Böhme's doctrines I shall illustrate his teaching from
the later works of William Law, who is by far its best exponent. Law
was an enthusiastic admirer of Böhme, and being, unlike his master, a
man of learning and a practised writer, was able to bring order out
of the chaos in which Böhme left his speculations. In strength of
intellect Law was Böhme's equal, and as a writer of clear and forcible
English he has few superiors.
Böhme's doctrine of God and the world resembles that of other
speculative mystics, but he contributes a new element in the great
stress which he lays on _antithesis_ as a law of being. "In Yes and No
all things consist," he says. No philosopher since Heraclitus and
Empedocles had asserted so strongly that "Strife is the father of all
things." Even in the hidden life of the unmanifested Godhead he finds
the play of Attraction and Diffusion, the resultant of which is a
Desire for manifestation felt in the Godhead. As feeling this desire,
the Godhead becomes "Darkness"; the light which illumines the darkness
is the Son. The resultant is the Holy Spirit, in whom arise the
archetypes of creation. So he explains Body, Soul, and Spirit as
thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; and the same formula serves to
explain Good, Evil, and Free Will; Angels, Devils, and the World. His
view of Evil is not very consistent; but his final doctrine is that
the object of the cosmic process is to exhibit the victory of Good
over Evil, of Love over Hatred.[351] He at least has the merit of
showing that strife is so inwoven with our lives here that we cannot
possibly soar above the conflict between Good and Evil. It must be
observed that Böhme repudiated the doctrine that there is any
evolution of God in time. "I say not that Nature is God," he says:
"He Himself is all, and communicates His power to all His works." But
the creation of the archetypes was not a temporal act.
Like other Protestant mystics, he lays great stress on the indwelling
presence of Christ. And, consistently with this belief, he revolts
against the Calvinistic doctrine of imputed righteousness, very much
as did the Cambridge Platonists a little later. "That man is no
Christian," he says, "who doth merely comfort himself with the
suffering, death, and satisfaction of Christ, and doth impute it to
himself as a gift of favour, remaining himself still a wild beast and
unregenerate.... If this said sacrifice is to avail for me, it must be
wrought _in_ me. The Father must beget His Son in my desire of faith,
that my faith's hunger may apprehend Him in His word of promise. Then
I put Him on, in His entire process of justification, in my inward
ground; and straightway there begins in me the killing of the wrath of
the devil, death, and hell, from the inward power of Christ's death. I
am inwardly dead, and He is my life; I live in Him, and not in my
selfhood. I am an instrument of God, wherewith He doeth what He will."
To the same effect William Law says, "Christ given _for_ us is neither
more nor less than Christ given _into_ us. He is in no other sense our
full, perfect, and sufficient Atonement, than as His nature and spirit
are born and formed in us." Law also insists that the Atonement was
the effect, not of the wrath, but of the love of God. "Neither reason
nor scripture," he says, "will allow us to bring wrath into God
Himself, as a temper of His mind, who is only infinite, unalterable,
overflowing Love." "Wrath is atoned when sin is extinguished." This
revolt against the forensic theory of the Atonement is very
characteristic of Protestant Mysticism.[352]
The disparagement of external rites and ordinances, which we have
found in so many mystics, appears in William Law, though he was
himself precise in observing all the rules of the English Church.
"This pearl of eternity is the Church, a temple of God _within_ thee,
the consecrated place of Divine worship, where alone thou canst
worship God in spirit and in truth. In _spirit_, because thy spirit is
that alone in thee which can unite and cleave unto God, and receive
the working of the Divine Spirit upon thee. In _truth_, because this
adoration in spirit is that truth and reality of which all outward
forms and rites, though instituted by God, are only the figure for a
time; but this worship is eternal. Accustom thyself to the holy
service of this inward temple. In the midst of it is the fountain of
living water, of which thou mayst drink and live for ever. There the
mysteries of thy redemption are celebrated, or rather opened in life
and power. There the supper of the Lamb is kept; the bread that came
down from heaven, that giveth life to the world, is thy true
nourishment: all is done, and known in real experience, in a living
sensibility of the work of God on the soul. There the birth, the life,
the sufferings, the death, the resurrection and ascension of Christ,
are not merely remembered, but inwardly found and enjoyed as the real
states of thy soul, which has followed Christ in the regeneration.
When once thou art well grounded in this inward worship, thou wilt
have learnt to live unto God above time and place. For every day will
be Sunday to thee, and wherever thou goest thou wilt have a priest, a
church, and an altar along with thee.[353]"
In his teaching about faith and love, Law follows the best mystical
writers; but none before him, I think, attained to such strong and
growing eloquence in setting it forth. "There is but one salvation for
all mankind, and the way to it is one; and that is, the desire of the
soul turned to God. This desire brings the soul to God, and God into
the soul; it unites with God, it co-operates with God, and is one life
with God. O my God, just and true, how great is Thy love and mercy to
mankind, that heaven is thus everywhere open, and Christ thus the
common Saviour to all that turn the desire of their hearts to Thee!"
And of love he says: "No creature can have any union or communion with
the goodness of the Deity till its life is a spirit of love. This is
the one only bond of union betwixt God and His creature." "Love has no
by-ends, wills nothing but its own increase: everything is as oil to
its flame. The spirit of love does not want to be rewarded, honoured,
or esteemed; its only desire is to propagate itself, and become the
blessing and happiness of everything that wants it."
The doctrine of the Divine spark (_synteresis_) is held by Law, but in
a more definitely Christian form than by Eckhart. "If Christ was to
raise a new life like His own in every man, then every man must have
had originally in the inmost spirit of his life a seed of Christ, or
Christ as a seed of heaven, lying there in a state of insensibility,
out of which it could not arise but by the mediatorial power of
Christ.... For what could begin to deny self, if there were not
something in man different from self?... The Word of God is the hidden
treasure of every human soul, immured under flesh and blood, till as a
day-star it arises in our hearts, and changes the son of an earthly
Adam into a son of God." Is not this the Platonic doctrine of
_anamnesis_, Christianised in a most beautiful manner?
Very characteristic of the later Mysticism is the language which both
Böhme and Law use about the future state. "The soul, when it departs
from the body," Böhme writes, "needeth not to go far; for where the
body dies, there is heaven and hell. God is there, and the devil; yea,
each in his own kingdom. There also is Paradise; and the soul needeth
only to enter through the deep door in the centre." Law is very
emphatic in asserting that heaven and hell are states, not places, and
that they are "no foreign, separate, and imposed states, adjudged to
us by the will of God." "Damnation," he says, "is the natural,
essential state of our own disordered nature, which is impossible, in
the nature of the thing, to be anything else but our own hell, both
here and hereafter." "There is nothing that is supernatural," he says
very finely, "in the whole system of our redemption. Every part of it
has its ground in the workings and powers of nature, and all our
redemption is only nature set right, or made to be that which it
ought to be.[354] There is nothing that is supernatural but God
alone.... Right and wrong, good and evil, true and false, happiness
and misery, are as unchangeable in nature as time and space. Nothing,
therefore, can be done to any creature supernaturally, or in a way
that is without or contrary to the powers of nature; but every thing
or creature that is to be helped, that is, to have any good done to
it, or any evil taken out of it, can only have it done so far as the
powers of nature are able, and rightly directed to effect it.[355]"
It is difficult to abstain from quoting more passages like this, in
which Faith, which had been so long directed only to the unseen and
unknown, sheds her bright beams over this earth of ours, and claims
all nature for her own. The laws of nature are now recognised as the
laws of God, and for that very reason they cannot be broken or
arbitrarily suspended. Redemption is a law of life. There will come a
time[356], "the time of the lilies," as Böhme calls it, when all
nature will be delivered from bondage. "All the design of Christian
redemption," says Law, "is to remove everything that is unheavenly,
gross, dark, wrathful, and disordered from every part of this fallen
world." No text is oftener in his mouth than the words of St. Paul
which I read as the text of this Lecture. That "dim sympathy" of the
human spirit with the life of nature which Plotinus felt, but which
mediæval dualism had almost quenched, has now become an intense and
happy consciousness of community with all living things, as subjects
of one all-embracing and unchanging law, the law of perfect love.
Magic and portents, apparitions and visions, the raptures of "infused
contemplation" and their dark Nemesis of Satanic delusions, can no
more trouble the serenity of him who has learnt to see the same God in
nature whom he has found in the holy place of his own heart.