CHAPTER I.

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._

Footnote 1:

_Die Christliche Mystik._ Von Dr. Ludwig Noack. Königsberg.

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.

BOOK I.—INTRODUCTION.

CHAPTER I.

Henry Atherton 3

Lionel Gower 5

Frank Willoughby 7

CHAPTER II.

Connection of the Arts 9

Mysticism in an Emblem 11

History 15

CHAPTER III.

Etymology 17

Definitions 21

Christian Mysticism 22

CHAPTER IV.

Causes of Mysticism 27

Reaction against Formalism 28

Weariness of the World 30

The Fascination of Mystery 31

CHAPTER V.

Classification of Mystics 35

Theopathetic Mysticism 37

Theosophy 39

Theurgy 45

BOOK II.—EARLY ORIENTAL MYSTICISM.

CHAPTER I.

The Bagvat-Gita 51

CHAPTER II.

Characteristics of Hindoo Mysticism 54

The Yogis 57

BOOK III.—THE MYSTICISM OF THE NEO-PLATONISTS.

CHAPTER I.

Philo 64

The Therapeutæ 66

Asceticism 67

CHAPTER II.

Plotinus 71

Alexandria 72

Eclecticism 75

Platonism and Neo-Platonism 76

Plotinus on Ecstasy 81

CHAPTER III.

Neo-Platonism in the Christian Church 85

Analogies between Ancient and Modern Speculation 87

Intuition 89

Theurgy 91

CHAPTER IV.

Porphyry 94

Philosophy seeks to rescue Polytheism 96

Theurgic Mysticism of Iamblichus 100

Proclus 105

BOOK IV.—MYSTICISM IN THE GREEK CHURCH.

CHAPTER I.

Saint Anthony 109

The Pseudo-Dionysius 111

CHAPTER II.

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.

CHAPTER I.

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

CHAPTER II.

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.

CHAPTER I.

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

CHAPTER II.

The Doctrine of Eckart discussed 204

Resemblance to Hegel 206

Pantheism Old and New 209

CHAPTER III.

The Interdict 214

Henry of Nördlingen 216

Insurrection in Strasburg 218

The Friends of God 224

Tauler on the Image of God 226

CHAPTER IV.

Tauler’s Disappearance 230

His Disgrace 233

His Restoration 234

The People comforted and the Pope defied 236

CHAPTER V.

Nicholas of Basle and Tauler 239

The Theology of Tauler 244

His Advice to Mystics 248

Estimate of his Doctrine 251

CHAPTER VI.

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

CHAPTER VII.

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

CHAPTER VIII.

Heinrich Suso 341

His Austerities 343

His Visions 345

His Adventures 348

The Monks of Mount Athos 356

CHAPTER IX.

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.

Footnote 2:

How fruitful may the smallest circle grow,

If we the secret of its culture know.

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.

Footnote 3:

The writer, who goes by the name of Dionysius Areopagita, teaches that

the highest spiritual truth is revealed only to those ‘who have

transcended every ascent of every holy height, and have left behind

all divine lights and sounds and heavenly discoursings, and have

passed into that Darkness where He really is (as saith the Scripture)

who is above all things.’—_De Mysticâ Theologiâ_, cap. i. § 3.

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.

Footnote 4:

On the word μύησις Suidas says, Εἴρηται δὲ παρὰ τὸ τὰ μυστήρια καὶ

ἀπόρῥητα τελεῖσθαι· ἤ διὰ τὸ μυόντας τὰς αἰσθήσεις καὶ ἐπέκεινα

σωματικῆς φαντασίας νενομένους, τὰς θείας εἰσδέχεσθαι ἐλλάμψεις.

Suicer also cites Hesychius: _Etym. Mag._—Μύστης, παρὰ τὸ μύω, τὸ

καμμύω. μύοντες γὰρ τὰς αἰσθήσεις καὶ ἔξω τῶν σαρκικῶν φροντίδων

γινόμενοι, οὕτω τὰς θείας ἀναλάμψεις ἐδέχοντο.

Footnote 5:

See Bingham, _Antiq. of the Christian Church_, vol. ix. pp. 96-105.

Clement of Alexandria abounds in examples of the application to

Christian doctrine of the phraseology in use concerning the heathen

mysteries;—_e.g._ _Protrept._ cap. xii. § 120.

Footnote 6:

Both Plotinus and Proclus speak of the highest revelation concerning

divine things as vouchsafed to the soul which withdraws into itself,

and, dead to all that is external, ‘gazes with closed eyes’ (μύσασαν).

See Tholuck’s _Blüthensammlung aus der Morgenlandischen Mystik_;

_Einleitung_, § I, p. 6. Dr. Tholuck is the only German writer I have

seen who throws light on the word in question by accurately

investigating its etymology and successive meanings; and I readily

acknowledge my debt to his suggestions on this point.

Footnote 7:

Dionysius thus describes the mystical adept who has reached the summit

of union:—‘Then is he delivered from all seeing and being seen, and

passes into the truly mystical darkness of ignorance, where he

excludes all intellectual apprehensions (τὰς γνωστικὰς ἀντιλήηψεις),

and abides in the utterly Impalpable and Invisible; being wholly His

who is above all, with no other dependence, either on himself or any

other; and is made one, as to his nobler part, with the utterly

Unknown, by the cessation of all knowing; and at the same time, in

that very knowing nothing, he knows what transcends the mind of

man.’—_De Mysticâ Theologiâ_, cap. i. p. 710. _S. Dion. Areop. Opp._

Paris, 1644.

So again he exhorts Timothy ‘by assiduous practice in mystical

contemplations to abandon the senses and all operations of the

intellect; all objects of sense and all objects of thought, all things

non-existent and existent (αἰσθητὰ = οὐκ ὄντα, νοητὰ = ὄντα), and

ignorantly to strive upwards towards Union as close as possible with

Him who is above all essence and knowledge:—inasmuch as by a pure,

free, and absolute separation (ἐκστάσει) of himself from all things,

he will be exalted (stripped and freed from everything) to the

superessential radiance of the divine darkness.’—p. 708.

About the words rendered ‘intellectual apprehensions’ commentators

differ. The context, the antithesis, and the parallel passage in the

earlier part of the chapter, justify us in understanding them in their

strict sense, as conveying the idea of cessation from all mental

action whatsoever.

Footnote 8:

See Note, p. 23.

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.

Footnote 9:

See Wilkins’ _Bagvat-Gita_, pp. 63-65. _Ward_, ii. 180. Also, _Asiatic

Researches_, vol. xvii. pp. 169-313, containing an account of these

Yogis, by Horace Hayman Wilson. One sect, we are told, have a way of

contemplating Vishnu in miniature, by imagining the god in their

heart, about the size of an open hand, and so adoring him from top to

toe. In this gross conception of an indwelling deity these Hindoos do

indeed exceed St. Theresa, who after swallowing the wafer conceives of

Christ as prisoner in her inwards, and, making her heart a

doll’s-house, calls it a temple. But beyond her, and beyond the

Indians, too, in sensuousness, are the Romanist stories of those

saints in whom it is declared that a _post-mortem_ examination has

disclosed the figure of Christ, or the insignia of his passion,

miraculously modelled in the chambers of the heart.

Footnote 10:

_Asiatic Researches_, _loc. cit._ The worshipped principle of

Hindooism is not love, but power. Certain objects are adored as

containing divine energy. The Guru is a representative and vehicle of

divine power—a Godful man, and accordingly the most imperious of

task-masters. The prodigies of asceticism, so abundant in Indian

fable, had commonly for their object the attainment of superhuman

powers. Thus Taraki, according to the Siva Puran, stood a hundred

years on tip-toe, lived a hundred years on air, a hundred on fire, &c.

for this purpose.—Notes to _Curse of Kehama_, p. 237.

The following passage, cited by Ward, exhibits the subjective idealism

of these Hindoos in its most daring absurdity. ‘Let every one meditate

upon himself; let him be the worshipper and the worship. Whatever you

see is but yourself, and father and mother are nonentities; you are

the infant and the old man, the wise man and the fool, the male and

the female; it is you who are drowned in the stream—you who pass over;

you are the sensualist and the ascetic, the sick man and the strong;

in short, whatsoever you see, that is you, as bubbles, surf, and

billows are all but water.’

Now, there is an obvious resemblance between this idealism and that of

Fichte. The Indian and the German both ignore the notions formed from

mere sensible experience; both dwell apart from experience, in a world

fashioned for themselves out of ‘pure thought;’ both identify thought

and being, subject and object. But here the likeness ends. The points

of contrast are obvious. The Hindoo accepts as profoundest wisdom what

would be an unfair caricature of the system of Fichte. The idealism of

the Oriental is dreamy and passive; it dissolves his individuality; it

makes him a particle, wrought now into this, now into that, in the

ever-shifting phantasmagoria of the universe; he has been, he may be,

he, therefore, in a sense is, anything and everything. Fichte’s

philosophy, on the contrary, rests altogether on the intense

activity—on the autocracy of the Ego, which posits, or creates, the

Non-Ego. He says, ‘The activity and passivity of the Ego are one and

the same. For in as far as it does _not_ posit a something in itself,

it posits that something in the Non-Ego. Again, the activity and

passivity of the Non-Ego are one and the same. In as far as the

Non-Ego works upon the Ego, and will absorb a something in it, the Ego

posits that very thing in the Non-Ego.’ (_Grundlage der gesammten

Wissenschaftslehre_, § 3. _Sämmtliche Werke_, v. i. p. 177.) Action is

all in all with him. God he calls ‘a pure Action’ (_reines Handeln_),

the life and principle of a supersensuous order of the world—just as I

am a pure Action, as a link in that order. (_Gerichtliche

Verantwortung gegen die Anklage des Atheismus, Werke_, v. p. 261.)

Charged with denying personality to God, Fichte replies that he only

denied him that conditioned personality which belongs to ourselves—a

denial, I suppose, in which we should all agree. The only God in his

system which is not an uninfluential abstraction is manifestly the

Ego—that is dilated to a colossal height, and deified. Pre-eminently

anti-mystical as was the natural temperament of Fichte, here he opens

a door to the characteristic misconception of mysticism—the

investiture of our own notions and our own will with a divine

authority or glory. He would say, ‘The man of genius _does_ think

divine thoughts. But the man who is unintelligible, who, in the very

same province of pure thought as that occupied by the true

philosopher, thinks only at random and incoherently; _he_ is mistaken,

I grant, in arrogating inspiration—_him_ I call a mystic.’ But of

unintelligibility or incoherence what is to be the test,—who is to be

the judge? In this anarchy of gods, numerous as thinkers, one deity

must have as much divine right as another. There can be no appeal to

experience, which all confessedly abandon; no appeal to facts, which

each Ego creates after its own fashion for itself.

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.

Footnote 11:

Philo gives an account of the Therapeutæ referred to in the letter, in

his treatise _De Vitâ Contemplativâ_.

Passages corresponding with those contained in the letter contributed

by Atherton, concerning the enmity of the flesh and the divine nature

of the soul, are to be found in the works of Philo, _Sacr. Leg.

Alleg._ lib. iii. p. 101 (ed. Mangey); lib. ii. p. 64; _De eo quod

det. potiori insid. soleat_, pp. 192, 208.

Philo’s interpretation of the scriptural account concerning Babel is

contained in the _De Confus. Linguarum_, p. 424. His exposition of

Gen. i. 9, illustrates the same principle, _Sacr. Leg. Alleg._ lib. i.

p. 54; so of Gen. xxxvii. 12; _De eo quod pot._ p. 192.

Eusebius shows us how Eleazar and Aristobulus must have prepared the

way for Philo in this attempt to harmonize Judaism with the letters

and philosophy of Greece. _Præp. Evang._ lib. viii. 9, 10.

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.

Footnote 12:

The testimony of Cicero and Iamblichus may be received as indicating

truly the similarity of spirit between Pythagoras and Plato,—their

common endeavour to escape the sensuous, and to realize in

contemplative abstraction that tranquillity, superior to desire and

passion, which assimilated men to gods. The principles of both

degenerated, in the hands of their latest followers, into the

mysteries of a theurgic freemasonry. The scattered Pythagoreans were,

many of them, incorporated in the Orphic associations, and their

descendants were those itinerant vendors of expiations and of

charms—the ἀγύρται of whom Plato speaks (_Repub._ ii. p. 70)—the

Grecian prototypes of Chaucer’s Pardonere. Similarly, in the days of

Iamblichus, the charlatans glorified themselves as the offspring of

Plato.

Footnote 13:

Clement of Alexandria gives a full account of the various stories

respecting this idol, _Protrept._ c. iv. p. 42 (ed. Potter); moreover

an etymology and legend to match, _Strom._ lib. i. p. 383.

Certain sorts of wood and metal were supposed peculiarly appropriate

to certain deities. The art of the theurgist consisted partly in

ascertaining the virtues of such substances; and it was supposed that

statues constructed of a particular combination of materials,

correspondent with the tastes and attributes of the deity represented,

possessed a mysterious influence attracting the Power in question, and

inducing him to take up his residence within the image. Iamblichus

lays down this principle of sympathy in the treatise _De Mysteriis_,

v. 23, p. 139 (ed. Gale, 1678). Kircher furnishes a description of

this statue of Serapis, _Œdip. Ægypt._ i. 139.

Footnote 14:

See _Histoire de l’Ecole d’Alexandrie_, par M. Jules Simon, tom. i. p.

99.

Footnote 15:

See Note, p. 82.

Footnote 16:

See _Jules Simon_, ii. pp. 626, &c.

Footnote 17:

See Note to Chap. III. p. 92.

Footnote 18:

The statements made in this and the preceding paragraph, and the

reasons adduced by Plotinus in support of them, will be found in the

fifth Ennead, lib. v. c. i. He assumes at once that the mind must be,

from its very nature, the standard of certitude. He asks (p. 519) Πῶς

γὰρ ἄν ἔτι νοῦς, ἀνοηταίνων εἴη· δεῖ ἄρα αὐτὸν ἀεὶ εἰδέναι καὶ· μὴ

δ᾽ἂν ἐπιλαθέσθαί πότε. He urges that if Intelligibles were without the

mind it could possess but images of them; its knowledge, thus mediate,

would be imperfect, p. 521. Truth consists in the harmony of the mind

with itself. Καὶ γὰρ αὖ, οὔτως οὐδ᾽ ἀποδείξεως δεῖ, οὐδὲ πίστεως ὅτι

οὕτως αὐτὸς γὰρ οὕτως. καὶ ἐναργὴς αὐτὸς αυτῷ. καὶ εἴ τι πρὸ αὐτοῦ,

ὅτι ἐξ αὐτοῦ. καὶ εἴ τι μετ᾽ ἐκεῖνο, ὅτι αὐτός. καὶ οὐδεὶς πιστότερος

αὐτῷ περὶ αὐτοῦ. καὶ ὅτι, ἐκεῖ τοῦτο, καὶ ὄντως. ὥστε καὶ ἡ ὄντως

ἀλήθεια, οὺ συμφωνοῦσα ἄλλῳ, ἄλλ᾽ ἑαυτῆ. καὶ οὐδὲν παρ αὑτὴν ἄλλο

λέγει καὶ ἔστι. καὶ ὅ ἔστι τοῦτο καὶ λέγει, p. 522.

Footnote 19:

_Enn._ iii. lib. v. capp. 2 & 7. There the gardens of Jove, and Porus,

with his plenty, are said to be allegorical representations of the

intellectual food of a soul nourished and delighted by the truths of

Reason. Poverty, again, with its sense of need, is the source of

intellectual desire. Comp. Plato, _Symp._ p. 429 (_Bekk_).

Footnote 20:

See Note 2, p. 82.

Footnote 21:

_Enn._ i. lib. 3, c. 1.

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.

Footnote 22:

There is above a light which makes visible the Creator to that

creature who finds his peace only in the vision of Him.

Footnote 23:

See Schelling’s _System des Trancendentalen Idealismus_, pp. 19-23

(Tübingen, 1800), and Chalybæus, _Hist. Entw. d. Spec. Phil._ p. 244.

Footnote 24:

_Aids to Reflection_, pp. 225, 249. The reader is referred to a

discriminating criticism of this doctrine in the _British Quarterly

Review_, No. xxxvii.

Footnote 25:

See Note, p. 92.

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.

Footnote 26:

_J. Simon_, i. 154; ii. 173.

Footnote 27:

_J. Simon_, liv. iii. chap. 4.

Footnote 28:

See Note, p. 106.

Footnote 29:

_Jules Simon_, ii. 218.

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.

Footnote 30:

All these orders gaze admiring upward, and exert an influence downward

(each on that immediately beneath it), so that they all together

reciprocally draw and are drawn toward God. Dionysius gave himself

with such zeal to the contemplation of them that he named and

distinguished them as I have done.

Footnote 31:

_Athanasii Opp. Vita S. Antonii._ The vision alluded to is related p.

498.

Footnote 32:

Poiret, _Bibliotheca Mysticorum_, p. 95. Macarius gives great

prominence to the doctrine of Union—describes the streaming in of the

Hypostatic Light—how the spiritual nature is all-pervaded by the

glory, and even the body is not so gross as to be impenetrable by the

divine radiance. Some centuries later we find the monks of Mount Athos

professing to discern this supernatural effulgence illuminating their

stomachs. Gass, _Die Mystik des N. Cabasilas_, p. 56.

Footnote 33:

In the year 533 the books of Dionysius were cited by the Severians,

and their genuineness called in question by the bishop because neither

Athanasius nor Cyril had made any allusion to them. _Acta Concil.

Hard._ ii. p. 1159.

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 _un_human,

anti-terrestrial, hypercreaturely—forgive the word—they drive us hard

for language. They found the separation already accomplished; they only

tilled with ardour the plot of ground freely allotted them by the

Church.

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.

Footnote 34:

For the passages authenticating this account, see _Dion. Areop. Opp._

as follows:—

(1.) _De Div. Nom._ c. iv. § 1; v. 3, 6, 8; vi. 2, 3; i. 1. _De Eccl.

Hier._ i. 3.

(2.) _De Cœl. Hier._ i. 2, 3; v. 3, 4; vii. _De Eccl. Hier._ i. 1; x.

3. The resemblance of this whole process to the Pröodos and Epistrophe

of Plotinus is sufficiently obvious.

(3.) _De Div. Nom._ iv. 20, p. 488. The chase after evil runs through

sections 24-34. He sums up in one place thus:—‘In a word, good springs

from the sole and complete cause, but evil from many and partial

defects. God knows the evil as good, and with him the causes of things

evil are beneficent powers.’ Proclus seeks escape from the hopeless

difficulty in precisely the same way.

Concerning the _Via negativa_ and _affirmativa_, see _De Div. Nom._ i.

1, 5, 4; _De Cœl. Hier._ xv.; and _De Myst. Theol._ i. 2, 3.

(4.) _Ibid._ Also, _Ep. ad. Dorotheum_, _De Myst. Theol._ iii. pp.

714, 721.

Footnote 35:

See Meier, ‘_Dionysii Areop. et Mysticorum sæculi_ xiv. _doctrinæ

inter se comparantur_.’ He remarks justly ‘causæ ad Causatum

relationem cum relatione generis ad speciem confudit’, p. 13.

Footnote 36:

The _hyper_ and the _a_ privative are in constant requisition with

Dionysius. He cannot suffer any ordinary epithet to go alone, and many

of his adjectives march pompously, attended by a _hyper_ on one side,

and a superlative termination on the other.

Footnote 37:

The later Greek theology modified the most objectionable parts of the

Dionysian doctrine, while continuing to reverence him as a Father. See

Ullmann’s _Nicholas von Methone_.

Footnote 38:

Aristot. _Eth. Nic._ lib. x. c. 8.—See Note, Page 123.

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.

Footnote 39:

See Note 1, p. 146.

Footnote 40:

See Note 2, p. 146.

Footnote 41:

_Vita_, ii. cap. v.

Footnote 42:

See the account of his diet, and of the feebleness and sickness

consequent on his austerities, by the same biographer (Alanus),

_Vita_, ii. cap. x., in the Paris reprint of 1839, from the

Benedictine edition of Bernard, tom. ii. p. 2426. John Eremita

describes the devil’s visit to Bernard, ‘ut ungeret sandalia sua

secundum consuetudinem,’ and relates the rebuke of the proud monk who

would not wash the _scutellæ_ in the kitchen.—_Vita_, iv. p. 2508.

Footnote 43:

_Vita_, ii. cap. x. 32.

Footnote 44:

_Epp._ cx., cxi.

Footnote 45:

_Chronologia Bernardina, Opp._ tom. i. p. 83.

Footnote 46:

_Epist._ cxli.

Footnote 47:

_De Consideratione_, IV. iii. 7, and II. vi. 11, pp. 1028 and 1060.

Footnote 48:

_Epist._ ccclxv. to the Archbishop of Mayence, against the fanatic

Rudolph.

Footnote 49:

He thus distinguishes Faith, Intellection, and Opinion:-Fides est

voluntaria quædam et certa prælibatio necdum propalatæ veritatis.

Intellectus est rei cujuscumque invisibilis certa et manifesta

notitia. Opinio est quasi pro vero habere aliquid; quod falsum esse

nescias.... Quid igitur distat (fides) ab intellectu? Nempe quod etsi

non habet incertum non magis quam intellectus, habet tamen involucrum,

quod non intellectus.... Nil autem malumus scire, quam quæ fide jam

scimus. Nil supererit ad beatitudinem, cum quæ jam certa sunt nobis,

erunt æque et nuda.—_De Consideratione_, V. 4, p. 1075.

Footnote 50:

See Note, p. 149.

Footnote 51:

See Note, p. 149.

Footnote 52:

See Note 1, p. 150.

Footnote 53:

See Note 2, p. 150.

Footnote 54:

Sane in hoc gradu (tertio) diu statur: et nescio si a quoquam hominum

quartus in hac vita perfecte apprehenditur, ut se scilicet diligat

homo tantum propter Deum. Asserant hoc si qui experti sunt: mihi,

fateor, impossibile videtur.—_De diligendo Deo_, xv. and _Epist._ xi.

8. And, again, in the same treatise (vii. 17),—Non enim sine præmio

diligitur Deus, etsi absque præmii intuitu diligendus sit.... Verus

amor se ipso contentus est. Habet præmium, sed id quod amatur.

Footnote 55:

See Note, p. 151.

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.

He dwells constantly on the importance of self-knowledge,

self-simplification, self-concentration, as essential to the ascent of

the soul.—_De Contemp._ lib. iii. c. 3, c. 6; and on the difficulty of

this attainment, lib. iv. c. 6.

Note to page 163.

_De Contemp._ lib. iv. cap. 6. _Ibid._ cap. 23, and comp. lib. v. cap.

1. Also iv. cap. 10. He calls it expressly a vision face to

face:—Egressus autem quasi facie ad faciem intuetur, qui per mentis

excessus extra semetipsum ductus summæ sapientiæ lumen sine aliquo

involucro figurarum ve adumbratione; denique non per speculum et in

enigmate, sed in simplici (ut sic dicam) veritate contemplatur.—Fol. 56.

See also lib. v. cœpp. 4, 5, where he enters at large on the degrees and

starting-points of self-transcendence. Comp. iv. c. 2, fol. 60.

_De Contemp._ i. cap. 10, describes the six wings, and declares that in

a future state we shall possess them all. Speaking of ecstasy, he

says:—‘Cum enim per mentis excessum supra sive intra nosmetipsos in

divinorum contemplationem rapimur exteriorum omnium statim immo non

solum eorum quæ extra nos verum etiam eorum quæ in nobis sunt omnium

obliviscimur.’ When explaining the separation of soul and spirit, he

exclaims,—‘O alta quies, O sublimis requies, ubi omnis quod humanitus

moveri solet motum omnem amittit; ubi omnis qui tunc est motus divinitus

fit et in Deum transit. Hic ille spiritus efflatus in manus patris

commendatur, non (ut ille somniator Jacob) scala indiget ut ad tertium

(ne dicam ad primum) cœlum evolet. Quid quæso scala indigeat quem pater

inter manus bajulat ut ad tertii cœli secreta rapiat intantum ut

glorietur, et dicat, Dextera tua suscepit me.... Spiritus ab infimis

dividitur ut ad summa sublimetur. Spiritus ab anima scinditur ut Domino

uniatur. Qui enim adhæret Domino unus spiritus est.—_De extermin. mali

et promotione boni_, cap. xviii. Again (_De Contemp._ lib. iv. c. 4), In

hac gemina speculatione nihil imaginarium, nihil fantasticum debet

occurrere. Longe enim omnem corporeæ similitudinis proprietatem excedit

quicquid spectaculi tibi hæc gemina novissimi operis specula

proponit.... Ubi pars non est minor suo toto, nec totum universalius suo

individuo; immo ubi pars a toto non minuitur, totum ex partibus non

constituitur; quia simplex est quod universaliter proponitur et

universale quod quasi particulare profertur; ubi totum singula, ubi

omnia unum et unum omnia. In his utique absque dubio succumbit humana

ratio, et quid faciat ibi imaginatio? Absque dubio in ejusmodi

spectaculo officere potest; adjuvare omnino non potest. Elsewhere he

describes the state as one of rapturous spiritual intoxication.

Magnitudine jocunditatis et exultationis mens hominis a seipsa

alienatur, quum intima illa internæ suavitatis abundantia potata, immo

plene inebriata, quid sit, quid fuerit, penitus obliviscitur; et in

abalienationis excessum tripudii sui nimietate traducitur; et in

supermundanum quendam affectum sub quodam miræ felicitatis statu raptim

transformatur.—_Ibid._ lib. v. c. 5, fol. 60.

Footnote 56:

_Light and Colour._—Light, thou eternally one, dwell above by the

great One Eternal; Colour, thou changeful, in love come to Humanity

down!

Footnote 57:

Liebner’s _Hugo of St. Victor_, p. 21.—This account of his early

studies is given by Hugo in his _Didascalion_.

Footnote 58:

Schmid, _Der Mysticismus des M. A._, p. 303.

Footnote 59:

Comp. _De Sacramentis_, lib. v. p. x. c. 4. (tom. iii. p. 411.

Garzon’s edition of his works, Cologne, 1617.)

Footnote 60:

See Liebner, p. 315.

Footnote 61:

_De Sacramentis_, lib. i. p. i. cap. 12.—Quisquis sic ordinatus est,

dignus est lumine solis: ut mente sursum erecta et desiderio in

superna defixo lumen summæ veritatis contemplanti irradiet: et jam non

per speculum in ænigmate, _sed in seipsa ut est_ veritatem agnoscat et

sapiat.

Footnote 62:

See Note, p. 170.

Footnote 63:

Tom. iii. p. 356.—In speaking of the days of creation and of the

analogous seasons in the new creation within man, he says that as God

first saw the light, that it was good, and then divided it from the

darkness, so we must first try the spirit and examine our light with

care, ere we part it from what we call darkness, since Satan can

assume the garb of an angel of light.

For an elaborate account of his entire theology, the reader is

referred to Liebner’s _Hugo von St. Victor und die Theologischen

Richtungen seiner Zeit_; one of the best of the numerous monographs

German scholarship has produced.

Footnote 64:

_Richardi S. Victoris Opp._ (Lyons, 1534), _De Preparatione animi ad

contemplationem_, fol. 39.

Footnote 65:

_Ibid._ cap. xli.

Footnote 66:

Engelhardt, _Richard von St. Victor_, p. 6.

Footnote 67:

See Note, p. 171.

Footnote 68:

The six degrees of contemplation are as follows (_De Contemp._ i. 6,

fol. 45):

1 In imaginatione secundum solam imaginationem.

2 In imaginatione secundum rationem.

3 In ratione secundum imaginationem.

4 In ratione secundum rationem.

5 Supra rationem sed non præter rationem.

6 Supra rationem videtur esse præter rationem.

The office of Imagination to which the first two belong is Thought

(_Cogitatio_); the office of Reason, Investigation (_Meditatio_); that

of Intelligence, Contemplation (_Contemplatio_).—_Ibid._ cap. 3. These

three states are distinguished with much care, and his definition of

the last is as follows:—Contemplatio est perspicax et liber animi

contuitus in res perspiciendas undequaque diffusus.—_Ibid._ cap. 4. He

draws the distinction between intelligibilia and intellectibilia in

cap. 7; the former = invisibilia ratione tamen comprehensibilia; the

latter = invisibilia et humanæ rationi incomprehensibilia. The four

lower kinds are principally occupied, he adds, with created objects,

the two last with what is uncreated and divine.—Fol. 45.

Footnote 69:

See Note, p. 171.

Footnote 70:

See Note, p. 172.

BOOK THE SIXTH

GERMAN MYSTICISM IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY

CHAPTER I.

I pray thee, peace; I will be flesh and blood,

For there was never yet philosopher,

That could endure the toothache patiently;

However they have writ the style of gods,

And made a pish at chance and sufferance.

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

It is more healthful and nutritive to dig the earth, and to eat of

her fruits, than to stare upon the greatest glories of the heavens,

and live upon the beams of the sun: so unsatisfying a thing is

rapture and transportation to the soul; it often distracts the

faculties, but seldom does advantage piety, and is full of danger in

the greatest of its lustre.—JEREMY TAYLOR.

The approach of summer separated the members of the Ashfield circle for

a time. Atherton purposed spending a few weeks in Germany, and

Willoughby consented to accompany him. They were to visit once more

Bonn, Heidelberg, and Frankfort, then to make Strasburg their head

quarters, and thence to ramble about Alsace.

As soon as Atherton had left them, Mrs. Atherton and Kate Merivale set

out for the West of England, to visit their friends Mr. and Mrs.

Lowestoffe. Gower projected a sketching excursion along the banks of the

Wye. He knew the Lowestoffes, and gladly bound himself by the promise

they exacted, that he would make Summerford House his home for a day or

two now and then, in the course of his wanderings. The beauty of the

grounds and neighbourhood would have rendered such visits eminently

delightful, even had the hospitable host and hostess been less

accomplished admirers of art, or had Gower found no irresistible

attraction in one of their guests.

The days at Summerford glided by in the enjoyment of those innumerable

minor _satisfactions_ which, far more than highly pleasurable

excitements, make up the happiness of existence. If you doubt it,

consult Abraham Tucker on the matter. To many persons, life at the

Lowestoffes’ would have been intolerably dull. There were few visitors.

The family seldom emerged from their retirement to visit the

neighbouring city. Their amusements and their occupations, though

varied, were confined within limits which some would find lamentably

narrow. Lowestoffe himself was an early man and a punctual. It cost him

something to smile a courteous forgiveness when even a favourite guest

transgressed any of the family regulations on which his comfort so much

depended. His horses and dogs, his grounds and his flowers, everything

about him and all dependent upon him, were methodically cared for,

inspected, or commanded by himself in person. In one respect only was

there irregularity,—no servant, labourer, or workman could be sure of

any moment in which the master might not suddenly appear to see that all

went rightly. Though scrupulously just, and of a generous nature,

Lowestoffe was only too subject to a nervous dread of being defrauded by

those he employed, and used often to declare that men were ruined, not

so much by what they spent themselves, as by what they allowed others to

spend for them. In his early days he had contented himself with the mere

necessaries of his position in life, to discharge the debts which he

inherited. He would actually have gone into business (to the horror of

his aristocratic friends, but with the applause of every impartial

conscience), had there been no other way whereby to emancipate his

property and honour. All declared he would have made a fortune if he

had. A few years of self-denial, and a few more of frugality and

industrious vigilance, realized the full accomplishment of his most

cherished desire. His care and activity enabled him to deal very

liberally whatever his confidence was at last bestowed, and to expend in

discriminating charity a large annual sum. He was a connoisseur and a

liberal patron of art, but no solicitation could induce him to purchase

an old master. He knew well how skilfully imitations of antiquity are

prepared, and had he bought a reputed Titian or Correggio, he would have

fidgeted himself into a fever in a fortnight, by ruminating on the

probabilities of deception. He spent his money far more wisely on choice

pieces by living artists. When the morning was over, the afternoon and

evening found him a cheerful and fascinating companion. His cares were

thrown off, and he was restless and anxious no longer about little

things. Literature and art, even mere frolic, play with a child, or a

game of any kind, were welcome. Gower whispered an antithesis one day,

to the effect that Lowestoffe gave one half the day to childish wisdom

and the other to wise childishness.

We have mentioned what was not to be found at Summerford. What the two

sisters did find there was amply sufficient for enjoyment. There was a

long avenue winding up to the house, so beset with ancient trees, that

it seemed a passage through the heart of a wood. The lawn on which it

opened was dotted with islands and rings of flower-bed,—perfect magic

circles of horticulture, one all blue, another red, another yellow.

There was the house itself, with its old-fashioned terraces, urns, and

balustrades, and behind it—oh, joy—a rookery! A conservatory shot out

its transparent glittering wing on one side of the edifice. At the foot

of a slope of grass descending from the flower-palace lay a pool, shut

in by a mound and by fragments of rock overgrown with flowers, and

arched above by trees. On the surface spread the level leaves of the

water-lilies, with the sparkling bubbles here and there upon their

edges, and everywhere the shadowed water was alive with fish, that might

be seen darting, like little ruddy flames, in and out among the arrowy

sheaves of reeds. Then farther away there were old irregular walks,

richly furred with moss, wandering under trees through which the

sunbeams shot, now making some glossy evergreen far in among the stems

and underwood shine with a startling brightness (so that the passer-by

turned to see if there were not running water there, and fancied Undine

had been at her tricks again),—now rendering translucent some plume of

fern, now kindling some rugged edge of fir, and again glistening on some

old tree-trunk, mailed with its circular plates of white lichen. These

wood pathways—often broken into natural steps by the roots of the trees

which ran across their course—led up a steep hill. From the summit were

seen, in front, opposite heights, thickly covered with foliage, through

which it was only here and there that a jutting point of rock could show

itself to be reddened by the setting sun. Beneath, at a great depth, a

shallow brook idled on its pebbles, and you looked down on the heads of

those who crossed its rustic bridge. On the one hand, there stretched

away to the horizon a gentle sweep of hills, crossed and re-crossed with

hedgerows and speckled with trees and sheep, and, on the other, lay the

sea, in the haze of a sultry day, seen like a grey tablet of marble

veined with cloud-shadows.

All this without doors, and books, pictures, prints, drawing, chess,

chat, so choice and plentiful within, made Summerford ‘a dainty place’—

Attempred goodly well for health and for delight.

Meanwhile Atherton in Germany was reviving old acquaintanceships and

forming new, studying the historic relics of old Strasburg under the

shadow of its lofty minster, and relieving his research by rides and

walks, now with student and now with professor. Early in August he and

Willoughby returned to England, and repaired straightway to Summerford.

There, accordingly, the mystical circuit was complete once more. In a

day or two the discovery was made, through some mysterious hints dropped

by Willoughby, that Atherton had brought home a treasure from the Rhine.

Cross-examination elicited the fact that the said treasure was a

manuscript. Something to do with mysticism? Partly so. Then we must hear

it. Atherton consented without pretending reluctance. The document

purported to be his translation of a narrative discovered among the

Strasburg archives, written by one Adolf Arnstein, an armourer of that

city,—a personage who appears to have lived in the fourteenth century,

and kept some record of what he saw and heard.

So the manuscript was read at intervals, in short portions, sometimes to

the little circle grouped on the grass under the trees, sometimes as

they sat in the house, with open windows, to let in the evening song of

the birds.

Atherton commenced his first reading as follows:—

THE CHRONICLE OF ADOLF ARNSTEIN OF STRASBURG.

_This book was begun in the year after the birth of our Lord, one

thousand three hundred and twenty. Whosoever readeth this book, let

him pray for the soul of Adolf Arnstein, a poor sinful man, who

wrote it. And to all who read the same, or hear it read, may God

grant everlasting life. Amen._

1320. _September. St. Matthew’s Day._—Three days ago I was surprised

by a visit from Hermann of Fritzlar,[71] who has travelled hither

from Hesse to hear Master Eckart preach. How he reminded me of what

seem old times to me now—ay, old times, though I am but twenty this

day—of the days when my honoured father lived and I was a merry boy

of fifteen, little thinking that I should so soon be left alone to

play the man as I best might.

Hermann is the cause of my writing this. We were talking together

yesterday in this room, while the workmen were hammering in the yard

below, and the great forge-bellows were groaning away as usual. I

told him how I envied his wonderful memory. He replied by reminding

me that I could write and he could not. ‘Ah,’ said I, ‘but your mind

is full of things worth writing down. You scarcely hear or read a

legend, a hymn, or a godly sermon, but it is presently your own, and

after it has lain working in your brain for some time, you produce

it again, and say or sing it after a way you have, so that it is

quite delightful to hear.’

[The night before last I had taken him down into the work-shop, and

told the men to stop their clatter for awhile, and hear something to

do them good—none of your Latin mumbling, but a godly history in

their mother-tongue. And then did my friend tell them the Legend of

Saint Dorothea, with such a simple tenderness that my rough fellows

stood like statues till he had done. I saw a tear run down Hans’

sooty face, making a white channel over his cheek. He would have it

afterwards that some dust had blown into his eye.]

‘My good friend,’ said Hermann, ‘I am a dozen years at least older

than you; let me counsel you not to set light by your gift, and let

it lie unused. Had I that same scrivening art at my service, I

should write me a book setting forth what I heard and observed while

it was fresh in my mind. I know many good men who would hold such a

book, written by a God-fearing man, as great treasure. They would

keep it with care and hand it down to those who came after them, so

that the writer thereof should be thought on when his hand was cold.

I have it in my thoughts to dictate one day or other to some cunning

scribe, some of the legends I so love. Haply they may not be the

worse for their passage through the mind of a plain man with a

loving heart, who has carried them about with him whithersoever he

went, lived in them and grown one with them. But you can do much

more if you list. I know, moreover, that you, Adolf, are not the man

to turn away from your father’s old friends because the great ones

despise and daily vex them.’

This evening I do herewith begin to act on the resolution his words

awakened. I am but a layman, and so is he, but for that matter I

have hearkened to teachers who tell me that the layman may be nearer

to heaven than the clerk, and that all such outer differences are of

small account in the eye of God.

* * * * *

My father was an armourer and president of the guild. All looked up

to him as the most fearless and far-seeing of our counsellors. He

taught us how to watch and to resist the encroachments of the bishop

and the nobles. We have to thank his wisdom mainly that our position

has been not a little strengthened of late. Still, how much wrong

have we oftentimes to suffer from the senate and their presidents!

Strasburg prospers—marvellously, considering the dreadful pestilence

seven years back; but there is much to amend, Heaven knows! My

father fell on a journey to Spires, in an affray with Von Otterbach

and his black band. He could use well the weapons he made, and

wounded Von Otterbach well nigh to the death before he was

overpowered by numbers. The Rhenish League was strong enough, and

for once bold enough, to avenge him well. That castle of Otterbach,

which every traveller and merchant trembled to pass, stands now

ruinous and empty. I, alas! was away the while, on my

apprentice-travels. The old evil is but little abated, though our

union has, I doubt not, prevented many of the worst mischiefs of the

fist-law. Every rock along the Rhine is castled. They espy us

approaching from far off, and at every turn have we to wrangle, and

now and then, if strong enough, to fight, with these vultures about

their robber-toll. Right thankful am I that my father died a man’s

death, fighting—that I have not to imagine his fate as like that of

some, who, falling alive into their hands, have been horribly

tortured, and let down by a windlass, with dislocated limbs, into

the loathsome dog-hole of a keep, to writhe and die by inches in

putrid filth and darkness. Yet our very perils give to our calling

an enterprise and an excitement it would otherwise lack. The

merchant has his chivalry as well as the knight. Moreover, as rich

old Gersdorf says, risk and profit run together—though, as to money,

I have as much already as I care for. We thrive, despite

restrictions and extortions innumerable, legal and illegal. My

brother Otto sends me word from Bohemia that he prospers. The

Bohemian throats can never have enough of our wines, and we are good

customers for their metal. Otto was always a rover. He talks of

journeying to the East. It seems but yesterday that he and I were

boys together, taking our reading and writing lessons from that poor

old Waldensian whom my father sheltered in our house. How we all

loved him! I never saw my father so troubled at anything as at his

death. Our house has been ever since a refuge for such persecuted

wanderers.

The wrath of Popes, prelates, and inquisitors hath been especially

kindled of late years against sundry communities, sects, and

residues of sects, which are known by the name of Beghards,

Beguines, Lollards, Kathari, Fratricelli, Brethren of the Free

Spirit,[72] &c. Councils, they tell me, have been held at Cologne,

Mayence, and Narbonne, to suppress the Beghards. Yet their numerous

communities in the Netherlands and the Rhineland are a blessing to

the poor folk, to whom the hierarchy are a curse. The clergy are

jealous of them. They live single, they work with their hands, they

nurse the sick, they lay out the dead, they lead a well-ordered and

godly life in their Beguinasia, under the Magister or Magistra; but

they are bound by no vows, fettered by no harassing minutiæ of

austerity, and think the liberty of the Spirit better than monkish

servitude. Some of them have fallen into the notions of those

enthusiastic Franciscans who think the end of the world at hand, and

that we live in, or near, the days of Antichrist. And no wonder,

when the spiritual heads of Christendom are so unchristian. There

are some sturdy beggars who wander about the country availing

themselves of the name of Beghard to lead an idle life. These I

excuse not. They say some of these Beghards claim the rank of

apostles—that they have subterranean rooms, where both sexes meet to

hear blasphemous preachers announce their equality with God. Yea,

worse charges than these—even of grossest lewdness—do they bring. I

know many of them, both here and at Cologne, but nothing of this

sort have I seen, or credibly heard of. They are the enemies of

clerical pomp and usurpation, and some, I fear, hold strange

fantastical notions, coming I know not whence. But the churchmen

themselves are at fault, and answerable for it all. They leave the

artisans and labourers in besotted ignorance, and when they do get a

solitary religious idea that comes home to them, ten to one but it

presently confounds or overthrows what little sense they have. Many

deeply religious minds among us, both of laity and clergy, are at

heart as indignant at the crimes of the hierarchy as can be the

wildest mob-leading fanatic who here and there appears for a moment,

haranguing the populace, denouncing the denouncers, and bidding men

fight sin with sin. We who sigh for reform, who must have more

spiritual freedom, have our secret communications, our meetings now

and then for counsel, our signs and counter-signs. Folks call the

Rhineland the Parsons’ Walk—so full is it of the clergy, so enjoyed

and lorded over by them. Verily, it is at least as full of those

hidden ones, who, in various wise which they call heresy, do worship

God without man coming in between.

The tide of the time is with us.[73] Our once famous Godfrey of

Strasburg is forgotten. Wolfram von Eschenbach is the universal

model. His _Parzival and Titurel_ live on the lips of the many

rhymesters and minstrels who wander from town to town now, as once

they did from court to court and castle to castle. It is the

religiousness and the learning of Wolfram that finds favour for him

and countless imitators. This is the good sign I mean. Our singers

have turned preachers. They are practical, after their fashion. They

are a Book of Proverbs, and give us maxims, riddles, doctrines,

science, in their verses. If they sing of chivalry, it is to

satirize chivalry—such knighthood as now we have. They are spreading

and descending towards the people. Men may have their songs of

chivalry in Spain, where, under the blessed St. Iago, good knights

and true have a real crusade against those heathen hounds the Moors,

whom God confound. But here each petty lord in his castle has

nothing to do but quarrel with his neighbour and oppress all weaker

than himself. What to such men, robbing, drinking, devouring their

living with harlots, are Arthur and the Round Table, or Oliver and

Roland? So the singers come to us. In good sooth, the old virtues of

knighthood—its truth and honour, its chastity and courage—are found

far more among the citizens than with the nobles. We relish the sage

precepts and quaint abstruseness of Reimar of Zweter, though he be

somewhat of a pedant. Albertus Magnus is the hero with him, instead

of Charlemagne. His learning is a marvel, and he draws all morality

by allegory out of the Seven Sciences in most wondrous wise.

Frauenlob himself (alas! I heard last year that he was dead) could

not praise fair ladies more fairly. He assails, in the boldest

fashion, the Pope and Rome, and their daughters Cologne and Mayence.

The last time he was over here from Bohemia, we laughed nigh to

bursting at his caricature of a tournament, and applauded till the

rafters rang again when he said that not birth, but virtue, made

true nobleness. Then our ballads and popular fables are full of

satire on the vices of ecclesiastics. All this tends to keep men

awake to the abuses of the day, and to deepen their desire for

reform. We shall need all the strength we can gather, political and

religious, if in the coming struggle the name of German is not to be

a shame. Our Holy Father promises to indemnify himself for the

humiliation he suffers at Avignon by heaping insults upon Germany.

If Louis of Bavaria conquers Frederick, I should not wonder if we

Strasburgers wake up some morning and find ourselves excommunicate.

All true hearts must be stirring—we shall have cowards and sluggards

enow on all hands.

Last month the Emperor Louis was here with his army for a few days.

Our bishop Ochsenstein and the Zorn family espouse the cause of his

rival Frederick the Fair. Louis has on his side, however, the best

of us—the family of the Müllenheim, the chief burghers, and the

people generally. Every true German heart, every hater of foreign

domination, must be with him. Many a skirmish has there been in our

streets between the retainers of the two great houses of Zorn and

Müllenheim, and now their enmity is even more bitter than

heretofore. The senate received Louis with royal honours. When

Frederick was here five years ago, we would only entertain him as a

guest. The clergy and most of the nobles hailed him as Emperor. Now,

when Louis came, it was their turn to stand aloof. There were few of

them in the cathedral the other day, when he graciously confirmed

our privileges. The bishop issued orders to put a stop to the

performance of all church offices while Louis was here; whereupon,

either from prudence or consideration for our souls, he shortened

his visit.[74]

1320. _September. St. Maurice’s Day._—A long conversation with

Hermann to-day. He has heard Eckart repeatedly, and, as I looked

for, is both startled and perplexed. Of a truth it is small marvel

that such preaching as his stirred up all Cologne, gathered crowds

of wondering hearers, made him fast friends and deadly enemies, and

roused the wrath of the heretic-hunting archbishop. Hermann brought

me home some of the things this famous doctor said which most struck

him. I wrote them down from his lips, and place them here.

‘He who is at all times alone is worthy of God. He who is at all

times at home, to him is God present. He who standeth at all times

in a present Now, in him doth God the Father bring forth his son

without ceasing.[75]

‘He who finds one thing otherwise than another—to whom God is dearer

in one thing than another, that man is carnal, and still afar off

and a child. But he to whom God is alike in all things hath become a

man.[76]

‘All that is in the Godhead is one. Thereof can we say nothing. It

is above all names, above all nature. The essence of all creatures

is eternally a divine life in Deity. God works. So doth not the

Godhead. Therein are they distinguished,—in working and not working.

The end of all things is the hidden darkness of the eternal Godhead,

unknown and never to be known.[77]

‘I declare, by good truth and truth everlasting, that in every man

who hath utterly abandoned self, God must communicate Himself

according to all His power, so completely that he retains nothing in

His life, in His essence, in His Nature, and in His Godhead—He must

communicate all to the bringing forth of fruit.[78]

‘When the Will is so united that it becometh a One in oneness, then

doth the Heavenly Father produce his only-begotten Son in Himself

and in me. Wherefore in Himself and in me? I am one with Him—He

cannot exclude me. In the self-same operation doth the Holy Ghost

receive his existence, and proceeds from me as from God. Wherefore?

I am in God, and if the Holy Ghost deriveth not his being from me,

He deriveth it not from God. I am in nowise excluded.[79]

‘There is something in the soul which is above the soul, divine,

simple, an absolute Nothing, rather unnamed than named, unknown than

known. So long as thou lookest on thyself as a _Something_, so long

thou knowest as little what this is as my mouth knows what colour

is, or as my eye knows what taste is. Of this I am wont to speak in

my sermons, and sometimes I have called it a Power, sometimes an

uncreated Light, sometimes a divine Spark. It is absolute and free

from all names and forms, as God is free and absolute in Himself. It

is higher than knowledge, higher than love, higher than grace. For

in all these there is still distinction. In this power doth blossom

and flourish God, with all His Godhead, and the Spirit flourisheth

in God. In this power doth the Father bring forth His only-begotten

Son, as essentially as in Himself, and in this light ariseth the

Holy Ghost. This Spark rejects all creatures, and will have only

God, simply as he is in Himself. It rests satisfied neither with the

Father, nor the Son, nor the Holy Ghost, nor with the three Persons,

as far as each exists in its respective attributes. I will say what

will sound more marvellous yet. This Light is satisfied only with

the super-essential essence. It is bent on entering into the simple

Ground, the still Waste, wherein is no distinction, neither Father,

Son, nor Holy Ghost,—into the Unity where no man dwelleth. There is

it satisfied in the light, there it is one; then is it in itself, as

this Ground is a simple stillness in itself, immoveable; and yet by

this Immobility are all things moved.[80]

‘God in himself was not God—in the creature only hath He become God.

I ask to be rid of God—that is, that God, by his grace, would bring

me into the Essence—that Essence which is above God and above

distinction. I would enter into that eternal Unity which was mine

before all time, when I was what I would, and would what I was;—into

a state above all addition or diminution;—into the Immobility

whereby all is moved.[81]

‘Folks say to me often—“Pray God for me.” Then I think with myself,

“Why go ye out? Why abide ye not in your own selves, and take hold

on your own possession? Ye have all truth essentially within

you?.”[82]

‘God and I are one in knowing. God’s Essence is His knowing, and

God’s knowing makes me to know Him. Therefore is His knowing my

knowing. The eye whereby I see God is the same eye whereby He seeth

me. Mine eye and the eye of God are one eye, one vision, one

knowledge, and one love.[83]

‘If any man hath understood this sermon, it is well for him. Had not

a soul of you been here, I must have spoken the very same words. He

who hath not understood it, let him not trouble his heart therewith,

for as long as a man is not himself like unto this truth, so long

will he never understand it, seeing that it is no truth of

reflection, to be thought out, but is come directly out of the heart

of God without medium.’[84]

Of all this I can understand scarcely anything. The perpetual

incarnation of God in good Christians, the nameless Nothing, the

self-unfolding and self-infolding of God (I know not what words to

use) are things too high for my grosser apprehension. I shall let

the sayings lie here; some one else who reads may comprehend them. I

am content to be a child in such matters. I look with awe and

admiration on men who have attained while yet in the flesh heights

of wisdom which will be, perhaps to all eternity, beyond the reach

of such as I am.

1320. _October. St. Francis’ Day._—Went with Hermann this morning to

hear mass. Master Eckart preached again. Dr. Tauler in the church.

How every one loves that man! As several of his brethren made their

way to their places, I saw the people frown on some of them, and

laugh and leer to each other as two or three of them passed. They

had reason, I know, to hate and to despise certain among them. But

to Tauler all bowed, and many voices blessed him. He has a kind

heart to feel for us, the commonalty. He and his sermons are one and

the same. He means all he says, and we can understand much, at

least, of what he means. There is a cold grandeur about Master

Eckart. He seems above emotion: his very face, all intellect, says

it is a weakness to feel. At him we wonder; with Master Tauler we

weep. How reverently did Tauler listen, as a son to a father, to the

words of the great Doctor. No doubt he understood every syllable. He

is and shall be my sole confessor. I will question him, some day,

concerning these lofty doctrines whereby it would seem that the

poorest beggar may outpass in wisdom and in blessedness all the

Popes of Christendom.

Master Eckart said to-day:—‘Some people are for seeing God with

their eyes, as they can see a cow, and would love God as they love a

cow (which thou lovest for the milk and for the cheese, and for

thine own profit). Thus do all those who love God for the sake of

outward riches or of inward comfort; they do not love aright, but

seek only themselves and their own advantage.[85]

‘God is a pure good in Himself, and therefore will He dwell nowhere

save in a pure soul. There He may pour Himself out; into that He can

wholly flow. What is Purity? It is that man should have turned

himself away from all creatures, and have set his heart so entirely

on the pure good, that no creature is to him a comfort, that he has

no desire for aught creaturely, save as far as he may apprehend

therein the pure good which is God. And as little as the bright eye

can endure aught foreign in it, so little can the pure soul bear

anything in it, any stain, aught between it and God. To it all

creatures are pure to enjoy, for it enjoyeth all creatures in God,

and God in all creatures. Yea, so pure is that soul that she seeth

through herself, she needeth not to seek God afar off, she finds him

in herself, when, in her natural purity, she hath flowed out into

the super-natural of the pure Godhead. And thus is she in God and

God in her, and what she doeth that she doeth in God and God doeth

it in her.[86]

‘Then shall a man be truly poor when he is as free from his creature

will as he was before he was born. And I say to you, by the eternal

truth, that so long as ye desire to fulfil the will of God, and have

any desire after eternity and God, so long are ye not truly poor. He

alone hath true spiritual poverty who wills nothing, knows nothing,

desires nothing.[87]

‘For us, to follow truly what God willeth, is to follow that whereto

we are most inclined,—whereto we feel most frequent inward

exhortation and strongest attraction. The inner voice is the voice

of God.’[88]

After the service, Hermann left me to go and see a sick friend. I

mingled with the crowd. There was a knot of people gathered before

All-Saints, discussing what they had heard. A portly, capon-lined

burgomaster declared he had first been hungry, then sleepy, and that

was all he knew. He had verily, as a wag presently told him, obeyed

the master, and lost consciousness of all external things. Whereat

the jolly citizen was so tickled that he took the joker home to dine

with him, promising mountains of pickled pork, a whole Black Forest

of sauer kraut, and boundless beakers of hippocras.

An innocent novice from the country (looking fresh as a new-caught

trout) began to say, ‘Well, it doth seem to me that though Doctor

Eckart received his Doctorate from Rome, at the hands of our Holy

Father, though he hath studied and taught at Paris, though he hath

been Provincial of our order in Saxony, and Vicar-General in

Bohemia—where he played the cat with the mice, I can tell you—yet

that some things he said were——’

‘Hold your tongue for a jackass,’ quoth a senior brother, who liked

not, methinks, to hear a whisper against the orthodoxy of the order,

by whomsoever or against whomsoever uttered.

‘He is a blasphemer,’ said a friar. ‘Good people, did not you hear

him say that what burned in hell was the Nothing?[89] Then nothing

burns; _ergo_, there is no hell.’

‘I don’t think he believes in God at all,’ cried one:—‘Did he not

say something about caring no more for God than for a stone?’

‘Ay, but,’ urged the friar, ‘no hell, and so no purgatory—think of

that. Why, he has swept the universe as clean of the devil as a

housewife’s platter at a christening.’

Some one in the crowd shouted out, ‘That fellow cares not what

becomes of God, but he can’t give up his devil.’ Whereon the friar

grew very red in the face, as we all laughed, but could not bethink

him of any answer, and went capped with the name of Brother

Brimstone ever after.

‘What was that he said,’ asked a slip-shod, sottish-looking tailor,

‘about doing what you like, and that is what God likes?’

‘Friends,’ cries next a rainbow-coloured, dandified puppy, a

secretary of the bishop’s, stroking the down of a would-be

moustache, evidently as yet only in a state of Becoming

(_Werden_)—‘I would fain have moderately kicked him,——

‘My friends’ (smiling with a patronizing blandness at the tailor),

‘you are right; the public morals are in danger. Evil men and

seducers wax worse and worse. But the Holy Church will protect her

children. We have heard pestilent heresy this day. To hear that man

talk, you would fancy he thought there was as much divinity in his

little finger as in the whole body of the Virgin Mother of God.’

Whereupon up starts a little man whom I knew for one of the brethren

of the Free Spirit—takes his place on a stone that lay in the mud of

the middle of the street, and begins—‘Good people, did you not hear

the doctor say that those who cannot understand his doctrine are to

hold by the common faith? Did not Saint Peter say of the Epistles of

the blessed Saint Paul that there were some things therein hard to

be understood, which the ignorant would wrest to their own

destruction? I’ll tell you the ignorance he means and the knowledge

he means. Friend Crispin there, whom you carried home drunk in a

barrow last night, and Master Secretary here, who transgresses in

like wise and worse in a daintier style, and hath, by the way, as

much perfumery about him as though the scent thereof, rising towards

heaven, were so much incense for the taking away of his many

sins—they are a couple of St. Paul’s ignoramuses. The knowledge St.

Paul means is the thoughtful love of doing the right thing for the

love of Christ. But the Pope himself may be one of these witless

ones, if the love of sin be stronger in him than the love of

holiness. The preaching of all the twelve Apostles would be turned

to mischief and to licence by such as you, you feather-brained,

civet-tanned puppet of a man, you adulterous, quill-driving

hypocrite.’

‘Seize him,’ shouts my Secretary, and darted forward; but an

apprentice put out his foot, and over he rolled into the mire,

grievously ruffling and besmutching all his gay feathers, while the

little man mingled with the laughing people, and made his escape. I

hope he is out of Strasburg, or he may be secluded in a darkness and

a solitude anything but divine. He was a trifle free of tongue,

assuredly; I suppose that makes a part of the freedom of the Spirit

with him. He had right, however, beyond question.

The confusion created by this incident had scarcely ceased, when I

saw advancing towards us the stately form of Master Eckart himself.

He looked with a calm gravity about upon us, as he paused in the

midst—seemed to understand at once of what sort our talk had been,

and appeared about to speak. There was a cry for silence—‘Hear the

Doctor! hear him!’ Whereon he spoke as follows:—

‘There was once a learned man who longed and prayed full eight years

that God would show him some one to teach him the way of truth. And

on a time, as he was in a great longing, there came unto him a voice

from heaven, and said, “Go to the front of the church, there wilt

thou find a man that shall show thee the way to blessedness.”

‘So thither he went, and found there a poor man whose feet were

torn, and covered with dust and dirt, and all his apparel scarce

three hellers worth. He greeted him, saying, “God give thee good

morrow.” Thereat made he answer, “I never had an ill morrow.” Again

said he, “God prosper thee.” The other answered, “Never had I aught

but prosperity.”

‘“Heaven save thee,” said the scholar, “how answerest thou me so?”

‘“I was never other than saved.”

‘“Explain to me this, for I understand not.”

‘“Willingly,” quoth the poor man. “Thou wishest me good morrow. I

never had an ill morrow, for, am I an hungered, I praise God; am I

freezing, doth it hail, snow, rain, is it fair weather or foul, I

praise God; and therefore had I never ill morrow. Thou didst say,

God prosper thee. I have been never unprosperous, for I know how to

live with God; I know that what he doth is best, and what God giveth

or ordaineth for me, be it pain or pleasure, that I take cheerfully

from Him as the best of all, and so I had never adversity. Thou

wishest God to bless me. I was never unblessed, for I desire to be

only in the will of God, and I have so given up my will to the will

of God, that what God willeth I will.”

‘“But if God were to cast thee into hell,” said the scholar, “what

wouldst thou do then?”

‘“Cast me into hell? His goodness holds him back therefrom. Yet if

he did, I should have two arms to embrace him withal. One arm is

true Humility, and therewith am I one with his holy humanity. And

with the right arm of Love, that joineth his holy Godhead, I would

embrace him, so He must come with me into hell likewise. And even

so, I would sooner be in hell, and have God, than in heaven, and not

have Him.”

‘Then understood this Master that true Abandonment, with utter

Abasement, was the nearest way to God.

‘Moreover the Master asked: “From whence comest thou?”

‘“From God.”

‘“Where hast thou found God?”

‘“Where I abandoned all creatures. I am a king. My kingdom is my

soul. All my powers, within and without, do homage to my soul. This

kingdom is greater than any kingdom on the earth.”

‘“What hath brought thee to this perfection?”

‘“My silence, my heavenward thoughts, my union with God. For I could

rest in nothing less than God. Now I have found God, and have

everlasting rest and joy in Him.”[90]

With that Master Eckart ceased, and went on his way again, leaving

us in wonderment; and I watched him, as far as I could see along the

winding street, walking on under the over-hanging gables, with his

steady step and abstract air, and his silver locks fluttering out in

the wind from under his doctor’s hat. When I looked round, I found

myself almost alone. He is a holy man, let what will be said about

heresy.

I set down here a new hymn Hermann sang me—sweet, as he sang it—with

a ringing repetition that chimes right pleasantly, and makes amends

for some lack of meaning in the words.[91]

Oh be glad, thou Zion’s daughter,

Joyous news to thee are sent;

Thou shalt sing a strain of sweetness,

Sing it to thy heart’s content.

Now the friend of God thou art,

Therefore shalt thou joy at heart,

Therefore know no sorrow-smart.

Lo! ’tis ju-ju-jubilation,

Meditation;

Ju-ju-ju-ju-jubilation,

Contemplation;

Ju-ju-ju-jubilation;

Ju-ju-ju-jubilation;

Speculation;

Ju-ju-ju-jubilation,

Conciliation!

Meditation, that is goodly,

When a man on God will muse;

Jubilation worketh wonder,

’Tis the harp the soul doth use.

Speculation, that is sheen,

Contemplation crowns, I ween,

Concord leads, the dance’s queen,

Lo! ju-ju-ju-

Conciliation!

’Tis jubilation

At the sweets of contemplation!

Have been haunted by this ju-ju, in-doors and out, whatever I have

been doing for the last three days, and I hear it in every stroke

upon the anvil.

1320. _Second week in October._—A ride over to Fegersheim about Sir

Rudolf’s new bascinet with the beaked ventaille. As I reached the

castle the ladies were just coming out for hawking, with a brave

company of knights and squires. They were fair to see, with their

copes and kirtles blue and white, and those fanciful new-fashioned

crowns on their heads, all glittering with gold and jewels. Sir

Rudolf stayed for me awhile and then followed them.

On my way back, rested at noon at a little hostelry, where I sat

before the door at a table, chatting with mine host. There ride up a

priest and monk with attendants. Holy Mary, what dresses! The monk

with bells on his horse’s bridle, his hood fastened with a great

golden pin, wrought at the head into a true-love knot, his hair

growing long so as to hide his tonsure, his shoes embroidered and

cut lattice-wise.[92] There was the priest with broad gold girdle,

gown of green and red, slashed after the newest mode, and a long

sword and dagger, very truly militant. I marvelled at the variety

and unction of the oaths they had at their service. The advantage of

a theological training was very manifest therein.

Scarcely were these worthies, with bag and baggage, well on their

way again when I espied, walking towards the inn, a giant of a

man—some three inches higher than I am (a sight I have not often

seen), miserably attired, dusty and travel-worn. When he came to

where I was he threw down his staff and bundle, cast his huge limbs

along the bench, gave a careless, surly glance at me, and, throwing

back his shaggy head of black hair, seemed about to sleep. Having

pity on his weariness I said, ‘Art thirsty, friend? the sun hath

power to-day.’ Thereupon he partly raised himself, looked fixedly at

me, and then drank off the tankard I pushed towards him, grunting

out a something which methought was meant for thanks. Being now

curious, I asked him straight, ‘Where he came from?’

_He._ I never came from anywhere.

_I._ What are you?

_He._ I am not.

_I._ What will you?

_He._ I will not.

_I._ This is passing strange. Tell me your name.

_He._ Men call me the Nameless Wild.

_I._ Not far off the mark either; you talk wildly enough. Where do

you come from? whither are you bound?

_He._ I dwell in absolute Freedom.

_I._ What is that?

_He._ When a man lives as he list, without distinction (Otherness,

_Anderheit_), without before or after. The man who hath in his

Eternal Nothing become nothing knows nought of distinctions.

_I._ But to violate distinction is to violate order, and to break

that is to be a slave. That is not the freedom indeed, which the

truth gives. He that committeth sin is the servant of sin. No man

can be so utterly self-annihilated and lost in God,—can be such a

very nothing that there remains no remnant of the original

difference between creature and Creator. My soul and body are one,

are not separate; but they are distinct. So is it with the soul

united to God. Mark the difference, friend, I prithee, between

separation and distinction (_Geschiedenheit und Unterschiedenheit_).

_He._ The teacher saith that the saintly man is God’s son, and what

Christ doth, that doth he.

_I._ He saith that such man followeth Christ in righteousness. But

our personality must ever abide. Christ is son of God by nature, we

by grace. Your pride blinds you. You are enlightened with a false

light, coming whence I know not. You try and ‘break through’ to the

Oneness, and you break through reason and reverence.

He replied by telling me that I was in thick darkness, and the boy

coming with my horse, I left him.[93]

As I rode homeward I thought on the contrast I had seen. This man

who came last is the natural consequent on the two who preceded him.

So doth a hypocritical, ghostly tyranny produce lawlessness. I have

seen the Priest and the Levite, and methinks one of the

thieves,—where is our good Samaritan? I know not which extreme is

the worst. One is selfish absoluteness, the other absolute

selfishness. Oh, for men among us who shall battle with each in the

strength of a truth above them both! Poor Alsace!

Here Atherton laid aside his manuscript, and conversation commenced.

Footnote 71:

The _Heiligenleben_ of Hermann von Fritslar has been recently edited

by Franz Pfeiffer, in his _Ausgabe der Deutschen Mystiker_ (Leipsig,

1845). Hermann says himself repeatedly that he had caused his book to

be written (_schreiben lassen_) and there is every reason to believe

that he was, like Rulman Merswin and Nicholas of Basle, his

contemporaries, a devout layman,—one of a class among the laity

characteristic of that age and neighbourhood, who, without entering

into an order, spent the greater part of their time in the exercises

of religion, and of their fortune on religious objects. Though he

could not write, he could read, and his book is confessedly a

compilation from many books and from the sermons and the sayings of

learned and godly men. He says, Diz buch ist zu sammene gelesen ûzze

vile anderen bucheren und ûzze vile predigâten und ûzze vil

lêrêren.—_Vorrede._

Footnote 72:

Concerning these sects, see Ullmann, _Reformatoren vor der

Reformation_, vol. ii. pp. 1-18. The fullest account is given of them

in a masterly Latin treatise by Mosheim, _De Beghardis et Beguinabus_.

He enters at length into the discussion of their name and origin;

details the various charges brought against them, and gives the bulls

and acts issued for their suppression. See especially the circular of

John Ochsenstein, Bishop of Strasburg, cap. iv. § xi. p. 255.

Footnote 73:

Authority for these statements concerning the literature of the

period, will be found in Gervinus, _Geschichte der poetischen

National-Literatur der Deutschen_, part vi. §§ 1, 2, 5.

Footnote 74:

_Johannes Tauler von Strasburg_, by Dr. Carl Schmidt, pp. 8-10; and

Laguille’s _Histoire d’Alsace_, liv. xxiv.

Footnote 75:

Meister Eghart spricht: wer alle cit allein ist, der ist gottes

wirdige; vnt wer alliu cit do heimenen ist, dem ist got gegenwürtig;

vnt wer alliu cit stat in einem gegenwürtigen nu, in dem gebirt got

der vatter sinen sune an vnderlas.—_Sprüche Deutscher Mystiker_, in

Wackernagel’s _Altdeutsches Lesebuch_, p. 889.

Footnote 76:

Meister Eghart sprach: vnt wem in einem anders ist denne in dem

andern, vnt dem got lieber ist in einem denne in dem andern, der

mensche ist grobe, vnt noch verre vnt ein kint. Aber dem got gelich

ist in allen, der ist ce man worden.—_Ibid._

Both this saying and the foregoing are expressions for that total

indifference and self-abandonment so strenuously inculcated by the

mystics. He who lives weaned from the world, alone with God, without

regrets, without anticipations, ‘stands in a present Now,’ and sees

the divine love as clearly in his sorrows as in his joys,—does not

find ‘one thing other than another.’ There is exaggeration in

suppressing, as Eckart would do, the instinct of thanksgiving for

special benefaction; but in his strong language lies couched a great

truth,—that only in utter self-surrender can man find abiding peace.

Footnote 77:

Alles das in der gottheyt ist, das ist ein, vnd davon ist nicht zu

sprechen. Got der würcket, die gotheyt nit, sy hat auch nicht zu

würckende, in ir ist auch kein werck. Got vnt gotheyt hat underscheyd,

an würcken vnd an nit würcken.

Was ist das letst end? Es ist die verborgen finsternusz der ewigen

gotheit, vnd ist unbekant, vnd wirt nymmerme bekant. (See a paper on

Eckart, by Dr. Carl Schmidt in the _Theol. Stud. u. Kritiken_, 1839,

3, p. 693.) Comp. the following:—Got ist noch gut noch besser, noch

allerbest, vnd ick thue also unrecht, wenn ick Got gut heisse, rechte

ase ob ick oder er etwas wiz weiss und ick es schwarz heisse.—_Ibid._

p. 675. This last assertion was one of the counts of accusation in the

bull of 1330.

Footnote 78:

Martensen’s _Meister Eckart_ (Hamburg, 1842), p. 22.—The divine

communication assumes with Eckart the form of philosophical necessity.

The man emptied of Self is infallibly full of Deity, after the fashion

of the old principle, ‘Nature abhors a vacuum.’ Yet even this doctrine

is not wholly false. It is the misrepresentation of a Christian truth.

Its correlative verity is this,—that the kingdom of grace, like the

kingdom of nature, has its immutable laws. He who seeks shall find; as

we sow we reap, with unerring certainty. Gravitation is not more sure

than the announcement, ‘With that man will I dwell who is of a meek

and contrite spirit.’

Footnote 79:

Martensen, p. 23. Comp. _Stud. u. Krit._ _loc. cit._ Alles das denn

got yn gegab seinem eingebornen sun, das hat er mir gegeben.... _Was

got würcket, das ist ein_, darumb gebiret er mich seinen sun, on aller

underscheyd.—These words exhibit the pantheistic principle on which

this assumption is based. All spirit (whether in so called creature or

Creator) is substantially one and the same. It cannot be divided; it

can have no distinctive operations. Our dividual personal

consciousness is, as it were, a temporary accretion on the Universal

Soul with which we are in contact. Escaping this consciousness, we

merge in—that is, we become—the Universal Soul. We are brought into

the Essence,—the calm, unknown oneness beyond all manifestation, above

creation, providence, or grace. This is Eckart’s escape from

distinction,—lapse into the totality of spirit. This doctrine he

teaches, not in opposition to the current Christian doctrine, but as a

something above it,—at once its higher interpretation and its climax.

Footnote 80:

These statements concerning the ‘füncklin der vernunfft’ are the

substance of passages given by Martensen, pp. 26, 27, and Schmidt

(_Stud. u. Krit._ _l. c._), pp. 707, 709.—Ich sprich es bey gutter

warheit, und bey yemmerwerender warheit, und bey ewiger warheit, das

disem liechte nit benüget an dem einfaltigem stilstanden götlichen

wesen, von wannen disz wesen harkommet, es will in den einfaltigen

grundt in die stillen wüste, das nye underscheyd ingeluget, weder

vatter noch sun noch heiliger geist, in dem einichen, da niemant

daheim ist, da benüget es im liechte, und da ist es einicher, denn

es sey in im selber, wann diser grundt ist ein einfeltig stille die

in ir selber unbeweglich ist, und von diser Unbeweglichkeit werdent

beweget alle ding, &c. Hermann von Fritslar, in a remarkable

passage, enumerates the various and conflicting names given to this

organ of mysticism. ‘Und das leben was daz licht der lûte.’ Daz

meinet, daz di sêle einen funken in ir hât, der ist in gote

êwiclîchen gewest leben und licht. Und dirre funke ist mit der sêle

geschaffen in allen menschen und ist ein lûter licht in ime selber

und strafet allewege umme sunde und hat ein stête heischen zu der

tugende und kriget allewege wider in sînen ursprung.... Dar umme

heizen in etlîche meistere einen wechter der sêle. Also sprach

Daniêl: ‘der wechter ûf dem turme der rufet gar sêre. Etliche heizen

disen funken einen haven der sêle. Etlîche heizen in di worbele

(axis, or centre) der sêle. Etelîche heizen in ein gotechen in der

sêle. Etelîche heizen in ein antlitze der sêle. Eteliche heizen

_intellectus_, daz ist ein instênde kraft in der sêle. Etlîche

heizen _in sinderisis_. Etliche heizen in daz wô der sêle. Etlîche

heizen in daz nirgen der sêle.—_Heiligenleben. Di dritte messe_, p.

32.

Footnote 81:

Martensen, p. 27. Schmidt, _loc. cit._

Footnote 82:

The passage in Martensen, p. 20.

Footnote 83:

Martensen, pp. 19, 29.

Footnote 84:

_Ibid._ p. 29.

Footnote 85:

Etlich leut wöllent got mit den ougen ansehn, als sy ein ku ansent

unnd wöllent gott liebhan, als sy ein ku liebhaben (die hastu lieb umb

die milch, und umb den kätz, und umb dein eigen nutz). Also thund alle

die leut die got liebhand, um uszwendigen reichtum, oder umb

inwendigen trost, und die hand gott nit recht lieb, sunder sy suchent

sich selbs und ir eigen nutz.—_Schmidt_, p. 712.

Footnote 86:

Got ist ein luter guot an ime selben, vnt do von wil er nienen wonen

denne in einer lutern sele: in die mag er sich ergiessen vnt

genzeclichen in si fliessen. was ist luterkeit? das ist das sich der

mensche gekeret habe von allen creaturen, vnt sin herce so gar uf

gerichtet habe gen dem lutern guot, das ime kein creature trœstlichen

si, vnt ir ouch nit begere denne als vil als si das luter guot, das

got ist, darinne begriffen mag. vnt also wenig das liechte ouge icht

in ime erliden mag, also wenig mag diu luter sele icht an ir erliden

keine vermasung vnt das si vermitlen mag. ir werdent alle creaturen

luter ce niessen: wanne si niusset alle creaturen in got vnt got in

allen creaturen. Denne si ist also luter, das si sich selben

durschowet, denne endarf si got nit verre suochen: si vindet in ir

selben, wanne si in ir natiurlichen luterkeit ist geflossen in das

übernatiurliche der lutern gotheit. vnt also ist si in got, vnt got in

ir; vnt was si tuot, das tuot si in got, vnt tuot es got in

ir.—_Wackernagel_, p. 891.

Footnote 87:

Wann sol der mensch warlich arm sein, so soll er seynes geschaffnen

willes also ledig sein, als er was do er noch nit was. Und ich sag

euch bey der ewigen warheit, _als lang ir willen hand zu erfüllend den

willen gottes, vnd icht begerung hand der ewigkeit und gottes, also

lang seind ir nitt recht arm_, wann das ist ein arm mensch der nicht

wil, noch nicht bekennet, noch nicht begeret—_Schmidt_, p. 716. Here

again is the most extravagant expression possible of the doctrine of

_sainte indifférence_, in comparison with which Madame Guyon is

moderation itself.

Footnote 88:

See _Schmidt_, p. 724.

Footnote 89:

He was charged with denying hell and purgatory, because he defined

future punishment as deprivation,—‘Das Nicht in der helle

brinnet.’—_Schmidt_, p. 722.

Footnote 90:

The narrative here put into the mouth of Eckart is found in an

appendix to Tauler’s _Medulla animæ_. There is every reason to believe

that it is Eckart’s. Martensen gives it, p. 107.

Footnote 91:

A literal translation of a curious old hymn in Wackernagel’s

collection, p. 896.

Footnote 92:

C. Schmidt (_Johannes Tauler von Strasburg_, p. 42) gives examples of

the extravagant display in dress common among the clergy at that time.

Footnote 93:

The substance of this dialogue will be found in the works of Heinrich

Suso (ed. Melchior Diepenbrock, Regensburg, 1837), Book iii. chap.

vii. pp. 310-14. Suso represents himself as holding such a

conversation with ‘ein vernunftiges Bilde, das war subtil an seinen

Worten und war aber ungeübt an seinen Werken und war ausbrüchig in

florirender Reichheit,’ as he sat lost in meditation on a summer’s

day. Atherton has ventured to clothe this ideal of the enthusiast of

those times in more than a couple of yards of flesh and blood, and

supposed Arnstein to have picked up divinity enough in his

sermon-hearing to be able to reason with him just as Suso does in his

book.

The wandering devotees, who at this time abounded throughout the whole

region between the Netherlands and Switzerland, approximated, some of

them, to Eckart’s portraiture of a religious teacher, others to Suso’s

ideal of the Nameless Wild. In some cases the enthusiasm of the same

man may have approached now the nobler and now the baser type.