CHAPTER IX.

Di Meistere sprechen von zwein antlitzen der sêle. Daz eine antlitze

ist gekart in dise werlt. Daz ander antlitze ist gekart di richte in

got. In diseme antlitze lûchtet und brennet got êwiclîchen, der

mensche wizzes oder enwizzes nicht.[178]—HERMANN VON FRITZLAR.

KATE. I should like to know what became of our mysterious ‘Layman,’

Nicholas of Basle.

ATHERTON. He lived on many years, the hidden ubiquitous master-spirit of

the Friends of God; expending his wealth in restless rapid travels to

and fro, and in aiding the adherents of the good cause; suddenly

appearing, now in the north and now in the south, to encourage and

exhort, to seek out new disciples and to confirm the old; and again

vanishing as suddenly, concealing his abode even from his spiritual

children, while sending them frequent tracts and letters by his trusty

messenger Ruprecht; growing ever more sad and earnest under repeated

visions of judgment overhanging Christendom; studying the Scriptures

(which had opened his eyes to so much of Romanist error) somewhat after

the old Covenanter fashion, with an indiscriminate application of Old

Testament history, and a firm belief that his revelations were such as

prophets and apostles enjoyed,—till, at last, at the close of the

century, he was overtaken at Vienna by the foe he had so often baffled,

and the Inquisition yet more ennobled a noble life by the fiery gift of

martyrdom.[179]

GOWER. I can well imagine what a basilisk eye the Inquisition must have

kept on these lay-priests—these indefatigable writers and preachers to

the people in the forbidden vernacular—these Friends of God, Beghards,

and Waldenses; and on those audacious Ishmaels, the Brethren of the Free

Spirit, most of all. I fancy I see it, lurking always on the edge of any

light, watching and watching, as they say the Indian lizard does,

crouched in the shadow just outside the circle of light a lamp makes

upon the ceiling, to snatch up with its arrowy tongue the moths which

fly toward the fascinating brightness.

WILLOUGHBY. And do not let us forget that even those pantheistic

Brethren of the Free Spirit, with all their coarseness and violence of

exaggeration, held at least some little truth, and might plead a large

excuse. If some of them broke blindly through all restraint, they made

at any rate a breach in priestcraft better used by better men.—

GOWER.—Just as the track where buffaloes have made their huge crashing

way through the forest, has often guided the hunter of the backwoods.

ATHERTON. We must not think that the efforts of such a man as Nicholas

were fruitless, whatever the apparent success of his persecutors.—

GOWER.—Though history has paid him too little attention, and though the

Inquisition paid him too much. How I love to find examples of that

consoling truth that no well-meant effort for God and man can ever

really die—that the relics of vanished, vanquished endeavours are

gathered up and conserved, and by the spiritual chemistry of Providence

transformed into a new life in a new age, so that the dead rise, and

mortality puts on immortality. The lessons such men scattered, though

they might seem to perish, perpetuated a hidden life till Luther’s

time;—like the dead leaves about the winter tree, they preserved the

roots from the teeth of the frost, and covered a vitality within, which

was soon to blossom on every bough in the sunshine of the Reformation.

ATHERTON. Our fourteenth century, so full of mysticism both in East and

West, has some other mystical products to show, principally of the

visionary, theurgic species. There is St. Brigitta, a widow of rank,

leaving her Swedish pine forests to visit Palestine, and after honouring

with a pilgrimage every shrine and relic in southern Europe, fixing her

residence at Rome, to the great pecuniary advantage of the faithful

there. She writes a discourse on the Blessed Virgin at the dictation of

an angel, who visited her punctually for the purpose: indites bombastic

invocations to the eyes, ears, hair, chin, &c., of the Saviour; and

_ditto_ to _ditto_ of the Virgin; and, what was not quite so bad, gives

to the world a series of revelations and prophecies, in which the vices

of popes and prelates are lashed unsparingly, and threatened with speedy

judgment.[180]

WILLOUGHBY. It would be interesting to trace this series of reformatory

prophets, male and female. From the twelfth to the close of the

fifteenth century there is a succession of them, called forth by the

hideousness of ecclesiastical corruption—Hildegard, Joachim, Brigitta,

Savonarola.

GOWER. Do not forget Dante.

ATHERTON. You hear them all executing variations, plaintive or

indignant, menacing or despairing, on the old and never antiquated

theme—

Curia Romana non petit ovem sine lanâ,

Dantes exaudit, non dantibus ostia claudit.

GOWER. And, to silence these complaints, the Church found inquisitors

and censors of service, but most of all—her pattern children—those

enthusiasts whose painful labours were employed to quiet the croaking,

much as the lord in old feudal times would often exercise his right of

compelling a vassal to spend a night or two in beating the waters of the

ponds, to stop the frog-chorus there, and procure his master an easy

sleep. Obedient enthusiasm toils all night that cardinals may snore.

ATHERTON. Angela de Foligni, who made herself miserable—I must say

something the converse of flourished—about the beginning of the

fourteenth century, was a fine model pupil of this sort, a genuine

daughter of St. Francis. Her mother, her husband, her children dead, she

is alone and sorrowful. She betakes herself to violent devotion—falls

ill—suffers incessant anguish from a complication of disorders—has

rapturous consolations and terrific temptations—is dashed in a moment

from a seat of glory above the empyrean to a depth so low that the floor

of hell might be its zenith. She tells us how, on her way to Assisi, the

Saviour addressed her, called her his love, his sweet, his joy; and

manifested himself within her soul as he had never done to evangelist or

apostle. On one occasion, her face shone with a divine glory, her eyes

were as flaming lamps; on another, a star proceeded from her side, broke

into a thousand beautiful colours, and glided upwards into the sky.[181]

WILLOUGHBY. A notable example of mystical pyrotechny.

ATHERTON. Her etherialised olfactories were gratified by odours of

indescribable fragrance; and to her exalted taste, the consecrated wafer

became almost insupportably delicious. Visions and ecstasies by scores

are narrated from her lips in the wretched Latin of Arnold the Minorite.

All is naught! The flattest and most insipid reading in the world—from

first to last a repetition of the old stock phrase, ‘feelings more

readily imagined than described.’ She concludes every account by saying,

‘No words can describe what I enjoyed;’ and each rapture is declared to

surpass in bliss all the preceding.

LOWESTOFFE. Enough! enough!

ATHERTON. Catharine of Siena——

WILLOUGHBY. No more, pray.

ATHERTON. Only this one. Catharine of Siena closes the century. She is a

specimen somewhat less wretched, of this delirious mysticism. Her

visions began when she was six years old, and a solemn betrothal to our

Lord was celebrated, with ring and vow, not very long after. She

travelled through the cities and hamlets of Italy, teaching, warning,

expostulating, and proclaiming to assembled crowds the wonders she had

seen in heaven and hell during that trance in which all had thought her

dead. She journeyed from Florence to Avignon, and back to Florence

again, to reconcile the Pope and Italy; she thrust herself between the

spears of Guelph and Ghibelline—a whole Mediæval Peace-Society in her

woman’s heart—and when she sank at last, saw all her labour swept away,

as the stormy waters of the Great Schism closed over her head.[182]

GOWER. What a condemning comment on the pretended tender mercies of

the Church are those narratives which Rome delights to parade of the

sufferings, mental and bodily, which her devotees were instructed to

inflict upon themselves! I am reminded of the thirsting mule, which

has, in some countries, to strike with its hoof among the spines of

the cactus, and drink, with lamed foot and bleeding lips, the few

drops of milk which ooze from the broken thorns. Affectionate

suffering natures came to Rome for comfort; but her scanty kindness

is only to be drawn with anguish from the cruel sharpness of

asceticism. The worldly, the audacious, escape easily; but these

pliant excitable temperaments, so anxiously in earnest, may be made

useful. The more dangerous, frightful, or unnatural their

performances, the more profit for their keepers. Men and women are

trained by torturing processes to deny their nature, and then they

are exhibited to bring grist to the mill—like birds and beasts

forced to postures and services against the laws of their being—like

those who must perform perilous feats on ropes or with lions,

nightly hazarding their lives to fill the pockets of a manager. The

self-devotion of which Rome boasts so much is a self-devotion she

has always thus made the most of for herself. Calculating men, who

have thought only of the interest of the priesthood, have known well

how best to stimulate and to display the spasmodic movements of a

brainsick disinterestedness. I have not the shadow of a doubt that,

once and again, some priest might have been seen, with cold grey

eye, endeavouring to do a stroke of diplomacy by means of the

enthusiastic Catharine, making the fancied ambassadress of heaven in

reality the tool of a schemer. Such unquestionable virtues as these

visionaries may some of them have possessed, cannot be fairly set

down to the credit of the Church, which has used them all for

mercenary or ambitious purposes, and infected them everywhere with a

morbid character. Some of these mystics, floating down the great

ecclesiastical current of the Middle Age, appear to me like the

trees carried away by the inundation of some mighty tropical river.

They drift along the stream, passive, lifeless, broken; yet they are

covered with gay verdure, the aquatic plants hang and twine about

the sodden timber and the draggled leaves, the trunk is a sailing

garden of flowers. But the adornment is not that of nature—it is the

decoration of another and a strange element; the roots are in the

air; the boughs, which should be full of birds, are in the flood,

covered by its alien products, swimming side by side with the

alligator. So has this priestcraft swept its victims from their

natural place and independent growth, to clothe them in their

helplessness, with a false spiritual adornment, neither scriptural

nor human, but ecclesiastical—the native product of that

overwhelming superstition which has subverted and enslaved their

nature. The Church of Rome takes care that while simple souls think

they are cultivating Christian graces, they shall be forging their

own chains; that their attempts to honour God shall always

dishonour, because they disenfranchise themselves. To be humble, to

be obedient, to be charitable, under such direction, is to be

contentedly ignorant, pitiably abject, and notoriously swindled.

ATHERTON. Strong language, Lionel,—yet not unjust to the spirit of the

Romanist system. The charity which pities the oppressed is bound to

denounce the oppressor.

WILLOUGHBY. _Rem acu tetigisti._ If you call priestcraft by smooth

names, your spurious charity to the tyrant is uncharitableness to the

slave. It is sickening to hear the unctuous talk with which now-a-days

ultra-liberalism will sometimes stretch out a hand to spiritual tyranny.

ATHERTON. Not surprising. It is just like the sentimental sympathy got

up for some notorious criminal, which forgets the outrage to society and

the sufferings of the innocent, in concern for the interesting offender.

And now let us bid adieu to that fourteenth century which has occupied

us so long. I shall only afflict you with one more paper,—to-morrow,

Lowestoffe, if we don’t go to Hawksfell. Some notes I have drawn up on

the contemporary Persian mysticism.

WILLOUGHBY. Stay—do not let us forget that little book, so much read in

the fifteenth century, and praised and edited by Luther,—the _German

Theology_.[183] I have read it with great interest. It seems to me to

stand alone as an attempt to systematise the speculative element in the

more orthodox mysticism of the age.

ATHERTON. We may call it a summary of Tauler’s doctrine, without his

fancy and vehement appeal; it is a treatise philosophic in its calmness,

deservedly popular for its homely, idiomatic diction. What we were

saying about Tauler applies substantially to the _Theologia Germanica_.

MRS. ATHERTON. I have been waiting to hear something about Thomas à

Kempis,[184]—certainly the best known of all your mystics.

ATHERTON. Right. Who could forget the comforter of the fifteenth

century? It is curious to compare the third book of his _Imitation of

Christ_, with its dialogue between Christ and the disciple, and Suso’s

conversation, in his _Book of the Eternal Wisdom_, between Wisdom and

the Servant.

GOWER. There is less genius, less _abandon_, if one may so say, about

Thomas.

ATHERTON. Decidedly. That original and daring spirit which carried

mysticism to such a height in the fourteenth century, could not survive

in the fifteenth,—an age tending towards consolidation and equilibrium,

bent on the softening down of extremes. Suso, a poet as much as an

ascetic, is continually quitting his cell to admire nature and to mix

with men. He mingles speculation borrowed from his master, Eckart, with

the luxuriant play of his own inexhaustible fancy. Thomas à Kempis is

exclusively the ascetic. His mysticism ranges in a narrower sphere.

Hence, to a great extent, his wider influence. He abjures everything

that belongs to the thought of the philosopher or the fine feeling of

the artist. He appeals neither to the intellect nor to the

imagination—simply to the heart. He could be understood without

learning, appreciated without taste, and so thousands, in castle and in

cloister, prayed and wept over his earnest page. ‘See!’ said he, ‘this

life is filled with crosses.’ And multitudes, in misery, or fear of

misery, made answer, ‘It is true.’—‘Then,’ urged the comforter, ‘be

thyself crucified to it, and it cannot harm thee. Cease to have any

care, any aim, any hope or fear, save Christ. Yield thyself, utterly

passive and dead to this life, into his hands who is Lord of a better.’

Then the sufferers dried their tears, and strove hard to forget time and

self in contemplating Christ.

GOWER. And, let us hope, not always quite in vain.

ATHERTON. I have one more name yet upon my list, with which the mediæval

mysticism reaches its conclusion. It is the great Frenchman, Chancellor

Gerson.[185] His figure stands out prominently among the confusions of

the time, half-way between the old age and the new. Up to a certain

point, he is a reformer; beyond it, the enemy of reform. He is active in

the deposition of John XXII., yet he does not hesitate to burn John

Huss. He looks on, with a smile of satisfaction, when the royal

secretaries stab with their penknives the papal bulls, and the rector

tears the insolent parchment into shreds. He sees, half with pity and

half with triumph, the emissaries of the Pope, crowned in mockery with

paper tiaras, and hung with insulting scrolls, dragged through the

streets in a scavenger’s tumbril, to be pilloried by angry Paris. But he

stands aloof in disdain when the University, deserted by the Parliament,

fraternizes with the mob to enforce reform,—when threadbare students

come down from their garrets in the Pays Latin to join the burly

butchers of St. Jacques la Boucherie,—when grave doctors shake hands

with ox-fellers, and Franciscans and White-hoods shout together for the

charter.

WILLOUGHBY. And very wrong he was, too, for those butchers, rough as

they were, were right in the main,—honest, energetic fellows, with good

heads on their shoulders. Could they but have raised money, they would

have saved France. But Gerson would rather be plundered than pay their

tax, and had to hurry down for hiding to the vaults of Notre Dame. I

remember the story. And when the princes came back to power, the

moderates were pillaged like the rest,—and serve them right.

ATHERTON. Yes, the reform demanded was just and moderate, and even the

rioters lost none of their respect for royalty, feeling still in their

rude hearts no little of that chivalrous loyalty which animated Gerson

himself when he bent low before the poor idiot king, and with oriental

reverence exclaimed, ‘O King, live for ever!’ Gerson was a radical in

the Church and a conservative in the State—the antagonist of the

political republicanism, the champion of the ecclesiastical. His

sanguine hopes of peace for his country and of reform for his Church,

were alike doomed to disappointment.

His great work on the theory and practice of mysticism was composed

during the stormy period of his public life. Imagine how happily he

forgot popes and councils, Cabochiens and Armagnacs, during those brief

intervals of quiet which he devoted to the elaboration of a psychology

that should give to mysticism a scientific basis. Nominalist as he was,

and fully conscious of the defects of scholasticism, then tottering to

its fall, he differs little in his results from Richard of St. Victor.

He closes the series of those who have combined mysticism with

scholasticism, and furnishes in himself a summary and critical _resumé_

of all that had previously been accomplished in this direction. He was

desirous at once of making mysticism definite and intelligible, and of

rendering the study of theology as a science more practical, devout, and

scriptural. Hence his opposition to the extravagance of Ruysbroek on the

one side, and to the frigid disputation of the schools on the other. He

essays to define and investigate the nature of ecstasy and rapture. He

even introduces into mysticism that _reflection_ which its very

principle repudiates. He recommends an inductive process, which is to

arrange and compare the phenomena of mysticism as manifest in the

history of saintly men, and thence to determine the true and legitimate

mystical experience, as opposed to the heterodox and the fantastic. He

maintains that man rises to the height of abstract contemplation,

neither by the intellectual machinery of Realism, nor by the flights of

Imagination. If he attempts the first, he becomes a heretic; if the

second, a visionary. The indispensable requisite is what he calls

‘rapturous love.’ Yet even this is knowledge in the truest sense, and

quite compatible with a rational, though impassioned self-consciousness.

His doctrine of union is so temperate and guarded as almost to exclude

him from the genuine mystical fellowship. He has no visions or

exaltations of his own to tell of. Resembling Richard in this respect,

to whom he is so much indebted, he elaborates a system, erects a

tabernacle, and leaves it to others to penetrate to the inmost

sanctuary. Like Bernard, he thinks those arduous and dazzling heights of

devotion are for ‘the harts and climbing goats,’ not for active

practical men such as the Chancellor. Above all, urges this reformer

both of the schoolmen and the mystics, clear your mind of phantasms—do

not mistake the creations of your own imagination for objective

spiritual realities. In other words, ‘Be a mystic, but do not be what

nine mystics out of every ten always have been.’

But now let us have a walk in the garden.

* * * * *

Thither all repaired. They entered the conservatory to look at the

flowers.

‘Which will you have, Mr. Atherton,’ asked Kate, ‘to represent your

mystics? These stiff, apathetic cactuses and aloes, that seem to know no

changes of summer and winter, or these light stemless blossoms, that

send out their delicate roots into the air?’

‘Those Aroideæ, do you mean?’ replied Atherton. ‘I think we must divide

them, and let some mystics have those impassive plants of iron for their

device, while others shall wear the silken filaments of these aërial

flowers that are such pets of yours.’

As they came out, the sun was setting in unusual splendour, and they

stood in the porch to admire it.

‘I was watching it an hour ago,’ said Gower. ‘Then the western sky was

crossed by gleaming lines of silver, with broken streaks of grey and

purple between. It was the funeral pyre not yet kindled, glittering with

royal robe and arms of steel, belonging to the sun-god. Now, see, he has

descended, and lies upon it—the torch is applied, the glow of the great

burning reaches over to the very east. The clouds, to the zenith, are

wreaths of smoke, their volumes ruddily touched beneath by the flame on

the horizon, and those about the sun are like ignited beams in a great

conflagration, now falling in and lost in the radiance, now sending out

fresh shapes of flashing fire: that is not to be painted!’

LOWESTOFFE (_starting_). The swan, I declare! How can he have got out?

That scoundrel, John!

ATHERTON. Never mind. I know what he comes for. He is a messenger from

Lethe, to tell us not to forget good Tauler.

LOWESTOFFE. Lethe! Nonsense.

MRS. ATHERTON. My love, how can you?

ATHERTON. The creature reminded me of an allegorical fancy recorded by

Bacon,—that is all. At the end of the thread of every man’s life there

is a little medal containing his name. Time waits upon the shears, and

as soon as the thread is cut, catches the medals, and carries them to

the river of Lethe. About the bank there are many birds flying up and

down, that will get the medals and carry them in their beak a little

while, and then let them fall into the river. Only there are a few

swans, which, if they get a name, will carry it to a temple, where it is

consecrated. Let the name of Tauler find a swan!

END OF VOL. I.

Footnote 178:

The Masters speak of two faces the soul hath. The one face is turned

towards this world. The other face is turned direct toward God. In

this latter face shineth and gloweth God eternally, whether man is

ware or unaware thereof.

Footnote 179:

Schmidt’s _Tauler_, pp. 205, &c.—Mosheim gives the passage in Nieder

relating the apprehension and death of Nicholas:—‘Acutissimus enim

erat (says this authority) et idcirco manus Inquisitorum diu

evaserat.’—_Mosheim de Beghardis et Beguinabus_, cap. iv. § 42, p.

454.

Footnote 180:

See _Revelationes Selectæ S. Brigittæ_ (Heuser, 1851).—This is a

selection for the edification of good Catholics, and contains

accordingly the most Mariolatrous and least important of her writings.

Rudelbach gives some specimens of her spirited rebuke of papal

iniquity in his _Savonarola_, pp. 300, &c. In her prophetic capacity

she does not hesitate to call the pope a murderer of souls, and to

declare him and his greedy prelates forerunners of Antichrist. She

says,—‘If a man comes to them with four wounds, he goes away with

five.’ Like Savonarola, she placed her sole hope of reform in a

general council.

A common mode of self-mortification with her found an imitator in

Madame Guyon:—the Swede dropped the wax of lighted tapers on her bare

flesh, and carried gentian in her mouth—_Vita_, p. 6. The Frenchwoman

burned herself with hot sealing-wax in the same manner, and chewed a

quid of coloquintida.

The _Revelationes de Vitâ et Passione Jesu Christi et gloriosæ

Virginis_, contain a puerile and profane account of the birth,

childhood, and death of our Lord, in the style of the apocryphal

_Gospel of the Infancy_, professedly conveyed in conversations with

the authoress by the Mother and her Son. The Virgin tells her, in

reference to her Son,—‘quomodo neque aliqua immunditia ascendit super

eum;’ and that his hair was never in a tangle—(nec perplexitas in

capillise jus apparuit).

Footnote 181:

‘_Angela de Foligni._’ See _Beatæ Angelæ Fulginio Visionum et

Instructionum Liber_; (recens. J. H. Lammertz; Cologne, 1851.)—The

account of the wonderful star is given by Arnold in his _Prologue_, p.

12. At one time it is promised by the Lord that the ‘whole Trinity

shall enter into her,’ (capit. xx.); at another, she is transported

into the midst of the Trinity.—(Capit. xxxii.) In chapter after

chapter of monotonous inflation, she wearies and disappoints the

curious reader by declaring her ‘abysses of delectation and

illumination’ altogether unutterable,—such as language profanes rather

than expresses—‘inenarrabiles,’ ‘indicibiles,’ &c. So the miraculous

taste of the host to her favoured palate was not like bread or flesh,

but a ‘sapor sapidissimus,’—like nothing that can be named.—Capit. xl.

The following act of saintship we give in the original, lest in

English it should act on delicate readers as an emetic. She speaks of

herself and a sister ascetic:—‘Lavimus pedes feminarum ibi existentium

pauperum, et manus hominum, et maxime cujusdam leprosi, qui habebat

manus valde fœtidas et marcidas et præpeditas et corruptas; _et

bibimus de illâ loturâ_. Tantam autem dulcedinem sensimus in illo

potu, quod per totam viam venimus in magnâ suavitate, et videbatur

mihi per omnia quod ego gustassem mirabilem dulcedinem, quantum ad

suavitatem quam ibi inveni. Et quia quædam squamula illarum plagarum

erat interposita in gutture meo, conata sum ad diglutiendum eam, sicut

si communicassem, donec deglutivi eam. Unde tantam suavitatem inveni

in hoc, quod eam non possum exprimere.’—Capit. l. p. 176.

In her ‘Instructions,’ she lays it down as a rule that none can ever

be deceived in the visions and manifestations vouchsafed them who are

truly poor in spirit,—who have rendered themselves as ‘dead and

putrid’ into the hands of God. (Capp. liv. lv.) She says that when God

manifests Himself to the soul, ‘it sees Him, without bodily form,

indeed, but more distinctly than one man can see another man, for the

eyes of the soul behold a spiritual plenitude, not a corporeal,

whereof I can say nothing, since both words and imagination fail

here.’ (Capit. lii. p. 192.) Angela died in 1309.

Footnote 182:

‘_Catharine of Siena._’ Görres gives a short account of her in his

Introduction to Diepenbrock’s edition of _Suso_, p. 96.

Footnote 183:

The theology of this remarkable little book is substantially the same

with that already familiar to us in the sermons of Tauler. Luther,

writing to Spalatin, and praising Tauler’s theology, sends with his

letter what he calls an epitome thereof,—cujus totius velut epitomen

ecce hic tibi mitto. (_Epp. De Wette_, No. xxv.) He refers, there can

be little doubt, to his edition of the _Deutsche Theologie_, which

came out that year.

Footnote 184:

See, especially, the twelfth chapter of the second book, _On the

Necessity of bearing the Cross_. Compare Michelet’s somewhat overdrawn

picture of the effects of the _Imitation_ in his _History of France_.

The _Ignitum cum Deo Soliloquium_ of Gerlacus Petrus is a contemporary

treatise belonging to the same school. (Comp. capp. xxxix. and xxvi.;

ed. Strange, 1849.) It is less popular, less impassioned than the

_Imitation_, and more thoroughly impregnated with the spirit of

mysticism. Gerlach would seem to have studied Suso: in one place he

imitates his language. The cast of his imagery, as well as the

prominence given to mystical phraseology, more peculiar to the

Germans, shows that he addresses himself to an advanced and

comparatively esoteric circle.—Comp. capp. xxii, xxiv, p. 78.

Footnote 185:

‘_Gerson._‘—See an article by Liebner (Gerson’s _Mystische Theologie_)

in the _Theologische Studien und Kritiken_; 1835, ii.

HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS

VOL. II.

CONTENTS OF VOL. II.

BOOK VII.—PERSIAN MYSTICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGE.

CHAPTER I.

The Sufis; their Mystical Poetry 3

Mystical Poetry in the West; Angelus Silesius 5

R. W. Emerson 8

CHAPTER II.

Rabia 10

The Oriental and the Western Mysticism compared 12

BOOK VIII.—THEOSOPHY IN THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION.

CHAPTER I.

The Position of the Mystics as regards the Reformation 31

The Advantage of the Ground occupied by Luther 32

Menacing Character of the Revolutionary Mysticism 35

The Anabaptists of Munster 37

CHAPTER II.

Luther and the Mystics 41

The Prophets of Zwickau 44

Carlstadt 44

Sebastian Frank 47

Schwenkfeld 50

Weigel 51

CHAPTER III.

Mysticism and Science 53

The Cabbala 55

Nature studied by the Light of Grace 57

Alchemy 58

Theurgy 59

CHAPTER IV.

Cornelius Agrippa 61

The Science of Sympathies 63

Redemption, Natural and Spiritual 67

CHAPTER V.

Theophrastus Paracelsus 71

Signatures 76

Theological Chemistry 77

CHAPTER VI.

Jacob Behmen and his _Aurora_ 79

Illumination 82

Troubles 86

CHAPTER VII.

Jacob Behmen, his Materials, and Style of Workmanship 90

The Theory of Development by Contraries 92

The Three Gates 95

The _Aurora_ 97

CHAPTER VIII.

Jacob Behmen—Sketch and Estimate of his System 103

The Mysterium Magnum 104

The Seven Fountain-Spirits 104

Examination of his Doctrine concerning the Origin of Evil 109

The Fall 115

Merits of his Theosophy 119

CHAPTER IX.

The Rosicrucians 128

Romance and Reality 129

Valentine Andreä and his _Fama Fraternitatis_ 134

Secret Societies 136

The Creatures of the Elements 138

Magical Words 140

Pordage and the Philadelphian Society 142

Joanna Leade 144

BOOK IX.—THE SPANISH MYSTICS.

CHAPTER I.

Neo-Platonism revived in Italy 147

Its Weakness, opposed to the Reformation 148

The Counter-reformation 150

Headed by Spain 150

Character of its Mysticism 151

St. Theresa 153

Her Autobiography 156

The Director 158

Visions 160

CHAPTER II.

Theresa’s Four Degrees of Prayer 167

Her Quietism 171

CHAPTER III.

St. John of the Cross 182

His Asceticism 183

His Mystical Night 185

More elevated Character of his Mysticism 193

BOOK X.—QUIETISM.

CHAPTER I.

Queen Quietude 201

The Doctrine of ‘Pure Love’ discussed 205

Madame Guyon 207

Her Unhappy Marriage 208

The Kingdom of God within us 211

Efforts to Annihilate Self 213

Interior Attraction 216

Madame Guyon and the Romish Saints 218

Confessors and Small-pox 222

The Seven Years of Famine 224

Self-loss in God 227

Mistakes concerning the Nature of Spiritual Influence 230

Reformatory Character of her Mysticism 233

Activity and Persecution 234

CHAPTER II.

The Quietist Controversy 242

Molinos 242

Madame Guyon at Paris 245

St. Cyr 248

Fénélon and Madame Guyon 250

Signs of Danger 252

The Conferences at Issy 255

The Quietism of Fénélon 258

His Critical Position 262

Writes the _Maxims of the Saints_ 263

Appeals to Rome 265

Bossuet’s _Account of Quietism_ 268

Fénélon’s _Reply_ 269

Infallibility submits to Louis 271

Fénélon submits to Infallibility 272

The Controversy reviewed 273

Mysticism in France and in Germany 275

CHAPTER III.

Disinterested Love 283

Antoinette Bourignon 286

Peter Poiret 287

Madame de Krüdener 288

BOOK XI.—MYSTICISM IN ENGLAND.

CHAPTER I.

Britain poor in Mystics 301

George Fox 303

The Early Friends 305

Asceticism 309

Doctrine of the Universal Light 309

CHAPTER II.

Doctrine of Perceptible Guidance 313

The English Platonists 315

Henry More; Norris of Bemerton 315

BOOK XII.—EMANUEL SWEDENBORG.

CHAPTER I.

Comprehensive Character of his Mysticism 321

Doctrine of Correspondences 323

Stands alone among the Mystics 326

CHAPTER II.

His _Memorable Relations_ 329

His Heaven and Hell 330

Moderation of his Doctrine concerning Spiritual Influence 331

Defects of his Doctrine concerning the Work of Christ 332

The Church of the New Jerusalem 335

BOOK XIII.—CONCLUSION.

CHAPTER I.

Mystical Tendencies of our own Time 340

The Faith-Philosophy 341

Schleiermacher 341

The Romantic School 343

Novalis 348

Revival of antiquated Error 350

The Modern Mysticism a Repetition of the Old 351

The Services of Mysticism 352

Its Dangers 352

Its Lessons 356

CHAPTER II.

Mysticism fostered by the Supposition of a Separate Religious

Faculty 361

Reason, how far amenable to Understanding 362

Historic Reality not opposed to Spirituality 365

CHAPTER III.

A Vision of Mystics 368

BOOK THE SEVENTH

PERSIAN MYSTICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGE

CHAPTER I.

Also, there is in God

Which being seen would end us with a shock

Of pleasure. It may be that we should die

As men have died of joy, all mortal powers

Summed up and finished in a single taste

Of superhuman bliss; or, it may be

That our great latent love, leaping at once

A thousand years in stature—like a stone

Dropped to the central fires, and at a touch

Loosed into vapour—should break up the terms

Of separate being, and as a swift rack,

Dissolving into heaven, we should go back

To God.

DOBELL.

The next day was fine, as well it might be after such a sunset; to

Hawksfell all the party went, and there was no reading. But on the

following (sunnier yet, if possible) they assembled immediately after

breakfast in the summer-house, Lowestoffe not excepted, for even he grew

inactive with the heat, and declared himself content to lie on the grass

by the hour. Atherton congratulated his hearers that they would not for

some time be troubled with more lucubrations of his—not till they came,

in due course, to Madame Guyon. For Willoughby was to take up Jacob

Behmen, and Gower, who possessed (as the fruit of an artist’s tour) some

acquaintance with Spanish, St. Theresa. Then, unrolling his manuscript,

he began.

THE SUFIS, OR MYSTICAL POETRY IN THE EAST AND WEST.

Among all the religions of civilized man, it would be difficult to

find one more unfriendly to the growth of mysticism than that of

Mohammed. Yet in no religion has mysticism spread more widely or

raised its head with greater pride. The cold rationalism of the

Koran, its ritual minutiæ, its formal self-righteousness, its

prohibition of the monastic order,—all combined to warn the mystic

from the religious domain of the Crescent. But stronger than

Mohammedan orthodoxy or the dying commands of the Prophet were the

wants of the human heart and the spirit of an eastern people. The

generation which laid Mohammed in the holy earth of Medina saw

monastic institutions arise and multiply on every side. Mystical

interpretation could with ease elude the less favourable passages of

the Koran, and turn others into a warrant. With a single touch of

this dexterous pencil, the mystic could make the Prophet’s

portraiture all he desired, and turn the frown into a smile. The

fatalism of the creed of Islam would furnish a natural basis for the

holy indifference of Quietism.

Each succeeding century of the Hegira was found more abundant than

the last in a class of men who revolted against the letter in the

name of the spirit, and who aspired to a converse and a unity with

God such as the Koran deemed unattainable on this side heaven. The

names of the saints and martyrs, the poets and philosophers, of

mysticism, are among the brightest in the hagiography and the

literature of the Mohammedan world. The achievements of the former

class are adorned with legendary extravagances such as those with

which the Prophet delighted to invest himself. The philosophy of the

latter (whether sung or said) was not a little aided, in its contest

with rigid orthodoxy, by the Grecian learning of that Alexandria

which fell, in the first outbreak of Moslem zeal, before the hosts

of Amrou. In later times (under the names of Plato and of Aristotle)

mysticism and method did battle with each other, in the East as in

the West,—at Shiraz, at Bagdad, or at Cordova, even as in the

University of Paris or the academies of Italy.

The term Sufism appears to be a general designation for the mystical

asceticism of the Mohammedan faith. The Sufis cannot be said to

constitute a distinct sect, or to embrace any particular

philosophical system. Their varieties are endless; their only common

characteristics a claim of some sort to a superhuman commerce with

the Supreme,—mystical rapture, mystical union, mystical identity, or

theurgic powers;—and a life of ascetic observance. The name is given

to mystics of every shade, from the sage to the quack, from poets

like Saadi or philosophers like Algazzali, to the mendicant dervise

or the crazy fanatic.

Persia has been for several centuries the great seat of Sufism. For

two hundred years (during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of

our era) the descendants of a Sufi occupied the throne,—governing,

however, as may be supposed, not like mystics, but as men of the

world.[186] It is with Sufism as exhibited principally by the Sufi

poets of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, that I propose now

to occupy your attention.

It will be found worth our while, as we proceed, to compare the

mystical poetry of the East and West. Oriental mysticism has become

famous by its poets; and into poetry it has thrown all its force and

fire. The mysticism of the West has produced prophecies and

interpretations of prophecy; soliloquies, sermons, and treatises of

divinity;—it has found solace in autobiography, and breathed out its

sorrow in hymns;—it has essayed, in earnest prose, to revive and to

reform the sleeping Church;—but it has never elaborated great poems.

In none of the languages of Europe has mysticism achieved the

success which crowned it in Persia, and prevailed to raise and rule

the poetic culture of a nation. Yet the occidental mysticism has not

been wholly lacking in poets of its own order. The seventeenth

century can furnish one, and the nineteenth another,—Angelus

Silesius and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The latest research has succeeded only in deciding who Angelus

Silesius was _not_. Some Roman Catholic priest or monk, assuming the

name of Angelus, did, in the seventeenth century, send forth sundry

hymns and religious poems,—among others, one most euphuistically

entitled _The Cherubic Wanderer_. The author of this book has been

generally identified, on grounds altogether inadequate, with a

contemporary named John Scheffler,—a renegade from Jacob Behmen to

the Pope. Suffice it to say that no two men could be more unlike

than the virulent fagotty-minded pervert Scheffler, and the

contemplative pantheistic Angelus—be he who he may.[187]

_The Cherubic Wanderer_ is a collection of religious epigrams or

rhyming sentences, most of them smart and pithy enough as to

expression, not a few as destitute of sense as they all are of

poetry. The Wanderer travelled a little way into the eighteenth

century, and then, lighting upon one of those oblivious arbours so

fatal to pilgrims, sat down, and slept long. A few years ago some

Romanticist littérateurs of Germany woke him up, and announced to

the world, with much sounding of brass and tinkling of cymbals, that

they had resuscitated a paragon of saintship and philosophy.

The Silesian’s book reiterates the customary utterances of

mysticism. But a harsher tone is audible, and the doctrines with

which we are familiar appear in a more startling and paradoxical

form. The more dangerous elements are intensified. Pantheism is

latent no longer. Angelus loves to play at a kind of intellectual

seesaw with the terms Finite and Infinite, and their subject or

kindred words. Now mounts one side, now the other, of the restless

antithesis. Each factor is made to share with its rival every

attribute of height or lowness. His favourite style of talking may

run as follows:—‘I cannot do without God, nor He without me; He is

as small as I, and I as great as He:—let time be to thee as

eternity, and eternity as time; the All as nothing, and nothing as

the All; then thou hast solved life’s problem, and art one with God,

above limit and distinction.’ We matter-of-fact folk feel

irresistibly inclined to parody such an oracle, and say,—‘Let whole

and part, black and white, be convertible terms;—let thy head be to

thee as thy heels, and thy heels as thy head; and thou hast

transcended the conditions of vulgar men, and lapsed to Limbo

irretrievably.’ Silesius, as a good churchman, repudiates, of

course, the charge of pantheism. He declares that the dissolution in

Deity he contemplates does not necessitate the loss of personality,

or confound the Maker and the made. His distinction is

distinguishable ‘as water is in water.’ He appeals to the strong

language he hunts out from Bernard, Tauler, and Ruysbroek. But the

cold-blooded epigram cannot claim the allowance due to the fervid

sermon or the often rhapsodical volume of devotion. Extravagant as

the Sufi, he cannot plead like him a spiritual intoxication.

Crystals and torrents must have separate laws. And which, moreover,

of the mystical masters to whom Angelus refers us would have indited

such presumptuous doggrel as this?

God in my nature is involved,

As I in the divine;

I help to make his being up,

As much as he does mine.

As much as I to God owes God to me

His blissfulness and self-sufficiency.

I am as rich as God, no grain of dust

That is not mine too,—share with me he must.

More than his love unto himself,

God’s love to me hath been;

If more than self I too love him,

We twain are quits, I ween.[188]

On the other hand, there are many terse and happy couplets and

quatrains in the _Wanderer_, which express the better spirit of

mysticism. Angelus insists constantly on the vanity of mere

externals,—the necessity of a Christ formed within, as opposed to a

dead, unsanctifying faith,—the death of self-will, as the seat of

all sin,—the reality of the hell or heaven already wrought in time

by sin or holiness. These were the maxims and ejaculations which

religious minds, mystically inclined, found so edifying. The

arrogant egotheism of some passages they took in another sense, or

deemed the sense beyond them. Moreover, the high-flown devotion

affected by Rome has always familiarized her children with

expressions which (as Thomas Fuller has it) ‘do knock at the door of

blasphemy, though not always with intent to enter in thereat.’

The second representative of the West, who must assist towards our

comparative estimate of pantheistic mysticism in its poetical form,

is Mr. Emerson, the American essayist. Whether in prose or verse he

is chief singer of his time at the high court of Mysticism. He

belongs more to the East than to the West—true brother of those

Sufis with whose doctrine he has so much in common. Luxuriant in

fancy, impulsive, dogmatic, darkly oracular, he does not reason. His

majestic monologue may not be interrupted by a question. His

inspiration disdains argument. He delights to lavish his varied and

brilliant resources upon some defiant paradox—and never more than

when that paradox is engaged in behalf of an optimism extreme enough

to provoke another Voltaire to write another _Candide_. He displays

in its perfection the fantastic incoherence of the ‘God-intoxicated’

man.

In comparing Emerson with the Sufis, it may be as well to state that

he does not believe in Mohammed and receive the Koran in a manner

which would satisfy an orthodox Mussulman. Yet he does so (if words

have meaning) much after the same fashion in which he believes in

Christ and receives the Bible. Mohammed and Jesus are both, to him,

extraordinary religious geniuses—the Bible and the Koran both

antiquated books. He looks with serene indifference on all the forms

of positive religion. He would agree perfectly with those Sufis who

proclaimed the difference between the Church and the Mosque of

little moment. The distance between the Crescent and the Cross is,

with him, one of degree—their dispute rather a question of

individual or national taste than a controversy between a religion

with evidence and a religion without.

In the nineteenth century, and in America, the doctrine of emanation

and the ascetic practice of the East can find no place. But the

pantheism of Germany is less elevated than that of Persia, in

proportion as it is more developed. The tendency of the latter is to

assign reality only to God; the tendency of the former is to assign

reality only to the mind of man. The Sufi strove to lose humanity in

Deity; Emerson dissolves Deity in humanity. The orientals are nearer

to theism, and the moderns farther from it, than they sometimes

seem. That primal Unity which the Sufi, like the Neo-Platonist,

posits at the summit of all things, to ray forth the world of

Appearance, may possibly retain some vestige of personality. But the

Over-Soul of Emerson, whose organs of respiration are men of genius,

can acquire personality only in the individual man. The Persian

aspired to reach a divinity above him by self-conquest; the American

seeks to realize a divinity within him by self-will.

Self-annihilation is the watchword of the one; self-assertion that

of the other.

Footnote 186:

Malcolm’s _Persia_, vol. ii., p. 383.

Footnote 187:

See Schrader’s _Angelus Silesius und seine Mystik_; Halle, 1853. This

author shows, that the supposition identifying Scheffler with Angelus

(copied too readily by one writer from another) may be traced up to a

source of very slight authority. Scheffler repudiated mysticism after

entering the Romish communion. Furious polemical treatises by

Scheffler, and sentimental religious poems by Angelus appeared

contemporaneously during a considerable interval. Had Scheffler

published anything mystical during his controversy, his Protestant

antagonists would not have failed to charge him with it. With

Scheffler the Church is everything. In the _Wanderer_ of Angelus the

word scarcely occurs. The former lives in externalisms; the latter

covets escape from them. The one is an angry bigot; the other, for a

Romanist, serenely latitudinarian. Characteristics so opposite, urges

Dr. Schrader, could not exist in the same man at the same time.

The epithet ‘_Cherubic_’ indicates the more speculative character of

the book; as contrasted, in the language of the mystics, with the

devotion of feeling and passion—_seraphic_ love.

Footnote 188:

_Cherubinischer Wandersmann_, i. 100, 9, 18; Schrader, p. 28.

CHAPTER II.

Und so lang du das nicht hast

Dieses: Stirb und werde!

Bist du nur ein trüber Gast

Auf der dunkeln Erde.[189]

GOETHE.

‘Let us proceed, then,’ resumed Atherton, smoothing his manuscript, ‘on

our Persian expedition. Dr. Tholuck, with his German translation, shall

act as interpreter, and we may pause now and then on our way to listen

to the deliverances of the two men of vision who accompany us from

Breslau and from Boston.’

The first century of the Hegira has scarcely expired when a

mysticism, strikingly similar to that of Madame Guyon, is seen to

arise spontaneously in the devout ardours of a female saint named

Rabia.[190] There is the same straining after indifference and

self-abnegation—after a love absolutely disinterested—after a

devotion beyond language and above means.

By the sick-bed of Rabia stood two holy men. One of them said, ‘The

prayers of that man are not sincere who refuses to bear the

chastening strokes of the Lord.’ The other went beyond him, saying,

‘He is not sincere who does not rejoice in them.’ Rabia, detecting

something of self in that very joy, surpassed them both as she

added, ‘He is not sincere who does not, beholding his Lord, become

totally unconscious of them.’ The Mohammedan _Lives of the Saints_

records that, on another occasion, when questioned concerning the

cause of a severe illness, she replied, ‘I suffered myself to think

on the delights of Paradise, and therefore my Lord hath punished

me.’ She was heard to exclaim, ‘What is the Kaaba to me? I need God

only.’ She declared herself the spouse of Heaven,—described her will

and personality as lost in God. When asked how she had reached this

state, she made the very answer we have heard a German mystic

render, ‘I attained it when everything which I had found I lost

again in God.’ When questioned as to the mode, she replied, ‘Thou,

Hassan, hast found Him by reason and through means; I immediately,

without mode or means.’

The seeds of Sufism are here. This mystical element was fostered to

a rapid growth through succeeding centuries, in the East as in the

West, by the natural reaction of religious fervour against

Mohammedan polemics and Mohammedan scholasticism.

In the ninth century of our era, Sufism appears divided between two

distinguished leaders, Bustami and Juneid. The former was notorious

chiefly for the extravagance of his mystical insanity. The men of

genius who afterwards made the name of Sufism honourable, and the

language of its aspiration classical, shrank from such coarse

excess. It was not enough for Bustami to declare that the

recognition of our personal existence was an idolatry, the worst of

crimes. It was not enough for him to maintain that when man adores

God, God adores himself. He claimed such an absorption in his

pantheistic deity as identified him with all the power, the wisdom,

and the goodness of the universe. He would say, ‘I am a sea without

bottom, without beginning, without end. I am the throne of God, the

word of God. I am Gabriel, Michael, Israfil; I am Abraham, Moses,

Jesus.’

If Epiphanius is to be believed, the Messalians were a sect

chargeable with the very same folly. If asked, he says, concerning a

patriarch, a prophet, an angel, or Christ, they would reply, ‘I am

that patriarch, that prophet, that angel; I am Christ.’

A reference to Emerson’s Essay on History renders such professions

perfectly credible. Bustami and the Messalians could not have made

them in the literal, but (by anticipation) in the Emersonian sense.

They believed, with him, that ‘there is one mind common to all

individual men.’ They find in him their interpreter, when he says,

‘Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or

can be done, for this is the only sovereign agent.’ Emerson couches

their creed in modern rhymes, as he sings exultant,—

I am owner of the sphere,

Of the seven stars and the solar year,

Of Cæsar’s hand and Plato’s brain,

Of Lord Christ’s heart, and Shakspeare’s strain.

In the spirit of the same philosophy, Angelus Silesius hints at the

possibility of such an empire. He reminds his readers that there is

no greatness which makes the glory of the past that may not be

realized by themselves in the present. Thus he asks—

Dost prize alone King Solomon as wisest of the wise?

Thou also canst be Solomon, and all his wisdom thine.[191]

But what is only potential with him is claimed as actual by mystical

brethren bolder yet than he.

The first endeavour of the Sufi (as of so many Christian mystics) is

to achieve that simplifying, purifying process which shall remove

from the mind everything earthly and human—all its creaturely

accidents, and reduce it to that abstract essence which mirrors

Deity, and is itself ultimately divine. An apologue in the Mesnevi

of Jelaleddin Rumi (a Sufi poet who wrote in the first half of our

thirteenth century) teaches this doctrine quite in the oriental

manner.

The Greeks and the Chinese dispute before a certain sultan as to

which of the two nations is the more skilful in the art of

decoration. The sultan assigns to the rival painters two structures,

facing each other, on which they shall exercise their best ability,

and determine the question of precedence by the issue:—

The Chinese ask him for a thousand colours,

All that they ask he gives right royally;

And every morning from his treasure-house

A hundred sorts are largely dealt them out.

The Greeks despise all colour as a stain—

Effacing every hue with nicest care.

Brighter and brighter shines their polished front,

More dazzling, soon, than gleams the floor of heaven.

This hueless sheen is worth a thousand dyes,—

This is the moon—they but her cloudy veil;

All that the cloud is bright or golden with

Is but the lending of the moon or sun.

And now, at length, are China’s artists ready.

The cymbals clang—the sultan hastens thither,

And sees enrapt the glorious gorgeousness—

Smit nigh to swooning by those beamy splendours.—

Then, to the Grecian palace opposite.

Just as the Greeks have put their curtain back,

Down glides a sunbeam through the rifted clouds,

And, lo, the colours of that rainbow house

Shine, all reflected on those glassy walls

That face them, rivalling: the sun hath painted

With lovelier blending, on that stony mirror

The colours spread by man so artfully.

Know then, O friend! such Greeks the Sufis are,

Owning nor book nor master; and on earth

Having one sole and simple task,—to make

Their hearts a stainless mirror for their God.

Is thy heart clear and argent as the moon?

Then imaged there may rest, innumerous,

The forms and hues of heaven.[192]

So, too, says Angelus Silesius,—

Away with accidents and false appearance,

Thou must be essence all, and colourless.

And again,—

Man! wouldst thou look on God, in heaven or while yet here,

Thy heart must first of all become a mirror clear.[193]

Jelaleddin Rumi describes the emancipation of the soul from

intellectual distinctions—the laws of finite thought, the

fluctuations of hope and fear, the consciousness of

personality,—under the image of night. This has been the favourite

and appropriate symbol of all the family of mystics, from Dionysius,

with his ‘Divine Darkness,’ to John of the Cross, in his _De Nocte

Obscurâ_, and on to Novalis, in his _Hymnen an die Nacht_. In the

following vigorous passage, Night is equivalent to the state of

self-abandonment and self-transcendence:—

Every night God frees the host of spirits—

Makes them clear as tablets smooth and spotless—

Frees them every night from fleshy prison.

Then the soul is neither slave nor master,

Nothing knows the bondman of his bondage,

Nothing knows the lord of all his lordship,

Gone from such a night is eating sorrow,

Gone the thoughts that question good and evil.

Then, without distraction or division,

In the One the spirit sinks and slumbers.

Silesius has the same thought, cold and dry, after the poetic

Persian, yet in words that would furnish no inapt motto to express

in a sentence this species of mysticism:—

Ne’er sees man in this life, the Light above all light,

As when he yields him up to darkness and to night.[194]

The ascetic Sufi bids the mystical aspirant close the senses against

every external impression—for the worlds of sense and of

contemplation reciprocally exclude each other. We have seen how the

Hindoos and the Hesychasts endeavoured literally to obey this

counsel, reiterated so often by so many mystagogues:—

Put wool within the ear of flesh, for that

Makes deaf the inner hearing, as with wool;

If that can hear, the spirit’s ear is deaf.

Let sense make blind no more the spirit’s eye.

Be without ear, without a sense or thought,

Hark only to the voice, ‘Home, wanderer, home!’

It is quite in accordance with such precepts that the judging

faculty should be abandoned by the Sufi for the intuitive, and the

understanding sacrificed to the feeling. According to the Koran,

Mohammed once soared heavenwards, to such a height that Gabriel

could not overtake him, and far off below, appeared to the Prophet

no larger than a sparrow. Jelaleddin compares the heart, the divine

principle in man (the spirit, in his psychology), to Mohammed, and

the understanding to Gabriel. Names and words, he says, are but

‘nets and shackles.’ With justice, in one sense, he bids men pass

from the sign to the thing signified, and asks,—

Didst ever pluck a rose from R and O and S?

Names thou mayst know: go, seek the truth they name;

Search not the brook, but heaven, to find the moon.

The senses and the lower powers, nourished by _forms_, belong to

earth, and constitute the mere foster-mother of our nature. The

intuitive faculty is a ray of Deity, and beholds Essence. The soul

which follows its divine parent is therefore a wonder, and often a

scandal to that which recognises only the earthly. Jelaleddin

compares the rapturous plunge of the soul into its divine and native

element to the hastening of the ducklings into the water, to the

terror of the hen that hatched them.[195]

While exulting in a devotion above all means and modes, we find the

Sufi (in nearly every stage of his ascension save the last) yielding

implicit obedience to some human guide of his own choice. The

Persian Pir was to him what the Director was to the Quietist or

semi-Quietist of France; what the experienced Friend of God was to

the mystic of Cologne or Strasburg; what Nicholas of Basle was so

long to Tauler. That a voluntary submission to such authority was

yielded is certain. Yet we find scarcely an allusion to these

spiritual guides among the chief bards of Sufism. Each singer claims

or seeks a knowledge of God which is immediate, and beyond the need

of at least the orthodox and customary aids and methods. Thus Rumi

says—

He needs a guide no longer who hath found

The way already leading to the Friend.

Who stands already on heaven’s topmost dome

Needs not to search for ladders. He that lies,

Folded in favour on the sultan’s breast,

Needs not the letter or the messenger.

So Emerson,—

‘The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it

is profane to seek to interpose helps.... Whenever a mind is simple,

and receives a divine wisdom, then old things pass away,—means,

teachers, texts, temples, fall; it lives now and absorbs past and

future into the present hour.’[196]

Hence, in both cases, the indifference before noticed to all the

various forms of positive religion. The Persian describes all

religions as the same liquor in different glasses—all are poured by

God into one mighty beaker.

The self-abandonment and self-annihilation of the Sufis rest on the

basis of their pantheism. Personal existence is with them the great

illusion of this world of appearance—to cling to it is to be blind

and guilty. Mahmud (a Sufi of the fourteenth century) says, in the

_Gulschen Ras_,—

All sects but multiply the I and Thou;

This I and Thou belong to partial being;

When I and Thou and several being vanish,

Then Mosque and Church shall bind thee never more.

Our individual life is but a phantom:

Make clear thine eye, and see Reality!

Again, (though here the sense may be moral rather than philosophic,

and selfishness, not personality, abjured)—

Go, soul! with Moses to the wilderness,

And hear with him that grand ‘I am the Lord!’

While, like a mountain that shuts out the sun,

Thine _I_ lifts up its head, thou shalt not see Me.

The lightning strikes the mountain into ruins,

And o’er the levelled dust the glory leaps!

Jelaleddin says of the Sufi in his self-abnegation,—

His love of God doth, like a flame of hell,

Even in a moment swallow love of self.

Mahmud, to express the same thought, employs the image used by

Thomas à Kempis:—

The path from _Me_ to God is truly found,

When pure that _Me_ from Self as clearest flame from smoke.

Angelus Silesius bids men lose, in utter Nihilism, all sense of any

existence separate from the Divine Substance—the Absolute:—

While aught thou art or know’st or lov’st or hast,

Not yet, believe me, is thy burden gone.

Who is as though he were not—ne’er had been—

That man, oh joy! is made God absolute.

Self is surpassed by self-annihilation;

The nearer nothing, so much more divine.[197]

Thus individuality must be ignored to the utmost; by mystical death

we begin to live; and in this perverted sense he that loseth his

life shall find it. Hence, by a natural consequence, the straining

after a sublime apathy almost as senseless as the last abstraction

of the Buddhist. The absolutely disinterested love, to which the

Sufi aspires, assumes, however, an aspect of grandeur as opposed to

the sensuous hopes and fears of Mohammed’s heaven and hell. Rumi

thus describes the blessedness of those whose will is lost in the

will of God:—

They deem it crime to flee from Destiny,

For Destiny to them brings only sweetness.

Welcome is all that ever can befal them,

For were it fire it turns to living waters.

The poison melts to sugar on their lip;

The mire they tread is lustrous diamond,

And weal and woe alike, whatever comes.

They and their kingdom lie in God’s divineness.

To pray, ‘O Lord, turn back this trouble from me,’

They count an insult to the hand that sent it.

Faithful they are, but not for Paradise;

God’s will the only crowning of their faith:

And not for seething hell, flee they from sin,

But that their will must serve the Will Divine.

It is not struggle, ’tis not discipline,

Wins them a will so restful and so blest;—

It is that God from his heart-fountain ever

Fills up their jubilant souls.

So, again, Angelus Silesius, sometimes pushing his negation to

unconscious caricature:—

True hero he that would as readily

Be left without God as enjoy him near.

Self-loss finds God—to let God also go,

That is the real, most rare abandonment.

Man! whilst thou thankest God for this or that,

Yet art thou slave to finite feebleness.

Not fully God’s is he who cannot live,

Even in hell, and find in hell no hell.

Nought so divine as to let nothing move thee,

Here or hereafter (could’st thou only reach it).

Who loves without emotion, and without knowledge knows,

Of him full fitly say we—he is more God than man.

Compare Emerson, discoursing of Intuition and the height to which it

raises men:—

‘Fear and hope are alike beneath it. It asks nothing. There is

somewhat low even in hope. We are then in vision. There is nothing

that can be called gratitude nor properly joy. The soul is raised

over passion,’ &c. So, again: ‘Prayer as a means to effect a private

end is theft and meanness. It supposes dualism in nature and

consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God he will not

beg. He will then see prayer in all action.’[198]

This elevation above petition and above desire, towards which many a

Sufi toiled, watching, fasting, solitary, through the ‘seven

valleys’ of mystic discipline, is cheaply accomplished now-a-days by

mere nonchalance, and is hit off by a flourish of the pen. It is the

easy boast of any one who finds prayer distasteful and scoffs at

psalm singing—who chooses to dub his money-getting with the title of

worship, and fancies that to follow instinct is to follow God. The

most painful self-negation and the most facile self-indulgence meet

at the same point and claim the same pre-eminence.

The eastern mystic ignores humanity to attain divinity. The ascent

and the descent are proportionate, and the privileges of nothingness

are infinite. We must accompany the Sufi to his highest point of

deification, and in that transcendental region leave him. His escape

from the finite limitations of time and space is thus described,—

On earth thou seest his outward, but his spirit

Makes heaven its tent and all infinity.

Space and Duration boundless do him service,

As Eden’s rivers dwell and serve in Eden.

Again, Said, the servant, thus recounts one morning to Mohammed the

ecstasy he has enjoyed:—

My tongue clave fever-dry, my blood ran fire,

My nights were sleepless with consuming love,

Till night and day sped past—as flies a lance

Grazing a buckler’s rim; a hundred faiths

Seemed then as one; a hundred thousand years

No longer than a moment. In that hour

All past eternity and all to come

Was gathered up in one stupendous _Now_,—

Let understanding marvel as it may.

Where men see clouds, on the ninth heaven I gaze,

And see the throne of God. All heaven and hell

Are bare to me and all men’s destinies,

The heavens and earth, they vanish at my glance:

The dead rise at my look. I tear the veil

From all the worlds, and in the hall of heaven

I set me central, radiant as the sun.

Then spake the Prophet:—‘Friend, thy steed is warm;

Spur him no more. The mirror in thy breast

Did slip its fleshly case, now put it up—

Hide it once more, or thou wilt come to harm.’

This magniloquence of Said’s is but the vehement poetic expression

for the ‘absolute intuition’ of modern Germany—that identity of

subject and object in which all limitations and distinctions vanish,

and are absorbed in an indescribable transcendental intoxication. If

the principle be true at all, its most lofty and unqualified

utterance must be the best, and what seems to common-sense the

thorough-going madness of the fiery Persian is preferable to the

colder and less consistent language of the modern Teutonic

mysticism. Quite in the spirit of the foregoing extracts, Emerson

laments that we do not oftener realize this identity, and transcend

time and space as we ought.—

‘We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles.

Meantime within man is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the

universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally

related,—the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and

whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing

and perfect every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen,

the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.’

And again:—‘Time and space are but inverse measures of the force of

the soul. A man is capable of abolishing them both. The spirit

sports with time—

‘Can crowd eternity into an hour

Or stretch an hour to eternity.’

So Angelus Silesius:—

Rise above Space and Time, and thou canst be

At any moment in Eternity.[199]

The following passage from Jelaleddin exhibits the kind of identity

with God claimed by the more extravagant devotees of Sufism:—

Are we fools, we’re God’s captivity;

Are we wise, we are his promenade;

Are we sleeping, we are drunk with God;

Are we waking, then we are his heralds;

Are we weeping, then his clouds of wrath;

Are we laughing, flashes of his love.

Some among them carried their presumption to a practical extreme

which did away with all distinction between good and evil. They

declared the sins of the Sufi dearer to God than the obedience of

other men, and his impiety more acceptable than their faith.[200]

Two extracts more will suffice to show the mode in which this

pantheistic mysticism confounds, at its acme, the finite and the

infinite. They are from Feridoddin Attar, who died in the second or

third decade of the fourteenth century.—

Man, what thou art is hidden from thyself.

Know’st not that morning, mid-day, and the eve,

All are within thee? The ninth heaven art thou;

And from the spheres into this roar of time

Didst fall erewhile. Thou art the brush that painted

The hues of all this world—the light of life,

That rayed its glory on the nothingness.

Joy! joy! I triumph! Now no more I know

Myself as simply me, I burn with love

Unto myself, and bury me in love.

The Centre is within me, and its wonder

Lies as a circle everywhere about me.

Joy! joy! no mortal thought can fathom me.

I am the merchant and the pearl at once.

Lo, time and space lie crouching at my feet.

Joy! joy! when I would revel in a rapture,

I plunge into myself and all things know.

The poet then introduces Allah, as saying that he had cast Attar

into a trance, and withdrawn him into his own essence, so that the

words he uttered were the words of God.[201]

Both with Emerson and Angelus, he who truly apprehends God becomes a

part of the divine nature,—is a son, a god in God, according to the

latter; and according to the former, grows into an organ of the

Universal Soul. This notion of identity Emerson seems to arrive at

from the human, Angelus from the divine side. The salvation of man

is reduced with the German, very much to a process of divine

development. With the American, every elevated thought merges man

for a time in the Oversoul. The idealism of Emerson is more

subjective, his pantheism more complete and consequent. Angelus is

bold on the strength of a theory of redemption which makes man

necessary to God. Emerson is bolder yet, on his own account, for he

makes his own God. This he does when he adores his own ideal, and,

expanding Self to Universality, falls down and worships.

Hear him describe this transcendental devotion:—

‘The simplest person, who in his integrity worships God, becomes

God; yet for ever and ever the influx of this better and universal

self is new and unsearchable.’ Again: ‘I, the imperfect, adore my

own Perfect. I am somehow receptive of the great soul, and thereby I

do overlook the sun and the stars, and feel them to be but the fair

accidents and effects which change and pass.’ So, speaking of the

contemplation of Nature:—‘I become a transparent eyeball. I am

nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate

through me; I am part or particle of God,’ &c.

Angelus says, in virtue of his ideal sonship,—

I am as great as God, and he as small as I;

He cannot me surpass, or I beneath him lie.

God cannot, without me, endure a moment’s space,

Were I to be destroyed, he must give up the ghost.

Nought seemeth high to me, I am the highest thing;

Because e’en God himself is poor deprived of me.[202]

The central idea of the Persian mysticism is _Emanation_. The soul

is to escape from the manifold to the One. Its tendency (in

proportion as its votary believes that return accomplished) is to

confound man with the Father. The leading principle in the mysticism

of Eckart and Angelus Silesius is _Incarnation_. Angelus is never

weary of reiterating the doctrine that God became man in order that

man might become God. He does not labour, like the orientals, to

attain deification by ascetic efforts of his own. He has a kind of

Mediator. He seems to believe that through Christ, in some way,

every man is a divine Son of God, if he will only think so. All he

has to do is to realize this sonship; then he becomes, by _Grace_,

all that the Son of God is by _Nature_. The obvious result of this

mysticism is to identify man with the Son.

In that order of modern mysticism represented by Emerson, the

central doctrine is _Inspiration_. In the creative efforts of the

poet, in the generalizations of the philosopher, the man of genius

speaks as he is moved by the Oversoul. An influx of the universal

spirit floods his being and carries him beyond himself. In intuition

the finite Ego is identified with the absolute Ego. Humanity is a

divine evolution, and each true man (to use Emerson’s apt

illustration)—a _façade_ of Deity. Even Angelus would have

acknowledged that it was in some sort through Christ that his

boastful sonship became possible. But the believer in the Oversoul

will admit no such medium, and owns a debt to Christ much as he owns

a debt to Shakspeare. Mysticism of this order usurps the office of

the Holy Ghost, and directly identifies the spirit of man with the

Spirit of God.

Mysticism has always been accustomed to express the transports of

its divine passion by metaphors borrowed from the amorous

phraseology of earth. It has done this with every variety of taste,

from the grossness of some of the most eminent Romanist saints, to

the beautiful Platonism of Spenser’s Hymns of ‘Heavenly Love’ and

‘Heavenly Beautie.’ But nowhere has metaphor branched so luxuriantly

into allegory as in the East, and nowhere in the East with such

subtilty and such freedom as among the Persian mystics. The admiring

countrymen of Hafiz, Saadi, and Jami, interpret mystically almost

everything they wrote. They underlay these poems everywhere with a

system of correspondence whose ingenuity would have done no

discredit to Swedenborg himself. Sir William Jones furnishes some

specimens of a sort of mystical glossary, by aid whereof their

drinking songs may be read as psalms, and their amatory effusions

transformed into hymns full of edification for the faithful.[203]

Never, since the days of Plotinus, was a deity imagined more

abstract than the Unity toward which the Sufi aspires. Yet never was

religious language more florid and more sensuous. According to the

system alluded to, wine is equivalent to devotion; the tavern is an

oratory; kisses and embraces, the raptures of piety; while

wantonness, drunkenness, and merriment, are religious ardour and

abstraction from all terrestrial thoughts.

The following passage from Mahmud’s _Gulschen Ras_ may suffice as a

specimen of these devout Bacchanalia. It has the advantage of

exhibiting the key in the lock:—

Know’st thou who the Host may be who pours the spirit’s wine

Know’st thou what his liquor is whose taste is so divine?

The Host is thy Beloved One—the wine annihilation,

And in the fiery draught thy soul drinks in illumination.

Up, soul! and drink with burning lip the wine of ecstasy,

The drop should haste to lose itself in His unbounded sea.

At such a draught mere intellect swims wildered and grows wild;

Love puts the slave-ring in his ear and makes the rebel mild.

Our Friend holds out the royal wine and bids us drink it up;

The whole world is a drinking-house and everything a cup.

Drunken even Wisdom lies—all in revel sunken;

Drunken are the earth and heaven; all the angels drunken.

Giddy is the very sky, round so often hasting,

Up and down it staggers wide, with but a single tasting.

Such the wine of might they drink in blest carouse above.

So the angels higher lift their flaming height of love.

Now and then the dregs they fling earthward in their quaffing,

And where’er a drop alights, lo, an Eden laughing![204]

Footnote 189:

And if thy heart know nought of this—‘Die that thou mayest be born;’

then walkest thou the darksome earth a sojourner forlorn.

Footnote 190:

Tholuck, _Ssufismus, sive Theosophia Persarum pantheistica_ (Berlin,

1822), pp. 51-54.

Footnote 191:

Tholuck, _Ssufismus_, p. 63. _Cherub. Wand._, ii. 18.

Footnote 192:

Tholuck, _Blüthensammlung aus der Morgenländischen Mystik_ (Berlin,

1825), p. 114.

Footnote 193:

_Cherub. Wand._, i. 274; v. 81.

Footnote 194:

_Blüthen._, p. 61. _Cherub. Wand._, iv. 23.

Footnote 195:

_Blüthen._, pp. 64, 71, 113, 156.

Footnote 196:

_Blüthen._, p. 167. Emerson’s _Essays_ (1848), p. 35.

Footnote 197:

_Blüthen._, pp. 204-206. _Cherub. Wand._, i. 24, 92, 140.

Footnote 198:

_Blüthen._, pp. 180, 181. _Cherub. Wand._, v. 367; ii. 92; i. 91, 39;

ii. 152, 59. Emerson, pp. 37, 42.

Footnote 199:

_Blüthen._, pp. 85, 116. Emerson, pp. 141, 143. _Cherub. Wand._, i.

12. Compare _Richard of St. Victor_, cited above, vol. i., p. 172,

Note to p. 163.

Footnote 200:

_Blüthen._, pp. 82, 84.—The truth, of which the licentious doctrine

alluded to is the abuse, is well put by Angelus,—

‘Dearer to God the good man’s very sleep

Than prayers and psalms of sinners all night long.’—(v. 334.)

Footnote 201:

_Blüthen._, pp. 266, 260.—Never does this soaring idealism become so

definite and apprehensible as when it speaks with the ‘large

utterance’ of the Sufis. Angelus has here and there somewhat similar

imagery for the same thought. What is with him a dry skeleton acquires

flesh and blood among the Orientals.

‘Sit in the centre, and thou seest at once

What is, what was; all here and all in heaven.

‘Is my will dead? Then what I will God must,

And I prescribe his pattern and his end.

‘I must be sun myself, and with my beams

Paint all the hueless ocean of the Godhead.’—(ii. 183; i. 98,

115.)

Footnote 202:

Emerson, pp. 154, 156, 196. _Cherub. Wand._, i. 10, 8, 204.—Angelus

has various modes of expressing the way in which God realizes his

nature in the salvation of men.

‘I bear God’s image. Would he see himself?

He only can in me, or such as I.

‘Meekness is velvet whereon God takes rest:

Art meek, O man?—God owes to thee his pillow.

‘I see in God both God and man,

He man and God in me;

I quench his thirst, and he, in turn,

Helps my necessity.’—(i. 105, 214, 224.)

Footnote 203:

Works, vol. iv., _On the Mystical Poetry of the Persians and Hindoos_.

Footnote 204:

_Blüthen._, p. 218.

BOOK THE EIGHTH

THEOSOPHY IN THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION

CHAPTER I.

Amongst them all sate he that wonned there,

That hight _Phantastes_ by his nature trew;

A man of years yet fresh, as mote appere,

Of swarth complexion and of crabbed hew,

That him full of melancholy did shew;

Bent hollow beetle brows, sharpe staring eyes

That mad or foolish seemed: one by his view

Mote deeme him born with ill disposed skyes,

When oblique Saturne sate in th’ house or agonyes.

SPENSER.

The autumn is already advanced, and our friends who met at Summerford

have returned to the neighbourhood of London. The days of damp and fog

have arrived. All nature looks sullen and lustreless. As Gower gazes

through the streaming pane on the narrowed dripping landscape, he

sometimes tries, as sunny Persia and the Sufis recur to him, to

transform the slope before his windows into an eastern valley. Fancy

shall sow it thick with poppies, and daisies, and hyacinths of brilliant

red;—a thymy smell breathes up the pass;—and there the ungainly stork,

and gaily painted quails flutter away at the sound of his horse’s hoofs.

Or those house-tops at the foot of the hill, among their trees, shall be

a Persian town, on which he looks from an eminence. There are the

flat-roofed white houses, enclosing in their courts those twinkling

silver lights, the fountains; the green of trees among the shining walls

relieves the eye; the domes and minarets look down into the narrow

streets; there sleeps the burial-ground, under the shadow of its

sentinel cypresses; and there blows the garland of gardens, surrounding

the whole with its wavy line of many colours. But the weather is a

water-monster, and swallows up too-venturous Fancy. For a few moments

imagination can lay light behind the clouds; bright hues flush out on

the surface of familiar forms, and the magic power prevails to change

them into creatures of the Orient. But the rainy reality is too potent,

and the wilderness of vapour will receive no form, retain no colour. So

Gower turns away from the windows—pokes the fire—feels idle and fit for

nothing—struggles with himself—conquers, and finally achieves a

morning’s work.

Willoughby has laid aside his romance for a time and taken to the

theosophists—to Jacob Behmen more especially. In fact, he had come to an

exciting point in his story. He thought he had found a kind of seething

turbulence in his thoughts, like that which certain rivers are said to

manifest, when in parts of their course they pass over beds of

subterranean fire. Afraid of becoming morbid and unnatural, he stopped

work at once, and had recourse to Behmen as a refrigerant and sedative.

The remedy succeeded to admiration. Within a day or two the patient

could pronounce himself out of poetical danger; and Atherton found him,

when he dropped in one morning, enjoying, with Behmen in his hand, that

most promising token of convalescence—a profound sleep.

Gower resolved to make himself amends for that uncongenial morning, by

spending the evening at Ashfield. Thither also Willoughby had found his

way. A considerable part of the evening was passed in Atherton’s

library, and conversation turned, before very long, upon the mystics,

once more, and their position as regards the Reformation.

* * * * *

WILLOUGHBY. Those Teutonic worthies of the fourteenth century are noble

specimens of the mystic.

GOWER. Truly, with them, Mysticism puts on her beautiful garments. See

her standing, gazing heavenward; ‘her rapt soul sitting in her eyes,’

and about her what a troop of shining ones! There is Charity, her cheek

wet with tears for the dead Christ and pale with love for the living;

carrying, too, the oil and the wine—for Mysticism was the good Samaritan

of the time, and succoured bleeding Poverty, when priest passed by and

Levite;—there is Truth, withdrawing worship from the form and

superstitious substitute, transferring it from priest and pageantry to

the heart alone with God, and pressing on, past every channel, toward

the Fount Himself;—there Humility, pointing to the embers of consumed

good works, while she declares that man is nothing and that God is

all;—and there, too, Patriotism, and awakening Liberty—for Mysticism

appealed to the people in their native tongue; fashioned the speech and

nerved the arms of the German nation; gave heart to the Fatherland

(bewildered in a tempest of fiery curses) to withstand, in the name of

Christ, the vicar of Christ; led on the Teutonic lion of her popular

fable to foil the plots of Italian Reynard; and dared herself to set at

nought the infuriate Infallibility.

ATHERTON. Go on, Gower.

GOWER. It seems to me that the doctrine of justification by faith, is

practically involved in a theology like that of Tauler, so deep in its

apprehension of sin as selfishness, so thorough in renouncing all merit

on the part of man.

ATHERTON. Yes, practically. What was needful in addition was, that this

doctrine should take its due central place in the system of Christian

truth, as the principle, if I may so speak, of salvation for all men. It

was not enough to arrive at it as the upshot of individual mystical

experience.

WILLOUGHBY. There I think you indicate the weak point of this

mysticism—it is _so_ individual—so much a matter of the personal inward

life.

GOWER. That surely is the very secret of its strength.

WILLOUGHBY. Yes, of its strength up to a certain limit; beyond that

limit, of its weakness. It lacked facility of impartation. Its

sympathies were broad and humane; its doctrine too narrow and ascetic.

Speaking from the depths of a soul that had known the nether darkness

and the insufferable glory, its utterance was broken and obscure. It

must be lived through to be understood. It might attract, but could only

partially retain, the many. Its message, after all, was to the few.

GOWER. But those few, master-minds, remember.

ATHERTON. True, yet what powers could compensate for the want of clear

speech—of a ready vehicle for transference of thought? A deep saying

that of Jeremy Taylor’s, where he remarks concerning mystical elevations

and abstractions, that, while in other sciences the terms must first be

known and then the rules and conclusions, the whole experience of

mysticism must first be obtained before we can so much as know what it

is, and the end acquired first—the conclusion before the premises.

WILLOUGHBY. When Luther appears, appealing to the Bible in the hands of

the people, the defect is supplied, and we have the Reformation. That

visible and venerable externalism, the Romish Church, could not be

successfully assailed on merely internal grounds. The testimony of the

individual heart against it was variable and uncertain, because more or

less isolated. But where the Scriptures are set free, and they can be

made the basis of assault, an externalism quite as visible, and more

venerable, brings the outward to bear against the outward; while the

power of an inward life, pure and deep and ardent as the best of the

mystics ever knew, animates the irresistible onset.

GOWER. The testimony of History, then, is decidedly against our modern

spiritualism, which complains that we make too much of the book, and

sacrifice the subjective religious development to an outward authority.

Luther—a true man of the spirit—conquered because he could point to a

letter. The fire of his own inward life could kindle so grand a flame,

because he was sustained by an authority which no individual mystic

could arrogate. The Scriptures were the common ground for the Reformer

who had the truth, and the inquirer who sought it. The excessive

subjectivity of the mystic deprived him of that advantage.

WILLOUGHBY. But are we not overlooking other causes which enabled Luther

to accomplish so much, and precluded the mystics from carrying further

their reforming tendency?

ATHERTON. By all means let the influence of the interval between the

fourteenth and sixteenth centuries be duly taken into account. To do so

will only make good Gower’s remark. During the fifteenth century you

find no fresh development of mysticism. The genuine religion of the

period was still mystical in its complexion, but characterised by a much

larger infusion of the scriptural element. This was the real advance of

that interim. At the Universities the Bible began to displace the

schoolmen. A better system of interpretation prevailed. Even with the

mystics St. Paul was already taking the place of Dionysius, and

mysticism began to lose its nature, merging in a true spirituality,

sober-minded while fervent. In the theology of such men as John Wessel

and Staupitz (who with Tauler and the German theology nourished the

early religious life of Luther), we see a clearer apprehension of the

nature of Christ’s work for us—a better balancing of the outward and the

inward. In fact, the great step necessary to produce a reformation,

after the mystics had made their preparation, was this very bringing

into prominence of the word of God. Then, to the ardour and the power of

mysticism in its noblest form, was added the authority, the guidance,

and the divine adaptation of that message of salvation announced to all

mankind.

WILLOUGHBY. Then, again, the doctrine of Luther directed men at once to

the attainment of that clear hope concerning their spiritual safety

which, say what we will, is the craving of our nature. We have seen how

an Eckart would become pantheist to extort from philosophy that

assurance which was denied him by the Church.

GOWER. Yet does not the strength and attraction of Romanism lie in this

very characteristic—its tempting facility of comfort? Most men prefer a

sleeping conscience to a tender one; and for such the Romish Church

offers a perpetual siesta.

WILLOUGHBY. Granted; for this very reason, however, she cannot satisfy

the deeper wants of the class I speak of—those men out of whom may be

made mystics, reformers, heretics,—but religious Helots never. I am not

speaking of mere comfort, but of true peace,—of that entrance into a new

relationship towards God which gives us the heart to aspire towards a

new nature.

GOWER. Agreed, then. Bunyan follows Paul when he makes Christian lose

his burden early in the pilgrimage, so that he treads the onward path

thenceforward with a lighter step.

ATHERTON. And can front Apollyon better. Look round at the Christendom

of that age. You see only two classes who escape the condition of the

hired servant—who are the sons of God and not his bondsmen. These are

the mystics and the reformers. The mystic realizes adoption through

appalling griefs and toils; the reformer is led thither straightway, as

he exclaims with St. Paul, ‘Being therefore justified by faith, we have

peace with God.’

WILLOUGHBY. How strongly does Luther urge men to believe on Christ as a

Saviour for _them_—to receive in lowly simplicity the peace divinely

offered. How triumphantly does he show that such a faith is victory—that

all other is a mere historic belief _about_ Christ, not a belief _in_ an

ever-present Deliverer, who lives within, and redeems us daily from

ourselves. Thus did his followers helm them speedily with hope, and

escape, in great measure, the fearful strain of those alternations

between rapture and despair, for which mysticism did not even seek a

remedy. The distinction between justification and sanctification is no

mere theological refinement. Its practical recognition, at least, is

essential to that solemn joyousness which is the strength and glory of

the Christian life.

ATHERTON. That is, after all, the true escape from Self which delivers

you from bondage to the shifting frames and feelings of the hour—the

mere accidents of personal temperament, by making clear the external

ground of hope. Mysticism had not light enough to find the way to its

own ideal of rest. Luther, with his Bible, realized in soberness the

longed-for repose of its intense passion.

WILLOUGHBY. We must confess too, I think, that the representatives of

the better mysticism were not strong enough to cope with the fanatical

or lawless leaders of the worse. How Tauler, Suso, Ruysbroek, and the

author of the _Theologia Germanica_, lift up their voices against the

‘false lights’—against men who deified every impulse, who professed to

have transcended all virtue, who renounced all moral obligation and

outward authority, or who resigned themselves to a stupid apathy which

they called poverty of spirit.

GOWER. Those who constituted this last class must have been men who

found in the false doctrine only an excuse for remaining as they

were:—hard, indeed, to raise them to anything better. I imagine them

poor ignorant hinds, the undermost victims of feudalism. One thinks of

Tennyson’s portraiture of the serf,—

The staring eye glazed o’er with sapless days,

The long mechanic pacings to and fro,

The set gray life and apathetic end.

WILLOUGHBY. Be that as it may, this bastard mysticism, whether rapacious

as King Stork, or passive as King Log, multiplies among men. Want and

oppression seize on the sacred pretext of an inward light, and mysticism

is fast growing fierce and revolutionary. Good men, speaking words of

spiritual freedom, have unawares awakened licence. They themselves slew

Self with vigil and with tears; and, lo! a Hydra-headed Self, rampant

and ruthless, stalks abroad, and they have been unwittingly his

creators.

ATHERTON. What could they do, as mystics, but mourn and rebuke? The

inward testimony would not render an unvarying verdict in every case.

Their appeal must be, either to an amount of right moral discernment

already in the individual, or to the social judgment of a certain

religious circle. Beyond these limits their very consistency is their

weakness. For the thorough-going mystic, who is resolved to be in all

things a light and law unto himself, replies that his inward light is

quite as divinely authoritative _for him_ as is that of the moderate

man, reproving his excesses, for himself. He will answer, ‘Friend, walk

thou by thy light, as I by mine. The external is nothing to the

internal. “What is the chaff to the wheat?” saith the Lord. Thou art

external to me, I listen therefore to the voice within me, not to

thine.’

WILLOUGHBY. We have, too, the express testimony of Melanchthon to the

fact, that had not Luther appeared when he did, to divert the

under-current of popular indignation into the middle course of the

Reformation, a fearful outbreak must have desolated Europe from the fury

kindled by the intolerable oppressions of Church and State.

GOWER. Certainly mysticism could never have spoken with power enough to

turn aside such a long-gathered tempest.

WILLOUGHBY. Where the revolutionary spirit had once broken out, only the

strong hand could avail.

ATHERTON. And how ruthlessly was that remedy applied! But—what in the

world—Gower, I say, open your eyes. Are you going to sleep?

GOWER. I was trying to recall a dream I had after reading about the

Anabaptists of Munster.

WILLOUGHBY. A dream! Let us have it.

GOWER. Wait a moment—ah, now I remember. First of all, I saw numbers of

people toiling across the fields or along miry roads; weary mothers,

delicately nurtured, carrying their babes, and followed by their crying

little ones; the fathers laden, it would seem, with such property as

they were allowed to take away. They look back mournfully towards the

walls of a city, out of whose gates more of their friends are being

thrust. These are the magistrates, the rich, the unbelievers, driven

forth by the populace to find what shelter they may among the boors, or

in the nearest towns. Then I am suddenly inside the city. I see, in one

place, a crowd gathered about a shaggy, wild-eyed preacher, spluttering,

screaming, foaming at the mouth; in another is a circle surrounding two

men in rags, whirling round like spinning dervishes. One man, with face

ghastly pale, and bandaged head, who seems to have escaped from a

hospital, moans and wrings his hands, predicting universal ruin. Now,

with a yell, he has fallen down in convulsions. There a burly brute has

pushed down a weeping woman from the door-steps of a great house, that

he may stand on the spot to roar out his prophecy and exhortation. All

this was somehow mingled with hosannas to Mathieson, the baker; and at

the end of the high street they were dancing about a bonfire made of all

the books in the town, save the Bible only. Then the crowd made way for

the favourite wife of John Bokelson, the tailor, riding in a great

coach, resplendent in silks and costly stuffs torn from the churches.

Methought I entered the Town Hall. There, on a throne, in a suit of

silver tissue, slashed and lined with crimson, fastened with buckles of

gold, sat John Bokelson himself.[205]

WILLOUGHBY. A Mormon elder, ‘all of the olden time!’

ATHERTON. Be quiet. He had only eight wives.

GOWER. There he sat, with his triple crown, his globe, and cross of

gold, his silver and golden swords, and above his head I could read,

‘_King of Righteousness over the whole World_.’ Then came a long

succession of petitioners, thrice kneeling and prostrating themselves

before him. A bell rang. The audience was over. Now he was sending out

ambassadors, calling on the neighbouring towns to rise and establish the

Kingdom of the Holy Ghost,—‘for the meek are to inherit the earth, and

the time for spoiling the Egyptians is come.’ After this I saw long

tables spread in the market-place, with fine linen cloths, whereat four

thousand people partook of the sacrament, and afterwards riotously

feasted; the grey towers of the cathedral looking down upon them. I

passed in at the church doors. All was confusion there, drunken shouts,

and running to and fro of boys from cook-shops. The great oriel window

had been broken by stones, and on the pavement, with its time-worn

epitaphs, lay the many-coloured fragments of glass, among broken flagons

and pools of beer. A mad musician had seized upon the organ, and above

the uproar rolled the mighty volumes of sound, shaking the old dusty

banners. Now came a crash of unearthly music—quite unheeded,—and then

the melody melted and trembled away, dying down with a far-off wail of

unutterable pathos. In the midst of his ecstasy the crazed performer was

hurled away by a swarm of ‘prentice lads who had found their way up the

staircase. One among them struck up the well-known air of a wanton song.

There was an outcry and sound of struggling, and I saw the madman leap

from the clerestory down into the middle of the nave,——

WILLOUGHBY. And you woke?

GOWER. No. There came over me a kind of blank bewilderment, and all was

changed. The sides of the church had become mountains. I was in a

winding rocky glen, and the moon was rising over the black fantastic

peaks that shut in the valley. I saw what made me think of Ezekiel’s

vision of dry bones. Along the hollow of the gorge, and in the great

furrows of the heights on each side, where should have been mountain

streams and pebbles, were the glistening bones; and on the rock-ledges

where the moonlight fell I could see them strewn; and on every boulder,

skeleton-heaps; and at the mouth of every cavern, like icicles hanging

from the stony jaws. I heard a rising wind sweep up the pass,—another

blast, and another; and then, coming nearer and nearer, a sound as

though withered boughs of innumerable trees were snapping in a tempest.

All was whirling, darting motion among the white rattling fragments,

above, beneath, around; till every clanking bone had been locked to its

fellow, and a skeleton sat on every crag and lay in every hollow. The

sinews and the flesh then came up upon them; after that, the breath; and

they arose, an exceeding great army. I heard a muttering near me, and

turning, I saw one gazing on the multitude, having in his hand a torch.

His wild, eager look startled me. Now I thought he was Carlstadt, and

then he changed into Thomas Münzer. Then again I was sure I recognized

Spenser’s Phantastes. He flung his torch into a cleft, whence it

breathed out its last sparks into the windy night, and bowing his head,

turned slowly away. I heard him say, ‘Dead Church! Dead Church! How

shalt thou live? I have learnt it. Flesh and blood first—then breath.

Truth for a body, then Love for a soul. The spirit must have a form—must

quicken a letter. First a fact for motive; then let the young life work.

The soul must have its sinews; the spirit its instrument, its means, its

words. Lie there, fire that destroyest; come hither, fire that

warmest,—that warmest to good, and that warnest from evil.’ Then I saw

that he had a new book in his hand,—the last part then published of

Luther’s German New Testament. He vanished. The hills rolled away in

smoke, and I awoke with a start.

ATHERTON. I wish Phantastes and his kindred had really learnt the lesson

of your dream. But such hot-brained enthusiasts cannot be taught, not

even by sore stripes of adversity in the school of fools.

Footnote 205:

A reference to Raumer’s _History of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth

Centuries_ will satisfy the reader that this dream ‘was not all a

dream.’ Most minute details are given in a letter from the MSS. of

Dupuy.

CHAPTER II.

He that misbelieves and lays aside clear and cautious reason in

things that fall under the discussion of Reason, upon the pretence

of hankering after some higher principle, (which, a thousand to one,

proves but the infatuation of Melancholy and a superstitious

hallucination), is as ridiculous as if he would not use his natural

eyes about their proper object till the presence of some

supernatural light, or till he had got a pair of Spectacles made of

the Crystalline Heaven, or of the Cœlum Empyreum, to hang upon his

nose for him to look through.—HENRY MORE.

ATHERTON. I ought to acknowledge, I suppose, that I have by me a rough

draught, made some time since, representing the first strife between

Mysticism and Reformation. But, as to reading it, I scarcely think——

WILLOUGHBY. You will not do so, I beg.

ATHERTON. Willoughby, you shall suffer for that. I’ll begin.

WILLOUGHBY. Pelt away. I thought I should get a cocoa-nut for my stone.

(_Atherton reads._)

_Luther and the Mystics._

The estimate to be formed of the mystics who lived before the

Reformation differs very widely from that which is due to those who

appeared after it. Previous to the Reformation, there was a far

larger amount of truth with the mystics than with any other party in

the Romish Church. They were, in reality, men of progress, and

belonged to the onward element in their day and generation. For

reform of some sort many of them laboured—all of them sighed. They

protested against the corruptions of religion. Many an Augean stable

would they have cleansed, could they but have found their Hercules.

In France, Briconnet, Gerard, and Roussel were men of this class—not

so outspoken as Luther and his followers, but led by mysticism to

sympathy with reforming views, and enabled by that very mysticism to

retain their connexion with Rome, regarding externals as

indifferent.

When Luther comes with his doctrine of justification by faith, and

his announcement that the Scriptures are the sufficient standard of

Christian truth, a great change takes place. Mystics of the more

thoughtful, rightly earnest sort, are among the first to embrace the

new doctrines. Here they have the guide they longed for—here they

find what mysticism could never give. They are, some of them, like

Justin Martyr, who waited long among the schools of the Platonists

for their promised immediate intuition of Deity, and then discovered

among Christians that God was to be known in another way far

better—through the medium of his written Word, by the teaching of

his Spirit. But those who when a fuller light came, refused to quit

for its lustre that isolated and flickering torch, about which men

had gathered for lack of anything brighter, such were given over to

the veriest absurdity, or speedily consigned to utter forgetfulness.

By the mystic of the fourteenth century, the way of the Reformation

was in great part prepared. By the mystic of the sixteenth century

it was hindered and imperilled. In that huge ship of the state

ecclesiastic, which all true hearts and hands in those troublous

times were concerned to work to their very best, a new code of

regulations had been issued. Such rule came in with Luther. Now some

of those who would have been among the very best sailors under the

old management, proved useless, or worse than useless under the new.

One set of them were insolent and mutinous—had a way of reviling the

captain in strange gibberish—and a most insane tendency to look into

the powder-room with a light. Another class lay about useless, till

having been tumbled over many times by their more active comrades,

they got kicked into corners, whence they were never more to emerge.

So fared it with mysticism, attempting to persist in existence when

its work for that time was done. The mystic so situated was either a

caricature of reform or a cipher, either a fanatical firebrand or an

unheeded negation.

We need not go far for examples. Dr. Bodenstein of Carlstadt (best

known as simple Carlstadt) is professor at Wittenberg, and a

thorough reformer. He is a little, swarthy, sunburnt man, crotchety

to the last degree. He follows his intuitions—now this whim, now

that—right to-day, wrong to-morrow—a man whom you never know where

to find. He must spring to his conclusion at once; he will not first

pause for satisfying reasons,—for clear ideas on the various

bearings of his thought or deed. So his life is a series of starts;

his actions incongruous and spasmodic, unlinked, unharmonized by any

thoughtful plan or principle.

But Carlstadt is a man of books as well as of action. He writes

treatises, repeating the doctrines of Tauler and the German

Theology, all about abandonment, and not seeing God or enjoying Him

more in this than in that event or employment; about the sin of

enjoying ordinances and media, rather than God immediately; about

the blessed self-loss in the One; about the reduction of ourselves

to nothing. Ah, Dr. Bodenstein, thou mayest write for ever that way,

and no one now will read! Men have left all this behind. A ripe full

vintage invites their thirst; thine acrid and ascetic grape is now

deserted. Gladly do they, for the most part, exchange the refined

and impracticable requirements of mysticism, its vagueness, its

incessant prohibition, for the genial, simple truth of that German

New Testament which Luther is giving them.

At the juncture of which we are about to speak, Luther lay hidden in

the Wartburg. In the small town of Zwickau, in the Erzgebirge, there

arose a knot of enthusiasts for whom Luther did not go half far

enough. There was Storch, a weaver, to whom Gabriel had made very

wonderful communications one night; another weaver, named Thomas,

and a student, Stübner, who had forsaken the toil of study for the

easier method of supernatural illumination. To these should be added

the more notorious Thomas Münzer, who has been erroneously regarded

as the founder of the party. ‘Why such a slavish reverence for what

the Bible says?’ cry these mystics. ‘What is a mere book?’ ‘Have we

not immediate voices, impulses, revelations from the Holy Spirit,

dictating all we should do? Better this than your Bible reading and

college work.’ Then, next, they prophesy terrible woes and judgments

to come on Christendom, mainly through the Turks; they themselves,

perhaps, in fitting time, may draw the sword of the Lord and of

Gideon, and win the land for the saints.

These worthies were put down by the magistrates of Zwickau. Shaking

off the Zwickau dust against their enemies, several of them seek a

‘larger sphere of usefulness’ in Wittenberg. They found the city

already in no small excitement concerning certain reforms which

Carlstadt was making at full speed. He fraternizes with the Zwickau

prophets at once. Indeed, he had been heard to say of the whole body

of Scripture what divines were accustomed to say of the law only,

that it was a killing letter, leading to nothing more than a sense

of guilt and deserved condemnation. Faster and faster come his

changes, so well-meant, but so ill-advised. With a few strokes he

abolishes auricular confession, makes it incumbent to violate the

fast days, and renders it customary to come to the sacrament without

preparation. Next an iconoclast riot is raised. Carlstadt declares

that the magistrates have power to render criminal those observances

which the popular voice declares contrary to the Word of God; that

if they refuse, the community may take the law into its own hands.