This principle, in its higher operations, is the source of wisdom

and glory. It predominates in all sweet things, in birds, in the

intercourse of the sexes; and its star is Venus. Behmen, in some

places, assigns this quality especially to the gracious Son.

VI. _The Quality of Sound._

Hence, in heaven, the songs of the angels, the harmony of the

spheres; in man, the five senses, understanding, and the gift of

speech. This quality is _primus_ in jovial temperaments, and

produces blue colours.

VII. _The Quality of Corporeity, or Essential Substance._

This is the quality by which all the rest come to manifestation. It

falls, with the preceding, more peculiarly under the province of the

Holy Spirit, as the searching and formative principle. It is the

source in the heavenly world of the beautiful forms of Paradise, as

the preceding is of its sweet sounds. On earth it is the plastic

power ruling matter—the operative spirit of nature.[243]

* * * * *

It is curious to observe how Behmen’s theory takes hold of Chemistry

with one hand, and Theology with the other. Paracelsus pronounced

all matter composed of salt, mercury, and sulphur. Behmen adds, ‘It

is even so, considering salt as the representative of the astringent

or attractive principle—mercury, of the fluent or separative,—and

sulphur, of nature’s pain in the resultant process of production.’

Again, the Father is the dark or fiery principle; the Son, the

principle of light or grace; and the Holy Ghost, the creative,

formative, preserving principle—the outbirth or realization of the

two former. There are no materials so incongruous that a dexterous

use of imaginative or superficial analogies cannot combine them. In

this way, a medley of terms from the nomenclature of every science

may be catalogued and bracketed in symmetrical groups of twos and

threes. Behmen was too much in earnest, however, to carry such

artificial method very far. He was more concerned about thought than

orderly form. He could not postulate a fact to fill a gap in a

synopsis. Though he mingles in much confusion the sciences of mind

and matter, he does not confound their subjects, and regard them as

different states of one substance. He would not affirm, with

Schelling, that matter was mind dormant; and mind, matter realized

and self-conscious.

We have seen that Behmen assigns the first three principles to the

dark kingdom of the Father. When he describes that as a realm of

wrath and darkness, he speaks chiefly from the human point of view.

God is love. The Father regarded as the wrath-principle, cannot

strictly be called God. But the very principle which makes love what

it is, becomes, in respect to sin, so much wrath.

Yet, independently of man, and of such wrath as he may know, God

would still have manifested himself in contraries. The divine One,

the unmanifested Subject, seeking an object—desiring, as it were, to

find himself, becomes what, for lack of better terms, Behmen has to

call a craving darkness, or burning sense of want. Not that Deity

suffers pain; but a certain passion must form the base of action.

Realizing that object, the darkness becomes light. That light—the

Son—had not been, but for the darkness—the Father. Then from the

two, which are one, arise, in the Holy Spirit, the archetypal Forms

of the universe. Thus, from the depth of the divine nature itself

spring these opposites, Power and Grace, Wrath and Love, Darkness

and Light; and thence, by a combination of forces, the manifestation

of God in the quickened, changeful universe. But for such antithesis

God had remained unrevealed. Without so much of antagonism as is

essential to action, the Divine Being had not realized the glory of

his nature.

At the same time, Behmen carefully excludes the notion of modern

pantheism, that the Divine Idea develops itself by a process, and

grows as the world grows.[244] ‘I have to relate in succession,’ he

would say, ‘what takes place simultaneously in God,—to describe

separately what is one in Him. He needs no method, no medium. The

Eternal Nature is not his instrument for creating the visible

universe. Thought and realization, with God, take place together,

and are in Him identical.’ So, in describing a landscape, we have to

relate severally the sounds and appearances of birds and clouds,

hills and waters. But to him who is on the spot, the birds sing, the

waters shine, the clouds fly, the trees bow on the hill, and the

corn waves along the valley, at one and the same time. His senses

are the focus of the whole: he sits in the centre. But description

must travel the circumference.

We now arrive once more at Behmen’s ‘Yea and Nay’—that theory of

antithesis before noticed: his explanation of the origin of Evil.

These Contraries are his trade-winds, whereby he voyages to and fro,

and traverses with such facility the whole system of things. He

teaches that the Divine Unity, in its manifestation or

self-realization, parts into two principles, variously called Light

and Darkness, Joy and Sorrow, Fire and Light, Wrath and Love, Good

and Evil. Without what is termed the Darkness and the Fire, there

would be no Love and Light. Evil is necessary to manifest Good. Not

that anything is created by God for evil. In everything is both good

and evil: the predominance decides its use and destiny. What is so

much pain and evil in hell, is, in heaven, so much joy and goodness.

The bitter fountain and the sweet flow originally from one divine

Source. The angels and the devils are both in God, of whom, and in

whom, all live and move. But from their divine basis, or root, the

former draw joy and glory, the latter shame and woe. The point of

collision is the gate of anguish and of bliss.

Thus Behmen, from far away, echoes Heraclitus, and declares Strife

the father of all things. What were Virtue, he would ask, without

temptation? In life’s warfare lies its greatness. Our full wealth of

being is only realized by a struggle for very life. Not till the

height of the conflict between Siegfried and the dragon—not till the

mountain is all flames and earthquake with that fearful fight, do

the dwarfs bring out their hoard, and untold riches glitter round

the victor.

Behmen was by no means the first to devise a hypothesis so

plausible. We meet with it in quarters widely remote—in the

pantheism of Jelaleddin Rumi and of John Scotus Erigena. But nowhere

does it occupy so central a place, undergo such full development,

receive such copious illustration, as in the theosophy of the

Görlitz shoemaker.

Like most of those attempts to explain the inexplicable which have

proved more than usually attractive, this theory has its truth and

its falsehood. It is true that the harmonious development of life is

neither more nor less than a successive reconciliation of

contraries. The persistent quality, representing our individuality

and what is due to the particular self, must not exist alone. The

diffusive quality, or fluent, having regard only to others, must not

exist alone. The extreme of either defeats itself. Each is necessary

to, or, as Behmen would say, lies in the other. The two factors are

reconciled, and consummated in a higher unity when the command is

obeyed—‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’ Towards this

standard all moral development must tend. Pairs of principles, like

the Personal and the Relative, the Ideal and the Actual, &c.—at once

twin and rival—where each is the complement of the other, are very

numerous. They are designed for union, as heat and cold combine to

produce a temperate or habitable clime. Had Behmen confined his

theory of contraries within such limits, we might have questioned

his expressions;—we must, I think, have admitted his principle.

But when he takes good and evil as the members of such an

antithesis, he is deceived by an apparent likeness. It would be a

strange thing should any one declare courage and meekness, lowliness

and aspiration, the work of God and the work of man, incapable of

harmony. It is still more strange to hear any man pronounce any

harmony possible between good and evil, sin and holiness. The former

set of terms belong to one family, the latter are reciprocally

destructive, totally incompatible. Here lies Behmen’s fallacy.

To regard goodness as a quality which would remain inert and

apathetic were it not endowed with individuality and consistence by

evil, and goaded to activity by temptation, is altogether to mistake

its nature. An adequate conception of Virtue must require that it be

benignly active within its allotted range.

The popular saying that a man should have enough of the devil in him

to keep the devil from him, expresses Behmen’s doctrine. But the

proverb has truth only as it means that of two evils we should

choose the less: supposing imperfection inevitable, better too much

self-will than too much pliability. It is true that greatness of

soul is never so highly developed or so grandly manifest as amid

surrounding evils. But it is not true that the good is intrinsically

dependent on the evil for its very being as goodness. No one will

maintain that He in whom there was no sin lacked individuality and

character, or that he was indebted to the hostility of scribes and

Pharisees for his glorious perfectness. Indeed, such a position

would subvert all our notions of right and wrong; for Evil—the

awakener of dormant virtue—would be the great benefactor of the

universe. Sin would be the angel troubling that stagnant

Bethesda—mere goodness, and educing hidden powers of blessing.

Moreover, we must not argue from the present to the original

condition of man. Nor can any one reasonably rank among the causes

by which he professes to account for sin, that which God has seen

fit to do in order to obviate its consequences. To say, ‘where sin

abounded, grace did much more abound,’ is not to explain the origin

of evil.

Once more, if evil be a necessary factor in our development, that

world from which all evil will be banished cannot be an object of

desire. Heaven seems to grow wan and insipid. To exhort us to root

out the evil of our nature is to enjoin a kind of suicide. It is to

bid us annihilate the animating, active seed of moral progress. So

death is life, and life death. Again, if man’s nature be progressive

and immortal, his immortality must be one of unending conflict.

Modern Pantheism escapes this conclusion by annihilating

personality, and by resolving the individual into the All. A poor

solution, surely—_dis_-solution. To Behmen, no consequence could

have been more repugnant. No man could hold more strongly than did

he, the doctrine of a future and eternal state, determined by the

deeds done in the body. Yet such a cessation of personality might be

logically urged from the theory which seemed to him triumphantly to

remove so much perplexity.[245]

A tale of chivalry relates how fair Astrid wandered in the

moonlight, seeking flowers for the wreath she was twining, but

always, when the last had just been woven in, the garland would drop

asunder in her hands, and she must begin again her sad endeavour,

ever renewed and ever vain. Human speculation resembles that ghostly

maiden. Each fresh attempt has all but completed the circuit of our

logic. But one link remains, and in the insertion of that the whole

fabric falls to pieces. It is a habit with fevered Reason to dream

that she has solved the great mystery of life. And when Reason does

so dream, her wild-eyed sister, Imagination, is sober and

self-distrustful in comparison.

Neither the theist nor the pantheist can claim Behmen as exclusively

his own. He would perhaps have reckoned their dispute among those

which he could reconcile. Certain it is, that he holds, in

combination, the doctrine which teaches a God _within_ the world,

and the doctrine which proclaims a God _above_ it.

Says the pantheist, ‘Do you believe in a God who is the heart and

life of the universe, the soul of that vast body, the world?’ Behmen

answers, ‘Yes; but I do not believe in a God who is a mere vital

force—a God of necessary process—a God lost in the matter He has

evolved.’

Says the theist, ‘Do you believe in a God who has Personality and

Character; who creates of self-conscious free-will; who rules, as He

pleases, the work of his hands?’ Behmen answers, ‘Yes; but I do not

relegate my Deity beyond the skies. I believe that He is the life of

all creatures, all substance; that He dwelleth in me; that I am in

His heaven, if I love Him, wherever I go; that the universe is born

out of Him and lives in Him.’

Like Erigena, Behmen supposed that the ‘Nothing,’ out of which God

made all things, was his own unrevealed abstract nature, called,

more properly, Non-being.

And, now, to Behmen’s version of the story of our world. He tells us

how God created three circles, or kingdoms of spirits, corresponding

to the three persons of the Trinity. To each a monarch and seven

princes were assigned, corresponding to the seven Qualities or

Fountain-Spirits. One of these angelic sovereigns, Lucifer, fell,

through pride, and all his kingdom with him. Straightway, as the

inevitable consequence of sin, the operation of all the seven

Qualities throughout his dominion became perverted and corrupt. The

Fiery principle, instead of being the root of heavenly glory, became

a principle of wrath and torment. The Astringent quality, instead of

ministering due stability, or coherence, became hard and stubborn;

the Sweet, foul and putrescent; the Bitter, fierce and raging. So

with all the rest. Now, it so happened that the seventh Quality of

Lucifer’s realm coincided, in space, with this world of ours. This

earth, therefore,—once a province of the heavenly world,—was broken

up into a chaos of wrath and darkness, roaring with the hubbub of

embattled elements. Before man was created, nature had fallen. The

creative word of God brought order into the ruins of this devastated

kingdom. Out of the chaos He separated sun and planets, earth and

elements.[246]

In the Black Forest lies a lake, bordered deep with lilies. As the

traveller gazes on that white waving margin of the dark waters, he

is told that those lilies, on the last moonlighted midnight, assumed

their spirit-forms,—were white-robed maidens, dancing on the mere;

till, at a warning voice, they resumed, ere daybreak, the shape of

flowers. Similarly, on Behmen’s strange theory, all our natural has

been previously spiritual beauty. The material of this world was,

erewhile, the fine substance of an angel realm. All our fair scenes

are as much below the higher forms of celestial fairness, as are the

material flowers of lower rank in loveliness than the phantom

dancers of that haunted lake. The ‘Heavenly Materiality,’ or ‘Glassy

Sea,’ of the angelic kingdom, was a marvellous mirror of perfect

shapes and colours, of sounds and virtues. Therein arose, in endless

variety, the ideal Forms of heaven—jubilant manifestations of the

divine fulness, gladdening the spirits of the praising angels with a

blessedness ever new. All the growth and productive effort of our

earth is an endeavour to bring forth as then it brought forth. Every

property of nature, quickened from its fall by the divine

command—‘Be fruitful and multiply,’ strives to produce in time as it

did in eternity.[247] But for that fall, this earth had never held

perilous sands nor cruel rocks; never put forth the poisonous herb,

nor bred the ravenous beast; and never would earthquake, pestilence,

or tempest, the deadly outbreaks of water or of fire, have

accompanied the warfare of disordered elements. The final fires will

redeem nature, purging away the dross, and closing the long strife

of time.

Adam was created to be the restoring angel of this world. His nature

was twofold. Within, he had an angelic soul and body, derived from

the powers of heaven. Without, he had a life and body derived from

the powers of earth. The former was given him that he might be

separate from, and superior to the world. He was endowed with the

latter, that he might be connected with, and operative in the world.

His external nature sheltered his inner from all acquaintance with

the properties of our corrupted earth. His love and his obedience

surrounded him with a perpetual paradise of his own. He could not

feel the fierceness of fire, the rigour of cold; he was inaccessible

to want or pain. He was designed to be the father of a like

angelic-human race, who should occupy and reclaim the earth for

God,—keeping down the ever-emerging Curse, and educing and

multiplying the Blessing which God had implanted.

But the will of Adam gradually declined from the inward paradisiacal

life towards the life of this world. He commenced his downward

course by desiring to know the good and evil of the world about him.

Then Eve was fashioned out of him, and the distinction of sex

introduced. This was a remedial interposition to check his descent.

It was deemed better that he should love the feminine part of his

own nature rather than the external world.[248] Each step of decline

was mercifully met by some new aid on the part of God, but all in

vain. He ate of the earthly tree, and the angelic life within him

became extinct.

Behmen contends stoutly that no arbitrary trial or penalty was

imposed on Adam. No divine wrath visited his sin on his descendants.

His liability to suffering and death was the natural consequence

(according to the divine order) of his breaking away from God, and

falling from the angel to the animal life. It is characteristic of

Behmen’s theology to resolve acts of judgment, or of sovereign

intervention, as much as possible, into the operation of law. Thus,

he will not believe that God inflicts suffering on lost souls or

devils. Their own dark and furious passions are their chain and

flame. He shares this tendency in common with most of the Protestant

mystics. And I am by no means prepared to say that our mystics are

altogether wrong on this matter.

No sooner had man fallen, than the mercy of God implanted in him the

seed of redemption. He lodged in the depths of our nature a hidden

gift of the Spirit, the inner light, the internal ‘serpent-bruiser,’

the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. All

our beginnings of desire towards God and heaven are the working of

this indwelling seed of life. Thus, salvation is wholly of grace. At

the same time, it rests with us whether we will realize or smother

the nascent blessing. Man is the arbiter of his own destiny, and

voluntarily develops, from the depths of his nature, his heaven or

his hell.

Lessons of self-abandonment, similar to those of the _Theologia

Germanica_, are reiterated by Jacob Behmen. We are never to forget

the ‘Nothingness’ of man, the ‘All’ of God. He pronounces means and

ordinances good only as they lead us directly to God,—as they

prepare us to receive the divine operation. With Behmen, as with the

mystics of the fourteenth century, redemption is our deliverance

from the restless isolation of Self, or Ownhood, and our return to

union with God. It is a new birth, a divine life, derived from

Christ, the true vine.[249]

But to this idea the theosophists add another. They have a physical

as well as a spiritual regeneration, and believe in the revival,

within the regenerate, of a certain internal or angelic body. The

Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation gave much encouragement to

such fancies. According to Weigel, Christ had a twofold body—one

truly human; another, called the heavenly, a procession from the

divine nature. Furthermore, theosophy extends the influence of

redemption to external nature. In the latter-day, ‘the time of the

Lilies,’ all men will be the true servants of Christ, our race will

have recovered its lost lordship over nature, and the Philosopher’s

Stone will be discovered. That is, man will be able to extract from

every substance its hidden perfectness and power.

The strongly subjective bent of Behmen’s mind has its good as well

as its evil. He never long loses sight of his great aim—the

awakening and sustenance of the inward life. That life was

imperilled by formalism, by fatalism, by dogmatical disputes, by the

greedy superstition of the gold-seeker. So Behmen warns men

incessantly, that no assent to orthodox propositions can save

them.[250] He argues against the Hyper-Calvinist, and against what

he regarded as the Antinomian consequence of the doctrine of

‘imputed righteousness.’[251] He was a man of peace,—little disposed

to add one more to so many controversies; seldom entering the lists

unless challenged.[252] He justly condemned as profitless the

Millenarian speculations in which some about him were

entangled.[253] He had no sympathy with those who endeavoured to

make ancient Jewish prophecy the fortune-teller of the present day.

He declared that the true Philosopher’s Stone, to be coveted by all,

was ‘the new life in Christ Jesus.’[254] Only by victory over Self

could any win victory over nature. To the selfish and the godless no

secrets would be revealed. Such men were continually within reach of

wonders they might not grasp. So the sinful Sir Launcelot slept by

the ruined chapel, and had neither grace nor power to awake, though

before him stood the holy vessel of the Sangreall on its table of

silver. The treatise on the _Three Principles_ abounds in counsels

and exhortation designed to promote practical holiness. The

_Büchlein vom heiligen Gebet_ is a collection of prayers for the

private use of ‘awakened and desirous souls,’ somewhat after the

manner of those in Doddridge’s _Rise and Progress of Religion_.

When Behmen finds that Scripture contradicts his scheme, on some

minor point, he will frequently, instead of resorting to a forced

allegorical interpretation, break away without disguise from the

authority of its text. Thus, he says more than once, concerning

passages in the Mosaic account of the creation, ‘It is evident that

the dear man Moses did not write this, for it is contrary to,’ &c.,

&c.[255]

Such, then, is the track of Behmen’s journeying across the

speculative wilderness, following the fiery pillar of an imaginary

illumination—a pillar, be it observed, much like that column of

glory which, as we stand upon the sea-shore, descends to us from the

setting sun,—a luminous line which moves as we move, and which,

whatever point we occupy, glows from the ripples at our feet up to

the fiery horizon beneath which day is sinking. Behmen’s work was

done chiefly among the educated. Had his mission been to the lower

orders, we should probably have heard of him as the founder of a

sect. His object was, however, at once to awaken the life and

expound the philosophy of religion, within the Lutheran Church. He

called attention to aspects of Christian truth which the systematic

theology of that day had too much overlooked. The extensive

circulation of his books, and the general welcome given to the main

positions of his doctrine, show that his teaching supplied a real

want in those times. There can be little doubt that one considerable

class of minds, repelled by the assumption or the harshness of the

current orthodoxy, was attracted once more to religion under the

more genial form in which Behmen presented it. Others were shaken

from the sleep of formalism by his vehement expostulations. When the

Creed had so largely superseded the Word,—when Protestants were more

embittered against each other than brave against the common foe, the

broader, deeper doctrine of Behmen would offer to many a blessed

refuge. For gold and precious stones shine among his wood and

stubble. The darker aspect which some theologians had given to the

Divine Sovereignty seemed to pass away, as the trembler studied

Behmen’s reassuring page. Apart from scientific technicalities, and

the nomenclature of his system, Behmen’s style and spirit were

mainly moulded upon Luther’s _German Bible_. Any one who will take

the trouble to look, not into the Aurora, but into the _Book of the

Three Principles_, will find, along with much clouded verbosity and

a certain crabbed suggestiveness, a racy idiomatic cast of

expression, a hearty manliness of tone, indicating very plainly that

Behmen had studied man, and the book which manifests man.

Though his voice is, for us, so faint and distant, we feel how near

he must have come to the hearts of his time. Through volumes of

speculative vapour, glance and glow the warm emotions of the man, in

his apostrophes, appeals, and practical digressions. His philosophy

is never that of the artificial abstraction-monger, or the pedantic

book-worm. He writes of men and for them as though he loved them.

Modern idealism expresses itself with a grace to which the

half-educated craftsman was a total stranger. But its rhetorical

adornment is a painted flame compared with Behmen’s fire. Unlike the

earlier mystics, his theosophy embraces the whole of man. Unlike so

much recent speculation, it is wrought out more by the aspiration of

the soul than the ambition of the intellect. Amidst the fantastic

disorder of his notions, and the strange inequalities of his

insight—now so clear and piercing, now so puerile or perverse,—a

single purpose stands unquestionable,—he desired to justify the ways

of God to men. His life was a waking dream; but never did mystical

somnambulist more sincerely intend service to man and praise to God.

Note to page 107.

Behmen derives _Qualität_ from _quallen_, or _quellen_ (our _well_), and

understands by it the characteristic virtue or operation of anything.

Thus the seven Qualities are the seven _Fountain_-Spirits—the prolific

sources of their several species of influence. _Aurora_, i. § 3. The

notion of pain (_qual_) in giving birth enters also into his conception

of Quality.

The description of these seven Qualities occupies (amidst many

digressions) a considerable portion of the _Aurora_, and is repeated,

with additions and varieties of expression, throughout all his larger

works. The summary here given is derived principally from the account in

the _Aurora_, and the _Tabula Principiorum_, _Wercke_, vol. iv. p. 268.

Similar classifications and definitions are contained in the three first

chapters of the _Drei Principien_, and with more clearness and precision

in the _Mysterium Magnum_, cap. vi. Compare also especially _Aurora_,

cap. iv. §§ 8, 9; xiv. §§ 89, &c.; and xiii. 70-78.

These seven Fountain-Spirits, or Mothers of Nature, are a contrivance

really novel. Paracelsus bequeathed to Behmen the term _Mysterium

Magnum_, applying it to the Chaos whence he supposed light and darkness,

heaven and hell, to derive their origin. But Behmen’s furniture or

fitting-up of the idea is wholly original. Of the early Gnostics he

could know nothing, and his Heptarchy of Nature is totally distinct from

theirs. Basilides has seven intellectual and moral impersonations,—the

first rank of successive emanations of seven, comprised in his mystical

Abraxas. Saturninus has seven star-spirits—the lowest emanations in his

scheme, and bordering on matter. Ancient Gnosticism devised these

agencies to bridge the space between the supreme Spirit and Hyle. But

Behmen recognises no such gulph, and requires no such media. With him,

the thought becomes at once the act of God. Matter is not a foreign

inert substance, on which God works, like a sculptor. The material

universe exhibits, incorporate, those very attributes which constitute

the divine glory. Nature is not merely of, but out of, God. Did there

lie no divineness in it, the Divine Being would (on Behmen’s theory) be

cut off from contact with it. With the Sephiroth of the Cabbala Behmen

may possibly have had acquaintance. But, in the Cabbala, each Sephira is

dependent on that immediately above it, as in the hierarchies of Proclus

and Dionysius Areopagita. Behmen’s seven equal Qualities, reciprocally

producing and produced, are not links in a descending chain,—they are

expressions for the collective possibilities of being. Compare with them

the seven lower Sephiroth of the Cabbala, called Might, Beauty, Triumph,

Glory, Foundation, and Kingdom. Here we have mere arbitrary

personifications of the magnificence displayed in creation. Behmen’s

qualities are arbitrary, it is true. They might have been different in

name, in nature, in number, and the fundamental principles of the system

still retained. But who could have resisted the obvious advantages of

the sacred planetary number, seven? Behmen, however, goes much deeper

than the Cabbalists. He does not idly hypostatise visible attributes.

His attractive and diffusive Qualities are the results of

generalisation. His Fountain-Spirits are the seminal principles of all

being. They are, he believes, the vital laws of universal nature. They

are Energies operative, through innumerable transformations, in every

range of existence,—in heaven, on earth, and under the earth.

Note to page 108.

In the following passage, Behmen endeavours to explain himself, and

repels the charge of material pantheism.

‘I know the sophist will accuse me for saying that the power of God is

in the fruits of the earth, and identifies itself with the generative

processes of nature. But, harkye, friend, open thine eyes a moment. I

ask thee—How hath Paradise existence in this world?.... Is it in this

world or without it? In the power of God, or in the elements? Is the

power of God revealed or hidden?.... Tell me, doth not God live in time

also? Is He not all in all? Is it not written, “Am not I He that filleth

all things,” and “Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, for

ever?”

‘Here I bethink myself. I would stand clear of all blame from your

misconception. I say not that Nature is God, far less that the fruits of

the earth are He. I say God gives to all life its power—be that power

used for good or evil,—gives power to every creature according to its

desire. He Himself is all, yet is not in all natures to be called God,

but only where there is light, in respect of that (_nach dem Liechte_)

wherein He Himself dwells, and shines with power throughall his nature.

He communicates his power to all his nature and works (_allen seinen

Wesen und Wercken_), and everything appropriates that power of his

according to its property. One appropriates darkness, another light: the

appetite of each demands what is proper to it, and the whole substance

is still all of God, whether good or evil. For from Him, and through

Him, are all things; and what is not of his love is of his wrath.

‘Paradise is still in the world, but man is not in Paradise, unless he

be born again of God; in that case he stands therein in his new birth,

and not with the Adam of the four elements,’ &c., &c.—_De Signatura

Rerum_, cap. viii. §§ 45-47.

Note to page 117.

In his practical writings, and especially in his letters, Behmen handles

well the great theme of the life of Christ in us. The prayer of

salutation in most of his letters is—‘The open fountain in the heart of

Christ Jesus refresh and illumine us ever.’

Hear him, on this matter, in a letter to N. N., dated 1623:—

‘That man is no Christian who doth merely comfort himself with the

suffering, death, and satisfaction of Christ, and doth impute it to

himself as a gift of favour, remaining still himself a wild beast, and

unregenerate.... I say, therefore, that no show of grace imputed from

without can make a true Christian. Sin is not forgiven him by the

speaking of a word once for all from without, as a lord of this world

may give a murderer his life by an outward act of favour. No, this

availeth nothing with God.

‘There is no grace whereby we can come to adoption, save simply in the

blood and death of Christ. For Him alone hath God appointed to be a

throne of grace in His own love, which He hath set in Him, in the sweet

name Jesus (from Jehovah). He is the only sacrifice God accepteth to

reconcile His anger.

‘But if this said sacrifice is to avail for me, it must be wrought _in_

me. The Father must communicate or beget His Son in my desire-of-faith

(_Glaubensbegierde_), so that my faith’s hunger may apprehend Him in His

word of promise. Then I put Him on, in His entire process of

justification, in my inward ground; and straightway there begins in me

the killing of the wrath of the devil, death, and hell, from the inward

power of Christ’s death.

‘For I can do nothing; I am dead to myself; but Christ worketh in me

when He ariseth within. So am I inwardly dead, as to my true man; and He

is my life; the life I live, I live in Him, and not in mine-hood

(_Meinheit_), for grace slays my will and establisheth itself lord in

place of my self-hood (_Ichheit_), so that I am an instrument of God

wherewith He doth what He will.

‘Henceforth I live in two kingdoms;—with my outward mortal man, in the

vanity of time, wherein the yoke of sin yet liveth, which Christ taketh

on Himself in the inward kingdom of the divine world, and helpeth my

soul to bear it.... The Holy Scripture everywhere testifieth that we are

justified from sin, not by meritorious works of ours, but through the

blood and death of Christ. Many teach this, but few of them rightly

understand it.’

The other kingdom which, in his haste, Behmen forgot to specify, is the

inward world of spiritual and eternal life, which he calls

Paradise.—_Theosophische Sendbriefe_, xlvi. §§ 7, &c. He inveighs

frequently against an antinomian Calvinism. But if any one will compare

this letter with Calvin’s _Institutes_ III. i. and III. ii. 24, he will

find that, on the doctrine of union with Christ, Calvin and Behmen, in

spite of all their differences, hold language precisely similar.

Note to page 117.

Behmen was well entitled to teach that lesson of tolerance which his age

had so forgotten. In one of his letters he says, ‘I judge no man; that

anathematizing one of another is an empty prating. The Spirit of God

Himself judgeth all things. If He be in us, why need we trouble

ourselves about such idle chatter? On the contrary, I rejoice much

rather in the gifts of my brethren, and if any of them have received

another gift to utter than have I, why should I therefore condemn them?

Doth one herb, or flower, or tree, say to another, Thou art sour and

dark; I cannot stand in thy neighbourhood? Have they not all one common

Mother, whence they grow? Even so do all souls, all men, proceed from

One. Why boast we of ourselves as the children of God, if we are no

wiser than the flowers and herbs of the field,’ &c.—_Theos. Sendbr._ 12,

§§ 35, 36. Again, in the same letter (§ 61), ‘Doth not a bee gather

honey out of many flowers; and though some flowers be far better than

others, what cares the bee for that? She takes what serves her purpose.

Should she leave her sting in the flower, if its juices are not to her

taste, as man doth in his disdainfulness? Men strive about the husk, but

the noble life-juice they forsake.’

Exhortations to try the spirits, and warnings like those adverted to,

not lightly to take whatever fancies may enter the brain, for special

revelation, are given in _Theos. Send._ xi. § 64. The test he gives for

decision between a true and a false claim to revelation, is the

sincerity of desire for the divine—not self-glory; a genuine charity

towards man; a true hunger, ‘not after bread, but God.’-Compare

_Aurora_, cap. xix. § 77.

Note to page 118.

Carriere, in an excellent summary of Behmen’s doctrine, is inclined to

idealize his expressions on this point. He would regard Behmen’s

language concerning the fall and restitution of nature as symbolical,

and understand him only in a subjective sense. But such, I feel

persuaded, was not Behmen’s meaning. The idea that man, himself

disordered, sees nature and the world as out of joint,—that the

restoration of light within him will glorify the universe without, is

comparatively modern. The original design of man, in Behmen’s system,

requires a restitution in which man shall be once more the angelic lord

of life,—the summoner and monarch of all its potencies. Carriere has

pointed out, with just discrimination, the distinction between Behmen’s

position and that of German pantheism in our times. But on some points

he seems to me to view him too much with the eyes of the nineteenth

century, and his judgment is, on the whole, too favourable. See his

_Phil. Weltanschauung der Reformationzeit_, chap. xi.

The _De Signatura Rerum_ abounds in examples of that curious admixture

of chemical or astrological processes and phenomena with the facts of

the gospel narrative, to which allusion has been made. The following

specimen may suffice:—

‘Adam had brought his will into the poison of the external Mercury. So,

then, must Christ, as Love, yield up his will also in the venomous

Mercury. Adam ate of the evil tree; Christ must eat of the wrath of God;

and as it came to pass inwardly in the spirit, so must it also outwardly

in the flesh. And even thus is it in the philosophic work. Mercury, in

the philosophic work, signifieth the Pharisees, who cannot endure the

dear child. When he sees it, it gives him trembling and anguish. Thus

trembles Venus also, before the poison of the wrathful Mercury: they

are, one with the other, as though a sweat went from them, as the

Artista will see. Mars saith, ‘I am the fire-heart in the body: Saturn

is my might, and Mercury is my life: I will not endure Love. I will

swallow it up in my wrath.’ He signifies the Devil, in the wrath of God;

and because he cannot accomplish his purpose, he awakens Saturn, as the

Impression, who signifies the secular government, and therewith seeks to

seize Venus, but cannot succeed; for she is to him a deadly poison.

Mercury can still less bear the prospect of losing his dominion,—as the

high priests thought Christ would take away their dominion, because He

said He was the Son of God. So Mercury is greatly troubled about the

child of Venus,’ &c., &c.—_De Signatura Rerum_, cap. xi. §§ 18-22.

Note to page 118.

A word or two should find place here concerning the fate of Behmen’s

doctrine. His friends, Balthasar Walther and Abraham von Franckenberg,

were indefatigably faithful to his memory. The son of the very Richter

who had so persecuted him, became their fellow-labourer in the

dissemination of his writings. Throughout the latter half of the

seventeenth century, Germans, Swiss, Hollanders, Englishmen, were busy

with translations, commentaries, or original works, in exposition and

development of his philosophy. Gichtel published the first complete

edition of his writings in 1682, and afterwards went off on his own

account into one of the craziest phases of mysticism. Orthodox

Lutheranism long continued to assail the doctrine, as it had assailed

the man. But the genial piety of Spener, and the large charity of

Arnold—that generous advocate of ecclesiastical outcasts—did justice to

the devout earnestness of the theosophist. In France, St. Martin became

at once a translator and a disciple. His best representative in England

is William Law. That nonjuring clergyman was elevated and liberalised by

his intercourse with the mind of the German mystic, and well did he

repay the debt. Law may be said to have introduced Behmen to the English

public, both by his services as a translator, and by original writings

in advocacy of his leading principles. As might be expected, the

educated and more practical Englishman frequently expresses the thoughts

of the Teuton with much more force and clearness than their originator

could command. Several other Englishmen, then and subsequently,

speculated in the same track. But they met with small encouragement, and

their names are all but forgotten. Here and there some of their books

are to be found among literary curiosities, whose rarity is their only

value. If any would make acquaintance with Behmen’s theology, unvexed by

the difficulties of his language or the complexity in which he involves

his system, let them read Law. The practical aspect of Behmen’s

doctrines concerning the fall and redemption are well exhibited in his

lucid and searching treatise entitled _The Spirit of Prayer_; or, _The

Soul rising out of the Vanity of Time into the Riches of Eternity_.

In Germany Behmen became the great mystagogue of the Romantic school.

Novalis and Tieck are ardent in their admiration; but they are cold to

Frederick Schlegel. This unconscious caricature of Romanticism (always

in some frantic extreme or other) places Behmen above Luther and beside

Dante. A plain translation of the Bible, like that of Luther, he could

scarcely account a benefit. But a symbolical interpretation, like that

of Behmen, was a Promethean gift. Christian art was defective, he

thought, because it wanted a mythology. In Behmen’s theosophy he saw

that want supplied. Alas, that Thorwaldsen did not execute a statue of

the Astringent Quality—that Cornelius did not paint the Fiery—that Tieck

has never sung the legend of the Mysterium Magnum—and that a Gallery of

the Seven Mothers should be still the desideratum of Europe! Hegel

condescends to throw to Behmen some words of patronising praise, as a

distant harbinger of his own philosophical Messiahship. Carriere

declares that Schelling borrowed many choice morsels from his

terminology without acknowledgment. Franz Baader published a course of

lectures on Behmen—revived and adapted him to modern thought, and

developed a theosophy, among the most conspicuous of recent times,

altogether upon Behmen’s model. Baader assures us that had Schelling

thought less of Spinosa and more deeply studied Behmen, his philosophy

would have been far more rich in valuable result than we now find it.

Carriere, pp. 721-725.—Hegel’s _Encyclopædie, Vorr. z. zweiten Aufl._ p.

22. Hoffman’s _Franz Baader im Verhältnisse zu Spinosa_, &c. p. 23.

The judgment of Henry More concerning Behmen is discriminating and

impartial. ‘But as for Jacob Behmen I do not see but that he holds firm

the fundamentals of the Christian religion, and that his mind was

devoutly united to the Head of the Church, the crucified Jesus, to whom

he breathed out this short ejaculation with much fervency of spirit upon

his death-bed,—Thou crucified Lord Jesus, have mercy on me, and take me

into thy kingdom....

‘But the case seems to me to stand thus:—There being two main ways

whereby our mind is won off to assent to things: viz., the guidance of

reason, or the strength and vigour of fancy; and according to the

complexion or constitution of the body, we being led by this faculty

rather than by that, suppose, by the strength or fulness of fancy rather

than the closeness of reason (neither of which faculties are so sure

guides that we never miscarry under their conduct; insomuch that all

men, even the very best of them that light upon truth, are to be deemed

rather fortunate than wise), Jacob Behmen, I conceive, is to be reckoned

in the number of those whose imaginative faculty has the pre-eminence

above the rational; and though he was an holy and good man, his natural

complexion, notwithstanding, was not destroyed, but retained its

property still; and therefore his imagination being very busy about

divine things, he could not without a miracle fail of becoming an

enthusiast, and of receiving divine truths upon the account of the

strength and vigour of his fancy: which being so well qualified with

holiness and sanctity, proved not unsuccessful in sundry apprehensions,

but in others it fared with him after the manner of men, the sagacity of

his imagination failing him, as well as the anxiety of reason does

others of like integrity with himself.

‘Which things I think very worthy of noting, that no man’s writings may

be a snare to any one’s mind; that none may be puzzled in making that

true which of itself is certainly false; nor yet contemn the hearty and

powerful exhortations of a zealous soul to the indispensable duties of a

Christian, by any supposed deviations from the truth in speculations

that are not so material nor indispensable. Nay, though something should

fall from him in an enthusiastic hurricane that seems neither suitable

to what he writes elsewhere, nor to some grand theory that all men in

their wits hitherto have allowed for truth, yet it were to be imputed

rather to that pardonable disease that his natural complexion is

obnoxious to, than to any diabolical design in the writer; which rash

and unchristian reproach is as far from the truth, if not further, as I

conceive, than the credulity of those that think him in everything

infallibly inspired.—_Mastix, his Letter to a private Friend_, appended

to the _Enthusiasmus Triumphatus_, &c., p. 294 (1656).

It will be sufficient to enumerate the mere names of several minor

mystics, whose fancies are of little moment in the history of mystical

doctrine. In the sixteenth century appeared David Joris, a Dutchman, who

had almost fatal ecstasies and visions, and wrote and exhorted men, in

mystical language, to purity and self-abandonment. Also Postel, a

Frenchman, more mad than the former, who believed in a female devotee,

named Johanna, as the second Eve, through whom humanity was to be

regenerated. Guthmann, Lautensack, and Conrad Sperber, were theosophists

who mingled, in hopeless confusion, religious doctrine and alchemic

process, physics and scripture, tradition, vision, fancy, fact. During

the first half of the seventeenth century, Brunswick was agitated by one

Engelbrecht, a sickly hypochondriacal weaver, who imagined himself

translated to heaven and hell, and commissioned to expound and preach

incessantly. During the latter part of the same century, the madman

Kuhlmann roved and raved about Europe, summoning sovereigns to his bar:

Conrad Dippel improvised a medley of Paracelsus, Schwenkfeld, and

Behmen; and John George Gichtel, a fanatical Quietist, bathed his soul

in imaginary flames, believed himself destined to illumine all mankind,

founded the sect of the Angel-Brethren, and seems to have ended in sheer

madness. An account of these and other mystics, even less notable, will

be found in Arnold’s _Kirchen-undKetzergeschichte_, Th. iii.

Footnote 241:

The initiate mind saith this and saith that, as it circles around the

unspeakable Depth. Thou art the bringer-forth, thou too the offspring;

thou the illuminer, thou the illuminate; thou art the manifest, thou

art the hidden one,—hid by thy glories. One, and yet all things, one

in thyself alone, yet throughout all things!

Footnote 242:

_Von den drei Principien des Göttlichen Wesens_, cap. vii. §§ 22, &c.,

cap. ix. 30, _et passim_. _Aurora_, cap. ii. § 41; cap. xxiii. 61-82.

Compare _Aurora_, cap. xx. §§ 49, &c. _Drei Princip._ cap. vii. 25.

_Aurora_, cap. x. § 58. Also cap. iii. throughout. There he describes

the way in which every natural object—wood, stone, or plant, contains

three principles,—the image, or impress of the divine Trinity; first,

the Power (_Krafft_) whereby it possesses a body proper to itself;

secondly, the sap (_Safft_) or heart; thirdly, the peculiar virtue,

smell, or taste proceeding from it; this is its _spirit_ (§ 47). So,

in the soul of man, do Power, and Light, and a Spirit of

Understanding—the offspring of both—correspond to the three persons of

the Trinity (§ 42).

Footnote 243:

See Note on p. 120.

Footnote 244:

See Note on p. 121.

Footnote 245:

Here I am much indebted to the masterly discussion of the theory in

question, contained in Müller’s _Lehre von der Sünde_, Buch ii. cap.

4.

Footnote 246:

_Aurora_, cap. ix. § 42; cap. xviii. § 10-15; cap. xxiii. §§ 92, &c.

The remarks in the text, concerning Behmen’s position as between

theism and pantheism, are only true if the word theism be there

understood as equivalent to deism. For theism, understanding by it

belief in a personal deity, does not remove God from the universe.

Theism ought to represent the true mean between the deism which

relegates a divine Mechanician far from the work of his hands, and the

pantheism which submerges him beneath it.

Footnote 247:

_Aurora_, cap. iv. §§ 10, 11. Comp. § 15, and also cap. xxi. § 37.

Footnote 248:

_Aurora_, cap. v. § 4; cap. xvii. § 16.

Footnote 249:

_Aurora._, § 27; cap. xiv. § 104; cap. x. §§ 42, 65; xix. § 50.

Footnote 250:

For example, in the _Drei Principien_, cap. xxvi. §§ 13-34, and in the

_Aurora_, cap. xii. § 65.

Footnote 251:

See Note on p. 121.

Footnote 252:

_Theos. Sendbr._ 46, §§ 51-54. See also Note on page 122.

Footnote 253:

Behmen supposed the latter day not far distant (_Aurora_, iv. 2), but

his remarks on the vanity of eschatological speculations generally

might be read with advantage by some of our modern interpreters of

prophecy. See the letters to Paul Kaym, _Theos. Send._ viii. and xi.

Footnote 254:

_Theos. Sendbr._ x. § 20. See also Note on page 123.

Footnote 255:

_Aurora_, cap. xx. § 1; xxii. 26. See also second Note on page 123.

CHAPTER IX.

O sola, mica, rama lamahi,

Volase, cala, maja, mira, salame,

Viemisa molasola, Rama, Afasala.

Mirahel, Zorabeli, Assaja!

_Citation for all Spirits, from the_ BLACK RAVEN.

A strict regard for historical accuracy compels me to state that the

following conversation took place in the drawing-room, and not in the

library. By such an arrangement, that bright feminine presence was

secured which, according to Gower, deprived mysticism itself of half its

obscurity.

‘Did Jacob Behmen frighten you away?’ asked Willoughby of Mrs. Atherton,

somewhat remorsefully. ‘I think Atherton and Gower will bear me out in

saying that it was not easy to render the worthy shoemaker

entertaining.’

MRS. ATHERTON. Mr. Gower was telling us just before you came in, that he

found him, from your account, a much more imaginative personage than he

had supposed—quite a poetical philosopher.

GOWER. Behmen holds a poet’s doctrine, surely, when he represents all

nature as struggling towards an ideal,—striving to bring forth now, as

it once did—ere Lucifer had fallen,—longing and labouring, in fellowship

with our human aspiration.

WILLOUGHBY. Such a notion must tend to remove from the mind that painful

sense we sometimes have of the indifference of nature to our thoughts

and doings.

ATHERTON. To remove that feeling from the imagination, at least.

WILLOUGHBY. And that is enough; for only in imagination can it have

existence. Man is so much greater than nature.

GOWER. It does, indeed, make all the difference to poets and artists,

whether they read sympathy or apathy in the face of creation. Think of

the various forms and agencies of nature—of the swart Cyclopean forces

under the earth—of the deftly-woven threadwork of the tissues—of

vapour-pageantries, and cloud-cupolas, and fairy curls of smoke—of the

changeful polity of the seasons, advancing and disgracing frost or

sunshine—of the waves lashing at the land, and the land growing into the

waves,—of all these ministries as working, like thoughtful man, toward a

divine standard; as rejoicing, in their measure, through every

descending range of being, under the restoring hand of the Divine

Artificer, and panting to recover the order and the beauty of the

Paradise which shines above,—of the Eden which once blossomed here

below. Think of the earth, resigning herself each winter to her space of

sleep, saying inwardly, ‘I have wrought another year to bring the

offspring of my breast nearer to the heavenly pattern hidden in my

heart. I rest, another circuit nearer to the final consummation.’ Then

there is that upper Paradise—substantial, yet ethereal,—as full of

beauty, for finer senses, as earth’s fairest spots for more gross,

without aught that is hurtful or discordant. Fill up Behmen’s outline.

Picture the heavenly hills and valleys, whispering one to another in

odorous airs,—a converse only broken sweetly, from time to time, by the

floating tones of some distant angel-psalm, as the quiet of a lake by a

gliding swan. There run rivers of life—the jubilant souls of the

meditative glens through which they wend. There are what seem birds,

gorgeous as sunset clouds, and less earthly,—animal forms, graceful as

the antelope, leaping among crags more lustrous than diamond,—creatures

mightier than leviathan; and mild-eyed as the dove couching among

immortal flowers, or bathing in the crystal sea. The very dust is

dazzling and priceless, intersown with the sapphire, the sardonyx, the

emerald of heaven; and all the ground and pavement of that world

branching with veins as of gold and silver, an arborescent glory,

instinct with mysterious life.

WILLOUGHBY. Thank you, Gower.

GOWER. Thank you, Willoughby. You are my informant. I never read a line

of Behmen on my own account, and, what is more, never will.

KATE. Helen and I want you very much to tell us something about the

Rosicrucians.

ATHERTON. You have read _Zanoni_——

KATE. And we are all the more curious in consequence. How much of such a

story may I think true?

ATHERTON. As an ideal portraiture of that ambition which seeks lordship

within the marches of the unseen world, I think _Zanoni_ perfect.

MRS. ATHERTON. The Rosicrucians pretended, did they not, that they could

prolong life indefinitely,—laid claim to all sorts of wonderful power

and knowledge? Have you not once or twice met with a person, or heard of

one, who would certainly have been suspected of being a Rosicrucian by

superstitious people? I mean, without any pretence on his part, merely

from a singular appearance, or a mysterious manner, or uncommon

cleverness.

ATHERTON. Oh, yes; such men would keep up the Rosicrucian tradition

bravely among the common folk.

WILLOUGHBY. And among great folk, too, if they took the pains.

MRS. ATHERTON. I was thinking of Colonel Napier’s description of George

Borrow, which we were reading the other day. He pictures him youthful in

figure, yet with snow-white hair; inscrutable, therefore, as to age, as

the Wandering Jew; he has deep-black mesmeric eyes, terrible to dogs and

Portuguese; he is silent about himself to the most tantalizing height of

mystery, no man knowing his whence or whither; he is master of

information astoundingly various, speaks with fluency English, French,

German, Spanish, Greek, Hindee, Moultanee, the gipsy tongue, and more

beside, for aught I know. So equipped, within and without, he might have

set up for a Zanoni almost anywhere, and succeeded to admiration.

ATHERTON. How small the charlatans look beside such a specimen of true

manhood. But where shall we find the distance wider between the ideal

and the actual than in this very province of supernatural pretension?

What a gulf between the high personage our romance imagines and that

roving, dare-devil buccaneer of science, or that shuffling quacksalver

which our matter-of-fact research discovers. Don’t you agree with me,

Willoughby?

WILLOUGHBY. Altogether. Only compare the two sets of figures—what we

fancy, and what we find. On the one side you picture to yourself a man

Platonically elevated above the grossness and entanglement of human

passions, disdaining earth, dauntlessly out-staring the baleful eyes of

that nameless horror—the Dweller on the Threshold; commanding the

prescience and the power of mightiest spirits; and visited, like

Shelley’s Witch of Atlas, as he reads the scrolls of some Saturnian

Archimage, by universal Pan, who comes with homage ‘out of his

everlasting lair,’—

‘Where the quick heart of the great world doth pant.’

This is the theurgist, as imagination paints him. Now turn, on the other

side, to the actual gallery of theosophic and theurgic worthies, as

history reveals them. Baptista Porta dwells in a house which is the

triumph of legerdemain,—the palace of Puck, the most intricate nest of

traps, surprises, optical delusions, grotesque transformations,—throwing

host and guests into paroxysms of laughter or of fear. You see Cornelius

Agrippa, in threadbare bravery, with his heart upon his sleeve, and

every expression by turns upon his brow, save that of the Platonic

serenity. Paracelsus swears worse than my uncle Toby’s comrades in

Flanders, and raves about his Homunculus. But from such men we cannot

withhold sympathy, respect, even a certain admiration. In that

eighteenth century, behold that grand magnet for all the loose and

dupable social particles in every class and country—the soi-disant Count

Cagliostro, with his Seraphina, his Egyptian Lodge, his elixirs and red

powder, his magical caraffes, his phosphorous glories, his Pentagon and

Columbs, his Seven Planetary Spirits, his Helios, Mene, Tetragrammaton.

In that age of professed Illuminism, in the times of Voltaire and

Diderot, when universal _Aufklärung_ was to banish every mediæval

phantasm, you see Father Gassner, with his miraculous cures, followed by

crowds through Swabia and Bavaria;—Mesmer attracting Paris and Vienna to

his darkened rooms and hidden music, to be awe-stricken by the

cataleptic horrors there achieved;—the Count St. Germain declaring

himself three hundred years old, and professing the occult science of

diamond-manufacturing Brahmins;—the coffee-house keeper, Schröpfer,

deluding Leipsic and Frankfort with his pretended theurgic art;—and St.

Maurice, swindling the sceptical wits and _roués_ who flutter in the

drawing-rooms of Mesdames Du Maine and De Tencin, pretending to open

converse for them with sylphs and Salamanders, invoking the genius

Alaël, and finally subsiding into the Bastille. Such are some among the

actual caricatures of the artistic conception embodied in the character

of Zanoni.

ATHERTON. Truly a bad symptom of the general disease, when men grow

unable to see that the highest dignity lies close at hand.

WILLOUGHBY. As though man could never exhibit magnanimity unless in some

thrilling dramatic ‘situation.’

GOWER. Or could not believe in the unseen world save by help of

necromancers, miracle-mongers, and clairvoyantes.

ATHERTON. The ancient saying abides true,—He that ruleth his own spirit

is greater than he that taketh a city,—greater than even he who should

carry the cloud-capital of the whole world of spirits, pull down its

meteor-flag, and make all the weird garrison his thralls. I think, if I

were a preacher, I should some day take up the phase of man’s mental

history we have now reviewed as a practical exposition of Christ’s

words—‘Nevertheless, in this rejoice not that the spirits are subject

unto you, but rather that your names are written in heaven.’

KATE. I should like to know, after all, precisely who and what these

Rosicrucians were. When did they make their first appearance?

WILLOUGHBY. They were originally neither more nor less than the ‘Mrs.

Harris’ of a Lutheran pastor.

MRS. ATHERTON. Mr. Willoughby!

ATHERTON. Fact, Lily. Willoughby never said anything truer.

WILLOUGHBY. Allow me to tell you the story.—About the year 1610, there

appeared anonymously a little book, which excited great sensation

throughout Germany. It was entitled, _The Discovery of the Brotherhood

of the Honourable Order of the Rosy Cross_, and dedicated to all the

scholars and magnates of Europe.[256]

It commenced with an imaginary dialogue between the Seven Sages of

Greece, and other worthies of antiquity, on the best method of

accomplishing a general reform in those evil times. The suggestion of

Seneca is adopted, as most feasible, namely, a secret confederacy of

wise philanthropists, who shall labour everywhere in unison for this

desirable end. The book then announces the actual existence of such an

association. One Christian Rosenkreuz, whose travels in the East had

enriched him with the highest treasures of occult lore, is said to have

communicated his wisdom, under a vow of secresy, to eight disciples, for

whom he erected a mysterious dwelling-place called The Temple of the

Holy Ghost. It is stated further, that this long-hidden edifice had been

at last discovered, and within it the body of Rosenkreuz, untouched by

corruption, though, since his death, one hundred and twenty years had

passed away. The surviving disciples of the institute call on the

learned and devout, who desire to co-operate in their projects of

reform, to advertise their names. They themselves indicate neither name

nor place of rendezvous. They describe themselves as true Protestants.

They expressly assert that they contemplate no political movement in

hostility to the reigning powers. Their sole aim is the diminution of

the fearful sum of human suffering, the spread of education, the

advancement of learning, science, universal enlightenment, and love.

Traditions and manuscripts in their possession have given them the power

of gold-making, with other potent secrets; but by their wealth they set

little store. They have _arcana_, in comparison with which the secret of

the alchemist is a trifle. But all is subordinate, with them, to their

one high purpose of benefiting their fellows both in body and soul.

MRS. ATHERTON. No wonder the book made some noise.

WILLOUGHBY. I could give you conclusive reasons, if it would not tire

you to hear them, for the belief that this far-famed book was written by

a young Lutheran divine named Valentine Andreä. He was one of the very

few who understood the age, and had the heart to try and mend it. You

see him, when his college days are over, starting on his travels—his old

mother giving him her tearful ‘God bless you,’ as she puts into his hand

all the treasure of her poverty,—a rusty old coin, and twelve kreuzer.

From the cottage-door her gaze follows with many a prayer the good son,

whose beloved form lessens along the country road. Years after, he comes

back, bringing with him the same old coin, and with it several hundred

gulden. He has seen the world, toiling, with quick observant eye and

brave kindly heart, through south and western Germany, among the Alps,

through Italy and France. He has been sometimes in clover as a

travelling tutor, sometimes he has slept and fared hard, under

vine-hedges, in noisy, dirty little inns, among carriers, packmen, and

travelling apprentices. The candidate becomes pastor, and proves himself

wise in men as well as books. A philanthropist by nature, he is not one

of those dreamers who hate all that will not aid their one pet scheme,

and cant about a general brotherhood which exempts them from particular

charity. Wherever the church, the school, the institute of charity have

fallen into ruin or disorder by stress of war, by fraud, or selfish

neglect, there the indefatigable Andreä appears to restore them. He

devises new plans of benevolence,—appealing, persuading, rebuking. He

endures the petulence of disturbed indolence, the persecution of exposed

abuse; bearing with, and winning over, all sorts of hopeless crabbed

people, thrusting men’s hands into their pockets, they know not how. He

is an arch bore in the eyes of miserly burgomasters and slumberous

brother clergy—a very patron-saint for the needy and distressed, the

orphan and the widow. To this robust practical benevolence was added a

genial humour, not uncommon in minds of strength like his, and a certain

trenchant skill in satirical delineation which renders some of his

writings among the most serviceable to the historian of those times.

GOWER. Oh, how I love that man!

WILLOUGHBY. Well, this Andreä writes the _Discovery of the Rosicrucian

Brotherhood_, a _jeu-d’esprit_ with a serious purpose, just as an

experiment to see whether something cannot be done by combined effort to

remedy the defect and abuses—social, educational, and religious, so

lamented by all good men. He thought there were many Andreäs scattered

throughout Europe—how powerful would be their united systematic action!

KATE. But why mix up with his proposal all this idle fabling about

Rosenkreuz and his fraternity?

WILLOUGHBY. But for that spice of romance, this notion of his could

never have done more than chip the shell or sprawl helpless in the nest.

The promise of supernatural powers awakened universal attention—fledged,

and gave it strength to fly through Europe.

MRS. ATHERTON. But the hoax could not last long, and would, after all,

encourage those idle superstitions which were among the most mischievous

of the errors he was trying to put down.

WILLOUGHBY. So indeed it proved. But his expectation was otherwise. He

hoped that the few nobler minds whom he desired to organize would see

through the veil of fiction in which he had invested his proposal; that

he might communicate personally with some such, if they should appear;

or that his book might lead them to form among themselves a practical

philanthropic confederacy, answering to the serious purpose he had

embodied in his fiction. Let the empty charlatan and the ignoble

gold-seeker be fooled to the top of their bent, their blank

disappointment would be an excellent jest; only let some few, to whom

humanity was more dear than bullion, be stimulated to a new enterprise.

GOWER. The scheme was certain, at any rate, to procure him some

amusement.

WILLOUGHBY. Many a laugh, you may be sure, he enjoyed in his parsonage

with his few friends who were in the secret, when they found their fable

everywhere swallowed greedily as unquestionable fact. On all sides they

heard of search instituted to discover the Temple of the Holy Ghost.

Printed letters appear continually, addressed to the imaginary

brotherhood, giving generally the initials of the candidate, where the

invisibles might hear of him, stating his motives and qualifications for

entrance into their number, and sometimes furnishing samples of his

cabbalistic acquirements. Still, no answer. Not a trace of the Temple.

Profound darkness and silence, after the brilliant flash which had

awakened so many hopes. Soon the mirth grew serious. Andreä saw with

concern that shrewd heads of the wrong sort began to scent his artifice,

while quacks reaped a rogue’s harvest from it. The reality was ridiculed

as fiction, and the fiction hailed as reality. Society was full of the

rotten combustible matter which his spark had kindled into a

conflagration he could not hope to stay. A cloud of books and pamphlets

issued from the press, for and against the fraternity, whose actual

house lay beneath the Doctor’s hat of Valentine Andreä. Medical

practitioners of the old school, who denounced the spagiric method, and

to whom the name of Paracelsus was an abomination, ridiculed the

Rosicrucian secrets, and scoffed at their offer of gratuitous cures.

Orthodox divines, like Libavius, swinging a heavy club, cruelly

demolished the little book,—which, of a truth, was not fit to sustain

rough handling. They called down fire from heaven on its unknown

authors, and declared that their _rosa_ should be _rota_—their rose, the

wheel. Meanwhile a number of enthusiasts became volunteer expositors of

the principle and aim of this undiscoverable brotherhood. Andreä saw his

scheme look as ridiculous in the hands of its credulous friends as it

seemed odious in those of its enemies. A swarm of impostors pretended to

belong to the Fraternity, and found a readier sale than ever for their

nostrums. Andreä dared not reveal himself. All he could do was to write

book after book to expose the folly of those whom his handiwork had so

befooled, and still to labour on, by pen and speech, in earnest aid of

that reform which his unhappy stratagem had less helped than hindered.

MRS. ATHERTON. And was no society ever actually formed?

WILLOUGHBY. I believe not; nothing, at least, answering in any way to

Andreä’s design. Confederacies of pretenders appear to have been

organized in various places; but Descartes says he sought in vain for a

Rosicrucian lodge in Germany. The name Rosicrucian became by degrees a

generic term, embracing every species of occult pretension,—arcana,

elixirs, the philosopher’s stone, theurgic ritual, symbols, initiations.

In general usage the term is associated more especially with that branch

of the secret art which has to do with the creatures of the elements.

ATHERTON. And from this deposit of current mystical tradition sprang, in

great measure, the Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism of the eighteenth

century,—that golden age of secret societies. Then flourished

associations of every imaginable kind, suited to every taste. The

gourmand might be sure of a good dinner in one; the alchemist might hope

to catch his secret in a second; the place-hunter might strengthen his

interest in the brotherhood of a third; and, in all, the curious and the

credulous might be fleeced to their hearts’ content. Some lodges

belonged to Protestant societies, others were the implements of the

Jesuits. Some were aristocratic, like the Strict Observance; others

democratic, seeking in vain to escape an Argus-eyed police. Some—like

the Illuminati under Weishaupt, Knigge, and Von Zwackh, numbering (among

many knaves) not a few names of rank, probity, and learning—were the

professed enemies of mysticism and superstition. Others existed only for

the profitable juggle of incantations and fortune-telling. The lodges

contended with each other and among themselves; divided and subdivided;

modified and remodified their constitutions; blended and dispersed;

till, at last, we almost cease to hear of them. The best perished at the

hands of the Jesuits, the worst at the hands of the police.

WILLOUGHBY. At Vienna, the Rosicrucians and Freemasons were at one time

so much the rage that a modification of the mason’s apron became a

fashionable part of female dress, and chatelaines were made of miniature

hammers, circles, and plumblines.

KATE. Very pretty, some of them, I dare say.

ATHERTON. Do you remember, Gower, that large old house we saw at Vienna,

called the Stift?

GOWER. Perfectly, and the Stift-gasse, too, leading to it, for there I

got wet through.

ATHERTON. That building is the relic of a charity founded by a professed

Rosicrucian. He took the name of Chaos (after their fashion)—every

brother changing his name for some such title as Sol, Aureus, Mercurius,

and so on, according to his taste. He came to Vienna in the seventeenth

century, and somehow, whether by his alchemy or not I cannot say,

acquired both fortune and nobility. Ferdinand III. made him

Hofkammerath, and prefixed a Von to the Chaos. This good man founded an

institution for orphans, who were once educated in that house, since

converted into a military academy, and bearing still, in its name and

neighbourhood, traces of the original endowment.

MRS. ATHERTON. Andreä would have taken some comfort could he but have

seen at least that practical fruit of his Rosicrucian whim. How his

heart would have rejoiced to hear the hum of the orphan school-room, and

to see their smoking platters!

KATE. My curiosity is not yet satisfied. I should like to know something

more about those most poetical beings, the creatures of the

elements,—Sylph, Undine, and Co.

ATHERTON. On this subject, Kate, I am happy to be able to satisfy you. I

can conduct you at once to the fountain-head. I will read you the

process enjoined in the _Comte de Gabalis_ for attaining to converse

with some of these fanciful creations. (_Taking down a little book._)

Here is the passage.[257] (_Reads._)

‘If we wish to recover our empire over the salamanders, we must purify

and exalt the element of fire we have within us, and restore the tone of

this chord which desuetude has so relaxed. We have only to concentrate

the fire of the world, by concave mirrors, in a globe of glass. This is

the process all the ancients have religiously kept secret; it was

revealed by the divine Theophrastus. In such a globe is formed a solar

powder, and this, self-purified from the admixture of other elements,

and prepared according to the rules of art, acquires, in a very short

time, a sovereign virtue for the exaltation of the fire within us, and

renders us, so to speak, of an igneous nature. Henceforth the

inhabitants of the fiery sphere become our inferiors. Delighted to find

our reciprocal harmony restored, and to see us drawing near to them,

they feel for us all the friendship they have for their own species, all

the respect they owe to the image and vicegerent of their Creator, and

pay us every attention that can be prompted by the desire of obtaining

at our hands that immortality which does not naturally belong to them.

The salamanders, however, as they are more subtile than the creatures of

the other elements, live a very long time, and are therefore less urgent

in seeking from the sage that affection which endows them with

immortality....

‘It is otherwise with the sylphs, the gnomes, and the nymphs. As they

live a shorter time, they have more inducement to court our regard, and

it is much easier to become intimate with them. You have only to fill a

glass vessel with compressed air, with earth, or with water, close it

up, and leave it exposed to the sun’s rays for a month. After that time,

effect a scientific separation of the elements, which you will easily

accomplish, more especially with earth or water. It is wonderful to see

what a charm each of the elements thus purified possesses for attracting

nymphs, sylphs, and gnomes. After taking the smallest particle of this

preparation every day for a few months, you see in the air the flying

commonwealth of the sylphs, the nymphs coming in crowds to the

waterside, and the guardians of hidden treasure displaying their stores

of wealth. Thus, without magical figures, without ceremonies, without

barbarous terms, an absolute power is acquired over all these people of

the elements. They require no homage from the philosopher, for they know

well that he is their superior.... Thus does man recover his natural

empire, and become omnipotent in the region of the elements, without aid

of dæmon, without illicit art.’

Of course you have all learnt from Undine that the creatures of the

elements are supposed to obtain a soul, and become immortal by alliance

with one of our race. There is a double advantage, too, for these happy

philosophers may not only raise their nymph or sylphide to a share with

them in the happiness of heaven, if they reach it, but if the sage

should be so unfortunate as not to be predestined to an immortality of

blessedness, his union with one of these beings will operate on himself

conversely,—that is, will render his soul mortal, and deliver him from

the horrors of the endless second death. So Satan misses his prey in

either sphere.

WILLOUGHBY. I never knew before that these cabbalists were Calvinists.

ATHERTON. This touch of Jansenism excites the same astonishment in the

author of the _Comte de Gabalis_. A delightful wag, that Abbé Villars!

The philosophers are described by the Count as the instructors and the

saviours of the poor elementary folk, who, but for their assistance in

forming _liaisons_ with mortals, would inevitably at last fall into the

hands of their enemy, the devil. As soon, he says, as a sylph has learnt

from us how to pronounce cabbalistically the potent name

NEHMAHMIHAH,[258] and to combine it, in due form, with the delicious

name ELIAEL, all the powers of darkness take to flight, and the sylph

enjoys, unmolested, the love he seeks!

WILLOUGHBY. How universal seems to have been the faith in the magical

efficacy of certain words, from the earliest to the latest times, among

the more sober as well as the most extravagant theurgists. A long list

of them might be drawn up. There is the Indian O-U-M; there are the

Ephesian letters; with Demogorgon, ‘dreaded name,’ as Milton reminds us;

the barbarous words, too, which the Chaldean oracles and Psellus declare

must on no account be Hellenised.

GOWER. And the word AGLA, I remember, in Colin de Plancy, which, when

duly pronounced, facing the east, makes absent persons appear, and

discovers lost property.[259] I suppose the potency is in proportion to

the unintelligibility of the terms.

ATHERTON. The Comte de Gabalis tells us how the Salamander Oramasis

enabled Shem and Japhet to restore the patriarch Noah to his former

vigour by instructing them how to pronounce six times alternately,

walking backward, the tremendous name JABAMIAH.

But the word above every word is the SHEMHAMPHORASH of the Talmud.[260]

The latter rabbins say that Moses was forty days on Mount Sinai, to

learn it of the angel Saxael. Solomon achieved his fiend-compelling

wonders by its aid. Jesus of Nazareth, they say, stole it from the

Temple, and was enabled by its virtue to delude the people. It is now,

alas! lost; but could any one rightly and devoutly pronounce it, he

would be able to create therewith a world. Even approximate sounds and

letters, supplied by rabbinical conjecture, give their possessor power

over the spirit-world, from the first-class archangel to the vulgar

ghost: he can heal the sick, raise the dead, and destroy his enemies.

WILLOUGHBY. It is curious to see some of these theosophists, who cry out

so against the letter, becoming its abject bondsmen among the

puerilities of the Cabbala. They protest loudly that the mere letter is

an empty shell—and then discover stupendous powers lying intrenched

within the curves and angles of a Hebrew character.

ATHERTON. Our seventeenth century mystics, even when most given to

romancing, occupied but a mere corner of that land of marvel in which

their Jewish contemporaries rejoiced. The Jews, in their dæmonology,

leave the most fantastic conceptions of all other times and nations at

an immeasurable distance. Their affluence of devils is amazing. Think of

it!—Rabbi Huna tells you that every rabbi has a thousand dæmons at his

left hand, and ten thousand at his right: the sensation of closeness in

a room of Jewish assembly comes from the press of their crowding

multitudes: has a rabbi a threadbare gabardine and holes in his shoes,

it is from the friction of the swarming devilry that everywhere attends

him.[261]

GOWER. To return to societies—did you ever hear, Willoughby, of the

Philadelphian Association?[262]

WILLOUGHBY. That founded by Pordage, do you mean—the doctor who fought

the giant so stoutly one night?

GOWER. The same. I picked up a book of his at a stall the other day.

KATE. Who was he? Pray tell us the story of the battle.

GOWER. A Royalist clergyman who took to medicine under the Protectorate.

The story is simply this.—Pordage, whose veracity even his enemies do

not impugn, declares that he woke from sleep one night, and saw before

his bed a giant ‘horrible and high,’ with an enormous sword drawn in one

hand, and an uprooted tree in the other. The monster evidently means

mischief. The Doctor seizes his walking-stick. Round swings the

lumbering tree-trunk, up goes the nimble staff——

ATHERTON. What became of the bedposts?

GOWER. Hush, base materialist! The weapons were but the symbols of the

conflict, and were symbolically flourished. The real combat was one of

spirit against spirit—wholly internal; what would now be called

electro-biological. Each antagonist bent against his foe the utmost

strength of will and imagination.

WILLOUGHBY. Somewhat after the manner of the Astras which the Indian

gods hurled at each other—spells of strong volition, which could parch

their object with heat, freeze him with cold, lash him with hail, shut

him up in immobility, though hundreds of miles away.

ATHERTON. Surpassing powers those, indeed; not even requiring the

present eye and will of the operator to master the imagination of the

subject mind.

KATE. And the battle in the bedroom?

GOWER. Lasted half an hour; when the giant, finding Dr. Pordage a tough

customer, took his departure.

WILLOUGHBY. Pordage was a great student and admirer of Behmen; but,

unlike his master, an inveterate spirit-seer. I dare say he actually had

a dream to the effect you relate.

GOWER. But he and the whole Philadelphian Society—a coterie of some

twenty ghost-seers—profess to have seen apparitions of angels and

devils, in broad daylight, every day, for nearly a month.

MRS. ATHERTON. What were they like?

GOWER. The chief devils drove in chariots of black cloud, drawn by

inferior dæmons in the form of dragons, bears, and lions. The spirits of

wicked men were the ugliest of all,—cloven-footed, cats-eared, tusked,

crooked-mouthed, bow-legged creatures.

ATHERTON. Did the Philadelphians profess to see the spirits with the

inward or the bodily eye?

GOWER. With both. They saw them in whole armies and processions, gliding

in through wall or window-pane—saw them as well with the eyes shut as

open. For, by means of the sympathy between soul and body, the outer

eye, says Pordage, is made to share the vision of the inner. When we

cease to use that organ, the internal vision is no less active. I should

add that the members were conscious of a most unpleasant smell, and were

troubled with a sulphurous taste in the mouth while such appearances

lasted.

WILLOUGHBY. Mrs. Leade is one of the most conspicuous of their number,—a

widow of good family from Norfolk, who forsook the world and retired

into her inmost self, holding intercourse with spirits and writing her

revelations.

GOWER. She, I believe, carried to its practical extreme the Paracelsian

doctrine concerning the magical power of faith.

WILLOUGHBY. That is her one idea. By union with the divine will, she

says, the ancient believers wrought their miracles. Faith has now the

same prerogative: the will of the soul, wholly yielded to God, becomes a

resistless power, can bind and loose, bless and ban, throughout the

universe. Had any considerable number among men a faith so strong,

rebellious nature would be subdued by their holy spells, and Paradise

restored.

ATHERTON. Some of the German Romanticists have revived this idea—never,

perhaps, wholly dead. Some stir was made for awhile by the theory that

the power of miracle was native in man—and haply recoverable.

WILLOUGHBY. Such a doctrine is but one among the many retrogressions of

the mediæval school.

Footnote 256:

See, concerning the history of this book, and its author, Valentine

Andreä, J. G. Buhle, _Ueber den Ursprung und die Vornehmsten Schiksale

der Orden der Rosenkreuzer und Freymaurer_ (Göttingen, 1804), chapp.

iii. and iv. Arnold gives a full account of the controversy, and

extracts, which appear to indicate very fairly the character of the

Fama Fraternitatis, _Kirchen-und-Ketzergeschichte_, Th. ii. Buch xvii.

cap. 18.

The derivation of the name Rosicrucian from _ros_ and _crux_, rather

than _rosa_ and _crux_, to which Brucker alludes (_Hist. Phil._ Per.

III. Pars i. lib. 3, cap. 3), is untenable. By rights, the word, if

from _rosa_, should no doubt be Rosacrucian; but such a malformation,

by no means uncommon, cannot outweigh the reasons adduced on behalf of

the generally-received etymology. See Buhle, pp. 174, &c.

Footnote 257:

_Le Comte de Gabalis, ou Entretiens sur les Sciences Secrètes_ (Metz,

an cinq. républicain), pp. 53-56.

The following passage is a sample of those high-sounding promises with

which the pretenders to the Rosicrucian science allured the neophyte:—

‘You are about to learn (says the Count to the author) how to command

all nature: God alone will be your master; the philosophers alone your

equals. The highest intelligences will be ambitious to obey your

desire; the demons will not dare to approach the place where you are;

your voice will make them tremble in the depths of the abyss, and all

the invisible populace of the four elements will deem themselves happy

to minister to your pleasures.... Have you the courage and the

ambition to serve God alone, and to be lord over all that is not God?

Have you understood what it is to be a man? Are you not weary of

serving as a slave,—you, who were born for dominion?‘—(p. 27.)

Footnote 258:

_Comte de Gabalis_, p. 185. See the story of Noah’s calamity, and the

salamander Oromasis, p. 140.

Footnote 259:

See Colin de Plancy’s _Dictionnaire Infernal_, Art. Cabale. Horst

furnishes a number of such words, _Zauberbibliothek_, vol. III. xvi.

2.

Footnote 260:

Horst inserts in his _Zauberbibliothek_ the whole of a once famous

cabbalistic treatise, entitled _Semiphoras et Shemhamphoras Salomonis

Regis_, a medley of astrological and theurgic doctrine and

prescription. The word Shemhamphorash is not the real word of power,

but an expression or conventional representative of it. The Rabbis

dispute whether the genuine word consisted of twelve, two-and-forty,

or two-and seventy-letters. Their Gematria or cabbalistic arithmetic,

endeavours partially to reconstruct it. They are agreed that the

prayers of Israel avail now so little because this word is lost, and

they know not ‘the _name_ of the Lord.’ But a couple of its real

letters, inscribed by a potent cabbalist on a tablet, and thrown into

the sea, raised the storm which destroyed the fleet of Charles V. in

1542. Write it on the person of a prince (a ticklish business,

surely), and you are sure of his abiding favour. Eisenmenger gives a

full account of all the legends connected therewith, _Entdecktes

Judenthum_, vol. i. pp. 157, 424, 581, &c. (Ed. 1711).

The rationale of its virtue, if we may so call it, affords a

characteristic illustration of the cabbalistic principle. The Divine

Being was supposed to have commenced the work of creation by

concentrating on certain points the primal universal Light. Within the

region of these was the appointed place of our world. Out of the

remaining luminous points, or foci, he constructed certain letters—a

heavenly alphabet. These characters he again combined into certain

creative words, whose secret potency produced the forms of the

material world. The word Shemhamphorash contains the sum of these

celestial letters, with all their inherent virtue, in its mightiest

combination.—Horst, _Zauberbibliothek_, vol. iv. p. 131.

Footnote 261:

See _Das transcendentale magie und magische Heilarten im Talmud_, von

Dr. G. Brecher, p. 52. Eisenmenger, _Entdecktes Judenthum_, ii. pp.

445, &c.

The _Tractat Berachoth_ says the devils delight to be about the

Rabbis, as a wife desireth her husband, and a thirsty land longeth

after water,—because their persons are so agreeable. Not so, rejoins

Eisenmenger, but because both hate the gospel and love the works of

darkness.—(p. 447.)

Footnote 262:

See Horst’s _Zauberbibliothek_, vol. i. pp. 314-327.

BOOK THE NINTH

THE SPANISH MYSTICS

CHAPTER I.

It is no flaming lustre, made of light,

No sweet concert nor well-timed harmony,

Ambrosia, for to feast the appetite,

Of flowery odour mixed with spicery,—

No soft embrace, or pleasure bodily;

And yet it is a kind of inward feast,

A harmony that sounds within the breast,

An odour, light, embrace, in which the soul doth rest.

A heavenly feast no hunger can consume;

A light unseen yet shines in every place;

A sound no time can steal; a sweet perfume

No winds can scatter; an entire embrace

That no satiety can e’er unlace;

Engraced into so high a favour there,

The saints with all their peers whole worlds outwear,

And things unseen do see, and thing unheard do hear.

GILES FLETCHER.

Gower fulfilled his promise, and read, on two successive evenings, the

following paper on the Mysticism of the Counter-Reformation, as

illustrated principally by its two Spanish champions, St. Theresa and

St. John of the Cross:—

I. _Saint Theresa._

On the revival of letters the mysticism of Alexandria reappeared in

Florence. That lamp which, in the study of Ficinus, burnt night and

day before the bust of Plato, proclaimed, in reality, the worship of

Plotinus. The erudite feebleness of Alexandrian eclecticism lived

again in Gemisthus Pletho,—blended, as of old, Platonic ideas,

oriental emanations, and Hellenic legend,—dreamed of a philosophic

worship, emasculated and universal, which should harmonize in a

common vagueness all the religions of the world. Nicholas of Cusa

re-adapted the allegorical mathematics which had flourished beneath

the Ptolemies and restored the Pythagoras of the Neo-Platonists.

Pico of Mirandola (the admirable Crichton of his time) sought to

reconcile the dialectics of Aristotle with the oracles of Chaldæa,

and to breathe into withered scholasticism the mysterious life of

Cabbalistic wisdom. An age so greedy of antiquity was imposed on by

the most palpable fabrications; and Greece beheld the servile

product of her second childhood reverenced as the vigorous promise

of her first. Patricius sought the sources of Greek philosophy in

writings attributed to Hermes and Zoroaster. He wrote to Gregory

XIV. proposing that authors such as these should be substituted for

Aristotle in the schools, as the best means of advancing true

religion and reclaiming heretical Germany.

The position of these scholars with regard to Protestantism

resembles, not a little, that of their Alexandrian predecessors when

confronted by Christianity. They were the philosophic advocates of a

religion in which they had themselves lost faith. They attempted to

reconcile a corrupt philosophy and a corrupt religion, and they made

both worse. The love of literature and art was confined to a narrow

circle of courtiers and literati. While Lutheran pamphlets in the

vernacular set all the North in a flame, the philosophic refinements

of the Florentine dilettanti were aristocratic, exclusive, and

powerless. Their intellectual position was fatal to sincerity; their

social condition equally so to freedom. The despotism of the Roman

emperors was more easily evaded by a philosopher of ancient times

than the tyranny of a Visconti or a D’Este, by a scholar at Milan or

Ferrara. It was the fashion to patronise men of letters. But the

usual return of subservience and flattery was rigorously exacted.

The Italians of the fifteenth century had long ceased to be familiar

with the worst horrors of war, and Charles VIII., with his ferocious

Frenchmen, appeared to them another Attila. Each Italian state

underwent, on its petty scale, the fate of Imperial Rome. The

philosophic and religious conservatism of Florence professed

devotion to a church which reproduced, with most prolific abundance,

the superstitions of by-gone Paganism,—of that very Paganism in

whose behalf the Neo-Platonist philosopher entered the lists against

the Christian father. To such men, the earnest religious movement of

the North was the same mysterious, barbaric, formidable foe which

primitive Christianity had been to the Alexandrians. The old

conflict between Pagan and Christian—the man of taste and the man of

faith—the man who lived for the past, and the man who lived for the

future, was renewed, in the sixteenth century, between the Italian

and the German. The Florentine Platonists, moreover, not only shared

in the weakness of their prototypes, as the occupants of an attitude

radically false; they failed to exhibit in their lives that

austerity of morals which won respect for Plotinus and Porphyry,

even among those who cared nothing for their speculations. Had

Romanism been unable to find defenders more thoroughly in earnest,

the shock she then received must have been her deathblow. She must

have perished as Paganism perished. But, wise in her generation, she

took her cause out of the hands of that graceful and heartless

Deism, so artificial and so self-conscious,—too impalpable and too

refined for any real service to gods or men. She needed men as full

of religious convictions as were these of philosophical and poetic

conceits. She needed men to whom the bland and easy incredulity of

such symposium-loving scholars was utterly inconceivable—abhorrent

as the devil and all his works. And such men she found. For by

reason of the measure of truth she held, she was as powerful to

enslave the noblest as to unleash the vilest passions of our nature.

It was given her, she said, to bind and to loose. It was time, she

knew, to bind up mercy and to loose revenge. A succession of

ferocious sanctities fulminated from the chair of St. Peter. Science

was immured in the person of Galileo. The scholarship, so beloved by

Leo, would have been flung into the jaws of the Inquisition by

Caraffa. Every avenue, open once on sufferance, to freer thought and

action, was rigorously blocked up. Princes were found willing to cut

off the right hand, pluck out the right eye of their people, that

Rome might triumph by this suicide of nations. But nowhere did she

find a prince and a people alike so swift to shed blood at her

bidding, as among that imperious race of which Philip II. was at

once the sovereign and the type. In Spain was found, in its

perfection, the chivalry of persecution: there dwelt the aristocracy

of fanaticism. It was long doubtful whether the Roman or the Spanish

Inquisition was the more terrible for craft, the more ingenious in

torments, the more glorious with blood.

But Spain was not merely the political and military head of the

Counter-Reformation. She contributed illustrious names to relume the

waning galaxy of saints. Pre-eminent among these luminaries shine

Ignatius Loyola, Theresa, and John of the Cross. The first taught

Rome what she had yet to learn in the diplomacy of superstition.

Education and intrigue became the special province of his order: it

was the training school of the teachers: it claimed and merited the

monopoly of the vizard manufacture. Rome found in Theresa her most

famous seeress; in John, her consummate ascetic. It was not in the

upper region of mysticism that the narrow intellect and invincible

will of Loyola were to realize distinction. He had his revelations,

indeed,—was rapt away to behold the mystery of the Trinity made

manifest, and the processes of creation detailed. But such favours

are only the usual insignia so proper to the founder of an order.

Compared with St. Francis the life of Ignatius is poor in vision and

in miracle. But his relics have since made him ample amends. Bartoli

enumerates a hundred miraculous cures.[263] John and Theresa were

mystics _par excellence_: the former, of the most abstract

theopathetic school; the latter, with a large infusion of the

theurgic element, unrivalled in vision—angelic and dæmoniacal.

But one principle is dominant in the three, and is the secret of the

saintly honours paid them. In the alarm and wrath awakened by the

Reformation, Rome was supremely concerned to enforce the doctrine of

blind obedience to ecclesiastical superiors. These Spanish saints

lived and laboured and suffered to commend this dogma to the Church

and to all mankind. Summoned by the Rule of Obedience, they were

ready to inflict or to endure the utmost misery. Their natures were

precisely of the kind most fitted to render service and receive

promotion at that juncture. They were glowing and ductile. Their

very virtues were the dazzle of the red-hot brand, about to stamp

the brow with slavery. Each excellence displayed by such

accomplished advocates of wrong, withered one of the rising hopes of

mankind. Their prayers watered with poisoned water every growth of

promise in the field of Europe. Their Herculean labours were

undertaken, not to destroy, but to multiply the monsters which

infested every highway of thought. Wherever the tears of Theresa

fell, new weeds of superstition sprang up. Every shining austerity

endured by John gilded another link in the chain which should bind

his fellows. The jubilant bells of their devotion rang the knell of

innumerable martyrs.

In the fourteenth century, mysticism was often synonymous with

considerable freedom of thought. In the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries, it was allowed to exist only as it subserved the

ecclesiastical scheme. The problem was,—how to excite the feeling

and imagination of the devotee to the highest pitch, and yet to

retain him in complete subjection to the slightest movement of the

rein. Of this problem John and Theresa are the practical and

complete solution. All their fire went off by the legitimate

conducting-rod: every flash was serviceable: not a gleam was wasted.

Once mysticism was a kind of escape for nature. The mystic left

behind him much of the coarse externalism necessary to his Church,

and found refuge in an inner world of feeling and imagination. But

now the Church, by means of the confessor, made mysticism itself the

innermost dungeon of her prison-house. Every emotion was

methodically docketed; every yearning of the heart minutely

catalogued. The sighs must always ascend in the right place: the

tears must trickle in orthodox course. The prying calculations of

the casuist had measured the sweep of every wave in the heaving

ocean of the soul. The instant terrible knife cut off the first

spray of love that shot out beyond the trimly-shaven border of

prescription. Strong feelings were dangerous guests, unless they

knew (like the old Romans) when to go home and slay themselves, did

that Tiberius, the director, but bestow on them a frown.

In France, too, mysticism was to fall under the same yoke; but the

Frenchman could never reach the hard austerity of the Spaniard. The

sixteenth century produced St. Francis de Sales on the north, and

St. John of the Cross on the south, of the Pyrénées. With the

former, mysticism is tender, genial, graceful; it appeals to every

class; it loves and would win all men. With the latter, it is a dark

negation—a protracted suffering—an anguish and a joy known only to

the cloister. De Sales was to John, as a mystic, what Henry IV. was

to Philip as a Catholic King. Even in Italy, the Counter-Reformation

was comparatively humane and philanthropic with Carlo Borromeo. In

Spain alone is it little more, at its very best, than a fantastic

gloom and a passionate severity.

But everywhere the principle of subserviency is in the ascendant.

The valetudinarian devotee becomes more and more the puppet of his

spiritual doctor. The director winds him up. He derives his

spiritless semblance of life wholly from the priestly mechanism. It

may be said of him, as of the sick man in Massinger’s play,

That he lives he owes

To art, not Nature; she has given him o’er.

He moves, like the fairy king, on screws and wheels

Made by his doctor’s recipes, and yet still

They are out of joint, and every day repairing.

Theresa was born at Avila, in the year 1515, just two years (as

Ribadeneira reminds us) before ‘that worst of men,’ Martin

Luther.[264] The lives of the saints were her nursery tales.

Cinderella is matter of fact; Jack and the Beanstalk commonplace,

beside the marvellous stories that must have nourished her infantine

faculty of wonder. At seven years old she thinks eternal bliss

cheaply bought by martyrdom; sets out with her little brother on a

walk to Africa, hoping to be despatched by the Moors, and is

restored to her disconsolate parents by a cruel matter-of-fact

uncle, who meets them at the bridge. Her dolls’ houses are

nunneries. These children construct in the garden, not dirt pies,

but mud-hermitages; which, alas! will always tumble down.

As she grows up, some gay associates, whose talk is of ribbons,

lovers, and bull-fights, secularise her susceptible mind. She reads

many romances of chivalry, and spends more time at the glass. Her

father sends her, when fifteen, to a convent of Augustinian nuns in

Avila, to rekindle her failing devotion. A few days reconcile her to

the change, and she is as religious as ever.

Then, what with a violent fever, Jerome’s Epistles, and a

priest-ridden uncle, she resolves on becoming a nun. Her father

refuses his consent; so she determines on a pious elopement, and

escapes to the Carmelite convent. There she took the vows in her

twentieth year.[265]

We find her presently vexed, like so many of the Romanist female

saints, with a strange complication of maladies,—cramps,

convulsions, catalepsies, vomitings, faintings, &c. &c. At one time

she lay four days in a state of coma; her grave was dug, hot wax had

been dropped upon her eyelids, and extreme unction administered; the

funeral service was performed; when she came to herself, expressed

her desire to confess, and received the sacrament.[266] It is not

improbable that some of the trances she subsequently experienced,

and regarded as supernatural, may have been bodily seizures of a

similar kind. But at this time she was not good enough for such

favours; so the attacks are attributed to natural causes. It is

significant that the miraculous manifestations of the Romish Church

should have been vouchsafed only to women whose constitution (as in

the case of the Catharines and Lidwina) was thoroughly broken down

by years of agonizing disease. After three years (thanks to St.

Joseph) Theresa was restored to comparative health, but remained

subject all her life, at intervals, to severe pains.[267]

On her recovery, she found her heart still but too much divided

between Christ and the world. That is to say, she was glad when her

friends came to see her, and she enjoyed witty and agreeable chat,

through the grating, with ladies whose conversation was not always

confined to spiritual topics. Grievously did her conscience smite

her for such unfaithfulness, and bitterly does she regret the laxity

of her confessors, who failed to tell her that it was a heinous

crime.

In her twenty-fourth year she resumed the practice of mental prayer,

and for the next twenty years continued it, with many inward

vicissitudes, and alternate tendernesses and desertions on the part

of the Divine Bridegroom. Her forty-fourth year is memorable as the

season of her entrance on those higher experiences, which have made

her name famous as the great revivalist of supernatural prayer and

mystical devotion in the sixteenth century.

The Saint Bartholomew’s day of 1562 was a day of glory for our

saint. Then was consecrated the new Convent of St. Joseph, at Avila,

established in spite of so much uproar and opposition; that convent

wherein the primitive austerity of the Carmelite Order was to be

restored,—where Theresa is presently appointed prioress (against her

will, as usual),—where there shall be no chats at the grating, no

rich endowment; but thirteen ‘fervent virgins’ shall dwell there,

discalceated (that is sandalled not shod), serge-clad,

flesh-abhorring, couched on straw, and all but perpetually

dumb.[268] The remainder of her life, from about her fiftieth year,

would appear to have been somewhat less fertile in marvellous

experiences. She was now recognised as the foundress of the Reformed

Carmelites, and could produce warrant from Rome, authorizing her to

found as many convents of the Bare-footed as she pleased. She was

harassed by the jealous intrigues of the old ‘mitigated’ Order, but

indefatigably befriended by John of the Cross, and other

thorough-going ascetics. She lived to see established sixteen

nunneries of the Reformed, and fourteen monasteries for friars of

the same rule. She has left us a long history of her foundations, of

all the troubles and difficulties she overcame; showing how funds

were often not forthcoming, but faith was; how apathy and opposition

were done away; and how busy she must have been (too busy for many

visions); all of which let whomsoever read that can.

* * * * *

In the year 1562, when Theresa had successfully commenced the

reformation of her Order, she wrote her life, at the bidding of her

confessor. In this autobiography her spiritual history is laid bare

without reserve. The narrative was published by her superiors, and

therein the heretic may listen to what she whispered in the ear of

her director during the years most prolific in extravagance. We can

thus discern the working of the confessional. Commanded to disclose

her most secret thoughts, we see her nervously afraid of omitting to

indicate the minutest variations of the religious thermometer, of

approaching the committal of that sin which Romanist devotees only

can commit—concealment from a confessor. She searches for evil in

herself, and creates it by the search. The filmiest evanescence of

the feeling has to be detained and anatomized, and changes into

something else under the scrutiny. It is as though she had let into

her crucifix a piece of looking-glass, that she might see reflected

every transport of devotion, and faithfully register the same in her

memory against the next shrift. After some excess of rapture, she

must set to work at her technical analysis; observe what faculties

were dormant, and what still active—what regions of the mind were

tenanted by divinity, and what still left to the possession of her

sinful self. Her intellect was never strong. She confesses that she

found her understanding rather in the way than otherwise.[269] Under

this omnipresent spiritual despotism it fell prostrate utterly. When

she has been favoured with a vision, she is not to know whether it

has steamed up from hell or been let down from heaven, until the

decision of her confessor fills her with horror or delight. The

cloister is her universe. Her mind, unformed, and uninformed, is an

empty room, papered with leaves from her breviary. She knew little

of that charity which makes gracious inroads on the outer world;

which rendered human so many of her sister-saints; which we admire

and pity in Madame de Chantal, admire and love in Madame Guyon. No

feet-washing do we read of, open or secret; no hospital-tending, no

ministry among the poor. The greater activity of her later years

brought her in contact with scarcely any but ‘religious’ persons.

Her ascetic zeal was directed, not for, but against, the mitigation

of suffering. It made many monks and nuns uncomfortable; but I am

not aware that it made any sinners better, or any wretched happy.

Peter of Alcantara is her admiration; he who for forty years never

slept more than one hour and a half in the twenty-four, and then in

a sitting posture, with his head against a wooden peg in the wall;

who ate in general only every third day; and who looked, she says,

as if he were made of the roots of trees (_hecho de reyzes de

arboles_[270]). Lodged in her monastic cranny of creation, she

convulses herself with useless fervours, absolutely ignorant of all

things and persons non-ecclesiastical. Her highest ambition is to

reduce the too-palpable reality of herself to the minutest possible

compass, and to hide herself—a kind of parasitical insect or

entozoön—in the personality of her confessor. Yet, complete as is

this suicide, she is never sure that she is sufficiently dead, and

incessantly asks him if _he_ is quite sure that she is sincere. Such

a life is an object of compassion more than blame. She was herself

the victim of the wicked system to which her name was to impart a

new impulse. The spasmodic energy she at last displays about her

Reformation is not native strength. She was surrounded from the

first by those who saw clearly what Rome needed at that time, who

beheld in her first almost accidental effort the germ of what they

desired, and in herself a fit instrument. A whisper from one of

these guides would be translated by such an imagination into a

direct commission from heaven. They had but to touch a spring, and

her excitable nature was surrounded with the phantasmagoria of

vision; one scene produced another, and that unfolded into more—all,

the reiteration and expansion of the bent once given to her fixed

idea.

Theresa experienced her first rapture while reciting the _Veni

Creator_, when she heard these words spoken in the interior of her

heart—‘I will have thee hold converse, not with men, but

angels.‘[271] She had been conscious, on several previous occasions,

of supernatural excitements in prayer, and was much perplexed

thereby, as indeed were several of her confessors. Here were

irresistible devotional seizures for which they had no rule ready.

They suspected an evil spirit, advised a struggle against such

extraordinary influences. But the more she resists, the more does

the Lord cover her with sweetnesses and glories, heap on her favours

and caresses. At last the celebrated Francis Borgia comes to Avila.

The Jesuit bids her resist no more; and she goes on the mystical way

rejoicing. The first rapture took place shortly after her interviews

with the future General of the Society of Jesus.

A word on this system of spiritual directorship. It is the vital

question for mystics of the Romish communion. Nowhere is the duty of

implicit self-surrender to the director or confessor more constantly

inculcated than in the writings of Theresa and John of the Cross,

and nowhere are the inadequacy and mischief of the principle more

apparent. John warns the mystic that his only safeguard against

delusion lies in perpetual and unreserved appeal to his director.

Theresa tells us that whenever our Lord commanded her in prayer to

do anything, and her confessor ordered the opposite, the Divine

guide enjoined obedience to the human; and would influence the mind

of the confessor afterwards, so that he was moved to counsel what he

had before forbidden![272] Of course. For who knows what might come

of it if enthusiasts were to have visions and revelations on their

own account? The director must draw after him these fiery and

dangerous natures, as the lion-leaders of an Indian pageantry

conduct their charge, holding a chain and administering opiates. The

question between the orthodox and the heterodox mysticism of the

fourteenth century was really one of theological doctrine. The same

question in the sixteenth and seventeenth was simply one of

ecclesiastical interests.[273] The condemned quietists were merely

mystics imperfectly subservient—unworkable raw material, and as such

flung into the fire. Out of the very same substance, duly wrought

and fashioned, might have come a saint like Theresa. By the great

law of Romish policy, whatever cannot be made to contribute to her

ornament or defence is straightway handed over to the devil.

Accordingly, the only mysticism acknowledged by that Church grows up

beneath her walls, and invigorates, with herbs of magic potency, her

garrison,—resembles the strip of culture about some eastern frontier

town, that does but fringe with green the feet of the ramparts; all

the panorama beyond, a wilderness;—for Bedouin marauders render

tillage perilous and vain. Thus, O mystic, not a step beyond that

shadow; or hell’s black squadrons, sweeping down, will carry thee

off captive to their home of dolour!

The confessions of Theresa are a continual refutation of her

counsels. She acknowledges that she herself had long and grievously

suffered from the mistakes of her early directors. She knew others

also who had endured much through similar incompetency. The judgment

of one conductor was reversed by his successor. She exhorts her nuns

to the greatest care in the selection of a confessor,—on no account

to choose a vain man or an ignorant. She vindicates their liberty to

change him when they deem it desirable.[274] John of the Cross, too,

dilates on the mischief which may be done by an inexperienced

spiritual guide. At one time Theresa was commanded to make the sign

of the cross when Christ manifested Himself to her, as though the

appearance had been the work of some deceiving spirit.[275] Her next

guide assured her that the form she beheld was no delusion. Dreadful

discovery, yet joyful! She had attempted to exorcise her Lord; but

the virtue of obedience had blotted out the sin of blasphemy. Thus

does each small infallibility mould her for his season, and then

pass her on to another. Her soul, with despair stamped on one side

and glory imaged on the other, spins dizzy in the air; and whether,

when it comes down, heaven or hell shall be uppermost, depends

wholly upon the twist of the ecclesiastical thumb.

But to return to her marvellous relations; and, first of all, to

those of the infernal species. On one occasion, she tells us, she

was favoured with a brief experience of the place she merited in

hell:—a kind of low oven, pitch dark, miry, stinking, full of

vermin, where sitting and lying were alike impossible; where the

walls seemed to press in upon the sufferer—crushing, stifling,

burning; where in solitude the lost nature is its own tormentor,

tearing itself in a desperate misery, interminable, and so intense,

that all she had endured from racking disease was delightful in

comparison.[276]

At another time, while smitten for five hours together with

intolerable pains, the Lord was pleased to make her understand that

she was tempted by the devil; and she saw him at her side like a

very horrible little negro, gnashing his teeth at her. At last she

contrived to sprinkle some holy water on the place where he was.

That moment he and her pains vanished together, and her body

remained as though she had been severely beaten. It is as well to

know that holy water will be found incomparably your best weapon in

such cases. The devils will fly from the cross, but may presently

return. The drops the Church has blest, do their business

effectually. Two nuns, who came into the room after the victory just

related, snuffed up the air of the apartment with manifest disgust,

and complained of a smell of brimstone. Once the sisters heard

distinctly the great thumps the devil was giving her, though she, in

a ‘state of recollection,’ was unconscious of his belabouring. The

said devil squatted one day on her breviary, and at another time had

all but strangled her.[277] She once saw, with the eye of her soul,

two devils, encompassing, with their meeting horns, the neck of a

sinful priest; and at the funeral of a man who had died without

confession, a whole swarm of devils tearing and tossing the body and

sporting in the grave.

But much more numerous, though as gross as these, are her visions of

celestial objects. ‘Being one day in prayer,’ she tells us, ‘our

Lord was pleased to show me his sacred hands, of excessive and

indescribable beauty; afterwards his divine face, and finally, at

mass, all his most sacred humanity.’ At one of his appearances, he

drew out with his right hand, the nail which transfixed his left,

some of the flesh following it. Three times did she behold in her

raptures the most sublime of all visions—the humanity of Christ in

the bosom of the Father; very clear to her mind, but impossible to

explain. While reciting the Athanasian Creed the mystery of the

Trinity was unfolded to her, with unutterable wonderment and

comfort. Our Lord paid her, one day, the compliment of saying, that

if He had not already created heaven, He would have done so for her

sake alone.[278]

Some of her ‘Memorable Relations’ are among the most curious

examples on record of the materialization of spiritual truth. With

all the mystics, she dwells much on the doctrine of Christ in us.

But while some of them have exaggerated this truth till they bury

under it all the rest, and others have authenticated by its plea

every vagary of special revelation, in scarcely any does it assume a

form so puerile and so sensuous as with St. Theresa. Repeatedly does

she exhort religious persons to imagine Christ as actually within

the interior part of their soul. The superstition of the mass

contributed largely in her case to render this idea concrete and

palpable. In a hymn, composed in a rapturous inspiration after

swallowing the consecrated wafer, she describes God as her

prisoner.[279] She relates in the following passage how she saw the

figure of Christ in a kind of internal looking-glass.

‘When reciting the hours one day with the nuns, my soul suddenly

lapsed into a state of recollection, and appeared to me as a bright

mirror, every part of which, back and sides, top and bottom, was

perfectly clear. In the centre of this was represented to me Christ

our Lord, as I am accustomed to see him. I seemed to see him in all

the parts of my soul also, distinctly as in a mirror, and at the

same time this mirror (I do not know how to express it) was all

engraven in the Lord himself, by a communication exceeding amorous

which I cannot describe. I know that this vision was of great

advantage to me, and has been every time I have called it to mind,

more especially after communion. I was given to understand, that

when a soul is in mortal sin, this mirror is covered with a great

cloud, and grows very dark, so that the Lord cannot be seen or

represented in us, though he is always present as the Author of our

being. In heretics, this mirror is as it were broken, which is much

worse than to have it obscured.’[280]

Here the _simplicitas_ and _nuditas_ of other mystics become a kind

of concrete crystal, inhabited by a divine miniature. In a Clara de

Montfaucon, this sensuous supra-naturalism goes a step further, and

good Catholics read with reverence, how a Lilliputian Christ on the

cross, with the insignia of the passion, was found, on a

_post-mortem_ examination, completely formed inside her heart.[281]

Similar in its character was a vision with which Theresa was

sometimes favoured, of a pretty little angel, with a golden dart,

tipped with fire, which he thrust (to her intolerable pain) into her

bowels, drawing them out after it, and when thus eviscerated, she

was inflamed with a sweet agony of love to God.[282]

A multitude more of such favours might be related:—how the Lord gave

her a cross of precious stones—a matchless specimen of celestial

jewellery to deck his bride withal; how, after communion one day,

her mouth was full of blood, that ran out over her dress, and Christ

told her it was his own—shed afresh, with great pain, to reward her

for the gratification her devotion had afforded him; how (doubtless

in imitation of Catherine of Siena) she saw and heard a great white

dove fluttering above her head; and how, finally, she repays the

attentions of the Jesuit Borgia, by repeated praises of the Order;

by recording visions of Jesuits in heaven bearing white banners,—of

Jesuits, sword in hand, with resplendent faces, gloriously hewing

down heretics; and by predicting the great things to be accomplished

through the zeal of that body.[283] Enough!

Note to page 159.

The dispute which agitated the Romish Church for more than half a

century (1670-1730), concerning the _Mistica Ciudad de Dios_, attributed

to Maria d’Agreda, furnishes a striking instance in proof of the

character here ascribed to the controversies of the period. This

monstrous book was given to the world as the performance of a Spanish

nun, at the dictation of the Virgin, or of God;—both assertions are

made, and the difference is not material. Its object is to establish, by

pretended special revelation, all the prerogatives assigned to the Queen

of Heaven, on the basis of her Immaculate Conception. It is replete with

the absurdities and indecencies of prurient superstition. Dufresnoy

applies to it, with justice, the words of John of Salisbury,—‘Erumpit

impudens et in facie erubescentium populorum genialis thori revelat et

denudat arcana.’ It states that the embryo of the Virgin was formed on a

Sunday, seventeen days before the ordinary time,—relates how, at

eighteen months, the infant demands a nun’s habit from St. Anna, of the

colour worn by the Franciscans,—how she sweeps the house, and has nine

hundred angels to wait upon her. The partizans of the book maintained,

not only that the work itself was a miracle from beginning to end, but

that its translation was miraculous also,—a French nun receiving

instantaneously the gift of the Spanish tongue, that these disclosures

from heaven might pass the Pyrenees. Such was the mass of corruption

about which the gadflies and the ‘shard-borne beetles’ of the Church

settled in contending swarms. This was the book on whose wholesomeness

for the flock of Christ his Vicars could not venture to

decide—eventually, rather evading reply than pronouncing sentence. No

such scruple concerning the unwholesomeness of the Bible.

The Abbé Dufresnoy handles the question broadly, but most of the

combatants are furious, this side or that, from some small party motive.

The French divines censure the book, for fear it should encourage

Quietism—their great bugbear at that time. The Spanish ecclesiastics,

jealous of the honour done their countrywoman, retorted with a _Censura

Censuræ_. But about the habit the battle was hottest. Every Carmelite

must reject the book with indignation, for had they not always believed,

on the best authority, that the Virgin wore a dress of _their_ colour?

The Franciscans again, and the religious of St. Clare, would defend it

as eagerly, for did not its pages authorize anew from heaven their

beloved ashen hue? Again, did not these revelations represent the

Almighty as adopting the Scotist doctrine? On this great question, of

course, Scotist and Thomist would fight to the death. Some account of

the controversy, and an examination of the book, will be found in

Dufresnoy, _Traité Historique et Dogmatique sur les Apparitions, les

Visions et les Révélations particulières_, tom. II. chap. xi. (1751).

The same spirit betrays itself in the instance of Molinos. Even after he

had written his _Guida Spirituale_, he was patronized by the Jesuits

because he had employed his pen against Jansenism, and the Franciscans

approved his book, while the Dominicans rejected it, because he had

delighted the one party and disgusted the other by speaking somewhat

disparagingly of Thomas Aquinas.

Footnote 263:

Alban Butler, July 31.

Footnote 264:

Ribadeneira, _Flos Sanctorum_, Appendix, p. 35 (Ed. 1659).

Footnote 265:

_Los Libros de la B. M. Teresa de Jesus_, _Vida_, capp. i. iii. This

edition of 1615 contains the _Camino de la Perfecion_, and the

_Castillo espiritual_, with the _Life_. The _Foundations_, at which I

have only glanced in the French, are devoted to business, not

mysticism.

Footnote 266:

_Vida_, cap. v. p. 26.

Footnote 267:

Teresa confesses that during the first year of her seizure her

disorder was such as sometimes completely to deprive her of her

senses:—Tan grave, que casi me privava el sentido siempre, y algunas

vezes del todo quedava sin el.—Pp. 17.

Footnote 268:

_Vida_, cap. xxxvi.

Footnote 269:

_Vida_, p. 83.

Footnote 270:

_Vida_, cap. xxvii. p. 196.

Footnote 271:

_Vida_, cap. xxiv. p. 171.

Footnote 272:

_Vida_, cap. xxvi. p. 186. Siempre que el Señor me mandava alguna cosa

en la oracion, si el confessor me dezia otra, me tornava el Señor a

dezir que le obedeciesse: despues su Magestad le bolvia para que me lo

tornasse a mandar. She speaks in the very same page of bad advice

given her by one of her confessors.

Footnote 273:

See Note on p. 164.

Footnote 274:

_Vida_, p. 85; _Camino de Perfecion_, capp. 4 and 5.

Footnote 275:

_Vida_, cap. xxix., p. 209.

Footnote 276:

_Vida_, cap. xxxii.

Footnote 277:

_Ibid._, cap. xxxi.

Footnote 278: