Philosophical Mystics
The mystical sense may be called philosophical in all those writers who
present their convictions in a philosophic form calculated to appeal to
the intellect as well as to the emotions. These writers, as a rule,
though not always, are themselves markedly intellectual, and their
primary concern therefore is with truth or wisdom. Thus Donne, William
Law, Burke, Coleridge, and Carlyle are all predominantly intellectual,
while Traherne, Emily Brontë, and Tennyson clothe their thoughts to some
extent in the language of philosophy.
The dominating characteristic of Donne is intellectuality; and this may
partly account for the lack in him of some essentialty mystical
qualities, more especially reverence, and that ascension of thought so
characteristic of Plato and Browning. These shortcomings are very well
illustrated in that extraordinary poem, _The, Progress of the Soul_. The
idea is a mystical one, derived from Pythagorean philosophy, and has
great possibilities, which Donne entirely fails to utilise; for, instead
of following the soul upwards on its way, he depicts it as merely
jumping about from body to body, and we are conscious of an entire lack
of any lift or grandeur of thought. This poem helps us to understand how
it was that Donne, though so richly endowed with intellectual gifts, yet
failed to reach the highest rank as a poet. He was brilliant in
particulars, but lacked the epic qualities of breadth, unity, and
proportion, characteristics destined to be the distinctive marks of the
school of which he is looked upon as the founder.
Apart from this somewhat important defect, Donne's attitude of mind is
essentially mystical. This is especially marked in his feeling about the
body and natural law, in his treatment of love, and in his conception of
woman. The mystic's postulate--if we could know ourselves, we should
know all--is often on Donne's lips, as for instance in that curious poem
written in memory of Elizabeth Drury, on the second anniversary of her
death. It is perhaps best expressed in the following verse:
But we know our selves least; Mere outward shews
Our mindes so store,
That our soules, no more than our eyes disclose
But forme and colour. Onely he who knowes
Himselfe, knowes more.
_Ode: Of our Sense of Sinne._
One of the marked characteristics of Donne's poetry is his continual
comparison of mental and spiritual with, physical processes. This sense
of analogy prevailing throughout nature is with him very strong. The
mystery of continual flux and change particularly attracts him, as it
did the Buddhists[28] and the early Greek thinkers, and Nettleship's
remarks about the nature of bread and unselfishness are akin to the
following comparison:--
Dost thou love
Beauty? (And beauty worthy'st is to move)
Poor cousened consener, _that_ she, and _that_ thou,
Which did begin to love, are neither now;
Next day repaires (but ill) last dayes decay.
Nor are, (although the river keepe the name)
Yesterdaies waters, and to-daies the same.
_Of the Progresse of the Soule. The second
Anniversarie_, 389-96.
Donne believes firmly in man's potential greatness, and the power within
his own soul:
Seeke wee then our selves in our selves; for as
Men force the Sunne with much more force to passe.
By gathering his beames with a chrystall glasse;
So wee, If wee into our selves will turne,
Blowing our sparkes of virtue, may out-burne
The straw, which doth about our hearts sojourne.
_Letter to Mr Roland Woodward._
And although, in the _Progress of the Soul_, he failed to give
expression to it, yet his belief in progress is unquenchable. He fully
shares the mystic's view that "man, to get towards Him that's Infinite,
must first be great" (_Letter to the Countess of Salisbury_).
In his treatment of love, Donne's mystical attitude is most clearly
seen. He holds the Platonic conception, that love concerns the soul
only, and is independent of the body, or bodily presence; and he is the
poet, who, at his best, expresses this idea in the most dignified and
refined way. The reader feels not only that Donne believes it, but that
he has in some measure experienced it; whereas with his imitators it
degenerated into little more than a fashionable "conceit." The
_Undertaking_ expresses the discovery he has made of this higher and
deeper kind of love; and in the _Ecstasy_ he describes the union of the
souls of two lovers in language which proves his familiarity with the
description of ecstasy given by Plotinus (_Enn._ vi. 9, § 11). The great
value of this spiritual love is that it is unaffected by time and space,
a belief which is nowhere more exquisitely expressed than in the refrain
of his little song, _Soul's Joy_.[29]
O give no way to griefe,
But let beliefe
Of mutuall love,
This wonder to the vulgar prove
Our Bodyes, not wee move.
In one of his verse letters to the Countess of Huntingdon[30] he
explains how true love cannot be desire:
'Tis love, but with such fatall weaknesse made,
That it destroyes it selfe with its owne shade.
He goes still further in the poem entitled _Negative Love_, where he
says that love is such a passion as can only be defined by negatives,
for it is above apprehension, and his language here is closely akin to
the description of the One or the Good given by Plotinus in the sixth
Ennead.
Thomas Traherne is a mystical writer of singular charm and originality.
The manuscripts of his poems and his prose _Meditations_, a kind of
spiritual autobiography and notebook, were only discovered and printed
quite recently, and they form a valuable addition to the mystical
literature of the seventeenth century.
He has affinities with Vaughan, Herbert, and Sir Thomas Browne, with
Blake and with Wordsworth. He is deeply sensitive to the beauty of the
natural world, and he insists on the necessity for rejoicing in this
beauty if we are really to live. By love alone is God to be approached
and known, he says, but this love must not be finite. "He must be loved
in all with an unlimited love, even in all His doings, in all His
friends, in all His creatures." In a prose passage of sustained beauty
Traherne thus describes the attitude towards earth which is needful
before we can enter heaven.
You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in
your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with
the stars:.... Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as
misers do in gold, and Kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the
world.
Till your spirit filleth the whole world, and the stars are your
jewels;.... till you love men so as to desire their happiness, with
a thirst equal to the zeal of your own: till you delight in God for
being good to all: you never enjoy the world.... The world is a
mirror of infinite beauty, yet no man sees it. It is a Temple of
Majesty, yet no man regards it. It is a region of Light and Peace,
did not men disquiet it. It is the Paradise of God.... It is, the
place of Angels and the Gate of Heaven.[31]
He is for ever reiterating, in company with all the mystics, that
'Tis not the object, but the light
That maketh Heaven: 'tis a purer sight.
He shares Wordsworth's rapture in the life of nature, and Browning's
interest in his fellow-men; he has Shelley's belief in the inner meaning
of love, and much of Keats's worship of beauty, and he expresses this in
an original and lyrical prose of quite peculiar and haunting beauty. He
has embodied his main ideas, with a good deal of repetition both in
prose and verse, but it is invariably the prose version, probably
written first, which is the most arresting and vigorous.
His _Meditations_ well repay careful study; they are full of wisdom and
of an imaginative philosophy, expressed in pithy and telling form, which
continually reminds the reader of Blake's _Proverbs of Hell_.
To have no principles or to live beside them, is equally miserable.
Philosophers are not those that speak but do great things.
All men see the same objects, but do not equally understand them.
Souls to souls are like apples, one being rotten rots another.
This kind of saying abounds on every page. Some of his more sustained
philosophic passages are also noteworthy; such, for instance, is his
comparison of the powers of the soul to the rays of the sun, which carry
light in them unexpressed until they meet an object (_Meditations_,
second century, No. 78). But Traherne's most interesting contribution to
the psychology of mysticism is his account of his childhood and the
"vision splendid" that he brought with him. Even more to him than to
Vaughan or Wordsworth,
The earth, and every common sight
... did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
and his description of his feelings and spiritual insight are both
astonishing and convincing. A number of his poems are devoted to this
topic (_The Salutation, Wonder, Eden, Innocence, The Rapture, The
Approach_, and others), but it is the prose account which must be given.
All appeared now, and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and
delightful and beautiful. I was a little stranger, which at my
entrance into the world was saluted and surrounded with innumerable
joys.... The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should
be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from
everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were
as precious as gold: the gates were at first the end of the world.
The green trees when I saw them first ... transported and ravished
me, their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and
almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful
things. The Men! O what venerable and reverend creatures did the
aged seem! Immortal Cherubims! And young men glittering and
sparkling Angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and
beauty! Boys and girls tumbling in the street, and playing, were
moving jewels. I knew not that they were born or should die; but
all things abided eternally as they were in their proper places....
The city seemed to stand in Eden, or to be built in Heaven.[32]
It is necessary to quote at some length, because it is the way in which
Traherne expresses his experiences or reflections which is the moving
and original thing about him. This last passage seems to anticipate
something of the magic of Keats in the _Ode to a Nightingale_ or the
_Grecian Urn_, the sense of continuity, and of eternity expressed in
time. Traherne's account of the gradual dimming of this early radiance,
and his enforced change of values is equally unusual. Only with great
difficulty did his elders persuade him "that the tinselled ware upon a
hobby-horse was a fine thing" and that a purse of gold was of any value,
but by degrees when he found that all men prized things he did not dream
of, and never mentioned those he cared for, then his "thoughts were
blotted out; and at last all the celestial great and stable treasures,
to which I was born, as wholly forgotten, if as they had never been."
But he remembered enough of those early glories to realise that if he
would regain happiness, he must "become, as it were, a little child
again," get free of "the burden and cumber of devised wants," and
recapture the value and the glory of the common things of life.
He was so resolutely bent on this that when he had left college and come
into the country and was free, he lived upon £10 a year, fed on bread
and water, and, like George Fox, wore a leather suit. Thus released from
all worldly cares, he says, through God's blessing, "I live a free and
kingly life as if the world were turned again into Eden, or much more,
as it is at this day."
In Emily Brontë we have an unusual type of mystic. Indeed she is one of
the most strange and baffling figures in our literature. We know in
truth very little about her, but that little is quite unlike what we
know about any one else. It is now beginning to be realised that she was
a greater and more original genius than her famous sister, and that
strong as were Charlotte's passion and imagination, the passion and
imagination of Emily were still stronger. She had, so far as we can
tell, peculiarly little actual experience of life, her material
interests were bounded by her family, the old servant Tabby, the dogs,
and the moors. For the greater part of her thirty years of life she did
the work of a servant in the little parsonage house on the edge of the
graveyard. She can have read little of philosophy or metaphysics, and
probably had never heard of the mystics; she was brought up in a narrow,
crude, and harshly material creed; yet her own inner experience, her
touch with the secret of life, enabled her to write the remarkable
series of poems the peculiar and haunting quality of which has as yet
scarcely been recognised. They are strong and free and certain, hampered
by no dogma, weighted by no explanation, but containing--in the simplest
language--the record of the experience and the vision of a soul. Emily
Brontë lived remote, unapproachable, self-sufficing and entirely
detached, yet consumed with a fierce, unquenchable love of life and of
nature, of the life which withheld from her all the gifts most prized of
men, love, friendship, experience, recognition, fame; and of the nature
which she knew only on a circumscribed space of the wild Yorkshire
moors.
In her poems her mysticism is seen principally in two ways: in her
unerring apprehension of values, of the illusory quality of material
things, even of the nature she so loved, together with the certain
vision of the one Reality behind all forms. This, and her description of
ecstasy, of the all-sufficing joy of the inner life of one who has
tasted this experience, mark her out as being among those who have seen,
and who know. In _The Prisoner_, the speaker, a woman, is "confined in
triple walls," yet in spite of bolts and bars and dungeon gloom she
holds within herself an inextinguishable joy and unmeasured freedom
brought to her every night by a "messenger."
He comes with western winds, with evening's wandering airs,
With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars.
Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire,
And visions rise, and change, that kill me with desire.
* * * * *
But, first, a hush of peace--a soundless calm descends;
The struggle of distress, and fierce impatience ends;
Mute music soothes my breast--unuttered harmony,
That I could never dream, till Earth was lost to me.
Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals;
My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels:
Its wings are almost free--its home, its harbour found,
Measuring the gulf, it stoops and dares the final bound.
Oh! dreadful is the check--intense the agony--
When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again;
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.
This is the description--always unmistakable--of the supreme mystic
experience, the joy of the outward flight, the pain of the return, and
it could only have been written by one who in some measure had knowledge
of it. This, together with the exquisite little poem _The Visionary_,
which describes a similar experience, and _The Philosopher_, stand apart
as expressions of spiritual vision, and are among the most perfect
mystic poems in English.
Her realisation of the meaning of common things, her knowledge that they
hold the secret of the universe, and her crystallisation of this in
verse, place her with Blake and Wordsworth.
What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?
More glory and more grief than I can tell:
The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.
And finally, the sense of continuous life--one central, all-sustaining
Life--of the oneness of God and man, has never been more nobly expressed
than in what is her best-known poem, the last lines she ever wrote:--
O God within my breast,
Almighty, ever-present Deity!
Life--that in me has rest,
As I--undying Life--have power in Thee!
* * * * *
With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years,
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.
Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.
Tennyson differs widely from the other poets whom we are considering in
this connection. He was not born with the mystical temperament, but, on
the contrary, he had a long and bitter struggle with his own doubts and
questionings before he wrested from them peace. There is nothing of
mystic calm or strength in the lines--
Oh, yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill.
He has no mystic rapture in Nature like Wordsworth,
I found Him not in world or sun
Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye;
no mystic interpretation of life as had Browning, no yearning for union
with the spirit of love and beauty as had Shelley. Tennyson's mysticism
came, as it were, rather in spite of himself, and is based on one thing
only--experience. He states his position quite clearly in _In Memoriam_,
cxxiv. As is well known, he had from time to time a certain peculiar
experience, which he describes fully both in prose and verse, a touch at
intervals throughout his life of "ecstasy," and it was on this he based
his deepest belief. He has left several prose accounts of this mental
state, which often came to him through repeating his own name silently,
till all at once, as it wore, out of the intensity of the
consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to
resolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused
state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest,
utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable
impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no
extinction, but the only true life[33]
It is a somewhat similar experience which is described in _In Memoriam_,
xcv.
And all at once it seem'd at last
The living soul was flash'd on mine,
And mine in this was wound, and whirl'd
About empyreal heights of thought,
And came on that which is, and caught
The deep pulsations of the world.
And again in the conclusion of the _Holy Grail_--
Let visions of the night or of the day
Come, as they will; and many a time they come,
Until this earth he walks on seems not earth,
This light that strikes his eyeball is not light,
This air that strikes his forehead is not air
But vision--yea, his very hand and foot--
In moments when he feels he cannot die,
And knows himself no vision to himself,
Nor the high God a A vision, nor that One
Who rose again.
"These three lines," said Tennyson, speaking of the last three quoted,
"are the (spiritually) central lines in the Idylls." They are also the
central lines in his own philosophy, for it was the experience of this
"vision" that inspired all his deepest convictions with regard to the
unity of all things, the reality of the unseen, and the persistence of
life.
The belief in the impotence of intellectual knowledge is very closely
connected, it is indeed based, upon these "gleams" of ecstasy. The
prologue to _In Memoriam_ (written when the poem was completed) seems to
sum up his faith after many years of struggle and doubt; but it is in
the most philosophical as well as one of the latest, of his poems, _The
Ancient Sage_, that we find this attitude most fully expressed. Tennyson
wrote of it: "The whole poem is very personal. The passages about
'Faith' and 'the Passion of the Past' were more especially my own
personal feelings." Through the mouth of the Sage, the poet declares in
impassioned words the position of the mystic, and points out the
impotence of sense-knowledge in dealing with that which is beyond either
the senses or the reason:
For Knowledge is the swallow on the lake
That sees and stirs the surface-shadow there
But never yet hath dipt into the abysm.
Tennyson, like Wordsworth, emphasises the truth that the only way in
which man can gain real knowledge and hear the "Nameless" is by diving
or sinking into the centre of his own being. There is a great deal of
Eastern philosophy and mysticism in the _Ancient Sage_, as, for
instance, the feeling of the unity of all existence to the point of
merging the personality into the universal.
But that one ripple on the boundless deep
Feels that the deep is boundless, and itself
For ever changing form, but evermore
One with the boundless motion of the deep.
We know that Tennyson had been studying the philosophy of Lâo-Tsze about
this time; yet, though this is, as it were, grafted on to the poet's
mind, still we may take it as being his genuine and deepest conviction.
The nearest approach to a definite statement of it to be found in his
poems is in the few stanzas called _The Higher Pantheism_, which he sent
to be read at the first meeting of the Metaphysical Society in 1869.
Speak to Him thou for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet--
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.
* * * * *
And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see;
But if we could see and hear, this Vision--were it not He?
In William Law, Burke, Coleridge, and Carlyle, we have a succession of
great English prose-writers whose work and thought is permeated by a
mystical philosophy. Of these four, Law is, during his later life, by
far the most consistently and predominantly mystical.
As has been indicated, there were many strains of influence which in the
seventeenth century tended to foster mystical thought in England. The
group of Cambridge Platonists, to which Henry More belonged, gave new
expression to the great Neo-platonic ideas, but in addition to this a
strong vein of mysticism had been kept alive in Amsterdam, where the
exiled Separatists had gone in 1593. They flourished there and waxed
strong, and sent back to England during the next century a continual
stream of opinion and literature. To this source can be traced the ideas
which inspired alike the Quakers, the Seekers, the Behmenists, the
Familists, and numberless other sects who all embodied a reaction
against forms and ceremonies, which, in ceasing to be understood, had
become lifeless. These sects were, up to a certain point, mystical in
thought, for they all believed in the "inner light," in the immediate
revelation of God within the soul as the all-important experience.
The persecutions of the Quakers under Charles II. tended to withdraw
them from active philanthropy, and to throw them more in the direction
of a personal and contemplative religion. It was then that the writings
of Madame Bourignon, Madame Guyon, and Fénelon became popular, and were
much read among a certain section of thinkers, while the influence of
the teachings of Jacob Boehme, whose works had been translated into
English between the years 1644 and 1692, can be traced, in diverse ways.
They impressed themselves on the thought of the founders of the Society
of Friends, they produced a distinct "Behmenist" sect, and it would seem
that the idea of the three laws of motion first reached Newton through
his eager study of Boehme. But all this has nothing directly to do with
literature, and would not concern us here were it not that in the
eighteenth century William Law came into touch with many of these
mystical thinkers, and that he has embodied in some of the finest prose
in our language a portion of the "inspired cobbler's" vision of the
universe.
Law's character is one of considerable interest. Typically English, and
in intellect typically of the eighteenth century, logical, sane,
practical, he is not, at first sight, the man one would expect to find
in sympathy with the mystics. Sincerity is the keynote of his whole
nature, sincerity of thought, of belief, of speech, and of life.
Sincerity implies courage, and Law was a brave man, never shirking the
logical outcome of his convictions, from the day when he ruined his
prospects at Cambridge, to the later years when he suffered his really
considerable reputation to be eclipsed by his espousal of an
uncomprehended and unpopular mysticism. He had a keen rather than a
profound intellect, and his thought is lightened by brilliant flashes of
wit or of grim satire. We can tell, however, from his letters and his
later writings, that underneath a severe and slightly stiff exterior,
were hidden emotion, enthusiasm, and great tenderness of feeling.
By middle life Law was well known as a most able and brilliant writer on
most of the burning theological questions of the day, as well as the
author of one of the best loved and most widely read practical and
ethical treatises in the language, _A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy
Life_. These earlier writings are by far the best known of his works,
and it is with the _Serious Call_ that his name will always be
associated.
Until middle age he showed no marked mystical tendency, although we know
that from the time he was an undergraduate he was a "diligent reader"
of mystical books, and that he had studied, among others, Dionysius the
Areopagite, Ruysbroek, Tauler, Suso, and the seventeenth century
Quietists, Fénelon, Madame Guyon, and Antoinette Bourignon.
When, however, he was about forty-six (c. 1733), he came across the
writings of the seer who set his whole nature aglow with spiritual
fervour, so that when he first read his works they put him into "a
perfect sweat." Jacob Boehme--or Behmen, as he has usually been called
in England--(1575-1624), the illiterate and untrained peasant shoemaker
of Görlitz, is one of the most amazing phenomena in the history of
mysticism, a history which does not lack wonders. His work has so much
influenced later mystical thought and philosophy that a little space
must be devoted to him here. He lived outwardly the quiet, hard-working
life of a simple German peasant, but inwardly--like his fellow-seer
Blake--he lived in a glory of illumination, which by flashes revealed to
him the mysteries and splendours he tries in broken and faltering words
to record. He saw with the eye of his mind into the heart of things, and
he wrote down as much of it as he could express.
The older mystics--eastern and western alike--had laid stress on unity
as seen in the nature of God and all things. No one more fully believed
in ultimate unity than did Boehme, but he lays peculiar stress on the
duality, or more accurately, the trinity in unity; and the central point
of his philosophy is the fundamental postulate that all manifestation
necessitates opposition. He asserted the uniformity of law throughout
all existence, physical and spiritual, and this law, which applies all
through nature, divine and human alike, is that nothing can reveal
itself without resistance, good can only be known through evil, and
weakness through strength, just as light is only visible when reflected
by a dark body.
Thus when God, the Triune Principle, or _Will_ under three aspects,
desires to become manifest, He divides the Will into two, the "yes" and
the "no," and so founds an eternal contrast to Himself out of His own
hidden Nature, in order to enter into struggle with it, and finally to
discipline and assimilate it. The object of all manifested nature is the
transforming of the will which says "No" into the will which says "Yes,"
and this is brought about by seven organising spirits or forms. The
first three of these bring nature out of the dark element to the point
where contact with the light is possible. Boehme calls them harshness,
attraction, and anguish, which in modern terms are contraction,
expansion, and rotation. The first two are in deadly antagonism, and
being forced into collision, form an endless whirl of movement. These
two forces with their resultant effect are to be found all through
manifested nature, within man and without, and are called by different
names: good, evil and life, God, the devil and the world, homogeneity,
heterogeneity, strain, or the three laws of motion, centripetal and
centrifugal force, resulting in rotation. They are the outcome of the
"nature" or "no" will, and are the basis of all manifestation. They are
the "power" of God, apart from the "love," hence their conflict is
terrible. When spirit and nature approach and meet, from the shock a new
form is liberated, lightning or fire, which is the fourth moment or
essence. With the lightning ends the development of the negative triad,
and the evolution of the three higher forms then begins; Boehme calls
them light or love, sound and substance; they are of the spirit, and in
them contraction, expansion, and rotation are repeated in a new sense.
The first three forms give the stuff or strength of being, the last
three manifest the quality of being good or bad, and evolution can
proceed in either direction.
The practical and ethical result of this living unity of nature is the
side which most attracted Law, and it is one which is as simple to state
as it is difficult to apply. Boehme's philosophy is one which can only
be apprehended by living it. Will, or desire, is the radical force in
man as it is in nature and in the Godhead, and until that is turned
towards the light, any purely historical or intellectual knowledge of
these things is as useless as if hydrogen were to expect to become water
by study of the qualities of oxygen, whereas what is needed is the
actual union of the elements.
The two most important of Law's mystical treatises are _An Appeal to all
that Doubt_, 1740, and _The Way to Divine Knowledge_, 1752. The first of
these should be read by any one desirous of knowing Law's later thought,
for it is a clear and fine exposition of his attitude with regard more
especially to the nature of man, the unity of all nature, and the
quality of fire or desire. The later book is really an account of the
main principles of Boehme, with a warning as to the right way to apply
them, and it was written as an introduction to the new edition of
Boehme's works which Law contemplated publishing.
The following is the aspect of Boehme's teaching which Law most
consistently emphasises.
Man was made out of the Breath of God; his soul is a spark of the Deity.
It therefore cannot die, for it "has the Unbeginning, Unending Life of
God in it." Man has fallen from his high estate through ignorance and
inexperience, through seeking separation, taking the part for the whole,
desiring the knowledge of good and evil as separate things. The
assertion of self is thus the root of all evil; for as soon as the will
of man "turns to itself, and would, as it were, have a Sound of its own,
it breaks off from the divine harmony, and falls into the misery of its
own discord." For it is the state of our will that makes the state of
our life. Hence, by the "fall," man's standpoint has been dislocated
from centre to circumference, and he lives in a false imagination. Every
quality is equally good, for there is nothing evil in God from whom all
comes; but evil appears to be through separation. Thus strength and
desire in the divine nature are necessary and magnificent qualities, but
when, as in the creature, they are separated from love, they appear as
evil.[34] The analogy of the fruit is, in this connection a favourite
one with both Law and Boehme. When a fruit is unripe (i.e. incomplete)
it is sour, bitter, astringent, unwholesome; but when it has been longer
exposed to the sun and air it becomes sweet, luscious, and good to eat.
Yet it is the same fruit, and the astringent qualities are not lost or
destroyed, but transmuted and enriched, and are thus the main cause of
its goodness.[35] The only way to pass from this condition of
"bitterness" to ripeness, from this false imagination to the true one,
is the way of death. We must die to what we are before we can be born
anew; we must die to the things of this world to which we cling, and for
which we desire and hope, and we must turn towards God. This should be
the daily, hourly exercise of the mind, until the whole turn and bent of
our spirit "points as constantly to God as the needle touched with the
loadstone does to the north."[36] To be alive in God, before you are
dead to your own nature, is "a thing as impossible in itself, as for a
grain of wheat to be alive before it dies."
The root of all, then, is the will or desire. This realisation of the
momentous quality of the will is the secret of every religious mystic,
the hunger of the soul, as Law calls it, is the first necessity, and all
else will follow.[37] It is the seed of everything that can grow in us;
"it is the only workman in nature, and everything is its work;" it is
the true magic power. And this will or desire is always active; every
man's life is a continual state of prayer, and if we are not praying for
the things of God, we are praying for _something else_.[38] For prayer
is but the desire of the soul. Our imaginations and desires are,
therefore, the greatest realities we have, and we should look closely to
what they are.[39]
It is essential to the understanding of Law, as of Boehme, to remember
his belief in the reality and actuality of the oneness of nature and of
law.[40] Nature is God's great Book of Revelation, for it is nothing
else but God's own outward manifestation of what He inwardly is, and can
do.... The mysteries of religion, therefore, are no higher, nor deeper
than the mysteries of nature.[41] God Himself is subject to this law.
There is no question of God's mercy or of His wrath,[42] for it is an
eternal principle that we can only receive what we are capable of
receiving; and to ask why one person gains no help from the mercy and
goodness of God while another does gain help is "like asking why the
refreshing dew of heaven does not do that to the flint which it does to
the vegetable plant."[43]
Self-denial, or mortification of the flesh is not a thing imposed upon
us by the mere will of God: considered in themselves they have nothing
of goodness or holiness, but they have their ground and reason in the
nature of the thing, and are as "absolutely necessary to make way for
the new birth, as the death of the husk and gross part of the grain is
necessary to make way for its vegetable life."[44]
These views are clear enough, but the more mystical ones, such as those
which Law and Boehme held, for instance, about fire, can only be
understood in the light of this living unity throughout nature,
humanity, and divinity.
"Everything in temporal Nature," says Law, "is descended out of
that which is eternal, and stands as a palpable, visible Outbirth
of it: ... Fire and Light and Air in this World are not only a true
Resemblance of the Holy Trinity in Unity, but are the Trinity
itself in its most outward, lowest kind of Existence or
Manifestation.... Fire compacted, created, separated from Light and
Air, is the Elemental Fire of this World: Fire uncreated,
uncompacted, unseparated from Light and Air, is the heavenly Fire
of Eternity: Fire kindled in any material Thing is only Fire
breaking out of its created, compacted state; it is nothing else
but the awakening the Spiritual Properties of that Thing, which
being thus stirred up, strive to get rid of that material Creation
under which they are imprisoned ... and were not these spiritual
Properties imprisoned in Matter, no material Thing could be made to
burn.... Fire is not, cannot be a material Thing, it only makes
itself visible and sensible by the Destruction of Matter."[45] "If
you ask what Fire is in its first true and unbeginning State, not
yet entered into any Creature, It is the Power and Strength, the
Glory and Majesty of eternal Nature.... If you ask what Fire is in
its own spiritual Nature, it is merely a _Desire_, and has no other
Nature than that of a _working Desire_, which is continually its
_own Kindler_." [46]
All life is a kindled fire in a variety of states, and every dead,
insensitive thing is only dead because its fire is quenched or
compressed, as in the case of a flint, which is in a state of death
"because its fire is bound, compacted, shut up and imprisoned," but a
steel struck against it, shows that every particle of the flint consists
of this compacted fire.
But even as, throughout all nature, a state of death is an imprisoned
fire, so throughout all nature is there only one way of kindling life.
You might as well write the word "flame" on the outside of a flint and
expect it to emit sparks as to imagine that any speculations of your
reason will kindle divine life in your soul.
No; Would you have Fire from a Flint; its House of Death must be
shaken, and its Chains of Darkness broken off by the Strokes of a
Steel upon it. This must of all Necessity be done to your Soul, its
imprisoned Fire must be awakened by the sharp Strokes of Steel, or
no true Light of Life can arise in it.[2]
All life, whether physical or spiritual, means a death to some previous
condition, and must be generated in pain. 6 1: _An Appeal, Works_,
vol. vi. pp. 166. 2 _Ibid._, p, 82.
If this mystical view of Fire be clear, it will be easy enough to
follow what Law says about Light and Darkness, or Air, Water, and Earth,
interpreting them all in the same way as "eternal Things become gross,
finite, measurable, divisible, and transitory."[47]
_The Spirit of Prayer_ is of all Law's works the one most steeped in
mystic ardour, and it possesses a charm, a melody of rhythm, and an
imaginative quality rarely to be found in his earlier work. It should be
read by those who would see Law under a little known aspect, and who do
not realise that we have an English mystic who expresses, with a
strength and beauty which Plotinus himself has rarely surpassed, the
longing of the soul for union with the Divine.
Burke, Coleridge, and Carlyle are three very different writers who are
alike in the mystical foundations of their belief, and who, through
their writings, for over a hundred years in England carry on the
mystical attitude and diffuse much mystical thought.
Burke, the greatest and most philosophic of English statesmen, was so
largely because of his mystic spirit and imagination. Much of the
greatness of his political pamphlets and speeches and of their enduring
value is owing to the fact that his arguments are based on a sense of
oneness and continuity, of oneness in the social organism and of
continuity in the spirit which animates it. He believes in a life in the
Universe, in a divine order, mysterious and inscrutable in origins and
in ends, of which man and society are a part.
This society is linked together in mutual service from the lowest to the
highest. "Society is indeed a contract," he says in a memorable passage,
It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a
partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of
such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it
becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but
between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are
to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause
in the great primæval contract of eternal society, linking the
lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible
world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable
oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their
appointed place.
These are strange words for an English statesman to address to the
English public in the year 1790; the thought they embody seems more in
keeping with its surroundings when we hear it thundered out anew forty
years later by the raw Scotch preacher-philosopher in the chapter he
calls "Organic Filaments" in his odd but strangely stirring mystical
rhapsody, _Sartor Resartus_.
It is on this belief of oneness, this interrelationship and
interdependence that all Burke's deepest practical wisdom is based. It
is on this he makes his appeal for high principle and noble example to
the great families with hereditary trusts and fortunes, who, he says, he
looks on as the great oaks that shade a country and perpetuate their
benefits from generation to generation.
This imaginative belief in the reality of a central spiritual life is
always accompanied, whether definitely expressed or not, with a belief
in the value of particulars, of the individual, as opposed to general
statements and abstract philosophy. The mystic, who believes in an
inward moulding spirit, necessarily believes that all reforms must come
from within, and that, as Burke points out in the _Present Discontents_,
good government depends not upon laws but upon individuals. Blake, in a
characteristic phrase, says: "He who would do good to another must do it
in minute particulars; general good is the plea of the hypocrite,
flatterer, and scoundrel." This sums up the essence of the social
philosophy of these three thinkers, as seen by Burke's insistence on the
value of concrete details in Coleridge's use of them in his Lay Sermon,
and in Carlyle's belief in the importance of the single individual life
in history.
It is easy to see that Coleridge's attitude of mind and the main lines
of his philosophy were mystical. From early years, as we know from
Lamb, he was steeped in the writings of the Neo-platonists and these,
together with Boehme, in whom he was much interested, and Schelling,
strengthened a type of belief already natural to him.
In spite of his devotion to the doctrines of Hartley, it is clear from
his poetry and letters, that Coleridge very early had doubts concerning
the adequacy of the intellect as an instrument for arriving at truth,
and that at the same time the conviction was slowly gaining ground with
him that an act of the will is necessary in order to bring man into
contact with reality. Coleridge believed in a Spirit of the universe
with which man could come into contact, both directly by desire, and
also mediately through the forms and images of nature, and in the
_Religious Musings_ (1794) we get very early a statement of this
mystical belief.
There is one Mind, one omnipresent Mind
Omnific. His most holy name is Love.
From Him--
... we roam unconscious, or with hearts
Unfeeling of our universal Sire,
and the greatest thing we can achieve, "our noon-tide majesty," is--
to know ourselves
Parts and proportions of one wonderous whole!
The way to attain this knowledge is not by a process of reasoning, but
by a definite act of will, when the "drowséd soul" begins to feel dim
recollections of its nobler nature, and so gradually becomes attracted
and absorbed to perfect love--
and centered there
God only to behold, and know, and feel,
Till by exclusive consciousness of God
All self-annihilated it shall make
God its Identity: God all in all!
This sense of "oneness," with the desire to reach out to it, was very
strong with Coleridge in these earlier years, and he writes to Thelwall
in 1797, "The universe itself, what but an immense heap of little
things?... My mind feels as if it ached to behold and know something
_great_, something _one_ and _indivisible_." He is ever conscious of the
symbolic quality of all things by which we are visibly surrounded,
all that meets the bodily sense I deem
Symbolical, one mighty alphabet
For infant minds.[48]
To pierce through the outer covering, and realise the truth which they
embody, it is necessary to feel as well as to see, and it is the loss of
this power of feeling which Coleridge deplores in those bitterly sad
lines in the _Dejection Ode_ when he gazes "with how blank an eye" at
the starry heavens, and cries,
I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!
It is in this Ode that we find the most complete description in English
verse of that particular state of depression and stagnation which often
follows on great exaltation, and to which the religious mystics have
given the name of the "dark night of the soul." This is an experience,
not common to all mystics, but very marked in some, who, like St John of
the Cross and Madame Guyon, are intensely devotional and ecstatic. It
seems to be a well-defined condition of listlessness, apathy, and
_dryness_, as they call it, not a state of active pain, but of terrible
inertia, weariness, and incapacity for feeling; "a wan and heartless
mood," says Coleridge,
A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,
In word, or sigh, or tear.
Coleridge's distrust of the intellect as sole guide, and his belief in
some kind of intuitional act being necessary to the apprehension of
reality, which he felt as early as 1794, was strengthened by his study
of the German transcendental philosophers, and in March 1801 he writes,
"My opinion is that deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep
feeling; and that all truth is a species of Revelation."
Coleridge, following Kant, gave the somewhat misleading name of "reason"
(as opposed to "understanding") to the intuitive power by which man
apprehends God directly, and, in his view, imagination is the faculty,
which in the light of this intuitive reason interprets and unifies the
symbols of the natural world. Hence its value, for it alone gives man
the key
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.[49]
Carlyle's mysticism is the essence of his being, it flames through his
amazing medley of writings, it guides his studies and his choice of
subjects, it unifies and explains his visions, his thought, and his
doctrines. His is a mystical attitude and belief of a perfectly simple
and broad kind, including no abstruse subtleties of metaphysical
speculation, as with Coleridge, but based on one or two deeply rooted
convictions. This position seems to have been reached by him partly
through intellectual conflict which found relief and satisfaction in the
view of life taken by Goethe, Fichte, and other German "transcendental"
thinkers; but partly also through a definite psychical experience which
befell him in Edinburgh when he was twenty-six, and which from that day
changed for him the whole of his outlook on life. He speaks of it
himself as "a Spiritual New-birth, or Baphometic Fire-baptism." It came
to him after a period of great wretchedness, of torture with doubt and
despair, and--what is significant--"during three weeks of total
sleeplessness." These are conditions which would be likely to reduce his
body to the state of weakness and sensitiveness which seems often
antecedent to psychic experience. He has given an account of the
incident in _Sartor_ (Book ii. chap, vii.), when, he says, "there rushed
like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base Fear away
from me for ever. I was strong, of unknown strength; a spirit, almost a
god." The revelation seems to have been of the nature of a certainty and
assertion of his own inherent divinity, his "native God-created
majesty," freedom and potential greatness. This brought with it a
characteristic defiance of untoward outer circumstances which gave him
strength and resolution. "Perhaps," he says, "I directly thereupon began
to be a man."
Carlyle believes that the world and everything in it is the expression
of one great indivisible Force; that nothing is separate, nothing is
dead or lost, but that all "is borne forward on the bottomless shoreless
flood of Action, and lives through perpetual metamorphoses." Everything
in the world is an embodiment of this great Force, this "Divine Idea,"
hence everything is important and charged with meaning. "Rightly viewed
no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows, through
which the philosophic eye looks into Infinitude itself."[50]
The universe is thus the "living visible garment of God," and "matter
exists only spiritually," "to represent some Idea, and _body_ it forth."
We, each of us, are therefore one expression of this central spirit, the
only abiding Reality; and so, in turn, everything we know and see is but
an envelope or clothing encasing something more vital which is invisible
within. Just as books are the most miraculous things men can make,
because a book "is the _purest_ embodiment a Thought of man can have,"
so great men are the highest embodiment of Divine Thought visible to us
here. Great men are, as it were, separate phrases, "inspired texts" of
the great book of revelation, perpetually interpreting and unfolding in
various ways the Godlike to man (_Hero as Man of Letters_, and _Sartor_,
Book ii. chap. viii.).
From this ground-belief spring all Carlyle's views and aims. Hence his
gospel of hero-worship, for the "hero" is the greatest embodied "Idea" a
man can know, he is a "living light fountain," he is "a man sent hither
to make the divine mystery more impressively known to us." Hence it is
clear that the first condition of the great man is that he should be
sincere, that he should _believe_. "The merit of originality is not
novelty: it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man." It is
equally necessary that his admirers should be sincere, they too must
believe, and not only, as Coleridge puts it, "believe that they
believe." No more immoral act can be done by a human creature, says
Carlyle, than to pretend to believe and worship when he does not.
Hence also springs Carlyle's doctrine of work. If man is but the
material embodiment of a spiritual Idea or Force, then his clear duty is
to express that Force within him to the utmost of his power. It is what
he is here for, and only so can he bring help and light to his
fellow-men.[51] And Carlyle, with Browning, believes that it is not the
actual deeds accomplished that matter, no man may judge of these, for
"man is the spirit he worked in; not what he did, but what he became."