the first mediæval writer in whom this influence appears. He follows
Plotinus and Dionysius closely in teaching that the Absolute Godhead is
“beyond being” and therefore transcendent to the trinity of Persons; a
doctrine of doubtful orthodoxy, which was of great importance in the
later development of mysticism. But a still closer approximation to the
thought, and especially to the psychology of Plotinus, is found in
Richard of St. Victor: perhaps the greatest mystical theologian,
certainly one of the most influential writers, of the early Middle Ages.
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries his works, which are now
hardly read, circulated through western Europe, and shaped the
developing mysticism of England, Germany, and Flanders. Dante, who calls
him one “who in contemplation was more than man,” places his radiant
soul among those of the great teachers in the Heaven of the Sun (_Par._
X. 131). Abandoning alike the many worlds of Dionysius and the crude
dualism of popular religion, Richard taught that three spheres are open
to human contemplation: _sensibilia_, _intelligibilia_, and
_intellectibilia_—a series closely analogous to the three worlds of
Plotinus. He said that three kinds of contemplation on man’s part
corresponded with these worlds. These are _mentis dilatatio_, a widening
of the soul’s vision, which yet remains within the natural order:
_mentis sublevatio_, an uplifting of the illuminated mind to the
apprehension of “things above itself” (or, as Neoplatonists would say,
intelligibles); and finally _mentis alienatio_ or ecstasy, in which the
soul gazes on Truth in its naked simplicity. Then “elevated above itself
and rapt in ecstasy, it beholds things in the Divine Light at which all
human reason succumbs.” This divine light is the _lumen gloriæ_, the
radiance of the spiritual or intelligible world, which transforms the
soul and makes it capable of beholding God; a conception which became a
commonplace of mediæval theology, was adopted by nearly all the mystics,
and plays an important part in the _Paradiso_.
“Lume è lassù, che visibile face
lo Creatore a quella creatura
che solo in lui vedere ha la sua pace” (xxx. 100).
Ruysbroeck—a student of Dionysius and of Richard—says of it in _The
Twelve Béguines_: “From the Face of the Father there shines a clear
light on those souls whose thought is bare and stripped of images,
uplifted above the senses and above similitudes, beyond and without
reason, in high purity of spirit. This Light is not God, but it is the
mediator between the seeing thought and God.” These passages and many
like them can be shown to derive directly through St. Augustine from the
Enneads. Thus Plotinus says: “Light is visible by Light. The _Nous_ sees
itself, and this light, shining on the soul, enlightens it and makes it
a member of the spiritual world” (V. 3. 8). Augustine, apparently
referring to this passage among others, says: “Often and in many places
does Plotinus declare, expounding the meaning of Plato, that what they
believe to be the Soul of the World has its bliss from the same source
as ours, namely, a Light which it is not, but by which it was created,
and from whose spiritual illumination it shines spiritually” (_De Civ.
Dei._ X. 2). And, of his own ecstatic experience, “I entered and beheld
with the mysterious eye of my soul the Light that never changes, above
the eye of my soul, above my intelligence.... He who knows the truth
knows that Light, and he who knows that Light knows Eternity” (_Conf._
VII. 10).
From the thirteenth century onwards, the majority of the mediæval
mystics show knowledge and appreciation of those Plotinian ideas which
reached them—though in an attenuated form—through St. Augustine,
Dionysius, and Richard of St. Victor. Even the Franciscan and
Christo-centric enthusiasm of such contemplatives as Jacopone da Todi
and Angela of Foligno was affected by these lofty conceptions. Thus
Jacopone takes from the Neoplatonists the three stages of spiritual
experience, and describes in unequivocal language his successive
achievements of that Logos-Christ—so near the Plotinian _Nous_—“_che de
omne bellezze se’ fattore_,” and of the “Imageless Good” who cannot be
named. So too, Angela’s successive visions of the divine fullness and
beauty, and of “the ineffable Thing of which nought may be said” depend
for their expression on the same philosophy.
Nor was its penetrative influence confined to the mystical schools. St.
Thomas Aquinas, who accepts and expounds in the _Summa_ (I. _q._12.
_a._5) the doctrine of the _lumen gloriæ_, is considerably indebted to
Plotinus in several other particulars; though he cites him inaccurately,
and does not seem to have known him at first hand. In a remarkable
passage, which afterwards influenced one of the finest rhapsodies of
Ruysbroeck, he has actually “lifted” the most celebrated phrase in the
Sixth Ennead, and adapted it to the distinctively Christian and
non-Platonic view of divine union, as a “mutual act” of God and the
soul. “In a wonderful and unspeakable manner,” says St. Thomas of the
soul in this place, “she both seizes and is seized upon, devours and is
herself devoured, embraces and is violently embraced; and by the knot of
love she unites herself with God, and _is with Him as the Alone with the
Alone_.”
It is in a later and less orthodox son of St. Dominic, the formidable
and adventurous thinker Eckhart, that the influence of Plotinus on the
mediæval mind is best seen: passing through him to Suso, Tauler,
Ruysbroeck, and other mystics of the fourteenth century. Eckhart’s
philosophy still provides one of the most suggestive glosses upon the
Enneads. He made that distinction between the absolute and
supra-personal Godhead and the God of devotion, which was almost
inevitable for a Christian thinker trying to find a place in theology
for the Neoplatonic One. The Godhead, he says, is “a non-God, a
non-Spirit, a non-person, a non-image: a sheer pure One.” The Son, in
whom “the Father becomes conscious of Himself,” combines the attributes
of the Logos-Christ with those of the _Nous_. In Him are the archetypes
of all created things. There is thus an emanation from the Godhead,
through the Son, into creation. The soul’s destiny is exactly that
conceived by Plotinus: it must ascend to the spiritual world, and
through it to its origin, the One, “flowing back into the bottom of the
bottomless fountain from which it flowed forth.” In Tauler and Suso, and
especially in the great Flemish contemplative Ruysbroeck, these
ideas—though modified by their inferior speculative ability and more
ardent spirit of Christian devotion—are still strongly felt: and since
their works and those of their disciples nourished many succeeding
generations of contemplatives, through them the mystical side of the
Neoplatonic tradition was handed down. In Ruysbroeck, with his threefold
division of spiritual experience into “the moral life, the contemplative
life, and the super-essential life,” and his astonishing and detailed
descriptions of the soul’s achievement of the Essential Unity, the
“death into the One through love,” the vision of Plotinus is fully
baptized into the Catholic Church. In Jacob Boehme, who drew through
Schwenkenfeld and Weigel from Eckhart and his school, the doctrine of
the three worlds which forms the basis of his cosmology contains
distinct reminiscences of the Plotinian Triad. “These three,” he says,
“are nought else than the One God in His wonderful works ... and we are
thus to understand a threefold Being, or three worlds in one another.”
His conception of the Light-world, source of all spiritual beauty and
home of “the true human essence,” is very near to the _Nous_. Yet the
very closeness with which all these mystics follow those parts of the
Neoplatonic doctrine which appeal to them, makes it possible for us to
measure the distance which separates their minds, their tone and temper,
from that of Plotinus and his school. The calm, the austerity of
thought, the emphasis on beauty, the clear cool light of the
Intelligible World have departed. These men see philosophy through the
haze of Christian feeling. Their work is full of passionate effort; is
centred on the ideas of sacrifice and of pain. Their religion is
coloured by the sharp Christian consciousness of sin, and by the
difficulty—never squarely faced—of reconciling devotion to a personal
redeemer with the mystical passion for the Absolute. That the philosophy
of the Enneads was able to enter a world so remote from its spirit, and
come to terms with an attitude of mind in many respects opposed to that
of its creator, is an oblique proof of the authenticity of its claim to
interpret the spiritual experiences of man.
THREE MEDIÆVAL MYSTICS
I
“THE MIRROR OF SIMPLE SOULS”
I
_The Mirror of Simple Souls_—a rare work on the spiritual life, of which
manuscripts exist in the British Museum, the Bodleian, and one or two
other public libraries—has so far received little or no attention from
students of religious literature. Yet it may turn out to possess great
importance, as one of the missing links in the history of English
mysticism: for it is a middle-English translation, made at the close of
the fourteenth century or beginning of the fifteenth, of the lost work
of a French thirteenth-century mystic. It shows, therefore, that the
common View of French mediæval religion as unmystical needs
qualification; and further indicates a path by which the contemplative
tradition of western Europe reached England and affected the development
of our native mystical school.
_The Mirror of Simple Souls_, as we now have it, is a work of nearly
60,000 words in length. So far from being simple, it deals almost
exclusively with the rarest and most sublime aspects of spiritual
experience. Its theme is the theme of all mysticism: the soul’s
adventures on its way towards union with God. It is not, like the
_Melum_ of Richard Rolle, or _Revelations_ of Julian of Norwich, a
subjective book; the record of personal experiences and actual
“conversations in heaven.” Rather it is objective and didactic, a work
of geography, not a history of travel; an advanced text-book of the
contemplative life. Only from the ardour and exactitude of its
descriptions, its strange air of authority, its defiance of pious
convention, can we gather that it is the fruit of first-hand experience,
not merely of theological study: though its writer was clearly a trained
theologian, familiar with the works of St. Augustine and Dionysius the
Areopagite, whom no mystic of the Middle Ages wholly escaped, and
apparently with those of St. Bernard, Hugh and Richard of St. Victor,
and other mediæval authorities on the inner life.
I have said that the _Mirror_, as we have it, purports to be the
translation of an unknown French treatise. This translation, so far as
we can judge from its language, was probably made in the early years of
the fifteenth century, perhaps at the end of the fourteenth. Its author,
then, lived at the close of the golden age of English mysticism: he was
the contemporary of Julian of Norwich, who was still living in 1413, and
of Walter Hilton, who died in 1395. Himself a mystic, he was no servile
translator; rather the eager interpreter of the book which he wished to
make accessible to his countrymen. Our manuscripts begin with his
prologue: an ingenuous confession of the difficulties of the
undertaking, his own temerity in daring to touch these “high divine
matters,” his fear lest the book should fall into unsuitable hands and
its more extreme teachings be misunderstood. It appears from this
prologue that our version of the _Mirror_ is a second, or revised
edition; the first having failed to be comprehensible to its readers.
The character of the translator, as disclosed for us in his prologue, is
itself interesting. Clearly he was a contemplative; and the “high
ghostly feelings” of which he treats are to him the strictly practical
objects of supreme desire, though he modestly disclaims their
possession. He appears before us as a gentle, humble, rather timid soul:
often frankly terrified by the daring flights of his “French book,”
which he is at pains to explain in a safe sense. One would judge him,
from the peeps which he gives us into his mind, a disciple of the devout
and homely school of Walter Hilton, rather than a descendant of the
group of advanced mystics which produced in the mid-fourteenth century
_The Cloud of Unknowing_, _The Pistle of Private Counsel_, and other
profound studies of the inner life. These books were written under the
strong influence of Dionysius the Areopagite; whose _Mystical Theology_,
under the title of _Dionise Hid Divinite_, was first translated into
English by some member of the school. But to the translator of the
_Mirror_ his author’s drastic applications of the Dionysian paradoxes of
indifference, passivity, and nescience as the path to knowledge teem
with “hard sayings.” His attitude towards them is that of reverential
alarm: he fears their probable effect on the mind of the hasty reader.
They seem, as he says in one place, “fable or error or hard to
understand” until one has read them several times. He is sure that their
real meaning is unexceptionable; but terribly afraid that they will be
misunderstood.
Here, then, is the prologue which sets forth his point of view.
“To the worship and laud of the Trinity be this work begun and ended!
Amen.
“This book, the which is called _The Mirror of Simple Souls_, I, most
unworthy creature and outcast of all other, many years gone wrote it out
of French into English after my lewd cunning; in hope that by the grace
of God it should profit the devout souls that shall read it. This was
forsooth mine intent. But now I am stirred to labour it again new, for
because I am informed that some words thereof have been mistaken.
Therefore, if God will, I shall declare these words more openly. For
though Love declare the points in the same book, it is but shortly
spoken, and may be taken otherwise than it is meant of them that read it
suddenly and take no further heed. Therefore such words to be twice
opened it would be more of audience [understanding]: and so by grace of
our Lord good God it shall the more profit to the auditors. But both the
first time and now, I have great dread to do it. For the book is of high
divine matters and high ghostly feelings, and cunningly and full
mystically it is spoken, and I am a creature right wretched and unable
to do any such work: poor and naked of ghostly fruits, darkened with
sins and defaults, environed and wrapped therein oft times, the which
taketh away my taste and my clear sight; so that little I have of
ghostly understanding and less of the feeling of divine love. Therefore
I may say the words of the prophet: ‘My teeth be nought white to bite of
this bread.’ But Almighty Jesu, God that feedeth the worm and gives
sight to the blind and wit to the unwitty; give me grace of wit and
wisdom in all times wisely to govern myself, following alway His will,
and send me clear sight and true understanding well to do this work to
His worship and pleasaunce: profit also and increase of grace to ghostly
lovers that be disposed and called to this high election of the freedom
of soul.”
He goes on to the difficulty which dogs all writers on mysticism; the
impossibility of making mystic truth seem real to those who have no
experience of the mystic life. It has been said that only mystics can
write about mysticism. It were truer to say that only mystics can read
about it.
“Oh ye that shall read this book! do ye as David says in the Psalter,
_Gustate et videte_: that is to say, ‘Taste and see.’ But why trow ye he
said, taste first, e’er than he said see? For first a soul must taste,
e’er it have very understanding and true sight; sight of ghostly
workings of divine love. Oh full naked and dark, dry and unsavoury be
the speakings and writings of these high ghostly feelings of the love of
God to them that have not tasted the sweetness thereof. But when a soul
is touched with grace, by which she has tasted somewhat of the sweetness
of this divine fruition, and begins to wade, and draweth the draughts to
her-ward, then it savours the soul so sweetly that she desires greatly
to have of it more and more, and pursueth thereafter. And then the soul
is glad and joyful to hear and to read of all thing that pertains to
this high feeling of the workings of divine love, in nourishing and
increasing her love and devotion to the will and pleasing of Him that
she loves, God Christ Jesu. Thus she enters and walks in the way of
illumination, that she might be taught into the ghostly influences of
the divine work of God, there to be drowned in the high flood, and oned
to God by ravishing of love, by which she is all one spirit with her
Spouse. Therefore to these souls that be disposed to these high feelings
Love has made of him this book in fulfilling of their desire.”
But even for those who have been initiated into this way of
illumination, the translator acknowledges that many things in the
_Mirror_ are difficult and obscure: “often he leaveth the nut and the
kernel within the shell unbroken, that is to say, that Love in this book
leaves to souls the touches of his divine works privily hid under dark
speech, for they should taste the deeper the draughts of his love and
drink; and also to make them have the more clear insight in divine
understandings to divine love, and declare himself.” Therefore he has
added his own explanations to the more difficult passages. “Where
meseems most need I will write more words thereto in manner of gloss
after my simple cunning as meseems best. And in these few places that I
put in more than I find written I will begin with the first letter of my
name M. and end with this letter N. the first of my surname.”
He ends with a gentle complaint of the badness of the text from which he
worked, and the confession that he has allowed himself a certain amount
of editorial liberty. “The French book that I shall write after is evil
written, and in some places for default of words and syllables the
reason is away. Also in translating of French some words need to be
changed, or it will fare ungoodly, not according to the sentence.
Wherefore I will follow the sentence according to the matter, as near as
God will give me grace; obeying me ever to the correction of Holy Kirk,
praying ghostly livers and clerks that they will vouchsafe to correct
and amend there that I do amiss.”
So much for M.N., the English mystic. The prologue of the author, which
comes next, tells us all that we know about the anonymous French writer
of the book. This person was of a very different temper from M.N. As a
Catholic scholar has observed of St. Teresa, “L’auteur ne se faisait pas
illusion sur le mèrite de son œuvre.” Like Teresa, he believed himself
to have written under immediate divine inspiration; a fact which
somewhat excuses his complacency in regard to the result. This is a
common claim with the mystics, in whom subconscious cerebration is
always exceptionally active, and whose writings often exhibit an
automatic and involuntary character, seeming to them the work of another
mind. Jacob Boehme, Madame Guyon, and Blake are obvious cases in point.
The author of the _Mirror_, however, was anxious that his claim to
inspiration should be endorsed. He therefore—most fortunately for
us—sent his work to various “learned clerks,” persons of importance in
the theological world, and chronicles their appreciatory remarks in the
prologue; which becomes in his hands a form of mediæval
“advance-notice.” It will be observed that his critics share the opinion
of M.N., that though full of “ghostly cunning” this is a dangerous work
to put into the hands of the plain man.
Of these critics “The first was a Friar Minor of great name, of life of
perfection. Men called him Friar John of Querayne.... He said soothly
that this book is made by the Holy Ghost. And though all the clerks of
the world heard it, but if they understand it, that is to say, but if
they have high ghostly feelings and this same working, they shall nought
wit what it means. And he prayed for the love of God that it be wisely
kept: and that but few should see it. And he said thus, that it was so
high that himself might not understand it. And after him a monk of
Cisetyns [Citeaux] read it, that hight Dan Frank, Chantor of the Abbey
of Viliers: and he said that it proved well by the Scripture that it is
all truth that this book says. And after him read it a Master of
Divinity, that hight Master Godfrey of Fountaynes: and he blamed it
nought, no more than did the other. But he said thus, that he counselled
nought [_sic_] that few should see it; and for this cause, for they
might leave their own working and follow this calling, to the which they
should never come, and so they might deceive themselves, for it is made
of a spirit so strong and so cutting, that there be but few such or
none.... For the peace of auditors was this proved, and for your peace
we say it to you. For this seed should bear holy fruit to them that hear
it and worthy be.”
Of the three persons here mentioned, Friar John and Dan Frank still
remain unidentified: but Godfrey of Fountaynes is almost certainly the
Master of Divinity, called Doctor Venerandus, who was a prominent member
of the University of Paris at the end of the thirteenth century. He was
at the height of his fame about 1280-1290, and died about 1306. “_Grande
lumen studii magister Godefridum de Fontanis_,” he is called in a letter
of 1301. In the great war between Friars and Seculars which divided the
University at the end of the thirteenth century, this Godfrey was one of
the bitterest opponents of the Mendicant Orders. He wrote against them,
and attacked them in the Synod of Paris in 1283. We see therefore that
the author of the _Mirror_, in placing Godfrey’s testimonial beside that
of Friar John, secured with a cunning other than ghostly a friend in
each of the opposing camps.
There is, however, one obvious and significant omission in this list of
patrons. There is no name which emanates directly from the great school
of St. Thomas Aquinas; supreme at that moment in the University, and the
custodian of orthodox philosophy. There is, indeed, little trace of
scholastic influence in the _Mirror_, which is far more in harmony with
the mystical theology favoured by St. Bonaventura, and continued during
the following century in the Franciscan schools: a fact which explains
at once the guarded approbation of Friar John, and the absence of
Dominican patronage. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the
Franciscans were eager students of and commentators on Dionysius the
Areopagite: and the order which produced and upheld the hardy
speculations of Duns Scotus might well look with indulgence on the most
extravagant statements of _The Mirror of Simple Souls_.
The original version of this book, then, was probably written in the
last quarter of the thirteenth century, and certainly before 1306. Its
writer was therefore the contemporary of Eckhart and Jacopone da Todi,
the great mystical lights of the Preaching and the Minor Friars. He was
no provincial recluse, but a person in touch with the intellectual life
of his time. He had connections with the University of Paris, but the
names of his patrons prove him to have been neither a member nor an
enemy of the Mendicant Orders. It is probable that he was a monk,
possible that he was a Carthusian; a strictly contemplative order
celebrated for its mystical leanings, which produced in the later Middle
Ages many students of the Dionysian writings, and many works upon
contemplation. He was widely read, and many parallels could be
established between his doctrines and the classics of Christian
mysticism. His lost book is so far our only evidence that abstruse prose
treatises of this kind were already written in the vernacular; and this
alone gives it great interest from the literary point of view. He was,
so far as we know, the first French mystic to write in French; the
forerunner of St. Francis de Sales, of Madame Guyon, of Malaval. If we
except the semi-mystical writings of Gerson, we must wait till the
seventeenth century to provide him with a worthy successor.
II
We come next to the manner and content of the book. The manner is that
of a dramatic dialogue: an unusual if not unique form for works of this
kind. It consists of a debate—often a lively debate—between Love, the
Soul, Reason, and a few intervening characters, of whom Pure Courtesy
and Discretion are the chief. The student will at once be reminded of
the _Romaunt de la Rose_: but he will have difficulty in matching this
form within the confines of ascetic literature. Duologues, such as those
in the Third Book of the _Imitatio_, or Suso’s conversations with
Eternal Wisdom, are not uncommon: but I know of no other instance of an
elaborate mystical doctrine presented through the mouths of a group of
symbolic personages.