and generous self-abandonment in all the daily incidents of life; a love
which consecrated “les actions les plus ordinaires.” She took as her
favourite saint the Curé d’Ars, because “he loved his family so deeply,
and only did ordinary things.” This was the “little pathway” to the
heart of Reality, on which, she thought, all might travel and none could
miss the road. “Aux âmes simples, il ne faut pas des moyens compliqués.”
Though the unquenchable thirst of her ardent nature for more suffering
and more love did more than once express itself by way of ecstatic
experience, she repudiated all abnormal “graces” and special
contemplative powers. “Je ne suis qu’un pauvre petit oiseau couvert
seulement d’un léger duvet; je ne suis pas un aigle, j’en ai simplement
les yeux et le cœur.” Her spiritual practice became simplified as she
grew in understanding. In the last years of her life the Gospels were
her only book of devotion, and her prayer became “un élan du cœur, un
simple regard jeté vers le ciel.” Yet the love thus expressed was no
mere “divine duet.” She was not a victim of that narrow fervour which
finds its satisfaction in a vertical relation with the Divine; her
religion was of a distinctly social type. “Le zêle d’une Carmelite doit
embrasser le monde,” she said; and this zeal showed itself, not only in
the passionate love she gave to her family, but in radiant affection
towards all living beings—the nuns in the convent, some of whom were
extremely tiresome and even unkind, her friends and correspondents in
the outside world, the animals and the birds. She always had her eye on
her fellow-creatures; she wanted to help them, to show light to them, to
save them. The eager service and voluntary mortifications of her life
closed with eighteen months of great physical suffering. She died in
September 1897, at the age of twenty-four.
Thérèse Martin had lived for nine years within the walls of a small,
strictly enclosed convent in a provincial town. This building and its
dreary little chapel formed the setting of her religious career. There
was nothing impressive in her surroundings, nothing to satisfy those
artistic instincts which she certainly possessed, to hint at the poetry
and mystery of the spiritual life. Her opportunities of action had been
limited on every side; her creative impulse found expression only in the
writing of some conventional religious verse, and the record of her
thoughts and experiences, composed not for publication, but as an act of
obedience to her Superior. Prayer, the teaching of novices, the family
life of the community, and a small amount of correspondence with those
in the world, were the only channels through which her passionate love
of humanity could flow. This record may not sound impressive. Its sequel
is amazing. Students of history have often discussed the stages and the
circumstances through which a simple man or woman, distinguished only by
a beautiful and humble life, has been transformed by the reverence,
love, and myth-making faculty of his contemporaries into a supernatural
being endowed with magical powers. This transformation has happened
within our own time in the person of Thérèse de l’Enfant-Jésus. This
young girl, whose life was marked by no bizarre incident, who was
brought up in an obscure Norman town, and deliberately shut herself up
in a convent of strictest enclosure to remain—as the “healthy-minded”
would say—buried alive till her death, is now loved and invoked wherever
the Roman Catholic church is established. Her short and uneventful life
has influenced and comforted countless other lives. Her “cause” has been
introduced, and although she is not yet canonized, she is already
regarded as numbered among the saints. To visit her grave in the
beautiful hillside cemetery outside Lisieux, and watch the endless
stream of pilgrims who come on every day of the year from all parts of
the world to ask her help, to deposit letters explaining their needs,
and lay on her tomb for blessing the clothes of babies or the food of
the sick, is to understand what the shrine of a mediæval saint must have
been like. It is to understand also something of the triumphant power of
character, and of the fact that the enclosing of a radiant personality
within the cloister is not burying it alive.
Although the whole of her short adult life had been passed behind the
high garden walls of the convent, and after she took the veil only the
members of her family had seen her—and this under the most restricted
conditions—yet at the time of her death Thérèse de l’Enfant-Jésus was
already known and valued by the whole town. That death was an event of
importance, evoking an extraordinary demonstration of affection and
reverence. The events which followed it are of deep interest. Here, in
our own day, we have the swift rise and diffusion of a _cultus_ exactly
similar to those which followed the deaths of the great popular saints
of the Middle Ages. Every element is present; the prompt setting up of a
pilgrimage, the veneration of the tomb, the distribution of relics—at
the Lisieux convent cards are sold, bearing splinters and bits of straw
from the cell of Thérèse—countless reports of visions, conversions,
“supernatural perfumes,” and miraculous answers to prayer. The
literature of the subject is already considerable, and a journal is
published giving details of “graces” obtained by her help. The causes
which lie behind such religious movements as this are still obscure; but
we have in the cult of Thérèse Martin a valuable clue by which to
interpret those reported from the past. Her “miracles,” in which
students of psychic phenomena will find much to interest them, range
from the cure of cancer to the multiplication of bank-notes, and even
include the restoration of dead geranium-cuttings. Many are obviously
explained by coincidence or hallucination, some are admirable examples
of faith-healing. But a few, apparently supported by good evidence, seem
to defy rationalistic explanation.
The cult quickly lost its local and ultimately its national character.
Though French Catholicism rightly claims Thérèse as its peculiar
possession, and devotion to her is probably more general in France than
elsewhere, yet she is now venerated in every country in the world, and
distributes her favours without regard to nationality. Scotland and
America in particular have numerous stories of her benevolent
intervention, at least as evidential as much that is offered to us by
the exponents of spiritualism. Her legend is in active formation, and
many picturesque incidents were added to it during the war. She is even
said to have appeared at the British Headquarters, and given advice at a
critical moment of the campaign. A large proportion of the Catholic
soldiers who fought for France probably placed themselves under her
protection, and attribute their safety to her care.
A little time before her death, she said to her sister Pauline, “Une
seule attente fait battre mon cœur; c’est l’amour que je recevrai et
celui que je pourrai donner.... Je veux passer mon ciel à faire du bien
sur la terre,” and again, “Je compte bien ne pas rester inactive au
ciel, mon désir est de travailler encore.” In these sayings, so unlike
in their vigorous activism the conventional aspirations of the devout,
we have probably the germinal point of her _cultus_. It has come to be
believed that this simple and loving spirit, who passed from the body
with so many generous longings unfulfilled, is indeed spending her
heaven in doing good; and the deeds attributed to her are just those
practical and friendly acts of kindness, through which during life she
expressed and perfected her spirit of love.
II
LUCIE-CHRISTINE
Those students of mysticism who feel that the purely cloistered type of
spirituality, as seen in Thérèse Martin and Elizabeth Catez, is too
remote from the common experience to be actual to us, may find something
with which they can sympathize and from which they can learn, in the
self-revelations of the remarkable contemplative who is known under the
pseudonym of Lucie-Christine.
This lady, whose spiritual journal was published in 1912, was a married
woman of the leisured class, leading the ordinary life of a person of
her type and position. She was born in 1844 and married in 1865. She had
five children. At forty-three she became a widow, and in 1908, after
nineteen years of blindness, she died at the age of sixty-four. Nothing
could have been more commonplace than her external circumstances. On the
religious side she was an exact and fervent Roman Catholic, accepting
without question the dogmas and discipline of the Church, and diligent
in all the outward observances of conventional French piety. Her time
was spent in family and social duties, sometimes in Paris, sometimes in
her country home; and she appeared to her neighbours remarkable only for
her goodness, gentleness, and love of religion. Yet her inward
life—unsuspected by any but her parish priest, for whom her journal was
written—had a richness and originality which entitle her to a place
among the Catholic mystics, and often help us to understand the meaning
and character of the parallel experiences which those mystics describe.
The value for study of a contemplative who is at once so modern and so
classic is obvious. This value is increased by the fact that for many
years Lucie-Christine knew nothing of mystical literature, and was
ignorant even of the names of the spiritual states which her journal so
faithfully describes. Therefore in her case unconscious imitation, which
accounts for much so-called mystical experience, appears to be excluded.
Her journal—at present our only source of information—covers
thirty-eight years: from 1870 to 1908. The first twelve years, however,
are only represented by fragmentary notes, put together in 1882; when
Lucie-Christine, at the suggestion of her confessor, began to keep a
detailed record of her religious life. Whatever view we may take of its
theological value, this record is certainly a psychological document of
the first class. It is the work of a woman of marked intelligence;
temperamentally philosophic, and with great intuitional gifts. The short
memoir prefixed to the French edition tells us that even as a child she
showed unusual qualities; was grave, thoughtful, and to some extent
“psychic,” being subject to flashes of clairvoyance, and premonitions of
important and tragic events. This peculiarity, which she disliked and
never spoke of, persisted through life; and its presence in her helps us
to understand how the many stories of abnormal power possessed by the
mystics first arose.
Her character was by no means of that detached and inhuman type which is
supposed to be proper to religious exaltation. She was ardent and
impressionable, gave love and craved for it; her qualities and faults
were essentially of a lovable kind. She reveals herself in her journal
as sensitive, idealistic, and affectionate; somewhat unpractical, very
easily wounded, tempted to irritability, and inclined to worry. “The
excessive wish to be loved, appreciated, admired by those whom I love,”
was one of the temptations against which, as a young woman, she felt it
necessary to pray: another was the longing for enjoyment, for personal
happiness. It was only after eight years of intermittent mystical
experience that she learned the secret of inward peace: to “lose her own
interests in those of God, and receive a share in His interests in
exchange.” Though the “activity and practical capacity of Martha” never
came naturally to her, she was yet a splendid wife and mother. Even in
the years when her inner life was passed in almost continuous
contemplation, she never neglected human duties for superhuman joys; but
planned and shared the amusements of her boys and girls, wrote and
rehearsed the plays which they acted, and watched with care over every
detail of their lives.
Her spiritual life developed gradually and evenly. There is no trace in
it of any psychic storm or dramatic conversion. She grew up in a
religious home, and even in childhood seems to have been attracted to
silent devotion or “mental prayer.” As a girl she was a vital, impulsive
creature, full of eager enthusiasms. That deep, instinctive longing for
Perfection which makes one man an artist, another a philosopher, and
another a saint, showed itself early in a passionate worship of all
beautiful things. “Tout ce que je connaissais de beau me passionnait et
entraînait toute mon âme. La première vue de la mer et des falaises
m’arracha des larmes.... Je ne pouvais trouver l’expression qui
traduisît assez l’ardeur dont le beau enflammait mon imagination, et je
ne voyais pas d’inconvénients à ces entraînements excessifs; au
contraire, je m’y livrais de toute la force de ma volonté. Infortunée,
mon âme en revenait cependant avec le sentiment du vide et de
l’insuffisance, et c’est alors qu’elle rejetait son activité dévorante
sur l’idéal qui lui réservait tant de dangers! Moins altérée du beau, je
me fusse peut-être contentée des choses réelles, mais comme le coureur,
lancé dans un fol élan, dépasse le but, ainsi mon âme s’élançait vers le
beau à peine aperçu et cherchait encore au delà.”
In this important passage we see the true source of Lucie’s mysticism.
It was the craving for an absolute and unchanging loveliness on which to
expend her large-hearted powers of adoration and self-giving, which led
her like the Platonists through visible beauty to its invisible source.
She had, as she says of herself in a sudden flash of ironic wit, “le
cœur assez mal placé pour trouver Dieu plus aimable que le monde, et
l’esprit assez étroit pour se contenter de l’Infini”; but it was not
until youth was nearly over, and she had been married for eight years,
that she found what she sought. One day, when she was meditating as
usual on a passage in the _Imitation of Christ_, she saw and heard
within her mind the words “Dieu seul!”—summing up and answering in one
phrase the vague efforts and questions of her growing mystical sense,
and offering to the hungry psyche the only satisfaction of desire. As
Fox was released from his conflict by the inner voice which cried,
“There is one only who can speak to thy condition,” so this inner voice,
says Lucie (whom it greatly astonished), “fut à la fois une lumière, un
attrait, et une force. Une lumière qui me fit voir comment je pouvais
être complètement à Dieu seul dans le monde, et je vis que jusque-là je
ne l’avais pas bien comprit. Un attrait par lequel mon cœur fut subjugué
et ravi. Une force qui m’inspira une résolution généreuse et me mit en
quelque sorte dans les mains les moyens de l’exécuter, car le propre de
ces paroles divines est d’opérer ce qu’elles disent.”
We see at once the complete and practical character of her reaction to
the divine; the promptitude with which she makes the vital connection
between intuition and act. St. Teresa said that the object of the
spiritual marriage was “the incessant production of work.” So for
Lucie-Christine that sure consciousness of the Presence of God which now
became frequent, “clothing and inundating” her as she sat alone at her
sewing or took part in some social activity, called her above all to
“faire les petites choses du dévouement journalier avec amour”;
conquering her natural irritability and dislike for the boredoms and
unrealities of a prosperous existence. “N’avoir jamais l’air ennuyé des
autres. Que de fois je manque à ceci avec les pauvres enfants. Vous êtes
ennuyeux! C’est bien vite dit! Est-ce une amabilité divine?”
More and more, as her mystical consciousness grew, the life of
contemplation became her delight; and it was plainly a real trial to be
distracted from it for trivial purposes. In company, or busied with
household duties, she went for hours with “her soul absorbed, its better
part rapt in God.” She “tried to appear ordinary,” and made excuses if
her abstraction was observed; but there are a few entries in her journal
which will give pleasure to those who condemn mysticism as an
“anti-social type of religion.” “Nous avons été nous promener, quatorze.
Je remarque que d’aller ainsi avec plusieurs ‘Marthes’ hommes ou femmes,
cela ne fait rien. On laisse discourir, on met un mot de temps en temps,
mais, en définitive, on demeure bien libre et l’oraison va toute seule.
Mais avec une seule Marthe, que c’est terrible! La tête-à-tête oblige à
causer presque tout le temps.”
When Lucie wrote this, ten years after her first illuminative
experience, she was far advanced in contemplation. She had known that
direct and ineffable vision of God “Himself the True, the Good, the
Beautiful; all things being nothing save by Him” which is
characteristic—though she knew it not—of the unitive way: known too the
corresponding experience of dereliction, when the door which had opened
on Eternity seemed tightly closed. It would be tedious to analyze in
detail the rich profusion of mystic states which she had already
exhibited: the degrees of contemplation, ecstasies, visions and voices,
all the forms taken by her growing intuition of the Transcendent. Many
of these can be matched in the writings of the great mystics. Again and
again as we read her, we are reminded of Angela of Foligno, Ruysbroeck,
Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Genoa, even of Plotinus: yet
Lucie-Christine was at this time ignorant of mystical literature, and
only in later life found with amazement descriptions of her own
experiences in the works of the great contemplatives.
These experiences had a wide range. Some we are justified in regarding
as invasions from her deeper self; coming to the rescue of the often
distracted surface personality, and correcting the impressions of the
outer world by its own intimations of Eternity. Thus, in 1875, she
confesses that being particularly worried by a number of people, the
Divine voice said to her, “Ma fille, il n’y a que toi et moi.” She
replied: “Seigneur, et les autres?” The voice said: “Pour chaque âme en
ce monde il n’y a que moi et elle, toutes les autres âmes et toutes
choses ne sont rien pour elle que par moi et pour moi,” and by this
timely reminder of the one Reality in whose life she lived, and by and
in whom alone all other lives are real, she was recalled to her inner
poise.
In assessing the value of this, and many other of her revelations, we
have to remember that Lucie-Christine was a fervent and exact
Churchwoman. Her belief was literal. She felt no discord between
traditional Christianity of the most concrete kind and the freedom of
her own communion with God. The fruits of that communion were often
expressed by her in theological terms, and the special atmosphere and
tendencies of French Catholicism certainly affected the form of many of
her contemplations. Thus at one end of the scale her passionate devotion
to the Person of Christ, and the fact that her religious practice
centred in the Eucharist, sometimes resulted in visions of a distinctly
anthropomorphic type. In these, her intuition of God’s presence
translated themselves into hallucinatory images of the Face of Christ,
or of His eyes looking at her; or photisms, which she explained to
herself as the radiance emanating from His person. As we all know, such
dramatizations of mystical emotion are comparatively commonplace. The
elements from which the self constructs them are by no means all of a
spiritual kind; and experienced mystics agree in regarding them with
much suspicion. A careful study of Lucie-Christine’s journal forces us
to admit, that the deliberate passivity which she cultivated often
placed her at the mercy of her instinctive nature; and that its hidden
wishes sometimes took a devotional form. To this source, too, we must
refer those “obsessions and temptations”—in other words, uprushes from
the lower centres—by which she was often attacked during contemplation,
and also the occasionally sentimental and emotional character of her
reactions to the Divine.
These objections, however, do not apply to the remarkable “metaphysical
visions”—sharp onsets of real transcendental consciousness—in which her
innate passion for the Absolute found satisfaction. Then, as she says,
God seemed to “put aside all intermediaries between Himself and the
soul;” and “bathed and irradiated by the Divine substance” she became
“aware of the Divine Abyss,” or perceived, as Julian of Norwich did,
“the Universe in a point,” swallowed up in the simple yet overwhelming
sight of God. Here lie, for us, the real interest and value of
Lucie-Christine’s confessions. She shares with Angela of Foligno and a
few other historical mystics the double apprehension of the Divine
Nature under its personal and impersonal forms; and as both utterly
transcendent to, yet completely immanent in, the human soul. In her
descriptions of these visions, this woman unread in philosophy displays
a grasp of the philosophic basis of religion which would do credit to a
trained theologian. Thus she says, “Il n’y a pas, ce me semble, de vue
intérieure qui égale celle de l’essence divine. Mon âme était comme
environnée de la substance divine en laquelle elle voyait ce caractère
essentiel qui nous est révelé par le mystère de la Sainte Trinité,
c’est-à-dire qu’il y a en Dieu l’unité et la distinction, le tout et le
particulier, et je sentais combien c’est folie de chercher quelque chose
en dehors de lui.” Again, “Étant profondément unie à lui dans la Sainte
Communion, je vis Dieu en tant qu’il est le souverain bien, et je
compris en même temps que le mal n’est que la négation du bien, un pur
_néant_.... Dans cette vue intellectuelle, je compris aussi combien sera
grande la confusion des pécheurs quand ils seront jugés, et qu’ils
verront que tout le mal qu’ils ont aimé, préconisé, adoré, se réduit au
néant! Avoir aimé le néant, avoir vécu pour lui, et perdre pour lui
l’Etre éternel!” Here Lucie’s view of sin is that characteristic of all
mystics; who can seldom be persuaded, however orthodox they may be in
other respects, that anything which is not good is real. We remember how
Julian of Norwich, also a natural contemplative of philosophic
temperament, says, “I saw not sin; for I believe it has no manner of
substance nor part of being.”
As an analyzer of her own psychological states, Lucie-Christine had
something of that genius which St. Teresa possessed in a supreme degree;
and she has, perhaps, an added value for us because she speaks not from
the past nor from the cloister, but out of the Paris of our own day. We
owe to her one of our most vivid descriptions of that apprehension of
Eternal Life—the immersion of our durational existence in the Absolute
Life of God—which Von Hügel regards as the fundamental religious
experience. “J’ai observé,” she says, “que pendant l’oraison passive et
surtout dans l’état d’union, l’âme perd le sentiment de la durée. Il n’y
a plus pour elle de succession de moments, mais un moment unique, et
j’ai cru comprendre qu’étant élevée à cet état, l’âme y vit selon le
mode de vivre de l’éternité, où il n’y a point de durée, point de passé
ni d’avenir, mais un moment unique, infini.” We have again to remember
that the woman who wrote this had then no acquaintance with the classics
of mysticism. It is her own impression which she is trying to register.
Again, consider this account of the state of divine union as she had
known it: “L’âme va prier, elle s’élance pour franchir la distance qui
la sépare de l’Infini, et cette distance elle ne la trouve plus! Elle
veut aller à vous, mon Dieu, et vous êtes en elle!... Perdue en vous,
elle oublie ellemême et tout le reste, elle ne sait plus comment elle
vit, ni comment elle aime; elle ne voit plus que Vous seul. Encore ne
peut elle pas _penser_ qu’elle vous voit et vous adore; car ce serait se
voir elle-même, et en de tels moments elle ne se voit pas, elle ne voit
que Vous. Elle connaît et aime par un mode nouveau et incompréhensible,
qui est en dehors et infiniment au-dessus de l’exercice ordinaire de ses
facultés. Elle sent que l’opération de Dieu a pris la place de la sienne
et que c’est Dieu même qui opère en elle la connaissance et l’amour.”