turned sour in her heart, she kept a great tenderness for erring or
tormented souls, praying and watching for them, warning and consoling;
and though the sinner proved obdurate, not yet would she relax her care;
nay, when the sisters besought her not to afflict herself for the sins
of the ungodly, she would answer that she would rather suffer death than
console herself for the misery of those who would only understand their
own perdition when at last they should stand in face of the eternal
expiation. So great was her compassion, that did she only hear of any
one sick in spirit, be he never so far away, she could not rest without
endeavouring to console his sorrow. And as men laid low with fever exist
from day to day in the hope of recovery, watching themselves to see if
they are not a little better, so she longed and watched from hour to
hour that the Lord might console the mourner and ease him in his
affliction.
Strange and pathetic this zeal for the indefinable and impersonal soul,
concerning itself nowise with character or feeling, with mind or
physical well-being. Strange and awful this transmuted love, this
transformed humanity and kindness, which deal with unrealities while all
around a world sickens and dies. Yet not so strange if we remember that
to exchange the reality for the shadow, the thought for the dream, and
truth for a phantasm, is the principle of mysticism.
VI.
Meanwhile Mechtild, a mystic by doctrine and circumstance, but not by
temperament, concerned herself, even in the convent, chiefly with the
affairs of reality. She was, as we have seen, every one’s friend, nurse,
and confidant, and but slenderly concerned with saintly glories for
herself. She never wrought any miracles, nor did God ever tell her that
she was His most favoured among women. It was Gertrude’s glory that she
declared. The saintly acts that are recorded of her have a pathetic
human grotesqueness never to be found in Gertrude’s doings or sayings.
For instance, out of a great pity for the sins of the mummers and
dancers at carnival, she filled her bed full of potsherds and broken
glass, and rolled in them till she was a mass of cuts and sores, begging
God to accept her suffering as a set-off to the merry-making of the
world outside. This is not the true mystical temper, which ignores all
but the union of the soul with God. Mechtild sought no advancement for
her own soul, she sought to palliate the offences of the guilty and to
save them from punishment rather than bring them to repentance; moreover
she felt herself responsible for their errors. The true ecstatic, lost
in God, abjures human responsibility. Nevertheless, even in the convent,
Mechtild, with her merry patience in suffering, her care for the sick
body no less than the sick soul, her humility and lovingness, was
naturally dearer than her austere, abstracted sister-saint. And, none
the less, the sisterhood was aware that Gertrude not Mechtild was their
real title to honour.
As the mystical life spread like a contagion through the convent, many
of the younger sisters, underfed, deprived of air and exercise, had not
strength to support the abnormal existence of the visionary. Sickness
was frequent in this convent of ecstatics, and whether at Rodardesdorf
or at Helfta its mortality was excessive. The nuns died young of
undefined diseases. We are always meeting allusions to their short,
dream-visited lives, to their early and inexplicable dying. They perish
of anæmia, before the acknowledgedly consumptive sisters; and the nuns
can find no reason for their death unless it be that God was anxious to
remove so much sweetness to flourish perpetually in His presence. The
diseases of the convent are such physical ills as are induced by mental
strain and by bodily inanition—consumption, hysteric convulsions, or
paralysis, disturbances of the liver. Such as cannot die—such as, like
Gertrude herself, have too strong a fibre to perish in girlhood—linger,
tormented by sickness, prematurely old and useless. All they have to
console them is the phrase, vouchsafed by her heavenly bridegroom to
Gertrude in vision, “Lo! ye that fain would hasten into my presence, ye
are as a spouse that bare and unadorned would venture into the nuptial
chamber; know, that after this death which ye so much desire, no further
grace can accrue to the soul, nor can it suffer any more for God’s
sake.”
Mechtild of Magdeburg, Dante’s Matilda, was the first of the greater
saints to succumb. A long life of hardship, of energetic striving with a
guilty world, years of Beguine Prophecy, much labour of writing and
preaching, and the pain of bodily weariness, had worn her out. At the
age of sixty-seven the strongest and sweetest of all the German
women-mystics departed from a world which she had not shrunk to face,
which even from her cloister she had striven to ennoble. The strong,
reforming spirit was stilled at last. The one woman in the convent of
Helfta who knew the world as it is, its sins and aspirations, its
generosities and crimes, was dead. A window was shut in that house, a
window showing the world beyond the chapel walls, and letting in upon
the heavy smell of flickering candles and swinging censers the free
breath of the wind. Henceforth there was no reminder of the larger
world, the purer air outside: Mechtild of Magdeburg was dead.
VII.
No such release was appointed for Gertrude; the easy death of the body
was not for her, though for death she prayed by day and by night,
finding that her prayers for health and strength were never granted.
Nailed to her mattress by exceeding weakness, she watched the younger
nuns die, one by one, “admitted to the celestial marriage-chambers,”
while she, faint, palsied, useless, lingered on. “O, my God,” she cries,
“could I not serve Thee better with my old strength than thus?” And ever
the soul-heard answer comes, that the more humbled the body, the poorer
the proud intellect of man, so much the dearer to God is his spiritual
essence. Thus dragged on year after year, and the great abbess filled
her five books of revelations and her eight books of spiritual
exercises. Her life was spent and she was old. The later hagiographers
relate of Saint Gertrude that she died of a languor of Divine love.
Modern science would call by another name this long palsy of the body
through the prostration of the mind. But no diagnosis, saintly or
scientific, can add to the sense of misery and waste with which we
recall that strong life so early broken, those twenty-five years of
strained nerves and aching limbs, that six-months-long daily death of
hysterical paralysis.
“This elect of God,” relates the _Vita_, “full of the Holy Spirit and
worthy to be embraced by the arms of Divine charity, Gertrude, most
benign abbess, all-praiseworthy, having laboured for forty years and as
many days in the honour and praise of God, ruling her abbey wisely and
with much prudence, sweetly, and with much discretion, being by reason
of all these virtues flowery as a fresh rose in this world, and
marvellously gracious and worthy to be loved, not by God only, but by
mankind as well, at last, after forty years and forty days, fell into a
grievous sickness, which is known as minor palsy, a form of apoplexy.”
The narrators of the life, who knew Gertrude and had often seen her, say
no word, it will be perceived, of the celestial love-sickness which a
more sentimental taste gave out afterwards to be the cause of her death.
And, indeed, such a superstition could not rise, even round so great a
saint, while the physical details of her last weakness remained fresh in
the minds of the nuns of Helfta. They mourned her truly, and believed
that never a holier saint had been translated to those pleasant fields
of heavenly green for which she had so often longed. But, with an
admirable _naïveté_, even while they believed that God had drawn her
miraculously from her sick bed into His arms, they knew that she had
died of palsy. To them there was nothing incongruous in the two ideas;
they had no thought of concealing—they would rather display—the
degradations and infirmities of the mere human body which had so long
enchained the heavenly soul. At first her senses remained to her, only
she could not move her limbs, could not stir the wasted hands that once
had been so swift to sew, to write, to put in order whatever was out of
place. She could lie still and dream, the poor, dying mystic.
For she had given to her now, as a gift that should not be taken away,
that perfect quiescence and immobility of body which she had practised
so often, so patiently, by day and night, in times gone past. And soon
she was to be granted that other wing of ecstasy, complete abstraction
of the mind from all human thoughts and affairs. So heavy became the
burden of her infirmity that she could no longer order the affairs of
the household, no longer care for others. At last she could not speak,
she could not pray, she could not think. She was perfected in the
mystical way; annihilated, stultified, palsied, she had attained the
summit of her desire. Never moving, never changing, dead-alive, she lay
there month by month, a helpless burden upon the community. Worshipped
as one indeed highly favoured of the Lord by those whose feet were all
set on the same sterile and deadly road, she could give utterance to no
other words but these, “My soul!” And this phrase she repeated over and
over again, finding it marvellously ample and sufficient to express all
the movements of the spirit. O pitiless ideal, O cruel and revolting
doctrine, is it to this you would reduce the living, thinking, active
human mind? Is the end of such continued sacrifice, such years of
hourly, daily labour nothing but this—a palsied useless body, a dumb,
numb soul, with no thought and no desire beyond itself? At length the
hour of dissolution was at hand, the night in which no man shall work;
and in waiting for this the days of life had gone by fruitless and
wasted; in hoping for this the sun had risen and set in vain, the
seasons had changed unnoticed; in preparation for this soul and heart
and mind and physical powers had deliberately hamstrung their noblest
faculties; and now the long-awaited night was at hand, the night in
which all mistakes are forgotten, all cares and anguish set at rest.
The last time that Gertrude spoke these two all-sufficing words, “My
soul!” was one evening when Compline was at an end. Then began her
passage to the other life. At this time, fables the author of the end of
the _Vita_, in quaint allegorical eulogy, not only the chamber of the
dying abbess, but the whole of the monastery, was crowded and thronged
to excess, since among the praying and weeping sisterhood knelt all the
virgin company of heaven.
“At length the happy hour was come when the Celestial and Imperial
Spouse should receive His beloved in His house of love, finally, after
so much longing, set free of the prison of the world.” The nuns knelt
round praying and weeping; the watching sisters saw angels kneeling too.
And we, do we not see the ghosts of stillborn pity, and joy, and love,
and help, standing white-eyed and shadowy there? Yet wherefore should
all or any weep? The end is at hand; the labour is over and gone, and
soon she will rest so well that, even if she could, she would not quit
her quiet bed. Well may she sleep, poor, troubled soul, mistaken and
most noble in its errors; well may she sleep who, being dead, yet speaks
with a clearer and surer voice than she spoke with on earth, telling of
patience and sacrifice borne willingly for love’s sake, of faithful
endurance through pain and toil, teaching an example and a warning in
one word. And in the middle of their praying none heard at what moment
the sleeping spirit went. The abbess was dead; but the convent went on
as though she had been still alive. Another abbess took her place;
another nun saw visions and worked miracles in her stead, a lesser saint
but of the same quality. Even after Mechtild’s death some years after,
the old life went on—the old routine of sleep and prayer, or of forced
wakeful nights and baneful ecstasy; and the old life of insufficient
food and insufficient thought begot the old aberrations and diseases.
The fever had not yet run its course.
We standing here, safe, as we imagine, from the deadly epidemic,
curiously studying these eight hundred closely printed pages as records
of morbid hysteria, may feel our hearts melt with a melancholy regret
for the shipwreck of so many noble lives. For the worst of this malady
was that it attacked the loftiest spirits, as phylloxera the oldest and
most fruitful vines. We may pity and praise them in a breath; we may
give a kindly wonder to their belated love and say that, but for them,
the sentiments that fills our hearts to-day would have been less
patient, less tender, less exalted. And this is well, that we should
honour the best in them. But let us take care that we ourselves are free
and whole; let us not deem ourselves too safe, but place a quarantine on
our own souls lest the sweet and fatal poison of mysticism penetrate
thither unawares.
THE ATTRACTION OF THE ABYSS.
I.
As an island is surrounded by water, as night surrounds the stars, and
air the globe, so beyond the region of the known there stretches an
illimitable space of darkness and of silence. All minds know that it is
there; to many of us it is a background of repose to the busy scene of
life; to some the hidden tract has its chart of faith or dogma. But
there are others to whom that vast and dark Unknown is more present than
the small and shining certainty of the Universe. They are sucked into
the eddy of its vastness and its darkness. These natures turn from the
substance to dream of the shadow, they leave the narrow fields of
science and go out boldly over those unsounded waters beyond. Souls such
as these are never quite at home in life: the dark, the undreamed of,
the infinite has enchanted them. They are drawn by the attraction of the
Abyss.
* * * * *
Mysticism allures different men by different methods. It draws by
various lines the passionate heart, the broken and humbled will, the
heated fancy, the indignant spirit wroth at the hardness and evil of the
world. It draws no less the reasoning and metaphysical mind, repelled by
dogma and yet desirous of the Deity. For Mysticism is not only an affair
of dreams, of miracles, and visions, it is not only a satisfaction to
disordered imaginations, to diseased and stunted passions; it includes a
system of philosophy so logical that who accepts the first easy thesis
arrives without negation or amazement at the last. The Mystics have, in
fact, made a science of the soul, an elaborate system of abstractions,
quite logical in itself, although in contradiction to the truths of
physical nature. No one, indeed, is readier to admit this contradiction
than the Mystic himself, for the soul, he says, is exactly the contrary
of the body. It is therefore natural that as bodily life rises in the
scale from simple to complex, so the soul’s existence should be purest
when least differentiate. For the soul and the body meet on one level
for a moment, but they come from different positions. The human body is
the highest evolution of the animate world; the human soul, the Mystics
assure us, is the lowest and last descent of Infinite Being. In fact,
the soul of man is to Divinity in the same relation as the zoophyte is
to us. Only, unfortunately for the simile, in this strange supernatural
cosmos the zoophyte is higher than the man. Let us rather say that man,
having progressed from the zoophyte to humanity in body, must now in
soul ascend from the man to the zoophyte. For the soul, we must
remember, is divinest when most simple. It is the last descent of God,
and God (the Mystics say) is absolute unity and simplicity. “God,” says
Meister Eckhart, “is the simplest essence of existence; and who,
thinking of God, sees any distinction from utter simplicity, be sure he
seeth not God.”
II.
“But how” (we can imagine one of Eckhart’s audience exclaiming), “how
can the absolutely simple be the manifold? God, you say, is the Simple
and the One; and yet you say that every soul descends from God. If God
is absolutely simple and single, He cannot divide Himself into many
souls.” Eckhart here, we may be sure, would smile and praise the
discretion of his assailant; for this objection brings us to the central
theory of Speculative Mysticism, the dearest dogma of Plotinus, of
Dionysius, of Scotus Erigena, as of Master Eckhart.
Spirit is everywhere one. Spirit is in the Godhead and indivisible. The
Godhead exists, our Mystics tell us, above and beyond all Divine
theophanies; the Godhead exists as a vast and unfathomable ocean,
rolling its seas of emptiness and silence from pole to pole. But
everywhere the ocean is bordered by the land; and its waters, in the
circle of their tides, wash over a hundred shores, and fill a thousand
bays and creeks and little rocky pools. Even as the deep sea sends its
shallower waters over the sands, and then withdraws them into its
eternal and unfathomable fulness, so the waters of God flow into every
soul. And when the sea withdraws its tide, it withdraws not merely the
contents of this pool and yonder creek, but the sea itself, eternally
undivided, though for the space of a tide it filled the limits and the
hollows of the shore.
But not all the strand, is washed by the sea; above a certain line the
sands grow their rank, stiff grass, and grey-green thistles; the sands
are almost land. And not the whole of the soul is visited by the Divine
simplicity; only the water-line, the arid depth of the soul, is swept
over and filled by the infinite being of God. “There is something in the
soul,” taught Meister Eckhart, “uncreated and uncreatable; there is
something in the soul which is beyond the soul, Divine, simple, an utter
nothingness; there is a place in the soul where God inhabits, and this
base of the soul is one with the base of God. And to reach this obscure
retreat of the Eternal and Divine, where the unconscious Godhead
dwells—this is the supreme and final goal of all created things.”
III.
And how shall the Mystic reach this obscure and inner depth, this
silence where the soul is one with God? By sinking into himself. For the
Mystic there exists no exterior world. Since God is within us, what
value is there in the world without? “Omnes creaturæ sunt purum nihil,”
formulates Master Eckhart. For the Mystic the body is only a prison, a
distortion, a hindrance; its senses, its experience cannot teach him.
“Being freed from the folly of the body,” said Plato, “we shall of
ourselves know the whole real essence.” “Matter,” says Plotinus, “is the
principle of individuation, and who would seek the one must quit the
things of matter.” Without the body, then, we were no longer personal,
no longer separate; we were all One and all God. It is the body which
determines our character; there is no personality in the soul. We must
conceive it as pure water poured into a coloured vase, which becomes
red, or blue, or green, according to the colour of the vase. The colour
is not a principle of the water, and does not affect the water. So the
soul poured into the body appears to take a note and colour of its own,
but, poured out again, is seen to be unaltered. The first aim of the
true Mystic is to purify his spirit from this extraneous and earthly
tint; to make the vase, if he can, as colourless, as simple and uniform
as that infinite Being, of which, in Erigena’s phrase, the Soul is the
last descent.
Since the soul is God the world is nothing. No more than the eye can
taste or the ear handle, can the created comprehend the Divine. “If we
are to know anything purely,” we read again in Plato, “we must be
separate from the body.” And Plotinus adds that he who enters in quest
of the One must ascend to the First Principle of his own nature. The
First Principle of Plotinus is the same as Meister Eckhart’s Foundation
of the Soul. It is the One. Intellect may be a means to reach it, but it
is certainly not an end. The Mystic philosopher thinks himself into an
ecstasy; and the ecstasy, not the thought, is his goal.
Our Mystic has therefore abandoned the world, and abandoned his own
experience in the endeavour to attain to God. He must be quite still,
passive, dumb; the mystic should be as a new-born child who has not yet
smiled in his mother’s face. He must not even _will_ to be made one with
God. “He must have no seeking for himself more than has a corpse,”
writes Eckhart. “Let him be as one dead,” counsels Suso. “He must not be
satisfied with any deed or virtue,” adds the Flemish Ruysbroch, “but
only in the Abyss.” And Tauler rises to a passionate eloquence: “Sink
thou into thy Depth and thy Nothingness, and let the tower and all its
bells fall down upon thee; yea, let all the devils in Hell storm out
upon thee; let Heaven and Earth with all their creatures assail thee,
yet shall they all but marvellously serve thee.... Sink thou only into
thy Nothingness, and the better part is thine.”
IV.
Death in life is the aim of the Mystic, and his consolation is the
thought of his annihilation. There is not any rest for him, and no
solace save in that which Suso calls “the desolate wilderness and deep
chasm of unsearchable Deity.” To us of a later age to whom the greatest
and most alluring promise of religion is the hope of Personal
Immortality, it is hard to realize a fact which must strike every
student; namely, that throughout the Middle Ages the most passionate
motive of a hundred passionate sects, the dearest thesis of the deepest
thinkers in the Church, was this intense desire of personal
annihilation. As a fact, this frenzy after Nothingness cost the Church
more heresies than any corruption in herself. The very doctors of the
Church were tainted with it. The lowest of the people—poor, starved, and
hunted fanatics—formed themselves into bands and brotherhoods to preach
this comforting gospel of extinction. The books of Dionysius the
Areopagite carried the Alexandrian theories of the One into every
monastery in Europe. The Almaricians, the Vaudois, the followers of
Ortlieb, the Beguines, the brothers and sisters of the Free Spirit, and
many other sects of poor and wandering people, spread their fantastic
corruptions of the same, throughout the working classes. From the
twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, the desire of many a mystical saint
was identical with the despair of atheists to-day. It was the extinction
of the personal soul. The whirligig of time brings strange revenges.