in the thinking and religious world, a position almost identical with
that of Spiritualism in our day. Like its modern offshoot, mediæval
Mysticism could be superimposed on any cult or habit; like Spiritualism,
it lent itself equally to a grossly sensual, or an abstract and idealist
interpretation. And Mysticism, therefore, appealed to an immense
audience; to the ignorant and pretentious, dissatisfied with the
Church’s authority, merely because it was authority; to the pure
reformers, anxious to preserve religion and quit the formal and
corrupted shows of it; to tender, pious, and dreaming souls, with no
great hold upon the world of fact; to the abstract reasoner, eager to
preserve his faith while letting untenable dogma slip away. The
authorized religion occupied a singular position towards these Mystics,
who formed, as it were, a Church within the Church. Afraid to quite
disown them or, indeed, to openly disapprove, lest she might thereby
weaken her own hold, yet conscious all the while that these theories of
her children were scarcely less subversive of her own supremacy than
those of any heretic or atheist, the Church burnt one Mystic and
canonized another, with an impartiality born of vacillation. The
influence of the Mystics was indeed immense, and too serious to be
lightly regarded. They promised to destroy the prison, the canker, the
disease of _Self_—to let the freed soul loose from the body, to vanish
for ever in the Divine darkness of the unimaginable Abyss; they made the
comfort of many a dreaming soul, tortured by the ineradicable memory of
human sin. They offered to the tired thinker, the starved and weary
labourer, the broken nun, the harassed townspeople, an attraction which
the Church herself dared not openly afford; and many who had wandered
away from the hard-and-fast, strict-and-narrow fold of Rome, found a
refuge in Mysticism, who might else have thrown aside all claim to
faith. Even as to-day, many are Spiritualists who otherwise would
certainly be Agnostics. For Spiritualism insists on none of the bonds or
dogmas of religion, and offers a palpable proof to its believers of that
which religion only promises; that is to say, the Immortality of the
Soul, that golden mirage-fountain of our thirsty modern world. This was
precisely the position of mediæval Mysticism, only, as we know, it was
Rest, not Life, that she offered; extinction, and not continuance; not
Paradise, but the Abyss.
V.
That a great many people everywhere at one time ardently desire one
thing is certainly no proof that their desire shall be satisfied; but it
shows a real want in the heart of man—a want which may be stopped by
altered conditions, if not by the actual things desired. As many people
longed for extinction in the harassed Middle Ages as pine for
immortality to-day. I do not mean to say they formulated this desire,
for most of them were fervent Christians. But life was bitter then, and
they hoped to extinguish their weary and craving souls in the
unconscious Godhead. When life is bitter now, we say “Eternal Justice
owes us a happier experience to discharge our sufferings here.” But in
both attitudes the same one fact remains, that so long as life is
bitter, men will crave and will complain. No modern preacher has spoken
more fervently of the joys of immortality than these medieval Mystics
spoke of the Abyss. Each to each has been the final and immeasurable
recompense for all the wrongs that ever there were in the world. By many
ardent Churchmen, and many saints, and many thinkers in the Middle Ages,
God was chiefly worshipped as the Abyss. He was the Supreme
Annihilation. The soul must plunge, says Eckhart, into pure Nothingness.
The soul must sink, says Tauler, in the Divine Darkness, into the secret
place of the Divine Abyss. “There is no safety,” says Guillame
Briçonnet, “save in the Abyss” (“l’abysme qui abysme en désabysmant”).
Adventitious reward, says Suso, may come in the consciousness of having
conquered evil and done good; but true reward, essential reward, is only
in the wild waste and deep abyss of inscrutable Deity, in the union of
the soul with sheer impersonal Godhead. This Godhead, says Eckhart, is a
simple stillness without quality or distinction. God is neither this nor
that. Who can distinguish and say, “This is good, sees not God; for all
that is in the Godhead is absolutely one, and formless, and void, and
interminable, and passive.” And the names under which God is chiefly
worshipped show this strange impersonal attitude. The Divine Dark, the
Obscure Night, the Desert, the Abyss, the Unimaged Nakedness, the
Infinite Essence, the Hidden Darkness, the One, the Supreme Nothing:
these are the names of this remote, abstract Jehovah of the mediæval
Mystics.
VI.
To lose themselves in this unconscious beatitude was the religious ideal
of a thousand souls. To lose themselves, to drown, extinguish, break
through and beyond the hateful imprisoning Ego—this was the motive of
their mood. But what, we may ask, remains of a man after he has lost
himself so utterly? How can he distinguish the bliss of which he dreams?
How can he even know he is resting? We are suspicious that these Mystics
did not quite realize their own desires, that they meant some residue of
themselves to remain and enjoy the sensation of their own Nirvana. And
so we ask of them what they mean by the Abyss. “Thereof,” says Eckhart,
“we cannot speak. It is the simplest essence of existence, it is
unknown, and must ever be unknown. It is the simple darkness of the
silent waste. It is the utmost term.”
But yet we are unsatisfied and persist in questioning. How can the
spirit of man, deprived of virtue, cognition, will, personality and
life, remain immortal? Still more, how can he enjoy such immortality?
The dim feeling of such eternal rest we all can understand, who have
gone suddenly from a lighted room into the vast night, and have felt our
souls suddenly invaded and possessed by a sense of mystery and silence.
We have felt this; but in his final beatitude the Mystic must not feel:
“He must be as one dead.” We also can understand the dizzy rapture of
unwinding abstraction from abstraction, till we weave a net that seems
to hold the heaven and all its stars. But the Mystic may not think. “He
must see neither distinction nor difference.” And the passionate upward
spring of the soul towards a God, unseen, unknown, in which it still
believes; thus might we pray. But the Mystic does not pray. “So long as
a man desires to do the will of God, so long he is not truly fit; he who
may seek the Godhead, he neither wills, nor knows, nor cares.”
What then, we ask again, what is the satisfaction that draws your souls
so firmly towards the Abyss? Will no one answer? And Tauler, the great
Mystical Dominican, replies, “There remains to a man, the fathomless
annihilation of himself; and an absolute ignoring of his personal
self—of all aims, of all will, heart, purpose, use, or way.”
VII.
It is not, then, a personal delight that awaits the Mystic in the abyss;
it is the sense of absorption in his Deity. It is hard to define the
character of this Godhead for which the man so gladly lays down his soul
and his life. Since it is identical with the foundation of the soul (and
this, Eckhart assures us, is not only Divine and simple, but an Utter
Nothingness), it is difficult to lay hold of the idea of its divinity—or
indeed of its difference from created matter which is also _purum
Nihil_, and it is easy to see how, by this path of negation, Mysticism
always diverges into Pantheism.... The essence of the Mystical Divinity
appears to be its very incomprehensibility; and it would be rash and
vain indeed to form an idea thereof. But we may at least attempt to
understand what that divinity appeared to its worshippers.
“The One,” begins Plotinus, “is neither substance, nor quality, nor
reason, nor soul, neither moving, nor at rest, not in place and not in
time; neither is it of any sort or kind.” Thus we learn what things were
not intrinsic to the Deity; we learn that we must conceive a bodiless,
unqualified, impersonal, interminable Void; an eternal, undifferentiate
essence of existence; an infinite Being not to be approached by reason
or by soul. Eckhart goes a step further, and affirms not only what the
Godhead is not, but even what it is. “There is a Godhead,” he says,
“above God. The Godhead neither moves nor works.... It is a simple
Stillness, an eternal Silence.”
If this were all we might comprehend the longing for quiet, the
passionate desire for rest which made the wearied and the
trouble-harried of all times deify silence and repose. Mysticism has
ever flourished best in starved or stormy ages. It is the shrinking of
the soul from a perplexed and hideous outer life; it is in some the
desire for love and peace, in some the desire for rest, in some for
immortality elsewhere. But in logical and speculative minds it is more
than this; the God of the Speculative Mystics is not merely Sleep, not
merely Dreams, not merely Stillness. They carry their reasoning
fearlessly to its natural conclusion, and this is worthy of all praise
in them; but that they should worship that conclusion is surely
strange—for “God is non-being,” writes Scotus Erigena; and, Eckhart adds
that when the soul penetrates the pure uncreate essence of the Godhead,
then Nothingness is at last in the presence of Nothingness.
VIII.
God, then, is Nothing; Erigena has given us the phrase, for _Nihilum_,
he says, is the infinite essence of God. The soul is Nothing; “a
fathomless annihilation of self,” in Tauler’s words, “an utter
nothingness,” in Eckhart’s sentence. And, lastly, the world is nothing,
_purum Nihil_, and as unreal as the rest. Already, in the close of the
twelfth century, David of Dinant had declared that Everything is at the
same time Spirit, Matter, and God. The later Mystics added a new line to
his Thesis: All is One and All is Nothing.
Such is the result of this strange Idealism, which sacrifices from first
to last the idea of personality to the conception of God. These are the
dogma of this singular phase of thought and feeling; a phase which
unites all that is cold and formal in philosophy with all that is
unreasoning, perfervid, and hysterical in a Religious Revival. The
doctors and preachers of Speculative Mysticism, have trances no less
real than those of Saint Francis; but what they contemplate with rapture
is not the idea of Infinite Love. It is Infinite Nothing which fills
them with ecstasy. And these Mystical thinkers are as precise and as
liable to become the mere pedants of a system, as any follower of Kant
or Comte. And yet, though they seek to use only their reason, they
despise reason. These philosophers look upon reason as the humble
handmaiden of ecstasy. And that divine ecstasy is excited by the thought
of a Nihilum.
This indeed appears almost an absurd position; and yet the position of
the Mystics was honourable and intelligent. They attempted to answer
questions which even to-day the theologians elude (see Newman, “Grammar
of Assent,” p. 210). “Whence comes Evil?” Evil, they reply, is not
created by God, but, so to speak, the blanks and spaces not filled up by
His creation. Evil and pain have no Real Existence; they are but a
deficiency of vitality; they are negative and temporary qualities
unrecognized by an unconscious God innocent of inflicting them. “Why are
we created responsible beings without our own consent?” Our bodies are
not created by God and we are not responsible to Him for their errors.
They are the expressions of our Eternal souls—their own expressions at
their own desire as a _modus vivendi_ in the world. “How can God need
our action if He is omnipotent? If omnipotent, how tolerant of Evil? If
permitting suffering, sin, and Hell, how then All-loving? If All-loving,
how Just?” These questions are all answered by the mystical conception
of God as a Divine Passivity, an unconscious Fund of Existence. All that
is impossible and absurd in the theories of the Mystics is caused by
adapting them to religious ideas. They had to explain the immortality of
the soul, ... and they spoke of eternal absorption into an Infinite
Nothing. They had to explain a good and omnipotent God creating an evil
and impotent humanity. They made the one nothing and the other nothing.
THE SCHISM.
In the year 1377 the Pope was at Avignon. Seventy years ago a Pope had
come there, as the guest of the Count of Provence, in order to arrange
with the King of France the iniquitous extermination of the Templars. He
had come to Avignon in the hour of Papal triumph; for in the tragic ruin
of the Hohenstaufens, the prestige of the empire was destroyed at last.
But in reality this fatal victory had left the Pope no longer the
arbiter between France and Germany, but the dependent of the sole
surviving Power. The attraction of successful France drew the Pope from
Rome to Avignon.
At Rome the Pope had left his Vatican, his authority, his tradition. At
Avignon, a chance guest, hastily lodged in the Dominican monastery, he
was little better than the Political Agent of Philippe-le-Bel. Yet he
showed no hurry to return. Clement was a Frenchman of the South, a
Gascon, at home in Provence but cruelly expatriated among the
dissensions, the enthusiasms, the treacheries of foreign Italy. Year
after year found him still at Avignon, and there he died in the year
1315. His successor, John XXI. or XXII., was another Gascon; and
Benedict XII. (1334-1342) and Clement VI. (1342-1352) were Frenchmen
also. They built a mighty palace at Avignon, immense, with huge square
towers, and walls—four metres thick—scarce broken by the rare small
pointed windows rearing their colossal strength high into the air. The
great golden-brown palace was less of a palace than a prison, less of a
cloister than a castle. It was, in fact, a baron’s fortress of the
feudal age; for the Pope had almost forgotten that he was Pope of Rome;
he was the Count of Venaissin and Avignon.
He was rich; he was a great lord; he lived luxuriously within those
frowning gates. His rooms were full of money-brokers, weighing and
counting out their heaps of gold; and there arose no Christ to drive
them from the Temple. France, England, Germany, Italy, groaned in vain
beneath the exactions of the unscrupulous financial ability that
furnished the Court of Avignon with its soft living, its delicate
manners, its attention to the Arts. In the beautiful house upon whose
walls Simone Memmi had painted a host of his sweet and melancholy
angels, men forgot the trumpet clang of the name of Hildebrand; and when
the officers of Clement VI. dared to remonstrate with him upon the
Oriental magnificence of his palace, deprecating an expenditure beyond
that of any of his predecessors—“None of my predecessors knew how to be
a Pope,” replied the Count of Venaissin. The Papal ideal had changed.
Yet it would be wrong to regard the Popes at Avignon as Oriental satraps
dreaming away, among enchanted reveries, a life of luxury. They were
above all things French and very French; active, keen, humane, with a
genius for prosperity, a natural quickness for organization. They had a
practical piety, of which they made a good income, not without an honest
expenditure of pains. Their missions were established in Egypt, India,
China, Nubia, Abyssinia, Barbary, and Morocco. Yet, though so eager to
convert the heathen, they kept no rancour in their hearts against the
unconverted. Cruel they were sometimes, for their age was cruel, but
often they were amazingly humane. John XXII. launched Bull after Bull in
defence of the unhappy Jews, massacred by Christian greed, and the
perverted pity of Christian superstition. “As Jews they are Jews, as men
they are men,” said the Pope. “Abhor their doctrines, respect their
lives and their wealth.” And Clement VI., when France and Germany
tortured and expelled the abominated nation, threw open wide the gates
of Avignon, and at the knees of the Vicar of Christ, he made a momentary
sanctuary for the Wandering Jew.
Clement was followed by Innocent VI., another Frenchman, equally content
with Avignon. When he died it was nearly sixty years since any Pope had
trodden the holy stones of Rome. But his successor, Urban V., for all
his Gallic blood, revolted against the position of St. Peter as chaplain
to the King of France. He saw that the Church lands in Italy were
slipping continually from the Pope’s control, while Papal vicars
established themselves as hereditary masters of their fiefs, and city
after city declared itself with impunity no longer the vassal of St.
Peter, but a free Republic.
In Germany the doctrines of Marsiglio and Occam had enduringly ruined
the prestige of the Pope. For they declared the Bishop of Rome a simple
bishop, subject to the law, subject to the Council, subject to
deposition at the hands of the faithful; his thunders were pronounced
illegitimate and harmless since no priest, but only a Council General,
could excommunicate or even interdict a nation or a king. In Germany the
Reformation had begun, as it was to continue, upon the lines of theory
and dogma; in England it was already a political revolt, a declaration
of national independence. In 1365 England refused to pay the tribute of
1,000 marks which John had promised to the Pope as to his lawful
suzerain. England at that moment was triumphant. Ten years ago the
battle of Poictiers had secured her hold on France. The French king had
died a captive in the Savoy in London, and Europe was not yet aware that
the new king of France was Charles the Wise.
At that moment, indeed, France, in reality so near the top of the wheel
of fortune, appeared at her lowest. Nations and men forget how quick
that wheel revolves; and the Pope, beholding France his sole protector
against the world, and France the prey of England, felt himself no
longer safe at Avignon. In 1361 a company of freebooters had defeated
the Papal troops at the very gates of the Papal city; the Pope had
bought them off with a ransom, and had redoubled the fortifications. But
he had realized his insecurity. It was evident that the real interests
of the Church demanded the return of the Pope to Rome.
Urban made a courageous, a heroic effort. He dragged his reluctant Court
of luxurious French Cardinals across the seas to Rome. But in that black
and savage haunt of robbers, the Pope remembered Avignon too well. He
came home at Christmas time in 1379; but it was only to die in the
beautiful familiar palace; and, out of France, the faithful called his
death the judgment of the Lord upon him who looks back from the plough.
A brighter epoch opened for his successor, Gregory XI. The genius of
King Charles and his brothers, the Dukes of Anjou and Burgundy, had
restored the fortunes of France; and Anjou, at any rate, was aware of
the advantage which the House of France might reap from the partnership
of a Pope at Avignon. For the Pope, of course, was a Frenchman and
willing to assist in the triumph of his country, a triumph he could best
assist by remaining at Avignon to further and inspire the policy of his
king. Every tie, indeed, united to detain Gregory in Provence. He was no
ascetic, indifferent to glory or to comfort; but an affectionate,
natural man, loving his ease, loving his family, loving the land where
he was born. At Avignon he dwelt among his friends, his kinsmen, his
father the Comte de Beaufort, his mother, his four sisters. The stories
of his Cardinals could only add to his own horror of that distant Italy
whose language he could not speak. He was ill, and he dreaded the miasma
of Rome; he needed the comforts of that Court whose luxurious memory
should long survive in France. “You should have come to Europe a few
years ago, before the Schism,” writes the anonymous author of Maître
Jehan de Meun—
“N’a pas longtemps mourût Gregoire
Je te dis que toute la gloire
Du plus hault seigneur terrien
Vers son estat n’estoit plus rien.
Là ne falloit ne pompe ne mise
Que herault sceult à devise,
Richesse du tout surmontant
Tout prince que lors fut vivant.”[5]
Footnote 5:
Paris: Bib. Nat. Français, 811; No. 7203; “L’Apparicion de Jehan de
Meun.”
Yet it was Gregory the Eleventh who was to restore the Papacy to Rome.
It was no longer so easy to return as it had been in the days of Urban.
That Pope had not removed to Rome until the energy of Gil Albornoz had
reduced the princes of Italy into submission. But now Albornoz was dead,
and Italy was more than ever tumultuous and discordant, for the French
Governors whom Urban had left behind him had filled the Papal states
with horror of the French Pope. Petrarch also was dead, whose pen no
less than the sword of Albornoz had been a potent instrument for the
return of Urban. The times were changed, and Italy, who had mourned so
long the Papal tiara fallen from her forehead, was no longer willing to
receive it. After seventy years of exile the Papacy had become a foreign
power, and by many of the Italian princes the restoration of Gregory
seemed little less than a French invasion. Of all the Papal states only
Orvieto, Ancona, Cesano, and Jesi remained true to him. Florence, of old
so faithful to the Church, was now united against her with the
Ghibelline Viscontis of Milan; and the Arch-Guelf clasped with a mailed
hand her new crimson banner written in golden letters with the one word
_Libertas_.
The Italians seemed as capable of shaking off the Pope as they had been
capable of shaking off the Emperor. Only a few voices still lamented the
exile of St. Peter. Gregory knew very well that the return to Rome meant
strife and bitterness, and that he must re-enter his dominions bringing
in his hand not peace, but a sword. This prospect inspired him with
disgust and fatigue; while every principle of habit, affection,
patriotism, loyalty, and selfish interest conspired to keep him in
Avignon. All this in one scale; but there lay in the other the
conscience of the Pope and the voice that inspired that conscience. It
was the voice of a young Italian nun. Europe, distracted with wars,
perplexed, unguided, heard at last one voice that proclaimed the will of
God, and acknowledged her conscience in St. Catherine of Siena.
The letters of St. Catherine came frequently to Avignon, and with them
came other letters from the French Governors telling of the increasing
difficulty of keeping together the little that was left of the patrimony
of St. Peter. Gregory became visibly disturbed. His conscience urged him
to return to Rome. In July the Duke of Anjou[6] came to Avignon to
dissuade the Pope from an enterprise so disastrous, as he believed, to
the future of France. Of all the royal princes Anjou was the one
specially concerned with Italian policy. He was a man handsome,
impressive, with a breadth of view and a force of ambition that made him
many followers. This son of St. Louis could not fail to influence the
Pope. He made it harder to go from Avignon; but the persuading voice of
Catherine would not be stilled. The Pope was ill and afraid, a timid
man; his sisters and his parents clung to him, entreating him to stay;
his Cardinals opposed him; his king commanded: yet on the 13th of
September he quitted Avignon. Evil omens added to the discouragement of
his spirit; his horse stumbled under him at starting, and fearful
tempests delayed him on the sea. But on January 17, 1377, the Pope
re-entered Rome.
Footnote 6:
July 17, 1376.
The seventy years which had made the beauty of Avignon had ruined Rome.
No longer the pilgrims brought her the custom of foreign countries; the
Court of the Vatican no longer gave an impetus to trade; the prestige of
the Pope had ceased to make of Rome the centre of Europe; and the
deserted city had realized her intrinsic poverty. Thirty years ago
Rienzi had proclaimed her a cave of robbers rather than the abode of
decent men. The churches were in ruins,[7] many of them wholly roofless;
and in St. Peter’s and the Lateran the flocks nibbled the grass of the
pavement up to the steps of the altar. Row after row of ruined
dwelling-places gave way to wild fields and heaths—scars of desolation
upon the depopulated enclosure of Aurelian. If mediæval Rome lay in
ruins, the Rome of antiquity was yet more ruthlessly destroyed, and the
temples and theatres of the pagans were used as a quarry or a limekiln
by their savage and impoverished successors. For with prosperity, peace
and order had deserted Rome. The fierce clans of Colonna and Orsini
terrorized the starved and fever-stricken populace; and there was no law
beyond their tyranny. Murder was frequent, vendetta an honoured custom,
and the Eternal City the shambles of unpunished bloodshedding.
Footnote 7:
Pastor, “Geschichte der Päpste,” i. 63, after Gregorovius.
In such a place decency, quiet, or even safety were naturally strangers.
The Cardinals, unwilling martyrs, mourned day and night for Avignon. The
Pope himself became disenchanted, ungentle, and embittered. But he was
resolved not to quit this odious Italy until the patrimony of St. Peter
was regained. Albornoz was dead, it is true; but in the Cardinal of the
Twelve Apostles the Pope found a spirit no less militant, resolute and
cruel to lead his armies against the revolted cities and to re-establish
in Italy the vanished prestige of Rome.