BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF 1891 The original of tliis book is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://archive.org/details/cu31924029351339 HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS Uniforjn with this voluine, crown Svff, cloth. I. THE SYMBOLISM OF CHURCHES AND CHURCH ORNAMENTS A TRANSLATION OF THE FIRST BOOK OF THE RATIONALE DIVINORUM OFFICIORUM Of WILLIA5I DURANDUS IVitii Introductory Essay and Notes by the Rev. J. M. NEALE and Rev. B. WEBB II. SYMBOLISM, OR EXPOSITION OF THE DOCTRINAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN CATHOLICS AND PROTESTANTS As evidenced by their Symbolical Writings By JOHN ADAM MOEHLER, X).D. HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS H dontribution to tbe Ibistorg of IReliolous ©pinion BY ROBERT ALFRED yAUGHAN, B.A. SIXTH EDITION TWO VOLUMES IN ONE VOL. I NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 743 & 745 BROADWAY 1893 PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. ^"^HE work which is now again published was the result of too many years' steady application, and has served too great an intellectual use in the special department of thought of which it treats, to be allowed to fall into oblivion. Certainly the reading which the author thought it necessary to accomplish before he presented his conclusions to the public was vast. and varied. That the fruit of his labours was com- mensurate may be gathered from the honest admi- ration which has been expressed by men knowing what hard study really means. The first edition of the 'Hours with the Mystics' appeared in 1856; the second was, to a great extent, revised by the author, but it did not appear until after his death. It was edited by his father, though most of the work of correction and verification was done by the author's widow. There is no intention of writing a memoir here. That has already been done. But it has been suggested that it might be interesting to trace how Mysticism gradually became the author's favourite study. To do that it may be well to give a very short sketch of his literary career. From the time he was quite a child he had the fixed H Preface to the Third Edition. idea that he must be a literary man. In his twenty- first year (1S44) he published a volume of poems, entitled ' The Witch of Endor, and other Poems.' The poetry in this little volume — long since out of print — was held to give promise of genius. It was, of course, the production of youth, and in after years the author was fully conscious of its defects. But even though some critics (and none could be a harder critic of his own work than himself) might point out an ' overcrowding of metaphor' and a ' want of clearness,' others could in- stance evidences of 'high poetical capability' and 'happy versification. But at the time it was thought desirable that the young poet should turn his attention to prose composition with the same earnestness. With that object his father proposed to him the study of the writings of Origen, with a view to an article on the subject in the British Quarterly Review. When just twenty-two the author finished this task, his first solid contribution to the literature of the day. The article showed signs of dili- gence and patient research in gaining a thorough know- ledge of the opinions of the great thinker with whom it dealt. ' It is nobly done,' Judge Talfourd wrote. 'If there is some exuberance of ornament in the setting forth of his (Origen's) brilliant theories, it is only akin to the irregular greatness and the Asiatic splendour of the mind that conceived them.' And the words of the late Sir James Stephen were not less flat- terhig : 'If I had been told that the writer of it (the article) was a grandfather, I should have wondered only that the old man had retained so much spirit and been able to combine it with a maturity of judgment so well becoming his years.' We believe it is no pre- Preface to the Third Edition. vii sumption to say that the article has not ceased to be useful to those who wish to gain an idea of the character of one whose name has often been the subject of bitter wordy war between Christian men. In I 846, a dramatic piece by Alfred Vaughan, entitled 'Edwin and Elgiva,' appeared in the London University j\Iagasine. The subject was one of a most sensational character, and was treated accordingly. Dunstan and his companions are painted in very black colours, and any doubts as to the reality of the cruelties alleged to have been practised on the unhappy Queen are not entertained. Two poems, the ' Masque of Antony' and 'Disenchantment,' though not published until later, were written about the same date. At this time, the author was attending the theo- logical course at Lancashire Independent College, of which his father was the president. Having completed his term of residence there, he went over to Halle in order to spend a year in a German University, before entering upon any fixed pastoral work. There he had a good opportunity of studying the state of German religious thought. The following extract from his journal shows the effect produced on his mind : — ' If I am spared to re- turn, I will preach more of what is called the Gospel than I did before. The talk about adapting religion to the times zvhich is prevalefit here, even among the religious, appears to me a miserable mistake. It never needed adapting so much as when the apostles preaclied it, but they made no such effort! It was, too, while studying German specu- lations that the author adopted the system of philosophy, distinct alike from sceptical and mystical, which is apparent in this his chief work. viii Preface to the Third Edition. It is, we believe, impossible for an earnest mind to go through life without periods of sad and painful doubt. The author was no exception to this rule, and while at Halle heseems to have suffered bitterly. But heknew the one refuge for the doubting heart, and turned to it. In the ' Dream of Philo,' written at this time and pub- lished in the volumes of 'Essays and Remains,' we see some reflection of his own feelings, and the following verses which we venture to quote must, wc think, strike a responsive chord in many a heart yearning for peace amidst the turmoil of the world : — Not a pathway in life's forest, Not a pathway on life's sea ; Who doth heed me, who doth lead me. Ah, woe is me ! Vain the planting and the training, For life's tree on every side Ever launches useless branches. Springs not high but spreadeth wide. Ah, my days go not together In an earnest solemn train. But go straying for their playing. Or are by each other slain. Listen, listen, thou forgettest Thou art one of many more ; All this ranging and this changing Has been law to man of yore. And thou canst not in life's city Rule thy course as in a cell There are others, all thy brothers, Who have work to do as well. Preface to the Third Edition. ix Some events that mar thy purpose May light them upon their way j Our sun-shining in dedining Gives earth's other side the day. Every star is drawn and draweth Mid the orbits of its peers ; And the blending thus unending Makes the music of the spheres. If thou doest one work only, In that one work thou wilt fail ; Use thou many ropes if any For the shifting of thy sail. Then will scarce a wind be stirring But thy canvas it shall fill ; Not the near way as thou thoughtest, But through tempest as thou oughtest, Though not straightly, not less greatly, Thou shalt win the haven still. These verses have been called 'Alfred Vaughan's Psalm of Life.' The lessons taught may be an encouragement to others, as they have been to the author's son, in times of trial and disappointment. But it must not be supposed that at this time the author's thoughts were all devoted to painful doubts and yearnings. He determined while in Germany to unite the labours of a literary man to the work of a pastor. His first plan was to take special periods of Church History and lay them before his readers in the form of dramas. He thus describes his idea: — T shall commence the series with Savonarola. I think it will not be necessary to pay regard to chronological order in the order of com- position. I may afterwards take up Chrysostom, per- Preface to the Third Edition. haps Hildebrand, endeavouring in all not merely to develop the character of the principal personage, but to give an exact picture of the religious and political spirit of the times. They must be dramas on the principles oi King John or Henry IV., rather than those oi Hamlet or Macbeth! With this scheme his father did not entirely agree, and the consequence was a considerable correspondence. Dr. Vaughan never doubted the genius of his son, or that something definite would come of his literary tastes, but he appears to have thought that the dramatic form was not a good way in which to bring the result of genuine hard work before the public. As it happened, none of these dramas saw the light, though the plan of the ' Hours with the Mystics' shows the strong attachment the author felt for that kind of writing, and it also shows the way in which he could overcome any difficulties arising from its peculiarities. The notion of gentlemen discussing the Mystics, over their wine and walnuts, or in the garden with the ladies in the twilight of a summer evening, has had to en- counter the sneers of some harsh critics, but we cannot help thinking that advantage is gained by the device of these conversations, because the talking by various speakers affords an easy opportunity of glancing over many varying theories upon any subject at the same time, while the essayist would find it difficult to keep his line of argument clear, and at the same moment state the divergent lines of thought necessary for the right under- standing of the position generally. The author began definite ministerial work at Bath in 1848. The thoroughness with which he performed his pastoral duties did not give him much time for Preface to the Third Edition. xi literary work. The articles written during his stay in that city were those on Schleiermacher and Savonarola. The materials for both essays were collected while at Halle. When writing to inform his father of the completion of the first of the articles, he refers to the Mystics in the following way : — ' I shall not begin to write another article at once. But I should like to fix on one to have more-or-less in view. There are three subjects on which I should like to write some time or other — ( i ) Savonarola, for which I have much material; (2) on Mysticism, tracing it in the East, in the Greek Church, in the German Mystics of the 14th century, in the French Mystics, and lastly in those most recent; (3) Leo the Great and his stirring times. I should like to do the Savonarola next. But I should also like to know what you think on these sub- jects, or on any other you would perhaps like better. The first and third would consist largely of interesting narrative. The second would be rather less popular but more novel.' The ' second ' subject was worked up into the two volumes now republished. As it gradually became his favourite study, he felt that the field was expanding before him, and that it would be necessary, if he did justice to his theme, to treat it at a greater length than could be allowed to a magazine article. In the British Quar- terly Review articles appeared on ' Madame Guyon,' and ' The Mystics and the Reformers,' which were simply the first results of his reading for the great work. It was at Birmingham that most of this writing was done : while there he was an indefatigable student. ' There,' says a writer in the Eclectic Review, Nov. 1861, xu Preface to the Third Edition. p. 508, 'he made himself familiar with many languages — the old German, the Spanish, even the Dutch, adding these to the Italian, French, Latin, and Greek in the classical and later forms, and all as preparations to the History of Mysticism to which he had pledged himself. The Mystics had thrown a spell upon him. Seldom have they wrought their charms without seducing to their bewildering self- abandonment In the case of Alfred Vaughan it was not so ; he continued faithful to the high duties of life. He trod the sphere of action and compelled the ghostly band he visited, or who visited him, to pay tribute to the highest religious teaching of Christian truth and life.' But the body would not keep pace with his mind. In 1 85 5 he was obliged to resign his pastoral charge at Birmingham, arid from that time he devoted himself entirely to literature. He wrote several articles and criticisms, chiefly in the British Quarterly amongst these, one on Kingsley's 'Hypatia,' which we believe was much appreciated by the future Canon of Westminster. An article on ' Art and History ' appeared in Fraser's Magazine about the same time. And now we reach the first publication of his greater achievement, the 'Hours with the Mystics.' In August, 1855, the printing of the original edition began, and was completed in the February of the following year. The author lived long enough afterwards to witness its success, and then swiftly came the end. In October, 1857, Alfred Vaughan passed away into another world where he has doubt- less found many of those on whose characters he loved to muse. We will not attempt any analysis of his character, but we cannot resist the impulse Preface to the Third Edition. xiii to insert one loving tribute to his memory, which appeared in a Birmingham paper {Aris' Gazette, Nov. 27th, 1857). 'It has seemed fit to the All-Wise Disposer of events to withdraw from this world one of its holiest and most gifted inhabitants, one who, had his life been prolonged, bade fair to have taken rank among its brightest lights and most distinguished ornaments. .... The strength and sweetness, so happily blended in his character, were apparent in his preaching ; he was tender enough for the most womanly heart, he was in- tellectual enough for the most masculine mind. As a writer he had already attained considerable reputation, and promised to become one of the chief luminaries of the age. As a Christian, he was sound in faith, benig- nant in spirit, and most holy in life; a delighter in the doctrine of God, his Saviour, and an eminent adorner of that doctrine.' Before venturing on any remarks upon the subject- matter of the book itself, we may be allowed to make a slight reference to opinions expressed upon it at the time of its publication. In Eraser's Magazine for September, 1856, there was a long review by Canon Kingsley. In this article weak points are shown and sometimes the criticisms are rather severe ; but there was too much real sympathy between the two men (though they never knew each other personally) for the reviewer not fully to appreciate the good qualities in the work before him. Now that Charles Kingsley's name is such. a household word in England, no apology is needed for quoting two passages from the above-mentioned essay. ' There is not a page,' it says in one place, 'nor a paragraph in which there is not something worth recol- xiv Preface to the Third Edition. lecting, and often reflections very wise and weighty indeed, which show that whether or not Mr. Vaughan has thoroughly grasped the subject of Mysticism, he has grasped and made part of his own mind and heart many things far more practically important than Mysti- cism, or any other form of thought; and no one ought to rise up from the perusal of his book without finding himself, if not a better, at least a m.ore thoughtful man, and perhaps a humbler one also, as he learns how many more struggles and doubts, discoveries, sorrows and joys, the human race has passed through, than are contained in his own private experience.' In another place, while pointing out various improvements which he would like to see in another edition, Mr. Kingsley adds, 'But whether our hope be fulfilled or not, a useful and honourable future is before the man who could write such a book as this is in spite of all defects.' The reviewer adds later in a reprint of this essay, ' Mr. Vaughan's death does not, I think, render it necessary for me to alter any of the opinions expressed here, and least of all that in the last sentence, fulfilled now more perfectly than I could have foreseen.' With the mention of Charles Kingsley's name we are reminded of others of the same school of thought, and therefore the following comparison in an article in the Eclectic Revieiv (November, 1861) may prove interesting. The reader must judge of its truth. ' While Robertson of Brighton,' says the reviewer, 'was preach- ing his sermons, and Archer Butler was preparing his Lectures on Philosophy, Alfred Vaughan about the same age, but younger than either, was accumulating material for, and putting into shape, the "Hourswith the Mystics." Preface to the Third Edition. xv He died within a year or two of their departure, and still nearer to the period of youth than those extraor- dinary men. His name suggests their names to the mind — all victims to the fatal thirty-four and thirty-seven. He had not the wonderful touch of Robertson's "vanished hand"; he had not the tenacity of muscle and fibre of Archer Butler; but he combined many of the character- istics of both, and added that which gave individuality to his genius. He had not the fine subtle sense of in- sight possessed by Robertson ; he had not the rapid and comprehensive power of Butler. They again had not his large and generous culture.' More of such favourable criticisms and kindly words from men of learn- ing might be quoted, but we forbear. The task of referring to such sentiments is not unnaturally attrac- tive to the son of such a man ; but it is simply desired to put forward this book once again on its own merits, in the hope that there are still many who will rightly appreciate the labour and genius to which it bears witness. About the work itself it will be necessary to say only a few words. When the ' Hours with the Mystics' first appeared it traversed ground which was to a great extent un- trodden, at any rate in England. Mysticism, though a favourite study of the author, was not then, and can scarcely be said to be now, a popular subject. A matter-of-fact age puts such ideas on one side, as something too weak for serious consideration. The majority indeed have but a very hazy notion as to what Mysticism is ; they only have an idea that some- thing is meant which is very inferior, and they pass it xvi Preface to the Third Edition. by. Well has Mr. Maurice said that such terms (Mediaeval Phil. p. 143) 'are the cold formal generalisa- tions of a late period, commenting on men with which it has no sympathy.' In the minds of thoughtful men the name of mystic points to a special and recognis- able tendency, and the history given in this book shows that the same tendency has been working in the world for ages ; — Hindus and Persians, Neoplatonists and Schoolmen, Anabaptists and Swedenborgians, have all felt its force. The main principle of all their doctrine was the necessity of a closer union with the Deity. Among Christians, — with whom we are chiefly concerned, — this close connection, it was thought, could only be gained after passing through stages of illumination and purification ; and progress in the way of perfection was to be made not by labour and study, but by solitude, and asceticism. In these volumes this doctrine is exhibited ; especially we trace the influence which the pseudo-Dionysius had in the fourth century ; how, under his guidance, these ideas spread in the East, and thence to the West ; the position taken up by Mystics against the Schoolmen, and the condition of Mysticism at the time of the Reformation. These topics are intere.sting, and to the questions which must be raised in connection with them in every thoughtful mind, it is hoped that the reader will find satisfactory answers in the following pages. It will be seen that the field over which the reader is taken by the author is very large. It is believed that though there have been during recent years various con- tributions made to the literature on this subject, no writer has attempted to take in all the various phases which Preface td the Third Edition. xvii are pictured in this book. In German Mystics soaie writers have found a congenial theme ; others have taught us more about the mysterious reh'gions of the East. It is, we think, to be regretted that more attention has not been paid to the Mystics of the Scholastic period. The position held by Hugo of S. Victor and his followers was by no means in- significant. As a mystic, Hugo showed that it was possible to combine contemplation with common sense and learning. In an age when Scholasticism was sub- mitting religion to cold and exact logic, it was like turning from some dusty road into a quiet grass-grown lane, to hear of devout contemplation leading up to per- fect holiness and spiritual knowledge. Most of us are ready to agree with these men when they maintain that there are mysteries of Divine Truth which cannot be analysed by the understanding, but which can be em- braced by thoughtful and reverent contemplation. So long as the use of both learning and devotion was admitted, we are able to sympathise with them. But it is a truism to say that the tendency of any move- ment is to go to extremes. The Mystics of this period appear to have recoiled horror-struck from what seemed to them rationalistic or materialistic ideas. In that, they might be right enough. But starting from the true stand- point that there are mysteries in the Infinite which we finite creatures cannot fathom with our finite minds, they proceeded to the extreme of putting devotion before know- ledge. Next, they thought there was nothing to which they could not attain by devout yearning, even to absorp- tion into the Deity. The logical conclusion of these theories tended to pantheism : those who discarded logic VOL I. b xviii Preface to the Third Edition. yielded to fanaticism. Into that error fell most of the disciples of the great Scholastic Mystics. And has not the like occurred elsewhere in history .'' Putting religion out of the question, Wycliffe may have been a socialist, but he was far behind his followers. But as such a falling away on the part of the disciple cannot justly tal. prjra TekeZtrOai' r] &^a. TO fXvoVTa^ ra? ataBrj- ^vovTe^ yap Tcis aiaBTJaei^ Kal efw Toii' fftt9 Kol en-exeivcL amiiaTtKriq (fiai/Taffiaj trapKiKbjv t^povri^ujv ■yti'ojLiei'ot, ovTuj Tas verojueVouy, Ta5 6eta9 eiffSe'^Yeo-Sat eAXafn|/ets. detaf a.va\aii.^^i.i k^exovro. VOL. I. C Introdicction. [n. i. doctrines. The disciple admitted to these was a philosophical ' myst,' or mystic. WiLLOUGHBY. The next step is very obvious. The family of words relating to mystery, initiation, &c., are adopted into the ecclesiastical phraseology of the early Christian world, — not in the modified use of them occasionally observable in St. Paul, but with their old Pagan significance. GowER. So that the exclusive and aristocratic spirit of Greek culture re-appears in Christianity? Atherton. Just so. Thus you see the church doors shutting out the catechumens from beholding • the mystery' (as they came to call the Eucharist, par excellence) quite as rigidly as the brazen gates of Eleusis excluded the profane many. You hear Theodoret and Ambrose speaking freely before the unini- tiated on moral subjects, but concerning the rites they deemed of mysterious, almost magical efScacy, they will deliver only obscure utterances to such auditors ; their language is purposely dark and figurative, — suggestive to the initiated, unintelligible to the neophyte. How often on approaching the subject of the sacrament, does Chrysostom stop short in his sermon, and break off abruptly with the formula, — ' the initiated will under- stand what I mean.' So Christianity, corrupted by Gentile philosophy, has in Hke manner its privileged and its inferior order of votaries, — becomes a respecter of persons, with arbi- trary distinction makes two kinds of religion out of one, and begins to nourish with fatal treachery its doctrine of reserve." WiLLOUGHBY. But Suidas has here, I perceive, a second meaning in store for us. This latter, I suspect, is most to our purpose, — it is simply an extension of the former. He refers the word to the practice of closing as completely as possible = See Bingham, Autiq. of the Chris- tian doctrine of the phraseology in use tian Church, vol. i.x. pp. 96-105, concerning the heathen mysteries •— Clement of Ale.xandria abounds in e.g. Protrept. cap. xii. § 120. ' examples of the application to Chris- c. 3-] History of the Word Mysticism. 1 9 every avenue of perception by the senses, for the purpose of withdrawing the mind from everything external into itself, so as to fit it (raised above every sensuous representation) for receiving divine illumination immediately from above. GowER. Platonic abstraction, in fact. Atherton. So it seems. The Neo-Platonist was accustomed to call every other branch of science the ' lesser mysteries :' this inward contemplation, the climax of Platonism, is the great mystery, the inmost, highest initiation. Withdraw into thyself, he will say, and the adytum of thine own soul will reveal to thee profounder secrets than the cave of Mithras. So that his mysticus is emphatically the enclosed, self-withdrawn, introverted man.^ This is an initiation which does not merely, like that of Isis or of Ceres, close the lips in silence, but the eye, the ear, every faculty of perception, in inward contempla- tion or in the ecstatic abstraction of tiie trance. WiLLOUGHBY. So then it is an effort man is to make — in harmony with the matter-hating principles of this school — to strip off the material and sensuous integuments of his being, and to reduce himself to a purely spiritual element. And in thus ignoring the follies and the phantasms of Appearance — as they call the actual world — the worshipper of pure Being be- lieved himself to enjoy at least a transitory oneness with the object of his adoration ? Atherton. So Plotinus would say, if not Plato. And now we come to the transmission of the idea and the expression to the Church. A writer, going by the name of Dionysius 3 Both Plotinus and Proclus speak 5 i, p. 6. Dr. Tholuck is the only of the highest revelation concerning German writer I have seen who throws divine things as vouchsafed to the soul light on the word in question by ac- which withdraws into itself, and, dead curately investigating its etymology to all that is external, 'gazes with and successive meanings ; and I readily closed eyes' (nvCTaira>»). See Tholuck's acknowledge my debt to his sugges- BlUthensavtmlung aus der Mor- tions on this point. genlandischen Mystlk ; EinUiiutig, C 2 20 Introduction. [b. i. the Areopagite, ferries this shade over into the darkness visible of the ecclesiastical world in the fifth century. The system of mystical theology introduced by him was eminently adapted to the monastic and hierarchical tendencies of the time. His ' Mystic' is not merely a sacred personage, acquainted with the doctrines and participator in the rites called mysteries, but one also who (exactly after the Neo-Platonist pattern) by mortifying the body, closing the senses to everything external, and ignoring every ' intellectual apprehension,'* attains in passivity a divine union, and in ignorance a wisdom transcending all knowledge. GowER. Prepared to say, I suppose, with one of old George Chapman's characters — I'll build all inward — not a light shall ope The common out-way. — I'll therefore live in dark ; and all my light, Like ancient temples, let in at my top. WiLLOUGHBY. Not much light either. The mystic, as such, was not to know anything about the Infinite, he was ' to gaze with closed eyes,' passively to receive impressions, lost in the silent, boundless ' Dark' of the Divine Subsistence. ■• Dionysius thus describes the mys- operations of the intellect ; all objects tical adept who has reached the sum- of sense and all objects of thought, all mit of union :— 'Then is he delivered things non-existent and e.\istent(oiiTer)Ti from all seeing and being seen, and ~ovk qvto., ^-oTjTa^oi/ra), and ionorantly passes into the truly mystical darkness to strive upwards towards Union as of ignorance, where he excludes all close as possible with Him who is above intellectual apprehensions (ris ■y"""'- all essence and knowledge:— inasmuch KK i-vrMi^cK), and abides in the as by a pure, free, and absolute separa- utterly Impalpable and Invisible ; tion (eKorao-ei) of himself from all being wholly His who is above all, things, he will be exalted (stripped and with no other dependence, either on freed "from everything) to the super- himself or any other ; and is made essential radiance of the divine dark- one, as to his nobler part, with the ness. ' — p. 708. utterly Unknown, by the cessation of About the words rendered ' intel- all knowing ; and at the same time, in lectual apprehensions' commentators that very knowing nothing, he knows differ. Tlie conte.xt, the antithesis, what transcends the mind of man.' — and the parallel passage in the earlier De Mystica Theologia. cap, i. p. 710. part of the chapter, justify us in under- S. Dion. Areop. 0pp. Paris, 1644. standing them in their strict sense, as So again he exhorts Timothy ' by conveying the idea of cessation from assiduous practice in mystical contem- all mental action whatsoever, platious to abandon the senses and all 0.3-] History of tlic Word Mysticism. 21 Atherton. This, then, is our result. The philosophical perfection of Alexandria and the monastic perfection of Byzan- tium belong to the same species. Philosopheis and monks alike employ the word mysticism and its cognate terms as in- volving the idea, not merely of initiation into something hidden, but, beyond this, of an internal manifestation of the Divine to the intuition or in the feeling of the secluded soul. It is in this last and narrower sense, therefore, that the word is to be under- stood when we speak of mystical death, mystical illumination, mystical union with God, and, in fact, throughout the phrase- ology of what is specially termed Theologia Mystical" GowER. I have often been struck by the surprising variety in the forms of thought and the modes of action in which mys- ticism has manifested itself among different nations and at dif- ferent periods. This arises, I should think, from its residing in so central a province of the mind — the feeling. It has been incorporated in theism, atheism, and pantheism. It has given men gods at every step, and it has denied all deity except self It has appeared in the loftiest speculation and in the grossest idolatry. It has been associated with the wildest licence and with the most pitiless asceticism. It has driven men out into action, it has dissolved them in ecstasy, it has frozen them to torpor. Atherton. Hence the difficulty of definition. I have seen none which quite satisfies me. Some include only a particular phase of it, while others so define its province as to stigmatise as mystical every kind of religiousness which rises above the zero of rationalism. WiLLOUGHBY. The Germans have two words for mysticism — mystik and mysticisnms. The former they use in a favourable, the latter in an unfavourable, sense. — GowER. Just as we say piety and pietism, or rationality and * See Note, p. 23. 2 2 lntroduciio7i. [p- i- rationalism; keeping the first of each pair for the use, the second for the abuse. A convenience, don't you think? Atherton. If the adjective were distinguishable like the nouns — but it is not ; and to have a distinction in the primitive and not in the derivative word is always confusing. But we shall keep to the usage of our own language. I suppose we shall all be agreed in employing the word mysticism in the un- favourable signification, as equivalent generally to spiritually diseased, grown unnatural, fantastic, and the like. GowER. At the same time admitting the true worth of many mystics, and the real good and truth of which such errors are the exaggeration or caricature. Atherton. I think we may say thus much generally — that mysticism, whether in religion or philosophy, is that form of error which mistakes for a divine manifestation the operations of a merely human faculty. WiLLOUGHBY. There you define, at any rate, the characteristic misconception of the mystics. GowER. And include, if I mistake not, enthusiasts, with their visions ; pretended prophets, with their claim of inspiration ; wonder-workers, trusting to the divine power resident in their theurglc formulas ; and the philosophers who believe them- selves organs of the world-soul, and their systems an evolution of Deity. Atherton. Yes, so far ; but I do not profess to give any definition altogether adequate. Speaking of Christian mysti- cism, I should describe it generally as the exaggeration of that aspect of Christianity which is presented to us by St. John. GowER. That answer provokes another question. How should you characterize John's peculiar presentation of the Gospel ? Atherton. I refer chiefly to that admixture of the contem- plative temperament and the ardent, by which he is personally c. 3.] Mystical Theology. 23 distinguished, — the opposition so manifest in his epistles to all religion of mere speculative opinion or outward usage, — the concentration of Christianity, as it were, upon the inward life derived from union with Christ. This would seem to be the province of Christian truth especially occupied by the beloved disciple, and this is the province which mysticism has in so many ways usurped. GowER. Truly that unction from the Holy One, of which John speaks, has found some strange claimants ! WiLLOUGHBY. Thus much I think is evident from our enquiry — that mysticism, true to its derivation as denoting chidden know- ledge, faculty, or life (the exclusive privilege of sage, adept, or recluse), presents itself, in all its phases, as more or less the religion of internal as opposed to external revelation, — of heated feeling, sickly sentiment, or lawless imagination, as opposed to that reasonable belief in which the intellect and the heart, the inward witness and the outward, are alike engaged. Note to page 21, Numerous definitions of ' Mystical Theology' are supplied by Roman Catholic divines who have written on the subject. With all of them the terms denote the religion of the heart as distinguished from speculation, scholasticism, or ritualism ; and, moreover, those higher experiences of tlie divine life associ- ated, in their belief, with extraordinary gifts and miraculous powers, yuch definitions wiil accordingly comprehend the theopathetic and theurgic forms of mysticism, but must necessarily exclude the theosophic. Many of them might serve as definitions of genuine religion. These mystical experiences have been always coveted and admired in the Romish Church ; and those, therefore, who write concerning them employ the word mysticism in a highly favourable sense. That excess of subjectivity — those visionary raptures and supernatural exaltations, which we regard as the symptoms of spiritual disease, are, in the eyes of these writers, the choice rewards of sufferings and of aspirations the most intense, — they are the vision of God and things celestial enjoyed by the pure in heart, — the dazzling glories wherewith God has crowned the heads of a chosen few, whose example shall give light to all the world. Two or three specimens will suffice. Gerson gives the two following defini- tions of the Thcologia Mystica : — ' Est animi extensio in Deum per amoris desiderium.' And again : ' Est motio anagogica in Deum per puruni et fervidum amorem.' Elsewhere he is more metaphorical, describing it as the theology which teaches men to escape from the stormy sea of sensuous desires to the safe harbour of Eternity, and shows them how to attain ttiat love which snatches ^4 Introduction. them away to the Beloved, unites them with Him, and secures them rest in Him. Dionysius the Carthusian (associating evidently mystica and tnyslcriosa)^ says,— 'Est autem mystica Tlieologia secretissima mentis cum Deo locutio. ' John k Jesu Maria calls it, ' crelestis quaedam Dei notitiaperunionem voluntatis Deo ad'hasrentis elicita, vel lumine coelitus immisso producta.' This mystical theology, observes the Carthusian Dionysius, farther, (commentating on the Areopagite), is no science, properly so called ; even regarded as an act, it is simply the concentration (defixio) of the mind on God — admiration of his majesty— a suspension of the mind in the boundless and eternal light — a most fervid, most peaceful, transforming gaze on Ueity, &c. All alike contrast the mystical with the scholastic and the symbohcal theo- logy. The points of dissimilarity are thus summed up by Cardinal Bona : — ' Per scholasticam discit homo recte uti intelligibilibus, per symbohcam sensi- bilibus, per hanc (mysticam) rapitur ad supermentales excessus. Scientios humanasin valle phantasise discuntur, hasc in apice mentis. IUee multis egent discursibus, et erroribus subjectoe sunt : haec unico et simplici verbo docetur et discilur, et est mere supernaturahs tarn in substantia quam inmodoprocedendi." — J'ia Compendii ad DcuTiit cap. iii. 1-3. The definition given by Corderius in his introduction to the mystical theology of Dionysius is modelled on the mysticism of John de la Cruz ; — ' Theologia Mystica est sapientia experimentalis, Dei affectiva, divinitus infusa, quaa mentem ab omni inordinatione puram, per actus supernaturales fidei, spei, et charitatis, cum Deo intime conjungit.' — Isagoge^ cap. ii. The most negative definition of all is that given by Pachymeres, the Greek paraphrast of Dionysius, who has evidently caught his master's mantle, or cloak of darkness. ' Mystical theology is not perception or discourse, not a movement of the mind, not an operation, not a habit, nothing that any other power we may possess will bring to us ; but if, in absolute immobility of mind we are ilkmiined concerning it, we shall know that it is beyond everything cognizable by the mind of man.' — Dion. 0pp. vol. i. p. 722. In one place the explanations of Corderius give us to understand that the mysticism he extols does at least open a door to theosophy itself, i.e. to inspired science. He declares that the mystical theologian not only has revealed to liim the hidden sense of Scripture, but that he can understand and pierce the mysteries of any natural science whatsoever, in a way quite different from that possible to other men — in short, by a kind of special revelation. — Isagoge, cap. iv. The reader will gather the most adequate notion of what is meant, or thought to be meant, by mystical theology from the description given by Ludovic Blosins, a high authority on matters mystical, in his Institutio Spiritztalis. Corderius cites him at length, as ' sublimissimus rerum mysticarum interpres.' Happy, he exclaims, is that soul which steadfastly follows after purity of heart and holy introversion, renouncing utterly all private affection, all self-will, all self-interest. Such a soul deserves to approach nearer and ever nearer to God. Then at length, when its higher powers have been elevated, purified, and furnished forth by divine grace, it attains to unity and nudity of spirit — to a pure love above representation— to that simplicity of thought which is devoid of all thinkings. Now, therefore, since it hath become receptive of the sur- passing and ineffable grace of God, it is led to that living fountain which flows from everlasting, and doth refresh the minds of the saints unto the full and in over-measure. Now do the powers of the soul shine as the stars, and she herself is fit to contemplate the abyss of Divinity with a serene, a simple, and a jubilant intuition, free from imagination and 'rom the smallest admixture of the intellect. Accordingly, when she lovingly turns herself absolutely unto God, the incomprehensible light shines into her depths, and that radiance Christian Mysticis in. blinds 'he eye of reason and understanding. But the simple eye of the soul itself remains open — 'that is thought^ pure, naked, uniform, and raised above the understanding. Moreover, when the natural light of reason is blinded by so blight a glory, the soul takes cognizance of nothing in time, but is raised above time and space, and assumes as it were a certain attribute of eternity. For the soul which has abandoned symbols and earthly distinctions and processes of thought, now learns experimentally that God far transcends all images — corporeal, spiiitual, or divine, and that whatsoever the reason can apprehend, whatsoever can hi said or written concerning God, whatsoever can be predicated of Him by words, must manifestly be infinitely remote from the reality of the divine sub- sistence which is unnameable. The soul knows not, therefore, what that God is she feels. Hence, by a foreknowledge which is exercised without knowledge, she rests in the nude, the simple, the unknown God. who alone is to be loved. For the light is called dark, from its excessive brightness. In this darkness the soul receives the hidden word which God utters in the inward silence and secret recess of the mind. This word she receives, and doth happily experience the bond of mystical union. For when, by means of love, she hath transcended reason and all symbols, and is carried away above herself (a favour God alone can procure her), straightway she flows away from herself and flows forth into God [a se dejiucns profluitin Deum), and then is God hei peace and her enjoyment. Rightly doth she sing, in such a transport, ' I will both lay me down in peace and sleep.' The loving soul flows down, I say, falls away from herself, and, reduced as it were to nothing, melts and glides aw^ay altogether into the abyss of eternal love. There, dead to herself, she lives in God, knowing nothing, perceiving nothing, except the love she tastes. For she loses herself in that vastest solitude and darkness of Divinity : but thus to lose is in fact to find herself. There, putting off whatsoeveris human, and putting on whatever is divine, she is transformed and transmuted into God, as iron in a furnace takes the form of fire and is transmuted into fire. Nevertheless, the essence of the soul thus deified remains, as the glowing iron does not cease to be iron. ... The soul,* thus bathed in the essence of God, liquefied by the consuming fire of love, and united to Him without medium, doth, by wise ignorance and by the inmost touch of love, more clearly know God than do our fleshly eyes discern the visible sun. . . . Though God doth sometimes manifest himself unto the perfect soul in most subhme and wondrous wise, yet lie doth not reveal himself as he is in his own ineffable glory, but as it is possible for him to be seen in this life. — hugoge Cord. cap. vii. CHAPTER IV. The desire of the moth for the star, Of the night for the morrow, The devotion to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow. Shelley. ■\ 11 HLLOUGHBY. Here's another definition for you :— Myitiasra is the romafice of religion. What do you say ? GowER. True to the spirit — not scientific, I fear. WiLLOUGHBY. Science be banished ! Is not the history of mysticism bright with stories of dazzHng spiritual enterprise, sombre with tragedies of the soul, stored with records of the achievements and the woes of martyrdom and saintship ? Has it not reconciled, as by enchantment, the most opposite ex- tremes of theory and practice ? See it, in theory, verging repeatedly on pantheism, ego-theism, nihilism. See it, in prac- tice, producing some of the most glorious examples of humility, benevolence, and untiring self-devotion. Has it not com- manded, with its indescribable fascination, the most powerful natures and the most feeble — minds lofty with a noble disdain of Ufe, or low with a weak disgust of it? If the self-torture it enacts seems hideous to our sobriety, what an attraction in its reward ! It lays waste the soul with purgatorial pains — but it. is to leave nothing there on which any fire may kindle after death. AVhat a promise ! — a perfect sanctification, a divine calm, fruition of heaven while yet upon the earth ! Atherton. Go on, Willoughby, I like your enthusiasm. Think of its adventures, too. 0. 4-] Mystidsvi — its Causes. 27 WiLi.OUGHBY. Aye, its adventures — both persecuted and canonized by kings and pontiffs ; one age enrolling the mystic among the saints, another committing him to the inquisitor's torch, or entombing him in the Bastille. And the principle indestructible after all — some minds always who must be reli- gious mj'stically or not at all. Atherton. I thought we might this evening enquire into the causes which tend continually to reproduce this religious phenomenon. You have suggested some already. Certain states of society have always fostered it. There have been times when all the real religion existing in a country appears to have been confined to its mystics. WiLLOUGHBY. In sucli an hour, how mysticism rises and does its deeds of spiritual chivalry GowER. Alas ! Quixotic enough, sometimes. WiLLOUGHBY. How conspicuous, then, grows this inward devotion ! — even the secular historian is compelled to say a word about it Atherton. And a sorry, superficial verdict he gives, too often. WiLLOUGHBY. How loud its protest against literalism, for- mality, scholasticism, human ordinances ! what a strenuous reaction against the corruptions of priestcraft ! Atherton. But, on the other side, Willoughby — and here comes the pathetic part of its romance — mysticism is heard discoursing concerning things unutterable. It speaks, as one in a dream, of the third heaven, and of celestial experiences, and revelations fitter for angels than for men. Its stammering utterance, confused with excess of rapture labouring with emo- tions too huge or abstractions too subtile for words, becomes utterly unintelligible. Then it is misrepresented : falls a victim to reaction in its turn ; the delirium is dieted by persecution, and it is consigned once more to secrecy and silence. 2 8 Introduction. [«• '• GowER. There, good night, and pleasant dreams to it ! WiLLouGHBY. It spins still in its sleep its mingled tissue of good and evil. Atherton. a mixture truly. We must not blindljr praise it in our hatred of formalism. We must not vaguely condemn it in our horror of extravagance. GowER. What you have both been saying indicates at once three of the causes we are in search of, — indeed, the three chief ones, as I suppose : first of all, the reaction you speak of against the frigid formality of religious torpor ; then, heart-weariness, the languishing longing for repose, the charm of mysticism for the selfish or the weak ; and, last, the desire, so strong in some minds, to pierce the barriers that hide from man the unseen world — the charm of mysticism for the ardent and .he strong. Atherton. That shrinking from conflict, that passionate yearning after inaccessible rest, how universal is it ; what wist- ful utterance it has found in every nation and every age ; how it subdues us all, at times, and sinks us into languor. WiLLOuGHBY. Want of patience lies at the root — who was it said that he should have all eternity to rest in ? Atherton. Think how the traditions of every people have embellished with their utmost wealth of imagination some hid- den spot upon the surface of the earth, which they have pour- trayed as secluded from all the tumult and the pain of time — a serene Eden — an ever-sunny Tempe — a vale of Avalon — a place beyond the sterner laws and rougher visitations of the common world— a fastness of perpetual calm, before which the tempests may blow their challenging horns in vain — they can win no entrance. Such, to the fancy of the Middle Age, was the famous temple of the Sangreal, with its dome of sapphire, its six-and-thirty towers, its crystal crosses, and its hangings of green samite, guarded by its knights girded by impenetrable forest, glittering on the onyx summit of Mount Salvage, for 4-] Weariness of the World. 29 ever invisible to every eye impure, inaccessible to every failing or faithless heart. Such, to the Hindoo, was the Cridavana meadow, among the heights of Mount Sitanta, full of flowers, of the song of birds, the hum of bees — ' languishing winds and murmuring falls of waters.' Such was the secret mountain KinkaduUe, celebrated by Olaus Magnus, which stood in a region now covered only by moss or snow, but luxuriant once, in less degenerate days, with the spontaneous growth of every pleasant bough and goodly fruit. What places like these have been to the popular mind, even such a refuge for the Ideal from the pursuit of the Actual — that the attainment of Ecstasy, the height of Contemplation, the bliss of Union, has been for the mystic. GowER. So those spiritual Lotos-eaters will only ■ hearken what the inner spirit sings, There is no joy but calm ; or, in their 'fugitive and cloistered virtue,' as Milton calls it, say, let us live and lie reclined On the hills like gods together, careless of mankind. Atherton. Some ; not all, however. Neither should we suppose that even those who have sunk to such a state WiLLOUGHBY. They would say — risen — ■ Atherton. Be it by sinking or rising, they have not been brought to that pass without a conflfct. From life's battle-field to the hospital of the hermitage has been but a step for a mul- titude of minds. Hiding themselves wounded from the victor (for the enemy they could not conquer shall not see and mock their sufferings), they call in the aid of an imaginative religion- ism to people their solitude with its glories. The Prometheus chained to his rock is comforted if the sea nymphs rise from the deep to visit him, and Ocean on his hippogrifif draws near. And thus, let the gliding fancies of a life of dreams, and Ima- 30 Introduction. \?- '• gination, the monarch of all their main of thought, visit the sorrow of these recluses, and they think they can forget the ravages of that evil which so vexed them once. Hence the mysticism of the visionary. He learns to crave ecstasies and revelations as at once his solace and his pride. GowER. Is it not hkely, too, that some of these mystics, in seasons of mental distress of which we have no record, tried Nature as a resource, and found her wanting ? Such a disap- pointment would make that ascetic theory which repudiates the seen and actual, plausible and even welcome to them. After demanding of the natural world what it has not to bestow, they would hurry to the opposite extreme, and deny it any healing influence whatever. Go out into the woods and valleys, when your heart is rather harassed than bruised, and when you suffer from vexation more than grief. Then the trees all hold out their arms to you to relieve you of the burthen of your heavy thoughts ; and the streams under the trees glance at you as they run by, and will carry away your trouble along with the fallen leaves; and the sweet-breathing air will draw it off together with the silver multitudes of the dew. But let it be with anguish or remorse in your heart that you go forth into Nature, and instead of your speaking her language, you make her speak yours. Your distress is then infused through all things, and clothes all things, and Nature only echoes, and seems to authenticate, your self-loathing or your hopelessness. Then you find the device of your sorrow on the argent shield of the moon, and see all the trees of the field weeping and wring- ing their hands with you, while the hills, seated at your side in sackcloth, look down upon you prostrate, and reprove you like the comforters of Job. Atherton. Doubtless, many of these stricken spirits suffered such disappointment at some early period of their history. Failure was inevitable, and the disease was heightened. How 4-] The Fascination of the Unseen. 3 i Coleridge felt this when he says so mournfully in his Ode to Dejection, — It were a vain endeavour Though I should gaze for ever On that green light that lingers in the west : I may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life whose fountains are within. WiLLOUGHBY. The feeling of the other class we spoke of— the men of bolder temperament — has been this : ' I am a king and yet a captive ; submit I cannot ; I care not to dream ; I must in some way act.' GowER. And, like Rasselas, a prince and yet a prisoner in the narrow valley, such a man, in his impatience, takes counsel of a philosopher, who promises to construct a pair of wings wherewith he shall overfly the summits that frown around him. The mystagogue is a philosopher such as Rasselas found, with a promise as large and a result as vain. Atherton. Hence the mysticism of the theurgist, who will pass the bounds of the dreaded spirit- world ; will dare all its horrors to seize one of its thrones ; and aspires — a Manfred or a Zanoni — to lord it among the powers of the air. WiLLOUGHBY. And of the mysticism of the theosophist, too, whose science is an imagined inspiration, who writes about plants and minerals under a divine afflatus, and who will give you from the resources of his special revelation an explanation of every mystery. GowER. The explanation, unhappily, the greatest mystery 1 of all. Atherton. Curiously enough, the Bible has been made to support mysticism by an interpretation, at one time too fanciful, at another too hteral. WiLLOUGHBY. We may call it, perhaps, the innocent cause of mysticism with one class, its victim with another : the one, running into mysticism because they wrongly interpreted the 3 2 Introdjiction. [" Bible; the other interpreting it wrongly because they were mystics. The mystical interpreters of school and cloister belong to the latter order, and many a Covenanter and godly trooper of the Commonwealth to the former. GowER. Not an unlikely result with the zealous Ironside — his reading limited to his English Bible and a few savoury treatises of divinity — pouring over the warlike story of ancient Israel, and identifying himself with the subjects of miraculous intervention, divine behest, and prophetic dream. How glorious would those days appear to such a man, when angels went and came among men ; when, in the midst of his hus- bandry or handicraft, the servant of the Lord might be called aside to see some 'great sight :' when the fire dropped sudden down from heaven on the accepted altar, like a drop spilt from the lip of an angel's fiery vial full of odours ; when the Spirit of the Lord mo\ed men at times, as Samson was moved in the camp of Dan, between Zorah and Eshtaol ; and when the Lord sent men hither and thither by an inward impulse, as Elijah was sent from Gilgal to Bethel, and from Bethel back to Jericho, and from Jericho on to Jordan. Imagination would reproduce those marvels in the world within, though miracles could no longer cross his path in the world without. He would believe that to him also words were given to speak, and deeds to do ; and that, whether in the house, the council, or the field, he was the Spirit's chosen instrument and messenger. Atherton. This is the practical and active kind of mysti- cism so prevalent in that age of religious wars, the seventeenth century. WiLLOUGHBY. The monks took the opposite course. While the Parhamentarian soldier was often seen endeavouring to adapt his Hfe to a mistaken appHcation of the Bible, the ascetic endeavoured to adapt the Bible to his mistaken life. c. 4.] T/if Fascination of the Unseen. 3 3 GowER. The New Testament not authorising the austerities of a Macarius or a Maximus, tradition must be called in WiLLOUGHBY. And side by side with tradition, mystical in- terpretation. The Bible, it was pretended, must not be under- stood as always meaning what it seems to mean. Ather'ion. It then becomes the favourite employment of the monk to detect this hidden meaning, and to make Scripture render to tradition the same service which the mask rendered to the ancient actor, not only disguising the face, but making the words go farther. To be thus busied was to secure two ad\-antages at once ; he had occupation for his leisure, and an answer for his adversaries. v(jr,. I. CHAPTER V. Oh ! contemplntion palls upon the spirit, Like the chill silence of an autumn sun : While action, like the roaring south-west wind, Sweeps, laden with eUxirs, with rich draughts Quickening the wombed earth. Giita. And yet what bliss, When, dying in the darkness of God's light, The soul can pierce these blinding webs of nature, And float up to the nothing, which is all things — The ground of being, where self-forgetful silence Is emptiness, — emptiness fulness, — fulness God, — ■ Till we touch Him, and, hke a snow-flake, melt Upon his light-sphere's keen circumference ! The Saint's Tragedy. /'"'OWER. Thanks, if you please, not reproaches. I was ^^ calling help for you, I was summoning the fay to your assistance, to determine the best possible order of your mystics. WiLLOUGHBY. The fay ? GowER. The fay. Down with you in that arm-chair, and sit quietly. Know that I was this morning reading Andersen's Marchen — all about Ole-Luk-Oie, his ways and works — the queer little elf. Upstairs he creeps, in houses where children are, softly, softly, in the dusk of the evening, with what do you think under his arm? — two umbrellas, one plain, the othet covered with gay colours and quaint figures. He makes the eyes of the children heavy, and when they are put to bed, holds over the heads of the good children the painted umbrella, which causes them to dream the sweetest and most wonderful dreams imaginable ; but over the naughty children he holds the other, and they do not dream at all. Now, thought I, let me emulate the profundity of ft German critic. Is this to be treated as a c. 5.] A Fairy Talc. 3 5 simple child's tale ? Far from it. There is a depth of philo- sophic meaning in it. Have not the mystics been mostly childlike natures ? Have not their lives been full of dreams, manifold and strange — and they therefore, if any, especial favourites of Ole-Luk-Oie ? They have accounted their dreams tlieir pride and their reward. They have looked on the sobriety of dreamlessness as the appropriate deprivation of privilege consequent on carnality and ignorance ; in other words, the non-dreamers have been with them the naughty children. To learn life's lessons well is, according to them, to enjoy as a recompence the faculty of seeing visions and of dreaming dreams. Here then is the idea of mysticism. You have its myth, its legend. Ole-Luk-Oie is its presiding genius. Now, Atherton, if you could but get hold of his umbrella, the segments of that silken hemisphere, with its painted constellations, would give you your divisions in a twinkling. That was why I wanted him. But I do not see him letting himself down the bellrope, or hear his tap at the door. I am afraid we must set to work without him. WiLLOUGHBY. So be it. A local or historical classification of the mystics is out of the question. I scarcely think you can find a metaphysical one that will bear the test of application and be practically serviceable. Then the division some adopt, of heterodox and orthodox, saves trouble indeed, but it is so arbitrary. The Church of Rome, from whom many of these mystics called heretical, dared to differ, is no church at all in the true sense, and assuredly no standard of orthodoxy. In addi- tion to this I have a nervous antipathy to the terms themselves ; for, as I have a liking for becoming the champion of any cause which appears to be borne down by numbers, I find my friends who are somewhat heterodox, frequently charging me with what is called orthodoxy, and those again who are orthodox as often suspecting me of heterodoxy. D 2 36 Introduction. [«• '• Atherton. Hear my proposed division. There are three kinds of mysticism, iheofathetic, theosophic, and theurgic. The first of these three classes I will subdivide, if needful, into tran- sitive and intransitive. GowER. Your alliteration is grateful to my ear ; I hope you have not strained a point to secure us the luxury. Atherton. Not a hair's breadth, I assure you. WiLLOUGHBY. Et3'mologically such a division has the advan- tage of showing that all the forms of mysticism are develop- ments of the religions sentiment ; that in all its varieties the relationship, real or imaginary, which mysticism sustains to the Divine, is its primary element; — that its widely differing aspects are all phases it presents in its eccentric orbit about the central luminary of the Infinite. GowER. Your theopathetic mysticism must include a very wide range. By the term theopathetic you denote, of course, that mysticism which resigns itself, in a passivity more or less absolute, to an imagined divine manifestation. Now, one man may regard himself as overshadowed, another as impelled by Deity. One mystic of this order may do nothing, another may display an unceasing activity. Whether he beUeves himself a mirror in whose quiescence the Divinity 'glasses himself-' or as it were, a leaf, driven by the mighty rushing wind of the Spirit, and thus the tongue by which the Spirit speaks, the organ by which God works — the principle of passivity is the same. Atherton. Hence my subdivision of this class of mystics into those whose mysticism assumes a transitive character and those with whom mysticism consists principally in conteui- plation, in Quietism, in negation, and so is properly called intransitive. WiLLOUGHBY. Yet Some of those whose mysticism has been pre-eminently negative, who have hated the very name of c. <,:] Tlieopathetic Mysticism. 37 speculation, and placed perfection in repose and mystical death, have mingled much in active life. They appear to defy our arrangement. Atherton. It is only in appearance. They have shrunk from carrying out their theory to its logical consequences. Their activity has been a bye-work. The diversities of character observable in the mysticism vv'hich is essentially intransitive arise, not from a difference in the principle at the root, but from varieties of natural temperament, of external circumstances, and from the dissimilar nature or proportion of the foreign elements incorporated. GowER. It is clear that we must be guided by the rule rather than the exception, and determine, according to the predomi- nant element in the mysticism of individuals, the position to be assigned them. If we were to classify only those who were perfectly consistent with themselves, we could include scarcely lialf-a-dozen names, and those, by the way, the least rational of all, for the most thorough-going are the madmen. Atherton. The mysticism of St. Bernard, for example, in spite of his preaching, his travels, his diplomacy, is altogether contemplative — the intransitive mysticism of the cloister. His active labours were a work apart. GowER. Such men have been serviceable as members of society in proportion to their inconsistency as devotees of mysticism. A heavy charge this against their principle. WiLLOUGHBY. In the intransitive division of the theopathetic mysticism you will have three such names as Suso, Ruys- brook, Molinos, and all the Quietists, whether French or Indian. Atherton. And in the transitive theopathy all turbulent prophets and crazy fanatics. This species of mysticism usurps the will more than the emotional part of our nature. The sub- ject of it suffers under the Divine, as he believes, but the result 3^ Introduction. t"- ^• of the manifestation is not confined to himself, it passes on to his fellows. GowER. If you believe Plato in the Ion, you must range here all the poets, for they sing well, he tells us, only as they are carried out of themselves by a divine madness, and mastered by an influence which their verse communicates to others in succession. WiLLOUGHBY. We must admit here also, according to ancient superstition, the Pythoness on her tripod, and the Sibyl in her cave at Cumae, as she struggles beneath the might of the god : — Plicebi nondum patiens immanis in anfio Bacchatur vates, magnum si pectore possit Excussisse Deum : tanto magis ille fatigat Os rabidura, fera corda domans, fingitque premendo. Atherton. I have no objection. According to Virgil's description, the poor Sibyl has earned painfully enough a place within the pale of mysticism. But those with whom we have more especially to do in this province are enthusiasts such as Tanchelra, who appeared in the twelfth century, and announced himself as the residence of Deity ; as Gichtel, who believed him- self appointed to expiate by his prayers and penance the sins of all mankind ; or as Kuhlmann, who traversed Europe, the imagined head of the Fifth monarchy, summoning kings and nobles to submission. GowER. Some of these cases we may dismiss in a summary manner. The poor brainsick creatures were cast on evil times indeed. What we should now call derangement was then exalted into heresy, and honoured with martyrdom. We should have taken care that Kuhlmann was sent to an asylum, but the Russian patriarch burned him, poor fellow. Atherton. We must not forget, however, that this species of mysticism has sometimes been found associated with the announcement of vital truths Look at George Fox and the sarly Quakers 5-1 Tkeosophy. 39 WiLLOUGHBY. Aiid I would refer also to this class some of the milder forms of mysticism, in which it is seen rather as a single morbid element than as a principle avowed and carried out. Jung Stilling is an instance of what I mean. You see him, fervent, earnest, and yet weak ; without forethought, Avith- out perseverance ; vaui and irresolute, he changes his course incessantly, seeing in every variation of feeling and of circunr- ' stance a special revelation of the Divine will. Atherton. Add to this modification a kindred error, the doctrine of a ^particular faith' in prayer, so much in vogue in Cromwell's court at AVhitehall. Howe boldly preached against it before the Protector himself WiLLOUGHBY. Now, Atherton, for your second division, Iheosophic mysticism. Whom do you call theosophists ? Atherton. Among the Germans I find mysticism generally called theosophy when applied to natural science. Too narrow a use of the word, I think. We should have in that case scarcely any theosophy in Europe till after the Reformation. The word itself was first employed by the school of Porphyry. The Neo- Platonist would say that the priest might have his traditional discourse concerning God (theology), but he alone, with his intuition, the highest wisdom concerning him. GowER. I can't say that I have any clear conception attached to the word. Atherton. You want examples? Take Plotinus and Behmen. GowER. What a conjunction ! Atherton. Not so far apart as may appear. Their difference is one of application more than of principle. Had Plotinus thought a metal or a plant worth his attention, he would have maintained that concerning that, even as concerning the infinite, all truth lay stored within the recesses of his own mind. But of course he only cared about ideas. Mystical philosophy is really a contradiction in terms, is it not ? 40 Introduction. [^- '■ GowER. Granted, since philosophy must build only upon reason. Atherton. Very good. Then when philosophy falls into mysticism I give it another name, and call it theosophy. And, on the other side, I call mysticism, trying to be philosophical, theosophy likewise. That is all. WiLLOUGHBY. So tjiat the theosophist is one who gives you a theory of God, or of the works of God, which has not reason, but an inspiration of his own for its basis. Ather roN. Yes ; he either believes, with Swedenborg and Behmen, that a special revelation has unfolded to him the mystery of the divine dispensations here or hereafter — laid bare the hidden processes of nature, or the secrets of the other world ; or else, with Plotinus and Schelling, he believes that his intuitions of those things are infallible because divine — subject and object being identical, — all truth being within him. Thus, while the mystic of the theopathetic species is content to contemplate, to feel, or to act, suffering under Deity in his sublime passivity, the mysticism I term theosophic aspires to know and believes itself in possession of a certain super- natural divine faculty for that purpose. GowER. You talk of mysticism trying to be philosophical; it does then sometimes seek to justify itself at the bar of reason? Atherton. I should think so — often : at one time trying to refute the charge of madness and prove itself throughout rational and sober; at another, using the appeal to reason up to a certain point and as far as serves its purpose, and then disdainfully mocking at demands for proof, and towering above argument, with the pretence of divine illumination. AViLLOUGHP.Y. Some of these mystics, talking of reason as they do, remind me of Lysander at the feet of Helena, protest- ing (with the magic juice scarce dry upon his eyelids) that the c. 5-] Tkeosophy. 41 decision of his spell-bound faculties is the deliberate exercise of manly judgment — The mind of man is by his reason swayed, And reason says you are the worthier maid, GowER. Now you come to Shakspeare, I must cap your quotation with another : I fit those mystics Atherton speaks of as using reason up to a certain point and then having done with it, with a motto from the Winter's Tale — much at their service. They answer, with young enamoured Florizel, when Reason, like a grave Camillo, bids them ' be advised'— I am : and by my fancy : if my reason Will thereto be obedient, I have reason ; If not, my senses better pleased with madness Do bid it welcome. Atherton. To classify the mystics adequately, we should have a terminology of dreams rich as that of Homer, and dis- tinguish, as he does, the dream-image of complete illusion from the half-conscious dream between sleeping and waking ; — 'iiva^ from v-Kop. How unanimous, by the way, would the mystics be in deriving oveipov from oviiap — dream from enjoyment. WiLLOUGHBY. To return from the poets to business ; was not all the science of the Middle Age theosophic rather than philosophic ? Both to mystical schoolmen and scholastic mystics the Bible was a book of symbols and propositions, from which all the knowable was somehow to be deduced. Atherton. Most certainly. The mystical interpretation of Scripture was their measuring-reed for the temple of the universe. The difference, however, between them and Behmen would be this — that, while both essayed to read the book of nature by the light of grace, Behmen claimed a special revela- tion, a divine mission for unfolding these mysteries in a new fashion ; schoolmen, like Richard of St. Victor, professed to do so only by the supernatural aid of the Spirit illuminating the data afforded by the Church. And again, Behmen differs from Introduction. ["■ Schelling and modern theosophy in studying nature through the medium of an external revelation mystically understood, while they interpret it by the unwritten inward revelation of Intellectual Intuition. I speak only of the difference of principle, not of result. But no one will dispute that nearly every scientific enquiry of the Middle Age was conducted on mystical principles, whether as regarded our source of knowing or its method. WiLLOUGHBY. And what wonder ? Does not Milton remind us that Julian's edict, forbidding Christians the study of heathen learning, drove the two Apollinarii to ' coin all the seven liberal sciences' out of the Bible ? The jealous tyranny of the Papacy virtually perpetuated the persecution of the Apostate. Every lamp must be filled with church oil. Every kind of knowledge must exist only as a decoration of the ecclesiastical structure. Every science must lay its foundation on theology. See a monument attesting this, a type of the times, in the cathedral of Chartres, covered with thousands of statues and symbols, representing all the history, astronomy, and physics of the age — a sacred encyclopedia transferred from the pages of Vincent of Beauvais to the enduring stone, so to bid all men see in the Church a Mirror of the Universe — a speculum uni- versale. Who can be surprised that by the aid of that facile expedient, mystical interpretation, many a work of mortal brain should have been bound and lettered as ' Holy Bible,' or that research should have simulated worship, as some Cantab, pressed for time, may study a problem at morning chapel ? Atherton. What interminable lengths of the fine-spun, gay- coloured ribbons of allegory and metaphor has the mountebank ingenuity of that mystical interpretation drawn out of the mouth of Holy Writ ! GowER. And made religion a toy — a tassel on the silken purse of the spendthrift Fancy. c- 5-] Descartes. 43 WiLLOUGHBY. Granting, Atherton, j-our general position that the undue inference of the objective from the 'subjective produces mysticism, what are we to say of a man like Des- cartes, for example ? You will not surely condemn him as a mystic. Atherton. Certainly, not altogether ; reason holds its own with him — is not swept away by the hallucinations of senti- ment, or feeling, or special revelation ; but none of our powers act quite singly — 7temo omnibus horis sapit — a mystical element crops out here and there. I think he carried too far the appli- cation of a principle based, in great part at least, on truth. In his inference of the objective from the subjective, I think he was so far right that our ability to conceive of a Supreme Per- fection affords a strong presumption that such a God must exist. It is not to be supposed that the conception can transcend the reality. His argument from within is a potent auxiliary of the argument from without, if not by itself so all-sufficient as he supposes. There are, too, I think, certain necessary truths which, by the constitution of our mind, we cannot conceive as possibly other than they are, when once presented to us from without. But we surely should not on this account be justified in saying with the mystic Bernard, that each soul contains an infallible copy of the ideas in the Divine Mind, so that the pure in heart, in proportion as they have cleansed the internal mirror, must in knowing themselves, know also God. It must be no less an exaggeration of the truth to say, with the philo- sopher Descartes, that certain notions of the laws of Nature are impressed upon our minds, so that we may, after reflecting upon them, discover the secrets of the universe. On the strength of this principle he undertakes to determine exactly how long a time it must have required to reduce chaos to order. The effort made by Descartes to insulate himself completely from the external world and the results of experience, was cer- 44 Introduction. [n. i. tainly similar in mode, though very different in its object, from the endeavours after absolute self-seclusion made by many of the mystics. The former sought to detect by abstraction the laws of mind ; the latter, to attain the vision of God. GowER. There is much more of mysticism discernible in some of the systems which hive followed in the path opened by Descartes. What can be more favourable than Schelling's Identity principle to the error which confounds, rather than allies, physics and metaphysics, science and theology? Atherton. Behmen himself is no whit more fantastical in this way than Oken and Franz Baader. GowER. These theosophies, old and new, with their self- evolved inexplicable explanations of everything, remind me of the Frenchman's play-bill announcing an exhibition of the Uni- versal Judgment by means of three thousand five hundred puppets. The countless marionette figures in the brain of the theosophist — Elements, Forms, Tinctures, Mothers of Nature, Fountain-spirits, Planetary Potencies, &c., are made to shift and gesticulate unceasingly, through all possible permutations and combinations, and the operator has cried ' Walk in !' so long and loudly, that he actually believes, while pulling the wires in his metaphysical darkness, that the great universe is being turned and twitched after the same manner as his painted dolls. WiLLOUGHBY. I must put in a word for men like Paracelsus and Cornelius Agrippa. They helped science out of the hands of Aristotle, baptized and spoiled by monks. Europe, newly- wakened, follows in search of truth, as the princess in the fairy- tale her lover, changed into a white dove ; now and then, at weary intervals, a feather is dropped to give a clue ; these aspi- rants caught once and again a little of the precious snowy down, though often filling their hands with mere dirt, and wounding them among the briars. Forgive them their signa- 5-1 Religious Euplmisin. 45 tures, their basilisks and homunculi, and all their restless, wrathful arrogance, for the sake of that indomitable hardihood which did life-long battle, single-handed, against enthroned prescription. Atherton. With all my heart. How venial the error of their mysticism (with an aim, at least, so worthy), compared with that of the enervating Romanist theopathy whose ' holy vegetation' the Reformers so rudely disturbed. On the eve of the Reformation you see hapless Christianity, after vanquishing so many powerful enemies, about to die by the hand of ascetic inventions and superstitions, imaginary sins and imaginary vir- tues, — the shadowy phantoms of monastic darkness ; like the legendary hero Wolf-Dietrich, who, after so many victories over fiesh-and-blood antagonists, perishes at last in a night-battle with ghosts. GowER. The later mystical saints of the Romish calendar seem to me to exhibit what one may call the degenerate chivalry of religion, rather than its romance. How superior is Bernard to John of the Cross ! It is easy to see how, in a rough age of fist-law, the laws of chivalry may inculcate courtesy and en- noble courage. But when afterwards an age of treaties and diplomacy comes in — when no Charles the Bold can be a match for the Italian policy of a Louis XI. — then these laws sink down into a mere fantastic code of honour. For the manly gallantry of Ivanhoe we have the euphuism of a Sir Piercie Shafton. And so a religious enthusiasm, scarcely too fervent for a really noble enterprise (could it only find one), gives birth, when debarred from the air of action and turned back upon itself, to the dreamy extravagances of the recluse, and the morbid ethical punctihos of the Director., WiLLOUGHBY. The only further question is about your third division, Atherton, — theurgic mysticism. We may let the Rab- binical Solomon — mastering the archdaemon Aschmedai and all 4^ Introduction. [»■ i- his host by the divine potency of the Schemhamporasch engraven on his ring, chaining at his will the colossal powers of the air by the tremendous name of Metatron, — stand as an example of theurgy. GowER. And lamblichus, summoning Souls, Heroes, and the Principalities of the upper sphere, by prayer and incense and awful mutterings of adjuration. Atherton. All very good ; but hear me a moment. I would use the term theurgic to characterize the mysticism which claims supernatural powers generally, — works marvels, not like the black art, by help from beneath, but as white magic, by the virtue of talisman or cross, demi-god, angel, or saint. Thus theurgic mysticism is not content, like the theo.pathetic, with either feehng or proselytising ; nor, like the theosophic, with knowing ; but it must open for itself a converse with the world of spirits, and win as its prerogative the power of miracle. This broad use of the word makes prominent the fact that a common principle of devotional enchantment lies at the root of all the pretences, both of heathen and of Christian miracle-mongers. The celestial hierarchy of Dionysius and the benign daemons of Proclus, the powers invoked by Pagan or by Christian theurgy, by Platonist, by Cabbalist, or by saint, alike reward the success- ful aspirant with supernatural endowments ; and so far Apol- lonius of Tyana and Peter of Alcantara, Asclepigenia and St. Theresa, must occupy as religious magicians the same province. The error is in either case the same — a divine efficacy is attri- buted to rites and formulas, sprinklings or fumigations, relics or incantations, of mortal manufacture. WiLLouGHBY. It is not difficult to understand how, after a time, both the species of mysticism we have been discussing may pass over into this one. It is the dream of the mystic that he can elaborate from the depth of his own nature the whole pro- , mised land of religious truth, and perceive (by special revelation) 5-] Theurgy — a degenerate Mysticism. 47 rising from within, all its green pastures and still waters, — somewhat as Pindar describes the sun beholding the Isle of Rhodes emerging from the bottom of the ocean, new-born, yet perfect, in all the beauty of glade and fountain, of grassy upland and silver tarn, of marble crag and overlianging wood, spa-rkling from the brine as after a summer shower. But alas, how tardily arises this new world of inner wonders ! It must be ac- celerated — drawn up by some strong compelling charm. The doctrine of passivity becomes impossible to some temperaments beyond a certain pass. The enjoyments of the vision or the rapture are too few and far between — could they but be pro- duced at will ! Whether the mystic seeks the triumph of superhuman knowledge or that intoxication of the feeling which is to translate him to the upper world, after a while he craves a sign. Theurgy is the art which brings it. Its appearance is the symptom of failing faith, whether in philosophy or religion. Its glory is the phosphorescence of decay. Atherton. Generally, I think it is ; though it prevailed in the age of the Reformation — borrowed, however, I admit, on the revival of letters, from an age of decline. BOOK THE SECOND EARLY ORIENTAL MYSTICISM VOL. I. CHAPTER I. From worldly cares hiniselfe he did esloyne, And greatly shunned manly exercise ; From everie worke he chalenged essoyne, For contemplation sake ; yet otherwise His life he led in lawlesse riotise ; By which lie grew to grievous maladie : For in his lustlesse limbs through evill guis?, A shaking fever raignd continually ; Such one was Idlenesse, first of this company. Spenser. TTAVING free access to the Commonplace Book of my friend Atherton, I now extract therefrom a few notes, written after reading Wilkins' translation of the Bagvat-Gita. This episode in a heroic poem of ancient India is considered the best exponent of early oriental mysticism. I give these. remarks just as I find them, brief and rough-hewn, but not, I think, hast)-. Observations on Indian mysticism, d, propos of the Bagvat-Gita. This poem consists of a dialogue between the god Crishna and the hero Arjoun. Crishna, though wearing a human form, speaks throughout as Deity. Arjoun is a young chieftain whom he befriends. A great civil war is raging, and the piece opens on the eve of battle. Crishna is driving the chariot of Arjoun, and they are between the lines of the opposing armies. On either side the war-shells are heard to sound — shells to which the Indian warriors gave names as did the paladins of Christendom to their swords. The battle will presently join, but Arjoun appears listless and sad. He looks on either army j E 2 S 2 Early Oriental Mysticism. [b- u. in the ranks of each he sees preceptors whom he has been taught to revere, and relatives whom he loves. He knows not for which party to desire a bloody victory : so he lays his bow aside and sits down in the chariot. Crishna remonstrates, reminds him that his hesitation will be attributed to cowardice, and that such scruples are, moreover, most unreasonable. He should learn to act without any regard whatever to the consequences of his actions. At this point commence the instructions of the god concerning faith and practice. So Arjoun must learn to disregard the consequences of his actions. I find here not a ' holy indifference,' as with the French Q^uietists, but an indifference which is unholy. The sainie indifference of the west essayed to rise above self, to welcome happiness or misery alike as the will of Supreme Love. The odious indifference of these orientals inculcates the supremacy of selfishness as the wisdom of a god. A steep toil, that apathy towards ourselves ; s.facilis descensus, this apathy toward others. One Quietist will scarcely hold out his hand to receive heaven : another will not raise a finger to succour his fellow. Mysticism, then, is born armed completely with its worst extravagances. An innocent childhood it never had; for in its very cradle this Hercules destroys, as deadly serpents, Reason and Morality. Crishna, it appears, can invest the actions ol his favourites with such divineness that nothing they do is •wrong. For the mystical adept of Hindooism the distinction between good and evil is obliterated as often as he pleases. Beyond this point mysticism the most perverted cannot go ; since such emancipation from moral law is in practice the worst aim of the worst men. The mysticism of a man who declares himself the Holy Ghost constitutes a stage more startling but less guilty ; for responsibihty ends where insanity begins. The orientals know little of a system of forces. They carry a single idea to its consequences. The dark issue of the self- c. I.] The Bagvat-Gita. 53 deifying tendency is exhibited among them on a large scale, — the degrees of the enormity are registered and made portentously apparent as by the movement of a huge hand upon its dial. Western mysticism, checked by many better influences, has rarely made so patent the inherent evil even of its most mis- chievous forms. The European, mystic though he be, will occasionally pause to qualify, and is often willing to allow some scope to facts and principles alien or hostile to a favourite idea. It should not be forgotten that the doctrine of metempsychosis is largely answerable for Crishna's cold-blooded maxim. He tells Arjoun that the soul puts on many bodies, as many garments, remaining itself unharmed : the death of so many of his countrymen — a mere transition, therefore — need not distress him. CHAPTER II. Quel diable de jargon entends-je ici ? Voici bien du haut style. — - MoLiiRE. "\ /T YSTICISM has no genealogy. It is no tradition con- veyed across frontiers or down the course of generations as a ready-made commodity. It is a state of thinking and feeUng, to which minds of a certain temperament are liable at any time or place, in Occident and orient, whether Romanist or Protestant, Jew, Turk, or Infidel. It is more or less deter- mined by the positive religion with which it is connected. But though conditioned by circumstance or education, its appear- ance is ever the spontaneous product of a certain crisis in individual or social history. A merely imitative mysticism, as exemplied by some Trac- tarian ecclesiastics, is an artificial expedient, welcome to ambi- tious minds as an engine, to the frivolous as a devotional diversion, to the weak and servile as a softly-cushioned yoke. Were mysticism a transmitted principle we should be able to trace it through successive translations to a form which might he termed primitive. We might mark and throw off, as we ascended, the accretions with which it has been invested, till we reached its origin — the simple idea of mysticism, new-born. The mysticism of India, the earHest we can find, shows us that nothing of this sort is possible. That set of principles which we repeatedly encounter, variously combined, throughout the history of mysticism, exhibits itself in the Bagvat-Gita almost complete. The same round of notions, occurring to minds of 0. 2.] Hindoo Mysticism. 5 5 similar make under similar circumstances, is common to mystics in ancient India and in modern Christendom. The develop- ment of these fundamental ideas is naturally more elevated and benign under the influence of Christianity. Summarily, I would say, this Hindoo mysticism — (i.) Lays claim to disinterested love, as opposed to a merce- nary religion ; (2.) Reacts against the ceremonial prescription and pedantic literalism of the Vedas ; (3.) Identifies, in its pantheism, subject and object, wor- shipper and worshipped ; (4.) Aims at ultimate absorption in the Infinite ; (5.) Inculcates, as the way to this dissolution, absolute pas- sivity, withdrawal into the inmost self, cessation of all the powers, — giving recipes for procuring this beatific torpor or trance ; (6.) Believes that eternity may thus be realized in time ; (7.) Has its mythical miraculous pretentions, i.e., its theurgic department ; (8.) And, finally, advises the learner in this kind of religion to submit himself implicitly to a spiritual guide, — his Guru. With regard to (i), it is to be observed that the disinterest- edness of the worship enjoined by Crishna is by no means abso- lute, as Madame Guyon endeavoured to render hers. The mere ritualist, buying prosperity by temple-gifts, will realise, says Crishna, only a partial enjoyment of heaven. Arjoun, too, is encouraged by the prospect of a recompence, for he is to aspire to far higher things. ' Men who are endowed with true wisdom are unmindful of good or evil in this world, — wise men who have abandoned all thought of the fruit which is produced from their actions are freed from the chains of birth, and go to the regions of eternal happiness.' 5 6 Early Oriental Mysticism. [»■ n. In some hands such doctrine might rise above the popular morality; in most it would be so interpreted as to sink below even that ignoble standard. (3.) 'God,' saith Crishna, Ms the gift of charity; God is the offering ; God is in the fire of the altar ; by God is the sacrifice performed ; and God is to be obtained by him who maketh God alone the object of his works.' Again, 'I am moisture in the water, light in the sun and moon, . . . human nature in man- kind, . . . the understanding of the wise, the glory of the proud, the strength of the strong,' &c. (4.) This eternal absorption in Brahm is supposed to be in some way consistent with personality, since Crishna promises Arjoun enjoyment. The mystic of the Bagvat-Gita seeks at once the highest aim of the Hindoo religion, the attainment of such a state that when he dies he shall not be born again into any form on earth. Future birth is the Hindoo hell and purgatory. So with Buddhism, and its Nirwana. But the final absorption which goes by the name of Nirwana among the Buddhists is described in terms which can only mean annihilation. According to the Buddhists all sentient existence has within it one spiritual element, homogeneous in the animal and the man, — Thought, which is a divine substance. This ' Thought' exists in its highest degree in man, the summit of creation, and from the best among men it lapses directly out of a particular existence into the universal. Thus the mind of man is divine, but most divine when nearest nothing. Hence the monastic asceticism, inertia, trance, of this kindred oriental superstition. {See Spence Hard}''s Eastern Monachism.') (S-) ' Divine wisdom is said to be confirmed when a man can restrain hi-s faculties from their wonted use, as the tortoise draws in his limbs.' The devotees who make it their principal aim to realise the c. 2.] Tlie Yogis. 57 emancipation of the spirit supposed to take place in trance, are called Yogis. ' The Yogi constantly exerciseth the spirit in private. He is recluse, of a subdued mind and spirit, free from hope and free from perception. He planteth his own seat firmly on a spot that is undefiled, neither too high nor too low, and sitteth upon the sacred grass which is called Koos, covered with a skin and a cloth. There he whose business is the restraining of his passions should sit, with his mind iixed on one object alone ; in the exercise of his devotion for the puritication of his soul, keeping his head, his neck, and body steady, without motion ; his eyes fixed on the point of his nose, looking at no other place around.' The monks of Mount Athos, whose mysticism was also of this most degraded type, substituted, as a gazing-point, the navel for the nose. Ward, in describing the Yogi practice, tells us that at the latest stage the eyes also are closed, while the fingers and even bandages are employed to obstruct almost completely the avenues of respiration. Then the soul is said to be united to the energy of the body ; both mount, and are as it were con- centrated in the skull ; whence the spirit escapes by the basilar suture, and, the body having been thus aban- doned, the incorporeal nature is reunited for a season to the Supreme.' ' See Wilkins' Bagvai-Gita, pp. who after swallowing the wafer con- 63-65. Ward, ii. 180. Also, Asiatic ceives of Christ as prisoner in her in- J^esearches, vol. xvii. pp. 169-313, con- wards, and, making her heart a doll's- taining an account of these Yogis, by house, calls it a ten-iple. But beyond Horace Hayman Wilson. One sect, her, and beyond the Indians, too, in we are told, have a way of contempla- sensuousness, are the Romanist stories ting Vishnu in miniature, by imagining of those saints in whom it is declared the god in their heart, about the size that a post-mortem examination has of an open hand, and so adoring him disclosed the figure of Christ, or the from top to toe. In this gross concep- insignia of his passion, miraculously tion of an indwelling deity these Hin- modelled in the chambers of the heart. doos do indeed exceed St. Theresa, 5 8 Early Oriental Mysticism. [b. n. Stupifying drugs were doubtless employed to assist in induc- ing this state of insensibility. Chrishna teaches that ' the wisely devout' walk in the night of time when all things rest, and sleep in the day of time when all things wake. In other words, the escape from sense is a flight from illusion into the undeceiving condition of trance. So the Code of Menu pronounces the waking state one of deceptive appearances — a life among mere phantasmata ; that of sleep a little nearer reality ; while that of ecstasy, or trance, presents the truth — reveals a new world, and enables the inner eye (which opens as the outer one is closed) to discern the inmost reality of things. These are pretensions which mysticism has often repeated. This notion underlies the theory and practice of spiritual clair- voyance. (6.) ' The learned behold him (Deity) alike in the reverend Brahmin perfected in knowledge ; in the ox and in the elephant ; in the dog, and in him who eateth the fiesh of dogs. Those whose minds are fixed on this equality gain eternity even in this world' (transcend the limitation of time). (7.) The following passage, given by Ward, exhibits at once the nature of the miraculous powers ascribed to the highest class of devotees, and the utter lawlessness arrogated by these 'L,3d-intoxicated' men : — ' He (the Yogi) will hear celestial sounds, the songs and conversation of celestial choirs. He will have the perception of their touch in their passage through the air. He is able to trace the progress of intellect through the senses, and the path of the animal spirit through the nerves. He is able to enter a dead or a living body by the path of the senses, and in this body to act as though it were his own. ' He who in the body hath obtained liberation is of no caste 0.2-] Apathy accounted Perfection. 59 of no sect, of no order; attends to no duties, adheres to no shastras, to no formulas, to no works of merit ; he is beyond the reach of speech ; he remains at a distance from all secular concerns ; he has renounced the love and the knowledge of sensible objects ; he is glorious as the autumnal sky ; he flatters none, he honours none ; he is not worshipped, he worships none ; whether he practises and follows the customs of his country or not, this is his character.' In the fourteenth century, mystics were to be found among the lower orders, whose ignorance and sloth carried negation almost as far as this. They pretended to imitate the divine immutability by absolute inaction. The dregs and refuse of mysticism along the Rhine are equal in quality to its most am- bitious produce on the banks of the Ganges. (8.) The Guru is paralleled by the Pir of the Sufis, the Con- fessor of the Middle Age, and the Directeur of modern France.'' A mysticism which rests ultimately on the doctrine that the human soul is of one substance with God, is fain to fall down and worship at the feet of a man. Such directorship is, of course, no essential part of mysticism — is, in fact, an inconsis- tency ; but, though no member, or genuine outgrowth, it is an entozoon lamentably prevalent. The mystic, after all his pains to reduce himself to absolute passivity, becomes not theo- pathetic, but anthropopathetic — suffers, not under God, but man. / 2 Asiatic Researches, loc. cit. The worshipped principle of Hindooism is not love, but power. Certain objects are adored as containing divine energy. The Guru is a representative and vehicle of divine power — a Godful man, and accordingly the most imperious of task-masters. The prodigies of asceticism, so abundant in Indian fable, had commonly for their object the attainment of superhuman powers. Thus Taraki, according to the Siva Puran, stood a hundred years on tip-toe, lived a hundred years on air, a hundred on fire, &c. for this purpose. — Notes to Curse of Kefiama, p. 237. The following passage, cited by Ward, exhibits the subjective idealism of these Hindoos in its most daring absurdity. ' Let every one meditate upon himself ; let him be the worshipper and the worship. Whatever you see is but yourself, and father and mother are nonentities ; you are the infant and the old man, the wise man and the fool, the male and the female ; it is you who are 6o Early Oriental Mysticism. drowned in the stream— you ^^■ho pass over ; you are the sensualist and the ascetic, the sick man and the strong ; in short, whatsoever you see, that is you, as bubbles, surf, and billows are all but water.' Now, there is an obvious resemblance between this idealism and that of Fichte. The Indian and the German both ignore the notions formed from mere sensible experience ; both dwell apart from experience, in a world fashioned for themselves out of ' pure thought ;' both identify thought and being, subject and object. But here the likeness ends. The points of contrast are obvious. The Hindoo accepts as profoundest wisdom what would be an unfair caricature of the system of Fichte. The idealism of the Oriental is dreamy and passive ; it dissolves his individuality ; it makes him a particle, wrought now into this, now into that, in the ever-shifting phantasmagoria of the universe ; he has been, he may be, he, therefore, in a sense is, anything and everything. Fichte's philosophy, on the contrary, rests altogether on the intense activity — ■ on the autocracy of the Ego, which posits, or creates, the Non-Ego.' He says, ' The activity and passivity of the Ego are one and the same. For in as far as it does noi posit a something in itself, it posits that something in the Non-Ego. Again, the activity and passivity of the Non-Ego are one and the same. In as far as the Non-Ego works upon the Ego, and will absorb a something in it, the Ego posits that very thing in the Non-Ego.' [Grundlage der gesai/imtcn Wissenschaftslehre, § 3. Sdmintliche Werke, v. i. p. 177-) Action is all in all with him. God he calls 'a pure Action {r elites Hand eln), the life and prin- ciple of a supersensuous order of the world — ^just as I am a pure Action, as a link in that order. [Gerichtliche Verantwortung gegen die Anklage desAtheismus, Werke, v. p. 261.) Charged with denying personahty to God, Fichte replies that he only denied him that conditioned personahty which belongs to ourselves — a denial, I suppose, in which we should all agree. The only God in his system which is not an uninfiuential abstraction is manifestly the Ego — that is dilated to a colossal height, and deified. Pre-eminently anti-mystical as was the natural temperament of Fichte, here he opens a door to the characteristic misconcep- tion of mysticism — the investiture of our own notions and our own will with a divine authority or glory. He would say, ' The man of genius does think divine thoughts. But the man who is unintelligible, who, in the very same province of pure thought as that occupied by the true philosopher, thinks only at random and incoherently ; he is mistaken, I grant, in arrogating inspiration — him I call a mystic' But of unintelligibility or incoherence what is to be the test, — who is to be the judge? In this anarchy of gods, numerous as thinkers, one deity must have as much divine right as another. There can be no appeal to experience, which all confessedly abandon ; no appeal to iacts, which each Ego creates after its own fashion for itself. BOOK THE THIRD THE MYSTICISM OF THE NEO-PLATONISTS CHAPTER I. • a man is not as God, But then most godlike being most a man. Tennyson. l/'ATE. What a formidable bundle of papers, Henry. Atherton. Don't be alarmed, I shall not read all this to you ; only three Neo-Platonist letters I have discovered. Mrs. Atherton. We were talking just before you caiaie in, Mr. Willoughby, about Mr. Crossley's sermon yesterday morning. Willoughby. Ah, the Tabernacle in the Wilderness ; did you not think his remarks on the use and abuse of symbolism in general very good ? Brief, too, and suggestive ; just what such portions of a sermon should be. Atherton. He overtook me on my walk this morning, and I alluded to the subject. He said he had been dipping into Philo last week, and that suggested his topic. I told him I had paid that respectable old gentleman a visit or two lately, and we amused ourselves with some of his fancies. Think of the seven branches of the candlestick being the seven planets — the four colours employed, the four elements — the forecourt symbolizing the visible, the two sanctuaries the ideal world — ■ and so on. GowER. At this rate the furniture in one of Hoffmann's tales cannot be more alive with spirit than Philo's temple apparatus. An ingenious trifler, was he not ? Atherton. Something better, I should say. 64 The Mysticism of the Nco-Platonists. [b. m. GowER. Not, surely, when his great characteristic is an uniiurpassed facility for allegorical interpretation. Is not mys- tical exegesis an invariable symptom of religious dilettantism ? Atherton. With the successors and imitators — yes ; not with the more earnest originals, — such names as Philo, Origen, Swedenborg. GowER. But, at any rate, if this spiritualizing mania be Philo's great claim to distinction, head a list of mystical commentators with him, and pass on to some one better. Atherton. He need not detain us long. For our enquiry he has importance chiefly as in a sort the intellectual father of Neo-Platonism — the first meeting-place of the waters of the eastern and the western theosophies. This is his great object — to combine the authoritative monotheism of his Hebrew Scriptures with the speculation of Plato. GowER. Absurd attempt ! — to interpret the full, clear utter- ance of Moses, who has found, by the hesitant and conflicting conjectures of Plato, who merely seeks. WiLLOUGHiiY. Yet a very natural mistake for a Jew at Alexandria, reared in Greek culture, fascinated by the dazzling abstractions of Greek philosophy. He belonged less to Jeru- salem, after all, than to Athens. Atherton. There lies the secret. Philo was proud of his saintly ancestry, yet to his eye the virtues of the Old Testa- ment worthy wore a rude and homely air beside the refinement of the Grecian sage. The good man of Moses and the philo- sopher of Philo represent two very different ideals. With the former the moral, with the latter the merely intellectual, pre- dominates. So the Hebrew faith takes with Philo the exclusive Gentile type, — despises the body, is horrified by matter, tends to substitute abstraction for personality, turns away, I fear, from the publican and the sinner. GowER. So, then, Platonism in Philo does for Judaism what c. 1.] ridlo oil the Contemplative Life. 65 it was soon to do for Christianity, — substitutes an ultra-human standard — an ascetic, unnatural, passively-gazing contemplation — an ambitious, would-be-disembodied intellectualism, for tlie all-embracing activities of common Christian life, so lowly, yet so great. WiLLOUGHBY. Yet Alexandrian Platonism was the gainer by Philo's accommodation. Judaism enfeebled could yet impart strength to heathendom. The infusion enabled the Neo-Plato- nists to walk with a firmer step in the religious province ; their philosophy assumed an aspect more decisively devout. Nurae- nias learns of Philo, and Plotinus of Numenius, and the ecstasy of Plotinus is the development of Philo's intuition. GowER. Let me sum up; and forgive an antithesis. Philo's great mistake lay in supposing that the religion of philosophy was necessarily the philosophy of religion. But we have forgotten your letter, Atherton. Atherton. Here is the precious document — a letter written by Philo from Alexandria, evidently just after his journey to Rome. {-Reads.) Philo to PIeph/estion. I am beginning to recover myself, after all the anxiety and peril of our embassy to Caligula. Nothing shall tempt me to visit Rome again so long as this Emperor lives. Our divine Plato is doubly dear after so long an absence. Only an im- perative sense of duty to my countrymen could .again induce me to take so prominent a part in their public affairs. Except when our religion or our trade is concerned, the government has always found us more docile than either the Greeks or the Egyptians, and we enjoy accordingly large privileges. Yet when I saw the ill turn our cause took at Rome, I could not but sigh for another Julius Cssar. I am sorry to find you saying that you are not likely to visit VOL. I. F 66 The Mysticism of the Neo-PIatonists. [e. m. Alexandria again. This restless, wicked city can present but few attractions, I grant, to a lover of philosophic quiet. But I cannot commend the extreme to which I see so many hasten- ing. A passion for ascetic seclusion is becoming daily more prevalent among the devout and the thoughtful, whether Jew or Gentile. Yet surely the attempt to combine contemplation and action should not be so soon abandoned. A man ought at least to have evinced some competency for the discharge of the social duties before he abandons them for the divine. First the less, then the greater. I have tried the life of the recluse. Solitude brings no escape from spiritual danger. If it closes some avenues of temptation, there are few in whose case it does not open more. Yet the Therapeutse, a sect similar to the Essenes, with whom you are acquainted, number many among them whose lives are truly exemplary. Their cells are scattered about the region border- ing on the farther shore of the Lake Mareotis. The members of either sex live a single and ascetic life, spending their time in fasting and contemplation, in prayer or reading. They be- lieve themselves favoured with divine illumination— an inner light. They assemble on the Sabbath for worship, and hsten to mystical discourses on the traditionary lore which they say has been handed down in secret among themselves. They also celebrate solemn dances and processions, of a mystic signi- ficance, by moonlight on the shore of the great mere. Some- times, on an occasion of public rejoicing, the margin of the lake on our side will be lit with a fiery chain of illuminations, and galleys, hung with lights, row to and fro with strains of music sounding over the broad water. Then the Therapeutse are all hidden in their little hermitages, and these sights and sounds of the world they have abandoned, make them with- draw into themselves and pray. Their principle at least is true. The soul which is occupied c. I.] Body versus Soul. 6'j with things above, and is initiated into the mysteries of the Lord, cannot but account the body evil, and even hostile. The soul of man is di\ine, and his highest wisdom is to become as much as possible a stranger to the body with its embarrassing appetites. God has breathed into man from heaven a portion of his own divinity. That which is divine is invisible. It may be extended, but it is incapable of separation. Consider how vast is the range of our thought over the past and the future, the heavens and the earth. This alliance with an upper world, of which we are conscious, would be impossible, were not the soul of man an indivisible portion of that divine and blessed Spirit (ft III] T)js OilciQ Kal cvcaijioroc i/'i'X'ls £i-'f(')'!jc liTTuairCKTfid ))i' oil ZiaipiTuv). Contemplation of the Divine Essence is the noblest exercise of man ; it is the only means of attaining to the highest truth and virtue, and therein to behold God is the consummation of our happiness here. The confusion of tongues at the building of the tower of Babel should teach us this lesson. The heaven those vain builders sought to reach, signifies symbolically the mind, where dwell divine pow"ers.. Their futile attempt represents the presumption of those who place sense above intelligence — who think that they can storm the Intelligible by the Sensible. The structure which such impiety would raise is overthrown by spiritual tranquillity. In calm retirement and contemplation we are taught that we know like only by like, and that the foreign and lower world of the sensuous and the practical may not intrude into the lofty region of divine illumination. I have written a small treatise on the Contemplative Life, giving an account of the Therapeutse. If you will neither visit me nor them, I will have a copy of it made, and send you.' Farewell. ' Philo gives an account of the Passages corresponding witli those Therapeutce referred to in the letter, contained in the letter contributed by in his treatise De V/fa Contemplativa, Atherton, concerning the enmity of F 2 68 The Mysticism of the Nco-Platonists. l" "'• Cower. How mistaken is Philo in maintaining that the senses cannot aid us in our ascent towards the supersensuous ; — as though the maltreatment of the body, the vassal, by the soul, the suzerain, were at once the means and the proof of mastery over it. Duly care for the body, and the thankful creature will not forget its place, and when you wish to meditate, will disturb you by no obtrusive hint of its presence. I find that I can rise above it only by attention to its just claims. If I violate its rights I am sued by it in the high court of nature, and cast with costs. Mrs. Atherton. And certainly our most favoured moments of ascent into the ideal world have their origin usually in some suggestion that has reached us through the senses. I remember a little song of Uhland's called The Passing Minstrel — a brief parable of melody, like so many of his pieces, — which, as I understood it, was designed to illustrate this very truth. The poet falls asleep on a ' hill of blossoms' near the road, and his soul flutters away in dream to the golden land of Fable. He wakes, as one fallen from the clouds, and sees the minstrel with liis harp, who has just passed by, and playing as he goes, is lost to sight among the trees. ' Was it he,' the poet asks, ' that sang into my soul those dreams of wonder ?' Another might infonn the fancy with another meaning, according to the mood of the hour. It appeared to me an emblem of the way in which we are often indebted to a sunset or a landscape, to a strain of music or a suddenly-remembered verse, for a voyage into a world of the flesh and the divine nature of the illustrates the same principle, S,icr. soul, are to be found in the works of Leg. Alleg. lib. i. p. 54 ; so of Gen. Philo, Sacr. Leg. Alleg. lib. iii. p. 101 x.'cxvii. 12 ; De eo quod pot. p. 192. (ed. Mangey) ; hb. ii. p. 64; De eo Eusebius shows us how Eleazar and (]uod del. potiori insid. soleal, pp. Aristobulus must have prepared the 192. 208. way for Philo in tliis attempt to har- Philo's interpretation of the scrip- monize Judaism with the letters and tiiral account concerning Babel is con- philosoiJIiy of Greece. Prap. Evan^. tained in the De Con/us. Liiiguarum, lib. viii. 9, 10. ^' p. 424. His exposition of Gen. i. 9, c. I.] Body versus Soul. 69 vision of our own, where we cease altogether to be aware of the external cause which first transported us thither. Atherton. That must always be true of imagination. But Piatonism discards the visible instead of mounting by it. Con- sidered morally, too, this asceticism sins so grievously. It misuses the iron of the will, given us to forge implements withal for life's husbandry, to fashion of it a bolt for a voluntary prison. At Alexandria, doubtless. Sin was imperious in her shamelessness, at the theatre and at the mart, in the hall of judgment and in the house of feasting, but there was suffering as well as sin among the crowds of that great city, with all their ignorance and care and want, and to have done a some- thing to lessen the suffering would have prepared the way for lessening the sin. CHAPTJ'.R II. T.a i)hil'_)sO|)liie 11 'est pas philosuphie si elle ne toucIiL' a I'abime ; mais die ccssi:; d'etre philosopliie si eilc y tombe. — Cf.iUSiN. /^"0^^'KR. I hope you are ready, Atherton, to illumine my darkness concerning Neo-Platonism, by taking up that individual instance you were speaking of last iNIonday. Atherton. I have something ready to inflict; so prepare to listen stoutly. {-Reads.) Plato pronounces Love the child of Poverty and Plenty — the Alexandrian philosophy was the oflspring of Reverence and Ambition. It combined an adoring homage to the departed genius of the age of Pericles with a passionate, credulous craving after a supernatural elevation. Its literary tastes and religious wants were alike imperative and irreconcilable. In obedience to the former, it disdained Christianity; impelled by the latter, it tra\estied Plato. But for that proud servility which fettered it to a glorious past, it might have recognised in Christianity the only satisfaction of its higher longings. Re- jecting that, it could only establish a philosophic church on the foundation of Plato's school, and, forsaking while it pro- fessed to expound him, embrace the hallucinations of intuition and of ecstasy, till it finally vanishes at Athens amid the incense and the hocus-pocus of theurgic incantation. As it degenerates, it presses more audaciously forward through the veil of the un- seen. It must see visions, dream dreams, work spells, and call down deities, demi-gods, and demons from their dwellings in c. 2.] Fusion of Religions. yi the upper air. The Alexandrians were eclectics, because such reverence taught them to look back ; mystics, because such ambition urged them to look up. They restore philosophy, after all its weary wanderings, to the place of its birth ; and, in its second childhood, it is cradled in the arms of those old poetic faiths of the past, from which, in the pride of its youth, it broke away. The mental history of the founder best illustrates the origin of the school. Plotinus, in a.d. 233, commences the study of philosophy in Alexandria, at the age of twenty-eight. His mental powers are of the concentrative rather than the compre- hensive order. Impatient of negation, he has commenced an earnest search after some truth which, however abstract, shall yet be positive. He pores over the Dialogues of Plato and the Metaphysics of Aristotle, day and night. To promote the growth of his ' soul-wings,' as Plato counsels, he practises austerities his master would never have sanctioned. He attempts to live what he learns to call the ' angelic life / the ' life of the disembodied in the body.' He reads with admira- tion the life of Apollonius of Tyana, by Philostratus, which has recently appeared. He can probably credit most of the marvels recorded of that strange thaumaturgist, who, two hundred years ago, had appeared — a revived Pythagoras, to dazzle nation after nation through which he passed, with prophecy and miracle ; who had travelled to the Indus and the Ganges, and brought back the supernatural powers of Magi and Gyi'nno- sophists, and who was said to have displayed to the world once more the various knowledge, the majestic sanctity, and the superhuman attributes, of the sage of Crotona. This por- traiture of a philosophical hierophant — a union of the philoso- pher and the priest in an inspired hero, fires the imagination of Plo.inus. In the New-Pythagoreanism of which Apollo- nius was a representative. Orientalism and Platonism were 7 2 The Mysticism of the Neo-Platonists. \y- m. alike embi-aced.' Perhaps the thought occurs thus early to Plolinus— could I travel eastward I might drink myself at those fountain-heads of tradition whence Pythagoras and Plato drew so much of their wisdom. Certain it is, that, with this purpose, he accompanied, several years subsequently, the dis- astrous expedition of Gordian against the Parthians, and narrowly escaped with life. At Alexandria, Plotinus doubtless hears from orientals there some fragments of the ancient eastern theosophy — doctrines concerning the principle of evil, the gradual development of the Divine Essence, and creation by intermediate agencies, none of \Yhich he finds in his Plato. He cannot be altogether a stranger to the lofty theism which Philo marred, while he attempted to refine, by the help of his 'Attic Moses.' He observes a tendency on the part of philosophy to fall back upon the sanctions of religion, ajid on the part of the religions of the day to mingle in a Deism or a Pantheism vs-hich might claim the sanctions of philosophy. The signs of a growing toleration or indifferentism meet him on every side. Rome has long been a Pantheon for all nations, and gods and provinces to- gether have found in the capitol at once their Olympus and their metropolis. He cannot walk the streets of Alexandria without perceiving that the very architecture tells of an alliance between the religious art of Egypt and of Greece. All, except Jews and Christians, join in the worship of Serapis." Was not ^ The testimony of Cicero and lam- P\'thagoreans were, many of them, blichus may be received as indicating incorporated in the Orphic associa- truly the similarity of spirit between lions, and their descendants were those Pythagoras and Plato, — their common itinerant vendors of expiations and of endeavour to escape the sensuous, and charnis — the ayuprat of whom Plato to realize in contemplative abstraction speaks {Repiib, ii. p. 70) — the Grecian that tranquillity, superior to desire and prototypes of Chaucer's Paidonere. passion, whicli assimilated men to Similarly, in the days of lamblichus, gods. The principles of both de- the charlatans glorified themselves as generated, in the hands of their latest the offspring of Plato, followers, into the mysteries of a - Clement of Alexandria gives a full Iheurgic Ircumasoiiry. The scattered account of the various stories respect- 2.1 Fusion of Religions. / J the very substance of which the statue of that god was made, an amalgam ? — fit symbol of the syncretism which paid him homage. Once Serapis had guarded the shores of the Euxine, now he is the patron of Alexandria, and in him the attributes of Zeus and of Osiris, of Apis and of Pluto, are adored alike by East and West. Men are learning to overlook the external differences of name and ritual, and to reduce all religions to one general sentiment of worship. For now more than fifty years, every educated man has laughed, with Lucian's satire in his hand, at the gods of the popular superstition. A century before Lucian, Plutarch had shown that some of the doctrines of the barbarians were not irreconcilable with the philosophy in which he gloried as a Greek. Plutarch had been followed by Apuleius, a practical eclectic, a learner in every school, an initiate in every temple, at once sceptical and credulous, a sophist and a devotee. Plotinus looks around him, and inquires what philosophy is doing in the midst of influences such as these. Peripateticism exists but in slumber under the dry scholarship of Adrastus and Alexander of Aphrodisium, the commentators of the last century.^ The New Academy and the Stoics attract youth still, but they are neither of them a philosophy so much as a system of ethics. Speculation has given place to morals. Philosophy is taken up as a branch of literature, as an elegant recreation, as a theme for oratorical display. Plotinus is persuaded that ing this idol, Protrcpt. c. iv, p. 42 (ed. possessed a mysterious influence at- Potter) ; moreover an etymology and tracting the Power in question, and legend to match, Strom, lib. i p. 383, inducing him to take up his residence Certain sorts of wood and metal within the .image. lambliclTus lays were supposed peculiarly appropriate down this principle of sympathy in to certain deities. I'iie art of the the treatise Dc MystefiLs, v. 23, p. 139 theurgist consisted partly in ascertain- (ed. G.ile, 1678). Kircher furnishes a ing the virtues of such substances ; description of this statue of Serapis, and it was supposed that statues con- CEdip. Aigypt. i. 139. structed of a particular combination of '"^ Sq& Htstoire de V Rcole d' Alexari' materials, correspondent with the tastes drie, par M. Jules Simon, torn. i. p. 99, and attributes of the deity represented, 74 The Mysticism of the Neo-Platonists. [b. ni. philosophy should be worship — speculation, a search after God ^no amusement, but a prayer. Scepticism is strong in pro- portion to the defect or weakness of everything positive around it. The influence of ^nesidemus, who, two centuries ago, proclaimed universal doubt, is still felt in Alexandria. But his scepticism would break up the foundations of morality. What is to be done ? Plotinus sees those who are true to speculation surrendering ethics, and those who hold to morality abandoning speculation. In his perplexity, a friend takes hira to hear Ammonius Saccas. He finds him a powerful, broad-shouldered man, as he might naturally be who not long before was to be seen any day in the sultry streets of Alexandria, a porter, wiping his brow under his burden. Ammonius is speaking of the reconciliation that might be effected between Plato and Aristotle. This eclecticism it is which has given him fame. At another time it might have brought on him only derision ; now there is an age ready to give the attempt an enthusiastic welcome. ' What,' he cries, kindling with his theme, ' did Plato leave behind him, what Aristotle, when Greece and philosophy had waned together ? The first, a chattering crew of sophists ; the second, the lifeless dogmatism of the sensationahst. The self- styled followers of Plato were not brave enough either to believe or to deny. The successors of the Stagyrite did little more than reiterate their denial of the Platonic doctrine of ideas. Between them morality was sinking fast. Then an effort was made for its revival. The attempt at least was good. It sprang out of a just sense of a deep defect. Without morality, what is philosophy worth ? But these ethics must rest on speculation for their basis. The Epicureans and the Stoics, I say, came forward to supply that moral want. Each said, we will be practical, intelligible, utilitarian. One school, with its hard lesson of fate and self-denial ; the other, with its easier doctrine <^- 2.] Eclecticism essays to revive Philosophy. 75 of pleasure, more or less refined, were rivals in their profession of ability to teach men how to live. In each there was a certain truth, but I will honour neither with the name of a philo- sophy. They have confined themselves to mere ethical applica- tion — they are willing, both of them, to let first principles lie unstirred. Can scepticism fail to take advantage of this ? While they wrangle, both are disbelieved. But, sirs, can we abide in scepticism ? — it is death. You ask me what I recom- mend ? I say, travel back across the past. Out of the whole of that by-gone and yet undying world of thought, construct a system greater than any of the sundered parts. Repudiate these partial scholars in the name of their masters. Leave them to their disputes, pass over their systems, already tottering for lack of a foundation, and be it yours to show how their teachers join hands far above them. In such a spirit of reverent enthu- siasm you may attain a higher unity, you mount in speculation, and from that height ordain all noble actions for your lower life. So you become untrue neither to experience nor to reason, and the genius of eclecticism will combine, yea, shall I say it, will surpass while it embraces, all the ancient triumphs of philosophy F* Such was the teaching which attracted Longinus, Herennius, and Origen (not the Father). It makes an epoch in the life of Plotinus. He desires now no other instructor, and is preparing to become himself a leader in the pathway Ammonius has pointed out. He is convinced that Platonism, exalted into an enthusiastic illuminism, and gathering about itself all the scat- tered truth upon the field of history, — Platonism, mystical and catholic, can alone preserve men from the abyss of scepticism. One of the old traditions of Finland relates how a mother once found her son torn into a thousand fragments at the bottom of the River of Death. She gathered the scattered members to •• See Xote, p. 82. "J 6 Tlie Mysticisvi of the Neo-Platonisti. [cm. her bosom, and rocking to and fro, sang a magic song, which made him whole again, and restored the departed life. Such a spell the Alexandrian philosophy sought to work — thus to recover and re-unite the rehcs of antique truth, dispersed and drowned by time. Plotinus occupied himself only with the most abstract ques- tions concerning knowledge and being. Detail and method — all the stitching and clipping of eclecticism, he bequeathed as the handicraft of his successors. His fundamental principle is the old /rf/Z/t' /;'/;/(://>// of idealism. Truth, according to him, is not the agreement of our apprehension of an external object with the object itself — it is rather the agreement of the mind with itself The objects we contemplate and that which con- templates, are identical for the philosopher. Both are thought ; only like can know like ; all truth is. within us. By reducing the soul to its most abstract simplicity, we subtilise it so that it expands into the infinite. In such a state we transcend our finite selves, and are one with the infinite ; this is the privileged condition of ecstasy. These blissful intervals, but too evanescent and too rare, were regarded as the reward of philosophic asceti- cism — the seasons of refreshing, which were to make amends for all the stoical austerities of the steep ascent towards the abstrac- tion of the primal unity. Thus the Neo-Platonists became ascetics and enthusiasts : Plato was neither. Where Plato acknowledges the services of the earliest philosophers — the imperfect utterances of the world's first thoughts, — Neo-Platonism (in its later period, at least) undertakes to detect, not the similarity merely, but the identity between Pythagoras and Plato, and even to exhibit the Plato- nism of Orpheus and of Hermes. Where Plato is hesitant or obscure, Neo-Platonism inserts a meaning of its own, and is confident that such, and no other, was the master's mind. Where Plato in lulges in a fancy, or hazards a bold assertion, c. 2.] Eclecticism essays to revive Philosophy. 77 Neo-Platonisra, ignoring the doubts riato may himself express elsewhere, spins it out into a theory, or bows to it as an infal- lible revelation/ Where Plato has the doctrine of Reminis- cence, Neo-Platonism has the doctrine of Fxstasy. In the Reminiscence of Plato, the ideas the mind perceives are without it. Here there is no mysticism, only the mistake incidental to metaphysicians generally, of giving an actual existence to mere mental abstractions. In Ecstasy, the ideas perceived are within the mind. The mystic, according to Plotinus, contemplates the divine perfections in himse f ; and, in the ecstatic state, indivi- duality (which is so much imperfection), memory, time, space, phenomenal contradictions, and logical distinctions, all vanish. It is not until the rapture is past, and the miad, held in this strange solution, is, as it were, precipitated on reality, that memory is again employed. Plotinus would say that Reminis- cence could impart only inferior knowledge, because it implies separation between the subject and the object. Ecstasy is superior — is absolute, being the realization of their identity. True to this doctrine of absorption, the Pantheism of Plotinus teaches him to maintain, alike with the Oriental mystic at one extreme of time, and with the Hegelian at the other, that our individual existence is but phenomenal and transitory. Plotinus, accordingly, does not banish reason, he only subordinates it to ecstasy where the Absolute is in question." It is not till the last that he calls in supernatural aid. The wizard king builds his tower of speculation by the hands of human workmen till he reaches the top story, and then summons his genii to fashion the battlements of adamant, and crown them with starry fire. GowER. Thanks. These Neo-Platonists are evidently no mere dreamers. They are erudite and critical, they study and *-See Jules Simon, ii. pp. 626, &c. « See Note to Chap. III. p. q2. 7 8 The Mysticism of the Neo-Platonisis. [n. m. they reason, they are logicians as well as poets ; they are not mystics till they have first been rationalists, and they have recourse at last to mysticism only to carry them Avhither they find reason cannot mount. Atherton. Now, I have a letter by Plotinus. It is with- out a date, but fiom internal evidence must have been written about A.D. 260. Plotinus to Flaccus. I applaud your devotion to philosophy; I rejoice to hear that your soul has set sail, like the returning Ulysses, for its native land — that glorious, that only real country — the world of unseen truth. To follow philosophy, the senator Rogatianus, one of the noblest of my disciples, gave up the other day all but the whole of his patrimony, set free his slaves, and sur- rendered all the honours of his station. Tidings have reached us that Valerian has been defeated, and is now in the hands of Sapor. The threats of Franks and Allemanni, of Goths and Persians, are alike terrible by turns to our degenerate Rome. In days like these, crowded wiih incessant calamities, the inducements to a life of contemplation are more than ever strong. Kven my quiet existence seems now to grow somewhat sensible of the advance of )'ears. Age alone I am unable to debar from my retirement. I aui weary already of this prison-house, the body, and calmly await the day when the divine nature within me shall be set free from matter. The r.gyptian priests used to tell me that a single touch with the wing of their holy bird could charm the crocodile into torpor ; it is not thus speedily, my dear friend, that the pinions of your soul will have power to still the untamed body. The creature will yield only to watchful, strenuous constancy of habit. Purify your soul from all undue hope and fear about c. 2-] Plotlniis to Flaccus. 79 earthly things, mortify the body, deny self, — affections as well as appetites, and the inner eye will begin to exercise its clear and solemn vision. You ask me to tell you how we know, and what is our crite- rion of certainty. To write is always irksome to me. But for the continual solicitations of Porphyry, I should not have left a line to survive me. For your own sake and for your father's, my reluctance shall be overcome. External objects present us only with appearances. Con- cerning them, therefore, we may be said to possess opinion rather than knowledge. The distinctions in the actual world of appearance are of import only to ordinary and practical men. Our question lies' with the ideal reality that exists behind appearance. How does the mind perceive these ideas ? Are they without us, and is the reason, like sensation, occupied with objects external to itself? What certainty could we then have, what assurance that our perception was infaUible ? The object perceived would be a something different from the mind perceiving it. We should have then an image instead of reaUty. It would be monstrous to believe for a moment that the mind was unable to perceive ideal truth exactly as it is, and that we had not certainty and real knowledge concerning the world of intelligence. It follows, therefore, that this region of truth is not to be investigated as a thing external to us, and so only imperfectly known. It is witJn)i us. Here the objects we contemplate and that which contemplates are identical, — both are thought. The subject cannot surely know an object different from itself. The world of ideas lies within our intelli- gence. Truth, therefore, is not the agreement of our appre- hension of an external object with the object itself. It is the agreement of the mind with itself. Consciousness, therefore) is the sole basis of certainty. The mind is its own witness. Reason sees in itself that which is above itself as its source ; ho The Mysticism of the Neo-Platonists. [p.. m. and again, that which is below itself as still itself once more. Knowledge has three degrees — Opinion, Science, Illumina- tion. The means or instnmient of the first is sense ; of the second, dialectic ; of the third, intuition. To the last I sub- ordinate reason. It is absolute knowledge founded on the identity of the mind knowing with the object known.' There is a raying out of all orders of existence, an external enianation from the ineffable One {Tvplmloq). There is again a returning irr.pulse, drawing all upwards and inwards towards the centre from whence all came (eTi/rrpnfli). Love, as Plato in the Banquet beautifully says, is the child of Poverty and Plenty." In the amorous quest of the soul after the Good, lies the painful sense of fall and depri\ation. Eut that Love is blessing, is salvation, is our guardian genius ; without it the centrifugal law would overpower us, and sweep our souls out far from their source toward the cold extremities of the Jvfaterial and the Manifold. The wise man recognises the idea of the Good within him. This he develops by withdrawal into the Holy Place of his own soul. He who does not understand how the soul contains the Beautiful within itself, seeks to reahze beauty without, by laborious production. His aim should rather be to concentrate and simplify, and so to expand his ^ The statements mnde in this and avTo? yap out.i)^. Kal ci'apyi)? aAijaq av-w. the preceding paraor.ipli, and the f^i et riTrpb auTo-^, ort tf avToi;. Kal et 71 rp.a^ons adduced by Plotinus in sup- >^"' ^"'i"". "''' ,"0Td5. Ka'i oiSeW ircardTE- port of them, will be found in the e°5 ""t™ „pt ™To,.._^a. ot; (V« toS™, «al i.rthEnr.ead.lib. V. c I. He assumes <.a,„o.Vn iAAo;, «AX' iavr,". \a.Miv^L at once that tlie mmd must be, from u,rT^i» iAAo AeV" kiI i? StwKetf) but abide (a true Quietist) in patient waiting, as one looking for the rising of the sun out of the ocean. The soul, bhnd to all beside, gazes intently on the ideal vision of the Beautiful, and is glorified as it contemplates it — ete'^ ko.vThv -n-as Tpiirtov koX SlSov^ oray Se koX olop 7r\r)p(a6elq fxivov^, el&e ju.ei' to. irpCyTO. KaAA.tto yevd/xti/of eaurbi', kcu iiTLcniK^QUTa. tu? eyyusoi'TOs awTOi), But this is only a preliminary stage of exaltation. The Absolute or the Plotlnus on Ecstasy. ^o One, has no parts ; all things partake of him, nothing possesses him ; to see impartially is an impossibility, a contradiction, — if \vc imagine we recognise a portion he is far from us yet, — to see him mediately (St' ereptoi^) is to behold his traces, not himself. 'Orai' ^ev opa? oAob- jSAcTre. But, asks Plocinus, is not seeing him wholly identity with him? cap. lo. The mystical aspirant is directed therefore to leave the glorified image of himself, radiant "with the transforming effulgence of Beauty, to escape from his individual self by withdrawing into his own unity, wherein he becomes identified with the Infinite One — eU tv avrtZ eA^ibu, Kal ^x-qK^Ti trxtVa?, iv 6^oi) ttolVto. etrrl ^er' e/cetVoi; tou 6^ov, a\po(i)r]TL irapovTo^. Retreating into the iumost recesses of his own being, he there ^X^'- ""a^t koI d(^ets ttji' ala-^-qo'Lv ets t' ovnCaui, tou eVepos eTvat 4>6p(^, e's eotlV eK€L. No language could more clearly express the doctrine of identity — the object seen and the subject seeing are one. Plotinus trium- phantly asks — ^f^y 0^'' ^Vrat TtT £1/ KaAcp, jutj 6p/:iaif avTo; t] o^cuj' avTu ui? eVepoi', ovBiiroi ti/ Ka\iZ' ■yeT'0|/f?'';c 6^ f'lTn, o^"-nf} ("^XitjTa Iv KaXw et ovc opairts Toii e^w, opcMJiv jj-iv ov ^f.l eicai, y\ oi'Tcu? tus Taurby Tip 6/"^aT(p, Ibid. pp. S52-3. CHAPTER III. Lume e lassu che visibile face Lo creatore a quella creatiira Che solo in lui vedere ha la sua pace' Dante. l\/rRS. ATHERTON. I confess I cannot understand what that state of mind can be which Plotiniis calls ecstasy in the letter you read us last night, and about which most of your mystical fraternity talk so mysteriously. Kate. I think I shall have myself mesmerised some day to form an idea. "WiLLOUGHBY. I suppose the mystic, by remaining for many hours (enfeebled, perhaps, by fast and vigil), absolutely mo- tionless, ceasing to think of anything — except that he thinks he is successful in thinking of nothing, and staring pertina- ciously at vacancy, throws himself at last into a kind of trance. In this state he may perceive, even when the eyes are closed, some luminous appearance, perhaps the result of pressure on the optic nerve — I am not anatomist enough to explain ; and if his mind be strongly imaginative, or labouring with the ground-swell of recent excitement, this light may shape itself into archetype, daemon, or what not. In any case, the more distinct the object seen, the more manifestly is it the projection of his own mind — a Brocken-phantom, the enlarged shadow of himself moving on some shifting tapestry of mist. Kate. Like the woodman described by Coleridge as behold- ing with such awe an appearance of the kind, when he ' There is above a light which creature who finds his peace only in makes visible the Creator to that the vision of Him. 0. 3-] Iiiflucnce on tJic Church. Sees full before him gliding without tread An image with a glory round its liead, This shade he worships for its golden Jiucs, And makes (not know ing) that whieh he pursues. Atherton. Such has been the god of many a mystic. He will soar above means, experience, history, external revelation, and ends by mistaking a hazy reflex of his own image for Deity. GowER. But we must not forget that, according to Plotinus, all sense of personality is lost during ecstasy, and he would re- gard any hght or form whatever (presented to what one may call his cerebral vision) as a sign that the trance was yet incomplete. He yearns to escape from e\erything that can be distinguished, bounded, or depicted, into the illimitable inane. Atherton. Very titie. And it is this extreine of negation and abstraction for which Plotinus is remarkable, that makes it alone worth our while to talk so much about him. His philo- sophy and that of his successors, mistaken for Platonism, was to corrupt the Christian Church. For hundreds of years there will be a succession of prelates, priests, or monks, in whose eyes the frigid refinements of Plotinus will be practically, though not confessedly, regarded as representing God far more worthily than the grand simplicity and the forcible figurativeness of Scripture language. For the Christian's God will be substituted that sublime cypher devised by Plotinus — that blank some- thing, of which you cannot say that it exists, for it is above existence. Stop a moment — let me tell my beads, and try to count off the doctrines we shall meet with again and again in those forms of Christian mysticism where the Neo-Platonist element pre- vails — the germs of all lie in Plotinus. There is, first of all, the principle of negation ; that all so- called manifestations and revelations of God do in fact \eil him ; that 110 affirmative can be predicated of him, because he is 86 The Mysticism of the Neo-Platonisis. [b. m. above all our positive conceptions ; that all symbols, figures, media, partial representations, must be utterly abandoned be- cause, as finite, they fall infinitely short of the Infinite. Here we are sunk below humanity — our knowledge consists in ignorance — our vision in darkness. The next step raises us in an instant from this degrading limitation up to Deity — ' sets our feet in a large room,' as the later mystics phrased it — even in infinity, and identifies us for a time with God. Since the partial finite way of knowing God^is so worthless, to know him truly we must escape from the finite, from all pro- cesses, all media, from the very gifts of God to God himself, and know him immediately, completely, in the infinite way — by receiving, or being received into, him directly. To attain this identity, in which, during a brief space of rap- ture at least, the subject and object, the knower and the known, are one and the same, we must withdraw into our inmost selves, into that simple oneness of our own essence which by its very rarity is susceptible of blending with that supreme attenuation called the Divine Essence. So doing, we await in passivity the glory, the embrace of Union. Hence the inmost is the highest — introversion is ascension, and introrsum ascendcre the watchword of all mystics. God is found v.ithin, at once radia- ting from the depths of the soul, and absorbing it as the husk of personality drops away. WiLLOUGHBY. And SO the means and faculties God has given us for knowing him are to lie unused. Atherton. Certainly ; night must fall on reason, imagina- tion, memory — on our real powers — that an imaginary power may awake. This is what the mystics call the absorption of the powers in God, leaving active within us nothing natural, in order that God may be substituted for ourselves, and all opera- tions within be supernatural, and even divine. 3-] Inadequacy of mere Intuition. 87 GowER. Then mysticism is a spiritual art whereby the possible is forsaken for the impossible — the knowable for the unknowable. WiLLOUGHBY. Or a contrivance, say, for reaching Divinity which realizes only torpor. GowER. A sorry sight this misdirection and disappointment of spiritual aspiration. Does it not remind you of that e\ er- suggestive legend of Psyche — how she has to carry the box of celestial beauty to Venus, and by the way covets some of this lovelinesi for herself. She lifts the lid, and there steals out a soporific vapour, throwing her into a deep slumber on the edge of a dizzy precipice. There she lies entranced till Eros comes to waken and to rescue her. Atherton. I should grow very tiresome if I were now to attempt to indicate the likeness and the difference between ancient and modern speculation on these questions, and where I think the error lies, and why. But you must bear with me, Kate, if I hang some dry remarks on what you said just now. Kate. I am sure I — Atherton. You quoted Coleridge a minute since. He first, and after him Carlyle, familiarized England with the German distinction between reason and understanding. In fact, what the Epicureans and the Stoics were to Plotinus in his day, that were Priestley and Paley to Coleridge. The spiritualist is the sworn foe of your rationalist and pleasures-of-virtue man. Ro- mance must loathe utilitarianism, enthusiasm scorn expediency. Hence the reaction which gives us ScheUing as the Plotinus of Berlin, and Coleridge as the Schelling of Highgate. The understanding had been over-tasked — set to work unanimated and unaided by the conscience and the heart. The result was pitiable — lifeless orthodoxy and sneering scepticism. Chris- tianity was elaborately defended on its external evidences ; the internal evidence of its own nature overlooked. 88 The Mysticism of the Nco-Platonisis. [b. hi. What was needful at such a juncture? Surely that both should be employed in healthful alliance — the understanding and the conscience — the faculty which distinguishes and judges, and the faculty which presides over our moral nature, deciding about right and wrong. These are adequate to recognise the claims of Revelation. The intellectual faculty can deal with the historic evidence, the moral can pronounce concerning the tendency of the book, righteous or unrighteous. In those features of it unexplained and inexplicable to the understand- ing, if we repose on faith, we do so on grounds which the understanding shows to be sound. Hence the reception given to Christianity is altogether reasonable. But no such moderate ground as this would satisfy the ardour which essayed reform ; the understanding, because it could not do everything — could not be the whole mind, but only apart — because it was proved unequal to accomplish alone the work of all our faculties together, was summarily cashiered. AVe must have for religion a new, a higher faculty. Instead of reinforcing the old power, a novel nomenclature is devised which seems to endow man with a loftier attribute. This faculty is the intuition of Plotinus, the Intellectiielle Anschauwig of Schelling ; the Intuitive Reason, Source of Ideas and Absolute Truths, the Organ of Philosophy and Theology, as Coleridge styles it. It is a direct beholding, which, according to Plotinus, rises in some moments of exaltation to ecstasy. It is, according to Schelling, a realization of the identity of subject and object in the indivi- dual, which blends him with that identity of subject and object called God ; so that, carried out of himself, he does, in a manner, think divine thoughts — views ail things from their highest point of view — mind and matter from the centre of their identity.^ He becomes recipient, according to Emerson, of the Soul of Ihe world. He loses, according to Coleridge, the particular in 2 See .Schelling's System des Ti-an- (Tiibin.^en, 1800), and Chalvbceus, xcndcntaUii Idealismi'.s, pp. 19-23 liiif. Bnho. d. Spec. Phil. xi. 'z\i^. c. 3-] Inadequacy of mere Intuition. 89 the universal reason ; finds that ideas appear within him from an internal source supplied by the Logos or Eternal Word of God — an infallible utterance from the divine original of man's highest nature.^ WiLLOUGHBY. One aim in all — to escape the surface varieties of our individual (or more properly dividual) being, and pene- trate to the universal truth — the absolute certainty everywhere the same : — a shaft-sinking operation — a descent into our original selves — digging down, in one case from a garden, in another from a waste, here from the heart of a town, there from a meadow, but all the miners are to find at the bottom a com- mon ground — the primpsval granite — the basis of the eternal truth-pillars. This I take to be the object of the self-simplifi- cation Plotinus inculcates — to get beneath the finite superficial accretions of our nature. Atherton. And what comes of it after all ? After denuding ourselves of all results of experience, conditioned distinctions, &c., we are landed in a void, we find only hollow silence, if we may accept a whisper or two, saying that ingratitude, treachery, fraud, and similar crimes, are very wrong. GowER. And even these dictates are those of our moral sense, not of an intellectual power of insight. For surely to call con- science practical Reason, as Kant does, is only to confound our moral and intellectual nature together. Atherton. Very well, then. Seclude and simplify your- self thoroughly, and you do not find data within you equal to your need — equal to show you what God is, has done, should do, &c. WiLLOUGHBY. But all these intuitionalists profess to evolve from their depths very much more than those simplest ethical perceptions. Atherton. By carrying down with them into those depths 3 Aids to Reflection, pp. 225, 249. nating criticism of this doctrine in the The leader is referred to a discrimi- British Quarterly Review, No. .\xxvii. 90 Tlie Mysticism of the Neo-Platoiiists. [b. m. the results of tlie understanding, of experience, of external cul- ture, and then bringing them up to light again as though they had newly emerged from the recesses of the Infinite. This intuitional metal, in its native state, is mere fluent, formless quicksilver ; to make it definite and serviceable you must fix it by an alloy ; but then, alas ! it vs, pure Reason no longer, and, so far from being universal truth, receives a countless variety of shapes, according to the temperament, culture, or philosophic party, of the individual thinker. So that, in the end, the result is merely a dogmatical investiture of a man's own notions with a sort of divine authority. You dispute with Schelling, and he waves you away as a profane and intuitionless laic. What is this but the sacerdotalism of the philosopher ? The fanatical mystic who believes himself called on to enforce the fantasies of his special revelation upon other men, does not more utterly contemn argument than does the theosophist, when he bids you kick your understanding back into its kennel, and hearken in reverend awe to his intuitions. WiLLOUGHBY. Telling you, too, that if your inward witness does not agree with his, you are, philosophically speaking, in the gall of bitterness and the bond of iniquity. Atherton. You are catching the approved style of expression so much in vogue with our modern religious infidelity. This is the artifice — to be scriptural in phrase, and anti-scriptural in sense : to parade the secret symbols of Christianity in the van of that motley army which marches to assail it. CJowER. The expedient reminds me of the device of Cani- liyses, who, when he drew out his forces against the Egyptians, placed a row of ibises in front of his line, and the Egyptians, it is said, suftered defeat rather than discharge an arrow which might wound the birds they worshipped. AViLLOUGHBv. To go back to Plotinus.' That doctrine of * See Nolo, p. 92, c. 3.] Necessitarian Ethics. o i the Epistrophe — the return of all intelligence by a law of nature to the divine centre — must inevitably be associated with the unhealthy morality always attendant on pantheism. It is an organic process godward, ending in loss of personal existence, no moral or spiritual elevation. GowER. His abstract Unity has no character, only negation of all conceivable attributes — so will and character can have no place in his theory of assimilation to God. Self-culture is self- reduction. What a plan of the universe ! — all intelligence magnetically drawn to the Centre, like the ships to the Mountain of the Loadstone in the Arabian Nights — as they approach, the nails which hold them together are withdrawn, they fall apart, and all the fabric is dissolved. WiLLOUGHBY. It is curious to observe how rapidly the mind gives way under the unnatural strain of this super-essential ab- straction, and indemnifies itself by imaginative and fantastical excesses for the attempt to sojourn in an atmosphere so rare. At first, ecstasy is an indescribable state — any form or voice would mar and materialize it. The vague boundlessness of this exaltation, in which the soul swoons away, is not to be hinted at by the highest utterance of mortal speech. But a degenerate age or a lower order of mind demands the detail and imagery of a more tangible marvel. The demand creates supply, and the mystic, deceiver or deceived, or both, begins to furnish forth for himself and others a full itinerary of those regions in the unseen v/orld which he has scanned or traversed in his moments of elevation. He describes the starred baldrics and meteor-swords of the aerial panoply ; tells what forlorn shapes have been seen standing dark against a far depth of brightness, like stricken pines on a sunset horizon ; what angelic forms, in gracious companies, alight about the haunts of men, thwarting the evil and opening pathways for the pood ; what genii tend what mortals, and under what astral 9 2 The Mysticism of the Neo-Platonists. [». m. influences they work weal or woe ; what beings of the middle air crowd in embattled rows the mountain side, or fill some vast amphitheatre of silent and inaccessible snow, — how some encamp in the valley, under the pennons of the summer lightning, and others find a tented field where the slow wind unrolls the exhalations along the marsh, and builds a billowy canopy of vapours : all is largely told, — what ethereal heraldry marshals with its blazon the thrones and dominions of the unseen realm ; what giant powers and principalities darken with long sjiadow, or illumine with a winged wake of glory, the forms of following myriads, — their ranks and races, wars and destiny, as minutely registered as the annals of some neighbour province, as confidently recounted as though the seer had nightly slipped his bonds of flesh, and mingled in their council or their battle. Atherton. a true portraiture. Observe how this mysticism pretends to raise man above self into the universal, and issues in giving us only what is personal. It presents us, after all, only with the creations of the fancy, the phenomena of the sensibility peculiar to the individual, — that finite, personal idiosyncrasy which is so despised. Its philosophy of the universe subsides into a morbid psychology. Man is persuaded that he is to traverse the realms of fire and air, where the in- telligible essences and archetypes of all things dwell ; and, like the Knight of La Mancha, he never stirs in reality from the little grass-plot of individual temperament on which his wondrous wooden horse stands still. This theosophy professes to make man divine, and it fails at last to keep him even rational. It prevents his becoming what he might be, while it promises to make him what he never can become. Note to page go. hown, \ lotinus distinct irom reason M. Simon has shown, with much acnteness, in what way the exigencies of tine system of Plotinus compcUed him to have recourse to a new facultv, flicfinnf ii\-iiTi rpn<;nn c. 3.] Plotiniis' System a Failure. 93 Plotinus perceived that Plato had not been true to the consequences of his own dialectics. WTien he had reached the summit of his logical ab- straction, — had passed through definition after definition, each more in- tangible than the last, on his way upward towards the One, he arrived at last at a God who was above Being itself. From this result he shrank, and so ceased to be consistent. How could such a God be a God of Provi- dence, such a shadow of a shade a creator? Plato was not prepared, like Plotinus, to soar so completely above experieuce and the practical as to accept the utmost consequences of his logical process. So, that his God might be still the God of Providence, he retained him wichin the sphere of reason, gave him Being, Thought, Power, and called him the Demiurge. W'lien Plotinus, like a true eclectic, carried still farther his survey of what history afforded him, he found Aristotle postulating a Deity so restricted by his own abstraction and immutability as to render it impossible to associate with his nature the idea of superintendence. It was feared that to repre- sent God as the God of Creation and of Providence would be to dualize him. And yet the world did e.xist. How were the serene and remote Unity demanded by logic, and that activity and contact with matter no less imperatively demanded for God by experience, to be reconciled with each other? It is scarcely necessary to observe that there was no real diffi- culty. The whole problem was the result of the notion, so universal, con- cerning the evil of matter, and of the wrong answer given by ancient philo- sophy to the vexed question — Does the Supreme work t^ iXva-i., orrw^ovAeo-eai? Philosophy maintained the former ; the Christian Church the latter. To remove this obstacle which philosophy had itself constructed, Plotinus pro- posed his theory of these hypostases, in the Divine Nature. Above and beyond a God such as that of Plato, he places another like that of Aristotle, and above him a simple Unity, like the God of the Eleatics. The last was the ultimatum of the process of logical simplification — a something above being. But the hypothesis was destitute of proof — it was, in fact, con- trary to reason. Plotinus must therefore either surrender his theory or bid farewell to reason. He chose the latter course. He does not deny the important services of reason, but he professes to transcend its limits. He calls in mysticism to substantiate, by the doctrines of Illumination and Iden- tity, his imaginary God. He affirms a God beyond reason, and then a faculty beyond reason to discern that God withal. This attempt to solve the problem in question is of course a failure. It is still more open than the system of Plato to Aristotle's objection, that it resembled the expedient of an arithmetician who should endeavour to sim- plify a calculation he found perplexing by taking still higher figures. Plotinus does not explain what he means by a Hypostasis. If the Hypos- tases in his Trinity have reality, the ideal unity he is so anxious to preserve in the "Divine Nature is after all destroyed. If they have not, the gap between jhe One and the Manifold is still without a bridge, and the diffi- culty they are introduced to remove remains in effect where it was. If this hypothesis had made no part of the system of Plotinus, the great occasion for the doctrine of Ecstasy and the most powerful internal inducement to mysticism would have been wanting. The philosopher escapes from his labyrinth by borrowing the wings of the mystic. — See Jules Simon, torn. i. pp. 63, 84 ; ii. 462. CHAPTER IV. stargaze. 'Tis drawn, I assure you, from the apliorisnis of the old Chal- deans, Zoroaster the first and greatest magician, Mercurius Trismegistus, the later Ptolemy, and the everlasting prognosticator, old Krra Pater.— Massingek. T'X nLLOUGHBY. We Iiave now about done, I suppose, with the theosophic branch of the Neo-Platonist school; with its latest leaders it degenerates into theurgic mysticism. Kate. I hope it is going to degenerate into something one can understand. GowER. The great metaphysician, Plotinus, is oft the stage, that is some comfort for you, Miss jNIerivale, Magic is less wearisome than metaphysics. Atherton. The change is marked, indeed, Plotinus, wrapt ia his proud abstraction, cared little for fame. His listening disciples were his world. Porphyry entered his school fresh from the study of Aristotle. At first the daring opponent of the master, he soon became the most devoted of his scholars. \\'ith a temperainent more active and practical than that of Plotinus, with more various ability and far more facility in adaptation, with an erudition equal to his fidelity, blameless in his life, pre-eminent in the loftiness and purity of his ethics, he was well fitted to do all that could be done towards secur- ing for the doctrines he had espoused that reputation and that wider influence to which Plotinus was so indifferent. His aim was twofold. He engaged in a conflict hand to hand with two antagonists at once, by both of whom he was eventually u. 4.] Heathendom cannot be rescued. 95 vanquished. He commenced an assault on Christianity with- out, and he endeavoured to check the progress of superstitious usage within the pale of Paganism. But Christianity could not be repulsed, and h'feathendom would not be reformed. In vain did he attempt to substitute a single philosophical religion which should be universal, for the manifolil and popular Poly- theism of the day. Christian truth rciielled his attack on the one side, and idolatrous superstition carried his defences on the other. WiLLoutiHiis'. A more false position could scarcely have been assumed. Men like Porphyry constituted themselves the defenders of a Paganism which did but partially acknowledge their advocacy. Often suspected by the Emperors, they were still oftener maligned and persecuted by the jealousy of the priests. The)' were the unaccredited champions of Paganism, for they sought to refine while they conserved it. They de- fended it, not as zealots, but as men of letters.' They defended it because the old faith could boast of great names and great achievements in speculation, literature, and art, and because the new appeared novel and barbarian in its origin, and humiliating in its claims. They wrote, they lectured, they dis- puted, in favour of the temple and against the church, because they dreamed of the days of Pericles under the yoke of the Empire : not because they worshipped idols, but because they Avorshipped Plato. Mrs. Athertox. And must not that very attempt, noticed just now, to recognise all religions, have been as fatal to them as the causes you mention ? Atherton. Certainly. Mankind does not require a revela- tion to give them a religion, but to give them one which shall be altogetlier true. These Neo-Platonists were confronted by a religion intolerant of all others. They attempted, by keeping ' y. Simon, i. 154 ; ii. 173. gG The Mysticism of tJie Neo-Platonists. [u. ni. open house in their eclectic Pantheon, to excel where they thought their antagonist deficient. They failed to see in that benign intolerance of falsehood, which stood out as so strange a characteristic in the Christian faith, one of the credentials of its divine origin. No theory of the universe manufactured by a school can be a gospel to man's soul. They forgot that lip- homage paid to all religions is the virtual denial of each. GowER. Strange position, indeed, maintaining as their car- dinal doctrine the unity and immutability of the divine nature, and entering the lists as conservators of polytheism ; teaching the most abstract and defending the most gross conceptions of deity ; exclaiming against vice, and solicitous to preserve all the incentives to it which svi^arm in every heathen mythology. Of a truth, no clean thing could be brought out of that unclean, — the new cloth would not mend the old garment. Men know that they otight to worship ; the question is. Whom ? and How ? WiLLouOHBY. Then, again, their attempt to combine religion and philosophy robbed the last of its only principle, the first of its only power. The religions lost in the process what sanctity and authoritativeness they had to lose, while speculation aban- doned all scientific precision, and deserted its sole consistent basis in the reason. This endeavour to philosophise superstition could only issue in the paradoxical product of a philosophy without reason, and a superstition without faith. To make philosophy superstitious was not difficult, and they did that ; but they could not — do what they would — make superstition philosopliical. Atherton. Add, too, that Greek philosophy, which had always repelled the people, possessed no power to seclude them from the Christianity that sought them out. In vain did it borrow from Christianity a new refinement, and receive some rays of light from the very foe which fronted it c- 4] Heathendom cannot he rescued. 97 WiLLOUGHBY. As is very visible in the higher moral tone of Porphyry's Treatise on Abstinence. Atherton. The struggles of heathendom to escape its doom only the more display its weakness and the justice of the sentence. GowER. Like the man in the Gesta Ro:nanonim, who came to the gate where every humpbacked, one-eyed, scald-headed passenger had to pay a penny for each infirmity : they were going only to demand toll for his hunch, but he resisted, and in the struggle was discovered to be amenable for every defor- mity and disease upon the table. So, no doubt, it must always be with systems, states, men, and dogs, that won't know when they have had their day. The scuffle makes sad work with the patched clothes, false teeth, wig, and cosmetics. Atherton. Life is sweet. As to Porphyry it was doubtless his more practical tempera- ment that led him to modify the doctrine of Plotinus concerning ecstasy. With Porphyry the mind does not lose, in that state of exaltation, its consciousness of personality. He calls it a dream in which the soul, dead to the world, rises to an activity that partakes of the divine. It is an elevation above reason, above action, above liberty, and yet no annihilation, but an ennobling restoration or transformation of the individual nature.'' GowEK. One of Porphyry's notions about the spirits of the air, of which you told me in our walk yesterday, quite haunted me afterwards. It contains a germ of poetry. Kate. By all means let us have it. GowER. Our philosopher believed in a certain order of evil genii who took pleasure in hunting wild beasts, — daemons, whom men worshipped by the title of Artemis and other names, falsely attributing their cruelty to the calm and guiltless Grid?, 2 J, Simo'i, liv, iii. chap, a The Mysticism of the Neo-Platonists. [b. m. who can never delight in blood. Some of these natures hunted another prey. They were said to chase souls that had escaped from the fetters of a body, and to force them to re-enter some fleshly prison once more. How I wish we could see a design of this by David Scott ! Imagine the soul that has just leaped out of the door of that dungeon of ignorance and pain, the body, as Porphyry would term it, fluttering in its new freedom in the sunshine among the tree-tops, over wild and town — all the fields of air its pleasure-ground for an exulting career on its upAvard way to join the journeying intelligences in their cars above. But it sees afar off, high in mid-air, a troop of dark shapes ; they seem to approach, to grow out of the airy recesses of the distance— they come down the white precipices of the piled clouds, over the long slant of some vapour promontory — forms invisible to man, and, with them, spectre-hounds, whose baying 'spirits alone can hear. As they approach, the soul recognises its enemies. In a moment it is flying away, away, and after it tliey sweep — pursuers and pursued, shapes so ethereal that the galleries of the ant are not shaken as hunters and quarry glide into the earth, and not a foam-bell is broken or brushed from the wave when they emerge upon the sea, and -i^ith many a winding and double mount the air. At last hemmed in, the soul is forced — spite- of that desperate sidelong dart which had all but eluded them — down into a body, the frame of a beggar's babe or of a slave's • and, like some struggling bird, drawn with beat- ing wings beneath the water, it sinks into the clay it must animate through many a miserable year to come. WiLLOUGHBY. I wish you would paint it for us yourself. You might represent, close by that battle of the spirits, a bird singing on a bough, a labourer looking down, with his foot upon his spade, and peasants dancing in their ' sunburnt mirth' and jollity — wholly unconscious, interrupted neither in toil nor pleasure by the conflict close at hand. It might read as a 4-] TJie Chase of a Soul. 99 satire on the too common indifference of men to the spiritual reaUlies which are about them every hour. Mrs. Atherton. The picture would be as mysterious as an Emblem by Albert Durer. - GowER. It is that suggestiveness I so admire in the Germans. For the sake of it I can often pardon their fantastic extrava- gances, their incongruous combinations, their frequent want 01 grace and symmetry. Atherton. So can I, \yhen an author occupies a province in which such indirectness or irony, such irregularity, confusion, or paradox, are admissible. Take, as a comprehensive example, Jean Paul. But in philosophy it is abominable. There, where transparent order should preside, to find that under the thick and spreading verbiage meaning is often lacking, and, with all the boastful and fire-new nomenclature, if found, is old and common, — that the language is commonly but an array of what one calls Rich windows that exclude the light, And passages that lead to nothing ; — This puts me out of all patience. GowER. The fault you object to reminds me of some Flemish landscape-pieces I have seen ; there are trees, so full of grand life, they seem with their outstretched arms to menace the clouds, and as though, if they smote with their many hundred hands, they could beat away the storm instead of being bowed by it; and underneath these great ones of the forest, which should shadow nothing less than a woodland council of Titans or a group of recumbent gods, the painter places only a rustic with a cow or two, an old horse, a beggar, or some other most every-day of figures. Mrs. Atherton. And you mean that the German words are large-looking as the trees, and the ideas worn and ordinary as the figures ? What will Mr. Willoughby say to that ? H 2 100 The Mysticism of the Neo-Platonist!;. [b. nr. Athertox. I think Willoughby will agree with nie that it is high time that we should go back to our theurgic mysticism and lamblichus. Here is a letter of his : — Iamblichus to Agathocles. ^ I assure you, my friend, that the efforts of Porphyry, of whom you appear disposed to think so highly, will be altogether in vain. He is not the true philosopher you imagine. He grows cold and sceptical with years. He shrinks with a timid incredulity from reaping in that field of supernatural attainment which theurgy has first opened, and now continually enlarges and enriches. Theurgy, be sure of it, is the grand, I may say, the sole path to the exaltation we covet. It is the heaven-given organum, in the hands of the wise and holy, for obtaining hap- piness, knowledge, power. The pomp of emperors becomes as nothing in comparison with the glory that surrounds the hierophant. The priest is a prophet full of deity. The subordinate powers of the upper world are at his bidding, for it is not a man, but a god who speaks the words of power. Such a man lives no longer the life common to other men. He has exchanged the human life for the divine. His nature is the instrument and vehicle of Deity, who fills and impels him (opyavuv n/ic tTrnrviovai 6so7c.) Men of this order do not employ, in the elevation they experi- ence, the waking senses as do others {ovtc Kar diadrjew ivep- ynvaiv ovre lypr]yi()a(!i). They have no purpose of their own, no mastery over themselves. They speak wisdom they do not understand, and their faculties, absorbed in a divine power, become the utterance of a superior will. Often, at the moment of inspiration, or when the afflatus has subsided, a fiery Appearance is seen, — the entering or departing Power. Those who are skilled in this wisdom can tell by the character of this glory the rank of the divinity who has seized for the time the reins of the mystic's soul, and guides it as he c. 4.] lamblichus — Theurgy. i o i will. Sometimes the body of the man subject to this influence Is violently agitated, sometimes it is rigid and motionless. In some instances sweet music is heard, in others, discordant and fearful sounds. The person of the subject has been known to dilate and tower to a superhuman height ; in other cases, it has been lifted up into the air. Frequently, not merely the ordinary exercise of reason, but sensation and animal life would appear to have been suspended ; and the subject of the afflatus has not felt the application of fire, has been pierced with spits, cut with knives, and been sensible of no pain. Yea, often, the more the body and the mind have been alike enfeebled by vigil and by fasts, the more ignorant or mentally imbecile a youth may be who is brought under this influence, the more freely and unmixedly will the divine power be made manifest. So clearly are these wonders the work, not of human skill or wisdom, but of supernatural agency ! Characteristics such as these I have mentioned, are the marks of the true inspiration. Now, there are, O Agathocles, four great orders of spiritual existence, — Gods, Dsemons, Heroes or Demi-gods, and Souls. You will naturally be desirous to learn how the apparition of a God or a Daemon is distinguished from those of Angels, Princi- palities, or Souls. Know, then, that their appearance to man corresponds to their nature, and that they always manifest themselves to those who invoke them in a manner consonant with their rank in the hierarchy of spiritual natures. The appearances of Gods are uniform (ixnvoiUij), those of Daemons various (TToia'Xa). The Gods shine with a benign aspect. When a God manifests himself, he frequently appears to hide sun or moon, and seems as he descends too vast for earth to con- tain. Archangels are at once awful and mild ; Angels yet more gracious ; Daemons terrible. Below the four leading classes I have mentioned are placed the malignant Daemons, the Anti- gods {ayridiovc). Each spiritual order has gifts of its own to bestow on tha 102 The Mysticism of the Neo-Platoiiists. [n initiated who evoke them. The Gods confer health of body, power and purity of mind, and, in short, elevate and restore our natures to their proper principles. Angels and Archangels have at their command only subordinate bestowments. Dfemons, however, are hostile to the aspirant,^afflict both body and mind, and hinder our escape from the sensuous. Principalities, who govern the sublunary elements, confer temporal advantages. Those of a lower rank, who preside over matter (i/Xtra), display their bounty in material gifts. Souls that are pure are, like Angels, salutary in their influence. Their appearance encourages the soul in its upward efforts. Heroes stimulate to great actions. All these powers depend, in a de- scending chain, each species on that immediately above it. Good Daemons are seen surrounded by the emblems of blessing, Dsemons who execute judgment appear with the instruments of punishment. There is nothing unworthy of behef in what you have been told concerning the sacred sleep, and divination by dreams. I explain it thus : — The soul has a twofold life, a lower and a higher. In sleep that soul is freed from the constraint of the body, and enters, as one emancipated, on its divine life of intelligence. Then, as the noble faculty which beholds the objects that truly are — the objects in the world of intelligence — stirs within, and awakens to its power, who can be surprised that the mind, which con- tains in itself the principles of all that happens, should, in this its state of Hberation, discern the future in those antecedent principles which will make that future what it is to be ? The nobler part of the soul is thus united by abstraction to higher natures, and becomes a participant in the wisdom and fore- knowledge of the Gods. Recouled examples of this are numerous and well authenti- cated ; ius'ances occur, too, every day. Numbers of sick, by 4-] EncroacJuncnts of Superstition. 103 sleeping in the temple of .Esculapius, have had their cure re- vealed to them in dreams vouchsafed by the god. Would not Alexander's army have perished but for a dream in which Dionysus pointed out the means of safety ? Was not the siege of Aphutis raised through a dream sent by Jupiter Ammon to Lysan- der? The night-time of the body is the day-time of the soul. What I have now said — with little method, I confess— sets before j'ou but a portion of the prerogatives in which the initiated glory. There is much behind for which words are too poor. I have written enough, I am sure, to kindle your ambition, to bid you banish doubt, and persevere in the aspirations which so possessed you when I saw you last,' Farewell. GowER. That explanation of prophetic dreams and the temple sleep is very curious and characteristic. No doubt the common phenomena of mesmerism may have been among the sacred secrets preserved by the priests of Egypt and of Greece. Kate. The preference for young and weakly persons, who would possess an organization more susceptible of such in- fluences, makes it look very likely. Atherton. Observe how completely the theurgic element, with lamblichus, supersedes the theosophic. In the process of time the philosophical principles on which the system of Plotinus rested are virtually surrendered, litde by little, while divination and evocations are practised with increasing credu- lity, and made the found^ation of the most arrogant pretensions. Plotinus declared the possibiUty of an absolute identification of the divine with the human nature. Here was the broadest basis for mysticism possible. Porphyry retired from this posi- tion, took up narrower ground, and qualified the great mystical 3 See Note, p. io6, 104 TIte Mysticism of tlic Nco-Platoiiists. it-., nt. principle of his master. He contended that in the union which takes place in ecstasy, we still retain the consciousness of per- sonahty. lamblichus, the most superstitious of all in practice, diminished the real principle of mysticism still farther in theory. He denied that man has a faculty inaccessible to passion, and eternally active.' WiLLOUGHBY. And so the metaphysics and the marvels of mysticism stand in an inverse ratio to each other. But it is not unnatural that as the mystic, from one cause or another, gives up those exaggerated notions of the powers of man and those mistaken views of the relationship between man and God, which went together to make up a mystical system of philosophy, he should endeavour to indemnify himself by the evocations of theurgy, so as to secure, if possible, through a supernatural channel, what speculation had unsuccessfully attempted. Ai HEKTON. True ; but in this case I should invert the order, and say that as the promise of theurgy exercised an attraction of growing strength on an order of mind less fitted for specu- lation, such temperaments would readily drop the speculative principle of mysticism in their eagerness to grasp the illusive prize — apparently so practical — which a commerce with superior natures held out. WiLLOucHBY. And so the intellectual ambition and the poetical spirit, so lofty in Plotinus, subside, among the followers of lamblichus, into the doggrel of the necromancer's charm. GowER. Much such a descent as the glory of Virgil has suffered, whose tomb at Pausilipo is now regarded by the popu- lace of degenerate Naples less with the reverence due to the poet than with the awe which arises from the legendary repute of the mediaeval magician. Atherton. So the idealism of strong minds becomes super- ■• JiiLs Simon, ii. 218. c. 4.] Rcsiill — a Blank. 105 stitlon in the weak. In the very shrine where culture paid its homage to art or science, feebleness and ignorance, in an age of decline, set up the image-worship of the merely marvellous. Mrs. Atherton. I think you mentioned only one other of these worthies. Atherton. Proclus. He is the last great name among the Neo-Platonists. He was the most eclectic of them all, perhaps because the most learned and the most systematic. He ela- borated the trinity of Plotinus into a succession of impalpable Triads, and surpassed lamblichus in his devotion to the prac- tice of theurgy. Proclus was content to develop the school in that direction which lamblichus — (successful from his very faults) — had already given it. With Proclus, theurgy was the art which gives man the magical passwords that carry him through barrier after barrier, dividing species from species of the upper existences, till, at the summit of the hierarchy, he arrives at the highest. According to him, God is the Non-Being who is above all being. He is apprehended only by negation. When we are raised out of our weakness, and on a level with God, it seems as though reason were silenced, for then we are above reason. We become intoxicated with God, we are in- spired as by the nectar of Olympus. He teaches philosophy as the best preparation for Quietism. For the scientific en- quirer, toiling in his research, Proclus has a God to tell of, supreme, almighty, the world-maker and governor of Plato. For him who has passed through this labour, a God known only by ecstasy — a God who is the repose he gives — a God of whom the more you deny the more do you affirm. WiLLOUGHBV. And this is all ! After years of austerity and toil, Proclus — the scholar, stored with the opinions of the past, surrounded by the admiration of the present — the astronomer, the geometrician, the philosopher, — learned in the lore of io6 Tlie Mysticism of the Neo-Platonists. [b. m symbols and of oracles, in the rapt utterances of Orpheus and of Zoroaster — an adept in the ritual of invocations among every people in the world — he, at the close, pronounces Quietism the consummation of the whole, and an unreasoning contem- plation, an ecstasy which casts off as an incumbrance all the knowledge so painfully acquired, the bourne of all the journey. Mrs. Atherton. As though it were the highest glory of man, forgetting all that his enquiry has achieved, hidden away from the world, — to gaze at vacancy, inactive and infantine ; — to be like some peasant's child left in its cradle for a while in the furrow of a field, shut in by the little mound of earth on either side, and having but the blue aether above, dazzling and void, at which to look up with smiles of witless wonder. Note to page 103. lamhlichiis de Mystcriis, sect. x. cc. i, 4, 6 ; iii. 4, 8, 6, 24 ; i. 5, 6 ; ii. 3 ; iii. 31 ; ii. 4, 6, 7 ; iii. i, 3. These passages, in the order given, will be found to correspond with the opinions expressed in the letter as those of laniblichus. The genuineness of the treatise De Mysta-iis has been called in question, but its antiquity is undoubted. It differs only in one or two very trivial statements from the doctrines of lamblichus as ascertained from other sources, and is admitted by all to be the production, if not of lamblichus himself, of one of his disciples, probably writing under his direction. Jules Siinon^ ii. 219. For the opinions ascribed to Porphyry in this letter, see his Epistola ad. Anebonem., passim. He there proposes a series of difficult questions, and dis- plays that sceptical disposition, especially concerning the pretensions of Theurgy, which so much scandalized lamblichus. '\\\qDc Mysierlis is an elaborate reply to that epistle, under the name of Abammon. In several pns;^ages of the De Mysterlis (ii. rr ; v. i, 2, 3, 7 ; vi. 6) lamblichus displays much anxiety lest his zeal for Theurgy should lead him to maintain any position inconsistent with the reverence due to the gods. He was closely pressed on this weak point by the objections of Porphyry. [Ep. ad Aitebon. 5, 6.) His explanation in reply is, that the deities are not in reality drawn down by the mere human will of the Theurgist, but that man is raised to a participation in the power of the gods. The approximation is real, but the apparent descent of divinity is in fact the ascent of humanity. By his long course of preparation, by his knowledge of rites and symbols, of potent hymns, and of the mysterious virtues of certain herbs and minerals, the Theurgist is supposed to rise at last to the rank of an associate with celestial powers ; their knowledge and their will become his, and he controls inferior natures with the authority of the gods themselves. lamblichus supposes, moreover, that there is an order of powers in the world, irrational and undiscerning, who are altogether at the bidding of man when by threats or conjurations he chooses to compel them. De Myst. vi. 5. BOOK THE FOURTH MYSTICISM IN THE GREEK CHURCH CHAPTER I. Qnesti ordiiii di su tutti s'ammirano E di gill vincon si che verso Iddio Tutti tirati sono e tutti tirano. K Dionisio con tauto disio A conteniplar questi ordini si mise, Clie li nomo e distiuse com' io.^ Dante. T^ATE. I have been looking at the pictures in Mrs, Jameson's Sacred and Lnrendary Art, of those strange creatures, the hermit saints — the Fathers of the desert. Only see this one, what a mane and claws ! The two lions digging the grave there are own brothers to the holy men themselves. Athertom. Yet they claimed powers as much above huma- nity as, to look at them, you would think them beneath it. GowER. Religious Nebuchadnezzars. WiLLOUGHBY. No shavelings, at any rate, like the smooth- faced sanctities of the later calendar. Atherton. You will find among these anchorites almost all the wonder-working pretensions of medieval mysticism in full development, thus early ; — the discernment of spirits, gift of prophecy, miraculous powers of various kinds, ecstasy, exorcism, &c. &c. I should take St. Antony as a fair specimen of the whole class.^ ^ All these orders gaze admiring with such zeal to the contemplation ol upward, and exert an influence down- them that he named and distinguished ward (each on that immediately be- them as I have done, nealh it), so that they all together - AUujnasil 0pp. Vila S, Aii[o7iu. reciprocally draw and are drawn The vision alluded to is related p. 498. toward God. Dionysius gave himself 1 1 Mysticism in the Greek Church. [b. iv. Mrs. Atherton. Look, here is his picture ; there he stands, with crutch and bell and pig. Atherton. The bell denotes his power over evil spirits, and the pig the vanquished d^mon of sensuality. In his life, by Athanasius, there is a full account of his battle with many dfemons in the shape of lions, bulls, and bears. He passed twenty years in an old castle which he found full of serpents. The power of the saint expelled those unpleasant aborigines. That nose, you see there, was supposed to possess the faculty of detecting by its miraculous keenness of scent the proximity of an evil spirit. ■ There is an odour of iniquity, you must know, . as well as an odour of sanctity. This disposition to literalize metaphors gave currency to the monkish stories of after times concerning the refreshing fragrance found to arise from the remains of disinterred saints. In fact, the materialization of the spiritual, or what passes for such, is the characteristic prin- ciple of the theurgic mysticism within the Roman Catholic Church. St. Antony, on one occasion, sees his own soul, separated from the body, carried through the air. GowER. A striking instance, I should say, of the objectivity of the subject. Atherton. One of his visions is not without grandeur. The brethren had been questioning him one day concerning the state of departed spirits. The following night he heard a voice saying, ' Antony, get up ; go out and look !' He obeyed, and saw a gigantic figure, whose head was in the clouds, and whose outstretched arms extended far across the sky. Many souls were fluttering in the air, and endeavouring, as they found opportunity, to fly upward past this dreadful being. Numbers of them he seized in the attempt, and dashed back upon the earth. Some escaped him and exulted above, while he raged at their success. Thus sorrowing and rejoicing were mingled together, as some were defeated and others triumphant. c. I.] Tlie Pseudo-Dionysiiis. t i 1 This, he was given to understand, was the rise and fall 6f souls. WiLLOUGHBY. That picture would be really Dantesque, if only a little more definite. Macarius is another great name, too, among these Christian ascetics and theurgists — the one who retired to the deserts of Nitriain the fourth century. Atherton. He is not only famous for his measure of the supernatural powers ascribed to his brethren, but his homilies have been appealed to by modern theopathetic mystics as an authority for Quietism. He teaches perfectionist doctrine, certainly, but I do not think his words will bear the construc- tion Poiret and others would give them. He was at least innocent of the sainte indifference? Mrs. Atherton. You said we were to discuss Dionysius the Areopagite this evening. Kate. Pray introduce me first. I know nothing about him. , Atherton. No one does know who really wrote the books which passed under that name. It is generally admitted that the forgery could not have been committed earlier than the hiiddle of the fifth century, probably somewhat later. So all I can tell you is, that somewhere or other (it is not unhkely at Constantinople, but there is no certainty), about the time when Theodoric was master of Italy — when the Vandal swarms had not yet been expelled from northern Africa — while Constanti- nople was in uproar between the greens and the blues, and rival ecclesiastics headed city riots with a rabble of monks, artizans, and bandit soldiery at their heels — while orthodoxy was grappling with the Monophysite and Eutychian heresies on 3 Poiret, Bibliotheca Mysticoriim, to be impenetrable by the divine radi- p. 95. Macarius gives great promi- ance. Some centuries later we find nence to the doctrine of Union^ the monks of Mount Athos professing describes the streaming in of the to discern this supernatural effulgence Hypostatic Light — how the spiritual illuminating their stomachs. Gass, nature is all-pervaded by the glory, Die Mystik des N. Cabasiias, p. 56. and even the body is not so Aross as I I 2 ^.lysiicism in the Greek Church. [b. iv. either hand, and the religious world was rocking still with the groundswell that followed those stormy synods in which Palestine and Alexandria, Asia and Constantinople, from opposite quarters, gathered their strength against each other — a monk or priest was busy, in his quiet solitude, with the fabrication of sundry treatises and letters which were to find their way into the Church under the ail-but apostolic auspices of that convert made by the Apostle of the Gentiles when he spoke on Mars Hill. The writings would seem to have been first appealed to as genuine in the year 533. As heretics cited them, their authority was disputed at the outset ; but being found favourable to the growing claims of the hierarchy, and likely to be useful, they were soon recognised and employed accordingly.* WiLLOUGHBY. Proclus could not have been long dead, and his reputation must have been still at its height, when this anonymous — let us call him Dionysius at once — was writing his Platonized theology. Atherton. With the divines of Byzantium Proclus repre- sented the grand old world of Greek thought. Even those who wrote against him as a heathen betray the influence he exercised on their doctrines. The object of Dionysius evidently was to accommodate the theosophy of Proclus to Christianity. Another aim, not less conspicuous, was to strengthen all the pretensions of the priesthood, and to invest with a new traditionary sanction the asce ic virtues of the cloister. ■• In tlie year 533 the books of Diony- sius nor Cyril had made any allusion sius were cited by the Heverians, and to tliem. Acta Coiicil. Hard. ii. their genuineness called in question p. 1159. by thebisliop because neither Athana- CHAPTER II. They that pretend to these heights call them the seerets of the kingdom ; >ut they are such which no man can describe ; sucli which God hath not re- vealed in the publication of the Gospel ; such for the acquiring of which there are no means prescribed, and to which no man is obliged, and which are not in any man's power to obtain ; nor such which it is lawful to pray for or desire ; nor concerning which we slrall ever be ealled to account. — ^Jeremy Taylor. ' T HAVE here,' said Atherton on the next evening, ' some notes on the doctrine of this pretended Areopagite — a short summary ; shall I read it?' ' By all means.' So the following abstract was listened to — and with creditable patience.' (i.) All things have emanated from God, and the end of all is return to God. Such return — deification, he calls it — is the consummation of the creature, that God may finally be all in all. A process of evolution, a centrifugal movement in the Divine Nature, is substituted in reality for creation. The ani- thesis of this is the centripetal process, or movement of involu- 1 For the passages authenticating thus: — ' In a word, good springs from this account, see Dlou. Areop. 0pp. the sole and complete cause, but evil as foUous ; — from many and partial defects. God (r.) De Div. Nom. c. iv. § i ; v. 3, knows the evil as good, and with him 6, 8 ; vi. 2, 3 ; i. i. De Eccl. Hicr. the causes of things evil are beneficent i. 3. powers.' Proclus seeks escape from (2.) Dc C(cl. Hier. i. 2, 3 ; v. 3, 4 ; the hopeless difficulty in precisely the vii. De Eccl. Hier. i. i ; x. 3. The same way. resemblance of this whole process to Concerning the \'ia ncgativa and the Proodos and Epistrophe of Pic- affinnativa, see De Div. Nom. i. i, timus is sufficiently obvious. 5. 4 ; Z^s Ccel. Hier. xv. ;. andDe Myst. (3.) De Div. Nom. iv. 20, p. 48S. Theol. i. 2, 3. The chase after evil runs througli bcc- (4.) Ibid. Also, Fii. ad. Dorotheum tions 24-34. He sums up in one place De Myst. Thcol.\\\ pp. ,7iJh 721. Vol. 1. I I 1 4 Mysticism in the Greek ChiLrch. [b. tion, which draws all existence towards the point of the Divine centre. The degree of real existence possessed by any being is the amount of God in that being — for God is the existence in all things. Yet He himself cannot be said to exist, for he is above existence. The more or less of God which the various creatures possess is determined by the proximity of their order to the centre. (2.) The chain of being in the upper and invisible world, through which the Divine Power diffuses itself in successive gradations, he calls the Celestial Hierarchy. The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy is a corresponding series in the visible world. The orders of Angelic natures and of priestly functionaries corre- spond to each other. The highest rank of the former receive illumination immediately from God. The lowest of the heavenly imparts divine light to the highest of the earthly hierarchy. Each order strives perpetually to approximate to that imme- diately above itself, from which it receives the transmitted in- fluence ; so that all, as Dante describes it, draw and are drawn, and tend in common towards the centre — God. The three triads of angelic existences, to whom answer the ranks of the terrestrial hierarchy, betrays the influence of Proclus, whose hierarchy of ideas corresponds, in a similar manner, to his hierarchy of hypostases. GowER. The system reminds one of those old pictures which are divided into two compartments, the upper occupied by angels and cherubs on the clouds, and the lower by human beings on the earth, gazing devoutly upward at their celestial benefactors. Atherton. The work of Christ is thrown into the back- ground to make room for the Church. The Saviour answers, with Dionysius, rather to the Logos of the Platonist than to the Son of God revealed in Scripture. He is allowed to be, as incarnate, the founder of the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy ; but, as c. 2.] The Hierarchies. 115 such, he is removed from men h) the long chain of priestly orders, and is less the Redeemer, than remotely the Illuminator, of the species. Purification, illumination, perfection, — the three great stages of ascent to God (which plays so important a part in almost every succeeding attempt to systematise mysticism) are mys- tically represented by the three sacraments, — Baptism, the Eucharist, and Unction. The Church is the great Mysta- gogue : its liturgy and offices a profound and elaborate system of symbolism. (3.) The Greek theory, with its inadequate conception of the nature of sin, compels Dionysius virtually to deny the existence of evil. Everything that exists is good, the more existence the more goodness, so that evil is a coming short of existence. He hunts sin boldly from place to place throughout the universe, and drives it at last into the obscurity of the limbo he contrives for it, where it Hes among things unreal. All that exists he regards as a symbolical manifestation of the super-existent. What we call creation is the divine allegory. In nature, in Scripture, in tradition, God is revealed only in figure. This sacred imagery should be studied, but in such study we are still far from any adequate cognizance of the Divine Nature. God is above all negation and affirmation : in Him such contraries are at once identified and transcended. But by negation we approach most nearly to a true apprehension of what He is. Negation and affirmation, accordingly, constitute the two opposed and yet simultaneous methods he lays down for the knowledge of the Infinite. These two paths, the Via Ncgativa (or Apophatica) and the Via Affirmativa (or Cataphatica) con- stitute the foundation of his mysticism. They are distinguished and elaborated in every part of his writings. The positive is the descending process. In the path downward from God, I 2 I 1 6 Mysticism in the Gi'eek Church. [b. through inferior existences, the Divine Being may be said to have many names ; — the negative method is one of ascent ; in that, God is regarded as nameless, the inscrutable Anonymous. The symbolical or visible is thus opposed, in the Platonist style, to the mystical or ideal. To assert anything concerning a God who is above all affirmation is to speak in figure, to veil him. The more you deny concerning Him, the more of such veils do you remove. He compares the negative method of speaking concerning the Supreme to the operation of the sculp- tor, who strikes off fragment after fragment of the marble, and progresses by diminution. (4.) Our highest knowledge of God, therefore, is said to con- sist in mystic ignorance. In omni-nescience we approach Om- niscience. This Path oi" Negation is the highway of mysticism. It is by refraining from any exercise of the intellect or of the imagination — by self-simplification, by withdra-wal into the inmost, the divine essence of our nature — that we surpass the ordinary condition of humanity, and are united in ecstasy with God. Dionysius does not insist so much on Union as the later mystics, but he believes, at all events, that the eminent saint may attain on earth an indescribable condition of soul — an elevation far transcending the reach of our natural faculties — an approach towards the beatific vision of those who are sup- posed to gaze directly on the Divine Essence in heaven. His disciple is perpetually exhorted to aspire to this climax oi abstraction — above sight, and thought, and feeling, as to the highest aim of man. 'iViLLOUGHBY. What contradictions are here ! With one breath he extols ineffable ignorance as the only wisdom ; with the next he pretends to elucidate the Trinity, and reads you oft" a muster-roll of the heavenly hierarchies. GowER. And are not these, supplemented by the hierarchy of ecclesiastics, his real objects of worship? No man could c- 2.] Tumid and tedious Style. 1 17 make an actual God of that super-essential ultimatum, that blank Next-to-Nothingness which the last Neo-Platonists imagined as their Supreme. Proclus could not ; Dionysius could not. What then? A reaction comes, which, after re- fining polytheism to an impalpable unity, restores men to polytheism once more. Up mounts speculation, rocket-like : men watch it, a single soaring star with its train of fire, and, at the height, it breaks into a scattering shower of many-coloured sparks. From that Abstraction of whicji nothing can be predi- cated, nothing can be expected. The figment above being is above benignity So the objects of invocation are gods, demi- gods, daemons, heroes ; or, when baptized, cherubim, seraphim, thrones, dominions, powers, archangels, angels, saints ; in either case, whether at Athens or at Constantinople, the excessive subtilisation of the One contributes toward the worship of the Manifold. Atherton. The theology of the Neo-Platonists was always in the first instance a mere matter of logic. It so happened that they confounded Universals with causes. The miserable consequence is clear. The Highest becomes with them, as he is with Dionysius, merely the most comprehensive, the universal idea, which includes the world, as genus includes species.' Mrs. Athertox. The divinity of this old father must be a bleak affair indeed — Christianity frozen out. GowER. I picture him to myself as entering with his philo- sophy into the theological structure of that day, like Winter into the cathedral of the woods (which an autunm of decline has begun to harm already) ; — what life yet lingers, he takes away, — he untwines the garlands from the pillars of the trees, - See Meier, ' Dionysii Areop. et ' causae ad Causatum relatioiieni cum Mysticorum saculi xiv. doc.trina: inter relatione generis ad spcciem ron- se comparaiitur.' He remarks justly fudit ' p 13. 1 1 8 Mysticism in the Grc':k Churclu [n. iv. extinguishes the many twinkhng lights the sunshine hung wavering in the foliage, silences all sounds of singing, and fills the darkened aisles and dome with a coldly-descending mist, whose silence is extolled as above the power of utterance, — its blinding, chill obscureness lauded as clearer than the intelligence and warmer than the fervour of a simple and scrip- tural devotion. Atherton. You have described my experience in reading him, though I must say he suggested nothing to me about your cathedral of the woods, &c. His verbose and turgid style, too, is destitute of all genuine feeling.' He piles epithet on epithet, throws superlative on superlative, hyperbole on hyperbole, and it is but log upon log, — he puts no fire under, neither does any come from elsewhere. He quotes Scripture — as might be ex- pected — in the worst style, both of the schoolman and the mystic. Fragments are torn from their connexion, and carried away to suffer the most arbitrary interpretation, and strew his ],'Oges that they may appear to illustrate or justify his theory. GowER. How forlorn do those texts of Scripture look that you discern scattered over the works of such writers, so mani- festly transported from a region of vitality and warmth to an expanse of barrenness. They make the context look still more sterile, and while they say there must be life soinew/iar, seem to aftirm, no less emphatically, that it is not in the neighbourhood about them. They remind me of those leaves from the chestnut and the birch I once observed upon a glacier. There they lay, foreign manifestly to the treeless world in which they were found ; the ice appeared to have shrunk from them, and they from the ice ; each isolated leaf had made itself a cup-like cavity, a tiny open sarcophagus of crystal, in which it " The hyper and the n privalive are lives march pompously, attended by a in constant requisition with Dionysius. hyper on one side, and a superlative He cannot suffer any ordinary epithet termination on the other, to go alone, and many of his adjec- f- 2.] J)ionys!its tlic hero of Mysticism. t io had lain, perliaps for several winters. Doubtless, a tempest, which had been vexing some pleasant valley far down beneath, and tearing at its trees, must have whirled them up thither. Yet the very presence of the captives reproached the poverty of the Snow-King who detained them, testifying as they did to a genial clime elsewhere, whose products that ice-world could no more put forth, than can such frozen speculations as this of Dionysius, the ripening ' fruits of the Spirit.' WiLLOUGHBY. His lurking fatalism and his pantheism were forgiven him, no doubt, on consideration of his services to priestly assumption. He descends from his most cloudy abstraction to assert the mysterious significance and divine potency of all the minutiae of the ecclesiastical apparatus and the sacerdotal etiquette. \\^\isA a reputation these writings had throughout the middle age ! -^ Atherton. Dionysius is the mythical hero of mysticism. You find traces of him everywhere. Go almost where you will through the writings of the medireval mystics, into their depths of nihilism, up their heights of rapture or of speculation, through their over-growth of fancy, you find his authority cited, his words employed, his opinions more or less fully transmitted, somewhat as the traveller in the Pyrenees discerns the fame of the heroic Roland still preserved in the names and in the legends of the rock, the valley, or the flower. Passages from the Areopagite were culled, as their warrant and their insignia, by the priestly ambassadors of mysticism, with as much care and reverence as the sacred verbenas that grew within the enclosure of the Capitoline by the Feciales of Rome. — Mrs. Athkrtok. ' Oh, sweet Fancy, let her loose,' as Keats says, I think my husband has been learning in Mr. Gower's school. How far he went to fetch that simile ! GowER. Perhaps he has my excuse in this case, that he could not help it. 120 Mysticism in tlie Greek Chitrch. [b. iv. W'lLLOUGHUY. Or he ir.ay at ciice boldly put in the plea o/ Sterne, who in one place lays claim to the gratitude of his readers for having voyaged to fetch a metaphor all the way to the Guinea coast and back. Atherton. It contributed greatly to the influence of the Areopagite that he became confounded with the Dionyslus, or Si. Denys, who was adopted as the patron-saint of France. Kate. A singular fortune, indeed : so that he was two other people besides himself; — like Mrs. Malaprop's Cerberus, three gentlemen at once. GowER. I think we have spent time enough upon him. Grievously do I pity the miserable monks his commentators, whose minds, submerged in the i7iare taicbrostun of the cloister, had to pass a term of years in the mazy arborescence of his verbiage, — like so many insects wiUiin their cells in the branches of a great coral.' Atherton. Don't throw away so much good compassion, I dare say it kept them out of mischief. WiLLouGHBY. I cannot get that wretched abstraction out of my head which the Neo-Platonists call deity. How such a notion must have dislocated all their ethics from head to foot ! The merest anthropomorphism had been better ; — yes, Homer and Hesiod are truer, after all. Atherton. I grant the gravity of the mischief. But we must not be too hard on this ecclesiastical Neo-Platonism. It does but follow Aristotle here. Vou remember he considers the possession of virtues as quite out of the question in the case of the gods. GowER. Is it possible? Why, that is as though a man should lame himself to run the faster. Here is a search after ■* Tlie later Greek theology modified to reverence liim as a Father. See the most objectionable parts of the Ullmann's Nicholas von Methone, Dionysian doctrine, while continuing c. 2.] ■ Huiiian Virtue and supciJiuiiian. \2\ God, in which, at starting, all moral qualities are removed from liim ; so that the testimony of conscience cannot count for any- thing; — the inward directory is sealed; the clue burnt Truly the world by wisdom knew not God ! WiLLOUGHEY. This unquestionably is the fatal error of Greek speculation — the subordination of morals to the intellec- tual refinenients of an ultra-human spiritualism. Even with Numenius you have to go down the scale to a subordinate god or hypostasis before you arrive at a deity who condescends to be good. GowER. How much ' salt' there must still have been in the medieeval Christianity to survive, as far as it did, the reception of these old ethical mistakes into the very heart of its doctrine ! Atherton. Aristotle reasons thus : how can the gods exhibit fortitude, who have nothing to fear — justice and honesty, with- out a business — temperance, without passions? Such insignifi- cant things as moral actions are beneath them. They do not toil, as men. They do not sleep, like Endymion, ' on the Lat- mian hill.' What remains ? They lead a life of contemplation ; — in contemplative energy lies their blessedness.' So the con- templative sage who energises directly toward the central Mind — the intellectual source and ultimatum, is the true imitator of the divine perfections. GowER. Transfer this principle to Christianity, and the monk becomes immediately the highest style of man. WiLLOUGHBV. And you have a double morality at once : heroic or superhuman \irtues, the graces of contemplation for the saintly few, — glorious in proportion to their uselessness; and ordinary virtues for the many, — social, serviceable, and secondary. Atherton. Not that the schoolman would release his saint altogether from the obligations of ordinary morality; but he ' Aristot. Elk. Nic. lib. x. c. 8.— See Note, Page 123. I.? 2 Mysticism in llie Gnck Cluirch. [i'. iv. would say, this ordinary morality does not fit the contemplatist for heaven — it is but a prehminary exercise — a means to an end, and that end, the transcendence of everything creaturely, a superlumian exaltation, the ceasing from his labours, and swooning as it were into the divine repose. WiLLOUGHBY. Then I must put in a word for our mystics. It is not they who corrupted Christian morals by devising this divorce between the virtues of daily life and certain other virtues which are z/^human, anti-terrestrial, hypercreaturely — forgive tlie word — they drive us hard for language. They found the separation already accomplished ; they only tilled with ardour the plot cf ground freely allotted them by the Church. Atherton. Just so ; in this doctrine of moral dualism — the prolific mother of mystics — Aquinas is as far gone as Bernard. GowER. The mention of Bernard's name makes one impa- tient to get away from the Greek Church, westward. Atherton. ^V'e may say farewell to Byzantium now. That (ireek Church never grew beyond what it was in the eighth and ninth centuries. GowER. I have always imagined it a dwarf, ^^•atching a Nibelungen hoard, which after all never enriches anybody. Nothing but that tedioiis counting, and keeping tidy, and stand- ing sentinel, for ages. Atherton. See what good a little fighting does. The Greek Church had its scholastic element — witness John of Damascus ; it had its mystical — as we have seen ; but neither the one nor the other was ever developed to such vigour as to assert itself against its rival, and struggle for mastery. In the West the two principles have their battles, their armistices, their recon- cihations, and both are the better. In the East they are coupled amicably in the leash of antiquity, and dare not so much as snarl. WiLL')UGHBY. I suppose the mysticism of the Greek Church c. 2-] Synibolisiii and Individualism. M"^ was more objective, as the Germans would say, — dependent on its sacramental media and long trains of angelic and human functionaries, handing down illumination ; that of the West, subjective. Atherton. That will be generally true. The eastern mysti- cism creeps under the sacerdotal vestments, is never known to quit the precincts of church and cloister, clings close to the dalmatica, and lives on whiffs of frankincense. The western is often to be found far from candle, book, and bell, venturing to worship without a priest. In short, as Gower would antithetically say, the mystic of the East is always a slave, the mystic of the West often a rebel ; .Symbolism is the badge of the one. Individualism the watch- word of the other. GowER. How spiteful you are to-night, Atherton. I pro- pose that we break up, and hear nothing more you may have to say. Note to Page 121. Aristotle extols contemplation, because it does not reqiiii'e means and oppor- tunity, as do the social virtues, generosity, courage, &c. Plotinus lays .still more stress on his distinction between the mere political virtues — \\hich con- stitute simply a preparatory, purifying process, and the superior, or exemplary — those divine attainments whereby man is united with God. Aquinas adopts this classitication, and distinguishes the virtues as exemplares, purgatories and foliticcB. He even goes so far as to give to each of the cardinal virtues a contemplative and ascetic turn ; designating Prudence, in its highest exercise, as contempt for all things worldly ; Temperance is abstraction from the sen- suous ; Fortitude, courage in sustaining ourselves in the aerial regions of con- templation, remote from the objects of sense ; Justice, the absolute surrender of the spirit to this law of its aspiration. He argues that, as man's highest blessedness is a beatitude surpassing the limits of human nature, he can be prepared for it only by having added to that nature certain principles from the divine ; — such principles are the theological or superhuman virtues. Faith, Hope, and Charity. See iVIiinscher's Dogmengeschic/ite, 2 Abth. 2 Absch. § 136. In consequence of the separation thus established between the human and the divine, we shall find the mystics of the fourteenth century representing regeneration almost as a process of dehumanization, and as the substitution of a divine nature for the human in the subject of grace. No theologians could have been further removed from Pelagianism ; few more forgetful than these ardent contemplatists that divine influence is vouchsafed, not to obliterate and 124 Mysticism in the Greek CImrch. [n. iv. supersede our natural capacities by some almost miraculous faculty, but to restore and elevate man's nature, to realise its lost possibilities, and to conse- crate it wholly, in body and soul — not in spirit, merely — to the service of God. With one voice both schoolmen and mystics would reason thus ; — ' Is not heaven the extreme opposite of this clouded, vexed, and sensuous life? '1 hen we approach its blessedness most nearly by a life the most contrary possible to the secular, — by contemplation, by withdrawment, by total abstraction from sense,' This is one view of our best preparation for the heavenly world. At the opposite pole stands Bebmen's doctrine, far less dangerous, and to be preferred if we must have an extreme, viz., that the believer is virtually in the heavenly state already— that eternity should be to ts as time, and time as eternity. Between these two stands the scriptural teaching. St. Paul does not attempt to persuade himself that earth is heaven, that faith is sight, that hope is fruition. He groans here, being burdened; he longs to have done with shortcoming and with conflict ; to enter on tlie vision face to face, on the unhindered service of the state of glory. But he does not deem it the best pieparntion for heaven to mimic upon earth an imaginary celestial repose, — he will rather labour to-day hi? utmost at the work to-day may bring,— he will fight the good fight, he wiU finish his couise, and then receive the crown. BOOK THE FIFTH MYSTICISM IN THE LATIN CHURCH CHAPTER I. Look up, my Ethel ! When on the glances of the upturned eye The plumed thoughts take travel, and ascend Through the unfathomable purple mansions. Threading the golden fires, and ever climbing As if 'twere homewards winging — at such time The native soul, distrammelled of dim earth. Doth know herself immortal, and sits light Upon her temporal perch. VlOLENZIA. ' I ^HE winter had now broken up his encampment, and was ■^ already in full retreat. With the approach of spring the mystical conversations of our friends entered on the period of the Middle Ages. The lengthening mornings found Atherton early at his desk, sipping a solitary and preliminary cup of coffee, and reading or writing. AVilloughby felt his invention quickened by the season, and a new elasticity pervade him. His romance advanced with fewer hindrances from that cross-grained dissatisfaction which used so frequently to disfigure his manu- script with the thorny scratches and interlineations of an insatiable correction. Gower, too, could enter once more on the enjoyment of his favourite walk before breakfast. In wandering through the dewy meadows, in ' the slanting sunlight of the dawn,' he felt, as we all must, that there is truth in what the chorus of mystics have ever said or sung about the inadequacy of words to ex- press the surmise and aspiration of the soul. In a morning solitude there seems to he about our fields of thought an aerial wealth too plenteous to be completely gathered into the granary of language. 123 Mysticism in the Latin Church. [=. v. O who would mar the sf^ason with dull speech, That must tie up our \isionary meanings And subtle individual apprehensions Into the common tongue of every man ? And of the swift and scarce detected visitants Of our illusive thoughts seek to make prisoners, And only grasp their garments. It is one of the pleasant pastimes of the spring to watch day by day the various ways in which the trees express, by a phy- siognomy and gesture of their own, their expectation of the summer. Look at those young and dehcate ones, aHve with impatience to the tip of every one of the thousand sprays that tremble distinct against the sky, swaying uneasily to and fro in the sharp morning breeze. They seem longing to slip their rooted hold upon the earth, and float away to embrace their bridegroom sun in the air. And see those veterans — what a gnarled, imperturbable gravity in those elder citizens of park or wood : they are used to it ; let the day bring new weatherstains or new buds, they can bide their time. And are they not already wrapped, many of them, in hood and habit of dark glossy ivy — woodland senatorial fur — they can afford to wait. Here, look, close beside us, the eyes of the buds are even now peeping through the black lattice of the boughs, and those amber-coloured clouds overhead are looking thern promises of kindly showers as they sail by. 'What is that sparkling on yonder hill? Only the windows of a house with eastern aspect: the sun lights his beacon-fire regularly there, to signal to his children down in the hollow that he is coming, though they cannot see him yet, and will roll away the cloud from the val- ley mouth, and make the place of their night-sepulchre glorious with his shining raiment. Amidst these delights of nature, and the occupation of his art, Gower thought sometimes of the mystics who enjoy such things so little. He had even promised to write a short paper on the mystical schoolmen of St. Victor, Hugo and Richard, I.] Neo-Plaiouisin — how incorporated. I2Q and was himself surprised to find liow soon he warmed to the subject — with what zest he sought for ghmpses of cloister-life in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. When next our friends met in the library, Gower expressed his hearty and unceremonious satisfaction at their having done, as he hoped, with that ' old bore,' Dionysius Areopagita. By none was the sentiment echoed with more fervour than by Atherton, whose conscience perhaps smote him for some dry reading he had inflicted on his auditors. But he made no apology, that Gower might not think he took his remark to himself, and return him a compliment. WiLLOUGHBy. To see how this world goes round ! Only think of Proclus having his revenge after all, — he and his fellows ruling from their urns when dead the Christianity which banished them while living. Athertok. Not altogether satisfactory, either, could he have looked in upon the world, and seen the use to which they put him. It was true that, under the name of Dionysius, his ideas were reverenced and expounded by generations of dreaming monks, — that under that name he contributed largely to those influences which kept stagnant the religious world of the East for some nine hundred years. But it was also true that his thoughts were thus conserved only to serve the pur- pose of his ancient enemies ; so that he assisted to confer omnipotence on those Christian priests whom he had cursed daily in his heart while lecturing, sacrificing, and conjuring at Athens. Gower. Again I say, let us turn from the stereotyped Greek Church to the West, — I want to hear about St. Bernard. Atherton. Presently. Let us try and apprehend clearly the way in which Neo-Platonism influenced mediaeval Europe. WiLLOUGHBY. A trifling preliminary ! Atherton means us to stay here all night. You may as well resign yourself, Gower. VOL. I. K 130 Mysticism in the Latin Church. [d. Atherton. Never fear ; I only want to look about me, and see where we are just now. Suppose ourselves sent back to the Middle Age — what will be our notion of Platonism ? We can't read a line of Greek. We see Plato only through Plo- tinus, conserved by. Augustine, handed down by Apuleius and Boethius. We reverence Aristotle, but we care only for his dialectics. We only assimilate from antiquity what seems to fall within the province of the Church. Plato appears to us sur- rounded by that religious halo with which Neo-Platonism invested philosophy when it grew so devotional. We take ,\ugustine's word for it that Plotinus really enunciated the long- hidden esoteric doctrine of Plato. The reverent, ascetic, ecstatic Platonism of Alexandria seems to us so like Chris- tianity, that we are almost ready to believe Plato a sort of harbinger for Christ. We are devoted Realists ; and Realism and Asceticism make the common ground of Platonist and Christian. If scholastic in our tendencies, Aristode may be oftener on our lips ; if mystical, Plato ; but we overlook their differences. "We believe, on Neo-Platonist authority, that the two great ones were not the adversaries which had been sup- posed. Aristotle is in the forecourt, and through study of him we pass into that inner shrine where the rapt Plato (all but a monk in our eyes) is supposed to exemplify the contemplative life. Dionysius in the East, then, is soporific. Mysticism, there, has nothing to do save drowsily to label all the Church gear with symboHc meanings of wondrous smallness. Dionysius in the West has come into a young world where vigorous minds have been long accustomed to do battle on the grandest questions ; grace and free-will — how they work to- gether ; sin and redemption — what they really are ; faith and reason — what may be their limits. GowER. Compare those great controversies with that mise- rable Monophysite and Monothelite dispute for which one can 0. i-i A bolder Spirit in the West. 131 never get up an interest. How much we owe still to that large-souled Augustine.' Atherton. Well, for this very reason, they might worship Dionysius as a patron saiot to their hearts' content at St. Denis, but he could never be in France the master mystagogue they made him at Byzantium. His name, and some elements in his system, became indeed an authority and rallying point for the mystical tendency of the West, but the system as a whole was never appropriated. He was reverentially dismembered, and so mixed up with doctrines and questions foreign to him, by a different order of minds, with another culture, and often with another purpose, that I would defy his ghost to recognise his own legacy to the Church. GowER. Good Hugo of St. Victor, in his Coiiunentary on the Hierarchies, does certainly wonderfully soften down the pan- theism of his original. Dionysius comes out from under his hands almost rational, quite a decent Christian. Atherton. And before Hugo, if you remember, John Scotus Erigena translated him, and elaborated on his basis a daring system of his own, pantheistic I fear, but a marvel of intel- lectual power — at least two or three centuries in advance of his age. And these ideas of Erigena's, apparently forgotten, filter through, and reappear once more at Paris in the free- thinking philosophy of such men as David of Dinant and Amalric of Bena.'' WiLLOUGHBY. Strange enough : so that, could Dionysius have returned to the world in the thirteenth century, he, the worshipper of the priesthood, would have found sundry of his own principles in a new livery, doing service in the ranks of the laity against the clergy, and strengthening the hands of that succession of heretics so long a thorn in the side of the corrupt hierarchy of France. ' See Note i, p, 146. 2 See Note 2, p. 146. K 2 13- Mysticism in the Latin Church. [b Atherton. In Germany, a century later, many of the mystics put Platonist doctrine to a similar use. In fact, I think we may say generally that the Neo-Platonist element, which acted as a mortal opiate in the East, became a vivifying prin- ciple in the West. There the Alexandrian doctrine of Emana- tion was abandoned, its pantheism nullified or rejected, but its allegorical interpretation, its exaltation, true or false, of the spirit above the letter, — all this was retained, and Platonism and mysticism together created a party in the Church the sworn foes of mere scholastic quibbling, of an arid and lifeless ortho- doxy, and at last of the more glaring abuses which had grown up with ecclesiastical pretension. GowER. Now for Bernard. I see the name there on that open page of your note-book. Read away — no excuses. Atherton. Some old notes. But before I read them, look at this rough plan of the valley of Clairvaux, with its famous abbey. I made it after reading the Descripio Monasterii Clara- Vatlensis, inserted in the Benedictine edition of Bernard's works. It will assist us to realize the locality in which this great church-father of the twelfth century passed most of his days. It was once called the Valley of Wormwood — was the ill-omened covert of banditti; Bernard and his monks come clearing and chanting, praying and planting ; and lo ! the absin- thial reputation vanishes — the valley smiles — is called, and made, Clairvaux, or Brightdale. Kate. Transformed, in short, into 'a serious paradise,' as Mr. Thackeray would say. Atherton. Yes, you puss. Here, you see, I have marked two ranges of hills which, parting company, enclose the broad sweep of our Brightdale, or Fairvalley. Where the hills are nearest together you see the one eminence covered with vines, the other with fruit trees ; and on the sides and tops dusky groups of monks have had many a hard day's work, getting rid Bernard at Clairvaiix. 133 of brambles and underwood, chopping and binding faggots, and preparing either slope to yield them wherewithal to drink, from the right hand, and to eat, from the left. Not far from this entrance to the valley stands the huge pile of the abbey itself, with its towers and crosses, its loop-hole windows and numerous outbuildings. That is the river Aube (Alba) running down between the heights; here, you see, is a winding channel the monks have dug, that a branch of it may flow in under the convent walls. Good river ! how hard it works for them. No sooner under the archway than it turns the great wheel that grinds their corn, fills their caldarium, toils in the tannery, sets the fulling-mill agoing. Hark to the hollow booming sound, and the regular tramp, tramp of those giant wooden feet ; and there, at last, out rushes the stream at the other side of the building, all in a fume, as if it had been ground itself into so much snowy foam. On this other side, you see it cross, and join the main course of its river again. Proceeding now along the valley, with your back to the monastery, you pass through the groves of the orchard, watered by crossing runnels from the river, overlooked by the infirmary windows — a delightful spot for contemplative invalids. Then you enter the great meadow — what a busy scene in bay-making time, all the monks out there, helped by the additional hands of donaii and conductitii, and the country folk from all the region round about, — they have been working since sunrise, and will work till vespers ; when the belfry sounds for prayers at the fourth hour after sun rise, they will sing their psalms in the open air to save time, and doubtless dine there too — a monastic pic-nic. On one side of the meadow is a small lake, well stored with fish. See some of the brethren angling on its bank, where those osiers have been planted to preserve the margin ; and two others have put off in a boat and are throwing their net, with edifying talk at whiles perhaps, on the parallel simplicity of fish and sinners. 134 Mysticism in the Latin Church. [b. At the extremity of the meadow are two large farm-houses, one on each side the river ; you might mistake them for monasteries from their size and structure, but for the ploughs and yokes of oxen you see about. Mrs. Atherton. Thank you; so much for the place; and the man — his personal appearance — is anything known about that?' Atherton. You must imagine him somewhat above the middle height, very thin, with a clear, transparent, red-and- white complexion ; always retaining some colour on his hollow cheeks ; his hair light; his beard inclining to red — in his later years, mixed with white ; his whole aspect noble and persuasi^'e, and when he speaks under excitement losing every trace of physical feebleness in the lofty transformation of a benign enthusiasm." - Now I shall trouble you with some of my remarks, on his mysticism principally. You will conceive what a world of business he must have had upon his shoulders, even when at home at Clairvaux, and acting as simple abbot ; so much detail to attend to, — so many difficulties to smooth, and quarrels to settle, and people to advise, in connexion with his own numerous charge and throughout all the surrounding neighbourhood ; while to all this was added the care of so many infant monasteries, springing up at the rate of about four a year, in every part of Europe, founded on the pattern of Clairvaux, and looking to him for counsel and for men. I scarcely need remind you how struggling Christendom sent incessant monks and priests, couriers and men-at-arms, to knock and blow horn at the gate of Clairvaux Abbey ; for Bernard, and none but he, must come out and fight that audacious Abelard ; Bernard must decide between rival Popes, and cross the Alps time after time to quiet tossing Italy; Bernard alone is the hope of fugitive Pope and trembling 3 Vita, ii. cap. v. o. I.] Bernard at Clairvaux. 135 Church ; he only can win back turbulent nobles, alienated people, recreant priests, when Arnold of Brescia is in arms at Rome, and when Catharists, Petrobrusians, Waldenses, and heretics of every shade, threaten the hierarchy on either side the Alps ; and at the preaching of Bernard the Christian world pours out to meet the disaster of a new crusade. GowER. And accomplishing a work like this with that ema- ciated, wretchedly dyspeptic frame of his ! — first of all exerting his extraordinary will to the utmost to unbuild his body ; and then putting forth the same self-control to make the ruins do the work of a sound structure. Atherton. Could we have seen him at home at Clairvaux, after one of those famous Italian journeys, no look or word would have betrayed a taint of spiritual pride, though every rank in church and state united to do him honour — though great cities would have made him almost by force their spiritual king — though the blessings of the people and the plaudits of the council followed the steps of the peacemaker — and though, in the belief of all, a dazzling chain of miracles had made his pathway glorious. ^Ve should have found him in the kitchen, rebuking by his example some monk who grumbled at having to wash the pots and pans ; on the hill-side, cutting his tale and bearing his burthen with the meanest novice ; or seen him oiling his own boots, as they say the arch-tempter did one day ; we should have interrupted him in the midst of his tender counsel to some distressed soul of his cloistered flock, or just as he had sat down to write a sermon on a passage in Canticles against the next church-festival.* But now to my notes. {^Atherton reads.) ■• See the account of his diet, and devil's visit to Bernard, ' ut ungeret of the feebleness and sickness conse- sandalia sua secundum consuetudi- quent on his austerities, by the same nam,' and relates the rebuke of the biographer (.Planus), Vita, ii, cap. x., proud monk who would not wash the in the Paris reprint of 1839, from the scuiellm in the kitchen. — Vita, iv. Benedictine edition of Bernard, tom.ii. p. 2508. p. 2426. John -Eremita describes the 136 Mysticism in the Latin Chitrch. In considering the religious position of Bernard, I find it not at all remarkable that he should have been a mystic, — very remarkable that he should not have been much more the mystic than he was. This moderation may be attributed partly to his constant habit of searching the Scriptures — studying them devotionally for himself, unencumbered with the commentaries reverenced by tradition/ Rigid exemplar and zealous propa- gator of monasticism as he was, these hours with the Bible proved a corrective not unblessed, and imparted even to the devotion of the cloister a healthier tone. Add to this his ex- cellent natural judgment, and the combination, in his case, of the active with the contemplative life. He knew the world and men ; he stood with his fellows in the breach, and the shock of conflict spoiled him for a dreamer. The distractions over which- he expended so much complaint were his best friends. They were a hindrance in the way to the monastic ideal of virtue — a help toward the Christian. They prevented his attaining that pitch of uselessness to which the conventual life aspires, and brought him down a little nearer to the meaner level of apostolic labour. They made him the worse monk, and by so much the better man. With Bernard the monastic life is the one thing needful. He began life by drawing after him into the convent all his kindred ; sweeping them one by one from the high seas of the world with the irresistible vortex of his own religious fervour. His incessant cry for Europe is — Better monasteries, and more of them. Let these ecclesiastical castles multiply ; let them cover and command the land, well garrisoned with men of God, and then, despite all heresy and .schism, theocracy will flourish, the earth shall yield her increase, and all people praise the Lord. Who so wise as Bernard to win souls for Christ — that is to say, recruits for the cloister? With what ^ Vita, ii. cap. X. 32. -•• I ) Influences qualifying his Mysticism. I 3 7 eloquence he paints the raptures of contemiDlation, the vanity and sin of earthly ambition or of earthly love ! Wherever in his travels Bernard may have preached, there, presently, exultant monks must open wide their doors to admit new converts. Wherever he goes he bereaves mothers of their children, the aged of their last solace and last support ; praising those the most who leave most misery behind them. How sternly does he rebuke those Rachels who mourn and will not be comforted for children dead to them for ever ! What vitriol does he pour into the wounds when he asks if they will drag their son down to perdition with themselves by resisting the vocation of heaven ! whether it was not enough that they brought him forth sinful to a world of sin, and will they now, in their insane affection, cast him into the fires of hell?" Yet Bernard is not hard-hearted by nature. He can pity this disgraceful weakness of the flesh. He makes such amends as superstition may. I will be a father to him, he says. Alas ! cold comfort. You, their hearts will answer, whose flocks are countless, would nothing content you but our ewe lamb? Perhaps some cloister will be, for them too, the last resource of their desolation. They will fly for ease in their pain to the system which caused it. Bernard hopes so. So inhuman is the humanity of asceticism ; cruel its tender mercies ; thus does it depopulate the world of its best in order to improve it. To measure, then, the greatness of Bernard, let me clearly apprehend the main purpose of his life. It was even this convent-founding, convent-ruling business. This is his proper praise, that, though devoted body and soul, to a system so false, he himself should have retained and practised so much of truth. The task of history is a process of selection. The farther '■' Epp. ex., cxi. 138 Mysticism in the Latin Church. [b. we recede from a period, the more do we eliminate of what interests us no longer. A few leading events stand clearly out as characteristic of the time, and about them all our details are clustered. But when dealing with an individual, or with the private life of any age, the method must be reversed, and we must encumber ourselves again with all the cast-off baggage that strews the wayside of time's march. So with Bernard. The Abelard controversy, the schism, the quarrels of pope and emperor, the crusade, are seen by us — who know what happened aftervvards — in their true impor- tance. These facts make the epoch, and throw all else into shade. But we could not so have viewed them in the press and confusion of the times that saw them born. Bernard and his monks were not always thinking of Abelard or Anaclet, of Arnold of Brescia, Roger of Sicily, or Lothaire. In the great conflicts which these names recal to our minds, Bernard bore his manful part as a means to an end. Many a sleepless night must they have cost him, many a journey full of anxiety and hardship, many an agonizing prayer, on the eve of a crisis calling for all his skill and all his courage. But these were difficulties which he was summoned to encounter on his road to the great object of his life — the establishment of ecclesiastical supremacy by means of the conventual institute. The quarrels within the Church, and between the Church and the State, must be in some sort settled before his panacea could be applied to the sick body of the time. In the midst of such controversies a host of minor matters would demand his care, — to him of scarcely less moment, to us indifferent. There would be the drawing out of convent charters and convent rules, the securing of land, of money, of armed protection for the rapidly increasing family of monasteries ; election of abbots and of bishops ; guidance of the same in perplexity ; holding of synods and councils, with the business thereto c. I.] His Success. 139 pertaining ; delinquencies and spiritual distresses of indi- viduals ; jealous squabbles to be soothed between his Cis- tercian order and them of Clugny ; suppression of clerical luxury and repression of lay encroachment, &c. &c. Thus the year 11 18 would be memorable to Bernard and his monks, not so much because in it Gelasius ascended the chair of St. Peter, and the Emperor Henry gave him a rival, or even because then the order of Knights Templars took its rise, so much as from their joy and labour about the founding of two new monasteries, — because that year saw the establishment of the first daughter of Clairvaux, the Abbey of Fontaines, in the diocese of Chalons ; and of a sister, Fontenay, beside the Yonne ; — the one a growth northward, among the dull plains of Champagne, with their lazy streams and monotonous poplars ; the other a southern colony, among the luscious slopes of vine-clad Burgundy.' Bernard had his wish. He made Clairvaux the cynosure of all contemplative eyes. For any one who could exist at all as a monk, with any satisfaction to himself, that was the place above all others. Brother Godfrey, sent out to be first abbot of Fontenay, — as soon as he has set all things in order there, returns, only too gladly, from that rich and lovely region, to re-enter his old cell, to walk around, delightedly revisiting the well-remembered spots among the trees or by the waterside, marking how the fields and gardens have come on, and relating to the eager brethren (for even Bernard's monks have curiosity) all that befel him in his work. He would sooner be third prior at Clairvaux than abbot of Fontenay. So, too, with brother Humbert, commissioned in like manner to regulate Igny Abbey (fourth daughter of Clairvaux). He soon comes back, weary of the labour and sick for home, to look on the Aube once more, to hear the old mills go drumming and ' Chronologia liernardina, 0pp. lom. i. p. 83. 140 Mysticism in the Latin Church. [« droning, with that monotony of muffled sound — tlie associate of his pious reveries — often heard in his dreams when far away ; to set his feet on the very same flagstone in the choir where he used to stand, and to be happy. But Bernard, though away in Italy, toiling in the matter of the schism, gets to hear of his return, and finds time to send him across the Alps a letter of rebuke for this criminal self-pleasing, whose terrible sharpness must have darkened the poor man's meditations for many a day.' Bernard had farther the satisfaction of improving and ex- tending monasticism to the utmost ; of sewing together, with tolerable success, the rended vesture of the papacy ; of sup- pressing a more popular and more scriptural Christianity, for the benefit of his despotic order; of quenching for a time, fey the extinction of Abelard, the spirit of free inquiry ; and of seeing his ascetic and superhuman ideal of religion every- where accepted as the genuine type of Christian virtue. At the same time the principles advocated by Bernard were deprived, in his hands, of their most noxious elements. His sincere piety, his large heart, his excellent judgment, always qualify, and seem sometimes to redeem, his errors. But the well-earned glory and the influence of a name achieved by an ardour and a toil almost passing human measure, were thrown into the wrong scale. The mischiefs latent in the teaching of Bernard become ruinously apparent in those who entered into his labours. His successes proved eventually the disasters of Christendom. One of the best of men made plain the way for some of the worst. Bernard, while a covert for the fugitive pontiff, hunted out by insurgent people or by wrathful emperor, would yet impose some rational limitations on the papal autho- rity.' But the chair upheld by Bernard was to be filled by an Innocent III., whose merciless arrogance should know no 8 Rpist. cxli. 3 De Connderatione, IV. iii. 7, and II. vi. 11. pp. 1028 and 1060. ■1 Undue Limitation of Reason. 141 hounds. Bernard pleaded nobly for the jews, decimated in the crusading fury.'" Yet the atrocities of Dominic were but the enkindling of fuel which Bernard had amassed. Disciple of tradition as he was, he would allow the intellect its range ; zealous as he might be for monastic rule, the spontaneous inner life of devotion was with him the end — all else the means. Kre long, the end was completely forgotten in the means. In succeeding centuries, the Church of Rome retained what life it could li)- repeating incessantly the remedy of Bernard. As corruption grew flagrant, new orders were devised. Bernard saw not, nor those who followed in his steps, that the evil lay, not in the defect or abuse of vows and rules, but in the introduction of vows and rules at all, — that these unnatural restraints must always produce unnatural excesses. What is true concerning the kind of religious impulse im- parted to Europe by the great endeavour of Bernard's life is no less so as regards the character of his mysticism. In the theology of Bernard reason has a place, but not the right one. His error in this respect is the primary source of that mystical bias so conspicuous in his religious teaching. Like Anselm, he bids you beHeve first, and understand, if pos- sible, afterwards. He is not prepared to admit the great truth that if Reason yields to Faith, and assigns itself anywhere a limit, it must be on grounds satisfactory to Reason. To any measure of Anselm's remarkable speculative ability, Bernard could lay no claim. He was at home only in the province of practical religion. But to enquiries and reasonings such as those in which Anselm delighted, he was ready to award, not blame, but admiration. Faith, with Bernard, receives the treasure of divine truth, as it were, wrapped up {invohdnm) ; Understanding may afterwards cautiously unfold the envelope, and peep at the prize, but may never examine the contents first, '" Eflst. ccclxv. to the Archbishop of Mayence, against the fanatic Rudolph, t42 Mysticism in the Latin Church. [b. v. to determine whether it shall be received or not." If the chase be so dear to that mighty hunter, Intellect, he shall have his sport, on certain conditions. Let him admit that the Church has caught and killed the quarry of truth, and brought it to his door. That granted, he may, if he will, cry boot and saddle, ride out to see where the game broke cover, or gallop with hounds, and halloo over hill and dale, pursuing an imagi- nary object, and learning how truth might have been run down. Great, accordingly, was Bernard's horror when he beheld Abelard throwing open to discussion the dogmas of the Church ; when he saw the alacrity with which such questions were taken up all over France, and learnt that not the scholars of Paris merely, but an ignorant and stripling laity were discussing every day, at street corners, in hall, in cottage, the mysteries ot the Trinity and the Immaculate Conception. Faith, he cried, believes ; does not discuss ; Abelard holds God in suspicion, and will not believe even Him without reason given." At the same time, the C7-edo ut intelligam of Bernard is no indolent or constrained reception of a formula. Faith is the divine persua- sion of the pure in heart and life. Bernard would grant that different minds will apprehend the same truth in difterent aspects ; that an absolute uniformity is impossible. But when faith is made to depend so entirely on the state of the heart, such concessions are soon withdrawn. A difference in opinion from the acknowledged standard of piety is regarded as a sure sign of a depraved heart. A divine illumination as to doctrine " He tlius distinguishes Faith, non magis quam intellectus, habet Intellection, and Opinion : — Fides est tamen involucrum, quod non intel- vohintaria qucedani et certaprEelibatio lectus Nil autem malumus necdum propalata; veritatis. Intel- scire, quam quaj fide jam scimus. lectus e.^t rei cujuscnnique invisibilis Nil supcrerit ad beatitudincm, cum certa et manifesta notitia. Opinio est quae jam certa sunt nobis, erunt ceque quasi pro vero habere aUquid ; quod etnuda. — De Considcratione, V. 4, p. falsum esse nescias Quid 1075. igitur distat (fides) ab intellectu ? 1- See Note, p. 149. Nempe quod cisi non habet incertura c. I.] Contemplative Abstraction. 143 is assumed for those whose practical holiness caused them to shine as lights in the Church." Thus, on the elementary question of faith, the m} stical tendency of Bernard is apparent; the subjective and even the merely emotional element assumes undue prominence ; and a way is opened for the error incident to all mysticism — the unwarrantable identification of our own thoughts with the mind of God. But if, in his starting-point, Bernard be a mystic, much more so is he in the goal he strains every power to reach. The design of Christianity is, in his idea, not to sanctify and elevate all our powers, to raise us to our truest manhood, accomplishing in every excellence all our faculties both of mind and body, but to teach us to nullify our corporeal part, to seclude ourselves, by abstraction, from its demands, and to raise us, while on earth, to a super-human exaltation above the flesh, — a vision and a glory approaching that of the angelic state. Thus he commences his analysis of meditation by describing the felicity of angels. They have not to study the Creator in his works, slowly ascending by the media of sense. They behold all things in the Word — more perfect there, by far, than in themselves. Their knowledge is immediate — a direct intuition of the primal ideas of things in the mind of the Creator. To such measure of this immediate intuition as mortals may attain he exhorts the devout mind to aspire. They do well who piously employ their senses among the things of sense for the divine glory and the good of others. Happier yet are they who, with a true philosophy, survey and explore things visible, that they may rise through them to a knowledge of the Invisible. But most of all does he extol the state of those who, not by gradual stages of ascent, but by a sudden rapture, are elevated at times, like St. Paul, to the immediate vision of heavenly things. '3 See Note, p, 149. 144 Mysticism in the Latin Chiirc/i. [b. v. Such favoured ones are adepts in the third and highest species of meditation. Totally withdrawn into themselves, they are not only, like other good men, dead to the body and the world, and raised above the grosser hindrances of sense, but even beyond those images and similitudes drawn from visible objects which colour and obscure our ordinary conceptions of spiritual truths." But if, so far, Bernard betrays the mystic, in this ambition to transcend humanity and to anticipate the sight and fruition of the celestial state, let him have full credit for the moderation which preserved him from going farther. Compared with that of many subsequent mystics, the mysticism of Bernard is sobriety itself. From the practical vice of mysticism in his Church, — its tendency to supersede by extraordinary attain- ments the humbler and more arduous Christian virtues — Bernard was as free as any one could be in those times. Against the self-indulgence which would sacrifice every active external obligation to a life of contemplative sloth he protested all his days, by word and by example. He is equally removed from the pantheistic extreme of Eckart and the imaginative extravagances of St. Theresa. His doctrine of Union with God does not surrender our personality or substitute God for the soul in man. When he has occasion to speak, with inuch hesi- tation and genuine humility, of the highest point of his own experience, he has no wonderful visions to relate. The visit of the Saviour to his soul was unattended by visible glory, by voices, tastes, or odours ; it vindicated its reality only by the joy which possessed him, and the new facility with whicli he brought forth the practical fruits of the Spirit." He prays God for peace and joy and charity to all men, and leaves other exaltations of devotion to apostles and apostolic men,— 'the high hills to the harts and the climbing goats.' The fourth " See Note i, p. 150. '^ See Note 2, p. 150. I.] Mystical interpretation riDining riot. 145 and highest stage of love in his scale, — that transformation and utter self-loss in which we love ourselves only for the sake of God, he believes unattainable in this life, — certainly beyond his own roach. To the mystical death, self-annihilation, and holy indifference of the Quietists, he is altogether a stranger." It is worth while at least to skim and dip among his sermons on the Canticles. The Soiis:^ of Solomon is a trying book for a man like Bernard, and those expositions do contain much sad stuff, interspersed, however, with many fine reaches of thought and passages of consummate eloquence. Mystical interpretation runs riot. Everything is symbolized. Metaphors are elabo- rated into allegories, similitudes broken up into divers branches, and about each ramification a new set of fancies clustered. The sensuous imagery borrowed from love and wine — the kisses, bedchambers, and winecellars of the soul, remind us at every page of that luscious poetry in which the Persian Sufis are said to veil the aspirations of the spirit of man after its Maker. Yet, with all the faults of a taste so vicious there is no affecta- tion, no sentimentahty, nothing intentionally profane. It was with Bernard a duty and a delight to draw as much meaning as possible from the sacred text, by the aid of an inexhaustible fancy and an inventive ingenuity in that way, which only Swedenborg has surpassed. Even in his letters on compara- tively ordinary topics, he always gives a certain largeness to his subject by his lofty imaginative style of handling it. He seldom confines himself to the simple point in hand, but starts off to fetch for it adornments, illustrations, or sanctions from quarters the most remote, or heights the most awful. Always IS Sane in hoc gtadu (terlio) diu xv. and Epist. xi. 8. And, again, in statur : et nescio si a qnoquam homi- tfie same treatise (vii. 17),— Non enim numquartusinhac vita perfecte appre- sine praemio diligitur Deus, etsi absque henditur, ut se scilicet diligat homo prcemii intuitu diligendus sit tantum propter Deum. Asserant hoc Veras amor se ipso contentus est. si qui experti sunt: mihi, fateor, Habet prEemiuin, sed idquod amatur. impossibile videtui .— i?« diligendoDeo, VOL. I. ^ 1^1 6 Mysticism in the Latin Church. [b. v. in earnest, yet always the rhetorician, he seems to write as though viewing, not the subject itself, but some vast reflection of it projected on the sky. In those sermons on Solomon's So/ig, it is generally rather the glowing and unseemly diction, than the thought, we have to blame. With such allowance, it is not difficult to discern, under that luxuriance of flowers and weeds, many a sentiment true and dear to the Christian heart in every age. Bernard appears to have believed himself invested on some occasions with miraculous powers. So far he has a place in the province of theurgic mysticism. Perhaps the worst thing of this sort to be laid to his charge is his going so far as he did towards endorsing the prophecies of the Abbess Hildegard." ^7 See Note, p. 151. Note to page 131. The writings of Augustine handed Neo-Platonism down to posterity as the original and esoteric doctrine of the first followers of Plato. He enu- merates the causes which led, in his opinion, to the negative position assumed by the Academics, and to the concealment of their real opinions. He describes Plotinus as a resuscitated Plato. Contra Academ. iii. 17-20. He commends Porphyrj' for his measure of scepticism as regards Theurgy, and bestows more than due praise on the doctrine of Illumination held by Plotinus, for its similarity to the Christian truth concerning divine grace. De Civitate Dei, x. 10 ; x. 2. He gives a scale of the spiritual degrees of ascent to God, formed after the Platonist model (the iTava^a-tiioi of the Symposium) , and so furnished a pre- cedent for all the attempts of a similar kind in which scholastic mysticism delighted to exercise its ingenuity. De Quaniitate Animis, c. 35. He enumerates three kinds of perception,— corporeal, intellectual (s,ieiilia) and spiritual (sapientia) ; and in describing the last uses the words introrsum iiscendere (De Trin. xii. 15 ; and comp. De Lib. Arbil. ii. 12). But this phrase does not appear to have carried, with Augustine, the sense it bore when gladly adopted by mystical divines of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. He says elsewhere that man, like the prodigal, must come to himself before he can arise and go to his Father, [Retract, i. 8.) Here what the wanderer finds within is the voice of conscience, and in this sense it is quite true that the step inward is a step upward. But it is not true that the inmost is the highest in the sense that man is able by abstraction and introspection to discover within himself a light which shall supersede, or supplement, or even supply the place of external Revelation. Note to page 131. John Scotus Erigena. — This remarkable man began to teach in the 'School of the Palace,' under Charles the Bald, about the middle of the ninth yohn Scot us Erigena. 147 century. He translated Dionysius, took part in the Gottschalk controversy, and, at last, when persecuted for the freedom of his opinions, found a refuge with Alfred the Great. Erigena idolizes Dionysius and his commentator Maximus. He believes in their hierarchies, their divine Dark, and supreme Nothing. He declares, witli them, that God is the essence of all things. Ipse nanique omnium essentia est qui solus vere est, ut ait Dionysius Areopagita. Esse, inquit, omnium est Superesse Divinitatis. — De Div. Nat. i. 3, p. 443. (Jo. Scoti 0pp. Paris, 1853.) But though much of the langT-iage is retained, the doctrine of Dionysius has assumed a form altogether new in the brain of the Scotchman. The phraseology of the emanation theory is, henceforth, only metaphor. What men call creation is, with Erigena, a necessary and eternal self-unfolding [analysis, he calls it) of the divine nature. As all things are now God, self-unfolded, so, in the final restitution, all things will be resolved into God, self-withdrawn. Not the mind of man merely, as the Greek thought, but matter and all creatures will be reduced to their primordial causes, and God be manifested as all in all. De Div. Nat. i. 72. Postremo universalis creatura Creatori adunabitur, et erit in ipso et cum ipso unum. Kt hie est finis omnium visibihum et invisibilium, quoniam omnia visibilia in intelligibilia, et intelhgibiUa in ipsum Deum transibunt, mirabili et ineffabili adunalione, non autem, ut ssepe diximus, essentiarum aut substantiarum confusiont; aut interitu — v, 20, p. 894. In this restitution, the elect are united to God with a degree of intimacy peculiar to themselves — v. 39. The agent of this restoration, both for beings above and below mankind, is the Incarnate Word — V. 25, p. 913. Erigena regards our incarceration in the body, and the dir.- tinction of sex, as the consequence of sin. He abandons the idea of a sen- suous hell. What is termed the fire of hell is with him a principle of law to which both the good and evil are subject, \\hich wickedness assimilates and makes a torment ; goodness a blessing. So, he says, the light is grateful to the sound eye, painful to the diseased ; and the food which is welcome to health is loathed by sickness. De Predestinatione, cap. xvii. p. 428. This idea, in which there lies assuredly an element of truth, became a favourite one with the mystics, and re-appears in many varieties of mysticism. Eri- gena, farther, anticipates Kant in regarding time and space as mere modes of conception peculiar to our present state. He himself is much more ra- tionalist than mysdc (except in the fanciful interpretations of Scripture to which he is compelled to resort) ; but his system was developed, three cen- turies later, into an extreme and revolutionary mysticism. The combination of Platonism and Christianity, so often attempted, aban- doned, and renewed, assumes five distinct phases. I. In the East, with Dionysius ; dualistic, with real and ideal worlds apart, removing man far from God by an intervening chain of hierarchic emanations. II. In the West, with Scotus Erigena ; abandoning emanation for ever, and taking up instead the idea to which the Germans give the name of Immanence. God regarded more as the inner life and vital substratum of the universe, than as radiating it from a far-off point of abstraction. III. In the thirteenth century, at Paris, with Amalric of Bena and David of Dinant. They pronounce God the material, essential cause of all things, — not the efficient cause merely. The Platonic identification of the veile and the esse in God. David and his sect blend with their pantheism the doctrine that under the coming new dispensation— that of the Holy Ghost— all believers are to regard themselves as incarnations of God, and to dispense (as men filled with the Spirit) with all sacraments and external rites. They carry the spiritualizing L 2 148 Mysticism in the Latin Church. \}.. v. tendency of Erigena to a monstrous extreme, claim special revelation, declare the real resurrection accomplished in themselves, and that tliey are already in heaven, which they regard as a state and not a place. They maintain that the good are sufficiently rewarded and the bad adecpately punished by the blessed- ness or the privation they inwardly experience in time, — in short, that retribution is complete on this side the grave, and heavy woes, accordingly, will visit cor- rupt Christendom. The practical extravagance of this pantheism was repeated, in the fourteenth century, by fanatical mystics among the lower orders. IV. With Eckart, who reminds us of Plotinus. The ' Intuition' of Plo- tinus is Eckart's * Spark of the Soul, ' the power whereby we can transcend the sensible, the manifold, the temporal, and merge ourselves in the change- less One. At the height of this attainment, the mystic of Plotinus and the mystic of Eckart find the same God, — that is, the same blank abstraction, above being and above attributes. But with Plotinus such escape from finite consciousness is possible only in certain favoured intervals of ecstasy. Eckart, however (whose very pantheism is the exaggeration of a Christian truth beyond the range of Plotinus), will have man realize habitually his oneness with the Infinite. According to him, if a man by self-abandonment attains this con- sciousness, God has realized Himself within him— has brought forth his Son — has evolved his Spirit. Such a man's knowledge of God is God's knowledge of Himself. For all spirit is one. To distinguish between the divine ground of the soul and the Divinity is to disintegrate the indivisible Universal Spirit — is to be far from God — is to stand on the lower ground of finite misconception, within the limits of transitory Appearance. The true child of God ' breaks through' such distinction to the ' Oneness.' Thus, creation and redemption are resolved into a necessary process — the evolution and involution of Godhead. ■Vet this form of medicEval pantheism appears to advantage when we compare it with that of ancient or of modem times. The pantheism of the Greek took refuge in apathy from Fate. The pantheism of the present day is a plea for self-will. But that of Eckart is half redeemed by a sublime disinterestedness, a confiding abnegation of all choice or preference, which betrays the presence of a measure of Christian element altogether inconsistent with the basis of his philosophy. V. With Tauler and the ' German Theology.' This is the best, indisputably, of all the forms assumed by the combination in question. The Platonism is practically absorbed in the Christianity. Tauler speaks of the ideal existence of the soul in God — of the loss of our nameless Ground in the unknown Godhead, and we find language in the Theologia Germanica concerning God as the sub- stance of aij things — concerning the partial and the Perfect, the manifold and the One, which might be pantheistically construed. But such interpretation would be most unfair, and is contradicted by the whole tenour both of the ser- mons and the treatise. An apprehension of the nature of sin so searching and profound as that in the .'Theology,' is impossible to pantheism. Luther could see therein only most Christian theism. These mystics still employed some of the terms transmitted by a revered philosophy. Tauler cites with deference the names of Dionysius, Proclus, and Plotinus. This mysticism clothes its thought with fragments from the old philosopher's cloak — but the heart and body belong to the school of Christ. With Dionysius, and even with Erigena, man seems to need but a process of approximation to the divine subsistence— a rise in the scale of being by becoming guanti/ativefyrather than qualitatively more. With the German mystics he must be altogether unmade and born anew. To shift from one degree of illumination to another somewhat higher, is nothing in their ayes, for the need lies not in the understanding, but in heart and will. Ac- cording to them, man must stand virtually in heaven or hell — be God's or the c- I-] Bernard. I49 devil's. The Father of our spirits is not relegated from men by ecclesiastical or angelic functionaries, but nearer to every one, clerk or lay, gentle or simple, than he is to himself. So the exclusiveness and the frigid intellectualism so characteristic of the ancient ethnic philosophy, has vanished fronr'the Teutonic mysticism. Plato helps rather than iiarms by giving a vantage ground and defence to the more true and subjective, as opposed to a merely institutional Christianity. Both Eckart and the Theologia Gcrmaiiica would have man ' break through' and transcend 'distinction.' But it is true, with slight exception, that the distinctions Eckart would escape are natural ; those which the ' Theology' would surpass, for the most part artificial. Tlie asceticism of both is excessive. The self-reduction of Eckart is, however, more metaphysical than moral ; that of the ' Theology' moral essentially. Both would say, the soul of the regenerate man is one with God — cannot be separated from Him' But only Eckart would say, such soul is not distinct from God. Both would essay to pass from the Nature to the Being of God — from his manifested Existence to his Essence, and they both declare that our nature has its being in the divine. But such assertion, with Tauler and the Theolagia Germanicj, by no means deifies man. It is but the Platonic expression of a great Christian doctrine — the real Fatherhood of God. Note to page 142. Itaque tum per totam fere Galliam in civitatibus, vicis, et castellis, a scholaribus, non solum intra scholas, sed etiam triviatim ; nee a litteratis, aut provectis tantum, sed a pueris et simplicibus, aut certe stultis, de sancta Trinitate, quae Deus est, disputaretur, &c. — Epist. 337, and comp. Epist. 332. Bernard at first refused to encounter Abelard, not simply because from his m- experience in such combats he was little fitted to cope with that dialectic Goliath — a man of war from his youth — but because such discussions were in themselves, he thought, an indignity to the faith. — Epist. 189. Abelard he denounces as; wrong, not only in his heretical results, but in principle, — Cum ea ratione nititur explorare, quae pia mens fidei vivacitate apprehendit. Fides piorum credit, non discutit. Sed iste Deum habens suspectum, credere non vult, nisi quod prius ratione discusserit. — Epist. 338, Note to page 143. In the eyes both of Anselm and Bernard, to deny the reality of Ideas is to cut off our only escape from the gross region of sense. Neither iaith nor reason have then left them any basis of operation. We attain to truth only through the medium of Ideas, by virtue of our essential relationship to the Divine Source of Ideas — the Infinite Truth. That Supreme Truth which gives to existing things their reality is also the source of true thoughts in our minds. Thus our knowledge is an illumination dependent on the state of the heait towards God. On this principle all doubt must be criminal, and every heresy the offspring, not of a bewildered brain, but of a wicked heart. The fundamental maxim of the mediaeval religio-philosophy— Invisibilia non decipiunt, was fertile in delusions. It led men to reject, as untrustworthy, the testimony of sense and of experience. Thus, in the transubstantiation con- troversy of the ninth century, Realism and Superstition conquered together, It taught them to deduce all knowledge from certain mental abstractions, Platonic Ideas and Aristotelian Forms. Thus Bonaventura (who exhibits this tendency at its height) resolves all science into union with God. The successive attainment of various kinds of knowledge is, in his system, an approximation, stage above stage, to God— a scahngof theheights o Illumina- 1^0 Mysticism in the Latin Church. [«■ tion, as we are more closely united with the Divine Word — the repertory of Ideas. Thus, again, the Scriptures were studied by the schoolmen less as a practical guide for the present life than as so much material whence they might deduce metaphysical axioms and propositions— discover more of those divine abstractions which they regarded as the seminal principles of all thought and all existence. They were constantly mistaking results which could only have been attained by revelation or tradition from without, for truth evolved n'om within the depths of the finite mind, by virtue of its immediate commerce with the Infinite. Anselm found no difficulty in assuming that the God of his outological proof was identical with the God of the Bible. Note to pagk 144. Thus, speaking of the angelic state, he says, — Creatura coeli ilia est, prsesto habens per quod ista intueatur. Videt Verbum, et in Verbo facta per Verbum. Nee opus habet ex his quae facta sunt, factoris notitiam mendicare. — De Consid. V. i., and comp. Serin, in Cantica, v. 4. The three kinds of meditation, or stages of Christian proficiency, referred to in the text, Bernard calls consideratio dispcnsativa, aistimativa, SLUdspeculativa. The last is thus defined : — Speculativa est consideratio se in se colligens, et, quantum divinitus adjuvatur, rebus humanis eximens ad contemplandum Deum. He who reaches it is among the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven. At omnium maximus, qui spreto ipso usu rerum et sensuum, quantum quidem humanae fragilitati fas est, non ascensoriis gradibus, sed inopinatis excessibus, avolare interdum conlemplando ad ilia sublimia consuevit. Ad hoc ultimum genus illos pertinere reor excessus Pauli. Excessus non ascensus : nam rap- tum potius fuisse, quam ascendisse ipse se perhibet. — De Co?isid. v. ii. In one of the Serinons on the Canticles, Bernard discourses at more length on this kind of exaltation. Proinde ct ego non absurde sponsae exstasim vocaverim mortem, quae tamen non vita, sed vitse eripiat laqueis Excedente quippe anima, ctsi non vita certe vitse sensu, necesse est etiam ut nee vitae tentatis sentiatur. .... Utinam hac morte frequenter cadam. . . . Bona mors, quae vitam non aufert, sed transfer! in melius ; bona, qua non corpus cadit, sed anima sublevatur. Verum haec hominurn. est. Sed moriatur anima mea morte etiam si dici potest, Angelorum, utpresentium memoriaexcedens rerum se inferiorum corporearumque non modo H anguish hangs over the strife. But when grace grows stronger, and the soul's , eye clearer, and truth pervades and swallows up the kindling, aspiring nature, then comes holy calm, and love is all in all. Save God in the heart, nothing of self is left.' Looking through this and other metaphors as best we may, we discover that Contemplation has two provinces — a lower and a higher. The lower degree of contemplation, which ranks next above Meditation, is termed Speculation. It is distinct from Contemplation proper, in its strictest signification. The attribute of Meditation is Care. The brow is heavy with inquiring thought, for the darkness is mingled with the light. The attribute of Speculation is Admiration — Wonder. In it the soul ascends, as it were, a watch-tower (specula), and surveys everything earthly. On this stage stood the Preacher when he beheld the sorrow and the glory of the world, and pronounced all things human Vanity. To this elevation, whence he philo- sophizes concerning all finite things, man is raised by the faith, ^ Comp. Dc Sacramcitth, lib. v. p. of his works, Cologne, 1617.) X. c. 4(tom. iii. p. 411. Garzon sedition * See Liebner, p. 315. c. 2.] The Eye of Contemplation. 157 the feeling, and the ascetic practice of reUgion. Speculative illumination is the reward of devotion. But at the loftiest elevation man beholds all things in God. Contemplation, in its narrower and highest sense, is immediate intuition of the Infinite. The attribute of this stage is Blessedness. As a mystic, Hugo cannot be satisfied with that mediate and approximate apprehension of the Divine Nature which here on earth should amply satisfy all who listen to Scripture and to Reason. Augustine had told him of a certain spiritual sense, or eye of the soul. This he makes the organ of his mysticism. Admitting the incomprehensibility of the Supreme, yet chafing as he does at the limitations of our finite nature. Faith — which is here the natural resource of Reason — fails to content him. He leaps to the conclusion that there must be some immediate intuition of Deity by means of a separate faculty vouchsafed for the purpose. You have sometimes seen from a hill-side a valley, over the undulating floor of which there has been laid out a heavy mantle of mist. The spires of the churches rise above it — you seem to catch the glistening of a roof or of a vane — here and there a higher house, a little erninence, or some tree-tops, are seen, islanded in the white vapour, but the lower and connecting objects, the linking lines of the roads, the plan and foundation of the whole, are completely hidden. Hugo felt that, with all our culture, yea, with Aristotle to boot, revealed truth was seen by us somewhat thus imperfectly. No doubt certain great facts and truths stand out clear and prominent, but there is a great deal at their basis, connecting them, attached to them, which is impervious to our ordinary faculties. We are, in fact, so lamentably far from knowing all about them. Is there not some power of vision to be attained which may pierce these clouds, lay bare to us these relationships, nay, even more, be to us like the faculty conferred by Asmodeus, and render the very I 5 8 Mysticism in the Latin CJutrcJi. [b. roofs transparent, so that from topstone to foundation, within and without, we may gaze our fill ? And if to realize this wholly be too much for sinful creatures, yet may not the wise and good approach such vision, and attain as the meed of their faith, even here, a superhuman elevation, and in a glance at least at the Heavenly Truth unveiled, escape the trammels ot the finite ? Such probably was the spirit of the question which possessed, with a ceaseless importunity, the minds of men, ambitious alike to define with the schoolman and to gaze with the seer. Hugo answers that the eye of Contemplation — closed by sin, but opened more or less by grace — furnishes the power thus deside- rated/ But at this, his highest point, he grasps a shadow in- stead of the substance. Something within the mind is mistaken for a manifestation from without. A mental creation is sub- stituted for that Divine Existence which his rapture seems to . reveal. He asserts, however, that this Eye beholds what the eye of sense and the eye of reason cannot see, what is both within us and above us — God. Within us, he cries, is both what we must flee and whither we must flee. The highest and the inmost are, so far, identical.' Thus do the pure in heart see God. In such moments the soul is transported beyond sense and reason, to a state similar to that enjoyed by angelic natures^ The contemplative life is prefigured by the ark in the deluge. Without are waves, and the dove can find no rest. As the holy ship narrowed toward the summit, so doth this life of seclusion ascend from the manifold and changeful to the Divine Immutable Unity. The simplification of the soul he inculcates is somewhat analogous to the Haplosis of the Neo-Platonists. All sensuous ^ De Sacramentis, lib. i. p. i. cap. irradiet : et jam non per speculum in 12. — Quisquis sic ordinatus est, dignus !enigmate, sed in seipsa nt «rfveritatem est lumine soils : ut mente sursum agnoscat et sapiat. erecta et desiderio in superna defixo ^ See Note, p. 170. lumen summK veritatis contemplanti 2.] ScIiooIduxh and Mystic. 159 images are to be discarded ; we must concentrate ourselves upon the inmost source, the nude essence of our being. He is careful, accordingly, to guard against the delusions of the imagination.' He cautions his readers lest they mistake a mere visionary phantasm — some shape of imaginary glory, for a supernatural manifestation of the Divine Nature to the soul. His mysticism is intellectual, not sensuous. Too practical for a sentimental Quietism or any of its attendant effeminacies, and, at the same time, too orthodox to verge on pantheism, his mys- tical doctrine displays less than the usual proportion of extra- vagance, and the ardent eloquence of his ' Praise of Love' may find an echo in every Christian heart. Richard of St. Victor. Now, let us pass on to Richard of St. Victor. He was a native of Scotland, first the pupil and afterwards the successor of Hugo. Richard was a man whose fearless integrity and energetic character made themselves felt at St. Victor not less than the intellectual subtilty and flowing rhetoric which dis- tinguished his prelections. He had far more of the practical reformer in him than the quiet Hugo. Loud and indignant are his rebukes of the empty disputation of the mere schoolman, — of the avarice and ambition of the prelate. His soul is grieved that there should be men who blush more for a false quantity than for a sin, and stand more in awe of Priscian than of Christ.' Alas ! he exclaims, how many come to the cloister to s Tom. iii. p. 356. — In speaking of For an elaborate account of his entire the days of creation and of the ana- theology, the reader is referred to loiJ-ous seasons in the new creation Xlfib'ntr', Hugo von St. Victor und die within man, he says that as God first Thcologischen Richtungen seiner Zeit : saw the light, that it was good, and one of the best of the numerous mono- then divided it from the darkness, so graphs German scholarship has pro- we must first try the spirit and examine duced. our light with care, ere we part it from ' Richardi S. Victoris 0pp. (Lyons, what we call darkness, since Satan can 1534), De Preparation animi adcon- assume the garb of an angel of light. iemplationem, fol. 39. i6o Mysticism in the Latin Church. [e. v. seek Christ, and find lying in that sepulchre only the linen clothes of your formalism ! How many mask their cowardice under the name of love, and let every abuse run riot on the plea of peace ! How many others call their hatred of indi- viduals hatred of iniquity, and think to be righteous cheaply by mere outcry against other men's sins ! Complaints like these are not without their application nearer home." His zeal did not confine itself to words. In the year 1 162 he was made prior. Ervisius the abbot was a man of worldly spirit, though his reputation had been high when he entered on his office. He gradually relaxed all discipline, persecuted the God- fearing brethren, and favoured flatterers and spies ; he was a very Dives in sumptuousness, and the fair name of St. Victor suffered no small peril at his hands. The usual evils of broken monastic rule were doubtless there, though little is specified — canons going in and out, whither they would, without inquiry, accounts in confusion, sacristy neglected, weeds literally and spiritually growing in holy places, wine-bibbing and scandal carried on at a lamentable rate, sleepy lethargy and noisy brawl, the more shameful because unpunished. Ervisius was good at excuses, and of course good for nothing else. If complaints were made to him, it was always that cellarer, that pittanciar, or that refectorarius — never his fault. These abuses must soon draw attention from without. Richard and the better sort are glad. The pope writes to the king about the sad accounts he hears. Bishops bestir themselves. Orders come from Rome forbidding the abbot to take any step without the consent of the majority of the chapter. Richard's position is delicate, between his vow of obedience to his superior and the good of the con- vent. But he plays his part like a man. An archbishop is sent to St. Victor to hold a commission of inquiry. All is curiosity and bustle, alarm and hope among the canons, inuo- '" Ihid. cap. xli. c. 2.] Schoolman and Mystic. 1 6 1 cent and guilty. At last, Ervisius, after giving them much trouble, is induced to resign. They choose an able successor, harmony and order gradually return, and Richard, having seen the abbey prosperous once more, dies in the following year." In the writings of Richard, as compared with those of Hugo, I find that what belongs to the schoolman has received a more elaborate and complex development, while what belongs to the mystic has also attained an ampler and more prolific growth. All the art of the scholastic is there — the endless ramification and subdivision of minute distinctions ; all the intellectual for- tification of the time — the redoubts, ravelins, counterscarps, and bastions of dry, stern logic ; and among these, within their lines and at last above them all, is seen an almost oriental luxuriance of fancy and of rhetoric — palm and pomegranate, sycamore and cypress, solemn cedar shadows, the gloom in the abysses of the soul, — luscious fruit and fragrant flowers, the triumphs of its ecstasy, all blissful with the bloom and odours of the upper Paradise. He is a master alike in the serviceable science of self-scrutiny, and in the imaginary one of self-transcendence. His works afford a notable example of that fantastic use of Scripture prevalent throughout the Middle Age. His psycho- logy, his metaphysics, his theology, are all extracted from the most unlikely quarters in the Bible by allegorical interpretation. Every logical abstraction is attached to some personage oi object in the Old Testament history, as its authority and type. Rachel and Leah are Reason and Affection. Bilhah and Zilpah are Imagination and Sense. His divinity is embroidered on the garments of Aaron, engraven on the sides of the ark, hung on the pins and rings of the tabernacle. His definitions and his fancies build in the eaves of Solomon's temple, and make their ' pendent bed and procreant cradle' in the carved work of the holy place. To follow the thread of his rehgious philosophy, '^ Engelhardt, Richard von St. Victor, p. 6. VOL. I. M 1 62 Mysticism in the Latin Church. [e you have to pursue his agile and discursive thoughts, as the sparrow-hawk the sparrow, between the capitals, among the cedar rafters, over the gilded roof, from court to court, column to column, and sometimes after all the chase is vain, for they have escaped into the bosom of a cloud." On a basis similar to that of Hugo, Richard erects six stages of Contemplation. The two first grades fall within the province of Imagination ; the two next belong to Reason ; the two high- est to Intelligence. The objects of the first two are Sensibilia; of the second pair, Intelligibilia (truths concerning what is invisible, but accessible to reason) ; of the third, Intelkctibilia (unseen truth above reason). These, again, have their subdi- visions, into which we need not enter." Within the depths of thine own soul, he would say, thou wilt find a threefold heaven — the imaginational, the rational, and the intellectual. The third heaven is open only to the eye of Intelligence — that Eye whose vision is clarified by divine grace and by a holy life. This Eye enjoys the immediate discernment of unseen truth, as the eye of the body beholds sensible objects. His use of the word Intelligence is not always uniform. It would seem that this divinely-illumined eye of the mind is to search first into the deeps of our own nature {inferiora invisibilia nostra), and then '- See Note, p. 171. tion (Meditatw) ; that of Intelligence, '3 The six degrees of contemplation Contemplation (C()«to;;//rt/w). — Ibid. areas follows (ZJ^Co^z/CTKiC. i. 6, fol. 45): cap. 3. These three states are dis- 1 In imaginatione secundum so- tinguished with much care, and his lam imaginationem. definition of the last is as follows ; — 2 In imaginatione secundum ra- Contemplatio est perspicax- et liber tionem. animi contuitus in res perspiciendas 3 In ratione secundum imagina- undequaque diffusus. — Ibid. cap. 4. tionem. He draws the distinction between in- 4 In ratione secundum rationem. telligibiliaandintellectibilia in cap. 7 ; 5 Supra rationem sed non prseter the former = invisibilia ratione tanien rationem. comprehensibilia ; the latter = invisi- 6 Sup'-a rationem videtuv esse bilia et humanae rationi incompre- proeter rationem. hensibiha. The four lower kinds are The office of Imagination to which principally occupied, he adds, with the first two belong is Thought [Cogi- created objects, the two last with what iaiio) ; the office of Reason, Investiga- is uncreated and divine.— Fol, 45. c. 2.J Ecstasy. 163 upward into the heights of the divine (superiora invisibilia divind)}'' For the highest degrees of Contemplation penitence avails more than science ; sighs obtain what is impossible to reason. This exalted intuition begins on earth, and is consummated in heaven. Some, by divine assistance, reach it as the goal of long and arduous effort. Others await it, and are at times rapt away unawares into the heaven of heavens. Some good men have been ever unable to attain the highest stage ; few are fully winged with all the six pinions of Contemplation. In the ecstasy he describes, there is supposed to be adivic'ing asunder of the soul and the spirit as by the sword of the Spin: of God. The body sleeps, and the soul and all the visible world is shut away. The spirit is joined to the Lord, and one with Him, — transcends itself and all the limitations of human thought. In such a moment it is conscious of no division, of no change ; all contraries are absorbed, the part does not appear less than the whole, nor is the whole greater than a part ; the universal is seen as particular, the particular as universal ; we forget both all that is without and all that is within ourselves ; all is one and one is all ; and when the rapture is past the spirit returns from its trance with a dim and dizzy memory of unutterable glory." This account presents in some parts the very language in which Schelling and his disciples are accustomed to describe the privilege of Intellectual Intuition. Atherton. I move thanks to Gower. WiLLOUGHBY. Which I second. It has been strange enough to see our painter turn bookworm, and oscillating, for the last fortnight or more, between the forest sunset on his easel and Atherton's old black-letter copy of Richard of St. Victor. " See Note, p, 171. '° See Note, p, 172. M 2 1 64 Mysticism in the Latin Church. [«■ v. GowER. The change was very pleasant. As grateful, I should think, as the actual alternation such men as Hugo and Richard must have enjoyed when they betook themselves, after the lassi- tude that followed an ecstasy, to a scholastic argumentation ; or again refreshed themselves, after the dryness of that, by an ima- ginative flight into the region of allegory, or by some contem- plative reverie which carried them farenough beyond the confines of logic. The monastic fancy found this interchange symbolized in the upward and downward motion of the holy bell. Is it not in Longfellow's Golden Legend that a friar says — And the upward and downward motions show That we toucti upon matters high and low ; And the constant change and transmutation Of action and of contemplation ; Downward, the Scripture brought from on high, ^ Upward, exalted again to the sky ; Downward, the literal interpretation. Upward, the Vision and Mystery ! WrLLouGHBY. Much as a miracle-play must have been very refreshing after a public disputation, or as the most overwrought and most distinguished members of the legal profession are said to devour with most voracity every good novel they can catch. Atherton. It is remarkable to see the mystical interpreters of that day committing the two opposite mistakes, now of regarding wh.at is symbolical in Scripture as literal, and again of treating what is liferal as symbolical. GowF.R. Somewhat like the early travellers, who mistook the hybrid figures of the hieroglyphic sculptures they saw for repre- sentations of living animals existing somewhere up the country, and then, at other times, fancied they found some profound significance in a simple tradition or an ordinary usage dictated by the climate. WiLLOUGHBY. Yet there lies a great truth in the counsel they give us to rise above all sensuous images in our contem- plation of the Divine Nature. !.] The Truth at the root of Mysticism. 165 Atherton. No doubt. God is a spirit. The Infinite Mind must not be represented to our thought through the medium of any material image, as though in that we had all the truth. We must not confound the medium with the object. But the object is in fact inaccessible without a medium. The Divine Nature is resolved into a mere blank diffusion when regarded as apart from a Divine Character, ^\"e are practically without a God in the presence of such an abstraction. To enable us to realize personality and character there must be a medium, a representation, some analogy drawn from relationships or objects with which we are acquainted. The fault I find with these mystics is, that they encourage the imagination to run riot in provinces where it is not needed, and prohibit its exercise where it would render the greatest service. Orthodox as they were in their day, they yet attempt to gaze on the Divine Nature in its absoluteness and abstraction, apart from the manifestation of it to our intellect, our heart, and our imagination, which is made in the incarnate Christ Jesus. God has supplied them with this help to their apprehension of Him, but they hope by His help to dispense with it. They neglect the possible and practical in striving after a dazzling impossi- bility which allures their spiritual ambition. This is a natural consequence of that extravagance of spirituality which tells man that his highest aim is to escape from his human nature — not to work under the conditions of his finite being, but to violate and escape them as far as possible in quest of a superhuman eleva- tion. We poor mortals, as Schiller says, must have colour. The attempt to evade this law always ends in substituting the mind's creation for the mind's Creator. WiLLOUGHBY. I cannot say that I clearly understand what this much-extolled introspection of theirs is supposed to reveal to them. Atherton. Neither, very probably, did they. But though 1 66 Mysticism in the Latin Chicrch. [n- v. an exact localization may be impossible, I think we can say whereabout they are in their opinion on this point. Their posi- tion is intermediate. They stand between the truth which assigns to an internal witness and an external revelation their just relative position, and that extreme of error which would deny the need or possibility of any external revelation what- ever. They do not ignore either factor ; they unduly increase one of them. WiLLOUGHBY. Good. AMll you have the kindness first to give me the truth as you hold it ? Then we shall have the ierini?ms a quo. Atherton. There is what has been variously termed an ex- perimental or moral evidence for Christianity, which comes from within. If any one reverently searches the Scriptures, desiring sincerely to know and do the will of God as there revealed, he has the promise of Divine assistance. He will find, in the evil of his own heart, a reality answering to the statements of the Bible. He will find, in repentance and in faith, in growing love and hope, that very change taking place within which is described in the book without. His nature is being gradually brought into harmony with the truth there set forth. He has experienced the truth of the Saviour's words, ' If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God.' But in this experimental evidence there is nothing mystical. It does not at all supersede or infringe on the evidence of testi- mony, — the convincing argument from without, which may at first have made the man feel it his duty to study a book sup- ported by a claim so strong. Neither does he cease to use his reason, when looking within, any more than when listening to witness from without. In self-observation, if in any exercise, reason must be vigilant. Neither is such inward evidence a miraculous experience peculiar to himself. It is common to multitudes. It is open to all who will take the same course he 2.] The inner Light and the outer. 167 has done. He does not reach it by a faculty which transcends his human nature, and leaves in the distance every power which has been hitherto in such wholesome exercise. There is here no special revelation, distinct from and supplementary to the general. Such a privilege would render an appeal from himself to others impossible. It would entrench each Christian in his individuality apart from the rest. It would give to conscien- tious differences on minor points the authority of so many con- flicting inspirations. It would issue in the ultimate disintegra- tion of the Christian body. The error of the mystics we are now considering consists in an exaggeration of the truth concerning experimental evidence. They seem to say that the Spirit will manifest to the devout mind verities within itself which are, as it were, the essence and original of the truths which the Church without has been accus- tomed to teach ; so that, supposing a man to have rightly used the external revelation, and at a certain point to suspend all reference to it, and to be completely secluded from all external influences, there would then be manifest to him, in God, the Ideas themselves which have been developed in time into a Bible and a historical Christianity. The soul, on this Platonist principle, enjoys a commerce once more with the world of Intelligence in the depth of the Divine Nature. She recovers her wings. The obliterations on the tablet of Reminiscence are supplied. A theosophist like Paracelsus would declare that the whole universe is laid up potentially in the mind of man — the microcosm answering to the macrocosm. In a similar way these mystics would have us believe that there is in man a microdogma within, answering to the macrodogma of the Church without. Accordingly they deem it not difficult to discover a Christology in psychology, a Trinity in metaphysics. Hence, too, this erroneous assertion that if the heathen had only known themselves, they would have known God. l68 Mysticism in the Latin Church. [n-v. GowER. If some of our modem advocates of the theory of Insight be right, they ought to have succeeded in both. Atherton. That ' Know thyself was a precept which had its worth in the sense Socrates gave it. In the sense of Plotinus it was a delusion. Apphed to morals, — regarded as equivalent to a call to obey conscience, it might render service. And yet varying and imperfect consciences — conflicting inner laws, could give men as an inference no immutable and perfect Lawgiver. Understood as equivalent to saying that the mind is in itself an all-sufficient and infallible repertory of spiritual truth, history in every page refutes it. The monstrosities of idolatry, the dis- putes of philosophical schools, the aspirations among the best of the sages of antiquity after a divine teaching of some sort — all these facts are fatal to the notion. It is one thing to be able in some degree to appreciate the excellence of revealed truth, and quite another to be competent to discover it for ourselves. Lactantius was right when he exclaimed, as he surveyed the sad and wasteful follies of heathendom, O qiiam difficilis est igno- rant ibus Veritas, et quam facilis scientibus 1 WiLLouGHBY. I must Say I can scarcely conceive it possible to exclude from the mind every trace and result of what is external, and to gaze down into the depths of our simple self- consciousness as the mystic bids us do. It is like forming a moral estimate of a man exclusive of the slightest reference to his character. GowER. I think that as the result of such a process, we should find only what we bring. Assuredly this must con- tinually have been the case with our friends Hugo and Richard. The method reminds me of a trick I have heard of as sometimes played on the proprietor of a supposed coal-mine in which no coal could be found, with a view to induce him to continue his profitless speculation. Geologists, learned theoretical men, pro- test that there can be no coal on that estate — there is none in that part of England. But the /rff^r/Zca/ man puts some lumps c. 2.] Intellectual Intuition. 1 69 slyly in his pocket, goes down with them, and brings them up in triumph, as fresh from the depths of the earth. Atherton. Some German writ .'rs, even of the better sort have committed a similar mistake in their treatment of the life of Christ. First they set to work to construct the idea of Christ (out of the depths of their consciousness, I suppose), then they study and compare the gospels to find that idea realized. They think they have established the claim of Evangelists when they can show that they have found their idea developed in the biography they give us. As though the German mind could have had any idea of Christ at all within its profundities, but for the fishermen in the first instance. Cower. This said Eye of Intelligence appears to me a pure fiction. What am I to make of a faculty which is above, and independent of, memory, reason, feeHng, imagination, — without cognizance of those external influences (which at least contribute to make us what we are), and without organs, instruments, or means of any kind for doing any sort of work whatever ? Surely this complete and perpetual separation between intuition and everything else within and without us, is a most unphilosophical dichotomy of the mind of man. Atherton. Equally so, whether it be regarded as natural to man or as a supernatural gift. Our intuitions, however rapid, must rest on the belief of some fact, the recognition of some relationship or sense of fitness, which rests again on a judgment, right or wrong. WiLLouGHBY. And in such judgment the world without must have large share. GowER. For the existence of such a separate faculty as a spiritual gift we have only the word of Hugo and his brethren. The faith of Scripture, instead of being cut off from the other powers of the mind, is sustained by them, and strengthens as we exercise them. Atherton. President Edwards, in his Treatise on the Affec- 1 70 Mysticism in the Latin Church, [b. v. iions^ appears to me to approach the error of those mystics, in endeavouring to make it appear that regeneration imparts a new power, rather than a new disposition, to the mind. Such a doctrine cuts off the common ground between the individual Christian and other men. According to the Victorines it would seem to be the glory of Christianity that it enables man, at intervals at least, to denude himself of reason. To me its triumph appears to consist in this, that it makes him, for the first time, truly reasonable, who before acted unreasonably because of a perverted will. Note to page 158. The treatise by Hugo, entitled De Vauitate Miindi, is a dialogue between teacher and scholar, in which, after directing his pupil to survey the endless variety and vicissitude of life, after showing him the horrors of a shipwreck, the house of Dives, a marriage feast, the toils and disputes of the learned, the instructor bids him shelter himself from this sea of care in that ark of God, the religious hfe. He proceeds to describe that innei Eye, that oculus cordis, whose vision is so precious. ' Thou hast another eye,' he says (hb. i. p. 172), ' an eye within, far more piercing than the other thou speakest of, — one that beholds at once tiie past, the present, and the future ; which diffuses through all things the keen brightness of its vision ; which penetrates what is bidden, investigates what is impalpable ; which needs no foreign light wherewith to see, but gazes by a hght of its own, peculiar to itself (luce aliena ad videndum non indigens, sed sua ac propria luce prospiciens). Self- collect ion is opposed (p. 175) to distraction, or attachment to the mani- fold, — is declared to be restanraiio, and at the same time elevatio. The scholar inquires, ' If the heart of man be an ark or ship, how can man be said to enter into his own heart, or to navigate the universe with his heart ? Lastly, if God, whom you call the harbour, be above, what can you mean by such an unheard-of thing as a voyage which carries the ship upwards, and bears away the mariner out of himself?' The teacher replies, 'When we purpose elevating the eye of the mind to things invisible, we must avail ourselves of certain analogies drawn from the objects of sense. Accordingly, when, speaking of things spiritual and unseen, we say that anything is highest, we do not mean that it is at the top of the sky, but that it is the inmost of all things. To ascend to God, therefore, is to enter into ourselves, and not only so, but in our inmost self to transcend our- selves. {Ascendere ergo ad Deum hoc est intrare ad semet ipsum, et non solum ad se intrare, sed ineffabiU quodam modo in intimis etiam se ipsum transire, p. 176.) Hugo, like Richard, associates this illumination inseparably with the practices of devotion. The tree of Wisdom within is watered by Grace. It stands by Faith, and is rooted in God. As it flouri:;hes, we die to the world, we empty ourselves, we sigh over even the necessary use of anything earthly. Devotion makes it bud, constancy of penitence causes it to grow. Such penitence (com- punctio) he compares to digging in search of a treasure, or to find a spring. Sin c. 2.] MysticisDi in the Latin Church. 171 has concealed this hoard — buried this water-source down beneath tlie many evils of the heart. The watching and the prayer of the contrite spirit clears away what is earthly, and restores the divine gift. The spirit, inflamed with heavenly desire, soars upward — becomes, as it ascends, less gross, as a column of smolte is least dense towards its summit, till we are all spirit ; are lost to mortal ken, as the cloud melts into the air, and find a perfect peace within, in secret gazing on the face of the Lord. De Area morali, lib. iii. cap. 7. Note to page 162. See the introductory chapters of the Benjamin Minor, or De prep, anlin. ad contevip. fol. 34, &c. — Richard rates this kind of interpretation very highly, and looks for success therein to Divine Illumination, {De eruditioue interiorii hominis, cap. vi. fol. 25.) A passage or two from an appendix to his Treatise on Contemplation, may serve, once for all, as a specimen of his mystical inter- pretation. It is entitled Nonnull^ allegories tabeniaculi fcederis. ' By the tabernacle of the covenant understand the state of perfection. Where perfec- tion of the soul is, there is the indwelling of God. The nearer we approach per- fection, the more closely are we united with God. The tabernacle must have a court about it. Understand by this the discipline of the body ; by the taber- nacle itself, the discipline of the mind. The one is useless without the other. The court is open to the sky, and so the discipline of the body is accessible to all. What was within the tabernacle could not be seen by those without. None knov/s what is in the inner man save the spirit of man which is in him. The inner man is divided into rational and intellectual ; the former represented by the outer, the latter by the inner part of the tabernacle. We call that rational perception by which we discern what is within ourselves. We here apply the term intellectual perception to that faculty by which we are elevated to the survey of what is divine. Man goes out of the tabernacle into the court in the exercise of works. He enters the first tabernacle wlien he returns to himself. He enters the second when he transcends himself. Self-transcendence is elevation into Deity. {Transcendendo sane seipsum elevatur in Deum.) In the former, man is occupied with the consideration of himself ; in the latter, with the contemplation of God. * The ark of the covenant represents the grace of contemplation. The kinds of contemplation are six, each distinct from the rest. Two of them are exercised with regard to visible creatures, two are occupied with invisible, the two last with what is divine. The first four are represented in the ark, the two ethers are set forth in the figures of the cherubim. Mark the difference between the wood and the gold. There is the same difference between the objects of imagination and the objects of reason. By imagination we behold the forms of things visible, by ratiocination we investigate their causes. The three kinds of consideration which hav« reference to things, works, and morals, belong to the length, breadth, and height of the ark respectively. In the consideration of for7n and matter, our knowledge avails a full cubit. (It is equivalent to a cubit when complete.) But our knowledge of the nature of things is only partial. For this part, therefore, we reckon only half a cubit. Accordingly, the length of the ark is two cubits and a half.' .... And thus he proceeds concerning the crown, the rings, the staves, the mercy-seat, the cherubim, &c. — Fol. 63, &c. Note to page 163. I'he three heavens within the mind are described at length, [De Coniemp. hb. iii. cap. 8.) In the first are contained the images of aU things visible ; in the second lie the definitions and principles of things seen, the investigations made concerning things unseen ; in the third are contemplations of things 172 Mysticism in the Latin Church. [b. v. divine, beheld as they truly are — a sun that knows no going down,— and tbcrf-, and there alone, the kingdom of God within us in its glory. — Cap. x. fol 52. The eye of Intelhgence is thus defined (cap. ix.) : — InteUigentias siquidem oculus est sensus ille quo invisibilia videmus : non sicut oculo rationis quo occulta et absentia per investigationem quserimus et invenimus ; sicut r^epe caus IS per effectus, vel effectus per causas, et aha atque aha quocunque ratlo- cinandi modo comprehend! mus. Sedsicutcoq^orallacorporeosensuvideresolemus \ isibihlerpotentialiteret corporahter ; sicutique intellectualis ille sensus invisibilia capit invisibiliter quidem, sed potentialiter, sed essentialiter. {Fol. 52.) Me then goes on to speak of the veil drawn over this organ by sin, and admits that even when illuminated from above, its gaze upon our inner self is not .so piercing as to be able to discern the esse!7ce of the soul. The inner verities arc said to be within, the upper, beyond the veil. ' It may be queuioned, however, whcti er we are to see with this same eye of Intelligence the things beyond the veil, or whether we use one sense to behold the invisible things which are divine, and another to behold the invisible things of our own nature. But those who main- tain that there is one sense for the intuition of things above and another for those below, must prove it as well as they can. I believe that in this way they introduce much confusion into the use of this word Intelligence, — now extending its signification to a speculation which is occupied with what is above, and now confining it to what is below, and sometimes including both senses. This two- fold intuition of things above and things below, whether we call it, as it were, a double sense in one, or divide it, is yet the instrument of the same sense, or a twofold effect of the same instrument, and whichever we choose, there can be no objection to our saying that they both belong to the intellectual heaven.' There is certainly much of the confusion of which he complains in his own use of the word, — a confusion which is perhaps explained by supposing that he soinetimes allows Intelligence to extend its office below its proper province, though no other faculty can rise above the limits assigned to it. Intelhgence may sometimes survey from her altitude the more slow and laborious processes of reason, though she never descends to such toil. He dwells constantly on the importance of self-knowledge, self-simplification, self-concentration, as essential to the ascent of the soul. — De Contemp. lib, iii. c. 3, c. 6 ; and on the difficulty of this attainment, lib. iv. c. 6. Note to page 163. De Contemp. lib. iv. cap. 6, Ibid. cap. 23, and comp. lib. v. cap. i. Also iv. cap. 10. He calls it expressly a vision face to face : — Egressus autem quasi facie ad faciem intuetur, qui per mentis e.xcessus extra semeiipsum ductus summse sapientipe lumen sine aliquo involucre figurarum. ve adumbratione ; denique non per speculum et in enigmate, sed in simphci {ut sic dicam) veritatc contemplatur.— Fol. 56. See also lib. v. ccepp 4, 5, where he enters at large on the degrees and starting-points of self-transcendence. Comp. iv. c. 2, fol. 60. De Contemp. i. cap. 10, describes the six wings, and declares that in a future state we shall possess them all. Speaking of ecstasy, he says : — *Cum enim per mentis excessum supra sive intra nosmetipsos in divinorum contemplatior.em rapimur exleriorum omnium statim immo non solum eorum quae extra nos verum etiam eorum quse in nobis sunt omnium obliviscimur.' When explaining' the separation of soul and spirit, he exclaims, — ' O alta quies, O sublimis requies, ubi omnis quod humanitus moveri solet motum omnem amittit ; ubi omnis qui tunc est motus divinitus fit et in Deum trans't. Hie ille spiritus effiatus in manus patris commendatur, non (ut ille somniator Jacob) scala indiget ut ad tertium (ne dicam ad primum) caelum evolet. Quid quasso scala indigeat quern pater inter manus bajulat ut ad tertii coeli secreta rapiat intantum ut glorietur, et dicat, Dextera tua suscepit me Spiritus ab infimis dividitur ut ad c. 2.] Mysticism in the Latin Church. I'ji sunima sublimetur. Spiritus ab anima scinditur ut Domino uniatur. Qui enim adlireret Domino unus spiritus est. — De extermin. mali et promntione boni, cap. xviii. Again [De Cojitetnp. lib. iv. c. 4), In hacgemina speculatione nihil jinaginarium, nihil fantasticum debet occurrere. Longe enim omnem corpore^e siniilitudinis proprietatem excedit quicquid spectaculi tibi haec geminanovissimi operis specula proponit Ubi pars non est minor suo toto, nee totum universalius suo individuo ; immo ubi pars a toto non minuitur, totum e.\: partibus non constituitur ; quia simplex est quod universaliter proponitur et universale quod quasi particulare profertur ; ubi totum singula, ubi omnia unum et unum omnia. In his utique absque dubio succumbit humana ratio, et quid faciat ibi imaginatio? Absque dubio in ejusmodi spectaculo officere potest; adjuvare omnino non potest. Elsewhere he describes the state as one of rap- turous spiritual intoxication. Magnitudine jocunditatis et exultationis mens hominis a seipsa ahenatur, quum intima ilia interniE saavitatis abundantia potata, immo plene inebriata, quid sit, quid fuerit, penitus obllviscitur ; et in abalienationis excessum tripudii sui nimietate traducitur ; et in supermundanum quendam affectum sub quodam miras felicitatis statu raptim trans forma tur. — Ibid. lib. V. c. 5, fol. 60. BOOK THE SIXTH GERMAN MYSTICISM IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY CHAPTER I. I pray tbec, peace : I will be flesh and blood , For there was never yet philosopher, That could endure the toothaciie patiently ; However they have writ the st\le of gods, And made a pish at chance and sufferance. Much Adli auout Nothing. Tt is more healthful and nutritive to dig the earth, and to eat of her fruits, than to stare upon the greatest glories of the heavens, and live upon the beams of the sun : so unsatisfying a thing is rapture and transportation to the soul ; it often distracts the faculties, but seldom does advantage piety, and is full of danger in the greatest of its lustre. — ^Jeremy" Taylor. ' I 'HE approach of summer separated the members of the Ashfield circle for a time. Atherton purposed spending a few weeks in Germany; and Willoughby consented to accom- pany him. They were to visit once more Bonn, Heidelberg, and Frankfort, then to make Strasburg their head quarters, and thence to ramble about Alsace. As soon as Atherton had left them, Mrs. Atherton and Kate Merivale set out for the West of England, to visit their friends Mr. and Mrs. Lowestoffe. Gower projected a sketching excur- sion along the banks of the Wye. He knew the Lowestoffes, and gladly bound himself by the promise they exacted, that he would make Summerford House his home for a day or two now and then, in the course of his wanderings. The beauty of the grounds and neighbourhood would have rendered such visits eminently delightful, even had the hospitable host and hostess been less accomplished admirers of art, or had Gower found no irresistible attraction in one of their guests. The days at Summerford ghded by in the enjoyment of VOL. I. N 1 7 8 German Mysticism in the i \'^ Century. [u- vi. those innumerable minor satisfactions which, far more than highly pleasurable excitements, make up the happiness of exist- ence. If you doubt it, consult Abraham Tucker on the matter. To many persons, life at the Lowestoffes' would have been intolerably dull. There were few visitors. The family seldom emerged from their retirement to visit the neighbouring city. Their amusements and their occupations, though varied, were confined within limits which some would find lamentably narrow. Lowesloffe himself was an early man and a punctual. It cost him something to smile a courteous forgiveness when even a favourite guest transgressed any of the family regulations on which his comfort so much depended. His horses and dogs, his grounds and his flowers, everything about him and all dependent upon him, were methodically cared for, inspected, or commanded by himself in person. In one respect only was there irregularity, — no servant, labourer, or workman could be sure of any moment in which the master might not suddenly appear to see that all went rightly. Though scrupulously just, and of a generous nature, Lowestofte was only too subject to a nervous dread of being defrauded by those he employed, and used often to declare that men were ruined, not so much by what they spent themselves, as by what they allowed others to spend for them. In his early days he had contented himself with the mere necessaries of his position in life, to discharge the debts which he inherited. He would actually have gone into business (to the horror of his aristocratic friends, but with the applause of every impartial conscience), had there been no other way whereby to emancipate his property and honour. All declared he would have made a fortune if he had. A feAv years of self-denial, and a few more of frugality and industrious vigi- lance, realized the full accomplishment of his most cherished desire. His care and activity enabled him to deal very liberally whatever his confidence was at last bestowed, and to expend fc- i.j Snminer/ord. 179 in discriminating charity a large annual sum. He was a con- noisseur and a liberal patron of art, but no solicitation could induce him to purchase an old master. He knew well how skilfully imitations of antiquity are prepared, and had he bought a reputed Titian or Correggio, he would have fidgeted himself into a fever in a fortnight, by ruminating on the probabilities of deception. He spent his money far more wisely on choice pieces by living artisls. When the morning was over, the afternoon and evening found him a cheerful and fascinating companion. His cares were thrown off, and he was restless and anxious no longer about little things. Literature and art, even mere frolic, play with a child, or a game of any kind, were welcome. Gower whispered an antithesis one day, to the effect that Lowestofife gave one half the day to childish wisdom and the other to wise childishness. We have mentioned what was not to be found at Summer- ford. What the two sisters did find there was amply sufficient for enjoyment. There was a long avenue winding up to the house, so beset with ancient trees, that it seemed a passage through the heart of a wood. The lawn on which it opened was dotted with islands and rings of flower-bed, — perfect magic circles of horticulture, one all blue, another red, another yellow. There was the house itself, with its old-fashioned terraces, urns, and balustrades, and behind it — oh, joy — a rookery! A con- servatory shot out its transparent glittering wing on one side of the edifice. At the foot of a slope of grass descending from the flower-palace lay a pool, shut in by a mound and by fragments of rock overgrown with flowers, and arched above by trees. . On the surface spread the level leaves of the water-lilies, with the sparkHng bubbles here and there upon their edges, and every- where the shadowed water was alive with fish, that might be seen darting, like little ruddy flames, in and out among the arrowy sheaves of reeds. Then farther away there were old N 3 l8o German Mysticism in the \Ar Century. [»• n. irregular walks, richly furred with moss, wandering under trees through which the sunbeams shot, now making some glossy- evergreen far in among the stems and underwood shine with a startling brightness (so that the passer-by turned to see if there were not running water there, and fancied Undine had been at her tricks again), — now rendering translucent some plume of fern, now kindling some rugged edge of fir, and again glistening on some old tree-trunk, mailed with its circular plates of white lichen. These wood pathways — often broken into natural steps by the roots of the trees which ran across their course — led up a steep hill. From the summit were seen, in front, opposite heights, thickly covered with foliage, through which it was only here and there that a jutting point of rock could show itself to be reddened by the setting sun. Beneath, at a great depth, a shallow brook idled on its pebbles, and you looked down on the heads of those who crossed its rustic bridge. On the one hand, there stretched away to the horizon a gentle sweep of hills, crossed and re-crossed with hedgerows and speckled with trees and sheep, and, on the other, lay the sea, in the haze of a sultry day, seen like a grey tablet of marble veined with cloud-shadows. All this without doors, and books, pictures, prints, drawing, chess, chat, so choice and plentiful within, made Summerford ' a dainty place' — AUempred goodly well for health and for delight. Meanwhile Atherton in Germany was reviving old acquaint- anceships and forming new, studying the historic relics of old Strasburg under the shadow of its lofty minster, and relieving his research by rides and walks, now with student and now with professor. Early in August he and Willoughby returned to England, and repaired straightway to Summerford. There, accordingly, the mystical circuit was complete once more. In a day or two the discovery was made, through some mysterious hints dropped by Willoughby, that Atherton had brought home c. I.] Adolf and Hermaim. i3i a treasure from the Rhine. Cross-examination elicited the fact that the said treasure was a manuscript. Something to do with mysticism ? Partly so. Then we must hear it. Atherton consented without pretending reluctance. The document pur- ported to be his translation of a narrative discovered among the Strasburg archives, written by one Adolf Arnstein, an armourer of that city, — a personage who appears to have lived in the four- teenth century, and kept some record of what he saw and heard. So the manuscript was read at intervals, in short portions, sometimes to the little circle grouped on the grass under the trees, sometimes as they sat in the house, with open windows, to let in the evening song of the birds. Atherton commenced his first reading as follows : — The Chronicle of Adolf Arnstein of Strasburg. This book was begun in the year after the birth of our Lord, one thousand three hundred and twenty. Whosoever readeth this book, let him pray for the sold of Adolf Arnstein, a poor sinful man, ^vho wrote it. And to all who read tne same, or hear it read, fnay God grant everlasting life. Amen. 1320. September. St. Matthew's Day. — Three days ago I was surprised by a visit from Hermann of Fritzlar,' who has travelled hither from Hesse to hear Master Eckart preach. How he reminded me of what seem old times to me now — ay, old times, though I am but twenty this day — of the days when my ' The Heitigenteien of Hermann von Iiood, who, without entering into an Fritslar has been recently edited by order, spent the greater part of tlieir Franz Pfeififer, in his Aus^^ade der time in the exercises of religion, and of Deutschm Mystiker (Leipsig, 1845). their fortune on religious objects. Hermann says himself repeatedly that Though he could not write, he could he had caused his book to be written read, and his book is confessedly a {schreiben ttisse/i) and there is every compilation from many books and from reason to believe that he was, like Rul- the sermons and the sayings of learned man iVIerswin and Nicholas of Basle, and godly men. He says, Diz buch his contemporaries, a devout layman, ist zu sammene gelesen iizze vile ande- — one of a class among the laity cha- ren bucheren und itzze vile predigaten racteristic of that age and neighbour- und flzze vil XatKw.^-Vorrede. 1 82 German Mysticism in the 14''* Century. [b. vi. honoured father lived and I was a merry boy of fifteen, little thinking that I should so soon be left alone to play the man as I best might. Hermann is the cause of my writing this. We were talking together yesterday in this room, while the workmen were ham- mering in the yard below, and the great forge-bellows were groaning away as usual. I told him how I envied his wonder- ful memory. He replied by reminding me that I could write and he could not. ' Ah,' said I, ' but your mind is full of things worth writing down. You scarcely hear or read a legend, a hymn, or a godly sermon, but it is presently your own, and after it has lain working in your brain for some time, you produce it again, and say or sing it after a way you have, so that it is quite delightful to hear.' [The night before last I had taken him down into the work- shop, and told the men to stop their clatter for awhile, and hear something to do them good — none of your Latin mumbling, but a godly history in their mother-tongue. And then did my friend tell them the Legend of Saint Dorothea, with such a simple ten- derness that my rough fellows stood like statues till he had done. I saw a tear run down Hans' sooty face, making a white channel over his cheek. He would have it afterwards that some dust had blown into his eye.] ' My good friend,' said Hermann, ' I am a dozen years at least older than you; let me counsel you not to set light by your gift, and let it lie unused. Had I that same scrivening art at my service, I should write me a book setting iorth what I heard and observed while it was fresh in my mind. I know many good men who would hold such a book, written by a God-fearing man, as great treasure. They would keep it with care and hand it down to those who came after them, so that the writer thereof jhould be thought on when his hand was cold. I have it in my thoughts to dictate one day or other to some cunning scribe, c. I.] Btisiness and Heresy. 183 some of the legends I so love. Haply they may not be the worse for their passage through the mind of a plain man with a loving heart, who has carried them about with him whither- soever he went, lived in them and grown one with them. But you can do much more if you list. I know, moreover, that you, Adolf, are not the man to turn away from your father's old friends because the great ones despise and daily vex them.' This evening I do herewith begin to act on the resolution his words awakened. I am but a layman, and so is he, but for that matter I have hearkened to teachers who tell me that the lay- man may be nearer to heaven than the clerk, and that all such outer differences are of small account in the eye of God. My father was an armourer and president of the guild. All looked up to him as the most fearless and far-seeing of our counsellors. He taught us how to watch and to resist the en- croachments of the bishop and the nobles. We have to thank his wisdom mainly that our position has been not a little strengthened of late. Still, how much wrong have we often- times to suffer from the senate and their presidents ! Strasburg prospers — marvellously, considering the dreadful pestilence seven years back ; but there is much to amend, Heaven knows ! My father fell on a journey to Spires, in an affray with Von Otterbach and his black band. He could use well the weapons he made, and wounded Von Otterbach well nigh to the death before he was overpowered by numbers. The Rhenish League was strong enough, and for once bold enough, to avenge him well. That castle of Otterbach, which every traveller and merchant trembled to pass, stands now ruinous and empty. I, alas ! was away the while, on my apprentice-travels. The old evil is but little abated, though our union has, I doubt not, prevented many of the worst mischiefs of the fist-law. Every rock along the j Rhine is castled. They espy us approaching from far off, and 184 German Mysticism in the 14 Century. [e-vi. at every turn have we to wrangle, and now and then, if strong enough, to fight, with these vultures about their robber-toll. Right thankful am I that my father died a man's death, fight- ing — that I have not to imagine his fate as like that of some, who, falling alive into their hands, have been horribly tortured, and let down by a windlass, with dislocated limbs, into the loathsome dog-hole of a keep, to writhe and die by inches in putrid filth and darkness. Yet our very perils give to our calling an enterprise and an excitement it would otherwise lack. The merchant has his chivalry as well as, die knight. More- over, as rich old Gersdorf says, risk and profit run together — though, as to money, I have as much already as I care for. "We thrive, despite restrictions and extortions innumerable, legal and illegal. My brother Otto sends me word from Bohemia that he prospers. The Bohemian throats can never have enough of our wines, and we are good customers for their metal. Otto was always a rover. He talks of journeying to the East. It seems but testerday that he and I were boys together, taking our reading and writing lessons from that poor old Waldensian whom my father sheltered in our house. How we all loved him ! I never saw my father so troubled at anything as at his death. Our house has been ever since a refuge for such persecuted wanderers. The wrath of Popes, prelates, and inquisitors hath been espe- cially kindled of late years against sundry communities, sects, and residues of sects, which are known by the name of Beg- hards, Beguines, Lollards, Kathari, Fratricelli, Brethren of the Free Spirit,^ &c. Councils, they tell me, have been held at Cologne, Mayence, and Narbonne, to suppress the Beghards. ' Concerning these sects, see UU- origin ; details the various charges m2x\x\, Reformatoren vor der Reforma- brought against them, and gives tlie Hon, vol. ii. pp. i-iS. The fullest bulls and acis issued for theirsuppres- account is given of them in a masterly sion. See especially the circular ci I atin treatise by ^\oi\if:\m, De Beghar- John Ochsenstein, Bishop of Strasburg, dis et Begvinabus. He enters at length cap. iv, § xi. p. 255, nto the discussion of theirname and c. I.] The Beghards. 185 Yet their numerous communities in the Netherlands and the Rhineland are a blessing to the poor folk, to whom the hierarchy are a curse. The clergy are jealous of them. They live single, they work with their hands, they nurse the sick, they lay out the dead, they lead a well-ordered and godly life in their Be- guinasia, under the Magister or Magistra; but they are bound by no vows, fettered by no harassing minutise of austerity, and think the liberty of the Spirit better than monkish servitude. Some of them have fallen into the notions of those enthusiastic Franciscans who think the end of the world at hand, and that we live in, or near, the days of Antichrist. And no wonder, when the spiritual heads of Christendom are so unchristian. There are some sturdy beggars who wander about the country availing themselves of the name of Beghard to lead an idle life. These I excuse not. They say some of these Beghards claim the rank of apostles — that they have subterranean rooms, where both sexes meet to hear blasphemous preachers announce their equality with God. Yea, worse charges than these — even of grossest lewdness — do theybring. I know many of them, both here and at Cologne, but nothing of this sort have I seen, or credibly heard of. They are the enemies of clerical pomp and usurpation, and some, I fear, hold strange fantastical notions, coming I know not whence. But the churchmen themselves are at fault, and answerable for it all. Thpy leave the artisans and labourers in besotted ignorance, and when they do get a solitary religious idea that comes home ta them, ten to one but it presently confounds or overthrows what little sense they have. ■ Many deeply religious minds among us, both of laity and clergy, are at heart as indignant at the crimes of the hierarchy as can be the wildest mob-leading fanatic who here and there appears for a moment, haranguing the populace, denouncing the de. nouncers, and bidding men fight sin with sin. We who sigh for reform, who must have more spiritual freedom, have our 1 86 German Mysticism in tlie 14" Century. [: secret communications, our meetings now and then for counsel, our signs and counter-signs. Folks call the Rhineland the Parsons' Walk — so full is it of the clergy, so enjoyed and lorded over by them. Verily, it is at least as full of those hidden ones, who, in various wise which they call heresy, do worship God without man coming in between. The tide of the time is with us." Our once famous Godfrey !of Strasburg is forgotten. Wolfram von Eschenbach is the universal model. His Parzival and Titiirel live on the lips of : the many rhymesters and minstrels who wander from town to town now, as once they did from court to court and castle to castle. It is the religiousness and the learning of Wolfram that finds favour for him and countless imitators. This is the good sign I mean. Our singers have turned preachers. They are practical, after their fashion. They are a Book of Proverbs, and give us maxims, riddles, doctrines, science, in their verses. If they sing of chivalry, it is to satirize chivalry — such knight- hood as now we have. They are spreading and descending towards the people. Men may have their songs of chivalry in Spain, where, under the blessed St. lago, good knights and true have a real crusade against those heathen hounds the Moors, whom God confound. But here each petty lord in his castle has nothing to do but quarrel with his neighbour and oppress all weaker than himself What to such men, robbing, drinking, devouring their living with harlots, are Arthur and the Round Table, or Oliver and Roland ? So the singers come to us. In good sooth, the old virtues of knighthood — its truth and honour, its chastity and courage — are found far more among the citizens than with the nobles. We relish the sage precepts and quaint abstruseness of Reimar of Zweter, though 2 Authority for these statements con- der foetischen National-Literatur der cerning the literature of the period, Deutschen, part vi. 5§ i> 2, $. will be found in Gervinus, Geschichte c. I.] Troubles in Germany. 187 he be somewhat of a pedant. Albertus Magnus is the hero with him, instead of Charlemagne. His learning is a marvel. and he draws all morality by allegory out of the Seven Sciences in most wondrous wise. Frauenlob himself (alas ! I heard last year that he was dead) could not praise fair ladies more fairly. He assails, in the boldest fashion, the Pope and Rome, and their daughters Cologne and Mayence. The last time he was over here from Bohemia, we laughed nigh to bursting at his caricature of a tournament, and applauded till the rafters rang again when he said that not birth, but virtue, made true nobleness. Then our ballads and popular fables are full of satire on the vices of ecclesiastics. All this tends to keep men awake to the abuses of the day, and to deepen their desire for reform. We shall need all the strength we can gather, political and religious, if in the coming struggle the name of German is not to be a shame. Our Holy Father promises to indemnify himself for the humiliation he suffers at Avignon by heaping insults upon Germany. If Louis of Bavaria conquers Frederick, I should not wonder if we Strasburgers wake up some morning and find ourselves excommunicate. All true hearts must be stirring — we shall have cowards and sluggards enow on all hands. Last month the Emperor Louis was here with his army for a few days. Our bishop Ochsenstein and the Zorn family espouse the cause of his rival Frederick the Fair. Louis has on his side, however, the best of us — the family of the Miil- lenheim, the chief burghers, and the people generally. Every true German heart, every hater of foreign domination, must be with him. Many a skirmish has there been in our streets between the retainers of the two great houses of Zorn and Miillenheim, and now their enmity is even more bitter than heretofore. The senate received Louis with royal honours. When Frederick was here five years ago, we would only enter- 1 8 8 German Mysticism in the i \"' Century. [b. vi tain him as a guest. The clergy and most of the nobles hailed him as Emperor. Now, when Louis came, it was their turn to stand aloof. There were few of them in the cathedral the other day, when he graciously confirmed our privileges. The bishop issued orders to put a stop to the performance of all church offices while Louis was here ; whereupon, either from prudence or consideration for our souls, he shortened his visit.' 1320. September. St. Maurices Day. — A long conversation with Hermann to-day. He has heard Eckart repeatedly, and, as I looked for, is both startled and perplexed. Of a truth it is small marvel that such preaching as his stirred up all Cologne, gathered crowds of wondering hearers, made him fast friends and deadly enemies, and roused the wrath of the heretic-hunting archbishop. Hermann brought me home some of the things this famous doctor said which most struck him. I wrote them down from his lips, and place them here. ' He who is at all times alone is worthy of God. He who is at all times at home, to him is God present. He who standeth at all times in a present Now, in him doth God the Father bring forth his son without ceasing.' ' He who finds one thing otherwise than another — to whom God is dearer in one thing than another, that man is carnal, and still afar off and a child. But he to whom God is ahke in all things hath become a man.' ■* Johannes Taulcr von Strashcrg, ^ Meister Eghart spracli : vnt wem by Dr. Carl Schmidt, pp. 8-10; and La- in einem anders ist denne in dcm guille's Hisfoire d' Alsace, liv. xxiv. andern, vnt dem got lieber ist in eime » Meister Eghart spricht : wer alia denne in dem andern, der mensche ist cit aliein ist, der ist gottes wirdige ; vnt grobe, vnt noclr verre vnt ein kint. wer alliu cit do heimenen ist, demist Aber dem got gelich ist in alien, der ist got gegenwiirtig ; vnt wer alliu cit stat ce man worden. — Ibid. in einem gegenwiirtigen nu, in dem Both this saying and the foregoing gebirt got der vatter sinen sune an are e.xpressions for that total indiffer^ vnderlas. — Sprilche Dculscher Mysti- ence and self-abandonment so strenu- Xrirr, inWackernagers^/Wca/j