Chapter IV…

Chapter IV

Stargaze. ’Tis drawn, I assure you, from the aphorisms of the old Chaldeans, Zoroaster the first and greatest magician; Mercurius Trismegistus, the later Ptolemy, and the everlasting prognosticator, old Erra Pater.—MASSINGER.

WILLOUGHBY. We have 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 off the stage, that is some comfort for you, Miss Merivale. Magic is less wearisome than metaphysics.

ATHERTON. The change is marked, indeed. Plotinus, wrapt in 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. With a temperament 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 securing 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 vanquished. He commenced an assault on Christianity without, and he endeavoured to check the progress of superstitious usage within the pale of Paganism. But Christianity could not be repulsed, and heathendom would not be reformed. In vain did he attempt to substitute a single philosophical religion which should be universal, for the manifold and popular Polytheism of the day. Christian truth repelled his attack on the one side, and idolatrous superstition carried his defences on the other.

WILLOUGHBY. 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. They were the unaccredited champions of Paganism, for they sought to refine while they conserved it. They defended it, not as zealots, but as men of letters.[26] 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 disputed, 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 worshipped Plato.

MRS. ATHERTON. 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 revelation to give them a religion, but to give them one which shall be altogether true. These Neo-Platonists were confronted by a religion intolerant of all others. They attempted, by keeping 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 cardinal 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 swarm 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 ought to worship; the question is, Whom? and How?

WILLOUGHBY. 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 abandoned 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 philosophical.

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——

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 Romanorum, 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 deformity 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 temperament 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.[27]

GOWER. 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,—dæmons, whom men worshipped by the title of Artemis and other names, falsely attributing their cruelty to the calm and guiltless gods, 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 upward 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 they 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 with 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 beating 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 satire on the too common indifference of men to the spiritual realities 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 extravagances, their incongruous combinations, their frequent want of grace and symmetry.

ATHERTON. So can I, when 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?

ATHERTON. I think Willoughby will agree with me that it is high time that we should go back to our theurgic mysticism and Iamblichus. 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 happiness, 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 (ὄργανον τοῖς ἐπιπνέουσι θεοῖς.) Men of this order do not employ, in the elevation they experience, the waking senses as do others (οὔτε κατ᾽ αἴσθησιν ἐνεργοῦσιν οὔτε ἐγρηγόρασι). 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 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, Dæmons, Heroes or Demi-gods, and Souls. You will naturally be desirous to learn how the apparition of a God or a Dæmon is distinguished from those of Angels, Principalities, 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 (μονοειδῆ), those of Dæmons various (ποικίλα). 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 contain. Archangels are at once awful and mild; Angels yet more gracious; Dæmons terrible. Below the four leading classes I have mentioned are placed the malignant Dæmons, the Anti-gods (ἀντιθέους).

Each spiritual order has gifts of its own to bestow on the 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. Dæmons, 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 (ὑλικά), 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 descending chain, each species on that immediately above it. Good Dæmons are seen surrounded by the emblems of blessing, Dæmons who execute judgment appear with the instruments of punishment.

There is nothing unworthy of belief 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 contains in itself the principles of all that happens, should, in this its state of liberation, 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 foreknowledge of the Gods.

Recorded examples of this are numerous and well authenticated; instances occur, too, every day. Numbers of sick, by sleeping in the temple of Æsculapius, have had their cure revealed 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 Lysander? 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 you 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.[28] 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 influences, makes it look very likely.

ATHERTON. Observe how completely the theurgic element, with Iamblichus, supersedes the theosophic. In the process of time the philosophical principles on which the system of Plotinus rested are virtually surrendered, little by little, while divination and evocations are practised with increasing credulity, and made the foundation of the most arrogant pretensions. Plotinus declared the possibility of an absolute identification of the divine with the human nature. Here was the broadest basis for mysticism possible. Porphyry retired from this position, took up narrower ground, and qualified the great mystical principle of his master. He contended that in the union which takes place in ecstasy, we still retain the consciousness of personality. Iamblichus, 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.[29]

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.

ATHERTON. 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 speculation, 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.

WILLOUGHBY. And so the intellectual ambition and the poetical spirit, so lofty in Plotinus, subside, among the followers of Iamblichus, 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 populace of degenerate Naples less with the reverence due to the poet than with the awe which arises from the legendary repute of the mediæval magician.

ATHERTON. So the idealism of strong minds becomes superstition 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 elaborated the trinity of Plotinus into a succession of impalpable Triads, and surpassed Iamblichus in his devotion to the practice of theurgy. Proclus was content to develop the school in that direction which Iamblichus—(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 inspired as by the nectar of Olympus. He teaches philosophy as the best preparation for Quietism. For the scientific enquirer, 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.

WILLOUGHBY. 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 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 contemplation, 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 æther above, dazzling and void, at which to look up with smiles of witless wonder.

Note to page 103.

Iamblichus, de Mysteriis, sect. x. cc. 1, 4, 6; iii. 4, 8, 6, 24; i. 5, 6; ii. 3; iii. 31; ii. 4, 6, 7; iii. 1, 3. These passages, in the order given, will be found to correspond with the opinions expressed in the letter as those of Iamblichus.

The genuineness of the treatise De Mysteriis has been called in question, but its antiquity is undoubted. It differs only in one or two very trivial statements from the doctrines of Iamblichus as ascertained from other sources, and is admitted by all to be the production, if not of Iamblichus himself, of one of his disciples, probably writing under his direction. Jules Simon, 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 displays that sceptical disposition, especially concerning the pretensions of Theurgy, which so much scandalized Iamblichus. The De Mysteriis is an elaborate reply to that epistle, under the name of Abammon.

In several passages of the De Mysteriis (ii. 11; v. 1, 2, 3, 7; vi. 6) Iamblichus 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 Anebon. 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.

Iamblichus 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.

Footnote 26:

J. Simon, i. 154; ii. 173.

Footnote 27:

J. Simon, liv. iii. chap. 4.

Footnote 28:

See Note, p. 106.

Footnote 29:

Jules Simon, ii. 218.

BOOK THE FOURTH MYSTICISM IN THE GREEK CHURCH

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Chapter I

Questi ordini di su tutti s’ammirano E di giù vincon si che verso Iddio Tutti tirati sono e tutti tirano. E Dionisio con tanto disio A contemplar questi ordini si mise, Che li nomò e distinse com’ io.[30]

DANTE.

KATE. I have been looking at the pictures in Mrs. Jameson’s Sacred and Legendary 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.

ATHERTON. Yet they claimed powers as much above humanity 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 mediæval 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.[31]

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 dæmon of sensuality. In his life, by Athanasius, there is a full account of his battle with many dæmons 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 principle 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. This, he was given to understand, was the rise and fall of 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 Nitria in 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 construction Poiret and others would give them. He was at least innocent of the sainte indifférence.[32]

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 middle of the fifth century, probably somewhat later. So all I can tell you is, that somewhere or other (it is not unlikely 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 Constantinople 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 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 all-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.[33]

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 represented 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 ascetic virtues of the cloister.

Footnote 30:

All these orders gaze admiring upward, and exert an influence downward (each on that immediately beneath it), so that they all together reciprocally draw and are drawn toward God. Dionysius gave himself with such zeal to the contemplation of them that he named and distinguished them as I have done.

Footnote 31:

Athanasii Opp. Vita S. Antonii. The vision alluded to is related p. 498.

Footnote 32:

Poiret, Bibliotheca Mysticorum, p. 95. Macarius gives great prominence to the doctrine of Union—describes the streaming in of the Hypostatic Light—how the spiritual nature is all-pervaded by the glory, and even the body is not so gross as to be impenetrable by the divine radiance. Some centuries later we find the monks of Mount Athos professing to discern this supernatural effulgence illuminating their stomachs. Gass, Die Mystik des N. Cabasilas, p. 56.

Footnote 33:

In the year 533 the books of Dionysius were cited by the Severians, and their genuineness called in question by the bishop because neither Athanasius nor Cyril had made any allusion to them. Acta Concil. Hard. ii. p. 1159.

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Chapter II

They that pretend to these heights call them the secrets of the kingdom; but they are such which no man can describe; such which God hath not revealed 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 shall ever be called to account.—JEREMY TAYLOR.

‘I 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.[34]

(1.) 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 antithesis of this is the centripetal process, or movement of involution, 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 correspond 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 immediately above itself, from which it receives the transmitted influence; 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 background 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 such, he is removed from men by 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 mystically represented by the three sacraments,—Baptism, the Eucharist, and Unction. The Church is the great Mystagogue: 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 lies 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 Negativa (or Apophatica) and the Via Affirmativa (or Cataphatica) constitute 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, 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 sculptor, who strikes off fragment after fragment of the marble, and progresses by diminution.

(4.) Our highest knowledge of God, therefore, is said to consist in mystic ignorance. In omni-nescience we approach Omniscience. This Path of Negation is the highway of mysticism. It is by refraining from any exercise of the intellect or of the imagination—by self-simplification, by withdrawal 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 supposed to gaze directly on the Divine Essence in heaven. His disciple is perpetually exhorted to aspire to this climax of abstraction—above sight, and thought, and feeling, as to the highest aim of man.

WILLOUGHBY. 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 off 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 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 refining 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 which nothing can be predicated, nothing can be expected. The figment above being is above benignity. So the objects of invocation are gods, demi-gods, dæmons, 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.[35]

MRS. ATHERTON. 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 philosophy into the theological structure of that day, like Winter into the cathedral of the woods (which an autumn of decline has begun to harm already);—what life yet lingers, he takes away,—he untwines the garlands from the pillars of the trees, extinguishes the many twinkling 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 scriptural 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.[36] 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 expected—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 pages 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 manifestly 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 somewhere, seem to affirm, 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 had lain, perhaps 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 minutiæ of the ecclesiastical apparatus and the sacerdotal etiquette. What 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 mediæval 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 verbenæ that grew within the enclosure of the Capitoline by the Feciales of Rome.

MRS. ATHERTON. ‘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.

WILLOUGHBY. Or he may at once boldly put in the plea of 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 Dionysius, or St. 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 mare tenebrosum of the cloister, had to pass a term of years in the mazy arborescence of his verbiage,—like so many insects within their cells in the branches of a great coral.[37]

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. You 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 God, in which, at starting, all moral qualities are removed from him; so that the testimony of conscience cannot count for anything;—the inward directory is sealed; the clue burnt. Truly the world by wisdom knew not God!

WILLOUGHBY. This unquestionably is the fatal error of Greek speculation—the subordination of morals to the intellectual refinements 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 mediæval 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, without a business—temperance, without passions? Such insignificant things as moral actions are beneath them. They do not toil, as men. They do not sleep, like Endymion, ‘on the Latmian hill.’ What remains? They lead a life of contemplation;—in contemplative energy lies their blessedness.[38] So the contemplative 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.

WILLOUGHBY. And you have a double morality at once: heroic or superhuman virtues, 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 would say, this ordinary morality does not fit the contemplatist for heaven—it is but a preliminary exercise—a means to an end, and that end, the transcendence of everything creaturely, a superhuman 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 _un_human, anti-terrestrial, hypercreaturely—forgive the word—they drive us hard for language. They found the separation already accomplished; they only tilled with ardour the plot of 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 impatient to get away from the Greek Church, westward.

ATHERTON. We may say farewell to Byzantium now. That Greek Church never grew beyond what it was in the eighth and ninth centuries.

GOWER. I have always imagined it a dwarf, watching a Nibelungen hoard, which after all never enriches anybody. Nothing but that tedious counting, and keeping tidy, and standing 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 reconciliations, and both are the better. In the East they are coupled amicably in the leash of antiquity, and dare not so much as snarl.

WILLOUGHBY. I suppose the mysticism of the Greek Church 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 mysticism 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 propose that we break up, and hear nothing more you may have to say.

Note to Page 121.

Aristotle extols contemplation, because it does not require means and opportunity, as do the social virtues, generosity, courage, &c. Plotinus lays still more stress on his distinction between the mere political virtues—which constitute simply a preparatory, purifying process, and the superior, or exemplary—those divine attainments whereby man is united with God. Aquinas adopts this classification, and distinguishes the virtues as exemplares, purgatoriæ and politicæ. 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 sensuous; Fortitude, courage in sustaining ourselves in the aerial regions of contemplation, 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 Münscher’s Dogmengeschichte, 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 supersede our natural capacities by some almost miraculous faculty, but to restore and elevate man’s nature, to realise its lost possibilities, and to consecrate 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? Then 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 Behmen’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 us 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 the vision face to face, on the unhindered service of the state of glory. But he does not deem it the best preparation for heaven to mimic upon earth an imaginary celestial repose,—he will rather labour to-day his utmost at the work to-day may bring,—he will fight the good fight, he will finish his course, and then receive the crown.

Footnote 34:

For the passages authenticating this account, see Dion. Areop. Opp. as follows:—

(1.) De Div. Nom. c. iv. § 1; v. 3, 6, 8; vi. 2, 3; i. 1. De Eccl. Hier. i. 3.

(2.) De Cœl. Hier. i. 2, 3; v. 3, 4; vii. De Eccl. Hier. i. 1; x. 3. The resemblance of this whole process to the Pröodos and Epistrophe of Plotinus is sufficiently obvious.

(3.) De Div. Nom. iv. 20, p. 488. The chase after evil runs through sections 24-34. He sums up in one place thus:—‘In a word, good springs from the sole and complete cause, but evil from many and partial defects. God knows the evil as good, and with him the causes of things evil are beneficent powers.’ Proclus seeks escape from the hopeless difficulty in precisely the same way.

Concerning the Via negativa and affirmativa, see De Div. Nom. i. 1, 5, 4; De Cœl. Hier. xv.; and De Myst. Theol. i. 2, 3.

(4.) Ibid. Also, Ep. ad. Dorotheum, De Myst. Theol. iii. pp. 714, 721.

Footnote 35:

See Meier, ‘Dionysii Areop. et Mysticorum sæculi xiv. doctrinæ inter se comparantur.’ He remarks justly ‘causæ ad Causatum relationem cum relatione generis ad speciem confudit’, p. 13.

Footnote 36:

The hyper and the a privative are in constant requisition with Dionysius. He cannot suffer any ordinary epithet to go alone, and many of his adjectives march pompously, attended by a hyper on one side, and a superlative termination on the other.

Footnote 37:

The later Greek theology modified the most objectionable parts of the Dionysian doctrine, while continuing to reverence him as a Father. See Ullmann’s Nicholas von Methone.

Footnote 38:

Aristot. Eth. Nic. lib. x. c. 8.—See Note, Page 123.

BOOK THE FIFTH MYSTICISM IN THE LATIN CHURCH

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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.

VIOLENZIA.

The 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. Willoughby 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 manuscript 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 express the surmise and aspiration of the soul. In a morning solitude there seems to lie about our fields of thought an aerial wealth too plenteous to be completely gathered into the granary of language.

O who would mar the season with dull speech, That must tie up our visionary 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 physiognomy and gesture of their own, their expectation of the summer. Look at those young and delicate ones, alive 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 them 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 valley 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, and was himself surprised to find how soon he warmed to the subject—with what zest he sought for glimpses 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.

ATHERTON. 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 purpose 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 mediæval Europe.

WILLOUGHBY. A trifling preliminary! Atherton means us to stay here all night. You may as well resign yourself, Gower.

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 Plotinus, 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 surrounded by that religious halo with which Neo-Platonism invested philosophy when it grew so devotional. We take Augustine’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 Christianity, 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, Aristotle 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 supposed. 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 symbolic 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 together; sin and redemption—what they really are; faith and reason—what may be their limits.

GOWER. Compare those great controversies with that miserable Monophysite and Monothelite dispute for which one can never get up an interest. How much we owe still to that large-souled Augustine.[39]

ATHERTON. Well, for this very reason, they might worship Dionysius as a patron saint 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 Commentary on the Hierarchies, does certainly wonderfully soften down the pantheism 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 intellectual 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.[40]

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.

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 principle in the West. There the Alexandrian doctrine of Emanation 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 orthodoxy, 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 Descriptio Monasterii Claræ-Vallensis, 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 absinthial 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 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 hay-making time, all the monks out there, helped by the additional hands of donati 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 sunrise, 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. 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 persuasive, and when he speaks under excitement losing every trace of physical feebleness in the lofty transformation of a benign enthusiasm.[41]

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 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 emaciated, 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. We 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.[42] But now to my notes. (Atherton reads.)

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.[43] Rigid exemplar and zealous propagator 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 excellent 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 eloquence he paints the raptures of contemplation, 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?[44] 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 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 afterwards—in their true importance. 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 pertaining; delinquencies and spiritual distresses of individuals; jealous squabbles to be soothed between his Cistercian order and them of Cluny; suppression of clerical luxury and repression of lay encroachment, &c. &c. Thus the year 1118 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.[45]

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 droning, with that monotony of muffled sound—the 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.[46]

Bernard had farther the satisfaction of improving and extending monasticism to the utmost; of sewing together, with tolerable success, the rended vesture of the papacy; of suppressing a more popular and more scriptural Christianity, for the benefit of his despotic order; of quenching for a time, by the extinction of Abelard, the spirit of free inquiry; and of seeing his ascetic and superhuman ideal of religion everywhere 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 authority.[47] But the chair upheld by Bernard was to be filled by an Innocent III., whose merciless arrogance should know no bounds. Bernard pleaded nobly for the Jews, decimated in the crusading fury.[48] 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. Ere long, the end was completely forgotten in the means. In succeeding centuries, the Church of Rome retained what life it could by 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 imparted 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 believe first, and understand, if possible, 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 (involutum); Understanding may afterwards cautiously unfold the envelope, and peep at the prize, but may never examine the contents first, to determine whether it shall be received or not.[49] 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 imaginary 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 of 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.[50] At the same time, the credo ut intelligam of Bernard is no indolent or constrained reception of a formula. Faith is the divine persuasion of the pure in heart and life. Bernard would grant that different minds will apprehend the same truth in different 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 is assumed for those whose practical holiness caused them to shine as lights in the Church.[51]

Thus, on the elementary question of faith, the mystical 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. 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.[52]

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 attainments 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 much hesitation 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 which he brought forth the practical fruits of the Spirit.[53] 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 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 reach. To the mystical death, self-annihilation, and holy indifference of the Quietists, he is altogether a stranger.[54]

It is worth while at least to skim and dip among his sermons on the Canticles. The Song 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 elaborated 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 affectation, no sentimentality, 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 comparatively 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 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 Song, 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.[55]

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 enumerates 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 Porphyry 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 ἐπαναβαθμοὶ of the Symposium), and so furnished a precedent for all the attempts of a similar kind in which scholastic mysticism delighted to exercise its ingenuity. De Quantitate Animæ, c. 35.

He enumerates three kinds of perception,—corporeal, intellectual (scientia) and spiritual (sapientia); and in describing the last uses the words introrsum ascendere (De Trin. xii. 15; and comp. De Lib. Arbit. 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 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, with them, that God is the essence of all things. Ipse namque 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 Opp., Paris, 1853.)

But though much of the language 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. Et hic est finis omnium visibilium et invisibilium, quoniam omnia visibilia in intelligibilia, et intelligibilia in ipsum Deum transibunt, mirabili et ineffabili adunatione, non autem, ut sæpe diximus, essentiarum aut substantiarum confusione 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 distinction of sex, as the consequence of sin. He abandons the idea of a sensuous hell. What is termed the fire of hell is with him a principle of law to which both the good and evil are subject, which 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. Erigena, farther, anticipates Kant in regarding time and space as mere modes of conception peculiar to our present state. He himself is much more rationalist than mystic (except in the fanciful interpretations of Scripture to which he is compelled to resort); but his system was developed, three centuries later, into an extreme and revolutionary mysticism.

The combination of Platonism and Christianity, so often attempted, abandoned, 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 velle 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 tendency of Erigena to a monstrous extreme, claim special revelation, declare the real resurrection accomplished in themselves, and that they 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 adequately punished by the blessedness 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 corrupt 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 Plotinus is Eckart’s ‘Spark of the Soul,’ the power whereby we can transcend the sensible, the manifold, the temporal, and merge ourselves in the changeless 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 consciousness, 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. Yet this form of mediæval pantheism appears to advantage when we compare it with that of ancient or of modern 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 substance of all 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 sermons 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 quantitatively rather 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 eyes, for the need lies not in the understanding, but in heart and will. According to them, man must stand virtually in heaven or hell—be God’s or the 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 from the Teutonic mysticism. Plato helps rather than harms 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 Germanica 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. The 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 Theologia Germanica, 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; nec a litteratis, aut provectis tantum, sed a pueris et simplicibus, aut certe stultis, de sancta Trinitate, quæ Deus est, disputaretur, &c.—Epist. 337, and comp. Epist. 332. Bernard at first refused to encounter Abelard, not simply because from his inexperience 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, quæ 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 faith 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 heart 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 mediæval 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 controversy 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 scaling of the heights of Illumination, 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 from 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 ontological proof was identical with the God of the Bible.

Note to page 144.

Thus, speaking of the angelic state, he says,—Creatura cœli illa est, præsto habens per quod ista intueatur. Videt Verbum, et in Verbo facta per Verbum. Nec opus habet ex his quæ facta sunt, factoris notitiam mendicare.—De Consid. V. i., and comp. Serm. in Cantica, v. 4.

The three kinds of meditation, or stages of Christian proficiency, referred to in the text, Bernard calls consideratio dispensativa, æstimativa, and speculativa. 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 humanæ fragilitati fas est, non ascensoriis gradibus, sed inopinatis excessibus, avolare interdum contemplando ad illa sublimia consuevit. Ad hoc ultimum genus illos pertinere reor excessus Pauli. Excessus non ascensus: nam raptum potius fuisse, quam ascendisse ipse se perhibet.—De Consid. v. ii. In one of the Sermons on the Canticles, Bernard discourses at more length on this kind of exaltation. Proinde et ego non absurde sponsæ exstasim vocaverim mortem, quæ tamen non vita, sed vitæ eripiat laqueis.... Excedente quippe anima, etsi non vita certe vitæ sensu, necesse est etiam ut nec vitæ tentatis sentiatur.... Utinam hac morte frequenter cadam.... Bona mors, quæ vitam non aufert, sed transfert in melius; bona, qua non corpus cadit, sed anima sublevatur. Verum hæc hominum est. Sed moriatur anima mea morte etiam si dici potest, Angelorum, ut presentium memoria excedens rerum se inferiorum corporearumque non modo cupiditatibus, sed et similitudinibus exuat.... Talis, ut opinor, excessus, aut tantum, aut maxime contemplatio dicitur. Rerum etenim cupiditatibus vivendo non teneri, humanæ virtutis est; corporum vero similitudinibus speculando non involvi, angelicæ puritatis est.... Profecisti, separasti te; sed nondum elongasti, nisi et irruentia undique phantasmata corporearum similitudinum transvolare mentis puritate prævaleas. Hucusque noli tibi promittere requiem.—In Cantica, Serm. lii. 4, 5.

Note to page 144.

Fateor et mihi adventasse Verbum, in insipientia dico, et pluries. Cumque sæpius intraverit ad me, non sensi aliquoties cum intravit. Adesse sensi, adfuisse recordor, interdum et præsentiæ potui introitum ejus, sentire nunquam, sed ne exitum quidem.... Qua igitur introivit? An forte nec introivit quidem, quia non deforis venit? Neque enim est unum aliquid ex iis que foris sunt. Porro nec deintra me venit quoniam bonum est, et scio quoniam non est in me bonum. Ascendi etiam superius meum: et ecce supra hoc Verbum eminens. Ad inferius quoque meum curiosus explorator descendi: et nihilominus infra inventum est. Si foras aspexi, extra omne exterius meum comperi illud esse: si vero intus, et ipsum interius erat.... Ita igitur intrans ad me aliquoties Verbum sponsus, nullis unquam introitum suum indiciis innotescere fecit, non voce, non specie, non incessu. Nullis denique suis motibus compertum est mihi, nullis meis sensibus illapsum penetralibus meis: tantum ex motu cordis, sicut præfatus sum, intellexi præsentiam ejus; et ex fuga vitiorum carnaliumque compressione affectuum, &c.—In Cantica, Serm. lxxiv. 5, 6. The metaphors of Bernard are actual sounds, sights, and fragrances with St. Theresa. From this sensuous extreme his practical devotion is as far removed, on the one side, as from the cold abstraction of Dionysius on the other. His contemplation is no staring at the Divine Essence till we are blind—no oblivion or disdain of outward means. We see God, he says, not as He is, but as He wills—sicuti vult non sicuti est. So when describing that ascent of the soul to God, or descent of God into the soul, which constitutes Union, he says,—In Spiritu fit ista conjunctio.... Non ergo sic affecta et sic dilecta (anima) contenta erit omnino vel illa, quæ multis per ea quæ facta sunt; vel, illa quæ paucis per visa et somnia facta est manifestatio sponsi, nisi et speciali prærogativa intimis illum affectibus atque ipsis medullis cordis cœlitus illapsum suscipiat, habeatque præsto quem desiderat non figuratum, sed infusum: non apparentem sed afficientem; nec dubium quin eo jucundiorem, quo intus, non foris. Verbum nempe est, non sonans, sed penetrans; non loquax, sed efficax; non obstrepens auribus, sed affectibus blandiens, &c.—In Cantica, Serm. xxxi. 6 and 1. Comp. also his remarks at the close of the sermon, on the difference between faith and sight, p. 2868.

Bernard describes three kisses of the soul,—the kiss of the feet of God, of the hand, and of the mouth. (Serm. de diversis, 87, and In Cantica, Serm. iv.) This is his fanciful way of characterising, by the elaboration of a single figurative phrase of Scripture, the progress of the soul through conversion and grace to perfection. Here, as in so many instances, his meaning is substantially correct; it is the expression which is objectionable. He is too much in earnest for the artificial gradations and metaphysical refinements of later mysticism. Compare him, in this respect, with John of the Cross. Bernard would have rejected as unprofitable those descriptions of the successive absorption of the several faculties in God; those manifold kinds of prayer—prayers of quiet, prayers of union, prayers of ecstasy, with their impalpable distinctions; that analysis, miraculously achieved, of miraculous ravishments, detailed at such length in the tedious treatises of the Spanish mystics. The doctrine taught by John of the Cross, that God compensates the faithful for the mortification of the senses by sensuous gratifications of a supernatural kind, would have revolted the more pure devotion of the simple-minded Abbot of Clairvaux.—See La Montée du Mont Carmel, livre ii. chapp. 16, 17; pp. 457, &c.

It should be borne in mind that the highest kind of Consideratio is identical, in Bernard’s phraseology, with Contemplatio; and the terms are thus often used interchangeably. Generally, Consideratio is applied to inquiry, Contemplatio to intuition. De Consid. lib. ii. cap. 2.

Note to page 146.

See Vita, ii. cap. 27, where his biographer gives Bernard’s own modest estimate of these wonders.

Wide, indeed, is the difference between the spiritual mysticism of Bernard and the gross materialism and arrogant pretension which characterise the vision and the prophecy to which Hildegard laid claim. The morbid ambition of theurgic mysticism received a new impulse from the sanction afforded her by Bernard and the contemporary popes. Bernard makes no doubt of the reality of her gifts, and desires a place in her prayers. (Epist. 366.) He did not foresee that the most extravagant and sensuous mysticism must soon of necessity displace the simpler and less dazzling. He would be afraid of taking his place with Rationalist mockers, and a superstitious awe would readily persuade him that it was better to believe than to doubt. When emperors and popes corresponded on familiar terms with the seeress; when haughty nobles and learned ecclesiastics sought counsel at her oracle concerning future events, and even for the decision of learned questions; when all she said in answer was delivered as subject to and in the interest of the Church Catholic—was often the very echo of Bernard’s own warnings and exhortations—who was he, that he should presume to limit the operations of the Spirit of God? Many of Hildegard’s prophecies, denouncing the ecclesiastical abuses of the day, were decidedly reformatory in their tendency. In this respect she is the forerunner of the Abbot Joachim of Calabria, and of St. Brigitta, whose prophetic utterances startled the corrupt Church in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In her supernatural gift of language, her attendant divine radiance, and her fantastic revelations, she, like her friend Elizabeth of Schonau (who had an angel to wait upon her, and saw the eleven thousand virgins), prepares the way for Catharine of Siena, Angela of Foligni, and St. Theresa.

Footnote 39:

See Note 1, p. 146.

Footnote 40:

See Note 2, p. 146.

Footnote 41:

Vita, ii. cap. v.

Footnote 42:

See the account of his diet, and of the feebleness and sickness consequent on his austerities, by the same biographer (Alanus), Vita, ii. cap. x., in the Paris reprint of 1839, from the Benedictine edition of Bernard, tom. ii. p. 2426. John Eremita describes the devil’s visit to Bernard, ‘ut ungeret sandalia sua secundum consuetudinem,’ and relates the rebuke of the proud monk who would not wash the scutellæ in the kitchen.—Vita, iv. p. 2508.

Footnote 43:

Vita, ii. cap. x. 32.

Footnote 44:

Epp. cx., cxi.

Footnote 45:

Chronologia Bernardina, Opp. tom. i. p. 83.

Footnote 46:

Epist. cxli.

Footnote 47:

De Consideratione, IV. iii. 7, and II. vi. 11, pp. 1028 and 1060.

Footnote 48:

Epist. ccclxv. to the Archbishop of Mayence, against the fanatic Rudolph.

Footnote 49:

He thus distinguishes Faith, Intellection, and Opinion:-Fides est voluntaria quædam et certa prælibatio necdum propalatæ veritatis. Intellectus est rei cujuscumque invisibilis certa et manifesta notitia. Opinio est quasi pro vero habere aliquid; quod falsum esse nescias.... Quid igitur distat (fides) ab intellectu? Nempe quod etsi non habet incertum non magis quam intellectus, habet tamen involucrum, quod non intellectus.... Nil autem malumus scire, quam quæ fide jam scimus. Nil supererit ad beatitudinem, cum quæ jam certa sunt nobis, erunt æque et nuda.—De Consideratione, V. 4, p. 1075.

Footnote 50:

See Note, p. 149.

Footnote 51:

See Note, p. 149.

Footnote 52:

See Note 1, p. 150.

Footnote 53:

See Note 2, p. 150.

Footnote 54:

Sane in hoc gradu (tertio) diu statur: et nescio si a quoquam hominum quartus in hac vita perfecte apprehenditur, ut se scilicet diligat homo tantum propter Deum. Asserant hoc si qui experti sunt: mihi, fateor, impossibile videtur.—De diligendo Deo, xv. and Epist. xi. 8. And, again, in the same treatise (vii. 17),—Non enim sine præmio diligitur Deus, etsi absque præmii intuitu diligendus sit.... Verus amor se ipso contentus est. Habet præmium, sed id quod amatur.

Footnote 55:

See Note, p. 151.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter II

Licht und Farbe.

Wohne, du ewiglich Eines, dort bei dem ewiglich Einen! Farbe, du wechselnde, komm’ freundlich zum Menschen herab![56]

SCHILLER.

On the next evening of meeting, Gower commenced as follows his promised paper on Hugo and Richard of St. Victor.

Hugo of St. Victor.

The celebrated School of St. Victor (so called from an ancient chapel in the suburbs of Paris) was founded by William of Champeaux at the commencement of the twelfth century. This veteran dialectician assumed there the habit of the regular canons of Augustine, and after an interval, began to lecture once more to the students who flocked to his retirement. In 1114, king and pope combined to elevate the priory to an abbacy. Bishops and nobles enriched it with their gifts. The canons enjoyed the highest repute for sanctity and learning in that golden age of the canonical institute. St. Victor colonized Italy, England, Scotland, and Lower Saxony, with establishments which regarded as their parent the mighty pile of building on the outskirts of Paris. Within a hundred years from its foundation it numbered as its offspring thirty abbeys and more than eighty priories.

Hugo of St. Victor was born in 1097, of a noble Saxon family. His boyhood was passed at the convent of Hamersleben. There he gave promise of his future eminence. His thirst after information of every kind was insatiable. The youth might often have been seen walking alone in the convent garden, speaking and gesticulating, imagining himself advocate, preacher, or disputant. Every evening he kept rigid account of his gains in knowledge during the day. The floor of his room was covered with geometrical figures traced in charcoal. Many a winter’s night, he says, he was waking between vigils in anxious study of a horoscope. Many a rude experiment in musical science did he try with strings stretched across a board. Even while a novice, he began to write. Attracted by the reputation of the abbey of St. Victor, he enrolled his name among the regular canons there. Not long after his arrival, the emissaries of an archdeacon, worsted in a suit with the chapter, murdered the prior, Thomas. Hugo was elected to succeed him in the office of instructor. He taught philosophy, rhetoric, and theology. He seldom quitted the precincts of the convent, and never aspired to farther preferment. He closed a peaceful and honoured life at the age of forty-four, leaving behind him those ponderous tomes of divinity to which Aquinas and Vincent of Beauvais acknowledge their obligations, and which gained for their author the name of a second Augustine.[57]

Hitherto mysticism, in the person of Bernard, has repudiated scholasticism. In Hugo, and his successor Richard, the foes are reconciled. Bonaventura in the thirteenth, and Gerson in the fifteenth century, are great names in the same province. Indeed, throughout the middle ages, almost everything that merits the title of mystical theology is characterized by some such endeavour to unite the contemplation of the mystic with the dialectics of the schoolman. There was good in the attempt. Mysticism lost much of its vagueness, and scholasticism much of its frigidity.

Hugo was well fitted by temperament to mediate between the extreme tendencies of his time. Utterly destitute of that daring originality which placed Erigena at least two centuries in advance of his age, his very gentleness and caution would alone have rendered him more moderate in his views and more catholic in sympathy than the intense and vehement Bernard. Hugo, far from proscribing science and denouncing speculation, called in the aid of the logical gymnastics of his day to discipline the mind for the adventurous enterprise of the mystic. If he regarded with dislike the idle word-warfare of scholastic ingenuity, he was quite as little disposed to bid common sense a perpetual farewell among the cloudiest realms of mysticism. His style is clear, his spirit kindly, his judgment generally impartial. It is refreshing in those days of ecclesiastical domination to meet with at least a single mind to whom that Romanist ideal—an absolute uniformity in religious opinion—appeared both impossible and undesirable.[58]

A few words may present the characteristic outlines of his mysticism. It avails itself of the aid of speculation to acquire a scientific form—in due subjection, of course, to the authority of the Church. It will ground its claim on a surer tenure than mere religious emotion or visionary reverie. Hugo, with all his contemporaries, reverenced the Pseudo-Dionysius. His more devout and practical spirit laboured at a huge commentary on the Heavenly Hierarchy, like a good angel, condemned for some sin to servitude under a paynim giant. In the hands of his commentator, Dionysius becomes more scriptural and human—for the cloister, even edifying, but remains as uninteresting as ever.

Hugo makes a threefold division of our faculties. First, and lowest, Cogitatio. A stage higher stands Meditatio: by this he means reflection, investigation. Third, and highest, ranges Contemplatio: in this state the mind possesses in light the truth which, in the preceding, it desired and groped after in twilight.[59]

He compares this spiritual process to the application of fire to green wood. It kindles with difficulty; clouds of smoke arise; a flame is seen at intervals, flashing out here and there; as the fire gains strength, it surrounds, it pierces the fuel; presently it leaps and roars in triumph—the nature of the wood is being transformed into the nature of fire. Then, the struggle over, the crackling ceases, the smoke is gone, there is left a tranquil, friendly brightness, for the master-element has subdued all into itself. So, says Hugo, do sin and grace contend; and the smoke of trouble and 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.[60]

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 philosophizes concerning all finite things, man is raised by the faith, the feeling, and the ascetic practice of religion. 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 eminence, 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 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 of 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 desiderated.[61] But at this, his highest point, he grasps a shadow instead of the substance. Something within the mind is mistaken for a manifestation from without. A mental creation is substituted 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.[62] 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 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.[63] 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 mystical doctrine displays less than the usual proportion of extravagance, 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 distinguished 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.[64] Alas! he exclaims, how many come to the cloister to 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 individuals 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.[65]

His zeal did not confine itself to words. In the year 1162 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 convent. 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, innocent 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.[66]

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 fortification 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 psychology, 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 or 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 religious philosophy, 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.[67]

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 highest 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, Intellectibilia (unseen truth above reason). These, again, have their subdivisions, into which we need not enter.[68] 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 upward into the heights of the divine (superiora invisibilia divina).[69]

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 a dividing asunder of the soul and the spirit as by the sword of the Spirit 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.[70]

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.

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 lassitude that followed an ecstasy, to a scholastic argumentation; or again refreshed themselves, after the dryness of that, by an imaginative flight into the region of allegory, or by some contemplative reverie which carried them far enough 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 touch 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!

WILLOUGHBY. 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 what is symbolical in Scripture as literal, and again of treating what is literal as symbolical.

GOWER. Somewhat like the early travellers, who mistook the hybrid figures of the hieroglyphic sculptures they saw for representations 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 contemplation of the Divine Nature.

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. We 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 impossibility 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 elevation. 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 an exact localization may be impossible, I think we can say whereabout they are in their opinion on this point. Their position 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 whatever. They do not ignore either factor; they unduly increase one of them.

WILLOUGHBY. Good. Will you have the kindness first to give me the truth as you hold it? Then we shall have the terminus a quo.

ATHERTON. There is what has been variously termed an experimental 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 testimony,—the convincing argument from without, which may at first have made the man feel it his duty to study a book supported 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 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 conscientious differences on minor points the authority of so many conflicting inspirations. It would issue in the ultimate disintegration 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 accustomed 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.

GOWER. If some of our modern 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. Applied 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 disputes 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 quam difficilis est ignorantibus veritas, et quam facilis scientibus!

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 continually 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, protest that there can be no coal on that estate—there is none in that part of England. But the practical man puts some lumps 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 writers, 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.

GOWER. 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, feeling, 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 Affections, 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 Vanitate Mundi, 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 life. He proceeds to describe that inner Eye, that oculus cordis, whose vision is so precious. ‘Thou hast another eye,’ he says (lib. i. p. 172), ‘an eye within, far more piercing than the other thou speakest of,—one that beholds at once the past, the present, and the future; which diffuses through all things the keen brightness of its vision; which penetrates what is hidden, investigates what is impalpable; which needs no foreign light wherewith to see, but gazes by a light of its own, peculiar to itself (luce aliena ad videndum non indigens, sed sua ac propria luce prospiciens).

Self-collection is opposed (p. 175) to distraction, or attachment to the manifold,—is declared to be restauratio, 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 ourselves. (Ascendere ergo ad Deum hoc est intrare ad semet ipsum, et non solum ad se intrare, sed ineffabili 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 flourishes, 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 (compunctio) he compares to digging in search of a treasure, or to find a spring. Sin has concealed this hoard—buried this water-source down beneath the 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 smoke 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 Arca morali, lib. iii. cap. 7.

Note to page 162.

See the introductory chapters of the Benjamin Minor, or De prep. anim. ad contemp. fol. 34, &c.—Richard rates this kind of interpretation very highly, and looks for success therein to Divine Illumination. (De eruditione interioris 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 interpretation. It is entitled Nonnullæ allegoriæ tabernaculi fœderis. ‘By the tabernacle of the covenant understand the state of perfection. Where perfection of the soul is, there is the indwelling of God. The nearer we approach perfection, 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 tabernacle 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 knows 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 when 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 others 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 have reference to things, works, and morals, belong to the length, breadth, and height of the ark respectively. In the consideration of form 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.

The three heavens within the mind are described at length. (De Contemp. lib. iii. cap. 8.) In the first are contained the images of all 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 divine, beheld as they truly are—a sun that knows no going down,—and there, and there alone, the kingdom of God within us in its glory.—Cap. x. fol 52.

The eye of Intelligence is thus defined (cap. ix.):—Intelligentiæ siquidem oculus est sensus ille quo invisibilia videmus: non sicut oculo rationis quo occulta et absentia per investigationem quærimus et invenimus; sicut sæpe causas per effectus, vel effectus per causas, et alia atque alia quocunque ratiocinandi modo comprehendimus. Sed sicut corporalia corporeo sensu videre solemus visibiliter potentialiter et corporaliter; sic utique intellectualis ille sensus invisibilia capit invisibiliter quidem, sed potentialiter, sed essentialiter. (Fol. 52.) He 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 essence of the soul. The inner verities are said to be within, the upper, beyond the veil. ‘It may be questioned, however, whether 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 maintain 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 twofold 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 sometimes allows Intelligence to extend its office below its proper province, though no other faculty can rise above the limits assigned to it. Intelligence 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. 1. Also iv. cap. 10. He calls it expressly a vision face to face:—Egressus autem quasi facie ad faciem intuetur, qui per mentis excessus extra semetipsum ductus summæ sapientiæ lumen sine aliquo involucro figurarum ve adumbratione; denique non per speculum et in enigmate, sed in simplici (ut sic dicam) veritate contemplatur.—Fol. 56. See also lib. v. cœpp. 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 contemplationem rapimur exteriorum omnium statim immo non solum eorum quæ extra nos verum etiam eorum quæ 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 transit. Hic ille spiritus efflatus in manus patris commendatur, non (ut ille somniator Jacob) scala indiget ut ad tertium (ne dicam ad primum) cœlum evolet. Quid quæso scala indigeat quem pater inter manus bajulat ut ad tertii cœli secreta rapiat intantum ut glorietur, et dicat, Dextera tua suscepit me.... Spiritus ab infimis dividitur ut ad summa sublimetur. Spiritus ab anima scinditur ut Domino uniatur. Qui enim adhæret Domino unus spiritus est.—De extermin. mali et promotione boni, cap. xviii. Again (De Contemp. lib. iv. c. 4), In hac gemina speculatione nihil imaginarium, nihil fantasticum debet occurrere. Longe enim omnem corporeæ similitudinis proprietatem excedit quicquid spectaculi tibi hæc gemina novissimi operis specula proponit.... Ubi pars non est minor suo toto, nec totum universalius suo individuo; immo ubi pars a toto non minuitur, totum ex 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 rapturous spiritual intoxication. Magnitudine jocunditatis et exultationis mens hominis a seipsa alienatur, quum intima illa internæ suavitatis abundantia potata, immo plene inebriata, quid sit, quid fuerit, penitus obliviscitur; et in abalienationis excessum tripudii sui nimietate traducitur; et in supermundanum quendam affectum sub quodam miræ felicitatis statu raptim transformatur.—Ibid. lib. v. c. 5, fol. 60.

Footnote 56:

Light and Colour.—Light, thou eternally one, dwell above by the great One Eternal; Colour, thou changeful, in love come to Humanity down!

Footnote 57:

Liebner’s Hugo of St. Victor, p. 21.—This account of his early studies is given by Hugo in his Didascalion.

Footnote 58:

Schmid, Der Mysticismus des M. A., p. 303.

Footnote 59:

Comp. De Sacramentis, lib. v. p. x. c. 4. (tom. iii. p. 411. Garzon’s edition of his works, Cologne, 1617.)

Footnote 60:

See Liebner, p. 315.

Footnote 61:

De Sacramentis, lib. i. p. i. cap. 12.—Quisquis sic ordinatus est, dignus est lumine solis: ut mente sursum erecta et desiderio in superna defixo lumen summæ veritatis contemplanti irradiet: et jam non per speculum in ænigmate, sed in seipsa ut est veritatem agnoscat et sapiat.

Footnote 62:

See Note, p. 170.

Footnote 63:

Tom. iii. p. 356.—In speaking of the days of creation and of the analogous seasons in the new creation within man, he says that as God first saw the light, that it was good, and then divided it from the darkness, so we must first try the spirit and examine our light with care, ere we part it from what we call darkness, since Satan can assume the garb of an angel of light.

For an elaborate account of his entire theology, the reader is referred to Liebner’s Hugo von St. Victor und die Theologischen Richtungen seiner Zeit; one of the best of the numerous monographs German scholarship has produced.

Footnote 64:

Richardi S. Victoris Opp. (Lyons, 1534), De Preparatione animi ad contemplationem, fol. 39.

Footnote 65:

Ibid. cap. xli.

Footnote 66:

Engelhardt, Richard von St. Victor, p. 6.

Footnote 67:

See Note, p. 171.

Footnote 68:

The six degrees of contemplation are as follows (De Contemp. i. 6, fol. 45):

1 In imaginatione secundum solam imaginationem. 2 In imaginatione secundum rationem. 3 In ratione secundum imaginationem. 4 In ratione secundum rationem. 5 Supra rationem sed non præter rationem. 6 Supra rationem videtur esse præter rationem.

The office of Imagination to which the first two belong is Thought (Cogitatio); the office of Reason, Investigation (Meditatio); that of Intelligence, Contemplation (Contemplatio).—Ibid. cap. 3. These three states are distinguished with much care, and his definition of the last is as follows:—Contemplatio est perspicax et liber animi contuitus in res perspiciendas undequaque diffusus.—Ibid. cap. 4. He draws the distinction between intelligibilia and intellectibilia in cap. 7; the former = invisibilia ratione tamen comprehensibilia; the latter = invisibilia et humanæ rationi incomprehensibilia. The four lower kinds are principally occupied, he adds, with created objects, the two last with what is uncreated and divine.—Fol. 45.

Footnote 69:

See Note, p. 171.

Footnote 70:

See Note, p. 172.

BOOK THE SIXTH GERMAN MYSTICISM IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY

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Chapter I

I pray thee, peace; I will be flesh and blood, For there was never yet philosopher, That could endure the toothache patiently; However they have writ the style of gods, And made a pish at chance and sufferance.

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

It 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.

The 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 accompany 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 excursion 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 glided by in the enjoyment of those innumerable minor satisfactions which, far more than highly pleasurable excitements, make up the happiness of existence. 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. Lowestoffe 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, Lowestoffe 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 few years of self-denial, and a few more of frugality and industrious vigilance, 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 in discriminating charity a large annual sum. He was a connoisseur 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 artists. 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 Lowestoffe gave one half the day to childish wisdom and the other to wise childishness.

We have mentioned what was not to be found at Summerford. 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 conservatory 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 sparkling bubbles here and there upon their edges, and everywhere 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 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’—

Attempred goodly well for health and for delight.

Meanwhile Atherton in Germany was reviving old acquaintanceships 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 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 purported 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 fourteenth 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 soul of Adolf Arnstein, a poor sinful man, who wrote it. And to all who read the same, or hear it read, may God grant everlasting life. Amen.

1320. September. St. Matthew’s Day.—Three days ago I was surprised by a visit from Hermann of Fritzlar,[71] 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 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 hammering in the yard below, and the great forge-bellows were groaning away as usual. I told him how I envied his wonderful 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 tenderness 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 forth 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 should be thought on when his hand was cold. I have it in my thoughts to dictate one day or other to some cunning scribe, 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 whithersoever 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 layman 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 encroachments 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 oftentimes 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 Rhine is castled. They espy us approaching from far off, and 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, fighting—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 the knight. Moreover, 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 yesterday 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 especially kindled of late years against sundry communities, sects, and residues of sects, which are known by the name of Beghards, Beguines, Lollards, Kathari, Fratricelli, Brethren of the Free Spirit,[72] &c. Councils, they tell me, have been held at Cologne, Mayence, and Narbonne, to suppress the Beghards. 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 Beguinasia, under the Magister or Magistra; but they are bound by no vows, fettered by no harassing minutiæ 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 they bring. 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. They leave the artisans and labourers in besotted ignorance, and when they do get a solitary religious idea that comes home to 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 denouncers, and bidding men fight sin with sin. We who sigh for reform, who must have more spiritual freedom, have our 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.[73] Our once famous Godfrey of Strasburg is forgotten. Wolfram von Eschenbach is the universal model. His Parzival and Titurel 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 knighthood 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. Iago, 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 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 Müllenheim, 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 Müllenheim, 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 entertain 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.[74]

1320. September. St. Maurice’s 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.[75]

‘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 alike in all things hath become a man.[76]

‘All that is in the Godhead is one. Thereof can we say nothing. It is above all names, above all nature. The essence of all creatures is eternally a divine life in Deity. God works. So doth not the Godhead. Therein are they distinguished,—in working and not working. The end of all things is the hidden darkness of the eternal Godhead, unknown and never to be known.[77]

‘I declare, by good truth and truth everlasting, that in every man who hath utterly abandoned self, God must communicate Himself according to all His power, so completely that he retains nothing in His life, in His essence, in His Nature, and in His Godhead—He must communicate all to the bringing forth of fruit.[78]

‘When the Will is so united that it becometh a One in oneness, then doth the Heavenly Father produce his only-begotten Son in Himself and in me. Wherefore in Himself and in me? I am one with Him—He cannot exclude me. In the self-same operation doth the Holy Ghost receive his existence, and proceeds from me as from God. Wherefore? I am in God, and if the Holy Ghost deriveth not his being from me, He deriveth it not from God. I am in nowise excluded.[79]

‘There is something in the soul which is above the soul, divine, simple, an absolute Nothing, rather unnamed than named, unknown than known. So long as thou lookest on thyself as a Something, so long thou knowest as little what this is as my mouth knows what colour is, or as my eye knows what taste is. Of this I am wont to speak in my sermons, and sometimes I have called it a Power, sometimes an uncreated Light, sometimes a divine Spark. It is absolute and free from all names and forms, as God is free and absolute in Himself. It is higher than knowledge, higher than love, higher than grace. For in all these there is still distinction. In this power doth blossom and flourish God, with all His Godhead, and the Spirit flourisheth in God. In this power doth the Father bring forth His only-begotten Son, as essentially as in Himself, and in this light ariseth the Holy Ghost. This Spark rejects all creatures, and will have only God, simply as he is in Himself. It rests satisfied neither with the Father, nor the Son, nor the Holy Ghost, nor with the three Persons, as far as each exists in its respective attributes. I will say what will sound more marvellous yet. This Light is satisfied only with the super-essential essence. It is bent on entering into the simple Ground, the still Waste, wherein is no distinction, neither Father, Son, nor Holy Ghost,—into the Unity where no man dwelleth. There is it satisfied in the light, there it is one; then is it in itself, as this Ground is a simple stillness in itself, immoveable; and yet by this Immobility are all things moved.[80]

‘God in himself was not God—in the creature only hath He become God. I ask to be rid of God—that is, that God, by his grace, would bring me into the Essence—that Essence which is above God and above distinction. I would enter into that eternal Unity which was mine before all time, when I was what I would, and would what I was;—into a state above all addition or diminution;—into the Immobility whereby all is moved.[81]

‘Folks say to me often—“Pray God for me.” Then I think with myself, “Why go ye out? Why abide ye not in your own selves, and take hold on your own possession? Ye have all truth essentially within you?.”[82]

‘God and I are one in knowing. God’s Essence is His knowing, and God’s knowing makes me to know Him. Therefore is His knowing my knowing. The eye whereby I see God is the same eye whereby He seeth me. Mine eye and the eye of God are one eye, one vision, one knowledge, and one love.[83]

‘If any man hath understood this sermon, it is well for him. Had not a soul of you been here, I must have spoken the very same words. He who hath not understood it, let him not trouble his heart therewith, for as long as a man is not himself like unto this truth, so long will he never understand it, seeing that it is no truth of reflection, to be thought out, but is come directly out of the heart of God without medium.’[84]

Of all this I can understand scarcely anything. The perpetual incarnation of God in good Christians, the nameless Nothing, the self-unfolding and self-infolding of God (I know not what words to use) are things too high for my grosser apprehension. I shall let the sayings lie here; some one else who reads may comprehend them. I am content to be a child in such matters. I look with awe and admiration on men who have attained while yet in the flesh heights of wisdom which will be, perhaps to all eternity, beyond the reach of such as I am.

1320. October. St. Francis’ Day.—Went with Hermann this morning to hear mass. Master Eckart preached again. Dr. Tauler in the church. How every one loves that man! As several of his brethren made their way to their places, I saw the people frown on some of them, and laugh and leer to each other as two or three of them passed. They had reason, I know, to hate and to despise certain among them. But to Tauler all bowed, and many voices blessed him. He has a kind heart to feel for us, the commonalty. He and his sermons are one and the same. He means all he says, and we can understand much, at least, of what he means. There is a cold grandeur about Master Eckart. He seems above emotion: his very face, all intellect, says it is a weakness to feel. At him we wonder; with Master Tauler we weep. How reverently did Tauler listen, as a son to a father, to the words of the great Doctor. No doubt he understood every syllable. He is and shall be my sole confessor. I will question him, some day, concerning these lofty doctrines whereby it would seem that the poorest beggar may outpass in wisdom and in blessedness all the Popes of Christendom.

Master Eckart said to-day:—‘Some people are for seeing God with their eyes, as they can see a cow, and would love God as they love a cow (which thou lovest for the milk and for the cheese, and for thine own profit). Thus do all those who love God for the sake of outward riches or of inward comfort; they do not love aright, but seek only themselves and their own advantage.[85]

‘God is a pure good in Himself, and therefore will He dwell nowhere save in a pure soul. There He may pour Himself out; into that He can wholly flow. What is Purity? It is that man should have turned himself away from all creatures, and have set his heart so entirely on the pure good, that no creature is to him a comfort, that he has no desire for aught creaturely, save as far as he may apprehend therein the pure good which is God. And as little as the bright eye can endure aught foreign in it, so little can the pure soul bear anything in it, any stain, aught between it and God. To it all creatures are pure to enjoy, for it enjoyeth all creatures in God, and God in all creatures. Yea, so pure is that soul that she seeth through herself, she needeth not to seek God afar off, she finds him in herself, when, in her natural purity, she hath flowed out into the super-natural of the pure Godhead. And thus is she in God and God in her, and what she doeth that she doeth in God and God doeth it in her.[86]

‘Then shall a man be truly poor when he is as free from his creature will as he was before he was born. And I say to you, by the eternal truth, that so long as ye desire to fulfil the will of God, and have any desire after eternity and God, so long are ye not truly poor. He alone hath true spiritual poverty who wills nothing, knows nothing, desires nothing.[87]

‘For us, to follow truly what God willeth, is to follow that whereto we are most inclined,—whereto we feel most frequent inward exhortation and strongest attraction. The inner voice is the voice of God.’[88]

After the service, Hermann left me to go and see a sick friend. I mingled with the crowd. There was a knot of people gathered before All-Saints, discussing what they had heard. A portly, capon-lined burgomaster declared he had first been hungry, then sleepy, and that was all he knew. He had verily, as a wag presently told him, obeyed the master, and lost consciousness of all external things. Whereat the jolly citizen was so tickled that he took the joker home to dine with him, promising mountains of pickled pork, a whole Black Forest of sauer kraut, and boundless beakers of hippocras.

An innocent novice from the country (looking fresh as a new-caught trout) began to say, ‘Well, it doth seem to me that though Doctor Eckart received his Doctorate from Rome, at the hands of our Holy Father, though he hath studied and taught at Paris, though he hath been Provincial of our order in Saxony, and Vicar-General in Bohemia—where he played the cat with the mice, I can tell you—yet that some things he said were——’

‘Hold your tongue for a jackass,’ quoth a senior brother, who liked not, methinks, to hear a whisper against the orthodoxy of the order, by whomsoever or against whomsoever uttered.

‘He is a blasphemer,’ said a friar. ‘Good people, did not you hear him say that what burned in hell was the Nothing?[89] Then nothing burns; ergo, there is no hell.’

‘I don’t think he believes in God at all,’ cried one:—‘Did he not say something about caring no more for God than for a stone?’

‘Ay, but,’ urged the friar, ‘no hell, and so no purgatory—think of that. Why, he has swept the universe as clean of the devil as a housewife’s platter at a christening.’

Some one in the crowd shouted out, ‘That fellow cares not what becomes of God, but he can’t give up his devil.’ Whereon the friar grew very red in the face, as we all laughed, but could not bethink him of any answer, and went capped with the name of Brother Brimstone ever after.

‘What was that he said,’ asked a slip-shod, sottish-looking tailor, ‘about doing what you like, and that is what God likes?’

‘Friends,’ cries next a rainbow-coloured, dandified puppy, a secretary of the bishop’s, stroking the down of a would-be moustache, evidently as yet only in a state of Becoming (Werden)—‘I would fain have moderately kicked him,——

‘My friends’ (smiling with a patronizing blandness at the tailor), ‘you are right; the public morals are in danger. Evil men and seducers wax worse and worse. But the Holy Church will protect her children. We have heard pestilent heresy this day. To hear that man talk, you would fancy he thought there was as much divinity in his little finger as in the whole body of the Virgin Mother of God.’

Whereupon up starts a little man whom I knew for one of the brethren of the Free Spirit—takes his place on a stone that lay in the mud of the middle of the street, and begins—‘Good people, did you not hear the doctor say that those who cannot understand his doctrine are to hold by the common faith? Did not Saint Peter say of the Epistles of the blessed Saint Paul that there were some things therein hard to be understood, which the ignorant would wrest to their own destruction? I’ll tell you the ignorance he means and the knowledge he means. Friend Crispin there, whom you carried home drunk in a barrow last night, and Master Secretary here, who transgresses in like wise and worse in a daintier style, and hath, by the way, as much perfumery about him as though the scent thereof, rising towards heaven, were so much incense for the taking away of his many sins—they are a couple of St. Paul’s ignoramuses. The knowledge St. Paul means is the thoughtful love of doing the right thing for the love of Christ. But the Pope himself may be one of these witless ones, if the love of sin be stronger in him than the love of holiness. The preaching of all the twelve Apostles would be turned to mischief and to licence by such as you, you feather-brained, civet-tanned puppet of a man, you adulterous, quill-driving hypocrite.’

‘Seize him,’ shouts my Secretary, and darted forward; but an apprentice put out his foot, and over he rolled into the mire, grievously ruffling and besmutching all his gay feathers, while the little man mingled with the laughing people, and made his escape. I hope he is out of Strasburg, or he may be secluded in a darkness and a solitude anything but divine. He was a trifle free of tongue, assuredly; I suppose that makes a part of the freedom of the Spirit with him. He had right, however, beyond question.

The confusion created by this incident had scarcely ceased, when I saw advancing towards us the stately form of Master Eckart himself. He looked with a calm gravity about upon us, as he paused in the midst—seemed to understand at once of what sort our talk had been, and appeared about to speak. There was a cry for silence—‘Hear the Doctor! hear him!’ Whereon he spoke as follows:—

‘There was once a learned man who longed and prayed full eight years that God would show him some one to teach him the way of truth. And on a time, as he was in a great longing, there came unto him a voice from heaven, and said, “Go to the front of the church, there wilt thou find a man that shall show thee the way to blessedness.”

‘So thither he went, and found there a poor man whose feet were torn, and covered with dust and dirt, and all his apparel scarce three hellers worth. He greeted him, saying, “God give thee good morrow.” Thereat made he answer, “I never had an ill morrow.” Again said he, “God prosper thee.” The other answered, “Never had I aught but prosperity.”

‘“Heaven save thee,” said the scholar, “how answerest thou me so?”

‘“I was never other than saved.”

‘“Explain to me this, for I understand not.”

‘“Willingly,” quoth the poor man. “Thou wishest me good morrow. I never had an ill morrow, for, am I an hungered, I praise God; am I freezing, doth it hail, snow, rain, is it fair weather or foul, I praise God; and therefore had I never ill morrow. Thou didst say, God prosper thee. I have been never unprosperous, for I know how to live with God; I know that what he doth is best, and what God giveth or ordaineth for me, be it pain or pleasure, that I take cheerfully from Him as the best of all, and so I had never adversity. Thou wishest God to bless me. I was never unblessed, for I desire to be only in the will of God, and I have so given up my will to the will of God, that what God willeth I will.”

‘“But if God were to cast thee into hell,” said the scholar, “what wouldst thou do then?”

‘“Cast me into hell? His goodness holds him back therefrom. Yet if he did, I should have two arms to embrace him withal. One arm is true Humility, and therewith am I one with his holy humanity. And with the right arm of Love, that joineth his holy Godhead, I would embrace him, so He must come with me into hell likewise. And even so, I would sooner be in hell, and have God, than in heaven, and not have Him.”

‘Then understood this Master that true Abandonment, with utter Abasement, was the nearest way to God.

‘Moreover the Master asked: “From whence comest thou?”

‘“From God.”

‘“Where hast thou found God?”

‘“Where I abandoned all creatures. I am a king. My kingdom is my soul. All my powers, within and without, do homage to my soul. This kingdom is greater than any kingdom on the earth.”

‘“What hath brought thee to this perfection?”

‘“My silence, my heavenward thoughts, my union with God. For I could rest in nothing less than God. Now I have found God, and have everlasting rest and joy in Him.”[90]

With that Master Eckart ceased, and went on his way again, leaving us in wonderment; and I watched him, as far as I could see along the winding street, walking on under the over-hanging gables, with his steady step and abstract air, and his silver locks fluttering out in the wind from under his doctor’s hat. When I looked round, I found myself almost alone. He is a holy man, let what will be said about heresy.

I set down here a new hymn Hermann sang me—sweet, as he sang it—with a ringing repetition that chimes right pleasantly, and makes amends for some lack of meaning in the words.[91]

Oh be glad, thou Zion’s daughter, Joyous news to thee are sent; Thou shalt sing a strain of sweetness, Sing it to thy heart’s content. Now the friend of God thou art, Therefore shalt thou joy at heart, Therefore know no sorrow-smart. Lo! ’tis ju-ju-jubilation, Meditation; Ju-ju-ju-ju-jubilation, Contemplation; Ju-ju-ju-jubilation; Ju-ju-ju-jubilation; Speculation; Ju-ju-ju-jubilation, Conciliation!

Meditation, that is goodly, When a man on God will muse; Jubilation worketh wonder, ’Tis the harp the soul doth use. Speculation, that is sheen, Contemplation crowns, I ween, Concord leads, the dance’s queen, Lo! ju-ju-ju- Conciliation! ’Tis jubilation At the sweets of contemplation!

Have been haunted by this ju-ju, in-doors and out, whatever I have been doing for the last three days, and I hear it in every stroke upon the anvil.

1320. Second week in October.—A ride over to Fegersheim about Sir Rudolf’s new bascinet with the beaked ventaille. As I reached the castle the ladies were just coming out for hawking, with a brave company of knights and squires. They were fair to see, with their copes and kirtles blue and white, and those fanciful new-fashioned crowns on their heads, all glittering with gold and jewels. Sir Rudolf stayed for me awhile and then followed them.

On my way back, rested at noon at a little hostelry, where I sat before the door at a table, chatting with mine host. There ride up a priest and monk with attendants. Holy Mary, what dresses! The monk with bells on his horse’s bridle, his hood fastened with a great golden pin, wrought at the head into a true-love knot, his hair growing long so as to hide his tonsure, his shoes embroidered and cut lattice-wise.[92] There was the priest with broad gold girdle, gown of green and red, slashed after the newest mode, and a long sword and dagger, very truly militant. I marvelled at the variety and unction of the oaths they had at their service. The advantage of a theological training was very manifest therein.

Scarcely were these worthies, with bag and baggage, well on their way again when I espied, walking towards the inn, a giant of a man—some three inches higher than I am (a sight I have not often seen), miserably attired, dusty and travel-worn. When he came to where I was he threw down his staff and bundle, cast his huge limbs along the bench, gave a careless, surly glance at me, and, throwing back his shaggy head of black hair, seemed about to sleep. Having pity on his weariness I said, ‘Art thirsty, friend? the sun hath power to-day.’ Thereupon he partly raised himself, looked fixedly at me, and then drank off the tankard I pushed towards him, grunting out a something which methought was meant for thanks. Being now curious, I asked him straight, ‘Where he came from?’

He. I never came from anywhere.

I. What are you?

He. I am not.

I. What will you?

He. I will not.

I. This is passing strange. Tell me your name.

He. Men call me the Nameless Wild.

I. Not far off the mark either; you talk wildly enough. Where do you come from? whither are you bound?

He. I dwell in absolute Freedom.

I. What is that?

He. When a man lives as he list, without distinction (Otherness, Anderheit), without before or after. The man who hath in his Eternal Nothing become nothing knows nought of distinctions.

I. But to violate distinction is to violate order, and to break that is to be a slave. That is not the freedom indeed, which the truth gives. He that committeth sin is the servant of sin. No man can be so utterly self-annihilated and lost in God,—can be such a very nothing that there remains no remnant of the original difference between creature and Creator. My soul and body are one, are not separate; but they are distinct. So is it with the soul united to God. Mark the difference, friend, I prithee, between separation and distinction (Geschiedenheit und Unterschiedenheit).

He. The teacher saith that the saintly man is God’s son, and what Christ doth, that doth he.

I. He saith that such man followeth Christ in righteousness. But our personality must ever abide. Christ is son of God by nature, we by grace. Your pride blinds you. You are enlightened with a false light, coming whence I know not. You try and ‘break through’ to the Oneness, and you break through reason and reverence.

He replied by telling me that I was in thick darkness, and the boy coming with my horse, I left him.[93]

As I rode homeward I thought on the contrast I had seen. This man who came last is the natural consequent on the two who preceded him. So doth a hypocritical, ghostly tyranny produce lawlessness. I have seen the Priest and the Levite, and methinks one of the thieves,—where is our good Samaritan? I know not which extreme is the worst. One is selfish absoluteness, the other absolute selfishness. Oh, for men among us who shall battle with each in the strength of a truth above them both! Poor Alsace!

Here Atherton laid aside his manuscript, and conversation commenced.

Footnote 71:

The Heiligenleben of Hermann von Fritslar has been recently edited by Franz Pfeiffer, in his Ausgabe der Deutschen Mystiker (Leipsig, 1845). Hermann says himself repeatedly that he had caused his book to be written (schreiben lassen) and there is every reason to believe that he was, like Rulman Merswin and Nicholas of Basle, his contemporaries, a devout layman,—one of a class among the laity characteristic of that age and neighbourhood, who, without entering into an order, spent the greater part of their time in the exercises of religion, and of their fortune on religious objects. Though he could not write, he could read, and his book is confessedly a compilation from many books and from the sermons and the sayings of learned and godly men. He says, Diz buch ist zu sammene gelesen ûzze vile anderen bucheren und ûzze vile predigâten und ûzze vil lêrêren.—Vorrede.

Footnote 72:

Concerning these sects, see Ullmann, Reformatoren vor der Reformation, vol. ii. pp. 1-18. The fullest account is given of them in a masterly Latin treatise by Mosheim, De Beghardis et Beguinabus. He enters at length into the discussion of their name and origin; details the various charges brought against them, and gives the bulls and acts issued for their suppression. See especially the circular of John Ochsenstein, Bishop of Strasburg, cap. iv. § xi. p. 255.

Footnote 73:

Authority for these statements concerning the literature of the period, will be found in Gervinus, Geschichte der poetischen National-Literatur der Deutschen, part vi. §§ 1, 2, 5.

Footnote 74:

Johannes Tauler von Strasburg, by Dr. Carl Schmidt, pp. 8-10; and Laguille’s Histoire d’Alsace, liv. xxiv.

Footnote 75:

Meister Eghart spricht: wer alle cit allein ist, der ist gottes wirdige; vnt wer alliu cit do heimenen ist, dem ist got gegenwürtig; vnt wer alliu cit stat in einem gegenwürtigen nu, in dem gebirt got der vatter sinen sune an vnderlas.—Sprüche Deutscher Mystiker, in Wackernagel’s Altdeutsches Lesebuch, p. 889.

Footnote 76:

Meister Eghart sprach: vnt wem in einem anders ist denne in dem andern, vnt dem got lieber ist in einem denne in dem andern, der mensche ist grobe, vnt noch verre vnt ein kint. Aber dem got gelich ist in allen, der ist ce man worden.—Ibid.

Both this saying and the foregoing are expressions for that total indifference and self-abandonment so strenuously inculcated by the mystics. He who lives weaned from the world, alone with God, without regrets, without anticipations, ‘stands in a present Now,’ and sees the divine love as clearly in his sorrows as in his joys,—does not find ‘one thing other than another.’ There is exaggeration in suppressing, as Eckart would do, the instinct of thanksgiving for special benefaction; but in his strong language lies couched a great truth,—that only in utter self-surrender can man find abiding peace.

Footnote 77:

Alles das in der gottheyt ist, das ist ein, vnd davon ist nicht zu sprechen. Got der würcket, die gotheyt nit, sy hat auch nicht zu würckende, in ir ist auch kein werck. Got vnt gotheyt hat underscheyd, an würcken vnd an nit würcken.

Was ist das letst end? Es ist die verborgen finsternusz der ewigen gotheit, vnd ist unbekant, vnd wirt nymmerme bekant. (See a paper on Eckart, by Dr. Carl Schmidt in the Theol. Stud. u. Kritiken, 1839, 3, p. 693.) Comp. the following:—Got ist noch gut noch besser, noch allerbest, vnd ick thue also unrecht, wenn ick Got gut heisse, rechte ase ob ick oder er etwas wiz weiss und ick es schwarz heisse.—Ibid. p. 675. This last assertion was one of the counts of accusation in the bull of 1330.

Footnote 78:

Martensen’s Meister Eckart (Hamburg, 1842), p. 22.—The divine communication assumes with Eckart the form of philosophical necessity. The man emptied of Self is infallibly full of Deity, after the fashion of the old principle, ‘Nature abhors a vacuum.’ Yet even this doctrine is not wholly false. It is the misrepresentation of a Christian truth. Its correlative verity is this,—that the kingdom of grace, like the kingdom of nature, has its immutable laws. He who seeks shall find; as we sow we reap, with unerring certainty. Gravitation is not more sure than the announcement, ‘With that man will I dwell who is of a meek and contrite spirit.’

Footnote 79:

Martensen, p. 23. Comp. Stud. u. Krit. loc. cit. Alles das denn got yn gegab seinem eingebornen sun, das hat er mir gegeben.... Was got würcket, das ist ein, darumb gebiret er mich seinen sun, on aller underscheyd.—These words exhibit the pantheistic principle on which this assumption is based. All spirit (whether in so called creature or Creator) is substantially one and the same. It cannot be divided; it can have no distinctive operations. Our dividual personal consciousness is, as it were, a temporary accretion on the Universal Soul with which we are in contact. Escaping this consciousness, we merge in—that is, we become—the Universal Soul. We are brought into the Essence,—the calm, unknown oneness beyond all manifestation, above creation, providence, or grace. This is Eckart’s escape from distinction,—lapse into the totality of spirit. This doctrine he teaches, not in opposition to the current Christian doctrine, but as a something above it,—at once its higher interpretation and its climax.

Footnote 80:

These statements concerning the ‘füncklin der vernunfft’ are the substance of passages given by Martensen, pp. 26, 27, and Schmidt (Stud. u. Krit. l. c.), pp. 707, 709.—Ich sprich es bey gutter warheit, und bey yemmerwerender warheit, und bey ewiger warheit, das disem liechte nit benüget an dem einfaltigem stilstanden götlichen wesen, von wannen disz wesen harkommet, es will in den einfaltigen grundt in die stillen wüste, das nye underscheyd ingeluget, weder vatter noch sun noch heiliger geist, in dem einichen, da niemant daheim ist, da benüget es im liechte, und da ist es einicher, denn es sey in im selber, wann diser grundt ist ein einfeltig stille die in ir selber unbeweglich ist, und von diser Unbeweglichkeit werdent beweget alle ding, &c. Hermann von Fritslar, in a remarkable passage, enumerates the various and conflicting names given to this organ of mysticism. ‘Und das leben was daz licht der lûte.’ Daz meinet, daz di sêle einen funken in ir hât, der ist in gote êwiclîchen gewest leben und licht. Und dirre funke ist mit der sêle geschaffen in allen menschen und ist ein lûter licht in ime selber und strafet allewege umme sunde und hat ein stête heischen zu der tugende und kriget allewege wider in sînen ursprung.... Dar umme heizen in etlîche meistere einen wechter der sêle. Also sprach Daniêl: ‘der wechter ûf dem turme der rufet gar sêre. Etliche heizen disen funken einen haven der sêle. Etlîche heizen in di worbele (axis, or centre) der sêle. Etelîche heizen in ein gotechen in der sêle. Etelîche heizen in ein antlitze der sêle. Eteliche heizen intellectus, daz ist ein instênde kraft in der sêle. Etlîche heizen in sinderisis. Etliche heizen in daz wô der sêle. Etlîche heizen in daz nirgen der sêle.—Heiligenleben. Di dritte messe, p. 32.

Footnote 81:

Martensen, p. 27. Schmidt, loc. cit.

Footnote 82:

The passage in Martensen, p. 20.

Footnote 83:

Martensen, pp. 19, 29.

Footnote 84:

Ibid. p. 29.

Footnote 85:

Etlich leut wöllent got mit den ougen ansehn, als sy ein ku ansent unnd wöllent gott liebhan, als sy ein ku liebhaben (die hastu lieb umb die milch, und umb den kätz, und umb dein eigen nutz). Also thund alle die leut die got liebhand, um uszwendigen reichtum, oder umb inwendigen trost, und die hand gott nit recht lieb, sunder sy suchent sich selbs und ir eigen nutz.—Schmidt, p. 712.

Footnote 86:

Got ist ein luter guot an ime selben, vnt do von wil er nienen wonen denne in einer lutern sele: in die mag er sich ergiessen vnt genzeclichen in si fliessen. was ist luterkeit? das ist das sich der mensche gekeret habe von allen creaturen, vnt sin herce so gar uf gerichtet habe gen dem lutern guot, das ime kein creature trœstlichen si, vnt ir ouch nit begere denne als vil als si das luter guot, das got ist, darinne begriffen mag. vnt also wenig das liechte ouge icht in ime erliden mag, also wenig mag diu luter sele icht an ir erliden keine vermasung vnt das si vermitlen mag. ir werdent alle creaturen luter ce niessen: wanne si niusset alle creaturen in got vnt got in allen creaturen. Denne si ist also luter, das si sich selben durschowet, denne endarf si got nit verre suochen: si vindet in ir selben, wanne si in ir natiurlichen luterkeit ist geflossen in das übernatiurliche der lutern gotheit. vnt also ist si in got, vnt got in ir; vnt was si tuot, das tuot si in got, vnt tuot es got in ir.—Wackernagel, p. 891.

Footnote 87:

Wann sol der mensch warlich arm sein, so soll er seynes geschaffnen willes also ledig sein, als er was do er noch nit was. Und ich sag euch bey der ewigen warheit, als lang ir willen hand zu erfüllend den willen gottes, vnd icht begerung hand der ewigkeit und gottes, also lang seind ir nitt recht arm, wann das ist ein arm mensch der nicht wil, noch nicht bekennet, noch nicht begeret—Schmidt, p. 716. Here again is the most extravagant expression possible of the doctrine of sainte indifférence, in comparison with which Madame Guyon is moderation itself.

Footnote 88:

See Schmidt, p. 724.

Footnote 89:

He was charged with denying hell and purgatory, because he defined future punishment as deprivation,—‘Das Nicht in der helle brinnet.’—Schmidt, p. 722.

Footnote 90:

The narrative here put into the mouth of Eckart is found in an appendix to Tauler’s Medulla animæ. There is every reason to believe that it is Eckart’s. Martensen gives it, p. 107.

Footnote 91:

A literal translation of a curious old hymn in Wackernagel’s collection, p. 896.

Footnote 92:

C. Schmidt (Johannes Tauler von Strasburg, p. 42) gives examples of the extravagant display in dress common among the clergy at that time.

Footnote 93:

The substance of this dialogue will be found in the works of Heinrich Suso (ed. Melchior Diepenbrock, Regensburg, 1837), Book iii. chap. vii. pp. 310-14. Suso represents himself as holding such a conversation with ‘ein vernunftiges Bilde, das war subtil an seinen Worten und war aber ungeübt an seinen Werken und war ausbrüchig in florirender Reichheit,’ as he sat lost in meditation on a summer’s day. Atherton has ventured to clothe this ideal of the enthusiast of those times in more than a couple of yards of flesh and blood, and supposed Arnstein to have picked up divinity enough in his sermon-hearing to be able to reason with him just as Suso does in his book.

The wandering devotees, who at this time abounded throughout the whole region between the Netherlands and Switzerland, approximated, some of them, to Eckart’s portraiture of a religious teacher, others to Suso’s ideal of the Nameless Wild. In some cases the enthusiasm of the same man may have approached now the nobler and now the baser type.

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