Chapter VII…

Chapter VII

Alas poor country; Almost afraid to know itself! It cannot Be called our mother, but our grave. Where nothing, But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile; Where sighs, and groans, and shrieks that rend the air, Are made, not mark’d; where violent sorrow seems A modern ecstasy; the dead man’s knell Is there scarce asked, for who; and good men’s lives Expire before the flowers in their caps, Dying or ere they sicken.

MACBETH.

The day after Atherton’s return, Willoughby and Gower met about noon, at Lowestoffe’s lodge gate, the one returning from a piscatory expedition of six hours, with fish, the other from a pictorial ramble of four days, with sketches. Willoughby had to tell of the escapades of tricksy trout, and of the hopes and fears which were suspended on his line. But not a word, of course, had he to say of the other thoughts which busied him the while,—how his romance was in his head, as he carried those credentials of idleness, the fishing-tackle, and how, while he was angling for fish, he was devising the fashion in which Blanche should throw the fly for Florian. Gower had seen such glades and uplands—such wondrous effects of light and shadow—he, too, had had his adventures, and could show his trophies.

Dinner was succeeded by that comparatively somnolent period which preceded the early tea so dear to Lowestoffe. Atherton found that a book of Schubert’s, which had interested him in the morning, was, in the afternoon, only a conducting-rod to lure down the subtile influence of sleep. Lowestoffe, lulled by the buzzing flies, dropped off into an arm-chair doze, without apology or disguise. He had been early up, and had been riding about all day on a new chestnut mare. Violently had he objurgated that wretch of a groom for giving her too many beans, thereby rendering her in danger of flying at the heels; and what was worse, the monster had put on a gag snaffle with the martingale, and narrowly escaped getting her into mischief. But the flying storm had long since swept away. Before tea, Lowestoffe was in his good-humoured, irrational humour; after tea he would be in his good-humoured rational one. As for Gower and Kate, they had quietly withdrawn together to see a water-lily that had just blown, and were not heard of till tea-time.

After tea, when certain sleepy people had again become responsible creatures, conversation began.

GOWER. Don’t you think Atherton has a very manuscriptural air to-night?

KATE. There is a certain aspect of repletion about him.

MRS. ATHERTON. We must bleed him, or the consequences may be serious. What’s this? (Pulls a paper out of his pocket.)

KATE. And this! (Pulls out another.)

WILLOUGHBY. He seems better now.

ATHERTON (abstractedly). I was thinking of the difference between Gower’s studies and mine for the last few days. I have been reading a dark, miserable chapter in the history of man. He has been the chronicler of pleasant passages in the history of rocks and trees,—his great epochs, a smile of sun-shine or sudden chill of shadow,—the worst disasters, a dull neutral-tint kind of day, or a heavy rain,—his most impracticable subjects, beauties too bright or evanescent to be caught. It is sad to think how every subject of our study deepens in sorrow as it rises in dignity.

WILLOUGHBY. And yet it is only by the manful struggles of past generations through calamity and against wrong, that we have bequeathed to us the leisure, the liberty, and the knowledge essential to the highest enjoyment of nature. Atherton, in fact, studies the chequered and intricate causes which issue in the taste of Gower as one of their effects. I should think it must be no small gain for an artist to be placed beyond the mediæval idea which set the Inferno in the centre of the earth, and imagined, far below the roots of the mountains and the channels of the sea, eternal flames as the kernel of the world.

GOWER. I have sometimes endeavoured, while lying on the grass, to realise in my own way the conception of the world by the light-hearted Greeks as an animal, or as a robe or peplus. I have imagined the clouds the floating breath of the great creature, rising against the crystal sphere of the sky, under which it lies as in an enchanter’s glass;—the seas, some delicate surfaces of the huge organism, that run wrinkled into a quick shiver at the cold touch of wind;—the forests, a fell of hair which is ruffled by the chafing hand of the tempest. Then, when I look at the earth in the other aspect, as a variegated woven robe, I see it threaded silverly with branching rivers spangled with eyes of lakes; where the sleek meadows lie, it is rich with piled velvet, and where the woods are, tufted with emerald feathers. But now I want to hear something more about our Strasburg people.

ATHERTON. Bad news. There is a great hiatus in Arnstein’s journal, which history fills up with pestilence and bloodshed. I have drawn up a few notes of this interval which must serve you as an outline. (Reads.)

In the year 1348 that terrible contagion, known as the Black Death, which journeyed from the East to devastate the whole of Europe, appeared at Strasburg.[129] Everywhere famine, floods, the inversion of the seasons, strange appearances in the sky, had been its precursors. In the Mediterranean Sea, as afterwards in the Baltic, ships were descried drifting masterless, filled only by plague-stricken corpses. Every man dreaded, not merely the touch and the breath of his neighbour, but his very eye, so subtile and so swift seemed the infection. In many parts of France it was computed that only two out of every twenty inhabitants were left alive. In Strasburg sixteen thousand perished; in Avignon sixty thousand. In Paris, at one time, four or five hundred were dying in a day. In that city, in the midst of a demoralization and a selfish horror like that Thucydides has painted, the Sisters of Mercy were seen tending the sufferers who crowded the Hôtel-Dieu; and, as death thinned their martyr-ranks, numbers more were ready to fill the same office of perilous compassion. Pausanias says that in Athens alone out of all Greece there was raised an altar to mercy. But it was an altar almost without a ministry. Heathendom, at its best, might glory in the shrine; Christianity, at its worst, could furnish the priesthood.

In Strasburg Tauler laboured fearlessly, with Thomas and Ludolph, among the panic-stricken people—doubly cursed by the Interdict and by the plague. Great fires of vine-wood, wormwood, and laurel were kept burning in the squares and market-places to purify the air, lighting up the carved work of the deserted town-hall, and flickering aslant the overhanging gables of the narrow crooked streets and the empty tradesmen’s stalls. The village was ravaged as fatally as the town. The herds grew wild in the fields of the dead peasants, or died strangely themselves—victims, apparently, to the universal blight of life. The charlatans of the day drove for awhile a golden traffic with quintessences and distillations, filthy and fantastic medicines, fumigation of shirts and kerchiefs, charms and invocations, only at last to perish in their turn. Even the monks had lost their love for gold, since every gift was deadly. In vain did trembling men carry their hoards to the monastery or the church. Every gate was barred, and the wealthy might be seen tossing their bags of bezants over the convent walls. In the outskirts of towns and cities, huge pits were opened, whose mouths were daily filled with hideous heaps of dead. The pope found it necessary to consecrate the river Rhone, and hundreds of corpses were cast out at Avignon, from the quays and pleasant gardens by the water-side, to be swept by the rapid stream under the silent bridges, past the forgotten ships and forsaken fields and mourning towns, livid and wasting, out into the sea.

In a frenzy of terror and revenge the people fell upon the miserable Jews. They were accused of poisoning the wells, and every heart was steeled against them. Fear seemed to render all classes more ferocious, and the man who might sicken and die to-morrow found a wretched compensation in inflicting death to-day on the imagined authors of his danger. Toledo was supposed to be the centre of an atrocious scheme by which the Jews were to depopulate Christendom. At Chillon several Jews, some after torture and some in terror of it, confessed that they had received poison for that purpose. It was a black and red powder, made partly from a basilisk, and sent in the mummy of an egg. The deposition of the Jews arrested at Neustadt was sent by the castellan of Chillon to Strasburg. Bishops, nobles, and chief citizens held a diet at Binnefeld in Alsace, to concert measures of persecution. The deputies of Strasburg, to their honour be it spoken, declared that nothing had been proved against the Jews. Their bishop was the most pitiless advocate of massacre. The result was a league of priests, lords, and people, to slay or banish every Jew. In some places the senators and burgomasters were disposed to mercy or to justice. The pope and the emperor raised their voices, alike in vain, in behalf of the victims. Some Christians, who had sought from pity or from avarice to save them, perished in the same flames. The noble of whom they bought protection was stigmatised as a Jew master, execrated by the populace, at the mercy of his enemies. No power could stem the torrent. The people had tasted blood; the priest had no mercy for the murderers of the Lord; the baron had debts easily discharged by the death of his creditor. At Strasburg a monster scaffold was erected in the Jewish burial ground, and two thousand were burnt alive. At Basle all the Jews were burnt together in a wooden edifice erected for the purpose. At Spires they set their quarter in flames, and perished by their own hands. A guard kept out the populace while men commissioned by the senate hunted for treasure among the smoking ruins. The corrupting bodies of those slain in the streets were put up in empty wine casks, and trundled into the Rhine. When the rage for slaughter had subsided, hands, red with Hebrew blood, were piously employed in building belfries and repairing churches with Jewish tombstones and the materials of Jewish houses.

The gloomy spirit of the time found fit expression in the fanaticism of the Flagellants.[130] Similar troops of devotees had in the preceding century carried throughout Italy the mania of the scourge; but never before had the frenzy of penance been so violent or so contagious. It was in the summer of 1349 that they appeared in Strasburg. All the bells rang out as two hundred of them, following two and two many costly banners and tapers, entered the city, singing strange hymns. The citizens vied with each other in opening to them their doors and seating them at their tables. More than a thousand joined their ranks. Whoever entered their number was bound to continue among them thirty-four days, must have fourpence of his own for each day, might enter no house unasked, might speak with no woman. The lash of the master awaited every infraction of their rule. The movement partook of the popular, anti-hierarchical spirit of the day. The priest or friar could hold no rank, as such, among the Flagellants. The mastership was inaccessible to him, and he was precluded from the secret council. The scourging took place twice a day. Every morning and evening they repaired in procession to the place of flagellation outside the city. There they stripped themselves, retaining only a pair of linen drawers. They lay down in a large circle, indicating by their posture the particular sin of which each penitent was principally guilty. The perjured lay on his side, and held up three fingers; the adulterer on his face. The master then passed round, applying his lash to each in succession, chanting the rhyme—

Stand up in virtue of holy pain, And guard thee well from guilt again.

One after the other, they rose and followed him, singing and scourging themselves with whips in which were great knots and nails. The ceremony closed with the reading of a letter, said to have been brought by an angel from heaven, enjoining their practice, after which they returned home in order as they came. The people crowded from far and near to witness the piteous expiation, and to watch with prayers and tears the flowing blood which was to mingle with that of Christ. The pretended letter was reverenced as another gospel, and the Flagellant was already believed before the priest. The clergy grew anxious as they saw the enthusiasm spreading on every side. But the unnatural furor could not last; its own extravagance prepared its downfall. An attempt made by some Flagellants in Strasburg to bring a dead child to life was fatal to their credit. The Emperor, the Pope, and the prelates took measures against them simultaneously, in Germany, in France, in Sicily, and in the East. The pilgrimage of the scourge was to have lasted four-and-thirty years. Six months sufficed to disgust men with the folly, to see their angelic letter laughed to scorn, their processions denounced, their order scattered.

Meanwhile the enemies of Tauler were not idle. Louis of Bavaria was dead. The new Emperor Charles IV. was of the papal party, and called the Parsons’ Kaiser, but a man of vigour and enlightenment; so weary Germany, broken by so many calamities, was generally inclined to acknowledge his claim. About the year 1348 he visited Strasburg, and the clergy brought Tauler and his two friends before him. They were to answer for their hard words against priests and princes. Charles listened attentively to the statement of their principles, and to their spirited defence of what they had said and done. At last he said (conceive the dismay of the prelates!) that, after all, ‘he was very much of their mind.’ But the ecclesiastics did not rest till they had procured a condemnatory sentence. The accused were commanded to publish a recantation, and to promise to refrain for the future from such contumacious language concerning the Church and the Interdict, on pain of excommunication. It is said that, in spite of this decision, they did but speak and write the more in the same spirit. This, however, is not certain. It is known that Tauler shortly afterwards left his native city, and fixed his residence in Cologne, where he mostly spent the remainder of his life, actively engaged as a preacher in endeavouring to promote a deeper spirituality, and in combating the enthusiasm of the pantheistic Beghards who abounded in that city.[131]

Chronicle of Adolf Arnstein, continued.

STRASBURG. 1354. January.—In the comparative leisure of the winter time, I set down in order (from such fragmentary notes as I then made) records of a journey undertaken last year to Flanders.

When I left Strasburg, to sail down the Rhine, our city had enjoyed at last nearly two years’ prosperity. We could scarcely believe the respite real. First of all, after so many troubles and dissensions, the Black Death had laid us waste. Then came the Flagellants, turning all things upside down—the irresistible infection of their fury—the thirst for blood they stirred up everywhere—the slaughter of the miserable Jews. Then we had the Emperor among us, demanding unrighteous imposts. Our old spirit rose. For two years and a half our chains and guard-ships barred the passage of the Rhine.[132] We would endure any extremity rather than submit, and our firmness won the day. Now, for the last three years,—the pestilence and its horrors over; blockaded business free again;—our little world has been gambolling like children let loose from school. Never such rapid and fruitful buying and selling, such marrying and giving in marriage, such feasting, pageantry, and merriment, among high and low alike.[133] All the year is May for the morris-dancers. No one remembers now the scourge or the torch.

The clergy might have learnt a lesson from the outbreak of the Flagellants. It should have shown them how hateful their vices and their pride had made them to the people. But the universal levity now pardons clerical crime and folly as it does every other. The odious exaggeration of the Flagellants has given men a pretext for licence, and ruined the hopes of reform. The cause of emperor against pope exists no longer. In the hour of conflict and of sorrow, men hailed the help and listened to the teaching of the Friends of God. Tauler himself, were he among us, would find it another Strasburg.

Landed at Cologne, I hastened to the cloister of St. Gertrude to find Dr. Tauler. With what delight did I see him once more! I thought him looking much older, and, indeed, he said he thought the same of me. The time has been long but a stepmother to merry faces and ruddy cheeks. He told me that he had met with great kindness in this city, which he had always loved. His friends were numerous; his preaching, he hoped not without fruit, and he had succeeded in reforming much that had been amiss.[134] I had many messages for him from his old friends in Strasburg, and he had so many questions to ask, he knew not where to begin.

He inquired particularly after Rulman Merswin. This rich merchant had withdrawn from the world (with the consent of his wife) and devoted himself altogether to the contemplative life, a short time previous to the coming of the Black Death. His austerities had been almost fatal. Tauler’s last counsel to him was to lessen their severity. I saw him before I left, and he desired me to tell Tauler that the Layman had visited him more than once, and was now his spiritual guide. I informed the Doctor, moreover, that during the last year Merswin had been privately busied in writing a book, to be called The Nine Rocks, of which he did me the honour of reading to me a part.[135] The Doctor asking what I thought, I said it seemed to be the work of a powerful and sombre imagination, excited by the sufferings he had inflicted on himself, yet containing many solemn and most just rebukes of the vices prevalent. Tauler said that such excessive mortification in all classes, and especially among the clergy, often weakened, instead of exalting the intellect. He feared that the good Rulman would always lean too much on visions, voices, ecstasies, and the like, and never rise to the higher calm of unsensuous, imageless contemplation.

The second time I visited Tauler, I found him reading—he told me for the fourth time—a book called The Spiritual Nuptials, by John Ruysbroek.[136] The Doctor praised it highly, and as I questioned him about it, offered to lend it me to read. I had heard of Ruysbroek as a master in spiritual mysteries, often holding intercourse by letter with the Friends of God in Cologne, Alsace, and even in the Oberland. I took the book home to my inn, and shut myself up to read it. Many parts of it I copied out. Not a few things in it I found hard to be understood, and consulting with the Doctor about them, he told me he purposed setting out in a few days to visit the author. Should I like to accompany him? I said ‘Yes, with all my heart.’ So we left Cologne to travel to the convent of Grünthal, in the heart of the forest of Soigne, not far from Louvain, whither the holy man, now sixty years of age, had of late retired.[137]

From Cologne we journeyed direct to Aix-la-Chapelle. There we saw the chair in which the emperors sit when they are crowned. Its sides are of ivory, and the bottom is made of a piece of wood from Noah’s Ark. Tasted the water in the famous hot springs there. It is saltish; the physicians say of singular virtue, whether taken inwardly or outwardly. Saw near the town a water which is lukewarm, by reason of one of the hot springs which passes under it. There are bred in it fine fish, they say, which must be put in cold water two months before they are eaten.

From Aix-la-Chapelle we went to Maestricht, and thence through Tirlemont, to Louvain. This last is a wealthy city, with a fine town-hall. The Flemings seem very fond of bells, which are always chiming, and the great multitude of storks was a strange thing to me; they make their nests on the tops of the chimneys. The country round is very fertile, and the great guilds exceeding prosperous. The small handicrafts have more power there than with us at Strasburg. At Ypres, I hear, they lately mustered five thousand strong in the market-place, and headed by their deacons, engaged and routed the knights and men-at-arms who wished to hold the town against the men of Ghent.[138] They are very brave and determined, and keep better together, as it seems to me, than our folk. I found no small excitement in the city, on account of the war then carrying on between the men of Ghent and their allies, on the one side, and the Earl of Flanders on the other. It began with the old rivalry between Ghent and Bruges—some dispute about a canal from the Lys. The real struggle is between lords and commons. What Bishop Berthold and his party have been to us, that is the Count de Male to these Flemings. The popular side has lost a brave leader in John Lyon. He revived the White Hoods, and stirred up all Flanders against the earl. But two at least of the new captains, John Boule and Peter du Bois, bid fair to fill his place. When I was at Louvain, the troops of the earl were besieged in Oudenarde by upwards of a hundred thousand men, gathered out of all the principal towns, well provisioned and appointed. The besiegers were very strong in cross-bow men, and had with them some great guns, which did no small damage. Many hot assaults were made, both by land and water, and on both sides many brave men slain (Heaven rest their souls!) for the Flemings were no whit behind the knights in foolhardiness. When I left Brabant, report said that a peace was, or soon would be concluded, to be ratified, according to their wont there, by enormous dinners. Certain it is that neither Oudenarde nor Dendermonde were carried after all.[139]

They still talked at Louvain about that flower of chivalry Edward III. of England, who was there for a season some few years back.[140] His princely entertainments to lords and ladies left the country full of golden traditions about him. The islanders won all hearts by their unparalleled magnificence and generosity. They say the English king called James von Artaveld—brewer of metheglin as he was—his cousin, and was passing wroth when he heard of his murder. Yet methinks he cares but little after all for the Flemish weavers, save as they may help him and his knights against France. Nevertheless, the weaker France, the better for Germany. I think I understand why our emperor Charles so flatters the pope. If his Holiness could confide in Germany he would fain break with France. Be this as it may, not a word now is heard about the claims of the empire. The Ghibelline cause finds no leader. The spirit of the Hohenstaufen lives only in the rhymes of the minstrel. No doubt times are changed. There may be policy in the submission, but I love it not. The Doctor interpreted to me the other day the emperor’s Latin motto, which set me thinking. It means—the best use you can make of your own wits is to turn to good account the follies of other people.[141] So cardinals and envoys riding to and fro, plotting and treaty-making, will manage Christendom now, not strong arms and sword-strokes. Whether, in the end, this change will lead to better or to worse, it baffles my poor brain to decide.

We set out from Louvain for Grünthal, quite a troop of us. There was a noble widow-lady, with her attendants, who was going to crave ghostly counsel from the prior. She had lost her husband by the plague, three years since, and appeared still overwhelmed with grief, speaking to no one, and never suffering her face to be seen. Her women, when not near her, were merry enough with the followers of a young Frenchman of family who carried letters to Ruysbroek from his uncle, an abbot in Paris. We had with us besides two Minorite friars from Guelders. The head dresses of the women were fit for giantesses, rising up like a great horn, with long ribbons fluttering from the top. One of them had a little dagger in her girdle, and managed a spirited horse to admiration. The Frenchman, with whom I had much talk, was an arrant fop, yet a shrewd fellow withal. He jingled like a jester with his many silver bells, his hair was tied behind in a tail, the points of his shoes turned up, his parti-coloured doublet cut short round (a new fashion, adopted for greater swiftness in flying from an enemy), and his beard, long and bushy, trimmed with a sort of studied negligence. He gave me a melancholy account of the state of France, divided within, overrun by the English invaders, nobles plundering and burning—here to-day and there to-morrow, without pity, law, or loyalty; knights destroying, not helping the weak: troops of robbers surprising castles and even taking towns; and the wretched peasantry fain often to hide themselves and their cattle for weeks and months in great caves hollowed out underneath the ground.

One of the friars told me a story current about Prior Ruysbroek, how, one day, he was absent longer than usual in the forest, whither he was accustomed to retire for meditation, and as some of the brethren went to seek him they saw a tree at a distance which appeared surrounded by fiery glory. The holy man was sitting at its foot, lost in contemplation! The Saviour and our Blessed Lady herself are said to have appeared to him more than once.[142]

We reached Grünthal—a great building of exceeding plainness—soon after nightfall. Found there visitors from Brussels, so that, between us, nearly all the guest chambers were filled. The good Ruysbroek has been there but a year, yet if he is always to be thus sought unto, methinks he is as far from his longed-for seclusion as ever.[143]

We remained three weeks at Grünthal, for whenever the Doctor would be going, the good Prior so besought him to tarry longer that he could not in courtesy say him nay. Often Ruysbroek and Tauler would spend all the summer morning in the forest, now walking, now sitting under the trees, talking of the concerns of the soul, or of the fears and hopes awakened by these doubtful times. I was permitted repeatedly to accompany them, and afterwards wrote down some of the more remarkable things I heard said. These two saintly men, prepared to love each other as brothers in a common experience, seemed at once to grow together into a friendship as strong as though many years had been employed in the building thereof. Neither of them vain, neither jealous, each was for humbling himself beneath the other, and seemed desirous rather to hear and learn than to talk about himself.

Speaking about the Son of God and the soul of man, Ruysbroek said—‘I believe that the Son is the Image of the Father, that in the Son have dwelt from all eternity, foreknown and contemplated by the Father, the prototypes of all mankind. We existed in the Son before we were born—He is the creative ground of all creatures—the eternal cause and principle of their life. The highest essence of our being rests therefore in God,—exists in his image in the Son. After our creation in time, our souls are endowed with these properties, which are in effect one; the first, the Imageless Nudity, (die bildlose Nacktheit)—by means of this we receive and are united to the Father; the second, the Higher Reason of the Soul (die höhere Vernunft der Seele), the mirror of brightness, by which we receive the Son; the third, the Spark of the Soul (Funken der Seele) by which we receive the love of God the Holy Ghost. These three faculties are in us all the ground of our spiritual life, but in sinners they are obscured and buried under their transgressions.[144]

‘The office of the Son in time was to die for us, fulfil the law, and give us a divine pattern of humility, love, and patience. He is the fountain whence flows to us all needed blessing, and with him works the Holy Spirit. What the Son did he did for all—is Light-bringer for all mankind, for the Catholic Church especially, but also for every devoutly-disposed mind. Grace is common, and whoever desires it has it. Without it no natural powers or merits can save us. The will is free by nature, it becomes by grace more free; yea, a king, lord of every lower power, crowned with Love, clad in the might of the Holy Ghost. There is a natural will towards good (Synderesis) implanted in us all, but damped by sin. We can will to follow this better impulse, and of ourselves desire the help of divine grace, without which we can never overcome sin and rise above ourselves. Everything depends on will. A man must will right strongly. Will to have humility and love, and they are thine. If any man is without the spirit of God, it is his own fault, for not seeking that without which he cannot please Him.[145]

‘True penitence is of the heart; bodily suffering is not essential. No one is to think he is shut out from Christ because he cannot bear the torturing penance some endure. We must never be satisfied with any performance, any virtue—only in the abyss, the Nothingness of Humility, do we rise beyond all heavens. True desire after God is not kept back by the sense of defect. The longing soul knows only this, that it is bent on God. Swallowed up in aspiration, it can take heed of nothing more.’[146] (A very weighty saying this, methinks, and helpful.)

Speaking of the inner life, and the union of the soul with God, Ruysbroek said—

‘God dwells in the highest part of the soul. He who ascends this height has all things under his feet. We are united to God when, in the practice of the virtues, we deny and forsake ourselves, loving and following God above all creatures. We cannot compel God by our love to love us, but He cannot sanctify us unless we freely contribute our effort. There is a reciprocal desire on our part and that of God. The free inspiration of God is the spring of all our spiritual life. Thence flows into us knowledge—an inner revelation which preserves our spirit open, and, lifting us above all images and all disturbance, brings us to an inward silence. Here the divine inspiration is a secret whispering in the inner ear. God dwells in the heart pure and free from every image. Then first, when we withdraw into the simplicitas of our heart, do we behold the immeasurable glory of God, and our intellect is as clear from all considerations of distinction and figurative apprehensions, as though we had never seen or heard of such things. Then the riches of God are open to us. Our spirit becomes desireless, as though there were nothing on earth or in heaven of which we stood in need. Then we are alone with God, God and we—nothing else. Then we rise above all multiplicity and distinction into the simple nakedness of our essence, and in it become conscious of the infinite wisdom of the Divine Essence, whose inexhaustible depths are as a vast waste, into which no corporeal and no spiritual image can intrude. Our created is absorbed in our uncreated life, and we are as it were transformed into God. Lost in the abyss of our eternal blessedness, we perceive no distinction between ourselves and God. As soon as we begin to reflect and to consider what that is we feel, we become aware of such distinction, and fall back to the level of reason.’[147]

Here Tauler asked whether such language was not liable to abuse by the heretics who confound man and God? He referred to a passage in the Spiritual Nuptials, in which Ruysbroek said that we became identical, in this union, with the glory by which we are illumined.[148]

Ruysbroek answered, that he had designed to qualify duly all such expressions. ‘But you know, Doctor,’ continued he, ‘I have not your learning, and cannot at all times say so accurately as I would what I mean. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings!—I would say that in such a state all our powers are in repose, not that they are annihilated. If so, we should lose our existence as creatures. We are one with God, but yet always creature existences distinct from God. I do humbly believe, let my enemies say what they may, that I wrote no word of that book save at the impulse of the Holy Ghost, and with a peculiar and most blessed presence to my soul of the Holy Trinity. But what shall I call this blessedness? It includes peace, inward silence, affectionate hanging on the source of our joy, sleep in God, contemplation of the heaven of darkness, far above reason.‘[149]

The conversation then turned on the heresies of the time, the corruptions of the Church and of the State, and other practical matters more within my compass. Ruysbroek said that the great sin and error of these heretics lay in their aspiring to union with God by a summary and arrogant method of their own. They persuaded themselves that, merely by ceasing to think and distinguish, they could withdraw themselves into the essence of their nature, and so, without the help of grace or the practice of virtue, attain by bare nature the rest and blessedness of absolute simplicity and superiority to all modes and images.

‘Verily,’ quoth Tauler, ‘though they give themselves out for the wisest and the holiest, it is only themselves, not God, they enjoy. Yet mischievous as they are, often as I have preached against them, I never have taken, nor shall I take, any part in their persecution.’[150]

‘I have had plentiful opportunity,’ continued Ruysbroek, ‘for observing these men. I would divide them into four classes.[151] First of all there are those whose doctrine sins especially against the Holy Ghost. They say the essential Godhead works not, but the Holy Ghost doth: that they belong to that Divine Essence, and will rest in like manner;—that they are, therefore, above the Spirit of God. They hold that, after time, all things will be God, one absolute Quiescence, without distinction and without change. So they will neither know nor act, neither think nor thank, but be free from all desire, all obligation. This they call Poverty of Spirit. I say it is a devilish poverty, and such souls must be poor as hell in divine love and knowledge.

‘The second class say, with like blasphemy, ‘We are divine by nature. There is one God, and we are identical with Him. We with Him have created all things; if we had not chosen, we had not been born. It was our own choice to exist as we do. God can do nothing without us, and we give Him therefore no preference, pay Him no homage. Honour to Him is honour to us. What we are we would be, what we would be we are; with God we have created ourselves and all things; heaven and earth hang on our will.’ This insane spiritual pride is flatly contrary to all catholic doctrine.

‘The third class sin not less against the Son. They say, we are as much incarnate as Christ was, and, in the same sense, divine sons of God. Had He lived long enough, He would have attained to the same contemplative quiet we enjoy. Retired into our inmost selves, we find ourselves the same Wisdom of God which Christ is. When He is honoured, we are honoured, for we are identical with Him.

‘The fourth class declare that neither God nor themselves, heaven nor hell, action nor rest, good nor evil, have any real existence. They deny God and the work of Christ, Scripture, sacraments,—everything. God is nothing; they are nothing; the universe is nothing.

‘Some hold doctrines such as these in secret, and conform outwardly, for fear. Others make them the pretext for every kind of vice and insolent insubordination. Of a truth we should cross ourselves when we but speak of them, as in the neighbourhood of spirits from the pit.’

‘And what hope,’ said Tauler, ‘of better things, while the Church is crowded with hirelings, and, with lust and bravery, everywhere leads on the world in sin?’

‘What hope, indeed!’ mournfully responded Ruysbroek. ‘The grace of the sacraments is shamefully bought and sold. Rich transgressors may live as they list. The wealthy usurer is buried before the altar, the bells ring, the priest declares him blessed. I declare that if he died in unrighteousness, not all the priests in Christendom, not all his hoards lavished to feed the poor, could save him from perdition. See, too, the monks, mendicants and all, what riches! what sumptuous fare! what licence, in violation of every vow! what odious distinctions! Some have four or five garments, another scarcely one. Some revel with the prior, the guardian, and the lector in the refectory, at a place of their own. Others must be content with herring and cabbage, washed down with sour beer. Little by little the habit is changed, black becomes brown, grey is exchanged for blue, the white must be of the finest stuff, the shape of the newest cut.’

‘This,’ said Tauler, ‘is what I so much admire in your little community here. You have practically abolished those mischievous distinctions, the cause of so much bitterness in our religious houses. Every one has his place, but no one is degraded. You yourself will perform the meanest offices, as the other morning, when Arnstein found you sweeping the lectorium. Yours is the true canonical life—the life of a family. Every one is ready to do kind offices for his brethren, and your own example teaches daily forgetfulness of self.’

Ruysbroek looked uneasy under these praises, and they spoke again of the prevalent evils in the Church.[152]

‘How many nuns have I seen,’ said Ruysbroek, ‘daintily attired, with silver bells to their girdles, whose prison was the cloister and their paradise the world! A retinue of forty reiters is a moderate attendance for a prelate out on a visitation. I have known some priests who engaged themselves as business agents to laymen; others who have entered the service of ladies of rank, and walked behind them as footmen into church. A criminal has but to pay money down, and he may serve the devil for another year. A trim reckoning, and satisfaction for all parties! The bishop gets the gold, the devil gets the soul, and the miserable fool the moment’s pleasure of his lust.’[153]

When, one day, they were conversing on future rewards and punishments, I remember hearing Ruysbroek say—‘I trust I am ready for all God sends me, life or death, or even hell-pains themselves.’ An attainment of virtue inconceivable to me.[154]

At Grünthal I saw much of a lay brother named John Affliginiensis, the cook of the community.[155] He accompanied Ruysbroek thither. Though wholly unlettered, he serves daily as a goodly ensample of the active and contemplative life united. It is his calling to see to the dinners of the brethren; he is scarce less helpful to their devotions. That he is a good plain cook I can bear witness, and to the edifying character of the discourses he sometimes delivers to the canons, all testify. He scarcely sleeps at all, goes meanly clad, and eats the veriest refuse of the convent fare. He is one of the meekest and most humble of men—has had his sore fights of temptation, fierce inward purgations, and also his favoured hours and secret revelations. Ruysbroek loves him like a brother. The esteem in which he is held, and the liberty of speech allowed him, is characteristic of the simple and brotherly spirit which dwells among these worthy canons. Grünthal is not, like so many religious houses, a petty image of the pettiest follies of the world. There they do seem to have withdrawn in spirit from the strife and pomp of secular life. Gladly would I spend my last years among the beeches and the oaks that shut in their holy peace. But while I may I must be doing; had my call been to the contemplative life I should have been moulded in another fashion.

On our journey back from Louvain I had rare entertainment. We had scarcely passed out beyond the gates, when Tauler rode forward, in deep discourse with an ecclesiastic of the party. A hasty glance at our fellow-travellers, as we mustered at the door of the hostelry, had not led me to look for any company likely to eke out a day’s travel with aught that was pleasant or of profit. But I was mistaken. I espied ere long, a neat, merry-looking little man, in a minstrel’s habit, with a gittern slung at his back. To him I joined himself, and he, pleased evidently with the notice I took of him, sang me songs and told me stories all the way. He said his name was Muscatblut, and I was not sorry to be able to gratify him by answering that his fame had already reached my ears.[156] He had store of songs, with short and long lines curiously interwoven in a way of his own, a very difficult measure to write, as he assured me—the very triumph of his heart. These love-lays he interspersed with riddles and rhyming proverbs, with quaint allegories, satires on clerks and monks, and stories about husbands and wives, making all within hearing roll in their saddles with laughter. He had likewise certain coarse songs, half amatory, half devotional, tagged with bits of slang and bits of Latin, about the wooing of our Lady. I told him, to his surprise, to stop; it was flat blasphemy. He said the voluptuous passages of his lay were after Frauenlob’s best manner, and as to the sacred personages, by St. Bartholomew! many a holy clerk had praised that part most of all, calling it a deep allegory, most edifying to the advanced believer.

At Cologne I parted from the Doctor with many embraces. On my way back to Strasburg I took boat up the Mayne to Frankfurt, whither business called me. We passed a little woody island in the midst of the river, which was pointed out to me as the residence of the leprous barefooted friar, whose songs and airs are so popular throughout the Rhineland. I looked with reverence at the melancholy spot. There he dwells alone, shut out from mankind, yet delighting and touching every heart. His songs are sweet as the old knightly lays of love, full of courtly grace and tenderness, and yet they are songs for the people from one truly of themselves. The burgher has his minstrelsy now, as well as the noble. This at least is a good sign.

Note to page 321.

From this time forward, Rulman Merswin gave himself up to the spiritual guidance of Nicholas the layman—taking him to be to him ‘in God’s stead.’ He took no step without his direction, and wrote at his command his book entitled Von den vier ioren sins anevohenden lebendes—a record of what may be called his spiritual apprenticeship. Nicholas took a copy of it back with him to the Oberland. Schmidt has brought together what is known of Merswin, in the Appendix to his life of Tauler, pp. 177, &c.

The Book of the Nine Rocks was commenced in 1352. It has been published in Diepenbrock’s edition of the works of Suso, to whom it was, till recently, attributed. The claim of Merswin to its authorship is established beyond question—(Schmidt, 180). The work opens by relating how, early one morning in Advent, a man (the author) was warned of God to prepare himself, by inward retirement, for that which He should show him. He was made to behold a vision full of strange and alarming appearances. He cried out, ‘Ah, my heart’s Love! what meanest thou with these mysterious symbols?’ He struggled hard against the phantoms of his trance, but the marvellous forms only multiplied the more. He was constrained by a divine voice to gaze, and commanded, in spite of his humble remonstrances, to write in a book what he saw—the image of the corruptions of Christendom, for the warning of the guilty and the edification of the faithful. The dialogues are given at length between him and God—‘the Man’ and ‘the Answer.’ For eleven weeks, in sickness and spiritual distress, he wavered. He was but a poor, ignorant layman; how should he presume to exhort the Church? ‘The Voice of the Answer’ is heard saying, ‘Came not thy reluctance from humility, I would consign thee to the pit. I see I must compel thee. In the name of the Holy Trinity, I command thee to begin to write this day.’

The souls of men proceeding from God, but few of them returning to their Original, are shown him under the similitude of multitudes of fish, brought down by the descent of great waters from the summit of a mountain. Men in the valley are catching them in nets. Scarce half of them reach the sea below. There the remnant swim in all directions, and at length endeavour to leap back, up to the source whence they came. Numbers are taken in the nets; only a few reach even the base of the mountain. Some who ascend higher fall back upon the rocks and die. A very few, springing from rock to rock, reach exhausted, the fountain at the top, and there forget their pains.

The twenty following chapters are occupied with a dialogue, in which the divine Voice enumerates the characteristic sins of all classes of mankind, from the pope to the begging friar—from the emperor to the serf.

Then commences the vision of the Nine Rocks. A mountain, enormous in breadth and height, fills all the scene. As the eye travels up the ascent, it beholds nine steep rocks, each loftier than that which preceded it,—the highest lost in the heavens. From the lowest the whole surface of the earth is visible. A net is spread over all the region beneath, but it does not reach the mountain. The multitudes seen beneath it are men in mortal sin. The men standing on the first and lowest rock are religious persons, but such as are lukewarm, defective in aspiration and in zeal. They dwell dangerously near the net—(cap. xxiii.). Some, from the first rock, are seen making their way up the precipice, and reaching the second, where they become of dazzling brightness. Those on the second rock have heartily forsaken the world; they will suffer less in purgatory, enjoy more in heaven, than those beneath; but they, too, are far from their Origin yet, and in danger of spiritual pride, self-seeking, and of growing faint and remiss in their painful progress—(cap. xxiv.). Those on the third rock, fewer in number, suffering far more severely in time, are nearer to God, will suffer little in purgatory, and are of yet more glorious aspect than their predecessors—(cap. xxv.). Such is the process to the summit. All the nine rocks must be surmounted, would we return to our Divine Source. But few attain the last, which is indeed the Gate of the Origin—the consummate blessedness, in which the believer, fearless of hell and purgatory, has annihilated self, and hath no wish or will save that of God. One of these true worshippers brings more blessing to Christendom than thousands of such as live after their own will, and know not that they are nothing.

Finally, ‘the man’ is permitted a moment’s glance into the Divine ‘Origin.’ The rapture of that moment he attempted in vain to describe;—no reflection, no image, could give the least hint of it.

Both Rulman and ‘the Friend of God in the Oberland’ believed themselves repeatedly warned of God in visions, that they should build a house for him in Strasburg. The merchant purchased a ruined cloister on a little island in the river Ill, without the city walls. He restored the church, and erected a stone belfry. Nicholas advised him to bestow it on the Johannites, in preference to any other Order,—for there had been no little rivalry among the monks as to who was to enjoy the gift. The conditions of the deed for which he stipulated with the Master of the Order are indicative of the new and more elevated position which mysticism had taught the laity to claim. The government of the house was to rest entirely with a lay triumvirate; the two survivors always to choose a third. The first three governors were Rulman himself, Heinzmann Wetzel, knight, and John Merswin, burg-graf. The admission of brethren rested with these heads of the house, and they were free to receive any one, clerk or layman, knight or serving man, whether belonging to the order of St. John or not, requiring only that he should bring with him the moderate sum requisite to render his residence no burden on the convent. (Schmidt, p. 189.)

Note to page 329.

The passage to which Tauler is made to refer is contained in the third book of the Spiritual Nuptials, chap. 5:—‘Ind alle die minschen die bouen ir geschaffenheit verhauen sin in eyn schauwende leuen, die synt eyn mit deser gotlicher clairheit, ind sij sint die clairheit selver. Ind sy sien ind gevoilen ind vynden sich selver ouermitz dit gotliche licht, dat sy sin der selue eynveldige gront na wijse irre ungeschaffenheit, da de clairheit sonder mias vs schynt in gotlicher wijsen ind na sympelheit des wesens eynueldich binnen blijfft ewelich sonder wise. Ind hervm soilen die innyge schauwende minschen vsgayn na wijse des schauwens bouen reden ind bouen vnderscheit ind bouen ir geschaffen wesen mit ewigen instarren ouermitz dat ingeboiren licht, soe werden sy getransformeirt ind eyn mit desem seluen licht da sy mede sien ind dat sy sien. Ind also vervolgen die schauwende minschen ir ewich bilde da si zo gemacht sin ind beschauwen got ind alle dinck sonder vnderscheit in eyme eynveldigen sien in gotlicher clairheit. In dat is dat edelste ind dat vrberlichste schauwen da men zo komen mach in desem leuen.’—Vier Schriften, p. 144.

[And all men who are exalted above their creatureliness into a contemplative life are one with this divine glory,—yea, are that glory. And they see, and feel, and find in themselves, by means of this divine light, that they are the same simple Ground as to their uncreated nature (i.e., in respect of their ideal pre-existence in the Son), since the glory shineth forth without measure, after the divine manner, and abideth within them simply and without mode (particular manifestation or medium), according to the simplicity of the essence. Wherefore interior contemplative men should go forth in the way of contemplation above reason and distinction, beyond their created substance, and gaze perpetually by the aid of their inborn light, and so they become transformed, and one with the same light, by means of which they see, and which they see. Thus do contemplative men arrive at that eternal image after which they were created, and contemplate God and all things without distinction in a simple beholding, in divine glory. And this is the loftiest and most profitable contemplation whereto men may attain in this life.]

This passage, and others like it, gave rise to the charge of pantheism brought by Gerson against Ruysbroek in the following century. The prior of Grünthal found a defender in Schönhoven, who pointed with justice to numerous expressions in the writings of the accused, altogether incompatible with the heresy alleged. Quite inconsistent with any confusion of the divine and human is Ruysbroek’s fine description of the insatiable hunger of the soul—growing by that it feeds on,—the consciousness that all possessed is but a drop to the illimitable undeemed Perfection yet beyond. (‘Wi leren in waerheit sijns aenschijns dat al dat wi gesmaken tegen dat ons ontblijft dat en is niet een draep tegen al die zee, dit verstormt onsen geest in hetten ende in ongeduer van mynnen.’—Von dem funkelnden Steine, x. p. 194.) So again he says, ‘Want wy enmogen te mael niet got werden ende onse gescapenheit verliesen, dat is onmoegelic’—p. 190; and similarly that we become one with God in love, not in nature, (‘ouerformet ende een mit hem in sijnre minnen, niet in sijnre naturen.’)—Spiegel der Seligkeit, xxiv.

Note to page 329.

Ruysbroek expressed to Gerard Groot, in these very words, his belief in the special guidance of the Holy Spirit vouchsafed for the composition of his books on these ‘deep things’ of the kingdom. (Engelhardt, p. 168.)

The doctrine of Ruysbroek is substantially the same with that of his friend and brother-mystic, Tauler. Whether speaking the high German of the upper Rhine or the low German of the Netherlands, mysticism gives utterance to the same complaint and the same aspiration. Ruysbroek is individually less speculative than Eckart, less practical than Tauler. The Flemish mystic is a more submissive son of the Church than the stout-hearted Dominican of Strasburg, and lays proportionally more stress on what is outward and institutional. He is fond of handling his topics analytically. His numerous divisions and subdivisions remind us of the scholastic Richard of St. Victor, but Ruysbroek, less methodical by nature, and less disciplined, more frequently loses sight of his own distinctions. The subject itself, indeed, where it possesses the writer, repudiates every artificial treatment. While he specifies with minuteness the stages of the mystical ascent, Ruysbroek does not contend that the experience of every adept in the contemplative life must follow the precise order he lays down. (Geistl. Hochzeit, ii. § 30, p. 71.) He loves to ally the distinctions he enumerates in the world of nature, in the operations of grace, in the heavenly state, and in the Divine Being, by a relationship of correspondence. Thus the seven planets and the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit answer to each other. The Empyrean in the external world corresponds to Pure Being in the divine nature, to the Spark of the soul in man, and to the Contemplative stage of his spiritual experience. This scheme of analogies, incidental in Ruysbroek and the earlier mystics, makes up almost the whole system of mystics like Behmen and Swedenborg. His elaborate comparison of the operations of grace to a fountain with three streams (one of which refreshes the memory, another clarifies the understanding, while a third invigorates the will), resembles strikingly the fanciful method of Madame Guyon in her Torrents, and of St. Theresa in her Degrees of Prayer. (Geistl. Hochzeit, xvii. § 36, p. 80.) The mysticism of Ruysbroek is less sensuous than that of the poetical Suso. Beyond question the higher elevation of the contemplative life must have been a welcome refuge to many devout minds wearied with vain ritual, penance, and routine. As acknowledged contemplatists, they could escape without scandal from contact with the grosser machinery of their religion. Accordingly, to claim superiority to means and modes was by no means always the arrogant pretension it may seem to us. Tauler’s ‘state above grace’ was the ark of an unconscious Protestantism. Where the means were made the end, wisdom forsook them, and rejoiced to find that the name of mystic could shelter spirituality from the dangers of the suspected heretic. Ruysbroek, however, felt the want of such a protection for freer thought, much less than did Tauler and some of his more active followers.

Footnote 129:

See Hecker’s Black Death (trans. by Dr. Babington, 1853).—Hecker gives the documents relating to the trial of the Neustadt Jews in an appendix, from the Chronicle of Jacob of Königshoven. See also pp. 103-127.

Footnote 130:

These fanatics were everywhere foremost among the instigators of the cruelties perpetrated on the Jews. Women, and even children, joined their ranks in great numbers, wearing the hats with red crosses, carrying flags, and scourging themselves with the rest. The particulars given are taken from the account in Jacob von Königshoven’s Elsassische u. Strassburgische Chronik, inserted entire in Wackernagel,—(p. 931). The chronicler says:—‘Zuo Strôsburg kam mê denne tûsent manne in ire geselleschaft, und siu teiltent sich zuo Strôsburg: eine parte der geischelaere gieng das lant abe, die ander parte das lant ûf. und kam sô vil volkes in ire bruoderschaft, das es verdrôs den bôbest und den keiser und die phafheit. und der keiser verschreip dem bôbeste das er etwas hie zuo gedaechte: anders die geischeler verkêrtent alle die welt.’ The Flagellants claimed power to confess and give absolution. The thirty-four days’ scourging among them was to make a man as innocent as a babe—the virtue of the lash was above all sacraments. Thus the people took religion into their own hands, blindly and savagely,—no other way was then possible. It was a spasmodic movement of the mass of life beneath, when the social disorder that accompanied the pestilence had loosened the grasp of the power temporal and spiritual which held them down so long.

Footnote 131:

See Schmidt’s Tauler, p. 58.

Footnote 132:

Laguille’s Histoire d'Alsace, liv. xxv. p. 290.

Footnote 133:

Hecker, p. 81.

Footnote 134:

Schmidt’s Tauler, p. 59.

Footnote 135:

See Note, p. 336.

Footnote 136:

Ruysbroek sent a copy of his book, De ornatu spiritualium nuptiarum, to the Friends of God in the Oberland. He had many friends in Cologne, and it is very likely that the work may have reached Tauler there, either through them or from the author, who must have heard of him.

Footnote 137:

See Johannes Ruysbroek, by Engelhardt, p. 168.

Footnote 138:

Froissart, book ii. chap. 40.

Footnote 139:

Froissart, chapp. 41, 42.

Footnote 140:

Ibid., book i. chap. 34.

Footnote 141:

Optimum aliena insania frui.

Footnote 142:

Engelhardt, p. 326.

Footnote 143:

It is certain that Ruysbroek was visited during the many years of his residence in Grünthal, much after the manner described, and also that Tauler was among the visitors, though the exact time of his journey is not known.

Footnote 144:

See Engelhardt, pp. 189, 288.—According to Ruysbroek, the Trinitarian process lies at the basis of the kingdoms both of Nature and of Grace. There is a flowing forth and manifestation in the creative Word,—a return and union of love by the Holy Ghost. This process goes on continually in the providential government of the universe, and in the spiritual life of believers. The upholding of the world, and the maintenance of the work of grace in the heart, are both in different ways a perpetual bringing forth of the Son, by whom all things consist, and who is formed in every devout soul. Ruysbroek is careful to state (as a caveat against pantheism) that such process is no necessary development of the divine nature,—it is the good pleasure of the Supreme. (See Vier Schriften von J. Ruysbroek, in niederdeutscher Sprache, by A. v. Arnswaldt; Hanover, 1848.) ‘Wi hebben alle boven onse ghescapenheit een ewich leuen in gode als in onse leuende sake die ons ghemaect ende ghescapen heest van niete, maer wi en sijn niet god noch wi en hebben ons seluen niet ghemaeckt. Wi en sijn ooc niet wt gode ghevloten van naturen, maer want ons god ewelijc ghevoelt heest ende bekent in hem seluen, so heest hi ons ghemaeckt, niet van naturen noch van node, maer van vriheit sijns willen,’—p. 291. (Spiegel der Seligkeit, xvii.)

The bosom of the Father, he says, is our proper ground and origin (der schois des vaders is onse eygen gront ind onse oirsprunck); we have all, therefore, the capacity for receiving God, and His grace enables us to recognise and realise this latent possibility (offenbairt ind brengit vort die verboirgenheit godes in wijsen),—p. 144.

Footnote 145:

Engelhardt, pp. 183, 186. Ruysbroek speaks as follows of that fundamental tendency godward of which he supposes prevenient grace (vurloiffende gracie) to lay hold:—‘Ouch hait der mynsche eyn naturlich gront neygen zo gode overmitz den voncken der sielen ind die overste reden die altzijt begert dat goide ind hasset dat quaide. Mit desen punten voirt got alle mynschen na dat sijs behoeven ind ecklichen na sinre noit,’ &c.—Geistl. Hochzeit, cap. 3.

Ruysbroek lays great stress on the exercise of the will. ‘Ye are as holy as ye truly will to be holy,’ said he one day to two ecclesiastics, inquiring concerning growth in grace. It is not difficult to reconcile such active effort with the passivity of mysticism. The mystics all say, ‘We strive towards virtue by a strenuous use of the gifts which God communicates, but when God communicates Himself, then we can be only passive—we repose, we enjoy, but all operation ceases.’

Footnote 146:

Engelhardt, pp. 195, 199.

Footnote 147:

Engelhardt, pp. 201, 213. In the season of spiritual exaltation, the powers of the soul are, as it were, absorbed in absolute essential enjoyment (staen ledich in een weselic gebrucken). But they are not annihilated, for then we should lose our creatureliness.—Mer si en werden niet te niete, want soe verloeren wy onse gescapenheit. Ende alsoe lange als wy mit geneichden geeste ende mit apen ogen sonder merken ledich staen, alsoe lange moegen wy schouwen ende gebruken. Mer in den seluen ogenblijc dat wy proeven ende merken willen wat dat is dat wy geuoelen, so vallen wy in reden, ende dan vynden wy onderscheit ende anderheit tusschen ons ende gade, ende dan vynden wy gade buten ons in onbegripelicheiden.—Von dem funkelnden Steine, x.

Footnote 148:

See first Note, p. 338.

Footnote 149:

See second Note, p. 338.

Footnote 150:

Engelhardt, p. 225. Schmidt’s Tauler, p. 61.—The same doctrine which furnished a sanctuary for the devotion of purer natures supplied also an excuse for the licence of the base. Wilful perversion, or mere ignorance, or some one of the manifold combinations of these two factors, would work the mystical exhortation into some such result as that denounced by Ruysbroek. We may imagine some bewildered man as speaking thus within himself:—‘So we are to covet ignorance, to surmount distinctions, to shun what is clear or vivid as mediate and comparatively carnal, to transcend means and bid farewell to the wisdom of the schools. Wise and devout men forsake all their learning, forget their pious toil and penance, to lose themselves in that ground in which we are united to God,—to sink into vague abstract confusion. But may I not do at first what they do at last? Why take in only to take out? I am empty already. Thank heaven! I haven’t a distinct idea in my head.’

It is so that the popular mind is sure to travesty the ultra-refinements of philosophy.

Footnote 151:

Engelhardt, pp. 224-228.—Eckart, like Hegel, would seem to have left behind him a right-hand and a left-hand party,—admirers like Suso and Tauler, who dropped his extreme points and held by such saving clauses as they found; and headstrong spirits, ripe for anarchy, like these New-Lights or High-Fliers, the representatives of mysticism run to seed. Ruysbroek’s classification of them is somewhat artificial; fanaticism does not distribute itself theologically. In the treatise entitled Spiegel der Seligkeit, § 16, he describes them generally as follows:—‘Ander quade duulische menschen vint men, die segghen dat si selue Cristus sijn of dat si god sijn, ende dat haer hant hemel ende erde ghemaect heest, ende dat an haer hant hanghet hemel ende erde ende alle dinc, ende dat si verheuen sijn boven alle die sacramenten der heiligher kerken, ende dat si der niet en behoeuen noch si en willen der ooc niet.’ He represents their claim to identity with God as leading to a total moral indifference (§ 17):—‘Ende sulke wanen god sijn, ende si en achten gheen dinc goet noch quaet, in dien dat si hem ontbeelden connen ende in bloter ledicheit haer eighen wesen vinden ende besitten moghen.’ Their idea of the consummation of all things savours of the Parisian heresy—the offspring of John Scotus, popularised by David of Dinant and his followers. The final restitution is to consist in the resolution of all creatures into the Divine Substance:—‘So spreken si voort dat in den lesten daghe des ordels enghele ende duuele, goede ende quade, dese sullen alle werden een eenvoudighe substancie der godheit ... ende na dan, spreken si voort, en sal god bekennen noch minnen hem seluen noch ghene creature’—(§ 16).

Footnote 152:

Engelhardt, pp. 326-336.—Good Ruysbroek was fully entitled to the encomium placed in the mouth of Tauler. He himself, like Bernard, would frequently perform the meanest offices of the cloister. The happy spirit of brotherhood which prevailed among the canons of Grünthal made a deep impression on that laborious practical reformer, Gerard Groot, when, in 1378, he visited the aged prior. What he then saw was not without its influence in the formation of that community with which his name is associated—the Brethren of the Common Life.—See Ullmann, Reformatoren vor der Reformation, vol. ii.

Footnote 153:

Engelhardt, p. 330.—Ruysbroek inveighs with much detail against the vanities of female dress—as to those hair-pads, sticking up like great horns, they are just so many ‘devil’s nests.’

Footnote 154:

Ruysbroek expressed himself in these words to Gerard Groot (Engelhardt, p. 168). In his touching description of the ‘desolation’ endured by the soul on its way upward toward the ‘super-essential contemplation,’ he makes the sufferer say,—‘O Lord, since I am thine (want ich din eygen bin), I would as soon be in hell as in heaven, if such should be thy good pleasure; only do thy glorious will with me, O Lord!‘—Geistl. Hochzeit, § 30. Ruysbroek, like Fénelon, abandons himself thus only on the supposition that even in hell he should still retain the divine favour;—so impossible after all is the absolute disinterestedness toward which Quietism aspires. The Flemish mystic distinguishes between the servants of God, the friends, and the sons. Those worshippers who stand in the relation of friends have still something of their own (besitten oer inwendichkeit mit eygenscap) in their love to God. The sons ascend, ‘dying-wise,’ to an absolute emptiness. The friends still set value on divine bestowments and experiences; the sons are utterly dead to self, in bare modeless love (in bloeter, wiseloeser mynnen). Yet, very inconsistently, he represents the sons as more assured of eternal life than the friends. (Von dem funkelnden Steine, § 8.)

Footnote 155:

A veritable personage. He died in 1377, and left behind him a book recording the conflicts he underwent and the revelations vouchsafed him. (Engelhardt, p. 326.)

Footnote 156:

The lyrics of Muscatblut are characterised by Gervinus (ii. p. 225), and the same authority gives some account, from the Limburg Chronicle, of the famous friar, leper, and poet mentioned by Arnstein.

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

Chapter VIII

Unde planctus et lamentum? Quid mentem non erigis? Quid revolvis monumentum? Tecum est quem diligis; Jesum quæris, et inventum Habes, nec intelligis.

Unde gemis, unde ploras? Verum habes gaudium. In te latet quod ignoras Doloris solatium. Intus habes, quæris foras Languoris remedium.[157]

HYMN OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.

Vivo sin vivir mi, Y tan alta vida espero Que muero porque no muero.[158]

ST. THERESA.

On the next evening Atherton resumed his reading as follows:—

Chronicle of Adolph Arnstein, continued.

1354. March. St. Brigitta’s Day.—A fortnight ago this day, there came to me, to buy as goodly a battle-axe as could be made, young Sir Ulric—the same who, at the tourney the other day, graced his new-won spurs by such gallant feats of arms. We fell into talk about the great floods which have everywhere wrought of late such loss of life, and cattle, and husbandry. He said he had but the day before saved the life of a monk who, with his companion, had been carried beyond his depth by the force of the water, as they were wading across the fields.

‘The one most in danger,’ said Ulric, ‘had a big book in his bosom. As he flounders about, out tumbles the book; he lets go his staff, and makes after it; and souse he goes, over head and ears in a twinkling. The other stands stock still, and bawls out to me for help. I, just sworn to succour the distressed and be true to the Church, spur Roland, plunge in, and lift out the draggled, streaming father by the hood, half throttled and half drowned, but clutching the book in his frozen fingers as though it were a standard or a fair lady’s token. I lay him before me across my horse; his fellow catches hold of my stirrup, and we land on the rising ground. When my monk had somewhat come to himself, he pours as many blessings on my head as there were drops running from his habit; not, he said, for saving his poor life merely, but that the book was safe. He had just finished writing it—there was not another copy in the world—the devil had an especial spite against it—no doubt the fiend had raised the waters to destroy the seed which fed men’s souls as well as the grain which nourished their bodies; but the faithful God had sent me, like his angel, just in time for rescue. I saw them in safety, and he promised to remember me in his orisons. His name, I think he said, was Seusse or Suso.’[159]

So Suso is in Strasburg, thought I,—the man I have long wished to see. I lost no time in inquiring after him at the Dominican convent. There I found, with no small satisfaction, that he was none the worse for his mishap; saw him several times, and persuaded him, at last, to honour for a few days my unworthy roof. He has been with us for a week, but must pursue his journey to-morrow. On my part, I could tell him news about Ruysbroek, and Tauler, and some of his old friends at Cologne. On his, he has won the love of all the household by his gentle, affectionate nature, blessed us by his prayers, and edified every heart by his godly conversation. My good wife would love him, if for nothing else, because he so loves the little ones. They love him because he always goes with them to feed the old falcon, and to throw out crumbs for the sparrows, because he joins them in petting Argus, and talks so sweetly about the Virgin and Child, and the lilies and violets and roses, and the angels with gold-bright wings that live in heaven. Those three tall fellows, my boys, fonder of sword-play, wrestling, and camping the bar, than of churchmen or church-going, will listen to him by the hour, while he tells of his visions, his journeys, his dangers, and his deliverances. Rulman Merswin also came over and spent two evenings with us. He talked much with Suso about Master Eckart. Suso was full of reminiscences and anecdotes about him. In his youthful days he had been his disciple at Cologne.

‘At one time,’ said Suso, ‘I was for ten years in the deepest spiritual gloom. I could not realize the mysteries of the faith. A decree seemed to have gone forth against me, and I thought I was lost. My cries, my tears, my penance,—all were vain. I bethought me at last of consulting my old teacher, left my cell, sailed down the Rhine, and at Cologne the Lord gave to the words of the master such power that the prison-doors were opened, and I stepped out into the sunshine once more. Neither did his counsel cease with life. I saw him in a vision, not long after his death. He told me that his place was in the ineffable glory, and that his soul was divinely transformed in God. I asked him, likewise, several questions about heavenly things, which he graciously answered, strengthening me not a little in the arduous course of the inner life of self-annihilation. I have marvelled often that any, having tasted of the noble wine of his doctrine, should desire any of my poor vintage.’[160]

In talking with the brethren at the convent, while Suso was their guest, I heard many things related concerning him altogether new to me. I was aware that he had been greatly sought after as a preacher in German throughout the Rhineland, and stood high in the esteem of holy men as a wise and tender-hearted guide of souls. That he was an especial friend of the Friends of God wherever he found them, I knew. When at Cologne I heard Tauler praise a book of his which he had in his possession, called the Horologe of Wisdom.[161] Something of the fame of his austerities, conflicts, and revelations, had come to my ears, but the half had not been told me.

It seems that his life, from his eighteenth to his fortieth year, was one long self-torture. The Everlasting Wisdom (who is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her, more precious than rubies, and with whom are durable riches and righteousness) manifested herself to him. This was his call to the spiritual life. He seemed to behold her—a maiden, bright as the sun,—her crown, eternity;—her raiment, blessedness;—her words, sweetness; unknown, and yet well known; near, and yet afar off; smiling on him, and saying, ‘My son, give me thine heart!’ From that time forth he dedicated his life to her service. He called himself the servant of the Eternal Wisdom, armed his soul as her knight, wooed her as his heart’s queen, bore without a murmur the lover’s pangs of coyness, doubt, and distance, with all the hidden martyrdom of spiritual passion.[162]

But the rose of his love, as he is wont to term it, had fearful thorns. I heard with a shudder of what he underwent that he might crush to death his naturally active, buoyant, impulsive temperament. Day and night he wore a close-fitting shirt in which were a hundred and fifty sharp nails, the points turned inward on the flesh. In this he lay writhing, like a mangled worm; and lest in his sleep he should find some easier posture, or relieve with his hands in any way the smart and sting that, like a nest of vipers, gnawed him everywhere, he had leather gloves made, covered with sharp blades, so that every touch might make a wound. Time after time were the old scars opened into new gashes. His body appeared like that of one who has escaped, half dead, from the furious clutches of a bear. This lasted sixteen years, till a vision bade him cease.

Never satisfied with suffering, he devised a new kind of discipline. He fashioned a wooden cross, with thirty nails whose points stood out beyond the wood, and this he wore between his shoulders underneath his garments, till his back was one loathly sore. To the thirty nails he added afterwards seven more, in honour of the sorrows of the Mother of God. When he would administer the discipline, he struck a blow on this cross with his fist, driving the points into his wounded flesh. He made himself, moreover, a scourge, one of the iron tags of which was bent like a fisher’s hook, and with this he lashed himself till it broke in his hand. For many years he lay at nights in a miserable hole he called his cell, with an old door for his bed, and in the depth of winter thought it sin to approach the stove for warmth. His convent lay on a little island where the Rhine flows out of the Lake of Constance. He could see the sparkling water on every side. His wounds filled him with feverish thirst; yet he would often pass the whole day without suffering a drop to moisten his lips. His recompence was the vision in which, at one time, the Holy Child brought him a vessel of spring-water; and, at another, Our Blessed Lady gave him to drink from her own heart. Such, they tell me, was his life till his fortieth year, when it was signified to him that he should remit these terrible exercises. He is now, I believe, little more than fifty years old—the mere wreck of a man to look at; but with such life and energy of spirit that, now he hath begun to live more like other people, he may have a good thirty years before him still.[163]

I questioned him about his book called the Horologe of Wisdom, or Book of the Eternal Wisdom, for it hath gone abroad under both names. He said it was finished in the year 1340, since which time he hath written sundry other pieces. He declared to me that he wrote that treatise only in his most favoured moments, himself ignorant and passive, but under the immediate impulse and illumination of the Divine Wisdom. He afterwards carefully examined all he had written, to be sure that there was nothing in his pages other than the holy Fathers had taught, and the Church received.[164] Methought, if he was sure of his inspiration, he might have spared himself this pain, unless the Holy Spirit could in some sort gainsay his own words.

He is strongly moved by music,—but what must have been his rapture to hear the hymns of the heavenly host! He has seen himself surrounded by the choir of seraphim and cherubim. He has heard a voice of thrilling sweetness lead the response, ‘Arise and shine, Jerusalem,’ and has wept in his cell with joy to hear from angels’ lips, at early dawn, the soaring words, ‘Mary, the morning star, is risen to-day.’ Many a time has he seen a heavenly company sent down to comfort him. They have taken him by the hand, and he has joined in spirit in their dance,—that celestial dance, which is a blissful undulation to and fro in the depths of the divine glory. One day, when thus surrounded in vision, he asked a shining prince of heaven to show him the mode in which God had His secret dwelling in his soul. Then answered the angel, ‘Take a gladsome look into thine inmost, and see how God in thy loving soul playeth His play of love.’ Straightway (said Suso to me) I looked, and behold the body about my heart was clear as crystal, and I saw the Eternal Wisdom calmly sitting in my heart in lovely wise: and, close by that form of beauty, my soul, leaning on God, embraced by His arm, pressed to His heart, full of heavenly longing, transported, intoxicated with love![165]

We were talking one evening of May-day eve, and asking Suso wherein their custom of celebrating that festival differed from our own. He said that in Suabia the youths went out, much in our fashion, singing songs before the houses of the maidens they loved, and craving from them garlands in honour of the May. He told us how he, in like manner, besought Our Lady with prayers and tears that he might have a garland from her Son, the Eternal Wisdom. It was his wont, he said, to set up a spiritual May-pole—the holy cross, that May-bough of the soul, blossoming with grace and beauty. ‘Before this,’ he continued, ‘I performed six venias,[166] and sung the hymn, ‘Hail, holy cross!’ thereafter praising God somewhat thus:—

‘Hail! heavenly May of the Eternal Wisdom, whose fruit is everlasting joy. First, to honour thee, I bring thee, to-day, for every red rose a heart’s love; then, for every little violet a lowly inclination; next, for every tender lily, a pure embrace; for every bright flower ever born or to be born of May, on heath or grassplot, wood or field, tree or meadow, my heart doth bring thee a spiritual kiss; for every happy song of birds that ever sang in the kindly May, my soul would give thee praises inexhaustible; for every grace that ever graced the May, my heart would raise thee a spiritual song, and pray thee, O thou blest soul’s May! to help me so to glorify thee in my little time below, that I may taste thy living fruit for evermore above!‘[167]

The beginning of a new stage of trial was made known to him by the appearance, in a vision, of an angel, bringing him the attire and the shoes of a knight. With these he was to gird himself for new and yet more terrible conflicts. Concerning his own austerities he never speaks, nor does he show to any one the letters of the name of Jesus, which he is said to have cut with a style upon his bosom. But of the sufferings which came upon him from without, he talks freely. At one time, when in Flanders, he was brought before the chapter on a charge of heresy; but his enemies gained not their wicked end.[168] He was in greatest danger of his life shortly before the coming of the plague, when the fearful rumour was abroad about the poisoning of the wells. He himself told me the story, as follows:—

‘I was once despatched on a journey in the service of the convent, and they gave me as my companion a half-witted lay-brother. We had not been many days on the road, when, one morning, having early left our quarters for the night, we arrived, after a long, hungry walk through the rain, at a village on the banks of the Rhine. It happened to be the fair-time. The street was full of booths and stalls, horses and cattle, country-folk, players, pedlers, and idle roystering soldiers. My fellow-traveller, Peter, catches sight of a sign, and turns in straightway to warm himself at the fire, telling me I can go on, do what I have to do, and I shall find him there. As I learnt after, he sits himself down to table with a ruffianly set of drovers and traders that had come to the fair, who first of all make him half-drunk, and then seize him, and swear he has stolen a cheese. At this moment there come in four or five troopers, hardened fellows, ripe for any outrage, who fall on him also, crying, ‘The scoundrel monk is a poisoner.’ The clamour soon gathers a crowd.

‘When Peter sees matters at this pass, he piteously cries out to them to loose him, and stand still and listen: he will confess everything. With that they let go their hold, and he, standing trembling in the midst of them, begins: ‘Look at me, sirs,—you see I am a fool; they call me silly, and nobody cares for what I say: but my companion, he is a wise man, so our Order has given him the poison-bag, and he is to poison all the springs between here and Alsace. He is gone now to throw some into the spring here, to kill every one that is come to the fair. That is why I stayed here, and would not go with him. You may be sure that what I say is true, for you will see him when he comes with a great wallet full of bags of poison and gold pieces, which he and the Order have received from the Jews for this murderous business.’

‘At these words they all shouted, ‘After the murderer! Stop him! Stop him!’ One seized a spear, another an axe, others the first tool or weapon they could lay hands on, and all hurried furiously from house to house, and street to street, breaking open doors, ransacking closets, stabbing the beds, and thrusting in the straw with their swords, till the whole fair was in an uproar. Some friends of mine, who heard my name mentioned, assured them of my innocence of such an abominable crime, but to no purpose. At last, when they could nowhere find me, they carried Peter off to the bailiff, who shut him up in the prison.

‘When I came back to the inn, knowing nothing of all this, the host told me what had befallen Peter, and how this evil rumour had stirred up the whole fair against me. I hastened off to the bailiff to beg Peter’s release. He refused. I spent nearly the whole day in trying to prevail with him, and in going about in vain to get bail. At last, about vesper time, with a heavy sum of gulden I opened the heart of the bailiff and the doors of the jail.

‘Then my greatest troubles began. As I passed through the village, hoping to escape unknown, I was recognised by some of the mob, and in a moment they were swarming about me. ‘Down with the poisoner!’ they cried. ‘His gold shall not serve him with us as it did with the bailiff.’ I ran a little way, but they closed me in again, some saying, ‘Drown him in the Rhine;’ others answering, ‘No, burn him! he’ll poison the whole river if you throw him in.’ Then I saw (methinks I see him now) a gigantic peasant in a russet jerkin, forcing his way through the crowd, with a pike in his hand. Seizing me by the throat with one hand, and flourishing the pike in the other, he shouted, ‘Hear me, all of you. Let me spit him with my long pike, like a poisonous toad, and then plant it in this stout hedge here, and let the caitiff howl and twist in the air till his soul goes home to the devil. Then every one that goes by will see his withered carcass, rotting and wasting, and sink him deeper down in hell with curses. Come on,—it serves him right.’

‘My brain swam round. I closed my eyes. I expected the next instant to feel the iron. By some merciful interposition, the wretch was not suffered to execute his purpose. I thought I saw some of the better sort looking on with horror-stricken faces, but they dared not interfere. The women shrieked and wrung their hands. I made my way from one to another of those who seemed least pitiless, beseeching them to save me. Heaven must have heard my cries, though man did not. They stood round watching me, disputing with horrid oaths among themselves what they should do. At length—as I had sunk on my knees under the hedge, praying for deliverance—I saw a priest, more like an angel than a man, mightily thrusting them from side to side, and when he reached me, laying his hand on my arm, he looked round on the ring of savage faces, and threatened them with the hottest curses of the Church if they harmed a hair upon the head of her servant; outvoiced their angry cries with loud rebukes of their cowardice, cruelty, and sacrilege, and led me out safely through them all. He brought me to his house, made fast the doors, refreshed and sheltered me for the night, and by the earliest dawn I was away and safe upon my journey, while that abode of the wicked was sunk in its drunken sleep. I keep the anniversary of that dreadful day, and never shall I cease to praise the goodness which answered my prayer in the hour of need, and delivered me as a bird from the snare of the fowler.[169]

‘On one other occasion only,’ continued Suso, ‘did I taste so nearly the bitterness of death.’

We begged him to tell us the adventure, and so he did, somewhat thus—

‘I was once on my way home from Flanders, travelling up the Rhine. A great feebleness and sickness had been upon me for some days, so that I could not walk fast, and my companion, young and active, had gone on about two miles ahead. I entered an old forest whose trees overhung the steep river bank. It was evening, and it seemed to grow dark in a moment as I entered the chilling shadow of a wood, in which many a defenceless passenger had been robbed and slain. I had gone on deeper and deeper into the growing gloom, the wind among the pines sounding like a hungry sea. The fall of my own footsteps seemed like the tread of one coming after me. I stood still and hearkened. It was no one; when suddenly I saw, not far off among the trees, two persons, a man and a woman, talking together and watching me. I trembled in every limb, but I made the sign of the cross, and passed on. Soon I heard quick footsteps behind me. I turned—it was the woman. She was young and fair to look on. She asked my name, and when she learnt it, said she knew and reverenced me greatly, told me how that robber with whom I saw her had forced her to become his wife, and prayed me there and then to hear her confession.

‘When I had shriven her, think how my fear was heightened to see her go back and talk long and earnestly with the robber, whose brow grew dark, as he left her without a word, and advanced gloomily towards where I stood. It was a narrow pathway; on the one side the forest, on the other the precipice, sheer down to the rapid river. Alas, thought I, as my heart sank within me, now I am lost. I have not strength to flee: no one will hear a cry for help: he will slay me, and hide the body in the wood. All was still. I listened in vain for the sound of a boat, a voice, or even the bark of a dog. I only heard the feet of the outlaw and the violent beating of my own heart. But, lo! when he approached me, he bowed his knee, and began to confess. Blessed Mary, what a black catalogue! While he spake I heard, motionless, every word of the horrible recital, and yet I was all the time listening for rescue, watching his face, and minutely noting every little thing about his person. I remember the very graining of the wood of his lance which he laid aside on the grass when he knelt to me—the long knife in his belt—his frayed black doublet—his rough red hair, growing close down to his shaggy eyebrows—two great teeth that stood out like tusks—and his hands clasped, covered with warts, and just the colour of the roots of the tree by which I stood. Even during those fearful moments, I can call to mind distinctly how I marked a little shining insect that was struggling among the blades of grass, climbing over a knot of wood, and that got upon a fir-cone and fell off upon its back.

‘After revealing to me crimes that made my blood run cold, he went on to say, ‘I was once in this forest, just about this hour of the day, on the look-out for booty as I was this evening, when I met a priest, to whom I confessed myself. He was standing just where you are now, and when my shrift was ended, I drew out this knife, stabbed him to the heart, and rolled his body down there into the Rhine.’ When I heard this, the cold sweat burst out upon my face; I staggered back giddy, almost senseless, against the tree. Seeing this, the woman ran up, and caught me in her arms, saying, ‘Good sir, fear nothing, he will not kill you.’ Whereat the murderer said, ‘I have heard much good of you, and that shall save your life to-day. Pray for me, good father, that, through you, a miserable sinner may find mercy in his last hour.’ At this I breathed again, and promised to do as he would have me. Then we walked on some way together, till they parted from me, and I reached the skirts of the wood, where sat my companion waiting. I could just stagger up to him, and then fell down at his side, shivering like a man with the ague. After some time I arose, and we went on our way. But I failed not, with strong inward groaning, to plead with the Lord for the poor outlaw, that he might find grace and escape damnation. And, in sooth, I had so strong an assurance vouchsafed to me of God, that I could not doubt of his final salvation.’

With stories such as these of what befel himself, and many others, whom he knew in Suabia and the Oberland, or met with on his journeys, the holy man whiled away our windy March nights by the ingle. Very edifying it was to hear him and Rulman Merswin talk together about the higher experiences of the inward life.

Concerning the stages thereof, Suso said that the first consisted in turning away from the world and the lusts of the flesh to God: the second, in patient endurance of all that is contrary to flesh and blood, whether inflicted of God or man: the third, in imitating the sufferings of Christ, and forming ourselves after his sweet doctrine, gracious walk, and pure life. After this, the soul must withdraw itself into a profound stillness, as if the man were dead, willing and purposing nought but the glory of Christ and our heavenly Father, and with a right lowly demeanour toward friend and foe. Then the spirit, thus advanced in holy exercise, arriveth at freedom from the outward senses, before so importunate; and its higher powers lose themselves in a supernatural sensibility. Here the spirit parts with its natural properties, presses within the circle which represents the eternal Godhead, and reaches spiritual perfection. It is made free by the Son in the Son.

‘This I call,’ he said, ‘the transit of the soul,—it passes beyond time and space, and is, with an amorous inward intuition, dissolved in God. This entrance of the soul banishes all forms, images, and multiplicity; it is ignorant of itself and of all things; it hovers, reduced to its essence, in the abyss of the Trinity. At this elevation there is no effort, no struggle; the beginning and the end are one.[170] Here the Divine Nature doth, as it were, embrace, and inwardly kiss through and through, the soul; that they may be for ever one.[171] He who is thus received into the Eternal Nothing is in the Everlasting Now, and hath neither before nor after. Rightly hath St. Dionysius said that God is Non-being—that is, above all our notions of being.[172] We have to employ images and similitudes, as I must do in seeking to set forth these truths, but know that all such figures are as far below the reality as a blackamoor is unlike the sun.[173] In this absorption whereof I speak, the soul is still a creature, but, at the time, hath no thought whether it be creature or no.’[174]

Suso repeated several times this saying—‘A man of true self-abandonment must be _un_built from the creature, in-built with Christ, and over-built into the Godhead.’[175]

We bid adieu with much regret to this excellent man, and his visit will abide long in our memory. We drew from him a half promise that he would come to see us yet again.

May, 1354.—Oh, most happy May! My brother Otto hath returned, after trading to and fro so long in foreign parts. He is well and wealthy, and will venture forth no more. What store of marvellous tales hath he about the East! What hairs-breadth escapes to relate, and what precious and curious things to show! Verily, were I to write down here all he hath to tell of, I might be writing all my days.

Only one thing will I note, while I think of it. He visited Mount Athos, now fourteen years ago: he described to me the beauty of the mountain, with its rich olives and lovely gardens, and the whole neighourhood studded with white convents and hermitages of holy men. Some of the monasteries were on rocks so steep that he had to be drawn up by a rope in a basket to enter them. The shrines were wondrous rich with gold and silver and precious stones. But nowhere, he said, was he more martyred by fleas. When he was there, a new doctrine or practice which had sprung up among the monks (taught, it is said, by a certain Abbot Simeon), was making no small stir. There was to be a synod held about it at that time in Constantinople. It seems that some of the monks (called, if I mistake not, Hesychasts) held that if a man shut himself up in a corner of his cell, with his chin upon his breast, turning his thoughts inward, gazing towards his navel, and centering all the strength of his mind on the region of the heart; and, not discouraged by at first perceiving only darkness, held out at this strange inlooking for several days and nights, he would at length behold a divine glory, and see himself luminous with the very light which was manifested on Mount Tabor. They call these devotees Navel-contemplators. A sorry business! All the monks, for lack of aught else to do, were by the ears about it,—either trying the same or reviling it.[176]

Methought if our heretics have their extravagances and utmost reaches of mystical folly here, there are some worse still among those lazy Greeks.

KATE. And is that the end of Arnstein’s journal?

ATHERTON. No more has come down to posterity.

MRS. ATHERTON. That last piece of news from Mount Athos seems quite familiar to me. I have just been reading Curzon’s Monasteries of the Levant, and thanks to him, I can imagine the scenery of the mountain and its neighourhood: the Byzantine convents, with their many little windows rounded at the top, the whole structure full of arches and domes,—the little farms interspersed, with their white square towers and cottages of stone at the foot,—the forests of gigantic plane trees, with an underwood of aromatic evergreens,—flowers like those in the conservatory everywhere growing wild,—waterfalls at the head of every valley, dashing down over marble rocks,—and the bells, heard tinkling every now and then, to call the monks to prayer.

WILLOUGHBY. The crass stupidity of those Omphalopsychi shows how little mere natural beauty can contribute to refine and cultivate,—at any rate when the pupils are ascetics. The contemporary mysticism of the East looks mean enough beside the speculation, the poetry, and the action of the German mystics of the fourteenth century. It is but the motionless abstraction of the Indian Yogi over again.

ATHERTON. Yet you will be unjust to the Greek Church (which has little enough to boast of) if you reckon this gross materialist Quietism as the only specimen of mysticism she has to show during this period. There was a certain Cabasilas, Archbishop of Thessalonica,[177] a contemporary of our German friends, an active man in the political and religious movements of the time, whose writings exhibit very fairly the better characteristics of Byzantine mysticism. His earnest practical devotion rests on the basis of the traditional sacerdotalism, but he stands between the extremes of the objective and the subjective mysticism, though naturally somewhat nearer to the former. He presents, however, nothing original to detain us;—so let us away to supper.

Note to page 354.

The following passage, placed in the mouth of the Everlasting Wisdom may serve as a further specimen of the sensuous and florid cast of Suso’s language:—

‘I am the throne of joy, I am the crown of bliss. Mine eyes are so bright, my mouth so tender, my cheeks so rosy-red, and all my form so winning fair, that were a man to abide in a glowing furnace till the Last Day, it would be a little price for a moment’s vision of my beauty. Behold! I am so beauteously adorned with a robe of glory, so delicately arrayed in all the blooming colours of the living flowers—red roses, white lilies, lovely violets, and flowers of every name, that the fair blossoms of all Mays, and the tender flowerets of all sunny fields, and the sweet sprays of all bright meadows, are but as a rugged thistle beside my loveliness.’ (Then he breaks into verse):—

‘I play in the Godhead the play of joy, And gladden the angel host on high With a sweetness such that a thousand years Like a vanishing hour of time run by.

‘... Happy he who shall share the sweet play, and tread at my side the joy-dance of heaven for ever in gladsome security. One word from my sweet mouth surpasses all the songs of angels, the sound of all harps, and all sweet playing on stringed instruments.... Lo! I am a good so absolute that he who hath in time but one single drop thereof finds all the joy and pleasure of this world a bitterness,—all wealth and honour worthless. Those dear ones who love me are embraced by my sweet love, and swim and melt in the sole Unity with a love which knows no form, no figure, no spoken words, and are borne and dissolved into the Good from whence they sprang,’ &c.—Leben, cap. vii. p. 199.

The following is a sample of Suso’s old Suabian German, from the extracts given by Wackernagel, p. 885:—

‘Entwürt der ewigen wisheit. Zuo uallende lon lit an sunderlicher frœd. die diu sel gewinnet von sunderlichen vnd erwirdigen werken mit dien si hie gesiget hat. alz die hohen lerer, die starken marterer. Vnd die reinen iungfrowen. Aber wesentliche lon. lit an schöwlicher ver einung der sele mit der blossen gotheit. Wan e geruowet si niemer, e si gefueret wirt über alle ir krefte vnd mugentheit. vnd gewiset wirt in der personen naturlich wesentheit. Vnd in dez wesens einvaltig blosheit. Vnd in dem gegenwurf vindet si denn genuegde vnd ewige selikeit. Vnd ie ab gescheidener lidiger usgang. ie frier uf gang., Vnd ie frier uf gang. ie neher in gang. in die wilden wuesti. vnd in daz tief ab gründe der wiselosen gotheit in die siu versenket ver swemmet vnd uer einet werdent. daz siu nit anderz mugen wellen denn daz got wil, vnd daz ist daz selb wesen daz do got ist. daz ist daz siu selig sint. von genaden. als er selig ist von nature. [Answer of the Everlasting Wisdom.—Adventitious reward consists in a particular joy which souls receive for particular worthy deeds wherein they have here been conquerors,—such, for example, are the lofty teachers, the stout martyrs, and the pure virgins. But essential reward consists in contemplative union of the soul with the bare Godhead: for she resteth not until she be carried above all her own powers and possibility, and led into the natural essentiality of the Persons, and into the simple absoluteness of the Essence. And in the reaction she finds satisfaction and everlasting bliss. And the more separate and void the passage out (of self), the more free the passage up; and the freer the passage up, the nearer the passage into the wild waste and deep abyss of the unsearchable Godhead, in which the souls are sunk and dissolved and united, so that they can will nothing but what God wills, and become of one nature with God,—that is to say, are blessed by grace as He is blessed by nature.]

Footnote 157:

Why smite thy breast and lament? why not lift up thy soul? why meditate for ever on the sign? He thou lovest is within thee. Thou seekest Jesus—thou hast him; he is found, and thou perceivest it not. Why these groans, this weeping? The true joy is thine; hidden within thee, though thou knowest it not, lies the solace of thine anguish; thou hast within, thou seekest without, the cure for thy languishing soul.

Footnote 158:

I live, but with no life of mine, and long towards a life so high—I die because I do not die.

Footnote 159:

The Life of Suso, published in Diepenbrock’s edition of his works, was written by his spiritual daughter, Elsbet Stäglin, according to the account she received at various intervals from his own lips. He sprang from a good family,—his name, originally Heinrich vom Berg. The name of Suso he adopted from his mother, a woman remarkable for her devotion. The secret name of Amandus, concealed till after his death, was supposed to have been conferred by the Everlasting Wisdom himself on his beloved servant.

The incident of the rescue of himself and his book from the floods, by the timely intervention of a knight passing that way, is related in the twenty-ninth chapter of the Life, p. 68.

Footnote 160:

Heinrich Suso’s Leben und Schriften, von M. Diepenbrock (1837), pp. 15, 51, 86. Diepenbrock’s book is an edition of the biography by Stäglin, and of the Book of the Everlasting Wisdom, &c., from the oldest manuscripts and editions, and rendered into modern German.

Footnote 161:

Leben, cap. 48,—where it is also said that, on one occasion, as ‘the servant was preaching at Cologne, one of his auditors beheld his face luminous with a supernatural effulgence.’ It is known that Tauler possessed a copy of the Horologium Sapientiæ.

See also Schmidt’s Tauler, p. 169. Comp. Leben, cap. xxxi. p. 72, and cap. xlix.

Footnote 162:

Leben, cap. iv.

Footnote 163:

Leben, cap. xvii.-xx. Suso died in 1385 at Ulm; he was born about the commencement of the century.

Footnote 164:

Suso sent a Latin version of the book of the Everlasting Wisdom, under the title Horologium Sapientiæ, to Hugo von Vaucemain, Master of the Order, for his approval. The date of the work is fixed between 1333 and 1342. The prologue contains the account of the ‘inspiratio superna’ under which the work was written.—(Diepenb. Vorbericht, p. 6.) It was translated ere long into French, Dutch, and English, and appears to have been in the fourteenth century almost what the Imitatio Christi became in the fifteenth.—Ibid., p. 15.

Footnote 165:

Leben, cap. vi.

Footnote 166:

Reverences or prostrations.

Footnote 167:

Leben, capp. x. and xiv.

Footnote 168:

Leben, cap. xxii. p 5; and xxv.

Footnote 169:

This incident is related at length in the twenty-seventh chapter of the Life; and the adventure with the robber, which follows, in the succeeding. The account given in the text follows closely in all essential particulars the narrative in the biography.

Footnote 170:

Leben, cap. lvii. Suso speaks to this effect in a dialogue with his spiritual daughter. She describes in another place (p. 74) how she drew Suso on to talk on these high themes, and then wrote down what follows.

Footnote 171:

Ibid., cap. xxxiv. p. 80; and comp. Buch. d. E. Weisheit, cap. vii. p. 199.

Footnote 172:

Buchlein von d. E. Weisheit, Buch. iii. cap. ii.; and Leben, cap. lvi. p. 168, and p. 302.

Footnote 173:

Leben, p. 171.

Footnote 174:

Extravagant as are his expressions concerning the absorption in God, Suso has still numerous passages designed to preclude pantheism; declaring that the distinction between the Creator and the creature is nowise infringed by the essential union he extols. The dialogue with the ‘nameless Wild,’ already alluded to, is an example.—Comp. Leben, cap. lvi. pp. 166, 167, and Buch. d. E. W., Buch. iii. cap. vi.

Footnote 175:

Leben, cap. liii. p. 148. See Note, p. 357.

Footnote 176:

Schröckh’s Kirchengeschichte, vol. xxxiv. pp. 431-450.

Footnote 177:

See Die Mystik des Nikolaus Cabasilas vom Leben in Christo, von Dr. W. Gass (1849).—In this work, Dr. Gass publishes, for the first time, the Greek text of the seven books, De Vita in Christo, with an able introduction. The authority for this summary of the theological tendency of Cabasilas will be found, pp. 210-224.

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

Chapter IX

Di Meistere sprechen von zwein antlitzen der sêle. Daz eine antlitze ist gekart in dise werlt. Daz ander antlitze ist gekart di richte in got. In diseme antlitze lûchtet und brennet got êwiclîchen, der mensche wizzes oder enwizzes nicht.[178]—HERMANN VON FRITZLAR.

KATE. I should like to know what became of our mysterious ‘Layman,’ Nicholas of Basle.

ATHERTON. He lived on many years, the hidden ubiquitous master-spirit of the Friends of God; expending his wealth in restless rapid travels to and fro, and in aiding the adherents of the good cause; suddenly appearing, now in the north and now in the south, to encourage and exhort, to seek out new disciples and to confirm the old; and again vanishing as suddenly, concealing his abode even from his spiritual children, while sending them frequent tracts and letters by his trusty messenger Ruprecht; growing ever more sad and earnest under repeated visions of judgment overhanging Christendom; studying the Scriptures (which had opened his eyes to so much of Romanist error) somewhat after the old Covenanter fashion, with an indiscriminate application of Old Testament history, and a firm belief that his revelations were such as prophets and apostles enjoyed,—till, at last, at the close of the century, he was overtaken at Vienna by the foe he had so often baffled, and the Inquisition yet more ennobled a noble life by the fiery gift of martyrdom.[179]

GOWER. I can well imagine what a basilisk eye the Inquisition must have kept on these lay-priests—these indefatigable writers and preachers to the people in the forbidden vernacular—these Friends of God, Beghards, and Waldenses; and on those audacious Ishmaels, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, most of all. I fancy I see it, lurking always on the edge of any light, watching and watching, as they say the Indian lizard does, crouched in the shadow just outside the circle of light a lamp makes upon the ceiling, to snatch up with its arrowy tongue the moths which fly toward the fascinating brightness.

WILLOUGHBY. And do not let us forget that even those pantheistic Brethren of the Free Spirit, with all their coarseness and violence of exaggeration, held at least some little truth, and might plead a large excuse. If some of them broke blindly through all restraint, they made at any rate a breach in priestcraft better used by better men.—

GOWER.—Just as the track where buffaloes have made their huge crashing way through the forest, has often guided the hunter of the backwoods.

ATHERTON. We must not think that the efforts of such a man as Nicholas were fruitless, whatever the apparent success of his persecutors.—

GOWER.—Though history has paid him too little attention, and though the Inquisition paid him too much. How I love to find examples of that consoling truth that no well-meant effort for God and man can ever really die—that the relics of vanished, vanquished endeavours are gathered up and conserved, and by the spiritual chemistry of Providence transformed into a new life in a new age, so that the dead rise, and mortality puts on immortality. The lessons such men scattered, though they might seem to perish, perpetuated a hidden life till Luther’s time;—like the dead leaves about the winter tree, they preserved the roots from the teeth of the frost, and covered a vitality within, which was soon to blossom on every bough in the sunshine of the Reformation.

ATHERTON. Our fourteenth century, so full of mysticism both in East and West, has some other mystical products to show, principally of the visionary, theurgic species. There is St. Brigitta, a widow of rank, leaving her Swedish pine forests to visit Palestine, and after honouring with a pilgrimage every shrine and relic in southern Europe, fixing her residence at Rome, to the great pecuniary advantage of the faithful there. She writes a discourse on the Blessed Virgin at the dictation of an angel, who visited her punctually for the purpose: indites bombastic invocations to the eyes, ears, hair, chin, &c., of the Saviour; and ditto to ditto of the Virgin; and, what was not quite so bad, gives to the world a series of revelations and prophecies, in which the vices of popes and prelates are lashed unsparingly, and threatened with speedy judgment.[180]

WILLOUGHBY. It would be interesting to trace this series of reformatory prophets, male and female. From the twelfth to the close of the fifteenth century there is a succession of them, called forth by the hideousness of ecclesiastical corruption—Hildegard, Joachim, Brigitta, Savonarola.

GOWER. Do not forget Dante.

ATHERTON. You hear them all executing variations, plaintive or indignant, menacing or despairing, on the old and never antiquated theme—

Curia Romana non petit ovem sine lanâ, Dantes exaudit, non dantibus ostia claudit.

GOWER. And, to silence these complaints, the Church found inquisitors and censors of service, but most of all—her pattern children—those enthusiasts whose painful labours were employed to quiet the croaking, much as the lord in old feudal times would often exercise his right of compelling a vassal to spend a night or two in beating the waters of the ponds, to stop the frog-chorus there, and procure his master an easy sleep. Obedient enthusiasm toils all night that cardinals may snore.

ATHERTON. Angela de Foligni, who made herself miserable—I must say something the converse of flourished—about the beginning of the fourteenth century, was a fine model pupil of this sort, a genuine daughter of St. Francis. Her mother, her husband, her children dead, she is alone and sorrowful. She betakes herself to violent devotion—falls ill—suffers incessant anguish from a complication of disorders—has rapturous consolations and terrific temptations—is dashed in a moment from a seat of glory above the empyrean to a depth so low that the floor of hell might be its zenith. She tells us how, on her way to Assisi, the Saviour addressed her, called her his love, his sweet, his joy; and manifested himself within her soul as he had never done to evangelist or apostle. On one occasion, her face shone with a divine glory, her eyes were as flaming lamps; on another, a star proceeded from her side, broke into a thousand beautiful colours, and glided upwards into the sky.[181]

WILLOUGHBY. A notable example of mystical pyrotechny.

ATHERTON. Her etherialised olfactories were gratified by odours of indescribable fragrance; and to her exalted taste, the consecrated wafer became almost insupportably delicious. Visions and ecstasies by scores are narrated from her lips in the wretched Latin of Arnold the Minorite. All is naught! The flattest and most insipid reading in the world—from first to last a repetition of the old stock phrase, ‘feelings more readily imagined than described.’ She concludes every account by saying, ‘No words can describe what I enjoyed;’ and each rapture is declared to surpass in bliss all the preceding.

LOWESTOFFE. Enough! enough!

ATHERTON. Catharine of Siena——

WILLOUGHBY. No more, pray.

ATHERTON. Only this one. Catharine of Siena closes the century. She is a specimen somewhat less wretched, of this delirious mysticism. Her visions began when she was six years old, and a solemn betrothal to our Lord was celebrated, with ring and vow, not very long after. She travelled through the cities and hamlets of Italy, teaching, warning, expostulating, and proclaiming to assembled crowds the wonders she had seen in heaven and hell during that trance in which all had thought her dead. She journeyed from Florence to Avignon, and back to Florence again, to reconcile the Pope and Italy; she thrust herself between the spears of Guelph and Ghibelline—a whole Mediæval Peace-Society in her woman’s heart—and when she sank at last, saw all her labour swept away, as the stormy waters of the Great Schism closed over her head.[182]

GOWER. What a condemning comment on the pretended tender mercies of the Church are those narratives which Rome delights to parade of the sufferings, mental and bodily, which her devotees were instructed to inflict upon themselves! I am reminded of the thirsting mule, which has, in some countries, to strike with its hoof among the spines of the cactus, and drink, with lamed foot and bleeding lips, the few drops of milk which ooze from the broken thorns. Affectionate suffering natures came to Rome for comfort; but her scanty kindness is only to be drawn with anguish from the cruel sharpness of asceticism. The worldly, the audacious, escape easily; but these pliant excitable temperaments, so anxiously in earnest, may be made useful. The more dangerous, frightful, or unnatural their performances, the more profit for their keepers. Men and women are trained by torturing processes to deny their nature, and then they are exhibited to bring grist to the mill—like birds and beasts forced to postures and services against the laws of their being—like those who must perform perilous feats on ropes or with lions, nightly hazarding their lives to fill the pockets of a manager. The self-devotion of which Rome boasts so much is a self-devotion she has always thus made the most of for herself. Calculating men, who have thought only of the interest of the priesthood, have known well how best to stimulate and to display the spasmodic movements of a brainsick disinterestedness. I have not the shadow of a doubt that, once and again, some priest might have been seen, with cold grey eye, endeavouring to do a stroke of diplomacy by means of the enthusiastic Catharine, making the fancied ambassadress of heaven in reality the tool of a schemer. Such unquestionable virtues as these visionaries may some of them have possessed, cannot be fairly set down to the credit of the Church, which has used them all for mercenary or ambitious purposes, and infected them everywhere with a morbid character. Some of these mystics, floating down the great ecclesiastical current of the Middle Age, appear to me like the trees carried away by the inundation of some mighty tropical river. They drift along the stream, passive, lifeless, broken; yet they are covered with gay verdure, the aquatic plants hang and twine about the sodden timber and the draggled leaves, the trunk is a sailing garden of flowers. But the adornment is not that of nature—it is the decoration of another and a strange element; the roots are in the air; the boughs, which should be full of birds, are in the flood, covered by its alien products, swimming side by side with the alligator. So has this priestcraft swept its victims from their natural place and independent growth, to clothe them in their helplessness, with a false spiritual adornment, neither scriptural nor human, but ecclesiastical—the native product of that overwhelming superstition which has subverted and enslaved their nature. The Church of Rome takes care that while simple souls think they are cultivating Christian graces, they shall be forging their own chains; that their attempts to honour God shall always dishonour, because they disenfranchise themselves. To be humble, to be obedient, to be charitable, under such direction, is to be contentedly ignorant, pitiably abject, and notoriously swindled.

ATHERTON. Strong language, Lionel,—yet not unjust to the spirit of the Romanist system. The charity which pities the oppressed is bound to denounce the oppressor.

WILLOUGHBY. Rem acu tetigisti. If you call priestcraft by smooth names, your spurious charity to the tyrant is uncharitableness to the slave. It is sickening to hear the unctuous talk with which now-a-days ultra-liberalism will sometimes stretch out a hand to spiritual tyranny.

ATHERTON. Not surprising. It is just like the sentimental sympathy got up for some notorious criminal, which forgets the outrage to society and the sufferings of the innocent, in concern for the interesting offender.

And now let us bid adieu to that fourteenth century which has occupied us so long. I shall only afflict you with one more paper,—to-morrow, Lowestoffe, if we don’t go to Hawksfell. Some notes I have drawn up on the contemporary Persian mysticism.

WILLOUGHBY. Stay—do not let us forget that little book, so much read in the fifteenth century, and praised and edited by Luther,—the German Theology.[183] I have read it with great interest. It seems to me to stand alone as an attempt to systematise the speculative element in the more orthodox mysticism of the age.

ATHERTON. We may call it a summary of Tauler’s doctrine, without his fancy and vehement appeal; it is a treatise philosophic in its calmness, deservedly popular for its homely, idiomatic diction. What we were saying about Tauler applies substantially to the Theologia Germanica.

MRS. ATHERTON. I have been waiting to hear something about Thomas à Kempis,[184]—certainly the best known of all your mystics.

ATHERTON. Right. Who could forget the comforter of the fifteenth century? It is curious to compare the third book of his Imitation of Christ, with its dialogue between Christ and the disciple, and Suso’s conversation, in his Book of the Eternal Wisdom, between Wisdom and the Servant.

GOWER. There is less genius, less abandon, if one may so say, about Thomas.

ATHERTON. Decidedly. That original and daring spirit which carried mysticism to such a height in the fourteenth century, could not survive in the fifteenth,—an age tending towards consolidation and equilibrium, bent on the softening down of extremes. Suso, a poet as much as an ascetic, is continually quitting his cell to admire nature and to mix with men. He mingles speculation borrowed from his master, Eckart, with the luxuriant play of his own inexhaustible fancy. Thomas à Kempis is exclusively the ascetic. His mysticism ranges in a narrower sphere. Hence, to a great extent, his wider influence. He abjures everything that belongs to the thought of the philosopher or the fine feeling of the artist. He appeals neither to the intellect nor to the imagination—simply to the heart. He could be understood without learning, appreciated without taste, and so thousands, in castle and in cloister, prayed and wept over his earnest page. ‘See!’ said he, ‘this life is filled with crosses.’ And multitudes, in misery, or fear of misery, made answer, ‘It is true.’—‘Then,’ urged the comforter, ‘be thyself crucified to it, and it cannot harm thee. Cease to have any care, any aim, any hope or fear, save Christ. Yield thyself, utterly passive and dead to this life, into his hands who is Lord of a better.’ Then the sufferers dried their tears, and strove hard to forget time and self in contemplating Christ.

GOWER. And, let us hope, not always quite in vain.

ATHERTON. I have one more name yet upon my list, with which the mediæval mysticism reaches its conclusion. It is the great Frenchman, Chancellor Gerson.[185] His figure stands out prominently among the confusions of the time, half-way between the old age and the new. Up to a certain point, he is a reformer; beyond it, the enemy of reform. He is active in the deposition of John XXII., yet he does not hesitate to burn John Huss. He looks on, with a smile of satisfaction, when the royal secretaries stab with their penknives the papal bulls, and the rector tears the insolent parchment into shreds. He sees, half with pity and half with triumph, the emissaries of the Pope, crowned in mockery with paper tiaras, and hung with insulting scrolls, dragged through the streets in a scavenger’s tumbril, to be pilloried by angry Paris. But he stands aloof in disdain when the University, deserted by the Parliament, fraternizes with the mob to enforce reform,—when threadbare students come down from their garrets in the Pays Latin to join the burly butchers of St. Jacques la Boucherie,—when grave doctors shake hands with ox-fellers, and Franciscans and White-hoods shout together for the charter.

WILLOUGHBY. And very wrong he was, too, for those butchers, rough as they were, were right in the main,—honest, energetic fellows, with good heads on their shoulders. Could they but have raised money, they would have saved France. But Gerson would rather be plundered than pay their tax, and had to hurry down for hiding to the vaults of Notre Dame. I remember the story. And when the princes came back to power, the moderates were pillaged like the rest,—and serve them right.

ATHERTON. Yes, the reform demanded was just and moderate, and even the rioters lost none of their respect for royalty, feeling still in their rude hearts no little of that chivalrous loyalty which animated Gerson himself when he bent low before the poor idiot king, and with oriental reverence exclaimed, ‘O King, live for ever!’ Gerson was a radical in the Church and a conservative in the State—the antagonist of the political republicanism, the champion of the ecclesiastical. His sanguine hopes of peace for his country and of reform for his Church, were alike doomed to disappointment.

His great work on the theory and practice of mysticism was composed during the stormy period of his public life. Imagine how happily he forgot popes and councils, Cabochiens and Armagnacs, during those brief intervals of quiet which he devoted to the elaboration of a psychology that should give to mysticism a scientific basis. Nominalist as he was, and fully conscious of the defects of scholasticism, then tottering to its fall, he differs little in his results from Richard of St. Victor. He closes the series of those who have combined mysticism with scholasticism, and furnishes in himself a summary and critical resumé of all that had previously been accomplished in this direction. He was desirous at once of making mysticism definite and intelligible, and of rendering the study of theology as a science more practical, devout, and scriptural. Hence his opposition to the extravagance of Ruysbroek on the one side, and to the frigid disputation of the schools on the other. He essays to define and investigate the nature of ecstasy and rapture. He even introduces into mysticism that reflection which its very principle repudiates. He recommends an inductive process, which is to arrange and compare the phenomena of mysticism as manifest in the history of saintly men, and thence to determine the true and legitimate mystical experience, as opposed to the heterodox and the fantastic. He maintains that man rises to the height of abstract contemplation, neither by the intellectual machinery of Realism, nor by the flights of Imagination. If he attempts the first, he becomes a heretic; if the second, a visionary. The indispensable requisite is what he calls ‘rapturous love.’ Yet even this is knowledge in the truest sense, and quite compatible with a rational, though impassioned self-consciousness. His doctrine of union is so temperate and guarded as almost to exclude him from the genuine mystical fellowship. He has no visions or exaltations of his own to tell of. Resembling Richard in this respect, to whom he is so much indebted, he elaborates a system, erects a tabernacle, and leaves it to others to penetrate to the inmost sanctuary. Like Bernard, he thinks those arduous and dazzling heights of devotion are for ‘the harts and climbing goats,’ not for active practical men such as the Chancellor. Above all, urges this reformer both of the schoolmen and the mystics, clear your mind of phantasms—do not mistake the creations of your own imagination for objective spiritual realities. In other words, ‘Be a mystic, but do not be what nine mystics out of every ten always have been.’

But now let us have a walk in the garden.

* * * * *

Thither all repaired. They entered the conservatory to look at the flowers.

‘Which will you have, Mr. Atherton,’ asked Kate, ‘to represent your mystics? These stiff, apathetic cactuses and aloes, that seem to know no changes of summer and winter, or these light stemless blossoms, that send out their delicate roots into the air?’

‘Those Aroideæ, do you mean?’ replied Atherton. ‘I think we must divide them, and let some mystics have those impassive plants of iron for their device, while others shall wear the silken filaments of these aërial flowers that are such pets of yours.’

As they came out, the sun was setting in unusual splendour, and they stood in the porch to admire it.

‘I was watching it an hour ago,’ said Gower. ‘Then the western sky was crossed by gleaming lines of silver, with broken streaks of grey and purple between. It was the funeral pyre not yet kindled, glittering with royal robe and arms of steel, belonging to the sun-god. Now, see, he has descended, and lies upon it—the torch is applied, the glow of the great burning reaches over to the very east. The clouds, to the zenith, are wreaths of smoke, their volumes ruddily touched beneath by the flame on the horizon, and those about the sun are like ignited beams in a great conflagration, now falling in and lost in the radiance, now sending out fresh shapes of flashing fire: that is not to be painted!’

LOWESTOFFE (starting). The swan, I declare! How can he have got out? That scoundrel, John!

ATHERTON. Never mind. I know what he comes for. He is a messenger from Lethe, to tell us not to forget good Tauler.

LOWESTOFFE. Lethe! Nonsense.

MRS. ATHERTON. My love, how can you?

ATHERTON. The creature reminded me of an allegorical fancy recorded by Bacon,—that is all. At the end of the thread of every man’s life there is a little medal containing his name. Time waits upon the shears, and as soon as the thread is cut, catches the medals, and carries them to the river of Lethe. About the bank there are many birds flying up and down, that will get the medals and carry them in their beak a little while, and then let them fall into the river. Only there are a few swans, which, if they get a name, will carry it to a temple, where it is consecrated. Let the name of Tauler find a swan!

END OF VOL. I.

Footnote 178:

The Masters speak of two faces the soul hath. The one face is turned towards this world. The other face is turned direct toward God. In this latter face shineth and gloweth God eternally, whether man is ware or unaware thereof.

Footnote 179:

Schmidt’s Tauler, pp. 205, &c.—Mosheim gives the passage in Nieder relating the apprehension and death of Nicholas:—‘Acutissimus enim erat (says this authority) et idcirco manus Inquisitorum diu evaserat.’—Mosheim de Beghardis et Beguinabus, cap. iv. § 42, p. 454.

Footnote 180:

See Revelationes Selectæ S. Brigittæ (Heuser, 1851).—This is a selection for the edification of good Catholics, and contains accordingly the most Mariolatrous and least important of her writings. Rudelbach gives some specimens of her spirited rebuke of papal iniquity in his Savonarola, pp. 300, &c. In her prophetic capacity she does not hesitate to call the pope a murderer of souls, and to declare him and his greedy prelates forerunners of Antichrist. She says,—‘If a man comes to them with four wounds, he goes away with five.’ Like Savonarola, she placed her sole hope of reform in a general council.

A common mode of self-mortification with her found an imitator in Madame Guyon:—the Swede dropped the wax of lighted tapers on her bare flesh, and carried gentian in her mouth—Vita, p. 6. The Frenchwoman burned herself with hot sealing-wax in the same manner, and chewed a quid of coloquintida.

The Revelationes de Vitâ et Passione Jesu Christi et gloriosæ Virginis, contain a puerile and profane account of the birth, childhood, and death of our Lord, in the style of the apocryphal Gospel of the Infancy, professedly conveyed in conversations with the authoress by the Mother and her Son. The Virgin tells her, in reference to her Son,—‘quomodo neque aliqua immunditia ascendit super eum;’ and that his hair was never in a tangle—(nec perplexitas in capillise jus apparuit).

Footnote 181:

‘Angela de Foligni.’ See Beatæ Angelæ Fulginio Visionum et Instructionum Liber; (recens. J. H. Lammertz; Cologne, 1851.)—The account of the wonderful star is given by Arnold in his Prologue, p. 12. At one time it is promised by the Lord that the ‘whole Trinity shall enter into her,’ (capit. xx.); at another, she is transported into the midst of the Trinity.—(Capit. xxxii.) In chapter after chapter of monotonous inflation, she wearies and disappoints the curious reader by declaring her ‘abysses of delectation and illumination’ altogether unutterable,—such as language profanes rather than expresses—‘inenarrabiles,’ ‘indicibiles,’ &c. So the miraculous taste of the host to her favoured palate was not like bread or flesh, but a ‘sapor sapidissimus,’—like nothing that can be named.—Capit. xl.

The following act of saintship we give in the original, lest in English it should act on delicate readers as an emetic. She speaks of herself and a sister ascetic:—‘Lavimus pedes feminarum ibi existentium pauperum, et manus hominum, et maxime cujusdam leprosi, qui habebat manus valde fœtidas et marcidas et præpeditas et corruptas; et bibimus de illâ loturâ. Tantam autem dulcedinem sensimus in illo potu, quod per totam viam venimus in magnâ suavitate, et videbatur mihi per omnia quod ego gustassem mirabilem dulcedinem, quantum ad suavitatem quam ibi inveni. Et quia quædam squamula illarum plagarum erat interposita in gutture meo, conata sum ad diglutiendum eam, sicut si communicassem, donec deglutivi eam. Unde tantam suavitatem inveni in hoc, quod eam non possum exprimere.’—Capit. l. p. 176.

In her ‘Instructions,’ she lays it down as a rule that none can ever be deceived in the visions and manifestations vouchsafed them who are truly poor in spirit,—who have rendered themselves as ‘dead and putrid’ into the hands of God. (Capp. liv. lv.) She says that when God manifests Himself to the soul, ‘it sees Him, without bodily form, indeed, but more distinctly than one man can see another man, for the eyes of the soul behold a spiritual plenitude, not a corporeal, whereof I can say nothing, since both words and imagination fail here.’ (Capit. lii. p. 192.) Angela died in 1309.

Footnote 182:

‘Catharine of Siena.’ Görres gives a short account of her in his Introduction to Diepenbrock’s edition of Suso, p. 96.

Footnote 183:

The theology of this remarkable little book is substantially the same with that already familiar to us in the sermons of Tauler. Luther, writing to Spalatin, and praising Tauler’s theology, sends with his letter what he calls an epitome thereof,—cujus totius velut epitomen ecce hic tibi mitto. (Epp. De Wette, No. xxv.) He refers, there can be little doubt, to his edition of the Deutsche Theologie, which came out that year.

Footnote 184:

See, especially, the twelfth chapter of the second book, On the Necessity of bearing the Cross. Compare Michelet’s somewhat overdrawn picture of the effects of the Imitation in his History of France.

The Ignitum cum Deo Soliloquium of Gerlacus Petrus is a contemporary treatise belonging to the same school. (Comp. capp. xxxix. and xxvi.; ed. Strange, 1849.) It is less popular, less impassioned than the Imitation, and more thoroughly impregnated with the spirit of mysticism. Gerlach would seem to have studied Suso: in one place he imitates his language. The cast of his imagery, as well as the prominence given to mystical phraseology, more peculiar to the Germans, shows that he addresses himself to an advanced and comparatively esoteric circle.—Comp. capp. xxii, xxiv, p. 78.

Footnote 185:

‘Gerson.‘—See an article by Liebner (Gerson’s Mystische Theologie) in the Theologische Studien und Kritiken; 1835, ii.

HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS VOL. II.

CONTENTS OF VOL. II.

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Chapter I

The Sufis; their Mystical Poetry 3 Mystical Poetry in the West; Angelus Silesius 5 R. W. Emerson 8

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Chapter II

Rabia 10 The Oriental and the Western Mysticism compared 12

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Chapter I

The Position of the Mystics as regards the Reformation 31 The Advantage of the Ground occupied by Luther 32 Menacing Character of the Revolutionary Mysticism 35 The Anabaptists of Munster 37

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Chapter II

Luther and the Mystics 41 The Prophets of Zwickau 44 Carlstadt 44 Sebastian Frank 47 Schwenkfeld 50 Weigel 51

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Chapter III

Mysticism and Science 53 The Cabbala 55 Nature studied by the Light of Grace 57 Alchemy 58 Theurgy 59

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Chapter IV

Cornelius Agrippa 61 The Science of Sympathies 63 Redemption, Natural and Spiritual 67

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Chapter V

Theophrastus Paracelsus 71 Signatures 76 Theological Chemistry 77

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Chapter VI

Jacob Behmen and his Aurora 79 Illumination 82 Troubles 86

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Chapter VII

Jacob Behmen, his Materials, and Style of Workmanship 90 The Theory of Development by Contraries 92 The Three Gates 95 The Aurora 97

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Chapter VIII

Jacob Behmen—Sketch and Estimate of his System 103 The Mysterium Magnum 104 The Seven Fountain-Spirits 104 Examination of his Doctrine concerning the Origin of Evil 109 The Fall 115 Merits of his Theosophy 119

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Chapter IX

The Rosicrucians 128 Romance and Reality 129 Valentine Andreä and his Fama Fraternitatis 134 Secret Societies 136 The Creatures of the Elements 138 Magical Words 140 Pordage and the Philadelphian Society 142 Joanna Leade 144

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Chapter I

Neo-Platonism revived in Italy 147 Its Weakness, opposed to the Reformation 148 The Counter-reformation 150 Headed by Spain 150 Character of its Mysticism 151 St. Theresa 153 Her Autobiography 156 The Director 158 Visions 160

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Chapter II

Theresa’s Four Degrees of Prayer 167 Her Quietism 171

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Chapter III

St. John of the Cross 182 His Asceticism 183 His Mystical Night 185 More elevated Character of his Mysticism 193

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Chapter I

Queen Quietude 201 The Doctrine of ‘Pure Love’ discussed 205 Madame Guyon 207 Her Unhappy Marriage 208 The Kingdom of God within us 211 Efforts to Annihilate Self 213 Interior Attraction 216 Madame Guyon and the Romish Saints 218 Confessors and Small-pox 222 The Seven Years of Famine 224 Self-loss in God 227 Mistakes concerning the Nature of Spiritual Influence 230 Reformatory Character of her Mysticism 233 Activity and Persecution 234

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Chapter II

The Quietist Controversy 242 Molinos 242 Madame Guyon at Paris 245 St. Cyr 248 Fénélon and Madame Guyon 250 Signs of Danger 252 The Conferences at Issy 255 The Quietism of Fénélon 258 His Critical Position 262 Writes the Maxims of the Saints 263 Appeals to Rome 265 Bossuet’s Account of Quietism 268 Fénélon’s Reply 269 Infallibility submits to Louis 271 Fénélon submits to Infallibility 272 The Controversy reviewed 273 Mysticism in France and in Germany 275

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Chapter III

Disinterested Love 283 Antoinette Bourignon 286 Peter Poiret 287 Madame de Krüdener 288

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Chapter I

Britain poor in Mystics 301 George Fox 303 The Early Friends 305 Asceticism 309 Doctrine of the Universal Light 309

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Chapter II

Doctrine of Perceptible Guidance 313 The English Platonists 315 Henry More; Norris of Bemerton 315

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Chapter I

Comprehensive Character of his Mysticism 321 Doctrine of Correspondences 323 Stands alone among the Mystics 326

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Chapter II

His Memorable Relations 329 His Heaven and Hell 330 Moderation of his Doctrine concerning Spiritual Influence 331 Defects of his Doctrine concerning the Work of Christ 332 The Church of the New Jerusalem 335

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Chapter I

Mystical Tendencies of our own Time 340 The Faith-Philosophy 341 Schleiermacher 341 The Romantic School 343 Novalis 348 Revival of antiquated Error 350 The Modern Mysticism a Repetition of the Old 351 The Services of Mysticism 352 Its Dangers 352 Its Lessons 356

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Chapter II

Mysticism fostered by the Supposition of a Separate Religious Faculty 361 Reason, how far amenable to Understanding 362 Historic Reality not opposed to Spirituality 365

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Chapter III

A Vision of Mystics 368

BOOK THE SEVENTH PERSIAN MYSTICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGE

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Chapter I

Also, there is in God Which being seen would end us with a shock Of pleasure. It may be that we should die As men have died of joy, all mortal powers Summed up and finished in a single taste Of superhuman bliss; or, it may be That our great latent love, leaping at once A thousand years in stature—like a stone Dropped to the central fires, and at a touch Loosed into vapour—should break up the terms Of separate being, and as a swift rack, Dissolving into heaven, we should go back To God.

DOBELL.

The next day was fine, as well it might be after such a sunset; to Hawksfell all the party went, and there was no reading. But on the following (sunnier yet, if possible) they assembled immediately after breakfast in the summer-house, Lowestoffe not excepted, for even he grew inactive with the heat, and declared himself content to lie on the grass by the hour. Atherton congratulated his hearers that they would not for some time be troubled with more lucubrations of his—not till they came, in due course, to Madame Guyon. For Willoughby was to take up Jacob Behmen, and Gower, who possessed (as the fruit of an artist’s tour) some acquaintance with Spanish, St. Theresa. Then, unrolling his manuscript, he began.

THE SUFIS, OR MYSTICAL POETRY IN THE EAST AND WEST.

Among all the religions of civilized man, it would be difficult to find one more unfriendly to the growth of mysticism than that of Mohammed. Yet in no religion has mysticism spread more widely or raised its head with greater pride. The cold rationalism of the Koran, its ritual minutiæ, its formal self-righteousness, its prohibition of the monastic order,—all combined to warn the mystic from the religious domain of the Crescent. But stronger than Mohammedan orthodoxy or the dying commands of the Prophet were the wants of the human heart and the spirit of an eastern people. The generation which laid Mohammed in the holy earth of Medina saw monastic institutions arise and multiply on every side. Mystical interpretation could with ease elude the less favourable passages of the Koran, and turn others into a warrant. With a single touch of this dexterous pencil, the mystic could make the Prophet’s portraiture all he desired, and turn the frown into a smile. The fatalism of the creed of Islam would furnish a natural basis for the holy indifference of Quietism.

Each succeeding century of the Hegira was found more abundant than the last in a class of men who revolted against the letter in the name of the spirit, and who aspired to a converse and a unity with God such as the Koran deemed unattainable on this side heaven. The names of the saints and martyrs, the poets and philosophers, of mysticism, are among the brightest in the hagiography and the literature of the Mohammedan world. The achievements of the former class are adorned with legendary extravagances such as those with which the Prophet delighted to invest himself. The philosophy of the latter (whether sung or said) was not a little aided, in its contest with rigid orthodoxy, by the Grecian learning of that Alexandria which fell, in the first outbreak of Moslem zeal, before the hosts of Amrou. In later times (under the names of Plato and of Aristotle) mysticism and method did battle with each other, in the East as in the West,—at Shiraz, at Bagdad, or at Cordova, even as in the University of Paris or the academies of Italy.

The term Sufism appears to be a general designation for the mystical asceticism of the Mohammedan faith. The Sufis cannot be said to constitute a distinct sect, or to embrace any particular philosophical system. Their varieties are endless; their only common characteristics a claim of some sort to a superhuman commerce with the Supreme,—mystical rapture, mystical union, mystical identity, or theurgic powers;—and a life of ascetic observance. The name is given to mystics of every shade, from the sage to the quack, from poets like Saadi or philosophers like Algazzali, to the mendicant dervise or the crazy fanatic.

Persia has been for several centuries the great seat of Sufism. For two hundred years (during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of our era) the descendants of a Sufi occupied the throne,—governing, however, as may be supposed, not like mystics, but as men of the world.[186] It is with Sufism as exhibited principally by the Sufi poets of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, that I propose now to occupy your attention.

It will be found worth our while, as we proceed, to compare the mystical poetry of the East and West. Oriental mysticism has become famous by its poets; and into poetry it has thrown all its force and fire. The mysticism of the West has produced prophecies and interpretations of prophecy; soliloquies, sermons, and treatises of divinity;—it has found solace in autobiography, and breathed out its sorrow in hymns;—it has essayed, in earnest prose, to revive and to reform the sleeping Church;—but it has never elaborated great poems. In none of the languages of Europe has mysticism achieved the success which crowned it in Persia, and prevailed to raise and rule the poetic culture of a nation. Yet the occidental mysticism has not been wholly lacking in poets of its own order. The seventeenth century can furnish one, and the nineteenth another,—Angelus Silesius and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The latest research has succeeded only in deciding who Angelus Silesius was not. Some Roman Catholic priest or monk, assuming the name of Angelus, did, in the seventeenth century, send forth sundry hymns and religious poems,—among others, one most euphuistically entitled The Cherubic Wanderer. The author of this book has been generally identified, on grounds altogether inadequate, with a contemporary named John Scheffler,—a renegade from Jacob Behmen to the Pope. Suffice it to say that no two men could be more unlike than the virulent fagotty-minded pervert Scheffler, and the contemplative pantheistic Angelus—be he who he may.[187]

The Cherubic Wanderer is a collection of religious epigrams or rhyming sentences, most of them smart and pithy enough as to expression, not a few as destitute of sense as they all are of poetry. The Wanderer travelled a little way into the eighteenth century, and then, lighting upon one of those oblivious arbours so fatal to pilgrims, sat down, and slept long. A few years ago some Romanticist littérateurs of Germany woke him up, and announced to the world, with much sounding of brass and tinkling of cymbals, that they had resuscitated a paragon of saintship and philosophy.

The Silesian’s book reiterates the customary utterances of mysticism. But a harsher tone is audible, and the doctrines with which we are familiar appear in a more startling and paradoxical form. The more dangerous elements are intensified. Pantheism is latent no longer. Angelus loves to play at a kind of intellectual seesaw with the terms Finite and Infinite, and their subject or kindred words. Now mounts one side, now the other, of the restless antithesis. Each factor is made to share with its rival every attribute of height or lowness. His favourite style of talking may run as follows:—‘I cannot do without God, nor He without me; He is as small as I, and I as great as He:—let time be to thee as eternity, and eternity as time; the All as nothing, and nothing as the All; then thou hast solved life’s problem, and art one with God, above limit and distinction.’ We matter-of-fact folk feel irresistibly inclined to parody such an oracle, and say,—‘Let whole and part, black and white, be convertible terms;—let thy head be to thee as thy heels, and thy heels as thy head; and thou hast transcended the conditions of vulgar men, and lapsed to Limbo irretrievably.’ Silesius, as a good churchman, repudiates, of course, the charge of pantheism. He declares that the dissolution in Deity he contemplates does not necessitate the loss of personality, or confound the Maker and the made. His distinction is distinguishable ‘as water is in water.’ He appeals to the strong language he hunts out from Bernard, Tauler, and Ruysbroek. But the cold-blooded epigram cannot claim the allowance due to the fervid sermon or the often rhapsodical volume of devotion. Extravagant as the Sufi, he cannot plead like him a spiritual intoxication. Crystals and torrents must have separate laws. And which, moreover, of the mystical masters to whom Angelus refers us would have indited such presumptuous doggrel as this?

God in my nature is involved, As I in the divine; I help to make his being up, As much as he does mine.

As much as I to God owes God to me His blissfulness and self-sufficiency.

I am as rich as God, no grain of dust That is not mine too,—share with me he must. More than his love unto himself, God’s love to me hath been; If more than self I too love him, We twain are quits, I ween.[188]

On the other hand, there are many terse and happy couplets and quatrains in the Wanderer, which express the better spirit of mysticism. Angelus insists constantly on the vanity of mere externals,—the necessity of a Christ formed within, as opposed to a dead, unsanctifying faith,—the death of self-will, as the seat of all sin,—the reality of the hell or heaven already wrought in time by sin or holiness. These were the maxims and ejaculations which religious minds, mystically inclined, found so edifying. The arrogant egotheism of some passages they took in another sense, or deemed the sense beyond them. Moreover, the high-flown devotion affected by Rome has always familiarized her children with expressions which (as Thomas Fuller has it) ‘do knock at the door of blasphemy, though not always with intent to enter in thereat.’

The second representative of the West, who must assist towards our comparative estimate of pantheistic mysticism in its poetical form, is Mr. Emerson, the American essayist. Whether in prose or verse he is chief singer of his time at the high court of Mysticism. He belongs more to the East than to the West—true brother of those Sufis with whose doctrine he has so much in common. Luxuriant in fancy, impulsive, dogmatic, darkly oracular, he does not reason. His majestic monologue may not be interrupted by a question. His inspiration disdains argument. He delights to lavish his varied and brilliant resources upon some defiant paradox—and never more than when that paradox is engaged in behalf of an optimism extreme enough to provoke another Voltaire to write another Candide. He displays in its perfection the fantastic incoherence of the ‘God-intoxicated’ man.

In comparing Emerson with the Sufis, it may be as well to state that he does not believe in Mohammed and receive the Koran in a manner which would satisfy an orthodox Mussulman. Yet he does so (if words have meaning) much after the same fashion in which he believes in Christ and receives the Bible. Mohammed and Jesus are both, to him, extraordinary religious geniuses—the Bible and the Koran both antiquated books. He looks with serene indifference on all the forms of positive religion. He would agree perfectly with those Sufis who proclaimed the difference between the Church and the Mosque of little moment. The distance between the Crescent and the Cross is, with him, one of degree—their dispute rather a question of individual or national taste than a controversy between a religion with evidence and a religion without.

In the nineteenth century, and in America, the doctrine of emanation and the ascetic practice of the East can find no place. But the pantheism of Germany is less elevated than that of Persia, in proportion as it is more developed. The tendency of the latter is to assign reality only to God; the tendency of the former is to assign reality only to the mind of man. The Sufi strove to lose humanity in Deity; Emerson dissolves Deity in humanity. The orientals are nearer to theism, and the moderns farther from it, than they sometimes seem. That primal Unity which the Sufi, like the Neo-Platonist, posits at the summit of all things, to ray forth the world of Appearance, may possibly retain some vestige of personality. But the Over-Soul of Emerson, whose organs of respiration are men of genius, can acquire personality only in the individual man. The Persian aspired to reach a divinity above him by self-conquest; the American seeks to realize a divinity within him by self-will. Self-annihilation is the watchword of the one; self-assertion that of the other.

Footnote 186:

Malcolm’s Persia, vol. ii., p. 383.

Footnote 187:

See Schrader’s Angelus Silesius und seine Mystik; Halle, 1853. This author shows, that the supposition identifying Scheffler with Angelus (copied too readily by one writer from another) may be traced up to a source of very slight authority. Scheffler repudiated mysticism after entering the Romish communion. Furious polemical treatises by Scheffler, and sentimental religious poems by Angelus appeared contemporaneously during a considerable interval. Had Scheffler published anything mystical during his controversy, his Protestant antagonists would not have failed to charge him with it. With Scheffler the Church is everything. In the Wanderer of Angelus the word scarcely occurs. The former lives in externalisms; the latter covets escape from them. The one is an angry bigot; the other, for a Romanist, serenely latitudinarian. Characteristics so opposite, urges Dr. Schrader, could not exist in the same man at the same time.

The epithet ‘Cherubic’ indicates the more speculative character of the book; as contrasted, in the language of the mystics, with the devotion of feeling and passion—seraphic love.

Footnote 188:

Cherubinischer Wandersmann, i. 100, 9, 18; Schrader, p. 28.

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Chapter II

Und so lang du das nicht hast Dieses: Stirb und werde! Bist du nur ein trüber Gast Auf der dunkeln Erde.[189]

GOETHE.

‘Let us proceed, then,’ resumed Atherton, smoothing his manuscript, ‘on our Persian expedition. Dr. Tholuck, with his German translation, shall act as interpreter, and we may pause now and then on our way to listen to the deliverances of the two men of vision who accompany us from Breslau and from Boston.’

The first century of the Hegira has scarcely expired when a mysticism, strikingly similar to that of Madame Guyon, is seen to arise spontaneously in the devout ardours of a female saint named Rabia.[190] There is the same straining after indifference and self-abnegation—after a love absolutely disinterested—after a devotion beyond language and above means.

By the sick-bed of Rabia stood two holy men. One of them said, ‘The prayers of that man are not sincere who refuses to bear the chastening strokes of the Lord.’ The other went beyond him, saying, ‘He is not sincere who does not rejoice in them.’ Rabia, detecting something of self in that very joy, surpassed them both as she added, ‘He is not sincere who does not, beholding his Lord, become totally unconscious of them.’ The Mohammedan Lives of the Saints records that, on another occasion, when questioned concerning the cause of a severe illness, she replied, ‘I suffered myself to think on the delights of Paradise, and therefore my Lord hath punished me.’ She was heard to exclaim, ‘What is the Kaaba to me? I need God only.’ She declared herself the spouse of Heaven,—described her will and personality as lost in God. When asked how she had reached this state, she made the very answer we have heard a German mystic render, ‘I attained it when everything which I had found I lost again in God.’ When questioned as to the mode, she replied, ‘Thou, Hassan, hast found Him by reason and through means; I immediately, without mode or means.’

The seeds of Sufism are here. This mystical element was fostered to a rapid growth through succeeding centuries, in the East as in the West, by the natural reaction of religious fervour against Mohammedan polemics and Mohammedan scholasticism.

In the ninth century of our era, Sufism appears divided between two distinguished leaders, Bustami and Juneid. The former was notorious chiefly for the extravagance of his mystical insanity. The men of genius who afterwards made the name of Sufism honourable, and the language of its aspiration classical, shrank from such coarse excess. It was not enough for Bustami to declare that the recognition of our personal existence was an idolatry, the worst of crimes. It was not enough for him to maintain that when man adores God, God adores himself. He claimed such an absorption in his pantheistic deity as identified him with all the power, the wisdom, and the goodness of the universe. He would say, ‘I am a sea without bottom, without beginning, without end. I am the throne of God, the word of God. I am Gabriel, Michael, Israfil; I am Abraham, Moses, Jesus.’

If Epiphanius is to be believed, the Messalians were a sect chargeable with the very same folly. If asked, he says, concerning a patriarch, a prophet, an angel, or Christ, they would reply, ‘I am that patriarch, that prophet, that angel; I am Christ.’

A reference to Emerson’s Essay on History renders such professions perfectly credible. Bustami and the Messalians could not have made them in the literal, but (by anticipation) in the Emersonian sense. They believed, with him, that ‘there is one mind common to all individual men.’ They find in him their interpreter, when he says, ‘Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only sovereign agent.’ Emerson couches their creed in modern rhymes, as he sings exultant,—

I am owner of the sphere, Of the seven stars and the solar year, Of Cæsar’s hand and Plato’s brain, Of Lord Christ’s heart, and Shakspeare’s strain.

In the spirit of the same philosophy, Angelus Silesius hints at the possibility of such an empire. He reminds his readers that there is no greatness which makes the glory of the past that may not be realized by themselves in the present. Thus he asks—

Dost prize alone King Solomon as wisest of the wise? Thou also canst be Solomon, and all his wisdom thine.[191]

But what is only potential with him is claimed as actual by mystical brethren bolder yet than he.

The first endeavour of the Sufi (as of so many Christian mystics) is to achieve that simplifying, purifying process which shall remove from the mind everything earthly and human—all its creaturely accidents, and reduce it to that abstract essence which mirrors Deity, and is itself ultimately divine. An apologue in the Mesnevi of Jelaleddin Rumi (a Sufi poet who wrote in the first half of our thirteenth century) teaches this doctrine quite in the oriental manner.

The Greeks and the Chinese dispute before a certain sultan as to which of the two nations is the more skilful in the art of decoration. The sultan assigns to the rival painters two structures, facing each other, on which they shall exercise their best ability, and determine the question of precedence by the issue:—

The Chinese ask him for a thousand colours, All that they ask he gives right royally; And every morning from his treasure-house A hundred sorts are largely dealt them out. The Greeks despise all colour as a stain— Effacing every hue with nicest care. Brighter and brighter shines their polished front, More dazzling, soon, than gleams the floor of heaven. This hueless sheen is worth a thousand dyes,— This is the moon—they but her cloudy veil; All that the cloud is bright or golden with Is but the lending of the moon or sun. And now, at length, are China’s artists ready. The cymbals clang—the sultan hastens thither, And sees enrapt the glorious gorgeousness— Smit nigh to swooning by those beamy splendours.— Then, to the Grecian palace opposite. Just as the Greeks have put their curtain back, Down glides a sunbeam through the rifted clouds, And, lo, the colours of that rainbow house Shine, all reflected on those glassy walls That face them, rivalling: the sun hath painted With lovelier blending, on that stony mirror The colours spread by man so artfully. Know then, O friend! such Greeks the Sufis are, Owning nor book nor master; and on earth Having one sole and simple task,—to make Their hearts a stainless mirror for their God. Is thy heart clear and argent as the moon? Then imaged there may rest, innumerous, The forms and hues of heaven.[192]

So, too, says Angelus Silesius,—

Away with accidents and false appearance, Thou must be essence all, and colourless.

And again,—

Man! wouldst thou look on God, in heaven or while yet here, Thy heart must first of all become a mirror clear.[193]

Jelaleddin Rumi describes the emancipation of the soul from intellectual distinctions—the laws of finite thought, the fluctuations of hope and fear, the consciousness of personality,—under the image of night. This has been the favourite and appropriate symbol of all the family of mystics, from Dionysius, with his ‘Divine Darkness,’ to John of the Cross, in his De Nocte Obscurâ, and on to Novalis, in his Hymnen an die Nacht. In the following vigorous passage, Night is equivalent to the state of self-abandonment and self-transcendence:—

Every night God frees the host of spirits— Makes them clear as tablets smooth and spotless— Frees them every night from fleshy prison. Then the soul is neither slave nor master, Nothing knows the bondman of his bondage, Nothing knows the lord of all his lordship, Gone from such a night is eating sorrow, Gone the thoughts that question good and evil. Then, without distraction or division, In the One the spirit sinks and slumbers.

Silesius has the same thought, cold and dry, after the poetic Persian, yet in words that would furnish no inapt motto to express in a sentence this species of mysticism:—

Ne’er sees man in this life, the Light above all light, As when he yields him up to darkness and to night.[194]

The ascetic Sufi bids the mystical aspirant close the senses against every external impression—for the worlds of sense and of contemplation reciprocally exclude each other. We have seen how the Hindoos and the Hesychasts endeavoured literally to obey this counsel, reiterated so often by so many mystagogues:—

Put wool within the ear of flesh, for that Makes deaf the inner hearing, as with wool; If that can hear, the spirit’s ear is deaf. Let sense make blind no more the spirit’s eye. Be without ear, without a sense or thought, Hark only to the voice, ‘Home, wanderer, home!’

It is quite in accordance with such precepts that the judging faculty should be abandoned by the Sufi for the intuitive, and the understanding sacrificed to the feeling. According to the Koran, Mohammed once soared heavenwards, to such a height that Gabriel could not overtake him, and far off below, appeared to the Prophet no larger than a sparrow. Jelaleddin compares the heart, the divine principle in man (the spirit, in his psychology), to Mohammed, and the understanding to Gabriel. Names and words, he says, are but ‘nets and shackles.’ With justice, in one sense, he bids men pass from the sign to the thing signified, and asks,—

Didst ever pluck a rose from R and O and S? Names thou mayst know: go, seek the truth they name; Search not the brook, but heaven, to find the moon.

The senses and the lower powers, nourished by forms, belong to earth, and constitute the mere foster-mother of our nature. The intuitive faculty is a ray of Deity, and beholds Essence. The soul which follows its divine parent is therefore a wonder, and often a scandal to that which recognises only the earthly. Jelaleddin compares the rapturous plunge of the soul into its divine and native element to the hastening of the ducklings into the water, to the terror of the hen that hatched them.[195]

While exulting in a devotion above all means and modes, we find the Sufi (in nearly every stage of his ascension save the last) yielding implicit obedience to some human guide of his own choice. The Persian Pir was to him what the Director was to the Quietist or semi-Quietist of France; what the experienced Friend of God was to the mystic of Cologne or Strasburg; what Nicholas of Basle was so long to Tauler. That a voluntary submission to such authority was yielded is certain. Yet we find scarcely an allusion to these spiritual guides among the chief bards of Sufism. Each singer claims or seeks a knowledge of God which is immediate, and beyond the need of at least the orthodox and customary aids and methods. Thus Rumi says—

He needs a guide no longer who hath found The way already leading to the Friend. Who stands already on heaven’s topmost dome Needs not to search for ladders. He that lies, Folded in favour on the sultan’s breast, Needs not the letter or the messenger.

So Emerson,—

‘The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it is profane to seek to interpose helps.... Whenever a mind is simple, and receives a divine wisdom, then old things pass away,—means, teachers, texts, temples, fall; it lives now and absorbs past and future into the present hour.’[196]

Hence, in both cases, the indifference before noticed to all the various forms of positive religion. The Persian describes all religions as the same liquor in different glasses—all are poured by God into one mighty beaker.

The self-abandonment and self-annihilation of the Sufis rest on the basis of their pantheism. Personal existence is with them the great illusion of this world of appearance—to cling to it is to be blind and guilty. Mahmud (a Sufi of the fourteenth century) says, in the Gulschen Ras,—

All sects but multiply the I and Thou; This I and Thou belong to partial being; When I and Thou and several being vanish, Then Mosque and Church shall bind thee never more. Our individual life is but a phantom: Make clear thine eye, and see Reality!

Again, (though here the sense may be moral rather than philosophic, and selfishness, not personality, abjured)—

Go, soul! with Moses to the wilderness, And hear with him that grand ‘I am the Lord!’ While, like a mountain that shuts out the sun, Thine I lifts up its head, thou shalt not see Me. The lightning strikes the mountain into ruins, And o’er the levelled dust the glory leaps!

Jelaleddin says of the Sufi in his self-abnegation,—

His love of God doth, like a flame of hell, Even in a moment swallow love of self.

Mahmud, to express the same thought, employs the image used by Thomas à Kempis:—

The path from Me to God is truly found, When pure that Me from Self as clearest flame from smoke.

Angelus Silesius bids men lose, in utter Nihilism, all sense of any existence separate from the Divine Substance—the Absolute:—

While aught thou art or know’st or lov’st or hast, Not yet, believe me, is thy burden gone.

Who is as though he were not—ne’er had been— That man, oh joy! is made God absolute.

Self is surpassed by self-annihilation; The nearer nothing, so much more divine.[197]

Thus individuality must be ignored to the utmost; by mystical death we begin to live; and in this perverted sense he that loseth his life shall find it. Hence, by a natural consequence, the straining after a sublime apathy almost as senseless as the last abstraction of the Buddhist. The absolutely disinterested love, to which the Sufi aspires, assumes, however, an aspect of grandeur as opposed to the sensuous hopes and fears of Mohammed’s heaven and hell. Rumi thus describes the blessedness of those whose will is lost in the will of God:—

They deem it crime to flee from Destiny, For Destiny to them brings only sweetness. Welcome is all that ever can befal them, For were it fire it turns to living waters. The poison melts to sugar on their lip; The mire they tread is lustrous diamond, And weal and woe alike, whatever comes. They and their kingdom lie in God’s divineness. To pray, ‘O Lord, turn back this trouble from me,’ They count an insult to the hand that sent it.

Faithful they are, but not for Paradise; God’s will the only crowning of their faith: And not for seething hell, flee they from sin, But that their will must serve the Will Divine. It is not struggle, ’tis not discipline, Wins them a will so restful and so blest;— It is that God from his heart-fountain ever Fills up their jubilant souls.

So, again, Angelus Silesius, sometimes pushing his negation to unconscious caricature:—

True hero he that would as readily Be left without God as enjoy him near.

Self-loss finds God—to let God also go, That is the real, most rare abandonment.

Man! whilst thou thankest God for this or that, Yet art thou slave to finite feebleness.

Not fully God’s is he who cannot live, Even in hell, and find in hell no hell.

Nought so divine as to let nothing move thee, Here or hereafter (could’st thou only reach it).

Who loves without emotion, and without knowledge knows, Of him full fitly say we—he is more God than man.

Compare Emerson, discoursing of Intuition and the height to which it raises men:—

‘Fear and hope are alike beneath it. It asks nothing. There is somewhat low even in hope. We are then in vision. There is nothing that can be called gratitude nor properly joy. The soul is raised over passion,’ &c. So, again: ‘Prayer as a means to effect a private end is theft and meanness. It supposes dualism in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action.’[198]

This elevation above petition and above desire, towards which many a Sufi toiled, watching, fasting, solitary, through the ‘seven valleys’ of mystic discipline, is cheaply accomplished now-a-days by mere nonchalance, and is hit off by a flourish of the pen. It is the easy boast of any one who finds prayer distasteful and scoffs at psalm singing—who chooses to dub his money-getting with the title of worship, and fancies that to follow instinct is to follow God. The most painful self-negation and the most facile self-indulgence meet at the same point and claim the same pre-eminence.

The eastern mystic ignores humanity to attain divinity. The ascent and the descent are proportionate, and the privileges of nothingness are infinite. We must accompany the Sufi to his highest point of deification, and in that transcendental region leave him. His escape from the finite limitations of time and space is thus described,—

On earth thou seest his outward, but his spirit Makes heaven its tent and all infinity. Space and Duration boundless do him service, As Eden’s rivers dwell and serve in Eden.

Again, Said, the servant, thus recounts one morning to Mohammed the ecstasy he has enjoyed:—

My tongue clave fever-dry, my blood ran fire, My nights were sleepless with consuming love, Till night and day sped past—as flies a lance Grazing a buckler’s rim; a hundred faiths Seemed then as one; a hundred thousand years No longer than a moment. In that hour All past eternity and all to come Was gathered up in one stupendous Now,— Let understanding marvel as it may. Where men see clouds, on the ninth heaven I gaze, And see the throne of God. All heaven and hell Are bare to me and all men’s destinies, The heavens and earth, they vanish at my glance: The dead rise at my look. I tear the veil From all the worlds, and in the hall of heaven I set me central, radiant as the sun. Then spake the Prophet:—‘Friend, thy steed is warm; Spur him no more. The mirror in thy breast Did slip its fleshly case, now put it up— Hide it once more, or thou wilt come to harm.’

This magniloquence of Said’s is but the vehement poetic expression for the ‘absolute intuition’ of modern Germany—that identity of subject and object in which all limitations and distinctions vanish, and are absorbed in an indescribable transcendental intoxication. If the principle be true at all, its most lofty and unqualified utterance must be the best, and what seems to common-sense the thorough-going madness of the fiery Persian is preferable to the colder and less consistent language of the modern Teutonic mysticism. Quite in the spirit of the foregoing extracts, Emerson laments that we do not oftener realize this identity, and transcend time and space as we ought.—

‘We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related,—the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.’ And again:—‘Time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul. A man is capable of abolishing them both. The spirit sports with time—

‘Can crowd eternity into an hour Or stretch an hour to eternity.’

So Angelus Silesius:—

Rise above Space and Time, and thou canst be At any moment in Eternity.[199]

The following passage from Jelaleddin exhibits the kind of identity with God claimed by the more extravagant devotees of Sufism:—

Are we fools, we’re God’s captivity; Are we wise, we are his promenade; Are we sleeping, we are drunk with God; Are we waking, then we are his heralds; Are we weeping, then his clouds of wrath; Are we laughing, flashes of his love.

Some among them carried their presumption to a practical extreme which did away with all distinction between good and evil. They declared the sins of the Sufi dearer to God than the obedience of other men, and his impiety more acceptable than their faith.[200]

Two extracts more will suffice to show the mode in which this pantheistic mysticism confounds, at its acme, the finite and the infinite. They are from Feridoddin Attar, who died in the second or third decade of the fourteenth century.—

Man, what thou art is hidden from thyself. Know’st not that morning, mid-day, and the eve, All are within thee? The ninth heaven art thou; And from the spheres into this roar of time Didst fall erewhile. Thou art the brush that painted The hues of all this world—the light of life, That rayed its glory on the nothingness.

Joy! joy! I triumph! Now no more I know Myself as simply me, I burn with love Unto myself, and bury me in love. The Centre is within me, and its wonder Lies as a circle everywhere about me. Joy! joy! no mortal thought can fathom me. I am the merchant and the pearl at once. Lo, time and space lie crouching at my feet. Joy! joy! when I would revel in a rapture, I plunge into myself and all things know.

The poet then introduces Allah, as saying that he had cast Attar into a trance, and withdrawn him into his own essence, so that the words he uttered were the words of God.[201]

Both with Emerson and Angelus, he who truly apprehends God becomes a part of the divine nature,—is a son, a god in God, according to the latter; and according to the former, grows into an organ of the Universal Soul. This notion of identity Emerson seems to arrive at from the human, Angelus from the divine side. The salvation of man is reduced with the German, very much to a process of divine development. With the American, every elevated thought merges man for a time in the Oversoul. The idealism of Emerson is more subjective, his pantheism more complete and consequent. Angelus is bold on the strength of a theory of redemption which makes man necessary to God. Emerson is bolder yet, on his own account, for he makes his own God. This he does when he adores his own ideal, and, expanding Self to Universality, falls down and worships.

Hear him describe this transcendental devotion:—

‘The simplest person, who in his integrity worships God, becomes God; yet for ever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and unsearchable.’ Again: ‘I, the imperfect, adore my own Perfect. I am somehow receptive of the great soul, and thereby I do overlook the sun and the stars, and feel them to be but the fair accidents and effects which change and pass.’ So, speaking of the contemplation of Nature:—‘I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God,’ &c.

Angelus says, in virtue of his ideal sonship,—

I am as great as God, and he as small as I; He cannot me surpass, or I beneath him lie.

God cannot, without me, endure a moment’s space, Were I to be destroyed, he must give up the ghost.

Nought seemeth high to me, I am the highest thing; Because e’en God himself is poor deprived of me.[202]

The central idea of the Persian mysticism is Emanation. The soul is to escape from the manifold to the One. Its tendency (in proportion as its votary believes that return accomplished) is to confound man with the Father. The leading principle in the mysticism of Eckart and Angelus Silesius is Incarnation. Angelus is never weary of reiterating the doctrine that God became man in order that man might become God. He does not labour, like the orientals, to attain deification by ascetic efforts of his own. He has a kind of Mediator. He seems to believe that through Christ, in some way, every man is a divine Son of God, if he will only think so. All he has to do is to realize this sonship; then he becomes, by Grace, all that the Son of God is by Nature. The obvious result of this mysticism is to identify man with the Son.

In that order of modern mysticism represented by Emerson, the central doctrine is Inspiration. In the creative efforts of the poet, in the generalizations of the philosopher, the man of genius speaks as he is moved by the Oversoul. An influx of the universal spirit floods his being and carries him beyond himself. In intuition the finite Ego is identified with the absolute Ego. Humanity is a divine evolution, and each true man (to use Emerson’s apt illustration)—a façade of Deity. Even Angelus would have acknowledged that it was in some sort through Christ that his boastful sonship became possible. But the believer in the Oversoul will admit no such medium, and owns a debt to Christ much as he owns a debt to Shakspeare. Mysticism of this order usurps the office of the Holy Ghost, and directly identifies the spirit of man with the Spirit of God.

Mysticism has always been accustomed to express the transports of its divine passion by metaphors borrowed from the amorous phraseology of earth. It has done this with every variety of taste, from the grossness of some of the most eminent Romanist saints, to the beautiful Platonism of Spenser’s Hymns of ‘Heavenly Love’ and ‘Heavenly Beautie.’ But nowhere has metaphor branched so luxuriantly into allegory as in the East, and nowhere in the East with such subtilty and such freedom as among the Persian mystics. The admiring countrymen of Hafiz, Saadi, and Jami, interpret mystically almost everything they wrote. They underlay these poems everywhere with a system of correspondence whose ingenuity would have done no discredit to Swedenborg himself. Sir William Jones furnishes some specimens of a sort of mystical glossary, by aid whereof their drinking songs may be read as psalms, and their amatory effusions transformed into hymns full of edification for the faithful.[203] Never, since the days of Plotinus, was a deity imagined more abstract than the Unity toward which the Sufi aspires. Yet never was religious language more florid and more sensuous. According to the system alluded to, wine is equivalent to devotion; the tavern is an oratory; kisses and embraces, the raptures of piety; while wantonness, drunkenness, and merriment, are religious ardour and abstraction from all terrestrial thoughts.

The following passage from Mahmud’s Gulschen Ras may suffice as a specimen of these devout Bacchanalia. It has the advantage of exhibiting the key in the lock:—

Know’st thou who the Host may be who pours the spirit’s wine Know’st thou what his liquor is whose taste is so divine? The Host is thy Beloved One—the wine annihilation, And in the fiery draught thy soul drinks in illumination. Up, soul! and drink with burning lip the wine of ecstasy, The drop should haste to lose itself in His unbounded sea. At such a draught mere intellect swims wildered and grows wild; Love puts the slave-ring in his ear and makes the rebel mild. Our Friend holds out the royal wine and bids us drink it up; The whole world is a drinking-house and everything a cup. Drunken even Wisdom lies—all in revel sunken; Drunken are the earth and heaven; all the angels drunken. Giddy is the very sky, round so often hasting, Up and down it staggers wide, with but a single tasting. Such the wine of might they drink in blest carouse above. So the angels higher lift their flaming height of love. Now and then the dregs they fling earthward in their quaffing, And where’er a drop alights, lo, an Eden laughing![204]

Footnote 189:

And if thy heart know nought of this—‘Die that thou mayest be born;’ then walkest thou the darksome earth a sojourner forlorn.

Footnote 190:

Tholuck, Ssufismus, sive Theosophia Persarum pantheistica (Berlin, 1822), pp. 51-54.

Footnote 191:

Tholuck, Ssufismus, p. 63. Cherub. Wand., ii. 18.

Footnote 192:

Tholuck, Blüthensammlung aus der Morgenländischen Mystik (Berlin, 1825), p. 114.

Footnote 193:

Cherub. Wand., i. 274; v. 81.

Footnote 194:

Blüthen., p. 61. Cherub. Wand., iv. 23.

Footnote 195:

Blüthen., pp. 64, 71, 113, 156.

Footnote 196:

Blüthen., p. 167. Emerson’s Essays (1848), p. 35.

Footnote 197:

Blüthen., pp. 204-206. Cherub. Wand., i. 24, 92, 140.

Footnote 198:

Blüthen., pp. 180, 181. Cherub. Wand., v. 367; ii. 92; i. 91, 39; ii. 152, 59. Emerson, pp. 37, 42.

Footnote 199:

Blüthen., pp. 85, 116. Emerson, pp. 141, 143. Cherub. Wand., i. 12. Compare Richard of St. Victor, cited above, vol. i., p. 172, Note to p. 163.

Footnote 200:

Blüthen., pp. 82, 84.—The truth, of which the licentious doctrine alluded to is the abuse, is well put by Angelus,—

‘Dearer to God the good man’s very sleep Than prayers and psalms of sinners all night long.’—(v. 334.)

Footnote 201:

Blüthen., pp. 266, 260.—Never does this soaring idealism become so definite and apprehensible as when it speaks with the ‘large utterance’ of the Sufis. Angelus has here and there somewhat similar imagery for the same thought. What is with him a dry skeleton acquires flesh and blood among the Orientals.

‘Sit in the centre, and thou seest at once What is, what was; all here and all in heaven.

‘Is my will dead? Then what I will God must, And I prescribe his pattern and his end.

‘I must be sun myself, and with my beams Paint all the hueless ocean of the Godhead.’—(ii. 183; i. 98, 115.)

Footnote 202:

Emerson, pp. 154, 156, 196. Cherub. Wand., i. 10, 8, 204.—Angelus has various modes of expressing the way in which God realizes his nature in the salvation of men.

‘I bear God’s image. Would he see himself? He only can in me, or such as I.

‘Meekness is velvet whereon God takes rest: Art meek, O man?—God owes to thee his pillow.

‘I see in God both God and man, He man and God in me; I quench his thirst, and he, in turn, Helps my necessity.’—(i. 105, 214, 224.)

Footnote 203:

Works, vol. iv., On the Mystical Poetry of the Persians and Hindoos.

Footnote 204:

Blüthen., p. 218.

BOOK THE EIGHTH THEOSOPHY IN THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION

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Chapter I

Amongst them all sate he that wonned there, That hight Phantastes by his nature trew; A man of years yet fresh, as mote appere, Of swarth complexion and of crabbed hew, That him full of melancholy did shew; Bent hollow beetle brows, sharpe staring eyes That mad or foolish seemed: one by his view Mote deeme him born with ill disposed skyes, When oblique Saturne sate in th’ house or agonyes.

SPENSER.

The autumn is already advanced, and our friends who met at Summerford have returned to the neighbourhood of London. The days of damp and fog have arrived. All nature looks sullen and lustreless. As Gower gazes through the streaming pane on the narrowed dripping landscape, he sometimes tries, as sunny Persia and the Sufis recur to him, to transform the slope before his windows into an eastern valley. Fancy shall sow it thick with poppies, and daisies, and hyacinths of brilliant red;—a thymy smell breathes up the pass;—and there the ungainly stork, and gaily painted quails flutter away at the sound of his horse’s hoofs. Or those house-tops at the foot of the hill, among their trees, shall be a Persian town, on which he looks from an eminence. There are the flat-roofed white houses, enclosing in their courts those twinkling silver lights, the fountains; the green of trees among the shining walls relieves the eye; the domes and minarets look down into the narrow streets; there sleeps the burial-ground, under the shadow of its sentinel cypresses; and there blows the garland of gardens, surrounding the whole with its wavy line of many colours. But the weather is a water-monster, and swallows up too-venturous Fancy. For a few moments imagination can lay light behind the clouds; bright hues flush out on the surface of familiar forms, and the magic power prevails to change them into creatures of the Orient. But the rainy reality is too potent, and the wilderness of vapour will receive no form, retain no colour. So Gower turns away from the windows—pokes the fire—feels idle and fit for nothing—struggles with himself—conquers, and finally achieves a morning’s work.

Willoughby has laid aside his romance for a time and taken to the theosophists—to Jacob Behmen more especially. In fact, he had come to an exciting point in his story. He thought he had found a kind of seething turbulence in his thoughts, like that which certain rivers are said to manifest, when in parts of their course they pass over beds of subterranean fire. Afraid of becoming morbid and unnatural, he stopped work at once, and had recourse to Behmen as a refrigerant and sedative. The remedy succeeded to admiration. Within a day or two the patient could pronounce himself out of poetical danger; and Atherton found him, when he dropped in one morning, enjoying, with Behmen in his hand, that most promising token of convalescence—a profound sleep.

Gower resolved to make himself amends for that uncongenial morning, by spending the evening at Ashfield. Thither also Willoughby had found his way. A considerable part of the evening was passed in Atherton’s library, and conversation turned, before very long, upon the mystics, once more, and their position as regards the Reformation.

* * * * *

WILLOUGHBY. Those Teutonic worthies of the fourteenth century are noble specimens of the mystic.

GOWER. Truly, with them, Mysticism puts on her beautiful garments. See her standing, gazing heavenward; ‘her rapt soul sitting in her eyes,’ and about her what a troop of shining ones! There is Charity, her cheek wet with tears for the dead Christ and pale with love for the living; carrying, too, the oil and the wine—for Mysticism was the good Samaritan of the time, and succoured bleeding Poverty, when priest passed by and Levite;—there is Truth, withdrawing worship from the form and superstitious substitute, transferring it from priest and pageantry to the heart alone with God, and pressing on, past every channel, toward the Fount Himself;—there Humility, pointing to the embers of consumed good works, while she declares that man is nothing and that God is all;—and there, too, Patriotism, and awakening Liberty—for Mysticism appealed to the people in their native tongue; fashioned the speech and nerved the arms of the German nation; gave heart to the Fatherland (bewildered in a tempest of fiery curses) to withstand, in the name of Christ, the vicar of Christ; led on the Teutonic lion of her popular fable to foil the plots of Italian Reynard; and dared herself to set at nought the infuriate Infallibility.

ATHERTON. Go on, Gower.

GOWER. It seems to me that the doctrine of justification by faith, is practically involved in a theology like that of Tauler, so deep in its apprehension of sin as selfishness, so thorough in renouncing all merit on the part of man.

ATHERTON. Yes, practically. What was needful in addition was, that this doctrine should take its due central place in the system of Christian truth, as the principle, if I may so speak, of salvation for all men. It was not enough to arrive at it as the upshot of individual mystical experience.

WILLOUGHBY. There I think you indicate the weak point of this mysticism—it is so individual—so much a matter of the personal inward life.

GOWER. That surely is the very secret of its strength.

WILLOUGHBY. Yes, of its strength up to a certain limit; beyond that limit, of its weakness. It lacked facility of impartation. Its sympathies were broad and humane; its doctrine too narrow and ascetic. Speaking from the depths of a soul that had known the nether darkness and the insufferable glory, its utterance was broken and obscure. It must be lived through to be understood. It might attract, but could only partially retain, the many. Its message, after all, was to the few.

GOWER. But those few, master-minds, remember.

ATHERTON. True, yet what powers could compensate for the want of clear speech—of a ready vehicle for transference of thought? A deep saying that of Jeremy Taylor’s, where he remarks concerning mystical elevations and abstractions, that, while in other sciences the terms must first be known and then the rules and conclusions, the whole experience of mysticism must first be obtained before we can so much as know what it is, and the end acquired first—the conclusion before the premises.

WILLOUGHBY. When Luther appears, appealing to the Bible in the hands of the people, the defect is supplied, and we have the Reformation. That visible and venerable externalism, the Romish Church, could not be successfully assailed on merely internal grounds. The testimony of the individual heart against it was variable and uncertain, because more or less isolated. But where the Scriptures are set free, and they can be made the basis of assault, an externalism quite as visible, and more venerable, brings the outward to bear against the outward; while the power of an inward life, pure and deep and ardent as the best of the mystics ever knew, animates the irresistible onset.

GOWER. The testimony of History, then, is decidedly against our modern spiritualism, which complains that we make too much of the book, and sacrifice the subjective religious development to an outward authority. Luther—a true man of the spirit—conquered because he could point to a letter. The fire of his own inward life could kindle so grand a flame, because he was sustained by an authority which no individual mystic could arrogate. The Scriptures were the common ground for the Reformer who had the truth, and the inquirer who sought it. The excessive subjectivity of the mystic deprived him of that advantage.

WILLOUGHBY. But are we not overlooking other causes which enabled Luther to accomplish so much, and precluded the mystics from carrying further their reforming tendency?

ATHERTON. By all means let the influence of the interval between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries be duly taken into account. To do so will only make good Gower’s remark. During the fifteenth century you find no fresh development of mysticism. The genuine religion of the period was still mystical in its complexion, but characterised by a much larger infusion of the scriptural element. This was the real advance of that interim. At the Universities the Bible began to displace the schoolmen. A better system of interpretation prevailed. Even with the mystics St. Paul was already taking the place of Dionysius, and mysticism began to lose its nature, merging in a true spirituality, sober-minded while fervent. In the theology of such men as John Wessel and Staupitz (who with Tauler and the German theology nourished the early religious life of Luther), we see a clearer apprehension of the nature of Christ’s work for us—a better balancing of the outward and the inward. In fact, the great step necessary to produce a reformation, after the mystics had made their preparation, was this very bringing into prominence of the word of God. Then, to the ardour and the power of mysticism in its noblest form, was added the authority, the guidance, and the divine adaptation of that message of salvation announced to all mankind.

WILLOUGHBY. Then, again, the doctrine of Luther directed men at once to the attainment of that clear hope concerning their spiritual safety which, say what we will, is the craving of our nature. We have seen how an Eckart would become pantheist to extort from philosophy that assurance which was denied him by the Church.

GOWER. Yet does not the strength and attraction of Romanism lie in this very characteristic—its tempting facility of comfort? Most men prefer a sleeping conscience to a tender one; and for such the Romish Church offers a perpetual siesta.

WILLOUGHBY. Granted; for this very reason, however, she cannot satisfy the deeper wants of the class I speak of—those men out of whom may be made mystics, reformers, heretics,—but religious Helots never. I am not speaking of mere comfort, but of true peace,—of that entrance into a new relationship towards God which gives us the heart to aspire towards a new nature.

GOWER. Agreed, then. Bunyan follows Paul when he makes Christian lose his burden early in the pilgrimage, so that he treads the onward path thenceforward with a lighter step.

ATHERTON. And can front Apollyon better. Look round at the Christendom of that age. You see only two classes who escape the condition of the hired servant—who are the sons of God and not his bondsmen. These are the mystics and the reformers. The mystic realizes adoption through appalling griefs and toils; the reformer is led thither straightway, as he exclaims with St. Paul, ‘Being therefore justified by faith, we have peace with God.’

WILLOUGHBY. How strongly does Luther urge men to believe on Christ as a Saviour for them—to receive in lowly simplicity the peace divinely offered. How triumphantly does he show that such a faith is victory—that all other is a mere historic belief about Christ, not a belief in an ever-present Deliverer, who lives within, and redeems us daily from ourselves. Thus did his followers helm them speedily with hope, and escape, in great measure, the fearful strain of those alternations between rapture and despair, for which mysticism did not even seek a remedy. The distinction between justification and sanctification is no mere theological refinement. Its practical recognition, at least, is essential to that solemn joyousness which is the strength and glory of the Christian life.

ATHERTON. That is, after all, the true escape from Self which delivers you from bondage to the shifting frames and feelings of the hour—the mere accidents of personal temperament, by making clear the external ground of hope. Mysticism had not light enough to find the way to its own ideal of rest. Luther, with his Bible, realized in soberness the longed-for repose of its intense passion.

WILLOUGHBY. We must confess too, I think, that the representatives of the better mysticism were not strong enough to cope with the fanatical or lawless leaders of the worse. How Tauler, Suso, Ruysbroek, and the author of the Theologia Germanica, lift up their voices against the ‘false lights’—against men who deified every impulse, who professed to have transcended all virtue, who renounced all moral obligation and outward authority, or who resigned themselves to a stupid apathy which they called poverty of spirit.

GOWER. Those who constituted this last class must have been men who found in the false doctrine only an excuse for remaining as they were:—hard, indeed, to raise them to anything better. I imagine them poor ignorant hinds, the undermost victims of feudalism. One thinks of Tennyson’s portraiture of the serf,—

The staring eye glazed o’er with sapless days, The long mechanic pacings to and fro, The set gray life and apathetic end.

WILLOUGHBY. Be that as it may, this bastard mysticism, whether rapacious as King Stork, or passive as King Log, multiplies among men. Want and oppression seize on the sacred pretext of an inward light, and mysticism is fast growing fierce and revolutionary. Good men, speaking words of spiritual freedom, have unawares awakened licence. They themselves slew Self with vigil and with tears; and, lo! a Hydra-headed Self, rampant and ruthless, stalks abroad, and they have been unwittingly his creators.

ATHERTON. What could they do, as mystics, but mourn and rebuke? The inward testimony would not render an unvarying verdict in every case. Their appeal must be, either to an amount of right moral discernment already in the individual, or to the social judgment of a certain religious circle. Beyond these limits their very consistency is their weakness. For the thorough-going mystic, who is resolved to be in all things a light and law unto himself, replies that his inward light is quite as divinely authoritative for him as is that of the moderate man, reproving his excesses, for himself. He will answer, ‘Friend, walk thou by thy light, as I by mine. The external is nothing to the internal. “What is the chaff to the wheat?” saith the Lord. Thou art external to me, I listen therefore to the voice within me, not to thine.’

WILLOUGHBY. We have, too, the express testimony of Melanchthon to the fact, that had not Luther appeared when he did, to divert the under-current of popular indignation into the middle course of the Reformation, a fearful outbreak must have desolated Europe from the fury kindled by the intolerable oppressions of Church and State.

GOWER. Certainly mysticism could never have spoken with power enough to turn aside such a long-gathered tempest.

WILLOUGHBY. Where the revolutionary spirit had once broken out, only the strong hand could avail.

ATHERTON. And how ruthlessly was that remedy applied! But—what in the world—Gower, I say, open your eyes. Are you going to sleep?

GOWER. I was trying to recall a dream I had after reading about the Anabaptists of Munster.

WILLOUGHBY. A dream! Let us have it.

GOWER. Wait a moment—ah, now I remember. First of all, I saw numbers of people toiling across the fields or along miry roads; weary mothers, delicately nurtured, carrying their babes, and followed by their crying little ones; the fathers laden, it would seem, with such property as they were allowed to take away. They look back mournfully towards the walls of a city, out of whose gates more of their friends are being thrust. These are the magistrates, the rich, the unbelievers, driven forth by the populace to find what shelter they may among the boors, or in the nearest towns. Then I am suddenly inside the city. I see, in one place, a crowd gathered about a shaggy, wild-eyed preacher, spluttering, screaming, foaming at the mouth; in another is a circle surrounding two men in rags, whirling round like spinning dervishes. One man, with face ghastly pale, and bandaged head, who seems to have escaped from a hospital, moans and wrings his hands, predicting universal ruin. Now, with a yell, he has fallen down in convulsions. There a burly brute has pushed down a weeping woman from the door-steps of a great house, that he may stand on the spot to roar out his prophecy and exhortation. All this was somehow mingled with hosannas to Mathieson, the baker; and at the end of the high street they were dancing about a bonfire made of all the books in the town, save the Bible only. Then the crowd made way for the favourite wife of John Bokelson, the tailor, riding in a great coach, resplendent in silks and costly stuffs torn from the churches. Methought I entered the Town Hall. There, on a throne, in a suit of silver tissue, slashed and lined with crimson, fastened with buckles of gold, sat John Bokelson himself.[205]

WILLOUGHBY. A Mormon elder, ‘all of the olden time!’

ATHERTON. Be quiet. He had only eight wives.

GOWER. There he sat, with his triple crown, his globe, and cross of gold, his silver and golden swords, and above his head I could read, ‘King of Righteousness over the whole World.’ Then came a long succession of petitioners, thrice kneeling and prostrating themselves before him. A bell rang. The audience was over. Now he was sending out ambassadors, calling on the neighbouring towns to rise and establish the Kingdom of the Holy Ghost,—‘for the meek are to inherit the earth, and the time for spoiling the Egyptians is come.’ After this I saw long tables spread in the market-place, with fine linen cloths, whereat four thousand people partook of the sacrament, and afterwards riotously feasted; the grey towers of the cathedral looking down upon them. I passed in at the church doors. All was confusion there, drunken shouts, and running to and fro of boys from cook-shops. The great oriel window had been broken by stones, and on the pavement, with its time-worn epitaphs, lay the many-coloured fragments of glass, among broken flagons and pools of beer. A mad musician had seized upon the organ, and above the uproar rolled the mighty volumes of sound, shaking the old dusty banners. Now came a crash of unearthly music—quite unheeded,—and then the melody melted and trembled away, dying down with a far-off wail of unutterable pathos. In the midst of his ecstasy the crazed performer was hurled away by a swarm of ‘prentice lads who had found their way up the staircase. One among them struck up the well-known air of a wanton song. There was an outcry and sound of struggling, and I saw the madman leap from the clerestory down into the middle of the nave,——

WILLOUGHBY. And you woke?

GOWER. No. There came over me a kind of blank bewilderment, and all was changed. The sides of the church had become mountains. I was in a winding rocky glen, and the moon was rising over the black fantastic peaks that shut in the valley. I saw what made me think of Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones. Along the hollow of the gorge, and in the great furrows of the heights on each side, where should have been mountain streams and pebbles, were the glistening bones; and on the rock-ledges where the moonlight fell I could see them strewn; and on every boulder, skeleton-heaps; and at the mouth of every cavern, like icicles hanging from the stony jaws. I heard a rising wind sweep up the pass,—another blast, and another; and then, coming nearer and nearer, a sound as though withered boughs of innumerable trees were snapping in a tempest. All was whirling, darting motion among the white rattling fragments, above, beneath, around; till every clanking bone had been locked to its fellow, and a skeleton sat on every crag and lay in every hollow. The sinews and the flesh then came up upon them; after that, the breath; and they arose, an exceeding great army. I heard a muttering near me, and turning, I saw one gazing on the multitude, having in his hand a torch. His wild, eager look startled me. Now I thought he was Carlstadt, and then he changed into Thomas Münzer. Then again I was sure I recognized Spenser’s Phantastes. He flung his torch into a cleft, whence it breathed out its last sparks into the windy night, and bowing his head, turned slowly away. I heard him say, ‘Dead Church! Dead Church! How shalt thou live? I have learnt it. Flesh and blood first—then breath. Truth for a body, then Love for a soul. The spirit must have a form—must quicken a letter. First a fact for motive; then let the young life work. The soul must have its sinews; the spirit its instrument, its means, its words. Lie there, fire that destroyest; come hither, fire that warmest,—that warmest to good, and that warnest from evil.’ Then I saw that he had a new book in his hand,—the last part then published of Luther’s German New Testament. He vanished. The hills rolled away in smoke, and I awoke with a start.

ATHERTON. I wish Phantastes and his kindred had really learnt the lesson of your dream. But such hot-brained enthusiasts cannot be taught, not even by sore stripes of adversity in the school of fools.

Footnote 205:

A reference to Raumer’s History of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries will satisfy the reader that this dream ‘was not all a dream.’ Most minute details are given in a letter from the MSS. of Dupuy.

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