Chapter I…

Chapter I

It is no flaming lustre, made of light, No sweet concert nor well-timed harmony, Ambrosia, for to feast the appetite, Of flowery odour mixed with spicery,— No soft embrace, or pleasure bodily; And yet it is a kind of inward feast, A harmony that sounds within the breast, An odour, light, embrace, in which the soul doth rest.

A heavenly feast no hunger can consume; A light unseen yet shines in every place; A sound no time can steal; a sweet perfume No winds can scatter; an entire embrace That no satiety can e’er unlace; Engraced into so high a favour there, The saints with all their peers whole worlds outwear, And things unseen do see, and thing unheard do hear.

GILES FLETCHER.

Gower fulfilled his promise, and read, on two successive evenings, the following paper on the Mysticism of the Counter-Reformation, as illustrated principally by its two Spanish champions, St. Theresa and St. John of the Cross:—

I. Saint Theresa.

On the revival of letters the mysticism of Alexandria reappeared in Florence. That lamp which, in the study of Ficinus, burnt night and day before the bust of Plato, proclaimed, in reality, the worship of Plotinus. The erudite feebleness of Alexandrian eclecticism lived again in Gemisthus Pletho,—blended, as of old, Platonic ideas, oriental emanations, and Hellenic legend,—dreamed of a philosophic worship, emasculated and universal, which should harmonize in a common vagueness all the religions of the world. Nicholas of Cusa re-adapted the allegorical mathematics which had flourished beneath the Ptolemies and restored the Pythagoras of the Neo-Platonists. Pico of Mirandola (the admirable Crichton of his time) sought to reconcile the dialectics of Aristotle with the oracles of Chaldæa, and to breathe into withered scholasticism the mysterious life of Cabbalistic wisdom. An age so greedy of antiquity was imposed on by the most palpable fabrications; and Greece beheld the servile product of her second childhood reverenced as the vigorous promise of her first. Patricius sought the sources of Greek philosophy in writings attributed to Hermes and Zoroaster. He wrote to Gregory XIV. proposing that authors such as these should be substituted for Aristotle in the schools, as the best means of advancing true religion and reclaiming heretical Germany.

The position of these scholars with regard to Protestantism resembles, not a little, that of their Alexandrian predecessors when confronted by Christianity. They were the philosophic advocates of a religion in which they had themselves lost faith. They attempted to reconcile a corrupt philosophy and a corrupt religion, and they made both worse. The love of literature and art was confined to a narrow circle of courtiers and literati. While Lutheran pamphlets in the vernacular set all the North in a flame, the philosophic refinements of the Florentine dilettanti were aristocratic, exclusive, and powerless. Their intellectual position was fatal to sincerity; their social condition equally so to freedom. The despotism of the Roman emperors was more easily evaded by a philosopher of ancient times than the tyranny of a Visconti or a D’Este, by a scholar at Milan or Ferrara. It was the fashion to patronise men of letters. But the usual return of subservience and flattery was rigorously exacted. The Italians of the fifteenth century had long ceased to be familiar with the worst horrors of war, and Charles VIII., with his ferocious Frenchmen, appeared to them another Attila. Each Italian state underwent, on its petty scale, the fate of Imperial Rome. The philosophic and religious conservatism of Florence professed devotion to a church which reproduced, with most prolific abundance, the superstitions of by-gone Paganism,—of that very Paganism in whose behalf the Neo-Platonist philosopher entered the lists against the Christian father. To such men, the earnest religious movement of the North was the same mysterious, barbaric, formidable foe which primitive Christianity had been to the Alexandrians. The old conflict between Pagan and Christian—the man of taste and the man of faith—the man who lived for the past, and the man who lived for the future, was renewed, in the sixteenth century, between the Italian and the German. The Florentine Platonists, moreover, not only shared in the weakness of their prototypes, as the occupants of an attitude radically false; they failed to exhibit in their lives that austerity of morals which won respect for Plotinus and Porphyry, even among those who cared nothing for their speculations. Had Romanism been unable to find defenders more thoroughly in earnest, the shock she then received must have been her deathblow. She must have perished as Paganism perished. But, wise in her generation, she took her cause out of the hands of that graceful and heartless Deism, so artificial and so self-conscious,—too impalpable and too refined for any real service to gods or men. She needed men as full of religious convictions as were these of philosophical and poetic conceits. She needed men to whom the bland and easy incredulity of such symposium-loving scholars was utterly inconceivable—abhorrent as the devil and all his works. And such men she found. For by reason of the measure of truth she held, she was as powerful to enslave the noblest as to unleash the vilest passions of our nature. It was given her, she said, to bind and to loose. It was time, she knew, to bind up mercy and to loose revenge. A succession of ferocious sanctities fulminated from the chair of St. Peter. Science was immured in the person of Galileo. The scholarship, so beloved by Leo, would have been flung into the jaws of the Inquisition by Caraffa. Every avenue, open once on sufferance, to freer thought and action, was rigorously blocked up. Princes were found willing to cut off the right hand, pluck out the right eye of their people, that Rome might triumph by this suicide of nations. But nowhere did she find a prince and a people alike so swift to shed blood at her bidding, as among that imperious race of which Philip II. was at once the sovereign and the type. In Spain was found, in its perfection, the chivalry of persecution: there dwelt the aristocracy of fanaticism. It was long doubtful whether the Roman or the Spanish Inquisition was the more terrible for craft, the more ingenious in torments, the more glorious with blood.

But Spain was not merely the political and military head of the Counter-Reformation. She contributed illustrious names to relume the waning galaxy of saints. Pre-eminent among these luminaries shine Ignatius Loyola, Theresa, and John of the Cross. The first taught Rome what she had yet to learn in the diplomacy of superstition. Education and intrigue became the special province of his order: it was the training school of the teachers: it claimed and merited the monopoly of the vizard manufacture. Rome found in Theresa her most famous seeress; in John, her consummate ascetic. It was not in the upper region of mysticism that the narrow intellect and invincible will of Loyola were to realize distinction. He had his revelations, indeed,—was rapt away to behold the mystery of the Trinity made manifest, and the processes of creation detailed. But such favours are only the usual insignia so proper to the founder of an order. Compared with St. Francis the life of Ignatius is poor in vision and in miracle. But his relics have since made him ample amends. Bartoli enumerates a hundred miraculous cures.[263] John and Theresa were mystics par excellence: the former, of the most abstract theopathetic school; the latter, with a large infusion of the theurgic element, unrivalled in vision—angelic and dæmoniacal.

But one principle is dominant in the three, and is the secret of the saintly honours paid them. In the alarm and wrath awakened by the Reformation, Rome was supremely concerned to enforce the doctrine of blind obedience to ecclesiastical superiors. These Spanish saints lived and laboured and suffered to commend this dogma to the Church and to all mankind. Summoned by the Rule of Obedience, they were ready to inflict or to endure the utmost misery. Their natures were precisely of the kind most fitted to render service and receive promotion at that juncture. They were glowing and ductile. Their very virtues were the dazzle of the red-hot brand, about to stamp the brow with slavery. Each excellence displayed by such accomplished advocates of wrong, withered one of the rising hopes of mankind. Their prayers watered with poisoned water every growth of promise in the field of Europe. Their Herculean labours were undertaken, not to destroy, but to multiply the monsters which infested every highway of thought. Wherever the tears of Theresa fell, new weeds of superstition sprang up. Every shining austerity endured by John gilded another link in the chain which should bind his fellows. The jubilant bells of their devotion rang the knell of innumerable martyrs.

In the fourteenth century, mysticism was often synonymous with considerable freedom of thought. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was allowed to exist only as it subserved the ecclesiastical scheme. The problem was,—how to excite the feeling and imagination of the devotee to the highest pitch, and yet to retain him in complete subjection to the slightest movement of the rein. Of this problem John and Theresa are the practical and complete solution. All their fire went off by the legitimate conducting-rod: every flash was serviceable: not a gleam was wasted. Once mysticism was a kind of escape for nature. The mystic left behind him much of the coarse externalism necessary to his Church, and found refuge in an inner world of feeling and imagination. But now the Church, by means of the confessor, made mysticism itself the innermost dungeon of her prison-house. Every emotion was methodically docketed; every yearning of the heart minutely catalogued. The sighs must always ascend in the right place: the tears must trickle in orthodox course. The prying calculations of the casuist had measured the sweep of every wave in the heaving ocean of the soul. The instant terrible knife cut off the first spray of love that shot out beyond the trimly-shaven border of prescription. Strong feelings were dangerous guests, unless they knew (like the old Romans) when to go home and slay themselves, did that Tiberius, the director, but bestow on them a frown.

In France, too, mysticism was to fall under the same yoke; but the Frenchman could never reach the hard austerity of the Spaniard. The sixteenth century produced St. Francis de Sales on the north, and St. John of the Cross on the south, of the Pyrénées. With the former, mysticism is tender, genial, graceful; it appeals to every class; it loves and would win all men. With the latter, it is a dark negation—a protracted suffering—an anguish and a joy known only to the cloister. De Sales was to John, as a mystic, what Henry IV. was to Philip as a Catholic King. Even in Italy, the Counter-Reformation was comparatively humane and philanthropic with Carlo Borromeo. In Spain alone is it little more, at its very best, than a fantastic gloom and a passionate severity.

But everywhere the principle of subserviency is in the ascendant. The valetudinarian devotee becomes more and more the puppet of his spiritual doctor. The director winds him up. He derives his spiritless semblance of life wholly from the priestly mechanism. It may be said of him, as of the sick man in Massinger’s play,

That he lives he owes To art, not Nature; she has given him o’er. He moves, like the fairy king, on screws and wheels Made by his doctor’s recipes, and yet still They are out of joint, and every day repairing.

Theresa was born at Avila, in the year 1515, just two years (as Ribadeneira reminds us) before ‘that worst of men,’ Martin Luther.[264] The lives of the saints were her nursery tales. Cinderella is matter of fact; Jack and the Beanstalk commonplace, beside the marvellous stories that must have nourished her infantine faculty of wonder. At seven years old she thinks eternal bliss cheaply bought by martyrdom; sets out with her little brother on a walk to Africa, hoping to be despatched by the Moors, and is restored to her disconsolate parents by a cruel matter-of-fact uncle, who meets them at the bridge. Her dolls’ houses are nunneries. These children construct in the garden, not dirt pies, but mud-hermitages; which, alas! will always tumble down.

As she grows up, some gay associates, whose talk is of ribbons, lovers, and bull-fights, secularise her susceptible mind. She reads many romances of chivalry, and spends more time at the glass. Her father sends her, when fifteen, to a convent of Augustinian nuns in Avila, to rekindle her failing devotion. A few days reconcile her to the change, and she is as religious as ever.

Then, what with a violent fever, Jerome’s Epistles, and a priest-ridden uncle, she resolves on becoming a nun. Her father refuses his consent; so she determines on a pious elopement, and escapes to the Carmelite convent. There she took the vows in her twentieth year.[265]

We find her presently vexed, like so many of the Romanist female saints, with a strange complication of maladies,—cramps, convulsions, catalepsies, vomitings, faintings, &c. &c. At one time she lay four days in a state of coma; her grave was dug, hot wax had been dropped upon her eyelids, and extreme unction administered; the funeral service was performed; when she came to herself, expressed her desire to confess, and received the sacrament.[266] It is not improbable that some of the trances she subsequently experienced, and regarded as supernatural, may have been bodily seizures of a similar kind. But at this time she was not good enough for such favours; so the attacks are attributed to natural causes. It is significant that the miraculous manifestations of the Romish Church should have been vouchsafed only to women whose constitution (as in the case of the Catharines and Lidwina) was thoroughly broken down by years of agonizing disease. After three years (thanks to St. Joseph) Theresa was restored to comparative health, but remained subject all her life, at intervals, to severe pains.[267]

On her recovery, she found her heart still but too much divided between Christ and the world. That is to say, she was glad when her friends came to see her, and she enjoyed witty and agreeable chat, through the grating, with ladies whose conversation was not always confined to spiritual topics. Grievously did her conscience smite her for such unfaithfulness, and bitterly does she regret the laxity of her confessors, who failed to tell her that it was a heinous crime.

In her twenty-fourth year she resumed the practice of mental prayer, and for the next twenty years continued it, with many inward vicissitudes, and alternate tendernesses and desertions on the part of the Divine Bridegroom. Her forty-fourth year is memorable as the season of her entrance on those higher experiences, which have made her name famous as the great revivalist of supernatural prayer and mystical devotion in the sixteenth century.

The Saint Bartholomew’s day of 1562 was a day of glory for our saint. Then was consecrated the new Convent of St. Joseph, at Avila, established in spite of so much uproar and opposition; that convent wherein the primitive austerity of the Carmelite Order was to be restored,—where Theresa is presently appointed prioress (against her will, as usual),—where there shall be no chats at the grating, no rich endowment; but thirteen ‘fervent virgins’ shall dwell there, discalceated (that is sandalled not shod), serge-clad, flesh-abhorring, couched on straw, and all but perpetually dumb.[268] The remainder of her life, from about her fiftieth year, would appear to have been somewhat less fertile in marvellous experiences. She was now recognised as the foundress of the Reformed Carmelites, and could produce warrant from Rome, authorizing her to found as many convents of the Bare-footed as she pleased. She was harassed by the jealous intrigues of the old ‘mitigated’ Order, but indefatigably befriended by John of the Cross, and other thorough-going ascetics. She lived to see established sixteen nunneries of the Reformed, and fourteen monasteries for friars of the same rule. She has left us a long history of her foundations, of all the troubles and difficulties she overcame; showing how funds were often not forthcoming, but faith was; how apathy and opposition were done away; and how busy she must have been (too busy for many visions); all of which let whomsoever read that can.

* * * * *

In the year 1562, when Theresa had successfully commenced the reformation of her Order, she wrote her life, at the bidding of her confessor. In this autobiography her spiritual history is laid bare without reserve. The narrative was published by her superiors, and therein the heretic may listen to what she whispered in the ear of her director during the years most prolific in extravagance. We can thus discern the working of the confessional. Commanded to disclose her most secret thoughts, we see her nervously afraid of omitting to indicate the minutest variations of the religious thermometer, of approaching the committal of that sin which Romanist devotees only can commit—concealment from a confessor. She searches for evil in herself, and creates it by the search. The filmiest evanescence of the feeling has to be detained and anatomized, and changes into something else under the scrutiny. It is as though she had let into her crucifix a piece of looking-glass, that she might see reflected every transport of devotion, and faithfully register the same in her memory against the next shrift. After some excess of rapture, she must set to work at her technical analysis; observe what faculties were dormant, and what still active—what regions of the mind were tenanted by divinity, and what still left to the possession of her sinful self. Her intellect was never strong. She confesses that she found her understanding rather in the way than otherwise.[269] Under this omnipresent spiritual despotism it fell prostrate utterly. When she has been favoured with a vision, she is not to know whether it has steamed up from hell or been let down from heaven, until the decision of her confessor fills her with horror or delight. The cloister is her universe. Her mind, unformed, and uninformed, is an empty room, papered with leaves from her breviary. She knew little of that charity which makes gracious inroads on the outer world; which rendered human so many of her sister-saints; which we admire and pity in Madame de Chantal, admire and love in Madame Guyon. No feet-washing do we read of, open or secret; no hospital-tending, no ministry among the poor. The greater activity of her later years brought her in contact with scarcely any but ‘religious’ persons. Her ascetic zeal was directed, not for, but against, the mitigation of suffering. It made many monks and nuns uncomfortable; but I am not aware that it made any sinners better, or any wretched happy. Peter of Alcantara is her admiration; he who for forty years never slept more than one hour and a half in the twenty-four, and then in a sitting posture, with his head against a wooden peg in the wall; who ate in general only every third day; and who looked, she says, as if he were made of the roots of trees (hecho de reyzes de arboles[270]). Lodged in her monastic cranny of creation, she convulses herself with useless fervours, absolutely ignorant of all things and persons non-ecclesiastical. Her highest ambition is to reduce the too-palpable reality of herself to the minutest possible compass, and to hide herself—a kind of parasitical insect or entozoön—in the personality of her confessor. Yet, complete as is this suicide, she is never sure that she is sufficiently dead, and incessantly asks him if he is quite sure that she is sincere. Such a life is an object of compassion more than blame. She was herself the victim of the wicked system to which her name was to impart a new impulse. The spasmodic energy she at last displays about her Reformation is not native strength. She was surrounded from the first by those who saw clearly what Rome needed at that time, who beheld in her first almost accidental effort the germ of what they desired, and in herself a fit instrument. A whisper from one of these guides would be translated by such an imagination into a direct commission from heaven. They had but to touch a spring, and her excitable nature was surrounded with the phantasmagoria of vision; one scene produced another, and that unfolded into more—all, the reiteration and expansion of the bent once given to her fixed idea.

Theresa experienced her first rapture while reciting the Veni Creator, when she heard these words spoken in the interior of her heart—‘I will have thee hold converse, not with men, but angels.‘[271] She had been conscious, on several previous occasions, of supernatural excitements in prayer, and was much perplexed thereby, as indeed were several of her confessors. Here were irresistible devotional seizures for which they had no rule ready. They suspected an evil spirit, advised a struggle against such extraordinary influences. But the more she resists, the more does the Lord cover her with sweetnesses and glories, heap on her favours and caresses. At last the celebrated Francis Borgia comes to Avila. The Jesuit bids her resist no more; and she goes on the mystical way rejoicing. The first rapture took place shortly after her interviews with the future General of the Society of Jesus.

A word on this system of spiritual directorship. It is the vital question for mystics of the Romish communion. Nowhere is the duty of implicit self-surrender to the director or confessor more constantly inculcated than in the writings of Theresa and John of the Cross, and nowhere are the inadequacy and mischief of the principle more apparent. John warns the mystic that his only safeguard against delusion lies in perpetual and unreserved appeal to his director. Theresa tells us that whenever our Lord commanded her in prayer to do anything, and her confessor ordered the opposite, the Divine guide enjoined obedience to the human; and would influence the mind of the confessor afterwards, so that he was moved to counsel what he had before forbidden![272] Of course. For who knows what might come of it if enthusiasts were to have visions and revelations on their own account? The director must draw after him these fiery and dangerous natures, as the lion-leaders of an Indian pageantry conduct their charge, holding a chain and administering opiates. The question between the orthodox and the heterodox mysticism of the fourteenth century was really one of theological doctrine. The same question in the sixteenth and seventeenth was simply one of ecclesiastical interests.[273] The condemned quietists were merely mystics imperfectly subservient—unworkable raw material, and as such flung into the fire. Out of the very same substance, duly wrought and fashioned, might have come a saint like Theresa. By the great law of Romish policy, whatever cannot be made to contribute to her ornament or defence is straightway handed over to the devil. Accordingly, the only mysticism acknowledged by that Church grows up beneath her walls, and invigorates, with herbs of magic potency, her garrison,—resembles the strip of culture about some eastern frontier town, that does but fringe with green the feet of the ramparts; all the panorama beyond, a wilderness;—for Bedouin marauders render tillage perilous and vain. Thus, O mystic, not a step beyond that shadow; or hell’s black squadrons, sweeping down, will carry thee off captive to their home of dolour!

The confessions of Theresa are a continual refutation of her counsels. She acknowledges that she herself had long and grievously suffered from the mistakes of her early directors. She knew others also who had endured much through similar incompetency. The judgment of one conductor was reversed by his successor. She exhorts her nuns to the greatest care in the selection of a confessor,—on no account to choose a vain man or an ignorant. She vindicates their liberty to change him when they deem it desirable.[274] John of the Cross, too, dilates on the mischief which may be done by an inexperienced spiritual guide. At one time Theresa was commanded to make the sign of the cross when Christ manifested Himself to her, as though the appearance had been the work of some deceiving spirit.[275] Her next guide assured her that the form she beheld was no delusion. Dreadful discovery, yet joyful! She had attempted to exorcise her Lord; but the virtue of obedience had blotted out the sin of blasphemy. Thus does each small infallibility mould her for his season, and then pass her on to another. Her soul, with despair stamped on one side and glory imaged on the other, spins dizzy in the air; and whether, when it comes down, heaven or hell shall be uppermost, depends wholly upon the twist of the ecclesiastical thumb.

But to return to her marvellous relations; and, first of all, to those of the infernal species. On one occasion, she tells us, she was favoured with a brief experience of the place she merited in hell:—a kind of low oven, pitch dark, miry, stinking, full of vermin, where sitting and lying were alike impossible; where the walls seemed to press in upon the sufferer—crushing, stifling, burning; where in solitude the lost nature is its own tormentor, tearing itself in a desperate misery, interminable, and so intense, that all she had endured from racking disease was delightful in comparison.[276]

At another time, while smitten for five hours together with intolerable pains, the Lord was pleased to make her understand that she was tempted by the devil; and she saw him at her side like a very horrible little negro, gnashing his teeth at her. At last she contrived to sprinkle some holy water on the place where he was. That moment he and her pains vanished together, and her body remained as though she had been severely beaten. It is as well to know that holy water will be found incomparably your best weapon in such cases. The devils will fly from the cross, but may presently return. The drops the Church has blest, do their business effectually. Two nuns, who came into the room after the victory just related, snuffed up the air of the apartment with manifest disgust, and complained of a smell of brimstone. Once the sisters heard distinctly the great thumps the devil was giving her, though she, in a ‘state of recollection,’ was unconscious of his belabouring. The said devil squatted one day on her breviary, and at another time had all but strangled her.[277] She once saw, with the eye of her soul, two devils, encompassing, with their meeting horns, the neck of a sinful priest; and at the funeral of a man who had died without confession, a whole swarm of devils tearing and tossing the body and sporting in the grave.

But much more numerous, though as gross as these, are her visions of celestial objects. ‘Being one day in prayer,’ she tells us, ‘our Lord was pleased to show me his sacred hands, of excessive and indescribable beauty; afterwards his divine face, and finally, at mass, all his most sacred humanity.’ At one of his appearances, he drew out with his right hand, the nail which transfixed his left, some of the flesh following it. Three times did she behold in her raptures the most sublime of all visions—the humanity of Christ in the bosom of the Father; very clear to her mind, but impossible to explain. While reciting the Athanasian Creed the mystery of the Trinity was unfolded to her, with unutterable wonderment and comfort. Our Lord paid her, one day, the compliment of saying, that if He had not already created heaven, He would have done so for her sake alone.[278]

Some of her ‘Memorable Relations’ are among the most curious examples on record of the materialization of spiritual truth. With all the mystics, she dwells much on the doctrine of Christ in us. But while some of them have exaggerated this truth till they bury under it all the rest, and others have authenticated by its plea every vagary of special revelation, in scarcely any does it assume a form so puerile and so sensuous as with St. Theresa. Repeatedly does she exhort religious persons to imagine Christ as actually within the interior part of their soul. The superstition of the mass contributed largely in her case to render this idea concrete and palpable. In a hymn, composed in a rapturous inspiration after swallowing the consecrated wafer, she describes God as her prisoner.[279] She relates in the following passage how she saw the figure of Christ in a kind of internal looking-glass.

‘When reciting the hours one day with the nuns, my soul suddenly lapsed into a state of recollection, and appeared to me as a bright mirror, every part of which, back and sides, top and bottom, was perfectly clear. In the centre of this was represented to me Christ our Lord, as I am accustomed to see him. I seemed to see him in all the parts of my soul also, distinctly as in a mirror, and at the same time this mirror (I do not know how to express it) was all engraven in the Lord himself, by a communication exceeding amorous which I cannot describe. I know that this vision was of great advantage to me, and has been every time I have called it to mind, more especially after communion. I was given to understand, that when a soul is in mortal sin, this mirror is covered with a great cloud, and grows very dark, so that the Lord cannot be seen or represented in us, though he is always present as the Author of our being. In heretics, this mirror is as it were broken, which is much worse than to have it obscured.’[280]

Here the simplicitas and nuditas of other mystics become a kind of concrete crystal, inhabited by a divine miniature. In a Clara de Montfaucon, this sensuous supra-naturalism goes a step further, and good Catholics read with reverence, how a Lilliputian Christ on the cross, with the insignia of the passion, was found, on a post-mortem examination, completely formed inside her heart.[281]

Similar in its character was a vision with which Theresa was sometimes favoured, of a pretty little angel, with a golden dart, tipped with fire, which he thrust (to her intolerable pain) into her bowels, drawing them out after it, and when thus eviscerated, she was inflamed with a sweet agony of love to God.[282]

A multitude more of such favours might be related:—how the Lord gave her a cross of precious stones—a matchless specimen of celestial jewellery to deck his bride withal; how, after communion one day, her mouth was full of blood, that ran out over her dress, and Christ told her it was his own—shed afresh, with great pain, to reward her for the gratification her devotion had afforded him; how (doubtless in imitation of Catherine of Siena) she saw and heard a great white dove fluttering above her head; and how, finally, she repays the attentions of the Jesuit Borgia, by repeated praises of the Order; by recording visions of Jesuits in heaven bearing white banners,—of Jesuits, sword in hand, with resplendent faces, gloriously hewing down heretics; and by predicting the great things to be accomplished through the zeal of that body.[283] Enough!

Note to page 159.

The dispute which agitated the Romish Church for more than half a century (1670-1730), concerning the Mistica Ciudad de Dios, attributed to Maria d’Agreda, furnishes a striking instance in proof of the character here ascribed to the controversies of the period. This monstrous book was given to the world as the performance of a Spanish nun, at the dictation of the Virgin, or of God;—both assertions are made, and the difference is not material. Its object is to establish, by pretended special revelation, all the prerogatives assigned to the Queen of Heaven, on the basis of her Immaculate Conception. It is replete with the absurdities and indecencies of prurient superstition. Dufresnoy applies to it, with justice, the words of John of Salisbury,—‘Erumpit impudens et in facie erubescentium populorum genialis thori revelat et denudat arcana.’ It states that the embryo of the Virgin was formed on a Sunday, seventeen days before the ordinary time,—relates how, at eighteen months, the infant demands a nun’s habit from St. Anna, of the colour worn by the Franciscans,—how she sweeps the house, and has nine hundred angels to wait upon her. The partizans of the book maintained, not only that the work itself was a miracle from beginning to end, but that its translation was miraculous also,—a French nun receiving instantaneously the gift of the Spanish tongue, that these disclosures from heaven might pass the Pyrenees. Such was the mass of corruption about which the gadflies and the ‘shard-borne beetles’ of the Church settled in contending swarms. This was the book on whose wholesomeness for the flock of Christ his Vicars could not venture to decide—eventually, rather evading reply than pronouncing sentence. No such scruple concerning the unwholesomeness of the Bible.

The Abbé Dufresnoy handles the question broadly, but most of the combatants are furious, this side or that, from some small party motive. The French divines censure the book, for fear it should encourage Quietism—their great bugbear at that time. The Spanish ecclesiastics, jealous of the honour done their countrywoman, retorted with a Censura Censuræ. But about the habit the battle was hottest. Every Carmelite must reject the book with indignation, for had they not always believed, on the best authority, that the Virgin wore a dress of their colour? The Franciscans again, and the religious of St. Clare, would defend it as eagerly, for did not its pages authorize anew from heaven their beloved ashen hue? Again, did not these revelations represent the Almighty as adopting the Scotist doctrine? On this great question, of course, Scotist and Thomist would fight to the death. Some account of the controversy, and an examination of the book, will be found in Dufresnoy, Traité Historique et Dogmatique sur les Apparitions, les Visions et les Révélations particulières, tom. II. chap. xi. (1751).

The same spirit betrays itself in the instance of Molinos. Even after he had written his Guida Spirituale, he was patronized by the Jesuits because he had employed his pen against Jansenism, and the Franciscans approved his book, while the Dominicans rejected it, because he had delighted the one party and disgusted the other by speaking somewhat disparagingly of Thomas Aquinas.

Footnote 263:

Alban Butler, July 31.

Footnote 264:

Ribadeneira, Flos Sanctorum, Appendix, p. 35 (Ed. 1659).

Footnote 265:

Los Libros de la B. M. Teresa de Jesus, Vida, capp. i. iii. This edition of 1615 contains the Camino de la Perfecion, and the Castillo espiritual, with the Life. The Foundations, at which I have only glanced in the French, are devoted to business, not mysticism.

Footnote 266:

Vida, cap. v. p. 26.

Footnote 267:

Teresa confesses that during the first year of her seizure her disorder was such as sometimes completely to deprive her of her senses:—Tan grave, que casi me privava el sentido siempre, y algunas vezes del todo quedava sin el.—Pp. 17.

Footnote 268:

Vida, cap. xxxvi.

Footnote 269:

Vida, p. 83.

Footnote 270:

Vida, cap. xxvii. p. 196.

Footnote 271:

Vida, cap. xxiv. p. 171.

Footnote 272:

Vida, cap. xxvi. p. 186. Siempre que el Señor me mandava alguna cosa en la oracion, si el confessor me dezia otra, me tornava el Señor a dezir que le obedeciesse: despues su Magestad le bolvia para que me lo tornasse a mandar. She speaks in the very same page of bad advice given her by one of her confessors.

Footnote 273:

See Note on p. 164.

Footnote 274:

Vida, p. 85; Camino de Perfecion, capp. 4 and 5.

Footnote 275:

Vida, cap. xxix., p. 209.

Footnote 276:

Vida, cap. xxxii.

Footnote 277:

Ibid., cap. xxxi.

Footnote 278:

Vida, pp. 198, 301, 209, 321. This last communication is not related by herself: we have it on the authority of Ribadeneira:—Itidem ei rursus apparens dixit: Cœlum nisi creassem, ob te solam crearem.—Vita Teresiæ, p. 41.

Footnote 279:

Originally:

Mas causa en mi tal passion Ver à Dios mi prisionero Que muero porque no muero.

Footnote 280:

Vida, cap. xl. p. 324.

Footnote 281:

The biographers of the saints differ both as to the time of her death (1308, 1299, 1393, are dates assigned), and as to the number and nature of the miraculous formations discovered within her heart. Ribadeneira’s account is by no means the most extravagant. He says:—Aperto ejus corde amplo et concavo, eidem repererunt impressa Dominicæ passionis insignia, nempe crucifixum cum tribus clavis, lancea, spongia, et arundine hinc, et illinic flagris, virgis, columna, corona spinea; atque hæc insignia Dominicæ Passionis, nervis validis durisque constabant.—Vida S. Claræ, p. 161.

Footnote 282:

Vida, cap. xxix, p. 213. Speaking of the delicious anguish, she says:—No es dolor corporal, sino espiritual, aunque no dexa de participar el cuerpo algo, y aun harto. Es un requiebro tan suave que passa entre el almo y Dios que suplico yo a su bondad lo dè a gustar a quien pensare que miento.

Footnote 283:

Vida, cap. xxxviii. pp. 300, 301; and xl. 328.

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

Chapter II

Indeed, when persons have been long softened with the continual droppings of religion, and their spirits made timorous and apt for impression by the assiduity of prayer, and perpetual alarms of death, and the continual dyings of mortification,—the fancy, which is a very great instrument of devotion, is kept continually warm, and in a disposition and aptitude to take fire, and to flame out in great ascents; and when they suffer transportations beyond the burdens and support of reason, they suffer they know not what, and call it what they please.—JEREMY TAYLOR.

I. Saint Theresa—(CONTINUED).

What disinterested love is to the mysticism of Fénelon, that is supernatural passive prayer to the mysticism of St. Theresa. She writes to describe her experience in the successive stages of prayer; to distinguish them, and to lay down directions for those who are their subjects. She professes no method whereby souls may be conducted from the lowest to the highest degree. On the contrary, she warns all against attempting to attain, by their own efforts, that blissful suspension of the powers which she depicts in colours so glowing. Unlike Dionysius, she counsels no effort to denude the soul of thought: she does not, with Tauler, bid the mystic laboriously sink into the ground of his being. She is emphatically a Quietist; quite as much so as Molinos, far more so than Fénélon. Spiritual consolation and spiritual desertion are to be alike indifferent. By a singular inconsistency, while tracing out the way of perfection, she forbids the taking of a step in that path.[284] You will be borne along, she would say, if you wait, as far as is fitting. Her experience receives its complexion, and some of her terminology is borrowed from the Lives of the Saints. Of the past career of Mystical Theology she is utterly ignorant. She hears, indeed, of a certain time-honoured division of the mystical process into Purgative, Illuminative, and Unitive; but she does not adopt the scheme. The Platonic and philosophic element is absent altogether from her mysticism. Her metaphysics are very simple:—the soul has three powers—Understanding, Memory, and Will. Now one, now another, now all of these, are whelmed and silenced by the incoming flood of Divine communication.

In addition to sundry chapters in her Life on the various kinds of prayer, she has left two treatises, The Way of Perfection (Camino de Perfecion) and The Castle of the Soul (Castillo Interior)—verbose, rambling, full of repetitions. For the conventual mind there is no rotation of crops; and the barrenness which limits such monotonous reproduction supervenes very soon. From these sources, then, we proceed to a brief summary of her theopathy.

There are in her scale four degrees of prayer. The first is Simple Mental Prayer,—fervent, inward, self-withdrawn; not exclusive of some words, nor unaided by what the mystics called discursive acts, i.e., the consideration of facts and doctrines prompting to devotion. In this species there is nothing extraordinary. No mysticism, so far.

SECOND DEGREE:—The Prayer of Quiet called also Pure Contemplation. In this state the Will is absorbed, though the Understanding and Memory may still be active in an ordinary way. Thus the nun may be occupied for a day or two in the usual religious services, in embroidering an altar-cloth, or dusting a chapel; yet without the Will being engaged. That faculty is supposed to be, as it were, bound and taken up in God. This stage is a supernatural one. Those who are conscious of it are to beware lest they suffer the unabsorbed faculties to trouble them. Yet they should not exert themselves to protract this ‘recollection.’ They should receive the wondrous sweetness as it comes, and enjoy it while it lasts, absolutely passive and tranquil. The devotee thus favoured often dreads to move a limb, lest bodily exertion should mar the tranquillity of the soul. But happiest are those who, as in the case just mentioned, can be Marys and Marthas at the same time.[285]

THIRD DEGREE:—The Prayer of Union, called also Perfect Contemplation. In this prayer, not the Will only, but the Understanding and Memory also, are swallowed up in God. These powers are not absolutely inactive; but we do not work them, nor do we know how they work. It is a kind of celestial frenzy—‘a sublime madness,’ says Theresa. In such a transport she composed her ecstatic hymn, without the least exercise of the understanding on her part. At this stage the contemplatist neither thinks nor feels as a human being. The understanding is stunned and struck dumb with amazement. The heart knows neither why it loves, nor what. All the functions of the mind are suspended. Nothing is seen, heard, or known. And wherefore this sudden blank? That for a brief space (which seems always shorter than it really is) the Living God may, as it were, take the place of the unconscious spirit—that a divine vitality may for a moment hover above the dead soul, and then vanish without a trace; restoring the mystic to humanity again, to be heartened and edified, perhaps for years to come, by the vague memory of that glorious nothingness.[286]

Some simple nun might ask, ‘How do you know that God did so plenarily enter into you, if you were conscious of nothing whatever?’

‘My daughter,’ replies the saint, ‘I know it by an infallible certainty (una certidumbre) that God alone bestows.’[287]

After this nothing remains to be said.

FOURTH DEGREE:—The Prayer of Rapture, or Ecstasy. This estate is the most privileged, because the most unnatural of all. The bodily as well as mental powers are sunk in a divine stupor. You can make no resistance, as you may possibly, to some extent, in the Prayer of Union. On a sudden your breath and strength begin to fail; the eyes are involuntarily closed, or, if open, cannot distinguish surrounding objects; the hands are rigid; the whole body cold.

Alas! what shall plain folk do among the rival mystics! Swedenborg tells us that bodily cold is the consequence of defective faith: Theresa represents it as the reward of faith’s most lofty exercise.

Were you reading, meditating, or praying, previous to the seizure, the book, the thought, the prayer, are utterly forgotten. For that troublesome little gnat, the memory (esta maraposilla importuna de la memoria), has burnt her wings at the glory. You may look on letters—you cannot read a word; hear speech—you understand nothing. You cannot utter a syllable, for the strength is gone. With intense delight, you find that all your senses are absolutely useless—your spiritual powers inoperative in any human mode. The saint is not quite certain whether the understanding, in this condition, understands; but she is sure that, if it does, it understands without understanding, and that its not understanding cannot be understood. Time of this beatific vacuum,—very long, if half an hour; though obviously a difficult point to decide, as you have no senses to reckon by.

Remarkable were the effects of the rapture on the body of the saint. An irrepressible lifting force seemed to carry her off her feet (they preserve the right foot in Rome to this day): it was the swoop of an eagle; it was the grasp of a giant. In vain, she tells us, did she resist. Generally the head, sometimes the whole body, was supernaturally raised into the air! On one occasion, during a sermon on a high day, in the presence of several ladies of quality, the reckless rapture took her. For in vain had she prayed that these favours might not be made public. She cast herself on the ground. The sisters hastened to hold her down; yet the upward struggling of the divine potency was manifest to all. Imagine the rush of the sisterhood, the screams of the ladies of quality, the pious ejaculations from the congregation,—watching that knot of swaying forms, wrestling with miracle, and the upturned eyes, or open-mouthed amazement, of the interrupted preacher![288]

The state of rapture is frequently accompanied by a certain ‘great pain’ (gran pena), a sweet agony and delicious torment, described by Theresa in language as paradoxical as that which Juliet in her passion applies to the lover who has slain her cousin—

Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical! Dove-feathered raven! wolfish-ravening lamb!

After some two or three hours’ endurance of this combined spiritual and corporeal torture, the sisters would find her almost without pulsation, the bones of the arms standing out (las canillas muy abiertas), her hands stiff and extended: in every joint were the pains of dislocation: she was apparently at the point of death.[289]

This mysterious ‘pain’ is no new thing in the history of mysticism. It is one of the trials of mystical initiation. It is the depth essential to the superhuman height. With St. Theresa, the physical nature contributes towards it much more largely than usual; and in her map of the mystic’s progress it is located at a more advanced period of the journey. St. Francis of Assisi lay sick for two years under the preparatory miseries. Catharine of Siena bore five years of privation, and was tormented by devils beside. For five years, and yet again for more than three times five, Magdalena de Pazzi endured such ‘aridity,’ that she believed herself forsaken of God. Balthazar Alvarez suffered for sixteen years before he earned his extraordinary illumination.[290] Theresa, there can be little doubt, regarded her fainting-fits, hysteria, cramps, and nervous seizures, as divine visitations. In their action and reaction, body and soul were continually injuring each other. The excitement of hallucination would produce an attack of her disorder, and the disease again foster the hallucination. Servitude, whether of mind or body, introduces maladies unknown to freedom. Elephantiasis and leprosy—the scourge of modern Greece—were unknown to ancient Hellas. The cloister breeds a family of mental distempers, elsewhere unheard of.

The mystics generally, from Dionysius downward, inculcate earnest endeavours to denude the mind of images, to suspend its reflex or discursive operations. Theresa goes a step farther, and forbids her pupils to strive towards such a state. If such a favour is to be theirs, it will be wrought in them as by enchantment. Passivity here reaches its extreme. On this ground a charge of Quietism might have been brought against Theresa with more justice than against Fénélon, or even Molinos. The Guida Spirituale of Molinos was designed to assist the mystic in attaining that higher contemplation of God which rises above the separate consideration of particular attributes. This indistinct and dazzled apprehension of all the perfections together is the very characteristic of Theresa’s Prayer of Rapture. Molinos cites her very words. The introduction to his condemned manual contains some very strong expressions. But nothing of his own is so extravagant as the passages from Dionysius and Theresa.

Who then is the Quietist—Molinos or Theresa? Both write books to mark out the mystic’s pathway. Theresa adds the caution, ‘Sit still.’ Manifestly, then, the excess of passivity lies with her. The oars of Molinos are the sails of Theresa,—erected, like the broad paddles of the Indian, to catch the breeze, and urge onward the canoe without an effort.[291] But the followers of Molinos were found guilty of neglecting ceremonial gewgaws for devout abstraction,—of escaping those vexatious observances so harassing to patients and so lucrative to priests. So Rome condemned him, and not Theresa, as the Quietist heretic. For his head the thundercloud; for hers the halo.[292]

Here the reader may naturally ask, ‘How do these mystics reconcile such extremes of abstraction and such extremes of sensuousness? If the state above symbols and above reasoning—above all conscious mental operations, distinctions, or figures, be so desirable (as they all admit),—must not crucifixes, images, and pictures of saints, yea, the very conception of our Saviour’s humanity itself, be so many hindrances?’

To this Theresa would answer, ‘I thought so once. But I was happily led to see my error ere long. In the Prayer of Rapture, all recognition of Christ’s humanity—as, indeed, of everything else—is doubtless obliterated. But, then, we do not effect this. There is no effort on our part to remove from our minds the conception of Christ’s person. The universal nescience of Rapture is supernaturally wrought, without will of ours.’[293] John of the Cross, who carries his negative, imageless abstraction so far, is fain (as a good son of the Church) to insert a special chapter in commendation of images, pictures, and the sensuous aids to devotion generally. It was unfortunate for the flesh and blood of Molinos that he failed to do the same.[294]

In the seventeenth century the Quietists were accused of rejecting the idea of Christ’s humanity, as a corporeal image which would only mar their supersensuous contemplation of abstract deity. Bossuet attempted to fasten the charge on Fénélon: it was one of the hottest points of their controversy. Fénélon completely clears himself. From the evidence within my reach, I am disposed to acquit Molinos also.[295]

Theresa relates with peculiar pleasure those passages in the marvellous history of the soul in which surpassing heights of knowledge, or of virtue, are supposed to be realized, on the instant, without processes or media. No transition is too violent for her faith. She is impatient of all natural growth; will acknowledge no conditions of development. The sinner turns into a seraph in the twinkling of an eye. The splendid symmetry of all the Christian virtues can arise, like the palace of Aladdin, in a single night. In one particular kind of Rapture—the Flight of the Soul (Buelo del Espiritu), the soul is described by her as, in a manner, blown up. It is discharged heavenwards by a soundless but irresistible explosive force from beneath, swift as a bullet (con la presteza que sale la pelota de un arcabuz). Thus transported the spirit is taught without the medium of words, and understands mysteries which long years of search could not even have surmised.[296]

Visions are intellectual or representative. The former is a consciousness of spiritual proximity, indescribable, unaccompanied by any appearances. The representative or imaginative vision, presents some definite form or image.[297]

There is a kind of supernatural tuition, she tells us, in which the Lord suddenly places in the centre of the soul, what he wishes it to understand, without words or representation of any kind. This privilege Theresa compares very truly to an ability to read without having learnt letters, or to nutriment derived from food without eating it.[298] In other instances certain efficacious words (the ‘substantial words’ of John), are spoken divinely in the centre of the soul, and immediately produce there the actual effects proper to their significance.[299] If something is thus inwardly spoken about humility, for example, the subject of such words is that moment completely humble. So the soul is supplied with virtues as the tables volantes of Louis XV. with viands,—a spring is touched, and presto! the table sinks and re-appears—spread.

Note to page 168.

Theresa compares the four degrees of prayer to four ways of watering the soul-garden: the first, to drawing water out of a well; the second, to raising it by means of a rope with buckets (less laborious and more plentiful); the third, to the introduction of a rivulet; and the fourth, to a copious shower, whereby God Himself abundantly waters the garden, without any effort of ours.—Cap. xi. p. 67. The second degree is fully described in the fourteenth chapter of her life, and in the thirty-first of the Camino de Perfecion.

The difference between the first degree and the three others is simply that generic distinction between Meditation and Contemplation with which the earlier mystics have made us familiar. Theresa’s second, third, and fourth degrees of prayer are her more loose and practical arrangement of the species of contemplation. She identifies Mystical Theology with Prayer, employing the latter term in a very comprehensive sense. So also does St. Francis de Sales:—En somme, l’oraison et théologie mystique n’est autre chose qu’une conversation par laquelle l’âme s’entretient amoureusement avec Dieu de sa très-aimable bonté pour s’unir et joindre à icelle.—Traité de l’Amour de Dieu, livre vi. chap. i. He likens the soul in the prayer of Quiet when the will is engaged but the other powers free, to an infant which can see and hear and move its arms, while adhering to the breast. The babe which removes its little mouth from the bosom to see where its feet are, resembles those who are distracted in the prayer of Quiet by self-consciousness, and disturb their repose by curiosity as to what the mind is doing the while.—Ibid. chap. x.

Note to page 170.

Vida, capp. xviii. xix.:—Estandoassi el alma buscando a Dios, siente con un deleyte grandissimo y suave casi desfallecerse toda con una manera de desmayo, que le va faltando el huelgo, y todas las fuerças corporales, demanera que sino es con mucha pena, no puede aun menear las manos; los ojos se le cierran sin querer, los cerrar, y si los tiene abiertos no vee casi nada; ni si lee, acierta a dezir letra ni casi atina a conocerla bien; vee que ay letra, mas como el entendimiento no ayuda, no sabe leer, aunque quiera. Oye, mas no entiende lo que oye. Assi que de los sentidos no se aprovecha nada, sino es para no la acabar de dexar a su plazer, y assi antes la dañan. Hablar, es por de mas, que no atina a formar palabra; ni ay fuerça ya que atinasse, para poderla pronunciar: porque toda la fuerça exterior se pierde, y se aumenta en las del alma, para mejor poder gozar de su gloria. El deleyte exterior que se siente es grande, y muy conocido.—P. 118.

As to the elevation of the body in the air during rapture, it is common enough in the annals of Romish saintship, and a goodly page might be filled with the mere names of the worthies who are represented as overcoming not only sin, but gravitation. Maria d’Agreda was seen, times without number, poised on nothing in a recumbent attitude, in an equilibrium so delicate, that by blowing, even at a distance, she was made to waft this way or that, like a feather. Dominic of Jesu Maria had the honour of being blown about, while in this soap-bubble condition, by the heretic-slaying breath of Philip II. Görres furnishes a long list of examples, and believes them all; Die Christliche Mystik, Buch. v. iv. § 2.

It is curious to see how Francis de Sales, who follows Theresa somewhat closely in his chapter on the Prayer of Quietude, grows wisely cautious as he treats of Rapture, softens down extravagance, avoids theurgy, and keeps to piety, and admirably substitutes practical devotion for the unintelligibility and the materialism of the Spanish saint. He enumerates three kinds of Rapture or ecstasy (ravissement and extase are identical),—that of the intellect, that of the affection, and that of action,—manifested, respectively, by glory, by fervour, and by deed,—realized by admiration, by devotion, and by operation. On the last he dwells most fully; on that he concentrates all his exhortations. To live without profaneness, he says, without falsehood, without robbery, to honour parents, to obey law, to reverence God,—this is to live according to the natural reason of man. But to embrace poverty, to hail reproach and persecution as blessings, and martyrdom as joy, by unceasing self-renunciation, to forsake the world, surmount its opinion, deny its rule,—this is to live, not humanly, but superhumanly;—to live out of ourselves and above ourselves, by supernatural energy,—this is to enjoy the noblest ecstasy, not of a moment, but of a life-time. Many saints have died without enjoying ecstatic trance—all have lived the ecstatic life.—Traité de l’Amour de Dieu, livre vii. chapp. iii. and vii.

Note to page 170.

This pain is described by Theresa in the twentieth chapter of the Life, and in the Castillo Interior, Morada vi. capp. 1 and 2. In the former place she gives a kind of rationale thereof, in the following words:—Parece me que esta assi el alma, que ni del cielo le viene consuelo, ni esta en el; ni de la tierra le quiere, ni esta en ella; sino como crucificada entre el cielo y la tierra, padeciendo sin venirle socorro di ningun cabo. Porque el que le viene del cielo (que es como he dicho una noticia de Dios tan admirable, muy sobre todo lo que podemos dessear) es para mas tormento, porque acreciento el desseo de manera que a mi parecer la gran pena algunas vezes quita el sentido, sino que dura poco sin el. Parecen unos transitos de la muerte, salvo que trae consigo un tan contento este padecer, que no se yo a que lo comparar.—P. 135.

The Castillo Interior describes the mystic’s progress under the emblem of a Castle, divided into seven apartments; the inmost, where God resides, representing the centre of the soul (termed the apex by some; the Ground by others); and each of these successive abodes, from the outermost to the central, corresponding to the advancing stages of discipline and privilege through which the mystic passes. The liability to the pain in question supervenes at the sixth apartment, prior to the last and most glorious stage attainable on earth.

Victor Gelenius of Treves (writing 1646) has seven degrees, and places this stage of misery and privation in the fourth, as the transition between the human and superhuman kinds of devotion. It is the painful weaning-time, wherein the soul passes (in an agony of strange bewilderment) from a religion which employs the faculties we possess, to that which is operated in us in a manner altogether incomprehensible and divine. Whatever division be adopted, such alone is the legitimate locality for this portion of the mystical experience. Here Gelenius and John of the Cross are perfectly agreed, though their graduation and nomenclature are different.

Note to page 171.

This pain is the ‘pressura interna’ of Tauler: the ‘horribile et indicibile tormentum’ of Catharine of Genoa; the ‘purgatory’ of Thomas à Jesu; the ‘languor infernalis’ of Harphius; the ‘terrible martyrium’ of Maria Vela, the Cistercian; the ‘divisio naturæ ac spiritus’ of Barbanson; the ‘privation worse than hell’ of Angela de Foligni. See Card. Bona’s Via Compendii ad Deum, cap. 10. Angelæ de Fulginio Visiones, cap. xix.

These sufferings are attributed by the mystics to the surpassing nature of the truths manifested to our finite faculties (as the sun-glare pains the eye),—to the anguish involved in the surrender of every ordinary religious support or enjoyment, when the soul, suspended (as Theresa describes it) between heaven and earth, can derive solace from neither,—to the intensity of the aspirations awakened, rendering those limitations of our condition here which detain us from God an intolerable oppression,—and to the despair by which the soul is tried, being left to believe herself forsaken by the God she loves.

On this subject John of the Cross and Theresa are most extravagant. In contrast with their folly stands the good sense of Fénélon. The middle ground is occupied by the comparative moderation of Francis de Sales. The privation described by John is preparatory to a state of complete de-humanization, in which we shall know, feel, do, nothing in the mortal manner, as our whole nature suffers a divine transformation. The privation of which Fénélon speaks is simply a refining process, to purify our love more thoroughly from self. The causes and the various species of this pain are detailed at length by John of the Cross in the Nuit Obscure, liv. ii. chapp. v. vi. vii.

De Sales says speaking of the ‘blessure d’amour:‘—Mais, Theotrine, parlant de l’amour sacré, il y a en la practique d’iceluy une sorte de blesseure que Dieu luy-meme faict quelquesfois pour sa souveraine bonté, comme la pressant et solicitant de l’aymer; et lors elle s’eslance de force comme pour voler plus haut vers son divin object; mais demeurant courte parce qu’elle ne peut pas tant aymer comme elle desire, o Dieu! elle sent une douleur qui n’a point d’esgale.... La voilà donc rudement tourmentée entre la violence de ses eslans et celle de son impuissance.—Traité de l’Amour de Dieu, liv. vi. ch. xiii.

Theresa declares that the intensity of this delicious agony is such as frequently to endanger life.—Castillo Int. vi. c. xi.

Francis de Sales, in whom the sufferings in question assume a highly sentimental character, adduces instances in which they proved fatal. The soul, springing forward to obey the attraction of the Well-beloved, sooner than be detained by the body amid the miseries of this life, tears herself away, abandons it, and mounts alone, like a lovely little dove, to the bosom of her celestial spouse. St. Theresa herself, he says, made it known, after her departure, that she died of an impetuous assault of love, too violent for nature to sustain.—Traité de l’Amour de Dieu, liv. vii. chapp x.-xii.

We may contrast the obscure and feverish utterances of Theresa, and the amorous phraseology of De Sales, on this topic, with the lucid and cautious language of Fénélon.

La sainte indifférence, qui n’est jamais que le désintéressement de l’amour, devient dans les plus extrêmes épreuves ce que les saints mystiques ont nommé abandon, c’est-à-dire, que l’âme désintéressée s’abandonne totalement et sans réserve à Dieu pour tout ce qui regarde son intérêt propre; mais elle ne renonce jamais ni à aucune des choses qui intéressent la gloire et le bon plaisir du bien-aimé.... Cette abnégation de nous-mêmes n’est que pour l’intérêt propre, et ne doit jamais empêcher l’amour désintéressé que nous nous devons à nous-mêmes comme au prochain, pour l’amour de Dieu. Les épreuves extrêmes où cet abandon doit être exercé sont les tentations par lesquelles Dieu jaloux veut purifier l’amour, en ne lui faisant voir aucune ressource ni aucune espérance pour son intérêt même éternel. Ces épreuves sont représentées par un très-grand nombre des saints comme un purgatoire terrible, qui peut exempter du purgatoire de l’autre vie les âmes qui le souffrent avec une entière fidélité.... Ces épreuves ne sont que pour un temps. Plus les âmes y sont fidèles à la grâce pour se laisser purifier de tout intérêt propre par l’amour jaloux, plus ces épreuves sont courtes. C’est d’ordinaire la résistance secrète des âmes à la grâce sous des beaux prétextes, c’est leur effort intéressé et empressé pour retenir les appuis sensibles dont Dieu veut les priver, qui rend leurs épreuves si longues et si douloureuses: car Dieu ne fait point souffrir sa créature pour la faire souffrir sans fruit, ce n’est que pour la purifier et pour vaincre ses résistances.—Explic. des Maximes des Saints, Art. VIII.

Note to page 172.

See the passage already cited (page 166, note), where Theresa expressly forbids any attempt on our part to suspend the powers of the mind. Effort to produce inaction appears to her a contradiction in terms. Yet such effort Dionysius expressly enjoins; and, indeed, without it, how can the swarming words or images that float about the mind be excluded? The ‘phantasmata irruentia,’ to be barred out, are the images of sensible objects, according to the old theory of perception—the ‘imagines rerum sensibilium et corporearum.’ Bona expresses the spirit of the old Platonist mysticism in the Romish Church, when he says, ‘Hæc omnia abdicanda et extirpanda prorsus sunt, ut Deum inveniamus.’—Via Compendii ad Deum, p. 26. Theresa is quite agreed with all the mystics as to the previous heart-discipline, and the ascetic process essential to the higher forms of contemplation.

The mystics generally rank the ‘contemplatio caliginosa’ much above the ‘contemplatio pura:’ the more indistinct our apprehensions, the more divine. John of the Cross comes next, in this respect, after Dionysius. Molinos borrows his doctrine, that as the distance between the Infinite and all our sensuous images, conclusions, and finite conceptions must be infinite after all, such things embarrass rather than aid our contemplation. But even he does not soar into a darkness so absolute as that of Dionysius. He says expressly, in the introduction to his Spiritual Guide:—‘In answer to the objection that the will must be inactive where no clear conception is given to the understanding,—that a man cannot love what he can take no cognizance of, my reply is this: Although the understanding does not distinctively recognise certain images and conceptions, by a discursive act or mental conclusion, it apprehends, nevertheless, by a dim and comprehensive faith. And though this knowledge be very cloudy, vague, and general, yet it is far more clear and perfect than any sensuous or scientific apprehensions that man can devise in this life, since all corporeal images must be immeasurably remote from God.’ See Arnold’s Kirchen-und-Ketzergeschichte, th. III. ch. xvii., where the Introduction is inserted entire.

Theresa also admits that during the ecstatic pain the soul adores no particular attribute of God, but, as it were, all his perfections collectively. Bien entiende que no quiere sino a su Dios, mas no ama cosa particular del, sino todo junto lo quiere, y no sabe lo que quiere.—Vida, cap. xx. p. 135. But it is a sore trial to her when her fancy is limed, and the key to her chamber of vision, for a season, lost.

When we leave Dionysius and John, and come to the French mystics, how great the difference! The soul hangs no longer in a lightless void, trembles no more on the verge of swooning ecstacy. This ‘Visio caliginosa’ becomes, not merely a comprehensible thing, but so clarified, humanized, and we may say Christianized, as to come within the range of every devout consciousness. The ‘indistinct contemplation’ of St. Francis de Sales is a summary and comprehensive view of Divine truth or the Divine Nature,—simple, emotional, jubilant, as distinguished from the detailed and partial views of searching Meditation. As he fancifully expresses it, this simplicity of contemplation does not pluck the rose, the thyme, the jessamine, the orange-flower, inhaling the scent of each separately,—this the flower-gatherer Meditation does;—Contemplation rejoices in the fragrance distilled from them all. An example perfectly explains his meaning. O que bien-heureux sont ceux qui, après avoir discouru (the discursive acts above spoken of) sur la multitude des motifs qu’ils ont d’aymer Dieu, reduisans tous leurs regards en une seule veuë et toutes leurs pensées en une seule conclusion, arrestant leur esprit en l’unité de la contemplation, à l’exemple de S. Augustin ou de S. Bruno, prononçant secrettement en leur ame, par une admiration permanente, ces paroles amoureuses: O bonté! bonté! bonté! tousjours ancienne et tousjours nouvelle!—Traité de l’Amour de Dieu, liv. vi. chap. v.

Every religious man must remember times when he was the subject of some such emotion, when the imagination bodied forth no form, the reason performed no conscious process, but, after some train of thought, at the sight of some word, or while gazing on some scene of beauty, an old truth seemed to overwhelm him (as though never seen till then) with all its grandeur or endearment,—times when he felt the poverty of words, and when utterance, if left at all, could only come in the fervid, broken syllables of reiterated ejaculation. In such melting or such tumult of the soul, there is no mysticism. Even Deism, in a susceptible Rousseau, cannot escape this passion. He speaks of a bewildering ecstasy awakened by nature, which would overcome him with such force, that he could but repeat, in almost delirious transport, ‘O Great Being! O Great Being!’ Neither is it mystical to prefer the kindling masterful impulse of a faith which possesses us, rather than we it, to the frigid exactitude of lifeless prescription. The error of the mystics lay in the undue value they attached to such emotions, and their frequent endeavours to excite them for their own sake; in transferring what was peculiar to those seasons to the other provinces of life; and in the constant tendency of their religionism to underrate the balanced exercise of all our faculties, neglecting knowledge and action in a feverish craving for evanescent fervours.

Fénélon, speaking of the negative character of pure and direct contemplation, teaches a doctrine widely different from that of Dionysius, even while referring with reverence to his name. He is careful to state that the attributes of God do not, at such times, cease to be present to the mind, though no sensible image be there, no discursive act performed; that the essence, without the attributes, would be the essence no longer; that, in the highest contemplation, the truths of revelation do not cease to be admissible to the mind; that the humanity of Christ, and all his mysteries, may then be distinctly present,—seen simply, lovingly, as faith presents them, only that there is no systematic effort to impress the several details on the imagination, or to draw conclusions from them.—Explic. des Maximes des Saints, art. xxvii.

Note to page 173.

See the clear and guarded language of the twenty-eighth article in the Maximes des Saints, and the Troisième Lettre en réponse à divers Ecrits, Seconde Partie.

The language of Molinos on this point is as follows:—‘Although the humanity of Christ is the most perfect and most holy mean of access to God, the highest mean of our salvation, yea the channel through which alone we receive every blessing for which we hope, yet is the humanity not the supreme good, for that consists in the contemplation of God. But as Jesus Christ is what he is more through his divine nature than his human, so that man contemplates Christ continually and thinks of Him, who thinks on God, and hath regard constantly to Him. And this is the case more especially with the contemplative man, who possesses a faith more purified, clear, and experimental.’—Arnold, loc. cit., p. 183.

Such a passage proves merely thus much, that Molinos shared in the general tendency of the authorised mediæval mysticism,—a tendency leading the contemplatist to see Christ in God, rather than God in Christ, and placing him in danger of resolving Redemption into self-loss in the abstract Godhead. Similar expressions are frequent in Tauler, in Ruysbroek, in Suso, in the German theology. Now we know by what these same men say at other times, that it was not their intention to disparage or discard the humanity of Christ. Similar allowance must be made for Molinos—quite as far from such practical Docetism as they were. The words just quoted should be compared with the title of the sixteenth chapter in his first book: ‘How in the inward recollection, or drawing in of our powers, we may enter into the internal Ground, through the most holy Humanity of Jesus Christ.’ A gross and materialised apprehension of the bodily sufferings of the Saviour had become general in the Romish Church. They were dramatized in imagination and in fact, into a harrowing spectacle of physical anguish. The end was lost sight of in the means. To such sensible representations—such excesses of over-wrought sentiment, Molinos was doubtless unfriendly; and so, also, the more refined and elevated mysticism of that communion has generally been. Molinos is nearer to the spiritual Tauler than to the sensuous Theresa. Where he speaks of passivity and acquiescence in desertion (§ 5), of contemplation (§§ 17, 18), of self-abandonment (§ 30), of the divine vocation and elevation necessary to the attainment of the contemplative heights, where he says that we must not, without the direction of an experienced adviser, seek to raise ourselves from one stage to a higher (§ 24), he does but repeat what the most orthodox mystics had said before him. Holy indifference to spiritual enjoyments and manifestations, and complete passivity, are not more earnestly enjoined by John of the Cross than by Molinos. Yet one main charge against the Quietists was, that they made mysticism a human method, and proposed to raise to mystical perfection all who were ready to go through their process. The accusations brought against Quietism by Berthier in his Discours sur le Non-Quiétisme de S. Theresa, and in his tenth letter on the works of John of the Cross, are self-destructive. In one place he finds the Quietists guilty of making ‘their pretended spiritual man’ an insensible kind of being, who remains always apathetic—dans une inaltération et une inaction entiere en la présence de Dieu. In another, he represents them as offering to teach contemplation to all (irrespective of the director’s consent, he fears) by reducing it to a method. Either way the unhappy Quietists cannot escape: they must always do too much or too little. It was against the artificial methods of devotion, so much in vogue, that Molinos protested, when he called his readers away from the puerile manuals and bead-counting of the day, to direct and solitary communion with God. Several of the articles of condemnation are such as would have been drawn out against a man suspected of Protestantism. On the question of the humanity of Christ, the proposition professedly deduced from the doctrines of Molinos, and censured accordingly, runs thus—‘We must do no good works of our own motion, and render no homage to Our Lady, the Saints, or Christ’s humanity,’ &c.—Art. xxxv.

Footnote 284:

Vida, pp. 71 and 75. In the latter passage, Theresa says expressly:—En la mystica Teologia, que comence a dezir, pierde de obrar el entendimiento, porque le suspende Dios, como despues declararè mas, si supiere, y el me diere para el lo su favor. Presumir, ni pensar de suspenderle nosotros, es lo que digo no se haga, ni se dexe de obrar con el, porque nos quedaremos bouos y frios, y ni haremos lo uno ni lo otro. Que quando el Señor le suspende, y haze parar, dale de que se espante, y en que se ocupe, y que sin discurrir entienda mas en un credo que nosotros podemos entendir con todas nuestras diligencias de tierra en muchos años.

Footnote 285:

See Note on p. 175.

Footnote 286:

Vida, cap. xvii. and Castillo Interior, Moradas Quintas, cap. i.

Footnote 287:

Castillo Interior, p. 580.

Footnote 288:

See second Note on p. 175.

Footnote 289:

See Note on p. 176.

Footnote 290:

See Note on p. 177.

Footnote 291:

See Note on p. 178.

Footnote 292:

See the account of the proceedings against Molinos and his followers, in Arnold, th. III., c. xvii., and more fully in an Appendix to the English translation of Madame Guyon’s Autobiography.

Footnote 293:

Vida, chap. xxii.:—Quando Dios quiere suspender todas las potencias (como en los modos de oracion que quedan dichos hemos visto) claro estâ que aunque no queramos se quita esta presencia.... Mas que nosotros de maña y con cuydado nos acostumbremos a no procurar con todas nuestras fuerças traer delante siempre (y pluguiesse al Señor fuesse siempre) esta sacratissima humanidad esto digo que no me parece bien, y que es andar el alma en ayre, como dizen: porque parece no trae arrimo, por mucho que la parezca anda llena de Dios.—P. 154.

Footnote 294:

The words of John are:—Mais il faut remarquer que quand je dis qu’il est à propos d’oublier les espèces et les connaissances des objets matériels, je ne prétends nullement parler de Jésus-Christ ni de son humanité sacrée. Quoique l’âme n’en ait pas quelquefois la mémoire dans sa plus haute contemplation et dans le simple regard de la divinité, parce que Dieu élève l’esprit à cette connaissance confuse et surnaturelle, néanmoins il ne faut jamais négliger exprès la représentation de cette adorable humanité ni en effacer le souvenir ou l’idée, ni en affaiblir la connaissance.—La Montée du Mont Carmel, liv. III. chap. 1. I have used the French translation of his works, edited by the Abbé Migne, in his Bibliothèque Universelle du Clergé. 1845.

The chapter on images is the fourteenth of the same book.

Father Berthier (Lettres sur les Œuvres de S. Jean de la Croix) attempts to show the difference between the mysticism of his author and that of the false mystics. He succeeds only in pointing out a manifest disagreement between the opinions of John and those which he himself believes (or pretends to believe) are those of Quietism—the accusations, in fact, against the Quietists—the exaggerated conclusions drawn by their enemies.

Footnote 295:

See Note on p. 180.

Footnote 296:

Castillo Interior. Morada vi., c. v.

Footnote 297:

Ibid., capp. viii., ix., x.

Footnote 298:

Vida, cap. xxvii., pp. 191, &c. Here the supernatural illumination without means or mode, longed for by so many mystics, is professedly realised. Molinos puts forward no claim so dangerous as this special revelation. Theresa is confident that this most inexplicable species of communication is beyond the reach of any delusion, and inaccessible altogether to the father of lies. Her language concerning the absolute passivity of those who are its subjects, is as strong as it could be. No Quietist could push it farther. It so happens that the saint, in his chapter, contravenes expressly the three criteria, afterwards laid down by Fénélon, to distinguish the true mysticism from the false. The genuine contemplation according to him is not purely infused, not purely gratuitous (i.e., without correspondence on the part of the soul to the grace vouchsafed), not miraculous. With Theresa this form of passive contemplation is all three. So much more Quietist was the mysticism authorised than the mysticism condemned by Rome. See Maximes des Saints, art. xxix. What Fénélon rejects in the following section as false, answers exactly to the position of Theresa. Fénélon supports his more refined and sober mysticism by the authority of preceding mystics. He finds among them ample credentials, and indeed more than he wants. Their extravagances he tacitly rejects. Not that, as a good Catholic, he could venture openly to impugn their statements, but their fantastic extremes, and choice wonders, find a place with him rather as so much religious tradition, or extraordinary history, than as forming any essential part of the mysticism he himself represents and commends.

Footnote 299:

Vida, cap. xxv.

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Chapter III

And those that endeavour after so still, so silent, and demure condition of minde, that they would have the sense of nothing there but peace and rest, striving to make their whole nature desolate of all Animal Figurations whatsoever, what do they effect but a clear Day, shining upon a barren Heath, that feeds neither Cow nor Horse,—neither Sheep nor Shepherd is to be seen there, but only a waste, silent Solitude, and one uniform parchednesse and vacuity. And yet while a man fancies himself thus wholly divine, he is not aware how he is even then held down by his Animal Nature; and that it is nothing but the stillnesse and fixednesse of Melancholy that thus abuses him, instead of the true divine Principle.—HENRY MORE.

II. St. John of the Cross.

Little John of the Cross—a hero, like Tydeus, small in body, but great in soul—was in the prime of life when Theresa was growing old. Early distinguished by surpassing austerity and zeal, he was selected by the Saint as her coadjutor in the great work of Carmelite reform. The task was no easy one, though sanctioned by the highest spiritual authority. This troculus service—the picking the teeth of the gorged ecclesiastical crocodile—has always been a somewhat delicate and dangerous affair. The great jaws closed with a horrible crash one day on poor Madame Guyon, as she was working away with her solitary bill and the best intentions. On John, too, busy at a little scavenger’s work, those jaws had once almost met, and at least knocked him fluttering into a hollow tooth,—in other words, a dark and noisome dungeon at Toledo. But what between St. Theresa’s intercession and that of the Mother of God, he is let fly again. Vicar-provincial of Andalusia, he plies his task anew, with admirable intrepidity and self-devotion; courts hatred and opprobrium on every side; flourishes his whip; overturns secularities; and mouses for flaws of regulation. He succeeds in excavating in every direction spiritual catacombs and mummy-caves, where, swathed up in long rows, the religious dumb and withered line the cloister-walls—motionless—satisfactorily dead. Next to Ignatius Loyola, he was, perhaps, the greatest soul-sexton that ever handled shovel.

John of the Cross obtained this distinctive name through his love of crosses. He was consumed by an insatiable love of suffering. It was his prayer that not a day of his life might pass in which he did not suffer something. Again and again does he exhort the monk, saying—‘Whatsoever you find pleasant to soul or body, abandon; whatsoever is painful, embrace it.’ ‘Take pains,’ he says, ‘to give your name an ill savour; burrow deep and deeper under heaped obloquy, and you are safe.’[300] Thus is the odour of sanctity best secured; and the disguised saint resembles that eastern prince who concealed himself from his pursuers beneath a heap of onions, lest the fragrance of his perfumes should betray him. The man who is truly dead and self-abandoned will not only thus disguise his virtues before others; he will be unconscious of them himself. The whole life of John was an attempt towards a practical fulfilment of such precepts. The party of his enemies gained the upper hand in the chapter, and the evening of his days was clouded by the disgrace of which he was covetous. He passed existence in violent extremes, now gazing with delight on some celestial mirage, swimming in seas of glory that waft him to the steps of the burning throne,—and anon hurled down into the abyss, while vampyre wings of fiends ‘darken his fall, with victory,’ and his heart itself is a seething hell-cauldron, wherein demon talons are the raking fleshhooks.

The piety of John is altogether of the Romanist type. In his doctrine of humility, truth is not to be considered, but expediency,—that is, an edifying display of self-vilification. On his own principles, John ought to have persuaded himself, and assured others, that he was a self-indulgent, pleasure-loving drone,—though perfectly aware of the contrary. St. Paul is content to bid men think of themselves not more highly than they ought to think. John of the Cross is not satisfied unless they think worse than they ought,—unless they think untruly, and labour to put a pious fraud upon themselves. John disturbs the equilibrium of Quietism. There is quite as much self-will in going out of the way of a blessing to seek a misery, as in avoiding a duty for the sake of ease. Many men will readily endure a score of mortifications of their own choosing, who would find it hard to display tolerable patience under a single infliction from a source beyond their control. This extreme of morbid asceticism is more easy, because more brilliant in its little world, than the lowly fortitude of ordinary Christian life. How many women, at this hour, in poverty, in pain, in sorrow of heart, are far surpassing St. Theresa in their self-sacrifice and patience, unseen and unpraised of men.

Banished to the little Convent of Pegnuela, he completed among the crags of the Sierra Morena his great mystical treatises, The Obscure Night, and The Ascent of Carmel. He follows in the steps of the Pseudo-Dionysius. He describes the successive denudations of the soul as it passes,—the shadow of itself, into the infinite shade of the Divine Dark.[301] We have seen how instantaneously Theresa could attain at times this oblivious self-reduction. Her soul falls prostrate, with the ordinary attire of faculties, but rises, stripped of all in a moment. Not more dexterously was the fallen Andrew Fairservice stripped in a twinkling by the Highlanders, so that he who tumbled down a well-clothed, decent serving-man, stood up ‘a forked, uncased, bald-pated, beggarly-looking scarecrow.’ John of the Cross describes with almost scientific method the process of spiritual unclothing,—preaches a series of sermons on the successive removal of each integument,—and perorates on the blessed reduction of the soul to a supernatural state of nature.

The ‘Obscure Night,’ would be the most fitting title for both treatises; for the night of mysticism is their sole subject, and Mount Carmel does but figure as a frontispiece, in compliment to the Order probably. Sundry verses head the works as texts; the first of these, with its exposition, will sufficiently indicate the character of the whole.

En una noche escura Con ansias en amores inflammada ¡O dichosa ventura! Salí sin ser notada Estando ya mi casa sosegada.

‘’Twas in a darksome night, inflamed with restless love, O fortune full of bliss, I ventured forth unmarked, what time my house was still.’

The Saint interprets his stanza, in substance, as follows:—

Here the soul says, ‘I went out unhindered by sensuality or the devil. I went out, that is, of myself—out from my own poor and feeble manner of knowing, loving, and tasting God. I went out, unassisted by any action of my own powers; while my understanding was wrapped in darkness; while will and memory were overwhelmed by affliction. I went out, abandoning myself in pure faith to darkness—that is, to the night of my spirit and my natural powers.

‘This going forth has crowned me with happiness; for I have been straightway elevated to operations entirely divine—to most familiar intercourses with God; in other words, my understanding has passed from a human to a divine condition. Uniting myself to God by this purgation, my knowledge is no longer weak and limited as formerly; but I know by the divine wisdom, to which I am conjoined.

‘My will also has gone out of itself, and become in a sort divine; for being united to the Divine Love, it does not love any longer by its own former powers, but by the powers of the Divine Spirit. Thus, its acts of love towards the Creator are rendered no more in a human manner.

‘My memory is filled with images of heavenly glory. All my powers, in short, and all my affections, are renovated by the Night of the spirit and the despoliation of the old man, in such sort that their very nature seems changed, and they can relish only spiritual and divine delights.’[302]

Thus, the soul is to resemble the wondrous eastern tree of the old travellers, which by daylight stands leafless and flowerless, but after sundown puts forth countless white blossoms, shining in the darkness like the drops of a silver fountain; and when the sun is risen again, sheds all its beauty, and stands bare and barren as before. When all our natural powers, slain and buried, lie dead under the midnight;—then arise, instead of them, certain divine substitutes, which will, and love, and know, as the Infinite does, not as men.

The FIRST NIGHT is that of the Sense: the long process of vigil and austerity which, with the caduceus of asceticism, tames and lulls to slumber the Argus-eyed monster of the flesh.[303] A painful work, but not without meet recompence. New pleasures, even of the sense, are supernaturally vouchsafed to the steadfast votary. The wearied eye and the unvisited ear are regaled by glorious visions and seraphic melody; yea, the parched tongue, and haggard, bleeding flesh, are made to know delights of taste and touch, that melt with most delicious pleasure through the frame, and beggar with their transport all the joys of banquets or of love.

But rejoice not, O mystic! for even now, lest thou shouldst grow greedy of these high luxuries, there strides towards thee the darkness of—

The SECOND NIGHT—the Night of the Spirit. Here all caresses are withdrawn. The deserted soul cannot think, or pray, or praise, as of old. The great pains are to begin. Pitiless purgation and privation absolute are about to make the second night not night only, but midnight. You seem to descend, God-abandoned, alive into hell. Make no resistance: utter no cry for comfort. Solace is a Tantalus’ bough, which will wave itself away as you stretch forth your hand. Acquiesce in all: be in your desertion as absolutely passive as in your rapture. So, from the bright glassy edge and summit of this awful fall, you shoot down helpless, blind, and dizzy,—down through the surging cataract, among the giant vapour columns, amid the eternal roar, to awake at the boiling foot, and find that you yet live, in your tossing shallop,—or rather, you no longer, for you yourself are dead—so much mere ballast in the bottom of the boat: a divine and winged Radiance has taken your place, who animates rather than steers, guiding, in your stead, by mysterious impulse.[304]

To the higher faculty, then, there are already visible, after the first horrors, breaking gleams of a super-celestial dawn. Visions are seen; forms of glory come and go: gifts of subtlest discernment are vouchsafed: substantial words are spoken within, which make you, in that moment, all they mean.[305]

But all such particular and special manifestations you are peremptorily to reject, come they from God or come they from the Devil;—not even to reflect upon and recall them afterwards, lest grievous harm ensue. For the philosophy of John is summary. Two ideas alone have room there—All and Nothing. Whatsoever is created is finite: whether actual or ideal, it bears no proportion to the All,—it cannot therefore be helpful to any on their way to the All. The Something is no link between the opposites of All and Nothing. Therefore, if any view of a particular divine perfection, any conception of Deity, or image of saint or angel, be even supernaturally presented to the mind, reject it. You are aiming at the highest—at loss in the All. Everything definite and particular—all finite apprehension, must be so much negation of the Infinite,—must limit that All. You should pass beyond such things to blend immediately with the Universal,—to attain that view of God which is above means—is unconditioned—is, from its illimitable vastness, an anguish of bliss,—a glory which produces the effect of darkness.[306]

But why, it will be asked, does God grant these favours of vision to the saints at all, if it is their duty to disregard them?

John answers, ‘Because some transition stage is unavoidable. But the higher you attain, the less of such manifestation will you meet with. This portion of your progress is a grand stair-case hung with pictures;—hurry up the steps, that you may enter the darkened chamber above, where divine ignorance and total darkness shall make you blest. If in doubt about a vision, there is always your confessor, to whom, if you have not constant resort, woe be to you! But you are safe, at any rate, in not receiving and cherishing such inferior bestowments. To reject them will be no sin—no loss. For the beneficial effects they are designed to produce will be wrought by God internally, if you only abide passive, and refuse to exert about such signs those lower faculties which can only hinder your advance.’[307]

Such a reply is but a fence of words against a serious difficulty. He should be the last to talk of necessary intermediate steps who proclaims the rejection of everything mediate,—who will have the mystic be reduced to the Nothing and rapt to the All, by a single entrancing touch.[308]

But much higher than any visions of the picture-gallery are certain manifestations (sometimes granted in this state) of divine truth in its absolute nakedness. These are glimpses of the veritas essentialis nude in se ipsa, beyond all men, and angels, and heavenly splendours, which Tauler bids the mystic long for. John forbids us to seek them—for effort would unseal our slumber. They come altogether without consent of ours. Though we are not to hold ourselves so negative towards them as we should towards more palpable and inferior favours.

The Quietists were charged with excluding all human co-operation in the mystical progress. John must plead guilty on this count. His writings abound with reiterated declarations that the soul does absolutely nothing in its night,—with prohibitions against seeking any supernatural favour or manifestation whatever.[309]

Urganda the fairy could find no way of raising the paladins she loved above the common lot of mortals, save that of throwing them into an enchanted sleep. So Galaor, Amadis, and Esplandian, sink into the image of death beneath her kindly wand. Such is the device of John—and so does he lull and ward venturous Understanding, learned Memory, and fiery Will. Faith is the night which extinguishes Understanding; Hope, Memory; and Love, Will. The very desire after supernatural bestowments, (though for no other purpose has everything natural been doomed to die) would be a stirring in the torpor—a restless, not a perfect sleep. The serenest Quiet may be ruffled by no such wish.

This, therefore, is John’s fundamental principle. All faculties and operations not beyond the limits of our nature must cease, that we may have no natural knowledge, no natural affection; but find, magically substituted, divine apprehensions and divine sentiments quite foreign to ourselves. Then, still farther, we are desired to ignore even supernatural manifestations, if they represent to us anything whatever; that we may rise, or sink (it is the same), to that swooning gaze on the Infinite Ineffable, wherein our dissolving nature sees, hears, knows, wills, remembers nothing.[310]

The THIRD NIGHT—that of the Memory and the Will.[311] Here, not only do all the ‘trivial fond records’ that may have been inscribed upon remembrance vanish utterly, but every trace of the divinest tokens and most devout experience. The soul sinks into profound oblivion. The flight of time is unmarked, bodily pain unfelt, and the place of Memory entirely emptied of its stored ‘species and cognitions,’—of everything particular and distinct. The patient forgets to eat and drink,—knows not whether he has done or not done, said or not said, heard or not heard this or that.

‘Strange exaltation this,’ cries the objector, ‘which imbrutes and makes a blank of man—sinks him below idiotic ignorance of truth and virtue!’

John is ready with his answer. This torpor, he replies, is but transitory. The perfect mystic, the adept established in union, has ceased to suffer this oblivion. Passing through it, he acquires a new and divine facility for every duty proper to his station. He is in the supernatural state, and his powers have so passed into God that the Divine Spirit makes them operate divinely,—all they do is divine. The Spirit makes such a man constantly ignorant of what he ought to be ignorant; makes him remember what he ought to remember; and love what is to be loved—God only. Transformed in God, these powers are human no more.[312]

In the same way the night of will extinguishes joy,—joy in sensible good, in moral excellence, in supernatural gifts, that the soul may soar to a delight above delight, be suspended as in a limitless expanse of calm, far beyond that lower meteoric sky which is figured over with wonders and with signs.

Thus John’s desired contemplatio infusa is always, at the same time, a contemplatio confusa.

At his culminating point the mystic is concealed as ‘on the secret top of Horeb;’ he ascends by a hidden scale, cloaked with darkness (por la secreta escala—a escuras y enzelada).

Mark the advantage of this enclouded state. The Devil, it is said, can only get at what is passing in our mind by observing the operations of the mental powers. If, therefore, these are inactive and absorbed, and a divine communication goes on, in which they have no part whatever, Satan is baffled. These highest manifestations, absolutely pure, nude, and immediate he cannot counterfeit or hinder. The soul is then blissfully incognito and anonymous. This secrecy preserves the mystic from malign arts, as the concealment of their real names was thought the safeguard of ancient cities, since hostile sooth-sayers, ignorant of the true name to conjure by, could not then entice away their tutelary gods.[313]

Such then is the teaching of the Mount Carmel and the Obscure Night, starred with numerous most irrelevant quotations from the psalms and the prophecies, as though David and Isaiah were Quietists, and spent their days in trying to benumb imagination, banish the sensuous images which made them poets, and tone down all distinct ideas to a lustreless, formless neutral tint. The Spanish painters have not more anachronisms than the Spanish mystics; and I think of Murillo’s ‘Moses striking the Rock,’ where Andalusian costumes make gay the desert, Andalusian faces stoop to drink, and Andalusian crockery is held out to catch the dashing streams.

In John of the Cross we behold the final masterpiece of Romanist mysticism, and the practice (if here the term be applicable) of supernatural theopathy is complete. The Art of Sinking in Religion—the divinity of diving, could go no deeper. The natives of South America say that the lobo or seal has to swallow great stones when he wishes to sink to the river-bed—so little natural facility has he that way. We sinners, too, have no native alacrity for the mystical descent: our gravitation does not tend towards that depth of nothing; and huge and hard are the stones (not bread) with which this mystagogue would lade us to bring us down. And when, in imagination at least, at the bottom, we are smothered in an obscure night of mud. What a granite boulder is this to swallow,—to be told that the faintest film of attachment that links you with any human being or created thing will frustrate all your aim, and be stout as a cable to hold back your soul,—that with all your mind, and soul, and strength, you must seek out and adore the Uncomfortable, for its own sake—that, drowned and dead, you must lie far down, hidden, not from the pleasant sunshine only, but from all sweet gladness of faith and hope and love—awaiting, in obstruction, an abstraction. This resurrection to a supersensuous serenity, wherein divine powers supersede your own, is a mere imagination—a change of words; the old hallucination of the mystic. After going through a certain amount of suffering, the devotee chooses to term whatever thoughts or feelings he may have, his own no longer: he fancies them divine. It is the same man from first to last.

Admitting its great fundamental error—this unnaturalness,—as though grace came in to make our flesh and blood a senseless puppet pulled by celestial wires,—it must be conceded that the mysticism of John takes the very highest ground. It looks almost with contempt upon the phantoms, the caresses, the theurgic toys of grosser mystics. In this respect, John is far beyond Theresa. He has a purpose; he thinks he knows a way to it; and he pursues it, unfaltering, to the issue. He gazes steadily on the grand impalpability of the Areopagite, and essays to mount thither with a holy ardour of which the old Greek gives no sign. And this, too, with the vision-craving sentimental Theresa at his side, and a coarsely sensuous Romanism all around him. No wonder that so stern a spiritualism was little to the taste of some church-dignitaries in soft raiment. It is impossible not to recognize a certain grandeur in such a man. Miserably mistaken as he was, he is genuine throughout as mystic and ascetic. Every bitter cup he would press to the lips of others he had first drained himself. His eagerness to suffer was no bravado—no romancing affectation, as with many of his tribe. In his last illness at Pegnuela he was allowed his choice of removal between two places. At one of them his deadly enemy was prior. He bade them carry him thither, for there he would have most to endure. That infamous prior treated with the utmost barbarity the dying saint, on whom his implacable hatred had already heaped every wrong within his power.[314] Let, then, a melancholy admiration be the meed of John—not because the mere mention of the cross was sufficient, frequently, to throw him into an ecstasy,—not because his face was seen more than once radiant with a lambent fire from heaven,—these are the vulgar glories of the calendar,—but because, believing in mystical death, he did his best to die it, and displayed in suffering and in action a self-sacrificing heroism which could only spring from a devout and a profound conviction. We find in him no sanctimonious lies, no mean or cruel things done for the honour of his Church—perhaps he was not thus tempted or commanded as others have been,—and so, while he must have less merit with Rome as a monk, let him have the more with us as a man.

Note to page 188.

Montée du Carmel, liv. II. ch. ii. and iv.; also La Nuit Obscure, I. viii. and II. ch. v.-ix. This night is far more dark and painful than the first and third; and while the first is represented as common to many religious aspirants, the second is attained but by a few.

Si quelqu’un demande pourquoi l’âme donne le nom de nuit obscure à la lumière divine qui dissipe ses ignorances, je réponds que cette divine sagesse est non-seulement la nuit de l’âme, mais encore son supplice, pour deux raisons: la première est, parce que la sublimité de la sagesse divine surpasse de telle sorte la capacité de l’âme, que ce n’est que nuit et ténèbres pour elle; la seconde, la bassesse et l’impureté de l’âme sont telles, que cette sagesse la remplit de peines et d’obscurités.—P. 593.

Mais le plus grand supplice de l’âme est de croire que Dieu la hait, la délaisse, et la jette pour cette raison dans les ténèbres.... En effet, lorsque la contemplation dont Dieu se sert pour purifier l’âme la mortifie en la dépouillant de tout, l’âme éprouve, avec une vivacité pénétrante, toute l’horreur que cause la mort, et toutes les douleurs et tous les gémissements de l’enfer, &c.... On peut dire avec probabilité, qu’une âme qui a passé par ce purgatoire spirituel, ou n’entrera pas dans le purgatoire de l’autre monde, ou n’y demeurera pas longtemps.—P. 597.

But the most characteristic passage on this subject is the following: it contains the essence of his mysticism:—Les affections et les connaissances de l’esprit purifié et élevé à la perfection sont d’un rang supérieur aux affections et aux connaissances naturelles, elles sont surnaturelles et divines; de sorte que, pour en acquérir les actes ou les habitudes, il est nécessaire que celles qui ne sortent point des bornes de la nature soient éteintes. C’est pourquoi il est d’une grande utilité en cette matière que l’esprit perde dans cette nuit obscure ses connaissances naturelles, pour être revêtu de cette lumière très-subtile et toute divine, et pour devenir lui-même, en quelque façon, tout divin dans son union avec la sagesse de Dieu. Cette nuit ou cette obscurité doit durer autant de temps qu’il en faut pour contracter l’habitude dans l’usage qu’on fait de cette lumière surnaturelle. On doit dire la même chose de la volonté: elle est obligée de se défaire de toutes ses affections qui l’attachent aux objets naturels, pour recevoir les admirables effets de l’amour qui est extrêmement spirituel, subtil, délicat, intime, qui surpasse tous les sentiments naturels et toutes les affections de la volonté, qui est enfin tout divin; et afin qu’elle soit toute transformée en cette amour par l’union qui lui est accordée dans la perte de tous ses biens naturels.

Il faut encore que la mémoire soit dénuée des images qui lui forment les connaissances douces et tranquilles des choses dont elle se souvient, afin qu’elle les regarde comme des choses étrangères, et que ces choses lui paraissent d’une manière différente de l’idée qu’elle en avait auparavant. Par ce moyen, cette nuit obscure retirera l’esprit du sentiment commun et ordinaire qu’il avait des objets créés, et lui imprimera un sentiment tout divin, qui lui semblera étranger; en sorte que l’âme vivra comme hors d’elle-même, et élevée au-dessus de la vie humaine; elle doutera quelquefois si ce qui se passe en elle n’est point un enchantement, ou une stupidité d’esprit; elle s’étonnera de voir et d’entendre des choses qui lui semblent fort nouvelles, quoiqu’elles soient les mêmes que celles qu’elle avait autrefois entre les mains. La cause de ce changement est parce que l’âme doit perdre entièrement ses connaissances et ses sentiments humains, pour prendre des connaissances et des sentiments divins; ce qui est plus propre de la vie future que de la vie présente.—P. 601.

Note to page 191.

‘Pour répondre à cette objection, je dis que plus la mémoire est unie à Dieu, plus elle perd ses connaissances distinctes et particulières, jusqu’à ce qu’elle les oublie entièrement: ce qui arrive lorsque l’âme est établie dans l’union parfaite. C’est pourquoi elle tombe d’abord dans un grand oubli, puisque le souvenir des espèces et des connaíssances s’évanouit en elle. Ensuite elle se comporte à l’égard des choses extérieures avec une négligence si notable et un si grand mépris d’elle-même, qu’étant toute abîmée en Dieu, elle oublie le boire et le manger, et elle ne sait si elle a fait quelque chose ou non, si elle a vu ou non; si on lui a parlé ou non. Mais lorsqu’elle est affermie dans l’habitude de l’union, qui est son souverain bien, elle ne souffre plus ces oubliances dans les choses raisonnables, dans les choses morales, ni dans les choses naturelles: au contraire, elle est plus parfaite dans les opérations convenables à son état, quoiqu’elle les produise par le ministère des images et des connaissances que Dieu excite d’une façon particulière dans la mémoire. Car lorsque l’habitude de l’union, qui est un état surnaturel, est formée, la mémoire et les autres puissances quittent leurs opérations naturelles et passent jusqu’à Dieu, qui est à leur égard un terme surnaturel. En sorte que la mémoire étant toute transformée en Dieu, ses opérations ne lui sont plus imprimées, et ne demeurent plus attachées à elle. La mémoire et les autres facultés de l’âme sont occupées de Dieu avec un empire si absolu, qu’elles semblent être toutes divines, et que c’est lui-même qui les meut par son esprit et par sa volonté divine, et qui les fait opérer en quelque façon divinement: “Puisque celui,” dit l’Apôtre, “qui s’unit au Seigneur, devient un même esprit avec lui” (1 Cor. vi. 17). Il est donc véritable que les opérations de l’âme, étant unies totalement à Dieu, sont toutes divines.’—Montée du Carmel, liv. III. ch. i.

Note to page 192.

La Nuit Obscure, liv. II. ch. xvii. xviii.:—‘L’esprit malin ne peut connaître ce qui se passe dans la volonté que par les opérations de ces puissances. Ainsi, plus les communications de Dieu son spirituelles, intérieures, et éloignées des sens, moins il peut découvrir et les pénétrer’.—P. 621.

Evil angels may counterfeit those supernatural communications which are vouchsafed through the agency of the good. But the infused passive contemplation, in which neither the understanding, the imagination, nor the sense, exercise their representative office, is secret and safe. ‘Quand Dieu la (l’âme) comble immédiatement par lui-même de ses grâces spirituelles, elle se dérobe entièrement à la vue de son adversaire, parce que Dieu, qui est son souverain Seigneur, demeure en elle, et ni les bons ni les mauvais anges ne peuvent y avoir entrée, ni découvrir les communications intimes et secrètes qui se font entre Dieu et l’âme. Elles sont toutes divines, elles sont infiniment élevées, elles sont en quelque sorte les sacrés attouchements des deux extrémités qui se trouvent entre Dieu et l’âme dans leur union: et c’est là où l’âme reçoit plus de biens spirituels qu’en tous les autres degrés de la contemplation (Cant. I. 1). C’est aussi ce que l’épouse demandait, quand elle priait l’Epoux divin de lui donner un saint baiser de sa bouche’.—Chap. xxiii. p. 623.

Thus, this culminating point of negation is at least, to some extent, a safeguard. The extinction of knowledge, by confining ourselves to the incomprehensible (Lettres Spirituelles, p. 724), and of joy, by renouncing spiritual delights, the refusal to entertain any extraordinary manifestations that assume a definite form or purport, does at the same time shut out all that region of visionary hallucination in which many mystics have passed their days. It is indisputably true that the more the mystic avoids, rather than craves, the excitements of imagination, sentiment, and miracle, the safer must he be from the delusions to which he is exposed, if not by the juggle of lying spirits, by the fever of his own distempered brain. No one who obeys John’s great maxim, ‘Il ne faut pas voyager pour voir, mais pour ne pas voir,’ will trouble the holy darkness of his church by any erratic novelties of light. Indeed, against such danger careful provision is made by that law which is with him the sine quâ non of mystical progress,—Ne regardez jamais votre supérieur, quel qu’il soit, que comme Dieu même, puisqu’il vous est donné comme lieutenant de Dieu.’—Précautions Spirituelles, p. 734.

Footnote 300:

His exhortations here carry ascetic self-abnegation far beyond the Quietist indifference of Fénélon or Madame Guyon. They were satisfied—he, always, and she throughout her later life—to seek a state of calm, to hail joy or sorrow alike, with the trustful equanimity of perfect resignation. John is too violent—too much enamoured of miseries, to await the will of Providence. His ambition will command events, and make them torments.

‘Au reste, le meilleur moyen, le plus méritoire et le plus propre pour acquérir les vertus; le moyen, dis-je, le plus sûr pour mortifier la joie, l’espérance, la crainte et la douleur, est de se porter toujours aux choses non pas les plus faciles, mais les plus difficiles; non pas les plus savoureuses, mais les plus insipides; non pas les plus agréables, mais les plus désagréables; non pas à celles qui consolent, mais à celles qui causent de la peine; non pas aux plus grandes, mais aux plus petites; non pas aux plus sublimes et aux plus précieuses, mais aux plus basses et aux plus méprisables. Il faut enfin désirer et rechercher ce qu’il y a de pire, et non ce qu’il y a de meilleur, afin de se mettre, pour l’amour de Jésus Christ, dans la privation de toutes les choses du monde, et d’entrer dans l’esprit d’une nudité parfaite....

‘Premièrement, il faut que celui qui veut réprimer cette passion tâche de faire les choses qui tournent à son déshonneur, et il aura soin de se faire mépriser aussi par le prochain.

‘Secondement, il dira lui-même et fera dire aux autres les choses qui lui attirent du mépris.’—Montée du Carmel, liv. II. ch. xiii.

Footnote 301:

Dionysius is very clearly followed into his darkness in La Montée du Carmel, liv. II. chap. viii.; and his Hierarchies reappear in La Nuit Obscure, liv. II. ch. xii.

Footnote 302:

La Nuit Obscure, liv. II. ch. iv.; et passim.

Footnote 303:

This first Night is treated of at length in the first book of the Montée du Carmel, and in the first of the Nuit Obscure. The supernatural sensuous enjoyments, alluded to, are described in the Montée du Carmel, liv. II. ch. xi. They are placed in the second Night,—the compensation not taking place immediately; and their recipient is on no account to rely on them, or desire their continuance (p. 444). By ‘sense,’ John understands, not the body merely, but the least disorder of the passions, and all those imperfections so common to beginners which arise from an undue eagerness for religious enjoyments, such, for example, as what he calls spiritual avarice, spiritual luxury, spiritual gourmandise, &c.

Footnote 304:

See Note on p. 195.

Footnote 305:

Montée du Carmel, liv. II. ch. xxv.-xxxii.

Footnote 306:

Ibid. ch. viii. and vi.

Footnote 307:

Ibid. ch. xvii. and liv. III. ch. xii.

Footnote 308:

What a scope for the indignant eloquence of Bossuet, had Fénélon proclaimed as possible such a sudden equipment with all imaginable virtues as this:—Quelques-unes de ces connaissances et de ces touches intérieures que Dieu répand dans l’âme l’enrichissent de telle sorte qu’une seule suffit, non-seulement pour la délivrer tout d’un coup des imperfections qu’elle n’avait pu vaincre durant tout le cours de sa vie, mais aussi pour l’orner des vertus chrétiennes et des dons divins.—Montée du Carmel, liv. II. ch. xxvi. p. 484.

Footnote 309:

In the chapter just cited, John says expressly, ‘Elle ne saurait cependant s’élever à ces connaissances et à ces touches divines par sa co-opération,’ and describes these gifts as coming from God, ‘subitement et sans attendre le consentement de la volonté.’—P. 485. So again, quite as strongly, liv. II. chap. xi. p. 445. He discountenances the attempt to seek perfection by the ‘voies surnaturelles,’ yet his books are an introduction to the mystical evening, and a guide through the mystical midnight.

Footnote 310:

La Nuit Obscure, liv. II. ch. ix.; especially the passage cited in note on p. 195.

Footnote 311:

This night occupies the third book of the Montée du Carmel.

Footnote 312:

See Note on p. 196.

Footnote 313:

See second Note on p. 196.

Footnote 314:

See the life of the saint in Alban Butler, Nov. 24.

BOOK THE TENTH QUIETISM.

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Chapter I

Love! if thy destined sacrifice am I, Come, slay thy victim, and prepare thy fires; Plunged in thy depths of mercy let me die The death which every soul that lives desires!

MADAME GUYON.

‘Do you remember,’ said Atherton to Willoughby, when he had called to see him one morning, ‘the hunt we once had after that passage in Jeremy Taylor, about Bishop Ivo’s adventure? Coleridge relates the story without saying exactly where it is, and his daughter states in a note that she had been unable to find the place in Taylor.’

‘I recollect it perfectly; and we discovered it, I think, in the first part of his sermon On the Mercy of the Divine Judgments. Ivo, going on an embassy for St. Louis, meets by the way a grave, sad woman, doesn’t he?—with fire in one hand, and water in the other; and when he inquires what these symbols may mean, she answers, “My purpose is with fire to burn Paradise, and with my water to quench the flames of hell, that men may serve God without the incentives of hope and fear, and purely for the love of God.”

‘Well, Gower has painted her portrait for us,—Queen Quietude, he calls her: and it is to be hung up here over my chimney-piece, by the next evening we meet together.’

* * * * *

The evening came. Atherton was to read a paper on ‘Madame Guyon and the Quietist Controversy,’ and Gower was to exhibit and explain his allegorical picture.

This painting represented a female figure, simply clad in sombre garments, sitting on a fragment of rock at the summit of a high hill. On her head hung a garland, half untwined, from neglect, which had been fantastically woven of cypress, bound about with heart’s-ease. Many flowers of the heart’s-ease had dropped off, withered; some were lying unheeded in her lap. Her face was bent downward; its expression perfectly calm, and the cast of sadness it wore rather recorded a past, than betrayed a present sorrow. Her eyes were fixed pensively, and without seeming to see them, on the thin hands which lay folded on her knees. No anxious effort of thought contracted that placid brow; no eager aspiration lifted those meekly-drooping eyelids.

At her feet lay, on her right, the little brazier in which she had carried her fire, still emitting its grey curls of smoke; and, on her left, the overturned water-urn—a Fortunatus-purse of water,—from whose silver hollow an inexhaustible stream welled out, and leaping down, was lost to sight among the rocks.

Behind her lay two wastes, stretching from east to west. The vast tracts, visible from her far-seeing mountain, were faintly presented in the distance of the picture. But they were never looked upon; her back was toward them; they belonged to a past never remembered. In the east stretched level lands, covered far as the eye could reach with cold grey inundation. Here and there coal-black ridges and dots indicated the highest grounds still imperfectly submerged; and in some places clouds of steam, water-spouts, and jets of stones and mire,—even boulders of rock, hurled streaming out of the waters into the air,—betrayed the last struggles of the Fire-Kingdom with the invasion of those illimitable tides. So have her enchantments slain the Giant of Fire, and laid him to rest under a water-pall. The place of dolours and of endless burning—so populous with Sorrows—is to be a place of great waters, where the slow vacant waves of the far-glittering reaches will come and go among the channels and the pools, and not even the bittern shall be there, with his foot to print the ooze, with his wing to shadow the sleeping shallows, with his cry to declare it all a desolation.

In the western background, the saintly art of Queen Quietude has made a whole burnt-offering of the cedar shades, and flowery labyrinths, and angel-builded crystal domes of Paradise. Most fragrant holocaust that ever breathed against the sky! Those volumes of cloud along the west, through which the sun is going down with dimmed and doubtful lustre (as though his had been the hand which put the torch to such a burning)—they are heavy with spicy odours. Such sweet wonders of the Eden woodlands cannot but give out sweetness in their dying. The heavens grow dusk and slumbrous with so much incense. A dreamy faintness from the laden air weighs down the sense. It seems time to sleep—for us, for all nature, to sleep, weary of terrestrial grossness and of mortal limitation,—to sleep, that all may awake, made new; and so, transformed divinely to the first ideal, have divine existence only, and God be all and in all. For God is love, and when hope and fear are dead, then love is all.

Somewhat thus did Gower describe his picture; whereon, in truth, he had expended no little art,—such a haze of repose, and likewise of unreality, had he contrived to throw over this work of fancy; and such a tone had he given, both to the work of the fire on the one side, and to that of the water on the other. The fire did not seem a cruel fire, nor the water an inhospitable water. Golden lines of light from the sun, and rose-red reflections from clouds whose breasts were feathered with fire, rested on the heads of the waves, where the great flood lay rocking. The very ruins of Paradise,—those charred tree-trunks—those dusty river-beds—that shrivelled boskage and white grass,—did not look utterly forlorn. Some of the glassy walls still stood, shining like rubies in the sunset, and glittering at their basements and their gateways with solid falls and pools of gold and silver, where their rich adornment had run down molten to their feet. The Destroyer was the Purifier; and the waiting sigh for renewal was full of trust.

‘A better frontispiece,’ said Atherton, ‘I could not have for my poor paper. I might have been raised to a less prosaic strain, and omitted some less relevant matter, had I been able to place your picture before me while writing. For upon this question of disinterested love, and so of quietude, our mysticism now mainly turns. With Fénélon and Madame Guyon, mysticism hovers no longer on the confines of pantheism. It deals less with mere abstractions. It is less eager to have everything which is in part done away, that the perfect may come, even while we are here. It is more patient and lowly, and will oftener use common means. Its inner light is not arrogant—for submissive love is that light; and it flames forth with no pretension to special revelations and novel gospels; neither does it construct any inspired system of philosophy. It is less feverishly ecstatic, less grossly theurgic, than in the lower forms of its earlier history. Comparative health is indicated by the fact that it aspires chiefly to a state of continuous resignation,—covets less starts of transport and instantaneous transformations. It seeks, rather, a long and even reach of trustful calm, which shall welcome joy and sorrow with equal mind,—shall live in the present, moment by moment, passive and dependent on the will of the Well-Beloved.

WILLOUGHBY. With Madame Guyon, too, I think the point of the old antithesis about which the mystics have so much to say is shifted;—I mean that the contrast lies, with her, not between Finite and Infinite—the finite Affirmation, the infinite Negation,—between sign and thing signified—between mode and modelessness—mediate and immediate,—but simply between God and Self.

ATHERTON. And so mysticism grows somewhat more clear, and reduces itself to narrower compass.

GOWER. And, just as it does so, is condemned by Rome.

ATHERTON. No doubt the attempt to reach an unattainable disinterestedness was less dangerous and less unwholesome than the strain after superhuman knowledge and miraculous vision.

MRS. ATHERTON. I have just opened on one of her verses in Cowper here, which exactly expresses what Mr. Willoughby was suggesting:—

The love of Thee flows just as much As that of ebbing self subsides; Our hearts, their scantiness is such, Bear not the conflict of two rival tides.

Stay; here is one I marked, which goes farther still. It is an allegorical poem. Love has bidden her embark, and then withdraws the vessel,—leaves her floating on the rushes and water-flowers, and spreads his wings for flight, heedless of her cries and prayers. At last she says,—

Be not angry; I resign Henceforth all my will to thine: I consent that thou depart, Though thine absence breaks my heart; Go then, and for ever too; All is right that thou wilt do.

This was just what Love intended, He was now no more offended; Soon as I became a child, Love returned to me and smiled: Never strife shall more betide ’Twixt the bridegroom and his bride.

ATHERTON. Yes, this is the pure love, the holy indifference of Quietism.

WILLOUGHBY. May not this imaginary surrender of eternal happiness—or, at least, the refusal to cherish ardent anticipations of heaven, really invigorate our spiritual nature, by concentrating our religion on a present salvation from sin?

ATHERTON. I think it possibly may, where contemplation of heaven is the resource of spiritual indolence or weariness in well-doing,—where the mind is prone to look forward to the better world, too much as a place of escape from the painstaking, and difficulty, and discipline of time. But where the hope of heaven is of the true sort—to put it out of sight is grievously to weaken, instead of strengthening, our position. I think we should all find, if we tried, or were unhappily forced to try, the experiment of sustaining ourselves in a religion that ignored the future, that we were lamentably enfeebled in two ways. First of all, by the loss of a support—that heart and courage which the prospect of final victory gives to every combatant; and then, secondly, by the immense drain of mental energy involved in the struggle necessary to reconcile ourselves to that loss. There can be no struggle so exhaustive as this, for it is against our nature,—not as sin has marred (so Madame Guyon thought), but as God has made it. Fearful must be the wear and tear of our religious being, in its vital functions,—and this, not to win, but to abandon an advantage. ‘He that hath this hope purifieth himself.’ So far from being able to dispense with it, we find in the hope of salvation, the helmet of our Christian armour. It is no height of Christian heroism, but presumption rather, to encounter, bare-headed, the onslaughts of sin and sorrow—even though the sword of the Spirit may shine naked in our right hand. But we should, at the same time, remember that our celestial citizenship is realised by present heavenly-mindedness:—a height and purity of temper, however, which grows most within as we have the habit of humbly regarding that kingdom as a place prepared for us. We should not limit our foretastes of heaven to intervals of calm. We may often be growing most heavenly amid scenes most unlike heaven.

WILLOUGHBY. In persecution, for example.

ATHERTON. We should not think that we catch its glory only in happy moments of contemplation, though such musing may well have its permitted place. Let us say also that every victory over love of ease, over discontent, over the sluggish coldness of the heart, over reluctance to duty, over unkindly tempers, is in fact to us an earnest and foretaste of that heaven, where we shall actively obey with glad alacrity, where we shall be pleased in all things with all that pleases God, where glorious powers shall be gloriously developed, undeadened by any lethargy, unhindered by any painful limitation; and where that Love, which here has to contend for very life, and to do battle for its rightful enjoyments, shall possess us wholly, and rejoice and reign among all the fellowships of the blest throughout the everlasting day.

GOWER. But all this while we have been very rude. Here is Madame Guyon come to tell us her story, and we have kept her, I don’t know how long, standing at the door.

KATE. Yes, let us hear your paper first, Mr. Atherton: we can talk afterwards, you know.

So Atherton began to read.

QUIETISM.

Part I.—Madame Guyon.

I.

Jeanne Marie Bouvières de la Mothe was born on Easter-eve, April 13th, 1648, at Montargis. Her sickly childhood was distinguished by precocious imitations of that religious life which was held in honour by every one around her. She loved to be dressed in the habit of a little nun. When little more than four years old, she longed for martyrdom. Her school-fellows placed her on her knees on a white cloth, flourished a sabre over her head, and told her to prepare for the stroke. A shout of triumphant laughter followed the failure of the child’s courage. She was neglected by her mother, and knocked about by a spoiled brother. When not at school, she was the pet or the victim of servants. She began to grow irritable from ill-treatment, and insincere from fear. When ten years old, she found a Bible in her sick room, and read it, she says, from morning to night, committing to memory the historical parts. Some of the writings of St. Francis de Sales, and the Life of Madame de Chantal, fell in her way. The latter work proved a powerful stimulant. There she read of humiliations and austerities numberless, of charities lavished with a princely munificence, of visions enjoyed and miracles wrought in honour of those saintly virtues, and of the intrepidity with which the famous enthusiast wrote with a red-hot iron on her bosom, the characters of the holy name Jesus. The girl of twelve years old was bent on copying these achievements on her little scale. She relieved, taught, and waited on the poor; and, for lack of the red-hot iron or the courage, sewed on to her breast with a large needle a piece of paper containing the name of Christ. She even forged a letter to secure her admission to a conventual establishment as a nun. The deceit was immediately detected; but the attempt shows how much more favourable was the religious atmosphere in which she grew up, to the prosperity of convents than to the inculcation of truth.

With ripening years, religion gave place to vanity. Her handsome person and brilliant conversational powers fitted her to shine in society. She began to love dress, and feel jealous of rival beauties. Like St. Theresa, at the same age, she sat up far into the night, devouring romances. Her autobiography records her experience of the mischievous effects of those tales of chivalry and passion. When nearly sixteen, it was arranged that she should marry the wealthy M. Guyon. This gentleman, whom she had seen but three days before her marriage, was twenty-two years older than herself.

The faults she had were of no very grave description, but her husband’s house was destined to prove for several years a pitiless school for their correction. He lived with his mother, a vulgar and hard-hearted woman. Her low and penurious habits were unaffected by their wealth; and in the midst of riches, she was happiest scolding in the kitchen about some farthing matter. She appears to have hated Madame Guyon with all the strength of her narrow mind. M. Guyon loved his wife after his selfish sort. If she was ill, he was inconsolable; if any one spoke against her, he flew into a passion; yet, at the instigation of his mother, he was continually treating her with harshness. An artful servant girl, who tended his gouty leg, was permitted daily to mortify and insult his wife. Madame Guyon had been accustomed at home to elegance and refinement,—beneath her husband’s roof she found politeness contemned and rebuked as pride. When she spoke, she had been listened to with attention,—now she could not open her mouth without contradiction. She was charged with presuming to show them how to talk, reproved for disputatious forwardness, and rudely silenced. She could never go to see her parents without having bitter speeches to bear on her return. They, on their part, reproached her with unnatural indifference towards her own family for the sake of her new connexions. The ingenious malignity of her mother-in-law filled every day with fresh vexations. The high spirit of the young girl was completely broken. She had already gained a reputation for cleverness and wit—now she sat nightmared in company, nervous, stiff, and silent, the picture of stupidity. At every assemblage of their friends she was marked out for some affront, and every visitor at the house was instructed in the catalogue of her offences. Sad thoughts would come—how different might all this have been had she been suffered to select some other suitor! But it was too late. The brief romance of her life was gone indeed. There was no friend into whose heart she could pour her sorrows. Meanwhile, she was indefatigable in the discharge of every duty,—she endeavoured by kindness, by cheerful forbearance, by returning good for evil, to secure some kinder treatment—she was ready to cut out her tongue that she might make no passionate reply—she reproached herself bitterly for the tears she could not hide. But these coarse, hard natures were not so to be won. Her magnanimity surprised, but did not soften minds to which it was utterly incomprehensible.[315]

Her best course would have been self-assertion and war to the very utmost. She would have been justified in demanding her right to be mistress in her own house—in declaring it incompatible with the obligations binding upon either side, that a third party should be permitted to sow dissension between a husband and his wife—in putting her husband, finally, to the choice between his wife and his mother. M. Guyon is the type of a large class of men. They stand high in the eye of the world—and not altogether undeservedly—as men of principle. But their domestic circle is the scene of cruel wrongs from want of reflection, from a selfish, passionate inconsiderateness. They would be shocked at the charge of an act of barbarity towards a stranger, but they will inflict years of mental distress on those most near to them, for want of decision, self-control, and some conscientious estimate of what their home duties truly involve. Had the obligations he neglected, the wretchedness of which he was indirectly the author, been brought fairly before the mind of M. Guyon, he would probably have determined on the side of justice, and a domestic revolution would have been the consequence. But Madame Guyon conceived herself bound to suffer in silence. Looking back on those miserable days, she traced a father’s care in the discipline she endured. Providence had transplanted Self from a garden where it expanded under love and praise, to a highway where every passing foot might trample it in the dust.

A severe illness brought her more than once to the brink of the grave. She heard of her danger with indifference, for life had no attraction. Heavy losses befel the family—she could feel no concern. To end her days in a hospital was even an agreeable anticipation. Poverty and disgrace could bring no change which would not be more tolerable than her present suffering. She laboured, with little success, to find comfort in religious exercises. She examined herself rigidly, confessed with frequency, strove to subdue all care about her personal appearance, and while her maid arranged her hair—how, she cared not—was lost in the study of Thomas à Kempis. At length she consulted a Franciscan, a holy man, who had just emerged from a five years’ solitude. ‘Madame,’ said he, ‘you are disappointed and perplexed because you seek without what you have within. Accustom yourself to seek God in your heart, and you will find Him.’

II.

These words of the old Franciscan embody the response which has been uttered in every age by the oracle of mysticism. It has its truth and its falsehood, as men understand it. There is a legend of an artist, who was about to carve from a piece of costly sandal-wood an image of the Madonna; but the material was intractable—his hand seemed to have lost its skill—he could not approach his ideal. When about to relinquish his efforts in despair, a voice in a dream bade him shape the figure from the oak-block which was about to feed his hearth. He obeyed, and produced a masterpiece. This story represents the truth which mysticism upholds when it appears as the antagonist of superstitious externalism. The materials of religious happiness lie, as it were, near at hand—among affections and desires which are homely, common, and of the fireside. Let the right direction, the heavenly influence, be received from without; and heaven is regarded with the love of home, and home sanctified by the hope of heaven. The far-fetched costliness of outward works—the restless, selfish bargaining with asceticism and with priestcraft for a priceless heaven, can never redeem and renew a soul to peace. But mysticism has not stopped here; it takes a step farther, and that step is false. It would seclude the soul too much from the external; and, to free it from a snare, removes a necessary help. Like some overshadowing tree, it hides the rising plant from the force of storms, but it also intercepts the appointed sunshine—it protects, but it deprives—and beneath its boughs hardy weeds have grown more vigorously than precious grain. Removing, more or less, the counterpoise of the letter, in its zeal for the spirit, it promotes an intense and morbid self-consciousness. Roger North tells us that when he and his brother stood on the top of the Monument, it was difficult for them to persuade themselves that their weight would not throw down the building. The dizzy elevation of the mystic produces sometimes a similar overweaning sense of personality.

Often instead of rising above the infirmities of our nature, and the common laws of life, the mystic becomes the sport of the idlest phantasy, the victim of the most humiliating reaction. The excited and overwrought temperament mistakes every vibration of the fevered nerves for a manifestation from without; as in the solitude, the silence, and the glare of a great desert, travellers have seemed to hear distinctly the church bells of their native village. In such cases an extreme susceptibility of the organ, induced by peculiarities of climate, gives to a mere conception or memory the power of an actual sound; and, in a similar way, the mystic has often both tempted and enraptured himself—his own breath has made both the ‘airs from heaven,’ and the ‘blasts from hell;’ and the attempt to annihilate Self has ended at last in leaving nothing but Self behind. When the tide of enthusiasm has ebbed, and the channel has become dry, simply because humanity cannot long endure a strain so excessive, then that magician and master of legerdemain, the Fancy, is summoned to recal, to eke out, or to interpret the mystical experience; then that fantastic acrobat, Affectation, is admitted to play its tricks—just as, when the waters of the Nile are withdrawn, the canals of Cairo are made the stage on which the jugglers exhibit their feats of skill to the crowds on either bank.

III.

To return to Madame Guyon. From the hour of that interview with the Franciscan she was a mystic. The secret of the interior life flashed upon her in a moment. She had been starving in the midst of fulness; God was near, not far off; the kingdom of heaven was within her. The love of God took possession of her soul with an inexpressible happiness. Beyond question, her heart apprehended, in that joy, the great truth that God is love—that He is more ready to forgive, than we to ask forgiveness—that He is not an austere being whose regard is to be purchased by rich gifts, tears, and penance. This emancipating, sanctifying belief became the foundation of her religion. She raised on this basis of true spirituality a mystical superstructure, in which there was some hay and stubble, but the corner stone had first been rightly laid, never to be removed from its place.

Prayer, which had before been so difficult, was now delightful and indispensable; hours passed away like moments—she could scarcely cease from praying. Her trials seemed great no longer; her inward joy consumed, like a fire, the reluctance, the murmur, and the sorrow, which had their birth in self. A spirit of confiding peace, a sense of rejoicing possession, pervaded all her days. God was continually present with her, and she seemed completely yielded up to God. She appeared to feel herself, and to behold all creatures, as immersed in the gracious omnipresence of the Most High. In her adoring contemplation of the Divine presence, she found herself frequently unable to employ any words, or to pray for any particular blessings.[316] She was then little more than twenty years of age. The ardour of her devotion would not suffer her to rest even here. It appeared to her that self was not yet sufficiently suppressed. There were some things she chose as pleasant, other things she avoided as painful. She was possessed with the notion that every choice which can be referred to self is selfish, and therefore criminal.

On this principle, Æsop’s traveller, who gathered his cloak about him in the storm, and relinquished it in the sunshine, should be stigmatized as a selfish man, because he thought only of his own comfort, and did not remember at the moment his family, his country, or his Maker. It is not regard for self which makes us selfish, but regard for self to the exclusion of due regard for others. But the zeal of Madame Guyon blinded her to distinctions such as these. She became filled with an insatiable desire of suffering.[317] She resolved to force herself to what she disliked, and deny herself what was gratifying, that the mortified senses might at last have no choice whatever. She displayed the most extraordinary power of will in her efforts to annihilate her will. Every day she took the discipline with scourges pointed with iron. She tore her flesh with brambles, thorns, and nettles. Her rest was almost destroyed by the pain she endured. She was in very delicate health, continually falling ill, and could eat scarcely anything. Yet she forced herself to eat what was most nauseous to her; she often kept wormwood in her mouth, and put coloquintida in her food, and when she walked she placed stones in her shoes. If a tooth ached she would bear it without seeking a remedy; when it ached no longer, she would go and have it extracted. She imitated Madame Chantal in dressing the sores of the poor, and ministering to the wants of the sick. On one occasion she found that she could not seek the indulgence offered by her Church for remitting some of the pains of purgatory. At that time she felt no doubt concerning the power of the priest to grant such absolution, but she thought it wrong to desire to escape any suffering. She was afraid of resembling those mercenary souls, who are afraid not so much of displeasing God, as of the penalties attached to sin. She was too much in earnest for visionary sentimentalism. Her efforts manifest a serious practical endeavour after that absolute disinterestedness which she erroneously thought both attainable and enjoined. She was far from attaching any expiatory value to these acts of voluntary mortification, they were a means to an end. When she believed that end attained, in the entire death of self, she relinquished them.

IV.

Situated as Madame Guyon was now, her mind had no resource but to collapse upon itself, and the feelings so painfully pent up became proportionately vehement. She found a friend in one Mère Granger; but her she could see seldom, mostly by stealth. An ignorant confessor joined her mother-in-law and husband in the attempt to hinder her from prayer and religious exercises. She endeavoured in everything to please her husband, but he complained that she loved God so much she had no love left for him. She was watched day and night; she dared not stir from her mother-in-law’s chamber or her husband’s bedside. If she took her work apart to the window, they followed her there, to see that she was not in prayer. When her husband went abroad, he forbade her to pray in his absence. The affections even of her child were taken from her, and the boy was taught to disobey and insult his mother. Thus utterly alone, Madame Guyon, while apparently engaged in ordinary matters, was constantly in a state of abstraction; her mind was elsewhere, rapt in devout contemplation. She was in company without hearing a word that was said. She went out into the garden to look at the flowers, and could bring back no account of them, the eye of her reverie could mark nothing actually visible. When playing at piquet, to oblige her husband, this ‘interior attraction’ was often more powerfully felt than even when at church. In her Autobiography she describes her experience as follows:—

‘The spirit of prayer was nourished and increased from their contrivances and endeavours to disallow me any time for practising it. I loved without motive or reason for loving; for nothing passed in my head, but much in the innermost of my soul. I thought not about any recompence, gift, or favour, or anything which regards the lover. The Well-beloved was the only object which attracted my heart wholly to Himself. I could not contemplate His attributes. I knew nothing else but to love and to suffer. Oh, ignorance more truly learned than any science of the Doctors, since it so well taught me Jesus Christ crucified, and brought me to be in love with His holy cross! In its beginning I was attracted with so much force, that it seemed as if my head was going to join my heart. I found that insensibly my body bent in spite of me. I did not then comprehend from whence it came; but have learned since, that as all passed in the will, which is the sovereign of the powers, that attracted the others after it, and reunited them in God, their divine centre and sovereign happiness. And as these powers were then unaccustomed to be united, it required the more violence to effect that union. Wherefore it was the more perceived. Afterwards it became so strongly riveted as to seem to be quite natural. This was so strong that I could have wished to die, in order to be inseparably united without any interstice to Him who so powerfully attracted my heart. As all passed in the will, the imagination and the understanding being absorbed in it, in a union of enjoyment, I knew not what to say, having never read or heard of such a state as I experienced; for, before this, I had known nothing of the operations of God in souls. I had only read Philothea (written by St. Francis de Sales), with the Imitation of Christ (by Thomas à Kempis), and the Holy Scriptures; also the Spiritual Combat, which mentions none of these things.’[318]

In this extract she describes strange physical sensations as accompanying her inward emotion. The intense excitement of the soul assumes, in her over-strained and secluded imagination, the character of a corporeal seizure. The sickly frame, so morbidly sensitive, appears to participate in the supernatural influences communicated to the spirit. On a subsequent occasion, she speaks of herself as so oppressed by the fulness of the Divine manifestations imparted to her, as to be compelled to loosen her dress. More than once some of those who sat next her imagined that they perceived a certain marvellous efflux of grace proceeding from her to themselves. She believed that many persons, for whom she was interceding with great fervour, were sensible at the time of an extraordinary gracious influence instantaneously vouchsafed, and that her spirit communicated mysteriously, ‘in the Lord,’ with the spirits of those dear to her when far away. She traced a special intervention of Providence in the fact, that she repeatedly ‘felt a strong draught to the door’ just when it was necessary to go out to receive a secret letter from her friend, Mère Granger; that the rain should have held up precisely when she was on her road to or from mass; and that at the very intervals when she was able to steal out to hear it, some priest was always found performing, or ready to perform the service, though at a most unusual hour.[319]

V.

Imaginary as all this may have been, the Church of Rome, at least, had no right to brand with the stigma of extravagance any such transference of the spiritual to the sensuous, of the metaphysical to the physical. The fancies of Madame Guyon in this respect are innocent enough in comparison with the monstrosities devised by Romish marvel-mongers to exalt her saints withal. St. Philip Neri was so inflamed with love to God as to be insensible to all cold, and burned with such a fire of devotion that his body, divinely feverish, could not be cooled by exposure to the wildest winter night. For two-and-fifty years he was the subject of a supernatural palpitation, which kept his bed and chair, and everything moveable about him, in a perpetual tremble. For that space of time his breast was miraculously swollen to the thickness of a fist above his heart. On a post-mortem examination of the holy corpse, it was found that two of the ribs had been broken, to allow the sacred ardour of his heart more room to play! The doctors swore solemnly that the phenomenon could be nothing less than a miracle. A divine hand had thus literally ‘enlarged the heart’ of the devotee.[320] St. Philip enjoyed, with many other saints, the privilege of being miraculously elevated into the air by the fervour of his heavenward aspirations. The Acta Sanctorum relates how Ida of Louvain—seized with an overwhelming desire to present her gifts with the Wise Men to the child Jesus—received, on the eve of the Three Kings, the distinguished favour of being permitted to swell to a terrific size, and then gradually to return to her original dimensions. On another occasion, she was gratified by being thrown down in the street in an ecstacy, and enlarging so that her horror-stricken attendant had to embrace her with all her might to keep her from bursting. The noses of eminent saints have been endowed with so subtile a sense that they have detected the stench of concealed sins, and enjoyed, as a literal fragrance, the well-known odour of sanctity. St. Philip Neri was frequently obliged to hold his nose and turn away his head when confessing very wicked people. In walking the streets of some depraved Italian town, the poor man must have endured all the pains of Coleridge in Cologne, where, he says,

‘I counted two-and-seventy stenches, All well-defined, and several stinks!’

Maria of Oignys received what theurgic mysticism calls the gift of jubilation. For three days and nights upon the point of death, she sang without remission her ecstatic swan-song, at the top of a voice whose hoarseness was miraculously healed. She felt as though the wing of an angel were spread upon her breast, thrilling her heart with the rapture, and pouring from her lips the praises, of the heavenly world. With the melodious modulation of an inspired recitative, she descanted on the mysteries of the Trinity and the incarnation—improvised profound expositions of the Scripture—invoked the saints, and interceded for her friends.[321] A nun who visited Catharina Ricci in her ecstasy, saw with amazement her face transformed into the likeness of the Redeemer’s countenance. St. Hildegard, in the enjoyment and description of her visions, and in the utterance of her prophecies, was inspired with a complete theological terminology hitherto unknown to mortals. A glossary of the divine tongue was long preserved among her manuscripts at Wiesbaden.[322] It is recorded in the life of St. Veronica of Binasco, that she received the miraculous gift of tears in a measure so copious, that the spot where she knelt appeared as though a jug of water had been overset there. She was obliged to have an earthen vessel ready in her cell to receive the supernatural efflux, which filled it frequently to the weight of several Milan pounds! Ida of Nivelles, when in an ecstasy one day, had it revealed to her that a dear friend was at the same moment in the same condition. The friend also was simultaneously made aware that Ida was immersed in the same abyss of divine light with herself. Thenceforward they were as one soul in the Lord, and the Virgin Mary appeared to make a third in the saintly fellowship. Ida was frequently enabled to communicate with spiritual personages, without words, after the manner of angelic natures. On one occasion, when at a distance from a priest to whom she was much attached, both she and the holy man were entranced at the same time; and, when wrapt to heaven, he beheld her in the presence of Christ, at whose command she communicated to him, by a spiritual kiss, a portion of the grace with which she herself had been so richly endowed. To Clara of Montfaucon allusion has already been made. In the right side of her heart was found, completely formed, a little figure of Christ upon the cross, about the size of a thumb. On the left, under what resembled the bloody cloth, lay the instruments of the passion—the crown of thorns, the nails, &c. So sharp was the miniature lance, that the Vicar-General Berengarius, commissioned to assist at the examination by the Bishop of Spoleto, pricked therewith his reverend finger. This marvel was surpassed in the eighteenth century by a miracle more piquant still. Veronica Giuliani caused a drawing to be made of the many forms and letters which she declared had been supernaturally modelled within her heart. To the exultation of the faithful—and the everlasting confusion of all Jews, Protestants, and Turks—a post-mortem examination disclosed the accuracy of her description, to the minutest point. There were the sacred initials in a large and distinct Roman character, the crown of thorns, two flames, seven swords, the spear, the reed, &c.—all arranged just as in the diagram she had furnished.[323] The diocese of Liège was edified, in the twelfth century, by seeing, in the person of the celebrated Christina Mirabilis, how completely the upward tendency of protracted devotion might vanquish the law of gravitation. So strongly was she drawn away from this gross earth, that the difficulty was to keep her on the ground. She was continually flying up to the tops of lonely towers and trees, there to enjoy a rapture with the angels, and a roost with the birds. In the frequency, the elevation, and the duration of her ascents into the air, she surpassed even the high-flown devotion of St. Peter of Alcantara, who was often seen suspended high above the fig-trees which overshadowed his hermitage at Badajos—his eyes upturned, his arms outspread—while the servant sent to summon him to dinner, gazed with open mouth, and sublunary cabbage cooled below. The limbs of Christina lost the rigidity, as her body lost the grossness, common to vulgar humanity. In her ecstasies she was contracted into the spherical form—her head was drawn inward and downward towards her breast, and she rolled up like a hedgehog. When her relatives wished to take and secure her, they had to employ a man to hunt her like a bird. Having started his game, he had a long run across country before he brought her down, in a very unsportsmanlike manner, by a stroke with his bludgeon which broke her shin. When a few miracles had been wrought to vindicate her aërostatic mission, she was allowed to fly about in peace.[324] She has occupied, ever since, the first place in the ornithology of Roman-catholic saintship. Such are a few of the specimens which might be collected in multitudes from Romanist records, showing how that communion has bestowed its highest favour on the most coarse and materialised apprehensions of spiritual truth. Extravagant inventions such as these—monstrous as the adventures of Baron Münchausen, without their wit—have been invested with the sanction and defended by the thunder of the Papal chair. Yet this very Church of Rome incarcerated Molinos and Madame Guyon as dangerous enthusiasts.

VI.

Madame Guyon had still some lessons to learn. On a visit to Paris, the glittering equipages of the park, and the gaieties of St. Cloud, revived the old love of seeing and being seen. During a tour in the provinces with her husband, flattering visits and graceful compliments everywhere followed such beauty, such accomplishments, and such virtue, with a delicate and intoxicating applause. Vanity—dormant, but not dead—awoke within her for the last time. She acknowledged, with bitter self-reproach, the power of the world, the weakness of her own resolves. In the spiritual desertion which ensued, she recognised the displeasure of her Lord, and was wretched. She applied to confessors—they were miserable comforters, all of them. They praised her while she herself was filled with self-loathing. She estimated the magnitude of her sins by the greatness of the favour which had been shown her. The bland worldliness of her religious advisers could not blind so true a heart, or pacify so wakeful a conscience. She found relief only in a repentant renewal of her self-dedication to the Saviour, in renouncing for ever the last remnant of confidence in any strength of her own.

It was about this period that she had a remarkable conversation with a beggar, whom she found upon a bridge, as, followed by her footman, she was walking one day to church. This singular mendicant refused her offered alms—spoke to her of God and divine things—and then of her own state, her devotion, her trials, and her faults. He declared that God required of her not merely to labour as others did to secure their salvation, that they might escape the pains of hell, but to aim at such perfection and purity in this life, as to escape those of purgatory. She asked him who he was. He replied, that he had formerly been a beggar, but now was such no more;—mingled with the stream of people, and she never saw him afterwards.[325]

The beauty of Madame Guyon had cost her tender conscience many a pang. She had wept and prayed over that secret love of display which had repeatedly induced her to mingle with the thoughtless amusements of the world. At four-and-twenty the virulence of the small-pox released her from that snare. M. Guyon was laid up with the gout. She was left, when the disorder seized her, to the tender mercies of her mother-in-law. That inhuman woman refused to allow any but her own physician to attend her, yet for him she would not send. The disease, unchecked, had reached its height, when a medical man, passing that way, happened to call at the house. Shocked at the spectacle Madame Guyon presented, he was proceeding at once to bleed her, expressing, in no measured terms, his indignation at the barbarity of such neglect. The mother-in-law would not hear of such a thing. He performed the operation in spite of her threats and invectives, leaving her almost beside herself with rage. That lancet saved the life of Madame Guyon, and disappointed the relative who had hoped to see her die. When at length she recovered, she refused to avail herself of the cosmetics generally used to conceal the ravages of the disorder. Throughout her suffering she had never uttered a murmur, or felt a fear. She had even concealed the cruelty of her mother-in-law. She said, that if God had designed her to retain her beauty, He would not have sent the scourge to remove it. Her friends expected to find her inconsolable—they heard her speak only of thankfulness and joy. Her confessor reproached her with spiritual pride. The affection of her husband was visibly diminished; yet the heart of Madame Guyon overflowed with joy. It appeared to her, that the God to whom she longed to be wholly given up had accepted her surrender, and was removing everything that might interpose between Himself and her.[326]

VII.

The experience of Madame Guyon, hitherto, had been such as to teach her the surrender of every earthly source of gratification or ground of confidence. Yet one more painful stage on the road to self-annihilation remained to be traversed. She must learn to give up cheerfully even spiritual pleasures. In the year 1674, according to the probable calculation of Mr. Upham, she was made to enter what she terms a state of desolation, which lasted, with little intermission, for nearly seven years.[327] All was emptiness, darkness, sorrow. She describes herself as cast down, like Nebuchadnezzar, from a throne of enjoyment, to live among the beasts. ‘Alas!’ she exclaimed, ‘is it possible that this heart, formerly all on fire, should now become like ice?’ The heavens were as brass, and shut out her prayers; horror and trembling took the place of tranquillity; hopelessly oppressed with guilt, she saw herself a victim destined for hell. In vain for her did the church doors open, the holy bells ring, the deep-voiced intonations of the priest arise and fall, the chanted psalm ascend through clouds of azure wandering incense. The power and the charm of the service had departed. Of what avail was music to a burning wilderness athirst for rain? Gladly would she have had recourse to the vow, to the pilgrimage, to the penance, to any extremity of self-torture. She felt the impotence of such remedies for such anguish. She had no ear for comfort, no eye for hope, not even a voice for complaint.

During this period the emotional element of religion in her mind appears to have suffered an almost entire suspension. Regarding the loss of certain feelings of delight as the loss of the divine favour, she naturally sank deeper and deeper in despondency. A condition by no means uncommon in ordinary Christian experience assumed, in her case, a morbid character. Our emotions may be chilled, or kindled, in ever-varying degrees, from innumerable causes. We must accustom ourselves to the habitual performance of duty, whether attended or not with feelings of a pleasurable nature. It is generally found that those powerful emotions of joy which attend, at first, the new and exalting consciousness of peace with God, subside after awhile. As we grow in religious strength and knowledge, a steady principle supplies their place. We are refreshed, from time to time, by seasons of heightened joy and confidence, but we cease to be dependent upon feeling. At the same time, there is nothing in Scripture to check our desire for retaining as constantly as possible a sober gladness, for finding duty delightful, and the ‘joy of the Lord’ our strength. These are the truths which the one-sided and unqualified expressions of Madame Guyon at once exaggerate and obscure.

During this dark interval M. Guyon died. His widow undertook the formidable task of settling his disordered affairs. Her brother gave her no assistance; her mother-in-law harassed and hindered to her utmost; yet Madame Guyon succeeded in arranging a chaos of papers, and bringing a hopeless imbroglio of business matters into order, with an integrity and a skill which excited universal admiration. She felt it was her duty; she believed that Divine assistance was vouchsafed for its discharge. Of business, she says, she knew as little as of Arabic; but she knew not what she could accomplish till she tried. Minds far more visionary than hers have evinced a still greater aptitude for practical affairs.

The 22nd of July, 1680, is celebrated by Madame Guyon as the happy era of her deliverance. A letter from La Combe was the instrument of a restoration as wonderful, in her eyes, as the bondage. This ecclesiastic had been first introduced by Madame Guyon into the path of mystical perfection. His name is associated with her own in the early history of the Quietist movement. He subsequently became her Director, but was always more her disciple than her guide. His admiration for her amounted to a passion. Incessant persecution and long solitary imprisonment combined, with devotional extravagance, to cloud with insanity at last an intellect never powerful. This feeble and affectionate soul perished, the victim of Quietism, and perhaps of love. It should not be forgotten, that before the inward condition of Madame Guyon changed thus remarkably for the better, her outward circumstances had undergone a similar improvement. She lived now in her own house, with her children about her. That Sycorax, her mother-in-law, dropped gall no longer into her daily cup of life. Domestic tormentors, worse than the goblins which buffeted St. Antony, assailed her peace no more. An outer sky grown thus serene, an air thus purified, may well have contributed to chase away the night of the soul, and to give to a few words of kindly counsel from La Combe the brightness of the day-star. Our simple-hearted enthusiast was not so absolutely indifferent as she thought herself to the changes of this transitory world.

VIII.

Madame Guyon had now triumphantly sustained the last of those trials, which, like the probation of the ancient mysteries, made the porch of mystical initiation a passage terrible with pain and peril. Henceforward, she is the finished Quietist: henceforward, when she relates her own experience, she describes Quietism. At times, when the children did not require her care, she would walk out into a neighbouring wood, and there, under the shade of the trees, amidst the singing of the birds, she now passed as many happy hours as she had known months of sorrow. Her own language will best indicate the thoughts which occupied this peaceful retirement, and exhibit the principle there deepened and matured. She says here in her Autobiography—

‘When I had lost all created supports, and even divine ones, I then found myself happily necessitated to fall into the pure divine, and to fall into it through all which seemed to remove me farther from it. In losing all the gifts, with all their supports, I found the Giver. Oh, poor creatures, who pass along all your time in feeding on the gifts of God, and think therein to be most favoured and happy, how I pity you if ye stop here, short of the true rest, and cease to go forward to God, through resignation of the same gifts! How many pass all their lives this way, and think highly of themselves therein! There are others who, being designed of God to die to themselves, yet pass all their time in a dying life, and in inward agonies, without ever entering into God through death and total loss, because they are always willing to retain something under plausible pretexts, and so never lose self to the whole extent of the designs of God. Wherefore, they never enjoy God in his fulness,—a loss that will not perfectly be known until another life.’[328]

She describes herself as having ceased from all self-originated action and choice. To her amazement and unspeakable happiness, it appeared as though all such natural movement existed no longer,—a higher power had displaced and occupied its room. ‘I even perceived no more (she continues) the soul which He had formerly conducted by His rod and His staff, because now He alone appeared to me, my soul having given up its place to Him. It seemed to me as if it was wholly and altogether passed into its God, to make but one and the same thing with Him; even as a little drop of water cast into the sea receives the qualities of the sea.’ She speaks of herself as now practising the virtues no longer as virtues—that is, not by separate and constrained efforts. It would have required effort not to practise them.[329]

Somewhat later she expresses herself as follows:—

‘The soul passing out of itself by dying to itself necessarily passes into its divine object. This is the law of its transition. When it passes out of self, which is limited, and therefore is not God, and consequently is evil, it necessarily passes into the unlimited and universal, which is God, and therefore is the true good. My own experience seemed to me to be a verification of this. My spirit, disenthralled from selfishness, became united with and lost in God, its Sovereign, who attracted it more and more to Himself. And this was so much the case, that I could seem to see and know God only, and not myself.... It was thus that my soul was lost in God, who communicated to it His qualities, having drawn it out of all that it had of its own.... O happy poverty, happy loss, happy nothing, which gives no less than God Himself in his own immensity,—no more circumscribed to the limited manner of the creation, but always drawing it out of that to plunge it wholly into His divine Essence. Then the soul knows that all the states of self-pleasing visions, of intellectual illuminations, of ecstasies and raptures, of whatever value they might once have been, are now rather obstacles than advancements; and that they are not of service in the state of experience which is far above them; because the state which has props or supports, which is the case with the merely illuminated and ecstatic state, rests in them in some degree, and has pain to lose them. But the soul cannot arrive at the state of which I am now speaking, without the loss of all such supports and helps.... The soul is then so submissive, and perhaps we may say so passive,—that is to say, is so disposed equally to receive from the hand of God either good or evil,—as is truly astonishing. It receives both the one and the other without any selfish emotions, letting them flow and be lost as they came.’[330]

These passages convey the substance of the doctrine which, illustrated and expressed in various ways, pervades all the writings of Madame Guyon. This is the principle adorned by the fancy of her Torrents and inculcated in the practical directions of her Short Method of Prayer. Such is the state to which Quietism proposes to conduct its votaries. In some places, she qualifies the strength of her expressions,—she admits that we are not at all times equally conscious of this absolute union of the soul with its centre,—the lower nature may not be always insensible to distress. But the higher, the inmost element of the soul is all the while profoundly calm, and recollection presently imparts a similar repose to the inferior nature. When the soul has thus passed, as she phrases it, out of the Nothing into the All, when its feet are set in ‘a large room’ (nothing less, according to her interpretation, than the compass of Infinity), ‘a substantial or essential word’ is spoken there. It is a continuous word—potent, ineffable, ever uttered without language. It is the immediate unchecked operation of resident Deity. What it speaks, it effects. It is blissful and mysterious as the language of heaven. With Madame Guyon, the events of Providence are God, and the decisions of the sanctified judgment respecting them are nothing less than the immediate voice of God in the soul. She compares the nature thus at rest in God to a tablet on which the divine hand writes,—it must be held perfectly still, else the characters traced there will be distorted or incomplete. In her very humility she verges on the audacity which arrogates inspiration. If she, passive and helpless, really acts no more, the impulses she feels, her words, her actions, must all bear the impress of an infallible divine sanction. It is easy to see that her speech and action—always well-meant, but frequently ill-judged,—were her own after all, though nothing of her own seemed left. She acknowledges that she was sometimes at a loss as to the course of duty. She was guided more than once by random passages of the Bible, and the casual expressions of others, somewhat after the fashion of the Sortes Virgilianæ and the omens of ancient Rome. Her knowledge of Scripture, the native power of her intellect, and the tenderness of her conscience, preserved her from pushing such a view of the inward light to its worst extreme.

IX.

The admixture of error in the doctrine which Madame Guyon was henceforward to preach with so much self-denying love, so much intrepid constancy, appears to us to lie upon the surface. The passages we have given convey, unquestionably, the idea of a practical substitution of God for the soul in the case of the perfectly sanctified. The soul within the soul is Deity. When all is desolate, silent, the divine Majesty arises, thinks, feels, and acts, within the transformed humanity. It is quite true that, as sanctification progresses, Christian virtue becomes more easy as the new habit gains strength. In many respects it is true, as Madame Guyon says, that effort would be requisite to neglect or violate certain duties or commands rather than to perform them. But this facility results from the constitution of our nature. We carry on the new economy within with less outcry, less labour, less confusion and resistance than we did when the revolution was recent, but we carry it on still—working with divine assistance. God works in man, but not instead of man. It is one thing to harmonize, in some measure, the human will with the divine, another to substitute divine volitions for the human. Every man has within him Conscience—the judge often bribed or clamoured down; Will—the marshal; Imagination—the poet; Understanding—the student; Desire—the merchant, venturing its store of affection, and gazing out on the future in search of some home-bound argosy of happiness. But all these powers are found untrue to their allegiance. The ermine—the baton—the song—the books—the merchandize, are at the service of a usurper—Sin. When the Spirit renews the mind, there is no massacre—no slaughterous sword filling with death the streets of the soul’s city, and making man the ruin of his former self. These faculties are restored to loyalty, and reinstated under God. Then Conscience gives verdict, for the most part, according to the divine statute-book, and is habitually obeyed. Then the lordly Will assumes again a lowly yet noble vassalage. Then the dream of Imagination is a dream no longer, for the reality of heaven transcends it. Then the Understanding burns the magic books in the market-place, and breaks the wand of its curious arts—but studies still, for eternity as well as time. The activity of Desire amasses still, according to its nature,—for some treasure man must have. But the treasure is on earth no longer. It is the advantage of such a religion that the very same laws of our being guide our spiritual and our natural life. The same self-controul and watchful diligence which built up the worldly habits towards the summits of success, may be applied at once to those habits which ripen us for heaven. The old experience will serve. But the mystic can find no common point between himself and other men. He is cut off from them, for he believes he has another constitution of being, inconceivable by them—not merely other tastes and a higher aim. The object of Christian love may be incomprehensible, but the affection itself is not so. It is dangerous to represent it as a mysterious and almost unaccountable sentiment, which finds no parallel in our experience elsewhere. Our faith in Christ, as well as our love to Christ, are similar to our faith and love as exercised towards our fellow-creatures. Regeneration imparts no new faculty, it gives only a new direction to the old.

X.

Quietism opposed to the mercenary religion of the common and consistent Romanism around it, the doctrine of disinterested love. Revolting from the coarse machinery of a corrupt system, it took refuge in an unnatural refinement. The love inculcated in Scripture is equally remote from the impracticable indifference of Quietism and the commercial principle of Superstition. Long ago, at Alexandria, Philo endeavoured to escape from an effete and carnal Judaism to a similar elevation. The Persian Sufis were animated with the same ambition in reaction against the frigid legalism of the creed of Islam. Extreme was opposed to extreme, in like manner, when Quietism, disgusted with the unblushing inconsistencies of nominal Christianity, proclaimed its doctrine of perfection—of complete sanctification by faith. This is not a principle peculiar to mysticism. It is of little practical importance. It is difficult to see how it can be applied to individual experience. The man who has reached such a state of purity must be the last to know it. If we do not, by some strange confusion of thought, identify ourselves with God, the nearer we approach Him the more profoundly must we be conscious of our distance. As, in a still water, we may see reflected the bird that sings in an overhanging tree, and the bird that soars towards the zenith—the image deepest as the ascent is highest—so it is with our approximation to the Infinite Holiness. Madame Guyon admits that she found it necessary jealously to guard humility, to watch and pray—that her state was only of ‘comparative immutability.’ It appears to us that perfection is prescribed as a goal ever to be approached, but ever practically inaccessible. Whatever degree of sanctification any one may have attained, it must always be possible to conceive of a state yet more advanced,—it must always be a duty diligently to labour towards it.

Quietist as she was, few lives have been more busy than that of Madame Guyon with the activities of an indefatigable benevolence. It was only self-originated action which she strove to annihilate. In her case, especially, Quietism contained a reformatory principle. Genuflexions and crossings were of little value in comparison with inward abasement and crucifixion. The prayers repeated by rote in the oratory, were immeasurably inferior to that Prayer of Silence she so strongly commends—that prayer which, unlimited to times and seasons, unhindered by words, is a state rather than an act, a sentiment rather than a request,—a continuous sense of submission, which breathes, moment by moment, from the serene depth of the soul, ‘Thy will be done.’[331]

As contrasted with the mysticism of St. Theresa, that of Madame Guyon appears to great advantage. She guards her readers against attempting to form any image of God. She aspires to an intellectual elevation—a spiritual intuition, above the sensuous region of theurgy, of visions, and of dreams. She saw no Jesuits in heaven bearing white banners among the heavenly throng of the redeemed. She beheld no Devil, ‘like a little negro,’ sitting on her breviary. She did not see the Saviour in an ecstasy, drawing the nail out of His hand. She felt no large white dove fluttering above her head. But she did not spend her days in founding convents—a slave to the interests of the clergy. So they made a saint of Theresa, and a confessor of Madame Guyon.

XI.

In the summer of 1681, Madame Guyon, now thirty-four years of age, quitted Paris for Gex, a town lying at the foot of the Jura, about twelve miles from Geneva. It was arranged that she should take some part in the foundation and management of a new religious and charitable institution there. A period of five years was destined to elapse before her return to the capital. During this interval, she resided successively at Gex, Thonon, Turin, and Grenoble. Wherever she went, she was indefatigable in works of charity, and also in the diffusion of her peculiar doctrines concerning self-abandonment and disinterested love. Strong in the persuasion of her mission, she could not rest without endeavouring to influence the minds around her. The singular charm of her conversation won a speedy ascendency over nearly all with whom she came in contact. It is easy to see how a remarkable natural gift in this direction contributed both to the attempt and the success. But the Quietest had buried nature, and to nature she would owe nothing,—these conversational powers could be, in her eyes, only a special gift of utterance from above. This mistake reminds us of the story of certain monks upon whose cloister garden the snow never lay, though all the country round was buried in the rigour of a northern winter. The marvellous exemption, long attributed by superstition to miracle, was discovered to arise simply from certain thermal springs which had their source within the sacred inclosure. It is thus that the warmth and vivacity of natural temperament has been commonly regarded by the mystic, as nothing less than a fiery impartation from the altar of the celestial temple.

At Thonon her apartment was visited by a succession of applicants from every class, who laid bare their hearts before her, and sought from her lips spiritual guidance or consolation. She met them separately and in groups, for conference and for prayer. At Grenoble, she says she was for some time engaged from six o’clock in the morning till eight at evening in speaking of God to all sorts of persons,—‘friars, priests, men of the world, maids, wives, widows, all came, one after another, to hear what I had to say.’[332] Her efforts among the members of the House of the Novitiates in that city, were eminently successful, and she appears to have been of real service to many who had sought peace in vain, by the austerities and the routine of monastic seclusion. Meanwhile, she was active, both at Thonon and Grenoble, in the establishment of hospitals. She carried on a large and continually increasing correspondence. In the former place she wrote her Torrents, in the latter, she published her Short Method of Prayer, and commenced her Commentaries on the Bible.[333]

But alas! all this earnest, tireless toil is unauthorized. Bigotry takes the alarm, and cries the Church is in danger. Priests who were asleep—priests who were place-hunting—priests who were pleasure-hunting, awoke from their doze, or drew breath in their chase, to observe this woman whose life rebuked them—to observe and to assail her; for rebuke, in their terminology, was scandal. Persecution hemmed her in on every side; no annoyance was too petty, no calumny too gross, for priestly jealousy. The inmates of the religious community she had enriched were taught to insult her—tricks were devised to frighten her by horrible appearances and unearthly noises—her windows were broken—her letters were intercepted. Thus, before a year had elapsed, she was driven from Gex. Some called her a sorceress; others, more malignant yet, stigmatized her as half a Protestant. She had indeed recommended the reading of the Scriptures to all, and spoken slightingly of mere bowing and bead-counting. Monstrous contumacy—said, with one voice, spiritual slaves and spiritual slave-owners—that a woman desired by her bishop to do one thing, should discover an inward call to do another. At Thonon the priests burnt in the public square all the books they could find treating of the inner life, and went home elated with their performance. One thought may have embittered their triumph—had it only been living flesh instead of mere paper! She inhabited a poor cottage that stood by itself in the fields, at some distance from Thonon. Attached to it was a little garden, in the management of which she took pleasure. One night a rabble from the town were incited to terrify her with their drunken riot,—they trampled down and laid waste the garden, hurled stones in at the windows, and shouted their threats, insults, and curses, round the house the whole night. Then came an episcopal order to quit the diocese. When compelled subsequently, by the opposition she encountered, to withdraw secretly from Grenoble, she was advised to take refuge at Marseilles. She arrived in that city at ten o’clock in the morning, but that very afternoon all was in uproar against her, so vigilant and implacable were her enemies.

Note to page 214.

Autobiography, chapp. viii. and x. In describing her state of mind at this time, she says,—‘This immersion in God immerged all things. I could no more see the saints, nor even the blessed Virgin, out of God; but I beheld them all in Him. And though I tenderly loved certain saints, as St. Peter, St. Paul, St. Mary Magdalen, St. Theresa, with all those who were spiritual, yet I could not form to myself images of them, nor invoke any of them out of God.’ Here a genuine religious fervour, described in the language of mystical theology, has overcome superstition, and placed her, unconsciously, in a position similar to that of Molinos with regard to these professedly subordinate objects of Romanist worship. It may be observed, in passing, that while Rome pretends to subordinate saint-worship, she denounces those of her children who really do so, as heretical, i.e., reformatory, in their tendency.

Madame Guyon was enabled at this period to enjoy a habitual inward prayer,—‘a prayer of rejoicing and possession, wherein the taste of God was so great, so pure, unblended, and uninterrupted, that it drew and absorbed the powers of the soul into a profound recollection, without act or discourse. For I had now no sight but of Jesus Christ alone. All else was excluded, in order to love with the greater extent, without any selfish motives or reasons for loving.’ With much good sense, she declares this continual and immediate sense of the Divine presence far safer and higher than the sensible relish of ecstasies and ravishments,—than distinct interior words or revelations of things to come,—so often imaginary, so apt to divert our desires from the Giver to the gifts;—this is the revelation of Jesus Christ, which makes us new creatures, the manifestation of the Word within us, who cannot deceive,—the life of true and naked faith, which darkens all self-pleasing lights, and reveals the minutest faults, that pure love may reign in the centre of the soul. Thus, while inheriting the phraseology of the mystics (and we discern in these accounts of her early experience the influence of her later readings in mystical theology), she is less sensuous than Theresa, less artificial than John. Like the latter, she assigns to love the office of annihilating the will, to faith that of absorbing the understanding, ‘so as to make it decline all reasonings, all particular brightnesses and illustrations.’ The Annihilation of the Will, or the Union in the Will of God, consists, with her, simply in a state of complete docility, the soul yielding itself up to be emptied of all which is its own, till it finds itself by little and little detached from every self-originated motion, and placed ‘in a holy indifference for willing;—wishing nothing but what God does and wills.’—P. 70.

Note to page 218.

She describes herself, when at Thonon, as causing sundry devils to withdraw with a word. But the said devils, like some other sights and sounds which terrified her there, were probably the contrivance of the monks who persecuted her, with whom expertness in such tricks was doubtless reckoned among the accomplishments of sanctity. When at the same place (she was then a little past thirty), Madame Guyon believed that a certain virtue was vouchsafed her—a gift of spiritual and sometimes of bodily healing, dependent, however, for its successful operation, on the degree of susceptibility in the recipients.—Autobiography, part II. c. xii.

There also she underwent some of her most painful and mysterious experiences with regard to Father La Combe. She says,—‘Our Lord gave me, with the weaknesses of a child, such a power over souls, that with a word I put them in pain or in peace, as was necessary for their good. I saw that God made Himself to be obeyed, in and through me, like an absolute Sovereign. I neither resisted Him nor took part in anything.... Our Lord had given us both (herself and La Combe) to understand that He would unite us by faith and by the cross. Ours, then, has been a union of the cross in every respect, as well as by what I have made him suffer, as by what I have suffered for him.... The sufferings which I have had on his account were such as to reduce me sometimes to extremity, which continued for several years. For though I have been much more of my time far from him than near him, that did not relieve my suffering, which continued till he was perfectly emptied of himself, and to the very point of submission which God required of him.... He hath occasioned me cruel pains when I was near a hundred leagues from him. I felt his disposition. If he was faithful in letting SELF be destroyed, I was in a state of peace and enlargement. If he was unfaithful in reflection or hesitation, I suffered till that was passed over. He had no need to write me an account of his condition, for I knew it; but when he did write, it proved to be such as I had felt it.’—Ibid. p. 51.

She says that frequently, when Father La Combe came to confess her, she could not speak a word to him; she felt take place within her the same silence toward him, which she had experienced in regard to God. I understood, she adds, that God wished to teach me that the language of angels might be learnt by men on earth,—that is, converse without words. She was gradually reduced to this wordless communication alone, in her interviews with La Combe; and they imagined that they understood each other, ‘in a manner ineffable and divine.’ She regarded the use of speech, or of the pen, as a kind of accommodation on her part to the weakness of souls not sufficiently advanced for these internal communications.

Here Madame Guyon anticipates the Quakers. Compare Barclay’s Apology, Prop. xi. §§ 6, 7.

Shortly after her arrival in Paris, she describes herself as favoured, from the plenitude which filled her soul, with ‘a discharge on her best-disposed children to their mutual joy and comfort, and not only when present, but sometimes when absent.’ ‘I even felt it,’ she adds, ‘to flow from me into their souls. When they wrote to me, they informed me that at such times they had received abundant infusions of divine grace.’—Ibid. part III. c. i.

Note to page 223.

Autobiography, part I. c. xiii. Here Madame Guyon has found confessors blind guides, and confessions profitless; and furthermore, she is encouraged and instructed in the inward life by a despised layman. There is every reason to believe that the experience of Madame Guyon, and the doctrines of the beggar, were shared to some extent by many more. Madame Guyon speaks as Theresa does of the internal pains of the soul as equivalent to those of purgatory. (c. xi.) The teaching of the quondam mendicant concerning an internal and present instead of a future purgatory, was not in itself contrary to the declarations of orthodox mysticism. But many were beginning to seek in this perfectionist doctrine a refuge from the exactions of the priesthood. With creatures of the clergy like Theresa, or with monks like John of the Cross, such a tenet would be retained within the limits required by the ecclesiastical interest. It might stimulate religious zeal—it would never intercept religious obedience. But it was not always so among the people—it was not so with many of the followers of Molinos. The jealous vigilance of priestcraft saw that it had everything to fear from a current belief among the laity, that a state of spiritual perfection, rendering purgatory needless, was of possible attainment—might be reached by secret self-sacrifice, in the use of very simple means. If such a notion prevailed, the lucrative traffic of indulgences might totter on the verge of bankruptcy. No devotee would impoverish himself to buy exemption hereafter from a purifying process which he believed himself now experiencing, in the hourly sorrows he patiently endured. It was at least possible—it had been known to happen, that the soul which struggled to escape itself—to rise beyond the gifts of God, to God—to ascend, beyond words and means, to repose in Him,—which desired only the Divine will, feared only the Divine displeasure,—which sought to ignore so utterly its own capacity and power, might come to attach paramount importance no longer to the powers of the priesthood and the ritual of the Church. Those aspirations which had been the boast of Rome in the few, became her terror in the many. The Quietest might believe himself sincere in orthodoxy, might choose him a director, and might reverence the sacraments. But such abasement and such ambition—distress so deep, and aims so lofty—would often prove alike beyond the reach of the ordinary confessional. The oily syllables of absolution would drop in vain upon the troubled waves of a nature thus stirred to its inmost depths. And if it could receive peace only from the very hand of God, priestly mediation must begin with shame to take a lower place. The value of relics and of masses, of penances and paternosters, would everywhere fall. An absolute indifference to self-interest would induce indifference also to those priestly baits by which that self-interest was allured. Such were the presentiments which urged the Jesuits of Rome to hunt down Molinos, with all the implacability of fear. The craft was in danger. Hinc illæ lachrymæ.

Note to page 224.

See the Life and Religious Opinions and Experience of Madame de la Mothe Guyon, &c., by Thomas C. Upham (New York, 1851); vol. i. p. 153. Mr. Upham, in this and in some other parts of his excellent biography, appears to me to have fallen into the same error with Madame Guyon. He perceives her mistake in regarding the absence of joy as evidence of the absence of the divine favour. But he contrasts the state in which we are conscious of alacrity and joy in religion—as one in which we still live comparatively by sight, with that condition of privation in which all such enjoyment is withdrawn—a state wherein we are called to live, not by sight, but by pure and naked faith. Now, faith and sight are not thus opposed in Scripture. In the New Testament, faith is always practical belief in what God has revealed; and sight, as the opposite course of life, always so much unbelief—undue dependence on things seen and temporal. It is quite true that too much stress should not be laid by us on the intensity or the displays of mere emotion,—since religion is a principle rather than a sentiment. But not a few have been nursed in dangerous delusion by supposing that when they feel within them scarce a trace of any of those desires or dispositions proper to every Christian heart—when they have no glimpse of what they incorrectly term ‘sight’—then is the time to exercise what they suppose to be faith,—that is, to work themselves up to the obstinate persuasion that they personally are still the children of God.

It may well be questioned, moreover, whether we have any scriptural ground for believing that it is usual with the Almighty, for the growth of our sanctification, to withdraw Himself,—the only source of it. To these supposed hidings of His face Madame Guyon, and every Quietist, would patiently submit, as to the sovereign and inscrutable caprice of the divine Bridegroom of the soul. Rather should we regard such obscurations as originating with ourselves and not with Him, and at once make the lost sense of His gracious nearness the object of humble and earnest search. ‘Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation!’

Madame Guyon describes her ‘state of total privation’ in the twenty-first chapter of the Autobiography, part I.

Footnote 315:

See the first six chapters of her Autobiography. This life was published posthumously at Cologne, in 1720. I have used an anonymous English translation, published at Bristol, in 1772.

Footnote 316:

See Note on p. 238.

Footnote 317:

Autobiography, chap. x.

Footnote 318:

Autobiography, chap. xii. p. 87.

Footnote 319:

See second Note on p. 238.

Footnote 320:

Görres, Die Christliche Mystik, b. IV. c. i.

Footnote 321:

Görres, Die Christliche Mystik, pp. 70-73.

Footnote 322:

Specimens of the language may be seen in Görres, p. 152.

Footnote 323:

Görres, Die Christliche Mystik, pp. 465, &c.

Footnote 324:

Ibid. pp. 532, &c.

Footnote 325:

See Note on p. 239.

Footnote 326:

Autobiography, part I. c. xv.

Footnote 327:

See Note on p. 240.

Footnote 328:

Autobiography, part I. c. xxviii. p. 163.

Footnote 329:

This spontaneity she likens to a fountain, as compared with a pump; love in the heart prompts every issue of life: outward occasions and stimulants are no longer awaited; and a glad inward readiness gives facility in every duty, patience under every trial. Such also is the teaching of Fénélon here—the genuine doctrine of spiritual life. But the enemies of Quietism were not slow to represent this ‘practising the virtues no longer as virtues,’ as a dangerous pretence for evading the obligations of virtue altogether.

Footnote 330:

Upham, vol. I. pp. 262, 263.

Footnote 331:

This Prayer of Silence became hers at an early period in her religious career, not as the result of direct effort in pursuance of a theory, but simply as the consequence of overpowering emotion. She says, ‘I had a secret desire given me from that time to be wholly devoted to the disposal of my God, let it be what it would. I said, ‘What couldst Thou demand of me, that I would not willingly sacrifice or offer Thee? Oh, spare me not.’ I could scarce hear speak of God, or our Lord Jesus Christ, without being almost ravished out of myself. What surprised me the most, was the great difficulty I had to say the vocal prayers I had been used to say. As soon as I opened my lips to pronounce them, the love of God seized me so strongly that I was swallowed up in a profound silence, and a peace not to be expressed. I made fresh essays, but still in vain. I began, but could not go on. And as I had never before heard of such a state, I knew not what to do. My inability therein still increased, because my love to God was still growing more strong, more violent, and more overpowering. There was made in me, without the sound of words, a continual prayer, which seemed to me to be the prayer of our Lord Jesus Christ Himself; a prayer of the Word, which is made by the Spirit, which, according to St. Paul, ‘asketh for us that which is good, perfect, and conformable to the will of God.’—Autobiography, part I. c. xiii.

Here we find genuine devout fervour, emancipating itself, very naturally in private, from allotted forms of prayer; but no mysticism, till we come to the last sentence—even that, admitting a favourable explanation.

Footnote 332:

Autobiography, part II. c. xvii. ‘God supplied me,’ she adds, ‘with what was pertinent and satisfactory to them all, after a wonderful manner, without any share of my study or meditation therein. Nothing was hid from me of their interior state, and of what passed within them. Here, O my God! thou madest an infinite number of conquests, known to Thyself only. They were instantly furnished with a wonderful facility of prayer. God conferred on them His grace plentifully, and wrought marvellous changes in them. The most advanced of these souls found, when with me, in silence, a grace communicated to them, which they could neither comprehend nor cease to admire. The others found an unction in my words, and that they operated in them what I said to them. They said they had never experienced anything like it. Friars of different orders, and priests of merit, came to see me, to whom our Lord granted very great favours, as indeed he did to all without exception, who came in sincerity. One thing was surprising, and that was, that I had not a word to say to such as came only to watch my words and to criticise them. Even when I thought to try to speak to them, I felt that I could not, and that God would not have me do it.... I felt that what I spoke flowed from the fountain, and that I was only the instrument of Him who made me speak.’—P. 86.

Footnote 333:

The little book to which she gave the name of The Torrents, was written, she tells us, at the suggestion of La Combe. When she took up her pen she knew not what she was to say, but soon came thoughts and words abundantly—as, indeed, they were sure to do. She compares the different kinds of spiritual progress to the mountain streams she had seen hurrying down the sides of the Alps. She describes the varieties in the gravitation of devout souls toward God—the ocean which they seek. Some proceed slowly, by means of meditations, austerities, and works of charity,—dependent mostly on outward appliances,—deficient in spontaneity and ardour,—little exercised by inward experience. Another class flow in a fuller stream,—grow into laden rivers—haste with more strength and speed; but these are apt to dwell, with too much complacence, on those rich gifts for which they are conspicuous. A third order (and to these she herself belonged) dash out from the poverty of the rocks, impetuous, leaping over every obstacle, unburdened by wealthy freightage, inglorious in the eyes of men, but simple, naked, self-emptied, with resistless eagerness foaming up out of abysmal chasms that seemed to swallow them, and finding, soonest of all, that Sea divine, wherein all rivers rest.

Her commentaries on Scripture were written with extraordinary rapidity. The fact that she consulted no book except the Bible in their composition must doubtless have contributed to their speed: certainly not, as she fancied, to their excellence. No writers are so diffuse as the mystics, because no others have written so fast, imagining headlong haste an attribute of inspiration. The transcriber could not copy in five days what she had written in one night. We may conjecture that the man must have been paid by the day. The commentary on the Canticles was written in a day and a half, and several visits received beside.—Autobiography, part II. c. xxi.

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