Chapter II…

Chapter II

O Mensch wiltu geimpffet werdn, Und sein versetzt in d’himlisch erdn! So mustu vor dein ästen wilt, Gantz hawen ab, das früchte milt Fürkommen nach Gotts ebenbildt.[334]

HYMN OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.

Part II.—The Quietist Controversy.

I.

In the year 1686, Madame Guyon returned to Paris, and entered the head-quarters of persecution. Rumours reached her, doubtless, from beyond the Alps, of cruel measures taken against opinions similar to her own, which had spread rapidly in Italy. But she knew not that all these severities originated with Louis XIV. and his Jesuit advisers,—that her king, while revoking the Edict of Nantes, and dispatching his dragoons to extirpate Protestantism in France, was sending orders to D’Estrées, his ambassador at Rome, to pursue with the utmost rigour Italian Quietism—and that the monarch, who shone and smiled at Marly and Versailles, was crowding with victims the dungeons of the Roman Inquisition.

The leader of Quietism in Italy was one Michael de Molinos, a Spaniard, a man of blameless life, of eminent and comparatively enlightened piety. His book, entitled The Spiritual Guide, was published in 1675, sanctioned by five famous doctors, four of them Inquisitors, and one a Jesuit, and passed, within six years, through twenty editions in different languages. His real doctrine was probably identical in substance with that of Madame Guyon.[335] It was openly favoured by many nobles and ecclesiastics of distinguished rank; by D’Etrees among the rest. Molinos had apartments assigned him in the Vatican, and was held in high esteem by Infallibility itself. But the Inquisition and the Jesuits, supported by all the influence of France, were sure of their game. The audacity of the Inquisitors went so far as to send a deputation to examine the orthodoxy of the man called Innocent XI.; for even the tiara was not to shield the patron of Molinos from suspicions of heresy. The courtier-cardinal D’Etrees found new light in the missives of his master. He stood committed to Quietism. He had not only embraced the opinions of Molinos, but had translated into Italian the book of Malaval, a French Quietist, far more extreme than Molinos himself.[336] Yet he became, at a moment’s notice, the accuser of his friend. He produced the letter of Louis rebuking the faithless sloth of the pontiff who could entertain a heretic in his palace, while he, the eldest son of the Church, toiled incessantly to root out heresy from the soil of France. He read before the Inquisitorial Tribunal extracts from the papers of Molinos. He protested that he had seemed to receive, in order at the proper juncture more effectually to expose, these abominable mysteries. If these professions were false, D’Etrees was a heretic; if true, a villain. The Inquisitors, of course, deemed his testimony too valuable to be refused. In the eyes of such men, the enormous crime which he pretended was natural, familiar, praiseworthy. Depths of baseness beyond the reach of ordinary iniquity, are heights of virtue with the followers of Dominic and Loyola. Guilt, which even a bad man would account a blot upon his life, becomes, in the annals of their zeal, a star. The Spanish Inquisitor-General, Valdes, who raised to the highest pitch his repute for sanctity, secured the objects of his ambition, averted the dangers which threatened him, and preserved his ill-gotten wealth from the grasp of the crown, simply by his activity as a persecutor, made a practice of sending spies to mix (under pretence of being converts or inquirers) among the suspected Lutherans of Valladolid and Seville. Desmarets de St. Sorlin denounced, and caused to be burnt, a poor harmless madman, named Morin, who fancied himself the Holy Ghost. Counselled by the Jesuit confessor of Louis, Father Canard, he pretended to become his disciple, and then betrayed him. This Desmarets, be it remembered, had written a book called Les Délices de l’Esprit, happily characterised by a French wit, when he proposed for délices to read délires. Those immoral consequences which the enemies of Madame Guyon professed to discern in her writings are drawn openly in the sensual and blasphemous phraseology of this religious extravaganza. But because Desmarets was a useful man to the Jesuits—because he had drawn away some of the nuns of the Port Royal—because he had given the flames a victim—because he was protected by Canard,—the same Archbishop of Paris who imprisoned Madame Guyon, honoured with his sanction the ravings of the licentious visionary.[337] So little had any sincere dread of spiritual extravagance to do with the hostility concentrated on the disciples of Quietism. The greater portion of the priesthood feared only lest men should learn to become religious on their own account. The leaders of the movement against Madame Guyon were animated by an additional motive. They knew they should delight his Most Christian Majesty by affording him another opportunity of manifesting his zeal for orthodoxy; and they wished to strike at the reputation of Fénélon through Madame Guyon. The fate of Molinos decided hers, and hers that of the Archbishop of Cambray.

The only crime brought home to the followers of Molinos was a preference for the religion of the heart to that of the rosary; the substitution of a devout retirement for the observance of certain superstitious forms and seasons. His condemnation was determined. After an imprisonment of two years he was exhibited in the Temple of Minerva, his hands bound, and a lighted taper between them. A plenary indulgence was granted to all who should be present; a vast concourse listened to the sentence; hired voices cried, ‘To the fire! to the fire!’ the mob was stirred to a frenzy of fanaticism. His last gaze upon the world beheld a sea of infuriate faces, the pomp of his triumphant adversaries,—then to the gloom and solitude of the dungeon in which he was to languish till death bestowed release.[338]

II.

At Paris, Madame Guyon became the centre of a small but illustrious circle, who listened with delight to her exposition of that Quietism to which the tender earnestness of her language, and her manner lent so indescribable a charm. There were the Duke and Duchess of Beauvilliers, the Duke and Duchess of Chevreuse, the Duchess of Bethune, and the Countess of Guiche. The daughters of Colbert and of Fouquet forgot the long enmity of their fathers in a religious friendship, whose tie was yet more closely drawn by their common admiration for Madame Guyon.[339] But letters filled with complaints against La Combe and Madame Guyon poured in upon Harlay, Archbishop of Paris.[340] He procured the arrest of La Combe, who spent the remainder of his days in various prisons. A little calumny and a forged letter obtained from the king a lettre de cachet confining Madame Guyon to an apartment in the Convent of St. Marie. The sisters were strongly prejudiced against her, but her gentle patience won all hearts, and her fair jailors soon vied with each other in praises of their fascinating prisoner. An examination elicited nothing decidedly unfavourable. Not a stain could be detected in her character; she offered to submit all her papers and her writings to investigation. The intercession of Madame Miramion and other friends with Madame de Maintenon, procured her release, after a captivity of eight months.

The most dangerous enemy Madame Guyon had as yet was her own half-brother, Père La Mothe. He had calumniated her in secret while in Switzerland; he was still more active now she was in Paris. He wished to become her Director, but La Combe was in the way. The artifices of La Mothe procured his arrest. He advised Madame Guyon, with hypocritical protestations of friendship, to flee to Montargis from the scandalous reports he himself had circulated, and from adversaries he himself had raised up. Then she would have been at his mercy—he would have pointed to her flight as a proof of guilt, and her own property and the guardianship of her children might have been secured for himself. He injured her as a relation only could. People said her cause must be a bad one, since her own brother was constrained, from regard to the credit of religion, to bear witness against her. A woman who had committed sacrilege at Lyons, and had run away from the Convent of Penitents at Dijon, was employed by him to forge letters which should damage the character of Madame Guyon; to personate one of her maids, and to go from confessor to confessor throughout Paris, asserting that after living sixteen or seventeen years with her mistress, she had quitted her at last, in disgust at her abominable life.

III.

Released from the Convent of St. Marie, Madame Guyon was conducted by her court friends to express her thanks to Madame de Maintenon at St. Cyr. This institution had been founded, ten years previously, for the education of the daughters of noble but impoverished families. The idea originated with Madame de Maintenon: it was executed with royal speed and magnificence by Louis, and St. Cyr became her favourite resort. In fifteen months two thousand six hundred workmen raised the structure, on a marshy soil, about half a league from Paris. The genius of Mansart presided over the architecture. The style of the ordinances was revised by Boileau and Racine. There three hundred young ladies of rank, dressed in gowns of brown crape, with white quilted caps, tied with ribbons whose colour indicated the class to which they belonged in the school, studied geography and drawing, heard mass, sang in the choir, and listened to preachments from the lips of Madame Brinon—who discoursed, so swore some of the courtiers, as eloquently as Bourdaloue himself. Tired out with the formal splendours of Versailles, Madame de Maintenon was never so happy as when playing the part of lady abbess at St. Cyr. Often she would be there by six in the morning, would herself assist at the toilette of the pupils, would take a class throughout the day, would give the novices lessons on spiritual experience; nothing in its routine was dull, nothing in its kitchen was mean. She hated Fontainebleau, for it tore her from her family at St. Cyr. For the private theatricals of St. Cyr, Racine wrote Esther, at the request of Madame de Maintenon. Happy was the courtier who could obtain permission to witness one of these representations, who could tell with triumph to envious groups of the excluded, what an admirable Ahasuerus Madame de Caylus made, what a spirited Mordecai was Mademoiselle de Glapion, how the graceful Mademoiselle de Veillenne charmed the audience in the prayer of Esther—in short, how far the Esther surpassed the Phedra; and the actresses excelled the Raisins and the Chammelés of the Parisian boards. Louis himself drew up the list of admissions, as though it were for a journey to Marly—he was the first to enter—and stood at the door, with the catalogue of names in one hand and his cane held across as a barrier in the other, till all the privileged had entered.[341] But the fashion of asceticism which grew with every year of Maintenon’s reign threw its gloom over St. Cyr. The absolute vows were introduced, and much of the monotonous austerity of conventual life. Religious excitement was the only resource left to the inmates if they would not die of ennui. This relief was brought them by Madame Guyon.

Madame de Maintenon was touched with pity for the misfortunes of Madame Guyon, with admiration for such patience, such forgetfulness of self,—she found in the freshness and fervour of her religious conversation, a charm which recalled the warmer feelings of youth; which was welcome, for its elevation, after the fatigue and anxiety of state, for its sweetness, as contrasted with the barren minutiæ of rigid formalism. She invited her constantly to her table—she encouraged her visits to St. Cyr—she met with her, and with Fénélon, at the Hôtels de Chevreuse and Beauvilliers, where a religious coterie assembled three times a week to discuss the mysteries of inward experience. Thus, during three or four years of favour with Madame de Maintenon, Madame Guyon became in effect the spiritual instructress of St. Cyr, and found herself at Paris surrounded by disciples whose numbers daily increased, and whom she withdrew from the licentious gaieties of the capital. At St. Cyr the young ladies studied her books, and listened to her as an oracle—the thoughtless grew serious—the religious strained every faculty to imitate the attainments of one in whom they saw the ideal of devotion. In Paris, mystical terminology became the fashionable language—it was caught up and glibly uttered by wits and roués—it melted from the lips of beauties who shot languishing glances at their admirers, while they affected to be weary of the world, and who coquetted while they talked significantly of holy indifference or pure love. Libertines, like Treville, professed reform, and wrote about mysticism,—atheists turned Christians, like Corbinelli, now became Quietists, and might be seen in the salon of Madame le Maigre, where Corbinelli shone, the brilliant expositor of the new religious romanticism.[342]

IV.

During this period, Madame Guyon became acquainted with Fénélon. At their first interview she was all admiration, he all distrust. ‘Her mind,’ she says, ‘had been taken up with him with much force and sweetness;’ it seemed to be revealed to her that he should become one of her spiritual children. Fénélon, on his part, thought she had neglected her duty to her family for an imaginary mission. But he had inquired concerning her life at Montargis, and heard only praise. After a few conversations his doubts vanished: he had proposed objections, requested explanations, pointed out unguarded expressions in her books—she was modest, submissive, irresistible.[343] There was a power in her language, her manner, her surviving beauty, which mysteriously dissipated prejudice; which even Nicole, Bossuet, Boileau, Gaillard, could not withstand when they conversed with her,—which was only overcome when they had ceased to behold her face, when her persuasive accents sounded no longer in their ears. She recalled to the thoughts of Fénélon his youthful studies at St. Sulpice;—there he had perused the mystical divines in dusty tomes, clasped and brazen-cornered,—now he beheld their buried doctrine raised to life in the busy present, animating the untaught eloquence of a woman, whom a noble enthusiasm alone had endowed with all the prerogatives of genius, and all the charms of beauty. This friendship, which events rendered afterwards so disastrous for himself, was beneficial to Madame Guyon. Fénélon taught her to moderate some of her spiritual excesses. Her extravagance reached its culminating point at Thonon. At Paris, influenced doubtless by Fénélon, as well as by more frequent intercourse with the world, she no longer enjoys so many picturesque dreams, no more heals the sick and casts out devils with a word, and no longer—as in her solitude there—suffers inward anguish consequent on the particular religious condition of Father La Combe when he is three hundred miles off.[344] It is curious to observe how the acquaintance of Fénélon with Madame Guyon began with suspicion and ripened into friendship, while that of Bossuet, commencing with approval, and even admiration, ended in calumny and persecution. Bossuet declared to the Duc de Chevreuse that while examining her writings, for the first time, he was astonished by a light and unction he had never before seen, and, for three days, was made to realize the divine Presence in a manner altogether new. Bossuet had never, like Fénélon, studied the mystics.[345]

V.

The two most influential Directors at St. Cyr were Godet des Marais, Bishop of Chartres, and Fénélon. These two men form a striking contrast. Godet was disgusting in person and in manners—a sour ascetic—a spiritual martinet—devoted to all the petty austerities of the most formal discipline. Fénélon was dignified and gentle, graceful as a courtier, and spotless as a saint—the most pure, the most persuasive, the most accomplished of religious guides. No wonder that most of the young inmates of St. Cyr adored Fénélon, and could not endure Godet. Madame de Maintenon wavered between her two confessors; if Fénélon was the more agreeable, Godet seemed the more safe. Godet was miserably jealous of his rival. He was not sorry to find that the new doctrines had produced a little insubordination within the quiet walls of St. Cyr—that Fénélon would be compromised by the indiscretion of some among his youthful admirers. He brought a lamentable tale to Madame de Maintenon. Madame du Peron, the mistress of the novices, had complained that her pupils obeyed her no longer. They neglected regular duties for unseasonable prayers. They had illuminations and ecstasies. One in the midst of sweeping her room would stand, leaning on her broom, lost in contemplation: another, instead of hearing lessons, became inspired, and resigned herself to the operation of the Spirit. The under-mistress of the classes stole away the enlightened from the rest, and they were found in remote corners of the house, feasting in secret on the sweet poison of Madame Guyon’s doctrine. The precise and methodical Madame de Maintenon was horrified. She had hoped to realize in her institute the ideal of her Church, a perfect uniformity of opinion, an unerring mechanism of obedience. We wished, said she, to promote intelligence, we have made orators; devotion, we have made Quietists; modesty, we have made prudes; elevation of sentiment, and we have pride. She commissioned Godet to reclaim the wanderers, to demand that the books of Madame Guyon should be surrendered, setting herself the example by publicly delivering into his hand her own copy of the Short Method. She requested Madame Guyon to refrain from visiting St. Cyr. She began to doubt the prudence or the orthodoxy of Fénélon.[346] What would the king say, if he heard of it—he, who had never liked Fénélon—who hated nothing so much as heresy—who had but the other day extinguished the Quietism of Molinos? She had read to him some of Madame Guyon’s exposition of the Canticles; and he called it dreamy stuff. Doctrines really dangerous to purity were insinuated by some designing monks, under the name of Quietism. The odium fell on the innocent Madame Guyon; and her friends would necessarily share it. Malicious voices charged her with corrupting the principles of the Parisian ladies. Madame Guyon replied with justice,—‘When they were patching, and painting, and ruining their families by gambling and by dress, not a word was said against it; now that they have withdrawn from such vanities, the cry is, that I have ruined them.’ Rumour grew more loud and scandalous every day: the most incredible reports were most credited. The schools, too, had taken up the question of mysticism, and argued it with heat. Nicole and Lami had dissolved an ancient friendship to quarrel about it,—as Fénélon and Bossuet were soon to do. No controversy threatened to involve so many interests, to fan so many passions, to kindle so many hatreds, as this variance about disinterestedness, about indifference, about love.

The politic Madame de Maintenon watched the gathering storm, and became all caution. At all costs, she must free herself from the faintest suspicion of fellowship with heresy. She questioned, on the opinions of Madame Guyon, Bossuet and Noailles, Bourdaloue, Joly, Tiberge, Brisacier, and Tronson; and the replies of these esteemed divines, uniformly unfavourable, decided her. It would be necessary to disown Madame Guyon: her condemnation would become inevitable. Fénélon must be induced to disown her too, or his career was at a close; and Madame de Maintenon could smile on him no longer.[347]

Madame Guyon, alarmed by the growing numbers and vehemence of her adversaries, had recourse to the man who afterwards became her bitterest enemy. She proposed to Bossuet that he should examine her writings. He complied; held several private interviews with her, and expressed himself, on the whole, more favourably than could have been expected. But these conferences, which did not altogether satisfy Bossuet, could do nothing to allay the excitement of the public.[348]

VI.

Madame Guyon now requested the appointment of commissioners, who should investigate, and pronounce finally concerning her life and doctrine.[349] Three were chosen—Bossuet; Noailles, Bishop of Chalons; and Tronson, Superior of St. Sulpice. Noailles was a sensible, kind-hearted man; Tronson, a worthy creature, in poor health, with little opinion of his own; Bossuet, the accredited champion of the Gallican Church, accustomed to move in an atmosphere of flattery—the august dictator of the ecclesiastical world—was absolute in their conferences. They met, from time to time, during some six months, at the little village of Issy, the country residence of the Superior of St. Sulpice. When Madame Guyon appeared before them, Bossuet alone was harsh and rude; he put the worst construction on her words; he interrupted her; now he silenced her replies, now he burlesqued them; now he affected to be unable to comprehend them; now he held up his hands in contemptuous amazement at her ignorance; he would not suffer to be read the justification which had cost her so much pains; he sent away her friend, the Duke of Chevreuse. This ominous severity confused and frightened her.[350] She readily consented to retire to a convent in the town of Meaux, there to be under the surveillance of Bossuet. She undertook this journey in the depth of the most frightful winter which had been known for many years; the coach was buried in the snow, and she narrowly escaped with life. The commissioners remained to draw up, by the fireside, certain propositions, which should determine what was, and what was not, true mysticism. These constitute the celebrated Articles of Issy.

Bossuet repeatedly visited Madame Guyon at Meaux. The great man did not disdain to approach the sick-bed of his victim, as she lay in the last stage of exhaustion, and there endeavour to overreach and terrify her. He demanded a submission, and promised a favourable certificate. The submission he received, the certificate he withheld. He sought to force her, by threats, to sign that she did not believe in the Incarnation. The more timid she appeared, the more boisterous and imperative his tone. One day, he would come with words of kindness, on another, with words of fury; yet, at the very time, this Pilate could say to some of his brethren, that he found no serious fault in her. He declared, on one occasion, that he was actuated by no dislike—he was urged to rigorous measures by others; on another, that the submission of Madame Guyon, and the suppression of Quietism, effected by his skill and energy, would be as good as an archbishopric or a cardinal’s hat to him. Justice and ambition contended within him; for a little while the battle wavered, till presently pride and jealousy brought up to the standard of the latter, reinforcements so overwhelming, that justice was beaten for ever from the field. After six months’ residence at Meaux, Madame Guyon received from Bossuet a certificate attesting her filial submissiveness to the Catholic faith, his satisfaction with her conduct, authorizing her still to participate in the sacrament of the Church, and acquitting her of all implication in the heresy of Molinos.[351]

Meanwhile, Fénélon had been added to the number of the commissioners at Issy. He and Bossuet were still on intimate terms; but Bossuet, like all vain men, was a dangerous friend. He knew how to inspire confidence which he did not scruple to betray. Madame Guyon, conscious of the purity of her life, of the orthodoxy of her intention, persuaded that such a man must be superior to the meaner motives of her persecutors, had placed in the hands of Bossuet her most private papers, not excluding the Autobiography, which had not been submitted even to the eye of Fénélon. To Bossuet, Fénélon had, in letters, unfolded his most secret thoughts—the conflicts and aspirations of his spiritual history, so unbounded was his reliance on his honour, so exalted his estimate of the judgment of that powerful mind in matters of religion. The disclosures of both were distorted and abused to crush them; both had to rue the day when they trusted one who could sacrifice truth to glory. At Issy, the deference and the candour of Fénélon were met by a haughty reserve on the part of Bossuet. The meekness of Fénélon and the timidity of Madame Guyon only inflamed his arrogance; to bow to him was to be overborne; to confront him was at once to secure respect, if not fairness. The Articles were already drawn up when the signature of Fénélon was requested. He felt that he should have been allowed his fair share in their construction; as they were, he could not sign them; he proposed modifications; they were acceded to; and the thirty-four Articles of Issy appeared in March, 1695, with the name of Fénélon associated with the other three.[352]

VII.

To any one who reads these Articles, and the letter written by Fénélon to Madame de la Maisonfort, after signing them, it will be obvious that the Quietism of Fénélon went within a moderate compass. When he comes to explain his meaning, the controversy is very much a dispute about words. He did not, like Madame Guyon, profess to conduct devout minds by a certain method to the attainment of perfect disinterestedness. He only maintained the possibility of realizing a love to God, thus purified from self. He was as fully aware as his opponents, that to evince our love to God by willingness to endure perdition, was the same thing as attesting our devotion to Him by our readiness to hate Him for ever. This is the standing objection against the doctrine of disinterested love. The great Nonconformist divine, John Howe, urges it with force. It is embodied in the thirty-second of the Articles in question. But it does not touch Fénélon’s position. His assertion is, that we should will our own salvation only because God wills it; that, supposing it possible for us to endure hell torments, retaining the grace of God and our consciousness that such suffering was according to His will, and conducive to His glory, the soul, animated by pure love, would embrace even such a doom.[353] It is but the supposition of an impossible case,—a supposition, moreover, which involves a very gross and external conception of hell. It could find no place in a mysticism like that of Behmen or Swedenborg, where hell is regarded, much more truly, less as an infliction from without, than as the development of dominant evil from within. The Quietism of Fénélon does not preclude the reflex actions of the mind, or confine the spirit of the adept to the sphere of the immediate. It forbids only the introspection of self-complacency.[354] It does not merge distinct acts in a continuous operation, nor discourage effort for self-advancement in holiness, or for the benefit of others—it only teaches us to moderate that impatience which has its origin in self, and declares that our own co-operation becomes, in certain cases, unconscious—is, as it were, lost in a ‘special facility.’[355] The indefatigable benevolence of his life abundantly repudiates the slanderous conclusion of his adversaries, that the doctrine of indifference concerning the future, involves indifference likewise to moral good and evil in the present. Bossuet himself is often as mystical as Fénélon, sometimes more so.[356] St. Francis de Sales and Madame de Chantal said the very same things,—not to mention the unbridled utterances of the earlier and the mediæval mystics canonized by the Church of Rome. Could the controversy have been confined to the real question, no harm would have been done. It would have resembled the duel, in Ben Jonson’s play, between Fastidious Brisk and Signor Puntarvolo, where the rapiers cut through taffeta and lace, gold embroidery and satin doublets, but nowhere enter the skin. Certain terms and certain syllogisms, a well-starched theory, or an argument trimmed with the pearls of eloquence—might have been transfixed or rent by a dexterous pen, on this side or on that, but the prize of the conqueror would not have been court favour, nor the penalty of the conquered, exile. Theologians might have written, for a few, the learned history of a logical campaign, but the eyes of Europe would never have been turned to a conflict for fame and fortune raging in the Vatican and at Versailles, enlisting every religious party throughout Roman-catholic Christendom, and involving the rise or fall of some of the most illustrious names among the churchmen and nobility of France.

VIII.

The writings of Madame Guyon had now been condemned, though without mention of her name; Bossuet had intimated that he required nothing further from her; she began to hope that the worst might be over, and returned with her friends from Meaux to Paris, to live there as much retired as possible. This flight, which he chose to call dishonourable, irritated Bossuet. She had suffered him to see that she could trust him no longer. He endeavoured to recover the certificate he had given. An order was procured for her arrest. The police observed that a house in the Faubourg St. Antoine was always entered by a pass-key. They made their way in, and found Madame Guyon. They brought away their prisoner, ill as she was, and the king was induced, with much difficulty, to sign an order for her incarceration at Vincennes. The despot thought a convent might suffice,—not so the persecutors.[357]

Bossuet had been for some time occupied in writing a work which should demolish with a blow the doctrine of Madame Guyon, and hold her up to general odium. It consisted of ten books, and was entitled Instructions on the States of Prayer. He showed the manuscript to Fénélon, desiring him to append a statement, approving all it contained, which should accompany the volume when published. Fénélon refused. Six months ago he had declared that he could be no party to a personal attack on Madame Guyon: the Instructions contained little else. That tremendous attack was no mere exposure of unguarded expressions—no mere deduction of dangerous consequences, possibly unforeseen by a half-educated writer; it charged Madame Guyon with having for her sole design the inculcation of a false spirituality, which abandoned, as an imperfection, faith in the divine Persons and the humanity of Christ; which disowned the authority of Scripture, of tradition, of morality; which dispensed with vocal prayer and acts of worship; which established an impious and brutal indifference between vice and virtue, between everlasting hate of God and everlasting love; which forbade resistance to temptation as an interruption to repose; which taught an imaginary perfection extinguishing the nobler desires only to inflame the lower, and clothing the waywardness of self-will and passion with the authority of inspiration and of prophecy. Fénélon knew that this accusation was one mass of falsehood. If Bossuet himself believed it, why had he suffered such a monster still to commune; why had he been so faithless to his high office in the Church, as to give his testimonials declaring the purity of her purpose and the soundness of her faith, when he had not secured the formal retraction of a single error? To sign his approval of that book, would be not merely a cowardly condemnation of a woman whom he knew to be innocent—it would be the condemnation of himself. His acquaintance with Madame Guyon was matter of notoriety. It would be to say that he—a student of theology, a priest, an archbishop, the preceptor of princes—had not only refrained from denouncing, but had honoured with his friendship, the teacher of an abominable spiritualism which abolished the first principles of right and wrong. It would be to declare, in fact, such a prelate far more guilty than such a heretic. And Bossuet pretended to be his friend—Bossuet, who had laid the snare which might have been the triumph of the most malignant enemy. It was not a mere question of persons—Madame Guyon might die in prison—he himself might be defamed and disgraced—he did not mean to become her champion—surely that was enough, knowing what he knew,—let her enemies be satisfied with his silence—he could not suffer another man to take his pen out of his hand to denounce as an emissary of Satan one whom he believed to be a child of God.[358]

Such was Fénélon’s position. He wished to be silent concerning Madame Guyon. To assent to the charges brought against her would not have been even a serviceable lie, if such a man could have desired to escape the wrath of Bossuet at so scandalous a price. Every one would have said that the Archbishop of Cambray had denounced his accomplice out of fear. Neither was he prepared to embrace the opposite extreme and to defend the personal cause of the accused, many of whose expressions he thought questionable, orthodox as might be her explanation, and many of whose extravagances he disapproved. His enemies wished to force him to speak, and were prepared to damage his reputation whether he appeared for or against the prisoner at Vincennes. At length it became necessary that he should break silence; and when he did, it was not to pronounce judgment concerning the oppressed or her oppressors, it was to investigate the abstract question,—the teaching of the Church on the doctrine of pure love. He wrote the Maxims of the Saints.

IX.

This celebrated book appeared in January, 1697, while Fénélon was at Cambray, amazing the Flemings of his diocese by affording them, in their new archbishop, the spectacle of a church dignitary who really cared for his flock, who consigned the easier duties to his vicars, and reserved the hardest for himself; who entered their cottages like a father, listened with interest to the story of their hardships or their griefs; who consoled, counselled, and relieved them; who partook of their black bread as though he had never shared the banquets of Versailles, and as though Paris were to him, as to themselves, a wonderful place far away, whose streets were paved with gold. Madame Guyon was in confinement at the village of Vaugirard, whither the compassion of Noailles had transferred her from Vincennes, resigned and peaceful, writing poetry and singing hymns with her pious servant-girl, the faithful companion of her misfortunes. Bossuet was visiting St. Cyr—very busy in endeavouring to purify the theology of the young ladies from all taint of Quietism—but quite unsuccessful in reconciling Madame de la Maisonfort to the loss of her beloved Fénélon.

The Maxims of the Saints was an exposition and vindication of the doctrines of pure love, of mystical union, and of perfection, as handed down by some of the most illustrious and authoritative names in the Roman-catholic Church, from Dionysius, Clement, and Augustine, to John of the Cross and Francis de Sales;—it explained their terminology;—it placed in juxtaposition with every article of legitimate mysticism its false correlative—the use and the abuse;—and was, in fact, though not expressly, a complete justification (on the principles of his Church) of that moderate Quietism held by himself, and in substance by Madame Guyon.[359] The book was approved by Tronson, by Fleury, by Hébert, by Pirot, a doctor of the Sorbonne, by Père La Chaise, the King’s Confessor, by the Jesuits of Clermont,—but it was denounced by Bossuet; it was nicknamed the Bible of the Little Church; Pontchartrain, the comptroller-general, and Maurice Le Tellier, Archbishop of Reims, told the King that it was fit only for knaves or fools. Louis sent for Bossuet. The Bishop of Meaux cast himself theatrically at the feet of majesty, and, with pretended tears, implored forgiveness for not earlier revealing the heresy of his unhappy brother. A compromise was yet possible; for Fénélon was ready to explain his explanations, and to suppress whatever might be pronounced dangerous in his pages. But the eagle of Meaux had seen the meek and dove-like Fénélon—once almost more his disciple than his friend—erect the standard of independence, and assume the port of a rival. His pride was roused. He was resolved to reign alone on the ecclesiastical Olympus of the Court, and he would not hear of a peace that might rob him of a triumph. Did Fénélon pretend to shelter himself by great names,—he, Bossuet, would intrench himself within the awful sanctuary of the Church; he represented religion in France; he would resent every attack upon his own opinions as an assault on the Catholic faith; he had the ear of the King, with whom heresy and treason were identical; success was all but assured, and, if so, war was glory. Such tactics are not peculiar to the seventeenth century. In our own day, every one implicated in religious abuses identifies himself with religion,—brands every exposure of his misconduct as hostility to the cause of God,—invests his miserable personality with the benign grandeur of the Gospel,—and stigmatizes as troublers in Israel all who dare to inquire into his procedure,—while innumerable dupes or cowards sleepily believe, or cautiously pretend to do so, that those who have management in a good object must themselves be good.

X.

Fénélon now requested the royal permission to appeal to Rome; he obtained it, but was forbidden to repair thither to plead in person the cause of his book, and ordered to quit the Court and confine himself to his diocese. The King went to St. Cyr, and expelled thence three young ladies, for an offence he could not in reality comprehend,—the sin of Quietism.[360] Intrigue was active, and the Duke de Beauvilliers was nearly losing his place in the royal household because of his attachment to Fénélon. The Duke—noble in spirit as in name, and worthy of such a friendship,—boldly told Le Grand Monarque that he was ready to leave the palace rather than to forsake his friend. Six days before the banishment of Fénélon, Louis had sent to Innocent XII. a letter, drawn up by Bossuet, saying in effect that the Maxims had been condemned at Paris, that everything urged in its defence was futile, and that the royal authority would be exerted to the utmost to execute the decision of the pontifical chair. Bossuet naturally calculated that a missive, thus intimating the sentence Infallibility was expected by a great monarch to pronounce,—arriving almost at the same time with the news of a disgrace reserved only for the most grave offences,—would secure the speedy condemnation of Fénélon’s book.

At Rome commenced a series of deliberations destined to extend over a space of nearly two years. Two successive bodies of adjudicators were impanelled and dissolved, unable to arrive at a decision. A new congregation of cardinals was selected, who held scores of long and wearisome debates, while rumour and intrigue alternately heightened or depressed the hopes of either party.[361] To write the Maxims of the Saints was a delicate task. It was not easy to repudiate the mysticism of Molinos without impugning the mysticism of St. Theresa. But the position of these judges was more delicate yet. It was still less easy to censure Fénélon without rendering suspicious, at the least, the orthodoxy of the most shining saints in the Calendar. On the one hand, there might be risk of a schism; on the other pressed the urgency and the influence of a powerful party, the impatience, almost the menaces of a great king.

The real question was simply this,—Is disinterested love possible? Can man love God for His own sake alone, with a love, not excluding, but subordinating all other persons and objects, so that they shall be regarded only in God who is All in All? If so, is it dangerous to assert the possibility, to commend this divine ambition, as Fénélon has done? But the discussion was complicated and inflamed by daily slander and recrimination, by treachery and insinuation, and by the honest anger they provoke; by the schemes of personal ambition, by the rivalry of religious parties, by the political intrigues of the State, by the political intrigues of the Church; by the interests of a crew of subaltern agents, who loved to fish in muddy waters; and by the long cherished animosity between Gallican and Ultramontanist. Couriers pass and repass continually between Rome and Cambray, between Rome and Paris. The Abbé Bossuet writes constantly from Rome to the Bishop of Meaux; the Abbé de Chanterac from the same city to the Archbishop of Cambray. Chanterac writes like a faithful friend and a good man; he labours day and night in the cause of Fénélon; he bids him be of good cheer and put his trust in God. The letters of the Abbé Bossuet to his uncle are worthy a familiar of the Inquisition. After circulating calumnies against the character of Madame Guyon, after hinting that Fénélon was a partaker of her immoralities as well as of her heresy, and promising, with each coming post, to produce fresh confessions and new discoveries of the most revolting licentiousness, he sits down to urge Bossuet to second his efforts by procuring the banishment of every friend whom Fénélon yet has at Court; and to secure, by a decisive blow in Paris, the ruin of that ‘wild beast,’ Fénélon, at Rome. Bossuet lost no time in acting on the suggestion of so base an instrument.[362]

XI.

At Paris a hot war of letters, pamphlets, and treatises, was maintained by the leaders, whose quarrel everywhere divided the city and the court into two hostile encampments. Fénélon offered a resistance Bossuet had never anticipated, and the veteran polemic was deeply mortified to see public opinion doubtful, whether he or a younger rival had won the laurels in argument and eloquence. In an evil hour for his fame he resolved to crush his antagonist at all costs; he determined that the laws of honourable warfare should be regarded no more, that no confidence should be any longer sacred. In the summer of 1698 the storm burst upon the head of the exile at Cambray. Early in June, Fénélon heard that the Abbé de Beaumont, his nephew, and the Abbé de Langeron, his friend, had been dismissed in disgrace from the office of sub-preceptors to the young Duke of Burgundy; that Dupuy and De Leschelles, had been banished the Court because of their attachment to him; that his brother had been expelled from the marine, and a son of Madame Guyon from the guards; that the retiring and pacific Fleury had narrowly escaped ignominy for a similar cause: that the Dukes of Beauvilliers, Chevreuse, and Guiche, were themselves menaced, and the prospect of their downfall openly discussed; and that to correspond with him was hereafter a crime against the State. Within a month, another Job’s messenger brought him tidings that Bossuet had produced a book entitled An Account of Quietism—an attack so terrible that the dismay of his remaining friends had almost become despair. Bossuet possessed three formidable weapons—his influence as a courtier, his authority as a priest, his powers as an author. He wielded them all at once, and all of them dishonourably. If he was unfair in the first capacity, when he invoked the thunders of royalty to ruin the cause of a theological opponent—if he was unfair in the second, when he denounced forbearance and silenced intercession as sins against God,—he was yet more so in the third, when he employed all his gifts, to weave into a malignant tissue of falsehood and exaggeration the memoirs of Madame Guyon, the correspondence of Fénélon with Madame de Maintenon, and his former confidential letters to himself—letters on spiritual matters to a spiritual guide—letters which should have been sacred as the secresy of the Confessional. The sensation created by the Account of Quietism was prodigious. Bossuet presented his book to the King, whose approval was for every parasite the authentication of all its slanders. Madame de Maintenon, with her own hand, distributed copies among the courtiers; in the salon of Marly nothing else was talked of; in the beautiful gardens groups of lords and ladies, such as Watteau would have loved to paint, were gathered on the grass, beside the fountains, beneath the trees, to hear it read; it was begged, borrowed, stolen, greedily snatched, and delightedly devoured; its anecdotes were so piquant, its style so sparkling, its bursts of indignant eloquence so grand; gay ladies, young and old, dandies, wits, and libertines, found its scandal so delicious,—Madame Guyon was so exquisitely ridiculous,—La Combe, so odious a Tartuffe,—Fénélon, so pitiably displumed of all his shining virtues; and, what was best of all, the insinuations were worse than the charges,—the book gave much and promised more,—it hinted at disclosures more disgraceful yet, and gave free scope to every malicious invention and every prurient conjecture.[363]

XII.

The generous Fénélon, more thoughtful for others than for himself, at first hesitated to reply even to such a provocation, lest he should injure the friends who yet remained to him at Versailles. But he was soon convinced that their position, as much as his, rendered an answer imperative. He received Bossuet’s book on the 8th of July, and by the 13th of August his defence had been written, printed, and arrived at Rome, to gladden the heart of poor Chanterac, to stop the mouth of the enemy, and to turn the tide once more in behalf of his failing party. This refutation, written with such rapidity, and under such disadvantages, was a masterpiece,—it redeemed his character from every calumny,—it raised his reputation to its height,—it would have decided a fair contest completely in his favour. It was composed when his spirit was oppressed by sorrow for the ruin of his friends, and darkened by the apprehension of new injuries which his justification might provoke,—by a proscribed man at Cambray, remote from the assistance and appliances most needful,—without a friend to guide or to relieve the labour of arranging and transcribing documents and of verifying dates, where scrupulous accuracy was of vital importance,—when it was difficult to procure correct intelligence from Paris, and hazardous to write thither lest he should compromise his correspondents,—when even his letters to Chanterac were not safe from inspection,—when it would be difficult to find a printer for such a book, and yet more so to secure its circulation in the metropolis. As it was, D’Argenson, the lieutenant of police,—a functionary pourtrayed by his contemporaries as at once the ugliest and most unprincipled of men,—seized a package of seven hundred copies at the gates of Paris. The Reply appeared, however, and was eagerly read. Even the few who were neutral, the many who were envious, the host who were prejudiced, could not withhold their admiration from that lucid and elegant style—that dignified and unaffected eloquence; numbers yielded, in secret, at least, to the force of such facts and such arguments; while all were astonished at the skill and self-command with which the author had justified his whole career without implicating a single friend; and leaving untouched the shield of every other adversary, had concentrated all his force on exposing the contradictions, the treachery, and the falsehood of Bossuet’s accusation.[364]

The controversy now draws to a close. Bossuet published Remarks on the Reply of Fénélon, and Fénélon rejoined with Remarks on the Remarks of Bossuet. Sixty loyal doctors of the Sorbonne censured twelve propositions, in the Maxims, while Rome was yet undecided. Towards the close of the same year (1698) Louis wrote a letter to the Pope, yet more indecently urgent than his former one, demanding a thorough condemnation of so dangerous a book; and this epistle he seconded by depriving Fénélon, a few weeks afterwards, of the title and pension of preceptor—that pension which Fénélon had once nobly offered to return to a treasury exhausted by ambitious wars.[365]

Innocent XII. had heard, with indignant sorrow, of the arbitrary measures adopted against Fénélon and his friends. He was mortified by the arrogance of Louis, by the attempts so openly made to forestall his judgment. He was accustomed to say that Cambray had erred through excess of love to God; Meaux, by want of love to his neighbour. But Louis was evidently roused, and it was not safe to provoke him too far. After a last effort at a compromise, the Pope yielded; and the cardinals pronounced a condemnation, far less complete, however, than the vehemence of the accusers had hoped to secure. Twenty-three propositions extracted from the Maxims, were censured, but the Pontiff openly declared that such censure did not extend to the explanations which the Archbishop of Cambray had given of his book. This sentence was delivered on the 12th of March, 1699. The submission of Fénélon is famous in history. He received the intelligence as he was about to ascend the pulpit; he changed his subject, and preached a sermon on the duty of submission to superiors.[366] Bossuet endeavoured, in vain, to represent the obedience which was the first to pronounce the sentence of self-condemnation, as a profound hypocrisy.

XIII.

Madame Guyon lingered for four years a solitary prisoner in the dungeons of the Bastille. In the same tower was confined the Man of the Iron Mask, and she may have heard, in her cell, the melancholy notes of the guitar with which her fellow-prisoner beguiled a captivity whose horrors had then lasted seven-and-thirty years. There, a constitution never strong, was broken down by the stony chill of rigorous winters, and by the noxious vapours which steamed from the stagnant moat in summer.[367] She was liberated in 1702, and sent to Blois,—a picturesque old city, whose steep and narrow streets, cut into innumerable steps, overlook the Loire,—crowned on the one side by its fine church, and on the other by the royal chateau, memorable for the murder of the Guises; its massive proportions adorned by the varying tastes of successive generations, then newly beautified after the designs of Mansart, and now a ruin, the delight of every artist. There she lived in quiet, sought out from time to time by visitors from distant provinces and other lands,—as patient under the infirmity of declining age as beneath the persecutions of her earlier years,—finding, as she had always done, some sweet in every bitter cup, and a theme for praise in every trial, purified by her long afflictions, elevated by her hope of glory, full of charity and full of peace, resigned and happy to the last. Her latest letter is dated in 1717,—Bossuet had departed, and Fénélon,—and before the close of that year, she also, the subject of such long and bitter strife, had been removed beyond all the tempests of this lower world.

In the judicial combats of ancient Germany, it was the custom to place in the centre of the lists a bier, beside which stood the accuser and the accused, at the head and at the foot, leaning there for some time in solemn silence before they laid lance in rest and encountered in the deadly shock. Would that religious controversialists had oftener entered and maintained their combat as alike in view of that final appeal in the unseen world of truth—with a deeper and more abiding sense of that supreme tribunal before which so many differences vanish, and where none but he who has striven lawfully can receive a crown. Bossuet was regarded as the champion of Hope, and drew his sword, it was said, lest sacrilegious hands should remove her anchor. Fénélon girded on his arms to defend the cause of Charity. Alas! said the Pope—heart-sick of the protracted conflict—they forget that it is Faith who is in danger. Among the many witty sayings which the dispute suggested to the lookers-on, perhaps one of the most significant is that attributed to the daughter of Madame de Sévigné. ‘M. de Cambray,’ said she, ‘pleads well the cause of God, but M. de Meaux yet better that of religion, and cannot fail to win the day at Rome.’ Fénélon undertook to show that his semi-Quietism was supported by the authority of ecclesiastical tradition, and he was unquestionably in the right. He might have sustained, on Romanist principles, a doctrine much less moderate, by the same argument. But it was his wish to render mysticism as rational and as attractive as possible; and no other advocate has exhibited it so purified from extravagance, or secured for it so general a sympathy. The principle of ‘holy indifference,’ however, must be weighed, not by the virtues of Fénélon, but according to the standard of Scripture,—and such an estimate must, we believe, pronounce it mistaken.

XIV.

The attempt to make mysticism definite and intelligible must always involve more or less of inconsistency. Nevertheless, the enterprise has been repeatedly undertaken; and it is a remarkable fact, that such efforts have almost invariably originated in France. Mysticism and scholasticism—the spirit of the cloud and the spirit of the snow—reign as rivals throughout the stormy region of the Middle Age. The reaction against the extreme of each nourished its antagonist. Hugo and Richard of St. Victor endeavoured to effect a union, and to reconcile these contending products of the heart and brain. In that ascetic abstraction, which hides in darkness all the objects of sense, they sought to develop, from the dull and arid stem of school divinity, the most precious blossoms of the feeling; and their mysticism resembles those plants of the cactus-tribe which unfold, from their lustreless and horny leaves, gorgeous flowers, that illumine, with phosphoric radiance, the darkness of the tropical night. The Victorines were succeeded in the same path by Bonaventura, a Frenchman by education, if not by birth, more a schoolman than a mystic; and, in the fifteenth century, by Gerson. These are mystics who have no tales to tell of inspiration and of vision—their aim is to legitimize rapture, to define ecstasy, to explain the higher phenomena of the spirit on the basis of an elaborate psychology, to separate the delusive from the real in mysticism, and to ascertain the laws of that mystical experience, of which they acknowledged themselves to be but very partially the subjects. With this view, Gerson introduced into mysticism, strange to say, the principle of induction; and proposed, by a collection and comparison of recorded examples, to determine its theory, and decide its practice. In the Maxims of the Saints, Fénélon carries out the idea of Gerson, as far as was requisite for his immediate purpose. Both are involved in the same difficulty, and fall into the same contradiction. What Molinos was to Fénélon, Ruysbroek was to Gerson. Fénélon wished to stop short of the spiritualism condemned as heretical in Molinos; Gerson, to avoid the pantheism he thought he saw in Ruysbroek. Both impose checks, which, if inefficacious, amount to nothing; if effective, are fatal to the very life of mysticism,—both hold doctrines, to which they dare not give scope; and both are, to some extent, implicated in the consequences they repudiate by the principles they admit.

Mysticism in France contrasts strikingly, in this respect, with mysticism in Germany. Speaking generally, it may be said that France exhibits the mysticism of sentiment, Germany the mysticism of thought. The French love to generalize and to classify. An arrangement which can be expressed by a word, a principle which can be crystallized into a sparkling maxim, they will applaud. But with them conventionalism reigns paramount—society is ever present to the mind of the individual—their sense of the ludicrous is exquisitely keen. The German loves abstractions for their own sake. To secure popularity for a visionary error in France, it must be lucid and elegant as the language—it must be at least an ingenious and intelligible falsehood; but in Germany, the most grotesque inversions of thought and of expression will be found no hindrance to its acceptability, and the most hopeless obscurity may be pronounced its highest merit. In this respect, German philosophy sometimes resembles Lycophron, who was so convinced that unintelligibility was grandeur, as to swear he would hang himself if a man were found capable of understanding his play of Cassandra. Almost every later German mystic has been a secluded student—almost every mystic of modern France has been a brilliant conversationalist. The genius of mysticism rises, in Germany, in the clouds of the solitary pipe; in France, it is a fashionable Ariel, who hovers in the drawing-room, and hangs to the pendants of the glittering chandelier. If Jacob Behmen had appeared in France, he must have counted disciples by units, where in Germany he reckoned them by hundreds. If Madame Guyon had been born in Germany, rigid Lutheranism might have given her some annoyance; but her earnestness would have redeemed her enthusiasm from ridicule, and she would have lived and died the honoured precursor of modern German Pietism. The simplicity and strength of purpose which characterize so many of the German mystics, appear to much advantage beside the vanity and affectation which have so frequently attended the manifestations of mysticism in France. In Germany, theosophy arose with the Reformation, and was as much a theology as a science. In France, where the Reformation had been suppressed, and where superstition had been ridiculed with such success, the same love of the marvellous was most powerful with the most irreligious—it filled the antechamber of Cagliostro with impatient dandies and grandees, trembling, and yet eager to pry into the future—too enlightened to believe in Christ, yet too credulous to doubt the powers of a man before whose door fashion drew, night after night, a line of carriages which filled the street.

Note to page 245.

A full account of the proceedings against the Quietists will be found in the narrative above referred to and in Arnold’s Kirchen-und-Ketzer Geschichte, th. III. cap. xvii.

The motive of Père La Chaise in urging this prosecution appears to have been twofold: partly, to start heretics whom his Most Christian Majesty might magnificently hunt, and still more to weaken the Spanish party and embarrass the Pope, who was suspected of leaning toward the house of Austria. The audacity of the Jesuits—so formidable always, from their numbers, their union, their unscrupulousness, and now emboldened by support so powerful, struck all Rome with terror. A man widely reputed for sanctity, throughout a period of twenty years—an honoured guest within the walls of the Vatican—who had long enjoyed, and not yet forfeited, the warm friendship of the Head of the Church—was suddenly declared the most dangerous enemy to the faith of Christendom. To accomplish the ruin of this victim, a venerable pontiff was threatened with the most grievous insult which infallibility could suffer. Within a month, two hundred persons were thrown into the dungeons of the Inquisition,—and many of these were eminent for rank, for learning, or for piety. Only the grossly stupid or the scandalously dissolute could feel themselves secure. To hint a question concerning the justice of a single step in prosecutions remarkable, even at Rome, for the baseness and illegality of their agents and their acts—to live a quiet and retiring life—to appear infrequently at confession or at mass,—these were circumstances sufficient to render any man suspected of Quietism; and if the informer were hungry, or a private enemy alert, from suspicion to conviction was but a step.

But the persecutors were destined to meet with many mortifications in their course. Molinos and his friend Petrucci—a bishop, and afterwards a cardinal—defended themselves, on their first summons, with such skill and intrepidity, that the writings which had been circulated against them were condemned as libellous. The case of Petrucci represents that of the great majority against whom the charge of Quietism was brought. Not an accusation could be substantiated, save this,—that blameless as his life might be, he had grown remiss in some of those outward observances which are the pride of Pharisaic sanctity. Thus defeated at the outset, the Jesuits were reinforced and rendered victorious by the falsehoods of D’Etrees, who refused to hear a word Molinos had to say in defence of his own writings. The Count and Countess Vespiniani were arrested, with other persons, to the number of seventy. They were accused of omitting the exterior practices of religion, and of giving themselves to solitude and prayer. The Countess bravely answered, that she had discovered her manner of devotion only to her confessor; he must have betrayed her; who but idiots would confess, if confession was made the engine of the persecutor—if no secret was sacred—if to confess might be to lie at the mercy of a villain? Henceforward she would confess to God alone. A rank so high must be respected. Words so bold were dangerous. So the Vespiniani were set free. The circular letter sent out against the Quietists was treated with indifference by most of the Italian bishops—not unleavened, many of them, by this obnoxious kind of piety. Nay, worse! for once, an epistle from the Inquisition was published. The unfortunate letter escaped somehow—was translated into Italian—all Rome was reading it. The world looked in on the procedure of the Holy Office, to the shame and bitter vexation of its holy men. It was said that the Inquisition collected some twenty thousand letters, or copies of letters, sent and received by Molinos, and that when he was arrested, twenty crowns’ worth of letters addressed to him were seized at the post-office. So extended was the influence of the heretic—so little likely, therefore, to perish with him. Some ecclesiastics had the candour to admit that most of the Quietists showed themselves better instructed than their accusers, and confronted their judges so ably, with passages, authorities, and arguments, that they could only be silenced by authority and force.

The letter of Cardinal Caraccioli to Innocent, about the Quietists, represents them as persons who attempt passive mental prayer and ‘contemplatio,’ without the previous preparation of the ‘via purgativa.’ Dreadful to relate, some of them had been known to leave their rosaries unfingered, to refuse to make the sign of the cross, to declare crucifixes rather in their way than otherwise! They trusted rather to their inward attraction than to directors. Some, though laymen, and though married, communed daily—an ominous sign—for it betokened the lowering (in their minds, at least) of that high partition wall, which Rome had made so strong, between clergy and laity—between the religious par excellence and the vulgar herd of Christians, who were to be saved only through the former. See Bausset’s Histoire de Fénélon, liv. ii.; Pièces Justificatives, No. II.

Note to page 259.

Fénélon could with ease bring from the arsenal of tradition even more proofs than he needed for the establishment of his doctrine. No prevarication or sophistry could conceal the fact that Bernard, Albertus Magnus, Francis de Sales, Theresa, Catharine of Genoa, and other saints, had used language concerning pure love, authenticating more than all that Fénélon was solicitous to defend. Thus much was proven,—even subtracting those passages which Fénélon unwittingly cited from an edition of De Sales’ Entretiens, said to be full of interpolations. The spiritual history of Friar Laurent and of Francis de Sales furnished actual examples of the most extreme case Fénélon was willing to put. Bossuet’s true answer was the reply he gave on the question to Madame de la Maisonfort,—such rare and extraordinary cases should be left out of our consideration, they should not be drawn within the range of possible experience, even for Christians considerably advanced. (Phelipeaux, liv. i. pp. 165-176.) In dispute with Fénélon, instead of admitting the fact, as with La Maisonfort, the polemic gets uppermost, and he tries very dishonestly to explain away the language of De Sales, while he misrepresents and garbles that of Fénélon. See Cinquième Lettre en Réponse à divers Ecrits; Première Lettre en Réponse à celle de M. L’Evêque de Meaux; Maximes des Saints, art. v.

Fénélon draws a subtile distinction between the object of love and the motive of love. That love in God which renders him our eternal blessedness, is among the objects of our love—for God has so revealed himself, but is not the motive of it. (Max. des Saints, art. iv.) Do we desire happiness less, he asks, because we desire it from a worthy motive,—i.e., as desired by God? Do we extinguish hope by exalting and regulating it? (Entretiens sur la Religion; Œuvres, tom. i. p. 35.) If any one of us knew that he should be annihilated at death, ought he less to love the infinitely Good? Is not eternal life a gift which God is free to grant or to withhold? Shall the love of the Christian who is to have eternal life be less than that of him who anticipates annihilation, just because the love of God to him is so much more? Shall such a gift serve only to make love interested? (Sur le Pur Amour, xix. Compare also Max. des Saints, art. 10, 11, 12; Correspondance, let. 43.)

Fénélon is very careful to state that disinterested love is put to its most painful proof only in rare and extreme cases,—that the love which is interested is not a sin, only a lower religious stage, and that he who requires that staff is to beware how he throws it aside prematurely, ambitious of a spiritual perfection which may be beyond his reach. Bossuet endeavoured to show that if Fénélon’s doctrine were true, any love except the disinterested was a crime. (Instructions et Avis, &c., xx.; Sur le Pur Amour, p. 329; Max. des Saints, art. iii., and sundry qualifications of importance, concerning self-abandonment in the ‘épreuves extrêmes,’ art. ix.)

Note to page 259.

Such is the explanation in the letter to La Maisonfort. But Fénélon is not always—perhaps, could not possibly be—quite consistent with himself on this most delicate of questions. Beyond a doubt, the attempt practically to apply this doctrine concerning reflex acts constitutes the morbid element in his system—is the one refinement above all others fatally unnatural. There is great truth in Fénélon’s warnings against nervous, impatient introspection. Against an evil so prevalent, and so constantly fostered by the confessional and the directors, it was high time that some one should protest. But, alas! not only does Fénélon himself uphold, most zealously, that very directorship, but this strain after a love perfectly disinterested tempts the aspirant to be continually hunting inwardly after traces of the hated self, which will never quite vanish. Happy, according to Fénélon, is that religionist who can sacrifice, not only himself, but the sacrifice of himself—who burns the burnt offering—who gives up the consciousness of having given himself up—and who has reached, without knowing it, the pinnacle of Christian perfection. The reader will find specimens of his more guarded language in the letter referred to in the Instructions et Avis, &c. xx.; Max. des Saints, art. xiii.; Lettres Spirituelles, xiii. This last, a letter to Sœur Charlotte de St. Cyprien, is of importance, as containing definitions of mystical terms, similar in substance to those given in the Maximes, and moreover, highly approved by Bossuet, a year after the conferences at Issy. The strongest expressions are found in the Instructions et Avis, xxii. xxiii. He says,—Pour consommer le sacrifice de purification en nous des dons de Dieu, il faut donc achever de détruire l’holocauste; il faut tout perdre, même l’abandon aperçu par lequel on se voit livré à sa perte.—P. 342. Compare the allusion to the unconscious prayer of St. Anthony, Max. des Saints, art. xxi.

Note to page 259.

L’activité que les mystiques blâment n’est pas l’action réelle et la co-opération de l’âme à la grâce; c’est seulement une crainte inquiète, ou une ferveur empressée qui recherche les dons de Dieu pour sa propre consolation.—Lettres Spirituelles, xiii. So also, in the letter to La Maisonfort, he shows that the state of passivity does not preclude a great number of distinct acts. This is what the mystics call co-operating with God without activity of our own—a subtlety which those may seek to understand who care. Fénélon means to forbid a selfish isolation, which, on pretence of quietude, neglects daily duty. True repose in God calmly discharges such obligations as they come. We have seen an example of this in St. Theresa. Fénélon is not prepared to go the length of John of the Cross, who denies our co-operation altogether.—Maximes des Saints, art. xxx. and xxix. Ils ne font plus d’actes empressés et marqués par une secousse inquiète: ils font des actes si paisibles et si uniformes, que ces actes, quoique très-réels, très-successifs, et même interrompus, leur paraissent ou un seul acte sans interruption, ou un repos continuel.

Fénélon is at any time ready to endorse all the counsels of John of the Cross, as to the duty of leaving behind (outre-passer) all apparitions, sounds, tastes, everything visionary, sensuous, or theurgic. With the grosser forms of mysticism he has no sympathy. He even endeavours to represent St. Theresa as an advocate of the purer and more refined mysticism, adducing the scarce-attainable seventh Morada, and overlooking the sensuous character of the preceding six. Theresa might, in the abstract, rate the visionless altitude above the valley of vision; but she preferred, for herself, unquestionably, the valley to the mountain. (Max. des Saints, xix.; Lettres Spirituelles, xiv. xvi. xvii.) In a letter on extraordinary gifts, he repeats the precept of John—‘Aller toujours par le non-voir;’ and ‘outre-passer les grands dons, et marcher dans la pure foi comme si on ne les avait pas reçus.’ He consigns the soul, in like manner, to a blank abstraction—to what Luther would have called ‘a void tedium.’ Tout ce qui est goût et ferveur sensible, image créée, lumière distincte et aperçue, donne une fausse confiance, et fait une impression trop vive; on les reçoit avec joie, et on les quitte avec peine. Au contraire, dans la nudité de la pure foi, on ne doit rien voir; on n’a plus en soi ni pensée ni volonté; on trouve tout dans cette simplicité générale, sans s’arrêter à rien de distinct; on ne possède rien, mais on est possédé.—Lettre xxiii. The very acts of which Contemplation is made up, are, says Fénélon—‘Si simples, si directs, si paisibles, si uniformes, qu’ils n’ont rien de marqué par où l’âme puisse les distinguer.’—Max. des Saints, art. xxi. What such acts can be, must remain for ever a mystery unfathomable. It is for these inexplicable ‘actes distincts’ that the convenient ‘facilité spéciale’ is provided. (Correspondance, lettre 43; comp. Lettres Spirituelles, xiii. 448.)

Fénélon is also careful to guard his mysticism against the pretences of special revelation and any troublesome insubordination on the part of the ‘inner light,’ or l’attrait intérieur. The said ‘attrait,’ he justly observes, ‘n’est point une inspiration miraculeuse et prophétique, qui rende l’âme infaillible, ni impeccable, ni indépendante, de la direction des pasteurs; ce n’est que la grâce, qui est sans cesse prévenante dans tous les justes, et qui est plus spéciale dans les âmes élevées par l’amour désintéressé,’ &c.—Loc. cit. p. 450; Max. des Saints, art. xxix. and vii.

Note to page 262.

Fénélon gives his reasons for refusing to affix his approval to Bossuet’s book, in letters to Tronson and Madame de Maintenon, and in the Réponse. (Correspondance, lettres 52, 53, 57; Réponse à la Relation, chap, v.) It was a strong point for Fénélon against Bossuet that the latter had administered to Madame Guyon the sacraments, and granted her a favourable certificate, after reading the very books in which he professed afterwards to discover the most flagitious designs. In thinking better, therefore, of her intentions than of her language, Fénélon was no more her partisan or defender than Bossuet himself had been, up to that point. The act of submission Bossuet made her sign was not a retractation of error, but simply a declaration that she had never held any of the errors condemned in the pastoral letter,—that she always meant to write in a sense altogether orthodox, and had no conception that any dangerous interpretation could be put upon the terms which, in her ignorance, she had employed. (Réponse à la Relation, chap. i.) Phelipeaux sees in everything Fénélon wrote—the notes for the Maxims—the memoranda he sent to Bossuet, only one purpose—an insane resolve to defend Madame Guyon at all costs. He chooses to imagine that every step taken by her was secretly dictated by Fénélon. In fact, however, from the time the first suspicions arose, Fénélon began to withdraw from Madame Guyon his former intimacy. Nothing could exceed his caution in the avoidance of all implication with one whose language was susceptible of such fatal misconstruction. He could probably have taken no better course. He endeavoured to retain the controversy about the real question, that she might be forgotten. But it soon became evident that he himself was the party attacked, and with a virulence for which the scandals attributed to Madame Guyon furnished an instrument too tempting to be neglected. The charges against Madame Guyon increased in magnitude—not with her resistance, for she made none—but with that of Fénélon. (Réponse, xxiii. lxxxiv. lx.)

Note to page 264.

The motives with which Fénélon wrote and published the Maxims are fully stated by himself. It was not to defend Madame Guyon, but to rescue the doctrine of pure love, threatened with destruction by the growing prejudice against the religion of the ‘inward way.’ It was not to excuse the Quietists, but to preserve, by due distinctions, souls attached to the true mysticism, from the illusions of the false. It was to give their full and legitimate scope to those venerable principles which a heretical Quietism was said to have abused. Mysticism was not to be extinguished by denying the truth it contained. Let, then, the true be separated from the false. The Maxims were believed by Fénélon to contain no position contrary to the articles of Issy. The passages which cannot be reconciled with the limitations imposed by those articles are not his own, but quotations from De Sales and others. The Andalusian Illuminati had rendered the greatest saints suspected. Theresa, Alvarez, John of the Cross, stood in need of defenders. Ruysbroek, whom Bellarmine called the great contemplatist; Tauler, the Apostle of Germany, had required and had found champions, the one in Dionysius the Carthusian, the other in Blosius. The Cardinal Berulle felt compelled to enter the lists on behalf of St. Francis de Sales, for suspicions had been cast upon the wisdom of that eminent saint. Such examples might well alarm all those whose religion was embued with mysticism,—all those to whom a faith of that type was a necessity. Let it be openly declared where the path of safety lies, and where the dangers commence. The Maxims were to furnish a via media between the extreme of those who repudiated mystical theology altogether, and the excesses of the false mystics. The doctrines stigmatized as false throughout the Maxims, are what Fénélon supposed to be the tenets of Molinos, judging from the sixty-eight propositions condemned at Rome. The Faux, therefore, which opposes to the Vrai is, for the most part, a mere chimera—made up of doctrines really believed by scarcely any one,—only taught, perhaps, now and then, by designing priests to women, for the purposes of seduction. See the ‘Avertissement’ to the Maxims; Première Lettre en Réponse, &c. p. 111; Correspondance, lettre 59; and the letter on the Maxims, to the Pope, Phelipeaux, p. 239.

Note to page 265.

Among the expelled was the brilliant, unmanageable Madame de la Maisonfort—the last woman in the world to have been shut up in the small monotony of St. Cyr. The history of mysticism at St. Cyr is a miniature of its history at large. The question by which it is tried is simply practical. Will it subordinate itself? If so, let it flourish. If not, root it out. Jean d’Avila, in his Audi, Filia, et Vide, has a section entitled Des Fausses Révélations. The whole question turns on this point. Is the visionary obedient to director, superior, &c.? If so, the visions are of God. If not, the visions are of the Devil. (Œuvres du B. Jean D’Avila, Audi, Filia, et Vide, chapp. 50-55.)

Madame Guyon, in becoming a religious instructress, as she did, only followed examples honoured by the Romish Church. Angela de Foligni, the two Catharines of Siena and of Genoa, St. Theresa, and others, had become the spiritual guides of numbers, both men and women, lay and ecclesiastic. At another juncture the kind of revival introduced by Madame Guyon might have met with encouragement. But her tendency was precisely that of which the times were least tolerant, and her disposition to follow her inward attraction rather than the counsels of prelates was magnified to proportions so portentous as to exclude all hope. The mysticism of Fénélon, judged by the test of obedience, should certainly have been spared. With an anxiety almost nervous, he inculcates wherever he can, those precepts of abject servility towards the director which are so agreeable to his Church. Wherever the director is in question, we lose sight of Fénélon, we see only the priest. But neither his own sincere professions of submission, nor his constant effort to place every one else under the feet of some ecclesiastic or other, could save him from a condemnation pronounced, not on religious, but political grounds.

In this respect Fénélon was anything but the esprit fort which the scepticism of a later age so fervently admired. His letters on religious subjects abound in directions for absolute obedience, and in warnings against the exercise of thought and judgment on our own account. Though Madame de la Maisonfort knew herself utterly unfit for the religious vocation which Madame de Maintenon wished her to embrace, Fénélon could tell her that her repugnance, her anguish, her tears, were nothing, opposed to the decision of five courtly ecclesiastics, affirming that she had the vocation. He writes to say, La vocation ne se manifeste pas moins par la décision d’autrui que par notre propre attrait.—Correspondance, lettre 19. See also Lettres Spirituelles, 18, 19, 169. The inward attraction presents some perplexity. In one instance it is only another word for taste (Ibid. 35), and in another place the attraction of grace is equivalent to an act of observation and judgment (Ibid. 176). Here, with so many mystics, Fénélon can only follow the ‘moi,’ from which he fancies he escapes (441). The knot of these interior difficulties is cut by the directorship.

If Fénélon speaks uncertainly as to what is the inward attraction, and what is not, much more would the majority of mystics be sorely perplexed in their own case. The mystic, bewildered and wearied with intense self-scrutiny, sees all swim before his eyes. He can be sure of nothing. Whatever alternative he chooses, he has no sooner acted on the choice than he finds self in the act, and fancies the other road the right one. He is distressed by finding inclination and inward attraction changing, while he gazes, into each other, and back again, times without number. He is afraid to do what he likes—this may be self-pleasing. He is afraid to do what he does not like—for this may be perverseness—some culpable self-will, at least. The life of a devotee, so conscientious and so unfortunate, is rendered tolerable only by the director. The man who can put an end to this inward strife about trifles—which are anything but trifles to the sufferer—is welcomed as an angel from heaven. Casuistry, the creature of the confessional, renders its parent a necessity. Fénélon laments the abuses of the system, but he will rather believe that miracles will be continually wrought, to rescue the faithful from such mischiefs, than question (as bolder mystics, like Harphius had done) the institution itself. Even the mistakes and bad passions of superiors will be wrought into blessings for the obedient. (Sur la Direction, pp. 677, 678.)

Footnote 334:

O man, wouldst thou be grafted, and to the heavenly soil transplanted? then must thou first thy branches wild hew quite away, that kindly fruits may come forth in God’s image.

Footnote 335:

As far as his doctrine differs from that of Madame Guyon, it is for the worse, because he approaches more nearly the extreme language of some of the orthodox mystics in his communion.

Footnote 336:

This Dialogue of Malaval’s, which goes much beyond the mysticism of Molinos, was approved by the Sorbonne, and found so conformable to the teachings of St. Theresa, that the translation of it was dedicated to the bare-footed Carmelites. The unobtrusive and not unqualified mysticism of Molinos was stigmatised by the new epithet of Quietism, and condemned as deadly error. The extravagant and wonder-working mysticism of Theresa was extolled as the angelic life. See the Account of Molinos and the Quietists, appended to the Autobiography of Madame Guyon: translated, I believe, from a French work, entitled, Recueil de Diverses Pièces concernant le Quiétisme et les Quiétistes.

Footnote 337:

Michelet, Priests, Women, and Families, p. 74.

Footnote 338:

See Note on p. 276.

Footnote 339:

Upham, vol. ii. pp. 3, &c. We find among these persons of rank a religion of some vitality—no court-fashion merely. It was to the Introduction à la Vie Dévote (1608) of St. Francis de Sales that Romanism was indebted for such hold as it really had on the upper classes. None of the great ecclesiastical writers of France—not even that darling of the fifteenth century, the Imitatio Christi, could win the ears of people of the world. In the Introduction, however, religion appeared neither ruthlessly stern, nor hopelessly fantastical. It was not, on the one side, scowling, unkempt, sordid, morose; it was not, on the other, impalpable, supersensuous, utterly unintelligible, as well as undesirable, to worldly common sense. Fashion and devotion met; piety and politeness embraced each other. The Introduction leaves to others the pains and raptures of the mystic. It is written for the Marthas, not the Marys. Its readers, personified in Philothea, are not supposed to be covetous of any extraordinary gifts. De Sales possessed a lively fancy, and the tender religious sentiment of his book, graced and lightened by its rainbow illustrations, was a bright-winged Psyche, welcome everywhere. These illustrations are drawn, sometimes from the farms, the flower-valleys, and the snow-peaks of his native Savoy; sometimes from fabulous natural history, from classic story, from the legends of the Church, or the forms and usages of the world,—oftenest of all, from the ways of infants and children, and from the love of mothers. St. Beuve happily characterises the work, as ‘un livre qui, sur la table d’une femme comme il faut ou d’un gentilhomme poli de ce temps-là, ne chassait pas absolument le volume de Montaigne, et, attendait, sans le fuir, le volume d’Urfé.’—Causeries du Lundi, tom. vii. p. 216.

Footnote 340:

This Harlay had owed his archbishopric to his libertinism in the days of Madame de Montespan. His sun was now setting, ingloriously enough, under the decent régime of the Maintenon, and there was nothing for it but to atone for the scandals of his life and diocese by exemplary rigour in matters of doctrine. The letters sent, and the documents shown him, were the fabrication of La Mothe and his creature the scrivener Gautier. They forged a letter from Marseilles, pretending that La Combe had slept in the same chamber with Madame Guyon—and also eaten meat in Lent. La Combe was further accused of having embraced and taught the heresy of Molinos.

The real letters which followed Madame Guyon from the scenes of her former activity breathe no suspicion of her character or motives. The Bishop of Geneva, in a letter quoted by Fénélon, declared that his only complaint against her was the indiscreet zeal with which she everywhere propagated truths which she believed serviceable to the Church. With that exception, ‘he esteemed her infinitely, and entertained for her the highest imaginable regard.’ This was in 1683. In 1688 he prohibited her books. But even in 1695, the same bishop repeats his praise of her piety and morals, and declares that his conscience never would have suffered him to speak of her in other than respectful language.—See Memoirs for the History of Madame de Maintenon (London, 1757), vol. III. bk. xi. c. 2. Autobiography, part III. chapp. i. ii. iii. Fénélon’s Réponse à la Relation sur le Quiétisme, chap. i.

Footnote 341:

Memoirs for the History of Madame de Maintenon, bk. ix. Madame Guyon’s doctrine entered St. Cyr while the absolute vows were yet under discussion.

Footnote 342:

Memoirs for the History of Madame de Maintenon, bk. xi. chap. v.

Footnote 343:

Autobiography, part III. chap. ix. Fénélon declares that her explanations at these interviews were such as to satisfy him of the harmlessness and orthodoxy of her intention. She appeared to him often extravagant or questionable in expression, from her ignorance; but so favoured of God, that the most learned divine might gather spiritual wisdom from her lips. She told him of certain instantaneous supernatural communications, which came and vanished, she knew not how. Yet, like John of the Cross, she did not rest on these, but passed on into the obscure path of pure faith. For this he praised her, and believed that though these experiences were illusory, a spirit so lowly and so obedient had been faithful to grace throughout, such involuntary deception notwithstanding.—Réponse à la Relation sur le Quiétisme, chap. i. 10-13.

Footnote 344:

She still speaks, however, of the ‘sense’ vouchsafed her of the state of the souls given to her, even when they were at a distance; and of communication in God with those to whom the Lord united her by the tie of spiritual maternity. Autobiography, part III. ch. viii. Nothing was more likely to open her eyes to the questionable character of some of her experiences, and to the unguarded nature of many of her expressions, than the kindly yet searching inquiries of a man like Fénélon, qualified by temperament to enter into her feelings, and a master in mystical theology. Mr. Upham seems to me greatly to overrate the influence of Madame Guyon on Fénélon. To her fancy, her imagination might at times depict him as a spiritual son: he was, in fact, a friendly judge.

Footnote 345:

When called to separate the true mysticism from the false in the writings of Madame Guyon, Bossuet was not only ignorant of Tauler, Ruysbroek, Harphius, and others; he had not even read Francis de Sales or John of the Cross. Fénélon, at his request, sent him a collection of passages from Suso, Harphius, Ruysbroek, Tauler, Catharine of Genoa, St. Theresa, John of the Cross, Alvarez, De Sales, and Madame de Chantal. With just indignation does Fénélon expose the artifice by which Bossuet afterwards attempted to turn this confidence against him.—Réponse à la Relation sur le Quiétisme, chap. ii. 18-27.

Footnote 346:

History of Madame de Maintenon, bk. XI. chap. vii.

Footnote 347:

History of Madame de Maintenon, bk. XI. chap. vii. Bausset, Histoire de Fénélon, liv. ii. p. 295. The high opinion entertained of Fénélon by Madame de Maintenon was, as yet, unshaken. She knew that though the friend of Madame Guyon, he was not her advocate. But she was called to side with the man of charity or the man of zeal—the liberal man or the bigot; and the issue could not long be doubtful. Fénélon early saw the signs of danger. We find him striving to moderate the enthusiasm of Madame de la Maisonfort—to reconcile her to the regulations of Godet—to repress her indiscreet zeal in behalf of her cousin, Madame Guyon.—Correspondance de Fénélon, Lettres 24, 26, 29, 30.

Footnote 348:

Autobiography, part III. chap. xiii. Phelipeaux gives in full the correspondence on both sides, Relation de l’Origine, du Progrès et de la Condamnation du Quiétisme répandu en France (1732), liv. i. pp. 73, &c. His account abounds in misrepresentations, and does little more, in the first part, than echo the Relation sur le Quiétisme of Bossuet, to whom the abbé was devoted. But his minuteness of detail, and the copious insertion of important letters and documents on either side, give to the heavy narrative considerable value. In a subsequent interview between Bossuet and Madame Guyon, she declared herself unable to pray for any particular thing—the forgiveness of her sins, for instance. To do so was to fail in absolute abandonment and disinterestedness. Bossuet was shocked. Madame Guyon promised and meant, to be all submission; but conscience would be unmanageable at times. Bossuet writes her long, sensible, hard-headed letters, in which, without much difficulty, he exposes her error, and leaves her no ground to stand on. She, however, must still humbly suggest that the exercise of love embraces all petitions, and that as there is a love without reflexion, so there may be a prayer without reflexion—a substantial prayer, comprehending all others.—Phelipeaux, p. 111.

Footnote 349:

Her request was made to Madame de Maintenon for commissioners, half clerical, half lay, to examine into the scandals which had been set afloat against her character.—Phelipeaux, liv. i. p. 114. Autobiography, part III. chap. xv.

Footnote 350:

Autobiography, chapp. xvi. xvii. See also her letter to the three commissioners, in Phelipeaux, p. 117. Harlay heard with indignation of this Conference at Issy, to decide upon a heresy which had been unearthed in his diocese. He endeavoured to rouse the suspicions of Louis, but in vain. He determined himself to condemn the writings of Madame Guyon, before the Commissioners could come to a decision. Madame de Maintenon informed Bossuet, who paid a visit without loss of time to his metropolitan, complimented him on the censure he was about to fulminate, gave every explanation, and took his departure with polite assurances that the verdict of Issy would but reiterate the condemnation pronounced by the vigilant Archbishop of Paris. So completely was the cause of Madame Guyon prejudged.—Phelipeaux, p. 125.

Footnote 351:

Autobiography, part III. chapp. xviii. xix. Réponse à la Relation, &c., I. ii. 3. Upham, vol. II. chapp. x. and xi.

Footnote 352:

The articles at first proposed to Fénélon for his signature were thirty in number. The 12th and 13th, the 33rd and 34th, were wanting. He said that he could only sign these thirty articles as they were, ‘par déférence,’ and against his persuasion. Two days afterwards, when the four additional articles were laid before him, he declared himself ready to sign them with his blood. The 34th article is the most important of the four, as bearing directly on the most critical question arising from the doctrine of disinterested love. It allows that doctrine expressly, if words have meaning, and occupies all the ground Fénélon himself was concerned to maintain in its defence. (Entretiens sur la Religion, Fén. Œuvres, tom. i. p. 34.) The article is in substance as follows:—On peut inspirer aux âmes peinées et vraiment humbles un consentement à la volonté de Dieu, quand même, par une supposition très-fausse, au lieu des biens éternels promis aux justes, il les tiendrait dans les tourments éternels, sans néanmoins les priver de sa grâce et de son amour.—Réponse à la Relation, &c., chap. iii. Phelipeaux, liv. i. pp. 131, 135-137.

Footnote 353:

See Note on p. 278.

Footnote 354:

See second Note on p. 278.

Footnote 355:

See Note on p. 279.

Footnote 356:

Witness the panegyrics of Bossuet on Theresa and John of the Cross. Compare also their different verdicts on the former. Fénélon says, writing to Madame de Maintenon, ‘Quelque respect et quelque admiration que j’aie pour Sainte Thérèse, je n’aurais jamais voulu donner au public tout ce qu’elle a écrit.’—Correspondance, 31. Bossuet, writing to Madame Guyon, says, ‘Je n’ai jamais hésité un seul moment sur les états de Sainte Thérèse, parceque je n’y ai rien trouvé, que je ne trouvasse aussi dans l’Ecriture,’ &c.—Phelipeaux, liv. i. p. 104. In the Instructions sur les Etats d’Oraison, Bossuet, in speaking of the passive state, had allowed of certain miraculous suspensions (impuissances) from which Fénelon shrinks—which he would have located in some section Faux of his Maxims—and to which Noailles refused his approval.—Réponse à la Relation, xxviii. and lxii.

Footnote 357:

Her letter to Bossuet furnishes a fair justification of this retreat to Paris.—Phelipeaux, liv. i. p. 152. It gratifies our curiosity to learn from this authority what books were seized when Desgrès, the detective, entered the little house in the Faubourg St. Antoine, in the name of the king. There were some plays of Molière, some romances, such as John of Paris and Richard Lion-heart, but these, said Madame Guyon, belonged to the lacqueys of her son, a lieutenant in the guards. But she acknowledged a Griseldis and Don Quixote as her books. It is pleasing to find our fair saint, so far of like passions with ourselves, amused with Sancho, and pitying Griseldis,—herself a patient sufferer at the hands of blinded, pitiless men.

Footnote 358:

See Note on p. 280.

Footnote 359:

See second Note on p. 280.

Footnote 360:

Bausset, Histoire de Fénélon, liv. iii. p. 45. See also Note on p. 281.

Footnote 361:

Bausset, Hist. de Fénélon, liv. iii. 47. A minute, though very partial account of all the squabbles and intrigues at Rome, from first to last, may be read in Phelipeaux.—See also Memoirs of Madame de Maintenon, xi. 19. Corr. de Fénélon, lettre 108.

Footnote 362:

Bausset, iii. 48-50; Aimé-Martin, Etudes sur la Vie de Fénélon, p. 14.

Footnote 363:

Bausset, 53-4; Mem. of Maintenon, XI. 20; Aimé-Martin, 15.

Footnote 364:

Bausset, 59-61. The means to which Bossuet could stoop—the falsehoods he could coolly repeat, after detection, as though nothing had happened—the misquotation, and misrepresentation—the constant reply to awkwardly pressing arguments by malicious personalities—all these things are exposed in Fénélon’s Lettres en Réponse, and in the Réponse itself. They are bad enough; but the student of controversy is accustomed to this imperturbable lying, to these arts of insinuation. The most detestable feature of all in the part played by Bossuet, lies in that sleek cant and tearful unction with which he calumniates—as though it almost broke his heart to write what he exults in writing. Well might Fénélon request that he would not weep over him so profusely while he tore him in pieces, and desire fewer tears and more fair play! See the Preface to the Réponse; Réponse, 59; and Réponse aux Remarques, § vi.

Footnote 365:

Bausset, iii. 68, 69; Upham, vol. ii. p. 289.

Footnote 366:

Bausset, 77, 78.

Footnote 367:

Upham, vol. ii. ch. 18.

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

Chapter III

All opinions and notions, though never so true, about things spiritual, may be the very matter of heresy, when they are adhered to as the principle and end, with obstinacy and acquiescence; and, on the contrary, opinions and speculations, however false, may be the subject of orthodoxy, and very well consist with it, when they are not stiffly adhered to, but only employed in the service of disposing the soul to the faith of entire resignation, which is the only true orthodoxy wherein there can be no heresy nor capital errours.—POIRET.

WILLOUGBY. I think, Atherton, you have been somewhat too indulgent on that question of disinterested love. To me it appears sheer presumption for any man to pretend that he loves God without any regard to self, when his very being, with its power to know and love, is a gift—when he has nothing that he did not receive,—when his salvation is wholly of favour, and not of merit,—and when, from the very first, he has been laid under an ever-increasing weight of obligation beyond all estimate. On this matter Oliver Cromwell appears to me a better divine than Fénélon, when he writes, ‘I have received plentiful wages beforehand, and I know that I shall never earn the least mite.’

GOWER. Yet Fénélon bases disinterested love on the doctrine which denies to man all possibility of merit.

ATHERTON. I think Willoughby looks at Fénélon’s teaching concerning disinterested love too much apart from his times and his Church. Grant that this disinterestedness is a needless and unattainable refinement, savouring of that high-flown, ultra-human devotion so much affected by Romish saintship—still it has its serviceable truth, as opposed to the servile and mercenary religionism which the Romanist system must ordinarily produce.

WILLOUGHBY. It is the less of two evils, perhaps; but, let divines say what they will, men cannot abjure self as such a doctrine requires. Man may ask it of his fellow-men, but God does not require it of them, when he tells them He would have all men to be saved. That inalienable desire of individual well-being, to which God appeals, these theologians disdain.

GOWER. But man comes into this world to live for something higher than happiness.

WILLOUGHBY. That depends on what you mean by the word. Of course, life has a purpose far above that snug animalism which some men call happiness. In opposition to that, the outcry revived of late against happiness, as a motive, has its full right. But I mean by happiness, man’s true well-being—that of his higher, not his lower nature—that of his nature, not for a moment, but for ever. With such happiness, duty, however stern, must always ultimately coincide. I say, man was formed to desire such a realisation of the possibilities of his nature, that to bid him cease or slacken in this desire is a cruelty and a folly, and that the will of God ought never for an instant to be conceived as hostile to such well-being. If He were, why hear we of Redemption? And I may point with reverence to the Incarnate Perfectness, ‘who, for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross;’ he would die to know the blessedness of restoring to us our life. Only the most sublime self-sacrifice could account such a result a recompense; and that recompense he did not refuse to keep constantly in view.

ATHERTON. Your dispute is very much a question of words. True self-annihilation certainly does not consist in being without a personal aim, but in suppressing all that within us which would degrade that aim below the highest.

GOWER. The Quietists are right in undervaluing, as they do, mere pleasurable feeling in religion.

ATHERTON. Quite so: in as far as they mean to say by such depreciation that God may be as truly near and gracious in spiritual sorrow as in spiritual joy,—that inward delights and blissful states of mind are not to be put virtually in the place of Christ, as a ground of trust—that the witness of the Spirit does not evince itself in the emotional nature merely, but is realised in the general consciousness of a divine life, which is its own evidence. But I think the Quietists too much overlook the fact that peace, rising at times to solemn joy, is after all, the normal state of the Christian life, and as such, always a legitimate object of desire.

GOWER. As to disinterested love, once more, may we not take Bunyan as a good example of the mean between our two extremes? When in prison, and uncertain whether he might not soon be condemned to die, the thought came into his mind:—Suppose God should withdraw Himself at the very last moment—fail to support me at the gallows—abandon me. But he resisted the temptation like a man. He tells how he said within himself, ‘If God doth not come in (to comfort me), I will leap off the ladder even blindfold into eternity, sink or swim, come heaven, come hell. It was my duty,’ he declared, ‘to stand to His word, whether He would ever look upon me, or save me at the last, or not.’

WILLOUGHBY. I can understand Bunyan. He was driven to that self-abandonment, and his faith made its brave stand there; he did not seek it. But the Quietists would have us cultivate, as the habit of Christian perfection, that self-oblivion which is, in fact, only our resource in the hottest moment of temptation. Why shut ourselves up in the castle-keep, if not an outwork has been carried?

ATHERTON. What a torrent of cant and affectation must have been set a flowing when Quietism became the fashion for awhile! What self-complacent chatter about self-annihilation; and how easily might the detail of spiritual maladies and imaginary sins be made to minister to display! Is it not thus Pope describes Affectation?—how she

Faints into airs, and languishes with pride, On the rich quilt sinks with becoming woe Wrapt in a gown for sickness, and for show.

GOWER. That reminds me of Zoilus, pretending to be ill, that he might exhibit to his friends the new purple counterpane just come from Alexandria.

WILLOUGHBY. But I can imagine some, in earnest, seeking refuge in Quietism—doing so rather in desperation than in aspiration—heart sick, weary of the world. Such would find but cold comfort. In vain would they be surrounded with offers of supersensible manifestations, divine touches, tastes, illapses—ethereal, super-angelic—not to say superhuman, fare. Craving some tangible consolation, some food adapted to their nature, they would be mocked with these pictures of a feast,—with promise of the sustenance proper only to some other race of creatures.

ATHERTON. As though one should feed a sick lion on gingerbread and liqueurs.

GOWER. Or one might liken such poor disappointed creatures to the lamb brought into the churches on St. Agnes’ day, reclined on its cushion fringed with gold, its ears and tail decked with gay ribbon,—bleating to church music—petted and adorned, in a manner to it most unintelligible and unsatisfying—and seeming, to the ear of the satirist, to cry all the while,—

Alack, and alas! What’s all this white damask to daisies and grass!

KATE. Helen and I were much interested in that old book you lent us, Mr. Atherton, The Life of Mistress Antonia Bourignon,[368] an excellent woman, shamefully persecuted.

ATHERTON. I think so. She took upon herself, you see, to rebuke the Church as well as the world.

MRS. ATHERTON. And had large property left her, which excited the cupidity of those Fathers of the Oratory, who gave her such trouble.

GOWER. I never heard of her before.

ATHERTON. Her Quietism was very similar to that of Madame Guyon, but she was not, like her, mixed up with a controversy famous in history. She found, however, a faithful Fénélon in her accomplished disciple, Peter Poiret,[369] a liberal and large-minded Quietist, whose mysticism may be said to occupy a position between that of the German Theology and our English Platonists.

WILLOUGHBY. I greatly enjoyed reading some parts of his Divine Œconomy. Tennyson’s stanza expresses the spirit of his theology:—

Our little systems have their day; They have their day and cease to be: They are but broken lights of Thee, And Thou, O Lord, art more than they.

ATHERTON. Yet his six volumes add one more to our many systems. The vitiating element, in a theology otherwise very fairly balanced, is the extreme to which he carries the doctrine of passivity. In religion, he will have the understanding utterly inert.[370]

WILLOUGHBY. Yet he uses, very effectively, in his writings, the faculty he calls on us to resign.

ATHERTON. It is very common with mysticism to demand, in that way, a sacrifice which it does not make itself. With Poiret, Philosophy, Criticism, and Rhetoric, are the curse of the Church—the sources of all false theology.

WILLOUGHBY. Still there is much truth in his assertion that all positive religion accomplishes its purpose only as it leads to a filial subjection of the soul to God—as it conducts men, beyond itself, to immediate intercourse with Deity.

ATHERTON. William Law has the same idea: it constitutes, with him, the natural basis of all revealed religion.

WILLOUGHBY. It is mainly on this ground, I suppose, that Poiret adopts an eschatology more mild than that of the Calvinism which he forsook. He is not without his hopes concerning heathens hereafter. He believes in a state of purification after death, for those who departed, in a state of grace, but not yet ripe for the full enjoyment of heaven.

ATHERTON. It is significant that the first step taken by Protestant Mysticism, after departing from Calvinistic, Lutheran, or Anglican orthodoxy, should always be an endeavour to mitigate the gloom which hangs over the doctrine of the future state.

MRS. ATHERTON. I have also been reading M. Eynard’s Life of Madame de Krüdener. She appears to me an inferior Madame Guyon—falling very short of her predecessor in real elevation of soul and power of mind, and decidedly more credulous.

ATHERTON. She was never chastened by trials so severe as those which befel Madame Guyon or Antoinette Bourignon. I do not think her insincere altogether,—she meant well, and often deceived herself; but she never thoroughly conquered her inordinate vanity and love of display. When her novel of Valerie had outlived its day of puffery—when she had ceased to shine in the world of fashion, she achieved distinction as a seeress and guide of souls at the Hotel Montchenu.

WILLOUGHBY. A tuft-hunting sort of Quietism, hers. What a picture Talleyrand gives of the evening religious service in her drawing-room, when the allies were in Paris. The Emperor Alexander was a frequent visitor, prominent among notabilities from every court in Europe. M. Empeytaz, in his gown, prayed and preached; Madame de Krüdener, with her blue eyes and long dark locks, would converse on the interior life, with guest after guest, in the inner apartment, or haply come forward and deliver a prophecy.[371]

ATHERTON. She had all the tact of a woman of the world, an impressive manner, and a fascinating gift of utterance. Her mysticism received its prophetic impulse chiefly from the predictions of a pretended clairvoyante, managed by a knave.[372]

MRS. ATHERTON. Jung Stilling and Swedenborg had also their share in giving that bent to her enthusiasm. I think she may have done good in some quarters.

ATHERTON. Very likely. The world is seldom the worse for the shock it receives when some one speaks out a strong belief in unseen realities, even though not always in the wisest way.

Note to page 286.

An anonymous work, entitled An Apology for Me. Antonia Bourignon (Lond. 1699), contains an account of her life. It was not her design to found a sect, for she taught that of sects there were too many: exclusive formulas and hostile systems had corrupted Christendom, and made it a very Babel. She wished to forsake the world, with a few associates, bound by no vows, distinguished by no habit, working with their hands, and giving themselves to prayer and meditation. She was much resorted to by religious persons of every communion, as a guide to the higher degrees of the Christian life. She believed that special light was granted her for the interpretation of Scripture, and that it was her mission to recall the Church from formalism and human notions to spirituality and Quietist devotion. She appears to have been truly successful in awakening and stimulating religious aspiration in very many minds, till the storm of persecution, raised by her sweeping censure of the ecclesiastical world, drove her from one hiding-place to another, throughout Schleswig and Holstein. She died, at last, impoverished and deserted, concealed in a wretched lodging at Amsterdam. Her letters are those of a pious and sensible woman, clear-headed, precise, and decided in vexatious business details, and singularly free from all obscureness or rhapsody. Swammerdam, the naturalist, was one of her disciples. Her Quietism was a welcome doctrine to many among Romanists, Lutherans, and Calvinists. Her bitterest persecutors were found among the clergy of every denomination. The Jesuits of Frederickstadt wished for fuel to burn her. The priests of the Oratory at Mechlin defrauded her of her property. Lutheran and Calvinist pastors alike, wrote, spoke, and preached against her with such virulence that the zealous populace of Flensburg were ready to tear her in pieces for the glory of God. (Life, pp. 310-313. Comp. Letters, xxii. xxiii. xxiv.: A Collection of Letters written by Mrs. A. Bourignon, Lond. 1708.)

Note to page 287.

Poiret was a Calvinistic clergyman, who, after his acquaintance with Antoinette Bourignon, and much reading of mystical writers, relinquished his office. In his retirement he wrote a number of theological works, of which the best known is his system of divinity, entitled The Divine Œconomy. He possessed a goodly measure of that scholarship and philosophic culture which, as a mystic, he at once uses and depreciates.

Our higher faculty—the understanding, or intellect, he calls it—is not (like what he terms ‘reason’) a limited capability; but ‘being made for God is in a manner infinite, so as to be able to exert infinite acts, that is, to raise itself up to the contemplation of God as incomprehensible, infinite, and above all particular forms of conceiving him.’ If, therefore, we make an absolute surrender of this faculty to God, and so, by a passive ‘implicit faith,’ yield ourselves up to whatsoever He may be pleased to communicate to us, we receive Him ‘in a manner worthy of Him, above all particular and bounded conception, light, and sentiment.’ Then, he says, we practically own this fundamental truth, ‘that God is infinite and incomprehensible; that he is a Light, a Good, a Wisdom, a Power, a Justice,—in a word, a Being above all comprehension and thought.’ He bids us remember that our apprehensions of God, however true, as derived from his own word and from particular communications of his own, are necessarily partial and imperfect, so that ‘a true and pure faith, while embracing the particular divine lights, will not regard chiefly the particular forms, but the infinite God that is annexed to them, and comprehends in himself infinitely more than the particulars he has disclosed to us.’ (Div. Œcon. vol. v. chap. iv. §§ 37-41.)

What is true in this doctrine has seldom been denied—viz. that beyond our highest apprehension of God, his nature extends infinitely. We know but parts of his ways. We know that infinity lies behind all our ‘bounded conceptions;’ but what that infinity is, no surrender of the Intellect can disclose to us.

Note to page 287.

Here Poiret shall speak for himself:—

‘The Understanding, to pass into the order of faith, must have these two conditions; the first, that it be empty, and shut to all ideas of worldly things, both heavenly and earthly; the second, that it keep itself open before God after an indeterminate and general manner, not particularly fixing upon anything. This being supposed, with the faith of desire afore-mentioned, God causes to rise in the soul his divine light, which is his eternal substantial word, which does himself modify (if I may so say), or rather fills and quickens the understanding of the soul, and enlightens it as he pleases.’—Div. Œcon. p. 93.

‘It will be objected, it may be, to what has been said, that this second condition required here of the intellect that means to be enlightened by Faith, is a state of idleness—time lost; and that it is an absurd thing not to make use of the understanding and faculties God has given us, nor so much as endeavour to excite in our minds good and bright thoughts. Here are several things tacked together, and most of them beside the purpose. For at present I am not treating of the means by which one may be introduced, or rather brought, as it were, to the threshold of faith, as I may say; nor of that imperfect and beginning faith, by me styled active. Nor yet do I say, that when one has been enlightened by the light of God, one is not to fix one’s mind to the consideration of the lights held out by God: but what I say is this: I suppose a man has already had some glimpse of the divine light by the call of preventing grace, and that he has actively co-operated with it, by turning his understanding towards it, with particular desires of such and such lights; and, moreover, that, to confirm himself therein, he has deduced in his reason and his other inferior faculties, notions, ratiocinations, images, and words, and other particular exercises wherein he has been exercised long enough to be capable of ascending to the state of pure and altogether divine faith. Upon this supposition, the question is, whether one whose faith has as yet been but weak, and the small light he has had clouded and mixed with great darkness, prejudices, and errors, designing to clear the principles of the fight he has from the aforesaid mixture, and desiring to see this divine light in its purity and more fully,—whether, I say, to this end he ought to apply thereto the activity of his understanding, of his meditations, reflections, and reasonings; or else, whether, all this apart, he ought to offer his understanding in vacuity and silence to the Son of God, the Sun of Righteousness, and the true Light of Souls? And this last is what we affirm, and against which the objections alleged are of no force.’—P. 100.

‘Thus have I shown what God requires of the intellect in matters of faith—viz. a fund of mind wherein neither reason nor imagination do at all act, but where God only may be, and act brightly as He pleases, the soul meanwhile not adhering to the particular manners of God’s acting, but merely because it is God acting, and God infinite and incomprehensible, who can dispose of His infinite ways above our understanding.’—P. 104.

Antoinette Bourignon found in Poiret a learned and philosophical disciple. He was to her, in some respects, what Robert Barclay was to George Fox. But her writings appear also to have awakened a response, of a more practical kind, in many devout minds of whom the world knew nothing. Throughout Germany and Holland, France and Switzerland, and in England also, were scattered little groups of friends who nourished a hidden devotion by the study of pietist or mystical writers. Arndt and Spener, Bourignon and Guyon, Labadie and Yvon, Thomas à Kempis, De Sales, or translations from the Spanish mystics, furnished the oil for their inward flame. Some withdrew altogether from the more active duties of life; others were separatists from the religion established around them. In some cases they held meetings for worship among themselves; in others, the struggles of a soul towards the higher life were only revealed to one or two chosen intimates. Whenever we can penetrate behind the public events which figure in history at the close of the seventeenth and the opening of the eighteenth century, indications are discernible which make it certain that a religious vitality of this description was far more widely diffused than is commonly supposed. A single example will be sufficiently suggestive. One M. de Marsay, who threw up his ensign’s commission in the French army, and retired, with two friends, into seclusion, after the manner recommended by Antoinette Bourignon, left behind him an unpublished Autobiography. A copy from a translation of this curious narrative, in the possession of Mr. Tindall Harris, has been kindly placed at my disposal by that gentleman. The copy was executed in 1773, by some one who had known De Marsay personally.

M. de Marsay was born at Paris, in 1688, of Protestant parents. A taste for devotional reading was fostered, in early youth, by the piety of his mother. Jurieu’s well-known work on Divine Love found its place among such studies; but none of the mystical writers. When he had entered the army, sometimes half the day, and often half the night also, was devoted to reading, meditation, and prayer. At one time he maintained an inward prayer for three or four days without intermission, though the regiment was on the march, and the troops under arms day and night. He fondly imagined that such a state would continue all his life. When the reaction came, his efforts to overcome the natural exhaustion and regain his spiritual joy were so strenuous and painful that his delicate frame gave way, and symptoms of consumption appeared. His distress at this time was similar to that of Madame Guyon, and of many others, at the earlier period of their entrance on the ‘inward way.’ Thomas à Kempis was in his hand; but he could not yet understand the lesson which the more experienced mystics so earnestly inculcate,—that spiritual pleasures may be sought too greedily,—that we should persevere and trust, whether in sensible delight or obscuration, whether in fulness or ‘aridity.’ He lay sick at Lisle for three months, calmly looking for death, and then, to the surprise of all, recovered.

Meanwhile his friend, Lieutenant Cordier, has been reading Bourignon’s Lux in Tenebris, in the camp before Bethune. He writes to De Marsay, saying that he was now convinced the devotion they had hitherto practised together was as nothing; that he had resolved to quit the army and retire to some desert, there to live a life of poverty and devotion. M. Barratier, the chaplain of their regiment, was of like mind; if De Marsay would read Madame Bourignon, he would probably arrive at the conclusion, and join them. So indeed it proved. De Marsay bought her nineteen volumes, and determined to live her ‘poor and evangelical life.’

After many delays, he succeeded in obtaining his discharge (diligently reading, meanwhile, Theresa’s Life, and John of the Cross); and at last, behold the three friends, in the spring of 1711, settled in a solitude such as they desired, at Schwartzenau, on the estate of the Countess Witgenstein. They rise at four, and begin the day by reading a chapter in the Bible. Cordier and De Marsay work in the field, and Barratier has breakfast ready for them at seven o’clock,—dry bread, of their own baking, and cold water. Till noon they spin, card, or knit wool; Cordier goes out on some errand; or De Marsay collects leaves, instead of straw, for their beds. At noon they dine, and Barratier (the cook and housekeeper) boils them the same food all the week through. One week it is pease, with bread; another week, barley; next, wheat, groats, or oatmeal pap; and for drink sometimes, ‘as a special treat,’ boiled groats, in milk. After dinner one of them reads aloud from Bourignon’s writings. Work again till four, and in the field till seven, when they sit down to supper, before a dish of pulse or salad, groats or turnips. Work again, in-doors, till nine, and then to bed. It was a rule that they should only speak to each other when it was absolutely necessary. They had no regular hours for prayer, but endeavoured (as Bourignon counsels) to do everything in a spirit of prayer, by living consciously in the presence of God, and referring all ceaselessly to Him.

Yet in this Paradise of asceticism De Marsay is not happy. The endeavour to retain constantly a general sense of the divine presence was far less unnatural and arduous than those protracted prayers and meditations at which he used to labour. But he has little enjoyment, and the clamorous demands of a large appetite sorely disturb his pious thoughts. See him, one day, sitting on the stump of a tree—the picture of despair. His soul is in the abyss. God seems to have abandoned him to himself. What has he done? He has eaten a potato between meals! Only by the most ample confession, the most contrite self-abasement, can he recover peace. Terrible tyranny of the misguided conscience over the feeble judgment! Here was a moral power that might have made a hero; and it only drives a slave.

But the revulsion must come; and simultaneously the three anchorites remit their silence and their introversion, and (the spell once broken) chatter incessantly; now one, and now another, bursting into fits of unmeaning, involuntary laughter. Yet, through all such mortifying discouragement, all terror and temptation, De Marsay makes his way. He does but yield himself, in his helplessness, the more absolutely to God, to be delivered from his spiritual adversaries, if He wills, or to be abandoned to the countless possibilities of evil, within him and about him. Bourignon brought him to this point. So far she essays to guide souls in the ‘interior way;’ after that, the Divine Conductor leads them each as He will.

With poor Cordier it fared not so well. They had relaxed their rule, he said: he would leave them, and live entirely alone. So he was carried from extreme to extreme, till he reached a spurious resignation—a passivity which did not resist evil—a self-forgetfulness which ceased to recognise in himself his most dangerous enemy. From the height of spiritual pride he was precipitated into licence. A woman living near, with great affectation of sanctity, beguiled him into marriage. This female Tartuffe stood afterwards revealed in her real iniquity; and Cordier eventually returned to the world and a godless libertinism.

The Countess Witgenstein gave shelter, about this time, to a Lady Clara de Callenberg, who had suffered much domestic unhappiness on account of her pietism. This lady, considerably his senior, De Marsay saw, wooed, and won. Our pair of ascetics resolved to live a life of absolute continence, and De Marsay renders hearty thanks that (in spite of many temptations) they received grace to adhere to their determination. The good man’s manner of reasoning is curious. The first thought of a change of life occurred to him one day, when sitting, ‘in great calmness of mind,’ under a tree, with his knitting-tackle. ‘It was shown to me,—if it was true that I was willing to be the property of God without exception, it was his will that I should give Him the first proof thereof, in marrying the Lady Clara de Callenberg.’ Barratier married them, and so the original association was finally dissolved.[373] The marriage was a very happy one, their principal outward trial arising from the frequent indisposition of his wife, who ruined her constitution by the miserable austerity of her diet. They were all but penniless; yet in this they rejoiced, as so much exercise of faith; and, indeed, such moderate means as they required were generally found forthcoming from one quarter or another.

De Marsay did not always remain in their hut at Schwartzenau; he journeyed to Switzerland to visit his mother, and again to Paris to see his brother, passing through Blois with letters to Madame Guyon, who died shortly before he reached that city. He travelled also repeatedly, in company with his wife, everywhere finding little circles of devout persons who received them with open arms. His narrative is full of the difficulties he found in ascertaining the divine will. Again and again does he discover, after an interval of years, that steps taken in the full persuasion that they were divinely directed, were, in reality, self-moved and erroneous. He fears to relax a severity, lest it should be self-indulgence; he fears to prolong it, lest it should be self-righteousness. After making one sacrifice, an additional one suggests itself as possible, and the longer the thought is entertained, the more hopeless is peace of mind, till conscience has compelled that also; and all this, sometimes from first to last, in fear and darkness. After dividing most of their little store among the poor, and selling their cottage as too large, Madame de Marsay can know no rest from her fears till the greater part of the money received has been also given away,—that the command may be obeyed, ‘Sell all that thou hast.’ Yet, through all self-made troubles, the genuineness of their religion shines out. He is ever humble, thankful, trustful. The reading of Madame Guyon weans him still farther from ‘sensible religious delights;’ he enters calmly into the state of ‘dark faith;’ begins to attach less importance to austerities; loses much of his stiffness; will attend public worship, and commune.

It is instructive to mark how few of those concerning whom he writes as having entered on the higher religious life, are found holding on in that course. After an interval of absence, he returns to a neighbourhood where he had known several such. He finds most of them in darkness and disappointment. They know not where their souls are, or what has come to them. Some are sunk in apathy. There are those who retain the form, though their fire has gone out long ago. Others have plunged from high profession into vices the most shameless. Yet a remnant are preserved through all the dangers of the way. Those perplexities and doubts which so frequently clouded the pathway of De Marsay, were probably his safeguard. In a life of such excessive introspection, a proper self-distrust must almost necessarily take the form of morbid scrupulosity. Even he had some narrow escapes, for which he does well to sing his lowly Non nobis Domine! He came afterwards to see how injurious was that withdrawment from all public worship (habitual with himself and his wife), in the case of those who had children. The offspring of such parents either grew up with a contempt for the ordinances of religion, or, finding their position as separatists hurtful to their advancement in the world, conformed, from interested motives.

In 1731, Count Zinzendorf came to Schwartzenau, and fascinated the De Marsays for a time. But De Marsay—so melancholy, and so given to solitude—was not one long ‘to find good for his soul’ in connexion with any religious community whatever. The Moravian converts met at first at his house, and he preached to them two or three times, with remarkable acceptance. But he detected pleasure to sense and self in such exercise of his gifts, and left them, resolving to yield himself up to the way of dark faith—to ‘die off from all the creatures’—to be as one excommunicate, and perishing in the wilderness of spiritual desertion for his unfaithfulness.

His difficulties were not diminished by mystical metaphysics. There is the Ground of his soul, and its inward attraction, to be followed, whatever reason, prudence, reflection, and even that which seems conscience, may urge or thunder against it. Whether the attraction be false or true, is exceedingly hard to determine;—the issue frequently proves it the former, and that the common-sense folk about him were right after all. He arrives at a state—the wished-for state, in fact—free from all form, image, object of hope, &c.—a total blank of the senses and powers, and yet complains bitterly of the misery of that condition. Reason, internal sense, hope,—all have been abandoned, and yet, out of the internal ground there arises nothing in the shape of light or encouragement. The most harassing secular life, in which he would have been driven to look out of himself to Christ, had been truer and happier than this morbid introversion.

A single passage in his history (and there are several like it) is better than a treatise in illustration of the dangers which beset the notion of perceptible spiritual guidance. He is at Berleberg (1726), and hears of emigration thence to Pennsylvania. As he lies awake one night, it is strongly impressed upon his mind that he ought to go: he and his wife might realize a complete solitude in that land of cheapness and freedom. For there was too much of the creature for him, even at Schwartzenau. They resolve, despite the earnest dissuasion of their friends, to join the next band of emigrants. News arrives that the greater part of those who last went out, died on the voyage, of disease or want. De Marsay finds nothing here to stagger him—for should he shrink from any such hazard? Again, it is shown him clearly that his wife will die if they sail—he seems to see her dead. They resolve, nevertheless, to yield themselves up to death; and spend wretched tearful days, nerved to that determination. At last, when again alone and in stillness, he receives an impression that it is not the will of God that he should go. He communicates the joyful tidings to his wife. She replies that she will go without him, unless she also receives a similar inward monition for herself. Such impression she happily obtains, and they remain. The sacrifice had been made, however, said De Marsay, the Isaac offered—but the victim was not to be actually slain. Finally, he discovers that his original impulse to go to America was ‘muddy and impure,’ arising from his excessive attachment to seclusion. So is it continually where men’s whims and fancies are identified with the oracles of an imagined perceptible guidance.

After many alternations—now rising to a love that casts out fear, and anon receding into gloom—his mind is mellowed and liberalized with advancing years. He no longer conceives it necessary to die to the creature by forsaking his religious friends. He lives at Wolfenbüttel, with Major Botticher, the husband of his niece, and has abandoned every ascetic singularity. He believes in the mystical states (for he has lived them), but he is no longer in any one of them. He looks away from himself only to Christ. He no longer identifies the mysteries of the interior way with spirituality. He has friendly intercourse with ministers—attends church—rejoices in the good work doing among Reformed and Lutherans everywhere.

Madame de Marsay died in 1742, in great mental distress; throughout several weeks previously having imagined herself abandoned and condemned. But her husband rejoiced in his assurance of her glorious rest. His end was a contrast to his distressful life. ‘I swim and bathe in joy,’ said he, ‘that I shall now soon obtain what, through the grace of our Saviour, I have so long and ardently wished and hoped for.’

Footnote 368:

See Note on p. 289.

Footnote 369:

See Note on p. 290.

Footnote 370:

See Second Note on p. 290.

Footnote 371:

See Revelations from the Life of Prince Talleyrand; and compare Eynard, Vie de Madame de Krüdener, chap. xvii. Madame de Genlis writes of her, ‘M^e. de Krüdener disait les choses les plus singulières avec un calme qui les rendait persuasives; elle était certainement de très bonne foi; elle me parut être aimable, spirituelle et d’une originalité très piquante.’—P. 30.

Footnote 372:

See the whole story of the pastor Fontaine and Maria Kummerin, in Eynard.

Footnote 373:

Barratier subsequently became minister to the French church in Halle.

BOOK THE ELEVENTH MYSTICISM IN ENGLAND

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Chapter I

Is virtue then, unless of Christian growth, Mere fallacy, or foolishness, or both? Ten thousand sages lost in endless woe, For ignorance of what they could not know? That speech betrays at once a bigot’s tongue; Charge not a God with such outrageous wrong. Truly not I—the partial light men have, My creed persuades me, well employed, may save; While he that scorns the noonday beam, perverse, Shall find the blessing, unimproved, a curse.

COWPER.

One morning, Willoughby, calling on Atherton, found him and Gower looking over an old-fashioned little volume.

WILLOUGHBY. What have you there, Atherton?

ATHERTON. A curious old book—The History of Hai Ebn Yokhdan, by Abu Jaafer Ebn Tophail—an Arabian philosopher of Spain, writing in the twelfth or thirteenth century: ‘done into English’ by Simon Ockley.

GOWER (to Willoughby). I happened to be looking through Barclay’s Apology—found him referring to this History of Yokhdan; and, behold, Atherton fetches me down, from one of his topmost dust-of-erudition strata there, the very book. It appears that good Barclay was so hard put to it, to find examples for the support of his doctrine concerning the Universal and Saving Light, that he has pressed this shadowy philosophical romance into the service, as an able-bodied unexceptionable fact:—sets up a fanciful ornament from the Moorish arabesques of Toledo as a bulwark for his theory.

WILLOUGHBY. Who, then, may this Hai Ebn Yokhdan be?

ATHERTON. Simply a mystical Robinson Crusoe. The book relates how a child was exposed in an ark upon the sea, drifted to a Fortunate Island in the Indian Ocean, was there suckled by a roe, dresses himself with skins and feathers, builds a hut, tames a horse, rises to the discovery of ‘One supreme and necessarily self-existent Being,’ and does, at last, by due abstinence and exclusion of all external objects, attain to a mystical intuition of Him—a contemplation of the divine essence, and a consciousness that his own essence, thus lost in God, is itself divine:—all this, by the unaided inner Light. A Mussulman hermit who is landed on the island, there to retire from mankind, finds him; teaches him to speak; and discovers, to his devout amazement, that this Ebn Yokhdan has attained, first by deduction from the external world, and then, abandoning that, by immediate intuition, to the very truth concerning God which he has learnt through the medium of the Koran—the tee-totum mysticism of spinning dervishes included.[374]

GOWER. Barclay, citing his Arab, points the moral as teaching ‘that the best and most certain knowledge of God, is not that which is attained by premises premised, and conclusions deduced; but that which is enjoyed by conjunction of the Mind of Man with the Supreme Intellect, after the mind is purified from its corruption and is separated from all bodily images, and is gathered into a profound stillness.’[375]

WILLOUGHBY. And the simple-hearted apologist of the Friends never suspected that this story was a philosopher’s conjecture—Abu Tophail’s ideal of what the inner light might be supposed to teach a man, in total seclusion?

ATHERTON. Not he. At any rate, Yokhdan figures in the first half-dozen editions of the Apology. I believe, in none later.

GOWER. A curious sight, to see the Arabian Sufi and the English Quaker keeping company so lovingly.

WILLOUGHBY. And yet how utterly repugnant to our English natures, that contemplative Oriental mysticism.

GOWER. In practice, of course. But in the theory lies a common ground.

ATHERTON. Our island would be but a spare contributor to a general exhibition of mystics. The British cloister has not one great mystical saint to show. Mysticism did not, with us, prepare the way for the Reformation. John Wycliffe and John Tauler are a striking contrast in this respect. In the time of the Black Death, the Flagellants could make no way with us. Whether coming as gloomy superstition, as hysterical fervour, or as pantheistic speculation, mysticism has found our soil a thankless one.

GOWER. I should like to catch a Hegelian, in good condition, well nourished with the finest of thrice-bolted philosophic grain, duly ignorant of England, and shut him up to determine, from the depths of his consciousness, what would be the form which mysticism must necessarily assume among us.

ATHERTON. He would probably be prepared to prove to us à priori that we could not possibly evolve such a product at all.

GOWER. Most likely. The torches of the Bacchantes, flung into the Tiber, were said still to burn; but what whirling enthusiast’s fire could survive a plunge into the Thames? There could be nothing for it but sputtering extinction, and then to float—a sodden lump of pine and pitch, bobbing against the stolid sides of barges.

WILLOUGHBY. The sage might be pardoned for prophesying that our mysticism would appear in some time of religious stagnation—a meteoric flash spasmodically flinging itself this way and that, startling with its radiance deep slimy pools, black rich oozing reaches of plurality and sinecure. Remembering the very practical mysticism of the Munster Anabaptists, he might invest our mystical day-star with such ‘trains of fire and dews of death;’ or depict it as a shape of terror, like his who ‘drew Priam’s curtain at the dead of night;’ heralding horrors; and waking every still cathedral close to dread the burning fate that befell, ‘the topless towers of Ilium.’

ATHERTON. It certainly would have been hard to foresee that mysticism in England would arise just when it did—would go so far, and no farther:—that in the time of the Commonwealth, when there was fuller religious freedom by far, and, throughout the whole middle class, a more earnest religious life than at any former period of our history,—when along the ranks of triumphant Puritanism the electric light of enthusiasm played every here and there upon the steel which won them victory, and was beheld with no ominous misgiving, but hailed rather as Pentecostal effluence,—that, at such a juncture, Quakerism should have appeared to declare this liberty insufficiently free, this spirituality too carnal, this enthusiasm too cold,—to profess to eject more thoroughly yet the world, the flesh, and the devil,—to take its place in the confused throng contending about the ‘bare-picked bone’ of Hierarchy, and show itself not to be tempted for a moment by wealth, by place, by power,—to commit many follies, but never a single crime,—to endure enumerable wrongs, but never to furnish one example of resistance or revenge.

WILLOUGHBY. Well done, old England! It is gratifying to think that, on our shores, mysticism itself is less fantastic than its wont,—labours benignly, if not always soberly; and is represented, not by nightmared visionaries, or fury-driven persecutors, but by the holy, tender-hearted, much-enduring George Fox. The Muggletonians, Fifth-Monarchy men, and Ranters of those days were the exceptional mire and dirt cast up by the vexed times, but assuredly not the representatives of English mysticism.

ATHERTON. The elements of Quakerism lie all complete in the personal history of Fox; and the religious sect is, in many respects, the perpetuation of his individual character;—the same intellectual narrowness, incident to an isolated, half-disciplined mind, and the same large, loving heart of charity for all men. Remember how he describes himself as ‘knowing pureness and righteousness at eleven years of age;’ carefully brought up, so that from his childhood all vice and profaneness were an abomination to him. Then there were his solitary musings and sore inward battles, as he walked about his native Drayton many nights by himself: his fastings oft; his much walking abroad in solitary spots many days; his sitting, with his Bible, in hollow trees and lonesome places, till night came on. Because the religious teachers to whom he applied in his temptations to despair were unhappily incompetent to administer relief, he concludes too hastily that the system of ministerial instruction is more often a hindrance than a help to ‘vital godliness.’ Because ‘priest Stevens’ worked up some of his remarks in conversation into his next Sunday’s sermon,—because the ‘ancient priest’ at Mansetter, to whom he next applied, could make nothing of him, and in despair recommended tobacco and psalm-singing (furthermore violating his confidence, and letting young George’s spiritual distresses get wind among a bevy of giggling milk-lasses),—because, after travelling seven miles to a priest of reputed experience at Tamworth, he found him after all ‘but like an empty hollow cask,’—because horticultural Dr. Cradock of Coventry fell into a passion with him for accidentally trampling on the border of his flower-bed,—because one Macham, a priest in high account, offered him physic and prescribed blood-letting,—therefore the institution of a clerical order was an error and a mischief, mainly chargeable with the disputings of the church, and the ungodliness of the world. So, in his simplicity, he regarded it as a momentous discovery to have it opened to him ‘that being bred at Oxford or Cambridge was not enough to fit and qualify men to be ministers of Christ.’[376]

GOWER. We may hold that without joining the Society of Friends.

ATHERTON. In like manner he argues that because believers are the temple of the Spirit, and many venerate places superstitiously, or identify church-going with religion, therefore ‘steeple-houses’ are a sinful innovation, diffusing, for the most part, darkness rather than light. Because it appeared to him that in his study of the Scriptures he knew Christ ‘only as the light grew’—by inward revelation—‘as he that hath the key did open,’ therefore the doctrine of the inward Light is proclaimed to all as the central principle of Redemption.

GOWER. True. This proneness to extremes has led his followers often to attach undue importance to the mere externals of a protest against externalism. Those peculiarities of dress and speech are petty formalities unworthy of their main principle. In his ‘Epistle to gathered Churches into outward forms upon the Earth,’ Fox can see scarce a vestige of spiritual religion anywhere beyond the pale of the Society of Friends.

ATHERTON. Yet ascetic and narrow on many points as he unquestionably was, and little disposed to make concession to human weakness, in practical charity he was most abundant. Oppression and imprisonment awakened the benevolent, never the malevolent impulses of his nature,—only adding fervour to his plea for the captive and the oppressed. His tender conscience could know no fellowship with the pleasures of the world; his tender heart could know no weariness in seeking to make less its sum of suffering. He is a Cato-Howard. You see him in his early days, refusing to join in the festivities of the time called Christmas; yet, if a stranger to the mirth, never to the mercy, of that kindly season. From house to house he trudges in the snow, visiting poor widows, and giving them money. Invited to marriage merry-makings, he will not enter the house of feasting; but the next day, or soon after, we find him there, offering, if the young couple are poor, the effectual congratulation of pecuniary help. In the prison-experiences of George Fox are to be found the germs of that modern philanthropy in which his followers have distinguished themselves so nobly. In Derby Jail he is ‘exceedingly exercised’ about the proceedings of the judges and magistrates—concerning their putting men to death for cattle, and money, and small matters,—and is moved to write to them, showing the sin of such severity; and, moreover, ‘what an hurtful thing it was that prisoners should lie so long in jail; how that they learned badness one of another in talking of their bad deeds; and therefore speedy justice should be done.’[377]

WILLOUGHBY. How the spirit of benevolence pervades all the Journals of the early Friends. Look at John Woolman, who will neither write nor have letters written to him by post, because the horses are overwrought, and the hardships of the postboys so great. When farthest gone in rhapsody, this redeeming characteristic was never wanting to the Quakers. It may be said of some of them, as was said of dying Pope—uttering, between his wanderings, only kindness—‘humanity seems to have outlasted understanding.’

ATHERTON. As to doctrine, again, consider how much religious extravagance was then afloat, and let us set it down to the credit of Fox that his mystical excesses were no greater. At Coventry he finds men in prison for religion who declared, to his horror, that they were God. While at Derby, a soldier who had been a Baptist, comes to him from Nottingham, and argues that Christ and the prophets suffered no one of them externally, only internally. Another company, he says, came to him there, who professed to be triers of spirits, and when he questioned them, ‘were presently up in the airy mind,’ and said he was mad. The priests and magistrates were not more violent against him than the Ranters, who roved the country in great numbers, professing to work miracles, forbidding other enthusiasts to preach, on pain of damnation; and in comparison with whom, Fox was soberness itself. Rice Jones, the Ranter, from Nottingham, prophesies against him with his company. At Captain Bradford’s house, Ranters come from York to wrangle with him. In the Peak country they oppose him, and ‘fall a-swearing.’ At Swanington, in Leicestershire, they disturb the meeting—hound on the mob against the Friends; they sing, whistle, and dance; but their leaders are confounded everywhere by the power of the Lord, and many of their followers, says the Journal, ’were reached and convinced, and received the Spirit of God; and are come to be a pretty people, living and walking soberly in the truth of Christ.’[378] Such facts should be remembered in our estimate. Fox’s inner light does not profess to supersede, nor does it designedly contradict, the external light of Revelation.

But hand me his Journal a moment. Here is a curious passage. It shows what a narrow escape Fox had of being resolved into an English Jacob Behmen.

He says, ‘Now (he was about four-and-twenty at the time) was I come up in spirit, through the flaming sword, into the paradise of God. All things were new; and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter. I knew nothing but pureness and innocency and righteousness, being renewed up into the image of God by Christ Jesus; so that I say I was come up to the state of Adam which he was in before he fell. The creation was opened to me; and it was showed me how all things had their names given them, according to their nature and virtue. And I was at a stand in my mind whether I should practise physic for the good of mankind, seeing the nature and virtues of the creatures were so opened to me by the Lord. But I was immediately taken up in spirit to see into another or more stedfast state than Adam’s in innocency, even into a state in Christ Jesus, that should never fall. And the Lord showed me that such as were faithful to Him in the power and light of Christ, should come up into that state in which Adam was before he fell; in which the admirable works of the creation, and the virtues thereof may be known, through the openings of that divine word of wisdom and power by which they were made. Great things did the Lord lead me into, and wonderful depths were opened unto me, beyond what can by words be declared; but as people come into subjection to the Spirit of God, and grow up in the image and power of the Almighty, they may receive the word of wisdom that opens all things, and come to know the hidden unity in the Eternal Being.‘[379]

Here he has arrived on life’s road where two ways meet;—had he taken the wrong alternative, and wandered down that shadowy and mysterious theosophic avenue, ignorant that it was no thoroughfare, what a different history! Imagine the intrepid, heart-searching preacher—the redoubted ‘man in leather breeches’—transformed into the physician, haply peruked and habited in black, dispensing inspired prescriptions, and writing forgotten treatises on Qualities and Signatures, Sympathies and Antipathies. What a waste of that indomitable energy!

WILLOUGHBY. How destructive to human life might his very benevolence have proved.

GOWER. Whatever direction the mysticism of a man like Fox might have taken, it must have been always actively benevolent. His mysticism is simple—no artificial stages of abstraction, mounting step by step above the finite, to a solitary superhuman sanctity. It is beneficent—his many and various spiritual distresses were permitted by God, he tells us, ‘in order that he might have a sense of all conditions—how else should he speak to all conditions?‘[380]

WILLOUGHBY. Truly, metaphysical refinements and Platonic abstraction could have no charm for this most practical of mystics. What a contrast here is his pietism to that of Zinzendorf—as abundant in sentiment as Fox is devoid of it.

GOWER. Nicholas of Basle is more like Fox than any of the German mystics—much more so than Tauler.

ATHERTON. Fox is, as you say, eminently practical in one sense, yet not enough so in another. In one respect Behmen and Law are more practical than he, because more comprehensive. They endeavour to infuse a higher spiritual life into forms and communities already existing. Fox will have no steeple-houses, vestments, forms of prayer, no ministry, regularly paid and highly educated. Such a code is not practical, for it rests on an abstraction: it does not legislate for men as they are. Formalism does not lie in these outward things themselves—it consists in the spirit in which they are used. Here, you see, the mystic, who will always go beneath the surface to the reality, is too superficial. Formalism cannot be expelled by any such summary process. The evil lies deeper.

WILLOUGHBY. So with the asceticism of the Friends. The worldly spirit is too subtile to be exorcised by a strict outward separation between church and world. How much easier is total abstinence from scenes of amusement than temperance in money-getting.

GOWER. Yet I know men and women who pique themselves on their separateness from the world, because they were never seen at a concert, whose covetousness, insincerity, or censorious speech, proclaim them steeped in worldliness to the very lips.

WILLOUGHBY. What say you, Atherton, to the doctrine of the Universal Light? In their theory on this matter the mystics seem to divide into two classes. With the mystics of the fourteenth century there is still left in fallen man a native tendency Godward, on which grace lays hold. With Behmen and Fox, on the contrary, the inward Seed is a supernatural gift, distinct from conscience, reason, or any relics of natural goodness—the hidden word of promise, inspoken into all men, in virtue of the redeeming work of Christ.[381]

ATHERTON. I do not believe that fallen man required a divine bestowment of this kind—a supernatural soul within the soul, to give him a moral sense, and make him responsible. But I am so far a believer in the doctrine that I would not go beyond what is written, and rigidly confine all the benefits of Christ’s redemption to those only who have had access to the Christian Scriptures. The words of the Apostle are still applicable,—‘Is he the God of the Jews only, is he not of the Gentiles also?’ I cannot suppose that all Pagan minds, past and present, have been utterly and for ever abandoned by the Divine Spirit, because the dispensation under which they have been placed is so much less privileged than our own. God has light enough to be Himself, in the twilight, even as in the noonday. Did He rule the rising and falling of ancient nations, working all things toward the fulness of time;—did He care for the bodies of those heathen, with seedtime and harvest for his witness, and shall we suppose that He debarred Himself from all access to their souls?

WILLOUGHBY. Yet no doctrine we can hold on this question materially lessens the mystery of that dark fact—the prevalence of Evil.

ATHERTON. I am afraid not. Whether we call that better part of man the light of nature, conscience, or the internal Word, we must admit that it accomplished next to nothing for the restoration of the vast majority. We must not judge of the moral effects of heathendom by the philosophic few merely; we must remember the state of the superstitious many. And mysticism will be the first to admit that an inoperative Christ (like that of the Antinomian, for example) is a deceptive phantom or a vain formula.

Our own position, however, is the same, let our theory or our hope, concerning others, be what it may. Whatever it may be possible (under the constitution of our nature) for the Spirit of God to make known inwardly to that man who is shut out from external teaching, it is quite certain that we shall receive no inward communications of gracious influence, while we neglect those outward means which are of divine appointment.

Note to page 300.

The full title of the work referred to runs as follows: The Improvement of Human Reason, exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokhdan: written in Arabick about 500 years ago, by Abn Jaafer Ebn Tophail. In which is demonstrated by what methods one may, by the mere Light of Nature, attain the knowledge of things Natural and supernatural; more particularly the knowledge of God and the affairs of another Life. Newly translated from the original Arabick by Simon Ockley, &c. 1708.

Ockley adds an Appendix, to guard the book from abuse by the Quakers, wherein he proposes to examine ‘the fundamental error’ of his author—viz. that ‘God has given such a power or faculty to man whereby he may, without any external means, attain to the knowledge of all things necessary to salvation, and even to the Beatifick Vision itself, whilst in the state.’

The following is a specimen of the mystical progress which our Arabian Defoe describes his Crusoe as making,—precisely that with which Ebn Tophail was well acquainted, but which no real solitary Ebn Yokhdan could ever have struck out for himself.

‘He began, therefore, to strip himself of all bodily properties, which he had made some progress in before, during the time of the former exercise, when he was employed in the imitation of the heavenly bodies; but there still remained a great many relicks, as his circular motion (motion being one of the most proper attributes of body), and his care of animals and plants, compassion upon them, and industry in removing whatever inconvenienced them. Now, all these things belong to corporeal attributes, for he could not see these things at first, but by corporeal faculties; and he was obliged to make use of the same faculties in preserving them. Therefore he began to reject and remove all those things from himself, as being in nowise consistent with that state which he was now in search of. So he continued, after confining himself to rest in the bottom of his cave, with his head bowed down and his eyes shut, and turning himself altogether from all sensible things and the corporeal faculties, and bending all his thoughts and meditations upon the necessarily self-existent Being, without admitting anything else besides him; and if any other object presented itself to his imagination, he rejected it with his utmost force; and exercised himself in this, and persisted in it to that degree, that sometimes he did neither eat nor stir for a great many days together. And whilst he was thus earnestly taken up in contemplation, sometimes all manner of beings whatsoever would be quite out of his mind and thoughts, except his own being only.

‘But he found that his own being was not excluded from his thoughts; no, not at such times when he was most deeply immersed in the contemplation of the first, true, necessarily self-existent Being; which concerned him very much,—for he knew that even this was a mixture in this simple vision, and the admission of an extraneous object in that contemplation. Upon which he endeavoured to disappear from himself, and be wholly taken up in the vision of that true Being; till at last he attained it; and then both the heavens and the earth, and whatsoever is between them, and all spiritual forms, and corporeal faculties, and all those powers which are separate from matter, and all those beings which know the necessarily self-existent Being, all disappeared and vanished, and were as if they had never been; and amongst these his own being disappeared too, and there remained nothing but this one, true, perpetually self-existent Being, who spoke thus in that saying of his (which is not a notion superadded to his essence):—“To whom now belongs the kingdom? To this One, Almighty God.”[382] Which words of his Hai Ebn Yokhdan understood and heard his voice; nor was his being unacquainted with words, and not being able to speak, any hindrance at all to the understanding him. Wherefore he deeply immersed himself into this state, and witnessed that which neither eye hath seen nor ear heard, nor hath it ever entered into the heart of man to conceive.’—§§ 83, 84.

Footnote 374:

See Note on p. 310.

Footnote 375:

Barclay’s Apology, propp. v. and vi. § 27, p. 194. Fourth Edition, 1701.

Footnote 376:

Fox’s Journal, pp. 76-83.

Footnote 377:

Fox’s Journal, vol. i. p. 130.

Footnote 378:

Fox’s Journal, vol. i. pp. 109, 129, 232. Vaughan’s Hist. of England under the House of Stuart, p. 539.

Footnote 379:

Journal, vol. i. p. 95.

Footnote 380:

Journal, p. 89. This theopathetic mysticism is emphatically transitive. Every inward manifestation speedily becomes a something to be done, a testimony to be delivered. The Quaker is ‘exercised,’ not that he may deck himself in the glory of saintship, but to fit him for rendering service, as he supposes, to his fellows. The early followers of Fox often caricatured the acted symbolism of the Hebrew prophets with the most profane or ludicrous unseemliness. Yet stark-mad as seemed the fashion of their denunciations, their object was very commonly some intelligible and actual error or abuse.

Footnote 381:

Barclay’s Apology, propp. v. and vi. 16. Sewell’s History, p. 544. (Barclay’s Letter to Paets); also p. 646 (The Christian Doctrine of the People called Quakers, &c., published 1693). Compare J. J. Gurney’s Observations on the Distinguishing Views and Practices of the Society of Friends, chap. i. p. 59.

Footnote 382:

Koran.

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

Chapter II

And to such Enthusiasm as is but the triumph of the soul of man, inebriated, as it were, with the delicious sense of the divine life, that blessed Root, and Original of all holy wisdom and virtue, I am as much a friend as I am to the vulgar fanatical Enthusiasm a professed enemy.—HENRY MORE.

WILLOUGHBY. There is no mysticism in the doctrine of an immediate influence exercised by the Spirit of God on the spirit of man.

ATHERTON. Certainly not. It would be strange if the Creator, in whom we live and move, should have no direct access to the spirits of his own creatures.

GOWER. Does not your admission indicate the line between the true and the false in that aspiration after immediate knowledge, intercourse, or intuition, so common among the mystics? It is true that the divine influence is exerted upon us directly. But it is not true that such influence dispenses with rather than demands—suspends rather than quickens, the desires and faculties of our nature. So it appears to me at least.

ATHERTON. And to me also.

WILLOUGHBY. And again (to continue your negatives, Gower) it is not true, as some of the mystics tell us, that we can transcend with advantage the figurative language of Scripture; or gaze directly on the Divine Subsistence,—that we can know without knowledge, believe without a promise or a fact, and so dispense, in religious matters, with modes and media.

ATHERTON. Agreed. For ourselves, I believe we shall always find it true that the letter and the spirit do reciprocally set forth and consummate each other,—

‘Like as the wind doth beautify a sail, And as a sail becomes the unseen wind.’

We see truth in proportion as we are true. The outward written word in our hands directs us to the unseen Word so high above us, yet so near. The story of Christ’s life and death is our soul’s food. We find that we may—we must, sit in spirit at his feet, who so spake, so lived, so died. And, having been with him, we find a new power and attraction in the words; we are led by the Spirit of Christ in the keeping of those commandments, concerning which he said, ‘The words I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.’

WILLOUGHBY. So Plotinus is right, in a sense, after all;—like only can know like. Our likeness to Christ is our true knowledge of him.

ATHERTON. Yes. But we become partakers of the unseen life and light of God only through the manifestation of that life and light, Christ Jesus. It is on this point that the theology of Fox is so defective.

WILLOUGHBY. His doctrine that the influence of the Spirit is perceptible, as well as immediate, is still more questionable, surely?

GOWER. Perceptible! aye, and physically perceptible, he will have it, in some cases,—manifested in a tremulous agitation of the frame.

WILLOUGHBY. True. The convulsive movements among the Protestant peasantry of the Cevennes are a similar instance. This spasmodical religious excitement is in a high degree infectious when many are assembled together.

ATHERTON. Yet we should not reject the doctrine of perceptible spiritual guidance because it is so liable to abuse. My objection is that I have never seen satisfactory proof adduced. Do not let us think, however, that we escape from the danger of self-delusion by denying this doctrine, and can afford to be careless accordingly. You often see persons who would think the Quaker belief a dangerous superstition, unscrupulously identifying their personal or party interests with the cause of God, as though they believed themselves divinely commissioned, and could not possibly be liable to deception.

WILLOUGHBY. Here you see the value of the Quaker doctrine concerning stillness and quiet. The soul must be withdrawn in a silent waiting, and so hearken for the divine voice. The impulses which stir in the unallayed tumult of the feelings are the promptings of passion or of self, not of God. Wherever the belief in perceptible guidance is entertained, this practice of tranquil tarrying should accompany it, as its proper safeguard.

ATHERTON. The Quakers are wrong, I think, in separating particular movements and monitions as divine. But, at the same time, the ‘witness of the Spirit,’ as regards our state before God, is something more, I believe, than the mere attestation to the written word.

WILLOUGHBY. The traditional asceticism of the Friends is their fatal defect as a body.

ATHERTON. And their proneness to hazard good principles by pushing them to some repulsive extreme. Thus, they propose to abolish physical force by yielding everything to it;—to put an end to war by laying Europe at the feet of a great military power,—by apologizing for the oppressor and reviling those who resist him.

GOWER. I believe the man who says to me, I am trying to love my neighbour as myself: I suspect him who professes to love him better. His profession is worse than worthless unless he be consistent, and will allow himself to be swindled with impunity.

ATHERTON. We may well be suspicious when we see this super-Christian morality defended by arguments which can only be valid with the meanest and most grovelling selfishness. Such ethics are, in promise, more than human; in performance—less.

WILLOUGHBY. But, leaving this question, I am sure no sect which systematically secludes itself from every province of philosophy, literature, and art, can grow largely in numbers and in influence in a state of society like ours.

GOWER. Our English Platonists contrast strongly, in this respect, with George Fox and his followers.

WILLOUGHBY. How incomprehensible must have been the rude fervour and symbolic prophesyings of the Quakers to the refined scholarship and retiring devotion of men like More and Norris, Gale and Cudworth. But can you call them mystics?

ATHERTON. Scarcely so, except in as far as Platonism is always in a measure mystical. A vein of mysticism peeps out here and there in their writings. Cold rationalism they hate. They warm, with a ready sympathy, to every utterance of the tender and the lofty in the aspirations of the soul. But their practical English sense shows itself in their instant rejection of sentimentalism, extravagance, or profanity. This is especially the case with More—as shrewd in some things as he was credulous in others, and gifted with so quick an eye for the ridiculous.

GOWER. Delightful reading, those racy pages of his, running over with quaint fancies.

ATHERTON. More’s position as regards mysticism is, in the main, that of a comprehensive and judicial mind. He goes a considerable distance with the enthusiast,—for he believes that love for the supreme Beautiful and Good may well carry men out of themselves; but for fanatical presumption he has no mercy.[383]

WILLOUGHBY. The Romanist type of mysticism would be the most repugnant of all, I should think, to these somewhat free-thinking English scholars.

ATHERTON. So I have found. More has no notion of professing to give up his reason, like Poiret; still less of awaiting a suspension of our powers, like John of the Cross. He believes that ‘the Spirit doth accomplish and enlarge our humane faculties.’[384]

GOWER. Yet Norris is less remote than More from the Romish mysticism, is he not? I mean that his Platonism seemed to me a little more monastic, and less philosophical.

ATHERTON. He has, it must be confessed, his four gradations of love—akin to the class-religion of the Romish Church;—as though a certain degree were incumbent on all Christians, but higher stages of devout affection (above mere duty) were set before the eminently religious.[385] Yet let us do full justice to the good sense of that excellent man. The Quietist doctrine of unconsciousness appears to him an unnatural refinement. He cannot conceive how it should be expected that a man was to be ‘such an America to himself,’ as not to know what his own wishes and attainments are. The infused virtue of the Spanish mystics appears to his discriminating eye ‘as great a paradox in divinity, as occult qualities in philosophy.‘[386]

WILLOUGHBY. And none of them, I think, distress themselves, as did Fénélon, about purely disinterested love.

ATHERTON. They are too close followers of Plato to do that. They do not disguise their impatience of the bodily prison-house. Neither have they any love for the divine ignorance and holy darkness of Dionysius. They are eager to catch every ray of knowledge—to know and to rejoice, to the utmost that our mortality may, upon its heavenward pilgrimage.[387]

Footnote 383:

Let the reader consult his Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, or read his caustic observations upon the Anima Magica Abscondita, and his Second Lash of Alazonomastix. Among the high-flyers of his day, there appear to have been some who spoke of being ‘godded with God,’ and ‘Christed with Christ,’ much after the manner of some of Eckart’s followers.

Footnote 384:

‘But now seeing the Logos or steady comprehensive wisdom of God, in which all Ideas and their respects are contained, is but universal stable reason, how can there be any pretence of being so highly inspired as to be blown above reason itself, unlesse men will fancy themselves wiser than God, or their understandings above the natures and reasons of things themselves.’—Preface to the Conjectura Cabbalistica.

Footnote 385:

See Norris’s Miscellanies (1699):

An Idea of Happiness: enquiring wherein the greatest happiness attainable by Man in this Life does consist, pp. 326-341.

Footnote 386:

Miscellanies, p. 276 (in a Discourse on Rom. xii. 3), and p. 334.

Footnote 387:

Norris says, in his Hymn to Darkness—

‘The blest above do thy sweet umbrage prize, When cloyed with light, they veil their eyes. The vision of the Deity is made More sweet and beatific by thy shade. But we poor tenants of this orb below Don’t here thy excellencies know, Till death our understandings does improve, And then our wiser ghosts thy silent night-walks love.’

In the writings of Henry More we can see, by a notice here and there, how Quakerism looked in the eyes of a retired scholar, by no means indiscriminately adverse to enthusiasm. The word enthusiasm itself, he always uses more in the classical than the modern sense. ‘To tell you my opinion of that sect which are called Quakers, though I must allow that there may be some amongst them good and sincere-hearted men, and it may be nearer to the purity of Christianity for the life and power of it than many others, yet I am well assured that the generality of them are prodigiously melancholy, and some few perhaps possessed with the devil.’ He thinks their doctrine highly dangerous, as mingling with so many good and wholesome things an abominable ‘slighting of the history of Christ, and making a mere allegory of it,—tending to the utter overthrow of that warrantable though more external frame of Christianity which Scripture itself points out to us.’ Yet he takes wise occasion, from the very existence of such a sect, to bid us all look at home, and see that we do not content ourselves with the mere Tabernacle without the Presence and Power of God therein.—Mastix, his Letter to a Friend, p. 306.

BOOK THE TWELFTH EMANUEL SWEDENBORG

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Chapter I

What if earth Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein Each to other like, more than on earth is thought.

MILTON.

Here follow extracts from a section in Atherton’s Note-book, entitled ‘Remarks on Swedenborg.’

The doctrine of Correspondence is the central idea of Swedenborg’s system. Everything visible has belonging to it an appropriate spiritual reality. The history of man is an acted parable; the universe, a temple covered with hieroglyphics. Behmen, from the light which flashes on certain exalted moments, imagines that he receives the key to these hidden significances,—that he can interpret the Signatura Rerum. But he does not see spirits, or talk with angels. According to him, such communications would be less reliable than the intuition he enjoyed. Swedenborg takes opposite ground. ‘What I relate,’ he would say, ‘comes from no such mere inward persuasion. I recount the things I have seen. I do not labour to recall and to express the manifestation made me in some moment of ecstatic exaltation. I write you down a plain statement of journeys and conversations in the spiritual world, which have made the greater part of my daily history for many years together. I take my stand upon experience. I have proceeded by observation and induction as strict as that of any man of science among you. Only it has been given me to enjoy an experience reaching into two worlds—that of spirit, as well as that of matter.’

A mysticism like that of Tauler strives, and strives in vain, to escape all image and ‘figuration.’ A mysticism like that of Swedenborg clothes every spiritual truth in some substantial envelope, and discerns a habitant spirit in every variety of form. The follower of Plato essays to rise from the visible to the invisible. But he spurns each ladder in succession by which he has ascended. The follower of Swedenborg seeks a similar ascent; but he never flings away, as common, the husk which guards the precious spiritual kernel. He will not shun the material, or diminish his relations to it. Rather will he surround himself by those objects and those ties of earth which, spiritually regarded, speak constantly of heaven. To look thus on life, I need not enter the school of Swedenborg.

But in this freedom from asceticism,—this tendency to see the spiritual, not beyond, but in, the natural,—the mysticism of Swedenborg, like that of Behmen, has advanced far beyond its mediæval type. Religion no longer plays the despot toward science; the flesh is no longer evil; this beautiful world no longer yielded over to that father of lies who called it his.

As regards the scriptures, I find Swedenborg less one-sided than mystics like Frank, Weigel, or the more extreme among the Quakers. He displays no inclination to depreciate the letter of scripture in favour of the inward teaching of the Word. Without this ‘book-revelation,’ he tells us, man would have remained in gross ignorance concerning his Maker and his future destinies. The literal sense of the word is the basis of the spiritual and celestial sense; and the word, for this very reason, holy in every syllable. He sets up no doctrine based on arbitrary or fantastical interpretations. His doctrinal system is drawn from the literal sense, and calmly, if not always satisfactorily deduced, by citation, exegesis, and comparison of passages, without any mysticism whatever. Thus the balance between the letter and the spirit is maintained in his theology with a fairness almost unparalleled in the history of mysticism.[388]

According to Swedenborg, all the mythology and the symbolisms of ancient times were so many refracted or fragmentary correspondences—relics of that better day when every outward object suggested to man’s mind its appropriate divine truth. Such desultory and uncertain links between the seen and the unseen are so many imperfect attempts toward that harmony of the two worlds which he believed himself commissioned to reveal. The happy thoughts of the artist, the imaginative analogies of the poet, are exchanged with Swedenborg for an elaborate system. All the terms and objects in the natural and spiritual worlds are catalogued in pairs. This method appears so much formal pedantry. Our fancies will not work to order. The meaning and the life with which we continually inform outward objects,—those suggestions from sight and sound, which make almost every man at times a poet,—are our own creations, are determined by the mood of the hour, cannot be imposed from without, cannot be arranged like the nomenclature of a science. As regards the inner sense of scripture, at all events, Swedenborg introduces some such yoke. In that province, however, it is perhaps as well that those who are not satisfied with the obvious sense should find some restraint for their imagination, some method for their ingenuity, some guidance in a curiosity irresistible to a certain class of minds. If an objector say, ‘I do not see why the ass should correspond to scientific truth, and the horse to intellectual truth,’ Swedenborg will reply, ‘This analogy rests on no fancy of mine, but on actual experience and observation in the spiritual world. I have always seen horses and asses present and circumstanced, when, and according as, those inward qualities were central.’[389] But I do not believe that it was the design of Swedenborg rigidly to determine the relationships by which men are continually uniting the seen and unseen worlds. He probably conceived it his mission to disclose to men the divinely-ordered correspondences of scripture, the close relationship of man’s several states of being, and to make mankind more fully aware that matter and spirit were associated, not only in the varying analogies of imagination, but by the deeper affinity of eternal law. In this way, he sought to impart an impulse rather than to prescribe a scheme. His consistent followers will acknowledge that had he lived in another age, and occupied a different social position, the forms under which the spiritual world presented itself to him would have been different. To a large extent, therefore, his Memorable Relations must be regarded as true for him only,—for such a character, in such a day, though containing principles independent of personal peculiarity and local colouring. It would have been indeed inconsistent, had the Protestant who (as himself a Reformer) essayed to supply the defects and correct the errors of the Reformation,—had he designed to prohibit all advance beyond his own position.

There is great depth and beauty in that idea of Dante’s, according to which he represents himself as conscious of ascending from heaven to heaven in Paradise, not by perception of a transit through space, but by seeing his Beatrice grow more and more lovely:—

Io non m’accorsi del salire in ella; Ma d’esserv’ entro mi fece assai fede La donna mia ch’ io vidi far più bella.

What is an imagination with Dante, acquires, in the theosophy of Swedenborg, the constancy of law. According to him, the more I have of goodness in me, the more shall I discern of the loveliness belonging to the form of a good angel. If I am evil, the hideous forms of evil natures will not be repulsive to me; and if I were placed in heaven, the glory would afflict me with pain. To three persons, in three different states of holiness and knowledge, a fourth would present three several aspects in the spiritual world. Thus, spirits see as they themselves are; their character modifies their vision; their nature creates for them their world. All this seems so much mere idealism, extended from this life into the next. I ask, Where is the absolute truth, then? My German neighbour quietly inquires, ‘Is there, or is there not, any Ding an sich?’ The Swedenborgian replies, ‘Swedenborg is no idealist, as you suspect. The absolute truth is with God; and the more goodness and wisdom the creatures have from him, the more truly do they see. The reality external to self, I do not take away; yea, rather I establish it on a divine basis. For the reality is even this divine order, which the Omniscient hath established and maintains,—that form and vision shall answer exactly to spirit and insight. Such correspondence is but partial in this masquerading world of ours, so full of polite pretences and seemly forms. But in the spiritual world every one appears by degrees only what he is. He gravitates towards that circle or association of spirits where all see as much as he does. His character is written, past all disguise, in his form; and so ‘the things spoken in the ear in closets are proclaimed upon the housetops.’

Humanity stands high with Behmen, higher yet with Swedenborg. The Divine Humanity is at once the Lord and pattern of all creation. The innumerable worlds of space are arranged after the human form. The universe is a kind of constellation Homo. Every spirit belongs to some province in Swedenborg’s ‘Grand Man,’ and affects the correspondent part of the human body. A spirit dwelling in those parts of the universe which answer to the heart or the liver, makes his influx felt in the cardiac or hepatic regions of Swedenborg’s frame before he becomes visible to the eye. Evil spirits, again, produced their correspondent maladies on his system, during the time of his intercourse with them. Hypocrites gave him a pain in the teeth, because hypocrisy is spiritual toothache. The inhabitants of Mercury correspond to a province of memory in the ‘grand man:’ the Lunarians to the ensiform cartilage at the bottom of the breast-bone. With Swedenborg likeness is proximity: space and time are states of love and thought. Hence his journeys from world to world;—passing through states being equivalent to travelling over spaces. Thus it took him ten hours to reach one planet, while at another he arrived in two, because a longer time was required to approximate the state of his mind to that of the inhabitants of the former.[390]

The thoughts of Swedenborg have never to struggle for expression, like those of the half-educated Behmen. The mind of the Swedish seer was of the methodical and scientific cast. His style is calm and clear. He is easily understood in detail. The metaphors of poets are objects of vision with him: every abstraction takes some concrete form: his illustrations are incessant. He describes with the graphic minuteness of Defoe. Nothing is lost in cloud. With a distinct and steady outline he pourtrays, to the smallest circumstance, the habitations, the amusements, the occupations, the penalties, the economy, the marriages of the unseen world. He is never amazed, he never exaggerates. He is unimpassioned, and wholly careless of effect. Those of his followers with whom I have come in contact, partake of their master’s philosophy. They are liberal in spirit, and nowise impatient of unbelief in others. Swedenborg never pants and strives—has none of the tearful vehemence and glowing emotion which choke the utterance of Behmen. He is never familiar in this page, and rhapsodical in that. Always serene, this imperturbable philosopher is the Olympian Jove of mystics. He writes like a man who was sufficient to himself; who could afford to wait. He lived much alone; and strong and deep is the stream of this mysticism which carries no fleck of foam.

Other mystics seem to know times of wavering, when enthusiasm burns low. To Swedenborg sunrise and sunset are not more constant and familiar than the divine mission which he claims. Other mystics are overpowered by manifestations from the unseen world. Horror seizes them, or a dizzy joy, or the vision leaves them faint and trembling. They have their alternations; their lights and shadows are in keeping; they will topple headlong from some sunny pinnacle into an abysmal misery. But Swedenborg is ‘in the spirit’ for near two score years, and in his easy chair, or at his window, or on his walks, holds converse, as a matter of course, with angels and departed great ones, with patriarchs and devils. He can even instruct some of the angels, who have had experience only of their own world, and are guileless accordingly.

Footnote 388:

See Swedenborg’s True Christian Religion, chap. iv.

Footnote 389:

See E. Swedenborg, a Biography, by J. G. Wilkinson, p. 99; a succinct and well-written account of the man, and the best introduction to his writings I have met with.

Footnote 390:

Wilkinson, pp. 187, 118.

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Chapter II

We have but faith: we cannot know; For knowledge is of things we see; And yet we trust it comes from Thee, A beam in darkness: let it grow.

Let knowledge grow from more to more, But more of reverence in us dwell; That mind and soul, according well, May make one music as before,

But vaster.

TENNYSON.

I find Swedenborg, in the midst of his spiritual interviews and voluminous authorship, taking his part for some time in the Diet of 1761, and presenting three memorials with high repute for practical sagacity. He publishes ‘A New Method of finding the Longitude,’ simultaneously with the ‘Apocalypse Revealed.’

He appears to have possessed a remarkable power of inward respiration. He says that he received from the Lord a conformation enabling him to breathe inwardly for a long time, without the aid of the external air, while his outward senses continued their operation.[391]

Swedenborg is strongly opposed to ascetic practice in every form. He contradicts all the cloistered contemplative mystics, when he declares that ‘man cannot be formed for heaven except by means of the world.’ He represents the ‘religious,’ and devotees who have renounced the world for pious meditation, as by no means agreeable or enviable personages in the other life. They are of a sorrowful temper, despising others, discontented at not having been honoured with superior happiness, selfish, turning away from offices of charity (the very means of conjunction with heaven), soon betaking themselves to solitary places. Truly, many of the first in the heaven of the Romish calendar are the last in the heaven of Swedenborg. And I doubt not that his arrangement is, in such cases, the more near the truth of the two. For, as he justly says, ‘a life of charity towards our neighbour (which consists in doing what is just and right in every employment) can only be exercised in general as man is engaged in some employment.’ Such a life, he declares, tends heavenward,—not so a life of piety without a life of charity.[392]

‘In heaven,’ says Swedenborg, ‘instruction is committed, not to memory, but to life;‘—a goodly saying.

Swedenborg’s ‘Christian Religion’ is a system of theology, calm and orderly throughout, illustrated with plates—the Memorable Relations. I interpret these marvellous narratives much as Swedenborg does the Mosaic record. I do not question their historic truth, for Swedenborg. Such things he saw and heard; for to such a mind all abstraction takes substantial form. His mental transitions are journeys. Every proposition has its appropriate scenery; every group of verities incorporates itself in a drama, and becomes a speech and action. But I put an inner sense into these Relations, and so reading them, find charming allegories, just in moral and elegant in style.

What Swedenborg tells us about a future state I am certainly not in a position to contradict, for I know nothing about such matters. The general conviction of the Christian world seems to me true in the main,—that the silence of the scriptures concerning such details is an argument for their inspiration—was wisely designed to check curiosity and to exercise faith. Yet it cannot be denied that after all Swedenborg’s disclosures, the Christian conflict, and the motives to that holy warfare, remain very much as the Bible presents them. Selfishness is still the root of evil; God the sole foundation of truth and goodness; faith alone, working by love, can overcome the world. If the arrangements he relates as finding place in heaven and hell, be regarded as the unconscious creation of his own brain, an extraordinary genius for legislature must be allowed him by all. There is generally an obvious fitness in the economy he describes. Here and there he is whimsical and Quevedo-like. Sometimes a certain grim satire peeps out. As regards individuals, we suspect prejudice or caprice. He represents Melanchthon as faring but poorly, for a long time, in the other world, because he would not let go his doctrine of justification by faith. He elevates Mahomet in his heaven, and lowers Paul. Who does not think of Dante, carrying the feud of Guelph and Ghibelline beyond the grave?[393]

It shocks such preconceived ideas as we may most of us have formed concerning heaven, to find it represented as so like earth. That in the spiritual world there should be towns and cities, gymnasia and theological discussions, sermons and book-writing, courts of law, and games, yea marriage, of a refined species, the progeny whereof are inward joys and virtues;—all this is novel.[394] Our notions here are mostly taken from Milton, and his, in considerable measure, from ecclesiastical and scholastic tradition. After the sublimity of the poet, the homely circumstantialities of the theosophist appear cruelly prosaic. Yet Swedenborg’s view of the future state may be regarded as, in many respects, a wholesome corrective to the popular conception. The truth, I should dimly surmise, may lie between the two. The general apprehension does perhaps make the transition at death too abrupt; forgets too much the great variety of degrees and societies of spirits which must distinguish the inhabitants of hell and heaven,—how completely the inward tendency will make the grief or the joy,—how little mere change of scene and mode of existence can constitute the bliss or woe,—and how various must be the occupations and enjoyments of a world which is to consummate, not our adoration merely, but active love and knowledge.

Very beautiful is Swedenborg’s description of infants in heaven, and the instruction they receive ‘from angels of the female sex, who in the life of the body, loved infants tenderly, and at the same time loved God.’[395]

Even wicked men, immediately after death, are kindly received by good angels—such mercy is there for our poor mortality at the last trying hour. But the evil nature of such persons soon resumes its former ascendancy. The society of those pure associates grows irksome, and is forsaken by the sinful for evil companionship similar to themselves.

Swedenborg cannot be considered mystical in his doctrine concerning spiritual influence—that customary seat of mysticism. Such influence he pronounces immediate on the divine part, but not perceptible on ours, nor such as to exclude the necessity of instruction and the use of means. The good we do, God alone worketh in us; but we are conscious only of effort on our own part, though believing that we receive divine assistance. There is to be no tarrying, he says, for magical grace; no crying ‘Wash me!’ while the divinely given means of purification lie unused at our side. The proprium, or own-hood of every angel, spirit, or man, is only evil. (All angels and devils were once good and bad men.) To live only from God and not from self, is the true purity. Every man is an organ of life, deriving his life and free-will from God, and receptive of the Divine influx—enjoying more or less, as he opens or closes his nature thereto. If the lower regions of his spiritual nature be closed against this influx, God is still in him, but he is not in God.[396]

Swedenborg declares that the Church has been corrupted by the doctrine of three divine persons existing from eternity. He maintains that such a belief must in reality involve the conception of three several gods, however loudly those who hold it may profess to acknowledge the Divine Unity. In his theology, the Father, Son, and Spirit, are ‘the three essentials of one God, which make One, like Soul, Body, and Operation in man.’

The doctrine of Swedenborg concerning the work of Christ appears to have received its peculiar complexion, at least in great measure, from his repugnance to Calvinism. He saw that the theology of the Reformation had unduly elaborated into doctrine, the forensic and pecuniary metaphors of Scripture, concerning justification and redemption. In his reaction, he is too much inclined to give to those figures a meaning considerably short of that which a consistent interpretation must assign them. Yet the results at which he arrives are not so decidedly opposed to those reached by the theology usually termed evangelical, as might have been anticipated. But the process of redemption in Swedenborg’s system differs widely. He says he cannot believe that the Father, in his wrath, condemned the human race, and in his mercy sent his Son to bear their curse; that out of love for his suffering Son he cancelled the sentence of damnation, yet only in favour of those for whom the Son should intercede, who was thus to be a perpetual Mediator in the presence of the Father.[397] He declares it a fundamental error of the Church to believe the passion of the Cross to be redemption itself. He pronounces imputed righteousness a subversion of the divine order.—So much for what he denies. On the other hand, he affirms that in the fulness of time, Jehovah assumed humanity to redeem and save mankind. Both in the spiritual regions and among men, evil had been gradually outgrowing and threatening to overpower good. The equilibrium between the heavenly and hellish worlds was lost. It was as though a dyke had been broken down, and sin were about to overflow the universe. Then God took to himself our nature, to subjugate the hells and to restore to order the heavens. Every victory gained by Christ over the temptations which assailed Him, distanced and enfeebled the powers of evil everywhere. It was the driving back of ravenous beasts to their dens,—the delivery and feeding of his flock, both men and angels. This victory of the Saviour is our victory, is that redemption in virtue of which we are able, believing in Him, to resist and vanquish evil. Mediation, Intercession, Atonement, Propitiation, are forms of speech ‘expressive of the approach which is opened to God, and of the grace communicated from God, by means of His Humanity.’ Thus Swedenborg also believes in a violated order and an impending perdition; in the redemption of the race from such a fate by the incarnate One; in the vindication or restoration of the divine law and order by his conflict and victory on our behalf; and in a life lived for us, which becomes also a life quickened in us. He appears to object to the idea of sacrifice as necessarily concentrating the work of redemption in the shedding of the Saviour’s blood. Such may have been the limited conception of sacrifice in the theology he opposed; but that error could be no good reason for explaining away the idea of sacrifice altogether. The language of Christ concerning himself must be strangely misinterpreted if no such idea is to be found there. But that sacrifice was constituted by his whole life, as well as by its last act—the laying down thereof. The distinction drawn by some divines between the active and passive obedience—as though the death alone were our atonement, and the life alone our example—is a most unhappy refinement.

In Swedenborg’s doctrine concerning union with Christ there is nothing mystical. From the passionate and sensuous union of some mystics, and from the pantheistic confusion of others, he is completely free.

It is to be regretted that the work of redemption should still be so partially regarded by opposing sections of the Church. On the one side are those who hold the doctrine of an exact satisfaction (the commercial theory); who suppose that, in virtue of imputed righteousness, God sees in his people no sin; and who would say that men may, rather than that they must, be exhorted to maintain good works. This covert and generally theoretical antinomianism is happily rare. Yet there are some well-meaning men, desirous of doing a reforming work among us, who actually imagine such an extreme as this to be the ordinary evangelical doctrine. On the other side are those whose tendency is to resolve the historical into the inward Christ. From any such leaning Swedenborg is more free than George Fox. On this side, too, stand those with whom Christ’s work is rather a first sample of restored humanity than the way of restoration, and who seem to suppose that in admitting God to be just, they make Him cruel. In this extreme aversion to acknowledge an external law, and an external danger consequent on its violation, Swedenborg does not share. But, like most of the mystics, he conceives of redemption as wrought for us only as it is wrought in us; takes justification for granted, if we have but sanctification; and regards our sins as remitted just in proportion as we are reclaimed from them. If we must lean towards some extreme, this is the more safe, because containing the larger measure of truth. It appears to me that the ‘divine order’ requires that man be accepted of God in a way consistent with the divine righteousness; and so also as, at the very same time, to become conformed to that righteousness. The sacred writers constantly combine those two aspects of redemption which our systems are so prone to separate. On the one side, Christ’s example is pressed upon us, even in those very acts which are peculiar to Himself as divine. On the other, the blood of Christ is represented as sanctifying us—purging our consciences from dead works to serve the living God; while it is also stated expressly that He died, the just for the unjust.

Similar as Swedenborg’s theology is in its spirit to that of Behmen, I find him expressly stating that he had never read the German theosophist.

Concerning the Church of the New Jerusalem, Swedenborg says, ‘Since the Lord cannot manifest himself in person (to the world), which has just been shown to be impossible, and yet He has foretold that He would come and establish a New Church, which is the New Jerusalem, it follows that He will effect this by the instrumentality of a man, who is able not only to receive the doctrines of that Church in his understanding, but also to make them known by the press. That the Lord manifested Himself before me His servant, that He sent me on this office, and afterwards opened the sight of my spirit, and so let me into the spiritual world, permitting me to see the heavens and the hells, and also to converse with angels and spirits; and this now continually for many years, I attest in truth; and farther, that from the first day of my call to this office, I have never received anything appertaining to the doctrines of that Church from any angel, but from the Lord alone, whilst I was reading the Word.’—True Christian Religion, § 779.

Footnote 391:

Wilkinson, pp. 79, 130.

Footnote 392:

Heaven and Hell, § 360.

Footnote 393:

True Christian Religion, § 796.

Footnote 394:

See the description of the heavenly palaces, of divine worship in heaven, and of the angelic employments, Heaven and Hell, §§ 183, 221, 387. True Christian Religion, §§ 694, 697. Also concerning marriages in heaven, Heaven and Hell, §§ 366-386.

Footnote 395:

Heaven and Hell, §§ 329-345.

Footnote 396:

True Christian Religion, chap. vi. 6, 7; Heaven and Hell, § 592.

Footnote 397:

True Christian Religion, chap. ii. 1-7. I give here Swedenborg’s idea of the evangelical theology. See especially §§ 132-135, where he represents himself as correcting the false doctrine of certain spirits in the other world concerning the Divine Nature.

BOOK THE THIRTEENTH CONCLUSION

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