BOOK THE EIGHTH
THEOSOPHY IN THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION
CHAPTER I.
The autumn is already advanced, and our friends who met at Summerford have returned to the neighbourhood of London. The days of damp and fog have arrived. All nature looks sullen and lustreless. As Gower gazes through the streaming pane on the narrowed dripping landscape, he sometimes tries, as sunny Persia and the Sufis recur to him, to transform the slope before his windows into an eastern valley. Fancy shall sow it thick with poppies, and daisies, and hyacinths of brilliant red;—a thymy smell breathes up the pass;—and there the ungainly stork, and gaily painted quails flutter away at the sound of his horse’s hoofs. Or those house-tops at the foot of the hill, among their trees, shall be a Persian town, on which he looks from an eminence. There are the flat-roofed white houses, enclosing in their courts those twinkling silver lights, the fountains; the green of trees among the shining walls relieves the eye; the domes and minarets look down into the narrow streets; there sleeps the burial-ground, under the shadow of its sentinel cypresses; and there blows the garland of gardens, surrounding the whole with its wavy line of many colours. But the weather is a water-monster, and swallows up too-venturous Fancy. For a few moments imagination can lay light behind the clouds; bright hues flush out on the surface of familiar forms, and the magic power prevails to change them into creatures of the Orient. But the rainy reality is too potent, and the wilderness of vapour will receive no form, retain no colour. So Gower turns away from the windows—pokes the fire—feels idle and fit for nothing—struggles with himself—conquers, and finally achieves a morning’s work.
Willoughby has laid aside his romance for a time and taken to the theosophists—to Jacob Behmen more especially. In fact, he had come to an exciting point in his story. He thought he had found a kind of seething turbulence in his thoughts, like that which certain rivers are said to manifest, when in parts of their course they pass over beds of subterranean fire. Afraid of becoming morbid and unnatural, he stopped work at once, and had recourse to Behmen as a refrigerant and sedative. The remedy succeeded to admiration. Within a day or two the patient could pronounce himself out of poetical danger; and Atherton found him, when he dropped in one morning, enjoying, with Behmen in his hand, that most promising token of convalescence—a profound sleep.
Gower resolved to make himself amends for that uncongenial morning, by spending the evening at Ashfield. Thither also Willoughby had found his way. A considerable part of the evening was passed in Atherton’s library, and conversation turned, before very long, upon the mystics, once more, and their position as regards the Reformation.
Willoughby. Those Teutonic worthies of the fourteenth century are noble specimens of the mystic.
Gower. Truly, with them, Mysticism puts on her beautiful garments. See her standing, gazing heavenward; ‘her rapt soul sitting in her eyes,’ and about her what a troop of shining ones! There is Charity, her cheek wet with tears for the dead Christ and pale with love for the living; carrying, too, the oil and the wine—for Mysticism was the good Samaritan of the time, and succoured bleeding Poverty, when priest passed by and Levite;—there is Truth, withdrawing worship from the form and superstitious substitute, transferring it from priest and pageantry to the heart alone with God, and pressing on, past every channel, toward the Fount Himself;—there Humility, pointing to the embers of consumed good works, while she declares that man is nothing and that God is all;—and there, too, Patriotism, and awakening Liberty—for Mysticism appealed to the people in their native tongue; fashioned the speech and nerved the arms of the German nation; gave heart to the Fatherland (bewildered in a tempest of fiery curses) to withstand, in the name of Christ, the vicar of Christ; led on the Teutonic lion of her popular fable to foil the plots of Italian Reynard; and dared herself to set at nought the infuriate Infallibility.
Atherton. Go on, Gower.
Gower. It seems to me that the doctrine of justification by faith, is practically involved in a theology like that of Tauler, so deep in its apprehension of sin as selfishness, so thorough in renouncing all merit on the part of man.
Atherton. Yes, practically. What was needful in addition was, that this doctrine should take its due central place in the system of Christian truth, as the principle, if I may so speak, of salvation for all men. It was not enough to arrive at it as the upshot of individual mystical experience.
Willoughby. There I think you indicate the weak point of this mysticism—it is so individual—so much a matter of the personal inward life.
Gower. That surely is the very secret of its strength.
Willoughby. Yes, of its strength up to a certain limit; beyond that limit, of its weakness. It lacked facility of impartation. Its sympathies were broad and humane; its doctrine too narrow and ascetic. Speaking from the depths of a soul that had known the nether darkness and the insufferable glory, its utterance was broken and obscure. It must be lived through to be understood. It might attract, but could only partially retain, the many. Its message, after all, was to the few.
Gower. But those few, master-minds, remember.
Atherton. True, yet what powers could compensate for the want of clear speech—of a ready vehicle for transference of thought? A deep saying that of Jeremy Taylor’s, where he remarks concerning mystical elevations and abstractions, that, while in other sciences the terms must first be known and then the rules and conclusions, the whole experience of mysticism must first be obtained before we can so much as know what it is, and the end acquired first—the conclusion before the premises.
Willoughby. When Luther appears, appealing to the Bible in the hands of the people, the defect is supplied, and we have the Reformation. That visible and venerable externalism, the Romish Church, could not be successfully assailed on merely internal grounds. The testimony of the individual heart against it was variable and uncertain, because more or less isolated. But where the Scriptures are set free, and they can be made the basis of assault, an externalism quite as visible, and more venerable, brings the outward to bear against the outward; while the power of an inward life, pure and deep and ardent as the best of the mystics ever knew, animates the irresistible onset.
Gower. The testimony of History, then, is decidedly against our modern spiritualism, which complains that we make too much of the book, and sacrifice the subjective religious development to an outward authority. Luther—a true man of the spirit—conquered because he could point to a letter. The fire of his own inward life could kindle so grand a flame, because he was sustained by an authority which no individual mystic could arrogate. The Scriptures were the common ground for the Reformer who had the truth, and the inquirer who sought it. The excessive subjectivity of the mystic deprived him of that advantage.
Willoughby. But are we not overlooking other causes which enabled Luther to accomplish so much, and precluded the mystics from carrying further their reforming tendency?
Atherton. By all means let the influence of the interval between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries be duly taken into account. To do so will only make good Gower’s remark. During the fifteenth century you find no fresh development of mysticism. The genuine religion of the period was still mystical in its complexion, but characterised by a much larger infusion of the scriptural element. This was the real advance of that interim. At the Universities the Bible began to displace the schoolmen. A better system of interpretation prevailed. Even with the mystics St. Paul was already taking the place of Dionysius, and mysticism began to lose its nature, merging in a true spirituality, sober-minded while fervent. In the theology of such men as John Wessel and Staupitz (who with Tauler and the German theology nourished the early religious life of Luther), we see a clearer apprehension of the nature of Christ’s work for us—a better balancing of the outward and the inward. In fact, the great step necessary to produce a reformation, after the mystics had made their preparation, was this very bringing into prominence of the word of God. Then, to the ardour and the power of mysticism in its noblest form, was added the authority, the guidance, and the divine adaptation of that message of salvation announced to all mankind.
Willoughby. Then, again, the doctrine of Luther directed men at once to the attainment of that clear hope concerning their spiritual safety which, say what we will, is the craving of our nature. We have seen how an Eckart would become pantheist to extort from philosophy that assurance which was denied him by the Church.
Gower. Yet does not the strength and attraction of Romanism lie in this very characteristic—its tempting facility of comfort? Most men prefer a sleeping conscience to a tender one; and for such the Romish Church offers a perpetual siesta.
Willoughby. Granted; for this very reason, however, she cannot satisfy the deeper wants of the class I speak of—those men out of whom may be made mystics, reformers, heretics,—but religious Helots never. I am not speaking of mere comfort, but of true peace,—of that entrance into a new relationship towards God which gives us the heart to aspire towards a new nature.
Gower. Agreed, then. Bunyan follows Paul when he makes Christian lose his burden early in the pilgrimage, so that he treads the onward path thenceforward with a lighter step.
Atherton. And can front Apollyon better. Look round at the Christendom of that age. You see only two classes who escape the condition of the hired servant—who are the sons of God and not his bondsmen. These are the mystics and the reformers. The mystic realizes adoption through appalling griefs and toils; the reformer is led thither straightway, as he exclaims with St. Paul, ‘Being therefore justified by faith, we have peace with God.’
Willoughby. How strongly does Luther urge men to believe on Christ as a Saviour for them—to receive in lowly simplicity the peace divinely offered. How triumphantly does he show that such a faith is victory—that all other is a mere historic belief about Christ, not a belief in an ever-present Deliverer, who lives within, and redeems us daily from ourselves. Thus did his followers helm them speedily with hope, and escape, in great measure, the fearful strain of those alternations between rapture and despair, for which mysticism did not even seek a remedy. The distinction between justification and sanctification is no mere theological refinement. Its practical recognition, at least, is essential to that solemn joyousness which is the strength and glory of the Christian life.
Atherton. That is, after all, the true escape from Self which delivers you from bondage to the shifting frames and feelings of the hour—the mere accidents of personal temperament, by making clear the external ground of hope. Mysticism had not light enough to find the way to its own ideal of rest. Luther, with his Bible, realized in soberness the longed-for repose of its intense passion.
Willoughby. We must confess too, I think, that the representatives of the better mysticism were not strong enough to cope with the fanatical or lawless leaders of the worse. How Tauler, Suso, Ruysbroek, and the author of the Theologia Germanica, lift up their voices against the ‘false lights’—against men who deified every impulse, who professed to have transcended all virtue, who renounced all moral obligation and outward authority, or who resigned themselves to a stupid apathy which they called poverty of spirit.
Gower. Those who constituted this last class must have been men who found in the false doctrine only an excuse for remaining as they were:—hard, indeed, to raise them to anything better. I imagine them poor ignorant hinds, the undermost victims of feudalism. One thinks of Tennyson’s portraiture of the serf,—
Willoughby. Be that as it may, this bastard mysticism, whether rapacious as King Stork, or passive as King Log, multiplies among men. Want and oppression seize on the sacred pretext of an inward light, and mysticism is fast growing fierce and revolutionary. Good men, speaking words of spiritual freedom, have unawares awakened licence. They themselves slew Self with vigil and with tears; and, lo! a Hydra-headed Self, rampant and ruthless, stalks abroad, and they have been unwittingly his creators.
Atherton. What could they do, as mystics, but mourn and rebuke? The inward testimony would not render an unvarying verdict in every case. Their appeal must be, either to an amount of right moral discernment already in the individual, or to the social judgment of a certain religious circle. Beyond these limits their very consistency is their weakness. For the thorough-going mystic, who is resolved to be in all things a light and law unto himself, replies that his inward light is quite as divinely authoritative for him as is that of the moderate man, reproving his excesses, for himself. He will answer, ‘Friend, walk thou by thy light, as I by mine. The external is nothing to the internal. “What is the chaff to the wheat?” saith the Lord. Thou art external to me, I listen therefore to the voice within me, not to thine.’
Willoughby. We have, too, the express testimony of Melanchthon to the fact, that had not Luther appeared when he did, to divert the under-current of popular indignation into the middle course of the Reformation, a fearful outbreak must have desolated Europe from the fury kindled by the intolerable oppressions of Church and State.
Gower. Certainly mysticism could never have spoken with power enough to turn aside such a long-gathered tempest.
Willoughby. Where the revolutionary spirit had once broken out, only the strong hand could avail.
Atherton. And how ruthlessly was that remedy applied! But—what in the world—Gower, I say, open your eyes. Are you going to sleep?
Gower. I was trying to recall a dream I had after reading about the Anabaptists of Munster.
Willoughby. A dream! Let us have it.
Gower. Wait a moment—ah, now I remember. First of all, I saw numbers of people toiling across the fields or along miry roads; weary mothers, delicately nurtured, carrying their babes, and followed by their crying little ones; the fathers laden, it would seem, with such property as they were allowed to take away. They look back mournfully towards the walls of a city, out of whose gates more of their friends are being thrust. These are the magistrates, the rich, the unbelievers, driven forth by the populace to find what shelter they may among the boors, or in the nearest towns. Then I am suddenly inside the city. I see, in one place, a crowd gathered about a shaggy, wild-eyed preacher, spluttering, screaming, foaming at the mouth; in another is a circle surrounding two men in rags, whirling round like spinning dervishes. One man, with face ghastly pale, and bandaged head, who seems to have escaped from a hospital, moans and wrings his hands, predicting universal ruin. Now, with a yell, he has fallen down in convulsions. There a burly brute has pushed down a weeping woman from the door-steps of a great house, that he may stand on the spot to roar out his prophecy and exhortation. All this was somehow mingled with hosannas to Mathieson, the baker; and at the end of the high street they were dancing about a bonfire made of all the books in the town, save the Bible only. Then the crowd made way for the favourite wife of John Bokelson, the tailor, riding in a great coach, resplendent in silks and costly stuffs torn from the churches. Methought I entered the Town Hall. There, on a throne, in a suit of silver tissue, slashed and lined with crimson, fastened with buckles of gold, sat John Bokelson himself.[205]
Willoughby. A Mormon elder, ‘all of the olden time!’
Atherton. Be quiet. He had only eight wives.
Gower. There he sat, with his triple crown, his globe, and cross of gold, his silver and golden swords, and above his head I could read, ‘King of Righteousness over the whole World.’ Then came a long succession of petitioners, thrice kneeling and prostrating themselves before him. A bell rang. The audience was over. Now he was sending out ambassadors, calling on the neighbouring towns to rise and establish the Kingdom of the Holy Ghost,—‘for the meek are to inherit the earth, and the time for spoiling the Egyptians is come.’ After this I saw long tables spread in the market-place, with fine linen cloths, whereat four thousand people partook of the sacrament, and afterwards riotously feasted; the grey towers of the cathedral looking down upon them. I passed in at the church doors. All was confusion there, drunken shouts, and running to and fro of boys from cook-shops. The great oriel window had been broken by stones, and on the pavement, with its time-worn epitaphs, lay the many-coloured fragments of glass, among broken flagons and pools of beer. A mad musician had seized upon the organ, and above the uproar rolled the mighty volumes of sound, shaking the old dusty banners. Now came a crash of unearthly music—quite unheeded,—and then the melody melted and trembled away, dying down with a far-off wail of unutterable pathos. In the midst of his ecstasy the crazed performer was hurled away by a swarm of ‘prentice lads who had found their way up the staircase. One among them struck up the well-known air of a wanton song. There was an outcry and sound of struggling, and I saw the madman leap from the clerestory down into the middle of the nave,——
Willoughby. And you woke?
Gower. No. There came over me a kind of blank bewilderment, and all was changed. The sides of the church had become mountains. I was in a winding rocky glen, and the moon was rising over the black fantastic peaks that shut in the valley. I saw what made me think of Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones. Along the hollow of the gorge, and in the great furrows of the heights on each side, where should have been mountain streams and pebbles, were the glistening bones; and on the rock-ledges where the moonlight fell I could see them strewn; and on every boulder, skeleton-heaps; and at the mouth of every cavern, like icicles hanging from the stony jaws. I heard a rising wind sweep up the pass,—another blast, and another; and then, coming nearer and nearer, a sound as though withered boughs of innumerable trees were snapping in a tempest. All was whirling, darting motion among the white rattling fragments, above, beneath, around; till every clanking bone had been locked to its fellow, and a skeleton sat on every crag and lay in every hollow. The sinews and the flesh then came up upon them; after that, the breath; and they arose, an exceeding great army. I heard a muttering near me, and turning, I saw one gazing on the multitude, having in his hand a torch. His wild, eager look startled me. Now I thought he was Carlstadt, and then he changed into Thomas Münzer. Then again I was sure I recognized Spenser’s Phantastes. He flung his torch into a cleft, whence it breathed out its last sparks into the windy night, and bowing his head, turned slowly away. I heard him say, ‘Dead Church! Dead Church! How shalt thou live? I have learnt it. Flesh and blood first—then breath. Truth for a body, then Love for a soul. The spirit must have a form—must quicken a letter. First a fact for motive; then let the young life work. The soul must have its sinews; the spirit its instrument, its means, its words. Lie there, fire that destroyest; come hither, fire that warmest,—that warmest to good, and that warnest from evil.’ Then I saw that he had a new book in his hand,—the last part then published of Luther’s German New Testament. He vanished. The hills rolled away in smoke, and I awoke with a start.
Atherton. I wish Phantastes and his kindred had really learnt the lesson of your dream. But such hot-brained enthusiasts cannot be taught, not even by sore stripes of adversity in the school of fools.
CHAPTER II.
He that misbelieves and lays aside clear and cautious reason in things that fall under the discussion of Reason, upon the pretence of hankering after some higher principle, (which, a thousand to one, proves but the infatuation of Melancholy and a superstitious hallucination), is as ridiculous as if he would not use his natural eyes about their proper object till the presence of some supernatural light, or till he had got a pair of Spectacles made of the Crystalline Heaven, or of the Cœlum Empyreum, to hang upon his nose for him to look through.—Henry More.
Atherton. I ought to acknowledge, I suppose, that I have by me a rough draught, made some time since, representing the first strife between Mysticism and Reformation. But, as to reading it, I scarcely think——
Willoughby. You will not do so, I beg.
Atherton. Willoughby, you shall suffer for that. I’ll begin.
Willoughby. Pelt away. I thought I should get a cocoa-nut for my stone. (Atherton reads.)
Luther and the Mystics.
The estimate to be formed of the mystics who lived before the Reformation differs very widely from that which is due to those who appeared after it. Previous to the Reformation, there was a far larger amount of truth with the mystics than with any other party in the Romish Church. They were, in reality, men of progress, and belonged to the onward element in their day and generation. For reform of some sort many of them laboured—all of them sighed. They protested against the corruptions of religion. Many an Augean stable would they have cleansed, could they but have found their Hercules. In France, Briconnet, Gerard, and Roussel were men of this class—not so outspoken as Luther and his followers, but led by mysticism to sympathy with reforming views, and enabled by that very mysticism to retain their connexion with Rome, regarding externals as indifferent.
When Luther comes with his doctrine of justification by faith, and his announcement that the Scriptures are the sufficient standard of Christian truth, a great change takes place. Mystics of the more thoughtful, rightly earnest sort, are among the first to embrace the new doctrines. Here they have the guide they longed for—here they find what mysticism could never give. They are, some of them, like Justin Martyr, who waited long among the schools of the Platonists for their promised immediate intuition of Deity, and then discovered among Christians that God was to be known in another way far better—through the medium of his written Word, by the teaching of his Spirit. But those who when a fuller light came, refused to quit for its lustre that isolated and flickering torch, about which men had gathered for lack of anything brighter, such were given over to the veriest absurdity, or speedily consigned to utter forgetfulness. By the mystic of the fourteenth century, the way of the Reformation was in great part prepared. By the mystic of the sixteenth century it was hindered and imperilled. In that huge ship of the state ecclesiastic, which all true hearts and hands in those troublous times were concerned to work to their very best, a new code of regulations had been issued. Such rule came in with Luther. Now some of those who would have been among the very best sailors under the old management, proved useless, or worse than useless under the new. One set of them were insolent and mutinous—had a way of reviling the captain in strange gibberish—and a most insane tendency to look into the powder-room with a light. Another class lay about useless, till having been tumbled over many times by their more active comrades, they got kicked into corners, whence they were never more to emerge. So fared it with mysticism, attempting to persist in existence when its work for that time was done. The mystic so situated was either a caricature of reform or a cipher, either a fanatical firebrand or an unheeded negation.
We need not go far for examples. Dr. Bodenstein of Carlstadt (best known as simple Carlstadt) is professor at Wittenberg, and a thorough reformer. He is a little, swarthy, sunburnt man, crotchety to the last degree. He follows his intuitions—now this whim, now that—right to-day, wrong to-morrow—a man whom you never know where to find. He must spring to his conclusion at once; he will not first pause for satisfying reasons,—for clear ideas on the various bearings of his thought or deed. So his life is a series of starts; his actions incongruous and spasmodic, unlinked, unharmonized by any thoughtful plan or principle.
But Carlstadt is a man of books as well as of action. He writes treatises, repeating the doctrines of Tauler and the German Theology, all about abandonment, and not seeing God or enjoying Him more in this than in that event or employment; about the sin of enjoying ordinances and media, rather than God immediately; about the blessed self-loss in the One; about the reduction of ourselves to nothing. Ah, Dr. Bodenstein, thou mayest write for ever that way, and no one now will read! Men have left all this behind. A ripe full vintage invites their thirst; thine acrid and ascetic grape is now deserted. Gladly do they, for the most part, exchange the refined and impracticable requirements of mysticism, its vagueness, its incessant prohibition, for the genial, simple truth of that German New Testament which Luther is giving them.
At the juncture of which we are about to speak, Luther lay hidden in the Wartburg. In the small town of Zwickau, in the Erzgebirge, there arose a knot of enthusiasts for whom Luther did not go half far enough. There was Storch, a weaver, to whom Gabriel had made very wonderful communications one night; another weaver, named Thomas, and a student, Stübner, who had forsaken the toil of study for the easier method of supernatural illumination. To these should be added the more notorious Thomas Münzer, who has been erroneously regarded as the founder of the party. ‘Why such a slavish reverence for what the Bible says?’ cry these mystics. ‘What is a mere book?’ ‘Have we not immediate voices, impulses, revelations from the Holy Spirit, dictating all we should do? Better this than your Bible reading and college work.’ Then, next, they prophesy terrible woes and judgments to come on Christendom, mainly through the Turks; they themselves, perhaps, in fitting time, may draw the sword of the Lord and of Gideon, and win the land for the saints.
These worthies were put down by the magistrates of Zwickau. Shaking off the Zwickau dust against their enemies, several of them seek a ‘larger sphere of usefulness’ in Wittenberg. They found the city already in no small excitement concerning certain reforms which Carlstadt was making at full speed. He fraternizes with the Zwickau prophets at once. Indeed, he had been heard to say of the whole body of Scripture what divines were accustomed to say of the law only, that it was a killing letter, leading to nothing more than a sense of guilt and deserved condemnation. Faster and faster come his changes, so well-meant, but so ill-advised. With a few strokes he abolishes auricular confession, makes it incumbent to violate the fast days, and renders it customary to come to the sacrament without preparation. Next an iconoclast riot is raised. Carlstadt declares that the magistrates have power to render criminal those observances which the popular voice declares contrary to the Word of God; that if they refuse, the community may take the law into its own hands.
A scholar like Carlstadt, a professor of established repute, surrenders at last to the vulgar error of the very coarsest mysticism. He advises his students to go home; human learning is vain; Hebrew and Greek an idle toil; inspiration is far above scholarship. Were there not prophets among them, wiser than all the doctors, who had never studied anything or anywhere for half an hour? He himself went about among the poor people, asking them the meaning of Scripture passages, and believing that the hap-hazard notions they put forth were a special revelation from Him who hideth from the wise and prudent what is revealed unto babes. Imagine the Professor bawling a text into the ear of some deaf old crone who cowers beside the stove, and awaiting the irrelevant mumblings of ignorant decrepitude as the oracle of God! Fancy him accosting the shoemaker at his stall, and getting his notion of the text in question, noting it down as infallible, and going his way rejoicing; while Crispin, who knows him, thinks over and over again what a far cleverer answer he might have given, and wishes unsaid what Carlstadt believes inspired!
Is there no one in Wittenberg to unmask these follies, and to quiet the smouldering excitement dangerously spreading among townspeople and students? Melanchthon is young. The loud browbeating volubility of the prophets overpowers his gentle nature. He is undecided—he fancies he sees some force in what they say about baptism. He is timid—he will do nothing.
Friends write to Luther. Back comes an answer from a man who sees to the heart of the matter in a moment—a standing confutation of the mystic’s ambition, in three sentences. Thus replies Luther—‘Do you wish to know the place, the time, the manner in which God holds converse with men? Hear then—‘As a lion so hath he crushed all my bones;’ and again, ‘I am cast out from before thy face;’ and again, ‘My soul is filled with plagues, and my life draweth nigh unto the gates of hell.’ The Divine Majesty does not speak to men immediately, as they call it, so that they have vision of God, for He saith, ‘No flesh shall see me and live.’ Human nature could not survive the least syllable of the Divine utterance. So God addresses man through men, because we could not endure His speaking to us without medium.’
And the mystics could not say (as mystics so commonly plead) that Luther was a man unable, from defective experience, to understand them. If any man had sounded the depths of the soul’s ‘dim and perilous way,’ it was he. Nay, it is for him to question their experience. ‘Inquire,’ he says to Melanchthon, ‘if they know aught of those spiritual distresses, those divine births, and deaths, and sorrows, as of hell.’[206]
Luther receives day by day more alarming intelligence. He fears the spread of false doctrine—insurrection in the name of reform. He is anxious lest the elector should persecute the new lights—a step which the fat, amiable, children-with-sugar-plums-feeding Frederick, was not very likely to take. He forms the heroic resolve of quitting his refuge, and suddenly reappears in Wittenberg. He preaches sermons marvellous for moderation and wisdom—sermons which accomplish what is so hard, the calming of heated passion, the reconciliation of adversaries. At his voice Violence and Tumult slink away—their hounds still in the leash; and Charity descends, waving her wand of peace, and shedding the light of her heavenly smile on every face. So triumphs Religion over Fanaticism.
Finally, Luther was called on to hold a discussion with two of the prophets, Stübner, and one Cellarius, a schoolmaster. The latter, when called upon by Luther to substantiate his positions from the Scripture, stamps, strikes the table with his fist, and declares it an insult to speak so to a man of God. Luther, at last, seeing this man foaming, roaring, leaping about like one possessed, comes to believe that there is a spirit in these men—but an unclean one from beneath. He cries out finally, after his homely fashion, ‘I smack that spirit of yours upon the snout.’ Howls of indignation from the Zwickauer side—universal confusion—dissolution of assembly. The prophets after this find themselves moved to quit Wittenberg without delay—their occupation gone. Let prosaic or sceptical folk regard this discussion as they may, to those who look beneath the surface, it is manifest that there really was a conflict of spirits going on then and there—the unclean spirit of Arrogance and Misrule quailing before that of Truth and Soberness.[207]
Carlstadt and his allies of Zwickau exhibit mysticism rampant, making reformation look questionable. A very fair representative of the other class of mystic is found in Sebastian Frank. This man, born at the close of the fifteenth century, seems to have lived a wandering life in different parts of Germany (often brought into trouble by his doctrines, probably) for some forty or fifty years. He was early enamoured of the German Theology, the writings of Tauler, above all, of Eckart’s speculations. The leading principles contained in the books he regarded with such veneration, he elaborated into a system of his own. Starting with the doctrine of the Theologia Germanica, that God is the substans of all things, he pushes it to the verge of a dreamy pantheism—nay, even beyond that uncertain frontier. He conceives of a kind of divine life-process (Lebens-prozess) through which the universe has to pass. This process, like the Hegelian, is threefold. First, the divine substance, the abstract unity which produces all existence. Second, said substance appearing as an opposite to itself—making itself object. Third, the absorption of this opposition and antithesis—the consummate realization whereof takes place in the consciousness of man when restored to the supreme unity and rendered in a sense divine. The fall of man is, in his system, a fall from the Divinity within him—that Reason which is the Holy Ghost, in which the Divine Being is supposed first to acquire will and self-consciousness. Christ is, with him, the divine element in man. The work of the historic Saviour is to make us conscious of the ideal and inward, and we thus arrive at the consciousness of that fundamental divineness in us which knows and is one with the Supreme by identity of nature.[208] Such doctrine is a relapse upon Eckart, and also an anticipation of modern German speculation.
Yet, shall we say on this account that Sebastian Frank was before his age or behind it? The latter unquestionably. He stood up in defence of obsolescent error against a truth that was blessing mankind. He must stand condemned, on the sole ground of judgment we modern judges care to take, as one of the obstructives of his day who put forth what strength he had to roll back the climbing wheel of truth. We pardon Tauler’s allegorical interpretations—those freaks of fancy, so subtile, so inexhaustible, so curiously irrelevant in one sense, yet so sagaciously brought home in another—we assent to Melanchthon’s verdict, who calls him the German Origen; but we remember that every one in his times interpreted the Bible in that arbitrary style. The Reformers, aided by the revival of letters, were successful in introducing those principles of interpretation with which we are ourselves familiar. But for this more correct method of exegesis, the benign influence of the Scriptures themselves had been all but nullified; for any one might have found in them what he would. Yet against this good thing, second only to the Word itself, Sebastian Frank stands up to fight in defence of arbitrary fancy and of lifeless pantheistic theory with such strength as he may. So has mysticism, once so eager to press on, grown childishly conservative, and is cast out straightway. Luther said he had written nothing against Frank, he despised him so thoroughly. ‘Unless my scent deceive me,’ says the reformer, ‘the man is an enthusiast or spiritualist (Geisterer), for whom nothing will do but spirit! spirit!—and not a word of Scripture, sacrament, or ministry.’
So Frank, contending for the painted dreams of night against the realities of day—for fantasy against soberness—and falling, necessarily, in the fight, has been curtained over in his sleep by the profoundest darkness. Scarcely does any one care to rescue from their oblivion even the names of his many books. What is his Golden Ark, or Seven Sealed Book, or collection of most extravagant interpretations, called Paradoxa, to any human creature?
For a Chronicle he left behind, the historian has sometimes to thank him. He had a near-sighted mind. Action immediately about him he could limn truly. But he had not the comprehensiveness to see whither the age was tending.
Willoughby. How admirable is that reply of Luther’s;—an unanswerable rebuke of that presumptuous mysticism which would boastfully tear aside the veil and dare a converse face to face with God. Semele perishes. That the fanatic survives is proof that he has but embraced a cloud.
Atherton. A rebuke, rather, of that folly, in all its forms, which imagines itself the subject of a special revelation that is no fearful searching of the soul, but merely a flattering reflection of its own wishes.
Gower. And what can most men make of that milder form of the same ambition—I mean the exhortation to escape all image and figure? How else can we grasp spiritual realities? The figurative language in which religious truth is conveyed to us seems to me to resemble that delicate membrane gummed to the back of the charred papyrus-roll, which otherwise would crumble to pieces in unwinding. The fragile film alone would drop to dust, but by this means it coheres, and may be unfolded for inspection.
Willoughby. And when a scripture figure is pressed too far (the besetting sin of systematising divines), it is as though your gold-beater’s skin, or whatever it be, had been previously written on, and the characters mistaken for those of the roll to which it was merely the support and lining.
Gower. I can readily conceive how provoking a man like Sebastian Frank must have been to Luther, with his doctrines of passivity and apathy, his holy contempt for rule, for rationality, or practicability, and his idle chaotic system-spinning, when every hand was wanted for the goodly cause of Reform.
Atherton. Then there was Schwenkfeld, too, who went off from Luther as pietist in one direction, while Frank departed as pantheist in the other.
Gower. A well-meaning man, though; a kind of sixteenth-century Quaker, was he not?
Atherton. Yes. Compound a Quaker, a Plymouth Brother, and an Antipædo Baptist, and the result is something like a Schwenkfeldian.
Willoughby. For my enquiries concerning Jacob Behmen, I find that the most important of the Lutheran mystics was a quiet man of few words, pastor at Tschopau during the latter half of the sixteenth century, by name Valentine Weigel.
Gower. You will give us more information about him when you read your essay on Jacob Behmen. For the present I confess myself tired of these minor mystics.
Willoughby. I shall have to do with him only in as far as he was a forerunner of Jacob. Weigel’s treatises were published posthumously, and a very pretty quarrel there was over his grave. He bases his theology on the Theologia Germanica, adds a modification of Sebastian Frank, and introduces the theosophy of Paracelsus. In this way he brings us near to Behmen, who united in himself the two species of mysticism—the theopathetic, represented by Schwenkfeld, on the one side, and the theosophic, by Paracelsus, on the other.
Atherton. As Lutheranism grew more cold and rigid, mysticism found more ground of justification, and its genial reaction rendered service to the Church once more.
Willoughby. I think the sword of the Thirty Years’ War may be said to have cleared legitimate space for it. In that necessary strife for opinion the inward life was sorely perilled. It was inevitable, I suppose, that multitudes should at least have sought, not only spirituality in mysticism and purity in separation, but wisdom in the stars, wealth in alchemy, and the communion of saints in secret societies.
Note to page 46.
Luther writes:—Jam vero privatum spiritum explores etiam, quæras, num experti sint spirituales illas angustias et nativitates divinas, mortes, infernosque. Si audieris blanda, tranquilla, devota (ut vocant) et religiosa, etiamsi in tertium cœlum sese raptos dicant, non approbabis. Tenta ergo et ne Iesum quidem audias gloriosum, nisi videris prius crucifixum. A golden rule.—Luth. Epist. De Wette, No. 358. Jan. 13, 1522. The language he uses elsewhere concerning such fanatics is strong, but not stronger than the occasion demanded. It was indeed no time for compliment—for hesitant, yea-nay utterance upon the question. The freedom claimed by Carlstadt’s followers led straightway to a lawless pride, which was so much servitude to Satan—was the death-wound, not the crown, of spiritual life. It was from the fulness of his charity—not in lack of it—that Luther uttered his manly protest against that perilous lie. Michelet selects a passage which shows in a very instructive manner how the strong mind (in this quarrel, as in so many more) breaks in pieces, with a touch, the idols which seduce the weak. ‘If you ask Carlstadt’s people,’ says Luther, ‘how this sublime spirit is arrived at, they refer you, not to the Gospel, but to their reveries, to their vacuum. ‘Place thyself,’ say they, ‘in a state of void tedium as we do, and then thou wilt learn the same lesson; the celestial voice will be heard, and God will speak to thee in person.’ If you urge the matter further, and ask what this void tedium of theirs is, they know as much about it as Dr. Carlstadt does about Greek and Hebrew.... Do you not in all this recognize the Devil, the enemy of divine order? Do you not see him opening a huge mouth, and crying, ‘Spirit, spirit, spirit!’ and all the while he is crying this, destroying all the bridges, roads, ladders,—in a word, every possible way by which the spirit may penetrate into you; that is to say, the external order established by God in the holy baptism, in the signs and symbols, and in his own Word. They would have you learn to mount the clouds, to ride the wind; but they tell you neither how, nor when, nor where, nor what; all these things you must learn of yourself, as they do.’