After some two or three hours’ endurance of this combined spiritual and corporeal torture, the sisters would find her almost without pulsation, the bones of the arms standing out (las canillas muy abiertas), her hands stiff and extended: in every joint were the pains of dislocation: she was apparently at the point of death.[289]
This mysterious ‘pain’ is no new thing in the history of mysticism. It is one of the trials of mystical initiation. It is the depth essential to the superhuman height. With St. Theresa, the physical nature contributes towards it much more largely than usual; and in her map of the mystic’s progress it is located at a more advanced period of the journey. St. Francis of Assisi lay sick for two years under the preparatory miseries. Catharine of Siena bore five years of privation, and was tormented by devils beside. For five years, and yet again for more than three times five, Magdalena de Pazzi endured such ‘aridity,’ that she believed herself forsaken of God. Balthazar Alvarez suffered for sixteen years before he earned his extraordinary illumination.[290] Theresa, there can be little doubt, regarded her fainting-fits, hysteria, cramps, and nervous seizures, as divine visitations. In their action and reaction, body and soul were continually injuring each other. The excitement of hallucination would produce an attack of her disorder, and the disease again foster the hallucination. Servitude, whether of mind or body, introduces maladies unknown to freedom. Elephantiasis and leprosy—the scourge of modern Greece—were unknown to ancient Hellas. The cloister breeds a family of mental distempers, elsewhere unheard of.
The mystics generally, from Dionysius downward, inculcate earnest endeavours to denude the mind of images, to suspend its reflex or discursive operations. Theresa goes a step farther, and forbids her pupils to strive towards such a state. If such a favour is to be theirs, it will be wrought in them as by enchantment. Passivity here reaches its extreme. On this ground a charge of Quietism might have been brought against Theresa with more justice than against Fénélon, or even Molinos. The Guida Spirituale of Molinos was designed to assist the mystic in attaining that higher contemplation of God which rises above the separate consideration of particular attributes. This indistinct and dazzled apprehension of all the perfections together is the very characteristic of Theresa’s Prayer of Rapture. Molinos cites her very words. The introduction to his condemned manual contains some very strong expressions. But nothing of his own is so extravagant as the passages from Dionysius and Theresa.
Who then is the Quietist—Molinos or Theresa? Both write books to mark out the mystic’s pathway. Theresa adds the caution, ‘Sit still.’ Manifestly, then, the excess of passivity lies with her. The oars of Molinos are the sails of Theresa,—erected, like the broad paddles of the Indian, to catch the breeze, and urge onward the canoe without an effort.[291] But the followers of Molinos were found guilty of neglecting ceremonial gewgaws for devout abstraction,—of escaping those vexatious observances so harassing to patients and so lucrative to priests. So Rome condemned him, and not Theresa, as the Quietist heretic. For his head the thundercloud; for hers the halo.[292]
Here the reader may naturally ask, ‘How do these mystics reconcile such extremes of abstraction and such extremes of sensuousness? If the state above symbols and above reasoning—above all conscious mental operations, distinctions, or figures, be so desirable (as they all admit),—must not crucifixes, images, and pictures of saints, yea, the very conception of our Saviour’s humanity itself, be so many hindrances?’
To this Theresa would answer, ‘I thought so once. But I was happily led to see my error ere long. In the Prayer of Rapture, all recognition of Christ’s humanity—as, indeed, of everything else—is doubtless obliterated. But, then, we do not effect this. There is no effort on our part to remove from our minds the conception of Christ’s person. The universal nescience of Rapture is supernaturally wrought, without will of ours.’[293] John of the Cross, who carries his negative, imageless abstraction so far, is fain (as a good son of the Church) to insert a special chapter in commendation of images, pictures, and the sensuous aids to devotion generally. It was unfortunate for the flesh and blood of Molinos that he failed to do the same.[294]
In the seventeenth century the Quietists were accused of rejecting the idea of Christ’s humanity, as a corporeal image which would only mar their supersensuous contemplation of abstract deity. Bossuet attempted to fasten the charge on Fénélon: it was one of the hottest points of their controversy. Fénélon completely clears himself. From the evidence within my reach, I am disposed to acquit Molinos also.[295]
Theresa relates with peculiar pleasure those passages in the marvellous history of the soul in which surpassing heights of knowledge, or of virtue, are supposed to be realized, on the instant, without processes or media. No transition is too violent for her faith. She is impatient of all natural growth; will acknowledge no conditions of development. The sinner turns into a seraph in the twinkling of an eye. The splendid symmetry of all the Christian virtues can arise, like the palace of Aladdin, in a single night. In one particular kind of Rapture—the Flight of the Soul (Buelo del Espiritu), the soul is described by her as, in a manner, blown up. It is discharged heavenwards by a soundless but irresistible explosive force from beneath, swift as a bullet (con la presteza que sale la pelota de un arcabuz). Thus transported the spirit is taught without the medium of words, and understands mysteries which long years of search could not even have surmised.[296]
Visions are intellectual or representative. The former is a consciousness of spiritual proximity, indescribable, unaccompanied by any appearances. The representative or imaginative vision, presents some definite form or image.[297]
There is a kind of supernatural tuition, she tells us, in which the Lord suddenly places in the centre of the soul, what he wishes it to understand, without words or representation of any kind. This privilege Theresa compares very truly to an ability to read without having learnt letters, or to nutriment derived from food without eating it.[298] In other instances certain efficacious words (the ‘substantial words’ of John), are spoken divinely in the centre of the soul, and immediately produce there the actual effects proper to their significance.[299] If something is thus inwardly spoken about humility, for example, the subject of such words is that moment completely humble. So the soul is supplied with virtues as the tables volantes of Louis XV. with viands,—a spring is touched, and presto! the table sinks and re-appears—spread.
Note to page 168.
Theresa compares the four degrees of prayer to four ways of watering the soul-garden: the first, to drawing water out of a well; the second, to raising it by means of a rope with buckets (less laborious and more plentiful); the third, to the introduction of a rivulet; and the fourth, to a copious shower, whereby God Himself abundantly waters the garden, without any effort of ours.—Cap. xi. p. 67. The second degree is fully described in the fourteenth chapter of her life, and in the thirty-first of the Camino de Perfecion.
The difference between the first degree and the three others is simply that generic distinction between Meditation and Contemplation with which the earlier mystics have made us familiar. Theresa’s second, third, and fourth degrees of prayer are her more loose and practical arrangement of the species of contemplation. She identifies Mystical Theology with Prayer, employing the latter term in a very comprehensive sense. So also does St. Francis de Sales:—En somme, l’oraison et théologie mystique n’est autre chose qu’une conversation par laquelle l’âme s’entretient amoureusement avec Dieu de sa très-aimable bonté pour s’unir et joindre à icelle.—Traité de l’Amour de Dieu, livre vi. chap. i. He likens the soul in the prayer of Quiet when the will is engaged but the other powers free, to an infant which can see and hear and move its arms, while adhering to the breast. The babe which removes its little mouth from the bosom to see where its feet are, resembles those who are distracted in the prayer of Quiet by self-consciousness, and disturb their repose by curiosity as to what the mind is doing the while.—Ibid. chap. x.
Note to page 170.
Vida, capp. xviii. xix.:—Estandoassi el alma buscando a Dios, siente con un deleyte grandissimo y suave casi desfallecerse toda con una manera de desmayo, que le va faltando el huelgo, y todas las fuerças corporales, demanera que sino es con mucha pena, no puede aun menear las manos; los ojos se le cierran sin querer, los cerrar, y si los tiene abiertos no vee casi nada; ni si lee, acierta a dezir letra ni casi atina a conocerla bien; vee que ay letra, mas como el entendimiento no ayuda, no sabe leer, aunque quiera. Oye, mas no entiende lo que oye. Assi que de los sentidos no se aprovecha nada, sino es para no la acabar de dexar a su plazer, y assi antes la dañan. Hablar, es por de mas, que no atina a formar palabra; ni ay fuerça ya que atinasse, para poderla pronunciar: porque toda la fuerça exterior se pierde, y se aumenta en las del alma, para mejor poder gozar de su gloria. El deleyte exterior que se siente es grande, y muy conocido.—P. 118.
As to the elevation of the body in the air during rapture, it is common enough in the annals of Romish saintship, and a goodly page might be filled with the mere names of the worthies who are represented as overcoming not only sin, but gravitation. Maria d’Agreda was seen, times without number, poised on nothing in a recumbent attitude, in an equilibrium so delicate, that by blowing, even at a distance, she was made to waft this way or that, like a feather. Dominic of Jesu Maria had the honour of being blown about, while in this soap-bubble condition, by the heretic-slaying breath of Philip II. Görres furnishes a long list of examples, and believes them all; Die Christliche Mystik, Buch. v. iv. § 2.
It is curious to see how Francis de Sales, who follows Theresa somewhat closely in his chapter on the Prayer of Quietude, grows wisely cautious as he treats of Rapture, softens down extravagance, avoids theurgy, and keeps to piety, and admirably substitutes practical devotion for the unintelligibility and the materialism of the Spanish saint. He enumerates three kinds of Rapture or ecstasy (ravissement and extase are identical),—that of the intellect, that of the affection, and that of action,—manifested, respectively, by glory, by fervour, and by deed,—realized by admiration, by devotion, and by operation. On the last he dwells most fully; on that he concentrates all his exhortations. To live without profaneness, he says, without falsehood, without robbery, to honour parents, to obey law, to reverence God,—this is to live according to the natural reason of man. But to embrace poverty, to hail reproach and persecution as blessings, and martyrdom as joy, by unceasing self-renunciation, to forsake the world, surmount its opinion, deny its rule,—this is to live, not humanly, but superhumanly;—to live out of ourselves and above ourselves, by supernatural energy,—this is to enjoy the noblest ecstasy, not of a moment, but of a life-time. Many saints have died without enjoying ecstatic trance—all have lived the ecstatic life.—Traité de l’Amour de Dieu, livre vii. chapp. iii. and vii.
Note to page 170.
This pain is described by Theresa in the twentieth chapter of the Life, and in the Castillo Interior, Morada vi. capp. 1 and 2. In the former place she gives a kind of rationale thereof, in the following words:—Parece me que esta assi el alma, que ni del cielo le viene consuelo, ni esta en el; ni de la tierra le quiere, ni esta en ella; sino como crucificada entre el cielo y la tierra, padeciendo sin venirle socorro di ningun cabo. Porque el que le viene del cielo (que es como he dicho una noticia de Dios tan admirable, muy sobre todo lo que podemos dessear) es para mas tormento, porque acreciento el desseo de manera que a mi parecer la gran pena algunas vezes quita el sentido, sino que dura poco sin el. Parecen unos transitos de la muerte, salvo que trae consigo un tan contento este padecer, que no se yo a que lo comparar.—P. 135.
The Castillo Interior describes the mystic’s progress under the emblem of a Castle, divided into seven apartments; the inmost, where God resides, representing the centre of the soul (termed the apex by some; the Ground by others); and each of these successive abodes, from the outermost to the central, corresponding to the advancing stages of discipline and privilege through which the mystic passes. The liability to the pain in question supervenes at the sixth apartment, prior to the last and most glorious stage attainable on earth.
Victor Gelenius of Treves (writing 1646) has seven degrees, and places this stage of misery and privation in the fourth, as the transition between the human and superhuman kinds of devotion. It is the painful weaning-time, wherein the soul passes (in an agony of strange bewilderment) from a religion which employs the faculties we possess, to that which is operated in us in a manner altogether incomprehensible and divine. Whatever division be adopted, such alone is the legitimate locality for this portion of the mystical experience. Here Gelenius and John of the Cross are perfectly agreed, though their graduation and nomenclature are different.
Note to page 171.
This pain is the ‘pressura interna’ of Tauler: the ‘horribile et indicibile tormentum’ of Catharine of Genoa; the ‘purgatory’ of Thomas à Jesu; the ‘languor infernalis’ of Harphius; the ‘terrible martyrium’ of Maria Vela, the Cistercian; the ‘divisio naturæ ac spiritus’ of Barbanson; the ‘privation worse than hell’ of Angela de Foligni. See Card. Bona’s Via Compendii ad Deum, cap. 10. Angelæ de Fulginio Visiones, cap. xix.
These sufferings are attributed by the mystics to the surpassing nature of the truths manifested to our finite faculties (as the sun-glare pains the eye),—to the anguish involved in the surrender of every ordinary religious support or enjoyment, when the soul, suspended (as Theresa describes it) between heaven and earth, can derive solace from neither,—to the intensity of the aspirations awakened, rendering those limitations of our condition here which detain us from God an intolerable oppression,—and to the despair by which the soul is tried, being left to believe herself forsaken by the God she loves.
On this subject John of the Cross and Theresa are most extravagant. In contrast with their folly stands the good sense of Fénélon. The middle ground is occupied by the comparative moderation of Francis de Sales. The privation described by John is preparatory to a state of complete de-humanization, in which we shall know, feel, do, nothing in the mortal manner, as our whole nature suffers a divine transformation. The privation of which Fénélon speaks is simply a refining process, to purify our love more thoroughly from self. The causes and the various species of this pain are detailed at length by John of the Cross in the Nuit Obscure, liv. ii. chapp. v. vi. vii.
De Sales says speaking of the ‘blessure d’amour:‘—Mais, Theotrine, parlant de l’amour sacré, il y a en la practique d’iceluy une sorte de blesseure que Dieu luy-meme faict quelquesfois pour sa souveraine bonté, comme la pressant et solicitant de l’aymer; et lors elle s’eslance de force comme pour voler plus haut vers son divin object; mais demeurant courte parce qu’elle ne peut pas tant aymer comme elle desire, o Dieu! elle sent une douleur qui n’a point d’esgale.... La voilà donc rudement tourmentée entre la violence de ses eslans et celle de son impuissance.—Traité de l’Amour de Dieu, liv. vi. ch. xiii.
Theresa declares that the intensity of this delicious agony is such as frequently to endanger life.—Castillo Int. vi. c. xi.
Francis de Sales, in whom the sufferings in question assume a highly sentimental character, adduces instances in which they proved fatal. The soul, springing forward to obey the attraction of the Well-beloved, sooner than be detained by the body amid the miseries of this life, tears herself away, abandons it, and mounts alone, like a lovely little dove, to the bosom of her celestial spouse. St. Theresa herself, he says, made it known, after her departure, that she died of an impetuous assault of love, too violent for nature to sustain.—Traité de l’Amour de Dieu, liv. vii. chapp x.-xii.
We may contrast the obscure and feverish utterances of Theresa, and the amorous phraseology of De Sales, on this topic, with the lucid and cautious language of Fénélon.
La sainte indifférence, qui n’est jamais que le désintéressement de l’amour, devient dans les plus extrêmes épreuves ce que les saints mystiques ont nommé abandon, c’est-à-dire, que l’âme désintéressée s’abandonne totalement et sans réserve à Dieu pour tout ce qui regarde son intérêt propre; mais elle ne renonce jamais ni à aucune des choses qui intéressent la gloire et le bon plaisir du bien-aimé.... Cette abnégation de nous-mêmes n’est que pour l’intérêt propre, et ne doit jamais empêcher l’amour désintéressé que nous nous devons à nous-mêmes comme au prochain, pour l’amour de Dieu. Les épreuves extrêmes où cet abandon doit être exercé sont les tentations par lesquelles Dieu jaloux veut purifier l’amour, en ne lui faisant voir aucune ressource ni aucune espérance pour son intérêt même éternel. Ces épreuves sont représentées par un très-grand nombre des saints comme un purgatoire terrible, qui peut exempter du purgatoire de l’autre vie les âmes qui le souffrent avec une entière fidélité.... Ces épreuves ne sont que pour un temps. Plus les âmes y sont fidèles à la grâce pour se laisser purifier de tout intérêt propre par l’amour jaloux, plus ces épreuves sont courtes. C’est d’ordinaire la résistance secrète des âmes à la grâce sous des beaux prétextes, c’est leur effort intéressé et empressé pour retenir les appuis sensibles dont Dieu veut les priver, qui rend leurs épreuves si longues et si douloureuses: car Dieu ne fait point souffrir sa créature pour la faire souffrir sans fruit, ce n’est que pour la purifier et pour vaincre ses résistances.—Explic. des Maximes des Saints, Art. VIII.
Note to page 172.
See the passage already cited (page 166, note), where Theresa expressly forbids any attempt on our part to suspend the powers of the mind. Effort to produce inaction appears to her a contradiction in terms. Yet such effort Dionysius expressly enjoins; and, indeed, without it, how can the swarming words or images that float about the mind be excluded? The ‘phantasmata irruentia,’ to be barred out, are the images of sensible objects, according to the old theory of perception—the ‘imagines rerum sensibilium et corporearum.’ Bona expresses the spirit of the old Platonist mysticism in the Romish Church, when he says, ‘Hæc omnia abdicanda et extirpanda prorsus sunt, ut Deum inveniamus.’—Via Compendii ad Deum, p. 26. Theresa is quite agreed with all the mystics as to the previous heart-discipline, and the ascetic process essential to the higher forms of contemplation.
The mystics generally rank the ‘contemplatio caliginosa’ much above the ‘contemplatio pura:’ the more indistinct our apprehensions, the more divine. John of the Cross comes next, in this respect, after Dionysius. Molinos borrows his doctrine, that as the distance between the Infinite and all our sensuous images, conclusions, and finite conceptions must be infinite after all, such things embarrass rather than aid our contemplation. But even he does not soar into a darkness so absolute as that of Dionysius. He says expressly, in the introduction to his Spiritual Guide:—‘In answer to the objection that the will must be inactive where no clear conception is given to the understanding,—that a man cannot love what he can take no cognizance of, my reply is this: Although the understanding does not distinctively recognise certain images and conceptions, by a discursive act or mental conclusion, it apprehends, nevertheless, by a dim and comprehensive faith. And though this knowledge be very cloudy, vague, and general, yet it is far more clear and perfect than any sensuous or scientific apprehensions that man can devise in this life, since all corporeal images must be immeasurably remote from God.’ See Arnold’s Kirchen-und-Ketzergeschichte, th. III. ch. xvii., where the Introduction is inserted entire.
Theresa also admits that during the ecstatic pain the soul adores no particular attribute of God, but, as it were, all his perfections collectively. Bien entiende que no quiere sino a su Dios, mas no ama cosa particular del, sino todo junto lo quiere, y no sabe lo que quiere.—Vida, cap. xx. p. 135. But it is a sore trial to her when her fancy is limed, and the key to her chamber of vision, for a season, lost.
When we leave Dionysius and John, and come to the French mystics, how great the difference! The soul hangs no longer in a lightless void, trembles no more on the verge of swooning ecstacy. This ‘Visio caliginosa’ becomes, not merely a comprehensible thing, but so clarified, humanized, and we may say Christianized, as to come within the range of every devout consciousness. The ‘indistinct contemplation’ of St. Francis de Sales is a summary and comprehensive view of Divine truth or the Divine Nature,—simple, emotional, jubilant, as distinguished from the detailed and partial views of searching Meditation. As he fancifully expresses it, this simplicity of contemplation does not pluck the rose, the thyme, the jessamine, the orange-flower, inhaling the scent of each separately,—this the flower-gatherer Meditation does;—Contemplation rejoices in the fragrance distilled from them all. An example perfectly explains his meaning. O que bien-heureux sont ceux qui, après avoir discouru (the discursive acts above spoken of) sur la multitude des motifs qu’ils ont d’aymer Dieu, reduisans tous leurs regards en une seule veuë et toutes leurs pensées en une seule conclusion, arrestant leur esprit en l’unité de la contemplation, à l’exemple de S. Augustin ou de S. Bruno, prononçant secrettement en leur ame, par une admiration permanente, ces paroles amoureuses: O bonté! bonté! bonté! tousjours ancienne et tousjours nouvelle!—Traité de l’Amour de Dieu, liv. vi. chap. v.
Every religious man must remember times when he was the subject of some such emotion, when the imagination bodied forth no form, the reason performed no conscious process, but, after some train of thought, at the sight of some word, or while gazing on some scene of beauty, an old truth seemed to overwhelm him (as though never seen till then) with all its grandeur or endearment,—times when he felt the poverty of words, and when utterance, if left at all, could only come in the fervid, broken syllables of reiterated ejaculation. In such melting or such tumult of the soul, there is no mysticism. Even Deism, in a susceptible Rousseau, cannot escape this passion. He speaks of a bewildering ecstasy awakened by nature, which would overcome him with such force, that he could but repeat, in almost delirious transport, ‘O Great Being! O Great Being!’ Neither is it mystical to prefer the kindling masterful impulse of a faith which possesses us, rather than we it, to the frigid exactitude of lifeless prescription. The error of the mystics lay in the undue value they attached to such emotions, and their frequent endeavours to excite them for their own sake; in transferring what was peculiar to those seasons to the other provinces of life; and in the constant tendency of their religionism to underrate the balanced exercise of all our faculties, neglecting knowledge and action in a feverish craving for evanescent fervours.
Fénélon, speaking of the negative character of pure and direct contemplation, teaches a doctrine widely different from that of Dionysius, even while referring with reverence to his name. He is careful to state that the attributes of God do not, at such times, cease to be present to the mind, though no sensible image be there, no discursive act performed; that the essence, without the attributes, would be the essence no longer; that, in the highest contemplation, the truths of revelation do not cease to be admissible to the mind; that the humanity of Christ, and all his mysteries, may then be distinctly present,—seen simply, lovingly, as faith presents them, only that there is no systematic effort to impress the several details on the imagination, or to draw conclusions from them.—Explic. des Maximes des Saints, art. xxvii.
Note to page 173.
See the clear and guarded language of the twenty-eighth article in the Maximes des Saints, and the Troisième Lettre en réponse à divers Ecrits, Seconde Partie.
The language of Molinos on this point is as follows:—‘Although the humanity of Christ is the most perfect and most holy mean of access to God, the highest mean of our salvation, yea the channel through which alone we receive every blessing for which we hope, yet is the humanity not the supreme good, for that consists in the contemplation of God. But as Jesus Christ is what he is more through his divine nature than his human, so that man contemplates Christ continually and thinks of Him, who thinks on God, and hath regard constantly to Him. And this is the case more especially with the contemplative man, who possesses a faith more purified, clear, and experimental.’—Arnold, loc. cit., p. 183.
Such a passage proves merely thus much, that Molinos shared in the general tendency of the authorised mediæval mysticism,—a tendency leading the contemplatist to see Christ in God, rather than God in Christ, and placing him in danger of resolving Redemption into self-loss in the abstract Godhead. Similar expressions are frequent in Tauler, in Ruysbroek, in Suso, in the German theology. Now we know by what these same men say at other times, that it was not their intention to disparage or discard the humanity of Christ. Similar allowance must be made for Molinos—quite as far from such practical Docetism as they were. The words just quoted should be compared with the title of the sixteenth chapter in his first book: ‘How in the inward recollection, or drawing in of our powers, we may enter into the internal Ground, through the most holy Humanity of Jesus Christ.’ A gross and materialised apprehension of the bodily sufferings of the Saviour had become general in the Romish Church. They were dramatized in imagination and in fact, into a harrowing spectacle of physical anguish. The end was lost sight of in the means. To such sensible representations—such excesses of over-wrought sentiment, Molinos was doubtless unfriendly; and so, also, the more refined and elevated mysticism of that communion has generally been. Molinos is nearer to the spiritual Tauler than to the sensuous Theresa. Where he speaks of passivity and acquiescence in desertion (§ 5), of contemplation (§§ 17, 18), of self-abandonment (§ 30), of the divine vocation and elevation necessary to the attainment of the contemplative heights, where he says that we must not, without the direction of an experienced adviser, seek to raise ourselves from one stage to a higher (§ 24), he does but repeat what the most orthodox mystics had said before him. Holy indifference to spiritual enjoyments and manifestations, and complete passivity, are not more earnestly enjoined by John of the Cross than by Molinos. Yet one main charge against the Quietists was, that they made mysticism a human method, and proposed to raise to mystical perfection all who were ready to go through their process. The accusations brought against Quietism by Berthier in his Discours sur le Non-Quiétisme de S. Theresa, and in his tenth letter on the works of John of the Cross, are self-destructive. In one place he finds the Quietists guilty of making ‘their pretended spiritual man’ an insensible kind of being, who remains always apathetic—dans une inaltération et une inaction entiere en la présence de Dieu. In another, he represents them as offering to teach contemplation to all (irrespective of the director’s consent, he fears) by reducing it to a method. Either way the unhappy Quietists cannot escape: they must always do too much or too little. It was against the artificial methods of devotion, so much in vogue, that Molinos protested, when he called his readers away from the puerile manuals and bead-counting of the day, to direct and solitary communion with God. Several of the articles of condemnation are such as would have been drawn out against a man suspected of Protestantism. On the question of the humanity of Christ, the proposition professedly deduced from the doctrines of Molinos, and censured accordingly, runs thus—‘We must do no good works of our own motion, and render no homage to Our Lady, the Saints, or Christ’s humanity,’ &c.—Art. xxxv.
CHAPTER III.
And those that endeavour after so still, so silent, and demure condition of minde, that they would have the sense of nothing there but peace and rest, striving to make their whole nature desolate of all Animal Figurations whatsoever, what do they effect but a clear Day, shining upon a barren Heath, that feeds neither Cow nor Horse,—neither Sheep nor Shepherd is to be seen there, but only a waste, silent Solitude, and one uniform parchednesse and vacuity. And yet while a man fancies himself thus wholly divine, he is not aware how he is even then held down by his Animal Nature; and that it is nothing but the stillnesse and fixednesse of Melancholy that thus abuses him, instead of the true divine Principle.—Henry More.
II. St. John of the Cross.
Little John of the Cross—a hero, like Tydeus, small in body, but great in soul—was in the prime of life when Theresa was growing old. Early distinguished by surpassing austerity and zeal, he was selected by the Saint as her coadjutor in the great work of Carmelite reform. The task was no easy one, though sanctioned by the highest spiritual authority. This troculus service—the picking the teeth of the gorged ecclesiastical crocodile—has always been a somewhat delicate and dangerous affair. The great jaws closed with a horrible crash one day on poor Madame Guyon, as she was working away with her solitary bill and the best intentions. On John, too, busy at a little scavenger’s work, those jaws had once almost met, and at least knocked him fluttering into a hollow tooth,—in other words, a dark and noisome dungeon at Toledo. But what between St. Theresa’s intercession and that of the Mother of God, he is let fly again. Vicar-provincial of Andalusia, he plies his task anew, with admirable intrepidity and self-devotion; courts hatred and opprobrium on every side; flourishes his whip; overturns secularities; and mouses for flaws of regulation. He succeeds in excavating in every direction spiritual catacombs and mummy-caves, where, swathed up in long rows, the religious dumb and withered line the cloister-walls—motionless—satisfactorily dead. Next to Ignatius Loyola, he was, perhaps, the greatest soul-sexton that ever handled shovel.
John of the Cross obtained this distinctive name through his love of crosses. He was consumed by an insatiable love of suffering. It was his prayer that not a day of his life might pass in which he did not suffer something. Again and again does he exhort the monk, saying—‘Whatsoever you find pleasant to soul or body, abandon; whatsoever is painful, embrace it.’ ‘Take pains,’ he says, ‘to give your name an ill savour; burrow deep and deeper under heaped obloquy, and you are safe.’[300] Thus is the odour of sanctity best secured; and the disguised saint resembles that eastern prince who concealed himself from his pursuers beneath a heap of onions, lest the fragrance of his perfumes should betray him. The man who is truly dead and self-abandoned will not only thus disguise his virtues before others; he will be unconscious of them himself. The whole life of John was an attempt towards a practical fulfilment of such precepts. The party of his enemies gained the upper hand in the chapter, and the evening of his days was clouded by the disgrace of which he was covetous. He passed existence in violent extremes, now gazing with delight on some celestial mirage, swimming in seas of glory that waft him to the steps of the burning throne,—and anon hurled down into the abyss, while vampyre wings of fiends ‘darken his fall, with victory,’ and his heart itself is a seething hell-cauldron, wherein demon talons are the raking fleshhooks.
The piety of John is altogether of the Romanist type. In his doctrine of humility, truth is not to be considered, but expediency,—that is, an edifying display of self-vilification. On his own principles, John ought to have persuaded himself, and assured others, that he was a self-indulgent, pleasure-loving drone,—though perfectly aware of the contrary. St. Paul is content to bid men think of themselves not more highly than they ought to think. John of the Cross is not satisfied unless they think worse than they ought,—unless they think untruly, and labour to put a pious fraud upon themselves. John disturbs the equilibrium of Quietism. There is quite as much self-will in going out of the way of a blessing to seek a misery, as in avoiding a duty for the sake of ease. Many men will readily endure a score of mortifications of their own choosing, who would find it hard to display tolerable patience under a single infliction from a source beyond their control. This extreme of morbid asceticism is more easy, because more brilliant in its little world, than the lowly fortitude of ordinary Christian life. How many women, at this hour, in poverty, in pain, in sorrow of heart, are far surpassing St. Theresa in their self-sacrifice and patience, unseen and unpraised of men.
Banished to the little Convent of Pegnuela, he completed among the crags of the Sierra Morena his great mystical treatises, The Obscure Night, and The Ascent of Carmel. He follows in the steps of the Pseudo-Dionysius. He describes the successive denudations of the soul as it passes,—the shadow of itself, into the infinite shade of the Divine Dark.[301] We have seen how instantaneously Theresa could attain at times this oblivious self-reduction. Her soul falls prostrate, with the ordinary attire of faculties, but rises, stripped of all in a moment. Not more dexterously was the fallen Andrew Fairservice stripped in a twinkling by the Highlanders, so that he who tumbled down a well-clothed, decent serving-man, stood up ‘a forked, uncased, bald-pated, beggarly-looking scarecrow.’ John of the Cross describes with almost scientific method the process of spiritual unclothing,—preaches a series of sermons on the successive removal of each integument,—and perorates on the blessed reduction of the soul to a supernatural state of nature.
The ‘Obscure Night,’ would be the most fitting title for both treatises; for the night of mysticism is their sole subject, and Mount Carmel does but figure as a frontispiece, in compliment to the Order probably. Sundry verses head the works as texts; the first of these, with its exposition, will sufficiently indicate the character of the whole.
‘’Twas in a darksome night, inflamed with restless love, O fortune full of bliss, I ventured forth unmarked, what time my house was still.’
The Saint interprets his stanza, in substance, as follows:—
Here the soul says, ‘I went out unhindered by sensuality or the devil. I went out, that is, of myself—out from my own poor and feeble manner of knowing, loving, and tasting God. I went out, unassisted by any action of my own powers; while my understanding was wrapped in darkness; while will and memory were overwhelmed by affliction. I went out, abandoning myself in pure faith to darkness—that is, to the night of my spirit and my natural powers.
‘This going forth has crowned me with happiness; for I have been straightway elevated to operations entirely divine—to most familiar intercourses with God; in other words, my understanding has passed from a human to a divine condition. Uniting myself to God by this purgation, my knowledge is no longer weak and limited as formerly; but I know by the divine wisdom, to which I am conjoined.
‘My will also has gone out of itself, and become in a sort divine; for being united to the Divine Love, it does not love any longer by its own former powers, but by the powers of the Divine Spirit. Thus, its acts of love towards the Creator are rendered no more in a human manner.
‘My memory is filled with images of heavenly glory. All my powers, in short, and all my affections, are renovated by the Night of the spirit and the despoliation of the old man, in such sort that their very nature seems changed, and they can relish only spiritual and divine delights.’[302]
Thus, the soul is to resemble the wondrous eastern tree of the old travellers, which by daylight stands leafless and flowerless, but after sundown puts forth countless white blossoms, shining in the darkness like the drops of a silver fountain; and when the sun is risen again, sheds all its beauty, and stands bare and barren as before. When all our natural powers, slain and buried, lie dead under the midnight;—then arise, instead of them, certain divine substitutes, which will, and love, and know, as the Infinite does, not as men.
The First Night is that of the Sense: the long process of vigil and austerity which, with the caduceus of asceticism, tames and lulls to slumber the Argus-eyed monster of the flesh.[303] A painful work, but not without meet recompence. New pleasures, even of the sense, are supernaturally vouchsafed to the steadfast votary. The wearied eye and the unvisited ear are regaled by glorious visions and seraphic melody; yea, the parched tongue, and haggard, bleeding flesh, are made to know delights of taste and touch, that melt with most delicious pleasure through the frame, and beggar with their transport all the joys of banquets or of love.
But rejoice not, O mystic! for even now, lest thou shouldst grow greedy of these high luxuries, there strides towards thee the darkness of—
The Second Night—the Night of the Spirit. Here all caresses are withdrawn. The deserted soul cannot think, or pray, or praise, as of old. The great pains are to begin. Pitiless purgation and privation absolute are about to make the second night not night only, but midnight. You seem to descend, God-abandoned, alive into hell. Make no resistance: utter no cry for comfort. Solace is a Tantalus’ bough, which will wave itself away as you stretch forth your hand. Acquiesce in all: be in your desertion as absolutely passive as in your rapture. So, from the bright glassy edge and summit of this awful fall, you shoot down helpless, blind, and dizzy,—down through the surging cataract, among the giant vapour columns, amid the eternal roar, to awake at the boiling foot, and find that you yet live, in your tossing shallop,—or rather, you no longer, for you yourself are dead—so much mere ballast in the bottom of the boat: a divine and winged Radiance has taken your place, who animates rather than steers, guiding, in your stead, by mysterious impulse.[304]
To the higher faculty, then, there are already visible, after the first horrors, breaking gleams of a super-celestial dawn. Visions are seen; forms of glory come and go: gifts of subtlest discernment are vouchsafed: substantial words are spoken within, which make you, in that moment, all they mean.[305]
But all such particular and special manifestations you are peremptorily to reject, come they from God or come they from the Devil;—not even to reflect upon and recall them afterwards, lest grievous harm ensue. For the philosophy of John is summary. Two ideas alone have room there—All and Nothing. Whatsoever is created is finite: whether actual or ideal, it bears no proportion to the All,—it cannot therefore be helpful to any on their way to the All. The Something is no link between the opposites of All and Nothing. Therefore, if any view of a particular divine perfection, any conception of Deity, or image of saint or angel, be even supernaturally presented to the mind, reject it. You are aiming at the highest—at loss in the All. Everything definite and particular—all finite apprehension, must be so much negation of the Infinite,—must limit that All. You should pass beyond such things to blend immediately with the Universal,—to attain that view of God which is above means—is unconditioned—is, from its illimitable vastness, an anguish of bliss,—a glory which produces the effect of darkness.[306]
But why, it will be asked, does God grant these favours of vision to the saints at all, if it is their duty to disregard them?
John answers, ‘Because some transition stage is unavoidable. But the higher you attain, the less of such manifestation will you meet with. This portion of your progress is a grand stair-case hung with pictures;—hurry up the steps, that you may enter the darkened chamber above, where divine ignorance and total darkness shall make you blest. If in doubt about a vision, there is always your confessor, to whom, if you have not constant resort, woe be to you! But you are safe, at any rate, in not receiving and cherishing such inferior bestowments. To reject them will be no sin—no loss. For the beneficial effects they are designed to produce will be wrought by God internally, if you only abide passive, and refuse to exert about such signs those lower faculties which can only hinder your advance.’[307]
Such a reply is but a fence of words against a serious difficulty. He should be the last to talk of necessary intermediate steps who proclaims the rejection of everything mediate,—who will have the mystic be reduced to the Nothing and rapt to the All, by a single entrancing touch.[308]
But much higher than any visions of the picture-gallery are certain manifestations (sometimes granted in this state) of divine truth in its absolute nakedness. These are glimpses of the veritas essentialis nude in se ipsa, beyond all men, and angels, and heavenly splendours, which Tauler bids the mystic long for. John forbids us to seek them—for effort would unseal our slumber. They come altogether without consent of ours. Though we are not to hold ourselves so negative towards them as we should towards more palpable and inferior favours.
The Quietists were charged with excluding all human co-operation in the mystical progress. John must plead guilty on this count. His writings abound with reiterated declarations that the soul does absolutely nothing in its night,—with prohibitions against seeking any supernatural favour or manifestation whatever.[309]
Urganda the fairy could find no way of raising the paladins she loved above the common lot of mortals, save that of throwing them into an enchanted sleep. So Galaor, Amadis, and Esplandian, sink into the image of death beneath her kindly wand. Such is the device of John—and so does he lull and ward venturous Understanding, learned Memory, and fiery Will. Faith is the night which extinguishes Understanding; Hope, Memory; and Love, Will. The very desire after supernatural bestowments, (though for no other purpose has everything natural been doomed to die) would be a stirring in the torpor—a restless, not a perfect sleep. The serenest Quiet may be ruffled by no such wish.
This, therefore, is John’s fundamental principle. All faculties and operations not beyond the limits of our nature must cease, that we may have no natural knowledge, no natural affection; but find, magically substituted, divine apprehensions and divine sentiments quite foreign to ourselves. Then, still farther, we are desired to ignore even supernatural manifestations, if they represent to us anything whatever; that we may rise, or sink (it is the same), to that swooning gaze on the Infinite Ineffable, wherein our dissolving nature sees, hears, knows, wills, remembers nothing.[310]
The Third Night—that of the Memory and the Will.[311] Here, not only do all the ‘trivial fond records’ that may have been inscribed upon remembrance vanish utterly, but every trace of the divinest tokens and most devout experience. The soul sinks into profound oblivion. The flight of time is unmarked, bodily pain unfelt, and the place of Memory entirely emptied of its stored ‘species and cognitions,’—of everything particular and distinct. The patient forgets to eat and drink,—knows not whether he has done or not done, said or not said, heard or not heard this or that.
‘Strange exaltation this,’ cries the objector, ‘which imbrutes and makes a blank of man—sinks him below idiotic ignorance of truth and virtue!’
John is ready with his answer. This torpor, he replies, is but transitory. The perfect mystic, the adept established in union, has ceased to suffer this oblivion. Passing through it, he acquires a new and divine facility for every duty proper to his station. He is in the supernatural state, and his powers have so passed into God that the Divine Spirit makes them operate divinely,—all they do is divine. The Spirit makes such a man constantly ignorant of what he ought to be ignorant; makes him remember what he ought to remember; and love what is to be loved—God only. Transformed in God, these powers are human no more.[312]
In the same way the night of will extinguishes joy,—joy in sensible good, in moral excellence, in supernatural gifts, that the soul may soar to a delight above delight, be suspended as in a limitless expanse of calm, far beyond that lower meteoric sky which is figured over with wonders and with signs.
Thus John’s desired contemplatio infusa is always, at the same time, a contemplatio confusa.
At his culminating point the mystic is concealed as ‘on the secret top of Horeb;’ he ascends by a hidden scale, cloaked with darkness (por la secreta escala—a escuras y enzelada).
Mark the advantage of this enclouded state. The Devil, it is said, can only get at what is passing in our mind by observing the operations of the mental powers. If, therefore, these are inactive and absorbed, and a divine communication goes on, in which they have no part whatever, Satan is baffled. These highest manifestations, absolutely pure, nude, and immediate he cannot counterfeit or hinder. The soul is then blissfully incognito and anonymous. This secrecy preserves the mystic from malign arts, as the concealment of their real names was thought the safeguard of ancient cities, since hostile sooth-sayers, ignorant of the true name to conjure by, could not then entice away their tutelary gods.[313]
Such then is the teaching of the Mount Carmel and the Obscure Night, starred with numerous most irrelevant quotations from the psalms and the prophecies, as though David and Isaiah were Quietists, and spent their days in trying to benumb imagination, banish the sensuous images which made them poets, and tone down all distinct ideas to a lustreless, formless neutral tint. The Spanish painters have not more anachronisms than the Spanish mystics; and I think of Murillo’s ‘Moses striking the Rock,’ where Andalusian costumes make gay the desert, Andalusian faces stoop to drink, and Andalusian crockery is held out to catch the dashing streams.
In John of the Cross we behold the final masterpiece of Romanist mysticism, and the practice (if here the term be applicable) of supernatural theopathy is complete. The Art of Sinking in Religion—the divinity of diving, could go no deeper. The natives of South America say that the lobo or seal has to swallow great stones when he wishes to sink to the river-bed—so little natural facility has he that way. We sinners, too, have no native alacrity for the mystical descent: our gravitation does not tend towards that depth of nothing; and huge and hard are the stones (not bread) with which this mystagogue would lade us to bring us down. And when, in imagination at least, at the bottom, we are smothered in an obscure night of mud. What a granite boulder is this to swallow,—to be told that the faintest film of attachment that links you with any human being or created thing will frustrate all your aim, and be stout as a cable to hold back your soul,—that with all your mind, and soul, and strength, you must seek out and adore the Uncomfortable, for its own sake—that, drowned and dead, you must lie far down, hidden, not from the pleasant sunshine only, but from all sweet gladness of faith and hope and love—awaiting, in obstruction, an abstraction. This resurrection to a supersensuous serenity, wherein divine powers supersede your own, is a mere imagination—a change of words; the old hallucination of the mystic. After going through a certain amount of suffering, the devotee chooses to term whatever thoughts or feelings he may have, his own no longer: he fancies them divine. It is the same man from first to last.
Admitting its great fundamental error—this unnaturalness,—as though grace came in to make our flesh and blood a senseless puppet pulled by celestial wires,—it must be conceded that the mysticism of John takes the very highest ground. It looks almost with contempt upon the phantoms, the caresses, the theurgic toys of grosser mystics. In this respect, John is far beyond Theresa. He has a purpose; he thinks he knows a way to it; and he pursues it, unfaltering, to the issue. He gazes steadily on the grand impalpability of the Areopagite, and essays to mount thither with a holy ardour of which the old Greek gives no sign. And this, too, with the vision-craving sentimental Theresa at his side, and a coarsely sensuous Romanism all around him. No wonder that so stern a spiritualism was little to the taste of some church-dignitaries in soft raiment. It is impossible not to recognize a certain grandeur in such a man. Miserably mistaken as he was, he is genuine throughout as mystic and ascetic. Every bitter cup he would press to the lips of others he had first drained himself. His eagerness to suffer was no bravado—no romancing affectation, as with many of his tribe. In his last illness at Pegnuela he was allowed his choice of removal between two places. At one of them his deadly enemy was prior. He bade them carry him thither, for there he would have most to endure. That infamous prior treated with the utmost barbarity the dying saint, on whom his implacable hatred had already heaped every wrong within his power.[314] Let, then, a melancholy admiration be the meed of John—not because the mere mention of the cross was sufficient, frequently, to throw him into an ecstasy,—not because his face was seen more than once radiant with a lambent fire from heaven,—these are the vulgar glories of the calendar,—but because, believing in mystical death, he did his best to die it, and displayed in suffering and in action a self-sacrificing heroism which could only spring from a devout and a profound conviction. We find in him no sanctimonious lies, no mean or cruel things done for the honour of his Church—perhaps he was not thus tempted or commanded as others have been,—and so, while he must have less merit with Rome as a monk, let him have the more with us as a man.