Christian Mysticism by William Ralph Inge

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"And also to prayer belongeth thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is a true
inward knowing, with great reverence and lovely dread turning
ourselves with all our mights unto the working that our good Lord
stirreth us to, rejoicing and thanking inwardly. And sometimes for
plenteousness it breaketh out with voice and saith: Good Lord! great
thanks be to Thee: blessed mote Thou be."

"Prayer is a right understanding of that fulness of joy that is to
come, with great longing and certain trust.... Then belongeth it to us
to do our diligence, and when we have done it, then shall we yet think
that it is nought; and in sooth it is. But if we do as we can, and
truly ask for mercy and grace, all that faileth us we shall find in
Him. And thus meaneth He where He saith: 'I am the ground of thy
beseeching.' And thus in this blessed word, with the Showing, I saw a
full overcoming against all our weakness and all our doubtful dreads."

Juliana's view of human personality is remarkable, as it reminds us of
the Neoplatonic doctrine that there is a higher and a lower self, of
which the former is untainted by the sins of the latter. "I saw and
understood full surely," she says, "that in every soul that shall be
saved there is a godly will that never assented to sin, nor ever
shall; which will is so good that it may never work evil, but evermore
continually it willeth good, and worketh good in the sight of God....
We all have this blessed will whole and safe in our Lord Jesus
Christ." This "godly will" or "substance" corresponds to the spark of
the German mystics.

"I saw no difference," she says, "between God and our substance, but,
as it were, all God. And yet my understanding took, that our substance
is _in_ God--that is to say, that God is God, and our substance a
creature in God. Highly ought we to enjoy that God dwelleth in our
soul, and much more highly, that our soul dwelleth in God.... Thus was
my understanding led to know, that our soul is _made_ Trinity, like to
the unmade Blessed Trinity, known and loved from without beginning,
and in the making oned to the Maker. This sight was full sweet and
marvellous to behold, peaceable and restful, sure and delectable."

"As anent our substance and our sense-part, both together may rightly
be called our soul; and that is because of the oneing that they have
in God. The worshipful City that our Lord Jesus sitteth in, it is our
sense-soul, in which He is enclosed, and our natural substance is
beclosed in Jesus, sitting with the blessed soul of Christ at rest in
the Godhead." Our soul cannot reach its full powers until our
sense-nature by the virtue of Christ's passion be "brought up to the
substance." This fulfilment of the soul "is grounded in nature. That
is to say, our reason is grounded in God, which is substantial
Naturehood; out of this substantial Nature mercy and grace spring and
spread into us, working all things in fulfilling of our joy: these
are our ground, in which we have our increase and our fulfilling. For
in nature we have our life and our being, and in mercy and grace we
have our increase and our fulfilling."

In one of her visions she was shown our Lord "scorning the fiend's
malice, and noughting his unmight." "For this sight I laught mightily,
and that made them to laugh that were about me. But I saw not Christ
laugh. After this I fell into graveness, and said, 'I see three
things: I see game, scorn, and earnest. I see game, that the fiend is
overcome; I see scorn, in that God scorneth him, and he shall be
scorned; and I see earnest, in that he is overcome by the blissful
passion and death of our Lord Jesus Christ, that was done in full
earnest and with sober travail.'"

Alternations of mirth and sadness followed each other many times, "to
learn me that it is speedful to some souls to feel on this wise." Once
especially she was left to herself, "in heaviness and weariness of my
life, and irksomeness of myself, that scarcely I could have pleasure
to live.... For profit of a man's soul he is sometimes left to
himself; although sin is not always the cause; for in that time I
sinned not, wherefore I should be so left to myself; for it was so
sudden. Also, I deserved not to have this blessed feeling. But freely
our Lord giveth when He will, and suffereth us to be in woe sometime.
And both is one love."

Her treatment of the problem of evil is very characteristic. "In my
folly, often I wondered why the beginning of sin was not letted; but
Jesus, in this vision, answered and said, 'Sin is behovable,[283] but
all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing
shall be well.' In this naked word _sin_ our Lord brought to my mind
generally all that is not good.... But I saw not sin; for I believe it
had no manner of substance, nor any part of being, nor might it be
known but by the pain that is caused thereof; and this pain ...
purgeth and maketh us to know ourself, and ask mercy. In these same
words ('all shall be well') I saw an high and marvellous privity hid
in God." She wondered _how_ "all shall be well," when Holy Church
teacheth us to believe that many shall be lost. But "I had no other
answer but this, 'I shall save my word in all things, and I shall make
all thing well.'" "This is the great deed that our Lord God shall do;
but what the deed shall be, and how it shall be done, there is no
creature beneath Christ that knoweth it, ne shall wit it till it is
done."

"I saw no wrath but on man's party," she says, "and that forgiveth He
in us. It is the most impossible that may be, that God should be
wroth.... Our life is all grounded and rooted in love.... Suddenly is
the soul oned to God, when it is truly peaced in itself; for in Him is
found no wrath. And thus I saw, when we be all in peace and love, we
find no contrariousness, nor no manner of letting, through that
contrariousness which is now in us; nay, our Lord God of His goodness
maketh it to us full profitable." No visions of hell were ever showed
to her. In place of the hideous details of torture which some of the
Romish visionaries describe almost with relish, Juliana merely
reports, "To me was showed none harder hell than sin."

Again and again she rings the changes on the words which the Lord said
to her, "I love thee and thou lovest Me, and our love shall never be
disparted in two." "The love wherein He made us was in Him from
without beginning; in which love," she concludes, "we have our
beginning, and all this shall be seen in God without end."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 257: The indebtedness of the fourteenth century mystics to
Eckhart is now generally recognised, at any rate in Germany; but
before Pfeiffer's work his name had been allowed to fall into most
undeserved obscurity. This was not the fault of his scholars, who, in
spite of the Papal condemnation of his writings, speak of Eckhart with
the utmost reverence, as the "great," "sublime," or "holy" master.]

[Footnote 258: "Vir ut ferunt devotus sed parum litteratus," says the
Abbe Tritheme (_ap._ Gessner, _Biblioth._). "Rusbrochius cum idiota
esset" (_Dyon. Carth._ Serm. i.). Compare Rousselot, _Les Mystiques
Espagnols_, p. 493.]

[Footnote 259: Maeterlinck, Ruysbroek's latest interpreter, is far too
complimentary to the intellectual endowments of his fellow-countryman.
"Ce moine possedait un des plus sages, des plus exacts, et des plus
subtils organes philosophiques qui aient jamais existe." He thinks it
marvellous that "il sait, a son insu, le platonisme de la Grece, le
soufisme de la Perse, le brahmanisme de I'Inde et le bouddhisme de
Thibet," etc. In reality, Ruysbroek gets all his philosophy from
Eckhart, and his manner of expounding it shows no abnormal acuteness.
But Maeterlinck's essay in _Le Tresor des Humbles_ contains some good
things--e.g. "Les verites mystiques ne peuvent ni vieillir ni
mourir.... Une oeuvre ne vieillit qu'en proportion de son
antimysticisme."]

[Footnote 260: So Preger, probably rightly. Noack places his birth
five years later. The chronology of the _Life_ is very loose.]

[Footnote 261: The extreme asceticism which was practised by Suso, and
(though to a less degree) by Tauler, is not enjoined by them as a
necessary part of a holy life. "We are to kill our passions, not our
flesh and blood," as Tauler says.]

[Footnote 262: It would be very interesting to trace the influence of
the chivalric idea on religious Mysticism. Chivalry, the worship of
idealised womanhood, is itself a mystical cult, and its relation to
religious Mysticism appears throughout the "Divine Comedy" and "Vita
Nuova" (see especially the incomparable paragraph which concludes this
latter), and in the sonnet of M. Angelo translated by Wordsworth, "No
mortal object did these eyes behold," etc.]

[Footnote 263: Nothing in the book is more touching than the scene
when the baby, deserted by its mother, Suso's false accuser, is
brought to him. Suso takes the child in his arms, and weeps over it
with affectionate words, while the infant smiles up at him. In spite
of the calumny which he knew was being spread wherever it would most
injure him, he insists on paying for the child's maintenance, rather
than leave it to die from neglect. The Italian mystic Scupoli, the
author of a beautiful devotional work called the _Spiritual Combat_,
was calumniated in a similar manner.]

[Footnote 264: By Schmidt, whose researches formed the basis of
several popular accounts of Tauler's life. Preger and Denifle both
reject the identification of the mysterious stranger with Nicholas;
Denifle doubts his existence altogether. The subject is very fully
discussed by Preger]

[Footnote 265: Tauler was well read in the earlier mystics. He cites
Proclus, Augustine (frequently), Dionysius, Bernard, and the
Victorines; also Aristotle and Aquinas.]

[Footnote 266: Tauler adheres to the doctrine of an "uncreated
ground," but he holds that it must always act upon us through the
medium of the "created ground." He evidently considered Eckhart's
later doctrine as too pantheistic. See below, p. 183.]

[Footnote 267: See p. 155. In my estimate of Tauler's doctrine, I have
made no use of the treatise on _The Imitation of the Poverty of
Christ_, which Noack calls his masterpiece, and the kernel of his
Mysticism. The work is not by Tauler.]

[Footnote 268: See above, p. 170.]

[Footnote 269: This expression is found first, I think, in Richard of
St. Victor; but St. Augustine speaks of "oculus interior atque
intelligibilis" (_De div. quaest._ 46).]

[Footnote 270: But Christ, he says, could see with both eyes at once;
the left in no way hindered the right.]

[Footnote 271: Tauler often uses similar language; as, for instance,
when he says, "The natural light of the reason must be entirely
brought to nothing, if God is to enter with His light."]

[Footnote 272: Stoeckl criticises the _Theologia Germanica_ in a very
hostile spirit. He finds it in "pantheism," by which he means
acosmism, and also "Gnostic-Manichean dualism," the latter being his
favourite charge against the Lutherans and their forerunners. He
considers that this latter tendency is more strongly marked in the
_German Theology_ than in the other works of the Eckhartian school, in
that the writer identifies "the false light" with the light of nature,
and selfhood with sin; "devil, sin, Adam, old man, disobedience,
selfhood, individuality, mine, me, nature, self-will, are all the
same; they all represent what is against God and without God."
Accordingly, salvation consists in annihilation of the self, and
substitution for God for it. There is no doubt that the writer of this
treatise is deeply impressed with the belief that the root of sin is
self-will, and that the new birth must be a complete transformation;
but it must be remembered that the language of piety is less guarded
than that of dogmatic disputation, and that the theology of such a
book must be judged by its whole tendency. My own judgment is that,
taken as a whole, it is safer than Tauler or Ruysbroek, and much safer
than Eckhart. The strongly-marked "ethical dualism" is of very much
the same kind as that which we find in St. John's Gospel. Taken as a
theory of the origin and nature of evil, it no doubt does hold out a
hand to Manicheism; but I do not think that the writer meant it to be
so taken, any more than St. John did.]

[Footnote 273: Throughout the fourteenth century, and still more in
the fifteenth, we can trace an increasing prominence given to
subjugation of the _will_ in mystical theology. This change is to be
attributed partly to the influence of the Nominalist science of Duns
Scotus, which gradually gained (at least this point) the ascendancy
over the school of Aquinas. It may be escribed as a transition from
the more speculative Mysticism towards quietism. In the fourteenth
century writings, such as the _Theologia Germanica_, we merely welcome
a new and valuable aspect of the religious life; since the change is
connected with a distrust of reason, and a return to standpoint of
harsh legalism, we cannot regard it as an improvement.]

[Footnote 274: Compare p. 161, for similar teaching in Eckhart
himself.]

[Footnote 275: See the quotation on p. 11, note.]

[Footnote 276: Irenaeus, _Contra Har_. iv. 6.]

[Footnote 277: No. 31. on Psalm xci. 13.]

[Footnote 278: Hilton's book has been reprinted from the edition of
1659, with an introduction by the Rev. J.B. Dalgairns. Very little is
known about the author's life, but his book was widely read, and was
"chosen to be the guide of good Christians in the courts of kings and
in the world." The mother of Henry VII. valued it very highly. I have
also used Mr. Guy's edition in my quotations from _The Scale of
Perfection_.]

[Footnote 279: 1 Cor. xiv. 15. This text was also appealed to by the
Quietists of the post-Reformation period.]

[Footnote 280: The texts to which he refers are those which Origen
uses in the same manner. Compare 1 Cor. i. 23, ii. 2, Gal. vi. 14,
with 1 Cor. i. 24.]

[Footnote 281: Julian (born 1343) was probably a Benedictine nun of
Carrow, near Norwich, but lived for the greater part of her life in an
anchorage in the churchyard of St. Julian at Norwich. There is a copy
of her _Revelations_ in the British Museum. Editions by Cressy, 1670;
reprint issued 1843; by Collins, 1877. See, further, in the
_Dictionary of National Biography_. In my quotations from her, I have
used an unpublished version kindly lent me by Miss G.H. Warrack. It is
just so far modernised as to be intelligible to those who are not
familiar with fourteenth century English.]

[Footnote 282: This was a recognised classification. Scaramelli says,
"Le visioni corporce sono favori propri dei principianti, che
incomminciano a camminare nella via dello spirito.... Le visioni
immaginari sono proprie dei principianti e dei proficienti, che non
sono ancor bene purgati.... Le visioni intellectuali sono proprie di
quelli che si trovano gia in istato di perfezione." It comes
originally from St. Augustine (_De Gen. ad litt._ xii. 7, n. 16): "Haec
sunt tria genera visionum.... Primum ergo appellemus corporale, quia
per corpus percipitur, et corporis sensibus exhibetur. Secundum
spirituale: quidquid enim corpus non est, et tamen aliquid est, iam
recte dicitur spiritus; et utique non est corpus, quamvis corpori
similis sit, imago absentis corporis, nee ille ipse obtutus quo
cernitur. Tertium vero intellectuale, ab intellectu."]

[Footnote 283: That is, "necessary" or "profitable."]

LECTURE VI

"O heart, the equal poise of Love's both parts,
Big alike with wounds and darts,
Live in these conquering leaves, live still the same,
And walk through all tongues one triumphant flame!
Live here, great heart, and love and die and kill,
And bleed, and wound, and yield, and conquer still.
Let this immortal life, where'er it comes,
Walk in a crowd of loves and martyrdoms.
Let mystic deaths wait on it, and wise souls be
The love-slain witnesses of this life of thee.
O sweet incendiary! show here thy art
Upon this carcase of a hard, cold heart;
Let all thy scattered shafts of light, that play
Among the leaves of thy large books of day,
Combined against this breast at once break in,
And take away from me myself and sin;
This glorious robbery shall thy bounty be,
And my best fortunes such fair spoils of me.
O thou undaunted daughter of desires!
By all thy dower of lights and fires,
By all the eagle in thee, all the dove,
By all thy lives and deaths of love,
By thy large draughts of intellectual day,
And by thy thirsts of love more large than they;
By all thy brim-fill'd bowls of fierce desire,
By thy last morning's draught of liquid fire,
By the full kingdom of that final kiss
That seized thy parting soul and seal'd thee His;
By all the heavens thou hast in Him,
Fair sister of the seraphim!
By all of Him we have in Thee,
Leave nothing of myself in me:
Let me so read thy life, that I
Unto all life of mine may die."

CRASHAW, _On St. Teresa_.

"In a dark night,
Burning with ecstasies wherein I fell,
Oh happy plight,
Unheard I left the house wherein I dwell,
The inmates sleeping peacefully and well.

"Secure from sight;
By unknown ways, in unknown robes concealed,
Oh happy plight;
And to no eye revealed,
My home in sleep as in the tomb was sealed.

"Sweet night, in whose blessed fold
No human eye beheld me, and mine eye
None could behold.
Only for Guide had I
His Face whom I desired so ardently."

ST. JUAN OF THE CROSS (translated by Hutchings).

PRACTICAL AND DEVOTIONAL MYSTICISM--_continued_

"Whom have I in heaven but Thee? and there is none upon earth that I
desire beside Thee. My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the
strength of my heart, and my portion for ever."--Ps. lxxiii. 25, 26.

We have seen that the leaders of the Reformation in Germany thrust
aside speculative Mysticism with impatience. Nor did Christian
Platonism fare much better in the Latin countries. There were students
of Plotinus in Italy in the sixteenth century, who fancied that a
revival of humane letters, and a better acquaintance with philosophy,
were the best means of combating the barbaric enthusiasms of the
North. But these Italian Neoplatonists had, for the most part, no deep
religious feelings, and they did not exhibit in their lives that
severity which the Alexandrian philosophers had practised. And so,
when Rome had need of a Catholic mystical revival to stem the tide of
Protestantism, she could not find what she required among the scholars
and philosophers of the Papal court. The Mysticism of the
counter-Reformation had its centre in Spain.

It has been said that "Mysticism is the philosophy of Spain.[284]"
This does not mean that idealistic philosophy flourished in the
Peninsula, for the Spanish race has never shown any taste for
metaphysics. The Mysticism of Spain is psychological; its point of
departure is not the notion of Being or of Unity, but the human soul
seeking reconcilation with God. We need not be on our guard against
pantheism in reading the Spanish mystics; they show no tendency to
obliterate the dividing lines of personality, or to deify sinful
humanity. The cause of this peculiarity is to be sought partly in the
strong individualism of the Spanish character, and partly in external
circumstances.[285] Free thought in Spain was so sternly repressed,
that those tendencies of mystical religion which are antagonistic to
Catholic discipline were never allowed to display themselves. The
Spanish mystics remained orthodox Romanists, subservient to their
"directors" and "superiors," and indefatigable in making recruits for
the cloister. Even so, they did not escape the attention of the
Inquisition; and though two among them, St. Teresa and St. Juan of the
Cross, were awarded the badge of sanctity, the fate of Molinos showed
how Rome had come to dread even the most submissive mystics.

The early part of the sixteenth century was a period of high culture
in Spain. The universities of Salamanca and Alcala were famous
throughout Europe; the former is said (doubtless with great
exaggeration) to have contained at one time fourteen thousand
students. But the Inquisition, which had been founded to suppress Jews
and Mahometans, was roused to a more baneful activity by the
appearance of Protestantism in Spain. Before the end of the sixteenth
century, the Spanish people, who up to that time had been second to
none in love of liberty and many-sided energy, had been changed into
sombre fanatics, sunk in ignorance and superstition, and retaining
hardly a trace of their former buoyancy and healthy independence.[286]
The first _Index Expurgatorius_ was published in 1546; the burning of
Protestants began in 1559. Till then, Eckhart, Tauler, Suso, and
Ruysbroek had circulated freely in Spain. But the Inquisition
condemned them all, except Ruysbroek. The same rigour was extended to
the Arabian philosophers, and so their speculations influenced Spanish
theology much less than might have been expected from the long sojourn
of the Moors in the Peninsula. Averroism was known in Spain chiefly
through the medium of the _Fons Vitae_ of Ibn Gebirol (Avicebron).
Dionysius and the scholastic mystics of the Middle Ages were, of
course, allowed to be read. But besides these, the works of Plato and
Plotinus were accessible in Latin translations, and were highly valued
by some of the Spanish mystics. This statement may surprise those who
have identified Spanish Mysticism with Teresa and Juan of the Cross,
and who know how little Platonism is to be found in their theology.
But these two militant champions of the counter-Reformation numbered
among their contemporaries mystics of a different type, whose
writings, little known in this country, entitle them to an honourable
place in the roll of Christian Platonists.

We find in them most of the characteristic doctrines of Christian
Neoplatonism: the radiation of all things from God and their return to
God; the immanence of God in all things;[287] the notion of man as a
microcosm, vitally connected with all the different orders of
creation;[288] the Augustinian doctrine of Christ and His members as
"one Christ";[289] insistence upon disinterested love;[290] and
admonitions to close the eye of sense.[291] This last precept, which,
as I have maintained, is neither true Platonism nor true Mysticism,
must be set against others in which the universe is said to be a copy
of the Divine Ideas, "of which Plotinus has spoken divinely," the
creation of Love, which has given form to chaos, and stamped it with
the image of the Divine beauty; and in which we are exhorted to rise
through the contemplation of nature to God.[292] Juan de Angelis, in
his treatise on the spiritual nuptials, quotes freely, not only from
Plato, Plotinus, and Virgil, but from Lucretius, Ovid, Tibullus, and
Martial.

But this kind of humanism was frowned upon by the Church, in Spain as
elsewhere. These were not the weapons with which Lutheranism could be
fought successfully. Juan d'Avila was accused before the Inquisition
in 1534, and one of his books was placed on the Index of 1559; Louis
de Granada had to take refuge in Portugal; Louis de Leon, who had the
courage to say that the Song of Solomon is only a pastoral idyll, was
sent to a dungeon for five years.[293] Even St. Teresa narrowly
escaped imprisonment at Seville; and St. Juan of the Cross passed nine
months in a black hole at Toledo.

Persecution, when applied with sufficient ruthlessness, seldom fails
of its immediate object. It took only about twelve years to destroy
Protestantism in Spain; and the Holy Office was equally successful in
binding Mysticism hand and foot.[294] And so we must not expect to
find in St. Teresa or St. Juan any of the characteristic independence
of Mysticism. The inner light which they sought was not an
illumination of the intellect in its search for truth, but a consuming
fire to burn up all earthly passions and desires. Faith presented
them with no problems; all such questions had been settled once for
all by Holy Church. They were ascetics first and Church Reformers
next; neither of them was a typical mystic.[295]

The life of St. Teresa[296] is more interesting than her teaching. She
had all the best qualities of her noble Castilian ancestors--
simplicity, straightforwardness, and dauntless courage; and the record
of her self-denying life is enlivened by numerous flashes of humour,
which make her character more lovable. She is best known as a visionary,
and it is mainly through her visions that she is often regarded as one
of the most representative mystics. But these visions do not occupy a
very large space in the story of her life. They were frequent during the
first two or three years of her convent life, and again between the ages
of forty and fifty: there was a long gap between the two periods, and
during the last twenty years of her life, when she was actively engaged
in founding and visiting religious houses, she saw them no more. This
experience was that of many other saints of the cloister. Spiritual
consolations seem to be frequently granted to encourage young
beginners;[297] then they are withdrawn, and only recovered after a long
period of dryness and darkness; but in later life, when the character is
fixed, and the imagination less active, the vision fades into the light
of common day. In considering St. Teresa's visions, we must remember
that she was transparently honest and sincere; that her superiors
strongly disliked and suspected, and her enemies ridiculed, her
spiritual privileges; that at the same time they brought her great fame
and influence; that she was at times haunted by doubts whether she ever
really saw them; and, lastly, that her biographers have given them a
more grotesque and materialistic character than is justified by her own
descriptions.

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