The essentials of mysticism, and other essays

by Evelyn Underhill

THREE MEDIÆVAL MYSTICS

I
“THE MIRROR OF SIMPLE SOULS”

I

The Mirror of Simple Souls—a rare work on the spiritual life, of which manuscripts exist in the British Museum, the Bodleian, and one or two other public libraries—has so far received little or no attention from students of religious literature. Yet it may turn out to possess great importance, as one of the missing links in the history of English mysticism: for it is a middle-English translation, made at the close of the fourteenth century or beginning of the fifteenth, of the lost work of a French thirteenth-century mystic. It shows, therefore, that the common View of French mediæval religion as unmystical needs qualification; and further indicates a path by which the contemplative tradition of western Europe reached England and affected the development of our native mystical school.

The Mirror of Simple Souls, as we now have it, is a work of nearly 60,000 words in length. So far from being simple, it deals almost exclusively with the rarest and most sublime aspects of spiritual experience. Its theme is the theme of all mysticism: the soul’s adventures on its way towards union with God. It is not, like the Melum of Richard Rolle, or Revelations of Julian of Norwich, a subjective book; the record of personal experiences and actual “conversations in heaven.” Rather it is objective and didactic, a work of geography, not a history of travel; an advanced text-book of the contemplative life. Only from the ardour and exactitude of its descriptions, its strange air of authority, its defiance of pious convention, can we gather that it is the fruit of first-hand experience, not merely of theological study: though its writer was clearly a trained theologian, familiar with the works of St. Augustine and Dionysius the Areopagite, whom no mystic of the Middle Ages wholly escaped, and apparently with those of St. Bernard, Hugh and Richard of St. Victor, and other mediæval authorities on the inner life.

I have said that the Mirror, as we have it, purports to be the translation of an unknown French treatise. This translation, so far as we can judge from its language, was probably made in the early years of the fifteenth century, perhaps at the end of the fourteenth. Its author, then, lived at the close of the golden age of English mysticism: he was the contemporary of Julian of Norwich, who was still living in 1413, and of Walter Hilton, who died in 1395. Himself a mystic, he was no servile translator; rather the eager interpreter of the book which he wished to make accessible to his countrymen. Our manuscripts begin with his prologue: an ingenuous confession of the difficulties of the undertaking, his own temerity in daring to touch these “high divine matters,” his fear lest the book should fall into unsuitable hands and its more extreme teachings be misunderstood. It appears from this prologue that our version of the Mirror is a second, or revised edition; the first having failed to be comprehensible to its readers.

The character of the translator, as disclosed for us in his prologue, is itself interesting. Clearly he was a contemplative; and the “high ghostly feelings” of which he treats are to him the strictly practical objects of supreme desire, though he modestly disclaims their possession. He appears before us as a gentle, humble, rather timid soul: often frankly terrified by the daring flights of his “French book,” which he is at pains to explain in a safe sense. One would judge him, from the peeps which he gives us into his mind, a disciple of the devout and homely school of Walter Hilton, rather than a descendant of the group of advanced mystics which produced in the mid-fourteenth century The Cloud of Unknowing, The Pistle of Private Counsel, and other profound studies of the inner life. These books were written under the strong influence of Dionysius the Areopagite; whose Mystical Theology, under the title of Dionise Hid Divinite, was first translated into English by some member of the school. But to the translator of the Mirror his author’s drastic applications of the Dionysian paradoxes of indifference, passivity, and nescience as the path to knowledge teem with “hard sayings.” His attitude towards them is that of reverential alarm: he fears their probable effect on the mind of the hasty reader. They seem, as he says in one place, “fable or error or hard to understand” until one has read them several times. He is sure that their real meaning is unexceptionable; but terribly afraid that they will be misunderstood.

Here, then, is the prologue which sets forth his point of view.

“To the worship and laud of the Trinity be this work begun and ended! Amen.

“This book, the which is called The Mirror of Simple Souls, I, most unworthy creature and outcast of all other, many years gone wrote it out of French into English after my lewd cunning; in hope that by the grace of God it should profit the devout souls that shall read it. This was forsooth mine intent. But now I am stirred to labour it again new, for because I am informed that some words thereof have been mistaken. Therefore, if God will, I shall declare these words more openly. For though Love declare the points in the same book, it is but shortly spoken, and may be taken otherwise than it is meant of them that read it suddenly and take no further heed. Therefore such words to be twice opened it would be more of audience [understanding]: and so by grace of our Lord good God it shall the more profit to the auditors. But both the first time and now, I have great dread to do it. For the book is of high divine matters and high ghostly feelings, and cunningly and full mystically it is spoken, and I am a creature right wretched and unable to do any such work: poor and naked of ghostly fruits, darkened with sins and defaults, environed and wrapped therein oft times, the which taketh away my taste and my clear sight; so that little I have of ghostly understanding and less of the feeling of divine love. Therefore I may say the words of the prophet: ‘My teeth be nought white to bite of this bread.’ But Almighty Jesu, God that feedeth the worm and gives sight to the blind and wit to the unwitty; give me grace of wit and wisdom in all times wisely to govern myself, following alway His will, and send me clear sight and true understanding well to do this work to His worship and pleasaunce: profit also and increase of grace to ghostly lovers that be disposed and called to this high election of the freedom of soul.”

He goes on to the difficulty which dogs all writers on mysticism; the impossibility of making mystic truth seem real to those who have no experience of the mystic life. It has been said that only mystics can write about mysticism. It were truer to say that only mystics can read about it.

“Oh ye that shall read this book! do ye as David says in the Psalter, Gustate et videte: that is to say, ‘Taste and see.’ But why trow ye he said, taste first, e’er than he said see? For first a soul must taste, e’er it have very understanding and true sight; sight of ghostly workings of divine love. Oh full naked and dark, dry and unsavoury be the speakings and writings of these high ghostly feelings of the love of God to them that have not tasted the sweetness thereof. But when a soul is touched with grace, by which she has tasted somewhat of the sweetness of this divine fruition, and begins to wade, and draweth the draughts to her-ward, then it savours the soul so sweetly that she desires greatly to have of it more and more, and pursueth thereafter. And then the soul is glad and joyful to hear and to read of all thing that pertains to this high feeling of the workings of divine love, in nourishing and increasing her love and devotion to the will and pleasing of Him that she loves, God Christ Jesu. Thus she enters and walks in the way of illumination, that she might be taught into the ghostly influences of the divine work of God, there to be drowned in the high flood, and oned to God by ravishing of love, by which she is all one spirit with her Spouse. Therefore to these souls that be disposed to these high feelings Love has made of him this book in fulfilling of their desire.”

But even for those who have been initiated into this way of illumination, the translator acknowledges that many things in the Mirror are difficult and obscure: “often he leaveth the nut and the kernel within the shell unbroken, that is to say, that Love in this book leaves to souls the touches of his divine works privily hid under dark speech, for they should taste the deeper the draughts of his love and drink; and also to make them have the more clear insight in divine understandings to divine love, and declare himself.” Therefore he has added his own explanations to the more difficult passages. “Where meseems most need I will write more words thereto in manner of gloss after my simple cunning as meseems best. And in these few places that I put in more than I find written I will begin with the first letter of my name M. and end with this letter N. the first of my surname.”

He ends with a gentle complaint of the badness of the text from which he worked, and the confession that he has allowed himself a certain amount of editorial liberty. “The French book that I shall write after is evil written, and in some places for default of words and syllables the reason is away. Also in translating of French some words need to be changed, or it will fare ungoodly, not according to the sentence. Wherefore I will follow the sentence according to the matter, as near as God will give me grace; obeying me ever to the correction of Holy Kirk, praying ghostly livers and clerks that they will vouchsafe to correct and amend there that I do amiss.”

So much for M.N., the English mystic. The prologue of the author, which comes next, tells us all that we know about the anonymous French writer of the book. This person was of a very different temper from M.N. As a Catholic scholar has observed of St. Teresa, “L’auteur ne se faisait pas illusion sur le mèrite de son œuvre.” Like Teresa, he believed himself to have written under immediate divine inspiration; a fact which somewhat excuses his complacency in regard to the result. This is a common claim with the mystics, in whom subconscious cerebration is always exceptionally active, and whose writings often exhibit an automatic and involuntary character, seeming to them the work of another mind. Jacob Boehme, Madame Guyon, and Blake are obvious cases in point. The author of the Mirror, however, was anxious that his claim to inspiration should be endorsed. He therefore—most fortunately for us—sent his work to various “learned clerks,” persons of importance in the theological world, and chronicles their appreciatory remarks in the prologue; which becomes in his hands a form of mediæval “advance-notice.” It will be observed that his critics share the opinion of M.N., that though full of “ghostly cunning” this is a dangerous work to put into the hands of the plain man.

Of these critics “The first was a Friar Minor of great name, of life of perfection. Men called him Friar John of Querayne.... He said soothly that this book is made by the Holy Ghost. And though all the clerks of the world heard it, but if they understand it, that is to say, but if they have high ghostly feelings and this same working, they shall nought wit what it means. And he prayed for the love of God that it be wisely kept: and that but few should see it. And he said thus, that it was so high that himself might not understand it. And after him a monk of Cisetyns [Citeaux] read it, that hight Dan Frank, Chantor of the Abbey of Viliers: and he said that it proved well by the Scripture that it is all truth that this book says. And after him read it a Master of Divinity, that hight Master Godfrey of Fountaynes: and he blamed it nought, no more than did the other. But he said thus, that he counselled nought [sic] that few should see it; and for this cause, for they might leave their own working and follow this calling, to the which they should never come, and so they might deceive themselves, for it is made of a spirit so strong and so cutting, that there be but few such or none.... For the peace of auditors was this proved, and for your peace we say it to you. For this seed should bear holy fruit to them that hear it and worthy be.”

Of the three persons here mentioned, Friar John and Dan Frank still remain unidentified: but Godfrey of Fountaynes is almost certainly the Master of Divinity, called Doctor Venerandus, who was a prominent member of the University of Paris at the end of the thirteenth century. He was at the height of his fame about 1280-1290, and died about 1306. “Grande lumen studii magister Godefridum de Fontanis,” he is called in a letter of 1301. In the great war between Friars and Seculars which divided the University at the end of the thirteenth century, this Godfrey was one of the bitterest opponents of the Mendicant Orders. He wrote against them, and attacked them in the Synod of Paris in 1283. We see therefore that the author of the Mirror, in placing Godfrey’s testimonial beside that of Friar John, secured with a cunning other than ghostly a friend in each of the opposing camps.

There is, however, one obvious and significant omission in this list of patrons. There is no name which emanates directly from the great school of St. Thomas Aquinas; supreme at that moment in the University, and the custodian of orthodox philosophy. There is, indeed, little trace of scholastic influence in the Mirror, which is far more in harmony with the mystical theology favoured by St. Bonaventura, and continued during the following century in the Franciscan schools: a fact which explains at once the guarded approbation of Friar John, and the absence of Dominican patronage. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the Franciscans were eager students of and commentators on Dionysius the Areopagite: and the order which produced and upheld the hardy speculations of Duns Scotus might well look with indulgence on the most extravagant statements of The Mirror of Simple Souls.

The original version of this book, then, was probably written in the last quarter of the thirteenth century, and certainly before 1306. Its writer was therefore the contemporary of Eckhart and Jacopone da Todi, the great mystical lights of the Preaching and the Minor Friars. He was no provincial recluse, but a person in touch with the intellectual life of his time. He had connections with the University of Paris, but the names of his patrons prove him to have been neither a member nor an enemy of the Mendicant Orders. It is probable that he was a monk, possible that he was a Carthusian; a strictly contemplative order celebrated for its mystical leanings, which produced in the later Middle Ages many students of the Dionysian writings, and many works upon contemplation. He was widely read, and many parallels could be established between his doctrines and the classics of Christian mysticism. His lost book is so far our only evidence that abstruse prose treatises of this kind were already written in the vernacular; and this alone gives it great interest from the literary point of view. He was, so far as we know, the first French mystic to write in French; the forerunner of St. Francis de Sales, of Madame Guyon, of Malaval. If we except the semi-mystical writings of Gerson, we must wait till the seventeenth century to provide him with a worthy successor.

II

We come next to the manner and content of the book. The manner is that of a dramatic dialogue: an unusual if not unique form for works of this kind. It consists of a debate—often a lively debate—between Love, the Soul, Reason, and a few intervening characters, of whom Pure Courtesy and Discretion are the chief. The student will at once be reminded of the Romaunt de la Rose: but he will have difficulty in matching this form within the confines of ascetic literature. Duologues, such as those in the Third Book of the Imitatio, or Suso’s conversations with Eternal Wisdom, are not uncommon: but I know of no other instance of an elaborate mystical doctrine presented through the mouths of a group of symbolic personages.

The Soul is naturally that of the author. Lady Love is his instructress, and all the most beautiful passages are given to her. Reason’s rôle is interrogatory. He catechises Love sharply though respectfully, and represents the invariable attitude of common sense confronted by the claims of mysticism. Sometimes he goes too far; Love or the Soul is driven to put him in his place. “Oh, understanding of Reason!” says this soul noughted, “what thou hast of rudeness! Thou takest the shell or the chaff and leavest the kernel or the grain. Thine understanding is so low, that thou mayst not so highly reach as them behoves that well would have understanding of the Being that we speak of.” In general, however, the figure of Reason is used with great art to elucidate the hard sayings of Love. The alert intelligence of the writer notes all possible objections to his doctrine, and states and refutes them out of the mouths of his characters. “O Lady Love, what is this that you say?” says the shocked voice of Reason whenever the argument becomes paradoxical or abstruse. “Reason,” says Love to this, “I will answer for the profit of them for whom thou makest to us this piteous request. Reason,” says Love, “where be these double words that thou prayest me to discuss ... it is well asked, and I will,” says Love, “answer thee to all thy asking.”

What, then, is the doctrine which these discussions put before us? It is the doctrine of the soul’s possible ascent from illusion to reality, from separateness to union with the Divine: the primal creed of all mysticism, here stated in its most extreme form, and pressed to its logical conclusion. It offers, not a chart of the way to a distant heaven of beatitude and recompense, but initiation into that state of being wherein we find our heaven here and now. “I took Jesus for my heaven,” said Julian of Norwich. So the writer of the Mirror: “Paradise is no other thing than God Himself ... why was the thief in Paradise anon as the soul was departed from his body?... He saw God, that is Paradise; for other thing is not Paradise than to see God. And this doth she [the soul] in sooth at all times that she is uncumbered of herself.” The super-essential and unknowable Godhead, whose nature is but partially revealed in the Blessed Trinity, is the only substance of reality, and the only satisfaction of the soul’s desire. “Though this soul had all the knowledge, love and learning that ever was given, or shall be given, of the Divine Trinity, it should be naught as in regard of that that she loves and shall love ... for there is no other God but He that none may know, which may not be known.” The history of human transcendence is the history of the soul’s transmutation to that condition of love in which it is, as the author is not afraid to say, deified; and so merged in the Reality from which it came forth, that it is no longer aware of its own separate experience but is “all one spirit with its Spouse.”

“I am God,” says Love, “for Love is God and God is Love. And this soul is God by condition of love, and I am God by nature divine. And this is hers by right-wiseness of love. So that this Precious, loved of me, is learned and led by me out of herself, for she is turned to me, in me.”

This process is set forth by the writer of the Mirror under three chief heads: those of Liberty as the aim, the Will as the agent, and Surrender as the method of the spiritual quest.

In the conception of Liberty as the supreme aim of the spiritual life we have what is perhaps the most original feature of his work: though it is a conception which is of course implicit in the New Testament. Where most contemplatives lay emphasis on the glad servitude of love, and use the symbols of wedlock to express the willing subjugation of the soul to its Divine Bridegroom, the key of this book is the idea of spiritual freedom; and that freedom as consisting in the liberation of man’s will from finite desires that it may rejoin and lose itself within the Will of the Infinite. We are to learn, it says in the first chapter, something of “the pure love, of the noble love, and of the high love of the free soul; and how the Holy Ghost has His sail in his ship.” With our “inward subtle understanding”—that spiritual intuition which is the instrument of all real knowledge—we are to follow its progress from the bondage of desire to the point at which, purged of self-will, perfected in meekness and love, “noughted and abased,” it reaches the “Seventh Estate of Grace,” and participates in the perfect liberty of Pure Being, wherein “the soul has fulhead of perception by divine fruition in life of peace.” “Not-willing” is the secret of liberation, and lord of our true life. “And this not-willing sows in souls the Divine Seed, fulfilled of the divine will of God. This seed may never fail, but few souls dispose them to receive this seed.” Though this emancipation is only attained by the utter surrender of all personal desire and achievement, yet throughout the book the dominant note is of glad liberation, of flying, of a rapturous ascent. As we read, we seem to hear from every page “the thunder of new wings.” The free soul is “six-winged like the seraphim.” She is “the eagle that flies high: so right high and yet more high than does any other bird; for she is feathered with fine love, and she beholds above other the beauty of the sun, and the beams and the brightness of the sun. Dame Nature,” says she, “I take leave of you: Love is me nigh, that holds me free of him against all without dread. Then,” says Love, “she afraies her nought for tribulation, nor stints for consolation.”

It is clear to the writer that only certain persons are capable of this complete freedom in love: and it is to them—the natural mystics, the people with a genius for reality—that his book is addressed. They are “of that lineage that be folks royal,” “called without fail of the Divine goodness,” and it is on their spiritual intuition, their transcendent knowledge, that “all Holy Church is founded”; a suspicious statement in the eyes of orthodox theology. They possess, or are able to possess, the incommunicable gift of spiritual vision.

“This gift is given,” says Love, “sometimes in a moment of time. Who that has it, keep it: for it is the most perfect gift that God gives to creature.” So removed is the resulting perception of reality from human wisdom that no one can teach the illuminated soul anything. “Now for God,” says Reason, “Lady Love, say what is this to say? This is to say,” says Love, “that this soul is of so great knowing that though she had all the knowing of all creatures that ever were, be or shall be, she would think it naught in regard of that that she loves.” Yet, true to Neoplatonic principles, she is aware that her highest perceptions are nothing, and her “right great and high words” but “gabbynge” or idle talk, compared with the ineffable reality. She “wots all and wots naught,” and is content it should be so. “He only is my God that none can one word of say, nor all they of Paradise one only point attain nor understand, for all the knowing that they have of Him.”

But though the Transcendent God is unknowable, the free soul, in singular contradiction to contemporary asceticism, finds Him everywhere immanent in the world. “And for this, that He is all in all, this soul, says Love, finds Him over all. So that for this all things are to this soul covetable, for she nor finds anything but she finds God.” So Meister Eckhart: “To it all creatures are pure to enjoy; for it enjoyeth all creatures in God and God in all creatures.”

The preliminary discipline of the mystic, the hard acquirement of that “very charity” which is “the perfection of virtues” and “dwelleth always in God’s sight ... obeying to nothing that is made but to love” is little dwelt on by the author of the Mirror; who did not write for beginners in the contemplative life, but for the mature soul whose love has made him free, and who therefore needs “nor masses nor sermons nor fasting nor orisons, and gives to nature all that he asks, without grudging of conscience”—a practical application of St. Augustine’s dangerous saying, “Love, and do what you like.” M.N., however, interpolates a prudent reminder that “by this way and by sharp contricion souls must go, or than they come to these divine usages.”

The author’s own instructions are really reducible to one point: the complete and loving surrender of the individual will to the Primal Will—detachment, or, as he calls it, the “noughting” of the soul. This is that “peace of charity in life noughted,” which constitutes the higher life of love; in contrast to the active life of virtue, struggling to keep unbroken its attitude of charity to God and man. In it the soul dwells, as do the Seraphim, within the divine atmosphere, and has direct access to the sources of its life. “This is the proper being of Seraphim: there is nought mediate between their love and the Divine Love; they have always its tidings without means. So hath this soul, that seeks not the divine science amongst the masters of the world, but the world and herself inwardly despises. Ah, God! what great difference it is between a gift given by means, of the Loved to the Lover, and the gift given without means of the Loved to the Lover. This book says sooth of this soul. It says she hath six wings as have the Seraphim. With two she covers the face of our Lord: that is to say, the more knowledge this soul hath of the Divine Goodness the more she knows that she knows not the amount of a mote as in regard to His Goodness, the which is not comprehended but of Himself. And with two she covers His feet: this is to say, the more that this soul hath knowledge of the sufferance that Jesu Christ suffered for us, the more perfectly she knows that she knows naught, as in regard of it that He suffered for us, the which is not known but of Him. And with two she flies, and so dwells in standing and sitting: this is to say, that all she covets and loves and prizes, it is the Divine Goodness. These be the wings that she flies with, and so dwells in standing, for she is alway in the sight of God: and sitting, for she dwells alway in the Divine Will. Whereof should this soul have dread, though she be in the world? An the world, the flesh, and our Enemy the Fiend, and the four elements, the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, tormented her and despised her and devoured her if it might so be, what might she lose if God dwelled with her? Oh, is he not Almightiful? Yea, without doubt: He is all might, all wisdom and all goodness, our Father and Brother and our true Friend.”

“This soul,” says Love, “can no more speak of God; for she is noughted to all outward desires, and of all the affections of the spirit. So that what this soul does, she does it by usage of good custom, and by commandment of Holy Church, without any desire: for will is dead, that gave her desire.... Who that asks these free souls, sure and peaceful, if they would be in purgatory, they say nay. If they would living be certified of their salvation, they say nay. Eh, what would they? They have nothing of will, this for to will; and if they willed, they should descend from Love: for He it is that hath their will.... Thus departs the soul from her will and the will departs from this soul, so she again puts it and gives and yields it in God where it was first.” Such a doctrine easily slides into the complete passivity or “holy indifference” which was the ideal of the seventeenth century Quietists: and the Mirror certainly does contain passages which, if taken alone, would convict their author of a fondness for this heresy. “I certify thee that these souls that fine love leads, they have as lief shame as worship, and worship as shame; and poverty as riches and riches as poverty; and torments of God and of His creatures as comforts of God and of His creatures; and to be hated as loved, and loved as hated; and hell as paradise and paradise as hell ... the free soul has no will to will or unwill, but only to will the will of God and suffer in peace His divine ordinance.”

Nevertheless, other passages make it clear that active surrender, not mere passivity is the aim, and that the “noughting” of the self within the All is a loving sacrifice, consistent with its achievement of completest happiness. “True love has but only one intent; and that is, that she might alway love truly, for of the love of her Lover has she no doubt, that He does what best is. And she follows this: that she does that that she ought to do. And she wills nought but one thing; and that is, that the Will of God be alway in her done.... This soul,” says Love, “swims in the sea of joy, that is, in the sea of delights, streaming of divine influences. She feels no joy, for she herself is joy. She swims and drenches in joy, for she lives in joy without feeling any joy. So is joy in her, that she herself is joy, by the virtue of joy that has merged her in Him. And so is the will of the Loved and the will of this soul turned into one as fire and flame.”

The teaching of the writer seems to be, that so long as the will is consciously active and desirous—however good its actions or desires—its owner cannot be liberated from the illusions and anxieties of the personal life. What he needs, if he did but know it, is reunion with that fontal life from which he came, to which he is perpetually drawn by love. Here his separate will finds its meaning, and is not annihilated but absorbed. “The understanding, that gives light, shows to the soul the thing that she loves. And the soul that receives by light of understanding the nighing and the knitting by accord of union in plenteous love, sees the Being, where that she holds to have her seat; receiving gladly the light of knowing that brings her tidings of love. And then she would become so, that she had but one will and love; and that is, the only will of Him that she loves.”

The detached soul who is thus “noughted in God” enjoys a freedom from stress, an immunity from disappointment incredible to those who still live the individual life. “Now shall I say to you what they be that sit in the mountain above the wind and the rain? These be they that have in earth neither shame nor worship, nor dread of anything that befalls.” She has, moreover, passed beyond that moral conflict which arises from the discord between conscience and desire, and is the essential character of the active life; for she has within her “the Master of Virtues, that is called Divine Love, that has her merged in them all and to Him united.” Thus she is able to say, “Virtues, I take leave of you for evermore. Now shall my heart be more free and more in peace than it has been. Forsooth, I wot well your service is too travaillous. Sometime I laid my heart in you without any dissevering: ye wot well this. I was in all thing to you obedient. O, I was then your servant: but now I am delivered out of your thralldom.”

M.N. is quick to gloss this dangerous declaration: “I am stirred here to say more to the matter ... when a soul gives her to perfection, she labours busily day and night to get virtues by counsel of reason, and strives with vices at every point, at every word and deed ... thus the virtues be mistresses and every virtue makes her to war with her contrary.... But so long one may bite on the bitter bark of the nut that at last he shall come to the sweet kernel. Right so, ghostly to understand, it fares with these souls that be come to peacefulness. They have so long striven with vices and wrought by virtues that they be come to the nut’s kernel, that is to say, to the love of God, which is sweetness. And when the soul has deeply tasted this love ... then is she mistress and lady over the virtues, for she has them all within herself ... and then this soul takes leave of virtues, as of thralldom and painful travail ... and now she is lady and sovereign and they be subjects.”

In the technical language of mysticism she has passed from the active to the contemplative life, the crucial phase in the evolution of man’s transcendental consciousness. This evolution is described for us with great psychological exactness in the Mirror, under the traditional formula of the “States” of the soul’s ascent. Since few mystics have escaped the mania for significant numbers, one is not surprised to find seven steps on this “steep stairway of love.” “I am called,” says this soul, “of the touchings of Love, something to say of the Seven Estates that we call beings: for so it is. And these be the degrees by which man climbs from the valley, to the top of the mountain that is so several [apart] that it sees but God.”

“The First Estate is, That a soul is touched of God by grace and dissevered from sin: and, as to her power, in intention to keep the commandments of God.” This is, of course, equivalent to the conversion or change of heart which begins the spiritual life.

“The Second is, that a soul hold what God counsels to His special lovers, passing that what he commands. And he is no good lover that demenes him not to fulfill all that the which he wist might best please to his Beloved.

“The Third is, that a soul holds the affection of love of works of perfection, by which her spirit is ripened by desires: taking the love of these works to multiply in her. And what does the subtlety of her thought, but makes it seem to the understanding of her humble affection, that she cannot make offering to her Love that might comfort her, but of thing that He loves: for other gift is not prized in love.

“The Fourth is that a soul is drawn by highness of love into delight of thought by meditation, and relinquishes all labours outward, and obedience to others, by highness of love in contemplation. Then the soul is dangerous, noble and delicious: in which she may not suffer that anything her touch but the touchings of pure delight of love, in the which she is singularly gladsome and jolly. What marvel is it if this soul be upheld and updrawed thus graciously? Love makes her all drunken, that suffers her not to attend but to Him.” These four stages have brought the self to the complete practice of the contemplative life, and prepared the way for that second great phase in the achievement of reality which consists in the surrender of the separate will.

“The Fifth is, that a soul beholds what God is, and His Goodness, by Divine Light. She sees the Will, by the spreading illumination of Divine Light, the which light gives her the will again to put in God this will; which she may not without this light yield, that may not her profit unless she departs from her own will. Thus departs the soul from her will, and the will departs from this soul, so she again puts it and gives and yields it in God, where it was first.

“Now is this soul fallen of love into nought, without the which nought, she may not all be. The which falling is so perfectly fallen, if she be fallen aright, that the soul may not arise out of this deepness, nor she ought not to do it. Within she ought to dwell. And then leaves the soul pride and play, for the spirit has become bitter, that suffers her no more to be playing nor jolly; for the spirit is departed from her that made her oft love in the highness of contemplation, and in the fourth estate fierce and dangerous.” Here the spirit of the mystic experiences that terrible and characteristic reaction from the exalted joys of contemplation which is sometimes called the “mystic death” or “dark night of the soul,” and destroys in it the last roots of selfhood. In this stage she completes the abandonment or “self-noughting” which initiate her into that which the German mystics called “the Upper School of the Holy Spirit.” Thence she passes to the Sixth Estate, of union with the Divine life, in so far as it can be achieved by those still in the flesh. The Seventh is that indescribable state of “glory” or super-essential life, which constitutes the beatific vision of the Saints, known only of those that “be fallen of love into this being.”

“The Sixth is, that a soul sees neither her nought by deepness of meekness, nor God by highful bounty. But God sees it in her of His Divine Majesty that illuminated her of Him. So that she sees that none is, but God Himself. And then is a soul in the Sixth Estate of all things made free, pure and illuminated. Not glorified, for gloryfying is in the Seventh Estate, that we shall have in glory that none can speak of. But, pure and clarified, she sees nor God nor herself: but God sees this of Him, in her, for her, withouten her, that shows her that there is none but He. Nay, she knows but Him, nor she loves but Him, nor she praises but Him, for there is but He. And the Seventh keeps He within Him, for to give us in everlasting glory. If we wit it not now, we shall wit it when the body our soul leaves.”

II
THE BLESSED ANGELA OF FOLIGNO

It is a curious fact that in the modern revival of interest in the Franciscan movement, little attention has been paid to the life and works of Angela of Foligno. Yet, excepting only St. Bonaventura, this woman has probably exerted a more enduring, more far-reaching influence than any other Franciscan of the century which followed the Founder’s death. In saying this, I do not forget the claims of such great Franciscans as John of Parma or Jacopone da Todi, nor yet of St. Clare, the Founder of the Second Order. But the influence of John of Parma was comparatively short-lived; and that of Jacopone’s superb poetry, though great in Italy, did not go beyond it. His ecstasies could not be translated into other tongues. As to St. Clare, with whom the feminine aspect of the Franciscan ideal first showed itself, her vocation was to the foundation of a contemplative order, which should support by its heavenly correspondences the active and missionary life of the Franciscan friars. The business of the Second Order is the essential woman’s business, of keeping the fire of love alight upon the hearth. Its influence, therefore, was and is almost entirely confined within the boundaries of the spiritual family. The deepest wells of Franciscan mysticism are there hidden, and must always be hidden, from the outer world.

But the vocation of Angela of Foligno was, in a sense, more thoroughly Franciscan than this, more broadly human, more complete. Like that of St. Catherine of Genoa, a mystic whom she resembles in certain respects, it was a twofold vocation: to the eternal and to the temporal, to the divine and to the human. She was a great contemplative, but she was also an exceedingly successful teacher of the secrets of the spiritual life: one of the great line of artist-mediators between the infinite and the human mind.

We know nothing of St. Clare’s mystical experience. We know of Angela’s all that she was able to express; and she tried hard, though for want of language she confesses that she often failed. This passionate, faulty, very human woman, who came to the Mystic Way from a disorderly life, and was hampered by a natural egotism which she transmuted, it is true, but never perhaps really killed, has earned the great title of “Mistress of Theologians.” She penetrated to that world of realities which the diagrams of theology, like the temple built with hands, foreshadow upon earth. Her book of visions and revelations, now so little read, profoundly affected the religious life of Europe. During the sixteenth and the seventeenth century we often come upon its traces in England and in France, as well as in Italy itself; for in this period it was one of the most widely circulated religious works. It exerted great influence on St. Francis de Sales, and also upon the French Quietists. It is quoted as an authority by Madame Guyon, Poiret, and Malaval; and through the great English Benedictine, Augustine Baker, and his pupil, Gertrude More, it has left its mark on the English Catholic mysticism of the seventeenth century.

This book is practically our only trustworthy source for the facts of Angela’s inner and outer life. It was written in Latin, at her dictation, by her Franciscan confessor Fra Arnaldo; at some date subsequent to 1294, since it dates a past event by the pontificate of Celestine V. It was not printed till the sixteenth century, when first an Italian translation, and then the Latin text appeared. Both soon became popular; the translation being one of the first Italian books of devotion to appear in the vulgar tongue. It is divided into three parts, which must be read in relation with one another. First we have the history of Angela’s conversion, penitence, and slow, difficult education in the mystic way: a detailed psychological document of much interest. Secondly we have, grouped together, all the visions and revelations which she received in that way. Unfortunately Fra Arnaldo has seen fit to arrange these according to their subjects, and not according to the order in which they were experienced; thereby increasing their edifying character at the expense of their scientific worth. Last comes “the evangelical doctrine of the Blessed Angela”; a treatise largely made up of letters addressed to her disciples, but, like the writings of St. Teresa, full of illuminating autobiographical touches.

Here, then, we have in one volume three aspects of human life as seen within the limits of one personality: the biographical facts, the supernal vision, and the ordered conclusions drawn from those facts and that vision, for the instruction of other men. All are of value to us in our study of her personality; for we shall never understand her as a mystic unless we try first to understand her as a human creature.

First as to her outward life. Angela was born of a prosperous Umbrian family in 1248; twenty-two years after the death of St. Francis, seventeen years before the birth of Dante. She was one year younger than St. Margaret of Cortona, the other great Franciscan penitent and contemplative. Her life, covering the second half of the thirteenth century, was roughly contemporary with that of Jacopone da Todi, who was twenty years her senior; and with those “spiritual” friars, such as Conrad of Offida and John of La Verna, who are commemorated in the “Little Flowers.” The period, in Italy, was one of contrasted worldly luxury and spiritual enthusiasm, and Angela’s life-history appears to have included experience of both extremes. She married when very young and had children, but lived a thoroughly worldly if not an actually immoral life: posing before society as an excellent Christian, but actually denying herself few indulgences. We learn from the list of sins of which she afterwards accused herself, that these “infirmities and diseases” had included the washing of her face, the curling, braiding, washing, combing, and anointing of her hair, wearing of “needless vain and curious clothes,” and laced shoes adorned with cut leather. She had also incurred the risk of hell by “vain running and dancing and walking about for pleasure,” and even by enjoying the scent of flowers: a crime which St. Francis could hardly have condemned. Remembering the intensely ascetic tone of Franciscan penitence and the puritan ideals of the Spiritual zealots, we need not take these confessions too seriously, or interpret in the worst sense the “embraces, touches, and other evil deeds” which she deplores. Nevertheless, the unregenerate Angela in early womanhood was not the kind of person whom one would pick out as likely to develop into a saint. She makes it quite clear to us that she was a vain, self-important, and hypocritical little egotist, “painted in false colours, a dissembler within and without.” Probably, like many women of the world, a nominal Tertiary, she loved to make a pious impression, but loved comfort even more. “I diligently made an outward show of being poor, but caused many sheets and coverings to be put down where I slept, and taken up in the morning so that none might see them.” There was an offensive sanctimoniousness about her too. “During the whole of my life,” she says frankly, “I have studied how that I might obtain the fame of sanctity.”

We do not know the date of Angela’s conversion, or the circumstances which brought it about; save that it took place under Franciscan influence, which was of course paramount in that part of Umbria in her day. It seems to have taken the form of a gradual awakening of conscience to the sinfulness and hypocrisy of her life. In her mental distress she prayed to St. Francis, and he appeared to her in a dream, the earliest of her visionary experiences; the confessor to whom she then went for advice was a Friar Minor, and after her husband’s death she adopted the plain habit worn by the more fervent Tertiaries, and remained faithful to the Order till her death. The fixed dates in her life are few and confusing. Her own book only gives two: the date of her final purification and the date of her death. We gather from this and other sources, however, that after her widowhood she lived at first with one companion in great retirement; but by about 1290, had formed a small sisterhood in Foligno. Its members, who observed Franciscan poverty in its full rigour, took the rule of the Third Order and the three vows of religion, but they were not cloistered. They devoted themselves to the care of the sick, and other works of charity.

In this community Angela spent the rest of her life; gradually becoming known as a teacher of “Seraphic wisdom” amongst those Spiritual Franciscans who were struggling to keep the ideals of St. Francis alive. She seems to have been the centre of a group of Franciscan Tertiaries of both sexes, for whom she was at once friend and prophetess, like St. Catherine of Siena in the next century. Several of her letters to these “sons” of hers are embedded in her book of “Evangelical Doctrine.” One of them, the turbulent and ardent friar Ubertino da Casale, owed to her his true initiation into the spiritual life: and his account of the impression which she made on him helps us to understand the nature of her influence. He came to her from Paris in 1298, when he was twenty-five years old; a successful preacher, but already conscious of the inward call to a life of greater perfection. “She restored,” he says, “a thousandfold all those spiritual gifts I had lost through my own sins; so that from that time I have not been the same man that I was before. When I had experienced the splendour of her radiant virtue, she changed the whole face of my mind, and so drove out the weakness and languor from my soul and body and healed my mind that was torn with distraction, that no one who knew me before could doubt that the Spirit of Christ was newly begotten in me through her.” This is almost our only glimpse of Angela as she was seen by contemporary eyes: but it indicates the position she came to occupy among the more devout Franciscan zelanti.

She died, surrounded by her spiritual children, in the octave of the Feast of the Holy Innocents, 1309, aged sixty-one; and was buried in the Church of the Franciscans at Foligno, where her body still lies. An Office in her honour was approved by Gregory XIV in 1701, and her Feast is kept throughout the Franciscan Order on March 30.

So much for the scanty outer history. Of greater interest is our knowledge of her inner life; the real life of mystics and contemplatives. The history of this inner life assures us that Angela was of the stuff of which great mystics are made; though not at all of the stuff of which many amateurs of mysticism expect them to be made. First great necessity, she possessed a strongly romantic temperament; like St. Francis, Suso, St. Ignatius, Mechthild, St. Teresa, her companions on the highway of the soul. Like these, she had also an innate simplicity and ardour, a character at once childlike and heroic; that “all-or-none” reaction, the power of total self-giving to the matter in hand, which distinguishes the hero, whether as man of action, as artist, or as saint. Indeed, heroism may properly be ascribed to a comfortable and self-indulgent married woman, who leaves all for the lonely adventure of Sinai, however many tumbles she may have upon the road. With this courage she combined an extreme sensibility to impressions, great power of endurance, a strong will; all the potentialities of a great sinner or a great saint. Further, she evidently possessed that peculiar, unstable psychic makeup, which the mystic shares with other types of genius; and which is seen in its full development in the two greatest of Italian saints, Francis of Assisi and Catherine of Siena. She experienced all the normal episodes of complete mystical development: the phases of penitence and self-discipline, illumination and dereliction, and at last that ecstatic union with the Divine Nature which is the goal of the Way. Her mysticism was deeply coloured by the Franciscan atmosphere in which it was nurtured; it exhibited the highly emotional and enthusiastic character, the tendency to eccentric penances, the concentration upon the Cross and Passion of Christ, which are found in her contemporary Jacopone da Todi, and are typical of the Franciscan mystics at their best. Indeed, the many parallels between Angela and Jacopone suggest to us that the favourite subjects of their contemplations were those in vogue in “Spiritual” circles at this time; and that we have in their works the surviving examples of a complete school of mysticism, which taught, as Ubertino da Casale says that Cecilia of Florence did, “the whole art of the higher contemplation.”

“As I walked,” said the Blessed Angela, “by the way of penitence, I took eighteen spiritual steps before I came to know the imperfections of my life.” This is the first sentence of the book of Conversion and Penitence which analyses in detail the changes through which she passed on her way to complete self-knowledge and self-adjustment. Those “eighteen steps” extended over many years. When they began, Angela was living luxuriously, as a married woman, in her husband’s house. When they ended, she was a poor widow vowed to the religious life; stripped of every superfluity, everything that would entangle her in the web of appearance, apt in contemplation, companioned by visions, esteemed as a teacher and an ecstatic, and the centre of a group of disciples. Her inner life, during these years of ascent, of hard and difficult growth, seems to have been a life of bitter and almost continuous struggle. Even after the preliminary steps of repentance were over, and her visionary powers had developed, the new spiritual ideals demanded of her ever more difficult renunciations. We see her, as we read the wonderful memoirs of her years of penitence, perpetually flung to and fro between adoration and contrition; as first one element and then the other of her complex personality took the upper hand. In her long and slow ascent towards the stars, she alternately experienced the sunshine and the shade.

From the turmoil which surrounded the hard re-making of Angela’s character, there emerged two great principles round which her subsequent life and teaching were to be grouped. The first was poverty, the second was self-knowledge. Naturally her instinct for poverty would be fostered by her Franciscan environment; but it is an instinct implicit in the mystical temperament, and not peculiar to the Poor Man of Assisi. Mystics know that possessions dissipate the energy which they need for other and more real things; that they must give up ownership, the verb “to have,” if they are to attain the freedom which they seek, and all the fullness of the verb “to be.” Thus Jacopone in his great ode expressed a universal spiritual law:

“Povertate è nulla avere

e nulla cosa poi volere;

ed omne cosa possedere

en spirito de libertate.”

It cost Angela many struggles before she fully accepted and acted upon this truth, and attained that which she calls the “liberty of poverty.” Self-knowledge, that hard essential of the soul’s re-education which Richard of St. Victor, and afterwards St. Catherine of Siena, made the starting-point of all mysticism, she recognized from the first as the true objective towards which her hard penances and long meditations must tend.

The eighteen “steps,” then, exhibit with extraordinary honesty her gradual progress in these two arts of self-knowledge and renunciation. At the first step, as we have seen, she was by something—we know not what—startled into attention to the real, and terrified by the vision of her own naked reality stripped of its pleasant veils and self-deceits. Her first reaction to this vision was avoidance. She was ashamed to look her sins in the face, or confess them. But having prayed to St. Francis, she was led by a dream—the form under which her unconscious mind most frequently controlled her—to seek a Franciscan friar and make a general confession of her sins. She performed his penance loyally, and became increasingly contrite for her faults: the sense of Divine Mercy touching her, and evoking an ever more humble and repentant grief. By the eighth step this contrition had become love, the passion for perfection triumphing over the hatred of imperfection. By that contemplation of the Cross which was specially dear to Franciscan devotion, and is the subject of one of Jacopone’s most splendid poems, she was led into an ever deeper understanding of the mystery of redemption by pain. Angela was now definitely committed to the mystic way. “In this beholding of the Cross,” she says, “I burned with the fire of love and remorse: so that standing before that Cross I divested myself of everything and offered myself to Him ... and the aforesaid fire compelled me, and I had no power to resist.” The special form which her renunciation took—that of a vow of chastity in deed and thought—suggests the direction in which her chief temptations lay; and this deduction is made more probable by the emotional quality of her visionary experience, in which the repressed ardours of her temperament found relief.

At the ninth step, this instinct for renunciation achieved more complete expression. “Enlightened and instructed”—doubtless by some member of the spiritual group—she learned that nothing less than a total sacrifice of friends, kindred, possessions, her very self, would serve her if she wished to tread the Way of Holy Cross. But in her acceptance of this bitter truth we still see something of the vanity, self-importance and narrow egotism of the old Angela. This is the one passage in all her writings which every one knows, and by which she is generally, and most unfairly, judged.

“I elected to walk on the thorny path which is the path of tribulation. So I began to put aside the fine clothing and adornments which I had, and the most delicate food, and also the covering of my head. But as yet, to do all these things was hard, and shamed me, because I did not feel much love for God, and was living with my husband. So that it was a bitter thing to me when anything offensive was said or done to me; but I bore it as patiently as I could. In that time, and by God’s will, there died my mother, who was a great hindrance to me in following the way of God; my husband died likewise; and in a short time there also died all my children. And because I had begun to follow the aforesaid way, and had prayed God to rid me of them, I had great consolation of their deaths, although I also felt some grief; wherefore, because God had shown me this grace, I imagined that my heart was in the heart of God and His will and His heart in my heart.”

This unfortunate paragraph outweighs for many minds the whole of Angela’s subsequent life and achievements. I do not deny that, taken alone, it appears to be a monument of spiritual egotism. But we must remember that it represents, not Angela the peaceful mystic, but Angela the worried and storm-tossed penitent at the most difficult moment of her career. The emotional centre of her life had shifted. An inexorable inner voice now urged her to a total concentration on God, and she knew that the way of penance and renunciation was her only hope. Yet living in a thoroughly discordant, thoroughly unspiritual environment, hemmed in on all sides by conventional existence and unsympathetic surroundings, this way seemed impossible to follow in its completeness; for she was not one of those who are able to harmonize the demands of both worlds. Moreover, these words were written by one who had long outlived the human sorrow which, as she says here and in another place, she felt at these accumulated bereavements. Now, looking back and seeing her past existence spread out before her, she recognized even this awful and drastic series of deprivations as a necessary factor in the life to which she was called.

After all, it is fair to acknowledge that family affection is not the strongest point in the character of the mystical saints. In the interests of their vocation, they are always ready to leave father, mother, brothers, and sisters; and moreover there is evangelical authority for this attitude. They are specialists, and are therefore bound, in the interests of the race, to give up many things which other men must develop and preserve. Artists are under much the same necessity. The vitality which we diffuse amongst many interests and loves, these must concentrate on the one object of their quest. Hence St. Francis himself flung his family aside without scruple when it came to the parting of the ways. Hence Jacopone da Todi was warned that even spiritual friendships must be held lightly by the pilgrim on the way of the Cross. Angela was only following in their footsteps, though she doubtless expressed herself with unnecessary and ill-regulated vigour, when she recognized human ties and human affections as possible impediments of the spiritual life. An easy capitulation to love and friendship in their most engrossing aspects seems always to have been her standing danger. It caused her in later life to say that she “feared love more than all other things”; even regarding with suspicion the deep affection which unites teacher and disciples, or two fellow-initiates of the contemplative life.

It was after her release from the duties of family life, and her more complete concentration on the ascetic life, that her visionary powers began to develop. At first they were little more than waking dreams of a commonplace kind; imaginary pictures of the Passion, the Crucifix, the Sacred Heart, such as have been experienced by innumerable Catholic saints. These vivid symbolic presentations of Divine love moved Angela to greater and more heroic heights of penitential love; and the passion for complete evangelical poverty came on her with renewed force. Her possessions enchained her, and she knew it. She made many efforts to screw herself up bit by bit to those heights of renunciation which St. Francis seems to have reached almost without effort.

“For this cause—namely, to have the liberty of poverty—I journeyed to Rome, to pray the Blessed Peter that he would obtain for me the grace of true poverty. It seemed to me at last that I could not sufficiently do penance whilst I was possessed of worldly things ... so I determined to forsake everything. In my imagination I had a great desire to become poor, and such was my zeal, that I often feared to die before I attained this state of poverty. On the other hand, I was assailed by temptations, which whispered to me that I was still young, that begging for alms might lead me into shame and danger; that if I did this, I should die of hunger, cold, and nakedness. Moreover, all my friends dissuaded me from it. But at last Divine mercy sent a great illumination into my heart, which, as I believed then and do now, I shall never lose even in eternity.... So then I did resolve in good earnest.”

Here is the final, deliberate act of will: the turning once for all from the unreal to the real—under whatever form the charms of unreality appear to the growing self—which all mystics have to make. It was Angela’s eleventh step. Her mystical powers were now developing rapidly. They showed themselves in visions, dreams, and ecstasies. Not all of these, it is true, can be accepted as marks of spiritual growth: for some clearly represent the re-emergence under religious symbols of old emotions and desires. But the deep and vivid intuitions of spiritual realities which came to her more and more frequently, show that a steady sublimation of those emotions and desires was in progress, and that they tended more and more towards supersensual ends.

At the fifteenth step, with truly Franciscan thoroughness—though, oddly enough, the Friars Minor whom she consulted forbade her to do it—she distributed the whole of her possessions amongst the poor. “Because methought I could not keep anything for myself without greatly offending Him who did thus enlighten me.” With this crucial act she seems to have attained at last the true and full state of illumination. “Then,” she says, “I began to feel the sweetness of God in my heart”: that which other mystics have called the “sense of the Presence.” Also, “I began to have understanding of the visions and the words”; a new spiritual lucidity running side by side with the symbolic pictures and imaginary voices that she saw and heard with the inner eye and ear. This, too, is normal and characteristic. From this point, then, we must read the book of Visions and Consolations side by side with the book of Penances if we would understand Angela’s inner life; for these two forms of experience, which she has unfortunately chosen to treat separately, alternated with one another.

In the time of her total acceptance of holy poverty, Angela seems to have been living in a state of almost hermit-like simplicity with one companion, the Blessed Paschalina of Foligno; whom at first she found a “weariness,” but afterwards discovered to be a fellow traveller on the Mystic Way. Some years had now passed since her conversion; and she was already accepted—perhaps indeed celebrated—as a religious teacher among the members of the Spiritual group. Definitely vowed to the service of the Franciscan Order, she seems soon to have become like St. Catherine of Siena, St. Catherine of Genoa, and many other women mystics, the centre of a group of adoring disciples or “spiritual sons.” Yet her inner life was still in a state of confusion, the remaking of her character was still in progress. She was flung perpetually to the extremes of joy and anguish. She would rise to great heights of mystical passion “filled with the fire and fervour of Divine love,” only to fall back to her old temptations. The repressed instinctive life began to take its revenge, and tortured her by vicious suggestions which she had never known before. “I would have chosen rather to be roasted than to endure such pains.” Also the great strain put upon her nervous system by the growing spiritual faculties resulted in absolute physical illness, as has been the case with many of the mystical saints. “The torments of my body,” she says, “were veritably numberless. There remained not one of my members that was not grievously tormented, nor was I ever free from pain, infirmity, or weariness.”

We need not be afraid to recognize in this struggle a reflection of the stresses and difficulties—some physical—which attend on the complete sublimation of man’s psychic life; especially in persons of a strongly emotional temperament. In Angela’s case the visions and dreams that accompanied it assure us of the character of the crisis through which she was passing. Many of her symptoms at this time were undoubtedly hysterical. She cried aloud when she heard the name of God, and fell into a fever on seeing a picture of the Passion of Christ. Her tears were perpetual, and often she longed to tear herself in pieces. Unfortunately Franciscan piety of the more extreme sort encouraged emotional extravagances of this kind, as we may see by the account of Angela’s contemporaries given in the “Little Flowers,” and failed to appreciate Jacopone’s profound distinction between ordered and disordered love. It also gave unqualified approval to those public and grotesque acts of self-abasement which play so large a part in the legend of his penitence; and here again, Angela was true to type. Still grieved by the memory of her old hypocrisies, made more poignant by the reverence she received from her disciples, she went through the city and open places with meat and fishes hanging from her neck, and crying, “I am that woman full of evil and dissembling, slave of all vices and iniquities, who did good deeds that she might obtain honour among men; and especially when I caused those bidden to my house to be told that I ate neither fish nor meat, and—being the while greedy, gluttonous, and drunken—feigned to desire nought but what was needful.”

Those familiar with the lives of the mystics will remember many parallels to this state of conflict: the ups and downs of Suso, his alternate illumination and despair, his great self-denials balanced by foolish little sins: the thirty years during which Teresa—already, like Angela, regarded as a great example—swayed between her mystical vocation and the claims of a more normal life. In Angela this inward battle culminated, she says, “some little while before the time of the pontificate of Celestino”—that is to say about 1294, when she was forty-six—and endured for more than two years. In it, in addition to bodily and mental agony, she was humiliated by recurrent temptations to sensual indulgence. Her depression was extreme, and her intellect often so clouded that she could not even recall the idea of God to her mind. It was her last lesson in humility and self-knowledge—an excellent antidote to the dangers of professional sanctity—and answered to that terrible period of final purification which other mystics have called the “Dark Night of the Soul.”

From this last purgation, in which all the elements of her character seemed flung back into the melting-pot, she emerged into that condition of spiritual equilibrium, of perfect harmony with transcendent reality, which is known to mystic writers as the Unitive Way. “A divine change,” she says, “took place in my soul, which neither saint nor angel could describe or explain. Wherefore I say again that it seems to me evil speaking or blasphemy if I try and tell of it.” Again, “I came not to this state of my own self, but was led and drawn thereto by God; so that though of my own self I should not have known how to desire or ask for it, I am now in that state continually.” Though the capacity for pain never left her, and is implied in many of her greatest revelations—for, like all the great Catholic mystics, she found the Christian paradox of joyous suffering at the very centre of truth—yet the last twelve years of her life seem to have been years of profound inward peace. “He hath placed within my soul,” she said, “a state which changes little, and I possess God in such fullness that I am no longer in the state in which I used to be; but I walk in such perfect peace of heart and mind that I am content in all things.”

It was that state of which Jacopone has written:

“La guerra è terminata

de le virtú battaglia,

de la mente travaglia

cosa nulla contende.

La mente è renovata

vestita a tal entaglia,

de tal ferro è la maglia

feruta no l’offerende.”

Angela has two claims to the title of a great mystic: that of her life, which we have briefly considered, and that of the revelations and experiences which she reports; our chief evidence of the unique nature of her consciousness. What then was the nature of these visions and revelations? There are signs in her book that she ran through the whole gamut of mystical experience. She practised, and described, all those degrees of contemplative prayer which are analyzed by St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross. She heard interior voices. She saw visions. She was an ecstatic. Moreover, at least after her achievement of spiritual equilibrium—for it would be unfair to take into account the morbid states from which she suffered during the period of readjustment—her ecstasies were of that rare and supernal kind which, far from being signs of mental or nervous disease, actually renew and invigorate the physical life of those who experience them. There is a beautiful passage in the life of St. Catherine of Genoa in which she is described as coming joyous and rosy-faced from the ecstatic encounter with God’s love. So Angela says: “Because of the change in my body, therefore I was not able to conceal my state from my companion, or from other people with whom I consorted; because at times my face was all resplendent and rosy, and my eyes shone like candles. When the soul is assured of God and refreshed by His presence, the body also receives health, satisfaction, and nobility.”

Her revelations were of two kinds. First we have a long series of “imaginary visions”: pictures, no doubt representing deep and imageless intuitions, resulting as it were from some communion with reality, but taking their form—as distinct from their content—from the memory and imagination of the visionary. Though many of these must be classed as dreams, and some indeed were received in sleep, others were definite experiences; seen, as she says, with the eyes of the mind, far more clearly than anything can be seen with the eyes of the body. Nevertheless we are bound to consider them less as objective revelations than as vivid artistic reconstructions; symbols of something that she has felt and known. Angela’s religious beliefs and romantic leanings are both clearly reflected in them. Some deal with the physical accidents of the Passion—always a favourite subject of the mediæval visionary—and these closely resemble the series of Passion-pictures seen by Julian of Norwich. Others are inspired by her devotion to the Eucharist. One or two seem, like the Visions of St. Gertrude, to anticipate the later cult of the Sacred Heart. In virtue of these visions Angela belongs to the great family of women Catholic mystics; women possessing a rich emotional life, and, largely by means of that emotional life, actualizing and expressing their communion with the spiritual world.

We see this emotional character clearly in one of Angela’s most celebrated experiences; the one of all others which seems to have set the seal on her career as a religious teacher, and which is placed at the beginning of her book of visions and revelations, though there was no vision involved in it. I mean the beautiful scene in which she talked with the Holy Ghost, walking on “the narrow road which leads upward to Assisi, and is beyond Spello.” That sense of heavenly intimacy, of divine communion, of a destiny pressed upon her from the spiritual sphere, which then took possession of her consciousness, was translated by the surface-mind of the natural Angela—whose nearest parallels to such an experience were found amongst the emotional incidents of human love—into the wonderful imaginary conversation in which, as she climbs the path between the vineyards, she is wooed by the Holy Spirit, and assured of His peculiar interest and affection. “I will bear thee company and speak with thee all the way,” He says to her. “I will make no end to My speaking, and thou wilt not be able to attend to anything save Me.” “Then did He begin to speak the following words to me, which persuaded me to love after this manner, ‘My daughter, who art sweet to Me, My daughter who art My temple, My beloved daughter, do thou love Me, for I love thee greatly, and much more than thou lovest Me.’ And very often He said to me, ‘Bride and daughter! sweet art thou to Me; I love thee better than any other in the valley of Spoleto.’ These and other similar things did He say to me. Then when I heard these words, I counted my sins, and I considered my faults; how that I was unworthy of so great a love. And I began to doubt these words; for which cause, my soul said to Him who had spoken to it, ‘If thou wert indeed the Holy Spirit, thou wouldest not speak thus; for it is not right or proper, because I am weak and frail and might grow vainglorious thereat.’ He answered, ‘Think and see if thou couldst become vainglorious because of the things for which thou art now made glad....’ Then I tried to grow vainglorious, that I might prove if He spoke truth; and I began to look at the vineyards, that I might learn the folly of my words. And wherever I looked, He said to me, ‘Behold and see! this is My creation’: and at this I felt ineffable delight.”

This is the poetry of mysticism, an artistic reduction of supernal intuitions, and is to be interpreted in poetic terms. But there is another, and rarer, form of spiritual perception: that imageless intuition of pure truth, which St. Teresa and other mystics call intellectual, but which would be better named metaphysical vision. Angela’s real importance amongst the mystics comes from the fact that she possessed this power in a high degree of development. In virtue of her immediate apprehensions of transcendent reality, she belongs to the rarest and highest type of mystic seer: a class in which Plotinus holds perhaps the first place, and of which Ruysbroeck is the most conspicuous mediæval example. The poetry of Jacopone da Todi shows us that he too knew the secret of those strange astounding regions, “beyond the polar circle of the mind,” where Angela tasted of unconditioned reality, and the language in which he describes them often reminds us of her. It is an interesting question, whether these two great Franciscan contemplatives directly influenced one another, or must be regarded as the twin stars of a school of “Seraphic wisdom” which taught the deepest mysteries of the spiritual life.

There are eight of these great visionary experiences recorded in Angela’s book. In them she says that she apprehended God successively under the attributes of Goodness, Beauty, Power, Wisdom, Love, Justice; and that after this she beheld the totality of the Godhead “darkly”—a way of describing her perceptions which is of course traceable to the “Divine darkness” of Dionysius the Areopagite. Finally she beheld it, “as clearly as is possible in this life.” All these visions seem to have come to her when she was in a state of ecstasy or trance. She speaks of being “exalted in spirit,” “rapt to the first elevation”; lifted to wholly new levels of consciousness. She describes them as well as she can, yet plainly she is only able to tell us a fraction of her experience. Over and over again she declares the hopeless inadequacy of human speech, the impossibility of “speaking as she saw.” Her state is like that of Dante at the end of the Paradiso, save that her wings were fitted for these flights.

“I beheld the ineffable fullness of God; but I can relate nothing of it, save that I have seen the fullness of Divine Wisdom, wherein is all goodness.” Again, “inasmuch as this was a supernatural thing, I cannot express it in words.” “Many other things were clearly set forth to me; but I neither can nor will relate them.” “All that I say of this, seems to me to be nothing. I feel as though I offended in speaking of it, for so greatly does the Good exceed all my words that my speech seems to be but blasphemy.”

Those things, however, which she does contrive to relate, have an astonishing suggestive quality, a great philosophic sweep, combined with an intimate appeal to our own deepest intuitions, which place them, so far as mystical history is concerned, on a level with some of the greatest passages in Jacopone da Todi and in Ruysbroeck; and in my opinion far beyond the more celebrated intellectual visions of St. Teresa.

Thus she says, “the eyes of my soul were opened and I beheld the plenitude of God, by which I understood the whole world both here and beyond the sea, the abyss, and all other things. And in this I beheld nothing save the Divine Power, in a way that is utterly indescribable, so that through the greatness of its wonder the soul cried with a loud voice, saying, ‘The whole world is full of God.’ Wherefore I understood that the world is but a little thing; and I saw that the power of God was above all things, and the whole world was filled with it.”

Here we are reminded of Julian of Norwich—“He showed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel nut. I looked thereon with the eye of my understanding and thought; What may this be? and it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made.”

“After I had seen the power of God, His will and His justice,” says Angela, again, “I was lifted higher still; and then I no longer beheld the power and will as before. But I beheld a Thing, as fixed and stable as it was indescribable; and more than this I cannot say, save that I have often said already, namely, that it was all good. And although my soul beheld not love, yet when it saw that indescribable Thing, it was itself filled with indescribable joy, so that it was taken out of the state it was in before, and placed in this great and ineffable state. I know not whether I was then in the body or out of the body. It is enough to say that all the other visions seemed to me less great than this.”

Again, “One time in Lent ... the eyes of my soul were opened, and I saw Love advancing gently towards me, and I saw the beginning but not the end. There seemed to me only a continuation and an eternity thereof, so that I cannot tell its likeness nor colour; but directly this Love reached me I beheld all these things more clearly with the eyes of the soul than I could do with the eyes of the body. This Love came towards me after the manner of a sickle. Not that there was any actual and measurable likeness; but when first it appeared to me it did not give itself to me in such abundance as I expected, but a part was withdrawn. Therefore I say, after the manner of a sickle. Then I was filled with love and a great satisfaction, but although it satisfied me, it generated within me so great a hunger that all my members were loosened; and my soul fainted with longing to attain to the All.”

I give one more, particularly interesting to English students because of its parallels with our own great mystical work, The Cloud of Unknowing: “There was a time when my soul was exalted to behold God with so much clearness that never before had I beheld Him so distinctly. But I did not here see Love so fully; rather I lost that which I had before, and was left without love. Afterwards I saw Him darkly, and this darkness was the greatest blessing that could be imagined, and thought can conceive nothing equal to this.... Here likewise I see all Good.... The soul delights unspeakably therein, yet it beholds nothing that can be spoken by the tongue or conceived by the heart. It sees nothing yet sees all, because it beholds the Good darkly; and the more darkly and secretly the Good is seen, the more certain it is, and excellent above all things. Wherefore all other good that can be seen or imagined is doubtless less than this, and even when the soul sees the Divine wisdom, power and will of God (which I have seen marvellously at other times), it is all less than this most certain Good. Because this is the whole, and those other things are but part of the whole.... But seen thus darkly, the Good brings no smile to the lips, no fervour of love to the heart; for the body does not tremble or become moved and distressed as at other times; because the soul sees, and not the body, which rests and sleeps, and the tongue is dumb and speechless. All the many ineffable kindnesses which God has shown me, all the sweet words and divine sayings and doings, are so much less than this that I saw in the darkness, that I put no hope in them.... But to this most high power of beholding God ineffably through great darkness, my spirit was uplifted three times only and no more.”

“This cloud,” says The Cloud of Unknowing, of that same Divine Dark, “is evermore between thee and thy God ... therefore shape thyself to abide in this darkness so long as thou mayest, evermore crying after Him whom thou lovest, for if ever thou shalt feel Him or see Him (in such sort as He may be seen or felt in this life) it behoveth always to be in this cloud or darkness.” So Angela: “When I behold and am in that Good, although I seem to see nothing yet I see all things.” In this achievement she reaches the goal of the mystic experience, the ecstatic communion with the Absolute One.

I have called her a Franciscan mystic. If by Franciscan mysticism we mean that exquisite sense of the Divine immanence in nature, that poetic temperament, that peculiar and elusive charm, which we associate with St. Francis himself; then, perhaps, there seems little that is characteristically Franciscan in Angela. But if, looking past the special character of the Founder, we try to seize the essence of that secret he was seeking to impart, then, allowing for the inevitable development which any idea undergoes when it enters the world of change, we may regard her as a typical Franciscan of the second generation. She was indeed conditioned at all points by the Franciscan environment in which her religious life developed; that ardent society of “Spirituals,” mostly recruited from the devout laity, which sprang up in her time in the Italian cities. This society, with its advanced contemplative tradition, its demand for a close imitation of Christ, was a forcing-house of the mystical life. Angela shows her close connection with it in the character of her penitence, in her passionate devotion to the Cross and Passion, and also in the metaphysical quality of her greatest mystical apprehensions. These three outstanding characteristics, corresponding in a general sense to the three great phases of the mystical life, are again seen in the poetry in which her contemporary Jacopone discloses to us the stages of anguished contrition and of uncontrolled fervour through which he moved to the heights of union with God. These two great converts and initiates of love illuminate and explain one another: for in them we see an identical tradition of the spiritual life interpreted by different temperaments. For each the Way is an education in love, and Jacopone speaks for both of them when he says of it:

“Distinguese l’amore en terzo stato:

bono, meglio, sommo, sublimato;

lo sommo sí vole essere amato

senza compagnia.”

III
JULIAN OF NORWICH.

All that we know directly of Julian of Norwich—the most attractive, if not the greatest of the English mystics—comes to us from her book, The Revelations of Divine Love, in which she has set down her spiritual experiences and meditations. Like her contemporaries, Walter Hilton and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, she lives only in her vision and her thought. Her external circumstances are almost unknown to us, but some of these can be recovered, or at least deduced, from the study of contemporary history and art; a source of information too often neglected by those who specialize in religious literature, yet without which that literature can never wholly be understood.

Julian, who was born about 1342, in the reign of Edward III, grew up among the surroundings and influences natural to a deeply religious East Anglian gentlewoman at the close of the Middle Ages. Though she speaks of herself as “unlettered,” which perhaps means unable to write, she certainly received considerable education, including some Latin, before her Revelations were composed. Her known connection with the Benedictine convent of Carrow, near Norwich, in whose gift was the anchorage to which she retired, suggests that she may have been educated by the nuns; and perhaps made her first religious profession at this house, which was in her time the principal “young ladies’ school” of the Norwich diocese, and a favourite retreat of those adopting the religious life. During her most impressionable years she must have seen in their freshness some of the greatest creations of Gothic art, for in Norfolk both architecture and painting had been carried to the highest pitch of excellence by the beginning of the fourteenth century. The great East Anglian school of miniature painting had already produced its masterpieces and was in its decadence. But if we look at these masterpieces—the wonderful manuscripts illuminated at Gorleston near Yarmouth, and other religious houses of the district—and remember that these are merely the surviving examples of an art which decorated the walls of the churches as richly as the pages of its service-books, we begin to realize the sort of iconography, the view of the Christian landscape, from which Julian’s mental furniture was derived. Some of the best of these manuscripts are in the British Museum; and those who wish to understand the atmosphere in which the mediæval mystics flourished would do well to study Julian’s Revelations in their light. There they will find expressed in design that mixture of gaiety and awe, that balanced understanding of the natural and the divine, which is one of her strong characteristics. She, like these artists, can afford to wreathe her images of supernatural mysteries in homely details drawn from the common life. Moreover, the more pictorial her revelations become, the more closely they approximate to the pictures in the psalters and Books of Hours of her time. From this source came her detailed visions of incidents in the Passion—the blood that she saw running down under the garland of thorns, the dried, discoloured body, the gaping wounds, and “rueful and wasted” face of Christ—and those of the Blessed Virgin as a “little maiden,” as “Mater Dolorosa,” and as the crowned Queen of Heaven. All these were common subjects with the miniature artists and wall painters of the time, and the form which they took in Julian’s revelations must be attributed to a large extent to unconscious memory of those artists’ works.

Another more inward aspect of contemporary religion has also affected her: the cult of the Holy Name of Jesus. This beautiful devotion was specially characteristic of English personal religion in the late Middle Ages, and is strongly marked in the writings of the mystics; especially Hilton and Rolle. The great popularity in England of the hymn Jesu Dulcis Memoria, and the many vernacular imitations of it current in Julian’s day, helped in the spread of this cult; with which was associated that intense and highly emotional preoccupation with the physical accidents of the Passion so constantly reflected in her visionary experience. “O good Jesu!” cried Rolle, “my heart thou hast bound in love of Thy Name and now I cannot but sing it”; and he spoke not for himself only but for all the best religious lyrists of the early fourteenth century, whose characteristic mood was that of personal, intimate, and sorrowing love of Jesus.

“Sweet Jesu, now will I sing

To thee, a song of love longing.

Teach me, Lord, thy love song

With sweet tears ever among.”

Thus, one of these Middle English poets could write:

“Jesu, well owe I to love thee

For that me showed the roodë tree,

The crown of thorns, the nailës three,

The sharp spear that through-stong thee,

Jesu of love is sooth tokening

Thy head down-bowed to love-kissing,

Thine arms spread to love-clipping,

Thy side all open to love-showing.”

Of such poetry as this—with which she was probably familiar—Julian often reminds us; and sometimes her parallels with it are close. Thus she says in her tenth Revelation: “Then with a glad cheer our Lord looked into his side, and beheld rejoicing. With his sweet looking he led forth the understanding of his creature by the same wound into his side within. And then he showed a fair delectable place and large enough for all mankind that shall be saved to rest in peace and in love.... And with this our good Lord said full blissfully: Lo! how that I loved thee.” In such passages as this, in her highly visualized meditations on the Crown of Thorns and the Precious Blood, and in such phrases as “I liked none other heaven than Jesus, who shall be my bliss when I am there,” and other ardent expressions of religious love, she is speaking the common devotional language and using the common devotional imagery of her own day. Hence those merely visionary experiences with which her book opens and which form by far the least important part of it, can be accounted for as the result of unconscious memory, weaving new vivid pictures from the current religious and artistic conceptions in which she had been reared. A correspondence has indeed been detected between the order of these fifteen “showings,” and the fifteen prayers on the Passion known as the “XV Os,” which occur in the Sarum Horæ. They are, in fact, dreams of which any devout and imaginative person of that time was capable; and need not be taken too seriously when estimating the character of Julian’s mysticism.

This, then, was the religious, artistic, and emotional environment in which she grew up; an environment to which new sombre colour and new realization of pain had been given by the Black Death which swept through Norfolk when she was a child. More important, however, than any external influence, was the part her own temperament played in her special apprehension of God. It is plain that she was from the first of an intensely religious, meditative disposition. As a girl, she says, she asked of God three things. The first was, that she might have a keen realization of Christ’s Passion; because although she had great feeling of it, she desired more, and specially a bodily sight of His pains. The second was bodily sickness, much esteemed in the Middle Ages as a means of grace; and this she wished to suffer at thirty years of age. The third was, that as Saint Cecilia was pierced by three wounds, so she might be pierced with the three wounds of contrition, compassion, and eager longing towards God. The first two desires she forgot for a while; but the three wounds she prayed for continually. When she was thirty years old, the gift of sickness was granted her, and it was exactly such a sickness, “so hard as unto death,” as she had asked: a fact which tells us a good deal about Julian’s mental make-up, revealing her as the possessor of an extremely active “psychic background.” By the law of association we may be sure that her illness brought back to mind the other forgotten prayer, for a deeper insight into, and vision of, the Passion. It is supposed that she was at this time already an anchoress, shut in that tiny room against the south wall of St. Julian’s church at Norwich, of which the foundations can still be traced. But nothing in her own account suggests this, and the presence of her mother and “other persons” round her sick bed is rather against it. At the same time, a single woman of strong religious bent is hardly likely in that period to have remained in the world till she was thirty. Julian was perhaps a Benedictine nun at Carrow, and after her vision sought a life of greater seclusion and austerity at St. Julian’s, which was the property of the Carrow convent. The anchoress was often, but not always, a professed nun: and though no reminiscences of cloister life can be traced in Julian’s writings, such a life would account in part for the theological knowledge and familiarity with dogmatic language which those writings display.

Julian’s account of what happened in her illness is extremely precise, and makes this part of her revelation an interesting psychological document. She fell ill early in May 1373; and on the fourth night was thought to be dying and given the last sacraments. For two days more she lingered, quite conscious and expecting death; and early in the morning of the third day, lost all feeling in her lower limbs. When the priest came to help her agony she was already speechless; but made her nurses prop her upright in bed, so that she could fix her failing eyes on the crucifix he held towards her. This she could see, though everything else grew dim to her sight. Then her head fell on one side, breath failed, and she was sure that the end had come.

With this conviction and acceptance of death, the stress of the involuntary struggle for life seems suddenly to have ended. She had passed into a new state of consciousness, in which her mind was clear and her body free of pain, “as whole as ever before or after.” In this condition her old and forgotten desires came back into her mind. The first, for sickness, had been granted. Now, she was impelled to ask the other, for a keener realization of the Passion; and this buried wish, surging back abruptly into consciousness, became the starting-point of her mystical experiences. We cannot deny that these experiences had their pathological side. Her physical and psychic state were abnormal. With the perfect candour and common sense which add so much to our delight in her, she confesses that she at first mistook her revelations for delirium, and said to the monk who afterwards visited her that she had raved. There are, however, in these revelations, as in all visionary experience of any value, two distinct sides. One is the visual or auditory hallucination—the vision seen, the voice heard—the materials for which clearly come from the unconscious mind of the visionary, and can generally be traced to their source. The other is the intuitive spiritual teaching that accompanies it, and often far exceeds the visionary’s own knowledge or power. Julian, in her account of what happened to her, keeps these two elements perfectly distinct. “All the blessed teaching of our Lord God,” she says, “was shown to me by three parts—that is to say, by the bodily sight, by words formed in mine understanding, and by ghostly sight.”

The bodily vision, as she expressly affirms, she did not ask for; and here she agrees with all true mystics, who invariably distrust these quasi-physical experiences. Yet it was in such visionary hallucination that her revelations began. With her eyes still fixed on the crucifix, and apparently at the point of death, she suddenly saw red blood running down from the Crown of Thorns, as if in answer to her prayer for more feeling of the Passion of Christ. The Cross had become for her, as the shining pewter dish did for Jacob Boehme, or the running stream for St. Ignatius, a focal point on which to concentrate; and so a door to a deeper state of consciousness. Spiritual insight went side by side with the bodily vision, which was accepted without question by Julian as a direct message from Christ to strengthen her, “lest she be tempted of fiends before she died”; for in spite of her intuitive philosophic sense, we must remember that she lived in imagination in that Gothic world of concrete devils and angels which the cathedral sculptors reproduced. The double experience—outward pictures of the Passion, and inward teachings of the nature of God—continued for five hours, whilst she lay in a state of trance which her mother mistook for death. “The first began early in the morn, about the hour of four; and they lasted, showing by process full fair and steadily, each following other, till it was nine of the day overpassed.” In those five hours Julian received the whole substance of her teaching, afterwards divided by her into sixteen “revelations of love.” When they had passed, normal consciousness returned, or, as she says, she “fell to herself,” and knew that she must live. She lay for some time in weakness and depression, tormented by evil dreams; but she recovered from her sickness, and lived to a great age. Her careful account of that illness, and of the psychic experiences accompanying it, helps us to understand those experiences from the psychological as well as the mystical point of view. Seen thus, they are not unique; but classic examples of a type which turns up from time to time in medical history. Thus Dr. Edwin Ash, in Faith and Suggestion, has described a case which strikingly resembles that of Julian. Here, too, at the crisis of an apparently hopeless illness, the patient fell into a death-like trance, had visions of a religious type, and emerged cured. Her mind was far inferior to that of Julian, hence her experience had less beauty and significance and was of little value for other souls. Nevertheless, its general outline forces us to acknowledge that it belongs to the same class, and helps us to interpret the facts which lie behind Julian’s words.

Julian’s revelations have come down to us in two distinct versions, which have both been edited for modern readers. The best known is the long version, reproduced in Miss Warrack’s delightful edition: but our earliest manuscript of this only goes back to the sixteenth century, at least a hundred years after Julian’s death. Another, much shorter, is found in one fifteenth-century manuscript in the British Museum, and this has been edited by Mr. Dundas Herford, who claims—I think with good reason—that it represents Julian’s first account of her visions, written or told while they were still fresh in her mind, and before her memory of them had been coloured by long meditation, or by the theological learning which she certainly acquired in later life. It briefly sets forth her chain of visions, and the “ghostly words” and inward teachings that accompanied them. These, she says, she has set down for the help of her fellow-Christians and because she saw it to be God’s will. “But,” she adds, “God forbid that ye should say or take it so, that I am a teacher: for I mean not so! No! I never meant so! For I am a woman, unlearned, feeble and frail; but I know well that this that I say, I have it of the showing of Him that is Sovereign Teacher.” In the long version these deprecatory words are omitted. Julian no longer fears to be regarded as a teacher. On the contrary, she speaks with a gentle authority as one whose position is assured. She is now, without doubt, the established anchoress; the devout woman whose special vocation is known, and to whom people come for spiritual teaching. Moreover, she tells us in this book that only twenty years, less three months, after her vision was she inwardly taught the importance of all its details, however “misty and indifferent” they seemed. She was therefore past fifty when she wrote or dictated it; and it contains the fruit, not only of her first vivid experience, but of all the ponderings by which the last atom of significance was extracted from it, the “enlightenings and touchings of the same Spirit,” which kept the revelation fresh in after life.

As she says herself—for her introspective powers were remarkable—the “first beginnings” and subsequent “ghostly teachings” at last became so merged in her understanding that she could not separate them. There is a parallel to this in the life of Boehme. He says that in the abnormal state which was induced by gazing at the polished pewter dish he “understood the Being of all Beings”—even as Julian “saw God in a Point”—but this stupendous revelation only left him dazed and inarticulate. Only after twelve years of meditation, during which he felt the seed of truth “unfolding within him like a young plant,” was he able to describe it.

When we compare the two versions of Julian’s work, we find many differences which remind us of this confession. Although the whole doctrine of the long book is really implied in the short book—for it is, in Boehme’s phrase, an unfolding of the plant from that one seed—we see that the most beautiful and poetical passages are found in the long version only. They are the fruit of meditation upon vision. The workings of Julian’s unconscious mind in her trance have only provided the raw material, as the inspiration of the poet gives only the crude beginnings of the poem. Moreover, with age her character deepened and grew richer. She used her talent to help other souls, and it increased. She studied, too, and found language of great subtlety and beauty in which to express her vision of truth. Though even the first version of her book shows theological knowledge which would put to shame most present-day Christians, in the later work this knowledge is much increased. Reading was part of the duty of an anchoress, being regarded as an essential element in the life of prayer; and intelligent reading has clearly nourished Julian’s deep meditations on the character of God. In her there was an almost perfect balance between the intellectual and the emotional life, and there are few women mystics of Whom we can say this.

The question of her literary sources is an interesting one. A careful examination of her revelations makes it plain that even when the short version was written, she was already acquainted with many theological conceptions; whilst the meditations with which the long version is enriched, and its fuller descriptions of her spiritual “Showings,” reveal her as possessing at least by middle life a considerable knowledge of the language of Augustinian theology and of the root-ideas of Christian mysticism. As used by her, many of these ideas have the special colour which was given to them by Meister Eckhart and his school; and suggest that Julian at one time or another had come into contact with the characteristically Dominican type of mysticism which is best known to us in the works of Suso and Tauler. In her teaching on sin—“I saw not sin, for I believe it hath no substance nor any part of being”—she is following, indeed almost quoting, Eckhart’s saying that “evil is nothing but a privation of being; not an effect, but a defect.” So, too, Eckhart’s daring assertion that sin has its place in the scheme—“Since God, in a way, also wills that I should have committed sins, I do not wish not to have committed them”—appears to be echoed in gentler form in Julian’s view of sin as a purifying scourge, and of the scars which it leaves on the redeemed soul as being “not wounds but worships.” Her beautiful saying that we are God’s bliss, “for in us He enjoyeth without end,” seems like a deduction from the Eckhartian paradox, “God needs me as much as I need Him.” She has received, perhaps from the same source, the antique mystical notion of the soul’s precession from and return to God. “The soul,” said Eckhart, “is created that it may flow back into the bottom of the bottomless fountain whence it came forth.” “Thus I understood,” says Julian, “that all His blessed children which be come out of Him by nature shall be brought again into Him by grace”; and again, “all kinds that He hath made to flow out of Him to work His will shall be restored and brought again into Him.” Here, again, the naked Eckhartian monism seems to be transmitted through a more human and more spiritual temperament. She agrees, too, with the German mystics in her doctrine of God as the “ground of the soul.” “Our soul is so deep-grounded in God and so endlessly treasured that we may not come to the knowing thereof till we have first knowing of God.... God is nearer to us than our own soul, for He is the ground in whom our soul standeth, and He is the mean that keepeth the substance and the sensuality together so that they shall never depart.” So Tauler says, “A man who verily desires to enter in will surely find God here, for God never separates Himself from this ground. God will be present with him and he will find and enjoy eternity here.”

Julian’s revelation was received in 1373, and the long text as we have it was written at some date after 1393. Eckhart had died in 1329, Tauler in 1361; and the great Ruysbroeck, whose mysticism owes much on its speculative side to Eckhart’s philosophy, in 1381. The influence of their teaching spread rapidly, and few preaching friars of an inward disposition can have escaped it. To these preaching friars was committed in the fourteenth century the special duty of giving solid theological teaching to nuns. This was commonly done by way of vernacular sermons and instructions, of which Tauler’s surviving sermons are types: and it was possibly through such instructions given in the Carrow convent that Julian obtained that peculiar knowledge of Dominican mysticism, those contacts with Augustinian and Victorine thought, on which the more philosophic side of her revelation seems to depend. The parallels with her great contemporary St. Catherine of Siena, which Professor Edmund Gardner has noted, are probably due to the fact that both women drew their ideas from some earlier source. Her likenesses to Ruysbroeck can also be accounted for. His Seven Cloisters, Kingdom of God’s Lovers, and Ornaments of the Spiritual Marriage were all completed before 1350, and knowledge of them would reach East Anglia quickly, through the Flemish colony established at Norwich. Several close correspondences with him can be traced in Julian’s work; especially her conception of God’s eternal thirst and love-longing, so similar to Ruysbroeck’s “hungry yet generous love of God,” and the opening phrase of her Third Revelation, “After this I saw God in a Point,” which reminds us of the great definition in the Seven Cloisters, “That Point in which all our lives find their end.” Julian thus represents the first emergence in English literature of a stream of tradition which is not represented in the classic school of English mysticism descended from Rolle. By this school she does not appear to have been greatly influenced; there is little in her that reminds us of it, or of that group of contemplatives who produced the Cloud of Unknowing and its companion works. Her true affinities are with the Christian Platonism which St. Augustine introduced into theology, and its developments in the works of Erigena and Eckhart. But when we have given full weight to the effects upon her work of oral teaching and of reading, the true originality of that work only becomes more manifest. Reading and teaching fed her speculative mind, and helped her to understand and express her own experience; but this experience in its essence was independent of intellectual knowledge. It was the fruit of a deeply mystical and poetic nature, brooding on the conception of God common to mediæval Christianity. Julian had in a high degree constructive religious genius; and for such a nature an evocative phrase is enough to waken the “ghostly sight.”

It is impossible in a short essay to give any full account of her teaching. That teaching is centred on her own ardent consciousness of God, as an all-transcending yet all-enclosing reality; a conception at once philosophic and practical. For Julian, as for the Platonists, God is the sum of the highest spiritual values—“He is all-thing that is good to my seeming, and all-thing that is good, it is He.” Her perception of the Divine Immanence is peculiarly intense, and expressed in the strongest terms. “God is kind (nature) in His being: that is to say, that goodness that is in kind, that is God. He is the ground, He is the substance, He is the same thing that is kind-head,” and again, “I saw full assuredly that our substance is in God, and also I saw that in our sensuality God is ... for it is His good pleasure to reign in our understanding blissfully, and sit in our soul restfully, and to dwell in our soul endlessly, us all working into Him.” But this vivid sense of Divine reality, as the very ground of being, is closely bound up with her devotion to the person of Christ. Her theological path, like her mystical experience, lay through the human to the Divine, through emotional realization of the Passion to intellectual vision of the Godhead. In the first revelation of all we get these two aspects of truth sharply contrasted; for there her vision of the bloodstained Crown of Thorns, with its intimate appeal to the heart, is balanced by her other interior sight of “the Godhead seen in mine understanding.” The long version of her book elaborates this simple intuition of the Deity into a very beautiful description of the Holy Trinity—always one of Julian’s favourite subjects—but the whole is really implied in the first brief statement, which strikes at once her characteristic chord of intimacy and awe, or, as she puts it, “the dread and the homeliness of God.” In the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity, which was never far from her thoughts, she found the link between these personal and impersonal apprehensions. That half-Platonic notion of Christ the Eternal Wisdom as “Mother” of the soul, which is one of her most original conceptions, here takes its place side by side with the other, more metaphysical intuition of that unconditioned Deity in whom “All-thing hath the Being.” “For all our life is in three: in the first we have our being, in the second we have our increasing, and in the third we have our fulfilling: the first is nature, the second is mercy, and the third is grace. For the first I understood that the high might of the Trinity is our Father, and the deep wisdom of the Trinity is our Mother, and the great love of the Trinity is our Lord: and all this we have in nature and in our substantial making.... All the fair working, and all the sweet kindly office of dearworthy motherhood is impropriated to the Second Person ... and all is one Love.”

This blend of personal and metaphysical vision is not unique. We find it again in the Franciscan contemplative, Angela of Foligno. But Julian’s nature is richer and more mellow, and the doctrine of love which she deduced from her experience is more profound. Here, in this harmonized consciousness of the most human and most philosophic aspects of religious experience, she is typical of Christian mysticism at its best. She avoids on the one hand the excessive intellectualism of the Neoplatonist, and on the other the unpleasant exuberance of the religious emotionalist, yet draws from the apprehensions of both the heart and the head all the elements needed to feed a full spiritual life. The human element brought in by Christianity, with all the emotional values belonging to it—however symbolic this side of contemplation must necessarily be—redeems philosophic mysticism from the clear coldness, the lofty superiority, that St. Augustine condemned in the Platonists. But, equally, it is the philosophic background, the austere worship of that trinity of Light, Life, and Love, in whom, as Julian says, we are clad more closely than a body in its clothes, which saves mystical fervour from its worst extravagances. Here she is and will ever be one of the safest guides to the contemplative life.

Another special quality of Julian’s teaching is its healthy, vigorous, affirmative character. The only two sins she sternly condemns—and she calls them not sins, but sickness—are sloth or lack of zest, and doubtful dread or lack of hope. Zest and hope she regards as essential factors in the life of the soul. The Light, Life, and Love which form her ultimate definition of triune Reality—the Mother, Brother, and Saviour, which are her nearest images for Christ’s relation with man—these are conceptions which kill the sort of pious moods that R. L. Stevenson called “dim, dem, and dowie.” God’s attitude to man is “courteous, glad, and merry,” and we do Him less honour by solemnity than by “cheer of mirth and joy.” To her, only the good is the true, and evil is a void, a lack of the only reality; a Platonic notion which has always been dear to the mystics. “In this naked word Sin,” says Julian, “our Lord brought to my mind generally all that is not good ... but I saw not sin, for I believe it hath no manner of substance nor no part of being, nor could it be known but by the pain it is cause of.” It follows that our attention should not be given to the avoidance or consideration of sin, but to the understanding and enjoyment of the good and the real. “The beholding of other men’s sins, it maketh as it were a thick mist before the eyes of the soul,” says Julian. Her strongest condemnation is given to morbid pondering of past sins and mistakes. “Right as by the courtesy of God He forgets our sins when we repent, right so will He that we forget our sin, and all our heaviness and all our doubtful dreads.” This world, after all, is only a nursery for heaven, and its inhabitants mostly spiritual babies who need not be taken too seriously. “I understood no higher stature in this life than childhood;” and the attitude of God to our infant souls is that of “the kindly loving Mother that witteth and knoweth the need of her child and keepeth it full tenderly as the kind and condition of Motherhood will.”

No modern psychologist could be more emphatic than this fourteenth-century recluse on the foolishness of worry, the duty of confidence, gaiety, and hope. “Notwithstanding our simple living and our blindness here, yet endlessly our courteous Lord beholdeth us in this working rejoicing; and of all things we may please him best, wisely and truly to believe, and to enjoy with Him and in Him.” She brings back the primitive Christian insistence on joy—confident happiness—as the one sure sign of the spiritual life. If we have not got this, it is because we lack the faith and common sense which sees life in a universal and disinterested light. Once, Julian says, she was inclined to worry about God’s work in the soul of a friend whom she loved, and she was answered in her reason “as it were by a friendly man,” “Take it generally! and behold the courtesy of thy Lord God as He shows it to thee, for it is more worship to God to behold Him in all than in any special thing.” In those words we have a complete prescription for happiness and inward peace. All that is made, as Julian saw in her vision, is but “a little thing the quantity of an hazel nut” in comparison with the Divine life that creates, keeps, and loves it, and may be known in those sudden glimpses of perfection which we call the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. These, in her language, are “God’s courteous showings of Himself,” and we are most likely to encounter them when we take the worlds of nature and grace “generally,” and refrain from partial or egoistic criticisms and demands. Failure in this simple rule, she thinks, is the true cause of human misery and unrest. “This is the cause why we be not all in ease of heart and soul; that we seek here rest in those things that are so little, wherein is no rest, and know not our God that is All-mighty, All-wise, and All-good.”