CHAPTER VII.
APPARITION OF MOLINOS, 1675.—HIS SUCCESS AT HOME.—FRENCH QUIETISTS.—MADAME GUYON.—HER DIRECTOR.—THE TORRENTS.—MYSTIC DEATH.—DO WE RETURN FROM IT?
The Spiritual Guide of Molinos appeared at Rome in 1675. The way having been prepared for twenty years by different publications of the same tendency, highly approved of by the inquisitors of Rome and Spain, this book had a success unparalleled in the age; in twelve years it was translated and reprinted twenty times.
We must not be surprised that this guide to annihilation, this method to die, was received so greedily. There was then throughout Europe a general feeling of wearisomeness. That century, still far from its close, already panted for repose. This appears to be the case by its own doctrines. Cartesianism, which gave it an impulse, became inactive and contemplative in Mallebranche (1674). Spinosa, as early as 1670, had declared the immobility of God, man, and the world, in the unity of substance. And in 1676, Hobbes gave his theory of political fatalism.
Spinosa, Hobbes, and Molinos—death, everywhere, in metaphysics, politics, and morality! What a dismal chorus! They are of one mind without knowing each other or forming any compact; they seem, however, to shout to each other from one extremity of Europe to the other!
Poor human liberty has nothing left but the choice of its suicide; either to be hurled by logic in the North into the bottomless pit of Spinosa, or to be lulled in the South by the sweet voice of Molinos, into a death-like and eternal slumber.
The age is, however, as yet in all its brilliancy and triumph. Some time must pass away before these discouraging and deadly thoughts pass from theory to practice, and politics become infected with this moral languor.
It is a delicate and interesting moment in every existence, that middle term between the period of increasing vigour and that of old age, when, retaining its brilliancy, it loses its strength, and decay imperceptibly begins. In the month of August the trees have all their leaves, but soon they change colour, many a one grows pale, and in their splendid summer robe you have a presentiment of their autumnal decline.
For some time an impure and feverish wind had blown from the South, both from Italy and Spain: Italy was already too lifeless, too deeply entombed to be able to produce even a doctrine of death. It was a Spaniard, established at Rome and imbued with Italian languor, who invented this theory and drew it forth into practice. Still it was necessary for his disciples to oblige him to write and publish. Molinos had, for twenty years, been satisfied with sowing his doctrine noiselessly in Rome, and propagating it gently from palace to palace. The theology of Quietism was wonderfully adapted to the city of catacombs, the silent city, where, from that time, scarcely anything was heard but the faint rustling of worms crawling in the sepulchre.
When the Spaniard arrived in Rome, it had hardly recovered from the effeminate pontificate of Madame Olympia. The crucified Jesus reposed in the delicate hands of her general Oliva, among sumptuous vines, exotic flowers, lilies, and roses. These torpid Romans, this idle nobility, and these lazy fair ones, who pass their time on couches, with half-closed eyes, are the persons to whom Molinos comes at a late hour to speak—ought I to say speak? His low whispering voice, sinking into their lethargy, is confounded with their inward dream.
Quietism had quite a different character in France. In a living country, the theory of death showed some symptoms of life. An infinite measure of activity was employed to prove that action was no longer necessary. This injured their doctrine, for noise and light were hurtful to it. This delicate plant loved darkness and sought to grow in the shade. Not to speak of the chimerical Desmarets, who could but render an opinion ridiculous, Malaval seemed to have an idea that this new doctrine outstepped Christianity. Concerning the words of Jesus, "I am the way," he uses an expression surprising for this century: "Since He is the way, let us pass by Him; but he who is always passing never arrives."
Our French Quietists by their lucid analysis, their rich and fertile developments, made known, for the first time, what had scarcely been dreamed of in the obscure form which Quietism had prudently preserved in other countries. Many things, that seemed in the bud hardly developed, appeared in Madame Guyon in full bloom, as clear as daylight, with the sun in the meridian. The singular purity of this woman rendered her intrepid in advancing the most dangerous ideas. She was as pure in her imagination as she was disinterested in her motives. She had no need to figure to herself the object of her pious love, under a material form. This is what gives her mysticism a sublime superiority over the coarse and sensual devotion of the Sacré-Coeur, established by the Visitandine, Marie Alacoque, about the same period. Madame Guyon was far too intellectual to give a form to her God; she truly loved a spirit; hence sprang her confidence and unlimited courage. She attempts bravely, but without suspecting herself to be brave, the most perilous paths, now ascending, now descending into regions that others had most avoided; she presses boldly forward past the point where every one had stopped through fear, like the luminary which brightens everything and remains unsullied itself. These courageous efforts, though innocent in so pure a woman, had nevertheless a dangerous effect upon the weak-minded. Her confessor, Father Lacombe, was wrecked in this dangerous gulf, where he was swallowed up and drowned. The person and the doctrine had equally deranged his faculties. All we know of his intercourse with her betrays a strange weakness, which she, in her sublime aspirations, seems hardly to have condescended to notice. The very first time he saw her, then young, and tending her aged husband, he was so affected by the sight that he fainted. Afterwards, having become her humble disciple, under the name of her director, he followed her everywhere in her adventurous life, both in France and Savoy. He never left her side, "and could not dine without her." He had succeeded in getting her portrait taken. Being arrested at the same time as herself, in 1687, he was for ten years a prisoner in the fortresses of the Pyrenees. In 1698, they took advantage of the weakness of his mind to make him write to Madame Guyon a compromising letter: "The poor man," said she, laughing, "is become mad." He certainly was so, and, a few days after, he died at Charenton.
This madness little surprises me, when I read Madame Guyon's Torrents, that fantastic, charming, but fearful book. It must not be passed over in silence.
When she composed the book, she was at Annecy, in the convent of the newly converted. She had bestowed her wealth upon her family, and the small income she reserved for herself was also given away by her to this religious establishment, where she was very ill used. This delicate woman, who had passed her life in luxury, was forced to work with her hands beyond her strength; her employment was washing and sweeping. Father Lacombe, then in Rome, had recommended her to write whatever came into her mind. "It is to obey you," says she, "that I am beginning to write what I do not know myself." She takes a ream of paper, and writes down the title of her subject:—Torrents.
As the torrents of the Alps, the rivers, rivulets, and mountain streams, which tumble from their heights, rush with all their force towards the sea, even so our souls, by the effect of their spiritual inclination, hasten to return towards God to be blended with Him. This comparison of living waters is not a simple text that serves her for a starting-point; she follows it up almost throughout the volume with renewed graces. One would suppose that this pleasing light style would tire us at last; but it does not: we feel that it is not mere words and language, but that it springs and flows like life-blood from the heart. She is evidently an uninformed woman, who has read only the Imitation, the Philothea of Saint François, some few stories, and Don Quixote; knows nothing at all, and has not seen much. Even these Torrents, which she describes, are not seen by her in the Alps, where she then is; she sees them within herself; she sees nature in the mirror of her heart.
In reading this book we seem absolutely as if we were on the brink of a cascade, pensively listening to the murmuring of the waters. They fall for ever and ever gently and charmingly, varying their uniformity by a thousand changes of sound and colour. Thence you see the approach of waters of every sort (images of human souls), rivers that flow only to reach other broad majestic streams, all loaded with boats, goods, and passengers, and that are admired and blessed for the services they render. These streams are the souls of the saints and great doctors. There are also more rapid and eager waters which are good for nothing, on which no one dares to float, that rush forward, in headlong impatience, to reach the ocean. Such waters have terrible falls, and occasionally grow impure. Sometimes they disappear.—Alas! poor torrent, what has become of thee? It is not lost; it returns to the surface, but only to be lost again; it is yet far from its goal; it will have first to be dashed against rocks, scattered abroad, and, as it were, annihilated!
When the writer has brought her torrent to this supreme fall, she is at fault about the simile of the living waters; she then leaves it, and the torrent becomes a soul again. No image taken from nature could express what this soul is about to suffer. Here begins a strange drama, where it seems no one before had dared to venture—that of mystic death. We certainly find in earlier books a word here and there upon this dark subject; but no one yet had reached the same depth in the tomb, that deep pit where the soul is about to be buried. Madame Guyon indulges in a sort of pleasure, or perseverance, I had almost said eagerness, to grope still lower, to find, beyond all funereal ideas, a more definite death, a death more decidedly dead.
There are many things in it, that we should never have expected from a woman's hand: passion in its transports forgets reserve. This soul, that is destined to perish, must first be divested, by her divine lover, of her trappings, the gifts that had ornamented her: he snatches off her garments, that is to say, the virtues in which she had been enveloped.—O shame! She sees herself naked, and knows not where to hide! This is not yet enough; her beauty is taken away. O horror! She sees she is ugly. Frightened and wandering, she runs and becomes loathsome. The faster she runs towards God, "the more she is soiled by the dirty paths she must travel in." Poor, naked, ugly, and deformed, she loses a taste for everything, understanding, memory, and will; lastly, she loses together with her will a something or other "that is her favourite," and would be a substitute for all—the idea that she is a child of God. This is properly the death at which she must arrive at last. Let nobody, neither the director nor any other, attempt to relieve her. She must die, and be put in the ground; be trodden under foot and walked upon, become foul and rotten, and suffer the stench of corruption, until rottenness becoming dust and ashes, hardly anything may remain to testify that the soul ever existed.
What was the soul must, if it still thinks, apparently think that all it can now do is, to remain motionless in the bosom of the earth. Now, however, it begins to feel something surprising! Has the sun darted a ray through a crack in the tomb? perhaps only for one moment? No: the effect is durable, the dead soul revives, recovers some strength, a sort of life. But this is no longer her own life, it is life in God. She has no longer anything of her own, neither will nor desire. What has she to do to possess what she loves? Nothing, nothing, eternally nothing. But can she have any defects in this state? Doubtless she has; she knows them, but does nothing to get rid of them: to be able to do so, she would have to become as before, "thoughtful about herself." These are little mists which she must allow to disappear gradually. The soul has now God for soul; He is now become her principle of life, He is one and identical with her.
"In this state nothing extraordinary happens, no visions, revelations, ecstasies, nor transports. All such things do not belong to this system, which is simple, pure, and naked, seeing nothing but in God, as God sees Himself, and by His eyes."
Thus, after many immoral and dangerous things, the book ends in a singular purity, which few mystics have even approached. A gentle new birth, without either visions or ecstasies, and a sight divinely pure and serene, is the lot of that soul, which has passed through all the various shadows of death.
If we listen to Madame Guyon, our life, after having been crushed, soiled, and destroyed, will revive in God. He who has passed through all the horror of the sepulchre, whose living body has become a corpse, which has held communion with worms, and from rottenness has become ashes and clay—even he will resume his life, and again bloom in the sun.
What can be less credible, or less conformable to nature? She deceives herself and us by equivocal terms. The life she promises us after this death is not our own; our personality extinguished, effaced, and annihilated, will be succeeded by another, infinite and perfect, I allow; but still not ours.
I had not yet read the Torrents when all this was, for the first time, represented to my mind. I was ascending St. Gothard, and had advanced to meet the violent Reuss that rushes madly down the mountain in its headlong course. My imagination conjured up, in spite of myself, the terrible strugglings with which it labours to force its way through rocks that would hem it in and bar its progress. I was frightened at its falls and the efforts it seemed to make, like a poor soul on the rack, to fly from itself, and hide where it might be seen no more. It writhes at the Devil's Bridge, and, in the midst of its agony, hurled from an immense height to the bottom of the abyss, it ceases for a moment to be a river: it becomes a tempest between heaven and earth, an icy vapour, a horrible frosty blast, that fills the dark valley with an infernal mist. Mount higher and higher still. You traverse a cavern, and pass a hollow rock. Lo! the uproar ceases; this grand battle of the elements is over. Peace and silence reign. And life?—is it renewed? Do you find a new-birth after this death-struggle? The meadow is blighted, the flowers are gone, and the very grass is scarce and poor. Nothing in nature stirs, not a bird in the air, not an insect on the earth. You see the sun again, it is true, but void of rays and heat.