Hours with the Mystics: A Contribution to the History of Religious Opinion

by Robert Alfred Vaughan

CHAPTER I.

Look up, my Ethel!

When on the glances of the upturned eye

The plumed thoughts take travel, and ascend

Through the unfathomable purple mansions,

Threading the golden fires, and ever climbing

As if ’twere homewards winging—at such time

The native soul, distrammelled of dim earth,

Doth know herself immortal, and sits light

Upon her temporal perch.

Violenzia.

The winter had now broken up his encampment, and was already in full retreat. With the approach of spring the mystical conversations of our friends entered on the period of the Middle Ages. The lengthening mornings found Atherton early at his desk, sipping a solitary and preliminary cup of coffee, and reading or writing. Willoughby felt his invention quickened by the season, and a new elasticity pervade him. His romance advanced with fewer hindrances from that cross-grained dissatisfaction which used so frequently to disfigure his manuscript with the thorny scratches and interlineations of an insatiable correction.

Gower, too, could enter once more on the enjoyment of his favourite walk before breakfast. In wandering through the dewy meadows, in ‘the slanting sunlight of the dawn,’ he felt, as we all must, that there is truth in what the chorus of mystics have ever said or sung about the inadequacy of words to express the surmise and aspiration of the soul. In a morning solitude there seems to lie about our fields of thought an aerial wealth too plenteous to be completely gathered into the granary of language.

O who would mar the season with dull speech,

That must tie up our visionary meanings

And subtle individual apprehensions

Into the common tongue of every man?

And of the swift and scarce detected visitants

Of our illusive thoughts seek to make prisoners,

And only grasp their garments.

It is one of the pleasant pastimes of the spring to watch day by day the various ways in which the trees express, by a physiognomy and gesture of their own, their expectation of the summer. Look at those young and delicate ones, alive with impatience to the tip of every one of the thousand sprays that tremble distinct against the sky, swaying uneasily to and fro in the sharp morning breeze. They seem longing to slip their rooted hold upon the earth, and float away to embrace their bridegroom sun in the air. And see those veterans—what a gnarled, imperturbable gravity in those elder citizens of park or wood: they are used to it; let the day bring new weatherstains or new buds, they can bide their time. And are they not already wrapped, many of them, in hood and habit of dark glossy ivy—woodland senatorial fur—they can afford to wait. Here, look, close beside us, the eyes of the buds are even now peeping through the black lattice of the boughs, and those amber-coloured clouds overhead are looking them promises of kindly showers as they sail by. What is that sparkling on yonder hill? Only the windows of a house with eastern aspect: the sun lights his beacon-fire regularly there, to signal to his children down in the hollow that he is coming, though they cannot see him yet, and will roll away the cloud from the valley mouth, and make the place of their night-sepulchre glorious with his shining raiment.

Amidst these delights of nature, and the occupation of his art, Gower thought sometimes of the mystics who enjoy such things so little. He had even promised to write a short paper on the mystical schoolmen of St. Victor, Hugo and Richard, and was himself surprised to find how soon he warmed to the subject—with what zest he sought for glimpses of cloister-life in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

When next our friends met in the library, Gower expressed his hearty and unceremonious satisfaction at their having done, as he hoped, with that ‘old bore,’ Dionysius Areopagita. By none was the sentiment echoed with more fervour than by Atherton, whose conscience perhaps smote him for some dry reading he had inflicted on his auditors. But he made no apology, that Gower might not think he took his remark to himself, and return him a compliment.

Willoughby. To see how this world goes round! Only think of Proclus having his revenge after all,—he and his fellows ruling from their urns when dead the Christianity which banished them while living.

Atherton. Not altogether satisfactory, either, could he have looked in upon the world, and seen the use to which they put him. It was true that, under the name of Dionysius, his ideas were reverenced and expounded by generations of dreaming monks,—that under that name he contributed largely to those influences which kept stagnant the religious world of the East for some nine hundred years. But it was also true that his thoughts were thus conserved only to serve the purpose of his ancient enemies; so that he assisted to confer omnipotence on those Christian priests whom he had cursed daily in his heart while lecturing, sacrificing, and conjuring at Athens.

Gower. Again I say, let us turn from the stereotyped Greek Church to the West,—I want to hear about St. Bernard.

Atherton. Presently. Let us try and apprehend clearly the way in which Neo-Platonism influenced mediæval Europe.

Willoughby. A trifling preliminary! Atherton means us to stay here all night. You may as well resign yourself, Gower.

Atherton. Never fear; I only want to look about me, and see where we are just now. Suppose ourselves sent back to the Middle Age—what will be our notion of Platonism? We can’t read a line of Greek. We see Plato only through Plotinus, conserved by Augustine, handed down by Apuleius and Boethius. We reverence Aristotle, but we care only for his dialectics. We only assimilate from antiquity what seems to fall within the province of the Church. Plato appears to us surrounded by that religious halo with which Neo-Platonism invested philosophy when it grew so devotional. We take Augustine’s word for it that Plotinus really enunciated the long-hidden esoteric doctrine of Plato. The reverent, ascetic, ecstatic Platonism of Alexandria seems to us so like Christianity, that we are almost ready to believe Plato a sort of harbinger for Christ. We are devoted Realists; and Realism and Asceticism make the common ground of Platonist and Christian. If scholastic in our tendencies, Aristotle may be oftener on our lips; if mystical, Plato; but we overlook their differences. We believe, on Neo-Platonist authority, that the two great ones were not the adversaries which had been supposed. Aristotle is in the forecourt, and through study of him we pass into that inner shrine where the rapt Plato (all but a monk in our eyes) is supposed to exemplify the contemplative life.

Dionysius in the East, then, is soporific. Mysticism, there, has nothing to do save drowsily to label all the Church gear with symbolic meanings of wondrous smallness.

Dionysius in the West has come into a young world where vigorous minds have been long accustomed to do battle on the grandest questions; grace and free-will—how they work together; sin and redemption—what they really are; faith and reason—what may be their limits.

Gower. Compare those great controversies with that miserable Monophysite and Monothelite dispute for which one can never get up an interest. How much we owe still to that large-souled Augustine.[^[39]]

Atherton. Well, for this very reason, they might worship Dionysius as a patron saint to their hearts’ content at St. Denis, but he could never be in France the master mystagogue they made him at Byzantium. His name, and some elements in his system, became indeed an authority and rallying point for the mystical tendency of the West, but the system as a whole was never appropriated. He was reverentially dismembered, and so mixed up with doctrines and questions foreign to him, by a different order of minds, with another culture, and often with another purpose, that I would defy his ghost to recognise his own legacy to the Church.

Gower. Good Hugo of St. Victor, in his Commentary on the Hierarchies, does certainly wonderfully soften down the pantheism of his original. Dionysius comes out from under his hands almost rational, quite a decent Christian.

Atherton. And before Hugo, if you remember, John Scotus Erigena translated him, and elaborated on his basis a daring system of his own, pantheistic I fear, but a marvel of intellectual power—at least two or three centuries in advance of his age. And these ideas of Erigena’s, apparently forgotten, filter through, and reappear once more at Paris in the free-thinking philosophy of such men as David of Dinant and Amalric of Bena.[^[40]]

Willoughby. Strange enough: so that, could Dionysius have returned to the world in the thirteenth century, he, the worshipper of the priesthood, would have found sundry of his own principles in a new livery, doing service in the ranks of the laity against the clergy, and strengthening the hands of that succession of heretics so long a thorn in the side of the corrupt hierarchy of France.

Atherton. In Germany, a century later, many of the mystics put Platonist doctrine to a similar use. In fact, I think we may say generally that the Neo-Platonist element, which acted as a mortal opiate in the East, became a vivifying principle in the West. There the Alexandrian doctrine of Emanation was abandoned, its pantheism nullified or rejected, but its allegorical interpretation, its exaltation, true or false, of the spirit above the letter,—all this was retained, and Platonism and mysticism together created a party in the Church the sworn foes of mere scholastic quibbling, of an arid and lifeless orthodoxy, and at last of the more glaring abuses which had grown up with ecclesiastical pretension.

Gower. Now for Bernard. I see the name there on that open page of your note-book. Read away—no excuses.

Atherton. Some old notes. But before I read them, look at this rough plan of the valley of Clairvaux, with its famous abbey. I made it after reading the Descriptio Monasterii Claræ-Vallensis, inserted in the Benedictine edition of Bernard’s works. It will assist us to realize the locality in which this great church-father of the twelfth century passed most of his days. It was once called the Valley of Wormwood—was the ill-omened covert of banditti; Bernard and his monks come clearing and chanting, praying and planting; and lo! the absinthial reputation vanishes—the valley smiles—is called, and made, Clairvaux, or Brightdale.

Kate. Transformed, in short, into ‘a serious paradise,’ as Mr. Thackeray would say.

Atherton. Yes, you puss. Here, you see, I have marked two ranges of hills which, parting company, enclose the broad sweep of our Brightdale, or Fairvalley. Where the hills are nearest together you see the one eminence covered with vines, the other with fruit trees; and on the sides and tops dusky groups of monks have had many a hard day’s work, getting rid of brambles and underwood, chopping and binding faggots, and preparing either slope to yield them wherewithal to drink, from the right hand, and to eat, from the left. Not far from this entrance to the valley stands the huge pile of the abbey itself, with its towers and crosses, its loop-hole windows and numerous outbuildings. That is the river Aube (Alba) running down between the heights; here, you see, is a winding channel the monks have dug, that a branch of it may flow in under the convent walls. Good river! how hard it works for them. No sooner under the archway than it turns the great wheel that grinds their corn, fills their caldarium, toils in the tannery, sets the fulling-mill agoing. Hark to the hollow booming sound, and the regular tramp, tramp of those giant wooden feet; and there, at last, out rushes the stream at the other side of the building, all in a fume, as if it had been ground itself into so much snowy foam. On this other side, you see it cross, and join the main course of its river again. Proceeding now along the valley, with your back to the monastery, you pass through the groves of the orchard, watered by crossing runnels from the river, overlooked by the infirmary windows—a delightful spot for contemplative invalids. Then you enter the great meadow—what a busy scene in hay-making time, all the monks out there, helped by the additional hands of donati and conductitii, and the country folk from all the region round about,—they have been working since sunrise, and will work till vespers; when the belfry sounds for prayers at the fourth hour after sunrise, they will sing their psalms in the open air to save time, and doubtless dine there too—a monastic pic-nic. On one side of the meadow is a small lake, well stored with fish. See some of the brethren angling on its bank, where those osiers have been planted to preserve the margin; and two others have put off in a boat and are throwing their net, with edifying talk at whiles perhaps, on the parallel simplicity of fish and sinners. At the extremity of the meadow are two large farm-houses, one on each side the river; you might mistake them for monasteries from their size and structure, but for the ploughs and yokes of oxen you see about.

Mrs. Atherton. Thank you; so much for the place; and the man—his personal appearance—is anything known about that?

Atherton. You must imagine him somewhat above the middle height, very thin, with a clear, transparent, red-and-white complexion; always retaining some colour on his hollow cheeks; his hair light; his beard inclining to red—in his later years, mixed with white; his whole aspect noble and persuasive, and when he speaks under excitement losing every trace of physical feebleness in the lofty transformation of a benign enthusiasm.[^[41]]

Now I shall trouble you with some of my remarks, on his mysticism principally. You will conceive what a world of business he must have had upon his shoulders, even when at home at Clairvaux, and acting as simple abbot; so much detail to attend to,—so many difficulties to smooth, and quarrels to settle, and people to advise, in connexion with his own numerous charge and throughout all the surrounding neighbourhood; while to all this was added the care of so many infant monasteries, springing up at the rate of about four a year, in every part of Europe, founded on the pattern of Clairvaux, and looking to him for counsel and for men. I scarcely need remind you how struggling Christendom sent incessant monks and priests, couriers and men-at-arms, to knock and blow horn at the gate of Clairvaux Abbey; for Bernard, and none but he, must come out and fight that audacious Abelard; Bernard must decide between rival Popes, and cross the Alps time after time to quiet tossing Italy; Bernard alone is the hope of fugitive Pope and trembling Church; he only can win back turbulent nobles, alienated people, recreant priests, when Arnold of Brescia is in arms at Rome, and when Catharists, Petrobrusians, Waldenses, and heretics of every shade, threaten the hierarchy on either side the Alps; and at the preaching of Bernard the Christian world pours out to meet the disaster of a new crusade.

Gower. And accomplishing a work like this with that emaciated, wretchedly dyspeptic frame of his!—first of all exerting his extraordinary will to the utmost to unbuild his body; and then putting forth the same self-control to make the ruins do the work of a sound structure.

Atherton. Could we have seen him at home at Clairvaux, after one of those famous Italian journeys, no look or word would have betrayed a taint of spiritual pride, though every rank in church and state united to do him honour—though great cities would have made him almost by force their spiritual king—though the blessings of the people and the plaudits of the council followed the steps of the peacemaker—and though, in the belief of all, a dazzling chain of miracles had made his pathway glorious. We should have found him in the kitchen, rebuking by his example some monk who grumbled at having to wash the pots and pans; on the hill-side, cutting his tale and bearing his burthen with the meanest novice; or seen him oiling his own boots, as they say the arch-tempter did one day; we should have interrupted him in the midst of his tender counsel to some distressed soul of his cloistered flock, or just as he had sat down to write a sermon on a passage in Canticles against the next church-festival.[^[42]] But now to my notes. (Atherton reads.)

In considering the religious position of Bernard, I find it not at all remarkable that he should have been a mystic,—very remarkable that he should not have been much more the mystic than he was. This moderation may be attributed partly to his constant habit of searching the Scriptures—studying them devotionally for himself, unencumbered with the commentaries reverenced by tradition.[^[43]] Rigid exemplar and zealous propagator of monasticism as he was, these hours with the Bible proved a corrective not unblessed, and imparted even to the devotion of the cloister a healthier tone. Add to this his excellent natural judgment, and the combination, in his case, of the active with the contemplative life. He knew the world and men; he stood with his fellows in the breach, and the shock of conflict spoiled him for a dreamer. The distractions over which he expended so much complaint were his best friends. They were a hindrance in the way to the monastic ideal of virtue—a help toward the Christian. They prevented his attaining that pitch of uselessness to which the conventual life aspires, and brought him down a little nearer to the meaner level of apostolic labour. They made him the worse monk, and by so much the better man.

With Bernard the monastic life is the one thing needful. He began life by drawing after him into the convent all his kindred; sweeping them one by one from the high seas of the world with the irresistible vortex of his own religious fervour. His incessant cry for Europe is—Better monasteries, and more of them. Let these ecclesiastical castles multiply; let them cover and command the land, well garrisoned with men of God, and then, despite all heresy and schism, theocracy will flourish, the earth shall yield her increase, and all people praise the Lord. Who so wise as Bernard to win souls for Christ—that is to say, recruits for the cloister? With what eloquence he paints the raptures of contemplation, the vanity and sin of earthly ambition or of earthly love! Wherever in his travels Bernard may have preached, there, presently, exultant monks must open wide their doors to admit new converts. Wherever he goes he bereaves mothers of their children, the aged of their last solace and last support; praising those the most who leave most misery behind them. How sternly does he rebuke those Rachels who mourn and will not be comforted for children dead to them for ever! What vitriol does he pour into the wounds when he asks if they will drag their son down to perdition with themselves by resisting the vocation of heaven! whether it was not enough that they brought him forth sinful to a world of sin, and will they now, in their insane affection, cast him into the fires of hell?[^[44]] Yet Bernard is not hard-hearted by nature. He can pity this disgraceful weakness of the flesh. He makes such amends as superstition may. I will be a father to him, he says. Alas! cold comfort. You, their hearts will answer, whose flocks are countless, would nothing content you but our ewe lamb? Perhaps some cloister will be, for them too, the last resource of their desolation. They will fly for ease in their pain to the system which caused it. Bernard hopes so. So inhuman is the humanity of asceticism; cruel its tender mercies; thus does it depopulate the world of its best in order to improve it.

To measure, then, the greatness of Bernard, let me clearly apprehend the main purpose of his life. It was even this convent-founding, convent-ruling business. This is his proper praise, that, though devoted body and soul, to a system so false, he himself should have retained and practised so much of truth.

The task of history is a process of selection. The farther we recede from a period, the more do we eliminate of what interests us no longer. A few leading events stand clearly out as characteristic of the time, and about them all our details are clustered. But when dealing with an individual, or with the private life of any age, the method must be reversed, and we must encumber ourselves again with all the cast-off baggage that strews the wayside of time’s march.

So with Bernard. The Abelard controversy, the schism, the quarrels of pope and emperor, the crusade, are seen by us—who know what happened afterwards—in their true importance. These facts make the epoch, and throw all else into shade. But we could not so have viewed them in the press and confusion of the times that saw them born. Bernard and his monks were not always thinking of Abelard or Anaclet, of Arnold of Brescia, Roger of Sicily, or Lothaire. In the great conflicts which these names recal to our minds, Bernard bore his manful part as a means to an end. Many a sleepless night must they have cost him, many a journey full of anxiety and hardship, many an agonizing prayer, on the eve of a crisis calling for all his skill and all his courage. But these were difficulties which he was summoned to encounter on his road to the great object of his life—the establishment of ecclesiastical supremacy by means of the conventual institute. The quarrels within the Church, and between the Church and the State, must be in some sort settled before his panacea could be applied to the sick body of the time. In the midst of such controversies a host of minor matters would demand his care,—to him of scarcely less moment, to us indifferent. There would be the drawing out of convent charters and convent rules, the securing of land, of money, of armed protection for the rapidly increasing family of monasteries; election of abbots and of bishops; guidance of the same in perplexity; holding of synods and councils, with the business thereto pertaining; delinquencies and spiritual distresses of individuals; jealous squabbles to be soothed between his Cistercian order and them of Cluny; suppression of clerical luxury and repression of lay encroachment, &c. &c. Thus the year 1118 would be memorable to Bernard and his monks, not so much because in it Gelasius ascended the chair of St. Peter, and the Emperor Henry gave him a rival, or even because then the order of Knights Templars took its rise, so much as from their joy and labour about the founding of two new monasteries,—because that year saw the establishment of the first daughter of Clairvaux, the Abbey of Fontaines, in the diocese of Chalons; and of a sister, Fontenay, beside the Yonne;—the one a growth northward, among the dull plains of Champagne, with their lazy streams and monotonous poplars; the other a southern colony, among the luscious slopes of vine-clad Burgundy.[^[45]]

Bernard had his wish. He made Clairvaux the cynosure of all contemplative eyes. For any one who could exist at all as a monk, with any satisfaction to himself, that was the place above all others. Brother Godfrey, sent out to be first abbot of Fontenay,—as soon as he has set all things in order there, returns, only too gladly, from that rich and lovely region, to re-enter his old cell, to walk around, delightedly revisiting the well-remembered spots, among the trees or by the waterside, marking how the fields and gardens have come on, and relating to the eager brethren (for even Bernard’s monks have curiosity) all that befel him in his work. He would sooner be third prior at Clairvaux than abbot of Fontenay. So, too, with brother Humbert, commissioned in like manner to regulate Igny Abbey (fourth daughter of Clairvaux). He soon comes back, weary of the labour and sick for home, to look on the Aube once more, to hear the old mills go drumming and droning, with that monotony of muffled sound—the associate of his pious reveries—often heard in his dreams when far away; to set his feet on the very same flagstone in the choir where he used to stand, and to be happy. But Bernard, though away in Italy, toiling in the matter of the schism, gets to hear of his return, and finds time to send him across the Alps a letter of rebuke for this criminal self-pleasing, whose terrible sharpness must have darkened the poor man’s meditations for many a day.[^[46]]

Bernard had farther the satisfaction of improving and extending monasticism to the utmost; of sewing together, with tolerable success, the rended vesture of the papacy; of suppressing a more popular and more scriptural Christianity, for the benefit of his despotic order; of quenching for a time, by the extinction of Abelard, the spirit of free inquiry; and of seeing his ascetic and superhuman ideal of religion everywhere accepted as the genuine type of Christian virtue.

At the same time the principles advocated by Bernard were deprived, in his hands, of their most noxious elements. His sincere piety, his large heart, his excellent judgment, always qualify, and seem sometimes to redeem, his errors. But the well-earned glory and the influence of a name achieved by an ardour and a toil almost passing human measure, were thrown into the wrong scale. The mischiefs latent in the teaching of Bernard become ruinously apparent in those who entered into his labours. His successes proved eventually the disasters of Christendom. One of the best of men made plain the way for some of the worst. Bernard, while a covert for the fugitive pontiff, hunted out by insurgent people or by wrathful emperor, would yet impose some rational limitations on the papal authority.[^[47]] But the chair upheld by Bernard was to be filled by an Innocent III., whose merciless arrogance should know no bounds. Bernard pleaded nobly for the Jews, decimated in the crusading fury.[^[48]] Yet the atrocities of Dominic were but the enkindling of fuel which Bernard had amassed. Disciple of tradition as he was, he would allow the intellect its range; zealous as he might be for monastic rule, the spontaneous inner life of devotion was with him the end—all else the means. Ere long, the end was completely forgotten in the means. In succeeding centuries, the Church of Rome retained what life it could by repeating incessantly the remedy of Bernard. As corruption grew flagrant, new orders were devised. Bernard saw not, nor those who followed in his steps, that the evil lay, not in the defect or abuse of vows and rules, but in the introduction of vows and rules at all,—that these unnatural restraints must always produce unnatural excesses.

What is true concerning the kind of religious impulse imparted to Europe by the great endeavour of Bernard’s life is no less so as regards the character of his mysticism.

In the theology of Bernard reason has a place, but not the right one. His error in this respect is the primary source of that mystical bias so conspicuous in his religious teaching. Like Anselm, he bids you believe first, and understand, if possible, afterwards. He is not prepared to admit the great truth that if Reason yields to Faith, and assigns itself anywhere a limit, it must be on grounds satisfactory to Reason. To any measure of Anselm’s remarkable speculative ability, Bernard could lay no claim. He was at home only in the province of practical religion. But to enquiries and reasonings such as those in which Anselm delighted, he was ready to award, not blame, but admiration. Faith, with Bernard, receives the treasure of divine truth, as it were, wrapped up (involutum); Understanding may afterwards cautiously unfold the envelope, and peep at the prize, but may never examine the contents first, to determine whether it shall be received or not.[^[49]] If the chase be so dear to that mighty hunter, Intellect, he shall have his sport, on certain conditions. Let him admit that the Church has caught and killed the quarry of truth, and brought it to his door. That granted, he may, if he will, cry boot and saddle, ride out to see where the game broke cover, or gallop with hounds, and halloo over hill and dale, pursuing an imaginary object, and learning how truth might have been run down. Great, accordingly, was Bernard’s horror when he beheld Abelard throwing open to discussion the dogmas of the Church; when he saw the alacrity with which such questions were taken up all over France, and learnt that not the scholars of Paris merely, but an ignorant and stripling laity were discussing every day, at street corners, in hall, in cottage, the mysteries of the Trinity and the Immaculate Conception. Faith, he cried, believes; does not discuss; Abelard holds God in suspicion, and will not believe even Him without reason given.[^[50]] At the same time, the credo ut intelligam of Bernard is no indolent or constrained reception of a formula. Faith is the divine persuasion of the pure in heart and life. Bernard would grant that different minds will apprehend the same truth in different aspects; that an absolute uniformity is impossible. But when faith is made to depend so entirely on the state of the heart, such concessions are soon withdrawn. A difference in opinion from the acknowledged standard of piety is regarded as a sure sign of a depraved heart. A divine illumination as to doctrine is assumed for those whose practical holiness caused them to shine as lights in the Church.[^[51]]

Thus, on the elementary question of faith, the mystical tendency of Bernard is apparent; the subjective and even the merely emotional element assumes undue prominence; and a way is opened for the error incident to all mysticism—the unwarrantable identification of our own thoughts with the mind of God. But if, in his starting-point, Bernard be a mystic, much more so is he in the goal he strains every power to reach.

The design of Christianity is, in his idea, not to sanctify and elevate all our powers, to raise us to our truest manhood, accomplishing in every excellence all our faculties both of mind and body, but to teach us to nullify our corporeal part, to seclude ourselves, by abstraction, from its demands, and to raise us, while on earth, to a super-human exaltation above the flesh,—a vision and a glory approaching that of the angelic state. Thus he commences his analysis of meditation by describing the felicity of angels. They have not to study the Creator in his works, slowly ascending by the media of sense. They behold all things in the Word—more perfect there, by far, than in themselves. Their knowledge is immediate—a direct intuition of the primal ideas of things in the mind of the Creator. To such measure of this immediate intuition as mortals may attain he exhorts the devout mind to aspire. They do well who piously employ their senses among the things of sense for the divine glory and the good of others. Happier yet are they who, with a true philosophy, survey and explore things visible, that they may rise through them to a knowledge of the Invisible. But most of all does he extol the state of those who, not by gradual stages of ascent, but by a sudden rapture, are elevated at times, like St. Paul, to the immediate vision of heavenly things. Such favoured ones are adepts in the third and highest species of meditation. Totally withdrawn into themselves, they are not only, like other good men, dead to the body and the world, and raised above the grosser hindrances of sense, but even beyond those images and similitudes drawn from visible objects which colour and obscure our ordinary conceptions of spiritual truths.[^[52]]

But if, so far, Bernard betrays the mystic, in this ambition to transcend humanity and to anticipate the sight and fruition of the celestial state, let him have full credit for the moderation which preserved him from going farther. Compared with that of many subsequent mystics, the mysticism of Bernard is sobriety itself. From the practical vice of mysticism in his Church,—its tendency to supersede by extraordinary attainments the humbler and more arduous Christian virtues—Bernard was as free as any one could be in those times. Against the self-indulgence which would sacrifice every active external obligation to a life of contemplative sloth he protested all his days, by word and by example. He is equally removed from the pantheistic extreme of Eckart and the imaginative extravagances of St. Theresa. His doctrine of Union with God does not surrender our personality or substitute God for the soul in man. When he has occasion to speak, with much hesitation and genuine humility, of the highest point of his own experience, he has no wonderful visions to relate. The visit of the Saviour to his soul was unattended by visible glory, by voices, tastes, or odours; it vindicated its reality only by the joy which possessed him, and the new facility with which he brought forth the practical fruits of the Spirit.[^[53]] He prays God for peace and joy and charity to all men, and leaves other exaltations of devotion to apostles and apostolic men,—‘the high hills to the harts and the climbing goats.’ The fourth and highest stage of love in his scale,—that transformation and utter self-loss in which we love ourselves only for the sake of God, he believes unattainable in this life,—certainly beyond his own reach. To the mystical death, self-annihilation, and holy indifference of the Quietists, he is altogether a stranger.[^[54]]

It is worth while at least to skim and dip among his sermons on the Canticles. The Song of Solomon is a trying book for a man like Bernard, and those expositions do contain much sad stuff, interspersed, however, with many fine reaches of thought and passages of consummate eloquence. Mystical interpretation runs riot. Everything is symbolized. Metaphors are elaborated into allegories, similitudes broken up into divers branches, and about each ramification a new set of fancies clustered. The sensuous imagery borrowed from love and wine—the kisses, bedchambers, and winecellars of the soul, remind us at every page of that luscious poetry in which the Persian Sufis are said to veil the aspirations of the spirit of man after its Maker. Yet, with all the faults of a taste so vicious there is no affectation, no sentimentality, nothing intentionally profane. It was with Bernard a duty and a delight to draw as much meaning as possible from the sacred text, by the aid of an inexhaustible fancy and an inventive ingenuity in that way, which only Swedenborg has surpassed. Even in his letters on comparatively ordinary topics, he always gives a certain largeness to his subject by his lofty imaginative style of handling it. He seldom confines himself to the simple point in hand, but starts off to fetch for it adornments, illustrations, or sanctions from quarters the most remote, or heights the most awful. Always in earnest, yet always the rhetorician, he seems to write as though viewing, not the subject itself, but some vast reflection of it projected on the sky. In those sermons on Solomon’s Song, it is generally rather the glowing and unseemly diction, than the thought, we have to blame. With such allowance, it is not difficult to discern, under that luxuriance of flowers and weeds, many a sentiment true and dear to the Christian heart in every age.

Bernard appears to have believed himself invested on some occasions with miraculous powers. So far he has a place in the province of theurgic mysticism. Perhaps the worst thing of this sort to be laid to his charge is his going so far as he did towards endorsing the prophecies of the Abbess Hildegard.[^[55]]

Note to page 131.

The writings of Augustine handed Neo-Platonism down to posterity as the original and esoteric doctrine of the first followers of Plato. He enumerates the causes which led, in his opinion, to the negative position assumed by the Academics, and to the concealment of their real opinions. He describes Plotinus as a resuscitated Plato. Contra Academ. iii. 17-20.

He commends Porphyry for his measure of scepticism as regards Theurgy, and bestows more than due praise on the doctrine of Illumination held by Plotinus, for its similarity to the Christian truth concerning divine grace. De Civitate Dei, x. 10; x. 2.

He gives a scale of the spiritual degrees of ascent to God, formed after the Platonist model (the ἐπαναβαθμοὶ of the Symposium), and so furnished a precedent for all the attempts of a similar kind in which scholastic mysticism delighted to exercise its ingenuity. De Quantitate Animæ, c. 35.

He enumerates three kinds of perception,—corporeal, intellectual (scientia) and spiritual (sapientia); and in describing the last uses the words introrsum ascendere (De Trin. xii. 15; and comp. De Lib. Arbit. ii. 12). But this phrase does not appear to have carried, with Augustine, the sense it bore when gladly adopted by mystical divines of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. He says elsewhere that man, like the prodigal, must come to himself before he can arise and go to his Father. (Retract. i. 8.) Here what the wanderer finds within is the voice of conscience, and in this sense it is quite true that the step inward is a step upward. But it is not true that the inmost is the highest in the sense that man is able by abstraction and introspection to discover within himself a light which shall supersede, or supplement, or even supply the place of external Revelation.

Note to page 131.

John Scotus Erigena.—This remarkable man began to teach in the ‘School of the Palace,’ under Charles the Bald, about the middle of the ninth century. He translated Dionysius, took part in the Gottschalk controversy, and, at last, when persecuted for the freedom of his opinions, found a refuge with Alfred the Great.

Erigena idolizes Dionysius and his commentator Maximus. He believes in their hierarchies, their divine Dark, and supreme Nothing. He declares, with them, that God is the essence of all things. Ipse namque omnium essentia est qui solus vere est, ut ait Dionysius Areopagita. Esse, inquit, omnium est Superesse Divinitatis.—De Div. Nat. i. 3, p. 443. (Jo. Scoti Opp., Paris, 1853.)

But though much of the language is retained, the doctrine of Dionysius has assumed a form altogether new in the brain of the Scotchman. The phraseology of the emanation theory is, henceforth, only metaphor. What men call creation is, with Erigena, a necessary and eternal self-unfolding (analysis, he calls it) of the divine nature. As all things are now God, self-unfolded, so, in the final restitution, all things will be resolved into God, self-withdrawn. Not the mind of man merely, as the Greek thought, but matter and all creatures will be reduced to their primordial causes, and God be manifested as all in all. De Div. Nat. i. 72. Postremo universalis creatura Creatori adunabitur, et erit in ipso et cum ipso unum. Et hic est finis omnium visibilium et invisibilium, quoniam omnia visibilia in intelligibilia, et intelligibilia in ipsum Deum transibunt, mirabili et ineffabili adunatione, non autem, ut sæpe diximus, essentiarum aut substantiarum confusione aut interitu—v. 20, p. 894. In this restitution, the elect are united to God with a degree of intimacy peculiar to themselves—v. 39. The agent of this restoration, both for beings above and below mankind, is the Incarnate Word—v. 25, p. 913. Erigena regards our incarceration in the body, and the distinction of sex, as the consequence of sin. He abandons the idea of a sensuous hell. What is termed the fire of hell is with him a principle of law to which both the good and evil are subject, which wickedness assimilates and makes a torment; goodness a blessing. So, he says, the light is grateful to the sound eye, painful to the diseased; and the food which is welcome to health is loathed by sickness. De Predestinatione, cap. xvii. p. 428. This idea, in which there lies assuredly an element of truth, became a favourite one with the mystics, and re-appears in many varieties of mysticism. Erigena, farther, anticipates Kant in regarding time and space as mere modes of conception peculiar to our present state. He himself is much more rationalist than mystic (except in the fanciful interpretations of Scripture to which he is compelled to resort); but his system was developed, three centuries later, into an extreme and revolutionary mysticism.

The combination of Platonism and Christianity, so often attempted, abandoned, and renewed, assumes five distinct phases.

I. In the East, with Dionysius; dualistic, with real and ideal worlds apart, removing man far from God by an intervening chain of hierarchic emanations.

II. In the West, with Scotus Erigena; abandoning emanation for ever, and taking up instead the idea to which the Germans give the name of Immanence. God regarded more as the inner life and vital substratum of the universe, than as radiating it from a far-off point of abstraction.

III. In the thirteenth century, at Paris, with Amalric of Bena and David of Dinant. They pronounce God the material, essential cause of all things,—not the efficient cause merely. The Platonic identification of the velle and the esse in God. David and his sect blend with their pantheism the doctrine that under the coming new dispensation—that of the Holy Ghost—all believers are to regard themselves as incarnations of God, and to dispense (as men filled with the Spirit) with all sacraments and external rites. They carry the spiritualizing tendency of Erigena to a monstrous extreme, claim special revelation, declare the real resurrection accomplished in themselves, and that they are already in heaven, which they regard as a state and not a place. They maintain that the good are sufficiently rewarded and the bad adequately punished by the blessedness or the privation they inwardly experience in time,—in short, that retribution is complete on this side the grave, and heavy woes, accordingly, will visit corrupt Christendom. The practical extravagance of this pantheism was repeated, in the fourteenth century, by fanatical mystics among the lower orders.

IV. With Eckart, who reminds us of Plotinus. The ‘Intuition’ of Plotinus is Eckart’s ‘Spark of the Soul,’ the power whereby we can transcend the sensible, the manifold, the temporal, and merge ourselves in the changeless One. At the height of this attainment, the mystic of Plotinus and the mystic of Eckart find the same God,—that is, the same blank abstraction, above being and above attributes. But with Plotinus such escape from finite consciousness is possible only in certain favoured intervals of ecstasy. Eckart, however (whose very pantheism is the exaggeration of a Christian truth beyond the range of Plotinus), will have man realize habitually his oneness with the Infinite. According to him, if a man by self-abandonment attains this consciousness, God has realized Himself within him—has brought forth his Son—has evolved his Spirit. Such a man’s knowledge of God is God’s knowledge of Himself. For all spirit is one. To distinguish between the divine ground of the soul and the Divinity is to disintegrate the indivisible Universal Spirit—is to be far from God—is to stand on the lower ground of finite misconception, within the limits of transitory Appearance. The true child of God ‘breaks through’ such distinction to the ‘Oneness.’ Thus, creation and redemption are resolved into a necessary process—the evolution and involution of Godhead. Yet this form of mediæval pantheism appears to advantage when we compare it with that of ancient or of modern times. The pantheism of the Greek took refuge in apathy from Fate. The pantheism of the present day is a plea for self-will. But that of Eckart is half redeemed by a sublime disinterestedness, a confiding abnegation of all choice or preference, which betrays the presence of a measure of Christian element altogether inconsistent with the basis of his philosophy.

V. With Tauler and the ‘German Theology.’ This is the best, indisputably, of all the forms assumed by the combination in question. The Platonism is practically absorbed in the Christianity. Tauler speaks of the ideal existence of the soul in God—of the loss of our nameless Ground in the unknown Godhead, and we find language in the Theologia Germanica concerning God as the substance of all things—concerning the partial and the Perfect, the manifold and the One, which might be pantheistically construed. But such interpretation would be most unfair, and is contradicted by the whole tenour both of the sermons and the treatise. An apprehension of the nature of sin so searching and profound as that in the ‘Theology,’ is impossible to pantheism. Luther could see therein only most Christian theism. These mystics still employed some of the terms transmitted by a revered philosophy. Tauler cites with deference the names of Dionysius, Proclus, and Plotinus. This mysticism clothes its thought with fragments from the old philosopher’s cloak—but the heart and body belong to the school of Christ. With Dionysius, and even with Erigena, man seems to need but a process of approximation to the divine subsistence—a rise in the scale of being by becoming quantitatively rather than qualitatively more. With the German mystics he must be altogether unmade and born anew. To shift from one degree of illumination to another somewhat higher, is nothing in their eyes, for the need lies not in the understanding, but in heart and will. According to them, man must stand virtually in heaven or hell—be God’s or the devil’s. The Father of our spirits is not relegated from men by ecclesiastical or angelic functionaries, but nearer to every one, clerk or lay, gentle or simple, than he is to himself. So the exclusiveness and the frigid intellectualism so characteristic of the ancient ethnic philosophy, has vanished from the Teutonic mysticism. Plato helps rather than harms by giving a vantage ground and defence to the more true and subjective, as opposed to a merely institutional Christianity.

Both Eckart and the Theologia Germanica would have man ‘break through’ and transcend ‘distinction.’ But it is true, with slight exception, that the distinctions Eckart would escape are natural; those which the ‘Theology’ would surpass, for the most part artificial. The asceticism of both is excessive. The self-reduction of Eckart is, however, more metaphysical than moral; that of the ‘Theology’ moral essentially. Both would say, the soul of the regenerate man is one with God—cannot be separated from Him. But only Eckart would say, such soul is not distinct from God. Both would essay to pass from the Nature to the Being of God—from his manifested Existence to his Essence, and they both declare that our nature has its being in the divine. But such assertion, with Tauler and the Theologia Germanica, by no means deifies man. It is but the Platonic expression of a great Christian doctrine—the real Fatherhood of God.

Note to page 142.

Itaque tum per totam fere Galliam in civitatibus, vicis, et castellis, a scholaribus, non solum intra scholas, sed etiam triviatim; nec a litteratis, aut provectis tantum, sed a pueris et simplicibus, aut certe stultis, de sancta Trinitate, quæ Deus est, disputaretur, &c.—Epist. 337, and comp. Epist. 332. Bernard at first refused to encounter Abelard, not simply because from his inexperience in such combats he was little fitted to cope with that dialectic Goliath—a man of war from his youth—but because such discussions were in themselves, he thought, an indignity to the faith.—Epist. 189. Abelard he denounces as wrong, not only in his heretical results, but in principle,—Cum ea ratione nititur explorare, quæ pia mens fidei vivacitate apprehendit. Fides piorum credit, non discutit. Sed iste Deum habens suspectum, credere non vult, nisi quod prius ratione discusserit.—Epist. 338.

Note to page 143.

In the eyes both of Anselm and Bernard, to deny the reality of Ideas is to cut off our only escape from the gross region of sense. Neither faith nor reason have then left them any basis of operation. We attain to truth only through the medium of Ideas, by virtue of our essential relationship to the Divine Source of Ideas—the Infinite Truth. That Supreme Truth which gives to existing things their reality is also the source of true thoughts in our minds. Thus our knowledge is an illumination dependent on the state of the heart towards God. On this principle all doubt must be criminal, and every heresy the offspring, not of a bewildered brain, but of a wicked heart.

The fundamental maxim of the mediæval religio-philosophy—Invisibilia non decipiunt, was fertile in delusions. It led men to reject, as untrustworthy, the testimony of sense and of experience. Thus, in the transubstantiation controversy of the ninth century, Realism and Superstition conquered together. It taught them to deduce all knowledge from certain mental abstractions, Platonic Ideas and Aristotelian Forms. Thus Bonaventura (who exhibits this tendency at its height) resolves all science into union with God. The successive attainment of various kinds of knowledge is, in his system, an approximation, stage above stage, to God—a scaling of the heights of Illumination, as we are more closely united with the Divine Word—the repertory of Ideas. Thus, again, the Scriptures were studied by the schoolmen less as a practical guide for the present life than as so much material whence they might deduce metaphysical axioms and propositions—discover more of those divine abstractions which they regarded as the seminal principles of all thought and all existence. They were constantly mistaking results which could only have been attained by revelation or tradition from without, for truth evolved from within the depths of the finite mind, by virtue of its immediate commerce with the Infinite. Anselm found no difficulty in assuming that the God of his ontological proof was identical with the God of the Bible.

Note to page 144.

Thus, speaking of the angelic state, he says,—Creatura cœli illa est, præsto habens per quod ista intueatur. Videt Verbum, et in Verbo facta per Verbum. Nec opus habet ex his quæ facta sunt, factoris notitiam mendicare.—De Consid. V. i., and comp. Serm. in Cantica, v. 4.

The three kinds of meditation, or stages of Christian proficiency, referred to in the text, Bernard calls consideratio dispensativa, æstimativa, and speculativa. The last is thus defined:—Speculativa est consideratio se in se colligens, et, quantum divinitus adjuvatur, rebus humanis eximens ad contemplandum Deum. He who reaches it is among the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven. At omnium maximus, qui spreto ipso usu rerum et sensuum, quantum quidem humanæ fragilitati fas est, non ascensoriis gradibus, sed inopinatis excessibus, avolare interdum contemplando ad illa sublimia consuevit. Ad hoc ultimum genus illos pertinere reor excessus Pauli. Excessus non ascensus: nam raptum potius fuisse, quam ascendisse ipse se perhibet.—De Consid. v. ii. In one of the Sermons on the Canticles, Bernard discourses at more length on this kind of exaltation. Proinde et ego non absurde sponsæ exstasim vocaverim mortem, quæ tamen non vita, sed vitæ eripiat laqueis.... Excedente quippe anima, etsi non vita certe vitæ sensu, necesse est etiam ut nec vitæ tentatis sentiatur.... Utinam hac morte frequenter cadam.... Bona mors, quæ vitam non aufert, sed transfert in melius; bona, qua non corpus cadit, sed anima sublevatur. Verum hæc hominum est. Sed moriatur anima mea morte etiam si dici potest, Angelorum, ut presentium memoria excedens rerum se inferiorum corporearumque non modo cupiditatibus, sed et similitudinibus exuat.... Talis, ut opinor, excessus, aut tantum, aut maxime contemplatio dicitur. Rerum etenim cupiditatibus vivendo non teneri, humanæ virtutis est; corporum vero similitudinibus speculando non involvi, angelicæ puritatis est.... Profecisti, separasti te; sed nondum elongasti, nisi et irruentia undique phantasmata corporearum similitudinum transvolare mentis puritate prævaleas. Hucusque noli tibi promittere requiem.—In Cantica, Serm. lii. 4, 5.

Note to page 144.

Fateor et mihi adventasse Verbum, in insipientia dico, et pluries. Cumque sæpius intraverit ad me, non sensi aliquoties cum intravit. Adesse sensi, adfuisse recordor, interdum et præsentiæ potui introitum ejus, sentire nunquam, sed ne exitum quidem.... Qua igitur introivit? An forte nec introivit quidem, quia non deforis venit? Neque enim est unum aliquid ex iis que foris sunt. Porro nec deintra me venit quoniam bonum est, et scio quoniam non est in me bonum. Ascendi etiam superius meum: et ecce supra hoc Verbum eminens. Ad inferius quoque meum curiosus explorator descendi: et nihilominus infra inventum est. Si foras aspexi, extra omne exterius meum comperi illud esse: si vero intus, et ipsum interius erat.... Ita igitur intrans ad me aliquoties Verbum sponsus, nullis unquam introitum suum indiciis innotescere fecit, non voce, non specie, non incessu. Nullis denique suis motibus compertum est mihi, nullis meis sensibus illapsum penetralibus meis: tantum ex motu cordis, sicut præfatus sum, intellexi præsentiam ejus; et ex fuga vitiorum carnaliumque compressione affectuum, &c.—In Cantica, Serm. lxxiv. 5, 6. The metaphors of Bernard are actual sounds, sights, and fragrances with St. Theresa. From this sensuous extreme his practical devotion is as far removed, on the one side, as from the cold abstraction of Dionysius on the other. His contemplation is no staring at the Divine Essence till we are blind—no oblivion or disdain of outward means. We see God, he says, not as He is, but as He wills—sicuti vult non sicuti est. So when describing that ascent of the soul to God, or descent of God into the soul, which constitutes Union, he says,—In Spiritu fit ista conjunctio.... Non ergo sic affecta et sic dilecta (anima) contenta erit omnino vel illa, quæ multis per ea quæ facta sunt; vel, illa quæ paucis per visa et somnia facta est manifestatio sponsi, nisi et speciali prærogativa intimis illum affectibus atque ipsis medullis cordis cœlitus illapsum suscipiat, habeatque præsto quem desiderat non figuratum, sed infusum: non apparentem sed afficientem; nec dubium quin eo jucundiorem, quo intus, non foris. Verbum nempe est, non sonans, sed penetrans; non loquax, sed efficax; non obstrepens auribus, sed affectibus blandiens, &c.—In Cantica, Serm. xxxi. 6 and 1. Comp. also his remarks at the close of the sermon, on the difference between faith and sight, p. 2868.

Bernard describes three kisses of the soul,—the kiss of the feet of God, of the hand, and of the mouth. (Serm. de diversis, 87, and In Cantica, Serm. iv.) This is his fanciful way of characterising, by the elaboration of a single figurative phrase of Scripture, the progress of the soul through conversion and grace to perfection. Here, as in so many instances, his meaning is substantially correct; it is the expression which is objectionable. He is too much in earnest for the artificial gradations and metaphysical refinements of later mysticism. Compare him, in this respect, with John of the Cross. Bernard would have rejected as unprofitable those descriptions of the successive absorption of the several faculties in God; those manifold kinds of prayer—prayers of quiet, prayers of union, prayers of ecstasy, with their impalpable distinctions; that analysis, miraculously achieved, of miraculous ravishments, detailed at such length in the tedious treatises of the Spanish mystics. The doctrine taught by John of the Cross, that God compensates the faithful for the mortification of the senses by sensuous gratifications of a supernatural kind, would have revolted the more pure devotion of the simple-minded Abbot of Clairvaux.—See La Montée du Mont Carmel, livre ii. chapp. 16, 17; pp. 457, &c.

It should be borne in mind that the highest kind of Consideratio is identical, in Bernard’s phraseology, with Contemplatio; and the terms are thus often used interchangeably. Generally, Consideratio is applied to inquiry, Contemplatio to intuition. De Consid. lib. ii. cap. 2.

Note to page 146.

See Vita, ii. cap. 27, where his biographer gives Bernard’s own modest estimate of these wonders.

Wide, indeed, is the difference between the spiritual mysticism of Bernard and the gross materialism and arrogant pretension which characterise the vision and the prophecy to which Hildegard laid claim. The morbid ambition of theurgic mysticism received a new impulse from the sanction afforded her by Bernard and the contemporary popes. Bernard makes no doubt of the reality of her gifts, and desires a place in her prayers. (Epist. 366.) He did not foresee that the most extravagant and sensuous mysticism must soon of necessity displace the simpler and less dazzling. He would be afraid of taking his place with Rationalist mockers, and a superstitious awe would readily persuade him that it was better to believe than to doubt. When emperors and popes corresponded on familiar terms with the seeress; when haughty nobles and learned ecclesiastics sought counsel at her oracle concerning future events, and even for the decision of learned questions; when all she said in answer was delivered as subject to and in the interest of the Church Catholic—was often the very echo of Bernard’s own warnings and exhortations—who was he, that he should presume to limit the operations of the Spirit of God? Many of Hildegard’s prophecies, denouncing the ecclesiastical abuses of the day, were decidedly reformatory in their tendency. In this respect she is the forerunner of the Abbot Joachim of Calabria, and of St. Brigitta, whose prophetic utterances startled the corrupt Church in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In her supernatural gift of language, her attendant divine radiance, and her fantastic revelations, she, like her friend Elizabeth of Schonau (who had an angel to wait upon her, and saw the eleven thousand virgins), prepares the way for Catharine of Siena, Angela of Foligni, and St. Theresa.