CHAPTER I.
Love! if thy destined sacrifice am I,
Come, slay thy victim, and prepare thy fires;
Plunged in thy depths of mercy let me die
The death which every soul that lives desires!
Madame Guyon.
‘Do you remember,’ said Atherton to Willoughby, when he had called to see him one morning, ‘the hunt we once had after that passage in Jeremy Taylor, about Bishop Ivo’s adventure? Coleridge relates the story without saying exactly where it is, and his daughter states in a note that she had been unable to find the place in Taylor.’
‘I recollect it perfectly; and we discovered it, I think, in the first part of his sermon On the Mercy of the Divine Judgments. Ivo, going on an embassy for St. Louis, meets by the way a grave, sad woman, doesn’t he?—with fire in one hand, and water in the other; and when he inquires what these symbols may mean, she answers, “My purpose is with fire to burn Paradise, and with my water to quench the flames of hell, that men may serve God without the incentives of hope and fear, and purely for the love of God.”
‘Well, Gower has painted her portrait for us,—Queen Quietude, he calls her: and it is to be hung up here over my chimney-piece, by the next evening we meet together.’
The evening came. Atherton was to read a paper on ‘Madame Guyon and the Quietist Controversy,’ and Gower was to exhibit and explain his allegorical picture.
This painting represented a female figure, simply clad in sombre garments, sitting on a fragment of rock at the summit of a high hill. On her head hung a garland, half untwined, from neglect, which had been fantastically woven of cypress, bound about with heart’s-ease. Many flowers of the heart’s-ease had dropped off, withered; some were lying unheeded in her lap. Her face was bent downward; its expression perfectly calm, and the cast of sadness it wore rather recorded a past, than betrayed a present sorrow. Her eyes were fixed pensively, and without seeming to see them, on the thin hands which lay folded on her knees. No anxious effort of thought contracted that placid brow; no eager aspiration lifted those meekly-drooping eyelids.
At her feet lay, on her right, the little brazier in which she had carried her fire, still emitting its grey curls of smoke; and, on her left, the overturned water-urn—a Fortunatus-purse of water,—from whose silver hollow an inexhaustible stream welled out, and leaping down, was lost to sight among the rocks.
Behind her lay two wastes, stretching from east to west. The vast tracts, visible from her far-seeing mountain, were faintly presented in the distance of the picture. But they were never looked upon; her back was toward them; they belonged to a past never remembered. In the east stretched level lands, covered far as the eye could reach with cold grey inundation. Here and there coal-black ridges and dots indicated the highest grounds still imperfectly submerged; and in some places clouds of steam, water-spouts, and jets of stones and mire,—even boulders of rock, hurled streaming out of the waters into the air,—betrayed the last struggles of the Fire-Kingdom with the invasion of those illimitable tides. So have her enchantments slain the Giant of Fire, and laid him to rest under a water-pall. The place of dolours and of endless burning—so populous with Sorrows—is to be a place of great waters, where the slow vacant waves of the far-glittering reaches will come and go among the channels and the pools, and not even the bittern shall be there, with his foot to print the ooze, with his wing to shadow the sleeping shallows, with his cry to declare it all a desolation.
In the western background, the saintly art of Queen Quietude has made a whole burnt-offering of the cedar shades, and flowery labyrinths, and angel-builded crystal domes of Paradise. Most fragrant holocaust that ever breathed against the sky! Those volumes of cloud along the west, through which the sun is going down with dimmed and doubtful lustre (as though his had been the hand which put the torch to such a burning)—they are heavy with spicy odours. Such sweet wonders of the Eden woodlands cannot but give out sweetness in their dying. The heavens grow dusk and slumbrous with so much incense. A dreamy faintness from the laden air weighs down the sense. It seems time to sleep—for us, for all nature, to sleep, weary of terrestrial grossness and of mortal limitation,—to sleep, that all may awake, made new; and so, transformed divinely to the first ideal, have divine existence only, and God be all and in all. For God is love, and when hope and fear are dead, then love is all.
Somewhat thus did Gower describe his picture; whereon, in truth, he had expended no little art,—such a haze of repose, and likewise of unreality, had he contrived to throw over this work of fancy; and such a tone had he given, both to the work of the fire on the one side, and to that of the water on the other. The fire did not seem a cruel fire, nor the water an inhospitable water. Golden lines of light from the sun, and rose-red reflections from clouds whose breasts were feathered with fire, rested on the heads of the waves, where the great flood lay rocking. The very ruins of Paradise,—those charred tree-trunks—those dusty river-beds—that shrivelled boskage and white grass,—did not look utterly forlorn. Some of the glassy walls still stood, shining like rubies in the sunset, and glittering at their basements and their gateways with solid falls and pools of gold and silver, where their rich adornment had run down molten to their feet. The Destroyer was the Purifier; and the waiting sigh for renewal was full of trust.
‘A better frontispiece,’ said Atherton, ‘I could not have for my poor paper. I might have been raised to a less prosaic strain, and omitted some less relevant matter, had I been able to place your picture before me while writing. For upon this question of disinterested love, and so of quietude, our mysticism now mainly turns. With Fénélon and Madame Guyon, mysticism hovers no longer on the confines of pantheism. It deals less with mere abstractions. It is less eager to have everything which is in part done away, that the perfect may come, even while we are here. It is more patient and lowly, and will oftener use common means. Its inner light is not arrogant—for submissive love is that light; and it flames forth with no pretension to special revelations and novel gospels; neither does it construct any inspired system of philosophy. It is less feverishly ecstatic, less grossly theurgic, than in the lower forms of its earlier history. Comparative health is indicated by the fact that it aspires chiefly to a state of continuous resignation,—covets less starts of transport and instantaneous transformations. It seeks, rather, a long and even reach of trustful calm, which shall welcome joy and sorrow with equal mind,—shall live in the present, moment by moment, passive and dependent on the will of the Well-Beloved.
Willoughby. With Madame Guyon, too, I think the point of the old antithesis about which the mystics have so much to say is shifted;—I mean that the contrast lies, with her, not between Finite and Infinite—the finite Affirmation, the infinite Negation,—between sign and thing signified—between mode and modelessness—mediate and immediate,—but simply between God and Self.
Atherton. And so mysticism grows somewhat more clear, and reduces itself to narrower compass.
Gower. And, just as it does so, is condemned by Rome.
Atherton. No doubt the attempt to reach an unattainable disinterestedness was less dangerous and less unwholesome than the strain after superhuman knowledge and miraculous vision.
Mrs. Atherton. I have just opened on one of her verses in Cowper here, which exactly expresses what Mr. Willoughby was suggesting:—
The love of Thee flows just as much
As that of ebbing self subsides;
Our hearts, their scantiness is such,
Bear not the conflict of two rival tides.
Stay; here is one I marked, which goes farther still. It is an allegorical poem. Love has bidden her embark, and then withdraws the vessel,—leaves her floating on the rushes and water-flowers, and spreads his wings for flight, heedless of her cries and prayers. At last she says,—
Be not angry; I resign
Henceforth all my will to thine:
I consent that thou depart,
Though thine absence breaks my heart;
Go then, and for ever too;
All is right that thou wilt do.
This was just what Love intended,
He was now no more offended;
Soon as I became a child,
Love returned to me and smiled:
Never strife shall more betide
’Twixt the bridegroom and his bride.
Atherton. Yes, this is the pure love, the holy indifference of Quietism.
Willoughby. May not this imaginary surrender of eternal happiness—or, at least, the refusal to cherish ardent anticipations of heaven, really invigorate our spiritual nature, by concentrating our religion on a present salvation from sin?
Atherton. I think it possibly may, where contemplation of heaven is the resource of spiritual indolence or weariness in well-doing,—where the mind is prone to look forward to the better world, too much as a place of escape from the painstaking, and difficulty, and discipline of time. But where the hope of heaven is of the true sort—to put it out of sight is grievously to weaken, instead of strengthening, our position. I think we should all find, if we tried, or were unhappily forced to try, the experiment of sustaining ourselves in a religion that ignored the future, that we were lamentably enfeebled in two ways. First of all, by the loss of a support—that heart and courage which the prospect of final victory gives to every combatant; and then, secondly, by the immense drain of mental energy involved in the struggle necessary to reconcile ourselves to that loss. There can be no struggle so exhaustive as this, for it is against our nature,—not as sin has marred (so Madame Guyon thought), but as God has made it. Fearful must be the wear and tear of our religious being, in its vital functions,—and this, not to win, but to abandon an advantage. ‘He that hath this hope purifieth himself.’ So far from being able to dispense with it, we find in the hope of salvation, the helmet of our Christian armour. It is no height of Christian heroism, but presumption rather, to encounter, bare-headed, the onslaughts of sin and sorrow—even though the sword of the Spirit may shine naked in our right hand. But we should, at the same time, remember that our celestial citizenship is realised by present heavenly-mindedness:—a height and purity of temper, however, which grows most within as we have the habit of humbly regarding that kingdom as a place prepared for us. We should not limit our foretastes of heaven to intervals of calm. We may often be growing most heavenly amid scenes most unlike heaven.
Willoughby. In persecution, for example.
Atherton. We should not think that we catch its glory only in happy moments of contemplation, though such musing may well have its permitted place. Let us say also that every victory over love of ease, over discontent, over the sluggish coldness of the heart, over reluctance to duty, over unkindly tempers, is in fact to us an earnest and foretaste of that heaven, where we shall actively obey with glad alacrity, where we shall be pleased in all things with all that pleases God, where glorious powers shall be gloriously developed, undeadened by any lethargy, unhindered by any painful limitation; and where that Love, which here has to contend for very life, and to do battle for its rightful enjoyments, shall possess us wholly, and rejoice and reign among all the fellowships of the blest throughout the everlasting day.
Gower. But all this while we have been very rude. Here is Madame Guyon come to tell us her story, and we have kept her, I don’t know how long, standing at the door.
Kate. Yes, let us hear your paper first, Mr. Atherton: we can talk afterwards, you know.
So Atherton began to read.
QUIETISM.
Part I.—Madame Guyon.
I.
Jeanne Marie Bouvières de la Mothe was born on Easter-eve, April 13th, 1648, at Montargis. Her sickly childhood was distinguished by precocious imitations of that religious life which was held in honour by every one around her. She loved to be dressed in the habit of a little nun. When little more than four years old, she longed for martyrdom. Her school-fellows placed her on her knees on a white cloth, flourished a sabre over her head, and told her to prepare for the stroke. A shout of triumphant laughter followed the failure of the child’s courage. She was neglected by her mother, and knocked about by a spoiled brother. When not at school, she was the pet or the victim of servants. She began to grow irritable from ill-treatment, and insincere from fear. When ten years old, she found a Bible in her sick room, and read it, she says, from morning to night, committing to memory the historical parts. Some of the writings of St. Francis de Sales, and the Life of Madame de Chantal, fell in her way. The latter work proved a powerful stimulant. There she read of humiliations and austerities numberless, of charities lavished with a princely munificence, of visions enjoyed and miracles wrought in honour of those saintly virtues, and of the intrepidity with which the famous enthusiast wrote with a red-hot iron on her bosom, the characters of the holy name Jesus. The girl of twelve years old was bent on copying these achievements on her little scale. She relieved, taught, and waited on the poor; and, for lack of the red-hot iron or the courage, sewed on to her breast with a large needle a piece of paper containing the name of Christ. She even forged a letter to secure her admission to a conventual establishment as a nun. The deceit was immediately detected; but the attempt shows how much more favourable was the religious atmosphere in which she grew up, to the prosperity of convents than to the inculcation of truth.
With ripening years, religion gave place to vanity. Her handsome person and brilliant conversational powers fitted her to shine in society. She began to love dress, and feel jealous of rival beauties. Like St. Theresa, at the same age, she sat up far into the night, devouring romances. Her autobiography records her experience of the mischievous effects of those tales of chivalry and passion. When nearly sixteen, it was arranged that she should marry the wealthy M. Guyon. This gentleman, whom she had seen but three days before her marriage, was twenty-two years older than herself.
The faults she had were of no very grave description, but her husband’s house was destined to prove for several years a pitiless school for their correction. He lived with his mother, a vulgar and hard-hearted woman. Her low and penurious habits were unaffected by their wealth; and in the midst of riches, she was happiest scolding in the kitchen about some farthing matter. She appears to have hated Madame Guyon with all the strength of her narrow mind. M. Guyon loved his wife after his selfish sort. If she was ill, he was inconsolable; if any one spoke against her, he flew into a passion; yet, at the instigation of his mother, he was continually treating her with harshness. An artful servant girl, who tended his gouty leg, was permitted daily to mortify and insult his wife. Madame Guyon had been accustomed at home to elegance and refinement,—beneath her husband’s roof she found politeness contemned and rebuked as pride. When she spoke, she had been listened to with attention,—now she could not open her mouth without contradiction. She was charged with presuming to show them how to talk, reproved for disputatious forwardness, and rudely silenced. She could never go to see her parents without having bitter speeches to bear on her return. They, on their part, reproached her with unnatural indifference towards her own family for the sake of her new connexions. The ingenious malignity of her mother-in-law filled every day with fresh vexations. The high spirit of the young girl was completely broken. She had already gained a reputation for cleverness and wit—now she sat nightmared in company, nervous, stiff, and silent, the picture of stupidity. At every assemblage of their friends she was marked out for some affront, and every visitor at the house was instructed in the catalogue of her offences. Sad thoughts would come—how different might all this have been had she been suffered to select some other suitor! But it was too late. The brief romance of her life was gone indeed. There was no friend into whose heart she could pour her sorrows. Meanwhile, she was indefatigable in the discharge of every duty,—she endeavoured by kindness, by cheerful forbearance, by returning good for evil, to secure some kinder treatment—she was ready to cut out her tongue that she might make no passionate reply—she reproached herself bitterly for the tears she could not hide. But these coarse, hard natures were not so to be won. Her magnanimity surprised, but did not soften minds to which it was utterly incomprehensible.[[315]]
Her best course would have been self-assertion and war to the very utmost. She would have been justified in demanding her right to be mistress in her own house—in declaring it incompatible with the obligations binding upon either side, that a third party should be permitted to sow dissension between a husband and his wife—in putting her husband, finally, to the choice between his wife and his mother. M. Guyon is the type of a large class of men. They stand high in the eye of the world—and not altogether undeservedly—as men of principle. But their domestic circle is the scene of cruel wrongs from want of reflection, from a selfish, passionate inconsiderateness. They would be shocked at the charge of an act of barbarity towards a stranger, but they will inflict years of mental distress on those most near to them, for want of decision, self-control, and some conscientious estimate of what their home duties truly involve. Had the obligations he neglected, the wretchedness of which he was indirectly the author, been brought fairly before the mind of M. Guyon, he would probably have determined on the side of justice, and a domestic revolution would have been the consequence. But Madame Guyon conceived herself bound to suffer in silence. Looking back on those miserable days, she traced a father’s care in the discipline she endured. Providence had transplanted Self from a garden where it expanded under love and praise, to a highway where every passing foot might trample it in the dust.
A severe illness brought her more than once to the brink of the grave. She heard of her danger with indifference, for life had no attraction. Heavy losses befel the family—she could feel no concern. To end her days in a hospital was even an agreeable anticipation. Poverty and disgrace could bring no change which would not be more tolerable than her present suffering. She laboured, with little success, to find comfort in religious exercises. She examined herself rigidly, confessed with frequency, strove to subdue all care about her personal appearance, and while her maid arranged her hair—how, she cared not—was lost in the study of Thomas à Kempis. At length she consulted a Franciscan, a holy man, who had just emerged from a five years’ solitude. ‘Madame,’ said he, ‘you are disappointed and perplexed because you seek without what you have within. Accustom yourself to seek God in your heart, and you will find Him.’
II.
These words of the old Franciscan embody the response which has been uttered in every age by the oracle of mysticism. It has its truth and its falsehood, as men understand it. There is a legend of an artist, who was about to carve from a piece of costly sandal-wood an image of the Madonna; but the material was intractable—his hand seemed to have lost its skill—he could not approach his ideal. When about to relinquish his efforts in despair, a voice in a dream bade him shape the figure from the oak-block which was about to feed his hearth. He obeyed, and produced a masterpiece. This story represents the truth which mysticism upholds when it appears as the antagonist of superstitious externalism. The materials of religious happiness lie, as it were, near at hand—among affections and desires which are homely, common, and of the fireside. Let the right direction, the heavenly influence, be received from without; and heaven is regarded with the love of home, and home sanctified by the hope of heaven. The far-fetched costliness of outward works—the restless, selfish bargaining with asceticism and with priestcraft for a priceless heaven, can never redeem and renew a soul to peace. But mysticism has not stopped here; it takes a step farther, and that step is false. It would seclude the soul too much from the external; and, to free it from a snare, removes a necessary help. Like some overshadowing tree, it hides the rising plant from the force of storms, but it also intercepts the appointed sunshine—it protects, but it deprives—and beneath its boughs hardy weeds have grown more vigorously than precious grain. Removing, more or less, the counterpoise of the letter, in its zeal for the spirit, it promotes an intense and morbid self-consciousness. Roger North tells us that when he and his brother stood on the top of the Monument, it was difficult for them to persuade themselves that their weight would not throw down the building. The dizzy elevation of the mystic produces sometimes a similar overweaning sense of personality.
Often instead of rising above the infirmities of our nature, and the common laws of life, the mystic becomes the sport of the idlest phantasy, the victim of the most humiliating reaction. The excited and overwrought temperament mistakes every vibration of the fevered nerves for a manifestation from without; as in the solitude, the silence, and the glare of a great desert, travellers have seemed to hear distinctly the church bells of their native village. In such cases an extreme susceptibility of the organ, induced by peculiarities of climate, gives to a mere conception or memory the power of an actual sound; and, in a similar way, the mystic has often both tempted and enraptured himself—his own breath has made both the ‘airs from heaven,’ and the ‘blasts from hell;’ and the attempt to annihilate Self has ended at last in leaving nothing but Self behind. When the tide of enthusiasm has ebbed, and the channel has become dry, simply because humanity cannot long endure a strain so excessive, then that magician and master of legerdemain, the Fancy, is summoned to recal, to eke out, or to interpret the mystical experience; then that fantastic acrobat, Affectation, is admitted to play its tricks—just as, when the waters of the Nile are withdrawn, the canals of Cairo are made the stage on which the jugglers exhibit their feats of skill to the crowds on either bank.
III.
To return to Madame Guyon. From the hour of that interview with the Franciscan she was a mystic. The secret of the interior life flashed upon her in a moment. She had been starving in the midst of fulness; God was near, not far off; the kingdom of heaven was within her. The love of God took possession of her soul with an inexpressible happiness. Beyond question, her heart apprehended, in that joy, the great truth that God is love—that He is more ready to forgive, than we to ask forgiveness—that He is not an austere being whose regard is to be purchased by rich gifts, tears, and penance. This emancipating, sanctifying belief became the foundation of her religion. She raised on this basis of true spirituality a mystical superstructure, in which there was some hay and stubble, but the corner stone had first been rightly laid, never to be removed from its place.
Prayer, which had before been so difficult, was now delightful and indispensable; hours passed away like moments—she could scarcely cease from praying. Her trials seemed great no longer; her inward joy consumed, like a fire, the reluctance, the murmur, and the sorrow, which had their birth in self. A spirit of confiding peace, a sense of rejoicing possession, pervaded all her days. God was continually present with her, and she seemed completely yielded up to God. She appeared to feel herself, and to behold all creatures, as immersed in the gracious omnipresence of the Most High. In her adoring contemplation of the Divine presence, she found herself frequently unable to employ any words, or to pray for any particular blessings.[[316]] She was then little more than twenty years of age. The ardour of her devotion would not suffer her to rest even here. It appeared to her that self was not yet sufficiently suppressed. There were some things she chose as pleasant, other things she avoided as painful. She was possessed with the notion that every choice which can be referred to self is selfish, and therefore criminal.
On this principle, Æsop’s traveller, who gathered his cloak about him in the storm, and relinquished it in the sunshine, should be stigmatized as a selfish man, because he thought only of his own comfort, and did not remember at the moment his family, his country, or his Maker. It is not regard for self which makes us selfish, but regard for self to the exclusion of due regard for others. But the zeal of Madame Guyon blinded her to distinctions such as these. She became filled with an insatiable desire of suffering.[[317]] She resolved to force herself to what she disliked, and deny herself what was gratifying, that the mortified senses might at last have no choice whatever. She displayed the most extraordinary power of will in her efforts to annihilate her will. Every day she took the discipline with scourges pointed with iron. She tore her flesh with brambles, thorns, and nettles. Her rest was almost destroyed by the pain she endured. She was in very delicate health, continually falling ill, and could eat scarcely anything. Yet she forced herself to eat what was most nauseous to her; she often kept wormwood in her mouth, and put coloquintida in her food, and when she walked she placed stones in her shoes. If a tooth ached she would bear it without seeking a remedy; when it ached no longer, she would go and have it extracted. She imitated Madame Chantal in dressing the sores of the poor, and ministering to the wants of the sick. On one occasion she found that she could not seek the indulgence offered by her Church for remitting some of the pains of purgatory. At that time she felt no doubt concerning the power of the priest to grant such absolution, but she thought it wrong to desire to escape any suffering. She was afraid of resembling those mercenary souls, who are afraid not so much of displeasing God, as of the penalties attached to sin. She was too much in earnest for visionary sentimentalism. Her efforts manifest a serious practical endeavour after that absolute disinterestedness which she erroneously thought both attainable and enjoined. She was far from attaching any expiatory value to these acts of voluntary mortification, they were a means to an end. When she believed that end attained, in the entire death of self, she relinquished them.
IV.
Situated as Madame Guyon was now, her mind had no resource but to collapse upon itself, and the feelings so painfully pent up became proportionately vehement. She found a friend in one Mère Granger; but her she could see seldom, mostly by stealth. An ignorant confessor joined her mother-in-law and husband in the attempt to hinder her from prayer and religious exercises. She endeavoured in everything to please her husband, but he complained that she loved God so much she had no love left for him. She was watched day and night; she dared not stir from her mother-in-law’s chamber or her husband’s bedside. If she took her work apart to the window, they followed her there, to see that she was not in prayer. When her husband went abroad, he forbade her to pray in his absence. The affections even of her child were taken from her, and the boy was taught to disobey and insult his mother. Thus utterly alone, Madame Guyon, while apparently engaged in ordinary matters, was constantly in a state of abstraction; her mind was elsewhere, rapt in devout contemplation. She was in company without hearing a word that was said. She went out into the garden to look at the flowers, and could bring back no account of them, the eye of her reverie could mark nothing actually visible. When playing at piquet, to oblige her husband, this ‘interior attraction’ was often more powerfully felt than even when at church. In her Autobiography she describes her experience as follows:—
‘The spirit of prayer was nourished and increased from their contrivances and endeavours to disallow me any time for practising it. I loved without motive or reason for loving; for nothing passed in my head, but much in the innermost of my soul. I thought not about any recompence, gift, or favour, or anything which regards the lover. The Well-beloved was the only object which attracted my heart wholly to Himself. I could not contemplate His attributes. I knew nothing else but to love and to suffer. Oh, ignorance more truly learned than any science of the Doctors, since it so well taught me Jesus Christ crucified, and brought me to be in love with His holy cross! In its beginning I was attracted with so much force, that it seemed as if my head was going to join my heart. I found that insensibly my body bent in spite of me. I did not then comprehend from whence it came; but have learned since, that as all passed in the will, which is the sovereign of the powers, that attracted the others after it, and reunited them in God, their divine centre and sovereign happiness. And as these powers were then unaccustomed to be united, it required the more violence to effect that union. Wherefore it was the more perceived. Afterwards it became so strongly riveted as to seem to be quite natural. This was so strong that I could have wished to die, in order to be inseparably united without any interstice to Him who so powerfully attracted my heart. As all passed in the will, the imagination and the understanding being absorbed in it, in a union of enjoyment, I knew not what to say, having never read or heard of such a state as I experienced; for, before this, I had known nothing of the operations of God in souls. I had only read Philothea (written by St. Francis de Sales), with the Imitation of Christ (by Thomas à Kempis), and the Holy Scriptures; also the Spiritual Combat, which mentions none of these things.’[[318]]
In this extract she describes strange physical sensations as accompanying her inward emotion. The intense excitement of the soul assumes, in her over-strained and secluded imagination, the character of a corporeal seizure. The sickly frame, so morbidly sensitive, appears to participate in the supernatural influences communicated to the spirit. On a subsequent occasion, she speaks of herself as so oppressed by the fulness of the Divine manifestations imparted to her, as to be compelled to loosen her dress. More than once some of those who sat next her imagined that they perceived a certain marvellous efflux of grace proceeding from her to themselves. She believed that many persons, for whom she was interceding with great fervour, were sensible at the time of an extraordinary gracious influence instantaneously vouchsafed, and that her spirit communicated mysteriously, ‘in the Lord,’ with the spirits of those dear to her when far away. She traced a special intervention of Providence in the fact, that she repeatedly ‘felt a strong draught to the door’ just when it was necessary to go out to receive a secret letter from her friend, Mère Granger; that the rain should have held up precisely when she was on her road to or from mass; and that at the very intervals when she was able to steal out to hear it, some priest was always found performing, or ready to perform the service, though at a most unusual hour.[[319]]
V.
Imaginary as all this may have been, the Church of Rome, at least, had no right to brand with the stigma of extravagance any such transference of the spiritual to the sensuous, of the metaphysical to the physical. The fancies of Madame Guyon in this respect are innocent enough in comparison with the monstrosities devised by Romish marvel-mongers to exalt her saints withal. St. Philip Neri was so inflamed with love to God as to be insensible to all cold, and burned with such a fire of devotion that his body, divinely feverish, could not be cooled by exposure to the wildest winter night. For two-and-fifty years he was the subject of a supernatural palpitation, which kept his bed and chair, and everything moveable about him, in a perpetual tremble. For that space of time his breast was miraculously swollen to the thickness of a fist above his heart. On a post-mortem examination of the holy corpse, it was found that two of the ribs had been broken, to allow the sacred ardour of his heart more room to play! The doctors swore solemnly that the phenomenon could be nothing less than a miracle. A divine hand had thus literally ‘enlarged the heart’ of the devotee.[[320]] St. Philip enjoyed, with many other saints, the privilege of being miraculously elevated into the air by the fervour of his heavenward aspirations. The Acta Sanctorum relates how Ida of Louvain—seized with an overwhelming desire to present her gifts with the Wise Men to the child Jesus—received, on the eve of the Three Kings, the distinguished favour of being permitted to swell to a terrific size, and then gradually to return to her original dimensions. On another occasion, she was gratified by being thrown down in the street in an ecstacy, and enlarging so that her horror-stricken attendant had to embrace her with all her might to keep her from bursting. The noses of eminent saints have been endowed with so subtile a sense that they have detected the stench of concealed sins, and enjoyed, as a literal fragrance, the well-known odour of sanctity. St. Philip Neri was frequently obliged to hold his nose and turn away his head when confessing very wicked people. In walking the streets of some depraved Italian town, the poor man must have endured all the pains of Coleridge in Cologne, where, he says,
‘I counted two-and-seventy stenches,
All well-defined, and several stinks!’
Maria of Oignys received what theurgic mysticism calls the gift of jubilation. For three days and nights upon the point of death, she sang without remission her ecstatic swan-song, at the top of a voice whose hoarseness was miraculously healed. She felt as though the wing of an angel were spread upon her breast, thrilling her heart with the rapture, and pouring from her lips the praises, of the heavenly world. With the melodious modulation of an inspired recitative, she descanted on the mysteries of the Trinity and the incarnation—improvised profound expositions of the Scripture—invoked the saints, and interceded for her friends.[[321]] A nun who visited Catharina Ricci in her ecstasy, saw with amazement her face transformed into the likeness of the Redeemer’s countenance. St. Hildegard, in the enjoyment and description of her visions, and in the utterance of her prophecies, was inspired with a complete theological terminology hitherto unknown to mortals. A glossary of the divine tongue was long preserved among her manuscripts at Wiesbaden.[[322]] It is recorded in the life of St. Veronica of Binasco, that she received the miraculous gift of tears in a measure so copious, that the spot where she knelt appeared as though a jug of water had been overset there. She was obliged to have an earthen vessel ready in her cell to receive the supernatural efflux, which filled it frequently to the weight of several Milan pounds! Ida of Nivelles, when in an ecstasy one day, had it revealed to her that a dear friend was at the same moment in the same condition. The friend also was simultaneously made aware that Ida was immersed in the same abyss of divine light with herself. Thenceforward they were as one soul in the Lord, and the Virgin Mary appeared to make a third in the saintly fellowship. Ida was frequently enabled to communicate with spiritual personages, without words, after the manner of angelic natures. On one occasion, when at a distance from a priest to whom she was much attached, both she and the holy man were entranced at the same time; and, when wrapt to heaven, he beheld her in the presence of Christ, at whose command she communicated to him, by a spiritual kiss, a portion of the grace with which she herself had been so richly endowed. To Clara of Montfaucon allusion has already been made. In the right side of her heart was found, completely formed, a little figure of Christ upon the cross, about the size of a thumb. On the left, under what resembled the bloody cloth, lay the instruments of the passion—the crown of thorns, the nails, &c. So sharp was the miniature lance, that the Vicar-General Berengarius, commissioned to assist at the examination by the Bishop of Spoleto, pricked therewith his reverend finger. This marvel was surpassed in the eighteenth century by a miracle more piquant still. Veronica Giuliani caused a drawing to be made of the many forms and letters which she declared had been supernaturally modelled within her heart. To the exultation of the faithful—and the everlasting confusion of all Jews, Protestants, and Turks—a post-mortem examination disclosed the accuracy of her description, to the minutest point. There were the sacred initials in a large and distinct Roman character, the crown of thorns, two flames, seven swords, the spear, the reed, &c.—all arranged just as in the diagram she had furnished.[[323]] The diocese of Liège was edified, in the twelfth century, by seeing, in the person of the celebrated Christina Mirabilis, how completely the upward tendency of protracted devotion might vanquish the law of gravitation. So strongly was she drawn away from this gross earth, that the difficulty was to keep her on the ground. She was continually flying up to the tops of lonely towers and trees, there to enjoy a rapture with the angels, and a roost with the birds. In the frequency, the elevation, and the duration of her ascents into the air, she surpassed even the high-flown devotion of St. Peter of Alcantara, who was often seen suspended high above the fig-trees which overshadowed his hermitage at Badajos—his eyes upturned, his arms outspread—while the servant sent to summon him to dinner, gazed with open mouth, and sublunary cabbage cooled below. The limbs of Christina lost the rigidity, as her body lost the grossness, common to vulgar humanity. In her ecstasies she was contracted into the spherical form—her head was drawn inward and downward towards her breast, and she rolled up like a hedgehog. When her relatives wished to take and secure her, they had to employ a man to hunt her like a bird. Having started his game, he had a long run across country before he brought her down, in a very unsportsmanlike manner, by a stroke with his bludgeon which broke her shin. When a few miracles had been wrought to vindicate her aërostatic mission, she was allowed to fly about in peace.[[324]] She has occupied, ever since, the first place in the ornithology of Roman-catholic saintship. Such are a few of the specimens which might be collected in multitudes from Romanist records, showing how that communion has bestowed its highest favour on the most coarse and materialised apprehensions of spiritual truth. Extravagant inventions such as these—monstrous as the adventures of Baron Münchausen, without their wit—have been invested with the sanction and defended by the thunder of the Papal chair. Yet this very Church of Rome incarcerated Molinos and Madame Guyon as dangerous enthusiasts.
VI.
Madame Guyon had still some lessons to learn. On a visit to Paris, the glittering equipages of the park, and the gaieties of St. Cloud, revived the old love of seeing and being seen. During a tour in the provinces with her husband, flattering visits and graceful compliments everywhere followed such beauty, such accomplishments, and such virtue, with a delicate and intoxicating applause. Vanity—dormant, but not dead—awoke within her for the last time. She acknowledged, with bitter self-reproach, the power of the world, the weakness of her own resolves. In the spiritual desertion which ensued, she recognised the displeasure of her Lord, and was wretched. She applied to confessors—they were miserable comforters, all of them. They praised her while she herself was filled with self-loathing. She estimated the magnitude of her sins by the greatness of the favour which had been shown her. The bland worldliness of her religious advisers could not blind so true a heart, or pacify so wakeful a conscience. She found relief only in a repentant renewal of her self-dedication to the Saviour, in renouncing for ever the last remnant of confidence in any strength of her own.
It was about this period that she had a remarkable conversation with a beggar, whom she found upon a bridge, as, followed by her footman, she was walking one day to church. This singular mendicant refused her offered alms—spoke to her of God and divine things—and then of her own state, her devotion, her trials, and her faults. He declared that God required of her not merely to labour as others did to secure their salvation, that they might escape the pains of hell, but to aim at such perfection and purity in this life, as to escape those of purgatory. She asked him who he was. He replied, that he had formerly been a beggar, but now was such no more;—mingled with the stream of people, and she never saw him afterwards.[[325]]
The beauty of Madame Guyon had cost her tender conscience many a pang. She had wept and prayed over that secret love of display which had repeatedly induced her to mingle with the thoughtless amusements of the world. At four-and-twenty the virulence of the small-pox released her from that snare. M. Guyon was laid up with the gout. She was left, when the disorder seized her, to the tender mercies of her mother-in-law. That inhuman woman refused to allow any but her own physician to attend her, yet for him she would not send. The disease, unchecked, had reached its height, when a medical man, passing that way, happened to call at the house. Shocked at the spectacle Madame Guyon presented, he was proceeding at once to bleed her, expressing, in no measured terms, his indignation at the barbarity of such neglect. The mother-in-law would not hear of such a thing. He performed the operation in spite of her threats and invectives, leaving her almost beside herself with rage. That lancet saved the life of Madame Guyon, and disappointed the relative who had hoped to see her die. When at length she recovered, she refused to avail herself of the cosmetics generally used to conceal the ravages of the disorder. Throughout her suffering she had never uttered a murmur, or felt a fear. She had even concealed the cruelty of her mother-in-law. She said, that if God had designed her to retain her beauty, He would not have sent the scourge to remove it. Her friends expected to find her inconsolable—they heard her speak only of thankfulness and joy. Her confessor reproached her with spiritual pride. The affection of her husband was visibly diminished; yet the heart of Madame Guyon overflowed with joy. It appeared to her, that the God to whom she longed to be wholly given up had accepted her surrender, and was removing everything that might interpose between Himself and her.[[326]]
VII.
The experience of Madame Guyon, hitherto, had been such as to teach her the surrender of every earthly source of gratification or ground of confidence. Yet one more painful stage on the road to self-annihilation remained to be traversed. She must learn to give up cheerfully even spiritual pleasures. In the year 1674, according to the probable calculation of Mr. Upham, she was made to enter what she terms a state of desolation, which lasted, with little intermission, for nearly seven years.[[327]] All was emptiness, darkness, sorrow. She describes herself as cast down, like Nebuchadnezzar, from a throne of enjoyment, to live among the beasts. ‘Alas!’ she exclaimed, ‘is it possible that this heart, formerly all on fire, should now become like ice?’ The heavens were as brass, and shut out her prayers; horror and trembling took the place of tranquillity; hopelessly oppressed with guilt, she saw herself a victim destined for hell. In vain for her did the church doors open, the holy bells ring, the deep-voiced intonations of the priest arise and fall, the chanted psalm ascend through clouds of azure wandering incense. The power and the charm of the service had departed. Of what avail was music to a burning wilderness athirst for rain? Gladly would she have had recourse to the vow, to the pilgrimage, to the penance, to any extremity of self-torture. She felt the impotence of such remedies for such anguish. She had no ear for comfort, no eye for hope, not even a voice for complaint.
During this period the emotional element of religion in her mind appears to have suffered an almost entire suspension. Regarding the loss of certain feelings of delight as the loss of the divine favour, she naturally sank deeper and deeper in despondency. A condition by no means uncommon in ordinary Christian experience assumed, in her case, a morbid character. Our emotions may be chilled, or kindled, in ever-varying degrees, from innumerable causes. We must accustom ourselves to the habitual performance of duty, whether attended or not with feelings of a pleasurable nature. It is generally found that those powerful emotions of joy which attend, at first, the new and exalting consciousness of peace with God, subside after awhile. As we grow in religious strength and knowledge, a steady principle supplies their place. We are refreshed, from time to time, by seasons of heightened joy and confidence, but we cease to be dependent upon feeling. At the same time, there is nothing in Scripture to check our desire for retaining as constantly as possible a sober gladness, for finding duty delightful, and the ‘joy of the Lord’ our strength. These are the truths which the one-sided and unqualified expressions of Madame Guyon at once exaggerate and obscure.
During this dark interval M. Guyon died. His widow undertook the formidable task of settling his disordered affairs. Her brother gave her no assistance; her mother-in-law harassed and hindered to her utmost; yet Madame Guyon succeeded in arranging a chaos of papers, and bringing a hopeless imbroglio of business matters into order, with an integrity and a skill which excited universal admiration. She felt it was her duty; she believed that Divine assistance was vouchsafed for its discharge. Of business, she says, she knew as little as of Arabic; but she knew not what she could accomplish till she tried. Minds far more visionary than hers have evinced a still greater aptitude for practical affairs.
The 22nd of July, 1680, is celebrated by Madame Guyon as the happy era of her deliverance. A letter from La Combe was the instrument of a restoration as wonderful, in her eyes, as the bondage. This ecclesiastic had been first introduced by Madame Guyon into the path of mystical perfection. His name is associated with her own in the early history of the Quietist movement. He subsequently became her Director, but was always more her disciple than her guide. His admiration for her amounted to a passion. Incessant persecution and long solitary imprisonment combined, with devotional extravagance, to cloud with insanity at last an intellect never powerful. This feeble and affectionate soul perished, the victim of Quietism, and perhaps of love. It should not be forgotten, that before the inward condition of Madame Guyon changed thus remarkably for the better, her outward circumstances had undergone a similar improvement. She lived now in her own house, with her children about her. That Sycorax, her mother-in-law, dropped gall no longer into her daily cup of life. Domestic tormentors, worse than the goblins which buffeted St. Antony, assailed her peace no more. An outer sky grown thus serene, an air thus purified, may well have contributed to chase away the night of the soul, and to give to a few words of kindly counsel from La Combe the brightness of the day-star. Our simple-hearted enthusiast was not so absolutely indifferent as she thought herself to the changes of this transitory world.
VIII.
Madame Guyon had now triumphantly sustained the last of those trials, which, like the probation of the ancient mysteries, made the porch of mystical initiation a passage terrible with pain and peril. Henceforward, she is the finished Quietist: henceforward, when she relates her own experience, she describes Quietism. At times, when the children did not require her care, she would walk out into a neighbouring wood, and there, under the shade of the trees, amidst the singing of the birds, she now passed as many happy hours as she had known months of sorrow. Her own language will best indicate the thoughts which occupied this peaceful retirement, and exhibit the principle there deepened and matured. She says here in her Autobiography—
‘When I had lost all created supports, and even divine ones, I then found myself happily necessitated to fall into the pure divine, and to fall into it through all which seemed to remove me farther from it. In losing all the gifts, with all their supports, I found the Giver. Oh, poor creatures, who pass along all your time in feeding on the gifts of God, and think therein to be most favoured and happy, how I pity you if ye stop here, short of the true rest, and cease to go forward to God, through resignation of the same gifts! How many pass all their lives this way, and think highly of themselves therein! There are others who, being designed of God to die to themselves, yet pass all their time in a dying life, and in inward agonies, without ever entering into God through death and total loss, because they are always willing to retain something under plausible pretexts, and so never lose self to the whole extent of the designs of God. Wherefore, they never enjoy God in his fulness,—a loss that will not perfectly be known until another life.’[[328]]
She describes herself as having ceased from all self-originated action and choice. To her amazement and unspeakable happiness, it appeared as though all such natural movement existed no longer,—a higher power had displaced and occupied its room. ‘I even perceived no more (she continues) the soul which He had formerly conducted by His rod and His staff, because now He alone appeared to me, my soul having given up its place to Him. It seemed to me as if it was wholly and altogether passed into its God, to make but one and the same thing with Him; even as a little drop of water cast into the sea receives the qualities of the sea.’ She speaks of herself as now practising the virtues no longer as virtues—that is, not by separate and constrained efforts. It would have required effort not to practise them.[[329]]
Somewhat later she expresses herself as follows:—
‘The soul passing out of itself by dying to itself necessarily passes into its divine object. This is the law of its transition. When it passes out of self, which is limited, and therefore is not God, and consequently is evil, it necessarily passes into the unlimited and universal, which is God, and therefore is the true good. My own experience seemed to me to be a verification of this. My spirit, disenthralled from selfishness, became united with and lost in God, its Sovereign, who attracted it more and more to Himself. And this was so much the case, that I could seem to see and know God only, and not myself.... It was thus that my soul was lost in God, who communicated to it His qualities, having drawn it out of all that it had of its own.... O happy poverty, happy loss, happy nothing, which gives no less than God Himself in his own immensity,—no more circumscribed to the limited manner of the creation, but always drawing it out of that to plunge it wholly into His divine Essence. Then the soul knows that all the states of self-pleasing visions, of intellectual illuminations, of ecstasies and raptures, of whatever value they might once have been, are now rather obstacles than advancements; and that they are not of service in the state of experience which is far above them; because the state which has props or supports, which is the case with the merely illuminated and ecstatic state, rests in them in some degree, and has pain to lose them. But the soul cannot arrive at the state of which I am now speaking, without the loss of all such supports and helps.... The soul is then so submissive, and perhaps we may say so passive,—that is to say, is so disposed equally to receive from the hand of God either good or evil,—as is truly astonishing. It receives both the one and the other without any selfish emotions, letting them flow and be lost as they came.’[[330]]
These passages convey the substance of the doctrine which, illustrated and expressed in various ways, pervades all the writings of Madame Guyon. This is the principle adorned by the fancy of her Torrents and inculcated in the practical directions of her Short Method of Prayer. Such is the state to which Quietism proposes to conduct its votaries. In some places, she qualifies the strength of her expressions,—she admits that we are not at all times equally conscious of this absolute union of the soul with its centre,—the lower nature may not be always insensible to distress. But the higher, the inmost element of the soul is all the while profoundly calm, and recollection presently imparts a similar repose to the inferior nature. When the soul has thus passed, as she phrases it, out of the Nothing into the All, when its feet are set in ‘a large room’ (nothing less, according to her interpretation, than the compass of Infinity), ‘a substantial or essential word’ is spoken there. It is a continuous word—potent, ineffable, ever uttered without language. It is the immediate unchecked operation of resident Deity. What it speaks, it effects. It is blissful and mysterious as the language of heaven. With Madame Guyon, the events of Providence are God, and the decisions of the sanctified judgment respecting them are nothing less than the immediate voice of God in the soul. She compares the nature thus at rest in God to a tablet on which the divine hand writes,—it must be held perfectly still, else the characters traced there will be distorted or incomplete. In her very humility she verges on the audacity which arrogates inspiration. If she, passive and helpless, really acts no more, the impulses she feels, her words, her actions, must all bear the impress of an infallible divine sanction. It is easy to see that her speech and action—always well-meant, but frequently ill-judged,—were her own after all, though nothing of her own seemed left. She acknowledges that she was sometimes at a loss as to the course of duty. She was guided more than once by random passages of the Bible, and the casual expressions of others, somewhat after the fashion of the Sortes Virgilianæ and the omens of ancient Rome. Her knowledge of Scripture, the native power of her intellect, and the tenderness of her conscience, preserved her from pushing such a view of the inward light to its worst extreme.
IX.
The admixture of error in the doctrine which Madame Guyon was henceforward to preach with so much self-denying love, so much intrepid constancy, appears to us to lie upon the surface. The passages we have given convey, unquestionably, the idea of a practical substitution of God for the soul in the case of the perfectly sanctified. The soul within the soul is Deity. When all is desolate, silent, the divine Majesty arises, thinks, feels, and acts, within the transformed humanity. It is quite true that, as sanctification progresses, Christian virtue becomes more easy as the new habit gains strength. In many respects it is true, as Madame Guyon says, that effort would be requisite to neglect or violate certain duties or commands rather than to perform them. But this facility results from the constitution of our nature. We carry on the new economy within with less outcry, less labour, less confusion and resistance than we did when the revolution was recent, but we carry it on still—working with divine assistance. God works in man, but not instead of man. It is one thing to harmonize, in some measure, the human will with the divine, another to substitute divine volitions for the human. Every man has within him Conscience—the judge often bribed or clamoured down; Will—the marshal; Imagination—the poet; Understanding—the student; Desire—the merchant, venturing its store of affection, and gazing out on the future in search of some home-bound argosy of happiness. But all these powers are found untrue to their allegiance. The ermine—the baton—the song—the books—the merchandize, are at the service of a usurper—Sin. When the Spirit renews the mind, there is no massacre—no slaughterous sword filling with death the streets of the soul’s city, and making man the ruin of his former self. These faculties are restored to loyalty, and reinstated under God. Then Conscience gives verdict, for the most part, according to the divine statute-book, and is habitually obeyed. Then the lordly Will assumes again a lowly yet noble vassalage. Then the dream of Imagination is a dream no longer, for the reality of heaven transcends it. Then the Understanding burns the magic books in the market-place, and breaks the wand of its curious arts—but studies still, for eternity as well as time. The activity of Desire amasses still, according to its nature,—for some treasure man must have. But the treasure is on earth no longer. It is the advantage of such a religion that the very same laws of our being guide our spiritual and our natural life. The same self-controul and watchful diligence which built up the worldly habits towards the summits of success, may be applied at once to those habits which ripen us for heaven. The old experience will serve. But the mystic can find no common point between himself and other men. He is cut off from them, for he believes he has another constitution of being, inconceivable by them—not merely other tastes and a higher aim. The object of Christian love may be incomprehensible, but the affection itself is not so. It is dangerous to represent it as a mysterious and almost unaccountable sentiment, which finds no parallel in our experience elsewhere. Our faith in Christ, as well as our love to Christ, are similar to our faith and love as exercised towards our fellow-creatures. Regeneration imparts no new faculty, it gives only a new direction to the old.
X.
Quietism opposed to the mercenary religion of the common and consistent Romanism around it, the doctrine of disinterested love. Revolting from the coarse machinery of a corrupt system, it took refuge in an unnatural refinement. The love inculcated in Scripture is equally remote from the impracticable indifference of Quietism and the commercial principle of Superstition. Long ago, at Alexandria, Philo endeavoured to escape from an effete and carnal Judaism to a similar elevation. The Persian Sufis were animated with the same ambition in reaction against the frigid legalism of the creed of Islam. Extreme was opposed to extreme, in like manner, when Quietism, disgusted with the unblushing inconsistencies of nominal Christianity, proclaimed its doctrine of perfection—of complete sanctification by faith. This is not a principle peculiar to mysticism. It is of little practical importance. It is difficult to see how it can be applied to individual experience. The man who has reached such a state of purity must be the last to know it. If we do not, by some strange confusion of thought, identify ourselves with God, the nearer we approach Him the more profoundly must we be conscious of our distance. As, in a still water, we may see reflected the bird that sings in an overhanging tree, and the bird that soars towards the zenith—the image deepest as the ascent is highest—so it is with our approximation to the Infinite Holiness. Madame Guyon admits that she found it necessary jealously to guard humility, to watch and pray—that her state was only of ‘comparative immutability.’ It appears to us that perfection is prescribed as a goal ever to be approached, but ever practically inaccessible. Whatever degree of sanctification any one may have attained, it must always be possible to conceive of a state yet more advanced,—it must always be a duty diligently to labour towards it.
Quietist as she was, few lives have been more busy than that of Madame Guyon with the activities of an indefatigable benevolence. It was only self-originated action which she strove to annihilate. In her case, especially, Quietism contained a reformatory principle. Genuflexions and crossings were of little value in comparison with inward abasement and crucifixion. The prayers repeated by rote in the oratory, were immeasurably inferior to that Prayer of Silence she so strongly commends—that prayer which, unlimited to times and seasons, unhindered by words, is a state rather than an act, a sentiment rather than a request,—a continuous sense of submission, which breathes, moment by moment, from the serene depth of the soul, ‘Thy will be done.’[[331]]
As contrasted with the mysticism of St. Theresa, that of Madame Guyon appears to great advantage. She guards her readers against attempting to form any image of God. She aspires to an intellectual elevation—a spiritual intuition, above the sensuous region of theurgy, of visions, and of dreams. She saw no Jesuits in heaven bearing white banners among the heavenly throng of the redeemed. She beheld no Devil, ‘like a little negro,’ sitting on her breviary. She did not see the Saviour in an ecstasy, drawing the nail out of His hand. She felt no large white dove fluttering above her head. But she did not spend her days in founding convents—a slave to the interests of the clergy. So they made a saint of Theresa, and a confessor of Madame Guyon.
XI.
In the summer of 1681, Madame Guyon, now thirty-four years of age, quitted Paris for Gex, a town lying at the foot of the Jura, about twelve miles from Geneva. It was arranged that she should take some part in the foundation and management of a new religious and charitable institution there. A period of five years was destined to elapse before her return to the capital. During this interval, she resided successively at Gex, Thonon, Turin, and Grenoble. Wherever she went, she was indefatigable in works of charity, and also in the diffusion of her peculiar doctrines concerning self-abandonment and disinterested love. Strong in the persuasion of her mission, she could not rest without endeavouring to influence the minds around her. The singular charm of her conversation won a speedy ascendency over nearly all with whom she came in contact. It is easy to see how a remarkable natural gift in this direction contributed both to the attempt and the success. But the Quietest had buried nature, and to nature she would owe nothing,—these conversational powers could be, in her eyes, only a special gift of utterance from above. This mistake reminds us of the story of certain monks upon whose cloister garden the snow never lay, though all the country round was buried in the rigour of a northern winter. The marvellous exemption, long attributed by superstition to miracle, was discovered to arise simply from certain thermal springs which had their source within the sacred inclosure. It is thus that the warmth and vivacity of natural temperament has been commonly regarded by the mystic, as nothing less than a fiery impartation from the altar of the celestial temple.
At Thonon her apartment was visited by a succession of applicants from every class, who laid bare their hearts before her, and sought from her lips spiritual guidance or consolation. She met them separately and in groups, for conference and for prayer. At Grenoble, she says she was for some time engaged from six o’clock in the morning till eight at evening in speaking of God to all sorts of persons,—‘friars, priests, men of the world, maids, wives, widows, all came, one after another, to hear what I had to say.’[[332]] Her efforts among the members of the House of the Novitiates in that city, were eminently successful, and she appears to have been of real service to many who had sought peace in vain, by the austerities and the routine of monastic seclusion. Meanwhile, she was active, both at Thonon and Grenoble, in the establishment of hospitals. She carried on a large and continually increasing correspondence. In the former place she wrote her Torrents, in the latter, she published her Short Method of Prayer, and commenced her Commentaries on the Bible.[[333]]
But alas! all this earnest, tireless toil is unauthorized. Bigotry takes the alarm, and cries the Church is in danger. Priests who were asleep—priests who were place-hunting—priests who were pleasure-hunting, awoke from their doze, or drew breath in their chase, to observe this woman whose life rebuked them—to observe and to assail her; for rebuke, in their terminology, was scandal. Persecution hemmed her in on every side; no annoyance was too petty, no calumny too gross, for priestly jealousy. The inmates of the religious community she had enriched were taught to insult her—tricks were devised to frighten her by horrible appearances and unearthly noises—her windows were broken—her letters were intercepted. Thus, before a year had elapsed, she was driven from Gex. Some called her a sorceress; others, more malignant yet, stigmatized her as half a Protestant. She had indeed recommended the reading of the Scriptures to all, and spoken slightingly of mere bowing and bead-counting. Monstrous contumacy—said, with one voice, spiritual slaves and spiritual slave-owners—that a woman desired by her bishop to do one thing, should discover an inward call to do another. At Thonon the priests burnt in the public square all the books they could find treating of the inner life, and went home elated with their performance. One thought may have embittered their triumph—had it only been living flesh instead of mere paper! She inhabited a poor cottage that stood by itself in the fields, at some distance from Thonon. Attached to it was a little garden, in the management of which she took pleasure. One night a rabble from the town were incited to terrify her with their drunken riot,—they trampled down and laid waste the garden, hurled stones in at the windows, and shouted their threats, insults, and curses, round the house the whole night. Then came an episcopal order to quit the diocese. When compelled subsequently, by the opposition she encountered, to withdraw secretly from Grenoble, she was advised to take refuge at Marseilles. She arrived in that city at ten o’clock in the morning, but that very afternoon all was in uproar against her, so vigilant and implacable were her enemies.
Note to page 214.
Autobiography, chapp. viii. and x. In describing her state of mind at this time, she says,—‘This immersion in God immerged all things. I could no more see the saints, nor even the blessed Virgin, out of God; but I beheld them all in Him. And though I tenderly loved certain saints, as St. Peter, St. Paul, St. Mary Magdalen, St. Theresa, with all those who were spiritual, yet I could not form to myself images of them, nor invoke any of them out of God.’ Here a genuine religious fervour, described in the language of mystical theology, has overcome superstition, and placed her, unconsciously, in a position similar to that of Molinos with regard to these professedly subordinate objects of Romanist worship. It may be observed, in passing, that while Rome pretends to subordinate saint-worship, she denounces those of her children who really do so, as heretical, i.e., reformatory, in their tendency.
Madame Guyon was enabled at this period to enjoy a habitual inward prayer,—‘a prayer of rejoicing and possession, wherein the taste of God was so great, so pure, unblended, and uninterrupted, that it drew and absorbed the powers of the soul into a profound recollection, without act or discourse. For I had now no sight but of Jesus Christ alone. All else was excluded, in order to love with the greater extent, without any selfish motives or reasons for loving.’ With much good sense, she declares this continual and immediate sense of the Divine presence far safer and higher than the sensible relish of ecstasies and ravishments,—than distinct interior words or revelations of things to come,—so often imaginary, so apt to divert our desires from the Giver to the gifts;—this is the revelation of Jesus Christ, which makes us new creatures, the manifestation of the Word within us, who cannot deceive,—the life of true and naked faith, which darkens all self-pleasing lights, and reveals the minutest faults, that pure love may reign in the centre of the soul. Thus, while inheriting the phraseology of the mystics (and we discern in these accounts of her early experience the influence of her later readings in mystical theology), she is less sensuous than Theresa, less artificial than John. Like the latter, she assigns to love the office of annihilating the will, to faith that of absorbing the understanding, ‘so as to make it decline all reasonings, all particular brightnesses and illustrations.’ The Annihilation of the Will, or the Union in the Will of God, consists, with her, simply in a state of complete docility, the soul yielding itself up to be emptied of all which is its own, till it finds itself by little and little detached from every self-originated motion, and placed ‘in a holy indifference for willing;—wishing nothing but what God does and wills.’—P. 70.
Note to page 218.
She describes herself, when at Thonon, as causing sundry devils to withdraw with a word. But the said devils, like some other sights and sounds which terrified her there, were probably the contrivance of the monks who persecuted her, with whom expertness in such tricks was doubtless reckoned among the accomplishments of sanctity. When at the same place (she was then a little past thirty), Madame Guyon believed that a certain virtue was vouchsafed her—a gift of spiritual and sometimes of bodily healing, dependent, however, for its successful operation, on the degree of susceptibility in the recipients.—Autobiography, part II. c. xii.
There also she underwent some of her most painful and mysterious experiences with regard to Father La Combe. She says,—‘Our Lord gave me, with the weaknesses of a child, such a power over souls, that with a word I put them in pain or in peace, as was necessary for their good. I saw that God made Himself to be obeyed, in and through me, like an absolute Sovereign. I neither resisted Him nor took part in anything.... Our Lord had given us both (herself and La Combe) to understand that He would unite us by faith and by the cross. Ours, then, has been a union of the cross in every respect, as well as by what I have made him suffer, as by what I have suffered for him.... The sufferings which I have had on his account were such as to reduce me sometimes to extremity, which continued for several years. For though I have been much more of my time far from him than near him, that did not relieve my suffering, which continued till he was perfectly emptied of himself, and to the very point of submission which God required of him.... He hath occasioned me cruel pains when I was near a hundred leagues from him. I felt his disposition. If he was faithful in letting Self be destroyed, I was in a state of peace and enlargement. If he was unfaithful in reflection or hesitation, I suffered till that was passed over. He had no need to write me an account of his condition, for I knew it; but when he did write, it proved to be such as I had felt it.’—Ibid. p. 51.
She says that frequently, when Father La Combe came to confess her, she could not speak a word to him; she felt take place within her the same silence toward him, which she had experienced in regard to God. I understood, she adds, that God wished to teach me that the language of angels might be learnt by men on earth,—that is, converse without words. She was gradually reduced to this wordless communication alone, in her interviews with La Combe; and they imagined that they understood each other, ‘in a manner ineffable and divine.’ She regarded the use of speech, or of the pen, as a kind of accommodation on her part to the weakness of souls not sufficiently advanced for these internal communications.
Here Madame Guyon anticipates the Quakers. Compare Barclay’s Apology, Prop. xi. §§ 6, 7.
Shortly after her arrival in Paris, she describes herself as favoured, from the plenitude which filled her soul, with ‘a discharge on her best-disposed children to their mutual joy and comfort, and not only when present, but sometimes when absent.’ ‘I even felt it,’ she adds, ‘to flow from me into their souls. When they wrote to me, they informed me that at such times they had received abundant infusions of divine grace.’—Ibid. part III. c. i.
Note to page 223.
Autobiography, part I. c. xiii. Here Madame Guyon has found confessors blind guides, and confessions profitless; and furthermore, she is encouraged and instructed in the inward life by a despised layman. There is every reason to believe that the experience of Madame Guyon, and the doctrines of the beggar, were shared to some extent by many more. Madame Guyon speaks as Theresa does of the internal pains of the soul as equivalent to those of purgatory. (c. xi.) The teaching of the quondam mendicant concerning an internal and present instead of a future purgatory, was not in itself contrary to the declarations of orthodox mysticism. But many were beginning to seek in this perfectionist doctrine a refuge from the exactions of the priesthood. With creatures of the clergy like Theresa, or with monks like John of the Cross, such a tenet would be retained within the limits required by the ecclesiastical interest. It might stimulate religious zeal—it would never intercept religious obedience. But it was not always so among the people—it was not so with many of the followers of Molinos. The jealous vigilance of priestcraft saw that it had everything to fear from a current belief among the laity, that a state of spiritual perfection, rendering purgatory needless, was of possible attainment—might be reached by secret self-sacrifice, in the use of very simple means. If such a notion prevailed, the lucrative traffic of indulgences might totter on the verge of bankruptcy. No devotee would impoverish himself to buy exemption hereafter from a purifying process which he believed himself now experiencing, in the hourly sorrows he patiently endured. It was at least possible—it had been known to happen, that the soul which struggled to escape itself—to rise beyond the gifts of God, to God—to ascend, beyond words and means, to repose in Him,—which desired only the Divine will, feared only the Divine displeasure,—which sought to ignore so utterly its own capacity and power, might come to attach paramount importance no longer to the powers of the priesthood and the ritual of the Church. Those aspirations which had been the boast of Rome in the few, became her terror in the many. The Quietest might believe himself sincere in orthodoxy, might choose him a director, and might reverence the sacraments. But such abasement and such ambition—distress so deep, and aims so lofty—would often prove alike beyond the reach of the ordinary confessional. The oily syllables of absolution would drop in vain upon the troubled waves of a nature thus stirred to its inmost depths. And if it could receive peace only from the very hand of God, priestly mediation must begin with shame to take a lower place. The value of relics and of masses, of penances and paternosters, would everywhere fall. An absolute indifference to self-interest would induce indifference also to those priestly baits by which that self-interest was allured. Such were the presentiments which urged the Jesuits of Rome to hunt down Molinos, with all the implacability of fear. The craft was in danger. Hinc illæ lachrymæ.
Note to page 224.
See the Life and Religious Opinions and Experience of Madame de la Mothe Guyon, &c., by Thomas C. Upham (New York, 1851); vol. i. p. 153. Mr. Upham, in this and in some other parts of his excellent biography, appears to me to have fallen into the same error with Madame Guyon. He perceives her mistake in regarding the absence of joy as evidence of the absence of the divine favour. But he contrasts the state in which we are conscious of alacrity and joy in religion—as one in which we still live comparatively by sight, with that condition of privation in which all such enjoyment is withdrawn—a state wherein we are called to live, not by sight, but by pure and naked faith. Now, faith and sight are not thus opposed in Scripture. In the New Testament, faith is always practical belief in what God has revealed; and sight, as the opposite course of life, always so much unbelief—undue dependence on things seen and temporal. It is quite true that too much stress should not be laid by us on the intensity or the displays of mere emotion,—since religion is a principle rather than a sentiment. But not a few have been nursed in dangerous delusion by supposing that when they feel within them scarce a trace of any of those desires or dispositions proper to every Christian heart—when they have no glimpse of what they incorrectly term ‘sight’—then is the time to exercise what they suppose to be faith,—that is, to work themselves up to the obstinate persuasion that they personally are still the children of God.
It may well be questioned, moreover, whether we have any scriptural ground for believing that it is usual with the Almighty, for the growth of our sanctification, to withdraw Himself,—the only source of it. To these supposed hidings of His face Madame Guyon, and every Quietist, would patiently submit, as to the sovereign and inscrutable caprice of the divine Bridegroom of the soul. Rather should we regard such obscurations as originating with ourselves and not with Him, and at once make the lost sense of His gracious nearness the object of humble and earnest search. ‘Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation!’
Madame Guyon describes her ‘state of total privation’ in the twenty-first chapter of the Autobiography, part I.