CHAPTER II.
He that misbelieves and lays aside clear and cautious reason in things that fall under the discussion of Reason, upon the pretence of hankering after some higher principle, (which, a thousand to one, proves but the infatuation of Melancholy and a superstitious hallucination), is as ridiculous as if he would not use his natural eyes about their proper object till the presence of some supernatural light, or till he had got a pair of Spectacles made of the Crystalline Heaven, or of the Cœlum Empyreum, to hang upon his nose for him to look through.—Henry More.
Atherton. I ought to acknowledge, I suppose, that I have by me a rough draught, made some time since, representing the first strife between Mysticism and Reformation. But, as to reading it, I scarcely think——
Willoughby. You will not do so, I beg.
Atherton. Willoughby, you shall suffer for that. I’ll begin.
Willoughby. Pelt away. I thought I should get a cocoa-nut for my stone. (Atherton reads.)
Luther and the Mystics.
The estimate to be formed of the mystics who lived before the Reformation differs very widely from that which is due to those who appeared after it. Previous to the Reformation, there was a far larger amount of truth with the mystics than with any other party in the Romish Church. They were, in reality, men of progress, and belonged to the onward element in their day and generation. For reform of some sort many of them laboured—all of them sighed. They protested against the corruptions of religion. Many an Augean stable would they have cleansed, could they but have found their Hercules. In France, Briconnet, Gerard, and Roussel were men of this class—not so outspoken as Luther and his followers, but led by mysticism to sympathy with reforming views, and enabled by that very mysticism to retain their connexion with Rome, regarding externals as indifferent.
When Luther comes with his doctrine of justification by faith, and his announcement that the Scriptures are the sufficient standard of Christian truth, a great change takes place. Mystics of the more thoughtful, rightly earnest sort, are among the first to embrace the new doctrines. Here they have the guide they longed for—here they find what mysticism could never give. They are, some of them, like Justin Martyr, who waited long among the schools of the Platonists for their promised immediate intuition of Deity, and then discovered among Christians that God was to be known in another way far better—through the medium of his written Word, by the teaching of his Spirit. But those who when a fuller light came, refused to quit for its lustre that isolated and flickering torch, about which men had gathered for lack of anything brighter, such were given over to the veriest absurdity, or speedily consigned to utter forgetfulness. By the mystic of the fourteenth century, the way of the Reformation was in great part prepared. By the mystic of the sixteenth century it was hindered and imperilled. In that huge ship of the state ecclesiastic, which all true hearts and hands in those troublous times were concerned to work to their very best, a new code of regulations had been issued. Such rule came in with Luther. Now some of those who would have been among the very best sailors under the old management, proved useless, or worse than useless under the new. One set of them were insolent and mutinous—had a way of reviling the captain in strange gibberish—and a most insane tendency to look into the powder-room with a light. Another class lay about useless, till having been tumbled over many times by their more active comrades, they got kicked into corners, whence they were never more to emerge. So fared it with mysticism, attempting to persist in existence when its work for that time was done. The mystic so situated was either a caricature of reform or a cipher, either a fanatical firebrand or an unheeded negation.
We need not go far for examples. Dr. Bodenstein of Carlstadt (best known as simple Carlstadt) is professor at Wittenberg, and a thorough reformer. He is a little, swarthy, sunburnt man, crotchety to the last degree. He follows his intuitions—now this whim, now that—right to-day, wrong to-morrow—a man whom you never know where to find. He must spring to his conclusion at once; he will not first pause for satisfying reasons,—for clear ideas on the various bearings of his thought or deed. So his life is a series of starts; his actions incongruous and spasmodic, unlinked, unharmonized by any thoughtful plan or principle.
But Carlstadt is a man of books as well as of action. He writes treatises, repeating the doctrines of Tauler and the German Theology, all about abandonment, and not seeing God or enjoying Him more in this than in that event or employment; about the sin of enjoying ordinances and media, rather than God immediately; about the blessed self-loss in the One; about the reduction of ourselves to nothing. Ah, Dr. Bodenstein, thou mayest write for ever that way, and no one now will read! Men have left all this behind. A ripe full vintage invites their thirst; thine acrid and ascetic grape is now deserted. Gladly do they, for the most part, exchange the refined and impracticable requirements of mysticism, its vagueness, its incessant prohibition, for the genial, simple truth of that German New Testament which Luther is giving them.
At the juncture of which we are about to speak, Luther lay hidden in the Wartburg. In the small town of Zwickau, in the Erzgebirge, there arose a knot of enthusiasts for whom Luther did not go half far enough. There was Storch, a weaver, to whom Gabriel had made very wonderful communications one night; another weaver, named Thomas, and a student, Stübner, who had forsaken the toil of study for the easier method of supernatural illumination. To these should be added the more notorious Thomas Münzer, who has been erroneously regarded as the founder of the party. ‘Why such a slavish reverence for what the Bible says?’ cry these mystics. ‘What is a mere book?’ ‘Have we not immediate voices, impulses, revelations from the Holy Spirit, dictating all we should do? Better this than your Bible reading and college work.’ Then, next, they prophesy terrible woes and judgments to come on Christendom, mainly through the Turks; they themselves, perhaps, in fitting time, may draw the sword of the Lord and of Gideon, and win the land for the saints.
These worthies were put down by the magistrates of Zwickau. Shaking off the Zwickau dust against their enemies, several of them seek a ‘larger sphere of usefulness’ in Wittenberg. They found the city already in no small excitement concerning certain reforms which Carlstadt was making at full speed. He fraternizes with the Zwickau prophets at once. Indeed, he had been heard to say of the whole body of Scripture what divines were accustomed to say of the law only, that it was a killing letter, leading to nothing more than a sense of guilt and deserved condemnation. Faster and faster come his changes, so well-meant, but so ill-advised. With a few strokes he abolishes auricular confession, makes it incumbent to violate the fast days, and renders it customary to come to the sacrament without preparation. Next an iconoclast riot is raised. Carlstadt declares that the magistrates have power to render criminal those observances which the popular voice declares contrary to the Word of God; that if they refuse, the community may take the law into its own hands.
A scholar like Carlstadt, a professor of established repute, surrenders at last to the vulgar error of the very coarsest mysticism. He advises his students to go home; human learning is vain; Hebrew and Greek an idle toil; inspiration is far above scholarship. Were there not prophets among them, wiser than all the doctors, who had never studied anything or anywhere for half an hour? He himself went about among the poor people, asking them the meaning of Scripture passages, and believing that the hap-hazard notions they put forth were a special revelation from Him who hideth from the wise and prudent what is revealed unto babes. Imagine the Professor bawling a text into the ear of some deaf old crone who cowers beside the stove, and awaiting the irrelevant mumblings of ignorant decrepitude as the oracle of God! Fancy him accosting the shoemaker at his stall, and getting his notion of the text in question, noting it down as infallible, and going his way rejoicing; while Crispin, who knows him, thinks over and over again what a far cleverer answer he might have given, and wishes unsaid what Carlstadt believes inspired!
Is there no one in Wittenberg to unmask these follies, and to quiet the smouldering excitement dangerously spreading among townspeople and students? Melanchthon is young. The loud browbeating volubility of the prophets overpowers his gentle nature. He is undecided—he fancies he sees some force in what they say about baptism. He is timid—he will do nothing.
Friends write to Luther. Back comes an answer from a man who sees to the heart of the matter in a moment—a standing confutation of the mystic’s ambition, in three sentences. Thus replies Luther—‘Do you wish to know the place, the time, the manner in which God holds converse with men? Hear then—‘As a lion so hath he crushed all my bones;’ and again, ‘I am cast out from before thy face;’ and again, ‘My soul is filled with plagues, and my life draweth nigh unto the gates of hell.’ The Divine Majesty does not speak to men immediately, as they call it, so that they have vision of God, for He saith, ‘No flesh shall see me and live.’ Human nature could not survive the least syllable of the Divine utterance. So God addresses man through men, because we could not endure His speaking to us without medium.’
And the mystics could not say (as mystics so commonly plead) that Luther was a man unable, from defective experience, to understand them. If any man had sounded the depths of the soul’s ‘dim and perilous way,’ it was he. Nay, it is for him to question their experience. ‘Inquire,’ he says to Melanchthon, ‘if they know aught of those spiritual distresses, those divine births, and deaths, and sorrows, as of hell.’[[206]]
Luther receives day by day more alarming intelligence. He fears the spread of false doctrine—insurrection in the name of reform. He is anxious lest the elector should persecute the new lights—a step which the fat, amiable, children-with-sugar-plums-feeding Frederick, was not very likely to take. He forms the heroic resolve of quitting his refuge, and suddenly reappears in Wittenberg. He preaches sermons marvellous for moderation and wisdom—sermons which accomplish what is so hard, the calming of heated passion, the reconciliation of adversaries. At his voice Violence and Tumult slink away—their hounds still in the leash; and Charity descends, waving her wand of peace, and shedding the light of her heavenly smile on every face. So triumphs Religion over Fanaticism.
Finally, Luther was called on to hold a discussion with two of the prophets, Stübner, and one Cellarius, a schoolmaster. The latter, when called upon by Luther to substantiate his positions from the Scripture, stamps, strikes the table with his fist, and declares it an insult to speak so to a man of God. Luther, at last, seeing this man foaming, roaring, leaping about like one possessed, comes to believe that there is a spirit in these men—but an unclean one from beneath. He cries out finally, after his homely fashion, ‘I smack that spirit of yours upon the snout.’ Howls of indignation from the Zwickauer side—universal confusion—dissolution of assembly. The prophets after this find themselves moved to quit Wittenberg without delay—their occupation gone. Let prosaic or sceptical folk regard this discussion as they may, to those who look beneath the surface, it is manifest that there really was a conflict of spirits going on then and there—the unclean spirit of Arrogance and Misrule quailing before that of Truth and Soberness.[[207]]
Carlstadt and his allies of Zwickau exhibit mysticism rampant, making reformation look questionable. A very fair representative of the other class of mystic is found in Sebastian Frank. This man, born at the close of the fifteenth century, seems to have lived a wandering life in different parts of Germany (often brought into trouble by his doctrines, probably) for some forty or fifty years. He was early enamoured of the German Theology, the writings of Tauler, above all, of Eckart’s speculations. The leading principles contained in the books he regarded with such veneration, he elaborated into a system of his own. Starting with the doctrine of the Theologia Germanica, that God is the substans of all things, he pushes it to the verge of a dreamy pantheism—nay, even beyond that uncertain frontier. He conceives of a kind of divine life-process (Lebens-prozess) through which the universe has to pass. This process, like the Hegelian, is threefold. First, the divine substance, the abstract unity which produces all existence. Second, said substance appearing as an opposite to itself—making itself object. Third, the absorption of this opposition and antithesis—the consummate realization whereof takes place in the consciousness of man when restored to the supreme unity and rendered in a sense divine. The fall of man is, in his system, a fall from the Divinity within him—that Reason which is the Holy Ghost, in which the Divine Being is supposed first to acquire will and self-consciousness. Christ is, with him, the divine element in man. The work of the historic Saviour is to make us conscious of the ideal and inward, and we thus arrive at the consciousness of that fundamental divineness in us which knows and is one with the Supreme by identity of nature.[[208]] Such doctrine is a relapse upon Eckart, and also an anticipation of modern German speculation.
Yet, shall we say on this account that Sebastian Frank was before his age or behind it? The latter unquestionably. He stood up in defence of obsolescent error against a truth that was blessing mankind. He must stand condemned, on the sole ground of judgment we modern judges care to take, as one of the obstructives of his day who put forth what strength he had to roll back the climbing wheel of truth. We pardon Tauler’s allegorical interpretations—those freaks of fancy, so subtile, so inexhaustible, so curiously irrelevant in one sense, yet so sagaciously brought home in another—we assent to Melanchthon’s verdict, who calls him the German Origen; but we remember that every one in his times interpreted the Bible in that arbitrary style. The Reformers, aided by the revival of letters, were successful in introducing those principles of interpretation with which we are ourselves familiar. But for this more correct method of exegesis, the benign influence of the Scriptures themselves had been all but nullified; for any one might have found in them what he would. Yet against this good thing, second only to the Word itself, Sebastian Frank stands up to fight in defence of arbitrary fancy and of lifeless pantheistic theory with such strength as he may. So has mysticism, once so eager to press on, grown childishly conservative, and is cast out straightway. Luther said he had written nothing against Frank, he despised him so thoroughly. ‘Unless my scent deceive me,’ says the reformer, ‘the man is an enthusiast or spiritualist (Geisterer), for whom nothing will do but spirit! spirit!—and not a word of Scripture, sacrament, or ministry.’
So Frank, contending for the painted dreams of night against the realities of day—for fantasy against soberness—and falling, necessarily, in the fight, has been curtained over in his sleep by the profoundest darkness. Scarcely does any one care to rescue from their oblivion even the names of his many books. What is his Golden Ark, or Seven Sealed Book, or collection of most extravagant interpretations, called Paradoxa, to any human creature?
For a Chronicle he left behind, the historian has sometimes to thank him. He had a near-sighted mind. Action immediately about him he could limn truly. But he had not the comprehensiveness to see whither the age was tending.
Willoughby. How admirable is that reply of Luther’s;—an unanswerable rebuke of that presumptuous mysticism which would boastfully tear aside the veil and dare a converse face to face with God. Semele perishes. That the fanatic survives is proof that he has but embraced a cloud.
Atherton. A rebuke, rather, of that folly, in all its forms, which imagines itself the subject of a special revelation that is no fearful searching of the soul, but merely a flattering reflection of its own wishes.
Gower. And what can most men make of that milder form of the same ambition—I mean the exhortation to escape all image and figure? How else can we grasp spiritual realities? The figurative language in which religious truth is conveyed to us seems to me to resemble that delicate membrane gummed to the back of the charred papyrus-roll, which otherwise would crumble to pieces in unwinding. The fragile film alone would drop to dust, but by this means it coheres, and may be unfolded for inspection.
Willoughby. And when a scripture figure is pressed too far (the besetting sin of systematising divines), it is as though your gold-beater’s skin, or whatever it be, had been previously written on, and the characters mistaken for those of the roll to which it was merely the support and lining.
Gower. I can readily conceive how provoking a man like Sebastian Frank must have been to Luther, with his doctrines of passivity and apathy, his holy contempt for rule, for rationality, or practicability, and his idle chaotic system-spinning, when every hand was wanted for the goodly cause of Reform.
Atherton. Then there was Schwenkfeld, too, who went off from Luther as pietist in one direction, while Frank departed as pantheist in the other.
Gower. A well-meaning man, though; a kind of sixteenth-century Quaker, was he not?
Atherton. Yes. Compound a Quaker, a Plymouth Brother, and an Antipædo Baptist, and the result is something like a Schwenkfeldian.
Willoughby. For my enquiries concerning Jacob Behmen, I find that the most important of the Lutheran mystics was a quiet man of few words, pastor at Tschopau during the latter half of the sixteenth century, by name Valentine Weigel.
Gower. You will give us more information about him when you read your essay on Jacob Behmen. For the present I confess myself tired of these minor mystics.
Willoughby. I shall have to do with him only in as far as he was a forerunner of Jacob. Weigel’s treatises were published posthumously, and a very pretty quarrel there was over his grave. He bases his theology on the Theologia Germanica, adds a modification of Sebastian Frank, and introduces the theosophy of Paracelsus. In this way he brings us near to Behmen, who united in himself the two species of mysticism—the theopathetic, represented by Schwenkfeld, on the one side, and the theosophic, by Paracelsus, on the other.
Atherton. As Lutheranism grew more cold and rigid, mysticism found more ground of justification, and its genial reaction rendered service to the Church once more.
Willoughby. I think the sword of the Thirty Years’ War may be said to have cleared legitimate space for it. In that necessary strife for opinion the inward life was sorely perilled. It was inevitable, I suppose, that multitudes should at least have sought, not only spirituality in mysticism and purity in separation, but wisdom in the stars, wealth in alchemy, and the communion of saints in secret societies.
Note to page 46.
Luther writes:—Jam vero privatum spiritum explores etiam, quæras, num experti sint spirituales illas angustias et nativitates divinas, mortes, infernosque. Si audieris blanda, tranquilla, devota (ut vocant) et religiosa, etiamsi in tertium cœlum sese raptos dicant, non approbabis. Tenta ergo et ne Iesum quidem audias gloriosum, nisi videris prius crucifixum. A golden rule.—Luth. Epist. De Wette, No. 358. Jan. 13, 1522. The language he uses elsewhere concerning such fanatics is strong, but not stronger than the occasion demanded. It was indeed no time for compliment—for hesitant, yea-nay utterance upon the question. The freedom claimed by Carlstadt’s followers led straightway to a lawless pride, which was so much servitude to Satan—was the death-wound, not the crown, of spiritual life. It was from the fulness of his charity—not in lack of it—that Luther uttered his manly protest against that perilous lie. Michelet selects a passage which shows in a very instructive manner how the strong mind (in this quarrel, as in so many more) breaks in pieces, with a touch, the idols which seduce the weak. ‘If you ask Carlstadt’s people,’ says Luther, ‘how this sublime spirit is arrived at, they refer you, not to the Gospel, but to their reveries, to their vacuum. ‘Place thyself,’ say they, ‘in a state of void tedium as we do, and then thou wilt learn the same lesson; the celestial voice will be heard, and God will speak to thee in person.’ If you urge the matter further, and ask what this void tedium of theirs is, they know as much about it as Dr. Carlstadt does about Greek and Hebrew.... Do you not in all this recognize the Devil, the enemy of divine order? Do you not see him opening a huge mouth, and crying, ‘Spirit, spirit, spirit!’ and all the while he is crying this, destroying all the bridges, roads, ladders,—in a word, every possible way by which the spirit may penetrate into you; that is to say, the external order established by God in the holy baptism, in the signs and symbols, and in his own Word. They would have you learn to mount the clouds, to ride the wind; but they tell you neither how, nor when, nor where, nor what; all these things you must learn of yourself, as they do.’