CHAPTER II.
And to such Enthusiasm as is but the triumph of the soul of man, inebriated, as it were, with the delicious sense of the divine life, that blessed Root, and Original of all holy wisdom and virtue, I am as much a friend as I am to the vulgar fanatical Enthusiasm a professed enemy.—Henry More.
Willoughby. There is no mysticism in the doctrine of an immediate influence exercised by the Spirit of God on the spirit of man.
Atherton. Certainly not. It would be strange if the Creator, in whom we live and move, should have no direct access to the spirits of his own creatures.
Gower. Does not your admission indicate the line between the true and the false in that aspiration after immediate knowledge, intercourse, or intuition, so common among the mystics? It is true that the divine influence is exerted upon us directly. But it is not true that such influence dispenses with rather than demands—suspends rather than quickens, the desires and faculties of our nature. So it appears to me at least.
Atherton. And to me also.
Willoughby. And again (to continue your negatives, Gower) it is not true, as some of the mystics tell us, that we can transcend with advantage the figurative language of Scripture; or gaze directly on the Divine Subsistence,—that we can know without knowledge, believe without a promise or a fact, and so dispense, in religious matters, with modes and media.
Atherton. Agreed. For ourselves, I believe we shall always find it true that the letter and the spirit do reciprocally set forth and consummate each other,—
‘Like as the wind doth beautify a sail,
And as a sail becomes the unseen wind.’
We see truth in proportion as we are true. The outward written word in our hands directs us to the unseen Word so high above us, yet so near. The story of Christ’s life and death is our soul’s food. We find that we may—we must, sit in spirit at his feet, who so spake, so lived, so died. And, having been with him, we find a new power and attraction in the words; we are led by the Spirit of Christ in the keeping of those commandments, concerning which he said, ‘The words I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.’
Willoughby. So Plotinus is right, in a sense, after all;—like only can know like. Our likeness to Christ is our true knowledge of him.
Atherton. Yes. But we become partakers of the unseen life and light of God only through the manifestation of that life and light, Christ Jesus. It is on this point that the theology of Fox is so defective.
Willoughby. His doctrine that the influence of the Spirit is perceptible, as well as immediate, is still more questionable, surely?
Gower. Perceptible! aye, and physically perceptible, he will have it, in some cases,—manifested in a tremulous agitation of the frame.
Willoughby. True. The convulsive movements among the Protestant peasantry of the Cevennes are a similar instance. This spasmodical religious excitement is in a high degree infectious when many are assembled together.
Atherton. Yet we should not reject the doctrine of perceptible spiritual guidance because it is so liable to abuse. My objection is that I have never seen satisfactory proof adduced. Do not let us think, however, that we escape from the danger of self-delusion by denying this doctrine, and can afford to be careless accordingly. You often see persons who would think the Quaker belief a dangerous superstition, unscrupulously identifying their personal or party interests with the cause of God, as though they believed themselves divinely commissioned, and could not possibly be liable to deception.
Willoughby. Here you see the value of the Quaker doctrine concerning stillness and quiet. The soul must be withdrawn in a silent waiting, and so hearken for the divine voice. The impulses which stir in the unallayed tumult of the feelings are the promptings of passion or of self, not of God. Wherever the belief in perceptible guidance is entertained, this practice of tranquil tarrying should accompany it, as its proper safeguard.
Atherton. The Quakers are wrong, I think, in separating particular movements and monitions as divine. But, at the same time, the ‘witness of the Spirit,’ as regards our state before God, is something more, I believe, than the mere attestation to the written word.
Willoughby. The traditional asceticism of the Friends is their fatal defect as a body.
Atherton. And their proneness to hazard good principles by pushing them to some repulsive extreme. Thus, they propose to abolish physical force by yielding everything to it;—to put an end to war by laying Europe at the feet of a great military power,—by apologizing for the oppressor and reviling those who resist him.
Gower. I believe the man who says to me, I am trying to love my neighbour as myself: I suspect him who professes to love him better. His profession is worse than worthless unless he be consistent, and will allow himself to be swindled with impunity.
Atherton. We may well be suspicious when we see this super-Christian morality defended by arguments which can only be valid with the meanest and most grovelling selfishness. Such ethics are, in promise, more than human; in performance—less.
Willoughby. But, leaving this question, I am sure no sect which systematically secludes itself from every province of philosophy, literature, and art, can grow largely in numbers and in influence in a state of society like ours.
Gower. Our English Platonists contrast strongly, in this respect, with George Fox and his followers.
Willoughby. How incomprehensible must have been the rude fervour and symbolic prophesyings of the Quakers to the refined scholarship and retiring devotion of men like More and Norris, Gale and Cudworth. But can you call them mystics?
Atherton. Scarcely so, except in as far as Platonism is always in a measure mystical. A vein of mysticism peeps out here and there in their writings. Cold rationalism they hate. They warm, with a ready sympathy, to every utterance of the tender and the lofty in the aspirations of the soul. But their practical English sense shows itself in their instant rejection of sentimentalism, extravagance, or profanity. This is especially the case with More—as shrewd in some things as he was credulous in others, and gifted with so quick an eye for the ridiculous.
Gower. Delightful reading, those racy pages of his, running over with quaint fancies.
Atherton. More’s position as regards mysticism is, in the main, that of a comprehensive and judicial mind. He goes a considerable distance with the enthusiast,—for he believes that love for the supreme Beautiful and Good may well carry men out of themselves; but for fanatical presumption he has no mercy.[[383]]
Willoughby. The Romanist type of mysticism would be the most repugnant of all, I should think, to these somewhat free-thinking English scholars.
Atherton. So I have found. More has no notion of professing to give up his reason, like Poiret; still less of awaiting a suspension of our powers, like John of the Cross. He believes that ‘the Spirit doth accomplish and enlarge our humane faculties.’[[384]]
Gower. Yet Norris is less remote than More from the Romish mysticism, is he not? I mean that his Platonism seemed to me a little more monastic, and less philosophical.
Atherton. He has, it must be confessed, his four gradations of love—akin to the class-religion of the Romish Church;—as though a certain degree were incumbent on all Christians, but higher stages of devout affection (above mere duty) were set before the eminently religious.[[385]] Yet let us do full justice to the good sense of that excellent man. The Quietist doctrine of unconsciousness appears to him an unnatural refinement. He cannot conceive how it should be expected that a man was to be ‘such an America to himself,’ as not to know what his own wishes and attainments are. The infused virtue of the Spanish mystics appears to his discriminating eye ‘as great a paradox in divinity, as occult qualities in philosophy.‘[[386]]
Willoughby. And none of them, I think, distress themselves, as did Fénélon, about purely disinterested love.
Atherton. They are too close followers of Plato to do that. They do not disguise their impatience of the bodily prison-house. Neither have they any love for the divine ignorance and holy darkness of Dionysius. They are eager to catch every ray of knowledge—to know and to rejoice, to the utmost that our mortality may, upon its heavenward pilgrimage.[[387]]