CHAPTER III.
Subtle. Your lapis philosophicus?
Face. ’Tis a stone,
And not a stone; a spirit, a soul, and a body;
Which if you do dissolve, it is dissolved;
If you coagulate, it is coagulated;
If you make it to fly, it flieth.
The Alchemist.
Atherton. We are to call on Willoughby to-night, I believe, to conduct us to Jacob Behmen—or Boehme, more correctly.
Willoughby. I shall scarcely bring you so far this evening. I have to trouble you with some preliminary paragraphs on the theosophic mysticism which arose with the Reformation, some remarks on the theurgic superstitions of that period, and a word or two about Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus. A very formidable preamble,—yet necessary, I assure you.
And herewith, Willoughby, after solacing himself with a goodly bunch of grapes, began to read his essay.
On the Theosophy of Jacob Behmen.
§ 1. Mysticism and Science.
I have to trace the advance of mysticism into a new world. Prior to the Reformation the mystic sought escape in God from all that was not God. After that epoch he is found seeking at the hands of his Maker a supernatural acquaintance with all that He has made. Once his highest knowledge was that surpassing ignorance which swoons in the glory of the Infinite. Now he claims a familiarity passing that of common mortals with the mysteries of sea and land, of stars and elements. Escaping that monastic dualism which abandoned the world to Satan, mysticism will now dispute the empire of the prince of this world. Inspired from above, and haply not unaided by angelic ministries, the master of the hidden wisdom will devoutly elicit the benign potencies of the universe, and repel the malevolent. No longer a mere contemplatist—gazing up at the heights of the divine nature, or down into the depth of the human—the mystic of the new age will sweep, with all-piercing vision, the whole horizon of things visible. The theosophist covets holiness still, but knowledge scarcely less. Virtue (as aforetime) may be regarded by such mystics too much as the means to an end. But the end is no longer the same. With the theopathetic mysticism the exercise of the Christian graces and the discipline of fiery spiritual purgations were the road to a superhuman elevation—a vision and repose anticipating heaven. With the theosophic, Faith and Charity and Hope were the conditions of the higher knowledge. For never to the proud, the greedy, the impure, would heaven vouchsafe the keys of mystery and hazardous prerogative in the unseen world. To the contemplative mystic the three heavenly sisters brought a cloud of glory; for the theosophist they unclasped nature’s ‘infinite book of secrecy;’ in the hand of the theurgist they placed an enchanter’s wand.
The sphere of mysticism was not thus extended by any expansive force of its own. The spirit of a new and healthier age had ventured to depreciate the morbid seclusion of the cloister. Men began to feel that it was at once more manly and more divine to enquire and to know than to gaze and dream. After the servitude of the schools and the collapse of the cloister, the ambition of the intellect would acknowledge no limit, would accept of no repose. The highest aspirations of religion and the most daring enterprise of science were alike mystical. They coalesced in theosophy. Changes such as these were wrought by a power from without. Mysticism was awakened from its feverish dream by the spirit of the time—as Milton’s Eve by Adam from her troubled morning sleep—and invited to go forth and see ‘nature paint her colours.’
As the revival of letters spread over Europe the taste for antiquity, and natural science began to claim its share in the freedom won for theology, the pretensions of the Cabbala, of Hermes, of the Neo-Platonist theurgy, became identified with the cause of progress.
That ancient doctrine, familiar to the school of Plotinus, according to which the world was a huge animal—a living organism united in all its parts by secret sympathies,—received some fresh development in the fancy of every adept. The student of white magic believed, with Iamblichus, in the divine power inherent in certain words of invocation, whereby the aspirant might hold intercourse with powers of the upper realm. With the modern, as with the ancient Neo-Platonists, religion bore an indispensable part in all such attempts. Proclus required of the theurgist an ascetic purity. Campanella demands a fides intrinseca,—that devout simplicity of heart which should qualify the candidate at once to commune with holy spirits and to baffle the delusive arts of the malign.[[209]]
But the theosophists of Germany were not, like the Alexandrians, slavish worshippers of the past. They did not resort to theurgy in order to prop a falling faith. They did not wield that instrument to prolong, by the spasmodic action of superstitious practice, the life of an expiring philosophy. Those formulæ of incantation, those ‘symbola’ and ‘synthemata,’ which were everything with Iamblichus, were with many of them only a bye-work, and by others utterly abjured. They believed devoutly in the genuineness of the Cabbala. They were persuaded that beneath all the floods of change this oral tradition had perpetuated its life unharmed from the days of Moses downward,—even as Jewish fable taught them that the cedars alone, of all trees, had continued to spread the strength of their invulnerable arms below the waters of the deluge. They rejoiced in the hidden lore of that book as in a treasure rich with the germs of all philosophy. They maintained that from its marvellous leaves man might learn the angelic heraldry of the skies, the mysteries of the divine nature, the means of converse with the potentates of heaven.[[210]] But such reverence, so far from oppressing, seemed rather to enfranchise and excite their imagination. In the tradition before which they bowed, the majesty of age and the charm of youth had met together. Hierocles brought to them Pythagoras out of an immemorial past; and there was no novelty more welcome in that restless wonder-loving present. Thus the theosophists could oppose age to age, and reverently impugn the venerable. Antiquity, in the name of Aristotle, so long absolute, had imposed a shameful bondage. Antiquity, in the name of Plato, newly disinterred, imparted a glorious privilege. The chains of the past were being filed away by instruments which the past had furnished. Ancient prescription became itself the plea for change when one half of its demands was repudiated in honour of the other.
This theosophy was a strange mixture of the Hellenic, the Oriental, and the Christian styles of thought. I shall assume as its emblem the church of St. John, at Rhodes, which, full of statues of saints and tombs of knights, broken, or rounded into mounds of sullied snow by the hand of time, is surmounted by a crescent, and echoes to the voice of the muezzin, while sheltering beneath its porch the altar of a Grecian God. But our incongruous theosophic structure, ever open and ever changing, enlarged its precincts continually. A succession of eccentric votaries enriched it ceaselessly with quaint devices, fresh flowers of fancy, new characters in mystical mosaic, and intricate arabesques of impenetrable significance.
Plotinus, indifferent to the material universe, had been content to inherit and transmit the doctrine of the world’s vitality. That notion now became the nucleus of a complex system of sympathies and antipathies. It suggested remedies for every disease, whether of mind or body. It prompted a thousand fantastic appliances and symbols. But at the same time it rendered the enquirer more keenly observant of natural phenomena. Extolling Trismegistus to the skies, and flinging his Galen into the fire, Paracelsus declared the world his book.[[211]] The leaves of that volume were continents and seas—provinces, its paragraphs—the plants, the stones, the living things of every clime, its illuminated letters.
In the dawn of science hovered a meteor, which at once lured onward and led astray the seekers after truth,—it was the hope of special illumination. They hastened to generalize on a medley of crude fancies and of partial facts. For generalization was with them a sudden impulse, not a slow result. It was an exalted act prompted by a Divine light that flashed on intuition from without, or radiated from the wondrous depths of the microcosm within. Hence (as with bees in dahlias) their industry was their intoxication. It is of the essence of mysticism to confound an internal creation or process with some external manifestation. Often did the theosophist rejoice in the thought that nature, like the rock in the desert, had been made to answer to his compelling rod,—that a divinely-given stream welled forth to satisfy his thirst for knowledge. As we look back upon his labours we can perceive that the impulse was by no means a wonder, and often anything but a blessing. It was in reality but as the rush of the water into the half-sunk shaft of his research, flooding the region of his first incautious efforts, and sooner or later arresting his progress in every channel he might open. In fact, the field of scientific enquiry, which had withered under the schoolman, was inundated by the mystic,—so facile and so copious seemed the knowledge realized by heaven-born intuition. It was reserved for induction to develop by a skilful irrigation that wonder-teeming soil. No steady advance was possible when any hap-hazard notion might be virtually invested with the sanction of inspiration.
The admixture of light and darkness during that twilight period reached precisely the degree of shadow most favourable to the vigorous pursuit of natural science by supernatural means.
It is true that the belief in witchcraft everywhere prevalent did, ever and anon, throw people and rulers alike into paroxysms of fear and fury. But an accomplished student of occult art was no longer in much danger of being burnt alive as a fair forfeit to Satan. The astrologer, the alchemist, the adept in natural magic, were in universal demand. Emperors and nobles, like Rudolph and Wallenstein, kept each his star-gazer in a turret chamber, surrounded by astrolabes and alembics, by ghastly preparations and mysterious instruments, and listened, with ill-concealed anxiety, as the zodiac-zoned and silver-bearded counsellor, bent with study and bleared with smoke, announced, in oracular jargon, the junction of the planets or his progress toward projection. The real perils of such pretenders now arose from the very confidence they had inspired. Such was the thirst for gold and the faith in alchemy, that no man supposed to possess the secret was secure from imprisonment and torture to compel its surrender. Setonius was broken on the wheel because the cruel avarice of the great could not wring out of him that golden process which had no existence. The few enquirers whose aim was of a nobler order were mortified to find their science so ill appreciated. They saw themselves valued only as casters of horoscopes and makers of cunning toys. Often, with a bitter irony, they assumed the airs of the charlatan for their daily bread. Impostors knavish as Sir Arthur Wardour’s Dousterswivel, deceived and deceiving like Leicester’s Alasco, swarmed at the petty court of every landgrave and elector.
Theurgic mysticism was practically admitted even within the Lutheran Church, while the more speculative or devotional mysticism of Sebastian Frank, Schwenkfeld, and Weigel, was everywhere proscribed. Lutheran doctors, believers in the Cabbala, which Reuchlin had vindicated against the monks, were persuaded that theurgic art could draw the angels down to mortals. Had not the heaven-sent power of the Cabbala wrought the marvels of Old Testament history? Had not the power of certain mystic words procured for Hebrew saints the privilege of converse with angelic natures? Had not the Almighty placed all terrestrial things under the viceregency of the starry influences? Had He not united all things, animate and inanimate, by a subtle network of sympathies, and was not man the leading chord in this system of harmony—the central heart of this circulating magnetic force? Thus much assumed, a devout man, wise in the laws of the three kinds of vincula between the upper and lower worlds, might be permitted to attract to himself on earth those bright intelligences who were to be his fellows in heaven. Theurgy rested, therefore, on the knowledge of the intellectual vinculum (the divine potency inherent in certain words), the astral (the favourable conjunction of the planets), and the elementary (the sympathy of creatures). In the use of these was, of course, involved the usual hocus-pocus of magical performance—talismans, magic lights, incense, doves’ blood, swallows’ feathers, et hoc genus omne.[[212]]