CHAPTER VI.
Keep all thy native good, and naturalize
All foreign of that name; but scorn their ill.
Embrace their activeness, not vanities;
Who follows all things forfeiteth his will.
Herbert.
The day after the conversation recorded in the last chapter, Atherton was called to a distance from Summerford on legal business. Before leaving, he had some further talk with Willoughby on several topics suggested by what had passed on the previous day. The lawyers did not release him so promptly as he had expected, and as he had taken a copy of Tauler’s sermons with him, and had time at his disposal, he wrote more than once to his friend in the course of the next week. This chapter will consist of extracts from the letters thus written, and will form a fitting supplement to matters dealt with in several preceding conversations.
I scarcely need remind you that there are great practical advantages to be derived from a course of mental travel among forms of Christian belief in many respects foreign to our own. Nothing so surely arrests our spiritual growth as a self-complacent, insular disdain of other men’s faith. To displace this pride by brotherly-kindness—to seek out lovingly the points whereon we agree with others, and not censoriously those wherein we differ, is to live in a clearer light, as well as a larger love. Then again, the powers of observation and of discrimination called into exercise by such journeyings among brethren of another speech will greatly benefit us. The very endeavour to distinguish between the good in others which we should naturalize and assimilate for ourselves, and the error which could be profitable neither for them nor for us, is most wholesome. Such studies lead us to take account of what we already have and believe; so that we come to know ourselves better by the comparison both in what we possess and in what we lack. Every section of the Church of Christ desires to include in its survey the whole fabric of revealed truth. What party will admit to an antagonist that its study of the divine edifice has been confined to a single aspect? And yet the fact is beyond all candid questioning that each group of worshippers, with whatever honesty of intention they may have started to go round about the building, and view it fairly from every side, have, notwithstanding, their favourite point of contemplation—one spot where they are most frequently to be found, intent on that side of truth to which, from temperament or circumstance, they are most attached. There is both good and evil in this inevitable partiality; but the good will be most happily realized, and the evil most successfully avoided, if we have liberality enough now and then to take each other’s places. It is possible, in this way, both to qualify and to enrich our own impressions from the observations of those who have given themselves, with all the intensity of passion, to some aspect of truth, which, while it may be the opposite, is yet the complement of the view preferred by ourselves. How often, as the result of an acquaintance made with some such diverse (and yet kindred) species of devotion, are we led to ask ourselves—‘Is there not a fuller meaning than I had supposed in this passage, or that other, of Holy Writ? Have I not, because certain passages have been abused, allowed myself unconsciously to slight or to defraud them of their due significance?’ And, in this way both those parts of Scripture we have most deeply studied, and those which we have but touched with our plummet, may disclose their blessing to us, and fill higher the measure of our joy.
Nor is this all. We gather both instruction and comfort from the spiritual history of others who have passed through the same darkness, doubt, or sorrow, which we ourselves have either encountered, or may be on our way to meet. How glad was Christian when he heard the voice of a fellow-pilgrim in the Valley of the Shadow of Death! And when suns are bright, and the waters calm, and the desired wind blows steadily, he is the wise mariner who employs his leisure in studying the records of others who have made voyage already in those latitudes; who learns from their expedients, their mishaps, or their deliverances, how best to weather the storms, or to escape the quicksands that await him. Of all who have sailed the seas of life, no men have experienced a range of vicissitude more wide than has fallen to the lot of some among the mystics. Theirs have been the dazzling heights; the lowest depths also have been theirs. Their solitary vessels have been swept into the frozen North, where the ice of a great despair has closed about them like the ribs of death, and through a long soul’s winter they have lain hidden in cold and darkness, as some belated swallow in the cleft of a rock. It has been theirs, too, to encounter the perilous fervours of that zone where never cooling cloud appears to veil insufferable radiance, and to glow beneath those glories with an ardour so intense that some men, in their pity, have essayed to heal it as a fever, and others, in their wrath, to chain it as a frenzy. Now afflicted, tossed with tempest, and not comforted, ere long there hath been built for them at once a palace and a place of rest; their foundations have been laid with sapphires, their windows have been made of agates, and their gates of carbuncles, and all their borders of pleasant stones.
A place of rest! Yes, in that one word REST lies all the longing of the mystic. Every creature in heaven above, and in the earth beneath, saith Master Eckart, all things in the height and all things in the depth, have one yearning, one ceaseless, unfathomable desire, one voice of aspiration: it is for rest; and again, for rest; and ever, till the end of time, for rest! The mystics have constituted themselves the interpreters of these sighs and groans of the travailing creation; they are the hierophants to gather, and express, and offer them to heaven; they are the teachers to weary, weeping men of the way whereby they may attain, even on this side the grave, a serenity like that of heaven. What the halcyon of fable is among the birds, that are the mystics among their kind. They essay to build them a marvellous nest, which not only floats upon the waves of life, but has the property of charming those waves to a glassy stillness, so that in mid-winter, and the very heart of storms, their souls enjoy, for a season, what the ancients called ‘the halcyon days,’—that wondrous week of calm ordained for the favoured bird when the year is roughest. ’Tis pity, murmurs old Montaigne, that more information hath not come down to us concerning the construction of these nests. Tradition has it, that the halcyon first of all fashions the said nest by interlacing the bones of some fish. When it is put together she takes it, like a boat ready for launching, and lays it on the beach: the waves come up: they lift it: they let it fall: they toss it gently among the rocks and pebbles; what is faultily made their play breaks, or makes to gape, so that the bird discovers the weak places, and what parts must be more duly finished; what is well knit together already, their strokes only season and confirm. Now when we read the lives of the mystics—each of whom has a method, more or less his own, of weaving such a nest, in other words, his Theory and Practice of Quietude—we see the structure on trial. Experience, with its buffeting, tests each man’s method for the attainment of Rest. If we watch carefully, we shall see that some things in the doctrine of many of them break away under trial, while others are rendered only more compact and buoyant thereby. The examination of the appliances and the processes adopted by these searchers after the Divine Stillness, ought to be very helpful to ourselves. As far as we have their history before us, we can try them by their fruits. We ask, in the case of one man, by what divine art was it that his ark was so skilfully framed as to out-ride those deluges of trouble as though they had been the waters of some windless mere? We ask, in the case of another, by what fault came it in the structure of his sailing nest, that the waters entered, and he sank, or seemed to sink, finding not the rest of soul he sought, but the vexation of soul he fled? We ask, in the several most signal examples of the class, how far did their mysticism help them to realize true manhood—make them strong to bear and strong to do? How far did it tend, or did it not tend, towards the complete development and consecration of their nature?
To derive from such inquiries their full benefit, two qualifications are indispensable:—the judgment must be clear, the sympathies must be warm. The inquirer must retain self-possession enough not to be too readily fascinated, or too soon offended, by certain strange and startling forms of expression; he must not suppose, that because, for a long time, the mystics have been unduly depreciated, it is wisdom now to cover them with thoughtless and indiscriminate praise. He must not suppose that the mystics are an exception to the ordinary limitations of mortals—that the glorious intensity of some among them was realized without any diminution of breadth, and that their view embraced, with equal fondness and with equal insight, every quarter in the heaven of truth. And, on the other hand, let him beware how he seeks to understand these men without fellow-feeling and without love. The weak and volatile nature is smitten, on a first interview with the mystics, with a rage for mysticism—is for turning mystic straightway, and is out of patience, for six weeks, with every other form of Christianity. The cold and proud nature scorns their ardour as a phantasy, and (to its own grievous injury) casts out the warmth they bring. The loving nature and the wise says not, ‘I will be blind to their errors,’ but, ‘I will always look at those errors in the light of their excellences.’
‘The critic of Tauler no man has a right to become, who has not first ascertained that he is a better man than Tauler.’[[127]] What are we to understand by these words? If such an assertion be true at all, it cannot be true for Tauler only. Would Mr. Kingsley say that no man has a right to become the critic of Augustine, of Luther, of Calvin, of Wesley, of George Fox, who has not first ascertained himself a better man? Ought every biographer, who is not a mere blind eulogist, to start with the presumption that he is a better man than he of whom he writes? Ought the historian, who forms his critical estimate of the qualities possessed or lacking—of the service rendered in this direction or in that, by the worthies of the Church, to suppose himself superior to each in turn? As in art he who estimates the worth of a poem is not required to write better poetry, so in morals, he who estimates the worth of a character is not required to display superior virtue. Or is it the opinions, rather than the character of Tauler, which only a better man than Tauler may criticise? Any one who, on being made acquainted with certain opinions, differs from them, is supposed to have criticised them. In as far as Mr. Kingsley may not agree with some of the well-known opinions of Augustine, Luther, or Fox, so far has he ventured to be their critic; yet he does not suppose himself a better man. Why should Tauler alone be thus fenced about with a statement that virtually prohibits criticism? Such advocacy harms a client’s cause. People are apt to suspect that their scrutiny is feared, when such pains are taken to keep them at a distance. So confident am I that the dross in Tauler is as nothing beside the gold, that I would invite, rather than deter, the most candid and sober exercise of the critical judgment with regard to him. Perhaps Mr. Kingsley may be, in reality, much of the same mind; if so, he should not write as though he thought quite otherwise.
I cannot suppose that Mr. Kingsley would seriously maintain that the mystic ought, from the very nature of his claims, to be exempt from that scrutiny to which history continually subjects the fathers, the schoolmen, and the reformers. Yet there are those who would have us hearken to every voice professing to speak from the ‘everlasting deeps’ with a reverence little more discriminating than that which the Mussulman renders to idiocy and madness. Curiously ignorant concerning the very objects of their praise, these admirers would seem to suppose that every mystic repudiates the exercise of understanding, is indifferent to the use of language, and invariably dissolves religious opinion in religious sentiment. These eulogists of mysticism imagine that they have found in the virtues of a Tauler, a platform whence to play off with advantage a volley of commonplaces against ‘literalisms,’ ‘formulas,’ ‘creeds,’ ‘shams,’ and the like. It is high time to rescue the mystics from a foolish adoration, which the best among them would be the most eager to repudiate. So far from forbidding men to try the spirits, the most celebrated among the mystics lead the way in such examination. It is the mystics themselves who warn us so seriously that mysticism comprises an evil tendency as well as a good, and has had its utterances from the nether realms as well as from the upper. The great mystics of the fourteenth century would have been indignant with any man who had confounded, in a blind admiration, their mysticism with the self-deifying antinomianism that prevailed among the ‘Brethren of the Free Spirit.’ In many of Tauler’s sermons, in the Theologia Germanica, in the writings of Suso and of Ruysbroek, care is taken to mark, with all the accuracy possible to language, the distinction between the False Light and the True. There is not a confession of faith in the world which surpasses in clearness and precision the propositions in Fénelon’s Maxims of the Saints, whereby it is proposed to separate the genuine Quietism from the spurious. The mystic Gerson criticises the mystic Ruysbroek. Nicholas of Strasburg criticises Hildegard and Joachim; Behmen criticises Stiefel and Meth; Henry More criticises the followers of George Fox. So far are such mystics from that indifference to the true or the false in doctrine, which constitutes, with some, their highest claim to our admiration. It is absurd to praise men for a folly: it is still more absurd to praise them for a folly of which they are guiltless.
But here I can suppose some one ready to interrupt me with some such question as this:—Is it not almost inevitable, when the significance of the word mysticism is so broad and ill-defined, that those who speak of it should misunderstand or be misunderstood? What two persons can you meet with who will define the term in precisely the same way? The word is in itself a not less general and extensive one than revolution, for instance. No one speaks of revolution in the abstract as good or evil. Every one calls this or that revolution glorious or disastrous, as they conceive it to have overthrown a good government or a bad. But the best among such movements are not without their evil, nor are the worst perhaps absolutely destitute of good. Does not mysticism, in like manner, sometimes rise up against a monstrous tyranny, and sometimes violate a befitting order? Has there been no excess in its triumphs? Has there been no excuse for its offences? See, then, what opposites are coupled under this single word! Is it not mainly for this reason that you hear one man condemning and another extolling mysticism? He who applauds is thinking of such mystics as Bernard, or Tauler, or Fénelon; he who denounces is thinking of the Carlstadts, the Münzers, or the Southcotes. He who applauds is thinking of men who vanquished formalism; he who denounces is thinking of men who trampled on reason or morality. Has not each his right? Are not your differences mere disputes about nomenclature, and can you ever come to understanding while you employ so ambiguous a term?
So it seems to me that Common Sense might speak, and very forcibly, too. It is indeed to be regretted that we have not two words—one to express what may be termed the true, and another for the false, mysticism. But regret is useless. Rather let us endeavour to show how we may employ, least disadvantageously, a term so controverted and unfortunate.
On one single question the whole matter turns:—Are we or are we not to call St. John a mystic? If we say ‘Yes,’ then of course all those are mystics whose teaching is largely impregnated with the aspect of Christianity presented in the writings of that Apostle. Then he is a mystic who loves to dwell on the union of Christians with Christ; on His abode in us, and our abiding in Him; on the identity of our knowledge of God with our likeness to Him; of truth with love; of light with life; on the witness which he who believes hath within himself. Then he is a mystic who regards the Eternal Word as the source of whatever light and truth has anywhere been found among men, and who conceives of the Church of Christ as the progressive realization of the Redeemer’s prayer—‘I in them and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one.’
Now, I think that, in the strict use of language, the word mystic should be applied, not to St. John, but to those who more or less exaggerate his doctrine concerning spiritual influence and life in God. The Scripture is the standard whereby alone the spirits are to be tried, in all candour and charity. To those who repudiate this authority I do not write. But if any one, understanding by ‘mystics’ simply those who give full force to the language of St. John, shall praise them, however highly, I am perfectly at one with him in his admiration—my only difference is about the use of the mere word.
So much then is settled. It will be obvious, however, that the historian of mysticism will scarcely find it possible always to confine his use of the word to the exaggeration just specified. For he must take up, one after the other, all those personages who have at any time been reckoned by general consent among the mystics. But an age which has relapsed into coldness will inevitably stigmatize as a mystic any man whose devout ardour rises a few degrees above its own frigidity. It is as certain as anything can be that, if a German had appeared among the Lutherans of the seventeenth century, teaching in his own way just as St. John taught, without one particle of exaggeration, he would have been denounced as a mystic from a hundred pulpits. Hence it has come to pass that some men, who have figured largely as mystics in the history of the Church, have in them but a comparatively small measure of that subjective excess which we would call mysticism, in the strict sense. Tauler is one of these.
But it may be said,—You talk of testing these men by Scripture; yet you can only mean, by your interpretation of Scripture. How are you sure that your interpretation is better than theirs? Such an objection lies equally against every appeal to Scripture. For we all appeal to what we suppose to be the meaning of the sacred writers, ascertained according to the best exercise of our judgment. The science of hermeneutics has established certain general principles of interpretation which are acknowledged by scholars of every creed. But if any one now-a-days resolves the New Testament into allegory, and supposes, for example, that by the five husbands of the woman of Samaria we are to understand the five Senses, I cannot of course try my cause with him before a Court where he makes the verdict what he pleases. I can only leave him with his riddles, and request him to carry my compliments to the Sphinx.
There is, then, a twofold test by which Tauler and other mystics are to be judged, if their teaching is to profit rather than to confuse and mislead us. We may compare the purport of his discourses with the general tenor and bearing of the New Testament, as far as we can apprehend it as a whole. Are some unquestionable truths but rarely touched, and others pushed to their utmost limits? If we think we see a certain disproportionateness—that there is a joyousness, and freedom, and warm humanity about the portraiture of Christian life in St. John, which we lack in his very sincere disciple, the ascetic and the mystic,—we trifle with truth if we do not say so. The other test is the historical. Was a certain mystic on the side of the truth and onwardness of his time, or against it? Did he rise above its worst errors, or did he aggravate them? And here Tauler stands with a glory round his head. Whatever exaggeration there may have been of the inward as against the outward, it was scarcely more than was inevitable in the case of a man who had to maintain the inmost verities of Christian life amidst almost universal formality and death.
What then, it may be asked, is that exaggeration of which you speak? For hitherto your account of mysticism proper is only negative—it is a something which St. John does not teach.
I will give a few examples. If a man should imagine that his inward light superseded outward testimony, so that the words of Christ and his inspired disciples became superfluous to him; if he regarded indifference to the facts and recorded truths of the New Testament as a sign of eminent spirituality, such a man would, I think, abuse the teaching of St. John concerning the unction from the Holy One. The same Apostle who declares that he who hateth his brother abideth in darkness, refuses to bid God speed to him who brings not the doctrine of Christ, and inseparably associates the ‘anointing’ which his children had received, with their abiding in the truth they had heard from his lips. (1 John ii. 24.) If, again, any man were to pretend that a special revelation exempted him from the ordinary obligations of morality—that his union with God was such as to render sinless in him what would have been sin in others, he would be condemned, and not supported, by conscience and Scripture. Neither could that mystic appeal to St. John who should teach, instead of the discipline and consecration of our faculties, such an abandonment of their use, in favour of supernatural gifts, as should be a premium on his indolence, and a discouragement to all faithful endeavour to ascertain the sense of Holy Writ. Nor, again, does any mystic who disdains hope as a meanness abide by the teaching of St. John. For the Apostle regards the hope of heaven as eminently conducive to our fitness for it, and says—‘He that hath this hope purifieth himself.’ The mystical ascetic who refuses to pray for particular or temporal bestowments is wrong in his practice, however elevated in his motive. For St. John can write,—‘I pray (εὔχομαι) above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.’ (3 John 2.) Nowhere does that Apostle prescribe absolute indifference, or absolute passivity. Lastly, John is not so afraid of anthropomorphism as to discourage or refine away the symbol and the figure. It is evident that he regards the fatherhoods and the brotherhoods of this earthly life, not as fleshly ideas which profane things spiritual, but as adumbrations, most fit (however inadequate) to set forth the divine relationship to us,—yea, farther, as facts which would never have had place in time, had not something like their archetype from the first existed in that Eternal Mind who has made man in his own image.
I remember hearing of an old lady, a member of the Society of Friends, who interrupted a conversation in which the name of Jerusalem had been mentioned, by the exclamation, ‘Jerusalem—umph—Jerusalem—it has not yet been revealed to me that there is such a place!’ Now I do not say that our friend the Quakeress might not have been an excellent Christian; but I do venture to think her far gone in mysticism. Her remark puts the idea of mysticism, in its barest and most extreme form, as a tendency which issues in refusing to acknowledge the external world as a source of religious knowledge in any way, and will have every man’s Christianity evolved de novo from the depths of his own consciousness, as though no apostle had ever preached, or evangelist written, or any Christian existed beside himself. It is not, therefore, the holding the doctrine of an inward light that makes a mystic, but the holding it in such a way as to ignore or to diminish the proper province of the outer.
I should certainly like to see some one settle for us definitively the questions which lie at the root of mysticism, such as these, for example:—Is there an immediate influence exerted by the Spirit of God on the spirit of man? And if so, under what conditions? What are those limits which, once passed, land us in mysticism? But the task, I fear, is beyond all hope of satisfactory execution. Every term used would have to be defined, and the words of the definition defined again, and every definition and subdefinition would be open to some doubt or some objection. Marco Polo tells us that the people of Kin-sai throw into the fire, at funerals, pieces of painted paper, representing servants, horses, and furniture; believing that the deceased will enjoy the use of realities corresponding to these in the other world. But, alas, for our poor definition-cutter, with his logical scissors! Where shall he find a faith like that of the Kin-sai people, to believe that there actually exist, in the realm of spirit and the world of ideas, realities answering to the terms he fashions? No; these questions admit but of approximate solution. The varieties of spiritual experience defy all but a few broad and simple rules. Hath not One told us that the influence in which we believe is as the wind, which bloweth as it listeth, and we cannot tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth?
For my own part, I firmly believe that there is an immediate influence exerted by the Divine Spirit. But is this immediate influence above sense and consciousness, or not? Yes, answers many a mystic. But, if it be above consciousness, how can any man be conscious of it? And what then becomes of the doctrine—so vital with a large class of mystics—of perceptible guidance, of inward impulses and monitions? Speaking with due caution on a matter so mysterious, I should say that, while the indwelling and guidance of the Spirit is most real, such influence is not ordinarily perceptible. It would be presumption to deny that in certain cases of especial need (as in some times of persecution, sore distress, or desolation) manifestations of a special (though not miraculous) nature may have been vouchsafed.
With regard to the witness of the Spirit, I think that the language of St. John warrants us in believing that the divine life within us is its own evidence. Certain states of physical or mental distemper being excepted, in so far as our life in Christ is vigorously and watchfully maintained, in so far will the witness of the Spirit with our spirit give us direct conviction of our sonship. How frequently, throughout his first Epistle, does the Apostle repeat that favourite word, οἴδαμεν, ‘we know!’
Again, as to the presence of Christ in the soul. Says the Lutheran Church, ‘We condemn those who say that the gifts of God only, and not God himself, dwell in the believer.’ I have no wish to echo any such condemnation, but I believe that the Lutheran affirmation is the doctrine of Scripture. Both Christ himself and the Spirit of Christ are said to dwell within the children of God. We may perhaps regard the indwelling of Christ as the abiding source or principle of the new life, and the indwelling of the Spirit as that progressive operation which forms in us the likeness to Christ. The former is vitality itself; the latter has its degrees, as we grow in holiness.
Once more, as to passivity. If we really believe in spiritual guidance, we shall agree with those mystics who bid us abstain from any self-willed guiding of ourselves. When a good man has laid self totally aside that he may follow only the leading of the Spirit, is it not essential to any practical belief in Divine direction that he should consider what then appears to him as right or wrong to be really such, in his case, according to the mind of the Spirit? Yet to say thus much is not to admit that the influences of the Spirit are ordinarily perceptible. The motion of a leaf may indicate the direction of a current of air; it does not render the air visible. The mystic who has gathered up his soul in a still expectancy, perceives at last a certain dominant thought among his thoughts. He is determined, in one direction or another. But what he has perceived is still one of his own thoughts in motion, not the hand of the Divine Mover. Here, however, some mystics would say, ‘You beg the question. What we perceive is a something quite separate from ourselves—in fact, the impelling Spirit.’ In this case the matter is beyond discussion. I can only say, my consciousness is different. I shall be to him a rationalist, as he to me a mystic; but let us not dispute.
Obviously, the great difficulty is to be quite sure that we have so annihilated every passion, preference or foregone conclusion as to make it certain that only powers from heaven can be working on the waters of the soul. That ripple, which has just stirred the stillness! Was it a breath of earthly air? Was it the leaping of a desire from within us? Or was it indeed the first touch, as it were, of some angelic hand, commissioned to trouble the pool with healing from on high? If such questions are hard to answer, when judging ourselves, how much more so when judging each other!
When we desire to determine difficult duty by aid of the illumination promised, self must be abandoned. But what self? Assuredly, selfishness and self-will. Not the exercise of those powers of observation and judgment which God has given us for this very purpose. A divine light is promised, not to supersede, but to illuminate our understanding. Greatly would that man err who should declare those things only to be his duty to which he had been specially ‘drawn,’ or ‘moved,’ as the Friends would term it. What can be conceived more snug and comfortable, in one sense, and more despicable, in another, than the easy, selfish life which such a man might lead, under pretence of eminent spirituality? Refusing to read and meditate on the recorded example of Christ’s life—for that is a mere externalism—he awaits inertly the development of an inward Christ. As he takes care not to expose himself to inducements to unpleasant duty—to any outward teachings calculated to awaken his conscience and elevate his standard of obligation—that conscience remains sluggish, that standard low. He is honest, respectable, sober, we will say. His inward voice does not as yet urge him to anything beyond this. Others, it is true, exhaust themselves in endeavours to benefit the souls and bodies of men. They are right (he says), for so their inward Christ teaches them. He is right (he says), for so does not his inward Christ teach him. It is to be hoped that a type of mysticism so ignoble as this can furnish but few specimens. Yet such is the logical issue of some of the extravagant language we occasionally hear concerning the bondage of the letter and the freedom of the spirit. When the letter means what God chooses, and the spirit what we choose, Self is sure to exclaim, ‘The letter killeth.’ If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!
Such, then, in imperfect outline, is what I hold to be true on this question concerning the reality and extent of the Spirit’s influence. As there are two worlds—the seen and the unseen—so have there been ever two revelations—an inward and an outward—reciprocally calling forth and supplementing each other. To undervalue the outward manifestation of God, in nature, in providence, in revelation, because it is outward—because it is vain without the inward manifestation of God in the conscience and by the Spirit, is the great error of mysticism. Hence it has often disdained means because they are not—what they were never meant to be—the end. An ultra-refinement of spirituality has rejected, as carnal and unclean, what God has commended to men as wholesome and helpful. It is not wise to refuse to employ our feet because they are not wings.
But it is not mysticism to believe in a world of higher realities, which are, and ever will be, beyond sight and sense; for heaven itself will not abrogate manifestation, but substitute a more adequate manifestation for a less. What thoughtful Christian man supposes that in any heaven of heavens, any number of millenniums hence, the Wisdom, Power, or Goodness of God will become manifest to him, as so many visible entities, with form, and hue, and motion? It is not mysticism to believe that the uncreated underlies all created good. Augustine will not be suspected of pantheism; and it is Augustine who says—‘From a good man, or a good angel, take away angel, take away man—and you find God.’ We may be realists (as opposed to the nominalist) without being mystics. For the surmise of Plato, that the world of Appearance subsisted in and by a higher world of Divine Thoughts is confirmed (while it is transcended) by Christianity, when it tells us of that Divine Subsistence, that Eternal Word, by whom and in whom, all things consist, and without whom was not anything made that is made. And herein lies that real, though often exaggerated, affinity between Platonism and Christianity, which a long succession of mystics have laboured so lovingly to trace out and to develop. In the second and third centuries, in the fourteenth, and in the seventeenth; in the Christian school at Alexandria, in the pulpits of the Rhineland, at Bemerton, and at Cambridge, Plato has been the ‘Attic Moses’ of the Clements and the Taulers, the Norrises and the Mores.
But when mysticism, in the person of Plotinus, declares all thought essentially one, and refuses to Ideas any existence external to our own minds, it has become pantheistic. So, also, when the Oriental mystic tells us that our consciousness of not being infinite is a delusion (maya) to be escaped by relapsing ecstatically into the universal Life. Still more dangerous does such mysticism become when it goes a step farther and says—That sense of sin which troubles you is a delusion also; it is the infirmity of your condition in this phantom world to suppose that right is different from wrong. Shake off that dream of personality, and you will see that good and evil are identical in the Absolute.
In considering the German mysticism of the fourteenth century it is natural to inquire, first of all, how far it manifests any advance beyond that of preceding periods. An examination of its leading principles will show that its appearance marks an epoch of no mean moment in the history of philosophy. These monks of the Rhineland were the first to break away from a long-cherished mode of thought, and to substitute a new and profounder view of the relations subsisting between God and the universe. Their memorable step of progress is briefly indicated by saying that they substituted the idea of the immanence of God in the world for the idea of the emanation of the world from God. These two ideas have given rise to two different forms of pantheism; but they are neither of them necessarily pantheistic. To view rightly the relationship of God to the universe it is requisite to regard Him as both above it and within it. So Revelation taught the ancient Hebrews to view their great ‘I am.’ On the one hand, He had His dwelling in the heavens, and humbled Himself to behold the affairs of men; on the other, He was represented as having beset man behind and before, as giving life to all creatures by the sending forth of His breath, as giving to man understanding by His inspiration, and as dwelling, in an especial sense, with the humble and the contrite. But philosophy, and mysticism, frequently its purest aspiration, have not always been able to embrace fully and together these two conceptions of transcendence and of immanence. We find, accordingly, that from the days of Dionysius Areopagita down to the fourteenth century, the emanation theory, in one form or another, is dominant. The daring originality of John Scotus could not escape from its control. It is elaborately depicted in Dante’s Paradiso. The doctrine of immanence found first utterance with the Dominican Eckart; not in timid hints, but intrepid, reckless, sounding blasphemous. What was false in Eckart’s teaching died out after a while; what was true, animated his brother mystics, transmigrated eventually into the mind of Luther, and did not die.
To render more intelligible the position of the German mystics it will be necessary to enter into some farther explanation of the two theories in question. The theory of emanation supposes the universe to descend in successive, widening circles of being, from the Supreme—from some such ‘trinal, individual’ Light of lights, as Dante seemed to see in his Vision. In the highest, narrowest, and most rapid orbits, sing and shine the refulgent rows of Cherubim and Seraphim and Thrones. Next these, in wider sweep, the Dominations, Virtues, Powers. Below these, Princedoms, Archangels, Angels, gaze adoring upwards. Of these hierarchies the lowest occupy the largest circle. Beneath their lowest begins our highest sphere—the empyrean, enfolding within its lesser and still lesser spheres, till we reach the centre—‘that dim spot which men call earth.’ Through the hierarchies of heaven, and the corresponding hierarchies of the church, the grace of God is transmitted, stage by stage, each order in its turn receiving from that above, imparting to that below. This descent of divine influence from the highest point to the lowest is designed to effect a similar ascent of the soul from the lowest to the highest. Of such a theory John Scotus Erigena is the most philosophical exponent. With him the restitution of all things consists in their resolution into their ideal sources (causæ primordiales). Man and nature are redeemed in proportion as they pass from the actual up to the ideal; for in his system, the actual is not so much the realization of the ideal as a fall from it. So, in the spirit of this theory, the mounting soul, when it anticipates in imagination the redemption of the travailing universe, will extract from music the very essence of its sweetness, and refine that again (far above all delight of sense) into the primal idea of an Eternal Harmony. So likewise, all form and colour—the grace of flowers, the majesty of mountains, the might of seas, the red of evening or of morning clouds, the lustre of precious stones and gold in the gleaming heart of mines—all will be concentrated and subtilized into an abstract principle of Beauty, and a hueless original of Light. All the affinities of things, and instincts of creatures, and human speech and mirth, and household endearment, he will sublimate into abstract Wisdom, Joy, or Love, and sink these abstractions again into some crystal sea of the third heaven, that they may have existence only in their fount and source—the superessential One.
Very different is the doctrine of Immanence, as it appears in the Theologia Germanica, in Eckart, in Jacob Behmen, and afterwards in some forms of modern speculation. The emanation theory supposes a radiation from above; the theory of immanence, a self-development, or manifestation of God from within. A geometrician would declare the pyramid the symbol of the one, the sphere the symbol of the other. The former conception places a long scale of degrees between the heavenly and the earthly: the latter tends to abolish all gradation, and all distinction. The former is successive; the latter, immediate, simultaneous. A chemist might call the former the sublimate, the latter the diluent, of the Actual. The theory of immanence declares God everywhere present with all His power—will realize heaven or hell in the present moment—denies that God is nearer on the other side the grave than this—equalizes all external states—breaks down all steps, all partitions—will have man at once escape from all that is not God, and so know and find only God everywhere. What are all those contrasts that make warp and woof in the web of time; what are riches and poverty, health and sickness; all the harms and horrors of life, and all its joy and peace,—what past and future, sacred and secular, far and near? Are they not the mere raiment wherewith our narrow human thought clothes the Ever-present, Ever-living One? Phantoms, and utter nothing—all of them! The one sole reality is even this—that God through Christ does assume flesh in every Christian man; abolishes inwardly his creature self, and absorbs it into the eternal stillness of His own ‘all-moving Immobility.’ So, though the storms of life may beat, or its suns may shine upon his lower nature, his true (or uncreated) self is hidden in God, and sits already in the heavenly places. Thus, while the Greek Dionysius bids a man retire into himself, because there he will find the foot of that ladder of hierarchies which stretches up to heaven; the Germans bid man retire into himself because, in the depths of his being, God speaks immediately to him, and will enter and fill his nature if he makes Him room.
In spite of some startling expressions (not perhaps unnatural on the first possession of men by so vast a truth), the advance of the German mysticism on that of Dionysius or Erigena is conspicuous. The Greek regards man as in need only of a certain illumination. The Celt saves him by a transformation from the physical into the metaphysical. But the Teuton, holding fast the great contrasts of life and death, sin and grace, declares an entire revolution of will—a totally new principle of life essential. It is true that the German mystics dwell so much on the bringing forth of the Son in all Christians now, that they seem to relegate to a distant and merely preliminary position the historical incarnation of the Son of God. But this great fact is always implied, though less frequently expressed. And we must remember how far the Church of Rome had really banished the Saviour from human sympathies, by absorbing to the extent she did, his humanity in his divinity. Christ was by her brought really near to men only in the magical transformation of the Sacrament, and was no true Mediator. The want of human sympathy in their ideal of Him, forced them to have recourse to the maternal love of the Virgin, and the intercession of the saints. Unspeakable was the gain, then, when the Saviour was brought from that awful distance to become the guest of the soul, and vitally to animate, here on earth, the members of his mystical body. Even Eckart, be it remembered, does not say, with the Hegelian, that every man is divine already, and the divinity of Christ not different in kind from our own. He attributes a real divineness only to a certain class of men—those who by grace are transformed from the created to the uncreated nature. It is not easy to determine the true place of Christ in his pantheistic system; but this much appears certain, that Christ and not man—grace, and not nature, is the source of that incomprehensible deification with which he invests the truly perfect and poor in spirit.
On the moral character of Eckart, even the malice of persecution has not left a stain. Yet that unknown God to which he desires to escape when he says ‘I want to be rid of God,’ is a being without morality. He is above goodness, and so those who have become identical with Him ‘are indifferent to doing or not doing,’ says Eckart. I can no more call him good, he exclaims, than I can call the sun black. In his system, separate personality is a sin—a sort of robbery of God: it resembles those spots on the moon, which the angel describes to Adam as ‘unpurged vapours, not yet into her substance turned.’ I am not less than God, he will say, there is no distinction: if I were not, He would not be. ‘I hesitate to receive anything from God—for to be indebted to Him would imply inferiority, and make a distinction between Him and me; whereas, the righteous man is, without distinction, in substance and in nature, what God is.’ Here we see the doctrine of the immanence of God swallowing up the conception of his transcendence. A pantheism, apparently apathetic and arrogant as that of the Stoics, is the result. Yet, when we remember that Eckart was the friend of Tauler and Suso, we cannot but suppose that there may have lain some meaning in such language less monstrous than that which the words themselves imply. Eckart would probably apply such expressions, not to his actual self;—for that he supposes non-existent, and reduced to its true nothing—but to the divine nature which, as he thought, then superseded within him the annihilated personality. Tauler (and with him Ruysbroek and Suso) holds in due combination the correlative ideas of transcendence and of immanence.
Such, then, is one of the most important characteristics of German mysticism in the fourteenth century. I have next to ascertain in which of the leading orders of mystics Tauler should be assigned a place.
‘Divination,’ saith Bacon, ‘is of two kinds—primitive, and by influxion.’ The former is founded on the belief that the soul, when by abstinence and observances it has been purified and concentrated, has ‘a certain extent and latitude of pre-notion.’ The latter is grounded on the persuasion that the foreknowledge of God and of spirits may be infused into the soul when rendered duly passive and mirror-like. Of these two kinds of divining the former is characterized by repose and quiet, the latter by a fervency and elevation such as the ancients styled furor. Now our mystical divines have this in common with the diviners, that they chiefly aim to withdraw the soul within itself. They may be divided most appropriately after a like manner. A cursory inspection will satisfy any one that theopathetic mysticism branches into two distinct, and often contrasted, species. There is the serene and contemplative mysticism; and over against it, the tempestuous and the active. The former is comparatively self-contained and intransitive; the latter, emphatically transitive. Its subject conceives himself mastered by a divine seizure. Emotions well-nigh past the strain of humanity, make the chest to heave, the frame to tremble; cast the man down, convulsed, upon the earth. Or visions that will not pass away, burn into his soul their glories and their terrors. Or words that will not be kept down, force an articulation, with quaking and with spasms, from organs no longer under his control. The contemplative mystic has most commonly loved best that side of Christian truth which is nearest to Platonism; the enthusiastic or practical mystic, that which connects it with Judaism. The former hopes to realize within himself the highest ascents of faith and hope—nay, haply, to surpass them, even while here below. The latter comes forth from his solitude, with warning, apocalyptic voice, to shake a sleeping Church. He has a word from the Lord that burns as a fire in his bones till it be spoken. He lifts up his voice, and cries, exhorting, commanding, or foretelling, with the authority of inspiration.
The Phrygian mountaineer, Montanus, furnishes the earliest example, and a very striking one, of this enthusiastic or prophetic kind of mysticism. He and his followers had been cradled in the fiercest and most frantic superstitions of heathendom. Terrible was Cybele, the mountain mother, throned among the misty fastnesses of Ida. Maddest uproar echoed through the glens on her great days of festival. There is beating of drum and timbrel, clashing of cymbals, shrill crying of pipes; incessant the mournful sound of barbarous horns; loud, above all, the groans and shrieks and yells from frenzied votaries whom the goddess has possessed. They toss their heads; they leap; they whirl; they wallow convulsed upon the rocks, cutting themselves with knives; they brandish, they hurl their weapons; their worship is a foaming, raving, rushing to-and-fro, till the driving deity flings them down exhausted, senseless. Among these demoniacs—sanguine fleti, Terrificas capitum quatientes numine cristas, as Lucretius has described them—these Corybantes, or head-tossers, Christianity made its way, exorcising a legion of evil spirits. But the enthusiastic temperament was not expelled. These wild men, become Christians, carried much of the old fervour into the new faith. Violent excitement, ecstatic transport, oracular utterance, were to them the dazzling signs of the divine victory—of the forcible dislodgment of the power of Darkness by the power of Light. So Montanus readily believes, and finds numbers to believe, that he is the subject of a divine possession. Against the bloodthirsty mob in the villages and towns—against a Marcus Aurelius, ordaining massacre from the high places of the Cæsars—had not God armed his own with gifts beyond the common measure—with rapture—with vision—with prophecy? Yes! the promised Paraclete was indeed among them, and it was not they, but He, who spake. So thought the Montanists, as they announced new precepts to the Church; as they foretold the gathering judgment of Antichrist and the dawning triumph of the saints; as they hastened forth, defiant and sublime, to provoke from their persecutors the martyr’s crown. Let us not overlook the real heroism of these men, while touching on their errors. But their conception of the Church of Christ, so analogous, in many respects, to that of the early Quakers—was it the right one? According to Montanus, the Church was to be maintained in the world by a succession of miraculous interventions. From time to time, fresh outpourings of the Spirit would inspire fresh companies of prophets to ordain ritual, to confute heresy, to organize and modify the Church according to the changing necessities of each period. He denied that the Scripture was an adequate source, whence to draw the refutation of error and the new supplies of truth demanded by the exigencies of the future. As Romanism sets up an infallible Pope to decide concerning truth, and in fact to supplement revelation, as the organ of the Divine Spirit ever living in the Church; so these mystics have their inspired teachers and prophets, raised up from time to time, for the same purpose. But the contemplative mystics, and indeed Christians generally, borne out, as we think, by Scripture and by history, deny any such necessity, and declare this doctrine of supplementary inspiration alien from the spirit of Christianity. While Montanus and his prophetesses, Maximilla and Priscilla, were thus speaking, in the name of the Lord, to the country-folk of Phrygia or to the citizens of Pepuza, Clement at Alexandria was teaching, on the contrary, that we have the organ requisite for finding in the Scriptures all the truth we need—that they are a well of depth sufficient, nay inexhaustible; and that the devout exercise of reason in their interpretation and application is at once the discipline and prerogative of the manhood proper to the Christian dispensation. We are no longer Jews, he would say, no longer children. The presence of the Spirit with us is a part of the ordinary law of the economy under which we live. It is designed that the supernatural shall gradually vindicate itself as the natural, in proportion as our nature is restored to its allegiance to God. It is not necessary that we should be inspired in the same way as the sacred writers were, before their writings can be adequately serviceable to us.
Such was the opposition in the second century, and such has it been in the main ever since, between these two kinds of mystical tendency. The Montanist type of mysticism, as we see it in a Hildegard, among the Quakers, among the Protestant peasantry of the Cevennes, and among some of the ‘Friends of God,’ usually takes its rise with the uneducated, is popular, sometimes revolutionary. Animated by its spirit, Carlstadt filled Wittenberg with scandal and confusion; and the Anabaptist mob reddened the sky with the burning libraries of Osnaburg and Munster. The Alexandrian mysticism, so far from despising scholarship and philosophy, as so much carnal wisdom, desires to appropriate for Christianity every science and every art. It is the mysticism of theologians, of philosophers, and scholars. It exists as an important element in the theology of Clement, of Origen, and of Augustine. It assumes still greater prominence in a Hugo or a Richard of St. Victor. It obtained its fullest proportions in these German mystics of the fourteenth century. It refined and elevated the scholarship of Reuchlin, Ficinus, and Mirandola. It is at once profound and expansive in our English Platonists.
Yet let it not be supposed that the extravagance of the enthusiastic mysticism has not its uses, or that the serenity of the contemplative is always alike admirable. Both have, in their turn, done goodly service. Each has had a work given it to do in which its rival would have failed. The eccentric impetuosity of Montanism, ancient and modern, has done good, directly and indirectly, by breaking through traditional routine—by protesting against the abuses of human authority—by stirring many a sleeping question, and daring many an untried path of action. On the other hand, the contemplative mysticism has been at times too timid, too fond of an elegant or devout, but still unworthy, ease. The Nicodemuses of the sixteenth century, the Briçonnets and the Gerard Roussels, were nearly all of them Platonists. They were men whose mysticism raised them above the wretched externalism of Rome, and at the same time furnished them with an ingenious excuse for abiding safely in her communion. ‘What,’ they would say, ‘are the various forms of the letter, to the unity of the Spirit? Can we not use the signs of Romanism in the spirit of Protestantism—since, to the spiritual and the wise, this outward usage or that, is of small matter?’ The enthusiastic mysticism tends to multiply, and the contemplative to diminish, positive precept and ordinance. The former will sometimes revolt against one kind of prescription only to devise a new one of its own. So the followers of Fox exchanged surplice and ‘steeple-house’ for a singularity of hat, coat, and pronouns. The contemplative mystic loves to inform his common life with the mysterious and the divine. Certain especial sanctities he has, but nothing unsanctified; and he covers his table with an altar-cloth, and curtains his bed with a chasuble, and drinks out of a chalice every day of his life. A Montanus commends celibacy; an Origen sees typified in marriage the espousals of the Church. The zeal of the enthusiastic mysticism is ever on the watch for signs—expects a kingdom coming with observation—is almost always Millenarian. The contemplatist regards the kingdom of heaven as internal, and sees in the history of souls a continual day of judgment. The one courts the vision and hungers after marvel: the other strives to ascend, above all form and language, from the valley of phantasmata to the silent heights of ‘imageless contemplation.’ The one loves violent contrasts, and parts off abruptly the religious world and the irreligious, the natural and the supernatural. The other loves to harmonize these opposites, as far as may be—would win rather than rebuke the world—would blend, in the daily life of faith, the human with the divine working: and delights to trace everywhere types, analogies, and hidden unity, rather than diversity and strife. The Old Testament has been always the favourite of the prophetic mysticism: the contemplative has drunk most deeply into the spirit of the New.
Mysticism, as exhibited in Tauler’s sermons, is much more likely to win appreciation at the hands of English readers than mysticism in the Theologia Germanica. The principles which were there laid down as bare abstractions are here warmed by sunshine and clothed with verdure. To the theory of mysticism we find added many a suggestive hint concerning its practice. There were general statements in the Theologia Germanica so dim, so vast, so ultra-human, that many readers would be at a loss to understand how they could possibly become a practice or a joy in any soul alive. In the sermons, a brother mystic supplies the requisite qualification, and shows that the old Teutonic knight had, after all, a meaning not so utterly remote from all the ways and wants of flesh and blood.
Brought out to view by Tauler’s fervour, his invisible ink becomes a legible character. The exhortations of the pulpit thus interpret the soliloquy of the cell; and when the preacher illuminates mysticism with the many-coloured lights of metaphor and passion—when he interrogates, counsels, entreats, rebukes, we seem to return from the confines of the nameless, voiceless Void to a region within the rule of the sun, and to beings a little lower than the angels. It will reassure many readers to discover from these sermons that the mystics whom Tauler represents are by no means so infatuated as to disdain those external aids which God has provided, or which holy men of old have handed down—that they do not call history a husk, social worship a vain oblation, or decent order bondage to the letter—that when they speak of transcending time and place, they pretend to no new commandment, and do but repeat a truth old as all true religion—that they are on their guard, beyond most men, against that spiritual pride which some think inseparable from the mystical aspiration—that so far from encouraging the morbid introspection attributed to them, it is their first object to cure men of that malady—that instead of formulating their own experience as a test and regimen for others, they tell men to sit down in the lowest place till God calls them to come up higher—and finally, that they are men who have mourned for the sins, and comforted the sorrows of their fellows, with a depth and compass of lowly love such as should have disarmed every unfriendly judgment, had their errors been as numerous as their excellence is extraordinary.
Any one who has attentively read Tauler’s discourses as now accessible may consider himself familiar with the substance of Tauler’s preaching. From whatever part of Scripture history, prophecy, song, or precept, his text be taken, the sermons, we may be sure, will contain similar exhortations to self-abandonment, the same warnings against a barren externalism, the same directions to prepare the way for the inward Advent of the Lord in the Ground of the Soul. The allegorical interpretation, universal in those days, rendered easy such an ever-varied presentation of a single theme. Did the multitude go out into the wilderness to the preaching of John? We are to go forth into the wilderness of the spiritual life. Did Joseph and Mary seek their son in vain among their friends and acquaintance, and find him in his Father’s house? We also must retire to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, and be found no more in the company of those hindering associates, our own Thoughts, Will, and Understanding. Did Christ say to Mary Magdalen, ‘I have not yet ascended to my Father?’ He meant, ‘I have not yet been spiritually raised within thy soul;’ for he himself had never left the Father.
From the sermon on the fifteenth Sunday after Trinity I select a passage which contains in two sentences the kernel of Tauler’s doctrine—the principle which, under a thousand varieties of illustration and application, makes the matter of all his sermons. ‘When, through all manner of exercises the outward man has been converted into the inward, reasonable man, and thus the two, that is to say, the powers of the senses and the powers of the reason, are gathered up into the very centre of the man’s being—the unseen depths of his spirit wherein lies the image of God,—and thus he flings himself into the divine abyss, in which he dwelt eternally before he was created; then when God finds the man thus simply and nakedly turned towards Him, the Godhead bends down and descends into the depths of the pure, waiting soul, and transforms the created soul, drawing it up into the uncreated essence, so that the spirit becomes one with Him. Could such a man behold himself, he would see himself so noble that he would fancy himself God, and see himself a thousand times nobler than he is in himself, and would perceive all the thoughts and purposes, words and works, and have all the knowledge of all men that ever were.’
An explanation of this extract will be a summary of Tauler’s theology. First of all, it is obvious that he regards human nature as tripartite—it is a temple in three compartments: there is the outer court of the senses; there is the inner court of the intellectual nature, where the powers of the soul, busy with the images of things, are ever active, where Reason, Memory, Will, move to and fro, as a kind of mediating priests; there is, lastly, and inmost, a Holy of Holies—the Ground of the Soul, as the mystics term it.
‘Yes!’ exclaims some critic, ‘this Ground, of which we hear so much, which the mystics so labour to describe, what is it, after all?’ Let Tauler answer. He here calls it ‘the very centre of man’s being’—‘the unseen depths of his spirit, wherein lies the image of God.’ I believe that he means to indicate by these and other names that element in our nature by virtue whereof we are moral agents, wherein lies that idea of a right and a wrong which finds expression (though not always adequate) in the verdicts of conscience—that Synderesis (to use an Aristotelian word) of which the Syneidesis is the particular action and voice—that part of our finite nature which borders on the infinite—that gate through which God enters to dwell with man. Nor is the belief in such a principle by any means peculiar to the mystics; men at the farthest remove, by temperament and education, from mysticism, are yet generally found ready to admit that we can only approach a solution of our great difficulties concerning predestination and free will, by supposing that there is a depth in our nature where the divine and human are one. This is Tauler’s spark and potential divinity of man—that face of man’s soul wherein God shineth always, whether the man be aware thereof or not. This, to speak Platonically, is the ideal part of man—that part of him whereby, as a creature, he participates in the Word by whose thought and will all creatures exist. It is the unlost and inalienable nobleness of man—that from which, as Pascal says, his misery as well as his glory proceeds—that which, according to Tauler, must exist even in hell, and be converted into the sorrow there. The Christian Platonist expresses his conception of the consummated redemption of man by saying that he is restored to his original idea—becomes what he was designed to be before sin marred him—puts off the actual sinful self, and puts on the truer primal self which exists only in God. In this sense Eckart says, ‘I shall be sorry if I am not younger to-morrow than I am to-day—that is, a step nearer to the source whence I came’—away from this Eckart to the Divine Idea of man.
Such, then, is this Ground. Next, how is the lapse, or transit into it, effected? Tauler reminds us that many men live as though God were not in this way nearer to them than they are to themselves. They possess inevitably this image—this immediate receptivity of God, but they never think of their prerogative, never seek Him in whom they live and move. Such men live in the outside of themselves—in the sensuous or intellectual nature; but never lift the curtain behind which are the rays of the Shekinah. It will profit me nothing, says Tauler, to be a king, if I know it not. So the soul must break away from outward things, from passion and self, and in abandonment and nothingness seek God immediately. When God is truly found, then indeed the simplified, self-annihilated soul, is passive. But the way thereto, what action it demands, what strong crying and tears, what trampling out of subtle, seemly, darling sins!
First of all, the senses must be mastered by, and absorbed in, the powers of the soul. Then must these very powers themselves—all reasonings, willings, hopings, fearings, be absorbed in a simple sense of the Divine presence—a sense so still, so blissful, as to annihilate before and after, obliterate self, and sink the soul in a Love, whose height and depth, and length and breadth, passing knowledge, shall fill it with all the fulness of God.
‘What!’ it may be said, ‘and is this death—not of sin merely, but of nature—the demand of your mysticism? Is all peace hollow which is not an utter passivity—without knowledge, without will, without desire—a total blank?’
Not altogether so, the mystic will reply. These powers of the soul must cease to act, in as far as they belong to self; but they are not destroyed: their absorption in the higher part of our nature is in one sense a death; in another, their truest life. They die; but they live anew, animated by a principle of life that comes directly from the Father of lights, and from the Light who is the life of men. That in them which is fit to live, survives. Still are they of use in this lower world, and still to be employed in manifold service; but, shall I say it? they are no longer quite the same powers. They are, as it were, the glorified spirits of those powers. They are risen ones. They are in this world, but not of it. Their life has passed into the life which, by slaying, has preserved and exalted them. So have I heard of a nightingale, challenged by a musician with his lute; and when all nature’s skill was vain to rival the swift and doubling and redoubling mazes and harmonies of mortal science, the bird, heart-broken, dropt dead on the victorious lute;—and yet, not truly dead, for the spirit of music which throbbed in that melodious throat had now passed into the lute; and ever afterward breathed into its tones a wild sweetness such as never Thessalian valley heard before—the consummate blending of the woodland witchery with the finished height of art.
‘You see,’ our mystic continues—and let us hear him, for he has somewhat more to say, and to the purpose, as it seems—‘you see that we are no enemies to the symbol and the figure in their proper place, any more than we are to the arguments of reason. But there are three considerations which I and my brethren would entreat you to entertain. First of all, that logical distinctions, and all forms of imagery, must of necessity be transcended when we contemplate directly that Being who is above time and space, before and after,—the universal Presence,—the dweller in the everlasting Now. In the highest states of the soul, when she is concentrated on that part of her which links her with the infinite, when she clings most immediately to the Father of spirits, all the slow technicalities, and the processes and the imaginations of the lower powers, must inevitably be forgotten. Have you never known times when, quite apart from any particular religious means, your soul has been filled, past utterance, with a sense of the divine presence,—when emotion has overflowed all reasoning and all words, and a certain serene amazement—a silent gaze of wonder—has taken the place of all conclusions and conceptions? Some interruption came, or some reflex act dissolved the spell of glory and recalled you to yourself, but could not rob you of your blessing. There remained a divine tranquillity, in the strength whereof your heaviest trouble had grown lighter than the grasshopper, and your hardest duty seemed as a cloud before the winds of the morning. In that hour, your soul could find no language; but looking back upon it, you think if that unutterable longing and unutterable rest could have found speech, it would have been in words such as these—“Whom have I in heaven but Thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee.”
‘Then again, we would have you consider that the mere conclusions of the intellect, the handiwork of imagination, the effervescence of sentiment, yea, sensible delight in certain religious exercises—all these things, though religion’s hand-maidens, are not religion herself. Sometimes they are delusive; always are they dangerous, if they, rather than God, become in any way our dependence. If the heart—the central fount of life’s issues—be not God’s, what avail the admitted propositions, and touching pictures, and wafts of sweetness—the mere furniture, adornment, and incense, of the outer courts of thy nature? Christ in thy soul, and not the truth about Him in thy brain, is thy life’s life; and his agony of love must pierce thee somewhat deeper than the pathos of a tragedy. There are those who live complacently on the facilities and enjoyments they have in certain practices of devotion, when all the while it is rather they themselves, as thus devout, and not their Lord, whom they love. Some such are not yet Christians at all. Others, who are, have yet to learn that those emotions they set such store by, belong, most of them, to the earliest and lowest stages of the Christian life. The lotus-flowers are not the Nile. There are those who violently excite the imagination and the feeling by long gazing on the crucifix—by picturing the torments of martyrs—by performing repeated acts of Contrition,—by trying to wish to appropriate to themselves, for Christ’s sake, all the sufferings of all mankind—by praying for a love above that of all seraphim, and do often, in wrestling after such extraordinary gifts, and harrowing their souls with such sensuous horrors, work out a mere passion of the lower nature, followed by melancholy collapse, and found pitiably wanting in the hour of trial.[[128]] In these states does it oftenest happen that the phantoms of imagination are mistaken for celestial manifestations; and forms which belong to middle air, for shiny ones from the third heaven. I have been told that astronomers have sometimes seen in the field of their glass, floating globes of light—as it seemed, new planets swimming within their ken; and these were but flying specks of dust, hovering in the air; but magnified and made luminous by the lenses through which they looked, and by the reflection of the light. The eye of the mind may be visited by similar illusions. I counsel all, therefore, that they ask only for grace sufficient against present evil, and covet not great things, but be content with such measures of assurance and sensible delight as God shall think safe for them; and that, above all, they look not at His gifts in themselves, but out of themselves, to Him, the Giver.
‘The third consideration I have to urge, in justification of precepts which appear to you unnatural, is this:—there are certain trials and desolations of soul, to which the best are exposed, wherein all subordinate acts are impossible; and then happy is he who has never exalted such helps above their due place. I scarcely know how to make myself understood to any save those who have been at some time on the edge, at least, of those unfathomable abysses. Good men of prosperous and active life may scarcely know them. Few who have lived much in retirement, with temperament meditative, and perhaps melancholy, have altogether escaped. There are times when, it may be that some great sorrow has torn the mind away from its familiar supports, and laid level those defences which in prosperity seemed so stable—when the most rooted convictions of the reason seem rottenness, and the blossom of our heavenward imaginations goes up before that blast as dust—when our works and joys and hopes, with all their multitude and pomp and glory, seem to go down together into the pit, and the soul is left as a garden that hath no water, and as a wandering bird cast out of the nest—when, instead of our pleasant pictures, we have about us only doleful creatures among ruins—when a spirit of judgment and a spirit of burning seem to visit the city of the heart, and in that day of trouble and of treading down and of perplexity, the noise of viols, and the mirth of the tabret, and the joy of the harp, are silent as the grave. Now, I say, blessed is the man who, when cast into this utter wretchedness, far away from all creatures and from all comfort, can yet be willing, amidst all his tears and anguish, there to remain as long as God shall please—who seeks help from no creature—who utters his complaint to the ear of God alone—who still, with ever-strengthening trust, is ready to endure till self shall have been purged out by the fires of that fathomless annihilation—who, crying out of the depths, while the Spirit maketh intercession within him with groanings that cannot be uttered, shall presently be delivered when the right time hath come, and rejoice in that glorious liberty of the children of God, wherein they are nothing and He is all!’
Now, somewhat thus, I think, would that class of mystics whom Tauler represents, reply to the very natural objections urged by many in our times. Nor does such reply, so far, seem to me either unsatisfactory in itself, or in any way contrary to Scripture. It is with the aim, and under the qualifications, I have endeavoured to set forth, that these mystics would refuge the soul in a height above reasonings, outward means and methods, in a serenity and an abstraction wherein the subtlest distinctions and most delicate imaginations would seem too gross and sensuous—where (as in Endymion’s ecstasy)
‘Essences
Once spiritual, are like muddy lees,
Meant but to fertilize our earthly root,
And make our branches lift a golden fruit
Into the bloom of heaven.’
On the latter part of the extract given just now I have not yet commented. It suggests a question of no small moment. What, it will be asked, is the relation sustained by the Saviour of mankind to this mystical process—this drawing up of the created soul into the uncreated essence? Is not a blank abstraction—an essential nothing, substituted for the Son of man? How does the abstract Essence in which Tauler would sink the soul, differ from the abstract Essence or super-essential Unity in which a Plotinus would lose himself, or from that Divine substance in which the pantheistic Sufis sought to dissolve their personality? In this region (confessedly above distinction), the mystic cannot, by his own admission, distinguish one abstraction from the other. There is a story of a lover who, Leander-like, swam nightly across a strait to visit the lady of his heart. A light which she exhibited on the shore was the beacon of the adventurous swimmer. But two brothers (cruel as those who murdered Isabella’s lover in the wood) removed the light one dark and stormy night, and placed it in a boat anchored not near shore, but in mid-waters, where the strait was broadest. Their victim struggled as long as mortal strength might endure, towards the treacherous light—farther and farther out—into the ocean which engulphed him. Have not the mystics, in like manner, shifted the beacon and substituted an expanse—an abyss, as the object of man’s effort, instead of that love and sympathy which await him in the heart of the Son of man?
Can it be possible that the best thing to do with a revelation of God, now we have one, is to throw it behind our backs? Now that the light the wisest heathen longed for has come, are we to rid ourselves of it, with all speed, and fly, like Eckart, from the known to the old, unknown God? To do this, is to account as foolishness the wisdom of God manifest in the flesh. Is it not all—as the enemies of Quietism used to say—a device of the Devil? Does it not look as though the Arch-enemy, unable to undo the work of redemption, had succeeded, by a master-stroke of policy, in persuading men to a false spirituality, which should consist in obliterating the facts of that redemption from their own minds as completely as though it had never been wrought?
Now it is much better, I think, to put objections like these in all their strength, and to give them fair hearing. They will occur to many persons in the reading of these sermons. They will awaken a distrust and a perplexity which are not to be talked down by high words, or by telling men that if they do not sufficiently admire these mystics, so much the worse for them. One of the objections thus urged is logically unanswerable. If Eckart and Plotinus both succeed in reducing their minds to a total emptiness of all memory, knowledge, and desire, in order to contemplate a super-essential Void, equally blank, the Christian and the heathen pantheist are indistinguishable. Vacuum A, would be a vacuum no longer if it contained anything to distinguish it from vacuum B; and to escape, in the most absolute sense, all distinction, is Eckart’s highest ambition. But it is to be remembered, first of all, that Tauler does not go so far as Eckart in his impatience of everything intelligible, conceivable, or utterable. And next, that, happily, neither Eckart, Tauler, nor any man, can really reduce himself to that total nescience and apathy demanded by the theory which makes personality a sin, knowledge an infirmity, imagination a folly. Humanity is still too strong for any such de-humanizing ideal. The Absolute of Tauler is not, like the Absolute of Plotinus, an abstraction above morality. His link between finite and infinite—his image of God, is moral, not metaphysical merely. It is his knowledge, first of all, of God in Christ which enables him to contemplate the Infinite, not as boundless being, but as unfathomable love. So he stands firm on the grand Christian foundation, and the Son is his way to the Father. Following Dionysius, that arch-mystagogue, he does indeed invite the trembling soul into the shadows of a Divine darkness, wherein no specific attribute or act is perceptible to the baffled sight. But across that profound obscure and utter silence, there floats, perceptible, some incense from the censer, of the Elder Brother—the eternal High Priest. It is a darkness, but such an one as we have when we close our eyes after spectacles of glory—a darkness luminous and living with the hovering residue of splendours visible no longer. It is a silence, but such an one as we have after sweet music—a silence still stirred by inward echoes, and repetitions, and floating fragments of melodies that have ceased to fall upon the ear. It seems a chilling purity, a hueless veil—but such a veil as the snowfall lays upon an Alpine church-yard, hiding all colour but not all form, and showing us still where the crosses are. By their fruits we know these mystics. No men animated by a love so Christ-like as was theirs, could have put an abstraction in the place of Christ.
With regard to the work of Christ, Tauler acknowledges (more readily than George Fox) that the divine element or inward light in man must remain a mere surmise or longing, apart from the historic manifestation of God in the flesh. It is Jesus of Nazareth who at once interprets to the soul, while He satisfies, its own restless heavenward desire. It is His grace alone which makes a mere capacity of God, a possession—a mere potentiality, actual. The view of Christ which Tauler loves to present most frequently is that expressed by those passages of Scripture which speak of Him as the first-born among many brethren, and which remind us that both He that sanctifieth and they that are sanctified are all of one. He would say that the Saviour now lives upon the earth, in the person of all true believers; and that, in a subordinate sense, the Word is being continually made flesh, as Christ is formed in the hearts of Christians. With one voice Eckart and Tauler, Ruysbroek and Suso, exclaim—‘Arise, O man! realize the end of thy being: make room for God within thy soul, that he may bring forth his Son within thee.’
The Saviour’s obedience unto death is regarded by Tauler, rather in its exemplary, than in its propitiatory aspect. Very important, as characteristic of his theology, is the distinction he makes between our union to the humanity of Christ, and our union to his divinity. As man, He is the ideal of humanity—the exemplar of self-surrender. All that He received from the Father was yielded up to Him in that absolute devotedness which all His brethren imitate. We are united to His humanity in proportion as we follow the obedience and self-sacrifice of His earthly life. But above this moral conformity to His example, Tauler sets another and a higher union to His divinity. And this union with the Godhead of the Son is not a superior degree of moral likeness to Him, it is rather an approximation to another mode of existence. It is an inward transit from our actual to our ideal self—not to the moral ideal (for that is already realized in proportion as we are united to His humanity), but to our Platonic archetypal ideal. This higher process of union to the Word, or return to our ideal place in Him, consists in escaping from all that distinguishes us as creatures on this earth—in denuding ourselves of reasonings, imaginations, passions,—humanities, in fact, and reducing ourselves to that metaphysical essence or germ of our being, which lay from eternity—not a creature, but the thought of a creature, in the Divine Word.
Now it appears to me that this self-spiritualizing process which seeks by a refined asceticism to transcend humanity and creatureliness, is altogether a mistake. An ideal sufficiently high, and ever beyond us, is already given in the moral perfection of Christ Jesus. This desire to escape from all the modes and means of our human existence came not from Paul, but from Plato. It revives the impatience of that noble but one-sided, Greek ideal, which despised the body and daily life, abhorred matter as a prison-house, instead of using it as a scaffolding, and longed so intensely to become pure, passionless intellect. I know no self-transcendence, and I desire none, higher than the self-sacrifice of the good Shepherd, who laid down his life for the sheep. You will probably be reminded here of another great Platonist. Origen, also, makes a distinction between those who know Christ, according to the flesh, as he terms it, i.e., in his sufferings, death, and resurrection, and that higher class of the perfect, or Gnostici, who, on the basis of that fundamental knowledge, rise from the historical Christ to the spiritual essence of the Word. Origen, however, supposed that this communion with the Logos, or eternal Reason, might become the channel of a higher knowledge, illumining the Gnosticus with a divine philosophy. With Tauler, on the contrary, the intellectual ambition is less prominent; and he who has ascended into the uncreated essence cannot bring down from thence any wisdom for this lower world. Thus, in our extract, he says that if the soul united to the word could perceive itself, it would seem altogether like God, and would appear possessed of all knowledge that ever was. Such is the ideal; but the first reflex act would dissolve that trance of absolute, immediate oneness, and restore the mystic to the humbling consciousness of a separate, actual self; and here lies the great difference between Tauler and Eckart. Tauler, Suso, and Ruysbroek say, that in these moments of exaltation the soul (above distinctions) is not conscious of its distinction as a separate, creature entity. Eckart says, not that the soul has, for a moment, forgotten all that is personal, and that parts it off from God, but that the distinction does not exist at all,—not that we do not know ourselves as separate, but that God does not. To draw the line between theism and pantheism, is not always easy; but I think it must lie somewhere hereabout.
With regard to the doctrines of holy indifference and disinterested love, the German mystics are by no means so extreme as the French. Their views of the divine character were more profound and comprehensive; their heaven and hell were less external and realistic. A mysticism like theirs could not concentrate itself, as Quietism did, on the degrees and qualities of one particular affection. Their God was one who, by a benign necessity of nature, must communicate Himself in blessing, one whose love lay at the root of His being. ‘If men would only believe,’ cries Tauler, in one of his sermons, ‘how passionately God longs to save, and bring forth His Son in them!’ They care little for being themselves accused of making matter eternal, and creatures necessary to God, if they can free Him from the imputation of selfishness or caprice. And so they have no scruples as to whether it be not selfish and criminal to pray for our own salvation. In the sense of Tauler—a true and deep one—no man can say, ‘Thy will be done,’ and ‘Thy kingdom come,’ without praying for his own salvation. When Tauler seems to demand a self-abnegation which consents to perdition itself, he is to be understood in one of two ways: either he would say that salvation should be desired for the sake of God, above our own, and that we should patiently submit, when He sees fit to try us by withdrawing our hope of it; or that the presence and the absence of God make heaven and hell—that no conceivable enjoyment ought to be a heaven to us without Him, no conceivable suffering a hell with Him. But how different is all this from teaching, with some of the Quietists, that, since (as they say) God is equally glorified in our perdition and in our salvation, we should have no preference (if our love be truly disinterested) for the one mode of glorifying Him above the other. That any human being ever attained such a sublime indifference I shall not believe, until it is attested by a love for man as much above ordinary Christian benevolence, as this love for God professes to be above ordinary Christian devotion; for what is true of the principle of love, is true of its degrees—‘He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath not seen?’
The strongly ascetic language of Tauler and his brethren, their almost Manichean contempt of the world, must be read by the light of their times, so full of misery and corruption; and by the light, also, of those fearful furnaces of trial through which they had personally passed. What soul, into which the iron has entered, will say, while the pain is still fresh, that the words of Tauler, or of Thomas à Kempis, are intemperate? It is probable that Tauler would have been less impatient to abolish his very personality, in order to give place to God, had he been able, like Luther, to regard salvation, in greater measure, as consisting in a work done for, as well as wrought in him. But his justification is a progressive, approximate process. It is not a something he accepts, but a something he has to work out; and seeing, as, with his true humility, he was sure to do, how unsatisfactory was his likeness to God, how great the distance still, the only resource open to him is to ignore or annihilate that sorry and disappointing personality altogether, that God, instead of it, may perform his actions, and be, in fact, the substitute for his soul. Both Tauler and Luther believe in substitution. The substitution of Tauler is internal—God takes his place within himself. The substitution of Luther is external—when he believed in Christ, the Saviour associated him with Himself, and so brought him into sonship. So inevitable is the idea of some substitution, where the sense of sin is deep. Luther believes as profoundly as Tauler in a present, inward, living Saviour, as opposed to a remote historic personage, intellectually acknowledged. In the theology of both the old dualism is broken down, and God is brought near to man, yea, within him. But the Son to whom Tauler is united, is the uncreated essence, the super-essential Word, from the beginning with the Father. The Son to whom Luther is united is emphatically the Godman, as truly human, in all sympathy and nearness, as when He walked the Galilean hills. The humanity of Christ is chiefly historic with Tauler, and for any practical purpose can scarcely be said to have survived His exaltation; but with Luther that humanity is so vital and so perpetual that he will even transfer to it the attributes of Deity. So far from desiring to pass upward from the man Christ Jesus to the Logos, as from a lower to a higher, Luther calls ‘that sinking himself so deep in flesh and blood,’ the most glorious manifestation of Godhead. He does not, with the Platonists, see degradation in the limitations of our nature; that nature has been honoured unspeakably, and is glorified, not annihilated, by the Incarnate One. According to Luther, the undivine consists in sin, and sin alone; not in our human means and modes, and processes of thought. Thus with him the divine and human are intimately associated, not merely in the religious life, as it is termed, but in our temporal hopes and fears, in every part of our complicated, struggling, mysterious humanity. The theology of Luther is more free, joyous, and human, partly because the serene and superhuman ideal of Tauler did not appear to him either possible or desirable, partly because sanctification was, with him, a change of state consequent on a change of relation—the grateful service of one who, by believing, has entered into rest; and partly, also, because he does not lose sight of the humanity of Christ, in His divinity, to the extent which Tauler does. Both Luther and Tauler say—the mere history alone will not profit: Christ must be born in you. Luther adds—Christ begins to be born in you as soon as you heartily believe upon Him. Tauler adds—Christ is born in you as soon as you have become nothing.
It would be very unfair to make it a matter of blame to Tauler that he did not see with Luther’s eyes, and do Luther’s work. Luther in one century, and Tauler in another, had their tasks appointed, and quitted themselves like men. It was for Tauler to loosen the yoke of asceticism: it was for Luther to break it in pieces. But it would be just as culpable to disguise the real differences between Tauler and Luther, and to conceal the truth, from a desire to make Tauler appear a more complete reformer than he really was. Our High Churchmen, in their insular self-complacency, love to depreciate Luther and the Continental reformers. Idolaters of the past as they are, we do not think that they will be better pleased with that noblest product of the Middle Age—the German mysticism of the fourteenth century, now placed within their reach. These sermons of Tauler assert so audaciously against sacerdotalism, the true priesthood of every Christian man. There is so little in them of the ‘Church about us,’ so much of the ‘Christ within us.’
It would have moved the scorn of some of the mystics, and the sorrow of others, could they have been made aware of the strange uses to which some persons were to turn them in this nineteenth century. The Emersonian philosophy, for example, is grieved that one series of writings should arrogate inspiration to themselves alone. It is obvious that a ready credence given to professed inspiration in other quarters, and later times, must tend to lower the exclusive prestige of the Scriptures. Thus the mystics may be played off against the Apostles, and all that is granted to mysticism may be considered as so much taken from the Bible. A certain door has been marked with a cross. Emerson, like the sly Abigail of the Forty Thieves, proceeds to mark, in like manner, all the doors in the street. Very gratifying truly, and comic in the highest degree, to witness the perplexity of mankind, going up and down, seeking some indication of the hoped-for guidance from above! I do not believe that the inspired writers were (to use Philo’s comparison) as passive as a lyre under the hand of a musician. But some, who are much shocked at this doctrine in their case, would have us be awe-stricken, rather than offended, by similar pretension on the part of certain mystics. Then, they tell us to tread delicately—to remember how little the laws of our own nature are known to us—to abstain from hasty judgment. In this way, it is supposed that Bibliolatry may be in some measure checked, and one of the greatest religious evils of the time be happily lessened. Criticise, if you will, John’s history, or Paul’s letters, but let due reverence restrain you from applying the tests of a superficial common sense to the utterances of the Montanuses, the Munzers, the Engelbrechts, the Hildegards, the Theresas. But what saith History as to mysticism? Very plainly she tells us that the mystics have been a power in the world, and a power for good, in proportion as their teaching has been in accordance with the Bible;—that the instances wherein they have failed have been precisely those in which they have attempted (whether wittingly, or not) to substitute another and a private revelation for it. They have come as a blessing to their age, just in proportion as they have called the attention of men to some of the deepest lessons of that book—to lessons too commonly overlooked. The very men who might seem, to superficial observers, to bear witness against the Bible, do in reality utter the most emphatic testimony for it. A fact of this nature lends additional importance to the history of mysticism at the present time.
Again, there are some who may suppose there is a real resemblance between the exhortations of Tauler, and the counsel given men by such philosophers as Fichte or Herr Teufelsdröckh. Do not both urge men to abandon introspections—to abstain from all self-seeking—to arise and live in the transcendental world, by abandoning hope and fear, and by losing our finite in an Infinite Will? Some similarity of sound there may occasionally be, but the antipathy of principle between the two kinds of teaching is profound and radical.
I will suppose that there comes to our Teufelsdröckh some troubled spirit, full of the burden of ‘this unintelligible world,’ questioning,—as to an oracle. The response is ready. ‘What do you come whining to me about your miserable soul for? The soul-saving business is going down fast enough now-a-days, I can tell you. So you want to be happy, do you? Pining after your Lubberland, as usual,—your Millennium of mere Ease and plentiful supply. Poor wretch! let me tell you this,—the very fact of that hunger of yours proves that you will never have it supplied. Your appetite, my friend, is too enormous. In this wild Universe of ours, storming-in, vague-menacing, it is enough if you shall find, not happiness, but existence and footing to stand on,—and that only by girding yourself for continual effort and endurance. I was wretched enough once—down in the “Everlasting Nay,” thinking this a Devil’s-world, because, in the universal scramble of myriads for a handful, I had not clutched the happiness I set my heart on. Now, here I am in the “Everlasting Yea,” serene as you see me. How? Simply by giving up wanting to be happy, and setting to work, and resigning myself to the Eternities, Abysses, or whatsoever other name shall be given to the fontal Vortices of the inner realms.... Miracles! Fiddlestick! Are not you a miracle to your horse? What can they prove?... Inspiration!—Try and get a little for yourself, my poor friend. Work, man: go work, and let that sorry soul of thine have a little peace.’
‘Peace,’ repeats our ‘poor friend,’ as he goes discomfited away. ‘Peace! the very thing this soul of mine will not let me have, as it seems. I know I am selfish. I dare say this desire of happiness is very mean and low, and all that; but I would fain reach something higher. Yet the first step thereto he does not show me. To leap into those depths of stoical apathy which that great man has reached, is simply impossible to poor me. His experience is not mine. He tells a bedridden man to climb the mountains, and he will straightway be well. Let him show me the way to a little strength, and in time I may. I will not hunger any more after mere “lubberly enjoyment,” if he will offer my affections something more attractive. But Infinite Will, and Law, and Abysses, and Eternities, are not attractive—nay, I am not sure that they are intelligible to me or any mortal.’
Now the doctrine of Tauler is nowhere more in contrast with that just uttered than in its tenderness of Christian sympathy and adaptation, as compared with the dreary and repellent pride of the philosopher. Instead of overwhelming the applicant by absurdly demanding, as the first step, a sublimity of self-sacrifice which only the finished adept may attain, Tauler is not too proud to begin at the beginning. Disinterested love is, with him, a mountain to which he points in the distance, bright with heavenly glory. Disinterested love, with Teufelsdröckh, is an avalanche hurled down right in the path of the beginner. Tauler does not see, in the unhappiness of the man, so much mere craven fear, or thwarted selfishness. He sees God’s image in him; he believes that that hunger of his soul, which he vainly tries to satisfy with things earthly, is a divine craving, a proof that he was born to satisfy it with things heavenly. He does not talk grandiloquently about Duty, and the glory of moral Freedom. He tells him that the same Saviour who died upon the cross is pleading and knocking at his heart, and doth passionately long to bless him. He sends him away to think over this fact, till it shall become more real to him than house and home, or sun and stars. He does not think that he can improve on ‘the low morality’ of the gospel by disdaining to appeal to hope and fear in order to snatch men from their sins. If so to plead be to speak after the flesh, after the flesh he will speak, to save a brother. There will be time enough, he thinks, if God sees fit to lead the man to the heights of absolute self-loss; and God will take His own way to do it. All Tauler has to do is to declare to him the truth concerning a Saviour, not to prescribe out of his own experience a law beyond that which is written. In this way, instead of striking him into despair, or bidding him bury care in work, he comforts and strengthens him. He does not despise him for keeping the law simply out of love to Him who gave it. He does not think it unmanly, but true manhood rather, when he sees him living, a suppliant, dependent on a life higher than his own—on a Person, whose present character and power were attested of old by history and miracle, as well as now by the ‘witness of the Spirit.’
I think the candid reader of Tauler’s sermons, and of Sartor Resartus, will admit that a difference in substance such as I have pointed out, does exist between them. If so, those who follow the philosophy of Teufelsdröckh cannot claim Tauler—have no right to admire him, and ought to condemn in him that which they condemn in the Christianity of the present day.