Hours with the Mystics: A Contribution to the History of Religious Opinion

by Robert Alfred Vaughan

CHAPTER VII.

Alas poor country;

Almost afraid to know itself! It cannot

Be called our mother, but our grave. Where nothing,

But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile;

Where sighs, and groans, and shrieks that rend the air,

Are made, not mark’d; where violent sorrow seems

A modern ecstasy; the dead man’s knell

Is there scarce asked, for who; and good men’s lives

Expire before the flowers in their caps,

Dying or ere they sicken.

Macbeth.

The day after Atherton’s return, Willoughby and Gower met about noon, at Lowestoffe’s lodge gate, the one returning from a piscatory expedition of six hours, with fish, the other from a pictorial ramble of four days, with sketches. Willoughby had to tell of the escapades of tricksy trout, and of the hopes and fears which were suspended on his line. But not a word, of course, had he to say of the other thoughts which busied him the while,—how his romance was in his head, as he carried those credentials of idleness, the fishing-tackle, and how, while he was angling for fish, he was devising the fashion in which Blanche should throw the fly for Florian. Gower had seen such glades and uplands—such wondrous effects of light and shadow—he, too, had had his adventures, and could show his trophies.

Dinner was succeeded by that comparatively somnolent period which preceded the early tea so dear to Lowestoffe. Atherton found that a book of Schubert’s, which had interested him in the morning, was, in the afternoon, only a conducting-rod to lure down the subtile influence of sleep. Lowestoffe, lulled by the buzzing flies, dropped off into an arm-chair doze, without apology or disguise. He had been early up, and had been riding about all day on a new chestnut mare. Violently had he objurgated that wretch of a groom for giving her too many beans, thereby rendering her in danger of flying at the heels; and what was worse, the monster had put on a gag snaffle with the martingale, and narrowly escaped getting her into mischief. But the flying storm had long since swept away. Before tea, Lowestoffe was in his good-humoured, irrational humour; after tea he would be in his good-humoured rational one. As for Gower and Kate, they had quietly withdrawn together to see a water-lily that had just blown, and were not heard of till tea-time.

After tea, when certain sleepy people had again become responsible creatures, conversation began.

Gower. Don’t you think Atherton has a very manuscriptural air to-night?

Kate. There is a certain aspect of repletion about him.

Mrs. Atherton. We must bleed him, or the consequences may be serious. What’s this? (Pulls a paper out of his pocket.)

Kate. And this! (Pulls out another.)

Willoughby. He seems better now.

Atherton (abstractedly). I was thinking of the difference between Gower’s studies and mine for the last few days. I have been reading a dark, miserable chapter in the history of man. He has been the chronicler of pleasant passages in the history of rocks and trees,—his great epochs, a smile of sun-shine or sudden chill of shadow,—the worst disasters, a dull neutral-tint kind of day, or a heavy rain,—his most impracticable subjects, beauties too bright or evanescent to be caught. It is sad to think how every subject of our study deepens in sorrow as it rises in dignity.

Willoughby. And yet it is only by the manful struggles of past generations through calamity and against wrong, that we have bequeathed to us the leisure, the liberty, and the knowledge essential to the highest enjoyment of nature. Atherton, in fact, studies the chequered and intricate causes which issue in the taste of Gower as one of their effects. I should think it must be no small gain for an artist to be placed beyond the mediæval idea which set the Inferno in the centre of the earth, and imagined, far below the roots of the mountains and the channels of the sea, eternal flames as the kernel of the world.

Gower. I have sometimes endeavoured, while lying on the grass, to realise in my own way the conception of the world by the light-hearted Greeks as an animal, or as a robe or peplus. I have imagined the clouds the floating breath of the great creature, rising against the crystal sphere of the sky, under which it lies as in an enchanter’s glass;—the seas, some delicate surfaces of the huge organism, that run wrinkled into a quick shiver at the cold touch of wind;—the forests, a fell of hair which is ruffled by the chafing hand of the tempest. Then, when I look at the earth in the other aspect, as a variegated woven robe, I see it threaded silverly with branching rivers spangled with eyes of lakes; where the sleek meadows lie, it is rich with piled velvet, and where the woods are, tufted with emerald feathers. But now I want to hear something more about our Strasburg people.

Atherton. Bad news. There is a great hiatus in Arnstein’s journal, which history fills up with pestilence and bloodshed. I have drawn up a few notes of this interval which must serve you as an outline. (Reads.)

In the year 1348 that terrible contagion, known as the Black Death, which journeyed from the East to devastate the whole of Europe, appeared at Strasburg.[^[129]] Everywhere famine, floods, the inversion of the seasons, strange appearances in the sky, had been its precursors. In the Mediterranean Sea, as afterwards in the Baltic, ships were descried drifting masterless, filled only by plague-stricken corpses. Every man dreaded, not merely the touch and the breath of his neighbour, but his very eye, so subtile and so swift seemed the infection. In many parts of France it was computed that only two out of every twenty inhabitants were left alive. In Strasburg sixteen thousand perished; in Avignon sixty thousand. In Paris, at one time, four or five hundred were dying in a day. In that city, in the midst of a demoralization and a selfish horror like that Thucydides has painted, the Sisters of Mercy were seen tending the sufferers who crowded the Hôtel-Dieu; and, as death thinned their martyr-ranks, numbers more were ready to fill the same office of perilous compassion. Pausanias says that in Athens alone out of all Greece there was raised an altar to mercy. But it was an altar almost without a ministry. Heathendom, at its best, might glory in the shrine; Christianity, at its worst, could furnish the priesthood.

In Strasburg Tauler laboured fearlessly, with Thomas and Ludolph, among the panic-stricken people—doubly cursed by the Interdict and by the plague. Great fires of vine-wood, wormwood, and laurel were kept burning in the squares and market-places to purify the air, lighting up the carved work of the deserted town-hall, and flickering aslant the overhanging gables of the narrow crooked streets and the empty tradesmen’s stalls. The village was ravaged as fatally as the town. The herds grew wild in the fields of the dead peasants, or died strangely themselves—victims, apparently, to the universal blight of life. The charlatans of the day drove for awhile a golden traffic with quintessences and distillations, filthy and fantastic medicines, fumigation of shirts and kerchiefs, charms and invocations, only at last to perish in their turn. Even the monks had lost their love for gold, since every gift was deadly. In vain did trembling men carry their hoards to the monastery or the church. Every gate was barred, and the wealthy might be seen tossing their bags of bezants over the convent walls. In the outskirts of towns and cities, huge pits were opened, whose mouths were daily filled with hideous heaps of dead. The pope found it necessary to consecrate the river Rhone, and hundreds of corpses were cast out at Avignon, from the quays and pleasant gardens by the water-side, to be swept by the rapid stream under the silent bridges, past the forgotten ships and forsaken fields and mourning towns, livid and wasting, out into the sea.

In a frenzy of terror and revenge the people fell upon the miserable Jews. They were accused of poisoning the wells, and every heart was steeled against them. Fear seemed to render all classes more ferocious, and the man who might sicken and die to-morrow found a wretched compensation in inflicting death to-day on the imagined authors of his danger. Toledo was supposed to be the centre of an atrocious scheme by which the Jews were to depopulate Christendom. At Chillon several Jews, some after torture and some in terror of it, confessed that they had received poison for that purpose. It was a black and red powder, made partly from a basilisk, and sent in the mummy of an egg. The deposition of the Jews arrested at Neustadt was sent by the castellan of Chillon to Strasburg. Bishops, nobles, and chief citizens held a diet at Binnefeld in Alsace, to concert measures of persecution. The deputies of Strasburg, to their honour be it spoken, declared that nothing had been proved against the Jews. Their bishop was the most pitiless advocate of massacre. The result was a league of priests, lords, and people, to slay or banish every Jew. In some places the senators and burgomasters were disposed to mercy or to justice. The pope and the emperor raised their voices, alike in vain, in behalf of the victims. Some Christians, who had sought from pity or from avarice to save them, perished in the same flames. The noble of whom they bought protection was stigmatised as a Jew master, execrated by the populace, at the mercy of his enemies. No power could stem the torrent. The people had tasted blood; the priest had no mercy for the murderers of the Lord; the baron had debts easily discharged by the death of his creditor. At Strasburg a monster scaffold was erected in the Jewish burial ground, and two thousand were burnt alive. At Basle all the Jews were burnt together in a wooden edifice erected for the purpose. At Spires they set their quarter in flames, and perished by their own hands. A guard kept out the populace while men commissioned by the senate hunted for treasure among the smoking ruins. The corrupting bodies of those slain in the streets were put up in empty wine casks, and trundled into the Rhine. When the rage for slaughter had subsided, hands, red with Hebrew blood, were piously employed in building belfries and repairing churches with Jewish tombstones and the materials of Jewish houses.

The gloomy spirit of the time found fit expression in the fanaticism of the Flagellants.[^[130]] Similar troops of devotees had in the preceding century carried throughout Italy the mania of the scourge; but never before had the frenzy of penance been so violent or so contagious. It was in the summer of 1349 that they appeared in Strasburg. All the bells rang out as two hundred of them, following two and two many costly banners and tapers, entered the city, singing strange hymns. The citizens vied with each other in opening to them their doors and seating them at their tables. More than a thousand joined their ranks. Whoever entered their number was bound to continue among them thirty-four days, must have fourpence of his own for each day, might enter no house unasked, might speak with no woman. The lash of the master awaited every infraction of their rule. The movement partook of the popular, anti-hierarchical spirit of the day. The priest or friar could hold no rank, as such, among the Flagellants. The mastership was inaccessible to him, and he was precluded from the secret council. The scourging took place twice a day. Every morning and evening they repaired in procession to the place of flagellation outside the city. There they stripped themselves, retaining only a pair of linen drawers. They lay down in a large circle, indicating by their posture the particular sin of which each penitent was principally guilty. The perjured lay on his side, and held up three fingers; the adulterer on his face. The master then passed round, applying his lash to each in succession, chanting the rhyme—

Stand up in virtue of holy pain,

And guard thee well from guilt again.

One after the other, they rose and followed him, singing and scourging themselves with whips in which were great knots and nails. The ceremony closed with the reading of a letter, said to have been brought by an angel from heaven, enjoining their practice, after which they returned home in order as they came. The people crowded from far and near to witness the piteous expiation, and to watch with prayers and tears the flowing blood which was to mingle with that of Christ. The pretended letter was reverenced as another gospel, and the Flagellant was already believed before the priest. The clergy grew anxious as they saw the enthusiasm spreading on every side. But the unnatural furor could not last; its own extravagance prepared its downfall. An attempt made by some Flagellants in Strasburg to bring a dead child to life was fatal to their credit. The Emperor, the Pope, and the prelates took measures against them simultaneously, in Germany, in France, in Sicily, and in the East. The pilgrimage of the scourge was to have lasted four-and-thirty years. Six months sufficed to disgust men with the folly, to see their angelic letter laughed to scorn, their processions denounced, their order scattered.

Meanwhile the enemies of Tauler were not idle. Louis of Bavaria was dead. The new Emperor Charles IV. was of the papal party, and called the Parsons’ Kaiser, but a man of vigour and enlightenment; so weary Germany, broken by so many calamities, was generally inclined to acknowledge his claim. About the year 1348 he visited Strasburg, and the clergy brought Tauler and his two friends before him. They were to answer for their hard words against priests and princes. Charles listened attentively to the statement of their principles, and to their spirited defence of what they had said and done. At last he said (conceive the dismay of the prelates!) that, after all, ‘he was very much of their mind.’ But the ecclesiastics did not rest till they had procured a condemnatory sentence. The accused were commanded to publish a recantation, and to promise to refrain for the future from such contumacious language concerning the Church and the Interdict, on pain of excommunication. It is said that, in spite of this decision, they did but speak and write the more in the same spirit. This, however, is not certain. It is known that Tauler shortly afterwards left his native city, and fixed his residence in Cologne, where he mostly spent the remainder of his life, actively engaged as a preacher in endeavouring to promote a deeper spirituality, and in combating the enthusiasm of the pantheistic Beghards who abounded in that city.[^[131]]

Chronicle of Adolf Arnstein, continued.

Strasburg. 1354. January.—In the comparative leisure of the winter time, I set down in order (from such fragmentary notes as I then made) records of a journey undertaken last year to Flanders.

When I left Strasburg, to sail down the Rhine, our city had enjoyed at last nearly two years’ prosperity. We could scarcely believe the respite real. First of all, after so many troubles and dissensions, the Black Death had laid us waste. Then came the Flagellants, turning all things upside down—the irresistible infection of their fury—the thirst for blood they stirred up everywhere—the slaughter of the miserable Jews. Then we had the Emperor among us, demanding unrighteous imposts. Our old spirit rose. For two years and a half our chains and guard-ships barred the passage of the Rhine.[^[132]] We would endure any extremity rather than submit, and our firmness won the day. Now, for the last three years,—the pestilence and its horrors over; blockaded business free again;—our little world has been gambolling like children let loose from school. Never such rapid and fruitful buying and selling, such marrying and giving in marriage, such feasting, pageantry, and merriment, among high and low alike.[^[133]] All the year is May for the morris-dancers. No one remembers now the scourge or the torch.

The clergy might have learnt a lesson from the outbreak of the Flagellants. It should have shown them how hateful their vices and their pride had made them to the people. But the universal levity now pardons clerical crime and folly as it does every other. The odious exaggeration of the Flagellants has given men a pretext for licence, and ruined the hopes of reform. The cause of emperor against pope exists no longer. In the hour of conflict and of sorrow, men hailed the help and listened to the teaching of the Friends of God. Tauler himself, were he among us, would find it another Strasburg.

Landed at Cologne, I hastened to the cloister of St. Gertrude to find Dr. Tauler. With what delight did I see him once more! I thought him looking much older, and, indeed, he said he thought the same of me. The time has been long but a stepmother to merry faces and ruddy cheeks. He told me that he had met with great kindness in this city, which he had always loved. His friends were numerous; his preaching, he hoped not without fruit, and he had succeeded in reforming much that had been amiss.[^[134]] I had many messages for him from his old friends in Strasburg, and he had so many questions to ask, he knew not where to begin.

He inquired particularly after Rulman Merswin. This rich merchant had withdrawn from the world (with the consent of his wife) and devoted himself altogether to the contemplative life, a short time previous to the coming of the Black Death. His austerities had been almost fatal. Tauler’s last counsel to him was to lessen their severity. I saw him before I left, and he desired me to tell Tauler that the Layman had visited him more than once, and was now his spiritual guide. I informed the Doctor, moreover, that during the last year Merswin had been privately busied in writing a book, to be called The Nine Rocks, of which he did me the honour of reading to me a part.[^[135]] The Doctor asking what I thought, I said it seemed to be the work of a powerful and sombre imagination, excited by the sufferings he had inflicted on himself, yet containing many solemn and most just rebukes of the vices prevalent. Tauler said that such excessive mortification in all classes, and especially among the clergy, often weakened, instead of exalting the intellect. He feared that the good Rulman would always lean too much on visions, voices, ecstasies, and the like, and never rise to the higher calm of unsensuous, imageless contemplation.

The second time I visited Tauler, I found him reading—he told me for the fourth time—a book called The Spiritual Nuptials, by John Ruysbroek.[^[136]] The Doctor praised it highly, and as I questioned him about it, offered to lend it me to read. I had heard of Ruysbroek as a master in spiritual mysteries, often holding intercourse by letter with the Friends of God in Cologne, Alsace, and even in the Oberland. I took the book home to my inn, and shut myself up to read it. Many parts of it I copied out. Not a few things in it I found hard to be understood, and consulting with the Doctor about them, he told me he purposed setting out in a few days to visit the author. Should I like to accompany him? I said ‘Yes, with all my heart.’ So we left Cologne to travel to the convent of Grünthal, in the heart of the forest of Soigne, not far from Louvain, whither the holy man, now sixty years of age, had of late retired.[^[137]]

From Cologne we journeyed direct to Aix-la-Chapelle. There we saw the chair in which the emperors sit when they are crowned. Its sides are of ivory, and the bottom is made of a piece of wood from Noah’s Ark. Tasted the water in the famous hot springs there. It is saltish; the physicians say of singular virtue, whether taken inwardly or outwardly. Saw near the town a water which is lukewarm, by reason of one of the hot springs which passes under it. There are bred in it fine fish, they say, which must be put in cold water two months before they are eaten.

From Aix-la-Chapelle we went to Maestricht, and thence through Tirlemont, to Louvain. This last is a wealthy city, with a fine town-hall. The Flemings seem very fond of bells, which are always chiming, and the great multitude of storks was a strange thing to me; they make their nests on the tops of the chimneys. The country round is very fertile, and the great guilds exceeding prosperous. The small handicrafts have more power there than with us at Strasburg. At Ypres, I hear, they lately mustered five thousand strong in the market-place, and headed by their deacons, engaged and routed the knights and men-at-arms who wished to hold the town against the men of Ghent.[^[138]] They are very brave and determined, and keep better together, as it seems to me, than our folk. I found no small excitement in the city, on account of the war then carrying on between the men of Ghent and their allies, on the one side, and the Earl of Flanders on the other. It began with the old rivalry between Ghent and Bruges—some dispute about a canal from the Lys. The real struggle is between lords and commons. What Bishop Berthold and his party have been to us, that is the Count de Male to these Flemings. The popular side has lost a brave leader in John Lyon. He revived the White Hoods, and stirred up all Flanders against the earl. But two at least of the new captains, John Boule and Peter du Bois, bid fair to fill his place. When I was at Louvain, the troops of the earl were besieged in Oudenarde by upwards of a hundred thousand men, gathered out of all the principal towns, well provisioned and appointed. The besiegers were very strong in cross-bow men, and had with them some great guns, which did no small damage. Many hot assaults were made, both by land and water, and on both sides many brave men slain (Heaven rest their souls!) for the Flemings were no whit behind the knights in foolhardiness. When I left Brabant, report said that a peace was, or soon would be concluded, to be ratified, according to their wont there, by enormous dinners. Certain it is that neither Oudenarde nor Dendermonde were carried after all.[^[139]]

They still talked at Louvain about that flower of chivalry Edward III. of England, who was there for a season some few years back.[^[140]] His princely entertainments to lords and ladies left the country full of golden traditions about him. The islanders won all hearts by their unparalleled magnificence and generosity. They say the English king called James von Artaveld—brewer of metheglin as he was—his cousin, and was passing wroth when he heard of his murder. Yet methinks he cares but little after all for the Flemish weavers, save as they may help him and his knights against France. Nevertheless, the weaker France, the better for Germany. I think I understand why our emperor Charles so flatters the pope. If his Holiness could confide in Germany he would fain break with France. Be this as it may, not a word now is heard about the claims of the empire. The Ghibelline cause finds no leader. The spirit of the Hohenstaufen lives only in the rhymes of the minstrel. No doubt times are changed. There may be policy in the submission, but I love it not. The Doctor interpreted to me the other day the emperor’s Latin motto, which set me thinking. It means—the best use you can make of your own wits is to turn to good account the follies of other people.[^[141]] So cardinals and envoys riding to and fro, plotting and treaty-making, will manage Christendom now, not strong arms and sword-strokes. Whether, in the end, this change will lead to better or to worse, it baffles my poor brain to decide.

We set out from Louvain for Grünthal, quite a troop of us. There was a noble widow-lady, with her attendants, who was going to crave ghostly counsel from the prior. She had lost her husband by the plague, three years since, and appeared still overwhelmed with grief, speaking to no one, and never suffering her face to be seen. Her women, when not near her, were merry enough with the followers of a young Frenchman of family who carried letters to Ruysbroek from his uncle, an abbot in Paris. We had with us besides two Minorite friars from Guelders. The head dresses of the women were fit for giantesses, rising up like a great horn, with long ribbons fluttering from the top. One of them had a little dagger in her girdle, and managed a spirited horse to admiration. The Frenchman, with whom I had much talk, was an arrant fop, yet a shrewd fellow withal. He jingled like a jester with his many silver bells, his hair was tied behind in a tail, the points of his shoes turned up, his parti-coloured doublet cut short round (a new fashion, adopted for greater swiftness in flying from an enemy), and his beard, long and bushy, trimmed with a sort of studied negligence. He gave me a melancholy account of the state of France, divided within, overrun by the English invaders, nobles plundering and burning—here to-day and there to-morrow, without pity, law, or loyalty; knights destroying, not helping the weak: troops of robbers surprising castles and even taking towns; and the wretched peasantry fain often to hide themselves and their cattle for weeks and months in great caves hollowed out underneath the ground.

One of the friars told me a story current about Prior Ruysbroek, how, one day, he was absent longer than usual in the forest, whither he was accustomed to retire for meditation, and as some of the brethren went to seek him they saw a tree at a distance which appeared surrounded by fiery glory. The holy man was sitting at its foot, lost in contemplation! The Saviour and our Blessed Lady herself are said to have appeared to him more than once.[^[142]]

We reached Grünthal—a great building of exceeding plainness—soon after nightfall. Found there visitors from Brussels, so that, between us, nearly all the guest chambers were filled. The good Ruysbroek has been there but a year, yet if he is always to be thus sought unto, methinks he is as far from his longed-for seclusion as ever.[^[143]]

We remained three weeks at Grünthal, for whenever the Doctor would be going, the good Prior so besought him to tarry longer that he could not in courtesy say him nay. Often Ruysbroek and Tauler would spend all the summer morning in the forest, now walking, now sitting under the trees, talking of the concerns of the soul, or of the fears and hopes awakened by these doubtful times. I was permitted repeatedly to accompany them, and afterwards wrote down some of the more remarkable things I heard said. These two saintly men, prepared to love each other as brothers in a common experience, seemed at once to grow together into a friendship as strong as though many years had been employed in the building thereof. Neither of them vain, neither jealous, each was for humbling himself beneath the other, and seemed desirous rather to hear and learn than to talk about himself.

Speaking about the Son of God and the soul of man, Ruysbroek said—‘I believe that the Son is the Image of the Father, that in the Son have dwelt from all eternity, foreknown and contemplated by the Father, the prototypes of all mankind. We existed in the Son before we were born—He is the creative ground of all creatures—the eternal cause and principle of their life. The highest essence of our being rests therefore in God,—exists in his image in the Son. After our creation in time, our souls are endowed with these properties, which are in effect one; the first, the Imageless Nudity, (die bildlose Nacktheit)—by means of this we receive and are united to the Father; the second, the Higher Reason of the Soul (die höhere Vernunft der Seele), the mirror of brightness, by which we receive the Son; the third, the Spark of the Soul (Funken der Seele) by which we receive the love of God the Holy Ghost. These three faculties are in us all the ground of our spiritual life, but in sinners they are obscured and buried under their transgressions.[^[144]]

‘The office of the Son in time was to die for us, fulfil the law, and give us a divine pattern of humility, love, and patience. He is the fountain whence flows to us all needed blessing, and with him works the Holy Spirit. What the Son did he did for all—is Light-bringer for all mankind, for the Catholic Church especially, but also for every devoutly-disposed mind. Grace is common, and whoever desires it has it. Without it no natural powers or merits can save us. The will is free by nature, it becomes by grace more free; yea, a king, lord of every lower power, crowned with Love, clad in the might of the Holy Ghost. There is a natural will towards good (Synderesis) implanted in us all, but damped by sin. We can will to follow this better impulse, and of ourselves desire the help of divine grace, without which we can never overcome sin and rise above ourselves. Everything depends on will. A man must will right strongly. Will to have humility and love, and they are thine. If any man is without the spirit of God, it is his own fault, for not seeking that without which he cannot please Him.[^[145]]

‘True penitence is of the heart; bodily suffering is not essential. No one is to think he is shut out from Christ because he cannot bear the torturing penance some endure. We must never be satisfied with any performance, any virtue—only in the abyss, the Nothingness of Humility, do we rise beyond all heavens. True desire after God is not kept back by the sense of defect. The longing soul knows only this, that it is bent on God. Swallowed up in aspiration, it can take heed of nothing more.’[^[146]] (A very weighty saying this, methinks, and helpful.)

Speaking of the inner life, and the union of the soul with God, Ruysbroek said—

‘God dwells in the highest part of the soul. He who ascends this height has all things under his feet. We are united to God when, in the practice of the virtues, we deny and forsake ourselves, loving and following God above all creatures. We cannot compel God by our love to love us, but He cannot sanctify us unless we freely contribute our effort. There is a reciprocal desire on our part and that of God. The free inspiration of God is the spring of all our spiritual life. Thence flows into us knowledge—an inner revelation which preserves our spirit open, and, lifting us above all images and all disturbance, brings us to an inward silence. Here the divine inspiration is a secret whispering in the inner ear. God dwells in the heart pure and free from every image. Then first, when we withdraw into the simplicitas of our heart, do we behold the immeasurable glory of God, and our intellect is as clear from all considerations of distinction and figurative apprehensions, as though we had never seen or heard of such things. Then the riches of God are open to us. Our spirit becomes desireless, as though there were nothing on earth or in heaven of which we stood in need. Then we are alone with God, God and we—nothing else. Then we rise above all multiplicity and distinction into the simple nakedness of our essence, and in it become conscious of the infinite wisdom of the Divine Essence, whose inexhaustible depths are as a vast waste, into which no corporeal and no spiritual image can intrude. Our created is absorbed in our uncreated life, and we are as it were transformed into God. Lost in the abyss of our eternal blessedness, we perceive no distinction between ourselves and God. As soon as we begin to reflect and to consider what that is we feel, we become aware of such distinction, and fall back to the level of reason.’[^[147]]

Here Tauler asked whether such language was not liable to abuse by the heretics who confound man and God? He referred to a passage in the Spiritual Nuptials, in which Ruysbroek said that we became identical, in this union, with the glory by which we are illumined.[^[148]]

Ruysbroek answered, that he had designed to qualify duly all such expressions. ‘But you know, Doctor,’ continued he, ‘I have not your learning, and cannot at all times say so accurately as I would what I mean. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings!—I would say that in such a state all our powers are in repose, not that they are annihilated. If so, we should lose our existence as creatures. We are one with God, but yet always creature existences distinct from God. I do humbly believe, let my enemies say what they may, that I wrote no word of that book save at the impulse of the Holy Ghost, and with a peculiar and most blessed presence to my soul of the Holy Trinity. But what shall I call this blessedness? It includes peace, inward silence, affectionate hanging on the source of our joy, sleep in God, contemplation of the heaven of darkness, far above reason.‘[^[149]]

The conversation then turned on the heresies of the time, the corruptions of the Church and of the State, and other practical matters more within my compass. Ruysbroek said that the great sin and error of these heretics lay in their aspiring to union with God by a summary and arrogant method of their own. They persuaded themselves that, merely by ceasing to think and distinguish, they could withdraw themselves into the essence of their nature, and so, without the help of grace or the practice of virtue, attain by bare nature the rest and blessedness of absolute simplicity and superiority to all modes and images.

‘Verily,’ quoth Tauler, ‘though they give themselves out for the wisest and the holiest, it is only themselves, not God, they enjoy. Yet mischievous as they are, often as I have preached against them, I never have taken, nor shall I take, any part in their persecution.’[^[150]]

‘I have had plentiful opportunity,’ continued Ruysbroek, ‘for observing these men. I would divide them into four classes.[^[151]] First of all there are those whose doctrine sins especially against the Holy Ghost. They say the essential Godhead works not, but the Holy Ghost doth: that they belong to that Divine Essence, and will rest in like manner;—that they are, therefore, above the Spirit of God. They hold that, after time, all things will be God, one absolute Quiescence, without distinction and without change. So they will neither know nor act, neither think nor thank, but be free from all desire, all obligation. This they call Poverty of Spirit. I say it is a devilish poverty, and such souls must be poor as hell in divine love and knowledge.

‘The second class say, with like blasphemy, ‘We are divine by nature. There is one God, and we are identical with Him. We with Him have created all things; if we had not chosen, we had not been born. It was our own choice to exist as we do. God can do nothing without us, and we give Him therefore no preference, pay Him no homage. Honour to Him is honour to us. What we are we would be, what we would be we are; with God we have created ourselves and all things; heaven and earth hang on our will.’ This insane spiritual pride is flatly contrary to all catholic doctrine.

‘The third class sin not less against the Son. They say, we are as much incarnate as Christ was, and, in the same sense, divine sons of God. Had He lived long enough, He would have attained to the same contemplative quiet we enjoy. Retired into our inmost selves, we find ourselves the same Wisdom of God which Christ is. When He is honoured, we are honoured, for we are identical with Him.

‘The fourth class declare that neither God nor themselves, heaven nor hell, action nor rest, good nor evil, have any real existence. They deny God and the work of Christ, Scripture, sacraments,—everything. God is nothing; they are nothing; the universe is nothing.

‘Some hold doctrines such as these in secret, and conform outwardly, for fear. Others make them the pretext for every kind of vice and insolent insubordination. Of a truth we should cross ourselves when we but speak of them, as in the neighbourhood of spirits from the pit.’

‘And what hope,’ said Tauler, ‘of better things, while the Church is crowded with hirelings, and, with lust and bravery, everywhere leads on the world in sin?’

‘What hope, indeed!’ mournfully responded Ruysbroek. ‘The grace of the sacraments is shamefully bought and sold. Rich transgressors may live as they list. The wealthy usurer is buried before the altar, the bells ring, the priest declares him blessed. I declare that if he died in unrighteousness, not all the priests in Christendom, not all his hoards lavished to feed the poor, could save him from perdition. See, too, the monks, mendicants and all, what riches! what sumptuous fare! what licence, in violation of every vow! what odious distinctions! Some have four or five garments, another scarcely one. Some revel with the prior, the guardian, and the lector in the refectory, at a place of their own. Others must be content with herring and cabbage, washed down with sour beer. Little by little the habit is changed, black becomes brown, grey is exchanged for blue, the white must be of the finest stuff, the shape of the newest cut.’

‘This,’ said Tauler, ‘is what I so much admire in your little community here. You have practically abolished those mischievous distinctions, the cause of so much bitterness in our religious houses. Every one has his place, but no one is degraded. You yourself will perform the meanest offices, as the other morning, when Arnstein found you sweeping the lectorium. Yours is the true canonical life—the life of a family. Every one is ready to do kind offices for his brethren, and your own example teaches daily forgetfulness of self.’

Ruysbroek looked uneasy under these praises, and they spoke again of the prevalent evils in the Church.[^[152]]

‘How many nuns have I seen,’ said Ruysbroek, ‘daintily attired, with silver bells to their girdles, whose prison was the cloister and their paradise the world! A retinue of forty reiters is a moderate attendance for a prelate out on a visitation. I have known some priests who engaged themselves as business agents to laymen; others who have entered the service of ladies of rank, and walked behind them as footmen into church. A criminal has but to pay money down, and he may serve the devil for another year. A trim reckoning, and satisfaction for all parties! The bishop gets the gold, the devil gets the soul, and the miserable fool the moment’s pleasure of his lust.’[^[153]]

When, one day, they were conversing on future rewards and punishments, I remember hearing Ruysbroek say—‘I trust I am ready for all God sends me, life or death, or even hell-pains themselves.’ An attainment of virtue inconceivable to me.[^[154]]

At Grünthal I saw much of a lay brother named John Affliginiensis, the cook of the community.[^[155]] He accompanied Ruysbroek thither. Though wholly unlettered, he serves daily as a goodly ensample of the active and contemplative life united. It is his calling to see to the dinners of the brethren; he is scarce less helpful to their devotions. That he is a good plain cook I can bear witness, and to the edifying character of the discourses he sometimes delivers to the canons, all testify. He scarcely sleeps at all, goes meanly clad, and eats the veriest refuse of the convent fare. He is one of the meekest and most humble of men—has had his sore fights of temptation, fierce inward purgations, and also his favoured hours and secret revelations. Ruysbroek loves him like a brother. The esteem in which he is held, and the liberty of speech allowed him, is characteristic of the simple and brotherly spirit which dwells among these worthy canons. Grünthal is not, like so many religious houses, a petty image of the pettiest follies of the world. There they do seem to have withdrawn in spirit from the strife and pomp of secular life. Gladly would I spend my last years among the beeches and the oaks that shut in their holy peace. But while I may I must be doing; had my call been to the contemplative life I should have been moulded in another fashion.

On our journey back from Louvain I had rare entertainment. We had scarcely passed out beyond the gates, when Tauler rode forward, in deep discourse with an ecclesiastic of the party. A hasty glance at our fellow-travellers, as we mustered at the door of the hostelry, had not led me to look for any company likely to eke out a day’s travel with aught that was pleasant or of profit. But I was mistaken. I espied ere long, a neat, merry-looking little man, in a minstrel’s habit, with a gittern slung at his back. To him I joined himself, and he, pleased evidently with the notice I took of him, sang me songs and told me stories all the way. He said his name was Muscatblut, and I was not sorry to be able to gratify him by answering that his fame had already reached my ears.[^[156]] He had store of songs, with short and long lines curiously interwoven in a way of his own, a very difficult measure to write, as he assured me—the very triumph of his heart. These love-lays he interspersed with riddles and rhyming proverbs, with quaint allegories, satires on clerks and monks, and stories about husbands and wives, making all within hearing roll in their saddles with laughter. He had likewise certain coarse songs, half amatory, half devotional, tagged with bits of slang and bits of Latin, about the wooing of our Lady. I told him, to his surprise, to stop; it was flat blasphemy. He said the voluptuous passages of his lay were after Frauenlob’s best manner, and as to the sacred personages, by St. Bartholomew! many a holy clerk had praised that part most of all, calling it a deep allegory, most edifying to the advanced believer.

At Cologne I parted from the Doctor with many embraces. On my way back to Strasburg I took boat up the Mayne to Frankfurt, whither business called me. We passed a little woody island in the midst of the river, which was pointed out to me as the residence of the leprous barefooted friar, whose songs and airs are so popular throughout the Rhineland. I looked with reverence at the melancholy spot. There he dwells alone, shut out from mankind, yet delighting and touching every heart. His songs are sweet as the old knightly lays of love, full of courtly grace and tenderness, and yet they are songs for the people from one truly of themselves. The burgher has his minstrelsy now, as well as the noble. This at least is a good sign.

Note to page 321.

From this time forward, Rulman Merswin gave himself up to the spiritual guidance of Nicholas the layman—taking him to be to him ‘in God’s stead.’ He took no step without his direction, and wrote at his command his book entitled Von den vier ioren sins anevohenden lebendes—a record of what may be called his spiritual apprenticeship. Nicholas took a copy of it back with him to the Oberland. Schmidt has brought together what is known of Merswin, in the Appendix to his life of Tauler, pp. 177, &c.

The Book of the Nine Rocks was commenced in 1352. It has been published in Diepenbrock’s edition of the works of Suso, to whom it was, till recently, attributed. The claim of Merswin to its authorship is established beyond question—(Schmidt, 180). The work opens by relating how, early one morning in Advent, a man (the author) was warned of God to prepare himself, by inward retirement, for that which He should show him. He was made to behold a vision full of strange and alarming appearances. He cried out, ‘Ah, my heart’s Love! what meanest thou with these mysterious symbols?’ He struggled hard against the phantoms of his trance, but the marvellous forms only multiplied the more. He was constrained by a divine voice to gaze, and commanded, in spite of his humble remonstrances, to write in a book what he saw—the image of the corruptions of Christendom, for the warning of the guilty and the edification of the faithful. The dialogues are given at length between him and God—‘the Man’ and ‘the Answer.’ For eleven weeks, in sickness and spiritual distress, he wavered. He was but a poor, ignorant layman; how should he presume to exhort the Church? ‘The Voice of the Answer’ is heard saying, ‘Came not thy reluctance from humility, I would consign thee to the pit. I see I must compel thee. In the name of the Holy Trinity, I command thee to begin to write this day.’

The souls of men proceeding from God, but few of them returning to their Original, are shown him under the similitude of multitudes of fish, brought down by the descent of great waters from the summit of a mountain. Men in the valley are catching them in nets. Scarce half of them reach the sea below. There the remnant swim in all directions, and at length endeavour to leap back, up to the source whence they came. Numbers are taken in the nets; only a few reach even the base of the mountain. Some who ascend higher fall back upon the rocks and die. A very few, springing from rock to rock, reach exhausted, the fountain at the top, and there forget their pains.

The twenty following chapters are occupied with a dialogue, in which the divine Voice enumerates the characteristic sins of all classes of mankind, from the pope to the begging friar—from the emperor to the serf.

Then commences the vision of the Nine Rocks. A mountain, enormous in breadth and height, fills all the scene. As the eye travels up the ascent, it beholds nine steep rocks, each loftier than that which preceded it,—the highest lost in the heavens. From the lowest the whole surface of the earth is visible. A net is spread over all the region beneath, but it does not reach the mountain. The multitudes seen beneath it are men in mortal sin. The men standing on the first and lowest rock are religious persons, but such as are lukewarm, defective in aspiration and in zeal. They dwell dangerously near the net—(cap. xxiii.). Some, from the first rock, are seen making their way up the precipice, and reaching the second, where they become of dazzling brightness. Those on the second rock have heartily forsaken the world; they will suffer less in purgatory, enjoy more in heaven, than those beneath; but they, too, are far from their Origin yet, and in danger of spiritual pride, self-seeking, and of growing faint and remiss in their painful progress—(cap. xxiv.). Those on the third rock, fewer in number, suffering far more severely in time, are nearer to God, will suffer little in purgatory, and are of yet more glorious aspect than their predecessors—(cap. xxv.). Such is the process to the summit. All the nine rocks must be surmounted, would we return to our Divine Source. But few attain the last, which is indeed the Gate of the Origin—the consummate blessedness, in which the believer, fearless of hell and purgatory, has annihilated self, and hath no wish or will save that of God. One of these true worshippers brings more blessing to Christendom than thousands of such as live after their own will, and know not that they are nothing.

Finally, ‘the man’ is permitted a moment’s glance into the Divine ‘Origin.’ The rapture of that moment he attempted in vain to describe;—no reflection, no image, could give the least hint of it.

Both Rulman and ‘the Friend of God in the Oberland’ believed themselves repeatedly warned of God in visions, that they should build a house for him in Strasburg. The merchant purchased a ruined cloister on a little island in the river Ill, without the city walls. He restored the church, and erected a stone belfry. Nicholas advised him to bestow it on the Johannites, in preference to any other Order,—for there had been no little rivalry among the monks as to who was to enjoy the gift. The conditions of the deed for which he stipulated with the Master of the Order are indicative of the new and more elevated position which mysticism had taught the laity to claim. The government of the house was to rest entirely with a lay triumvirate; the two survivors always to choose a third. The first three governors were Rulman himself, Heinzmann Wetzel, knight, and John Merswin, burg-graf. The admission of brethren rested with these heads of the house, and they were free to receive any one, clerk or layman, knight or serving man, whether belonging to the order of St. John or not, requiring only that he should bring with him the moderate sum requisite to render his residence no burden on the convent. (Schmidt, p. 189.)

Note to page 329.

The passage to which Tauler is made to refer is contained in the third book of the Spiritual Nuptials, chap. 5:—‘Ind alle die minschen die bouen ir geschaffenheit verhauen sin in eyn schauwende leuen, die synt eyn mit deser gotlicher clairheit, ind sij sint die clairheit selver. Ind sy sien ind gevoilen ind vynden sich selver ouermitz dit gotliche licht, dat sy sin der selue eynveldige gront na wijse irre ungeschaffenheit, da de clairheit sonder mias vs schynt in gotlicher wijsen ind na sympelheit des wesens eynueldich binnen blijfft ewelich sonder wise. Ind hervm soilen die innyge schauwende minschen vsgayn na wijse des schauwens bouen reden ind bouen vnderscheit ind bouen ir geschaffen wesen mit ewigen instarren ouermitz dat ingeboiren licht, soe werden sy getransformeirt ind eyn mit desem seluen licht da sy mede sien ind dat sy sien. Ind also vervolgen die schauwende minschen ir ewich bilde da si zo gemacht sin ind beschauwen got ind alle dinck sonder vnderscheit in eyme eynveldigen sien in gotlicher clairheit. In dat is dat edelste ind dat vrberlichste schauwen da men zo komen mach in desem leuen.’—Vier Schriften, p. 144.

[And all men who are exalted above their creatureliness into a contemplative life are one with this divine glory,—yea, are that glory. And they see, and feel, and find in themselves, by means of this divine light, that they are the same simple Ground as to their uncreated nature (i.e., in respect of their ideal pre-existence in the Son), since the glory shineth forth without measure, after the divine manner, and abideth within them simply and without mode (particular manifestation or medium), according to the simplicity of the essence. Wherefore interior contemplative men should go forth in the way of contemplation above reason and distinction, beyond their created substance, and gaze perpetually by the aid of their inborn light, and so they become transformed, and one with the same light, by means of which they see, and which they see. Thus do contemplative men arrive at that eternal image after which they were created, and contemplate God and all things without distinction in a simple beholding, in divine glory. And this is the loftiest and most profitable contemplation whereto men may attain in this life.]

This passage, and others like it, gave rise to the charge of pantheism brought by Gerson against Ruysbroek in the following century. The prior of Grünthal found a defender in Schönhoven, who pointed with justice to numerous expressions in the writings of the accused, altogether incompatible with the heresy alleged. Quite inconsistent with any confusion of the divine and human is Ruysbroek’s fine description of the insatiable hunger of the soul—growing by that it feeds on,—the consciousness that all possessed is but a drop to the illimitable undeemed Perfection yet beyond. (‘Wi leren in waerheit sijns aenschijns dat al dat wi gesmaken tegen dat ons ontblijft dat en is niet een draep tegen al die zee, dit verstormt onsen geest in hetten ende in ongeduer van mynnen.’—Von dem funkelnden Steine, x. p. 194.) So again he says, ‘Want wy enmogen te mael niet got werden ende onse gescapenheit verliesen, dat is onmoegelic’—p. 190; and similarly that we become one with God in love, not in nature, (‘ouerformet ende een mit hem in sijnre minnen, niet in sijnre naturen.’)—Spiegel der Seligkeit, xxiv.

Note to page 329.

Ruysbroek expressed to Gerard Groot, in these very words, his belief in the special guidance of the Holy Spirit vouchsafed for the composition of his books on these ‘deep things’ of the kingdom. (Engelhardt, p. 168.)

The doctrine of Ruysbroek is substantially the same with that of his friend and brother-mystic, Tauler. Whether speaking the high German of the upper Rhine or the low German of the Netherlands, mysticism gives utterance to the same complaint and the same aspiration. Ruysbroek is individually less speculative than Eckart, less practical than Tauler. The Flemish mystic is a more submissive son of the Church than the stout-hearted Dominican of Strasburg, and lays proportionally more stress on what is outward and institutional. He is fond of handling his topics analytically. His numerous divisions and subdivisions remind us of the scholastic Richard of St. Victor, but Ruysbroek, less methodical by nature, and less disciplined, more frequently loses sight of his own distinctions. The subject itself, indeed, where it possesses the writer, repudiates every artificial treatment. While he specifies with minuteness the stages of the mystical ascent, Ruysbroek does not contend that the experience of every adept in the contemplative life must follow the precise order he lays down. (Geistl. Hochzeit, ii. § 30, p. 71.) He loves to ally the distinctions he enumerates in the world of nature, in the operations of grace, in the heavenly state, and in the Divine Being, by a relationship of correspondence. Thus the seven planets and the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit answer to each other. The Empyrean in the external world corresponds to Pure Being in the divine nature, to the Spark of the soul in man, and to the Contemplative stage of his spiritual experience. This scheme of analogies, incidental in Ruysbroek and the earlier mystics, makes up almost the whole system of mystics like Behmen and Swedenborg. His elaborate comparison of the operations of grace to a fountain with three streams (one of which refreshes the memory, another clarifies the understanding, while a third invigorates the will), resembles strikingly the fanciful method of Madame Guyon in her Torrents, and of St. Theresa in her Degrees of Prayer. (Geistl. Hochzeit, xvii. § 36, p. 80.) The mysticism of Ruysbroek is less sensuous than that of the poetical Suso. Beyond question the higher elevation of the contemplative life must have been a welcome refuge to many devout minds wearied with vain ritual, penance, and routine. As acknowledged contemplatists, they could escape without scandal from contact with the grosser machinery of their religion. Accordingly, to claim superiority to means and modes was by no means always the arrogant pretension it may seem to us. Tauler’s ‘state above grace’ was the ark of an unconscious Protestantism. Where the means were made the end, wisdom forsook them, and rejoiced to find that the name of mystic could shelter spirituality from the dangers of the suspected heretic. Ruysbroek, however, felt the want of such a protection for freer thought, much less than did Tauler and some of his more active followers.