Mysticism in English Literature

by Caroline F. E. Spurgeon

This poem is a delicate example of what is called "erotic mysticism," that is the love and attraction of the soul for God, and of God for the soul, expressed in the terms of the love between man and woman. It is a type of expression characteristic of the great mystics of the Catholic Church, especially in the Middle Ages,[53] and we find a good deal of it in our earliest mystical writers. One of the most charming examples of it other than this lyric, is the chapter "Of Love" in the Ancren Riwle, or Rule for Anchoresses, written probably early in the thirteenth century. An account is there given, quite unsurpassed for delicate beauty, of the wooing of the soul by God.[54] On the whole, however, this type of mysticism is rare in England, and we scarcely meet it again after these early writers until we come to the poems of Crashaw. The finest expression of it is the Song of Solomon, and it is easy to see that such a form of symbolism is specially liable to degradation, and is open to grave dangers, which it has not always escaped. Yet, in no other terms known to man is it possible so fully to express the sense of insatiable craving and desire as well as the rapture of intimate communion felt by the mystic towards his God, as in the language of that great passion which, in its purest form, is the best thing known to man and his highest glory. "I saw Him, and sought Him, I had Him and I wanted Him." Could any words more completely express the infinity of love's desire, ever unsatisfied even in possession, than does this love-cry from the heart of Julian the anchoress of Norwich?

The intensity and freshness of religious feeling of a mystical type in England in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries are often not realised, partly owing to the fact that much of the religious writing of this time is still in manuscript. The country was full of devotees who had taken religious vows, which they fulfilled either in the many monasteries and convents, or often in single cells, as "hermit" or "anchoress." Here they lived a life devoted to contemplation and prayer, and to the spiritual assistance of those who sought them out.

The hermits, of whom there were a large number, were apparently free to move from one neighbourhood to another, but the woman recluse, or "anchoress," seldom or never left the walls of her cell, a little house of two or three rooms built generally against the church wall, so that one of her windows could open into the church, and another, veiled by a curtain, looked on to the outer world, where she held converse with and gave counsel to those who came to see her. Sometimes a little group of recluses lived together, like those three sisters of Dorsetshire for whom the Ancren Riwle was written, a treatise which gives us so many homely details of this type of life.

Richard Rolle (c. 1300-1349), of Hampole, near Doncaster, and the Lady Julian, a Benedictine nun of Norwich (1342-c.1413), are the two most interesting examples of the mediæval recluse in England. Both seem to have had a singular charm of character and a purity of mystical devotion which has impressed itself on their writings. Richard Rolle, who entered upon a hermit's life at nineteen on leaving Oxford, had great influence both through his life and work on the whole group of fourteenth-century religious writers, and so on the thought of mediæval England. His contemporaries thought him mad, they jeered at him and abused him, but he went quietly on his way, preaching and writing. Love forced him to write; love, he said, gave him wisdom and subtlety, and he preached a religion of love. Indeed the whole of his work is a symphony of feeling, a song of Love, and forms a curious reaction against the exaltation of reason and logic in scholasticism. He wrote a large number of treatises and poems, both in Latin and English, lyrical songs and alliterative homilies, burning spiritual rhapsodies and sound practical sermons, all of which were widely known and read. Certain points about Rolle are of special interest and distinguish him from other mystics and seers. One is that for him the culminating mystical experience took the form of melody, rhythm, harmony. He is the most musical of mystics, and where others "see" or "feel" Reality, he "hears" it. Hence his description of his soul's adventures is peculiarly beautiful, he thinks in images and symbols of music, and in his writings we find some of the most exquisite passages in the whole literature of mysticism, veritable songs of spiritual joy. In the Fire of Love, perhaps the finest of his more mystical works, he traces in detail his journey along the upward path. This is very individual, and it differs in some important respects from other similar records. He passed through the stage of "purgation," of struggle between the flesh and spirit, of penitence and aspiration, through "illumination," until he reached, after nearly three years, the third stage of contemplation of God through love.[55]

In this condition, after about a year, "the door of heaven yet biding open," he experienced the three phases to which he gives the names of "calor, canor, dulcor," heat, song, and sweetness. "Heat soothly I call when the mind truly is kindled in Love Everlasting, and the heart on the same manner to burn not hopingly, but verily is felt."[56]

This "burning" seems to have been for him a real physical sensation, a bodily condition induced by the adventure of the spirit. This is not unusual in mystical states, and possibly the cryptic notes made by Pascal record a similar experience.[57] He continued in this warmth for nine months, when suddenly he felt and heard the "canor," the "spiritual music," the "invisible melody" of heaven. Here is his description of his change from "burning love" to the state of "songful love."

Whilst ... I sat in chapel, in the night, before supper, as I my psalms sung, as it were the sound of readers or rather singers about me I beheld. Whilst also, praying to heaven, with all desire I took heed, suddenly, in what manner I wot not, in me the sound of song I felt; and likeliest heavenly melody I took, with me dwelling in mind. Forsooth my thought continually to mirth of song was changed: and as it were the same that loving I had thought, and in prayers and psalms had said, the same in sound I showed, and so forth with [began] to sing that [which] before I had said, and from plenitude of inward sweetness I burst forth, privily indeed, alone before my Maker.[58]

The sweetness of this inward spiritual song is beyond any sound that may be heard with bodily ears, even lovers can only catch snatches of it. "Worldly lovers soothly words or ditties of our song may know, for the words they read: but the tone and sweetness of that song they may not learn."[59] The final stage of "sweetness" seems really to include the other two, it is their completion and fruition. The first two, says Rolle, are gained by devotion, and out of them springs the third.[60] Rolle's description of it, of the all-pervading holy joy, rhythm, and melody, when the soul, "now become as it were a living pipe," is caught up into the music of the spheres, "and in the sight of God ... joying sounds,"[61] deserves to be placed beside what is perhaps the most magnificent passage in all mystical literature, where Plotinus tells us of the choral dance of the soul about her God.[62]

Enough has been said to show that Rolle is a remarkable individual, and one of the most poetic of the English religious mystical writers, and it is regrettable that some of his other works are not more easily accessible. Unfortunately, the poem with which his name is generally associated, The Pricke of Conscience, is entirely unlike all his other work, both in form and matter. It is a long, prosaic and entirely unmystical homily in riming couplets, of a very ordinary mediæval type, stirring men's minds to the horrors of sin by dwelling on the pains of purgatory and hell. It would seem almost certain, on internal evidence, that the same hand cannot have written it and the Fire of Love, and recent investigation appears to make it clear that Rolle's part in it, if any, was merely of the nature of compilation or translation of some other work, possibly by Grosseteste.[63]

Of the life of the Lady Julian we know very little, except that she was almost certainly a Benedictine nun, and that she lived for many years in an anchoress's cell close to the old church of St Julian at Conisford, near Norwich. But her character and charm are fully revealed in the little book she has left of Revelations of Divine Love, which contains a careful account of a definite psychological experience through which she passed on the 8th day of May 1373, when she was thirty years of age. She adds to this record of fact certain commentaries and explanations which, she says, have been taught her gradually in the course of the subsequent twenty years. This experience, which lasted altogether between five and six hours, was preceded by a seven days' sickness most vividly described, ending in a semi-rigidity of the body as if it were already half dead, and it took the form of sixteen "Shewings" or "Visions." These, she says, reached her in three ways, "by bodily sight, by word formed in mine understanding" (verbal messages which took form in her mind), "and by spiritual sight." But of this last, she adds, "I may never fully tell it."[64] It is impossible here to do justice to this little book, for it is one of the most important documents in the history of mysticism. There is no mention in it of any preliminary "purgative" stage, nor of any ultimate experience of ecstasy; it is simply—if one may so put it—a narrative of certain intimate talks with God, once granted, when, during a few hours of the writer's life, He explained various difficulties and made clear to her certain truths. The impression left of the nearness of God to the soul was so vivid and sustaining, that it is not possible to read the record of it, even now, across six hundred years, without feeling strangely stirred by the writer's certainty and joy.