In this important passage we see the true source of Lucie’s mysticism. It was the craving for an absolute and unchanging loveliness on which to expend her large-hearted powers of adoration and self-giving, which led her like the Platonists through visible beauty to its invisible source. She had, as she says of herself in a sudden flash of ironic wit, “le cœur assez mal placé pour trouver Dieu plus aimable que le monde, et l’esprit assez étroit pour se contenter de l’Infini”; but it was not until youth was nearly over, and she had been married for eight years, that she found what she sought. One day, when she was meditating as usual on a passage in the Imitation of Christ, she saw and heard within her mind the words “Dieu seul!”—summing up and answering in one phrase the vague efforts and questions of her growing mystical sense, and offering to the hungry psyche the only satisfaction of desire. As Fox was released from his conflict by the inner voice which cried, “There is one only who can speak to thy condition,” so this inner voice, says Lucie (whom it greatly astonished), “fut à la fois une lumière, un attrait, et une force. Une lumière qui me fit voir comment je pouvais être complètement à Dieu seul dans le monde, et je vis que jusque-là je ne l’avais pas bien comprit. Un attrait par lequel mon cœur fut subjugué et ravi. Une force qui m’inspira une résolution généreuse et me mit en quelque sorte dans les mains les moyens de l’exécuter, car le propre de ces paroles divines est d’opérer ce qu’elles disent.”
We see at once the complete and practical character of her reaction to the divine; the promptitude with which she makes the vital connection between intuition and act. St. Teresa said that the object of the spiritual marriage was “the incessant production of work.” So for Lucie-Christine that sure consciousness of the Presence of God which now became frequent, “clothing and inundating” her as she sat alone at her sewing or took part in some social activity, called her above all to “faire les petites choses du dévouement journalier avec amour”; conquering her natural irritability and dislike for the boredoms and unrealities of a prosperous existence. “N’avoir jamais l’air ennuyé des autres. Que de fois je manque à ceci avec les pauvres enfants. Vous êtes ennuyeux! C’est bien vite dit! Est-ce une amabilité divine?”
More and more, as her mystical consciousness grew, the life of contemplation became her delight; and it was plainly a real trial to be distracted from it for trivial purposes. In company, or busied with household duties, she went for hours with “her soul absorbed, its better part rapt in God.” She “tried to appear ordinary,” and made excuses if her abstraction was observed; but there are a few entries in her journal which will give pleasure to those who condemn mysticism as an “anti-social type of religion.” “Nous avons été nous promener, quatorze. Je remarque que d’aller ainsi avec plusieurs ‘Marthes’ hommes ou femmes, cela ne fait rien. On laisse discourir, on met un mot de temps en temps, mais, en définitive, on demeure bien libre et l’oraison va toute seule. Mais avec une seule Marthe, que c’est terrible! La tête-à-tête oblige à causer presque tout le temps.”
When Lucie wrote this, ten years after her first illuminative experience, she was far advanced in contemplation. She had known that direct and ineffable vision of God “Himself the True, the Good, the Beautiful; all things being nothing save by Him” which is characteristic—though she knew it not—of the unitive way: known too the corresponding experience of dereliction, when the door which had opened on Eternity seemed tightly closed. It would be tedious to analyze in detail the rich profusion of mystic states which she had already exhibited: the degrees of contemplation, ecstasies, visions and voices, all the forms taken by her growing intuition of the Transcendent. Many of these can be matched in the writings of the great mystics. Again and again as we read her, we are reminded of Angela of Foligno, Ruysbroeck, Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Genoa, even of Plotinus: yet Lucie-Christine was at this time ignorant of mystical literature, and only in later life found with amazement descriptions of her own experiences in the works of the great contemplatives.
These experiences had a wide range. Some we are justified in regarding as invasions from her deeper self; coming to the rescue of the often distracted surface personality, and correcting the impressions of the outer world by its own intimations of Eternity. Thus, in 1875, she confesses that being particularly worried by a number of people, the Divine voice said to her, “Ma fille, il n’y a que toi et moi.” She replied: “Seigneur, et les autres?” The voice said: “Pour chaque âme en ce monde il n’y a que moi et elle, toutes les autres âmes et toutes choses ne sont rien pour elle que par moi et pour moi,” and by this timely reminder of the one Reality in whose life she lived, and by and in whom alone all other lives are real, she was recalled to her inner poise.
In assessing the value of this, and many other of her revelations, we have to remember that Lucie-Christine was a fervent and exact Churchwoman. Her belief was literal. She felt no discord between traditional Christianity of the most concrete kind and the freedom of her own communion with God. The fruits of that communion were often expressed by her in theological terms, and the special atmosphere and tendencies of French Catholicism certainly affected the form of many of her contemplations. Thus at one end of the scale her passionate devotion to the Person of Christ, and the fact that her religious practice centred in the Eucharist, sometimes resulted in visions of a distinctly anthropomorphic type. In these, her intuition of God’s presence translated themselves into hallucinatory images of the Face of Christ, or of His eyes looking at her; or photisms, which she explained to herself as the radiance emanating from His person. As we all know, such dramatizations of mystical emotion are comparatively commonplace. The elements from which the self constructs them are by no means all of a spiritual kind; and experienced mystics agree in regarding them with much suspicion. A careful study of Lucie-Christine’s journal forces us to admit, that the deliberate passivity which she cultivated often placed her at the mercy of her instinctive nature; and that its hidden wishes sometimes took a devotional form. To this source, too, we must refer those “obsessions and temptations”—in other words, uprushes from the lower centres—by which she was often attacked during contemplation, and also the occasionally sentimental and emotional character of her reactions to the Divine.
These objections, however, do not apply to the remarkable “metaphysical visions”—sharp onsets of real transcendental consciousness—in which her innate passion for the Absolute found satisfaction. Then, as she says, God seemed to “put aside all intermediaries between Himself and the soul;” and “bathed and irradiated by the Divine substance” she became “aware of the Divine Abyss,” or perceived, as Julian of Norwich did, “the Universe in a point,” swallowed up in the simple yet overwhelming sight of God. Here lie, for us, the real interest and value of Lucie-Christine’s confessions. She shares with Angela of Foligno and a few other historical mystics the double apprehension of the Divine Nature under its personal and impersonal forms; and as both utterly transcendent to, yet completely immanent in, the human soul. In her descriptions of these visions, this woman unread in philosophy displays a grasp of the philosophic basis of religion which would do credit to a trained theologian. Thus she says, “Il n’y a pas, ce me semble, de vue intérieure qui égale celle de l’essence divine. Mon âme était comme environnée de la substance divine en laquelle elle voyait ce caractère essentiel qui nous est révelé par le mystère de la Sainte Trinité, c’est-à-dire qu’il y a en Dieu l’unité et la distinction, le tout et le particulier, et je sentais combien c’est folie de chercher quelque chose en dehors de lui.” Again, “Étant profondément unie à lui dans la Sainte Communion, je vis Dieu en tant qu’il est le souverain bien, et je compris en même temps que le mal n’est que la négation du bien, un pur néant.... Dans cette vue intellectuelle, je compris aussi combien sera grande la confusion des pécheurs quand ils seront jugés, et qu’ils verront que tout le mal qu’ils ont aimé, préconisé, adoré, se réduit au néant! Avoir aimé le néant, avoir vécu pour lui, et perdre pour lui l’Etre éternel!” Here Lucie’s view of sin is that characteristic of all mystics; who can seldom be persuaded, however orthodox they may be in other respects, that anything which is not good is real. We remember how Julian of Norwich, also a natural contemplative of philosophic temperament, says, “I saw not sin; for I believe it has no manner of substance nor part of being.”
As an analyzer of her own psychological states, Lucie-Christine had something of that genius which St. Teresa possessed in a supreme degree; and she has, perhaps, an added value for us because she speaks not from the past nor from the cloister, but out of the Paris of our own day. We owe to her one of our most vivid descriptions of that apprehension of Eternal Life—the immersion of our durational existence in the Absolute Life of God—which Von Hügel regards as the fundamental religious experience. “J’ai observé,” she says, “que pendant l’oraison passive et surtout dans l’état d’union, l’âme perd le sentiment de la durée. Il n’y a plus pour elle de succession de moments, mais un moment unique, et j’ai cru comprendre qu’étant élevée à cet état, l’âme y vit selon le mode de vivre de l’éternité, où il n’y a point de durée, point de passé ni d’avenir, mais un moment unique, infini.” We have again to remember that the woman who wrote this had then no acquaintance with the classics of mysticism. It is her own impression which she is trying to register.
Again, consider this account of the state of divine union as she had known it: “L’âme va prier, elle s’élance pour franchir la distance qui la sépare de l’Infini, et cette distance elle ne la trouve plus! Elle veut aller à vous, mon Dieu, et vous êtes en elle!... Perdue en vous, elle oublie ellemême et tout le reste, elle ne sait plus comment elle vit, ni comment elle aime; elle ne voit plus que Vous seul. Encore ne peut elle pas penser qu’elle vous voit et vous adore; car ce serait se voir elle-même, et en de tels moments elle ne se voit pas, elle ne voit que Vous. Elle connaît et aime par un mode nouveau et incompréhensible, qui est en dehors et infiniment au-dessus de l’exercice ordinaire de ses facultés. Elle sent que l’opération de Dieu a pris la place de la sienne et que c’est Dieu même qui opère en elle la connaissance et l’amour.”
This sense of complete surrender to a larger life and greater power, of which love is the very substance and ground, is characteristic of nearly all high mystical experience; and the literature of contemplation would furnish many parallels to all that Lucie tells us of it. In this state, as she says in another place, “the thirst of the spirit is suddenly fulfilled by the Infinite,” and “God takes possession of the ground of the soul, without passage of time or feeling of space.” Then, the bewilderment and unrest produced in us by the disharmonies of daily life are healed. “Là où tout raisonnement échoue,” she says in one of her most beautiful passages; “où l’âme est tellement troublée qu’elle ne saurait même expliquer ce qui la trouble, la divine presence paraît, et soudain le vertige cesse et la paix renaît avec la lumière.” Consciousness, ceasing more or less completely its normal correspondences with the temporal order, then becomes aware of the eternal and spiritual universe in which we really live.