We have here the elements of piety, intellectual and devotional. Hugo is an example of their union; they also preserve their equal weight in Aquinas. But because Hugo emphasizes the limitations of the intellect, and so ardently recognizes the heart’s yearning and immediacy of apperception, he is what is styled a mystic; a term which we are now in a position to consider, and to some extent exchange for other phrases of more definite significance.[494]
Quite to avoid the term is not possible, inasmuch as the conception certainly includes what is mysterious because unknowable through reason. For it includes a sense of the supreme, a sense of God, who is too great for human reason to comprehend, and therefore a mystery. And it includes a yearning toward God, the desire of Him, and the feeling of love. The last is also mysterious, in that it has not exclusive part with reason, but springs as well from feeling. Yet the essence or nature of this spirit of piety which we would analyse, consists in consciousness of the reality of the object of its yearning or devotion. Not altogether through induction or deduction, but with an irrational immediacy of conviction, it feels and knows its object. In place of the knowledge which is mediated through rational processes, is substituted a conviction upheld by yearning, love’s conviction indeed, of the reality and presence of that which is all the greater and more worthy because it baffles reason. And the final goal attainable by this mystic love is, even as the goal of other love, union with the Beloved.
The mystic spirit is an essential part of all piety or religion, which relates always and forever to the rationally unknown, and therefore mysterious. Without a consciousness of mystery, there can be neither piety nor religion. Nor can there be piety without some devotion to God, nor the deepest and most ardent forms of piety, without fervent love of God. This devotion and this love supply strength of conviction, creating a realness of communion with the divine, and an assurance of the soul’s rest and peace therein. But that the intellect has part, Hugo abundantly demonstrates. One must have perceptions, and thought’s severest wrestlings—cogitatio and meditatio—before reaching that first stage of wide and sure intelligence, which relates to the creature world, and affords a broad basis of assurance, whence at last the soul shall spring to God. Intellectual perceptions and rational knowledge, and all the mind’s puttings together of its data in inductions and deductions and constructions, form a basis for contemplation, and yield material upon which the emotional side of human nature may exercise itself in yearning and devotion. Herein the constructive imagination works; which is intellectual faculty illuminated and impelled by the emotions.
This spirit actualizes itself in the power and scope of its resultant conviction, by which it makes real to itself the qualities, attributes, and actions of its object, God, and the nature of man’s relationship or union with the divine. In its final energy, when only partly conscious of its intellectual inductions, it discards syllogisms, quite dissatisfied with their devious and hesitating approach. Instead, by the power of love, it springs directly to its God. Nevertheless the soul which feels the inadequacy of reason even to voice the soul’s desires, will seek means of expression wherein reason still will play a submerged part. The soul is seeking to express what is not altogether expressible in direct and rational statement. It seeks adumbrations, partial unveilings of its sentiments, which shall perhaps make up in warmth of colour what they lack in definiteness of line. In fine, it seeks symbols. Such symbolism must be large and elastic, in order to shadow forth the soul’s relations with the Infinite; it must also be capable of carrying passion, that it may satisfy the soul’s craving to give voice to its great love.
In Greek thought as well as in the Hellenizing Judaism of a Philo, symbolism, or more specifically speaking, allegorical interpretation, was obviously apologetic, seeking to cloud in naturalistic interpretations the doings of the rather over-human gods of Greece.[495] But it sprang also from the unresting need of man to find expression for that sense of things which will not fit definite statement. This was the need which became creative, and of necessity fancifully creative, with Plato. Though he would have nothing to do with falsifying apologetics, all the more he felt the need of allegories, to suggest what his dialectic could not formulate. In the early times of the Church militant of Christ, allegorical interpretation was exploited to defend the Faith; in the later patristic period, the Faith had so far triumphed, that allegory as a sword of defence and attack might be sheathed, or just allowed to glitter now and then half-drawn. But piety’s other need, with increasing energy, compelled the use of symbols and articulate allegory to express the directly inexpressible. Thereafter through the Middle Ages, while the use of allegory as a defence against the Gentiles slumbered, so much more the other need of it, and the sense of the universal symbolism of material things, filled the minds of men; and in age-long answer to this need, allegory, symbolism, became part of the very spirit of the mediaeval time.
Thus it became the universal vehicle of pious expression: it may be said almost to have co-extended with all mediaeval piety. It was ardently loving, as with St. Bernard; it might be filled with scarlet passion, as with Mechthild of Magdeburg; or it might be used in the self-conscious, and yet inspired vision-pictures of Hildegard of Bingen. And indeed with almost any mediaeval man or woman, it might keep talking, as a way of speech, obtrusively, conventionally, ad nauseam. For indeed in treatise after treatise even of the better men, allegory seems on the one hand to become very foolish and perverse, banal, intolerably talking on and on beyond the point; or again we sense its mechanism, hear the creaking of its jaws, while no living voice emerges,—and we suspect that the mystery of life, if it may not be compassed by direct statement, also lies deeper than allegorical conventions.
Hugo’s great De sacramentis showed the equipoise of intellectual and pietistic interests in him, and the Platonic quality of his mind’s sure sense of the reality of the supersensual.[496] Other treatises of his show his yearning piety, and the Augustinian quality of his soul, “made toward thee, and unquiet till it rests in thee.” The De arca Noe morali,[497] that is to say, the Ark of Noah viewed in its moral significance, is charming in its spiritual refinement, and interesting in its catholic intellectual reflections. The Prologue presents a situation:
“As I was sitting once among the brethren, and they were asking questions, and I replying, and many matters had been cited and adduced, it came about that all of us at once began to marvel vehemently at the unstableness and disquiet of the human heart; and we began to sigh. Then they pleaded with me that I would show them the cause of such whirlings of thought in the human heart; and they besought me to set forth by what art or exercise of discipline this evil might be removed. I indeed wished to satisfy my brethren, so far as God might aid me, and untie the knot of their questions, both by authority and by argument. I knew it would please them most if I should compose my matter to read to them at table.
“It was my plan to show first whence arise such violent changes in man’s heart, and then how the mind may be led to keep itself in stable peace. And although I had no doubt that this is the proper work of grace, rather than of human labour, nevertheless I know that God wishes us to co-operate. Besides it is well to know the magnitude of our weakness and the mode of its repairing, since so much the deeper will be our gratitude.
“The first man was so created, that if he had not sinned, he would always have beheld in present contemplation his Creator’s face, and by always seeing Him, would have loved Him always, and, by loving, would always have clung close to Him, and by clinging to Him who was eternal, would have possessed life without end. Evidently the one true good of man was perfect knowledge of his Creator. But he was driven from the face of the Lord, since for his sin he was struck with the blindness of ignorance, and passed from that intimate light of contemplation; and he inclined his mind to earthly desires, as he began to forget the sweetness of the divine. Thus he was made a wanderer and fugitive over the earth. A wanderer indeed, because of disordered concupiscence; and a fugitive, through guilty conscience, which feels every man’s hand against it. For every temptation will overcome the man who has lost God’s aid.