Fénelon: The Mystic

by James Mudge

This is why in all ages of the Church, when the outward has come to usurp and absorb attention, when formalism and ceremonialism have dominated the mind, when scholasticism has gained ascendency, and especially when a corrupt looseness of morals has set in to degrade the very ideals of humanity, there have been those who have arisen to make a stand for a purer, more fervent, more spiritual type of piety. They have met, of course, with bitter opposition; they have troubled those who did not wish to be disturbed in their carnal indulgences or worldly conformities, and they have had various uncomplimentary epithets thrown at them: such as, Pietists, Quietists, Mystics, Puritans, Quakers, and Methodists. They have been misrepresented in manifold ways. They have been persecuted even unto the death. But they have been the salt of the earth, and the succession has been kept up under one name or another from the earliest days to the present. They have not always been endowed with philosophic minds or skilled in the learning of the schools. They have been keenly conscious of the difficulty, the impossibility, of completely expressing, in imperfect human words, the deep things of God revealed to them on the mounts of vision with which they have been favored. They have struggled hard with the inadequacy of the only language at their command, and have been driven to a liberal use of figures of speech, some of them questionable in point of propriety. They have had a cramped vocabulary, have made mistakes, have not found themselves able to translate into intelligible terms all that was in their minds. To mint the secrets of the interior life into the current coin of language suited to the comprehension of common souls requires a skill given to but few. And more especially have their expressions been found unintelligible, or worse, by adversaries not qualified by any experience to comprehend what it was all about. For, as St. Paul says (I Cor. ii): “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness unto him, and he can not know them, because they are spiritually judged. We speak wisdom among the perfect, God’s wisdom in a mystery, even a wisdom which hath been hidden, which none of the rulers of this world knoweth. Which things also we speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Spirit teacheth, interpreting spiritual things to spiritual men.” The adversaries were also eager in many cases to remove out of the way those who, by their purity of life and their opposition to priestly claims and gains, were esteemed dangerous to the peace of the Church. We are confident that in the main this is a fair interpretation of the course which events have taken. Not but what some of the Mystics have really laid themselves open to the complaints of their enemies. They have been unguarded in their language, have been so carried away with ecstasy, as some new precious truth has burst upon them, that they have stated it too strongly; have not supplied the limitations and modifications and exceptions which would have been well, which were necessary for a complete rounding out of the statement; have taken for granted that the other side had been sufficiently emphasized before, and that their special mission to emphasize the neglected point would be recognized; hence they have said things which, by strict construction and taken in bald literalness, were not precisely true. All this can be granted without casting any serious reflection either on their character or their doctrines. Their books must be read with caution and discrimination. To persons not well balanced they might sometimes be a source of peril. But this admission is in no way incompatible with the assertion that they have conferred a very great benefit upon mankind, that their doctrines, on the whole, are sound, and that this generation could ill afford to overlook the good to be obtained by careful studies in this direction.

The first Mystics were really St. John and St. Paul; and their words have full justification in what they derived from their Divine Master. Who more positively than the great Apostle to the Gentiles, “according to the wisdom given unto him,” preached a gospel that was foolishness to some, but which he continually called the wisdom and the mystery of God; a gospel which proclaims the Divine indwelling, we in Him and He in us, our bodies the temples of the Holy Ghost, believers being “in Christ” and “members one of another?” He was a man caught up into Paradise, and hearing unspeakable words which it was not lawful or possible for a man to utter. “I die daily,” he said, “I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me;” “To me to live is Christ;” “I have learned the secret, I can do all things in Him;” “I fill up on my part that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ;” “Ye died, and your life is hid with Christ in God;” “In Him we live, and move, and have our being;” “The Spirit Himself beareth witness with our spirit,”—and many other such like things there be, left on record from his pen to show clearly that he was a true Mystic. Still more, perhaps, do the Mystics look to St. John for complete authorization of their position. His Gospel is the spiritual Gospel, the charter of Christian Mysticism. It is he who tells us, “God is love,” “God is light,” “God is Spirit.” The Divine union which he sets before us is of the closest kind. “Our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ;” “Ye have an anointing from the Holy One, and ye know all things;” “The anointing which ye received of Him abideth in you, and ye need not that any teach you;” “Hereby we know that He abideth in us, by the Spirit which He hath given us;” “He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness;” “He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him,” etc. It is impossible to quote a tithe of the words in John’s Epistles and Gospel which embody the fundamental ideas of Mysticism. Especially do we find in the marvelous words of Jesus reported by John alone, as by the one peculiarly fitted to formulate them, in the thirteenth to the seventeenth chapters of his Gospel, the seeds and roots of all which have been drawn forth by subsequent writers on these profound themes.

Plato has been called “the Father of European Mysticism.” Dr. Inge says: “Both the great types of Mystics may appeal to him,—those who try to rise through the visible to the invisible, through nature to God; and those who look upon this earth as a place of banishment, upon material things as a veil which hides God’s face from us, and who bid us seek yonder in the realm of ideas the heart’s true home. Plato teaches that the highest good is the greatest likeness to God; that the greatest happiness is the vision of God; that we should seek holiness, not for the sake of reward, but because it is the health of the soul, while vice is its disease; that goodness is unity and harmony, while evil disintegrates; that it is our duty to rise above the visible and transitory to the invisible and permanent.”

The Church has never lacked during its history for those who have followed this line of thought and cultivated this kind of experience. Clement of Alexandria has been called “the Founder of Christian Mysticism,” a Neoplatonist among the Fathers; followed by Dionysius the Areopagite, and a lengthy line of successors, large among whom looms the noble Bernard of Clairvaux, the glory of the twelfth century. Without tracing out the story in detail it will be enough for our purpose to refer briefly to those who, in the few centuries before Fénelon, stood forth most prominently as leaders in this realm of truth, and so prepared the way for him.

In the fourteenth century we find a most remarkable band of devout believers who called themselves “Friends of God,” to signify that they had reached that stage of Christian life when Christ, according to His promise, would call them “no longer servants but friends.” They were composed of persons from all classes of society, and from all the religious orders. Most prominent among these were Master Eckhart—styled “Doctor Ecstaticus”—vicar-general of the Dominican order, a man of uncommon purity of life and great excellence of character, one of the profound thinkers of the Middle Ages; Henry Suso, who has been called “the Minnesinger of Divine Love,” and who was wont to say, “A man of true self-abandonment must be unbuilt from the creature, inbuilt with Christ, and overbuilt into the Godhead” (he was prior of the Dominican convent at Ulm, where he died in 1365); Nicholas of Basle; and John Tauler. Nicholas was a layman who wielded a powerful pen and was also a great preacher; thoroughly devoted to religion from his earliest days. He traveled much through Germany, propagating his opinions in a quiet, unostentatious manner, and gradually there grew up around him a society of Christians composed of men and women likeminded with himself, who loved to honor him as their spiritual father. It seems to have been largely his personal influence which held them together, for they fell to pieces after he was burned at the stake for heresy, near Poitiers, about 1382.

John Tauler—“Doctor Illuminatus”—born at Strasburg, 1290, and dying there in 1361, was still more distinguished, although indebted to Nicholas for being led out into the light. This took place when he was over fifty years of age. Nicholas, coming to Strasburg to hear the famous preacher, speedily detected his deficiency in spiritual experience, and the lack of true power attending the Word on this account. With rare humility, Tauler, a learned theologian, received this rebuke from the uneducated layman, and so profited by it that he was able, though not without long struggle, to enter into complete freedom. Then he preached in a very different manner, and the first time he opened his mouth in public fourteen persons fell as if dead under the Word, and nearly thirty others were so deeply moved that they remained sitting in the churchyard long after the congregation was dismissed, unwilling to move away. For eighteen years after this second conversion he made great progress in the divine life, rising to a place of highest esteem with his brethren, and being rightly reckoned among the chief of God’s children on earth.

Properly to be counted among these Friends of God can be set down the unknown author of “Deutsche Theologie,” or “Theologia Germanica,” which contained so much truth that it had the distinguished honor of being put upon the Romish Index of prohibited works. Luther ascribed it to Tauler. It is in his style, and contains his sentiments; but it is now considered more probable that it originated a little later than his time, and was written by some other member of the band. It was their usual practice to conceal their names as much as possible when they wrote, lest a desire for fame should mingle in their endeavors to be useful. Luther placed it next to the Bible and St. Augustine as a source of knowledge concerning God and Christ and man. Baron Bunsen ranks it still higher. And many others have expressed their supreme indebtedness to it for help in respect to the perfect life. It has continued up to the present day to be the favorite handbook of devotion in Germany.

Concerning the views and doctrines of these Friends of God, although some of their expressions and opinions may be objected to, considering the corrupt age in which they lived they must be pronounced worthy of high praise. They insisted, first of all, on the uttermost self-renunciation, yet they avoided the system of penances and austerities common in the monasteries. Neither idle contemplation nor passive asceticism found favor with them; they were evangelical and practical, full of good works and the imitation of Christ both in patient suffering and active usefulness. They were animated by an exalted reformatory spirit which threw them out of touch with the ecclesiastics around them. Though they did not in all cases fall under the ban of the Church, they may still be regarded as forerunners of the Reformation. Their Mysticism was a powerful protest against the terrible corruptions of the Romish Church and the cold, barren speculations of scholasticism. They craved and secured direct communion with God, unrestricted by human interposition; an immediate vision of the Almighty, undimmed by any separating veil and unchanged by any distorting medium. The highest form of the Divine life in a man seemed to them to be perfect resignation to the will of God, and they counted prayer to be the best means of bringing about this state of resignation. “To pray for a change in one’s circumstances,” they said, “is to pray that what God sends may be made subject to us, not that we should submit ourselves to it; and so tends to produce self-assertion, not self-renunciation.” Nicholas taught that “when self-renunciation is complete, the soul of man, having become entirely resigned to the Divine will, becomes so entirely assimilated to the Divine nature that it has continually a near fellowship with God; he is always in familiar intercourse with the Spirit of God, who communicates to him all Divine knowledge.” “All things to the beloved are of God; all, therefore, are indifferent.” That religion which sprang from fear of punishment or hope of reward they counted of little worth, and considered love to be by far the highest state, the only one truly worthy of the Christian.[5] Their union with Deity was not that of pantheism but of passionate love, and great prominence was given to the will as the mainspring on which all developments of the higher life depend.

The following quotations from “Theologia Germanica” will convey in a few words what may be called the root ideas of the book and of the men whose spirit it so well embodies:

“A true lover of God loveth Him alike in having and in not having, in sweetness and in bitterness, in good or evil report; for he seeketh only the honor of God, and not his own, either in spiritual or natural things. Therefore he standeth alike unshaken in all things.”