Nourished by isolation, feebleness, and misfortune.
The same thing happens when human affections are shipwrecked in us, lose their object, no longer find anything to which they can attach themselves. In France, as in England and America, the habitual devotion of spinsters has long since been observed, though it often coincides with a certain pining away of the heart. In our times a virtuous unmarried woman is, so to speak, predestined to devotion; divine love is for her (on an average, of course) a necessary compensation. Remark also that old men are generally more inclined to devotion than young. There are, no doubt, a number of reasons for it: the approach of death, the enfeeblement of the body and of the intelligence, the increasing need for a support, etc.; but there exists also a more profound reason. The old man, always more isolated than the young, and deprived of the excitations of the sexual instinct, possesses a smaller outlet for his instinct for affection and for love. Thus there accumulates in him an amount of treasure which he is free to apply as to him seems best; well, the service of God is that which demands least effort, which is most appropriate to the natural indolence of the old, to their preoccupation with themselves; they become therefore devotees, partly out of egoism, partly out of a need for some disinterested occupation. A grain of incense burns in every heart, and when the perfume of it can no longer be given to the earth we let it mount to heaven. Note also that the loss of beloved beings, misfortunes of every sort, and irreparable infirmities all provoke an expansion of the heart toward God. In the Middle Ages unhappiness was frequently one of the most important factors of piety; when a great and unmerited misfortune happened to a man, the chances were that he would enter the Church or else become an atheist; it depended often on his strength of mind, his habits, and his education. When one strikes an animal it is equally possible that it may bite one or crouch at one’s feet. Every time the heart is violently bruised there comes an inevitable reaction; we must reply from within to the blows from without, and this reply is sometimes revolt and sometimes adoration. The feeble, the disinherited, the suffering, all those to whom misfortune has not left strength enough for rebellion, have but one resource: the sweet and consoling humility of divine love. Whoever does not love, or is not loved completely and sufficiently, on earth will always turn toward heaven: the proposition is as regular as the parallelogram of forces.
Power of mysticism a perversion of love.
Just as we have seen in an error of the senses one of the objective principles of religious physics, so perhaps may we find in a perversion of love one of the most essential subjective principles of mysticism. It is by love that this unction, this penetrating sweetness which makes the mystic tremble to the marrow of his bones, is to be explained. Profound love, even the most terrestrial, tends to envelop the object with respect and veneration; an effect which is due to a number of causes, and among others to the psychological law according to which desire magnifies the desired object. To love is always a little to adore. If it is a human being that is the object of the love, the divinization incidental to it will be confined within certain limits, but if the love stretch up from the earth into heaven, it may command the full powers of the imagination; the soul, seeking at a distance for some vague object to which to attach itself, will go out in mystic outbursts of emotion and ecstasy. The soul will personify its ideal, will supply it with figure and speech: its ideal will be Jesus with Mary Magdalene at his feet, or the Virgin weeping at the foot of the cross, or Moses in the midst of the clouds, or the child Buddha before whom the statues of the gods rose and made obeisance. Thus mystical religions are formed of great images and passionate sentiments and the heart of man, the very life blood of which they turn to their profit. What appears often to be the most intellectual of tastes is only love in disguise. The most earthly love is often a religion in its earliest stages. Henri Beyle, visiting the salt-mines at Salzburg, found in a shaft a branch covered with incomparable diamonds scintillating in the light. It was a dead timber on which the salt had crystallized; in the timber thus transformed Beyle saw the symbol of what happens in every loving heart; every object one finds there has taken on an extraordinary brilliancy, a marvellous beauty. He calls this phenomenon crystallization; we should prefer to call it divinization. Love always divinizes its object; partially and provisionally when this object is placed upon earth and close to one’s eyes, but definitively when this object is lost in the distance of heaven. Our gods are like those mysterious beings who spring, in legend, from a drop of generous blood or a loving tear let fall upon the earth; it is with our own substance that we nourish them; their beauty, their goodness come out of our love, and if we love them as we do, the reason is that we must love something; must lift up to the four corners of the horizon, even if they be deaf, a supreme appeal. This outcome of love and religious sentiment is most visible in exalted minds, both in the Middle Ages and in our own days. The true element of originality in Christian literature is that one there finds, for the first time, a sincere and warm accent of love, scarcely divined, here and there, by the great spirits of antiquity, by Sappho and Lucretius. In a page of St. Augustine one finds the expression of a franker and more profound ardour than in all the elegant affectations of Horace or the languors of Tibullus. Nothing in pagan antiquity is comparable to the chapter in the “Imitation” on love. The passion, confined and held in check, mounts to heights till then unknown, like a dammed river; but it is no less genuinely itself. What shall we say of the visionary mystics of the people like St. Theresa, and Chantal, and Guyon? Among them piety, in its most exaggerated form, verges upon the madness of love. St. Theresa might have been a courtesan of genius equally as well as a saint. Physiologists and physicians have often observed, in our days, analogous pathological cases, in which the religious effusion is simply, so to speak, a case of mistake in identity.[50]
Worship of Christ to a considerable extent a perversion of love.
In Christianity the conception of Jesus, the beautiful, gentle young man, the Holy Spirit incarnate in the purest and most ideal form, favours more directly than any corresponding conception in any rival religion this particular perversion of love. Christianity is the most anthropomorphic belief in existence, for it is the one of all others which, after having conceived the most elevated idea of God, abases it, without degrading it, to the most human of human conditions. By a much more refined, much more profound paganism than the paganism of antiquity, the Christian religion has succeeded in making God the object of an ardent love, without ceasing to make Him an object of respect. By a myth much more seductive and poetic even than that of Psyche, we see God, the true God, descended upon earth in the form of a blond and smiling young man; we hear him speak low in the ear of Mary Magdalene at the fall of evening; and then this vision suddenly disappears and we see in the gathering shadow two mutilated arms extended toward us, and a heart which bleeds for humanity. In this legend all the powers of the imagination are called in play, all the fibres of the heart are moved; it is an accomplished work of art. What is there astonishing in the fact that Christ has been and is still the great seducer of souls? In the ears of a young girl his name appeals at once to all her instincts, even to the maternal instinct, for Jesus is often represented as a child with the dimpled, rosy cheeks which the Greeks ascribed to Eros. The heart of the woman is thus besieged on all sides at once: her wavering and timid imagination wanders from the cherub to the youth, and from the youth to the pale figure, with the bowed head, upon the cross. It is possible that from the birth of Christianity down to the present day there has not been one single woman of an exalted piety whose heart has not first beat for her God, for Jesus, for the most lovable and loving type that the human mind has ever conceived.
Moral element in the law of God.
Side by side with its somewhat sentimental element the love of God contains a moral element, which is progressively detaching itself with the march of ideas. God being the very principle of goodness, the personification of the moral ideal, the love of God ultimately becomes a moral love properly so called, the love of virtue, of sanctity at its height. The subjective act of charity thus becomes the religious act par excellence, in which morality and subjective worship are identified; good works and the externals of worship are simply a translation into the outer world of the moral consciousness. At the same time, in the highest speculations of philosophic theology, charity has been conceived as embracing simultaneously all beings in the divine love, and by consequence as beginning to realize the sort of perfect society in which “all exist in all and all in every part.” The social and moral character of religion thus attains its highest degree of perfection and God appears as a sort of mystic realization of the universal society, sub specie æterni.