In that truth he found his beauty.
Platonism, then, came as a direct appeal to the religious mind of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which was so constituted that the element of philosophic revery was blended most naturally with a strain of pure devotional love. Although the ultimate postulates of that philosophy were intellectual principles, they were such as could be grasped by the soul only in its deep passion of love for spiritual beauty. The condemnation which Baxter passes upon other philosophies could not be brought with truth against Platonism. “In short,” he says, “I am an enemy of their philosophy that vilify sense.... The Scripture that saith of God that He is life and light, saith also that He is love, and love is complacence, and complacence is joy; and to say God is infinite, essential love and joy is a better notion than with Cartesians and Cocceians to say that God and angels and spirits are but a thought or an idea. What is Heaven to us if there be no love and joy?”[[8]] This desire of life and love, along its upper levels of thought, was satisfied by Platonism; it enabled the poets to forecast the life of the soul in heaven, and of its anticipation on earth as a love of beauty.
There was a strong tendency, however, throughout this period of religious poetry, toward a phase of devotional love which may be called erotic mysticism, or that love for Christ which is characterized less by admiration and more by tenderness and mere delight in the pure sensuous experience of love. Contemplation of Christ’s divine nature as essential beauty is totally absent from this passion. Christ as the object of this love is conceived only as the perfection of physical beauty; and the response within the soul of the lover is that of mere sensuous delight either in the sight of his personal beauties or in the realization of the union with him. This strain of religious devotion is heard in Herbert, in Vaughan, and Crashaw. In Herbert, who confessed that he entered the service of the church in order to be like Christ, “by making humility lovely,”—a confession which breathes pure emotion,—there was joined so sensuous a strain that “he seems to rejoice in the thoughts of that word Jesus, and say, that the adding these words, my Master, to it, and often repetition of them, seemed to perfume his mind, and leave an oriental fragrancy in his very breath.”[[9]] The spectacle of the crucified Saviour of man was especially influential in keeping this strain of mystical devotion alive; and the minds of these poets are continually dwelling upon the beauty of his mangled hands and feet. In a nature so eminently intellectual as John Donne’s, this strain of feeling is still present, and in his explanation of the grounds for such a love is found an excellent account of its varying phases. In one of his sermons he says:
“I love my Saviour, as he is the Lord, he that studies my salvation: and as Christ, made a person able to work my salvation; but when I see him in the third notion, Jesus, accomplishing my salvation, by an actual death, I see those hands stretched out, that stretched out the heavens, and those feet racked, to which they that racked them are footstools: I hear him, from whom his nearest friends fled, pray for his enemies, and him, whom his Father forsook, not forsake his brethren: I see him that clothes this body with his creatures, or else it would wither, and clothes this soul with his righteousness, or else it would perish, hang naked upon the cross; ... when I conceit, when I contemplate my Saviour thus, I love the Lord, and there is reverent adoration in that love, I love Christ, and there is a mysterious adoration in that love, but I love Jesus, and there is a tender compassion in that love....” (Works, II. 181.)
Whenever Platonism enters into this tender passion it always elevates the emotion into a higher region, where the more intellectual or spiritual nature of Christ or God is the object of contemplation; and it does this by affording the poets a conception of the object of the soul’s highest love, as a philosophical principle, whether of beauty, of good, or of true being.
The first way by which this elevation of a purely sensuous passion into a higher region was effected was through the Platonic conception of the “idea.” Plato had taught that in love the mind should pass from a sight of the objects of beauty through ever widening circles of abstraction to the contemplation of absolute beauty in its idea. This can be known only by the soul, and is the only real beauty. Spenser’s “Hymne of Heavenly Love” is the best example of the application of this idea to the love of Christ. In this poem he sings the praise of Christ as the God of Love. He finds the chief manifestation of Christ’s love in his sacrifice. At first he treats this as a spectacle to move the eye. He dwells upon the mangling of Christ’s body (ll. 241–247), and exhorts the beholder to
“bleede in every vaine,
At sight of his most sacred heavenly corse.”
(ll. 251–252.)
But later, instead of calling upon the beholder to lift up his “heavie clouded eye” to behold such a manifestation of mercy (ll. 226–227), he directs him to lift up his mind and meditate upon the author of his salvation (l. 258). Christ’s love then will burn all earthly desire away by the power of