Hours with the Mystics: A Contribution to the History of Religious Opinion

by Robert Alfred Vaughan

I cannot suppose that Mr. Kingsley would seriously maintain that the mystic ought, from the very nature of his claims, to be exempt from that scrutiny to which history continually subjects the fathers, the schoolmen, and the reformers. Yet there are those who would have us hearken to every voice professing to speak from the ‘everlasting deeps’ with a reverence little more discriminating than that which the Mussulman renders to idiocy and madness. Curiously ignorant concerning the very objects of their praise, these admirers would seem to suppose that every mystic repudiates the exercise of understanding, is indifferent to the use of language, and invariably dissolves religious opinion in religious sentiment. These eulogists of mysticism imagine that they have found in the virtues of a Tauler, a platform whence to play off with advantage a volley of commonplaces against ‘literalisms,’ ‘formulas,’ ‘creeds,’ ‘shams,’ and the like. It is high time to rescue the mystics from a foolish adoration, which the best among them would be the most eager to repudiate. So far from forbidding men to try the spirits, the most celebrated among the mystics lead the way in such examination. It is the mystics themselves who warn us so seriously that mysticism comprises an evil tendency as well as a good, and has had its utterances from the nether realms as well as from the upper. The great mystics of the fourteenth century would have been indignant with any man who had confounded, in a blind admiration, their mysticism with the self-deifying antinomianism that prevailed among the ‘Brethren of the Free Spirit.’ In many of Tauler’s sermons, in the Theologia Germanica, in the writings of Suso and of Ruysbroek, care is taken to mark, with all the accuracy possible to language, the distinction between the False Light and the True. There is not a confession of faith in the world which surpasses in clearness and precision the propositions in Fénelon’s Maxims of the Saints, whereby it is proposed to separate the genuine Quietism from the spurious. The mystic Gerson criticises the mystic Ruysbroek. Nicholas of Strasburg criticises Hildegard and Joachim; Behmen criticises Stiefel and Meth; Henry More criticises the followers of George Fox. So far are such mystics from that indifference to the true or the false in doctrine, which constitutes, with some, their highest claim to our admiration. It is absurd to praise men for a folly: it is still more absurd to praise them for a folly of which they are guiltless.

But here I can suppose some one ready to interrupt me with some such question as this:—Is it not almost inevitable, when the significance of the word mysticism is so broad and ill-defined, that those who speak of it should misunderstand or be misunderstood? What two persons can you meet with who will define the term in precisely the same way? The word is in itself a not less general and extensive one than revolution, for instance. No one speaks of revolution in the abstract as good or evil. Every one calls this or that revolution glorious or disastrous, as they conceive it to have overthrown a good government or a bad. But the best among such movements are not without their evil, nor are the worst perhaps absolutely destitute of good. Does not mysticism, in like manner, sometimes rise up against a monstrous tyranny, and sometimes violate a befitting order? Has there been no excess in its triumphs? Has there been no excuse for its offences? See, then, what opposites are coupled under this single word! Is it not mainly for this reason that you hear one man condemning and another extolling mysticism? He who applauds is thinking of such mystics as Bernard, or Tauler, or Fénelon; he who denounces is thinking of the Carlstadts, the Münzers, or the Southcotes. He who applauds is thinking of men who vanquished formalism; he who denounces is thinking of men who trampled on reason or morality. Has not each his right? Are not your differences mere disputes about nomenclature, and can you ever come to understanding while you employ so ambiguous a term?

So it seems to me that Common Sense might speak, and very forcibly, too. It is indeed to be regretted that we have not two words—one to express what may be termed the true, and another for the false, mysticism. But regret is useless. Rather let us endeavour to show how we may employ, least disadvantageously, a term so controverted and unfortunate.

On one single question the whole matter turns:—Are we or are we not to call St. John a mystic? If we say ‘Yes,’ then of course all those are mystics whose teaching is largely impregnated with the aspect of Christianity presented in the writings of that Apostle. Then he is a mystic who loves to dwell on the union of Christians with Christ; on His abode in us, and our abiding in Him; on the identity of our knowledge of God with our likeness to Him; of truth with love; of light with life; on the witness which he who believes hath within himself. Then he is a mystic who regards the Eternal Word as the source of whatever light and truth has anywhere been found among men, and who conceives of the Church of Christ as the progressive realization of the Redeemer’s prayer—‘I in them and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one.’

Now, I think that, in the strict use of language, the word mystic should be applied, not to St. John, but to those who more or less exaggerate his doctrine concerning spiritual influence and life in God. The Scripture is the standard whereby alone the spirits are to be tried, in all candour and charity. To those who repudiate this authority I do not write. But if any one, understanding by ‘mystics’ simply those who give full force to the language of St. John, shall praise them, however highly, I am perfectly at one with him in his admiration—my only difference is about the use of the mere word.

So much then is settled. It will be obvious, however, that the historian of mysticism will scarcely find it possible always to confine his use of the word to the exaggeration just specified. For he must take up, one after the other, all those personages who have at any time been reckoned by general consent among the mystics. But an age which has relapsed into coldness will inevitably stigmatize as a mystic any man whose devout ardour rises a few degrees above its own frigidity. It is as certain as anything can be that, if a German had appeared among the Lutherans of the seventeenth century, teaching in his own way just as St. John taught, without one particle of exaggeration, he would have been denounced as a mystic from a hundred pulpits. Hence it has come to pass that some men, who have figured largely as mystics in the history of the Church, have in them but a comparatively small measure of that subjective excess which we would call mysticism, in the strict sense. Tauler is one of these.

But it may be said,—You talk of testing these men by Scripture; yet you can only mean, by your interpretation of Scripture. How are you sure that your interpretation is better than theirs? Such an objection lies equally against every appeal to Scripture. For we all appeal to what we suppose to be the meaning of the sacred writers, ascertained according to the best exercise of our judgment. The science of hermeneutics has established certain general principles of interpretation which are acknowledged by scholars of every creed. But if any one now-a-days resolves the New Testament into allegory, and supposes, for example, that by the five husbands of the woman of Samaria we are to understand the five Senses, I cannot of course try my cause with him before a Court where he makes the verdict what he pleases. I can only leave him with his riddles, and request him to carry my compliments to the Sphinx.

There is, then, a twofold test by which Tauler and other mystics are to be judged, if their teaching is to profit rather than to confuse and mislead us. We may compare the purport of his discourses with the general tenor and bearing of the New Testament, as far as we can apprehend it as a whole. Are some unquestionable truths but rarely touched, and others pushed to their utmost limits? If we think we see a certain disproportionateness—that there is a joyousness, and freedom, and warm humanity about the portraiture of Christian life in St. John, which we lack in his very sincere disciple, the ascetic and the mystic,—we trifle with truth if we do not say so. The other test is the historical. Was a certain mystic on the side of the truth and onwardness of his time, or against it? Did he rise above its worst errors, or did he aggravate them? And here Tauler stands with a glory round his head. Whatever exaggeration there may have been of the inward as against the outward, it was scarcely more than was inevitable in the case of a man who had to maintain the inmost verities of Christian life amidst almost universal formality and death.

What then, it may be asked, is that exaggeration of which you speak? For hitherto your account of mysticism proper is only negative—it is a something which St. John does not teach.

I will give a few examples. If a man should imagine that his inward light superseded outward testimony, so that the words of Christ and his inspired disciples became superfluous to him; if he regarded indifference to the facts and recorded truths of the New Testament as a sign of eminent spirituality, such a man would, I think, abuse the teaching of St. John concerning the unction from the Holy One. The same Apostle who declares that he who hateth his brother abideth in darkness, refuses to bid God speed to him who brings not the doctrine of Christ, and inseparably associates the ‘anointing’ which his children had received, with their abiding in the truth they had heard from his lips. (1 John ii. 24.) If, again, any man were to pretend that a special revelation exempted him from the ordinary obligations of morality—that his union with God was such as to render sinless in him what would have been sin in others, he would be condemned, and not supported, by conscience and Scripture. Neither could that mystic appeal to St. John who should teach, instead of the discipline and consecration of our faculties, such an abandonment of their use, in favour of supernatural gifts, as should be a premium on his indolence, and a discouragement to all faithful endeavour to ascertain the sense of Holy Writ. Nor, again, does any mystic who disdains hope as a meanness abide by the teaching of St. John. For the Apostle regards the hope of heaven as eminently conducive to our fitness for it, and says—‘He that hath this hope purifieth himself.’ The mystical ascetic who refuses to pray for particular or temporal bestowments is wrong in his practice, however elevated in his motive. For St. John can write,—‘I pray (εὔχομαι) above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.’ (3 John 2.) Nowhere does that Apostle prescribe absolute indifference, or absolute passivity. Lastly, John is not so afraid of anthropomorphism as to discourage or refine away the symbol and the figure. It is evident that he regards the fatherhoods and the brotherhoods of this earthly life, not as fleshly ideas which profane things spiritual, but as adumbrations, most fit (however inadequate) to set forth the divine relationship to us,—yea, farther, as facts which would never have had place in time, had not something like their archetype from the first existed in that Eternal Mind who has made man in his own image.