‘Divination,’ saith Bacon, ‘is of two kinds—primitive, and by influxion.’ The former is founded on the belief that the soul, when by abstinence and observances it has been purified and concentrated, has ‘a certain extent and latitude of pre-notion.’ The latter is grounded on the persuasion that the foreknowledge of God and of spirits may be infused into the soul when rendered duly passive and mirror-like. Of these two kinds of divining the former is characterized by repose and quiet, the latter by a fervency and elevation such as the ancients styled furor. Now our mystical divines have this in common with the diviners, that they chiefly aim to withdraw the soul within itself. They may be divided most appropriately after a like manner. A cursory inspection will satisfy any one that theopathetic mysticism branches into two distinct, and often contrasted, species. There is the serene and contemplative mysticism; and over against it, the tempestuous and the active. The former is comparatively self-contained and intransitive; the latter, emphatically transitive. Its subject conceives himself mastered by a divine seizure. Emotions well-nigh past the strain of humanity, make the chest to heave, the frame to tremble; cast the man down, convulsed, upon the earth. Or visions that will not pass away, burn into his soul their glories and their terrors. Or words that will not be kept down, force an articulation, with quaking and with spasms, from organs no longer under his control. The contemplative mystic has most commonly loved best that side of Christian truth which is nearest to Platonism; the enthusiastic or practical mystic, that which connects it with Judaism. The former hopes to realize within himself the highest ascents of faith and hope—nay, haply, to surpass them, even while here below. The latter comes forth from his solitude, with warning, apocalyptic voice, to shake a sleeping Church. He has a word from the Lord that burns as a fire in his bones till it be spoken. He lifts up his voice, and cries, exhorting, commanding, or foretelling, with the authority of inspiration.
The Phrygian mountaineer, Montanus, furnishes the earliest example, and a very striking one, of this enthusiastic or prophetic kind of mysticism. He and his followers had been cradled in the fiercest and most frantic superstitions of heathendom. Terrible was Cybele, the mountain mother, throned among the misty fastnesses of Ida. Maddest uproar echoed through the glens on her great days of festival. There is beating of drum and timbrel, clashing of cymbals, shrill crying of pipes; incessant the mournful sound of barbarous horns; loud, above all, the groans and shrieks and yells from frenzied votaries whom the goddess has possessed. They toss their heads; they leap; they whirl; they wallow convulsed upon the rocks, cutting themselves with knives; they brandish, they hurl their weapons; their worship is a foaming, raving, rushing to-and-fro, till the driving deity flings them down exhausted, senseless. Among these demoniacs—sanguine fleti, Terrificas capitum quatientes numine cristas, as Lucretius has described them—these Corybantes, or head-tossers, Christianity made its way, exorcising a legion of evil spirits. But the enthusiastic temperament was not expelled. These wild men, become Christians, carried much of the old fervour into the new faith. Violent excitement, ecstatic transport, oracular utterance, were to them the dazzling signs of the divine victory—of the forcible dislodgment of the power of Darkness by the power of Light. So Montanus readily believes, and finds numbers to believe, that he is the subject of a divine possession. Against the bloodthirsty mob in the villages and towns—against a Marcus Aurelius, ordaining massacre from the high places of the Cæsars—had not God armed his own with gifts beyond the common measure—with rapture—with vision—with prophecy? Yes! the promised Paraclete was indeed among them, and it was not they, but He, who spake. So thought the Montanists, as they announced new precepts to the Church; as they foretold the gathering judgment of Antichrist and the dawning triumph of the saints; as they hastened forth, defiant and sublime, to provoke from their persecutors the martyr’s crown. Let us not overlook the real heroism of these men, while touching on their errors. But their conception of the Church of Christ, so analogous, in many respects, to that of the early Quakers—was it the right one? According to Montanus, the Church was to be maintained in the world by a succession of miraculous interventions. From time to time, fresh outpourings of the Spirit would inspire fresh companies of prophets to ordain ritual, to confute heresy, to organize and modify the Church according to the changing necessities of each period. He denied that the Scripture was an adequate source, whence to draw the refutation of error and the new supplies of truth demanded by the exigencies of the future. As Romanism sets up an infallible Pope to decide concerning truth, and in fact to supplement revelation, as the organ of the Divine Spirit ever living in the Church; so these mystics have their inspired teachers and prophets, raised up from time to time, for the same purpose. But the contemplative mystics, and indeed Christians generally, borne out, as we think, by Scripture and by history, deny any such necessity, and declare this doctrine of supplementary inspiration alien from the spirit of Christianity. While Montanus and his prophetesses, Maximilla and Priscilla, were thus speaking, in the name of the Lord, to the country-folk of Phrygia or to the citizens of Pepuza, Clement at Alexandria was teaching, on the contrary, that we have the organ requisite for finding in the Scriptures all the truth we need—that they are a well of depth sufficient, nay inexhaustible; and that the devout exercise of reason in their interpretation and application is at once the discipline and prerogative of the manhood proper to the Christian dispensation. We are no longer Jews, he would say, no longer children. The presence of the Spirit with us is a part of the ordinary law of the economy under which we live. It is designed that the supernatural shall gradually vindicate itself as the natural, in proportion as our nature is restored to its allegiance to God. It is not necessary that we should be inspired in the same way as the sacred writers were, before their writings can be adequately serviceable to us.
Such was the opposition in the second century, and such has it been in the main ever since, between these two kinds of mystical tendency. The Montanist type of mysticism, as we see it in a Hildegard, among the Quakers, among the Protestant peasantry of the Cevennes, and among some of the ‘Friends of God,’ usually takes its rise with the uneducated, is popular, sometimes revolutionary. Animated by its spirit, Carlstadt filled Wittenberg with scandal and confusion; and the Anabaptist mob reddened the sky with the burning libraries of Osnaburg and Munster. The Alexandrian mysticism, so far from despising scholarship and philosophy, as so much carnal wisdom, desires to appropriate for Christianity every science and every art. It is the mysticism of theologians, of philosophers, and scholars. It exists as an important element in the theology of Clement, of Origen, and of Augustine. It assumes still greater prominence in a Hugo or a Richard of St. Victor. It obtained its fullest proportions in these German mystics of the fourteenth century. It refined and elevated the scholarship of Reuchlin, Ficinus, and Mirandola. It is at once profound and expansive in our English Platonists.
Yet let it not be supposed that the extravagance of the enthusiastic mysticism has not its uses, or that the serenity of the contemplative is always alike admirable. Both have, in their turn, done goodly service. Each has had a work given it to do in which its rival would have failed. The eccentric impetuosity of Montanism, ancient and modern, has done good, directly and indirectly, by breaking through traditional routine—by protesting against the abuses of human authority—by stirring many a sleeping question, and daring many an untried path of action. On the other hand, the contemplative mysticism has been at times too timid, too fond of an elegant or devout, but still unworthy, ease. The Nicodemuses of the sixteenth century, the Briçonnets and the Gerard Roussels, were nearly all of them Platonists. They were men whose mysticism raised them above the wretched externalism of Rome, and at the same time furnished them with an ingenious excuse for abiding safely in her communion. ‘What,’ they would say, ‘are the various forms of the letter, to the unity of the Spirit? Can we not use the signs of Romanism in the spirit of Protestantism—since, to the spiritual and the wise, this outward usage or that, is of small matter?’ The enthusiastic mysticism tends to multiply, and the contemplative to diminish, positive precept and ordinance. The former will sometimes revolt against one kind of prescription only to devise a new one of its own. So the followers of Fox exchanged surplice and ‘steeple-house’ for a singularity of hat, coat, and pronouns. The contemplative mystic loves to inform his common life with the mysterious and the divine. Certain especial sanctities he has, but nothing unsanctified; and he covers his table with an altar-cloth, and curtains his bed with a chasuble, and drinks out of a chalice every day of his life. A Montanus commends celibacy; an Origen sees typified in marriage the espousals of the Church. The zeal of the enthusiastic mysticism is ever on the watch for signs—expects a kingdom coming with observation—is almost always Millenarian. The contemplatist regards the kingdom of heaven as internal, and sees in the history of souls a continual day of judgment. The one courts the vision and hungers after marvel: the other strives to ascend, above all form and language, from the valley of phantasmata to the silent heights of ‘imageless contemplation.’ The one loves violent contrasts, and parts off abruptly the religious world and the irreligious, the natural and the supernatural. The other loves to harmonize these opposites, as far as may be—would win rather than rebuke the world—would blend, in the daily life of faith, the human with the divine working: and delights to trace everywhere types, analogies, and hidden unity, rather than diversity and strife. The Old Testament has been always the favourite of the prophetic mysticism: the contemplative has drunk most deeply into the spirit of the New.
Mysticism, as exhibited in Tauler’s sermons, is much more likely to win appreciation at the hands of English readers than mysticism in the Theologia Germanica. The principles which were there laid down as bare abstractions are here warmed by sunshine and clothed with verdure. To the theory of mysticism we find added many a suggestive hint concerning its practice. There were general statements in the Theologia Germanica so dim, so vast, so ultra-human, that many readers would be at a loss to understand how they could possibly become a practice or a joy in any soul alive. In the sermons, a brother mystic supplies the requisite qualification, and shows that the old Teutonic knight had, after all, a meaning not so utterly remote from all the ways and wants of flesh and blood.
Brought out to view by Tauler’s fervour, his invisible ink becomes a legible character. The exhortations of the pulpit thus interpret the soliloquy of the cell; and when the preacher illuminates mysticism with the many-coloured lights of metaphor and passion—when he interrogates, counsels, entreats, rebukes, we seem to return from the confines of the nameless, voiceless Void to a region within the rule of the sun, and to beings a little lower than the angels. It will reassure many readers to discover from these sermons that the mystics whom Tauler represents are by no means so infatuated as to disdain those external aids which God has provided, or which holy men of old have handed down—that they do not call history a husk, social worship a vain oblation, or decent order bondage to the letter—that when they speak of transcending time and place, they pretend to no new commandment, and do but repeat a truth old as all true religion—that they are on their guard, beyond most men, against that spiritual pride which some think inseparable from the mystical aspiration—that so far from encouraging the morbid introspection attributed to them, it is their first object to cure men of that malady—that instead of formulating their own experience as a test and regimen for others, they tell men to sit down in the lowest place till God calls them to come up higher—and finally, that they are men who have mourned for the sins, and comforted the sorrows of their fellows, with a depth and compass of lowly love such as should have disarmed every unfriendly judgment, had their errors been as numerous as their excellence is extraordinary.
Any one who has attentively read Tauler’s discourses as now accessible may consider himself familiar with the substance of Tauler’s preaching. From whatever part of Scripture history, prophecy, song, or precept, his text be taken, the sermons, we may be sure, will contain similar exhortations to self-abandonment, the same warnings against a barren externalism, the same directions to prepare the way for the inward Advent of the Lord in the Ground of the Soul. The allegorical interpretation, universal in those days, rendered easy such an ever-varied presentation of a single theme. Did the multitude go out into the wilderness to the preaching of John? We are to go forth into the wilderness of the spiritual life. Did Joseph and Mary seek their son in vain among their friends and acquaintance, and find him in his Father’s house? We also must retire to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, and be found no more in the company of those hindering associates, our own Thoughts, Will, and Understanding. Did Christ say to Mary Magdalen, ‘I have not yet ascended to my Father?’ He meant, ‘I have not yet been spiritually raised within thy soul;’ for he himself had never left the Father.
From the sermon on the fifteenth Sunday after Trinity I select a passage which contains in two sentences the kernel of Tauler’s doctrine—the principle which, under a thousand varieties of illustration and application, makes the matter of all his sermons. ‘When, through all manner of exercises the outward man has been converted into the inward, reasonable man, and thus the two, that is to say, the powers of the senses and the powers of the reason, are gathered up into the very centre of the man’s being—the unseen depths of his spirit wherein lies the image of God,—and thus he flings himself into the divine abyss, in which he dwelt eternally before he was created; then when God finds the man thus simply and nakedly turned towards Him, the Godhead bends down and descends into the depths of the pure, waiting soul, and transforms the created soul, drawing it up into the uncreated essence, so that the spirit becomes one with Him. Could such a man behold himself, he would see himself so noble that he would fancy himself God, and see himself a thousand times nobler than he is in himself, and would perceive all the thoughts and purposes, words and works, and have all the knowledge of all men that ever were.’
An explanation of this extract will be a summary of Tauler’s theology. First of all, it is obvious that he regards human nature as tripartite—it is a temple in three compartments: there is the outer court of the senses; there is the inner court of the intellectual nature, where the powers of the soul, busy with the images of things, are ever active, where Reason, Memory, Will, move to and fro, as a kind of mediating priests; there is, lastly, and inmost, a Holy of Holies—the Ground of the Soul, as the mystics term it.