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

by Robert Alfred Vaughan

Once spiritual, are like muddy lees,

Meant but to fertilize our earthly root,

And make our branches lift a golden fruit

Into the bloom of heaven.’

On the latter part of the extract given just now I have not yet commented. It suggests a question of no small moment. What, it will be asked, is the relation sustained by the Saviour of mankind to this mystical process—this drawing up of the created soul into the uncreated essence? Is not a blank abstraction—an essential nothing, substituted for the Son of man? How does the abstract Essence in which Tauler would sink the soul, differ from the abstract Essence or super-essential Unity in which a Plotinus would lose himself, or from that Divine substance in which the pantheistic Sufis sought to dissolve their personality? In this region (confessedly above distinction), the mystic cannot, by his own admission, distinguish one abstraction from the other. There is a story of a lover who, Leander-like, swam nightly across a strait to visit the lady of his heart. A light which she exhibited on the shore was the beacon of the adventurous swimmer. But two brothers (cruel as those who murdered Isabella’s lover in the wood) removed the light one dark and stormy night, and placed it in a boat anchored not near shore, but in mid-waters, where the strait was broadest. Their victim struggled as long as mortal strength might endure, towards the treacherous light—farther and farther out—into the ocean which engulphed him. Have not the mystics, in like manner, shifted the beacon and substituted an expanse—an abyss, as the object of man’s effort, instead of that love and sympathy which await him in the heart of the Son of man?

Can it be possible that the best thing to do with a revelation of God, now we have one, is to throw it behind our backs? Now that the light the wisest heathen longed for has come, are we to rid ourselves of it, with all speed, and fly, like Eckart, from the known to the old, unknown God? To do this, is to account as foolishness the wisdom of God manifest in the flesh. Is it not all—as the enemies of Quietism used to say—a device of the Devil? Does it not look as though the Arch-enemy, unable to undo the work of redemption, had succeeded, by a master-stroke of policy, in persuading men to a false spirituality, which should consist in obliterating the facts of that redemption from their own minds as completely as though it had never been wrought?

Now it is much better, I think, to put objections like these in all their strength, and to give them fair hearing. They will occur to many persons in the reading of these sermons. They will awaken a distrust and a perplexity which are not to be talked down by high words, or by telling men that if they do not sufficiently admire these mystics, so much the worse for them. One of the objections thus urged is logically unanswerable. If Eckart and Plotinus both succeed in reducing their minds to a total emptiness of all memory, knowledge, and desire, in order to contemplate a super-essential Void, equally blank, the Christian and the heathen pantheist are indistinguishable. Vacuum A, would be a vacuum no longer if it contained anything to distinguish it from vacuum B; and to escape, in the most absolute sense, all distinction, is Eckart’s highest ambition. But it is to be remembered, first of all, that Tauler does not go so far as Eckart in his impatience of everything intelligible, conceivable, or utterable. And next, that, happily, neither Eckart, Tauler, nor any man, can really reduce himself to that total nescience and apathy demanded by the theory which makes personality a sin, knowledge an infirmity, imagination a folly. Humanity is still too strong for any such de-humanizing ideal. The Absolute of Tauler is not, like the Absolute of Plotinus, an abstraction above morality. His link between finite and infinite—his image of God, is moral, not metaphysical merely. It is his knowledge, first of all, of God in Christ which enables him to contemplate the Infinite, not as boundless being, but as unfathomable love. So he stands firm on the grand Christian foundation, and the Son is his way to the Father. Following Dionysius, that arch-mystagogue, he does indeed invite the trembling soul into the shadows of a Divine darkness, wherein no specific attribute or act is perceptible to the baffled sight. But across that profound obscure and utter silence, there floats, perceptible, some incense from the censer, of the Elder Brother—the eternal High Priest. It is a darkness, but such an one as we have when we close our eyes after spectacles of glory—a darkness luminous and living with the hovering residue of splendours visible no longer. It is a silence, but such an one as we have after sweet music—a silence still stirred by inward echoes, and repetitions, and floating fragments of melodies that have ceased to fall upon the ear. It seems a chilling purity, a hueless veil—but such a veil as the snowfall lays upon an Alpine church-yard, hiding all colour but not all form, and showing us still where the crosses are. By their fruits we know these mystics. No men animated by a love so Christ-like as was theirs, could have put an abstraction in the place of Christ.

With regard to the work of Christ, Tauler acknowledges (more readily than George Fox) that the divine element or inward light in man must remain a mere surmise or longing, apart from the historic manifestation of God in the flesh. It is Jesus of Nazareth who at once interprets to the soul, while He satisfies, its own restless heavenward desire. It is His grace alone which makes a mere capacity of God, a possession—a mere potentiality, actual. The view of Christ which Tauler loves to present most frequently is that expressed by those passages of Scripture which speak of Him as the first-born among many brethren, and which remind us that both He that sanctifieth and they that are sanctified are all of one. He would say that the Saviour now lives upon the earth, in the person of all true believers; and that, in a subordinate sense, the Word is being continually made flesh, as Christ is formed in the hearts of Christians. With one voice Eckart and Tauler, Ruysbroek and Suso, exclaim—‘Arise, O man! realize the end of thy being: make room for God within thy soul, that he may bring forth his Son within thee.’

The Saviour’s obedience unto death is regarded by Tauler, rather in its exemplary, than in its propitiatory aspect. Very important, as characteristic of his theology, is the distinction he makes between our union to the humanity of Christ, and our union to his divinity. As man, He is the ideal of humanity—the exemplar of self-surrender. All that He received from the Father was yielded up to Him in that absolute devotedness which all His brethren imitate. We are united to His humanity in proportion as we follow the obedience and self-sacrifice of His earthly life. But above this moral conformity to His example, Tauler sets another and a higher union to His divinity. And this union with the Godhead of the Son is not a superior degree of moral likeness to Him, it is rather an approximation to another mode of existence. It is an inward transit from our actual to our ideal self—not to the moral ideal (for that is already realized in proportion as we are united to His humanity), but to our Platonic archetypal ideal. This higher process of union to the Word, or return to our ideal place in Him, consists in escaping from all that distinguishes us as creatures on this earth—in denuding ourselves of reasonings, imaginations, passions,—humanities, in fact, and reducing ourselves to that metaphysical essence or germ of our being, which lay from eternity—not a creature, but the thought of a creature, in the Divine Word.

Now it appears to me that this self-spiritualizing process which seeks by a refined asceticism to transcend humanity and creatureliness, is altogether a mistake. An ideal sufficiently high, and ever beyond us, is already given in the moral perfection of Christ Jesus. This desire to escape from all the modes and means of our human existence came not from Paul, but from Plato. It revives the impatience of that noble but one-sided, Greek ideal, which despised the body and daily life, abhorred matter as a prison-house, instead of using it as a scaffolding, and longed so intensely to become pure, passionless intellect. I know no self-transcendence, and I desire none, higher than the self-sacrifice of the good Shepherd, who laid down his life for the sheep. You will probably be reminded here of another great Platonist. Origen, also, makes a distinction between those who know Christ, according to the flesh, as he terms it, i.e., in his sufferings, death, and resurrection, and that higher class of the perfect, or Gnostici, who, on the basis of that fundamental knowledge, rise from the historical Christ to the spiritual essence of the Word. Origen, however, supposed that this communion with the Logos, or eternal Reason, might become the channel of a higher knowledge, illumining the Gnosticus with a divine philosophy. With Tauler, on the contrary, the intellectual ambition is less prominent; and he who has ascended into the uncreated essence cannot bring down from thence any wisdom for this lower world. Thus, in our extract, he says that if the soul united to the word could perceive itself, it would seem altogether like God, and would appear possessed of all knowledge that ever was. Such is the ideal; but the first reflex act would dissolve that trance of absolute, immediate oneness, and restore the mystic to the humbling consciousness of a separate, actual self; and here lies the great difference between Tauler and Eckart. Tauler, Suso, and Ruysbroek say, that in these moments of exaltation the soul (above distinctions) is not conscious of its distinction as a separate, creature entity. Eckart says, not that the soul has, for a moment, forgotten all that is personal, and that parts it off from God, but that the distinction does not exist at all,—not that we do not know ourselves as separate, but that God does not. To draw the line between theism and pantheism, is not always easy; but I think it must lie somewhere hereabout.