‘This I call,’ he said, ‘the transit of the soul,—it passes beyond time and space, and is, with an amorous inward intuition, dissolved in God. This entrance of the soul banishes all forms, images, and multiplicity; it is ignorant of itself and of all things; it hovers, reduced to its essence, in the abyss of the Trinity. At this elevation there is no effort, no struggle; the beginning and the end are one.[[170]] Here the Divine Nature doth, as it were, embrace, and inwardly kiss through and through, the soul; that they may be for ever one.[[171]] He who is thus received into the Eternal Nothing is in the Everlasting Now, and hath neither before nor after. Rightly hath St. Dionysius said that God is Non-being—that is, above all our notions of being.[[172]] We have to employ images and similitudes, as I must do in seeking to set forth these truths, but know that all such figures are as far below the reality as a blackamoor is unlike the sun.[[173]] In this absorption whereof I speak, the soul is still a creature, but, at the time, hath no thought whether it be creature or no.’[[174]]
Suso repeated several times this saying—‘A man of true self-abandonment must be unbuilt from the creature, in-built with Christ, and over-built into the Godhead.’[[175]]
We bid adieu with much regret to this excellent man, and his visit will abide long in our memory. We drew from him a half promise that he would come to see us yet again.
May, 1354.—Oh, most happy May! My brother Otto hath returned, after trading to and fro so long in foreign parts. He is well and wealthy, and will venture forth no more. What store of marvellous tales hath he about the East! What hairs-breadth escapes to relate, and what precious and curious things to show! Verily, were I to write down here all he hath to tell of, I might be writing all my days.
Only one thing will I note, while I think of it. He visited Mount Athos, now fourteen years ago: he described to me the beauty of the mountain, with its rich olives and lovely gardens, and the whole neighourhood studded with white convents and hermitages of holy men. Some of the monasteries were on rocks so steep that he had to be drawn up by a rope in a basket to enter them. The shrines were wondrous rich with gold and silver and precious stones. But nowhere, he said, was he more martyred by fleas. When he was there, a new doctrine or practice which had sprung up among the monks (taught, it is said, by a certain Abbot Simeon), was making no small stir. There was to be a synod held about it at that time in Constantinople. It seems that some of the monks (called, if I mistake not, Hesychasts) held that if a man shut himself up in a corner of his cell, with his chin upon his breast, turning his thoughts inward, gazing towards his navel, and centering all the strength of his mind on the region of the heart; and, not discouraged by at first perceiving only darkness, held out at this strange inlooking for several days and nights, he would at length behold a divine glory, and see himself luminous with the very light which was manifested on Mount Tabor. They call these devotees Navel-contemplators. A sorry business! All the monks, for lack of aught else to do, were by the ears about it,—either trying the same or reviling it.[[176]]
Methought if our heretics have their extravagances and utmost reaches of mystical folly here, there are some worse still among those lazy Greeks.
Kate. And is that the end of Arnstein’s journal?
Atherton. No more has come down to posterity.
Mrs. Atherton. That last piece of news from Mount Athos seems quite familiar to me. I have just been reading Curzon’s Monasteries of the Levant, and thanks to him, I can imagine the scenery of the mountain and its neighourhood: the Byzantine convents, with their many little windows rounded at the top, the whole structure full of arches and domes,—the little farms interspersed, with their white square towers and cottages of stone at the foot,—the forests of gigantic plane trees, with an underwood of aromatic evergreens,—flowers like those in the conservatory everywhere growing wild,—waterfalls at the head of every valley, dashing down over marble rocks,—and the bells, heard tinkling every now and then, to call the monks to prayer.
Willoughby. The crass stupidity of those Omphalopsychi shows how little mere natural beauty can contribute to refine and cultivate,—at any rate when the pupils are ascetics. The contemporary mysticism of the East looks mean enough beside the speculation, the poetry, and the action of the German mystics of the fourteenth century. It is but the motionless abstraction of the Indian Yogi over again.