Atherton. We may call it a summary of Tauler’s doctrine, without his fancy and vehement appeal; it is a treatise philosophic in its calmness, deservedly popular for its homely, idiomatic diction. What we were saying about Tauler applies substantially to the Theologia Germanica.
Mrs. Atherton. I have been waiting to hear something about Thomas à Kempis,[[184]]—certainly the best known of all your mystics.
Atherton. Right. Who could forget the comforter of the fifteenth century? It is curious to compare the third book of his Imitation of Christ, with its dialogue between Christ and the disciple, and Suso’s conversation, in his Book of the Eternal Wisdom, between Wisdom and the Servant.
Gower. There is less genius, less abandon, if one may so say, about Thomas.
Atherton. Decidedly. That original and daring spirit which carried mysticism to such a height in the fourteenth century, could not survive in the fifteenth,—an age tending towards consolidation and equilibrium, bent on the softening down of extremes. Suso, a poet as much as an ascetic, is continually quitting his cell to admire nature and to mix with men. He mingles speculation borrowed from his master, Eckart, with the luxuriant play of his own inexhaustible fancy. Thomas à Kempis is exclusively the ascetic. His mysticism ranges in a narrower sphere. Hence, to a great extent, his wider influence. He abjures everything that belongs to the thought of the philosopher or the fine feeling of the artist. He appeals neither to the intellect nor to the imagination—simply to the heart. He could be understood without learning, appreciated without taste, and so thousands, in castle and in cloister, prayed and wept over his earnest page. ‘See!’ said he, ‘this life is filled with crosses.’ And multitudes, in misery, or fear of misery, made answer, ‘It is true.’—‘Then,’ urged the comforter, ‘be thyself crucified to it, and it cannot harm thee. Cease to have any care, any aim, any hope or fear, save Christ. Yield thyself, utterly passive and dead to this life, into his hands who is Lord of a better.’ Then the sufferers dried their tears, and strove hard to forget time and self in contemplating Christ.
Gower. And, let us hope, not always quite in vain.
Atherton. I have one more name yet upon my list, with which the mediæval mysticism reaches its conclusion. It is the great Frenchman, Chancellor Gerson.[[185]] His figure stands out prominently among the confusions of the time, half-way between the old age and the new. Up to a certain point, he is a reformer; beyond it, the enemy of reform. He is active in the deposition of John XXII., yet he does not hesitate to burn John Huss. He looks on, with a smile of satisfaction, when the royal secretaries stab with their penknives the papal bulls, and the rector tears the insolent parchment into shreds. He sees, half with pity and half with triumph, the emissaries of the Pope, crowned in mockery with paper tiaras, and hung with insulting scrolls, dragged through the streets in a scavenger’s tumbril, to be pilloried by angry Paris. But he stands aloof in disdain when the University, deserted by the Parliament, fraternizes with the mob to enforce reform,—when threadbare students come down from their garrets in the Pays Latin to join the burly butchers of St. Jacques la Boucherie,—when grave doctors shake hands with ox-fellers, and Franciscans and White-hoods shout together for the charter.
Willoughby. And very wrong he was, too, for those butchers, rough as they were, were right in the main,—honest, energetic fellows, with good heads on their shoulders. Could they but have raised money, they would have saved France. But Gerson would rather be plundered than pay their tax, and had to hurry down for hiding to the vaults of Notre Dame. I remember the story. And when the princes came back to power, the moderates were pillaged like the rest,—and serve them right.
Atherton. Yes, the reform demanded was just and moderate, and even the rioters lost none of their respect for royalty, feeling still in their rude hearts no little of that chivalrous loyalty which animated Gerson himself when he bent low before the poor idiot king, and with oriental reverence exclaimed, ‘O King, live for ever!’ Gerson was a radical in the Church and a conservative in the State—the antagonist of the political republicanism, the champion of the ecclesiastical. His sanguine hopes of peace for his country and of reform for his Church, were alike doomed to disappointment.
His great work on the theory and practice of mysticism was composed during the stormy period of his public life. Imagine how happily he forgot popes and councils, Cabochiens and Armagnacs, during those brief intervals of quiet which he devoted to the elaboration of a psychology that should give to mysticism a scientific basis. Nominalist as he was, and fully conscious of the defects of scholasticism, then tottering to its fall, he differs little in his results from Richard of St. Victor. He closes the series of those who have combined mysticism with scholasticism, and furnishes in himself a summary and critical resumé of all that had previously been accomplished in this direction. He was desirous at once of making mysticism definite and intelligible, and of rendering the study of theology as a science more practical, devout, and scriptural. Hence his opposition to the extravagance of Ruysbroek on the one side, and to the frigid disputation of the schools on the other. He essays to define and investigate the nature of ecstasy and rapture. He even introduces into mysticism that reflection which its very principle repudiates. He recommends an inductive process, which is to arrange and compare the phenomena of mysticism as manifest in the history of saintly men, and thence to determine the true and legitimate mystical experience, as opposed to the heterodox and the fantastic. He maintains that man rises to the height of abstract contemplation, neither by the intellectual machinery of Realism, nor by the flights of Imagination. If he attempts the first, he becomes a heretic; if the second, a visionary. The indispensable requisite is what he calls ‘rapturous love.’ Yet even this is knowledge in the truest sense, and quite compatible with a rational, though impassioned self-consciousness. His doctrine of union is so temperate and guarded as almost to exclude him from the genuine mystical fellowship. He has no visions or exaltations of his own to tell of. Resembling Richard in this respect, to whom he is so much indebted, he elaborates a system, erects a tabernacle, and leaves it to others to penetrate to the inmost sanctuary. Like Bernard, he thinks those arduous and dazzling heights of devotion are for ‘the harts and climbing goats,’ not for active practical men such as the Chancellor. Above all, urges this reformer both of the schoolmen and the mystics, clear your mind of phantasms—do not mistake the creations of your own imagination for objective spiritual realities. In other words, ‘Be a mystic, but do not be what nine mystics out of every ten always have been.’