Were I to be destroyed, he must give up the ghost.
Nought seemeth high to me, I am the highest thing;
Because e’en God himself is poor deprived of me.[[202]]
The central idea of the Persian mysticism is Emanation. The soul is to escape from the manifold to the One. Its tendency (in proportion as its votary believes that return accomplished) is to confound man with the Father. The leading principle in the mysticism of Eckart and Angelus Silesius is Incarnation. Angelus is never weary of reiterating the doctrine that God became man in order that man might become God. He does not labour, like the orientals, to attain deification by ascetic efforts of his own. He has a kind of Mediator. He seems to believe that through Christ, in some way, every man is a divine Son of God, if he will only think so. All he has to do is to realize this sonship; then he becomes, by Grace, all that the Son of God is by Nature. The obvious result of this mysticism is to identify man with the Son.
In that order of modern mysticism represented by Emerson, the central doctrine is Inspiration. In the creative efforts of the poet, in the generalizations of the philosopher, the man of genius speaks as he is moved by the Oversoul. An influx of the universal spirit floods his being and carries him beyond himself. In intuition the finite Ego is identified with the absolute Ego. Humanity is a divine evolution, and each true man (to use Emerson’s apt illustration)—a façade of Deity. Even Angelus would have acknowledged that it was in some sort through Christ that his boastful sonship became possible. But the believer in the Oversoul will admit no such medium, and owns a debt to Christ much as he owns a debt to Shakspeare. Mysticism of this order usurps the office of the Holy Ghost, and directly identifies the spirit of man with the Spirit of God.
Mysticism has always been accustomed to express the transports of its divine passion by metaphors borrowed from the amorous phraseology of earth. It has done this with every variety of taste, from the grossness of some of the most eminent Romanist saints, to the beautiful Platonism of Spenser’s Hymns of ‘Heavenly Love’ and ‘Heavenly Beautie.’ But nowhere has metaphor branched so luxuriantly into allegory as in the East, and nowhere in the East with such subtilty and such freedom as among the Persian mystics. The admiring countrymen of Hafiz, Saadi, and Jami, interpret mystically almost everything they wrote. They underlay these poems everywhere with a system of correspondence whose ingenuity would have done no discredit to Swedenborg himself. Sir William Jones furnishes some specimens of a sort of mystical glossary, by aid whereof their drinking songs may be read as psalms, and their amatory effusions transformed into hymns full of edification for the faithful.[[203]] Never, since the days of Plotinus, was a deity imagined more abstract than the Unity toward which the Sufi aspires. Yet never was religious language more florid and more sensuous. According to the system alluded to, wine is equivalent to devotion; the tavern is an oratory; kisses and embraces, the raptures of piety; while wantonness, drunkenness, and merriment, are religious ardour and abstraction from all terrestrial thoughts.
The following passage from Mahmud’s Gulschen Ras may suffice as a specimen of these devout Bacchanalia. It has the advantage of exhibiting the key in the lock:—
Know’st thou who the Host may be who pours the spirit’s wine
Know’st thou what his liquor is whose taste is so divine?
The Host is thy Beloved One—the wine annihilation,