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

by Robert Alfred Vaughan

Engraced into so high a favour there,

The saints with all their peers whole worlds outwear,

And things unseen do see, and thing unheard do hear.

Giles Fletcher.

Gower fulfilled his promise, and read, on two successive evenings, the following paper on the Mysticism of the Counter-Reformation, as illustrated principally by its two Spanish champions, St. Theresa and St. John of the Cross:—

I. Saint Theresa.

On the revival of letters the mysticism of Alexandria reappeared in Florence. That lamp which, in the study of Ficinus, burnt night and day before the bust of Plato, proclaimed, in reality, the worship of Plotinus. The erudite feebleness of Alexandrian eclecticism lived again in Gemisthus Pletho,—blended, as of old, Platonic ideas, oriental emanations, and Hellenic legend,—dreamed of a philosophic worship, emasculated and universal, which should harmonize in a common vagueness all the religions of the world. Nicholas of Cusa re-adapted the allegorical mathematics which had flourished beneath the Ptolemies and restored the Pythagoras of the Neo-Platonists. Pico of Mirandola (the admirable Crichton of his time) sought to reconcile the dialectics of Aristotle with the oracles of Chaldæa, and to breathe into withered scholasticism the mysterious life of Cabbalistic wisdom. An age so greedy of antiquity was imposed on by the most palpable fabrications; and Greece beheld the servile product of her second childhood reverenced as the vigorous promise of her first. Patricius sought the sources of Greek philosophy in writings attributed to Hermes and Zoroaster. He wrote to Gregory XIV. proposing that authors such as these should be substituted for Aristotle in the schools, as the best means of advancing true religion and reclaiming heretical Germany.

The position of these scholars with regard to Protestantism resembles, not a little, that of their Alexandrian predecessors when confronted by Christianity. They were the philosophic advocates of a religion in which they had themselves lost faith. They attempted to reconcile a corrupt philosophy and a corrupt religion, and they made both worse. The love of literature and art was confined to a narrow circle of courtiers and literati. While Lutheran pamphlets in the vernacular set all the North in a flame, the philosophic refinements of the Florentine dilettanti were aristocratic, exclusive, and powerless. Their intellectual position was fatal to sincerity; their social condition equally so to freedom. The despotism of the Roman emperors was more easily evaded by a philosopher of ancient times than the tyranny of a Visconti or a D’Este, by a scholar at Milan or Ferrara. It was the fashion to patronise men of letters. But the usual return of subservience and flattery was rigorously exacted. The Italians of the fifteenth century had long ceased to be familiar with the worst horrors of war, and Charles VIII., with his ferocious Frenchmen, appeared to them another Attila. Each Italian state underwent, on its petty scale, the fate of Imperial Rome. The philosophic and religious conservatism of Florence professed devotion to a church which reproduced, with most prolific abundance, the superstitions of by-gone Paganism,—of that very Paganism in whose behalf the Neo-Platonist philosopher entered the lists against the Christian father. To such men, the earnest religious movement of the North was the same mysterious, barbaric, formidable foe which primitive Christianity had been to the Alexandrians. The old conflict between Pagan and Christian—the man of taste and the man of faith—the man who lived for the past, and the man who lived for the future, was renewed, in the sixteenth century, between the Italian and the German. The Florentine Platonists, moreover, not only shared in the weakness of their prototypes, as the occupants of an attitude radically false; they failed to exhibit in their lives that austerity of morals which won respect for Plotinus and Porphyry, even among those who cared nothing for their speculations. Had Romanism been unable to find defenders more thoroughly in earnest, the shock she then received must have been her deathblow. She must have perished as Paganism perished. But, wise in her generation, she took her cause out of the hands of that graceful and heartless Deism, so artificial and so self-conscious,—too impalpable and too refined for any real service to gods or men. She needed men as full of religious convictions as were these of philosophical and poetic conceits. She needed men to whom the bland and easy incredulity of such symposium-loving scholars was utterly inconceivable—abhorrent as the devil and all his works. And such men she found. For by reason of the measure of truth she held, she was as powerful to enslave the noblest as to unleash the vilest passions of our nature. It was given her, she said, to bind and to loose. It was time, she knew, to bind up mercy and to loose revenge. A succession of ferocious sanctities fulminated from the chair of St. Peter. Science was immured in the person of Galileo. The scholarship, so beloved by Leo, would have been flung into the jaws of the Inquisition by Caraffa. Every avenue, open once on sufferance, to freer thought and action, was rigorously blocked up. Princes were found willing to cut off the right hand, pluck out the right eye of their people, that Rome might triumph by this suicide of nations. But nowhere did she find a prince and a people alike so swift to shed blood at her bidding, as among that imperious race of which Philip II. was at once the sovereign and the type. In Spain was found, in its perfection, the chivalry of persecution: there dwelt the aristocracy of fanaticism. It was long doubtful whether the Roman or the Spanish Inquisition was the more terrible for craft, the more ingenious in torments, the more glorious with blood.

But Spain was not merely the political and military head of the Counter-Reformation. She contributed illustrious names to relume the waning galaxy of saints. Pre-eminent among these luminaries shine Ignatius Loyola, Theresa, and John of the Cross. The first taught Rome what she had yet to learn in the diplomacy of superstition. Education and intrigue became the special province of his order: it was the training school of the teachers: it claimed and merited the monopoly of the vizard manufacture. Rome found in Theresa her most famous seeress; in John, her consummate ascetic. It was not in the upper region of mysticism that the narrow intellect and invincible will of Loyola were to realize distinction. He had his revelations, indeed,—was rapt away to behold the mystery of the Trinity made manifest, and the processes of creation detailed. But such favours are only the usual insignia so proper to the founder of an order. Compared with St. Francis the life of Ignatius is poor in vision and in miracle. But his relics have since made him ample amends. Bartoli enumerates a hundred miraculous cures.[^[263]] John and Theresa were mystics par excellence: the former, of the most abstract theopathetic school; the latter, with a large infusion of the theurgic element, unrivalled in vision—angelic and dæmoniacal.

But one principle is dominant in the three, and is the secret of the saintly honours paid them. In the alarm and wrath awakened by the Reformation, Rome was supremely concerned to enforce the doctrine of blind obedience to ecclesiastical superiors. These Spanish saints lived and laboured and suffered to commend this dogma to the Church and to all mankind. Summoned by the Rule of Obedience, they were ready to inflict or to endure the utmost misery. Their natures were precisely of the kind most fitted to render service and receive promotion at that juncture. They were glowing and ductile. Their very virtues were the dazzle of the red-hot brand, about to stamp the brow with slavery. Each excellence displayed by such accomplished advocates of wrong, withered one of the rising hopes of mankind. Their prayers watered with poisoned water every growth of promise in the field of Europe. Their Herculean labours were undertaken, not to destroy, but to multiply the monsters which infested every highway of thought. Wherever the tears of Theresa fell, new weeds of superstition sprang up. Every shining austerity endured by John gilded another link in the chain which should bind his fellows. The jubilant bells of their devotion rang the knell of innumerable martyrs.