In the fourteenth century, mysticism was often synonymous with considerable freedom of thought. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was allowed to exist only as it subserved the ecclesiastical scheme. The problem was,—how to excite the feeling and imagination of the devotee to the highest pitch, and yet to retain him in complete subjection to the slightest movement of the rein. Of this problem John and Theresa are the practical and complete solution. All their fire went off by the legitimate conducting-rod: every flash was serviceable: not a gleam was wasted. Once mysticism was a kind of escape for nature. The mystic left behind him much of the coarse externalism necessary to his Church, and found refuge in an inner world of feeling and imagination. But now the Church, by means of the confessor, made mysticism itself the innermost dungeon of her prison-house. Every emotion was methodically docketed; every yearning of the heart minutely catalogued. The sighs must always ascend in the right place: the tears must trickle in orthodox course. The prying calculations of the casuist had measured the sweep of every wave in the heaving ocean of the soul. The instant terrible knife cut off the first spray of love that shot out beyond the trimly-shaven border of prescription. Strong feelings were dangerous guests, unless they knew (like the old Romans) when to go home and slay themselves, did that Tiberius, the director, but bestow on them a frown.
In France, too, mysticism was to fall under the same yoke; but the Frenchman could never reach the hard austerity of the Spaniard. The sixteenth century produced St. Francis de Sales on the north, and St. John of the Cross on the south, of the Pyrénées. With the former, mysticism is tender, genial, graceful; it appeals to every class; it loves and would win all men. With the latter, it is a dark negation—a protracted suffering—an anguish and a joy known only to the cloister. De Sales was to John, as a mystic, what Henry IV. was to Philip as a Catholic King. Even in Italy, the Counter-Reformation was comparatively humane and philanthropic with Carlo Borromeo. In Spain alone is it little more, at its very best, than a fantastic gloom and a passionate severity.
But everywhere the principle of subserviency is in the ascendant. The valetudinarian devotee becomes more and more the puppet of his spiritual doctor. The director winds him up. He derives his spiritless semblance of life wholly from the priestly mechanism. It may be said of him, as of the sick man in Massinger’s play,
That he lives he owes
To art, not Nature; she has given him o’er.
He moves, like the fairy king, on screws and wheels
Made by his doctor’s recipes, and yet still
They are out of joint, and every day repairing.
Theresa was born at Avila, in the year 1515, just two years (as Ribadeneira reminds us) before ‘that worst of men,’ Martin Luther.[[264]] The lives of the saints were her nursery tales. Cinderella is matter of fact; Jack and the Beanstalk commonplace, beside the marvellous stories that must have nourished her infantine faculty of wonder. At seven years old she thinks eternal bliss cheaply bought by martyrdom; sets out with her little brother on a walk to Africa, hoping to be despatched by the Moors, and is restored to her disconsolate parents by a cruel matter-of-fact uncle, who meets them at the bridge. Her dolls’ houses are nunneries. These children construct in the garden, not dirt pies, but mud-hermitages; which, alas! will always tumble down.
As she grows up, some gay associates, whose talk is of ribbons, lovers, and bull-fights, secularise her susceptible mind. She reads many romances of chivalry, and spends more time at the glass. Her father sends her, when fifteen, to a convent of Augustinian nuns in Avila, to rekindle her failing devotion. A few days reconcile her to the change, and she is as religious as ever.