The Abbé Dufresnoy handles the question broadly, but most of the combatants are furious, this side or that, from some small party motive. The French divines censure the book, for fear it should encourage Quietism—their great bugbear at that time. The Spanish ecclesiastics, jealous of the honour done their countrywoman, retorted with a Censura Censuræ. But about the habit the battle was hottest. Every Carmelite must reject the book with indignation, for had they not always believed, on the best authority, that the Virgin wore a dress of their colour? The Franciscans again, and the religious of St. Clare, would defend it as eagerly, for did not its pages authorize anew from heaven their beloved ashen hue? Again, did not these revelations represent the Almighty as adopting the Scotist doctrine? On this great question, of course, Scotist and Thomist would fight to the death. Some account of the controversy, and an examination of the book, will be found in Dufresnoy, Traité Historique et Dogmatique sur les Apparitions, les Visions et les Révélations particulières, tom. II. chap. xi. (1751).
The same spirit betrays itself in the instance of Molinos. Even after he had written his Guida Spirituale, he was patronized by the Jesuits because he had employed his pen against Jansenism, and the Franciscans approved his book, while the Dominicans rejected it, because he had delighted the one party and disgusted the other by speaking somewhat disparagingly of Thomas Aquinas.
CHAPTER II.
Indeed, when persons have been long softened with the continual droppings of religion, and their spirits made timorous and apt for impression by the assiduity of prayer, and perpetual alarms of death, and the continual dyings of mortification,—the fancy, which is a very great instrument of devotion, is kept continually warm, and in a disposition and aptitude to take fire, and to flame out in great ascents; and when they suffer transportations beyond the burdens and support of reason, they suffer they know not what, and call it what they please.—Jeremy Taylor.
I. Saint Theresa—(CONTINUED).
What disinterested love is to the mysticism of Fénelon, that is supernatural passive prayer to the mysticism of St. Theresa. She writes to describe her experience in the successive stages of prayer; to distinguish them, and to lay down directions for those who are their subjects. She professes no method whereby souls may be conducted from the lowest to the highest degree. On the contrary, she warns all against attempting to attain, by their own efforts, that blissful suspension of the powers which she depicts in colours so glowing. Unlike Dionysius, she counsels no effort to denude the soul of thought: she does not, with Tauler, bid the mystic laboriously sink into the ground of his being. She is emphatically a Quietist; quite as much so as Molinos, far more so than Fénélon. Spiritual consolation and spiritual desertion are to be alike indifferent. By a singular inconsistency, while tracing out the way of perfection, she forbids the taking of a step in that path.[[284]] You will be borne along, she would say, if you wait, as far as is fitting. Her experience receives its complexion, and some of her terminology is borrowed from the Lives of the Saints. Of the past career of Mystical Theology she is utterly ignorant. She hears, indeed, of a certain time-honoured division of the mystical process into Purgative, Illuminative, and Unitive; but she does not adopt the scheme. The Platonic and philosophic element is absent altogether from her mysticism. Her metaphysics are very simple:—the soul has three powers—Understanding, Memory, and Will. Now one, now another, now all of these, are whelmed and silenced by the incoming flood of Divine communication.
In addition to sundry chapters in her Life on the various kinds of prayer, she has left two treatises, The Way of Perfection (Camino de Perfecion) and The Castle of the Soul (Castillo Interior)—verbose, rambling, full of repetitions. For the conventual mind there is no rotation of crops; and the barrenness which limits such monotonous reproduction supervenes very soon. From these sources, then, we proceed to a brief summary of her theopathy.
There are in her scale four degrees of prayer. The first is Simple Mental Prayer,—fervent, inward, self-withdrawn; not exclusive of some words, nor unaided by what the mystics called discursive acts, i.e., the consideration of facts and doctrines prompting to devotion. In this species there is nothing extraordinary. No mysticism, so far.
Second Degree:—The Prayer of Quiet called also Pure Contemplation. In this state the Will is absorbed, though the Understanding and Memory may still be active in an ordinary way. Thus the nun may be occupied for a day or two in the usual religious services, in embroidering an altar-cloth, or dusting a chapel; yet without the Will being engaged. That faculty is supposed to be, as it were, bound and taken up in God. This stage is a supernatural one. Those who are conscious of it are to beware lest they suffer the unabsorbed faculties to trouble them. Yet they should not exert themselves to protract this ‘recollection.’ They should receive the wondrous sweetness as it comes, and enjoy it while it lasts, absolutely passive and tranquil. The devotee thus favoured often dreads to move a limb, lest bodily exertion should mar the tranquillity of the soul. But happiest are those who, as in the case just mentioned, can be Marys and Marthas at the same time.[[285]]
Third Degree:—The Prayer of Union, called also Perfect Contemplation. In this prayer, not the Will only, but the Understanding and Memory also, are swallowed up in God. These powers are not absolutely inactive; but we do not work them, nor do we know how they work. It is a kind of celestial frenzy—‘a sublime madness,’ says Theresa. In such a transport she composed her ecstatic hymn, without the least exercise of the understanding on her part. At this stage the contemplatist neither thinks nor feels as a human being. The understanding is stunned and struck dumb with amazement. The heart knows neither why it loves, nor what. All the functions of the mind are suspended. Nothing is seen, heard, or known. And wherefore this sudden blank? That for a brief space (which seems always shorter than it really is) the Living God may, as it were, take the place of the unconscious spirit—that a divine vitality may for a moment hover above the dead soul, and then vanish without a trace; restoring the mystic to humanity again, to be heartened and edified, perhaps for years to come, by the vague memory of that glorious nothingness.[[286]]