After some two or three hours’ endurance of this combined spiritual and corporeal torture, the sisters would find her almost without pulsation, the bones of the arms standing out (las canillas muy abiertas), her hands stiff and extended: in every joint were the pains of dislocation: she was apparently at the point of death.[[289]]
This mysterious ‘pain’ is no new thing in the history of mysticism. It is one of the trials of mystical initiation. It is the depth essential to the superhuman height. With St. Theresa, the physical nature contributes towards it much more largely than usual; and in her map of the mystic’s progress it is located at a more advanced period of the journey. St. Francis of Assisi lay sick for two years under the preparatory miseries. Catharine of Siena bore five years of privation, and was tormented by devils beside. For five years, and yet again for more than three times five, Magdalena de Pazzi endured such ‘aridity,’ that she believed herself forsaken of God. Balthazar Alvarez suffered for sixteen years before he earned his extraordinary illumination.[[290]] Theresa, there can be little doubt, regarded her fainting-fits, hysteria, cramps, and nervous seizures, as divine visitations. In their action and reaction, body and soul were continually injuring each other. The excitement of hallucination would produce an attack of her disorder, and the disease again foster the hallucination. Servitude, whether of mind or body, introduces maladies unknown to freedom. Elephantiasis and leprosy—the scourge of modern Greece—were unknown to ancient Hellas. The cloister breeds a family of mental distempers, elsewhere unheard of.
The mystics generally, from Dionysius downward, inculcate earnest endeavours to denude the mind of images, to suspend its reflex or discursive operations. Theresa goes a step farther, and forbids her pupils to strive towards such a state. If such a favour is to be theirs, it will be wrought in them as by enchantment. Passivity here reaches its extreme. On this ground a charge of Quietism might have been brought against Theresa with more justice than against Fénélon, or even Molinos. The Guida Spirituale of Molinos was designed to assist the mystic in attaining that higher contemplation of God which rises above the separate consideration of particular attributes. This indistinct and dazzled apprehension of all the perfections together is the very characteristic of Theresa’s Prayer of Rapture. Molinos cites her very words. The introduction to his condemned manual contains some very strong expressions. But nothing of his own is so extravagant as the passages from Dionysius and Theresa.
Who then is the Quietist—Molinos or Theresa? Both write books to mark out the mystic’s pathway. Theresa adds the caution, ‘Sit still.’ Manifestly, then, the excess of passivity lies with her. The oars of Molinos are the sails of Theresa,—erected, like the broad paddles of the Indian, to catch the breeze, and urge onward the canoe without an effort.[[291]] But the followers of Molinos were found guilty of neglecting ceremonial gewgaws for devout abstraction,—of escaping those vexatious observances so harassing to patients and so lucrative to priests. So Rome condemned him, and not Theresa, as the Quietist heretic. For his head the thundercloud; for hers the halo.[[292]]
Here the reader may naturally ask, ‘How do these mystics reconcile such extremes of abstraction and such extremes of sensuousness? If the state above symbols and above reasoning—above all conscious mental operations, distinctions, or figures, be so desirable (as they all admit),—must not crucifixes, images, and pictures of saints, yea, the very conception of our Saviour’s humanity itself, be so many hindrances?’
To this Theresa would answer, ‘I thought so once. But I was happily led to see my error ere long. In the Prayer of Rapture, all recognition of Christ’s humanity—as, indeed, of everything else—is doubtless obliterated. But, then, we do not effect this. There is no effort on our part to remove from our minds the conception of Christ’s person. The universal nescience of Rapture is supernaturally wrought, without will of ours.’[[293]] John of the Cross, who carries his negative, imageless abstraction so far, is fain (as a good son of the Church) to insert a special chapter in commendation of images, pictures, and the sensuous aids to devotion generally. It was unfortunate for the flesh and blood of Molinos that he failed to do the same.[[294]]
In the seventeenth century the Quietists were accused of rejecting the idea of Christ’s humanity, as a corporeal image which would only mar their supersensuous contemplation of abstract deity. Bossuet attempted to fasten the charge on Fénélon: it was one of the hottest points of their controversy. Fénélon completely clears himself. From the evidence within my reach, I am disposed to acquit Molinos also.[[295]]
Theresa relates with peculiar pleasure those passages in the marvellous history of the soul in which surpassing heights of knowledge, or of virtue, are supposed to be realized, on the instant, without processes or media. No transition is too violent for her faith. She is impatient of all natural growth; will acknowledge no conditions of development. The sinner turns into a seraph in the twinkling of an eye. The splendid symmetry of all the Christian virtues can arise, like the palace of Aladdin, in a single night. In one particular kind of Rapture—the Flight of the Soul (Buelo del Espiritu), the soul is described by her as, in a manner, blown up. It is discharged heavenwards by a soundless but irresistible explosive force from beneath, swift as a bullet (con la presteza que sale la pelota de un arcabuz). Thus transported the spirit is taught without the medium of words, and understands mysteries which long years of search could not even have surmised.[[296]]
Visions are intellectual or representative. The former is a consciousness of spiritual proximity, indescribable, unaccompanied by any appearances. The representative or imaginative vision, presents some definite form or image.[[297]]
There is a kind of supernatural tuition, she tells us, in which the Lord suddenly places in the centre of the soul, what he wishes it to understand, without words or representation of any kind. This privilege Theresa compares very truly to an ability to read without having learnt letters, or to nutriment derived from food without eating it.[[298]] In other instances certain efficacious words (the ‘substantial words’ of John), are spoken divinely in the centre of the soul, and immediately produce there the actual effects proper to their significance.[[299]] If something is thus inwardly spoken about humility, for example, the subject of such words is that moment completely humble. So the soul is supplied with virtues as the tables volantes of Louis XV. with viands,—a spring is touched, and presto! the table sinks and re-appears—spread.