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

by Robert Alfred Vaughan

Note to page 259.

Such is the explanation in the letter to La Maisonfort. But Fénélon is not always—perhaps, could not possibly be—quite consistent with himself on this most delicate of questions. Beyond a doubt, the attempt practically to apply this doctrine concerning reflex acts constitutes the morbid element in his system—is the one refinement above all others fatally unnatural. There is great truth in Fénélon’s warnings against nervous, impatient introspection. Against an evil so prevalent, and so constantly fostered by the confessional and the directors, it was high time that some one should protest. But, alas! not only does Fénélon himself uphold, most zealously, that very directorship, but this strain after a love perfectly disinterested tempts the aspirant to be continually hunting inwardly after traces of the hated self, which will never quite vanish. Happy, according to Fénélon, is that religionist who can sacrifice, not only himself, but the sacrifice of himself—who burns the burnt offering—who gives up the consciousness of having given himself up—and who has reached, without knowing it, the pinnacle of Christian perfection. The reader will find specimens of his more guarded language in the letter referred to in the Instructions et Avis, &c. xx.; Max. des Saints, art. xiii.; Lettres Spirituelles, xiii. This last, a letter to Sœur Charlotte de St. Cyprien, is of importance, as containing definitions of mystical terms, similar in substance to those given in the Maximes, and moreover, highly approved by Bossuet, a year after the conferences at Issy. The strongest expressions are found in the Instructions et Avis, xxii. xxiii. He says,—Pour consommer le sacrifice de purification en nous des dons de Dieu, il faut donc achever de détruire l’holocauste; il faut tout perdre, même l’abandon aperçu par lequel on se voit livré à sa perte.—P. 342. Compare the allusion to the unconscious prayer of St. Anthony, Max. des Saints, art. xxi.

Note to page 259.

L’activité que les mystiques blâment n’est pas l’action réelle et la co-opération de l’âme à la grâce; c’est seulement une crainte inquiète, ou une ferveur empressée qui recherche les dons de Dieu pour sa propre consolation.—Lettres Spirituelles, xiii. So also, in the letter to La Maisonfort, he shows that the state of passivity does not preclude a great number of distinct acts. This is what the mystics call co-operating with God without activity of our own—a subtlety which those may seek to understand who care. Fénélon means to forbid a selfish isolation, which, on pretence of quietude, neglects daily duty. True repose in God calmly discharges such obligations as they come. We have seen an example of this in St. Theresa. Fénélon is not prepared to go the length of John of the Cross, who denies our co-operation altogether.—Maximes des Saints, art. xxx. and xxix. Ils ne font plus d’actes empressés et marqués par une secousse inquiète: ils font des actes si paisibles et si uniformes, que ces actes, quoique très-réels, très-successifs, et même interrompus, leur paraissent ou un seul acte sans interruption, ou un repos continuel.

Fénélon is at any time ready to endorse all the counsels of John of the Cross, as to the duty of leaving behind (outre-passer) all apparitions, sounds, tastes, everything visionary, sensuous, or theurgic. With the grosser forms of mysticism he has no sympathy. He even endeavours to represent St. Theresa as an advocate of the purer and more refined mysticism, adducing the scarce-attainable seventh Morada, and overlooking the sensuous character of the preceding six. Theresa might, in the abstract, rate the visionless altitude above the valley of vision; but she preferred, for herself, unquestionably, the valley to the mountain. (Max. des Saints, xix.; Lettres Spirituelles, xiv. xvi. xvii.) In a letter on extraordinary gifts, he repeats the precept of John—‘Aller toujours par le non-voir;’ and ‘outre-passer les grands dons, et marcher dans la pure foi comme si on ne les avait pas reçus.’ He consigns the soul, in like manner, to a blank abstraction—to what Luther would have called ‘a void tedium.’ Tout ce qui est goût et ferveur sensible, image créée, lumière distincte et aperçue, donne une fausse confiance, et fait une impression trop vive; on les reçoit avec joie, et on les quitte avec peine. Au contraire, dans la nudité de la pure foi, on ne doit rien voir; on n’a plus en soi ni pensée ni volonté; on trouve tout dans cette simplicité générale, sans s’arrêter à rien de distinct; on ne possède rien, mais on est possédé.—Lettre xxiii. The very acts of which Contemplation is made up, are, says Fénélon—‘Si simples, si directs, si paisibles, si uniformes, qu’ils n’ont rien de marqué par où l’âme puisse les distinguer.’—Max. des Saints, art. xxi. What such acts can be, must remain for ever a mystery unfathomable. It is for these inexplicable ‘actes distincts’ that the convenient ‘facilité spéciale’ is provided. (Correspondance, lettre 43; comp. Lettres Spirituelles, xiii. 448.)

Fénélon is also careful to guard his mysticism against the pretences of special revelation and any troublesome insubordination on the part of the ‘inner light,’ or l’attrait intérieur. The said ‘attrait,’ he justly observes, ‘n’est point une inspiration miraculeuse et prophétique, qui rende l’âme infaillible, ni impeccable, ni indépendante, de la direction des pasteurs; ce n’est que la grâce, qui est sans cesse prévenante dans tous les justes, et qui est plus spéciale dans les âmes élevées par l’amour désintéressé,’ &c.—Loc. cit. p. 450; Max. des Saints, art. xxix. and vii.

Note to page 262.

Fénélon gives his reasons for refusing to affix his approval to Bossuet’s book, in letters to Tronson and Madame de Maintenon, and in the Réponse. (Correspondance, lettres 52, 53, 57; Réponse à la Relation, chap, v.) It was a strong point for Fénélon against Bossuet that the latter had administered to Madame Guyon the sacraments, and granted her a favourable certificate, after reading the very books in which he professed afterwards to discover the most flagitious designs. In thinking better, therefore, of her intentions than of her language, Fénélon was no more her partisan or defender than Bossuet himself had been, up to that point. The act of submission Bossuet made her sign was not a retractation of error, but simply a declaration that she had never held any of the errors condemned in the pastoral letter,—that she always meant to write in a sense altogether orthodox, and had no conception that any dangerous interpretation could be put upon the terms which, in her ignorance, she had employed. (Réponse à la Relation, chap. i.) Phelipeaux sees in everything Fénélon wrote—the notes for the Maxims—the memoranda he sent to Bossuet, only one purpose—an insane resolve to defend Madame Guyon at all costs. He chooses to imagine that every step taken by her was secretly dictated by Fénélon. In fact, however, from the time the first suspicions arose, Fénélon began to withdraw from Madame Guyon his former intimacy. Nothing could exceed his caution in the avoidance of all implication with one whose language was susceptible of such fatal misconstruction. He could probably have taken no better course. He endeavoured to retain the controversy about the real question, that she might be forgotten. But it soon became evident that he himself was the party attacked, and with a virulence for which the scandals attributed to Madame Guyon furnished an instrument too tempting to be neglected. The charges against Madame Guyon increased in magnitude—not with her resistance, for she made none—but with that of Fénélon. (Réponse, xxiii. lxxxiv. lx.)

Note to page 264.

The motives with which Fénélon wrote and published the Maxims are fully stated by himself. It was not to defend Madame Guyon, but to rescue the doctrine of pure love, threatened with destruction by the growing prejudice against the religion of the ‘inward way.’ It was not to excuse the Quietists, but to preserve, by due distinctions, souls attached to the true mysticism, from the illusions of the false. It was to give their full and legitimate scope to those venerable principles which a heretical Quietism was said to have abused. Mysticism was not to be extinguished by denying the truth it contained. Let, then, the true be separated from the false. The Maxims were believed by Fénélon to contain no position contrary to the articles of Issy. The passages which cannot be reconciled with the limitations imposed by those articles are not his own, but quotations from De Sales and others. The Andalusian Illuminati had rendered the greatest saints suspected. Theresa, Alvarez, John of the Cross, stood in need of defenders. Ruysbroek, whom Bellarmine called the great contemplatist; Tauler, the Apostle of Germany, had required and had found champions, the one in Dionysius the Carthusian, the other in Blosius. The Cardinal Berulle felt compelled to enter the lists on behalf of St. Francis de Sales, for suspicions had been cast upon the wisdom of that eminent saint. Such examples might well alarm all those whose religion was embued with mysticism,—all those to whom a faith of that type was a necessity. Let it be openly declared where the path of safety lies, and where the dangers commence. The Maxims were to furnish a via media between the extreme of those who repudiated mystical theology altogether, and the excesses of the false mystics. The doctrines stigmatized as false throughout the Maxims, are what Fénélon supposed to be the tenets of Molinos, judging from the sixty-eight propositions condemned at Rome. The Faux, therefore, which opposes to the Vrai is, for the most part, a mere chimera—made up of doctrines really believed by scarcely any one,—only taught, perhaps, now and then, by designing priests to women, for the purposes of seduction. See the ‘Avertissement’ to the Maxims; Première Lettre en Réponse, &c. p. 111; Correspondance, lettre 59; and the letter on the Maxims, to the Pope, Phelipeaux, p. 239.