It was at the opening of the present century that the great rush to Rome took place: a significant lesson, indicating the constant issue of that subjective poetical religionism which divorces Truth from Beauty, which craves religious fancies and neglects religious facts, till it falls a victim to the greatest religious fallacy. Then was celebrated the perversion of Frederick Schlegel, of Adam Müller, of Zachariah Werner—‘a born mystic,’ as Carlyle rightly styles him. Tieck, who must stand acquitted of the follies of the school; and August Wilhelm Schlegel (despite some crotchets, immeasurably superior to Frederick) retained their Protestantism.
Novalis, for by this name Friedrich von Hardenberg is most known, is perhaps as fair a representative of Romanticism as can be found. He had no occasion, like some of the party, to affect, as so much art, the language of the mystics whom he studied with such devotion. Novalis was to the manner born. To none was the realm of reverie and fable—visited by most of us only at intervals—more completely a familiar, daily dwelling-place. Scarcely to the morbid phantasy of Hoffmann was the ordinary life more visibly inwrought with the mysterious. Poetry was his practical staff of every-day existence; and practical life, to him, all poetry. The creations of his fancy were his Holy Writ; and Holy Writ the most divine creation of the fancy. Werner regretted that men should ever have employed two distinct terms to designate Art and Religion. With Novalis they are perfectly identical. It is his wont to deal with spiritual truth by analogies drawn from physics, and to investigate physics by his mystical axioms concerning spiritual truth. A mind so desultory and discursive was quite unequal to the formation of a system. But to what sort of system such a confusion of thought must lead, if ever methodically elaborated, has not patient, hard-working Jacob Behmen already shown us? Where other men are satisfied with tracing a resemblance, Novalis announces an identity. What others use as an illustration, he will obey as a principle. With him, as with the old theosophists, the laws of the universe are the imaginative analogies which link together all its regions, seen and unseen,—analogies bred in his own heated brain.
Thus, according to Novalis, he is the true Archimage of Idealism, ‘who can transform external things into thoughts, and thoughts into external things.’ ‘The poet,’ he says, ‘is the true enchanter: by identifying himself with an object he compels it to become what he will.’ ‘Experience is magical, and only magically explicable.’ ‘Physics is the theory of imagination.’ ‘Religion, Love, Nature, Politics, all must be treated mystically.’ On such a principle alone can we account for the ultra-Neoplatonist rodomontade he utters in praise of mathematics. He declares the genuine mathematician the enthusiast par excellence—mathematics is the life of the gods—it is religion—it is virtual omniscience. Mathematical books are to be read devoutly, as the word of God.[[404]]
The suggestive and sparkling aphorisms of Novalis should be read with due allowance. Some contain admirable thoughts, pointedly expressed; others are curiously perverse or puerile. Now they breathe the lofty stoical spirit we find in Schleiermacher’s monologues. Presently, Fichte seems forgotten; the strain of Titanic self-assertion is relaxed, and Novalis languidly reclines with the Lotos-eaters among the flowers. In one page life is but ‘a battle and a march,’ in another, the soul’s activity is an eating poison; love, a sickness; life, the disease of the spirit—a brief fever, to be soothed by the slumber of mystical repose, and healed at last by healthful, restful death. In this latter mood he woos the sleepy abstraction of the oriental mysticism. Action is morbid, in his eyes; to dream is to overcome. All activity ceases, he says, when Knowledge enters. The condition of Knowlege is Eudæmonia—saintly calm of contemplation.[[405]] Such is the aspiration dimly discernible through the florid obscurity of his Hymns to Night. Shutting out the garish outer world of the Actual, forgetting all its tinsel glories and its petty pains, the enthusiast seems to rise into that mystic meditative Night, whose darkness reveals more truth than the searching brightness of the daylight, and in whose recesses his transported spirit celebrates its bridal with the Queen of Heaven—the æsthetic Mary, the Eternal Beauty.
Now that the assailants of Revelation have grown so extremely pious, we find them zealously enlisting certain modifications of mysticism on their side. Modern spiritualism revives the tactics of ancient philosophy. It borrows from Christianity (as did Porphyry) a higher moral tone than it could otherwise have reached, and then pretends to look down upon the ethics of the scriptures. The religious sentiment so variously evolved in every age and country, is brought forth to overwhelm the religious truth revealed in Christ. A philosophic church is set up. The hope full of immortality is depreciated as low and selfish. Quietism abased itself so profoundly that it would scarcely lift its eyes toward that hope. Spiritualism exalts itself so ambitiously, that it will not stoop to make that hope its own. In the seventeenth century, mysticism was in sad earnest on this question of disinterestedness: in the nineteenth, such indifference is the pretence of a preposterous self-sufficiency.
But the device which failed so signally, some fourteen centuries ago, cannot now prevail, though the hostile approach is more artfully contrived. That antichristian sentimentalism which is too refined for the medium of a book, and for the morality of the Bible, was discomfited as soon as seen, and received its coup de grace from the ‘Eclipse of Faith,’ amidst universal laughter. But this repetition of old ideas is, after all, the most mortifying and damnatory fact. To think; that the advocates of a philosophic religious sentiment, in opposition to the old Book, should exhibit as little novelty as their enemies,—that even after throwing off the Biblical fetters, no progress should be visible,—that the haunting Past should be with them still,—that after making their escape from antiquated Paul and John, they should find themselves in company with antiquated Proclus and Plotinus!
The theosophy of Swedenborg was original. Mysticism has produced nothing really new in that direction since his day, and the northern seer still walks alone within his circle. Franz Baader re-clothes the bones of Behmen’s system from the materials of modern science; and Oetinger, a student both of Behmen and of Swedenborg, attempts to arrange a divine system of science by the mystical interpretation of scripture. Even the ‘holy vegetation’ of oriental mysticism has been reproduced. Schelling bids man know God ‘in silent not-knowing,’ as the plant reveals eternal beauty in ‘stillest existence and without reflection.’ Such counsel means much more than the maxim, ‘Il ne faut pas voyager pour voir, mais pour ne pas voir,’ so frequent with John of the Cross and Fénélon. Laurence Oken, a physiologist of note and a disciple of Schelling, sees in the snail an exalted symbol of mind slumbering deeply within itself. He beholds in that creature an impersonation of majestic wisdom: it is ‘the prophesying goddess sitting on the tripod.’ What reflection, what earnestness, what timidity, what confidence! The same Oken travesties Behmen, when he makes red = fire, love, Father; blue = air, truth, belief, Son; green = water, formation, hope, Ghost; yellow = earth, Satan. He imagined that he wrote his Physio-philosophy in a kind of inspiration. Here, again, we see that this intellectual intuition, professedly so keen, so spontaneous, so free from every formula, does yet continually repeat itself.
Great and various have been the services rendered by mysticism throughout the history of the Christian Church. It has exposed pretence, it has demanded thoroughness. It has sought, amidst surrounding formalism, what was deemed the highest form of spirituality. Its strain has been sometimes of a mood so high as to ‘create a soul within the ribs of death.’
But it has been influential for good in proportion to its temperance in the doctrine concerning the outward rule and the inner light. Wherever it has been extravagant in this respect—has thrown off common sense or decency—been turbulent, licentious, or ‘high fantastical,’ there good men and thoughtful have stood mournfully aloof from it, while formal men or designing have made its follies a plea for tightening the cords of spiritual oppression. It has won acceptance from men when it has been sufficiently moderate to urge intelligible arguments, and to appeal sincerely (if not always warrantably) to that outward Revelation which is commonly received. But the world has rarely been disposed to receive boastful professions of spirituality or freedom, vague declamation and rhapsodical denunciation of reason or the schools, in the place of those definite expressions of opinion which, though sometimes narrow, are at least readily apprehensible. Incalculable must be the advantage of any man or party who can manifest a clear meaning over those who cannot.
There is danger in the present day, lest in the reaction against logical formalism and prescription, an extravagant value should be set on faith for its own sake. The Romanist makes mere faith, blind and implicit, a saving virtue. The spiritualist falls into the same error when he says, ‘Only be in earnest—get faith in an idea—in something, at any rate—and all will be well.’ But faith is a principle, not an instinct. Among the many claimants for my belief, I must make an intelligent choice. It is of some consequence whether the ‘idea’ on which I am mounted be false or true. It can be good for no man to be recklessly earnest in the devil’s work.