Mysticism corrupts sentiment by exaggerating its power.
Mysticism begins by suppressing in man reason, or, at least, it subordinates and sacrifices reason to sentiment.
Listen to mysticism: it says that by the heart alone is man in relation with God. All that is great, beautiful, infinite, eternal, love alone reveals to us. Reason is only a lying faculty. Because it may err, and does err, it is said that it always errs. Reason is confounded with every thing that it is not. The errors of the senses, and of reasoning, the illusions of the imagination, even the extravagances of passion, which sometimes give rise to those of mind, every thing is laid to the charge of reason. Its imperfections are triumphed over, its miseries are complacently exhibited; the most audacious dogmatical system—since it aspires to put man and God in immediate communication—borrows against reason all the arms of skepticism.
Mysticism goes farther: it attacks liberty itself; it orders liberty to renounce itself, in order to identify itself by love with him from whom the infinite separates us. The ideal of virtue is no longer the courageous perseverance of the good man, who, in struggling against temptation and suffering, makes life holy; it is no longer the free and enlightened devotion of a loving soul; it is the entire and blind abandonment of ourselves, of our will, of our being, in a barren contemplation of thought, in a prayer without utterance, and almost without consciousness.
The source of mysticism is in that incomplete view of human nature, which knows not how to discern in it what therein is most profound, which betakes itself to what is therein most striking, most seizing, and, consequently, also most seizable. We have already said that reason is not noisy, and often is not heard, whilst its echo of sentiment loudly resounds. In this compound phenomenon, it is natural that the most apparent element should cover and dim the most obscure.
Moreover, what relations, what deceptive resemblances between these two faculties! Without doubt, in their development, they manifestly differ; when reason becomes reasoning, one easily distinguishes its heavy movement from the flight of sentiment; but spontaneous reason is almost confounded with sentiment,—there is the same rapidity, the same obscurity. Add that they pursue the same object, and almost always go together. It is not, then, astonishing that they should be confounded.
A wise philosophy distinguishes[74] them without separating them. Analysis demonstrates that reason precedes, and that sentiment follows. How can we love what we are ignorant of? In order to enjoy the truth, is it not necessary to know it more or less? In order to be moved by certain ideas, is it not necessary to have possessed them in some degree? To absorb reason in sentiment is to stifle the cause in the effect. When one speaks of the light of the heart, he designates, without knowing it, that light of the spontaneous reason which discovers to us truth by a pure and immediate intuition entirely opposite to the slow and laborious processes of the reflective reason and reasoning.
Sentiment by itself is a source of emotion, not of knowledge. The sole faculty of knowledge is reason. At bottom, if sentiment is different from sensation, it nevertheless pertains on all sides to general sensibility, and it is, like it, variable; it has, like it, its interruptions, its vivacity, and its lassitude, its exaltation and its short-comings. The inspirations of sentiment, then, which are essentially mobile and individual, cannot be raised to a universal and absolute rule. It is not so with reason; it is constantly the same in each one of us, the same in all men. The laws that govern its exercise constitute the common legislation of all intelligent beings. There is no intelligence that does not conceive some universal and necessary truth, and, consequently, the infinite being who is its principle. These grand objects being once known excite in the souls of all men the emotions that we have endeavored to describe. These emotions partake of the dignity of reason and the mobility of imagination and sensibility. Sentiment is the harmonious and living relation between reason and sensibility. Suppress one of the two terms, and what becomes of the relation? Mysticism pretends to elevate man directly to God, and does not see that in depriving reason of its power, it really deprives him of that which makes him know God, and puts him in a just communication with God by the intermediary of eternal and infinite truth.
The fundamental error of mysticism is, that it discards this intermediary, as if it were a barrier and not a tie: it makes the infinite being the direct object of love. But such a love can be sustained only by superhuman efforts that end in folly. Love tends to unite itself with its object: mysticism absorbs love in its object. Hence the extravagances of that mysticism so severely and so justly condemned by Bossuet and the Church in quietism.[75] Quietism lulls to sleep the activity of man, extinguishes his intelligence, substitutes indolent and irregular contemplation for the seeking of truth and the fulfilment of duty. The true union of the soul with God is made by truth and virtue. Every other union is a chimera, a peril, sometimes a crime. It is not permitted man to reject, under any pretext, that which makes him man, that which renders him capable of comprehending God, and expressing in himself an imperfect image of God, that is to say, reason, liberty, conscience. Without doubt, virtue has its prudence, and if we must never yield to passion, there are diverse ways of combating it in order to conquer it. One can let it subside, and resignation and silence may have their legitimate employment. There is a portion of truth, of utility even, in the Spiritual Letters, even in the Maxims of the Saints. But, in general, it is unsafe to anticipate in this world the prerogatives of death, and to dream of sanctity when virtue alone is required of us, when virtue is so difficult to attain, even imperfectly. The best quietism can, at most, be only a halt in the course, a truce in the strife, or rather another manner of combating. It is not by flight that battles are gained; in order to gain them it is necessary to come to an engagement, so much the more as duty consists in combating still more than in conquering. Of the two opposite extremes—stoicism and quietism—the first, taken all in all, is preferable to the second; for if it does not always elevate man to God, it maintains, at least, human personality, liberty, conscience, whilst quietism, in abolishing these, abolishes the entire man. Oblivion of life and its duties, inertness, sloth, death of soul,—such are the fruits of that love of God, which is lost in the sterile contemplation of its object, provided it does not cause still sadder aberrations! There comes a moment when the soul that believes itself united with God, puffed up with this imaginary possession, despises both the body and human personality to such an extent that all its actions become indifferent to it, and good and evil are in its eyes the same. Thus it is that fanatical sects have been seen mingling crime and devotion, finding in one the excuse, often even the motive, of the other, and prefacing infamous irregularities or abominable cruelties with mystic transports,—deplorable consequences of the chimera of pure love, of the pretension of sentiment to rule over reason, to serve alone as a guide to the human soul, and to put itself in direct communication with God, without the intermediary of the visible world, and without the still surer intermediary of intelligence and truth.
But it is time to pass to another kind of mysticism, more singular, more learned, more refined, and quite as unreasonable, although it presents itself in the very name of reason.