The theory of ecstasy is at once the necessary condition and the condemnation of the theory of absolute unity. Without absolute unity as the direct object of knowledge, of what use is ecstasy in the subject of knowledge? Ecstasy, far from elevating man to God, abases him below man; for it effaces in him thought, by taking away its condition, which is consciousness. To suppress consciousness, is to render all knowledge impossible; it is not to comprehend the perfection of this mode of knowing, wherein the limitation of subject and object gives at once the simplest, most immediate, and most determinate knowledge.[90]
The Alexandrian mysticism is the most learned and the profoundest of all known mysticisms. In the heights of abstraction where it loses itself, it seems very far from popular superstitions; and yet the school of Alexandria unites ecstatic contemplation and theurgy. These are two things, in appearance, incompatible, but they pertain to the same principle, to the pretension of directly perceiving what inevitably escapes all our efforts. On the one hand, a refined mysticism aspires to God by ecstasy; on the other, a gross mysticism thinks to seize him by the senses. The processes, the faculties employed, differ, but the foundation is the same, and from this common foundation necessarily spring the most opposite extravagances. Apollonius of Tyanus is a popular Alexandrianist, and Jamblicus is Plotinus become a priest, mystagogue, and hierophant. A new worship shone forth by miracles; the ancient worship would have its own miracles, and philosophers boasted that they could make the divinity appear before other men. They had demons for themselves, and, in some sort, for their own orders; the gods were not only invoked, but evoked. Ecstasy for the initiates, theurgy for the crowd.
At all times and in all places, these two mysticisms have given each other the hand. In India and in China, the schools where the most subtile idealism is taught, are not far from pagodas of the most abject idolatry. One day the Bhagavad-Gita or Lao-tseu[91] is read, an indefinable God is taught, without essential and determinate attributes; the next day there is shown to the people such or such a form, such or such a manifestation of this God, who, not having a form that belongs to him, can receive all forms, and being only substance in itself, is necessarily the substance of every thing, of a stone and a drop of water, of a dog, a hero, and a sage. So, in the ancient world under Julien, for example, the same man was at once professor in the school of Athens and guardian of the temple of Minerva or Cybele, by turns obscuring the Timæus and the Republic by subtile commentaries, and exhibiting to the eyes of the multitude sometimes the sacred vale,[92] sometimes the shrine of the good goddess,[93] and in either function, as priest or philosopher, imposing on others and himself, under taking to ascend above the human mind and falling miserably below it, paying in some sort the penalty of an unintelligible metaphysics, in lending himself to the most shameless superstitions.
When the Christian religion triumphed, it brought humanity under a discipline that puts a rein upon this deplorable mysticism. But how many times has it brought back, under the reign of spiritual religion, all the extravagances of the religions of nature! It was to appear especially at the renaissance of the schools and of the genius of Paganism in the sixteenth century, when the human mind had broken with the philosophy of the Middle Age, without yet having arrived at modern philosophy.[94] The Paracelsuses and the Von Helmonts renewed the Apolloniuses and the Jamblicuses, abusing some chemical and medical knowledge, as the former had abused the Socratic and Platonic method, altered in its character, and turned from its true object. And so, in the midst of the eighteenth century, has not Swedenborg united in his own person an exalted mysticism and a sort of magic, opening thus the way to those senseless[95] persons who contest with me in the morning the solidest and best-established proofs of the existence of the soul and God, and propose to me in the evening to make me see otherwise than with my eyes, and to make me hear otherwise than with my ears, to make me use all my faculties otherwise than by their natural organs, promising me a superhuman science, on the condition of first losing consciousness, thought, liberty, memory, all that constitutes me an intelligent and moral being. I should know all, then, but at the cost of knowing nothing that I should know. I should elevate myself to a marvellous world, which, awakened and in a natural state, I am not even able to suspect, of which no remembrance will remain to me:—a mysticism at once gross and chimerical, which perverts both psychology and physiology; an imbecile ecstasy, renewed without genius from the Alexandrine ecstasy; an extravagance which has not even the merit of a little novelty, and which history has seen reappearing at all epochs of ambition and impotence.
This is what we come to when we wish to go beyond the conditions imposed upon human nature. Charron first said, and after him Pascal repeated it, that whoever would become an angel becomes a beast. The remedy for all these follies is a severe theory of reason, of what it can and what it cannot do; of reason enveloped first in the exercise of the senses, than elevating itself to universal and necessary ideas, referring them to their principle, to a being infinite and at the same time real and substantial, whose existence it conceives, but whose nature it is always interdicted to penetrate and comprehend. Sentiment accompanies and vivifies the sublime intuitions of reason, but we must not confound these two orders of facts, much less smother reason in sentiment. Between a finite being like man and God, absolute and infinite substance, there is the double intermediary of that magnificent universe open to our gaze, and of those marvellous truths which reason conceives, but has not made more than the eye makes the beauties it perceives. The only means that is given us of elevating ourselves to the Being of beings, without being dazzled and bewildered, is to approach him by the aid of a divine intermediary; that is to say, to consecrate ourselves to the study and the love of truth, and, as we shall soon see, to the contemplation and reproduction of the beautiful, especially to the practice of the good.