Strange to relate, the leader of the mystical movement in France to which philosophy was destined to attach itself, was himself the mildest and least revolutionary of men.
Louis Claude de Saint-Martin might be described as the reincarnation of St. Francis of Assisi in the eighteenth century. Had he lived four hundred years earlier he would have passed his gentle flower-like life in the seclusion of some cloister, had beatific visions of the Saviour of the world, communed with the Virgin and Saints, worked miracles, founded a monastic order, and at his death been canonized by the Church, of whose faith he would have been the champion and of its tenderness the exemplar. Pure and meditative by nature he had been greatly influenced when a boy by an ascetic book, The Art of Knowing Oneself, that he chanced to read. As his father, to whom he was deeply attached, intended him for the Bar he devoted himself to the study of law, and though he had no taste for the profession passed his examinations. But after practising six months he declared himself incapable of distinguishing in any suit between the claims of the defendant and the plaintiff, and requested to be allowed to exchange the legal profession for the military—not because he had any liking for the career of arms, but in order that he might “have leisure to continue the study of religion and philosophy.”
To oblige his father the Duc de Choiseul, then Prime Minister, gave him a lieutenancy in the Regiment de Foix, then in garrison at Bordeaux. Here he met one of those strange characters so common in this century, who, either charlatans of genius or dreamers by temperament, supplied with arms from the arsenal of the supernatural boldly asserted the supremacy of the occult and attacked science and philosophy alike. This particular individual was called Martinez Pasqualis, but as like so many of his kind he enveloped himself in mystery it is impossible to discover who or what he was, or where he came from. He was supposed to be a Christianized Jew from one of the Portuguese colonies in the East, which would account perhaps for his skill in the practice of the occult. At any rate, the strange secrecy he maintained in regard to himself was sufficient in the eighteenth century to credit him with supernatural powers.
When Saint-Martin met him in Bordeaux he had for ten years held a sort of school of theurgy. At Avignon, Toulouse, and other Southern cities his pupils or disciples formed themselves into a sect, known as Martinists after their master, for the practice of his doctrines, which though but vaguely understood were attractive from the hopes they held out of communicating with the invisible world. Saint-Martin was the first to grasp their meaning. He joined the Martinists, whose existence till then was scarcely known, and became their chief when the dissensions to which the private life of Pasqualis had given rise were healed by his sudden and singular departure for Haiti, where he died of yellow fever shortly after his arrival.
Drawn from obscurity by the personal charm and high social position of its new leader, Martinism rapidly attracted attention. In a strange little book, Des Erreurs et de la Vérité par un philosophe inconnu, Saint-Martin endeavoured to detach himself and his adherents from the magic in which Pasqualis—who practised it openly—had involved this sect. But though he gave up the quest of supernatural phenomena as unnecessary to an acquaintance with the unseen, and wandered deeper and deeper into pure mysticism, he never wholly succeeded in escaping from the grosser influence of his first initiation in the occult. From the fact, however, that he called himself the “Robinson Crusoe of spiritualism,” some idea may be gained of the distance that separated him from those who also claimed connection with the invisible world. He did not count on being understood. Of one of his books he said, “it is too far from ordinary human ideas to be successful. I have often felt in writing it as if I were playing valses on my violin in the cemetery of Montmartre, where for all the magic of my bow, the dead will neither hear nor dance.”
Nevertheless, though philosophy failed to follow him to the remote regions of speculation to which he withdrew, it grasped enough of his meaning to apply it. And the Revolution, which before its arrival he had regarded as the “lost word” by which the regeneration of mankind was to be effected, and when it actually came as “the miniature of the last judgment,” adopted his sacred ternary “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity”—the Father, Son and Holy Ghost of Martinism—as its device. Saint-Martin was one of the few who strove to inaugurate it whom it did not devour. He passed through it unmolested, dying as he had lived gently. His only regret in passing from the visible to the invisible was that he had left “the mystery of numbers unsolved.”
V
The influence of Saint-Martin, however, was passive rather than active. Though philosophy confusedly and unconsciously imbibed the Socialistic theories of mysticism, the French being at once a practical and an excitable people were not to be kindled by speculations of the intellect, however daring, original, and attractive they might be. The palpable prodigies of Mesmer appealed more powerfully to them than the vague abstractions of Saint-Martin.
It was in Germany that revolutionary mysticism found its motive power. Whilst Saint-Martin, proclaiming in occult language that “all men were kings,” sought to efface himself at the feet of sovereigns, Adam Weishaupt was shaking their thrones. It would be impossible to find two men more unlike. Weishaupt was the very antithesis of Saint-Martin. He was not a mystic at all, and furthermore always professed the greatest contempt for “supernatural tricks.” But consumed with an implacable hatred of despotism and with a genius for conspiracy he perceived in the widespread attraction and revolutionary tendency of the supernatural the engine of destruction he required.
Born of Catholic parents at Ingolstadt in Bavaria, Weishaupt had been sent as a boy to the Jesuit seminary in that town, but conceiving a great dislike for the method of instruction employed there he left it for the university. On the temporary abolition of the Order of the Jesuits, having taken his degree, he was appointed to the professorship of jurisprudence till then held by a Jesuit. Though deprived of their functions the members of the suppressed Order still remained in the country, and posing as martyrs continued to exercise in secret their malign influence as powerfully as ever. Weishaupt naturally found in them bitter enemies; and to fight them conceived the idea of founding a secret society, which the great popularity he enjoyed among the students enabled him to realize.