If we try to represent the course of Mysticism in Europe during the Christian period by the common device of a chronological curve, showing, by its rises and falls as it passes across the centuries, the absence or preponderance in any given epoch of mystics and mystical thought; we shall find that the great periods of mystical activity correspond with a curious exactness with the great periods of artistic, material, and intellectual civilization. Rather, they come immediately after, and seem to complete such periods: those stupendous outbursts of vitality in which man makes fresh conquests over his universe, apparently producing as their last stage a type of heroic character which extends these victories to the spiritual sphere. When science, politics, literature, and the arts—the domination of nature and the ordering of life—have risen to their height and produced their greatest works, the mystic comes to the front; snatches the torch, and carries it on. It is almost as if he were humanity’s finest flower; the product at which each great creative period of the race had aimed.
Thus the thirteenth century expressed to perfection the mediaeval ideal in religion, art, philosophy, and public life. It built the Gothic cathedrals, put the finishing touch to the system of chivalry, and nourished the scholastic philosophers. It has many saints, but not very many mystics; though they increase in number as the century draws on. The fourteenth century is filled by great contemplatives; who lifted this wave of activity to spiritual levels, and brought all the romance and passion of the mediaeval temperament to bear upon the deepest mysteries of the transcendental life. Again, the sixteenth century, blazing with an intellectual vitality which left no corner of existence unexplored, which produced the Renaissance and the Humanists and remade the mediaeval world, had hardly reached its full development before the great procession of the post-Renaissance p. 542 mystics, with St. Teresa at their head, began. If Life, then—the great and restless life of the race—be described under the trite metaphor of a billowy sea, each great wave as it rises from the deep bears the mystic type upon its crest.
Our curve, then, will follow close behind that other curve which represents the intellectual life of humanity. Its course will be studded and defined for us by the names of the great mystics; the possessors of spiritual genius, the pathfinders to the country of the soul. These starry names are significant not only in themselves, but also as links in the chain of man’s growing spiritual history. They are not isolated phenomena, but are related to one another. Each receives something from the past: each by his personal adventures enriches it, and hands it on to the future. As we go on, we notice more and more this cumulative power of the past. Each mystic, original though he be, yet owes much to the inherited acquirement of his spiritual ancestors. These ancestors form his tradition, are the classic examples on which his education is based; and from them he takes the language which they have sought out and constructed as a means of telling their adventures to the world. It is by their help too, very often, that he elucidates for himself the meaning of the dim perceptions of his amazed soul. From his own experiences he adds to this store; and hands on an enriched tradition of the transcendental life to the next spiritual genius evolved by the race. Hence the names of the great mystics are connected by a thread; and it becomes possible to treat them as subjects of history rather than of biography.
I have said that this thread forms a curve, following the fluctuations of the intellectual life of the race. At its highest points, the names of the mystics are clustered most thickly, at its descents they become fewer and fewer, at the lowest points they die away. Between the first century A.D. and the nineteenth, this curve exhibits three great waves of mystical activity; besides many minor fluctuations. They correspond with the close of the Classical, the Mediaeval and the Renaissance periods in history: reaching their highest points in the third, fourteenth, and seventeenth centuries. In one respect, however, the mystic curve diverges from the historical one. It rises to its highest point in the fourteenth century, and does not again approach the level it there attains; for the mediaeval period was more favourable to the development of mysticism than any subsequent epoch has been. The fourteenth century is as much the classic moment for the spiritual history of our race as the thirteenth is for the history of Gothic, or the fifteenth for that of Italian art.
The names upon our curve, especially during the first ten centuries p. 543 of the Christian era, are often separated by long periods of time. This, of course, does not necessarily mean that these centuries produced few mystics: merely that few documents relating to them have survived. We have now no means of knowing, for instance, the amount of the true mysticism which undoubtedly existed amongst the initiates of the Greek or Egyptian Mysteries; how many inarticulate contemplatives of the first rank there were amongst the Alexandrian Neoplatonists, amongst the pre-Christian communities of contemplatives described by Philo, the deeply mystical Alexandrian Jew (B.C. 20-A.D. 40), the innumerable Gnostic sects which replaced in the early Christian world the Orphic and Dionysiac mystery-cults of Greece and Italy, or later, the thousands of monks and hermits who peopled the Egyptian Thebaid in the sixth and seventh centuries. Much real mystical inspiration there must have been, for we know that from these centres of life came many of the doctrines best loved by later mystics: that the Neoplatonists gave them the concepts of Pure Being and the One, that the New Birth and the Spiritual Marriage were foreshadowed in the Mysteries, that Philo anticipates the theology of the Fourth Gospel.
As we stand at the beginning of the Christian period we see three great sources whence its mystical tradition might have been derived. These sources are Greek, Oriental, and Christian—i.e., primitive Apostolic—doctrine or thought. As a matter of fact all contributed their share: but where Christianity gave the new vital impulse to transcendence, Greek and Oriental thought provided the principal forms in which it was expressed. The Christian religion, by its very nature, had a profoundly mystical side. Putting the personality of its Founder outside the limits of the present discussion, St. Paul and the author of the Fourth Gospel are obvious instances of mystics of the first rank amongst its earliest missionaries. The inner history of primitive Christianity is still in confusion; but in what has been already made out we find numerous, if scattered, indications that the mystic life was indigenous in the Church and the natural mystic had little need to look for inspiration outside the limits of his creed. Not only the epistles of St Paul and the Johannine writings, but also the earliest liturgic fragments which we possess, and such primitive religious poetry as the “Odes of Solomon” and the “Hymn of Jesus,” show how congenial was mystical expression to the mind of the Church; how eagerly that Church absorbed and transmuted the mystic element of Essene, Orphic, and Neoplatonic thought.
Towards the end of the second century this tendency received brilliant literary expression at the hands of Clement of Alexandria (c. 160-220), who first adapted the language of the pagan Mysteries to the Christian theory of the spiritual life. Nevertheless, the first person p. 544 after St. Paul of whom it can now be decisively stated that he was a practical mystic of the first rank, and in whose writings the central mystic doctrine of union with God is found, is a pagan. That person is Plotinus, the great Neoplatonic philosopher of Alexandria (A.D. 205-c. 270). His mysticism owes nothing to the Christian religion, which is never mentioned in his works. Intellectually it contains elements drawn from Platonic philosophy, from the Mysteries, and probably from the Oriental cults and philosophies which ran riot in Alexandria in the third century. These things, however, merely served Plotinus on his mystical side as a means of expressing as much of his own sublime experience as he chose to tell the world. Ostensibly a metaphysician, he possessed transcendental genius of a high order, and was consumed by a burning passion for the Absolute. His disciple Porphyry has left it on record that on four occasions he saw his master rapt to ecstatic union with “the One.”
The Neoplatonism of which Plotinus was the greatest exponent became the vehicle in which most of the mysticism—both Christian and pagan—of the first six centuries was expressed. But, since the emergence of mysticism always means the emergence of a certain type of character or genius, not the emergence of a certain type of philosophy, Neoplatonism as a whole, and the mysticism which used its language, must not be identified with one another: though Porphyry (203-304), favourite pupil of Plotinus, seems to have inherited something of his master’s mysticism. Neoplatonism as a whole was a confused, semi-religious philosophy, containing many inconsistent elements. Appearing at the moment in which the wreck of paganism was complete, but before Christianity had conquered the educated world, it made a strong appeal to the spiritually minded; and also to those who hankered after the mysterious and the occult. It taught the illusory nature of all temporal things, and in the violence of its idealism outdid its master Plato. It also taught the existence of an Absolute God, the “Unconditioned One,” who might be known in ecstasy and contemplation; and here it made a direct appeal to the mystical instincts of men. Those natural mystics who lived in the time of its greatest popularity found in it therefore a ready means of expressing their own intuitions of reality. Hence it is that the early mysticism of Europe, both Christian and pagan, has come down to us in a Neoplatonic dress; and speaks the tongue of Alexandria rather than that of Jerusalem, Athens, or Rome.
The influence of Plotinus upon later Christian mysticism was enormous though indirect. During the patristic period all that was best in the spirit of Neoplatonism flowed into the veins of the Church. p. 545 St. Augustine (A.D. 354-430) and Dionysius the Areopagite (writing between 475 and 525) are amongst his spiritual children. So too is Proclus (412-c. 490), the last of the pagan philosophers. Through these there is hardly one in the long tale of the European contemplatives whom his powerful spirit has failed to reach.
The mysticism of St. Augustine is partly obscured for us by the wealth of his intellectual and practical life: yet no one can read the “Confessions” without being struck by the intensity and actuality of his spiritual experience, and the characteristically mystical formulæ under which he apprehended Reality. In the period in which he composed this work it is clear that he was already an advanced contemplative. The marvellous intellectual activities by which he is best remembered were fed by the solitary adventures of his soul. No merely literary genius could have produced the wonderful chapters in the seventh and eighth books, or the innumerable detached passages in which his passion for the Absolute breaks out: and later mystics, recognizing this fact, will be found to appeal again and again to his authority.
The influence of St. Augustine on the later history of mysticism, though very great, was nothing in comparison with that exercised by the writings of the strange and nameless character who chose to ascribe his works to Dionysius the Areopagite, the friend of St. Paul, and to address his letters upon mysticism to Paul’s fellow-worker, Timothy. The pseudo-Dionysius was probably a Syrian monk. The patristic quotations detected in his work prove that he cannot have written before A.D. 475; it is most likely that he flourished in the early part of the sixth century. His chief works are the treatises on the Angelic Hierarchies and on the Names of God, and a short but priceless tract on mystical theology. Few persons now look at the works of Dionysius: but from the ninth century to the seventeenth they nourished the most spiritual intuitions of men, and possessed an authority which it is now hard to realize. In studying mediæval mysticism one has always to reckon with him. Particularly in the fourteenth century, the golden age of mystical literature, the phrase “Dionysius saith” is of continual recurrence: and has for those who use it much the same weight as quotations from the Bible or the great fathers of the Church.
The importance of Dionysius lies in the fact that he was the first, and for a long time the only Christian writer who attempted to describe frankly and accurately the workings of the mystical consciousness, and the nature of its ecstatic attainment of God. So well did he do his work that later contemplatives, reading him, found their most sublime and amazing experiences reflected and partly explained. Hence in p. 546 describing those experiences, they adopted in their turn his language and metaphors; which afterwards became the classic terms of contemplative science. To him Christian literature owes the paradoxical concept of the Absolute Godhead as the “Divine Dark,” the Unconditioned, “the negation of all that is”—i.e., of all that the surface consciousness perceives—and of the soul’s attainment of the Absolute as a “divine ignorance,” a way of negation. This idea is common to Greek and Indian philosophy. With Dionysius it enters the Catholic fold.
The Patristic period, running from the second century to the seventh, has amongst its great names several deeply mystical spirits who have left their mark upon religious history: especially the profound thinker and contemplative Origen (c. 185-253) and the Coptic hermit St. Macarius of Egypt (c. 295-386), the disciple of St. Anthony and friend of St. Basil—a forgotten genius in whose writings the pure ideal of Christian mysticism attains perfect expression. The period terminates with the life of the saintly Pope Gregory the Great (540-604). In his works, influenced though they were by the Greek fathers, there first emerges that sober and orderly mystical doctrine destined to be characteristic of the Roman Church. He was much read by succeeding contemplatives; his practical counsels counterbalancing the intense Neoplatonism of Dionysius, whose works were translated from Greek into Latin about A.D. 850 by the great Irish philosopher and theologian, John Scotus Erigena, one of the scholars assembled at the court of Charlemagne. From this event we must date the beginning of a full tradition of mysticism in Western Europe. John the Scot, many of whose own writings exhibit a strong mystical bias, is the only name in this period which the history of mysticism can claim. We are on the descending line of the “Dark Ages”: and here the curve of mysticism runs parallel with the curves of intellectual and artistic activity.
During the eleventh century the arts revived: and by the beginning of the twelfth the wave of new life had reached the mystic level. France now made the first of her many contributions to the history of mysticism in the person of St. Bernard (1091-1153), the great Abbot of Clairvaux: and was the adopted country of another mystic almost as great, though now less famous: the Scotch or Irish Richard of St. Victor (ob. c. 1173), whom Dante held to be “in contemplation more than man.” Richard’s master and contemporary, the scholastic philosopher Hugh (1097-1141) of the same Abbey of St. Victor at Paris, is also generally reckoned amongst the mystics of this period, but with less reason; since contemplation occupies a small place in his theological p. 547 writings. In spite of the deep respect which is shown towards him by Aquinas and other theologians, Hugh’s influence on later mystical literature was slight. The spirit of Richard and of St. Bernard, on the contrary, was destined to dominate it for the next two hundred years. With them the literature of mediaeval mysticism, properly so called, begins.
This literature falls into two classes: the autobiographical and the didactic. Sometimes, as happens in a celebrated sermon of St. Bernard, the two are combined; the teacher appealing to his own experience in illustration of his theme.
In the works of the Victorines, the attitude is purely didactic: one might almost say scientific. In them, mysticism—that is to say, the degrees of contemplation, the training and exercise of the spiritual sense—takes its place as a recognized department of theology. It is, in Richard’s favourite symbolism, “Benjamin,” the beloved child of Rachel, emblem of the Contemplative Life: and in his two chief works, “Benjamin Major” and “Benjamin Minor,” it is classified and described in all its branches, with a wealth of allegorical detail which too often obscures the real beauties and ardours beneath. Richard of St. Victor was one of the chief channels through whom the antique mystical tradition, which flowed through Plotinus and the Areopagite, was transmitted to the mediaeval world. In his hands. that tradition was codified. Like his master, Hugh, he had the mediaeval passion for elaborate allegory, neat arrangement, rigid classification and significant numbers in things. As Dante parcelled out Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell with mathematical precision, and proved that Beatrice was herself a Nine; so these writers divide and subdivide the stages of contemplation, the states of the soul, the degrees of Divine Love: and perform terrible tours de force in the course of compelling all the living spontaneous and ever-variable expressions of man’s spiritual vitality to fall into orderly and parallel series, conformable to the mystic numbers of Seven, Four, and Three.
The same baneful passion obscures for modern readers the real merits of St. Bernard, though it did but enhance his reputation with those for whom he wrote. His writings, and those of Richard of St. Victor, quickly took their place amongst the living forces which conditioned the development of later mystics. Both have a special interest for us in the fact that they influenced the formation of our national school of mysticism in the fourteenth century. Translations and paraphrases of the “Benjamin Major,” “Benjamin Minor,” and other works of Richard of St. Victor, and of various tracts and epistles of St. Bernard, are constantly met with in the MS. collections of mys p. 548 tical and theological literature written in England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. An early paraphrase of the “Benjamin Minor,” sometimes attributed to the “father of English mysticism,” Richard Rolle, was probably made by the anonymous author of the “Cloud of Unknowing,” who was also responsible for the first appearance of the Areopagite in English dress.
The curve of mystical life, then, travelling through the centuries, has moved, like all waves of spiritual vitality, from east to west. By the twelfth century it has reached France: and shown, in the persons of Richard of St. Victor and St. Bernard, at once the intellectual and political strength of the mystic type. At the same time there appear in Germany the first of the long line of women mystics: the first, at any rate, whose literary works and authentic records have survived.
With St. Hildegarde (1098-1179) and St. Elizabeth of Schoenau (1138-1165) the history of German mysticism begins. These remarkable women, visionaries, prophetesses, and political reformers, are the early representatives of a type of mysticism of which St. Catherine of Siena is the most familiar and perhaps the greatest example. Exalted by the strength of their spiritual intuitions, they emerged from an obscure life to impose their wills, and their reading of events, upon the world. From the point of view of Eternity, in whose light they lived, they attacked the corruption of their generation. Already in the inspired letters which St. Hildegarde sent like firebrands over Europe, we see German idealism and German practicality struggling together; the unflinching description of abuses, the vast poetic vision by which they are condemned. These qualities are seen again in the South German mystics of the next century: the four Benedictine women of genius, who had their home in the convent of Helfde. These are the Nun Gertrude (Abbess 1251-1291) and her sister St. Mechthild of Hackborn (ob. 1310), with her sublime symbolic visions: then, the poet of the group, the exquisite Mechthild of Magdeburg (1212-1299), who, first a béguine at Magdeburg, where she wrote the greater part of “The Flowing Light of the Godhead,” came to Helfde in 1268; lastly the celebrated St. Gertrude the Great (1256-1311). In these contemplatives the political spirit is less marked than in St. Hildegarde: but religious and ethical activity takes its place. St. Gertrude the Great is a characteristic Catholic visionary of the feminine type: absorbed in her subjective experiences, her often beautiful and significant dreams, her loving conversations with Christ and the Blessed Virgin. Close to her in temperament is St. Mechthild of Hackborn; but her attitude as a whole is more impersonal, more truly mystic. The great symbolic visions in which her most p. 549 spiritual perceptions are expressed are artistic creations rather than psycho-sensorial hallucinations, and dwell little upon the humanity of Christ, with which St. Gertrude is constantly occupied. The terms in which Mechthild of Magdeburg—an educated and well-born woman, half poet, half seer—describes her union with God, are intensely individual, and apparently owe little to earlier religious writers. The works of this Mechthild, early translated into Latin, were read by Dante. Their influence is traceable in the “Paradiso”; and by some scholars she is believed to be the Matilda of his Earthly Paradise, though others give this position to her sister-mystic, St. Mechthild of Hackborn.
Another precursor of Dante begins for us the history of Italian mysticism: St. Francis of Assisi, poet and mystic (1182-1226), one of the greatest figures of the mediaeval world. It might truly be said of St. Francis, as was untruly said of his disciple St. Bonaventura, that all his learning was comprised in the crucifix. His mysticism owed much to nature, nothing to tradition; was untouched by the formative influence of monastic discipline, the writings of Dionysius and St. Bernard. It was the spontaneous and original expression of his personality, the rare personality of a poet of the Infinite, a “troubadour of God.” It showed itself in his few poems, his sayings, above all in his life: the material in which his genius expressed itself best. He walked, literally, in an enchanted world; where every living thing was a theophany, and all values were transvaluated by love.
None of those who came after him succeeded in recapturing his secret, which was the secret of spiritual genius of the rarest type: but he left his mark upon the history of Europe and the influence of his spirit has never wholly died. Italian mysticism descends from St. Francis, and in its first period seems indeed to be the prerogative of his friars. In the thirteenth century we see it, in all its detachment, freshness, and spontaneity, in four very different temperaments. First in St. Bonaventura (1221-1274), biographer of St. Francis, a theologian and doctor of the Church. Perhaps the least mystical of the four, he has had the greatest influence on later mystics. He combined a contemplative nature with considerable intellectual powers. A student of Dionysius, whose influence pervades his writings, it was he who brought the new spirit into line with the tradition of the past. Next, in the beautiful figure of St. Douceline (n. 1214), the lady of Genoa turned béguine, we find a spirit which, like that of its master, could find its way to the Divine through flowers and birds and simple natural things. The third of these Franciscan contemplatives, Jacopone da Todi (ob. 1306), the converted lawyer turned mystical p. 550 poet, lifts Franciscan mysticism to the heights of ecstatic rapture and of literary expression. Jacopone’s work has been shown by Von Hügel to have had a formative influence on St. Catherine of Genoa; and has probably affected many other Italian mystics.
The Blessed Angela of Foligno (1248-1309), last of the four in time though not in importance, was converted from a sinful life to become a tertiary hermit of the Franciscan order; and has left in her “Divine Consolations” the record of a series of profoundly significant visions and intuitions of truth. By the sixteenth century her works, translated into the vernacular, had taken their place amongst the classics of mysticism. In the seventeenth they were largely used by St. Francis de Sales, Madame Guyon, and other Catholic contemplatives. Seventeen years older than Dante, whose great genius properly closes this line of spiritual descent, she is a link between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Italian mysticism.
We now approach the Golden Age of Mysticism: and at the opening of that epoch, dominating it by their genius, stand that astonishing pair of friends, St. Bonaventura, the Franciscan, and St. Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican (1226-1274). As with St. Augustine, the intellectual greatness of St. Thomas has obscured his mystical side. Hence it is commonly stated that fourteenth-century mysticism derives from St. Bonaventura, and represents an opposition to scholastic theology; but as a matter of fact its greatest personalities—in particular Dante and the German Dominican school—are soaked in the spirit of Aquinas, and quote his authority at every turn.
Most of the mystical literature of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries is still in MS., and much probably remains unidentified. An interesting example has lately come to light in “The Mirror of Simple Souls”; a long treatise, translated and edited by an unknown English contemplative in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century from a lost French original, which was probably written under Franciscan influence between the years 1280-1309. The Mirror, which its prologue declares to be full of “high ghostly cunning” dangerous for common men, is certainly a piece of mystical literature of an advanced kind. Strongly influenced by Dionysius, by Richard of St. Victor, and by St. Bonaventura, it probably influenced in its turn the English writers who produced in the next century “The Cloud of Unknowing” and other profound treatises upon the inner life: and these are in fact the works which most nearly resemble it in substance, though its manner is its own.
With “The Mirror of Simple Souls” we bridge not only the gap between the mysticism of England and of France, but also that be p. 551 tween the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In Europe the mystic curve is now approaching its highest point. In the East, that point has already been passed. Sūfi, or Mahommedan mysticism, appearing in the ninth century, attains literary expression in the twelfth in the Confessions of Al Ghazzali, and has its classic period in the thirteenth in the works of the mystic poets ’Attar (c. 1140-1234), Sādi (1184-1263), and the saintly Jalalu ’d Din (1207-1273). Its tradition is continued in the fourteenth century by the rather erotic mysticism of Hafiz (c. 1300-1388) and his successors: and in the fifteenth by the poet Jámí (1414-1492).
Whilst Hafiz already strikes a note of decadence for the mysticism of Islam, the year 1300 is for Europe a vital year in the history of the spiritual life. In Italy, England, Germany, and Flanders mystics of the first rank are appearing, or about to appear. In Italy Dante (1265-1321) is forcing human language to express one of the most sublime visions of the Absolute which has ever been crystallized into speech. He inherits and fuses into one that loving and artistic reading of reality which was the heart of Franciscan mysticism, and that other ordered vision of the transcendental world which the Dominicans through Aquinas poured into the stream of European thought. For the one the spiritual world was all love: for the other all law. For Dante it was both. In the “Paradiso” his stupendous genius apprehends and shows to us a Beatific Vision in which the symbolic systems of all great mystics, and many whom the world does not call mystics—of Dionysius, Richard, St. Bernard, Mechthild, Aquinas, and countless others—are included and explained.
In Germany at the moment when the “Commedia” was being written, another mighty personality, the great Dominican scholar Meister Eckhart (1260-1329), who resembles Dante in his combination of mystical insight with intense intellectual power, was laying the foundations at once of German philosophy and German mysticism. These two giants stand side by side at the opening of the century, perfect representatives of the Teutonic and Latin instinct for transcendental reality.
Eckhart, though only a few years younger than St. Gertrude the Great, seems to belong to a different world. His commanding personality, his strange genius for the supra-sensible, moulded and inspired all whom it came near. The German and Flemish mystics of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, differing enormously in temperament from their master and from each other, have yet something in common: something which is shared by no other school. This something is derived from Eckhart; for one and all have passed under p. 552 his hand, being either his immediate disciples, or the friends or pupils of his disciples. Towards the end of his life he fell into disgrace. A number of propositions extracted from his writings, and representing his more extreme views, were condemned by the Church as savouring of pantheism and other heresies: and certainly the violence and daring of his language easily laid him open to misconstruction. In his efforts to speak of the unspeakable he was constantly betrayed into expressions which, though doubtless as near as he could get to his sublime intuitions of the Absolute, were bound to seem paradoxical and exaggerated to other men. Eckhart’s influence, however, was little hurt by ecclesiastical condemnation. His pupils, though they remained loyal Catholics, contrived also to be loyal disciples, and to the end of their lives their teaching was coloured—often inspired—by the doctrines of the great, if heretical, scholar.
The contrast in type between Eckhart and his two most famous disciples is an interesting one. All three were Dominican friars, all were devout followers of St. Augustine, the Areopagite, St. Bernard, and Aquinas: all lived and worked in the valley of the Rhine. The mysticism of Eckhart, so far as he allows us to see it in his sermons—the only literary works he has left—is objective; one might almost say dogmatic. He describes with an air of almost terrible certainty and intimacy, not that which he has felt, but the place or plane of being he has known—“the desert of the Godhead where no one is at home.” He is a learned mystic. A great scholar, a natural metaphysician, he had taught in the schools at Paris and Cologne: and his sermons, though addressed to the people and delivered in German, give evidence of his culture at every turn.
Of his two pupils, John Tauler (c. 1300-1361), friar-preacher of Strassburg, was a born missionary: a man who combined with great theological learning and mystical genius of a high order an overwhelming zeal for souls. He laboured incessantly to awaken men to a sense of their transcendental heritage. Without the hard intellectualism occasionally noticeable in Eckhart, or the tendency to introspection and the excessive artistic sensibility of Suso, Tauler is the most virile of the German mystics. The breadth of his humanity is only equalled by the depth of his spirituality. His sermons—and these are his only authentic works—are trumpet-calls to heroic action upon spiritual levels. They influenced many later mystics, especially St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross. Tauler is not a subjective writer: only by implication can we assure ourselves that he speaks from personal experience. He has sometimes, and most unfairly, been described as a precursor of the Reformation. Such a claim could p. 553 only be made by those who look upon all pure Christianity as a form of Protestant heresy. He attacked, like St. Catherine of Siena and many other mediaeval mystics, the ecclesiastical corruption of his period: but in the matter of belief his writings, if read in unexpurgated editions, prove him to have been a fervent and orthodox Catholic.
Tauler was one of the leading spirits in the great informal society of the Friends of God, which sprang into being in Strassburg, spread through the Rhenish province, and worked in this moment of religious decadence for the spiritual regeneration of the people. In a spirit of fierce enthusiasm and whole-hearted devotion, the Friends of God set themselves to the mystic life, as the only life worthy of the name. A tremendous outburst of transcendental activity took place: many visions and ecstasies were reported: amazing conversions occurred. The movement had many features in common with that of the Quakers, excepting that it took place within, instead of without, the official Church. With it was connected the third of the trio of great German Dominican mystics, the Blessed Henry Suso (c. 1300-1365), a natural recluse and ascetic, and a visionary of the most exuberant Catholic type.
To Suso, subjective, romantic, deeply interested in his own soul and his personal relation with God, mysticism was not so much a doctrine to be imparted to other men, as an intimate personal adventure. In his autobiography—a human document far more detailed and ingenuous than St. Teresa’s more celebrated Life—he has left us the record of all his griefs and joys, his pains, visions, ecstasies, and miseries. Even his mystical treatises are in dialogue form, as if he could hardly get away from the personal and dramatic aspect of the spiritual life.
Around these three—Eckhart, Tauler, Suso—are gathered other and more shadowy personalities: members of this mystical society of the Friends of God, bound to the heroic attempt to bring life—the terribly corrupt and disordered religious life of the fourteenth century—back into relation with spiritual reality, to initiate their neighbours into the atmosphere of God. From one of these nameless members comes the literary jewel of the movement: the beautiful little treatise called the “Theologia Germanica,” one of the most successful of many attempts to make mystic principles available for common men. Others are known to us only as the authors of letters, descriptions of conversions, visions, and spiritual adventures—literature which the Friends of God produced in enormous quantities. No part of the history of mysticism has been more changed by recent research than that of the p. 554 Rhenish school: and the work is still but partly done. At present we can only record the principal names which we find connected with the mystical propaganda of the Friends of God. These are first the nuns Margaret Ebner (1291-1351) and her sister Christina, important personages in the movement, upon whose historicity no doubts have been cast. Margaret appears to have been a psychic as well as a mystic: and to have possessed, like Madame Guyon, telepathic and clairvoyant powers. Next the rather shadowy pair of laymen, Henry of Nordlingen and Nicholas of Basle. Lastly the puzzling and fascinating figure of Rulman Merswin (c. 1310-1382), whose story of his conversion and mystic life, whether it be regarded as fact or “tendency literature,” is a psychological document of the first rank.
In immediate dependence on the German school, and like it drawing its intellectual vigour from the genius of Eckhart, is the mysticism of Flanders: best known to us—though not so well as it should be—in the work of its most sublime representative, the Blessed John Ruysbroeck (1293-1381), one of the very greatest mystics whom the world has yet known. In his early years a priest in Brussels, in old age a recluse in the forest of Soignes, Ruysbroeck’s influence on his own generation was great In that mystic age great mystics were recognized, and their help was eagerly sought. Through his disciple Gerard Groot (1340-1384), founder of the Brotherhood of the Common Life, his spirit touched in the next generation the very different character of Thomas à Kempis (1380-1471). In the fifteenth century Denis the Carthusian was a close student of his works, and calls him “another Dionysius,” but “clear where the Areopagite is obscure”—the highest praise he knew how to bestow. His works, with those of Suso, appear in English MSS. early in the fifteenth century, taking their place by the side of St. Bernard, St. Bonaventura, and the great English mystic Richard Rolle. The influence of his genius has even been detected in the mystical literature of Spain. In Ruysbroeck’s works the metaphysical and personal aspects of mystical truth are fused and attain their highest expression. Intellectually indebted to Augustine, Richard of St. Victor, and Eckhart, his value lies in the fact that the Eckhartian philosophy is merely the medium by which he expresses the results of profound experience. He was both saint and seer: truly a “God-intoxicated man.”
England, so closely akin to Flanders in religious thought and art, first appears in the history of mysticism at the end of the thirteenth century, with the shadowy figure of Margery Kempe (probably writing c. 1290), the anchoress of Lynn. We know nothing of this woman’s p. 555 life; and only a fragment of her “Contemplations” has survived. With the next name, however, Richard Rolle of Hampole (c. 1290-1349), the short but brilliant procession of English mystics begins. Rolle, educated at Oxford and widely read in mystical theology, became a hermit in order to live in perfection that mystic life of “Heat, Sweetness, and Song,” to which he felt himself to be called. Richard of St. Victor, St. Bernard, and St. Bonaventura are the authors who have influenced him most; but he remains, in spite of this, one of the most individual of all writers on mysticism. Rolle already shows the practical temper destined to be characteristic of the English school. His interest is not philosophy, but spiritual life. There is a touch of Franciscan poetry in his descriptions of his communion with Divine Love, and the “heavenly song” in which it was expressed; of Franciscan ardour in his zeal for souls. His works greatly influenced succeeding mystics.
He was followed in the second half of the fourteenth century by the unknown author—or possibly group of authors—of “The Cloud of Unknowing” and its companion treatises, and by the gracious spirit of Walter Hilton (ob. 1396). With “The Cloud of Unknowing” the spirit of Dionysius first appears in English literature. It is the work of an advanced contemplative, deeply influenced by the Areopagite and the Victorines, who was also an acute psychologist. From the hand that wrote it came the first English translation of the Theologia Mystica, “Dionise Hid Divinite”: a work which, says an old writer, “ran across England like deere,” so ready was the national consciousness for the reception of mystical truth.
Hilton, though also influenced by Dionysius and Richard of St. Victor, addresses a wider audience. He is pre-eminently a lover, not a metaphysician: a devout and gentle spirit anxious to share his certitudes with other men. The moment of his death coincides with the completion of the most beautiful of all English mystical works, the Revelations of Love of Julian of Norwich (1343—died after 1413), “theodidacta, profunda, ecstatica,” whose unique personality closes and crowns the history of mediaeval mysticism. In her the best gifts of Rolle and Hilton are transmuted by a “genius for the infinite” of a peculiarly beautiful and individual type. She was a seer, a lover, and a poet. Her mysticism, owing little to her predecessors, results from a direct and personal vision of singular intensity.
Julian’s life takes us on into the fifteenth century. It was probably before her death that this century produced two mystical works of the first rank: the exquisite “Imitation of Christ” (written 1400-1425) and the more amazing, less celebrated “Fiery Soliloquy p. 556 with God” of À Kempis’s contemporary Gerlac Peterson (c. 1411)—last gleams from the setting sun of the mediaeval world. Her later life saw the birth of Blessed Joan of Arc (1412-1431), and the appearance of a Flemish mystic of a type less congenial to the modern mind, the suffering visionary St. Lydwine of Schiedam (1380-1432).
Already before the completion of Julian’s revelations another woman of supreme genius, St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380), had lived and died. The true successor of Dante as a revealer of Reality, and next to St. Francis the greatest of Italian mystics, Catherine exhibits the Unitive Life in its richest, most perfect form. She was a great active and a great ecstatic: at once politician, teacher, and contemplative, holding a steady balance between the inner and the outer life. With little education she yet contrived, in a short career dogged by persistent ill-health, to change the course of history, rejuvenate religion, and compose, in her Divine Dialogue, one of the jewels of Italian religious literature.
With the first half of the fifteenth century it is plain that the mystic curve droops downwards. The great period is over: the new life of the Renaissance, already striving in other spheres of activity, has hardly touched the spiritual plane. France gives us two names only: Joan of Arc, the last gift of the Middle Ages, and Denis the Carthusian (1402-1471), a theologian and contemplative deeply read in mystical science. He was a close student and passionate admirer of the Areopagite and of Ruysbroeck; and his works, now forgotten but very popular during the three succeeding centuries, helped to carry over into the modern world the best traditions of Christian mysticism.
With the second half of the century the scene shifts to Italy, where a spiritual genius of the first rank appeared in St. Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510). She, like her namesake of Siena, was at once an eager lover and an indomitable doer. More, she was a constructive mystic, a profound thinker, as well as an ecstatic: an original teacher, a busy and practical philanthropist. Her influence lived on, and is seen in the next generation in the fine, well-balanced nature of another contemplative: the Venerable Battista Vernazza (1497-1587), her goddaughter and the child of one of her most loyal friends.
Catherine of Genoa stands alone in her day as an example of the sane and vigorous mystic life. Her contemporaries were for the most part visionaries of the more ordinary female type; such as Osanna Andreasi of Mantua (1449-1505), Columba Rieti (c. 1430-1501), and her disciple, Lucia of Narni. They seem to represent the slow extinction of the spirit which burned so bright in Catherine of Siena.
That spirit reappears in the sixteenth century in Flanders, in the works of the Benedictine ascetic Blosius (1506-1565), and, far more p. 557 conspicuously in Spain, a country almost untouched by the outburst of mystical life which elsewhere closed the mediaeval period. Spanish mysticism, discernible as an influence in the writings of Luis of Leon and Luis of Granada, attained definite expression in the life and personality of St. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), the great founder of the Society of Jesus. The concrete nature of St. Ignatius’s work, and especially its later developments has blinded historians to the fact that he was a true mystic; own brother to such great actives as St. Teresa and George Fox, actuated by the same vision of reality, passing through the same stages of psychological growth. His spiritual sons influenced greatly the inner life of the great Carmelite, St. Teresa (1515-1582): an influence shared by another and very different mystic, the Franciscan saint, Peter of Alcantara (1499-1562).
Like St. Catherine of Siena, these three mystics—and to them we must add St. Teresa’s greatest disciple, the poet and contemplative St. John of the Cross (1542-1591)—seem to have arisen in direct response to the need created by the corrupt or disordered religious life of their time. They are the “saints of the counter-Reformation”; and, in a period of ecclesiastical chaos, flung the weight of their genius and their sanctity into the orthodox Catholic scale. Whilst St. Ignatius organized a body of spiritual soldiery, who should attack heresy and defend the Church, St. Teresa, working against heavy odds, infused new vitality into a great religious order and restored it to its duty of direct communion with the transcendental world. In this she was helped by St. John of the Cross; who, a scholar as well as a great mystic, performed the necessary function of bringing the personal experience of the Spanish school back again into touch with the main stream of mystic tradition. All three, practical organizers and profound contemplatives, exhibit in its splendour the dual character of the mystic life. They left behind them in their literary works an abiding influence, which has guided the footsteps and explained the discoveries of succeeding generations of adventurers in the transcendental world. The true spiritual children of these mystics are to be found, not in their own country, where the religious life which they had lifted to transcendent levels degenerated as soon as their overmastering influence was withdrawn: but amongst the innumerable contemplative souls of succeeding generations who have fallen under the spell of the “Spiritual Exercises,” the “Interior Castle,” or the “Dark Night of the Soul.”
The Divine fire which blazed up and exhausted itself so quickly in Spain, is next seen in the New World: in the beautiful figure, too little p. 558 known to English readers, of St. Rose of Lima (1586-1617), the Peruvian nun. It appears at the same moment, under a very different aspect, in Protestant Germany; in the person of one of the giants of mysticism, the “inspired shoemaker” Jacob Boehme (1575-1624).
Boehme, one of the most astonishing cases in history of a natural genius for the transcendent, has left his mark upon German philosophy as well as upon the history of mysticism. William Law, Blake, and Saint-Martin are amongst those who have sat at his feet. The great sweep of Boehme’s vision includes both Man and the Universe: the nature of God and of the Soul. In him we find again that old doctrine of Rebirth which the earlier German mystics had loved. Were it not for the difficult symbolism in which his vision is expressed, his influence would be far greater than it is. He remains one of those cloud-wrapped immortals who must be rediscovered and reinterpreted by the adventurers of every age.
The seventeenth century rivals the fourteenth in the richness and variety of its mystical life. Two main currents are to be detected in it: dividing between them the two main aspects of man’s communion with the Absolute. One, symbolic, constructive, activistic, bound up with the ideas of regeneration, and often using the language of the alchemists, sets out from the Teutonic genius of Boehme. It achieves its successes outside the Catholic Church: and chiefly in Germany and England, where by 1650 his works were widely known. In its decadent forms it runs to the occult: to alchemy, Rosicrucianism, apocalyptic prophecy, and other aberrations of the spiritual sense.
The other current arises within the Catholic Church, and in close touch with the great tradition of Christian mysticism. It represents the personal and intimate side of contemplation: tends to encourage passive receptivity: and produces in its exaggerated forms the aberrations of the Quietists. It has its chief field in the Latin countries: France, Italy, and Spain.
In the seventeenth century England was peculiarly rich, if not in great mystics, at any rate in mystically-minded men. Mysticism, it seems, was in the air; broke out under many disguises and affected many forms of life. It produced in George Fox (1624-1690) the founder of the Quakers, a “great active” of the first rank, entirely unaffected by tradition; and in the Quaker movement itself an outbreak of genuine mysticism which is only comparable to the fourteenth-century movement of the Friends of God. At the opposite end of the theological scale, and in a very different form, it shows itself in Gertrude More (1606-1633) the Benedictine nun, a Catholic contemplative of singular charm.
Gertrude More carries on that tradition of the communion of love which flows from St. Augustine through St. Bernard and Thomas à Kempis, and is the very heart of Catholic mysticism. In the writings of her director, and the preserver of her works, the Venerable Augustine Baker (1575-1641)—one of the most lucid and orderly of guides to the contemplative life—we see what were still the formative influences in the environment where her mystical powers were trained. Richard of St. Victor, Hilton and the “Cloud of Unknowing”; Angela of Foligno; Tauler, Suso, Ruysbroeck; St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross; these are the authorities to whom Augustine Baker most constantly appeals, and through these, as we know, the line of descent goes back to the Neoplatonists and the first founders of the Church.
Outside that Church, the twins Thomas Vaughan the spiritual alchemist and Henry Vaughan, Silurist, the mystical poet (1622-1695) show the reaction of two very different temperaments upon the transcendental life. Again, the group of “Cambridge Platonists,” Henry More (1614-1687), John Smith (1618-1652), Benjamin Whichcote (1609-1683), and John Norris (1657-1711) developed and preached a philosophy deeply tinged with mysticism; and Thomas Traherne (c. 1637-1674) gave poetic expression to the Platonic vision of life. In Bishop Hall (1574-1656) the same spirit takes a devotional form. Finally, the Rosicrucians, symbolists, and other spiritually minded occultists—above all the extraordinary sect of Philadelphians, ruled by Dr. Pordage (1608-1698) and the prophetess Jane Lead (1623-1704)—exhibit mysticism in its least balanced aspect, mingled with mediumistic phenomena, wild symbolic visions, and apocalyptic prophecies. The influence of these Philadelphians, who were themselves strongly affected by Boehme’s works, lingered on for a century, appearing again in Saint-Martin the “Unknown Philosopher.”
The Quietistic trend of seventeenth-century mysticism is best seen in France. There, at the beginning of the century, the charming personality of St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622) sets the key of the spiritual life of the time, with a delicate but slightly sentimental application of the principles of mystic love to popular piety. Under the brilliant worldly life of seventeenth-century France, there was something amounting to a cult of the inner life. Such episodes as the careers of St. Jeanne Françoise de Chantal and St. Vincent de Paul, the history of Port Royal, the apostolate of Madame Guyon, the controversies of Bossuet and Fénelon, and the interest which these events aroused, indicate a period of considerable vitality. The spiritual life threatened to become fashionable. Hence, its most satisfactory initiates are those least in touch with the life of the time; such as the simple p. 560 Carmelite, Brother Lawrence (1611-1691). Lawrence shows the passive tendency of French mysticism in its most sane, well-balanced form. He was a humble empiricist, laying claim to no special gifts: a striking contrast to his contemporary, the brilliant and unhappy genius Pascal (1623-1662), who fought his way through many psychic storms to the final vision of the Absolute.
The earliest in date and most exaggerated in type of the true Quietists is the Franco-Flemish Antoinette Bourignan (1616-1680): a strong-willed and wrong-headed woman who, having renounced the world with Franciscan thoroughness, founded a sect, endured considerable persecutions, and made a great stir in the religious life of her time. An even greater uproar resulted from the doctrinal excesses of the devout Spanish priest Miguel de Molinos (1640-1697); whose extreme teachings were condemned by the Church, and for a time brought the whole principle of passive contemplation into disrepute. Quietism, at bottom, was the expression of a need not unlike that which produced the contemporary Quaker movement in England: a need for personal contact with spiritual realities, evoked by the formal and unsatisfying quality of the official religion of the time. Unfortunately the great Quietists were not great mystics. Hence their unbalanced propaganda, in which the principle of passivity—divorced from, and opposed to, all spiritual action—was pressed to its logical conclusion, came dangerously near to nihilism: and resulted in a doctrine fatal not only to all organized religion, but to the healthy development of the inner life.
Madame Guyon (1648-1717), the contemporary of Molinos and one of the most interesting personalities of the time, though usually quoted as a typical Quietist, taught and practised a far more balanced mysticism. Madame Guyon is an instance of considerable mystical genius linked with a feeble surface intelligence. Had she possessed the robust common sense so often found in the great contemplatives, her temperamental inclination to passivity would have been checked, and she would hardly have made use of the unfortunate expressions which brought about the official condemnation of her works. In spite of the brilliant championship of Fénelon, and the fact that she really continues the tradition of feminine mysticism as developed by Angela of Foligno, St. Catherine of Genoa, and St. Teresa—though lacking the wide, impersonal outlook of these mystics—she was involved in the general condemnation of “passive orison” which the aberrations of the extreme Quietists had called forth.
The end of the seventeenth century saw a great outburst of popular Quietism; some within and some without the official Church. p. 561 Amongst the more respectable of these quasi-mystics—all of whom appealed to the general tradition of mysticism in support of their one-sided doctrine—were Malaval, whose “Théologie Mystique” contains some beautiful French translations from St. Teresa, and Peter Poiret (1646-1719), once a Protestant pastor, then the devoted disciple of Antoinette Bourignan. Later generations owe a considerable debt to the enthusiasm and industry of Poiret, whose belief in spiritual quiescence was combined with great literary activity. He rescued and edited all Madame Guyon’s writings; and has left us, in his “Bibliotheca Mysticorum,” the memorial of many lost works on mysticism. From this unique bibliography we can see how “orthodox” was the food which nourished even the most extreme of the Quietists: how thoroughly they believed themselves to represent not a new doctrine, but the true tradition of Christian Mysticism.
With the close of the seventeenth century, the Quietist movement faded away. The beginning of the eighteenth sees the triumph of its “completing opposite”; that other stream of spiritual vitality which arose outside the Catholic Church and flowed from the great personality of Jacob Boehme. If the idea of surrender be the mainspring of Quietism, the complementary idea of rebirth is the mainspring of this school. In Germany, Boehme’s works had been collected and published by an obscure mystic, John Gichtel (1638-1710); whose life and letters constantly betray his influence. In England, where that influence had been a living force from the middle of the seventeenth century, when his writings first became known, the Anglo-German Dionysius Andreas Freher was writing between 1699 and 1720.
In the early years of the eighteenth century, Freher was followed by William Law (1686-1761), the Nonjuror: a brilliant stylist and one of the most profound of English religious writers. Law, who was converted by the reading of Boehme’s works from the narrow Christianity to which he gave classic expression in the “Serious Call” to a wide and philosophic mysticism, gave, in a series of writings which burn with mystic passion, a new interpretation and an abiding place in English literature to the “inspired shoemaker’s” astounding vision of Man and the Universe.
The latter part of a century which clearly represents the steep downward trend of the mystic curve, gives us three great personalities; all of whom have passed through Boehme’s school, and have placed themselves in opposition to the dry ecclesiasticism of their day. In Germany, Eckartshausen (1752-1803), in “The Cloud upon the Sanctuary” and other works, continued upon individual lines that p. 562 tradition of esoteric and mystical Christianity, and of rebirth as the price of man’s entrance into Reality, which found its best and sanest interpreter in William Law. In France, the troubled spirit of the transcendentalist Saint-Martin (1743-1803), “the unknown philosopher,” was deeply affected in his passage from a merely occult to a mystical philosophy, by the reading of Boehme and Eckartshausen; and also by the works of the English “Philadelphians,” Dr. Pordage and Jane Lead, who had long sunk to oblivion in their native land. In England, one of the greatest mystics of all time, William Blake (1757-1827), shines like a solitary star in the uncongenial atmosphere of the Georgian age.
The career of Blake, poet, painter, visionary, and prophet, provides us with a rare instance of mystical genius forcing not only rhythm and words, but also colour and form, to express its vision of truth. So individual in his case was this vision, so strange the elements from which his symbolic reconstructions were built up, that he failed in the attempt to convey it to other men. Neither in his prophetic books “dark with excessive light,” nor in his beautiful mystical paintings, does he contrive to transmit more than great and stimulating suggestions of “things seen” in some higher and more valid state of consciousness.
An impassioned Christian of a deeply mystical type, Blake, like Eckartshausen and Saint-Martin, was at the same time a determined and outspoken foe of conventional Christianity. He seems at first sight the Ishmael of the mystics, wayward and individual, hardly touched by tradition; but as a matter of fact his spirit gathered up and expressed the scattered threads of that tradition, parted since the Reformation amongst divergent groups of explorers of the unseen. It is for this reason that his name may fitly close and complete this short survey of European mysticism.
Whilst his visionary symbolism derives to a large extent from Swedenborg, whose works were the great influence of his youth, Blake has learned much from Boehme, and probably from his English interpreters. But, almost alone amongst English Protestant mystics, he has also received and assimilated the Catholic tradition of the personal and inward communion of love. In his stupendous vision of “Jerusalem,” St. Teresa and Madame Guyon are amongst the “gentle souls” whom he sees guarding that Four-fold Gate which opens towards Beulah—the gate of the contemplative life—and guiding the great “Wine-press of Love” whence mankind, at the hands of its mystics, has received, in every age, the Wine of Life.