Mysticism

I f 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 tend to correspond with the great periods of artistic, material, and intellectual civilization. As a rule, they come immediately after, and seem to complete such periods: those 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 medieval 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 the intellectual vigour, the romance and passion of the mediaeval temperament, to bear upon the deepest mysteries of the transcendental life. Again, the sixteenth century, that period of abounding 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 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 will therefore 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 manes growing spiritual history. They are not isolated phenomena, but are related to one another. Each receives something from his predecessors: 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 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 true mysticism which may have existed amongst the initiates of the Greek or Egyptian Mysteries; how many advanced but inarticulate contemplatives there were amongst the Alexandrian Neo-platonists, amongst the pre-Christian communities of contemplatives described by Philo , the deeply mystical Alexandrian Jew (20 B.C.-A.D. 40), or the innumerable Gnostic sects which replaced in the early Christian world the Orphic and Dionysiac mystery-cults of Greece and Italy. 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 anticipated 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. Much of the inner history of primitive Christianity still remains unknown to us, 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 easily that Church could absorb and transmute the mystic elements 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—and his great pupil Origen (c. 183-253). Nevertheless, the first person 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 is based on the Platonic philosophy, and also shows the influence of the Mysteries, and perhaps certain of the Oriental cults and philosophies which ran riot in Alexandria in the third century. Ostensibly a metaphysician, however, Plotinus possessed transcendental genius of a high order, and was consumed by a burning passion for the Absolute: and the importance of his work lies in the degree in which his intellectual constructions are made the vehicle of mystical experience. 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 medium in which much of the mysticism—both Christian and pagan—of the first six centuries was expressed. But since mysticism is a way of life—an experience of Reality, not a philosophic account of Reality—Neoplatonism, and the mysticism which used its language, must not be identified with one another. Porphyry (233-304) the favourite pupil of Plotinus seems to have inherited something of his master’s mysticism, but Neoplatonism as a whole was a confused, semi-religious philosophy, containing many inconsistent elements. Appearing when 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 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. St. Augustine (A.D. 354-430) and Dionysius the Areopagite (writing between 475 and 525) are amongst his spiritual children; and it is mainly through them that his doctrine reached the mediaeval world. Proclus (412-c. 490), the last of the pagan philosophers, also derives from his teaching. Through these three 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 formula under which he apprehended Reality. It is clear that when he composed this work he was already an advanced contemplative. The immense 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. Later mystics, recognizing this fact, constantly appeal to his authority, and his influence ranks next to that of the Bible in the formation of the mediaeval school.

Second only to that of St. Augustine was the influence exercised by the strange and nameless writer 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. From the ninth century to the seventeenth these writings nourished the most spiritual intuitions of men, and possessed an authority which it is now hard to realize. Medieval mysticism is soaked in Dionysian conceptions. 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 h s work that later contemplatives, reading him, found their most sublime experiences reflected and partly explained. Hence in describing those experiences, they adopted 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.

Side by side with the Neoplatonic mysticism of St. Augustine and Dionysius runs another line of spiritual culture, hardly less important for the development of the contemplative life. This takes its rise among the Fathers of the Egyptian desert, whose heroic spirituality was a contributory factor in St. Augustine’s conversion. It finds beautiful expression in the writings of St. Marcarius of Egypt (c. 295-386), the disciple of St. Anthony and friend of St. Basil, and reaches the West through the “Dialogues” of John Cassian (c. 350- ), one of the most important documents for the history of Christian mysticism. The fruit of a seven-year pilgrimage among the Egyptian monasteries, and many conversations on spiritual themes with the monks, we find in these dialogues for the first time a classified and realistic description of the successive degrees of contemplative prayer, and their relation to the development of the spiritual life. Adopted by St. Benedict as part of the regular spiritual food of his monks, they have had a decisive influence on the cloistered mysticism of the Middle Ages. Their sober and orderly doctrine, destined to be characteristic of the Roman Church, received fresh emphasis in the works of St. Gregory the Great (540-604), which also helped to form the souls of succeeding generations of contemplatives.

We have therefore, at the opening of the Middle Ages, two great streams of spiritual culture; the Benedictine, moderate and practical, formed chiefly on Cassian and St. Gregory, and the Neoplatonic, represented by Dionysius the Areopagite, and in a less exclusive form by St. Augustine. The works of Dionysius were translated from Greek into Latin about A.D. 850 by the Irish philosopher and theologian, John Scotus Erigena , one of the scholars assembled at the court of Charlemagne: and this event marks 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.

The great current of medieval mysticism first shows itself in the eleventh century, and chiefly in connection with the Benedictine Order for the work of such monastic reformers as St. Romuald (c. 950-1027) St. Peter Damian (1007-1072), and St. Bruno (1032-1101), the founder of the Grande Chartreuse, was really the effort of contemplative souls to establish an environment in which the mystical life could be lived. Thus too we must regard at least a large proportion of the hermits and solitaries who became so marked a feature in the religion of the West. At this period mysticism was not sharply distinguished from the rest of the religious complex, but was rather the realistic experience of the truths on which religion rests. It spread mainly through personal instruction and discipleship. Its literary monuments were few among the most important and widely influential being the “Meditations” of St. Anselm (1033-1109), which, disentangled by recent scholarship from the spurious material passing under his name, are now seen to have been a chief channel of transmission for the Augustinian mysticism which dominated the early Middle Ages. The general religious revival of the twelfth century had its marked mystical aspect, and produced four personalities of great historical importance: the Benedictines St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153), St. Hildegarde of Bingen (1098-1179), and Joachim of Flora (1132-1202); and the Scotch or Irish Augustinian 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 thus period, but with less reason; since contemplation occupies a small place in his theological writings. In spite of the deep respect 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 personal and the didactic. Sometimes, as 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 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. Though mysticism was for Richard the “science of the heart” and he had little respect for secular learning, yet his solid intellectuality did much to save the medieval school from the perils of religious emotionalism. In his hands the antique mystical tradition which flowed through Plotinus and the Areopagite, was codified and transmitted to the mediaeval world. 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 the 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 influence of Richard of St. Victor, great as it was, is exceeded by that of St. Bernard; the dominant spiritual personality of the twelfth century. Bernard’s career of ceaseless and varied activity sufficiently disproves the “idleness” of the contemplative type. He continued and informed with his own spirit the Benedictine tradition, and his writings quickly took their place, with those of Richard of St. Victor, among the living forces which conditioned the development of later mysticism. Both these mystics exerted a capital influence on 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 mystical and theological literature written in England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. An early paraphrase of the “Benjamin Minor,” sometimes attributed to 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.

If mediaeval mysticism in the West develops mainly under the sane and enduring influence of the Victorines and St. Bernard, in Germany and Italy it appeared in a more startling form; seeking, in the prophetic activities of St. Hildegarde of Bingen and the Abbot Joachim of Flora, to influence the course of secular history. In St. Hildegarde and her fellow-Benedictine St. Elizabeth of Shönau (1138-1165) we have the first of that long line of women mystics—visionaries, prophetesses, and political reformers—combining spiritual transcendence with great practical ability, of whom St. Catherine of Siena is probably 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 sins of their generation. St. Hildegarde, a woman of powerful character, apparently possessed of abnormal psychic gifts, was driven by that Living Light which was her inspiration to denounce the corruptions of Church and State. In the inspired letters which she 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; last 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 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 more to the romantic poets of her time than 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.

Modern scholarship tends more and more to see in the strange personality of the Abbot Joachim of Flora, whom Dante placed among the great contemplatives in the Heaven of the Sun, the chief influence in the development of Italian mysticism. The true import of his prophecies, which proclaimed in effect the substitution of mystical for institutional Christianity, was only appreciated after his death. But their prestige grew during the course of the thirteenth century; especially after the appearance of the mendicant friars, who seemed to fulfil his prediction that the new era of the Holy Spirit would be brought in about the year 1260 by two new Orders who would live in poverty the spiritual life. From this time, Joachism found its chief vehicle of expression through Franciscan mysticism of the more revolutionary sort. Though there is no evidence that St. Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) knew the prophecies of the “Eternal Gospel,” he can hardly have grown up without some knowledge of them, and also of the Cathari and other semi-mystical heresies—many of them stressing the idea of evangelical poverty—which were spreading through Italy from the north. But the mystical genius which may have received food from these sources was itself strikingly original; the spontaneous expression of a rare personality, a great spiritual realist who admitted no rival to the absolute claims of the mystical life of poverty and joy. St. Francis was untouched by monastic discipline, or the writings of Dionysius or St. Bernard. His only literary influence was the New Testament.

With him, mysticism comes into the open air, seeks to transform the stuff of daily life, speaks the vernacular, turns the songs of the troubadours to the purposes of Divine love; yet remains completely loyal to the Catholic Church. None 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, art and literature of Western Europe, and the influence of his spirit still lives.

In a general sense it is true to say that Italian mysticism descends from St. Francis, and in its first period seems almost to be the prerogative of his disciples; especially those of the “Spiritual” party who strove to maintain his ideals in their purity. It is here that we find Franciscan ardour and singlemindedness in alliance with apocalyptic notions deriving from Joachist ideas. In Provence, a widespread mystical movement coloured by Joachism was led by Hugues de Digne and his sister St. Douceline ( n . 1214); in whom we find a spirit which, like that of Francis, could find the Divine through flowers and birds and simple natural things. In Italy, nourished by the influence of such deeply mystical friars as John of Parma (ob. 1288 ) and John of La Verna , this Franciscan spirituality entered into conflict with the ecclesiastical politics of the day; taking up that duty of denouncing the corruptions of the Church, which has so often attracted the mystics. Here the typical figure is that of Jacopone da Todi ( 1228-1306), the converted lawyer turned mystical poet. On one hand deeply influenced by St. Augustine and Dionysius the Areopagite, on the other the devoted exponent of the Founder’s ideals, his “spiritual songs” lift Franciscan mysticism to the heights of ecstatic rapture and literary expression; whilst his savage castigations of the Papacy give him a place among the great mediaeval satirists. Jacopone’s poems have been shown by Von Hügel to have had a formative influence on St.

In his contemporary the Blessed Angela of Foligno (1248-1309) who was converted from a sinful life to become a tertiary hermit of the Franciscan Order we have a mystic of the first rank whose visions and revelations place her in the same class as St. Catherine of Genoa and St. Teresa. Known to her followers as the Mistress of Theologians, and numbering among her disciples the brilliant and tempestuous “spiritual” friar Ubertino da Casale, the lofty metaphysical element in Angela’s mysticism suggests the high level of spiritual culture achieved in Franciscan circles of her time. 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. François 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 peculiar combination of intellectual and spiritual power stand the figures of the “Seraphic and Angelic Doctors,” St. Bonaventura , the Franciscan (1221-1274), and St. Thomas Aquinas , the Dominican (1226-1274). As with St. Augustine, the intellectual greatness of St. Thomas has obscured his mystical side, whilst St. Bonaventura, the apostle of a wise moderation, may easily appear to the hurried reader the least mystical of the Franciscan mystics. Yet both were contemplatives, and because of this were able to interpret to the medieval world the great spiritual tradition of the past. Hence their immense influence on the mystical schools of the fourteenth century. It is sometimes stated that these schools derive mainly from St. Bonaventura, and represent an opposition to scholastic theology; but as a matter of fact their greatest personalities—in particular Dante and the German Dominicans—are soaked in the spirit of Aquinas, and quote his authority at every turn.

In Europe the mystic curve is now approaching its highest point. In the East that point has already been passed. Sufi, or Mahommedan mysticism, appearing in the eighth century in the beautiful figure of Rabi’a , the “Moslem St. Teresa” (717-801), and continued by the martyr Al Hallaj (ob. 922), attains literary expression in the eleventh in the “Confessions” of Al Ghazzali (1058-1111), and has its classic period in the thirteenth in the works of the mystic poets ‘Attar (c. 1140-1234), Sadi (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 Western Europe a vital year in the history of the spiritual life. Mystics of the first rank are appearing, or about to appear. The Majorcan scholar-mystic Ramon Lull (ob. 1315) is drawing to the end of his long life. 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.

The moment in which the “Commedia” was being written coincides with the awakening of mystical activity in Germany and Flanders. Between the years 1280 and 1309 was produced, probably in the Liege district and under Franciscan influence, the curious anonymous work which isnow only known to us in Latin and English translations— “The Mirror of Simple Souls.” This long treatise, clearly influenced by Dionysius, the Victorines, and the twelfth-century tract known as the “Letter to the Brethren of Mons Dei,” is a piece of mystical literature of an advanced kind, often fringing the borders of orthodoxy and looking forward to the speculative Flemish mysticism of the fourteenth century. Its writer was probably contemporary with the founder of this school; the great Dominican scholar Meister Eckhart (1260-1327), who resembled Dante in his combination of mystical insight with intense intellectual power, and laid 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 genius for the supra-sensible nourished by the works of Dionysius and Erigena, moulded and inspired all whom it came near. The German and Flemish mystics of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, differing much 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 all have passed under his hand, being either his immediate disciples, or the friends or pupils of his disciples. Eckhart’s doctrine is chiefly known to us by reports of his vernacular sermons delivered at Strassburg; then the religious centre of Germany. In these we see him as a teaching mystic full of pastoral zeal, but demanding a high level both of intellect and spirituality in those he addressed. 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 laid him open to misconstruction. In his efforts to speak of the unspeakable he was constantly betrayed into expressions which 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.

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 had been trained in the schools of Cologne, where Albert the Great and St. Thomas had taught, and where their powerful influence still lived. The mysticism of Eckhart, so far as he allows us to see it in his sermons and fragmentary writings, 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 were no one is at home.” He is a great scholar, a natural metaphysician passionately condensed with the quest of Absolute Truth.

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—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, though unfairly, been described as a precursor of the Reformation. Such a claim could only be made by those who look upon all pure Christianity as a form of Protestant heresy. He attacked, like St. Hildegarde, St. Catherine of Siena, and many others, the ecclesiastical corruption of his period: but 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 beyond to Switzerland and Bavaria, and worked in this moment of religious decadence for the spiritual regeneration of the people. In a spirit of fierce enthusiasm and wholehearted devotion, the Friends of God set themselves to the mystic life as the only life worthy of the name. A great 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; except that it took place within, instead of without, the official Church, and was partly directed against the doctrines of the Brethren of the Free Spirit and other heretical sects. With it was connected the third of the trio of great German Dominican mystics, the Blessed Henry Suso (c. 1295-1365), 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. Though a trained philosopher and theologian, and a devoted follower of Eckhart, his autobiography—a human document far more detailed and ingenuous than St. Teresa’s more celebrated “Life”—is mainly the record of his griefs and joys, his pains, visions, ecstasies, and miseries.

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,” or “Book of the Perfect Life,” probably written in Frankfort about the year 1350 by a priest of the Teutonic Order. One of the most successful of many attempts to make mystic principles available for common men, this book was greatly loved by Luther, who published an incomplete edition in 1518. Other Friends of God are now only known to us as the authors of letters, descriptions of conversions, visions, and spiritual adventures—literature which the movement produced in enormous quantities. No part of the history of mysticism has been more changed by recent research than that of the 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 Nicolas of Basle . Lastly the puzzling figure of Rulman Merswin (c. 1310-1382), author of the series of apocalyptic visions called The Book of the Nine Rocks”; 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 in the work of its most sublime representative, the Blessed John Ruysbroeck (1293-1381), one of the greatest mystics whom the world has yet known. In Ruysbroeck’s works the metaphysical and personal aspects of mystical truth are fused and attain their highest expression. Intellectually indebted to St. Augustine, Richard of St. Victor, and Eckhart, his value lies in the fact that the Eckhartian philosophy was merely the medium by which he expressed the results of profound experience. 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. Through his disciple Gerard Groot (1340-1384), founder of the Brotherhood of the Common Life, it formed the inspiration of the religious movement of the New Devotion; which carried over into the next century the spirit of the great mediaeval mystics. The mystical writings of Henry de Mande (c. 1360-1415), the “Ruysbroeck of the North,” the beautiful and deeply Platonic “Fiery Soliloquy with God” of Gerlac Petersen (1378-1411), and above all the “Imitation of Christ” of his friend Thomas à Kempis (1380-1471), in which some of Gerard Groot’s meditations may be enshrined, are the chief channels through which this mystical current passed.

In the next century the Franciscan Henry de Herp or Harphius (ob. 1477) and two greater personalities—the learned and holy Platonist, Cardinal Nicolas of Cusa (1401-1464), and his friend the theologian and contemplative Denis the Carthusian (1402-1471), one of the great religious figures of the fifteenth century—drew their inspiration from Ruysbroeck. Denis translated the whole of his works into Latin; and calls him “another Dionysius” but “clear where the Areopagite is obscure.” It was mainly through the voluminous writings of Denis, widely read during succeeding centuries, that the doctrine of the mediaeval mystics was carried over to the Renaissance world. Ruysbroeck’s 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 also been detected in the mystical literature of Spain.