Part 7

As an island is surrounded by water, as night surrounds the stars, and air the globe, so beyond the region of the known there stretches an illimitable space of darkness and of silence. All minds know that it is there; to many of us it is a background of repose to the busy scene of life; to some the hidden tract has its chart of faith or dogma. But there are others to whom that vast and dark Unknown is more present than the small and shining certainty of the Universe. They are sucked into the eddy of its vastness and its darkness. These natures turn from the substance to dream of the shadow, they leave the narrow fields of science and go out boldly over those unsounded waters beyond. Souls such as these are never quite at home in life: the dark, the undreamed of, the infinite has enchanted them. They are drawn by the attraction of the Abyss.

* * * * *

Mysticism allures different men by different methods. It draws by various lines the passionate heart, the broken and humbled will, the heated fancy, the indignant spirit wroth at the hardness and evil of the world. It draws no less the reasoning and metaphysical mind, repelled by dogma and yet desirous of the Deity. For Mysticism is not only an affair of dreams, of miracles, and visions, it is not only a satisfaction to disordered imaginations, to diseased and stunted passions; it includes a system of philosophy so logical that who accepts the first easy thesis arrives without negation or amazement at the last. The Mystics have, in fact, made a science of the soul, an elaborate system of abstractions, quite logical in itself, although in contradiction to the truths of physical nature. No one, indeed, is readier to admit this contradiction than the Mystic himself, for the soul, he says, is exactly the contrary of the body. It is therefore natural that as bodily life rises in the scale from simple to complex, so the soul’s existence should be purest when least differentiate. For the soul and the body meet on one level for a moment, but they come from different positions. The human body is the highest evolution of the animate world; the human soul, the Mystics assure us, is the lowest and last descent of Infinite Being. In fact, the soul of man is to Divinity in the same relation as the zoophyte is to us. Only, unfortunately for the simile, in this strange supernatural cosmos the zoophyte is higher than the man. Let us rather say that man, having progressed from the zoophyte to humanity in body, must now in soul ascend from the man to the zoophyte. For the soul, we must remember, is divinest when most simple. It is the last descent of God, and God (the Mystics say) is absolute unity and simplicity. “God,” says Meister Eckhart, “is the simplest essence of existence; and who, thinking of God, sees any distinction from utter simplicity, be sure he seeth not God.”

II.

“But how” (we can imagine one of Eckhart’s audience exclaiming), “how can the absolutely simple be the manifold? God, you say, is the Simple and the One; and yet you say that every soul descends from God. If God is absolutely simple and single, He cannot divide Himself into many souls.” Eckhart here, we may be sure, would smile and praise the discretion of his assailant; for this objection brings us to the central theory of Speculative Mysticism, the dearest dogma of Plotinus, of Dionysius, of Scotus Erigena, as of Master Eckhart.

Spirit is everywhere one. Spirit is in the Godhead and indivisible. The Godhead exists, our Mystics tell us, above and beyond all Divine theophanies; the Godhead exists as a vast and unfathomable ocean, rolling its seas of emptiness and silence from pole to pole. But everywhere the ocean is bordered by the land; and its waters, in the circle of their tides, wash over a hundred shores, and fill a thousand bays and creeks and little rocky pools. Even as the deep sea sends its shallower waters over the sands, and then withdraws them into its eternal and unfathomable fulness, so the waters of God flow into every soul. And when the sea withdraws its tide, it withdraws not merely the contents of this pool and yonder creek, but the sea itself, eternally undivided, though for the space of a tide it filled the limits and the hollows of the shore.

But not all the strand, is washed by the sea; above a certain line the sands grow their rank, stiff grass, and grey-green thistles; the sands are almost land. And not the whole of the soul is visited by the Divine simplicity; only the water-line, the arid depth of the soul, is swept over and filled by the infinite being of God. “There is something in the soul,” taught Meister Eckhart, “uncreated and uncreatable; there is something in the soul which is beyond the soul, Divine, simple, an utter nothingness; there is a place in the soul where God inhabits, and this base of the soul is one with the base of God. And to reach this obscure retreat of the Eternal and Divine, where the unconscious Godhead dwells—this is the supreme and final goal of all created things.”

III.

And how shall the Mystic reach this obscure and inner depth, this silence where the soul is one with God? By sinking into himself. For the Mystic there exists no exterior world. Since God is within us, what value is there in the world without? “Omnes creaturæ sunt purum nihil,” formulates Master Eckhart. For the Mystic the body is only a prison, a distortion, a hindrance; its senses, its experience cannot teach him. “Being freed from the folly of the body,” said Plato, “we shall of ourselves know the whole real essence.” “Matter,” says Plotinus, “is the principle of individuation, and who would seek the one must quit the things of matter.” Without the body, then, we were no longer personal, no longer separate; we were all One and all God. It is the body which determines our character; there is no personality in the soul. We must conceive it as pure water poured into a coloured vase, which becomes red, or blue, or green, according to the colour of the vase. The colour is not a principle of the water, and does not affect the water. So the soul poured into the body appears to take a note and colour of its own, but, poured out again, is seen to be unaltered. The first aim of the true Mystic is to purify his spirit from this extraneous and earthly tint; to make the vase, if he can, as colourless, as simple and uniform as that infinite Being, of which, in Erigena’s phrase, the Soul is the last descent.

Since the soul is God the world is nothing. No more than the eye can taste or the ear handle, can the created comprehend the Divine. “If we are to know anything purely,” we read again in Plato, “we must be separate from the body.” And Plotinus adds that he who enters in quest of the One must ascend to the First Principle of his own nature. The First Principle of Plotinus is the same as Meister Eckhart’s Foundation of the Soul. It is the One. Intellect may be a means to reach it, but it is certainly not an end. The Mystic philosopher thinks himself into an ecstasy; and the ecstasy, not the thought, is his goal.

Our Mystic has therefore abandoned the world, and abandoned his own experience in the endeavour to attain to God. He must be quite still, passive, dumb; the mystic should be as a new-born child who has not yet smiled in his mother’s face. He must not even _will_ to be made one with God. “He must have no seeking for himself more than has a corpse,” writes Eckhart. “Let him be as one dead,” counsels Suso. “He must not be satisfied with any deed or virtue,” adds the Flemish Ruysbroch, “but only in the Abyss.” And Tauler rises to a passionate eloquence: “Sink thou into thy Depth and thy Nothingness, and let the tower and all its bells fall down upon thee; yea, let all the devils in Hell storm out upon thee; let Heaven and Earth with all their creatures assail thee, yet shall they all but marvellously serve thee.... Sink thou only into thy Nothingness, and the better part is thine.”

IV.

Death in life is the aim of the Mystic, and his consolation is the thought of his annihilation. There is not any rest for him, and no solace save in that which Suso calls “the desolate wilderness and deep chasm of unsearchable Deity.” To us of a later age to whom the greatest and most alluring promise of religion is the hope of Personal Immortality, it is hard to realize a fact which must strike every student; namely, that throughout the Middle Ages the most passionate motive of a hundred passionate sects, the dearest thesis of the deepest thinkers in the Church, was this intense desire of personal annihilation. As a fact, this frenzy after Nothingness cost the Church more heresies than any corruption in herself. The very doctors of the Church were tainted with it. The lowest of the people—poor, starved, and hunted fanatics—formed themselves into bands and brotherhoods to preach this comforting gospel of extinction. The books of Dionysius the Areopagite carried the Alexandrian theories of the One into every monastery in Europe. The Almaricians, the Vaudois, the followers of Ortlieb, the Beguines, the brothers and sisters of the Free Spirit, and many other sects of poor and wandering people, spread their fantastic corruptions of the same, throughout the working classes. From the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, the desire of many a mystical saint was identical with the despair of atheists to-day. It was the extinction of the personal soul. The whirligig of time brings strange revenges.

Mysticism throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries occupied, in the thinking and religious world, a position almost identical with that of Spiritualism in our day. Like its modern offshoot, mediæval Mysticism could be superimposed on any cult or habit; like Spiritualism, it lent itself equally to a grossly sensual, or an abstract and idealist interpretation. And Mysticism, therefore, appealed to an immense audience; to the ignorant and pretentious, dissatisfied with the Church’s authority, merely because it was authority; to the pure reformers, anxious to preserve religion and quit the formal and corrupted shows of it; to tender, pious, and dreaming souls, with no great hold upon the world of fact; to the abstract reasoner, eager to preserve his faith while letting untenable dogma slip away. The authorized religion occupied a singular position towards these Mystics, who formed, as it were, a Church within the Church. Afraid to quite disown them or, indeed, to openly disapprove, lest she might thereby weaken her own hold, yet conscious all the while that these theories of her children were scarcely less subversive of her own supremacy than those of any heretic or atheist, the Church burnt one Mystic and canonized another, with an impartiality born of vacillation. The influence of the Mystics was indeed immense, and too serious to be lightly regarded. They promised to destroy the prison, the canker, the disease of _Self_—to let the freed soul loose from the body, to vanish for ever in the Divine darkness of the unimaginable Abyss; they made the comfort of many a dreaming soul, tortured by the ineradicable memory of human sin. They offered to the tired thinker, the starved and weary labourer, the broken nun, the harassed townspeople, an attraction which the Church herself dared not openly afford; and many who had wandered away from the hard-and-fast, strict-and-narrow fold of Rome, found a refuge in Mysticism, who might else have thrown aside all claim to faith. Even as to-day, many are Spiritualists who otherwise would certainly be Agnostics. For Spiritualism insists on none of the bonds or dogmas of religion, and offers a palpable proof to its believers of that which religion only promises; that is to say, the Immortality of the Soul, that golden mirage-fountain of our thirsty modern world. This was precisely the position of mediæval Mysticism, only, as we know, it was Rest, not Life, that she offered; extinction, and not continuance; not Paradise, but the Abyss.

V.

That a great many people everywhere at one time ardently desire one thing is certainly no proof that their desire shall be satisfied; but it shows a real want in the heart of man—a want which may be stopped by altered conditions, if not by the actual things desired. As many people longed for extinction in the harassed Middle Ages as pine for immortality to-day. I do not mean to say they formulated this desire, for most of them were fervent Christians. But life was bitter then, and they hoped to extinguish their weary and craving souls in the unconscious Godhead. When life is bitter now, we say “Eternal Justice owes us a happier experience to discharge our sufferings here.” But in both attitudes the same one fact remains, that so long as life is bitter, men will crave and will complain. No modern preacher has spoken more fervently of the joys of immortality than these medieval Mystics spoke of the Abyss. Each to each has been the final and immeasurable recompense for all the wrongs that ever there were in the world. By many ardent Churchmen, and many saints, and many thinkers in the Middle Ages, God was chiefly worshipped as the Abyss. He was the Supreme Annihilation. The soul must plunge, says Eckhart, into pure Nothingness. The soul must sink, says Tauler, in the Divine Darkness, into the secret place of the Divine Abyss. “There is no safety,” says Guillame Briçonnet, “save in the Abyss” (“l’abysme qui abysme en désabysmant”). Adventitious reward, says Suso, may come in the consciousness of having conquered evil and done good; but true reward, essential reward, is only in the wild waste and deep abyss of inscrutable Deity, in the union of the soul with sheer impersonal Godhead. This Godhead, says Eckhart, is a simple stillness without quality or distinction. God is neither this nor that. Who can distinguish and say, “This is good, sees not God; for all that is in the Godhead is absolutely one, and formless, and void, and interminable, and passive.” And the names under which God is chiefly worshipped show this strange impersonal attitude. The Divine Dark, the Obscure Night, the Desert, the Abyss, the Unimaged Nakedness, the Infinite Essence, the Hidden Darkness, the One, the Supreme Nothing: these are the names of this remote, abstract Jehovah of the mediæval Mystics.

VI.

To lose themselves in this unconscious beatitude was the religious ideal of a thousand souls. To lose themselves, to drown, extinguish, break through and beyond the hateful imprisoning Ego—this was the motive of their mood. But what, we may ask, remains of a man after he has lost himself so utterly? How can he distinguish the bliss of which he dreams? How can he even know he is resting? We are suspicious that these Mystics did not quite realize their own desires, that they meant some residue of themselves to remain and enjoy the sensation of their own Nirvana. And so we ask of them what they mean by the Abyss. “Thereof,” says Eckhart, “we cannot speak. It is the simplest essence of existence, it is unknown, and must ever be unknown. It is the simple darkness of the silent waste. It is the utmost term.”

But yet we are unsatisfied and persist in questioning. How can the spirit of man, deprived of virtue, cognition, will, personality and life, remain immortal? Still more, how can he enjoy such immortality? The dim feeling of such eternal rest we all can understand, who have gone suddenly from a lighted room into the vast night, and have felt our souls suddenly invaded and possessed by a sense of mystery and silence. We have felt this; but in his final beatitude the Mystic must not feel: “He must be as one dead.” We also can understand the dizzy rapture of unwinding abstraction from abstraction, till we weave a net that seems to hold the heaven and all its stars. But the Mystic may not think. “He must see neither distinction nor difference.” And the passionate upward spring of the soul towards a God, unseen, unknown, in which it still believes; thus might we pray. But the Mystic does not pray. “So long as a man desires to do the will of God, so long he is not truly fit; he who may seek the Godhead, he neither wills, nor knows, nor cares.”

What then, we ask again, what is the satisfaction that draws your souls so firmly towards the Abyss? Will no one answer? And Tauler, the great Mystical Dominican, replies, “There remains to a man, the fathomless annihilation of himself; and an absolute ignoring of his personal self—of all aims, of all will, heart, purpose, use, or way.”

VII.

It is not, then, a personal delight that awaits the Mystic in the abyss; it is the sense of absorption in his Deity. It is hard to define the character of this Godhead for which the man so gladly lays down his soul and his life. Since it is identical with the foundation of the soul (and this, Eckhart assures us, is not only Divine and simple, but an Utter Nothingness), it is difficult to lay hold of the idea of its divinity—or indeed of its difference from created matter which is also _purum Nihil_, and it is easy to see how, by this path of negation, Mysticism always diverges into Pantheism.... The essence of the Mystical Divinity appears to be its very incomprehensibility; and it would be rash and vain indeed to form an idea thereof. But we may at least attempt to understand what that divinity appeared to its worshippers.

“The One,” begins Plotinus, “is neither substance, nor quality, nor reason, nor soul, neither moving, nor at rest, not in place and not in time; neither is it of any sort or kind.” Thus we learn what things were not intrinsic to the Deity; we learn that we must conceive a bodiless, unqualified, impersonal, interminable Void; an eternal, undifferentiate essence of existence; an infinite Being not to be approached by reason or by soul. Eckhart goes a step further, and affirms not only what the Godhead is not, but even what it is. “There is a Godhead,” he says, “above God. The Godhead neither moves nor works.... It is a simple Stillness, an eternal Silence.”

If this were all we might comprehend the longing for quiet, the passionate desire for rest which made the wearied and the trouble-harried of all times deify silence and repose. Mysticism has ever flourished best in starved or stormy ages. It is the shrinking of the soul from a perplexed and hideous outer life; it is in some the desire for love and peace, in some the desire for rest, in some for immortality elsewhere. But in logical and speculative minds it is more than this; the God of the Speculative Mystics is not merely Sleep, not merely Dreams, not merely Stillness. They carry their reasoning fearlessly to its natural conclusion, and this is worthy of all praise in them; but that they should worship that conclusion is surely strange—for “God is non-being,” writes Scotus Erigena; and, Eckhart adds that when the soul penetrates the pure uncreate essence of the Godhead, then Nothingness is at last in the presence of Nothingness.

VIII.

God, then, is Nothing; Erigena has given us the phrase, for _Nihilum_, he says, is the infinite essence of God. The soul is Nothing; “a fathomless annihilation of self,” in Tauler’s words, “an utter nothingness,” in Eckhart’s sentence. And, lastly, the world is nothing, _purum Nihil_, and as unreal as the rest. Already, in the close of the twelfth century, David of Dinant had declared that Everything is at the same time Spirit, Matter, and God. The later Mystics added a new line to his Thesis: All is One and All is Nothing.

Such is the result of this strange Idealism, which sacrifices from first to last the idea of personality to the conception of God. These are the dogma of this singular phase of thought and feeling; a phase which unites all that is cold and formal in philosophy with all that is unreasoning, perfervid, and hysterical in a Religious Revival. The doctors and preachers of Speculative Mysticism, have trances no less real than those of Saint Francis; but what they contemplate with rapture is not the idea of Infinite Love. It is Infinite Nothing which fills them with ecstasy. And these Mystical thinkers are as precise and as liable to become the mere pedants of a system, as any follower of Kant or Comte. And yet, though they seek to use only their reason, they despise reason. These philosophers look upon reason as the humble handmaiden of ecstasy. And that divine ecstasy is excited by the thought of a Nihilum.

This indeed appears almost an absurd position; and yet the position of the Mystics was honourable and intelligent. They attempted to answer questions which even to-day the theologians elude (see Newman, “Grammar of Assent,” p. 210). “Whence comes Evil?” Evil, they reply, is not created by God, but, so to speak, the blanks and spaces not filled up by His creation. Evil and pain have no Real Existence; they are but a deficiency of vitality; they are negative and temporary qualities unrecognized by an unconscious God innocent of inflicting them. “Why are we created responsible beings without our own consent?” Our bodies are not created by God and we are not responsible to Him for their errors. They are the expressions of our Eternal souls—their own expressions at their own desire as a _modus vivendi_ in the world. “How can God need our action if He is omnipotent? If omnipotent, how tolerant of Evil? If permitting suffering, sin, and Hell, how then All-loving? If All-loving, how Just?” These questions are all answered by the mystical conception of God as a Divine Passivity, an unconscious Fund of Existence. All that is impossible and absurd in the theories of the Mystics is caused by adapting them to religious ideas. They had to explain the immortality of the soul, ... and they spoke of eternal absorption into an Infinite Nothing. They had to explain a good and omnipotent God creating an evil and impotent humanity. They made the one nothing and the other nothing.

THE SCHISM.

In the year 1377 the Pope was at Avignon. Seventy years ago a Pope had come there, as the guest of the Count of Provence, in order to arrange with the King of France the iniquitous extermination of the Templars. He had come to Avignon in the hour of Papal triumph; for in the tragic ruin of the Hohenstaufens, the prestige of the empire was destroyed at last. But in reality this fatal victory had left the Pope no longer the arbiter between France and Germany, but the dependent of the sole surviving Power. The attraction of successful France drew the Pope from Rome to Avignon.

At Rome the Pope had left his Vatican, his authority, his tradition. At Avignon, a chance guest, hastily lodged in the Dominican monastery, he was little better than the Political Agent of Philippe-le-Bel. Yet he showed no hurry to return. Clement was a Frenchman of the South, a Gascon, at home in Provence but cruelly expatriated among the dissensions, the enthusiasms, the treacheries of foreign Italy. Year after year found him still at Avignon, and there he died in the year 1315. His successor, John XXI. or XXII., was another Gascon; and Benedict XII. (1334-1342) and Clement VI. (1342-1352) were Frenchmen also. They built a mighty palace at Avignon, immense, with huge square towers, and walls—four metres thick—scarce broken by the rare small pointed windows rearing their colossal strength high into the air. The great golden-brown palace was less of a palace than a prison, less of a cloister than a castle. It was, in fact, a baron’s fortress of the feudal age; for the Pope had almost forgotten that he was Pope of Rome; he was the Count of Venaissin and Avignon.