Chapter I

Also, there is in God
Which being seen would end us with a shock
Of pleasure. It may be that we should die
As men have died of joy, all mortal powers
Summed up and finished in a single taste
Of superhuman bliss; or, it may be
That our great latent love, leaping at once
A thousand years in stature—like a stone
Dropped to the central fires, and at a touch
Loosed into vapour—should break up the terms
Of separate being, and as a swift rack,
Dissolving into heaven, we should go back
To God.

DOBELL.

The next day was fine, as well it might be after such a sunset; to Hawksfell all the party went, and there was no reading. But on the following (sunnier yet, if possible) they assembled immediately after breakfast in the summer-house, Lowestoffe not excepted, for even he grew inactive with the heat, and declared himself content to lie on the grass by the hour. Atherton congratulated his hearers that they would not for some time be troubled with more lucubrations of his—not till they came, in due course, to Madame Guyon. For Willoughby was to take up Jacob Behmen, and Gower, who possessed (as the fruit of an artist’s tour) some acquaintance with Spanish, St. Theresa. Then, unrolling his manuscript, he began.

THE SUFIS, OR MYSTICAL POETRY IN THE EAST AND WEST.

Among all the religions of civilized man, it would be difficult to
find one more unfriendly to the growth of mysticism than that of
Mohammed. Yet in no religion has mysticism spread more widely or
raised its head with greater pride. The cold rationalism of the
Koran, its ritual minutiæ, its formal self-righteousness, its
prohibition of the monastic order,—all combined to warn the mystic
from the religious domain of the Crescent. But stronger than
Mohammedan orthodoxy or the dying commands of the Prophet were the
wants of the human heart and the spirit of an eastern people. The
generation which laid Mohammed in the holy earth of Medina saw
monastic institutions arise and multiply on every side. Mystical
interpretation could with ease elude the less favourable passages of
the Koran, and turn others into a warrant. With a single touch of
this dexterous pencil, the mystic could make the Prophet’s
portraiture all he desired, and turn the frown into a smile. The
fatalism of the creed of Islam would furnish a natural basis for the
holy indifference of Quietism.

Each succeeding century of the Hegira was found more abundant than
the last in a class of men who revolted against the letter in the
name of the spirit, and who aspired to a converse and a unity with
God such as the Koran deemed unattainable on this side heaven. The
names of the saints and martyrs, the poets and philosophers, of
mysticism, are among the brightest in the hagiography and the
literature of the Mohammedan world. The achievements of the former
class are adorned with legendary extravagances such as those with
which the Prophet delighted to invest himself. The philosophy of the
latter (whether sung or said) was not a little aided, in its contest
with rigid orthodoxy, by the Grecian learning of that Alexandria
which fell, in the first outbreak of Moslem zeal, before the hosts
of Amrou. In later times (under the names of Plato and of Aristotle)
mysticism and method did battle with each other, in the East as in
the West,—at Shiraz, at Bagdad, or at Cordova, even as in the
University of Paris or the academies of Italy.

The term Sufism appears to be a general designation for the mystical
asceticism of the Mohammedan faith. The Sufis cannot be said to
constitute a distinct sect, or to embrace any particular
philosophical system. Their varieties are endless; their only common
characteristics a claim of some sort to a superhuman commerce with
the Supreme,—mystical rapture, mystical union, mystical identity, or
theurgic powers;—and a life of ascetic observance. The name is given
to mystics of every shade, from the sage to the quack, from poets
like Saadi or philosophers like Algazzali, to the mendicant dervise
or the crazy fanatic.

Persia has been for several centuries the great seat of Sufism. For
two hundred years (during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of
our era) the descendants of a Sufi occupied the throne,—governing,
however, as may be supposed, not like mystics, but as men of the
world.[186] It is with Sufism as exhibited principally by the Sufi
poets of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, that I propose now
to occupy your attention.

It will be found worth our while, as we proceed, to compare the
mystical poetry of the East and West. Oriental mysticism has become
famous by its poets; and into poetry it has thrown all its force and
fire. The mysticism of the West has produced prophecies and
interpretations of prophecy; soliloquies, sermons, and treatises of
divinity;—it has found solace in autobiography, and breathed out its
sorrow in hymns;—it has essayed, in earnest prose, to revive and to
reform the sleeping Church;—but it has never elaborated great poems.
In none of the languages of Europe has mysticism achieved the
success which crowned it in Persia, and prevailed to raise and rule
the poetic culture of a nation. Yet the occidental mysticism has not
been wholly lacking in poets of its own order. The seventeenth
century can furnish one, and the nineteenth another,—Angelus
Silesius and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The latest research has succeeded only in deciding who Angelus
Silesius was _not_. Some Roman Catholic priest or monk, assuming the
name of Angelus, did, in the seventeenth century, send forth sundry
hymns and religious poems,—among others, one most euphuistically
entitled _The Cherubic Wanderer_. The author of this book has been
generally identified, on grounds altogether inadequate, with a
contemporary named John Scheffler,—a renegade from Jacob Behmen to
the Pope. Suffice it to say that no two men could be more unlike
than the virulent fagotty-minded pervert Scheffler, and the
contemplative pantheistic Angelus—be he who he may.[187]

_The Cherubic Wanderer_ is a collection of religious epigrams or
rhyming sentences, most of them smart and pithy enough as to
expression, not a few as destitute of sense as they all are of
poetry. The Wanderer travelled a little way into the eighteenth
century, and then, lighting upon one of those oblivious arbours so
fatal to pilgrims, sat down, and slept long. A few years ago some
Romanticist littérateurs of Germany woke him up, and announced to
the world, with much sounding of brass and tinkling of cymbals, that
they had resuscitated a paragon of saintship and philosophy.

The Silesian’s book reiterates the customary utterances of
mysticism. But a harsher tone is audible, and the doctrines with
which we are familiar appear in a more startling and paradoxical
form. The more dangerous elements are intensified. Pantheism is
latent no longer. Angelus loves to play at a kind of intellectual
seesaw with the terms Finite and Infinite, and their subject or
kindred words. Now mounts one side, now the other, of the restless
antithesis. Each factor is made to share with its rival every
attribute of height or lowness. His favourite style of talking may
run as follows:—‘I cannot do without God, nor He without me; He is
as small as I, and I as great as He:—let time be to thee as
eternity, and eternity as time; the All as nothing, and nothing as
the All; then thou hast solved life’s problem, and art one with God,
above limit and distinction.’ We matter-of-fact folk feel
irresistibly inclined to parody such an oracle, and say,—‘Let whole
and part, black and white, be convertible terms;—let thy head be to
thee as thy heels, and thy heels as thy head; and thou hast
transcended the conditions of vulgar men, and lapsed to Limbo
irretrievably.’ Silesius, as a good churchman, repudiates, of
course, the charge of pantheism. He declares that the dissolution in
Deity he contemplates does not necessitate the loss of personality,
or confound the Maker and the made. His distinction is
distinguishable ‘as water is in water.’ He appeals to the strong
language he hunts out from Bernard, Tauler, and Ruysbroek. But the
cold-blooded epigram cannot claim the allowance due to the fervid
sermon or the often rhapsodical volume of devotion. Extravagant as
the Sufi, he cannot plead like him a spiritual intoxication.
Crystals and torrents must have separate laws. And which, moreover,
of the mystical masters to whom Angelus refers us would have indited
such presumptuous doggrel as this?

God in my nature is involved,
As I in the divine;
I help to make his being up,
As much as he does mine.

As much as I to God owes God to me
His blissfulness and self-sufficiency.

I am as rich as God, no grain of dust
That is not mine too,—share with me he must.
More than his love unto himself,
God’s love to me hath been;
If more than self I too love him,
We twain are quits, I ween.[188]

On the other hand, there are many terse and happy couplets and
quatrains in the _Wanderer_, which express the better spirit of
mysticism. Angelus insists constantly on the vanity of mere
externals,—the necessity of a Christ formed within, as opposed to a
dead, unsanctifying faith,—the death of self-will, as the seat of
all sin,—the reality of the hell or heaven already wrought in time
by sin or holiness. These were the maxims and ejaculations which
religious minds, mystically inclined, found so edifying. The
arrogant egotheism of some passages they took in another sense, or
deemed the sense beyond them. Moreover, the high-flown devotion
affected by Rome has always familiarized her children with
expressions which (as Thomas Fuller has it) ‘do knock at the door of
blasphemy, though not always with intent to enter in thereat.’

The second representative of the West, who must assist towards our
comparative estimate of pantheistic mysticism in its poetical form,
is Mr. Emerson, the American essayist. Whether in prose or verse he
is chief singer of his time at the high court of Mysticism. He
belongs more to the East than to the West—true brother of those
Sufis with whose doctrine he has so much in common. Luxuriant in
fancy, impulsive, dogmatic, darkly oracular, he does not reason. His
majestic monologue may not be interrupted by a question. His
inspiration disdains argument. He delights to lavish his varied and
brilliant resources upon some defiant paradox—and never more than
when that paradox is engaged in behalf of an optimism extreme enough
to provoke another Voltaire to write another _Candide_. He displays
in its perfection the fantastic incoherence of the ‘God-intoxicated’
man.

In comparing Emerson with the Sufis, it may be as well to state that
he does not believe in Mohammed and receive the Koran in a manner
which would satisfy an orthodox Mussulman. Yet he does so (if words
have meaning) much after the same fashion in which he believes in
Christ and receives the Bible. Mohammed and Jesus are both, to him,
extraordinary religious geniuses—the Bible and the Koran both
antiquated books. He looks with serene indifference on all the forms
of positive religion. He would agree perfectly with those Sufis who
proclaimed the difference between the Church and the Mosque of
little moment. The distance between the Crescent and the Cross is,
with him, one of degree—their dispute rather a question of
individual or national taste than a controversy between a religion
with evidence and a religion without.

In the nineteenth century, and in America, the doctrine of emanation
and the ascetic practice of the East can find no place. But the
pantheism of Germany is less elevated than that of Persia, in
proportion as it is more developed. The tendency of the latter is to
assign reality only to God; the tendency of the former is to assign
reality only to the mind of man. The Sufi strove to lose humanity in
Deity; Emerson dissolves Deity in humanity. The orientals are nearer
to theism, and the moderns farther from it, than they sometimes
seem. That primal Unity which the Sufi, like the Neo-Platonist,
posits at the summit of all things, to ray forth the world of
Appearance, may possibly retain some vestige of personality. But the
Over-Soul of Emerson, whose organs of respiration are men of genius,
can acquire personality only in the individual man. The Persian
aspired to reach a divinity above him by self-conquest; the American
seeks to realize a divinity within him by self-will.
Self-annihilation is the watchword of the one; self-assertion that
of the other.

Footnote 186:

Malcolm’s _Persia_, vol. ii., p. 383.

Footnote 187:

See Schrader’s _Angelus Silesius und seine Mystik_; Halle, 1853. This
author shows, that the supposition identifying Scheffler with Angelus
(copied too readily by one writer from another) may be traced up to a
source of very slight authority. Scheffler repudiated mysticism after
entering the Romish communion. Furious polemical treatises by
Scheffler, and sentimental religious poems by Angelus appeared
contemporaneously during a considerable interval. Had Scheffler
published anything mystical during his controversy, his Protestant
antagonists would not have failed to charge him with it. With
Scheffler the Church is everything. In the _Wanderer_ of Angelus the
word scarcely occurs. The former lives in externalisms; the latter
covets escape from them. The one is an angry bigot; the other, for a
Romanist, serenely latitudinarian. Characteristics so opposite, urges
Dr. Schrader, could not exist in the same man at the same time.

The epithet ‘_Cherubic_’ indicates the more speculative character of
the book; as contrasted, in the language of the mystics, with the
devotion of feeling and passion—_seraphic_ love.

Footnote 188:

_Cherubinischer Wandersmann_, i. 100, 9, 18; Schrader, p. 28.