Chapter II

Und so lang du das nicht hast
Dieses: Stirb und werde!
Bist du nur ein trüber Gast
Auf der dunkeln Erde.[189]

GOETHE.

‘Let us proceed, then,’ resumed Atherton, smoothing his manuscript, ‘on our Persian expedition. Dr. Tholuck, with his German translation, shall act as interpreter, and we may pause now and then on our way to listen to the deliverances of the two men of vision who accompany us from Breslau and from Boston.’

The first century of the Hegira has scarcely expired when a
mysticism, strikingly similar to that of Madame Guyon, is seen to
arise spontaneously in the devout ardours of a female saint named
Rabia.[190] There is the same straining after indifference and
self-abnegation—after a love absolutely disinterested—after a
devotion beyond language and above means.

By the sick-bed of Rabia stood two holy men. One of them said, ‘The
prayers of that man are not sincere who refuses to bear the
chastening strokes of the Lord.’ The other went beyond him, saying,
‘He is not sincere who does not rejoice in them.’ Rabia, detecting
something of self in that very joy, surpassed them both as she
added, ‘He is not sincere who does not, beholding his Lord, become
totally unconscious of them.’ The Mohammedan _Lives of the Saints_
records that, on another occasion, when questioned concerning the
cause of a severe illness, she replied, ‘I suffered myself to think
on the delights of Paradise, and therefore my Lord hath punished
me.’ She was heard to exclaim, ‘What is the Kaaba to me? I need God
only.’ She declared herself the spouse of Heaven,—described her will
and personality as lost in God. When asked how she had reached this
state, she made the very answer we have heard a German mystic
render, ‘I attained it when everything which I had found I lost
again in God.’ When questioned as to the mode, she replied, ‘Thou,
Hassan, hast found Him by reason and through means; I immediately,
without mode or means.’

The seeds of Sufism are here. This mystical element was fostered to
a rapid growth through succeeding centuries, in the East as in the
West, by the natural reaction of religious fervour against
Mohammedan polemics and Mohammedan scholasticism.

In the ninth century of our era, Sufism appears divided between two
distinguished leaders, Bustami and Juneid. The former was notorious
chiefly for the extravagance of his mystical insanity. The men of
genius who afterwards made the name of Sufism honourable, and the
language of its aspiration classical, shrank from such coarse
excess. It was not enough for Bustami to declare that the
recognition of our personal existence was an idolatry, the worst of
crimes. It was not enough for him to maintain that when man adores
God, God adores himself. He claimed such an absorption in his
pantheistic deity as identified him with all the power, the wisdom,
and the goodness of the universe. He would say, ‘I am a sea without
bottom, without beginning, without end. I am the throne of God, the
word of God. I am Gabriel, Michael, Israfil; I am Abraham, Moses,
Jesus.’

If Epiphanius is to be believed, the Messalians were a sect
chargeable with the very same folly. If asked, he says, concerning a
patriarch, a prophet, an angel, or Christ, they would reply, ‘I am
that patriarch, that prophet, that angel; I am Christ.’

A reference to Emerson’s Essay on History renders such professions
perfectly credible. Bustami and the Messalians could not have made
them in the literal, but (by anticipation) in the Emersonian sense.
They believed, with him, that ‘there is one mind common to all
individual men.’ They find in him their interpreter, when he says,
‘Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or
can be done, for this is the only sovereign agent.’ Emerson couches
their creed in modern rhymes, as he sings exultant,—

I am owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Cæsar’s hand and Plato’s brain,
Of Lord Christ’s heart, and Shakspeare’s strain.

In the spirit of the same philosophy, Angelus Silesius hints at the
possibility of such an empire. He reminds his readers that there is
no greatness which makes the glory of the past that may not be
realized by themselves in the present. Thus he asks—

Dost prize alone King Solomon as wisest of the wise?
Thou also canst be Solomon, and all his wisdom thine.[191]

But what is only potential with him is claimed as actual by mystical
brethren bolder yet than he.

The first endeavour of the Sufi (as of so many Christian mystics) is
to achieve that simplifying, purifying process which shall remove
from the mind everything earthly and human—all its creaturely
accidents, and reduce it to that abstract essence which mirrors
Deity, and is itself ultimately divine. An apologue in the Mesnevi
of Jelaleddin Rumi (a Sufi poet who wrote in the first half of our
thirteenth century) teaches this doctrine quite in the oriental
manner.

The Greeks and the Chinese dispute before a certain sultan as to
which of the two nations is the more skilful in the art of
decoration. The sultan assigns to the rival painters two structures,
facing each other, on which they shall exercise their best ability,
and determine the question of precedence by the issue:—

The Chinese ask him for a thousand colours,
All that they ask he gives right royally;
And every morning from his treasure-house
A hundred sorts are largely dealt them out.
The Greeks despise all colour as a stain—
Effacing every hue with nicest care.
Brighter and brighter shines their polished front,
More dazzling, soon, than gleams the floor of heaven.
This hueless sheen is worth a thousand dyes,—
This is the moon—they but her cloudy veil;
All that the cloud is bright or golden with
Is but the lending of the moon or sun.
And now, at length, are China’s artists ready.
The cymbals clang—the sultan hastens thither,
And sees enrapt the glorious gorgeousness—
Smit nigh to swooning by those beamy splendours.—
Then, to the Grecian palace opposite.
Just as the Greeks have put their curtain back,
Down glides a sunbeam through the rifted clouds,
And, lo, the colours of that rainbow house
Shine, all reflected on those glassy walls
That face them, rivalling: the sun hath painted
With lovelier blending, on that stony mirror
The colours spread by man so artfully.
Know then, O friend! such Greeks the Sufis are,
Owning nor book nor master; and on earth
Having one sole and simple task,—to make
Their hearts a stainless mirror for their God.
Is thy heart clear and argent as the moon?
Then imaged there may rest, innumerous,
The forms and hues of heaven.[192]

So, too, says Angelus Silesius,—

Away with accidents and false appearance,
Thou must be essence all, and colourless.

And again,—

Man! wouldst thou look on God, in heaven or while yet here,
Thy heart must first of all become a mirror clear.[193]

Jelaleddin Rumi describes the emancipation of the soul from
intellectual distinctions—the laws of finite thought, the
fluctuations of hope and fear, the consciousness of
personality,—under the image of night. This has been the favourite
and appropriate symbol of all the family of mystics, from Dionysius,
with his ‘Divine Darkness,’ to John of the Cross, in his _De Nocte
Obscurâ_, and on to Novalis, in his _Hymnen an die Nacht_. In the
following vigorous passage, Night is equivalent to the state of
self-abandonment and self-transcendence:—

Every night God frees the host of spirits—
Makes them clear as tablets smooth and spotless—
Frees them every night from fleshy prison.
Then the soul is neither slave nor master,
Nothing knows the bondman of his bondage,
Nothing knows the lord of all his lordship,
Gone from such a night is eating sorrow,
Gone the thoughts that question good and evil.
Then, without distraction or division,
In the One the spirit sinks and slumbers.

Silesius has the same thought, cold and dry, after the poetic
Persian, yet in words that would furnish no inapt motto to express
in a sentence this species of mysticism:—

Ne’er sees man in this life, the Light above all light,
As when he yields him up to darkness and to night.[194]

The ascetic Sufi bids the mystical aspirant close the senses against
every external impression—for the worlds of sense and of
contemplation reciprocally exclude each other. We have seen how the
Hindoos and the Hesychasts endeavoured literally to obey this
counsel, reiterated so often by so many mystagogues:—

Put wool within the ear of flesh, for that
Makes deaf the inner hearing, as with wool;
If that can hear, the spirit’s ear is deaf.
Let sense make blind no more the spirit’s eye.
Be without ear, without a sense or thought,
Hark only to the voice, ‘Home, wanderer, home!’

It is quite in accordance with such precepts that the judging
faculty should be abandoned by the Sufi for the intuitive, and the
understanding sacrificed to the feeling. According to the Koran,
Mohammed once soared heavenwards, to such a height that Gabriel
could not overtake him, and far off below, appeared to the Prophet
no larger than a sparrow. Jelaleddin compares the heart, the divine
principle in man (the spirit, in his psychology), to Mohammed, and
the understanding to Gabriel. Names and words, he says, are but
‘nets and shackles.’ With justice, in one sense, he bids men pass
from the sign to the thing signified, and asks,—

Didst ever pluck a rose from R and O and S?
Names thou mayst know: go, seek the truth they name;
Search not the brook, but heaven, to find the moon.

The senses and the lower powers, nourished by _forms_, belong to
earth, and constitute the mere foster-mother of our nature. The
intuitive faculty is a ray of Deity, and beholds Essence. The soul
which follows its divine parent is therefore a wonder, and often a
scandal to that which recognises only the earthly. Jelaleddin
compares the rapturous plunge of the soul into its divine and native
element to the hastening of the ducklings into the water, to the
terror of the hen that hatched them.[195]

While exulting in a devotion above all means and modes, we find the
Sufi (in nearly every stage of his ascension save the last) yielding
implicit obedience to some human guide of his own choice. The
Persian Pir was to him what the Director was to the Quietist or
semi-Quietist of France; what the experienced Friend of God was to
the mystic of Cologne or Strasburg; what Nicholas of Basle was so
long to Tauler. That a voluntary submission to such authority was
yielded is certain. Yet we find scarcely an allusion to these
spiritual guides among the chief bards of Sufism. Each singer claims
or seeks a knowledge of God which is immediate, and beyond the need
of at least the orthodox and customary aids and methods. Thus Rumi
says—

He needs a guide no longer who hath found
The way already leading to the Friend.
Who stands already on heaven’s topmost dome
Needs not to search for ladders. He that lies,
Folded in favour on the sultan’s breast,
Needs not the letter or the messenger.

So Emerson,—

‘The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it
is profane to seek to interpose helps.... Whenever a mind is simple,
and receives a divine wisdom, then old things pass away,—means,
teachers, texts, temples, fall; it lives now and absorbs past and
future into the present hour.’[196]

Hence, in both cases, the indifference before noticed to all the
various forms of positive religion. The Persian describes all
religions as the same liquor in different glasses—all are poured by
God into one mighty beaker.

The self-abandonment and self-annihilation of the Sufis rest on the
basis of their pantheism. Personal existence is with them the great
illusion of this world of appearance—to cling to it is to be blind
and guilty. Mahmud (a Sufi of the fourteenth century) says, in the
_Gulschen Ras_,—

All sects but multiply the I and Thou;
This I and Thou belong to partial being;
When I and Thou and several being vanish,
Then Mosque and Church shall bind thee never more.
Our individual life is but a phantom:
Make clear thine eye, and see Reality!

Again, (though here the sense may be moral rather than philosophic,
and selfishness, not personality, abjured)—

Go, soul! with Moses to the wilderness,
And hear with him that grand ‘I am the Lord!’
While, like a mountain that shuts out the sun,
Thine _I_ lifts up its head, thou shalt not see Me.
The lightning strikes the mountain into ruins,
And o’er the levelled dust the glory leaps!

Jelaleddin says of the Sufi in his self-abnegation,—

His love of God doth, like a flame of hell,
Even in a moment swallow love of self.

Mahmud, to express the same thought, employs the image used by
Thomas à Kempis:—

The path from _Me_ to God is truly found,
When pure that _Me_ from Self as clearest flame from smoke.

Angelus Silesius bids men lose, in utter Nihilism, all sense of any
existence separate from the Divine Substance—the Absolute:—

While aught thou art or know’st or lov’st or hast,
Not yet, believe me, is thy burden gone.

Who is as though he were not—ne’er had been—
That man, oh joy! is made God absolute.

Self is surpassed by self-annihilation;
The nearer nothing, so much more divine.[197]

Thus individuality must be ignored to the utmost; by mystical death
we begin to live; and in this perverted sense he that loseth his
life shall find it. Hence, by a natural consequence, the straining
after a sublime apathy almost as senseless as the last abstraction
of the Buddhist. The absolutely disinterested love, to which the
Sufi aspires, assumes, however, an aspect of grandeur as opposed to
the sensuous hopes and fears of Mohammed’s heaven and hell. Rumi
thus describes the blessedness of those whose will is lost in the
will of God:—

They deem it crime to flee from Destiny,
For Destiny to them brings only sweetness.
Welcome is all that ever can befal them,
For were it fire it turns to living waters.
The poison melts to sugar on their lip;
The mire they tread is lustrous diamond,
And weal and woe alike, whatever comes.
They and their kingdom lie in God’s divineness.
To pray, ‘O Lord, turn back this trouble from me,’
They count an insult to the hand that sent it.

Faithful they are, but not for Paradise;
God’s will the only crowning of their faith:
And not for seething hell, flee they from sin,
But that their will must serve the Will Divine.
It is not struggle, ’tis not discipline,
Wins them a will so restful and so blest;—
It is that God from his heart-fountain ever
Fills up their jubilant souls.

So, again, Angelus Silesius, sometimes pushing his negation to
unconscious caricature:—

True hero he that would as readily
Be left without God as enjoy him near.

Self-loss finds God—to let God also go,
That is the real, most rare abandonment.

Man! whilst thou thankest God for this or that,
Yet art thou slave to finite feebleness.

Not fully God’s is he who cannot live,
Even in hell, and find in hell no hell.

Nought so divine as to let nothing move thee,
Here or hereafter (could’st thou only reach it).

Who loves without emotion, and without knowledge knows,
Of him full fitly say we—he is more God than man.

Compare Emerson, discoursing of Intuition and the height to which it
raises men:—

‘Fear and hope are alike beneath it. It asks nothing. There is
somewhat low even in hope. We are then in vision. There is nothing
that can be called gratitude nor properly joy. The soul is raised
over passion,’ &c. So, again: ‘Prayer as a means to effect a private
end is theft and meanness. It supposes dualism in nature and
consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God he will not
beg. He will then see prayer in all action.’[198]

This elevation above petition and above desire, towards which many a
Sufi toiled, watching, fasting, solitary, through the ‘seven
valleys’ of mystic discipline, is cheaply accomplished now-a-days by
mere nonchalance, and is hit off by a flourish of the pen. It is the
easy boast of any one who finds prayer distasteful and scoffs at
psalm singing—who chooses to dub his money-getting with the title of
worship, and fancies that to follow instinct is to follow God. The
most painful self-negation and the most facile self-indulgence meet
at the same point and claim the same pre-eminence.

The eastern mystic ignores humanity to attain divinity. The ascent
and the descent are proportionate, and the privileges of nothingness
are infinite. We must accompany the Sufi to his highest point of
deification, and in that transcendental region leave him. His escape
from the finite limitations of time and space is thus described,—

On earth thou seest his outward, but his spirit
Makes heaven its tent and all infinity.
Space and Duration boundless do him service,
As Eden’s rivers dwell and serve in Eden.

Again, Said, the servant, thus recounts one morning to Mohammed the
ecstasy he has enjoyed:—

My tongue clave fever-dry, my blood ran fire,
My nights were sleepless with consuming love,
Till night and day sped past—as flies a lance
Grazing a buckler’s rim; a hundred faiths
Seemed then as one; a hundred thousand years
No longer than a moment. In that hour
All past eternity and all to come
Was gathered up in one stupendous _Now_,—
Let understanding marvel as it may.
Where men see clouds, on the ninth heaven I gaze,
And see the throne of God. All heaven and hell
Are bare to me and all men’s destinies,
The heavens and earth, they vanish at my glance:
The dead rise at my look. I tear the veil
From all the worlds, and in the hall of heaven
I set me central, radiant as the sun.
Then spake the Prophet:—‘Friend, thy steed is warm;
Spur him no more. The mirror in thy breast
Did slip its fleshly case, now put it up—
Hide it once more, or thou wilt come to harm.’

This magniloquence of Said’s is but the vehement poetic expression
for the ‘absolute intuition’ of modern Germany—that identity of
subject and object in which all limitations and distinctions vanish,
and are absorbed in an indescribable transcendental intoxication. If
the principle be true at all, its most lofty and unqualified
utterance must be the best, and what seems to common-sense the
thorough-going madness of the fiery Persian is preferable to the
colder and less consistent language of the modern Teutonic
mysticism. Quite in the spirit of the foregoing extracts, Emerson
laments that we do not oftener realize this identity, and transcend
time and space as we ought.—

‘We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles.
Meantime within man is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the
universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally
related,—the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and
whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing
and perfect every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen,
the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.’
And again:—‘Time and space are but inverse measures of the force of
the soul. A man is capable of abolishing them both. The spirit
sports with time—

‘Can crowd eternity into an hour
Or stretch an hour to eternity.’

So Angelus Silesius:—

Rise above Space and Time, and thou canst be
At any moment in Eternity.[199]

The following passage from Jelaleddin exhibits the kind of identity
with God claimed by the more extravagant devotees of Sufism:—

Are we fools, we’re God’s captivity;
Are we wise, we are his promenade;
Are we sleeping, we are drunk with God;
Are we waking, then we are his heralds;
Are we weeping, then his clouds of wrath;
Are we laughing, flashes of his love.

Some among them carried their presumption to a practical extreme
which did away with all distinction between good and evil. They
declared the sins of the Sufi dearer to God than the obedience of
other men, and his impiety more acceptable than their faith.[200]

Two extracts more will suffice to show the mode in which this
pantheistic mysticism confounds, at its acme, the finite and the
infinite. They are from Feridoddin Attar, who died in the second or
third decade of the fourteenth century.—

Man, what thou art is hidden from thyself.
Know’st not that morning, mid-day, and the eve,
All are within thee? The ninth heaven art thou;
And from the spheres into this roar of time
Didst fall erewhile. Thou art the brush that painted
The hues of all this world—the light of life,
That rayed its glory on the nothingness.

Joy! joy! I triumph! Now no more I know
Myself as simply me, I burn with love
Unto myself, and bury me in love.
The Centre is within me, and its wonder
Lies as a circle everywhere about me.
Joy! joy! no mortal thought can fathom me.
I am the merchant and the pearl at once.
Lo, time and space lie crouching at my feet.
Joy! joy! when I would revel in a rapture,
I plunge into myself and all things know.

The poet then introduces Allah, as saying that he had cast Attar
into a trance, and withdrawn him into his own essence, so that the
words he uttered were the words of God.[201]

Both with Emerson and Angelus, he who truly apprehends God becomes a
part of the divine nature,—is a son, a god in God, according to the
latter; and according to the former, grows into an organ of the
Universal Soul. This notion of identity Emerson seems to arrive at
from the human, Angelus from the divine side. The salvation of man
is reduced with the German, very much to a process of divine
development. With the American, every elevated thought merges man
for a time in the Oversoul. The idealism of Emerson is more
subjective, his pantheism more complete and consequent. Angelus is
bold on the strength of a theory of redemption which makes man
necessary to God. Emerson is bolder yet, on his own account, for he
makes his own God. This he does when he adores his own ideal, and,
expanding Self to Universality, falls down and worships.

Hear him describe this transcendental devotion:—

‘The simplest person, who in his integrity worships God, becomes
God; yet for ever and ever the influx of this better and universal
self is new and unsearchable.’ Again: ‘I, the imperfect, adore my
own Perfect. I am somehow receptive of the great soul, and thereby I
do overlook the sun and the stars, and feel them to be but the fair
accidents and effects which change and pass.’ So, speaking of the
contemplation of Nature:—‘I become a transparent eyeball. I am
nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate
through me; I am part or particle of God,’ &c.

Angelus says, in virtue of his ideal sonship,—

I am as great as God, and he as small as I;
He cannot me surpass, or I beneath him lie.

God cannot, without me, endure a moment’s space,
Were I to be destroyed, he must give up the ghost.

Nought seemeth high to me, I am the highest thing;
Because e’en God himself is poor deprived of me.[202]

The central idea of the Persian mysticism is _Emanation_. The soul
is to escape from the manifold to the One. Its tendency (in
proportion as its votary believes that return accomplished) is to
confound man with the Father. The leading principle in the mysticism
of Eckart and Angelus Silesius is _Incarnation_. Angelus is never
weary of reiterating the doctrine that God became man in order that
man might become God. He does not labour, like the orientals, to
attain deification by ascetic efforts of his own. He has a kind of
Mediator. He seems to believe that through Christ, in some way,
every man is a divine Son of God, if he will only think so. All he
has to do is to realize this sonship; then he becomes, by _Grace_,
all that the Son of God is by _Nature_. The obvious result of this
mysticism is to identify man with the Son.

In that order of modern mysticism represented by Emerson, the
central doctrine is _Inspiration_. In the creative efforts of the
poet, in the generalizations of the philosopher, the man of genius
speaks as he is moved by the Oversoul. An influx of the universal
spirit floods his being and carries him beyond himself. In intuition
the finite Ego is identified with the absolute Ego. Humanity is a
divine evolution, and each true man (to use Emerson’s apt
illustration)—a _façade_ of Deity. Even Angelus would have
acknowledged that it was in some sort through Christ that his
boastful sonship became possible. But the believer in the Oversoul
will admit no such medium, and owns a debt to Christ much as he owns
a debt to Shakspeare. Mysticism of this order usurps the office of
the Holy Ghost, and directly identifies the spirit of man with the
Spirit of God.

Mysticism has always been accustomed to express the transports of
its divine passion by metaphors borrowed from the amorous
phraseology of earth. It has done this with every variety of taste,
from the grossness of some of the most eminent Romanist saints, to
the beautiful Platonism of Spenser’s Hymns of ‘Heavenly Love’ and
‘Heavenly Beautie.’ But nowhere has metaphor branched so luxuriantly
into allegory as in the East, and nowhere in the East with such
subtilty and such freedom as among the Persian mystics. The admiring
countrymen of Hafiz, Saadi, and Jami, interpret mystically almost
everything they wrote. They underlay these poems everywhere with a
system of correspondence whose ingenuity would have done no
discredit to Swedenborg himself. Sir William Jones furnishes some
specimens of a sort of mystical glossary, by aid whereof their
drinking songs may be read as psalms, and their amatory effusions
transformed into hymns full of edification for the faithful.[203]
Never, since the days of Plotinus, was a deity imagined more
abstract than the Unity toward which the Sufi aspires. Yet never was
religious language more florid and more sensuous. According to the
system alluded to, wine is equivalent to devotion; the tavern is an
oratory; kisses and embraces, the raptures of piety; while
wantonness, drunkenness, and merriment, are religious ardour and
abstraction from all terrestrial thoughts.

The following passage from Mahmud’s _Gulschen Ras_ may suffice as a
specimen of these devout Bacchanalia. It has the advantage of
exhibiting the key in the lock:—

Know’st thou who the Host may be who pours the spirit’s wine
Know’st thou what his liquor is whose taste is so divine?
The Host is thy Beloved One—the wine annihilation,
And in the fiery draught thy soul drinks in illumination.
Up, soul! and drink with burning lip the wine of ecstasy,
The drop should haste to lose itself in His unbounded sea.
At such a draught mere intellect swims wildered and grows wild;
Love puts the slave-ring in his ear and makes the rebel mild.
Our Friend holds out the royal wine and bids us drink it up;
The whole world is a drinking-house and everything a cup.
Drunken even Wisdom lies—all in revel sunken;
Drunken are the earth and heaven; all the angels drunken.
Giddy is the very sky, round so often hasting,
Up and down it staggers wide, with but a single tasting.
Such the wine of might they drink in blest carouse above.
So the angels higher lift their flaming height of love.
Now and then the dregs they fling earthward in their quaffing,
And where’er a drop alights, lo, an Eden laughing![204]

Footnote 189:

And if thy heart know nought of this—‘Die that thou mayest be born;’
then walkest thou the darksome earth a sojourner forlorn.

Footnote 190:

Tholuck, _Ssufismus, sive Theosophia Persarum pantheistica_ (Berlin,
1822), pp. 51-54.

Footnote 191:

Tholuck, _Ssufismus_, p. 63. _Cherub. Wand._, ii. 18.

Footnote 192:

Tholuck, _Blüthensammlung aus der Morgenländischen Mystik_ (Berlin,
1825), p. 114.

Footnote 193:

_Cherub. Wand._, i. 274; v. 81.

Footnote 194:

_Blüthen._, p. 61. _Cherub. Wand._, iv. 23.

Footnote 195:

_Blüthen._, pp. 64, 71, 113, 156.

Footnote 196:

_Blüthen._, p. 167. Emerson’s _Essays_ (1848), p. 35.

Footnote 197:

_Blüthen._, pp. 204-206. _Cherub. Wand._, i. 24, 92, 140.

Footnote 198:

_Blüthen._, pp. 180, 181. _Cherub. Wand._, v. 367; ii. 92; i. 91, 39;
ii. 152, 59. Emerson, pp. 37, 42.

Footnote 199:

_Blüthen._, pp. 85, 116. Emerson, pp. 141, 143. _Cherub. Wand._, i.
12. Compare _Richard of St. Victor_, cited above, vol. i., p. 172,
Note to p. 163.

Footnote 200:

_Blüthen._, pp. 82, 84.—The truth, of which the licentious doctrine
alluded to is the abuse, is well put by Angelus,—

‘Dearer to God the good man’s very sleep
Than prayers and psalms of sinners all night long.’—(v. 334.)

Footnote 201:

_Blüthen._, pp. 266, 260.—Never does this soaring idealism become so
definite and apprehensible as when it speaks with the ‘large
utterance’ of the Sufis. Angelus has here and there somewhat similar
imagery for the same thought. What is with him a dry skeleton acquires
flesh and blood among the Orientals.

‘Sit in the centre, and thou seest at once
What is, what was; all here and all in heaven.

‘Is my will dead? Then what I will God must,
And I prescribe his pattern and his end.

‘I must be sun myself, and with my beams
Paint all the hueless ocean of the Godhead.’—(ii. 183; i. 98,
115.)

Footnote 202:

Emerson, pp. 154, 156, 196. _Cherub. Wand._, i. 10, 8, 204.—Angelus
has various modes of expressing the way in which God realizes his
nature in the salvation of men.

‘I bear God’s image. Would he see himself?
He only can in me, or such as I.

‘Meekness is velvet whereon God takes rest:
Art meek, O man?—God owes to thee his pillow.

‘I see in God both God and man,
He man and God in me;
I quench his thirst, and he, in turn,
Helps my necessity.’—(i. 105, 214, 224.)

Footnote 203:

Works, vol. iv., _On the Mystical Poetry of the Persians and Hindoos_.

Footnote 204:

_Blüthen._, p. 218.