Chapter VI: Part 6

It is plain that St. Augustine, in his first Christian period, was deeply indebted to Plotinus, whom he knew through Victorinus and frequently quotes by name; calling him “one of those more excellent philosophers” whose doctrine of the soul is in harmony with the Prologue of the Fourth Gospel. When he came to write the “Confessions,” the glamour of the Platonic vision had begun to fade, and he was able to deal in a critical spirit with his own brief Plotinian experience of “that which Is” (VII. 17). Nevertheless, none can understand that book without some knowledge of the Enneads, from which all its finest passages are derived, and in more than one instance—especially Book VII and the celebrated tenth chapter of Book IX—closely imitated. In Augustine’s invocation of “the Beauty so old and so new,” in his description of the “Country which is no vision but a Father-land,” or of “the Light which never changes, above the soul, above the intelligence,” we see how closely he had studied them, the extent to which their language had permeated his thought. It is, however, in the tracts composed soon after his conversion—e.g. _De Quantitate Animæ_, written about A.D. 388—that their influence is most strongly marked; and the ecstatic vision of the One is definitely put forward as the summit of Christian experience. From this time onwards, the main outlines of mystical theology were more or less fixed: and since St. Augustine was one of the most widely read and deeply reverenced of the Fathers, with an authority hardly inferior to that of Scripture itself, its Neoplatonic colour was never lost. Wherever Christian mysticism passes from the emotional and empirical to the philosophic, this colour is clearly seen, and the concepts of Plotinus, more or less disguised, reappear: even in those mediæval writers who had no direct acquaintance with Greek philosophy. The immense popularity of the so-called Dionysian writings, which derive much of their doctrine through Proclus from the Enneads, helped to establish yet more firmly the Neoplatonic character of Christian and also of Sūfi mysticism. Through these writings the conceptions of the Super-essential Godhead; of successive spiritual spheres or emanations of descending splendour, intervening between the Absolute and the physical world; and of ecstatic union with the transcendent and unconditioned One as the term of religious experience, passed over from the ancient to the mediæval world. Translated from Greek into Syriac in the fifth century, they deeply affected Sūfi philosophy. They entered Western thought in the ninth century, through Erigena’s Latin translation. It is said that by A.D. 850 Dionysius was known from the Tigris to the Atlantic: and from this time onwards his influence, and through him that of Plotinus, can be traced in the spiritual literature of Christianity and Islam.

Erigena, whose original works are strongly coloured by Neoplatonism, is the first mediæval writer in whom this influence appears. He follows Plotinus and Dionysius closely in teaching that the Absolute Godhead is “beyond being” and therefore transcendent to the trinity of Persons; a doctrine of doubtful orthodoxy, which was of great importance in the later development of mysticism. But a still closer approximation to the thought, and especially to the psychology of Plotinus, is found in Richard of St. Victor: perhaps the greatest mystical theologian, certainly one of the most influential writers, of the early Middle Ages. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries his works, which are now hardly read, circulated through western Europe, and shaped the developing mysticism of England, Germany, and Flanders. Dante, who calls him one “who in contemplation was more than man,” places his radiant soul among those of the great teachers in the Heaven of the Sun (_Par._ X. 131). Abandoning alike the many worlds of Dionysius and the crude dualism of popular religion, Richard taught that three spheres are open to human contemplation: _sensibilia_, _intelligibilia_, and _intellectibilia_—a series closely analogous to the three worlds of Plotinus. He said that three kinds of contemplation on man’s part corresponded with these worlds. These are _mentis dilatatio_, a widening of the soul’s vision, which yet remains within the natural order: _mentis sublevatio_, an uplifting of the illuminated mind to the apprehension of “things above itself” (or, as Neoplatonists would say, intelligibles); and finally _mentis alienatio_ or ecstasy, in which the soul gazes on Truth in its naked simplicity. Then “elevated above itself and rapt in ecstasy, it beholds things in the Divine Light at which all human reason succumbs.” This divine light is the _lumen gloriæ_, the radiance of the spiritual or intelligible world, which transforms the soul and makes it capable of beholding God; a conception which became a commonplace of mediæval theology, was adopted by nearly all the mystics, and plays an important part in the _Paradiso_.

“Lume è lassù, che visibile face
lo Creatore a quella creatura
che solo in lui vedere ha la sua pace” (xxx. 100).

Ruysbroeck—a student of Dionysius and of Richard—says of it in _The Twelve Béguines_: “From the Face of the Father there shines a clear light on those souls whose thought is bare and stripped of images, uplifted above the senses and above similitudes, beyond and without reason, in high purity of spirit. This Light is not God, but it is the mediator between the seeing thought and God.” These passages and many like them can be shown to derive directly through St. Augustine from the Enneads. Thus Plotinus says: “Light is visible by Light. The _Nous_ sees itself, and this light, shining on the soul, enlightens it and makes it a member of the spiritual world” (V. 3. 8). Augustine, apparently referring to this passage among others, says: “Often and in many places does Plotinus declare, expounding the meaning of Plato, that what they believe to be the Soul of the World has its bliss from the same source as ours, namely, a Light which it is not, but by which it was created, and from whose spiritual illumination it shines spiritually” (_De Civ. Dei._ X. 2). And, of his own ecstatic experience, “I entered and beheld with the mysterious eye of my soul the Light that never changes, above the eye of my soul, above my intelligence.... He who knows the truth knows that Light, and he who knows that Light knows Eternity” (_Conf._ VII. 10).

From the thirteenth century onwards, the majority of the mediæval mystics show knowledge and appreciation of those Plotinian ideas which reached them—though in an attenuated form—through St. Augustine, Dionysius, and Richard of St. Victor. Even the Franciscan and Christo-centric enthusiasm of such contemplatives as Jacopone da Todi and Angela of Foligno was affected by these lofty conceptions. Thus Jacopone takes from the Neoplatonists the three stages of spiritual experience, and describes in unequivocal language his successive achievements of that Logos-Christ—so near the Plotinian _Nous_—“_che de omne bellezze se’ fattore_,” and of the “Imageless Good” who cannot be named. So too, Angela’s successive visions of the divine fullness and beauty, and of “the ineffable Thing of which nought may be said” depend for their expression on the same philosophy.

Nor was its penetrative influence confined to the mystical schools. St. Thomas Aquinas, who accepts and expounds in the _Summa_ (I. _q._12. _a._5) the doctrine of the _lumen gloriæ_, is considerably indebted to Plotinus in several other particulars; though he cites him inaccurately, and does not seem to have known him at first hand. In a remarkable passage, which afterwards influenced one of the finest rhapsodies of Ruysbroeck, he has actually “lifted” the most celebrated phrase in the Sixth Ennead, and adapted it to the distinctively Christian and non-Platonic view of divine union, as a “mutual act” of God and the soul. “In a wonderful and unspeakable manner,” says St. Thomas of the soul in this place, “she both seizes and is seized upon, devours and is herself devoured, embraces and is violently embraced; and by the knot of love she unites herself with God, and _is with Him as the Alone with the Alone_.”

It is in a later and less orthodox son of St. Dominic, the formidable and adventurous thinker Eckhart, that the influence of Plotinus on the mediæval mind is best seen: passing through him to Suso, Tauler, Ruysbroeck, and other mystics of the fourteenth century. Eckhart’s philosophy still provides one of the most suggestive glosses upon the Enneads. He made that distinction between the absolute and supra-personal Godhead and the God of devotion, which was almost inevitable for a Christian thinker trying to find a place in theology for the Neoplatonic One. The Godhead, he says, is “a non-God, a non-Spirit, a non-person, a non-image: a sheer pure One.” The Son, in whom “the Father becomes conscious of Himself,” combines the attributes of the Logos-Christ with those of the _Nous_. In Him are the archetypes of all created things. There is thus an emanation from the Godhead, through the Son, into creation. The soul’s destiny is exactly that conceived by Plotinus: it must ascend to the spiritual world, and through it to its origin, the One, “flowing back into the bottom of the bottomless fountain from which it flowed forth.” In Tauler and Suso, and especially in the great Flemish contemplative Ruysbroeck, these ideas—though modified by their inferior speculative ability and more ardent spirit of Christian devotion—are still strongly felt: and since their works and those of their disciples nourished many succeeding generations of contemplatives, through them the mystical side of the Neoplatonic tradition was handed down. In Ruysbroeck, with his threefold division of spiritual experience into “the moral life, the contemplative life, and the super-essential life,” and his astonishing and detailed descriptions of the soul’s achievement of the Essential Unity, the “death into the One through love,” the vision of Plotinus is fully baptized into the Catholic Church. In Jacob Boehme, who drew through Schwenkenfeld and Weigel from Eckhart and his school, the doctrine of the three worlds which forms the basis of his cosmology contains distinct reminiscences of the Plotinian Triad. “These three,” he says, “are nought else than the One God in His wonderful works ... and we are thus to understand a threefold Being, or three worlds in one another.” His conception of the Light-world, source of all spiritual beauty and home of “the true human essence,” is very near to the _Nous_. Yet the very closeness with which all these mystics follow those parts of the Neoplatonic doctrine which appeal to them, makes it possible for us to measure the distance which separates their minds, their tone and temper, from that of Plotinus and his school. The calm, the austerity of thought, the emphasis on beauty, the clear cool light of the Intelligible World have departed. These men see philosophy through the haze of Christian feeling. Their work is full of passionate effort; is centred on the ideas of sacrifice and of pain. Their religion is coloured by the sharp Christian consciousness of sin, and by the difficulty—never squarely faced—of reconciling devotion to a personal redeemer with the mystical passion for the Absolute. That the philosophy of the Enneads was able to enter a world so remote from its spirit, and come to terms with an attitude of mind in many respects opposed to that of its creator, is an oblique proof of the authenticity of its claim to interpret the spiritual experiences of man.

THREE MEDIÆVAL MYSTICS

I
“THE MIRROR OF SIMPLE SOULS”

I

_The Mirror of Simple Souls_—a rare work on the spiritual life, of which manuscripts exist in the British Museum, the Bodleian, and one or two other public libraries—has so far received little or no attention from students of religious literature. Yet it may turn out to possess great importance, as one of the missing links in the history of English mysticism: for it is a middle-English translation, made at the close of the fourteenth century or beginning of the fifteenth, of the lost work of a French thirteenth-century mystic. It shows, therefore, that the common View of French mediæval religion as unmystical needs qualification; and further indicates a path by which the contemplative tradition of western Europe reached England and affected the development of our native mystical school.

_The Mirror of Simple Souls_, as we now have it, is a work of nearly 60,000 words in length. So far from being simple, it deals almost exclusively with the rarest and most sublime aspects of spiritual experience. Its theme is the theme of all mysticism: the soul’s adventures on its way towards union with God. It is not, like the _Melum_ of Richard Rolle, or _Revelations_ of Julian of Norwich, a subjective book; the record of personal experiences and actual “conversations in heaven.” Rather it is objective and didactic, a work of geography, not a history of travel; an advanced text-book of the contemplative life. Only from the ardour and exactitude of its descriptions, its strange air of authority, its defiance of pious convention, can we gather that it is the fruit of first-hand experience, not merely of theological study: though its writer was clearly a trained theologian, familiar with the works of St. Augustine and Dionysius the Areopagite, whom no mystic of the Middle Ages wholly escaped, and apparently with those of St. Bernard, Hugh and Richard of St. Victor, and other mediæval authorities on the inner life.

I have said that the _Mirror_, as we have it, purports to be the translation of an unknown French treatise. This translation, so far as we can judge from its language, was probably made in the early years of the fifteenth century, perhaps at the end of the fourteenth. Its author, then, lived at the close of the golden age of English mysticism: he was the contemporary of Julian of Norwich, who was still living in 1413, and of Walter Hilton, who died in 1395. Himself a mystic, he was no servile translator; rather the eager interpreter of the book which he wished to make accessible to his countrymen. Our manuscripts begin with his prologue: an ingenuous confession of the difficulties of the undertaking, his own temerity in daring to touch these “high divine matters,” his fear lest the book should fall into unsuitable hands and its more extreme teachings be misunderstood. It appears from this prologue that our version of the _Mirror_ is a second, or revised edition; the first having failed to be comprehensible to its readers.

The character of the translator, as disclosed for us in his prologue, is itself interesting. Clearly he was a contemplative; and the “high ghostly feelings” of which he treats are to him the strictly practical objects of supreme desire, though he modestly disclaims their possession. He appears before us as a gentle, humble, rather timid soul: often frankly terrified by the daring flights of his “French book,” which he is at pains to explain in a safe sense. One would judge him, from the peeps which he gives us into his mind, a disciple of the devout and homely school of Walter Hilton, rather than a descendant of the group of advanced mystics which produced in the mid-fourteenth century _The Cloud of Unknowing_, _The Pistle of Private Counsel_, and other profound studies of the inner life. These books were written under the strong influence of Dionysius the Areopagite; whose _Mystical Theology_, under the title of _Dionise Hid Divinite_, was first translated into English by some member of the school. But to the translator of the _Mirror_ his author’s drastic applications of the Dionysian paradoxes of indifference, passivity, and nescience as the path to knowledge teem with “hard sayings.” His attitude towards them is that of reverential alarm: he fears their probable effect on the mind of the hasty reader. They seem, as he says in one place, “fable or error or hard to understand” until one has read them several times. He is sure that their real meaning is unexceptionable; but terribly afraid that they will be misunderstood.

Here, then, is the prologue which sets forth his point of view.

“To the worship and laud of the Trinity be this work begun and ended! Amen.

“This book, the which is called _The Mirror of Simple Souls_, I, most unworthy creature and outcast of all other, many years gone wrote it out of French into English after my lewd cunning; in hope that by the grace of God it should profit the devout souls that shall read it. This was forsooth mine intent. But now I am stirred to labour it again new, for because I am informed that some words thereof have been mistaken. Therefore, if God will, I shall declare these words more openly. For though Love declare the points in the same book, it is but shortly spoken, and may be taken otherwise than it is meant of them that read it suddenly and take no further heed. Therefore such words to be twice opened it would be more of audience [understanding]: and so by grace of our Lord good God it shall the more profit to the auditors. But both the first time and now, I have great dread to do it. For the book is of high divine matters and high ghostly feelings, and cunningly and full mystically it is spoken, and I am a creature right wretched and unable to do any such work: poor and naked of ghostly fruits, darkened with sins and defaults, environed and wrapped therein oft times, the which taketh away my taste and my clear sight; so that little I have of ghostly understanding and less of the feeling of divine love. Therefore I may say the words of the prophet: ‘My teeth be nought white to bite of this bread.’ But Almighty Jesu, God that feedeth the worm and gives sight to the blind and wit to the unwitty; give me grace of wit and wisdom in all times wisely to govern myself, following alway His will, and send me clear sight and true understanding well to do this work to His worship and pleasaunce: profit also and increase of grace to ghostly lovers that be disposed and called to this high election of the freedom of soul.”

He goes on to the difficulty which dogs all writers on mysticism; the impossibility of making mystic truth seem real to those who have no experience of the mystic life. It has been said that only mystics can write about mysticism. It were truer to say that only mystics can read about it.

“Oh ye that shall read this book! do ye as David says in the Psalter, _Gustate et videte_: that is to say, ‘Taste and see.’ But why trow ye he said, taste first, e’er than he said see? For first a soul must taste, e’er it have very understanding and true sight; sight of ghostly workings of divine love. Oh full naked and dark, dry and unsavoury be the speakings and writings of these high ghostly feelings of the love of God to them that have not tasted the sweetness thereof. But when a soul is touched with grace, by which she has tasted somewhat of the sweetness of this divine fruition, and begins to wade, and draweth the draughts to her-ward, then it savours the soul so sweetly that she desires greatly to have of it more and more, and pursueth thereafter. And then the soul is glad and joyful to hear and to read of all thing that pertains to this high feeling of the workings of divine love, in nourishing and increasing her love and devotion to the will and pleasing of Him that she loves, God Christ Jesu. Thus she enters and walks in the way of illumination, that she might be taught into the ghostly influences of the divine work of God, there to be drowned in the high flood, and oned to God by ravishing of love, by which she is all one spirit with her Spouse. Therefore to these souls that be disposed to these high feelings Love has made of him this book in fulfilling of their desire.”

But even for those who have been initiated into this way of illumination, the translator acknowledges that many things in the _Mirror_ are difficult and obscure: “often he leaveth the nut and the kernel within the shell unbroken, that is to say, that Love in this book leaves to souls the touches of his divine works privily hid under dark speech, for they should taste the deeper the draughts of his love and drink; and also to make them have the more clear insight in divine understandings to divine love, and declare himself.” Therefore he has added his own explanations to the more difficult passages. “Where meseems most need I will write more words thereto in manner of gloss after my simple cunning as meseems best. And in these few places that I put in more than I find written I will begin with the first letter of my name M. and end with this letter N. the first of my surname.”

He ends with a gentle complaint of the badness of the text from which he worked, and the confession that he has allowed himself a certain amount of editorial liberty. “The French book that I shall write after is evil written, and in some places for default of words and syllables the reason is away. Also in translating of French some words need to be changed, or it will fare ungoodly, not according to the sentence. Wherefore I will follow the sentence according to the matter, as near as God will give me grace; obeying me ever to the correction of Holy Kirk, praying ghostly livers and clerks that they will vouchsafe to correct and amend there that I do amiss.”

So much for M.N., the English mystic. The prologue of the author, which comes next, tells us all that we know about the anonymous French writer of the book. This person was of a very different temper from M.N. As a Catholic scholar has observed of St. Teresa, “L’auteur ne se faisait pas illusion sur le mèrite de son œuvre.” Like Teresa, he believed himself to have written under immediate divine inspiration; a fact which somewhat excuses his complacency in regard to the result. This is a common claim with the mystics, in whom subconscious cerebration is always exceptionally active, and whose writings often exhibit an automatic and involuntary character, seeming to them the work of another mind. Jacob Boehme, Madame Guyon, and Blake are obvious cases in point. The author of the _Mirror_, however, was anxious that his claim to inspiration should be endorsed. He therefore—most fortunately for us—sent his work to various “learned clerks,” persons of importance in the theological world, and chronicles their appreciatory remarks in the prologue; which becomes in his hands a form of mediæval “advance-notice.” It will be observed that his critics share the opinion of M.N., that though full of “ghostly cunning” this is a dangerous work to put into the hands of the plain man.

Of these critics “The first was a Friar Minor of great name, of life of perfection. Men called him Friar John of Querayne.... He said soothly that this book is made by the Holy Ghost. And though all the clerks of the world heard it, but if they understand it, that is to say, but if they have high ghostly feelings and this same working, they shall nought wit what it means. And he prayed for the love of God that it be wisely kept: and that but few should see it. And he said thus, that it was so high that himself might not understand it. And after him a monk of Cisetyns [Citeaux] read it, that hight Dan Frank, Chantor of the Abbey of Viliers: and he said that it proved well by the Scripture that it is all truth that this book says. And after him read it a Master of Divinity, that hight Master Godfrey of Fountaynes: and he blamed it nought, no more than did the other. But he said thus, that he counselled nought [_sic_] that few should see it; and for this cause, for they might leave their own working and follow this calling, to the which they should never come, and so they might deceive themselves, for it is made of a spirit so strong and so cutting, that there be but few such or none.... For the peace of auditors was this proved, and for your peace we say it to you. For this seed should bear holy fruit to them that hear it and worthy be.”

Of the three persons here mentioned, Friar John and Dan Frank still remain unidentified: but Godfrey of Fountaynes is almost certainly the Master of Divinity, called Doctor Venerandus, who was a prominent member of the University of Paris at the end of the thirteenth century. He was at the height of his fame about 1280-1290, and died about 1306. “_Grande lumen studii magister Godefridum de Fontanis_,” he is called in a letter of 1301. In the great war between Friars and Seculars which divided the University at the end of the thirteenth century, this Godfrey was one of the bitterest opponents of the Mendicant Orders. He wrote against them, and attacked them in the Synod of Paris in 1283. We see therefore that the author of the _Mirror_, in placing Godfrey’s testimonial beside that of Friar John, secured with a cunning other than ghostly a friend in each of the opposing camps.

There is, however, one obvious and significant omission in this list of patrons. There is no name which emanates directly from the great school of St. Thomas Aquinas; supreme at that moment in the University, and the custodian of orthodox philosophy. There is, indeed, little trace of scholastic influence in the _Mirror_, which is far more in harmony with the mystical theology favoured by St. Bonaventura, and continued during the following century in the Franciscan schools: a fact which explains at once the guarded approbation of Friar John, and the absence of Dominican patronage. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the Franciscans were eager students of and commentators on Dionysius the Areopagite: and the order which produced and upheld the hardy speculations of Duns Scotus might well look with indulgence on the most extravagant statements of _The Mirror of Simple Souls_.

The original version of this book, then, was probably written in the last quarter of the thirteenth century, and certainly before 1306. Its writer was therefore the contemporary of Eckhart and Jacopone da Todi, the great mystical lights of the Preaching and the Minor Friars. He was no provincial recluse, but a person in touch with the intellectual life of his time. He had connections with the University of Paris, but the names of his patrons prove him to have been neither a member nor an enemy of the Mendicant Orders. It is probable that he was a monk, possible that he was a Carthusian; a strictly contemplative order celebrated for its mystical leanings, which produced in the later Middle Ages many students of the Dionysian writings, and many works upon contemplation. He was widely read, and many parallels could be established between his doctrines and the classics of Christian mysticism. His lost book is so far our only evidence that abstruse prose treatises of this kind were already written in the vernacular; and this alone gives it great interest from the literary point of view. He was, so far as we know, the first French mystic to write in French; the forerunner of St. Francis de Sales, of Madame Guyon, of Malaval. If we except the semi-mystical writings of Gerson, we must wait till the seventeenth century to provide him with a worthy successor.

II

We come next to the manner and content of the book. The manner is that of a dramatic dialogue: an unusual if not unique form for works of this kind. It consists of a debate—often a lively debate—between Love, the Soul, Reason, and a few intervening characters, of whom Pure Courtesy and Discretion are the chief. The student will at once be reminded of the _Romaunt de la Rose_: but he will have difficulty in matching this form within the confines of ascetic literature. Duologues, such as those in the Third Book of the _Imitatio_, or Suso’s conversations with Eternal Wisdom, are not uncommon: but I know of no other instance of an elaborate mystical doctrine presented through the mouths of a group of symbolic personages.

The Soul is naturally that of the author. Lady Love is his instructress, and all the most beautiful passages are given to her. Reason’s rôle is interrogatory. He catechises Love sharply though respectfully, and represents the invariable attitude of common sense confronted by the claims of mysticism. Sometimes he goes too far; Love or the Soul is driven to put him in his place. “Oh, understanding of Reason!” says this soul noughted, “what thou hast of rudeness! Thou takest the shell or the chaff and leavest the kernel or the grain. Thine understanding is so low, that thou mayst not so highly reach as them behoves that well would have understanding of the Being that we speak of.” In general, however, the figure of Reason is used with great art to elucidate the hard sayings of Love. The alert intelligence of the writer notes all possible objections to his doctrine, and states and refutes them out of the mouths of his characters. “O Lady Love, what is this that you say?” says the shocked voice of Reason whenever the argument becomes paradoxical or abstruse. “Reason,” says Love to this, “I will answer for the profit of them for whom thou makest to us this piteous request. Reason,” says Love, “where be these double words that thou prayest me to discuss ... it is well asked, and I will,” says Love, “answer thee to all thy asking.”

What, then, is the doctrine which these discussions put before us? It is the doctrine of the soul’s possible ascent from illusion to reality, from separateness to union with the Divine: the primal creed of all mysticism, here stated in its most extreme form, and pressed to its logical conclusion. It offers, not a chart of the way to a distant heaven of beatitude and recompense, but initiation into that state of being wherein we find our heaven here and now. “I took Jesus for my heaven,” said Julian of Norwich. So the writer of the _Mirror_: “Paradise is no other thing than God Himself ... why was the thief in Paradise anon as the soul was departed from his body?... He saw God, that is Paradise; for other thing is not Paradise than to see God. And this doth she [the soul] in sooth at all times that she is uncumbered of herself.” The super-essential and unknowable Godhead, whose nature is but partially revealed in the Blessed Trinity, is the only substance of reality, and the only satisfaction of the soul’s desire. “Though this soul had all the knowledge, love and learning that ever was given, or shall be given, of the Divine Trinity, it should be naught as in regard of that that she loves and shall love ... for there is no other God but He that none may know, which may not be known.” The history of human transcendence is the history of the soul’s transmutation to that condition of love in which it is, as the author is not afraid to say, deified; and so merged in the Reality from which it came forth, that it is no longer aware of its own separate experience but is “all one spirit with its Spouse.”

“I am God,” says Love, “for Love is God and God is Love. And this soul is God by condition of love, and I am God by nature divine. And this is hers by right-wiseness of love. So that this Precious, loved of me, is learned and led by me out of herself, for she is turned to me, in me.”

This process is set forth by the writer of the _Mirror_ under three chief heads: those of Liberty as the aim, the Will as the agent, and Surrender as the method of the spiritual quest.

In the conception of Liberty as the supreme aim of the spiritual life we have what is perhaps the most original feature of his work: though it is a conception which is of course implicit in the New Testament. Where most contemplatives lay emphasis on the glad servitude of love, and use the symbols of wedlock to express the willing subjugation of the soul to its Divine Bridegroom, the key of this book is the idea of spiritual freedom; and that freedom as consisting in the liberation of man’s will from finite desires that it may rejoin and lose itself within the Will of the Infinite. We are to learn, it says in the first chapter, something of “the pure love, of the noble love, and of the high love of the _free_ soul; and how the Holy Ghost has His sail in his ship.” With our “inward subtle understanding”—that spiritual intuition which is the instrument of all real knowledge—we are to follow its progress from the bondage of desire to the point at which, purged of self-will, perfected in meekness and love, “noughted and abased,” it reaches the “Seventh Estate of Grace,” and participates in the perfect liberty of Pure Being, wherein “the soul has fulhead of perception by divine fruition in life of peace.” “Not-willing” is the secret of liberation, and lord of our true life. “And this not-willing sows in souls the Divine Seed, fulfilled of the divine will of God. This seed may never fail, but few souls dispose them to receive this seed.” Though this emancipation is only attained by the utter surrender of all personal desire and achievement, yet throughout the book the dominant note is of glad liberation, of flying, of a rapturous ascent. As we read, we seem to hear from every page “the thunder of new wings.” The free soul is “six-winged like the seraphim.” She is “the eagle that flies high: so right high and yet more high than does any other bird; for she is feathered with fine love, and she beholds above other the beauty of the sun, and the beams and the brightness of the sun. Dame Nature,” says she, “I take leave of you: Love is me nigh, that holds me free of him against all without dread. Then,” says Love, “she afraies her nought for tribulation, nor stints for consolation.”

It is clear to the writer that only certain persons are capable of this complete freedom in love: and it is to them—the natural mystics, the people with a genius for reality—that his book is addressed. They are “of that lineage that be folks royal,” “called without fail of the Divine goodness,” and it is on their spiritual intuition, their transcendent knowledge, that “all Holy Church is founded”; a suspicious statement in the eyes of orthodox theology. They possess, or are able to possess, the incommunicable gift of spiritual vision.

“This gift is given,” says Love, “sometimes in a moment of time. Who that has it, keep it: for it is the most perfect gift that God gives to creature.” So removed is the resulting perception of reality from human wisdom that no one can teach the illuminated soul anything. “Now for God,” says Reason, “Lady Love, say what is this to say? This is to say,” says Love, “that this soul is of so great knowing that though she had all the knowing of all creatures that ever were, be or shall be, she would think it naught in regard of that that she loves.” Yet, true to Neoplatonic principles, she is aware that her highest perceptions are nothing, and her “right great and high words” but “gabbynge” or idle talk, compared with the ineffable reality. She “wots all and wots naught,” and is content it should be so. “He only is my God that none can one word of say, nor all they of Paradise one only point attain nor understand, for all the knowing that they have of Him.”

But though the Transcendent God is unknowable, the free soul, in singular contradiction to contemporary asceticism, finds Him everywhere immanent in the world. “And for this, that He is all in all, this soul, says Love, finds Him over all. So that for this all things are to this soul covetable, for she nor finds anything but she finds God.” So Meister Eckhart: “To it all creatures are pure to enjoy; for it enjoyeth all creatures in God and God in all creatures.”

The preliminary discipline of the mystic, the hard acquirement of that “very charity” which is “the perfection of virtues” and “dwelleth always in God’s sight ... obeying to nothing that is made but to love” is little dwelt on by the author of the _Mirror_; who did not write for beginners in the contemplative life, but for the mature soul whose love has made him free, and who therefore needs “nor masses nor sermons nor fasting nor orisons, and gives to nature all that he asks, without grudging of conscience”—a practical application of St. Augustine’s dangerous saying, “Love, and do what you like.” M.N., however, interpolates a prudent reminder that “by this way and by sharp contricion souls must go, or than they come to these divine usages.”

The author’s own instructions are really reducible to one point: the complete and loving surrender of the individual will to the Primal Will—detachment, or, as he calls it, the “noughting” of the soul. This is that “peace of charity in life noughted,” which constitutes the higher life of love; in contrast to the active life of virtue, struggling to keep unbroken its attitude of charity to God and man. In it the soul dwells, as do the Seraphim, within the divine atmosphere, and has direct access to the sources of its life. “This is the proper being of Seraphim: there is nought mediate between their love and the Divine Love; they have always its tidings without means. So hath this soul, that seeks not the divine science amongst the masters of the world, but the world and herself inwardly despises. Ah, God! what great difference it is between a gift given by means, of the Loved to the Lover, and the gift given without means of the Loved to the Lover. This book says sooth of this soul. It says she hath six wings as have the Seraphim. With two she covers the face of our Lord: that is to say, the more knowledge this soul hath of the Divine Goodness the more she knows that she knows not the amount of a mote as in regard to His Goodness, the which is not comprehended but of Himself. And with two she covers His feet: this is to say, the more that this soul hath knowledge of the sufferance that Jesu Christ suffered for us, the more perfectly she knows that she knows naught, as in regard of it that He suffered for us, the which is not known but of Him. And with two she flies, and so dwells in standing and sitting: this is to say, that all she covets and loves and prizes, it is the Divine Goodness. These be the wings that she flies with, and so dwells in standing, for she is alway in the sight of God: and sitting, for she dwells alway in the Divine Will. Whereof should this soul have dread, though she be in the world? An the world, the flesh, and our Enemy the Fiend, and the four elements, the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, tormented her and despised her and devoured her if it might so be, what might she lose if God dwelled with her? Oh, is he not Almightiful? Yea, without doubt: He is all might, all wisdom and all goodness, our Father and Brother and our true Friend.”

“This soul,” says Love, “can no more speak of God; for she is noughted to all outward desires, and of all the affections of the spirit. So that what this soul does, she does it by usage of good custom, and by commandment of Holy Church, without any desire: for will is dead, that gave her desire.... Who that asks these free souls, sure and peaceful, if they would be in purgatory, they say nay. If they would living be certified of their salvation, they say nay. Eh, what would they? They have nothing of will, this for to will; and if they willed, they should descend from Love: for He it is that hath their will.... Thus departs the soul from her will and the will departs from this soul, so she again puts it and gives and yields it in God where it was first.” Such a doctrine easily slides into the complete passivity or “holy indifference” which was the ideal of the seventeenth century Quietists: and the _Mirror_ certainly does contain passages which, if taken alone, would convict their author of a fondness for this heresy. “I certify thee that these souls that fine love leads, they have as lief shame as worship, and worship as shame; and poverty as riches and riches as poverty; and torments of God and of His creatures as comforts of God and of His creatures; and to be hated as loved, and loved as hated; and hell as paradise and paradise as hell ... the free soul has no will to will or unwill, but only to will the will of God and suffer in peace His divine ordinance.”

Nevertheless, other passages make it clear that active surrender, not mere passivity is the aim, and that the “noughting” of the self within the All is a loving sacrifice, consistent with its achievement of completest happiness. “True love has but only one intent; and that is, that she might alway love truly, for of the love of her Lover has she no doubt, that He does what best is. And she follows this: that she does that that she ought to do. And she wills nought but one thing; and that is, that the Will of God be alway in her done.... This soul,” says Love, “swims in the sea of joy, that is, in the sea of delights, streaming of divine influences. She feels no joy, for she herself is joy. She swims and drenches in joy, for she lives in joy without feeling any joy. So is joy in her, that she herself is joy, by the virtue of joy that has merged her in Him. And so is the will of the Loved and the will of this soul turned into one as fire and flame.”

The teaching of the writer seems to be, that so long as the will is consciously active and desirous—however good its actions or desires—its owner cannot be liberated from the illusions and anxieties of the personal life. What he needs, if he did but know it, is reunion with that fontal life from which he came, to which he is perpetually drawn by love. Here his separate will finds its meaning, and is not annihilated but absorbed. “The understanding, that gives light, shows to the soul the thing that she loves. And the soul that receives by light of understanding the nighing and the knitting by accord of union in plenteous love, sees the Being, where that she holds to have her seat; receiving gladly the light of knowing that brings her tidings of love. And then she would become so, that she had but one will and love; and that is, the only will of Him that she loves.”

The detached soul who is thus “noughted in God” enjoys a freedom from stress, an immunity from disappointment incredible to those who still live the individual life. “Now shall I say to you what they be that sit in the mountain above the wind and the rain? These be they that have in earth neither shame nor worship, nor dread of anything that befalls.” She has, moreover, passed beyond that moral conflict which arises from the discord between conscience and desire, and is the essential character of the active life; for she has within her “the Master of Virtues, that is called Divine Love, that has her merged in them all and to Him united.” Thus she is able to say, “Virtues, I take leave of you for evermore. Now shall my heart be more free and more in peace than it has been. Forsooth, I wot well your service is too travaillous. Sometime I laid my heart in you without any dissevering: ye wot well this. I was in all thing to you obedient. O, I was then your servant: but now I am delivered out of your thralldom.”

M.N. is quick to gloss this dangerous declaration: “I am stirred here to say more to the matter ... when a soul gives her to perfection, she labours busily day and night to get virtues by counsel of reason, and strives with vices at every point, at every word and deed ... thus the virtues be mistresses and every virtue makes her to war with her contrary.... But so long one may bite on the bitter bark of the nut that at last he shall come to the sweet kernel. Right so, ghostly to understand, it fares with these souls that be come to peacefulness. They have so long striven with vices and wrought by virtues that they be come to the nut’s kernel, that is to say, to the love of God, which is sweetness. And when the soul has deeply tasted this love ... then is she mistress and lady over the virtues, for she has them all within herself ... and then this soul takes leave of virtues, as of thralldom and painful travail ... and now she is lady and sovereign and they be subjects.”

In the technical language of mysticism she has passed from the active to the contemplative life, the crucial phase in the evolution of man’s transcendental consciousness. This evolution is described for us with great psychological exactness in the _Mirror_, under the traditional formula of the “States” of the soul’s ascent. Since few mystics have escaped the mania for significant numbers, one is not surprised to find seven steps on this “steep stairway of love.” “I am called,” says this soul, “of the touchings of Love, something to say of the Seven Estates that we call beings: for so it is. And these be the degrees by which man climbs from the valley, to the top of the mountain that is so several [apart] that it sees but God.”

“The First Estate is, That a soul is touched of God by grace and dissevered from sin: and, as to her power, in intention to keep the commandments of God.” This is, of course, equivalent to the conversion or change of heart which begins the spiritual life.

“The Second is, that a soul hold what God counsels to His special lovers, passing that what he commands. And he is no good lover that demenes him not to fulfill all that the which he wist might best please to his Beloved.

“The Third is, that a soul holds the affection of love of works of perfection, by which her spirit is ripened by desires: taking the love of these works to multiply in her. And what does the subtlety of her thought, but makes it seem to the understanding of her humble affection, that she cannot make offering to her Love that might comfort her, but of thing that He loves: for other gift is not prized in love.

“The Fourth is that a soul is drawn by highness of love into delight of thought by meditation, and relinquishes all labours outward, and obedience to others, by highness of love in contemplation. Then the soul is dangerous, noble and delicious: in which she may not suffer that anything her touch but the touchings of pure delight of love, in the which she is singularly gladsome and jolly. What marvel is it if this soul be upheld and updrawed thus graciously? Love makes her all drunken, that suffers her not to attend but to Him.” These four stages have brought the self to the complete practice of the contemplative life, and prepared the way for that second great phase in the achievement of reality which consists in the surrender of the separate will.

“The Fifth is, that a soul beholds what God is, and His Goodness, by Divine Light. She sees the Will, by the spreading illumination of Divine Light, the which light gives her the will again to put in God this will; which she may not without this light yield, that may not her profit unless she departs from her own will. Thus departs the soul from her will, and the will departs from this soul, so she again puts it and gives and yields it in God, where it was first.

“Now is this soul fallen of love into nought, without the which nought, she may not all be. The which falling is so perfectly fallen, if she be fallen aright, that the soul may not arise out of this deepness, nor she ought not to do it. Within she ought to dwell. And then leaves the soul pride and play, for the spirit has become bitter, that suffers her no more to be playing nor jolly; for the spirit is departed from her that made her oft love in the highness of contemplation, and in the fourth estate fierce and dangerous.” Here the spirit of the mystic experiences that terrible and characteristic reaction from the exalted joys of contemplation which is sometimes called the “mystic death” or “dark night of the soul,” and destroys in it the last roots of selfhood. In this stage she completes the abandonment or “self-noughting” which initiate her into that which the German mystics called “the Upper School of the Holy Spirit.” Thence she passes to the Sixth Estate, of union with the Divine life, in so far as it can be achieved by those still in the flesh. The Seventh is that indescribable state of “glory” or super-essential life, which constitutes the beatific vision of the Saints, known only of those that “be fallen of love into this being.”

“The Sixth is, that a soul sees neither her nought by deepness of meekness, nor God by highful bounty. But God sees it in her of His Divine Majesty that illuminated her of Him. So that she sees that none is, but God Himself. And then is a soul in the Sixth Estate of all things made free, pure and illuminated. Not glorified, for gloryfying is in the Seventh Estate, that we shall have in glory that none can speak of. But, pure and clarified, she sees nor God nor herself: but God sees this of Him, in her, for her, withouten her, that shows her that there is none but He. Nay, she knows but Him, nor she loves but Him, nor she praises but Him, for there is but He. And the Seventh keeps He within Him, for to give us in everlasting glory. If we wit it not now, we shall wit it when the body our soul leaves.”

II
THE BLESSED ANGELA OF FOLIGNO

It is a curious fact that in the modern revival of interest in the Franciscan movement, little attention has been paid to the life and works of Angela of Foligno. Yet, excepting only St. Bonaventura, this woman has probably exerted a more enduring, more far-reaching influence than any other Franciscan of the century which followed the Founder’s death. In saying this, I do not forget the claims of such great Franciscans as John of Parma or Jacopone da Todi, nor yet of St. Clare, the Founder of the Second Order. But the influence of John of Parma was comparatively short-lived; and that of Jacopone’s superb poetry, though great in Italy, did not go beyond it. His ecstasies could not be translated into other tongues. As to St. Clare, with whom the feminine aspect of the Franciscan ideal first showed itself, her vocation was to the foundation of a contemplative order, which should support by its heavenly correspondences the active and missionary life of the Franciscan friars. The business of the Second Order is the essential woman’s business, of keeping the fire of love alight upon the hearth. Its influence, therefore, was and is almost entirely confined within the boundaries of the spiritual family. The deepest wells of Franciscan mysticism are there hidden, and must always be hidden, from the outer world.

But the vocation of Angela of Foligno was, in a sense, more thoroughly Franciscan than this, more broadly human, more complete. Like that of St. Catherine of Genoa, a mystic whom she resembles in certain respects, it was a twofold vocation: to the eternal and to the temporal, to the divine and to the human. She was a great contemplative, but she was also an exceedingly successful teacher of the secrets of the spiritual life: one of the great line of artist-mediators between the infinite and the human mind.