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. We know nothing of St. Clare’s mystical experience. We know of Angela’s all that she was able to express; and she tried hard, though for want of language she confesses that she often failed. This passionate, faulty, very human woman, who came to the Mystic Way from a disorderly life, and was hampered by a natural egotism which she transmuted, it is true, but never perhaps really killed, has earned the great title of “Mistress of Theologians.” She penetrated to that world of realities which the diagrams of theology, like the temple built with hands, foreshadow upon earth. Her book of visions and revelations, now so little read, profoundly affected the religious life of Europe. During the sixteenth and the seventeenth century we often come upon its traces in England and in France, as well as in Italy itself; for in this period it was one of the most widely circulated religious works. It exerted great influence on St. Francis de Sales, and also upon the French Quietists. It is quoted as an authority by Madame Guyon, Poiret, and Malaval; and through the great English Benedictine, Augustine Baker, and his pupil, Gertrude More, it has left its mark on the English Catholic mysticism of the seventeenth century. This book is practically our only trustworthy source for the facts of Angela’s inner and outer life. It was written in Latin, at her dictation, by her Franciscan confessor Fra Arnaldo; at some date subsequent to 1294, since it dates a past event by the pontificate of Celestine V. It was not printed till the sixteenth century, when first an Italian translation, and then the Latin text appeared. Both soon became popular; the translation being one of the first Italian books of devotion to appear in the vulgar tongue. It is divided into three parts, which must be read in relation with one another. First we have the history of Angela’s conversion, penitence, and slow, difficult education in the mystic way: a detailed psychological document of much interest. Secondly we have, grouped together, all the visions and revelations which she received in that way. Unfortunately Fra Arnaldo has seen fit to arrange these according to their subjects, and not according to the order in which they were experienced; thereby increasing their edifying character at the expense of their scientific worth. Last comes “the evangelical doctrine of the Blessed Angela”; a treatise largely made up of letters addressed to her disciples, but, like the writings of St. Teresa, full of illuminating autobiographical touches. Here, then, we have in one volume three aspects of human life as seen within the limits of one personality: the biographical facts, the supernal vision, and the ordered conclusions drawn from those facts and that vision, for the instruction of other men. All are of value to us in our study of her personality; for we shall never understand her as a mystic unless we try first to understand her as a human creature. First as to her outward life. Angela was born of a prosperous Umbrian family in 1248; twenty-two years after the death of St. Francis, seventeen years before the birth of Dante. She was one year younger than St. Margaret of Cortona, the other great Franciscan penitent and contemplative. Her life, covering the second half of the thirteenth century, was roughly contemporary with that of Jacopone da Todi, who was twenty years her senior; and with those “spiritual” friars, such as Conrad of Offida and John of La Verna, who are commemorated in the “Little Flowers.” The period, in Italy, was one of contrasted worldly luxury and spiritual enthusiasm, and Angela’s life-history appears to have included experience of both extremes. She married when very young and had children, but lived a thoroughly worldly if not an actually immoral life: posing before society as an excellent Christian, but actually denying herself few indulgences. We learn from the list of sins of which she afterwards accused herself, that these “infirmities and diseases” had included the washing of her face, the curling, braiding, washing, combing, and anointing of her hair, wearing of “needless vain and curious clothes,” and laced shoes adorned with cut leather. She had also incurred the risk of hell by “vain running and dancing and walking about for pleasure,” and even by enjoying the scent of flowers: a crime which St. Francis could hardly have condemned. Remembering the intensely ascetic tone of Franciscan penitence and the puritan ideals of the Spiritual zealots, we need not take these confessions too seriously, or interpret in the worst sense the “embraces, touches, and other evil deeds” which she deplores. Nevertheless, the unregenerate Angela in early womanhood was not the kind of person whom one would pick out as likely to develop into a saint. She makes it quite clear to us that she was a vain, self-important, and hypocritical little egotist, “painted in false colours, a dissembler within and without.” Probably, like many women of the world, a nominal Tertiary, she loved to make a pious impression, but loved comfort even more. “I diligently made an outward show of being poor, but caused many sheets and coverings to be put down where I slept, and taken up in the morning so that none might see them.” There was an offensive sanctimoniousness about her too. “During the whole of my life,” she says frankly, “I have studied how that I might obtain the fame of sanctity.” We do not know the date of Angela’s conversion, or the circumstances which brought it about; save that it took place under Franciscan influence, which was of course paramount in that part of Umbria in her day. It seems to have taken the form of a gradual awakening of conscience to the sinfulness and hypocrisy of her life. In her mental distress she prayed to St. Francis, and he appeared to her in a dream, the earliest of her visionary experiences; the confessor to whom she then went for advice was a Friar Minor, and after her husband’s death she adopted the plain habit worn by the more fervent Tertiaries, and remained faithful to the Order till her death. The fixed dates in her life are few and confusing. Her own book only gives two: the date of her final purification and the date of her death. We gather from this and other sources, however, that after her widowhood she lived at first with one companion in great retirement; but by about 1290, had formed a small sisterhood in Foligno. Its members, who observed Franciscan poverty in its full rigour, took the rule of the Third Order and the three vows of religion, but they were not cloistered. They devoted themselves to the care of the sick, and other works of charity. In this community Angela spent the rest of her life; gradually becoming known as a teacher of “Seraphic wisdom” amongst those Spiritual Franciscans who were struggling to keep the ideals of St. Francis alive. She seems to have been the centre of a group of Franciscan Tertiaries of both sexes, for whom she was at once friend and prophetess, like St. Catherine of Siena in the next century. Several of her letters to these “sons” of hers are embedded in her book of “Evangelical Doctrine.” One of them, the turbulent and ardent friar Ubertino da Casale, owed to her his true initiation into the spiritual life: and his account of the impression which she made on him helps us to understand the nature of her influence. He came to her from Paris in 1298, when he was twenty-five years old; a successful preacher, but already conscious of the inward call to a life of greater perfection. “She restored,” he says, “a thousandfold all those spiritual gifts I had lost through my own sins; so that from that time I have not been the same man that I was before. When I had experienced the splendour of her radiant virtue, she changed the whole face of my mind, and so drove out the weakness and languor from my soul and body and healed my mind that was torn with distraction, that no one who knew me before could doubt that the Spirit of Christ was newly begotten in me through her.” This is almost our only glimpse of Angela as she was seen by contemporary eyes: but it indicates the position she came to occupy among the more devout Franciscan _zelanti_. She died, surrounded by her spiritual children, in the octave of the Feast of the Holy Innocents, 1309, aged sixty-one; and was buried in the Church of the Franciscans at Foligno, where her body still lies. An Office in her honour was approved by Gregory XIV in 1701, and her Feast is kept throughout the Franciscan Order on March 30. So much for the scanty outer history. Of greater interest is our knowledge of her inner life; the real life of mystics and contemplatives. The history of this inner life assures us that Angela was of the stuff of which great mystics are made; though not at all of the stuff of which many amateurs of mysticism expect them to be made. First great necessity, she possessed a strongly romantic temperament; like St. Francis, Suso, St. Ignatius, Mechthild, St. Teresa, her companions on the highway of the soul. Like these, she had also an innate simplicity and ardour, a character at once childlike and heroic; that “all-or-none” reaction, the power of total self-giving to the matter in hand, which distinguishes the hero, whether as man of action, as artist, or as saint. Indeed, heroism may properly be ascribed to a comfortable and self-indulgent married woman, who leaves all for the lonely adventure of Sinai, however many tumbles she may have upon the road. With this courage she combined an extreme sensibility to impressions, great power of endurance, a strong will; all the potentialities of a great sinner or a great saint. Further, she evidently possessed that peculiar, unstable psychic makeup, which the mystic shares with other types of genius; and which is seen in its full development in the two greatest of Italian saints, Francis of Assisi and Catherine of Siena. She experienced all the normal episodes of complete mystical development: the phases of penitence and self-discipline, illumination and dereliction, and at last that ecstatic union with the Divine Nature which is the goal of the Way. Her mysticism was deeply coloured by the Franciscan atmosphere in which it was nurtured; it exhibited the highly emotional and enthusiastic character, the tendency to eccentric penances, the concentration upon the Cross and Passion of Christ, which are found in her contemporary Jacopone da Todi, and are typical of the Franciscan mystics at their best. Indeed, the many parallels between Angela and Jacopone suggest to us that the favourite subjects of their contemplations were those in vogue in “Spiritual” circles at this time; and that we have in their works the surviving examples of a complete school of mysticism, which taught, as Ubertino da Casale says that Cecilia of Florence did, “the whole art of the higher contemplation.” “As I walked,” said the Blessed Angela, “by the way of penitence, I took eighteen spiritual steps before I came to _know_ the imperfections of my life.” This is the first sentence of the book of _Conversion and Penitence_ which analyses in detail the changes through which she passed on her way to complete self-knowledge and self-adjustment. Those “eighteen steps” extended over many years. When they began, Angela was living luxuriously, as a married woman, in her husband’s house. When they ended, she was a poor widow vowed to the religious life; stripped of every superfluity, everything that would entangle her in the web of appearance, apt in contemplation, companioned by visions, esteemed as a teacher and an ecstatic, and the centre of a group of disciples. Her inner life, during these years of ascent, of hard and difficult growth, seems to have been a life of bitter and almost continuous struggle. Even after the preliminary steps of repentance were over, and her visionary powers had developed, the new spiritual ideals demanded of her ever more difficult renunciations. We see her, as we read the wonderful memoirs of her years of penitence, perpetually flung to and fro between adoration and contrition; as first one element and then the other of her complex personality took the upper hand. In her long and slow ascent towards the stars, she alternately experienced the sunshine and the shade. From the turmoil which surrounded the hard re-making of Angela’s character, there emerged two great principles round which her subsequent life and teaching were to be grouped. The first was poverty, the second was self-knowledge. Naturally her instinct for poverty would be fostered by her Franciscan environment; but it is an instinct implicit in the mystical temperament, and not peculiar to the Poor Man of Assisi. Mystics know that possessions dissipate the energy which they need for other and more real things; that they must give up ownership, the verb “to have,” if they are to attain the freedom which they seek, and all the fullness of the verb “to be.” Thus Jacopone in his great ode expressed a universal spiritual law: “Povertate è nulla avere e nulla cosa poi volere; ed omne cosa possedere en spirito de libertate.” It cost Angela many struggles before she fully accepted and acted upon this truth, and attained that which she calls the “liberty of poverty.” Self-knowledge, that hard essential of the soul’s re-education which Richard of St. Victor, and afterwards St. Catherine of Siena, made the starting-point of all mysticism, she recognized from the first as the true objective towards which her hard penances and long meditations must tend. The eighteen “steps,” then, exhibit with extraordinary honesty her gradual progress in these two arts of self-knowledge and renunciation. At the first step, as we have seen, she was by something—we know not what—startled into attention to the real, and terrified by the vision of her own naked reality stripped of its pleasant veils and self-deceits. Her first reaction to this vision was avoidance. She was ashamed to look her sins in the face, or confess them. But having prayed to St. Francis, she was led by a dream—the form under which her unconscious mind most frequently controlled her—to seek a Franciscan friar and make a general confession of her sins. She performed his penance loyally, and became increasingly contrite for her faults: the sense of Divine Mercy touching her, and evoking an ever more humble and repentant grief. By the eighth step this contrition had become love, the passion for perfection triumphing over the hatred of imperfection. By that contemplation of the Cross which was specially dear to Franciscan devotion, and is the subject of one of Jacopone’s most splendid poems, she was led into an ever deeper understanding of the mystery of redemption by pain. Angela was now definitely committed to the mystic way. “In this beholding of the Cross,” she says, “I burned with the fire of love and remorse: so that standing before that Cross I divested myself of everything and offered myself to Him ... and the aforesaid fire compelled me, and I had no power to resist.” The special form which her renunciation took—that of a vow of chastity in deed and thought—suggests the direction in which her chief temptations lay; and this deduction is made more probable by the emotional quality of her visionary experience, in which the repressed ardours of her temperament found relief. At the ninth step, this instinct for renunciation achieved more complete expression. “Enlightened and instructed”—doubtless by some member of the spiritual group—she learned that nothing less than a total sacrifice of friends, kindred, possessions, her very self, would serve her if she wished to tread the Way of Holy Cross. But in her acceptance of this bitter truth we still see something of the vanity, self-importance and narrow egotism of the old Angela. This is the one passage in all her writings which every one knows, and by which she is generally, and most unfairly, judged. “I elected to walk on the thorny path which is the path of tribulation. So I began to put aside the fine clothing and adornments which I had, and the most delicate food, and also the covering of my head. But as yet, to do all these things was hard, and shamed me, because I did not feel much love for God, and was living with my husband. So that it was a bitter thing to me when anything offensive was said or done to me; but I bore it as patiently as I could. In that time, and by God’s will, there died my mother, who was a great hindrance to me in following the way of God; my husband died likewise; and in a short time there also died all my children. And because I had begun to follow the aforesaid way, and had prayed God to rid me of them, I had great consolation of their deaths, although I also felt some grief; wherefore, because God had shown me this grace, I imagined that my heart was in the heart of God and His will and His heart in my heart.” This unfortunate paragraph outweighs for many minds the whole of Angela’s subsequent life and achievements. I do not deny that, taken alone, it appears to be a monument of spiritual egotism. But we must remember that it represents, not Angela the peaceful mystic, but Angela the worried and storm-tossed penitent at the most difficult moment of her career. The emotional centre of her life had shifted. An inexorable inner voice now urged her to a total concentration on God, and she knew that the way of penance and renunciation was her only hope. Yet living in a thoroughly discordant, thoroughly unspiritual environment, hemmed in on all sides by conventional existence and unsympathetic surroundings, this way seemed impossible to follow in its completeness; for she was not one of those who are able to harmonize the demands of both worlds. Moreover, these words were written by one who had long outlived the human sorrow which, as she says here and in another place, she felt at these accumulated bereavements. Now, looking back and seeing her past existence spread out before her, she recognized even this awful and drastic series of deprivations as a necessary factor in the life to which she was called. After all, it is fair to acknowledge that family affection is not the strongest point in the character of the mystical saints. In the interests of their vocation, they are always ready to leave father, mother, brothers, and sisters; and moreover there is evangelical authority for this attitude. They are specialists, and are therefore bound, in the interests of the race, to give up many things which other men must develop and preserve. Artists are under much the same necessity. The vitality which we diffuse amongst many interests and loves, these must concentrate on the one object of their quest. Hence St. Francis himself flung his family aside without scruple when it came to the parting of the ways. Hence Jacopone da Todi was warned that even spiritual friendships must be held lightly by the pilgrim on the way of the Cross. Angela was only following in their footsteps, though she doubtless expressed herself with unnecessary and ill-regulated vigour, when she recognized human ties and human affections as possible impediments of the spiritual life. An easy capitulation to love and friendship in their most engrossing aspects seems always to have been her standing danger. It caused her in later life to say that she “feared love more than all other things”; even regarding with suspicion the deep affection which unites teacher and disciples, or two fellow-initiates of the contemplative life. It was after her release from the duties of family life, and her more complete concentration on the ascetic life, that her visionary powers began to develop. At first they were little more than waking dreams of a commonplace kind; imaginary pictures of the Passion, the Crucifix, the Sacred Heart, such as have been experienced by innumerable Catholic saints. These vivid symbolic presentations of Divine love moved Angela to greater and more heroic heights of penitential love; and the passion for complete evangelical poverty came on her with renewed force. Her possessions enchained her, and she knew it. She made many efforts to screw herself up bit by bit to those heights of renunciation which St. Francis seems to have reached almost without effort. “For this cause—namely, to have the liberty of poverty—I journeyed to Rome, to pray the Blessed Peter that he would obtain for me the grace of true poverty. It seemed to me at last that I could not sufficiently do penance whilst I was possessed of worldly things ... so I determined to forsake everything. In my imagination I had a great desire to become poor, and such was my zeal, that I often feared to die before I attained this state of poverty. On the other hand, I was assailed by temptations, which whispered to me that I was still young, that begging for alms might lead me into shame and danger; that if I did this, I should die of hunger, cold, and nakedness. Moreover, all my friends dissuaded me from it. But at last Divine mercy sent a great illumination into my heart, which, as I believed then and do now, I shall never lose even in eternity.... So then I did resolve in good earnest.” Here is the final, deliberate act of will: the turning once for all from the unreal to the real—under whatever form the charms of unreality appear to the growing self—which all mystics have to make. It was Angela’s eleventh step. Her mystical powers were now developing rapidly. They showed themselves in visions, dreams, and ecstasies. Not all of these, it is true, can be accepted as marks of spiritual growth: for some clearly represent the re-emergence under religious symbols of old emotions and desires. But the deep and vivid intuitions of spiritual realities which came to her more and more frequently, show that a steady sublimation of those emotions and desires was in progress, and that they tended more and more towards supersensual ends. At the fifteenth step, with truly Franciscan thoroughness—though, oddly enough, the Friars Minor whom she consulted forbade her to do it—she distributed the whole of her possessions amongst the poor. “Because methought I could not keep anything for myself without greatly offending Him who did thus enlighten me.” With this crucial act she seems to have attained at last the true and full state of illumination. “Then,” she says, “I began to feel the sweetness of God in my heart”: that which other mystics have called the “sense of the Presence.” Also, “I began to have understanding of the visions and the words”; a new spiritual lucidity running side by side with the symbolic pictures and imaginary voices that she saw and heard with the inner eye and ear. This, too, is normal and characteristic. From this point, then, we must read the book of _Visions and Consolations_ side by side with the book of _Penances_ if we would understand Angela’s inner life; for these two forms of experience, which she has unfortunately chosen to treat separately, alternated with one another. In the time of her total acceptance of holy poverty, Angela seems to have been living in a state of almost hermit-like simplicity with one companion, the Blessed Paschalina of Foligno; whom at first she found a “weariness,” but afterwards discovered to be a fellow traveller on the Mystic Way. Some years had now passed since her conversion; and she was already accepted—perhaps indeed celebrated—as a religious teacher among the members of the Spiritual group. Definitely vowed to the service of the Franciscan Order, she seems soon to have become like St. Catherine of Siena, St. Catherine of Genoa, and many other women mystics, the centre of a group of adoring disciples or “spiritual sons.” Yet her inner life was still in a state of confusion, the remaking of her character was still in progress. She was flung perpetually to the extremes of joy and anguish. She would rise to great heights of mystical passion “filled with the fire and fervour of Divine love,” only to fall back to her old temptations. The repressed instinctive life began to take its revenge, and tortured her by vicious suggestions which she had never known before. “I would have chosen rather to be roasted than to endure such pains.” Also the great strain put upon her nervous system by the growing spiritual faculties resulted in absolute physical illness, as has been the case with many of the mystical saints. “The torments of my body,” she says, “were veritably numberless. There remained not one of my members that was not grievously tormented, nor was I ever free from pain, infirmity, or weariness.” We need not be afraid to recognize in this struggle a reflection of the stresses and difficulties—some physical—which attend on the complete sublimation of man’s psychic life; especially in persons of a strongly emotional temperament. In Angela’s case the visions and dreams that accompanied it assure us of the character of the crisis through which she was passing. Many of her symptoms at this time were undoubtedly hysterical. She cried aloud when she heard the name of God, and fell into a fever on seeing a picture of the Passion of Christ. Her tears were perpetual, and often she longed to tear herself in pieces. Unfortunately Franciscan piety of the more extreme sort encouraged emotional extravagances of this kind, as we may see by the account of Angela’s contemporaries given in the “Little Flowers,” and failed to appreciate Jacopone’s profound distinction between ordered and disordered love. It also gave unqualified approval to those public and grotesque acts of self-abasement which play so large a part in the legend of his penitence; and here again, Angela was true to type. Still grieved by the memory of her old hypocrisies, made more poignant by the reverence she received from her disciples, she went through the city and open places with meat and fishes hanging from her neck, and crying, “I am that woman full of evil and dissembling, slave of all vices and iniquities, who did good deeds that she might obtain honour among men; and especially when I caused those bidden to my house to be told that I ate neither fish nor meat, and—being the while greedy, gluttonous, and drunken—feigned to desire nought but what was needful.” Those familiar with the lives of the mystics will remember many parallels to this state of conflict: the ups and downs of Suso, his alternate illumination and despair, his great self-denials balanced by foolish little sins: the thirty years during which Teresa—already, like Angela, regarded as a great example—swayed between her mystical vocation and the claims of a more normal life. In Angela this inward battle culminated, she says, “some little while before the time of the pontificate of Celestino”—that is to say about 1294, when she was forty-six—and endured for more than two years. In it, in addition to bodily and mental agony, she was humiliated by recurrent temptations to sensual indulgence. Her depression was extreme, and her intellect often so clouded that she could not even recall the idea of God to her mind. It was her last lesson in humility and self-knowledge—an excellent antidote to the dangers of professional sanctity—and answered to that terrible period of final purification which other mystics have called the “Dark Night of the Soul.” From this last purgation, in which all the elements of her character seemed flung back into the melting-pot, she emerged into that condition of spiritual equilibrium, of perfect harmony with transcendent reality, which is known to mystic writers as the Unitive Way. “A divine change,” she says, “took place in my soul, which neither saint nor angel could describe or explain. Wherefore I say again that it seems to me evil speaking or blasphemy if I try and tell of it.” Again, “I came not to this state of my own self, but was led and drawn thereto by God; so that though of my own self I should not have known how to desire or ask for it, I am now in that state continually.” Though the capacity for pain never left her, and is implied in many of her greatest revelations—for, like all the great Catholic mystics, she found the Christian paradox of joyous suffering at the very centre of truth—yet the last twelve years of her life seem to have been years of profound inward peace. “He hath placed within my soul,” she said, “a state which changes little, and I possess God in such fullness that I am no longer in the state in which I used to be; but I walk in such perfect peace of heart and mind that I am content in all things.” It was that state of which Jacopone has written: “La guerra è terminata de le virtú battaglia, de la mente travaglia cosa nulla contende. La mente è renovata vestita a tal entaglia, de tal ferro è la maglia feruta no l’offerende.” Angela has two claims to the title of a great mystic: that of her life, which we have briefly considered, and that of the revelations and experiences which she reports; our chief evidence of the unique nature of her consciousness. What then was the nature of these visions and revelations? There are signs in her book that she ran through the whole gamut of mystical experience. She practised, and described, all those degrees of contemplative prayer which are analyzed by St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross. She heard interior voices. She saw visions. She was an ecstatic. Moreover, at least after her achievement of spiritual equilibrium—for it would be unfair to take into account the morbid states from which she suffered during the period of readjustment—her ecstasies were of that rare and supernal kind which, far from being signs of mental or nervous disease, actually renew and invigorate the physical life of those who experience them. There is a beautiful passage in the life of St. Catherine of Genoa in which she is described as coming joyous and rosy-faced from the ecstatic encounter with God’s love. So Angela says: “Because of the change in my body, therefore I was not able to conceal my state from my companion, or from other people with whom I consorted; because at times my face was all resplendent and rosy, and my eyes shone like candles. When the soul is assured of God and refreshed by His presence, the body also receives health, satisfaction, and nobility.” Her revelations were of two kinds. First we have a long series of “imaginary visions”: pictures, no doubt representing deep and imageless intuitions, resulting as it were from some communion with reality, but taking their form—as distinct from their content—from the memory and imagination of the visionary. Though many of these must be classed as dreams, and some indeed were received in sleep, others were definite experiences; seen, as she says, with the eyes of the mind, far more clearly than anything can be seen with the eyes of the body. Nevertheless we are bound to consider them less as objective revelations than as vivid artistic reconstructions; symbols of something that she has felt and known. Angela’s religious beliefs and romantic leanings are both clearly reflected in them. Some deal with the physical accidents of the Passion—always a favourite subject of the mediæval visionary—and these closely resemble the series of Passion-pictures seen by Julian of Norwich. Others are inspired by her devotion to the Eucharist. One or two seem, like the Visions of St. Gertrude, to anticipate the later cult of the Sacred Heart. In virtue of these visions Angela belongs to the great family of women Catholic mystics; women possessing a rich emotional life, and, largely by means of that emotional life, actualizing and expressing their communion with the spiritual world. We see this emotional character clearly in one of Angela’s most celebrated experiences; the one of all others which seems to have set the seal on her career as a religious teacher, and which is placed at the beginning of her book of visions and revelations, though there was no vision involved in it. I mean the beautiful scene in which she talked with the Holy Ghost, walking on “the narrow road which leads upward to Assisi, and is beyond Spello.” That sense of heavenly intimacy, of divine communion, of a destiny pressed upon her from the spiritual sphere, which then took possession of her consciousness, was translated by the surface-mind of the natural Angela—whose nearest parallels to such an experience were found amongst the emotional incidents of human love—into the wonderful imaginary conversation in which, as she climbs the path between the vineyards, she is wooed by the Holy Spirit, and assured of His peculiar interest and affection. “I will bear thee company and speak with thee all the way,” He says to her. “I will make no end to My speaking, and thou wilt not be able to attend to anything save Me.” “Then did He begin to speak the following words to me, which persuaded me to love after this manner, ‘My daughter, who art sweet to Me, My daughter who art My temple, My beloved daughter, do thou love Me, for I love thee greatly, and much more than thou lovest Me.’ And very often He said to me, ‘Bride and daughter! sweet art thou to Me; I love thee better than any other in the valley of Spoleto.’ These and other similar things did He say to me. Then when I heard these words, I counted my sins, and I considered my faults; how that I was unworthy of so great a love. And I began to doubt these words; for which cause, my soul said to Him who had spoken to it, ‘If thou wert indeed the Holy Spirit, thou wouldest not speak thus; for it is not right or proper, because I am weak and frail and might grow vainglorious thereat.’ He answered, ‘Think and see if thou couldst become vainglorious because of the things for which thou art now made glad....’ Then I tried to grow vainglorious, that I might prove if He spoke truth; and I began to look at the vineyards, that I might learn the folly of my words. And wherever I looked, He said to me, ‘Behold and see! this is My creation’: and at this I felt ineffable delight.” This is the poetry of mysticism, an artistic reduction of supernal intuitions, and is to be interpreted in poetic terms. But there is another, and rarer, form of spiritual perception: that imageless intuition of pure truth, which St. Teresa and other mystics call intellectual, but which would be better named metaphysical vision. Angela’s real importance amongst the mystics comes from the fact that she possessed this power in a high degree of development. In virtue of her immediate apprehensions of transcendent reality, she belongs to the rarest and highest type of mystic seer: a class in which Plotinus holds perhaps the first place, and of which Ruysbroeck is the most conspicuous mediæval example. The poetry of Jacopone da Todi shows us that he too knew the secret of those strange astounding regions, “beyond the polar circle of the mind,” where Angela tasted of unconditioned reality, and the language in which he describes them often reminds us of her. It is an interesting question, whether these two great Franciscan contemplatives directly influenced one another, or must be regarded as the twin stars of a school of “Seraphic wisdom” which taught the deepest mysteries of the spiritual life. There are eight of these great visionary experiences recorded in Angela’s book. In them she says that she apprehended God successively under the attributes of Goodness, Beauty, Power, Wisdom, Love, Justice; and that after this she beheld the totality of the Godhead “darkly”—a way of describing her perceptions which is of course traceable to the “Divine darkness” of Dionysius the Areopagite. Finally she beheld it, “as clearly as is possible in this life.” All these visions seem to have come to her when she was in a state of ecstasy or trance. She speaks of being “exalted in spirit,” “rapt to the first elevation”; lifted to wholly new levels of consciousness. She describes them as well as she can, yet plainly she is only able to tell us a fraction of her experience. Over and over again she declares the hopeless inadequacy of human speech, the impossibility of “speaking as she saw.” Her state is like that of Dante at the end of the _Paradiso_, save that her wings were fitted for these flights. “I beheld the ineffable fullness of God; but I can relate nothing of it, save that I have _seen_ the fullness of Divine Wisdom, wherein is all goodness.” Again, “inasmuch as this was a supernatural thing, I cannot express it in words.” “Many other things were clearly set forth to me; but I neither can nor will relate them.” “All that I say of this, seems to me to be nothing. I feel as though I offended in speaking of it, for so greatly does the Good exceed all my words that my speech seems to be but blasphemy.” Those things, however, which she does contrive to relate, have an astonishing suggestive quality, a great philosophic sweep, combined with an intimate appeal to our own deepest intuitions, which place them, so far as mystical history is concerned, on a level with some of the greatest passages in Jacopone da Todi and in Ruysbroeck; and in my opinion far beyond the more celebrated intellectual visions of St. Teresa. Thus she says, “the eyes of my soul were opened and I beheld the plenitude of God, by which I understood the whole world both here and beyond the sea, the abyss, and all other things. And in this I beheld nothing save the Divine Power, in a way that is utterly indescribable, so that through the greatness of its wonder the soul cried with a loud voice, saying, ‘The whole world is full of God.’ Wherefore I understood that the world is but a little thing; and I saw that the power of God was above all things, and the whole world was filled with it.” Here we are reminded of Julian of Norwich—“He showed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel nut. I looked thereon with the eye of my understanding and thought; What may this be? and it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made.” “After I had seen the power of God, His will and His justice,” says Angela, again, “I was lifted higher still; and then I no longer beheld the power and will as before. But I beheld a _Thing_, as fixed and stable as it was indescribable; and more than this I cannot say, save that I have often said already, namely, that it was all good. And although my soul beheld not love, yet when it saw that indescribable _Thing_, it was itself filled with indescribable joy, so that it was taken out of the state it was in before, and placed in this great and ineffable state. I know not whether I was then in the body or out of the body. It is enough to say that all the other visions seemed to me less great than this.” Again, “One time in Lent ... the eyes of my soul were opened, and I saw Love advancing gently towards me, and I saw the beginning but not the end. There seemed to me only a continuation and an eternity thereof, so that I cannot tell its likeness nor colour; but directly this Love reached me I beheld all these things more clearly with the eyes of the soul than I could do with the eyes of the body. This Love came towards me after the manner of a sickle. Not that there was any actual and measurable likeness; but when first it appeared to me it did not give itself to me in such abundance as I expected, but a part was withdrawn. Therefore I say, after the manner of a sickle. Then I was filled with love and a great satisfaction, but although it satisfied me, it generated within me so great a hunger that all my members were loosened; and my soul fainted with longing to attain to the All.” I give one more, particularly interesting to English students because of its parallels with our own great mystical work, _The Cloud of Unknowing_: “There was a time when my soul was exalted to behold God with so much clearness that never before had I beheld Him so distinctly. But I did not here see Love so fully; rather I lost that which I had before, and was left without love. Afterwards I saw Him darkly, and this darkness was the greatest blessing that could be imagined, and thought can conceive nothing equal to this.... Here likewise I see all Good.... The soul delights unspeakably therein, yet it beholds nothing that can be spoken by the tongue or conceived by the heart. It sees nothing yet sees all, because it beholds the Good darkly; and the more darkly and secretly the Good is seen, the more certain it is, and excellent above all things. Wherefore all other good that can be seen or imagined is doubtless less than this, and even when the soul sees the Divine wisdom, power and will of God (which I have seen marvellously at other times), it is all less than this most certain Good. Because this is the whole, and those other things are but part of the whole.... But seen thus darkly, the Good brings no smile to the lips, no fervour of love to the heart; for the body does not tremble or become moved and distressed as at other times; because the soul sees, and not the body, which rests and sleeps, and the tongue is dumb and speechless. All the many ineffable kindnesses which God has shown me, all the sweet words and divine sayings and doings, are so much less than this that I saw in the darkness, that I put no hope in them.... But to this most high power of beholding God ineffably through great darkness, my spirit was uplifted three times only and no more.” “This cloud,” says _The Cloud of Unknowing_, of that same Divine Dark, “is evermore between thee and thy God ... therefore shape thyself to abide in this darkness so long as thou mayest, evermore crying after Him whom thou lovest, for if ever thou shalt feel Him or see Him (in such sort as He may be seen or felt in this life) it behoveth always to be in this cloud or darkness.” So Angela: “When I behold and am in that Good, although I seem to see nothing yet I see all things.” In this achievement she reaches the goal of the mystic experience, the ecstatic communion with the Absolute One. I have called her a Franciscan mystic. If by Franciscan mysticism we mean that exquisite sense of the Divine immanence in nature, that poetic temperament, that peculiar and elusive charm, which we associate with St. Francis himself; then, perhaps, there seems little that is characteristically Franciscan in Angela. But if, looking past the special character of the Founder, we try to seize the essence of that secret he was seeking to impart, then, allowing for the inevitable development which any idea undergoes when it enters the world of change, we may regard her as a typical Franciscan of the second generation. She was indeed conditioned at all points by the Franciscan environment in which her religious life developed; that ardent society of “Spirituals,” mostly recruited from the devout laity, which sprang up in her time in the Italian cities. This society, with its advanced contemplative tradition, its demand for a close imitation of Christ, was a forcing-house of the mystical life. Angela shows her close connection with it in the character of her penitence, in her passionate devotion to the Cross and Passion, and also in the metaphysical quality of her greatest mystical apprehensions. These three outstanding characteristics, corresponding in a general sense to the three great phases of the mystical life, are again seen in the poetry in which her contemporary Jacopone discloses to us the stages of anguished contrition and of uncontrolled fervour through which he moved to the heights of union with God. These two great converts and initiates of love illuminate and explain one another: for in them we see an identical tradition of the spiritual life interpreted by different temperaments. For each the Way is an education in love, and Jacopone speaks for both of them when he says of it: “Distinguese l’amore en terzo stato: bono, meglio, sommo, sublimato; lo sommo sí vole essere amato senza compagnia.” III JULIAN OF NORWICH. All that we know directly of Julian of Norwich—the most attractive, if not the greatest of the English mystics—comes to us from her book, _The Revelations of Divine Love_, in which she has set down her spiritual experiences and meditations. Like her contemporaries, Walter Hilton and the author of _The Cloud of Unknowing_, she lives only in her vision and her thought. Her external circumstances are almost unknown to us, but some of these can be recovered, or at least deduced, from the study of contemporary history and art; a source of information too often neglected by those who specialize in religious literature, yet without which that literature can never wholly be understood. Julian, who was born about 1342, in the reign of Edward III, grew up among the surroundings and influences natural to a deeply religious East Anglian gentlewoman at the close of the Middle Ages. Though she speaks of herself as “unlettered,” which perhaps means unable to write, she certainly received considerable education, including some Latin, before her _Revelations_ were composed. Her known connection with the Benedictine convent of Carrow, near Norwich, in whose gift was the anchorage to which she retired, suggests that she may have been educated by the nuns; and perhaps made her first religious profession at this house, which was in her time the principal “young ladies’ school” of the Norwich diocese, and a favourite retreat of those adopting the religious life. During her most impressionable years she must have seen in their freshness some of the greatest creations of Gothic art, for in Norfolk both architecture and painting had been carried to the highest pitch of excellence by the beginning of the fourteenth century. The great East Anglian school of miniature painting had already produced its masterpieces and was in its decadence. But if we look at these masterpieces—the wonderful manuscripts illuminated at Gorleston near Yarmouth, and other religious houses of the district—and remember that these are merely the surviving examples of an art which decorated the walls of the churches as richly as the pages of its service-books, we begin to realize the sort of iconography, the view of the Christian landscape, from which Julian’s mental furniture was derived. Some of the best of these manuscripts are in the British Museum; and those who wish to understand the atmosphere in which the mediæval mystics flourished would do well to study Julian’s _Revelations_ in their light. There they will find expressed in design that mixture of gaiety and awe, that balanced understanding of the natural and the divine, which is one of her strong characteristics. She, like these artists, can afford to wreathe her images of supernatural mysteries in homely details drawn from the common life. Moreover, the more pictorial her revelations become, the more closely they approximate to the pictures in the psalters and Books of Hours of her time. From this source came her detailed visions of incidents in the Passion—the blood that she saw running down under the garland of thorns, the dried, discoloured body, the gaping wounds, and “rueful and wasted” face of Christ—and those of the Blessed Virgin as a “little maiden,” as “Mater Dolorosa,” and as the crowned Queen of Heaven. All these were common subjects with the miniature artists and wall painters of the time, and the form which they took in Julian’s revelations must be attributed to a large extent to unconscious memory of those artists’ works. Another more inward aspect of contemporary religion has also affected her: the cult of the Holy Name of Jesus. This beautiful devotion was specially characteristic of English personal religion in the late Middle Ages, and is strongly marked in the writings of the mystics; especially Hilton and Rolle. The great popularity in England of the hymn _Jesu Dulcis Memoria_, and the many vernacular imitations of it current in Julian’s day, helped in the spread of this cult; with which was associated that intense and highly emotional preoccupation with the physical accidents of the Passion so constantly reflected in her visionary experience. “O good Jesu!” cried Rolle, “my heart thou hast bound in love of Thy Name and now I cannot but sing it”; and he spoke not for himself only but for all the best religious lyrists of the early fourteenth century, whose characteristic mood was that of personal, intimate, and sorrowing love of Jesus. “Sweet Jesu, now will I sing To thee, a song of love longing. Teach me, Lord, thy love song With sweet tears ever among.” Thus, one of these Middle English poets could write: “Jesu, well owe I to love thee For that me showed the roodë tree, The crown of thorns, the nailës three, The sharp spear that through-stong thee, Jesu of love is sooth tokening Thy head down-bowed to love-kissing, Thine arms spread to love-clipping, Thy side all open to love-showing.” Of such poetry as this—with which she was probably familiar—Julian often reminds us; and sometimes her parallels with it are close. Thus she says in her tenth Revelation: “Then with a glad cheer our Lord looked into his side, and beheld rejoicing. With his sweet looking he led forth the understanding of his creature by the same wound into his side within. And then he showed a fair delectable place and large enough for all mankind that shall be saved to rest in peace and in love.... And with this our good Lord said full blissfully: Lo! how that I loved thee.” In such passages as this, in her highly visualized meditations on the Crown of Thorns and the Precious Blood, and in such phrases as “I liked none other heaven than Jesus, who shall be my bliss when I am there,” and other ardent expressions of religious love, she is speaking the common devotional language and using the common devotional imagery of her own day. Hence those merely visionary experiences with which her book opens and which form by far the least important part of it, can be accounted for as the result of unconscious memory, weaving new vivid pictures from the current religious and artistic conceptions in which she had been reared. A correspondence has indeed been detected between the order of these fifteen “showings,” and the fifteen prayers on the Passion known as the “XV Os,” which occur in the _Sarum Horæ_. They are, in fact, dreams of which any devout and imaginative person of that time was capable; and need not be taken too seriously when estimating the character of Julian’s mysticism. This, then, was the religious, artistic, and emotional environment in which she grew up; an environment to which new sombre colour and new realization of pain had been given by the Black Death which swept through Norfolk when she was a child. More important, however, than any external influence, was the part her own temperament played in her special apprehension of God. It is plain that she was from the first of an intensely religious, meditative disposition. As a girl, she says, she asked of God three things. The first was, that she might have a keen realization of Christ’s Passion; because although she had great feeling of it, she desired more, and specially a bodily sight of His pains. The second was bodily sickness, much esteemed in the Middle Ages as a means of grace; and this she wished to suffer at thirty years of age. The third was, that as Saint Cecilia was pierced by three wounds, so she might be pierced with the three wounds of contrition, compassion, and eager longing towards God. The first two desires she forgot for a while; but the three wounds she prayed for continually. When she was thirty years old, the gift of sickness was granted her, and it was exactly such a sickness, “so hard as unto death,” as she had asked: a fact which tells us a good deal about Julian’s mental make-up, revealing her as the possessor of an extremely active “psychic background.” By the law of association we may be sure that her illness brought back to mind the other forgotten prayer, for a deeper insight into, and vision of, the Passion. It is supposed that she was at this time already an anchoress, shut in that tiny room against the south wall of St. Julian’s church at Norwich, of which the foundations can still be traced. But nothing in her own account suggests this, and the presence of her mother and “other persons” round her sick bed is rather against it. At the same time, a single woman of strong religious bent is hardly likely in that period to have remained in the world till she was thirty. Julian was perhaps a Benedictine nun at Carrow, and after her vision sought a life of greater seclusion and austerity at St. Julian’s, which was the property of the Carrow convent. The anchoress was often, but not always, a professed nun: and though no reminiscences of cloister life can be traced in Julian’s writings, such a life would account in part for the theological knowledge and familiarity with dogmatic language which those writings display. Julian’s account of what happened in her illness is extremely precise, and makes this part of her revelation an interesting psychological document. She fell ill early in May 1373; and on the fourth night was thought to be dying and given the last sacraments. For two days more she lingered, quite conscious and expecting death; and early in the morning of the third day, lost all feeling in her lower limbs. When the priest came to help her agony she was already speechless; but made her nurses prop her upright in bed, so that she could fix her failing eyes on the crucifix he held towards her. This she could see, though everything else grew dim to her sight. Then her head fell on one side, breath failed, and she was sure that the end had come. With this conviction and acceptance of death, the stress of the involuntary struggle for life seems suddenly to have ended. She had passed into a new state of consciousness, in which her mind was clear and her body free of pain, “as whole as ever before or after.” In this condition her old and forgotten desires came back into her mind. The first, for sickness, had been granted. Now, she was impelled to ask the other, for a keener realization of the Passion; and this buried wish, surging back abruptly into consciousness, became the starting-point of her mystical experiences. We cannot deny that these experiences had their pathological side. Her physical and psychic state were abnormal. With the perfect candour and common sense which add so much to our delight in her, she confesses that she at first mistook her revelations for delirium, and said to the monk who afterwards visited her that she had raved. There are, however, in these revelations, as in all visionary experience of any value, two distinct sides. One is the visual or auditory hallucination—the vision seen, the voice heard—the materials for which clearly come from the unconscious mind of the visionary, and can generally be traced to their source. The other is the intuitive spiritual teaching that accompanies it, and often far exceeds the visionary’s own knowledge or power. Julian, in her account of what happened to her, keeps these two elements perfectly distinct. “All the blessed teaching of our Lord God,” she says, “was shown to me by three parts—that is to say, by the bodily sight, by words formed in mine understanding, and by ghostly sight.” The bodily vision, as she expressly affirms, she did not ask for; and here she agrees with all true mystics, who invariably distrust these quasi-physical experiences. Yet it was in such visionary hallucination that her revelations began. With her eyes still fixed on the crucifix, and apparently at the point of death, she suddenly saw red blood running down from the Crown of Thorns, as if in answer to her prayer for more feeling of the Passion of Christ. The Cross had become for her, as the shining pewter dish did for Jacob Boehme, or the running stream for St. Ignatius, a focal point on which to concentrate; and so a door to a deeper state of consciousness. Spiritual insight went side by side with the bodily vision, which was accepted without question by Julian as a direct message from Christ to strengthen her, “lest she be tempted of fiends before she died”; for in spite of her intuitive philosophic sense, we must remember that she lived in imagination in that Gothic world of concrete devils and angels which the cathedral sculptors reproduced. The double experience—outward pictures of the Passion, and inward teachings of the nature of God—continued for five hours, whilst she lay in a state of trance which her mother mistook for death. “The first began early in the morn, about the hour of four; and they lasted, showing by process full fair and steadily, each following other, till it was nine of the day overpassed.” In those five hours Julian received the whole substance of her teaching, afterwards divided by her into sixteen “revelations of love.” When they had passed, normal consciousness returned, or, as she says, she “fell to herself,” and knew that she must live. She lay for some time in weakness and depression, tormented by evil dreams; but she recovered from her sickness, and lived to a great age. Her careful account of that illness, and of the psychic experiences accompanying it, helps us to understand those experiences from the psychological as well as the mystical point of view. Seen thus, they are not unique; but classic examples of a type which turns up from time to time in medical history. Thus Dr. Edwin Ash, in _Faith and Suggestion_, has described a case which strikingly resembles that of Julian. Here, too, at the crisis of an apparently hopeless illness, the patient fell into a death-like trance, had visions of a religious type, and emerged cured. Her mind was far inferior to that of Julian, hence her experience had less beauty and significance and was of little value for other souls. Nevertheless, its general outline forces us to acknowledge that it belongs to the same class, and helps us to interpret the facts which lie behind Julian’s words. Julian’s revelations have come down to us in two distinct versions, which have both been edited for modern readers. The best known is the long version, reproduced in Miss Warrack’s delightful edition: but our earliest manuscript of this only goes back to the sixteenth century, at least a hundred years after Julian’s death. Another, much shorter, is found in one fifteenth-century manuscript in the British Museum, and this has been edited by Mr. Dundas Herford, who claims—I think with good reason—that it represents Julian’s first account of her visions, written or told while they were still fresh in her mind, and before her memory of them had been coloured by long meditation, or by the theological learning which she certainly acquired in later life. It briefly sets forth her chain of visions, and the “ghostly words” and inward teachings that accompanied them. These, she says, she has set down for the help of her fellow-Christians and because she saw it to be God’s will. “But,” she adds, “God forbid that ye should say or take it so, that I am a teacher: for I mean not so! No! I never meant so! For I am a woman, unlearned, feeble and frail; but I know well that this that I say, I have it of the showing of Him that is Sovereign Teacher.” In the long version these deprecatory words are omitted. Julian no longer fears to be regarded as a teacher. On the contrary, she speaks with a gentle authority as one whose position is assured. She is now, without doubt, the established anchoress; the devout woman whose special vocation is known, and to whom people come for spiritual teaching. Moreover, she tells us in this book that only twenty years, less three months, after her vision was she inwardly taught the importance of all its details, however “misty and indifferent” they seemed. She was therefore past fifty when she wrote or dictated it; and it contains the fruit, not only of her first vivid experience, but of all the ponderings by which the last atom of significance was extracted from it, the “enlightenings and touchings of the same Spirit,” which kept the revelation fresh in after life. As she says herself—for her introspective powers were remarkable—the “first beginnings” and subsequent “ghostly teachings” at last became so merged in her understanding that she could not separate them. There is a parallel to this in the life of Boehme. He says that in the abnormal state which was induced by gazing at the polished pewter dish he “understood the Being of all Beings”—even as Julian “saw God in a Point”—but this stupendous revelation only left him dazed and inarticulate. Only after twelve years of meditation, during which he felt the seed of truth “unfolding within him like a young plant,” was he able to describe it. When we compare the two versions of Julian’s work, we find many differences which remind us of this confession. Although the whole doctrine of the long book is really implied in the short book—for it is, in Boehme’s phrase, an unfolding of the plant from that one seed—we see that the most beautiful and poetical passages are found in the long version only. They are the fruit of meditation upon vision. The workings of Julian’s unconscious mind in her trance have only provided the raw material, as the inspiration of the poet gives only the crude beginnings of the poem. Moreover, with age her character deepened and grew richer. She used her talent to help other souls, and it increased. She studied, too, and found language of great subtlety and beauty in which to express her vision of truth. Though even the first version of her book shows theological knowledge which would put to shame most present-day Christians, in the later work this knowledge is much increased. Reading was part of the duty of an anchoress, being regarded as an essential element in the life of prayer; and intelligent reading has clearly nourished Julian’s deep meditations on the character of God. In her there was an almost perfect balance between the intellectual and the emotional life, and there are few women mystics of Whom we can say this. The question of her literary sources is an interesting one. A careful examination of her revelations makes it plain that even when the short version was written, she was already acquainted with many theological conceptions; whilst the meditations with which the long version is enriched, and its fuller descriptions of her spiritual “Showings,” reveal her as possessing at least by middle life a considerable knowledge of the language of Augustinian theology and of the root-ideas of Christian mysticism. As used by her, many of these ideas have the special colour which was given to them by Meister Eckhart and his school; and suggest that Julian at one time or another had come into contact with the characteristically Dominican type of mysticism which is best known to us in the works of Suso and Tauler. In her teaching on sin—“I saw not sin, for I believe it hath no substance nor any part of being”—she is following, indeed almost quoting, Eckhart’s saying that “evil is nothing but a privation of being; not an effect, but a defect.” So, too, Eckhart’s daring assertion that sin has its place in the scheme—“Since God, in a way, also wills that I should have committed sins, I do not wish not to have committed them”—appears to be echoed in gentler form in Julian’s view of sin as a purifying scourge, and of the scars which it leaves on the redeemed soul as being “not wounds but worships.” Her beautiful saying that we are God’s bliss, “for in us He enjoyeth without end,” seems like a deduction from the Eckhartian paradox, “God needs me as much as I need Him.” She has received, perhaps from the same source, the antique mystical notion of the soul’s precession from and return to God. “The soul,” said Eckhart, “is created that it may flow back into the bottom of the bottomless fountain whence it came forth.” “Thus I understood,” says Julian, “that all His blessed children which be come out of Him by nature shall be brought again into Him by grace”; and again, “all kinds that He hath made to flow out of Him to work His will shall be restored and brought again into Him.” Here, again, the naked Eckhartian monism seems to be transmitted through a more human and more spiritual temperament. She agrees, too, with the German mystics in her doctrine of God as the “ground of the soul.” “Our soul is so deep-grounded in God and so endlessly treasured that we may not come to the knowing thereof till we have first knowing of God.... God is nearer to us than our own soul, for He is the ground in whom our soul standeth, and He is the mean that keepeth the substance and the sensuality together so that they shall never depart.” So Tauler says, “A man who verily desires to enter in will surely find God here, for God never separates Himself from this ground. God will be present with him and he will find and enjoy eternity here.” Julian’s revelation was received in 1373, and the long text as we have it was written at some date after 1393. Eckhart had died in 1329, Tauler in 1361; and the great Ruysbroeck, whose mysticism owes much on its speculative side to Eckhart’s philosophy, in 1381. The influence of their teaching spread rapidly, and few preaching friars of an inward disposition can have escaped it. To these preaching friars was committed in the fourteenth century the special duty of giving solid theological teaching to nuns. This was commonly done by way of vernacular sermons and instructions, of which Tauler’s surviving sermons are types: and it was possibly through such instructions given in the Carrow convent that Julian obtained that peculiar knowledge of Dominican mysticism, those contacts with Augustinian and Victorine thought, on which the more philosophic side of her revelation seems to depend. The parallels with her great contemporary St. Catherine of Siena, which Professor Edmund Gardner has noted, are probably due to the fact that both women drew their ideas from some earlier source. Her likenesses to Ruysbroeck can also be accounted for. His _Seven Cloisters_, _Kingdom of God’s Lovers_, and _Ornaments of the Spiritual Marriage_ were all completed before 1350, and knowledge of them would reach East Anglia quickly, through the Flemish colony established at Norwich. Several close correspondences with him can be traced in Julian’s work; especially her conception of God’s eternal thirst and love-longing, so similar to Ruysbroeck’s “hungry yet generous love of God,” and the opening phrase of her Third Revelation, “After this I saw God in a Point,” which reminds us of the great definition in the _Seven Cloisters_, “That Point in which all our lives find their end.” Julian thus represents the first emergence in English literature of a stream of tradition which is not represented in the classic school of English mysticism descended from Rolle. By this school she does not appear to have been greatly influenced; there is little in her that reminds us of it, or of that group of contemplatives who produced the _Cloud of Unknowing_ and its companion works. Her true affinities are with the Christian Platonism which St. Augustine introduced into theology, and its developments in the works of Erigena and Eckhart. But when we have given full weight to the effects upon her work of oral teaching and of reading, the true originality of that work only becomes more manifest. Reading and teaching fed her speculative mind, and helped her to understand and express her own experience; but this experience in its essence was independent of intellectual knowledge. It was the fruit of a deeply mystical and poetic nature, brooding on the conception of God common to mediæval Christianity. Julian had in a high degree constructive religious genius; and for such a nature an evocative phrase is enough to waken the “ghostly sight.” It is impossible in a short essay to give any full account of her teaching. That teaching is centred on her own ardent consciousness of God, as an all-transcending yet all-enclosing reality; a conception at once philosophic and practical. For Julian, as for the Platonists, God is the sum of the highest spiritual values—“He is all-thing that is good to my seeming, and all-thing that is good, it is He.” Her perception of the Divine Immanence is peculiarly intense, and expressed in the strongest terms. “God is kind (nature) in His being: that is to say, that goodness that is in kind, that is God. He is the ground, He is the substance, He is the same thing that is kind-head,” and again, “I saw full assuredly that our substance is in God, and also I saw that in our sensuality God is ... for it is His good pleasure to reign in our understanding blissfully, and sit in our soul restfully, and to dwell in our soul endlessly, us all working into Him.” But this vivid sense of Divine reality, as the very ground of being, is closely bound up with her devotion to the person of Christ. Her theological path, like her mystical experience, lay through the human to the Divine, through emotional realization of the Passion to intellectual vision of the Godhead. In the first revelation of all we get these two aspects of truth sharply contrasted; for there her vision of the bloodstained Crown of Thorns, with its intimate appeal to the heart, is balanced by her other interior sight of “the Godhead seen in mine understanding.” The long version of her book elaborates this simple intuition of the Deity into a very beautiful description of the Holy Trinity—always one of Julian’s favourite subjects—but the whole is really implied in the first brief statement, which strikes at once her characteristic chord of intimacy and awe, or, as she puts it, “the dread and the homeliness of God.” In the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity, which was never far from her thoughts, she found the link between these personal and impersonal apprehensions. That half-Platonic notion of Christ the Eternal Wisdom as “Mother” of the soul, which is one of her most original conceptions, here takes its place side by side with the other, more metaphysical intuition of that unconditioned Deity in whom “All-thing hath the Being.” “For all our life is in three: in the first we have our being, in the second we have our increasing, and in the third we have our fulfilling: the first is nature, the second is mercy, and the third is grace. For the first I understood that the high might of the Trinity is our Father, and the deep wisdom of the Trinity is our Mother, and the great love of the Trinity is our Lord: and all this we have in nature and in our substantial making.... All the fair working, and all the sweet kindly office of dearworthy motherhood is impropriated to the Second Person ... and all is one Love.” This blend of personal and metaphysical vision is not unique. We find it again in the Franciscan contemplative, Angela of Foligno. But Julian’s nature is richer and more mellow, and the doctrine of love which she deduced from her experience is more profound. Here, in this harmonized consciousness of the most human and most philosophic aspects of religious experience, she is typical of Christian mysticism at its best. She avoids on the one hand the excessive intellectualism of the Neoplatonist, and on the other the unpleasant exuberance of the religious emotionalist, yet draws from the apprehensions of both the heart and the head all the elements needed to feed a full spiritual life. The human element brought in by Christianity, with all the emotional values belonging to it—however symbolic this side of contemplation must necessarily be—redeems philosophic mysticism from the clear coldness, the lofty superiority, that St. Augustine condemned in the Platonists. But, equally, it is the philosophic background, the austere worship of that trinity of Light, Life, and Love, in whom, as Julian says, we are clad more closely than a body in its clothes, which saves mystical fervour from its worst extravagances. Here she is and will ever be one of the safest guides to the contemplative life. Another special quality of Julian’s teaching is its healthy, vigorous, affirmative character. The only two sins she sternly condemns—and she calls them not sins, but sickness—are sloth or lack of zest, and doubtful dread or lack of hope. Zest and hope she regards as essential factors in the life of the soul. The Light, Life, and Love which form her ultimate definition of triune Reality—the Mother, Brother, and Saviour, which are her nearest images for Christ’s relation with man—these are conceptions which kill the sort of pious moods that R. L. Stevenson called “dim, dem, and dowie.” God’s attitude to man is “courteous, glad, and merry,” and we do Him less honour by solemnity than by “cheer of mirth and joy.” To her, only the good is the true, and evil is a void, a lack of the only reality; a Platonic notion which has always been dear to the mystics. “In this naked word Sin,” says Julian, “our Lord brought to my mind generally all that is not good ... but I saw not sin, for I believe it hath no manner of substance nor no part of being, nor could it be known but by the pain it is cause of.” It follows that our attention should not be given to the avoidance or consideration of sin, but to the understanding and enjoyment of the good and the real. “The beholding of other men’s sins, it maketh as it were a thick mist before the eyes of the soul,” says Julian. Her strongest condemnation is given to morbid pondering of past sins and mistakes. “Right as by the courtesy of God He forgets our sins when we repent, right so will He that we forget our sin, and all our heaviness and all our doubtful dreads.” This world, after all, is only a nursery for heaven, and its inhabitants mostly spiritual babies who need not be taken too seriously. “I understood no higher stature in this life than childhood;” and the attitude of God to our infant souls is that of “the kindly loving Mother that witteth and knoweth the need of her child and keepeth it full tenderly as the kind and condition of Motherhood will.” No modern psychologist could be more emphatic than this fourteenth-century recluse on the foolishness of worry, the duty of confidence, gaiety, and hope. “Notwithstanding our simple living and our blindness here, yet endlessly our courteous Lord beholdeth us in this working rejoicing; and of all things we may please him best, wisely and truly to believe, and to enjoy with Him and in Him.” She brings back the primitive Christian insistence on joy—confident happiness—as the one sure sign of the spiritual life. If we have not got this, it is because we lack the faith and common sense which sees life in a universal and disinterested light. Once, Julian says, she was inclined to worry about God’s work in the soul of a friend whom she loved, and she was answered in her reason “as it were by a friendly man,” “Take it generally! and behold the courtesy of thy Lord God as He shows it to thee, for it is more worship to God to behold Him in all than in any special thing.” In those words we have a complete prescription for happiness and inward peace. All that is made, as Julian saw in her vision, is but “a little thing the quantity of an hazel nut” in comparison with the Divine life that creates, keeps, and loves it, and may be known in those sudden glimpses of perfection which we call the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. These, in her language, are “God’s courteous showings of Himself,” and we are most likely to encounter them when we take the worlds of nature and grace “generally,” and refrain from partial or egoistic criticisms and demands. Failure in this simple rule, she thinks, is the true cause of human misery and unrest. “This is the cause why we be not all in ease of heart and soul; that we seek here rest in those things that are so little, wherein is no rest, and know not our God that is All-mighty, All-wise, and All-good.” MYSTICISM IN MODERN FRANCE I SŒUR THÉRÈSE DE L’ENFANT-JÉSUS That Christian tradition of the spiritual life which has been specially developed within the religious orders—with its definite objective, its methodical training in self-conquest and the art of prayer—is often regarded as a mere survival of mediævalism, lingering in odd corners but having no points of contact with our modern world. Yet this tradition lives now, as surely as in the days of St. Gertrude or St. Teresa. It continues to exercise its mysterious attraction; transmuting those who give themselves to its influence, and producing that special type of character and experience which is so clearly marked in the histories of the Catholic saints. In a world of change, this has hardly altered. Within the contemplative convents there obtains that same scale of values, that same contempt for the body and undivided attention to the interests of the soul, that same avoidance of all comfort or pleasure and eager acceptance of pain, which is revealed in the standard writings of Christian asceticism. In these houses, mysticism is still a practical art: the education there given represents the classic spiritual discipline of the west, and still retains its transforming power. Through it, souls obtain access to a veritable world of spirit; and apprehend under symbols eternal values, which are unperceived by their fellow men. By it they are supported through the difficult adjustments of consciousness and sublimation of instinct, which are needed when the centre of life’s interest is shifted from physical to supernal levels. This is a fact which students of psychology, and especially of religious experience in its intensive form, should not ignore. They need not go to the Middle Ages for their examples of the effect of ascetic training and contemplative practice, or for characteristic specimens of the “saintly type”; for these may be found within our own period, and studied in their relation to our modern world. Those who regard this saintly type as a hot-house plant, raised under conditions which appear to defend it from the temptations and distractions of ordinary existence, can have little acquaintance either with cloister ideals or with cloistered lives. A thoroughgoing monastic discipline is the most searching school of virtue ever invented. It withers easy-going piety and “other-worldliness” at the root. It confers a robust humility which is proof against all mortifications and disappointments. It leaves no room for individual tastes and preferences, religious or secular. Its pupils must learn to resent nothing, to demand nothing; to thrive on humiliations, to love and serve all without distinction, without personal choice; even to renounce the special consolations of religion. The common idea of the cloister, as providing a career of impressive religious ceremonial varied by plain sewing, pious gossip, and “devotionettes” is far from the truth. On its external side, a well-ordered convent provides a busy, practical, family life of the most austere kind, with many duties, both religious and domestic, countless demands upon patience, good-temper and unselfishness, and few relaxations. On its hidden side, it is a device to train and toughen the spirit, develop its highest powers, and help it to concentrate its attention more and more completely on eternal realities. That training is still given in its completeness; and the classic, saintly character is still being produced, with its special cultivation of love, meekness, and self-sacrifice, balanced by energy, courage, and strength of will. Sanctity is the orientation of the spirit towards supreme Reality. To the believer in any theistic religion, no attitude of the soul could be simpler, more natural than this. There is nothing about it which deserves to be called abnormal, archaic, or fantastic. The complications with which it is surrounded, the unnatural aspect which it wears for practical men, all come from its collision with the entangled interests and perverse ideals of the world. Thus, retreat from this tangle of sham interests, the building up of a consistent universe within which the self can develop its highest powers and purest loves, is felt to be imperative for those selves in whom this innate aptitude for God reaches the conscious level. In these spirits, the “vocation” for the special life of correspondence with the supersensual reproduces on a higher plane the vocation of the artist or the poet. All the self’s best energies and desires tend in this direction, and it will achieve harmonious development only by unifying itself about this centre of interest, and submitting to the nurture and discipline which shall assure its dominance. The symbols with which the universe of religion is furnished, the moral law which there obtains, are all contributory to the one end; and find their justification in its achievement. Within the Christian Church, and especially in that which is technically called the “religious life,” these symbols and this law have not varied for many centuries; nor has the type of personality which they develop changed much since it first appeared in monastic history. The sharp sense of close communion with, and immediate responsibility to, a personal God possessing human attributes; the complete abandonment of desire, combined with astonishing tenacity of purpose; contempt for the merely comfortable either in spiritual or physical affairs; a glad and eager acceptance of pain—these are the qualities of the Christian saint, and these are still fostered in appropriate subjects by the cloistered life. These facts have been abundantly demonstrated during the last thirty years in a group of French Carmelite mystics, of whom the best known is Thérèse Martin, already the object of a widespread _cultus_ under the name of Sœur Thérése de l’Enfant Jésus. Others who will repay study are Elizabeth Catez, or Sœur Elizabeth de la Trinité (1880-1906) and Mère Marie-Ange de l’Enfant-Jésus (1881-1909). It is clear that we have in these young women—for they all died before they were thirty years of age—a genuine renaissance of traditional Catholic mysticism. Their experience exhibits many close correspondences with that of the great mystics of the past; the same development of the interior life can be traced in them, and they knew at first hand some at least among those forms of spiritual consciousness which are described by Ruysbroeck, Angela of Foligno, St. Teresa, and St. John of the Cross. The first in time and in importance—for the others depended to a greater or less degree on her influence and example—was Thérèse Martin, who was born at Alençon in 1873 and died in 1897. The last nine years of her life were spent in the Carmelite Convent of Lisieux in Normandy; and she there wrote the spiritual autobiography, _L’histoire d’une âme_, which has since been translated into every European language. In her life—which shows with exceptional clearness the reality and driving power of that instinct which is known as religious vocation—and in the incidents connected with her death and _cultus_, we find many suggestive parallels with the histories of the historical saints. These parallels often help us to determine the true meaning of statements in those histories; indicating the possible origin of much that now appears extravagant and abnormal, and restoring to their real position in the human race men and women who dropped their living characteristics in ascending to the altars of the Church. We notice first in Thérèse the extent to which heredity and environment contributed to the formation in her of an exclusively religious temperament. She inherited from both parents an ascetic tendency. Her father, as a young man, had sought without success to become a novice at the Great St. Bernard; her mother had wished to be a Sister of Charity. Their marriage had the character of a religious dedication; and their one wish was for children who might be consecrated to the service of God. Nine were born, of whom four died in infancy. The five girls who survived all entered the cloister, for which indeed their whole life had been a perfect preparation. The idea of marriage seems never to have occurred to any member of the family. Hence Thérèse, the youngest child, grew up in a home which was a veritable forcing-house of the spiritual life, though full of happiness and warm affection; and by it was moulded to that puritanism and other-worldliness which is characteristic of real Catholic piety. There the conception of earthly existence as a “school for saints” was taken for granted, and the supremacy of religious interests never questioned: all deeds and words, however trivial, being judged by the grief or pleasure they would give to God. Even as a tiny child, she was given a string of beads to count the “sacrifices” made each day. The Martin family lived, in fact, within a dream-world, substantially identical with the universe of mediæval piety. It was peopled with angels and demons, whose activities were constantly noted; its doors were ever open for the entry of the miraculous, its human inhabitants were the objects of the Blessed Virgin’s peculiar care, every chance happening was the result of Divine interference. For them this universe was actual, not symbolic. Their minds instinctively rejected every impression that conflicted with it; and its inconsistencies with the other—perhaps equally symbolic and less lovely—world of our daily life were unperceived. The most bizarre legends of the saints were literal facts; all relics were authentic, and most were full of supernatural power. The Holy House of Loretto, the face of St. Catherine of Bologna still marked by the kiss of the Infant Christ, found in them willing and awestruck believers. Yet these crude symbols, thus literally understood, became for them the means of a real transcendence. The dominant interests of the home were truly supersensual; a vigorous spiritual life was fostered in it, marked by humility and love, true goodness, complete unselfishness, a courageous attitude towards misfortune and pain. Thus from birth Thérèse was protected from all risk of intellectual conflict, and surrounded by harmonious contributory suggestions all tending to press her emotional life into one mould. Such a nurture could hardly fail to create either the disposition of a rebel or that of a saint: but there was in Thérèse no tendency to revolt. Her temperament—ardent, imaginative, abnormally sensitive, and psychically unstable—inclined her to the enthusiastic acceptance of religious ideas, and even in childhood she showed a fervour and devotion exceeding that of her sisters. When she was still a little girl, the two eldest left home one after the other, in order to become nuns in the Carmelite convent of Lisieux. The departure of the first, Pauline, was a crushing grief to Thérèse, at that time about nine years old; and was apparently the beginning of her own desire to be a nun. She told the Superior of the convent that she, too, intended to be a Carmelite, and wished to take the veil at once. The Reverend Mother, a woman of kindness and good sense, did not laugh; but advised her to wait until she was sixteen, and then to try her vocation. There is less absurdity than at first appears in this childish craving; for the religious type is often strangely precocious. As the tendency to music or painting may appear in earliest childhood, so the sense of vocation may awaken, long before the implications of this mysterious impulse are fully understood. Thus Elizabeth Catez, afterwards Sœur Elizabeth de la Trinité, determined to be a nun when she was seven years old, and began at this age to govern her inner life. She and Thérèse help us to understand the stories and the visions and self-dedication of the little St. Catherine of Siena; or those of St. Catherine of Genoa and Madame Guyon, who both wished at twelve years old to enter a religious order. We are faced in all such cases by the strange phenomenon of accelerated development: strongly marked in the case of Thérèse, who undoubtedly had, in spite of the great simplicity of her nature, a real genius for the spiritual life. She had, too, and in a marked degree, the peculiarly sensitive psychic organization which is observed in many of the historic mystics. A long and severe nervous illness had followed her sister’s departure for the cloister. It was cured by a form of auto-suggestion for which many parallels can be found in the history of adult religious experience; though few in that of children of her age. This incident Thérèse has described in her memoirs with great clearness and honesty. At a crisis of the sickness, when she was reduced to utter misery and weakness and tormented by hallucinations and fears, her three sisters came to her room and knelt before the statue of the Blessed Virgin, praying for her cure. The sick child, praying too as well as she could, suddenly saw the statue take life and advance towards her with a smile. Instantly the prayer was answered, her pains and delusions left her, and she was cured. The “vision” being told—and of course accepted at face-value as a supernatural grace—marked Thérèse from this time as a privileged soul. It certainly indicated in her an abnormal suggestibility, comparable with that which is revealed by the somewhat similar incident in the life of Julian of Norwich, and was not without importance for her future development. The religious transformation and exaltation so often experienced in adolescence is seen in Thérèse in its most intense form. It was initiated when she was thirteen by another nervous illness, apparently brought on by a morbid brooding on her own supposed imperfections—the spiritual ailment well known to religious directors as “scrupulosity”—and it was from this period that she afterwards dated the beginning of her real spiritual life. The childish determination to become a Carmelite had now grown in strength, and when she was fourteen she broke to her father her own violent consciousness of vocation; a certitude which nothing could shake. Her inner life was at this time astonishingly mature. She was not a prig, but a sensitive and affectionate little girl; yet her autobiography is full of sayings which surprise us by their depth and wisdom, when we remember the age of the child who thought and said them. By the constant practice of small renunciations, self-denial was now habitual to her; for it was by that which she called the “little pathway” of incessant but inconspicuous sacrifices and kind deeds, and not by any abnormal austerities or devotions, that her character was formed. Though perfectly free from all spiritual pride, she was, moreover, quite certain of her own communion with the Divine order, and of the authority of the impressions which she received from it. “En ce temps-là, je n’osais rien dire de mes sentiments intérieurs; la voie par laquelle je marchais était si droite, si lumineuse, que je ne sentais pas le besoin d’un autre guide que Jésus ... je pensais que pour moi, le bon Dieu ne se servait pas d’intermédiaire, mais agissait directement.” These are bold words for a young girl who had been reared in the most rigid provincial piety, and had been taught to distrust private judgment and regard her director as the representative of God. In them we see the action of that strong will, power of initiative and clear conception of her own needs and duties, which redeem her often emotional religious fervour from insipidity. It is true that she can and does express that fervour in the sentimental language which is the least attractive element in French piety. The sense of a special relationship and special destiny which more and more possessed her, far exceeded her powers either of realization or of expression; and unfortunately impelled her to describe herself as the “fleurette,” the “petite fiancée,” even the “jouet” of Jesus, and to note in too many casual happenings evidence of “les delicatesses du bon Dieu pour moi.” Yet we cannot forget that similar declarations, equally offensive to modern taste, abound in some of the greatest historical mystics, and that their full unpleasantness is only mitigated to us by the quaint and archaic phrases in which they are expressed. Whilst no doubt these declarations represent the invasion of human desires and instincts into the field of spiritual experience, its natural craving for protection and personal love; they also witness to the mystic’s intense personal consciousness of close communion, a consciousness which far transcends the poor vocabulary and commonplace symbols through which it must be told. Therefore we cannot dismiss Thérèse Martin as a mere victim of religious emotionalism, because her mental equipment is inadequate to her spiritual experience. When, moreover, we remember the amazing vigour and tenacity of purpose with which, when barely fifteen, this gentle and home-loving child, driven by her strong sense of vocation, planned and carried through a lifelong separation from the father she adored and the world of nature she loved, we are bound to acknowledge in her an element of greatness, a strong and an adventurous soul. With a certitude of her own duty which nothing could shake, Thérèse interviewed on her own behalf the Superior of the order, who snubbed her, and the Bishop of the diocese, who was kind but prevaricated with her; demanding from them permission to take the veil at once, instead of waiting till the usual age of twenty-one. Further, being taken by her father to Rome with a party of French pilgrims, when they were all received by the Pope she had the courage to address him directly—although the priest in charge of the pilgrimage forbade it—and asked for his support. The end of it was that she at last convinced the authorities of her special vocation, and was allowed to become a postulant in the most austere of all religious orders at the unheard-of age of fifteen. Her career as a Carmelite was far from being the succession of mystical enjoyments, the basking in divine sunshine, which some imagine the contemplative life to be. She now experienced the common lot of the “proficient” in the mystic way; paying for her religious exaltation by reactions, long periods of aridity, which were doubtless due in part to psychic exhaustion. Then, in addition to the perpetual little sacrifices, self-deprivations, and penances which she imposed on herself, she seemed, as she says, to be plunged in a “terrible desert,” a “profound night” of darkness and solitude; and prayer itself became dreary and unreal. “Tout a disparu ... ce n’est plus un voile, c’est un mur qui s’éleve jusqu’aux cieux et couvre le firmament étoilé.” But an inner life which was nourished on the robust doctrine of St. John of the Cross could bear this deprivation with fortitude, and make of inward poverty itself a gain. Outwardly, too, her life was difficult. Her superiors seem at once to have perceived in her that peculiar quality of soul which is capable of sanctity; and since it is the ambition of every community to produce a saint, they addressed themselves with vigour to the stern task of educating Thérèse for her destiny. Still a child, sensitive and physically delicate, she was spared no opportunity of self-denial and mortification. Her most trifling deficiencies were remarked, her most reasonable desires thwarted, her good points ignored. When her health began to fail under a rule of life far beyond her strength, and the first signs of tuberculosis—that scourge of the cloister—appeared in her, the Prioress, in her ferocious zeal for souls, even refused to dispense the ailing girl from attendance at the night-office. “Une âme de cette trempe, disait-elle, ne doit pas être traité comme une enfant, les dispenses ne sont pas faites pour elle. Laissez-la. Dieu la soutient.” This drastic training did its work. Thérèse had a heroic soul, though her courage and generosity found expression for the most part in small and obscure ways. She has said that she felt in herself the longing to be a soldier, an apostle, a martyr; and within the limits of the cloister, she found means of satisfying these desires. “Elle accomplissait simplement des actes héroïques,” said the Superior after her death. Determined, in her own metaphor, to be a “victime d’amour,” her brave spirit never faltered in its willing acceptance of pain. She hid her mental and physical sufferings, fought her increasing weakness, ate without hesitation the rough food which made her ill, refused every comfort and amelioration. By this hard yet humble way she rose in a few years to the heights of perfect self-conquest and moral perfection: passing through suffering to a state in which love, and total self-giving for love, was realized by her as the central secret of the spiritual life. “La charité me donna la clef de ma vocation.... Enfin, je l’ai trouvée. Ma vocation, c’est l’amour.” In this completed love, stretching from the smallest acts of service to the most secret experiences of the soul, she found—as every mystic has done—that unifying principle of action which alone gives meaning to life. In its light all problems were solved, and the meaning of all experiences was disclosed. So Julian of Norwich, fifteen years after her first revelation, was answered in ghostly understanding: “Wouldest thou wit thy Lord’s meaning in this thing? Wit it well, Love was his meaning. Who showed it thee? Love. What showed he thee? Love. Wherefore showed it he? For love. Hold thee therein and thou shalt wit and know more in the same; but thou shalt never know nor wit therein other thing without end.” To live in this supernatural charity is to introduce into the world of succession the steadfast values of eternity; hence this quality, so simple yet so difficult of attainment, is the one essential character of the saints. “Pour atteindre à la vie idéale de l’âme,” said Elizabeth Catez, who so greatly exceeded her fellow-Carmelite in philosophic grasp, though not in moral beauty, “je crois qu’il faut vivre dans le surnaturel, prendre conscience que Dieu est au plus intime de nous, et aller à tout avec lui: alors on n’est jamais banal, même en faisant les actions les plus ordinaires, car on ne vit pas en ces choses, on les dépasse. Une âme surnaturelle ne traite pas avec les causes secondes, mais avec Dieu seulement ... pour elle, tout se reduite à l’unité.” Thérese de l’Enfant-Jésus came to this consummation by way of a total and generous self-abandonment in all the daily incidents of life; a love which consecrated “les actions les plus ordinaires.” She took as her favourite saint the Curé d’Ars, because “he loved his family so deeply, and only did ordinary things.” This was the “little pathway” to the heart of Reality, on which, she thought, all might travel and none could miss the road. “Aux âmes simples, il ne faut pas des moyens compliqués.” Though the unquenchable thirst of her ardent nature for more suffering and more love did more than once express itself by way of ecstatic experience, she repudiated all abnormal “graces” and special contemplative powers. “Je ne suis qu’un pauvre petit oiseau couvert seulement d’un léger duvet; je ne suis pas un aigle, j’en ai simplement les yeux et le cœur.” Her spiritual practice became simplified as she grew in understanding. In the last years of her life the Gospels were her only book of devotion, and her prayer became “un élan du cœur, un simple regard jeté vers le ciel.” Yet the love thus expressed was no mere “divine duet.” She was not a victim of that narrow fervour which finds its satisfaction in a vertical relation with the Divine; her religion was of a distinctly social type. “Le zêle d’une Carmelite doit embrasser le monde,” she said; and this zeal showed itself, not only in the passionate love she gave to her family, but in radiant affection towards all living beings—the nuns in the convent, some of whom were extremely tiresome and even unkind, her friends and correspondents in the outside world, the animals and the birds. She always had her eye on her fellow-creatures; she wanted to help them, to show light to them, to save them. The eager service and voluntary mortifications of her life closed with eighteen months of great physical suffering. She died in September 1897, at the age of twenty-four. Thérèse Martin had lived for nine years within the walls of a small, strictly enclosed convent in a provincial town. This building and its dreary little chapel formed the setting of her religious career. There was nothing impressive in her surroundings, nothing to satisfy those artistic instincts which she certainly possessed, to hint at the poetry and mystery of the spiritual life. Her opportunities of action had been limited on every side; her creative impulse found expression only in the writing of some conventional religious verse, and the record of her thoughts and experiences, composed not for publication, but as an act of obedience to her Superior. Prayer, the teaching of novices, the family life of the community, and a small amount of correspondence with those in the world, were the only channels through which her passionate love of humanity could flow. This record may not sound impressive. Its sequel is amazing. Students of history have often discussed the stages and the circumstances through which a simple man or woman, distinguished only by a beautiful and humble life, has been transformed by the reverence, love, and myth-making faculty of his contemporaries into a supernatural being endowed with magical powers. This transformation has happened within our own time in the person of Thérèse de l’Enfant-Jésus. This young girl, whose life was marked by no bizarre incident, who was brought up in an obscure Norman town, and deliberately shut herself up in a convent of strictest enclosure to remain—as the “healthy-minded” would say—buried alive till her death, is now loved and invoked wherever the Roman Catholic church is established. Her short and uneventful life has influenced and comforted countless other lives. Her “cause” has been introduced, and although she is not yet canonized, she is already regarded as numbered among the saints. To visit her grave in the beautiful hillside cemetery outside Lisieux, and watch the endless stream of pilgrims who come on every day of the year from all parts of the world to ask her help, to deposit letters explaining their needs, and lay on her tomb for blessing the clothes of babies or the food of the sick, is to understand what the shrine of a mediæval saint must have been like. It is to understand also something of the triumphant power of character, and of the fact that the enclosing of a radiant personality within the cloister is not burying it alive. Although the whole of her short adult life had been passed behind the high garden walls of the convent, and after she took the veil only the members of her family had seen her—and this under the most restricted conditions—yet at the time of her death Thérèse de l’Enfant-Jésus was already known and valued by the whole town. That death was an event of importance, evoking an extraordinary demonstration of affection and reverence. The events which followed it are of deep interest. Here, in our own day, we have the swift rise and diffusion of a _cultus_ exactly similar to those which followed the deaths of the great popular saints of the Middle Ages. Every element is present; the prompt setting up of a pilgrimage, the veneration of the tomb, the distribution of relics—at the Lisieux convent cards are sold, bearing splinters and bits of straw from the cell of Thérèse—countless reports of visions, conversions, “supernatural perfumes,” and miraculous answers to prayer. The literature of the subject is already considerable, and a journal is published giving details of “graces” obtained by her help. The causes which lie behind such religious movements as this are still obscure; but we have in the cult of Thérèse Martin a valuable clue by which to interpret those reported from the past. Her “miracles,” in which students of psychic phenomena will find much to interest them, range from the cure of cancer to the multiplication of bank-notes, and even include the restoration of dead geranium-cuttings. Many are obviously explained by coincidence or hallucination, some are admirable examples of faith-healing. But a few, apparently supported by good evidence, seem to defy rationalistic explanation. The cult quickly lost its local and ultimately its national character. Though French Catholicism rightly claims Thérèse as its peculiar possession, and devotion to her is probably more general in France than elsewhere, yet she is now venerated in every country in the world, and distributes her favours without regard to nationality. Scotland and America in particular have numerous stories of her benevolent intervention, at least as evidential as much that is offered to us by the exponents of spiritualism. Her legend is in active formation, and many picturesque incidents were added to it during the war. She is even said to have appeared at the British Headquarters, and given advice at a critical moment of the campaign. A large proportion of the Catholic soldiers who fought for France probably placed themselves under her protection, and attribute their safety to her care. A little time before her death, she said to her sister Pauline, “Une seule attente fait battre mon cœur; c’est l’amour que je recevrai et celui que je pourrai donner.... Je veux passer mon ciel à faire du bien sur la terre,” and again, “Je compte bien ne pas rester inactive au ciel, mon désir est de travailler encore.” In these sayings, so unlike in their vigorous activism the conventional aspirations of the devout, we have probably the germinal point of her _cultus_. It has come to be believed that this simple and loving spirit, who passed from the body with so many generous longings unfulfilled, is indeed spending her heaven in doing good; and the deeds attributed to her are just those practical and friendly acts of kindness, through which during life she expressed and perfected her spirit of love. II LUCIE-CHRISTINE Those students of mysticism who feel that the purely cloistered type of spirituality, as seen in Thérèse Martin and Elizabeth Catez, is too remote from the common experience to be actual to us, may find something with which they can sympathize and from which they can learn, in the self-revelations of the remarkable contemplative who is known under the pseudonym of Lucie-Christine. This lady, whose spiritual journal was published in 1912, was a married woman of the leisured class, leading the ordinary life of a person of her type and position. She was born in 1844 and married in 1865. She had five children. At forty-three she became a widow, and in 1908, after nineteen years of blindness, she died at the age of sixty-four. Nothing could have been more commonplace than her external circumstances. On the religious side she was an exact and fervent Roman Catholic, accepting without question the dogmas and discipline of the Church, and diligent in all the outward observances of conventional French piety. Her time was spent in family and social duties, sometimes in Paris, sometimes in her country home; and she appeared to her neighbours remarkable only for her goodness, gentleness, and love of religion. Yet her inward life—unsuspected by any but her parish priest, for whom her journal was written—had a richness and originality which entitle her to a place among the Catholic mystics, and often help us to understand the meaning and character of the parallel experiences which those mystics describe. The value for study of a contemplative who is at once so modern and so classic is obvious. This value is increased by the fact that for many years Lucie-Christine knew nothing of mystical literature, and was ignorant even of the names of the spiritual states which her journal so faithfully describes. Therefore in her case unconscious imitation, which accounts for much so-called mystical experience, appears to be excluded. Her journal—at present our only source of information—covers thirty-eight years: from 1870 to 1908. The first twelve years, however, are only represented by fragmentary notes, put together in 1882; when Lucie-Christine, at the suggestion of her confessor, began to keep a detailed record of her religious life. Whatever view we may take of its theological value, this record is certainly a psychological document of the first class. It is the work of a woman of marked intelligence; temperamentally philosophic, and with great intuitional gifts. The short memoir prefixed to the French edition tells us that even as a child she showed unusual qualities; was grave, thoughtful, and to some extent “psychic,” being subject to flashes of clairvoyance, and premonitions of important and tragic events. This peculiarity, which she disliked and never spoke of, persisted through life; and its presence in her helps us to understand how the many stories of abnormal power possessed by the mystics first arose. Her character was by no means of that detached and inhuman type which is supposed to be proper to religious exaltation. She was ardent and impressionable, gave love and craved for it; her qualities and faults were essentially of a lovable kind. She reveals herself in her journal as sensitive, idealistic, and affectionate; somewhat unpractical, very easily wounded, tempted to irritability, and inclined to worry. “The excessive wish to be loved, appreciated, admired by those whom I love,” was one of the temptations against which, as a young woman, she felt it necessary to pray: another was the longing for enjoyment, for personal happiness. It was only after eight years of intermittent mystical experience that she learned the secret of inward peace: to “lose her own interests in those of God, and receive a share in His interests in exchange.” Though the “activity and practical capacity of Martha” never came naturally to her, she was yet a splendid wife and mother. Even in the years when her inner life was passed in almost continuous contemplation, she never neglected human duties for superhuman joys; but planned and shared the amusements of her boys and girls, wrote and rehearsed the plays which they acted, and watched with care over every detail of their lives. Her spiritual life developed gradually and evenly. There is no trace in it of any psychic storm or dramatic conversion. She grew up in a religious home, and even in childhood seems to have been attracted to silent devotion or “mental prayer.” As a girl she was a vital, impulsive creature, full of eager enthusiasms. That deep, instinctive longing for Perfection which makes one man an artist, another a philosopher, and another a saint, showed itself early in a passionate worship of all beautiful things. “Tout ce que je connaissais de beau me passionnait et entraînait toute mon âme. La première vue de la mer et des falaises m’arracha des larmes.... Je ne pouvais trouver l’expression qui traduisît assez l’ardeur dont le beau enflammait mon imagination, et je ne voyais pas d’inconvénients à ces entraînements excessifs; au contraire, je m’y livrais de toute la force de ma volonté. Infortunée, mon âme en revenait cependant avec le sentiment du vide et de l’insuffisance, et c’est alors qu’elle rejetait son activité dévorante sur l’idéal qui lui réservait tant de dangers! Moins altérée du beau, je me fusse peut-être contentée des choses réelles, mais comme le coureur, lancé dans un fol élan, dépasse le but, ainsi mon âme s’élançait vers le beau à peine aperçu et cherchait encore au delà.” In this important passage we see the true source of Lucie’s mysticism. It was the craving for an absolute and unchanging loveliness on which to expend her large-hearted powers of adoration and self-giving, which led her like the Platonists through visible beauty to its invisible source. She had, as she says of herself in a sudden flash of ironic wit, “le cœur assez mal placé pour trouver Dieu plus aimable que le monde, et l’esprit assez étroit pour se contenter de l’Infini”; but it was not until youth was nearly over, and she had been married for eight years, that she found what she sought. One day, when she was meditating as usual on a passage in the _Imitation of Christ_, she saw and heard within her mind the words “Dieu seul!”—summing up and answering in one phrase the vague efforts and questions of her growing mystical sense, and offering to the hungry psyche the only satisfaction of desire. As Fox was released from his conflict by the inner voice which cried, “There is one only who can speak to thy condition,” so this inner voice, says Lucie (whom it greatly astonished), “fut à la fois une lumière, un attrait, et une force. Une lumière qui me fit voir comment je pouvais être complètement à Dieu seul dans le monde, et je vis que jusque-là je ne l’avais pas bien comprit. Un attrait par lequel mon cœur fut subjugué et ravi. Une force qui m’inspira une résolution généreuse et me mit en quelque sorte dans les mains les moyens de l’exécuter, car le propre de ces paroles divines est d’opérer ce qu’elles disent.” We see at once the complete and practical character of her reaction to the divine; the promptitude with which she makes the vital connection between intuition and act. St. Teresa said that the object of the spiritual marriage was “the incessant production of work.” So for Lucie-Christine that sure consciousness of the Presence of God which now became frequent, “clothing and inundating” her as she sat alone at her sewing or took part in some social activity, called her above all to “faire les petites choses du dévouement journalier avec amour”; conquering her natural irritability and dislike for the boredoms and unrealities of a prosperous existence. “N’avoir jamais l’air ennuyé des autres. Que de fois je manque à ceci avec les pauvres enfants. Vous êtes ennuyeux! C’est bien vite dit! Est-ce une amabilité divine?” More and more, as her mystical consciousness grew, the life of contemplation became her delight; and it was plainly a real trial to be distracted from it for trivial purposes. In company, or busied with household duties, she went for hours with “her soul absorbed, its better part rapt in God.” She “tried to appear ordinary,” and made excuses if her abstraction was observed; but there are a few entries in her journal which will give pleasure to those who condemn mysticism as an “anti-social type of religion.” “Nous avons été nous promener, quatorze. Je remarque que d’aller ainsi avec plusieurs ‘Marthes’ hommes ou femmes, cela ne fait rien. On laisse discourir, on met un mot de temps en temps, mais, en définitive, on demeure bien libre et l’oraison va toute seule. Mais avec une seule Marthe, que c’est terrible! La tête-à-tête oblige à causer presque tout le temps.” When Lucie wrote this, ten years after her first illuminative experience, she was far advanced in contemplation. She had known that direct and ineffable vision of God “Himself the True, the Good, the Beautiful; all things being nothing save by Him” which is characteristic—though she knew it not—of the unitive way: known too the corresponding experience of dereliction, when the door which had opened on Eternity seemed tightly closed. It would be tedious to analyze in detail the rich profusion of mystic states which she had already exhibited: the degrees of contemplation, ecstasies, visions and voices, all the forms taken by her growing intuition of the Transcendent. Many of these can be matched in the writings of the great mystics. Again and again as we read her, we are reminded of Angela of Foligno, Ruysbroeck, Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Genoa, even of Plotinus: yet Lucie-Christine was at this time ignorant of mystical literature, and only in later life found with amazement descriptions of her own experiences in the works of the great contemplatives. These experiences had a wide range. Some we are justified in regarding as invasions from her deeper self; coming to the rescue of the often distracted surface personality, and correcting the impressions of the outer world by its own intimations of Eternity. Thus, in 1875, she confesses that being particularly worried by a number of people, the Divine voice said to her, “Ma fille, il n’y a que toi et moi.” She replied: “Seigneur, et les autres?” The voice said: “Pour chaque âme en ce monde il n’y a que moi et elle, toutes les autres âmes et toutes choses ne sont rien pour elle que par moi et pour moi,” and by this timely reminder of the one Reality in whose life she lived, and by and in whom alone all other lives are real, she was recalled to her inner poise. In assessing the value of this, and many other of her revelations, we have to remember that Lucie-Christine was a fervent and exact Churchwoman. Her belief was literal. She felt no discord between traditional Christianity of the most concrete kind and the freedom of her own communion with God. The fruits of that communion were often expressed by her in theological terms, and the special atmosphere and tendencies of French Catholicism certainly affected the form of many of her contemplations. Thus at one end of the scale her passionate devotion to the Person of Christ, and the fact that her religious practice centred in the Eucharist, sometimes resulted in visions of a distinctly anthropomorphic type. In these, her intuition of God’s presence translated themselves into hallucinatory images of the Face of Christ, or of His eyes looking at her; or photisms, which she explained to herself as the radiance emanating from His person. As we all know, such dramatizations of mystical emotion are comparatively commonplace. The elements from which the self constructs them are by no means all of a spiritual kind; and experienced mystics agree in regarding them with much suspicion. A careful study of Lucie-Christine’s journal forces us to admit, that the deliberate passivity which she cultivated often placed her at the mercy of her instinctive nature; and that its hidden wishes sometimes took a devotional form. To this source, too, we must refer those “obsessions and temptations”—in other words, uprushes from the lower centres—by which she was often attacked during contemplation, and also the occasionally sentimental and emotional character of her reactions to the Divine. These objections, however, do not apply to the remarkable “metaphysical visions”—sharp onsets of real transcendental consciousness—in which her innate passion for the Absolute found satisfaction. Then, as she says, God seemed to “put aside all intermediaries between Himself and the soul;” and “bathed and irradiated by the Divine substance” she became “aware of the Divine Abyss,” or perceived, as Julian of Norwich did, “the Universe in a point,” swallowed up in the simple yet overwhelming sight of God. Here lie, for us, the real interest and value of Lucie-Christine’s confessions. She shares with Angela of Foligno and a few other historical mystics the double apprehension of the Divine Nature under its personal and impersonal forms; and as both utterly transcendent to, yet completely immanent in, the human soul. In her descriptions of these visions, this woman unread in philosophy displays a grasp of the philosophic basis of religion which would do credit to a trained theologian. Thus she says, “Il n’y a pas, ce me semble, de vue intérieure qui égale celle de l’essence divine. Mon âme était comme environnée de la substance divine en laquelle elle voyait ce caractère essentiel qui nous est révelé par le mystère de la Sainte Trinité, c’est-à-dire qu’il y a en Dieu l’unité et la distinction, le tout et le particulier, et je sentais combien c’est folie de chercher quelque chose en dehors de lui.” Again, “Étant profondément unie à lui dans la Sainte Communion, je vis Dieu en tant qu’il est le souverain bien, et je compris en même temps que le mal n’est que la négation du bien, un pur _néant_.... Dans cette vue intellectuelle, je compris aussi combien sera grande la confusion des pécheurs quand ils seront jugés, et qu’ils verront que tout le mal qu’ils ont aimé, préconisé, adoré, se réduit au néant! Avoir aimé le néant, avoir vécu pour lui, et perdre pour lui l’Etre éternel!” Here Lucie’s view of sin is that characteristic of all mystics; who can seldom be persuaded, however orthodox they may be in other respects, that anything which is not good is real. We remember how Julian of Norwich, also a natural contemplative of philosophic temperament, says, “I saw not sin; for I believe it has no manner of substance nor part of being.” As an analyzer of her own psychological states, Lucie-Christine had something of that genius which St. Teresa possessed in a supreme degree; and she has, perhaps, an added value for us because she speaks not from the past nor from the cloister, but out of the Paris of our own day. We owe to her one of our most vivid descriptions of that apprehension of Eternal Life—the immersion of our durational existence in the Absolute Life of God—which Von Hügel regards as the fundamental religious experience. “J’ai observé,” she says, “que pendant l’oraison passive et surtout dans l’état d’union, l’âme perd le sentiment de la durée. Il n’y a plus pour elle de succession de moments, mais un moment unique, et j’ai cru comprendre qu’étant élevée à cet état, l’âme y vit selon le mode de vivre de l’éternité, où il n’y a point de durée, point de passé ni d’avenir, mais un moment unique, infini.” We have again to remember that the woman who wrote this had then no acquaintance with the classics of mysticism. It is her own impression which she is trying to register. Again, consider this account of the state of divine union as she had known it: “L’âme va prier, elle s’élance pour franchir la distance qui la sépare de l’Infini, et cette distance elle ne la trouve plus! Elle veut aller à vous, mon Dieu, et vous êtes en elle!... Perdue en vous, elle oublie ellemême et tout le reste, elle ne sait plus comment elle vit, ni comment elle aime; elle ne voit plus que Vous seul. Encore ne peut elle pas _penser_ qu’elle vous voit et vous adore; car ce serait se voir elle-même, et en de tels moments elle ne se voit pas, elle ne voit que Vous. Elle connaît et aime par un mode nouveau et incompréhensible, qui est en dehors et infiniment au-dessus de l’exercice ordinaire de ses facultés. Elle sent que l’opération de Dieu a pris la place de la sienne et que c’est Dieu même qui opère en elle la connaissance et l’amour.” This sense of complete surrender to a larger life and greater power, of which love is the very substance and ground, is characteristic of nearly all high mystical experience; and the literature of contemplation would furnish many parallels to all that Lucie tells us of it. In this state, as she says in another place, “the thirst of the spirit is suddenly fulfilled by the Infinite,” and “God takes possession of the ground of the soul, without passage of time or feeling of space.” Then, the bewilderment and unrest produced in us by the disharmonies of daily life are healed. “Là où tout raisonnement échoue,” she says in one of her most beautiful passages; “où l’âme est tellement troublée qu’elle ne saurait même expliquer ce qui la trouble, la divine presence paraît, et soudain le vertige cesse et la paix renaît avec la lumière.” Consciousness, ceasing more or less completely its normal correspondences with the temporal order, then becomes aware of the eternal and spiritual universe in which we really live. Such an attitude to Eternity was a marked characteristic of Lucie-Christine’s mysticism. Often, it produced in her the complete mono-ideism of ecstasy; and she describes the oncoming, content, and passing of these states with a minuteness which makes her journal a valuable document for the psychologist. Constantly, the intense awareness of the Divine Presence persisted through the many duties and activities of the day; “like a grave and tender note, dominating all the modulations of the keyboard of my exterior life.” She is not afraid to use the most violent metaphors, the most concrete images, in her efforts to express the intensity and reality of this spiritual life that she leads, this divine companionship that she enjoys. “I am nourished by God’s substance.” “I breathe the divine essence.” “The presence of God is so clear that faith is not faith—it is sight.” “The soul plays within God, as within a limitless universe.” “The Divine action penetrates and transforms my adoration. It is the Divine Being who thinks, loves, and lives within me.” None of the mystics have gone further than this in their claims; but it is significant that nearly all the greatest go as far. Yet in all this, Lucie-Christine is strictly Evangelical. She was a Christian first, and a mystic afterwards. Though her expressions may seem startling, her mysticism never goes beyond that of St. John and St. Paul; and her most Platonic utterances can be justified by the New Testament. But the Pauline and Johannine teachings on the soul’s union with Christ are not for her merely doctrinal statements. They are vivid descriptions of states she has personally known, when her consciousness truly penetrated to that “région d’amour, région unique, où l’âme trouve un autre jour, une autre vie, un autre air respirable, où du moins tous ces éléments latents se trouvent manifestés, où Dieu seul apparaît, et tout le reste rentre dans l’ombre.” Such a personal and overwhelming consciousness of “the greatness, power, and simplicity of God”—an all-inclusive unity which the unity of her spirit could comprehend—was the central interest of her life. She certainly tended to that which Baron von Hügel has called “the vertical relation” with the Divine. Nevertheless, this theocentric existence did not involve either the limp passivity or the spiritual selfishness with which it is sometimes charged. On the ethical side it committed her to a constant moral discipline; for her ardent and impulsive temperament reacted too easily to every external stimulus. “I must give up pleasure—never work for my own enjoyment.” “My one prayer is, that I may not feel joy and grief so vividly: that I may feel only Thee.” This deliberate unselfing and concentration on God so strengthened the fibres of character that she was able to bear with quietness her many personal sorrows, and the long years of blindness—a bitter cross for that keen lover of beauty—which closed her life. Yet it did not muffle her in the unattractive folds of “holy indifference.” She loved her family devotedly, and felt without mitigation the anxieties and griefs of human life. Her attitude to others was generous and sympathetic. God, she says, gives Himself to us that we may give Him again. His unique light must pass through the soul as through a prism; breaking up into the many colours of word and deed, forgiveness and good counsel, prayer and alms, self-forgetfulness and self-giving. Though exceedingly reserved about her spiritual experiences, which were only known to her confessor, the influence of these experiences was felt by those among whom she lived; and her house was known by them as “the house of peace.” Moreover, her love for the institutional and sacramental side of religion saved her from many of the dangers and extravagances of individualism. It gave her a framework within which her own intuitions could find their place; and a valid symbolism through which she could interpret to herself the most rarefied experiences of her soul. She is an example of the way in which the mystic seems able to achieve the universal without losing or rejecting its particular expression: assimilating symbols of an amazing crudity without in any way impairing her vision of truth. The conflict between that vision and the concrete objectives of popular devotion was ignored by her; as it is generally ignored by practical mystics of the institutional type. She, who had touched the Absolute in her contemplations, was yet deeply impressed by the drama of the Church; by its ceremonies, holy places, festivals, consecrations. Her inner life was nourished by its sacraments. She displayed the power—so characteristic of Christian mysticism at its best—of transcending without rejecting the formulæ of belief as commonly understood; of remaining within, and drawing life from, the organism, without any diminution in the proper liberty of the soul. Thus, seen as a whole, Lucie-Christine’s spiritual life has a richness and balance which reflects the richness and balance of her own nature; for an impoverished or one-sided character was never yet found capable of a fully developed and fruitful mysticism. We see her from girlhood seeking to satisfy her innate longing for reality; urged on the one hand by the artist’s craving for perfect loveliness, on the other by the philosopher’s instinct for Eternity. When the veil was lifted, and the inner voice said, “God only!” she found at once the reconciliation and the fulfilment of these two desires. The long and varied experience which followed was no more than an unfolding of the content of those words. They revealed to her the Substance of all beauty and truth; shining in that world of appearance which she loved to the last with an artist’s passion, yet ever abiding unchanged in that world of pure being which she touched in her contemplations “above all feeling, image, and idea.” Because of this double outlook on reality, her mysticism was both transcendental and sacramental. It irradiated the natural world, and also the symbols of religion, with that simple light of Eternity wherein she found “all beauties known and unknown, all harmonies natural and supernatural.” Lucie-Christine makes clear to us, as few mystics have done, the immense transfiguration of ordinary life which comes from such an extension of consciousness; when “the veil suddenly drops, God reveals Himself, and the soul _knows_ experimentally that which she knew not before.” Her journal is full of passages in which its joy and splendour are described. I take one written in a time of great mental and physical suffering, when the cruel deprivations of blindness were already closing in on her, and the two beings she loved best—her husband and her youngest daughter—had lately been taken from her by death. “Figurez-vous un pauvre prisonnier au fond d’un cachot renfermé et obscur, voyant tout à coup s’entr’ouvrir la voûte de ce cachot, et par là recevant la lumière du soleil, et aspirant avec force l’air du dehors qui lui arrive embaumé des senteurs de la vie et de la chaleur de l’atmosphère resplendissante. Ainsi mon âme s’ouvrait, et buvait Dieu! ... mon âme aspirait et buvait la vie même de la Trinité Sainte, et se sentait revivre, et n’avait plus aucun mal.” III CHARLES PÉGUY In the turmoil and anxieties of the first weeks of the war, few people observed that France had lost upon the battle-field one of the greatest of her modern poets; a fearless and original thinker, a constructive mystic, who exercised a unique influence over the young writers and thinkers of his world. Yet the death in action of Charles Péguy, who was killed on September 5, 1914, at the age of forty-one, removed a striking figure from contemporary literature, and was among the chief intellectual losses sustained by France in the war. Born in Orleans in 1873, of peasant stock, Péguy had many of the fundamental qualities of the French peasant; the sturdy independence, the frugal tastes, the untiring industry, the close kinship with the soil. His father was a cabinet-maker; his mother that familiar figure of the cathedrals, the woman who lets the chairs. The great friend of his boyhood was an old republican carpenter with whom he used to talk, and to whose conversation he owed his first political ideas. This heredity and these influences gave to his thought and attitude a character which he never lost. In his mature work we see side by side the result of those two compensating elements in his childish environment; the mingled mystery and homeliness of that mediæval and intensely national Catholicism which finds in the French cathedrals its living symbols, the keen sense of social justice, of the need for social salvation, which inspired the popular republicanism of the years following the Franco-German war. These characteristics, which afterwards, in a sublimated form, came to dominate his mysticism and gave to it its special colour, its mingling of antique tradition with forward-looking hope, can be traced back to the blend of Christian and of democratic impressions which he received as a child. Perhaps only the son of French peasants could understand and reinterpret as he had done the figure of St. Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who saved France; and whose longing to mend and redeem, at once so practical and so transcendental, linked up the objectives of social endeavour and of faith. Brought up within the atmosphere of provincial piety, Péguy rose from the elementary school to the lycée; and at nineteen, through his own efforts and his mother’s sacrifices, passed from Orleans to the University of Paris. There his vigorous mind and positive character soon made him the centre of a group of students, over whom he quickly obtained influence. There, too, he made the transition—almost inevitable for an ardent young man of his world—from Catholic orthodoxy to humanitarian socialism: the first stage in his spiritual pilgrimage, and the first attempt to answer that question which underlies all his thought and act, his poetry and controversy—“Comment faut-il sauver?” These words, which Péguy puts into the mouth of St. Joan of Arc, and shows to us as the mainspring of her actions, define too the secret impulse of his own career. His mysticism was not that of the contemplative, the solitary and God-intoxicated devotee: it was that of a strong-willed man of action, who sees far off the “mighty beauty” and longs to actualize it within the common life. He saw that common life with the eyes of a poet who was also a child of the people; discerning beneath its surface the dignity and the beauty of its antique and simple types—the spinner and the tiller, the housewife, the mother and the child. “Les armes de Jésus, c’est la pauvre famille, Les frères et la sœur, les garçons et la fille, Le fuseau lourd de laine et la savante aiguille.” But he found in the French socialism of the ’nineties a dry and materialistic spirit; which could not satisfy his passionate idealism, his instinct for a completed life, a universal redemption, that should harmonize soul and body and fulfil their needs. Hence, by a process too gradual to be called a conversion, he grew from humanitarianism into a somewhat anti-clerical, original, yet mediæval and mystical Catholicism; in which those ideals and demands which had dominated his humanitarian period—the sense of the rights and dignity of mankind, the longing to save, “de porter remède au mal universel humain”—reappear in a spiritualized form. In Christianity he saw condensed the saving power of Spirit; never letting man alone, but redeeming him even in defiance of his own will, contriving its victories by or in spite of the evils and disharmonies of life. The belief which he achieved—doubtless fed by childish memories—was absolute and literal, and most easily expressed itself in mediæval forms. Modernism filled him with horror; he desired no attenuation of the supernatural, no reinterpretation of dogma. The faith which fought the crusades and built the Cathedrals was that in which he felt at home, and which he believed himself destined to bring back to the soul of France: “Au fond, c’est une renaissance Catholique qui se fait par moi.” Yet his inner life was full of difficulty and unhappiness. There were in him two strains, two warring impulses, to which we must attribute many of the griefs and disappointments of his life: for his great accomplishment both as poet and as founder of the _Cahiers de la Quinzaine_ brought him little personal joy. On one side of his nature he was proud, vehement, combative; full of a destructive energy, an obstinate fanaticism, which found vent in his violent political pamphlets, often expressing with the uncouth vigour of the peasant his uncompromising hates and loves. Though so ardent a Christian, he was neither meek nor gentle. He could never resist giving blow for blow, and by his impatience and intolerance alienated by turns his socialist and Catholic friends. About 1910, having thus quarrelled with most of his associates, he withdrew into a voluntary retirement, in which the spiritual side of his divided temperament seems at last to have had some opportunity of growth. His mystical poems—all composed between 1910 and 1913—show to us the love and exaltation of which he now became capable; the purity of that vision which had inspired his vigorous guerilla warfare against the shams and sordidness of modern life, and which now became the chief factor in his consciousness. Writing in 1912 to his old friend Joseph Lotte, he says, “Mon vieux, j’ai beaucoup changé depuis deux ans; je suis devenu un homme nouveau. J’ai tant souffert et tant prié. Tu ne peux pas savoir.” The secret of this inner conflict, of the terrible months during which, as he afterwards confessed, he was unable to say “Thy will be done,” he revealed to none; but hints of the way by which he had passed may be found in his poems. The mystical certitude which inspires their most beautiful passages seems never to have obtained complete control of his psychic being. The life of prayer and the life of personal struggle persisted side by side, not fully harmonized; and it is doubtful whether he ever achieved that complete surrender to the divine action “in which alone we do not surrender our true selves,” which is characteristic of the developed mystic life. “Celui qui s’abandonne ne s’abandonne pas, et il est le seul qui ne s’abandonne pas.” It was surely to himself that Péguy addressed this observation, and it represents his own central need. Those profound readjustments of character, that unselfing of the moral nature, which must precede spiritual unification, and so are the only foundations of inner peace, had never been accomplished in him. Like his patroness and heroine St. Joan, he combined the temperaments of fighter and dreamer, but he never succeeded in fusing them in one. We know, too, something of the outward circumstances which added to his difficulties. Married during his agnostic period to a freethinker, his intense respect for human freedom forbade him to force on his wife his own convictions, or even to bring his adored children to baptism against their mother’s will. For this refusal he was himself denied access to the sacraments; and hence this impassioned Catholic, for conscience’ sake, lived and died out of communion with the official Church. No one will really understand Péguy’s position or the meaning of his poems, unless this paradoxical situation, and this constant element of frustration and incompleteness in his experience, be kept in mind. He was in one sense an exile, ever gazing at the beloved country which he knew and understood so much better than many of its citizens. Deeply religious, he lived at odds with his religious world. Capable of the strangest inconsistencies and refusals, though sparing himself nothing of the anguish they involved, he could make on foot a pilgrimage to Chartres to pray for the life of his sick child; yet would not face the struggle necessary to make those children members of the Church in which he believed. “Je ne peux pas m’occuper de tout. Je n’ai pas une vie ordinaire. Nul n’est prophète en son pays. Mes petits ne sont pas baptisés. A la sainte Vierge de s’en occuper!” Himself, he felt called upon to devote his powers, without distraction, to that missionary propaganda in which the mystical and combative sides of his nature found creative expression, and to which his poetry and much of his prose is consecrated. “Il y a tant de manque. Il y a tant à demander,” says St. Joan to the patient nun who seeks to teach her resignation: and here she expresses Péguy’s deepest conviction. There is so much lacking that men might obtain of joy and peace and love. Action no less than prayer is needed; every soul must take its share in meeting the world’s need, for we are the accomplices of ill if we do nothing to prevent it. There was never any place in Péguy’s eager and restless heart for that “other-worldly” mysticism which achieves the love of God at the expense of love of home and fellow-men; for religion in his view was an affair of flesh and blood, not of pure spirit—not merely transcendental, but concrete, national, fraternal, even revolutionary. On this side his mysticism represents the spiritualization of that activist philosophy which was coming into prominence in the formative years of his life, and could not fail to exert a powerful influence on him. Both as mystic and as patriot, he had the reformer’s passion: a measure, too, of the reformer’s violence and intolerant zeal. He worked for a sweeter and a saner world, a restoration to man of his lost inheritance. The modern France, he felt, was wrong. It had lost its hold upon realities; mistaken its professors and scientists for apostles, its codes and systems for truth, its political institutions for liberty, the “triumphs of civilization” for perdurable goods. It had lost freshness, naïveté, hope: had sacrificed beauty and joy for an imaginary progress and comfort. In the place of the ancient types of human worth, the primitive yet august figures of parent and child, craftsman and tiller of the soil, it had produced the bemused victim of modern education “avec sa tête de carton et son cœur de bazar.” In this perversion of life and cultivation of the second-best he saw the “universal evil,” which poisons the sources of human happiness. Yet behind and within it Péguy, visionary and optimist, discerned the possible restoration of good; mankind brought back into contact with the real and eternal world. He saw his beloved France ceasing to be “un peuple qui dit non,” and becoming, by intensity and harmony of action and vision, “une race affirmative.” He looked past shams, pretences, and bad workmanship to a heaven that should contain not only people but things: “Dans le paradis tel que je le montrerai, il n’y aura pas seulement des âmes; il y aura des choses. Tout ce qui existe et qui est réussi. Les cathédrales, par exemple. Notre Dame, Chartres, je les y mettrai.” It was such a restoration of humanity to the wholesome and beautiful life for which it was made, that he had at first sought in socialism; and the earlier numbers of the _Cahiers de la Quinzaine_, of which he was the founder and editor, reflect this faith. He saw socialism then in its ideal aspect, as a triumph of justice and love: a reasonable career offered to the whole race. For this triumph, this reordering of the common life, he never ceased to work; but a deeper experience taught him that it could not be effected by any change imposed on society from without, or any readjustment between man and man. The readjustment needed was that between man and God; a change of heart, a rearrangement of the values of life effected from within, which should make possible the complete spiritualization of existence. Therefore it was that Péguy became, in his last and most creative period, a Christian mystic of an original type; an ardent missionary, who opposed the intellectualism, materialism, and individualism which France of the early twentieth century mistook for progress, by a propaganda which was anti-intellectual, nationalist, and profoundly Catholic. It is to this period that his poetry and much of his most vehement prose belongs. All is didactic in intention; but is saved by its author’s wit, sincerity, and remarkable imaginative genius from the usual fate of those who try to turn art to the purposes of edification. The prose is largely controversial, and inevitably suffers to some extent from this: for Péguy was violent and sometimes unjust when attacking the errors and follies of the time, and had at his disposal an astonishing power of mockery, irony, and scorn. Yet even here, his instinct for beauty constantly asserted itself: and in the midst of some biting attack upon “progressive” politics or modernist theology, we get an abrupt invasion of loveliness which transports us to the atmosphere of his poems. These poems fall into two groups: first, the three _Mystères_ which he wrote for the 500th anniversary of the birth of Jeanne d’Arc, “la sainte la plus grande après Sainte Marie,” and which deal with her spiritual preparation for the saving of France; _La Charité de Jeanne d’Arc_ (1910), _Le Porche du Mystère de la Deuxième Vertu_ (1911), _Les Saints Innocents_ (1912). These are all written in unrhymed irregular verse; a verse so indefinite in construction that it is often indistinguishable from rhythmic prose. They consist chiefly in long meditative discourses, alternating between the extremes of homeliness and sublimity, and put into the mouths of Jeanne and of Madame Gervaise, a Franciscan nun to whom she tells her problems and her dreams—an apt device for the conveyance of Péguy’s own religious and patriotic gospel. They were followed by three volumes in rhymed duodecasyllabic verse, which he called _Tapisseries: Sainte Geneviève et Jeanne d’Arc_ (1912), _Notre Dame_ (1913), and _Eve_ (1914), perhaps his finest and most sustained single work. When we examine these poems in order, we find that we can trace in them the development of a consistent philosophy of life: for, like most of the convinced opponents of intellectualism, Péguy was a profound thinker, relying to a far greater extent than he would ever have confessed on the ungodly processes of a singularly acute mind. The deliberate simplicity of diction, the assumed ingenuousness of attitude are deceptive, and conceal a deeply reasoned view of the universe. “Je n’aime pas, dit Dieu, celui qui pense Et qui se tourmente, et qui se soucie Et qui roule une migraine perpétuelle.” This is not the doctrine of the charcoal-burner; it is the doctrine of the experienced philosopher, bitterly conscious of the limitations of the brain. The foundation of his creed is the essentially mystical belief, so beautifully expressed in _Eve_, in the solidarity of the Universe. As humanity is one and indivisible, so too the human and the divine cannot be separated. “Nous sommes solidaires des damnés éternels,” he said when he was twenty: and in his posthumous work _Clio_, he reiterates the same truth. “Jésus est du même monde que le dernier des pécheurs; et le dernier des pécheurs est du même monde que Jésus. C’est une communion. C’est même proprement cela qui est une communion. Et à parler vrai ou plutôt à parler réel il n’y a point d’autre communion que d’être du même monde.” The spiritual and eternal world, then, is not something set over against the natural order; but is closely entwined with it, the neglected element of reality, which alone can make human existence dignified and sweet. “Car le surnaturel est lui-même charnel Et l’arbre de la grâce est raciné profond Et plonge dans le sol et cherche jusqu’au fond, Et l’arbre de la race est lui-même éternel. Et l’éternité même est dans le temporel Et l’arbre de la grâce est raciné profond Et plonge dans le sol et touche jusqu’au fond Et le temps est lui-même un temps intemporel.“ What he realizes and points out, therefore, is not some distant transcendental life and reality, divorced from our normal, flowing, changing life and reality. Rather he insists on the beauty and nobility, the deep spiritual quality of this immediate life; the supernatural character of nature itself, when seen from the angle of Christian idealism. The Blessed Virgin is herself: “Infiniment céleste Parce qu’aussi elle est infiniment terrestre.” In Christianity, with its incarnational philosophy, its balanced cultivation of the active and the mystic life, its sacramental touch upon all common things, he sees the only perfect expression of this principle; the only power capable of embracing and spiritualizing the whole of the rich complex of existence. Determined to bring home to his fellow-countrymen, on the one hand, the concrete and objective nature of this Christian life, on the other, the simplicity of soul necessary to those who would understand it, he rejects all attempts at religious philosophizing or symbolic interpretation. His treatment of theology is characterized by a deliberate homely literalness, a naïve use of tradition, which was intensely exasperating to his agnostic and Modernist critics; and which may be found distasteful by some religious minds, unable to realize the intimate connection between gaiety and faith. To others it will seem that, alone amongst modern writers, he has recaptured the mediæval secret of familiarity combined with adoration: of a love, awe, and vision, a profound earnestness, which yet leave room for laughter. His picture of God is shamelessly anthropomorphic. (“Je suis honnête homme, dit Dieu; droit comme un Français.”) Yet it is full of grave beauty, of the sense of fatherhood, the mystical consciousness of the Divine desire. Revealed religion is God’s Word, and therefore means what it says. “Jésus n’est pas venu pour nous dire des amusettes,” says Madame Gervaise to Joan of Arc. The faith which Péguy wished to restore to France was not the religious rationalism of the modernist: still less the morbid, æsthetic fervour of Huysmans. It was the homely everyday faith of the past, the humble yet assured relation with the supernatural order, the courage and hope which is rooted in tradition and is wholly independent of intellectual subtleties. “La foi est toute naturelle, toute allante, tout simple, toute venante”—the great and simple affirmation. The perfect type of this faith is not the world-weary convert, but the healthy unselfconscious child; and the child, for Péguy, is the most holy and most significant figure in the human group. “C’est l’enfant qui est plein et l’homme qui est vide.” Only in the child and in those untarnished human beings who retain their childlike simplicity of heart do we see unspoilt humanity: only in the child do we see incarnate hope. “J’éclate tellement dans ma création,” says God, “et surtout dans les enfants.” “On envoie les enfants à l’école, dit Dieu. Je pense que c’est pour oublier le peu qu’ils savent. On ferait mieux d’envoyer les parents à l’école. C’est eux qui en ont besoin Mais naturellement il faudrait une école de moi Et non pas une école d’hommes.” The tenderness and charm of those passages in which he celebrates the importance and sanctity of childhood, its innocence, its capacity for growth, its virginal outlook, its freshness and power of response, place him in the front rank of the poets who have treated this most difficult subject, and constantly remind us of Blake: “Comme leur jeune regard a une promesse, une secrète assurance intérieure, et leur front, et toute leur personne. Leur petite, leur auguste, leur si révérente et révérende personne.... Heureuse enfance. Tout leur petit corps, toute leur petite personne, tous leurs petits gestes, est pleine, ruisselle, regorge d’une espérance. Resplendit, regorge d’une innocence Qui est l’innocence même de l’espérance.” This hope, the childhood of the heart, is to Péguy the most precious of human qualities, and the one in which man draws nearest to an understanding of the Divine Idea. Jesus is “the man who has hoped,” and the Christian assault, which is the assault of hope, can alone make a breach in the defences of eternity. It is “the faith that God loves best”; the beginning of liberty, the growing point of the eager spirit of life. Faith beholds that which is: Charity loves that which is: Hope alone beholds and loves that which shall be. Faith is static; hope dynamic. Faith is a great tree; hope is the rising sap, the little, swelling bud upon the spray. “La petite espérance Est celle qui toujours commence”— the persistent element in all effort and all change. She deceives us twenty times running; yet she is the only one of our leaders who never deceives us in the end. She gives significance to human toil, beauty and meaning to human suffering, reality to human joy. In one of his most beautiful verses, he describes the crowning of humanity with this living, budding diadem of hope. “Comme une mère fait un diadème de ses doigts allongés, des doigts conjoints et affrontés de ses deux mains fraîches Autour du front brûlant de son enfant Pour apaiser ce front brûlant, cette fièvre, Ainsi une couronne éternelle a été tressée pour apaiser le front brûlant. Et c’était une couronne de verdure. Une couronne de feuillage.” Moreover, “cette curieuse enfant Espérance” is the motive-power of the spiritual order too. God Himself hopes for and in man: has placed His eternal hope in man’s hands, and given to him, along with the gift of liberty, the terrible power of frustrating or achieving the purposes of Divine Love. “Le plus infirme des pécheurs peut découronner, peut couronner Une espérance de Dieu.” Such a freedom is the very condition of spirituality; for faith, hope, and charity are not servile virtues, but heavenward-tending impulses of the free soul, activities of the will. Here lies their value; since only in true love, voluntary service, deliberate choice, can the possibilities of human nature be fulfilled: “Toutes les soumissions d’esclaves du monde, ne valent pas un beau regard d’homme libre.” Therefore, for the author of this gospel of freedom and hope, the course of salvation takes an exactly opposite course to that described by Huysmans and his school. The typical soul for Péguy is not the “twice-born” exhausted and fastidious sensualist Durtal, driven at last to seek reconciliation by his overwhelming sense of sin. It is the “once-born” simple and ardent peasant child, Joan of Arc; brought straight from the sheepfold to serve the heroic purposes of God. “Tenant tout un royaume en sa ténacité Vivant en plein mystère avec sagacité Mourant en plein martyre avec vivacité La fille de Lorraine à nulle autre pareille.” The typical experience is an experience of growth, freshness, novelty; action rightly directed, and a vision which perceives beauty and dignity in the antique and homely labours of the race. The cultivator of the earth and the rearer of children, the faithful priest, the strong and loyal soldier—of these is the kingdom of heaven. Of these and by these the old France was built up; and through these ideals and virtues, and the national saints in whom they are expressed, the new France may be saved. With Huysmans in our mystical moments we are usually inside a church, assisted by incense and plain-chant of the best quality: with Péguy, we are in the open air, in the market garden, or in the nursery. There his poetry, in Francis Thompson’s beautiful image, “plays at the foot of the Cross.” Even the Holy Innocents in heaven are playing at bowling hoops with their palms and crowns. “At least, I think so,” says God, “for they never asked _My_ permission.” “Tel est mon paradis.... Mon paradis est tout ce qu’il y a de plus simple.” Side by side with Péguy’s spiritual gospel, or rather entwined with it, goes his practical and patriotic gospel. Since for him the whole of life was crammed with spiritual significance, he saw in the patriotic passion a sacrament of heavenly love, and in earthly cities symbols of the City of God. Hence nationalism was to him, as to Dostoevsky, essentially religious, and Joan of Arc— “Une humble enfant perdue en deux amours, L’amour de son pays parmi l’amour de Dieu”— was the perfect saint, fusing the two halves of human experience in one whole. These two aspects of love he could not separate, for they seemed to him equally the flowers of a completed life. Even God, he thought, would find it difficult to decide between them. “Dans une belle vie, il n’est que de beaux jours, Dans une belle vie il fait toujours beau temps. Dieu la déroule toute et regarde longtemps Quel amour est plus cher entre tous les amours. Ainsi Dieu ne sait pas, ainsi le divin Maître Ne sait quel retenir et placer hors du lieu Et pour lequel tenir, et s’il faut vraiment mettre L’amour de la patrie après l’amour de Dieu.“ This mystical patriotism was his great gift to the mind of France; and it was to her regeneration that his work was really consecrated. It was the ideal France, the “eldest daughter of God,” which claimed his devotion and inspired his finest verse. She is the creative nation, planter of gardens and sower of seeds, the nation which turns all things to the purposes of more abundant life: “Ici, dit Dieu, dans cette douce France, ma plus noble création, Dans cette saine Lorraine, Ici ils sont bons jardiniers.... Toutes les sauvageries du monde ne valent pas un beau jardin français. Honnête, modeste, ordonné. C’est là que j’ai cueilli mes plus belles âmes.” Péguy saw France in the laborious and heroic past, with her ancient traditions of culture, liberty, and order: patient, scrupulous, diligent, tending her seedbeds and weeding her fields—for good work was always in his eyes the earnest of a healthy soul. He hoped for her in the future: a future to be conditioned, not by the progressive character of her political institutions, but by her freshness, her eternal youth; above all, by her spirit of hope. “Peuple, les peuples de la terre te dirent léger Parce que tu es un peuple prompt.... Mais moi, je t’ai pesé, dit Dieu, et je ne t’ai point trouvé léger. O peuple inventeur de la cathédrale, je ne t’ai point trouvé léger en foi. O peuple inventeur de la croisade, je ne t’ai point trouvé léger en charité. Quant à l’espérance, il vaut mieux ne pas en parler, il n’en a que pour eux.” Owing everything to the love and industry of his mother and grandmother—for his father died before his birth—it was natural that Péguy should find in faithful and laborious womanhood the ultimate types of human truth and goodness. Two such types appear again and again in his poems, as living symbols of the national soul: St. Geneviève, “vigilante bergère, aïeule et paroissienne,” whose prayer and fortitude saved Paris, and, above all, St. Joan of Arc, “enfant échappée à de pauvres familles,” in whom the dual love of God and man, carried into vigorous action, availed to change the history of France. In the three _Mystères_ which he wrote in her honour, he extols the three qualities in which he found the secret of St. Joan’s holiness, significance, and power; her ardent charity, her unquenchable hope, the childlike innocence of her soul. Charity, the passionate longing to help and save, urged her to rescue France from its miseries. “Il y a tant de manque, il y a tant à demander.” In this profound sense of ill to be mended, her mission, and in Péguy’s view the mission of all Christians, takes its rise. Hope, the ever-renewed belief in a possible perfection, “invisible et immortelle et impossible à éteindre,” gave her courage to obey her Voices and strength to perform apparently impossible acts. Because she was a child at heart, with a child’s unsullied outlook, simplicity and zest—its entire aloofness from the unreal complications of adult existence—she had an assurance, a freshness, a power of initiative, which carried her through and past the superhuman difficulties of her task: “Ce grand général qui prenait des bastilles Ainsi qu’on prend le ciel, c’est en sautant dedans, N’était devant la herse et parmi les redans Qu’une enfant échappée à de pauvres familles.... “Elle est montée au ciel ensemble jeune et sage A peine parvenue au bord de son printemps Au bord de sa tendresse et de son jeune temps A peine au débarqué de son premier village.” St. Joan thus appears as the supreme example of the practical mystic; rooted in the soil, and agent of that saving force which will never rest until it has resolved the discords of man’s life and inducted him into the kingdom of reality. She is for Péguy not only the redeemer and incarnate soul of France, but also, in her spirit of prayer and her militant vigour, the leader and patron of all those initiates of hope who “seek to mend the universal ill.” “Heureux ceux d’entre nous qui la verront paraître Le regard plus ouvert que d’une âme d’enfant, Quand ce grand général et ce chef triomphant Rassemblera sa troupe aux pieds de notre maître.” It is easy enough to exhibit Péguy’s defects, both literary and temperamental. Among the first we must reckon his tiresome mannerisms and apparent absence of form, his digressions and lapses into the didactic, his exaggerated love of repetition: the way in which his verse, in such a poem as _Eve_, seems to advance by means of passionate reiterations, stanza after stanza, like the waves of one tide, distinguished only by the smallest verbal changes. On the temperamental side we must acknowledge his intractable arrogance, a complete want of sympathy with his opponents’ point of view, something too of the morose distrustfulness of the peasant: faults which persisted side by side with his real mystical enthusiasm, for his nature never completely unified itself. On one side a spiritual poet, on the other side he was and remained to the last a violent and often cruel pamphleteer: carrying on against both private enemies and public movements a guerilla warfare in which he seemed to himself to be, like his patroness, fighting the cause of his Voices and of the right. As with most poets who are also missionaries, apostolic zeal sometimes got the better of artistic discretion. In the fury of his invective against the folly, priggishness, cowardice, and love of comfort of the modern world, he seized any image that came to hand; sometimes with disconcerting effect. No other poet, perhaps, would have dared to introduce cachets of antipyrine into his indignant catalogue of our weaknesses and crimes. Yet, as against this, what other poet of our day has achieved so wide a sweep of emotion; has revealed to us so great and so earnest a personality? When we consider his range, the tender simplicity of his passages on little children, the sublime Hymn to the Virgin and Address to Night in _La Deuxième Vertu_, the solemn yet ardent celebration of “les armes de Jésus”—suffering, poverty, failure, death—in _La Tapisserie de Sainte Geneviève_; and Eve, with its alternate notes of irony and exaltation, its exquisite concluding rhapsody on St. Geneviève and St. Joan of Arc, the “two shepherdesses of France”—then we forget the sermons and the diatribes, and we feel that the world lost in Péguy a great Christian poet. He died, as we may be sure that he would have wished to do, in defence of the country which he so passionately loved: and a strangely poignant interest attaches to those verses in his last published work which he devotes to the “poor sinners” redeemed by this most sacred of deaths: “Heureux ceux qui sont morts pour la terre charnelle, Mais pourvu que ce fût dans une juste guerre. Heureux ceux qui sont morts pour quatre coins de terre. Heureux ceux qui sont morts d’une mort solennelle.... “Heureux les grands vainqueurs. Paix aux hommes de guerre. Qu’ils soient ensevelis dans un dernier silence. Que Dieu mette avec eux dans la juste balance Un peu de ce terrain d’ordure et de poussière. “Que Dieu mette avec eux dans le juste plateau Ce qu’ils ont tant aimé, quelques grammes de terre. Un peu de cette vigne, un peu de ce coteau, Un peu de ce ravin sauvage et solitaire.... “Mère, voici vos fils et leur immense armée. Qu’ils ne soient pas jugés sur leur seule misère. Que Dieu mette avec eux un peu de cette terre Qui les a tant perdus et qu’ils ont tant aimée.” PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LTD., BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E. 1, AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK. ● Transcriber’s Notes: ○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_). ○ Footnotes have been moved to follow the sections in which they are referenced.