c. 9.] Rome and Her Devotees. 365 The worldly, the audacious, escape easily; but these pliant excitable temperaments, so anxiously in earnest, may be made useful. The more dangerous, frightful, or unnatural their performances, the more profit for their keepers. Men and women are trained by torturing processes to deny their nature, and then they are exhibited to bring grist to the mill-like birds and beasts forced to postures and services against the laws of their being-like those who must perform perilous feats on ropes or with lions, nightly hazarding their lives to fill the pockets of a manager. The self-devotion of which Rome boasts so much is a self-devotion she has always thus made the most of for herself. Calculating men, who have thought only of the interest of the priesthood, have known well how best to stimulate and to display the spasmodic movements of a brainsick disinterestedness. I have not the shadow of a doubt that, once and again, some priest might have been seen, with cold grey eye, endeavouring to do a stroke of diplomacy by means of the enthusiastic Catharine, making the fancied ambassadress of heaven in reality the tool of a schemer. Such unquestionable virtues as these visionaries may some of them have possessed, cannot be fairly set down to the credit of the Church, which has used them all for mercenary or ambitious purposes, and infected them everywhere with a morbid character. Some of these mystics, floating down the great ecclesiastical current of the Middle Age, appear to me like the trees carried away by the inundation of some mighty tropical river. They drift along the stream, passive, lifeless, broken; yet they are covered with gay verdure, the aquatic plants hang and twine about the sodden timber and the draggled leaves, the trunk is a sailing garden of flowers. But the adornment is not that of nature-it is the decoration of another and a strange element; the roots are in the air; the boughs, which should be full of birds, are in the flood, covered by its alien products, swimming side by side with the alligator. So has this priestcraft swept its victims from their natural place and independent growth, to clothe them in their helplessness, with a false spiritual adornment, neither scriptural nor human, but ecclesiastical-the native product of that overwhelming superstition which has subverted and enslaved their nature. The Church of Rome takes care that while simple souls think they are cultivating Christian graces, they shall be forging their own chains; that their attempts to honour God shall always dishonour, because they disenfranchise themselves. To be humble, to be obedient, to be charitable, under such direction, is to be contentedly ignorant, pitiably abject, and notoriously swindled. ATHERTON. Strong language, Lionel,—yet not unjust to the spirit of the Romanist system. The charity which pities the oppressed is bound to denounce the oppressor. WILLOUGHBY. Rem acu tetigisti. If you call priestcraft by smooth names, your spurious charity to the tyrant is uncharitableness to the slave. It is sickening to hear the unctuous talk with which now-a-days ultra-liberalism will sometimes stretch out a hand to spiritual tyranny. ATHERTON. Not surprising. It is just like the sentimental sympathy got up for some notorious criminal, which forgets the outrage to society and the sufferings of the innocent, in concern for the interesting offender. And now let us bid adieu to that fourteenth century which has occupied us so long. I shall only afflict you with one more paper,-to-morrow, Lowestoffe, if we don't go to Hawksfell. Some notes I have drawn up on the contemporary Persian mysticism. WILLOUGHBY. Stay-do not let us forget that little book, so much read in the fifteenth century, and praised and edited by Luther, the German Theology. I have read it with great 6 The theology of this remarkable with that already famillar to us in the little book is substantially the same sermons of Tauler. Luther, writing c. 9.] The German Theology. 367 interest. It seems to me to stand alone as an attempt to systematise the speculative element in the more orthodox mysticism of the age. ATHERTON. We may call it a summary of Tauler's doctrine, without his fancy and vehement appeal; it is a treatise philosophic in its calmness, deservedly popular for its homely, idiomatic diction. What we were saying about Tauler applies substantially to the Theologia Germanica. MRS. ATHERTON. I have been waiting to hear something about Thomas à Kempis,'-certainly the best known of all your mystics. ATHERTON. Right. Who could forget the comforter of the fifteenth century? It is curious to compare the third book of his Imitation of Christ, with its dialogue between Christ and the disciple, and Suso's conversation, in his Book of the Eternal Wisdom, between Wisdom and the Servant. GOWER. There is less genius, less abandon, if one may so say, about Thomas. ATHERTON. Decidedly. That original and daring spirit which carried mysticism to such a height in the fourteenth century, could not survive in the fifteenth, an age tending towards consolidation and equilibrium, bent on the softening down of extremes. Suso, a poet as much as an ascetic, is to Spalatin, and praising Tauler's theology, sends with his letter what he calls an epitome thereof,-cujus totius velut epitomen ecce hic tibi mitto. (Epp. De Wette, No. xxv.) He refers, there can be little doubt, to his edition of the Deutsche Theologie, which came out that year. 7 See, especially, the twelfth chapter of the second book, On the Necessity of bearing the Cross. Compare Michelet's somewhat overdrawn picture of the effects of the Imitation in his History of France. of Gerlacus Petrus is a contemporary treatise belonging to the same school. (Comp. capp. xxxix. and xxvi.; ed. Strange, 1849.) It is less popular, less impassioned than the Imitation, and more thoroughly impregnated with the spirit of mysticism. Gerlach would seem to have studied Suso: in one place he imitates his language. The cast of his imagery, as well as the prominence given to mystical phraseology, more peculiar to the Germans, shows that he addresses himself to an advanced and comparatively esoteric circle.-Comp. The Ignitum cum Deo Soliloquium capp. xxii. xxiv. p. 78. continually quitting his cell to admire nature and to mix with men. He mingles speculation borrowed from his master, Eckart, with the luxuriant play of his own inexhaustible fancy. Thomas à Kempis is exclusively the ascetic. His mysticism ranges in a narrower sphere. Hence, to a great extent, his wider influence. He abjures everything that belongs to the thought of the philosopher or the fine feeling of the artist. He appeals neither to the intellect nor to the imagination-simply to the heart. could be understood without learning, appreciated without taste, and so thousands, in castle and in cloister, prayed and wept over his earnest page. 'See!' said he, 'this life is filled with crosses.' And multitudes, in misery, or fear of misery, made answer, 'It is true.'-'Then,' urged the comforter, 'be thyself crucified to it, and it cannot harm thee. Cease to have any care, any aim, any hope or fear, save Christ. Yield thyself, utterly passive and dead to this life, into his hands who is Lord of a better.' Then the sufferers dried their tears, and strove hard to forget time and self in contemplating Christ. GOWER. And, let us hope, not always quite in vain. ATHERTON. I have one more name yet upon my list, with which the medieval mysticism reaches its conclusion. It is the great Frenchman, Chancellor Gerson. His figure stands out prominently among the confusions of the time, half-way between the old age and the new. Up to a certain point, he is a reformer; beyond it, the enemy of reform. He is active in the deposition of John XXII., yet he does not hesitate to burn John Huss. He looks on, with a smile of satisfaction, when the royal secretaries stab with their penknives the papal bulls, and the rector tears the insolent parchment into shreds. He sees, half with pity and half with triumph, the emissaries of the Pope, crowned in mockery with paper tiaras, and hung with 8 'Gerson.'-See an article by Lieb- the Theologische Studien und Kritiken; ner (Gerson's Mystische Theologie) in 1835, ii. c. 9.] Gerson. 369 insulting scrolls, dragged through the streets in a scavenger's tumbril, to be pilloried by angry Paris. But he stands aloof in disdain when the University, deserted by the Parliament, fraternizes with the mob to enforce reform,-when threadbare students come down from their garrets in the Pays Latin to join the burly butchers of St. Jacques la Boucherie,—when grave doctors shake hands with ox-fellers, and Franciscans and White-hoods shout together for the charter. WILLOUGHBY. And very wrong he was, too, for those butchers, rough as they were, were right in the main,-honest, energetic fellows, with good heads on their shoulders. Could they but have raised money, they would have saved France. But Gerson would rather be plundered than pay their tax, and had to hurry down for hiding to the vaults of Notre Dame. I remember the story. And when the princes came back to power, the moderates were pillaged like the rest,-and serve them right. ATHERTON. Yes, the reform demanded was just and moderate, and even the rioters lost none of their respect for royalty, feeling still in their rude hearts no little of that chivalrous loyalty which animated Gerson himself when he bent low before the poor idiot king, and with oriental reverence exclaimed, ‘O King, live for ever!' Gerson was a radical in the Church and a conservative in the State-the antagonist of the political republicanism, the champion of the ecclesiastical. His sanguine hopes of peace for his country and of reform for his Church, were alike doomed to disappointment. His great work on the theory and practice of mysticism was composed during the stormy period of his public life. Imagine. how happily he forgot popes and councils, Cabochiens and Armagnacs, during those brief intervals of quiet which he devoted to the elaboration of a psychology that should give to mysticism a scientific basis. Nominalist as he was, and fully VOL. I. BB |