the court because of their attachment to him; their position, as much as his, rendered an that his brother had been expelled from the answer imperative. He received Bossuet's marine, and a son of Madame Guyon from the book on the 8th of July, and by the 13th of guards; that the retiring and pacific Fleury August his defence had been written, printed, had narrowly escaped similar ignominy for a and arrived at Rome, to gladden the heart of similar cause; that the Dukes of Beauvilliers, poor Chanterac, to stop the mouth of the Chevreuse, and Guiche, were themselves enemy, and to turn the tide once more in bemenaced, and the prospect of their downfall half of his failing party. This refutation, openly discussed; and that to correspond with written with such rapidity, and under such him was hereafter a crime against the State. disadvantages, was a masterpiece-it reWithin a month, another Job's messenger deemed his character from every calumny brought him tidings that Bossuet had produced it raised his reputation to its height - it a book entitled An Account of Quietism· -an would have decided a fair contest completely attack so terrible that the dismay of his re- in his favor. It was composed when his spirit maining friends had almost become despair. was oppressed by sorrow for the ruin of his Bossuet possessed three formidable weapons friends, and darkened by the apprehension of his influence as a courtier, his authority new injuries which his justification might proas a priest, his powers as an author. He voke-by a proscribed man at Cambray, rewielded them all at once, and all of them dis-mote from the assistance and appliances most honorably. If he was unfair in the first ca-needful without a friend to guide or to repacity, when he invoked the thunders of lieve the labor of arranging and transcribing royalty to ruin the cause of a theological op- documents and of verifying dates, where scruponent-if he was unfair in the second, when pulous accuracy was of vital importance — he denounced forbearance and silenced inter- when it was difficult to procure correct intelcession as sins against God- he was yet more ligence from Paris, and hazardous to write to in the third, when he employed all his thither lest he should compromise his corregifts to weave into a malignant tissue of spondents — when even his letters to Chanterac falsehood and exaggeration the memoirs of were not safe from inspection when it would Madame Guyon, the correspondence of Fenelon be difficult to find a printer for such a book, with Madame Maintenon, and his former con- and yet more so to secure its circulation in fidential letters to himself-letters on spirit- the metropolis. As it was, D'Argenson, the ual matters to a spiritual guide letters lieutenant of police - -a functionary portrayed which should have been sacred as the secresy by his contemporaries as at once the ugliest of the confessional. The sensation created and most unprincipled of men-seized a packby the Account of Quietism was prodigious. age of seven hundred copies at the gates of Bossuet presented his book to the king, whose Paris. The Reply appeared, however, and approval was for every parasite the authen- was eagerly read. Even the few who were tication of all its slanders. Madame de Main-neutral, the many who were envious, the host tenon, with her own hand, distributed copies who were prejudiced, could not withhold their among the courtiers; in the salon of Marly admiration from that lucid and elegant style nothing else was talked of; in the beautiful that dignified and unaffected eloquence; gardens groups of lords and ladies, such as Wat-numbers yielded, in secret, at least, to the teau would have loved to paint, were gathered force of such facts and such arguments; while on the grass, beside the fountains, beneath the all were astonished at the skill and self-comtrees, to hear it read; it was begged, bor-mand with which the author had justified his rowed, stolen, greedily snatched and delight- whole career without implicating a single edly devoured; its anecdotes were so piquant, friend; and, leaving untouched the shield of its style so sparkling, its bursts of indignant eloquence so grand; gay ladies, young and old, dandies, wits, and libertines, found its scandal so delicious - Madame Guyon was so exquisitely ridiculous La Combe, so odious a Tartuffe Fenelon, so pitiably displumed of all his dazzling virtues; and, what was best of all, the insinuations were worse than the charges the book gave much and promised more-it hinted at disclosures more disgraceful yet, and gave free scope to every malicious invention and every prurient conjecture. The generous Fenelon, more thoughtful for others than for himself, at first hesitated to reply even to such a provocation, lest he should injure the friends who yet remained to him at Versailles. But he was soon convinced that every other adversary, had concentrated all his force on exposing the contradictions, the treachery, and the falsehood of Bossuet's accusation. The controversy now draws to a close. Bossuet published Remarks on the Reply of Fenelon, and Fenelon rejoined with Remarks on the Remarks of Bossuet. Sixty loyal doctors of the Sorbonne censured twelve propositions in the Marims, while Rome was yet undecided. Towards the close of the same year (1698) Louis wrote a letter to the Pope, yet more indecently urgent than his former one, demanding a thorough condemnation of so dangerous a book; and this epistle he seconded by depriving Fenelon, a few weeks afterwards, of the title and pension of precep tor-that pension which Fenelon had once nobly offered to return to a treasury exhausted by ambitious wars. Innocent XII. had heard, with indignant sorrow, of the arbitrary measures adopted against Fenelon and his friends. He was mortified by the arrogance of Louis, by the attempts so openly made to forestall his judgment. He was accustomed to say that Cambray had erred through excess of love to God, Meaux, by want of love to his neighbor. But Louis was evidently roused, and it was not safe to provoke him too far. After a last effort at a compromise, the Pope yielded, and the cardinals pronounced a condemnation, far less complete, however, than the vehemence of the accusers had hoped to secure. Twenty-three propositions extracted from the Maxims were censured, but the pontiff openly declared that such censure did not extend to the explanations which the Archbishop of Cambray had given of his book. This sentence was delivered on the 12th of March, 1699. The submission of Fenelon is famous in history. He received the intelligence as he was about to ascend the pulpit; he changed his subject, and preached a sermon on the duty of submission to superiors. Bossuet endeavored, in vain, to represent the obedience which was the first to pronounce the sentence of self-condemnation as a profound hypocrisy. Madame Guyon lingered for four years a solitary prisoner in the dungeons of the Bastile. In the same tower was confined the Man of the Iron Mask, and she may have heard, in her cell, the melancholy notes of the guitar with which her fellow-prisoner beguiled a captivity whose horrors had then lasted seven-and-thirty years. There, a constitution never strong was broken down by the stony chill of rigorous winters, and by the noxious vapors which steamed from the stagnant moat in summer. She was liberated in 1702, and sent to Blois - a picturesque old city, whose steep and narrow streets, cut into innumerable steps, overlook the Loire, -crowned on the one side by its fine church, and on the other by the royal chateau, memorable for the murder of the Guises; its massive proportions adorned by the varying tastes of successive generations, then newly beautified after the designs of Mansard, and now a ruin, the delight of every artist. There she lived in quiet, sought out from time to time by visitors from distant provinces and other lands as patient under the infirmity of declining age as beneath the persecutions of her earlier years-finding, as she had always done, some sweet in every bitter cup, and a theme for praise in every trial, purified by her long afflictions, elevated by her hope of glory, full of charity and full of peace, resigned and happy to the last. Her latest letter is dated in 1717-Bossuet had departed, and Fenelon-and before the close of that year, she also, the subject of such long and bitter strife, had been removed beyond all the tempests of this lower world. - In the judicial combats of ancient Germany it was the custom to place in the centre of the lists a bier, beside which stood the accuser and the accused, at the head and at the foot, leaning there for some time in solemn silence before they laid lance in rest and encountered in the deadly shock. Would that religious controversialists had oftener entered and maintained their combat as alike in view of that final appeal in the unseen world of truth with a deeper and more abiding sense of that supreme tribunal before which so many differences vanish, and where none but he who has striven lawfully can receive a crown. Bossuet was regarded as the champion of Hope, and drew his sword, it was said, lest sacrilegious hands should remove her anchor. Fenelon girded on his arms to defend the cause of Charity. Alas! said the Pope heart-sick of the protracted conflict-they forget that it is Faith who is in danger. Among the many witty sayings which the dispute suggested to the lookers-on, perhaps one of the most significant is that attributed to the daughter of Madame Sévigné.“ M. de Cambray," said she, "pleads well the cause of God, but M. de Meaux yet better that of religion, and cannot fail to win the day at Rome." Fenelon undertook to show that his semi-Quietism was supported by the authority of ecclesiastical tradition, and he was unquestionably in the right. He might have sustained, on Romanist principles, a doctrine much less moderate, by the same argument. But it was his wish to render mysticism as rational and as attractive as possible; and no other advocate has exhibited it so purified from extravagance, or secured for it so general a sympathy. The principle of "holy indifference," however, must be weighed, not by the virtues of Fenelon, but according to the standard of Scripture — and such an estimate must, we believe, pronounce it mistaken. The attempt to make mysticism definite and intelligible must always involve more or less of inconsistency, since mysticism is the worship of the indefinite, ignores reflective and discursive acts, and is the natural enemy of logic. Nevertheless, the enterprise has been repeatedly undertaken; and it is a remarkable fact, that such efforts have almost invariably originated in France. Mysticism and scholasticism- the spirit of the cloud and the spirit of the snow-reign as rivals throughout the stormy region of the Middle Age. The reaetion against the extremes of each nourished its antagonist. From beneath the cold and rigid formulas of the schools an exhaustless flow of mysticism leaped continually into life, like the torrent perpetually produced by the glacier, which rushes out to freedom and to sunshine | ever present to the mind of the individual from under its portcullis of hanging ice. In their sense of the ludicrous is exquisitely keen. the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, two The German loves abstractions for their own Frenchmen, Hugo and Richard of St. Victor, sake. In the isolation of his reverie, the endeavored to effect a union, and to reconcile whole province of reasoning and observation these contending products of the heart and becomes as completely subjective as the inbrain. They sought to animate the one, and most sanctuary of the feeling. The Frenchto systematize the other. In that ascetic ab- man will transform, by sentiment from within, straction, which hides in darkness all the ob- the form of truth which he receives from jects of sense, they sought to develop, from without. The German mystic turns his back the dull and arid stem of school divinity, the upon the schools, and is proud of elaborating most precious blossoms of the feeling; and both form and content from his own mind their mysticism resembles those plants of the alone. Where the Frenchman is afraid lest cactus-tribe which unfold from their lustreless his notions should be laughed at as fantastic and horny leaves, gorgeous flowers, that illu- and bizarre, the German revels in the monmine, with phosphoric radiance, the darkness strous, and is ambitious to amaze mankind by of the tropical night. The Victorines were revolutionizing the world of thought. To sesucceeded in the same path by Bonaventura, cure popularity for a visionary error in France a Frenchman by education, if not by birth, it must be lucid and elegant as their language more a schoolman than a mystic; and, in the it must be at least an ingenious and intelfifteenth century, by the celebrated Chancellor ligible falsehood; but in Germany, the most Gerson, who found time, amidst the tumult grotesque inversions of thought and of exand alarm of revolted Paris and invaded pression will be found no hindrance to its France, to write a work on the theory and acceptability, and the most hopeless obscurity practice of mysticism. These are mystics will be pronounced its highest merit. In this who have no tales to tell of inspiration and of respect, the German philosophers resemble Lyvision their aim is to legitimize rapture, to cophron, who was so convinced that uninteldefine ecstasy, to explain the higher phenom-ligibility was grandeur as to swear he would ena of the spirit on the basis of an elaborate hang himself if a man were found capable of psychology, to separate the delusive from the understanding his play of Cassandra. Almost real in mysticism, and to ascertain the laws of every later German mystic has been a secluded that mystical experience, of which they ac- student almost every mystic of modern knowledged themselves to be but very partially France has been a brilliant conversationalist. the subjects. With this view, Gerson intro- The genius of mysticism rises, in Germany, duced into mysticism, strange to say, the in the clouds of the solitary pipe; in France, principle of induction; and proposed, by a it is a fashionable Ariel, who hovers in the collection and comparison of recorded ex-drawing-room, and hangs to the pendants of amples, to determine its theory, and decide the glittering chandelier. If Jacob Behmen its practice. In the Maxims of the Saints, had appeared in France, he must have counted Fenelon carries out the idea of Gerson, as far disciples by units, where in Germany he reckas was requisite for his immediate purpose. oned them by hundreds. If Madame Guyon Both are involved in the same difficulty, and had been born in Germany, rigid Lutheranism fall into the same contradiction. What Mo- might have given her some annoyance; but linos was to Fenelon, Ruysbroek was to Ger- her earnestness would have redeemed her enson. Fenelon wished to stop short of the spir-thusiasm from ridicule, and she would have itualism condemned as heretical in Molinos; Gerson, to avoid the pantheism he thought he saw in Ruysbroek. Both impose checks, which, if inefficacious, amount to nothing; if effective, are fatal to the very life of mysticism-both hold doctrines to which they dare not give scope and both are, to some extent, implicated in the consequences they repudiate by the principles they admit. lived and died the honored precursor of modern German Pietism. The simplicity and strength of purpose which characterize so many of the German mystics appear to much advantage beside the vanity and affectation which have so frequently attended the manifestations of mysticism in France. When theosophic and theurgic mysticism arose in Ger- I many, and attempted to construct an inspired Mysticism in France contrasts strikingly, in science, which should disclose to the adept, this respect, with mysticism in Germany. by special revelation, the mysteries of nature Speaking generally, it may be said that France and the hidden inhabitants of the fire and the exhibits the mysticism of sentiment, Germany waters, the air and the earth, it was associated the mysticism of thought. The French love almost everywhere with religion. Even Parto generalize and to classify; an arrangement acelsus was an amateur divine as well as a which can be expressed by a word, a principle doctor, and dispenses, in his writings, theolwhich can be crystallized into a sparkling ogy and medicine together. Jacob Behmen maxim, they will applaud. But with them clothes the mysteries of faith in the chemical conventionalism reigns paramount-society is jargon of his day, and unfolds his scientific theories in the language of the Bible. But, with all his follies, no one who has read his letters can doubt the depth and sincerity of his religious feeling. In France, where the Reformation had been suppressed, and where superstition had been ridiculed with such success, the same love of the marvellous was most powerful with the most irreligious-it filled the antechamber of Cagliostro with impatient dandies and grandees, trembling, and yet eager to pry into the future-too enlightened to believe in Christ, yet too credulous to doubt the powers of a man before whose door fashion drew, night after night, a line of carriages which filled the street. The fourteenth century was singularly prolific, both in the east and west, in every variety of mysticism. It is traced in Spain among the Allombrados, whose only records are the chronicles of the Inquisition. It existed in the university of Paris, among the remaining followers of Amalric of Bena and David of Dinant, the doctrinal successors of the pantheistic Erigena. It was the forerunner of the Reformation in Germany, and pervaded, under different forms, both the higher and the lower classes of society throughout Switzerland, the Rhineland, and the Netherlands. It was represented in Italy by Angela de Foligni and Catharine of Genoa, while St. Brigitta was its deputy from Sweden; in the east it was gross and material with the Hesychasts of Mount Athos, and sacerdotal with the Byzantine Cabasilas; while in Persia, Sufis like Dschelaleddin Rumi, Saadi, and Feridoddin Attar, adorned with all the luxuriant imagery of Oriental song, doctrines of mystical death, divine afflatus, and absorption in God, which constitute a pantheistic Quietism. Under the great German mystics of that period-Eckart, Tauler, and Suso-mysticism was for the first and almost the last time thoroughly popular. It was occupied, it is true, with the most recondite speculations; its high-strained spiritualism urged the most impossible demands; but then its teachers wrote and preached in the vernacular; espoused the cause of the laity against the arrogance of the priesthood; stood up for the fatherland against French craft and papal domination; denounced judgment with a terrible prophetic fervor on the heads of robber-nobles and exacting priests; formed associations for safety and for reform throughout the great free towns, in which the layman and the clerk were on a level; and was, for many years, in many regions of Germany, the only kind of religion left to a people whose bells had been muffled, their mass-books shut, their churches barricaded, their priests silenced by the vindictive ban of a voluptuous Pope at Avignon. In the fourteenth century the range of mysticism was wide; its tendency was to idealize the objective truths of revelation; it found a trinity and an incarnation within the heart of man; it aimed to restore men in time to the condition they were supposed to occupy before time, when they existed as thoughts in the mind of God - -as archetypes within the divine word-in an everlasting nowwithout before and after; it strove to develop the divine spark, hidden in the depth of man's nature, by the gradual reduction of that nature to its nude simplicity. In the seventeenth century, and in France, this Platonic element-these aspirations after an antenatal state these speculations concerning the perpetual incarnation of the Word in the persons of believers, drop out of sight, and inysticism concentrates itself, with Fenelon, on the inward life of disinterested love. The reformatory character of mysticism is far less prominent in the latter period; for in the fourteenth century reformation was longed for and yet afar off; in the seventeenth it had arrived, and the Gallican church, horror-stricken by Protestantism, identified every opposition to the excess of outward observance with Luther and the devil. The reforming mysticism of Germany could accomplish no reformation, because of the inherent defects of its principle. Confounding, as it did, sanctification and justification -deficient in scriptural truth, when grossly apprehended by the people it too often led to lawless excesses which disgraced it, and when retained in its purer form its refined transcendentalism could only secure the sympathies of the few. We need not be at great pains, now-a-days, to show that mysticism is an error in science; that Jacob Behmen was egregiously mistaken in fancying the little room above his cobbler's shop a holy place, in which all the secrets of the universe would be revealed to him, while he sat in his chair, pen in hand; that the theosophists were wrong in imagining that their studies were like the Tower of the Universe, in which the wizard Zirfea enclosed the princes and princesses who figure in the romance of Amadis of Greece, and where all the history and mystery of the world was presented by magic to their gaze, as they reclined, spell-bound, upon enchanted seats. Mysticism is not less an error in religionan excessive subjectivity- a feverish spiritualism. It supposes the human mind to be. like one of those old manuscripts called palimpsests, from which an earlier character has been effaced to make room for some later and worthless writing, and which the scholar carefully scours to remove the upper inscription and to restore the lower, which may prove some precious relic of antiquity, over-written by the barbarous Latin of a monkish scribe. Similarly the mystic proposes, by an abstraction which shall clear the mind of all that time and passion and the outer world have written there, to discover the hidden law primarily traced by a divine hand, and to find, in the original of the soul, an exact transcript of the thought of God. The medieval mystic, who persuaded himself that he had succeeded in this attempt, believed his mind a mirror which in its calm presented the exact reflex of the verities of the divine nature and the unseen world (superiora invisibilia divina) his impressions obtained the sanction of revelation and to look inward and to look upward was identical. Mysticism, in its higher forms, would ascend above all historic facts and sensible images aspires to gaze immediately on the unrevealed Godhead, and to be lost in that as a drop in the ocean. It substitutes an unknown God for the known, and forgets that Scripture adapted, not to an imaginary faculty of mystical intuition, but to the whole of our nature- is full of sensible images, of facts, of reasonings, and of appeals to that hope and fear which mysticisin disdains. It forsakes the common sunshine of revelation for an extraordinary light which is to illumine its narrow and ascetic seclusion, and would be lit only -as the Talmud says Noah was in the ark - by the radiance of pearls and diamonds. Its self-annihilation has often so completely substituted God for the ravished personality of the individual, that many of its votaries have regarded themselves as a kind of divinities, as vehicles of God, and grown as mad as the hypochondriac woman whom old Burton describes as afraid to shut her hand lest she should crush the world. Its morbid introspection and its asceticism have generally made its followers inactive and useless. Naturalists tell us there is a torpor produced by heat as well as by cold, and that the crocodile and the boa lie, in the baking mire of the tropics, as insensible as the bear while hybernating in the arctic snow. It is the same in the spiritual world, and when the fervors of the mystic have subsided into practical Quietism, his sleep is as dead as the frozen slumber of the sceptic. Faints into airs, and languishes with pride, The mysticism which arose in Europe to resist the exclusiveness of the clergy and the formalism of the Romish sacraments, did good service in maintaining the necessity of experimental religion against the opus operatum. But that mysticism which has been conducted and extolled by the priesthood, was too commonly profitable only to confessors and directors, and a most miserable experiment for its subjects. When the priests had caught an enthusiast, they availed themselves, with ̧ equal art and cruelty, of his anguish, bis earnestness, his self-forgetfulness, to train him for a pattern- to stimulate his extravagance to its height; -for the more monstrous his asceticism, the more portentous and unnatural the distortions of his frenzied devotion, the more would the crowd gather, money flow, and priestcraft flourish. Such specimens of mental and spiritual disease were commonly regarded with all the reverence the Russian serf pays to an intoxicated man, with all the veneration the Mohammedan feels for the idiot whose intellect he believes to be in heaven. These models of useless self-sacrifice were put forward by a corrupt clergy to hide their own self-indulgence, and their sanctity was employed in ecclesiastical tactics for much the same purpose to which Cambyses put the sacred birds of Egypt, when he posted a line of them before his invading army-aware that the Egyptians would rather surrender on the spot than harm a feather of their holy ibis. The fiery convulsions of these ardent natures was often found effective as a spectacle, to stimulate the sluggish devotion and the reluctant offerings of grosser temperaments -as chemists say, that the fires of Vesuvius and Etna supply the air with gases which foster vegetation on the dull and quiet plains of monotonous Holland. In France, especially, mysticism was It is amusing to see how egotistical are the frequent resource of men and women oversome mystics in their abjuration of the Ego. whelmed by sorrow, or disgusted with a life They are never weary of talking about that of dissipation. To such the most extravagant which they profess to annihilate the la- form of religion was the most attractive, as mentations and confessions of their spiritual extreme begets extreme. In some cases, as disorder minister continually to display they resorted to religion, disappointed by the their eloquence shines in the description of world, so they took refuge in Quietism when imaginary ailments, and they parade their disappointed by ordinary religion. Exhausted mental affluence as they disclose their spirit- by the trying. alternations of religious hope ual maladies-somewhat like Zoilus, who and fear, they embraced indifference - and pretended to be ill that he might exhibit to their Quietism was less aspiration than deshis friends the new purple counterpane he|peration. It is sad to think of the sufferings had just received from Alexandria. They of many a bruised heart, seeking peace in remind us of that picture of Affectation so mysticism under the guidance of some Jesuit finely drawn by Pope, when he describes how director a religious Dousterswivel-whose she pretended art is powerless to bestow the |
