Christian Mysticism. William Ralph Inge

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СКАЧАТЬ solent mystici tres vias, purgativam, illuminativam, et unitivam." Molinos was quite a heterodox mystic in teaching that there is but a "unica via, scilicet interna," and this proposition was condemned by a Bull of Innocent XI.]

      [Footnote 17: In Plotinus the civic virtues precede the cathartic; but they are not, as with some perverse mystics, considered to lie outside the path of ascent.]

      [Footnote 18: Tauler is careful to put social service on its true basis. "One can spin," he says, "another can make shoes; and all these are gifts of the Holy Ghost. I tell you, if I were not a priest, I should esteem it a great gift that I was able to make shoes, and would try to make them so well as to be a pattern to all." In a later Lecture I shall revert to the charge of indolent neglect of duties, so often preferred against the mystics.]

      [Footnote 19: R.L. Nettleship, Remains.]

      [Footnote 20: In a Roman Catholic manual I find: "Non raro sub nomine theologiæ mysticæ intelligitur etiam ascesis, sed immerito. Nam ascesis consuetas tantum et tritas perfectionis semitas ostendit, mystica autem adhuc excellentiorem viam demonstrat." This is to identify "mystical theology" with the higher rungs of the ladder. It has been used in this curious manner from the Middle Ages. Ribet says, "La mystique, comme science spéciale, fait partie de la théologie ascétique"; that part, namely, "dans lequel l'homme est réduit à la passivité par l'action souveraine de Dieu." "L'ascèse" is defined as "l'ascension de l'âme vers Dieu."]

      [Footnote 21: Cf. Professor W. Wallace's collected Lectures and Essays, p. 276.]

      [Footnote 22: See Appendix C on the Doctrine of Deification.]

      [Footnote 23: So Fénelon, after asserting the truth of mystical "transformation," adds: "It is false to say that transformation is a deification of the real and natural soul, or a hypostatic union, or an unalterable conformity with God."]

      [Footnote 24: Life of Tennyson, vol. i. p. 320. The curious experience, that the repetition of his own name induced a kind of trance, is used by the poet in his beautiful mystical poem, "The Ancient Sage." It would, indeed, have been equally easy to illustrate this topic from Wordsworth's prose and Tennyson's poetry.]

      [Footnote 25: See the very interesting note in Harnack, History of Dogma, vol. i. p. 53.]

      [Footnote 26: The Abbé Migne says truly, "Ceux qui traitent les mystiques de visionnaires seraient fort étonnés de voir quel peu de cas ils font des visions en elles-mémes." And St. Bonaventura says of visions, "Nec faciunt sanctum nec ostendunt: alioquin Balaam sanctus esset, et asina, quæ vidit Angelum."]

      [Footnote 27: The following passage from St. Francis de Sales is much to the same effect as those referred to in the text: "Les philosophes mesmes ont recogneu certaines espèces d'extases naturelles faictes par la véhémente application de l'esprit à la considération des choses relevées. Une marque de la bonne et sainete extase est qu'elle ne se prend ny attache jamais tant à l'entendement qu'à la volonté, laquelle elle esmeut, eschauffe, et remplit d'une puissante affection envers Dieu; de manière que si l'extase est plus belle que bonne, plus lumineuse qu'affective, elle est grandement douteuse et digne de soupçon."]

      [Footnote 28: Some of my readers may find satisfaction in the following passage of Jeremy Taylor: "Indeed, when persons have long been softened with the continual droppings of religion, and their spirits made timorous and apt for impression by the assiduity of prayer, and the continual dyings of mortification—the fancy, which is a very great instrument of devotion, is kept continually warm, and in a disposition and aptitude to take fire, and to flame out in great ascents; and when they suffer transportations beyond the burdens and support of reason, they suffer they know not what, and call it what they please." Henry More, too, says that those who would "make their whole nature desolate of all animal figurations whatever," find only "a waste, silent solitude, and one uniform parchedness and vacuity. And yet, while a man fancies himself thus wholly Divine, he is not aware how he is even then held down by his animal nature; and that it is nothing but the stillness and fixedness of melancholy that thus abuses him, instead of the true Divine principle."]

      [Footnote 29: Plato, Phædrus, 244, 245; Ion, 534.]

      [Footnote 30: Lacordaire, Conférences, xxxvii.]

      [Footnote 31: Compare, too, the vigorous words of Henry More, the most mystical of the group: "He that misbelieves and lays aside clear and cautious reason in things that fall under the discussion of reason, upon the pretence of hankering after some higher principle (which, a thousand to one, proves but the infatuation of melancholy, and a superstitious hallucination), is as ridiculous as if he would not use his natural eyes about their proper object till the presence of some supernatural light, or till he had got a pair of spectacles made of the crystalline heaven, or of the cælum empyreum, to hang upon his nose for him to look through."]

      [Footnote 32: There is, of course, a sense in which any strong feeling lifts us "above reason." But this is using "reason" in a loose manner.]

      [Footnote 33: [Greek: ho nous basileus], says Plotinus.]

      [Footnote 34: Roman Catholic writers can assert that "la plupart des contemplatifs étaient dépourvus de toute culture littéraire." But their notion of "contemplation" is the passive reception of "supernatural favours,"—on which subject more will be said in Lectures IV. and VII.]

      [Footnote 35: "Die Mystik ist formlose Speculation," Noack, Christliche Mystik, p. 18.]

      [Footnote 36: The Atomists, from Epicurus downwards, have been especially odious to the mystics.]

      [Footnote 37: The theory that time is real, but not space, leads us into grave difficulties. It is the root of the least satisfactory kind of evolutionary optimism, which forgets, in the first place, that the idea of perpetual progress in time is hopelessly at variance with what we know of the destiny of the world; and, in the second place, that a mere progressus is meaningless. Every created thing has its fixed goal in the realisation of the idea which was immanent in it from the first.]

      [Footnote 38: Origen in Matth., Com. Series, 100; Contra Celsum, ii. 64. Referred to by Bigg, Christian Platonists of Alexandria, p. 191.]

      [Footnote 39: Paradiso viii. 13—

      "Io non m'accorsi del salire in ella;

       Ma d'esserv' entro mi fece assai fede

       La donna mia ch'io vidi far più bella." ]

      [Footnote 40: "Deo nihil opponitur," says Erigena.]

      [Footnote 41: Compare Bradley, Appearance and Reality, where it is shown that the essential attributes of Reality are harmony and inclusiveness.]

      [Footnote 42: I.e. "necessary" or "expedient."]

      [Footnote 43: Life, vol. i. p. 55.]

      [Footnote 44: J. Smith, Select Discourses, v. So Bernard says (De Consid. v. I), "quid opus est scalis tenenti iam solium?"]

      [Footnote 45: Aug. De Libero Arbitrio, ii. 16, 17.]

      [Footnote 46: Troilus and Cressida, Act III. Scene 3.]

      [Footnote 47: This idea of the world as a living being is found in Plotinus: and Origen definitely teaches that "as our body, while consisting of many members, is yet an organism which is held together by one soul, so the universe is to СКАЧАТЬ