The Press. — London, England, 1856-03-08 00:00:00

Nittraturt. Hours with the Mystics. A Contribution to the History of Religious Opinion. By R. A. Vaughan, B.A. Two Vols. London: Parker and Son. IF the name of the author had not appeared on the titlepage, we should have been inclined to refer this work to some one of the most dis tinguished masters of thought of our day—as to Mr. Henry Rogers, or to Mr. Moseley. It is much in the style of the " Eclipse of Faith," and if less elevated in its eloquence, and less sharp in its logic, it has the advantage of a wider range of topics, and the capability of displaying more various learning. The work is cast in the form of dialogue, and its object is to show the various forms of mysticism which have prevailed in the world, and particularly in the Christian world, until the present day. " The term itself is derived " from the root mu, to close, the secret rites of " the Greek mysteries being things about which "the mouth was to be closed. We have the ex " pressive word mum in our own language." The philosophers, says the author, borrowed the word from the priests, and applied it to their inner esoteric doctrines. Subsequently it was imported into the ecclesiastical world, but the signification of the word remained substan tially the same, the mystic being one who closed the external world to his view, and shut himself up in his own mind. He was essentially a believer in innate ideas. He con ceived that the mind had not only a life but a knowledge of its own, apart from the percep tions of sense, and that this life grew more vigorous, and this knowledge wider, as the mind was more isolated from the body and its organs. The various forms into which mysti cism may be divided (1., 40 et seq.) are stated with great precision, and show both the clear ness and depth of the author's thought. The spirit of mysticism is tracked through all its erratic manifestations, and in this way is made to form a most singular and instructive chap ter in the history of the human mind. Mysti cism is the groundwork of all those intellectual enthusiasms which pretend to a knowledge above what sense, experience, and information can teach, and which claim for the mind a revelation of its own, and assert either that it has special communion with Deity, or that it is itself supreme, and in itself the lord of the universe. It is the latter form of m 3 sticism which seems to find most favour in the present day. If we rightly apprehend the spirit and pur pose of Mr. Vaughan's volumes, he regards mysticism of all kinds as essentially false, yet entitled to respect for the truth mingled with it, and the service it has done, as we respect the labours of the alchemists while perceiving lie errors of their principle. The mystics, with all their absurdities, yet stimulated thought ; they kept the intellect in activity ; and in the midst of much that was false they arrived at some important truths. The radical error of all mysticism is well stated here: it leads " to the unwarrantable identification of " our own thoughts with the mind of God." Hence have flowed mainly all the delusions which have misled, wasted, and scourged the world. Hence the tyranny of intolerance and the crimes of bigotry. Men believing in the inspiration of their own thought, and in virtue of that inspiration setting themselves up above all the lights of experience, and all the aids of sense and external knowledge, will re cognise no other kind of moral restraint, and no other limit to their action, than what is suggested to them by their own fevered mind. The mystic confined to contemplation, may be harmless ; but when intrusted with power, he is almost sure to run into demonaical excesses. Tice error of mysticism—in itself but a prac tical development of the doctrine of innate ideas—is exemplified in numerous passages of Mr. Vaughan's work. In one of the conversa tions it is observed that. Proclus, the last great name among the Neo-Platonists of Alexandria, taught philosophy only as a path to Quietism. His,God was a Deity of Negation, " a God of THE PRESS. " whom the more you deny the more you " affirm." One of the speakers remarks : And this is all! After years of austerity and toil, Proclus, the scholar stored with the opinions of the past, surrounded by the admiration of the present,—the astro nomer, the geometncian, the philosopher,—learned in the lore of symbols and of oracles, in the rapt utterances of Orpheus and of Zoroaster,—an adept in the ritual of invo cations among every people in the world,—he at the close pronounces Quietism the consummation of the whole, and an unreasoning contemplation an ecstacy which casts off as an incumbrance all the knowledge so painfully acquired, the bourne of all the journey. One of the ladies who join in the conversa tion beautifully adds : As though it were the highest glory of man, forgetting all that his inquiry has achieved—hidden away from the world—to gaze at vacancy, inactive and infantine; to he like some peasant's child, left in its cradle for awhile in the furrow of a field, shut in by the little mound of earth on either side. and having but the blue tether above, daz• zling and void, at which to look with smiles of witless wonder. This sentiment is the key-note of the whole book:— The fault I find with these myatics is, that they en courage the imagination to run riut in provinces where it is not needed, and prohibit its exercise where it would render the greatest service. Orthodox as they were in their day, they yet attempt to gaze on the Divine Nature in its absoluteness and abstraction, apart from the mani festation of it to our heart, our intellect, and our imagina tion, which is made in the incarnate Christ Jesus. God has supplied them with this help to their apprehension of Him, but they hope by His help to dispense with it. They neglect the possible and practical in striving after a dazzling impossibility, which allures their spiritual ambi tion. This is a natural consequence of that extravagance of spirituality which tells man that his highest aim is to escape from his human nature; not to work under the conditions of his finite being, but to violate and escape them as far as possible, in quest of a superhuman eleva tion. We poor mortals, as Schiller says, must have colour. The attempt to evade this law always ends in substituting the mind's creation for the mind's Creator. In other words, we must know God not by the constitution of our mind, but by such manifestations of His Being as He is pleased to make to us. His knowledge is to be sought in the ways He has appointed, and not in the ways which intellectual vanity would pre scribe. The less cannot contain the greater ; He is not contained in us; but we may hope to be contained in Him. Another of the characters remarks : This said Eye of Intelligence appears to me a pure fic• tion. What am I to make of a faculty which is above, and independent of, memory, reason, feeling, imagination, without cognisance of those external influences ( which, at least, contribute to make us what we are), and without organs, instruments, or means of any kind for doing any sort of work whatever? Surely this complete and perpetual separation between intuition and everything else within and without us is a most unphilosophical dichotomy of the mind of man. Again : The history of mysticism shows us farther, that the attempt to escape all figure or symbol in our apprehen- sions of Divine truth is useless, or worse than useless Such endeavour commonly ends in substituting for a figure which, though limited and partial, has life and heart in it, some vague abstraction, cold and lifeless, and itself perhaps ultimately no figure after all Surely the words " King," `• Shepherd," " Father," ex• press more truth concerning God than the "Pure Act" of philosophy. These conceptions are, in our opinion essentially sound and wliplesome. A form of mysticism has become prevalent in our day ; and it is an unfortunate circumstance that the great Burnett prizes should have been awarded to works of a mystical tendency, works which are only profound in dialectical logic, and which are deficient in a remarkable degree in solid matter and in natural science. But this fashion will pass away—the profoundest minds of our day are opposed to it. Natural theology can rest on no other foundation than that on which other sciences depend,—just inferences from established facts. " Poor Paley," as modern mystics delight to call him, will out live all their cloudy abstractions, and afford instruction and delight when their theories of " egoism " are classed with the follies of past time. Mr. Vaughan's hook displays great learning, eloquence, and original thought. In form it re senibles the " Eclipse of Faith ;" but in matter, and in its thorough mastery• of a difficult tlr2me, it is more like the profound book of Mr. Moseley—the finest philosophical essay of our day—on the St. Augustinian doctrine of Predestination. RATURDAY, Memoirs of Celebrated Characters. By Alphon se de Larnartine. Three Vols. Vol. 111. London: Bentley. (Second Notice.) IT is the presence of a noble conscientious• ness which makes Lamartine's essay on Bos suet so valuable. It is not a onesided piece of writing; on the contrary, it is impartial and loftily moral in its tone. It rebukes Bossuet for his bigotry, and attacks him with some polemical severity on account of his schismati cal view about the Gallican Church; but it would be impossible to render more critical appreciation to the genius of Bossuet. Th e commencement of the essay is particularly fine : If, after having studied, in all their details, the actions, works, opinions, faults, virtues, style, and language of so eminent a person as Bossuet, we desire to sum up, in one word, his general character, the word which presents itself to our minds as descriptive of the man is —Priest. The priest, in all his majesty, his authority, his intel• lectual pride, could not be better represented than in the person of Bossuet. Bossuet, to exhibit himself as he was,—to develop, i❑ all their extent and grandeur, the high qualities of soul, genius, diplomacy, energy, and eloquence, with which Nature had endowed him, could not have been anything but a priest. This eminent person was made for the priesthood, the pontificate, the altar, the vestibule of the cathedral, the pulpit, the trailing robe, and the tiara; any other place, office, or habiliment would be inconsistent with such a nature. The mind could not picture Bossuet to itself in the habit of a layman. A " priest," unquestionably, Bossuct was. His nature was peculiarly unsuited for the hearty love of liberty. In the middle of the essay Laniartine observes—of Bossuet's high birth at Dijon:— The innate contempt that Bossuet seemed to have adopted from the hour of his birth for the doctrine of equality; the instinctive love of hierarchy, high caste, and authority ; the peremptory tone and haughty glance, are the natural and distinctive traits of this patrician breed of Upper Burgundy, where the blood, warm at the head, but coldly stimulates the heart. The character of a race is to be retraced in each of its descendants; the exceptions are only accidental. The peculiar genius of an individual will not belie the genius of a city; Dijon is an intellectual capital, but not one that overflows with enthusiasm or feeling. St. Bernard, Bossuet, Buffon, natives of this town, were men compounded rather of bronze and marble than of flesh : the first had Abelard for his victim, the second Fenelon, and the third dissected all nature without finding a tear, a single hymn of praise, or a Deity ! Personal pride is unconsciously stamped on all the effusions of Bossuet. He was not a man for " the people," in the modern sense of the term, and his tone of thought does not suit the living supporters of the Church of Home, which, with its instinctive love of abso lutism, flatters democracy. In his remarks on the genius loci of Dijon we think that Lamartine is rather fanciful. St. Bernard's writings show that he was not a "Irian of bronze or marble." On the contrary, St. Bernard is renowned as " the mellifluons doctor," and his writings abound in what French preachers call onetion, while his the ology was addressed rather to the heart than the head. But a critical knowledge of litera ture is not the strong point of Lamartine. He is one of those writers who show that the modern school of authors is beginning to trench upon the peculiar domain given hitherto to artists. Like all orators in every age, Bossuet took enormous pains to train his organs of speech. Recollecting how the stage was anathematised by the French Church, the facts in the following passage are more re markable : To modulate his voice, to study his attitudes, to rept• late his gesticulation, he went frequently to the theatres, to hear the great tragic actors who recited upon the stage the dialogues and speeches of Rotron, Corneille, and Racine. He did not consider it any desecration to tae word of God in his mouth, to devote to it all the energy and excellence of human organs: he borrowed all he could from profane art, that he might embellish and add strength to his sacred calling. What he sought from the drama Nay not the idle pleasure of hearing a speech beautifully de• elaimed in a musical cadence; he looked for esamplesbY which to reach the perfection of Oratory. He did not hide from others his frequent visits to the theatre, the only forum where he could learn to imitate the ancient orators, and the most ascetic did not blame him. In all great writers or speakers who address the feelings, there is a certain indefinable charm which baffles analysis. Beneath all the talent of Bossuet there is a peculiar vibration which we never can forget. The wail of humanity, mourning at its fugitive life, and 232