The Waning of the Middle Ages/Chapter 17
CHAPTER XVII
RELIGIOUS THOUGHT BEYOND THE LIMITS
OF IMAGINATION
The imagination was continually striving, and in vain, to express the ineffable by giving it shape and figure. To call up the absolute, recourse is always had to the terminology of extension in space, and the effort always fails. From the pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite onward, mystic authors have piled up terms of immensity and infinity. It is always infinite extension which has to serve for rendering the eternal accessible to reason. Mystics exert themselves to find suggestive images. Imagine, says Denis the Carthusian, a mountain of sand, as large as the universe; that every hundred thousand years a grain be taken from it. The mountain will disappear at last. But after such an inconceivable space of time the sufferings of hell will not have diminished, and will not be nearer to the end than when the first grain was removed. And yet, if the damned knew that they would be set free when the mountain had disappeared, it would be a great consolation to them.
If, to inculcate fear and horror, the imagination disposed of resources of appalling wealth, the expression of celestial joys, on the other hand, always remained extremely primitive and monotonous. Human language cannot provide a vision of absolute bliss. It has at its disposal only inadequate superlatives, which can do nothing but strengthen the idea arithmetically. What was the use of producing terms of height, or extension, or the inexhaustible? People never could progress beyond imagery, the reduction of the infinite to the finite, and the consequent weakening of the feeling of the absolute. Every sensation in expressing itself lost a little of its immediate force, every attribute ascribed to God robbed Him of a little of His majesty.
Thus begins the tremendous struggle of the spirit which yearns to rise above all imagery. It is the same at all epochs and with all races. Mystics, it has been said, have neither birthday nor native land. But the support of imagination cannot be given up all at once. The insufficiency of all modes of expression is gradually accepted. First the brilliant imagery of symbolism is abandoned, and the too concrete formulas of dogma are avoided. But still the contemplation of the absolute Being ever remains linked up with notions of extension or of light. Next these notions change into their negative opposites—silence, the void, obscurity. And as these latter formless conceptions, too, in their turn, prove insufficient, a constant joining of each to its contrary is tried. Finally, nothing remains to express the idea of divinity but pure negation.
Of course, these successive stages in the abandoning of imagery have not actually followed in strict chronological order. All had been reached already by Denis the Areopagite. In the following passage of Denis the Carthusian we find the greater number of these modes of expression united. In a revelation he hears the voice of God who is angry. "On hearing this answer the monk, collected within himself, and finding himself as transported into a region of immense light, most sweetly, in an intense tranquillity, by a secret call without external sound invoked the most secret and truly hidden, the incomprehensible God: O most over-lovable God, Thou in Thyself art the light and the region of light, in which Thy elect sweetly come to rest, repose, sleep. Thou art like a desert most over-vast, even and intraversable, where the truly pious heart, entirely purified of all individual affection, ilumined from on high and inflamed by sacred ardour, deviates without erring and errs without deviating, happily fails and unfailingly convalesces."
We here find first the image of light, next that of sleep, then that of the desert, and, lastly, the opposites which cancel one another. The mystic imagination found a very impressive concept in adding to the image of the desert, that is to say, extension of surface—that of the abyss, or extension of depth. The sensation of giddiness is added to the feeling of infinite space. The German mystics, as well as Ruysbroeck, have made a very plastic use of this striking image.
Master Eckhart spoke of “the abyss without mode and without form of the silent and waste divinity.” The fruition of bliss, says Ruysbroeck, “is so immense that God Himself is as swallowed up with all the blessed ... in an absence of modes, which is a not-knowing, and in an eternal loss of self.” And elsewhere: “The seventh degree, which follows next ... is attained when, beyond all knowledge and all knowing, we discover in ourselves a bottomless not-knowing; when beyond all names given to God and to creatures, we come to expire and pass over in eternal namelessness, where we lose ourselves ... and when we contemplate all these blessed spirits which are essentially sunken away, merged and lost in their super-essence, in an unknown darkness without mode.”
Always the hopeless attempt to dispense with images and to attain “the state of void, that is mere absence of images,” which only God can give. “He deprives us of all images and brings us back to the initial state where we find only wild and waste absoluteness, void of all form or image, for ever corresponding with eternity.”
The contemplation of God, says Denis the Carthusian, is more adequately rendered by negations than by affirmations. “For, when I say: God is goodness, essence, life, I seem to indicate what God is, as if what He is had anything in common with, or any resemblance to, a creature, whereas it is certain, that He is incomprehensible and unknown, inscrutable and ineffable, and separated from all He works by an immeasurable and wholly incomparable difference and excellence.” It is for this reason that the “uniting wisdom” was called by the Areopagite: unreasonable, insane and foolish.
But whether Denis or Ruysbroeck speak of light changed into darkness (a motif inspired by the Old Testament and which the pseudo-Areopagite had developed), or again of ignorance, forlornness or of death, they never get beyond images.
Without metaphors it is impossible to express a single thought. All effort to rise above images is doomed to fail. To speak of our most ardent aspirations only in negative terms does not satisfy the cravings of the heart, and where philosophy no longer finds expression, poetry comes in again. Mysticism has always rediscovered the road from the giddy heights of sublime contemplation to the flowery meadows of symbolism. The sweet lyricism of the older French mystics, Saint Bernard and the Victorines, will always come to the aid of the seer, when all the resources of expression have been exhausted. In the transports of ecstasy the colours and figures of allegory reappear. Henry Suso sees his betrothed, Eternal Wisdom: “She soared high above him in a sky with clouds, she was bright like the morning star and shone like the radiant sun; her crown was eternity, her robe beatitude, her speech sweetness, her kiss absolute delight; she was remote and near, high aloft and below; she was present and yet hidden; she let herself be approached and yet no one could grasp her.”
The Church has always feared the excesses of mysticism, and with reason. For the fire of contemplative rapture, consuming all forms and images, must needs burn all formulas, concepts, dogmas, and sacraments too. However, the very nature of mystic transport implied a safeguard for the Church. To be uplifted to the clarity of ecstasy, to wander on the solitary heights of contemplation stripped of forms and images, tasting union with the only and absolute principle, was to the mystic never more than the rare grace of a single moment. He had to come down from the mountain-tops. The extremists, it is true, with their following “enfants perdus,” did deviate into pantheism and eccentricities. The others, however—and it is among these that we find the great mystics—never lost their way back to the Church awaiting them with its wise and economic system of mysteries fixed in the liturgy. It offered to everybody the means to get into touch at a given moment with the divine principle in all security and without danger of individual extravagances. It economized mystic energy, and that is why it has always outlived unbridled mysticism and the dangers it compassed.
“Unitive wisdom is unreasonable, insane and foolish.” The path of the mystic leading into the infinite leads to unconsciousness. By denying all positive connection between the Deity and all that has form and a name, the operation of transcendency is really abolished: “All creatures”—says Eckhart—“are mere nothing; I do not say that they are little or aught: they are nothing. That which has no entity, is not. All creatures have no being, for their being depends on the presence of God.” Intensive mysticism signifies return to a pre-intellectual mental life. All that is culture is obliterated and annulled.
If, notwithstanding, mysticism has, at all times, borne abundant fruit for civilization, it is because it always rises by degrees, and because in its initial stages it is a powerful element of spiritual development. Contemplation demands a severe culture of moral perfection as a preparatory condition. The gentleness, the curbing of desires, the simplicity, the temperance, the laboriousness practised in mystical circles, create about them an atmosphere of peace and of pious fervour. All the great mystics have praised humble labour and charity. In the Netherlands these concomitant features of mysticism—moralism, pietism—became the essence of a very important spiritual movement. From the preparatory phases of intensive mysticism of the few issued the extensive mysticism of the “devotio moderna” of the many. Instead of the solitary ecstasy of the blessed moment comes a constant and collective habit of earnestness and fervour, cultivated by simple townspeople in the friendly intercourse of their Frater-houses and Windesheim convents. Theirs was mysticism by retail. They had “only received a spark.” But in their midst the spirit lived which gave the world the work in which the soul of the declining Middle Ages found its most fruitful expression for the times to come: The Imitation of Jesus Christ. Thomas à Kempis was no theologian and no humanist, no philosopher and no poet, and hardly even a true mystic. Yet he wrote the book which was to console the ages. Perhaps here the abundant imagination of the medieval mind conquered in the highest sense.
Thomas à Kempis leads us back to everyday life.