Christian Mysticism Part 25

were not sufficiently venerable to make the idea of deification ([Greek: theopoiesis]) grotesque. We find, as we should expect, that this vulgarisation of the word affected even Christians in the Greek-speaking countries. Not only were the "barbarous people" of Galatia and Malta ready to find "theophanies" in the visits of apostles, or any other strangers who seemed to have unusual powers, but the philosophers (except the "G.o.dless Epicureans") agreed in calling the highest faculty of the soul Divine, and in speaking of "the G.o.d who dwells within us." There is a remarkable pa.s.sage of Origen (quoted by Harnack) which shows how elastic the word [Greek: theos] was in the current dialect of the educated. "In another sense G.o.d is said to be an immortal, rational, moral Being. In this sense every gentle ([Greek: asteia]) soul is G.o.d. But G.o.d is otherwise defined as the self-existing immortal Being. In this sense the souls that are enclosed in wise men are not G.o.ds." Clement, too, speaks of the soul as "training itself to be G.o.d." Even more remarkable than such language (of which many other examples might be given) is the frequently recurring accusation that bishops, teachers, martyrs, philosophers, etc., are venerated with Divine or semi-Divine honours.

These charges are brought by Christians against pagans, by pagans against Christians, and by rival Christians against each other. Even the Epicureans habitually spoke of their founder Epicurus as "a G.o.d."

If we try to a.n.a.lyse the concept of [Greek: theos], thus loosely and widely used, we find that the prominent idea was that exemption from the doom of death was the prerogative of a Divine Being (cf. 1 Tim.

vi. 16, "Who _only_ hath immortality"), and that therefore the gift of immortality is itself a deification. This notion is distinctly adopted by several Christian writers. Theophilus says (_ad Autol._ ii. 27) "that man, by keeping the commandments of G.o.d, may receive from him immortality as a reward ([Greek: misthon]), _and become G.o.d._" And Clement (_Strom._ v. 10. 63) says, "To be imperishable ([Greek: to me phtheiresthai]) is to share in Divinity." To the same effect Hippolytus (_Philos._ x. 34) says, "Thy body shall be immortal and incorruptible as well as thy soul. For _thou hast become G.o.d_. All the things that follow upon the Divine nature G.o.d has promised to supply to thee, for _thou wast deified in being born to immortality_." With regard to later times, Harnack says that "after Theophilus, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Origen, the idea of deification is found in all the Fathers of the ancient Church, and that in a primary position. We have it in Athanasius, the Cappadocians, Apollinaris, Ephraem Syrus, Epiphanius, and others, as also in Cyril, Sophronius, and late Greek and Russian theologians. In proof of it, Ps. lx.x.xii. 6 ('I said, Ye are G.o.ds') is very often quoted." He quotes from Athanasius, "He became man that we might be deified"; and from Pseudo-Hippolytus, "If, then, man has become immortal, he will be G.o.d."

This notion grew within the Church as chiliastic and apocalyptic Christianity faded away. A favourite phrase was that the Incarnation, etc., "abolished death," and brought mankind into a state of "incorruption" ([Greek: aphtharsia]) This transformation of human nature, which is also spoken of as [Greek: theopoiesis] is the highest work of the Logos. Athanasius makes it clear that what he contemplates is no pantheistic merging of the personality in the Deity, but rather a renovation after the original type.

But the process of deification may be conceived of in two ways: (a) as essentialisation, (b) as subst.i.tution. The former may perhaps be called the more philosophical conception, the latter the more religious. The former lays stress on the high calling of man, and his potential greatness as the image of G.o.d; the latter, on his present misery and alienation, and his need of redemption. The former was the teaching of the Neoplatonic philosophy, in which the human mind was the throne of the G.o.dhead; the latter was the doctrine of the Mysteries, in which salvation was conceived of realistically as something imparted or infused.

The notion that salvation or deification consists in realising our true nature, was supported by the favourite doctrine that like only can know like. "If the soul were not essentially G.o.dlike ([Greek: theoeides]), it could never know G.o.d." This doctrine might seem to lead to the heretical conclusion that man is [Greek: omoousios to Patri] in the same sense as Christ. This conclusion, however, was strongly repudiated both by Clement and Origen. The former (_Strom._ xvi. 74) says that men are _not_ [Greek: meros theou kai to theo omoousioi]; and Origen (_in Joh._ xiii. 25) says it is very impious to a.s.sert that we are [Greek: omoousioi] with "the unbegotten nature."

But for those who thought of Christ mainly as the Divine Logos or universal Reason, the line was not very easy to draw. Methodius says that every believer must, through partic.i.p.ation in Christ, be born as a Christ,--a view which, if pressed logically (as it ought not to be), implies either that our nature is at bottom identical with that of Christ, or that the life of Christ is subst.i.tuted for our own. The difficulty as to whether the human soul is, strictly speaking, "divinae particula aurae," is met by Proclus in the ingenious and interesting pa.s.sage quoted p. 34; "There are," he says, "three sorts of _wholes_, (1) in which the whole is anterior to the parts, (2) in which the whole is composed of the parts, (3) which knits into one stuff the parts and the whole ([Greek: he tois holois ta mere sunyphainousa])."

This is also the doctrine of Plotinus, and of Augustine. G.o.d is not split up among His creatures, nor are they essential to Him in the same way as He is to them. Erigena's doctrine of deification is expressed (not very clearly) in the following sentence (_De Div. Nat._ iii. 9): "Est igitur partic.i.p.atio divinae essentiae a.s.sumptio.

a.s.sumptio vero eius divinae sapientiae fusio quae est omnium substantia et essentia, et quaec.u.mque in eis naturaliter intelliguntur."

According to Eckhart, the _Wesen_ of G.o.d transforms the soul into itself by means of the "spark" or "apex of the soul" (equivalent to Plotinus' [Greek: kentron psyches], _Enn._ vi. 9. 8), which is "so akin to G.o.d that it is one with G.o.d, and not merely united to Him."

The history of this doctrine of the spark, and of the closely connected word _synteresis_, is interesting. The word "spark" occurs in this connexion as early as Tatian, who says (_Or._ 13): "In the beginning the spirit was a constant companion of the soul, but forsook it because the soul would not follow it; yet it retained, as it were, a spark of its power," etc. See also Tertullian, _De Anima_, 41. The curious word _synteresis_ (often misspelt _sinderesis_), which plays a considerable part in mediaeval mystical treatises, occurs first in Jerome (on _Ezech._ i.): "Quartamque ponunt quam Graeci vocant [Greek: synteresin], quae scintilla conscientiae in Cain quoque pectore non exstinguitur, et qua victi voluptatibus vel furore nos peccare sentimus.... In Scripturis [eam] interdum vocari legimus Spiritum."

Cf. Rom. viii. 26; 2 Cor. ii. 11. Then we find it in Alexander of Hales, and in Bonaventura, who (_Itinerare_, c. I) defines it as "apex mentis seu scintilla"; and more precisely (_Breviloquium, Pars_ 2, c.

11): "Benignissimus Deus quadruplex contulit ei adiutorium, scilicet duplex naturae et duplex gratiae. Duplicem enim indidit rect.i.tudinem ipsi naturae, videlicet unam ad recte iudicandum, et haec est rect.i.tudo conscientiae, aliam ad recte volendum, et haec est synteresis, cuius est remurmurare contra malum et stimulare ad bonum." Hermann of Fritslar speaks of it as a power or faculty in the soul, wherein G.o.d works immediately, "without means and without intermission." Ruysbroek defines it as the natural will towards good implanted in us all, but weakened by sin. Giseler says: "This spark was created with the soul in all men, and is a clear light in them, and strives in every way against sin, and impels steadily to virtue, and presses ever back to the source from which it sprang." It has, says La.s.son, a double meaning in mystical theology, (a) the ground of the soul; (b) the highest ethical faculty. In Thomas Aquinas it is distinguished from "intellectus principiorum," the former being the highest activity of the moral sense, the latter of the intellect. In Gerson, "synteresis"

is the highest of the affective faculties, the organ of which is the intelligence (an emanation from the highest intelligence, which is G.o.d Himself), and the activity of which is contemplation. Speaking generally, the earlier scholastic mystics regard it as a remnant of the sinless state before the fall, while for Eckhart and his school it is the core of the soul.

There is another expression which must be considered in connexion with the mediaeval doctrine of deification. This is the _intellectus agens_, or [Greek: nous poietikos], which began its long history in Aristotle (_De Anima_, iii. 5). Aristotle there distinguishes two forms of Reason, which are related to each other as form and matter. Reason _becomes_ all things, for the matter of anything is potentially the whole cla.s.s to which it belongs; but Reason also _makes_ all things, that is to say, it communicates to things those categories by which they become objects of thought. This higher Reason is separate and impa.s.sible ([Greek: choristos kai amiges kai apathes]); it is eternal and immortal; while the pa.s.sive reason perishes with the body.

The creative Reason is immanent both in the human mind and in the external world; and thus only is it possible for the mind to know things. Unfortunately, Aristotle says very little more about his [Greek: nous poietikos], and does not explain how the two Reasons are related to each other, thereby leaving the problem for his successors to work out. The most fruitful attempt to form a consistent theory, on an idealistic basis, out of the ambiguous and perhaps irreconcilable statements in the _De Anima_, was made by Alexander of Aphrodisias (about 200 A.D.), who taught that the Active Reason "is not a part or faculty of our soul, but comes to us from without"--it is, in fact, identified with the Spirit of G.o.d working in us. Whether Aristotle would have accepted this interpretation of his theory may be doubted; but the commentary of Alexander of Aphrodisias was translated into Arabic, and this view of the Active Reason became the basis of the philosophy of Averroes. Averroes teaches that it is possible for the pa.s.sive reason to unite itself with the Active Reason, and that this union may be attained or prepared for by ascetic purification and study. But he denies that the pa.s.sive reason is perishable, not wishing entirely to depersonalise man. Herein he follows, he says, Themistius, whose views he tries to combine with those of Alexander.

Avicenna introduces a celestial hierarchy, in which the higher intelligences shed their light upon the lower, till they reach the Active Reason, which lies nearest to man, "a quo, ut ipse dicit, effluunt species intelligibiles in animas nostras" (Aquinas). The doctrine of "monopsychism" was, of course, condemned by the Church.

Aquinas makes both the Active and Pa.s.sive Reason parts of the human soul. Eckhart, as I have said in the fourth Lecture, at one period of his teaching expressly identifies the "intellectus agens" with the "spark," in reference to which he says that "here G.o.d's ground is my ground, and my ground G.o.d's ground." This doctrine of the Divinity of the ground of the soul is very like the Cabbalistic doctrine of the Neschamah, and the Neoplatonic doctrine of [Greek: Nous] (cf.

Stockl, vol. ii. p. 1007). Eckhart was condemned for saying, "aliquid est in anima quod est increatum et increabile; si tota anima esset talis, esset increata et increabilis. Hoc est intellectus." Eckhart certainly says explicitly that "as fire turns all that it touches into itself, so the birth of the Son of G.o.d in the soul turns us into G.o.d, so that G.o.d no longer knows anything in us but His Son." Man thus becomes "filius naturalis Dei," instead of only "filius adoptivus." We have seen that Eckhart, towards the end of his life, inclined more and more to separate the spark, the organ of Divine contemplation, from the reason. This is, of course, an approximation to the _other_ view of deification--that of subst.i.tution or miraculous infusion from _without_, unless we see in it a tendency to divorce the personality from the reason. Ruysbroek states his doctrine of the Divine spark very clearly: "The unity of our spirit in G.o.d exists in two ways, essentially and actively. The essential existence of the soul, _quae secundum aeternam ideam in Deo nos sumus, itemque quam in n.o.bis habemus, medii ac discriminis expers est_. Spiritus Deum in nuda natura essentialiter possidet, et spiritum Deus. Vivit namque in Deo et Deus in ipso; et _secundum supremam sui partem_ Dei claritatem suscipere absque medio idoneus est; quin etiam per aeterni exemplaris sui claritudinem _essentialiter ac personaliter in ipso lucentis, secundum supremam vivacitatis suae portionem, in divinam sese demitt.i.t ac demergit essentiam_, ibidemque perseveranter secundum ideam manendo aeternam suam possidet beat.i.tudinem; rursusque c.u.m creaturis omnibus per aeternam Verbi generationem inde emanans, in esse suo creato const.i.tuitur." The "natural union," though it is the first cause of all holiness and blessedness, does not make us holy and blessed, being common to good and bad alike. "Similitude" to G.o.d is the work of grace, "quae lux quaedam deiformis est." We cannot lose the "unitas,"

but we can lose the "similitudo quae est gratia." The highest part of the soul is capable of receiving a perfect and immediate impression of the Divine essence; by this "apex mentis" we may "sink into the Divine essence, and by a new (continuous) creation return to our created being according to the idea of G.o.d." The question whether the "ground of the soul" is created or not is obviously a form of the question which we are now discussing. Giseler, as I have said, holds that it was created with the soul. Sternga.s.sen says: "That which G.o.d has in eternity in uncreated wise, that has the soul in time in created wise." But the author of the _Treatise on Love_, which belongs to this period, speaks of the spark as "the Active Reason, _which is G.o.d_."

And again, "This is the _Uncreated_ in the soul of which Master Eckhart speaks." Suso seems to imply that he believed the ground of the soul to be uncreated, an emanation of the Divine nature; and Tauler uses similar language. Ruysbroek, in the last chapter of the _Spiritual Nuptials_, says that contemplative men "see that they are _the same simple ground as to their uncreated nature_, and are one with the same light by which they see, and which they see." The later German mystics taught that the Divine essence is the material substratum of the world, the creative will of G.o.d having, so to speak, _alienated_ for the purpose a portion of His own essence. If, then, the created form is broken through, G.o.d Himself becomes the ground of the soul. Even Augustine countenances some such notion when he says, "From a good man, or from a good angel, take away 'man' or 'angel,'

and you find G.o.d." But one of the chief differences between the older and later Mysticism is that the former regarded union with G.o.d as achieved through the faculties of the soul, the latter as inherent in its essence. The doctrine of _immanence_, more and more emphasised, tended to encourage the belief that the Divine element in the soul is not merely something potential, something which the faculties may acquire, but is immanent and basal. Tauler mentions both views, and prefers the latter. Some hesitation may be traced in the _Theologia Germanica_ on this point (p. 109, "Golden Treasury" edition): "The true light is that eternal Light which is G.o.d; _or else_ it is a created light, but yet Divine, which is called grace." Our Cambridge Platonists naturally revived this Platonic doctrine of deification, much to the dissatisfaction of some of their contemporaries. Tuckney speaks of their teaching as "a kind of moral divinity minted only with a little tincture of Christ added. Nay, _a Platonic faith unites to G.o.d!_" Notwithstanding such protests, the Platonists persisted that all true happiness consists in a partic.i.p.ation of G.o.d; and that "we cannot enjoy G.o.d by any external conjunction with Him."

The question was naturally raised, "If man by putting on Christ's life can get nothing more than he has already, what good will it do him?"

The answer in the _Theologia Germanica_ is as follows: "This life is not chosen in order to serve any end, or to get anything by it, but for love of its n.o.bleness, and because G.o.d loveth and esteemeth it so greatly." It is plain that any view which regards man as essentially Divine has to face great difficulties when it comes to deal with theodicy.

The other view of deification, that of a _subst.i.tution_ of the Divine Will, or Life, or Spirit, for the human, cannot in history be sharply distinguished from the theories which have just been mentioned. But the idea of subst.i.tution is naturally most congenial to those who feel strongly "the corruption of man's heart," and the need of deliverance, not only from our ghostly enemies, but from the tyranny of self. Such men feel that there must be a _real_ change, affecting the very depths of our personality. Righteousness must be imparted, not merely imputed. And there is a death to be died as well as a life to be lived. The old man must die before the new man, which is "not I but Christ," can be born in us. The "birth of G.o.d (or Christ) in the soul"

is a favourite doctrine of the later German mystics. Pa.s.sages from the fourteenth century writers have been quoted in my fourth and fifth Lectures. The following from Giseler may be added: "G.o.d will be born, not in the Reason, not in the Will, but in the most inward part of the essence, and all the faculties of the soul become aware thereof.

Thereby the soul pa.s.ses into mere pa.s.sivity, and lets G.o.d work." They all insist on an immediate, substantial, personal indwelling, which is beyond what Aquinas and the Schoolmen taught. The Lutheran Church condemns those who teach that only the gifts of G.o.d, and not G.o.d Himself, dwell in the believer; and the English Platonists, as we have seen, insist that "an infant Christ" is really born in the soul. The German mystics are equally emphatic about the annihilation of the old man, which is the condition of this indwelling Divine life. In quietistic (Nominalist) Mysticism the usual phrase was that the will (or, better, "self-will") must be utterly destroyed, so that the Divine Will may take its place. But Crashaw's "leave nothing of myself in me," represents the aspiration of the later Catholic Mysticism generally. St. Juan of the Cross says, "The soul must lose entirely its human knowledge and human feelings, in order to receive Divine knowledge and Divine feelings"; it will then live "as it were outside itself," in a state "more proper to the future than to the present life." It is easy to see how dangerous such teaching may be to weak heads. A typical example, at a much earlier date, is that of Mechthild of Hackeborn (about 1240). It was she who said, "My soul swims in the G.o.dhead like a fish in water!" and who believed that, in answer to her prayers, G.o.d had so united Himself with her that she saw with His eyes, and heard with His ears, and spoke with His mouth. Many similar examples might be found among the mediaeval mystics.

Between the two ideas of essentialisation and of subst.i.tution comes that of gradual _transformation_, which, again, cannot in history be separated from the other two. It has the obvious advantage of not regarding deification as an _opus operatum_, but as a process, as a hope rather than a fact. A favourite maxim with mystics who thought thus, was that "love changes the lover into the beloved." Louis of Granada often recurs to this thought.

The best mystics rightly see in the doctrine of the Divinity of Christ the best safeguard against the extravagances to which the notion of deification easily leads. Particularly instructive here are the warnings which are repeated again and again in the _Theologia Germanica_. "The false light dreameth itself to be G.o.d, and taketh to itself what belongeth to G.o.d as G.o.d is in eternity without the creature. Now, G.o.d in eternity is without contradiction, suffering, and grief, and nothing can hurt or vex Him. But with G.o.d when He is made man it is otherwise." "Therefore the false light thinketh and declareth itself to be above all works, words, customs, laws, and order, and above that life which Christ led in the body which He possessed in His holy human nature. So likewise it professeth to remain unmoved by any of the creature's works; whether they be good or evil, against G.o.d or not, is all alike to it; and it keepeth itself apart from all things, like G.o.d in eternity; and all that belongeth to G.o.d and to no creature it taketh to itself, and vainly dreameth that this belongeth to it." "It doth not set up to be Christ, but the eternal G.o.d. And this is because Christ's life is distasteful and burdensome to nature, therefore it will have nothing to do with it; but to be G.o.d in eternity and not man, or to be Christ as He was after His resurrection, is all easy and pleasant and comfortable to nature, and so it holdeth it to be best."

These three views of the manner in which we may hope to become "partakers of the Divine nature," are all aspects of the truth. If we believe that we were made in the image of G.o.d, then in becoming like Him we are realising our true idea, and entering upon the heritage which is ours already by the will of G.o.d. On the other hand, if we believe that we have fallen very far from original righteousness, and have no power of ourselves to help ourselves, then we must believe in a deliverance from _outside_, an acquisition of a righteousness not our own, which is either imparted or imputed to us. And, thirdly, if we are to hope for a real change in our relations to G.o.d, there must be a real change _in_ our personality,--a progressive trans.m.u.tation, which without breach of continuity will bring us to be something different from what we were. The three views are not mutually exclusive. As Vatke says, "The influence of Divine grace does not differ from the immanent development of the deepest Divine germ of life in man, only that it here stands over-against man regarded as a finite and separate being--as something external to himself. If the Divine image is the true nature of man, and if it only possesses reality in virtue of its ident.i.ty with its type or with the Logos, then there can be no true self-determination in man which is not at the same time a self-determination of the type in its image." We cannot draw a sharp line between the operations of our own personality and those of G.o.d in us. Personality escapes from all attempts to limit and define it. It is a concept which stretches into the infinite, and therefore can only be represented to thought symbolically. The personality must not be identified with the "spark," the "Active Reason," or whatever we like to call the highest part of our nature.

Nor must we identify it with the changing _Moi_ (as Fenelon calls it).

The personality, as I have said in Lecture I. (p. 33), is both the end--the ideal self, and the changing _Moi_, and yet neither. If either thesis is held divorced from its ant.i.thesis, the thought ceases to be mystical. The two ideals of self-a.s.sertion and self-sacrifice are both true and right, and both, separately, unattainable. They are opposites which are really necessary to each other. I have quoted from Vatke's attempt to reconcile grace and free-will: another extract from a writer of the same school may perhaps be helpful. "In the growth of our experience," says Green, "an animal organism, which has its history in time, gradually becomes the vehicle of an eternally complete consciousness. What we call our mental history is not a history of this consciousness, which in itself can have no history, but a history of the process by which the animal organism becomes its vehicle. 'Our consciousness' may mean either of two things: either a function of the animal organism, which is being made, gradually and with interruptions, a vehicle of the eternal consciousness; or that eternal consciousness itself, as making the animal organism its vehicle and subject to certain limitations in so doing, but retaining its essential characteristic as independent of time, as the determinant of becoming, which has not and does not itself become. The consciousness which varies from moment to moment ... is consciousness in the former sense. It consists in what may properly be called phenomena.... The latter consciousness ... const.i.tutes our knowledge"

(_Prolegomena to Ethics_, pp. 72, 73). a.n.a.logous is our _moral_ history. But no Christian can believe that our life, mental or moral, is or ever can be _necessary_ to G.o.d in the same sense in which He is necessary to our existence. For practical religion, the symbol which we shall find most helpful is that of a progressive transformation of our nature after the pattern of G.o.d revealed in Christ; a process which has as its end a real union with G.o.d, though this end is, from the nature of things, unrealisable in time. It is, as I have said in the body of the Lectures, a _progessus ad infinitum_, the consummation of which we are nevertheless ent.i.tled to claim as already ours in a transcendental sense, in virtue of the eternal purpose of G.o.d made known to us in Christ.

APPENDIX D

The Mystical Interpretation Of The Song Of Solomon

The headings to the chapters in the Authorised Version give a sort of authority to the "mystical" interpretation of Solomon's Song, a poem which was no doubt intended by its author to be simply a romance of true love. According to our translators, the Lover of the story is meant for Christ, and the Maiden for the Church. But the tendency of Catholic Mysticism has been to make the individual soul the bride of Christ, and to treat the Song of Solomon as symbolic of "spiritual nuptials" between Him and the individual "contemplative." It is this latter notion, the growth of which I wish to trace.

Erotic Mysticism is no part of Platonism. That "sensuous love of the unseen" (as Pater calls it), which the Platonist often seems to aim at, has more of admiration and less of tenderness than the emotion which we have now to consider. The notion of a spiritual marriage between G.o.d and the soul seems to have come from the Greek Mysteries, through the Alexandrian Jews and Gnostics. Representations of "marriages of G.o.ds" were common at the Mysteries, especially at those of the least reputable kind (cf. Lucian, _Alexander_, 38). In other instances the ceremony of initiation was made to resemble a marriage, and the [Greek: mystes] was greeted with the words [Greek: chaire, nymphie]. And among the Jews of the first century there existed a system of Mysteries, probably copied from Eleusis. They had their greater and their lesser Mysteries, and we hear that among their secret doctrines was "marriage with G.o.d." In Philo we find strange and fantastic speculations on this subject. For instance, he argues that as the Bible does not mention Abraham, Jacob, and Moses as [Greek: gnorizontas tas gynaikas], we are meant to believe that their children were not born naturally. But he allegorises the women of the Pentateuch in such a way ([Greek: logo men eisi gynaikes, ergo de aretai]) that it is difficult to say what he wishes us to believe in a literal sense. The Valentinian Gnostics seem to have talked much of "spiritual marriage," and it was from them that Origen got the idea of elaborating the conception. But, curiously enough, it is Tertullian who first argues that the body as well as the soul is the bride of Christ. "If the soul is the bride," he says, "the flesh is the dowry"

(_de Resurr._ 63). Origen, however, really began the mischief in his homilies and commentary on the Song of Solomon. The prologue of the commentary in Rufinus commences as follows: "Epithalamium libellus hic, id est nuptiale carmen, dramatis in modum mihi videtur a Salomone conscriptus, quem cecinit instar nubentis sponsae, et erga sponsum suum qui est sermo Dei caelesti amore flagrantis. Adamavit enim eum _sive anima_, quae ad imaginem eius facta est, sive ecclesia." Harnack says that Gregory of Nyssa exhibits the conception in its purest and most attractive form in the East, and adds, "We can point to very few Greek Fathers in whom the figure does not occur." (There is a learned note on the subject by Louis de Leon, which corroborates this statement of Harnack. He refers to Chrysostom, Theodoret, Irenaeus, Hilary, Cyprian, Augustine, Tertullian, Ignatius, Gregory of Nyssa, Cyril, Leo, Photius, and Theophylact as calling Christ the bridegroom of souls.) In the West, we find it in Ambrose, less prominently in Augustine and Jerome. Dionysius seizes on the phrase of Ignatius, "My love has been crucified," to justify erotic imagery in devotional writing.

Bernard's homilies on the Song of Solomon gave a great impetus to this mode of symbolism; but even he says that the Church and not the individual is the bride of Christ. There is no doubt that the enforced celibacy and virginity of the monks and nuns led them, consciously or unconsciously, to transfer to the human person of Christ (and to a much slighter extent, to the Virgin Mary) a measure of those feelings which could find no vent in their external lives. We can trace this, in a wholesome and innocuous form, in the visions of Juliana of Norwich. Quotations from Ruysbroek's _Spiritual Nuptials_, and from Suso, bearing on the same point, are given in the body of the Lectures. Good specimens of devotional poetry of this type might be selected from Crashaw and Quarles. (A few specimens are included in Palgrave's _Golden Treasury of Sacred Song_.) Fenelon's language on the subject is not quite so pleasing; it breathes more of sentimentality than of reverence. The contemplative, he says, desires "une simple presence de Dieu purement amoureuse," and speaks to Christ always "comme l'epouse a l'epoux."

The Sufis or Mohammedan mystics use erotic language very freely, and appear, like true Asiatics, to have attempted to give a sacramental or symbolic character to the indulgence of their pa.s.sions. From this degradation the mystics of the cloister were happily free; but a morbid element is painfully prominent in the records of many mediaeval saints, whose experiences are cla.s.sified by Ribet. He enumerates--(1) "Divine touches," which Scaramelli defines as "real but purely spiritual sensations, by which the soul feels the intimate presence of G.o.d, and tastes Him with great delight"; (2) "The wound of love," of which one of his authorities says, "haec poena tam suavis est quod nulla sit in hac vita delectatio quae magis satisfaciat." It is to this experience that Cant. ii. 5 refers: "Fulcite me floribus, stipate me malis, quia amore langueo." Sometimes the wound is not purely spiritual: St. Teresa, as was shown by a post-mortem examination, had undergone a miraculous "transverberation of the heart": "et pourtant elle survecut pres de vingt ans a cette blessure mortelle"! (3) Catherine of Siena was betrothed to Christ with a ring, which remained always on her fingers, though visible to herself alone. Lastly, in the revelations of St. Gertrude we read: "Feria tertia Paschae dum communicatura desideraret a Domino ut per idem sacramentum vivific.u.m renovare dignaretur in anima eius matrimonium spirituale quod ipsi in spiritu erat desponsata per fidem et religionem, necnon per virginalis pudicitiae integritatem, Dominus blanda serenitate respondit: hoc, inquiens, indubitanter faciam. Sic inclinatus ad eam blandissimo affectu eam ad se stringens osculum praedulce animae eius infixit," etc.

The employment of erotic imagery to express the individual relation between Christ and the soul is always dangerous; but this objection does not apply to the statement that "the Church is the bride of Christ." Even in the Old Testament we find the chosen people so spoken of (cf. Isa. liv. 5; Jer. iii. 14). Professor Cheyne thinks that the Canticles were interpreted in this sense, and that this is why the book gained admission into the Canon. In the New Testament, St. Paul uses the symbol of marriage in Rom. vii. 1-4; 1 Cor. xi. 3; Eph. v.

23-33. On the last pa.s.sage Canon Gore says: "The love of Christ--the removal of obstacles to His love by atoning sacrifice--the act of spiritual purification--the gradual sanctification--the consummated union in glory; these are the moments of the Divine process of redemption, viewed from the side of Christ, which St. Paul specifies."

This use of the "sacrament" of marriage (as a symbol of the mystical union between Christ and the Church), which alone has the sanction of the New Testament, is one which, we hope, the Church will always treasure. The more personal relation also exists, and the fervent devotion which it elicits must not be condemned; though we are forced to remember that in our mysteriously const.i.tuted minds the highest and lowest emotions lie very near together, and that those who have chosen a life of detachment from earthly ties must be especially on their guard against the "occasional revenges" which the lower nature, when thwarted, is always plotting against the higher.