Read Ebook: Mysticism in English Literature by Spurgeon Caroline F E Caroline Frances Eleanor

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 319 lines and 44610 words, and 7 pages

In our first group we have four poets of markedly different temperaments--Shelley intensely spiritual; Rossetti with a strong tinge of sensuousness, of "earthiness" in his nature; Browning, the keenly intellectual man of the world, and Patmore a curious mixture of materialist and mystic; yet to all four love is the secret of life, the one thing worth giving and possessing.

Shelley, like Blake, regarded the human imagination as a divine creative force; Prometheus stands for the human imagination, or the genius of the world; and it is his union with Asia, the divine Idea, the Spirit of Beauty and of Love, from which a new universe is born. It is this union, which consummates the aspirations of humanity, that Shelley celebrates in the marvellous love-song of Prometheus. As befitted a disciple of Godwin, he believed in the divine potentiality of man, convinced that all good is to be found within man's own being, and that his progress depends on his own will.

It is our will That thus enchains us to permitted ill-- We might be otherwise--we might be all We dream of happy, high, majestical. Where is the love, beauty, and truth we seek But in our mind?

And the Great Spirit of Good did creep among The nations of mankind, and every tongue Cursed and blasphemed him as he passed, for none Knew good from evil.

"the person whom it celebrates was a cloud instead of a Juno," and continues, "If you are curious, however, to hear what I am and have been, it will tell you something thereof. It is an idealized history of my life and feelings. I think one is always in love with something or other; the error--and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it--consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal."

No poet has a more distinct philosophy of life than Browning. Indeed he has as much a right to a place among the philosophers, as Plato has to one among the poets. Browning is a seer, and pre-eminently a mystic; and it is especially interesting as in the case of Plato and St Paul, to encounter this latter quality as a dominating characteristic of the mind of so keen and logical a dialectician. We see at once that the main position of Browning's belief is identical with what we have found to be the characteristic of mysticism--unity under diversity at the centre of all existence. The same essence, the one life, expresses itself through every diversity of form.

He dwells on this again and again:--

God is seen In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the clod.

And through all these forms there is growth upwards. Indeed, it is only upon this supposition that the poet can account for

many a thrill Of kinship, I confess to, with the powers Called Nature: animate, inanimate In parts or in the whole, there's something there Man-like that somehow meets the man in me.

The poet sees that in each higher stage we benefit by the garnered experience of the past; and so man grows and expands and becomes capable of feeling for and with everything that lives. At the same time the higher is not degraded by having worked in and through the lower, for he distinguishes between the continuous persistent life, and the temporary coverings it makes use of on its upward way;

From first to last of lodging, I was I, And not at all the place that harboured me.

Humanity then, in Browning's view, is not a collection of individuals, separate and often antagonistic, but one whole.

When I say "you" 'tis the common soul, The collective I mean: the race of Man That receives life in parts to live in a whole And grow here according to God's clear plan.

This sense of unity is shown in many ways: for instance, in Browning's protest against the one-sidedness of nineteenth-century scientific thought, the sharp distinction or gulf set up between science and religion. This sharp cleavage, to the mystic, is impossible. He knows, however irreconcilable the two may appear, that they are but different aspects of the same thing. This is one of the ways in which Browning anticipates the most advanced thought of the present day.

I too have sought to KNOW as thou to LOVE Excluding love as thou refusedst knowledge.... We must never part ... Till thou the lover, know; and I, the knower, Love--until both are saved.

loses what he lived for And eternally must lose it.

For life with all it yields of joy and woe And hope and fear ... Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love.

This is Browning's central teaching, the key-note of his work and philosophy. The importance of love in life is to Browning supreme, because he holds it to be the meeting-point between God and man. Love is the sublimest conception possible to man; and a life inspired by it is the highest conceivable form of goodness.

In this exaltation of love, as in several other points, Browning much resembles the German mystic, Meister Eckhart. To compare the two writers in detail would be an interesting task; it is only possible here to suggest points of resemblance. The following passage from Eckhart suggests several directions in which Browning's thought is peculiarly mystical:--

Intelligence is the youngest faculty in man.... The soul in itself is a simple work; what God works in the simple light of the soul is more beautiful and more delightful than all the other works which He works in all creatures. But foolish people take evil for good and good for evil. But to him who rightly understands, the one work which God works in the soul is better and nobler and higher than all the world. Through that light comes grace. Grace never comes in the intelligence or in the will. If it could come in the intelligence or in the will, the intelligence and the will would have to transcend themselves. On this a master says: There is something secret about it; and thereby he means the spark of the soul, which alone can apprehend God. The true union between God and the soul takes place in the little spark, which is called the spirit of the soul.

The essential unity of God and man is expressed more than once by Browning in Eckhart's image: as when he speaks of God as Him

Who never is dishonoured in the spark He gave us from his fire of fires.

Wholly distrust thy knowledge, then, and trust As wholly love allied to ignorance! There lies thy truth and safety. ... Consider well! Were knowledge all thy faculty, then God Must be ignored: love gains him by first leap.

At the same time, clear knowledge that evil is illusion would defeat its own end and paralyse all moral effort, for evil only exists for the development of good in us.

Type needs antitype: As night needs day, as shine needs shade, so good Needs evil: how were pity understood Unless by pain?

This is one reason why Browning never shrank from the evil in the world, why indeed he expended so much of his mind and art on the analysis and dissection of every kind of evil, laying bare for us the working of the mind of the criminal, the hypocrite, the weakling, and the cynic; because he held that--

Only by looking low, ere looking high Comes penetration of the mystery.

There are other ways in which Browning's thought is especially mystical, as, for instance, his belief in pre-existence, and his theory of knowledge, for he, like Plato, believes in the light within the soul, and holds that--

To know Rather consists in opening out a way Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape, Than in effecting entry for a light Supposed to be without.

The natural result of Browning's theory of evil, and his sense of the value of limitation, is that he should welcome for man the experience of doubt, difficulty, temptation, pain; and this we find is the case.

Life is probation and the earth no goal But starting point of man ... To try man's foot, if it will creep or climb 'Mid obstacles in seeming, points that prove Advantage for who vaults from low to high And makes the stumbling-block a stepping-stone.

It is this trust in unending progress, based on the consciousness of present failure, which is peculiarly inspiriting in Browning's thought, and it is essentially mystical. Instead of shrinking from pain, the mystic prays for it, for, properly met, it means growth.

Was the trial sore? Temptation sharp? Thank God a second time! Why comes temptation but for man to meet And master and make crouch beneath his foot, And so be pedestaled in triumph?

Coventry Patmore was so entirely a mystic that it seems to be the first and the last and the only thing to say about him. His central conviction is the unity of all things, and hence their mutual interpretation and symbolic force. There is only one kind of knowledge which counts with him, and that is direct apprehension or perception, the knowledge a man has of Love, by being in love, not by reading about its symptoms. The "touch" of God is not a figure of speech.

Once given the essential idea, to be grasped by the intuitive faculty alone, the world is full of analogies, of natural revelations which help to support and illustrate great truths. Patmore was, however, caught and enthralled by one aspect of unity, by one great analogy, almost to the exclusion of all others. This is that in human love, but above all in wedded love, we have a symbol of the love between God and the soul. What Patmore meant was that in the relationship and attitude of wedded lovers we hold the key to the mystery at the heart of life, and that we have in it a "real apprehension" of the relationship and attitude of humanity to God. His first wife's love revealed to him this, which is the basic fact of all his thought and work.

He believed that sex is a relationship at the base of all things natural and divine;

Nature, with endless being rife, Parts each thing into "him" and "her" And, in the arithmetic of life, The smallest unit is a pair.

This division into two and reconciliation into one, this clash of forces resulting in life, is, as Patmore points out in words curiously reminiscent of those of Boehme, at the root of all existence. All real apprehension of God, he says, is dependent upon the realisation of his triple Personality in one Being.

Nature goes on giving echoes of the same living triplicity in animal, plant, and mineral, every stone and material atom owing its being to the synthesis or "embrace" of the two opposed forces of expansion and contraction. Nothing whatever exists in a single entity but in virtue of its being thesis, antithesis, and synthesis and in humanity and natural life this takes the form of sex, the masculine, the feminine, and the neuter, or third, forgotten sex spoken of by Plato, which is not the absence of the life of sex, but its fulfilment and power, as the electric fire is the fulfilment and power of positive and negative in their "embrace."

Female and male God made the man; His image is the whole, not half; And in our love we dimly scan The love which is between Himself.

God he conceived of as the great masculine positive force, the soul as the feminine or receptive force, and the meeting of these two, the "mystic rapture" of the marriage of Divinity and Humanity, as the source of all life and joy.

It may be noted that the other human affections and relationships also have for Patmore a deep symbolic value, and two of his finest odes are written, the one in symbolism of mother love, the other in that of father and son.

We learn by human love, so be points out, to realise the possibility of contact between the finite and Infinite, for divinity can only be revealed by voluntarily submitting to limitations. It is "the mystic craving of the great to become the love-captive of the small, while the small has a corresponding thirst for the enthralment of the great."

And this process of intercourse between God and man is symbolised in the Incarnation, which is not a single event in time, but the culmination of an eternal process. It is the central fact of a man's experience, "for it is going on perceptibly in himself"; and in like manner "the Trinity becomes the only and self-evident explanation of mysteries which are daily wrought in his own complex nature." In this way is it that to Patmore religion is not a question of blameless life or the holding of certain beliefs, but it is "an experimental science" to be lived and to be felt, and the clues to the experiments are to be found in natural human processes and experiences interpreted in the light of the great dogmas of the Christian faith.

A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air; A laughing school-boy without grief or care Hiding the springy branches of an elm.

Then follows simple unreflective enjoyment of Nature. The next stage is sympathy with human life, with human grief and joy, which brings a sense of the mystery of the world, a longing to pierce it and arrive at its meaning, symbolised in the figure of the charioteer.

Feel we these things?--that moment have we stept Into a sort of oneness, and our state Is like a floating spirit's.

Keats felt this passage was inspired, and in a letter to Taylor in January 1818 he says, "When I wrote it, it was a regular stepping of the Imagination towards a truth."

Beauty is truth, truth Beauty, that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

... As I grew in years, still didst thou blend With all my ardours: thou wast the deep glen; Thou wast the mountain-top, the sage's pen, The poet's harp, the voice of friends, the sun; Thou wast the river, thou wast glory won; Thou wast my clarion's blast, thou wast my steed, My goblet full of wine, my topmost deed: Thou wast the charm of women, lovely Moon!

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet