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The Sufis; their Mystical Poetry 3 Mystical Poetry in the West; Angelus Silesius 5 R. W. Emerson 8

Rabia 10 The Oriental and the Western Mysticism compared 12

The Position of the Mystics as regards the Reformation 31 The Advantage of the Ground occupied by Luther 32 Menacing Character of the Revolutionary Mysticism 35 The Anabaptists of Munster 37

Luther and the Mystics 41 The Prophets of Zwickau 44 Carlstadt 44 Sebastian Frank 47 Schwenkfeld 50 Weigel 51

Mysticism and Science 53 The Cabbala 55 Nature studied by the Light of Grace 57 Alchemy 58 Theurgy 59

Cornelius Agrippa 61 The Science of Sympathies 63 Redemption, Natural and Spiritual 67

Theophrastus Paracelsus 71 Signatures 76 Theological Chemistry 77

Jacob Behmen--Sketch and Estimate of his System 103 The Mysterium Magnum 104 The Seven Fountain-Spirits 104 Examination of his Doctrine concerning the Origin of Evil 109 The Fall 115 Merits of his Theosophy 119

Neo-Platonism revived in Italy 147 Its Weakness, opposed to the Reformation 148 The Counter-reformation 150 Headed by Spain 150 Character of its Mysticism 151 St. Theresa 153 Her Autobiography 156 The Director 158 Visions 160

Theresa's Four Degrees of Prayer 167 Her Quietism 171

St. John of the Cross 182 His Asceticism 183 His Mystical Night 185 More elevated Character of his Mysticism 193

Queen Quietude 201 The Doctrine of 'Pure Love' discussed 205 Madame Guyon 207 Her Unhappy Marriage 208 The Kingdom of God within us 211 Efforts to Annihilate Self 213 Interior Attraction 216 Madame Guyon and the Romish Saints 218 Confessors and Small-pox 222 The Seven Years of Famine 224 Self-loss in God 227 Mistakes concerning the Nature of Spiritual Influence 230 Reformatory Character of her Mysticism 233 Activity and Persecution 234

Disinterested Love 283 Antoinette Bourignon 286 Peter Poiret 287 Madame de Kr?dener 288

Britain poor in Mystics 301 George Fox 303 The Early Friends 305 Asceticism 309 Doctrine of the Universal Light 309

Doctrine of Perceptible Guidance 313 The English Platonists 315 Henry More; Norris of Bemerton 315

Comprehensive Character of his Mysticism 321 Doctrine of Correspondences 323 Stands alone among the Mystics 326

Mystical Tendencies of our own Time 340 The Faith-Philosophy 341 Schleiermacher 341 The Romantic School 343 Novalis 348 Revival of antiquated Error 350 The Modern Mysticism a Repetition of the Old 351 The Services of Mysticism 352 Its Dangers 352 Its Lessons 356

Mysticism fostered by the Supposition of a Separate Religious Faculty 361 Reason, how far amenable to Understanding 362 Historic Reality not opposed to Spirituality 365

A Vision of Mystics 368

BOOK THE SEVENTH PERSIAN MYSTICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGE

Also, there is in God Which being seen would end us with a shock Of pleasure. It may be that we should die As men have died of joy, all mortal powers Summed up and finished in a single taste Of superhuman bliss; or, it may be That our great latent love, leaping at once A thousand years in stature--like a stone Dropped to the central fires, and at a touch Loosed into vapour--should break up the terms Of separate being, and as a swift rack, Dissolving into heaven, we should go back To God.

DOBELL.

The next day was fine, as well it might be after such a sunset; to Hawksfell all the party went, and there was no reading. But on the following they assembled immediately after breakfast in the summer-house, Lowestoffe not excepted, for even he grew inactive with the heat, and declared himself content to lie on the grass by the hour. Atherton congratulated his hearers that they would not for some time be troubled with more lucubrations of his--not till they came, in due course, to Madame Guyon. For Willoughby was to take up Jacob Behmen, and Gower, who possessed some acquaintance with Spanish, St. Theresa. Then, unrolling his manuscript, he began.

THE SUFIS, OR MYSTICAL POETRY IN THE EAST AND WEST.

Among all the religions of civilized man, it would be difficult to find one more unfriendly to the growth of mysticism than that of Mohammed. Yet in no religion has mysticism spread more widely or raised its head with greater pride. The cold rationalism of the Koran, its ritual minutiae, its formal self-righteousness, its prohibition of the monastic order,--all combined to warn the mystic from the religious domain of the Crescent. But stronger than Mohammedan orthodoxy or the dying commands of the Prophet were the wants of the human heart and the spirit of an eastern people. The generation which laid Mohammed in the holy earth of Medina saw monastic institutions arise and multiply on every side. Mystical interpretation could with ease elude the less favourable passages of the Koran, and turn others into a warrant. With a single touch of this dexterous pencil, the mystic could make the Prophet's portraiture all he desired, and turn the frown into a smile. The fatalism of the creed of Islam would furnish a natural basis for the holy indifference of Quietism.

Each succeeding century of the Hegira was found more abundant than the last in a class of men who revolted against the letter in the name of the spirit, and who aspired to a converse and a unity with God such as the Koran deemed unattainable on this side heaven. The names of the saints and martyrs, the poets and philosophers, of mysticism, are among the brightest in the hagiography and the literature of the Mohammedan world. The achievements of the former class are adorned with legendary extravagances such as those with which the Prophet delighted to invest himself. The philosophy of the latter was not a little aided, in its contest with rigid orthodoxy, by the Grecian learning of that Alexandria which fell, in the first outbreak of Moslem zeal, before the hosts of Amrou. In later times mysticism and method did battle with each other, in the East as in the West,--at Shiraz, at Bagdad, or at Cordova, even as in the University of Paris or the academies of Italy.

The term Sufism appears to be a general designation for the mystical asceticism of the Mohammedan faith. The Sufis cannot be said to constitute a distinct sect, or to embrace any particular philosophical system. Their varieties are endless; their only common characteristics a claim of some sort to a superhuman commerce with the Supreme,--mystical rapture, mystical union, mystical identity, or theurgic powers;--and a life of ascetic observance. The name is given to mystics of every shade, from the sage to the quack, from poets like Saadi or philosophers like Algazzali, to the mendicant dervise or the crazy fanatic.

Persia has been for several centuries the great seat of Sufism. For two hundred years the descendants of a Sufi occupied the throne,--governing, however, as may be supposed, not like mystics, but as men of the world. It is with Sufism as exhibited principally by the Sufi poets of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, that I propose now to occupy your attention.

It will be found worth our while, as we proceed, to compare the mystical poetry of the East and West. Oriental mysticism has become famous by its poets; and into poetry it has thrown all its force and fire. The mysticism of the West has produced prophecies and interpretations of prophecy; soliloquies, sermons, and treatises of divinity;--it has found solace in autobiography, and breathed out its sorrow in hymns;--it has essayed, in earnest prose, to revive and to reform the sleeping Church;--but it has never elaborated great poems. In none of the languages of Europe has mysticism achieved the success which crowned it in Persia, and prevailed to raise and rule the poetic culture of a nation. Yet the occidental mysticism has not been wholly lacking in poets of its own order. The seventeenth century can furnish one, and the nineteenth another,--Angelus Silesius and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The Silesian's book reiterates the customary utterances of mysticism. But a harsher tone is audible, and the doctrines with which we are familiar appear in a more startling and paradoxical form. The more dangerous elements are intensified. Pantheism is latent no longer. Angelus loves to play at a kind of intellectual seesaw with the terms Finite and Infinite, and their subject or kindred words. Now mounts one side, now the other, of the restless antithesis. Each factor is made to share with its rival every attribute of height or lowness. His favourite style of talking may run as follows:--'I cannot do without God, nor He without me; He is as small as I, and I as great as He:--let time be to thee as eternity, and eternity as time; the All as nothing, and nothing as the All; then thou hast solved life's problem, and art one with God, above limit and distinction.' We matter-of-fact folk feel irresistibly inclined to parody such an oracle, and say,--'Let whole and part, black and white, be convertible terms;--let thy head be to thee as thy heels, and thy heels as thy head; and thou hast transcended the conditions of vulgar men, and lapsed to Limbo irretrievably.' Silesius, as a good churchman, repudiates, of course, the charge of pantheism. He declares that the dissolution in Deity he contemplates does not necessitate the loss of personality, or confound the Maker and the made. His distinction is distinguishable 'as water is in water.' He appeals to the strong language he hunts out from Bernard, Tauler, and Ruysbroek. But the cold-blooded epigram cannot claim the allowance due to the fervid sermon or the often rhapsodical volume of devotion. Extravagant as the Sufi, he cannot plead like him a spiritual intoxication. Crystals and torrents must have separate laws. And which, moreover, of the mystical masters to whom Angelus refers us would have indited such presumptuous doggrel as this?

God in my nature is involved, As I in the divine; I help to make his being up, As much as he does mine.

As much as I to God owes God to me His blissfulness and self-sufficiency.

I am as rich as God, no grain of dust That is not mine too,--share with me he must. More than his love unto himself, God's love to me hath been; If more than self I too love him, We twain are quits, I ween.

In comparing Emerson with the Sufis, it may be as well to state that he does not believe in Mohammed and receive the Koran in a manner which would satisfy an orthodox Mussulman. Yet he does so much after the same fashion in which he believes in Christ and receives the Bible. Mohammed and Jesus are both, to him, extraordinary religious geniuses--the Bible and the Koran both antiquated books. He looks with serene indifference on all the forms of positive religion. He would agree perfectly with those Sufis who proclaimed the difference between the Church and the Mosque of little moment. The distance between the Crescent and the Cross is, with him, one of degree--their dispute rather a question of individual or national taste than a controversy between a religion with evidence and a religion without.

In the nineteenth century, and in America, the doctrine of emanation and the ascetic practice of the East can find no place. But the pantheism of Germany is less elevated than that of Persia, in proportion as it is more developed. The tendency of the latter is to assign reality only to God; the tendency of the former is to assign reality only to the mind of man. The Sufi strove to lose humanity in Deity; Emerson dissolves Deity in humanity. The orientals are nearer to theism, and the moderns farther from it, than they sometimes seem. That primal Unity which the Sufi, like the Neo-Platonist, posits at the summit of all things, to ray forth the world of Appearance, may possibly retain some vestige of personality. But the Over-Soul of Emerson, whose organs of respiration are men of genius, can acquire personality only in the individual man. The Persian aspired to reach a divinity above him by self-conquest; the American seeks to realize a divinity within him by self-will. Self-annihilation is the watchword of the one; self-assertion that of the other.

Footnote 186:

Footnote 187:

Footnote 188:

Und so lang du das nicht hast Dieses: Stirb und werde! Bist du nur ein tr?ber Gast Auf der dunkeln Erde.

GOETHE.

'Let us proceed, then,' resumed Atherton, smoothing his manuscript, 'on our Persian expedition. Dr. Tholuck, with his German translation, shall act as interpreter, and we may pause now and then on our way to listen to the deliverances of the two men of vision who accompany us from Breslau and from Boston.'

The first century of the Hegira has scarcely expired when a mysticism, strikingly similar to that of Madame Guyon, is seen to arise spontaneously in the devout ardours of a female saint named Rabia. There is the same straining after indifference and self-abnegation--after a love absolutely disinterested--after a devotion beyond language and above means.

The seeds of Sufism are here. This mystical element was fostered to a rapid growth through succeeding centuries, in the East as in the West, by the natural reaction of religious fervour against Mohammedan polemics and Mohammedan scholasticism.

In the ninth century of our era, Sufism appears divided between two distinguished leaders, Bustami and Juneid. The former was notorious chiefly for the extravagance of his mystical insanity. The men of genius who afterwards made the name of Sufism honourable, and the language of its aspiration classical, shrank from such coarse excess. It was not enough for Bustami to declare that the recognition of our personal existence was an idolatry, the worst of crimes. It was not enough for him to maintain that when man adores God, God adores himself. He claimed such an absorption in his pantheistic deity as identified him with all the power, the wisdom, and the goodness of the universe. He would say, 'I am a sea without bottom, without beginning, without end. I am the throne of God, the word of God. I am Gabriel, Michael, Israfil; I am Abraham, Moses, Jesus.'

If Epiphanius is to be believed, the Messalians were a sect chargeable with the very same folly. If asked, he says, concerning a patriarch, a prophet, an angel, or Christ, they would reply, 'I am that patriarch, that prophet, that angel; I am Christ.'

A reference to Emerson's Essay on History renders such professions perfectly credible. Bustami and the Messalians could not have made them in the literal, but in the Emersonian sense. They believed, with him, that 'there is one mind common to all individual men.' They find in him their interpreter, when he says, 'Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only sovereign agent.' Emerson couches their creed in modern rhymes, as he sings exultant,--

I am owner of the sphere, Of the seven stars and the solar year, Of Caesar's hand and Plato's brain, Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakspeare's strain.

In the spirit of the same philosophy, Angelus Silesius hints at the possibility of such an empire. He reminds his readers that there is no greatness which makes the glory of the past that may not be realized by themselves in the present. Thus he asks--

Dost prize alone King Solomon as wisest of the wise? Thou also canst be Solomon, and all his wisdom thine.

But what is only potential with him is claimed as actual by mystical brethren bolder yet than he.

The first endeavour of the Sufi is to achieve that simplifying, purifying process which shall remove from the mind everything earthly and human--all its creaturely accidents, and reduce it to that abstract essence which mirrors Deity, and is itself ultimately divine. An apologue in the Mesnevi of Jelaleddin Rumi teaches this doctrine quite in the oriental manner.

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