WALTER HILTON of Thurgarton, the author of that great spiritual classic The Scale of Perfection, is commonly reckoned among the English medieval mystics; that small yet strangely varied group of God-intoxicated souls. If religious realism, a perpetual pointing on toward God, be the mark of a mystic, then he has every right to that name but I think he is best understood as a great teaching saint. He was surely that before all else; and would prefer, I think, to be loved and remembered above all else for his careful, exact, untiring instruction of individual souls in their ascent to God. His sanctity is assured to us not by his exhibition of startling and difficult virtues, or by outwardly heroic acts—still less by any of the extraordinary phenomena, ecstasies and visions which are too often regarded as the marks of the mystical saint—but for a far more Christian, more truly supernatural reason; by the continuous life-giving power of his works. He is one of those hidden figures, those quiet and secret friends of God who have never failed the Church; and through whom Christ s gift of more abundant life reaches the world and enters those souls that are ready to receive it: Thus we might well regard him as the patron saint of all those who are called to work in obscurity for
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the increase of that supernatural life in other souls: the pastoral vocation in its most intense form. This hiddenness, this self-effacement, and this immortality of influence, he shares with his probable contemporary the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, and with the writer of The Imitation of Christ. All these were content—as indeed the greatest Christians commonly are content—to work in and for a few souls; and just because they have been so content, have thus acquired an enduring and ever-widening influence.
For great spiritual work is usually quiet, deep and hidden; unconcerned with publicity. As the deepest teachings of Christ were first given to a small commmunity, a little flock, and only through them spread gradually to the world; so this method is employed again and again by those teaching saints, whose vocation it is to deepen and expand our human knowledge of the supernatural life. That knowledge is not spread by sermons to big congregations. It oozes out drop by drop from hearts that have been transsformed in love: and is generally found, when tracked to its source, to arise from the hidden sober life of consecration and prayer led by one devoted soul. Of this truth Walter Hilton is one of the greatest examples. His life is completely hidden from us except at one point, where it emerges to teach and help other men. The three undoubted works of his which we possess are all what would now be called letters of direction of an elaborate kind. He even thought it worth while to write a whole book for the purpose of educating one special soul; for The Scale of Perfection, the work by which he is best known, is
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really a complete guide-book to the spiritual life written in the vernacular for the use of the particular anchoress to whom it is addressed. It is not easy for us, bewildered by the wealth of spiritual literature which is provided for us, to realize what it meant to simple men and women who knew themselves called to the interior life, when for the first time a guide to its mystenes was put into their hands, written in the language of everyday life. As regards the Scale there is plenty of internal evidence to prove that this is the literal truth about its origin, and not a mere literary device; though it was quickly copied and circulated, and became what I suppose we should now call a success.
Indeed, Hilton is not alone in thus feeling that it was abundantly worth while to take this or any other amount of trouble in order to further the sanctification of one individual committed to his care: a conviction which is the mark of the great director of souls, the assistant shepherd who really knows his sheep by name, and is too devoted to the needs of the one, to care about the appreciative bleats of the ninety-nine. The Middle Ages give us many examples of this lovely grace: some of the greatest books of Ruysbroeck, for instance, were thus written for the use of a single person, and Hilton’s own English contemporary, the unknown writer of The Cloud of Unknowing, seems always to have addressed his works to individuals who had demanded his advice. And perhaps it is Just because they thus give their treasures so freely simply, and humbly to those who want them, to the souls next to them, and do not worry about big move-
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ments, or messages to the whole world, that the expansion of their influence still goes quietly on.
Apart from these writings of his, all composed with a practical intention for the use of the special persons who needed them, we know almost nothing about Walter Hilton’s career, personality, and spiritual experience. He lives for us as the author of one book of massive spirituality and massive common sense: not as an ecstatic, not as a contemplative—though he may have been both—but as a devoted father of souls. A persistent tradition, which is supported by the earliest extant manuscripts of his works, asserts that he lived, wrote, and probably died and was buried as an Augustinian Canon of the Priory of Thurgarton, in Nottinghamshire. We suppose that he was born some time during the first half of the fourteenth century; for it is practically certain that he died in 1396. There is no real evidence that he was ever the Prior of Thurgarton, although this position is sometimes claimed for him. In fact, as the list of fourteenth-century Priors is extant and practically complete, we may almost say with certainty that he never did fill that office; and it seems much more consistent with the character which his work reveals to us that he should have preferred to remain in the background of the community life, undistracted by the many practical duties—including a considerable share in the local government of the district —which had to be fulfilled by the Superior of such a great house as Thurgarton was in his day. He would have been far more fitly occupied with that direction of souls for which he was plainly possessed of peculiar
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genius; and with the living out of the exacting interior life which this vocation demands. Pastoral work, theological study and education, were the three chief forms of service to which the Austin Canons were called; and these were enough to give Hilton the opportunities for full use of his special gifts.
The three works by which we now know Hilton—that is, The Scale of Perfection, the beautiful little tract called The Song of the Angels, and the Letter to a Devout Man—entitle him to high rank among the great English spiritual writers of the fourteenth century; for I suppose we must agree that Richard Rolle of Hampole, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, and Dame Julian of Norwich represent with him the highest points reached by English medieval spirituality. And of those four, Hilton, who has been by far the most widely and persistently influential, is one of the two who tell us least about themselves; who show in their work the supreme Christian grace of a complete self-forgetfulness. He and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, rival one another in the perfection of their anonymity, their avoidance of the confessional point of view. Nor, I think, is this anonymity, this avoidance, an attitude which they have deliberately chosen and maintained. Were this so, its perfect ease and graciousness would be impaired. It happens quite naturally and spontaneously, beecause their supreme interest is in the cherishing and teaching of other souls, in making supernatural personalities; and not in talking about their own personalities, which are simply left on one side.
And they prove to us their lofty supernatural status, by
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the perfection with which they thus obliterate themselves.
So I think that in considering Hilton’s work, the first thing that comes home to us is the way in which, from one quiet man, living in a remote corner of the country, there came out a stream of spiritual culture that has affected ever since the eternal interests of a multitude of souls. And next, that this stream of spiritual culture originates in the patient, skilled, and devoted work done by that one quiet soul for another soul. And thirdly, that this light-giving power depended on and emerged from a hidden life of prayer, almost as complete in its self-effacement as is its Pattern, the hidden life of Christ Himself; a life which claims for itself no special quality or special insight, which refuses even to acknowledge that a personal spiritual experience lies behind its realistic declarations. In these facts taken together, we have surely a great demonstration of the immensity and endurance of the supernatural power which a complete humility is able to release.
We turn, then, from contemplation of this hidden life to the chief book in which Hilton’s spirit lives and acts: The Scale of Perfection. Even in his lifetime, manuscripts of it seem to have been widely distributed. Before the end of the fourteenth century it had been translated into Latin, and in that form its influence spread on the Continent; and by the middle of the fifteenth it was more read in this country than any other English devotional book. It was printed in 1494, an honour conferred on very few spiritual works; and when we come down to the seventeenth century
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we find it well known and loved by all who care for the interior life.
In its complete form, the Scale consists of two distinct parts each in itself complete. They appear to have been written separately at different periods. Part I exists alone in many MS. Versions, and was evidently circulated for some time as a separate work: being considered, as time has proved it to be, a suitable manual for the use of all earnest Christians desiring to follow the ‘ordinary ways’ of the interior life. It deals with the soul’s preparation for the supernatural life of contemplative love, and the first degrees of prayer; its teaching is mainly psychological and ascetic. The second part deals with the soul’s development within that life: its teaching is mainly contemplative and mystical. Thus each part assumes a very different status in the person who is addressed; and I do not think it too much to say that each is the fruit of a different stage in Hilton’s own development.
The Scale is not perhaps, at first sight, the sort of book which many people expect a mystic to produce. It is downright, practical, homely, and realistic. In its first part especially, it embodies much of the ordinary routine teaching of Catholic Christianity. It depends on and perpetually quotes Holy Scripture; here showing perhaps the influence of that determined Bible-Christian, Richard Rolle. It keeps very close to human nature’s common ways. It dwells quite as much on homely things as lofty things. Yet few books, when we come to understand it, enter more deeply or treat more exactly the essential business of the spiritual life; that is to say, that purifi-
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cation, re-ordering, and transforming of our imperfect personality, which makes it fit for the union with God which is the goal of our spiritual growth—the making of that ‘new creature’ which St. Paul felt a real Christian must be. Von Hugel has somewhere spoken of ‘the mysterious paradox which pervades all true life; and which shows us the human soul as self-active in proportion to God’s action within it’. That phrase might serve as a fitting introduction to Hilton’s great book; for he is one of the very best teachers of that double movement of docility and initiative—the real and powerful working of the holy energy we call grace, and yet the absolute need of a vigorous use of our own will—through which human personality is transformed and sanctified. Were his work re-written in the psychological language of the present day, its literary quality would certainly be reduced. But we should then perhaps realize better how profound and how exact was his understanding of our many-levelled human nature, its cravings and its needs.
The whole of Hilton’s teaching is based on the two great realities with which all religion is concerned: the perfect and rich reality of God, and the partial and derived reality of the soul, and the essential correspondence existing between them. In the first part of the Scale, the centre of the picture is occupied by the natural or, as he prefers to say, the ‘unreformed’ man or woman. Perhaps it is easier for us to use here the word ‘untransformed’. We are to understand by this term the soul whose latent spiritual quality has been obscured, overlaid by the image of
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sin; but who desires and is capable of transformation into the spiritual man, or ‘reformed image ‘. This transformation, this restoration of human personality to what it ought to be, takes in Christian experience two distinct forms. The average good man—and also the soul destined to fullness of spiritual life whilst still in its earlier stages—is ‘reformed in faith’ by a faithful effort to co-operate with God, and lead the Christian life. But these have no conscious experience of a fundamental change in their world and their life; as Rolle would say, of ‘the opening of the heavenly door’. Only those who go further—and to them the Second Book of the Scale is addressed—are reformed in ‘feeling’ as well as in ‘faith’; achieving an experimental knowledge of God’s Presence, and of His union with the soul in love. And it is only in so far as she uses her exceptional devotional opportunities for that most lofty and most practical end, that the anchoress for whom Hilton writes is justified in his sight in her special way of living. She is released from the complications of active life arid human society only in order that the inward work may be more vigorously and thoroughly done.
The opening phrase of the book at once sets the note of Hilton’s teaching; its actuality, its determined insistence on facts :
Hold thou content and stand steadfastly, travailling busily with all the mights of thy soul for to fulfil in soothfastness of good living the state which thou hast taken in likeness and in seeming. . . For wit thou well, a bodily turning to God without the heart following is but a figuring and likeness of virtues and no soothfastness.
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Look, he says in effect, at the facts. What is it that you have promised to do? You have promised—not merely for your own soul’s sake but as a servant of the Church—to live the contemplative life. This is a tremendous undertaking, not to be accomplished merely by shutting yourself up and performing devotional exercises.
Contemplative life lieth in perfect love and charity felt inwardly, by ghostly virtues, and by soothfast knowing and sight of God and ghostly things.
Such perfect love, such steady attention to Eternity, is not to be had at small cost.
Now then [he says to her in his bracing way] since it is so that thy state asketh for to be contemplative, for that is the end and the intent of thine enclosing, that thou mightest more freely and entirely give thee to ghostly occupation: then behoveth thee for to be right busy night and day with travail of body and of spirit, for to come to that life as near as thou mightest, by such means as thou hopest were best unto thee.
He then proceeds, bit by bit, to discuss the means, and the way in which she may use them; with the penetrating exactitude of a psychologist, and the homely common sense of an experienced father of souls. These means of becoming more spiritual can be classed under three heads.
First, knowledge of self over against God: a clear view of our nothingness, fragility, and dependence. Next, the inward seeking of Christ in contemplation and prayer, a process which is at first ‘travaillous but the finding is blissful’. Last, the discovery and mortifying of sin—that element in human nature which is hostile to God—at its very
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source. These are quite enough to keep the average soul fairly busy. We feel that Hilton would have agreed with St. Teresa, in summing up the whole interior life as ‘work, suffering, and love’.
Thus, in the technical language of mysticism, we might say that Hilton treats first and fully of the way of purgation; and only after this has been completely charted goes on to those mystical experiences which mark the progress of the purified and expanded soul towards perfect union with God. But he does not deal very much in this technical language. He has his own symbolism, frequently Biblical and always homely and direct, in which he treats of that long, hard, and costly work throughout which Divine grace and man’s will must co-operate, ever rising and falling together, if the soul is ever to reach its spiritual goal; that is to say, the point where no discord exists between the Creator and the created spirit. It is remarkable how free from rigid and doctrinaire notions, how close to psychological truth, is Hilton’s treatment of this subject. ‘Man’, he says—here of course following St. Augustine, that prince of psychologists —’is naught else but his thoughts and his loves’; and freedom consists in a certain limited power of directing those thoughts and those loves. Thus the true character of his desires and intentions, the direction of his emotional drive, is all-important for man’s spiritual destiny. One chief point in self-knowledge is the discovery of our real centre of interest; and the test proposed still retains its validity—
If thou wilt wit what thou lovest, look whereupon thou thinkest; for where thy love is there is the eye, and where
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thy liking is, there is most the heart thinking. If thou love mickle God, thee liketh for to think mickle of Him, and if thou love little, then little thou thinkest of Him.
Hilton feels with St. Augustine, whom he frequently quotes without acknowledgement, that it is the pull of these fundamental desires and interests, what we do with them, how we transform and spiritualize them which is decisive in the life of the soul. The perfection to which each is called, involves the complete dedication of those thoughts and those loves with which it is endowed to God, who is Reality; and the cost and tension of the supernatural life consists in the drastic process of transmutation through which alone this end can be achieved. Though God is indeed the prime agent in everything which concerns that supernatural life—though, in the deepest sense, He is all and does all too—yet man’s obligation of effort, choice, and response begins at the first moment and continues all the time. It is largely by the exercise of this free though limited will and choice, its complete unification and concentration on one point, that he grows up from a narrow selfhood into a creature with a capacity for God.
An whole and a stable intention, that is for to say, an whole will and a desire only for to please God,
is the first necessity. A solid realization of what the soul truly wants and what it means to do, a deliberate, costly seeking and attending, is the condition under which He is found. Under the symbolism of the lost piece of silver of the Gospels, Hilton describes the search and the discovery of Christ the Divine Reason
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hidden within the soul; the vigorous sweeping out of dark corners, and the diligent, painstaking seeking demanded by this episode in its career.
Thou hast lost Him, but where? Soothly in thine house, that is in thy soul.If thou haddest lost Him out of thine house, that is to say, if thou haddest lost all the reason of thy soul by the first sin, thy soul should never have found Him again; but He left to thee reason, and so He is in thy soul and never shall be lost out of it. Nevertheless thou art never the nearer to Him till thou hast found Him.
He leaves us in no doubt that the spiritual life is a real job and not an agreeable dream. It involves work, indeed drudgery; on the moral level and on the devotional level too. Devotion and moral effort must go hand in hand: one alone is useless. For it is only when sin is seen in the spirit of prayer, and in contrast with the spirit of Christ, that its character is fully perceived and its destruction completely willed.
Only this destruction of sin at the root, this purgation and transformation of the very heart of personality, is, he thinks, ultimately worthwhile.
Anything short of this is a mere scratching of the surface; and however impressive it may be in appearance, does not impress him very much. He observes, with his characteristic love of homely and realistic imagery, that the ‘untransformed’ human soul is rather like a garden in which there is a foul and stinking pond, with runnels of bad water running out of it in all directions. We may stop up the runnels one by one, thus apparently curing ourselves of separate sinful tendencies —pride, anger, envy, and the rest—but unless the secret root of all these evil dispositions, namely ‘a
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false misruled love unto thyself’, has been extirpated, it will merely pay you out for that policy of repression by soaking into the ground and poisoning the whole personality. This is a bit of psychological analysis which we might now express in other terms, but of which few would deny the essential truth. Self-love, he thinks, must be destroyed at the root, the only place where it can be attacked with any hope of succcess; and this is the first and hardest stage in that reforming of the defaced image of the soul, which is to bring it back to the lost likeness of God. It must be done, or at least must seem to us to be done, largely by our own efforts, by a deliberate and patient exercise of will; but this personal struggle is really to be considered as only preparatory to those deeper purifications in which the” emphasis is shifted from that which each person must do for himself, to that which God alone can do in the soul.
In the second part of The Scale of Perfection it is this Divine action and the disposition in which man can receive it, which is treated as central to the development of the true supernatural or contemplative life. Here loving surrender and confidence take the place of anxious struggle; and the great humbling and pacifying truth of man’s nothingness, and the joy and power that come with its acknowledgement, dominate all other aspects of the soul’s relation to God. Again and again Hilton brings his pupil back to the one all-embracing declaration, ‘I am nothing; I have nothing; I desire nothing save Jesu only’—the single reply which the pilgrim to Jerusalem, which is the City of the Love of God, is to make to all who
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try to frighten him—or deflect him from his way. The passage in which he describes the soul’s journey to Jerusalem is one of the best known and most beauutiful in his works, and curiously anticipates Bunyan’s dream.
Right as a true pilgrim going to Jerusalem leaveth behind him house and land, wife and child, and maketh himself poor and bare from all that he hath, that he might go lightly without letting: right so, if thou wilt be a ghostly pilgrim, thou shalt make thyself naked from all that thou hast, that are both good deeds and bad, and cast them all behind thee; that thou be so poor in thine own feeling that there be nothing of thine own working that thou wilt lean upon restingly, but aye desiring more grace of love, and aye seeking the ghostly presence of Jhesu. And if thou do thus, then shalt thou set in thy heart wholly and fully, that thou wouldest be at Jeruusalem and at none other place but there. And that is, thou shalt set in thine heart wholly and fully, that thou wouldest nothing have but the love of Jhesu, and the ghostly sight of Him as He will show Him; for to that only thou art made and bought, and that is thy beginning and thine end, thy joy and thy bliss.
It is a policy of entire consecration, of total concentration on the soul’s one end that Hilton asks for: the solemn affirmation of St. Ignatius, ‘I come from God, I belong to God, I am destined for God’, stated in the gentler terms of Christo-centric love.
In this second part of The Scale of Perfection he is of course addressing a pupil far more advanced in the spiritual life than was his ghostly sister when he first undertook her education. The strict ascetic training, and instruction on methods of prayer, which fill the earlier chapters have now done their work; and a larger, deeper, more supple, and more genial
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method is opened up before us. The emphasis no longer falls on self- improvement and self-discipline; but rather on a free and joyful self- abandonment, the simple yet profound communion of the soul with Christ which is the essence of the life of contemplation as taught by Hilton and his school.
What thou hast or what thou dost, hold it as nought for to rest in, without the sight and the love of Jhesu. Cast it all behind thee and forget it, that thou might have that that is the best of all.
The recluse who was once told to ‘labour and swink busily’ at the getting of virtues has profited by her lessons, and is now ready to be taught St. Paul’s more excellent way; in which the whole of the business and work of the contemplative life is seen to be comprehended in love.
This love [says Hilton] is nought else but Jhesu Himself, that for love worketh all this in a man’s soul and reformeth it in feeling to His likeness, as I have before said, and somewhat also I shall say. This love bringeth into the soul the fullhead of all virtues, and maketh them all clean and true, soft and easy, and turneth them all into love and into liking; and on what manner wise He doth it, I shall tell thee a little afterward. This love draweth the soul from fleshlihood into ghostliness, from earthly feeling into heavenly savour, and from vain beholding of worldly things into contemplation of ghostly creatures, and of God’s privities.
We have now moved away from the instructions suited to beginners, to those appropriate to advanced souls; souls who are really, as Hilton says, reformed in feeling as well as in faith—in other words, who actually feel different, and are capable of conscious communion with God. And here we feel too that the mature
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soul of the author involuntarily discloses some of its own secrets; which are simply the unchanging secrets of the developed life of prayer, as it is lived by one who is no longer just the faithful servant, but the consciously loving and dependent child of God. Hilton now begins to write with that accent of delighted certitude, of unselfconscious joy which is, of all things in religion, strongest in its missionary appeal. Thus, in the beautiful passage in which he describes the humility and genial indifference which come, not from the vision of self in its horror but from the intimate presence of Christ in His perfection, we can hardly doubt that a personal experience speaks to us across the centuries.
For the heart of a true lover of Jhesu is made so mickle and so large through a little sight of Him and a little feeling of His ghostly love, that all the liking and all the joy of all earth may not suffice for to fill a corner of it. And then seemeth it well that these wretched worldly lovers that are as it were ravished in love of their own worship, and pursue after it for to have it with all the might and the will that they have, they have no savour in this meekness, they are wonder far therefrom. But the lover of Jhesu hath this meekness lastingly and that not with heaviness and striving for it, but with liking and gladness: the which gladness he hath, not for he forsaketh the worship of the world, for that were a proud meekness that longeth to an hypocrite, but for he hath a sight and a ghostly knowing of soothfastness and of worthiness of Jhesu through the gift of the Holy Ghost.
That reverent sight and that lovely beholding of Jhesu comforteth the soul so wonderfully and beareth it up so mightily and so softly, that it may not like nor fully rest in none earthly joy, nor it will not. He maketh no account whether men blame him or praise him, worship him or despise him as for himself. He setteth it not at heart neither for to be well paid if men despise him, as for more meekness, nor for
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to be evil paid that men should worship him or praise him. He had liefer for to forget both that one and that other, and only think on Jhesu, and get meekness by that way; and that is mickle the securer way, whoso might come thereto.
For Hilton, then, the science and art of contemplation is simply the science and art of perfect love. He would say with St. Augustine: ‘Love, and do what you like’. In the light of his teaching we begin to understand why it was that St. Teresa called such contemplation ‘a short cut to perfection’,—a phrase that is frequently misunderstood. It is truly a short cut, in so much as it aims at the very heart and centre of the supernatural life; takes the straight way uphill to the City of the Love of God without considering the surface and the gradient, instead of the long and gradual spiral travelled by the non-contemplative soul. It involves such an absorption of the whole human self in its assigned end, which is God, that the centre of interest is changed, and merely self-regarding sins become impossible to it.
Love worketh wisely and softly in a soul where he will, for he slayeth mightily ire and envy and all passions of angriness and melancholy in it, and bringeth into the soul virtues of patience and mildness, peaceability and amity to his even-christian. It is full hard and a great need to a man that standeth only in working of his own reason, for to keep patience, holy rest and softness in heart, and charity to his even-christian if they trouble him unreasonably and do him wrong, that he shall not somewhat do again to them through stirring of ire or of melancholy, either in speaking or in working or in both.
But to a true lover of Jhesu is no great need for to suffer all this; for why, love fighteth for him, and slayeth wonder softly such stirring of wrath and of melancholy, and maketh
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his soul so easy, so peaceable, so suffering and so godly through the ghostly sight of Jhesu with the feeling of His blessed love, that though he be despised and reproved of other men, or take wrong or harm, shame or villainy, he chargeth it not.
Such an achievement as this means the discovery, not in idea but in literal fact, that the whole of the supernatural life in its utter devotion to the interests of reality, its steadfast movement towards union with God—all that some spiritual writers make so elaborate, so inhuman, and so difficult—every bit of this can be comprehended in the single practice of a self-oblivious love. It means the replacement of all self-occupied spirituality, all scruples and direct struggle with sins, by a simple and total loving adherence to God in Christ. But the soul has a long way to go before it can understand and practise this, in the actual sense in which the great mystics understand it; and, as a fact, the great division between the ascetic and the mystical levels of the life of prayer lies here.
The distinction is in the soul’s experience and practice of love, its capacity for that gentle and complete renunciation which brought Pascal certitude, joy and peace.
For a soul that hath the gift of love through gracious beholding of Jhesu as I mean, or else if he have it not yet but would have it, he is not busy for to strain himself over his might, as it were by bodily strength, for to have it by bodily fervours and so for to feel of the love of God. But him thinketh that he is right nought, and that he can do right nought of himself; but as it were a dead thing only hanging and borne up by the mercy of God. He seeth well that Jhesu is all and doth all, and therefore asketh he nought else but the gift of His love. For since that the soul seeth that his own love is nought, therefore it would have his love, for that
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is enough. Therefore prayeth he, and that desireth he, that the love of God would touch him with His blessed light, that he might see a little of Him by His gracious presence, for then should he love Him; and so by this way cometh the gift of love, that is God, into a soul.
But ‘this realization’ says Hilton, ‘can only be had for much bodily and ghostly labour going before’. It is not the easy trick offered by the Quietists; but a gift of God which is the reward of humble and faithful effort, steady discipline and purification. It brings with it a wise suppleness, the gentle acquiescence in the pace and the purpose of God which is the essence of true humility; and is far more effective than the wild first-hand struggle for personal attainment of those whom he calls ‘lovers of God that make themselves for to love God as it were by their own might’.
And so it seemeth that neither grace only without full working of a soul that in it is, nor working alone without grace, bringeth a soul to reforming in feeling; the which reforming standeth in perfect love and charity. But that one joined to that other, that is grace joined to working, bringeth into a soul the blessed feeling of perfect love, the which grace may not rest fully but on a meek soul, that is full of dread of God.
Full of dread of God: awe, a quality often missed out of those encouraging little books which assure us that religion is so natural and so easy, all breadth and no depth. The great revealers of the mysteries of God have never dared to talk like that.
This second book of the Scale is really in its wholeness a treatise on the communion of the soul with
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God in Christ. Even a casual reading, much more an intimate acquaintance with it, brings home to us the intensely personal character of medieval devotion; how vividly actual and realistic was its Christo-centric orientation, the glow and colour, the depth and gentle intimacy, which are united in its passionate worship of the Holy Name. English mysticism has its origin in that intense devotion to the Person of our Lord, which arose in this country in the twelfth century. And although we cannot deny that Hilton shares with his contemporaries the curious aloofness of the English mystics from the Sacraments, the doctrine of the contemplative life which he develops in this book might well be called the mysticism of the Real Presence.
How that presence is felt [he says], it may better be known by experience than by any writing; for it is the life and the love, the might and the light, the joy and the rest of a chosen soul. And therefore he that hath soothfastly once felt it, he may not forbear it without pain; he may not undesire it, it is so good in itself and so comfortable. What is more comfortable to a soul here than for to be drawn out through grace from the vile noye of worldly business and filth of desires, and from vain affection of all creatures into rest and softness of ghostly love; privily perceiving the gracious presence of Jhesu, feelably fed with savour of His unseeable blessed face? Soothly nothing, me thinketh. Nothing may make the soul of a lover full merry, but the gracious presence of Jhesu as He can show Him to a clean soul.
