[p 303]
The struggle between the negative transcendentalism of the Neoplatonists and the dynamic affirmative instincts of primitive Christian enthusiasm — between the ideal of a vision seen and of a life lived — endured for more than two centuries: and culminated, as such long-drawn warfare often does, in the apparent victory of both combatants, the apparaent consummation of an alliance between them. Christian mysticism seems at first sight to have conquered Neoplatonism only after absorbing nearly everything that it possessed. (1) In the work of Dionysius the Areopagite, which closed the Neoplatonic period and became the chief representative on the Christian side of its mystical phiosophy, we have a theory of the spiritual world and man's communion with it, which the Hellenist may call Neoplatonised Christianity and the Christian, Christianised Neoplatonism. (2) Here the Greek intellect and the Christian aspiration are present in about equal proportions: with the result that the character of each is modified to a degree which obscures its most vital characteristics.
The manner and extent in which the different members of the Christian body came to terms with Neoplatonism varied enormously. In some cases the assimilation was complete; and the new method of communion with
[p 304]
Reality, the new language which described it, did but educate and enrich the total experience of a "new creature'' strong enough to digest this spiritual food. In others, Hellenism achieved a private victory by accepting the title whilst obliterating the true marks of the Christian mystic; and substituting the sterile principle of static contemplation for the vital principle of growth.
That vital principle, however — the dynamic, richly hurnan, all-embracing mysticism of Jesus and Paul — did not fail: though its triumphs in this period do not lie upon the surface of history. It shifted its centre, broke out in a new direction, and put on an almost impenetrable disguise before it undertook its pilgrimage to the west: a disguise behind which many scholars have failed to recognise the features of that Spirit of Life which is "movement itself." Superficially, the general tendency of fourth-century Christianity seems practical and intellectual rather than mystical: inclined ever more and more to sacrifice that character of mobility which is the essence of life, that it may obtain a secure foothold within the social framework in exchange. As the external Church rose towards power and splendour, entered upon warfare against heretics, built up her theological bulwarks and elaborated her ceremonial cult, her manifold activities — the numerous and inevitable compromises effected between the austere primitive spirit and the "world" to which it supposed itself to be sent — obscured the ideals of those mystical souls, those true citizens of the Kingdom of Reality, who constitute the "invisible church." The Church of the third century, says Harnack, was already and to a high degree secularised. She had not renounced her characteristic nature; but had dangerously lowered her standard of life. (3) She had, in fact, "travelled far from the original conception of a community of saints, all washed, all sanctified, all justified: far from the ideal of that little company of disciples who stood aloof from the whole world lying under the power
[p 305]
of the evil one, and who could not sin because "the seed of Him " [I John iii. 9] was abiding in them." (4) Yet the descendants of that little company survived, the thoroughfare of life was still open, the original type continued to reproduce itself: chiefly, perhaps, amongst those ascetics and candidates for martyrdom who formed a permanent and well-marked class within the Christian community, and represented a vivid if one-sided apprehension of the Christian demand.
During the primitive period, these representatives of the "little flock," the glad romantic spirit of self-donation, had not separated themselves from ordinary life. Whilst the age of enthusiasm endured they stood — in idea if not in fact — for the Christian norm rather than the Christian exception. Later, the ascetics often lived in a partial seclusion on the outskirts of towns and villages: a stage of development described in the early chapters of the Vita Antonii. But as time went on, and the primitive instinct for a new life, a total change of outlook, grew more rare, those in whom "the mind of Christ" appeared were less and less able to adjust its stern demands to the counter-claim of the social system within which they found themselves; and which was tolerated, if not accepted in theory, by the growing Church. More and more such spirits felt the need for that free life of poverty and detachment, that single-minded concentration on Reality, that opportunity of self-simplification, which He had proclaimed as the condition of a perfect fruition of Eternal Life.(5)
The upgrowth of the monastic system within Christianity, which began in Egypt early in the fourth century (6)
[p 306]
represents the flight of these mystical spirits from the restless complications and unrealities of the world; with its perpetual calls on attention, its perpetual tendency to deflect the movement of consciousness from the "strait and narrow path" of its thoroughfare to God. Here, the thwarted spirit of new life shifts its centre, begins to cut another "way out" towards transcendence, tries once again to conquer those "oppositions of matter," those tendencies to automatism, which dog its steps, and hinder the performance of its great office of bringing Eternity into time. "It is one of the most striking historical facts," says Harnack, that the Church, precisely at the time when she was becoming more and rnore a legal and sacramental institution, threw out an ideal of life which could be realised not in herself, but only alongside of herself. The more deeply she became compromised with the world, the higher, the more superhuman, became her ideal. . . . Monasticism, unable to find satisfaction in "theology," seriously accepted the view that Christianity is a religion, and demands from the individual a surrender of his life." (7) The monastic movement, in fact, was essentially a mystical movement; one more exhibition of the imperishable instinct for new life, the ever-renewed necessity for distinction between the "little flock " of forward moving spirits and the crowd. It was a genuine outshoot from the parent stem: that official Church, which tended more and more to exchange spontaneity for habit and mystical actuality for symbolic form — to turn, in fact, on its own tracks, and adjust itself to this world rather than cut its way through to the next.(8)
This new off-shoot proclaimed itself, and with some justice, as a return to the primitive Christian ideal. Its aim was the double aim of the Christian mystic : a vital
[p 307]
and permanent union with God, and regeneration as the way thereto. Its emphasis was on life-changing and life-enhancement: and on penance and prayer — purification and ccmmunion — as the only means by which this could be achieved. It sought, as well as it could, escape from just those conditions which prevent the "imitation of Christ"; and made the life of spirit possible to many selves whose vitality would not have sufficed for the hard and pioneer work of path-cutting through the jungle of the world. "Anciently," says Augustine Baker, "souls embracing a religious life were moved thereto merely out of the spirit of penance, without any regard at all to make use of their solitude for the getting of learning — their principal care being, to attend unto God, and to aspire unto perfect union in spirit with Him." (9)
So the old Benedictine ascetic. Protestant scholarship supports the same view. According to the Greek and Rornan churches, says Harnack, "the true monk is the true and most perfect Christlan. Monasticism is not in the Catholic churches a more or less accidental phenomenon alongside of others: but as the churches are today, and as they have for centuries understood the gospel, it is an institution based on their essential nature — it is the Christian life." (10) Hence, from the fourth century onwards, a large proportion of those true mystics who have never failed to leaven the Christian Church, are likely to be found within the monastic system: and the life which that system proposes to its novices is likely to be framed upon lines corresponding with those psychological laws which govern the mystical temperament.
Both theories are justified bv fact. Throughout the "dark ages" and the mediaeval period, the majority of those in whom the "new life" awoke tended more and more to adopt the religious profession, driven to specialisation by the oppositions of the world, and by an interior sense of their own limitations: the impossibilty of moving
[p 308]
in two directions at once, conforming simultaneously to two discordant rhythms — in fact, of serving both "God and Mammon." Their object was the attainment of that interior sanctity which is the self's response to a perceived perfection: the inevitable corollary of the vision of God. True, in the case of all the greatest spirits, the real and complete "imitators of Christ," this retreat from the world was but the preliminary to a return. The great solitaries and monks were not the selfish visionaries, the cowardly fugitives from the battle of life, which the ultra-Protestant imagination delights to depict: but mighty and heroic lovers of Reality, who fulfilled the lover's function of handing on the torch. of life. "Our holy fathers, filled with God," they are called in the liturgy of the Orthodox Church.(11) Even St. Anthony, first and most uncompromising of hermits, who lived for twenty years shut up in a ruined fort without seeing the face of man, emerged from that long retreat when he felt that the time of preparation was over, and lived amongst his disciples, teaching them the mysteries of the ascetic life or "perfect way." (12) So, too, St. Bernard, St. Hildegarde, St. Francis, St. Teresa, and rnany an other — sometimes by the creative power of their writings, sometimes by immediate act — were the instruments of a world-renewal directly dependent on their own first movement of retreat and concentration: and which could never have been effected by the busy and altruistic Martha "pulled this way and that" (13) by a multitude of conflicting claims upon attention, will and love.
Religious orders, then, in so far as they retained the primitive spirit of self-donation, the primitive passion for sanctity, tended to attract those selves most capable of growth towards the Real. Hence results the fact that the discipline of those orders did, and does still, imitate in
[p 309]
little the life process of the mystical soul, its spiral ascent towards union with Reality, as seen in perfection in Jesus and those who follow most closely in His steps. It does this because, as those who made the great monastic Rules, and those who lived them best, perpetually declare to us, the one object of the true monk is to "imitate Christ." Vita tua, via nostra, said a Kempis, speaking for all of them; and his book, which is little more than an expansion of this epigram, reflects in its purest form the true monastic ideal. "Our Lord saith: he that followeth me goeth not in darkness. These are the words of Christ in the which we are admonished to follow his life and his manners if we would be verily illumined and be delivered from all manner of blindness of heart. Wherefore let our sovereign study be in the life of Jesu Christ. The teaching of Christ passeth the teachirg of all saints and holy men; and he that hath the spirit of Christ should find there hidden manna. But it happeneth that many feel but little desire of often hearing of the gospel; for they have not the spirit of Christ; for whoever will understand the words of Christ plainly and in their savour, must study to conform all his life to His life." (14)
To this study — this effort to repeat life's greatest achievement — the monastic orders were dedicated. "The Benedictine rule," says Hannay, the rule which first gathered to an orderly system the principles of the monastic life, and is the root of all subsequent developments in the west, was true to the old ascetic ideal of seeking God only without compromise, and literally imitating Christ. If the monks of the order became afterwards colonists, philanthropists, scholars, statesmen, it was not because their rule trained them for such work. They were trained to be good, and nothing more. They sought the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. It was not because they pursued them, or laboured for them, or desired them, that all the other things were added to
[p 310]
them afterwards. . . . The Benedictine rule aimed at making good men, and left the question of their usefulness to God." (15)
This being so, it is of special interest to observe how close is the accordance between this Rule, this "training in goodness," and, not only the ethics of the New Testament but also, the psychological laws which govern mystic growth. The system of education implied by it, leads the postulant through the degrees of " Beginner" ard " Proficient " towards that of " Perfect"; (16) a sequence which has a real and organic resemblance to the "mystic way" of Purgation, Illumination and Union. This "threefold way" of monastic asceticism begins by hard and unremitted mortification and penances, a true purgation of the roots of self-hood; an education, part mental, part physical, in which the regnant will obtains an ever increasing control of the lower centres of consciousness, character is slowly purged, braced, and readjusted to the new and higher life, and that humility whrch is "pure receptivity"(17) is attained. This is succeeded by a period in which, the "virtues" being conquered, and will and desire turned "towards the Best," the growing self is led to higher levels of correspondence with Reality, a balanced career of service and of prayer: finally — and often by way of the aridity and spiritual distress well known in the cloistered life — to that condition of perfect adjustment to the Divine will, "by pureness and singleness of heart, by love and by contemplation," (18) which is the normal man's equivalent of the Unitive State attained by the great mystic in his last stage. (19)
[p 311]
This, then, was the mould into which the "oppositions of rnatter" gradually forced the spirit of new life: with the inevitable result of that loss of elasticity and freedom which always follows upon the tendency of spirit to take material form. The subsequent history of monasticism is largely the history of the perpetually recurring lapse of the mystical into the mechanical: its periodical restoration through the appearance both within and without the cloister of great and vital spirits, able to triumph over the automatisms of the system which surrounded them. In these, the elan vital found, again and again, a new opportunity of expression, a new thoroughfare to the heights. From them again and again, a new dower of vitality, was poured out upon the world.(20)
lt was with the emergence of a group of such great spirits — the first Egyptian hermits of the third and fourth centuries — that Christian monasticism began, and Christian mysticism found its fresh thoroughfare. The Coptic saints, Anthony the Great (21) and his pupil Macarius of Egypt,(22) preserved and carried over to the post-Nicene Church the true "secret of the Kingdom": the mystery of organic spiritual growth. They represent a genuine new movement on Life's part, the cutting of a fresh channel through the world of things.
Anthony, the hero and pioneer of this whole movement, was suddenlv converted in true mystical fashion, and at
[p 312]
the psychologically probable age of eighteen,(23) from a prosperous life in the world — he was the son of wealthy Christian parents — to the extreme of ascetic renunciation. It happened one day that he heard in church the words of the gospel: " If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow Me."(24) As St. Augustine, hearing the child's voice say "Tolle, lege!" knew that it spoke for him alone; as St. Francis was "smitten by unwonted visitations" in the lonely church and came out another man; as St. Catherine of Genoa suddenly received in her heart the "wound of the unmeasured love of God," so Anthony heard in these words a personal cornmand. He at once obeyed them : and having stripped himself of all property, he went to and fro for some time amongst those Christians who were striving to live the ascetic life in the world — the "athletes of piety " as they were called in the language of that day — that he might learn from them all he could.
But the storms and trials of the Purgative Way soon seized upon him. His nature was strong and ardent: and its movement toward transcendence was one long series of battles between the lower and the higher centres af consciousness. He fled into the desert; first to a tomb near his native village, then to a lonely ruined fort near the Nile. Here, for a long period of years, in utmost solitude, he struggled for self-conquest. The violence of his temptations, the heroic austerities by which he opposed them, can be discerned behind the symbolic form which they have taken in the ancient, and well known, legends of the "temptations of St. Anthony." When at last, at the age of fifty-five, he returned to the world of men those who had expected to see a man physically wrecked and mentally over-strung by fasting, penance and loneliness, saw instead the adept of a true asceticism; the "mortified" mystic, "normal in body simply sane in
[p 313]
mind."(25) Driven by the mystical impulse for service ,
Anthony now devoted himself to organising the lives of those ascetics who had followed him to the desert. During the persecution of Maxirninus (A.D. 311) he went to Alexandria to comfort and strengthen the suffering church: but this period of contact with the world was followed, when the immediate need far his presence ceased, by a second retreat into more remote solitude — the "inner mountain," near the Red Sea. There he lived until his death: sometimes visiting his old disciples in the desert of the Thebaid, and ever accessible to the many who came to him for help, teaching and advice.(26) It is said that his was one of those rare natures which never attained the equilibrium characteristic of a mature mystical consciousness. His inner life was characterised by alternate conflict and high spiritual joy; swinging to and fro between the negative sense of sin and failure, and the ecstatic communion with God which he described as "the only perfect prayer ";(27) between the Divine Union and the Dark Night. As he put it in the figurative language that he loved, his "conflicts with demons " continued to the last.
In Anthony's second retreat, less savagely austere than that of his purgative period, work took its place by the side of contemplation as a part of the sane and normal monastic life: not only the constant spiritual work of teaching disciples, and giving comfort and advice to pilgrims who sought him out, but those homely trades of mat-weaving and agriculture which became a part of the rule observed by all later Egyptian solitaries and monks,(28)
[p 314]
and give the first hint of that monastic ideal of ardent soul in industrious body which finds its classical expression in the Benedictine rule.
Anthony had little education, though the reports of his disputes with Pagan philosophers suggest that he possessed the ready wit and lucid mind so often found in great contemplatives. Hence his mysticism never took literary form: we can but guess his doctrine from his life.(28) That doctrine was propagated through his immediate personal influence; the enduring influence and contagious quality, possessed by a commanding character, a natural leader and initiator of men. He "found a new form of life and justified it" — the peculiarity, says Delacroix. of the Christian mystical type; found it by way of heroic sacrifices, nurtured it by the twin means of contemplation and service, and handed it on, through the disciples who inherited his vitality, to the generations that were to be.
Notes
1. Cf Harnack, History of Dogma, Vol. I. p. 361
2. There are of course, other elements, both Jewish and Oriental, in the religious metaphysics of Dionysius; but these were known and used by later Pagan neoplatonists, many of whom might have adapted Moliere's motto, "Je prends mon bien ou je le trouve."
3. Das Monchtum § 3.
4. Hannay, The Spirit and Origin of Christian Monasticism, p. 76.
5. Matt. xix. 16-22
6. According to Dom Cuthbert Butler, the birth of Christian Monasticism coincides with St Anthony's return from his great retreat in the desert (for which, see below) and first attempt to organise the lives of his disciples. This took place in the first years of the fourth century. Two of these disciples, St. Pachomius and St Macarius, are usually regarded as the founders of the eraliest monastic communities, which effected the transition from anchorite to monk. Cf Dom Cuthbert Butler, "Monasticism", in the Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed., Vol. XVIII. p. 687.
7. Harnack, Das Monchtum, § 3.
8. Cf. Harnack, loc. cit.
9. Holy Wisdom, p. 168.
10. Das Monchtum, § 1.
11. Neale and Littledale, The Liturgies of SS. Mark, James, Clement, Chrysostom and Basil, p. 185.
12. Vita Antonii, caps. 10 and 48.
13. Luke x. 40. (Weymouth's translation).
14. De Imit. Christi, Bk. I. cap. 1
15. Hannay, The Spirit and Origin of Christian Monasticism, pp. 246, 250
16. These are technical terms of Christian asceticism; appearing in all books of monastic, and many of non-monastic, origin which treat of the mystic life. see for instances Rolle, The Mending of Life, cap. 12; The Cloud of Unknowing, cap. 35, and the Theologia Germanica, cap. 14.
17. Harnack, Das Wesen des Christentums, p. 47.
18. Theo. Ger., loc.cit.
19. Details in almost any manual of Catholic asceticism: particularly Augustine Baker, Holy Wisdom; A Poulain, Graces d'oraison; A. Savdreau, Les Degres de la Vie spirituelle; A. Devine, Manual of Ascetic Theology.
20. The history of vital religion is largely the history of such personalities and the new life which flows from them: for instance, St Benedict, St Bernard, St Hildegarde, St Dominic, St Francis of Assisi, St Catherine of Siena, the Friends of God, St Ignatius, St Teresa. To these we may, perhaps, add our own regenerators, Bunyan, Fox, and Wesley.
21. A.D. 251-356.
22. St Macarius, called "of Egypt", also, "the Great", was born in either 295 or 300, and died in either 386 or 391. The best authorities incline to the earlier date.
23. Cf. supra, Cap. I, § IV
24. Matt. xix. 21.
25. Hannay, op. cit., p. 99. I have condensed much of the preceding account of Antony's conversion and penance, which occupies the first fourteen chapters of the Vita, from Mr hannay's excellent paraphrase.
26. Vita Antonii, caps. 49 - 58
27. Cassian, Coll., IX. 31
28. See Murray's Dictionary of Christian Biography, art. "Antonius Abbas." Such manual work was the great protection of the hermit soul against the monastic sin of accidie' the restless misery and boredom which comes over the contemplative when his spiritual insight fails him and he is thrown back on the futilities of daily life. Hannay, (op.cit. pp 154-157) has a vivid and amusing account of the monk smitten with this spiritual disease.
29. The long sermon into which Antony's teachings are condensed in the Vita deals chiefly with his favourite subject of "demons" and the way in which they may best be overcome.
