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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 (during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries of our era) the descendants of a Sufi occupied the
throne,—governing, however, as may be supposed, not like
mystics, but as men of the world.[186] 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 latest research has succeeded only in deciding who Angelus
Silesius was not. Some Roman Catholic priest or monk,
assuming the name of Angelus, did, in the seventeenth century,
send forth sundry hymns and religious poems,—among others,
one most euphuistically entitled The Cherubic Wanderer. The
author of this book has been generally identified, on grounds
altogether inadequate, with a contemporary named John
Scheffler,—a renegade from Jacob Behmen to the Pope. Suffice
it to say that no two men could be more unlike than the virulent
fagotty-minded pervert Scheffler, and the contemplative
pantheistic Angelus—be he who he may.[187]
The Cherubic Wanderer is a collection of religious epigrams or
rhyming sentences, most of them smart and pithy enough as to
expression, not a few as destitute of sense as they all are of
poetry. The Wanderer travelled a little way into the eighteenth
century, and then, lighting upon one of those oblivious arbours so
fatal to pilgrims, sat down, and slept long. A few years ago some
Romanticist littérateurs of Germany woke him up, and
announced to the world, with much sounding of brass and
tinkling of cymbals, that they had resuscitated a paragon of
saintship and philosophy.
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?
On the other hand, there are many terse and happy couplets and
quatrains in the Wanderer, which express the better spirit of
mysticism. Angelus insists constantly on the vanity of mere
externals,—the necessity of a Christ formed within, as opposed
to a dead, unsanctifying faith,—the death of self-will, as the seat
of all sin,—the reality of the hell or heaven already wrought in
time by sin or holiness. These were the maxims and ejaculations
which religious minds, mystically inclined, found so edifying. The
arrogant egotheism of some passages they took in another
sense, or deemed the sense beyond them. Moreover, the high-
flown devotion affected by Rome has always familiarized her
children with expressions which (as Thomas Fuller has it) ‘do
knock at the door of blasphemy, though not always with intent to
enter in thereat.’
The second representative of the West, who must assist towards
our comparative estimate of pantheistic mysticism in its poetical
form, is Mr. Emerson, the American essayist. Whether in prose
or verse he is chief singer of his time at the high court of
Mysticism. He belongs more to the East than to the West—true
brother of those Sufis with whose doctrine he has so much in
common. Luxuriant in fancy, impulsive, dogmatic, darkly oracular,
he does not reason. His majestic monologue may not be
interrupted by a question. His inspiration disdains argument. He
delights to lavish his varied and brilliant resources upon some
defiant paradox—and never more than when that paradox is
engaged in behalf of an optimism extreme enough to provoke
another Voltaire to write another Candide. He displays in its
perfection the fantastic incoherence of the ‘God-intoxicated’ man.
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 (if words have meaning) 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.
CHAPTER II.
Goethe.
And again,—
Silesius has the same thought, cold and dry, after the poetic
Persian, yet in words that would furnish no inapt motto to
express in a sentence this species of mysticism:—
Ne’er sees man in this life, the Light above all light,
As when he yields him up to darkness and to night.[194]
The ascetic Sufi bids the mystical aspirant close the senses
against every external impression—for the worlds of sense and
of contemplation reciprocally exclude each other. We have seen
how the Hindoos and the Hesychasts endeavoured literally to
obey this counsel, reiterated so often by so many mystagogues:
—
So Emerson,—
‘The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it is
profane to seek to interpose helps.... Whenever a mind is simple,
and receives a divine wisdom, then old things pass away,—
means, teachers, texts, temples, fall; it lives now and absorbs
past and future into the present hour.’[196]
Hence, in both cases, the indifference before noticed to all the
various forms of positive religion. The Persian describes all
religions as the same liquor in different glasses—all are poured
by God into one mighty beaker.
The self-abandonment and self-annihilation of the Sufis rest on
the basis of their pantheism. Personal existence is with them the
great illusion of this world of appearance—to cling to it is to be
blind and guilty. Mahmud (a Sufi of the fourteenth century) says,
in the Gulschen Ras,—
Angelus Silesius bids men lose, in utter Nihilism, all sense of any
existence separate from the Divine Substance—the Absolute:—
So Angelus Silesius:—
The poet then introduces Allah, as saying that he had cast Attar
into a trance, and withdrawn him into his own essence, so that
the words he uttered were the words of God.[201]
Both with Emerson and Angelus, he who truly apprehends God
becomes a part of the divine nature,—is a son, a god in God,
according to the latter; and according to the former, grows into
an organ of the Universal Soul. This notion of identity Emerson
seems to arrive at from the human, Angelus from the divine side.
The salvation of man is reduced with the German, very much to
a process of divine development. With the American, every
elevated thought merges man for a time in the Oversoul. The