MYSTICISM IN MODERN FRANCE
That Christian tradition of the spiritual life which has been specially developed within the religious orders—with its definite objective, its methodical training in self-conquest and the art of prayer—is often regarded as a mere survival of mediævalism, lingering in odd corners but having no points of contact with our modern world. Yet this tradition lives now, as surely as in the days ofSt.Gertrude orSt.Teresa. It continues to exercise its mysterious attraction; transmuting those who give themselves to its influence, and producing that special type of character and experience which is so clearly marked in the histories of the Catholic saints. In a world of change, this has hardly altered. Within the contemplative convents there obtains that same scale of values, that same contempt for the body and undivided attention to the interests of the soul, that same avoidance of all comfort or pleasure and eager acceptance of pain, which is revealed in the standard writings of Christian asceticism. In these houses, mysticism is still a practical art: the education there given represents the classic spiritual discipline of the west, and still retains its transforming power. Through it, souls obtain access to a veritable world of spirit; and apprehend under symbols eternal values, which are unperceived by their fellow men. By it they are supported throughthe difficult adjustments of consciousness and sublimation of instinct, which are needed when the centre of life’s interest is shifted from physical to supernal levels. This is a fact which students of psychology, and especially of religious experience in its intensive form, should not ignore. They need not go to the Middle Ages for their examples of the effect of ascetic training and contemplative practice, or for characteristic specimens of the “saintly typeâ€; for these may be found within our own period, and studied in their relation to our modern world.
Those who regard this saintly type as a hot-house plant, raised under conditions which appear to defend it from the temptations and distractions of ordinary existence, can have little acquaintance either with cloister ideals or with cloistered lives. A thoroughgoing monastic discipline is the most searching school of virtue ever invented. It withers easy-going piety and “other-worldliness†at the root. It confers a robust humility which is proof against all mortifications and disappointments. It leaves no room for individual tastes and preferences, religious or secular. Its pupils must learn to resent nothing, to demand nothing; to thrive on humiliations, to love and serve all without distinction, without personal choice; even to renounce the special consolations of religion. The common idea of the cloister, as providing a career of impressive religious ceremonial varied by plain sewing, pious gossip, and “devotionettes†is far from the truth. On its external side, a well-ordered convent provides a busy, practical, family life of the most austere kind, with many duties, both religious and domestic, countless demands upon patience, good-temper and unselfishness, and few relaxations. On its hidden side, it is a device to train and toughen the spirit, develop its highest powers, and help it to concentrate its attention more and more completely on eternal realities. That training is still given in its completeness; and the classic, saintly character is still being produced,with its special cultivation of love, meekness, and self-sacrifice, balanced by energy, courage, and strength of will.
Sanctity is the orientation of the spirit towards supreme Reality. To the believer in any theistic religion, no attitude of the soul could be simpler, more natural than this. There is nothing about it which deserves to be called abnormal, archaic, or fantastic. The complications with which it is surrounded, the unnatural aspect which it wears for practical men, all come from its collision with the entangled interests and perverse ideals of the world. Thus, retreat from this tangle of sham interests, the building up of a consistent universe within which the self can develop its highest powers and purest loves, is felt to be imperative for those selves in whom this innate aptitude for God reaches the conscious level. In these spirits, the “vocation†for the special life of correspondence with the supersensual reproduces on a higher plane the vocation of the artist or the poet. All the self’s best energies and desires tend in this direction, and it will achieve harmonious development only by unifying itself about this centre of interest, and submitting to the nurture and discipline which shall assure its dominance. The symbols with which the universe of religion is furnished, the moral law which there obtains, are all contributory to the one end; and find their justification in its achievement.
Within the Christian Church, and especially in that which is technically called the “religious life,†these symbols and this law have not varied for many centuries; nor has the type of personality which they develop changed much since it first appeared in monastic history. The sharp sense of close communion with, and immediate responsibility to, a personal God possessing human attributes; the complete abandonment of desire, combined with astonishing tenacity of purpose; contempt for the merely comfortable either in spiritual or physical affairs; a glad and eager acceptance of pain—these are the qualities of the Christian saint, and these are stillfostered in appropriate subjects by the cloistered life. These facts have been abundantly demonstrated during the last thirty years in a group of French Carmelite mystics, of whom the best known is Thérèse Martin, already the object of a widespreadcultusunder the name of Sœur Thérése de l’Enfant Jésus. Others who will repay study are Elizabeth Catez, or Sœur Elizabeth de la Trinité (1880-1906) and Mère Marie-Ange de l’Enfant-Jésus (1881-1909). It is clear that we have in these young women—for they all died before they were thirty years of age—a genuine renaissance of traditional Catholic mysticism. Their experience exhibits many close correspondences with that of the great mystics of the past; the same development of the interior life can be traced in them, and they knew at first hand some at least among those forms of spiritual consciousness which are described by Ruysbroeck, Angela of Foligno,St.Teresa, andSt.John of the Cross.
The first in time and in importance—for the others depended to a greater or less degree on her influence and example—was Thérèse Martin, who was born at Alençon in 1873 and died in 1897. The last nine years of her life were spent in the Carmelite Convent of Lisieux in Normandy; and she there wrote the spiritual autobiography,L’histoire d’une âme, which has since been translated into every European language. In her life—which shows with exceptional clearness the reality and driving power of that instinct which is known as religious vocation—and in the incidents connected with her death andcultus, we find many suggestive parallels with the histories of the historical saints. These parallels often help us to determine the true meaning of statements in those histories; indicating the possible origin of much that now appears extravagant and abnormal, and restoring to their real position in the human race men and women who dropped their living characteristics in ascending to the altars of the Church.
We notice first in Thérèse the extent to which heredity and environment contributed to the formation in her of an exclusively religious temperament. She inherited from both parents an ascetic tendency. Her father, as a young man, had sought without success to become a novice at the Great St. Bernard; her mother had wished to be a Sister of Charity. Their marriage had the character of a religious dedication; and their one wish was for children who might be consecrated to the service of God. Nine were born, of whom four died in infancy. The five girls who survived all entered the cloister, for which indeed their whole life had been a perfect preparation. The idea of marriage seems never to have occurred to any member of the family. Hence Thérèse, the youngest child, grew up in a home which was a veritable forcing-house of the spiritual life, though full of happiness and warm affection; and by it was moulded to that puritanism and other-worldliness which is characteristic of real Catholic piety. There the conception of earthly existence as a “school for saints†was taken for granted, and the supremacy of religious interests never questioned: all deeds and words, however trivial, being judged by the grief or pleasure they would give to God. Even as a tiny child, she was given a string of beads to count the “sacrifices†made each day. The Martin family lived, in fact, within a dream-world, substantially identical with the universe of mediæval piety. It was peopled with angels and demons, whose activities were constantly noted; its doors were ever open for the entry of the miraculous, its human inhabitants were the objects of the Blessed Virgin’s peculiar care, every chance happening was the result of Divine interference. For them this universe was actual, not symbolic. Their minds instinctively rejected every impression that conflicted with it; and its inconsistencies with the other—perhaps equally symbolic and less lovely—world of our daily life were unperceived. The most bizarre legends of the saints were literal facts; all relics were authentic, andmost were full of supernatural power. The Holy House of Loretto, the face ofSt.Catherine of Bologna still marked by the kiss of the Infant Christ, found in them willing and awestruck believers. Yet these crude symbols, thus literally understood, became for them the means of a real transcendence. The dominant interests of the home were truly supersensual; a vigorous spiritual life was fostered in it, marked by humility and love, true goodness, complete unselfishness, a courageous attitude towards misfortune and pain.
Thus from birth Thérèse was protected from all risk of intellectual conflict, and surrounded by harmonious contributory suggestions all tending to press her emotional life into one mould. Such a nurture could hardly fail to create either the disposition of a rebel or that of a saint: but there was in Thérèse no tendency to revolt. Her temperament—ardent, imaginative, abnormally sensitive, and psychically unstable—inclined her to the enthusiastic acceptance of religious ideas, and even in childhood she showed a fervour and devotion exceeding that of her sisters. When she was still a little girl, the two eldest left home one after the other, in order to become nuns in the Carmelite convent of Lisieux. The departure of the first, Pauline, was a crushing grief to Thérèse, at that time about nine years old; and was apparently the beginning of her own desire to be a nun. She told the Superior of the convent that she, too, intended to be a Carmelite, and wished to take the veil at once. The Reverend Mother, a woman of kindness and good sense, did not laugh; but advised her to wait until she was sixteen, and then to try her vocation. There is less absurdity than at first appears in this childish craving; for the religious type is often strangely precocious. As the tendency to music or painting may appear in earliest childhood, so the sense of vocation may awaken, long before the implications of this mysterious impulse are fully understood. Thus Elizabeth Catez, afterwards Sœur Elizabeth dela Trinité, determined to be a nun when she was seven years old, and began at this age to govern her inner life. She and Thérèse help us to understand the stories and the visions and self-dedication of the littleSt.Catherine of Siena; or those ofSt.Catherine of Genoa and Madame Guyon, who both wished at twelve years old to enter a religious order. We are faced in all such cases by the strange phenomenon of accelerated development: strongly marked in the case of Thérèse, who undoubtedly had, in spite of the great simplicity of her nature, a real genius for the spiritual life.
She had, too, and in a marked degree, the peculiarly sensitive psychic organization which is observed in many of the historic mystics. A long and severe nervous illness had followed her sister’s departure for the cloister. It was cured by a form of auto-suggestion for which many parallels can be found in the history of adult religious experience; though few in that of children of her age. This incident Thérèse has described in her memoirs with great clearness and honesty. At a crisis of the sickness, when she was reduced to utter misery and weakness and tormented by hallucinations and fears, her three sisters came to her room and knelt before the statue of the Blessed Virgin, praying for her cure. The sick child, praying too as well as she could, suddenly saw the statue take life and advance towards her with a smile. Instantly the prayer was answered, her pains and delusions left her, and she was cured. The “vision†being told—and of course accepted at face-value as a supernatural grace—marked Thérèse from this time as a privileged soul. It certainly indicated in her an abnormal suggestibility, comparable with that which is revealed by the somewhat similar incident in the life of Julian of Norwich, and was not without importance for her future development.
The religious transformation and exaltation so often experienced in adolescence is seen in Thérèse in its mostintense form. It was initiated when she was thirteen by another nervous illness, apparently brought on by a morbid brooding on her own supposed imperfections—the spiritual ailment well known to religious directors as “scrupulosityâ€â€”and it was from this period that she afterwards dated the beginning of her real spiritual life. The childish determination to become a Carmelite had now grown in strength, and when she was fourteen she broke to her father her own violent consciousness of vocation; a certitude which nothing could shake. Her inner life was at this time astonishingly mature. She was not a prig, but a sensitive and affectionate little girl; yet her autobiography is full of sayings which surprise us by their depth and wisdom, when we remember the age of the child who thought and said them. By the constant practice of small renunciations, self-denial was now habitual to her; for it was by that which she called the “little pathway†of incessant but inconspicuous sacrifices and kind deeds, and not by any abnormal austerities or devotions, that her character was formed. Though perfectly free from all spiritual pride, she was, moreover, quite certain of her own communion with the Divine order, and of the authority of the impressions which she received from it.
“En ce temps-là , je n’osais rien dire de mes sentiments intérieurs; la voie par laquelle je marchais était si droite, si lumineuse, que je ne sentais pas le besoin d’un autre guide que Jésus ... je pensais que pour moi, le bon Dieu ne se servait pas d’intermédiaire, mais agissait directement.â€
These are bold words for a young girl who had been reared in the most rigid provincial piety, and had been taught to distrust private judgment and regard her director as the representative of God. In them we see the action of that strong will, power of initiative and clear conception of her own needs and duties, which redeem her often emotional religious fervour from insipidity. It is true that she can and does express that fervour in the sentimental language whichis the least attractive element in French piety. The sense of a special relationship and special destiny which more and more possessed her, far exceeded her powers either of realization or of expression; and unfortunately impelled her to describe herself as the “fleurette,†the “petite fiancée,†even the “jouet†of Jesus, and to note in too many casual happenings evidence of “les delicatesses du bon Dieu pour moi.†Yet we cannot forget that similar declarations, equally offensive to modern taste, abound in some of the greatest historical mystics, and that their full unpleasantness is only mitigated to us by the quaint and archaic phrases in which they are expressed. Whilst no doubt these declarations represent the invasion of human desires and instincts into the field of spiritual experience, its natural craving for protection and personal love; they also witness to the mystic’s intense personal consciousness of close communion, a consciousness which far transcends the poor vocabulary and commonplace symbols through which it must be told.
Therefore we cannot dismiss Thérèse Martin as a mere victim of religious emotionalism, because her mental equipment is inadequate to her spiritual experience. When, moreover, we remember the amazing vigour and tenacity of purpose with which, when barely fifteen, this gentle and home-loving child, driven by her strong sense of vocation, planned and carried through a lifelong separation from the father she adored and the world of nature she loved, we are bound to acknowledge in her an element of greatness, a strong and an adventurous soul. With a certitude of her own duty which nothing could shake, Thérèse interviewed on her own behalf the Superior of the order, who snubbed her, and the Bishop of the diocese, who was kind but prevaricated with her; demanding from them permission to take the veil at once, instead of waiting till the usual age of twenty-one. Further, being taken by her father to Rome with a party of French pilgrims, when they were all received by the Pope she hadthe courage to address him directly—although the priest in charge of the pilgrimage forbade it—and asked for his support. The end of it was that she at last convinced the authorities of her special vocation, and was allowed to become a postulant in the most austere of all religious orders at the unheard-of age of fifteen.
Her career as a Carmelite was far from being the succession of mystical enjoyments, the basking in divine sunshine, which some imagine the contemplative life to be. She now experienced the common lot of the “proficient†in the mystic way; paying for her religious exaltation by reactions, long periods of aridity, which were doubtless due in part to psychic exhaustion. Then, in addition to the perpetual little sacrifices, self-deprivations, and penances which she imposed on herself, she seemed, as she says, to be plunged in a “terrible desert,†a “profound night†of darkness and solitude; and prayer itself became dreary and unreal. “Tout a disparu ... ce n’est plus un voile, c’est un mur qui s’éleve jusqu’aux cieux et couvre le firmament étoilé.†But an inner life which was nourished on the robust doctrine ofSt.John of the Cross could bear this deprivation with fortitude, and make of inward poverty itself a gain. Outwardly, too, her life was difficult. Her superiors seem at once to have perceived in her that peculiar quality of soul which is capable of sanctity; and since it is the ambition of every community to produce a saint, they addressed themselves with vigour to the stern task of educating Thérèse for her destiny. Still a child, sensitive and physically delicate, she was spared no opportunity of self-denial and mortification. Her most trifling deficiencies were remarked, her most reasonable desires thwarted, her good points ignored. When her health began to fail under a rule of life far beyond her strength, and the first signs of tuberculosis—that scourge of the cloister—appeared in her, the Prioress, in her ferocious zeal for souls, even refused to dispense the ailing girl from attendance atthe night-office. “Une âme de cette trempe, disait-elle, ne doit pas être traité comme une enfant, les dispenses ne sont pas faites pour elle. Laissez-la. Dieu la soutient.â€
This drastic training did its work. Thérèse had a heroic soul, though her courage and generosity found expression for the most part in small and obscure ways. She has said that she felt in herself the longing to be a soldier, an apostle, a martyr; and within the limits of the cloister, she found means of satisfying these desires. “Elle accomplissait simplement des actes héroïques,†said the Superior after her death. Determined, in her own metaphor, to be a “victime d’amour,†her brave spirit never faltered in its willing acceptance of pain. She hid her mental and physical sufferings, fought her increasing weakness, ate without hesitation the rough food which made her ill, refused every comfort and amelioration. By this hard yet humble way she rose in a few years to the heights of perfect self-conquest and moral perfection: passing through suffering to a state in which love, and total self-giving for love, was realized by her as the central secret of the spiritual life. “La charité me donna la clef de ma vocation.... Enfin, je l’ai trouvée. Ma vocation, c’est l’amour.â€
In this completed love, stretching from the smallest acts of service to the most secret experiences of the soul, she found—as every mystic has done—that unifying principle of action which alone gives meaning to life. In its light all problems were solved, and the meaning of all experiences was disclosed. So Julian of Norwich, fifteen years after her first revelation, was answered in ghostly understanding: “Wouldest thou wit thy Lord’s meaning in this thing? Wit it well, Love was his meaning. Who showed it thee? Love. What showed he thee? Love. Wherefore showed it he? For love. Hold thee therein and thou shalt wit and know more in the same; but thou shalt never know nor wit therein other thing without end.†To live in this supernatural charityis to introduce into the world of succession the steadfast values of eternity; hence this quality, so simple yet so difficult of attainment, is the one essential character of the saints. “Pour atteindre à la vie idéale de l’âme,†said Elizabeth Catez, who so greatly exceeded her fellow-Carmelite in philosophic grasp, though not in moral beauty, “je crois qu’il faut vivre dans le surnaturel, prendre conscience que Dieu est au plus intime de nous, et aller à tout avec lui: alors on n’est jamais banal, même en faisant les actions les plus ordinaires, car on ne vit pas en ces choses, on les dépasse. Une âme surnaturelle ne traite pas avec les causes secondes, mais avec Dieu seulement ... pour elle, tout se reduite à l’unité.â€
Thérese de l’Enfant-Jésus came to this consummation by way of a total and generous self-abandonment in all the daily incidents of life; a love which consecrated “les actions les plus ordinaires.†She took as her favourite saint the Curé d’Ars, because “he loved his family so deeply, and only did ordinary things.†This was the “little pathway†to the heart of Reality, on which, she thought, all might travel and none could miss the road. “Aux âmes simples, il ne faut pas des moyens compliqués.†Though the unquenchable thirst of her ardent nature for more suffering and more love did more than once express itself by way of ecstatic experience, she repudiated all abnormal “graces†and special contemplative powers. “Je ne suis qu’un pauvre petit oiseau couvert seulement d’un léger duvet; je ne suis pas un aigle, j’en ai simplement les yeux et le cœur.†Her spiritual practice became simplified as she grew in understanding. In the last years of her life the Gospels were her only book of devotion, and her prayer became “un élan du cœur, un simple regard jeté vers le ciel.†Yet the love thus expressed was no mere “divine duet.†She was not a victim of that narrow fervour which finds its satisfaction in a vertical relation with the Divine; her religion was of a distinctly social type. “Lezêle d’une Carmelite doit embrasser le monde,†she said; and this zeal showed itself, not only in the passionate love she gave to her family, but in radiant affection towards all living beings—the nuns in the convent, some of whom were extremely tiresome and even unkind, her friends and correspondents in the outside world, the animals and the birds. She always had her eye on her fellow-creatures; she wanted to help them, to show light to them, to save them. The eager service and voluntary mortifications of her life closed with eighteen months of great physical suffering. She died in September 1897, at the age of twenty-four.
Thérèse Martin had lived for nine years within the walls of a small, strictly enclosed convent in a provincial town. This building and its dreary little chapel formed the setting of her religious career. There was nothing impressive in her surroundings, nothing to satisfy those artistic instincts which she certainly possessed, to hint at the poetry and mystery of the spiritual life. Her opportunities of action had been limited on every side; her creative impulse found expression only in the writing of some conventional religious verse, and the record of her thoughts and experiences, composed not for publication, but as an act of obedience to her Superior. Prayer, the teaching of novices, the family life of the community, and a small amount of correspondence with those in the world, were the only channels through which her passionate love of humanity could flow. This record may not sound impressive. Its sequel is amazing. Students of history have often discussed the stages and the circumstances through which a simple man or woman, distinguished only by a beautiful and humble life, has been transformed by the reverence, love, and myth-making faculty of his contemporaries into a supernatural being endowed with magical powers. This transformation has happened within our own time in the person of Thérèse de l’Enfant-Jésus. This young girl, whose life was marked by no bizarre incident, who was brought up in anobscure Norman town, and deliberately shut herself up in a convent of strictest enclosure to remain—as the “healthy-minded†would say—buried alive till her death, is now loved and invoked wherever the Roman Catholic church is established. Her short and uneventful life has influenced and comforted countless other lives. Her “cause†has been introduced, and although she is not yet canonized, she is already regarded as numbered among the saints. To visit her grave in the beautiful hillside cemetery outside Lisieux, and watch the endless stream of pilgrims who come on every day of the year from all parts of the world to ask her help, to deposit letters explaining their needs, and lay on her tomb for blessing the clothes of babies or the food of the sick, is to understand what the shrine of a mediæval saint must have been like. It is to understand also something of the triumphant power of character, and of the fact that the enclosing of a radiant personality within the cloister is not burying it alive.
Although the whole of her short adult life had been passed behind the high garden walls of the convent, and after she took the veil only the members of her family had seen her—and this under the most restricted conditions—yet at the time of her death Thérèse de l’Enfant-Jésus was already known and valued by the whole town. That death was an event of importance, evoking an extraordinary demonstration of affection and reverence. The events which followed it are of deep interest. Here, in our own day, we have the swift rise and diffusion of acultusexactly similar to those which followed the deaths of the great popular saints of the Middle Ages. Every element is present; the prompt setting up of a pilgrimage, the veneration of the tomb, the distribution of relics—at the Lisieux convent cards are sold, bearing splinters and bits of straw from the cell of Thérèse—countless reports of visions, conversions, “supernatural perfumes,†and miraculous answers to prayer. The literature of the subject is already considerable, and a journal is published givingdetails of “graces†obtained by her help. The causes which lie behind such religious movements as this are still obscure; but we have in the cult of Thérèse Martin a valuable clue by which to interpret those reported from the past. Her “miracles,†in which students of psychic phenomena will find much to interest them, range from the cure of cancer to the multiplication of bank-notes, and even include the restoration of dead geranium-cuttings. Many are obviously explained by coincidence or hallucination, some are admirable examples of faith-healing. But a few, apparently supported by good evidence, seem to defy rationalistic explanation.
The cult quickly lost its local and ultimately its national character. Though French Catholicism rightly claims Thérèse as its peculiar possession, and devotion to her is probably more general in France than elsewhere, yet she is now venerated in every country in the world, and distributes her favours without regard to nationality. Scotland and America in particular have numerous stories of her benevolent intervention, at least as evidential as much that is offered to us by the exponents of spiritualism. Her legend is in active formation, and many picturesque incidents were added to it during the war. She is even said to have appeared at the British Headquarters, and given advice at a critical moment of the campaign. A large proportion of the Catholic soldiers who fought for France probably placed themselves under her protection, and attribute their safety to her care.
A little time before her death, she said to her sister Pauline, “Une seule attente fait battre mon cœur; c’est l’amour que je recevrai et celui que je pourrai donner.... Je veux passer mon ciel à faire du bien sur la terre,†and again, “Je compte bien ne pas rester inactive au ciel, mon désir est de travailler encore.†In these sayings, so unlike in their vigorous activism the conventional aspirations of the devout, we have probably the germinal point of hercultus. It has come to be believed that this simple and loving spirit, who passed from the bodywith so many generous longings unfulfilled, is indeed spending her heaven in doing good; and the deeds attributed to her are just those practical and friendly acts of kindness, through which during life she expressed and perfected her spirit of love.
IILUCIE-CHRISTINE
Those students of mysticism who feel that the purely cloistered type of spirituality, as seen in Thérèse Martin and Elizabeth Catez, is too remote from the common experience to be actual to us, may find something with which they can sympathize and from which they can learn, in the self-revelations of the remarkable contemplative who is known under the pseudonym of Lucie-Christine.
This lady, whose spiritual journal was published in 1912, was a married woman of the leisured class, leading the ordinary life of a person of her type and position. She was born in 1844 and married in 1865. She had five children. At forty-three she became a widow, and in 1908, after nineteen years of blindness, she died at the age of sixty-four. Nothing could have been more commonplace than her external circumstances. On the religious side she was an exact and fervent Roman Catholic, accepting without question the dogmas and discipline of the Church, and diligent in all the outward observances of conventional French piety. Her time was spent in family and social duties, sometimes in Paris, sometimes in her country home; and she appeared to her neighbours remarkable only for her goodness, gentleness, and love of religion. Yet her inward life—unsuspected by any but her parish priest, for whom her journal was written—had a richness and originality which entitle her to a place among the Catholic mystics, and often help us to understand the meaning and character of the parallel experiences which those mysticsdescribe. The value for study of a contemplative who is at once so modern and so classic is obvious. This value is increased by the fact that for many years Lucie-Christine knew nothing of mystical literature, and was ignorant even of the names of the spiritual states which her journal so faithfully describes. Therefore in her case unconscious imitation, which accounts for much so-called mystical experience, appears to be excluded.
Her journal—at present our only source of information—covers thirty-eight years: from 1870 to 1908. The first twelve years, however, are only represented by fragmentary notes, put together in 1882; when Lucie-Christine, at the suggestion of her confessor, began to keep a detailed record of her religious life. Whatever view we may take of its theological value, this record is certainly a psychological document of the first class. It is the work of a woman of marked intelligence; temperamentally philosophic, and with great intuitional gifts. The short memoir prefixed to the French edition tells us that even as a child she showed unusual qualities; was grave, thoughtful, and to some extent “psychic,†being subject to flashes of clairvoyance, and premonitions of important and tragic events. This peculiarity, which she disliked and never spoke of, persisted through life; and its presence in her helps us to understand how the many stories of abnormal power possessed by the mystics first arose.
Her character was by no means of that detached and inhuman type which is supposed to be proper to religious exaltation. She was ardent and impressionable, gave love and craved for it; her qualities and faults were essentially of a lovable kind. She reveals herself in her journal as sensitive, idealistic, and affectionate; somewhat unpractical, very easily wounded, tempted to irritability, and inclined to worry. “The excessive wish to be loved, appreciated, admired by those whom I love,†was one of the temptations against which, as a young woman, she felt it necessary to pray:another was the longing for enjoyment, for personal happiness. It was only after eight years of intermittent mystical experience that she learned the secret of inward peace: to “lose her own interests in those of God, and receive a share in His interests in exchange.†Though the “activity and practical capacity of Martha†never came naturally to her, she was yet a splendid wife and mother. Even in the years when her inner life was passed in almost continuous contemplation, she never neglected human duties for superhuman joys; but planned and shared the amusements of her boys and girls, wrote and rehearsed the plays which they acted, and watched with care over every detail of their lives.
Her spiritual life developed gradually and evenly. There is no trace in it of any psychic storm or dramatic conversion. She grew up in a religious home, and even in childhood seems to have been attracted to silent devotion or “mental prayer.†As a girl she was a vital, impulsive creature, full of eager enthusiasms. That deep, instinctive longing for Perfection which makes one man an artist, another a philosopher, and another a saint, showed itself early in a passionate worship of all beautiful things. “Tout ce que je connaissais de beau me passionnait et entraînait toute mon âme. La première vue de la mer et des falaises m’arracha des larmes.... Je ne pouvais trouver l’expression qui traduisît assez l’ardeur dont le beau enflammait mon imagination, et je ne voyais pas d’inconvénients à ces entraînements excessifs; au contraire, je m’y livrais de toute la force de ma volonté. Infortunée, mon âme en revenait cependant avec le sentiment du vide et de l’insuffisance, et c’est alors qu’elle rejetait son activité dévorante sur l’idéal qui lui réservait tant de dangers! Moins altérée du beau, je me fusse peut-être contentée des choses réelles, mais comme le coureur, lancé dans un fol élan, dépasse le but, ainsi mon âme s’élançait vers le beau à peine aperçu et cherchait encore au delà .â€
In this important passage we see the true source of Lucie’smysticism. It was the craving for an absolute and unchanging loveliness on which to expend her large-hearted powers of adoration and self-giving, which led her like the Platonists through visible beauty to its invisible source. She had, as she says of herself in a sudden flash of ironic wit, “le cÅ“ur assez mal placé pour trouver Dieu plus aimable que le monde, et l’esprit assez étroit pour se contenter de l’Infiniâ€; but it was not until youth was nearly over, and she had been married for eight years, that she found what she sought. One day, when she was meditating as usual on a passage in theImitation of Christ, she saw and heard within her mind the words “Dieu seul!â€â€”summing up and answering in one phrase the vague efforts and questions of her growing mystical sense, and offering to the hungry psyche the only satisfaction of desire. As Fox was released from his conflict by the inner voice which cried, “There is one only who can speak to thy condition,†so this inner voice, says Lucie (whom it greatly astonished), “fut à la fois une lumière, un attrait, et une force. Une lumière qui me fit voir comment je pouvais être complètement à Dieu seul dans le monde, et je vis que jusque-là je ne l’avais pas bien comprit. Un attrait par lequel mon cÅ“ur fut subjugué et ravi. Une force qui m’inspira une résolution généreuse et me mit en quelque sorte dans les mains les moyens de l’exécuter, car le propre de ces paroles divines est d’opérer ce qu’elles disent.â€
We see at once the complete and practical character of her reaction to the divine; the promptitude with which she makes the vital connection between intuition and act.St.Teresa said that the object of the spiritual marriage was “the incessant production of work.†So for Lucie-Christine that sure consciousness of the Presence of God which now became frequent, “clothing and inundating†her as she sat alone at her sewing or took part in some social activity, called her above all to “faire les petites choses du dévouement journalier avec amourâ€; conquering her natural irritability and dislikefor the boredoms and unrealities of a prosperous existence. “N’avoir jamais l’air ennuyé des autres. Que de fois je manque à ceci avec les pauvres enfants. Vous êtes ennuyeux! C’est bien vite dit! Est-ce une amabilité divine?â€
More and more, as her mystical consciousness grew, the life of contemplation became her delight; and it was plainly a real trial to be distracted from it for trivial purposes. In company, or busied with household duties, she went for hours with “her soul absorbed, its better part rapt in God.†She “tried to appear ordinary,†and made excuses if her abstraction was observed; but there are a few entries in her journal which will give pleasure to those who condemn mysticism as an “anti-social type of religion.†“Nous avons été nous promener, quatorze. Je remarque que d’aller ainsi avec plusieurs ‘Marthes’ hommes ou femmes, cela ne fait rien. On laisse discourir, on met un mot de temps en temps, mais, en définitive, on demeure bien libre et l’oraison va toute seule. Mais avec une seule Marthe, que c’est terrible! La tête-à -tête oblige à causer presque tout le temps.â€
When Lucie wrote this, ten years after her first illuminative experience, she was far advanced in contemplation. She had known that direct and ineffable vision of God “Himself the True, the Good, the Beautiful; all things being nothing save by Him†which is characteristic—though she knew it not—of the unitive way: known too the corresponding experience of dereliction, when the door which had opened on Eternity seemed tightly closed. It would be tedious to analyze in detail the rich profusion of mystic states which she had already exhibited: the degrees of contemplation, ecstasies, visions and voices, all the forms taken by her growing intuition of the Transcendent. Many of these can be matched in the writings of the great mystics. Again and again as we read her, we are reminded of Angela of Foligno, Ruysbroeck, Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Genoa, even of Plotinus: yet Lucie-Christine was at this time ignorant of mystical literature,and only in later life found with amazement descriptions of her own experiences in the works of the great contemplatives.
These experiences had a wide range. Some we are justified in regarding as invasions from her deeper self; coming to the rescue of the often distracted surface personality, and correcting the impressions of the outer world by its own intimations of Eternity. Thus, in 1875, she confesses that being particularly worried by a number of people, the Divine voice said to her, “Ma fille, il n’y a que toi et moi.†She replied: “Seigneur, et les autres?†The voice said: “Pour chaque âme en ce monde il n’y a que moi et elle, toutes les autres âmes et toutes choses ne sont rien pour elle que par moi et pour moi,†and by this timely reminder of the one Reality in whose life she lived, and by and in whom alone all other lives are real, she was recalled to her inner poise.
In assessing the value of this, and many other of her revelations, we have to remember that Lucie-Christine was a fervent and exact Churchwoman. Her belief was literal. She felt no discord between traditional Christianity of the most concrete kind and the freedom of her own communion with God. The fruits of that communion were often expressed by her in theological terms, and the special atmosphere and tendencies of French Catholicism certainly affected the form of many of her contemplations. Thus at one end of the scale her passionate devotion to the Person of Christ, and the fact that her religious practice centred in the Eucharist, sometimes resulted in visions of a distinctly anthropomorphic type. In these, her intuition of God’s presence translated themselves into hallucinatory images of the Face of Christ, or of His eyes looking at her; or photisms, which she explained to herself as the radiance emanating from His person. As we all know, such dramatizations of mystical emotion are comparatively commonplace. The elements from which the self constructs them are by no means all of a spiritual kind; and experienced mystics agree in regarding them with muchsuspicion. A careful study of Lucie-Christine’s journal forces us to admit, that the deliberate passivity which she cultivated often placed her at the mercy of her instinctive nature; and that its hidden wishes sometimes took a devotional form. To this source, too, we must refer those “obsessions and temptationsâ€â€”in other words, uprushes from the lower centres—by which she was often attacked during contemplation, and also the occasionally sentimental and emotional character of her reactions to the Divine.
These objections, however, do not apply to the remarkable “metaphysical visionsâ€â€”sharp onsets of real transcendental consciousness—in which her innate passion for the Absolute found satisfaction. Then, as she says, God seemed to “put aside all intermediaries between Himself and the soul;†and “bathed and irradiated by the Divine substance†she became “aware of the Divine Abyss,†or perceived, as Julian of Norwich did, “the Universe in a point,†swallowed up in the simple yet overwhelming sight of God. Here lie, for us, the real interest and value of Lucie-Christine’s confessions. She shares with Angela of Foligno and a few other historical mystics the double apprehension of the Divine Nature under its personal and impersonal forms; and as both utterly transcendent to, yet completely immanent in, the human soul. In her descriptions of these visions, this woman unread in philosophy displays a grasp of the philosophic basis of religion which would do credit to a trained theologian. Thus she says, “Il n’y a pas, ce me semble, de vue intérieure qui égale celle de l’essence divine. Mon âme était comme environnée de la substance divine en laquelle elle voyait ce caractère essentiel qui nous est révelé par le mystère de la Sainte Trinité, c’est-à -dire qu’il y a en Dieu l’unité et la distinction, le tout et le particulier, et je sentais combien c’est folie de chercher quelque chose en dehors de lui.†Again, “Étant profondément unie à lui dans la Sainte Communion, je vis Dieu en tant qu’il est le souverain bien, et je compris en même temps que le maln’est que la négation du bien, un purnéant.... Dans cette vue intellectuelle, je compris aussi combien sera grande la confusion des pécheurs quand ils seront jugés, et qu’ils verront que tout le mal qu’ils ont aimé, préconisé, adoré, se réduit au néant! Avoir aimé le néant, avoir vécu pour lui, et perdre pour lui l’Etre éternel!†Here Lucie’s view of sin is that characteristic of all mystics; who can seldom be persuaded, however orthodox they may be in other respects, that anything which is not good is real. We remember how Julian of Norwich, also a natural contemplative of philosophic temperament, says, “I saw not sin; for I believe it has no manner of substance nor part of being.â€
As an analyzer of her own psychological states, Lucie-Christine had something of that genius whichSt.Teresa possessed in a supreme degree; and she has, perhaps, an added value for us because she speaks not from the past nor from the cloister, but out of the Paris of our own day. We owe to her one of our most vivid descriptions of that apprehension of Eternal Life—the immersion of our durational existence in the Absolute Life of God—which Von Hügel regards as the fundamental religious experience. “J’ai observé,†she says, “que pendant l’oraison passive et surtout dans l’état d’union, l’âme perd le sentiment de la durée. Il n’y a plus pour elle de succession de moments, mais un moment unique, et j’ai cru comprendre qu’étant élevée à cet état, l’âme y vit selon le mode de vivre de l’éternité, où il n’y a point de durée, point de passé ni d’avenir, mais un moment unique, infini.†We have again to remember that the woman who wrote this had then no acquaintance with the classics of mysticism. It is her own impression which she is trying to register.
Again, consider this account of the state of divine union as she had known it: “L’âme va prier, elle s’élance pour franchir la distance qui la sépare de l’Infini, et cette distance elle ne la trouve plus! Elle veut aller à vous, mon Dieu, et vous êtes en elle!... Perdue en vous, elle oublie ellemêmeet tout le reste, elle ne sait plus comment elle vit, ni comment elle aime; elle ne voit plus que Vous seul. Encore ne peut elle paspenserqu’elle vous voit et vous adore; car ce serait se voir elle-même, et en de tels moments elle ne se voit pas, elle ne voit que Vous. Elle connaît et aime par un mode nouveau et incompréhensible, qui est en dehors et infiniment au-dessus de l’exercice ordinaire de ses facultés. Elle sent que l’opération de Dieu a pris la place de la sienne et que c’est Dieu même qui opère en elle la connaissance et l’amour.â€
This sense of complete surrender to a larger life and greater power, of which love is the very substance and ground, is characteristic of nearly all high mystical experience; and the literature of contemplation would furnish many parallels to all that Lucie tells us of it. In this state, as she says in another place, “the thirst of the spirit is suddenly fulfilled by the Infinite,†and “God takes possession of the ground of the soul, without passage of time or feeling of space.†Then, the bewilderment and unrest produced in us by the disharmonies of daily life are healed. “Là où tout raisonnement échoue,†she says in one of her most beautiful passages; “où l’âme est tellement troublée qu’elle ne saurait même expliquer ce qui la trouble, la divine presence paraît, et soudain le vertige cesse et la paix renaît avec la lumière.†Consciousness, ceasing more or less completely its normal correspondences with the temporal order, then becomes aware of the eternal and spiritual universe in which we really live.
Such an attitude to Eternity was a marked characteristic of Lucie-Christine’s mysticism. Often, it produced in her the complete mono-ideism of ecstasy; and she describes the oncoming, content, and passing of these states with a minuteness which makes her journal a valuable document for the psychologist. Constantly, the intense awareness of the Divine Presence persisted through the many duties and activities of the day; “like a grave and tender note, dominating all the modulations of the keyboard of my exterior life.†She isnot afraid to use the most violent metaphors, the most concrete images, in her efforts to express the intensity and reality of this spiritual life that she leads, this divine companionship that she enjoys. “I am nourished by God’s substance.†“I breathe the divine essence.†“The presence of God is so clear that faith is not faith—it is sight.†“The soul plays within God, as within a limitless universe.†“The Divine action penetrates and transforms my adoration. It is the Divine Being who thinks, loves, and lives within me.†None of the mystics have gone further than this in their claims; but it is significant that nearly all the greatest go as far.
Yet in all this, Lucie-Christine is strictly Evangelical. She was a Christian first, and a mystic afterwards. Though her expressions may seem startling, her mysticism never goes beyond that ofSt.John andSt.Paul; and her most Platonic utterances can be justified by the New Testament. But the Pauline and Johannine teachings on the soul’s union with Christ are not for her merely doctrinal statements. They are vivid descriptions of states she has personally known, when her consciousness truly penetrated to that “région d’amour, région unique, où l’âme trouve un autre jour, une autre vie, un autre air respirable, où du moins tous ces éléments latents se trouvent manifestés, où Dieu seul apparaît, et tout le reste rentre dans l’ombre.â€
Such a personal and overwhelming consciousness of “the greatness, power, and simplicity of Godâ€â€”an all-inclusive unity which the unity of her spirit could comprehend—was the central interest of her life. She certainly tended to that which Baron von Hügel has called “the vertical relation†with the Divine. Nevertheless, this theocentric existence did not involve either the limp passivity or the spiritual selfishness with which it is sometimes charged. On the ethical side it committed her to a constant moral discipline; for her ardent and impulsive temperament reacted too easily to every externalstimulus. “I must give up pleasure—never work for my own enjoyment.†“My one prayer is, that I may not feel joy and grief so vividly: that I may feel only Thee.†This deliberate unselfing and concentration on God so strengthened the fibres of character that she was able to bear with quietness her many personal sorrows, and the long years of blindness—a bitter cross for that keen lover of beauty—which closed her life. Yet it did not muffle her in the unattractive folds of “holy indifference.†She loved her family devotedly, and felt without mitigation the anxieties and griefs of human life. Her attitude to others was generous and sympathetic. God, she says, gives Himself to us that we may give Him again. His unique light must pass through the soul as through a prism; breaking up into the many colours of word and deed, forgiveness and good counsel, prayer and alms, self-forgetfulness and self-giving. Though exceedingly reserved about her spiritual experiences, which were only known to her confessor, the influence of these experiences was felt by those among whom she lived; and her house was known by them as “the house of peace.â€
Moreover, her love for the institutional and sacramental side of religion saved her from many of the dangers and extravagances of individualism. It gave her a framework within which her own intuitions could find their place; and a valid symbolism through which she could interpret to herself the most rarefied experiences of her soul. She is an example of the way in which the mystic seems able to achieve the universal without losing or rejecting its particular expression: assimilating symbols of an amazing crudity without in any way impairing her vision of truth. The conflict between that vision and the concrete objectives of popular devotion was ignored by her; as it is generally ignored by practical mystics of the institutional type. She, who had touched the Absolute in her contemplations, was yet deeply impressed by the drama of the Church; by its ceremonies, holy places, festivals, consecrations.Her inner life was nourished by its sacraments. She displayed the power—so characteristic of Christian mysticism at its best—of transcending without rejecting the formulæ of belief as commonly understood; of remaining within, and drawing life from, the organism, without any diminution in the proper liberty of the soul.
Thus, seen as a whole, Lucie-Christine’s spiritual life has a richness and balance which reflects the richness and balance of her own nature; for an impoverished or one-sided character was never yet found capable of a fully developed and fruitful mysticism. We see her from girlhood seeking to satisfy her innate longing for reality; urged on the one hand by the artist’s craving for perfect loveliness, on the other by the philosopher’s instinct for Eternity. When the veil was lifted, and the inner voice said, “God only!†she found at once the reconciliation and the fulfilment of these two desires. The long and varied experience which followed was no more than an unfolding of the content of those words. They revealed to her the Substance of all beauty and truth; shining in that world of appearance which she loved to the last with an artist’s passion, yet ever abiding unchanged in that world of pure being which she touched in her contemplations “above all feeling, image, and idea.†Because of this double outlook on reality, her mysticism was both transcendental and sacramental. It irradiated the natural world, and also the symbols of religion, with that simple light of Eternity wherein she found “all beauties known and unknown, all harmonies natural and supernatural.†Lucie-Christine makes clear to us, as few mystics have done, the immense transfiguration of ordinary life which comes from such an extension of consciousness; when “the veil suddenly drops, God reveals Himself, and the soulknowsexperimentally that which she knew not before.†Her journal is full of passages in which its joy and splendour are described. I take one written in a time of great mental and physical suffering, when the cruel deprivations of blindnesswere already closing in on her, and the two beings she loved best—her husband and her youngest daughter—had lately been taken from her by death. “Figurez-vous un pauvre prisonnier au fond d’un cachot renfermé et obscur, voyant tout à coup s’entr’ouvrir la voûte de ce cachot, et par là recevant la lumière du soleil, et aspirant avec force l’air du dehors qui lui arrive embaumé des senteurs de la vie et de la chaleur de l’atmosphère resplendissante. Ainsi mon âme s’ouvrait, et buvait Dieu! ... mon âme aspirait et buvait la vie même de la Trinité Sainte, et se sentait revivre, et n’avait plus aucun mal.â€