the universe; as the crowning effort of creation, he em- bodies in himself the future recapitulation of all things ! in God. Substantial union with the Deity is only pos- sil)le in human nature: and it was made possible to all by the iniion of manhood and Godhead in Christ. Thereby man's spirit soars up to God through the en- ergy of the will, and the incarnation of the Word is I perpetuated in tiie individual. By means of his own ' free will man may be raised more and more above the ' trammels of the body, and be formed in God. As God | is man by incarnation, so man through grace is divinely formed, and is one with God. God through love be- came man; man through love, and by virtue of the incarnation, becomes God. It is not once for all, but by an indefectible continuance in all and through all, the whole mass of humanity, that the mystery of the incarnation is perfected. These opinions were not held only by their author. The writings of Maximus, with Erigena's translation of Dionysius, circulated freely, and among the theologians of the West helped to raise scho- lastic thought from its dry dialectics, and to create a taste for spiritual contemplation. Thej^ even reached the secluded monks in their cells, and led them to spec- ulate so boldly that they fell into the wildest extrava- gances. One of the most favorable examples of this raediajval monastic tendency is to be found in St. Ber- nard, of Clairvaux, who, in his deep appreciation of things iniseen, stands forth in strong contrast with the materialism of Abelard and Gilbert de la Poree, for he went so far as to identify his own thoughts with the mind of God. Full of monastic prepossessions, Bernard spurned the flesh, and sought to rise by abstraction into the immediate vision of heavenly things. He de- [ nounced reason and the dialectics of the schools. Two j canons of St. Victoire, selected apparently for their kin- dred tone of mystic thought — Hugo de St. Victoire be- ing of Saxon, Kichard of Irish extraction — did not, however, like St. Bernard, oppose scholasticism, but rather threw a fervor into the theology of the schools, the cold reasoning of which was seen by them to chill down religious warmth. The conception of Hugo on every other subject was " moulded by his theology, and that theology is throughout sacramental" (Maurice, Mtdiirnil rhilosophy, iv, 74). Mysticism, as applied to thi.s school, means a deep appreciation of the things of faith, a realization by the spirit of the unseen world, and is very far from implying the unintelligible mus- ings of the enthu>iast, or any other '' cold, formal gene- ralization of a later ]ierii>d" (^laurice, Mcdicer. Phil, iv, 41). Fuller, in his Church History, speaking of this period of mysticism, tpiaintly says: "The schoolmen principally employed themselves in knotty and thorny (juestions of divinity; indeed, as such who live in Eon- don and like populous places, having but little ground for their founclations to build houses on, may be said to enlarge the hrcndlh of their houses in hnyhl, so the schoolmen of this age, lacking the latitude of general learning and language, thought to enlarge their active minds by mounting up, so improving their small bot- tom with towering speculations — thought some of things mystical that mii/ht not, more of things dilHcult that could not, most of things curious that need not be known to us." Indeed, the schoolman and the Mystic were at this time generally regarded as formidable antagonists.
Yet it is apparent now that the schoolman and the Slystic are not so constantly antagonistic as has been supposed, and are assuredly alike in one respect— for the buildings of the latter, with foundations both very small and very insufficient, rise into the very clouds. We wish that the architectural analog}' could be carried further, and that a Theological and Scientific Building Act could forbid the erections of theories above a certain height without a proportionate solidity of foundation. At the head of the Mystics of this time stands Hugo. Yet it was not his but Walter's mysticism which was in direct antagonism with the scholastic system, his Contra quatuor Luhyrinthos Gallia being a running in- vective against the principles developeil by the four principal Galilean schoolmen — Peter Abelard, Gilbert de la Poree, Peter Lombard, and Peter of Poictiers. Joachim a Floris opposed an apocalyptic mysticism to the dialectical theology of the school. In Bonaventura and Gerson the mystic and dialectic elements flowed on once more in harmonious action. In the 14th cen- tury the mystic tone given by the Ilesychast monks of Mount Athos to the Greek Church was ajiprovcd by three councils held on the subject at Constantinople — A.D. 1341, 1347, and 1350, They drew their inspiration froin the writings of Maximus, the annotator of the Celestial Hierarchi/. In the controversy that arose in the Greek Church, Nicholas Cabasilas (archbishop of Thessalonica, A.D. 1354) stood forth as the Ilesychast champion, and his Seven Discourses of Life in Christ is one of the most effective works that mystical theology has produced. The mysticism of St. Hildegard in the 12th century, of the Swedish saint Brigitta and of Catharine de Sienna in the 14th, all form part of the same wave of thought. Paulicianism» the remote germ of the Waldensian and Albigensian sects, was rooted in a dualistic mysticism; and the Quietists of the 17th century were still true to the Alombrado stock from which they sprang.