MYSTICS
803
MYSTICS
also, was one of the most bitter persecutors of Madame Giiyoii, and succeeded iu procuring the public condem- natioa of her writings. Feneloii was for a time con- joined with Bossuet in opposing Guyon, but all the while he was conscious that his own opinions did not differ from hers. At length, in 1G97, he openly avowed his sympathy with the sentiments of the Mystics in a work which, under the name of the Maxims of the Siniit'^jV.'a^ deviited to an incjiury as to the teachings of the Churcli on the doctrines of pure love, of mystical union, and of perfection. The publication of this trea- tise gave rise to a lengthened and angry controversy. Bossuet sought to invoke the vengeance of the govern- ment upon his heretical brother, and he had even hoped to call down upon him the fulminations of the pope. In the first object he was successful ; in the second he was, for a time at least, disappointed. A war of pam- phlets and treatises now raged at Paris, the chief com- batants being Bossuet on the one side and Fenelon on the other. The Maxims were censured bj'^ the Sor- bonne, and their author was persecuted by the king of France ; but pope Innocent XII declined for a time to pronounce a sentence of condemnation upon Fenelon, of whom he had been accustomed to say that he had erred through an excess of love to God. At length, with the utmost reluctance, and in measured terms, he sent forth the much expected anathema, and Fenelon submitted to the decision of the Roman see. Madame Guyon, after a long life of persecution, thirty-seven years of which were spent in prison, died in 1717. Among the Quietists of the 17 th century may be men- tioned Madame Bourignon and her accomplished disci- ple, Feter Poiret; and among those of later times, the fascinating jMystic, Madame de Krlidener.
Vaughan, in his work, Houis with the Bfystics, insti- tutes a comparison between the Mystics of France and Germany up to this time, and is led thus to comment on the characteristics of these two exponents of mysti- cism : " Speaking generally, it may be said that France exhibits the mysticism of sentiment, Germany the mys- ticism of thought. The French love to generalize and to classify. An arrangement which can be expressed by a word, a principle which can be crystallized into a sparkling maxim, they will applaud. But with them conventionalism reigns paramount — society is ever pres- ent to the mind of the individual — their sense of the ludicrous is exquisitely keen. The German loves ab- stractions for their own sake. To secure popularity for a visionary error in France, it must be lucid and elegant as the language — it must be at least an ingenious and intelligible falsehood; but in Germany the most gro- tesque inversions of thought and of expression will be found no hinderance to its acceptability, and the most hopeless obscurity may be pronounced its highest merit. In this respect German philosophy sometimes resembles Lycophron, who was so convinced that unintelligibility was grandeur as to swear he would hang himself if a man were found capable of understanding his play of Cassandra. Almost every later German Mystic has been a secluded student — almost every Mystic of mod- ern France has been a brilliant conversationalist. The genius of mysticism rises in Germany in the clouds of the solitary pipe; in France it is a fashionable Ariel, who hovers in the drawing-room, and hangs to the pendants of the glittering chandelier. If Jacob Bcihrne had appeared in France, he must have counted dis- ciples by units, where in Germany he reckoned them by hundreds. If Madame Guyon had been born in Ger- many, rigid Lutheranism might have given her some annoyance; but her earnestness would have redeemed her enthusiasm from ridicule, and she would have lived and died the honored precursor of German pietism."
The modern mysticism of Germany is chiefly re- markable for its excessive irveligiousness, and its close alliance with a congeries of metaphysical clouds, mis- named philosophjr, which, by essaying to 'pass beyond the limits of the human faculties, turns day-dreams into
logical systems, and resolves all truth and all religion into the discovery that there is no God, or that God is but a name for the universe. The infidelity which in England took the form of natural religion, and in France that of ribaldry and ridicule, assumed in Germany the garb of speculation and of sentimental feeling. To the speculations of Kant, of Fichte, and of Schelling, as well as to the claims of divine revelation, Friedrich Henry Jacobi, in his work on Divine Things, opposed that in- tuitive and immediate knowledge of divine things which he denominated faith, mental feeling, or reason, and which has acquired for his philosophy the name of mysticism. It is a revival of the reveries of Bohme, of the Gnostics, and of the Orientals. Passing through such modifications as it could receive from the learned piety of Schleiermacher, the critical acumen of De Wette, the poetry of Novalis, and the picturesque gen- ius of Carlyle, we now find it exciting to something like vitality the negative theology of Unitarianism in America and in England. By the side of these specu- lative Mystics we find also in modern times the imag- inative Mystics, whose system is less the invention of something new and false than the perversion of what is old and true. To this branch of mysticism belongs the mystical interpretation of the Scriptures, the originator of which, as we have seen, is supposed to have been Philo the Jew, and the character of which pervaded the writ'- ings of Hermes, Justin, Clemens of Alexandria, Orlgen, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrosius, Jerome, Augustine, Greg- ory the Great, Bede, INIaurus, and Hugo de St. Caro.