Justification by faith might not be taught, but justification by works was cast aside as unworthy of the truly spiritual man. In all this there was the germ of a rebellion as defiant as that of Luther. If the inner light was a direct inspiration from God, it superseded the commands of the Holy See and, under such impulse, private judgement was to be followed, irrespective of what the Church might ordain. The mystic, who considered himself to be communing directly with God and who held meditation and mental prayer to be the highest of religious acts, was apt to feel himself released from ecclesiastical precepts and to regard with indifference, if not with contempt, the observances enjoined by the Church as essential to salvation. ![]() ![]() That it should eventually be so regarded was inevitable. The condemnation, by the Council of Vienne in 1312, of the tenets of the so-called Begghards respecting impeccability was carried into the body of canon law and thus was rendered familiar to jurists, when mysticism came to be regarded as dangerous and was subjected to the Inquisition. Zealots too there were who taught the pre-eminent holiness of nudity and, in imitation of the follies of early Christian ascetics, assumed to triumph over the lusts of the flesh by exposing themselves to the crucial temptation of sleeping with the other sex and indulging in lascivious acts. Master Eckhart, the founder of German mysticism, was prosecuted for sharing in these venturesome speculations and, if the twenty-eight articles condemned by John XXII were correctly drawn from his writings, he admitted the common divinity of man and God and that, in the sight of God, sin and virtue are the same. The followers of Amaury of BÈne, who came to be popularly known in Germany as Begghards and Beguines, invented the term Illuminism to describe the condition of the soul suffused with divine light and held that any one, thus filled with the Holy Ghost, was impeccable, irrespective of the sins which he might commit he was simply following the impulses of the Spirit which can do no sin. Yet there were dangers in the pursuit of the via purgativa and the via illuminativa. The connection is well illustrated by the Umbilicarii, the pious monks of Mount Athos who, by prolonged contemplation of their navels, found their souls illuminated with light from above. These spiritual marvels are reduced to the common-places of psychology by modern researches into hypnotism and auto-suggestion. If Cardinal Jacques de Vitry is to be believed, the nuns of LiÉge, in the thirteenth century, were largely given to these mystic raptures of one of them he relates that she often had twenty-five ecstasies a day, while others passed years in bed, dissolved in divine love and Richard Rolle, the Hermit of Hampole, who missed his deserved canonization, was fully acquainted with the superhuman delights of union with God. ![]() Bonaventura, John Tauler, John of Rysbroek, Henry Suso, Henry Herp, John Gerson and many others. ![]() These supernal joys continued to be the reward of those who earned them by disciplining the flesh, and the virtues of mental prayer, in which the soul lost consciousness of all earthly things, were taught by a long series of doctors-Richard of Saint Victor, Joachim of Flora, St. Paul gave to these beliefs the sanction of his own experience Tertullian describes the influence of the Holy Spirit on the devotee in manifestations which bear a curious similitude to those which we shall meet in Spain, and the anchorites of the Nitrian desert were adepts of the same kind to whom all the secrets of God were laid bare. Passing through ecstasy into trance, it was admitted to the secrets of God, it enjoyed revelations of the invisible universe, it acquired foreknowledge and wielded supernatural powers. T HE belief that, by prolonged meditation and abstraction from the phenomenal world, the soul can elevate itself to the Creator, and can even attain union with the Godhead, has existed from the earliest times and among many races.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |