IT would be difficult to conceive of a more striking contrast than that presented by the period with which we were dealing in the last chapter and the period which has now to be considered. The age of S. Bernard was not only an age of religious unity. It was an age when religious unity was a prevailing instinct and had become a settled habit. It was an age when religious unity was not imposed by any external authority, but was the result and expression of an internal harmony. The society which is characterised by such harmony has within itself a vital principle of authority. In it authority has as yet no need to assert itself, to call attention to, or vindicate, its claims. It exists diffusedly as, and with, the general consent of its members. Now, there are two characteristics about the religious society which possesses this diffused authority, both of which are conspicuous in the Church of the early Middle Ages. The first is a clear recognition, shared in alike by its official rulers and by those whom they rule, of what the society stands for, of what that life-principle is which has ultimate [73] and supereminent authority within it. And the second is the large freedom, claimed by the members of the society and admitted by the society in its members, in giving effect, according to their capacity, to the objects for which the society stands. The mediæval Church was a society pronouncedly characterised in both these ways. No member of it, from the Pope to the humblest layman, doubted that its prevailing purpose was to extend and deepen Divine justice among men. Its official authority had a sanction in the general belief that it was invested with a Divine charisma, or special grace, for the more effectual procuring of that end. Every offender against the Divine justice in Christendom bowed himself in the end before that authority and recognised its judgment as the just sentence of an outraged and offended God. But if that official authority at any time clearly failed in the fulfilment of its function, if it failed to render justice or was reasonably suspect of conniving at injustice, it was not only open to the reproof of those whose superior sanctity gave them the clear right to reprove it, but, further, it usually accepted that reproof and often canonised those who administered it. We have seen with what freedom Bernard reproved even zealous Popes like Innocent II. and Eugenius III. for tolerating abuses which it would have been impossible for any but the strongest to remove--and they were not strong--and how as long as they lived they invited a continuance of that faithful dealing from the humble monk. And [74] a whole century after S. Bernard we have the instance of that terrible indictment of the Papal Court in a sermon preached before Innocent IV. at Lyons by our own Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln. More than a century later still there is again the holy boldness of that poor uneducated Italian peasant woman, Catherine of Siena, who did more than anyone else to release the Papacy from the Babylonian captivity of Avignon before she died at the age of thirty-three. In the Middle Ages it was the saint, the man or woman marked by conspicuous zeal for the triumph of the Divine justice, who spoke the final and decisive word in the ears of Christendom. He or she, however humble in station, though often, as in the case of S. Catherine, wholly uneducated, was invested with a Divine authority, questioned by none, acclaimed by all, to indict official authority when it became false to its Divine mission and to recall it from its practical apostasy. We grievously misread the story of the mediæval Papacy when we ascribe its strength to the slavish submission of an ignorant Christendom to its arbitrary decrees. Its real strength lay in its own ultimate submission to a judgment pronounced by the humblest voice in Christendom, if that voice was clearly the utterance of a life inspired by the Divine wisdom and holiness.

      But all this had changed by the dawn of the sixteenth century. The highest official authority within the Church had grown weak by its own defection from the Divine ideal which it [75] represented. It had wantonly forfeited the confidence and respect of the Christian multitudes. The universal belief in the mission of the Church as an instrument of Divine justice and in its official authority as supremely entrusted with the application of this justice to human affairs--this same belief, I say, which had once held up the Papacy to the high level of its duty, was now ebbing away into a total despair both of its willingness to recognise and of its competence to fulfil that duty. More than a half of Christendom had risen in open revolt against it. Of that revolted section considerable portions had already, by the middle of the sixteenth century, organised themselves into independent societies as the sole hope of preserving the Christian ideal of the Church. If the remainder was to be retained or recovered to the Papal allegiance, it was clear that the Papacy itself must be reformed. That was the work of the Counter-Reformation, which actually recovered the Latin countries with parts of Southern Germany and Poland to the Roman obedience. But this very notable success was accompanied by an almost complete reversal of the characteristic attitude of the mediæval Church. The ideal at which it aimed supremely was sanctity, and its unity was the spontaneous result of its universal respect for that ideal. The post-Reformation Church, on the contrary, was forced to concentrate upon unity as the ideal to be achieved, and it came more and more to be taken for granted that this enforced unity would [76] secure and guarantee sanctity. The supreme authority which had centred for each Christian generation in its own best lives was now transferred to the official leadership which could ensure and maintain at least an outer unity. The generous measure of freedom which in the Middle Ages accompanied the general recognition of a constitutional authority, had now become a danger to be most jealously guarded against, and was replaced by an unquestioning submission to official authority identified more and more with immediate Divine authority.

      The reforming movements which wrought this enormous change were naturally of very various degrees of religious value, but it may be admitted at once that they were all alike inspired by a more or less authentic religious zeal. Some of them, however, and notably the activities of the Society of Jesus, were occasionally characterised by a spirit of intrigue which recalled and accentuated the worst features of political action. So long as the ideal which the Church held before the world was primarily that of sanctity, it had to convince the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment. But when it came to subordinate that ideal to the ideal of unity, it was almost inevitably led to trust more to circumventing the world, to dealings with it in its own spirit. It is impossible to ignore, as it would be gross partiality to condone, this quasi-political element in the otherwise genuinely religious reform which the sixteenth century effected in both the separated sections [77] of Western Christendom. But it would be equally unjust to exaggerate it. And it is with one of the aspects of the Counter-Reform which was utterly free from it that we have now to deal.

      The Order of our Lady of Mount Carmel is perhaps the last surviving witness to a view of history which was once universal among Christian apologists, but which most of us have long since outgrown. S. Augustine, for instance, held that the Church, which assumed an independent existence under the Apostles, had already existed in the Synagogue, and had even preceded the Synagogue through the line of the Patriarchs, and through Noah, Enoch, Abel back to Adam. So the Order which first emerges upon the field of European history at the beginning of the thirteenth century traced its origin to a mysterious race of solitaries dwelling in the recesses of Mount Carmel who kept alive, during the hundreds of years which preceded the Advent of Christ, the monastic Rule of Elijah, Elisha, and the Prophets. And not content with this ancient lineage of the Spirit, they even claimed that the Rule of their Father Elijah ultimately derived from Enoch. Among the adherents of this ancient Rule were the Rechabites and the Essenes and S. John the Baptist. After a long underground existence during the three centuries of repression or persecution under the Pagan Empire, the rule once more appeared, controlling the lives of the solitaries of the Egyptian deserts, and was reformulated in the Rules of Pachomius and Basil. The Rule [78] of Pachomius is therefore, in reality, the Rule of Elijah or even of Enoch. And if it be asked how such a tradition can be in any sense Christian, the question only reveals a very naïve forgetfulness of the significance of that conception of history which we have seen in S. Augustine. The Rule of the prophet Elijah was Christian because he himself was a Christian, because he and all the Prophets were the secret depositaries of the revelation made later in and through the Incarnate Lord. Nay, in the mysterious cloud upon Mount Carmel in which "the Lord was not," there was vouchsafed to the prophet the dim vision of the Blessed Virgin, who lingered over the holy mountain for nine hundred years, giving special protection to its solitaries until the coming of her Son in the flesh.

      Now, it is in no spirit of idle curiosity that I recall these peculiar claims of the Carmelites. Nor is it to direct against them the scornful shafts of the historical critic, as the Jesuit hagiologists did two hundred years ago. It is because they reveal better than the most careful analysis of it the temper of mind and heart in which S. Teresa and S. John of the Cross, the sixteenth-century reformers of the Order, set themselves to their work. Their work, like that of the other Orders which then arose or were re-formed in that section of the Western Church which remained true to the Roman obedience, was, of course, to counter the activities of the schismatic national Churches and heretical sects which were springing [79] up on all sides throughout Western Christendom. But they set themselves to the common task with a difference. They did not, like the clever Jesuits, forge for themselves a complete armour of secular learning in which they might meet on equal terms a world that was growing accustomed to the use of new intellectual methods. They did not even propose, like the Oratorians, to meet the needs of the new time by training a more capable priesthood, nor, like the Lazarists, to carry a mission of spiritual enlightenment and social reconciliation among the derelict masses of the ignorant and the destitute. They trusted absolutely to the revival of the interior life, by the restoration of the ancient discipline of prayer, to which alone they ascribed all the permanent victories of the Christian religion. There, as I think, they were really meeting the Reform on its own ground, far more effectually, perhaps, than the clever devices of the Jesuits enabled them to meet it. What the Reform aimed at doing, and for a time in large measure succeeded in doing, was to introduce the prayer-life into the world and under the conditions imposed upon men by their ordinary secular avocations. In condemning the cloister and fleeing from it, it unconsciously proceeded to re-establish the cloister in the very thick of the world-life. Wherever the Reform succeeded religiously, in English Puritanism, in German Pietism, in Calvinism almost universally, it was by applying the discipline of the cloister, most of its abstentions and refusals [80] (marriage, of course, excepted), and its one absorbing interest of prayer or Divine meditation, in and to the conduct of world-affairs. The Reform has succeeded religiously just where and just in proportion as it has formed groups of cloistered communities within the circle of the world's activities and out of the ordinary human stuff determined by those activities. Where it has not succeeded in doing that, it has failed religiously. The Churches of the Reform, I would say, have never been Churches in the traditional Christian sense at all. They have been at their worst national State departments for maintaining a minimum of religious observance within the nation, and at their best religiously disciplined groups reproducing the cloister in the world. S. Teresa probably thought little, or thought not at all, of this latter characteristic of the Reformed sects. To her they were no doubt nothing more than so many new heresies. None the less, it was by a true instinct that she set herself to counter their activities by a revival of the most ancient and the most rigorous of monastic rules. Not the clever appeal to, and manipulation of, the superficial religious instincts and prejudices of the world to which the Jesuits resorted were needed to correct so great an aberration as the Reform must have seemed to her, but the revelation of what the prayer-life could be at its best.

      Now, if it was through S. Teresa that the contemplative life was in practice restored in all its ancient rigour, it was through her fellow-worker [81] and disciple S. John of the Cross that the theory of the prayer-life as thus revived was most fully and indeed brilliantly exposed and illustrated. There is nothing probably in all Christian literature at once so vivid and profound in its insight into spiritual states as the saint's Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night of the Soul. They have become, indeed, the classics of the modern religious psychologist. I do not deny that many of the experiences which the saint describes must seem morbid to us ordinary people. But no one can ever quite mistake the accent of sincerity in the account of experiences the most unfamiliar to himself. And it is this accent which no one can ever miss in S. John of the Cross. He, we feel, has passed through these experiences which he describes, however strange they may seem to us: and he has achieved through them a finer spiritual strength and sanity. I do not propose however, to dwell upon what is most strange and occasionally fantastic in these experiences of a soul. What is strange in the mere form of the conceptions is due probably to that indifference to exact history, to that acceptance as history of a quite fantastic combination of past events and connection between them, which we have seen in the Carmelite account of the origins of the Order. But one of the most interesting things about S. John of the Cross is his rooted distrust of those visions and revelations which the mystics, as a rule, set such store by. S. Teresa herself was the constant recipient of such revelations, in [82] the form both of visions and locutions--i. e., things presented to the inner eye and the inner ear with the same degree of vividness as if they had actual form and sound, though in fact they have neither. Yet this devoted disciple of hers disparages all such revelations and reproves any trust in them. To him it seems that there is no guarantee of their divine or against their diabolic origin. "I hold," he says, "the desire to know things by supernatural means as much worse than the desire of other spiritual pleasures that come through the senses. For I do not see how the soul which would gratify this desire can acquit itself of at least venial sin, even though it have many good intentions and be in a high state of perfection. And I would say the same also of him who commands a soul to seek this gratification or consents to its doing so. For there is no necessity for it whatsoever, seeing that natural reason, the commandments, and the doctrine of the Gospel are sufficient for our guidance: nor is there either difficulty or trouble which we cannot solve or remedy by means of these, with much enjoyment of God's favour and profit to the soul. Besides, we can gain so much profit and true service to our souls from reason and the doctrine of the Gospel that even though, whether with or without our will, certain things may be supernaturally communicated to us, we ought to receive only that which is comformable to reason and to the Gospel law." It would be difficult to insist more strongly on the dangers of taking our own [83] pious fancies or emotional experiences for Divine revelations, and on the necessity of some objective standard of truth by which all unusual movements and experiences of the inner life may be tested. No one certainly, ever believed more fully than S. John in the inner light or lived more consistently by its guidance. Every word of his bears the impress of a genuine spiritual originality. He is always appealing to experience, his own profound personal experience, in attestation of the truth which he would commend to others. There is nothing barely traditional, merely handed on as a current coin guaranteed by the stamp of some authoritative mint, in all his teaching. Yet the inner light is for him no occasional illumination of exalted interior states of feeling. It belongs to the deepest and most permanent centre of our spiritual being. It is the life of conscience patiently proving itself against an objective revelation of the Divine will, against what is already most certainly and most universally known of that will, that gradually learns to apprehend that will more deeply, fully, personally, that gradually receives fuller illumination as to its nature and bearing upon the circumstances of our own life. S. John's was a mysticism in which authority and freedom were exquisitely blended. They did not merely exist side by side, as it were, in his spiritual life, each ready to act as a check upon any possible excesses of the other. Each rather proved itself in his experience necessary to the other's growth. The free movement of [84] his spirit was rooted in the threefold authority of natural reason, law, and Gospel, and its healthy life was preserved in due submission to that authority. Yet, on the other hand, that authority would have been an inert and lifeless thing if the free life of conscience had not, like a germinating seed, fed upon its inner substance and thus given it a new and independent existence. Authority suffers by being merely accepted and submitted to. Freedom suffers in escaping the due restraints and corrections of authority. It is always the temptation of the mystic to ignore or be impatient of this great law of the spiritual life, to abandon himself absolutely to the unregulated movements of the inner life and accept them as the unmediated direction of God. That so great a mystic as John of the Cross, rich in experiences of the soul which by their strangeness and intensity at once dazzle and terrify us, should nevertheless have perceived this danger so clearly and so consistently exposed it, is enough to place him among the very sanest of the masters of the spiritual life.

      It is natural, therefore, that we should find the imprint of this sanity upon all his teaching about prayer as the main sustenance and support of the life of the spirit. We must, I think, be occasionally surprised at the continual insistence upon the necessity of mental prayer and the comparative depreciation of vocal prayer which is so characteristic of the sixteenth and seventeenth century revival of the prayer-life. To us it seems impossible to separate the two, or rather it seems [85] impossible to regard mere words as prayer at all, unless through them the mind and spirit are ascending with a full authentic consciousness of effort towards God. Now, it is true that the mystics, even the sanest and most deeply and steadfastly spiritual among them, do hold definitely that prayer has never approached its due perfection until it can, or rather must, dispense with words and has become a rapt and sustained contemplation of the Divine will and nature. Yet I think that much of their depreciation of vocal prayer was motived only by the knowledge of how easily the continual repetition of prayers in the ordered life of the cloister might empty those prayers of all content. What was really meant often by the slights cast upon vocal prayer may be gathered from these words of S. Teresa:

      "As far as I can understand, the gate by which to enter this castle [the interior life] is prayer and meditation. I do not allude more to mental than to vocal prayer: for if it is prayer at all, the mind must take part in it. If a person neither considers to Whom he is addressing himself, what he asks, nor what he is who ventures to speak to God, although his lips may utter many words, I do not call it prayer. Sometimes, indeed, one may pray devoutly without making all these considerations because one has practised them at other times. But the custom of speaking to God Almighty as freely as with a slave--caring nothing whether one's words are suitable or not, but simply saying the first thing that comes to [86] the mind from being learnt by heart by frequent repetition--cannot be called prayer. God grant that no Christian may address Him in this manner!" The burden of S. Teresa's complaint, it is sufficiently apparent from these words (and indeed she often states it in still more express terms), was that the real life of prayer had died out of the cloister, and that just because the routine of prayer had been there so sedulously preserved without sufficient regard to the interior discipline which could alone ensure its true quality. The whole object of her reform was to restore to the cloister the true idea of prayer, to give effect to the apostolic injunction, "Pray without ceasing," to attune the heart and mind to a constant intercourse with God and uninterrupted dependence upon the Divine will, to make God the constant background of all the activities of life. Teresa, at least, did not depreciate the value of vocal prayer in so far as it was the real momentary expression of the soul's constant prayer-state, though, of course, she held that that state was most surely manifested in the gift of contemplation.

      Now, the spiritual lore of S. John of the Cross, in so far as it relates directly to prayer, is concerned almost entirely with the habitual preparation of the soul for its acts of prayer. In the forefront of this preparatory discipline he places what all the great mystics, and among them the English Quakers, have been wont to call "waiting upon God." That is to say, the soul must lose [87] its natural instinct of virtually dictating to God the conditions under which He is to speak to it. It must be willing to bare itself, to become independent of its ordinary spiritual attachments, whether natural or acquired. It must learn to sit loose to the self-chosen preferences of spiritual custom which it is inclined to regard as necessary to its intercourse with God. It must learn to let God speak to it as He will in the natural occasions of life. S. John's castigations of this religious self-will and conceit are perhaps too remote from our own religious habits to be easily appreciated by us. He says, for instance, that there are people who think that God will not hear them except at a particular altar, unless a certain number of candles are lit upon it, unless such and such ceremonies and postures are observed and practised, and each in its due place and manner, even unless such or such a priest says the Mass. They think, he continues, that if one point is missing from the customary rites, God has not heard them, nor has the service benefited them in any degree. Such childish wilfulness he characterises as a blasphemous dictation to God. It is blasphemous, because it is a virtual offering of the worship which we owe to God to those things which He Himself has appointed as the dispensable means and instruments of our approach to Him.

      But still worse and more to be condemned as a misunderstanding of the nature of prayer is the habit which such people have of, as it were, [88] putting God to the proof. They expect as a result of what S. John calls their "ceremonial and superstitious prayers" to feel some effect which will assure them that the object of their request will be granted. This, he says, "is nothing else than to tempt God and so gravely to displease Him that He will at times allow the devil to deceive them, by making them feel and purpose things very far from their soul's profit. And this they deserve by reason of the attachment and self-love which they retain in their prayers, desiring rather that success may be granted to their own special aims than that the will of God be done." What S. John of the Cross would make us feel is that the over-eagerness to look out for an exact answer to our prayers is sure evidence that they have not been true and worthy prayer. Such an attitude reveals to ourselves the fact that we have been serving God for reward. It is once again the doctrine of S. Thomas: "It is clear that he does not pray who, far from uplifting himself to God, requires that God shall lower Himself to him, and who resorts to prayer not to stir the man in us to will what God wills, but only to persuade God to will what the man in us wills."

      Once more, we find S. John of the Cross repeating almost in identical terms S. Bernard's enumeration of the things which ought to be sought always and with the whole heart in contrast with the things which we must ask for only with the condition--if they are according to the [89] will of God, since we can never know whether such indifferent things are according to His will or not. What we must always pray God for is the purification of conscience, and the sincere and steadfast intention to seek always those things which are necessary to our eternal salvation, to seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. If that desire so occupies our hearts as to control the whole character of our outward action, the whole inner habitude of our lives, then we know that we are praying aright. And then all those other things that may be necessary for us, and in the measure in which God sees that they are necessary, He will give to us without our asking for them. The petitions which are alone worthy of the prayer-life and necessary to it are petitions for its own growth, for the desire and power of lifting up our lives to God increasingly in the integrity of their motives, their purpose, their action. [90]

[PCT 71-90]