The Faith of the Millions.
by George Tyrrell.
JULIANA OF NORWICH.
"One of the most remarkable books of the middle ages," writes Father Dalgairns, [1] "is the hitherto almost unknown work, t.i.tled, _Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love made to a Devout Servant of G.o.d, called Mother Juliana, an Anch.o.r.ess of Norwich_" How "one of the most remarkable books" should be "hitherto almost unknown," may be explained partly by the fact to which the same writer draws attention, namely, that Mother Juliana lived and wrote at the time when a certain mystical movement was about to bifurcate and pursue its course of development, one branch within the Church on Catholic lines, the other outside the Church along lines whose actual issue was Wycliffism and other kindred forms of heterodoxy, and whose logical outcome was pantheism. Hence, between the language of these pseudo-mystics and that of the recluse of Norwich, "there is sometimes a coincidence ... which might deceive the unwary." It is almost necessarily a feature of every heresy to begin by using the language of orthodoxy in a strained and non-natural sense, and only gradually to develop a distinctive terminology of its own; but, as often as not, certain ambiguous expressions, formerly taken in an orthodox sense, are abandoned by the faithful on account of their ambiguity and are then appropriated to the expression of heterodoxy, so that eventually by force of usage the heretical meaning comes to be the princ.i.p.al and natural meaning, and any other interpretation to seem violent and non-natural. "The few coincidences," continues Father Dalgairns, "between Mother Juliana and Wycliffe are among the many proofs that the same speculative view often means different things in different systems. Both St. Augustine, Calvin, and Mahomet, believe in predestination, yet an Augustinian is something utterly different from a Scotch Cameronian or a Mahometan.... The idea which runs through the whole of Mother Juliana is the very contradictory of Wycliffe"s Pantheistic Necessitarianism." Yet on account of the mere similarity of expression we can well understand how in the course of time some of Mother Juliana"s utterances came to be more ill-sounding to faithful ears in proportion as they came to be more exclusively appropriated by the unorthodox. It is hard to be as vigilant when danger is remote as when it is near at hand; and until heresy has actually wrested them to its purpose it is morally impossible that the words of ecclesiastical and religious writers should be so delicately balanced as to avoid all ambiguities and inaccuracies. Still less have we a right to look for such exact.i.tude in the words of an anch.o.r.ess who, if not wholly uneducated in our sense of the word, yet on her own confession "could no letter," i.e., as we should say, was no scholar, and certainly made no pretence to any skill in technical theology. But however much some of her expressions may jar with the later developments of Catholic theology, it must be remembered, as has been said, that they were current coin in her day, common to orthodox and unorthodox; and that though their restoration is by no means desirable, yet they are still susceptive of a "benignant" interpretation. "I pray Almighty G.o.d," says Mother Juliana in concluding, "that this book come not but into the hands of those that will be His faithful lovers, and that will submit them to the faith of Holy Church." [2] And indeed such can receive no possible harm from its perusal, beyond a little temporary perplexity to be dispelled by inquiry; and this only in the case of those who are sufficiently instructed and reflective to perceive the discord in question. The rest are well used in their reading to take what is familiar and to leave what is strange, so that they will find in her pages much to ponder, and but a little to pa.s.s over.
It is, however, not only to these occasional obscurities and ambiguities that we are to ascribe the comparative oblivion into which so remarkable a book has fallen; but also to the fact that its noteworthiness is perhaps more evident and relative to us than to our forefathers. It cannot but startle us to find doubts that we hastily look upon as peculiarly "modern," set forth in their full strength and wrestled with and overthrown by an unlettered recluse of the fourteenth century. In some sense they are the doubts of all time, with perhaps just that peculiar complexion which they a.s.sume in the light of Christianity. Yet, owing to the modern spread of education, or rather to the indiscriminate divulgation of ideas, these problems are now the possession of the man in the street, whereas in former days they were exclusively the property of minds capable--not indeed of answering the unanswerable, but at least of knowing their own limitations and of seeing why such problems must always exist as long as man is man. Dark as the age of Mother Juliana was as regards the light of positive knowledge and information; yet the light of wisdom burned at least as clearly and steadily then as now; and it is by that light alone that the shades of unbelief can be dispelled.
Of course, wisdom without knowledge must starve or prey on its own vitals, and this was the intellectual danger of the middle ages; but knowledge without wisdom is so much food undigested and indigestible, and this is the evil of our own day, when to be pa.s.sably well-informed so taxes our time and energy as to leave us no leisure for a.s.similating the knowledge with which we have stuffed ourselves.
We must not, however, think of Mother Juliana as shut up within four walls of a cell, evolving all her ideas straight from her own inner consciousness without any reference to experience. Such a barren contemplation, tending to mental paralysis, belongs to Oriental pessimism, whose aim is the extinction of life, mental and physical, and reabsorption into that void whence, it is said, misfortune has brought us forth to troublous consciousness. The Christian contemplative knows no ascent to G.o.d but by the ladder of creatures; he goes to the book of Nature and of human life, and to the book of Revelation, and turns and ponders their pages, line by line and word by word, and so feeds and fills the otherwise thin and shadowy conception of G.o.d in his own soul, and ever pours new oil upon the flame of Divine love. Father Daigairns writes: "Juliana is a recluse very different from the creatures of the imagination of writers on comparative morals. So far from being cut off from sympathy with her kind, her mind is tenderly and delicately alive to every change in the spiritual atmosphere of England.... The four walls of her narrow home seem to be rent and torn asunder, and not only England but Christendom appears before her view;" and he is at pains to show how both anchorites and anch.o.r.esses were much-sought after by all in trouble, temporal or spiritual, and how abundant were their opportunities of becoming acquainted with human life and its burdens, and of more than compensating, through the confidences of others, whatever defect their minds might suffer through lack of personal experience. Even still, how many a priest or nun whose experience had else been narrowed to the petty domestic interests of a small family, is, in virtue of his or her vocation, put in touch with a far larger world, or with a far more important aspect of the world, than many who mingle with its every-day trivialities, and is thus made a partaker in some sense of the deeper life and experience of society and of the Universal Church! The anch.o.r.ess "did a great deal more than pray. The very dangers against which the author of her rule [3] warns her, are a proof that she had many visitors. He warns her against becoming a "babbling" or "gossiping" anch.o.r.ess, a variety evidently well-known; a recluse whose cell was the depository of all the news from the neighbourhood at a time when newspapers did not exist." Such abuses throw light upon the legitimate use of the anch.o.r.ess"s position in the mediaeval community.
And so, though Mother Juliana "could no letter," though she knew next to nothing of the rather worthless physical science of those times, and hardly more of philosophy or technical theology, yet she knew no little of that busy, sad, and sinful human life going on round her, not only at Norwich, but in England, and even in Europe; and rich with this knowledge, to which all other lore is subordinate and for whose sake alone it is valuable, she betook herself to prayer and meditation, and brought all this experience into relation with G.o.d, and drew from it an ever clearer understanding of Him and of His dealings with the souls that His Love has created and redeemed.
It is not then so wonderful that this wise and holy woman should have faced the problems presented by the apparent discord between the truths of faith and the facts of human life--a discord which is felt in every age by the observant and thoughtful, but which in our age is a commonplace on the lips of even the most superficial. But an age takes its tone from the many who are the children of the past, rather than from the few who are the parents of the future. Mother Juliana"s book could hardly have been in any sense "popular" until these days of ours, in which the particular disease of mind to which it ministers has become epidemic.
If then these suggestions to some extent furnish an explanation of the oblivion into which the revelations of Mother Juliana have fallen, they also justify the following attempt to draw attention to them once more, and to give some sort of a.n.a.lysis of their contents; more especially as we have reason to believe that they are about to be re-edited by a competent scholar and made accessible to the general public, which they have not been since the comparative extinction of Richardson"s edition of 1877. Little is known of Mother Juliana"s history outside what is implied in her revelations; nor is it our purpose at present to go aside in search of biographical details that will be of interest only after their subject has become interesting. Suffice it here to say that she was thirty at the time of her revelations, which she tells us was in 1373. Hence she was born in 1343, and is said to have been a centenarian, in which case she must have died about 1443. She probably belonged to the Benedictine nuns at Carrow, near Norwich, and being called to a still stricter life, retired to a hermitage close by the Church of St. Julian at Norwich. The details she gives about her own sick-room exclude the idea of that stricter "reclusion" which is popularly spoken of as "walling-up"--not of course in the mythical sense.
With these brief indications sufficient to satisfy the craving of our imagination for particulars of time and place, let us turn to her own account of the circ.u.mstances of her visions, as well as of their nature.
She tells us that in her life previous to 1373, she had, at some time or other, demanded three favours from G.o.d; first, a sensible appreciation of Christ"s Pa.s.sion in such sort as to share the grace of Mary Magdalene and others who were eye-witnesses thereof: "therefore I desired a bodily sight wherein I might have more knowledge of the bodily pain of our Saviour." And the motive of this desire was that she might "afterwards because of that showing have the more true mind of the Pa.s.sion of Christ." Her aim was a deeper practical intelligence, and not the gratification of mere emotional curiosity.
This grace she plainly recognizes as extraordinary; for she says: "Other sight or showing of G.o.d asked I none, till when the soul was departed from the body." Her second request was likewise for an extraordinary grace; namely, for a bodily sickness which she and others might believe to be mortal; in which she should receive the last sacraments, and experience all the bodily pains, and all the spiritual temptations incident to the separation of soul and body. And the motive of this request was that she might be "purged by the mercy of G.o.d, and afterwards live more to the worship of G.o.d because of that sickness." In other words, she desired the grace of what we might call a "trial-death," that so she might better meet the real death when it came. Further, she adds, "this sickness I desired in my youth, that I might have it when I was thirty years old." And "these two desires were with a condition" (namely, if G.o.d should so will), "for methought this was not the common use of prayer." But the third request she proffers boldly "without any condition," since it was necessarily G.o.d"s desire to grant it and to be sued for it; namely, the grace of a three-fold wound: the wound of true sorrow for sin; the wound of "kind compa.s.sion" with Christ"s sufferings; and the wound of "wilful belonging to G.o.d," that is, of self-devotion.
She is careful to tell us that while she ever continued to urge the unconditional third request, the two first pa.s.sed completely out of her head in the course of years, until she was reminded of them by their simultaneous and remarkable fulfilment. "For when I was thirty years old and a half, G.o.d sent me a bodily sickness in which I lay three days and three nights; and on the fourth night I took all my rites of Holy Church, and weened not to have lived till day. And after this I lay two days and two nights, and on the third night I weened oftentimes to have pa.s.sed, and so weened they that were with me.... And I understood in my reason, and by the feeling of my pains that I should die, and I a.s.sented fully with all the will of my heart, to be at G.o.d"s will. Thus I endured till day, and by then, was my body dead to all feeling from the midst down." She is then raised up in a sitting position for greater ease, and her curate is sent for, as the end is supposed to be near. On arrival, he finds her speechless and with her eyes fixed upwards towards heaven, "where I trusted to come by the mercy of G.o.d." He places the crucifix before her, and bids her bend her eyes upon it. "I a.s.sented to set my eyes in the face of the crucifix if I could; and so I did; for methought I could endure longer to look straight in front of me than right up"--a touch that shows the previous upturning of the eyes to have been voluntary and not cataleptic. At this moment we seem to pa.s.s into the region of the abnormal: "After this my sight began to fail; it waxed as dark about me in the chamber as if it had been night, save in the image of the cross, wherein I beheld a common light, and I wist not how. And all that was beside the cross was ugly and fearful to me, as it had been much occupied with fiends." Then the upper part of her body becomes insensible, and the only pain left is that of weakness and breathlessness. Suddenly she is totally eased and apparently quite cured, which, however, she regards as a momentary miraculous relief, but not as a deliverance from death. In this breathing s.p.a.ce it suddenly occurs to her to beg for the second of those three wounds which were the matter of her unconditional third request; namely, for a deepened sense and sympathetic understanding of Christ"s Pa.s.sion. "But in this I never desired any bodily sight, or any manner of showing from G.o.d; but such compa.s.sion as I thought that a kind soul might have with our Lord Jesus." In a word, the remembrance of her two conditional and extraordinary requests of bygone years was not in her mind at the time.
"And in this, suddenly I saw the red blood trickling down from under the garland;"--and so she pa.s.ses from objective to subjective vision;[4] and the first fifteen revelations follow, as she tells us later, one after another in unbroken succession, lasting in all some few hours.
"I had no grief or no dis-ease," she tells us later, "as long as the fifteen showings lasted in showing. And at the end all was close, and I saw no more; and soon I felt that I should live longer." Presently all her pains, bodily and spiritual, return in full force; and the consolation of the visions seems to her as an idle dream and delusion; and she answers to the inquiries of a Religious at her bedside, that she had been raving: "And he laughed loud and drolly. And I said: "The cross that stood before my face, methought it bled fast."" At which the other looked so serious and awed that she became ashamed of her own incredulity. "I believed Him truly for the time that I saw Him. And so it was then my will and my meaning to do, ever without end--but, as a fool, I let it pa.s.s out of my mind. And lo! how wretched I was," &c.
Then she falls asleep and has a terrifying dream of the Evil One, of which she says: "This ugly showing was made sleeping and so was none other," whence it seems that her self-consciousness was unimpaired in the other visions; that is, she was aware at the time that they were visions, and did not confound them with reality as dreams are confounded. Then follows the sixteenth and last revelation; ending with the words: "Wit well it was no raving thou sawest to-day: but take it, and believe it, and keep thee therein, and comfort thee therewith and trust thereto, and thou shalt not be overcome." Then during the rest of the same night till about Prime next morning she is tempted against faith and trust by the Evil One, of whose nearness she is conscious; but comes out victorious after a sustained struggle. She understands from our Lord, that the series of showings is now closed; "which blessed showing the faith keepeth, ... for He left with me neither sign nor token whereby I might know it." Yet for her personally the obligation not to doubt is as of faith: "Thus am I bound to keep it in my faith; for on the same day that it was showed, what time the sight was pa.s.sed, as a wretch I forsook it and openly said that I raved."
Fifteen years later she gets an inward response as to the general gist and unifying purport of the sixteen revelations. "Wit it well; love was His meaning. Who showed it thee? Love. Wherefore showed He it thee? For love."
Having thus sketched the circ.u.mstances of the revelations, we may now address ourselves to their character and substance.
There is nothing to favour and everything to disfavour the notion that Mother Juliana was an habitual visionary, or was the recipient of any other visions, than those which she beheld in her thirty-first year; and of these, she tells us herself, the whole sixteen took place within a few hours. "Now have I told you of fifteen showings, ... of which fifteen showings, the first began early in the morning about the hour of four, ... each following the other till it was noon of the day or past, ... and after this the Good Lord showed me the sixteenth revelation on the night following." Speaking of them all as one, she tells us: "And from the time it was showed I desired oftentimes to wit what was in our Lord"s meaning; and fifteen years after and more I was answered in ghostly understanding, saying thus: "What! wouldst thou wit thy Lord"s meaning in this thing? Wit it well: Love was His meaning."" But this "ghostly understanding" can hardly be pressed into implying another revelation of the evidently supernormal type.
We rather insist on this point, as indicating the habitual healthiness of Mother Juliana"s soul--a quality which is also abundantly witnessed by the unity and coherence of the doctrine of her revelations, which bespeaks a mind well-knit together, and at harmony with itself. The hysterical mind is one in which large tracts of consciousness seem to get detached from the main body, and to take the control of the subject for the time being, giving rise to the phenomena rather foolishly called double or multiple "personality." This is a disease proper to the pa.s.sive-minded, to those who give way to a "drifting" tendency, and habitually suffer their whole interests to be absorbed by the strongest sensation or emotion that presents itself. Such minds are generally chaotic and unorganized, as is revealed in the rambling, involved, interminably parenthetical and digressive character of their conversation. But when, as with Mother Juliana, we find unity and coherence, we may infer that there has been a life-long habit of active mental control, such as excludes the supposition of an hysterical temperament.
Perhaps the similarity of the phenomena which attend both on extraordinary psychic weakness and pa.s.sivity, and on extraordinary energy and activity may excuse a confusion common enough, and which we have dwelt on elsewhere. But obviously as far as the natural consequences of a given psychic state are concerned, it is indifferent how that state is brought about. Thus, that extreme concentration of the attention, that perfect abstraction from outward things, which in hysterical persons is the effect of weakness and pa.s.sive-mindedness--of the inability to resist and shake off the spell of pa.s.sions and emotions; is in others the effect of active self-control, of voluntary concentration, of a complete mastery over pa.s.sions and emotions. Yet though the causes of the abnormal state are different, its effects may well be the same.
In thus maintaining the healthiness and vigour of Mother Juliana"s mind, we may seem to be implicitly treating her revelation, not as coming from a Divine source, but simply as an expression of her own habitual line of thought--as a sort of pouring forth of the contents of her subconscious memory. Our direct intention, however, is to show how very unlikely it is antecedently that one so clear-headed and intelligent should be the victim of the common and obvious illusions of the hysterical visionary.
For her book contains not only the matter of her revelations, but also the history of all the circ.u.mstances connected with them, as well as a certain amount of personal comment upon them, professedly the fruit of her normal mind; and best of all, a good deal of a.n.a.lytical reflection upon the phenomena which betrays a native psychological insight not inferior to that of St. Teresa. From these sources we could gather the general sobriety and penetration of her judgment, without a.s.suming the actual teaching of the revelations to be merely the unconscious self-projection of her own mind. But in so much as many of these revelations were professedly Divine answers to her own questions, and since the answer must ever be adapted not merely to the question considered in the abstract, but as it springs from its context in the questioner"s mind; we are not wrong, on this score alone, in arguing from the character of the revelation to the character of the mind to which it was addressed. Fallible men may often speak and write above or beside the intelligence of their hearers and readers; but not so He who reads the heart He has made. Now these revelations were not addressed to the Church through Mother Juliana; but, as she says, were addressed to herself and were primarily for herself, though most that was said had reference to the human soul in general. They were adapted therefore to the character and individuality of her mind; and are an index of its thoughts and workings. For her they were a matter of faith; but, as she tells us, she had no token or outward proof wherewith to convince others of their reality. Those who feel disposed, as we ourselves do, to place much confidence in the word of one so perfectly sane and genuinely holy, may draw profit from the message addressed to her need; but never can it be for them a matter of faith as in a Divine message addressed directly or indirectly to themselves. So far as these revelations are a clear and n.o.ble expression of truths already contained implicitly in our faith and reason, which it brings into more explicit consciousness and vitalizes with a new power of stimulus, they may be profitable to us all; but they must be received with due criticism and discernment as themselves subject to a higher rule of truth--namely, the teaching of the Universal Church.
But to determine, with respect to these and kindred revelations, how far they may be regarded as an expression of the recipient"s own mind and latent consciousness, will need a digression which the general interest of the question must excuse.
There is a tendency in the modern philosophy of religion (for example, in Mr. Balfour"s _Foundations of Belief_) to rationalize inspired revelation and to explain it as altogether kindred to the apparently magical intuitions of natural genius in non-religious matters; as the result, in other words, of a rending asunder of the veil that divides what is called "super-liminal" from "subliminal" consciousness; to find in prophecy and secret insight the effect of a flash of unconscious inference from a ma.s.s of data buried in the inscrutable darkness of our forgotten self. Together with this, there is also a levelling-up philosophy, a sort of modernized ontologism, which would attribute all natural intuition to a more immediate self-revelation on G.o.d"s part than seems quite compatible with orthodoxy.
But neither of these philosophies satisfy what is vulgarly understood by "revelation," and therefore both use the word in a somewhat strained sense. For certainly the first sense of the term implies a consciousness on the part of the recipient of being spoken to, of being related through such speech to another personality, whereas the flashes and intuitions of natural genius, however they may resemble and be called "inspirations" because of their exceeding the known resources of the thinker"s own mind, yet they are consciously autochthonous; they are felt to spring from the mind"s own soil; not to break the soul"s solitude with the sense of an alien presence. Such interior illuminations, though doubtless in a secondary sense derived from the "True Light which enlightens every man coming into this world,"
certainly do not fulfil the traditional notion of revelation as understood, not only in the Christian Church, but also in all ethnic religions. For common to antiquity is the notion of some kind of possession or seizure, some usurpation of the soul"s faculties by an external personality, divine or diabolic, for its own service and as its instrument of expression--a phenomenon, in fact, quite a.n.a.logous, if not the same in species, with that of hypnotic control and suggestion, where the thought and will of the subject is simply pa.s.sive under the thought and will of the agent.
Saints and contemplatives are wont--not without justification--to speak of their lights in prayer, and of the ordinary intuitions of their mind, under the influence of grace, as Divine utterances in a secondary sense; to say, "G.o.d said to me," or "seemed to say to me," or "G.o.d showed me,"
and so on. But to confound these products of their own mind with revelation is the error only of the uninstructed or the wilfully self-deluded. Therefore, as commonly understood, "revelation" implies the conscious control of the mind by another mind; just as its usual correlative, "inspiration," implies the conscious control of the will by another will.
There can be no doubt whatever but that Mother Juliana of Norwich considered her revelations to be of this latter description, and not to have been merely different in degree from those flashes of spiritual insight with which she was familiar in her daily contemplations and prayers. How far, then, her own mind may have supplied the material from which the tissues were woven, or lent the colours with which the pictures were painted, or supplied the music to which the words were set, is what we must now try to determine.
II.
Taking the terms "revelation" and "inspiration" in the unsophisticated sense which they have borne not only in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, but in almost all the great ethnic religions as well, we may inquire into the different sorts and degrees of the control exercised by the presumably supernatural agents over the recipient of such influence. For clearness" sake we may first distinguish between the control of the cognitive, the volitional, and the executive faculties. For our present inquiry we may leave aside those cases where the control of the executive faculties, normally subject to the will and directed by the mind, seem to be wrested from that control by a foreign agent possessed of intelligence and volition, as, for example, in such a case as is narrated of the false prophet Balaam, or of those who at the Pentecostal outpouring spoke correctly in languages unintelligible to themselves, or of the possessed who were constrained in spite of themselves to confess Christ. In these and similar cases, not only is the action involuntary or even counter to the will, but it manifests such intelligent purpose as seemingly marks it to be the effect of an alien will and intelligence. Of this kind of control exercised by the agent over the outer actions of the patient, it may be doubted if it be ever effected except through the mediation of a suggestion addressed to the mind, in such sort that though not free, the resulting action is not wholly involuntary. Be this as it may, our concern at present is simply with control exercised over the will and the understanding.
With regard to the will, it is a commonplace of mystical theology that G.o.d, who gave it its natural and essential bent towards the good of reason, i.e., towards righteousness and the Divine will; who created it not merely as an irresistible tendency towards the happiness and self-realization of the rational subject, but as a resistible tendency towards its _true_, happiness and _true_ self-realization--that this same G.o.d can directly modify the will without the natural mediation of some suggested thought. We ourselves, by the laborious cultivation of virtue, gradually modify the response of our will to certain suggestions, making it more sensitive to right impulses, more obtuse to evil impulses. According to mystic theology, it is the prerogative of G.o.d to dispense with this natural method of education, and, without violating that liberty of choice (which no inclination can prejudice), to incline the rational appet.i.te this way or that; not only in reference to some suggested object, but also without reference to any distinct object whatsoever, so that the soul should be abruptly filled with joy or sadness, with fear or hope, with desire or aversion, and yet be at a loss to determine the object of these spiritual pa.s.sions. St. Ignatius Loyola, in his "Rules for Discerning Spirits," borrowed no doubt from the current mystical theology of his day, makes this absence of any suggested object a criterion of "consolation" coming from G.o.d alone--a criterion always difficult to apply owing to the lightning subtlety of thoughts that flash across the soul and are forgotten even while their emotional reverberation yet remains. Where there was a preceding thought to account for the emotion, he held that the "consolation" might be the work of spirits (good or evil) who could not influence the will directly, but only indirectly through the mind; or else it might be the work of the mind itself, whose thoughts often seem to us abrupt through mere failure of self-observation.
Normally what is known as an "actual grace" involves both an ill.u.s.tration of the mind, and an enkindling of the will; but though supernatural, such graces are not held to be miraculous or preternatural, or to break the usual psychological laws of cause and effect; like the ordinary answers to prayer, they are from G.o.d"s ordinary providence in that supernatural order which permeates but does not of itself interfere with the natural. But over and above what, relatively to our observation, we call the "ordinary" course, there is the extraordinary, whose interference with it is apparent, though of course not absolute or real--since nothing can be out of harmony with the first and highest law, which is G.o.d Himself. And to the category of the extraordinary must be a.s.signed such inspirations and direct will-movements as we here speak of. [5]
Yet not altogether; for in the natural order, too, we have the phenomenon of instinct to consider--both spiritual and animal. Giving heredity all the credit we can for storing up acc.u.mulated experience in the nervous system of each species, there remains a host of fundamental animal instincts which that law is quite inadequate to explain; those, for example, which govern the multiplication of the species and secure the conditions under which alone heredity can work. Such cannot be at once the effect and the essential condition of heredity; and yet they are, of all instincts, the most complex and mysterious. Indeed, it seems more scientific to ascribe other instincts to the same known and indubitable, if mysterious, cause, than to seek explanation in causes less known and more hypothetical. In the case of many instincts, it would seem that the craving for the object precedes the distinct cognition of it; that the object is only ascertained when, after various tentative gropings, it is stumbled upon, almost, it might seem, by chance. And this seems true, also, of some of our fundamental spiritual instincts; for example, that craving of the mind for an unified experience, which is at the root of all mental activity, and whose object is ever approached yet never attained; or, again, there is the social and political instinct, which has not yet formed a distinct and satisfying conception of what it would be at. Or nearer still to our theme, is the natural religious instinct which seeks interpretations and explanatory hypotheses in the various man-made religions of the race, and which finds itself satisfied and transcended by the Christian revelation.
In these and like instances, we find will-movements not caused by the subjects" own cognitions and perceptions, but contrariwise, giving birth to cognitions, setting the mind to work to interpret the said movements, and to seek out their satisfying objects.
This is quite a.n.a.logous to certain phenomena of the order of grace. St.
Ignatius almost invariably speaks, not, as we should, of thoughts that give rise to will-states of "consolation" or "desolation," but conversely, of these will-states giving rise to congruous thoughts.
Indeed, nothing is more familiar to us than the way in which the mind is magnetized by even our physical states of elation or depression, to select the more cheerful or the gloomier aspects of life, according as we are under one influence or the other; and in practice, we recognize the effect of people"s humours on their opinions and decisions, and would neither sue mercy nor ask a favour of a man in a temper. In short, it is hardly too much to say, that our thoughts are more dependent on our feelings than our feelings on our thoughts. This, then, is one possible method of supernatural guidance which we shall call "blind inspiration"--for though the feeling or impulse is from G.o.d, the interpretation is from the subject"s own mind. It is curious how St.
Ignatius applies this method to the determining of the Divine will in certain cases--as it were, by the inductive principle of "concomitant variation." A suggestion that always comes and grows with a state of "consolation," and whose negative is in like manner a.s.sociated with "desolation," is presumably the right interpretation of the blind impulse. [6] And perhaps this is one of the commonest subjective a.s.surances of faith, namely, that our faith grows and declines with what we know intuitively to be our better moods; that when lax we are sceptical, and believing when conscientious.
Another species of will-guidance recognized by saints, is not so much by way of a vague feeling seeking interpretation, as by way of a sort of enforced decision with regard to some naturally suggested course of conduct. And this, perhaps, is what is more technically understood by an inspiration; as, for example, when the question of writing or not writing something publicly useful, say, the records of the Kings of Israel, rises in the mind, and it is decided for and in the subject, but not by him. Of course this "inspiration" is a common but not essential accompaniment of "revelation" or "mind-control,"--in those cases, namely, where the communicated information is for the good of others; as, also, where it is for the guidance of the practical conduct of the recipient. Such "inspiration" at times seems to be no more than a strong inclination compatible with liberty; at other times it amounts to such a "fixing" of the practical judgment as would ordinarily result from a determination of the power of choice--if that were not a contradiction.
Better to say, it is a taking of the matter out of the jurisdiction of choice, by the creation of an _idee fixe_ [7] in the subject"s mind.
Turning now to "revelation" in the stricter sense of a preternatural enlightenment of the mind, it might conceivably be either by way of a real accretion of knowledge--an addition to the contents of the mind--or else by way of manipulating contents already there, as we ourselves do by reminiscence, by rumination, comparison, a.n.a.lysis, inference. Thus we can conceive the mind being consciously controlled in these operations, as it were, by a foreign will; being reminded of this or that; being shown new consequences, applications, and relations of truths already possessed.
When, however, there is a preternatural addition to the sum total of the mind"s knowledge, we can conceive the communication to be effected through the outer senses, as by visions seen (real or symbolic), or words heard; or through the imagination--pictorial, symbolic, or verbal; visual or auditory; or, finally, in the very reason and intelligence itself, whose ideas are embodied in these images and signs, and to whose apprehension they are all subservient.
Now from all this tedious division and sub-division it may perhaps be clear in how many different senses the words of such a professed revelation as Mother Juliana has left on record can be regarded as preternatural utterances; or rather, in how many different ways she herself may have considered them such, and wished them so to be considered. Indeed, as we shall see, she has done a good deal more to determine this, in regard to the various parts of her record, than most have done, and it is for that reason that we have taken the opportunity to open up the general question. Such a record might then be, either wholly or in part:
(a) The work of religious "inspiration" or genius, in the sense in which rationalists use the word, levelling the idea down to the same plane as that of artistic inspiration.
(b) Or else it might be "inspired" as mystic philosophy or ontologism uses the expression, when it ascribes all natural insight to a more or less directly divine enlightenment.
(c) Or, taking the word more strictly as implying the influence of a distinct personal agency over the soul of the writer, it might be that the record simply expresses an attempted interpretation, an imaginary embodiment, of some blind preternatural stirring of the writer"s affections--a.n.a.logous to the romances and dreams created in the imagination at the first awakening of the amatory affections.
(d) Or, the matter being in no way from preternatural sources, the strong and perhaps irresistible impulse to record and publish it, might be preternatural.
(e) Or (in addition to or apart from such an impulse), it might be a record of certain truths already contained implicitly in the writer"s mind, but brought to remembrance or into clear recognition, not by the ordinary free activity of reason, but, as it were, by an alien will controlling the mind.
(f) Or, if really new truths or facts are communicated to the mind from without, this may be effected in various ways: (i) By the way of verbal "inspiration," as when the very words are received apparently through the outer senses; or else put together in the imagination.
(ii) Or, the matter is presented pictorially (be it fact or symbol) to the outer senses or to the imagination; and then described or "word-painted" according to the writer"s own ability. (iii) Or, the truth is brought home directly to the intelligence; and gets all its imaginative and verbal clothing from the recipient.
Many other hypotheses are conceivable, but most will be reducible to one or other of these. We may perhaps add that, when the revelation is given for the sake of others, this purpose might be frustrated, were not a substantial fidelity of expression and utterance also secured. This would involve, at least, that negative kind of guidance of the tongue or pen, known technically as "a.s.sistance."
Mother Juliana gives us some clue in regard to her own revelations where she says: [8] "All this blessed showing of our Lord G.o.d was showed in three parts; that is to say, by bodily sight; and by words formed in my understanding; and by ghostly sight. For the bodily sight, I have said as I saw, as truly as I can" (that is, the appearances were, she believed, from G.o.d, but the description of them was her own). "And for the words I have said them right as our Lord showed them to me" (for here nothing was her own, but bare fidelity of utterance). "And for the ghostly sight I have said some deal, but I may never full tell it" (that is to say, no language or imagery of her own can ever adequately express the spiritual truths revealed to her higher reason). As a rule she makes it quite clear throughout, which of these three kinds of showing is being described. We have an example of bodily vision when she saw "the red blood trickling down from under the garland," and in all else that seemed to happen to the crucifix on which her open eyes were set. And of all this she says: "I conceived truly and mightily that it was Himself that showed it me, without any mean between us;" that is, she took it as a sort of pictorial language uttered directly by Christ, even as if He had addressed her in speech; she took it not merely as _having_ a meaning, but as designed and uttered to _convey_ a meaning--for to speak is more than to let one"s mind appear. Or again, it is by bodily vision she sees a little hasel-nut in her hand, symbolic of the "naughting of all that is made." Of words formed in her imagination she tells us, for example, "Then He (i.e., Christ as seen on the crucifix) without voice and opening of lips formed in my soul these words: _Herewith is the fiend overcome_." Of "ghostly sight," or spiritual intuition, we have an instance when she says: "In the same time that I saw (i.e., visually) this sight of the Head bleeding, our good Lord showed a ghostly sight of His homely loving. I saw that He is to us everything that is comfortable to our help; He is our clothing, that for love wrappeth us," &c.--where, in her own words and imagery, she is describing a divine-given insight into the relation of G.o.d and the soul. Or again, when she is shown our Blessed Lady, it is no pictorial or bodily presentment, "but the virtues of her blissful soul, her truth, her wisdom, her charity." "And Jesus ... showed me a _ghostly_ sight of her, right as I had seen her before, little and simple and pleasing to Him above all creatures."