The search for God is no exception to the
mysterious law of human nature, that we cannot get anything worth
having--neither holiness nor happiness nor wisdom--by trying for it directly. It
must be given us through something else. The recluse who lives like Parnell's
"Hermit":
"Prayer all his business, all his
pleasure praise,"
is not only a poor sort of saint, but he will
offer a poor sort of prayers and praises. He will miss real holiness for the
same reason that makes the pleasure-seeker miss real happiness. We must lose
ourselves in some worthy interest in order to find again both a better self and
an object higher than that which we sought. This the German mystics in a sense
knew well. There is a noble sentence of Suso to the effect that "he who
realises the inward in the outward, to him the inward becomes more inward than
to him who only recognises the inward in the inward." Moreover, the
recognition that "God manifests Himself and worketh more in one creature
than another" ("Theologia Germanica"), involves a denial of the
nihilistic view that all the creatures are "ein lauteres Nichts."[xxi]
It would be easy to find such passages in all the fourteenth-century mystics,
but it cannot be denied that on the whole their religion is too self-centred.
There are not many maxims so fundamentally wrong-headed and un-Christian as
Suso's advice to "live as if you were the only person in the world."[xxii]
The life of the cloistered saint may be abundantly justified--for the spiritual
activity of some of them has been of far greater service to mankind than the
fussy benevolence of many "practical" busybodies--but the idea of
social service, whether in the school of Martha or of Mary, ought surely never
to be absent. The image of Christ as the Lover of the individual soul rather
than as the Bridegroom of the Church was too dear to these lonely men and women.
Unconsciously, they looked to their personal devotions to compensate them for
the human loves which they had forsworn. The raptures of Divine Love, which they
regarded as signal favours bestowed upon them, were not very wholesome in
themselves, and diverted their thoughts from the needs of their fellow-men. They
also led to most painful reactions, in which the poor contemplative believed
himself abandoned by God and became a pray to terrible depression and
melancholy. These fits of wretchedness came indeed to be recognised as God's
punishment for selfishness in devotion and for too great desire for the
sweetness of communing with God, and so arose the doctrine of
"disinterested love," which was more and more emphasised in the later
mysticism, especially by the French Quietists.
