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The Way of Perfection in the English Mystics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 August 2024
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The time is ripe for reintroducing readers of English to the growth of the spiritual life according to an English idiom coined from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. This idiom has largely been lost to the English tongue through the deservedly victorious attack of the Spanish and French “spiritualities” which have carried the day since the counter-reformation. St Teresa, St John of the Cross, St Francis de Sales and the vast horde of spiritual writers thrown together by the French controversies, Jansenism and Quietism, these have soaked into English writing on the same topic and the healthy, robust, if a trifle easy-going, spiritual writings of Rolle, Mother Julian, Hilton and the Cloud have been left to the academic scholars of middle English and to the rising tide of dabblers in “mysticism.” In view of the multiplicity of men who have become interested in this exotic-sounding subject, it is imperative to publish some form of introduction to the English Mystics if they are to be used as spiritual guides.
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- Copyright © 1946 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
(1) For example, Asceticae et Mysticae Summa, by E. P. Chrysogono de Jesu Sacramentato. Turin, 1936.
(2) It is useful to turn to the admirable classification of the theological and cognate sciences given by George Rabeau in his Introduction à l'Etude de la Théologie (cf. pp. 301 sqq.). In this he places Ascetic and Mystical Theology under the general heading of Religious Psychology in a similar category with Psychology, History of Religions, Comparative Religion, etc. Ascetics follows the development of faith illumining the soul according as sanctifying grace transforms the Christian life. It is the science of the common Christian life in its less common aspects, the facts being supplied by those who have passed through the various stages of the ascent. It is fundamentally a psychological study—#“a psychology that follows the mystics, desiring to understand the men themselves and accepting their descriptions and interpretations even when apparently contrary to the data of common psychology.” From the point of view of pure speculation, though, ascetics forms but one science with mystical theology, which with ascetic is only a branch of moral theology. The method is more descriptive than deductive, but it necessarily leads to a study of the nature of the experiences, though this is strictly moral theology—this separate study being justified by pedagogical and specialist reasons. These speculations are applied to things of experience, facts furnished by observation.
(3) Etienne Gilson: Introduction à l'étude de St Augustin, p. 220.
(4) De Doctrina Christiana, i, 29.
(5) The objectivity of the older type of spirituality is contrasted with the new subjective attitude, in terms of the Liturgical sources of the former, in La Trappe in England, by a Religious of Holy Cross Abbey. London, 1937. pp. 186-189.
(6) II-II, 24 9; 183 4. It is suggested that the division comes originally from the Pseudo-Denis, Celestial Hierarchies iii, 2. cf. also St Augustine, De Ordine, i, 2; Confessions, i, 13. St Gregory, Moralia, 124, 7; St Bernard on the Canticles. Serm. 3 and 4; Hugh of St Victor, De Gradibus Caritatis; Pseudo-Bonaventure, Pharetra, i, 1.
(7) Just as von Hügel, in discussing the three elements of religion, divides them according to (i) the Child—Sense and Memory, (ii) the Youth-Question and Argument, (iii) Adult—Intuition, Feeling and Volitional requirements and evidences. cf. Mystical Elements of Religion, I, pp. 50 sqq.
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