The difficulty, says Father Benet, can only be overcome through a sustained act of faith which, while the mind dwells on the image of Christ on the cross, absorbs and annihilates that image in God’s essence. From a psychological point of view, this whole passage is peculiarly interesting. It reveals Father Benet as a true mystic, very far advanced on the road to union; and yet constrained, by the logic of the theology he has accepted as true, to turn back from ultimate reality towards a particular manifestation of reality, from the direct intuition of God to imaginings and discursive reasonings connected with a person.
Such, then, were the doctrines which the youthful Baron de Maffliers received from his first master in religion, and which, as Father Joseph, he was later to reproduce, in a simpler and more systematic form, for the benefit of his converts and the novices entrusted to his charge. The friar’s own method of orison has been described at length in the first chapter, and it is unnecessary to add any further details here. Suffice it to say that his Introduction a la vie spirituelle par une facile methode d’ oraison is an excellent specimen of its kind, well balanced, practical, distinguished by sound sense no less than by eloquence. In spite, however, of all these merits, it was little read.
Like The Rule of Perfection, Father Joseph’s Introduction was soon forgotten, and exercised no appreciable influence on the course of religious life during the seventeenth century. To develop Father Benet’s doctrine, to introduce it to a wider public, was to be the work not of Father Joseph, but of his friend and fellow disciple, Pierre de Berulle. The history of this accomplishment and of its unforeseen consequences is only indirectly relevant to our main theme, but it is intrinsically so interesting and instructive that I make no excuse for briefly summarizing it here.
‘An able thinker of our time,’ writes Berulle, ‘has maintained that the sun is at the centre of the world, not the earth; that the former stands still, while the latter moves in relation to it. This novel opinion, not widely accepted in the science of the stars; is useful and should be followed in the science of salvation.’ This Copernican revolution in theology was Berulle’s reaction to the intense personalism of the then fashionable Jesuit devotion, based upon the ‘Spiritual Exercises’ of St. Ignatius Loyola. At the beginning of his ‘Exercises,’ Ignatius had, it is true, reaffirmed the fundamental Christian doctrine that man’s end and purpose in this world is the glory of God. But having made this affirmation he proceeded to write a book, in which the predominant role is played by the human individual.
The exercises are a gymnastic of the personal will; so much so that, instead of being an end in itself, the worship of God is made, in some sort, an instrument to be used by the gymnast in establishing self-control. For this ptolemaic system of religious thought and feeling Berulle substituted a thoroughgoing theocentrism. God is to be worshipped without regard to one’s spiritual profit. He is to be worshipped for his own sake, in an act of adoration and awe. He is to be worshipped as he is in himself, the sovereign and infinite being. To worship this sovereign and infinite being adequately, a man would have himself to be infinite and possess the highest reality, In practice, God has only once been worshipped as he should be worshipped and that was by Christ, who being God as well as man, was alone capable of giving the infinite adoration due to an infinite and eternal reality.
All this is strictly in accord with the Dionysian tradition.
All good contemplatives are religious Copernicans, and, in genuine mysticism, the theocentric hypothesis is axiomatic . Berulle’s contribution to religious thought and practice consists in this; that he developed and systematized traditional theocentrism, while at the same time he developed and systematized into an elaborate ‘Jesus-centrism’ the aberrant mystical doctrine which he had learned from Father Benet.
In discussing the reasons for Father Benet’s departure from the Dionysian tradition, I suggested that one of these might be found in the friar’s sense of the essential un-Catholicness of pure mysticism. That this was true of Berulle is certain. Writing of the school of which Berulle was the founder, Bremond says that ‘its spirituality continually refers to and derives authority from the dogmas of the Church.’ Berulle possessed undoubtedly a great aptitude for the mystical life; but before being a mystic, he was a Catholic. For him, theology, the gospel story and ecclesiastical tradition were fundamental data, antecedent to personal experience, which was something to be bent and moulded into conformity with them.
The contemplatives of the Dionysian tradition, on the other hand, had adapted dogma to their own experience, with the result that, in so far as they were advanced mystics,.they had ceased to be specifically Catholic. To a non-Christian, this seems the supremely important, the eminently encouraging fact about mysticism-that it provides the basis for a religion free from unacceptable dogmas, which themselves are contingent upon ill-established and arbitrarily interpreted historical facts. To certain pious Christians, on the other hand, mysticism is suspect precisely because of its undogmatic and unhistorical character. (Karl Barth, for example, regards it as nothing but ‘esoteric atheism.’)
Berulle knew and respected the mystics of the Dionysian tradition, but he preferred not to follow them. Instead, he devoted all the energies of a powerful intellect to the creation of a new, mystico-Catholic philosophy of life. In this philosophy, the raw materials of Catholic dogmas and popular Catholic devotion were worked up into a finished product of high spirituality by means of techniques borrowed from the Dionysian contemplatives. The result was in the highest degree remarkable; but it was not mysticism. It was not mysticism because though the approach was the same as that of the Dionysian contemplatives, the object approached was not the imageless Godhead of their direct experience and of their theology. The revolution which Berulle accomplished at the instigation of Benet Fitch and under the influence of Catholic thought and practice was more than Copernican.
Not content with affirming that the sun was the centre of the world, he insisted that there were several suns. To theocentrism he added Jesus-centrism and even Virgin-centrism -the contemplation of Christ and his mother in and for themselves. These two new suns assumed such importance for Berulle that they came, in his system, very largely to eclipse the great original sun of the Godhead. ‘Each man,’ he wrote, ‘is but a part of which Jesus is the whole. It is not enough for a man to be subordinated; he must be disappropriated and annihilated, and appropriated to Jesus, subsisting in Jesus, grafted in Jesus, living and operating in Jesus.’ Substitute ‘God’ for ‘Jesus,’ and the passage might have been written by the author of The Cloud of Unknowing.
The same significant similarities and differences can be found in the devotional practices of Berulle and his followers on the one hand and of the-Dionysian contemplatives, represented by the author of The Cloud on the other. For Berulle, as for the earlier mystics, the end and purpose of orison is the annihilation of self through self-abandonment to the divine will. The act of self-abandonment begins with adoration or admiration’ a sublime, rare and ravishing occupation,’ in Berulle’s words-and goes on to ‘adherence,’ which is a process of cleaving to that which one had adored, of immersing oneself in it, of transubstantiating the soul into what it contemplates. But here again, where the earlier mystics had insisted that adoration should beat upon the imageless cloud which envelops the Godhead, Berulle advocated ‘adherence’ and finally ‘servitude’ to Christ and even to the Virgin.
Urban VIII, who raised him to the cardinalate, gives him, along with the Hat, the title of ‘apostle of the Incarnate Word.’ The nature and scope of Berulle’s more than Copernican revolution was not only recognized by his contemporaries; it was also officially approved. ‘ Virtue,’ the author of The Cloud had written, translating directly from Richard of St. Victor, ‘is naught else but an ordered and measured affection, plainly directed unto God for himself.’ St. Augustine had expressed the same idea in a phrase: Love, and do what you will. A man who has learnt to love God intensely and unremittingly can safely do what he wishes, because he will never wish to do evil.
Berulle and his followers often contrasted their method with that of the pagan and non-mystical moralists. The moralist, they pointed out, seeks to become virtuous by strengthening his self-conscious will. His method consists in making a succession of resolutions to demonstrate some particular virtue. The carrying out of these resolutions is virtue in action, and may be expected, in the long run, to establish a habit. The defect of such a method, as the psychologists of every time and country have pointed out, is that it engages only the superficial levels of the mind and leaves the subconscious more or less unaffected. But it is from the subconscious that our impulses to action, our cravings and aversions, mainly spring. It follows, therefore, that the moralists’ method of training is fundamentally unsatisfactory. ‘We should accomplish our acts of virtue,’ says Berulle, ‘more through relation and homage to Jesus Christ than out of desire for the same virtue in itself:’ And we should do this, not only because all true religion is theocentric, but also because theocentrism produces better ethical results than anthropocentrism and moralism.
For, as one of Berulle’s contemporaries and followers remarks, ‘when
