The effects of Berulle’s more than Copernican revolution were profound, far-reaching and mainly disastrous. From the end of the seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth, mysticism practically disappeared out of the Catholic Church. As of all historical events, the causes of this disappearance are many and complex. There can be no doubt, however, that among these causes the Berullian revolution must take an important place. By substituting Christ and the Virgin for the undifferentiated Godhead of the earlier mystics, Berulle positively guaranteed that none who followed his devotional practices should ever accede to the highest states of union or enlightenment.
Contemplation of persons and their qualities entails a great deal of analytic thinking and an incessant use of the imagination. But analytic thinking and imagination are precisely the things which prevent the soul from attaining enlightenment. On this point all the great mystical writers, Christian and Oriental, are unanimous and emphatic. Consequently the would-be mystic who follows Berulle and chooses as the object of his love and contemplation, not the Godhead, but a person and personal qualities, thereby erects insurmountable barriers between himself and the higher states of union.
In this context it is interesting to compare Berulle and Berullism with Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuit school of devotion. Loyola seems to have been a born mystic who rejected the gift of passive contemplation in favour of active meditation based on analytic thought and imagination. Anthropocentric and moralistic, his Spiritual Exercises lie outside the field of mystical literature and make little appeal to persons of mystical temperament. Brought up on these exercises, the Jesuit theologians were mostly ignorant of the highest mystical states, and, being ignorant of them, denied their very possibility and regarded with suspicion or even actively persecuted those who insisted that such states existed. The influence of Berulle and his followers was of a subtler kind; for they revolutionized mysticism from within.
Unlike Loyola, Berulle did not reject his own mystical gifts. He preached the theocentrism traditional among mystics up to the time of St. John of the Cross, and he practised their traditional ‘adherence.’ Hence the appeal of his writings to the mystically minded; hence the depth and inwardness of his influence; hence, too, the fatal consequences of his subordination of direct mystical experience to personalistic theology. Berulle no doubt sincerely believed that the soul could adhere to the Incarnate Word or to the Virgin in exactly the same way as it could adhere to God, and with the same consequences. But, psychologically, this is impossible.
There cannot be adherence to persons or personal qualities without analysis and imagination; and where analysis and imagination are active, the mind is unable to receive into itself the being of God. Berulle taught potential mystics to follow a path which could not, in the nature of things, lead to the ultimate goal of mysticism. It was a path that would lead them to virtue; for (as Coue sufficiently demonstrated in our own day) imagination is more effective in this respect than will; a soul can be made virtuous by being dyed in its own mental image of another’s goodness.
It was also a path that would lead them to intense, affective devotion to divine persons, and to untiring activity on their behalf. But it was not a path that would lead to union with ultimate reality. Like the Jesuits, the followers of Berulie were condemned, by the very nature of their devotions, to a spiritual ignorance all the more fatal for imagining itself to be knowledge. It was the prevalence of this ignorance among sincere and virtuous men that led to the reaction against mysticism in the second half of the seventeenth century. The aberrations of the Quietists were used to justify the violence of this reaction.
But, as a matter of fact, neither Molinos nor Mme Guyon wrote anything that a little common sense cannot easily neutralize. The real objection to the Quietists was that they were continuators of that Dionysian tradition of mysticism whose last great representative had been St. John of the Cross. They were out of place in a world where Jesuitism and Berullism were just coming to their devotional consummation in the cult of the Sacred Heart. (Jean Eudes, beatified as the Father, Doctor and Apostle of that cult, was a Berullian, and the revelations of Margaret Mary Alacoque were sporisored by the Jesuits.) By the end of the seventeenth century, mysticism has lost its old significance in Christianity and is more than half dead.
‘Well, what of it?’ it may be asked. ‘Why shouldn’t it die?
What use is it when it’s alive?’ ‘
The answer to these questions is that where there is no vision, the people perish; and that, if those who are the salt of the earth lose their savour, there is nothing to keep that earth disinfected, nothing to prevent it from falling into complete decay. The mystics are channels through which a little knowledge of reality filters down into our human universe of ignorance and illusion. A totally unmystical world would be a world totally blind and insane. From the beginnings of the eighteenth century onwards, the sources of mystical knowledge have been steadily diminishing in number, all over the planet. We are dangerously far advanced into the darkness. By a tragic irony (due, of course, to the ignorance that accompanied their good intentions) the ecstatic Father Benet, the brilliant and saintly Pierre de Berulle take their place among the men who have contributed to the darkening of the human spirit.
CHAPTER IV The Evangelist
In the foregoing chapter I have painted in some detail the religious setting, historical, contemporary and personal of Father Joseph’s life. It was against this fixed back-drop of an intense Catholic devotion, partly mystical, partly imaginative and emotional, that the episodes of his political career were acted out; and it was in relation to it that they had to be explained and justified in his own mind.
During the first years of his life as a Capuchin, Father Joseph’s activities were exclusively religious. His career began, as we have seen, with a year’s novitiate at Orleans. After his profession in Paris he was sent to the Capuchin seminary at Rouen. Here the course of studies ordinarily lasted four years; but the new pupil was already so far advanced that he was altogether excused the preliminary year of philosophy and one of the three subsequent years of theology. His reputation at the seminary was that of a young religious graced with notable spiritual gifts, fervent in prayer, indefatigable in good works, burning with the holy ambition to become a saint.
He practised supererogatory austerities in the matter of food and labour; he kept such a careful watch over pride that he was never heard to speak of his past life, his present wishes or his future projects; he was eager in all circumstances to do more than his duty. That Spartan taste of his for the uncomfortable and the strenuous continually manifested itself, sometimes in the oddest ways. For example, it was his custom, during certain of the prescribed periods of prayer, to worship standing, bare-footed on the flagstones.
When sleepiness overtook him (which it sometimes did, as he was in the habit of shortening his nights with contemplation) he would combat it but standing on one leg. The practice was not generally approved of in the seminary; but when warned of the dangers of excess, the need of discretion even in matters of piety, Father Joseph would answer that the Kingdom of Heaven is taken by violence, and continue his prayers to the accompaniment of excruciating muscular strain.
All this was a sign of most commendable zeal; but what chiefly interested his superiors was the fact that their new pupil seemed to have a definite gift of orison. Father Benet had taught him the theory and practice of his own kind of modified Dionysian mysticism; and the young Capuchin had brought to his devotions that obsessive, hallucinatory preoccupation with the sufferings of Calvary which had haunted his mind from earliest childhood. The result was a type of mental prayer which his superiors described as an orison of ‘seraphic and crucified love.’ Intensive practice of this form of contemplation (to which the young seminarist gave many more hours than the two which the Capuchin rule prescribed for mental prayer) led not infrequently to ecstasy and the seeing of visions.
If we add to all these the fact that he had eloquence and a talent for religious controversy and religious exhortation, we shall not be surprised at the extraordinarily favourable judgment passed upon him by Ange de Joyeuse . .’Father Joseph,’ he declared in 1601, when the young man was still at the Rouen seminary, ‘is the perfect Capuchin and the
