SAINT-MARTIN THE raYsnc.*
A PEaron of simply destructive criticism may be more fertile in great regenerative ideas than a period of creative criticism. Destructive criticism was the chief characteristic of the eighteenth
• fiakt-Martim, is Philotophe Inconns,—ut Vie d as Santa Box Math**, Martins, Lars Groupee. D'spres des Documents Index. Par lL Natter. Paris: Didier.
century; creative criticism is the chief characteristic of our own. Yet the eighteenth century, so fiercely and ignorantly decried, was one incessant outpouring of the largest and loftiest conceptions ; while our own, so vain of its achievements, so boastful of its progress, is obliged to work out in detail thoughts to which the eighteenth century gave birth. Compared to the nineteenth cen- tury the eighteenth was eminently original ; _ original in its philanthropic dreams, its schemes of universal emancipation, no less than in its crimes, audacities, and excesses ; original in its charlatans as well as in its conquerors. Its very negativism, so absolute and fanatical, was sublime. We smile at its temerities and chimeras, and point in scorn or in pity to the disenchantments that followed them. But how mighty must have been the genius and the will from which visions and determinations- so colossal sprang! To the faults and defects of the eighteenth century we are by no means blind ; we are not its eulogists, we merely con- tend for a generous appreciation of its aspirings, and darings, and doings ; and we maintain that it was not that season of deplorable barrenness which some men of talent, fonder of pictorial phrases than of historical truth, have represented it. If we know the past better, estimate it more wisely and perhaps lovingly than the thinkers of the eighteenth century, how elevated and enthusiastic were their hopes of the future!
The most interesting feature of the eighteenth century was not the poetical revival of which Goethe or the metaphysical revival of which Kant was the leader, was not the social and' political theories which culminated in the grandest if saddest of social and political revolutions, but a mysticism strangely in contrast with an age of scepticism, and unbelief, and bold denial. All the real religious yearnings and movements of the eighteenth century were mystical in a supreme degree. State 'churches might be torpid ; official, or conventional theologies might be frigid, and .apathy might be as general as blasphemy- Nevertheless men proclaimed in a thousand ways that they could not live without God, and in the face alike of indifference and infidelity they prayed, and toiled, and suffered for the Unseen and the Holy. Sects mainly mystical either arose, such as the Methodists, or were energetically transfigured, such as the Quakers and the Moravian Brethren. Quietism continued to have its represen- tatives, though Fenelon and Madame Guyon had died at the beginning of the century ; and from the wreck of Jansenism, harsh and dogmatic though Jansenism was, a mystical element emerged. Swedenborg, the visionary by excellence, was almost strictly the contemporary of Voltaire, the remorseless idol-breaker. William Law, who wrote a book tinged by a persuasive mysticism, a book to which Johnson ascribed his conversion, and whose works, so profoundly- pious and so rich in unction, are much less read than they deserve to be, had intimate relations with the family of him who is almost better known in England as the foe of Christianity than as the historian of Rome's decline and fall. It was not the ascetic or the saint that the scoffer attacked ; and the ascetic and the saint pursued their own path, without knowing or heeding whether there were scoffers in the world. Much of the mysticism in the eighteenth century might be called by the convenient term re-action. But re-action is an eternal ebb and flow, and. does not mark one age more than another. Far more correct would it be to say that the eighteenth century was as earnest as it was frivolous, and that even its frivolities had a species of earnestness. Who could be more frivolous and at the same time more earnest than Voltaire him- self ? And was not Frederick the Great both a genuine worker and a thorough trifler? Take Diderot, the eighteenth century's typical man. What fervour and simplicity along• with what recklessness and sensuality we here behold ! That mania for the imitation of antiquity which seized on the French; and which has been so often ridiculed, had its noble and venerable side. It was the striving after ideal and heroic virtue. The terrible Saint-Just, to whom, more than to Robespierre, we must ascribe the bloody aspect which the French Revolution for a moment wore, had an antique elevation and courage along with an irre- proachable purity. In truth we cannot sufficiently admire or sufficiently hate the eighteenth century, with the treasure of Christian graces in its heart, with the crown of Greek and Roman 'velours on its brow, with lewdness and cruelty in its eye, and with a sneer on its lips-; marching manfully, yet stumbling lamentably; by turns ashamed and proud of its most gifted and eloquent son Roasseaul pausing, amid• its hallucinations• and quackeries, to applaud Pestalozzi, or some other reformer ; and not quite sure whether it should surrender its whole being to God or Cagliostro.
Few mystics during the• last century gained an enduring nem a and influence except Saint-Martin. M. Matter, in a solid and readable, but not very attractive volume, has supplied us with the that detailed and trustworthy account of him. While for a service so meritorious grateful to M. Matter, who is a veteran in literature, and who has written besides a variety of other works an elaborate History of Gnosticism, we doubt whether in this or in any of his productions he is more than an able and conscientious book-maker. He is one of those heavy respectititles whom it is impossible to praise, but whom it would be unfair to condemn, and to whom the English are more tolerant than the French, though Guizot, spite of his notable acquirements and immense reputation, belongs to the class. The worst thing about your heavy respect- able is his pedantic habit of treating every matter judicially. We must all have felt what an excellent judge has been spoiled in M. Guizot to make a second-rate writer and a third-rate statesman. He and the rest of the heavy respectables provoke us by their inter- minable seesawing, and by their want of passion and of sympathy. Literature is more than a tribunal, and less. It has not ex- clusively, or even mainly, a moral purpose. A voice of life to the living, it grows dreary when it puts on a periwig and solemnly holds the scales of justice. M. Matter sums up in favour of the prisoner at the bar, and wags his sapient head, after the fashion of his tribe, but he does not give us—what we should have much preferred—a vivid picture of Saint-Martin, or of those conflicting or commingling forces which moulded• the destinies of mankind a hundred years ago.
Saint-Martin himself has said that there are things which we can reveal to all the world; things which we can reveal only to a few, things which we can reveal to none. In the existence of the mystic the last of these abound. The things which can be revealed only to a few he puts into his conversation and correspondence with his intimate friends, or into his books, if he writes books. But of the• things that can be revealed to all the world how limited is his share? Hence the biography of a mystic cannot well be given except by a mystic, just as saints•can alone fully discourse to us about saints. That wordless ecatacy which is not so much• the most exalted and precious part of the mystic's being as his whole being; that entrancement, which is to him enchantment, a brother mystic can imagine, sympathize with; and revere. For that very reason, however, he abstains from any attempt to delineate it. Yet theliteraryman by profession,—the bookmaker, who can neither imagine sympathise with, nor revere it, never scruples to paint it as if it were a sort of amusing phenomenon which every one could understand. Internally,—by the things which can be revealed to none, and by the things which can be revealed only to a few, the mystic is more interesting than the saint; by the things which can be revealed to all the world,—less interesting. The saint dwells in the holy of holies that he may bring forth treasures of mercy to his sinning and suffering race. On the other hand, the mystic views whatsoever is beautiful and sacred in the Outward as symbolical of the joys in the innermost abode of- his soul. This distinction is not fanciful, and it has an emphatic and suggestive bearing on the distinction which ought ever to be observed between the biography of a mystic and the biography of a saint. The bio- graphy-of a saint enters more into the literary region,—is more comprehensible by ordinary minds. Let the Swedish Saint Bridget be compared with the Spanish Saint Theresa. The former attracts us almost purely as a saint, the latter almost purely as a mystic. But Saint Theresa, notwithstanding her transcendent genius and her divine self-denial and charity, does not approach DB with the legendary radiance, the romantic glory of her Swedish predecessor. She is too much an angel, dimly seen, rough clearly heard, to impress as a woman. It is therefore with not a little hesitation that we venture on a sketch of Saint- /din-tin, who stands far below the adorable Santa Teresa in that hierarchy which is the visible representative of the city-of God.
The province of Touraine, now the department of Indre and Loire, has been called the Garden of France. In this province is the town of Amboise, which lies on the banks of the Loire, and is historically- famous as the spot where Charles VIII. was born and died, and where in 1530 a formidable but fruitless conspiracy was formed against the Guises. At Amboise, on the 18th January, 1743, Louis Claude de Saint-Martin first saw the light. He was by birth a gentleman, and he displayed throughout his career the most refined instincts of a gentleman. His constitution was feeble, but he always regarded-this as a favour of Heaven, as tending to lead him away from things visible. From his father, and especially from his stepmother, his own mother having died young, he re- ceived a singularly-pious education. The tenderness of his step- mother deepened' and confirmed the effect' of her holy precepts and example. A French Protestant theoltogian who attained much distinction and influence at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth was Abbadie. In his latter days he inclined to mysticism. The most popu- lar of his many works was the Art of Self-Knowledge. This was the first book which induced the thoughtful and affec- tionate child Saint-Martin to meditate on the divine perfec- tion. It taught him that divine truth is only a path to divine beauty. When it grew necessary to choose a profession, Saint- Martin became a student of law, and he commenced to practise as an advocate at Tours, at the age of twenty-two. But in a few months he abandoned the law, and entered as lieutenant a regiment in garrison at Bordeaux. Before this period he had read the philosophers most in vogue. But none of them satisfied him, and only one of them, Rousseau, corresponded in some mea- sure to his spiritual longings. Those longings found nourishment in an odd and unexpected fashion. At Bordeaux he met Mar- tinez Pasqualis, a Portuguese Jew, who had been busy for a number of years in winning converts to a peculiar, mystical scheme, in which, if much was his own, a good deal seems to have been borrowed from the Kabbala and other sources. Pasqualis does not appear to have been either a quack or an adventurer. He sought to fulfil what he deemed his vocation with the utmost secrecy, and was the more intensely an enthusiast from being free from the ostentation of enthusiasm. Saint-Martin was adinitted as one of- his disciples. What the mode of initiation was it is impossible to ascertain, nor does it much matter: Things the most various and the most opposed pass under the general name of mysticism. The lowest form of mysticism is' thaumaturgy. If we ascend a step we come to theurgy ; another, to apparitional discernment ; another, to vision in God; another, to life in God ; another, to conscious identity with God. To our own coarse age the coarsest kinds of thaumaturgy are acceptable, and only as thaumaturgy is mysticism conceived of and embraced at present. The more mysticism descends to thaumaturgy, to theurgy, to apparitional discernment, the more room is there for imposture and deception; the more it rises to life in God, to vision in God, to conscious identity with God, the more it leaves the realm of legerdemain behind it. When the miracle prevails over the mystery we have vulgar, with the risk of having false, mysticism, while if the mystery predominates over the miracle we have true mysticism, with an absolUte freedom from delusion, though Rationalists might pronounce the whole affair to be folly and fraud. Now we are afraid that in the system of Martinez Pasqualis there were too many of the baser mystical elements, and that too much importance was-attached to thanmaturgy and apparitional' discernment. It is true that Saint-Martin continw- ally insisted on the diviner elements, but the grosser elements he was not energetic in repudiating. Mysticism of the highest order, so far as it can be expressed at all, employs the-simplest language or clothes itself in symbols: The enigmatical jargon adopted in imitation of the Kabbalistical writers it strenuously shuns. It is that jargon• which offends us in Saint-Martin's productions. Saint` Martin left the army in 1771, and- what he learned as a neophyte he grew jealous to propagate as an• apostle, But his propagandism was like his master's--quiet and unobtru- sive ; and he delighted in calling himself the unknown philosopher and the Robinson Crusoe of Spiritualism. This, however; only indicates his dislike to publicity, and his conviction that a creed such as his should not be indiscriminately divulged, not his un- willingness to make proselytes. In 1775 appeared his first works entitled "'On Errors and Truth." It was a refutation of the reigning materialism. But it was an exposition besides of what it would not be wrong' to describe as a modified and modern Gnosticism. Unlike most mystics, Saint-Martin did not live the life of a recluse. He moved in the beat society, where the noble- ness of his character and the charm of his manners made him welcome and loved. One of his friends and protectors was the Duke de Richelieu. The-old'Afarshal tried to interest Voltaire in Saint-Martin's book. Voltaire, in reply to the application, said, "The work, the whole of which you have read, I do not know ; but if it is a good work, the first part ought to contain fifty folio volumes, and the second half a page." Afterwards Voltaire, having perused the book, severely criticized it in a letter to D'Alembert. When travelling for a short time in Italy, in 1775, Saint Martin seems to have been afraid of being seized by the Inquisition as a heretic, and to have taken in consequence some rather absurd precautions. In 1787 Saint-Martin paid a second and more prolonged visit to Italy, accompanied by the Russian Prince Alexis Galitzin, whom he had met in London. Saint-Martin's residence in England, immediately preceding the second journey to Italy, was brief. Except a handful' of solitary
mystics, there was nothing in England for which Saint-Martin felt affinity On returning from Italy Saint-Martin in 1788 sought a home at Strasburgh. Here he resided till 1791, when the illness of his father summoned him to Amboise, where, or at Paris, the remainder of his days was spent. He died at Aunay, near Paris, on the 13th October, 1803.
The sojourn of Saint-Martin at Strasburgh was in more than one way memorable for his spiritual development. In that city he was surrounded by sympathetic souls, to whom mysticism was a faith as intense and rapturous as to himself. Moreover, it was at Strasburgh that his profound study of Jacob Boehme's writings commenced. Jacob Boehme was his second master, and in his eyes greater, much greater, than the first, Pasqualis.
On Saint-Martin's fortunes the French Revolution had a disastrous effect. To the extremity of want he was never re- duced; he had, however, to suffer many privations. But he bore adversity cheerfully, and he ceased not for an instant to view the French Revolution hopefully. He was not silly or short-sighted enough to anathematize it on account of its errors, illusions, absurdities, and exaggerations. As a grand social and political movement he watched with earnest eye its successive phases. But he was more disposed to hail it as the dawn of spiritual regeneration for all mankind. He could not dream that forces so tremendous could be unchained by Providence, only that from transient anarchy might spring permanent despotism. And surely those are wisest who believe, as he believed, that the French Revolution was the prelude of moral and religious change, though the complete redemption may yet be remote.
If we take the word syncretism in its most favourable sense, then we must admit that Saint-Martin was a mystical syncretist. Influenced by his first teacher, Pasqualis, and by a variety of mystical writings, chiefly those of Jacob Boehme, he strove to build a system which, faithful to the inner life, should yet be re- concileable with progressive science. This was the aim of his New Man and of his other productions, published either during his life or after his death. He was therefore as much an imitator and as much an originator as the best philosophers of the Alexandrian school. Appearing in a religious age, he would have been nothing more than a devout priest, happy and unambitious in the dis- charge of his duties. But, like his contemporaries, Jung Stilling and Lavater, he was less conspicuous for new ideas and distinctive individuality than for his relations to a period of unbelief and overthrow.
The bibliographical information which M. Matter furnishes is as ample as the biographical. Saint-Martin translated some of Jacob Boehme's principal works. Several of his own works have appeared in German, one, if not more of them, in English. As a poet, he com- posed the long and curious so-called Crocodile, and sundry minor pieces. Poetical genius he certainly had not,—but as a prose writer he manifested that instinct of style which the French so eminently possess. It is not, however, for their literary merits that bis works will ever be read. They are tiresome to all not gifted with mystical feeling and phantasy. To a much wider circle M. Matter's volume commends itself, though M. Matter is simply an honest, painstaking biographer, and not an accomplished literary artist.
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