Part 19

This drastic training did its work. Thérèse had a heroic soul, though her courage and generosity found expression for the most part in small and obscure ways. She has said that she felt in herself the longing to be a soldier, an apostle, a martyr; and within the limits of the cloister, she found means of satisfying these desires. “Elle accomplissait simplement des actes héroïques,” said the Superior after her death. Determined, in her own metaphor, to be a “victime d’amour,” her brave spirit never faltered in its willing acceptance of pain. She hid her mental and physical sufferings, fought her increasing weakness, ate without hesitation the rough food which made her ill, refused every comfort and amelioration. By this hard yet humble way she rose in a few years to the heights of perfect self-conquest and moral perfection: passing through suffering to a state in which love, and total self-giving for love, was realized by her as the central secret of the spiritual life. “La charité me donna la clef de ma vocation.... Enfin, je l’ai trouvée. Ma vocation, c’est l’amour.”

In this completed love, stretching from the smallest acts of service to the most secret experiences of the soul, she found—as every mystic has done—that unifying principle of action which alone gives meaning to life. In its light all problems were solved, and the meaning of all experiences was disclosed. So Julian of Norwich, fifteen years after her first revelation, was answered in ghostly understanding: “Wouldest thou wit thy Lord’s meaning in this thing? Wit it well, Love was his meaning. Who showed it thee? Love. What showed he thee? Love. Wherefore showed it he? For love. Hold thee therein and thou shalt wit and know more in the same; but thou shalt never know nor wit therein other thing without end.” To live in this supernatural charity is to introduce into the world of succession the steadfast values of eternity; hence this quality, so simple yet so difficult of attainment, is the one essential character of the saints. “Pour atteindre à la vie idéale de l’âme,” said Elizabeth Catez, who so greatly exceeded her fellow-Carmelite in philosophic grasp, though not in moral beauty, “je crois qu’il faut vivre dans le surnaturel, prendre conscience que Dieu est au plus intime de nous, et aller à tout avec lui: alors on n’est jamais banal, même en faisant les actions les plus ordinaires, car on ne vit pas en ces choses, on les dépasse. Une âme surnaturelle ne traite pas avec les causes secondes, mais avec Dieu seulement ... pour elle, tout se reduite à l’unité.”

Thérese de l’Enfant-Jésus came to this consummation by way of a total and generous self-abandonment in all the daily incidents of life; a love which consecrated “les actions les plus ordinaires.” She took as her favourite saint the Curé d’Ars, because “he loved his family so deeply, and only did ordinary things.” This was the “little pathway” to the heart of Reality, on which, she thought, all might travel and none could miss the road. “Aux âmes simples, il ne faut pas des moyens compliqués.” Though the unquenchable thirst of her ardent nature for more suffering and more love did more than once express itself by way of ecstatic experience, she repudiated all abnormal “graces” and special contemplative powers. “Je ne suis qu’un pauvre petit oiseau couvert seulement d’un léger duvet; je ne suis pas un aigle, j’en ai simplement les yeux et le cœur.” Her spiritual practice became simplified as she grew in understanding. In the last years of her life the Gospels were her only book of devotion, and her prayer became “un élan du cœur, un simple regard jeté vers le ciel.” Yet the love thus expressed was no mere “divine duet.” She was not a victim of that narrow fervour which finds its satisfaction in a vertical relation with the Divine; her religion was of a distinctly social type. “Le zêle d’une Carmelite doit embrasser le monde,” she said; and this zeal showed itself, not only in the passionate love she gave to her family, but in radiant affection towards all living beings—the nuns in the convent, some of whom were extremely tiresome and even unkind, her friends and correspondents in the outside world, the animals and the birds. She always had her eye on her fellow-creatures; she wanted to help them, to show light to them, to save them. The eager service and voluntary mortifications of her life closed with eighteen months of great physical suffering. She died in September 1897, at the age of twenty-four.

Thérèse Martin had lived for nine years within the walls of a small, strictly enclosed convent in a provincial town. This building and its dreary little chapel formed the setting of her religious career. There was nothing impressive in her surroundings, nothing to satisfy those artistic instincts which she certainly possessed, to hint at the poetry and mystery of the spiritual life. Her opportunities of action had been limited on every side; her creative impulse found expression only in the writing of some conventional religious verse, and the record of her thoughts and experiences, composed not for publication, but as an act of obedience to her Superior. Prayer, the teaching of novices, the family life of the community, and a small amount of correspondence with those in the world, were the only channels through which her passionate love of humanity could flow. This record may not sound impressive. Its sequel is amazing. Students of history have often discussed the stages and the circumstances through which a simple man or woman, distinguished only by a beautiful and humble life, has been transformed by the reverence, love, and myth-making faculty of his contemporaries into a supernatural being endowed with magical powers. This transformation has happened within our own time in the person of Thérèse de l’Enfant-Jésus. This young girl, whose life was marked by no bizarre incident, who was brought up in an obscure Norman town, and deliberately shut herself up in a convent of strictest enclosure to remain—as the “healthy-minded” would say—buried alive till her death, is now loved and invoked wherever the Roman Catholic church is established. Her short and uneventful life has influenced and comforted countless other lives. Her “cause” has been introduced, and although she is not yet canonized, she is already regarded as numbered among the saints. To visit her grave in the beautiful hillside cemetery outside Lisieux, and watch the endless stream of pilgrims who come on every day of the year from all parts of the world to ask her help, to deposit letters explaining their needs, and lay on her tomb for blessing the clothes of babies or the food of the sick, is to understand what the shrine of a mediæval saint must have been like. It is to understand also something of the triumphant power of character, and of the fact that the enclosing of a radiant personality within the cloister is not burying it alive.

Although the whole of her short adult life had been passed behind the high garden walls of the convent, and after she took the veil only the members of her family had seen her—and this under the most restricted conditions—yet at the time of her death Thérèse de l’Enfant-Jésus was already known and valued by the whole town. That death was an event of importance, evoking an extraordinary demonstration of affection and reverence. The events which followed it are of deep interest. Here, in our own day, we have the swift rise and diffusion of a _cultus_ exactly similar to those which followed the deaths of the great popular saints of the Middle Ages. Every element is present; the prompt setting up of a pilgrimage, the veneration of the tomb, the distribution of relics—at the Lisieux convent cards are sold, bearing splinters and bits of straw from the cell of Thérèse—countless reports of visions, conversions, “supernatural perfumes,” and miraculous answers to prayer. The literature of the subject is already considerable, and a journal is published giving details of “graces” obtained by her help. The causes which lie behind such religious movements as this are still obscure; but we have in the cult of Thérèse Martin a valuable clue by which to interpret those reported from the past. Her “miracles,” in which students of psychic phenomena will find much to interest them, range from the cure of cancer to the multiplication of bank-notes, and even include the restoration of dead geranium-cuttings. Many are obviously explained by coincidence or hallucination, some are admirable examples of faith-healing. But a few, apparently supported by good evidence, seem to defy rationalistic explanation.

The cult quickly lost its local and ultimately its national character. Though French Catholicism rightly claims Thérèse as its peculiar possession, and devotion to her is probably more general in France than elsewhere, yet she is now venerated in every country in the world, and distributes her favours without regard to nationality. Scotland and America in particular have numerous stories of her benevolent intervention, at least as evidential as much that is offered to us by the exponents of spiritualism. Her legend is in active formation, and many picturesque incidents were added to it during the war. She is even said to have appeared at the British Headquarters, and given advice at a critical moment of the campaign. A large proportion of the Catholic soldiers who fought for France probably placed themselves under her protection, and attribute their safety to her care.

A little time before her death, she said to her sister Pauline, “Une seule attente fait battre mon cœur; c’est l’amour que je recevrai et celui que je pourrai donner.... Je veux passer mon ciel à faire du bien sur la terre,” and again, “Je compte bien ne pas rester inactive au ciel, mon désir est de travailler encore.” In these sayings, so unlike in their vigorous activism the conventional aspirations of the devout, we have probably the germinal point of her _cultus_. It has come to be believed that this simple and loving spirit, who passed from the body with so many generous longings unfulfilled, is indeed spending her heaven in doing good; and the deeds attributed to her are just those practical and friendly acts of kindness, through which during life she expressed and perfected her spirit of love.

II LUCIE-CHRISTINE

Those students of mysticism who feel that the purely cloistered type of spirituality, as seen in Thérèse Martin and Elizabeth Catez, is too remote from the common experience to be actual to us, may find something with which they can sympathize and from which they can learn, in the self-revelations of the remarkable contemplative who is known under the pseudonym of Lucie-Christine.

This lady, whose spiritual journal was published in 1912, was a married woman of the leisured class, leading the ordinary life of a person of her type and position. She was born in 1844 and married in 1865. She had five children. At forty-three she became a widow, and in 1908, after nineteen years of blindness, she died at the age of sixty-four. Nothing could have been more commonplace than her external circumstances. On the religious side she was an exact and fervent Roman Catholic, accepting without question the dogmas and discipline of the Church, and diligent in all the outward observances of conventional French piety. Her time was spent in family and social duties, sometimes in Paris, sometimes in her country home; and she appeared to her neighbours remarkable only for her goodness, gentleness, and love of religion. Yet her inward life—unsuspected by any but her parish priest, for whom her journal was written—had a richness and originality which entitle her to a place among the Catholic mystics, and often help us to understand the meaning and character of the parallel experiences which those mystics describe. The value for study of a contemplative who is at once so modern and so classic is obvious. This value is increased by the fact that for many years Lucie-Christine knew nothing of mystical literature, and was ignorant even of the names of the spiritual states which her journal so faithfully describes. Therefore in her case unconscious imitation, which accounts for much so-called mystical experience, appears to be excluded.

Her journal—at present our only source of information—covers thirty-eight years: from 1870 to 1908. The first twelve years, however, are only represented by fragmentary notes, put together in 1882; when Lucie-Christine, at the suggestion of her confessor, began to keep a detailed record of her religious life. Whatever view we may take of its theological value, this record is certainly a psychological document of the first class. It is the work of a woman of marked intelligence; temperamentally philosophic, and with great intuitional gifts. The short memoir prefixed to the French edition tells us that even as a child she showed unusual qualities; was grave, thoughtful, and to some extent “psychic,” being subject to flashes of clairvoyance, and premonitions of important and tragic events. This peculiarity, which she disliked and never spoke of, persisted through life; and its presence in her helps us to understand how the many stories of abnormal power possessed by the mystics first arose.

Her character was by no means of that detached and inhuman type which is supposed to be proper to religious exaltation. She was ardent and impressionable, gave love and craved for it; her qualities and faults were essentially of a lovable kind. She reveals herself in her journal as sensitive, idealistic, and affectionate; somewhat unpractical, very easily wounded, tempted to irritability, and inclined to worry. “The excessive wish to be loved, appreciated, admired by those whom I love,” was one of the temptations against which, as a young woman, she felt it necessary to pray: another was the longing for enjoyment, for personal happiness. It was only after eight years of intermittent mystical experience that she learned the secret of inward peace: to “lose her own interests in those of God, and receive a share in His interests in exchange.” Though the “activity and practical capacity of Martha” never came naturally to her, she was yet a splendid wife and mother. Even in the years when her inner life was passed in almost continuous contemplation, she never neglected human duties for superhuman joys; but planned and shared the amusements of her boys and girls, wrote and rehearsed the plays which they acted, and watched with care over every detail of their lives.

Her spiritual life developed gradually and evenly. There is no trace in it of any psychic storm or dramatic conversion. She grew up in a religious home, and even in childhood seems to have been attracted to silent devotion or “mental prayer.” As a girl she was a vital, impulsive creature, full of eager enthusiasms. That deep, instinctive longing for Perfection which makes one man an artist, another a philosopher, and another a saint, showed itself early in a passionate worship of all beautiful things. “Tout ce que je connaissais de beau me passionnait et entraînait toute mon âme. La première vue de la mer et des falaises m’arracha des larmes.... Je ne pouvais trouver l’expression qui traduisît assez l’ardeur dont le beau enflammait mon imagination, et je ne voyais pas d’inconvénients à ces entraînements excessifs; au contraire, je m’y livrais de toute la force de ma volonté. Infortunée, mon âme en revenait cependant avec le sentiment du vide et de l’insuffisance, et c’est alors qu’elle rejetait son activité dévorante sur l’idéal qui lui réservait tant de dangers! Moins altérée du beau, je me fusse peut-être contentée des choses réelles, mais comme le coureur, lancé dans un fol élan, dépasse le but, ainsi mon âme s’élançait vers le beau à peine aperçu et cherchait encore au delà.”

In this important passage we see the true source of Lucie’s mysticism. It was the craving for an absolute and unchanging loveliness on which to expend her large-hearted powers of adoration and self-giving, which led her like the Platonists through visible beauty to its invisible source. She had, as she says of herself in a sudden flash of ironic wit, “le cœur assez mal placé pour trouver Dieu plus aimable que le monde, et l’esprit assez étroit pour se contenter de l’Infini”; but it was not until youth was nearly over, and she had been married for eight years, that she found what she sought. One day, when she was meditating as usual on a passage in the _Imitation of Christ_, she saw and heard within her mind the words “Dieu seul!”—summing up and answering in one phrase the vague efforts and questions of her growing mystical sense, and offering to the hungry psyche the only satisfaction of desire. As Fox was released from his conflict by the inner voice which cried, “There is one only who can speak to thy condition,” so this inner voice, says Lucie (whom it greatly astonished), “fut à la fois une lumière, un attrait, et une force. Une lumière qui me fit voir comment je pouvais être complètement à Dieu seul dans le monde, et je vis que jusque-là je ne l’avais pas bien comprit. Un attrait par lequel mon cœur fut subjugué et ravi. Une force qui m’inspira une résolution généreuse et me mit en quelque sorte dans les mains les moyens de l’exécuter, car le propre de ces paroles divines est d’opérer ce qu’elles disent.”

We see at once the complete and practical character of her reaction to the divine; the promptitude with which she makes the vital connection between intuition and act. St. Teresa said that the object of the spiritual marriage was “the incessant production of work.” So for Lucie-Christine that sure consciousness of the Presence of God which now became frequent, “clothing and inundating” her as she sat alone at her sewing or took part in some social activity, called her above all to “faire les petites choses du dévouement journalier avec amour”; conquering her natural irritability and dislike for the boredoms and unrealities of a prosperous existence. “N’avoir jamais l’air ennuyé des autres. Que de fois je manque à ceci avec les pauvres enfants. Vous êtes ennuyeux! C’est bien vite dit! Est-ce une amabilité divine?”

More and more, as her mystical consciousness grew, the life of contemplation became her delight; and it was plainly a real trial to be distracted from it for trivial purposes. In company, or busied with household duties, she went for hours with “her soul absorbed, its better part rapt in God.” She “tried to appear ordinary,” and made excuses if her abstraction was observed; but there are a few entries in her journal which will give pleasure to those who condemn mysticism as an “anti-social type of religion.” “Nous avons été nous promener, quatorze. Je remarque que d’aller ainsi avec plusieurs ‘Marthes’ hommes ou femmes, cela ne fait rien. On laisse discourir, on met un mot de temps en temps, mais, en définitive, on demeure bien libre et l’oraison va toute seule. Mais avec une seule Marthe, que c’est terrible! La tête-à-tête oblige à causer presque tout le temps.”

When Lucie wrote this, ten years after her first illuminative experience, she was far advanced in contemplation. She had known that direct and ineffable vision of God “Himself the True, the Good, the Beautiful; all things being nothing save by Him” which is characteristic—though she knew it not—of the unitive way: known too the corresponding experience of dereliction, when the door which had opened on Eternity seemed tightly closed. It would be tedious to analyze in detail the rich profusion of mystic states which she had already exhibited: the degrees of contemplation, ecstasies, visions and voices, all the forms taken by her growing intuition of the Transcendent. Many of these can be matched in the writings of the great mystics. Again and again as we read her, we are reminded of Angela of Foligno, Ruysbroeck, Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Genoa, even of Plotinus: yet Lucie-Christine was at this time ignorant of mystical literature, and only in later life found with amazement descriptions of her own experiences in the works of the great contemplatives.

These experiences had a wide range. Some we are justified in regarding as invasions from her deeper self; coming to the rescue of the often distracted surface personality, and correcting the impressions of the outer world by its own intimations of Eternity. Thus, in 1875, she confesses that being particularly worried by a number of people, the Divine voice said to her, “Ma fille, il n’y a que toi et moi.” She replied: “Seigneur, et les autres?” The voice said: “Pour chaque âme en ce monde il n’y a que moi et elle, toutes les autres âmes et toutes choses ne sont rien pour elle que par moi et pour moi,” and by this timely reminder of the one Reality in whose life she lived, and by and in whom alone all other lives are real, she was recalled to her inner poise.

In assessing the value of this, and many other of her revelations, we have to remember that Lucie-Christine was a fervent and exact Churchwoman. Her belief was literal. She felt no discord between traditional Christianity of the most concrete kind and the freedom of her own communion with God. The fruits of that communion were often expressed by her in theological terms, and the special atmosphere and tendencies of French Catholicism certainly affected the form of many of her contemplations. Thus at one end of the scale her passionate devotion to the Person of Christ, and the fact that her religious practice centred in the Eucharist, sometimes resulted in visions of a distinctly anthropomorphic type. In these, her intuition of God’s presence translated themselves into hallucinatory images of the Face of Christ, or of His eyes looking at her; or photisms, which she explained to herself as the radiance emanating from His person. As we all know, such dramatizations of mystical emotion are comparatively commonplace. The elements from which the self constructs them are by no means all of a spiritual kind; and experienced mystics agree in regarding them with much suspicion. A careful study of Lucie-Christine’s journal forces us to admit, that the deliberate passivity which she cultivated often placed her at the mercy of her instinctive nature; and that its hidden wishes sometimes took a devotional form. To this source, too, we must refer those “obsessions and temptations”—in other words, uprushes from the lower centres—by which she was often attacked during contemplation, and also the occasionally sentimental and emotional character of her reactions to the Divine.