Mysticism in English Literature | Page 9

has versified some of

his discourses. At this time also many of the "metaphysical poets" are
mystical in much of their thought. Chief among these is John Donne,
and we may also include Henry Vaughan, Traherne, Crashaw, and
George Herbert.
Bunyan might at first sight appear to have many of the characteristics
of the mystic, for he had certain very intense psychic experiences
which are of the nature of a direct revelation of God to the soul; and in
his vivid religious autobiography, Grace Abounding, he records
sensations which are akin to those felt by Rolle, Julian, and many
others. But although psychically akin, he is in truth widely separated
from the mystics in spirit and temperament and belief. He is a Puritan,
overwhelmed with a sense of sin, the horrors of punishment in hell, and
the wrath of an outside Creator and Judge, and his desire is aimed at
escape from this wrath through "election" and God's grace. But he is a
Puritan endowed with a psychopathic temperament sensitive to the
point of disease and gifted with an abnormally high visualising power.
Hence his resemblance to the mystics, which is a resemblance of
psychical temperament and not of spiritual attitude.
In the eighteenth century the names of William Law and William Blake
shine out like stars against a dark firmament of "rationalism" and
unbelief. Their writings form a remarkable contrast to the prevailing
spirit of the time. Law expresses in clear and pointed prose the main
teachings of the German seer Jacob Boehme;[6] whereas Blake sees
visions and has knowledge which he strives to condense into forms of
picture and verse which may be understood of men. The influence of
Boehme in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is very far-reaching.
In addition to completely subjugating the strong intellect of Law, he
profoundly influenced Blake. He also affected Thomas Erskine of
Linlathen, and through him, Carlyle, J. W. Farquhar, F. D. Maurice,
and others. Hegel, Schelling, and Schlegel are alike indebted to him,
and through them, through his French disciple St Martin, and through
Coleridge--who was much attracted to him--some of his root-ideas
returned again to England in the nineteenth century, thus preparing the
way for a better understanding of mystical thought. The Swedish seer
Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) was another strong influence in

the later eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Swedenborg in some
ways is curiously material, at any rate in expression, and in one point at
least he differs from other mystics. That is, he does not seem to believe
that man has within him a spark of the divine essence, but rather that he
is an organ that reflects the divine life. He is a recipient of life, but not
a part of life itself. God is thought of as a light or sun outside, from
which spiritual heat and light (= love and wisdom) flow into men. But,
apart from this important difference Swedenborg's thought and teaching
are entirely mystical. He believes in the substantial reality of spiritual
things, and that the most essential part of a person's nature, that which
he carries with him into the spiritual world, is his love. He teaches that
heaven is not a place, but a condition, that there is no question of
outside rewards or punishments, and man makes his own heaven or hell;
for, as Patmore pointedly expresses it--
Ice-cold seems heaven's noble glow To spirits whose vital heat is hell.
He insists that Space and Time belong only to physical life, and when
men pass into the spiritual world that love is the bond of union, and
thought or "state" makes presence, for thought is act. He holds that
instinct is spiritual in origin; and the principle of his science of
correspondences is based on the belief that everything outward and
visible corresponds to some invisible entity which is its inward and
spiritual cause. This is the view echoed by Mrs Browning more than
once in Aurora Leigh--
There's not a flower of spring, That dies in June, but vaunts itself allied
By issue and symbol, by significance And correspondence, to that
spirit-world Outside the limits of our space and time, Whereto we are
bound.
In all this and much more, Swedenborg's thought is mystical, and it has
had a quite unsuspected amount of influence in England, and it is
diffused through a good deal of English literature.
Blake knew some at least of Swedenborg's books well; two of his
friends, C. A. Tulk and Flaxman, were devoted Swedenborgians, and
he told Tulk that he had two different states, one in which he liked

Swedenborg's writings, and one in which he disliked them.
Unquestionably, they sometimes irritated him, and then he abused them,
but it is only necessary to read his annotations of his copy of
Swedenborg's Wisdom of the Angels