The Cell of Self-Knowledge: Seven Early English Mystical Treatises | Page 7

the Ancren Riwle.14 It is clearly only a fragment of her complete book (whatever that may have been); but it is enough to show that she was a worthy precursor of that other great woman mystic of East Anglia: Juliana of Norwich. For Margery, as for Juliana, Love is the interpretation of revelation, and the key to the universal mystery:[15]--
"Daughter, thou mayst no better please God, than to think continually in His love."
"If thou wear the habergeon or the hair, fasting bread and water, and if thou saidest every day a thousand Pater Nosters, thou shalt not please Me so well as thou dost when thou art in silence, and suffrest Me to speak in thy soul."
"Daughter, if thou knew how sweet thy love is to Me, thou wouldest never do other thing but love Me with all thine heart."
"In nothing that thou dost or sayest, daughter, thou mayst no better please God than believe that He loveth thee. For, if it were possible that I might weep with thee, I would weep with thee for the compassion that I have of thee."
And, from the midst of her celestial contemplations, rises up the simple, poignant cry of human suffering: "Lord, for Thy great pain have mercy on my little pain."
We are on surer ground with the treatise that follows, the Song of Angels.16 Walter Hilton--who died on March 24, 1396--holds a position in the religious life and spiritual literature of England in the latter part of the fourteenth century somewhat similar to that occupied by Richard Rolle in its earlier years. Like the Hermit of Hampole, he was the founder of a school, and the works of his followers cannot always be distinguished with certainty from his own. Like his great master in the mystical way, Richard of St. Victor, Hilton was an Augustinian, the head of a house of canons at Thurgarton, near Newark. His great work, the Scala Perfectionis, or Ladder of Perfection, "which expoundeth many notable doctrines in Contemplation," was first printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1494, and is still widely used for devotional reading. A shorter treatise, the Epistle to a Devout Man in Temporal Estate, first printed by Pynson in 1506, gives practical guidance to a religious layman of wealth and social position, for the fulfilling of the duties of his state without hindrance to his making profit in the spiritual life. These, with the Song of Angels, are the only printed works that can be assigned to him with certainty, though many others, undoubtedly from his pen, are to be found in manuscripts, and a complete and critical edition of Walter Hilton seems still in the far future.[17] The Song of Angels has been twice printed since the edition of Pepwell.[18] In profoundly mystical language, tinged with the philosophy of that mysterious Neo-Platonist whom we call the pseudo-Dionysius, it tells of the wonderful "onehead," the union of the soul with God in perfect charity:--
"This onehead is verily made when the mights of the soul are reformed by grace to the dignity and the state of the first condition; that is, when the mind is firmly established, without changing and wandering, in God and ghostly things, and when the reason is cleared from all worldly and fleshly beholdings, and from all bodily imaginations, figures, and fantasies of creatures, and is illumined by grace to behold God and ghostly things, and when the will and the affection is purified and cleansed from all fleshly, kindly, and worldly love, and is inflamed with burning love of the Holy Ghost."
But to this blessed condition none may attain perfectly here on earth. The writer goes on to speak of the mystical consolations and visitations granted to the loving soul in this life, distinguishing the feelings and sensations that are mere delusions, from those that truly proceed from the fire of love in the affection and the light of knowing in the reason, and are a very anticipation of that ineffable "onehead" in heaven.
The three remaining treatises--the Epistle of Prayer, the Epistle of Discretion in Stirrings of the Soul, and the Treatise of Discerning of Spirits[19]--are associated in the manuscripts with four other works: the Divine Cloud of Unknowing, the Epistle of Privy Counsel, a paraphrase of the Mystical Theology of Dionysius entitled Dionise Hid Divinity, and the similar translation or paraphrase of the Benjamin Minor of Richard of St. Victor already considered.[20] These seven treatises are all apparently by the same hand. The Divine Cloud of Unknowing has been credited to Walter Hilton, as likewise to William Exmew, or to Maurice Chauncy, Carthusians of the sixteenth century, whereas the manuscripts are at least a hundred years earlier than their time; but it seems safer to attribute the whole series to an unknown writer of the second part of