The Cell of Self-Knowledge: Seven Early English Mystical Treatises | Page 4

"Stiamo nella cella del cognoscimento di noi; cognoscendo, noi per noi
non essere, e la bonta di Dio in noi; ricognoscendo l'essere, e ogni

grazia che e posta sopra l'essere, da lui."--St. Catherine of Siena.
"Tergat ergo speculum suum, mundet spiritum suum, quisquis sitit
videre Deum suum. Exterso autem speculo et diu diligenter inspecto,
incipit ei quaedam divini luminis claritas interlucere, et immensus
quidam insolitae visionis radius oculis ejus apparere. Hoc lumen oculos
ejus irradiaverat, qui dicebat: Signatum est super nos lumen vultus tui,
Domine; dedisti laetitiam in corde meo. Ex hujus igitur luminis visione
quam admiratur in se, mirum in modum accenditur animus, et animatur
ad videndum lumen, quod est supra se."--Richard of St. Victor.

CONTENTS

I. A very Devout Treatise, named Benjamin, of the Mights and Virtues
of Man's Soul, and of the Way to True Contemplation, compiled by a
Noble and Famous Doctor, a man of great holiness and devotion,
named Richard of Saint Victor
The Prologue
Cap. I. How the Virtue of Dread riseth in the Affection
Cap. II. How Sorrow riseth in the Affection
Cap. III. How Hope riseth in the Affection
Cap. IV. How Love riseth in the Affection
Cap. V. How the Double Sight of Pain and Joy riseth in the
Imagination
Cap. VI. How the Virtues of Abstinence and Patience rise in the
Sensuality
Cap. VII. How Joy of Inward Sweetness riseth in the Affection
Cap. VIII. How Perfect Hatred of Sin riseth in the Affection
Cap. IX. How Ordained Shame riseth and groweth in the Affection
Cap. X. How Discretion and Contemplation rise in the Reason
II. Divers Doctrines Devout and Fruitful, taken out of the Life of that
Glorious Virgin and Spouse of Our Lord, Saint Katherin of Seenes
III. A Short Treatise of Contemplation taught by Our Lord Jesu Christ,
or taken out of the Book of Margery Kempe, Ancress of Lynn
IV. A Devout Treatise compiled by Master Walter Hylton of the Song
of Angels
V. A Devout Treatise called the Epistle of Prayer
VI. A very necessary Epistle of Discretion in Stirrings of the Soul

VII. A Devout Treatise of Discerning of Spirits, very necessary for
Ghostly Livers

INTRODUCTION

FROM the end of the thirteenth to the beginning of the fifteenth
century may be called the golden age of mystical literature in the
vernacular. In Germany, we find Mechthild of Magdeburg (d. 1277),
Meister Eckhart (d. 1327), Johannes Tauler (d. 1361), and Heinrich
Suso (d. 1365); in Flanders, Jan Ruysbroek (d. 1381); in Italy, Dante
Alighieri himself (d. 1321), Jacopone da Todi (d. 1306), St. Catherine
of Siena (d. 1380), and many lesser writers who strove, in prose or in
poetry, to express the hidden things of the spirit, the secret intercourse
of the human soul with the Divine, no longer in the official Latin of the
Church, but in the language of their own people, "a man's own
vernacular," which "is nearest to him, inasmuch as it is most closely
united to him."[1] In England, the great names of Richard Rolle, the
Hermit of Hampole (d. 1349), of Walter Hilton (d. 1396), and of
Mother Juliana of Norwich, whose Revelation of Divine Love
professedly date from 1373, speak for themselves.
The seven tracts or treatises before us were published in 1521 in a little
quarto volume: "Imprynted at London in Poules chyrchyarde at the
sygne of the Trynyte, by Henry Pepwell. In the yere of our lorde God,
M.CCCCC.XXI., the xvi. daye of Nouembre." They may, somewhat
loosely speaking, be regarded as belonging to the fourteenth century,
though the first and longest of them professes to be but a translation of
the work of the great Augustinian mystic of an earlier age.
St. Bernard, Richard of St. Victor, and St. Bonaventura--all three very
familiar figures to students of Dante's Paradiso--are the chief influences
in the story of English mysticism. And, through the writings of his
latter-day followers, Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, and the anonymous
author of the Divine Cloud of Unknowing, Richard of St. Victor is,
perhaps, the most important of the three.
Himself either a Scot or an Irishman by birth, Richard entered the
famous abbey of St. Victor, a house of Augustinian canons near Paris,
some time before 1140, where he became the chief pupil of the great
mystical doctor and theologian whom the later Middle Ages regarded

as a second Augustine, Hugh of St. Victor. After Hugh's death (1141),
Richard succeeded to his influence as a teacher, and completed his
work in creating the mystical theology of the Church. His masterpiece,
De Gratia Contemplationis, known also as Benjamin Major, in five
books, is a work of marvellous spiritual insight, unction, and eloquence,
upon which Dante afterwards based the whole mystical psychology of
the Paradiso.2 In it Richard shows how the soul passes