Poetry of Contemplation John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and the Modern Period 1990

  Poetry of Contemplation : John Donne, George Herbert,

  title:

  Henry Vaughan, and the Modern Period author: Clements, Arthur L.

  publisher: State University of New York Press isbn10 | asin: 0791401278 print isbn13: 9780791401279 ebook isbn13: 9780585091136 language: English

  English poetry--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism, Contemplation in literature, Christian poetry,

  subject English--History and criticism, Mysticism in literature,

  Donne, John,--1572-1631--Criticism and interpretation, Herbert, George,--1593-1633--Cri

  publication date: 1990 lcc: PR545.C675C57 1990eb ddc: 821/.3/09384

  English poetry--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism, Contemplation in literature, Christian poetry,

  subject: English--History and criticism, Mysticism in literature,

  Donne, John,--1572-1631--Criticism and interpretation, Herbert, George,--1593-1633--Cri Poetry of Contemplation John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and the Modern Period

  ARTHUR L. CLEMENTS

  State University of New York Press Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 1990 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  For information, address State University of New York Press, State University Plaza, Albany, NY 12246 Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication Data Clements, Arthur L.

  Poetry of contemplation: John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and the modern period / Arthur L. Clements. p. cm Bibliography: p. Includes index.

  ISBN 0-7914-0126-X. ISBN 0-7914-0127-8 (pbk.) 1. English poetryEarly modern, 15001700History and criticism.

  2. Contemplation in literature. 3. Christian poetry. English-History and criticism. 4. Mysticism in literature. 5. Donne, John, 15721631Criticism and interpretation. 6. Herbert, George, 15931633Criticism and interpretation. 7. Vaughan, Henry, 16221695Criticism and interpretation. 8. Literature, Modern20th centuryHistory and criticism. I. Title. PR545.C675C57 1990 821©.3©09384dc19 88-32408

  CIP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For my children, Margaret, Stephen, Michael, and Thomas And for my grandchildren, Michele, Phillip, Rachele, and Anthony

Contents

  Acknowledgments vii

  Preface xi

  Chapter 1 Contemplative Tradition

  1 Chapter 2 John Donne

  19 Chapter 3 George Herbert

  81 Chapter 4 Henry Vaughan 129

  Chapter 5 Contemplative Poetry and the Modern Period 173 Appendix A Grouping of the Songs and Sonnets and a 241

  General Dating of Poems Appendix B Selected Bibliography of "The Exstasie" 246 Notes

  251 Works Cited

  281 Index

  297

Acknowledgments

  This book has been a long time in the making. Since "gratitude is heaven itself," as William Blake remarks, it is thus a very special pleasure to express appreciation for the help and encouragement of those who contributed in various ways to its making.

  I feel a particular sense of debt and gratitude to two of my teachers, W. T. Stace and R.

  A. Durr, who early stimulated my interest, respectively, in the philosophy of religion and in seventeenth-century poetry, and from both of whom I learned much about mysticism. I hope and believe their good influences may be apparent from the beginning to the end of this book.

  Friends and colleagues made various contributions. Albert Tricomi of SUNY-Binghamton read through the manuscript and offered many thoughtful suggestions; I was able to consult with during the development of the manuscript through earlier and later versions, and I invariably found his responses constructive and helpful. Mary Giles of California State University, Sacramento, gave much specific, useful advice not only as reader of the manuscript but also earlier as the editor of Studia Mystica, in which two of my essays incorporated in this book were previously published; I am especially grateful for her advice to expand the last chapter and strengthen the case for the transformative power of contemplative poetry. Robert Boenig and Terence Hoagwood, both of Texas A&M University, also read the manuscript and provided many thoughtful and detailed comments for improvements. Norman Burns of SUNY-Binghamton read part of the manuscript. All students of seventeenth-century English literature are of course indebted to the work of Louis L. Martz of Yale University and Joseph H. Summers of the University of Rochester; I have benefitted, additionally, from their insightful readings of my manuscript. I am conscious of the valuable contributions made by all these readers. The shortcomings are my own.

  If this book is at all gracefully written, it owes much to the help, example, and presence of the poet, Susan Hauptfleisch Clements, my wife. My friend and colleague Philip Brady helped with the proofreading and index. Tamara Jetton, a student in my graduate seventeenth-century poetry seminar, Fall 1989, also helped with proofreading. The National Endowment for the Humanties awarded me a fellowship which provided free time to do some of the research and writing on George Herbert. The Research Foundation of the State University of New York supported the research and writing of other parts of this book with awards of summer fellowships in 1973, 1974, and 1978. The Union of University Professionals of the State University of New York granted two Faculty Travel Awards to enable me to travel to libraries to conduct research. The following publishers and journals kindly granted permission to reprint, usually in a much revised form, some of my previously published work. From The Mystical Poetry of Thomas Traherne. Reprinted by permission of Harvard University Press. From "Theme, Tone and Tradition in George Herbert's Poetry," English Literary Renaissance, 3 (1973), 264283. Reprinted by permission of English Literary Renaissance. From "Mysticism, Science, and the Task of Poetry," Studia Mystica, 9 (1986), 4659, and "Meditation and Contemplation in Henry Vaughan: 'The Night,'" 10 (1987), 333. Reprinted by permission of Studia Mystica. From "Donne's 'Holy Sonnet XIV,'" Modern Language Notes, 76 (1961), 484489. Reprinted by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. From "Sacramental Vision: The Poetry of Robert Penn Warren," South Atlantic Bulletin, 43 (1978), 4765. Reprinted by permission of South Atlantic Modern Language Association. From "Syntax, Structure, and Self in Galway Kinnell's Poetry," 6 (1987), 5685. Reprinted by permission of Cumberland Poetry Review. The following publishers kindly granted permission to reprint some of the work of others.

  From Robert Penn Warren's New and Selected Poems: 19231985, and Selected Poems 19231975. Copyright by Robert Penn Warren. Reprinted by permission of Random House.

  From The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, collected and edited by Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts. Copyright (c) 1964, 1971 by Angelo Ravagli and C. M. Weekley, Executors of the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA, Inc. From The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence by D. H. Lawrence. Copyright 1932 by the Estate of D. H. Lawrence. Copyright renewed (c) 1960 by the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Vikig Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA, Inc.

  "The Bear" from Body Rags by Galway Kinnell. Copyright (c) 1967 by Galway Kinnell. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

  "St. Francis and the Sow" and "Fergus Falling" from Mortal Acts, Mortal Words by Galway Kinnell. Copyright (c) 1980 by Galway Kinnell. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

  "Freedom, New Hampshire" from What a Kingdom It Was by Galway Kinnell. Copyright (c) 1960 by Galway Kinnell. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

  Preface The Argument. As the true method of knowledge is experiment, the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty which experiences. This faculty I treat of the Poetic Genius is the true Man. William Blake

  The desire for union with God is the basic and vital center of religious life, and this desire is the essence of mysticism. Mystical or contemplative experience is the heart of religion in the sense that its characterizes the divine as being present in experience. Every mystic's distinction is that he or she attains to union or an aspect of it in this life, and need not wait entirely until the afterlife. The mystic is the one who, given an initial and partial realization of higher reality, makes the fervent attempt to realize full union. Mysticism need not and must not be set apart from orthodox faith-religion but is in fact its most profound and essential life. The wise mystic, as Rufus Jones notes, does not exalt his own illuminations over historical revelation, but rather interprets them "in the light of the master-revelations." To understand, the seventeenth-century religious poets requires a knowledge of the central religious tradition that they themselves would have known, lived, and dwelled in, for this tradition, through its Bible and its writers, theologians, and Church doctors ("the light of the master-revelations"), formulates what is most essential to these poets: their relationship to divinity. John Donne's religious consciousness seems in a sense more fully developed and advanced in his secular rather than in his divine poetry. This critical perception by itself may suggest how important and permeating religious consciousness was in everyday life during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Perhaps the modern mind, after "the death of God" in the nineteenth century, cannot fully appreciate, at least without a radical transformation of that mind, that the religious life was as vital, integral, and nourishing to the seventeenth-century poet as earth, sun, air, and rain are to a flower. And at the center of the heart of that religious life was the passionate contemplative desire for union with divinity. Thus, a knowledge of contemplative tradition and of the nature of contemplative life is central to an understanding and appreciation of these poets. To be a Christian in the fullest sense, each one of them would thoroughly need and want to be, as this book intends the terms, a Christian contemplative.

  Critical opinion has been vigorously and variously advanced concerning the major religious elements of meditation and contemplation (or mysticism) in the poetry of John Donne, George Herbert, and Henry Vaughan. First, there are those critics who argue ably and knowledgeably that these three are meditative poets; secondly, those who adduce considerable scholarship to establish one or another of the three poets not primarily as meditative but as mystical; and, thirdly, those who with seemingly equal skill, contend that no one of the three is at all a mystic, or who at least reject the primacy of mysticism. One of many reasons for the critical division regarding mysticism in these poets may simply involve the matter of which poems a critic focuses upon. Some of their poems are conventionally religious and pious; Some are mainly meditative; but others, usually their most distinguished and highly regarded poems, have profound and powerful mystical elements in them, sometimes alongside the pious and meditative elements. Hence critics may well be divided; and hence the answer to the question whether these poets are mystical (which some critics answer yes and others no) is yes and nodepending on which poems one is referring to, on whether one believes a few or many poems must be mystical before designating a poet mystical, and, especially, on how one understands the meaning of "mysticism." The critical problem is of course more serious than just choosing poems, and is in part linguistic, or definitional, precisely because the vexed yet vital question of mysticism in the seventeenth-century religious poets is often answered in terms of confused, uncertain, or ambiguous usages of the word "mysticism." As the anonymous Benedictine author of Medieval Mystical Tradition and Saint John of the Cross remarks, "mysticism is one of the most abused words in all civilized languages.'' To say nothing of widespread popular use and misuse, various scholars, whether they regard any one of these poets as a mystic or not, may readily be found using this troublesome word and its grammatical variants in quite different and even casual, inexact ways. Oversimplified, inaccurate, and untraditional usages are misleading and in effect turn discussion of mysticism in seventeenth-century poetry essentially into rhetorical argument. Although there is no single, simple, wholly satisfactory "definition" of mysticism, there are many reliable and valuable scholarly works which should help to clarify and de-mystify the subject, and raise it from the level of rhetoric to substance. Works by such distinguished modern authors as Aldous Huxley, Thomas Merton, Sidney Spencer, W. T. Stace, D. T. Suzuki, Evelyn Underhill, and Alan Watts, to name a few, admirably describe the common and distinctive characteristics of mystical experiences.

  Even if mysticism were properly understood, still another reason for the critical disputes and division is the failure to distinguish carefully the stages of the spiritual life. This failure is understandable, for such distinguishing is itself difficult and complicated; and the stages of spiritual growth through which the mystic typically passes are sometimes rendered as three or seven or five, depending on the degree of generality or particularity desired. Few travellers of the via mystica present them all in perfection, and in many cases some stages are blurred, not readily apparent, or even absent. Yet, even with such difficulties, the effort to distinguish, which this book shall make, must be made in order to help determine the extent to which the poetry is meditative or contemplative. Other reasons for critical differences and difficulties arise from the notion that religious poets may have recourse to mystical terminology as a source of powerful metaphor and, more importantly, from the fact that meditation leads to and blends into contemplation and is therefore not always readily distinguishable from it. Given these circumstances, Louis Martz properly cautions against hasty and inaccurate labeling of meditative writers as mystical. He is of course aware of the presence of mystical elements in Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Traherne, but he believes that "the term 'meditative' seems more accurate than 'mystical' when applied to English religious poetry of the seventeenth century." Although "meditative" may seem more accurate than the term "mystical" or "contemplative" when applied in general to English religious poetry of the seventeenth century, there still remain two important questions: (1) which term is more accurate when applied to particular poems and to a particular poet of the seventeenth century; and (2) to what extent did ancient-medieval-Renaissance contemplative literature, in addition to sixteenth-century meditative literature, "influence" seventeenth-century English religious poetry.

  Since there is no simple, wholly satisfactory definition of mysticism, and since the word is emotionally charged, ambiguous, and troublesome, to say the least, a critic may, instead of using a simple or otherwise unsatisfactory definition, alternatively read widely in the primary and secondary literature of mysticism and then apply such knowledge as appropriate to the study of particular poets and poems in the hope that such efforts might be illuminating. Having recourse to mystical tradition, to the traditional distinction between meditation and contemplation, to the stages, types, and kinds of mysticism, to key contemplative ideas, and to certain lucidly described characteristics of mystical experience may help bring a degree of clarity and precision to this vexed subject. All of these mystical matters will be discussed in Chapter One, Contemplative Tradition, which thereby provides some definition of "contemplation" and "contemplative tradition." Chapters Two, Three, and Four will apply the terms and distinctions of the first chapter as necessary to, respectively, Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan, in order to determine more clearly and certainly the nature and extent of contemplation in their major poetry and thereby further to illuminate that poetry. The concluding Chapter Five will extend this study of contemplative poetry to some modern poets (concentrating on D. H. Lawrence, Robert Penn Warren, and Galway Kinnell) and to contemporary concerns, including scientific and moral matters. The primary object of this book, then, is the scholarly one of addressing the matter of mysticism in this major poetry. By relating this poetry to contemporary issues, the last chapter attempts to show the continuing relevance of contemplative poets to the modern reader so that, among other reasons, they, and poets in general, may acquire the larger audience that poets deserve.

  In a large measure, this book is an outgrowth and continuation of my work on The Mystical Poetry of Thomas Traherne (Harvard). Traherne, that book shows, may best be understood by setting his poetry in the context of ancient-medieval-Renaissance contemplative tradition. The main question for this present book is precisely to what extent and in what particular qualified ways may Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan be thus viewed. This book intends to present the bestfullest, fairest, most accuratereading of contemplation in the work of these poets. Although the poetry of Traherne is regarded as the least accomplished poetically of these four poets, it well may be the most spiritually, mystically, advanced. To reverse the usual progress and to proceed from the study of Traherne in the context of contemplative tradition to the study of these earlier seventeenth-century poets may thus provide a valuable perspective. As one of these poets has written,

  Some men a forward motion love, But I by backward steps would more.

  Admittedly, forward steps may also lead to genuine progress in apprepciating these poets, so, where appropriate, this book will draw, too, upon the valuable contributions to our subject made by various modern authorities, critics, and writers as well as by ancient, medieval, and Renaissance ones, so that a double perspective may bring into sharper focus, "as two eyes make one in sight," the poets of our study. The wealth of valuable work by many critics and editors of Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan places later scholars under heavy debt. Recent scholarship has centered on the question concerning which historical contexts are most appropriate for understanding the texts of these poets, particularly on the issue of Reformation Protestantism versus medieval and counter-Reformation Catholicism, a division which in part may be a twentieth-century fabrication. The abundance of fine critical work makes citing names in this Preface impractical. Much of my indebtedness to many critics and editors will become apparent in the course of this book and in the Notes. Since various sources, influences, backgrounds, and contexts contribute significantly to informing a major poet's work, study of these various elements obviously may improve our understanding of the poetry. By considering the context of contemplative tradition both in its ancient and medieval dimensions and in its Renaissance aspects, I intend to take both telescopic and microscopic views, as it were, of Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan, to provide both a perennial and a contemporary single Catholic-Protestant tradition as illuminating context, and thereby perhaps also help bridge some of the divisions, real and apparent, between Reformatiion Protestantism and medieval and counter-Reformation Catholicism.

  Of necessity, not all the important questions pertaining to a complex subject can be answered in a single book. For example, how generally did Anglicans and other Protestants respond to mystical tradition; how did they modify or otherwise make use of it? What is the relationship of mystical tradition for formal aspects of Anglican theology or to Calvinism? How did Perkins, Adams, Ussher, and Hall, for example, understand and define contemplation? How did Protestants in general modify medieval Catholic contemplative tradition to accord with the tenets of their faith? Do Protestant and Catholic mystical traditions differ in essential ways? Because mysticism, in its concentration on what is most essential about religion, tends to transcend sectarian and denominational boundaries, I believe Catholic and Protestant mystical traditions do not differ significantly in essential matters. But this book's primary concern is with the response of Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan (not of Anglicans or Protestants in general) to contemplative tradition and especially with the ways by which that tradition may eludicate these poets' works. While I can and do consider, directly and indirectly, some relevant sixteenth- and seventeenth-century figures, including Protestant ones, it is beyond the intentional and scope of this book to study Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan exlusively (or even just more thoroughly) from the perspective of sixteenth-century Protestantism. Such a study, answering the above and other questions, should prove valuable but must be the subject of another book. Obviously, mysticism is not simply or solely a sixteenth-century phenomenon. To understand it as it probably would have presented itself to Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan necessitates adopting a large historical contemplative context from the Bible and Plato and early Church Fathers through important mystics of the Middle Ages to sixteenth-and seventeenth-century contemplatives.

  The first four chapters mainly, but not exclusively, treat the poem within this broad mystical context as an object which we can determine is or is not contemplative in the precise senses delineated by this book. As indicated, for example, by the many more frequent references to "the poem" and to "the poet or speaker" rather than just to "the poet," the main focus in these chapters is on the text, not the poet, person, human being who wrote the text (such focus being all the more important because many vital biographical facts concerning Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan are unavailable). Since mysticism is essentially an experimental or experiential matter, discussing the subject necessarily involves discussing "mystical experience.'' But merely to say that "Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan may or may not have undergone mystical experiences" is cautiously to avoid the "naive expressive theory," according to current anti- autobiographical critical trends, and to make a true but timid, safe, and not very meaningful statement. Would we say that Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan wrote meditative poems but did not practice meditation? Should we assert that a poet wrote contemplative poems but did not experience contemplation? Of course, a poet may write one or a few "meditative" and "contemplative" poems for the sake of literary exercise or for whatever other reasons. But to suppose that a poet might compose a large body of meditative and contemplative poems with no relation to or revelation of his own spiritual life is simply silly, not genuinely scholarlyl. The relationship between poem and poet's life is often tenuous, complex, and difficult to determine but also usually not non-existent. That difficulty should not silence us but rather prompt us to exercise the best scholarly care and arguments in order to make informed, intelligent, reasonable statements. Besides, it is not any biographical details of the poet's life that we are here trying to determine from the poetry but, beyond our main concern with the poetry itself, whether that poetry generally suggests the poet may have been a contemplative, and, if so, in what sense. Literary criticism must be scholarly in the best senses but need not be merely insular and irrelevant. Renaissance and modern poets, including Lawrence, Warren, and Kinnell, have discussed the vital connection between their works and their own experience, especially religious experience, between poetry and late "real" world, between the moral and esthetic concerns as aspects of creative activity, and between poetry and the two selves. Scholars (as well as poets) should, at least occasionally, swim out into the deep waters, go beyond the text and attempt to use all their accumulated knowledge and wisdom to make some intelligent statements (speculations, if you prefer) about the relation of text to author, reader, and world. In the last section of Chapter Four and in Chapter Five, the question, implicit throughout the book, of contemplative poetry's redemptive and transformative power becomes most prominent, and the relevance, indeed the vital necessity, of such poetry to the ''real" world and to human life, to the reader, is explicitly discussed. The poet, the reader, and the outer world, as well as the poem, all come into consideration in the hope that this book will stimulate informed dialog both about contemplation in poetry and about the value of the poetry of contemplation to our lives.

  One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is, nobody in your audience. My audience are the people who think God is dead. Flannery O'Connor

  In my view, the context most pertinent and enlightening for the study of Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan, as well as Traherne, is the rich and complex Christian contemplative or

  1

  mystical tradition, with which their own visions are most in accord. This is to imply that their most important actual or probable sources and influences, direct or indirect, are the Bible, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Church Fathers, and Renaissance Humanists, and that to these one should add, either as direct sources and influences or at least as spiritual brethren, such names as Richard of St. Victor, St. Bonaventura, Meister Eckhart, Jan Ruysbroeck, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich, St. John of the Cross, and Jacob Boehme, to list in chronological order but a few Christian mystics among the many contemplatives whose major ideas correspond closely to these poets' ideas and whose writings may therefore illuminate their poems. A major assumption of this book, then, is that much of the poetry of Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan may best be understood and appreciated through the perspective and within the context of Christian contemplative tradition, including of course the effect of the Bible, Plato, Neoplatonism, and Aristotelianism on that tradition. The great speculative Christian school of mysticism, especially between Eckhart and Boehme, forms a curiously well- integrated tradition (and one which might be considered roughly equivalent to a Christian branch of the Perennial Philosophy). Renaissance and later medieval mystics were familiar with earlier Christian mystics as well as with the Church Fathers, many of whom were themselves contemplatives, and with classical writers. Even Plotinus himself, the pagan Neoplatonist who so remarkably affected Christianity, like other Neoplatonists often employs Aristotelian vocabulary, argumentation, and ideas. The numerous strands of this complex contemplative tradition are more variously and closely interwoven than might at first

  2

  glance appear. Even if the reader finally does not share the view that this broad yet interconnected Catholic-Protestant tradition provides the most illuminating context for the Anglican poets Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan, I trust the reader will nevertheless find that numerous poems are elucidated by this book's approach and methods and that the very confused subject of mysticism in these poets is somewhat clarified. Drawing upon all of the authors mentioned above and other mystics, modern scholars provide an analytical overview of ancient-medieval-Renaissance contemplative tradition or, more precisely, different aspects of it as it existed in the Renaissance and was known to seventeenth-century and later writers. These aspects include the stages, types, and characteristics of mystical experience, the kinds of "vision," and some key contemplative ideas, such as regeneration and the distinctions between the two selves and between meditation and contemplation. This century has produced valuable scholarship on mysticism, and one cannot reasonably expect to improve much upon the brilliant work of distinguished authorities. Thus, availing itself of the more pertinent scholarship, this chapter presents a synthetic account of contemplative tradition, grounded in the many mystical writings of antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, via some of the best (for our purposes) modern authorities. But as a scholar of mysticism, I hope also in other ways to make various, direct contributions to the subject. Thus, in addition to the relevant work of twentieth-century experts on mysticism, I will also, as needed, directly consider in this and later chapters contributions of the Bible, Plato, Aristotle, and numerous specifically mentioned mystics and Church Fathers. This twofold method should afford an efficient, scholarly way of providing the necessary background and concepts of a very complex subject in an orderly, clear, and accurate manner. The anonymous Benedictine author of Medieval Mystical Tradition and Saint John of the Cross, who surveys the meanings of the words meditation, prayer, and contemplation, points out that in the twelfth century and later there existed the scale or order, going from lowest to highest, of lectio divina (prayerful reading of some portion of the Scripture), meditation, prayer, contemplation. Contemplation was understood as "an experimental union with God which no meditation can produce, but for which a soul may pray. The soul is 'athirst,' 'aglow with love,' and God's answer is contemplationobviously the 'infused contemplation' of modern spiritual theology. Since there can be no question of real 'beginners' reaching this stage, we can see how gradually, as this meaning became attached to contemplation, that word came to be synonymous with contemplative or mystical prayer. Meditation and contemplation came to mean an earlier and a later kind of prayer, and no longer a mere difference in degree in one and the same prayer . the latter [contemplation] is a free gift of God." (9).

  Although the word "meditation" was sometimes used inter-changeably in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the closely related words "prayer" and "contemplation," the terms did, however, also retain in those centuries the same distinct medieval meanings. As St. John of the Cross writes, "the state of beginners comprises meditation and discursive acts" (Flame, III, 30, in Complete Works, III, 68). Meditation, Louis Martz points out, ''cultivates the basic, the lower levels of the spiritual life; it is not, properly speaking, a mystical activity, but a part of the duties of every man in daily life" (The Poetry of Meditation, 16). Even more than as a set form of prayer, meditation was understood as a lower, early, or pre-mystical stage of the spiritual life, which may very well employ certain forms of prayer. It was considered an almost indispensable preparation for the progressive realization of mystical experience or contemplation, the higher level and goal of spiritual progress. To be a meditative poet, therefore, is to be at least potentially a mystical poet, to be, in any event, in the early stages of and in progress toward the contemplative life, and we should indeed expect to find meditative poems in the body of a mystical poet's work.

  In the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance, spiritual life and progress were frequently but not always charted by the threefold stages of the Purgative Way, Illuminative Way, and Unitive Way or, more simply, Purgation, Illumination, and Union. The stages of spiritual growth through which the mystic passes were sometimes rendered as more than three, depending on the degree of generality or particularity desired. As exemplified by Richard Rolle's The Form of Perfect Living and the anonymous Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God, different spiritual writers preferred different systems of stages. During the Renaissance, however, the time-honored trifold system was basic and continues so to the present day. Like the more numerous stages of other systems, the three stages, well-known to seventeenth-century writers, are, of course, to be understood as diagrammatic, as an approximate and useful map, not as the actual territory of the mystical life, with its multivaried peaks, plateaus, and valleys. It is helpful to relate this traditional threefold schema in a general way to the traditional distinction between meditation and contemplation. We may say that meditation, the early period of the spiritual life, generally corresponds to Purgation; and contemplation, advanced periods of spiritual life, corresponds to Illumination and Union. Meditation may lead to contemplation, and the early stages may lead to the later ones. To determine whether a writer is or is not a mystic is in part to make a judgment about his progress in these familiar, well-described, and traditional terms. It must be emphasized that there is no absolute disjunction but rather a continuity, interrelationship, and movement back and forth between meditation and contemplation and the stages of the mystical life. For example, "Saint John of the Cross not only says that progressives, who have begun to receive graces of mystical contemplation, should return to active meditation whenever they 'see that the soul is not occupied in repose and (mystical) knowledge.' He adds that meditation is an ordinary means of disposing oneself for mystical prayer. 'In order to reach this state, [the soul] will frequently need to make use of meditation, quietly and in moderation'" (Merton, 8990). Indeed, we might well find both meditative and contemplative elements in a single poem.

  The above description reveals the basic, essential way a seventeenth-century writer would regard both the via mystica and the significance of meditation and contemplation. Evelyn Underhill details two more stages in addition to the time-honored threefold division of Purgation, Illumination, and Union. We need not be concerned with Underhill's preliminary stage of Awakening, which precedes Purgation, for our three poets, two of them Anglican ministers, were undoubtedly awake to and believed in the reality of divinity. But the additional, advanced purgative stage of the Dark Night of the Soul, which follows Illumination and which Underhill bases primarily on the work of the great 16th- century contemplative, St. John of the Cross, provides a refinement that will be of particular value to the distinctions we will need to make with respect to Herbert and especially Vaughan. A large part of Underhill's classic work on Mysticism is devoted to describing the traditional mystic stages. For present purposes, it may suffice to quote Underhill's introductory briefer description of the stages from Purgation to Union.

  The Self, aware of Divine Beauty, realizes by contrast its own finiteness and imperfection, the manifold illusions in which it is immersed, the immense distance which separates it from the One. Its attempts to eliminate by discipline and mortification all that stands in the way of its progress towards union with God constitute Purgation: a state of pain and effort.

  When by Purgation the Self has become detached from the "things of sense," and acquired those virtues which are the "ornaments of the spiritual marriage," its joyful consciousness of the Transcendent Order returns in an enhanced form. Like the prisoners in Plato's "Cave of Illusion," it has awakened to knowledge of Reality, has struggled up the harsh and difficult path to the mouth of the cave. Now it looks upon the sun. This is Illumination: a state which includes in itself many of the stages of contemplation, "degrees of orison," visions and adventures of the soul described by St. Teresa and other mystical writers. These form, as it were, a way within the Way: a moyen de parvenir, a training devised by experts which will strengthen and assist the mounting soul. They stand, so to speak, for education; whilst the Way proper represents organic growth. Illumination is the contemplative state par excellence. Many mystics never go beyond it; and, on the other hand, many seers and artists not usually classed amongst them, have shared, to some extent, the experiences of the illuminated state. Illumination brings a certain apprehension of the Absolute, a sense of the Divine Presence: but not true union with it. It is a state of happiness.

  In the development of the great and strenuous seekers after God, this is followedor sometimes intermittently accompaniedby the most terrible of all the experiences of the Mystic Way: the final and complete purification of the Self, which is called by some contemplatives the "mystic pain" or "mystic death," by others the Purification of the Spirit or Dark Night of the Soul. The consciousness which had, in Illumination, sunned itself in the sense of the Divine Presence, now suffers under an equally intense sense of the Divine Absence: learning to dissociate the personal satisfaction of mystical vision from the reality of mystical life. As in Purgation the sense were cleansed and humbled, and the energies and interests of the Self were concentrated upon transcendental things: so now the purifying process is extended to the very centre of I-hood, the will. The human instinct for personal happiness must be killed. This is the "spiritual crucifixion" so often described by the mystics: the great desolation in which the soul seems abandoned by the Divine. The Self now surrenders itself, its individuality, and its will, completely. It desires nothing, asks nothing, is utterly passive, and is thus prepared for Union: the true goal of the mystic quest. In this state the Absolute

  Life is not merely perceived and enjoyed by the Self, as in Illumination: but is one with it. This is the end towards which all the previous oscillations of consciousness have tended. It is a state of equilibrium, or purely spiritual life; characterized by peaceful joy, by enhanced powers, by intense certitude. (169170)

  Although Christianity has been insistently monotheistic over against the polytheism of paganism, the Church does recognize what may mistakenly appear to some as a kind of pantheism. Strictly speaking, it is not pantheism but the omnipresence of the one God that is recognized. An important factor of the mystic experience is the discovery of the immanence and/or transcendence of God. To the catechism question "Where is God?" the proper response is "everywhere." To the enlightened mystic, when the veils of custom, convention and selfish solicitude are removed and the third eye opened, God appears in the features and faces of human beings and in the forms of Nature as well as being wholly transcendent. Hence, mystical experiences may be "extrovertive," aware of immanent divinity through the redeemed senses, or "introvertive," conscious of transcendent divinity beyond all the senses. In his admirable and lucid discussion of world-wide mysticism, Mysticism and Philosophy W. T. Stace introduces these terms, which correspond to terminology used by Rudolf Otto and Evelyn Underhill, and he adds that both the extravertive or outward and introvertive or inward experiences "culminate in the perception of an ultimate Unitywhat Plotinus called the Onewith which the perceiver realizes his own union or even identity. But the extrovertive mystic, using his physical sense, perceives the multiplicity of external material objects mystically transfigured so that the One, or the Unity, shines through them. The introvertive mystic, on the contrary, seeks by deliberately shutting off the senses, by obliterating from consciousness the entire multiplicity of sensations, images, and thoughts, to plunge into the depths of his own [self]. There, in that darkness and silence, he alleges that he perceives the Oneand is united with it'' (6162). By examining the detailed evidence from both Western and Eastern mysticism, Stace is able to present a list of characteristics, like lists by other writers on the subject, of both types of mystical experience.

  In the extrovertive type, the primary and central point around which all other "characteristics revolve is the apprehension of a unity taken to be in some way basic to the universe," frequently though not altogether satisfactorily expressed in the formula "All is

  One." "The One is perceived through the physical senses, in or through the multiplicity of objects" (79). From this first characteristic, the second follows: "the more concrete apprehension of the One as an inner subjectivity, or life, in all things" (131).

  In the introvertive type, the nuclear characteristic is "the Unitary Consciousness, from which all the multiplicity of sensuous or conceptual or other empirical content has been excluded, so that there remains only a void and empty unity" (110). Inevitably following from this primary point is the second characteristic of being nonspatial and nontemporal.

  The remaining characteristics of both extrovertive and introvertive mystical experiences are identical for both:

  3.Sense of objectivity or reality 4.Feelings of blessedness, joy, peace, happiness, etc.

  5.Feeling that what is apprehended is holy, sacred, or divine

  6.Paradoxicality 7.Alleged ineffability (79, 110, 131).

  To this, we should add three qualifications: the extrovertive type may also exhibit the characteristic of timelessness; a serious omission from Stace's account, as R. C. Zaehner

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  remarks, is love, which we will include along with feelings of blessedness, joy, etc.; and a complex mystical experience may exhibit both extrovertive and introvertive elements. Generally, contemplative experience is distinguishable as being of one type or the other. But many mystics have both extrovertive and introvertive mystical experiences, sometimes on different occasions, sometimes on the same occasion. Often, one type of mystical experience will lead or predispose a contemplative to the other type. Whether a mystic experiences one or the other type may depend on (or perhaps it determines) the extent of Platonism or Aristotelianism in his thinking. Plato and some but by no means all Neoplatonists almost exclusively or at least preferably incline toward introvertive mystical experience and tend not to share the extrovertive Hebraic-Christian praise of and joy in God's "very good" (Gen. 1:31) visible creation. When mystics write of not being able to apprehend ultimate reality with the bodily, fleshly, or conventional eyes or senses they are referring either to nonsensuous introvertive mysticism or to the necessity of purgation so that eventually one may sensuously perceive ultimate reality with a pure heart through cleansed senses. The idea that it is Christ who enables us to see with purified hearts in either the introvertive or extrovertive way goes back to the earliest days of the Church. St. Clement of Rome, the first-century bishop and Apostolic Father, whose Epistle to the Corinthians portrays an early Christianity of inwardness and the Spirit and yet simultaneously of powerful brotherhood, observes that through Christ "we see as in a mirror the spotless and excellent face of God: through him the eyes of our hearts were opened" (Bettenson, The Early Christian Fathers, 29). In The City of God, St.

  Augustine writes: "Thus, it was with his 'heart' that the Prophet says he saw. Now just think, when God will be 'all in all,' how much greater will be this gift of vision in the hearts of all! The eyes of the body will still retain their function and will be found where they now are, and the spirit through its spiritual body will make use of the eyes" (trans. Walsh et al, 535). Redeemed vision in extrovertive experience is seeing not with the senses, but, as William Blake knew, with the heart through the cleansed senses. As opposed to seeing objects in some generalized, rationalistic, abstract way, which ultimately comes to thinking about rather than actually looking at them, contemplative extrovertive vision means Christ in us seeing, means our seeing with fully open eyes rather than with closed or indifferent eyes, seeing felicitously into the particular-universal suchness or quiddity of an object with regenerated or enlightened heart and senses rather than seeing in such a way as mentally to abstract an essence from the object, as if essence and object could ever really (that is, in fact, not just in mind) be dualistically separated. Extrovertive mystical experiences would therefore more likely give rise to (or arise out of, depending on whether or not experience precedes philosophy) and Aristotelian rather than a Platonic metaphysic, insofar as we understand Plato as asserting the separation of Forms and matter and Aristotle as insisting upon the fusing of the universal form with the particular material thing into the completely unity of the individual object. Contrariwise, introvertive mystical experiences would more likely give rise to a Platonic rather than an Aristotelian metaphysic. In other words, Plato puts emphasis on the transcendental nature of ultimate reality; Aristotle stresses its immanence. One of the important differences, then, between Platonism and Aristotelianism on the one hand and Christian mystical theology on the other is that, whereas the former philosophers tend to regard ultimate reality as either transcendent or immanent, Christian mystics paradoxically see God as both transcendent and immanent. In this sense, Christianity represents a synthesis of the two great ancient influences on Western thought, a synthesis which is reflected in the apophatic (negative) and cataphatic (affirmative) branches of

  Christian mystical theology, as discussed, for example, by Dionysius the Areopagite in Chapter 3 of his Mystical Theology. Apophatic theology concerns the dark, non-senuous relationship of the self and the ineffable God dwelling in Divine Darkness, concerns the self's movement upwards or, better, inwards (an idea very familiar in Augustine) to the transcendent God. Cataphatic theology concerns God's manifestation of his divinity to the redeemed senses (or, as Augustine says, to the "heart") in and through the universe, which God created and pronounced "very good." In the Divine Names, a work on what we can say about God, Dionysius rather succinctly sums up cataphatic and apophatic theology, epitomizes the mystic's experience of immanent divinity and of the wholly transcendent Godhead: "God is known in all things, and apart from all things" (VII.3). In a beautiful, paradoxical passage from his account of his search for God through the memory, Augustine at greater length suggests the transcendent and perhaps also the immanent discovery and love of God:

  But what is it that I love when I love You? Not the beauty of any bodily thing, nor the order of the seasons, not

the brightness of light that rejoices the eye, nor the sweet melodies of all songs, nor the sweet fragrance of flowers

and ointments and spices; not manna or honey, not the limbs that carnal love embraces. None of these things do