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grokking
Deep
Reinforcement
Learning
grokking
Deep
Reinforcement
Learning
Miguel Morales
Foreword by Charles Isbell, Jr.
MANNING
S helter I sl and
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trademark claim, the designations have been printed in initial caps or all caps.
Recognizing the importance of preserving what has been written, it is Manning’s policy to have the
books we publish printed on acid-free paper, and we exert our best efforts to that end. Recognizing also
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least 15 percent recycled and processed without the use of elemental chlorine.
ISBN: 9781617295454
Printed in the United States of America
For Danelle, Aurora, Solomon, and those to come.
I love you!
contents
foreword xi
preface xiii
acknowledgments xv
about this book xvii
about the author xxi
vii
viii
index 437
foreword
So, here’s the thing about reinforcement learning. It is difficult to learn and difficult to
teach, for a number of reasons. First, it’s quite a technical topic. There is a great deal of
math and theory behind it. Conveying the right amount of background without drown-
ing in it is a challenge in and of itself.
Second, reinforcement learning encourages a conceptual error. RL is both a way of
thinking about decision-making problems and a set of tools for solving those problem.
By “a way of thinking,” I mean that RL provides a framework for making decisions: it dis-
cusses states and reinforcement signals, among other details. When I say “a set of tools,”
I mean that when we discuss RL, we find ourselves using terms like Markov decision pro-
cesses and Bellman updates. It is remarkably easy to confuse the way of thinking with the
mathematical tools we use in response to that way of thinking.
Finally, RL is implementable in a wide variety of ways. Because RL is a way of thinking,
we can discuss it by trying to realize the framework in a very abstract way, or ground it in
code, or, for that matter, in neurons. The substrate one decides to use makes these two
difficulties even more challenging—which bring us to deep reinforcement learning.
Focusing on deep reinforcement learning nicely compounds all these problems at
once. There is background on RL, and background on deep neural networks. Both are
separately worthy of study and have developed in completely different ways. Working
out how to explain both in the context of developing tools is no easy task. Also, do not
forget that understanding RL requires understanding not only the tools and their realiza-
tion in deep networks, but also understanding the way of thinking about RL; otherwise,
you cannot generalize beyond the examples you study directly. Again, teaching RL is
hard, and there are so many ways for teaching deep RL to go wrong—which brings us to
Miguel Morales and this book.
This book is very well put together. It explains in technical but clear language what
machine learning is, what deep learning is, and what reinforcement learning is. It allows
the reader to understand the larger context of where the field is and what you can do with
xi
xii foreword
the techniques of deep RL, but also the way of thinking that ML, RL, and deep RL present. It
is clear and concise. Thus, it works as both a learning guide and as a reference, and, at least for
me, as a source of some inspiration.
I am not surprised by any of this. I’ve known Miguel for quite a few years now. He went
from taking machine learning courses to teaching them. He has been the lead teaching assis-
tant on my Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making course for the Online Masters of
Science at Georgia Tech for more semesters than I can count. He’s reached thousands of
students during that time. I’ve watched him grow as a practitioner, a researcher, and an edu-
cator. He has helped to make the RL course at GT better than it started out, and continues
even as I write this to make the experience of grokking reinforcement learning a deeper one
for the students. He is a natural teacher.
This text reflects his talent. I am happy to be able to work with him, and I’m happy he’s
been moved to write this book. Enjoy. I think you’ll learn a lot. I learned a few things myself.
Reinforcement learning is an exciting field with the potential to make a profound impact
on the history of humankind. Several technologies have influenced the history of our
world and changed the course of humankind, from fire, to the wheel, to electricity, to the
internet. Each technological discovery propels the next discovery in a compounding
way. Without electricity, the personal computer wouldn’t exist; without it, the internet
wouldn’t exist; without it, search engines wouldn’t exist.
To me, the most exciting aspect of RL and artificial intelligence, in general, is not so
much to merely have other intelligent entities next to us, which is pretty exciting, but
instead, what comes after that. I believe reinforcement learning, being a robust frame-
work for optimizing specific tasks autonomously, has the potential to change the world.
In addition to task automation, the creation of intelligent machines may drive the under-
standing of human intelligence to places we have never been before. Arguably, if you can
know with certainty how to find optimal decisions for every problem, you likely under-
stand the algorithm that finds those optimal decisions. I have a feeling that by creating
intelligent entities, humans can become more intelligent beings.
But we are far away from this point, and to fulfill these wild dreams, we need more
minds at work. Reinforcement learning is not only in its infancy, but it’s been in that state
for a while, so there is much work ahead. The reason I wrote this book is to get more
people grokking deep RL, and RL in general, and to help you contribute.
Even though the RL framework is intuitive, most of the resources out there are diffi-
cult to understand for newcomers. My goal was not to write a book that provides code
examples only, and most definitely not to create a resource that teaches the theory of
reinforcement learning. Instead, my goal was to create a resource that can bridge the gap
between theory and practice. As you’ll soon see, I don’t shy away from equations; they are
essential if you want to grok a research field. And, even if your goal is practical, to build
quality RL solutions, you still need that theoretical foundation. However, I also don’t
solely rely on equations because not everybody interested in RL is fond of math. Some
xiii
xiv preface
people are more comfortable with code and concrete examples, so this book provides the
practical side of this fantastic field.
Most of my effort during this three-year project went into bridging this gap; I don’t shy
away from intuitively explaining the theory, and I don’t just plop down code examples. I do
both, and in a very detail-oriented fashion. Those who have a hard time understanding the
textbooks and lectures can more easily grasp the words top researchers use: why those specific
words, why not other words. And those who know the words and love reading the equations
but have trouble seeing those equations in code and how they connect can more easily under-
stand the practical side of reinforcement learning.
Finally, I hope you enjoy this work, and more importantly that it does fulfill its goal for
you. I hope that you emerge grokking deep reinforcement learning and can give back and
contribute to this fantastic community that I’ve grown to love. As I mentioned before, you
wouldn’t be reading this book if it wasn’t for a myriad of relatively recent technological
innovations, but what happens after this book is up to you, so go forth and make an impact
in the world.
acknowledgments
I want to thank the people at Georgia Tech for taking the risk and making available the
first Online Master of Science in Computer Science for anyone in the world to get a high-
quality graduate education. If it weren’t for those folks who made it possible, I probably
would not have written this book.
I want to thank Professor and Dean Charles Isbell and Professor Michael Littman for
putting together an excellent reinforcement-learning course. I have a special appreciation
for Dean Isbell, who has given me much room to grow and learn RL. Also, the way I teach
reinforcement learning—by splitting the problem into three types of feedback—I learned
from Professor Littman. I’m grateful to have received instruction from them.
I want to thank the vibrant teaching staff at Georgia Tech’s CS 7642 for working
together on how to help students learn more and enjoy their time with us. Special thanks
go to Tim Bail, Pushkar Kolhe, Chris Serrano, Farrukh Rahman, Vahe Hagopian, Quinn
Lee, Taka Hasegawa, Tianhang Zhu, and Don Jacob. You guys are such great teammates.
I also want to thank the folks who previously contributed significantly to that course.
I’ve gotten a lot from our interactions: Alec Feuerstein, Valkyrie Felso, Adrien Ecoffet,
Kaushik Subramanian, and Ashley Edwards. I want to also thank our students for asking
the questions that helped me identify the gaps in knowledge for those trying to learn RL.
I wrote this book with you in mind. A very special thank you goes out to that anonymous
student who recommended me to Manning for writing this book; I still don’t know who
you are, but you know who you are. Thank you.
I want to thank the folks at Lockheed Martin for all their feedback and interactions
during my time writing this book. Special thanks go to Chris Aasted, Julia Kwok, Taylor
Lopez, and John Haddon. John was the first person to review my earliest draft, and his
feedback helped me move the writing to the next level.
I want to thank the folks at Manning for providing the framework that made this book
a reality. I thank Brian Sawyer for reaching out and opening the door; Bert Bates for set-
ting the compass early on and helping me focus on teaching; Candace West for helping
xv
xvi acknowledgments
me go from zero to something; Susanna Kline for helping me pick up the pace when life got
busy; Jennifer Stout for cheering me on through the finish line; Rebecca Rinehart for putting
out fires; Al Krinker for providing me with actionable feedback and helping me separate the
signal from the noise; Matko Hrvatin for keeping up with MEAP releases and putting that
extra pressure on me to keep writing; Candace Gillhoolley for getting the book out there,
Stjepan Jureković for getting me out there; Ivan Martinovic for getting the much-needed
feedback to improve the text; Lori Weidert for aligning the book to be production-ready
twice; Jennifer Houle for being gentle with the design changes; Katie Petito for patiently
working through the details; Katie Tennant for the meticulous and final polishing touches;
and to anyone I missed, or who worked behind the scenes to make this book a reality. There
are more, I know: thank you all for your hard work.
To all the reviewers—Al Rahimi, Alain Couniot, Alberto Ciarlanti, David Finton, Doniyor
Ulmasov, Edisson Reinozo, Ezra Joel Schroeder, Hank Meisse, Hao Liu, Ike Okonkwo, Jie Mei,
Julien Pohie, Kim Falk Jørgensen, Marc-Philippe Huget, Michael Haller, Michel Klomp, Nacho
Ormeño, Rob Pacheco, Sebastian Maier, Sebastian Zaba, Swaminathan Subramanian, Tyler
Kowallis, Ursin Stauss, and Xiaohu Zhu—thank you, your suggestions helped make this a
better book.
I want to thank the folks at Udacity for letting me share my passion for this field with their
students and record the actor-critic lectures for their Deep Reinforcement Learning
Nanodegree. Special thanks go to Alexis Cook, Mat Leonard, and Luis Serrano.
I want to thank the RL community for helping me clarify the text and improve my under-
standing. Special thanks go to David Silver, Sergey Levine, Hado van Hasselt, Pascal Poupart,
John Schulman, Pieter Abbeel, Chelsea Finn, Vlad Mnih, for their lectures; Rich Sutton for
providing the gold copy of the field in a single place (his textbook); and James MacGlashan,
and Joshua Achiam for their codebases, online resources, and guidance when I didn’t know
where to go to get an answer to a question. I want to thank David Ha for giving me insights
as to where to go next.
Special thanks go to Silvia Mora for helping make all the figures in this book presentable
and helping me in almost every side project that I undertake.
Finally, I want to thank my family, who were my foundation throughout this project. I
“knew” writing a book was a challenge, and then I learned. But my wife and kids were there
regardless, waiting for my 15-minute breaks every 2 hours or so during the weekends. Thank
you, Solo, for brightening up my life midway through this book. Thank you, Rosie, for shar-
ing your love and beauty, and thank you Danelle, my wonderful wife, for everything you
are and do. You are my perfect teammate in this interesting game called life. I’m so glad I
found you.
about this book
Grokking Deep Reinforcement Learning bridges the gap between the theory and prac-
tice of deep reinforcement learning. The book’s target audience is folks familiar with
machine learning techniques, who want to learn reinforcement learning. The book begins
with the foundations of deep reinforcement learning. It then provides an in-depth explo-
ration of algorithms and techniques for deep reinforcement learning. Lastly, it provides a
survey of advanced techniques with the potential for making an impact.
xvii
xviii about this book
that RL agents can understand. Chapter 3 contains details of algorithms for solving RL prob-
lems when the agent knows the dynamics of the world. Chapter 4 contains details of algo-
rithms for solving simple RL problems when the agent does not know the dynamics of the
world. Chapter 5 introduces methods for solving the prediction problem, which is a founda-
tion for advanced RL methods.
In part 2, chapter 6 introduces methods for solving the control problem, methods that
optimize policies purely from trial-and-error learning. Chapter 7 teaches more advanced
methods for RL, including methods that use planning for more sample efficiency. Chapter 8
introduces the use of function approximation in RL by implementing a simple RL algorithm
that uses neural networks for function approximation. Chapter 9 dives into more advanced
techniques for using function approximation for solving reinforcement learning problems.
Chapter 10 teaches some of the best techniques for further improving the methods intro-
duced so far. Chapter 11 introduces a slightly different technique for using DL models with
RL that has proven to reach state-of-the-art performance in multiple deep RL benchmarks.
Chapter 12 dives into more advanced methods for deep RL, state-of-the-art algorithms, and
techniques commonly used for solving real-world problems. Chapter 13 surveys advanced
research areas in RL that suggest the best path for progress toward artificial general
intelligence.
xxi
Introduction to
deep reinforcement learning 1
In this chapter
• You will know what to expect from this book and how to get the
most out of it.
1
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Julian’s church at Norwich, of which the foundations can still be
traced. But nothing in her own account suggests this, and the
presence of her mother and “other persons” round her sick bed is
rather against it. At the same time, a single woman of strong
religious bent is hardly likely in that period to have remained in the
world till she was thirty. Julian was perhaps a Benedictine nun at
Carrow, and after her vision sought a life of greater seclusion and
austerity at St. Julian’s, which was the property of the Carrow
convent. The anchoress was often, but not always, a professed nun:
and though no reminiscences of cloister life can be traced in Julian’s
writings, such a life would account in part for the theological
knowledge and familiarity with dogmatic language which those
writings display.
Julian’s account of what happened in her illness is extremely precise,
and makes this part of her revelation an interesting psychological
document. She fell ill early in May 1373; and on the fourth night was
thought to be dying and given the last sacraments. For two days
more she lingered, quite conscious and expecting death; and early in
the morning of the third day, lost all feeling in her lower limbs. When
the priest came to help her agony she was already speechless; but
made her nurses prop her upright in bed, so that she could fix her
failing eyes on the crucifix he held towards her. This she could see,
though everything else grew dim to her sight. Then her head fell on
one side, breath failed, and she was sure that the end had come.
With this conviction and acceptance of death, the stress of the
involuntary struggle for life seems suddenly to have ended. She had
passed into a new state of consciousness, in which her mind was
clear and her body free of pain, “as whole as ever before or after.” In
this condition her old and forgotten desires came back into her mind.
The first, for sickness, had been granted. Now, she was impelled to
ask the other, for a keener realization of the Passion; and this buried
wish, surging back abruptly into consciousness, became the starting-
point of her mystical experiences. We cannot deny that these
experiences had their pathological side. Her physical and psychic
state were abnormal. With the perfect candour and common sense
which add so much to our delight in her, she confesses that she at
first mistook her revelations for delirium, and said to the monk who
afterwards visited her that she had raved. There are, however, in
these revelations, as in all visionary experience of any value, two
distinct sides. One is the visual or auditory hallucination—the vision
seen, the voice heard—the materials for which clearly come from the
unconscious mind of the visionary, and can generally be traced to
their source. The other is the intuitive spiritual teaching that
accompanies it, and often far exceeds the visionary’s own knowledge
or power. Julian, in her account of what happened to her, keeps
these two elements perfectly distinct. “All the blessed teaching of
our Lord God,” she says, “was shown to me by three parts—that is
to say, by the bodily sight, by words formed in mine understanding,
and by ghostly sight.”
The bodily vision, as she expressly affirms, she did not ask for; and
here she agrees with all true mystics, who invariably distrust these
quasi-physical experiences. Yet it was in such visionary hallucination
that her revelations began. With her eyes still fixed on the crucifix,
and apparently at the point of death, she suddenly saw red blood
running down from the Crown of Thorns, as if in answer to her
prayer for more feeling of the Passion of Christ. The Cross had
become for her, as the shining pewter dish did for Jacob Boehme, or
the running stream for St. Ignatius, a focal point on which to
concentrate; and so a door to a deeper state of consciousness.
Spiritual insight went side by side with the bodily vision, which was
accepted without question by Julian as a direct message from Christ
to strengthen her, “lest she be tempted of fiends before she died”;
for in spite of her intuitive philosophic sense, we must remember
that she lived in imagination in that Gothic world of concrete devils
and angels which the cathedral sculptors reproduced. The double
experience—outward pictures of the Passion, and inward teachings
of the nature of God—continued for five hours, whilst she lay in a
state of trance which her mother mistook for death. “The first began
early in the morn, about the hour of four; and they lasted, showing
by process full fair and steadily, each following other, till it was nine
of the day overpassed.” In those five hours Julian received the whole
substance of her teaching, afterwards divided by her into sixteen
“revelations of love.” When they had passed, normal consciousness
returned, or, as she says, she “fell to herself,” and knew that she
must live. She lay for some time in weakness and depression,
tormented by evil dreams; but she recovered from her sickness, and
lived to a great age. Her careful account of that illness, and of the
psychic experiences accompanying it, helps us to understand those
experiences from the psychological as well as the mystical point of
view. Seen thus, they are not unique; but classic examples of a type
which turns up from time to time in medical history. Thus Dr. Edwin
Ash, in Faith and Suggestion, has described a case which strikingly
resembles that of Julian. Here, too, at the crisis of an apparently
hopeless illness, the patient fell into a death-like trance, had visions
of a religious type, and emerged cured. Her mind was far inferior to
that of Julian, hence her experience had less beauty and significance
and was of little value for other souls. Nevertheless, its general
outline forces us to acknowledge that it belongs to the same class,
and helps us to interpret the facts which lie behind Julian’s words.
Julian’s revelations have come down to us in two distinct versions,
which have both been edited for modern readers. The best known is
the long version, reproduced in Miss Warrack’s delightful edition: but
our earliest manuscript of this only goes back to the sixteenth
century, at least a hundred years after Julian’s death. Another, much
shorter, is found in one fifteenth-century manuscript in the British
Museum, and this has been edited by Mr. Dundas Herford, who
claims—I think with good reason—that it represents Julian’s first
account of her visions, written or told while they were still fresh in
her mind, and before her memory of them had been coloured by
long meditation, or by the theological learning which she certainly
acquired in later life. It briefly sets forth her chain of visions, and the
“ghostly words” and inward teachings that accompanied them.
These, she says, she has set down for the help of her fellow-
Christians and because she saw it to be God’s will. “But,” she adds,
“God forbid that ye should say or take it so, that I am a teacher: for
I mean not so! No! I never meant so! For I am a woman, unlearned,
feeble and frail; but I know well that this that I say, I have it of the
showing of Him that is Sovereign Teacher.” In the long version these
deprecatory words are omitted. Julian no longer fears to be regarded
as a teacher. On the contrary, she speaks with a gentle authority as
one whose position is assured. She is now, without doubt, the
established anchoress; the devout woman whose special vocation is
known, and to whom people come for spiritual teaching. Moreover,
she tells us in this book that only twenty years, less three months,
after her vision was she inwardly taught the importance of all its
details, however “misty and indifferent” they seemed. She was
therefore past fifty when she wrote or dictated it; and it contains the
fruit, not only of her first vivid experience, but of all the ponderings
by which the last atom of significance was extracted from it, the
“enlightenings and touchings of the same Spirit,” which kept the
revelation fresh in after life.
As she says herself—for her introspective powers were remarkable—
the “first beginnings” and subsequent “ghostly teachings” at last
became so merged in her understanding that she could not separate
them. There is a parallel to this in the life of Boehme. He says that in
the abnormal state which was induced by gazing at the polished
pewter dish he “understood the Being of all Beings”—even as Julian
“saw God in a Point”—but this stupendous revelation only left him
dazed and inarticulate. Only after twelve years of meditation, during
which he felt the seed of truth “unfolding within him like a young
plant,” was he able to describe it.
When we compare the two versions of Julian’s work, we find many
differences which remind us of this confession. Although the whole
doctrine of the long book is really implied in the short book—for it is,
in Boehme’s phrase, an unfolding of the plant from that one seed—
we see that the most beautiful and poetical passages are found in
the long version only. They are the fruit of meditation upon vision.
The workings of Julian’s unconscious mind in her trance have only
provided the raw material, as the inspiration of the poet gives only
the crude beginnings of the poem. Moreover, with age her character
deepened and grew richer. She used her talent to help other souls,
and it increased. She studied, too, and found language of great
subtlety and beauty in which to express her vision of truth. Though
even the first version of her book shows theological knowledge
which would put to shame most present-day Christians, in the later
work this knowledge is much increased. Reading was part of the
duty of an anchoress, being regarded as an essential element in the
life of prayer; and intelligent reading has clearly nourished Julian’s
deep meditations on the character of God. In her there was an
almost perfect balance between the intellectual and the emotional
life, and there are few women mystics of Whom we can say this.
The question of her literary sources is an interesting one. A careful
examination of her revelations makes it plain that even when the
short version was written, she was already acquainted with many
theological conceptions; whilst the meditations with which the long
version is enriched, and its fuller descriptions of her spiritual
“Showings,” reveal her as possessing at least by middle life a
considerable knowledge of the language of Augustinian theology and
of the root-ideas of Christian mysticism. As used by her, many of
these ideas have the special colour which was given to them by
Meister Eckhart and his school; and suggest that Julian at one time
or another had come into contact with the characteristically
Dominican type of mysticism which is best known to us in the works
of Suso and Tauler. In her teaching on sin—“I saw not sin, for I
believe it hath no substance nor any part of being”—she is following,
indeed almost quoting, Eckhart’s saying that “evil is nothing but a
privation of being; not an effect, but a defect.” So, too, Eckhart’s
daring assertion that sin has its place in the scheme—“Since God, in
a way, also wills that I should have committed sins, I do not wish
not to have committed them”—appears to be echoed in gentler form
in Julian’s view of sin as a purifying scourge, and of the scars which
it leaves on the redeemed soul as being “not wounds but worships.”
Her beautiful saying that we are God’s bliss, “for in us He enjoyeth
without end,” seems like a deduction from the Eckhartian paradox,
“God needs me as much as I need Him.” She has received, perhaps
from the same source, the antique mystical notion of the soul’s
precession from and return to God. “The soul,” said Eckhart, “is
created that it may flow back into the bottom of the bottomless
fountain whence it came forth.” “Thus I understood,” says Julian,
“that all His blessed children which be come out of Him by nature
shall be brought again into Him by grace”; and again, “all kinds that
He hath made to flow out of Him to work His will shall be restored
and brought again into Him.” Here, again, the naked Eckhartian
monism seems to be transmitted through a more human and more
spiritual temperament. She agrees, too, with the German mystics in
her doctrine of God as the “ground of the soul.” “Our soul is so
deep-grounded in God and so endlessly treasured that we may not
come to the knowing thereof till we have first knowing of God....
God is nearer to us than our own soul, for He is the ground in whom
our soul standeth, and He is the mean that keepeth the substance
and the sensuality together so that they shall never depart.” So
Tauler says, “A man who verily desires to enter in will surely find God
here, for God never separates Himself from this ground. God will be
present with him and he will find and enjoy eternity here.”
Julian’s revelation was received in 1373, and the long text as we
have it was written at some date after 1393. Eckhart had died in
1329, Tauler in 1361; and the great Ruysbroeck, whose mysticism
owes much on its speculative side to Eckhart’s philosophy, in 1381.
The influence of their teaching spread rapidly, and few preaching
friars of an inward disposition can have escaped it. To these
preaching friars was committed in the fourteenth century the special
duty of giving solid theological teaching to nuns. This was commonly
done by way of vernacular sermons and instructions, of which
Tauler’s surviving sermons are types: and it was possibly through
such instructions given in the Carrow convent that Julian obtained
that peculiar knowledge of Dominican mysticism, those contacts with
Augustinian and Victorine thought, on which the more philosophic
side of her revelation seems to depend. The parallels with her great
contemporary St. Catherine of Siena, which Professor Edmund
Gardner has noted, are probably due to the fact that both women
drew their ideas from some earlier source. Her likenesses to
Ruysbroeck can also be accounted for. His Seven Cloisters, Kingdom
of God’s Lovers, and Ornaments of the Spiritual Marriage were all
completed before 1350, and knowledge of them would reach East
Anglia quickly, through the Flemish colony established at Norwich.
Several close correspondences with him can be traced in Julian’s
work; especially her conception of God’s eternal thirst and love-
longing, so similar to Ruysbroeck’s “hungry yet generous love of
God,” and the opening phrase of her Third Revelation, “After this I
saw God in a Point,” which reminds us of the great definition in the
Seven Cloisters, “That Point in which all our lives find their end.”
Julian thus represents the first emergence in English literature of a
stream of tradition which is not represented in the classic school of
English mysticism descended from Rolle. By this school she does not
appear to have been greatly influenced; there is little in her that
reminds us of it, or of that group of contemplatives who produced
the Cloud of Unknowing and its companion works. Her true affinities
are with the Christian Platonism which St. Augustine introduced into
theology, and its developments in the works of Erigena and Eckhart.
But when we have given full weight to the effects upon her work of
oral teaching and of reading, the true originality of that work only
becomes more manifest. Reading and teaching fed her speculative
mind, and helped her to understand and express her own
experience; but this experience in its essence was independent of
intellectual knowledge. It was the fruit of a deeply mystical and
poetic nature, brooding on the conception of God common to
mediæval Christianity. Julian had in a high degree constructive
religious genius; and for such a nature an evocative phrase is
enough to waken the “ghostly sight.”
It is impossible in a short essay to give any full account of her
teaching. That teaching is centred on her own ardent consciousness
of God, as an all-transcending yet all-enclosing reality; a conception
at once philosophic and practical. For Julian, as for the Platonists,
God is the sum of the highest spiritual values—“He is all-thing that is
good to my seeming, and all-thing that is good, it is He.” Her
perception of the Divine Immanence is peculiarly intense, and
expressed in the strongest terms. “God is kind (nature) in His being:
that is to say, that goodness that is in kind, that is God. He is the
ground, He is the substance, He is the same thing that is kind-head,”
and again, “I saw full assuredly that our substance is in God, and
also I saw that in our sensuality God is ... for it is His good pleasure
to reign in our understanding blissfully, and sit in our soul restfully,
and to dwell in our soul endlessly, us all working into Him.” But this
vivid sense of Divine reality, as the very ground of being, is closely
bound up with her devotion to the person of Christ. Her theological
path, like her mystical experience, lay through the human to the
Divine, through emotional realization of the Passion to intellectual
vision of the Godhead. In the first revelation of all we get these two
aspects of truth sharply contrasted; for there her vision of the
bloodstained Crown of Thorns, with its intimate appeal to the heart,
is balanced by her other interior sight of “the Godhead seen in mine
understanding.” The long version of her book elaborates this simple
intuition of the Deity into a very beautiful description of the Holy
Trinity—always one of Julian’s favourite subjects—but the whole is
really implied in the first brief statement, which strikes at once her
characteristic chord of intimacy and awe, or, as she puts it, “the
dread and the homeliness of God.” In the Catholic doctrine of the
Trinity, which was never far from her thoughts, she found the link
between these personal and impersonal apprehensions. That half-
Platonic notion of Christ the Eternal Wisdom as “Mother” of the soul,
which is one of her most original conceptions, here takes its place
side by side with the other, more metaphysical intuition of that
unconditioned Deity in whom “All-thing hath the Being.” “For all our
life is in three: in the first we have our being, in the second we have
our increasing, and in the third we have our fulfilling: the first is
nature, the second is mercy, and the third is grace. For the first I
understood that the high might of the Trinity is our Father, and the
deep wisdom of the Trinity is our Mother, and the great love of the
Trinity is our Lord: and all this we have in nature and in our
substantial making.... All the fair working, and all the sweet kindly
office of dearworthy motherhood is impropriated to the Second
Person ... and all is one Love.”
This blend of personal and metaphysical vision is not unique. We
find it again in the Franciscan contemplative, Angela of Foligno. But
Julian’s nature is richer and more mellow, and the doctrine of love
which she deduced from her experience is more profound. Here, in
this harmonized consciousness of the most human and most
philosophic aspects of religious experience, she is typical of Christian
mysticism at its best. She avoids on the one hand the excessive
intellectualism of the Neoplatonist, and on the other the unpleasant
exuberance of the religious emotionalist, yet draws from the
apprehensions of both the heart and the head all the elements
needed to feed a full spiritual life. The human element brought in by
Christianity, with all the emotional values belonging to it—however
symbolic this side of contemplation must necessarily be—redeems
philosophic mysticism from the clear coldness, the lofty superiority,
that St. Augustine condemned in the Platonists. But, equally, it is the
philosophic background, the austere worship of that trinity of Light,
Life, and Love, in whom, as Julian says, we are clad more closely
than a body in its clothes, which saves mystical fervour from its
worst extravagances. Here she is and will ever be one of the safest
guides to the contemplative life.
Another special quality of Julian’s teaching is its healthy, vigorous,
affirmative character. The only two sins she sternly condemns—and
she calls them not sins, but sickness—are sloth or lack of zest, and
doubtful dread or lack of hope. Zest and hope she regards as
essential factors in the life of the soul. The Light, Life, and Love
which form her ultimate definition of triune Reality—the Mother,
Brother, and Saviour, which are her nearest images for Christ’s
relation with man—these are conceptions which kill the sort of pious
moods that R. L. Stevenson called “dim, dem, and dowie.” God’s
attitude to man is “courteous, glad, and merry,” and we do Him less
honour by solemnity than by “cheer of mirth and joy.” To her, only
the good is the true, and evil is a void, a lack of the only reality; a
Platonic notion which has always been dear to the mystics. “In this
naked word Sin,” says Julian, “our Lord brought to my mind
generally all that is not good ... but I saw not sin, for I believe it
hath no manner of substance nor no part of being, nor could it be
known but by the pain it is cause of.” It follows that our attention
should not be given to the avoidance or consideration of sin, but to
the understanding and enjoyment of the good and the real. “The
beholding of other men’s sins, it maketh as it were a thick mist
before the eyes of the soul,” says Julian. Her strongest
condemnation is given to morbid pondering of past sins and
mistakes. “Right as by the courtesy of God He forgets our sins when
we repent, right so will He that we forget our sin, and all our
heaviness and all our doubtful dreads.” This world, after all, is only a
nursery for heaven, and its inhabitants mostly spiritual babies who
need not be taken too seriously. “I understood no higher stature in
this life than childhood;” and the attitude of God to our infant souls
is that of “the kindly loving Mother that witteth and knoweth the
need of her child and keepeth it full tenderly as the kind and
condition of Motherhood will.”
No modern psychologist could be more emphatic than this
fourteenth-century recluse on the foolishness of worry, the duty of
confidence, gaiety, and hope. “Notwithstanding our simple living and
our blindness here, yet endlessly our courteous Lord beholdeth us in
this working rejoicing; and of all things we may please him best,
wisely and truly to believe, and to enjoy with Him and in Him.” She
brings back the primitive Christian insistence on joy—confident
happiness—as the one sure sign of the spiritual life. If we have not
got this, it is because we lack the faith and common sense which
sees life in a universal and disinterested light. Once, Julian says, she
was inclined to worry about God’s work in the soul of a friend whom
she loved, and she was answered in her reason “as it were by a
friendly man,” “Take it generally! and behold the courtesy of thy Lord
God as He shows it to thee, for it is more worship to God to behold
Him in all than in any special thing.” In those words we have a
complete prescription for happiness and inward peace. All that is
made, as Julian saw in her vision, is but “a little thing the quantity of
an hazel nut” in comparison with the Divine life that creates, keeps,
and loves it, and may be known in those sudden glimpses of
perfection which we call the Good, the Beautiful, and the True.
These, in her language, are “God’s courteous showings of Himself,”
and we are most likely to encounter them when we take the worlds
of nature and grace “generally,” and refrain from partial or egoistic
criticisms and demands. Failure in this simple rule, she thinks, is the
true cause of human misery and unrest. “This is the cause why we
be not all in ease of heart and soul; that we seek here rest in those
things that are so little, wherein is no rest, and know not our God
that is All-mighty, All-wise, and All-good.”
MYSTICISM IN MODERN FRANCE
I
SŒUR THÉRÈSE DE L’ENFANT-JÉSUS
That Christian tradition of the spiritual life which has been specially
developed within the religious orders—with its definite objective, its
methodical training in self-conquest and the art of prayer—is often
regarded as a mere survival of mediævalism, lingering in odd
corners but having no points of contact with our modern world. Yet
this tradition lives now, as surely as in the days of St. Gertrude or St.
Teresa. It continues to exercise its mysterious attraction;
transmuting those who give themselves to its influence, and
producing that special type of character and experience which is so
clearly marked in the histories of the Catholic saints. In a world of
change, this has hardly altered. Within the contemplative convents
there obtains that same scale of values, that same contempt for the
body and undivided attention to the interests of the soul, that same
avoidance of all comfort or pleasure and eager acceptance of pain,
which is revealed in the standard writings of Christian asceticism. In
these houses, mysticism is still a practical art: the education there
given represents the classic spiritual discipline of the west, and still
retains its transforming power. Through it, souls obtain access to a
veritable world of spirit; and apprehend under symbols eternal
values, which are unperceived by their fellow men. By it they are
supported through the difficult adjustments of consciousness and
sublimation of instinct, which are needed when the centre of life’s
interest is shifted from physical to supernal levels. This is a fact
which students of psychology, and especially of religious experience
in its intensive form, should not ignore. They need not go to the
Middle Ages for their examples of the effect of ascetic training and
contemplative practice, or for characteristic specimens of the “saintly
type”; for these may be found within our own period, and studied in
their relation to our modern world.
Those who regard this saintly type as a hot-house plant, raised
under conditions which appear to defend it from the temptations and
distractions of ordinary existence, can have little acquaintance either
with cloister ideals or with cloistered lives. A thoroughgoing monastic
discipline is the most searching school of virtue ever invented. It
withers easy-going piety and “other-worldliness” at the root. It
confers a robust humility which is proof against all mortifications and
disappointments. It leaves no room for individual tastes and
preferences, religious or secular. Its pupils must learn to resent
nothing, to demand nothing; to thrive on humiliations, to love and
serve all without distinction, without personal choice; even to
renounce the special consolations of religion. The common idea of
the cloister, as providing a career of impressive religious ceremonial
varied by plain sewing, pious gossip, and “devotionettes” is far from
the truth. On its external side, a well-ordered convent provides a
busy, practical, family life of the most austere kind, with many
duties, both religious and domestic, countless demands upon
patience, good-temper and unselfishness, and few relaxations. On
its hidden side, it is a device to train and toughen the spirit, develop
its highest powers, and help it to concentrate its attention more and
more completely on eternal realities. That training is still given in its
completeness; and the classic, saintly character is still being
produced, with its special cultivation of love, meekness, and self-
sacrifice, balanced by energy, courage, and strength of will.
Sanctity is the orientation of the spirit towards supreme Reality. To
the believer in any theistic religion, no attitude of the soul could be
simpler, more natural than this. There is nothing about it which
deserves to be called abnormal, archaic, or fantastic. The
complications with which it is surrounded, the unnatural aspect
which it wears for practical men, all come from its collision with the
entangled interests and perverse ideals of the world. Thus, retreat
from this tangle of sham interests, the building up of a consistent
universe within which the self can develop its highest powers and
purest loves, is felt to be imperative for those selves in whom this
innate aptitude for God reaches the conscious level. In these spirits,
the “vocation” for the special life of correspondence with the
supersensual reproduces on a higher plane the vocation of the artist
or the poet. All the self’s best energies and desires tend in this
direction, and it will achieve harmonious development only by
unifying itself about this centre of interest, and submitting to the
nurture and discipline which shall assure its dominance. The symbols
with which the universe of religion is furnished, the moral law which
there obtains, are all contributory to the one end; and find their
justification in its achievement.
Within the Christian Church, and especially in that which is
technically called the “religious life,” these symbols and this law have
not varied for many centuries; nor has the type of personality which
they develop changed much since it first appeared in monastic
history. The sharp sense of close communion with, and immediate
responsibility to, a personal God possessing human attributes; the
complete abandonment of desire, combined with astonishing
tenacity of purpose; contempt for the merely comfortable either in
spiritual or physical affairs; a glad and eager acceptance of pain—
these are the qualities of the Christian saint, and these are still
fostered in appropriate subjects by the cloistered life. These facts
have been abundantly demonstrated during the last thirty years in a
group of French Carmelite mystics, of whom the best known is
Thérèse Martin, already the object of a widespread cultus under the
name of Sœur Thérése de l’Enfant Jésus. Others who will repay
study are Elizabeth Catez, or Sœur Elizabeth de la Trinité (1880-
1906) and Mère Marie-Ange de l’Enfant-Jésus (1881-1909). It is clear
that we have in these young women—for they all died before they
were thirty years of age—a genuine renaissance of traditional
Catholic mysticism. Their experience exhibits many close
correspondences with that of the great mystics of the past; the
same development of the interior life can be traced in them, and
they knew at first hand some at least among those forms of spiritual
consciousness which are described by Ruysbroeck, Angela of
Foligno, St. Teresa, and St. John of the Cross.
The first in time and in importance—for the others depended to a
greater or less degree on her influence and example—was Thérèse
Martin, who was born at Alençon in 1873 and died in 1897. The last
nine years of her life were spent in the Carmelite Convent of Lisieux
in Normandy; and she there wrote the spiritual autobiography,
L’histoire d’une âme, which has since been translated into every
European language. In her life—which shows with exceptional
clearness the reality and driving power of that instinct which is
known as religious vocation—and in the incidents connected with her
death and cultus, we find many suggestive parallels with the
histories of the historical saints. These parallels often help us to
determine the true meaning of statements in those histories;
indicating the possible origin of much that now appears extravagant
and abnormal, and restoring to their real position in the human race
men and women who dropped their living characteristics in
ascending to the altars of the Church.
We notice first in Thérèse the extent to which heredity and
environment contributed to the formation in her of an exclusively
religious temperament. She inherited from both parents an ascetic
tendency. Her father, as a young man, had sought without success
to become a novice at the Great St. Bernard; her mother had wished
to be a Sister of Charity. Their marriage had the character of a
religious dedication; and their one wish was for children who might
be consecrated to the service of God. Nine were born, of whom four
died in infancy. The five girls who survived all entered the cloister,
for which indeed their whole life had been a perfect preparation. The
idea of marriage seems never to have occurred to any member of
the family. Hence Thérèse, the youngest child, grew up in a home
which was a veritable forcing-house of the spiritual life, though full
of happiness and warm affection; and by it was moulded to that
puritanism and other-worldliness which is characteristic of real
Catholic piety. There the conception of earthly existence as a “school
for saints” was taken for granted, and the supremacy of religious
interests never questioned: all deeds and words, however trivial,
being judged by the grief or pleasure they would give to God. Even
as a tiny child, she was given a string of beads to count the
“sacrifices” made each day. The Martin family lived, in fact, within a
dream-world, substantially identical with the universe of mediæval
piety. It was peopled with angels and demons, whose activities were
constantly noted; its doors were ever open for the entry of the
miraculous, its human inhabitants were the objects of the Blessed
Virgin’s peculiar care, every chance happening was the result of
Divine interference. For them this universe was actual, not symbolic.
Their minds instinctively rejected every impression that conflicted
with it; and its inconsistencies with the other—perhaps equally
symbolic and less lovely—world of our daily life were unperceived.
The most bizarre legends of the saints were literal facts; all relics
were authentic, and most were full of supernatural power. The Holy
House of Loretto, the face of St. Catherine of Bologna still marked by
the kiss of the Infant Christ, found in them willing and awestruck
believers. Yet these crude symbols, thus literally understood, became
for them the means of a real transcendence. The dominant interests
of the home were truly supersensual; a vigorous spiritual life was
fostered in it, marked by humility and love, true goodness, complete
unselfishness, a courageous attitude towards misfortune and pain.
Thus from birth Thérèse was protected from all risk of intellectual
conflict, and surrounded by harmonious contributory suggestions all
tending to press her emotional life into one mould. Such a nurture
could hardly fail to create either the disposition of a rebel or that of
a saint: but there was in Thérèse no tendency to revolt. Her
temperament—ardent, imaginative, abnormally sensitive, and
psychically unstable—inclined her to the enthusiastic acceptance of
religious ideas, and even in childhood she showed a fervour and
devotion exceeding that of her sisters. When she was still a little girl,
the two eldest left home one after the other, in order to become
nuns in the Carmelite convent of Lisieux. The departure of the first,
Pauline, was a crushing grief to Thérèse, at that time about nine
years old; and was apparently the beginning of her own desire to be
a nun. She told the Superior of the convent that she, too, intended
to be a Carmelite, and wished to take the veil at once. The Reverend
Mother, a woman of kindness and good sense, did not laugh; but
advised her to wait until she was sixteen, and then to try her
vocation. There is less absurdity than at first appears in this childish
craving; for the religious type is often strangely precocious. As the
tendency to music or painting may appear in earliest childhood, so
the sense of vocation may awaken, long before the implications of
this mysterious impulse are fully understood. Thus Elizabeth Catez,
afterwards Sœur Elizabeth de la Trinité, determined to be a nun
when she was seven years old, and began at this age to govern her
inner life. She and Thérèse help us to understand the stories and the
visions and self-dedication of the little St. Catherine of Siena; or
those of St. Catherine of Genoa and Madame Guyon, who both
wished at twelve years old to enter a religious order. We are faced in
all such cases by the strange phenomenon of accelerated
development: strongly marked in the case of Thérèse, who
undoubtedly had, in spite of the great simplicity of her nature, a real
genius for the spiritual life.
She had, too, and in a marked degree, the peculiarly sensitive
psychic organization which is observed in many of the historic
mystics. A long and severe nervous illness had followed her sister’s
departure for the cloister. It was cured by a form of auto-suggestion
for which many parallels can be found in the history of adult
religious experience; though few in that of children of her age. This
incident Thérèse has described in her memoirs with great clearness
and honesty. At a crisis of the sickness, when she was reduced to
utter misery and weakness and tormented by hallucinations and
fears, her three sisters came to her room and knelt before the statue
of the Blessed Virgin, praying for her cure. The sick child, praying
too as well as she could, suddenly saw the statue take life and
advance towards her with a smile. Instantly the prayer was
answered, her pains and delusions left her, and she was cured. The
“vision” being told—and of course accepted at face-value as a
supernatural grace—marked Thérèse from this time as a privileged
soul. It certainly indicated in her an abnormal suggestibility,
comparable with that which is revealed by the somewhat similar
incident in the life of Julian of Norwich, and was not without
importance for her future development.
The religious transformation and exaltation so often experienced in
adolescence is seen in Thérèse in its most intense form. It was
initiated when she was thirteen by another nervous illness,
apparently brought on by a morbid brooding on her own supposed
imperfections—the spiritual ailment well known to religious directors
as “scrupulosity”—and it was from this period that she afterwards
dated the beginning of her real spiritual life. The childish
determination to become a Carmelite had now grown in strength,
and when she was fourteen she broke to her father her own violent
consciousness of vocation; a certitude which nothing could shake.
Her inner life was at this time astonishingly mature. She was not a
prig, but a sensitive and affectionate little girl; yet her autobiography
is full of sayings which surprise us by their depth and wisdom, when
we remember the age of the child who thought and said them. By
the constant practice of small renunciations, self-denial was now
habitual to her; for it was by that which she called the “little
pathway” of incessant but inconspicuous sacrifices and kind deeds,
and not by any abnormal austerities or devotions, that her character
was formed. Though perfectly free from all spiritual pride, she was,
moreover, quite certain of her own communion with the Divine order,
and of the authority of the impressions which she received from it.
“En ce temps-là, je n’osais rien dire de mes sentiments intérieurs; la
voie par laquelle je marchais était si droite, si lumineuse, que je ne
sentais pas le besoin d’un autre guide que Jésus ... je pensais que
pour moi, le bon Dieu ne se servait pas d’intermédiaire, mais agissait
directement.”
These are bold words for a young girl who had been reared in the
most rigid provincial piety, and had been taught to distrust private
judgment and regard her director as the representative of God. In
them we see the action of that strong will, power of initiative and
clear conception of her own needs and duties, which redeem her
often emotional religious fervour from insipidity. It is true that she
can and does express that fervour in the sentimental language which
is the least attractive element in French piety. The sense of a special
relationship and special destiny which more and more possessed her,
far exceeded her powers either of realization or of expression; and
unfortunately impelled her to describe herself as the “fleurette,” the
“petite fiancée,” even the “jouet” of Jesus, and to note in too many
casual happenings evidence of “les delicatesses du bon Dieu pour
moi.” Yet we cannot forget that similar declarations, equally offensive
to modern taste, abound in some of the greatest historical mystics,
and that their full unpleasantness is only mitigated to us by the
quaint and archaic phrases in which they are expressed. Whilst no
doubt these declarations represent the invasion of human desires
and instincts into the field of spiritual experience, its natural craving
for protection and personal love; they also witness to the mystic’s
intense personal consciousness of close communion, a
consciousness which far transcends the poor vocabulary and
commonplace symbols through which it must be told.
Therefore we cannot dismiss Thérèse Martin as a mere victim of
religious emotionalism, because her mental equipment is inadequate
to her spiritual experience. When, moreover, we remember the
amazing vigour and tenacity of purpose with which, when barely
fifteen, this gentle and home-loving child, driven by her strong sense
of vocation, planned and carried through a lifelong separation from
the father she adored and the world of nature she loved, we are
bound to acknowledge in her an element of greatness, a strong and
an adventurous soul. With a certitude of her own duty which nothing
could shake, Thérèse interviewed on her own behalf the Superior of
the order, who snubbed her, and the Bishop of the diocese, who was
kind but prevaricated with her; demanding from them permission to
take the veil at once, instead of waiting till the usual age of twenty-
one. Further, being taken by her father to Rome with a party of
French pilgrims, when they were all received by the Pope she had
the courage to address him directly—although the priest in charge of
the pilgrimage forbade it—and asked for his support. The end of it
was that she at last convinced the authorities of her special vocation,
and was allowed to become a postulant in the most austere of all
religious orders at the unheard-of age of fifteen.
Her career as a Carmelite was far from being the succession of
mystical enjoyments, the basking in divine sunshine, which some
imagine the contemplative life to be. She now experienced the
common lot of the “proficient” in the mystic way; paying for her
religious exaltation by reactions, long periods of aridity, which were
doubtless due in part to psychic exhaustion. Then, in addition to the
perpetual little sacrifices, self-deprivations, and penances which she
imposed on herself, she seemed, as she says, to be plunged in a
“terrible desert,” a “profound night” of darkness and solitude; and
prayer itself became dreary and unreal. “Tout a disparu ... ce n’est
plus un voile, c’est un mur qui s’éleve jusqu’aux cieux et couvre le
firmament étoilé.” But an inner life which was nourished on the
robust doctrine of St. John of the Cross could bear this deprivation
with fortitude, and make of inward poverty itself a gain. Outwardly,
too, her life was difficult. Her superiors seem at once to have
perceived in her that peculiar quality of soul which is capable of
sanctity; and since it is the ambition of every community to produce
a saint, they addressed themselves with vigour to the stern task of
educating Thérèse for her destiny. Still a child, sensitive and
physically delicate, she was spared no opportunity of self-denial and
mortification. Her most trifling deficiencies were remarked, her most
reasonable desires thwarted, her good points ignored. When her
health began to fail under a rule of life far beyond her strength, and
the first signs of tuberculosis—that scourge of the cloister—appeared
in her, the Prioress, in her ferocious zeal for souls, even refused to
dispense the ailing girl from attendance at the night-office. “Une
âme de cette trempe, disait-elle, ne doit pas être traité comme une
enfant, les dispenses ne sont pas faites pour elle. Laissez-la. Dieu la
soutient.”
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,