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CHAPTER VIII

VALENTINE WEIGEL AND NATURE MYSTICISM

It is a central idea of mysticism that there is a way to God through
the human soul. The gate to Heaven is thus kept, not by St. Peter or
by any other saint of the calendar; it is kept by each individual
person himself as he opens or closes within himself the spiritual
circuit of connection with God. The door into the Eternal swings
within the circle of our own inner life, and all things are ours if we
learn how to use the key that opens, for "to open" and "to find God"
are one and the same thing. The emphasis in "Nature Mysticism" lies
not so much on this direct pathway to God through the soul as upon the
symbolic character of the world of Nature as a visible revelation of an
invisible Universe, and upon the idea that man is a microcosm, a little
world, reproducing in epitome, point for point, though in miniature,
the great world, or macrocosm. On this line of thought, _everything is
double_. The things that are seen are parables of other things which
are not seen. They are like printed words which _mean_ something
vastly more and deeper than what the eye sees as it scans mere letters.
One indwelling Life, one animating Soul, lives in and moves through the
whole mighty frame of things and expresses its Life through visible
things in manifold ways, as the invisible human soul expresses itself
through the visible body. Everything is thus, in a fragmentary way, a
focus of revelation for the Divine Spirit, whose garment is this vast
web of the visible world. But man in a very special way, as a complete
microcosm, is a concentrated extract, a {134} comprehensive
quintessence of the whole cosmos, visible and invisible--an image of
God and a mirror of the Universe.

These views have a very ancient history and unite many strands of
historic thought. They came to light in the sixteenth century with the
revival through Greek literature of Stoic, Neo-Platonic, and
Neo-Pythagorean ideas. But the Greek stream of thought as it now
reappeared was fused with streams of thought from many other
sources--medieval mysticism, Persian astrology, Arabian philosophy, and
the Jewish Cabala, which, in turn, was a fusing of many elements--and
the mixture was honestly believed to be genuine, revived Christianity,
and Christ, as the new Adam, is throughout the central Figure of these
systems.

Marsilius Ficino, the Italian Humanist, who translated Plato and the