Little
Canfield
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Little
Canfield
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by Canon Jesse Berridge
(An abstract from a paper read
before the Colchester and District Clerical Society, June 1948 – Benet Canfield
was born at Little Canfield Hall)
In past
history, when efforts for spiritual advance have seemed faced with failure,
there has been an emergence of some few souls with certain definite
characteristics, broadly defined under the term ‘mystics,’ and these men and
women have provided new hope by an uncompromising other-worldliness and by an assertion
of experience and their consciousness of god, unshaken by human logic,
unaffected by scientific advance or world events. One such elect soul, now
almost unknown or nearly forgotten, as he would wish to be, is the subject of
this paper.
‘The wind
bloweth where it listeth … so is every one that is born of the Spirit.’ The story of William Fitch, or Benet
Canfield, as he was known when he entered the Capuchin Order in 1586, is the
story of a man whose life-story was utterly unexpected and unaccountable
humanly speaking, the story of the son of an Essex village squire, born in
1563, who came to be the director of the most exalted of the purely religious
spirits of his time in France, including S. Francis de Sales, Cardinal Berulle,
and Madame Acarie. He originated the cult of the inner life at the heart of the
religious revival of
Some
attention has lately been directed to Benet Canfield in a remarkable book by
Aldous Huxley called Grey Eminence, a
study of Pere Joseph, the friar-diplomatist at the back of Cardinal Richelieu
and the inspirer of his policy. Mr. Huxley’s interest is in the strange
combination which Pere Joseph manifested, of religion, devotion, and the
engineering of the Thirty Years’ War, which devastated
There is
a brass relating to Canfield’s father, William Fytche Esquire, described as
‘late Lorde of this towne,’ in Little Canfield Church, who resided at the Hall
which still stands. He died in 1578 at the age of eighty-two. The William Fitch
of this memoir was the second son of a second wife. He is set then in that
amazing period of English history, the Revival of Learning, the Renaissance,
the aspirations of the human spirit breaking into flower unrestrainedly – the
background of Elizabethan England; a young man finding perhaps the Arcadia of
Sidney in an Essex village, rich and with romantic leanings.
His life
in the capital is described as undisciplined, frequenting plays, sports,
rambling about and idling in S. Paul’s, at schools of dancing and fencing. Suddenly ‘the world turned upside down’ for
him as the result of the reading of a devout book, and he joined the Roman
Catholic Church. What that book was no one knows, but one may hazard a good
guess that is was The Cloud of Unknowing,
that profound and perhaps most beautiful expression of English mysticism, an
anonymous work, but, as many think, written by Walter Hilton, author of The Scale of Perfection. Some hint of
the tremendous choice that presented itself nakedly before the vision of the
young Renaissance spirit may be gathered from a brief word to the reader of The
rule of Perfection, Canfield’s book:
Reader
and Friend, there are two ways that lead men up to God: one is enquiry, the
other self-denial; the first
whereof is more agreeable, the second
more effective: the one has the more
pleasure in it, but the other more of soundness and of safety. The former is
not for all men; from the latter none of intention is excluded.
For
William Fitch now the attraction is for the mind’s search into truth rather
than the allurement of the senses, and yet there is a more excellent way for
all men than either; more excellent even
than the pursuit of knowledge: prima gratior, secunda utilor. ‘What,’ says a Kempis, ‘shall it avail thee
to dispute profoundly of the Trinity if thou be devoid of humility and art
thereby displeasing to the Trinity?’
In the
conflict of the two currents of the time, the movements that threw up
Shakespeare, Savonarola, Erasmus, More, he must yield himself to one, and he
chose. He threw his weight into the scale that included a chance of profit for
all rather than that of the choice and scholarly spirits – the poets, the
artists, the adventurers. From the vivid Elizabethan England of Shakespeare’s
Sonnets, Holbein, Bacon, he turned to the grey Franciscan robe and the
spiritual enthusiasm of the movement in
William
Fitch went to
He was
soon actively employed. The religious revival that accompanied the
Counter-Reformation, of which S. Teresa and S. John of the Cross were the
exemplifications in
Briefly,
he returned to
The word
‘mystic’ has been loosely used, and has sometimes included the charlatans, the
self-deceived, and those whom the eighteenth century described as
‘enthusiasts.’ Dr. Inge, in his ‘Bampton Lectures on Christian Mysticism,’ has
dealt trenchantly with some later developments and cults of characters
sometimes described under the term. But by now we have come to recognise the
genuine mystic as one of a royal line of exalted souls down the ages who have
known and claimed to have known direct experience of God, the supreme Reality,
and by self-surrender have found union with Him. Broadly, they agree in a
threefold method of progress to this finality – Purgation, Illumination,
Benet
Canfield is unmistakably of the authentic type of mystic. He left several
literary testimonies as to what he stood for. The chief of these is Regula Perfectionis. As printed in the
edition of 1610 in the Chelmsford Cathedral Library, to which I have referred,
the translation of the title is: ‘The Rule of Perfection of Benedict the
Englishman of Canfield in Essex of the order of Capuchins containing a short
and plain Compendium of the whole spiritual life, brought down to the single
point of the divine will.’
The whole
spiritual life in a single point of consideration – a single idea. The aim
shows the practicability of an English type of mysticism – simplicity,
kindliness for the average soul, the uncompromising demand for adventure for
God. Like all mystical guides, it is divided into three parts, the first part
dealing with the active life, the outward will; the second with the
contemplative life and the inward will;
the third with what is called the essential will, effecting the
transcendent life. The reader is helped
by a frontispiece, said to be designed by Benet Canfield himself. Here is a
translation of his own description of it.
This figure in the shape of a sun shows the will of God.
The faces gathered here united signify souls living in another soul. The
joyfulness which you see them display indicates the joy of these souls. Their
faces are disposed in a triple circle in order to show the three steps of the
divine will, that is, of the Outward, of the Inward, and of the Essential,
which constitute the three divisions of this book. Souls of the first degree
look towards the divine will as the Outward. Those of the second as Inward, but
those of the third as Essential. Or if rather they see, according to St. Paul,
that will as Good, in the second as Acceptable, and the third as the Perfect.
The first degree shows the souls of the active life, the second those of the
contemplative, the third of the life of the transcendent. So, therefore, many
tools and instruments are assembled outside the first circle, by which the
active life may be indicated. Within the third circle Jehova is placed that the
transcendent life in the Essential will, which is God Himself, may be before
the eyes. To the circle and the
arrangement in the middle nothing is assigned, that if may become clear in this
type of contemplative life without any further search or effort, the attraction
of God, already known and tasted in the Outward will is to be followed, and the
quest to be abandoned in no degree. The land-tools that lie on the ground are
of themselves full of darkness, yet they do shine in the beams of the sun and
sparkle when struck by its brightness, because they gleam clearly, lit up by
that richness of the divine will. The faces of the first order shine but little
in the glory of the divine will, because souls in that condition do not receive
the light from thence to a great degree. The second circle of faces shine much
more, because souls in that state draw upon a more ample illumination. But the
faces of the third circle shine completely with an inward glory, because those
that have attained that degree of complete achievement shed forth their light
thenceforth as complete souls. The first are shown most clearly, the second
less, and the third hardly at all, and this is in order that you may know that
the souls in that first degree are lingering much in themselves, and but little
in God; the souls in the second degree less
in themselves, and but little in God;
the souls of the third degree to be hardly at all in themselves but
absorbed through and through by the very God and by His essential will. All
these pictured faces direct their eyes toward the will of God, by which they
indicate the pure desire of the souls before whose eyes this will ought never
to fail to be present.
This distinction of degrees, however, does not bear
comparison with the divine will in its own nature, since that is always like
itself and never unlike; wherefore these are depicted as unequal degrees of
light, but are portrayed in an uniform manner, every difference driving only by
proximity or remoteness of the souls to it, by the furthest whereof the lowest
order is shown, by the second the middle one, and by the closest the highest.
The will
of God the single point. Before each of us there is a single point of divine
purpose, of divine truth. The writer cannot evade it and the reader cannot
evade it either, if he takes his own being and experience seriously and
practically.
There is
no space here to summarise even briefly the method of Benet Canfield, the
spiritual subtleties as to the degrees and media
employed in the soul’s progress to her ecstatic and final state. These demand a
separate treatment and study, and probably the pages of the Essex Review are not appropriate for the
contemplation of such celestial heights. But the use of sacred scripture is
interesting in its boldness as to mystical interpretations. The ‘Song of Songs’
is of course freely quoted with its inner significance of the soul and the
Beloved. The annihilation of the self is the aim, thereby to find God, a change
of desire into what is desirable, of act into what it was meant to lead to, and
this must be a divine act, as no human act can be without form or image. As the
soul is distracted by her own act, the soul must cease from action. This
stripping of the spirit involves purgation and illumination, and we are warned
not to wrestle in violent effort to attain, for any action implies life – the
life of a separate self and the overflowing thoughts that hinder transcendent
life. A man should relinquish the struggle to his God. Images of the mind, such
as Will, Power, Divinity, Unity, Trinity, goodness – these are not God Himself,
but attributes.
There
follows a remarkable proviso. The
Passion of Christ is excepted. This is ever to be in our recollection and
contemplated in the Totality as united to it, as one and the same thing. Here
it is that Mr. Aldous Huxley declares that the mystical tradition in the Roman
Catholic Church has been wrecked by Benet Canfield. ‘There cannot,’ says Mr.
Huxley, ‘be adherence to persons or personal qualities without analysis and
imagination, and where analysis and imagination are active the mind is unable
to receive into itself the being of God.
Psychologically this is impossible.’ But may we not think psychology is
insufficient to arbitrate here? ‘By a tragic irony,’ he goes on, ‘the ecstatic
Father Benet, the brilliant and saintly Pierre de Berulle take their place
among the men who have contributed to the darkening of the human spirit.’ It
may well be, however, that the vision of Benet Canfield carries us nearer to
truth than dialectic. There is a reconciliation of the logical conflict, he
says, in Faith and Love. A simple contemplation of God at one with man in the
Passion at the same time is by God’s grace, within our reach. Through the
Incarnation Divinity and Humanity are one thing. Faith reduces images of the
mind to nothing. It is a matter of experience rather than a lesson. The Passion
is to be thought of as in ourselves
rather than in
The
mystical use of the Scriptures is open to the charge that you can attach any
meaning to a text. ‘That this sort of thing,’ says Mr. Huxley, ‘should ever
have carried conviction to anybody seems now completely incomprehensible.’ But
I think we cannot leave it at that. The allegorism, employed by S. Paul and
dear to the early Christian and medieval minds, has its roots firmly in
Christian method and has an immortal strengthening in the fadeless flowers of
poetry. Martha and Mary, as representing active and contemplative religion;
Sarah and Hagar, S. Paul’s ‘allegory’; the whole background of the Exodus as
applied to the thought of Christian salvation, and so on.
The
number of references to the ‘Song of Songs’ in Canfield’s book is outstanding.
Dr. Inge has an essay on the mystical use of this scripture in an appendix to
his Bampton Lectures (1899) on Christian Mysticism, where, however, Canfield is
not mentioned. The ‘Song of Songs’ has the imprimatur
in the Authorised Version for mystical use, though the interpretation of the
Bridegroom and the Bride is that of Christ and the Church. In Canfield it is
Christ and the individual soul that is stressed.
* * *
The
oblivion into which Canfield has fallen, the neglect of his significant place
in religious history, the disappearance of his book have been ascribed to a
suspicion of ‘Quietism’ by authority, the ‘Quietism’ subsequently condemned,
but as Bremonde in his Literary History
of Religion in France writes, ‘Anyone who accuses Benet Canfield of
Quietism cannot have read him. Master of the masters themselves, he, in my
opinion,’ adds Bremonde, ‘more than anyone else, gave our religious renaissance
that clearly mystical character which was to last for the next fifty years.’
I am not competent to assess or pass judgment on
the outlook or experiences of a religious within the structure of the Roman
Catholic Church of 350 years ago, but I have read his book, and to anyone for
whom humanism has value and the story of Christianity in
