Books: Light, Life, and Love
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W. R. Inge >> Light, Life, and Love
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15 CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
ECKHART
TAULER
MEDITATIONS ON THE SEVEN WORDS FROM THE CROSS
SUSO
RUYSBROEK
THEOLOGIA GERMANICA
INTRODUCTION
Sect. 1. THE PRECURSORS OF THE GERMAN MYSTICS
TO most English readers the "Imitation of Christ" is the
representative of mediaeval German mysticism. In reality, however,
this beautiful little treatise belongs to a period when that
movement had nearly spent itself. Thomas a Kempis, as Dr. Bigg has
said,[1] was only a semi-mystic. He tones down the most
characteristic doctrines of Eckhart, who is the great original
thinker of the German mystical school, and seems in some ways to
revert to an earlier type of devotional literature. The "Imitation"
may perhaps be described as an idealised picture of monastic piety,
drawn at a time when the life of the cloister no longer filled a
place of unchallenged usefulness in the social order of Europe. To
find German mysticism at its strongest we must go back a full
hundred years, and to understand its growth we must retrace our
steps as far as the great awakening of the thirteenth century--the
age of chivalry in religion--the age of St. Louis, of Francis and
Dominic, of Bonaventura and Thomas Aquinas. It was a vast revival,
bearing fruit in a new ardour of pity and charity, as well as in a
healthy freedom of thought. The Church, in recognising the new
charitable orders of Francis and Dominic, and the Christianised
Aristotelianism of the schoolmen, retained the loyalty and profited
by the zeal of the more sober reformers, but was unable to prevent
the diffusion of an independent critical spirit, in part provoked
and justified by real abuses. Discontent was aroused, not only by
the worldiness of the hierarchy, whose greed and luxurious living
were felt to be scandalous, but by the widespread economic distress
which prevailed over Western Europe at this period. The crusades
periodically swept off a large proportion of the able-bodied men, of
whom the majority never returned to their homes, and this helped to
swell the number of indigent women, who, having no male protectors,
were obliged to beg their bread. The better class of these female
mendicants soon formed themselves into uncloistered charitable
Orders, who were not forbidden to marry, and who devoted themselves
chiefly to the care of the sick. These Beguines and the
corresponding male associations of Beghards became very numerous in
Germany. Their religious views were of a definite type. Theirs was
an intensely inward religion, based on the longing of the soul for
immediate access to God. The more educated among them tended to
embrace a vague idealistic Pantheism. Mechthild of Magdeburg
(1212-1277), prophetess, poetess, Church reformer, quietist, was the
ablest of the Beguines. Her writings prove to us that the technical
terminology of German mysticism was in use before Eckhart,[2] and
also that the followers of what the "Theologia Germanica" calls the
False Light, who aspired to absorption in the Godhead, and despised
the imitation of the incarnate Christ, were already throwing
discredit on the movement. Mechthild's independence, and her
unsparing denunciations of corruption in high places, brought her
into conflict with the secular clergy. They tried to burn her
books--those religious love songs which had already endeared her to
German popular sentiment. It was then that she seemed to hear a
voice saying to her:
Lieb' meine, betrŸbe dich nicht zu sehr,
Die Wahrheit mag niemand verbrennen!
The rulers of the Church, unhappily, were not content with burning
books. Their hostility towards the unrecognised Orders became more
and more pronounced: the Beghards and Beguines were harried and
persecuted till most of them were driven to join the Franciscans or
Dominicans, carrying with them into those Orders the ferment of
their speculative mysticism. The more stubborn "Brethren and Sisters
of the Free Spirit" were burned in batches at Cologne and elsewhere.
Their fate in those times did not excite much pity, for many of the
victims were idle vagabonds of dissolute character, and the general
public probably thought that the licensed begging friars were enough
of a nuisance without the addition of these free lances.
The heretical mystical sects of the thirteenth century are very
interesting as illustrating the chief dangers of mysticism. Some of
these sectaries were Socialists or Communists of an extreme kind;
others were Rationalists, who taught that Jesus Christ was the son
of Joseph and a sinner like other men; others were Puritans, who
said that Church music was "nothing but a hellish noise" (nihil nisi
clamor inferni), and that the Pope was the magna meretrix of the
Apocalypse. The majority were Anti-Sacramentalists and Determinists;
and some were openly Antinomian, teaching that those who are led by
the Spirit can do no wrong. The followers of Amalric of Bena[3]
believed that the Holy Ghost had chosen their sect in which to
become incarnate; His presence among them was a continual guarantee
of sanctity and happiness. The "spiritual Franciscans" had dreams of
a more apocalyptic kind. They adopted the idea of an "eternal
Gospel," as expounded by Joachim of Floris, and believed that the
"third kingdom," that of the Spirit, was about to begin among
themselves. It was to abolish the secular Church and to inaugurate
the reign of true Christianity--i.e. "poverty" and asceticism.
Such are some of the results of what our eighteenth-century
ancestors knew and dreaded as "Enthusiasm"--that ferment of the
spirit which in certain epochs spreads from soul to soul like an
epidemic, breaking all the fetters of authority, despising tradition
and rejecting discipline in its eagerness to get rid of formalism
and unreality; a lawless, turbulent, unmanageable spirit, in which,
notwithstanding, is a potentiality for good far higher than any to
which the lukewarm "religion of all sensible men" can ever attain.
For mysticism is the raw material of all religion; and it is easier
to discipline the enthusiast than to breathe enthusiasm into the
disciplinarian.
Meanwhile, the Church looked with favour upon the orthodox mystical
school, of which Richard and Hugo of St. Victor, Bonaventura, and
Albertus Magnus were among the greatest names. These men were
working out in their own fashion the psychology of the contemplative
life, showing how we may ascend through "cogitation, meditation, and
speculation" to "contemplation," and how we may pass successively
through jubilus, ebrietas spiritus, spiritualis jucunditas, and
liquefactio, till we attain raptus or ecstasy. The writings of the
scholastic mystics are so overweighted with this pseudo-science,
with its wire-drawn distinctions and meaningless classifications,
that very few readers have now the patience to dig out their
numerous beauties. They are, however, still the classics of mystical
theology in the Roman Church, so far as that science has not
degenerated into mere miracle-mongering.
Sect. 2. MEISTER ECKHART
It was in 1260, when Mechthild of Magdeburg was at the height of her
activity, that Meister Eckhart, next to Plotinus the greatest
philosopher-mystic, was born at Hocheim in Thuringia. It seems that
his family was in a good position, but nothing is known of his early
years. He entered the Dominican Order as a youth, perhaps at
sixteen, the earliest age at which novices were admitted into that
Order. The course of instruction among the Dominicans was as
follows:--After two years, during which the novice laid the
foundations of a good general education, he devoted the next two
years to grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, and then the same amount
of time to what was called the Quadrivium, which consisted of
"arithmetic, mathematics, astronomy, and music." Theology, the queen
of the sciences, occupied three years; and at the end of the course,
at the age of twenty-five, the brothers were ordained priests. We
find Eckhart, towards the end of the century, Prior of Erfurt and
Vicar of Thuringia, then Lector Biblicus at Paris, then Provincial
Prior of Saxony. In 1307 the master of the Order appointed him
Vicar-General for Bohemia, and in 1311 he returned to Paris. We find
him next preaching busily at Strassburg,[4] and after a few more
years, at Cologne, where the persecution of the Brethren of the Free
Spirit was just then at its height. At Strassburg there were no less
than seven convents of Dominican nuns, for since 1267 the Order had
resumed the supervision of female convents, which it had renounced a
short time after its foundation. Many of Eckhart's discourses were
addressed to these congregations of devout women, who indeed were to
a large extent the backbone of the mystical movement, and it is
impossible not to see that the devotional treatises of the school
are strongly coloured by feminine sentiment. A curious poem, written
by a Dominican nun of this period, celebrates the merits of three
preachers, the third of whom is a Master Eckhart, "who speaks to us
about Nothingness. He who understands him not, in him has never
shone the light divine." These nuns seem to have been fed with the
strong meat of Eckhart's mystical philosophy; in the more popular
sermons he tried to be intelligible to all. It was not very long
after he took up his residence at Cologne that he was himself
attacked for heresy. In 1327 he read before his own Order a
retractation of "any errors which might be found" (si quid errorum
repertum fuerit) in his writings, but withdrew nothing that he had
actually said, and protested that he believed himself to be
orthodox. He died a few months later, and it was not till 1329 that
a Papal bull was issued, enumerating seventeen heretical and eleven
objectionable doctrines in his writings.
This bull is interesting as showing what were the points in
Eckhart's teaching which in the fourteenth century were considered
dangerous. They also indicate very accurately what are the real
errors into which speculative mysticism is liable to fall, and how
thinkers of this school may most plausibly be misrepresented by
those who differ from them. After expressing his sorrow that "a
certain Teuton named Ekardus, doctor, ut fertur, sacrae paginae, has
wished to know more than he should," and has sown tares and thistles
and other weeds in the field of the Church, the Pope specifies the
following erroneous statements as appearing in Eckhart's
writings[5]:--1. "God created the world as soon as God was. 2. In
every work, bad as well as good, the glory of God is equally
manifested. 3. A man who prays for any particular thing prays for an
evil and prays ill, for he prays for the negation of good and the
negation of God, and that God may be denied to him.[6] 4. God is
honoured in those who have renounced everything, even holiness and
the kingdom of heaven. 5. We are transformed totally into God, even
as in the Sacrament the bread is converted into the Body of Christ.
Unum, non simile. 6. Whatever God the Father gave to His
only-begotten Son in His human nature, He has given it all to me. 7.
Whatever the Holy Scripture says about Christ is verified in every
good and godlike man. 8. External action is not, properly speaking,
good nor divine; God, properly speaking, only works in us internal
actions. 9. God is one, in every way and according to every reason,
so that it is not possible to find any plurality in Him, either in
the intellect or outside it; for he who sees two, or sees any
distinction, does not see God; for God is one, outside number and
above number, for one cannot be put with anything else, but follows
it; therefore in God Himself no distinction can be or be understood.
10. All the creatures are absolutely nothing: I say not that they
are small or something, but that they are absolutely nothing." All
these statements are declared to have been found in his writings. It
is also "objected against the said Ekardus" that he taught the
following two articles in these words:--1. "There is something in
the soul, which is uncreated and uncreatable: if the whole soul were
such, it would be uncreated and uncreatable: and this is the
intelligence.[7] 2. God is not good or better or best: I speak ill
when I call God good; it is as if I called white black."[8] The bull
declares all the propositions above quoted to be heretical, with the
exception of the three which I have numbered 8-10, and these "have
an ill sound" and are "very rash," even if they might be so
supplemented and explained as to bear an orthodox sense.
This condemnation led to a long neglect of Eckhart's writings. He
was almost forgotten till Franz Pfeiffer in 1857 collected and
edited his scattered treatises and endeavoured to distinguish those
which were genuine from those which were spurious. Since Pfeiffer's
edition fresh discoveries have been made, notably in 1880, when
Denifle found at Erfurt several important fragments in Latin, which
in his opinion show a closer dependence on the scholastic theology,
and particularly on St Thomas Aquinas, than Protestant scholars,
such as Preger, had been willing to allow. But the attempt to prove
Eckhart a mere scholastic is a failure; the audacities of his German
discourses cannot be explained as an accommodation to the tastes of
a peculiar audience. For good or evil Eckhart is an original and
independent thinker, whose theology is confined by no trammels of
authority.
Sect. 3. ECKHART'S RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY
The Godhead, according to Eckhart, is the universal and eternal
Unity comprehending and transcending all diversity. "The Divine
nature is Rest," he says in one of the German discourses; and in the
Latin fragments we find: "God rests in Himself, and makes all things
rest in Him." The three Persons of the Trinity, however, are not
mere modes or accidents,[9] but represent a real distinction within
the Godhead. God is unchangeable, and at the same time an
"everlasting process." The creatures are "absolutely nothing"; but
at the same time "God without them would not be God," for God is
love, and must objectify Himself; He is goodness, and must impart
Himself. As the picture in the mind of the painter, as the poem in
the mind of the poet, so was all creation in the mind of God from
all eternity, in uncreated simplicity. The ideal world was not
created in time; "the Father spake Himself and all the creatures in
His Son"; "they exist in the eternal Now"[10]--"a
becoming without a becoming, change without change." "The Word of
God the Father is the substance of all that exists, the life of all
that lives, the principle and cause of life." Of creation he says:
"We must not falsely imagine that God stood waiting for something to
happen, that He might create the world. For so soon as He was God,
so soon as He begat His coeternal and coequal Son, He created the
world." So Spinoza says: "God has always been before the creatures,
without even existing before them. He precedes them not by an
interval of time, but by a fixed eternity." This is not the same as
saying that the world of sense had no beginning; it is possible that
Eckhart did not mean to go further than the orthodox scholastic
mystic, Albertus Magnus, who says: "God created things from
eternity, but the things were not created from eternity." St
Augustine (Conf. xi. 30) bids objectors to "understand that there
can be no time without creatures, and cease to talk nonsense."
Eckhart also tries to distinguish between the "interior" and the
"exterior" action of God. God, he says, is in all things, not as
Nature, not as Person, but as Being. He is everywhere, undivided;
yet the creatures participate in Him according to their measure.[11]
The three Persons of the Trinity have impressed their image upon the
creatures, yet it is only their "nothingness" that keeps them
separate creatures. Most of this comes from the Neoplatonists, and
much of it through the pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, a
Platonising Christian of the fifth century, whose writings were
believed in the Middle Ages to proceed from St Paul's Athenian
convert. It would, however, be easy to find parallels in St
Augustine's writings to most of the phases quoted in this paragraph.
The practical consequences will be considered presently.
The creatures are a way from God; they are also a way to Him. "In
Christ," he says, "all the creatures are one man, and that man is
God." Grace, which is a real self-unfolding of God in the soul, can
make us "what God is by Nature"--one of Eckhart's audacious phrases,
which are not really so unorthodox as they sound. The following
prayer, which appears in one of his discourses, may perhaps be
defended as asking no more than our Lord prayed for (John xvii.) for
His disciples, but it lays him open to the charge, which the Pope's
bull did not fail to urge against him, that he made the servant
equal to his Lord. "Grant that I, by Thy grace, may be united to Thy
Nature, as Thy Son is eternally one in Thy Nature, and that grace
may become my nature."
The ethical aim is to be rid of "creatureliness," and so to be
united to God. In Eckhart's system, as in that of Plotinus,
speculation is never divorced from ethics. On our side the process
is a negative one. All our knowledge must be reduced to
not-knowledge; our reason and will, as well as our lower faculties,
must transcend themselves, must die to live. We must detach
ourselves absolutely "even from God," he says. This state of
spiritual nudity he calls "poverty." Then, when our house is empty
of all else, God can dwell there: "He begets His Son in us." This
last phrase has always been a favourite with the mystics. St Paul
uses very similar language, and the Epistle to Diognetus, written in
the second century, speaks of Christ as, "being ever born anew in
the hearts of the saints." Very characteristic, too, is the doctrine
that complete detachment from the creatures is the way to union with
God. Jacob Bšhme has arrived independently at the same conclusion as
Eckhart. "The scholar said to his master: How may I come to the
supersensual life, that I may see God and hear Him speak? The master
said: When thou canst throw thyself but for a moment into that place
where no creature dwelleth, then thou hearest what God speaketh. The
scholar asked: Is that near or far off? The master replied: It is in
thee, and if thou canst for a while cease from all thy thinking and
willing, thou shalt hear unspeakable words of God. The scholar said:
How can I hear, when I stand still from thinking and willing? The
master answered: When thou standest still from the thinking and
willing of self, the eternal hearing, seeing, and speaking will be
revealed to thee, and so God heareth and seeth through thee."
In St Thomas Aquinas it is "the will enlightened by reason" which
unites us to God. But there are two sorts of reason. The passive
reason is the faculty which rises through discursive thinking to
knowledge. The active reason is a much higher faculty, which exists
by participation in the divine mind, "as the air is light by
participation in the sunshine." When this active reason is regarded
as the standard of moral action, it is called by Aquinas
synteresis.[12] Eckhart was at first content with this teaching of
St Thomas, whom he always cites with great reverence; but the whole
tendency of his thinking was to leave the unprofitable
classification of faculties in which the Victorine School almost
revelled, and to concentrate his attention on the union of the soul
with God. And therefore in his more developed teaching,[13] the
"spark" which is the point of contact between the soul and its Maker
is something higher than the faculties, being "uncreated." He seems
to waver about identifying the "spark" with the "active reason," but
inclines on the whole to regard it as something even higher still.
"There is something in the soul," he says, "which is so akin to God
that it is one with Him and not merely united with Him." And again:
"There is a force in the soul; and not only a force, but something
more, a being; and not only a being, but something more; it is so
pure and high and noble in itself that no creature can come there,
and God alone can dwelt there. Yea, verily, and even God cannot come
there with a form; He can only come with His simple divine nature."
And in the startling passage often quoted against him, a passage
which illustrates admirably his affinity to one side of Hegelianism,
we read: "The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which He
sees me. Mine eye and God's eye are one eye and one sight and one
knowledge and one love."
I do not defend these passages as orthodox; but before exclaiming
"rank Pantheism!" we ought to recollect that for Eckhart the being
of God is quite different from His personality. Eckhart never taught
that the Persons of the Holy Trinity become, after the mystical
Union, the "Form" of the human soul. It is the impersonal light of
the divine nature which transforms our nature; human personality is
neither lost nor converted into divine personality. Moreover, the
divine spark at the centre of the soul is not the soul nor the
personality. "The soul," he says in one place, using a figure which
recurs in the "Theologia Germanica," "has two faces. One is turned
towards this world and towards the body, the other towards God." The
complete dominion of the "spark" over the soul is an unrealised
ideal.[14]
The truth which he values is that, as Mr Upton[15] has well
expressed it, "there is a certain self-revelation of the eternal and
infinite One to the finite soul, and therefore an indestructible
basis for religious ideas and beliefs as distinguished from what is
called scientific knowledge. . . . This immanent universal principle
does not pertain to, and is not the property of any individual mind,
but belongs to that uncreated and eternal nature of God which lies
deeper than all those differences which separate individual minds
from each other, and is indeed that incarnation of the Eternal, who
though He is present in every finite thing, is still not broken up
into individualities, but remains one and the same eternal
substance, one and the same unifying principle, immanently and
indivisibly present in every one of the countless plurality of
finite individuals." It might further be urged that neither God nor
man can be understood in independence of each other. A recent writer
on ethics,[16] not too well disposed towards Christianity, is, I
think, right in saying: "To the popular mind, which assumes God and
man to be two different realities, each given in independence of the
other, . . . the identification of man's love of God with God's love
of Himself has always been a paradox and a stumbling-block. But it
is not too much to say that until it has been seen to be no paradox,
but a simple and fundamental truth, the masterpieces of the world's
religious literature must remain a sealed book to us."
Eckhart certainly believed himself to have escaped the pitfall of
Pantheism; but he often expressed himself in such an unguarded way
that the charge may be brought against him with some show of reason.
Love, Eckhart teaches, is the principle of all virtues; it is God
Himself. Next to it in dignity comes humility. The beauty of the
soul, he says in the true Platonic vein, is to be well ordered, with
the higher faculties above the lower, each in its proper place. The
will should be supreme over the understanding, the understanding
over the senses. Whatever we will earnestly, that we have, and no
one can hinder us from attaining that detachment from the creatures
in which our blessedness consists.
Evil, from the highest standpoint, is only a means for realising the
eternal aim of God in creation; all will ultimately be overruled for
good. Nevertheless, we can frustrate the good will of God towards
us, and it is this, and not the thought of any insult against
Himself, that makes God grieve for our sins. It would not be worth
while to give any more quotations on this subject, for Eckhart is
not more successful than other philosophers in propounding a
consistent and intelligible theory of the place of evil in the
universe.
Eckhart is well aware of the two chief pitfalls into which the
mystic is liable to fall--dreamy inactivity and Antinomianism. The
sects of the Free Spirit seem to have afforded a good object-lesson
in both these errors, as some of the Gnostic sects did in the second
century. Eckhart's teaching here is sound and good. Freedom from
law, he says, belongs only to the "spark," not to the faculties of
the soul, and no man can live always on the highest plane.
Contemplation is, in a sense, a means to activity; works of charity
are its proper fruit. "If a man were in an ecstasy like that of St
Paul, when he was caught up into the third heaven, and knew of a
poor man who needed his help, he ought to leave his ecstasy and help
the needy." Suso[17] tells us how God punished him for disregarding
this duty. True contemplation considers Reality (or Being) in its
manifestations as well as in its origin. If this is remembered,
there need be no conflict between social morality and the inner
life. Eckhart recognises[18] that it is a harder and a nobler task
to preserve detachment in a crowd than in a cell; the little daily
sacrifices of family life are often a greater trial than
self-imposed mortifications. "We need not destroy any little good in
ourselves for the sake of a better, but we should strive to grasp
every truth in its highest meaning, for no one good contradicts
another." "Love God, and do as you like, say the Free Spirits. Yes;
but as long as you like anything contrary to God's will, you do not
love Him."
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