Chapter II
For as though there were metempsychosis, and the soul of one man passed into another; opinions do find, after certain revolutions, men and minds like those that first begat them.—SIR THOMAS BROWNE.
WILLOUGHBY. What struck me most as novel in the mysticism of this strange Master Eckart was the stress he laid on our own consciousness of being the sons of God. Neither the ecclesiastical nor the scholastic gradations and preparatives for mysticism, so important with his predecessors, seem of much moment with him in comparison with the attainment, per saltum, as it were, of this blessed certainty. Perhaps the secret of his reaction against the orthodoxy of his day lay here. He craves a firm resting-place for his soul. The Church cannot satisfy the want. He will supply it for himself, and, to do so, builds together into a sort of system certain current notions that suit his purpose, some new and others old, some in tolerable harmony with Christianity, others more hostile to it than he was altogether aware. These pantheistic metaphysics may have seemed to him his resource and justification—may have been the product of the brain labouring to assure the heart.
ATHERTON. A very plausible conjecture. Amalric of Bena, who had been famous as a teacher in Paris nearly a hundred years before Eckart went to study there, maintained that a personal conviction of our union to Christ was necessary to salvation. He was condemned for the doctrine, but it survived.
WILLOUGHBY. Thank you. That fact supports me. Might not Eckart have desired to assert for our inward religious life a worthier and more independent place, as opposed to the despotic externalism of the time—to make our access to Christ more immediate, and less subject to the precarious mercies of the Church?
ATHERTON. A grand aim, if so: but to reach it he unfortunately absorbs the objective in the subjective element of religion—rebounds from servility to arrogance, and makes humanity a manifestation of the Divine Essence.
GOWER. In order to understand his position, the question to be first asked appears to me to be this. If Eckart goes to the Church, and says, ‘How can I be assured that I am in a state of salvation?’ what answer will the Holy Mother give him? Can you tell me, Atherton?
ATHERTON. She confounds justification and sanctification together, you will remember. So she will answer, ‘My son, as a Christian of the ordinary sort, you cannot have any such certainty—indeed, you are much better without it. You may conjecture that you are reconciled to God by looking inward on your feelings, by assuring yourself that at least you are not living in any mortal sin. If, indeed, you were appointed to do some great things for my glory, you might find yourself among the happy few who are made certain of their state of grace by a special and extra revelation, to hearten them for their achievements.’
GOWER. Shameful! The Church then admits the high, invigorating influence of such certainty, but denies it to those who, amid secular care and toil, require it most.
WILLOUGHBY. While discussing Eckart, we have lighted on a doctrine which must have produced more mysticism than almost any other you can name. On receiving such reply, how many ardent natures will strain after visions and miraculous manifestations, wrestling for some token of their safety!
GOWER. And how many will be the prey of morbid introspections, now catching the exultant thrill of confidence, and presently thrown headlong into some despairing abyss.
ATHERTON. As for the mass of the people, they will be enslaved for ever by such teaching, trying to assure themselves by plenty of sacraments, believing these the causes of grace, and hanging for their spiritual all on the dispensers thereof.
WILLOUGHBY. Then, to apply the result of your question, Gower, to Eckart,—as he has in him nothing servile, and nothing visionary, he resolves to grasp certainty with his own hand—wraps about him relics of the old Greek pallium, and retires to his extreme of majestic isolation.
GOWER. Pity that he could not find the scriptural Via Media—that common truth which, while it meets the deepest wants of the individual, yet links him in wholesome fellowship with others—that pure outer light which nurtures and directs the inner.
WILLOUGHBY. No easy way to find in days when Plato was installed high priest, and the whole biblical region a jungle of luxuriant allegoric conceits or thorny scholastic formulas.
GOWER. This daring Eckart reminds me of that heroic leader in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Bonduca. I think I hear him cry with Caratach,
Cease your fretful prayers, Your whinings, and your tame petitions; The gods love courage armed with confidence, And prayers fit to pull them down: weak tears And troubled hearts, the dull twins of cold spirits, They sit and smile at. Hear how I salute ’em.
LOWESTOFFE. Did you not say yesterday, Atherton, that Eckart’s system had received high praise from Hegel?
ATHERTON. Oh yes, he calls it ‘a genuine and profound philosophy.’ Indeed the points of resemblance are very striking, and, setting aside for the moment some redeeming expressions and the more religious spirit of the man, Eckart’s theosophy is a remarkable anticipation of modern German idealism. That abstract ground of Godhead Eckart talks about, answers exactly to Hegel’s Logische Idee. The Trinity of process, the incarnation ever renewing itself in men, the resolution of redemption almost to a divine self-development, constitute strong features of family likeness between the Dominican and both Hegel and Fichte.[94]
GOWER. One may fancy that while Hegel was teaching at Heidelberg it must have fared with poor Eckart as with the dead huntsman in the Danish ballad, while a usurper was hunting with his hounds over his patrimony,—
With my dogs so good, He hunteth the wild deer in the wood; And with every deer he slays on the mould, He wakens me up in the grave so cold.
ATHERTON. Nay, if we come to fancying, let us call in Pythagoras at once, and say that the soul of Eckart transmigrated into Hegel.
GOWER. With all my heart. The Portuguese have a superstition according to which the soul of a man who has died, leaving some duty unfulfilled or promised work unfinished, is frequently known to enter into another person, and dislodging for a time the rightful soul-occupant, impel him unconsciously to complete what was lacking. On a dreamy summer day like this, we can imagine Hegel in like manner possessed by Eckart in order to systematize his half-developed ideas.
WILLOUGHBY. It is certainly very curious to mark the pathway of these pantheistic notions through successive ages. Seriously, I did not know till lately how venerably antique were the discoveries of absolute idealism.
LOWESTOFFE. I confess that the being one in oneness, the nothing, the soul beyond the soul, the participation in the all-moving Immobility of which Eckart speaks, are to me utterly unintelligible.
GOWER. Do not trouble yourself. No one will ever be able to get beyond the words themselves, any more than Bardolph could with the phrase which so tickled the ear of Justice Shallow. ‘Accommodated; that is, when a man is, as they say, accommodated: or, when a man is,—being,—whereby,—he may be thought to be accommodated; which is an excellent thing.’
ATHERTON. Yet, to do Eckart justice, he has his qualifications and his distinctions in virtue of which he imagines himself still within the pale of orthodoxy, and he strongly repudiates the Antinomian consequences to which his doctrines were represented as tending.
GOWER. Ay, it is just in this way that the mischief is done. These distinctions many a follower of his could not or would not understand, and so his high philosophy produced in practice far oftener such men as the Nameless Wild than characters resembling the more pure and lofty ideal he drew himself in his discourse to the good people of Strasburg. These philosophical edge-tools are full perilous. Modern Germany is replete with examples of that fatal facility in the common mind for a practical application of philosophic paradox which our friend Adolf lamented at Fegersheim. When a philosophy which weakens the embankments that keep licence out has once been popularized, the philosopher cannot stop the inundation by shouting from his study-window. De Wette himself at last became aware of this, and regretted it in vain. Such speculation resembles the magic sword of Sir Elidure—its mysterious virtue sometimes filled even its owner with a furor that hurried him to an indiscriminate slaughter, but wielded by any other hand its thirst could be satisfied only with the blood of every one around, and at last with the life of him who held it.
LOWESTOFFE. Still there is far more excuse for Eckart than for our nineteenth century pantheists. Even the desperation of some of those poor ignorant creatures, who exaggerated Eckart’s paradoxes till they grew a plea for utter lawlessness, is not so unnatural, however lamentable. Who can wonder that some should have overwrought the doctrine of Christ in us and neglected that of Christ for us, when the opus operatum was in its glory, ghostly comfort bought and sold, and Christ our sacrifice pageanted about in the mass, as Milton says,—a fearful idol? Or that the untaught many, catching the first thought of spiritual freedom from some mystic, should have been intoxicated instantly. The laity, forbidden so long to be Christians on their own account, rise up here and there, crying, ‘We will be not Christians merely, but so many Christs.’ They have been denied what is due to man, they will dreadfully indemnify themselves by seizing what is due to God. Has not the letter been slaying them by inches all their days? The spirit shall give them life!
GOWER. Like the peasant in the apologue;—religion has been so long doled out to them in a few pitiful drops of holy water, till in their impatience they must have a whole Ganges-flood poured into their grounds, obliterating, with a vengeance, ‘all distinctions,’ and drowning every logical and social landmark under the cold grey level—the blank neutral-tint of a stoical indifference which annihilates all order and all law.
ATHERTON. By a strange contradiction, Eckart employs Revelation at one moment only to escape it the next—and uses its beacon-lights to steer from, not to the haven. He pays homage to its authority, he consults its record, but presently leaves it far behind to lose himself in the unrevealed Godhead—floats away on his ‘sail-broad vans’ of speculation through the vast vacuity in search of
——a dark Illimitable ocean, without bound, Without dimension, where length, breadth, and height, And time and place are lost.
When there, he finds his cloudy seat soon fails him; he returns once more to the realities of revelation, only to forsake this lower ground again when he has renewed his strength. This oscillation betrays a fatal contradiction. To shut behind us the gate on this inferior world is not necessarily to open the everlasting doors of the upper one.
GOWER. I very much admire the absolute resignation of that devout mendicant described by Eckart. He is a Quietist of the very best sort—his life a ‘Thy will be done.’ He is a Fénelon in rags.
ATHERTON. After all, make what allowance we will,—giving Eckart all the benefit due from the fact that his life was pure, that he stood in no avowed antagonism to Christian doctrine or institute, that devout men like Tauler and Suso valued his teaching so highly,—still, he stands confessed a pantheist; no charity can explain that away.
GOWER. I am afraid not. What else can we call him when he identifies himself and all Christian men with the Son, as we have heard, makes himself essential to God, will share with him in the evolution of the Holy Ghost, and, forbidding you to regard yourself as a something distinct from God, exhorts you (if you would be a justified person and child of God indeed) to merge the ground of your own nature in the divine, so that your knowledge of God and his of you are the same thing,—i.e., you and He one and the same? But can you conjecture, Atherton, by what process he arrived at such a pass?
ATHERTON. Perhaps in this way:—John Scotus Erigena (with whose writings Eckart could scarcely have failed to make acquaintance at Paris) asserts the identity of Being and Willing, of the Velle and the Esse in God; also the identity of Being and Knowing. Applying this latter proposition to the relationship between God and man, he comes logically enough to this conclusion,—‘Man, essentially considered, may be defined as God’s knowledge of him; that is, man reduced to his ultimate—his ground, or simple subsistence—is a divine Thought. But, on the same principle, the thoughts of God are, of course, God. Hence Eckart’s doctrine—the ground of your being lies in God. Reduce yourself to that simplicity, that root, and you are in God. There is no longer any distinction between your spirit and the divine,—you have escaped personality and finite limitation. Your particular, creature self, as a something separate and dependent on God, is gone. So also, obviously, your creaturely will. Henceforth, therefore, what seems an inclination of yours is in fact the divine good pleasure. You are free from law. You are above means. The very will to do the will of God is resolved into that will itself. This is the Apathy, the Negation, the Poverty, he commends.
With Eckart personally this self-reduction and deification is connected with a rigorous asceticism and exemplary moral excellence. Yet it is easy to see that it may be a merely intellectual process, consisting in a man’s thinking that he is thinking himself away from his personality. He declares the appearance of the Son necessary to enable us to realize our sonship; and yet his language implies that this realization is the perpetual incarnation of that Son—does, as it were, constitute him. Christians are accordingly not less the sons of God by grace than is Christ by nature. Believe yourself divine, and the Son is brought forth in you. The Saviour and the saved are dissolved together in the blank absolute Substance.
WILLOUGHBY. So then, Eckart would say,—‘To realize himself, God must have Christians;’ and Hegel,—‘To realize him self, He must have philosophers.’
ATHERTON. Miserable inversion! This result of Eckart’s speculation was expressed with the most impious enormity by Angelus Silesius, in the seventeenth century. In virtue of the necessity God is under (according to this theory) of communicating himself, bon gré, mal gré, to whomsoever will refine himself down to his ‘Nothing,’ he reduces the Almighty to dependence, and changes places with Him upon the eternal throne on the strength of his self-transcending humility!
Note to page 207.
Both Hegel and Eckart regard Thought as the point of union between the human nature and the divine. But the former would pronounce both God and man unrevealed, i.e., unconscious of themselves, till Thought has been developed by some Method into a philosophic System. Mysticism brings Eckart nearer to Schelling on this matter than to the dry schoolman Hegel. The charge which Hegel brings against the philosophy of Schelling he might have applied, with a little alteration, to that of Eckart. Hegel says, ‘When this knowledge which claims to be essential and ignores apprehension (is begrifflose), professes to have sunk the peculiarity of Self in the Essence, and so to give forth the utterance of a hallowed and unerring philosophy,[95] men quite overlook the fact that this so-called wisdom, instead of being yielded up to the influence of Divinity by its contempt of all proportion and definiteness, does really nothing but give full play to accident and to caprice. Such men imagine that by surrendering themselves to the unregulated ferment of the Substance (Substanz), by throwing a veil over consciousness, and abandoning the understanding, they become those favourites of Deity to whom he gives wisdom in sleep; verily, nothing was ever produced by such a process better than mere dreams.’—Vorrede zur Phænomenologie, p. 6.
These are true and weighty words: unfortunately Hegel’s remedy proves worse than the disease.
We seem to hear Eckart speak when Fichte exclaims, ‘Raise thyself to the height of religion, and all veils are removed; the world and its dead principle passes away from thee, and the very Godhead enters thee anew in its first and original form, as Life, as thine own life which thou shalt and oughtest to live.—Anweisung zum sel. Leben, p. 470.
And again, ‘Religion consists in the inward consciousness that God actually lives and acts in us, and fulfils his work.’—Ibid. p. 473.
But Eckart would not have affirmed with Fichte (a few pages farther on) that, were Christ to return to the world, he would be indifferent to the recognition or the denial of his work as a Saviour, provided a man were only united to God somehow!
Footnote 94:
See Note, p. 212.
Footnote 95:
Eckart does not make use of his lapse into the Essence to philosophise withal; it is simply his religious ultimatum.
Chapter III
With that about I tourned my hedde, And sawe anone the fifth rout That to this lady gan lout, And doune on knees, anone, to fall, And to her tho besoughten all, To hiden hir good workes eke, And said, they yeve not a leke For no fame, ne soch renoun, For they for contemplacioun, And Goddes love had it wrought, Ne of fame would they nought.
CHAUCER: THE HOUSE OF FAME.
On the next occasion when our little Summerford circle was ready to hear some more of Arnstein’s Chronicle, they were informed by Atherton that four years of the manuscript were missing,—that such intervals were only too frequent,—in fact, the document was little more than a collection of fragments.
‘The next entry I find,’ said he, ‘is in 1324, and the good armourer, in much excitement, begins with an exclamation.
1324. July. St. Kylian’s Day.—What a day this has been! Strasburg, and all the states which adhere to Louis, are placed under the bann. The bells were ringing merrily at early morning; now, the Interdict is proclaimed, and every tongue of them is silent. As the news flew round, every workman quitted his work. The busy stalls set out on either side of the streets were left empty. The tools and the wares lay unlooked at and untouched. The bishop and the clergy of his party, and most of the Dominicans, keep out of sight. My men are furious. I have been all day from house to house, and group to group, telling the people to keep a good heart. We shall have a sad time of it, I see. It is so hard for the poor creatures to shake off a fear in which they have been cradled.
The clergy and the monks will pour out of Strasburg, as out of a Sodom, in shoals. A mere handful will stay behind,—not nearly enough to christen those who will be born and to shrive those who will die in this populous city. They may name their price: the greedy of gain may make their fortunes. The miserable poor will die, numbers of them, in horror, unable to purchase absolution. And then, out of the few priests who do remain, scarcely any will have the courage to disobey the pope, and, despite the Interdict, say mass.
’Tis an anxious time for either party. Louis has most of the states on his side, and the common voice, in all the towns of the Rhineland—(in the princely Cologne most of all), is, I hear, loud in his favour. The Minorites will be with him, and all of that sort among the friars, who have little favour to lose with his Holiness. But France is with the Pope against him; Duke Leopold is a doughty adversary; John of Bohemia restless and fickle, and no doubt the Pope will set on the Polacks and pagan Lithuanians to waste most horribly all the north and eastern frontiers. Since the victory of Mühldorf, Frederick has lain in prison. That battle is the grievance. The enemies of the Emperor are more full of rancour than ever. Yet, with all the mischief it may bring in the present, what lover of the Fatherland can sorrow therefor? Gallant little Schweppermann, with his lame foot and grey hair, and his glorious two eggs, long may he live to do other such deeds![96] Louis holds a high spirit at present, and goes about under the bann with a brave heart. But it is only the outset as yet. I much fear me he may lack the staunchness to go through as he has begun. There is store of thunder behind at Avignon. Methinks he hankers, like a child, mainly after the lance and sword and crown of Charlemagne, to dress him out perfectly withal King of the Romans, and seeth not the full bearing of the very war he wages.
We shall not be idle. It is already proposed to send off troops to the aid of Louis. I have half a mind to go myself; but home can ill spare me now, and I render the Emperor more service by such little influence as I have in Strasburg. To-morrow, to consult about the leagues to be formed with neighbouring towns and with the Swiss burghers, to uphold the good cause together.
* * * * *
1326. March. St. Gregory’s Day.—Duke Leopold died here yesterday, at the Ochsenstein Palace.[97] After ravaging the suburbs of Spires, he came hither in a raging fever to breathe his last. The bishop told him he must pardon the Landgrave of Lower Alsace from the bottom of his heart. They say he struggled long and wrathfully against the condition, till, finding the bishop firm in refusing absolution on other terms, he gave way. But, just as he was about to receive the host, a fit of vomiting came on, wherein he presently expired, without the sacrament after all.
Frederick has been now at liberty some months. Louis visited him in his prison. To think of their having been together all their boyhood, and loving each other so, to meet thus! Frederick the Handsome, haggard with a three years’ imprisonment—his beard down to his waist; and Louis, successful and miserable. They say Frederick cut off his beard at first, and sent it, by way of memorial, to John of Bohemia, and that when he went back to his castle he found his young wife had wept herself blind during his captivity. He swore on the holy wafer to renounce his claim to the empire. The Pope released him from his oath soon after, but he keeps his word like knight, not like priest, and holds to it yet. It is whispered that they have agreed to share the throne. But that can never be brought to pass.
Heard to-day, by a merchant, of Hermann.[98] He is travelling through Spain. I miss him much. Before he left Strasburg he was full of Eckart’s doctrine, out of all measure admiring the wonderful man, and hoarding every word that dropped from his lips. Eckart is now sick at Cologne, among his sorrowing disciples. Grieved to hear that the leeches say he hath not long to live.
A long conversation with Henry of Nördlingen.[99] He has journeyed hither, cast down and needy, to ask counsel of Tauler. Verily he needs counsel, but hath not strength of mind to take it when given. Tauler says Henry has many friends among the excellent of the earth; all love him, and he is full of love, but sure a pitiful sight to see. His heart is with us. He mourns over the trouble of the time. He weeps for the poor folk, living and dying without the sacraments. But the Interdict crushes his soul. Now he has all but gathered heart to do as Tauler doth—preach and labour on, unmoved by all this uproar, but anon his courage is gone, and he falls back into his fear again as soon as he is left alone. He sits and pores over those letters of spiritual consolation which Margaret Ebner has written to him. He says sometimes she alone retains him on the earth. Verily I fear me that, priest as he is, some hopeless earthly love mingles with his friendship for that saintly woman. He has had to flee from his home for refusing to perform service. Strasburg, in that case, can be no abiding place for him. I see nothing before him but a wretched wandering, perhaps for years. I cannot get him to discern the malice of Pope John, rather than the wrath of heaven, in the curse that withers us. I gave him a full account of what the Pope’s court at Avignon truly is, as I gathered from a trusty eye-witness, late come from thence, whom I questioned long the other day.[100] I told him that gold was the one true god there—our German wealth, wrung out from us, and squandered on French courtiers, players, buffoons, and courtezans—Christ sold daily for it—the palace full of cardinals and prelates, grey-haired debauchees and filthy mockers, to a man—accounting chastity a scandal, and the soul’s immortality and coming judgment an old wife’s fable;—yea, simony, adultery, murder, incest, so frequent and unashamed, that the Frenchmen themselves do say the Pope’s coming hath corrupted them. I asked him if these were the hands to take up God’s instruments of wrath to bruise with them his creatures? But all in vain. There is an awfulness in the very name of Pope which blinds reason and strikes manhood down, in him, as in thousands more.
* * * * *
A.D. 1332. Fourth week after Easter.—But now awaked from the first sleep I have had for the last three days and nights. I set down in a word or two what hath happened, then out to action again. Last Wednesday, at the great festival, the nobles, knights, and senators, with a brave show of fair ladies, banqueted at the grand house in the Brandgasse.[101] Within, far into the night, minstrelsy and dancing; without, the street blocked up with a crowd of serving men and grooms with horses, torch-bearers, and lookers-on of all sorts—when, suddenly, the music stopped—they heard shouts and the clash of swords and shrill screams. There had been a quarrel between a Zorn and a Müllenheim—they drew—Von Hunefeld was killed on the spot, another of the Zorns avenged him by cutting down Wasselenheim; the conflict became general, in hall, in the antechambers, down the great staircase, out on the steps, the retainers took part on either side, and the fray ended in the flight of the Zorns, who left six slain in the house and in the street. Two were killed on the side of the Müllenheims. All who fell were of high rank, and several of either faction are severely wounded. They draw off to their quarters, each breathing vengeance, preparing for another conflict at daybreak. All the rest of the night the Landvogt and Gotzo von Grosstein were riding to and fro to pacify them—to no purpose. Each party declared they would send for the knights and gentry of their side from the country round about. I was with Burckard Zwinger when we heard this. ‘Now,’ said I, ‘or all is lost. Off, and harangue the people. I will get the best of the burghers together.’ We parted. All the city was astir. As I made my way from house to house, I sent the people I met off to the market place to hear Zwinger. I could hear their shouts, summons enough now, without any other. When I got back to the Roland’s pillar, I found that his plain, home-thrust speech had wrought the multitude to what we would, and no more. Snatches of it flew from mouth to mouth, like sparks of fire,—he had struck well while the iron was hot. ‘To the Stadtmeister!’ was the cry. ‘The keys! The seal! The standard! We will have our standard. Let the citizens defend their own!’ Most of the burghers were of one mind with Zwinger, and we went in a body (the crowd shouting behind us, a roaring sea of heads, and the bell on the townhouse ringing as never before) to demand the keys of young Sieck. He yielded all with trembling. By daybreak we had dispersed; the several corporations repaired armed to their quarters; the gates were shut; the bridges guarded; the walls manned. All was in our hands. So far safe. The nobles, knights, and gentry of the neighbourhood came up in the morning in straggling groups, approaching the city from various quarters, with as many of their men as could be hastily gathered, but drew off again when they saw our posture of defence. It was truly no time for them. This promptitude has saved Strasburg from being a field of battle in every street for counts and men at arms, who despise and hate the citizens—whose victory, on whatever side, would have been assured pillage and rapine, and, in the end, the loss of our privilege to deal solely for ourselves in our own affairs. Well done, good Zwinger, thou prince of bakers, with thy true warm heart, and cool head, and ready tongue! To our praise be it said, no deed of violence was done; there was no blood-thirstiness, no spoiling, but a steady purpose in the vast crowd that, hap what would, no strangers should come in to brawl and rob in Strasburg.
While the gates have been closed and the Town Hall guarded, we have been deliberating on a new senate. Four new Stadtmeisters elected. Zwinger made Amtmeister. The magistracy taken out of the exclusive hands of the great families and open to the citizens generally, gentlemen, burghers, and artizans, side by side. The workmen no longer to be slaves to the caprice of the gentry. The nobles are disarmed for a time, to help them settle their quarrel more quickly. I go the rounds with the horse patrol every night. The gates are never to be opened except when the great bell has rung to give permission. We sit in the Town Hall with our swords. I took my place there this morning, armed to the teeth, and verily my Margarita seemed proud enough when she sent me forth, with a kiss, to my new dignity, clad in good steel instead of senatorial finery. We have every prospect of peace and prosperousness. The nobles see our strength, and must relinquish with as good a grace as they may a power they have usurped. The main part of the old laws will abide as before. All is perfectly quiet. There has been no mere vengeance or needless rigour. I hear nothing worse than banishment will be inflicted upon any—that only on a few. The bishop’s claws will be kept shorter.
* * * * *
1338. August. St. Bartholomew’s Day.—Now is the rent between clerk and layman, pope and emperor, wider even than heretofore. Last month was held the electorial diet at Rhense. The electors, by far the greater part, with Louis; and their bold doings now apparent. Yesterday was issued, at Frankfort, a manifesto of the Emperor’s, wherein Benedict, he and all his curses, are set at nought, and the mailed glove manfully hurled in his teeth. Thereby he declares, that whomsoever the electors choose they will have acknowledged rightful emperor, whether the pope bless or bann, and all who gainsay this are traitors;—that the emperor is not, and will not be, in anywise dependent on the pope. All good subjects are called on to disregard the Interdict, and such towns or states as obey the same are to forfeit their charters.[102]
It was indeed high time to speak out. Louis, losing heart, tried negotiation, and made unworthy concessions to the pope, whereon he (impatient, they say, to get back to Italy) would have come to an agreement, but the French cardinals took care to cross and undo all. The emperor even applied to Philip personally—asking the King of France, forsooth, to suffer him to be king of the Romans—then, finding that vain, is leagued with the English king, and war declared against France. This sounds bravely. Shame on the electors if they hold not to their promise now.
As to our Strasburg, we stand by the emperor, as of old, despite our bishop Berthold, who, with sword instead of crook, has done battle with the partisans of Louis for now some years, gathering help from all parts among the nobles and the gentry, burning villages, besieging and being besieged, spoiling and being spoiled; moreover, between whiles, thinking to win himself the name of a zealous pastor by issuing decrees against long hair growing on clerks’ heads, and enforcing fiercely all the late bulls against the followers of Eckart, the Beghards, and others.[103] Last year he tasted six weeks’ imprisonment, having quarrelled with the heads of the chapter. Rudolph von Hohenstein and others of the opposite party, surrounded one night the house of the Provost of Haselach, where he lay, and carried him off in his shirt to the Castle of Vendenti; and smartly did they make him pay before he came out. We have full authority to declare war against him, if he refuses now to submit to Louis, as I think not likely, seeing how matters go at present. He had the conscience to expect that we magistrates would meddle in his dispute and take his part. Even the senators, who adhere mainly to the Zorn family, were against him, and methinks after all he has done to harass and injure us, we did in a sort return good for evil in being merely lookers-on.
Tauler is away on a visit to Basle, where the state of parties is precisely similar to our own, the citizens there, as in Friburg, joining our league for Louis and for Germany; and the bishop against them, tooth and nail.[104] My eldest boy (God bless him, he is fifteen this day, and a lad for a father to be proud of) hath accompanied the Doctor thither, having charge of sundry matters of business for me there. Had word from him last week. They have somehow procured a year’s remission of the Interdict for Basle. He says Suso came to see Tauler, and that they had long talk together for two days. Henry of Nördlingen is there likewise, and now that the pope hath kennelled his barking curse for a twelvemonth, preaches, to the thronging of the churches, wherever he goes.
A.D. 1339. January.—The new year opens gloomily. Without loss of time, fresh-forged anathemas are come, and coming, against the outspoken emperor and this troublesome Germany. Some of the preachers, and the bare-footed friars especially, have yet remained to say mass and perform the offices; now, even these are leaving the city. Some cloisters have stood for now two or three years quite empty. Many churches are deserted altogether, and the doors nailed up. The magistracy have issued orders to compel the performance of service. The clerks are fairly on the anvil; the civil hammer batters them on the one side, and the ecclesiastical upon the other with alternate strokes.
Bitter wind and sleet this morning. Saw three Dominicans creeping back into the town, who had left it a month ago, refusing to say mass. Poor wretches, how starved and woe-begone they looked, after miserable wanderings about the country in the snow, winter showing them scant courtesy, and sure I am the boors less; and now coming back to a deserted convent and to a city where men’s faces are towards them as a flint. Straight, as I saw them, there came into my mind that goodly exhortation of Dr. Tauler’s, that we should show mercy, as doth God, unto all, enemies and friends alike, for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God, whom he hath not seen?[105] Ran after them, called them in, thawed them, fed them, comforted them with kind words and good ale by the great fire,—then argued with them. They thought it a cruel thing that they must starve because pope and emperor are at feud. ‘And is it not,’ urged I, ‘a crueller that thousands of innocent poor folk should live without sacrament, never hear a mass, perhaps die unshriven, for the very same reason? Is not God’s law higher than the pope’s,—do to others as ye would they should do unto you? Could you look for other treatment at the hands of our magistrates, and expect to be countenanced and sustained by them in administering the malediction of their enemies?‘ Thought it most courteous, however, to ply them more pressingly with food than with arguments.
While they were there, in comes my little Otto, opens his eyes wide with wonder to see them, and presently breaks out with the words, now on the tongue of every Strasburger, a rhyming version of the decree:—
They shall still their masses sing, Or out of the city we’ll make them spring.[106]
Told him he should not sing that just then, and, when he was out of the room, bade them mark by that straw which way the wind blew.
I record here a vision vouchsafed to that eminent saint the abbess Christina Ebner, of Engelthal, near Nurnberg. She beheld the Romish Church in the likeness of a great minster, fair to see, but with doors closed by reason of the bann. Priestly voices, solemn and sweet, were heard to chant within; and, without, stood a multitude waiting and hearkening, but no man dared enter. Then came there to the nun one in the habit of a preacher, and told her that he would give her words to speak to comfort the poor folk withal that stood outside,—and that man was the Lord Christ.
And verily, in some sort, so hath God done, having pity upon us, for through all Rhineland hath he moved godly men, both clerks and laity, to draw nearer the one to the other, forming together what we call the association of the Friends of God, for the better tending of the inward life in these troublous times, for wrestling with the Almighty on behalf of his suffering Christendom, and for the succour of the poor people, by preaching and counsel and sacrament, that are now as sheep without a shepherd, and perishing for lack of spiritual bread.[107] Tauler is of the foremost among them, and with his brethren, Egenolph of Ehenheim and Dietrich of Colmar, labours without ceasing, having now the wider field and heavier toil, as so few are left in Strasburg who will perform any church service for love or money. Ah! well might the Abbess Christina say of him that the Spirit of God dwelt within him as a sweet harping. He has travelled much of late, and wherever he goes spreads blessing and consolation; the people flock to hear him; the hands of the Friends of God are strengthened; and a savour of heavenly love and wisdom is left behind. His good name hath journeyed, they say, even beyond the Alps, and into the Low Countries. Neither are there wanting many like-minded, though none equal to him. He found at Cologne Henry of Löwen, Henry, and Franke, and John of Sterngasse,[108] brother Dominicans all of them, preaching constantly, with much of his own fervour, if with a doctrine more like that of Eckart. In Switzerland there is Suso, and I hear much of one Ruysbroek, in the Netherlands, a man younger than Tauler, and a notable master in the divine art of contemplation.
Among the Friends of God are numbers both of men and women of every rank, abbots and farmers, knights and nuns, monks and artizans. There is Conrad, Abbot of Kaisersheim: there are the nuns of Unterlinden and Klingenthal, at Colmar and Basle, as well as the holy sisters of Engelthal; the knights of Rheinfeld, Pfaffenheim, and Landsberg; our rich merchant here, Rulman Merswin, and one, unworthy of so good a name, that holds this pen. Our law is that universal love commanded by Christ, and not to be gainsaid by his vicar. Some have joined themselves to us for awhile, and gone out from us because they were not of us; for we teach no easy road to heaven for the pleasing of the flesh. Many call us sectaries, Beghards, brethren of the Free Spirit, or of the New Spirit, and what not. They might call us by worse names, but we are none of these. The prophecies of some among us, concerning judgments to be looked for at the hands of God, and the faithful warnings of others, have made many angry. Yet are not such things needed, when, as Dr. Tauler saith, the princes and prelates are, too many of them, worse than Jews and infidels, and mere horses for the devil’s riding.[109] So far from wishing evil, we mourn as no others over the present woe, and the Friends of God are, saith Dr. Tauler again, pillars of Christendom, and holders off for awhile of the gathered cloud of wrath. Beyond all question, if all would be active as they are active in works of love to their fellows, the face of the times would brighten presently, and the world come into sunshine.
It was but yesterday that in his sermon Tauler repeated the saying of one—an eminent Friend of God—‘I cannot pass my neighbour by without wishing for him in my heart more of the blessedness of heaven than for myself;‘—‘and that,’ said the good Doctor, ‘I call true love.’ Sure I am that such men stand between the living and the dead.[110]
1339. March.—Much encouraged on hearing Dr. Tauler’s sermon on ‘Whose is the image and superscription?‘[111] It was the last part that gladdened me more especially, when he was enforcing watchfulness and self-examination, and yet showed that the command might be obeyed by men such as I am, in the midst of a worldly calling. Many, said he, complain that they are so busied with outward things as to have no time to look inward. But let such, for every six steps they have to take outward in their daily duty, take one step inward, and observe their hearts, and their business will be to them no stumbling-block. Many are cloistered in body while thought and desire wander to and fro over the earth. But many others do, even amid the noise and stir of the market-place and the shop, keep such watch over their hearts, and set such ward on their senses, that they go unharmed, and their inner peace abides unbroken. Such men are much more truly to be called monks than those who, within a convent wall, have thought and senses so distraught that they can scarce say a single Paternoster with true devotion.
He said that God impressed his image and superscription on our souls when he created us in his image. All true Christians should constantly retire into themselves, and examine throughout their souls wherein this image of the Holy Trinity lieth, and clear away therefrom such images and thoughts as are not of God’s impressing,—all that is merely earthly in love and care, all that hath not God purely for its object. It must be in separateness from the world, withdrawal from all trust and satisfaction in what is creaturely, that we present God the image he hath engraven, clear and free from rust. This image and superscription lies in the inmost inmost of the soul, whither God only cometh, and neither men nor angels, and where he delights to dwell. He will share it with no other. He hath said, ‘My delight is in the sons of men.’ Thus is the inmost of our soul united to the inmost of the very Godhead, where the eternal Father doth ever speak and bring forth his eternal essential Word, his only-begotten Son, equal in honour, power, and worthiness, as saith the Apostle—‘He is the brightness of his glory and the express image of his person.’ By him hath the Father made all things. As all things have their beginning and source from the Godhead, by the birth of the eternal Word out of the Father, so do all creatures in their essence subsist by the same birth of the Son out of the Father, and therefore shall they all return in the same way to their source, to wit, through the Son to the Father. From this eternal birth of the Son ariseth the love of God the Father to his divine Son, and that of the Son to his divine Father, which love is the Holy Ghost—an eternal and divine Bond, uniting the Father and the Son in everlasting Love. These three are essentially one—one single pure essential unity, as even the heathen philosophers bear witness. Therefore, saith Aristotle, ‘There is but one Lord who ordaineth all things.’
He, therefore, that would be truly united to God must dedicate the penny of his soul, with all its faculties, to God alone, and join it unto Him. For if the highest and most glorious Unity, which is God himself, is to be united to the soul, it must be through oneness (Einigkeit). Now when the soul hath utterly forsaken itself and all creatures, and made itself free from all manifoldness, then the sole Unity, which is God, answers truly to the oneness of the soul, for then is there nothing in the soul beside God. Therefore between such a soul and God (if a man be so prepared that his soul hangs on nothing but God himself) there is so great a oneness that they become one, as the Apostle saith, ‘He that is joined to the Lord is one spirit.’
But there are some who will fly before they have wings, and pluck the apples before they are ripe, and, at the very outset of the Divine life, be so puffed up that it contents them not to enter in at the door and contemplate Christ’s humanity, but they will apprehend his highness and incomprehensible Deity only. So did once a priest, and fell grievously, and bitterly mourned his folly, and had to say, ‘Ah, most Merciful! had I followed truly the pattern of thy holy humanity, it had not been thus with me!’ Beware of such perilous presumption—your safe course is to perfect yourselves first in following the lowly life of Christ, and in earnest study of the shameful cross.
Methinks this is true counsel, and better, for our sort at least, than Master Eckart’s exhortation to break through into the essence, and to exchange God made manifest for the absolute and inscrutable Godhead.
1339. March 20.—Finished to-day a complete suit of armour for young Franz Müllenheim. The aristocratic families bear the change of government more good-humouredly than I looked for. Their influence is still great, and they can afford to make a virtue of necessity. Most of them now, too, are on the right side.
A great improvement—locking our doors at night.[112] This is the first time I have thought to record it, though the custom has been introduced these nine years. Before, there was not a lock to a house-door in Strasburg, and if you wanted to shut it, on ever so great a need, you had to work with spade and shovel to remove a whole mountain of dirt collected about the threshold. Several new roads, too, made of late by the merchant-league of the Rhineland.
Footnote 96:
Louis was indebted for this important victory to the skill of Schweppermann. After the battle the sole supply of the imperial table was found to consist of a basket of eggs, which the emperor distributed among his officers, saying, ‘To each of you one egg—to our gallant Schweppermann two.’—Menzel.
Footnote 97:
See Laguille, Histoire d’Alsace, liv. xxiii. p. 271.
Footnote 98:
Many passages in his Heiligenleben are altogether in the spirit of Eckart, and have their origin, beyond question, in his sayings, or in those of his disciples.—See pp. 114, 125, 150, 187 (Pfeiffer), and also the extracts in Wackernagel, Altd. Leseb. p. 853.
Footnote 99:
See Schmidt’s Tauler, Appendix, p. 172, &c., where such information as can be obtained concerning Henry of Nördlingen is given.
Footnote 100:
Compare Petrarch’s account in his letters, cited by Gieseler: ‘Mitto stupra, raptus, incestus, adulteria, qui jam pontificalis lasciviæ ludi sunt: mitto raptarum viros, ne mutire audeant, non tantum avitis laribus, sed finibus patriis exturbatos, quæque contumeliarum gravissima est, et violatas conjuges et externo semine gravidas rursus accipere, et post partum reddere ad alternam satietatem abutentium coactos.’
Footnote 101:
Laguille gives an account of this revolution, Hist. d’Alsace, p. 276.
Footnote 102:
Schmidt’s Tauler, p. 12.
Footnote 103:
Laguille, liv. xxiv. p. 280.
Footnote 104:
Schmidt, p. 22.
Footnote 105:
Tauler’s Sermon on the Twenty-second Sunday after Trinity contains an exhortation to Christian love, remarkable for beauty and discrimination. Tauler’s Predigten, vol ii. p. 591 (Berlin, 1841).
Footnote 106:
Schmidt, p. 14:—
‘do soltent sü ouch fürbas singen oder aber us der statt springen.’
Footnote 107:
Schmidt’s Tauler, Anhang über die Gottesfreunde.
Footnote 108:
Passages from two of these mystics, Heinrich von Löwen and Johannes von Sterngasse, are given among the Sprüche Deutscher Mystiker, in Wackernagel, p. 890.
Footnote 109:
See Tauler’s Predigten, vol. ii. p. 584; and also, concerning the charge of sectarianism, p. 595; and the services of the Friends of God, vol. i. pred. xxvi. p. 194; pred. xi. p. 85.
Footnote 110:
Ibid., vol. ii. pred. lxvi. p. 594.
Footnote 111:
The sermon referred to is that on the Twenty-third Sunday after Trinity, vol. ii. p. 598.
While he is careful to warn his hearers against the presumption of attempting at once to contemplate Deity apart from its manifestation in the humanity of Christ, he yet seems to admit that when the soul has been thoroughly exercised in the imitation of Christ,—has become conformed, as far as man can be, to his spirit and his sufferings, then there commences a period of repose and joy in which there is an extraordinary intuition of Deity, which approximates to that perfect vision promised hereafter, when we shall see, not ‘through a glass darkly,’ but face to face.—Vol. ii. p. 609.
Footnote 112:
Meiners, Hist. Vergleichung der Sitten, &c., des Mittelalters, vol. ii. p. 117.
Chapter IV
If you would be pleased to make acquaintance with a solid theology of the good old sort in the German tongue, get John Tauler’s sermons; for neither in Latin nor in our own language have I ever seen a theology more sound or more in harmony with the Gospel.—LUTHER (to Spalatin).
Die Sehnsucht und der Traüme Weben Sie sind der weichen Seele süss, Doch edler ist ein starkes Streben Und macht den schönen Traum gewiss.[113]
UHLAND.
On another evening, after Kate had played a plaintive air on the piano as an overture; when Atherton had praised it as expressive of the upward fluttering struggle of the Psyche of Mysticism, and Gower had quoted Jean Paul’s fancy, where he says that sweet sounds are the blue waves that hide the sea-monsters which lurk in the deeps of life—Adolf’s journal was continued, as follows:—
1339. December. St. Barbara’s Day.—Three days ago, at the close of his sermon, Doctor Tauler said he would preach to-day on the highest perfection attainable in this life. Went to hear him. The cloister-chapel crowded long before the time. He began by telling us that he had much to say, and so would not to-day preach from the gospel according to his wont, and moreover would not put much Latin into his sermon, but would make good all he taught with Holy Writ. Then he went on to preach on the necessity of dying utterly to the world and to our own will, and to yield ourselves up, ‘dying-wise,’ into the hands of God. He gave further four-and-twenty marks, whereby we may discern who are the true, righteous, illuminated, contemplative men of God.[114]
Observed close under the pulpit a stranger (by his dress, from the Oberland) who did diligently write down, from time to time, what the Doctor said—a man of notable presence, in the prime of life, with large piercing eyes under shaggy brows, eagle nose, thoughtful head—altogether so royal a man as I never before saw. He mingled with the crowd after sermon, and I could not learn who he was. Several others, as curious, and no wiser than myself. This mysterious personage may perhaps be one of the Friends of God, who are numerous in the Oberland. Methought he wished to escape notice. Perhaps he is a Waldensian, and dreads the evil eye of the inquisitor.
1340. January. Eve of St. Agnes.—Strange; nothing has been seen of the Doctor for this whole month. His penitents are calling continually at the convent, craving admittance to their confessor, but he will see no one. He is not ill, they say, and takes his part in the convent services with the rest, but never stirs beyond the walls. None of his many friends can tell us what is the matter.
1340. July. St. Alexius’ Day.—All things much as aforetime, that is, ill enough. Business slack generally, but our hammers going. The worst is this loss of Tauler, our comfort in our trouble. Many reports, no certainty. Some say he has committed some crime, and sits now in the convent prison. This I everywhere contradict. Others will have it that he is gone mad. Many of his former friends are now turned against him, and his enemies make them merry. Went again to the convent to get what news I could. Enquired of the porter why the Doctor had shut himself up. He replied, ‘Indeed, sir, and I cannot know.’ Methought a wonderful close answer for a porter. Went into the locutory. In the passage the cook ran by me, having just received twenty-five cuffs on the head for leaving the vessels and linen dirty on Saturday night. Much laughter thereat. Several monks in the locutory, among them brother Bernard, the cellarer, an acquaintance of mine—a bustling, shrewd little man, provider of the monastic prog[115] to general satisfaction, talking often of pittances and profound in beeves,—a brave blade, and seen swaggering now and then on holidays with sword at his side, affecting, more than beseems, secular gallantry. Said, when I asked him concerning Tauler, ‘Oh, poor fellow, the devil’s clawing him a bit, that’s all.’ Another said, ‘We always knew it would be this way.’ A third, ‘I said so from the first—spiritual pride, Lucifer’s sin, Lucifer’s sin!’ Looked at the rascal’s paunch—thought he ran little danger of such sin from any over-mortifying of the flesh. His flesh ought to have mortified him, the brazen-face. Spake up for Tauler as I could, but saw that he was the jest of his brethren—having doubtless to bear cruelty and mocking along with some melancholy inward fight of afflictions—and came away home with a heavy heart. Could not get speech with the abbot, who was busy looking to the monks’ beds, that they were not too soft.
1342. New Year’s Day.—Public notice given, that in three days Tauler will preach once more. The news makes great talk. My heart sings jubilate thereat. I look back on two weary years that he has now been hidden from those who so need him. I have confessed to no one the while—somehow, could not to any other—yet I fear me such neglect is a sin. Those like-minded with Tauler have been busy among us in their work of love, but the master-spirit is sorely missed, notwithstanding. One Ludolph of Saxony, who was a Dominican, and has come over hither from Cologne lately, to be prior of the new Carthusian convent, has been a great blessing unto us. He speaks out boldly against abuses, and persuades men tenderly to follow Christ carrying the cross.
Bishop Berthold quieter of late; finds it prudent to keep on better terms at present with the emperor.
Little Hans a month old to-day. A household of now five children. Henry of great service to me. Think sometimes of leaving the business with him almost altogether, if only to have him near. Margarita not again ill since the first times of the interdict. A great mercy! Getting richer yet, and tremble sometimes lest it should ensnare my soul, therefore, I disencumber myself at intervals of considerable sums for sick and poor folk. Must bear in mind Tauler’s counsel to use and enjoy everything intending God therein. Find my affections go forth much—I hope not too much—towards this last babe. He thrives well; verily, no child could be more unlike the blessed St. Nicholas, of whom I have heard a friar say that, when hanging on his mother’s breast, he fasted Wednesdays and Fridays, and could not be brought to suck more than once a day. But if I stay to number up my blessings, I shall have a list longer than the curse-roll of the Pope. God give me an unworldly, thankful, watchful spirit!
1342. January 6.—Alas! that I should have to write what now I must! I forced a way into the crowded church—every part filled with people, wedged in below so that they could not move, clustered like bees where they had climbed above into every available place, and a dense mass in the porch besides. The Doctor came, looking woefully ill, changed as I scarce ever saw a man, to live. He mounted the lectorium, held his cap before his eyes, and said:
‘O merciful and eternal God, if it be thy will, give me so to speak that thy divine name may be praised and honoured, and these men bettered thereby.’
With that he began to weep. We waited, breathless. Still he wept, and could speak no word, his sobs audible in the stillness, and the tears making their way through his fingers as he hid his face in his hands. This continued till the people grew restless. Longer yet, with more manifest discontent. At last a voice cried out from among the people (I think it was that roughspoken Carvel, the butcher), ‘Now then, Sir, how long are we to stop here? It is getting late, if you don’t mean to preach, let us go home.’
I saw that Tauler was struggling to collect himself by prayer, but his emotion became only the more uncontrollable, and at last he said, with a broken voice,—
‘Dear brethren, I am sorry from my heart to have kept you so long, but at this time I cannot possibly speak to you. Pray God for me that he would help me, and I may do better at another time.’
So we went away, and the report thereof was presently all over Strasburg. The snowball had plenty of hands to roll it, and lost nothing by the way. The people, numbers of them, seemed to me with a wicked glee to delight in showing how the learned Doctor had made a fool of himself. Those who had counted him mad before reckoned themselves now little short of prophets. Many such whom I met in the streets looked and spoke with such a hateful triumph of the matter as well nigh put me beside myself. Not so long ago, no one could satisfy them but Tauler; not the name of the most popular of saints oftener on their lips; the very ground he trod on was blessed; a kindly word from his lips food for days—and now the hands stretched out almost in adoration, throw mire on the fallen idol, and not a ‘prentice lad behind his stall but hugs himself in his superior sanity. Had he been a hunter after popularity, what a judgment! Verily that man has the folly of a thousand fools who lives for the applause of the multitude. But I know how Tauler’s heart bled for them.
Friar Bernard came over this evening. He says the superiors are wroth beyond measure with Tauler for the scandal he has brought upon the order, and will forbid him to preach more. Entertained my jovial gauger of monks’ bellies with the best cheer I had—he has a good heart after all, and is unfeignedly sorry for Tauler’s disgrace. Says he thinks the Doctor has fasted and done penance beyond his strength, that the sudden coming out from his cell to preach to such numbers was too much for his weakness,—that he will get over it and be himself again, and much more,—to the hope whereof he pledged me in another glass, and left me not a little comforted.
1342. January. St. Vincent’s Day.—Saw Bernard again, who gives me the good news that Dr. Tauler obtained permission from the prior to deliver a Latin address in the school, and did acquit himself to such admiration, that he is to be allowed to preach in public when he will.
1342. January 23.—Tauler preached to-day in the chapel of the nunnery of St. Agatha, on ‘Behold the bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet him.’ A wondrous discourse—a torrent that seems to make me dizzy yet. As he was describing, more like an angel than a man, the joy of the bride at the approach of the bridegroom, a man cried out, ‘It is true!’ and fell senseless on the floor. As they were about him to bring him to himself, a woman among them shrieked, ‘Oh, stop, sir, stop! or he will die in our arms!’ Whereat he said calmly, and with his face lighted up as though he saw the heavens opened, ‘Ah, dear children, and if the bridegroom will call home the bride, shall we not willingly suffer him? But nevertheless I will make an end.’ Then after sermon he read mass again, and, as I came out, I saw the people gathered about several persons in the court who lay on the ground, as though dead, such had been the power of his words.
1342. February. St. Blasius’ Day.—Now Tauler is continually preaching, not only in the church of his convent, but in those of various monasteries and nunneries, in the Beguinasia, and in the cells wherein little companies of pious women have gathered themselves together to hide from the dangers of the world. He never cited so much Latin as some, now less than heretofore. More alive than ever, it would seem, to our wants, he addresses himself mightily to heart and conscience, which he can bind up or smite at will. His love and care, for the laity most of all, is a marvel; he lives for us, and yet appears to hold himself no greater than the least. Before, there was none like him, now we feel that in heavenliness of nature he has gone beyond his former self. So earnestly does he exhort to active love to man, as well as to perfect resignation to God, that already a new spirit seems to pervade many, and they begin to care for others, as he tells us the first Christians did. He tells them mere prayers, and mass, and alms, and penance, will help them nothing unless the Holy Spirit breathes life into them. He says the priests are not of necessity better men because they oftener taste the Lord’s body, that outward things such as those profit nothing alone, and that those who love their fellows most are the truest instructors, and teach more wisely than all the schools.
1344. March.—Tauler hath of late, besides preaching constantly as ever, begun to send forth from time to time sundry small books, full of consolation and godly counsel for these days. Copies of them are fast multiplied, and people gather to hear them read at each other’s houses. This is a new thing, and works powerfully.
The greatest stir has been made by two letters issued by Tauler, Ludolph the Carthusian, and others, and sent out, not only through Strasburg, but all the region round about.[116] The bishop is very angry thereat; though, before, he had come several times to hear Tauler, and had professed no small admiration of him. One of these letters is to comfort the people, and exhorts all priests to administer the sacraments to all who shall desire, the bann notwithstanding. ‘For,’ it saith, ‘ye are bound to visit and console the sick, remembering the bitter pain and death of Christ, who hath made satisfaction, not for your sins only, but also for those of the whole world, who doth represent us all before God, so that if one falleth innocently under the bann, no Pope can shut him out of heaven. Ye should, therefore, give absolution to such as wish therefor—giving heed rather to the bidding of Christ and his Apostles than to the bann, which is issued only out of malice and avarice.’
Thus truly have these good men done, and many with them, so that numbers have died in peace, fearing the bann not a whit, whereas before, many thousands, unshriven, gave up the ghost in the horrors of despair.
The other letter is addressed to the learned and great ones among the clergy. It saith that there are two swords—a spiritual, which is God’s word, and the temporal, the secular power:—that these two are to be kept distinct; both are from God, and ought not to be contrary the one to the other. The spiritual power should fulfil its proper duty and uphold the temporal, while that again should protect the good and be a terror to evil-doers. If temporal princes sin, such as are spiritual should exhort them, in love and humility, to amend their ways. It is against the law of Christ that the shepherds, when one of these falls beneath their displeasure, should for that reason presume to damn a whole country, with all its cities, towns, and villages, where dwell the poor innocent folk who are no partakers in the sin. It cannot be proved from Scripture that all those who will not kiss the Pope’s foot, or receive a certain article of faith, or who hold by an emperor duly elected and well fulfilling his office, and do him service as set over them by God, do therein sin against the Church and are heretics. God will not demand of vassals an account of the sins of their lords, and neither should subjects, bound to obey the emperor as the highest temporal power, be given over to damnation as though answerable for the faults of their rulers. Therefore all who hold the true Christian faith, and sin only against the person of the Pope, are no heretics. Those, rather, are real heretics who obstinately refuse to repent and forsake their sins; for let a man have been what he may, if he will so do, he cannot be cast out of the Church. Through Christ, the truly penitent thief, murderer, traitor, adulterer, all may have forgiveness. Such as God beholdeth under an unrighteous bann, he will turn for them the curse into a blessing. Christ himself did not resist the temporal power, but said, My kingdom is not of this world. Our souls belong unto God, our body and goods to Cæsar. If the emperor sins, he must give account to God therefor—not to a poor mortal man.
Footnote 113:
To long and weave a woof of dreams is sweet unto the feeble soul, but nobler is stout-hearted striving, and makes the dream reality.
Footnote 114:
This sermon is given entire in the second chapter of the Lebenshistorie des ehrwürdigen Doctors Johann Tauler, prefixed to his sermons. The succeeding incidents are all related by the same authority. The cellarer only and the family affairs of Adolf, appear to be invented by Atherton.
Footnote 115:
Atherton defends this word by the usage of Thomas Fuller.
Footnote 116:
These letters are preserved in substance in Specklin’s Collectanea, and are inserted, from that source, in the introduction by Görres to Diepenbrock’s edition of Suso’s works; pp. xxxv. &c.
Chapter V
The meanes, therefore, which unto us is lent Him to behold, is on his workes to looke, Which he hath made in beautie excellent, And in the same, as in a brasen booke, To read enregistred in every nooke His goodnesse, which his beautie doth declare; For all that’s good is beautifull and faire.
Thence gathering plumes of perfect speculation, To impe the wings of thy high-flying mynd, Mount up aloft through heavenly contemplation, From this darke world, whose damps the soule do blynd, And, like the native brood of eagles kynd, On that bright Sunne of Glorie fixe thine eyes, Cleared from grosse mists of fraile infirmities.
SPENSER: HYMNE OF HEAVENLY BEAUTIE.
WILLOUGHBY. I did not think Atherton had so much artifice in him. He broke off his last reading from Arnstein’s Chronicle with a mystery unexplained, quite in the most approved feuilleton style.
GOWER. You have excited the curiosity of the ladies most painfully, I assure you. I believe I am empowered to say that they cannot listen to any more of the armourer’s journal until you have accounted for Tauler’s singular disappearance.
KATE. One word for us and two for yourself, Mr. Gower.
ATHERTON. Ungrateful public! You all know I haven’t a particle of invention in my nature. It is just because I am not a novelist that I have not been able to explain everything. Arnstein is, like me, a matter-of-fact personage, and could not be in two places at once.
However, to relieve you, I am ready to acknowledge that I am in possession of information about these incidents quite independent of the irregular entries in his record. There is no secret; it is all matter of sober history. The facts are these—
One day there came a stranger to Tauler, desiring to confess to him. It was the remarkable man who had so attracted the attention of Adolf in the church. He was called Nicholas of Basle, and was well known in the Oberland as an eminent ‘Friend of God.’ He was one of those men so characteristic of that period—a layman exercising a wider spiritual influence than many a bishop. He was perhaps a Waldensian, holding the opinions of that sect, with a considerable infusion of visionary mysticism. The Waldenses, and the Friends of God, were drawn nearer to each other by opposition, and the disorders of the time, as well as by the more liberal opinions they held in common, and it is not always easy to distinguish them.
After confession, the layman requested, much to the Doctor’s surprise, that he would preach a sermon on the highest spiritual attainment a man may reach in time. Tauler yielded at length to his importunity, and fulfilled his promise. Nicholas brought his notes of the sermon to Tauler, and in the course of their conversation, disclosed the object of his visit. He had travelled those thirty miles, he said, not merely to listen to the doctor, of whom he had heard so much, but, by God’s help, to give him some counsel that should do him good. He told him plainly that the sermon, though excellent in its way, could teach him nothing—the Great Teacher could impart to him more knowledge in an hour than Tauler and all his brethren, preaching till the day of doom. Tauler was first astonished, then indignant, to hear a mere layman address him in such language. Nicholas appealed to that very anger as a proof that the self-confidence of the Pharisee was not yet cleansed away, that the preacher trusted with unbecoming pride in his mastership and great learning.
You must remember the vast distance which at that day separated the clerk from the layman, to give to the candour and humility of Tauler its due value. The truth flashed across his mind. Deeply affected, he embraced the layman, saying, ‘Thou hast been the first to tell me of my fault. Stay with me here. Henceforth I will live after thy counsel; thou shalt be my spiritual father, and I thy sinful son.’
Nicholas acceded to his request, and gave him, to begin with, a kind of spiritual A B C,—a list of moral rules, commencing in succession with the letters of the alphabet, which he was to commit to memory and to practise, together with sundry bodily austerities, for five weeks, in honour of the five wounds of Christ. But the discipline which followed was yet more severe. Tauler was directed to abstain from hearing confession, from study and from preaching, and to shut himself up in his cell, that, in solitary contemplation of the sufferings and death of Christ, he might attain true humility and complete renewal. The anticipated consequences ensued. His friends and penitents forsook him; he became the by-word of the cloister; his painful penances brought on a lingering sickness. Borne down by mental and bodily sufferings together, he applied to his friend for relief. The layman told him that he was going on well—it would be better with him ere long—he might remit his severer self-inflictions, and should recruit the body by a more generous diet.
Nicholas was now called away by important business, he said, and Tauler was left to himself. His parting advice to his spiritual scholar was, that if he came to want, he should pawn his books, but sell them on no account, for the day would come when he would need them once more.
Tauler continued in this trying seclusion for nearly two years, contemned by the world without as one beside himself, oppressed within by distress of mind and feebleness of body. It had been forbidden him to desire, even when thus brought low, any special communication from God that might gladden him with rapture or consolation. Such a request would spring from self and pride. He was there to learn an utter self-abandonment—to submit himself without will or choice to the good pleasure of God—to be tried with this or any other affliction, if need were, till the judgment day.
Now it came to pass, when he had become so ill that he could not attend mass or take his place in the choir as he had been wont, that, as he lay on his sickbed, he meditated once more on the sufferings and love of our Lord and Saviour, and thought on his own life, what a poor thing it had been, and how ungrateful. With that he fell into a marvellous great sorrow, says the history, for all his lost time and all his sins, and spake, with heart and mouth, these words:—
‘O merciful God, have mercy upon me, a poor sinner; have mercy in thine infinite compassion, for I am not worthy to live on the face of the earth.’
Then as he sat up waking in his sickness and sorrow, he heard a voice saying, ‘Stand fast in thy peace, trust God, remember that he was once on the earth in human nature, healing sick bodies and sick souls.’ When he heard these words he fell back fainting, and knew no more. On coming to himself, he found that both his inward and outward powers had received new life. Much that had before been strange now seemed clear. He sent for his friend, who heard with joy what he had to tell.
‘Now,’ said Nicholas, ‘thou hast been for the first time moved by the Highest, and art a partaker of the grace of God, and knowest that though the letter killeth, the Spirit giveth life. Now wilt thou understand the Scripture as never before—perceive its harmony and preciousness, and be well able to show thy fellow Christians the way to eternal life. Now one of thy sermons will bring more fruit than a hundred aforetime, coming, as it will, from a simple, humbled, loving heart; and much as the people have set thee at nought, they will now far more love and prize thee. But a man with treasure must guard against the thieves. See to it that thou hold fast thy humility, by which thou wilt best keep thy riches. Now thou needest my teaching no longer, having found the right Master, whose instrument I am, and who sent me hither. Now, in all godly love, thou shalt teach me in turn.’
Tauler had pledged his books for thirty gulden. The layman went immediately and redeemed them at his own cost, and by his advice Tauler caused it to be announced that in three days he would preach once more. You have already heard how our good friend Adolf records the unhappy result of this first attempt. Tauler went with his trouble to Nicholas, who comforted him by the assurance that such farther trial was but a sign of the careful love which carried on the work within. There must have been some remnant of self-seeking which was still to be purged away. He advised him to wait awhile, and then apply for permission to deliver a Latin address to the brethren in the school. This he at last received, and a better sermon they never heard. So the next preacher, at the close of his discourse, made the following announcement to the congregation: ‘I am requested to give notice that Doctor Tauler will preach here to-morrow. If he succeeds no better than before, the blame must rest with himself. But this I can say, that he has read us in the school a prelection such as we have not heard for many a day; how he will acquit himself now, I know not, God knoweth.’
Then followed the overpowering discourse, of whose effects you have heard; and from this time forward commenced a new æra in Tauler’s public life. For full eight years he laboured unremittingly, with an earnestness and a practical effect far surpassing his former efforts, and in such esteem with all classes that his fellow-citizens would seem to have thought no step should be taken in spiritual matters, scarcely in temporal, without first seeking counsel of Tauler.
LOWESTOFFE. A most singular story. But how have all these minute circumstances come down to us?
ATHERTON. When Tauler was on his death-bed he sent for Nicholas, and gave him a manuscript, in which he had written down their conversations, with some account of his own life and God’s dealings towards him, His unworthy servant, requesting him to make thereof a little book. The layman promised to do so. ‘But see to it,’ continued the Doctor, ‘that you can conceal our names. You can easily write ‘The Man and the Doctor’—for the life and words and works which God hath wrought through me, an unworthy, sinful man, are not mine, but belong unto Almighty God for ever. So let it be, for the edifying of our fellow men; but take the writing with thee into thy country, and let no man see it while I live.’ This narrative has been preserved, and there is no difficulty in discerning in the Doctor and the man, Tauler and Nicholas of Basle.[117]
You will now let me resume my reading, I suppose.
Chronicle of Adolf Arnstein, continued.
1344. Eve of St. Dionysius.—I here set down passages from sermons I have at sundry times heard Doctor Tauler preach. I have made it my wont to go straight home as soon as the service has been ended, and write what I could best remember. The goodly sayings which follow are copied from those imperfect records, and placed here for my edification and that of my children and others after me.
From a sermon on Christ’s teaching the multitude out of the ship.—The soul of the believing man, wherein Christ is, doth find its representation in that ship. Speaking of the perpetual peace such souls may have, despite what storm and commotion soever, he added (not a little to my comfort): ‘But some of you have not felt all this; be not ye dismayed. There are poor fishers as well as rich; yea, more poor than rich. Hold this as unchangeably sure, that the trials and struggle of no man are of small account. If a man be but in right earnest, longeth to be a true lover of God, and perseveres therein, and loves those he knows or deems to be such,—doth heartily address himself to live fairly after Job’s pattern, and intend God unfeignedly in his doing or not doing, such a man will assuredly enter into God’s peace, though he should tarry for it till his dying day. Even those true friends and lovers of God who enjoy so glorious a peace have disquiet and trouble of their own in that they cannot be towards their faithful God all they would, and in that even what God giveth is less large than their desires.’
‘In the highest stage of divine comfort is that peace which is said to pass all understanding. When that noblest part of the soul to which no name can be given is completely turned to God and set on Him, it takes with it all those faculties in man to which we can give names. This conversion involves both that in God which is Nameless and that in the consciousness of man which can be named. These are they whom St. Dionysius calls godly-minded men. As Paul saith, ‘That ye may be rooted and grounded in love; and understand with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and height, and depth.’ For the height and depth which are revealed in such men can be apprehended by no human sense or reason; they reach beyond all sense out into a deep abyss. This great good, light, and comfort, is inwardly revealed only to those who are outwardly sanctified and inwardly illuminated, and who know how to dwell inwardly within themselves. To such, heaven and earth and all creatures are as an absolute Nothing, for they themselves are a heaven of God, inasmuch as God dwelleth and rests in them.’
‘God draweth these men in such wise into Himself, that they become altogether pleasing unto Him, and all that is in them becomes, in a super-essential way, so pervaded and transformed, that God himself doeth and worketh all their works. Wherefore, clearly, such persons are called with right—Godlike (Gottformige). For if we could see such minds as they truly are, they would appear to us like God, being so, however, not by nature, but by grace. For God lives, forms, ordaineth, and doeth in them all his works, and doth use Himself in them.’
‘It fares with such men as with Peter, when, at the miraculous draught of fishes, he exclaimed, ‘Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!’ See! he can find no words, no way of utterance, for that within. So is it, I say, with such men—they find themselves empty of fit words and works. And that is the first mode. The other is that they fall utterly into their own groundless Nothing (in ihr grundloses Nichts), and become so small and utterly nothing in God as quite to forget all gifts they have received before, and do, as it were, pour themselves back again absolutely into God (whose they properly are) as though such bestowments had never been theirs. Yea, they are withal as barely nothing as though they had never been. So sinks the created Nothing in the Uncreated, incomprehensibly, unspeakably. Herein is true what is said in the Psalter, ‘Deep calleth unto deep.’ For the uncreated Deep calls the created, and these two deeps become entirely one. Then hath the created spirit lost itself in the spirit of God, yea, is drowned in the bottomless sea of Godhead. But how well it is with such a man passeth all understanding to comprehend. Such a man becomes, thirdly, essential, virtuous, godly; in his walk, loving and kindly, condescending and friendly towards all men, so that no man can detect in him any fault or transgression, any vice or crime. Moreover, he is believing and trustful towards all men, hath mercy and sympathy for every man without distinction; is not austere and stern, but friendly, gentle, and good, and it is not possible that such men should ever be separated from God. Unto such perfectness may all we be graciously helped of God our Saviour, unto whom be praise for ever. Amen.’[118]
‘The ground or centre of the soul is so high and glorious a thing, that it cannot properly be named, even as no adequate name can be found for the Infinite and Almighty God. In this ground lies the image of the Holy Trinity. Its kindred and likeness with God is such as no tongue can utter. Could a man perceive and realize how God dwelleth in this ground, such knowledge would be straightway the blessedness of salvation. The apostle saith, ‘be renewed in the spirit of your mind (Gemüthes).’ When the mind is rightly directed, it tendeth towards this ground whose image is far beyond its powers. In this mind we are to be renewed, by a perpetual bringing of ourselves into this ground, truly loving and intending God immediately. This is not impossible for the mind itself, though our inferior powers are unequal to such unceasing union with God. This renewal must take place also in the spirit. For God is a spirit, and our created spirit must be united to and lost in the uncreated, even as it existed in God before its creation. Every moment in which the soul so re-enters into God, a complete restoration takes place. If it be done a thousand times in a day, there is, each time, a true regeneration: as the Psalmist saith,—‘This day have I begotten thee.’ This is when the inmost of the spirit is sunk and dissolved in the inmost of the Divine Nature, and thus new-made and transformed. God pours Himself out thus into our spirit, as the sun rays forth its natural light into the air, and fills it with sunshine, so that no eye can tell the difference between the sunshine and the air. If the union of the sun and air cannot be distinguished, how far less this divine union of the created and the uncreated Spirit! Our spirit is received and utterly swallowed up in the abyss which is its source. Then the spirit transcends itself and all its powers, and mounts higher and higher towards the Divine Dark, even as an eagle towards the sun.’
‘Yet let no man in his littleness and nothingness think of himself to approach that surpassing darkness,—rather let him draw nigh to the darkness of his ignorance of God, let him simply yield himself to God, ask nothing, desire nothing, love and mean only God, yea, and such an unknown God. Let him lovingly cast all his thoughts and cares, and his sins too, as it were, on that unknown Will. Beyond this unknown will of God he must desire and purpose nothing, neither way, nor rest, nor work, neither this nor that, but wholly subject and offer himself up to this unknown will. Moreover, if a man, while busy in this lofty inward work, were called by some duty in the Providence of God to cease therefrom and cook a broth for some sick person, or any other such service, he should do so willingly and with great joy. This I say that if it happened to me that I had to forsake such work and go out to preach or aught else, I should go cheerfully, believing not only that God would be with me, but that He would vouchsafe me it may be even greater grace and blessing in that external work undertaken out of true love in the service of my neighbour than I should perhaps receive in my season of loftiest contemplation.’
‘The truly enlightened man—alas! that they should be so few—scarce two or three among a thousand—sinks himself the deeper in his Ground the more he recognises his honour and his blessedness, and of all his gifts ascribes not even the least unto himself. Our righteousness and holiness, as the prophet saith, is but filthiness. Therefore must we build, not on our righteousness, but on the righteousness of God, and trust, not in our own words, works, or ways, but alone in God. May this God give us all power and grace to lose ourselves wholly in Him, that we may be renewed in truth, and found to His praise and glory. Amen.’[119]
Speaking of the publican in the temple, he put up a prayer that God would give him such an insight as that man had into his own Nothing and unworthiness;—‘That,’ said he, ‘is the highest and most profitable path a man can tread. For that way brings God continually and immediately into man. Where God appears in His mercy, there is He manifest also with all His nature—with Himself.’[120]
I understand the Doctor as teaching three states or conditions wherein man may stand; that of nature, by the unaided light of reason, which in its inmost tends Godward, did not the flesh hinder; that of grace; and a higher stage yet, above grace, where means and medium are as it were superseded, and God works immediately within the transformed soul. For what God doeth that He is. Yet that in this higher state, as in the second, man hath no merit; he is nothing and God all. In the course of this same sermon he described humility as indispensable to such perfectness, since the loftiest trees send their roots down deepest. He said that we should not distress ourselves if we had not detailed to our confessor all the short-coming and sin of our hearts, but confess to God and ask His mercy. No ecclesiastical absolution can help us unless we are contrite for our sin before God. We are not to keep away from the Lord’s body because we feel so deeply our unworthiness to partake of the sacrament, seeing that they who are whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.[121]
‘There are some who can talk much and eloquently of the incarnation and bitter sufferings of Christ, who do with tears apostrophise him from head to foot as they present him to their imagination. Yet is there often in this more of sense and self-pleasing than of true love to God. They look more to the means than to the end. For my part, I would rather there were less of such excitement and transport, less of mere sweet emotion, so that a man were diligent and right manful in working and in virtue, for in such exercise do we learn best to know ourselves. These raptures are not the highest order of devotion, though would that many a dull heart had more of such sensibility! There are, as St. Bernard hath said, three kinds of love, the sweet, the wise, and the strong. The first is as a gilded image of wood, the second as a gilded image of silver, the third an image of pure gold. One to whom God hath vouchsafed such sweetness should receive it with lowliness and thankfulness, discerning therein his weakness and imperfection, in that God has to allure and entice him as a little child. He should not rest at this point, but press on, through images, above all image and figure; through the outward exercise of the senses to the inward ground of his soul, where properly the kingdom of God is. There are many altogether at home amid sensuous imagery, and having great joy therein, whose inner ground is as fast shut to them as a mountain of iron through which there is no way.’
‘Dionysius writeth how God doth far and superessentially surpass all images, modes, forms, or names that can be applied to Him. The true fulness of divine enlightenment is known herein that it is an essential illumination, not taking place by means of images or in the powers of the soul, but rather in the ground itself of the soul, when a man is utterly sunk in his own Nothing. This I say against the ‘free spirits,’ who persuade themselves that by means of certain appearances and glances of revelation they have discerned the truth, and please themselves with their own exaltation, knowledge, and wisdom; going about in a false emptiness (Ledigkeit) of their own; and speaking to others as though they were not yet advanced beyond the use of forms and images; bringing, with their frivolous presumption, no small dishonour upon God. But know ye, Christians beloved, that no truly pious and God-fearing man gives himself out as having risen above all things, for things in themselves utterly insignificant and mean are yet, in the truth, right and good; and though any one may be in reality elevated above such lesser matters, yet doth he love and honour them not less than heretofore; for the truly pious account themselves less than all things, and boast not that they have surpassed or are lifted above them.’[122]
‘O, dear child, in the midst of all these enmities and dangers, sink thou into thy ground and thy Nothingness, and let the tower with all its bells fall on thee, yea, let all the devils in hell storm out upon thee, let heaven and earth with all their creatures assail thee, all shall but marvellously serve thee—sink thou only into thy Nothingness, and the better part is thine!‘[123]
‘Yet some will ask what remains after a man hath thus lost himself in God? I answer, nothing but a fathomless annihilation of himself, an absolute ignoring of all reference to himself personally, of all aims of his own in will and heart, in way, in purpose, or in use. For in this self-loss man sinks so deep into the ground that if he could, out of pure love and lowliness, sink himself deeper yet, and become absolutely nothing, he would do so right gladly. For such a self-annihilation hath been brought to pass within him that he thinketh himself unworthy to be a man, unfit to enter God’s house and temple, and to look upon a crucifix painted on the wall; yea, such a man deemeth himself not so good by far as the very worst. Nevertheless, as far as regards the sufferings and death of the Lord—the birth and incarnation of the Son of God—His holy and perfect life that He lived on earth among sinful men, all this such a man did never before so heartily and strongly love as now he doth; yea, now his care is how he may order his life right Christianly, and fashion it anew, and out of fervent love toward his Lord and Saviour, exercise himself without ceasing in all good work and virtue.’[124]
‘There are those who thoughtlessly maim and torture their miserable flesh, and yet leave untouched the inclinations which are the root of evil in their hearts. Ah, my friend, what hath thy poor body done to thee, that thou shouldst so torment it? Oh folly! mortify and slay thy sins, not thine own flesh and blood.’[125]
WILLOUGHBY. My dear Atherton, this is grand doctrine. May I never be farther from the kingdom of heaven than such a mystic. Surely Luther’s praise is just. Compare such theology as this with the common creed and practice of that day. The faults are nearly all those of the time—the excellence his own.
ATHERTON. It is wonderful to see how little harm his Platonism can do to a man so profoundly reverent, so fervent in his love to Christ. How often he seems to tread the verge of Eckart’s pantheistic abyss, but never falls into it! His heart is true; he walks uprightly, and so, surely. That conception of sin as selfishness—that doctrine of self-abandonment, death in ourselves and life in God—these are convictions with him so deep and blessed—so far beyond all Greek philosophy—so fatal to the intellectual arrogance of pantheism, that they bear him safe through every peril.
GOWER. His sermons cannot fail to do one good—read with the heart and imagination. But if you coldly criticise, and can make no allowance for the allegories and metaphors and vehement language of the mystic, you may shut the book at once.
ATHERTON. And shut out blessing from your soul. It is not difficult to see, however, where Tauler’s danger lies. There is an excess of negation in his divinity. He will ignore, deny, annihilate almost everything you can name,—bid you be knowledgeless, desireless, motionless,—will enjoin submission to the unknown God (when it is our triumph in Christ that we submit to the Revealed and Known)—and, in short, leaves scarcely anything positive save the mysterious lapse of the soul’s Ground, or Spark, into the Perfect, the Essential One. He seems sometimes to make our very personality a sin, as though the limitations of our finite being were an element in our guilt. The separation of a particular faculty or higher power of the soul which unites with God, while the inferior powers are either absorbed or occupied in the lower sphere, this is the great metaphysical mistake which lies at the root of so many forms of mysticism. With Tauler the work of grace consists too much of extremes—it dehumanizes in order to deify.
WILLOUGHBY. But that, remember, is no fault of Tauler’s especially. He does but follow here the ascetic, superhuman aspiration of a Church which, trying to raise some above humanity, sinks myriads below it.
ATHERTON. Granted. That error does not lessen my love and admiration for the man.
GOWER. Your extracts show, too, that the Nothingness towards which he calls men to strive is no indolent Quietism, nor, as with Eckart, a kind of metaphysical postulate, but in fact a profound spiritual self-abasement and the daily working out of a self-sacrificing Christ-like character.
ATHERTON. Blessed are his contradictions and inconsistencies! Logic cannot always reconcile Tauler with himself—our hearts do.[126]
WILLOUGHBY. Never surely was a theory so negative combined with an action more fervently intense—a positiveness more benign.
GOWER. In his life we understand him,—that is at once the explanation and vindication of what his mysticism means.
ATHERTON. Few, however, of his fellow-mystics rose, so far as Tauler, above the peculiar dangers of mysticism. Even the good layman, Nicholas of Basle, was a man of vision, and assumed a kind of prophecy. Tauler and the Theologia Germanica stand almost alone in rejecting the sensuous element of mysticism—its apparitions, its voices, its celestial phantasmagoria. With many of his friends mysticism became secluded, effeminate, visionary, because uncorrected, as in his case, by benevolent action, by devoted conflict against priestly wrong.
KATE. Tauler, then, was a Protestant in spirit—a genuine forerunner of the Reformation?
ATHERTON. Unquestionably.
MRS. ATHERTON. But what could the common people make of this high ideal he sets before them? Could they be brought heartily to care about that kind of ultra-human perfectness? Beautiful it must have been to hear this eloquent man describe the divine passion of the soul, how—
Love took up the harp of life and smote on all the chords with might, Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, passed in music out of sight,
—but bewildering, rather?
ATHERTON. I am afraid so. Yet there was much they evidently did understand and relish.
GOWER. In fact the Reformers were wanted, with their Bible, with their simpler, homelier teaching—so much less ascetic, so much more human—and with their written word, interpreted more soundly; coming, not to extinguish that inner light, but to enclose, as in a glass, the precious flame, otherwise fitfully blown about by the gusts of circumstance and feeling.
WILLOUGHBY. But none the less let us praise the man who lived so nobly by the light he had—who made human works as nothing, that God might be all—who took the heavenly kingdom from the hands of the priest, and proclaimed it in the heart of every spiritual worshipper.
GOWER. Though Tauler adopts at times the language of Eckart, no one can fail to discern a very different spirit. How much more profound his apprehension of sin—his sense of need; how much more prominent Christ, rescuing and purifying the stricken soul. Tauler lays man in the dust, and keeps him there. Eckart suffers him to expand from Nothing to Infinity. Summarily, I would put the difference thus:—With Eckart the language of Christianity becomes the metaphorical expression for pantheism; with Tauler, phraseology approaching pantheism is the metaphorical expression of a most truly Christian conviction. If the former sins even more in the spirit than in the letter, in the case of the latter the sins of the letter are redeemed by the excellence of the spirit.
Note to page 246.
The passages in the text are from the second Sermon on Fifth Sunday after Trinity, Predigten, ii. pp. 353, &c. The spiritual conflict and desolation which had shaken Tauler’s nature to its depths bears fruit in this profound humility. Self-abasement is the cardinal doctrine of all his sermons; his lowliness of spirit the safeguard of his theology from all dangerous error. The troubles through which he and Suso were made to pass, gave them an antidote to the poison of the current ecclesiastical doctrine. Consciences so stirred were not to be cast into a sleep by the mesmeric passes of a priestly hand. He only who had hurt could heal; they fled from man to God—from means to the End, and so, like the patriarch, their eye saw God, and they repented and abhorred themselves as in dust and ashes. Never after that could they believe in salvation by works, and so they became aliens from the spirit of that Church whose pale retained them to the last.
Tauler and his brethren will ‘escape distinction;‘—not that which is between creature and Creator, or between good and evil—that rather which the Pharisee makes when he says, ‘I am holier than thou.’ It is their very anxiety to escape all assumption of merit which partly vitiates the letter of their theology, and makes them speak as though grace substituted God for man within the renewed nature. They will escape the dry and fruitless distinctions of the schoolman. They will escape the distinction which selfish comfort-worshippers make so broad between ease and hardship. Sorrow and joy, pain and pleasure, are trustfully accepted as alike coming from the hand of love.
Even when Tauler speaks of self-surrender to an ‘unknown Will,’ we must not press his words too far. It is very evident that he who reaches this coveted abandonment is not supposed to have forgotten that gracious character under which God has made Himself known—of which Christ is the manifestation. In casting his care on an unknown Will, Tauler acts on the conviction that he is cared for,—this fact he knows; but precisely what that care may deem best for him he does not know. He surrenders, in true self-distrust, his personal notion of what may be the Divine good pleasure in any particular case. Few lessons were more needed than this in Tauler’s day, when superstition found signs and wonders everywhere, and fanaticism so recklessly identified human wrath and Divine righteousness.
Tauler’s ‘state above grace,’ and ‘transformed condition of the soul, in which God worketh all its works,’ are perhaps little more than injudicious expressions for that more spontaneous and habitual piety characteristic of the established Christian life,—that religion which consists so much more in a pervading spirit of devotion than in professed and special religious acts. He certainly inculcates no proud and self-complacent rejection and depreciation of any means. Rather would the man who learnt Tauler’s doctrine well find all persons, objects, and circumstances, made more or less ‘means of grace’ to him. In a landscape or a fever, an enemy or an accident, his soul would find discipline and blessing, and not in mass and penance and paternoster merely;—for is not God in all things near us, and willing to make everything minister to our spiritual growth? Such teaching was truly reformatory, antagonistic as it was to that excessive value almost everywhere attached in those days to works and sacraments.
So again with Tauler’s exhortation to rise above symbol, image, or figure. He carries it too far, indeed. Such asceticism of the soul is too severe a strain for ordinary humanity. It is unknown to His teaching, who spake as never man spake. Yet there lay in it a most wholesome protest against religious sentimentalism, visionary extravagance, hysterical inoperative emotions,—against the fanciful prettinesses of superstitious ritual and routine.
Tauler’s ‘Nothing,’ or ‘Ground’ of the soul, may be metaphysically a fiction—religiously it indicates the sole seat of inward peace. Only as we put no trust in things earthly,—only as amidst our most strenuous action the heart saith ever, ‘Thy will be done,’—only as we strive to reduce our feverish hopes and fears about temporal enjoyment as nearly as we can to Nothing,—are we calm and brave, whatever may befal. This loving repose of Faith is Eternal Life, as sin is so much present death;—it is a life lived, in harmony with the everlasting, above the restlessness of time;—it is (in Eckart’s phrase, though not in Eckart’s sense) a union with the Allmoving Immobility—the divine serenity of Love Omnipotent, guiding and upholding all without an effort.
Note to page 248.
The above is from the Sermon on the Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity, ii. p. 546. He says in this discourse that the soul has various names, according to the different operations and attributes belonging to it. It is called Anima, or soul; Spirit; and Disposition (gemüth), a marvellous and very lovely thing—for the memory, the understanding, and the will of man are all collected therein. The Disposition hath an objectum above the other powers, and as it follows or forsakes that aim so is it well or ill with the rest of man’s nature. Fourthly, the soul is called mens or mensch (man), and that is the ground which is nameless, and wherein dwells hidden the true image of the Holy Trinity. (Compare Third Serm. on Third Sunday after Trin., ii. p. 305, and Serm. on Eleventh Sunday after Trin., ii. p. 435.) By the synteresis, or synderesis, Tauler appears to mean the native tendency of the soul towards God. With Tauler and the mystics generally this tendency is an original capacity for knowing God immediately. The term is not peculiar to the mystics, but it bears in their writings a signification which non-mystical theologians refuse to admit. The distinction usually made between συντήρησις and συνείδησις is simply this: the former expresses that constitution of our nature whereby we assent at once to the axioms of morality, while the latter denotes that judgment which man passes on himself in conformity with such constitution of his moral nature. The second is related to the first somewhat as recollection is to memory.
On this divine centre or substratum of the soul rests the fundamental doctrine of these mystics. So Hermann of Fritslar says, speaking of—di kraft in der sêle di her heizit sinderisis. In dirre kraft mac inkein krêatûre wirken noch inkein krêatûrlîch bilde, sunder got der wirket dar in âne mittel und âne underlâz. Heiligenleben, p. 187. Thus, he says elsewhere, that the masters speak of two faces of the soul, the one turned toward this world, the other immediately to God. In the latter God doth flow and shine eternally, whether man knoweth it or not. It is, therefore, according to man’s nature as possessed of this divine ground, to seek God, his original; it must be so for ever, and even in hell the suffering there has its source in the hopeless contradiction of this indestructible tendency.
Note to page 251.
This passage is from the Third Serm. on Thirteenth Sun. after Trin., ii. p. 480. The same remarkable combination of inward aspiration and outward love and service is urged with much force and beauty in the Sermon on Fifth Sunday after Trinity, and in that on the Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity, ii. p. 512.
Tauler speaks of this Ground of the soul as that which is inseparable from the Divine nature, and wherein man hath by Grace what God is by nature. Predigten, ii. p. 199. He quotes Proclus as saying that, while man is busied with images, which are beneath us, and clings to such, he cannot possibly return into his Ground or Essence. ‘If thou wilt know by experience that such a Ground truly is, thou must forsake all the manifold and gaze thereon with thine intellectual eye alone. But wouldst thou come nearer yet, turn thine intellectual eyesight therefrom—for even the intellect is beneath thee—and become one with the One—that is, unite thyself with Unity.’ This unity Proclus calls the ‘calm, silent, slumbering, and incomprehensible divine Darkness.’ ‘To think, beloved in the Lord, that a heathen should understand so much and go so far, and we be so behind, may well make us blush for shame. To this our Lord Jesus Christ testifies when he says the kingdom of God is within you. That is, this kingdom is born in the inmost Ground of all, apart from all that the powers of the mind can accomplish.... In this Ground the eternal heavenly Father doth bring forth his only-begotten Son, a hundred thousand times quicker than an instant, according to our apprehension,—ever anew in the light of Eternity, in the glory and unutterable brightness of his own Self. He who would experience this must turn himself inward far away from all working of his outward and inward powers and imaginations—from all that ever cometh from without, and then sink and dissolve himself in the Ground. Then cometh the power of the Father, and calls the man into Himself through his only-begotten Son; and so the Son is born out of the Father and returneth unto the Father, and such a man is born in the Son of the Father, and floweth back with the Son into the Father again, and becomes one with them’ (p. 203, and Schmidt, p. 127). Yet, with all this, Tauler sincerely repudiates any pantheistic confusion of the Divine and human, and is always careful to state that this highest attainment—the vanishing point of Humanity, is the work of Grace. Some of his expressions in describing this union are almost as strong as those of Eckart (Third Serm. on Third Sun. after Trin., ii. p. 310), but his general tone far more lowly, practical, and true.
Note to page 253.
We best ascertain the true meaning of Tauler’s mystical phraseology, and discover the point at which he was desirous that mysticism should arrest its flight, by listening to the rebukes he administers to the unrighteous, pantheistic, or fantastical mystics of the day. A sermon of his on Psalm xci. 5 (Pred. vol. i. p. 228) is of great importance in this respect.
Speaking of such as embrace a religious life, without any true vocation, he points out how, as they follow only their own inclinations, they naturally desire rest, but are satisfied with a merely natural inaction instead of that spiritual calm which is the gift of God. Consequently, while the devout mind (as Gregory saith) cannot tolerate self-seeking, or be content with any such mere negation, these men profess to have attained the elevation of true peace while they have done nothing more than abstain from all imagination and action. Any man, remarks Tauler, very sensibly, may do this, without any especial grace from God. Such persons live in indolence, become self-complacent and full of pride. True love ever longs to love more; the more of God it hath the more it covets. God is never to be found in the pretended quiet of such men, which any Turk or heathen could find in the same way, as easily as they. They are persuaded by the devil that devout exercises and works of charity will only disturb their inward quiet, and do, in fact, disobey and resist God in their self-satisfied delusion.
He next exposes the error of those who undergo great austerities to be thought holy,—suffering for their own glory rather than that of God; and who think their penance and their works give them an extraordinary claim on the Most High. He shows how often they fall into temptation by their wayward and passionate desire after special spiritual manifestations, and by their clamorous importunity for particular bestowments on which their unmortified self-will has been obstinately set. Divine love, he says, offers itself up without reserve to God—seeks His glory alone, and can be satisfied with nothing short of God Himself. Natural love seeks itself in all things, and falls ere long, as Adam did, into mortal sin—into licence, pride, and covetousness.
Then he proceeds to describe an error, ‘yet more dangerous than this,’ as follows:—‘Those who compose this class call themselves God-seeing (Gott schauende) men. You may know them by the natural rest they profess to experience, for they imagine themselves free from sin and immediately united to God. They fancy themselves free from any obligation to obey either divine or human laws, and that they need no longer be diligent in good works. They believe the quiet to which they have devoted themselves so lofty and glorious a thing that they cannot, without sin, suffer themselves to be hindered or disturbed therein. Therefore will they be subject to no man—will work not at all, either inwardly or outwardly, but lie like an idle tool awaiting its master’s hand. They think, if they were to work, God’s operation within them would be hindered; so they sit inactive, and exercise themselves in no good work or virtue. In short, they are resolved to be so absolutely empty and idle that they will not so much as praise and thank God—will not desire or pray for anything—will not know or learn anything. All such things they hold to be mischievous—persuade themselves that they possess already all that can be requested, and that they have the true spiritual poverty because, as they flatter themselves, they live without any will of their own, and have abandoned all choice. As to the laws and ordinances of the Church, they believe that they have not only fulfilled them, but have advanced far beyond that state for which such institutions were designed. Neither God nor man (they say) can give or take from them aught, because they suffered all that was to be suffered till they passed beyond the stage of trial and virtue, and finally attained this absolute Quiet wherein they now abide. For they declare expressly that the great difficulty is not so much to attain to virtue as to overcome or surpass it, and to arrive at the said Quiet and absolute emptiness of all virtue. Accordingly they will be completely free and submit to no man,—not to pope or bishops, or to the priests and teachers set over them; and if they sometimes profess to obey, they do not in reality yield any obedience either in spirit or in practice. And just as they say they will be free from all laws and ordinances of the Holy Church, so they affirm, without a blush, that as long as a man is diligently striving to attain unto the Christian virtues he is not yet properly perfect, and knows not yet what spiritual poverty and spiritual freedom or emptiness really are. Moreover, they believe that they are exalted above the merits of all men and angels; that they can neither add to their virtues nor be guilty of any fault or sin, because (as they fancy) they live without will, have brought their spirit into Quiet and Emptiness, are in themselves nothing, and veritably united unto God. They believe, likewise, madly enough, that they may fulfil all the desires of their nature without any sin, because, forsooth, they have arrived at perfect innocence, and for them there is no law. In short, that the Quiet and freedom of their spirit may not be hindered, they do whatsoever they list. They care not a whit for fasts, festivals, or ordinances, but what they do is done on account of others, they themselves having no conscience about any such matters.’
A fourth class brought under review are less arrogant than these enthusiasts, and will admit that they may progress in grace. They are ‘God-suffering (Gottesleidende) men’—in fact, mystics of the intransitive theopathetic species par excellence. Their relation toward God is to be one of complete passivity, and all their doings (of whatever character) are His work. Tauler acknowledges duly the humility and patient endurance of these men. Their fault lies, he says, in their belief that every inward inclination they feel is the movement of the Holy Ghost, and this even when such inclinations are sinful, ‘whereas the Holy Spirit worketh in no man that which is useless or contrary to the life of Christ and Holy Scriptures.’ In their constancy as well as in their doctrine they nearly resemble the early Quakers. They would sooner die, says Tauler, than swerve a hair’s breadth from their opinion or their purpose.
Tauler’s reprobation of these forms of mysticism—which his own expressions, too literally understood, might appear sometimes to approach—shows clearly that he was himself practically free from such extremes. His concluding remarks enforce very justly the necessity of good works as an evidence to our fellow-men of our sincerity. He dwells on the indispensableness of religious ordinance, worship, and thanksgiving, as at once the expression and the nourishment of devout affection. He precludes at the same time, in the strongest language, all merit in the creature before God. ‘I say that if it were possible for our spiritual nature to be deprived of all its modes of operation, and to be as absolutely inactive as it was when it lay yet uncreated in the abyss of the Divine Nature,—if it were possible for the rational creature to be still as it was when in God prior to creation,—neither the one nor the other could even thus merit anything, yea, not now any more than then; it would have no more holiness or blessedness in itself than a block or a stone’ (p. 243). He points to the example of Christ as the best refutation of this false doctrine of Quiet, saying, ‘He continued without ceasing to love and desire, to bless and praise his Heavenly Father, and though his soul was joined to and blessed in the Divine Essence, yet he never arrived at the Emptiness of which these men talk.’
Footnote 117:
The substance of the foregoing narrative concerning Tauler and the laymen will be found in the Lebenshistorie des ehrwürdigen Doctors Joh. Tauler. See also C. Schmidt’s account of Nicholas in his monograph on Tauler (p. 28), and a characteristic letter by Nicholas concerning visions of coming judgment given in the Appendix.
Footnote 118:
See Note, p. 254.
Footnote 119:
See first Note, p. 256.
Footnote 120:
Serm. on Eleventh Sun. after Trinity, ii. p. 436.
Footnote 121:
Serm. on Eleventh Sun. after Trin., ii. pp. 442, 443. Also, Predigten, vol. iii. p. 19, and Schmidt, p. 125.
Footnote 122:
Third Serm. on Thirteenth Sun. after Trin., ii. pp. 474-478.
Footnote 123:
First Serm. on Thirteenth Sun. after Trin., ii. p. 459.
Footnote 124:
See second Note, p. 256.
Footnote 125:
Twenty-first Sun. after Trin., ii. p. 584.
Footnote 126:
See Note, p. 257.
Chapter VI
Keep all thy native good, and naturalize All foreign of that name; but scorn their ill. Embrace their activeness, not vanities; Who follows all things forfeiteth his will.
HERBERT.
The day after the conversation recorded in the last chapter, Atherton was called to a distance from Summerford on legal business. Before leaving, he had some further talk with Willoughby on several topics suggested by what had passed on the previous day. The lawyers did not release him so promptly as he had expected, and as he had taken a copy of Tauler’s sermons with him, and had time at his disposal, he wrote more than once to his friend in the course of the next week. This chapter will consist of extracts from the letters thus written, and will form a fitting supplement to matters dealt with in several preceding conversations.
* * * * *
I scarcely need remind you that there are great practical advantages to be derived from a course of mental travel among forms of Christian belief in many respects foreign to our own. Nothing so surely arrests our spiritual growth as a self-complacent, insular disdain of other men’s faith. To displace this pride by brotherly-kindness—to seek out lovingly the points whereon we agree with others, and not censoriously those wherein we differ, is to live in a clearer light, as well as a larger love. Then again, the powers of observation and of discrimination called into exercise by such journeyings among brethren of another speech will greatly benefit us. The very endeavour to distinguish between the good in others which we should naturalize and assimilate for ourselves, and the error which could be profitable neither for them nor for us, is most wholesome. Such studies lead us to take account of what we already have and believe; so that we come to know ourselves better by the comparison both in what we possess and in what we lack. Every section of the Church of Christ desires to include in its survey the whole fabric of revealed truth. What party will admit to an antagonist that its study of the divine edifice has been confined to a single aspect? And yet the fact is beyond all candid questioning that each group of worshippers, with whatever honesty of intention they may have started to go round about the building, and view it fairly from every side, have, notwithstanding, their favourite point of contemplation—one spot where they are most frequently to be found, intent on that side of truth to which, from temperament or circumstance, they are most attached. There is both good and evil in this inevitable partiality; but the good will be most happily realized, and the evil most successfully avoided, if we have liberality enough now and then to take each other’s places. It is possible, in this way, both to qualify and to enrich our own impressions from the observations of those who have given themselves, with all the intensity of passion, to some aspect of truth, which, while it may be the opposite, is yet the complement of the view preferred by ourselves. How often, as the result of an acquaintance made with some such diverse (and yet kindred) species of devotion, are we led to ask ourselves—‘Is there not a fuller meaning than I had supposed in this passage, or that other, of Holy Writ? Have I not, because certain passages have been abused, allowed myself unconsciously to slight or to defraud them of their due significance?’ And, in this way both those parts of Scripture we have most deeply studied, and those which we have but touched with our plummet, may disclose their blessing to us, and fill higher the measure of our joy.
Nor is this all. We gather both instruction and comfort from the spiritual history of others who have passed through the same darkness, doubt, or sorrow, which we ourselves have either encountered, or may be on our way to meet. How glad was Christian when he heard the voice of a fellow-pilgrim in the Valley of the Shadow of Death! And when suns are bright, and the waters calm, and the desired wind blows steadily, he is the wise mariner who employs his leisure in studying the records of others who have made voyage already in those latitudes; who learns from their expedients, their mishaps, or their deliverances, how best to weather the storms, or to escape the quicksands that await him. Of all who have sailed the seas of life, no men have experienced a range of vicissitude more wide than has fallen to the lot of some among the mystics. Theirs have been the dazzling heights; the lowest depths also have been theirs. Their solitary vessels have been swept into the frozen North, where the ice of a great despair has closed about them like the ribs of death, and through a long soul’s winter they have lain hidden in cold and darkness, as some belated swallow in the cleft of a rock. It has been theirs, too, to encounter the perilous fervours of that zone where never cooling cloud appears to veil insufferable radiance, and to glow beneath those glories with an ardour so intense that some men, in their pity, have essayed to heal it as a fever, and others, in their wrath, to chain it as a frenzy. Now afflicted, tossed with tempest, and not comforted, ere long there hath been built for them at once a palace and a place of rest; their foundations have been laid with sapphires, their windows have been made of agates, and their gates of carbuncles, and all their borders of pleasant stones.
A place of rest! Yes, in that one word REST lies all the longing of the mystic. Every creature in heaven above, and in the earth beneath, saith Master Eckart, all things in the height and all things in the depth, have one yearning, one ceaseless, unfathomable desire, one voice of aspiration: it is for rest; and again, for rest; and ever, till the end of time, for rest! The mystics have constituted themselves the interpreters of these sighs and groans of the travailing creation; they are the hierophants to gather, and express, and offer them to heaven; they are the teachers to weary, weeping men of the way whereby they may attain, even on this side the grave, a serenity like that of heaven. What the halcyon of fable is among the birds, that are the mystics among their kind. They essay to build them a marvellous nest, which not only floats upon the waves of life, but has the property of charming those waves to a glassy stillness, so that in mid-winter, and the very heart of storms, their souls enjoy, for a season, what the ancients called ‘the halcyon days,’—that wondrous week of calm ordained for the favoured bird when the year is roughest. ’Tis pity, murmurs old Montaigne, that more information hath not come down to us concerning the construction of these nests. Tradition has it, that the halcyon first of all fashions the said nest by interlacing the bones of some fish. When it is put together she takes it, like a boat ready for launching, and lays it on the beach: the waves come up: they lift it: they let it fall: they toss it gently among the rocks and pebbles; what is faultily made their play breaks, or makes to gape, so that the bird discovers the weak places, and what parts must be more duly finished; what is well knit together already, their strokes only season and confirm. Now when we read the lives of the mystics—each of whom has a method, more or less his own, of weaving such a nest, in other words, his Theory and Practice of Quietude—we see the structure on trial. Experience, with its buffeting, tests each man’s method for the attainment of Rest. If we watch carefully, we shall see that some things in the doctrine of many of them break away under trial, while others are rendered only more compact and buoyant thereby. The examination of the appliances and the processes adopted by these searchers after the Divine Stillness, ought to be very helpful to ourselves. As far as we have their history before us, we can try them by their fruits. We ask, in the case of one man, by what divine art was it that his ark was so skilfully framed as to out-ride those deluges of trouble as though they had been the waters of some windless mere? We ask, in the case of another, by what fault came it in the structure of his sailing nest, that the waters entered, and he sank, or seemed to sink, finding not the rest of soul he sought, but the vexation of soul he fled? We ask, in the several most signal examples of the class, how far did their mysticism help them to realize true manhood—make them strong to bear and strong to do? How far did it tend, or did it not tend, towards the complete development and consecration of their nature?
To derive from such inquiries their full benefit, two qualifications are indispensable:—the judgment must be clear, the sympathies must be warm. The inquirer must retain self-possession enough not to be too readily fascinated, or too soon offended, by certain strange and startling forms of expression; he must not suppose, that because, for a long time, the mystics have been unduly depreciated, it is wisdom now to cover them with thoughtless and indiscriminate praise. He must not suppose that the mystics are an exception to the ordinary limitations of mortals—that the glorious intensity of some among them was realized without any diminution of breadth, and that their view embraced, with equal fondness and with equal insight, every quarter in the heaven of truth. And, on the other hand, let him beware how he seeks to understand these men without fellow-feeling and without love. The weak and volatile nature is smitten, on a first interview with the mystics, with a rage for mysticism—is for turning mystic straightway, and is out of patience, for six weeks, with every other form of Christianity. The cold and proud nature scorns their ardour as a phantasy, and (to its own grievous injury) casts out the warmth they bring. The loving nature and the wise says not, ‘I will be blind to their errors,’ but, ‘I will always look at those errors in the light of their excellences.’
‘The critic of Tauler no man has a right to become, who has not first ascertained that he is a better man than Tauler.’[127] What are we to understand by these words? If such an assertion be true at all, it cannot be true for Tauler only. Would Mr. Kingsley say that no man has a right to become the critic of Augustine, of Luther, of Calvin, of Wesley, of George Fox, who has not first ascertained himself a better man? Ought every biographer, who is not a mere blind eulogist, to start with the presumption that he is a better man than he of whom he writes? Ought the historian, who forms his critical estimate of the qualities possessed or lacking—of the service rendered in this direction or in that, by the worthies of the Church, to suppose himself superior to each in turn? As in art he who estimates the worth of a poem is not required to write better poetry, so in morals, he who estimates the worth of a character is not required to display superior virtue. Or is it the opinions, rather than the character of Tauler, which only a better man than Tauler may criticise? Any one who, on being made acquainted with certain opinions, differs from them, is supposed to have criticised them. In as far as Mr. Kingsley may not agree with some of the well-known opinions of Augustine, Luther, or Fox, so far has he ventured to be their critic; yet he does not suppose himself a better man. Why should Tauler alone be thus fenced about with a statement that virtually prohibits criticism? Such advocacy harms a client’s cause. People are apt to suspect that their scrutiny is feared, when such pains are taken to keep them at a distance. So confident am I that the dross in Tauler is as nothing beside the gold, that I would invite, rather than deter, the most candid and sober exercise of the critical judgment with regard to him. Perhaps Mr. Kingsley may be, in reality, much of the same mind; if so, he should not write as though he thought quite otherwise.
I cannot suppose that Mr. Kingsley would seriously maintain that the mystic ought, from the very nature of his claims, to be exempt from that scrutiny to which history continually subjects the fathers, the schoolmen, and the reformers. Yet there are those who would have us hearken to every voice professing to speak from the ‘everlasting deeps’ with a reverence little more discriminating than that which the Mussulman renders to idiocy and madness. Curiously ignorant concerning the very objects of their praise, these admirers would seem to suppose that every mystic repudiates the exercise of understanding, is indifferent to the use of language, and invariably dissolves religious opinion in religious sentiment. These eulogists of mysticism imagine that they have found in the virtues of a Tauler, a platform whence to play off with advantage a volley of commonplaces against ‘literalisms,’ ‘formulas,’ ‘creeds,’ ‘shams,’ and the like. It is high time to rescue the mystics from a foolish adoration, which the best among them would be the most eager to repudiate. So far from forbidding men to try the spirits, the most celebrated among the mystics lead the way in such examination. It is the mystics themselves who warn us so seriously that mysticism comprises an evil tendency as well as a good, and has had its utterances from the nether realms as well as from the upper. The great mystics of the fourteenth century would have been indignant with any man who had confounded, in a blind admiration, their mysticism with the self-deifying antinomianism that prevailed among the ‘Brethren of the Free Spirit.’ In many of Tauler’s sermons, in the Theologia Germanica, in the writings of Suso and of Ruysbroek, care is taken to mark, with all the accuracy possible to language, the distinction between the False Light and the True. There is not a confession of faith in the world which surpasses in clearness and precision the propositions in Fénelon’s Maxims of the Saints, whereby it is proposed to separate the genuine Quietism from the spurious. The mystic Gerson criticises the mystic Ruysbroek. Nicholas of Strasburg criticises Hildegard and Joachim; Behmen criticises Stiefel and Meth; Henry More criticises the followers of George Fox. So far are such mystics from that indifference to the true or the false in doctrine, which constitutes, with some, their highest claim to our admiration. It is absurd to praise men for a folly: it is still more absurd to praise them for a folly of which they are guiltless.
But here I can suppose some one ready to interrupt me with some such question as this:—Is it not almost inevitable, when the significance of the word mysticism is so broad and ill-defined, that those who speak of it should misunderstand or be misunderstood? What two persons can you meet with who will define the term in precisely the same way? The word is in itself a not less general and extensive one than revolution, for instance. No one speaks of revolution in the abstract as good or evil. Every one calls this or that revolution glorious or disastrous, as they conceive it to have overthrown a good government or a bad. But the best among such movements are not without their evil, nor are the worst perhaps absolutely destitute of good. Does not mysticism, in like manner, sometimes rise up against a monstrous tyranny, and sometimes violate a befitting order? Has there been no excess in its triumphs? Has there been no excuse for its offences? See, then, what opposites are coupled under this single word! Is it not mainly for this reason that you hear one man condemning and another extolling mysticism? He who applauds is thinking of such mystics as Bernard, or Tauler, or Fénelon; he who denounces is thinking of the Carlstadts, the Münzers, or the Southcotes. He who applauds is thinking of men who vanquished formalism; he who denounces is thinking of men who trampled on reason or morality. Has not each his right? Are not your differences mere disputes about nomenclature, and can you ever come to understanding while you employ so ambiguous a term?
So it seems to me that Common Sense might speak, and very forcibly, too. It is indeed to be regretted that we have not two words—one to express what may be termed the true, and another for the false, mysticism. But regret is useless. Rather let us endeavour to show how we may employ, least disadvantageously, a term so controverted and unfortunate.
On one single question the whole matter turns:—Are we or are we not to call St. John a mystic? If we say ‘Yes,’ then of course all those are mystics whose teaching is largely impregnated with the aspect of Christianity presented in the writings of that Apostle. Then he is a mystic who loves to dwell on the union of Christians with Christ; on His abode in us, and our abiding in Him; on the identity of our knowledge of God with our likeness to Him; of truth with love; of light with life; on the witness which he who believes hath within himself. Then he is a mystic who regards the Eternal Word as the source of whatever light and truth has anywhere been found among men, and who conceives of the Church of Christ as the progressive realization of the Redeemer’s prayer—‘I in them and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one.’
Now, I think that, in the strict use of language, the word mystic should be applied, not to St. John, but to those who more or less exaggerate his doctrine concerning spiritual influence and life in God. The Scripture is the standard whereby alone the spirits are to be tried, in all candour and charity. To those who repudiate this authority I do not write. But if any one, understanding by ‘mystics’ simply those who give full force to the language of St. John, shall praise them, however highly, I am perfectly at one with him in his admiration—my only difference is about the use of the mere word.
So much then is settled. It will be obvious, however, that the historian of mysticism will scarcely find it possible always to confine his use of the word to the exaggeration just specified. For he must take up, one after the other, all those personages who have at any time been reckoned by general consent among the mystics. But an age which has relapsed into coldness will inevitably stigmatize as a mystic any man whose devout ardour rises a few degrees above its own frigidity. It is as certain as anything can be that, if a German had appeared among the Lutherans of the seventeenth century, teaching in his own way just as St. John taught, without one particle of exaggeration, he would have been denounced as a mystic from a hundred pulpits. Hence it has come to pass that some men, who have figured largely as mystics in the history of the Church, have in them but a comparatively small measure of that subjective excess which we would call mysticism, in the strict sense. Tauler is one of these.
But it may be said,—You talk of testing these men by Scripture; yet you can only mean, by your interpretation of Scripture. How are you sure that your interpretation is better than theirs? Such an objection lies equally against every appeal to Scripture. For we all appeal to what we suppose to be the meaning of the sacred writers, ascertained according to the best exercise of our judgment. The science of hermeneutics has established certain general principles of interpretation which are acknowledged by scholars of every creed. But if any one now-a-days resolves the New Testament into allegory, and supposes, for example, that by the five husbands of the woman of Samaria we are to understand the five Senses, I cannot of course try my cause with him before a Court where he makes the verdict what he pleases. I can only leave him with his riddles, and request him to carry my compliments to the Sphinx.
There is, then, a twofold test by which Tauler and other mystics are to be judged, if their teaching is to profit rather than to confuse and mislead us. We may compare the purport of his discourses with the general tenor and bearing of the New Testament, as far as we can apprehend it as a whole. Are some unquestionable truths but rarely touched, and others pushed to their utmost limits? If we think we see a certain disproportionateness—that there is a joyousness, and freedom, and warm humanity about the portraiture of Christian life in St. John, which we lack in his very sincere disciple, the ascetic and the mystic,—we trifle with truth if we do not say so. The other test is the historical. Was a certain mystic on the side of the truth and onwardness of his time, or against it? Did he rise above its worst errors, or did he aggravate them? And here Tauler stands with a glory round his head. Whatever exaggeration there may have been of the inward as against the outward, it was scarcely more than was inevitable in the case of a man who had to maintain the inmost verities of Christian life amidst almost universal formality and death.
What then, it may be asked, is that exaggeration of which you speak? For hitherto your account of mysticism proper is only negative—it is a something which St. John does not teach.
I will give a few examples. If a man should imagine that his inward light superseded outward testimony, so that the words of Christ and his inspired disciples became superfluous to him; if he regarded indifference to the facts and recorded truths of the New Testament as a sign of eminent spirituality, such a man would, I think, abuse the teaching of St. John concerning the unction from the Holy One. The same Apostle who declares that he who hateth his brother abideth in darkness, refuses to bid God speed to him who brings not the doctrine of Christ, and inseparably associates the ‘anointing’ which his children had received, with their abiding in the truth they had heard from his lips. (1 John ii. 24.) If, again, any man were to pretend that a special revelation exempted him from the ordinary obligations of morality—that his union with God was such as to render sinless in him what would have been sin in others, he would be condemned, and not supported, by conscience and Scripture. Neither could that mystic appeal to St. John who should teach, instead of the discipline and consecration of our faculties, such an abandonment of their use, in favour of supernatural gifts, as should be a premium on his indolence, and a discouragement to all faithful endeavour to ascertain the sense of Holy Writ. Nor, again, does any mystic who disdains hope as a meanness abide by the teaching of St. John. For the Apostle regards the hope of heaven as eminently conducive to our fitness for it, and says—‘He that hath this hope purifieth himself.’ The mystical ascetic who refuses to pray for particular or temporal bestowments is wrong in his practice, however elevated in his motive. For St. John can write,—‘I pray (εὔχομαι) above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.’ (3 John 2.) Nowhere does that Apostle prescribe absolute indifference, or absolute passivity. Lastly, John is not so afraid of anthropomorphism as to discourage or refine away the symbol and the figure. It is evident that he regards the fatherhoods and the brotherhoods of this earthly life, not as fleshly ideas which profane things spiritual, but as adumbrations, most fit (however inadequate) to set forth the divine relationship to us,—yea, farther, as facts which would never have had place in time, had not something like their archetype from the first existed in that Eternal Mind who has made man in his own image.
I remember hearing of an old lady, a member of the Society of Friends, who interrupted a conversation in which the name of Jerusalem had been mentioned, by the exclamation, ‘Jerusalem—umph—Jerusalem—it has not yet been revealed to me that there is such a place!’ Now I do not say that our friend the Quakeress might not have been an excellent Christian; but I do venture to think her far gone in mysticism. Her remark puts the idea of mysticism, in its barest and most extreme form, as a tendency which issues in refusing to acknowledge the external world as a source of religious knowledge in any way, and will have every man’s Christianity evolved de novo from the depths of his own consciousness, as though no apostle had ever preached, or evangelist written, or any Christian existed beside himself. It is not, therefore, the holding the doctrine of an inward light that makes a mystic, but the holding it in such a way as to ignore or to diminish the proper province of the outer.
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I should certainly like to see some one settle for us definitively the questions which lie at the root of mysticism, such as these, for example:—Is there an immediate influence exerted by the Spirit of God on the spirit of man? And if so, under what conditions? What are those limits which, once passed, land us in mysticism? But the task, I fear, is beyond all hope of satisfactory execution. Every term used would have to be defined, and the words of the definition defined again, and every definition and subdefinition would be open to some doubt or some objection. Marco Polo tells us that the people of Kin-sai throw into the fire, at funerals, pieces of painted paper, representing servants, horses, and furniture; believing that the deceased will enjoy the use of realities corresponding to these in the other world. But, alas, for our poor definition-cutter, with his logical scissors! Where shall he find a faith like that of the Kin-sai people, to believe that there actually exist, in the realm of spirit and the world of ideas, realities answering to the terms he fashions? No; these questions admit but of approximate solution. The varieties of spiritual experience defy all but a few broad and simple rules. Hath not One told us that the influence in which we believe is as the wind, which bloweth as it listeth, and we cannot tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth?
For my own part, I firmly believe that there is an immediate influence exerted by the Divine Spirit. But is this immediate influence above sense and consciousness, or not? Yes, answers many a mystic. But, if it be above consciousness, how can any man be conscious of it? And what then becomes of the doctrine—so vital with a large class of mystics—of perceptible guidance, of inward impulses and monitions? Speaking with due caution on a matter so mysterious, I should say that, while the indwelling and guidance of the Spirit is most real, such influence is not ordinarily perceptible. It would be presumption to deny that in certain cases of especial need (as in some times of persecution, sore distress, or desolation) manifestations of a special (though not miraculous) nature may have been vouchsafed.
With regard to the witness of the Spirit, I think that the language of St. John warrants us in believing that the divine life within us is its own evidence. Certain states of physical or mental distemper being excepted, in so far as our life in Christ is vigorously and watchfully maintained, in so far will the witness of the Spirit with our spirit give us direct conviction of our sonship. How frequently, throughout his first Epistle, does the Apostle repeat that favourite word, οἴδαμεν, ‘we know!’
Again, as to the presence of Christ in the soul. Says the Lutheran Church, ‘We condemn those who say that the gifts of God only, and not God himself, dwell in the believer.’ I have no wish to echo any such condemnation, but I believe that the Lutheran affirmation is the doctrine of Scripture. Both Christ himself and the Spirit of Christ are said to dwell within the children of God. We may perhaps regard the indwelling of Christ as the abiding source or principle of the new life, and the indwelling of the Spirit as that progressive operation which forms in us the likeness to Christ. The former is vitality itself; the latter has its degrees, as we grow in holiness.
Once more, as to passivity. If we really believe in spiritual guidance, we shall agree with those mystics who bid us abstain from any self-willed guiding of ourselves. When a good man has laid self totally aside that he may follow only the leading of the Spirit, is it not essential to any practical belief in Divine direction that he should consider what then appears to him as right or wrong to be really such, in his case, according to the mind of the Spirit? Yet to say thus much is not to admit that the influences of the Spirit are ordinarily perceptible. The motion of a leaf may indicate the direction of a current of air; it does not render the air visible. The mystic who has gathered up his soul in a still expectancy, perceives at last a certain dominant thought among his thoughts. He is determined, in one direction or another. But what he has perceived is still one of his own thoughts in motion, not the hand of the Divine Mover. Here, however, some mystics would say, ‘You beg the question. What we perceive is a something quite separate from ourselves—in fact, the impelling Spirit.’ In this case the matter is beyond discussion. I can only say, my consciousness is different. I shall be to him a rationalist, as he to me a mystic; but let us not dispute.
Obviously, the great difficulty is to be quite sure that we have so annihilated every passion, preference or foregone conclusion as to make it certain that only powers from heaven can be working on the waters of the soul. That ripple, which has just stirred the stillness! Was it a breath of earthly air? Was it the leaping of a desire from within us? Or was it indeed the first touch, as it were, of some angelic hand, commissioned to trouble the pool with healing from on high? If such questions are hard to answer, when judging ourselves, how much more so when judging each other!
When we desire to determine difficult duty by aid of the illumination promised, self must be abandoned. But what self? Assuredly, selfishness and self-will. Not the exercise of those powers of observation and judgment which God has given us for this very purpose. A divine light is promised, not to supersede, but to illuminate our understanding. Greatly would that man err who should declare those things only to be his duty to which he had been specially ‘drawn,’ or ‘moved,’ as the Friends would term it. What can be conceived more snug and comfortable, in one sense, and more despicable, in another, than the easy, selfish life which such a man might lead, under pretence of eminent spirituality? Refusing to read and meditate on the recorded example of Christ’s life—for that is a mere externalism—he awaits inertly the development of an inward Christ. As he takes care not to expose himself to inducements to unpleasant duty—to any outward teachings calculated to awaken his conscience and elevate his standard of obligation—that conscience remains sluggish, that standard low. He is honest, respectable, sober, we will say. His inward voice does not as yet urge him to anything beyond this. Others, it is true, exhaust themselves in endeavours to benefit the souls and bodies of men. They are right (he says), for so their inward Christ teaches them. He is right (he says), for so does not his inward Christ teach him. It is to be hoped that a type of mysticism so ignoble as this can furnish but few specimens. Yet such is the logical issue of some of the extravagant language we occasionally hear concerning the bondage of the letter and the freedom of the spirit. When the letter means what God chooses, and the spirit what we choose, Self is sure to exclaim, ‘The letter killeth.’ If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!
Such, then, in imperfect outline, is what I hold to be true on this question concerning the reality and extent of the Spirit’s influence. As there are two worlds—the seen and the unseen—so have there been ever two revelations—an inward and an outward—reciprocally calling forth and supplementing each other. To undervalue the outward manifestation of God, in nature, in providence, in revelation, because it is outward—because it is vain without the inward manifestation of God in the conscience and by the Spirit, is the great error of mysticism. Hence it has often disdained means because they are not—what they were never meant to be—the end. An ultra-refinement of spirituality has rejected, as carnal and unclean, what God has commended to men as wholesome and helpful. It is not wise to refuse to employ our feet because they are not wings.
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But it is not mysticism to believe in a world of higher realities, which are, and ever will be, beyond sight and sense; for heaven itself will not abrogate manifestation, but substitute a more adequate manifestation for a less. What thoughtful Christian man supposes that in any heaven of heavens, any number of millenniums hence, the Wisdom, Power, or Goodness of God will become manifest to him, as so many visible entities, with form, and hue, and motion? It is not mysticism to believe that the uncreated underlies all created good. Augustine will not be suspected of pantheism; and it is Augustine who says—‘From a good man, or a good angel, take away angel, take away man—and you find God.’ We may be realists (as opposed to the nominalist) without being mystics. For the surmise of Plato, that the world of Appearance subsisted in and by a higher world of Divine Thoughts is confirmed (while it is transcended) by Christianity, when it tells us of that Divine Subsistence, that Eternal Word, by whom and in whom, all things consist, and without whom was not anything made that is made. And herein lies that real, though often exaggerated, affinity between Platonism and Christianity, which a long succession of mystics have laboured so lovingly to trace out and to develop. In the second and third centuries, in the fourteenth, and in the seventeenth; in the Christian school at Alexandria, in the pulpits of the Rhineland, at Bemerton, and at Cambridge, Plato has been the ‘Attic Moses’ of the Clements and the Taulers, the Norrises and the Mores.
But when mysticism, in the person of Plotinus, declares all thought essentially one, and refuses to Ideas any existence external to our own minds, it has become pantheistic. So, also, when the Oriental mystic tells us that our consciousness of not being infinite is a delusion (maya) to be escaped by relapsing ecstatically into the universal Life. Still more dangerous does such mysticism become when it goes a step farther and says—That sense of sin which troubles you is a delusion also; it is the infirmity of your condition in this phantom world to suppose that right is different from wrong. Shake off that dream of personality, and you will see that good and evil are identical in the Absolute.
In considering the German mysticism of the fourteenth century it is natural to inquire, first of all, how far it manifests any advance beyond that of preceding periods. An examination of its leading principles will show that its appearance marks an epoch of no mean moment in the history of philosophy. These monks of the Rhineland were the first to break away from a long-cherished mode of thought, and to substitute a new and profounder view of the relations subsisting between God and the universe. Their memorable step of progress is briefly indicated by saying that they substituted the idea of the immanence of God in the world for the idea of the emanation of the world from God. These two ideas have given rise to two different forms of pantheism; but they are neither of them necessarily pantheistic. To view rightly the relationship of God to the universe it is requisite to regard Him as both above it and within it. So Revelation taught the ancient Hebrews to view their great ‘I am.’ On the one hand, He had His dwelling in the heavens, and humbled Himself to behold the affairs of men; on the other, He was represented as having beset man behind and before, as giving life to all creatures by the sending forth of His breath, as giving to man understanding by His inspiration, and as dwelling, in an especial sense, with the humble and the contrite. But philosophy, and mysticism, frequently its purest aspiration, have not always been able to embrace fully and together these two conceptions of transcendence and of immanence. We find, accordingly, that from the days of Dionysius Areopagita down to the fourteenth century, the emanation theory, in one form or another, is dominant. The daring originality of John Scotus could not escape from its control. It is elaborately depicted in Dante’s Paradiso. The doctrine of immanence found first utterance with the Dominican Eckart; not in timid hints, but intrepid, reckless, sounding blasphemous. What was false in Eckart’s teaching died out after a while; what was true, animated his brother mystics, transmigrated eventually into the mind of Luther, and did not die.
To render more intelligible the position of the German mystics it will be necessary to enter into some farther explanation of the two theories in question. The theory of emanation supposes the universe to descend in successive, widening circles of being, from the Supreme—from some such ‘trinal, individual’ Light of lights, as Dante seemed to see in his Vision. In the highest, narrowest, and most rapid orbits, sing and shine the refulgent rows of Cherubim and Seraphim and Thrones. Next these, in wider sweep, the Dominations, Virtues, Powers. Below these, Princedoms, Archangels, Angels, gaze adoring upwards. Of these hierarchies the lowest occupy the largest circle. Beneath their lowest begins our highest sphere—the empyrean, enfolding within its lesser and still lesser spheres, till we reach the centre—‘that dim spot which men call earth.’ Through the hierarchies of heaven, and the corresponding hierarchies of the church, the grace of God is transmitted, stage by stage, each order in its turn receiving from that above, imparting to that below. This descent of divine influence from the highest point to the lowest is designed to effect a similar ascent of the soul from the lowest to the highest. Of such a theory John Scotus Erigena is the most philosophical exponent. With him the restitution of all things consists in their resolution into their ideal sources (causæ primordiales). Man and nature are redeemed in proportion as they pass from the actual up to the ideal; for in his system, the actual is not so much the realization of the ideal as a fall from it. So, in the spirit of this theory, the mounting soul, when it anticipates in imagination the redemption of the travailing universe, will extract from music the very essence of its sweetness, and refine that again (far above all delight of sense) into the primal idea of an Eternal Harmony. So likewise, all form and colour—the grace of flowers, the majesty of mountains, the might of seas, the red of evening or of morning clouds, the lustre of precious stones and gold in the gleaming heart of mines—all will be concentrated and subtilized into an abstract principle of Beauty, and a hueless original of Light. All the affinities of things, and instincts of creatures, and human speech and mirth, and household endearment, he will sublimate into abstract Wisdom, Joy, or Love, and sink these abstractions again into some crystal sea of the third heaven, that they may have existence only in their fount and source—the superessential One.
Very different is the doctrine of Immanence, as it appears in the Theologia Germanica, in Eckart, in Jacob Behmen, and afterwards in some forms of modern speculation. The emanation theory supposes a radiation from above; the theory of immanence, a self-development, or manifestation of God from within. A geometrician would declare the pyramid the symbol of the one, the sphere the symbol of the other. The former conception places a long scale of degrees between the heavenly and the earthly: the latter tends to abolish all gradation, and all distinction. The former is successive; the latter, immediate, simultaneous. A chemist might call the former the sublimate, the latter the diluent, of the Actual. The theory of immanence declares God everywhere present with all His power—will realize heaven or hell in the present moment—denies that God is nearer on the other side the grave than this—equalizes all external states—breaks down all steps, all partitions—will have man at once escape from all that is not God, and so know and find only God everywhere. What are all those contrasts that make warp and woof in the web of time; what are riches and poverty, health and sickness; all the harms and horrors of life, and all its joy and peace,—what past and future, sacred and secular, far and near? Are they not the mere raiment wherewith our narrow human thought clothes the Ever-present, Ever-living One? Phantoms, and utter nothing—all of them! The one sole reality is even this—that God through Christ does assume flesh in every Christian man; abolishes inwardly his creature self, and absorbs it into the eternal stillness of His own ‘all-moving Immobility.’ So, though the storms of life may beat, or its suns may shine upon his lower nature, his true (or uncreated) self is hidden in God, and sits already in the heavenly places. Thus, while the Greek Dionysius bids a man retire into himself, because there he will find the foot of that ladder of hierarchies which stretches up to heaven; the Germans bid man retire into himself because, in the depths of his being, God speaks immediately to him, and will enter and fill his nature if he makes Him room.
In spite of some startling expressions (not perhaps unnatural on the first possession of men by so vast a truth), the advance of the German mysticism on that of Dionysius or Erigena is conspicuous. The Greek regards man as in need only of a certain illumination. The Celt saves him by a transformation from the physical into the metaphysical. But the Teuton, holding fast the great contrasts of life and death, sin and grace, declares an entire revolution of will—a totally new principle of life essential. It is true that the German mystics dwell so much on the bringing forth of the Son in all Christians now, that they seem to relegate to a distant and merely preliminary position the historical incarnation of the Son of God. But this great fact is always implied, though less frequently expressed. And we must remember how far the Church of Rome had really banished the Saviour from human sympathies, by absorbing to the extent she did, his humanity in his divinity. Christ was by her brought really near to men only in the magical transformation of the Sacrament, and was no true Mediator. The want of human sympathy in their ideal of Him, forced them to have recourse to the maternal love of the Virgin, and the intercession of the saints. Unspeakable was the gain, then, when the Saviour was brought from that awful distance to become the guest of the soul, and vitally to animate, here on earth, the members of his mystical body. Even Eckart, be it remembered, does not say, with the Hegelian, that every man is divine already, and the divinity of Christ not different in kind from our own. He attributes a real divineness only to a certain class of men—those who by grace are transformed from the created to the uncreated nature. It is not easy to determine the true place of Christ in his pantheistic system; but this much appears certain, that Christ and not man—grace, and not nature, is the source of that incomprehensible deification with which he invests the truly perfect and poor in spirit.
On the moral character of Eckart, even the malice of persecution has not left a stain. Yet that unknown God to which he desires to escape when he says ‘I want to be rid of God,’ is a being without morality. He is above goodness, and so those who have become identical with Him ‘are indifferent to doing or not doing,’ says Eckart. I can no more call him good, he exclaims, than I can call the sun black. In his system, separate personality is a sin—a sort of robbery of God: it resembles those spots on the moon, which the angel describes to Adam as ‘unpurged vapours, not yet into her substance turned.’ I am not less than God, he will say, there is no distinction: if I were not, He would not be. ‘I hesitate to receive anything from God—for to be indebted to Him would imply inferiority, and make a distinction between Him and me; whereas, the righteous man is, without distinction, in substance and in nature, what God is.’ Here we see the doctrine of the immanence of God swallowing up the conception of his transcendence. A pantheism, apparently apathetic and arrogant as that of the Stoics, is the result. Yet, when we remember that Eckart was the friend of Tauler and Suso, we cannot but suppose that there may have lain some meaning in such language less monstrous than that which the words themselves imply. Eckart would probably apply such expressions, not to his actual self;—for that he supposes non-existent, and reduced to its true nothing—but to the divine nature which, as he thought, then superseded within him the annihilated personality. Tauler (and with him Ruysbroek and Suso) holds in due combination the correlative ideas of transcendence and of immanence.
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Such, then, is one of the most important characteristics of German mysticism in the fourteenth century. I have next to ascertain in which of the leading orders of mystics Tauler should be assigned a place.
‘Divination,’ saith Bacon, ‘is of two kinds—primitive, and by influxion.’ The former is founded on the belief that the soul, when by abstinence and observances it has been purified and concentrated, has ‘a certain extent and latitude of pre-notion.’ The latter is grounded on the persuasion that the foreknowledge of God and of spirits may be infused into the soul when rendered duly passive and mirror-like. Of these two kinds of divining the former is characterized by repose and quiet, the latter by a fervency and elevation such as the ancients styled furor. Now our mystical divines have this in common with the diviners, that they chiefly aim to withdraw the soul within itself. They may be divided most appropriately after a like manner. A cursory inspection will satisfy any one that theopathetic mysticism branches into two distinct, and often contrasted, species. There is the serene and contemplative mysticism; and over against it, the tempestuous and the active. The former is comparatively self-contained and intransitive; the latter, emphatically transitive. Its subject conceives himself mastered by a divine seizure. Emotions well-nigh past the strain of humanity, make the chest to heave, the frame to tremble; cast the man down, convulsed, upon the earth. Or visions that will not pass away, burn into his soul their glories and their terrors. Or words that will not be kept down, force an articulation, with quaking and with spasms, from organs no longer under his control. The contemplative mystic has most commonly loved best that side of Christian truth which is nearest to Platonism; the enthusiastic or practical mystic, that which connects it with Judaism. The former hopes to realize within himself the highest ascents of faith and hope—nay, haply, to surpass them, even while here below. The latter comes forth from his solitude, with warning, apocalyptic voice, to shake a sleeping Church. He has a word from the Lord that burns as a fire in his bones till it be spoken. He lifts up his voice, and cries, exhorting, commanding, or foretelling, with the authority of inspiration.
The Phrygian mountaineer, Montanus, furnishes the earliest example, and a very striking one, of this enthusiastic or prophetic kind of mysticism. He and his followers had been cradled in the fiercest and most frantic superstitions of heathendom. Terrible was Cybele, the mountain mother, throned among the misty fastnesses of Ida. Maddest uproar echoed through the glens on her great days of festival. There is beating of drum and timbrel, clashing of cymbals, shrill crying of pipes; incessant the mournful sound of barbarous horns; loud, above all, the groans and shrieks and yells from frenzied votaries whom the goddess has possessed. They toss their heads; they leap; they whirl; they wallow convulsed upon the rocks, cutting themselves with knives; they brandish, they hurl their weapons; their worship is a foaming, raving, rushing to-and-fro, till the driving deity flings them down exhausted, senseless. Among these demoniacs—sanguine fleti, Terrificas capitum quatientes numine cristas, as Lucretius has described them—these Corybantes, or head-tossers, Christianity made its way, exorcising a legion of evil spirits. But the enthusiastic temperament was not expelled. These wild men, become Christians, carried much of the old fervour into the new faith. Violent excitement, ecstatic transport, oracular utterance, were to them the dazzling signs of the divine victory—of the forcible dislodgment of the power of Darkness by the power of Light. So Montanus readily believes, and finds numbers to believe, that he is the subject of a divine possession. Against the bloodthirsty mob in the villages and towns—against a Marcus Aurelius, ordaining massacre from the high places of the Cæsars—had not God armed his own with gifts beyond the common measure—with rapture—with vision—with prophecy? Yes! the promised Paraclete was indeed among them, and it was not they, but He, who spake. So thought the Montanists, as they announced new precepts to the Church; as they foretold the gathering judgment of Antichrist and the dawning triumph of the saints; as they hastened forth, defiant and sublime, to provoke from their persecutors the martyr’s crown. Let us not overlook the real heroism of these men, while touching on their errors. But their conception of the Church of Christ, so analogous, in many respects, to that of the early Quakers—was it the right one? According to Montanus, the Church was to be maintained in the world by a succession of miraculous interventions. From time to time, fresh outpourings of the Spirit would inspire fresh companies of prophets to ordain ritual, to confute heresy, to organize and modify the Church according to the changing necessities of each period. He denied that the Scripture was an adequate source, whence to draw the refutation of error and the new supplies of truth demanded by the exigencies of the future. As Romanism sets up an infallible Pope to decide concerning truth, and in fact to supplement revelation, as the organ of the Divine Spirit ever living in the Church; so these mystics have their inspired teachers and prophets, raised up from time to time, for the same purpose. But the contemplative mystics, and indeed Christians generally, borne out, as we think, by Scripture and by history, deny any such necessity, and declare this doctrine of supplementary inspiration alien from the spirit of Christianity. While Montanus and his prophetesses, Maximilla and Priscilla, were thus speaking, in the name of the Lord, to the country-folk of Phrygia or to the citizens of Pepuza, Clement at Alexandria was teaching, on the contrary, that we have the organ requisite for finding in the Scriptures all the truth we need—that they are a well of depth sufficient, nay inexhaustible; and that the devout exercise of reason in their interpretation and application is at once the discipline and prerogative of the manhood proper to the Christian dispensation. We are no longer Jews, he would say, no longer children. The presence of the Spirit with us is a part of the ordinary law of the economy under which we live. It is designed that the supernatural shall gradually vindicate itself as the natural, in proportion as our nature is restored to its allegiance to God. It is not necessary that we should be inspired in the same way as the sacred writers were, before their writings can be adequately serviceable to us.
Such was the opposition in the second century, and such has it been in the main ever since, between these two kinds of mystical tendency. The Montanist type of mysticism, as we see it in a Hildegard, among the Quakers, among the Protestant peasantry of the Cevennes, and among some of the ‘Friends of God,’ usually takes its rise with the uneducated, is popular, sometimes revolutionary. Animated by its spirit, Carlstadt filled Wittenberg with scandal and confusion; and the Anabaptist mob reddened the sky with the burning libraries of Osnaburg and Munster. The Alexandrian mysticism, so far from despising scholarship and philosophy, as so much carnal wisdom, desires to appropriate for Christianity every science and every art. It is the mysticism of theologians, of philosophers, and scholars. It exists as an important element in the theology of Clement, of Origen, and of Augustine. It assumes still greater prominence in a Hugo or a Richard of St. Victor. It obtained its fullest proportions in these German mystics of the fourteenth century. It refined and elevated the scholarship of Reuchlin, Ficinus, and Mirandola. It is at once profound and expansive in our English Platonists.
Yet let it not be supposed that the extravagance of the enthusiastic mysticism has not its uses, or that the serenity of the contemplative is always alike admirable. Both have, in their turn, done goodly service. Each has had a work given it to do in which its rival would have failed. The eccentric impetuosity of Montanism, ancient and modern, has done good, directly and indirectly, by breaking through traditional routine—by protesting against the abuses of human authority—by stirring many a sleeping question, and daring many an untried path of action. On the other hand, the contemplative mysticism has been at times too timid, too fond of an elegant or devout, but still unworthy, ease. The Nicodemuses of the sixteenth century, the Briçonnets and the Gerard Roussels, were nearly all of them Platonists. They were men whose mysticism raised them above the wretched externalism of Rome, and at the same time furnished them with an ingenious excuse for abiding safely in her communion. ‘What,’ they would say, ‘are the various forms of the letter, to the unity of the Spirit? Can we not use the signs of Romanism in the spirit of Protestantism—since, to the spiritual and the wise, this outward usage or that, is of small matter?’ The enthusiastic mysticism tends to multiply, and the contemplative to diminish, positive precept and ordinance. The former will sometimes revolt against one kind of prescription only to devise a new one of its own. So the followers of Fox exchanged surplice and ‘steeple-house’ for a singularity of hat, coat, and pronouns. The contemplative mystic loves to inform his common life with the mysterious and the divine. Certain especial sanctities he has, but nothing unsanctified; and he covers his table with an altar-cloth, and curtains his bed with a chasuble, and drinks out of a chalice every day of his life. A Montanus commends celibacy; an Origen sees typified in marriage the espousals of the Church. The zeal of the enthusiastic mysticism is ever on the watch for signs—expects a kingdom coming with observation—is almost always Millenarian. The contemplatist regards the kingdom of heaven as internal, and sees in the history of souls a continual day of judgment. The one courts the vision and hungers after marvel: the other strives to ascend, above all form and language, from the valley of phantasmata to the silent heights of ‘imageless contemplation.’ The one loves violent contrasts, and parts off abruptly the religious world and the irreligious, the natural and the supernatural. The other loves to harmonize these opposites, as far as may be—would win rather than rebuke the world—would blend, in the daily life of faith, the human with the divine working: and delights to trace everywhere types, analogies, and hidden unity, rather than diversity and strife. The Old Testament has been always the favourite of the prophetic mysticism: the contemplative has drunk most deeply into the spirit of the New.
* * * * *
Mysticism, as exhibited in Tauler’s sermons, is much more likely to win appreciation at the hands of English readers than mysticism in the Theologia Germanica. The principles which were there laid down as bare abstractions are here warmed by sunshine and clothed with verdure. To the theory of mysticism we find added many a suggestive hint concerning its practice. There were general statements in the Theologia Germanica so dim, so vast, so ultra-human, that many readers would be at a loss to understand how they could possibly become a practice or a joy in any soul alive. In the sermons, a brother mystic supplies the requisite qualification, and shows that the old Teutonic knight had, after all, a meaning not so utterly remote from all the ways and wants of flesh and blood.
Brought out to view by Tauler’s fervour, his invisible ink becomes a legible character. The exhortations of the pulpit thus interpret the soliloquy of the cell; and when the preacher illuminates mysticism with the many-coloured lights of metaphor and passion—when he interrogates, counsels, entreats, rebukes, we seem to return from the confines of the nameless, voiceless Void to a region within the rule of the sun, and to beings a little lower than the angels. It will reassure many readers to discover from these sermons that the mystics whom Tauler represents are by no means so infatuated as to disdain those external aids which God has provided, or which holy men of old have handed down—that they do not call history a husk, social worship a vain oblation, or decent order bondage to the letter—that when they speak of transcending time and place, they pretend to no new commandment, and do but repeat a truth old as all true religion—that they are on their guard, beyond most men, against that spiritual pride which some think inseparable from the mystical aspiration—that so far from encouraging the morbid introspection attributed to them, it is their first object to cure men of that malady—that instead of formulating their own experience as a test and regimen for others, they tell men to sit down in the lowest place till God calls them to come up higher—and finally, that they are men who have mourned for the sins, and comforted the sorrows of their fellows, with a depth and compass of lowly love such as should have disarmed every unfriendly judgment, had their errors been as numerous as their excellence is extraordinary.
Any one who has attentively read Tauler’s discourses as now accessible may consider himself familiar with the substance of Tauler’s preaching. From whatever part of Scripture history, prophecy, song, or precept, his text be taken, the sermons, we may be sure, will contain similar exhortations to self-abandonment, the same warnings against a barren externalism, the same directions to prepare the way for the inward Advent of the Lord in the Ground of the Soul. The allegorical interpretation, universal in those days, rendered easy such an ever-varied presentation of a single theme. Did the multitude go out into the wilderness to the preaching of John? We are to go forth into the wilderness of the spiritual life. Did Joseph and Mary seek their son in vain among their friends and acquaintance, and find him in his Father’s house? We also must retire to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, and be found no more in the company of those hindering associates, our own Thoughts, Will, and Understanding. Did Christ say to Mary Magdalen, ‘I have not yet ascended to my Father?’ He meant, ‘I have not yet been spiritually raised within thy soul;’ for he himself had never left the Father.
From the sermon on the fifteenth Sunday after Trinity I select a passage which contains in two sentences the kernel of Tauler’s doctrine—the principle which, under a thousand varieties of illustration and application, makes the matter of all his sermons. ‘When, through all manner of exercises the outward man has been converted into the inward, reasonable man, and thus the two, that is to say, the powers of the senses and the powers of the reason, are gathered up into the very centre of the man’s being—the unseen depths of his spirit wherein lies the image of God,—and thus he flings himself into the divine abyss, in which he dwelt eternally before he was created; then when God finds the man thus simply and nakedly turned towards Him, the Godhead bends down and descends into the depths of the pure, waiting soul, and transforms the created soul, drawing it up into the uncreated essence, so that the spirit becomes one with Him. Could such a man behold himself, he would see himself so noble that he would fancy himself God, and see himself a thousand times nobler than he is in himself, and would perceive all the thoughts and purposes, words and works, and have all the knowledge of all men that ever were.’
An explanation of this extract will be a summary of Tauler’s theology. First of all, it is obvious that he regards human nature as tripartite—it is a temple in three compartments: there is the outer court of the senses; there is the inner court of the intellectual nature, where the powers of the soul, busy with the images of things, are ever active, where Reason, Memory, Will, move to and fro, as a kind of mediating priests; there is, lastly, and inmost, a Holy of Holies—the Ground of the Soul, as the mystics term it.
‘Yes!’ exclaims some critic, ‘this Ground, of which we hear so much, which the mystics so labour to describe, what is it, after all?’ Let Tauler answer. He here calls it ‘the very centre of man’s being’—‘the unseen depths of his spirit, wherein lies the image of God.’ I believe that he means to indicate by these and other names that element in our nature by virtue whereof we are moral agents, wherein lies that idea of a right and a wrong which finds expression (though not always adequate) in the verdicts of conscience—that Synderesis (to use an Aristotelian word) of which the Syneidesis is the particular action and voice—that part of our finite nature which borders on the infinite—that gate through which God enters to dwell with man. Nor is the belief in such a principle by any means peculiar to the mystics; men at the farthest remove, by temperament and education, from mysticism, are yet generally found ready to admit that we can only approach a solution of our great difficulties concerning predestination and free will, by supposing that there is a depth in our nature where the divine and human are one. This is Tauler’s spark and potential divinity of man—that face of man’s soul wherein God shineth always, whether the man be aware thereof or not. This, to speak Platonically, is the ideal part of man—that part of him whereby, as a creature, he participates in the Word by whose thought and will all creatures exist. It is the unlost and inalienable nobleness of man—that from which, as Pascal says, his misery as well as his glory proceeds—that which, according to Tauler, must exist even in hell, and be converted into the sorrow there. The Christian Platonist expresses his conception of the consummated redemption of man by saying that he is restored to his original idea—becomes what he was designed to be before sin marred him—puts off the actual sinful self, and puts on the truer primal self which exists only in God. In this sense Eckart says, ‘I shall be sorry if I am not younger to-morrow than I am to-day—that is, a step nearer to the source whence I came’—away from this Eckart to the Divine Idea of man.
Such, then, is this Ground. Next, how is the lapse, or transit into it, effected? Tauler reminds us that many men live as though God were not in this way nearer to them than they are to themselves. They possess inevitably this image—this immediate receptivity of God, but they never think of their prerogative, never seek Him in whom they live and move. Such men live in the outside of themselves—in the sensuous or intellectual nature; but never lift the curtain behind which are the rays of the Shekinah. It will profit me nothing, says Tauler, to be a king, if I know it not. So the soul must break away from outward things, from passion and self, and in abandonment and nothingness seek God immediately. When God is truly found, then indeed the simplified, self-annihilated soul, is passive. But the way thereto, what action it demands, what strong crying and tears, what trampling out of subtle, seemly, darling sins!
First of all, the senses must be mastered by, and absorbed in, the powers of the soul. Then must these very powers themselves—all reasonings, willings, hopings, fearings, be absorbed in a simple sense of the Divine presence—a sense so still, so blissful, as to annihilate before and after, obliterate self, and sink the soul in a Love, whose height and depth, and length and breadth, passing knowledge, shall fill it with all the fulness of God.
‘What!’ it may be said, ‘and is this death—not of sin merely, but of nature—the demand of your mysticism? Is all peace hollow which is not an utter passivity—without knowledge, without will, without desire—a total blank?’
Not altogether so, the mystic will reply. These powers of the soul must cease to act, in as far as they belong to self; but they are not destroyed: their absorption in the higher part of our nature is in one sense a death; in another, their truest life. They die; but they live anew, animated by a principle of life that comes directly from the Father of lights, and from the Light who is the life of men. That in them which is fit to live, survives. Still are they of use in this lower world, and still to be employed in manifold service; but, shall I say it? they are no longer quite the same powers. They are, as it were, the glorified spirits of those powers. They are risen ones. They are in this world, but not of it. Their life has passed into the life which, by slaying, has preserved and exalted them. So have I heard of a nightingale, challenged by a musician with his lute; and when all nature’s skill was vain to rival the swift and doubling and redoubling mazes and harmonies of mortal science, the bird, heart-broken, dropt dead on the victorious lute;—and yet, not truly dead, for the spirit of music which throbbed in that melodious throat had now passed into the lute; and ever afterward breathed into its tones a wild sweetness such as never Thessalian valley heard before—the consummate blending of the woodland witchery with the finished height of art.
‘You see,’ our mystic continues—and let us hear him, for he has somewhat more to say, and to the purpose, as it seems—‘you see that we are no enemies to the symbol and the figure in their proper place, any more than we are to the arguments of reason. But there are three considerations which I and my brethren would entreat you to entertain. First of all, that logical distinctions, and all forms of imagery, must of necessity be transcended when we contemplate directly that Being who is above time and space, before and after,—the universal Presence,—the dweller in the everlasting Now. In the highest states of the soul, when she is concentrated on that part of her which links her with the infinite, when she clings most immediately to the Father of spirits, all the slow technicalities, and the processes and the imaginations of the lower powers, must inevitably be forgotten. Have you never known times when, quite apart from any particular religious means, your soul has been filled, past utterance, with a sense of the divine presence,—when emotion has overflowed all reasoning and all words, and a certain serene amazement—a silent gaze of wonder—has taken the place of all conclusions and conceptions? Some interruption came, or some reflex act dissolved the spell of glory and recalled you to yourself, but could not rob you of your blessing. There remained a divine tranquillity, in the strength whereof your heaviest trouble had grown lighter than the grasshopper, and your hardest duty seemed as a cloud before the winds of the morning. In that hour, your soul could find no language; but looking back upon it, you think if that unutterable longing and unutterable rest could have found speech, it would have been in words such as these—“Whom have I in heaven but Thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee.”
‘Then again, we would have you consider that the mere conclusions of the intellect, the handiwork of imagination, the effervescence of sentiment, yea, sensible delight in certain religious exercises—all these things, though religion’s hand-maidens, are not religion herself. Sometimes they are delusive; always are they dangerous, if they, rather than God, become in any way our dependence. If the heart—the central fount of life’s issues—be not God’s, what avail the admitted propositions, and touching pictures, and wafts of sweetness—the mere furniture, adornment, and incense, of the outer courts of thy nature? Christ in thy soul, and not the truth about Him in thy brain, is thy life’s life; and his agony of love must pierce thee somewhat deeper than the pathos of a tragedy. There are those who live complacently on the facilities and enjoyments they have in certain practices of devotion, when all the while it is rather they themselves, as thus devout, and not their Lord, whom they love. Some such are not yet Christians at all. Others, who are, have yet to learn that those emotions they set such store by, belong, most of them, to the earliest and lowest stages of the Christian life. The lotus-flowers are not the Nile. There are those who violently excite the imagination and the feeling by long gazing on the crucifix—by picturing the torments of martyrs—by performing repeated acts of Contrition,—by trying to wish to appropriate to themselves, for Christ’s sake, all the sufferings of all mankind—by praying for a love above that of all seraphim, and do often, in wrestling after such extraordinary gifts, and harrowing their souls with such sensuous horrors, work out a mere passion of the lower nature, followed by melancholy collapse, and found pitiably wanting in the hour of trial.[128] In these states does it oftenest happen that the phantoms of imagination are mistaken for celestial manifestations; and forms which belong to middle air, for shiny ones from the third heaven. I have been told that astronomers have sometimes seen in the field of their glass, floating globes of light—as it seemed, new planets swimming within their ken; and these were but flying specks of dust, hovering in the air; but magnified and made luminous by the lenses through which they looked, and by the reflection of the light. The eye of the mind may be visited by similar illusions. I counsel all, therefore, that they ask only for grace sufficient against present evil, and covet not great things, but be content with such measures of assurance and sensible delight as God shall think safe for them; and that, above all, they look not at His gifts in themselves, but out of themselves, to Him, the Giver.
‘The third consideration I have to urge, in justification of precepts which appear to you unnatural, is this:—there are certain trials and desolations of soul, to which the best are exposed, wherein all subordinate acts are impossible; and then happy is he who has never exalted such helps above their due place. I scarcely know how to make myself understood to any save those who have been at some time on the edge, at least, of those unfathomable abysses. Good men of prosperous and active life may scarcely know them. Few who have lived much in retirement, with temperament meditative, and perhaps melancholy, have altogether escaped. There are times when, it may be that some great sorrow has torn the mind away from its familiar supports, and laid level those defences which in prosperity seemed so stable—when the most rooted convictions of the reason seem rottenness, and the blossom of our heavenward imaginations goes up before that blast as dust—when our works and joys and hopes, with all their multitude and pomp and glory, seem to go down together into the pit, and the soul is left as a garden that hath no water, and as a wandering bird cast out of the nest—when, instead of our pleasant pictures, we have about us only doleful creatures among ruins—when a spirit of judgment and a spirit of burning seem to visit the city of the heart, and in that day of trouble and of treading down and of perplexity, the noise of viols, and the mirth of the tabret, and the joy of the harp, are silent as the grave. Now, I say, blessed is the man who, when cast into this utter wretchedness, far away from all creatures and from all comfort, can yet be willing, amidst all his tears and anguish, there to remain as long as God shall please—who seeks help from no creature—who utters his complaint to the ear of God alone—who still, with ever-strengthening trust, is ready to endure till self shall have been purged out by the fires of that fathomless annihilation—who, crying out of the depths, while the Spirit maketh intercession within him with groanings that cannot be uttered, shall presently be delivered when the right time hath come, and rejoice in that glorious liberty of the children of God, wherein they are nothing and He is all!’
Now, somewhat thus, I think, would that class of mystics whom Tauler represents, reply to the very natural objections urged by many in our times. Nor does such reply, so far, seem to me either unsatisfactory in itself, or in any way contrary to Scripture. It is with the aim, and under the qualifications, I have endeavoured to set forth, that these mystics would refuge the soul in a height above reasonings, outward means and methods, in a serenity and an abstraction wherein the subtlest distinctions and most delicate imaginations would seem too gross and sensuous—where (as in Endymion’s ecstasy)
‘Essences Once spiritual, are like muddy lees, Meant but to fertilize our earthly root, And make our branches lift a golden fruit Into the bloom of heaven.’
On the latter part of the extract given just now I have not yet commented. It suggests a question of no small moment. What, it will be asked, is the relation sustained by the Saviour of mankind to this mystical process—this drawing up of the created soul into the uncreated essence? Is not a blank abstraction—an essential nothing, substituted for the Son of man? How does the abstract Essence in which Tauler would sink the soul, differ from the abstract Essence or super-essential Unity in which a Plotinus would lose himself, or from that Divine substance in which the pantheistic Sufis sought to dissolve their personality? In this region (confessedly above distinction), the mystic cannot, by his own admission, distinguish one abstraction from the other. There is a story of a lover who, Leander-like, swam nightly across a strait to visit the lady of his heart. A light which she exhibited on the shore was the beacon of the adventurous swimmer. But two brothers (cruel as those who murdered Isabella’s lover in the wood) removed the light one dark and stormy night, and placed it in a boat anchored not near shore, but in mid-waters, where the strait was broadest. Their victim struggled as long as mortal strength might endure, towards the treacherous light—farther and farther out—into the ocean which engulphed him. Have not the mystics, in like manner, shifted the beacon and substituted an expanse—an abyss, as the object of man’s effort, instead of that love and sympathy which await him in the heart of the Son of man?
Can it be possible that the best thing to do with a revelation of God, now we have one, is to throw it behind our backs? Now that the light the wisest heathen longed for has come, are we to rid ourselves of it, with all speed, and fly, like Eckart, from the known to the old, unknown God? To do this, is to account as foolishness the wisdom of God manifest in the flesh. Is it not all—as the enemies of Quietism used to say—a device of the Devil? Does it not look as though the Arch-enemy, unable to undo the work of redemption, had succeeded, by a master-stroke of policy, in persuading men to a false spirituality, which should consist in obliterating the facts of that redemption from their own minds as completely as though it had never been wrought?
Now it is much better, I think, to put objections like these in all their strength, and to give them fair hearing. They will occur to many persons in the reading of these sermons. They will awaken a distrust and a perplexity which are not to be talked down by high words, or by telling men that if they do not sufficiently admire these mystics, so much the worse for them. One of the objections thus urged is logically unanswerable. If Eckart and Plotinus both succeed in reducing their minds to a total emptiness of all memory, knowledge, and desire, in order to contemplate a super-essential Void, equally blank, the Christian and the heathen pantheist are indistinguishable. Vacuum A, would be a vacuum no longer if it contained anything to distinguish it from vacuum B; and to escape, in the most absolute sense, all distinction, is Eckart’s highest ambition. But it is to be remembered, first of all, that Tauler does not go so far as Eckart in his impatience of everything intelligible, conceivable, or utterable. And next, that, happily, neither Eckart, Tauler, nor any man, can really reduce himself to that total nescience and apathy demanded by the theory which makes personality a sin, knowledge an infirmity, imagination a folly. Humanity is still too strong for any such de-humanizing ideal. The Absolute of Tauler is not, like the Absolute of Plotinus, an abstraction above morality. His link between finite and infinite—his image of God, is moral, not metaphysical merely. It is his knowledge, first of all, of God in Christ which enables him to contemplate the Infinite, not as boundless being, but as unfathomable love. So he stands firm on the grand Christian foundation, and the Son is his way to the Father. Following Dionysius, that arch-mystagogue, he does indeed invite the trembling soul into the shadows of a Divine darkness, wherein no specific attribute or act is perceptible to the baffled sight. But across that profound obscure and utter silence, there floats, perceptible, some incense from the censer, of the Elder Brother—the eternal High Priest. It is a darkness, but such an one as we have when we close our eyes after spectacles of glory—a darkness luminous and living with the hovering residue of splendours visible no longer. It is a silence, but such an one as we have after sweet music—a silence still stirred by inward echoes, and repetitions, and floating fragments of melodies that have ceased to fall upon the ear. It seems a chilling purity, a hueless veil—but such a veil as the snowfall lays upon an Alpine church-yard, hiding all colour but not all form, and showing us still where the crosses are. By their fruits we know these mystics. No men animated by a love so Christ-like as was theirs, could have put an abstraction in the place of Christ.
With regard to the work of Christ, Tauler acknowledges (more readily than George Fox) that the divine element or inward light in man must remain a mere surmise or longing, apart from the historic manifestation of God in the flesh. It is Jesus of Nazareth who at once interprets to the soul, while He satisfies, its own restless heavenward desire. It is His grace alone which makes a mere capacity of God, a possession—a mere potentiality, actual. The view of Christ which Tauler loves to present most frequently is that expressed by those passages of Scripture which speak of Him as the first-born among many brethren, and which remind us that both He that sanctifieth and they that are sanctified are all of one. He would say that the Saviour now lives upon the earth, in the person of all true believers; and that, in a subordinate sense, the Word is being continually made flesh, as Christ is formed in the hearts of Christians. With one voice Eckart and Tauler, Ruysbroek and Suso, exclaim—‘Arise, O man! realize the end of thy being: make room for God within thy soul, that he may bring forth his Son within thee.’
The Saviour’s obedience unto death is regarded by Tauler, rather in its exemplary, than in its propitiatory aspect. Very important, as characteristic of his theology, is the distinction he makes between our union to the humanity of Christ, and our union to his divinity. As man, He is the ideal of humanity—the exemplar of self-surrender. All that He received from the Father was yielded up to Him in that absolute devotedness which all His brethren imitate. We are united to His humanity in proportion as we follow the obedience and self-sacrifice of His earthly life. But above this moral conformity to His example, Tauler sets another and a higher union to His divinity. And this union with the Godhead of the Son is not a superior degree of moral likeness to Him, it is rather an approximation to another mode of existence. It is an inward transit from our actual to our ideal self—not to the moral ideal (for that is already realized in proportion as we are united to His humanity), but to our Platonic archetypal ideal. This higher process of union to the Word, or return to our ideal place in Him, consists in escaping from all that distinguishes us as creatures on this earth—in denuding ourselves of reasonings, imaginations, passions,—humanities, in fact, and reducing ourselves to that metaphysical essence or germ of our being, which lay from eternity—not a creature, but the thought of a creature, in the Divine Word.
Now it appears to me that this self-spiritualizing process which seeks by a refined asceticism to transcend humanity and creatureliness, is altogether a mistake. An ideal sufficiently high, and ever beyond us, is already given in the moral perfection of Christ Jesus. This desire to escape from all the modes and means of our human existence came not from Paul, but from Plato. It revives the impatience of that noble but one-sided, Greek ideal, which despised the body and daily life, abhorred matter as a prison-house, instead of using it as a scaffolding, and longed so intensely to become pure, passionless intellect. I know no self-transcendence, and I desire none, higher than the self-sacrifice of the good Shepherd, who laid down his life for the sheep. You will probably be reminded here of another great Platonist. Origen, also, makes a distinction between those who know Christ, according to the flesh, as he terms it, i.e., in his sufferings, death, and resurrection, and that higher class of the perfect, or Gnostici, who, on the basis of that fundamental knowledge, rise from the historical Christ to the spiritual essence of the Word. Origen, however, supposed that this communion with the Logos, or eternal Reason, might become the channel of a higher knowledge, illumining the Gnosticus with a divine philosophy. With Tauler, on the contrary, the intellectual ambition is less prominent; and he who has ascended into the uncreated essence cannot bring down from thence any wisdom for this lower world. Thus, in our extract, he says that if the soul united to the word could perceive itself, it would seem altogether like God, and would appear possessed of all knowledge that ever was. Such is the ideal; but the first reflex act would dissolve that trance of absolute, immediate oneness, and restore the mystic to the humbling consciousness of a separate, actual self; and here lies the great difference between Tauler and Eckart. Tauler, Suso, and Ruysbroek say, that in these moments of exaltation the soul (above distinctions) is not conscious of its distinction as a separate, creature entity. Eckart says, not that the soul has, for a moment, forgotten all that is personal, and that parts it off from God, but that the distinction does not exist at all,—not that we do not know ourselves as separate, but that God does not. To draw the line between theism and pantheism, is not always easy; but I think it must lie somewhere hereabout.
With regard to the doctrines of holy indifference and disinterested love, the German mystics are by no means so extreme as the French. Their views of the divine character were more profound and comprehensive; their heaven and hell were less external and realistic. A mysticism like theirs could not concentrate itself, as Quietism did, on the degrees and qualities of one particular affection. Their God was one who, by a benign necessity of nature, must communicate Himself in blessing, one whose love lay at the root of His being. ‘If men would only believe,’ cries Tauler, in one of his sermons, ‘how passionately God longs to save, and bring forth His Son in them!’ They care little for being themselves accused of making matter eternal, and creatures necessary to God, if they can free Him from the imputation of selfishness or caprice. And so they have no scruples as to whether it be not selfish and criminal to pray for our own salvation. In the sense of Tauler—a true and deep one—no man can say, ‘Thy will be done,’ and ‘Thy kingdom come,’ without praying for his own salvation. When Tauler seems to demand a self-abnegation which consents to perdition itself, he is to be understood in one of two ways: either he would say that salvation should be desired for the sake of God, above our own, and that we should patiently submit, when He sees fit to try us by withdrawing our hope of it; or that the presence and the absence of God make heaven and hell—that no conceivable enjoyment ought to be a heaven to us without Him, no conceivable suffering a hell with Him. But how different is all this from teaching, with some of the Quietists, that, since (as they say) God is equally glorified in our perdition and in our salvation, we should have no preference (if our love be truly disinterested) for the one mode of glorifying Him above the other. That any human being ever attained such a sublime indifference I shall not believe, until it is attested by a love for man as much above ordinary Christian benevolence, as this love for God professes to be above ordinary Christian devotion; for what is true of the principle of love, is true of its degrees—‘He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath not seen?’
The strongly ascetic language of Tauler and his brethren, their almost Manichean contempt of the world, must be read by the light of their times, so full of misery and corruption; and by the light, also, of those fearful furnaces of trial through which they had personally passed. What soul, into which the iron has entered, will say, while the pain is still fresh, that the words of Tauler, or of Thomas à Kempis, are intemperate? It is probable that Tauler would have been less impatient to abolish his very personality, in order to give place to God, had he been able, like Luther, to regard salvation, in greater measure, as consisting in a work done for, as well as wrought in him. But his justification is a progressive, approximate process. It is not a something he accepts, but a something he has to work out; and seeing, as, with his true humility, he was sure to do, how unsatisfactory was his likeness to God, how great the distance still, the only resource open to him is to ignore or annihilate that sorry and disappointing personality altogether, that God, instead of it, may perform his actions, and be, in fact, the substitute for his soul. Both Tauler and Luther believe in substitution. The substitution of Tauler is internal—God takes his place within himself. The substitution of Luther is external—when he believed in Christ, the Saviour associated him with Himself, and so brought him into sonship. So inevitable is the idea of some substitution, where the sense of sin is deep. Luther believes as profoundly as Tauler in a present, inward, living Saviour, as opposed to a remote historic personage, intellectually acknowledged. In the theology of both the old dualism is broken down, and God is brought near to man, yea, within him. But the Son to whom Tauler is united, is the uncreated essence, the super-essential Word, from the beginning with the Father. The Son to whom Luther is united is emphatically the Godman, as truly human, in all sympathy and nearness, as when He walked the Galilean hills. The humanity of Christ is chiefly historic with Tauler, and for any practical purpose can scarcely be said to have survived His exaltation; but with Luther that humanity is so vital and so perpetual that he will even transfer to it the attributes of Deity. So far from desiring to pass upward from the man Christ Jesus to the Logos, as from a lower to a higher, Luther calls ‘that sinking himself so deep in flesh and blood,’ the most glorious manifestation of Godhead. He does not, with the Platonists, see degradation in the limitations of our nature; that nature has been honoured unspeakably, and is glorified, not annihilated, by the Incarnate One. According to Luther, the undivine consists in sin, and sin alone; not in our human means and modes, and processes of thought. Thus with him the divine and human are intimately associated, not merely in the religious life, as it is termed, but in our temporal hopes and fears, in every part of our complicated, struggling, mysterious humanity. The theology of Luther is more free, joyous, and human, partly because the serene and superhuman ideal of Tauler did not appear to him either possible or desirable, partly because sanctification was, with him, a change of state consequent on a change of relation—the grateful service of one who, by believing, has entered into rest; and partly, also, because he does not lose sight of the humanity of Christ, in His divinity, to the extent which Tauler does. Both Luther and Tauler say—the mere history alone will not profit: Christ must be born in you. Luther adds—Christ begins to be born in you as soon as you heartily believe upon Him. Tauler adds—Christ is born in you as soon as you have become nothing.
It would be very unfair to make it a matter of blame to Tauler that he did not see with Luther’s eyes, and do Luther’s work. Luther in one century, and Tauler in another, had their tasks appointed, and quitted themselves like men. It was for Tauler to loosen the yoke of asceticism: it was for Luther to break it in pieces. But it would be just as culpable to disguise the real differences between Tauler and Luther, and to conceal the truth, from a desire to make Tauler appear a more complete reformer than he really was. Our High Churchmen, in their insular self-complacency, love to depreciate Luther and the Continental reformers. Idolaters of the past as they are, we do not think that they will be better pleased with that noblest product of the Middle Age—the German mysticism of the fourteenth century, now placed within their reach. These sermons of Tauler assert so audaciously against sacerdotalism, the true priesthood of every Christian man. There is so little in them of the ‘Church about us,’ so much of the ‘Christ within us.’
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It would have moved the scorn of some of the mystics, and the sorrow of others, could they have been made aware of the strange uses to which some persons were to turn them in this nineteenth century. The Emersonian philosophy, for example, is grieved that one series of writings should arrogate inspiration to themselves alone. It is obvious that a ready credence given to professed inspiration in other quarters, and later times, must tend to lower the exclusive prestige of the Scriptures. Thus the mystics may be played off against the Apostles, and all that is granted to mysticism may be considered as so much taken from the Bible. A certain door has been marked with a cross. Emerson, like the sly Abigail of the Forty Thieves, proceeds to mark, in like manner, all the doors in the street. Very gratifying truly, and comic in the highest degree, to witness the perplexity of mankind, going up and down, seeking some indication of the hoped-for guidance from above! I do not believe that the inspired writers were (to use Philo’s comparison) as passive as a lyre under the hand of a musician. But some, who are much shocked at this doctrine in their case, would have us be awe-stricken, rather than offended, by similar pretension on the part of certain mystics. Then, they tell us to tread delicately—to remember how little the laws of our own nature are known to us—to abstain from hasty judgment. In this way, it is supposed that Bibliolatry may be in some measure checked, and one of the greatest religious evils of the time be happily lessened. Criticise, if you will, John’s history, or Paul’s letters, but let due reverence restrain you from applying the tests of a superficial common sense to the utterances of the Montanuses, the Munzers, the Engelbrechts, the Hildegards, the Theresas. But what saith History as to mysticism? Very plainly she tells us that the mystics have been a power in the world, and a power for good, in proportion as their teaching has been in accordance with the Bible;—that the instances wherein they have failed have been precisely those in which they have attempted (whether wittingly, or not) to substitute another and a private revelation for it. They have come as a blessing to their age, just in proportion as they have called the attention of men to some of the deepest lessons of that book—to lessons too commonly overlooked. The very men who might seem, to superficial observers, to bear witness against the Bible, do in reality utter the most emphatic testimony for it. A fact of this nature lends additional importance to the history of mysticism at the present time.
Again, there are some who may suppose there is a real resemblance between the exhortations of Tauler, and the counsel given men by such philosophers as Fichte or Herr Teufelsdröckh. Do not both urge men to abandon introspections—to abstain from all self-seeking—to arise and live in the transcendental world, by abandoning hope and fear, and by losing our finite in an Infinite Will? Some similarity of sound there may occasionally be, but the antipathy of principle between the two kinds of teaching is profound and radical.
I will suppose that there comes to our Teufelsdröckh some troubled spirit, full of the burden of ‘this unintelligible world,’ questioning,—as to an oracle. The response is ready. ‘What do you come whining to me about your miserable soul for? The soul-saving business is going down fast enough now-a-days, I can tell you. So you want to be happy, do you? Pining after your Lubberland, as usual,—your Millennium of mere Ease and plentiful supply. Poor wretch! let me tell you this,—the very fact of that hunger of yours proves that you will never have it supplied. Your appetite, my friend, is too enormous. In this wild Universe of ours, storming-in, vague-menacing, it is enough if you shall find, not happiness, but existence and footing to stand on,—and that only by girding yourself for continual effort and endurance. I was wretched enough once—down in the “Everlasting Nay,” thinking this a Devil’s-world, because, in the universal scramble of myriads for a handful, I had not clutched the happiness I set my heart on. Now, here I am in the “Everlasting Yea,” serene as you see me. How? Simply by giving up wanting to be happy, and setting to work, and resigning myself to the Eternities, Abysses, or whatsoever other name shall be given to the fontal Vortices of the inner realms.... Miracles! Fiddlestick! Are not you a miracle to your horse? What can they prove?... Inspiration!—Try and get a little for yourself, my poor friend. Work, man: go work, and let that sorry soul of thine have a little peace.’
‘Peace,’ repeats our ‘poor friend,’ as he goes discomfited away. ‘Peace! the very thing this soul of mine will not let me have, as it seems. I know I am selfish. I dare say this desire of happiness is very mean and low, and all that; but I would fain reach something higher. Yet the first step thereto he does not show me. To leap into those depths of stoical apathy which that great man has reached, is simply impossible to poor me. His experience is not mine. He tells a bedridden man to climb the mountains, and he will straightway be well. Let him show me the way to a little strength, and in time I may. I will not hunger any more after mere “lubberly enjoyment,” if he will offer my affections something more attractive. But Infinite Will, and Law, and Abysses, and Eternities, are not attractive—nay, I am not sure that they are intelligible to me or any mortal.’
Now the doctrine of Tauler is nowhere more in contrast with that just uttered than in its tenderness of Christian sympathy and adaptation, as compared with the dreary and repellent pride of the philosopher. Instead of overwhelming the applicant by absurdly demanding, as the first step, a sublimity of self-sacrifice which only the finished adept may attain, Tauler is not too proud to begin at the beginning. Disinterested love is, with him, a mountain to which he points in the distance, bright with heavenly glory. Disinterested love, with Teufelsdröckh, is an avalanche hurled down right in the path of the beginner. Tauler does not see, in the unhappiness of the man, so much mere craven fear, or thwarted selfishness. He sees God’s image in him; he believes that that hunger of his soul, which he vainly tries to satisfy with things earthly, is a divine craving, a proof that he was born to satisfy it with things heavenly. He does not talk grandiloquently about Duty, and the glory of moral Freedom. He tells him that the same Saviour who died upon the cross is pleading and knocking at his heart, and doth passionately long to bless him. He sends him away to think over this fact, till it shall become more real to him than house and home, or sun and stars. He does not think that he can improve on ‘the low morality’ of the gospel by disdaining to appeal to hope and fear in order to snatch men from their sins. If so to plead be to speak after the flesh, after the flesh he will speak, to save a brother. There will be time enough, he thinks, if God sees fit to lead the man to the heights of absolute self-loss; and God will take His own way to do it. All Tauler has to do is to declare to him the truth concerning a Saviour, not to prescribe out of his own experience a law beyond that which is written. In this way, instead of striking him into despair, or bidding him bury care in work, he comforts and strengthens him. He does not despise him for keeping the law simply out of love to Him who gave it. He does not think it unmanly, but true manhood rather, when he sees him living, a suppliant, dependent on a life higher than his own—on a Person, whose present character and power were attested of old by history and miracle, as well as now by the ‘witness of the Spirit.’
I think the candid reader of Tauler’s sermons, and of Sartor Resartus, will admit that a difference in substance such as I have pointed out, does exist between them. If so, those who follow the philosophy of Teufelsdröckh cannot claim Tauler—have no right to admire him, and ought to condemn in him that which they condemn in the Christianity of the present day.
Footnote 127:
Preface to Tauler’s Life and Sermons by Susanna Winkworth.
Footnote 128:
Nicole, in his Traité de la Prière, describes and criticises this style of devotion. It must always be borne in mind that the warnings of Tauler with regard to the image and the symbol are addressed, not to us sober Protestant folk, but especially to the devotees of the cloister. Those who have some acquaintance with the fantastic excesses he combats, will not think his language too strong.