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!