Hours with the Mystics: A Contribution to the History of Religious Opinion

by Robert Alfred Vaughan

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.’