It is not, then, a personal delight that awaits the Mystic in the abyss; it is the sense of absorption in his Deity. It is hard to define the character of this Godhead for which the man so gladly lays down his soul and his life. Since it is identical with the foundation of the soul (and this, Eckhart assures us, is not only Divine and simple, but an Utter Nothingness), it is difficult to lay hold of the idea of its divinity—or indeed of its difference from created matter which is also purum Nihil, and it is easy to see how, by this path of negation, Mysticism always diverges into Pantheism.... The essence of the Mystical Divinity appears to be its very incomprehensibility; and it would be rash and vain indeed to form an idea thereof. But we may at least attempt to understand what that divinity appeared to its worshippers.
“The One,” begins Plotinus, “is neither substance, nor quality, nor reason, nor soul, neither moving, nor at rest, not in place and not in time; neither is it of any sort or kind.” Thus we learn what things were not intrinsic to the Deity; we learn that we must conceive a bodiless, unqualified, impersonal, interminable Void; an eternal, undifferentiate essence of existence; an infinite Being not to be approached by reason or by soul. Eckhart goes a step further, and affirms not only what the Godhead is not, but even what it is. “There is a Godhead,” he says, “above God. The Godhead neither moves nor works.... It is a simple Stillness, an eternal Silence.”
If this were all we might comprehend the longing for quiet, the passionate desire for rest which made the wearied and the trouble-harried of all times deify silence and repose. Mysticism has ever flourished best in starved or stormy ages. It is the shrinking of the soul from a perplexed and hideous outer life; it is in some the desire for love and peace, in some the desire for rest, in some for immortality elsewhere. But in logical and speculative minds it is more than this; the God of the Speculative Mystics is not merely Sleep, not merely Dreams, not merely Stillness. They carry their reasoning fearlessly to its natural conclusion, and this is worthy of all praise in them; but that they should worship that conclusion is surely strange—for “God is non-being,” writes Scotus Erigena; and, Eckhart adds that when the soul penetrates the pure uncreate essence of the Godhead, then Nothingness is at last in the presence of Nothingness.
VIII.
God, then, is Nothing; Erigena has given us the phrase, for Nihilum, he says, is the infinite essence of God. The soul is Nothing; “a fathomless annihilation of self,” in Tauler’s words, “an utter nothingness,” in Eckhart’s sentence. And, lastly, the world is nothing, purum Nihil, and as unreal as the rest. Already, in the close of the twelfth century, David of Dinant had declared that Everything is at the same time Spirit, Matter, and God. The later Mystics added a new line to his Thesis: All is One and All is Nothing.
Such is the result of this strange Idealism, which sacrifices from first to last the idea of personality to the conception of God. These are the dogma of this singular phase of thought and feeling; a phase which unites all that is cold and formal in philosophy with all that is unreasoning, perfervid, and hysterical in a Religious Revival. The doctors and preachers of Speculative Mysticism, have trances no less real than those of Saint Francis; but what they contemplate with rapture is not the idea of Infinite Love. It is Infinite Nothing which fills them with ecstasy. And these Mystical thinkers are as precise and as liable to become the mere pedants of a system, as any follower of Kant or Comte. And yet, though they seek to use only their reason, they despise reason. These philosophers look upon reason as the humble handmaiden of ecstasy. And that divine ecstasy is excited by the thought of a Nihilum.
This indeed appears almost an absurd position; and yet the position of the Mystics was honourable and intelligent. They attempted to answer questions which even to-day the theologians elude (see Newman, “Grammar of Assent,” p. 210). “Whence comes Evil?” Evil, they reply, is not created by God, but, so to speak, the blanks and spaces not filled up by His creation. Evil and pain have no Real Existence; they are but a deficiency of vitality; they are negative and temporary qualities unrecognized by an unconscious God innocent of inflicting them. “Why are we created responsible beings without our own consent?” Our bodies are not created by God and we are not responsible to Him for their errors. They are the expressions of our Eternal souls—their own expressions at their own desire as a modus vivendi in the world. “How can God need our action if He is omnipotent? If omnipotent, how tolerant of Evil? If permitting suffering, sin, and Hell, how then All-loving? If All-loving, how Just?” These questions are all answered by the mystical conception of God as a Divine Passivity, an unconscious Fund of Existence. All that is impossible and absurd in the theories of the Mystics is caused by adapting them to religious ideas. They had to explain the immortality of the soul, ... and they spoke of eternal absorption into an Infinite Nothing. They had to explain a good and omnipotent God creating an evil and impotent humanity. They made the one nothing and the other nothing.
The Schism.
In the year 1377 the Pope was at Avignon. Seventy years ago a Pope had come there, as the guest of the Count of Provence, in order to arrange with the King of France the iniquitous extermination of the Templars. He had come to Avignon in the hour of Papal triumph; for in the tragic ruin of the Hohenstaufens, the prestige of the empire was destroyed at last. But in reality this fatal victory had left the Pope no longer the arbiter between France and Germany, but the dependent of the sole surviving Power. The attraction of successful France drew the Pope from Rome to Avignon.
At Rome the Pope had left his Vatican, his authority, his tradition. At Avignon, a chance guest, hastily lodged in the Dominican monastery, he was little better than the Political Agent of Philippe-le-Bel. Yet he showed no hurry to return. Clement was a Frenchman of the South, a Gascon, at home in Provence but cruelly expatriated among the dissensions, the enthusiasms, the treacheries of foreign Italy. Year after year found him still at Avignon, and there he died in the year 1315. His successor, John XXI. or XXII., was another Gascon; and Benedict XII. (1334-1342) and Clement VI. (1342-1352) were Frenchmen also. They built a mighty palace at Avignon, immense, with huge square towers, and walls—four metres thick—scarce broken by the rare small pointed windows rearing their colossal strength high into the air. The great golden-brown palace was less of a palace than a prison, less of a cloister than a castle. It was, in fact, a baron’s fortress of the feudal age; for the Pope had almost forgotten that he was Pope of Rome; he was the Count of Venaissin and Avignon.