His glory shall not pause
But live in men's perpetual gratitude.
While he who on thy naked sill has stood
He shall be counted low, etc.
D.G. Rossetti.
The concept of the German mystics was infinitely more profound than the concept of the merely external poverty of the Franciscans, which in the case of St. Francis and Jacopone was an inherent characteristic and pure, but in the case of the others more or less vicious. "Man cannot live in this world without labour," says Eckhart, "but labour is man's portion; therefore he must learn to have God in his heart, although surrounded by the things of this world, and not let his business or his surroundings be a barrier." There is a passage in the book of an unknown author, entitled The Imitation of Christ's Poverty (formerly ascribed to Tauler), which reads as follows: "Poverty is equality with God, a mind turned away from all creatures; poverty clings to nothing and nothing clings to it; a man who is poor clings to nothing which is beneath him, but to that alone which is greater than all things. And that is the loftiest virtue of poverty that it clings only to that which is sublime and takes no heed of the things which are base, so far as it is possible." "The soul while it is burdened with temporal and transient things is not free. Before it can aspire to freedom and nobility it must cast away all the things of the world." "Nobody can be really poor unless God make him so; but God makes no man poor unless he be in his inmost heart; then all things will be taken from him which are not God's. The more spiritual a man is, the poorer will he be, for spirituality and poverty are one...." Pseudo-Tauler even affirms that a man "can possess abundant wealth and yet be poor in spirit." The meaning of this is clear: He whose heart is not wrapped up in the things of the world, will find his way to God; a soul which is without desire is rich.
But there was a still greater contrast between the naïve religion represented by St. Francis of Assisi and the religion of Eckhart. The former lived entirely in the obvious and visible; the love of all creatures filled his heart and shaped his life. The heart of the mystic too, was filled with love, but it was love transcending the love of the individual, love of the primary cause. In the last sense Eckhart taught, contrary to traditional Christianity, and in conformity with Indian wisdom, that the soul must be absorbed into the absolute and that everything transient and individual must cease to exist. "The highest freedom is that the soul should rise above itself and flow into the fathomless abyss of its archetype, of God Himself."
Even St. Bernard was not quite free from this mystical heresy (cf. the previously quoted passages). "When he has reached the highest degree of perfection, man is in a state of complete forgetfulness of self, and having entirely ceased to belong to himself, becomes one with God, released from everything not divine." Even compassion must cease in this state, for there is nothing left but justice and perfection.
We recognise here a characteristic of all those who are greatest among men: of Goethe, for instance, of Bach, or Kant: namely, the correspondence of intense personality and the most highly developed objectivity; for the greatest personality ceases in the end to distinguish between itself and the world, has eradicated everything paltry, selfish and subjective and has become entirely objective, impersonal, divine. St. Francis knew nothing of this consciousness. "God has chosen me because among all men He could find no one more lowly, and because through my instrumentality He purposed to confound nobility, greatness, strength, beauty and the wisdom of the world." He was the disciple of the earthly Jesus, Who went through life the compassionate consoler of all those who were sorrowful. But Eckhart aspired "to the shapeless nature of God." "We will follow Him, but not in all things," he said of the historical Jesus. "He did many things which He meant us to understand spiritually, not literally ... we must always follow Him in the profounder sense." Compared to the religion of Eckhart, the religion of St. Francis is the faith of a little child, picturing God as a benevolent old man. Such a religion is equally true and sincere, but it represents an earlier stage on the road of humanity. If Christianity were—as we are occasionally assured—the religion of Jesus, then the great mystics cannot be called Christians. And yet St. Augustine's: "We are not Christians, but Christs," was fulfilled in them.
The profoundest depth of European religion, of which Eckhart was the exponent, and which found artistic expression in Gothic art, was not sounded by music until very much later. Bach, more emphatically in the High Mass and the Magnificat, but also in his purely instrumental music, brought the universal feeling of mysticism to absolute artistic perfection. The deep religious sentiment which pervades the High Mass is so far above all cults, that it has no real connection with any historical faith—it is pure consciousness of the divine.