"I have never comprehended this so clearly myself," said she. "But I have often felt how difficult it must be to know whether one loves who shows not a sign of love that could not be imitated. And, again, I have thought that no one could know it unless he knew love himself, and that he could only believe in the love of another so far as he believed in his own love. As with the gift of love so is it with the gift of the Holy Spirit. They upon whom it descended heard a rushing from heaven as of a mighty wind, and there appeared to them cloven tongues like as of fire. But the rest were either amazed and perplexed, or they made sport of them and said: 'They are full of sweet wine.'
"Still, as I said to you, it is the 'German Theology' to which I am indebted for learning to believe in my belief, and what will seem a weakness to many, strengthened me the most; namely, that the old master never stops to demonstrate his propositions rigidly, but scatters them like a sower, in the hope that some grains will fall upon good soil and bear fruit a thousand fold. So our Divine Master never attempted to prove his doctrines, for the perfect conviction of truth disdains the form of a demonstration."
"Yes," I interrupted her, for I could not help thinking of the wonderful chain of proof in Spinoza's 'Ethics,' the straining after demonstration by Spinoza gives me the impression that this acute thinker could not have believed in his own doctrines with his whole heart, and that he therefore felt the necessity of fastening every mesh of his net with the utmost care. "Still," I continued, "I must acknowledge I do not share this great admiration for the 'German Theology,' although I owe the book many a doubt. To me there is a lack of the human and the poetical in it, and of warm feeling and reverence for reality altogether. The entire mysticism of the fourteenth century is wholesome as a preparative, but it first reaches solution in the divinely holy and divinely courageous return to real life, as was exemplified by Luther. Man must at some time in his life recognize his nothingness. He must feel that he is nothing of himself, that his existence, his beginning, his everlasting life are rooted in the superearthly and incomprehensible. That is the returning to God which in reality is never concluded on earth but yet leaves behind in the soul a divine home sickness, which never again ceases. But man cannot ignore the creation as the Mystics would. Although created out of nothing, that is, through and out of God, he cannot of his own power resolve himself back into this nothingness. The self-annihilation of which Tauler so often speaks is scarcely better than the sinking away of the human soul in Nirvana, as the Buddhists have it. Thus Tauler says: 'That if he by greater reverence and love could reach the highest existence in non-existence, he would willingly sink from his height into the deepest abyss.' But this annihilation of the creature was not the purpose of the Creator since he made it. 'God is transformed in man,' says Augustine, 'not man in God.' Thus mysticism should be only a fire-trial which steels the soul but does not evaporate it like boiling water in a kettle. He who has recognized the nothingness of self ought to recognize this self as a reflection of the actual divine. The 'German Theology' says:
["Was nu us geflossen ist, das ist nicht war wesen, und hat kein wesen anders dan in dem volkomen, sunder es ist ein zufal oder ein glast und ein schin, der nicht wesen ist oder nicht wesen hat anders, dan in dem sewer, da der glast us flusset, als in der sunnen oder in einem liechte.">[
"What has flown out is not real substance and has no other reality except in the perfect; but it is an incident or a glare or a shimmer, which is no substance, and has no other reality, except in the fire from which a glare proceeds, as in the sun or a light."
"What is emitted from the divine, though it be only like the reflection from the fire, still has the divine reality in itself, and one might almost ask what were the fire without glow, the sun without light, or the Creator without the creature? These are questions of which it is said very truthfully:
["Welch mensche und welche creatur begert zu erfaren und zu wissen den heimlichen rat und willen gottes, der begert nicht anders denne als Adam tet und der boese geist.">[
"What man or creature desires to learn and to know the secret counsel and will of God—desires nothing else but what Adam did and the evil spirit.
"For this reason, it should be enough for us to feel and to appear that we are a reflection of the divine until we are divine. No one should place under a bushel or extinguish the divine light which illuminates us, but let it beam out, that it may brighten and warm all about it. Then one feels a living fire in his veins, and a higher consecration for the struggle of life. The most trivial duties remind us of God. The earthly becomes divine, the temporal eternal, and our entire life a life in God. God is not eternal repose. He is everlasting life, which Angelus Silesius forgets when he says: 'God is without will.'
"'We pray: 'Thy will my Lord and God be done,'
And lo, He has no will! He is an eternal silence.'"