[3] A spiritual relationship was established if a man and woman were sponsors to the same child at baptism.
[4] Presumably of affinity, i.e., a wife's sister, but there is nothing to show that this law did not also apply to consanguinity, and at one time the pope proposed that the natural son of Henry VIII, the Duke of Richmond, should marry his half sister, Mary.
[5] "Nota diligenter, quod huiusmodi gratiae et dispensationes non conceduntur pauperibus." Taxa cancellariae apostolicae, in E. Friedberg: Lerbuch des katholischen und evangelischen Kirchenrechts, 1903, pp. 389 ff.
[6] Maitland: Canon Law in the Church of England, p. 100.
SECTION 4. THE MYSTICS
One of the earliest efforts to transcend the economy of salvation offered by the church was made by a school of mystics in the fourteenth and fifteenth {30} century. In this, however, there was protest neither against dogma nor against the ideal of other-worldliness, for in these respects the mystics were extreme conservatives, more religious than the church herself. They were like soldiers who disregarded the orders of their superiors because they thought these orders interfered with their supreme duty of harassing the enemy. With the humanists and other deserters they had no part nor lot; they sought to make the church more spiritual, not more reasonable. They bowed to her plan for winning heaven at the expense of earthly joy and glory; they accepted her guidance without question; they rejoiced in her sacraments as aids to the life of holiness. But they sorrowed to see what they considered merely the means of grace substituted for the end sought; they were insensibly repelled by finding a mechanical instead of a personal scheme of salvation, an almost commercial debit and credit of good works instead of a life of spontaneous and devoted service. Feeling as few men have ever felt that the purpose and heart of religion is a union of the soul with God, they were shocked to see the interposition of mediators between him and his creature, to find that instead of hungering for him men were trying to make the best bargain they could for their own eternal happiness. While rejecting nothing in the church they tried to transfigure everything. Accepting priest and sacrament as aids to the divine life they declined to regard them as necessary intermediaries.
[Sidenote: Eckhart, 1260-1327]
The first of the great German mystics was Master Eckhart, a Dominican who lived at Erfurt, in Bohemia, at Paris, and at Cologne. The inquisitors of this last place summoned him before their court on the charge of heresy, but while his trial was pending he died. He was a Christian pantheist, teaching that God was the only true being, and that man was capable of reaching {31} the absolute. Of all the mystics he was the most speculative and philosophical. Both Henry Suso and John Tauler were his disciples. [Sidenote: Suso, 1300-66] Suso's ecstatic piety was of the ultra-medieval type, romantic, poetic, and bent on winning personal salvation by the old means of severe self-torture and the constant practice of good works. Tauler, a Dominican of Strassburg, belonged to a society known as The Friends of God. [Sidenote: Tauler c. 1300-61] Of all his contemporaries he in religion was the most social and practical. His life was that of an evangelist, preaching to laymen in their own vernacular the gospel of a pure life and direct communion with God through the Bible and prayer. Like many other popular preachers he placed great emphasis on conversion, the turning (Kehr) from a bad to a good life. Simple faith is held to be better than knowledge or than the usual works of ecclesiastical piety. Tauler esteemed the holiest man he had ever seen one who had never heard five sermons in his life. All honest labor is called God's service, spinning and shoe-making the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Pure religion is to be "drowned in God," "intoxicated with God," "melted in the fire of his love." Transcending the common view of the average Christian that religion's one end was his own salvation, Tauler taught him that the love of God was greater than this. He tells of a woman ready to be damned for the glory of God—"and if such a person were dragged into the bottom of hell, there would be the kingdom of God and eternal bliss in hell."
One of the fine flowers of German mysticism is a book written anonymously—"spoken by the Almighty, Eternal God, through a wise, understanding, truly just man, his Friend, a priest of the Teutonic Order at Frankfort." The German Theology, [Sidenote: The German Theology] as it was named by Luther, teaches in its purest form entire abandonment to God, simple passivity in his hands, utter {32} self-denial and self-surrender, until, without the interposition of any external power, and equally without effort of her own, the soul shall find herself at one with the bridegroom. The immanence of God is taught; man's helpless and sinful condition is emphasized; and the reconciliation of the two is found only in the unconditional surrender of man's will to God. "Put off thine own will and there will be no hell."
Tauler's sermons, first published 1498, had an immense influence on Luther. They were later taken up by the Jesuit Canisius who sought by them to purify his church. [Sidenote: 1543] The German Theology was first published by Luther in 1516, with the statement that save the Bible and St. Augustine's works, he had never met with a book from which he had learned so much of the nature of "God, Christ, man, and all things." But other theologians, both Protestant and Catholic, did not agree with him. Calvin detected secret and deadly poison in the author's pantheism, and in 1621 the Catholic Church placed his work on the Index.