Willoughby. It is certainly very curious to mark the pathway of these pantheistic notions through successive ages. Seriously, I did not know till lately how venerably antique were the discoveries of absolute idealism.
Lowestoffe. I confess that the being one in oneness, the nothing, the soul beyond the soul, the participation in the all-moving Immobility of which Eckart speaks, are to me utterly unintelligible.
Gower. Do not trouble yourself. No one will ever be able to get beyond the words themselves, any more than Bardolph could with the phrase which so tickled the ear of Justice Shallow. ‘Accommodated; that is, when a man is, as they say, accommodated: or, when a man is,—being,—whereby,—he may be thought to be accommodated; which is an excellent thing.’
Atherton. Yet, to do Eckart justice, he has his qualifications and his distinctions in virtue of which he imagines himself still within the pale of orthodoxy, and he strongly repudiates the Antinomian consequences to which his doctrines were represented as tending.
Gower. Ay, it is just in this way that the mischief is done. These distinctions many a follower of his could not or would not understand, and so his high philosophy produced in practice far oftener such men as the Nameless Wild than characters resembling the more pure and lofty ideal he drew himself in his discourse to the good people of Strasburg. These philosophical edge-tools are full perilous. Modern Germany is replete with examples of that fatal facility in the common mind for a practical application of philosophic paradox which our friend Adolf lamented at Fegersheim. When a philosophy which weakens the embankments that keep licence out has once been popularized, the philosopher cannot stop the inundation by shouting from his study-window. De Wette himself at last became aware of this, and regretted it in vain. Such speculation resembles the magic sword of Sir Elidure—its mysterious virtue sometimes filled even its owner with a furor that hurried him to an indiscriminate slaughter, but wielded by any other hand its thirst could be satisfied only with the blood of every one around, and at last with the life of him who held it.
Lowestoffe. Still there is far more excuse for Eckart than for our nineteenth century pantheists. Even the desperation of some of those poor ignorant creatures, who exaggerated Eckart’s paradoxes till they grew a plea for utter lawlessness, is not so unnatural, however lamentable. Who can wonder that some should have overwrought the doctrine of Christ in us and neglected that of Christ for us, when the opus operatum was in its glory, ghostly comfort bought and sold, and Christ our sacrifice pageanted about in the mass, as Milton says,—a fearful idol? Or that the untaught many, catching the first thought of spiritual freedom from some mystic, should have been intoxicated instantly. The laity, forbidden so long to be Christians on their own account, rise up here and there, crying, ‘We will be not Christians merely, but so many Christs.’ They have been denied what is due to man, they will dreadfully indemnify themselves by seizing what is due to God. Has not the letter been slaying them by inches all their days? The spirit shall give them life!
Gower. Like the peasant in the apologue;—religion has been so long doled out to them in a few pitiful drops of holy water, till in their impatience they must have a whole Ganges-flood poured into their grounds, obliterating, with a vengeance, ‘all distinctions,’ and drowning every logical and social landmark under the cold grey level—the blank neutral-tint of a stoical indifference which annihilates all order and all law.
Atherton. By a strange contradiction, Eckart employs Revelation at one moment only to escape it the next—and uses its beacon-lights to steer from, not to the haven. He pays homage to its authority, he consults its record, but presently leaves it far behind to lose himself in the unrevealed Godhead—floats away on his ‘sail-broad vans’ of speculation through the vast vacuity in search of
——a dark
Illimitable ocean, without bound,