Willoughby. But that, remember, is no fault of Tauler’s especially. He does but follow here the ascetic, superhuman aspiration of a Church which, trying to raise some above humanity, sinks myriads below it.
Atherton. Granted. That error does not lessen my love and admiration for the man.
Gower. Your extracts show, too, that the Nothingness towards which he calls men to strive is no indolent Quietism, nor, as with Eckart, a kind of metaphysical postulate, but in fact a profound spiritual self-abasement and the daily working out of a self-sacrificing Christ-like character.
Atherton. Blessed are his contradictions and inconsistencies! Logic cannot always reconcile Tauler with himself—our hearts do.[[126]]
Willoughby. Never surely was a theory so negative combined with an action more fervently intense—a positiveness more benign.
Gower. In his life we understand him,—that is at once the explanation and vindication of what his mysticism means.
Atherton. Few, however, of his fellow-mystics rose, so far as Tauler, above the peculiar dangers of mysticism. Even the good layman, Nicholas of Basle, was a man of vision, and assumed a kind of prophecy. Tauler and the Theologia Germanica stand almost alone in rejecting the sensuous element of mysticism—its apparitions, its voices, its celestial phantasmagoria. With many of his friends mysticism became secluded, effeminate, visionary, because uncorrected, as in his case, by benevolent action, by devoted conflict against priestly wrong.
Kate. Tauler, then, was a Protestant in spirit—a genuine forerunner of the Reformation?
Atherton. Unquestionably.
Mrs. Atherton. But what could the common people make of this high ideal he sets before them? Could they be brought heartily to care about that kind of ultra-human perfectness? Beautiful it must have been to hear this eloquent man describe the divine passion of the soul, how—