But it is not mysticism to believe in a world of higher realities, which are, and ever will be, beyond sight and sense; for heaven itself will not abrogate manifestation, but substitute a more adequate manifestation for a less. What thoughtful Christian man supposes that in any heaven of heavens, any number of millenniums hence, the Wisdom, Power, or Goodness of God will become manifest to him, as so many visible entities, with form, and hue, and motion? It is not mysticism to believe that the uncreated underlies all created good. Augustine will not be suspected of pantheism; and it is Augustine who says—‘From a good man, or a good angel, take away angel, take away man—and you find God.’ We may be realists (as opposed to the nominalist) without being mystics. For the surmise of Plato, that the world of Appearance subsisted in and by a higher world of Divine Thoughts is confirmed (while it is transcended) by Christianity, when it tells us of that Divine Subsistence, that Eternal Word, by whom and in whom, all things consist, and without whom was not anything made that is made. And herein lies that real, though often exaggerated, affinity between Platonism and Christianity, which a long succession of mystics have laboured so lovingly to trace out and to develop. In the second and third centuries, in the fourteenth, and in the seventeenth; in the Christian school at Alexandria, in the pulpits of the Rhineland, at Bemerton, and at Cambridge, Plato has been the ‘Attic Moses’ of the Clements and the Taulers, the Norrises and the Mores.
But when mysticism, in the person of Plotinus, declares all thought essentially one, and refuses to Ideas any existence external to our own minds, it has become pantheistic. So, also, when the Oriental mystic tells us that our consciousness of not being infinite is a delusion (maya) to be escaped by relapsing ecstatically into the universal Life. Still more dangerous does such mysticism become when it goes a step farther and says—That sense of sin which troubles you is a delusion also; it is the infirmity of your condition in this phantom world to suppose that right is different from wrong. Shake off that dream of personality, and you will see that good and evil are identical in the Absolute.
In considering the German mysticism of the fourteenth century it is natural to inquire, first of all, how far it manifests any advance beyond that of preceding periods. An examination of its leading principles will show that its appearance marks an epoch of no mean moment in the history of philosophy. These monks of the Rhineland were the first to break away from a long-cherished mode of thought, and to substitute a new and profounder view of the relations subsisting between God and the universe. Their memorable step of progress is briefly indicated by saying that they substituted the idea of the immanence of God in the world for the idea of the emanation of the world from God. These two ideas have given rise to two different forms of pantheism; but they are neither of them necessarily pantheistic. To view rightly the relationship of God to the universe it is requisite to regard Him as both above it and within it. So Revelation taught the ancient Hebrews to view their great ‘I am.’ On the one hand, He had His dwelling in the heavens, and humbled Himself to behold the affairs of men; on the other, He was represented as having beset man behind and before, as giving life to all creatures by the sending forth of His breath, as giving to man understanding by His inspiration, and as dwelling, in an especial sense, with the humble and the contrite. But philosophy, and mysticism, frequently its purest aspiration, have not always been able to embrace fully and together these two conceptions of transcendence and of immanence. We find, accordingly, that from the days of Dionysius Areopagita down to the fourteenth century, the emanation theory, in one form or another, is dominant. The daring originality of John Scotus could not escape from its control. It is elaborately depicted in Dante’s Paradiso. The doctrine of immanence found first utterance with the Dominican Eckart; not in timid hints, but intrepid, reckless, sounding blasphemous. What was false in Eckart’s teaching died out after a while; what was true, animated his brother mystics, transmigrated eventually into the mind of Luther, and did not die.
To render more intelligible the position of the German mystics it will be necessary to enter into some farther explanation of the two theories in question. The theory of emanation supposes the universe to descend in successive, widening circles of being, from the Supreme—from some such ‘trinal, individual’ Light of lights, as Dante seemed to see in his Vision. In the highest, narrowest, and most rapid orbits, sing and shine the refulgent rows of Cherubim and Seraphim and Thrones. Next these, in wider sweep, the Dominations, Virtues, Powers. Below these, Princedoms, Archangels, Angels, gaze adoring upwards. Of these hierarchies the lowest occupy the largest circle. Beneath their lowest begins our highest sphere—the empyrean, enfolding within its lesser and still lesser spheres, till we reach the centre—‘that dim spot which men call earth.’ Through the hierarchies of heaven, and the corresponding hierarchies of the church, the grace of God is transmitted, stage by stage, each order in its turn receiving from that above, imparting to that below. This descent of divine influence from the highest point to the lowest is designed to effect a similar ascent of the soul from the lowest to the highest. Of such a theory John Scotus Erigena is the most philosophical exponent. With him the restitution of all things consists in their resolution into their ideal sources (causæ primordiales). Man and nature are redeemed in proportion as they pass from the actual up to the ideal; for in his system, the actual is not so much the realization of the ideal as a fall from it. So, in the spirit of this theory, the mounting soul, when it anticipates in imagination the redemption of the travailing universe, will extract from music the very essence of its sweetness, and refine that again (far above all delight of sense) into the primal idea of an Eternal Harmony. So likewise, all form and colour—the grace of flowers, the majesty of mountains, the might of seas, the red of evening or of morning clouds, the lustre of precious stones and gold in the gleaming heart of mines—all will be concentrated and subtilized into an abstract principle of Beauty, and a hueless original of Light. All the affinities of things, and instincts of creatures, and human speech and mirth, and household endearment, he will sublimate into abstract Wisdom, Joy, or Love, and sink these abstractions again into some crystal sea of the third heaven, that they may have existence only in their fount and source—the superessential One.
Very different is the doctrine of Immanence, as it appears in the Theologia Germanica, in Eckart, in Jacob Behmen, and afterwards in some forms of modern speculation. The emanation theory supposes a radiation from above; the theory of immanence, a self-development, or manifestation of God from within. A geometrician would declare the pyramid the symbol of the one, the sphere the symbol of the other. The former conception places a long scale of degrees between the heavenly and the earthly: the latter tends to abolish all gradation, and all distinction. The former is successive; the latter, immediate, simultaneous. A chemist might call the former the sublimate, the latter the diluent, of the Actual. The theory of immanence declares God everywhere present with all His power—will realize heaven or hell in the present moment—denies that God is nearer on the other side the grave than this—equalizes all external states—breaks down all steps, all partitions—will have man at once escape from all that is not God, and so know and find only God everywhere. What are all those contrasts that make warp and woof in the web of time; what are riches and poverty, health and sickness; all the harms and horrors of life, and all its joy and peace,—what past and future, sacred and secular, far and near? Are they not the mere raiment wherewith our narrow human thought clothes the Ever-present, Ever-living One? Phantoms, and utter nothing—all of them! The one sole reality is even this—that God through Christ does assume flesh in every Christian man; abolishes inwardly his creature self, and absorbs it into the eternal stillness of His own ‘all-moving Immobility.’ So, though the storms of life may beat, or its suns may shine upon his lower nature, his true (or uncreated) self is hidden in God, and sits already in the heavenly places. Thus, while the Greek Dionysius bids a man retire into himself, because there he will find the foot of that ladder of hierarchies which stretches up to heaven; the Germans bid man retire into himself because, in the depths of his being, God speaks immediately to him, and will enter and fill his nature if he makes Him room.
In spite of some startling expressions (not perhaps unnatural on the first possession of men by so vast a truth), the advance of the German mysticism on that of Dionysius or Erigena is conspicuous. The Greek regards man as in need only of a certain illumination. The Celt saves him by a transformation from the physical into the metaphysical. But the Teuton, holding fast the great contrasts of life and death, sin and grace, declares an entire revolution of will—a totally new principle of life essential. It is true that the German mystics dwell so much on the bringing forth of the Son in all Christians now, that they seem to relegate to a distant and merely preliminary position the historical incarnation of the Son of God. But this great fact is always implied, though less frequently expressed. And we must remember how far the Church of Rome had really banished the Saviour from human sympathies, by absorbing to the extent she did, his humanity in his divinity. Christ was by her brought really near to men only in the magical transformation of the Sacrament, and was no true Mediator. The want of human sympathy in their ideal of Him, forced them to have recourse to the maternal love of the Virgin, and the intercession of the saints. Unspeakable was the gain, then, when the Saviour was brought from that awful distance to become the guest of the soul, and vitally to animate, here on earth, the members of his mystical body. Even Eckart, be it remembered, does not say, with the Hegelian, that every man is divine already, and the divinity of Christ not different in kind from our own. He attributes a real divineness only to a certain class of men—those who by grace are transformed from the created to the uncreated nature. It is not easy to determine the true place of Christ in his pantheistic system; but this much appears certain, that Christ and not man—grace, and not nature, is the source of that incomprehensible deification with which he invests the truly perfect and poor in spirit.
On the moral character of Eckart, even the malice of persecution has not left a stain. Yet that unknown God to which he desires to escape when he says ‘I want to be rid of God,’ is a being without morality. He is above goodness, and so those who have become identical with Him ‘are indifferent to doing or not doing,’ says Eckart. I can no more call him good, he exclaims, than I can call the sun black. In his system, separate personality is a sin—a sort of robbery of God: it resembles those spots on the moon, which the angel describes to Adam as ‘unpurged vapours, not yet into her substance turned.’ I am not less than God, he will say, there is no distinction: if I were not, He would not be. ‘I hesitate to receive anything from God—for to be indebted to Him would imply inferiority, and make a distinction between Him and me; whereas, the righteous man is, without distinction, in substance and in nature, what God is.’ Here we see the doctrine of the immanence of God swallowing up the conception of his transcendence. A pantheism, apparently apathetic and arrogant as that of the Stoics, is the result. Yet, when we remember that Eckart was the friend of Tauler and Suso, we cannot but suppose that there may have lain some meaning in such language less monstrous than that which the words themselves imply. Eckart would probably apply such expressions, not to his actual self;—for that he supposes non-existent, and reduced to its true nothing—but to the divine nature which, as he thought, then superseded within him the annihilated personality. Tauler (and with him Ruysbroek and Suso) holds in due combination the correlative ideas of transcendence and of immanence.
Such, then, is one of the most important characteristics of German mysticism in the fourteenth century. I have next to ascertain in which of the leading orders of mystics Tauler should be assigned a place.