CHAPTER VII

GERMAN AND FLEMISH MYSTICISM
ECKHART—THE FRIENDS OF GOD—‘* THEOLOGIA GERMANICA ”—TAULER—SUSO—RUYSBROECK
Tue expansion of mystical religion in medieval Italy and England was largely due to the spiritual experience of St. Francis and of Richard Rolle : an experience coloured by romanticism, by a sharp revolt from religious conventions, by an ardent and personal Christocentric feeling. In both we see the characteristic reaction of a poetic and artistic temperament to Eternal Life. The man who has been justly called the Father of German Mysticism was of a very different type, but the life-giving character of his great personality was not less marked. All that is peculiar in the teach- ing of the German mystics, differentiating it from the general Christian tradition of the inner life, originates in the teaching of Meister Eckhart. His daring—indeed sometimes dangerous—specu- lations and profound insights brought to the spiritual landscape of the later Middle Ages new mystery and depth ; and, in spite of exaggerations, greatly enriched and spiritualized the general “ sense of God.”
Born about 1260, Eckhart entered the Domini- can order as a youth, and studied at Cologne and at Paris; theological schools in which the influence
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of the great Dominican doctors, Albertus Magnus (1193-1280) and his pupil St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74), was paramount. Eckhart learnt much from these sources, and frequently quotes St. Thomas’s works ; but the determining fact in his mental formation was his encounter with Neo- platonic philosophy, so exactly appropriate to his intensely religious yet fastidious and speculative mind. He owed much to Dionysius the Areo- pagite, and perhaps to the great though heretical genius of Erigena. Pure and unworldly, with a remarkable instinct for metaphysical realities, and an intellectual passion for clearness even in the most ineffable reaches of spiritual experience, he pushed to an extreme that Neoplatonic conception of Reality which has always formed a part, but never the whole, of the mystical tradition of the Church. It encouraged in him a total disdain for history and succession, a tendency to exile God from His creation ; and led him to set up a sharp distinction between the Absolute and unconditioned Godhead, “unknown and never to be known,” and the God of religious experience. This separa- tion is fundamental to Eckhart’s thought, and affected the whole development of German mysti- cism.
Yet this leaning to transcendental speculation, landing him at last in a monism which—did we judge him by his formal declarations—can hardly be reconciled with Christianity, was combined with simple and homely pastoral effort. Intellec- tual processes might lead to the discovery of a “bare” and impersonal Divinity, unoccupied with time and space, and to the logical demand for a
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similar abstraction on the part of ‘“‘ sanctified ” souls, But a deep religious sensitiveness modified this inhuman aloofness. The vernacular sermons, preached mostly to the laity and religious com- munities of Strassburg, by which we know Eckhart best, are a strange blend of metaphysical and missionary fervour, exhibiting by turns the influ- ence of his heart and his head. With his gaze, as it were, perpetually fixed beyond the horizons of the mind, he set forth the most abstract of con- ceptions with the persuasive ardour of a lover. Even now we cannot read him without catching something of his certitude that only the Unknow- able is truly real and truly to be desired.
He preached to those who could bear it—and his immense reputation testifies to the general hunger for a deepening of spiritual life—the austere doctrine of total detachment from creatures. He insisted that “‘if a soul is to see God it must look at nothing in time; for while the soul is occupied with time or place or any image of the kind, it cannot recognize God. . .. Only he knows God who recognizes that all creatures are nothingness.” By this constant emphasis on the mystery of Being, the unsearchableness of the real things of God, Eckhart revived that sense of awe which is fundamental to the spiritual life. Yet against this unplumbed background of the Infinite he displays a divine love which is “ever ready, though we are unready—nigh to us, though we are far from Him,”’ and is discoverable as surely by the path of mercy as by that of contemplation. ‘“ Were one in a rapture like that of St. Paul,” he says, “and a sick man needed help, it were better
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to come out of the rapture and show love by serving him who had need.”
Though the judgment of the Pope upon Eckhart, that ‘“‘ he wished to know more than he should,” is not born of mere obscurantism, but contains sound common sense, there is no doubt that his violent and one-sided restatement of the foundations of theism—his struggle to make diagrams of the undiscoverable—did real service to the inner life of the Church. He ranks with the creative mystics whose experience of God has quickened other souls, and through them enriched the general Christian consciousness.
The distinctive fact about the German mystics of the fourteenth century is the enormous impulse they received from Eckhart, their close acquaint- ance with his teaching ; all use his ideas, modified and warmed through by their own temperament or experience. From him they get their wide horizons, their way of escape from a merely human range of imagery and emotion. This is specially true of his two chief disciples, the Dominicans Suso (c. 1295-1365) and Tauler (¢. 1300-61), whose immense veneration for their “‘ Great Master” indicates the strength of Eckhart’s personality and the devotion he could inspire. In Suso, Eckhartian theology is combined with the ascetic and monastic tradition, and passed through a singularly gentle, fervent, and romantic mind. In Tauler we see a born preacher and reformer turning the same material to his special purposes. The Fleming, Ruysbroeck (1293-1381), one of the greatest of Christian contemplatives, seems often to use
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experiences, but the ardour and realism with which he invests them are his own.
With this group of mystics, all young men at the time of Eckhart’s death, and all strongly affected by him, we encounter the second, or social phase of German mysticism. Suso and Tauler were directly, Ruysbroeck perhaps indirectly, con- nected wtih the widespread spiritual movement, or revival, of the Friends of God, which incor- porated everything that was best in the personal and active religion of the time. As the Spiritual Franciscans strove to perpetuate the inner teaching and apostolic ardour of St. Francis, and actually provided a religious environment in which mysti- cism could grow; so this informal brotherhood, largely of lay origin and membership, fed upon the stern Eckhartian teaching and became a nursery of visionaries and mystics.
Like the Spiritual Franciscans, the Friends of God were and desired to remain faithful members of the Catholic Church; but they put before tradition the direct experiences of the Spirit. They had, too, an apocalyptic side to their propa- ganda, revealing their attachment to that German prophetic tradition which began with St. Hilde- garde. They denounced the numerous and glaring abuses and sins of the time, foretold divine ven- geance, demanded realismand sincerity, and practised an often extreme asceticism; regarding themselves as an ‘inner Church ”’ of spiritual men, a faithful remnant in an evil generation, directly guided by the Holy Ghost. They taught a mystical form of personal religion, based on the conception of a “divine spark ”’ or Godlike quality latent in every
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"| ‘THE MYSTICS OF THE CHURCH soul, by the upgrowth of which those called to experience God might become “ divine and super- natural men.” ‘These were said to be led into “the Upper School of Perfect Resignation,’’ where great trials and sufferings were endured, selfhood was slain, and the Holy Spirit was felt to be teaching directly within the soul. In this doctrine of the Inner Light, the Friends of God anticipated the Quaker position ; but they never broke with institutional religion, and seem to have felt peculiar reverence for the sacraments.
Such a spiritual atmosphere inevitably produced a large crop of abnormal phenomena. Ecstasy, visions, prophecy and clairvoyance became frequent among the members of the group. A quantity of literature—much of it still in existence—was pro- duced and circulated among the members, who were scattered through the Rhineland, Switzer- land and Bavaria. This literature, which is partly allegorical and prophetic, partly confessional and didactic, and abounds in psychological and his- torical problems, indicates that, whilst Dominican influence was prominent, the direction and inspira- tion of the Friends of God remained largely in lay hands. Ina time of much clerical corruption, the movement asserted the right of the truly spiritual man to assume religious leadership and teach religious truth. Thus one of its leaders was Rulman Merswin, a Strassburg merchant, whose spiritual experiences are recorded in the Book of Nine Rocks. The ideal figure of the “‘ Friend of God of the Oberland,” prominent in its documents, is a layman ; whilst the Book of the Master of Holy Scripture is designed to show that even a great
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theologian may learn supernatural truth from any holy but unlearned man.
We may therefore regard the movement of the Friends of God as an unorganized corporate experi- ment in mystical religion, fed on the intellectual side by Eckhart, on the prophetic and visionary side by the older German mysticism. The ecstatic nuns, Margaret and Christina Ebner, who were amongst its leaders, reproduced many of the charac- teristics of St. Hildegarde. We see in the wonder- ful little book called the Theologia Germanica the strength and beauty of the spiritual teaching which nourished it. Here the Neoplatonic demand for a total flight from created things, in order that the uncreated and eternal may be achieved, is reinterpreted in terms of will and desire. It is through the fixing of these powers of the soul upon Reality—that is to say a total and selfless concen- tration on the purposes of God—that man escapes from the fetters of mere selfhood; and, “‘ made a partaker of the Divine Nature,” finds his true personality and peace.
He who is made a partaker of the Divine Nature neither willeth, desireth nor seeketh anything save Goodness as Goodness for the sake of Goodness . . . where this Light is, the man’s end and aim is not this or that, Me or Thee, or the like, but only the One, Who is neither I nor Thou, this nor that, but is above all I and Thou, this and that; and in Him all goodness is loved as one Good.
This solid and bracing doctrine, with its sure touch upon the supernatural, its easy movement between the homely and the transcendent, shows us the mysticism of the Friends of God at its best : its spiritual realism, its moral zeal. The anony- mous writer, through whom these ideas passed to
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Luther and thence into the main stream of Pro- testant thought, is described as a priest of the Teutonic order in Frankfort. He was plainly influenced by Eckhart, and more directly by his pupil Tauler, the greatest personality among the leaders of the Friends of God.
Through Tauler, the movement maintained that contact with the great spiritual traditions of Christen- dom which saved it from degenerating into the fanatical extravagances of many contemporary mys- tical sects. Though we know little of him beyond what his vernacular sermons tell us—for the other works ascribed to him are not considered authentic —these sermons, of which nearly a hundred and fifty survive, entitle him to a great place among the teaching mystics of the Church. Born about 1300, he became a Dominican novice at fifteen, and during his studies at Strassburg and Cologne came under the influence of Eckhart, whose teaching permanently coloured his thought. He lived for a time in Basle, a great centre of the Friends of God; afterwards returning to Strassburg, where he died in 1361-
Tauler unites a deep philosophic mysticism with intense pastoral fervour. His sermons, with their evidences of religious culture, their close depen- dence on St. Augustine, St. Bernard and St. Thomas Aquinas, their easy movement between the simplest religious imagery and the loftiest mystical ideas, witness to the greatness and steadiness of his soul. He invests the profound conception of the Godhead which he learned from Eckhart with a warmth of appeal which brings it within the radius of simple Christian experience: for “the depth of the
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Divine Abyss cannot be fathomed by reason, but the depth may be fathomed by deep humility.” All good and humble men, he thinks, should be able, ‘‘ communing with themselves in their inmost hearts,” thus to “‘ return to the Source from which wesprang.” Sucha “return to thine Origin means that the presence of all things in which thou canst not find God will seem like a wound to thee,” and it requires a complete detachment from personal desire.
Tauler’s demands on those who chose the spiritual life were heroic in their completeness. He asked of them “a mind that is empty and un- troubled by a// other things, and has secretly yielded itself up with a// its powers in the Presence of God.’’ To one who really achieved this, he declared that “‘ many a glimpse will be vouchsafed in his inmost heart ; and what God is will be made much clearer and plainer to him than the natural sun is to his bodily eyes.”
In such passages Tauler seems to give us a hint of his own mystical experiences, as to which his reticence is otherwise complete: for his method is always objective. Though he can speak more wonderfully perhaps than any mystic since St. Augustine of that unconditioned experience of God beyond thought, which is “so close and yet so far off, and so far beyond all things that it has neither time nor place—a simple and unchanging con- dition,” yet his language remains impersonal, and offers no encouragement to that cult of religious consolations which often flourishes in coteries of the devout. To his mind the true Friend of God was one who had chosen for friendship’s sake a hard career, and might even rise beyond acceptance
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‘
to a “‘consuming thirst”’ for suffering. “‘ That a man should have a life of quiet or rest in God is good ; that a man should lead a painful life in patience is better ; but that a man should have rest in a painful life is best of all!” Here the doctrine of unmitigated detachment justifies itself, and is brought back into immediate touch with the tensions and opportunities of human life.
If Tauler taught, and teaches still, by exclusively objective methods, his friend and contemporary Suso redresses the balance by the vividly personal and subjective character of his work. In his autobiography he reveals, almost without reserve, the course of his interior life; showing in action the principles which Tauler expounds. He too was a Dominican friar, and had sat at the feet of Eckhart, whose influence is easily recognized in the philosophic passages of his Life, and especially in the Book of Eternal Wisdom. After Eckhart’s death Suso had a vision in which that ‘‘ Blessed Master ”’—whose most daring propositions were destined to be censured by the Church—appeared, and signified that he was in great glory, and that his soul was “‘ transformed and made Godlike in God.”
Upon this the Servitor besought him to tell him two things. The first was, the manner in which those persons dwell in God, who with real and genuine detachment have sought to rest in the supreme Truth alone? To this he answered, that no words can tell the way in which these persons are taken up into the modeless abyss of the Divine Essence. ‘The second thing was: what exercise is most calculated to help forward him, whose earnest desire is to arrive at this state? The Master replied that he must die to himself by - deep detachment, receive everything as from God and not from creatures, and establish himself in unruffled patience towards all men, however wolfish they may be.
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But in spite of his veneration for Eckhart, Suso’s real affinities were with the earlier German mystics. The poetic and symbolic visions of St. Mechthild and St. Gertrude, their turn for dramatic action, their ardent yet innocent emotion- alism, are more congenial to him than the austere doctrine of the unknowable Godhead. He tells us very simply that “he had from youth up a loving heart’ ; and from the time of his conver- sion—which happened when he was eighteen—this governed his religious reactions. Like his con- temporary, Richard Rolle, he loved to describe in almost sensual terms the sweet savour, ardent fires and heavenly music which visited his adoring soul. Songs and dances, flowers and angels, all the paraphernalia of romance, illustrate in his visions the most abstract theological ideas. He tells us that “his desire was to become and be called a Servitor of the Eternal Wisdom ’’—yet he conceived of this attribute of Deity almost in the manner of chivalry as “‘a gentle loving Mistress, rich in wisdom and overflowing with love.”
Thus it grew into a habit with him, whenever he heard songs of praise, or the sweet music of stringed instruments, or lays, or dis- course about earthly love, immediately to turn his heart and mind inwards, and gaze abstractedly upon his loveliest Love, whence all love flows. It were impossible to tell how often with weeping eyes, from out the unfathomable depth of his outspread heart, he em- braced this lovely form, and pressed it tenderly to his heart. And thus it fared with him as with a sucking child, which lies encircled by its mother’s arms upon her breast. As the child with its head and the movement of its body lifts itself up against its tender mother, and by these loving gestures testifies its heart’s delight, even so his heart many a time leapt up within his body towards the delightful presence of the Eternal Wisdom, and melted away in sensible affections.
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Though in such visions as these we seem to see Suso’s starved human affections seeking an outlet, the spiritual life was not for him chiefly a matter of ecstasies, visions and emotional consola- tions. Side by side with these, he practised a severe and indeed savage asceticism, which is described in his Life with horrifying detail. The Friends of God accepted in full the medieval theory of physical penance, and Suso’s vehement nature seized eagerly upon this opportunity of suffering for the sake of love. His self-inflicted torments lasted for over twenty years.
After this he was inwardly warned that the time of deliberate and exterior suffering was over. ““ All these practices were nothing more than a good beginning, and a breaking through his un- crushed natural man.” He was now called to that Upper School of Perfect Resignation, in which the hard lesson of complete spiritual detachment was taught ; a cardinal doctrine among the Friends of God, whose ideal of the mystical life was heroic and austere. The reluctance with which Suso, now worn with penances and approaching middle- age, faced this new call on his endurance, his openly expressed preference for a “‘ comfortable life,” and the stages by which he reached the heights of self-abandonment, are all set out with the simplicity and candour which make his auto- biography one of the most precious and engaging documents in the whole range of medieval mysti- cism. Exterior and interior trials seemed to gather round the unfortunate Servitor of the Eternal Wisdom ; his noblest acts of charity brought scandal on his convent and himself ; for years he
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was beset by temptations to doubt and despair, and was successively accused of hypocrisy, heresy and immorality. |
During this time he lived in much seclusion ; but after eight years was inwardly taught that schooling was over and he must now “ go forth to his neighbour.” ‘Though his gentle and sensitive nature was not adapted to popular success, and he never rivalled Tauler’s eminence as a preacher, Suso’s fervour and depth of spirituality were recognized ; and during the last period of his life many spiritual children gathered round him. He also restored many relaxed nunneries to a more strict religious observance, and became a beloved and successful director of souls. One of his spiritual daughters, the Swiss nun Elizabeth Staglin, was evidently the chief joy and interest of his later years ; and his correspondence with her, which fills the last half of his Life, shows how beautiful was the link which bound together the scattered Friends of God. Elizabeth was an educated and intelligent girl, ‘‘ of an angelic dis- position within,” who had studied the writings of Eckhart and found in them “a great many deep intellectual views very pleasant to reflect upon.” Nevertheless she was conscious that these took her somewhat out of her depth, and wrote for help to Suso; asking him, with a pleasant touch of youth- ful conceit, to “ pass over the common ordinary kind of instruction and deal with high subjects.”
Suso’s reply is that of the experienced man of prayer, who has reached the realities of spiritual life :
What I have to say will need but few words. ‘True bliss lies not in beautiful words but good works. . . . Let alone for the
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present these deep questions and attend to those fit for thee. ‘Thou seemest to me as yet a young unexercised sister, and therefore it will be more profitable to thee to hear about the first beginnings of the spiritual life.
Elizabeth showed her quality by accepting this snub meekly. She answered: ‘‘ What I long for is not wise words, but a holy life . . . begin first with the lowest things and guide me in them, just as a school child is first taught what is fit for its young age.”
Suso therefore told her bit by bit “the way in which he broke through created things to arrive at God,” though he forbade his pupil to imitate his own methods in the matter of physical penance. ““Seek not to imitate the severe exercises of thy spiritual father. . . . God has many kinds of crosses with which He chastens His friends. I look for Him to lay another sort of cross on thy shoulders.” Under these wise and gentle counsels, Elizabeth progressed in the mystical life, and became capable of receiving from her director, who was plainly delighted by her theological enthusiasm, much high teaching based on “ the holy Master Eckhart ” and those “bright lights”’ St. Denis (the Areo- pagite) and “‘the dear St. Thomas.’ But the scholastic severity of his favourite authorities is softened and coloured by Suso’s lovely and poetic mind. ‘Thus when the maiden asks, ‘‘ What is God?” he first replies with a dreadful exactitude that He is “ substantial Being,” but his pupil upon this asking him to “tell her more about it,’’ he bursts into a beautiful rhapsody on God as found in His creation, in which the artist and lover of all beauty conquers at least for a moment the scholar
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Look above thee and around thee to the four quarters of the universe, and see how wide and high the beautiful heaven is in its swift course, and how nobly its Master has adorned it with the seven planets, each of which, not to reckon in the moon, is much bigger than the whole earth, and how He has decked it with the countless multitude of the bright stars. Oh! when in summer time the beautiful sun bursts forth unclouded and serene, what fruitfulness and blessings it bestows unceasingly upon the earth! See how the leaves and grass shoot up, and the lovely flowers smile ; how forest, heath, and meadow ring again with the sweet song of nightingales and other little birds; how all those little creatures, which stern winter had shut up, issue forth rejoicing, and pair together; and how men too, both young and old, entranced with joy, disport themselves right merrily. Ah, gentle God, if Thou art so lovely in Thy creatures, how exceeding beautiful and ravishing Thou must be in Thyself! But look again, I pray thee, and behold the four elements—earth, water, air, and fire, with all the wondrous things which they contain in manifold variety—men, beasts, birds, fishes and sea-monsters ; and mark how they all cry aloud together, Praise and honour be to the unfathomable immensity that is in Thee! Who is it, Lord, that sustains all this? Who feeds it all? It is Thou who providest for all, each in its own way; for great and small, for rich and poor. It is Thou, O God, who doest this. "Thou, O God, art God indeed !
Come, daughter, thou hast now found thy God, whom thy heart has so long sought after. Look upwards, then, with sparkling eyes and radiant face and bounding heart, and behold Him and embrace Him with the infinite outstretched arms of thy soul and thy affection, and give thanks and praise to Him, the noble Prince of all creatures. See how, by gazing on this mirror, there springs up speedily, in a soul susceptible of such impressions, an intense inward jubilee; for by jubilee is meant a joy which no tongue can tell, but which pours itself with might through heart and soul.
The chapters in which these communications are recorded witness to the lofty intellectual standard reached amongst the Friends of God, ethos the idea that they were merely a society of simple pietists or excited visionaries, Their mystical religion rested upon solid foundations, expressing
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itself not only in great purity of life, but in vigorous apostolic action. Elizabeth Staglin died five years before her spiritual father. His Life ends with the vision of her liberated soul ‘‘ shining with a dazzling brightness and full of a heavenly joy.”
Contemporary with Suso and Tauler, and in- fluenced by their doctrines, though hardly to be reckoned amongst the formal adherents of the Friends of God, was one of the greatest—perhaps the very greatest—of the mystics of the Church. John Ruysbroeck (1293-1381), brought up in Brussels by two learned and holy priests, and accustomed from childhood to the atmosphere of spiritual religion, spent the first half of his life as a chaplain of the cathedral of St. Gudule. Simple and unassuming, going about his ordinary business with “‘a mind lifted up into God,’’ he seems to have moved gently and without crisis to the heights of the contemplative life. When he was fifty years old, the longing for greater solitude and quiet drove him from the city. With his two foster- fathers he left Brussels and established at Groenen- dael, in the forest of Soignes, a small community under the Augustinian rule. Here he lived peace- fully for thirty-eight years, and here he wrote his greatest mystical works.
Ruysbroeck’s teaching cannot be summarized. No words other than his own can suggest its real quality, for it implies and proceeds from an experience of God which transcends the normal process of the mind. It has that peculiar char- acter which great mystical literature shares with great poetry ; with each fresh reading it discloses fresh truths and secrets to those—and only those—
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who are ready to receive them. Increased famili- arity with these writings brings a growing convic- tion that a real weight of meaning must be attached to every phrase, and that those which seem obscure to us are dark with excess of light. Ruysbroeck is struggling to describe a genuine experience of Reality, so great when measured by our common human level, that the effort to understand him, to follow his enraptured ascent to “‘ that wayless being which all interior spirits have chosen above all other things,” leaves us bewildered and awed.
Yet a certain method, borrowed in part from earlier writers—though only so borrowed, we may be sure, because experience had proved its worth —can be discerned in his works ; and a knowledge of this method helps us to understand him. He always treats the spiritual life as a growth or pro- gress. It begins on simple human levels, with the purifying and ordering of that natural life of the senses which, with all its animal impulses and inevitable moral struggles, must yet be the raw material of sanctity.
The first business of “‘ those who follow the way of Love” is to ‘‘ be like other good people,’”’ in fulfilling the duties of outward or “active” life. They must renounce self-will, learn to bear provo- cation with gentleness, show a friendly face, and be ready to serve, give, and lend to everyone, while cleaving to God alone. Moreover they must be faithful to the ordinances of the Church; for Ruysbroeck, the most transcendental of all mystics, highly valued corporate and sacramental religion. Only those whose will and senses have been thus disciplined and mortified are fit for the next stage :
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that interior life in which the reason in its turn is sublimated, ‘‘ nourished and fulfilled by the Spirit,” and receives the supersensual illumination which ‘“‘is not God, but is the light whereby we perceive © Him.” Beyond this again is the true contempla- tive or “‘ super-essential ” life of the God-desiring soul—‘ above reason, but not without reason ’’?— wherein the spirit is lifted up “‘ according to a way that is wayless,’’ and lives in God and God in it.
There are we emptied of ourselves and of every creature, and made one with God in love. But between us and God this unity for ever ceaselessly renews itself; for the Spirit of God, outflowing and indrawing, touches and stirs our spirit, urging us to live according to the beloved will of God, and love Him as He deserveth . . . as God sendeth us forth, with all His gifts, to live according to His beloved will, so His Spirit draweth us within, to love Him as He deserveth.
Thus for Ruysbroeck the “‘ supreme summit of the inner life ”’ is not an achieved condition of still beatitude, a blank absorption in the Absolute ; it is, on the contrary, a life so rich and so abundant that it requires for its expression the extremes of activity and of rest, pouring itself out in generous acts of charity to “all in common,” and yet “‘ inwardly abiding in unbroken repose.” In this it is the faint copy of that Divine life and love which the mystic “‘ perceives in his inward seeing,’ as a common good pouring forth through heaven and earth, and drawing all things to itself, yet which is “eternally still and wayless according to the simplicity of its Essence.”
In language directly borrowed from Eckhart, Ruysbroeck identifies the Divine activity in which every soul must share with ‘“‘the Trinity of the Persons of God” ; and the eternal repose tasted
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in contemplation with the Godhead or Simple Being. But these expressions, when he employs them, lose their dry and abstract character and become transfused with life and love. No other mystic gives to his readers so deep a sense of un- searchable mystery, yet of almost intolerable joys. To do this he needed, and used, all that the intellectualism of the Early and Middle Ages—in Augustine, Dionysius, Richard of St. Victor, Eck- hart, and Aquinas—could give him; and by its means conveys to us at least a hint of ineffable adventures, together with the certitude that “all we taste, against all we lack, is like a single drop of water against the whole sea . . . for we feed upon His Immensity, which we cannot devour, and we yearn after His Infinity, which we cannot attain.” ILLUSTRATIVE WORKS Eckhart, Meister. Translated by C. de B. Evans. London, 1924. Inge, W. R. Christian Mysticism, 2nd ed. London, 1912. Fones, Rufus. Studies in Mystical Religion. London,1g909. Ruysbroeck. The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, The Book of Truth, The Sparkling Stone. ‘Trans- lated by P. Wynschenk Dom. London, 1916. The XII Béguines. Translated by J. Francis. London, 1913. Suso. Life. Translated by T. F. Knox. London, 1913. The Little Book of Eternal Wisdom. London, 1910. Tauler, John. “Twenty-five Sermons. ‘Translated by S. Winkworth. New edition. London, 1906. The Inner Way: Thirty-six Sermons for Festivals. 3rd edition. London, 1909. Theologia Germanica. Edited by S. Winkworth. London,
1907. Underhill, E. Ruysbroeck. London, 1915.
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