Christian Mysticism by William Ralph Inge

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In this Lecture we are following the line of speculative Mysticism,
and we have now to consider the greatest of all speculative mystics,
Meister Eckhart, who was born soon after the middle of the thirteenth
century.[234] He was a Dominican monk, prior of Erfurt and vicar of
Thuringen, and afterwards vicar-general for Bohemia. He preached a
great deal at Cologne about 1325; and before this period had come into
close relations with the Beghards and Brethren of the Free
Spirit--societies of men and women who, by their implicit faith in the
inner light, resembled the Quakers, though many of them, as has been
said, were accused of immoral theories and practices. His teaching
soon attracted the attention of the Inquisition, and some of his
doctrines were formally condemned by the Pope in 1329, immediately
after his death.

The aim of Eckhart's religious philosophy is to find a speculative basis
for the doctrines of the Church, which shall at the same time satisfy
the claims of spiritual religion. His aims are purely constructive, and
he shows a distaste for polemical controversy. The writers whom he
chiefly cites by name are Dionysius, Augustine, Gregory, and Boethius;
but he must have read Erigena, and probably Averroes, writers to whom a
Catholic could hardly confess his obligations.[235] He also frequently
introduces quotations with the words, "A master saith." The "master" is
nearly always Thomas Aquinas, to whom Eckhart was no doubt greatly
indebted, though it would be a great mistake to say, as some have done,
that all Eckhart can be found in the _Summa_. For instance, he sets
himself in opposition to Thomas about the "spark," which Thomas regarded
as a faculty of the soul, while Eckhart, in his later writings, says
that it is uncreated.[236] His double object leads him into some
inconsistencies. Intellectually, he is drawn towards a semi-pantheistic
idealism; his heart makes him an Evangelical Christian. But though it is
possible to find contradictions in his writings, his transparent
intellectual honesty and his great powers of thought, combined with deep
devoutness and childlike purity of soul, make him one of the most
interesting figures in the history of Christian philosophy.

Eckhart wrote in German; that is to say, he wrote for the public, and
not for the learned only. His desire to be intelligible to the general
reader led him to adopt an epigrammatic antithetic style, and to omit
qualifying phrases. This is one reason why he laid himself open to so
many accusations of heresy.[237]

Eckhart distinguishes between "the Godhead" and "God." The Godhead is
the abiding potentiality of Being, containing within Himself all
distinctions, as yet undeveloped. He therefore cannot be the object of
knowledge, nor of worship, being "Darkness" and "Formlessness.[238]"
The Triune God is evolved from the Godhead. The Son is the Word of
the Father, His uttered thought; and the Holy Ghost is "the Flower of
the Divine Tree," the mutual love which unites the Father and the Son.
Eckhart quotes the words which St. Augustine makes Christ say of
Himself: "I am come as a Word from the heart, as a ray from the sun,
as heat from the fire, as fragrance from the flower, as a stream from
a perennial fountain." He insists that the generation of the Son is a
continual process.

The universe is the expression of the whole thought of the Father; it
is the language of the Word. Eckhart loves startling phrases, and says
boldly, "Nature is the lower part of the Godhead," and "Before
creation, God was not God." These statements are not so crudely
pantheistic as they sound. He argues that without the Son the Father
would not be God, but only undeveloped potentiality of being. The
three Persons are not merely accidents and modes of the Divine
Substance, but are inherent in the Godhead.[239] And so there can
never have been a time when the Son was not. But the generation of the
Son necessarily involves the creation of an ideal world; for the Son
is Reason, and Reason is constituted by a cosmos of ideas. When
Eckhart speaks of creation and of the world which had no beginning, he
means, not the world of phenomena, but the world of ideas, in the
Platonic sense. The ideal world is the complete expression of the
thought of God, and is above space and time. He calls it "non-natured
nature," as opposed to "diu gena-turte nature," the world of
phenomena.[240] Eckhart's doctrine here differs from that of Plotinus
in a very important particular. The Neoplatonists always thought of
emanation as a diffusion of rays from a sun, which necessarily
decrease in heat and brightness as they recede from the central focus.
It follows that the second Person of the Trinity, the [Greek: Nous] or
Intelligence, is subordinate to the First, and the Third to the
Second. But with Eckhart there is no subordination. The Son is the
pure brightness of the Father's glory, and the express image of His
Person. "The eternal fountain of things is the Father; the image of
things in Him is the Son, and love for this Image is the Holy Ghost."
All created things abide "formless" (as possibilities) in the ground
of the Godhead, and all are realised in the Son. The Alexandrian
Fathers, in identifying the Logos with the Platonic [Greek: Nous], the
bearer of the World-Idea, had found it difficult to avoid
subordinating Him to the Father. Eckhart escapes this heresy, but in
consequence his view of the world is more pantheistic. For his
intelligible world is really God--it is the whole content of the
Divine mind.[241] The question has been much debated, whether Eckhart
really falls into pantheism or not. The answer seems to me to depend
on what is the obscurest part of his whole system--the relation of the
phenomenal world to the world of ideas. He offers the Christian dogma
of the Incarnation of the Logos as a kind of explanation of the
passage of the "prototypes" into "externality." When God "speaks" His
ideas, the phenomenal world arises. This is an incarnation. But the
process by which the soul emancipates itself from the phenomenal and
returns to the intelligible world, is also called a "begetting of the
Son." Thus the whole process is a circular one--from God and back to
God again. Time and space, he says, were created with the world.
Material things are outside each other, spiritual things in each
other. But these statements do not make it clear how Eckhart accounts
for the imperfections of the phenomenal world, which he is precluded
from explaining, as the Neoplatonists did, by a theory of emanation.
Nor can we solve the difficulty by importing modern theories of
evolution into his system. The idea of the world-history as a gradual
realisation of the Divine Personality was foreign to Eckhart's
thought. Stoeckl, indeed, tries to father upon him the doctrine that
the human mind is a necessary organ of the self-development of God.
But this theory cannot be found in Eckhart. The "necessity" which
impels God to "beget His Son" is not a physical but a moral necessity.
"The good must needs impart itself," he says.[242] The fact is that
his view of the world is much nearer to acosmism than to pantheism.
"Nothing hinders us so much from the knowledge of God as time and
place," he says. He sees in phenomena only the negation of being, and
it is not clear how he can also regard them as the abode of the
immanent God.[243] It would probably be true to say that, like most
mediaeval thinkers, he did not feel himself obliged to give a permanent
value to the transitory, and that the world, except as the temporary
abode of immortal spirits, interested him but little. His neglect of
history, including the earthly life of Christ, is not at all the
result of scepticism about the miraculous. It is simply due to the
feeling that the Divine process in the "everlasting Now" is a fact of
immeasurably greater importance than any occurrence in the external
world can be.

When a religious writer is suspected of pantheism, we naturally turn
to his treatment of the problem of evil. To the true pantheist all is
equally divine, and everything for the best or for the worst, it does
not much matter which.[244] Eckhart certainly does not mean to
countenance this absurd theory, but there are passages in his writings
which logically imply it; and we look in vain for any elucidation, in
his doctrine of sin, of the dark places in his doctrine of God.[245]
In fact, he adds very little to the Neoplatonic doctrine of the nature
of evil. Like Dionysius, he identifies Being with Good, and evil, as
such, with not-being. Moral evil is self-will: it is the attempt, on
the part of the creature, to be a particular This or That outside of
God.

But what is most distinctive in Eckhart's ethics is the new importance
which is given to the doctrine of immanence. The human soul is a
microcosm, which in a manner contains all things in itself. At the
"apex of the mind" there is a Divine "spark," which is so closely akin
to God that it is one with Him, and not merely united to Him.[246] In
his teaching about this "ground of the soul" Eckhart wavers. His
earlier view is that it is created, and only the medium by which God
transforms us to Himself. But his later doctrine is that it is
uncreated, the immanence of the Being and Nature of God Himself.
"Diess Fuenkelein, das ist Gott," he says once. This view was adopted
by Ruysbroek, Suso, and (with modifications by) Tauler, and became one
of their chief tenets.[247] This spark is the organ by which our
personality holds communion with God and knows Him. It is with
reference to it that Eckhart uses the phrase which has so often been
quoted to convict him of blasphemous self-deification--"the eye with
which I see God is the same as that with which He sees me.[248]" The
"uncreated spark" is really the same as the grace of God, which raises
us into a Godlike state. But this grace, according to Eckhart (at
least in his later period), is God Himself acting like a human faculty
in the soul, and transforming it so that "man himself becomes grace."

The following is perhaps the most instructive passage: "There is in
the soul something which is above the soul, Divine, simple, a pure
nothing; rather nameless than named, rather unknown than known. Of
this I am accustomed to speak in my discourses. Sometimes I have
called it a power, sometimes an uncreated light, and sometimes a
Divine spark. It is absolute and free from all names and all forms,
just as God is free and absolute in Himself. It is higher than
knowledge, higher than love, higher than grace. For in all these there
is still _distinction_. In this power God doth blossom and flourish
with all His Godhead, and the Spirit flourisheth in God. In this
power the Father bringeth forth His only-begotten Son, as essentially
as in Himself; and in this light ariseth the Holy Ghost. This spark
rejecteth all creatures, and will have only God, simply as He is in
Himself. It rests satisfied neither with the Father, nor with the Son,
nor with the Holy Ghost, nor with the three Persons, so far as each
existeth in its particular attribute. It is satisfied only with the
superessential essence. It is determined to enter into the simple
Ground, the still Waste, the Unity where no man dwelleth. Then it is
satisfied in the light; then it is one: it is one in itself, as this
Ground is a simple stillness, and in itself immovable; and yet by this
immobility are all things moved."

It is God that worketh in us both to will and to do of His good
pleasure; but our own nature and personality remain intact. It is
plain that we could not see God unless our personality remained
distinct from the personality of God. Complete fusion is as
destructive of the possibility of love and knowledge as complete
separation[249].

Eckhart gives to "the highest reason[250]" the primacy among our
faculties, and in his earlier period identifies it with "the spark."
He asserts the absolute supremacy of reason more strongly than anyone
since Erigena. His language on this subject resembles that of the
Cambridge Platonists. "Reasonable knowledge is eternal life," he says.
"How can any external revelation help me," he asks, "unless it be
verified by inner experience? The last appeal must always be to the
deepest part of my own being, and that is my reason." "The reason," he
says, "presses ever upwards. It cannot rest content with goodness or
wisdom, nor even with God Himself; it must penetrate to the Ground
from whence all goodness and wisdom spring."

Thus Eckhart is not content with the knowledge of God which is
mediated by Christ, but aspires to penetrate into the "Divine
darkness" which underlies the manifestation of the Trinity. In fact,
when he speaks of the imitation of Christ, he distinguishes between
"the way of the manhood," which has to be followed by all, and "the
way of the Godhead," which is for the mystic only. In this overbold
aspiration to rise "from the Three to the One," he falls into the
error which we have already noticed, and several passages in his
writings advocate the quietistic self-simplification which belongs to
this scheme of perfection. There are sentences in which he exhorts us
to strip off all that comes to us from the senses, and to throw
ourselves upon the heart of God, there to rest for ever, "hidden from
all creatures[251]." But there are many other passages of an opposite
tendency. He tells us that "the way of the manhood," which, of course,
includes imitation of the active life of Christ, must be trodden first
by all; he insists that in the state of union the faculties of the
soul will act in a new and higher way, so that the personality is
restored, not destroyed; and, lastly, he teaches that contemplation is
only the means to a higher activity, and that this is, in fact, its
object; "what a man has taken in by contemplation, that he pours out
in love." There is no contradiction in the desire for rest combined
with the desire for active service; for rest can only be defined as
unimpeded activity; but in Eckhart there is, I think, a real
inconsistency. The traditions of his philosophy pointed towards
withdrawal from the world and from outward occupations--towards the
monkish ideal, in a word; but the modern spirit was already astir
within him. He preached in German to the general public, and his
favourite themes are the present living operation of the Spirit, and
the consecration of life in the world. There is, he shows, no
contradiction between the active and the contemplative life; the
former belongs to the faculties of the soul, the latter to its
essence. In commenting on the story of Martha and Mary, those
favourite types of activity and contemplation[252], he surprises us by
putting Martha first. "Mary hath _chosen_ the good part; that is," he
says, "she is striving to be as holy as her sister. Mary is still at
school: Martha has learnt her lesson. It is better to feed the hungry
than to see even such visions as St. Paul saw." "Besser ein
Lebemeister als tausend Lesemeister." He discourages monkish
religiosity and external badges of saintliness--"avoid everything
peculiar," he says, "in dress, food, and language." "You need not go
into a desert and fast; a crowd is often more lonely than a
wilderness, and small things harder to do than great." "What is the
good of the dead bones of saints?" he asks, in the spirit of a
sixteenth century reformer; "the dead can neither give nor take[253]."
This double aspect of Eckhart's teaching makes him particularly
interesting; he seems to stand on the dividing-line between mediaeval
and modern Christianity.

Like other mystics, he insists that love, when perfect, is independent
of the hope of reward, and he shows great freedom in handling
Purgatory, Hell, and Heaven. They are states, not places; separation
from God is the misery of hell, and each man is his own judge. "We
would spiritualise everything," he says, with especial reference to
Holy Scripture.[254]

In comparing the Mysticism of Eckhart with that of his predecessors,
from Dionysius downwards, and of the scholastics down to Gerson, we
find an obvious change in the disappearance of the long ladders of
ascent, the graduated scales of virtues, faculties, and states of
mind, which fill so large a place in those systems. These lists are
the natural product of the imagination, when it plays upon the theory
of _emanation_. But with Eckhart, as we have seen, the fundamental
truth is the _immanence_ of God Himself, not in the faculties, but in
the ground of the soul. The "spark of the soul" is for him really
"divinae particula aurae." "God begets His Son in me," he is fond of
saying: and there is no doubt that, relying on a verse in the
seventeenth chapter of St. John, he regards this "begetting" as
analogous to the eternal generation of the Son.[255] This birth of the
Son in the soul has a double aspect--the "eternal birth," which is
unconscious and inalienable,[256] but which does not confer
blessedness, being common to good and bad alike; and the assimilation
of the faculties of the soul by the pervading presence of Christ, or
in other words by grace, "quae lux quaedam deiformis est," as Ruysbroek
says. The deification of our nature is therefore a thing to be striven
for, and not given complete to start with; but it is important to
observe that Eckhart places no intermediaries between man and God.
"The Word is very nigh thee," nearer than any object of sense, and any
human institutions; sink into thyself, and thou wilt find Him. The
heavenly and earthly hierarchies of Dionysius, with the reverence for
the priesthood which was built upon them, have no significance for
Eckhart. In this as in other ways, he is a precursor of the
Reformation.

With Eckhart I end this Lecture on the speculative Mysticism of the
Middle Ages. His successors, Ruysbroek, Suso, and Tauler, much as they
resemble him in their general teaching, differ from him in this, that
with none of them is the intellectual, philosophical side of primary
importance. They added nothing of value to the speculative system of
Eckhart; their Mysticism was primarily a _religion of the heart_ or a
rule of life. It is this side of Mysticism to which I shall next
invite your attention. It should bring us near to the centre of our
subject: for a speculative religious system is best known by its
fruits.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 188: _Conf._ viii. 2-5. The best account of the theology of
Victorinus is Gore's article in the _Dictionary of Christian
Biography_.]

[Footnote 189: So Synesius calls the Son [Greek: patros morphe].]

[Footnote 190: "Non enim vivimus praeteritum aut vivimus futurum, sed
semper praesenti utimur." "AEternitas semper per praesentiam habet omnia
et haec semper."]

[Footnote 191: "Effectus est omnia," Victorinus says plainly.]

[Footnote 192: Victorinus must have got this phrase from some Greek
Neoplatonist. It was explained that [Greek: to me on] may be used in
four senses, and that it is not intended to identify the two extremes.
But the very remarkable passage in Hierotheus (referred to in Lecture
III.) shows that the two categories of [Greek: aoristia] cannot be
kept apart.]

[Footnote 193: "Ipse se ipsum circumterminavit."]

[Footnote 194: _De Trin_. vii. 4. 7; _de Doctr. Christ_. i. 5. 5;
_Serm_. 52. 16; _De Civ. Dei_, ix. 16.]

[Footnote 195: _Contr. Adim. Man._ 11.]

[Footnote 196: _De Ord._ ii. 16. 44, 18. 47.]

[Footnote 197: _Enarrat. in Ps._ 85. 12.]

[Footnote 198: _Conf._ vii. 13 _ad fin._]

[Footnote 199: Compare with this sentence of the _Confessions_ the
statement of Erigena quoted below, that "the things which are not are
far better than those which are."]

[Footnote 200: _Ep._ 120. 20. St. Augustine wrote in early life an
essay "On the Beautiful and Fit," which he unhappily took no pains to
preserve.]

[Footnote 201: _De Ord._ ii. 16. 42, 59; Plot. _Enn._ i. 6. 4.]

[Footnote 202: _De Lib. Arb._ ii. 16. 41; Plot. _Enn._ i. 6. 8, iii.
8. 11.]

[Footnote 203: _Enarr. in Ps._ xliv. 3; _Ep._ 120. 20. Plot. _Enn._ i.
6. 4, says with more picturesqueness than usual [Greek: kalon to tes
dikaiosynes kai sophrosynes prosopon, kai oute hesperos oute eoos
outo kala]. (From Aristotle, _Eth._ v. 1. 15.)]

[Footnote 204: _Ench._ iii. "etiam illud quod malum dicitur bene
ordinatum est loco suo positum; eminentius commendat bona." St.
Augustine also says (_Ench._ xi.), "cum omnino mali nomen non sit nisi
privationis boni"; cf. Plot. _Enn._ iii. 2. 5, [Greek: holos de to
kakon elleipsin tou agathou theteon.] St. Augustine praises Plotinus
for his teaching on the universality of Providence.]

[Footnote 205: _De Civ. Dei_, iv. 12, vii. 5.]

[Footnote 206: _De Quantitate Animae_, xxx.]

[Footnote 207: _Conf._ vii. 10. I have quoted Bigg's translation.]

[Footnote 208: _Conf._ xi. 9.]

[Footnote 209: St. Augustine does not reject the belief that visions
are granted by the mediation of angels, but he expresses himself with
great caution on the subject. Cf. _De Gen. ad litt._ xii. 30, "Sunt
quaedam excellentia et merito divina, quae demonstrant angeli miris
modis: utrum visa sua facili quadam et praepotenti iunctione vel
commixtione etiam nostra esse facientes, an scientes nescio quo modo
nostram in spiritu nostro informar visionem, difficilis perceptu et
difficilior dictu res est."]

[Footnote 210: See Lotze, _Microcosmus_, bk. viii. chap. 4, and other
places. We may perhaps compare the Johannine [Greek: kosmos] with the
Synoptic [Greek: aion] as examples of the two modes of envisaging
reality.]

[Footnote 211: Eriugena is, no doubt, the more correct spelling, but I
have preferred to keep the name by which he is best known.]

[Footnote 212: Erigena quotes also Origen, the two Gregorys, Basil,
Maximus, Ambrose, and Augustine. Of pagan philosophers he puts Plato
first, but holds Aristotle in high honour.]

[Footnote 213: Stoeckl calls him "ein faelscher Mystiker," because the
Neoplatonic ("gnostic-rationalistic") element takes, for him, the
place of supernaturalism. This, as will be shown later, is in
accordance with the Roman Catholic view of Mysticism, which is not
that adopted in these Lectures. For us, Erigena's defect as a mystic
is rather to be sought in his extreme intellectualism.]

[Footnote 214: "Dum vero (divina bonitas) incomprehensibilis
intelligitur, per excellentiam non immerito _nihilum_ vocitatur."]

[Footnote 215: This is really a revival of "modalism." The unorthodoxy
of the doctrine becomes very apparent in some of Erigena's
successors.]

[Footnote 216: _De Div. Nat._ i. 36: "Iamdudum inter nos est confectum
omnia quae vel sensu corporeo vel intellectu vel ratione cognoscuntur
de Deo merito creatore omnium, posse praedicari, dum nihil eorum quae de
se praedicantur pura veritatis contemplatio eum approbat esse." All
affirmations about God are made "non proprie sed translative"; all
negations "non translative sed proprie." Cf. also _ibid._ i. 1. 66,
"verius fideliusque negatur in omnibus quam affirmatur"; and
especially _ibid._ i. 5. 26, "theophanias autem dico visibilium et
invisibilium species, quarum ordine et pulcritudine cognoscitur Deus
esse et invenitur _non quid est, sed quia solummodo est._" Erigena
tries to say (in his atrocious Latin) that the external world can
teach us nothing about God, except the bare fact of His existence. No
passage could be found to illustrate more clearly the real tendencies
of the negative road, and the purely subjective Mysticism connected
with it. Erigena will not allow us to infer, from the order and beauty
of the world, that order and beauty are Divine attributes.]

[Footnote 217: But it must be remembered that Erigena calls God
"nihilum." His words about creation are, "Ac sic de nihilo facit
omnia, de sua videlicet superessentialitate producit essentias, de
supervitalitate vitas, de superintellectualitate intellectus, de
negatione omnium quae sunt et quae non sunt, affirmationes omnium quae
sunt et quae non sunt."]

[Footnote 218: So Kaulich shows in his monograph on the speculative
system of Erigena.]

[Footnote 219: Erigena was roused by a work on predestination, written
by Gotteschalk, and advocating Calvinistic views, to protest against
the doctrine that God, who is life, can possibly predestine anyone to
eternal death.]

[Footnote 220: Berengar objected to the crudely materialistic theories
of the real presence which were then prevalent. He protested against
the statement that the transmutation of the elements takes place "vere
et sensualiter," and that "portiunculae" of the body of Christ lie upon
the altar. "The mouth," he said, "receives the _sacrament_, the inner
man the true body of Christ."]

[Footnote 221: Similar teaching from the sacred books of the East is
quoted by E. Caird, _Evolution of Religion_, vol. i. p. 355.]

[Footnote 222: This is the accepted phrase for the work of the twelfth
and thirteenth century theologians. We might also say that they
modified uncompromising Platonic Realism by Aristotelian science. Cf.
Harnack, _History of Dogma_, vol. vi. p. 43 (English translation):
"Under what other auspices could this great structure be erected than
under those of that Aristotelian Realism, which was at bottom a
dialectic between the Platonic Realism and Nominalism; and which was
represented as capable of uniting immanence and transcendence, history
and miracle, the immutability of God and mutability, Idealism and
Realism, reason and authority."]

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