Chapter II: Part 2

Eckhart thinks that he is speaking of no God other than that God of whom Augustine, and the Evangelist, and Thomas, speak, and yet this testimony as to God is not his testimony, their witness is not his. “Some people want to see God with the same eyes they see a cow withal, and want to love God as they would love a cow. So they love God for the sake of outer riches and inner comfort; but such folk do not rightly love God.... Simple folk fancy they should behold God as though He stood there and they here. But it is not so. God and I are one in the act of knowing (_im Erkennen_).” What underlies such expressions in Eckhart’s mouth is nothing else than the experience of the inner sense; and this experience shows him things in a higher light. He therefore believes himself to have no need of an external light in order to attain to the highest insight: “A Master says: God became man, whereby the whole human race is uplifted and made worthy. Thereof may we be glad that Christ our brother of His own strength rose above all the choirs of angels and sitteth at the right hand of the Father. That Master spake well; but, in truth, I would give little for it. What would it help me, had I a brother who was a rich man, and I therewithal a poor man? What would it help me, had I a brother who was a wise man, and I were a fool?... The Heavenly Father begetteth His Only-Begotten Son in Himself and in me. Wherefore in Himself and in me? I am one with Him; and He has no power to shut me out. In the self-same work, the Holy Ghost receives its being and proceeds from me, as from God. Wherefore? I am in God, and if the Holy Ghost takes not its being from me, neither does it take it from God. In no wise am I shut out.”

When Eckhart recalls the saying of St. Paul: “Put ye on Jesus Christ,” he means to imply in this saying the meaning: Sink yourselves into yourselves, dive down into self-contemplation: and from out the depths of your being, God will shine forth to meet you; He illumines all things for you; you have found Him within you; you have become united with God’s Being. “God became man, that I might become God.”

In his booklet upon _Loneliness_, Eckhart expresses himself as follows upon the relation of the outer perception to the inner: “Here thou must know that the Masters say that in every man there are two kinds of man: the one is called the outer man, and yet he acts through the power of the soul. The other man is called the inner man, that is, that which is within the man. Now thou must know that every man who loveth God maketh no more use of the powers of the soul in the outer man than so far as the five senses absolutely require; and that which is within turns not itself to the five senses, save in so far as it is the guide and conductor of the five senses, and shepherds them, so that they follow not after their craving to bestiality.” One who speaks in such wise of the inner man can no longer direct his gaze upon a Being of things lying outside himself; for he sees clearly that from no kind or species of the outer world can this Being come to him.

An objector might urge: What can it matter to the things of the outer world, what you add to them out of your own mind? Do but rely upon your own senses. They alone give you information of the outer world. Do not adulterate, by a mental addition, what your senses give you in purity, without admixture, as the image of the outer world. Your eye tells you what colour is; what your mind knows about colour, of that there is nothing whatever in colour itself. To this, from Meister Eckhart’s standpoint, the answer would have to be: The senses are a physical apparatus; therefore what they have to tell us about objects can concern only that which is physical in the objects. And this physical factor in the objects communicates itself to me in such wise that in myself a physical process is set going.

Colour, as a physical process of the outer world, sets up a physical process in my eye and brain. Thereby I perceive colour. But in this manner I can perceive of colour only so much as is physical, sensuous. Sense-perception cuts out everything non-sensuous from objects. Objects are thus by sense-perception stripped of everything about them which is non-sensuous. If I then advance to the spiritual, the ideal content, I in fact only reinstate in the objects what sense-perception has shut out therefrom. Thus sense-perception does not exhibit to me the deepest Being of objects, it rather separates me from that being. But the spiritual, the ideal conception, seizing upon them again, unites me with that being. It shows me that objects are inwardly of exactly the same spiritual (_geistigen_) nature as I myself.

The barrier between myself and the outer world falls through this spiritual conception of things. I am separated from the external world in so far as I am a thing of the senses among other things of the senses. Colour and my eye are two different entities. My brain and a plant are two different things. But the ideal content of the plant and of colour belong together with the ideal content of my brain and eye alike to a single ideal entity.

This way of looking at things must not be confused with the very widespread anthropomorphising conception of the world, which imagines that it grasps the objects of the outer world by ascribing to them qualities of a physical nature, which are supposed to resemble the qualities of the human soul. This view asserts: When we meet another human being, we perceive in him only sensuous characteristics. I cannot see into my fellow-man’s inner life. I infer from what I see and hear of him, his inner life, his soul. Thus the soul is never anything which I can directly perceive; I perceive a soul only within myself. My thoughts, my imaginations, my feelings, no man sees. Now just as I have such an inner life, alongside of the life which can be outwardly perceived, so, too, all other beings must have such an inner life.

Thus concludes one who occupies the standpoint of the anthropomorphising conception of the world. What I perceive externally in the plant, must equally be the outer side of something inward, of a soul, which I must add in my imagination to what I actually perceive. And since for me there exists but one single inner world, namely, my own, therefore I can conceive of the inner world of other beings only as resembling my own inner world. Along this line of argument one comes to a sort of universal ensouling of all nature (Pan-psychism).

This view depends, however, on a failure to recognise what the awakened inner sense really gives us. The spiritual (_geistig_) content of an external object, which reveals itself to me in my inner self, is not anything added in or by thought to the outer perception. It is just as little this as is the spirit of another man. I perceive this spiritual content through the inner sense just in the same way as I perceive its physical content through the external senses. And what I call my inner life in the above sense (_i.e._, thoughts, feelings, etc.), is not at all in the higher sense, my spirit (_Geist_). This so-called inner life is only the outcome of purely sensuous processes, and belongs to me only as a purely individual personality, which is nothing more than the result of its physical organisation. If I transfer this inner life to outer things, I am, as a matter of fact, thinking in the air.

My personal soul-life, my thoughts, memories, and feelings, are in me, because I am a nature-being organised in such and such a way, with a perfectly definite sense-apparatus, with a perfectly definite nervous system. I have no right to transfer this my human soul to other things. I should only be entitled to do so if I happened to find anywhere a similarly organised nervous system. But my individual soul is not the highest spiritual element in me. This highest spiritual element must first be awakened through the inner sense; and this awakened spiritual element in me is also one and the same with the spiritual element in all things. The plant appears immediately in its own proper spirituality to this spiritual element,--I have no need to endow it with a spirituality like unto my own.

All talk about the unknown “thing-in-itself” loses any kind of meaning with this conception of the world; for it is just that very “thing-in-itself” which reveals itself to the inner sense. All such talk originates simply in the fact that those who talk thus are unable to recognise in the spiritual contents of their own inner being the “things-in-themselves.” They think that they know in their own inner selves mere shadows and schemes without being,--“mere concepts and ideas” of things. But as they still have a sort of premonition of the “thing-in-itself,” they therefore believe that this “thing-in-itself” is concealing itself, and that there are limits set to man’s power of knowing. One cannot prove to such as are entangled in this belief, that they must grasp the “thing-in-itself” in their own inner being, for even if one were to put it before them, they would still never recognise or admit this “thing-in-itself.” But it is just this recognition with which we are concerned.

All that Meister Eckhart says is saturated with this recognition. “Of this take a comparison: A door opens and shuts upon a hinge. If, now, I compare the outer plank of this door to the outer man, I must then compare the hinge to the inner man. Now, when the door opens and shuts, the outer plank moves to and fro, while yet the hinge remains constantly immovable and is in no way changed thereby. In like manner it is here also.” As an individual sense-being, I can investigate things in all directions--the door opens and shuts,--if I do not spiritually give birth within me to the perceptions of the senses, then do I know nothing of their nature--the hinge does not move!

The illumination brought about through the inner sense is, according to Eckhart’s view, the entrance of God into the soul. The light of knowledge which flames up through this entrance, he calls the “little spark of the soul.” The point in man’s inner being at which this “spark” flames up is “so pure, so lofty, and so noble in itself, that no creature can be therein, but only God alone dwells therein with His purely Divine Nature.” Whosoever has kindled this “spark” in himself, no longer sees only as sees the ordinary man with his outer senses, and with his logical understanding which orders and classifies the impressions of the senses, but he sees how things are in themselves. The outer senses and the classifying understanding separate the individual man from other things; they make of him an individual in space and time, who also perceives the other things in space and time. The man illuminated by the “spark” ceases to be a single separated being. He annihilates his separateness. All that brings about the difference between himself and things ceases to be. That he, as a single being, is that which perceives, no longer comes into consideration. Things and he himself are no longer separated. Things, and with them, God, see themselves in him. “This spark is in very deed God, in that it is a single oneness and bears within it the imagery of all creatures, image without image, and image upon image.”

Eckhart proclaims in the most magnificent words the extinction of the isolated being: “It is therefore to be known, that according to things it is one and the same to know God and to be known by God. Therein do we know God and see, that He makes us to see and to know. And as the air, which enlighteneth, is nothing other than what it enlightens; for the air giveth light, because it is enlightened; even so do we know that we are known, and that He maketh us to know Himself.”

On this foundation Meister Eckhart builds up his relation to God. It is a purely spiritual one, and cannot be modelled according to any image borrowed from human individual experience. Not as one separated individual loves another can God love his creation: not as an architect builds a house can God have created it. All such thoughts vanish before the inner vision. It belongs to God’s very being that He should love the world. A God who could love or not love at pleasure, is imagined according to the likeness of the individual man. “I speak in good truth and in eternal truth and in everlasting truth, that God must needs ever pour Himself forth in every man who has reached down to his true root to the utmost of possibility, so wholly and completely that in His life and in His being, in His nature and in His Godhead, He keeps nothing back; He must ever pour all forth in fruitful wise.” And the inner illumination is something that the soul must necessarily find when it sinks itself deep into the basis of its being.

From this it is already obvious that God’s communication to humanity cannot be conceived after the fashion of the revelation of one human being to another. This communication may also be cut off, for one man can shut himself off from another; but God _must_, by virtue of His very nature, reveal Himself. “It is a sure and certain truth, that it is a necessity for God to seek us, exactly as if His very Godhead depended upon it. God can as little dispense with us as we with Him. Even though we turn away from God, yet God can never turn away from us.” Consequently, man’s relation to God cannot be conceived of as though something image-like, something taken from the individual human being, were contained therein.

Eckhart is thus conscious that it belongs to the perfectness of the Root-Being of the world to find Itself in the human soul. This Root-Being indeed would be imperfect, incomplete, if it lacked that part of its unfoldment which comes to light in the soul. What happens in man belongs to the Root-Being; and if it did not happen, then the Root-Being would be but a part of Itself. In this sense, man can feel himself as a necessary part of the Being of the universe. This Eckhart expresses by describing his feelings towards God as follows: “I thank not God that He loveth me, for He may not do otherwise; whether He will it or no, His nature yet compelleth Him.... Therefore will I not pray to God to give me anything, nor will I praise Him for that which He hath given me....”

But this relationship of the soul to the Root-Being must not be conceived of as if the soul in its individual nature were declared to be identical with this Root-Being. The soul which is entangled in the sense-world, and so in the finite, has as such not yet got within itself the content of the Root-Being. The soul must first develop that content within itself. It must annihilate itself as an isolated being; and Meister Eckhart most aptly characterises this annihilation as _Entwerdung_ (un-becoming or involution). “When I come to the root of the Godhead, none ask me whence I come and where I have been, and none doth miss me, for here there is an _Entwerdung_.” Again, the following phrase speaks very clearly about this relation: “I take a cup of water and lay therein a mirror and set it under the disc of the sun. The sun casts out its shining light on the mirror and yet doth not pass away. The reflecting of the mirror in the sun is sun in the sun, and yet the mirror remains what it is. So is it about God. God is in the soul with His very nature and being and Godhead, and yet He is not the soul. The reflecting of the soul in God, is God in God, and yet the soul is still that which it is.”

The soul which gives itself up to the inner illumination knows in itself not only what this same soul was before its illumination; but it also knows that which this soul only became through this illumination. “We must be united with God in being; we must be united with God uniquely; we must be united with God wholly. How shall we be united with God in being? That must happen in the beholding and not in the _Wesung_. His being may not become our being, but it shall be our life.” Not an already existent life--a _Wesung_--is to be known in the logical sense; but the higher knowing--the beholding--shall itself become life; the spiritual, the ideal must be so felt by the beholder, as ordinary daily life is felt by individual human nature.

From such starting points, Meister Eckhart also builds up a pure conception of Freedom. In its ordinary life the soul is not free; for it is interwoven with the realm of lower causes, and accomplishes that to which it is impelled by these lower causes. But by “beholding” or “vision” it is raised out of the domain of these causes, and acts no longer as a separated individual soul. The root of being is laid bare in this soul, and that can be moved to action by naught save by itself. “God does not compel the will; rather He sets the will free, so that it wills not otherwise than what God Himself wills; and the spirit desires not to will other than what God wills: and that is not its un-freedom: it is its true and real freedom. For freedom is that we are not bound, but free and pure and unmixed, as we were in our first outpouring, as we were set free in the Holy Ghost.”

It may be said of the illuminated man that he is himself the being which from within itself determines what is good and what is evil. He can do naught absolutely, but accomplish the good. For he does not serve the good, but the good realises and lives itself out in him. “The righteous man serveth neither God, nor the creature; for he is free, and the nearer he is to righteousness, the more he is Freedom’s very self.” What then, for Meister Eckhart, can evil be? It can be only action under the influence of the lower mode of regarding things;--the acting of a soul which has not passed through the state of _Entwerdung_ (un-becoming). Such a soul is selfish in the sense that it wills only itself. It could not bring its willing outwardly into accord with moral ideals. The soul having vision cannot in this sense be selfish. Even if it willed itself, it yet could will only the lordship of the ideal; for it has made itself into this very ideal. It can no longer will the ends of the lower nature, for it has no longer aught in common with this lower nature. To act in conformity with moral ideals implies for the soul which has vision, no compulsion, no deprivation.

“The man who standeth in God’s will and in God’s love, to him it is a craving to do all good things that God willeth, and leave undone all evil things that are contrary to God. And it is impossible for him to leave undone anything that God will have done. Even as walking is impossible to one whose legs are bound, just so it would be impossible for a man who standeth in God’s will to do aught unvirtuous.”

Eckhart moreover expressly guards himself against the idea that, with this view of his, free license is given for anything and everything that the individual may will. The man possessing vision is indeed to be recognised by the very fact that as a separated individual he no longer wills anything. “Certain men say: If I have God and God’s freedom, then I may just do whatever I please. Such understand wrongly this saying. So long as thou canst do aught that is contrary to God and His commandment, so long thou hast not God’s love; even though thou mayest well deceive the world, as if thou hadst.” Eckhart is convinced that to the soul which dives down into its own root, the most perfect morality will shine forth from that root to meet it; that there all logical conception, and all acting in the ordinary sense, ceases, and an entirely new ordering of human life makes its appearance.

“For all that the understanding can grasp, and all that desiring can desire, is verily not God. Where understanding and desiring end, there it is dark, there shineth God. There that power unfolds in the soul which is wider than the wide heavens.... The bliss of the righteous and the bliss of God is one bliss; for there is the righteous full of bliss, where God is full of bliss.”

THE FRIENDSHIP OF GOD

In Johannes Tauler (1300-1361), Heinrich Suso (1295-1365), and Johannes Ruysbroeck (1293-1381), one makes acquaintance with men whose life and work exhibit in a very striking manner those “motions of the soul” to which such a spiritual path as that of Meister Eckhart is calculated to give rise in natures of depth and power. While Eckhart seems like a man who, in the blissful experiencing of spiritual re-birth, speaks of the nature of Knowledge as of a picture which he has succeeded in painting; these others, followers of his, appear rather like pilgrims, to whom their inner re-birth has shown a new road which they fain would tread, but whose goal seems to vanish before them into the illimitable distance. Eckhart dwells more upon the glories of his picture; they upon the difficulties of the new path.

To understand the difference between personalities like Eckhart and Tauler, one must see quite clearly how a man stands towards his higher cognitions. Man is interwoven with the sense-world and the laws of nature by which that sense-world is ruled. He is himself a product of that world. He lives because its forces and its materials are at work in him; nay, he perceives this sense-world and judges of it by laws, according to which both he himself and that world are alike built up. If he turns his eyes upon an object, not only does the object present itself to him as a complex of interacting forces, ruled by nature’s laws, but the eye, with which he sees the object is itself a body built up according to just such laws and of just such forces; and the seeing, too, takes place by similar laws and forces. If we had reached the goal of natural science, we should be able to follow out this play of the forces of nature according to natural laws right up into the highest regions of thought-formation,--but in the very act of doing this, we raise ourselves _above_ this play of forces. For do we not stand above and beyond all the “uniformities which make up the laws of nature,” when we over-see the whole and recognise how we ourselves fit into nature? We _see_ with our eyes according to laws of nature. But we know also the laws, according to which we see.

We can take our stand upon a higher summit and overlook at once both ourselves and the outer world in their mutual interplay. Is there not here a something working in us, which is higher than the sensuous-organic personality working with Nature’s forces and according to Nature’s laws? In such activity does there still remain any wall of division between our inner selves and the outer world? That which here judges and gains for itself insight is no longer our separated personality; it is rather the general world-being, which has torn down the barrier between the inner and outer worlds and now embraces both alike. As true as it is that, judged by the outer appearance, I still remain the same separated individual when I have thus torn down this barrier, so true is it also that, judged according to essential being, I am no longer this separated unit. Henceforth there lives in me the feeling that there speaks in my soul the All-Being, which embraces both myself and the entire world.

This is what Tauler felt, when he said: “Man is just as if he were three men--his animal man as he is according to the senses; then his rational man and lastly, his highest, godlike man.... The one is the outer, animal, sensuous man; the other is the inner, understanding man, with his understanding and reasoning powers; the third man is spirit, (_Gemüth_--lit. emotional, feeling nature), the very highest part of the soul.”[1] How far this third man is above the first and second, Eckhart has expressed in the words: “The eye through which I see God, that is the same eye with which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye, that is one eye and one knowing and one feeling.”

[1] _Cp._ W. Preger: _Geschichte der Deutschen Mystik_, vol. iii, p.
161.

But in Tauler another feeling is active as well as this. He has fought his way through to a real vision of the spiritual, and does not constantly confuse, as do the false materialists and the false idealists, the sensibly-natural with the spiritual. If, with his disposition, Tauler had become a scientist, he would have insisted upon explaining all that is natural, including the _whole_ of man, both the first and the second, purely upon natural lines. He would never have transferred purely spiritual forces into nature itself. He would never have talked of a “purposefulness” in nature conceived of according to men’s notions. He knew that there, where we perceive with our senses, no “creative ideas” are to be found. Far rather he was most keenly conscious of the fact that man is a purely natural being. And as he felt himself to be, not a scientist, but a devotee of moral life, he therefore felt most keenly the contrast which reveals itself between this natural being of man and that vision of God which arises naturally and within nature, but as spirituality. And just in that very contrast the meaning of life presented itself to his eyes. Man finds himself as a single being, a creature of nature. And no science can reveal to him anything else about this life than that he is such a creature of nature. As a creature of nature he cannot get outside of the sphere of natural creation. In it he must remain. And yet his inner life leads him outside and beyond it. He must have confidence in that which no science of outer nature can give him or show to him.

If he calls only this nature Being or “that which is,” then he must be able to reach out to the vision which recognises as the higher, Non-being, or “that which is not.” Tauler seeks for no God who is present in the same sense as a natural force; he seeks no God who has created the world in the sense of human creation. In him lives the clear insight that the conception of creation even of the Fathers of the Church is only idealised human creating. It is clear to him that God is not to be found as nature’s working and her laws are found, by science. Tauler is well aware that we must not add in thought anything to nature as God. He knows that whoever thinks God, in his sense, no longer thinks thought-content, as does one who has grasped nature in thought. Therefore, Tauler seeks not to think God, but to think divinely, to think as God thinks. The knowledge of nature is not _enriched_ by the knowledge of God, but _transformed_. The knower of God does not know a different thing from the knower of nature, but he knows in a different way. Not one single letter can the knower of God add to the knowledge of nature; but through his whole knowing of nature there shines a new light.

What root-feelings will take possession of a man’s soul who contemplates the world from this point of view, will depend upon how he regards that experience of the soul which brings about spiritual re-birth. Within this experience, man is wholly a natural being, when he considers himself in his interaction with the rest of nature; and he is wholly a spiritual being when he considers the conditions into which this re-birth has brought him. Thus we can say with equal truth, the inmost depth of the soul is still natural; as also it is already divine. Tauler emphasised the former in accordance with his own tendency of thought. However far we may penetrate into our souls, we still remain separated individual human beings, said he to himself. But yet in the very depths of the soul of the individual being there gleams forth the All-Being.

Tauler was dominated by the feeling: Thou canst not free thyself from separateness, nor purify thyself from it. Therefore the All-Being in its purity can never make its appearance within thee, it can only shed its light into the depths of thy soul. Thus in its depths only a mere reflection, a picture of the All-Being comes into existence. Thou canst so transform thy separated personality that it reproduces the All-Being as a picture; but this All-Being itself does not shine forth in thee. Starting from such conceptions, Tauler came to the idea of a Godhead that never merges wholly into the human world, never flows quite completely into it. More, he attaches importance to his not being confused with those who maintain that man’s inmost being is itself divine. He says: “The Union with God is taken by foolish men in a fleshly sense, and they say that they shall be transformed into divine nature; but such is false and an evil heresy. For even in the very highest, most inward Union with God, God’s nature and God’s being still remain lofty, yea, higher than the loftiest; that passeth into a divine abyss, where never yet was creature.”

Tauler wishes, and rightly, to be called a good Catholic in the sense of his age and of his priestly calling. He has no desire to oppose any other conception to Christianity. He desires only to deepen and spiritualise that Christianity through his way of looking at it. He speaks as a pious priest of the content of Holy Writ. But this same scripture still becomes in the world of his conceptions a means for the expression of the inmost experiences of his soul. “God worketh all his works in the soul and giveth them to the soul; and the Father begetteth His only begotten Son in the soul, as truly as He begetteth Him in eternity, neither more, nor less. What is born when one says: God begetteth in the soul? Is it a likeness of God, or a picture of God, or is it somewhat of God? Nay: it is neither picture nor likeness of God, but the same God and the same Son whom the Father begetteth in eternity and naught else than the blissful divine word, that is the second person in the Trinity, Him the Father begetteth in the soul, ... and thereof the soul hath thus great and special dignity.”[2] The stories of scripture become for Tauler the garment in which he clothes the happiness of the inner life. “Herod, who drove out the child and sought to slay him, is a likeness of the world, which yet seeketh to kill this child in a believing man, therefore one should and must flee therefrom, if we do desire to keep that child alive in us, but that child is the enlightened believing soul of each and every man.”

[2] _Cp._ Preger: _History of German Mysticism_, vol. iii., p. 219
_et seq._

As Tauler directs his gaze mainly upon the natural man, he is comparatively less concerned to tell us what happens when the higher man enters into the natural man, than to discover the paths which the lower forces of the personality must follow if they are to be transmuted into the higher life. As a devotee of the moral life, he desires to show to men the roads to the All-Being. He has unconditional faith and trust that the All-Being shines forth in man, if man will so order his life that there shall be in him a shrine for the Divine. But this All-Being can never shine forth while man shuts himself up in his mere natural separated personality. Such a man, separated off in himself, is merely one member of the world: a single creature, in Tauler’s language. The more man shuts himself off within this his being as a member of the world, so much the less can the All-Being find place in him. “If man is in reality to become one with God, then all energies and powers even of the inner man must die and become silent. The will must turn away even from the Good and from all willing, and become void of willing.” “Man must escape from all his senses and turn inwards all his powers, and come into a forgetting of all things and of himself.” “For the true and eternal Word of God is uttered only in the desert, when the man hath gone out from himself and from all things and is quite untrammelled, desolate and alone.”

When Tauler stood at his zenith, the problem which occupied the central point of his mental life was: How can man overcome and kill out in himself his separated existence, so as to live in perfect unison with the All-life? For one in this position, all feelings towards the All-Being concentrate themselves into this one thing: Awe before the All-Being as that which is inexhaustible, endless. He says to himself: whatever level thou hast reached, there remain still higher perspectives, still more exalted possibilities. Thus clear and defined as is to him the direction in which he has to turn his steps, it is equally clear to him that he can never speak of a goal: for a new goal is only the beginning of a new path. Through such a new goal man reaches a certain level of evolution: but evolution itself continues illimitably. And what that evolution may attain upon some more distant level, it can never know upon its present stage. There is no _knowing_ the final goal: only a _trusting_ in the path, in evolution itself. There is knowing for everything which man has already attained. It consists in the penetration of an already present object by the powers of our spirit. For the higher life of man’s inner being, there is no such knowing. Here the powers of our spirit must first transfer the object itself into the realm of the existent; they must first create for it an existence, constituted as is natural existence.

Natural Science follows the evolution of beings from the simplest up to the most perfected, to man himself. This evolution lies before us as already completed. We know it, by penetrating it with the powers of our spirit. When evolution has reached humanity, man then finds nothing further there before him as its continuation. He himself accomplishes the further unfoldment. Henceforward he _lives_ what for earlier stages he only _knows_. He creates, according to the object, that which, for what has gone before, he only copies in accordance with its spiritual nature. That truth is not one with the existent in nature, but naturally embraces both the existent and the non-existent: of this truth Tauler is filled to overflowing in all his feelings. It has been handed down to us that Tauler was led to this fulfilling by an illuminated layman, a “Friend of God from the Mountains.”

We have here a mysterious story. As to where this “Friend of God” lived there exist only conjectures; as to who he was, not even these. He seems to have heard much of Tauler’s way of preaching, and to have resolved accordingly to journey to Tauler, who was then working as a preacher in Strassburg, in order to fulfil a certain duty by him. Tauler’s relation to the Friend of God, and the influence which the latter exercised upon the former, are to be found described in a text which is printed along with the oldest editions of Tauler’s sermons under the title, “The Book of the Master.” Therein a Friend of God, in whom some seek to recognise the same who came into relations with Tauler, gives an account of a “Master,” whom some assert to be Tauler himself. He relates how a transformation, a spiritual re-birth, was brought about in a certain “Master” and how the latter, when he felt his death drawing near, called his friend to him and begged him to write the story of his “enlightenment,” but yet to take care that no one should ever learn of whom the book speaks. He asks this on the ground that all the knowledge that proceeds from him is yet not really from him. “For know ye that God hath brought all to pass through me, poor worm, and that what it is, is not mine, it is of God.”

A learned controversy which has connected itself with the occurrence is not of the very smallest importance for the essence of the matter. An effort was made to prove on one side[3] that the Friend of God never existed, but that his existence was fiction and that the books ascribed to him come from another hand (Rulman Merswin). On the other hand Wilhelm Preger has sought with many arguments (in his _History of German Mysticism_) to support the existence, the genuineness of the writings, and the correctness of the facts that relate to Tauler.

[3] Denifle: _Die Dichtungen des Gottesfreundes im Oberlande_.

I am here under no obligation to throw light by presumptuous investigation upon a relationship as to which any one, who understands how to read the writings[4] in question, will know that it should remain a secret.

[4] The writings in question are, among others: _Von eime
eigenwilligen weltwisen manne, der von eime heiligen weltpriestere
gewiset wart uffe demuetige gehorsamme_, 1338; _Das Buch von den
zwei Mannen_; _Der gefangene Ritter_, 1349; _Die geistliche stege_,
1350; _Von der geistlichen Leiter_, 1357; _Das Meisterbuch_, 1369;
_Geschichte von zwei fünfzehnjährigen Knaben_.

If one says of Tauler, that at a certain stage of his life a transformation took place in him, that will be amply sufficient. Tauler’s personality need no longer be in any way considered in this connection, but only a personality “in general.” As regards Tauler, we are only concerned with the fact that we must understand his transformation from the point of view set forth in what follows. If we compare his later activity with his earlier, the fact of this transformation is obvious without further search. I will leave aside all outer circumstances and relate the inner occurrences in the soul of the “Master” under “the influence of the layman.” What my reader will understand by the “layman” and the “Master” depends entirely upon his own mentality; what I myself think about it is a matter as to which I cannot know for whom it is of any weight.

A Master is instructing his disciples as to the relationship of the soul to the All-Being of things. He speaks of the fact that when man plunges into the abysmal depths of his soul, he no longer feels the natural, limited forces of the separated personality working within him. Therein the separated man no longer speaks, therein speaks God. There man does not see God, or the world; there God sees Himself. Man has become one with God. But the Master knows that this teaching has not yet awakened to full life in him. He thinks it with his understanding: but he does not yet live in it with every fibre of his personality. He is thus teaching about a state of things which he has not yet completely lived through in himself. The description of the condition corresponds to the truth; yet this truth has no value if it does not gain life, if it does not bring itself forth in reality as actually existent.

The “layman” or “Friend of God” hears of the Master and his teachings. He is no less saturated with the truth which the Master utters than the Master himself. But he possesses this truth not as a matter of the understanding; he has it as the whole force of his life. He knows that when this truth has come to a man from outside, he can himself give utterance to it, without even in the least living in accordance with it. But in that case he has nothing other in him than the natural knowledge of the understanding. He then speaks of this natural knowledge as if it were the highest, equivalent to the working of the All-Being. It is not so, because it has not been acquired in a life that has approached to this knowledge as a transformed, a reborn life. What one acquires only as a natural man, that remains only natural,--even when one afterwards expresses in words the fundamental characteristic of the higher knowledge. Outwards, from within the very nature itself, must the transformation be accomplished.

Nature, which by living has evolved itself to a certain level, must evolve further through life; something new must come into existence through this further evolution. Man must not only look backwards upon the evolution which already lies behind him--claim as the highest that which shapes itself according thereto in his spirit--but he must look forward upon the uncreated: his knowledge must be a beginning of a new content, not an end to the content of evolution which already lies before it. Nature advances from the worm to the mammal, from the mammal to man, not in a conceptual but in an actual, real process. Man has to repeat this process not in his mind alone. The mental repetition is only the beginning of a fresh, real evolution, which, however, despite its being spiritual, is real. Man, then, does not merely know what nature has produced; he continues nature; he translates his knowledge into living action. He gives birth within himself to the spirit, and this spirit advances thence onwards from level to level of evolution, as nature itself advances. Spirit begins a natural process upon a higher level.

The talk about the God who contemplates Himself in man’s inner being, takes on a different character in one who has recognised this. He attaches little importance to the fact that an insight already attained has led him into the depths of the All-Being; instead, his spiritual nature acquires a new character. It unfolds itself further in the direction determined by the All-Being. Such a man not only looks at the world differently from one who merely understands: he lives his life otherwise. He does not talk of the meaning which life already has through the forces and laws of the world: but he gives anew a fresh meaning to his life. As little as the fish already has in itself what makes its appearance on a later level of evolution as the mammal, as little has the understanding man already in himself what shall be born from him as the higher man. If the fish could know itself and the things around it, it would regard the being-a-fish as the meaning of life. It would say: the All-Being is like the fish: in the fish the All-Being beholds itself. Thus would the fish speak as long as it remained constant to its understanding kind of knowledge. In reality it does not remain constant thereto. It reaches out beyond its knowledge with its activity. It becomes a reptile and later a mammal. The meaning which it gives to itself in reality reaches out beyond the meaning which mere contemplation gives to it.

In man also this must be so. He gives himself a meaning in reality; he does not halt and stand still at the meaning he already has, which his contemplation shows him. Knowledge leaps out beyond itself, if only it understands itself aright. Knowledge cannot deduce the world from a ready-made God; it can only unfold itself from a germ in the direction towards a God. The man who has understood this will not regard God as something that is outside of him; he will deal with God as a being who wanders with him towards a goal, which at the outset is just as unknown as the nature of the mammal is unknown to the fish. He does not aim to be the knower of the hidden, or of the self-revealing existent God, but to be the friend of the divine doing and working, which is exalted over both being and non-being.

The layman, who came to the Master, was a “Friend of God” in this sense, and through him the Master became from a contemplator of the being of God, one who is “alive in the spirit,” one who not only contemplated, but lived in the higher sense. The Master now no longer brought forth concepts and ideas of the understanding from his inner nature, but these concepts and ideas burst forth from him as living, actualised spirit. He no longer merely edified his hearers; he shook the very foundations of their being. He no longer plunged their souls into their inner being; he led them into a new life. This is recounted to us symbolically: about forty people fell down through his preaching and lay as if dead.

* * * * *

As a guide to such a new life, we possess a book about whose author nothing is known. Luther first made it known in print. The philologist, Franz Pfeiffer, has recently printed it according to a manuscript of the year 1497, with a modern German translation facing the original text. What precedes the book indicates its purpose and its goal: “Here begins the man from Frankfurt and saith many very lofty and very beautiful things about a perfect life.” Upon this follows the “Preface about the man from Frankfurt”: “Al-mighty, Eternal God hath uttered this little book through a wise, understanding, truthful, righteous man, his friend, who in former days was a German nobleman, a priest and a custodian in the German House of Nobles at Frankfurt; it teacheth many a lovely insight into Divine Wisdom, and especially how and whereby one may know the true, righteous friends of God, and also the unrighteous, false, free-thinkers, who are very hurtful to Holy Church.”

By “free-thinkers” one may perhaps understand those who live in a merely conceptual world, like the “Master” described above before his transformation by means of the “Friend of God,” and by the “true, righteous friends of God,” such as possess the disposition of the “layman.” One may further ascribe to the book the intention of so working upon its readers as the “Friend of God from the Mountains” did upon the Master. It is not known who the author was. But what does that mean? It is not known when he was born and died, or what he did in his outer life. That the author aimed to preserve eternal secrecy about these facts of his outer life, belongs naturally to the way in which he desired to work. It is not the “I” of this or the other man, born at a definite point of time, who is to speak to us, but the “I-ness” in the depths whereof “the separateness of individualities” (in the sense of Paul Asmus’ saying[5]) must first unfold itself. “If God took to Himself all men who are or who have ever been, and became man in them, and they became God in Him, and it did not happen to me also, then my fall and my turning away would never be made good, unless it also happened in me too. And in this restoration and making good, I neither can nor may nor should do anything thereto save a mere pure suffering, so that God alone doeth and worketh all things in me, and I suffer Him and all His works and His divine will. But if I will not submit to this, but possess myself with egotism, _i.e._, with mine, and I, to me, for me, and the like, that hinders God so that He cannot work His work in me purely alone and without hindrance. Therefore my fall and my turning away remain thus not made good.” The “man from Frankfurt” aims to speak not as a separated individual; he desires to let God speak. That he yet can do this only as a single, distinct personality he naturally knows full well; but he is a “Friend of God,” that means a man who aims not at presenting the nature of life through contemplation, but at pointing out the beginning of a new evolutionary pathway through the living spirit.

[5] _Vide ante_, page 34.

The explanations in the book are various instructions as to how one comes to this pathway. The root-thought returns again and again: man must strip off everything that is connected with that which makes him appear as a single, separate personality. This thought seems to be worked out only in respect of the moral life; it should be extended, without further ado, to the higher life of knowledge as well. One must annihilate in oneself whatever appears as separateness: then separated existence ceases; the All-Life enters into us. We cannot master this All-Life by drawing it towards us. It comes into us, when we reduce the separateness in us to silence. We have the All-Life least of all just then, when we so regard our separated existence as if the Whole already dwelt within it. This first comes to light in the separated existence when this separated existence no longer claims for itself to be anything. This pretension on the part of the separated existence our text terms “assumption.”

Through “assumption” the self makes it impossible for itself that the Universal Self should enter into it. The self then puts itself as a part, as something imperfect, in the place of the whole, of the perfect. “The perfect is a being, that in itself and in its being has conceived and resolved all beings, and without which and apart from which there is no true being, and in which all things have their being; for it is the being of all things and is in itself unchangeable and immovable, and changes and moves all other things. But the divided and the imperfect is that which has sprung from out of this perfect, or becomes, just as a ray or a light that flows forth from the sun or a light and shines upon something, this or that. And that is called the creature, and of all these divided things none is the perfect. Therefore also is the perfect none of the divided.... When the perfect cometh, the divided is despised. But when does it come? I say: When so far as is possible it is known, felt, tasted in the soul; for the defect lies wholly in us and not in it. For just as the sun illuminates the whole world and is just as near to the one as to the other, yet a blind man sees it not. But that is no defect of the sun but of the blind man.... If my eye is to see anything, it must become cleansed, or be already cleansed from all other things.... Now one might be inclined to say: In so far then as it is unknowable and inconceivable for all creatures, and since the soul is also a creature, how can it then be known in the soul? Answer: Therefore is it said, the creature shall be known _as a creature_.”

This is as much as to say that all creatures shall be regarded as created and creation and not regard themselves as I-ness and self-ness, whereby this knowing is made impossible. “For in whatever creature this perfect one shall be known, there all creature-being, created-being, I-ness, self-ness, and everything of the kind must be lost, be and become naught.”[6] The soul must therefore look within itself; there it finds its I-ness, its self-ness. If it remains standing there, it thereby cuts itself off from the perfect. If it regards its I-ness only as a thing lent to it as it were, and annihilates it in spirit, it will be seized upon by the stream of the All-Life, of Perfection.

[6] Chap. i., _Book of the Man from Frankfurt_.