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.