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_.
“When the creature assumes to itself somewhat of good, as Being, Life,
Knowledge, Power, in short, aught of that which one calls good and
thinks that it is that, or that it belongs to it or comes from it, so
often and so much as that happens, does the creature turn away.” “The
created soul of man has two eyes. The one is the possibility of seeing
in eternity; the other of seeing in time and in creation.” “Man should
therefore stand and be quite free without himself, that is without
self-ness, I-ness, me, mine, for me and the like, so that he as little
seeks and thinks of himself and what is his in all things as if it did
not exist; and he should therefore also think little of himself, as if
he were not, and as if another had done all his deeds.”[7]
[7] Chap. xv., _Book of the Man from Frankfurt_.
One must also take account of the fact in regard to the writer of
these sentences, that the thought-content, to which he gives a
direction by his higher ideas and feelings, is that of a believing
priest in the spirit of his own time. We are here concerned not with
the thought-content, but with the direction, not with the thoughts
but with the way of thinking. Any one who does not live as he does in
Christian dogmas, but in the conceptions of natural science, finds in
his sentences other thoughts; but with these other thoughts he points
in the same direction. And this direction is that which leads to the
overcoming of the self-hood, by the Self-hood itself. The highest light
shines for man in his Ego. But this light only then imparts to his
concept-world the right reflection, when he becomes aware that it is
not his own self-light, but the universal world-light.
Hence there is no more important knowledge than self-knowledge; and
there is equally no knowledge which leads so completely out beyond
itself. When the “self” knows itself aright, it is already no longer
a “self.” In his own language, the writer of the book in question
expresses this as follows: “For God’s ‘own-ness’ is void of this and
that, void of self-ness and I-ness; but the nature and own-ness of the
creature is that it seeketh and willeth itself and its own and ‘this’
and ‘that’; and in all that it does or leaves undone, it seeketh to
receive its own benefit and profit.”
“When, now, the creature or the man loseth his own-ness and his
self-ness and himself, and goeth out from himself, then God entereth in
with His Own-ness, that is with his Self-hood.”[8] Man soars upwards,
from a view of his “Ego” which makes the latter appear to him as his
very being, to a view such that it shows him his Ego as a mere organ,
in which the All-Being works upon itself. In the concept-sphere of our
text, this means: “If man can attain thereto that he belongeth unto God
just as a man’s hand belongeth to him, then let him content himself and
seek no further.”[9] That is not intended to mean that when man has
reached a certain stage of his evolution he shall stand still there,
but that, when he has got as far as is indicated in the above words,
he should not set on foot further investigations into the meaning of
the hand, but rather make use of the hand, in order that it may render
service to the body to which it belongs.
[8] Chap. xxiv, _Book of the Man from Frankfurt_.
[9] _Ibid._, Chap. liv.
* * * * *
HEINRICH SUSO and JOHANNES RUYSBROEK possessed a type of mind which
may be characterised as genius for feeling. Their feelings are drawn
by something like instinct in the same direction in which Eckhart’s
and Tauler’s feelings were guided by their higher thought-life. Suso’s
heart turns devoutly towards that Root-Being which embraces the
individual man just as much as the whole remaining world, and in whom
forgetting himself, he yearns to lose himself as a drop of water in the
mighty ocean. He speaks of this his yearning towards the All-Being, not
as of something that he desires to embrace in thought; he speaks of it
as a natural impulse, that makes his soul drunken with desire for the
annihilation of its separated existence and its re-awakening to life in
the all-efficiency of the endless life. “Turn thine eyes to this being
in its pure naked simplicity, so that thou mayest let fall this and
that manifold being. Take being in itself alone, that is unmoved with
not-being; for all not-being denies all being. A thing that is yet to
become, or that has been, is not now in actual presence.”
“Now, one cannot know mixed being or not-being except by some mark of
being as a whole. For if one will understand a thing, the reason first
encounters being, and that is a being that worketh all things. It is
a divided being of this or that creature,--for divided being is all
mingled with something of other-ness, with a possibility of receiving
something. Therefore the nameless divine being must so be a _whole_
being in itself, that it sustaineth all divided beings by its presence.”
Thus speaks Suso in the autobiography which he wrote in conjunction
with his pupil Elsbet Stäglin. He, too, is a pious priest and lives
entirely in the Christian circle of thought. He lives therein as if it
were quite unthinkable that anybody with his mental tendency could live
in any other world. But of him also it is true that one can combine
another concept-content with his mental tendency. This is clearly borne
out by the way in which the content of the Christian teaching has
become for him actual inner experience, and his relation to Christ has
become a relation between his own spirit and the eternal truth in a
purely ideal, spiritual way.
He composed a “_Little Book of Eternal Wisdom_.” In this he makes the
“Eternal Wisdom” speak to its servant, in other words to himself:
“Knowest thou me not? How art thou so cast down, or hast thou lost
consciousness from agony of heart, my tender child? Behold it is
I, merciful Wisdom, who have opened wide the abyss of fathomless
compassion which yet is hidden from all the saints, tenderly to receive
thee and all repentant hearts; it is I, sweet Eternal Wisdom, who was
there poor and miserable, so as to bring thee to thy worthiness; it is
I, who suffered bitter death, that I might make thee to live again!
I stand here pale and bleeding and lovely, as I stood on the lofty
gallows of the cross between the stern judgment of my Father and thee.
It is I, thy brother; look, it is I, thy spouse! I have therefore
wholly forgotten all thou hast done against me, as if it had never
been, if only thou turnest wholly to me and separatest thyself no more
from me.”
All that is bodily and temporal in the Christian conception has become
for Suso, as one sees, a spiritual-ideal process in the recesses of his
soul. From some chapters of Suso’s biography mentioned above, it might
appear as if he had let himself be guided not by the mere action of his
own spiritual power, but through external revelations, through ghostly
visions. But he expresses his meaning quite clearly about this. One
attains to the truth through reasonableness, not through any kind of
revelation. “The difference between pure truth and two-souled visions
in the matter of knowledge I will also tell you. An immediate beholding
of the bare Godhead, that is right pure truth, without all doubt; and
every vision, so that it be reasonable and without pictures and the
more like it be unto that bare beholding, the purer and nobler it is.”
Meister Eckhart, too, leaves no doubt that he puts aside the view which
seeks to be spiritual in bodily-spacial forms, in appearances which one
can perceive by any senses. Minds of the type of Suso and Eckhart are
thus opponents of such a view, as that which finds expression in the
spiritualism which has developed during the nineteenth century.
* * * * *
JOHANNES RUYSBROEK, the Belgian mystic, trod the same path as Suso. His
spiritual way found an active opponent in Johannes Gerson (born 1363),
who was for some time Chancellor of the University of Paris and played
a momentous rôle at the Council of Constance. Some light is thrown upon
the nature of the mysticism which was practised by Tauler, Suso and
Ruysbroek, if one compares it with the mystic endeavours of Gerson, who
had his predecessors in Richard de St. Victor, Bonaventura, and others.
Ruysbroek himself fought against those whom he reckoned among the
heretical mystics. As such he considered all those who, through an
easy-going judgment of the understanding, hold that all things proceed
from one Root-Being, who therefore see in the world only a manifoldness
and in God the unity of this manifoldness. Ruysbroek does not count
himself among these, for he knew that one cannot attain to the
Root-Being by the contemplation of things, but only by raising oneself
from this lower mode of contemplation to a higher one.
Similarly, he turned against those who seek to see without further
ado, in the individual man, in his separated existence (in his
creature-being), his higher nature also. He deplored not a little the
error which confuses all differences in the sense-world, and asserts
light-mindedly that things are different only in appearance, but that
in their being they are all alike. This would amount, for a way of
thinking like Ruysbroek’s, to the same thing as saying: That the fact
that the trees in an avenue seem to our seeing to come together does
not concern us. In reality they are everywhere equally far apart,
therefore our eyes ought to accustom themselves to see correctly.
But our eyes see aright. That the trees run together depends upon a
necessary law of nature; and we have nothing to reproach our seeing
with, but on the contrary to recognise in spirit why we see them thus.
Moreover, the mystic does not turn away from the things of the senses.
As things of the senses, he accepts them as they are, and it is
clear to him that through no judgment of the understanding can they
become otherwise. But in spirit he passes beyond both senses and
understanding, and then only does he find the unity. His faith is
unshakable that he can develop himself to the beholding of this unity.
Therefore does he ascribe to the nature of man the divine spark which
can be brought to shine in him, to shine by its own light.
People of the type of Gerson think otherwise. They do not believe in
this self-shining. For them, what man can behold remains always a
something external, that from some side or other must come to them
externally. Ruysbroek believed that the highest wisdom must needs shine
forth for mystic contemplation. Gerson believed only that the soul can
illuminate the content of an external teaching (that of the Church).
For Gerson, Mysticism was nothing else but possessing a warm feeling
for everything that is revealed in this teaching. For Ruysbroek, it was
a faith, that the content of all teaching is also born in the soul.
Therefore Gerson blames Ruysbroek in that the latter imagines that not
only has he the power to behold the All-Being with clearness, but that
in this beholding there expresses itself an activity of the All-Being.
Ruysbroek simply could not be understood by Gerson. Both spoke of two
wholly different things. Ruysbroek has in his mind’s eye the life of
the soul that lives itself into oneness with its God; Gerson, only a
soul-life that seeks to love the God whom it can never actually live
in itself. Like many others, Gerson fought against something that was
strange to him only because he could not grasp it in experience.
CARDINAL NICHOLAS OF CUSA
A gloriously shining star in the sky of the thought-life of the Middle
Ages is Nicholas Chrysippus of Cusa (at Trevis, 1401-1464). He stands
upon the summit of the knowledge of his time. In mathematics he
accomplished remarkable work. In natural science he may be described as
the forerunner of Copernicus, for he took up the standpoint that the
earth is a moving celestial body like others. He had already broken
away from a view upon which even a hundred years later the great
astronomer, Tycho Brahe, based himself, when he hurled against the
teaching of Copernicus the sentence: “The earth is a gross, heavy mass
inapt for movement; how, then, can Copernicus make a star of it and
run it about in the air?” The same man who thus not only embraced all
the knowledge of his time, but also extended it further, possessed in
addition, in a high degree, the power of awakening this knowledge in
the inner life, so that it not only illuminates the external world, but
also mediates for man that spiritual life, which from the profounder
depths of his soul he needs must long after.
If we compare Nicholas with such spirits as Eckhart or Tauler, we
obtain a remarkable result. Nicholas is the scientific thinker,
striving to lift himself from research about the things of the world
on to the level of a higher perception; Eckhart and Tauler are the
faithful believers, who seek the higher life from within the content
of this faith. Eventually Nicholas arrives at the same inner life as
Meister Eckhart; but the inner life of the former has a rich store of
knowledge as its content.
The full significance of this difference becomes clear when we reflect
that for the student of science the danger lies very near at hand of
misunderstanding the scope of that species of knowing which enlightens
us regarding the various special departments of knowledge. He can
very readily be misled into believing that there really is only one
single kind or mode of knowledge; and then he will either over- or
under-rate this knowledge which leads us to the goal in the various
special sciences. In the one case he will approach the subject-matter
of the highest spiritual life as he would a problem in physics, and
proceed to deal with it by means of concepts such as he would apply to
gravitation or electricity. Thus, according as he believes himself to
be more or less enlightened, the world will appear to him as a blindly
working machine, or an organism, or as the teleological structure of
a personal God: perhaps even as a form which is ruled and pervaded by
a more or less clearly conceived “World-Soul.” In the other case he
notes that the knowledge, of which alone he has any experience, is
adapted only to the things of the sense-world; and then he will become
a sceptic, saying to himself: We can know nothing about things which
lie beyond the world of the senses. Our knowledge has a limit. For
the needs of the higher life we have no choice but to throw ourselves
blindly into the arms of faith untouched by knowledge. And for a
learned theologian like Nicholas of Cusa, who was also a scientist,
this second danger lay peculiarly near at hand. For he emerged, along
the lines of his learned training, from Scholasticism,--the way of
conceiving things which was dominant in scientific life within the
Mediæval Church; a mode of thought that St. Thomas Aquinas (1227-1274),
the “Prince of Scholastics,” had brought to its highest perfection. We
must take this mode of conceiving things as the background, when we
desire to portray the personality of Nicholas of Cusa.
Scholasticism is, in the highest degree, a product of human sagacity;
and in it the logical capacity celebrated its highest triumphs. Any one
who is striving to work out concepts in their sharpest, most clear-cut
outlines, ought to go to the Scholastics for instruction. They afford
us the High School for the technique of thinking. They possess an
incomparable skill in moving in the field of pure thinking. It is easy
to under-value what they were able to achieve in this field; for it
is only with difficulty accessible to man as regards most departments
of knowledge. The majority rise to its level only in the domains of
numbers and calculation, and in reflecting upon the connection of
geometrical figures.
We can count by adding in thought a unity to a number, without needing
to call to our help sense-conceptions. We calculate also, without such
conceptions, in the pure element of thought. In regard to geometrical
figures, we know that they never perfectly coincide with any sensible
perception. There is no such thing within sensible reality as an
“ideal” circle. Yet our thinking concerns itself with the purely
ideal circle. For things and processes which are more complicated than
forms of number and space, it is more difficult to find the ideal
counterparts. This has even led so far that it has been contended, from
various sides, that in the separated departments of knowledge there is
only so much of real science as there is of measuring and counting.
The truth about this is that most men are not capable of grasping the
pure thought-element where it is no longer concerned with what can be
counted or measured. But the man who cannot do that for the higher
realms of life and knowledge, resembles in that respect a child, which
has not yet learned to count otherwise than by adding one pea to
another. The thinker who said there was just so much real science in
any domain as there was mathematics in it, was not very much at home in
the matter. One ought rather to demand that everything which cannot be
measured or counted should be handled just as ideally as the forms of
number and space. And the Scholastics in the fullest way did justice to
this demand. They sought everywhere the thought-content of things, just
as the mathematician seeks it in the field of what is measurable and
countable.
In spite of this perfected logical art, the Scholastics attained
only to a one-sided and subordinate conception of Knowledge. Their
conception is this: that in the act of knowing, man creates in himself
an image of what he is to know. It is obvious, without further
discussion, that with such a conception of the knowing process all
reality must be located outside of the knowing. For one can grasp, in
knowing, not the thing itself, but only an image of that thing.
Also, in knowing himself man cannot grasp himself, but again, what he
does know of himself is only an image of himself. It is entirely from
out of the spirit of Scholasticism that an accurate student thereof[10]
says: “Man has in time no perception of his ego, of the hidden ground
of his spiritual being and life, ... he will never attain to beholding
himself; for either, estranged for ever from God, he will find in
himself only a fathomless, dark abyss, an endless emptiness, or else,
made blessed in God, he will find on turning his gaze inwards just that
very God, the sun of whose mercy is shining within him, whose image
and likeness shapes itself in the spiritual traits of his nature.”
[10] K. Werner, in his book upon _Frank Suarez and the Scholasticism
of the Last Centuries_, p. 122.
Whoever thinks like this about all knowing, has only such a conception
of knowing as is applicable to external things. The sensible factor in
anything always remains external for us; therefore we can only take up
into our knowledge pictures of whatever is sensible in the world. When
we perceive a colour or a stone, we are unable, in order to know the
being of the colour or the stone, to become ourselves the colour or
the stone. Just as little can the colour or the stone transform itself
into a part of our own being. It may, however, be questioned whether
the conception of such a knowing-process, wholly directed to what is
external in things, is an exhaustive one.
For Scholasticism, all human knowing does certainly in the main
coincide with this kind of knowing. Another admirable authority on
Scholasticism[11] characterises the conception of knowledge with which
we are concerned in this direction of thought in the following manner:
“Our spirit, allied in earth-life with the body, is primarily focussed
upon the surrounding bodily world, but ordered in the direction of the
spiritual therein: the beings, natures, forms of things, the elements
of existence, which are related to our spirit and offer to it the rungs
for its ascent to the super-sensuous; the field of our knowledge is
therefore the realm of experience, but we must learn to understand what
it offers, to penetrate to its meaning and thought, and thereby unlock
for ourselves the world of thought.”
[11] Otto Willman, in his _History of Idealism_, vol. ii., p. 395.
The Scholastic could not attain to any other conception of knowledge,
for the dogmatic content of his theology prevented his doing so. If he
had directed the gaze of his spiritual eye upon that which he regards
as an image only, he would then have seen that the spiritual content of
things reveals itself in this supposed image; he would then have found
that in his own inner being the God not alone images Himself, but that
He lives therein, is present there in His own nature. He would have
beheld in gazing into his own inner being, not a dark abyss, an endless
emptiness, but also not merely an image of God; he would have felt that
a life pulses within him, which is the very life of God itself; and
that his own life is verily just God’s life.