For as though there were metempsychosis, and the soul of one man
passed into another; opinions do find, after certain revolutions,
men and minds like those that first begat them.—SIR THOMAS BROWNE.
WILLOUGHBY. What struck me most as novel in the mysticism of this
strange Master Eckart was the stress he laid on our own consciousness of
being the sons of God. Neither the ecclesiastical nor the scholastic
gradations and preparatives for mysticism, so important with his
predecessors, seem of much moment with him in comparison with the
attainment, _per saltum_, as it were, of this blessed certainty. Perhaps
the secret of his reaction against the orthodoxy of his day lay here. He
craves a firm resting-place for his soul. The Church cannot satisfy the
want. He will supply it for himself, and, to do so, builds together into
a sort of system certain current notions that suit his purpose, some new
and others old, some in tolerable harmony with Christianity, others more
hostile to it than he was altogether aware. These pantheistic
metaphysics may have seemed to him his resource and justification—may
have been the product of the brain labouring to assure the heart.
ATHERTON. A very plausible conjecture. Amalric of Bena, who had been
famous as a teacher in Paris nearly a hundred years before Eckart went
to study there, maintained that a personal conviction of our union to
Christ was necessary to salvation. He was condemned for the doctrine,
but it survived.
WILLOUGHBY. Thank you. That fact supports me. Might not Eckart have
desired to assert for our inward religious life a worthier and more
independent place, as opposed to the despotic externalism of the time—to
make our access to Christ more immediate, and less subject to the
precarious mercies of the Church?
ATHERTON. A grand aim, if so: but to reach it he unfortunately absorbs
the objective in the subjective element of religion—rebounds from
servility to arrogance, and makes humanity a manifestation of the Divine
Essence.
GOWER. In order to understand his position, the question to be first
asked appears to me to be this. If Eckart goes to the Church, and says,
‘How can I be assured that I am in a state of salvation?’ what answer
will the Holy Mother give him? Can you tell me, Atherton?
ATHERTON. She confounds justification and sanctification together, you
will remember. So she will answer, ‘My son, as a Christian of the
ordinary sort, you cannot have any such certainty—indeed, you are much
better without it. You may conjecture that you are reconciled to God by
looking inward on your feelings, by assuring yourself that at least you
are not living in any mortal sin. If, indeed, you were appointed to do
some great things for my glory, you might find yourself among the happy
few who are made certain of their state of grace by a special and
_extra_ revelation, to hearten them for their achievements.’
GOWER. Shameful! The Church then admits the high, invigorating influence
of such certainty, but denies it to those who, amid secular care and
toil, require it most.
WILLOUGHBY. While discussing Eckart, we have lighted on a doctrine which
must have produced more mysticism than almost any other you can name. On
receiving such reply, how many ardent natures will strain after visions
and miraculous manifestations, wrestling for some token of their safety!
GOWER. And how many will be the prey of morbid introspections, now
catching the exultant thrill of confidence, and presently thrown
headlong into some despairing abyss.
ATHERTON. As for the mass of the people, they will be enslaved for ever
by such teaching, trying to assure themselves by plenty of sacraments,
believing these the causes of grace, and hanging for their spiritual all
on the dispensers thereof.
WILLOUGHBY. Then, to apply the result of your question, Gower, to
Eckart,—as he has in him nothing servile, and nothing visionary, he
resolves to grasp certainty with his own hand—wraps about him relics of
the old Greek pallium, and retires to his extreme of majestic isolation.
GOWER. Pity that he could not find the scriptural _Via Media_—that
common truth which, while it meets the deepest wants of the individual,
yet links him in wholesome fellowship with others—that pure outer light
which nurtures and directs the inner.
WILLOUGHBY. No easy way to find in days when Plato was installed high
priest, and the whole biblical region a jungle of luxuriant allegoric
conceits or thorny scholastic formulas.
GOWER. This daring Eckart reminds me of that heroic leader in Beaumont
and Fletcher’s _Bonduca_. I think I hear him cry with Caratach,
Cease your fretful prayers,
Your whinings, and your tame petitions;
The gods love courage armed with confidence,
And prayers fit to pull them down: weak tears
And troubled hearts, the dull twins of cold spirits,
They sit and smile at. Hear how I salute ’em.
LOWESTOFFE. Did you not say yesterday, Atherton, that Eckart’s system
had received high praise from Hegel?
ATHERTON. Oh yes, he calls it ‘a genuine and profound philosophy.’
Indeed the points of resemblance are very striking, and, setting aside
for the moment some redeeming expressions and the more religious spirit
of the man, Eckart’s theosophy is a remarkable anticipation of modern
German idealism. That abstract ground of Godhead Eckart talks about,
answers exactly to Hegel’s _Logische Idee_. The Trinity of process, the
incarnation ever renewing itself in men, the resolution of redemption
almost to a divine self-development, constitute strong features of
family likeness between the Dominican and both Hegel and Fichte.[94]
GOWER. One may fancy that while Hegel was teaching at Heidelberg it must
have fared with poor Eckart as with the dead huntsman in the Danish
ballad, while a usurper was hunting with his hounds over his patrimony,—
With my dogs so good,
He hunteth the wild deer in the wood;
And with every deer he slays on the mould,
He wakens me up in the grave so cold.
ATHERTON. Nay, if we come to fancying, let us call in Pythagoras at
once, and say that the soul of Eckart transmigrated into Hegel.
GOWER. With all my heart. The Portuguese have a superstition according
to which the soul of a man who has died, leaving some duty unfulfilled
or promised work unfinished, is frequently known to enter into another
person, and dislodging for a time the rightful soul-occupant, impel him
unconsciously to complete what was lacking. On a dreamy summer day like
this, we can imagine Hegel in like manner possessed by Eckart in order
to systematize his half-developed ideas.
WILLOUGHBY. It is certainly very curious to mark the pathway of these
pantheistic notions through successive ages. Seriously, I did not know
till lately how venerably antique were the discoveries of absolute
idealism.
LOWESTOFFE. I confess that the being one in oneness, the nothing, the
soul beyond the soul, the participation in the all-moving Immobility of
which Eckart speaks, are to me utterly unintelligible.
GOWER. Do not trouble yourself. No one will ever be able to get beyond
the words themselves, any more than Bardolph could with the phrase which
so tickled the ear of Justice Shallow. ‘Accommodated; that is, when a
man is, as they say, accommodated: or, when a man is,—being,—whereby,—he
may be thought to be accommodated; which is an excellent thing.’
ATHERTON. Yet, to do Eckart justice, he has his qualifications and his
distinctions in virtue of which he imagines himself still within the
pale of orthodoxy, and he strongly repudiates the Antinomian
consequences to which his doctrines were represented as tending.
GOWER. Ay, it is just in this way that the mischief is done. These
distinctions many a follower of his could not or would not understand,
and so his high philosophy produced in practice far oftener such men as
the Nameless Wild than characters resembling the more pure and lofty
ideal he drew himself in his discourse to the good people of Strasburg.
These philosophical edge-tools are full perilous. Modern Germany is
replete with examples of that fatal facility in the common mind for a
practical application of philosophic paradox which our friend Adolf
lamented at Fegersheim. When a philosophy which weakens the embankments
that keep licence out has once been popularized, the philosopher cannot
stop the inundation by shouting from his study-window. De Wette himself
at last became aware of this, and regretted it in vain. Such speculation
resembles the magic sword of Sir Elidure—its mysterious virtue sometimes
filled even its owner with a furor that hurried him to an indiscriminate
slaughter, but wielded by any other hand its thirst could be satisfied
only with the blood of every one around, and at last with the life of
him who held it.
LOWESTOFFE. Still there is far more excuse for Eckart than for our
nineteenth century pantheists. Even the desperation of some of those
poor ignorant creatures, who exaggerated Eckart’s paradoxes till they
grew a plea for utter lawlessness, is not so unnatural, however
lamentable. Who can wonder that some should have overwrought the
doctrine of Christ _in_ us and neglected that of Christ _for_ us, when
the _opus operatum_ was in its glory, ghostly comfort bought and sold,
and Christ our sacrifice pageanted about in the mass, as Milton says,—a
fearful idol? Or that the untaught many, catching the first thought of
spiritual freedom from some mystic, should have been intoxicated
instantly. The laity, forbidden so long to be Christians on their own
account, rise up here and there, crying, ‘We will be not Christians
merely, but so many Christs.’ They have been denied what is due to man,
they will dreadfully indemnify themselves by seizing what is due to God.
Has not the letter been slaying them by inches all their days? The
spirit shall give them life!
GOWER. Like the peasant in the apologue;—religion has been so long doled
out to them in a few pitiful drops of holy water, till in their
impatience they must have a whole Ganges-flood poured into their
grounds, obliterating, with a vengeance, ‘all distinctions,’ and
drowning every logical and social landmark under the cold grey level—the
blank neutral-tint of a stoical indifference which annihilates all order
and all law.
ATHERTON. By a strange contradiction, Eckart employs Revelation at one
moment only to escape it the next—and uses its beacon-lights to steer
_from_, not to the haven. He pays homage to its authority, he consults
its record, but presently leaves it far behind to lose himself in the
unrevealed Godhead—floats away on his ‘sail-broad vans’ of speculation
through the vast vacuity in search of
——a dark
Illimitable ocean, without bound,
Without dimension, where length, breadth, and height,
And time and place are lost.
When there, he finds his cloudy seat soon fails him; he returns once
more to the realities of revelation, only to forsake this lower ground
again when he has renewed his strength. This oscillation betrays a fatal
contradiction. To shut behind us the gate on this inferior world is not
necessarily to open the everlasting doors of the upper one.
GOWER. I very much admire the absolute resignation of that devout
mendicant described by Eckart. He is a Quietist of the very best
sort—his life a ‘Thy will be done.’ He is a Fénelon in rags.
ATHERTON. After all, make what allowance we will,—giving Eckart all the
benefit due from the fact that his life was pure, that he stood in no
avowed antagonism to Christian doctrine or institute, that devout men
like Tauler and Suso valued his teaching so highly,—still, he stands
confessed a pantheist; no charity can explain that away.
GOWER. I am afraid not. What else can we call him when he identifies
himself and all Christian men with the Son, as we have heard, makes
himself essential to God, will share with him in the evolution of the
Holy Ghost, and, forbidding you to regard yourself as a something
distinct from God, exhorts you (if you would be a justified person and
child of God indeed) to merge the ground of your own nature in the
divine, so that your knowledge of God and his of you are the same
thing,—_i.e._, you and He one and the same? But can you conjecture,
Atherton, by what process he arrived at such a pass?
ATHERTON. Perhaps in this way:—John Scotus Erigena (with whose writings
Eckart could scarcely have failed to make acquaintance at Paris) asserts
the identity of Being and Willing, of the _Velle_ and the _Esse_ in God;
also the identity of Being and Knowing. Applying this latter proposition
to the relationship between God and man, he comes logically enough to
this conclusion,—‘Man, essentially considered, may be defined as God’s
knowledge of him; that is, man reduced to his ultimate—his ground, or
simple subsistence—is a divine Thought. But, on the same principle, the
thoughts of God are, of course, God. Hence Eckart’s doctrine—the ground
of your being lies in God. Reduce yourself to that simplicity, that
root, and you are in God. There is no longer any distinction between
your spirit and the divine,—you have escaped personality and finite
limitation. Your particular, creature self, as a something separate and
dependent on God, is gone. So also, obviously, your creaturely will.
Henceforth, therefore, what seems an inclination of yours is in fact the
divine good pleasure. You are free from law. You are above means. The
very will to do the will of God is resolved into that will itself. This
is the Apathy, the Negation, the Poverty, he commends.
With Eckart personally this self-reduction and deification is connected
with a rigorous asceticism and exemplary moral excellence. Yet it is
easy to see that it may be a merely intellectual process, consisting in
a man’s thinking that he is thinking himself away from his personality.
He declares the appearance of the Son necessary to enable us to realize
our sonship; and yet his language implies that this realization is the
perpetual incarnation of that Son—does, as it were, constitute him.
Christians are accordingly not less the sons of God by grace than is
Christ by nature. Believe yourself divine, and the Son is brought forth
in you. The Saviour and the saved are dissolved together in the blank
absolute Substance.
WILLOUGHBY. So then, Eckart would say,—‘To realize himself, God must
have Christians;’ and Hegel,—‘To realize him self, He must have
philosophers.’
ATHERTON. Miserable inversion! This result of Eckart’s speculation was
expressed with the most impious enormity by Angelus Silesius, in the
seventeenth century. In virtue of the necessity God is under (according
to this theory) of communicating himself, _bon gré, mal gré_, to
whomsoever will refine himself down to his ‘_Nothing_,’ he reduces the
Almighty to dependence, and changes places with Him upon the eternal
throne on the strength of his self-transcending humility!
Note to page 207.
Both Hegel and Eckart regard _Thought_ as the point of union between the
human nature and the divine. But the former would pronounce both God and
man unrevealed, _i.e._, unconscious of themselves, till Thought has been
developed by some Method into a philosophic System. Mysticism brings
Eckart nearer to Schelling on this matter than to the dry schoolman
Hegel. The charge which Hegel brings against the philosophy of Schelling
he might have applied, with a little alteration, to that of Eckart.
Hegel says, ‘When this knowledge which claims to be essential and
ignores apprehension (is _begrifflose_), professes to have sunk the
peculiarity of Self in the _Essence_, and so to give forth the utterance
of a hallowed and unerring philosophy,[95] men quite overlook the fact
that this so-called wisdom, instead of being yielded up to the influence
of Divinity by its contempt of all proportion and definiteness, does
really nothing but give full play to accident and to caprice. Such men
imagine that by surrendering themselves to the unregulated ferment of
the Substance (_Substanz_), by throwing a veil over consciousness, and
abandoning the understanding, they become those favourites of Deity to
whom he gives wisdom in sleep; verily, nothing was ever produced by such
a process better than mere dreams.’—_Vorrede zur Phænomenologie_, p. 6.
These are true and weighty words: unfortunately Hegel’s remedy proves
worse than the disease.
We seem to hear Eckart speak when Fichte exclaims, ‘Raise thyself to the
height of religion, and all veils are removed; the world and its dead
principle passes away from thee, and the very Godhead enters thee anew
in its first and original form, as Life, as thine own life which thou
shalt and oughtest to live.—_Anweisung zum sel. Leben_, p. 470.
And again, ‘Religion consists in the inward consciousness that God
actually lives and acts in us, and fulfils his work.’—_Ibid._ p. 473.
But Eckart would not have affirmed with Fichte (a few pages farther on)
that, were Christ to return to the world, he would be indifferent to the
recognition or the denial of his work as a Saviour, provided a man were
only united to God _somehow_!
Footnote 94:
See Note, p. 212.
Footnote 95:
Eckart does not make use of his lapse into the Essence to philosophise
withal; it is simply his religious _ultimatum_.