by Scotus Erigena:, himself the most pronounced pantheist of the Middle Ages. Through the joint influence of these two men, a strong tendency to pantheism was developed to a greater or less degree among the mediaeval Mystics. Even the associations among the people, such as the Beghards and Lollards, although at first exemplary and useful, by adopting a system of mystic pantheism became entirely corrupt.-"^ Believing themselves to be modes of the divine existence, all they did God did, and all they felt inclined to do was an impulse from God, and therefore nothing could be wrong. In our own day the same principles have led to the same conse- quences in one wing of the German school of philosophy.
It was not only among the people and in these secret fellowships that this system was adopted. Men of the highest rank in the schools, and personally exemplary in their deportment, became the advocates of the theory which lay at the foundation of these prac- tical evils. Of these scholastic pantheistical Mystics, the most dis- tinguished and influential was Henry Eckart, whom some modern writers regard " as the deepest thinker of his age, if not of any age." Neither the time nor the place of his birth is known. He first appears in Paris as a Dominican monk and teacher. In 1304 he was Provincial of the Dominicans in Saxony. Soon after he was active in Strasburg as a preacher. His doctrines were con- demned as heretical, although he denied that he had in any respect departed from the doctrines of the Church. From the decision of his archbishop and his provincial council, Eckart appealed to the Pope, by whom the sentence of condemnation was confirmed. This decision, however, was not published unfil 1329, when Eckart was already dead. It is not necessary here to give the details of his system. ' Suffice it to say, that he held that God is the only being ; that the universe is the. self- manifestation of God ; that the high- est destiny of man is to come to the consciousness of his identity with God ; that that end is to be accomplished partly by philo- sophical abstraction and partly by ascetic self renunciation.
" Although union with God is effected mainly by thinking and consciousness, still it also requires a corresponding act of the will, something practical, such as self-denial and privation, by which man rises above all that is finite. Not only must he lay aside all created things, the world and earthly good, and mortify desire, but more than all he must resign his ' I,' reduce himself to nothing, and become what lie was before he issued forth into this temporal state. Nay, man must rise above the chief good, above virtue,
1 UUniann, vol. ii. ch. 2.
78 INTRODUCTION. [Ch. IV. — Mysticism.
piety, blessedness, and God himself, as things external and supe- rior to his spirit, and it is only when he has thus annihilated self, and all that is not God within him, that nothing remains except the pure and simple divine essence, in which all division is brought into absolute unity." ^
Another distinguished and influential writer of the same class was John Ruysbroek, born 1293, in a village of that name not far from Brussels. Having entered the service of the Church he de- voted himself to the duties of a secular priest until his sixtieth year, when he became prior of a newly instituted monastery. He was ictive and faithful, gentle and devout. Whether he was a theist or a pantheist is a matter of dispute. His speculative views were formed more or less under the influence of the writings of the pseudo-Dionysius and of Eckart. Gerson, himself a Mystic, ob- jected to his doctrines as pantheistic ; and every one acknowledges that there are not only forms of expression but also principles to be found in his writings which imply the pantheistic theory. He speaks of God as the super-essential being including all beings. All creatures, he taught, were in God, as thoughts before their creation. " God saw and recognized them in himself, as somehow, but not wholly, different from himself, for what is in God, is God." " In the act of self-depletion, the spirit loses itself in the enjoyment of love, and imbibes directly the brightness of God, yea, becomes the very briglitness which it imbibes. All who are raised to the sublimity of this contemplative life are one with'deifying (deifica) brightness, and become one and the same light as that which they behold. To such a height is the spirit elevated above itself, and made one with God, in respect that in the oneness of that living original in which, according to its uncreated being, it possesses itself, it enjoys and contemplates boundless treasures in the same manner as God himself." ITllmann, who quotes these and similar passages, still maintains that Ruysbroek was a theist, because, as he says, Ruysbroek " distinctly recognizes not only the immanence of God, but what no pantheist can do, his transcendence." More- over, he " too frequently and too solicitously avers that, in the oneness of the contemplative man with God, he still recognizes a difference between the two, to permit us to asci-ibe to him the doc- tiine of an absolute solution of the individual into the Divine sub- stance."^ A man may aver a difference between the waves and the ocean, between the leaves and the tree, and yet in both cases assert a substantial unity. It is true that no one can intelligently
1 Ullmann, Translation in Clark's Library, vol. ii. p. 27. '^ Hnd. p. 47