§ 31. HENRY suso. 265
In his fortieth year, when his physical organization had been reduced to a wreck, so that nothing remained but to die or to desist from the discipline, God revealed to him that his long-practised austerity was only a good beginning, a breaking up of his untamed humanity, — Ein Durehbreehen seines ungehrocJienen Menschen, — and that thereafter he would have to try another way in order to "get right." And so he proceeded to macerations of the inner man, and learned the lessons which asceticisms of the soul can impart.
Suso nowhere has words of condemnation for such barbarous self-imposed torture^^a method of pleasing God which the Reformation put aside in favor of saner rules of piety.
Other sufferings came upon Suso, but not of his own infliction. These he bore with Christian submission, and the evils involved he sought to rectify by services rendered to others. His sister, a nun, gave way to temptation. Overcoming his first feelings of indignation, Suso went far and near in search of her, and had the joy of seeing her rescued to a worthy life, and adorned with all religious virtues. Another cross he had to bear was the charge that he was the father of an unborn child, a charge which for a time alienated Henry of Nordlingen and other close friends. He bore the insinuation without resentment, and even helped to maintain the child after it was born.
Suso's chief writings, which abound in imagery and comparisons drawn frorn^nature, are_an^ Autohiographg} and works on The Eternal Wisdom — BUclilein von der ewigen Weisheit —^^ndi the Truth — Biiclilein von der Wahrheit. To these are to be added his sermons and letters.
The Autobiography/ came to be preserved by chance. At. the request of Elsbet Staglin, Suso told her a number of his experiences. This woman, the daughter of one of the leading men of Zurich, was an inmate of the convent of Tosse, near Winterthur. When Suso discovered that she had committed his conversations to writing, he treated her act as "a
1 It contains 53 chapters. Diepenbrock's ed., pp. 137-306 ; Bihlmeyer's ed. , pp. 1-195. Diepenbrock's edition has the advantage for the modern reader of being transmuted into modern German.
266 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 12'J4-1517.
spiritual theft," and burnt a part of the manuscript. The remainder he preserved, in obedience to a supernatural communication, and revised. Suso appears in the book as " The Servant of the Eternal Wisdom."
The Autohiq^raphy is & apiiitual self-revelation in which the author does not pretend to follow the outward stages of his career^ In addition to the facts of his religious experience, Tie sets forth a number of devotional rules containing much wisdom, and closes with judicious and edifying remarks on the being of God, which he gave to Elsbet in answer to her questions.^
The Booh of the Eternal Whdoj^i, which is in the form of a dialogue between Cluist, the Eternal Wisdom, and the writer, has been called by Denifle, wlio bore Suso's name, the consummate fruit of German mysticism. It records, in German,2 meditations in which use is made of the Scriptures. Here we have a body of experimental theology such as ruled among the more pious spirits in the German convents of the fourteenth century.
Suso declares that one who is without love is as unable to understand a tongue that is quick with love as one speaking in German is unable to understand a Fleming, or as one who hears a report of the music of a harp is unable to understand the feelings of one who has heard the music with his own ears. The Saviour is represented as saying that it would be easier to bring back the years of the past, revive the withered flowers or collect all the droplets of rain than to measure the love — Minne — he has for men.
The Servant, after lamenting the hardness of heart which refuses to be moved by the spectacle of the cross and the love of God, seeks to discover how it is that God can at once be so loving and so severe. As for the pains of hell, the lost are represented as exclaiming, " Oh, how we desire that
^ A translation of these definitions is given by In^e, in Light, Life and Love, pp. 0(i-H2.
2 Suso made a revision of lii.s woik in Latin under the title Horologiuvi etertue supientice, a copy of which Tauler seems to have had in his possession. Preger, H. 324.