The Evolution of Love Part 4

St. Francis re-lived the terrestrial life of Jesus; in one direction he excelled his model, for though the love of Christ embraced all mankind, the heart of St. Francis went out to all things, beasts and plants and stars. He applied the words, "Whatsoever ye do to the least of my brethren, ye have done unto me," to _Brother Bear_ and _his sisters the little birds_. He was one of the first men, since the Greek era, who saw nature in its true aspect and not as a hieroglyphic of the divine word.

Men had realised with a feeling of helplessness the dangers of the elements, without perceiving their magnificence; they had speculated on and attempted to decipher the secret language of the terrestrial and celestial phenomena. The discovery of the beauty of nature, and with it the revival of aesthetics, was an essential part of the new-born civilisation. This fact was accomplished--in an almost sentimental way--by the troubadours and minnesingers. But the relationship of St.

Francis to nature was something very different. The co-ordination of man and beast--in his sermon to the birds, for instance--cannot be called anything but frankly pagan. St. Francis said to his disciples: "Tarry a little while in the road while I go and preach to my little sisters, the birds." And he went into the fields and began to preach to the birds which sat on the ground; and straightway all the others flew down from the trees and flocked round him, and did not fly away until he had blessed them; and when he touched them, they did not move. And these were the words which he spoke to them: "My brothers and sisters, little birds, praise G.o.d and thank Him that He has given you wings with which to fly and clothed you with a garment of feathers. That he admitted your kind into Noah's ark so that your race should not disappear from the earth. Be grateful to Him that He has given you the air for your kingdom; you sow not, neither do you reap, but your Heavenly Father gives you abundance of food. He gave you the rivers and fountains; He gave you the mountains and valleys as a refuge, and the high trees so that you may build your nests in safety. And because you can neither spin nor cook, G.o.d clothed you and your little ones. Behold the greatness of the love of your Creator! Beware of the sin of ingrat.i.tude and diligently praise G.o.d all day!" And when he had thus spoken, the birds opened their beaks, beat their wings and bowed to the ground.

More than a hundred years later (1300-1365), a man was living in Swabia whose soul was kindred to the soul of St. Francis: Suso, who is, as a rule, cla.s.sed with the mystics. He had a profound, typically German love of meadow and forest, and expressed it more exquisitely than the best among the minnesingers. "Look above you and around you and behold the vastness of heaven and the speed of its revolutions. The Lord has emblazoned it with seven planets, each of which--not only the sun--is far larger than the earth; he has adorned it with myriads of radiant stars. See how serenely the glorious sun is riding in the cloudless sky, giving to the earth abundance of fruit! Behold the verdure of the meadow! The trees are bursting into leaf and the gra.s.s is springing up; behold the smiling flowers and listen to glen and dale re-echoing with the sweet song of the nightingales and little singing birds; the beasts which the bitter winter drove into nooks and crannies, and into the dark ground, are emerging from their hiding-places to rejoice in the sun and seek a mate. Young and old are glad with an exceeding joy. Oh! Thou gentle G.o.d, how fair art Thou in Thy creatures! Oh! fields and meadows, how surpa.s.sing is your beauty!" Or: "My dear brethren, what more shall I say to you than that my eyes have seen many gladsome sights. I walked across the flowering meadows and listened to the heavenly harps of the little birds praising their gentle and loving Creator so that the woods echoed with their songs." And, more compa.s.sionate even than St. Francis: "I will say nothing of the children of man; but the misery and sorrow of all the beasts and little birds, and all created things, is well-nigh breaking my heart; and having no power to help them, I sighed, and prayed to the Most High, Most Merciful Lord, that He would deliver them." His description of a paradisean meadow sounds like the description of a picture by Fra Angelico: "Now behold with your own eyes the heavenly meadow! Lo! What summer joy! Behold the kingdom of sweet May, the valley of all true joy! Glad eyes are gazing into glad eyes!

Hark to the harps and fiddles, the singing and laughter! Young men and maidens are leading the dance! Love without sorrow shall reign for ever...." etc. There is a picture, drawn by this same Suso, representing the journey of man through life, his departure from G.o.d and his return.

In this picture the path of humanity is renunciation and asceticism; death flourishes his scythe above the heads of a dancing couple, and underneath is written: "This is earthly love; its end is sorrow"; to such an extent was this sincere and sensitive man under the influence of the traditional hatred of the world which Eckhart, his great master, had completely overcome.

Provencals and Italians sang the delight of spring, and the German minnesingers greeted it as the deliverer from all the hardships of the severe winter; with the latter it was more a childish delight in the open-air life which had again become possible, after the long imprisonment of winter, than pure joy in beauty. But some of the German epic poems, "Tristan and Isolde," for instance, contain genuine, sincere descriptions of sylvan beauty. The student of art, especially the German art of the Renascence, cannot help being struck by the extraordinary love with which quite insignificant objects of nature, such as a bird, or a flower, are treated. The familiar things of every-day life were in this way brought into connection with solemn biblico-historical subjects.

There is no doubt that at all times a certain keen perception of the beauty of nature has been inherent in some favoured individuals; but the universally accepted opinion that only the supernal was really beautiful, and that terrestrial beauty was merely its reflected glory, was too strong even for them. Thus we have seen Suso translating the beauty of the earthly spring to the kingdom of heaven.

At the same time men were beginning to travel to distant countries for the sole purpose of seeing new scenes and acquiring fresh knowledge. The famous Venetian, Marco Polo, was the first European who (in 1300) visited Central Asia, crossed China and Thibet, and brought news to Europe of the fairyland of j.a.pan. Sight-seeing as an end in itself was discovered. Long sea-voyages for commercial purposes were no novelty, but no human foot had ever trod the summits of the Lower Alps, unless it had been the foot of a peasant whose cattle had strayed. Petrarch was the first man (in 1336) to climb a barren mountain, the Mont Ventoux in Provence, voluntarily undergoing a certain amount of fatigue for sheer delight in the beauty of nature. This was a great, an immortal deed, greater than all his sonnets and treatises put together. In a long letter which has been preserved to us, he describes with much spirit and erudition this extraordinary ascent, before whose profound significance all the Alpine exploits of our time shrink into paltry gymnastic exercises.

The beauty of nature discovered and appreciated, interest began to be evinced in the relationship existing between the various phenomena and there arose a desire to obtain ocular proof of what was written in the venerable books--perhaps even make new discoveries. The first man of any importance in this direction was the German Albrecht Bollstadt (Albertus Magnus), who, although he contributed more than any other man to the promulgation of Aristotelian philosophy, wrote a book on natural history founded on personal observation; his great English contemporary, however, Roger Bacon, is the true father of modern experimental science.

It was he who coined the expression "scientia experimentalis," and framed the principle that all research must be based on the study of nature. He maintained that experience was the "mistress of all sciences," and said: "I respect Aristotle and account him the prince of philosophers, but I do not always share his opinion. Aristotle and the other philosophers have planted the tree of science, but the latter has not by any means put forth all its branches or matured all its fruit."

This thought, though it seems to us self-evident, was of great moment in the age of scholasticism. Bacon spent ten years in prison; but in spite of everything, he was so much under the influence of scholasticism that he considered it the task of philosophy to adduce evidence for the truth of the Christian dogma.

Here it is essential roughly to sketch the essence of the philosophical thought of that period, and point out the way which led from the Christianity of the Fathers of the Church and scholasticism to the religion of unhistorical Christianity, the so-called mysticism.

Scholasticism had reached its climax in the thirteenth century; universities were founded in Paris, Oxford and Padua, and he who aspired to the full dignity of learning had to take his degrees there; even Eckhart did not neglect to obtain his scholastic education in Paris.

Scholasticism was an imposing and yet strangely grotesque system of the world, built up--before a background of blazing stakes--of scriptural pa.s.sages and ecclesiastical tradition, lofty, pure thought and antique-mediaeval superst.i.tion. Its fundamental problem, the determination of the border line between faith and knowledge, was purely philosophical. While the older scholasticism, based on Platonic traditions, endeavoured to bring these into harmony with Christianity, that is to say, prove the revelations by dialectics, Albertus Magnus and, authoritatively, his pupil, Thomas Aquinas (1226-1274), strictly distinguished, by the use of Aristotelian weapons, the rational or perceptive truths from the supernatural verities or the subjects of faith. This distinction, made in order to safeguard dogma, quickly revealed its double-face. The handmaiden philosophy rebelled against her mistress theology, and asked her for her credentials. According to the cla.s.sic and dogmatic doctrine of Thomas, the natural verities alone could be grasped by human understanding; the supernatural or revealed truths (the dogmas) were beyond proof and scientific cognition. To submit them to research was not only an impossible task, but Thomas stigmatised every effort in this direction as heresy, fondly believing that he had once and for all safeguarded the position of faith. But more resolute and profound thinkers, although not in so many words attacking the authority of the Scriptures, and leaving Thomas' border-line unquestioned, found the unfathomable truths not in ecclesiastical tradition but in their own souls, thus investing "faith" with a new meaning, una.s.sailable by criticism.

The idea of drawing a line between perceivable or rational truths and imperceivable or divine truths, is fraught with the burning question as to the limits of human knowledge, a question which to this day remains unanswered. In the course of time the limits were extended in favour of imperfect knowledge (but the character of the unknowable was problematised and questioned). While Thomas was still convinced of the possibility of proving the existence of a G.o.d by the power of the human intellect, Duns Scotus removed the problem of the existence of a G.o.d and the immortality of the soul from the domain of science, and made both propositions a matter of faith. William of Occam, more uncompromising than Duns Scotus, maintained the absolute impossibility of acquiring knowledge of supernatural things, and taught--on this point, too, antic.i.p.ating Kant--that objective knowledge acquired through the senses should precede abstract knowledge. The last conclusion of nominalism was thus arrived at, the existence of universal conceptions, or universals, supposed to exist outside material things--the curse of the Platonic inheritance--declared to be impossible, and reality conceded to the individual only. Roscellinus, the founder of this doctrine, had still been content to deny the existence of the conception of "deity," leaving the individual persons, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, as real individuals, untouched.

We see from the foregoing that the universally derided scholasticism travelled along the whole line of modern thought: from the "realism" of Thomas, which leaves the universals as yet una.s.sailed by doubt and occupying the very heart of knowledge, past the first and, to our view, very modest doubts of the nominalists, to the agnosticism of Bacon, Duns and Occam.

With the new position of decided nominalism the foundation was prepared for the experimental sciences on the one hand, and mysticism on the other. For the conclusion that things supernatural are a closed book to us may have two results: on the one hand, the rejection of the transcendental and the victory of science; on the other, the need to descend into the profoundest depths of the universe and the soul, and grasp by intuition what common sense does not see.

The time was ripe and the consummators came: Dante in the south, Eckhart in the countries north of the Alps. With regard to Dante, I will say one thing only; he gathered together all the achievements of the new art and transcended them in a work which has never been surpa.s.sed. The profoundly symbolical words, "The new life is beginning," are written at the commencement of his _Vita Nuova_, and with his _Divine Comedy_ the art of Europe had attained perfection.

It is necessary to give a more detailed account of Eckhart. He had been almost forgotten in favour of his pupils, Tauler and Suso, and the unknown author of the _Theologica Germanica_ (to which Luther wrote a preface), but to-day a faint idea of the great importance of this man is beginning to dawn upon the world. Eckhart was the greatest creative religious genius since Jesus, and I believe that in time his writings will be considered equal to the Gospel of St. John. He grasped the spirit of religion with unparalleled depth; everything produced by the highly religious later mediaeval era pales before his illumination.

Compared to him, St. Augustine, St. Bernard, and even St. Francis dwindle into insignificance; all the later reformers are small beside the greatness of his soul. Every one of his sermons contains profound pa.s.sages, such as "G.o.d must become I and I must become G.o.d." "The soul as a separate ent.i.ty must be so completely annihilated that nothing remains except G.o.d, yea, that it becomes more glorious than G.o.d, as the sun is more glorious than the moon." "The Scriptures were written and G.o.d created the world solely that He may be born in the soul and the soul again in Him." "The essence of all grain is wheat, of all metal gold, and of all creatures man. Thus spoke a great man: 'There is no beast, but it is in some way a semblance of man.'" "The least faculty of my soul is more infinite than the boundless heavens." "Again we understand by the kingdom of G.o.d the soul; for the soul and the Deity are one." "The soul is the universe and the kingdom of G.o.d." "G.o.d dwells so much within the soul that all His divinity depends on it." "Man shall be free and master of all his deeds, undestroyed and unsubdued."

Eckhart was the first man who thought consecutively in the German vernacular, and who made this philosophically still virginal language a medium for expressing profound thought. In addition he wrote Latin treatises which were discovered a short time ago; I have not read them, but I have no doubt that his profoundest convictions were expressed in the German tongue. The Latin language has at all times fettered the spirit far more successfully than the still untainted and living German.

The religious genius of a single individual had created Christianity.

But from the very beginning it was misunderstood; the salvation of the world was linked to the person of a man who had aspired to be an example to the whole race. The term, "Son of G.o.d," was understood in the sense of the hero-cult of antiquity; possibly the Jewish faith in a Messiah, the politico-national hope of the Children of Israel, was a good deal to blame for this. A historical event was translated into metaphysic. The only truly religious man was made the centre of a new mythology and navely worshipped. It may sound like a paradox, but it is a fact that the whole of the first millenary was inwardly irreligious; it concealed its want of metaphysical intuition behind the falsification of historical events. The entire mediaeval (and a large proportion of the Protestant) theology laboured to obtain an intellectual grasp of the doctrine of a unique historical salvation of humanity and frame it into a dogma. And thus occurred that unparalleled misunderstanding (a misunderstanding which never clouded the mind of India) which based religion, the timeless metaphysical treasure of the soul, on the historical record of an event which had happened in Asia Minor, and had come down to us in a more or less garbled--some say entirely falsified--version. This was the great sin of Christianity: It regarded a historical event, revealing the very essence of religion, and consequently capable of being formulated, as a divine intervention for the purpose of bringing about the salvation of the world, instead of recognising in the sublime figure of the founder of the Christian religion a great, perhaps even perfect, incarnation of the eternally new relationship between G.o.d and the soul. It promulgated the strange thought that only the one soul, the soul of the founder, was divine, and instead of teaching the divinity of humanity, it taught the divinity of this one man only--Jesus became a G.o.d who could no longer be looked upon as the perfect specimen and prototype of the race, but before whom it behoved man to kneel and pray for salvation. Perhaps it was not possible to understand the new doctrine in any other way; before men can conceive the idea of their divinity, they must have become conscious of their souls.

This complete misunderstanding and externalising of religion which took place in the first millenary, and which can never now be retrieved, is fundamentally pagan, antique. The record of the salvation of the world, achieved by a hero once and for all time, the historification of the divine spark which is daily re-born in the soul, entirely corresponds to the Greek myths of G.o.ds and demi-G.o.ds which before their new, symbolical interpretation, were taken quite literally. I am not now concerned with the problem of how far the antique heroes and Eastern mysteries directly influenced the conception of the figure of Christ; I only wish to emphasise the profound contrast between true religion which springs up in the soul of the individual, and historical tradition. If there is such a thing as religion, it must exist equally for all men, for those who accidentally received a report of a certain historical event, as well as for those who remained in ignorance of the fact. All heretical demonstrations were rooted in a vague realisation of this contrast. But Eckhart accomplished the unparalleled deed of once more building a bridge between the soul and the deity; of relegating to the background all the ineradicable historical misrepresentations or, if there was no alternative, of unhesitatingly proclaiming them as erroneous, or interpreting them symbolically. "St. Paul's words," he says, for instance, "are nothing but the words of Paul; it is not true that he spoke them in a state of grace." He did not regard the Scriptures as the bourne of truth, but as subsequent proof of the directly experienced truth of the divine event. With this conception Christianity had reached its highest stage. Henceforth the origin of all truths and values was no longer sought in doctrine and authority, but in the soul of man; G.o.d was neither to be found in the heavens nor in history, but in the soul; the soul must become divine and creative; it had found its task: the recreation of the world. It was true, St. Augustine had said: "_Non Christianised, Christi sumus_," but this saying had never been understood, and very probably St. Augustine had not meant it in its literal sense. At last the fundamental consciousness of Christianity had triumphed: the principle of the "Son-of-G.o.dship" inspired the soul of the mystics; in future religion must emanate from the soul and find its goal in G.o.d; written doc.u.ments and--in the case of the profoundest thinkers--examples were no longer needed. The heretical sects had been content to reject post-evangelical tradition, in order to lay greater stress on the words of Christ. They were genuine reformers, but they were as much constrained by the historical facts as the Roman Catholic Church, and their standpoint has to this day remained the standpoint of the Protestant professions of faith.

The fact of this new conception attaching no importance to the historical Jesus of Nazareth (had he never lived it would have made no difference) made of it a new religion. By putting aside this external and accidental moment, it placed the metaphysical and purely spiritual core of Christianity, the fundamental conviction of the divinity of the soul, and the will to eternal life, within the centre of religious consciousness, and by so doing put itself beyond the reach of historical criticism and scepticism, Eckhart, more than any other teacher, was profoundly convinced of the freedom and eternal value of the soul. "I, as the Son, am the same as my Heavenly Father." He taught that Christ is born in the soul, that the divine spark is continuously re-kindled in the soul: "It is the quality of eternity that life and youth are one,"

and that man must become more and more divine, more and more free from all that is unessential and accidental until he no longer differs from G.o.d. It is only a logical conclusion to say that a perfect man, mystically speaking, is G.o.d; his being and his will are in nothing differentiated from absolute, universal, divine will--German mysticism agrees in this with the Upanishads. Kant would have said that the principles of such a man would become cosmic laws; sin would be the estrangement from G.o.d, the will to draw away from G.o.d.

The profound and only mission of religion is the endowment of man in this hurly-burly of life with the consciousness of eternity. Religion places our transient life under the aspect of eternity, and therefore it must, in its essence, remain a stranger to things temporal. Only that moment in the life of a man can be called religious which lifts him beyond himself, out of his petty, narrow existence, conditioned by and subject to accidents, into timeless, universal life; which gives him the certainty that historical events can never be regarded as definite and ultimate--that moment which has the power to set free, to deliver, to save. Thus it is irreligious to regard an event which occurred on the temporal plane--and were it the greatest event which ever befell on earth--as the pivot of metaphysical value for all men; to link the salvation of the world to an occurrence which was relatively accidental, to base the consciousness of eternity on the knowledge of a fact. This would be a victory of time over eternity, a victory of irreligion over religion.

I regard it as the greatest achievement of that great time that spontaneous religion again became possible. Eckhart rediscovered the divine nature of man; never has the consciousness of timeless eternity been expressed as he expressed it in his tract, _On Solitude_. Doubtless there have been men before him who possessed direct religious intuitions, and now and then gave timid utterance to them; but the authority of tradition has always been too great, and they never did more than compromise between the historical events on which the Christian religion is based and the genuinely religious experience of their own souls. Eckhart, too, was careful not to offend against the letter, and his pupils, after suspicion had fallen on them, made many a concession in terms, and perhaps even in thought. St. Augustine already had steered a middle course between the historical and the religious conception, in his phrase: _Per Christum hominem at Christum deum_, and Suso (in his _Booklet of Eternal Wisdom_) followed his lead. "Thus speaks the eternal wisdom: If ye will behold me in my eternal divinity ye must know and love me in my suffering humanity. For this is the quickest road to eternal salvation." The brutality of the tenet which maintains that all those are eternally lost who, without their own fault, have no knowledge of the salvation of the world (especially therefore, those who died before the event), was a stumbling-block to many thoughtful minds. The patriarchs of the Old Testament were looked upon as saved--to some extent--by the fact of their being the ancestors or prophets of Christ; but pagans and Greeks, including Aristotle, were condemned even by the great Dante. At the conclusion of his _Divine Comedy_ Dante proved himself a truly inspired mystic, for he gave to us the profoundest vision of the divinity which has ever been vouchsafed to man. But his genius was directed and restricted by the dogmas of the Church; his religious standpoint was the standpoint of the early Middle Ages and dogmatic Catholicism. As poet and lover he was the inaugurator of a new world; here he represents the culmination and conclusion of the condemned world-system. He was the iron landmark of the ages--Eckhart, the creator of eternal values.

The foremost of the precursors of Eckhart was Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153). He was the exponent of the love of G.o.d which he placed above knowledge; in one of his letters he calls love "the existence of G.o.d Himself," basing his definition on the pa.s.sage in the Gospel of St.

John, "G.o.d is Love." "Love is the eternal law which created and preserves the universe; the whole world is governed by love; but although love is the law to which all creation is subject, it is not itself without law, but it is a law unto itself. Serfs and mercenaries are ruled by laws which are not from G.o.d, but which they made themselves; some because they do not love G.o.d, others because they love the things of this world better than G.o.d.... They made their own laws and subordinated the universal and eternal laws to their own will. But those (who live righteously) are in the world as G.o.d is: neither serfs nor mercenaries, but the children of G.o.d and, like G.o.d Himself, they live only by the law of love." "His greatest happiness is complete absorption in the vision of the divine and forgetfulness of self." "All love is an emanation of that one love. It is the eternally creative and governing law of the universe." "To be penetrated by such emotion is to become deified. As a drop of water in a cup of wine is completely dissolved and takes the taste and colour of the wine, so also, in an indescribable manner, is the human will absorbed in the divine will, and transformed into the will of G.o.d. For how could G.o.d become all in all if anything human were left in man?" "They are completely immersed (the martyrs) in the infinite ocean of eternal light, in radiant eternity...." The entranced soul "shall lose all knowledge of itself and become completely absorbed in G.o.d; it shall become unlike itself in the measure as it has received the gift of becoming divine." Sensuous metaphors from the Song of Songs and the Psalms are again and again intermingled with these lofty thoughts. But in spite of his divine emotion, in spite of his antic.i.p.ations of the German mystics, Bernard took the standpoint of ecclesiastical orthodoxy whenever he was not in the ecstatic state; his contemplative mind was unable to grasp the importance of independent thought, a fact amply proved by his inglorious quarrel with Abelard, the greatest thinker of his time. This quarrel was a typical ill.u.s.tration of the difference between the believer and the thinker. Bernard forgot all about love, and did not hesitate to stir up unpleasantness whenever he could do so. So he wrote to Pope Innocent II.: "Peter Abelard is striving to destroy the Christian faith, and imagines that his human intellect can penetrate the depths of the divine mind.... Nothing is hidden from him, neither in the earth below, nor in the heavens above; his intellectual pride exceeds all limits; he attacks the doctrines of faith, and ponders problems far above his intellectual capacity; he is an inventor of heresies ...," etc. Thanks to his machinations, Abelard was compelled to recant at the Council of Sens, and was condemned by the Pope to eternal silence. Berengar of Poitier took Abelard's part, and in a satirical treatise ventured to criticise St. Bernard's conduct: "Thus philosophise the old women at the looms. Of course, when Bernard tells us that we must love G.o.d, he speaks a true and venerable word; but he need not have opened his lips to do so, for it is a self-evident truth." As a matter of fact, these words branded and contradicted the merely subjective emotional mysticism; to the emotional mystic salvation lies in the "absorption in G.o.d," in shapeless, thoughtless contemplation. Richard of St. Victor, founding his theories on St. Bernard, established six stages of meditation. The Franciscan monk, Bonaventura, the famous author of the _Biblia Pauperum_, added a seventh, a complete rest in G.o.d--"like the Sabbath after the six days of labour." To Bonaventura, as later on to Dante, the world was a ladder leading up to G.o.d.

If we turn from these thinkers of the Neo-Latin race, who in spite of their undeniable mysticism were completely under the dominion of the Church--to German mysticism, we find above and beyond mysticism, we find above and beyond love, a new principle: The soul of man is the starting-point of religious consciousness and the content of the religious consciousness is the soul's road to G.o.d. The nativity of Christ ceased to be regarded as a historical event, and became the birth of the divine principle in the soul of man. In pa.s.sing I will mention a German nun, Mechthild of Magdeburg (1212-1277), who antic.i.p.ated some of the great thoughts of Eckhart, although she was incapable of grasping their mutual connection. "The Holy Trinity and everything in heaven and earth must be subject to me" (the soul), were words in the true spirit of Eckhart, leaving St. Bernard far behind. Mechthild found metaphors of true poetical grandeur when she spoke of the union of the soul with G.o.d.

"The dominion of the fire has yet to come. That is Jesus Christ in Whose hands the Heavenly Father has laid the salvation of the world and the Last Judgment. On the Day of Judgment He shall fashion cups of wondrous beauty out of the crackling sparks; therein the Father will drink on His festival all the holiness which through His dear Son He has poured into human souls."

Emotional mysticism was the prevailing form of mysticism in those days; even Eckhart's pupil, Suso, belonged to this cla.s.s of mystics. This vague sentimentalism saved many a mind from the rigid dogmas of the Church, and as its vagueness could be interpreted in more than one way, it caused very little offence; but these visions and ecstasies, which are so often mistaken for true mysticism, have done much to bring the latter into contempt with the seriously minded. Eckhart did not acknowledge it as genuine mysticism and directly condemned it in many of his writings; and as he rejected mystic sentimentalism, clearly divining its pathological cause, so he also rejected asceticism and all religious ceremonies. The evangelical poverty of the Franciscan monks was an object of loathing to him. St. Francis (and thirty years before him Peter Valdez) had navely interpreted the imitation of Christ as a life of absolute poverty, and had been relentless in his denunciation of worldly wealth, which every monk of his order had to renounce. He himself never touched money, seeing in it the source of all evil. His transcendent treasure was "Holy Poverty"; Jacopone wrote an ardent hymn to "Queen Poverty," and even Thomas, the representative of Dominican erudition, theoretically took up the cudgels on its behalf. But even in the primitive Church the principle of worldly and spiritual poverty was widely spread and encouraged. In the defence of poverty, which was practically nearly always synonymous with idleness and begging, and therefore roused much hostility among the people, Bonaventura pointed out (in his treatise, _De Paupertate Christi_) that Jesus Himself had never done any manual work. The universal preference for a contemplative life encouraged the tendency, and the extreme charitableness of the Middle Ages made its realisation possible. Work was frequently looked upon as a punishment--a view which could easily be upheld by reference to Adam's expulsion from Paradise--and inflicted upon the monks for offences against the rules. Dante's friend, Guido Cavalcanti, expressed the natural sentiment that poverty is a distressing condition, in a canzone which bristles with insults hurled at the Queen of the Franciscans:

Yea, rightly art thou hated worse than death, For he, at length, is longed for in the breast.

But not with thee, wild beast, Was ever aught found beautiful or good; For life is all that man can lose by death, Not fame and the fair summits of applause; His glory shall not pause But live in men's perpetual grat.i.tude.

While he who on thy naked sill has stood He shall be counted low, etc.

D.G. ROSSETTI.

The concept of the German mystics was infinitely more profound than the concept of the merely external poverty of the Franciscans, which in the case of St. Francis and Jacopone was an inherent characteristic and pure, but in the case of the others more or less vicious. "Man cannot live in this world without labour," says Eckhart, "but labour is man's portion; therefore he must learn to have G.o.d in his heart, although surrounded by the things of this world, and not let his business or his surroundings be a barrier." There is a pa.s.sage in the book of an unknown author, ent.i.tled _The Imitation of Christ's Poverty_ (formerly ascribed to Tauler), which reads as follows: "Poverty is equality with G.o.d, a mind turned away from all creatures; poverty clings to nothing and nothing clings to it; a man who is poor clings to nothing which is beneath him, but to that alone which is greater than all things. And that is the loftiest virtue of poverty that it clings only to that which is sublime and takes no heed of the things which are base, so far as it is possible." "The soul while it is burdened with temporal and transient things is not free. Before it can aspire to freedom and n.o.bility it must cast away all the things of the world." "n.o.body can be really poor unless G.o.d make him so; but G.o.d makes no man poor unless he be in his inmost heart; then all things will be taken from him which are not G.o.d's. The more spiritual a man is, the poorer will he be, for spirituality and poverty are one...." Pseudo-Tauler even affirms that a man "can possess abundant wealth and yet be poor in spirit." The meaning of this is clear: He whose heart is not wrapped up in the things of the world, will find his way to G.o.d; a soul which is without desire is rich.

But there was a still greater contrast between the nave religion represented by St. Francis of a.s.sisi and the religion of Eckhart. The former lived entirely in the obvious and visible; the love of all creatures filled his heart and shaped his life. The heart of the mystic too, was filled with love, but it was love transcending the love of the individual, love of the primary cause. In the last sense Eckhart taught, contrary to traditional Christianity, and in conformity with Indian wisdom, that the soul must be absorbed into the absolute and that everything transient and individual must cease to exist. "The highest freedom is that the soul should rise above itself and flow into the fathomless abyss of its archetype, of G.o.d Himself."

Even St. Bernard was not quite free from this mystical heresy (_cf._ the previously quoted pa.s.sages). "When he has reached the highest degree of perfection, man is in a state of complete forgetfulness of self, and having entirely ceased to belong to himself, becomes one with G.o.d, released from everything not divine." Even compa.s.sion must cease in this state, for there is nothing left but justice and perfection.

We recognise here a characteristic of all those who are greatest among men: of Goethe, for instance, of Bach, or Kant: namely, the correspondence of intense personality and the most highly developed objectivity; for the greatest personality ceases in the end to distinguish between itself and the world, has eradicated everything paltry, selfish and subjective and has become entirely objective, impersonal, divine. St. Francis knew nothing of this consciousness. "G.o.d has chosen me because among all men He could find no one more lowly, and because through my instrumentality He purposed to confound n.o.bility, greatness, strength, beauty and the wisdom of the world." He was the disciple of the earthly Jesus, Who went through life the compa.s.sionate consoler of all those who were sorrowful. But Eckhart aspired "to the shapeless nature of G.o.d." "We will follow Him, but not in all things,"

he said of the historical Jesus. "He did many things which He meant us to understand spiritually, not literally ... we must always follow Him in the profounder sense." Compared to the religion of Eckhart, the religion of St. Francis is the faith of a little child, picturing G.o.d as a benevolent old man. Such a religion is equally true and sincere, but it represents an earlier stage on the road of humanity. If Christianity were--as we are occasionally a.s.sured--the religion of Jesus, then the great mystics cannot be called Christians. And yet St. Augustine's: "We are not Christians, but Christs," was fulfilled in them.

The profoundest depth of European religion, of which Eckhart was the exponent, and which found artistic expression in Gothic art, was not sounded by music until very much later. Bach, more emphatically in the High Ma.s.s and the Magnificat, but also in his purely instrumental music, brought the universal feeling of mysticism to absolute artistic perfection. The deep religious sentiment which pervades the High Ma.s.s is so far above all cults, that it has no real connection with any historical faith--it is pure consciousness of the divine.

The peculiar state of the soul, called mysticism, could never become popular, or exert any very great influence. A few men, such as Tauler, Suso, Merswin, and the unknown author of the _Theologica Germanica_ handed on--not by any means always unadulterated--the doctrine they had received from Eckhart--which at all times appealed to a few thinkers--but the real influence on the world and on history was reserved for the reformers. The reformer, in his inmost nature, is related to the people; his soul is agitated by formulas and ceremonies, to which the mystic is indifferent; they are to him obstacles to his faith and he strains every nerve to destroy them. He has every appearance of the truly free spirit, but he is secretly dependent on that against which he is fighting. He suffers under its inefficiency; his deed is the final reaction against his environment; salvation seems to him to lie in the improvement of existing conditions, and not until he has succeeded in accomplishing his purpose can he hope for religious peace. The mystic is possible in all states of civilisation. He is not dependent on external circ.u.mstances; his whole consciousness is filled with one problem only, before which everything else pales: the relationship of the soul to G.o.d. But the reformer is possible only under certain circ.u.mstances. He, too, starts from an inner religious consciousness, but his problem is soon solved, and he devotes all his energy to the world. The mystic is not even aware of the difference between his own conception of G.o.d and traditional religion; he is under the impression that he is still an orthodox believer, long after he has broken fresh ground; for he has taken from the traditional doctrine everything which he can re-animate. The remainder is dead as far as he is concerned. To accuse him of heresy appears to him as a monstrous misunderstanding.

Thus mystic and reformer drink from the same well of direct religious consciousness. But while in the case of the mystic the well is fathomless, it is much more shallow in the case of the reformer. Certain of himself, he directs his energy to the conversion and reformation of the world. He resembles in some respects the public orator and agitator; he has a grasp of social conditions, strives to influence his surroundings by word and deed, and is ready to sacrifice his life to his convictions. The mystic remains solitary and misunderstood. Luther, who was to some extent influenced by German mysticism, fought, at his best, against the dogma of historical salvation.

It is the tragic fate of all religions that they must crystallise into a system. A reflection of the enthusiasm which animated their founders still falls on their disciples: Follow me! But the second generation already demands proofs, tradition and clumsy miracles; reports are drawn up and looked upon as sacred--religion has become a glimpse into the past. Most people never have any direct religious experience, their salvation lies in the dogmas, the universally accepted doctrines. The founder of a new religion is always regarded by his contemporaries as abnormal, and is persecuted accordingly; not in malice, but of necessity. Arnold of Brescia died at the stake; St. Francis was no more than a heretic tolerated by the Church, and Eckhart escaped the tribunal of the Inquisition only through his death.

I have attempted to show in diverse domains of the higher spiritual and psychical life, how powerfully _the Christian principle of the individual soul, the real fundamental value of the European civilisation_, manifested itself at the time of the Crusades, and everywhere became the germ of new things. The deepest thinkers teach the deification of man as the culmination of existence, the ultimate purpose of this earthly life, and claim immortality for the soul. This position, which may roughly be conceived as the raising of the individual into the ideal, has determined the European ideal of culture and differentiated it from all Orientalism, including even the loftiest Indian philosophy.

Every attempt to subst.i.tute for this fundamental concept and its emotional content something else--whether it be pantheism, Buddhism, or naturalism--will always remain a failure.

Side by side with the splendid achievement of the German mysticism, the Teutonic race has always been apt to give practical proof of its individualism by endless petty quarrels and by splittings into numerous cliques. But even before this race began to play a part in history, at the beginning of the third century, the principle of the individual soul was outwardly carried to extremes. While it was the ideal of the man of antiquity to serve the higher community of the State with body and soul, nascent Christianity cared solely for the salvation of the individual soul, and frequently proved this by quite external evidence, by living a hermit's life in the desert, for instance. Children left their parents, husband and wife separated, dignitaries forsook their office to seek solitude and prepare their souls for the world beyond the grave. The first convents--the outcome of Christian individualism and asceticism--were founded; and the anti-social extreme of this individualism acquired such ominous proportions that the Emperor Valens in the year of grace 365, was forced to legislate against the monastic life.

This hatred of the world, which was quite in harmony with the spirit of Christianity, was only overcome by the profounder concepts of German mysticism, for in the primitive dualistic view of the first millenary the renunciation of the world was the only possibility of avoiding sin.

The Emperor Justinian decreed that any man who induced a consecrated nun to marry him should be punished by death. The thought that personal greatness did not consist in renouncing the world but in living in it and overcoming it, had not yet been conceived.

The delight in the human form, characteristic of antiquity, was extinguished, a crude dualism denied all antique values. The body must be hated, so that the soul could flourish. But as the h.e.l.lenic period was preceded by vague, unindividualised, material life, so the impersonal, chaotic, spiritual life of the first thousand years of Christianity matured the individual soul. It found its climax in Dante and Eckhart, the greatest poet of the Neo-Latin race, and the most illumined religious genius of Germany. These two men, who were contemporaries (Dante died in 1321 and Eckhart in 1329), finally revealed the character of two kindred nations, completing and fructifying each other. In Dante the great artistic power of the Neo-Latin race appeared for the first time in its full intensity; it took possession of the whole visible universe, and poured new beauty into the traditional myths of Christendom. Eckhart experienced and recreated the shapeless depths of the soul, the regions of the blending of the soul with G.o.d. With these two men Europe definitely severed herself from antiquity and barbarism, henceforth to follow her own star.

The new world had come into existence! Renascence, the lucky heir, gathered the ripe fruit from the tree of art which had blossomed so marvellously. G.o.d was no longer sought in the depth of the soul, all emotion was projected into the world of sense. Churches were built, not from an irresistible impulse, but as store-houses of the pictures which were painted with amazing rapidity. The fundamental principle of personality was externalised in the Renascence. Vanity and boasting, traces of which frequently appeared in the age of chivalry, grew exuberantly. No less manifest than the incomparable genius and _esprit_ of the heyday of the Renascence--although far less frequently commented on--was the desire to be conspicuous, to shine, to display wealth and learning. The essence of personality, instead of being sought in the soul, was sought in outward magnificence. As a matter of fact, the much extolled Renascence only perfected the various branches of art and poetry, which had sprung up in the period of the Crusades. The latter was the time of the planting of the tree of European culture; all that followed was merely its growth and ramification. Only exact science had its origin in the Renascence, and this fact, in historical perspective, must be regarded as the supreme glory of this period. However paradoxical it may sound--the "impersonal" science is the perfection of the European system of individualism, its most potent weapon for taking spiritual possession of the world and all that the world contains. The consciousness of personality had to permeate the whole soul before it could recover its external function: organic existence justified by itself. While art borrows from nature and mankind all that we ourselves deem beautiful, perfect, valuable, and imposes on the world a man-made law--science strives to understand all things and all creatures according to the law which dominates them; it strives to comprehend nature and humanity--even where they are foreign and hostile--not according to human values, but according to their inherent nature--and this is only possible when the individuality of all things is respected.

The method of science has slowly become the perfect weapon by whose aid Europe has attained the mastery of the world; it rests on the fundamental feeling for the material, and is capable of confronting the "I" with the whole system of natural phenomena, the "not-I," and expresses the final victory of comprehending spirit over matter.

CHAPTER II

THE DEIFICATION OF WOMAN