From The British Quarterly Review. THE MYSTICS OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY AND THEIR CONNECTION WITH THE REFORMATION.*

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Church and that new religious life which set Roman Christendom at defiance.

Nothing has done so much to show how mistaken both parties have been, and how idle is the attempt to treat the Reformation either as a wholly isolated outburst of religious illumination, or as a merely anti-Christian revolt, than the many critical histories of the growth and development of individual doctrines which have appeared within the last twenty years. The historical portions of Person of Christ," Müller's "Doctrine works such as Dorner's "Doctrine of the of Sin," and Ritschl's "Doctrine of Justi

fication and Reconciliation," show us

that the medieval or scholastic period is by no means such a barren one as has been supposed, and the more we study them the more thorough becomes the conviction that no doctrine of Christian

theology can be accurately known unless its history and growth during the times of the old Catholic Church be carefully traced and investigated.

CHURCH historians who have made the great Reformation of the sixteenth century a special field of investigation have been too apt to ignore that most interesting period of the development of ecelesiastical life and doctrine which is contained in the three preceding centuries, and have overlooked in a great measure the many tendencies in the old Catholic Church which were slowly preparing it for the great outburst of religious feeling which was to rend it asunder. Protestants have very commonly held that there have been two periods of great illumination in the Church of Christ, the age of the Apostles and of the earlier Fathers of the Church, and the age of the Reformation,— and have been content to pass over the progress of theology and Christian life from the time of Augustine to the revolt of Luther. Whatever does not come within the limits of those two periods has been represented to be either of little practical worth for the student of the history of tions, has taught us that everything has theology, or valuable only as affording its birth and being in time, and has a an example of continuous decay. And growth or on-going. Every outburst of Roman Catholics, who have always tried religious life has its history. It is the to show that the Reformation was the rechild of time, and grows on in time as sult of unchristian influences at work surely as the man or the tree. Its bewithout the Church, have, as was to beginning may have been long hidden, expected, altogether ignored or denied nothing may have been seen of it until it has suddenly, as it seems, leapt into life; any connection between the old Catholic but the small beginning and the slow growth on to maturity have been there, and must be traced and known if we are to know the true nature of the religious outburst itself. Church historians have already begun to recognize this, and no if they were solitary phenomena. They longer try to explain religious events as now see that in order to account for any occurrence in religious life, and any new

* (1.) Deutschen Mystiker des vierzehnten Jahrhunderts; Meister Eckhart. Edited by FRANZ PFEIFFER. Leipzig: 1845

(2.) Hours with the Mystics. By ROBERT ALFRED

VAUGHAN. 1873.

(3.) The History and Life of John Tauler, &c. By S. WINKWorth, London: 1857.

(4) Theologica Germanica &c. Translated by S.

WINKWORTH.

London: 1854.

(5.) Nicolas von Basle, Leben, und . . . Werke. By Dr. CARL SCHMIDT. Wien: 1866.

The idea of "development," too, that most characteristic of modern concep

(6.) Die Gottes-Freunde im vierzehnten Jahrhun-phase in religious doctrine, they must be

dert. By Dr. CARL SCHMIDT. Jena: 1854.

(7.) Werken van Jan van Ruusbroec, from the Publications of the Matschappy der Vlamische Bibli

ophilen. (Ser. 3, Pts. 1, 4, 7, 12.) Ghent.

(8.) The Life of the Blessed Henry Suso. By HIM

SELF.

Translated from the German by J. F. KNOX.

London: 1865.

(9.) The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Atonement. By Dr. ALBRECHT RITSCHL. Translated by JOHN S. BLACK, M.A. Edinburgh: 1871.

able to link it on to what has gone before, and show how the new product has long lain dormant like the seed in the warm earth, yet cherished and quickened by numberless hidden influences. They must point out its first birth when it leaves the protecting soil and endeavours

to push its way out to the air and the light. They must be able to tell what gentle breezes of popular enlightenment and national circumstances have welcomed its young beginnings, and must trace its growth bit by bit until it so gathers strength as to overcome all obstacles and stand forth revealed in its might. It is to such a conception as this that we owe the elaborate histories of individual doctrines like those above mentioned, and the admission - now almost universally made,- that the Reformation Church, while repudiating the mediæval type of Christianity, arose out of the Medieval Church. Modern writers on the history of Protestant dogmatic such as Dorner and others recognize the importance of a knowledge of pre-Reformation Church life and doctrine, and are not content merely to describe the various outstanding peculiarities in Reformation doctrine and controversy. They endeavour to explain more or less satisfactorily, by a reference to past and contemporary movements and emotions in the hearts and minds of men and people, how and why the Reformation Church came to be what it was, and not something else. With them the "Reformers before the Reformation are not solitary individuals who held opinions exactly the same as Luther, but somehow or other were accidentally dropped down on the world's stage a century or two before him; they are rather men who have got a partial glimpse of the great truths which were growing onwards to revelation, and show, as outstanding examples, the gradual preparation of the Church for the doctrines to be revealed.

Among the many influences at work in the old Catholic Church which were slowly preparing the way for its disruption in the sixteenth century, few were more powerful than medieval mysticism, few have attracted so much attention from theologians, and none has so much general interest. Mysticism has always great charms for a large class of minds, and mediæval mysticism has special attractions for every devotional-minded man, and for every one who can admire a noble, pious, and lonely life. For

those old mediæval mystics were for the most part men who had felt, more than others, the weariness and sorrow of human life. Their lot was cast in evil days, in times when men were really tried, and forced to show of what stuff they were made. They lived, as it seemed to them, in the last days of an evil dying world Hora novissima, tempora pessima sunt, vigileEcce minaciter imminet arbiter, ille supremus. mus!

and it behoved them to live, though in the world, spiritual heavenly lives, not of the world. They were the Stoics of the Middle Ages, with the hard morality of stoicism softened and humanized by the Christian ideas of love and the common brotherhood of mankind, and the stoical idea of a universal moral commonwealth of men transformed into the hope of the coming kingdom of heaven. The same influences which were at work in the early decline of the old Empire of the Cæsars to make thoughtful and devout men betake themselves to stoicism, turn their backs in proud scorn on an evil, hopelessly evil world, and live mostly within the circle of their own ideas,those same influences were busy during the long decay and downfall of the Holy Roman Empire, leading men to betake themselves to lives of solitary mystical contemplation, to despair of anything like organic Church life, and to turn away from a world too hopelessly bad to become regenerate. Mediæval mysticism, as we shall afterwards see, is from one point of view a revival of the old Roman stoicism with Christianity superadded.

The medieval mystics were all of them men who had lived and suffered as few have been called on to suffer, and who have recorded for us their sorrows, and how they were able to endure, and even in some measure to triumph over them. It is this that gives to their writings such power over our hearts, and awakens in us such sympathy with their lives, their sayings and doings. The sympathy of sorrow brings all men nearer each other, and annihilates in a way that nothing else can the length of time that stretches between this nineteenth century of ours,

and the far-off period in which these men lived and laboured, sorrowed and were comforted; so that their "noble little books," as Luther called them, can never be to us mere books, collections of ideas, or records of opinions, but are rather the living voices of human souls speaking to us with directness and power, awakening all our feelings, and stirring us to the bottom of our hearts.

This, which may be called the human interest in medieval mysticism, as opposed to the theological, requires to be clearly stated and kept in mind, whenever the influence of these mystics is discussed; but when it has once been acknowledged we need not again refer to it. What we have to do with in this article is not the power which the medieval mystics have exercised in all times because of the

I suppose [says George Eliot, in the "Mill depth of their human sympathies, or beon the Floss"] that the reason why the small cause they lived great lives; our busiold-fashioned book, for which you need only ness is with their special influence as a pay sixpence at a book stall, works miracles class or school of theologians on contemto this day, turning bitter waters into sweet-porary and future theological doctrines. ness, while expensive sermons and treatises No doubt these mystics, like all men, newly issued leave all things as they were be- and especially like all men whose lives fore, is, that it was written down by a hand that waited for the heart's prompting; it is the chronicle of a solitary hidden anguish, struggle, trust, and triumph: not written on

velvet cushions to teach endurance to those

who are treading with bleeding feet on the

stones. And so it remains to all time a lasting record of human needs and human consolations; the voice of a brother who ages ago felt, and suffered, and renounced-in the cloister, perhaps, with serge gown and tonsured head, with chaunting and long fasting, and with a fashion of speech different from ours, but under the same silent far-off heavens, and with the same passionate desires, the same strivings, the same failures, the same

weariness.

are preeminently more interesting than their opinions, are to be tried and tested as individuals who thought their own thoughts and lived their own lives, and they themselves would have so wished to

be tried. Eckhart or Tauler would have objected as vehemently as the late Frederick Denison Maurice did to any critic who would have spoken of their "system," or discussed their writings as rep-. resenting a "school" of thinkers. But the purpose of historical criticism absorbs the individual in the class of which he is a member, and must do so, even at the risk of some injustice towards the men whose opinions are criticised. Nor It is because of this intense human is there much harm done to the individinterest which there is in mysticism, and ual, if the critic bears in mind, as he especially the mysticism of the four-ought always to do, that it is only the teenth century, that their contributions to theology have become perhaps unduly prominent, and have had a place yielded to them in theological discussion which is scarcely their due; and that the full worth of mysticism can never be It is necessary to separate with some felt, nor can the good work done by it in clearness at the outset, mysticism, in so the world ever be measured, if we look far as it is an object of interest to the upon it as merely a branch of old Cath- theologian and in so far as it influenced olic theology. We cannot help loving the development of theological doctrine, those old mystics, and longing to get from the more widely felt interest which near them in spirit; they were such all men, whether theologians or not, great-souled, tender-hearted, sorrowing men, full of earnest duty, full of steadfast daring, full of noble manhood; and in this mood we care little for doctrines or systems. It is the men we seek to know, not their theological opinions.

doctrine which he is describing, and whose effects he is tracing, and does not seek to limit the sphere of the man by the spread and power of his more distinctive opinions.

must take in the lives of the principal medieval mystics; for the distinction has often been forgotten, and the special theological meaning of many of the doctrines of mysticism has by many critics been so connected with the pious

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lives of those who have held and taught, tween the Reformation and mysticism the doctrines, that "mystic" is often be- somewhat close, select the writers we lieved to mean one who is more pious have mentioned, with Thomas of Kempen than his neighbours." and the author of the "Deutsche Theo

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Medieval mysticism, whether consid-logie" as the typical mystics. ered as a whole, or as divided into sev- Eckhart, or Meister Eckhart,* as he is eral branches, is by far too wide a sub- commonly called, was at once the earliest ject to be discussed in a short article and the greatest of the mystics of the like this. To show how all the various fourteenth century. Born in 1251, the doctrines and opinions, whether theolog- first fifty years of his long life seem to ical, moral, or philosophical, which have have been spent in calm preparation for been classed under the common name its stirring and tumultuous close. Of mysticism, have come to bear that com- his early years we know little or nothing mon name, to trace the historical connec- even his birthplace is unknown. Action between the various stages of its cording to some biographers he was a growth, and how much each teacher or native of Saxony, while others, with great sect brought into the common stock, is probability, say that he was born in Strasone of the most difficult tasks yet to be burg. He studied at the University of accomplished in historical theology, and Paris, where he took the degree of Master one that cannot be attempted here. We of Arts. There he laid the foundation accordingly set aside many interesting of his great theological learning, and questions which at once are suggested after a time became a very successful by our subject: Who was the pseudo- lecturer. We are told that he knew Dionysius, and what the influence of his thoroughly the writings of the principal writings on the mystical theology of the Church Fathers, from Origen to Thomas Western Church? What was the theo- of Aquin and Ægidius of Colonna. His logical influence of Scotus Erigena upon favourite authors were Augustin, Thomas Eckhart and Tauler? and many such of Aquin, the Pseudo-Dionysius † and, like. We must make no mention of the Scotus Erigena, but beyond all he prized school of St. Victor and its many pious the writings of Hugo of St. Victor, whose disciples. No attempt must be made to disciple he claimed to be. In 1289, distinguish the true ethical mystics from having resolved to give up his secular the many immoral sects which laid claim occupation, he was appointed teacher of to the name. The curious theological philosophy in the Dominican School of and political questions suggested by the St. Jaques, in Paris, and continued there terms Fratricelli, Brotherhood of the for nine years. During this period he Free Spirit, Beguines, Beghards, &c., was created doctor of theology by Bonmust be left unnoticed. We propose toiface VIII., a fact which shows that the confine our attention to the mystics of the fourteenth century, or rather to Eckhart, Tauler, Nicolas of Basle, Heinrich Suso, and Jan van Ruusbroec, and their followers, and seek to trace the connection between the mysticism they taught and the theology of the great Reformation which came two hundred years later. It was in the fourteenth century that mysticism reached its bloom-time, and those theologians who are inclined to make the connection

Since Hegel, in his "History of Philosophy," said that Eckhart was the father of German philosophy, and his writings an anticipation of modern speculation, there has been no lack of monographs describing his life and writings in many different ways. The best of these is undoubtedly Adolf Lasson's Me:ster Eckhart, der Mystiker. Zür Geschichte der religiösen Specu lation in Deutschland. Berlin, 1868. The student should also consult Bach's Meister Eckhart, der Vater der deutschen Speculation, Wien, 1864-though this book is in every way inferior to Lasson's; and Dr. Carl Schmidt's essay in "Studien und Kritiken" for But whoever would know Eckhart 1839, PP. 663-7. for himself should peruse the work which heads our be-list, an edition of Eckhart's writings carefully edited by Franz Pfeiffer, that indefatigable editor of medieval German literature. The book purports to be the first The only thorough-going attempt to solve this of a series of the writings of the fourteenth century problem, so far as we know, is that of H. Schmid in mystics, but we believe that no others were published. his "Der Mysticismus des Mittelalters in seiner Ent-Any references made to Eckhart's writings are made to stehungs-periode, Jena, 1824," and it is too vague and this edition. inaccurate to be of much help to the student.

† By "theology of the Reformation" is meant the theology of the Lutheran and Reformed Churches, as opposed to the theology of the Old Catholic, of the Roman Catholic Churches, and also as opposed to that of the Socinians. The connection between the theology of the Mystics and that of the Reformation Church is a purely critical question, and we purpose to treat it as We take the doctrines of both systems, not for the purpose of defending either, but simply to find what is the connection, if any, between them.

such.

The works of the pseudo-Dionysius are certain mystical writings in which the theories of the NeoPlatonists and the more prominent doctrines of Christianity are so blended together as to form a mystical theology. These writings, which were very popular with medieval theologians, and possessed great fascina tion for any minds at all inclined to mysticism, were ascribed, wrongly it can now be shown, to Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian convert of St. Paul. They are the great source of the mysticism of the Western Church.

fame of the Dominican monk had been spiritual Christians whom his preaching gradually growing, and that his superiors had aroused to attempt to live higher in his order and in the Church had dis- Christian lives, and he preached to vast cerned his eminent abilities. In 1304 he audiences from day to day with untiring was made provincial of his order for energy. Hitherto he had suffered no Saxony, and in 1307 he was further pro- interruption in the course of his journeys, moted to the rank of vicar-general of but he was now to array against himself the order in Bohemia, and injunctions and his work more than one powerful were laid upon him to superintend and Churchman. When Eckhart came to reform the cloister-preachers. It was at Strasburg the Rhine provinces were full this time, when he was nearly sixty years of the followers of certain enthusiastic of age, that Eckhart began his life of mystical sects, who gave great trouble to active work. He travelled a great deal, the bishops of the dioceses. Beghards making tours of inspection, reforming and Beguines, Lollards and Fratricelli, abuses, selecting men whom he could made Köln their head-quarters, and their trust for the important office of cloister- disciples, we are told, abounded in all the preacher, and all the time preaching from day to day to the people. This is the period of his life to which we owe those sermons which have come down to us. From the first his discourses were noted for those mystical expressions and ideas which were to be expected from the student of the pseudo-Dionysius and of Hugo of St. Victor, but they soon began to show that Eckhart was a man of independent thought, who could bring altogether new ideas into his theology, and had the boldness to preach what he believed. His sermons were written in the rude German of the middle ages, but his style made up by its vigour for what it lacked in refinement, and few preachers have been so popular with the common people. When we remember the kind of preaching to which the laity were then accustomed, and how such a book as the "Gesta Romanorum cum applicationibus" furnished the preaching friars with the texts, illustrations, and practical applications for their sermons, we need not wonder much that the noble enthusiasm of Eckhart and the deep spirituality of his discourses must have had a wonderful effect on the German mind. Wherever he went crowds assembled to hear him preach, and by-and-by little companies of praying believers were formed, who looked up to Eckhart as a spiritual father. Encouraged by the work done in Saxony and Bohemia, Eckhart resolved to widen the range of his preaching journeys, and in 1324 he came to Strasburg, intending to preach in all the chief towns of the Rhine provinces. He was now nearly seventy-five years of age, but his activity was untiring. He transacted regularly the great amount of business which fell to the care of a provincial vicar-general of one of the largest of the religious orders, he corresponded constantly with all the little companies of

villages and towns of Rhine-land, from Köln to Strasburg.* When Eckhart preached in Strasburg, and still more notably when he went to Frankfort, numbers of Beghards and of other proscribed sects attended his preaching, and the great preacher had a good deal of intercourse with them. Several members of those heretical sects were admitted into the religious associations formed by Eckhart, and there was so much intercourse between them and the great Dominican as to excite the suspicions of the chief of the regular clergy of the Rhine provinces. Johann of Ockenstein, Bishop of Strasburg, and Heinrich of Virnenburg, Archbishop of Köln, accused Eckhart of holding and teaching the doctrines of the Beghards. He was summoned before a council of the Dominician order at Venice, and it was there decided that Eckhart was free from any taint of heresy. The Archbishop Heinrich enraged at this decision, and knowing that Eckhart's mystical theology had to some extent leavened the Dominicans, boldly accused the whole order of heresy, and summoned it, and especially its vicargeneral for Bohemia, before the Inquisition. This happened in the beginning of 1326, and the Dominicans at once appealed to the pope, John XXII. A papal appeal was always a lengthy matter, and

The history and theological and political character of those obscure mystical sects is one of the most difficult problems of the religious history of the Middle Ages. There seems to be no doubt but that a desire after a more spiritual Christianity than the Church seemed capable of giving was at the beginning the main element in their revolt from the Catholic Church. On the other hand, however, it must be acknowledged, that the life and conduct of many of these sects were grossly immoral, so much so that no modern government could allow their existence within its dominion; and it must also be borne in mind that in many cases their political creed was communistic, and their religion pantheistic. It does not seem unlikely that in all these sects the good and evil elements were mingled, and. them out.

that each came to the surface as circumstances called