Part 5
A Master is instructing his disciples as to the relationship of the soul to the All-Being of things. He speaks of the fact that when man plunges into the abysmal depths of his soul, he no longer feels the natural, limited forces of the separated personality working within him. Therein the separated man no longer speaks, therein speaks God. There man does not see God, or the world; there God sees Himself. Man has become one with God. But the Master knows that this teaching has not yet awakened to full life in him. He thinks it with his understanding: but he does not yet live in it with every fibre of his personality. He is thus teaching about a state of things which he has not yet completely lived through in himself. The description of the condition corresponds to the truth; yet this truth has no value if it does not gain life, if it does not bring itself forth in reality as actually existent.
The “layman” or “Friend of God” hears of the Master and his teachings. He is no less saturated with the truth which the Master utters than the Master himself. But he possesses this truth not as a matter of the understanding; he has it as the whole force of his life. He knows that when this truth has come to a man from outside, he can himself give utterance to it, without even in the least living in accordance with it. But in that case he has nothing other in him than the natural knowledge of the understanding. He then speaks of this natural knowledge as if it were the highest, equivalent to the working of the All-Being. It is not so, because it has not been acquired in a life that has approached to this knowledge as a transformed, a reborn life. What one acquires only as a natural man, that remains only natural,--even when one afterwards expresses in words the fundamental characteristic of the higher knowledge. Outwards, from within the very nature itself, must the transformation be accomplished.
Nature, which by living has evolved itself to a certain level, must evolve further through life; something new must come into existence through this further evolution. Man must not only look backwards upon the evolution which already lies behind him--claim as the highest that which shapes itself according thereto in his spirit--but he must look forward upon the uncreated: his knowledge must be a beginning of a new content, not an end to the content of evolution which already lies before it. Nature advances from the worm to the mammal, from the mammal to man, not in a conceptual but in an actual, real process. Man has to repeat this process not in his mind alone. The mental repetition is only the beginning of a fresh, real evolution, which, however, despite its being spiritual, is real. Man, then, does not merely know what nature has produced; he continues nature; he translates his knowledge into living action. He gives birth within himself to the spirit, and this spirit advances thence onwards from level to level of evolution, as nature itself advances. Spirit begins a natural process upon a higher level.
The talk about the God who contemplates Himself in man’s inner being, takes on a different character in one who has recognised this. He attaches little importance to the fact that an insight already attained has led him into the depths of the All-Being; instead, his spiritual nature acquires a new character. It unfolds itself further in the direction determined by the All-Being. Such a man not only looks at the world differently from one who merely understands: he lives his life otherwise. He does not talk of the meaning which life already has through the forces and laws of the world: but he gives anew a fresh meaning to his life. As little as the fish already has in itself what makes its appearance on a later level of evolution as the mammal, as little has the understanding man already in himself what shall be born from him as the higher man. If the fish could know itself and the things around it, it would regard the being-a-fish as the meaning of life. It would say: the All-Being is like the fish: in the fish the All-Being beholds itself. Thus would the fish speak as long as it remained constant to its understanding kind of knowledge. In reality it does not remain constant thereto. It reaches out beyond its knowledge with its activity. It becomes a reptile and later a mammal. The meaning which it gives to itself in reality reaches out beyond the meaning which mere contemplation gives to it.
In man also this must be so. He gives himself a meaning in reality; he does not halt and stand still at the meaning he already has, which his contemplation shows him. Knowledge leaps out beyond itself, if only it understands itself aright. Knowledge cannot deduce the world from a ready-made God; it can only unfold itself from a germ in the direction towards a God. The man who has understood this will not regard God as something that is outside of him; he will deal with God as a being who wanders with him towards a goal, which at the outset is just as unknown as the nature of the mammal is unknown to the fish. He does not aim to be the knower of the hidden, or of the self-revealing existent God, but to be the friend of the divine doing and working, which is exalted over both being and non-being.
The layman, who came to the Master, was a “Friend of God” in this sense, and through him the Master became from a contemplator of the being of God, one who is “alive in the spirit,” one who not only contemplated, but lived in the higher sense. The Master now no longer brought forth concepts and ideas of the understanding from his inner nature, but these concepts and ideas burst forth from him as living, actualised spirit. He no longer merely edified his hearers; he shook the very foundations of their being. He no longer plunged their souls into their inner being; he led them into a new life. This is recounted to us symbolically: about forty people fell down through his preaching and lay as if dead.
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As a guide to such a new life, we possess a book about whose author nothing is known. Luther first made it known in print. The philologist, Franz Pfeiffer, has recently printed it according to a manuscript of the year 1497, with a modern German translation facing the original text. What precedes the book indicates its purpose and its goal: “Here begins the man from Frankfurt and saith many very lofty and very beautiful things about a perfect life.” Upon this follows the “Preface about the man from Frankfurt”: “Al-mighty, Eternal God hath uttered this little book through a wise, understanding, truthful, righteous man, his friend, who in former days was a German nobleman, a priest and a custodian in the German House of Nobles at Frankfurt; it teacheth many a lovely insight into Divine Wisdom, and especially how and whereby one may know the true, righteous friends of God, and also the unrighteous, false, free-thinkers, who are very hurtful to Holy Church.”
By “free-thinkers” one may perhaps understand those who live in a merely conceptual world, like the “Master” described above before his transformation by means of the “Friend of God,” and by the “true, righteous friends of God,” such as possess the disposition of the “layman.” One may further ascribe to the book the intention of so working upon its readers as the “Friend of God from the Mountains” did upon the Master. It is not known who the author was. But what does that mean? It is not known when he was born and died, or what he did in his outer life. That the author aimed to preserve eternal secrecy about these facts of his outer life, belongs naturally to the way in which he desired to work. It is not the “I” of this or the other man, born at a definite point of time, who is to speak to us, but the “I-ness” in the depths whereof “the separateness of individualities” (in the sense of Paul Asmus’ saying[5]) must first unfold itself. “If God took to Himself all men who are or who have ever been, and became man in them, and they became God in Him, and it did not happen to me also, then my fall and my turning away would never be made good, unless it also happened in me too. And in this restoration and making good, I neither can nor may nor should do anything thereto save a mere pure suffering, so that God alone doeth and worketh all things in me, and I suffer Him and all His works and His divine will. But if I will not submit to this, but possess myself with egotism, _i.e._, with mine, and I, to me, for me, and the like, that hinders God so that He cannot work His work in me purely alone and without hindrance. Therefore my fall and my turning away remain thus not made good.” The “man from Frankfurt” aims to speak not as a separated individual; he desires to let God speak. That he yet can do this only as a single, distinct personality he naturally knows full well; but he is a “Friend of God,” that means a man who aims not at presenting the nature of life through contemplation, but at pointing out the beginning of a new evolutionary pathway through the living spirit.
[5] _Vide ante_, page 34.
The explanations in the book are various instructions as to how one comes to this pathway. The root-thought returns again and again: man must strip off everything that is connected with that which makes him appear as a single, separate personality. This thought seems to be worked out only in respect of the moral life; it should be extended, without further ado, to the higher life of knowledge as well. One must annihilate in oneself whatever appears as separateness: then separated existence ceases; the All-Life enters into us. We cannot master this All-Life by drawing it towards us. It comes into us, when we reduce the separateness in us to silence. We have the All-Life least of all just then, when we so regard our separated existence as if the Whole already dwelt within it. This first comes to light in the separated existence when this separated existence no longer claims for itself to be anything. This pretension on the part of the separated existence our text terms “assumption.”
Through “assumption” the self makes it impossible for itself that the Universal Self should enter into it. The self then puts itself as a part, as something imperfect, in the place of the whole, of the perfect. “The perfect is a being, that in itself and in its being has conceived and resolved all beings, and without which and apart from which there is no true being, and in which all things have their being; for it is the being of all things and is in itself unchangeable and immovable, and changes and moves all other things. But the divided and the imperfect is that which has sprung from out of this perfect, or becomes, just as a ray or a light that flows forth from the sun or a light and shines upon something, this or that. And that is called the creature, and of all these divided things none is the perfect. Therefore also is the perfect none of the divided.... When the perfect cometh, the divided is despised. But when does it come? I say: When so far as is possible it is known, felt, tasted in the soul; for the defect lies wholly in us and not in it. For just as the sun illuminates the whole world and is just as near to the one as to the other, yet a blind man sees it not. But that is no defect of the sun but of the blind man.... If my eye is to see anything, it must become cleansed, or be already cleansed from all other things.... Now one might be inclined to say: In so far then as it is unknowable and inconceivable for all creatures, and since the soul is also a creature, how can it then be known in the soul? Answer: Therefore is it said, the creature shall be known _as a creature_.”
This is as much as to say that all creatures shall be regarded as created and creation and not regard themselves as I-ness and self-ness, whereby this knowing is made impossible. “For in whatever creature this perfect one shall be known, there all creature-being, created-being, I-ness, self-ness, and everything of the kind must be lost, be and become naught.”[6] The soul must therefore look within itself; there it finds its I-ness, its self-ness. If it remains standing there, it thereby cuts itself off from the perfect. If it regards its I-ness only as a thing lent to it as it were, and annihilates it in spirit, it will be seized upon by the stream of the All-Life, of Perfection.
[6] Chap. i., _Book of the Man from Frankfurt_.
“When the creature assumes to itself somewhat of good, as Being, Life, Knowledge, Power, in short, aught of that which one calls good and thinks that it is that, or that it belongs to it or comes from it, so often and so much as that happens, does the creature turn away.” “The created soul of man has two eyes. The one is the possibility of seeing in eternity; the other of seeing in time and in creation.” “Man should therefore stand and be quite free without himself, that is without self-ness, I-ness, me, mine, for me and the like, so that he as little seeks and thinks of himself and what is his in all things as if it did not exist; and he should therefore also think little of himself, as if he were not, and as if another had done all his deeds.”[7]
[7] Chap. xv., _Book of the Man from Frankfurt_.
One must also take account of the fact in regard to the writer of these sentences, that the thought-content, to which he gives a direction by his higher ideas and feelings, is that of a believing priest in the spirit of his own time. We are here concerned not with the thought-content, but with the direction, not with the thoughts but with the way of thinking. Any one who does not live as he does in Christian dogmas, but in the conceptions of natural science, finds in his sentences other thoughts; but with these other thoughts he points in the same direction. And this direction is that which leads to the overcoming of the self-hood, by the Self-hood itself. The highest light shines for man in his Ego. But this light only then imparts to his concept-world the right reflection, when he becomes aware that it is not his own self-light, but the universal world-light.
Hence there is no more important knowledge than self-knowledge; and there is equally no knowledge which leads so completely out beyond itself. When the “self” knows itself aright, it is already no longer a “self.” In his own language, the writer of the book in question expresses this as follows: “For God’s ‘own-ness’ is void of this and that, void of self-ness and I-ness; but the nature and own-ness of the creature is that it seeketh and willeth itself and its own and ‘this’ and ‘that’; and in all that it does or leaves undone, it seeketh to receive its own benefit and profit.”
“When, now, the creature or the man loseth his own-ness and his self-ness and himself, and goeth out from himself, then God entereth in with His Own-ness, that is with his Self-hood.”[8] Man soars upwards, from a view of his “Ego” which makes the latter appear to him as his very being, to a view such that it shows him his Ego as a mere organ, in which the All-Being works upon itself. In the concept-sphere of our text, this means: “If man can attain thereto that he belongeth unto God just as a man’s hand belongeth to him, then let him content himself and seek no further.”[9] That is not intended to mean that when man has reached a certain stage of his evolution he shall stand still there, but that, when he has got as far as is indicated in the above words, he should not set on foot further investigations into the meaning of the hand, but rather make use of the hand, in order that it may render service to the body to which it belongs.
[8] Chap. xxiv, _Book of the Man from Frankfurt_.
[9] _Ibid._, Chap. liv.
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HEINRICH SUSO and JOHANNES RUYSBROEK possessed a type of mind which may be characterised as genius for feeling. Their feelings are drawn by something like instinct in the same direction in which Eckhart’s and Tauler’s feelings were guided by their higher thought-life. Suso’s heart turns devoutly towards that Root-Being which embraces the individual man just as much as the whole remaining world, and in whom forgetting himself, he yearns to lose himself as a drop of water in the mighty ocean. He speaks of this his yearning towards the All-Being, not as of something that he desires to embrace in thought; he speaks of it as a natural impulse, that makes his soul drunken with desire for the annihilation of its separated existence and its re-awakening to life in the all-efficiency of the endless life. “Turn thine eyes to this being in its pure naked simplicity, so that thou mayest let fall this and that manifold being. Take being in itself alone, that is unmoved with not-being; for all not-being denies all being. A thing that is yet to become, or that has been, is not now in actual presence.”
“Now, one cannot know mixed being or not-being except by some mark of being as a whole. For if one will understand a thing, the reason first encounters being, and that is a being that worketh all things. It is a divided being of this or that creature,--for divided being is all mingled with something of other-ness, with a possibility of receiving something. Therefore the nameless divine being must so be a _whole_ being in itself, that it sustaineth all divided beings by its presence.”
Thus speaks Suso in the autobiography which he wrote in conjunction with his pupil Elsbet Stäglin. He, too, is a pious priest and lives entirely in the Christian circle of thought. He lives therein as if it were quite unthinkable that anybody with his mental tendency could live in any other world. But of him also it is true that one can combine another concept-content with his mental tendency. This is clearly borne out by the way in which the content of the Christian teaching has become for him actual inner experience, and his relation to Christ has become a relation between his own spirit and the eternal truth in a purely ideal, spiritual way.
He composed a “_Little Book of Eternal Wisdom_.” In this he makes the “Eternal Wisdom” speak to its servant, in other words to himself: “Knowest thou me not? How art thou so cast down, or hast thou lost consciousness from agony of heart, my tender child? Behold it is I, merciful Wisdom, who have opened wide the abyss of fathomless compassion which yet is hidden from all the saints, tenderly to receive thee and all repentant hearts; it is I, sweet Eternal Wisdom, who was there poor and miserable, so as to bring thee to thy worthiness; it is I, who suffered bitter death, that I might make thee to live again! I stand here pale and bleeding and lovely, as I stood on the lofty gallows of the cross between the stern judgment of my Father and thee. It is I, thy brother; look, it is I, thy spouse! I have therefore wholly forgotten all thou hast done against me, as if it had never been, if only thou turnest wholly to me and separatest thyself no more from me.”
All that is bodily and temporal in the Christian conception has become for Suso, as one sees, a spiritual-ideal process in the recesses of his soul. From some chapters of Suso’s biography mentioned above, it might appear as if he had let himself be guided not by the mere action of his own spiritual power, but through external revelations, through ghostly visions. But he expresses his meaning quite clearly about this. One attains to the truth through reasonableness, not through any kind of revelation. “The difference between pure truth and two-souled visions in the matter of knowledge I will also tell you. An immediate beholding of the bare Godhead, that is right pure truth, without all doubt; and every vision, so that it be reasonable and without pictures and the more like it be unto that bare beholding, the purer and nobler it is.”
Meister Eckhart, too, leaves no doubt that he puts aside the view which seeks to be spiritual in bodily-spacial forms, in appearances which one can perceive by any senses. Minds of the type of Suso and Eckhart are thus opponents of such a view, as that which finds expression in the spiritualism which has developed during the nineteenth century.
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JOHANNES RUYSBROEK, the Belgian mystic, trod the same path as Suso. His spiritual way found an active opponent in Johannes Gerson (born 1363), who was for some time Chancellor of the University of Paris and played a momentous rôle at the Council of Constance. Some light is thrown upon the nature of the mysticism which was practised by Tauler, Suso and Ruysbroek, if one compares it with the mystic endeavours of Gerson, who had his predecessors in Richard de St. Victor, Bonaventura, and others.
Ruysbroek himself fought against those whom he reckoned among the heretical mystics. As such he considered all those who, through an easy-going judgment of the understanding, hold that all things proceed from one Root-Being, who therefore see in the world only a manifoldness and in God the unity of this manifoldness. Ruysbroek does not count himself among these, for he knew that one cannot attain to the Root-Being by the contemplation of things, but only by raising oneself from this lower mode of contemplation to a higher one.
Similarly, he turned against those who seek to see without further ado, in the individual man, in his separated existence (in his creature-being), his higher nature also. He deplored not a little the error which confuses all differences in the sense-world, and asserts light-mindedly that things are different only in appearance, but that in their being they are all alike. This would amount, for a way of thinking like Ruysbroek’s, to the same thing as saying: That the fact that the trees in an avenue seem to our seeing to come together does not concern us. In reality they are everywhere equally far apart, therefore our eyes ought to accustom themselves to see correctly. But our eyes see aright. That the trees run together depends upon a necessary law of nature; and we have nothing to reproach our seeing with, but on the contrary to recognise in spirit why we see them thus.