Light, Life, and Love | Page 2

was an intensely inward religion, based on the longing of the
soul for immediate access to God. The more educated among them
tended to embrace a vague idealistic Pantheism. Mechthild of
Magdeburg (1212-1277), prophetess, poetess, Church reformer, quietist,
was the ablest of the Beguines. Her writings prove to us that the
technical terminology of German mysticism was in use before
Eckhart,[2] and also that the followers of what the "Theologia
Germanica" calls the False Light, who aspired to absorption in the
Godhead, and despised the imitation of the incarnate Christ, were
already throwing discredit on the movement. Mechthild's independence,
and her unsparing denunciations of corruption in high places, brought

her into conflict with the secular clergy. They tried to burn her
books--those religious love songs which had already endeared her to
German popular sentiment. It was then that she seemed to hear a voice
saying to her:
Lieb' meine, betrŸbe dich nicht zu sehr,
Die Wahrheit mag niemand verbrennen!
The rulers of the Church, unhappily, were not content with burning
books. Their hostility towards the unrecognised Orders became more
and more pronounced: the Beghards and Beguines were harried and
persecuted till most of them were driven to join the Franciscans or
Dominicans, carrying with them into those Orders the ferment of their
speculative mysticism. The more stubborn "Brethren and Sisters of the
Free Spirit" were burned in batches at Cologne and elsewhere. Their
fate in those times did not excite much pity, for many of the victims
were idle vagabonds of dissolute character, and the general public
probably thought that the licensed begging friars were enough of a
nuisance without the addition of these free lances.
The heretical mystical sects of the thirteenth century are very
interesting as illustrating the chief dangers of mysticism. Some of these
sectaries were Socialists or Communists of an extreme kind; others
were Rationalists, who taught that Jesus Christ was the son of Joseph
and a sinner like other men; others were Puritans, who said that Church
music was "nothing but a hellish noise" (nihil nisi clamor inferni), and
that the Pope was the magna meretrix of the Apocalypse. The majority
were Anti-Sacramentalists and Determinists; and some were openly
Antinomian, teaching that those who are led by the Spirit can do no
wrong. The followers of Amalric of Bena[3] believed that the Holy
Ghost had chosen their sect in which to become incarnate; His presence
among them was a continual guarantee of sanctity and happiness. The
"spiritual Franciscans" had dreams of a more apocalyptic kind. They
adopted the idea of an "eternal Gospel," as expounded by Joachim of
Floris, and believed that the "third kingdom," that of the Spirit, was
about to begin among themselves. It was to abolish the secular Church
and to inaugurate the reign of true Christianity--i.e. "poverty" and

asceticism.
Such are some of the results of what our eighteenth-century ancestors
knew and dreaded as "Enthusiasm"--that ferment of the spirit which in
certain epochs spreads from soul to soul like an epidemic, breaking all
the fetters of authority, despising tradition and rejecting discipline in its
eagerness to get rid of formalism and unreality; a lawless, turbulent,
unmanageable spirit, in which, notwithstanding, is a potentiality for
good far higher than any to which the lukewarm "religion of all
sensible men" can ever attain. For mysticism is the raw material of all
religion; and it is easier to discipline the enthusiast than to breathe
enthusiasm into the disciplinarian.
Meanwhile, the Church looked with favour upon the orthodox mystical
school, of which Richard and Hugo of St. Victor, Bonaventura, and
Albertus Magnus were among the greatest names. These men were
working out in their own fashion the psychology of the contemplative
life, showing how we may ascend through "cogitation, meditation, and
speculation" to "contemplation," and how we may pass successively
through jubilus, ebrietas spiritus, spiritualis jucunditas, and liquefactio,
till we attain raptus or ecstasy. The writings of the scholastic mystics
are so overweighted with this pseudo-science, with its wire-drawn
distinctions and meaningless classifications, that very few readers have
now the patience to dig out their numerous beauties. They are, however,
still the classics of mystical theology in the Roman Church, so far as
that science has not degenerated into mere miracle-mongering.
Sect. 2. MEISTER ECKHART
It was in 1260, when Mechthild of Magdeburg was at the height of her
activity, that Meister Eckhart, next to Plotinus the greatest
philosopher-mystic, was born at Hocheim in Thuringia. It seems that
his family was in a good position, but nothing is known of his early
years. He entered the Dominican Order as a youth, perhaps at sixteen,
the earliest age at which novices were admitted into that Order. The
course of instruction among the Dominicans was as follows:--After two
years, during which the novice laid the foundations of a good