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Light, Life, and Love : selections from the German mystics of the middle ages By: William Ralph Inge (1860-1954) |
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Selections from the German Mystics of the Middle Ages by W. R. Inge LONDON
Second Edition 1919
CONTENTS INTRODUCTION
ECKHART
TAULER
MEDITATIONS ON THE SEVEN WORDS FROM THE CROSS
SUSO
RUYSBROEK
THEOLOGIA GERMANICA
INTRODUCTION Sect. 1. THE PRECURSORS OF THE GERMAN MYSTICS TO most English readers the "Imitation of Christ" is the
representative of mediaeval German mysticism. In reality, however,
this beautiful little treatise belongs to a period when that
movement had nearly spent itself. Thomas a Kempis, as Dr. Bigg has
said,[1] was only a semi mystic. He tones down the most
characteristic doctrines of Eckhart, who is the great original
thinker of the German mystical school, and seems in some ways to
revert to an earlier type of devotional literature. The "Imitation"
may perhaps be described as an idealised picture of monastic piety,
drawn at a time when the life of the cloister no longer filled a
place of unchallenged usefulness in the social order of Europe. To
find German mysticism at its strongest we must go back a full
hundred years, and to understand its growth we must retrace our
steps as far as the great awakening of the thirteenth century the
age of chivalry in religion the age of St. Louis, of Francis and
Dominic, of Bonaventura and Thomas Aquinas. It was a vast revival,
bearing fruit in a new ardour of pity and charity, as well as in a
healthy freedom of thought. The Church, in recognising the new
charitable orders of Francis and Dominic, and the Christianised
Aristotelianism of the schoolmen, retained the loyalty and profited
by the zeal of the more sober reformers, but was unable to prevent
the diffusion of an independent critical spirit, in part provoked
and justified by real abuses. Discontent was aroused, not only by
the worldiness of the hierarchy, whose greed and luxurious living
were felt to be scandalous, but by the widespread economic distress
which prevailed over Western Europe at this period. The crusades
periodically swept off a large proportion of the able bodied men, of
whom the majority never returned to their homes, and this helped to
swell the number of indigent women, who, having no male protectors,
were obliged to beg their bread. The better class of these female
mendicants soon formed themselves into uncloistered charitable
Orders, who were not forbidden to marry, and who devoted themselves
chiefly to the care of the sick. These Beguines and the
corresponding male associations of Beghards became very numerous in
Germany. Their religious views were of a definite type. Theirs 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, betrbe 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... Continue reading book >>
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