Chapter 10 of The Intellectual History of Europe, Volume I -
From the Beginnings of Western Thought to Luther, tr. Jonathan Steinberg, Anchor books 1968.
Henry Suso had what used to be called a warm social sense. He saw very clearly that every inward man ought to give up whatever his neighbour might need [63]. He had an affinity with the primitive communism of the Fathers and urged men to take from things only what necessity demands. In him the broad streams of traditional mysticism turned grey, muddy and turgid with emotionalism, individualism and solipsism. Within the narrow, cramped compass of small convents and groups, morbid tendencies began to develop. There was a desire to attain mystical experience by force, a yearning for encounters with God, for ecstasies, for visions. Those corruptions which Tauler feared began to eat like a cancer into the great movement [64]. Biographies of female mystics were written by their sisters in religion. Spiritual experience was perverted to bodily sensation as in Elsbet Stagel's Lives of the Sisters of Töss. Throughout the subsequent history of pietism, until it emptied into Romanticism in the nineteenth century, ecstatic women and feminine mysticizing were to be dominant aspects of the movement. Bettina vonBretano, Günderode and the Lady poetesses of the nineteenth century are directly descended from their Sisters of Töss.
