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The First German Movement In Its European Setting (1270-1350)
Page 5
These cities were the political home of sectarians and of the members of the various right-wing and left-wing religious movements. Since the twelfth century, there had been Cathars and Waldensians in all the cities of the Rhineland (Note of the author: cf. Ekbert of Schönau and Hildegard). During the thirteenth century there were innumerable small groups representing new types of piety-Beguines and Beghards, Lollards, Brethren of the Holy Ghost, Brethren of the Common Life, Adamites, Luciferians, Picards, Flagellants. Their resentments began to form an anticléricalisme des bigots, [5] an "ill-informed piety of a devout laity harassed into anticlericalism" [6]. Partly as a result of this the German mystics never succeeded in freeing themselves from the taint of heresy, persecution and ecclesiastical condemnation. They never achieved a legitimate, official place in the Church because their associations with the fractious cities were too intimate to be ignored by the authorities. Hildegard of Bingen and her convent suffered under the condemnation of the city of Mainz. Mechthild of Magdeburg was persecuted as a heretic and had to flee in 1270 to Helffta. In the same way, Eckhart, Tauler and Suso always worked against a background of persecution. They spoke only to a small circle of "brothers and sisters", who were all members of an interior resistance movement to the power of the imperial Church.
The message of these great mystics became the secret treasure of a small group of initiates. The first grand movement of the German spirit received, as a result, the character of an inner emigration. There never arose in Germany the sort of humanism and spiritual democracy which inspired the West largely because the ideas of the German spiritual reformers were confined to the limits of conventicles and convents. There, in little communities of brethren, they could exercise their enlightening, instructive and formative influences. As these groups were made up largely of women and selected members of the nobility, their influence was both restricted and distorted. The ruling classes became imbued with the concept of the inner nobility of the soul, but its symbol was the woman. The soul's relation to God was that of the noble lady in the minne-ideology. Whatever influence such enlightened groups may have had was soon diluted and vulgarized, occasionally even perverted into heresy, as it spread through groups and circles of petty bourgeoisie.
Cf. Meister Eckhart von Friedrich Heer ||| Mail: Heer, Tauler & nazism
