Source:
W. R. Inge, Light, life and love - Selections from the German
Mystics of the Middle Ages, 1904
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,[i]
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,[ii]
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, betrübe dich nicht zu sehr, / Die Wahrheit mag niemand verbrennen!
