Source:
W. R. Inge, Light, life and love - Selections from the German
Mystics of the Middle Ages, 1904
Page 11
The present writer is convinced that this is
not the truth about mysticism. Eckhart may have encouraged Schwester Katrei in
her attempt to substitute the living death of the blank trance for the dying
life of Christian charity; but none the less she caricatured and stultified his
teaching. And I think it is possible to lay our finger on the place where she
and so many others went wrong. The aspiration of mysticism is to find the unity
which underlies all diversity, or, in religious language, to see God face to
face. From the Many to the One is always the path of the mystic. Plotinus, the
father of all mystical philosophy in Europe (unless, as he himself would have
wished, we give that honour to Plato), mapped out the upward road as
follows:--At the bottom of the hill is the sphere of the "merely
many"--of material objects viewed in disconnection, dull, and spiritless.
This is a world which has no real existence; it may best be called
"not-being" ("ein lauteres Nichts," as Eckhart says),
and as the indeterminate, it can only be apprehended by a corresponding
indeterminateness in the soul. The soul, however, always adds some form and
determination to the abstract formlessness of the "merely many." Next,
we rise to, or project for ourselves, the world of "the one and the
many." This is the sphere in which our consciousness normally moves. We are
conscious of an overruling Mind, but the creatures still seem external to and
partially independent of it. Such is the temporal order as we know it. Above
this is the intelligible world, the eternal order, "the one-many," das
ewige Nu, the world in which God's will is done perfectly and all reflects
the divine mind. Highest of all is "the One," the, Absolute, the
Godhead, of whom nothing can be predicated, because He is above all
distinctions. This Neoplatonic Absolute is the Godhead of whom Eckhart says:
"God never looked upon deed," and of whom Angelus Silesius sings:
"Und sieh, er ist nicht Wille, / Er ist ein' ewige Stille."
