Source:
W. R. Inge, Light, life and love - Selections from the German
Mystics of the Middle Ages, 1904
Page 17
4.
THE GERMAN MYSTICS AS GUIDES TO HOLINESS
THIS little volume is a contribution to a
"Library of Devotion," and in the body of the work the reader will be
seldom troubled by any abstruse philosophising. I have thought it necessary to
give, in this Introduction, a short account of Eckhart's system, but the
extracts which follow are taken mainly from his successors, in whom the
speculative tendency is weaker and less original, while the religious element is
stronger and more attractive. It is, after all, as guides to holiness that these
mystics are chiefly important to us. This side of their life's work can never be
out of date, for the deeper currents of human nature change but little; the
language of the heart is readily understood everywhere and at all times. The
differences between Catholic and Protestant are hardly felt in the keen air of
these high summits. It was Luther himself who discovered the "Theologia
Germanica" and said of it that, "next to the Bible and St Augustine,
no book hath ever come into my hands whence I have learnt or would wish to learn
more of what God and Christ and man and all things are. I thank God that I have
heard and found my God in the German tongue, as I have not yet found Him in
Latin, Greek, or Hebrew." The theology of these mystics takes us straight
back to the Johannine doctrine of Christ as the all-pervading Word of God, by
whom all things were made and in whom all things hold together. He is not far
from any one of us if we will but seek Him where He is to be found--in the
innermost sanctuary of our personal life. In personal religion this means that
no part of revelation is to be regarded as past, isolated, or external. "We
should mark and know of a very truth," says the author of the
"Theologia Germanica," "that all manner of virtue and goodness,
and even the eternal Good which is God Himself, can never make a man virtuous,
good, or happy, so long as it is outside the soul." In the same spirit
Jacob Boehme, 250 years later, says: "If the sacrifice of Christ is to
avail for me, it must be wrought in me." Or, as his English
admirer, William Law, puts it: "Christ given for us is neither more nor
less than Christ given into us. He is in no other sense our full, perfect, and
sufficient Atonement than as His nature and spirit are born and formed in
us." The whole process of redemption must in a sense be reenacted in the
inner life of every Christian. And as Christ emptied Himself for our sakes, so
must we empty ourselves of all self-seeking. "When the creature claimeth
for its own anything good, such as life, knowledge, or power, and in
short whatever we commonly call good, as if it were that, or possessed
that--it goeth astray." Sin is nothing else but self-assertion, self-will.
"Be assured," says the "Theologia Germanica," "that he
who helpeth a man to his own will, helpeth him to the worst that he can."
He, therefore, who is "simply and wholly bereft of self" is delivered
from sin, and God alone reigns in his inmost soul. Concerning the highest part
or faculty of the soul, the author of this little treatise follows Eckhart, but
cautiously. "The True Light," he says, is that eternal Light which is
God; or else it is a created light, but yet Divine, which is called
grace." In either case, "where God dwells in a godly man, in such a
man somewhat appertaineth to God which is His own, and belongs to Him only and
not to the creature." This doctrine of divine immanence, for which there is
ample warrant in the New Testament, is the real kernel of German mysticism. It
is a doctrine which, when rightly used, may make this world a foretaste of
heaven, but alas! the "False Light" is always trying to counterfeit
the true. In the imitation of the suffering life of Christ lies the only means
of escaping the deceptions of the Evil One. "The False Light dreameth
itself to be God, and sinless"; but "none is without sin; if any is
without consciousness of sin, he must be either Christ or the Evil Spirit."
