Light, Life, and Love | Page 7

really weak points of any religious movement are exposed with a
cruel logicality most exasperating to the leaders by the second
generation of its adherents. The dangerous side of the Eckhartian
mysticism is painfully exhibited in the life of his spiritual daughter,
"Schwester Katrei," the saint of the later Beguines. Katrei is a rather
shadowy person; but for our present purpose it does not much matter
whether the story of her life has been embroidered or not. Her memory
was revered for such sayings and doings as these which follow. On one
occasion she exclaimed: "Congratulate me; I have become God!" and
on another she declared that "not even the desire of heaven should
tempt a good man towards activity." It was her ambition to forget who
were her parents, to be indifferent whether she received absolution and
partook of the Holy Communion or not; and she finally realised her
ambition by falling into a cataleptic state in which she was supposed to
be dead, and was carried out for burial. Her confessor, perceiving that
she was not really dead, awoke her: "Art thou satisfied?" "I am satisfied
at last," said Katrei: she was now "dead all through," as she wished to
be.

Are we to conclude that the logical outcome of mysticism is this
strange reproduction, in Teutonic Europe, of Indian Yogism? Many
who have studied the subject have satisfied themselves that Schwester
Katrei is the truly consistent mystic. They have come to the conclusion
that the real attraction of mysticism is a pining for deliverance from this
fretful, anxious, exacting, individual life, and a yearning for absorption
into the great Abyss where all distinctions are merged in the Infinite.
According to this view, mysticism in its purest form should be studied
in the ancient religious literature of India, which teaches us how all this
world of colour and diversity, of sharp outlines and conflicting forces,
may be lost and swallowed up in the "white radiance," or black
darkness (it does not really matter which we call it) of an empty
Infinite.
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."
Plotinus taught that the One, being superessential, can only be
apprehended in ecstasy, when thought, which still distinguishes itself
from its object, is transcended, and knower and known become one. As
Tennyson's Ancient Sage says:
"If thou would'st hear the Nameless, and descend Into the Temple-cave
of thine own self, There, brooding by the central altar, thou May'st
haply learn the Nameless hath a voice, By which thou wilt abide, if
thou be wise; For knowledge is the swallow on the lake, That sees and
stirs the surface-shadow there But never yet hath dipt into the Abysm."
In the same way Eckhart taught that no creature can apprehend the
Godhead, and, therefore, that the