Light, Life, and Love | Page 9

of human
nature, that we cannot get anything worth having--neither holiness nor
happiness nor wisdom--by trying for it directly. It must be given us
through something else. The recluse who lives like Parnell's "Hermit":
"Prayer all his business, all his pleasure praise,"
is not only a poor sort of saint, but he will offer a poor sort of prayers
and praises. He will miss real holiness for the same reason that makes
the pleasure-seeker miss real happiness. We must lose ourselves in
some worthy interest in order to find again both a better self and an
object higher than that which we sought. This the German mystics in a
sense knew well. There is a noble sentence of Suso to the effect that
"he who realises the inward in the outward, to him the inward becomes
more inward than to him who only recognises the inward in the
inward." Moreover, the recognition that "God manifests Himself and
worketh more in one creature than another" ("Theologia Germanica"),
involves a denial of the nihilistic view that all the creatures are "ein
lauteres Nichts."[21] It would be easy to find such passages in all the
fourteenth-century mystics, but it cannot be denied that on the whole
their religion is too self-centred. There are not many maxims so
fundamentally wrong-headed and un-Christian as Suso's advice to "live
as if you were the only person in the world."[22] The life of the
cloistered saint may be abundantly justified--for the spiritual activity of
some of them has been of far greater service to mankind than the fussy

benevolence of many "practical" busybodies--but the idea of social
service, whether in the school of Martha or of Mary, ought surely never
to be absent. The image of Christ as the Lover of the individual soul
rather than as the Bridegroom of the Church was too dear to these
lonely men and women. Unconsciously, they looked to their personal
devotions to compensate them for the human loves which they had
forsworn. The raptures of Divine Love, which they regarded as signal
favours bestowed upon them, were not very wholesome in themselves,
and diverted their thoughts from the needs of their fellow-men. They
also led to most painful reactions, in which the poor contemplative
believed himself abandoned by God and became a pray to terrible
depression and melancholy. These fits of wretchedness came indeed to
be recognised as God's punishment for selfishness in devotion and for
too great desire for the sweetness of communing with God, and so
arose the doctrine of "disinterested love," which was more and more
emphasised in the later mysticism, especially by the French Quietists.
I have spoken quite candidly of the defects of Eckhart's mystical
Christianity. As a religious philosophy it does not keep clear of the
fallacy that an ascent though the unreal can lead to reality. "To suppose,
as the mystic does, that the finite search has of itself no Being at all, is
illusory, is Maya, is itself nothing, this is also to deprive the Absolute
of even its poor value as a contrasting goal. For a goal that is a goal of
no real process has as little value as it has content."[23] But, as Prof.
Royce says, mysticism furnishes us with the means of correcting itself.
It supplies an obvious reductio ad absurdum of the theory with which it
set out, that "Immediacy is the one test of reality," and is itself forced to
give the world of diversity a real value as manifesting in different
degrees the nature of God. Those who are acquainted with the sacred
books of the East will recognise that here is the decisive departure from
real Pantheism. And it may be fairly claimed for the German mystics
that though their speculative teaching sometimes seems to echo too
ominously the apathetic detachment of the Indian sage, their lives and
example, and their practical exhortations, preached a truer and a larger
philosophy. Eckhart, as we have seen, was a busy preacher as well as a
keen student, and some of the younger members of his school were
even more occupied in pastoral work. If the tree is to be judged by its

fruits, mysticism can give a very good account of itself to the Marthas
as well as the Marys of this world.
Sect. 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,