passing through their angelic minds stream down through all the revolving heavens and penetrate everywhere through the universe, while all created intelligences aspiring toward the answering love of God cause a cosmic dance of love. Love is the center and circumference of all things. Love is the goal and guide of every pilgrim soul.

Prolonged contemplation of this inspiring interpretation of truth profoundly changed Dante's character. It became impossible for him to be the mere troubadour either of Beauty or of Philosophy. To continue the Convivio was impossible. He must make the whole vision manifest. He is called to be a prophet of the Highest. He must arouse men from their sleep of sin and show the way to true felicity. Therefore he writes the Divina Commedia to reveal the nature of sin, the way of escape and the path to God.

Continued meditation on the divine truths enkindled in the poet-prophet a thirst for that all penetrating glance into the heart of Truth which is the goal of the desire of every intellectual mystic. "Well I know that the mind never sated is unless the Truth illumine it beyond which naught else extends." To behold the splendor of the Ultimate Truth, to stand as the representative of humanity before the Fountain of the Living Light Eternal, to interpret as far as human speech could do the final mystery, this became the audacious purpose of the poet. The troubadour has long been dead within him; the artist eager for the laurel has perished, it is only the mystic passion within him now that urges him on to look into the face of God. Choosing St. Bernard, symbol of the mind's intuitive power, “who on earth tasted of this bliss,” as his guide, Dante advanced into the center of the Mystical White Rose and joined his gaze to that point of intensest Light in whose depths he beheld the ultimate mysteries. And how could a vivid mind like his hold before it continuously that vision without having its intolerable glory stamp the divine stigmata on his soul?

That Dante's mysticism was thoroughly of the intellectual sort is proved by the structure of the Paradiso. There is not a sensuous line in it. No golden streets or gates of pearl. No languishing embrace of lovers. It is a Paradise such as Sir Isaac Newton might have conceived; the heaven of a mathematician, beholding the ever heightening beauty of truth, not defining truth, but dealing in its symbols — the point and the circle. And God is neither the anthropomorphic Being of Milton and the artists, nor an abstraction of the philosophers,- Reason, Thought, a Principle; but Light, "Light intellectual, full of love, love of true good, full of joy, joy that transcends every sweetness."

If I put my thought in a phrase of my own coining, and therefore perhaps awkward and inadequate, I should call Dante an aesthetico-intellectual mystic, for he found God by beholding "the beauty of truth enkindled along the stairway of the eternal palace."

THE MYSTICISM OF MEISTER ECKHART

RUFUS M. JONES

Among the mystics who have reached "the shining tableland to which our God Himself is moon and sun," Meister Eckhart most surely belongs. The details of his life are nearly all lost and one needs to say "probably" before almost all statements about him. He was born in the village of Hochheim in Thuringia, not far from Gotha, somewhat before 1260. In his fifteenth year he entered the Dominican Order at Erfurt, where Luther was later to distinguish himself. The Order was at its height at this time and attracted the most highly endowed and thoughtful youth, among whom Eckhart was a shining example. He seems to have continued his studies in Cologne under Albertus, then venerable with age, the greatest teacher of the time, the one scholar who has won the title of "Magnus,” and the master who inspired and trained Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274). He was chosen Prior of the Dominican Convent at Erfurt and was made Vicar for the district of Thuringia and thus the great scholar, who was to glorify silence and contemplation, found himself in a tangle of intricate practical problems.

He was sent to Paris in 1300 on important business for the Order and with the intent that he should complete his studies at this great center of learning. He appears to have spent two years in Paris and to have won the title "Meister," by which he has been ever since known. At a later time he seems to have spent a second period in Paris and to have taught in the University. During the next twenty years

after becoming "Meister" he was one of the leading administrators of the Dominican Order in Germany, compelled to take long and frequent journeys and to be immersed in the details and controversies of an extensive religious Society. He appears to have spent a period in Frankfurt as Dominican preacher, a somewhat longer one in Strasbourg and to have settled in Cologne as Teacher in the Dominican School there, probably about 1320.

Two of the great mystics of the fourteenth century, Johannes Tauler and Heinrich Suso, came under his influence during the Cologne period. Other persons heard him, wondered, were touched and moved, went their way and engaged in the pursuits of life. These two men heard him, listened with their souls, had the creative fire kindled within them and became altered forever under the inspiration and impact of their teacher. Not only these two pillar mystics among his contemporaries, but almost all succeeding mystics as well, were influenced by the great spiritual scholar. He takes his place in the small list of those guiding thinkers who through the ages have marked out the mystic path which multitudes of humbler souls have walked.

He was a successful administrator, but his greatest vocation was that of preacher. He preached usually in the vernacular speech and drew large throngs to hear him. It is one of the amazing characteristics of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that the people of those times were able to understand the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, the poetry of Dante and the sermons of Meister Eckhart. Few college students of the present day are competent for any one of these three tasks. The most difficult of the three tasks is understanding Eckhart's sermons to which the common people flocked, as they did a little later to hear Tauler in Strasbourg.

It was an age of mysticism, in the schools, in the cloister, in literature, in philosophy and among the common people.

Many popular forms of mysticism were abroad, some of them good and some of them bad. It was a fermenting, seething period when religion was the main business of life. The Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Beghards, the Beguines and many other loosely mystical brotherhoods were to be found up and down the Rhine Valley and, to a less extent, in other parts of Germany. Meister Eckhart was very familiar with their teaching and their ways. His circuit had been a wide one and he was an expert in these matters. He preached sermons sometimes which left the common earth and its practical problems far behind, but he never lost, as some of the lesser mystics of the time did, the distinction of right and wrong, of good and evil. He had a profound regard for moral implications. He would go as far as any one in his insistence upon a Divine Light within the soul, but he had one criterion by which he distinguished inner Light from darkness the Light, if it was Light, must guide the recipient into truth and goodness, it could not promote anything which entangled the life in looseness or evil. "There are," he declared in a sermon, people who say, if I have God and His love, I may do what I like. That is a false idea of liberty. When thou wishest a thing contrary to God and His law thou hast not the love of God in thee." 1 One of the clearest and noblest of all his words declared: "No person is ever free from the consequences of sin until he is free of sin." 2

During the closing period of his life Eckhart was suspected of being unorthodox and was charged with "heresies " in a series of twenty-eight propositions. The technical heresies" of which he was suspected need not concern us now. He wished to know more than he should," is the interesting verdict which the Pope gave after the good man

"

1 Pfeiffer's Meister Eckhart Vol. II of Deutsche Mystiker, Leipzig, 1857, p. 232.

Pfeiffer, op. cit., p. 664.