had died, with his heresy trial not yet finished. "Orthodox" in the strict sense he was not, but he was pure, sincere, profound, loving, adoring, burning with unmixed passion for God. We may well match these great characteristics of his soul off against the modicum of error that may have existed in the twenty-eight propositions collected out of his sermons.

It is unfortunate that in relation to Eckhart we possess so little material of an autobiographical character. Personal accounts of experience are of first importance in studying a mystic. It is of some value, no doubt, to find out what type of metaphysics he held and what were his theories about the soul's relation to God, but these things are poor substitutes for the person's own description of what happened to him and what he knew first hand. Just because we possess no " Confessions,” no revealing autobiography, of Eckhart the studies of him have usually taken an abstract turn and are, as they are bound to be, cold, dry and hard to read. His style is difficult, because he is fond of epigram and breathlessly bold paradox. Furthermore he was using at language not yet adapted for the expression of such profound and subtle thought, and finally he goes down into that inner region of life for which no language has coined words of easy description. In all these particulars he was like Heraclitus the Dark, whose famous fragment would have pleased Eckhart: "You cannot find the boundaries of the soul by going in any direction, so deep and bottomless it is." If he wrote the story of Schwester Katrie" (Sister Cathie) which is usually attributed to him he was very probably suggesting, in his account of another's experience, what a long hard road of discipline must be traveled before the soul can get beyond words about God and can come fully home to Him. You must learn,” he says, not only to ascend, but to descend." "You must know the lonely place of peace as a man knows his own courtyard." It is not a state of feelings; it is a work of mind and will coöperating

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with Grace. One of his contemporaries bore this interesting testimony of him, that "God kept nothing hid" from Meister Eckhart, which implies that he himself never spared the "toil of heart and knees and hands that won the spiritual heights where he arrived.3

Nothing can be more completely false than the view that the mystic's way is a lazy man's expedient. Modern Christians are inclined to look back upon the thirteenth century as a time of superstition and darkness and to suppose that the medieval saints withdrew from the stern affairs of life and adopted superficial, rose-water methods of dealing with sin. Few of us, I am afraid, are made of the fiber to endure the discipline, to bear the crucifixions, to undergo the mental training, to stand the strain of concentration and contemplation required for even the beginner on the mystic pathway. The attainments of the outstanding figures like Eckhart and Ruysbroeck are wholly beyond the range of what is possible to us to-day, I will not say in deed, but even in thought and imagination. With all his powers one must pray," our mystic says. Eyes, ears, heart, mouth and the whole mind must be given to it." 4

Meister Eckhart was in one particular at least a forerunner of the Reformation. He put a very low estimate upon what had come to be called "works or "merits." He went so far as to say that it was a suggestion of the Devil that salvation depended upon fastings, vigils, mortifications and external performances. These things have no magic for him. He felt that even works of pity and compassion, done to secure salvation, were likewise inadequate. They belong to the stage of the servant, not that of the free son. There must be an inner work, he always insists. The motive, the attitude of the soul, the birth of love and de

votion are the essential matters. Even ecstasies are no indication that one has arrived at his goal. They are temporary and fleeting. They do not indicate spiritual height or sublimity. The soul must attain an abiding possession, a permanent union with God, and then the inner state will determine the outer activities. It is only a weak spiritual life that leans upon outward garb and external works, but when the inward life is pure and free from selfishness one will be ready to leave an ecstasy of the highest degree, even like that of St. Paul's, to carry a cup of soup to a poor needy person.5 When once the soul is joined in union with God, then nothing is too hard, no labors or suffering, no privations or losses. "Torment not thyself [i. e., with mortifications]; if God lays sufferings on thee, bear them. If He gives thee honors and fortunes, bear them with no less readiness. One man cannot do all things; he must do some one thing; but in this one he can comprehend all things. If the obstacle is not in thee, thou canst as well have God present with thee by the fire or in the stall as in devout prayer. Thou mayest arrive at the state in which thou shalt have God essentially dwelling in thee; thou shalt be in God and God in thee." 6

Not less in the spirit of the Reformation were his emphasis on the importance of individual religious experience and his lack of emphasis on the sphere and function of the Church and ecclesiastical machinery. Doctrine, orthodoxy, sacraments, priests, the Virgin Mary, take a very lowly and subordinate place in his thought. Love, faith, earnestness, purity, consecration count infinitely more than conformity to system does. 'Mary is blessed not because she bore Christ

5 Pfeiffer, op. cit., p. 553. See also p. 330 and p. 543.

The passage quoted is not a literal translation, but a paraphrase of a striking sermon by Eckhart. Pfeiffer, op. cit., pp. 543-578. The paraphrase is taken in part from Ueberweg, History of Philosophy, New York, 1874, Vol. I, p. 480.

bodily but because she bore him spiritually, and in this particular every one can be like her." "

The most important point in Eckhart's teaching to select for consideration in a short exposition like this is his doctrine of the soul. He arrived at his conception of the soul along two paths, one of them the path of experience and the other the path of metaphysics, which is experience deeply reflected upon. Mere metaphysics does not make one a mystic. We do not properly call a man a mystic unless through the inner way, in silence and contemplation, or by the tapping of interior reservoirs of energy, he feels himself to be in contact and correspondence with the realm of spiritual resources and emerges from his experience with the conviction alive. within him that God and man have somehow been finding each other.

No one can read Eckhart without feeling assured that such experiences were an important part of his life. He speaks always as though he had been there. There is a glow, a fervor, a radiance breaking through his rugged mediæval German sentences which leave no doubt in the mind of the stumbling reader that this man knows what he is talking about and that if we could see his luminous face and could revisualize his transformed, dynamic personality we should understand why the common people flocked to hear him and why Tauler and Suso were changed through their fellowship with him. Take words like these which he spoke in one of his sermons: Earth cannot escape the sky, let it flee as it will up or down; the sky flows into it and makes it fruitful whether it will or not. So does God to man. He who will escape Him only runs to His bosom; for all corners of the world are open to Him." 8 That does not sound like dialectic, it is first-hand testimony. "Truth," he says, must be inwardly won "; " the eternal word must be heard

7 Pfeiffer, op. cit., p. 280. 8 Pfeiffer, op. cit., p. 287.

and understood in ourselves and we must be inwardly united to God." That is not theory, it is knowledge of acquaint

ance.

9

But at the same time Eckhart did have a very carefully thought out theory of the nature of the soul. He has gathered his point of view from many sources, both Christian and pagan. It has been suggested 10 that there is a strong Arabian influence apparent in Eckhart's conception of the soul, especially the influence of Averroes. Such influence is not impossible, but it does not seem to me necessary to go out of the beaten track of European thought, leading back to Aristotle for the sources of the peculiar psychology of Eckhart. "The apex of the mind" (das hochste der selen vernunftigkeit) is unsundered from God. We now realize that the retina of the eye is to all intents and purposes a projected part of the brain, somewhat so Eckhart thinks that there is an active, creative principle in man's soul which through all the mutability of time and space binds us back into our divine origin and holds us firmly in Him who made us for Himself. Eckhart calls this central principle of the soul the "Fünklein," spark, or flash, or glimmer. Sometimes he names it with an old German word, now obsolete, the "Ganster" (das ganster des geistes, p. 670; or daz obeste gensterlein, p. 79). This word also means spark or gleam, and in a passage on page 79 of Pfeiffer's edition he says that this highest light-spark in the soul is never separated from God and operates directly, i. e., without any mediation. It is the Principle which the schoolmen called synteresis, the divine ground of the soul, the essential spiritual nature in man, which makes him exercise faith, become responsive to God and capable of salvation in the deeper sense. The word scintilla had sometimes been used for this innermost faculty,

9 Ibid. p. 24.

10 See Karl Pearson in Mind, Vol. XI, 1886.