17

we are to receive Him, and He needs us as much as we need Him.16 "You shall sink away from your selfhood," this bold mystic tells us, “you shall flow into His selfhood and your you shall become completely changed into His Mine, so that you apprehend eternally with Him His uncreated essential being. The highest process, the supreme attainment here, or even hereafter, for this great mystic is the birth of God, the bringing forth of the Son in man. Eckhart, when he is in these high regions, never makes his meaning very clear. He startles with his paradoxes, but he does not supply the seeker with much concrete description. He is saying, as all the most spiritual teachers have said, that the vital stage of religion is not reached until we get beyond the use of words and phrases, beyond ceremony and ritual, beyond historical events and things done for us by others, and exercise our own essential spiritual activities. In Saint Paul's words: "It is not circumcision that avails but a new creation." It is not a scrupulous observance of a sacred law that makes one Godlike; it is dying to the law, being crucified to even the loftiest external systems, until one can say out of his own experience: "It is no more I that live but Christ lives in me."

Bringing forth the Son," is Eckhart's way of telling his generation that "works" are dead and empty things, that pilgrimages and masses, holy relics and prayers to saints fall. far short of what constitutes the essential act of religion. This consists of an inward act of response to the divine presence inwardly revealed, a complete surrender of everything in the universe which separates the soul from Him, an undivided inclination of the whole inner being toward Him and an experience of revitalization comparable only to a resurrection from the dead. This, to Eckhart's mind, is the real business of the universe; suns and stars, mountains

16 Pfeiffer, op. cit., pp. 60 and 149.

17 Pfeiffer, op. cit., p. 319.

and rivers, kings and thrones, generals with their victorious armies are dust and ashes compared with the spiritual rebirth of God in a human life. The joy is double. The soul rejoices as Mary rejoiced when Christ was born and God rejoices as does the shepherd when the sheep is found.

It is an unimportant question what Eckhart thought were the marks which forever distinguished Christ from the Son reborn in other men. One would need to ask the same question of Saint Paul. Christ was for them both the pattern revelation of the Son, but He is the first-born among many brethren, since God never ceases to bring forth His Son and to carry forward the revelation of His creative activity. "We are celebrating," Eckhart says in his first sermon, "the time of the Eternal Birth which God the Father brought forth and never ceases to bring forth to Eternity: a Birth which takes place in time and in human nature. Saint Augustine says this Birth is forever taking place. But if it does not take place in me, what does it avail? Everything depends on this that He shall be born in me.

" 18

The rebirth of the soul culminates in a union with God in which the soul is not lost but found. The united soul does not talk any more of I, or me, or mine. any striving for things that are finite and

and stress are over.

There is no longer indifferent. Such

things are estimated at their real value. God is seen to be all there is worth having or loving or enjoying. The strain The soul has arrived. Activity, however, does not cease. On the contrary, God works now unhindered through the soul; the energies of God pulsate through the reborn man and make him a burning and shining light. Nothing is now too hard or difficult. Pain and hardship, losses and crosses are welcomed. "I say that after God there was never anything nobler than sorrow. Had there been anything nobler than sorrow, then surely the Father 18 Pfeiffer, op. cit., p. 3.

would have granted that to His Son, Jesus Christ. But we find that in His humanity there was no other thing of which Christ had so much as of sorrow. . . . If there had been anything nobler than sorrow then God would therewith have redeemed man." 19 It was not a stoic, "bloody but unbowed," who spoke the following message, it was a man whom God had brought very close to His loving heart: "That a man has a restful and peaceful life in God is good. That a man endures a painful life in patience, that is better; but that a man has his rest in the midst of a painful life, that is the best of all." 20

Nowhere does Eckhart reveal more depth of insight than in the way he deals with time and space, but it is difficult to see how his listeners could have understood him as he took them into such breathless regions. Eternity never means for him something which begins after time ends, or mere endless time, or a going on forever. Eternity is an all-containing, all-inclusive, indivisible Now. "The Now in which God made the world is as near the present time as is the now in which I am speaking; and the Last Day is as near that Now as is our yesterday. Everything that God does

is

an everpresent Now (in eime gegenwürtigen nu)." 21 We live so much on the lower plane of passive reason with its discursive methods of spreading everything out in space and ticking it off in a clock-time succession that we fail to grasp things as they really are in a miteinander experience, i. e., as taking place in one integral whole of reality, the way for instance that we experience music and visible beauty. The Eternal Birth is an ascent from this lower plain of life to that table-land level where the soul sees spiritual things spiritually.

It is true in one sense that Eckhart was a quietist, even

19 Ibid. 335.

20 Ibid. p. 221.

21 Pfeiffer, op. cit., p. 266.

that he was a father of quietists. He had no faith in the capacities of "mere man" (if there is any such being). He depreciated the "creature." He preached against the exercise of confidence in the finite self. He threw everybody back upon the work which God Himself works through the soul when man gets his creaturely self out of the way, removes the hindrances and allows God to act unimpeded. But this does not mean passivity, stagnation or cessation of action. It means action on a higher level, under higher guidance and direction. Instead of acting for petty ends and selfish aims, one now becomes a channel for the purpose of God to flow through. "All that a man receives through contemplation he must pour out in love."

It seems to me unimportant to discuss at length the distinction which Eckhart made between the Godhead and God. This was a common feature of systems which came under the influence of Plotinus, as Eckhart's did. The logic of these systems of thought seemed forced to go back to an absolute Reality, and in order to get an infinite, all-perfect Source, they felt compelled to retreat beyond all that was finite, all that was manifested or expressed, beyond all that could be defined, therefore beyond self-consciousness, will-purpose and all we mean by personality. They had to begin with a blank infinite, an absolute that was super-everything. The attain ment of the conception of a concrete infinite is one of the supreme achievements of modern philosophy, and we shall not need to charge it up against Plotinus, Eckhart and Boehme that they found themselves forced to take refuge in the One, the Alone, the Undifferentiated Godhead (die ungenaturte natur). Their triumph consists in having attained such a degree of spiritual life and positive goodness when they were forced to work with such stubborn abstract concepts. Would that with our better equipment of intellectual furnishings we could equal them in dedication of spirit and holiness of life!

THE MYSTICISM OF SAINT THERESA 1

GEORGE WARREN RICHARDS

In a study of the mysticism of St. Theresa 2 we shall have to take account of those facts and incidents in her life and times which had a bearing on her religious experience.3 She was born at Avila, in Old Castile, Spain, March 28th, 1515, and she died at Alva, in Leon, Spain, October 4th, 1582. Through the place of birth, she became a Spaniard, a Roman Catholic, and a counter-reformer. She was predisposed by her Spanish blood to a mystical type of piety. Rousselot says: "Mysticism is the philosophy of Spain.' It was the land of Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus, and of John of the Cross, Rome's consummate ascetic." Both were contemporaries of St. Theresa and the three had mystical experiences though in different degrees.

"4

Born into a devout Catholic home, she grew up and remained through her life a loyal child of the church. She never consciously diverted to a hair's breadth from the

1" Of late it has been the fashion to write her name Teresa or Teresia, without "h," not only in Spanish and Italian where the "h" could have no place, but also in French, German, and Latin, which ought to preserve the etymological spelling. As it is derived from a Greek name, Tharasia, the saintly wife of St. Paulinus of Nola, it should be written Theresia in German and Latin, and Thérèse in French." Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 14, p. 516.

2 Her full name was Doña Teresa Sanchez Cepeda Davila y Ahumada. In the monastery of the Incarnation she was known for twenty-eight years as Doña Teresa. When in 1563 she entered the Monastery of St. Joseph, of the Reform of the Carmelites, she took the name of Teresa of Jesus.

3 Autobiography, chap. 1, 2, note 2.

Les Mystiques Espagnols, p. 3, quoted by Inge, Christian Mysticism, Oxford, 1899, p. 213.