the closing sonnet of the Vita Nuova and its prose commentary did his mystic passion suffuse his pages. Upon the death of Beatrice he turned to truth and sought it until the sight of his eyes was blurred, and he grew lean from vigils. Like Plato he would attain the vision of God by the process of reflective thought. He had an intuition of the One in the Many rather than a feeling of the divine Friend. With all his love of philosophy our poet had little of the serene temper of the true philosopher. His heart was too passionate and intense. The cold, crystalline vision that enraptured the mind of the greatest of Greeks was not that which Dante framed by his glowing imagination. At first he personified Philosophy as a rare maiden, whose glowing eyes represented the demonstration of truth, and the radiance of her smile its persuasion. Dante is as yet only the philosophic troubadour yearning for the laurel. He has entered the Temple of Truth and known full well the joys of study, but into the Arcanum where every personal wrong and ambition is forgotten in ecstacy of communion with God's splendor he has not entered.

But as he searched through the books of his day on science and theology and mystical love how unified and resplendent was that conception of Reality which searched through every avenue of emotion and aspiration! The Ptolemaic conception of the universe, and the medieval theology were easily woven into a system complete and readily visualized, and in our poet's mind this scheme of things became anything but a dry scholastic system. His imperial imagination saw it stand as a flaming and many-hued object of adoration. What a vision it was! God, the Eternal Light in his timeless, spaceless Empyrean! Nine hierarchies of angels circling about him gaze with fascinated vision into the ever unfolding depths of divine wisdom and grace. The wonders they behold enflame their hearts with quenchless love and call forth in them supernatural powers of service. The light and love of God

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

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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.