Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 3.djvu/448

in the Oupnekhat, then also in the Enneads of Plotinus, in Scotus Erigena, in passages of Jakob Böhm, but especially in the marvellous work of Madame de Guion, Les Torrens, and in Angelus Silesius; finally also in the poems of the Sufis, of which Tholuk has given us a collection translated into Latin, and another translated into German, and in many other works. The Sufis are the Gnostics of Islam. Hence Sadi denotes them by a word which may be translated "full of insight." Theism, calculated with reference to the capacity of the multitude, places the source of existence without us, as an object. All mysticism, and so also Sufism, according to the various degrees of its initiation, draws it gradually back within us, as the subject, and the adept recognises at last with wonder and delight that he is it himself. This procedure, common to all mysticism, we find not only expressed by Meister Eckhard, the father of German mysticism, in the form of a precept for the perfect ascetic, "that he seek not God outside himself" (Eckhard's works, edited by Pfeiffer, vol. i. p. 626), but also very naïvely exhibited by Eckhard's spiritual daughter, who sought him out, when she had experienced that conversion in herself, to cry out joyfully to him, "Sir, rejoice with me, I have become God" (loc. cit., p. 465). The mysticism of the Sufis also expresses itself throughout precisely in accordance with this spirit, principally as a revelling in the consciousness that one is oneself the kernel of the world and the source of all existence, to which all returns. Certainly there also often appears the call to surrender all volition as the only way in which Deliverance from individual existence and its suffering is possible, yet subordinated and required as something easy. In the mysticism of the Hindus, on the other hand, the latter side comes out much more strongly, and in Christian mysticism it is quite predominant, so that pantheistic consciousness, which is essential to all mysticism, here only appears in a secondary manner, in consequence of the surrender of all volition, as union with