Elizabeth of Hungary, the pious landgravine of Thuringia, assisted in the foundation of many convents in the north of Germany. (For an account of the chief of these female saints see the first volume of W. Preger’s Geschichte der deutschen Mystik.) Mechthild of Magdeburg appears to have been the most influential, and her book Das fliessende Licht der Gottheit is important as the oldest work of its kind in German. It proves that much of the terminology of German mysticism was current before Eckhart’s time. Mechthild’s clerico-political utterances show that she was acquainted with the “eternal gospel” of Joachim of Floris. Joachim had proclaimed the doctrine of three world-ages—the kingdom of the Father, of the Son, and of the Spirit. The reign of the Spirit was to begin with the year 1260, when the abuses of the world and the Church were to be effectually cured by the general adoption of the monastic life of contemplation. Very similar to this in appearance. is the teaching of Amalric of Bena (d. 1207); but, while the movements just mentioned were reformatory without being heretical, this is very far from being the case with the mystical pantheism derived by Amalric from the writings of Erigena. His followers held a progressive revelation of God in the ages of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Just as the Mosaic dispensation came to an end with the appearance of Christ, so the sacraments of the new dispensation have lost their meaning and efficacy since the incarnation of God as Holy Spirit in the Amalricans. With this opposition to the Church they combine a complete antinomianism, through the identification of all their desires with the impulses of the divine Spirit. Amalric’s teaching was condemned by the Church, and his heresies led to the public burning of Erigena’s De divisione naturae in 1225. The sect of the New Spirit, or of the Free Spirit as it was afterwards called, spread widely through the north of France and into Switzerland and Germany. They were especially numerous in the Rhineland in the end of the 13th and during the 14th century; and they seem to have corrupted the originally orthodox communities of Beghards, for Beghards and Brethren of the Free Spirit are used henceforward as convertible terms, and the same immoralities are related of both. Such was the seed-ground in which what is specifically known as German mysticism sprang up.
In Meister Eckhart (?1260–1327) the German mind definitively asserts its pre-eminence in the sphere of speculative mysticism. Eckhart was a distinguished son of the Church; but in reading his works we feel at once that we have passed into quite a different sphere of thought from that of the churchly mystics; we seem to leave the cloister behind Eckhart. and to breathe a freer atmosphere. The scholastic mysticism was, for the most part, practical and psychological in character. It was largely a devotional aid to the realization of present union with God; and, so far as it was theoretical, it was a theory of the faculties by which such a union is attainable. Mysticism was pieced on somewhat incongruously to a scholastically accepted theology; the feelings and the intellect were not brought together. But in Eckhart the attitude of the churchman and traditionalist is entirely abandoned. Instead of systematizing dogmas, he appears to evolve a philosophy by the free exercise of reason. His system enables him to give a profound significance to the doctrines of the Church; but, instead of the system being accommodated to the doctrines, the doctrines—and especially the historical facts—acquire a new sense in the system, and often become only a mythical representation of speculative truth. The freedom with which Eckhart treats historical Christianity allies him much more to the German idealists of the 19th century than to his scholastic predecessors.
The political circumstances of Germany in the first half of the 14th century were in the last degree disastrous. The war between the rival emperors, Frederick of Austria and Louis of Bavaria, and the interdict under which the latter was placed in 1324 inflicted extreme misery upon the unhappy people. From some places the interdict was not removed for twenty-six years. Men’s minds were pained and disquieted by the conflict of duties and the absence of spiritual consolation. The country was also visited by a succession of famines and floods, and in 1348 the Black Death swept over Europe like a terrible scourge. In the midst of these unhappy surroundings religion became more inward in men of real piety and the desire grew among them to draw closer the bonds that united them to one another. Thus arose the society of the Friends of God (Gottesfreunde) The “Gottes-freunde.” in the south and west of Germany, spreading as far as Switzerland on the one side and the Netherlands on the other. They formed no exclusive sect. They often took opposite sides in politics and they also differed in the type of their religious life; but they uniformly desired to strengthen one another in living intercourse with God. Among them chiefly the followers of Eckhart were to be found. Such were Heinrich Suso of Constance (1295–1366) and Johann Tauler of Strassburg (1300–1361), the two most celebrated of his immediate disciples. Nicolas of Basel, the mysterious layman from whose visit Tauler dates his true religious life, seems to have been the chief organizing force among the Gottesfreunde. The society counted many members among the pious women in the convents of southern Germany. Such were Christina Ebner of Engelthal near Nuremberg, and Margaretha Ebner of Medingen in Swabia. Laymen also belonged to it, like Hermann of Fritzlar and Rulman Merswin, the rich banker of Strassburg (author of a mystical work, Buch der neun Felsen, on the nine rocks or upwards steps of contemplation). It was doubtless one of the Friends who sent forth anonymously from the house of the Teutonic Order in Frankfort the famous handbook of mystical devotion called Eine deutsche Theologie, first published in 1516 by Luther.
Jan van Ruysbroeck (1294–1381), the father of mysticism in the Netherlands, stood in connexion with the Friends of God, and Tauler is said to have visited him in his seclusion at Groenendal (Vauvert, Grünthal) near Brussels. He was decisively influenced by Eckhart, though there is noticeable occasionally a shrinking back from some of Eckhart’s Ruysbroeck. phraseology. Ruysbroeck’s mysticism is more of a practical than a speculative cast. He is chiefly occupied with the means whereby the unio mystica is to be attained, whereas Eckhart dwells on the union as an ever-present fact, and dilates on its metaphysical implications. Towards the end of Ruysbroeck’s life, in 1378, he was visited by the fervid lay-preacher Gerhard Groot (1340–1384), who was so impressed by the life of the community at Groenendal that he conceived the idea of founding a Christian brotherhood, bound by no monastic vows, but living together in simplicity and piety with all things in common, after the apostolic pattern. This was the origin of the Brethren of the Common Lot (or Common Life). The first house of the Brethren was founded at Deventer by Gerhard Groot and his youthful friend Florentius Radewyn; and here Thomas à Kempis (q.v.) received his training. Similar brother-houses soon sprang up in different places throughout the Low Countries and Westphalia, and even Saxony.
It has been customary for Protestant writers to represent the mystics of Germany and Holland as precursors of the Reformation. In a sense this is true. But it would be false to say that these men protested against the doctrines of the Church in the way the Reformers felt themselves called upon to do. There is no Mystics and the Reformation. sign that Tauler, for example, or Ruysbroeck, or Thomas à Kempis had felt the dogmatic teaching of the Church jar in any single point upon their religious consciousness. Nevertheless, mysticism did prepare men in a very real way for a break with the traditional system. Mysticism instinctively recedes from formulas that have become stereotyped and mechanical. On the other hand its claim for spiritual freedom was soon to be found in opposition also to the Reformers.
The wild doctrines of Thomas Münzer and the Zwickau prophets, merging eventually into the excesses of the Peasants’ War and the doings of the Anabaptists in Münster, first roused Luther to the dangerous possibilities of mysticism as a disintegrating force. He was Later German Mystics.
