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MEISTEB ECKEHART, THE MYSTIC. 21 progenitor of Spinoza ; on the other Averroes was the master from whom fourteenth century German mysticism drew its most striking ideas. During this century Averro- ism was the ruling philosophical system at both the leading European universities, at Paris and at Oxford. It was the result of Averroistic teaching which produced two of the most characteristic thinkers of the age. The theolo- gico-philosophical system which John Wyclif, the Oxford professor, develops in his Trialogus is unintelligible without a knowledge of Averroistic ideas. The mysticism of Eckehart, the far-famed Paris lecturer, owes its leading characteristics to a like source. In 1317 the then Bishop of Strasburg condemned Eckehart's doctrines ; in 1327 the Archbishop and Inquisitors of Cologne renewed the condemnation, and Eckehart recanted ; in 1329, a year after Eckehart's death, a papal bull cited 28 theses of the master and rejected them as heretical. What a parallel does this offer to the proceed- ings of the hierarchy against Wyclif, culminating in his post- humous condemnation by the Council of Constance ! Yet what more natural, when both men were deeply influenced by the ideas of the arch-heretic Averroes, whom later Christian art was to place alongside Judas and Mahomet in the darkest shades of hell 9 1 Wyclif and Eckehart each in their individual fashion represent the Averroistic ideas under the garb of Christian Scholasticism ; in strange contrast with these thinkers we find in Spinoza the like ideas treated with a rationalism, which, however, has not yet quite freed itself from the idealistic influence of Hebrew theosophy. The contrast is one possibly as interesting and instructive as could well be found in the whole history of the development of human thought. Before entering upon a discussion of Eckehart's ideas, it may not be out of place to recall those features of Averroism with which we shall be principally concerned, and at the same time to prove by citations from a remarkable tractate of an anonymous writer of the 14th century the direct con- nexion of Averroistic thought with German mysticism. Aristotle in his De A nima (III. v. 1) distinguishes in man a double form of reason, the active and the passive : the first is separated from the body, eternal, and passionless ; the 1 A further link between Eckehart and Wyclif is perhaps to be found in the Pseudo-Dionysius with his commentator Grossetete. Eckehart was acquainted with " Lincolniensis " (Deutsche Mystiker, ii. 363), whom Wyclif regarded as peculiarly his own precursor.