Mystics of The Renaissance and Their Relation To Modern Thought

MYSTICS OF THE RENAISSANCE
RUDOLF STEINER
RUDOLF Steiner (1861-1925), an Austrian philosopher and
prolific author, earned his doctorate from the University of
Rostock in 1891. Steiner made substantial contributions to
numerous fields and wrote extensively about science,
medicine, agriculture, social interactions, education,
architecture and art. In particular, his insight into humanity,
and its material and spiritual needs, became the essence of his
work. Among the foremost of his discoveries was his direct
experience of the reality of the Christ, which took a central
place in his teaching.
The range of Rudolf Steiners contribution to modern
thought can be found in his complete works, which consist of
over 330 volumes, from his foundational publication of The
Philosophy of Freedom through his end-of-life autobiography,
The Story of My Life.
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MYSTICS
OF THE
RENAISSANCE
and
Their Relation to Modern Thought
Meister Eckhart
Johannes Tauler
Heinrich Suso
Johannes Ruysbroek
Nicholas of Cusa
Agrippa von Nettesheim
Theophrastus Paracelsus
Valentine Weigel
Jacob Boehme
Giordano Bruno
Angelus Silesius
RUDOLF STEINER
Scriptoria Books
Mystics of the Renaissance

and Their Relation to Modern Thought
Copyright 2009, 2014 by Scriptoria Books

All Rights Reserved
Transcribed, edited, and formatted for print and digital media by

Scriptoria Books. Every effort has been made to preserve the text
and language (English UK) of the original publication. Minor
corrections to spelling, capitalization, and punctuation were based
on the period in which the work was written.
Originally published by G. P. Putnams Sons, The Knickerbocker
Press, New York, 1911.
Mystics of the Renaissance and Their Relation to Modern Thought

/ by Rudolf Steiner ; translated by Bertram Keightley.
p. cm.
ISBN 9781449500801 (pbk)
1. Mysticism.
I. Steiner, Rudolf. 1861-1925.
Scriptoria Books
Mesa, Arizona USA
www.scriptoriabooks.com
CONTENTS
Foreword
ix
Introduction
Meister Eckhart
25
Friendship with God: Tauler, Suso and Ruysbroek
39
Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa
65
Agrippa von Nettesheim and Theophrastus Paracelsus
89
Valentine Weigel and Jacob Boehme .
109
Giordano Bruno and Angelus Silesius .
121
Afterword
133
FOREWORD
THE matter which I am laying before the public in this
book formed the content of lectures which I delivered
during last winter at the Theosophical Library in Berlin.
I had been requested by Grfin and Graf Brockdorff to
speak upon Mysticism before an audience for whom the
matters thus dealt with constitute a vital question of the
utmost importance. Ten years earlier I could not have
ventured to fulfil such a request. Not that the realm of
ideas, to which I now give expression, did not even then
live actively within me. For these ideas are already fully
contained in my Philosophy of Freedom (Berlin, 1894. Emil
Felber). But to give expression to this world of ideas in
such wise as I do to-day, and to make it the basis of an
exposition as is done on the following pagesto do this
requires something quite other than merely to be
immovably convinced of the intellectual truth of these
ideas. It demands an intimate acquaintance with this
realm of ideas, such as only many years of life can give.
Only now, after having enjoyed that intimacy, do I
venture to speak in such wise as will be found in this
book.
Any one who does not approach my world of ideas
without preconceptions is sure to discover therein
contradiction after contradiction. I have quite recently
(Berlin, 1900. S. Cronbach) dedicated a book upon the
world conceptions of the nineteenth century to that great
naturalist, Ernst Haeckel, and closed it with a defence of
his thought-world. In the following expositions, I speak
about the Mystics, from Master Eckhart to Angelus
Silesius, with a full measure of devotion and
MYS TICS O F THE RENAIS SANCE
acquiescence. Other contradictions, which one critic

or another may further count up against me, I shall not
mention at all. It does not surprise me to be condemned
from one side as a Mystic and from the other as a
Materialist. When I find that the Jesuit Father Mller
has solved a difficult chemical problem, and I therefore
in this particular matter agree with him unreservedly, one
can hardly condemn me as an adherent of Jesuitism
without being reckoned a fool by those who have
insight.
Whoever goes his own road, as I do, must needs
allow many a misunderstanding about himself to pass.
That, however, he can put up with easily enough. For
such misunderstandings are, in the main, inevitable in his
eyes, when he recalls the mental type of those who
misjudge him. I look back, not without humorous
feelings, upon many a critical judgment that I have
suffered in the course of my literary career. At the
outset, matters went fairly well. I wrote about Goethe
and his philosophy. What I said there appeared to many
to be of such a nature that they could file it in their
mental pigeon-holes. This they did by saying: A work
such as Rudolf Steiners Introduction to Goethes Writings
upon Natural Science may, without hesitation, be described
as the best that has been written upon this question.
When, later, I published an independent work, I had
already grown a good bit more stupid. For now a well
meaning critic offered the advice: Before he goes on
reforming further and gives his Philosophy of Freedom to
the world, he should be pressingly advised first to work
himself through to an understanding of these two
philosophers [Hume and Kant]. The critic unfortu-
FORWARD
xi
nately knows only so much as he is himself able to read

in Kant and Hume; practically, therefore, he simply
advises me to learn to see no more in these thinkers than
he himself sees. When I have attained that, he will be
satisfied with me. Then when my Philosophy of Freedom
appeared, I was found to be as much in need of
correction as the most ignorant beginner. This I
received from a gentleman who probably nothing else
impelled to the writing of books except that he had not
understood innumerable foreign ones. He gravely
informs me that I should have noticed my mistakes if I
had made more thorough studies in psychology, logic,
and the theory of knowledge; and he enumerates
forthwith the books I ought to read to become as wise as
himself: Mill, Sigwart, Wundt, Riehl, Paulsen, B.
Erdmann. What amused me especially was this advice
from a man who was so impressed with the way he
understood Kant that he could not even imagine how
any man could have read Kant and yet judge otherwise
than himself. He therefore indicates to me the exact
chapters in question in Kants writings from which I may
be able to obtain an understanding of Kant as deep and
as thorough as his own.
I have cited here a couple of typical criticisms of my
world of ideas. Though in themselves unimportant, yet
they seem to me to point, as symptoms, to facts which
present themselves to-day as serious obstacles in the
path of any one aiming at literary activity in regard to the
higher problems of knowledge. Thus I must go on my
way, indifferent, whether one man gives me the good
advice to read Kant, or another hunts me as a heretic
because I agree with Haeckel. And so I have also written
upon Mysticism, wholly indifferent as to how a faithful
xii
and believing materialist may judge of me. I would only

likeso that printers ink may not be wasted wholly
without needto inform any one who may, perchance
advise me to read Haeckels Riddle of the Universe, that
during the last few months I have delivered about thirty
lectures upon the said work.
I hope to have shown in this book that one may be a
faithful adherent of the scientific conception of the
world and yet be able to seek out those paths to the Soul
along which Mysticism, rightly understood, leads. I even
go further and say: Only he who knows the Spirit, in the
sense of true Mysticism, can attain a full understanding
of the facts of Nature. But one must not confuse true
Mysticism with the pseudo-mysticism of ill-ordered
minds. How Mysticism can err, I have shown in my
Philosophy of Freedom (page 131 et seq.).
Rudolf Steiner.
Berlin, September, 1901.
MYSTICS OF THE RENAISSANCE
INTRODUCTION
THERE are certain magical formulae which operate
throughout the centuries of Mans mental history in ever
new ways. In Greece one such formula was regarded as
an oracle of Apollo. It runs: Know Thyself. Such
sentences seem to conceal within them an unending life.
One comes upon them when following the most diverse
roads in mental life. The further one advances, the more
one penetrates into the knowledge of things, the deeper
appears the significance of these formulae. In many a
moment of our brooding and thinking, they flash out
like lightning, illuminating our whole inner being. In
such moments there quickens within us a feeling as if we
heard the heart-beat of the evolution of mankind. How
close do we not feel ourselves to personalities of the
past, when the feeling comes over us, through one of
their winged words, that they are revealing to us that
they, too, had had such moments!
We feel ourselves then brought into intimate touch
with these personalities. For instance, we learn to know
Hegel intimately when, in the third volume of his Lectures
on the Philosophy of History we come across the words:
Such stuff, one may say, the abstractions that we
contemplate when we allow the philosophers to quarrel
and battle in our study, and make it out to be thus or
somere verbal abstractions! No! No! These are
deeds of the world-spirit and therefore of destiny.
Therein the Philosophers are nearer to the Master than
are those who feed themselves with the crumbs of the
spirit; they read or write the Cabinet Orders in the
original at once; they are constrained to write them out
along with Him. The Philosophers are the Mystae who,

at the crisis in the inmost shrine, were there and took
part. When Hegel said this, he had experienced one of
those moments just spoken of. He uttered the phrases
when, in the course of his remarks, he had reached the
close of Greek philosophy; and through them he showed
that once, like a gleam of lightning, the meaning of the
Neoplatonic philosophy, of which he was just treating,
had flashed upon him. In the instant of this flash, he
had become intimate with minds like Plotinus and
Proklus; and we become intimate with him when we
read his words.
We become intimate, too, with that solitary thinker,
the Pastor of Zschopau, M. Valentine Weigel, when we
read the opening words of his little book Know Thyself,
written in 1578: We read in the wise men of old the
useful saying, Know Thyself, which, though it be right
well used about worldly manners, as thus: regard well
thyself, what thou art, seek in thine own bosom, judge
thyself and lay no blame on others, a saying, I repeat,
which, though thus used of human life and manners,
may well and appropriately be applied by us to the
natural and supernatural knowing of the whole man; so
indeed, that man shall not only consider himself and
thereby remember how he should bear himself before
people, but that he shall also know his own nature, inner
and outer, in spirit and in Nature; whence he cometh and
whereof he is made, to what end he is ordained. So,
from points of view peculiar to himself, Valentine
Weigel attained to insight which in his mind summed
itself up in this oracle of Apollo.
INTRODUCTION
A similar path to insight and a like relation to the

saying Know Thyself may be ascribed to a series of
deep-natured thinkers, beginning with Master Eckhart
(1250-1327), and ending with Angelus Silesius (16241677), among whom may be found also Valentine
Weigel himself.
All these thinkers have in common a strong sense of
the fact that in mans knowing of himself there rises a
sun which illuminates something very different from the
mere accidental, separated personality of the beholder.
What Spinoza became conscious of in the ethereal
heights of pure thought,viz., that the human soul
possesses an adequate knowledge of the Eternal and
Infinite Being of God,that same consciousness lived
in them as immediate feeling; and self-knowledge was to
them the path leading to this Eternal and Infinite Being.
It was clear to them that self-knowledge in its true form
enriched man with a new sense, which unlocked for him
a world standing in relation to the world accessible to
him without this new sense as does the world of one
possessing physical sight to that of a blind man.
It would be difficult to find a better description of the
import of this new sense than the one given by J. G.
Fichte in his Berlin Lectures (1813):
Imagine a world of men born blind, to whom all
objects and their relations are known only through the
sense of touch. Go amongst them and speak to them of
colours and other relations, which are rendered visible
only through light. Either you are talking to them of
nothing,and if they say this, it is the luckier, for thus
you will soon see your mistake, and, if you cannot open
their eyes, cease your useless talking,or, for some

reason or other, they will insist upon giving some
meaning or other to what you say; then they can only
interpret it in relation to what they know by touch. They
will seek to feel, they will imagine they do feel light and
colour, and the other incidents of visibility, they will
invent something for themselves, deceive themselves
with something within the world of touch, which they
will call colour. Then they will misunderstand, distort,
and misinterpret it.
The same thing applies to what the thinkers we are
speaking of sought after. They beheld a new sense
opening in self-knowledge, and this sense yielded,
according to their experiences, views of things which are
simply non-existent for one who does not see in selfknowledge what distinguishes it from all other kinds of
knowing. One in whom this new sense has not been
opened, believes that self-knowing, or self-perception, is
the same thing as perception through the outer senses,
or through any other means acting from without. He
thinks: Knowing is knowing, perceiving is perceiving.
Only in the one case the object is something lying in the
world outside, in the other this object is his own soul.
He finds words merely, or at best, abstract thoughts, in
that which for those who see more deeply is the very
foundation of their inner life; namely, in the proposition:
that in every other kind of knowing or perception we
have the object perceived outside of ourselves, while in
self-knowledge or self-perception we stand within that
object; that we see every other object coming to us
already complete and finished off, while in ourselves we,
as actors and creators, are weaving that which we
observe within us. This may appear to be nothing but a
INTRODUCTION
merely verbal explanation, perhaps even a triviality; it

may appear, on the other hand, as a higher light which
illuminates every other cognition. One to whom it
appears in the first way, is in the position of a blind man,
to whom one says: there is a glittering object. He hears
the words, but for him the glitter is not there. He might
unite in himself the whole sum of knowledge of his time;
but if he does not feel and realise the significance of selfknowledge, then it is all, in the higher sense, a blind
knowledge.
The world, outside of and independent of us, exists
for us by communicating itself to our consciousness.
What is thus made known must needs be expressed in
the language peculiar to ourselves. A book, the contents
of which were offered in a language unknown to us,
would for us be without meaning. Similarly, the world
would be meaningless for us did it not speak to us in our
own tongue; and the same language which reaches us
from things, we also hear from within ourselves. But in
that case, it is we ourselves who speak. The really
important point is that we should correctly apprehend
the transposition which occurs when we close our
perception against external things and listen only to that
which then speaks from within. But to do this needs this
new sense. If it has not been awakened, we believe that
in what is thus told us about ourselves we are hearing
only about something external to us; we fancy that
somewhere there is hidden something which is speaking
to us in the same way as external things speak. But if we
possess this new sense, then we know that these
perceptions differ essentially from those relating to
external things. Then we realise that this new sense does
not leave what it perceives outside of itself, as the eye
leaves the object it sees; but that it can take up its object
wholly into itself, leaving no remainder. If I see a thing,
that thing remains outside of me; if I perceive myself,
then I myself enter into my perception. Whoever seeks
for something more of himself than what is perceived,
shows thereby that for him the real content in the
perception has not come to light. Johannes Tauler
(1300-1361), has expressed this truth in the apt words:
If I were a king and knew it not, then should I be no
king. If I do not shine forth for myself in my own selfperception, then for myself I do not exist. But if for
myself I do shine out, then I possess myself also in my
perception, in my own most deeply original being.
There remains no residue of myself left outside of my
perception.
J. G. Fichte, in the following words, vigorously points
to the difference between self-perception and every
other kind of perception: The majority of men could be
more easily brought to believe themselves a lump of lava
in the moon than an ego. Whoever is not at one with
himself as to this, understands no thorough-going
philosophy and has need of none. Nature, whose
machine he is, will guide him in all the things he has to
do without any sort of added help from him. For
philosophising, self-reliance is needed, and this one can
only give to oneself. We ought not to want to see
without the eye; but also we ought not to maintain that it
is the eye which sees.
Thus the perception of oneself is also the awakening
of oneself. In our cognition we combine the being of
things with our own being. The communications, which
things make to us in our own language, become mem-
INTRODUCTION
bers of our own selves. An object in front of me is not

separated from me, once I have known it. What I am
able to receive from it becomes part and parcel of my
own being. If, now, I awaken my own self, if I become
aware of the content of my own inner being, then I also
awaken to a higher mode of being, that which from
without I have made part of my own being. The light
that falls upon me at my awakening falls also upon
whatever I have made my own from the things of the
outside world. A light springs up within me and
illumines me, and with me all that I have cognised of the
world. Whatever I might know would remain blind
knowledge, did not this light fall upon it. I might search
the world through and through with my perception; still
the world would not be that which in me it must
become, unless that perception were awakened in me to
a higher mode of being.
That which I add to things through this awakening is
not a new idea, is not an enrichment of the content of
my knowing; it is an uplifting of the knowledge, of the
cognition, to a higher level, where everything is suffused
with a new glory. So long as I do not raise my
consciousness to this level, all knowledge continues to be
for me, in the higher sense, valueless. The things are
there without my presence. They have their being in
themselves. What possible meaning could there be in
my linking with their being, which they have outside and
apart from me, another spiritual existence in addition,
which repeats the things over again within me? If only a
mere repetition of things were involved, it would be
senseless to carry it out. But, really, a mere repetition is
only involved so long as I have not awakened, along with
my own self, the mental content of these things upon a
higher level. When this occurs, then I have not merely

repeated within myself the being of things, but I have
brought it to a new birth on a higher level. With the
awakening of my self, there is accomplished a spiritual
re-birth of the things of the world.
What the things reveal in this re-birth did not
previously belong to them. There, without, stands the
tree. I take it up into my consciousness. I throw my
inner light upon that which I have thus conceived. The
tree becomes in me more than it is outside. That in it
which finds entrance through the gate of the senses is
taken up into a conscious content. An ideal replica of
the tree is within me, and that has infinitely more to say
about the tree than what the tree itself, outside, can tell
me. Then, for the first time there shines out from within
me, towards the tree, what the tree is. The tree is now
no longer the isolated being that it is out there in space.
It becomes a link in the entire conscious world that lives
in me. It links its content with other ideas that are in me.
It becomes a member of the whole world of ideas that
embraces the vegetable kingdom; it takes its place,
further, in the series of all that lives.
Another example: I throw a stone in a horizontal
direction away from me. It moves in a curved line and
after some time falls to the ground. I see it in successive
moments of time in different places. Through
observation and reflection I acquire the following:
During its motion the stone is subject to different
influences. If it were subject only to the influence of the
impulse which I imparted to it, it would go on flying for
ever in a straight line, without altering its velocity. But
now the earth exerts an influence upon it. It attracts the
INTRODUCTION
stone towards itself. If, instead of throwing the stone, I

had simply let it go, it would have fallen vertically to
earth; and its velocity in doing so would have constantly
increased. From the mutual interaction of these two
influences arises that which I actually see.
Let us assume that I could not in thought separate the
two influences, and from this orderly combination put
together again in thought what I see: in that case, the
matter would end with the actual happening. It would
be mentally a blind staring at what happened; a
perception of the successive positions which the stone
occupies. But in actual fact, matters do not stop there.
The whole occurrence takes place twice. Once outside,
and then my eye sees it; then my mind causes the whole
happening to repeat itself again, in a mental or conscious
manner. My inner sense must be directed upon the
mental occurrence, which my eye does not see, and then
it becomes clear to that sense that I, by my own inner
power, awaken that occurrence as a mental one.
Again, another sentence of J. G. Fichtes may be
quoted which brings this fact clearly before the mind.
Thus the new sense is the sense for the spirit; that for
which there exists only spirit and absolutely nothing else,
and for which also the other, the given being, assumes
the form of spirit and transforms itself into spirit, for
which therefore being in its own proper form has actually
disappeared. . . . There has been the faculty of seeing
with this sense ever since men have existed, and all that
is great and excellent in the world, which alone upholds
humanity, originates in what has been seen by means of
this sense. It is, however, not the case that this sense has
been perceived or known in its difference and its
10
contrast with that other, ordinary sense. The

impressions of the two senses melted into one another,
life fell apart into these two halves without a bond of
union.
The bond of union is created by the fact that the
inner sense grasps in its spirituality the spiritual element
which it awakens in its intercourse with the outer world.
That which we take up into our consciousness from
outside things thereby ceases to appear as a mere
meaningless repetition. It appears as something new
over against that which only external perception can
give. The simple occurrence of throwing the stone, and
my perception thereof, appear in a higher light when I
make clear to myself the kind of task which my inner
sense has to perform in regard to the whole thing. In
order to fit together in thought the two influences and
their modes of action, an amount of mental content is
needed which I must already have acquired when I
cognise the flying stone. I therefore apply a spiritual
content already stored up within me to something that
confronts me in the external world. And this occurrence
in the external world fits itself into the spiritual content
already present. It reveals itself in its own special
individuality as an expression of this content.
Through the understanding of my inner sense, there is
thus disclosed to me the nature of the relation that
obtains between the content of this sense and the things
of the external world. Fichte would say that without the
understanding of this sense, the world falls apart for me
into two halves: into things outside of me, and into
pictures of these things within me. The two halves
become united when the inner self understands itself and
INTRODUCTION
11
consequently recognises clearly what sort of illumination

it throws upon things in the cognitive process. And
Fichte could also venture to say that this inner sense sees
only Spirit. For it perceives how the Spirit enlightens the
sense-world by making it part and parcel of the spiritual
world. The inner sense causes the outer sense-world to
arise within itself as a spiritual being on a higher level.
An external object is completely known when there is no
part of it which has not thus undergone a spiritual rebirth. Thus every external object fits itself into a spiritual
content, which, when it has been grasped by the inner
sense, shares the destiny of self-knowledge. The spiritual
content, which belongs to an object through its
illumination from within, merges itself wholly, like the
very self, into the world of ideas, leaving no remainder
behind.
These developments contain nothing which is
susceptible or even in need of logical proof. They are
nothing but the results of inner experience. Whoever
calls into question this content, shows only that he is
lacking in this inner experience. It is impossible to
dispute with him; as little could one discuss colour with a
blind man.
It must not, however, be contended that this inner
experience is made possible only through the special
endowment of a few chosen people. It is a common
property. Every one can enter upon the path to this
experience who does not of his own will shut himself
against it. This closing up of oneself against it, is,
however, common enough. And in dealing with
objections raised in this direction, one always has the
feeling that it is not so much a matter of people being
12
unable to attain this inner experience, as of their having

hopelessly blocked the entrance to it with all kinds of
logical spiders webs. It is almost as if some one looking
through a telescope and discovering a new planet should
yet deny its existence because his calculations have
shown that there can be no planet in that position.
But with all this there is still in most people the clearly
marked feeling that all that really lies in the being of
things cannot be completely given in what the outer
senses and the analysing understanding can cognise.
They then believe that the remainder so left over must
be just as much in the external world as are the things of
our perceptions themselves. They think that there must
be something which remains unknown to cognition.
What they ought to attain by again perceiving with the
inner sense, on a higher plane, the very object which they
have already cognised and grasped with the understanding,this they transfer as something inaccessible
and unknown into the external world. Then they talk of
the limits of knowledge which prevent our reaching the
thing-in-itself. They talk of the unknown being of
things. That this very being of things shines out when
the inner sense lets its light fall upon the things, is what
they will not recognise. The famous Ignorabimus
speech of the scientist, Du Bois-Reymond, in the year
1876, furnished a particularly blatant example of this
error. We are supposed to be able to get in every
direction only so far as to be able to see in all natural
processes the manifestations of matter. What
matter itself is, we are supposed to be unable to know.
Du Bois-Reymond contends that we shall never succeed
in penetrating to wherever it is that matter leads its
ghostly life in space. The reason why we cannot get
INTRODUCTION
13
there lies, however, in the fact that there is nothing

whatsoever to be looked for there. Whoever speaks like
Du Bois-Reymond must have a feeling that the
knowledge of Nature yields results which point to a
something further and other which Nature-knowledge
itself cannot give. But he refuses to follow the road,
the road of inner experience, which leads to this other.
Therefore he stands at a complete loss before the
question of matter as before a dark riddle. In him
who treads the path of inner experience, objects attain to
a new birth; and that in them which remains unknown to
outer experience then shines forth.
In such wise the inner being of man obtains light not
only as regards itself but also as regards external things.
From this point of view an endless perspective opens
out before mans knowledge. Within him shines a light
whose illumination is not restricted to that which is
within him. It is a sun which lights up all reality at once.
Something makes its appearance in us which links us
with the whole world. No longer are we simply isolated,
chance human beings, no longer this or that individual.
The entire world reveals itself in us. It unveils to us its
own coherence; and it unveils to us how we ourselves as
individuals are bound up with it. From out of selfknowledge is born knowledge of the world. And our
own limited individuality merges itself spiritually into the
great interconnected world-whole, because in us
something has come to life that reaches out beyond this
individuality, that embraces along with it everything of
which this individuality forms a part.
Thinking which does not block up its own road to
inner experience with logical preconceptions always
14
comes, in the long run, to a recognition of the entity that

rules in us and connects us with the entire world,
because through this entity we overcome the opposition
of inner and outer in regard to man. Paul Asmus,
the keen-sighted philosopher, who died young,
expressed himself as follows about this position (cp. his
book Das Ich und das Ding an Sich, p. 14 et seq.):Let us
make it clear by an example: imagine a piece of sugar; it
is square, sweet, impenetrable, etc., etc., these are one
and all qualities which we understand; one thing,
however, hovers before us as something totally different,
that we do not understand, that is so different from
ourselves that we cannot penetrate into it without losing
ourselves; from the mere surface of which thought starts
back afraid. This one thing is the unknown bearer of all
these qualities; the thing-in-itself, which constitutes the
inmost self of the object. Thus Hegel rightly says that
the entire content of our perception is related as mere
accident to this obscure subject, while we, without
penetrating into its depths, merely attach determinations
to what it is in itself,which ultimately, since we do not
know the thing itself, remain merely subjective and have
no objective value. Conceptual thought, on the other
hand, has no such unknowable subject, whose
determinations might be mere accidents, but the
objective subject falls within the concept. If I cognise
anything, then it is present in its entire fulness in my
conception; I am at home in the inmost shrine of its
being, not because it has no proper being-in-itself of its
own, but because it compels me to re-think its concept,
in virtue of that necessity of the concept which hovers
over us both and appears subjectively in me and
objectively in the concept itself. Through this rethinking there reveals itself to us at the same time, as
INTRODUCTION
15
Hegel says,just as this is our own subjective

activitythe true nature of the object. So can speak
only a man who is able to illuminate the life of thought
with the light of inner experience.
In my Philosophy of Freedom (Berlin, 1894, Verlag Emil
Felber), starting from other points of view, I have also
pointed out the root-fact of the inner life (p. 46): It is
therefore unquestionable: in our thinking we hold the
world-process by one corner, where we must be present,
if it is to come about at all. And that is just the very
thing we are here concerned with. That is just the reason
why things seem to confront me so mysteriously: that I
am so without any share in their coming into existence.
I simply find them there; in thinking, however, I know
how it is done. Hence one can find no more original
starting point for a consideration of the world-process
than that of thought.
For one who looks thus upon the inner life of man, it
is also obvious what is the meaning of human cognition
within the whole world-process. It is not a mere empty
accompaniment to the rest of the world happenings. It
would be such if it represented merely an ideal repetition
of what is outwardly present. But in cognition
something is accomplished which accomplishes itself
nowhere in the outer world: the world-process sets
before itself its own spiritual being. The world-process
would be to all eternity a mere half-thing, if it did not
attain to this confrontation. Therewithal mans inner
experience finds its place in the objective world-process;
and without it that process would be incomplete.
16
It is apparent that only the life which is ruled by the

inner sense, mans highest spiritual life in its most proper
sense,it is this life only which can thus raise man
above himself. For only in this life does the being of
things unveil itself before itself. The matter lies quite
differently in regard to the lower perceptive power. For
instance, the eye which meditates the seeing of an object
is the theatre of a process which, in contrast to the inner
life, is exactly like any other external process. My organs
are members of the spacial world like other things, and
their perceptions are processes in time like any others.
Further, their being only appears when they are sunk
into the inner life. I thus live a double life; the life of an
object among other objects, which lives within its own
embodiment and perceives through its organs what lies
outside this embodiment; and above this life a higher
life, that knows no such inside and outside, that extends,
stretching and bridging over both the outside world and
itself. I shall therefore be forced to say: at one time I am
an individual, a limited self; at another time I am a
general, universal Self. This, too, Paul Asmus has
expressed in excellent words (cp. his book: D i e
indogermanischen Religionen in den Hauptpunkten ihrer
Entwickelung, p. 29 of Vol. I.):
The activity of merging ourselves in something else,
is what we call thinking; in thinking, the ego has
fulfilled its concept, it has given itself up as a single
thing; therefore, in thinking do we find ourselves in a
sphere which is alike for all, for the principle of
separateness which is involved in the relation of our
self to that which is other than itself has vanished in the
activity of the self-cancelling of the single self, and there
remains then only the Self-hood common to all.
INTRODUCTION
17
Spinoza has exactly the same thing in view when he

describes, as the highest activity of knowing, that which
advances from an adequate conception of the real
nature of some of the attributes of God to an adequate
knowledge of the nature of things. This advancing is
no other than the illumination of things with the light of
inner experience. Spinoza describes in glowing colours
the life in this inner experience: The highest virtue of
the soul is to know God, or to obtain insight into things
in the thirdthe highestmode of knowing. This
virtue is the greater, the more the soul knows things by
this method of knowing; thus he who can grasp things in
this mode of knowing attains the highest human
perfection and consequently becomes filled with the
highest joy, accompanied, moreover, by the conceptions
of himself and of virtue. Thus there arises from this
mode of knowing the highest peace of soul that is
possible.
He who knows things in this way, transforms himself
within himself; for his single separated self becomes at
such moments absorbed by the universal Self; all
beings appear not to a single limited individual in
subordinated importance, they appear to themselves.
On this level there remains no difference between Plato
and me; what separated us belongs to a lower level of
cognition. We are separated only as individuals; the
individual which works within us is one and the same.
But about this fact it is impossible to argue with one who
has no experience of it. He will everlastingly emphasise:
Plato and you are two. That this duality, that all
multiplicity, is reborn as unity in the outbursting life of
the highest level of knowledge: that cannot be proved,
that must be experienced. Paradoxical as it may sound, it
18
is the truth: the idea which Plato conceived and the like
idea which I conceive are not two ideas. It is one and
the same idea. And there are not two ideas: one in
Platos head and one in mine; but in the higher sense
Platos head and mine interpenetrate each other; all
heads interpenetrate which grasp one and the same idea;
and this idea is only once there as a single idea. It is
there; and the heads all go to one and the same place in
order to have this idea in them.
The transformation that is brought about in the whole
being of man when he learns to see things thus, is
indicated in beautiful words by the Hindu poem, the
Bhagavad-Gt, about which Wilhelm von Humboldt
said that he was thankful to the fate which had allowed
him to live long enough to become acquainted with this
work. In this poem, the inner light declares: An eternal
ray from myself, having attained a distinct existence in
the world of personal life, draws around itself the five
senses and the individual soul, which belong to nature.
When the spirit, shining from above, embodies itself in
space and time, or when it quits embodiment, it seizes
upon things and carries them away with it, as the zephyr
seizes the perfumes of the flowers and bears them away
with it. The inner light rules the ear, touch, taste and
smell, as also the emotions: it knits together the link
between itself and the objects of the senses. The
ignorant know not when the inner light shines forth or is
extinguished, nor when it is married to objects; only he
who partakes of the inner light can know thereof.
So strongly does the Bhagavad-Gt insist upon the
transformation of the man, that it says of the wise man
that he can no longer err, no longer sin. If, apparently,
INTRODUCTION
19
he errs or sins, then he must illuminate his thoughts or

his actions with a light wherein that no longer appears as
error or as sin which to the ordinary consciousness
appears as such. He who has raised himself and whose
knowledge is of the purest kind, he kills not, nor does he
stain himself, even though he should have slain another.
This points only to the same basic mood of the soul
flowing from the highest knowledge, of which Spinoza,
after having described it in his Ethics, breaks out into the
passionate words: Here is concluded that which I aimed
to bring forward in regard to the power of the soul over
its affections or in regard to the freedom of the soul.
Hence it is clear how very greatly the wise man is
superior to the ignorant, and how much more powerful
than he who is ruled only by his lusts. For the ignorant
is not merely driven hither and thither by external causes
in many ways and never attains to the true peace of soul,
but he also lives in ignorance of himself, of God and of
things, and when his suffering ceases, his existence
ceases also; while on the other hand, the wise man, as
such, feels hardly any disturbance in his spirit and ever
enjoys the true peace of the soul. Even if the road which
I have outlined as leading thereto appears very difficult,
still it can be found. And well may it be difficult,
because it is so seldom found. For how could it be
possible, if salvation lay close at hand and could be
found without great trouble, that it should be neglected
by almost all? Yet all that is noble is as difficult as it is
rare.
Goethe has indicated in monumental form the point
of view of the highest knowledge in the words: If I
know my relation to myself and to the outer world, I call
it truth. And thus every one can have his own truth, and
20
yet it is always one and the same. Each has his own
truth: because each is an individual, separate being,
beside and along with others. These other beings act
upon him through his organs. From the individual
standpoint at which he is placed, and according to the
constitution of his power of perception, he builds up his
own truth for himself in intercourse with the things
around him. He acquires his relation to things. If, then,
he enters into self-knowledge, if he learns to know his
relation to himself, then his special separate truth is
merged in the universal Truth; and this universal Truth is
in all the same.
The understanding of the raising of the individual, of
the single self, into the Universal Self in the personality,
is regarded by deeper natures as the secret which reveals
itself in the inmost heart of man as the root-mystery of
life. And Goethe has found an apt expression for this:
And so long as thou hast not that, this: Die and
Become! Then thou art but a melancholy guest upon
this dark earth.
Not a mere repetition in thought, but a real part of
the world-process, is that which goes on in mans inner
life. The world would not be what it is if the factor
belonging thereto in the human soul did not play its part.
And if one calls the highest which is attainable by man
the Divine, then one must say that this Divine is not
present as something external, to be repeated pictorially
in the human mind, but that this Divine is awakened in
man. Angelus Silesius has found the right words for this:
I know that without me God can live no instant; if I
become nothing, He must of necessity give up the
ghost. Without me God may make no single smallest
INTRODUCTION
21
worm: if I do not sustain it with Him, then it must

straightway perish. Only he can make such an assertion
who presupposes that in man something comes to light,
without which external being cannot exist. If everything
pertaining to the worm were there present without
man, then one could not possibly say that it must perish
if man did not sustain it.
The innermost kernel of the world comes to life as
spiritual content in self-knowledge. The experience of
self-knowledge means for man working and weaving
within the kernel of the world. He who is permeated
with self-knowledge naturally carries out his own action
in the light of self-knowledge. Human action isin
generaldetermined by motives. Robert Hamerling, the
poet-philosopher, has rightly said (Atomistik des Willens,
p. 213):
A man can indeed do what he willsbut he cannot
will whatever he pleases, because his will is determined
by motives. He cannot will whatever he pleases? Look
again at these words more closely. Is there any sensible
meaning in them? Freedom of the will ought then to
consist in being able to will something without reason,
without motive. But what does willing mean other than
the having a reason for preferring to do or endeavour
to attain this, rather than that? To will something
without reason, without motive, would mean to will
something without willing it. The concept of motive is
inseparably bound up with that of willing. Without a
definite motive the will is an empty potentiality: only
through a motive does it become active and real. It is
therefore quite correct that mans will is in so far not free
22
as its direction is always determined by the strongest

motive.
For all action that is not accomplished in the light of
self-knowledge, the motive, the reason for action, must
needs be felt as a constraint. But the matter is otherwise
when the reason or motive is taken up into selfknowledge. Then this reason becomes a part of the self.
The willing is no longer determined; it determines itself.
The law-abidingness, the motives of willing, now no
longer rule over the one who wills, but are one and the
same with this willing. To illuminate the laws of ones
action with the light of self-observation means to
overcome all constraint of motive. By so doing, will
transfers itself into the realm of freedom.
It is not all human action which bears the marks of
freedom. Only such action is free action which in its
every part is lighted up with the glow of self-observation.
And because self-observation raises the individual self up
to the Universal Self, therefore free action is that which
flows from the Universal Self. The old controversy
whether mans will is free or subject to a universal law, to
an unalterable necessity, is a problem wrongly stated. All
action is bound which is done by a man as an individual;
all action free which is accomplished after his spiritual
re-birth. Man, therefore, is not, in general, either free or
bound. He is both the one and the other. He is bound
before his re-birth; and he can become free through this
re-birth. The individual upward development of man
consists in the transformation of unfree willing into will
possessing the character of freedom. The man who has
realised the law-abidingness of his action as his own, has
overcome the constraint of this law-abidingness and
INTRODUCTION
23
therewith of un-freedom. Freedom is not from the

outset a fact of human existence, but a goal thereof.
With the attainment of free action, man resolves a
contradiction between the world and himself. His own
deeds become deeds of universal being. He feels himself
in the fullest harmony with this universal being. He feels
every discord between himself and another as the
outcome of a not yet fully awakened self. But such is the
fate of the self, that only in its separation from the whole
can it find its contact with this whole. Man would not
be man if he were not shut off as an individual self from
everything else; but also he is not man in the highest
sense if he does not, as such a shut-off and isolated self,
widen himself out again into the Universal Self. It
belongs through and through to the nature of man that it
should overcome an inherent contradiction which has
lain therein from the beginning.
Any one who regards spirit as, in the main, logical
understanding, may well feel his blood run cold at the
idea that objects should be supposed to undergo their rebirth in spirit. He will compare the fresh, living flower,
outside there in its fulness of colour, with the cold,
faded, schematic thought of the flower. He will feel
himself particularly ill at ease with the conception that
the man who draws his motives from the solitude of his
own self-consciousness is more free than the original,
naive personality which acts from its immediate
impulses, from the fulness of its own nature. To one
who sees only one-sided logic, another man who sinks
himself into his own inner being will appear like a mere
walking scheme of concepts, like a mere ghost in
24
contrast with the man who remains in his own natural

individuality.
Such objections to the re-birth of things in spirit are
especially to be heard from those whose power of
perception fails in the presence of things with a purely
spiritual content; although they are well provided with
healthy organs of sense-perception and with impulses
and passions full of life. As soon as they are called upon
to perceive the purely spiritual, the power to do so fails
them; they can deal only with mere conceptual husks,
when even they are not limited to empty words. They
remain, therefore, in what concerns spiritual content,
men of dry, abstract understanding. But the man who
in things purely spiritual possesses a gift of perception
like that in things of the senses, finds life assuredly not
the poorer when he has enriched it with its spiritual
content. If I look out upon a flower, why should its rich
colours lose aught whatever of their freshness, because
not only does my eye see the colours, but my inner sense
also perceives the spiritual being of the flower? Why
should the life of my personality become poorer, because
I do not follow my passions and impulses in spiritual
blindness, but illuminate them throughout with the light
of higher knowledge? Not poorer, but fuller, richer, is
that life which is given back again in the spirit.
MEISTER ECKHART
THE world of Meister Eckharts conceptions is aglow
through and through with the feeling that things become
re-born as higher entities in the spirit of man. Like the
greatest Christian theologian of the Middle Ages, St.
Thomas Aquinas, who lived from 1225 till 1274, Meister
Eckhart belonged to the Dominican Order. Eckhart was
an unqualified admirer of St. Thomas; and this will seem
the more intelligible when we fix our gaze upon
Eckharts whole manner of conceiving things. He
believed himself to be as completely in harmony with the
teachings of the Christian Church as he assumed a like
agreement on the part of St. Thomas. Eckhart had
neither the desire to take aught away from the content of
Christianity, nor the wish to add anything to it; but he
desired to bring forward this content anew in his own
way. It forms no part of the spiritual needs of a
personality such as he was to set up new truths of this or
the other kind in the place of old ones. Such a
personality has grown completely intertwined with the
content which it has received from tradition; but it
craves to give to this content a new form, a new life.
Eckhart desired, without doubt, to remain an
orthodox Christian. The Christian truths were his own;
only he desired to regard these truths in another way
from that, for instance, in which St. Thomas Aquinas
had done. St. Thomas accepted two sources of
knowledge: Revelation, in matters of faith, and Reason,
in those of research. Reason recognises the laws of
things, that is, the spiritual in nature. Reason can raise
itself above nature and grasp in the spirit from one side
26
the Divine Being underlying nature. But it does not

attain in this way to merging itself in the full being of
God. A still higher truth-content must come to meet it.
That is given in the Holy Scripture, which reveals what
man cannot attain to through himself. The truth-content
of the Scripture must be accepted by man; Reason can
defend it. Reason can seek to understand it as well as
possible through its powers of knowing; but never can
Reason engender that truth from within the spirit of
man. Not what the spirit perceives is the highest truth,
but what has come to this spirit from without.
St. Augustine declares himself unable to find within
himself the source for that which he should believe. He
says: I would not believe in the Gospel, did not the
authority of the Catholic Church move me thereto.
That is in the same spirit as the Evangelist, who points
to the external testimony: That. . . which we have
heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have
looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word
of Life; . . . that which we have seen and heard declare
we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us.
But Meister Eckhart would rather impress upon man the
words of Christ: It is expedient for you that I go away:
for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto
you; and he explains these words by saying: Just as if
he had said: Ye have set too much joy upon my present
appearance, therefore the full joy of the Holy Ghost
cannot come to you.
Eckhart thinks that he is speaking of no God other
than that God of whom Augustine, and the Evangelist,
and Thomas, speak, and yet this testimony as to God is
not his testimony, their witness is not his. Some people
MEISTER ECKHART
27
want to see God with the same eyes they see a cow
withal, and want to love God as they would love a cow.
So they love God for the sake of outer riches and inner
comfort; but such folk do not rightly love God. . . .
Simple folk fancy they should behold God as though He
stood there and they here. But it is not so. God and I
are one in the act of knowing (im Erkennen). What
underlies such expressions in Eckharts mouth is nothing
else than the experience of the inner sense; and this
experience shows him things in a higher light. He
therefore believes himself to have no need of an external
light in order to attain to the highest insight: A Master
says: God became man, whereby the whole human race
is uplifted and made worthy. Thereof may we be glad
that Christ our brother of His own strength rose above
all the choirs of angels and sitteth at the right hand of
the Father. That Master spake well; but, in truth, I
would give little for it. What would it help me, had I a
brother who was a rich man, and I therewithal a poor
man? What would it help me, had I a brother who was a
wise man, and I were a fool? . . . The Heavenly Father
begetteth His Only-Begotten Son in Himself and in me.
Wherefore in Himself and in me? I am one with Him;
and He has no power to shut me out. In the self-same
work, the Holy Ghost receives its being and proceeds
from me, as from God. Wherefore? I am in God, and if
the Holy Ghost takes not its being from me, neither
does it take it from God. In no wise am I shut out.
When Eckhart recalls the saying of St. Paul: Put ye
on Jesus Christ, he means to imply in this saying the
meaning: Sink yourselves into yourselves, dive down into
self-contemplation: and from out the depths of your
being, God will shine forth to meet you; He illumines all
28
things for you; you have found Him within you; you
have become united with Gods Being. God became
man, that I might become God.
In his booklet upon Loneliness, Eckhart expresses
himself as follows upon the relation of the outer
perception to the inner: Here thou must know that the
Masters say that in every man there are two kinds of
man: the one is called the outer man, and yet he acts
through the power of the soul. The other man is called
the inner man, that is, that which is within the man.
Now thou must know that every man who loveth God
maketh no more use of the powers of the soul in the
outer man than so far as the five senses absolutely
require; and that which is within turns not itself to the
five senses, save in so far as it is the guide and conductor
of the five senses, and shepherds them, so that they
follow not after their craving to bestiality. One who
speaks in such wise of the inner man can no longer
direct his gaze upon a Being of things lying outside
himself; for he sees clearly that from no kind or species
of the outer world can this Being come to him.
An objector might urge: What can it matter to the
things of the outer world, what you add to them out of
your own mind? Do but rely upon your own senses.
They alone give you information of the outer world. Do
not adulterate, by a mental addition, what your senses
give you in purity, without admixture, as the image of the
outer world. Your eye tells you what colour is; what
your mind knows about colour, of that there is nothing
whatever in colour itself. To this, from Meister
Eckharts standpoint, the answer would have to be: The
senses are a physical apparatus; therefore what they have
MEISTER ECKHART
29
to tell us about objects can concern only that which is

physical in the objects. And this physical factor in the
objects communicates itself to me in such wise that in
myself a physical process is set going.
Colour, as a physical process of the outer world, sets
up a physical process in my eye and brain. Thereby I
perceive colour. But in this manner I can perceive of
colour only so much as is physical, sensuous. Senseperception cuts out everything non-sensuous from
objects. Objects are thus by sense-perception stripped
of everything about them which is non-sensuous. If I
then advance to the spiritual, the ideal content, I in fact
only reinstate in the objects what sense-perception has
shut out therefrom. Thus sense-perception does not
exhibit to me the deepest Being of objects, it rather
separates me from that being. But the spiritual, the ideal
conception, seizing upon them again, unites me with that
being. It shows me that objects are inwardly of exactly
the same spiritual (geistigen) nature as I myself.
The barrier between myself and the outer world falls
through this spiritual conception of things. I am
separated from the external world in so far as I am a
thing of the senses among other things of the senses.
Colour and my eye are two different entities. My brain
and a plant are two different things. But the ideal
content of the plant and of colour belong together with
the ideal content of my brain and eye alike to a single
ideal entity.
This way of looking at things must not be confused
with the very widespread anthropomorphising conception of the world, which imagines that it grasps the
30
objects of the outer world by ascribing to them qualities

of a physical nature, which are supposed to resemble the
qualities of the human soul. This view asserts: When we
meet another human being, we perceive in him only
sensuous characteristics. I cannot see into my fellowmans inner life. I infer from what I see and hear of him,
his inner life, his soul. Thus the soul is never anything
which I can directly perceive; I perceive a soul only
within myself. My thoughts, my imaginations, my
feelings, no man sees. Now just as I have such an inner
life, alongside of the life which can be outwardly
perceived, so, too, all other beings must have such an
inner life.
Thus concludes one who occupies the standpoint of
the anthropomorphising conception of the world. What
I perceive externally in the plant, must equally be the
outer side of something inward, of a soul, which I must
add in my imagination to what I actually perceive. And
since for me there exists but one single inner world,
namely, my own, therefore I can conceive of the inner
world of other beings only as resembling my own inner
world. Along this line of argument one comes to a sort
of universal ensouling of all nature (Pan-psychism).
This view depends, however, on a failure to recognise
what the awakened inner sense really gives us. The
spiritual (geistig) content of an external object, which
reveals itself to me in my inner self, is not anything
added in or by thought to the outer perception. It is just
as little this as is the spirit of another man. I perceive
this spiritual content through the inner sense just in the
same way as I perceive its physical content through the
external senses. And what I call my inner life in the
MEISTER ECKHART
31
above sense (i.e., thoughts, feelings, etc.), is not at all in

the higher sense, my spirit (Geist).
This so-called inner life is only the outcome of purely
sensuous processes, and belongs to me only as a purely
individual personality, which is nothing more than the
result of its physical organisation. If I transfer this inner
life to outer things, I am, as a matter of fact, thinking in
the air.
My personal soul-life, my thoughts, memories, and
feelings, are in me, because I am a nature-being
organised in such and such a way, with a perfectly
definite sense-apparatus, with a perfectly definite
nervous system. I have no right to transfer this my
human soul to other things. I should only be entitled to
do so if I happened to find anywhere a similarly organised nervous system. But my individual soul is not the
highest spiritual element in me. This highest spiritual
element must first be awakened through the inner sense;
and this awakened spiritual element in me is also one and
the same with the spiritual element in all things. The
plant appears immediately in its own proper spirituality
to this spiritual element,I have no need to endow it
with a spirituality like unto my own.
All talk about the unknown thing-in-itself loses any
kind of meaning with this conception of the world; for it
is just that very thing-in-itself which reveals itself to
the inner sense. All such talk originates simply in the
fact that those who talk thus are unable to recognise in
the spiritual contents of their own inner being the
things-in-themselves. They think that they know in
their own inner selves mere shadows and schemes
32
without being,mere concepts and ideas of things.

But as they still have a sort of premonition of the thingin-itself, they therefore believe that this thing-in-itself
is concealing itself, and that there are limits set to mans
power of knowing. One cannot prove to such as are
entangled in this belief, that they must grasp the thingin-itself in their own inner being, for even if one were
to put it before them, they would still never recognise or
admit this thing-in-itself. But it is just this recognition
with which we are concerned.
All that Meister Eckhart says is saturated with this
recognition. Of this take a comparison: A door opens
and shuts upon a hinge. If, now, I compare the outer
plank of this door to the outer man, I must then
compare the hinge to the inner man. Now, when the
door opens and shuts, the outer plank moves to and fro,
while yet the hinge remains constantly immovable and is
in no way changed thereby. In like manner it is here
also. As an individual sense-being, I can investigate
things in all directionsthe door opens and shuts,if I
do not spiritually give birth within me to the perceptions
of the senses, then do I know nothing of their
naturethe hinge does not move !
The illumination brought about through the inner
sense is, according to Eckharts view, the entrance of
God into the soul. The light of knowledge which flames
up through this entrance, he calls the little spark of the
soul. The point in mans inner being at which this
spark flames up is so pure, so lofty, and so noble in
itself, that no creature can be therein, but only God
alone dwells therein with His purely Divine Nature.
Whosoever has kindled this spark in himself, no
MEISTER ECKHART
33
longer sees only as sees the ordinary man with his outer
senses, and with his logical understanding which orders
and classifies the impressions of the senses, but he sees
how things are in themselves. The outer senses and the
classifying understanding separate the individual man
from other things; they make of him an individual in
space and time, who also perceives the other things in
space and time. The man illuminated by the spark
ceases to be a single separated being. He annihilates his
separateness. All that brings about the difference
between himself and things ceases to be. That he, as a
single being, is that which perceives, no longer comes
into consideration. Things and he himself are no longer
separated. Things, and with them, God, see themselves
in him. This spark is in very deed God, in that it is a
single oneness and bears within it the imagery of all
creatures, image without image, and image upon image.
Eckhart proclaims in the most magnificent words the
extinction of the isolated being: It is therefore to be
known, that according to things it is one and the same to
know God and to be known by God. Therein do we
know God and see, that He makes us to see and to
know. And as the air, which enlighteneth, is nothing
other than what it enlightens; for the air giveth light,
because it is enlightened; even so do we know that we
are known, and that He maketh us to know Himself.
On this foundation Meister Eckhart builds up his
relation to God. It is a purely spiritual one, and cannot
be modelled according to any image borrowed from
human individual experience. Not as one separated
individual loves another can God love his creation: not
as an architect builds a house can God have created it.
34
All such thoughts vanish before the inner vision. It

belongs to Gods very being that He should love the
world. A God who could love or not love at pleasure, is
imagined according to the likeness of the individual man.
I speak in good truth and in eternal truth and in
everlasting truth, that God must needs ever pour
Himself forth in every man who has reached down to his
true root to the utmost of possibility, so wholly and
completely that in His life and in His being, in His nature
and in His Godhead, He keeps nothing back; He must
ever pour all forth in fruitful wise. And the inner
illumination is something that the soul must necessarily
find when it sinks itself deep into the basis of its being.
From this it is already obvious that Gods communication to humanity cannot be conceived after the
fashion of the revelation of one human being to another.
This communication may also be cut off, for one man
can shut himself off from another; but God must, by
virtue of His very nature, reveal Himself. It is a sure
and certain truth, that it is a necessity for God to seek us,
exactly as if His very Godhead depended upon it. God
can as little dispense with us as we with Him. Even
though we turn away from God, yet God can never turn
away from us. Consequently, mans relation to God
cannot be conceived of as though something image-like,
something taken from the individual human being, were
contained therein.
Eckhart is thus conscious that it belongs to the
perfectness of the Root-Being of the world to find Itself
in the human soul. This Root-Being indeed would be
imperfect, incomplete, if it lacked that part of its
unfoldment which comes to light in the soul. What
MEISTER ECKHART
35
happens in man belongs to the Root-Being; and if it did

not happen, then the Root-Being would be but a part of
Itself. In this sense, man can feel himself as a necessary
part of the Being of the universe. This Eckhart
expresses by describing his feelings towards God as
follows: I thank not God that He loveth me, for He
may not do otherwise; whether He will it or no, His
nature yet compelleth Him. . . . Therefore will I not pray
to God to give me anything, nor will I praise Him for
that which He hath given me. . . .
But this relationship of the soul to the Root-Being
must not be conceived of as if the soul in its individual
nature were declared to be identical with this RootBeing. The soul which is entangled in the sense-world,
and so in the finite, has as such not yet got within itself
the content of the Root-Being. The soul must first
develop that content within itself. It must annihilate
itself as an isolated being; and Meister Eckhart most
aptly characterises this annihilation as Entwerdung (unbecoming or involution). When I come to the root of
the Godhead, none ask me whence I come and where I
have been, and none doth miss me, for here there is an
Entwerdung. Again, the following phrase speaks very
clearly about this relation: I take a cup of water and lay
therein a mirror and set it under the disc of the sun. The
sun casts out its shining light on the mirror and yet doth
not pass away. The reflecting of the mirror in the sun is
sun in the sun, and yet the mirror remains what it is. So
is it about God. God is in the soul with His very nature
and being and Godhead, and yet He is not the soul. The
reflecting of the soul in God, is God in God, and yet the
soul is still that which it is.
36
The soul which gives itself up to the inner illumination knows in itself not only what this same soul was
before its illumination; but it also knows that which this
soul only became through this illumination. We must
be united with God in being; we must be united with
God uniquely; we must be united with God wholly.
How shall we be united with God in being? That must
happen in the beholding and not in the Wesung. His
being may not become our being, but it shall be our life.
Not an already existent lifea Wesungis to be known
in the logical sense; but the higher knowingthe
beholdingshall itself become life; the spiritual, the
ideal must be so felt by the beholder, as ordinary daily
life is felt by individual human nature.
From such starting points, Meister Eckhart also builds
up a pure conception of Freedom. In its ordinary life
the soul is not free; for it is interwoven with the realm of
lower causes, and accomplishes that to which it is
impelled by these lower causes. But by beholding or
vision it is raised out of the domain of these causes,
and acts no longer as a separated individual soul. The
root of being is laid bare in this soul, and that can be
moved to action by naught save by itself. God does not
compel the will; rather He sets the will free, so that it
wills not otherwise than what God Himself wills; and the
spirit desires not to will other than what God wills: and
that is not its un-freedom: it is its true and real freedom.
For freedom is that we are not bound, but free and pure
and unmixed, as we were in our first outpouring, as we
were set free in the Holy Ghost.
It may be said of the illuminated man that he is
himself the being which from within itself determines
MEISTER ECKHART
37
what is good and what is evil. He can do naught

absolutely, but accomplish the good. For he does not
serve the good, but the good realises and lives itself out
in him. The righteous man serveth neither God, nor
the creature; for he is free, and the nearer he is to
righteousness, the more he is Freedoms very self.
What then, for Meister Eckhart, can evil be? It can be
only action under the influence of the lower mode of
regarding things;the acting of a soul which has not
passed through the state of Entwerdung (un-becoming).
Such a soul is selfish in the sense that it wills only itself.
It could not bring its willing outwardly into accord with
moral ideals. The soul having vision cannot in this sense
be selfish. Even if it willed itself, it yet could will only
the lordship of the ideal; for it has made itself into this
very ideal. It can no longer will the ends of the lower
nature, for it has no longer aught in common with this
lower nature. To act in conformity with moral ideals
implies for the soul which has vision, no compulsion, no
deprivation.
The man who standeth in Gods will and in Gods
love, to him it is a craving to do all good things that God
willeth, and leave undone all evil things that are contrary
to God. And it is impossible for him to leave undone
anything that God will have done. Even as walking is
impossible to one whose legs are bound, just so it would
be impossible for a man who standeth in Gods will to
do aught unvirtuous.
Eckhart moreover expressly guards himself against
the idea that, with this view of his, free license is given
for anything and everything that the individual may will.
The man possessing vision is indeed to be recognised by
38
the very fact that as a separated individual he no longer

wills anything. Certain men say: If I have God and
Gods freedom, then I may just do whatever I please.
Such understand wrongly this saying. So long as thou
canst do aught that is contrary to God and His
commandment, so long thou hast not Gods love; even
though thou mayest well deceive the world, as if thou
hadst. Eckhart is convinced that to the soul which
dives down into its own root, the most perfect morality
will shine forth from that root to meet it; that there all
logical conception, and all acting in the ordinary sense,
ceases, and an entirely new ordering of human life makes
its appearance.
For all that the understanding can grasp, and all that
desiring can desire, is verily not God. Where
understanding and desiring end, there it is dark, there
shineth God. There that power unfolds in the soul
which is wider than the wide heavens. . . . The bliss of
the righteous and the bliss of God is one bliss; for there
is the righteous full of bliss, where God is full of bliss.
THE FRIENDSHIP OF GOD

IN Johannes Tauler (1300-1361), Heinrich Suso (12951365), and Johannes Ruysbroek (1293-1381), one makes
acquaintance with men whose life and work exhibit in a
very striking manner those motions of the soul to
which such a spiritual path as that of Meister Eckhart is
calculated to give rise in natures of depth and power.
While Eckhart seems like a man who, in the blissful
experiencing of spiritual re-birth, speaks of the nature of
Knowledge as of a picture which he has succeeded in
painting; these others, followers of his, appear rather like
pilgrims, to whom their inner re-birth has shown a new
road which they fain would tread, but whose goal seems
to vanish before them into the illimitable distance.
Eckhart dwells more upon the glories of his picture; they
upon the difficulties of the new path.
To understand the difference between personalities
like Eckhart and Tauler, one must see quite clearly how a
man stands towards his higher cognitions. Man is
interwoven with the sense-world and the laws of nature
by which that sense-world is ruled. He is himself a
product of that world. He lives because its forces and its
materials are at work in him; nay, he perceives this senseworld and judges of it by laws, according to which both
he himself and that world are alike built up. If he turns
his eyes upon an object, not only does the object,
present itself to him as a complex of interacting forces,
ruled by natures laws, but the eye, with which he sees
the object is itself a body built up according to just such
laws and of just such forces; and the seeing, too, takes
place by similar laws and forces. If we had reached the
40
goal of natural science, we should be able to follow out

this play of the forces of nature according to natural laws
right up into the highest regions of thought-formation,
but in the very act of doing this, we raise ourselves
above this play of forces. For do we not stand above and
beyond all the uniformities which make up the laws of
nature, when we over-see the whole and recognise how
we ourselves fit into nature? We see with our eyes
according to laws of nature. But we know also the laws,
according to which we see.
We can take our stand upon a higher summit and
overlook at once both ourselves and the outer world in
their mutual interplay. Is there not here a something
working in us, which is higher than the sensuous-organic
personality working with Natures forces and according
to Natures laws? In such activity does there still remain
any wall of division between our inner selves and the
outer world? That which here judges and gains for itself
insight is no longer our separated personality; it is rather
the general world-being, which has torn down the barrier
between the inner and outer worlds and now embraces
both alike. As true as it is that, judged by the outer
appearance, I still remain the same separated individual
when I have thus torn down this barrier, so true is it also
that, judged according to essential being, I am no longer
this separated unit. Henceforth there lives in me the
feeling that there speaks in my soul the All-Being, which
embraces both myself and the entire world.
This is what Tauler felt, when he said: Man is just as
if he were three menhis animal man as he is according
to the senses; then his rational man and lastly, his
highest, godlike man. . . . The one is the outer, animal,
TAU LER, SUS O AND RUYSBROEK
41
sensuous man; the other is the inner, understanding man,

with his understanding and reasoning powers; the third
man is spirit, (Gemthlit. emotional, feeling nature), the
very highest part of the soul.1 How far this third man is
above the first and second, Eckhart has expressed in the
words: The eye through which I see God, that is the
same eye with which God sees me. My eye and Gods
eye, that is one eye and one knowing and one feeling.
But in Tauler another feeling is active as well as this.
He has fought his way through to a real vision of the
spiritual, and does not constantly confuse, as do the false
materialists and the false idealists, the sensibly-natural
with the spiritual. If, with his disposition, Tauler had
become a scientist, he would have insisted upon
explaining all that is natural, including the whole of man,
both the first and the second, purely upon natural lines.
He would never have transferred purely spiritual forces
into nature itself. He would never have talked of a
purposefulness in nature conceived of according to
mens notions. He knew that there, where we perceive
with our senses, no creative ideas are to be found. Far
rather he was most keenly conscious of the fact that man
is a purely natural being. And as he felt himself to be,
not a scientist, but a devotee of moral life, he therefore
felt most keenly the contrast which reveals itself between
this natural being of man and that vision of God which
arises naturally and within nature, but as spirituality.
And just in that very contrast the meaning of life
presented itself to his eyes. Man finds himself as a single
being, a creature of nature. And no science can reveal to
him anything else about this life than that he is such a
1
Cp. W. Preger: Geschichte der Deutschen Mystik, vol. iii, p. 161.
42
creature of nature. As a creature of nature he cannot get

outside of the sphere of natural creation. In it he must
remain. And yet his inner life leads him outside and
beyond it. He must have confidence in that which no
science of outer nature can give him or show to him.
If he calls only this nature Being or that which is,
then he must be able to reach out to the vision which
recognises as the higher, Non-being, or that which is
not. Tauler seeks for no God who is present in the
same sense as a natural force; he seeks no God who has
created the world in the sense of human creation. In
him lives the clear insight that the conception of creation
even of the Fathers of the Church is only idealised
human creating. It is clear to him that God is not to be
found as natures working and her laws are found, by
science. Tauler is well aware that we must not add in
thought anything to nature as God. He knows that
whoever thinks God, in his sense, no longer thinks
thought-content, as does one who has grasped nature in
thought. Therefore, Tauler seeks not to think God, but
to think divinely, to think as God thinks. The
knowledge of nature is not enriched by the knowledge of
God, but transformed. The knower of God does not
know a different thing from the knower of nature, but
he knows in a different way. Not one single letter can
the knower of God add to the knowledge of nature; but
through his whole knowing of nature there shines a new
light.
What root-feelings will take possession of a mans
soul who contemplates the world from this point of
view, will depend upon how he regards that experience
of the soul which brings about spiritual re-birth. Within
43
this experience, man is wholly a natural being, when he

considers himself in his interaction with the rest of
nature; and he is wholly a spiritual being when he
considers the conditions into which this re-birth has
brought him. Thus we can say with equal truth, the
inmost depth of the soul is still natural; as also it is
already divine. Tauler emphasised the former in
accordance with his own tendency of thought. However
far we may penetrate into our souls, we still remain
separated individual human beings, said he to himself.
But yet in the very depths of the soul of the individual
being there gleams forth the All-Being.
Tauler was dominated by the feeling: Thou canst not
free thyself from separateness, nor purify thyself from it.
Therefore the All-Being in its purity can never make its
appearance within thee, it can only shed its light into the
depths of thy soul. Thus in its depths only a mere
reflection, a picture of the All-Being comes into
existence. Thou canst so transform thy separated
personality that it reproduces the All-Being as a picture;
but this All-Being itself does not shine forth in thee.
Starting from such conceptions, Tauler came to the idea
of a Godhead that never merges wholly into the human
world, never flows quite completely into it. More, he
attaches importance to his not being confused with those
who maintain that mans inmost being is itself divine.
He says: The Union with God is taken by foolish men
in a fleshly sense, and they say that they shall be
transformed into divine nature; but such is false and an
evil heresy. For even in the very highest, most inward
Union with God, Gods nature and Gods being still
remain lofty, yea, higher than the loftiest; that passeth
into a divine abyss, where never yet was creature.
44
Tauler wishes, and rightly, to be called a good Catholic in the sense of his age and of his priestly calling. He
has no desire to oppose any other conception to
Christianity. He desires only to deepen and spiritualise
that Christianity through his way of looking at it. He
speaks as a pious priest of the content of Holy Writ. But
this same scripture still becomes in the world of his
conceptions a means for the expression of the inmost
experiences of his soul. God worketh all his works in
the soul and giveth them to the soul; and the Father
begetteth His only begotten Son in the soul, as truly as
He begetteth Him in eternity, neither more, nor less.
What is born when one says: God begetteth in the soul?
Is it a likeness of God, or a picture of God, or is it
somewhat of God? Nay: it is neither picture nor likeness
of God, but the same God and the same Son whom the
Father begetteth in eternity and naught else than the
blissful divine word, that is the second person in the
Trinity, Him the Father begetteth in the soul, . . . and
thereof the soul hath thus great and special dignity.2
The stories of scripture become for Tauler the garment
in which he clothes the happiness of the inner life.
Herod, who drove out the child and sought to slay him,
is a likeness of the world, which yet seeketh to kill this
child in a believing man, therefore one should and must
flee therefrom, if we do desire to keep that child alive in
us, but that child is the enlightened believing soul of
each and every man.
As Tauler directs his gaze mainly upon the natural
man, he is comparatively less concerned to tell us what
happens when the higher man enters into the natural
2
Cp. Preger: History of German Mysticism, vol. iii., p. 219 et seq.
45
man, than to discover the paths which the lower forces

of the personality must follow if they are to be transmuted into the higher life. As a devotee of the moral
life, he desires to show to men the roads to the AllBeing. He has unconditional faith and trust that the AllBeing shines forth in man, if man will so order his life
that there shall be in him a shrine for the Divine. But
this All-Being can never shine forth while man shuts
himself up in his mere natural separated personality.
Such a man, separated off in himself, is merely one
member of the world: a single creature, in Taulers
language. The more man shuts himself off within this
his being as a member of the world, so much the less can
the All-Being find place in him. If man is in reality to
become one with God, then all energies and powers
even of the inner man must die and become silent. The
will must turn away even from the Good and from all
willing, and become void of willing. Man must escape
from all his senses and turn inwards all his powers, and
come into a forgetting of all things and of himself.
For the true and eternal Word of God is uttered only in
the desert, when the man hath gone out from himself
and from all things and is quite untrammelled, desolate
and alone.
When Tauler stood at his zenith, the problem which
occupied the central point of his mental life was: How
can man overcome and kill out in himself his separated
existence, so as to live in perfect unison with the All-life?
For one in this position, all feelings towards the AllBeing concentrate themselves into this one thing: Awe
before the All-Being as that which is inexhaustible,
endless. He says to himself: whatever level thou hast
reached, there remain still higher perspectives, still more
46
exalted possibilities. Thus clear and defined as is to him

the direction in which he has to turn his steps, it is
equally clear to him that he can never speak of a goal: for
a new goal is only the beginning of a new path. Through
such a new goal man reaches a certain level of evolution:
but evolution itself continues illimitably. And what that
evolution may attain upon some more distant level, it
can never know upon its present stage. There is no
knowing the final goal: only a trusting in the path, in
evolution itself. There is knowing for everything which
man has already attained. It consists in the penetration
of an already present object by the powers of our spirit.
For the higher life of mans inner being, there is no such
knowing. Here the powers of our spirit must first
transfer the object itself into the realm of the existent;
they must first create for it an existence, constituted as is
natural existence.
Natural Science follows the evolution of beings from
the simplest up to the most perfected, to man himself.
This evolution lies before us as already completed. We
know it, by penetrating it with the powers of our spirit.
When evolution has reached humanity, man then finds
nothing further there before him as its continuation. He
himself accomplishes the further unfoldment. Henceforward he lives what for earlier stages he only knows. He
creates, according to the object, that which, for what has
gone before, he only copies in accordance with its
spiritual nature. That truth is not one with the existent
in nature, but naturally embraces both the existent and
the non-existent: of this truth Tauler is filled to
overflowing in all his feelings. It has been handed down
to us that Tauler was led to this fulfilling by an
47
illuminated layman, a Friend of God from the

Mountains.
We have here a mysterious story. As to where this
Friend of God lived there exist only conjectures; as to
who he was, not even these. He seems to have heard
much of Taulers way of preaching, and to have resolved
accordingly to journey to Tauler, who was then working
as a preacher in Strassburg, in order to fulfil a certain
duty by him. Taulers relation to the Friend of God, and
the influence which the latter exercised upon the former,
are to be found described in a text which is printed along
with the oldest editions of Taulers sermons under the
title, The Book of the Master. Therein a Friend of
God, in whom some seek to recognise the same who
came into relations with Tauler, gives an account of a
Master, whom some assert to be Tauler himself. He
relates how a transformation, a spiritual re-birth, was
brought about in a certain Master and how the latter,
when he felt his death drawing near, called his friend to
him and begged him to write the story of his
enlightenment, but yet to take care that no one should
ever learn of whom the book speaks. He asks this on
the ground that all the knowledge that proceeds from
him is yet not really from him. For know ye that God
hath brought all to pass through me, poor worm, and
that what it is, is not mine, it is of God.
A learned controversy which has connected itself with
the occurrence is not of the very smallest importance for
the essence of the matter. An effort was made to prove
on one side3 that the Friend of God never existed, but
3
Denifle: Die Dictungen des Gottesfreundes im Oberlande.
48
that his existence was fiction and that the books ascribed
to him come from another hand (Rulman Merswin). On
the other hand Wilhelm Preger has sought with many
arguments (in his History of German Mysticism) to support
the existence, the genuineness of the writings, and the
correctness of the facts that relate to Tauler.
I am here under no obligation to throw light by
presumptuous investigation upon a relationship as to
which any one, who understands how to read the
writings4 in question, will know that it should remain a
secret.
If one says of Tauler, that at a certain stage of his life
a transformation took place in him, that will be amply
sufficient. Taulers personality need no longer be in any
way considered in this connection, but only a personality
in general. As regards Tauler, we are only concerned
with the fact that we must understand his transformation
from the point of view set forth in what follows. If we
compare his later activity with his earlier, the fact of this
transformation is obvious without further search. I will
leave aside all outer circumstances and relate the inner
occurrences in the soul of the Master under the
influence of the layman. What my reader will
understand by the layman and the Master depends
entirely upon his own mentality; what I myself think
about it is a matter as to which I cannot know for whom
it is of any weight.
4The
writings in question are, among others: Von eime

eigenwilligen weltwisen manne, der von eime heiligen weltpriestere gewiset wart
uffe demuetige gehorsamme, 1338; Das Buch von den zwei Mannen; Der
gefangene Ritter, 1349; Die geistliche stege, 1350; Von der geistlichen Leiter,
1357; Das Meisterbuch, 1369; Geschichte von zwei fnfzehnjhzigen
Knaben.
49
A Master is instructing his disciples as to the

relationship of the soul to the All-Being of things. He
speaks of the fact that when man plunges into the
abysmal depths of his soul, he no longer feels the
natural, limited forces of the separated personality
working within him. Therein the separated man no
longer speaks, therein speaks God. There man does not
see God, or the world; there God sees Himself. Man has
become one with God. But the Master knows that this
teaching has not yet awakened to full life in him. He
thinks it with his understanding: but he does not yet live
in it with every fibre of his personality. He is thus
teaching about a state of things which he has not yet
completely lived through in himself. The description of
the condition corresponds to the truth; yet this truth has
no value if it does not gain life, if it does not bring itself
forth in reality as actually existent.
The layman or Friend of God hears of the
Master and his teachings. He is no less saturated with
the truth which the Master utters than the Master
himself. But he possesses this truth not as a matter of
the understanding; he has it as the whole force of his life.
He knows that when this truth has come to a man from
outside, he can himself give utterance to it, without even
in the least living in accordance with it. But in that case
he has nothing other in him than the natural knowledge
of the understanding. He then speaks of this natural
knowledge as if it were the highest, equivalent to the
working of the All-Being. It is not so, because it has not
been acquired in a life that has approached to this
knowledge as a transformed, a reborn life. What one
acquires only as a natural man, that remains only
natural,even when one afterwards expresses in words
50
the fundamental characteristic of the higher knowledge.

Outwards, from within the very nature itself, must the
transformation be accomplished.
Nature, which by living has evolved itself to a certain
level, must evolve further through life; something new
must come into existence through this further evolution.
Man must not only look backwards upon the evolution
which already lies behind himclaim as the highest that
which shapes itself according thereto in his spiritbut
he must look forward upon the uncreate: his knowledge
must be a beginning of a new content, not an end to the
content of evolution which already lies before it. Nature
advances from the worm to the mammal, from the
mammal to man, not in a conceptual but in an actual,
real process. Man has to repeat this process not in his
mind alone. The mental repetition is only the beginning
of a fresh, real evolution, which, however, despite its
being spiritual, is real. Man, then, does not merely know
what nature has produced; he continues nature; he
translates his knowledge into living action. He gives
birth within himself to the spirit, and this spirit advances
thence onwards from level to level of evolution, as
nature itself advances. Spirit begins a natural process
upon a higher level.
The talk about the God who contemplates Himself in
mans inner being, takes on a different character in one
who has recognised this. He attaches little importance to
the fact that an insight already attained has led him into
the depths of the All-Being; instead, his spiritual nature
acquires a new character. It unfolds itself further in the
direction determined by the All-Being. Such a man not
only looks at the world differently from one who merely
51
understands: he lives his life otherwise. He does not talk

of the meaning which life already has through the forces
and laws of the world: but he gives anew a fresh meaning
to his life. As little as the fish already has in itself what
makes its appearance on a later level of evolution as the
mammal, as little has the understanding man already in
himself what shall be born from him as the higher man.
If the fish could know itself and the things around it, it
would regard the being-a-fish as the meaning of life. It
would say: the All-Being is like the fish: in the fish the
All-Being beholds itself. Thus would the fish speak as
long as it remained constant to its understanding kind of
knowledge. In reality it does not remain constant
thereto. It reaches out beyond its knowledge with its
activity. It becomes a reptile and later a mammal. The
meaning which it gives to itself in reality reaches out
beyond the meaning which mere contemplation gives to
it.
In man also this must be so. He gives himself a
meaning in reality; he does not halt and stand still at the
meaning he already has, which his contemplation shows
him. Knowledge leaps out beyond itself, if only it
understands itself aright. Knowledge cannot deduce the
world from a ready-made God; it can only unfold itself
from a germ in the direction towards a God. The man
who has understood this will not regard God as
something that is outside of him; he will deal with God
as a being who wanders with him towards a goal, which
at the outset is just as unknown as the nature of the
mammal is unknown to the fish. He does not aim to be
the knower of the hidden, or of the self-revealing
existent God, but to be the friend of the divine doing
52
and working, which is exalted over both being and nonbeing.

The layman, who came to the Master, was a Friend
of God in this sense, and through him the Master
became from a contemplator of the being of God, one
who is alive in the spirit, one who not only
contemplated, but lived in the higher sense. The Master
now no longer brought forth concepts and ideas of the
understanding from his inner nature, but these concepts
and ideas burst forth from him as living, actualised spirit.
He no longer merely edified his hearers; he shook the
very foundations of their being. He no longer plunged
their souls into their inner being; he led them into a new
life. This is recounted to us symbolically: about forty
people fell down through his preaching and lay as if
dead.
*
As a guide to such a new life, we possess a book

about whose author nothing is known. Luther first
made it known in print. The philologist, Franz Pfeiffer,
has recently printed it according to a manuscript of the
year 1497, with a modern German translation facing the
original text. What precedes the book indicates its
purpose and its goal: Here begins the man from
Frankfurt and saith many very lofty and very beautiful
things about a perfect life. Upon this follows the
Preface about the man from Frankfurt: Almighty,
Eternal God hath uttered this little book through a wise,
understanding, truthful, righteous man, his friend, who
in former days was a German nobleman, a priest and a
custodian in the German House of Nobles at Frankfurt;
53
it teacheth many a lovely insight into Divine Wisdom,

and especially how and whereby one may know the true,
righteous friends of God, and also the unrighteous, false,
free-thinkers, who are very hurtful to Holy Church.
By free-thinkers one may perhaps understand those
who live in a merely conceptual world, like the Master
described above before his transformation by means of
the Friend of God, and by the true, righteous friends
of God, such as possess the disposition of the
layman. One may further ascribe to the book the
intention of so working upon its readers as the Friend
of God from the Mountains did upon the Master. It is
not known who the author was. But what does that
mean? It is not known when he was born and died, or
what he did in his outer life. That the author aimed to
preserve eternal secrecy about these facts of his outer
life, belongs naturally to the way in which he desired to
work. It is not the I of this or the other man, born at
a definite point of time, who is to speak to us, but the Iness in the depths whereof the separateness of
individualities (in the sense of Paul Asmus saying5)
must first unfold itself. If God took to Himself all men
who are or who have ever been, and became man in
them, and they became God in Him, and it did not
happen to me also, then my fall and my turning away
would never be made good, unless it also happened in
me too. And in this restoration and making good, I
neither can nor may nor should do anything thereto save
a mere pure suffering, so that God alone doeth and
worketh all things in me, and I suffer Him and all His
works and His divine will. But if I will not submit to
5
Vide ante, page 34.
54
this, but possess myself with egotism, i.e., with mine, and
I, to me, for me, and the like, that hinders God so that
He cannot work His work in me purely alone and
without hindrance. Therefore my fall and my turning
away remain thus not made good. The man from
Frankfurt aims to speak not as a separated individual;
he desires to let God speak. That he yet can do this only
as a single, distinct personality he naturally knows full
well; but he is a Friend of God, that means a man who
aims not at presenting the nature of life through
contemplation, but at pointing out the beginning of a
new evolutionary pathway through the living spirit.
The explanations in the book are various instructions
as to how one comes to this pathway. The root-thought
returns again and again: man must strip off everything
that is connected with that which makes him appear as a
single, separate personality. This thought seems to be
worked out only in respect of the moral life; it should be
extended, without further ado, to the higher life of
knowledge as well. One must annihilate in oneself
whatever appears as separateness: then separated
existence ceases; the All-Life enters into us. We cannot
master this All-Life by drawing it towards us. It comes
into us, when we reduce the separateness in us to silence.
We have the All-Life least of all just then, when we so
regard our separated existence as if the Whole already
dwelt within it. This first comes to light in the separated
existence when this separated existence no longer claims
for itself to be anything. This pretension on the part of
the separated existence our text terms assumption.
Through assumption the self makes it impossible
for itself that the Universal Self should enter into it. The
55
self then puts itself as a part, as something imperfect, in

the place of the whole, of the perfect. The perfect is a
being, that in itself and in its being has conceived and
resolved all beings, and without which and apart from
which there is no true being, and in which all things have
their being; for it is the being of all things and is in itself
unchangeable and immovable, and changes and moves
all other things. But the divided and the imperfect is that
which has sprung from out of this perfect, or becomes,
just as a ray or a light that flows forth from the sun or a
light and shines upon something, this or that. And that
is called the creature, and of all these divided things none
is the perfect. Therefore also is the perfect none of the
divided. . . . When the perfect cometh, the divided is
despised. But when does it come? I say: When so far as
is possible it is known, felt, tasted in the soul; for the
defect lies wholly in us and not in it. For just as the sun
illuminates the whole world and is just as near to the one
as to the other, yet a blind man sees it not. But that is no
defect of the sun but of the blind man. . . . If my eye is
to see anything, it must become cleansed, or be already
cleansed from all other things. . . . Now one might be
inclined to say: In so far then as it is unknowable and
inconceivable for all creatures, and since the soul is also
a creature, how can it then be known in the soul?
Answer: Therefore is it said, the creature shall be known
as a creature.
This is as much as to say that all creatures shall be
regarded as created and creation and not regard
themselves as I-ness and self-ness, whereby this knowing
is made impossible. For in whatever creature this
perfect one shall be known, there all creature-being,
created-being, I-ness, self-ness, and everything of the
56
kind must be lost, be and become naught.6 The soul

must therefore look within itself; there it finds its I-ness,
its self-ness. If it remains standing there, it thereby cuts
itself off from the perfect. If it regards its I-ness only as
a thing lent to it as it were, and annihilates it in spirit, it
will be seized upon by the stream of the All-Life, of
Perfection. When the creature assumes to itself
somewhat of good, as Being, Life, Knowledge, Power, in
short, aught of that which one calls good and thinks that
it is that, or that it belongs to it or comes from it, so
often and so much as that happens, does the creature
turn away. The created soul of man has two eyes.
The one is the possibility of seeing in eternity; the other
of seeing in time and in creation. Man should
therefore stand and be quite free without himself, that is
without self-ness, I-ness, me, mine, for me and the like,
so that he as little seeks and thinks of himself and what is
his in all things as if it did not exist; and he should
therefore also think little of himself, as if he were not,
and as if another had done all his deeds.7
One must also take account of the fact in regard to
the writer of these sentences, that the thought-content,
to which he gives a direction by his higher ideas and
feelings, is that of a believing priest in the spirit of his
own time. We are here concerned not with the thoughtcontent, but with the direction, not with the thoughts
but with the way of thinking. Any one who does not live
as he does in Christian dogmas, but in the conceptions
of natural science, finds in his sentences other thoughts;
but with these other thoughts he points in the same
6
7
Chap. i., Book of the Man from Frankfurt.

Chap. xv., Book of the Man from Frankfurt.
57
direction. And this direction is that which leads to the

overcoming of the self-hood, by the Self-hood itself.
The highest light shines for man in his Ego. But this
light only then imparts to his concept-world the right
reflection, when he becomes aware that it is not his own
self-light, but the universal world-light.
Hence there is no more important knowledge than
self-knowledge; and there is equally no knowledge which
leads so completely out beyond itself. When the self
knows itself aright, it is already no longer a self. In his
own language, the writer of the book in question
expresses this as follows: For Gods own-ness is void
of this and that, void of self-ness and I-ness; but the
nature and own-ness of the creature is that it seeketh and
willeth itself and its own and this and that; and in all
that it does or leaves undone, it seeketh to receive its
own benefit and profit.
When, now, the creature or the man loseth his ownness and his self-ness and himself, and goeth out from
himself, then God entereth in with His Own-ness, that is
with his Self-hood.8 Man soars upwards, from a view
of his Ego which makes the latter appear to him as his
very being, to a view such that it shows him his Ego as a
mere organ, in which the All-Being works upon itself. In
the concept-sphere of our text, this means: If man can
attain thereto that he belongeth unto God just as a mans
hand belongeth to him, then let him content himself and
seek no further.9 That is not intended to mean that
when man has reached a certain stage of his evolution he
8
9
Chap. xxiv, Book of the Man from Frankfurt.

Ibid., Chap. liv.
58
shall stand still there, but that, when he has got as far as
is indicated in the above words, he should not set on
foot further investigations into the meaning of the hand,
but rather make use of the hand, in order that it may
render service to the body to which it belongs.
*
H EINRICH S U S O and JOHANNES RUYSBROEK

possessed a type of mind which may be characterised as
genius for feeling. Their feelings are drawn by
something like instinct in the same direction in which
Eckharts and Taulers feelings were guided by their
higher thought-life. Susos heart turns devoutly towards
that Root-Being which embraces the individual man just
as much as the whole remaining world, and in whom
forgetting himself, he yearns to lose himself as a drop of
water in the mighty ocean. He speaks of this his
yearning towards the All-Being, not as of something that
he desires to embrace in thought; he speaks of it as a
natural impulse, that makes his soul drunken with desire
for the annihilation of its separated existence and its reawakening to life in the all-efficiency of the endless life.
Turn thine eyes to this being in its pure naked
simplicity, so that thou mayest let fall this and that
manifold being. Take being in itself alone, that is
unmoved with not-being; for all not-being denies all
being. A thing that is yet to become, or that has been, is
not now in actual presence.
Now, one cannot know mixed being or not-being
except by some mark of being as a whole. For if one will
understand a thing, the reason first encounters being,
and that is a being that worketh all things. It is a divided
59
being of this or that creature,for divided being is all

mingled with something of other-ness, with a possibility
of receiving something. Therefore the nameless divine
being must so be a whole being in itself, that it sustaineth
all divided beings by its presence.
Thus speaks Suso in the autobiography which he
wrote in conjunction with his pupil Elsbet Stglin. He,
too, is a pious priest and lives entirely in the Christian
circle of thought. He lives therein as if it were quite
unthinkable that anybody with his mental tendency could
live in any other world. But of him also it is true that
one can combine another concept-content with his
mental tendency. This is clearly borne out by the way in
which the content of the Christian teaching has become
for him actual inner experience, and his relation to Christ
has become a relation between his own spirit and the
eternal truth in a purely ideal, spiritual way.
He composed a Little Book of Eternal Wisdom. In
this he makes the Eternal Wisdom speak to its servant,
in other words to himself: Knowest thou me not? How
art thou so cast down, or hast thou lost consciousness
from agony of heart, my tender child? Behold it is I,
merciful Wisdom, who have opened wide the abyss of
fathomless compassion which yet is hidden from all the
saints, tenderly to receive thee and all repentant hearts; it
is I, sweet Eternal Wisdom, who was there poor and
miserable, so as to bring thee to thy worthiness; it is I,
who suffered bitter death, that I might make thee to live
again! I stand here pale and bleeding and lovely, as I
stood on the lofty gallows of the cross between the stern
judgment of my Father and thee. It is I, thy brother;
look, it is I, thy spouse! I have therefore wholly for-
60
gotten all thou hast done against me, as if it had never

been, if only thou turnest wholly to me and separatest
thyself no more from me.
All that is bodily and temporal in the Christian
conception has become for Suso, as one sees, a spiritualideal process in the recesses of his soul. From some
chapters of Susos biography mentioned above, it might
appear as if he had let himself be guided not by the mere
action of his own spiritual power, but through external
revelations, through ghostly visions. But he expresses
his meaning quite clearly about this. One attains to the
truth through reasonableness, not through any kind of
revelation. The difference between pure truth and twosouled visions in the matter of knowledge I will also tell
you. An immediate beholding of the bare Godhead, that
is right pure truth, without all doubt; and every vision, so
that it be reasonable and without pictures and the more
like it be unto that bare beholding, the purer and nobler
it is.
Meister Eckhart, too, leaves no doubt that he puts
aside the view which seeks to be spiritual in bodilyspacial forms, in appearances which one can perceive by
any senses. Minds of the type of Suso and Eckhart are
thus opponents of such a view, as that which finds
expression in the spiritualism which has developed
during the nineteenth century.
*
JOHANNES RUYSBROEK, the Belgian mystic, trod the

same path as Suso. His spiritual way found an active
opponent in Johannes Gerson (born 1363), who was for
61
some time Chancellor of the University of Paris and

played a momentous role at the Council of Constance.
Some light is thrown upon the nature of the mysticism
which was practised by Tauler, Suso and Ruysbroek, if
one compares it with the mystic endeavours of Gerson,
who had his predecessors in Richard de St. Victor,
Bonaventura, and others.
Ruysbroek himself fought against those whom he
reckoned among the heretical mystics. As such he
considered all those who, through an easy-going
judgment of the understanding, hold that all things
proceed from one Root-Being, who therefore see in the
world only a manifoldness and in God the unity of this
manifoldness. Ruysbroek does not count himself among
these, for he knew that one cannot attain to the RootBeing by the contemplation of things, but only by raising
oneself from this lower mode of contemplation to a
higher one.
Similarly, he turned against those who seek to see
without further ado, in the individual man, in his
separated existence (in his creature-being), his higher
nature also. He deplored not a little the error which
confuses all differences in the sense-world, and asserts
light-mindedly that things are different only in
appearance, but that in their being they are all alike. This
would amount, for a way of thinking like Ruysbroeks, to
the same thing as saying: That the fact that the trees in
an avenue seem to our seeing to come together does not
concern us. In reality they are everywhere equally far
apart, therefore our eyes ought to accustom themselves
to see correctly. But our eyes see aright. That the trees
run together depends upon a necessary law of nature;
62
and we have nothing to reproach our seeing with, but on

the contrary to recognise in spirit why we see them thus.
Moreover, the mystic does not turn away from the
things of the senses. As things of the senses, he accepts
them as they are, and it is clear to him that through no
judgment of the understanding can they become
otherwise. But in spirit he passes beyond both senses
and understanding, and then only does he find the unity.
His faith is unshakable that he can develop himself to
the beholding of this unity. Therefore does he ascribe to
the nature of man the divine spark which can be brought
to shine in him, to shine by its own light.
People of the type of Gerson think otherwise. They
do not believe in this self-shining. For them, what man
can behold remains always a something external, that
from some side or other must come to them externally.
Ruysbroek believed that the highest wisdom must needs
shine forth for mystic contemplation. Gerson believed
only that the soul can illuminate the content of an
external teaching (that of the Church). For Gerson,
Mysticism was nothing else but possessing a warm
feeling for everything that is revealed in this teaching.
For Ruysbroek, it was a faith, that the content of all
teaching is also born in the soul. Therefore Gerson
blames Ruysbroek in that the latter imagines that not
only has he the power to behold the All-Being with
clearness, but that in this beholding there expresses itself
an activity of the All-Being. Ruysbroek simply could not
be understood by Gerson. Both spoke of two wholly
different things. Ruysbroek has in his minds eye the life
of the soul that lives itself into oneness with its God;
Gerson, only a soul-life that seeks to love the God
63
whom it can never actually live in itself. Like many

others, Gerson fought against something that was
strange to him only because he could not grasp it in
experience.
CARDINAL NICHOLAS OF CUSA

A GLORIOUSLY shining star in the sky of the thoughtlife of the Middle Ages is Nicholas Chrysippus of Cusa
(at Trevis, 1401-1464). He stands upon the summit of
the knowledge of his time. In mathematics he
accomplished remarkable work. In natural science he
may be described as the forerunner of Copernicus, for
he took up the standpoint that the earth is a moving
celestial body like others. He had already broken away
from a view upon which even a hundred years later the
great astronomer, Tycho Brahe, based himself, when he
hurled against the teaching of Copernicus the sentence:
The earth is a gross, heavy mass inapt for movement;
how, then, can Copernicus make a star of it and run it
about in the air? The same man who thus not only
embraced all the knowledge of his time, but also
extended it further, possessed in addition, in a high
degree, the power of awakening this knowledge in the
inner life, so that it not only illuminates the external
world, but also mediates for man that spiritual life, which
from the profounder depths of his soul he needs must
long after.
If we compare Nicholas with such spirits as Eckhart
or Tauler, we obtain a remarkable result. Nicholas is the
scientific thinker, striving to lift himself from research
about the things of the world on to the level of a higher
perception; Eckhart and Tauler are the faithful believers,
who seek the higher life from within the content of this
faith. Eventually Nicholas arrives at the same inner life
as Meister Eckhart; but the inner life of the former has a
rich store of knowledge as its content.
66
The full significance of this difference becomes clear

when we reflect that for the student of science the
danger lies very near at hand of misunderstanding the
scope of that species of knowing which enlightens us
regarding the various special departments of knowledge.
He can very readily be misled into believing that there
really is only one single kind or mode of knowledge; and
then he will either over- or under-rate this knowledge
which leads us to the goal in the various special sciences.
In the one case he will approach the subject-matter of
the highest spiritual life as he would a problem in
physics, and proceed to deal with it by means of
concepts such as he would apply to gravitation or
electricity. Thus, according as he believes himself to be
more or less enlightened, the world will appear to him as
a blindly working machine, or an organism, or as the
teleological structure of a personal God: perhaps even as
a form which is ruled and pervaded by a more or less
clearly conceived World-Soul. In the other case he
notes that the knowledge, of which alone he has any
experience, is adapted only to the things of the senseworld; and then he will become a sceptic, saying to
himself: We can know nothing about things which lie
beyond the world of the senses. Our knowledge has a
limit. For the needs of the higher life we have no choice
but to throw ourselves blindly into the arms of faith
untouched by knowledge. And for a learned theologian
like Nicholas of Cusa, who was also a scientist, this
second danger lay peculiarly near at hand. For he
emerged, along the lines of his learned training, from
Scholasticism,the way of conceiving things which was
dominant in scientific life within the Mediaeval Church;
a mode of thought that St. Thomas Aquinas (12271274), the Prince of Scholastics, had brought to its
NICHOLAS OF CUS A
67
highest perfection. We must take this mode of conceiving things as the background, when we desire to
portray the personality of Nicholas of Cusa.
Scholasticism is, in the highest degree, a product of
human sagacity; and in it the logical capacity celebrated
its highest triumphs. Any one who is striving to work
out concepts in their sharpest, most clear-cut outlines,
ought to go to the Scholastics for instruction. They
afford us the High School for the technique of thinking.
They possess an incomparable skill in moving in the field
of pure thinking. It is easy to undervalue what they were
able to achieve in this field; for it is only with difficulty
accessible to man as regards most departments of
knowledge. The majority rise to its level only in the
domains of numbers and calculation, and in reflecting
upon the connection of geometrical figures.
We can count by adding in thought a unity to a
number, without needing to call to our help senseconceptions. We calculate also, without such conceptions, in the pure element of thought. In regard to
geometrical figures, we know that they never perfectly
coincide with any sensible perception. There is no such
thing within sensible reality as an ideal circle. Yet our
thinking concerns itself with the purely ideal circle. For
things and processes which are more complicated than
forms of number and space, it is more difficult to find
the ideal counterparts. This has even led so far that it
has been contended, from various sides, that in the
separated departments of knowledge there is only so
much of real science as there is of measuring and
counting.
68
The truth about this is that most men are not capable
of grasping the pure thought-element where it is no
longer concerned with what can be counted or
measured. But the man who cannot do that for the
higher realms of life and knowledge, resembles in that
respect a child, which has not yet learned to count
otherwise than by adding one pea to another. The
thinker who said there was just so much real science in
any domain as there was mathematics in it, was not very
much at home in the matter. One ought rather to
demand that everything which cannot be measured or
counted should be handled just as ideally as the forms of
number and space. And the Scholastics in the fullest
way did justice to this demand. They sought everywhere
the thought-content of things, just as the mathematician
seeks it in the field of what is measurable and countable.
In spite of this perfected logical art, the Scholastics
attained only to a one-sided and subordinate conception
of Knowledge. Their conception is this: that in the act
of knowing, man creates in himself an image of what he
is to know. It is obvious, without further discussion,
that with such a conception of the knowing process all
reality must be located outside of the knowing. For one
can grasp, in knowing, not the thing itself, but only an
image of that thing.
Also, in knowing himself man cannot grasp himself,
but again, what he does know of himself is only an image
of himself. It is entirely from out of the spirit of
Scholasticism that an accurate student thereof10 says:
K. Werner, in his book upon Frank Suarez and the Scholasticism
of the Last Centuries, p. 122.
10
NICHOLAS OF CUS A
69
Man has in time no perception of his ego, of the hidden

ground of his spiritual being and life, . . . he will never
attain to beholding himself; for either, estranged for ever
from God, he will find in himself only a fathomless, dark
abyss, an endless emptiness, or else, made blessed in
God, he will find on turning his gaze inwards just that
very God, the sun of whose mercy is shining within him,
whose image and likeness shapes itself in the spiritual
traits of his nature.
Whoever thinks like this about all knowing, has only
such a conception of knowing as is applicable to external
things. The sensible factor in anything always remains
external for us; therefore we can only take up into our
knowledge pictures of whatever is sensible in the world.
When we perceive a colour or a stone, we are unable, in
order to know the being of the colour or the stone, to
become ourselves the colour or the stone. Just as little
can the colour or the stone transform itself into a part of
our own being. It may, however, be questioned whether
the conception of such a knowing-process, wholly
directed to what is external in things, is an exhaustive
one.
For Scholasticism, all human knowing does certainly
in the main coincide with this kind of knowing. Another
admirable authority on Scholasticism11 characterises the
conception of knowledge with which we are concerned
in this direction of thought in the following manner:
Our spirit, allied in earth-life with the body, is primarily
focussed upon the surrounding bodily world, but
ordered in the direction of the spiritual therein: the
11
Otto Willman, in his History of Idealism, vol. ii., p. 395.
70
beings, natures, forms of things, the elements of

existence, which are related to our spirit and offer to it
the rungs for its ascent to the super-sensuous; the field
of our knowledge is therefore the realm of experience,
but we must learn to understand what it offers, to
penetrate to its meaning and thought, and thereby
unlock for ourselves the world of thought.
The Scholastic could not attain to any other
conception of knowledge, for the dogmatic content of
his theology prevented his doing so. If he had directed
the gaze of his spiritual eye upon that which he regards
as an image only, he would then have seen that the
spiritual content of things reveals itself in this supposed
image; he would then have found that in his own inner
being the God not alone images Himself, but that He
lives therein, is present there in His own nature. He
would have beheld in gazing into his own inner being,
not a dark abyss, an endless emptiness, but also not
merely an image of God; he would have felt that a life
pulses within him, which is the very life of God itself;
and that his own life is verily just Gods life.
This the Scholastic dared not admit. The God must
not, in his opinion, enter into him and speak forth from
him; God must only be in him as an image. In reality,
the Godhead must be external to the self. Accordingly,
also, it could not reveal itself from within through the
spiritual life, but must reveal itself from outside, through
supernatural communication. What is aimed at in this, is
just exactly what is least of all attained thereby. It is
sought to attain to the highest possible conception of the
Godhead. In reality, the Godhead is dragged down and
made a thing among other things; only that these other
NICHOLAS OF CUS A
71
things reveal themselves to us naturally, through

experience; while the Godhead is supposed to reveal
Itself to us supernaturally. A difference, however,
between the knowledge of the divine and of the created
is attained in this way: that as regards the created, the
external thing is given in experience, so that we have
knowledge of it; while as regards the divine, the object is
not given to us in experience; we can reach it only in
faith.
The highest things, therefore, are for the Scholastic
not objects of knowledge, but mainly of faith. It is true
that the relation of knowledge to faith must not be so
conceived, according to the Scholastic view, as if in a
certain domain only knowledge, and in another only faith
reigned. For the knowledge of that which is, is possible
to us, because it, itself, springs from a creative element;
things are for the spirit, because they are from the spirit;
they have something to tell us, because they have a
meaning which a higher intelligence has placed in
them.12 Because God has created the world according
to thoughts, we too are able, when we grasp the thoughts
of the world, to seize also upon the traces of the Divine
in the world, through scientific reflection. But what God
is, according to His own being, we can learn only from
that revelation which He has given to us in supernatural
ways, and in which we must believe. What we ought to
think about the highest things, must be decided not by
any human knowledge, but by faith; and to faith
belongs all that is contained in the writings of the New
and of the Old Testament, and in the divine
traditions.13
12
13
Otto Willman, History of Idealism, vol. ii., p. 383.

Joseph Kleutgen, Die Theologie der Vorzeit, vol. i., p. 39.
72
It is not our task here to present and establish in detail

the relation of the content of faith to the content of
knowledge. In truth, all and every faith-content
originates from some actual inner human experience that
has once been undergone. Such an experience is then
preserved, as far as its outer form goes, without the
consciousness of how it was acquired. And people
maintain in regard to it that it came into the world by
supernatural revelation. The content of the Christian
faith was simply accepted by the Scholastics. Science,
inner experience, had no business to claim any rights
over it. As little as science can create a tree, just so little
dared Scholasticism to create a conception of God; it
was bound to accept the revealed one ready-made and
complete, just as natural science has to accept the tree
ready-made. That the spiritual itself can shine forth and
live in mans inner nature, could never, never be
admitted by the Scholastic. He therefore drew the
frontier of the rightful power of knowledge at the point
where the domain of outer experience ceases. Human
knowledge must not dare to beget out of itself a
conception of the higher beings; it is bound to accept a
revealed one. The Scholastics naturally could not admit
that in doing so they were accepting and proclaiming as
revealed a conception which in truth had really been
begotten at an earlier stage of mans spiritual life.
Thus, in the course of its development, all those ideas
had vanished from Scholasticism which indicated the
ways and means by which man had begotten, in a natural
manner, his conceptions of the divine. In the first
centuries of the development of Christianity, at the time
of the Church Fathers, we see the doctrinal content of
theology growing bit by bit by the assimilation of inner
NICHOLAS OF CUS A
73
experiences. In Johannes Scotus Erigena, who stood at

the summit of Christian theological culture in the ninth
century, we find this doctrinal content being handled
entirely as an inner living experience. With the
Scholastics of the following centuries, this characteristic
of an inner, living experience disappears altogether: the
old doctrinal content becomes transposed into the
content of an external, supernatural revelation.
One might, therefore, understand the activity of the
mystical theologians, Eckhart, Tauler, Suso and their
associates, in the following sense: they were stimulated
by the doctrines of the Church, which were contained in
its theology, but had been misinterpreted, to bring to
birth afresh from within themselves, as inner living
experience, a similar content.
*
Nicholas of Cusa sets out to mount from the

knowledge one acquires in the isolated sciences up to the
inner living experiences. There can be no doubt that the
excellent logical technique which the Scholastics have
developed, and for which Nicholas himself was
educated, forms a most effective means of attaining to
these inner experiences, even though the Scholastics
themselves were held back from this road by their
positive faith. But one can only understand Nicholas
fully when one reflects that his calling as a priest, which
raised him to the dignity of Cardinal, prevented him
from coming to a complete breach with the faith of the
Church, which found an expression appropriate to the
age in Scholasticism. We find him so far along the road,
that a single step further would necessarily have carried
74
him out of the Church. We shall therefore understand

the Cardinal best if we complete the one step more
which he did not take; and then, looking backwards,
throw light upon what he aimed at.
The most significant thought in Nicholas mental life
is that of learned ignorance. By this he means a form
of knowing which occupies a higher level as compared
with ordinary knowledge. In the lower sense, knowledge
is the grasping of an object by the mind, or spirit. The
most important characteristic of knowing is that it gives
us light about something outside of the spirit, that
therefore it directs its gaze upon something different
from itself. The spirit, therefore, is concerned in the
knowing-process with things thought of as outside itself.
Now what the spirit develops in itself about things is the
being of those things. The things are spirit. Man sees
the spirit so far only through the sensible encasement.
What lies outside the spirit is only this sensible
encasement; the being of the things enters into the spirit.
If, then, the spirit turns its attention to this being of the
things, which is of like nature with itself, then it can no
longer talk of knowing; for it is not looking at anything
outside of itself, but is looking at something which is
part of itself; is, indeed, looking at itself. It no longer
knows; it only looks upon itself. It is no longer
concerned with a knowing, but with a not-knowing.
No longer does man grasp something through the
mind; he beholds without conceiving his own life.
This highest stage of knowing is, in comparison with the
lower stages, a not-knowing.
But it is obvious that the essential being of things can
only be reached through this stage of knowing. Thus
NICHOLAS OF CUS A
75
Nicholas of Cusa in speaking of his learned notknowing is really speaking of nothing else but
knowing come to a new birth, as an inner experience.
He tells us himself how he came to this inner experience.
I made many efforts to unite the ideas of God and the
world, of Christ and the Church, into a single root-idea;
but nothing satisfied me until at last, on my way back
from Greece by sea, my minds vision, as if by an
illumination from above, soared up to that perception in
which God appeared to me as the supreme Unity of all
contradictions. To a greater or less extent this
illumination was due to influences derived from the
study of his predecessors. One recognises in his way of
looking at things a peculiar revival of the views which we
meet with in the writings of a certain Dionysius. The
above-mentioned Scotus Erigena translated these
writings into Latin, and speaks of their author as the
great and divine revealer.
The works in question are first mentioned in the first
half of the sixth century. They were ascribed to that
Dionysius, the Areopagite, named in the Acts of the
Apostles, who was converted to Christianity by St. Paul.
When these writings were really composed may here be
left an open question. Their contents worked powerfully
upon Nicholas as they had already worked upon Scotus
Erigena, and as they must also have been in many ways
stimulating for the way of thinking of Eckhart and his
colleagues. This learned not-knowing is in a certain
way preformed in these writings. Here we can only
indicate the essential trait in the way of conceiving things
found in these works. Man primarily knows the things
of the sense-world. He forms thoughts about its being
and action. The Primal Cause of all things must lie
76
higher than these things themselves. Man therefore

must not seek to grasp this Primal Cause by means of
the same concepts and ideas as things. If he therefore
ascribes to the Root-Being (God) attributes which he has
learned to know in lower things, such attributes can be at
best auxiliary conceptions of his weak spirit, which drags
down the Root-Being to itself, in order to conceive it.
In truth, therefore, no attribute whatsoever which
lower things possess can be predicated of God. It must
not even be said that God is. For being too is a
concept which man has formed from lower things. But
God is exalted above being and not-being. The
God to whom we ascribe attributes, is therefore not the
true God. We come to the true God, when we think of
an Over-God above and beyond any God with such
attributes. Of this Over-God we can know nothing in
the ordinary sense. In order to attain to Him,
knowing must merge into not-knowing.
One sees that at the root of such a view there lies the
consciousness that man himself is able to develop a
higher knowing, which is no longer mere knowingin a
purely natural manneron the basis of what his various
sciences have yielded him. The Scholastic view declared
knowledge to be impotent to such a development; and,
at the point where knowledge is supposed to cease, it
called in to the help of knowledge a faith basing itself
upon external revelation. Nicholas of Cusa was thus
upon the road to develop out of knowledge itself that
which the Scholastics had declared to be unattainable for
knowledge.
NICHOLAS OF CUS A
77
We thus see that, from Nicholas of Cusas point of

view, there can be no question of there being only one
kind or mode of knowing. On the contrary, for him,
knowing clearly divides itself into two, first into such
knowing as mediates our acquaintance with external
objects, and second into such as is itself the object of
which one gains knowledge. The first mode of knowing
is dominant in the sciences, which teach us about the
things and occurrences of the outer world; the second is
in us when we ourselves live in the knowledge we have
acquired. This second kind of knowing grows out of the
first. Now, however, it is still one and the same world
with which both these modes of knowing are concerned;
and it is one and the self-same man who is active in
both. Hence the question must arise, whence comes it
that one and the self-same man develops two different
kinds of knowledge of one and the same world.
Already, in connection with Tauler, the direction
could be indicated in which the answer to this question
must be sought. Here in Nicholas of Cusa this answer
can be still more definitely formulated. In the first place,
man lives as a separated (individual) being amidst other
separated beings. In addition to the effects which the
other beings produce on each other, there arises in his
case the (lower) knowledge. Through his senses he
receives impressions from other beings, and works up
these impressions with his inner spiritual powers. He
then turns his spiritual gaze away from external things,
and beholds himself as well as his own activity. In so
doing self-knowledge arises in him. But so long as he
remains on this level of self-knowledge, he does not, in
the true sense of the word, behold himself. He can still
believe that some hidden being is active within him,
78
whose manifestations and effects are only that which

appears to him to be his own activities. But now the
moment may come in which, through an incontrovertible inner experience, it becomes clear to the man
that he experiences, in what he perceives or feels within
himself, not the manifestation or effect of any hidden
power or being, but this very being itself in its most
essential and intimate form. Then he can say to himself:
In a certain way I find all other things ready given, and I
myself, standing apart from and outside of them, add to
them whatever the spirit has to tell about them. But
what I thus creatively add to the things in myself, therein
do I myself live; that is myself, my very own being. But
what is that which speaks there in the depths of my
spirit? It is the knowledge which I have acquired of the
things of the world. But in this knowledge there speaks
no longer an effect, a manifestation; that which speaks
expresses itself wholly, holding back nothing of what it
contains. In this knowledge, there speaks the world in
all its immediacy. But I have acquired this knowledge of
things and of myself, as one thing among other things.
From out my own being I myself speak, and the things,
too, speak.
Thus, in truth, I am giving utterance no longer only to
my own being; I am also giving utterance to the being of
things themselves. My ego is the form, the organ in
which the things express themselves about themselves. I
have gained the experience that in myself I experience
my own essential being; and this experience expands
itself in me to the further one that in myself and through
myself the All-Being Itself expresses Itself, or in other
words, knows Itself. I can now no longer feel myself as
NICHOLAS OF CUS A
79
a thing among other things; I can now only feel myself as

a form in which the All-Being lives out Its own life.
It is thus only natural that one and the same man
should have two modes of knowing. Judging by the
facts of the senses, he is a thing among other things, and,
in so far as he is that, he gains for himself a knowledge
of these things; but at any moment he can acquire the
higher experience that he is really the form in which the
All-Being beholds Itself. Then man transforms himself
from a thing among other things into a form of the AllBeingand, along with himself, the knowledge of things
transforms itself into the expression of the very being of
things. But as a matter of fact this transformation can
only be accomplished through man. That which is
mediated in the higher knowledge does not exist as long
as this higher knowledge itself is not present. Man
becomes only a real being in the creation of this higher
knowledge; and only through mans higher knowledge
can things also bring their being forth into real existence.
If, therefore, we demand that man shall add nothing
to things through his inner knowledge, but merely give
expression to whatever already exists in the things
outside of himself, that would really amount to a
complete abnegation of all higher knowledge. From the
fact that man, in respect of his sensible life, is merely one
thing among others, and that he only attains to the
higher knowledge when he himself accomplishes with
himself, as a being of the senses, the transformation into
a higher being, it follows that he can never replace the
one kind of knowledge by the other. His spiritual life
consists, on the contrary, in a ceaseless oscillation
between these two poles of knowledgebetween
80
knowing and seeing. If he shuts himself off from the

seeing, he abandons the real nature of things: if he seeks
to shut himself off from sense-perception, he would shut
out from himself the things whose nature he seeks to
know. It is these very same things which reveal
themselves alike in the lower knowing and the higher
seeing; only in the one case they reveal themselves
according to their outer appearance; in the other
according to their inner being. Thus it is not due to the
things themselves that, at a certain stage, they appear
only as external things; but their doing so is due to the
fact that man must first of all raise and transform himself
to the level upon which the things cease to be external
and outside.
In the light of these considerations, some of the views
which natural science has developed during the
nineteenth century appear for the first time in the right
light. The supporters of these views tell us that we hear,
see, and touch the objects of the physical world through
our senses. The eye, for instance, transmits to us a
phenomenon of light, a colour. Thus we say that a body
emits red light, when with the help of the eye we
experience the sensation red. But the eye can give us
this same sensation in other cases also. If the eyeball is
struck or pressed upon, or if an electric spark is allowed
to pass through the head, the eye has a sensation of light.
It is thus evident that even in the cases in which we
have the sensation of a body emitting red light,
something may really be happening in that body which
has no sort of resemblance to the colour we sensate.
Whatever may be actually happening outside of us in
space, so long as what happens is capable of making an
NICHOLAS OF CUS A
81
impression on the eye, there arises in us the sensation of

light. Thus what we experience arises in us, because we
possess organs constituted in a particular manner. What
happens outside in space, remains outside of us; we
know only the effects which the external happenings call
up in us. Hermann Helmholtz (1821-1893) has given a
clearly outlined expression to this thought :
Our sensations are simply effects which are
produced in our organs by external causes, and the
manner in which such an effect will show itself depends,
naturally enough, altogether upon the kind of apparatus
upon which the action takes place. In so far as the
quality of our sensation gives us information as to the
peculiar nature of the external action which produces the
sensation, so far can the sensation be regarded as a sign
or symbol of this external action, but not as an image or
reproduction of it. For we expect in a picture some kind
of resemblance to the object it represents; thus in a
statue, resemblance of form; in a drawing, resemblance
in the perspective projection of the field of view; in a
painting, resemblance of colour in addition. A symbol,
however, is not required to have any sort of resemblance
to that which it symbolises. The necessary connection
between the object and the symbol is limited to this: that
the same object coming into action under the same
conditions shall call up the same symbol, and that
therefore different symbols shall always correspond to
different objects. When berries of a certain kind in
ripening produce together red colouration and sugar,
then red colour and a sweet taste will always find
themselves together in our sensation of berries of this
form14
14
Cp. Helmholtz, Die Thatsachen der Wahrnehmung, p. 12 et seq. . . .
82
Let us follow out step by step the line of thought

which this view makes its own. It is assumed that
something happens outside of me in space; this produces
an effect upon my sense-organs; and my nervous system
conducts the impression thus made to my brain. There
another occurrence is brought about. I experience the
sensation red. Now follows the assertion: therefore
the sensation red is not outside, not external to me; it
is in me. All our sensations are merely symbols or signs
of external occurrences of whose real quality we know
nothing. We live and move in our sensations and know
nothing of their origin. In the spirit of this line of
thought, it would thus be possible to assert that if we
had no eyes, colour would not exist; for then there
would be nothing to translate this, to us, wholly
unknown external happening into the sensation red.
For many people this line of thought possesses a
curious attraction; but nevertheless it originates in a
complete misconception of the facts under consideration. (Were it not that many of the present day
scientists and philosophers are blinded even to absurdity
by this line of thought, one would need to say less about
it. But, as a matter of fact, this blindness has ruined in
many respects the thinking of the present day.) In truth,
since man is but one object or thing among other things,
it naturally follows that if he is to have any experience of
them at all, they must make an impression upon him
somehow or other. Something that happens outside the
man must cause something to happen within him, if in
(cont.). . . . I have characterised this kind of conception in detail
in my Philosophie der Freiheit, Berlin, 1894, and in my Welt- und
Lebens-anschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, vol. ii., p. i., etc.
14
NICHOLAS OF CUS A
83
his visual field the sensation red is to make its

appearance.
The whole question turns upon this: What is without?
what within? Outside of him something happens in
space and time. But within there is undoubtedly a
similar occurrence. For in the eye there occurs such a
process, which manifests itself to the brain when I
perceive the colour red. This process which goes on
inside me, I cannot perceive directly, any more than I
can directly perceive the wave motions outside which
the physicist conceives of as answering to the colour
red. But really it is only in this sense that I can speak
of an inside and an outside at all. Only on the plane
of sense-perception can the opposition between
outside and inside hold good.
The recognition of this leads me to assume the
existence outside of a process in space and time,
although I do not directly perceive it at all. And the
same recognition further leads me to postulate a similar
process within myself, although I cannot directly
perceive that either. But, as a matter of fact, I habitually
postulate analogous occurrences in space and time in
ordinary life which I do not directly perceive; as, for
instance, when I hear piano-playing next door, and
assume that a human being in space is seated at the
piano and is playing upon it. And my conception, when
I speak of processes happening outside of, and within
me, is just the same. I assume that these processes have
qualities analogous to those of the processes which do
fall within the province of my senses, only that, because
of certain reasons, they escape my direct perception.
84
If I were to attempt to deny to these processes all the

qualities which my senses show me in the domains of
space and time, I should in reality and in truth be trying
to think something not unlike the famous knife without
a handle, whose blade was wanting. Therefore, I can
only say that space and time processes take place
outside me; these bring about space and time
processes within me; and both are necessary if the
sensation red is to appear in my field of vision. And,
in so far as this red is not in space and time, I shall
seek for it equally in vain, whether I seek without or
within myself. Those scientists and philosophers who
cannot find it outside, ought not to want to find it
inside either. For it is not inside, in exactly the same
sense in which it is not outside. To declare that the
total content of that which the sense-world presents to
us is but an inner world of sensation or feeling, and then
to endeavour to tack on something external or
outside to it, is a wholly impossible conception.
Hence, we must not speak of red, sweet, hot,
etc., as being symbols, or signs, which as such are only
aroused within us, and to which outside of us
something totally different corresponds. For that which
is really set going within us, as the effect of some
external happening, is something altogether other than
what appears in the field of our sensations. If we want
to call that which is within us a symbol, then we can say:
These symbols make their appearance within our
organism, in order to mediate to us the perceptions
which, as such, in their immediacy, are neither within nor
outside of us, but belong, on the contrary, to that
common world, of which my external world and my
internal world are only parts. In order to be able to
NICHOLAS OF CUS A
85
grasp this common world, I must, it is true, raise myself

to that higher plane of knowledge, for which an inner
and an outer no longer exist. (I know quite well that
people who pride themselves on the gospel that our
entire world of experience builds itself up out of
sensations and feelings of unknown origin will look
contemptously upon these remarks; as, for instance, Dr.
Erich Adikes in his book, Kant contra Haeckel, observes
condescendingly: At first people like Haeckel and
thousands of his type philosophise gaily away without
troubling themselves about theory of knowledge or
critical self-reflection. Such gentlemen have no inkling
of how cheap their own theories of knowledge are. They
suspect the lack of critical self-reflection only in others.
Let us leave to them their wisdom.)
Nicholas of Cusa expresses some very telling thoughts
bearing directly upon this very point. The clear and
distinct way in which he holds apart the lower and the
higher knowledge enables him, on the one side, to arrive
at a full and complete recognition of the fact that man as
a sense-being can only have in himself processes which,
as effects, must necessarily be altogether unlike the
corresponding external processes; while, on the other
side, it guards him against confusing the inner processes
with the facts which make their appearance in the field
of our perceptions, and which, in their immediacy, are
neither outside nor inside, but altogether transcend this
opposition of in and out.
But Nicholas was hampered in the thorough carrying
through of these ideas by his priestly garments. So we
see how he makes a fine beginning with the progress
from knowing to not-knowing. At the same time
86
we must also note that in the domain of the higher

knowledge, or ignorance, he unfolds practically
nothing but the content of the theological teaching
which the Scholastics also give us. Certainly he knows
how to expound this theological content in a most able
manner. He presents us with teachings about
Providence, Christ, the creation of the world, mans
salvation, the moral life, which are kept thoroughly in
harmony with dogmatic Christianity. It would have been
in accordance with his mental starting point, to say: I
have confidence in human nature that after having
plunged deeply into the science of things in all
directions, it is capable of transforming from within itself
this knowing into a not-knowing, in such wise that
the highest insight shall bring satisfaction. In that case,
he would not simply have accepted the traditional ideas
of the soul, immortality, salvation, God, creation, the
Trinity, and so forth, as he actually did, but he would
have represented his own.
But Nicholas personally was, however, so saturated
with the conceptions of Christianity that he might well
believe himself to have awakened in himself a notknowing of his own, while yet he was merely bringing
to light the traditional views in which he was brought up.
But he stood upon the verge of a terrible precipice in the
spiritual life of man. He was a scientific man. Now
science, primarily, estranges us from the innocent
harmony in which we live with the world so long as we
abandon ourselves to a purely naive attitude towards life.
In such an attitude to life, we dimly feel our connection
with the world-whole.
NICHOLAS OF CUS A
87
We are beings like others, forming links in the chain

of Natures workings. But with knowledge we separate
ourselves off from this whole; we create within us a
mental world, wherewith we stand alone and isolated
over against Nature. We have become enriched; but our
riches are a burden which we bear with difficulty; for it
weighs primarily upon ourselves alone. And we must
now, by our own strength, find the way back again to
Nature. We have to recognise that we ourselves must
now fit our wealth into the stream of world activities,
just as previously Nature herself had fitted in our
poverty. All evil demons lie in wait for man at this point.
His strength can easily fail him. Instead of himself
accomplishing this fitting in, he will, if his strength thus
fails, seek refuge in some revelation coming from
without, which frees him again from his loneliness,
which leads back once more the knowledge that he feels
a burden, into the very womb of being, into the
Godhead. Like Nicholas of Cusa, he will believe that he
is travelling his own road; and yet in reality he will be
only following the path which his own spiritual evolution
has pointed out for him.
Now there arein the mainthree roads which one
can follow, when once one has reached the point at
which Nicholas had arrived: the one is positive faith,
forcing itself upon us from without; the second is
despair; one stands alone with ones burden, and feels
the whole universe tottering with oneself; the third road
is the development of the deepest, most inward powers
of man. Confidence, trust in the world must be one of
our guides upon this third path; courage, to follow that
confidence whithersoever it may lead us, must be the
other.
AGRIPPA VON NETTESHEIM

AND
THEOPHRASTUS PARACELSUS
BOTH Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim
(1487-1535) and Theophrastus Paracelsus (1493-1541)
followed the same road along which points Nicholas of
Cusas way of conceiving things. They devoted themselves to the study of Nature, and sought to discover her
laws by all the means in their power and as thoroughly as
possible. In this knowledge of Nature, they saw the true
basis of all higher knowledge. They strove to develop
this higher knowledge from within the science or
knowledge of Nature by bringing that knowledge to a
new birth in the spirit.
Agrippa von Nettesheim led a much varied life. He
sprang from a noble family and was born in Cologne.
He early studied medicine and law, and sought to obtain
clear insight into the processes of Nature in the way
which was then customary within certain circles and
societies, or even among isolated investigators, who
studiously kept secret whatever of the knowledge of
Nature they discovered. For these purposes he went
repeatedly to Paris, to Italy, and to England, and also
visited the famous Abbot Trithemius of Sponheim in
Wrzburg. He taught at various times in learned
institutions, and here and there entered the service of
rich and distinguished people, at whose disposal he
placed his abilities as a statesman and a man of science.
If the services that he rendered are not always described
by his biographers as unobjectionable, if it is said that he
made money under the pretence of understanding secret
90
arts and conferring benefits on people thereby, there

stands against this his unmistakable, unresting impulse to
acquire honestly the entire knowledge of his age, and to
deepen this knowledge in the direction of a higher
cognition of the world.
We may see in him very plainly the endeavour to
attain to a clear and definite attitude towards natural
science on the one hand, and to the higher knowledge
on the other. But he only can attain to such an attitude
who is possessed of a clear insight as to the respective
roads which lead to one and to the other kind of
knowledge. As true as it is on the one hand that natural
science must eventually be raised into the region of the
spirit, if it is to pass over into higher knowledge; so, also,
it is true on the other, that this natural science must, to
begin with, remain upon its own special ground, if it is to
yield the right basis for the attainment of a higher level.
The spirit in Nature exists only for spirit. So surely as
Nature in this sense is spiritual, so surely too is there
nothing in Nature, of all that is perceived by my bodily
organs, which is immediately spiritual. There exists
nothing spiritual which can appear to my eye as spiritual.
Therefore, I must not seek for the spirit as such in
Nature; but that is what I am doing when I interpret any
occurrence in the external world immediately as spiritual;
when, for instance, I ascribe to a plant a soul which is
supposed to be only remotely analogous to that of man.
Further, I again do the same when I ascribe to spirit
itself an existence in space and time: as, for instance,
when I assert of the human soul that it continues to exist
in time without the body, but yet after the manner of a
body; or again, when I even go so far as to believe that,
NETTESHEIM AND PARACELSUS
91
under any sort of conditions or arrangements perceivable

by the senses, the spirit of a dead person can show itself.
Spiritualism, which makes this mistake, only shows
thereby that it has not attained to a true conception of
the spirit at all, but is still bent upon directly and
immediately seeing the spirit in something grossly
sensible. It mistakes equally both the real nature of the
sensible and also that of the spirit. It de-spiritualises the
ordinary world of sense, which hourly passes before our
eyes, in order to give the name of spirit immediately to
something rare, surprising, uncommon. It fails to
understand that that which lives as the spirit in nature
reveals itself to him who is able to perceive spirit in the
collision of two elastic balls, for instance; and not only in
occurrences which are striking from their rarity, and
which cannot all at once be grasped in their natural
sequence and connection.
But the spiritist further drags the spirit down into a
lower sphere. Instead of explaining something that
happens in space, and that he perceives through his
senses only, in terms of forces and beings which in their
turn are spacial and perceptible to the senses, he resorts
to spirits, which he thereby places exactly on a level
with the things of the senses. At the very root of such a
way of viewing things, there lies a lack of the power of
spiritual apprehension. We are unable to perceive
spiritual things spiritually; we therefore satisfy our
craving for the spiritual with mere beings perceptible to
the senses. Their own inner spirit reveals to such men
nothing spiritual; and therefore they seek for the spiritual
through the senses. As they see clouds flying through
the air, so they would fain see spirits hastening along.
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Agrippa von Nettesheim fought for a genuine science of

Nature, which shall explain the phenomena of Nature,
not by means of spirits phenomenalising in the world of
the senses, but by seeing in Nature only the natural, and
in the spirit only the spiritual.
Of course, Agrippa will be entirely misunderstood if
one compares his natural science with that of later
centuries which dispose of wholly different experiences.
In such a comparison, it might easily seem that he was
still actually and entirely referring to the direct action of
spirits, things which only depend upon natural
connections or upon mistaken experience. Such a wrong
is done to him by Moriz Carrire when he says, not in
any malicious sense, it is true:
Agrippa gives a huge list of things which belong to
the Sun, the Moon, the Planets and the fixed stars, and
receive influences from them; for instance: to the Sun
are related Fire, Blood, Laurel, Gold, Chrysolite; they
confer the gifts of the Sun: Courage, Cheerfulness, and
Light. . . . Animals have a natural sense, which, higher
than human understanding, approaches the spirit of
prophecy. . . . Men can be bewitched to love and hate,
to sickness and health. Thieves can be bewitched so that
they cannot steal at some particular place, merchants,
that they cannot do business, mills, that they cannot
work, lightning flashes, that they cannot strike. This is
brought about through drinks, salves, images, rings,
incantations; the blood of hyenas or basilisks is adapted
to such a purposeit reminds one of Shakespeares
witches cauldron. No; it does not remind one of that,
if one understands Agrippa aright. He believedit goes
without sayingin many facts which in his time
93
everybody regarded as unquestionable. But we still do

the same to-day. Or do we imagine that future centuries
will not relegate much of what we now regard as
undoubted fact to the lumber-room of blind
superstition?
I am convinced that in our knowledge of facts there
has been a real progress. When once the fact that the
earth is round had been discovered, all previous
conjectures were banished into the domain of
superstition; and the same holds good of certain truths
of astronomy, biology, etc. The doctrine of natural
evolution constitutes an advance, as compared with all
previous theories of creation, similar to that marked by
the recognition of the roundness of the earth as
contrasted with all previous speculations as to its form.
Nevertheless, I am vividly conscious that in our learned
scientific works and treatises there is to be found many a
fact which will seem to future centuries to be just as
little of a fact as much that Paracelsus and Agrippa
maintain; but the really important point is not what they
regarded as fact, but h o w , in what spirit, they
interpreted their facts.
In Agrippas time, there was little understanding or
sympathy for the natural magic he represented, which
sought in Nature the naturalthe spiritual only in the
spirit; men clung to the supernatural magic, which
sought the spiritual in the realm of the sensible, and
which Agrippa combated. Therefore the Abbot
Trithemius of Sponheim was right in giving him the
advice to communicate his views only as a secret
teaching to a few chosen pupils who could rise to a
similar idea of Nature and spirit, because one gives only
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hay to oxen and not sugar as to singing birds. It may be

that Agrippa himself owed to this same Abbot his own
correct point of view. In his Steganography, Trithemius
has produced a book in which he handled with the most
subtle irony that mode of conceiving things which
confuses nature with spirit.
In this book he apparently speaks of nothing but
supernatural occurrences. Any one reading it as it stands
must believe that the author is talking of conjurations of
spirits, of spirits flying through the air, and so on. If,
however, one drops certain words and letters under the
table, there remainas Wolfgang Ernst Heidel proved
in the year 1676letters which, combined into words,
describe purely natural occurrences. (In one case, for
instance, in a formula of conjuration, one must drop the
first and last words entirely, and then cancel from the
remainder the second, fourth, sixth, and so on. In the
words left over, one must again cancel the first, third,
fifth letters and so on. One next combines what is then
left into words; and the conjuration formula resolves
itself into a purely natural communication.)
How difficult it was for Agrippa to work himself free
from the prejudices of his time and to rise to a pure
perception is proved by the fact that he did not allow his
Occult Philosophy (Philosophia Occulta), already written
in 1510, to appear before the year 1531, because he
considered it unripe. Further evidence of this fact is
given by his work On the Vanity of the Sciences (De
Vanitate Scientiarum) in which he speaks with bitterness of
the scientific and other activities of his time. He there
states quite clearly that he has only with difficulty
wrenched himself free from the phantasy which beholds
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in external actions immediate spiritual processes, in

external facts prophetic indications of the future, and so
forth.
Agrippa advances to the higher knowledge in three
stages. He treats as the first stage the world as it is given
for the senses, with its substances, its physical, chemical
and other forces. He calls Nature, in so far as it is
looked at on this level, elementary Nature. On the
second stage, one contemplates the world as a whole in
its natural interconnection, as it orders things according
to measure, number, weight, harmony, and so forth.
The first stage proceeds from one thing to the next
nearest. It seeks for the causes of an occurrence in its
immediate surroundings. The second stage regards a
single occurrence in connection with the entire universe.
It carries through the idea that everything is subject to
the influence of all other things in the entire worldwhole. In its eyes this world-whole appears as a vast
harmony, in which each individual item is a member.
Agrippa terms the world, regarded from this point of
view, the astral or heavenly world. The third stage
of knowing is that wherein the spirit, by plunging deep
into itself, perceives immediately the spiritual, the RootBeing of the world. Agrippa here speaks of the world, of
soul and spirit.
The views which Agrippa develops about the world,
and the relation of man to the world, present themselves
to us in the case of Theophrastus Paracelsus, in a similar
manner, only in more perfected form. It is better,
therefore, to consider them in connection with the latter.
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Paracelsus characterises himself aptly, when he writes

under his portrait: None shall be anothers slave, who
for himself can remain alone. His whole attitude
towards knowledge is given in these words. He strives
everywhere to go back himself to the deepest
foundations of natural knowledge, in order to rise by his
own strength to the loftiest regions of cognition. As
Physician, he will not, like his contemporaries, simply
accept what the ancient investigators, who then counted
as authorities,Galen or Avicenna, for instance,
asserted long ago; he is resolved to read for himself
directly in the book of Nature. The Physician must
pass Natures examination, which is the world, and all its
origins. And the very same that Nature teaches him, he
must command to his wisdom, but seek for nothing in
his wisdom, only and alone in the light of Nature. He
shrinks from nothing, in order to learn to know Nature
and her workings in all directions. For this purpose he
made journeys to Sweden, Hungary, Spain, Portugal, and
the East. He can truly say of himself: I have followed
the Art at the risk of my life, and have not been ashamed
to learn from wanderers, executioners and sheepshearers. My doctrine was tested more severely than
silver in poverty, fears, wars and hardships.
What has been handed down by ancient authorities
has for him no value, for he believes that he can attain to
the right view only if he himself experiences the upward
climb from the knowledge of Nature to the highest
insight. This living, personal experience puts into his
mouth the proud utterance: He who will follow truth,
must come into my monarchy. . . . After me; not I after
you, Avicenna, Rhases, Galen, Mesur! After me; not I
after you, O ye of Paris, ye of Montpellier, ye of Swabia,
97
ye of Meissen, ye of Cologne, ye of Vienna and of what

lies on the Danube and the Rhine; ye islands in the sea,
thou Italy, thou Dalmatia, thou Athens, thou Greek,
thou Arab, thou Israelite; after me, not I after you! Mine
is the Monarchy.
It is easy to misunderstand Paracelsus because of his
rough exterior, which sometimes conceals a deep
earnestness behind a jest. Does he not himself say: By
nature I am not subtly woven, nor brought up on figs
and wheat-bread, but on cheese, milk and rye-bread,
wherefore I may well be rude with the over-clean and
superfine; for those who were brought up in soft
clothing and we who were bred in pine needles do not
easily understand one another. When in myself I mean
to be kindly, I must therefore often be taken as rude.
How can I not be strange to one who has never
wandered in the sun?
In his book about Winkelmann, Goethe has described
the relation of man to Nature in the following beautiful
sentence: When the healthy nature of man acts as a
whole; when he feels himself as one with a great,
beautiful, noble and worthy whole; when the sense of
harmonious well-being gives him a pure and free delight;
then would the Universe, if it could be conscious of its
own feeling, burst forth in joy at having attained its goal,
and contemplate with wondering admiration the summit
of its own becoming and being. With a feeling such as
finds expression in these sentences, Paracelsus is simply
saturated. From out of its depths the riddle of humanity
takes shape for him. Let us watch how this happens in
Paracelsus sense.
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At the outset, the road by which Nature has travelled

to attain her loftiest altitude is hidden from mans power
of comprehension. She has climbed, indeed, to the
summit; but the summit does not proclaim: I feel myself
as the whole of Nature; it proclaims, on the contrary: I
feel myself as this single, separated human being. That
which in reality is an achievement of the whole universe,
feels itself as a separated, isolated being, standing alone
by itself. This indeed is the true being of man, viz., that
he must needs feel himself to be something quite
different from what, in ultimate analysis, he really is.
And if that be a contradiction, then must man be called a
contradiction come to life.
Man is the universe in his own particular way; he
regards his oneness with the universe as a duality: he is
the very same that the universe is; but he is the universe
as a repetition, as a single being. This is the contrast
which Paracelsus feels as the Microcosm (Man) and the
Macrocosm (Universe). Man, for him, is the universe in
miniature. That which makes man regard his
relationship to the world in this way, that is his spirit.
This spirit appears as if bound to a single being, to a
single organism: and this organism belongs, by the very
nature of its whole being, to the mighty stream of the
universe. It is one member, one link in that whole,
having its very existence only in relation with all the
other links or members thereof. But spirit appears as an
outcome of this single, separated organism, and sees
itself at the outset as bound up only with that organism.
It tears loose this organism from the mother earth out of
which it has grown. So, for Paracelsus, a deep-seated
connection between man and the universe lies hidden in
the basic foundations of being, a connection which is
99
hidden through the presence of spirit. That spirit

which leads us to higher insight by making knowledge
possible, and leads on this knowledge to a new birth on a
higher levelthis has, as its first result for us men, to
veil from us our own oneness with the whole.
Thus the nature of man resolves itself for Paracelsus
in the first place into three factors: our sensuous-physical
nature, our organism which appears to us as a natural
being among other natural beings and is of like nature
with all other natural beings; our concealed or hidden
nature, which is a link in the chain of the whole universe,
and therefore is not shut up within the organism or
limited to it, but radiates and receives the workings of
energy upon and from the entire universe; and our
highest nature, our spirit, which lives its life in a purely
spiritual manner. The first factor in mans nature
Paracelsus calls the elementary body; the second, the
ethereal-heavenly, or astral body; and the third he
names the Soul.
Thus in the astral phenomena, Paracelsus recognises an intermediate stage between the purely physical
and the properly spiritual or soul-phenomena. Therefore
these astral activities will come into view when the spirit
or soul, which veils or conceals the natural basis of our
being, suspends its activity. In the dream-world we see
the simplest phenomena of this realm. The pictures
which hover before us in dreams, with their remarkably
significant connection with occurrences in our
environment and with states of our inner nature, are
products of our natural basis or root-being, which are
obscured by the brighter light of the soul. For example,
when a chair falls over beside my bed and I dream a
100
whole drama ending with a shot fired in a duel; or when

I have palpitation of the heart and dream of a boiling
cauldron, we can see that in these dreams natural
operations come to light which are full of sense and
meaning, and disclose a life lying between the purely
organic functions and the concept-forming activity
which is carried on in the full, clear consciousness of the
spirit. Connected with this region are all the phenomena
belonging to the domain of hypnotism and suggestion;
and in the latter are we not compelled to recognise an
interaction between human beings, which points to some
connection or relation between beings in Nature, which
is normally hidden by the higher activity of the mind?
From this starting point we can reach an understanding
of what Paracelsus meant by the astral body. It is the
sum total of those natural operations under whose
influence we stand, or may in special circumstances
come to stand, or which proceed from us, without our
souls or minds coming into consideration in connection
with them, but which yet cannot be included under the
concept of purely physical phenomena. The fact that
Paracelsus reckons as truths in this domain things which
we doubt to-day, does not come into the question, from
the point of view which I have already described.
Starting from the basis of these views as to the nature
of man, Paracelsus divides him into seven factors or
principles, which are the same as those we also find in
the wisdom of the ancient Egyptians, among the
Neoplatonists and in the Kabbalah. In the first place,
man is a physical-bodily being, and therefore subject to
the same laws as every other body. He is, in this respect,
therefore, a purely elementary body. The purely
physical-bodily laws combine into an organic life-
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process, and Paracelsus denotes this organic sequence of

law by the terms archaeus or spiritus vitae. Next, the
organic rises into a region of phenomena resembling the
spiritual, but which are not yet properly spiritual, and
these he classifies as astral phenomena. From amidst
these astral phenomena, the functions of the animal
soul make their appearance. Man becomes a being of
the senses.
Then he connects together his sense impressions
according to their nature, by his understanding or mind,
and the human soul or reasoning soul becomes alive
in him. He sinks himself deep into his own mental
productions, and learns to recognise spirit as such, and
thus he has risen at length to the level of the spiritual
soul. Finally, he must come to recognise that in this
spiritual soul he is experiencing the ultimate basis of
universal being; the spiritual soul ceases to be individual,
to be separated. Then arises the knowledge of which
Eckhart spoke when he felt no longer that he was
speaking within himself, but that in him the Root-Being
was uttering Itself. The condition has come about in
which the All-Spirit in man beholds Itself. Paracelsus
has stamped the feeling of this condition with the simple
words: And that is a great thing whereon to dwell: there
is naught in heaven or upon earth that is not in Man.
And God who dwelleth in Heaven, He also is in Man.
With these seven principles of human nature,
Paracelsus aims at expressing nothing else than the facts
of inner and outer experience. The fact remains
unquestioned that, what for human experience
subdivides itself into a multiplicity of seven factors, is in
higher reality a unity. But the higher insight exists just
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for the very purpose of exhibiting the unity in all that

appears as multiplicity to man, owing to his bodily and
spiritual organisation. On the level of the highest
insight, Paracelsus strives to the utmost to fuse the
unitary Root-Being of the world with his own spirit. But
he knows that man can only cognise Nature in its
spirituality, when he enters into immediate intercourse
with that Nature. Man does not grasp Nature by
peopling it from within himself with arbitrarily assumed
entities; but by accepting and valuing it as it is, as Nature.
Paracelsus therefore does not seek for God or for spirit
in Nature; but Nature, just as it comes before his eyes, is
for him wholly, immediately divine. Must one then first
ascribe to the plant a soul after the kind of a human soul,
in order to find the spiritual?
Hence Paracelsus explains to himself the development
of things, so far as that is possible with the scientific
means of his age, altogether in such wise that he
conceives this development as a sensible-natural process.
He makes all things to proceed from the root-matter, the
root-water (Yliaster). And he regards as a further natural
process the separation of the root-matter (which he also
calls the great Limbus) into the four elements: Water,
Earth, Fire and Air. When he says that the Divine
Word called forth the multiplicity of beings from the
root-matter, one must understand this also only in such
wise as perhaps in more recent natural science one must
understand the relationship of Force to Matter. A
Spirit, in a matter-of-fact sense, is not yet present at
this stage. This Spirit is no matter-of-fact basis of the
natural process, but a matter-of-fact result of that
process.
103
This Spirit does not create Nature, but develops itself

out of Nature. Not a few statements of Paracelsus might
be interpreted in the opposite sense. Thus when he says:
There is nothing which does not possess and carry with
it also a spirit hidden in it and that lives not withal. Also,
not only has that life, which stirs itself and moves, as
men, animals, the worms in the earth, the birds in the
sky and the fishes in water, but all bodily and actual
things as well.
But in such sayings Paracelsus only aims at warning us
against that superficial contemplation of Nature which
fancies it can exhaust the being of a thing with a couple
of stuck-up concepts, according to Goethes apt
expression. He aims not at putting into things some
imaginary being, but at setting in motion all the powers
of man to bring out that which in actual fact lies in the
thing.
What matters is not to let oneself be misled by the
fact that Paracelsus expresses himself in the spirit of his
time. It is far more important to recognise what things
really hovered before his mind when, looking upon
Nature, he expresses his ideas in the forms of expression
proper to his age. He ascribes to man, for instance, a
dual flesh, that is, a dual bodily constitution. The flesh
must also be understood, that it is of two kinds, namely
the flesh that comes from Adam and the flesh which is
not from Adam. The flesh from Adam is a gross flesh,
for it is earthly and nothing besides flesh, that can be
bound and grasped like wood and stone. The other flesh
is not from Adam, it is a subtle flesh and cannot be
bound or grasped, for it is not made of earth. What is
the flesh that is from Adam? It is everything that man
104
has received through natural development, everything,

therefore, that has passed on to him by heredity. To that
is added, whatever man has acquired for himself in his
intercourse with the world around him in the course of
time.
The modern scientific conceptions of inherited
characteristics and those acquired by adaptation easily
emerge from the above-cited thought of Paracelsus. The
more subtle flesh that makes man capable of his
intellectual activities, has not existed from the beginning
in man. Man was gross flesh like the animal, a flesh
that can be bound and grasped like wood and stone.
In a scientific sense, therefore, the soul is also an
acquired characteristic of the gross flesh. What the
scientist of the nineteenth century has in his minds eye
when he speaks of the factors inherited from the animal
world, is just what Paracelsus has in view when he uses
the expression, the flesh that comes from Adam.
Naturally I have not the least intention of blurring the
difference that exists between a scientist of the sixteenth
and one of the nineteenth century. It was, indeed, this
latter century which for the first time was able to see, in
the full scientific sense, the phenomena of living beings
in such a connection that their natural relationship and
actual descent, right up to man, stood out clearly before
ones eyes. Science sees only a natural process where
Linnaeus in the eighteenth century saw a spiritual
process and characterised it in the words: There are
counted as many species of living beings, as there were
created different forms in the beginning. While thus in
Linnaeus time, the Spirit had still to be transferred into
the spacial world and have assigned to it the task of
105
spiritually generating the forms of life, or creating

them: the natural science of the nineteenth century could
give to Nature what belonged to Nature, and to Spirit
what belonged to Spirit. To Nature is even assigned the
task of explaining her own creations; and the Spirit can
plunge into itself there, where alone it is to be found, in
the inner being of man.
But although in a certain sense Paracelsus thinks
according to the spirit of his age, yet he has grasped the
relationship of man to Nature in a profound manner,
especially in relation to the idea of Evolution, of
Becoming. He did not see in the Root-Being of the
universe something which in any sense is there as a
finished thing, but he grasped the Divine in the process
of Becoming. Thereby he was enabled truly to ascribe to
man a self-creative activity. For if the divine root of
being is, as it were, given once for all, then there can be
no question of any truly creative activity in man. It is
not man, living in time, who then creates, but it is God,
who is from Eternity, that creates. But for Paracelsus
there is no such God from Eternity. For him there is
only an eternal happening, and man is one link in this
eternal happening. What man forms, was previously in
no sense existent. What man creates, is, as he creates it,
a new, original creation. If it is to be called divine, it can
only be so-called in the sense in which it is a human
creation. Therefore Paracelsus can assign to man a role
in the building of the universe, which makes him a coarchitect in its creation. The divine root of being is
without man, not that which it is with man.
For nature brings nothing to light, which as such is
perfect, but man must make it perfect. This self-
106
creative activity of man in the building of the universe is

what Paracelsus calls Alchemy. This perfecting is
Alchemy. Thus the Alchemist is the baker, when he
bakes bread, the vintager, when he makes wine, the
weaver, when he makes cloth. Paracelsus aims at being
an Alchemist in his own domain as a Physician.
Therefore I may well write so much here about
Alchemy, that ye may well understand it, and experience
that which it is and how it is to be understood; and not
find a stumbling-block therein that neither Gold nor
Silver shall come to thee therefrom. But have regard
thereunto, that the Arcana [curative means] be revealed
unto thee. . . . The third pillar of medicine is Alchemy,
for the preparation of the medicines cannot come to
pass without it, because Nature cannot be made use of
without Art.
In the strictest sense, therefore, the eyes of Paracelsus
are directed to Nature, in order to overhear from herself
what she has to say about that which she brings forth.
He seeks to explore the laws of chemistry, so that, in his
sense, he may work as an Alchemist. He pictures to
himself all bodies as compounded out of three rootsubstances: Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury. What he thus
names, naturally does not coincide with that which later
chemistry solely and strictly calls by these names; just as
little as that which Paracelsus conceives of as the rootsubstance is such in the sense of our later chemistry.
Different things are called by the same names at
different times. What the ancients called the four
elements: Earth, Water, Air, and Fire, we still have today. But we call these four elements no longer
elements, but states of aggregation and have for them
the designations: solid, liquid, gaseous and etheric. The
107
Earth, for instance, was for the ancients not earth, but
the solid.
Again, we can clearly recognise the three rootsubstances of Paracelsus in contemporary conceptions,
though not in present names of like sound. For
Paracelsus, dissolution in a liquid and burning are the
two most important chemical processes which he
utilises. If a body be dissolved or burnt, it breaks up into
its parts. Something remains behind as insoluble;
something dissolves, or is burnt. What is left behind is
to him of the nature of Salt; the soluble (liquid) of the
nature of Mercury; while he terms Sulphur-like the part
that can be burnt.
All this, taken as relating to material things, may leave
the man cold who cannot look out beyond such natural
processes; whoever seeks at all costs to grasp the spirit
with his senses, will people these processes with all sorts
of ensouling beings. He, however, who like Paracelsus
knows how to regard them in connection with the
whole, which permits its secret to become revealed in
mans inner being,he accepts them, as the senses offer
them; he does not first re-interpret them; for just as the
occurrences of Nature lie before us in their sensible
reality, so too do they, in their own way, reveal to us the
riddle of existence. That which through their sensible
reality they have to unveil from within the soul of man,
stands, for him who strives after the light of higher
knowledge, far higher than all super-natural wonders that
man can invent or get revealed to him about their
suppositious spirit. There is no Spirit of Nature,
capable of uttering loftier truths than the mighty works
of Nature herself, when our soul links itself in friendship
108
with that Nature and listens to the revelations of her

secrets in intimate and tender intercourse. Such
friendship with Nature was what Paracelsus sought.
VALENTINE WEIGEL
AND
JACOB BOEHME
IN the view of Paracelsus, what mattered most was to
acquire ideas about Nature which should breathe the
spirit of the higher insight that he represented. A thinker
related to him, who applied the same mode of
conceiving things to his own nature especially, is
VALENTINE W EIGEL (1533-1588). He grew up out of
Protestant theology in a like sense to that in which
Eckhart, Tauler, and Suso grew up out of Roman
Catholic theology. He has predecessors in Sebastian
Frank and Caspar Schwenckfeldt. These two, as
contrasted with the orthodox Churchmen clinging to
external profession, pointed downwards to the
deepening of the inner life. For them it is not that Jesus
whom the Gospels preach who is of value, but the Christ
who can be born in every man as his deeper nature, and
become for him the Saviour from the lower life and the
guide to ideal uplifting.
Weigel performed silently and humbly the duties of
his office as clergyman in Zschopau. It was only from
the writings he left behind, printed first in the
seventeenth century, that the world learned anything of
the significant ideas which had come to him about the
nature of man.15
The following, from among his writings, may be named: Der
gldene Griff, das ist alle Ding ohne Irrthumb zu erkennen, vielen
Hochgelehrten unbekandt, und doch allen Menschen nothwendig zu wissen;
Erkenne dich selbst; Vom Ort der Welt.
15
110
Weigel feels himself driven to gain a clear understanding of his relation to the teaching of the Church;
and that leads him on further to investigate the basic
foundations of all knowledge. Whether man can know
anything through a confession of faith, is a question as
to which he can only give himself an account when he
knows how man knows. Weigel starts from the lowest
kind of knowing. He asks himself: How do I know a
sensible object, when it presents itself before me?
Thence he hopes to be able to mount upwards to a point
of view whence he can give himself an account of the
highest knowledge.
In cognition through the senses, the instrument (the
sense-organ) and the object, the counterpart
(Gegenwurf) stand opposed. Since in natural perception
there must be two things, as the object or counterpart,
which is to be known and seen by the eye; and the eye,
or the perceiver, which sees or knows the object, so do
thou hold over against each other: whether the
knowledge comes forth from the object to the eye; or
whether the judgment, or the cognition, flows out from
the eye into the object.16 Weigel now says to himself: If
the cognition (or knowledge) flowed from the
counterpart (or thing) into the eye, then of necessity
from one and the same thing a similar and perfect
cognition must come to all eyes. But that is not the case,
for each man sees according to the measure of his own
eyes. Only the eyes, not the counterpart (or object)
can be in fault, in that various and different conceptions
are possible of one and the same thing. To clear up the
matter, Weigel compares seeing with reading. If the
16
Der gldene Griff, p. 26 et seq.
WEIGEL AN D BOH ME
111
book were not there, I naturally could not read it; but it
might still be there, and yet I could read nothing in it, if I
did not understand the art of reading. The book
therefore must be there; but, from itself it can give me
not the smallest thing; I must draw forth everything I
read from within myself. That is also the nature of
sensible perception. Colour is there as the counterpart, but it can give the eye nothing from out of itself.
The eye must recognise, from out of itself, what colour
is. As little as the content of the book is in the reader,
just so little is colour in the eye. If the content of the
book were in the reader, he would not need to read it.
Yet in reading, this content does not flow out from the
book, but from the reader. So is it also with the sensible
object. What the sensible thing before him is; that does
not flow from outside into the man, but from within
outwards.
Starting from these thoughts, one might say: If all
knowledge flows out from man into the object, then one
does not know what is in the object, but only what is in
man. The detailed working out of this line of thought,
brought about the view of Immanuel Kant (17241804).17
Weigel says to himself: Even if the knowledge flows
out from man, it is still only the being of the
counterpart (or object) which comes to light in this
indirect way through man. As I learn the content of the
book by reading it, and not by my own content, so also I
The error in this line of thought will be found explained in
my book, The Philosophy of Freedom, Berlin, 1894. Here I must limit
myself to mentioning that Valentine Weigel, with his simple, robust
way of conceiving things, stands far higher than Kant.
17
112
learn the colour of the counterpart through the eye,

not any colour to be found in the eye, or in myself.
(Thus Weigel arrives by a road of his own at a result that
we have already encountered in Nicholas of Cusa. Cp.
pages 151-160). In this way Weigel attained to clearness
as to the nature of sense-perception. He arrived at the
conviction that everything which external things have to
tell us can only flow forth from our own inner nature
itself. Man cannot remain passive when he tries to know
sensible objects and seeks merely to allow them to act
upon him; but he must assume an active attitude, and
bring forth the knowledge from within himself. The
counterpart (or object) merely awakens the knowledge in
the spirit. Man rises to higher knowledge when his spirit
becomes its own counterpart. One can see from
sensible cognition that no cognition can flow into man
from outside. Therefore there can be no such thing as
an external revelation, but only an inner awakening.
As now the external counterpart waits till there comes
into its presence man, in whom it can express its being,
so too must man wait, when he seeks to be his own
counterpart (or object) until the knowledge of his own
being shall be awakened in him. If, in cognition through
the senses, man must assume an active attitude in order
that he may bring to meet the counterpart its own
being, so in the higher knowing, man must hold himself
passive, because he is himself now the counterpart.
He must admit its being into himself. Therefore the
cognition of the spirit appears to him as enlightenment
from above. In contrast to cognition through the senses,
Weigel therefore terms the higher cognition the Light
of Mercy. This Light of Mercy is, in reality, nothing
WEIGEL AN D BOH ME
113
other than the self-knowledge of the spirit in man, or the

re-birth of knowledge on the higher level of beholding.
Now just as Nicholas of Cusa, in following up his
road from knowing to beholding, does not really bring
about the re-birth of the knowledge he has gained, on
the higher level, but only the faith of the Church in
which he was brought up appears deceptively before him
as such a re-birth, so is it also the case with Weigel. He
guides himself to the right road, but loses it again in the
very moment in which he steps upon it. He who will
travel the road that Weigel points out, can regard the
latter as his guide only as far as the starting-point.
*
What rings out to meet us from the works of the

Master-Shoemaker of Grlitz, JACOB BOEHME (15751624), sounds like the joyous outburst of Nature
admiring her own being upon the summit of her
evolution. A man appears before us whose words have
wings, woven out of the inspiring feeling of having seen
knowledge shining within him as Higher Wisdom. Jacob
Boehme describes his own state as Piety which strives
only to be Wisdom, and as a Wisdom that seeks to live
only in Piety: As I was wrestling and fighting in Gods
behalf, behold a wondrous light shone into my soul,
such as was quite foreign to savage nature; therein I first
knew what God and man were, and what God had to do
with men.
Jacob Boehme no longer feels himself as a separated
being expressing its insights; he feels himself as an organ
of the great All-Spirit, speaking in him. The limits of his
114
personality do not appear to him as the limits of the

Spirit that speaks from within him. This Spirit is for him
present everywhere. He knows that the Sophist will
blame him when he speaks of the beginning of the
world and its creation: the while I was not thereby and
did not myself see it. To him be it said that in the
essence of my soul and body, when I was not yet the I,
but when I was still Adams essence, I was there present
and myself squandered away my glory in Adam.
Only in external similes is Boehme able to indicate
how the light broke forth in his inner being. When once
as a boy he finds himself on the top of a mountain, he
sees above him a place where large red stones seem to
shut up the mountain; the entrance is open and in its
depth he sees a vessel full of gold. A shudder runs
through him; and he goes on his way without touching
the treasure. Later on he is apprenticed to a shoemaker
in Grlitz. A stranger steps into the shop and demands
a pair of shoes. Boehme is not allowed to sell them in
the absence of his master. The stranger departs, but
after a while calls the apprentice out of the shop and says
to him: Jacob, thou art little, but thou wilt some day
become quite another man, over whom the world will
break out into wonder. In riper years, Jacob Boehme
sees the reflection of the bright sun in a tin vessel: the
view that thus presents itself to him seems to him to
unveil a profound secret. Even after the impression of
this appearance, he believes himself to be in possession
of the key to the riddles of Nature.
He lives as a spiritual anchorite, humbly earning his
living by his trade, and between whiles, as though for his
own recollection, he notes down the harmonies which
WEIGEL AN D BOH ME
115
resound in his inner being when he feels the Spirit in

himself. The zealotry of priestly fervour makes life hard
for the man; he, who desires naught but to read the
Scripture which the light of his inner nature illuminates
for him, is persecuted and tortured by those to whom
only the external writ, the rigid, dogmatic confession of
faith, is accessible.
One world-riddle remains as a disquieting presence in
Jacob Boehmes soul, driving him on to knowledge. He
believes himself to be in his spirit enfolded in a divine
harmony; but when he looks around him, he sees discord
everywhere in the divine workings. To man belongs the
light of Wisdom; and yet he is exposed to error; in him
lives the impulse to the good, and yet the discord of evil
sounds throughout the whole of human development.
Nature is governed by its own great laws; yet its harmony
is disturbed by happenings of no purport, and the
warfare of the elements. How is this discord in the
harmonious world-whole to be understood? This
question tortures Jacob Boehme. It strides into the
centre of the world of his thought. He strives to gain a
view of the world as a whole, which shall include the
discordant. For how can a conception which leaves the
actual present discord unexplained explain the world?
The discord must be explained out of the harmony, the
evil out of the good itself. Let us restrict ourselves, in
speaking of these things, to the good and the evil,
wherein the lack of harmony in the narrower sense finds
its expression. For, fundamentally, Jacob Boehme also
restricts himself to this. He can do so, for Nature and
man appear to him as a single entity. He sees in both
similar laws and processes. The purposeless seems to
him an evil something in Nature, just as evil seems to
116
him something purposeless in man. Similar fundamental

forces rule both here and there. To one who has known
the origin of evil in man, the source of evil in Nature
also lies open and clear.
Now, how can the evil as well as the good flow forth
from the very same Root-Being? Speaking in Jacob
Boehmes sense, one would give the following answer.
The Root-Being does not live out its existence in itself.
The multiplicity of the world shares in this existence. As
the human body lives its life, not as a single member, but
as a multiplicity of members, so also the Root-Being.
And as human life is poured out into this multiplicity of
members, so too the Root-Being is poured out into the
manifoldness of the things of this world. As true as it is
that the entire man has only one life, so true is it that
every member has its own life. And as little as it
contradicts the whole harmonious life of a man, that his
hand should turn itself against his own body and wound
it, so little is it impossible that the things of the world,
which live the life of the Root-Being in their own way,
should turn themselves against each other. Thus the
Root-Being, in dividing itself among different lives,
confers upon each such life the capacity to turn itself
against the whole.
It is not from the good that evil streams forth, but
from the way in which the good lives. As the light is
only able to shine when it pierces the darkness, so the
good can bring itself to life only when it permeates its
opposite. From out of the fathomless abyss of
darkness there streams forth the light; from the
groundlessness of the indifferent there is brought to
birth the Good. And as in the shadow only the
WEIGEL AN D BOH ME
117
brightening demands a pointing to the light; but the

darkness, as a matter of course, is felt as that which
weakens the light; so too in the world, it is only the lawabiding character that is sought for in all things; and the
evil, the purposeless, is accepted as a matter of course,
intelligible in itself. Thus, in spite of the fact that for
Jacob Boehme the Root-Being is the All, still nothing in
the world can be understood, unless one has an eye both
to the Root-Being and its opposite at once. The good
has swallowed up into itself the evil or the hideous. . . .
Every being has in itself good and evil, and in its
unfoldment, as it passes over into division, it becomes a
contradiction of qualities, as one seeks to overcome the
other.
Hence it is altogether in accordance with Jacob
Boehmes view to see in everything, and in every process
of the world, both good and evil; but it is not in accord
with his meaning, without more ado to seek the RootBeing in the mingling of good and evil. The Root-Being
must swallow up the evil; but the evil is not a part of the
Root-Being. Jacob Boehme seeks the Root-Being of the
world; but the world itself has sprung forth from the
fathomless abyss through the Root-Being. The
external world is not God, and eternally will not be
called God, but only a being wherein God manifests
Himself. . . . When one says: God is all, God is heaven
and earth, and also the outer world, so is that true: for
from him and in him all stands originally rooted. But
what am I to do with such a saying, which is no
religion?
With such a view in the background, Jacob Boehmes
conceptions as to the being of the whole world built
118
themselves up in his mind, so that he makes the orderly

world emerge in a series of steps from the fathomless
abyss. This world builds itself up in seven natural
forms. In dark astringency the Root-Being receives
form, dumbly shut up within itself and motionless. This
astringency Boehme grasps under the symbol of Salt. In
employing such designations he leans upon Paracelsus,
who had borrowed from chemical processes his names
for the processes of Nature. By swallowing up its
opposite, the first nature-form passes over into the form
of the second; the astringent, the motionless, takes on
movement; Power and Life enter into it. Quicksilver
(Mercury) is the symbol for this second form. In the
struggle of Rest and Motion, of Death with Life, the
third form of Nature unveils itself (Sulphur). This Life
battling within itself, becomes manifest to itself; it lives
thenceforward no longer an outer battle of its members;
there quivers through it as it were a unifying glowing
flash, itself lighting up its own being (Fire). This fourth
form of Nature rises to the fifth, the living battle of the
parts resting in themselves (Water). On this level, as
upon the first, there is present an inner astringency and
dumbness; only it is not an absolute rest, a silence of the
inner opposites, but an interior movement of the
opposites. It is not the motionless resting in itself, but
the moved, that which has been kindled by the fire-flash
of the fourth stage. Upon the sixth level, the Root-Being
itself becomes aware of itself as such inner life. Living
beings endowed with senses represent this form of
Nature. Jacob Boehme calls it the Clang or Call, and
in so doing adopts the sense-perception of sound as the
symbol for sense-perception in general. The seventh
form of Nature is the Spirit, raising itself on the basis of
its sense-perceptions (Wisdom). He finds himself again
WEIGEL AN D BOH ME
119
as himself, as the Root-Being, within the world that has

grown up out of the fathomless abyss, shaping itself
out of the harmonious and the discordant. The Holy
Ghost brings the Glory of this Majesty into the being,
wherein the Godhead stands revealed.
It is with such views that Jacob Boehme seeks to
fathom that world which for him, according to the
knowledge of his time, was reckoned as the actual world
of fact. For him all is fact which is so regarded by the
natural science of his time and by the Bible. His way of
conceiving things is one thing, his world of facts quite
another. One can imagine the former applied to a totally
different knowledge of facts. And thus there appears
before our eyes a Jacob Boehme as he might stand at the
parting of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.
Such a one would not saturate with his way of
conceiving things the six days creation work of the Bible
and the fight of the angels and the devils, but Lyells
geological knowledge and the facts of Haeckels The
History of Creation. He who can penetrate into the spirit
of Jacob Boehmes writings must arrive at this
conviction.18
18 We may here name the most important of Boehmes writings:

Die Morgenrthe im Aufgang; Die drei Prinzipien gttlichen Lebens oder ber
das dreifache Leben des Menschen; Das umgewandte Auge; Signatura rerum
oder von der Geburt und Bezeichnung aller Wesen; Das Mysterium
Magnum.
GIORDANO BRUNO
AND
ANGELUS SILESIUS
IN the first decennium of the sixteenth century, the
scientific genius of Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543)
thinks out in the castle of Heilsberg, in Prussia, an
intellectual structure which compels the men of
subsequent epochs to look up to the starry heavens with
other conceptions than those which their forefathers in
antiquity and the Middle Ages had. To them the earth
was their dwelling-place, at rest in the centre of the
Universe. The stars, however, were for them beings of a
perfect nature, whose motion took place in circles
because the circle is the representative of perfection.
In that which the stars showed to human senses they
beheld something of the nature of soul, something
spiritual. It was one kind of speech that the things and
processes upon earth spoke to man; quite another, that
of the shining stars, beyond the moon in the pure aether,
which seemed like some spiritual nature filling space.
Nicholas of Cusa had already formed other ideas.
Through Copernicus, earth became for man a
brother-being in face of the other heavenly bodies, a star
moving like others. All the difference that earth has to
show for man he could now reduce to this: that earth is
his dwelling-place. He was no longer forced to think
differently about the events of this earth and those of the
rest of universal space. The world of his senses had
expanded itself into the most remote spaces. He was
compelled henceforth to allow that which penetrated his
122
eye from the aether to count as sense-world just as much

as the things of earth. He could no longer seek in the
aether in sensuous fashion for the Spirit.
Whoever, henceforth, strove after higher knowledge,
must needs come to an understanding with this
expanded world of the senses. In earlier centuries, the
brooding mind of man stood before a world of facts.
Now he was confronted with a new task. No longer
could the things of earth only express this nature from
within mans inner being. This inner nature of his was
called on to embrace the spirit of a sense-world, which
fills the All of Space everywhere alike.
The thinker of Nola, P HILOTHEO GIORDANO
B RUNO (1548-1600) found himself faced by such a
problem. The senses have conquered the universe of
space; henceforth the Spirit is no more to be found in
space. Thus man was guided from without to seek
henceforward for the Spirit there alone where from out
of profound inner experiences those glorious thinkers
sought it, whose ranks our previous expositions have led
before us. These thinkers drew upon a view of the
world to which, later on, the advance of natural
knowledge forces humanity. The sun of those ideas,
which later should shine upon a new view of Nature,
with them still stands below the horizon; but their light
already appears as the early dawn at a time when mens
thoughts of Nature itself still lay in the darkness of night.
The sixteenth century gave the heavenly spaces to
natural science for the sense-world to which it rightfully
belongs; by the end of the nineteenth century, this
science had advanced so far that, even within the
BRU NO AND SILESIUS
123
phenomena of plant, animal, and human life, it could

assign to the world of sensible facts that which belongs
to it. Neither, then, in the aether above, nor in the
development of living creatures, can this natural science
henceforth seek for anything but sensible, matter-of-fact
processes. As the thinker in the sixteenth century had to
say: The earth is a star among other stars, subject to the
same laws as other stars; so must the thinker of the
nineteenth century say: Man, whatever may be his
origin and his future, is for anthropology only a
mammal, and further, that mammal whose organisation,
needs and diseases are the most complex, whose brain,
with its marvellous capacities, has reached the highest
level of development.19
From such a standpoint, attained through natural
science, there can no longer occur any confusion
between the spiritual and the sensible, provided man
understands himself rightly. Developed natural science
makes it impossible to seek in Nature for a Spirit
conceived of after the fashion of something material, just
as healthy thinking makes it impossible to seek for the
reason of the forward movement of the clock-hand, not
in mechanical laws (the Spirit of inorganic Nature), but
in a special Daimon, supposed to bring about the
movements of the hands. Ernst Haeckel was quite right
in rejecting, as a scientist, the gross conception of a God
conceived of in material fashion. In the higher and
more abstract forms of religion, the bodily appearance is
abandoned and God is worshipped as pure Spirit, devoid
of body. God is a Spirit, and they that worship him
must worship him in spirit and in truth. But, never19
Paul Topinard: Anthropologie, Leipzig, 1888, p. 528.
124
theless, the soul-activity of this pure Spirit remains

quite the same as that of the anthropomorphic personal
God. In reality, even this immaterial Spirit is not
thought of as bodiless, but as invisible, like a gas. We
thus arrive at the paradoxical conception of God as a
gaseous vertebrate.20
In reality, the matter-of-fact, sensible existence of
something spiritual may be assumed only when
immediate sensible experience shows something
spiritual, and only such a degree of the spiritual may be
assumed as can be perceived in this manner. That first
rate thinker, B. Carneri, ventured to say (in his book:
Empfindung und Bewusstsein, p. 15): The dictum: No spirit
without matter, but also no matter without
spirit,would entitle us to extend the question to the
plant also, nay, even to any block of stone taken at
random, wherein there seems very little to speak in
favour of these correlative conceptions. Spiritual
occurrences as matters of fact are the results of various
doings of an organism; the Spirit of the world is not
present in the world in a material sense, but precisely
after a spiritual fashion. Mans soul is a sum of
processes in which Spirit appears most immediately as
fact. In the form of such a soul, however, Spirit is
present in man only. And it implies that one misunderstands Spirit, that one commits the worst sin
against Spirit, to seek for Spirit in the form of Soul
elsewhere than in man, to imagine other beings thus
ensouled as man is. Whoever does this, only shows that
he has not experienced Spirit within himself; he has only
experienced that outer form of appearance of Spirit, the
20
Haeckel, Riddle of the Universe.
BRU NO AND SILESIUS
125
Soul, which reigns in him. But that is just the same as

though one regarded a circle drawn with a pencil as the
real, mathematically ideal circle. Whoever experiences in
himself nothing other than the soul-form of the Spirit,
feels himself thereupon driven to assume also such a
soul-form in non-human things, in order that thereby he
may not need to remain rooted in the materiality of the
gross senses. Instead of thinking the Root-Being of the
world as Spirit, he thinks of it as World-Soul, and
postulates a general ensoulment of Nature.
Giordano Bruno, upon whom the new Copernican
view of Nature forced itself, could grasp Spirit in the
world, from which it had been expelled in its old form,
in no other manner than as World-Soul. On plunging
into Brunos writings (especially his deeply thoughtful
book: De Rerum Principiis et Elementis et Causis) one gets
the impression that he thought of things as ensouled,
although in varying degree. He has not, in reality,
experienced in himself the Spirit, therefore he conceives
Spirit after the fashion of the human soul, wherein alone
he has encountered it. When he speaks of Spirit, he
conceives of it in the following way: The universal
reason is the inmost, most effective and most special
capacity, and a potential part of the World-Soul; it is
something one and identical, which fills the All,
illuminates the universe and instructs Nature how to
bring forth her species as they ought to be. In these
sentences Spirit, it is true, is not described as a gaseous
vertebrate, but it is described as a being that is like to
the human soul. Let now a thing be as small and tiny as
you please, it yet has within it a portion of spiritual
substance, which, when it finds a substratum adapted
thereto, reaches out to become a plant, an animal, and
126
organises itself to any body you choose that is ordinarily

called ensouled. For Spirit is to be found in all things,
and there does not exist even the tiniest little body which
does not embrace in itself such a share thereof as causes
it to come to life.
Because Giordano Bruno had not really experienced
the Spirit, as Spirit, in himself, he could therefore
confuse the life of the Spirit with the external mechanical
processes, wherewith Raymond Lully (1235-1315)
wanted to unveil the secrets of the Spirit in his so-called
Great Art (Ars Magna). A recent philosopher, Franz
Brentano, describes this Great Art thus: Concepts
were to be inscribed upon concentric, separately revolving discs, and then the most varied combinations
produced by turning them about. Whatever chance
brings up in the turning of these discs, was shaped into a
judgment about the highest truths. And Giordano
Bruno, in his manifold wanderings through Europe,
made his appearance at various seats of learning as a
teacher of this Great Art. He possessed the daring
courage to think of the stars as worlds, perfectly
analogous to our earth; he widened the outlook of
scientific thinking beyond the confines of earth; he
thought of the heavenly bodies no longer as bodily
spirits; but he still thought of them as soul-like spirits.
One must not be unjust towards the man whom the
Catholic Church caused to pay with death the penalty for
his advanced way of thinking. It required something
gigantic to harness the whole space of heaven in the
same view of the universe which hitherto had been
applied only to things upon earth, even though Bruno
did still think of the sensible as soul-like.
BRU NO AND SILESIUS
127
*
*
*
In the seventeenth century there appeared Johann
Scheffler, called ANGELUS S ILESIUS (1624-1677), a
personality in whom there once more shone forth, in
mighty harmony of soul, what Tauler, Weigel, Jacob
Boehme, and others, had prepared. Gathered, as it were,
into a spiritual focus and shining with enhanced lightgiving power, the ideas of the thinkers named make their
appearance in his book: Cherubinischer Wandersmann.
Geistreiche Sinn- und Schluss-reime. And everything
that Angelus Silesius utters appears as such an immediate, inevitable, natural revelation of his personality, that it
is as though this man had been called by a special
providence to embody wisdom in a personal form. The
simple, matter-of-course way in which he lives wisdom,
attains its expression by being set forth in sayings which,
even in respect of their art and their form, are worthy of
admiration. He hovers like some spiritual being over all
earthly existence; and what he says is like the breath of
another world, freed beforehand from all that is gross
and impure, wherefrom human wisdom generally only
toilsomely works itself free.
He only is truly a knower, in the sense of Angelus
Silesius, who brings the eye of the All to vision in
himself; he alone sees his action in the true light who
feels that this action is wrought in him by the hand of
the All: God is in me the fire, and I in him the light; are
we not in most intimate communion one with
another?I am as rich as God; there can be no grain
of dust that Ibelieve me, man,have not in common
with Him.God loves me above Himself; if I love
Him above myself: I so give Him as much as He gives
me from Himself.The bird flies in the air, the stone
128
rests on the earth; in water lives the fish, my spirit in

Gods own hand.Art thou born of God, then
bloometh God in thee; and His Godhead is thy sap and
thy adornment.Halt! whither runnest thou? Heaven
is in thee: seekest thou God otherwhere, thou missest
Him ever and ever.
For one who thus feels himself in the All, every
separation ceases between self and another being; he no
longer feels himself as a single individual; rather does he
feel all that there is of him as a part of the world, his
own proper being, indeed, as that World-Whole itself.
The world, it holds thee not; thou art thyself the world
that holds thee, in thee, with thee, so strongly captive
bound.Man has never perfect bliss before that unity
has swallowed up other-ness.Man is all things; if
aught is lacking to him, then in truth he knoweth not his
own riches.
As a sense-being, man is a thing among other things,
and his sense-organs bring to him, as a sensible
individuality, sense-news of the things in space and time
outside of him; but when Spirit speaks in man, then
there remains no without and no within; nothing is here
and nothing is there that is spiritual; nothing is earlier
and nothing is later; space and time have vanished in the
contemplation of the All-Spirit. Only so long as man
looks forth as an individual, is he here and the thing
there; and only so long as he looks forth as an individual,
is this earlier, and this later. Man, if thou swingest thy
spirit over time and place, so each moment canst thou be
in eternity.I am myself eternity when I leave time
behind, and self in God and God in self together
grasp.The rose that here thine outer eye doth see, it
BRU NO AND SILESIUS
129
so hath bloomed in God from all eternity.In centre

set thyself, so seest thou all at once: what then and now
occurred, here and in heavens realm.So long for
thee, my friend, in mind lies place and time: so long
graspest thou not whats God, nor what eternity.
When man from manifoldness withdraws, and inward
turns to God, so cometh he to unity. The summit has
thus been climbed, whereon man steps forth beyond his
individual I and abolishes every opposition between
the world and himself. A higher life begins for him.
The inner experience that comes over him appears to
him as the death of the old and a resurrection in a new
life. When thou dost raise thyself above thyself and
lettest God oerrule; then in thy spirit happens ascension
into heaven.The body in the spirit must arise, the
spirit, too, in God: if thou in him, my man, will live for
ever blessed.So much mine I in me doth minish
and decrease; so much therefore to power cometh the
Lords own I.
From such a point of view, man recognises his
meaning and the meaning of all things in the realm of
eternal necessity. The natural All appears to him
immediately as the Divine Spirit. The thought of a
divine All-Spirit, who could still have being and subexistence over and beside the things of the world,
vanishes away as a superseded conception. This AllSpirit appears so outpoured into things, so becomes one
in being with the things, that it could no longer be
thought at all, if even one single member were thought
away from its being. Naught is but I and thou; and if
we twain were not; then is God no more God, and
heaven falleth in.Man feels himself as a necessary link
in the world-chain. His doing has no longer aught of
130
arbitrariness or of individuality in it. What he does is

necessary in the whole, in the world-chain, which would
fall to pieces if this his doing were to fall out from it.
God may not make without me a single little worm: if I
with him uphold it not, straightway must it burst
asunder.I know that without me God can no
moment live: if I come to naught, he needs must give up
the ghost.Upon this height, man for the first time
sees things in their real being. He no longer needs to
ascribe from outside to the smallest thing, to the grossly
sensible, a spiritual entity. For just as this minutest thing
is, in all its smallness and gross sensibility, it is a link in
the Whole. No grain of dust is so vile, no mote can be
so small: the wise man seeth God most gloriously
therein.In a mustard seed, if thou wilt understand it,
is the image of all things above and beneath.
Man feels himself free upon this height. For
constraint is there only where a thing can constrain from
without. But when all that is without has flowed into the
within, when the opposition between I and world,
Without and Within, Nature and Spirit, has
disappeared, man then feels all that impels him as his
own impulse. Shut me, as strongly as thou wilt, in a
thousand irons: I still will be quite free and
unfettered.So far as my will is dead, so far must
God do what I will; I myself prescribe to him the pattern
and the goal.At this point cease all moral obligations,
coming from without: man becomes to himself measure
and goal. He is subject to no law; for the law, too, has
become his being. For the wicked is the law; were there
no command written, still would the pious love God and
their neighbour.
BRU NO AND SILESIUS
131
Thus, on the higher level of knowledge, the innocence

of Nature is given back to man. He fulfils the tasks that
are set him in the feeling of an external necessity. He
says to himself: Through this iron necessity it is given
into thy hand to withdraw from this very iron necessity
the link which has been allotted to thee. Ye men, learn
but from the meadow flower: how ye shall please God
and be beautiful as well.The rose exists without why
and because, she blooms because she blooms; she takes
no heed of herself, asks not if men see her. The man
who has arisen upon the higher level feels in himself the
eternal, necessary pressure of the All, as does the
meadow flower; he acts, as the meadow flower blooms.
The feeling of his moral responsibility grows in all his
doing into the immeasurable. For that which he does
not do is withdrawn from the All, is a slaying of that All,
so far as the possibility of such a slaying lies with him.
What is it, not to sin? Thou needst not question long:
go, the dumb flowers will tell it thee.All must be
slain. If thou slayest not thyself for God, then at last
eternal death shall slay thee for the enemy.
AFTERWORD
NEARLY two and a half centuries have passed since
Angelus Silesius gathered up the profound wisdom of his
predecessors in his Cherubinean Wanderer. These centuries
have brought rich insights into Nature. Goethe opened
a vast perspective to natural science. He sought to
follow up the eternal, unchangeable laws of Natures
working, to that summit where, with like necessity, they
cause man to come into being, just as on a lower level
they bring forth the stone.21 Lamarck, Darwin, Haeckel,
and others, have laboured further in the direction of this
way of conceiving things. The question of all
questions, that in regard to the natural origin of man,
found its answer in the nineteenth century; and other
related problems in the realm of natural events have also
found their solutions. To-day men comprehend that it is
not necessary to step outside of the realm of the actual
and the sensible in order to understand the serial
succession of beings, right up to man, in its development
in a purely natural manner.
And, further, J. G. Fichtes penetration has thrown
light into the being of the human ego, and shown the
soul of man where to seek itself and what it is.22 Hegel
has extended the realm of thought over all the provinces
of being, and striven to grasp in thought the entire
Cp. my book: Goethes Weltanschauung, Weimar, 1897.

Cp. ante, and the section upon Fichte in my book: Welt- und
Lebens-anschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, vol. i., Berlin, S.
Cronbach.
21
22
134
sensible existence of Nature, as also the loftiest creations

of the human spirit.23
How, then, do those men of genius whose thoughts
have been traced in the preceding pages, appear in the
light of a world-conception which takes into account the
scientific achievements of the centuries that followed
their epoch? They still believed in a supernatural story
of creation. How do their thoughts appear when
confronted with a natural history of creation, which
the science of the nineteenth century has built up?
This natural science has given to Nature naught that
did not belong to her; it has only taken from her what
did not belong to her. It has banished from Nature all
that is not to be sought in her, but is to be found only in
mans inner being. It sees no longer any being in Nature
that is like unto the human soul, and that creates after
the manner of man. It no longer makes the organic
forms to be created by a man-like God; it follows up
their development in the sense-world according to purely
natural laws. Meister Eckhart, as well as Tauler, and also
Jacob Boehme with Angelus Silesius, would needs feel
the deepest satisfaction in contemplating this natural
science. The spirit in which they desired to behold the
world has passed over in the fullest sense to this view of
Nature, when it is rightly understood. What they were
still unable to do, viz.: to bring the facts of Nature
themselves into the light which had risen for them, that,
undoubtedly, would have been their longing, if this same
natural science had been laid before them. They could
Cp. my presentation of Hegel in Welt- und Lebens-anschauungen
im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, vol. i.
23
AFTERWORD
135
not do it; for no geology, no natural history of creation

told them about the processes in Nature. The Bible
alone told them in its own way about such processes.
Therefore they sought, so far as they could, for the
spiritual where alone it is to be found: in the inner nature
of man.
At the present time, they would have quite other aids
at hand than in their own time, to show that an actually
existing Spirit is to be found only in man. They would
to-day agree unreservedly with those who seek Spirit as a
fact not in the root of Nature, but in her fruit. They
would admit that Spirit as perceivable is a result of
evolution, and that upon lower levels of evolution such
Spirit must not be sought for. They would understand
that no creative thought ruled in the forthcoming of
the Spirit in the organism, any more than such a
creative thought caused the ape to evolve from the
marsupials.
Our present age cannot speak about the facts of
Nature as Jacob Boehme spoke of them. But there
exists a point of view, even in this present day, which
brings Jacob Boehmes way of regarding things near to a
view of the world that takes account of modern natural
science. There is no need to lose the Spirit, when one
finds in Nature only the natural. Many do, indeed,
believe to-day that one must needs lose oneself in a
shallow and prosaic materialism, if one simply accepts
the facts which natural science has discovered. I
myself stand fully upon the ground of this same natural
science. I have, through and through, the feeling that, in
a view of Nature such as Ernst Haeckels, only he can
lose himself amid shallows who himself approaches it
136
with a shallow thought-world. I feel something higher,

more glorious, when I let the revelations of the natural
history of creation work upon me, than when the
supernatural miracle stories of the confessions of faith
force themselves upon me. In no holy book do I
know aught that unveils for me anything as lofty as the
sober fact, that every human germ in the mothers
womb repeats in brief, one after the other, those animal
types which its animal ancestors have passed through. If
only we fill our hearts with the glory of the facts that our
senses behold, then we shall have little left over for
wonders which do not lie in the course of Nature. If
we experience the Spirit in ourselves, then we have no
need of such in external Nature.
In my Philosophy of Freedom, (Berlin, 1894) I have
described my view of the world, which has no thought
of driving out the Spirit, because it beholds Nature as
Darwin and Haeckel beheld her. A plant, an animal,
gains nothing for me if I people it with souls of which
my senses give me no information. I do not seek in the
external world for a deeper, more soulful being of
things; nay, I do not even assume it, because I believe
that the insight which shines forth for me in my inner
being guards me against it. I believe that the things of
the sense-world are, in fact, just as they present
themselves to us, because I see that a right selfknowledge leads us to this: that in Nature we should seek
nothing but natural processes. I seek no Spirit of God in
Nature, because I believe that I perceive the nature of
the human spirit in myself. I calmly admit my animal
ancestry, because I believe myself to know that there,
where these animal ancestors have their origin, no spirit
of like nature with soul can work. I can only agree with
AFTERWORD
137
Ernst Haeckel when he prefers the eternal rest of the

grave to an immortality such as is taught by some
religions.24 For I find a dishonouring of Spirit, an ugly
sin against the Spirit, in the conception of a soul
continuing to exist after the manner of a sensible being.
I hear a shrill discord when the scientific facts in
Haeckels presentation come up against the piety of
the confessions of some of our contemporaries. But for
me there rings out from confessions of faith, which give
a discord with natural facts, naught of the spirit of the
higher piety which I find in Jacob Boehme and Angelus
Silesius. This higher piety stands far more in full
harmony with the working of the natural. There lies no
contradiction in the fact of saturating oneself with the
knowledge of the most recent natural science, and at the
same time treading the path which Jacob Boehme and
Angelus Silesius have sought. He who enters on that
path in the sense of those thinkers has no need to fear
losing himself in a shallow materialism when he lets the
secrets of Nature be laid before him by a natural history
of creation. Whoever has grasped my thoughts in this
sense will understand with me in like manner the last
saying of the Cherubinean Wanderer, with which also this
book shall close: Friend, it is even enough. In case
thou more wilt read, go forth, and thyself become the
book, thyself the reading.
24
Cp. Haeckels Riddle of the Universe.

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MYSTICS OF THE RENAISSANCE

Mystics of the Renaissance

Copyright 2009, 2014 by Scriptoria Books

Transcribed, edited, and formatted for print and digital media by

Friendship with God: Tauler, Suso and Ruysbroek

Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa

Agrippa von Nettesheim and Theophrastus Paracelsus

Valentine Weigel and Jacob Boehme .

Giordano Bruno and Angelus Silesius .

MYS TICS O F THE RENAIS SANCE

acquiescence. Other contradictions, which one critic

nately knows only so much as he is himself able to read

MYS TICS O F THE RENAIS SANCE

and believing materialist may judge of me. I would only

MYSTICS OF THE RENAISSANCE

MYS TICS O F THE RENAIS SANCE

along with Him. The Philosophers are the Mystae who,

A similar path to insight and a like relation to the

MYS TICS O F THE RENAIS SANCE

their eyes, cease your useless talking,or, for some

merely verbal explanation, perhaps even a triviality; it

MYS TICS O F THE RENAIS SANCE

bers of our own selves. An object in front of me is not

MYS TICS O F THE RENAIS SANCE

higher level. When this occurs, then I have not merely

stone towards itself. If, instead of throwing the stone, I

MYS TICS O F THE RENAIS SANCE

contrast with that other, ordinary sense. The

consequently recognises clearly what sort of illumination

MYS TICS O F THE RENAIS SANCE

unable to attain this inner experience, as of their having

there lies, however, in the fact that there is nothing

MYS TICS O F THE RENAIS SANCE

comes, in the long run, to a recognition of the entity that

Hegel says,just as this is our own subjective

MYS TICS O F THE RENAIS SANCE

It is apparent that only the life which is ruled by the

Spinoza has exactly the same thing in view when he

MYS TICS O F THE RENAIS SANCE

he errs or sins, then he must illuminate his thoughts or

MYS TICS O F THE RENAIS SANCE

worm: if I do not sustain it with Him, then it must

MYS TICS O F THE RENAIS SANCE

as its direction is always determined by the strongest

therewith of un-freedom. Freedom is not from the

MYS TICS O F THE RENAIS SANCE

contrast with the man who remains in his own natural

MYS TICS O F THE RENAIS SANCE

the Divine Being underlying nature. But it does not

MYS TICS O F THE RENAIS SANCE

to tell us about objects can concern only that which is

MYS TICS O F THE RENAIS SANCE

objects of the outer world by ascribing to them qualities

above sense (i.e., thoughts, feelings, etc.), is not at all in

MYS TICS O F THE RENAIS SANCE

without being,mere concepts and ideas of things.

MYS TICS O F THE RENAIS SANCE

All such thoughts vanish before the inner vision. It