C. 2.] Eckart and Hegel. 207 and, setting aside for the moment some redeeming expressions and the more religious spirit of the man, Eckart's theosophy is a remarkable anticipation of modern German idealism. That abstract ground of Godhead Eckart talks about, answers exactly to Hegel's Logische Idee. The Trinity of process, the incarnation ever renewing itself in men, the resolution of redemption almost to a divine self-development, constitute strong features of family likeness between the Dominican and both Hegel and Fichte.1 GOWER. One may fancy that while Hegel was teaching at Heidelberg it must have fared with poor Eckart as with the dead huntsman in the Danish ballad, while a usurper was hunting with his hounds over his patrimony,— With my dogs so good, He hunteth the wild deer in the wood; ATHERTON. Nay, if we come to fancying, let us call in Pythagoras at once, and say that the soul of Eckart transmigrated into Hegel. GOWER. With all my heart. The Portuguese have a superstition according to which the soul of a man who has died, leaving some duty unfulfilled or promised work unfinished, is frequently known to enter into another person, and dislodging for a time the rightful soul-occupant, impel him unconsciously to complete what was lacking. On a dreamy summer day like this, we can imagine Hegel in like manner possessed by Eckart in order to systematize his half-developed ideas. WILLOUGHBY. It is certainly very curious to mark the pathway of these pantheistic notions through successive ages. Seriously, I did not know till lately how venerably antique were the discoveries of absolute idealism. 1 See Note, p. 212. LOWESTOFFE. I confess that the being one in oneness, the nothing, the soul beyond the soul, the participation in the allmoving Immobility of which Eckart speaks, are to me utterly unintelligible. GOWER. Do not trouble yourself. No one will ever be able to get beyond the words themselves, any more than Bardolph could with the phrase which so tickled the ear of Justice Shallow. 'Accommodated; that is, when a man is, as they say, accommodated: or, when a man is,-being,—whereby,— he may be thought to be accommodated; which is an excellent thing.' ATHERTON. Yet, to do Eckart justice, he has his qualifications and his distinctions in virtue of which he imagines himself still within the pale of orthodoxy, and he strongly repudiates the Antinomian consequences to which his doctrines were represented as tending. GOWER. Ay, it is just in this way that the mischief is done. These distinctions many a follower of his could not or would not understand, and so his high philosophy produced in practice far oftener such men as the Nameless Wild than characters resembling the more pure and lofty ideal he drew himself in his discourse to the good people of Strasburg. These philosophical edge-tools are full perilous. Modern Germany is replete with examples of that fatal facility in the common mind for a practical application of philosophic paradox which our friend Adolf lamented at Fegersheim. When a philosophy which weakens the embankments that keep licence out has once been popularized, the philosopher cannot stop the inundation by shouting from his study-window. De Wette himself at last became aware of this, and regretted it in vain. Such speculation resembles the magic sword of Sir Elidure-its mysterious virtue sometimes filled even its owner with a furor that hurried him to an indiscriminate slaughter, but wielded by any other c. 2.] Mysticism ferments among the People. 209 hand its thirst could be satisfied only with the blood of every one around, and at last with the life of him who held it. LOWESTOFFE. Still there is far more excuse for Eckart than for our nineteenth century pantheists. Even the desperation. of some of those poor ignorant creatures, who exaggerated Eckart's paradoxes till they grew a plea for utter lawlessness, is not so unnatural, however lamentable. Who can wonder that some should have overwrought the doctrine of Christ in us and neglected that of Christ for us, when the opus operatum was in its glory, ghostly comfort bought and sold, and Christ our sacrifice pageanted about in the mass, as Milton says,-a fearful idol? Or that the untaught many, catching the first thought of spiritual freedom from some mystic, should have been intoxicated instantly. The laity, forbidden so long to be Christians on their own account, rise up here and there, crying, 'We will be not Christians merely, but so many Christs.' They have been denied what is due to man, they will dreadfully indemnify themselves by seizing what is due to God. Has not the letter been slaying them by inches all their days? The spirit shall give them life! GOWER. Like the peasant in the apologue ;-religion has been so long doled out to them in a few pitiful drops of holy water, till in their impatience they must have a whole Gangesflood poured into their grounds, obliterating, with a vengeance, all distinctions,' and drowning every logical and social landmark under the cold grey level-the blank neutraltint of a stoical indifference which annihilates all order and all law. ATHERTON. By a strange contradiction, Eckart employs Revelation at one moment only to escape it the next-and uses its beacon-lights to steer from, not to the haven. He pays homage to its authority, he consults its record, but presently leaves it far behind to lose himself in the unrevealed Godhead VOL. I. P -floats away on his sail-broad vans' of speculation through the vast vacuity in search of a dark Illimitable ocean, without bound, Without dimension, where length, breadth, and height, When there, he finds his cloudy seat soon fail him; he returns once more to the realities of revelation, only to forsake this lower ground again when he has renewed his strength. This oscillation betrays a fatal contradiction. To shut behind us the gate on this inferior world is not necessarily to open the everlasting doors of the upper one. GOWER. I very much admire the absolute resignation of that devout mendicant described by Eckart. He is a Quietist of the very best sort-his life a 'Thy will be done.' He is a Fénélon in rags. ATHERTON. After all, make what allowance we will,-giving Eckart all the benefit due from the fact that his life was pure, that he stood in no avowed antagonism to Christian doctrine or institute, that devout men like Tauler and Suso valued his teaching so highly,-still, he stands confessed a pantheist ; no charity can explain that away. GOWER. I am afraid not. What else can we call him when he identifies himself and all Christian men with the Son, as we have heard, makes himself essential to God, will share with him in the evolution of the Holy Ghost, and, forbidding you to regard yourself as a something distinct from God, exhorts you (if you would be a justified person and child of God indeed) to merge the ground of your own nature in the divine, so that your knowledge of God and his of you are the same thing,i.e., you and He one and the same? But can you conjecture, Atherton, by what process he arrived at such a pass? ATHERTON. Perhaps in this way :-John Scotus Erigena (with whose writings Eckart could scarcely have failed to make c. 2.] Pantheism-old and new. 211 acquaintance at Paris) asserts the identity of Being and Willing, of the Velle and the Esse in God; also the identity of Being and Knowing. Applying this latter proposition to the relationship between God and man, he comes logically enough to this conclusion, Man, essentially considered, may be defined as God's knowledge of him; that is, man reduced to his ultimate -his ground, or simple subsistence-is a divine Thought. But, on the same principle, the thoughts of God are, of course, God. Hence Eckart's doctrine-the ground of your being lies in God. Reduce yourself to that simplicity, that root, and you are in God. There is no longer any distinction between your spirit and the divine,-you have escaped personality and finite limitation. Your particular, creature self, as a something separate and dependent on God, is gone. So also, obviously, your creaturely will. Henceforth, therefore, what seems an inclination of yours is in fact the divine good pleasure. You are free from law. You are above means. The very will to do the will of God is resolved into that will itself. This is the Apathy, the Negation, the Poverty, he commends. With Eckart personally this self-reduction and deification is connected with a rigorous asceticism and exemplary moral excellence. Yet it is easy to see that it may be a merely intellectual process, consisting in a man's thinking that he is thinking himself away from his personality. He declares the appearance of the Son necessary to enable us to realize our sonship; and yet his language implies that this realization is the perpetual incarnation of that Son-does, as it were, constitute him. Christians are accordingly not less the sons of God by grace than is Christ by nature. Believe yourself divine, and the Son is brought forth in you. The Saviour and the saved are dissolved together in the blank absolute Substance. WILLOUGHBY. So then, Eckart would say, 'To realize him |