The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. The Friends of God

[ 1 ] In Johannes Tauler (1300-136I), Heinrich Soso (1295-1366) and Johannes Ruysbroeck (1295-1366) we get to know personalities in whose life and work the movements of the soul are revealed in the most vivid way, which a spiritual path such as that of Meister Eckhart causes in deep-seated natures. If Eckhart appears like a man who, in the blissful experience of spiritual rebirth, speaks of the nature and essence of knowledge as of a picture that he has succeeded in painting, the others present themselves as wanderers to whom this rebirth has shown a new path that they want to walk, but whose goal seems infinitely distant to them. Eckhart describes more the glories of his image, they the difficulties of the new path. One must be completely clear about man's attitude to his higher knowledge if one wants to understand the difference between personalities like Eckhart and Tauler. The human being is caught up in the world of the senses and in the laws of nature by which the world of the senses is governed. He is himself a result of this world. He lives in that its forces and substances are active in him; indeed, he perceives this world of the senses and judges it according to the laws by which it and he are constructed. When he directs his eye towards an object, not only does the object present itself to him as a sum of interacting forces governed by the laws of nature, but the eye itself is a body constructed according to such laws and by such forces; and seeing takes place according to such laws and through such forces. If we had come to an end in natural science, we could probably follow this play of natural forces in the sense of the laws of nature up to the highest regions of thought formation. - But in doing so, we are already rising above this play. Do we not stand above all mere natural lawfulness when we overlook how we integrate ourselves into nature? We see with our eyes according to the laws of nature. But we also recognize the laws by which we see. We can place ourselves on a higher level and at the same time see the outside world and ourselves in their interplay. Is there not an entity at work in us that is higher than the sensual-organic personality that works according to natural laws and with natural forces? Is there still a dividing wall between our inner being and the outside world in such activity? That which judges, that which enlightens, is no longer our individual personality; it is rather the general world entity which has torn down the barrier between the inner world and the outer world, and which now embraces both. As true as it is that I still remain the same individual in outward appearance when I have torn down the barrier in this way, it is also true that I am in essence no longer this individual. The feeling now lives in me that the All-Being speaks in my soul, which embraces me and all the world. - Such feelings live in Tauler when he says: "Man is right, as if he were three men, his animal man, as he is according to the senses, then his rational man, and finally his supreme God-shaped, God-formed man... The one is the outward, animal, sensual man; the other is the inward, rational man, with his rational powers; the third man is the mind, the supreme part of the soul" (cf. W. Preger, "Geschichte der deutschen Mystik", 3rd vol., p. 161). Eckhart explained how this third person is superior to the first and second in the following words: "The eye through which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me. My eye and God's eye are one eye and one seeing and one recognizing and one feeling." But in Tauler, another perception lives alongside this one. He struggles through to a real view of the spiritual and does not continually, like the false materialists and the false idealists, mix the sensual-natural with the spiritual. If Tauler, with his mindset, had become a naturalist, he would have had to insist on explaining everything natural, including the whole human being, the first and the second, in purely natural terms. He would never have put "purely" spiritual forces into nature itself. He would not have spoken of an "expediency" in nature conceived according to the human pattern. He knew that where we perceive with our senses, there are no "thoughts of creation" to be found. Rather, he had the strongest possible awareness of the fact that man is a purely natural being. And since he did not feel himself to be a natural scientist, but rather a nurturer of moral life, he felt the contrast that arose between this natural being of man and the vision of God that arises in the midst of naturalness, in a natural way, but as spirituality. It was precisely in this contrast that the meaning of life became apparent to him. Man finds himself as an individual being, as a natural creature. And no science can reveal to him anything else about this life than that he is such a creature of nature. As a creature of nature, he cannot transcend the creatureliness of nature. He must remain within it. And yet his inner life leads him beyond it. He must have confidence in that which no science of external nature can give and show him. If he calls this nature that which exists, he must be able to penetrate to the view that recognizes the non-existent as the higher. Tauler does not seek a God who exists in the sense of a natural force; he does not seek a God who would have created the world in the sense of human creations. In him lives the realization that even the concept of creation of the Doctors of the Church is only idealized human creation. It is clear to him that God cannot be found in the same way that science finds the workings of nature and the laws of nature. Tauler is aware that we must not think of anything in addition to nature as God. He knows that whoever, in his sense, thinks God, thinks no more thought content than whoever has conceived nature in thought. Tauler therefore does not want to think God, but he wants to think divinely. Knowledge of nature is not enriched by knowledge of God, but transformed. The knower of God does not know differently from the knower of nature, but knows differently. The knower of God cannot add one letter to the knowledge of nature; but a new light shines through his entire knowledge of nature.

[ 2 ] Which basic feelings take possession of the soul of a person who looks at the world from such points of view will depend on how he looks at the experience of the soul that spiritual rebirth brings. Within this experience man is entirely a natural being when he looks at himself in interaction with the rest of nature; and he is entirely a spiritual being when he looks at the state which his transformation brings him. One can therefore say with equal justification that the deepest ground of the soul is still natural, just as it is already divine. Tauler, in accordance with his way of thinking, emphasized the former. No matter how deeply we penetrate our souls, we always remain individuals, he said to himself. But the universal being nevertheless shines forth in the soul of the individual. Tauler was dominated by the feeling: you cannot detach yourself from the individual, you cannot purify yourself from it. That is why the all-being cannot emerge in you in its purity, but can only shine on the ground of your soul. In this only a reflection, an image of the All Being comes into being. You can transform your individual personality in such a way that it reflects the All-Being in the image; but this All-Being itself does not shine in you. From such ideas, Tauler arrived at the thought of a deity that never completely merges into the human world, never flows into it. Indeed, he makes a point of not being confused with those who declare the inner being of man himself to be divine. He says that the union with God "is taken carnally by unintelligent men, who say that it should be transformed into divine nature; but this is especially false and wicked heresy. For even in the highest, closest, most intimate union with God, divine nature and God's essence are high, indeed higher than all heights; that which never becomes a creature goes into a divine abyss." In the spirit of his time and in the spirit of his priestly profession, Tauler rightly wants to be called a devout Catholic. He was not interested in opposing Christianity with a different view. He only wants to deepen and spiritualize this Christianity through his view. Like a pious priest, he speaks of the content of Scripture. But in his imagination, this scripture becomes a means of expression for the innermost experiences of his soul. "God works all his works in the soul and gives them to the soul, and the Father gives birth to his only begotten Son in the soul, just as he gives birth to him in eternity, neither less nor more. What is born when one says: God gives birth in the soul? Is it a likeness of God, or is it an image of God, or is it something of God? No, it is neither an image nor a likeness of God, but the same God and the same Son whom the Father gives birth to in eternity, and nothing else, for the mincible divine Word, who is the other Person in the Trinity, is born of the Father in the soul... and from this the soul thus has great and special worthiness" (cf. Preger, "Geschichte der deutschen Mystik", 3rd vol., p. 219 f). €" For Tauler, the stories of Scripture become the garment in which he wraps the processes of inner life. "Herod, who chased away the child and wanted to kill it, is an example of the world that still wants to kill this child in a believing person, which is why we should and must flee from it if we want to keep the child alive in us, but the child is the enlightened believing soul of every human being."

[ 3 ] Tauler, because he focuses on the natural man, is less concerned with saying what will happen when the higher man enters the natural man than with finding the paths that the lower powers of the personality must take if they are to be transferred to the higher life. As the caretaker of the moral life, he wants to show man the ways to the universal being. He has the unconditional faith and trust that the All-being will light up in man if he arranges his life in such a way that there is a place for the divine in him. But this all-being can never shine forth if man closes himself off in his mere, natural, individual personality. In Tauler's language, this self-contained man is only a member of the world, a single creature. The more man encloses himself in this existence as a member of the world, the less room there is for the universal being within him. "If man is to become one with God in truth, then all the powers of the inner man must also die and be silent. The will itself must be stripped of goodness and all will and become will-less." "Man must withdraw from all his senses and relinquish all his powers, and come to forget all things and himself." "For the true and eternal word of God is spoken only in the wilderness, when man has gone out from himself and from all things, and stands completely alone, desolate and lonely."

[ 4 ] When Tauler was at his height, the question became the focus of his imaginative life: how can man destroy and overcome his individual existence within himself so that he can live in the spirit of all-life? Whoever finds himself in this situation, his feelings towards the All-being merge into one: Reverence for this All-being, as that which is inexhaustible, infinite. He says to himself: whatever level you have reached, there are still higher vistas, still more sublime possibilities. As definite and clear to him is the direction in which he has to move his steps, so clear is it to him that he can never speak of a goal. A new goal is only the beginning of a new path. Through such a new goal man has reached a degree of development; the development itself moves into the immeasurable. And what it will achieve at a more distant stage, it never knows in the present. There is no recognition of the final goal; only confidence in the path, in development. There is a recognition for everything that man has already achieved. It consists in penetrating an already existing object through the powers of our spirit. There is no such recognition for the higher life of the inner being. Here the powers of our spirit must first bring the object itself into existence; they must first create an existence for it that is like natural existence. Natural science traces the development of beings from the simplest to the most perfect, man himself. This development lies before us as a completed one. We recognize it by penetrating it with our spiritual powers. Once the development has reached man, he finds no further continuation. He carries out the further development himself. He now lives what he merely recognizes for earlier stages. He creates after the object what he creates for the preceding only according to the spiritual being. That truth is not one with what exists in nature, but that it naturally embraces what exists and what does not exist: Tauler is completely filled with this in all his sentiments. It has been handed down to us that he was led to this fulfillment by an enlightened layman, a "friend of God from the Oberland". There is a mysterious story here. There is only conjecture about where this friend of God lived; not even about who he was. He is said to have heard a lot about Tauler's way of preaching and, after hearing this, decided to travel to Tauler, who was working as a preacher in Strasbourg, in order to fulfill a task for him. Tauler's relationship with his friend of God and the influence he exerted on him are described in a booklet that is included in the oldest editions of Tauler's sermons under the title "The Master's Book". In it, a friend of God, in whom one wants to recognize the one who has entered into a relationship with Tauler, tells of a "master" as whom one wants to recognize Tauler himself. He tells how a turnaround, a spiritual rebirth was brought about in a "master", and how this master, when he felt his death approaching, called the friend to him and asked him to write the story of his "enlightenment", but to ensure that no one would ever know who was mentioned in the book. He asked for this because all the insights that emanate from him are not from him. "For know that God has wrought all things through me poor worm, it is not mine, it is God's." A scientific dispute that has arisen over the matter is not of the slightest significance for the essence of the matter. One side (Denifle, "Die Dichtungen des Gottesfreundes im Oberlande") has attempted to prove that the God's Friend never existed, but that his existence was invented, and that the books attributed to him were written by someone else (Rulman Merswin). Wilhelm Preger ("Geschichte der deutschen Mystik") has tried to support the existence, the authenticity of the writings and the accuracy of the facts relating to Tauler with many reasons. - It is not for me here to shed light with intrusive research on a human relationship which those who know how to read the writings in question know quite well should remain a secret. (These writings in question are, among others: "Von eime eiginwilligen weltwisen manne, der von eime heiligen weltpriestere gewiset war 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 jungen 15 jährigen Knaben"). If it is said of Tauler that he underwent a transformation at a certain stage of his life, such as the one I will now describe, that is quite sufficient. Tauler's personality no longer comes into consideration, but a personality "in general". As far as Tauler is concerned, we are only concerned with understanding his transformation from the point of view indicated by the following. If we compare his later work with his earlier one, the fact of this transformation is given without further ado. I omit all external facts and relate the inner soul processes of the "Master" under "the influence of the layman". What my reader thinks of under the "layman" and under the "master" depends entirely on his way of thinking; what I think of it myself, I cannot know for whom else it comes into consideration. - A master teaches his listeners about the relationship of the soul to the all-being of things. He speaks of the fact that man no longer feels the natural, limited powers of the individual personality at work in him when he descends into the abyss of the depths of his soul. It is no longer the individual human being who speaks there, it is God who speaks. 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 become fully alive in him. He thinks it with his mind; but he does not yet live in it with every fiber of his personality. He therefore teaches from a state which he has not yet fully undergone within himself. The description of the state corresponds to the truth; but this truth is worth nothing if it does not gain life, if it does not bring itself forth in reality as existence. The "layman" or "friend of God" hears about the Master and his teachings. He is no less imbued with the truth spoken by the master than the master himself. But he does not have this truth as a matter of the intellect. He has it as the whole force of his life. He knows that when this truth has flown in from outside, he can speak it himself without living in the slightest sense of it. One then has nothing but the natural knowledge of the intellect within oneself. This natural knowledge is then spoken of as if it were the highest knowledge, the same as the working of the All-being. It is not, because it is not acquired in a life that has already approached this knowledge as a transformed, as a reborn one. That which one acquires as a mere natural human being remains mere natural, even if one subsequently expresses the basic trait of higher knowledge in words. The transformation must be accomplished out of nature itself. Nature, which has developed to a certain stage when alive, must be further developed through life; new things must arise through this further development. Man must not merely look back to the already existing development and address that which replicates itself in his spirit through this development as the highest; but he must look forward to the uncreated; his cognition must be a beginning of a new content, not an end of the developmental content lying before it. Nature progresses from worm to mammal, from mammal to man, not in a conceptual but in a real process. Man should not merely repeat this process in spirit. The spiritual repetition is only the beginning of a new real development, which is, however, a spiritual reality. Man then does not merely recognize what nature has produced; he continues nature; he transforms his knowledge into living action. He gives birth to the spirit within himself; and this spirit progresses from then on from stage to stage of development, just as nature progresses. The spirit begins a natural process at a higher level. Speaking about the God who sees Himself within man takes on a different character with him who has recognized this. He attaches little importance to the fact that an already attained knowledge has led him into the depths of the universal being; instead his way of thinking acquires a new character. It develops further in the direction determined by the All Being. Such a person not only looks at the world differently than the merely intelligent; he also lives life differently. He does not speak of the sense that life already has through the forces and laws of the world; rather, he first gives this life a new meaning. Just as little as the fish has within itself that which will emerge as a mammal at a later stage of development, so little does the intelligent human being already have within himself that which is to be born of him as a higher human being. If the fish could recognize itself and the things around it, it would regard being a fish as the meaning of life. It would say: The All-being is like the fish; in the fish the All-being sees itself. The fish may speak in this way as long as it merely adheres to its intellectual cognition. In reality, it does not adhere to this. It goes beyond its cognition with its actions. It becomes a crawling animal and later a mammal. The meaning that he gives himself in reality goes beyond the meaning that mere observation gives him. It must be the same with man. He gives himself a meaning in reality; he does not stop at the meaning he already has and which his contemplation shows him. Cognition leaps beyond itself, if only it understands itself correctly. Cognition cannot derive the world from a finished God; it can only develop from a germ in the direction of a God. Man who has grasped this does not want to regard God as something that is outside him; he wants to treat God as a being that walks with him towards a goal that is as unknown in the beginning as the nature of the mammal is unknown to the fish. He does not want to be a recognizer of the hidden, or revealing, existing God, but a friend of the divine action and activity that is elevated above being and non-being. A "friend of God" in this sense was the layman who came to the Master. And through him, the master turned from an observer of the essence of God into a "living being in the spirit" who not only observed, but lived in a higher sense. He no longer drew concepts and ideas of the intellect from within himself, but these concepts and ideas emerged from him as a living, essential spirit. He no longer merely edified his listeners; he shook them. He no longer sank their souls into their inner being; he led them into a new life. We are told this symbolically: around forty people fell down as a result of his sermon and were as if dead.

[ 5 ] The guide to such a new life is a writing about whose author nothing is known. Luther first made it known through print. The linguist Franz Pfeiffer has recently printed it from a manuscript dating back to 1497, with a new German translation of the original text. What precedes the text indicates its intention and purpose: "Here the Frankfurter begins and says very high and beautiful things about a perfect life." This is followed by "the preface about the Frankfurter": "This little book has been spoken by the almighty, eternal God through a wise, understanding, truthful, righteous man, his friend, who was a German gentleman, a priest and a custos in the German gentlemen's house in Frankfurt; it teaches many a lovely insight into divine truth, and especially how and by what means one may recognize the true, righteous friends of God, and also the unrighteous, false, free spirits, who are quite harmful to the holy church." - By "free spirits" we may understand those who live in a world of imagination, like the "master" described above before his transformation by the "friend of God", and by the "true, righteous friends of God" those with the attitude of the "layman". One may also ascribe to the book the intention of having the same effect on its readers as the "God's friend in the Oberland" had on the Master. We do not know the author. But what does that mean? We do not know when he was born and died, or what he did in his outward life. The fact that the author strove for an eternal mystery about these facts of his external life is already part of the way in which he wanted to work. It is not the "I" of this or that person born at a certain point in time that should speak to us, but the "I-ness" on the basis of which "the particularity of individualities" (in the sense of Paul Asmus' saying, cf. p. 27 f. above) first develops. "If God were to take all human beings who are and ever were, and were to humanize them, and were to deify them in him, and if this were not also to happen to me, then my fall and my turning away would never be improved, for it would also happen in me. And in this restoration and improvement I can and may and should do nothing but a mere pure suffering, so that God alone does and works all things in me, and I suffer him and all his works and his divine will. But if I do not want to suffer this, but possess myself with attribute, i.e. with My and I, Me, Myself and the like, this prevents God from working His work in me honestly alone and without hindrance. That is why my fall and my turning away remain unimproved." The "Frankfurter" does not want to speak as an individual; he wants to let God speak. Of course, he knows that he can only do this as an individual, special personality; but he is a "friend of God", that is, a person who does not want to represent the essence of life through contemplation, but who wants to show the beginning of a direction of development through the living spirit. The disputes in Scripture are various instructions on how to arrive at this path. The basic idea recurs again and again: man should cast off everything that is connected with the view that makes him appear as a single, special personality. This thought only seems to be applied to the moral life; it can also easily be transferred to the higher life of knowledge. One should destroy in oneself what appears to be special: then the special existence ceases; the all-life moves into us. We cannot take possession of this all-life by drawing it towards us. It comes into us when we silence the individual being within us. We have the All-life least of all when we regard our individual existence as if the All already rested in it. This only merges into the individual existence when this individual existence does not claim to be something. Scripture calls this claiming of individual existence "acceptance". By "accepting", the "I" makes it impossible for the All-I to move into it. The ego then replaces the whole, the perfect, as a part, as the imperfect. "The perfect is a being which in itself and in its being has comprehended and determined 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 immutable and immovable, and transforms and moves all other things. But that which is divided and imperfect is that which has sprung, or becomes, from this perfection, just like a radiance or a glow that flows out of the sun or out of a light and shines something, this or that. And this is called a creature, and none of these divided things is perfect. So also the perfect of the divided is none... When the perfect comes, the divided is spurned. But when does it come? I say: when it is recognized, felt and tasted in the soul, if it is possible; for the lack is entirely in us and not in it. For just as the sun illuminates the whole world and is as close to one person as to another, so a blind person does not see it. But this is not a defect of the sun, but of the blind man... If my eye is to see anything, it must be purified, or be purified from all other things... Now one would like to say: if it is now unrecognizable and incomprehensible by all creatures, and the soul is now a creature, how can it then be recognized in the soul?" Answer: therefore one speaks, the creature is to be recognized as a creature. This means that all creatures should be regarded as creatureliness and nature, and not, whereby this recognition is impossible, as ego and selfhood. "For in whichever creature this perfection is to be recognized, creatureliness, nature, ego, selfhood and the like must all be lost and come to nothing." (Chapter 1 of Frankfurter's writing.) The soul must therefore look within itself, there it finds its ego, its selfhood. If it stops there, it separates itself from perfection. If it regards its I-ness only as one lent to it, as it were, and destroys it in the spirit, it is seized by the stream of all-life, of perfection. "When the creature assumes something good, as being, life, knowledge, cognition, ability, recently everything that should be called good, and thinks that it is this, or that it is its own, or that it belongs to it, or that it is from it: as often and as much as this happens, it turns away." "The created soul of man has two eyes. One is the ability to see into eternity; the other is the ability to see into time and into the creature." "Man should therefore stand and be quite free without himself, that is, without selfhood, I-ness, Me, Mine, Me and the like, so that he should seek and think so little of himself and his own in all things as if it were not; and should also think so little of himself as if he were not, and as if another had done all his works." (Chapter 5) In the case of the author of these sentences, too, one must reckon with the fact that the conceptual content to which he gives direction through his higher ideas and feelings is that of a believing priest in the sense of his time. Here it is not a question of the conceptual content, but of the direction, not of the thoughts, but of the way of thinking. He who does not live, as he does, in Christian dogmas, but in ideas of natural science, imprints other thoughts on his propositions; but with these other thoughts he points in the same direction. And this direction is the one that leads to the overcoming of selfhood through this selfhood itself. The highest light shines for man in his ego. But this light only gives the right reflection to his imaginary world when he realizes that it is not his self-light, but the general world-light. There is therefore no more important knowledge than self-knowledge; and at the same time there is none that leads so completely beyond itself. If the "I" recognizes itself correctly, it is no longer an "I". The author of the scripture in question expresses this in his own language: "For God's attribute is without this and without that and without selfhood and ego; but the nature and property of the creature is that it seeks and wants itself and its own, and this and that; and in all that it does or leaves undone, it wants to receive its piety and benefit. Now where the creature or man loses his own and his selfhood and himself, and goes out from himself, there God enters in with his own, that is, with his selfhood." (Chapter 24.) Man rises from a view of his "I" which makes it appear to him as his essence, to one which shows it to him as a mere organ in which the All-being acts upon itself. Within the conceptual circle of our Scripture this means: "If man can come to the conclusion that he belongs to God just as much as the hand of man belongs to God, then let him be content and seek no further." (Chapter 54.) This is not to say that man should stop at a certain point in his development, but that when he has reached the point indicated in the above words, he should make no further inquiry into the meaning of the hand, but rather use the hand so that it may render service to the body to which it belongs.

[ 6 ] Heinrich Suso and Johannes Ruysbroek had a way of thinking that can be described as genius of the mind. Their feelings are drawn by something instinctive, where Eckhart's and Tauler's feelings were led by higher imagination. Suso's heart turns fervently towards a primordial being that embraces the individual as much as the rest of the world, and in which he, forgetting himself, wants to merge like a drop of water in the great ocean. He does not speak of this longing of his for the All-Being as something he wants to encompass with thoughts; he speaks of it as a natural instinct that makes his soul drunk with the desire for the annihilation of its special existence and for resurrection in the all-effectiveness of the infinite Being. "Turn your eyes to the being in its pure and simple simplicity, so that you drop this and that partaking being. Take only being in itself, which is unmixed with non-being; for all non-being denies all being; so does being in itself, which denies all non-being. A thing that is yet to become, or has been, is not now in essential presence. Now one cannot recognize mixed essence or non-essence except by means of a sign of all essence. For if one wants to understand a thing, reason first encounters essence, and that is an essence that affects all things. It is not a divided essence of this or that creature; for the divided essence is everything mixed with something other than a possibility of receiving something. Therefore, the nameless divine being must be in itself an all-being that sustains all divided beings with its presence." This is what Suso says in his self-biography, which he wrote down together with his student Elsbet Stäglin. He, too, is a pious priest and lives entirely within the Christian concept. He lives in it as if it were quite unthinkable that one could live with his spiritual direction in another spiritual world. But it is also true of him that one can connect a different conceptual content with his spiritual direction. The way in which the content of Christian doctrine becomes an inner experience for him and his relationship to Christ becomes one between his spirit and eternal truth in a purely ideal-spiritual way speaks clearly for this. He wrote a "booklet on eternal wisdom". In it, he lets the "eternal wisdom" speak to its "servant", i.e. probably to himself: "Do you not recognize me? How have you even sunk down, or have you lost your senses from the sorrow of your heart, my tender child? It is I, the merciful Wisdom, who have opened wide the abyss of causeless mercy, which is nevertheless hidden from all saints, to receive you and all repentant hearts graciously; it is I, the sweet, eternal Wisdom, who became poor and miserable, that I might restore you to your dignity; it is I, who suffered bitter death, that I might make you alive again! I stand here, pale and bloody and mincing, as I stood on the high gallows of the cross, between the severe judgment of my Father and you. It is I, your brother; lug, it is I, your spouse! I have forgotten everything that you ever did against me, as if it had never happened, if you now turn to me completely and no longer part from me." For Suso, as we can see, everything physical and temporal in the Christian conception of the world has become a spiritual and ideal process within his soul. - From some chapters of the above-mentioned description of Suso's life, it might seem as if he was not guided by the mere activity of his own spiritual power, but by external revelations, by spiritual visions. Yet he also expresses his opinion on this quite clearly. Truth can only be attained through reason, not through any kind of revelation. "The difference between pure truth and doubtful visions in professed matter... I will also tell you. An unmediated vision of the mere Godhead, that is right pure truth, without all doubt; and every vision, the more reasonable and imageless it is, and the more like the same mere vision, the nobler it is." - Master Eckhart also leaves no doubt that he rejects the view that wants to see the spiritual in physical-spatial formations, in phenomena that can be perceived like sensual ones. Spirits of the kind of Suso and Eckhart are thus opponents of a view as expressed in the spiritualism that developed in the 19th century.

[ 7 ] Johannes Ruysbroek, the Belgian mystic, followed the same path as Suso. His spiritual path found a lively opponent in Johannes Gerson (born 1363), who was chancellor of the University of Paris for a time and played a significant role at the Council of Constance. It sheds some light on the nature of the mysticism that found its fosterers in Tauler, Suso and Ruysbroek when compared with the mystical endeavors of Gerson, who had predecessors in Richard of St. Victor, Bonaventure and others. - Ruysbroek himself fought against those whom he counted as heretical mystics. He regarded as such all those who, through a frivolous intellectual judgment, consider all things to be the outflow of a primordial being, who thus see in the world only a multiplicity and in God the unity of this multiplicity. Ruysbroek did not count himself among them, for he knew that one could not arrive at the primordial being by looking at things themselves, but only by rising from this lower to a higher way of looking at things. In the same way he turned against those who wanted to see in the individual human being, in his special existence (in his creatureliness), his higher nature without further ado. He also deplored the error that blurs all differences in the world of the senses and easily says that things are only different in appearance, but are all the same in essence. For a way of thinking such as Ruysbroek's, this would be just like saying that it is none of our business that the trees of an avenue converge in the distance for our vision. They are in reality the same distance apart everywhere, so our eyes have to get used to seeing correctly. But our eyes see correctly. The fact that the trees converge is based on a necessary law of nature; and we have no objection to our seeing, but to recognize in the spirit why we see that way. The mystic also does not turn away from sensual things. He accepts them as sensual, as they are. And he is also aware that they cannot be changed by any intellectual judgment. But he goes beyond the senses and the intellect in spirit, and only then does he find unity. His faith is unshakeable, that he can develop into seeing this unity. That is why he ascribes to human nature the divine spark that can be made to shine in him, to self-illuminate. Spirits of Gerson's kind are different. They do not believe in this self-luminosity. For them, what man can see always remains an external thing that must also come to them externally from some side. Ruysbroek believed that the highest wisdom must illuminate mystical vision; Gerson only believed that the soul could illuminate an external doctrinal content (that of the church). For Gerson, mysticism was nothing other than having a warm feeling for all that is revealed in this doctrinal content. For Ruysbroek it was a belief that all doctrinal content is also born in the soul. That is why Gerson criticizes Ruysbroek for imagining that he not only possesses the ability to see the All-being with clarity, but that in this seeing he himself expresses an activity of the All-being. Ruysbroek could not be understood by Gerson. Both spoke of two quite different things. Ruysbroek had in mind the life of the soul that lives into its God; Gerson only a life of the soul that wants to love the God that it is never able to live in itself. Why many, Gerson also fought against something that was only alien to him because he could not grasp it in experience. ^{1In my writings you will find various kinds of talk about "mysticism". One will find the apparent contradiction that some personalities want to find in it clarified in the notes to the new edition of my "Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung", p. 139f.}