The life of the rest of Europe in the later medieval period has little special significance in the history of freethought. France and Italy, by German admission, were the lands of the medieval Aufklärung.466 The poetry of the German Minnesingers, a growth from that of the Troubadours, presented the same anti-clerical features;467 and the story of Reynard the Fox was turned to anti-ecclesiastical purpose in Germany as in France. The relative freethinking set up by the crusaders’ contact with the Saracens seems to be the source of doubt of the Minnesinger Freidank concerning the doom of hell-fire on heretics and heathens, the opinion of Walter der Vogelweide that Christians, Jews, and Moslems all serve the same God,468 and still more mordant heresy. But such bold freethinking did not spread. Material prosperity rather than culture was the main feature of German progress in the Middle Ages; architecture being the only art greatly developed. Heresy of the anti-ecclesiastical order indeed abounded, and was duly persecuted; but the higher freethinking developments were in the theosophic rather than the rationalistic direction. Albert the Great (fl. 1260), “the universal Doctor,” the chief German teacher of the Middle Ages, was of unimpeached orthodoxy.469
The principal German figure of the period is Master Eckhart (d. 1329), who, finding religious beliefs excluded from the sphere of reason by the freer philosophy of his day, undertook to show that they were all matters of reason. He was, in fact, a mystically reasoning preacher, and he taught in the interests of popular religion. Naturally, as he philosophized on old bases, he did not really subject his beliefs to any skeptical scrutiny, but took them for granted and proceeded speculatively upon them. This sufficed to bring him before the Inquisition at Cologne, where he recanted conditionally on an appeal to the Pope. Dying soon after, he escaped the papal bull condemning twenty-eight of his doctrines. His school later divided into a heretical and a Church party, of which the former, called the “false free spirits,” seems to have either joined or resembled the antinomian Brethren of the Free Spirit, then numerous in Germany. The other section became known as the “Friends of God,” a species of mystics who were “faithful to the whole medieval imaginative creed, Transubstantiation, worship of the Virgin and Saints, Purgatory.”470 Through Tauler and others, Eckhart’s pietistic doctrine gave a lead to later Protestant evangelicalism; but the system as a whole can never have been held by any popular body.471
Dr. Lasson pronounces (Ueberweg, i, 483) that the type of Eckhart’s character and teaching “was derived from the innermost essence of the German national character.” At the same time he admits that all the offshoots of the school departed more or less widely from Eckhart’s type—that is, from the innermost essence of their own national character. It would be as plausible to say that the later mysticism of Fénelon derived from the innermost essence of the French character. The Imitatio Christi has been similarly described as expressing the German character, on the assumption that it was written by Thomas à Kempis. Many have held that the author was the Frenchman Gerson (Hallam, Lit. of Europe, ed. 1872, i, 139–40). It was in all probability, as was held by Suarez, the work of several hands, one a monk of the twelfth century, another a monk of the thirteenth, and the third a theologian of the fifteenth; neither Gerson nor Thomas à Kempis being concerned (Le Clerc, Hist. Litt. du XIVe Siècle, 2e édit. pp. 384–85; cp. Neale’s Hist. of the so-called Jansenist Church of Holland, 1858, pp. 97–98).
The Imitatio Christi (1471), the most popular Christian work of devotion ever published,472 tells all the while of the obscure persistence of the search for knowledge and for rational satisfactions. Whatever be the truth as to its authorship, it belongs to all Christendom in respect of its querulous strain of protest against all manner of intellectual curiosity. After the first note of world-renunciation, the call to absorption in the inner religious life, there comes the sharp protest against the “desire to know.” “Surely an humble husbandman that serveth God is better than a proud philosopher who, neglecting himself, laboureth to understand the course of the heavens.... Cease from an inordinate desire of knowing.”473 No sooner is the reader warned to consider himself the frailest of all men than he is encouraged to look down on all reasoners. “What availeth it to cavil and dispute much about dark and hidden things, when for being ignorant of them we shall not be so much as reproved at the day of judgment? It is a great folly to neglect the things that are profitable and necessary, and give our minds to that which is curious and hurtful.... And what have we to do with genus and species, the dry notions of logicians?”474 The homily swings to and fro between occasional admissions that “learning is not to be blamed,” perhaps interpolated by one who feared to have religion figure as opposed to knowledge, and recurrent flings—perhaps also interpolated—at all who seek book-lore or physical science; but the note of distrust of reason prevails. “Where are all those Doctors and Masters whom thou didst well know whilst they lived and flourished in learning? Now others have their livings, and perchance scarce ever think of them. While they lived they seemed something, but now they are not spoken of.”475 It belongs to the whole conception of retreat and aloofness that the devout man should “meddle not with curiosities, but read such things as may rather yield compunction to his heart than occupation to his head”; and the last chapter of the last book closes on the note of the abnegation of reason. “Human reason is feeble and may be deceived, but true faith cannot be deceived. All reason and natural search ought to follow faith, not to go before it, nor to break in upon it.... If the works of God were such that they might be easily comprehended by human reason, they could not be justly called marvellous or unspeakable.” Thus the very inculcation of humility, by its constant direction against all intellectual exercise, becomes an incitement to a spiritual arrogance; and all manner of science finds in the current ideal of piety its pre-ordained antagonist.