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1. Die Christliche Mystik. Von Dr. Ludwig Noack. Königsberg.
2.
3. The writer, who goes by the name of Dionysius Areopagita, teaches that the highest spiritual truth is revealed only to those ‘who have transcended every ascent of every holy height, and have left behind all divine lights and sounds and heavenly discoursings, and have passed into that Darkness where He really is (as saith the Scripture) who is above all things.’—De Mysticâ Theologiâ, cap. i. § 3.
4. On the word μύησις Suidas says, Εἴρηται δὲ παρὰ τὸ τὰ μυστήρια καὶ ἀπόρῥητα τελεῖσθαι· ἤ διὰ τὸ μυόντας τὰς αἰσθήσεις καὶ ἐπέκεινα σωματικῆς φαντασίας νενομένους, τὰς θείας εἰσδέχεσθαι ἐλλάμψεις.
Suicer also cites Hesychius: Etym. Mag.—Μύστης, παρὰ τὸ μύω, τὸ καμμύω. μύοντες γὰρ τὰς αἰσθήσεις καὶ ἔξω τῶν σαρκικῶν φροντίδων γινόμενοι, οὕτω τὰς θείας ἀναλάμψεις ἐδέχοντο.
5. See Bingham, Antiq. of the Christian Church, vol. ix. pp. 96-105. Clement of Alexandria abounds in examples of the application to Christian doctrine of the phraseology in use concerning the heathen mysteries;—e.g. Protrept. cap. xii. § 120.
6. Both Plotinus and Proclus speak of the highest revelation concerning divine things as vouchsafed to the soul which withdraws into itself, and, dead to all that is external, ‘gazes with closed eyes’ (μύσασαν). See Tholuck’s Blüthensammlung aus der Morgenlandischen Mystik; Einleitung, § I, p. 6. Dr. Tholuck is the only German writer I have seen who throws light on the word in question by accurately investigating its etymology and successive meanings; and I readily acknowledge my debt to his suggestions on this point.
7. Dionysius thus describes the mystical adept who has reached the summit of union:—‘Then is he delivered from all seeing and being seen, and passes into the truly mystical darkness of ignorance, where he excludes all intellectual apprehensions (τὰς γνωστικὰς ἀντιλήηψεις), and abides in the utterly Impalpable and Invisible; being wholly His who is above all, with no other dependence, either on himself or any other; and is made one, as to his nobler part, with the utterly Unknown, by the cessation of all knowing; and at the same time, in that very knowing nothing, he knows what transcends the mind of man.’—De Mysticâ Theologiâ, cap. i. p. 710. S. Dion. Areop. Opp. Paris, 1644.
So again he exhorts Timothy ‘by assiduous practice in mystical contemplations to abandon the senses and all operations of the intellect; all objects of sense and all objects of thought, all things non-existent and existent (αἰσθητὰ = οὐκ ὄντα, νοητὰ = ὄντα), and ignorantly to strive upwards towards Union as close as possible with Him who is above all essence and knowledge:—inasmuch as by a pure, free, and absolute separation (ἐκστάσει) of himself from all things, he will be exalted (stripped and freed from everything) to the superessential radiance of the divine darkness.’—p. 708.
About the words rendered ‘intellectual apprehensions’ commentators differ. The context, the antithesis, and the parallel passage in the earlier part of the chapter, justify us in understanding them in their strict sense, as conveying the idea of cessation from all mental action whatsoever.
9. See Wilkins’ Bagvat-Gita, pp. 63-65. Ward, ii. 180. Also, Asiatic Researches, vol. xvii. pp. 169-313, containing an account of these Yogis, by Horace Hayman Wilson. One sect, we are told, have a way of contemplating Vishnu in miniature, by imagining the god in their heart, about the size of an open hand, and so adoring him from top to toe. In this gross conception of an indwelling deity these Hindoos do indeed exceed St. Theresa, who after swallowing the wafer conceives of Christ as prisoner in her inwards, and, making her heart a doll’s-house, calls it a temple. But beyond her, and beyond the Indians, too, in sensuousness, are the Romanist stories of those saints in whom it is declared that a post-mortem examination has disclosed the figure of Christ, or the insignia of his passion, miraculously modelled in the chambers of the heart.
10. Asiatic Researches, loc. cit. The worshipped principle of Hindooism is not love, but power. Certain objects are adored as containing divine energy. The Guru is a representative and vehicle of divine power—a Godful man, and accordingly the most imperious of task-masters. The prodigies of asceticism, so abundant in Indian fable, had commonly for their object the attainment of superhuman powers. Thus Taraki, according to the Siva Puran, stood a hundred years on tip-toe, lived a hundred years on air, a hundred on fire, &c. for this purpose.—Notes to Curse of Kehama, p. 237.
The following passage, cited by Ward, exhibits the subjective idealism of these Hindoos in its most daring absurdity. ‘Let every one meditate upon himself; let him be the worshipper and the worship. Whatever you see is but yourself, and father and mother are nonentities; you are the infant and the old man, the wise man and the fool, the male and the female; it is you who are drowned in the stream—you who pass over; you are the sensualist and the ascetic, the sick man and the strong; in short, whatsoever you see, that is you, as bubbles, surf, and billows are all but water.’
Now, there is an obvious resemblance between this idealism and that of Fichte. The Indian and the German both ignore the notions formed from mere sensible experience; both dwell apart from experience, in a world fashioned for themselves out of ‘pure thought;’ both identify thought and being, subject and object. But here the likeness ends. The points of contrast are obvious. The Hindoo accepts as profoundest wisdom what would be an unfair caricature of the system of Fichte. The idealism of the Oriental is dreamy and passive; it dissolves his individuality; it makes him a particle, wrought now into this, now into that, in the ever-shifting phantasmagoria of the universe; he has been, he may be, he, therefore, in a sense is, anything and everything. Fichte’s philosophy, on the contrary, rests altogether on the intense activity—on the autocracy of the Ego, which posits, or creates, the Non-Ego. He says, ‘The activity and passivity of the Ego are one and the same. For in as far as it does not posit a something in itself, it posits that something in the Non-Ego. Again, the activity and passivity of the Non-Ego are one and the same. In as far as the Non-Ego works upon the Ego, and will absorb a something in it, the Ego posits that very thing in the Non-Ego.’ (Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, § 3. Sämmtliche Werke, v. i. p. 177.) Action is all in all with him. God he calls ‘a pure Action’ (reines Handeln), the life and principle of a supersensuous order of the world—just as I am a pure Action, as a link in that order. (Gerichtliche Verantwortung gegen die Anklage des Atheismus, Werke, v. p. 261.) Charged with denying personality to God, Fichte replies that he only denied him that conditioned personality which belongs to ourselves—a denial, I suppose, in which we should all agree. The only God in his system which is not an uninfluential abstraction is manifestly the Ego—that is dilated to a colossal height, and deified. Pre-eminently anti-mystical as was the natural temperament of Fichte, here he opens a door to the characteristic misconception of mysticism—the investiture of our own notions and our own will with a divine authority or glory. He would say, ‘The man of genius does think divine thoughts. But the man who is unintelligible, who, in the very same province of pure thought as that occupied by the true philosopher, thinks only at random and incoherently; he is mistaken, I grant, in arrogating inspiration—him I call a mystic.’ But of unintelligibility or incoherence what is to be the test,—who is to be the judge? In this anarchy of gods, numerous as thinkers, one deity must have as much divine right as another. There can be no appeal to experience, which all confessedly abandon; no appeal to facts, which each Ego creates after its own fashion for itself.
11. Philo gives an account of the Therapeutæ referred to in the letter, in his treatise De Vitâ Contemplativâ.
Passages corresponding with those contained in the letter contributed by Atherton, concerning the enmity of the flesh and the divine nature of the soul, are to be found in the works of Philo, Sacr. Leg. Alleg. lib. iii. p. 101 (ed. Mangey); lib. ii. p. 64; De eo quod det. potiori insid. soleat, pp. 192, 208.
Philo’s interpretation of the scriptural account concerning Babel is contained in the De Confus. Linguarum, p. 424. His exposition of Gen. i. 9, illustrates the same principle, Sacr. Leg. Alleg. lib. i. p. 54; so of Gen. xxxvii. 12; De eo quod pot. p. 192.
Eusebius shows us how Eleazar and Aristobulus must have prepared the way for Philo in this attempt to harmonize Judaism with the letters and philosophy of Greece. Præp. Evang. lib. viii. 9, 10.
12. The testimony of Cicero and Iamblichus may be received as indicating truly the similarity of spirit between Pythagoras and Plato,—their common endeavour to escape the sensuous, and to realize in contemplative abstraction that tranquillity, superior to desire and passion, which assimilated men to gods. The principles of both degenerated, in the hands of their latest followers, into the mysteries of a theurgic freemasonry. The scattered Pythagoreans were, many of them, incorporated in the Orphic associations, and their descendants were those itinerant vendors of expiations and of charms—the ἀγύρται of whom Plato speaks (Repub. ii. p. 70)—the Grecian prototypes of Chaucer’s Pardonere. Similarly, in the days of Iamblichus, the charlatans glorified themselves as the offspring of Plato.
13. Clement of Alexandria gives a full account of the various stories respecting this idol, Protrept. c. iv. p. 42 (ed. Potter); moreover an etymology and legend to match, Strom. lib. i. p. 383.
Certain sorts of wood and metal were supposed peculiarly appropriate to certain deities. The art of the theurgist consisted partly in ascertaining the virtues of such substances; and it was supposed that statues constructed of a particular combination of materials, correspondent with the tastes and attributes of the deity represented, possessed a mysterious influence attracting the Power in question, and inducing him to take up his residence within the image. Iamblichus lays down this principle of sympathy in the treatise De Mysteriis, v. 23, p. 139 (ed. Gale, 1678). Kircher furnishes a description of this statue of Serapis, Œdip. Ægypt. i. 139.
14. See Histoire de l’Ecole d’Alexandrie, par M. Jules Simon, tom. i. p. 99.
16. See Jules Simon, ii. pp. 626, &c.
18. The statements made in this and the preceding paragraph, and the reasons adduced by Plotinus in support of them, will be found in the fifth Ennead, lib. v. c. i. He assumes at once that the mind must be, from its very nature, the standard of certitude. He asks (p. 519) Πῶς γὰρ ἄν ἔτι νοῦς, ἀνοηταίνων εἴη· δεῖ ἄρα αὐτὸν ἀεὶ εἰδέναι καὶ· μὴ δ᾽ἂν ἐπιλαθέσθαί πότε. He urges that if Intelligibles were without the mind it could possess but images of them; its knowledge, thus mediate, would be imperfect, p. 521. Truth consists in the harmony of the mind with itself. Καὶ γὰρ αὖ, οὔτως οὐδ᾽ ἀποδείξεως δεῖ, οὐδὲ πίστεως ὅτι οὕτως αὐτὸς γὰρ οὕτως. καὶ ἐναργὴς αὐτὸς αυτῷ. καὶ εἴ τι πρὸ αὐτοῦ, ὅτι ἐξ αὐτοῦ. καὶ εἴ τι μετ᾽ ἐκεῖνο, ὅτι αὐτός. καὶ οὐδεὶς πιστότερος αὐτῷ περὶ αὐτοῦ. καὶ ὅτι, ἐκεῖ τοῦτο, καὶ ὄντως. ὥστε καὶ ἡ ὄντως ἀλήθεια, οὺ συμφωνοῦσα ἄλλῳ, ἄλλ᾽ ἑαυτῆ. καὶ οὐδὲν παρ αὑτὴν ἄλλο λέγει καὶ ἔστι. καὶ ὅ ἔστι τοῦτο καὶ λέγει, p. 522.
19. Enn. iii. lib. v. capp. 2 & 7. There the gardens of Jove, and Porus, with his plenty, are said to be allegorical representations of the intellectual food of a soul nourished and delighted by the truths of Reason. Poverty, again, with its sense of need, is the source of intellectual desire. Comp. Plato, Symp. p. 429 (Bekk).
21. Enn. i. lib. 3, c. 1.
22. There is above a light which makes visible the Creator to that creature who finds his peace only in the vision of Him.
23. See Schelling’s System des Trancendentalen Idealismus, pp. 19-23 (Tübingen, 1800), and Chalybæus, Hist. Entw. d. Spec. Phil. p. 244.
24. Aids to Reflection, pp. 225, 249. The reader is referred to a discriminating criticism of this doctrine in the British Quarterly Review, No. xxxvii.
26. J. Simon, i. 154; ii. 173.
27. J. Simon, liv. iii. chap. 4.
29. Jules Simon, ii. 218.
30. All these orders gaze admiring upward, and exert an influence downward (each on that immediately beneath it), so that they all together reciprocally draw and are drawn toward God. Dionysius gave himself with such zeal to the contemplation of them that he named and distinguished them as I have done.
31. Athanasii Opp. Vita S. Antonii. The vision alluded to is related p. 498.
32. Poiret, Bibliotheca Mysticorum, p. 95. Macarius gives great prominence to the doctrine of Union—describes the streaming in of the Hypostatic Light—how the spiritual nature is all-pervaded by the glory, and even the body is not so gross as to be impenetrable by the divine radiance. Some centuries later we find the monks of Mount Athos professing to discern this supernatural effulgence illuminating their stomachs. Gass, Die Mystik des N. Cabasilas, p. 56.
33. In the year 533 the books of Dionysius were cited by the Severians, and their genuineness called in question by the bishop because neither Athanasius nor Cyril had made any allusion to them. Acta Concil. Hard. ii. p. 1159.
34. For the passages authenticating this account, see Dion. Areop. Opp. as follows:—
(1.) De Div. Nom. c. iv. § 1; v. 3, 6, 8; vi. 2, 3; i. 1. De Eccl. Hier. i. 3.
(2.) De Cœl. Hier. i. 2, 3; v. 3, 4; vii. De Eccl. Hier. i. 1; x. 3. The resemblance of this whole process to the Pröodos and Epistrophe of Plotinus is sufficiently obvious.
(3.) De Div. Nom. iv. 20, p. 488. The chase after evil runs through sections 24-34. He sums up in one place thus:—‘In a word, good springs from the sole and complete cause, but evil from many and partial defects. God knows the evil as good, and with him the causes of things evil are beneficent powers.’ Proclus seeks escape from the hopeless difficulty in precisely the same way.
Concerning the Via negativa and affirmativa, see De Div. Nom. i. 1, 5, 4; De Cœl. Hier. xv.; and De Myst. Theol. i. 2, 3.
(4.) Ibid. Also, Ep. ad. Dorotheum, De Myst. Theol. iii. pp. 714, 721.
35. See Meier, ‘Dionysii Areop. et Mysticorum sæculi xiv. doctrinæ inter se comparantur.’ He remarks justly ‘causæ ad Causatum relationem cum relatione generis ad speciem confudit’, p. 13.
36. The hyper and the a privative are in constant requisition with Dionysius. He cannot suffer any ordinary epithet to go alone, and many of his adjectives march pompously, attended by a hyper on one side, and a superlative termination on the other.
37. The later Greek theology modified the most objectionable parts of the Dionysian doctrine, while continuing to reverence him as a Father. See Ullmann’s Nicholas von Methone.
41. Vita, ii. cap. v.
42. See the account of his diet, and of the feebleness and sickness consequent on his austerities, by the same biographer (Alanus), Vita, ii. cap. x., in the Paris reprint of 1839, from the Benedictine edition of Bernard, tom. ii. p. 2426. John Eremita describes the devil’s visit to Bernard, ‘ut ungeret sandalia sua secundum consuetudinem,’ and relates the rebuke of the proud monk who would not wash the scutellæ in the kitchen.—Vita, iv. p. 2508.
43. Vita, ii. cap. x. 32.
44. Epp. cx., cxi.
45. Chronologia Bernardina, Opp. tom. i. p. 83.
46. Epist. cxli.
47. De Consideratione, IV. iii. 7, and II. vi. 11, pp. 1028 and 1060.
48. Epist. ccclxv. to the Archbishop of Mayence, against the fanatic Rudolph.
49. He thus distinguishes Faith, Intellection, and Opinion:-Fides est voluntaria quædam et certa prælibatio necdum propalatæ veritatis. Intellectus est rei cujuscumque invisibilis certa et manifesta notitia. Opinio est quasi pro vero habere aliquid; quod falsum esse nescias.... Quid igitur distat (fides) ab intellectu? Nempe quod etsi non habet incertum non magis quam intellectus, habet tamen involucrum, quod non intellectus.... Nil autem malumus scire, quam quæ fide jam scimus. Nil supererit ad beatitudinem, cum quæ jam certa sunt nobis, erunt æque et nuda.—De Consideratione, V. 4, p. 1075.
54. Sane in hoc gradu (tertio) diu statur: et nescio si a quoquam hominum quartus in hac vita perfecte apprehenditur, ut se scilicet diligat homo tantum propter Deum. Asserant hoc si qui experti sunt: mihi, fateor, impossibile videtur.—De diligendo Deo, xv. and Epist. xi. 8. And, again, in the same treatise (vii. 17),—Non enim sine præmio diligitur Deus, etsi absque præmii intuitu diligendus sit.... Verus amor se ipso contentus est. Habet præmium, sed id quod amatur.
56. Light and Colour.—Light, thou eternally one, dwell above by the great One Eternal; Colour, thou changeful, in love come to Humanity down!
57. Liebner’s Hugo of St. Victor, p. 21.—This account of his early studies is given by Hugo in his Didascalion.
58. Schmid, Der Mysticismus des M. A., p. 303.
59. Comp. De Sacramentis, lib. v. p. x. c. 4. (tom. iii. p. 411. Garzon’s edition of his works, Cologne, 1617.)
60. See Liebner, p. 315.
61. De Sacramentis, lib. i. p. i. cap. 12.—Quisquis sic ordinatus est, dignus est lumine solis: ut mente sursum erecta et desiderio in superna defixo lumen summæ veritatis contemplanti irradiet: et jam non per speculum in ænigmate, sed in seipsa ut est veritatem agnoscat et sapiat.
63. Tom. iii. p. 356.—In speaking of the days of creation and of the analogous seasons in the new creation within man, he says that as God first saw the light, that it was good, and then divided it from the darkness, so we must first try the spirit and examine our light with care, ere we part it from what we call darkness, since Satan can assume the garb of an angel of light.
For an elaborate account of his entire theology, the reader is referred to Liebner’s Hugo von St. Victor und die Theologischen Richtungen seiner Zeit; one of the best of the numerous monographs German scholarship has produced.
64. Richardi S. Victoris Opp. (Lyons, 1534), De Preparatione animi ad contemplationem, fol. 39.
65. Ibid. cap. xli.
66. Engelhardt, Richard von St. Victor, p. 6.
68. The six degrees of contemplation are as follows (De Contemp. i. 6, fol. 45):
The office of Imagination to which the first two belong is Thought (Cogitatio); the office of Reason, Investigation (Meditatio); that of Intelligence, Contemplation (Contemplatio).—Ibid. cap. 3. These three states are distinguished with much care, and his definition of the last is as follows:—Contemplatio est perspicax et liber animi contuitus in res perspiciendas undequaque diffusus.—Ibid. cap. 4. He draws the distinction between intelligibilia and intellectibilia in cap. 7; the former = invisibilia ratione tamen comprehensibilia; the latter = invisibilia et humanæ rationi incomprehensibilia. The four lower kinds are principally occupied, he adds, with created objects, the two last with what is uncreated and divine.—Fol. 45.
71. The Heiligenleben of Hermann von Fritslar has been recently edited by Franz Pfeiffer, in his Ausgabe der Deutschen Mystiker (Leipsig, 1845). Hermann says himself repeatedly that he had caused his book to be written (schreiben lassen) and there is every reason to believe that he was, like Rulman Merswin and Nicholas of Basle, his contemporaries, a devout layman,—one of a class among the laity characteristic of that age and neighbourhood, who, without entering into an order, spent the greater part of their time in the exercises of religion, and of their fortune on religious objects. Though he could not write, he could read, and his book is confessedly a compilation from many books and from the sermons and the sayings of learned and godly men. He says, Diz buch ist zu sammene gelesen ûzze vile anderen bucheren und ûzze vile predigâten und ûzze vil lêrêren.—Vorrede.
72. Concerning these sects, see Ullmann, Reformatoren vor der Reformation, vol. ii. pp. 1-18. The fullest account is given of them in a masterly Latin treatise by Mosheim, De Beghardis et Beguinabus. He enters at length into the discussion of their name and origin; details the various charges brought against them, and gives the bulls and acts issued for their suppression. See especially the circular of John Ochsenstein, Bishop of Strasburg, cap. iv. § xi. p. 255.
73. Authority for these statements concerning the literature of the period, will be found in Gervinus, Geschichte der poetischen National-Literatur der Deutschen, part vi. §§ 1, 2, 5.
74. Johannes Tauler von Strasburg, by Dr. Carl Schmidt, pp. 8-10; and Laguille’s Histoire d’Alsace, liv. xxiv.
75. Meister Eghart spricht: wer alle cit allein ist, der ist gottes wirdige; vnt wer alliu cit do heimenen ist, dem ist got gegenwürtig; vnt wer alliu cit stat in einem gegenwürtigen nu, in dem gebirt got der vatter sinen sune an vnderlas.—Sprüche Deutscher Mystiker, in Wackernagel’s Altdeutsches Lesebuch, p. 889.
76. Meister Eghart sprach: vnt wem in einem anders ist denne in dem andern, vnt dem got lieber ist in einem denne in dem andern, der mensche ist grobe, vnt noch verre vnt ein kint. Aber dem got gelich ist in allen, der ist ce man worden.—Ibid.
Both this saying and the foregoing are expressions for that total indifference and self-abandonment so strenuously inculcated by the mystics. He who lives weaned from the world, alone with God, without regrets, without anticipations, ‘stands in a present Now,’ and sees the divine love as clearly in his sorrows as in his joys,—does not find ‘one thing other than another.’ There is exaggeration in suppressing, as Eckart would do, the instinct of thanksgiving for special benefaction; but in his strong language lies couched a great truth,—that only in utter self-surrender can man find abiding peace.
77. Alles das in der gottheyt ist, das ist ein, vnd davon ist nicht zu sprechen. Got der würcket, die gotheyt nit, sy hat auch nicht zu würckende, in ir ist auch kein werck. Got vnt gotheyt hat underscheyd, an würcken vnd an nit würcken.
Was ist das letst end? Es ist die verborgen finsternusz der ewigen gotheit, vnd ist unbekant, vnd wirt nymmerme bekant. (See a paper on Eckart, by Dr. Carl Schmidt in the Theol. Stud. u. Kritiken, 1839, 3, p. 693.) Comp. the following:—Got ist noch gut noch besser, noch allerbest, vnd ick thue also unrecht, wenn ick Got gut heisse, rechte ase ob ick oder er etwas wiz weiss und ick es schwarz heisse.—Ibid. p. 675. This last assertion was one of the counts of accusation in the bull of 1330.
78. Martensen’s Meister Eckart (Hamburg, 1842), p. 22.—The divine communication assumes with Eckart the form of philosophical necessity. The man emptied of Self is infallibly full of Deity, after the fashion of the old principle, ‘Nature abhors a vacuum.’ Yet even this doctrine is not wholly false. It is the misrepresentation of a Christian truth. Its correlative verity is this,—that the kingdom of grace, like the kingdom of nature, has its immutable laws. He who seeks shall find; as we sow we reap, with unerring certainty. Gravitation is not more sure than the announcement, ‘With that man will I dwell who is of a meek and contrite spirit.’
79. Martensen, p. 23. Comp. Stud. u. Krit. loc. cit. Alles das denn got yn gegab seinem eingebornen sun, das hat er mir gegeben.... Was got würcket, das ist ein, darumb gebiret er mich seinen sun, on aller underscheyd.—These words exhibit the pantheistic principle on which this assumption is based. All spirit (whether in so called creature or Creator) is substantially one and the same. It cannot be divided; it can have no distinctive operations. Our dividual personal consciousness is, as it were, a temporary accretion on the Universal Soul with which we are in contact. Escaping this consciousness, we merge in—that is, we become—the Universal Soul. We are brought into the Essence,—the calm, unknown oneness beyond all manifestation, above creation, providence, or grace. This is Eckart’s escape from distinction,—lapse into the totality of spirit. This doctrine he teaches, not in opposition to the current Christian doctrine, but as a something above it,—at once its higher interpretation and its climax.
80. These statements concerning the ‘füncklin der vernunfft’ are the substance of passages given by Martensen, pp. 26, 27, and Schmidt (Stud. u. Krit. l. c.), pp. 707, 709.—Ich sprich es bey gutter warheit, und bey yemmerwerender warheit, und bey ewiger warheit, das disem liechte nit benüget an dem einfaltigem stilstanden götlichen wesen, von wannen disz wesen harkommet, es will in den einfaltigen grundt in die stillen wüste, das nye underscheyd ingeluget, weder vatter noch sun noch heiliger geist, in dem einichen, da niemant daheim ist, da benüget es im liechte, und da ist es einicher, denn es sey in im selber, wann diser grundt ist ein einfeltig stille die in ir selber unbeweglich ist, und von diser Unbeweglichkeit werdent beweget alle ding, &c. Hermann von Fritslar, in a remarkable passage, enumerates the various and conflicting names given to this organ of mysticism. ‘Und das leben was daz licht der lûte.’ Daz meinet, daz di sêle einen funken in ir hât, der ist in gote êwiclîchen gewest leben und licht. Und dirre funke ist mit der sêle geschaffen in allen menschen und ist ein lûter licht in ime selber und strafet allewege umme sunde und hat ein stête heischen zu der tugende und kriget allewege wider in sînen ursprung.... Dar umme heizen in etlîche meistere einen wechter der sêle. Also sprach Daniêl: ‘der wechter ûf dem turme der rufet gar sêre. Etliche heizen disen funken einen haven der sêle. Etlîche heizen in di worbele (axis, or centre) der sêle. Etelîche heizen in ein gotechen in der sêle. Etelîche heizen in ein antlitze der sêle. Eteliche heizen intellectus, daz ist ein instênde kraft in der sêle. Etlîche heizen in sinderisis. Etliche heizen in daz wô der sêle. Etlîche heizen in daz nirgen der sêle.—Heiligenleben. Di dritte messe, p. 32.