Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries
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Title: Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries
Author: Rufus M. Jones
Release date: March 28, 2008 [eBook #24934]
Language: English
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SPIRITUAL REFORMERS IN THE 16TH & 17TH CENTURIES
by
RUFUS M. JONES, M.A., D.Litt.
Professor Of Philosophy, Haverford College, U.S.A.
MacMillan and Co., Limited
St. Martin's Street, London
1914
Copyright
_OTHER VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES_
_EDITED By RUFUS M. JONES_
STUDIES IN MYSTICAL RELIGION. (1908.)
By Rufus M. Jones.
THE QUAKERS IN THE AMERICAN COLONIES. (1911).
By Rufus M. Jones, assisted by Isaac Sharpless and Amelia M. Gummere.
THE BEGINNINGS OF QUAKERISM. (1912.)
By William Charles Braithwaite.
THE SECOND PERIOD OF QUAKERISM. (_In preparation._)
By William Charles Braithwaite.
THE LATER PERIODS OF QUAKERISM. (_In preparation._)
By Rufus M. Jones.
{v}
PREFACE
In my _Quakers in the American Colonies_ I announced the preparation of
a volume to be devoted mainly to Jacob Boehme and his influence. I
soon found, however, as my work of research proceeded, that Boehme was
no isolated prophet who discovered in solitude a fresh way of approach
to the supreme problems of the soul. I came upon very clear evidence
that he was an organic part of a far-reaching and significant
historical movement--a movement which consciously aimed, throughout its
long period of travail, to carry the Reformation to its legitimate
terminus, the restoration of apostolic Christianity. The men who
originated the movement, so far as anything historical can be said to
be "originated," were often scornfully called "Spirituals" by their
opponents, while they thought of themselves as divinely commissioned
and Spirit-guided "Reformers," so that I have with good right named
them "Spiritual Reformers."
I have had two purposes in view in these studies. One purpose was the
tracing of a religious movement, profoundly interesting in itself, as a
great side current of the Reformation. The other purpose was the
discovery of the background and environment of seventeenth century
Quakerism. There can be little doubt, I think, that I have here found
at least one of the great historical sources of the Quaker movement.
This volume, together with my _Studies in Mystical Religion_, will at
any rate {vi} furnish convincing evidence that the ideas, aims,
experiences, practices, and aspirations of the early Quakers were the
fruit of long spiritual preparation. This movement, as a whole, has
never been studied before, and my work has been beset with
difficulties. I have been aided by helpful monographs on individual
"Reformers," written mainly by German and French scholars, who have
been duly credited at the proper places, but for the most part my
material has been drawn from original sources. I am under much
obligation to my friend, Theodor Sippell of Schweinsberg, Germany. I
am glad to announce that he is preparing a critical historical study on
John Everard and the Ranters, which will throw important light on the
religious ideas of the English Commonwealth. He has read my proofs,
and has, throughout my period of research, given me the benefit of his
extensive knowledge of this historical field. I wish to express my
appreciation of the courtesy and kindness which I have received from
the officials of the University Library at Marburg. William Charles
Braithwaite of Banbury, England, has given me valuable help. My wife
has assisted me in all my work of research. She has read and re-read
the proofs, made the Index, and given me an immense amount of patient
help. I cannot close this Preface without again referring to the
inspiration of my invisible friend, John Wilhelm Rowntree, in whose
memory this series was undertaken.
HAVERFORD, PENNSYLVANIA,
_January_ 1914.
{vii}
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION
WHAT IS "SPIRITUAL RELIGION" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
CHAPTER I
THE MAIN CURRENT OF THE REFORMATION . . . . . . . . . . . 1
CHAPTER II
HANS DENCK AND THE INWARD WORD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
CHAPTER III
TWO PROPHETS OF THE INWARD WORD: BUeNDERLIN AND ENTFELDER 31
CHAPTER IV
SEBASTIAN FRANCK: AN APOSTLE OF INWARD RELIGION . . . . . 46
CHAPTER V
CASPAR SCHWENCKFELD AND THE REFORMATION OF THE "MIDDLE WAY" 64
CHAPTER VI
SEBASTIAN CASTELLIO: A FORGOTTEN PROPHET . . . . . . . . . 88
{viii}
CHAPTER VII
COORNHERT AND THE COLLEGIANTS--A MOVEMENT FOR
SPIRITUAL RELIGION IN HOLLAND . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
CHAPTER VIII
VALENTINE WEIGEL AND NATURE MYSTICISM . . . . . . . . . . 133
CHAPTER IX
JACOB BOEHME: HIS LIFE AND SPIRIT . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
CHAPTER X
BOEHME'S UNIVERSE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
CHAPTER XI
JACOB BOEHME'S "WAY OF SALVATION" . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
CHAPTER XII
JACOB BOEHME'S INFLUENCE IN ENGLAND . . . . . . . . . . . 208
CHAPTER XIII
EARLY ENGLISH INTERPRETERS OF SPIRITUAL RELIGION:
JOHN EVERARD, GILES RANDALL, AND OTHERS . . . . . . . . 235
CHAPTER XIV
SPIRITUAL RELIGION IN HIGH PLACES--ROUS, VANE, AND STERRY 266
{ix}
CHAPTER XV
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE, THE FIRST OF THE "LATITUDE-MEN" . . . 288
CHAPTER XVI
JOHN SMITH, PLATONIST--"AN INTERPRETER OF THE SPIRIT" . . 305
CHAPTER XVII
THOMAS TRAHERNE AND THE SPIRITUAL POETS OF THE
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 320
CHAPTER XVIII
CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 336
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351
{x}
Within thy sheltering darkness spin the spheres;
Within the shaded hollow of thy wings.
The life of things,
The changeless pivot of the passing years--
These in thy bosom lie.
Restless we seek thy being; to and fro
Upon our little twisting earth we go:
We cry, "Lo, there!"
When some new avatar thy glory does declare,
When some new prophet of thy friendship sings,
And in his tracks we run
Like an enchanted child, that hastes to catch the sun.
And shall the soul thereby
Unto the All draw nigh?
Shall it avail to plumb the mystic deeps
Of flowery beauty, scale the icy steeps
Of perilous thought, thy hidden Face to find,
Or tread the starry paths to the utmost verge of the sky?
Nay, groping dull and blind
Within the sheltering dimness of thy wings--
Shade that their splendour flings
Athwart Eternity--
We, out of age-long wandering, but come
Back to our Father's heart, where now we are at home.
EVELYN UNDERHILL in _Immanence_, p. 82.
{xi}
INTRODUCTION
WHAT IS "SPIRITUAL RELIGION"
I
There is no magic in words, though, it must be confessed, they often
exercise a psychological influence so profound and far-reaching that
they seem to possess a miracle-working efficacy. Some persons live all
their lives under the suggestive spell of certain words, and it
sometimes happens that an entire epoch is more or less dominated by the
mysterious fascination of a sacred word, which needs only to be spoken
on the house-top to set hearts beating and legs marching.
"Spiritual" has always been one of these wonder-working words. St.
Paul, in Christian circles, was the first to give the word its unique
value. For him it named a new order of life and a new level of being.
In his thought, a deep cleavage runs through the human race and divides
it into two sharply-sundered classes, "psychical men" and "pneumatical
men"--men who live according to nature, and men who live by the life of
the Spirit. The former class, that is psychical men, are of the earth
earthy; they are, as we should say to-day, _empirical_, parts of a vast
nature-system, doomed, as is the entire system, to constant flux and
mutability and eventually to irretrievable wreck and ruin; the natural,
psychical, corruptible man cannot inherit incorruption.[1] On the
other hand, the pneumatical or spiritual man {xii} "puts on"
incorruption and immortality. He is a member of a new order; he is
"heavenly," a creation "not made with hands," but wrought out of the
substance of the spiritual world, and furnished with the inherent
capacity of eternal duration, so that "mortality is swallowed up of
life."[2]
This word, thus made sacred by St. Paul's great use of it to designate
the new race of the saved, was made the bearer in the Johannine
writings of a no less exalted message, which has become a living and
indissoluble part of the religious consciousness of the Christian
world. "Eternal life"--or, what in these writings is the same thing,
"life"--comes through the reception of the Spirit, in a birth from
above. "That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is
born of the Spirit is Spirit."[3] When the Spirit comes as the
initiator of this abundant life, then we "know that we abide in Him and
He in us, because He hath given us of His Spirit," and it becomes
possible for the Spirit-led person to be guided "into all the truth,"
to "love even as He loved," and to "overcome the world."[4] Here,
again, the human race is divided into those who have "received of the
Spirit," and those who have not so received; those who are "born from
above" and those who have had only a natural birth; the twice-born and
the once-born; those who are "of the Spirit," _i.e._ spiritual, and
those who are "of this world," _i.e._ empirical.
The Gnostic Sects of the second century had one common link and badge;
they all proposed a "way," often bizarre and strange-sounding to modern
ears, by which the soul, astray, lost, encumbered, or imprisoned in
matter, might attain its freedom and become _spiritual_. Most of the
Gnostic teachers, who in their flourishing time were as thick as
thistle-downs in summer, conceived of man as consisting of two "halves"
which corresponded with two totally different world-orders. There was
in man, or there belonged to man (1) a visible body, which {xiii} was
again dichotomized, and believed to be composed, according to many of
the Gnostics, of a subtle element like that of which they supposed Adam
in his unfallen state was made, which they named the _hylic_ body, and
a sheath of gross earthly matter which they called the _choical_
body.[5] There was also (2) another, invisible, "half," generally
divided into lower and higher stories. The lower story, the psychical,
was created or furnished by the Demiurge, or sub-divine creator of the
natural system, while the top-story, or pneumatical self, was a
_spiritual seed_ derived from the supreme spiritual Origin, the Divine
Pleroma, the Fulness of the Godhead. Those who possessed this
spiritual seed were "the elect," "the saved," who eventually, stripped
of their sheath of matter and their psychical dwelling, would be able
to pass all "the keepers of the way," and rise to the pure spiritual
life.
The Montanists launched in the second century a movement, borne along
on a mountain-wave of enthusiasm, for a "spiritual" Church composed
only of "spiritual" persons. They called themselves "the Spirituals,"
and they insisted that the age or dispensation of the Spirit had now
come. The Church, rigidly organized with its ordained officials, its
external machinery, and its accumulated traditions, was to them part of
an old and outworn system to be left behind. In the place of it was to
come a new order of "spiritual people" of whom the Montanist prophets
were the "first fruits,"--a new and peculiar people, born from above,
recipients of a divine energizing power, partakers in the life of the
Spirit and capable of being guided on by progressive revelations into
all the truth. To be "spiritual" in their vocabulary meant to be a
participator in the Life of God, and to be a living member of a group
that was led and guided by a continuously self-revealing Spirit. This
Spirit was conceived, however, not as immanent and resident, not as the
{xiv} indwelling and permeative Life of the human spirit, but as
foreign and remote, and He was thought of as "coming" in sporadic
visitations to whom He would, His coming being indicated in
extraordinary and charismatic manifestations.
This type of "spiritual religion," though eventually stamped out in the
particular form of Montanism, reappeared again and again, with peculiar
local and temporal variations, in the history of Christianity.[6] To
the bearers of it, the historic Church, with its crystallized system
and its vast machinery, always seemed "unspiritual" and traditional.
They believed, each time the movement appeared, that _they_ had found
the way to more abundant life, that the Spirit had come upon them in a
special manner, and was through them inaugurating a higher order of
Christianity, and they always felt that their religion of direct
experience, of invading energy, of inspirational insights, of
charismatic bestowals, and of profound emotional fervour was distinctly
"spiritual," as contrasted with the historic Church which claimed
indeed a divine origin and divine "deposits," but which, as they
believed, lacked the continuous and progressive leadership of the
Spirit. They were always very certain that their religion was
characteristically "spiritual," and all other forms seemed to them
cold, formal, or dead. In their estimates, men were still divided into
spiritual persons and psychical persons--those who lived by the "heart"
and those who lived by the "head."
Parallel with the main current of the Protestant Reformation, a new
type of "spiritual religion" appeared and continued to manifest itself
with mutations and developments, throughout the entire Reformation era,
with a wealth of results which are still operative in the life of the
modern world. The period of this new birth was a time of profound
transition and ferment, and a bewildering variety of roads was tried to
spiritual Canaans and new Jerusalems, then fondly believed to {xv} be
near at hand. It is a long-standing tragedy of history that the right
wing of a revolutionary or transforming movement must always suffer for
the unwisdom and lack of balance of those who constitute the left, or
extreme radical, wing of the movement. So it happened here. The
nobler leaders and the saner spirits were taken in the mass with those
of an opposite character, and were grouped under comprehensive labels
of reproach and scorn, such as "Antinomians," "Enthusiasts," or
"Anabaptists," and in consequence still remain largely neglected and
forgotten.
The men who initiated and guided this significant undertaking--the
exhibition in the world of what they persistently called "spiritual
religion"--were influenced by three great historic tendencies, all
three of which were harmoniously united in their type of Christianity.
They were the Mystical tendency, the Humanistic or Rational tendency,
and the distinctive Faith-tendency of the Reformation. These three
strands are indissolubly woven together in this type of so-called
spiritual Religion. It was an impressive attempt, whether completely
successful or not, to widen the sphere and scope of religion, to carry
it into _the whole of life_, to ground it in the very nature of the
human spirit, and to demonstrate that to be a man, possessed of full
life and complete health, is to be religious, to be spiritual. I
propose, as a preliminary preparation for differentiating this special
type of "spiritual religion," to undertake a study, as brief as
possible, of these three underlying and fundamental strands or
tendencies in religion which will, of course, involve some
consideration of the inherent nature of religion itself.
For my present purpose it is not necessary to study the twilight
history of religion in primitive races nor to trace its origins in the
cradle-stage of human life. Anthropologists are rendering a valuable
service in their attempts to explore the baffling region of primitive
man's mind, and they have hit upon some very suggestive clues, though
so far only tentative ones, to the psychological experiences and
attitudes which set man's feet on the {xvi} momentous religious trail.
At every stage of its long and devious history, religion has been _some
sort of life-adjustment to realities which were felt to be of supreme
importance either to the individual or to the race_, and it becomes
thus possible for the scientific observer to note a developmental
process and to discover a principle which links it in with a universal
scheme of evolution.
But religion can never be adequately treated either in terms of racial
origins or of biological history, though there can be no doubt whatever
that there are genetic and biological factors to be considered. Nor,
again, can religion be adequately and exhaustively dealt with by the
psychological method of investigation. The psychological studies of
religion in recent years have greatly enriched our knowledge of the
range and scope and power of man's psychic nature and functions, of his
instincts, desires, valuations, needs, yearnings, beliefs, and modes of
activity and behaviour, and particularly of the important influence
which the social group has exercised and still exercises in the
furtherance of religious attitudes and ideals. But the psychological
method has obvious and inherent limitations. Like any other natural
science, psychology is limited to description and causal explanation of
the phenomena of its special field, which in this case is states of
consciousness. It does not pretend, or even aspire, to pronounce upon
the ultimate nature of consciousness, nor upon the moral significance
of personality. Psychology is as empirical as any other science. It
modestly confines its scope of research to what _appears_ in finite and
describable forms. It possesses no ladder by which it can transcend
the empirical order, the fact-level. The religion which the
psychologist reports upon is necessarily stripped of all transcendental
and objective reference. Its wings are severely clipped. It is only
one of man's multitudinous _reactions_ in the presence of the facts of
his time and space world. It is nakedly subjective and _works_, not
because there is Something or Some One beyond, which answers it, and
corresponds with its up-reach, but only {xvii} because undivided
faith-attitudes always liberate within the field of consciousness
energy for life-activity.
We need not blame the psychologist for this radical reduction of the
age-long pretensions of religion. If he is to bring religion over into
the purview of the scientific field, he can do nothing else but reduce
it. Science can admit into its world nothing that successfully defies
descriptive treatment. The poet may know of flowers which "can give
thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears," but science discovers
no such flowers in its field. Its flowers are amazingly complex, but
they call for no handkerchief. They are merely aggregations of
describable parts, each of which has well-defined functions. The "man"
whom science studies is complicated almost beyond belief. He is an
aggregation of trillions of cells. He is such a centre of vibrations
that a cyclone is almost a calm compared to the constant cyclic storms
within the area of man's corporeal system. His "mental states" have
their entries and exits before "the foot-lights of consciousness" and
exhibit a drama more intricate than any which human genius has
conceived. But each "state" is a definite, more or less describable,
_fact_ or _phenomenon_. For science, "man's" inner life, as well as
his corporeal bulk, is an aggregate of empirical items. No loophole is
left for freedom--that is for any novel undetermined event. No
shekinah remains within for a mysterious "conscience" to inject into
this fact-world insights drawn from a higher world of noumenal, or
absolute, reality. "Man" is merely a part of the naturalistic order,
and has no way of getting out of the vast net in which science catches
and holds "all that is."
There is, I repeat, no ground for blaming the psychologist for making
these reductions. His science can deal only with an order of facts
which will conform to the scientific method, for wherever science
invades a field, it ignores or eliminates every aspect of novelty or
mystery or wonder, every aspect of reality which cannot be brought
under scientific categories, _i.e._ every aspect which cannot be
treated quantitatively and causally and {xviii} arranged in a congeries
of interrelated facts occurring according to natural laws. The only
cogent criticism is that any psychologist should suppose that his
scientific account is the "last word" to be spoken, that his reports
contain all the returns that can be expected, or that this method is
the only way of approach to truth and reality. Such claims to the
rights of eminent domain and such dogmatic assertions of exclusive
finality always reveal the blind spot in the scientist's vision. He
sees steadily but he does not see wholes. He is of necessity dealing
with a reduced and simplified "nature" which he constantly tends to
substitute for the vastly richer whole of reality that boils over and
inundates the fragment which submits to his categories. We do well to
gather in every available fact which biology or anthropology or
psychology can give us that throws light on human behaviour, or on
primitive cults, or on the richer subjective and social religious
functions of full-grown men. But the interior insight got from
religion itself, the rich wholeness of religious experience, the
discovery within us of an inner nature which defies description and
baffles all plumb-lines, and which _can draw out of itself more than it
contains_, indicate that we here have dealings with a type of reality
which demands for adequate treatment other methods of comprehension
than those available to science.
In the old Norse stories, Thor tried to empty the famous drinking-horn
in the games of Utgard, but to his surprise he found that, though the
horn looked small, he could not empty it, for it turned out that the
horn was immersed in the limitless and bottomless ocean. Again he
tried to lift a small and insignificant-looking animal, but, labour as
he might, he could not lift it, for it was grown into, and was organic
with, the whole world, and could not be raised without raising the very
ground on which the lifter stood! Somewhat so, the reality of religion
is so completely bound up with the whole personal life of man and with
his conjunct life in the social group and in the world of nature; it
is, in short, so much an {xix} affair of man's whole of experience, of
his spirit in its undivided and synthetic aspects, that it can never be
adequately dealt with by the analytic and descriptive method of this
wonderful new god of science, however big with results that method may
be.
The interior insight, the appreciation of religion, the rich and
concrete whole of religious consciousness, is, and will always remain,
the primary way to the _secret_ of religion--religion in its "first
intention"--as the experience of time-duration is the only possible way
to the elemental meaning of time. It has in recent years in many
quarters become the fashion to call this "interior insight," this
appreciation of religion from within, "mysticism"; and to assume that
here in mysticism we come upon the very essence of religion. This
conclusion, however, is as narrow and as unwarranted as is the
truncation of religion at the hands of science. The mystical element
in religion is only one element in a vastly richer complex, and it must
not be given undue emphasis and imperial sway in the appreciation of
the complete whole of "spiritual religion." We must, too, carefully
discriminate _mystical experience_ from the elaborate body of doctrines
and theories, historically known as "mysticism," which is as much an
_ism_ as are the other typical, partial, and more or less abstract
formulations of religion.
Mysticism for the mystic himself is characterized by a personal
experience through which the ordinary limitations of life and the
passionate pursuits of the soul are transcended, and a self-evident
conviction is attained that he is in communion, or even in union, with
some self-transcending Reality that absolutely satisfies and is what he
has always sought. "This is He, this is He," the mystic exclaims:
"There is no other: This is He whom I have waited for and sought after
from my childhood!"[7]
The experience is further characterized by the inrush {xx} of new
energies as though a mysterious door had been pushed open--either out
or in--admitting the human spirit to wider sources of life. "Fresh
bubblings from the eternal streams of Life flowing into the soul" is
the way the recipient often describes it. All the deep-lying powers of
the inward self, usually so divergent and conflicting--the foreground
purposes defeated by background inhibitions, and by doubts on the
border,--become liberated and unified into one conscious life which is
not merely intellectual, nor merely volitional, nor solely emotional,
but an undivided whole of experience, intensely joyous, enriched with
insight and pregnant with deeds of action. As in lofty experiences of
appreciation of beauty, or of music, or when the chords of life are
swept by a great love, or by a momentous moral issue, the spirit rises
in mystical experience to a form of consciousness which no longer marks
clock-time and succession of events, whether outward or inward. It may
afterwards take hours or days or weeks or even years to spread out and
review and apprehend and adjust to the experience--"the opening," to
use George Fox's impressive word--but while it is _there_ it is held in
one unbroken synthetic time-span. It is, to revive a scholastic
phrase, a _totum simul_, an all-at-once experience, in which parts,
however many, make one integral whole, as in a melody or in a work of
art; so that the mystic has a real experience of what we try to express
by the word Eternity. It feels as though the usual insulations of our
own narrow personal life were suddenly broken through and we were in
actual contact with an enfolding presence, life-giving, joy-bringing,
and light-supplying.
In instances where the intensity is great, unusual psychological
phenomena appear. Sometimes voices are heard, or sounds "like a mighty
rushing wind"; sometimes there are automatic visions of light, or of
forms or figures, as, for instance, of Christ, or of a cross; sometimes
automatic writing or speaking attends the experience; sometimes there
are profound body-changes of a temporary, or even permanent character;
sometimes there {xxi} is a state of swoon or ecstacy, lasting from a
few seconds to entire days. These physical phenomena, however, are as
spiritually unimportant and as devoid of religious significance as are
the normal bodily resonances and reverberations which accompany, in
milder degrees, all our psychic processes. They indicate no high rank
of sainthood and they prove no miracle-working power. The significant
features of the experience are the consciousness of fresh springs of
life, the release of new energies, the inner integration and
unification of personality, the inauguration of a sense of mission, the
flooding of the life with hope and gladness, and the conviction,
amounting in the mind of the recipient to certainty, that God is found
as an environing and vitalizing presence--as the recipient already
quoted reports his conviction: "I have met with my God; I have met with
my Saviour. I have felt the healings drop upon my soul from under His
wings."[8]
If _everybody_ had experiences of that sort there would be no more
doubt of the existence of an actual spiritual environment in vitalizing
contact with the human spirit than there now is of an external world
with which we correspond. There is _a priori_ no reason against the
reality of such an inner spiritual universe. It is precisely as
conceivable that constructive and illuminating influences should stream
into our inner selves from that central Light with which our inmost
self is allied, as that objects in space and time should bombard us
with messages adapted to our senses. The difference is that we all
experience the outer environment and only a few of us experience the
inner. The mystic himself has no doubt--_he sees_, but he cannot give
quite his certainty of vision to any one else. He cannot, like "the
weird sisters" of Greek story, lend out his eye for others to see with.
He can only talk about, or write about, what he has seen, and his words
are often words of little meaning to those who lack the vision.
{xxii}
II
But the very characteristics of mystical religion which give it its
self-evidence and power at the same time mark limits to its scope and
range. It is and must be primarily and essentially first-hand
experience, and yet it is an experience that is by no means universal.
It is not, so far as we can see from the facts at hand, an experience
which attaches to the very nature of consciousness as such, or indeed
one which is bound to occur even when the human subject strains forward
all the energies of his will for the adventure, or when by strict
obedience to the highest laws of life known to him he _waits_ for the
high visitation. Some aspect is involved over which the will has no
control. Some other factor is implied besides the passion and the
purity of the seeking soul. The experience "comes," as an inrush, as
an emergence from the deeper levels of the inner life, but the glad
recipient does not know how he secured the prize or how to repeat the
experience, or how to tell his friend the way to these "master moments"
of blessedness.
There are numerous persons who are as serious and earnest and
passionate as the loftiest mystical saint, and who, in spite of all
their listening for the inner flow of things, discover no inrushes,
feel no invasions, are aware of no environing Companion, do not even
feel a "More of Consciousness conterminous and continuous with their
own." Their inner life appears impervious to divine bubblings. The
only visitants that pass over the threshold of their consciousness are
their own mental states, now bright and clear, now dim and strange, but
all bearing the brand and mark of temporal origin. This type of
experience must not, therefore, be insisted on as the only way to God
or to the soul's homeland. Spiritual religion must not be put to the
hazard of conditions that limit its universality and restrict it to a
chosen few. To insist on mystical experience as the only path to
religion would involve an "election" no less inscrutable and {xxiii}
pitiless than that of the Calvinistic system--an "election" settled for
each person by the peculiar psychic structure of his inner self.[9]
There is another limitation which must always attach to religion of the
purely mystical type. In so far as it is an _experience_ of the inward
type, it is indescribable and incommunicable. That does not mean or
imply any lessened value in the experience itself, it only means that
it is very difficult to mint it into the universal coinage of the
world. The recovery of faith, after some catastrophic bankruptcy of
spiritual values, as with Job or Dante or Faust, cannot be described in
analytic steps. The loss of faith in the rationality of the universe,
the collapse of the "beautiful world" within, can be told step by step;
the process of integration and reconstruction, on the other hand,
always remains somewhat of a mystery, though it is plain enough that a
new and richer inner world has been found. So, too, with Mysticism.
The experience itself may, and often does, bring to the recipient an
indubitable certainty of spiritual realities, revealing themselves
within his own spirit, and, furthermore, it is often productive of
permanent life-results, such as augmented conviction, heightened tone
of joy, increased unification of personality, intense moral passion and
larger conquering power, but he, nevertheless, finds it a baffling
matter to draw from his mystical experience concrete information about
the nature and character of God, or to supply, from the experience
alone, definite contributions that can become part of the common
spiritual inheritance of the race.
The soul
Remembering how she felt, but _what_ she felt
Remembering not, retains an obscure sense
Of possible sublimity.[10]
{xxiv}
There can be, I think, no doubt that the persons whom we call mystics
have enormously added to the richness of our conception of God, or that
they have made impressive contributions to the capital stock of our
religious knowledge. But I question whether these increments of
knowledge can be fairly traced to "information" which has entered the
world through the secret door of mystical "openings." The conception
of God by which we live, and our knowledge of eternal life, are in the
main not formed of the material which has mysteriously dropped into the
world by means of "sudden incursions," or "oracular communications"
through persons of extraordinary psychical disposition. What we get
from the mystic, or from the prophet, is not his "experience" but his
interpretation, and as soon as he begins to _interpret_, he does so by
means of the group-material which the race has gathered in its
corporate experience through the ages. The valuable _content_ of his
message, so far as he succeeds in delivering one, the ideas with which
his words are freighted, bear the marks of the slow accumulations of
spiritual experience, and they reveal the rich and penetrative
influence of the social group in which the mystic's inner life formed
and ripened. They have a history as all ideas do.
The real fact of the matter is, that the great mystics are religious
geniuses. They make their contribution to religion in ways similar to
those in which the geniuses in other fields raise the level of human
attainments and achievements. They swiftly seize upon and appreciate
the specific achievements of the race behind them; they are profoundly
sensitive to the aspirations of their time and to the deep-lying
currents of their age; they are suggestible in an acute degree, through
heightened interest, to certain ideas or truths or principles which
they synthesise by such leaps of insight that slow-footed logic seems
to be transcended. Then these unifying and intensifying experiences to
which they are subject give them irresistible conviction, "a surge of
certainty," a faith of the mountain-moving order, and an increasing
{xxv} dynamic of life which, in the best cases, is manifest in thoughts
and words and deeds. Their mystical experience seldom supplies them
with a new intellectual content which they communicate, but their
experience enables them rather to _see_ what they know, to get
possession of themselves, and to fuse their truth with the heat of
conviction. The mystical experience is thus a way of heightening life
and of increasing its dynamic quality rather than a way to new
knowledge.
The _negative way_, which has been such a prominent and prevailing
characteristic of historical mysticism that many writers have made it
the distinct and sufficient differentia of mysticism, has often
produced intensity and depth, but it is, nevertheless, a mark of the
limitation of this type of religion. The indescribable and
undifferentiated character of mystical experience is no doubt partly
responsible for the emphatic place which negation has held in
mysticism. The experience itself, which seems like "a flight of the
alone to the Alone," can be told in no words except those of negation.
"The mortal limit of the self" seems loosed, and the soul seems merged
into that which it forever seeks but which having found it cannot
utter. But the type of metaphysics through which most of the great
mystics of history have done their thinking and have made their
formulations is still further responsible for the excessive negativity
of their systems.
There is, of course, a negative element or aspect in all genuine
religion. No person can grow rich in spiritual experience or can gain
an intimate acquaintance with a God of purity and truth without
negating the easy ways of instinct, the low pursuits of life which end
in self, the habits of thought and action which limit and hamper the
realization of the diviner possibilities of the whole nature.
Sometimes the eye that hinders must be plucked out or the right hand
cut off and thrust away for the sake of a freer pursuit of the soul's
kingdom. There is, too, a still deeper principle of negativity
involved in the very fibre of personal life itself. No one can advance
without {xxvi} surrender, no one can have gains without losses, no one
can reach great goals without giving up many things in themselves
desirable. There is "a rivalry of me's" which no person can ever
escape, for in order to choose and achieve one typical self another
possible self must be sternly sacrificed. In a very real sense it
remains forever true that we must die to live, we must die to the
narrow self in order to be raised to the wider and richer self.
But the _negative way_ of mysticism is more rigorous and more thorough
in its negation than that. Its negations "wind up the hill all the way
to the very top." Even the _self_ must be absolutely negated. "The
self, the I, the me and the like, all belong to the evil spirit. The
whole matter can be set forth in these words: Be simply and wholly
bereft of self." "The I, the me, and the mine, nature, selfhood, the
Devil, sin, are all one and the same thing."[11] Not only so, but all
_desire_ for any particular thing, or any particular experience must be
utterly extirpated. "Whatever Good the creature as creature can
conceive of and understand is something this or that," and therefore
not the One Real Good.[12] "So long as thy soul has an image, it is
without simplicity, and so long as it is without simplicity it doth not
rightly love God."[13] "Divine love can brook no rival." He who seeks
God must "rid himself of all that pertains to the creature." He that
would find the absolute Good must withdraw not only beyond all his
senses, but beyond all desires, into an inner "solitude where no word
is spoken, where is neither creature nor image nor fancy." "Everything
depends," Tauler counsels us, "upon a fathomless sinking into a
fathomless nothingness. . . . God has really no place to work in but
the ground where all has been annihilated. . . . Then when all forms
have ceased, in the twinkling of an eye, the man is transformed. . . .
Thou must sink into the unknown and unnamed abyss, and above all ways,
images, forms, and above all powers, {xxvii} lose thyself, deny
thyself, and even unform thyself."[14] The moment the will focusses
upon any concrete aim as its goal, it must thereby miss that Good which
is above and beyond all particular "things" that can be conceived or
named.
But the _negative way_ winds up farther still. It ends in the
absolutely negative Silent Desert of Godhead "where no one is at home."
Its way up is the way of abstraction and withdrawal from everything
finite. He whom the soul seeks cannot be found in anything "here" or
"now"; He must be "yonder." "It is by no means permitted," says one of
the great experts in negation, "to speak or even to think anything
concerning the super-essential and hidden Deity. . . . It is a Unity
above mind, a One above conception and inconceivable to all
conceptions, a Good unutterable by word."[15] "Thou must love God,"
Eckhart says, "as not-God, not-Spirit, not-person, not-image, but as He
is, a sheer, pure, absolute One, sundered from all two-ness and in whom
we must eternally sink from nothingness to nothingness."[16] God, the
Godhead, is thus the absolute "Dark," "the nameless Nothing," an empty
God, a characterless Infinite. "Why dost thou prate of God," Eckhart
says, "whatever thou sayest of Him is untrue!" The rapt soul at the
end of his road, at the top of the hill, only knows that every finite
account is false and that the only adequate word is an everlasting Nay.
Whatever idea your mind comes at,
I tell you flat
God is _not_ that.[17]
The great mystics have always saved themselves by neglecting to be
consistent with this rigorous negation and abstraction. In their
practice they have cut through their theory and gone on living the rich
concrete life. {xxviii} But the theory itself is a false theory of
life, and it leads only to a God of abstraction, not to the God of
spiritual religion. The false trail, however, is to be charged, as I
have said, not so much to mystical experience as to the metaphysics
through which the mystics, not only of Christian communions, but of
other faiths, were compelled to do their thinking. There was no other
way of thinking known to them except this way of negation. The
Infinite was the not-finite; the Absolute was precisely what the
contingent was _not_. The perfect was free of every mark of
imperfection. Behind all manifestations was the essential Substance
which made the manifestations. The completely Real was above all
mutation and process. "For one to assign," therefore, "to God any
human attributes," as Spinoza, the supreme apostle of this negative way
has said, "is to reveal that he has no true idea of God." It has taken
all the philosophical and spiritual travail of the centuries to
discover that there may be a concrete Infinite, an organic Absolute, an
immanent Reality, and that the way to share in this comprehending Life
is at least as much a way of affirmation as of negation, a way that
leads not into "the Dark" but into the Light, and not into a
"fathomless nothing," but into an abundant and radiant life.
Mysticism, as a type of religion, has further staked its precious
realities too exclusively upon the functions of what to-day we call the
sub-conscious. Impressed with the divine significance of "inward
bubblings," the mystic has made too slight an account of the testimony
of Reason and the contribution of history. The subconscious functions
are very real and very important aspects of personal life, and can
never again be ignored in any full account of personality. They
influence every thought, feeling, attitude, volition, opinion, mood,
and insight, and are thus operative in all the higher as well as in all
the lower phases of human life and character. Metaphorically, but only
metaphorically, we speak of the sub-conscious as a vast zone, an
indefinable margin, surrounding the narrow focus of attention, and we
may {xxix} figuratively, but only figuratively, call it the subliminal
"region" where all our life-gains, and often the gains of the race, are
garnered. The contributions from this mental underworld are
inestimable--we could not be men without them--but this subconscious
zone is a source of things bad as well as good, things silly as well as
things wise, of rubbish as well as of treasures, and it is diabolical
as well as divine. It seems in rare moments to connect, as though it
were a hidden inland stream, with the "immortal sea which brought us
hither," and we feel at times, through its incomes, as though we were
aware of _tides_ from beyond our own margin. And, in fact, I believe
we are.
But obviously we cannot assume that whatever comes spontaneously out of
the subconscious is divinely given. It mothers strange
offspring--Esaus as well as Jacobs; its openings, its inrushes, its
bubblings must be severely tested. Impulses of many sorts feel
categorically imperative, but some call to deeds of light and some to
deeds of darkness. They cannot be taken at their face value; they must
be judged in some Court which is less capricious and which is guided by
a more universal principle--something _semper et ubique_. A spiritual
religion of the full and complete type will, I believe, have inward,
mystical depth, it will keep vitalized and intensified with its
experiences of divine supplies, and of union and unification with an
environing Spirit, but it must at the same time soundly supplement its
more or less capricious and subjective, and always fragmentary,
mystical insights with the steady and unwavering testimony of Reason,
and no less with the immense objective illumination of History.
III
The men whom I am here calling Spiritual Reformers are examples of this
wider synthesis. They all read and loved the mystics and they
themselves enjoyed times of direct refreshment from an inward Source of
Life, but {xxx} they were, most of them, at the same time, devoted
Humanists. They shared with enthusiasm the rediscovery of those
treasures which human Reason had produced, and they rose to a more
virile confidence in the sphere and capacity of Reason than had
prevailed in Christian circles since the days of the early Greek
Fathers. They took a variety of roads to their conclusion, but in one
way or another they all proclaimed that deep in the central nature of
man--an inalienable part of Reason--there was a Light, a Word, an Image
of God, something permanent, reliable, universal, and unsundered from
God himself. They all knew that man is vastly more than "mere man."
Hans Denck, one of the earliest of this group of Spiritual Reformers,
declared that there is a _witness to God_ in the soul of every man, and
that without this inward Word it would be as impossible to bring men to
God by outward means as it would be to show sunlight to eyeless men.
He anticipated the great saying of Pascal in these words, "Apart from
God no one can either seek or find God, for he who seeks God already in
truth has Him."[18] "We are," says Jacob Boehme, who belongs in this
line of Spiritual Reformers, "of God's substance: we have heaven and
hell in ourselves."[19] There is in us, Peter Sterry says, a _unity of
spirit_ which holds all things together in an _at-once_ experience, "a
spire-top of spirit where all things meet and sit recollected and
concentred in an unfathomed Depth of Life."[20] Most of these men were
in revolt against scholasticism and all its works. They speak often
very slightingly of "Reasoning," the attempt to find a way to ultimate
Realities by logical syllogisms, but they, nevertheless, believed great
things of man's rational and moral nature. They are often confused and
cloudy in their explicit accounts of this ultimate moral and rational
nature. They everywhere indicate the conceptual limitations {xxxi}
under which even those who were the most emancipated from tradition
were compelled to do their thinking in that age. They could not break
the age-long spell and mighty fascination with which the Adam story and
the Garden of Eden picture had held the Christian world. They were
convinced, however, that the Augustinian interpretation of the fall,
with its entail of an indelible taint upon the race forever, was an
inadequate, if not an untrue account, though they could not quite
arrive at an insight which enabled them to speak with authority on the
fundamental nature of man. But with an instinct that pointed right,
they took Adam as a type of the unspoiled man, and they saw writ large
in him the possibilities and potentialities of man. What had been
originally possible in Adam became, according to their thought, actual
realization in Jesus Christ--the form and type of man, the true Head of
the race--and in spite of the havoc and spoiling, which sin had
wrought, that original possibility, that divine potentiality, still
reappears in every child, who comes now, as Adam did, made in the image
of God, with the breath of God in him, and with creative freedom of
will to settle his own destiny. Some of the Reformers whom I am here
studying centre this image of God, this immense divine potentiality, in
the ideal man, in man as God conceives him in his perfect state, or as
God by His Grace intends him to be, and they do not go the whole bold
way of asserting that this man we know, this man who lives in time and
space, who loves and sins and suffers, has and always has, in the very
structure of his inmost moral and rational being, a divine, unlost,
inalienable, soul-centre which is unsundered from God, and bears
eternal witness to our origin from Him, our potential likeness to Him,
and our capacity to receive illumination from Him.[21] But this latter
{xxxii} bolder view of the inherent greatness of man's essential nature
is the prevailing tendency of these men. They are thus the forerunners
of the Quaker faith that there is something of God in man, and they
continue the direct line, which goes back for ancestry to the Socratic
movement in philosophy of those who find God involved and implicated in
the nature of normal self-consciousness and in the idea of the Good
toward which we live.[22]
Mystics and prophets, as Seely well says in _Ecce Homo_, seem to
themselves to "discover truth not so much by a process of reasoning as
by _an intense gaze_, and they announce their conclusions with the
voice of a herald, using the name of God and giving no reasons." The
rational way of approach is different. It seeks to draw out by a
process of rational argument what is involved in the outer or inner
facts that are present to consciousness. It does not claim the power
to make bricks without clay, to construct its conclusions out of
nothing. Its only legitimate field is that of interpreting experience.
There have always been men who were religious because they could not
help being religious, because a Universe without God seemed to them
utterly irrational and unthinkable. Schleiermacher is only one witness
in a long and impressive succession of thinkers that have insisted that
"consciousness of God and self-consciousness are inseparable."[23] It
is obvious even to the unmetaphysical person that self-consciousness
always presupposes and involves something prior to one's own existence
and some reality transcending the reality of one's own self. The
finite is intelligible only through the infinite, the temporal only
through the eternal. We cannot think at all without appealing to some
_permanent more of reality_ than is just now given in our particular
finite experience, and no matter how far one travels on the road of
knowledge one always finds it still necessary to make reference to _a
transcending more_. "All consciousness is," as Hegel {xxxiii} showed
in 1807, in his philosophical Pilgrim's Progress, the _Phenomenology of
Spirit_, "an appeal to more consciousness," and there is no rational
halting-place short of a self-consistent and self-explanatory spiritual
Reality, which explains the origin and furnishes the goal of all that
is real.
On the other hand, there have always been men who have not granted any
such compelling implications to self-consciousness. They have
maintained that "finites" are forever "finites," and that there are no
bridges that carry us from our finite "nows" and "heres" to an infinite
Reality. The infinite Reality, they all admit, is conceivable; it is
"an idea" to which any mind can rise by normal processes of thought,
"but," so they say, "an _idea_ of an infinite Reality, an Infinite
merely conceived in the mind, is different, by the whole width of the
sky, from an actual objective infinite Reality that is _there_, and
that contains inherently all that our hearts seek in God."
It is quite true, of course, that the presence of "an idea" in our mind
does not of itself prove the existence of a corresponding objective
reality _out there_ in a world independent of our mind. There is most
assuredly no way of bridging "the chasm" between mind and an objective
world beyond and outside of mind, when once the "chasm" is assumed.
But the fundamental error lies in the assumption of any such "chasm."
The "chasm" which yawns between the inner and outer world is of our own
making. Whenever we know anything, wherever there is knowledge at all,
there is a synthetic indivisible whole of experience in which a subject
knows an object. Subject and object cannot be really sundered without
putting an instant end to knowledge--leaving "a bare grin without a
face!" The only way we know anything is that we know we know it in
experience. We do not ever succeed in proving that objects exist _out
there_ in the world beyond us exactly correspondent to these ideas in
our minds. That is a feat of mental gymnastics quite parallel to that
of "finding" {xxxiv} the self with which we do the seeking. The
crucial problem of knowledge is not to discover a bridge to leap the
chasm between the mind within and the world beyond. It is rather the
problem of finding a basis of verifying and testing what we know, and
of making knowledge a consistent rational whole.
The method of testing and verifying any fact of truth which we have on
our hands, is always to organize it and link it into a larger whole of
knowledge which we ourselves, or the wider group of persons in which we
are organic members, have verified, and to see that it fits in
consistently into this larger whole, and in this rational process we
always assume, and are bound to assume, some sort of Reality that
transcends the fleeting and temporal, the caprice of the moment, the
will of the subject, the here and the now. The mind that knows and
knows that it knows must, as Plato centuries ago declared, rise from
the welter and flux of momentary seemings to true Being, to the
eternally Real,[24] and the knowledge process of binding fragments of
experience into larger wholes and of getting articulate insight into
the significance of many facts grasped in synthetic unity--in the
"spire-top of spirit," as Sterry puts it--carries the mind steadily and
irresistibly on to an infinitely-inclusive and self-explanatory
spiritual Whole, which is always implied in knowledge. Some reference
to the _permanent_ is necessary in judging even the fleetingness of the
"now," some confidence in the eternally true is essential for any
pronouncement upon the false, some assurance of the infinite is
presupposed in the endless dissatisfaction with the finite, some appeal
to a total whole of Reality is implicated in any assertion that _this
fact here and now_ is known as real. Any one who feels the full
significance of what is involved in knowing the _truth_ has a coercive
feeling that Eternity has been set within us, that our finite life is
deeply rooted in the all-pervading Infinite.
The great thinkers of the first rank who have undertaken to sound the
significance of rational knowledge, {xxxv} and who have appreciated the
meaning of the synthetic unity of the knowing mind and the world of
objects that submit to its forms of thought, have recognized that there
must be some deep-lying fundamental relation between the mind that
knows and the world that is known, some Reality common to both outer
and inner realms. They have, almost without exception, found
themselves carried along irresistibly to an ultimate Reality that is
the ground and explanation of all the fragmentary facts of experience,
and without which nothing can be held to be permanent or rational--
Something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a Spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.[25]
The technical logical formulation of arguments to _prove_ the existence
of God as objectively real--arguments from causality, ontological
arguments, and arguments from design--all of which assume a "chasm"
between the knower and the object known, seem to us perhaps on critical
analysis thin and insufficient. The bridge of formal logic seems too
weak to carry us safely over from a finite here to an infinite yonder,
from a contingent fact to an Absolute Reality, from something given
_in_ consciousness to Something existent outside and beyond it; but it
is an impressive and significant fact that all finite experience, both
of inner and outer events, involves a More yet, that we cannot think
finite and contingent things without rational appeal to Something
infinite and necessary, that human experience cannot be rationally
conceived except as a fragment of a vastly more inclusive Experience,
always recognized within the finite spirit, that unifies and binds
together into one self-explanatory whole all that is absolutely Real
and True, and this is Reason's conviction of God.
{xxxvi}
When once the conviction is _felt_ and the rational postulate of God is
made, it immediately verifies its practical value in the solution of
our deepest problems. A happy illustration of the practical value and
verifying evidence of the rational postulate of God has been given by
James Ward: "Suppose," he says, "that the earth were wrapt in clouds
all day while the sky was clear at night, so that we were able to see
the planets and observe their movements as we do now, though the sun
itself was invisible. The best account we could give of the planetary
motions would still be to refer them to what for us, in accordance with
our supposition, would only be an imaginary focus [or centre of
physical energy], but one to which was assigned a position identical
with the sun's [present] position."[26] This assumption would at once
unlock the mystery and account for the varying movements of these
visible bodies and the more rigorously the hypothesis were applied, the
more exactly it would verify itself. So, too, with Reason's sublime
venture of faith. The nature of self-consciousness demands the
postulate, and once it is made it _works_.
The same result follows any attempt adequately to account for the moral
imperative--the will to live the truly good life. The moral will turns
out always to be imbedded in a deeper, richer, more inclusive Life than
that of the fragmentary finite individual. There is a creative and
autonomous central self in us which puts before us ideals of truth and
beauty and goodness that are nowhere to be "found" in this world of
sense-facts, and that yet are more real and august than any things our
eyes see or our hands handle. Our main moral problem is not to adjust
our inner ideals to our environment, but rather to compel the
environment to level up to our ideals. The world that ought to be
makes us forever dissatisfied with the world that is, and sets us with
a fixity of purpose at the task of realizing the Kingdom which might
possibly be, which we know ought to be, and which, therefore, has our
loyal endeavour that it {xxxvii} shall be, regardless of the cost in
pain and sacrifice. Man, as William Wallace has put it, "projects his
own self-to-be into the nature he seeks to conquer. Like an assailant
who should succeed in throwing his standard into the strong central
keep of the enemy's fortress, and fight his way thereto with assured
victory in his eyes of hope, so man with the vision of his soul
prognosticates his final triumph."[27] But if the life of moral
endeavour is to be essentially consistent and reasonable there must be
a world of Reality that transcends this realm of empirical, causal, and
utilitarian happenings. Struggle for ends of goodness must be at least
as significant in function as struggle for existence; our passion for
what ought to be must have had birth in an inner eternal environment at
least as real as that which produced our instincts and appetite for the
things by which we live in time. If the universe is through and
through rational, there must be some personal Heart that _cares_; some
moral Will that guarantees and backs our painful strivings--our
groaning and travailing--to make what ought to be come into play here
in the world which is. This postulate is Reason's faith in God, and
again it _works_.
The evolution of life--if it is evolving as we believe it is,
and if it is to be viewed with rational insight as an upward
process--irresistibly involves and implies some sort of fundamental
intelligence and conscious purpose, some Logos steering the mighty
movement. We have outgrown crude arguments from "design," and we
cannot think of God as a foreign and external Creator, working as a
Potter on his clay; but it is irrational to "explain" a steadily
unfolding movement, an ever-heightening procession of life, by
"fortuitous variations," by "accidental" shifts of level, or even by a
blind _elan vital_. If there is an increasing purpose and a clearly
culminating drama unfolding in this moving flood of life, then there is
some Mind that sees the way, and some Will that directs the march of
Life. And this confidence of ours in some divine Event to which the
whole creation moves, {xxxviii} this insight that there must be a
significant and adequate explanation for the immanent teleology and
beauty with which our universe is crammed, is, once more, Reason's
postulate of God. There is something in us, indissoluble from Reason
itself--a Light, a Word, a Witness as these Spiritual Reformers
insisted--which links us in all the deeper processes of
self-consciousness with _That Which Is_ and without which "knowledge"
would be a mere flux of seemings, a flight of _seriatim_ items.
IV
When this world's pleasures for my soul sufficed,
Ere my heart's plummet sounded depths of pain,
I called on reason to control my brain,
And scoffed at that old story of the Christ.
But when o'er burning wastes my feet had trod,
And all my life was desolate with loss,
With bleeding hands I clung about the cross,
And cried aloud, "Man needs a suffering God."[28]
There can be no doubt that the compulsions and implications of rational
insight have brought multitudes of men to God, have given them an
unescapable conviction of His reality, and have swayed their wills to
live in conformity to His perfect Goodness; and it is also true that
when for any cause this clue of rationality is missed or lost, men
flounder about in the fog and pass through periods of inward tragedy
amounting often to despair. But the approach of Reason still leaves
much to be desired. It points to something deeper than the transitory
flux of things, it raises our minds to some sort of ultimate and
self-explanatory Reality, it compels the conviction that there is an
all-inclusive Logos--Mind or Spirit--that explains what is and what
ought to be, and what in the unfolding course of things is to be; but
it does not bring us to a personal God who is our loving Friend and the
{xxxix} intimate Companion of our souls, it does not help us solve the
mystery of human suffering that lies heavily upon our lives, and it
does not bring to our spirits _the saving reinforcement of personal
Love_ that must be a central feature of a spiritual and adequate
religion.
There is still another way of approach to a Religion for mature minds
which has been no less universally operative and no less dynamic in its
transforming effects upon human lives than either of the two tendencies
so far considered--I refer to the way of Faith. By Faith I mean the
soul's moral or appreciative apprehension of God as _historically
revealed_, particularly as revealed in the personal life of Jesus
Christ. This Faith-way to God cannot be wholly separated--except by an
artificial abstraction--from the inward way of mysticism, or from the
implications of Reason. It is no blind acceptance of traditional
opinions, no uncritical reliance on "authority," or on some mysterious
infallible oracle. It is the spiritual response--or "assent," as
Clement of Alexandria called it--the moral swing of our inmost self, as
we catch insights of a loving Heart and holy Will revealed through the
words and lives and sufferings of saints and prophets, who have lived
by their vision of God, and supremely revealed in the Life and Love,
the Passion and the Triumphs of that Person whose experience and
character and incarnation of life's possibilities seem at last adequate
for all the needs--the heights and the depths--of this complex life of
ours.
It was Luther's living word which first brought the momentous
significance of Faith to clear consciousness in the sixteenth century.
But the new way of Faith meant many and discordant things, according to
the preparation of the ears of those who heard. It spoke, as all
Pentecosts do, to each man in his own tongue. To those who came to the
Lutheran insight with a deep hunger of spirit for reality and with
minds liberated by Humanistic studies, the Faith-message meant new
heavens and a new earth. It was a new discovery of God, and a new
estimate of man. They suddenly caught {xl} a vision of life as it was
capable of becoming, and they committed their fortunes to the task of
making that possible world real. By a shift of view, as revolutionary
as that from Ptolemaic astronomy to the verifiable insight of
Copernicus, they passed over from the dogma of a Christ who came to
appease an angry God, and to found a Church as an ark of safety in a
doomed world, to the living apprehension of a Christ--verifiable in
experience--who revealed to them, in terms of His own nature, an
eternally tender, loving, suffering, self-giving God, and who made them
see, with the enlightened eyes of their heart, the divine possibilities
of human life. Through this insight, they were the beginners of a new
type of Christianity, which has become wide-spread and impressive in
the modern world, a type that finds the supreme significance of
Christ's Life in His double revelation of the inherent nature of God,
and the immense value and potentiality of man, and that changes the
emphasis from schemes of salvation to interpretations of life, from the
magic significance of doctrine to the incalculable worth of the moral
will.
These men were weak in historical sense, and, like everybody else in
their generation, they used Scripture without much critical insight.
But they hit upon a principle which saved them from slavery to texts,
and which gave them a working faith in the steady moral and spiritual
development of man. I mean the principle that this Christ whom they
had discovered anew was an eternal manifestation of God, an immanent
Word of God, a Spirit brooding over the world of men, as in the
beginning over the face of the waters, present in the unfolding events
of history as well as in the far-away "dispensations of Grace." As a
result, they grew less interested in the problem that had fascinated so
many mystics, the problem of the super-empirical evolution of the
divine Consciousness; the super-temporal differentiation of the unity
of the Godhead into a Father and Son and self-revealing Holy Ghost; and
they tried rather to appreciate and to declare the concrete revelation
through Christ, and {xli} the import of His visible and invisible
presence in the world.[29]
This approach of Faith, this appreciation of the nature of God as He
has been unveiled in the ethical processes of history, especially in
the Person of Christ, and in His expanding conquest of the world, must
always be one of the great factors of spiritual religion. The profound
results of higher criticism, with its stern winnowings, have brought us
face to face with problems unknown to the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. So much of what seemed the solid continent of historical
truth has weathered and crumbled away that some have wondered whether
any irreducible nucleus would remain firm and permanent above the flood
of the years, and whether the religion of the future must not dispense
with the historical element, and the Faith-aspect that goes with it,
and rest wholly upon present inward experience.
There are, however, I believe, no indications worth considering, of the
disappearance of Jesus Christ from human history. On the contrary, He
holds, as never before, the commanding place in history. He still
dominates conscience, by the moral sway of His Life of Goodness, as
does no other Person who has ever lived; and by the attractive power of
His life and love He still sets men to living counter to the strong
thrust of instinct and impulse as does no one else who has ever touched
the springs of conduct. The Faith-aspect is still a very live element
in religion, and it is, as it has been so often before, precisely the
aspect which supplies concrete body and filling and objective ethical
direction to our deep sub-conscious yearnings and strivings and
experiences.
Once at least there shone through the thin veil of matter a personal
Life which brought another kind of world than this world of natural law
and utilitarian aims full into light. There broke through here in the
face of Jesus {xlii} Christ a revelation of Purpose in the universe so
far beyond the vague trend of purpose dimly felt in slowly evolving
life that it is possible here to catch an illuminating vision of what
the goal of the long drama may be--the unveiling of sons of God. Here
the discovery can be made that the deepest Reality toward which Reason
points, and which the mystical experience _feels_, is no vague
Something Beyond, but a living, loving Some One, dealing with us as
Person with person. In Him there comes to focus in a Life that we can
love and appreciate a personal character which impresses us as being
absolutely good, and as being in its inexhaustible depth of Love and
Grace worthy to be taken as the revelation of the true nature of the
God whom all human hearts long for. And finally through this personal
revelation of God in Christ there has come to us a clear insight that
pain and suffering and tragedy can be taken up into a self-chosen Life
and absorbed without spoiling its immense joy, and that precisely
through suffering-love, joyously accepted, a Person expressing in the
world the heart of God may become the moral and spiritual Saviour of
others. As von Hugel has finely said: "A Person came and lived and
loved, and did and taught, and died and rose again, and lives on by His
power and His Spirit forever within us and amongst us, so unspeakably
rich and yet so simple, so sublime and yet so homely, so divinely above
us precisely in being so divinely near that His character and teaching
require, for an ever fuller yet never complete understanding, the
varying study, and different experiments and applications, embodiments
and unrollings of all the races and civilizations, of all the
individual and corporate, the simultaneous and successive experiences
of the human race to the end of time."[30]
The only salvation worth talking about is that which consists of an
inner process of moral transformation, through which one passes over
"the great divide" from a life that is self-centred and dominated by
impulse and sin to a life that is assured of divine forgiveness, that
has {xliii} conceived a passion for a redeemed inward nature, that is
conscious of help from beyond its own resources, and that is dedicated
to the task of making moral goodness triumph over the evil of the
world. Any experience which brings to the soul a clear vision of the
moral significance of human life, and that engenders in us a practical
certainty that God is working with us in all our deepest undertakings,
tends to have saving efficacy and to bring about this inward
transformation. But nowhere else in the universe--above us or within
us--has the moral significance of life come so full into sight, or the
reality of actual divine fellowship, whether in our aspirations or in
our failures, been raised to such a pitch of practical certainty as in
the personal life and death and resurrection and steady historical
triumph of Jesus Christ. He exhibits in living fulness, with
transforming power, a Life which consciously felt itself one with the
heart and will of God. He reveals the inherent blessedness of
Love--even though it may involve suffering and pain and death. He
shows the moral supremacy, even in this imperfect empirical world, of
the perfectly good will, and He impresses those who _see_ Him--see Him,
I mean, with eyes that can penetrate through the temporal to the
eternal and find His real nature--as being the supreme personal
unveiling of God, as worthy to be our Leader, our Ideal Life, our
typical personal Character, and strong enough in His infinite Grace and
divine self-giving to convince us of the eternal co-operation of God
with our struggling humanity, and to settle our Faith in the essential
Saviourhood of God.
He who sees _that_ in Christ has found a real way to God and has
discovered a genuine way of salvation. It is the way of Faith, but
Faith is no airy and unsubstantial road, no capricious leap. There is
no kind of aimful living conceivable that does not involve faith in
something trans-subjective--faith in something not given in present
empirical experience. Even in our most elementary life-adjustments
there is something operative in us which far underlies our conscious
perceiving and {xliv} the logic of our conclusions. We are moved, not
alone by what we clearly picture and coldly analyse, but by deep-lying
instincts which defy analysis, by background and foreground fringes of
consciousness, by immanent and penetrative intelligence which cannot be
brought to definite focus, by the vast reservoirs of accumulated wisdom
through which we _feel_ the way to go, though we can pictorially
envisage no "spotted trees" that mark the trail.
This religious and saving Faith, through which the soul discovers God
and makes the supreme life-adjustment to Him, is profoundly moral and,
in the best sense of the word, rational. It does not begin with an
assumption, blind or otherwise, as to Christ's metaphysical nature, it
does not depend upon the adoption of systematically formulated
doctrines; it becomes operative through the discovery of a personal
Life, historically lived--and continued through the centuries as a
transforming Spirit--rich enough in its experience to exhibit the
infinite significance of life, inwardly deep enough in its spiritual
resources to reveal the character of God, and strong enough in
sympathy, in tenderness, in patience, and in self-giving love to beget
forever trust and confidence and love on the part of all who thus find
Him.
The God whom we learn to know in Christ--the God historically
revealed--is no vague first Cause, no abstract Reality, no all-negating
Absolute. He is a concrete Person, whose traits of character are
intensely moral and spiritual. His will is no fateful swing of
mechanical law; it is a morally good will which works patiently and
forever toward a harmonized world, a Kingdom of God. The central trait
of His character is Love. He does not become Father, He is not
reconciled to us by persuasive offerings and sacrifices. He is
inherently and by essential disposition Father and the God of all
Grace. He is not remote and absentee--making a world "in the
beginning," and leaving it to run by law, or only occasionally
interrupting its normal processes--He is immanent Spirit, working
always, the God of beauty and organizing purpose. He {xlv} is Life and
Light and Truth, an Immanuel God who can and does show Himself in a
personal Incarnation, and so exhibits the course and goal of the race.
The way of Faith is a way to God, and the religion of this type is as
properly _a first-hand religion_ as that of any other type.
I have, of course, by no means exhausted the types of mature religion.
There are other ways of approach to God, other roads by which the soul
finds the way home--"On the East three gates; on the North three gates;
on the South three gates; and on the West three gates"--and they will
continue to be sacred ways--_viae sacrae_--for those who travel them
and thus find their heart's desire. What we should learn from this
brief study is that religion is too rich and complex an experience to
be squeezed down to some one isolated aspect of life or of
consciousness. There are many ways to God and any way that actually
brings the soul to Him is a good way, but the best way is that one
which produces upon the imperfect personal life the profoundest saving
effects, the most dynamic moral reinforcement, and which brings into
sway over the will the goal of life most adequate for men like us in a
social world like ours.
For most of us no one way of approach--no single type of religion--is
quite sufficient for all the needs of our life. Most of us are
fortunate enough to have at least moments when we feel in warm and
intimate _contact_ with a divine, enwrapping environment more real to
us than things of sense and of arithmetic, and when the infinite and
eternal is no less, but immeasurably more, sure than the finite and
temporal. Most of us, again, succeed, at least on happy occasions of
mental health, in finding rational clues which carry us through the
maze of contingency and clock-time happenings, through the
imperfections of our slow successive events, to the One Great Now of
perfect Reality which explains the process, and we attain to an
intellectual love of God. And in spite of the literary difficulties of
primitive narratives and of false trails which the historical Church
has again and again taken, almost any serious, earnest soul to-day
{xlvi} may find that divine Face, that infinitely deep and luminous
Personality who spoke as no man ever spake, who loved as none other
ever loved, who saw more in humanity than anybody else has ever seen,
and who felt as no other person ever has that He was one in heart and
mind and will with God; and having found Him, by a morally responsive
Faith which dominates and transforms the inward self, one has found God
as Companion, Friend, and Saviour. Where all these ways converge, and
a soul enjoys the privilege of mystical contact, the compulsion of
rational insight, and the moral reinforcement of personal Faith in
Christ, religion comes to its consummate flower, and may with some
right be called "spiritual Religion."
V
The most radical step which these spiritual Reformers took--the step
which put them most strikingly out of line with the main course of the
Reformation--was their break with Protestant Theology. They were not
satisfied with a programme which limited itself to a correction of
abuses, an abolition of mediaeval superstitions, and a shift of
external authority. They were determined to go the whole way to a
Religion of inward life and power, to a Christianity whose only
authority should be its dynamic and spiritual authority. They placed
as low an estimate on the saving value of orthodox systems of
theological formulation as the Protestant Reformers did on the saving
value of "works." To the former, salvation was an affair neither of
"works" nor of what they called "notions," _i.e._ views, beliefs, or
creeds. They are never weary of insisting that a person may go on
endless pilgrimages to holy places, he may repeat unnumbered
"paternosters," he may mortify his body to the verge of
self-destruction, and still be unsaved and unspiritual; so, too, he may
"believe" all the dogma of the most orthodox system of faith, he may
take on his lips the most sacred words of sound doctrine, and yet be
utterly alien {xlvii} to the kingdom of God, a stranger and a foreigner
to the spirit of Christ. They were determined, therefore, to go
through to a deeper centre and to make only those things pivotal which
are absolutely essential to life and salvation.
They began their reconstruction of the meaning of salvation with (1) a
new and fresh interpretation of God, and (2) with a transformed
eschatology. As I have already said, they re-discovered God through
Christ, and in terms of His revelation; and coming to God _this way_,
they saw at once that the prevailing interpretations of the atonement
were inadequate and unworthy. God, they declared, is not a Suzerain,
treating men as his vassals, reckoning their sins up against them as
infinite debts to be paid off at last in a vast commercial transaction
only by the immeasurable price of a divine Life, given to pay the debt
which had involved the entire race in hopeless bankruptcy. Nor, again,
in their thought is He a mighty Sovereign, meting out to the world
strict justice and holding all sin as flagrant disloyalty and appalling
violation of law, never to be forgiven until the full requirements of
sovereign justice are met and balanced and satisfied. All this seemed
to them artificial and false. Salvation, as they understand it, cannot
be conceived as escape from debt nor as the satisfaction of justice,
since it is a personal life-relationship with a personal God who is and
always was eternal Love. God's universe, both outer and inner, is
loaded with moral significance, is meant for discipline, and therefore
it has its stern aspects and drives its lessons home with the
unswerving hammer of _consequences_. But in the personal Heart of the
universe, Love and Tenderness and Sympathy and Forgiveness are supreme,
and every process and every instrument of salvation, in the divine
purpose, is vital, ethical, spiritual.
God has shown Himself as Father. He has revealed the immeasurable
suffering which sin inflicts on love. To find the Father-Heart; to cry
"Abba" in filial joy; to die to sin and to be born to love, is to be
saved. Jacob Boehme gave this new conception of God, and its bearing
{xlviii} on the way of salvation, the most adequate expression that was
given by any of this group, but all these so-called spiritual Reformers
herein studied had reached the same insight at different levels of
adequacy. Their return to a more vital conception of salvation, with
its emphasis on the value of personality, brought with it, too, a new
humanitarian spirit and a truer estimate of the worth of man. As they
re-discovered the love of God, they also found again the gospel of love
and brotherhood which is woven into the very tissue of the original
gospel of divine Fatherhood.
Their revised eschatology was due, at least partly, to this altered
account of the character of God, but it was also partly due to their
profound tendency to deal with all matters of the soul in terms of life
and vital processes. Heaven and Hell were no longer thought of as
terminal places, where the saved were everlastingly rewarded and the
lost forever punished. Heaven and Hell were for them inward
conditions, states of the soul, the normal gravitation of the Spirit
toward its chosen centre. Heaven and Hell cease, therefore, to be
eschatological in the true sense of the word; they become present
realities, tendencies of life, ways of reacting toward the things of
deepest import. Heaven, whether here or in any other world, is the
condition of complete adjustment to the holy will of God; it is joy in
the prevalence of His goodness; peace through harmonious correspondence
with His purposes; the formation of a spirit of love, the creation of
an inward nature that loves what God loves and enjoys what He enjoys.
Hell, here or elsewhere, is a disordered life, out of adjustment with
the universal will of God; it is concentration upon self and self-ends;
the contraction of love; the shrinking of inward resources; the
formation of a spirit of hate, the creation of an inward nature that
hates what God loves. Hell is the inner condition inherently attaching
to the kind of life that displays and exhibits the spirit and attitude
which must be overcome before God with His purposes of goodness can be
{xlix} ultimately triumphant and all in all. Salvation, therefore,
cannot be thought of in terms of escape from a place that is dreaded to
a place that is desired as a haven. It is through and through a
spiritual process--escape from a wrongly fashioned will to a will
rightly fashioned. It is complete spiritual health and wholeness of
life, brought into operation and function by the soul's recovery of God
and by joyous correspondence with Him.
Here is the genuine beginning in modern times of what has come to be
the deepest note of present-day Christianity, _the appreciation of
personality as the highest thing in earth or heaven_, and the
initiation of a movement to find the vital sources and resources for
the inner kindling of the spirit, and for raising the whole personal
life to higher functions and to higher powers.
Putting the emphasis, as they did, on personal religion, _i.e._ on
experience, instead of on theology, they naturally became exponents of
free-will, and that, too, in a period when fore-ordination was a
central dogma of theology. This problem of freedom, which is as deep
as personality itself, always has its answer "determined" by the point
of approach. For those who _begin_ with an absolute and omnipotent
God, and work down from above, the necessarian position is determined.
Their answer is: "All events are infallibly connected with God's
disposal." For those who start, however, from actual experience and
from the testimony of consciousness, freedom feels as certain as life
itself. Their answer is: "Human will is a real factor in the direction
of events and man shapes his own destiny toward good or evil."
Calvin's logic is irresistible if his assumptions are once granted.
These spiritual Reformers, however, were untouched by it, because they
began from the interior life, with its dramatic movements, as their
basal fact, and man as they knew him was free.
This spiritual movement involved, as a natural development, an entire
shift from the historical idea of the Church as an authoritative and
supernatural instrument of salvation, to a Church whose authority was
entirely vital, {l} ethical, spiritual, dynamic. The Church of these
spiritual Reformers was a Fellowship, a Society, a Family, rather than
a mysterious and supernatural entity. They felt once again, as
powerfully perhaps as it was possible in their centuries to feel it,
the immense significance of the Pauline conception of the Church as the
continued embodiment and revelation of Christ, the communion of saints
past and present who live or have lived by the Spirit. Through this
spiritual group, part of whom are visible and part invisible, they held
that the divine revelation is continued and the eternal Word of God is
being uttered to the race. "The true religion of Christ," as one of
these spiritual teachers well puts it, "is written in the soul and
spirit of man by the Spirit of God; and the believer is the only book
in which God now writes His New Testament."[31] This Church of the
Spirit is always being built. Its power is proportional to the
spiritual vitality of the membership, to the measure of apprehension of
divine resources, to the depth of insight and grasp of truth, to the
prevalence of love and brotherhood, to the character of service, which
the members exhibit. It possesses no other kind of power or authority
than the power and authority of personal lives formed into a community
by living correspondence with God, and acting as human channels and
organs of His Life and Spirit. Such a Church can meet new formulations
of science and history and social ideals with no authoritative and
conclusive word of God which automatically settles the issue. Its only
weapons are truth and light, and these have to be continually
re-discovered and re-fashioned to fit the facts which the age has found
and verified. Its mission is _prophetic_. It does not dogmatically
decide what facts must be believed, but it sees and announces the
spiritual significance of the facts that are discovered and verified.
It was, thus, in their thought a growing, changing, ever-adjusting
body--the living body of Christ in the world. To the Protestant
Reformers this spiritual ideal presented "a Church" so shorn and
emasculated as to be {li} absolutely worthless. It seemed to them a
propaganda which threatened and endangered the mighty work of
reformation to which they felt themselves called, and they used all the
forces available to suppress and annihilate those of this other "way."
Nearly four hundred wonderful years have passed since the issue was
first drawn, since the first of these spiritual prophets uttered his
modest challenge. There can be no question that the current of
Christian thought has been strongly setting in the direction which
these brave and sincere innovators took. I feel confident that many
persons to-day will be interested in these lonely men and will follow
with sympathy their valiant struggles to discover the road to a genuine
spiritual religion, and their efforts to live by the eternal Word of
God as it was freely revealed as the Day Star to their souls.
[1] 1 Cor. xv. 50.
[2] 2 Cor. v. 1-4.
[3] John iii. 6.
[4] 1 John iv. 13; John xiii. 34 and xvi. 13; 1 John iv. 4.
[5] They found their authority for this outer sheath of body in the
text which says: "The Lord God made for Adam and for his wife coats of
skins, and clothed them."--Gen. iii. 21.
[6] Many of these historical reappearances are considered in my
_Studies in Mystical Religion_.
[7] Isaac Penington, "A True and Faithful Relation of my Spiritual
Travails," _Works_ (edition of 1761), i. pp. xxxvii.-xxxviii.
[8] Isaac Penington's _Works_, i. pp. xxxvii.-xxxviii.
[9] The exact and sharply-defined "ladders" of mystic ascent which form
a large part of the descriptive material in books on Mystical Religion
are far from being universal ladders. Like creeds, or like religious
institutions, they powerfully assist certain minds to find the way
home, but they seem unreal and artificial to many other persons, and
they must be considered only as symbolisms which speak to the condition
of a limited number of spiritual pilgrims.
[10] Wordsworth's "Prelude," Bk. ii.
[11] _Theologia Germanica_, chaps. xxii. and xliii.
[12] _Ibid._ chap. liii.
[13] _Meister Eckhart_, Pfeiffer, p. 320. 20.
[14] Tauler's Sermons. See especially Sermons IV. and XXIII. in
Hutton's _Inner Way_.
[15] _The Divine Names_ of Dionysius the Areopagite, chap. i. sec. i.
[16] _Meister Eckhart_, Pfeiffer, p. 320. 25-30.
[17] Quoted in W. H. J. Gairdner's _The Reproach of Islam_, p. 151.
[19] Denck's _Was geredet sey, dass die Schrift_, B. 2. Pascal's
saying is: "Comfort thyself; thou wouldst not be seeking Me hadst thou
not already found Me."--Le Mystere de Jesus, sec. 2.
[19] _The Threefold Life of Man_, xiv. 72.
[20] Sterry's _Rise, Race, and Royalty of the Kingdom of God in the
Soul of Man_, p. 24.
[21] "The finite individual soul seems naturally to present a double
aspect. It looks like, on the one hand, a climax or concentration of
the nature beneath it and the community around it, and, on the other
hand, a spark or fragment from what is above and beyond it. It is
crystallized out of the collective soul of nature or society, or it
falls down from the transcendental soul of heaven or what is above
humanity. In both cases alike it has its share of divinity."--Bernard
Bosanquet, _The Value and Destiny of the Individual_ (London, 1913), p.
1.
[22] The way to the world of Perfect Reality, Socrates says in the
_Theaetetus_, consists in likeness to God, nor is there, he adds,
anything more like God than is a good man.--_Theaetetus_ 176 A and B.
[23] Schleiermacher's _Glaubenslehre_.
[24] _Republic_ vii. 518 B.
[25] Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey."
[26] _Realm of Ends_, p. 230.
[27] _Lectures and Addresses_, p. 193.
[28] Ella Wheeler Wilcox, _Poems of Life and Moments_.
[29] Jacob Boehme, however, shows this fascination for the
super-empirical at its height and culmination. It was an attempt,
though a bungling attempt, to pass from an abstract God to a God of
_character_, and it was a circuitous way of getting round the problem
of evil.
[30] _Mystical Elements of Religion_, i. p. 26.
[31] William Dell's sermon on "The Trial of Spirits," _Works_, p. 438.
{1}
CHAPTER I
THE MAIN CURRENT OF THE REFORMATION
I
One of the greatest tragedies in Christian history is the division of
forces which occurred in the Reformation movements of the sixteenth
century. Division of forces in the supreme spiritual undertakings of
the race is of course confined to no one century and to no one
movement; it is a very ancient tragedy. But the tragedy of division is
often relieved by the fact that through the differentiation of opposing
parties a vigorous emphasis is placed upon aspects of truth which might
otherwise have been allowed to drop out of focus. This
sixteenth-century division is peculiarly tragic, because through the
split in the lines the very aspects of truth which were most needed to
give the movement a steady increment of insight and power were lost in
the din and confusion of party warfare.
There was a short but glorious period--the years from 1517 to
1523--during which it seemed as though the spiritual and intellectual
travail of the three preceding centuries was to consummate in the birth
of a movement that would draw together and unify all the liberating
forces which had slowly become available. The Humanists of the
Renaissance, no less than Columbus, were finding a new world.[1] They
had boldly travelled out beyond the {2} boundaries which the medieval
mind had set to human interests, and had discovered that man was more
than the abstract being whose "soul" had alone concerned ecclesiastics
and schoolmen. Man, the Humanists saw, is possessed in his own right
of great powers of reason. He is a creative and autonomous being, he
has vast capacities for life and enjoyment to which the Church had
failed to minister. They stood amazed at the artistic and literary
culture, the political and intellectual freedom and the great richness
of life which the newly discovered classical literature revealed as
having existed in the pre-Christian world, and at the wonderful
comprehension of life revealed in the Gospels. With commendable
passion they proposed to refresh and reshape the world through the new
models, the new ideals, and the new spirit which they had discovered.
First of all they would wipe out the old Augustinian cleavage which had
carried its sharp dualism wherever it ran. They would no longer
recognize the double world scheme--a divine realm set over against an
undivine realm, the "sacred" set over against the "secular," the
spiritual set over against the natural, the Church set against the
world, faith set in contrast to reason, the spirit pitted against the
flesh, "the other world" put in such light that "this world" by
contrast lay dull in the shadow. Those who were broadened and
liberated by the new learning found not only a new world in classical
literature, but they also found a new gospel in the Gospel. As they
studied the New Testament documents themselves and became freed from
the bondage of tradition they discovered that the primitive message
dealt with life and action rather than with theology. They found the
key to the Gospel in the Sermon on the Mount, and in the Parables of
Jesus, and they shifted the emphasis from doctrine to ethics. This
change of emphasis quite naturally involved another change. It brought
man into greater prominence, and the Church as an ecclesiastical system
into less prominence; for life, they discovered, was settled in the
teaching of Christ by the {3} attitude of the will and by the formation
of character, rather than by the mediation of a priesthood external to
man. "I wish," Erasmus wrote to Capito in 1518, "that there could be
an end of scholastic subtleties, or, if not an end, that they could be
thrust into a second place and Christ be taught plainly and simply.
The reading of the Bible and the early Fathers will have this effect.
Doctrines are taught now which have no affinity with Christ, and only
darken our eyes."[2] Again in 1521 he wrote to a friend, words which
appear again and again in his letters: "It would be well for us if we
thought less about our dogmas and more about the gospel,"[3] or, as he
often puts it, "if we made less of dogmatic subtleties and more of
Scripture." So far as Humanism was a religious force it was pushing
toward a religion of the lay-type, with man himself--man with his
momentous will--as the centre of interest.
Another important influence was slowly but pervasively filtering down
into the life of the people and preparing the way for a religion of
greater personal vitality and spiritual inwardness; I mean the
testimony of the great mystics. One has only to study the life and
writings of such a scholar as Nicolaus Chrypffs--generally called
Cusanus, or Nicholas of Cusa--who died shortly before Luther was
born,[4] to see what a live force the mystical teaching was even in
this period of Renaissance. God is for him, as for his great masters,
Plotinus, Erigena, Eckhart, and Tauler, the infinite and indescribable
subsoil of the universe, in whose Reality all the roots of life and all
the reality of things are grounded. The soul, by nature spiritual and
immortal, at its apex rises above the contradictions which lower
knowledge everywhere meets and comes into possession, by a "learned
ignorance," of Truth itself and into an unspeakable union with God.
But it was not merely among scholars like Nicholas that mysticism
formed the elemental basis of life and thought; it had, through the
circles of the {4} "Brothers of the Common Life,"[5] and through such
masterpieces as the _Imitation of Christ_, the _Theologia Germanica_,
and the Sermons of Eckhart and of John Tauler, become a part of the
spiritual atmosphere which serious-minded men breathed. Every one of
the men who belong in my list of "Spiritual Reformers" read and loved
"the golden book of German Theology," and most of them knew the other
writings of the great fourteenth-century mystics. There are
unmistakable evidences of a subtle formative influence from these rich
sources, which explains the simultaneous sporadic outbreak of similar
views in widely sundered places.
There was, thus, abroad at the opening of the Reformation a deep
yearning among serious people for a religion of inward experience, a
religion based not on proof-texts nor on external authority of any
kind, but on the native capacity of the soul to seek, to find and to
enjoy the living God who is the Root and Sap of every twig and branch
of the great tree of life. The general trend of this mystical
tendency, as also of the Humanistic movement, was in the direction of
lay-religion, and both movements alike emphasized the inherent and
native capacity of man, whose destiny by his free choice is in his own
hands.
There were, too, at work many other deep-lying tendencies away from the
bondage and traditions of the past; aspiration for economic and social
reforms to liberate the common people and give them some real chance to
be persons--tendencies which all the Reformers treated in this book
deeply felt and shared.
All these movements toward intellectual, spiritual, and social freedom
seemed at first to find their champion in the dynamic hero, whose
ninety-five theses on the door at Wittenberg shook the world awake in
1517. He was by birth and spirit a child of the people--"ein Kind des
Volkes"--and he seemed to be a prophet, divinely called to voice their
dumb aspirations. He possessed, {5} like all great prophets, a
straightforward moral honesty and sincerity, an absolute fearlessness,
a magnetic and commanding personality, an unusual mastery of the
vernacular speech, and an abundant power of pathos, humour, and satire.
All the world loves a hero who can say in the face of real danger, "I
would go forward to Worms if there were as many devils there as there
are tiles on the roof!" or again, "I would go to Leipzig if it rained
Duke Georges for nine days running!"[6]
He had, too, unusual religious depth and power which sprang, as in the
case of the great mystics, from a profound inward experience. Luther,
like St. Paul and St. Augustine, and many another spiritual guide of
the race, came upon his supreme insights in sudden epoch-making
revelations or illuminations by which he found himself on a new level,
with the line of march shifted and all values altered. His conversion
and dedication to religion was an instance of this type. So, too, was
his discovery of the way of Faith. Legend has very likely coloured our
accounts of this experience, but for purposes of valuation it is of
little moment to us whether the dynamic flash came to him in his cell
at Wittenberg as he was studying the Epistle to the Romans, or whether
it came while he was climbing the penitential stairway in Rome.[7] When
all legendary coverings are stripped away we have left an inner event
of the first importance, a _live idea_ bursting into consciousness like
a new star on the field of vision. By processes much deeper and richer
than those of logical argument, his mind leaped to the certainty of
infinite grace and forgiving love in God as revealed in Christ. In a
word, this baffled and despairing monk, striving in vain to heap up
merits enough to win {6} divine favour, suddenly discovered a new God
who filled his whole world with a new light and freedom and joy. His
name for this discovery was Faith ["Glaube"], but Faith in its first
intention for Luther meant a personal experience or discovery of God,
brought into full view and clear apprehension in Christ. "No one can
understand God or God's Word," Luther once wrote, "unless he has it
revealed immediately ["on Mittel"] by the Holy Ghost, but nobody can
receive anything from the Holy Ghost unless he experiences it. In
experience the Holy Ghost teaches as in His own school, outside of
which nothing of value can be learned."[8]
Not only was Faith for Luther thus possessed of a mystical character as
an inward discovery and as a personal experience which laid hold on God
immediately, but it also owed its illuminating birth in his
consciousness largely to the influence of the writings and the lives of
the mystics. However suddenly the "revelation" seemed to burst into
his mind, there had nevertheless been a long period of psychological
gestation and preparation for it before the epoch-making moment finally
came. He had already in his early convent days come under the spell of
St. Augustine, St. Bernard, Gerson, and many another guide into the
deep regions of inward personal religion, and his intimate friend, the
Vicar-general Staupitz, had been to him in some sense a personal
embodiment of this type of religion. But the German mystics of the
fourteenth century, with their mighty experience and their
extraordinary depth, carried him still farther in this direction. He
was so enthusiastic over that beautiful anonymous classic of mystical
religion, the _Theologia Germanica_, that he twice edited and published
it, declaring in his Preface that he had learned from it "more of what
God and Christ and man and all things are" than from any other book
except the Bible and St. Augustine. John Tauler, the great Dominican
preacher of Strasbourg, impressed him no less profoundly. "Neither in
the Latin nor the German language," he {7} wrote to Spalatin in 1516,
"have I ever found purer or more wholesome teaching, nor any that so
agrees with the Gospel." Both these great teachers of spiritual
religion helped him to see that complete confidence in and surrender to
the will of God is salvation--"Put off thy own will and there will be
no hell."
In Luther's earlier writings we come frequently upon passages which
reveal the way in which experience still saturates Faith for him, and
which exhibit the mystical depth of his Christianity at this period.
Commenting on the phrase, "Christ liveth in me" (Gal. ii. 20), in his
_Commentary on Galatians_[9] he says, "He [Christ] is my form, my
furniture, and perfection, adorning and beautifying my faith as the
colour, the clear light, the whiteness, do garnish and beautify the
wall. Thus are we constrained grossly to set forth this matter. For
we cannot _conceive_ that Christ is so nearly joined and united unto us
as the colour or whiteness is unto the wall. But Christ thus joined
and united unto me and abiding in me, liveth this life in me which now
I live; yea, Christ Himself is this life which now I live. Wherefore
Christ and I in this behalf are both one."[10] And in a famous passage
in the tract "On Christian Liberty," he declares that "Faith has the
incomparable grace of uniting the soul to Christ as bride to husband,
so that the soul possesses whatever Christ Himself possesses."
Not only was this Luther of the early period the hero of the people and
the prophet of a deep and inward religion, he seemed also to have
found, even more emphatically than had the Humanists, a far-reaching
principle of individualism which took the key from the Church and put
it into the hands of the Christian man himself. Salvation in its
essence, he sees, is conferred upon no one from without. The soul is
dependent for it upon no organization, no traditions, no dogma, no
sacred performances. It is a transaction between the {8} individual
soul and God, and the person who lays hold on God in living faith
thereby has salvation, assurance, and joy. With this principle of
individualism there came naturally to Luther a new conception of the
Church altogether.[11] It was for him, in ideal at least, a community
or congregation ["Gemeinde"] of believers, each member a spiritual
priest, ministering to the spiritual and social life of all: "I believe
that there is on earth, wide as the world is, not more than one holy
universal Christian Church, which is nothing else than the community or
assembly of the saints. . . . I believe that in this community or
Christendom, all things are common, and each one shares the goods of
the others and none calls anything his own. Therefore all the prayers
and good works of the entire community help me and every believer, and
support and strengthen us at every time in life and in death."[12]
This ideal of a priesthood of believers, ministering to each other in
mutual service and practising neighbourly love in daily life, would, if
it had been actually carried into effect, have marked a great step in
the direction in which the Humanists were going, namely, the transfer
of the emphasis from dogma to life, from doctrine to ethics, from
ecclesiasticism to personality. Luther's great discovery that personal
faith is the only thing which counts toward God, and that love and
service are the only things in the human sphere which have religious
significance would have introduced, if it had been put full into play,
a new era of personal freedom and a new stage in the progress of the
Kingdom of God as a world-wide brotherhood of men engaged in mutual
service.
{9}
II
But the young Luther of these glowing ideals is not the actual Luther
of the Protestant Reformation, any more than the Augustine of the
mighty spiritual experiences portrayed in the _Confessions_ is the St.
Augustine of history. The historical Luther had the hero-spirit in him
in high degree; he had mystical depth and inward experience as we have
seen, and he possessed the prophetic power of vision and forereach
which makes him often seem far in advance of his time; but these
dynamic traits were more than overbalanced by his fundamentally
conservative disposition and by his determination not to go faster or
farther than he could carry Germany, especially the nobility, with him.
He was, in a very real sense, a child of his time, a product of
medieval Europe, and he never succeeded in liberating himself from the
tight swaddling-bands in which his youth was wrapped. He could not
comprehend, as we shall see, the bold spirits who were dedicated to the
task of reinterpreting Christianity in terms of the new age; he loved
the old, in so far as it seemed to him unspoiled by apostacy and
corruption, and he naturally kept reverting to the ancient dogma and
the accepted theology of the old Church instead of leading the way into
a fresh, vital, spiritual form of Christianity adapted to the social
aspiration of the time.
In spite of the fact that Luther knew and loved the German mystics and
had himself received a powerful inward experience of Christ as the
bridegroom of his soul--an experience which quickened all the forces of
his will and raised him to the rank of a world-hero--nevertheless his
normal tendency was toward a non-mystical type of Christianity, toward
a Christianity thoroughly based on Scripture, logically constructed out
of concepts of the nature of God and Man, so ancient, sacred, and
orthodox, that they seemed to him axioms of theology and capable of
being formulated into a saving {10} system of truth, as universal and
as unalterable as the multiplication table.
However unconscious Luther himself may have been of the shift of
emphasis that was taking place in him as the movement progressed, the
historical observer has no difficulty in noting the change from the
Luther who is endeavouring to sound the deeps of life itself, and whose
religion is the creation of the inward stream of life within him; and
the Luther who wanders far afield from experience, draws curious
conclusions from unverified concepts, piles text on text as though
heaven could be scaled by another Pelion on Ossa, and once more turns
religion back to the cooled lava-beds of theology. He never could
succeed in getting the God of his heart's glowing faith into the
theologies which he laboriously builded. As soon as he started
constructing he invariably fell back upon the building-material which
had already been quarried, and which lay at hand. His experimental
Faith discovered a God of all Grace, but his inherited _concept_ of
God, the God of the Old Testament and of theology, was vastly
different, and remained to the end unrevolutionized by his heart's
insight. This background conception of God comes to extreme expression
in his _De servo arbitrio_ ["The Unfree Will"] of 1525: "This is the
acme of faith, to believe that God who saves so few and condemns so
many is merciful; that He is just who at His own pleasure has made us
necessarily doomed to damnation, so that . . . He seems to delight in
the tortures of the wretched and to be more deserving of hatred than of
love. _If by any effort of reason I could conceive how God, who shows
so much anger and harshness, could be merciful and just, there would be
no need of faith._" There could, in his thought, be no salvation for
man, no hope, and no joy, until some way of escape was found from the
stern judgments of this angry and wrathful God. This way of escape is
found in what Luther calls "the Word of God," by which he means "the
Gospel of God concerning His Son, incarnate, suffering, risen, and
glorified."[13] {11} This Word of God is for him the sum total of "the
promises that God is _for us_": "the pure Gospel" of a pardoning,
forgiving God; the revelation in the Cross of Christ that no self-merit
counts or is needed, but that on Christ's account God forgives the
sinner and bestows His Grace upon him.
Speaking theologically, Faith consists in believing in the God whom
Christ has historically revealed--believing without any doubt that He
will be and will do to us according to the things which are said of Him
in "the Word of God." It must be said that for Luther himself, Faith
was an "active, powerful thing," "a deliberate confidence in the grace
of God," which made him "joyous and intrepid" and "for which he could
die a thousand deaths";[14] but there was always an irresistible
tendency in the Lutheran teaching for faith to drop to the lower level
of doctrine, and to consist in the acceptance of a scheme of
justification.
This tendency was, I say, easy and irresistible just because Luther did
not normally and naturally think of God as being inherently and
essentially loving, gracious, tender, and forgiving, that is to say,
_fundamentally a Father_ and in his deepest nature like the self-giving
Christ. For him, as for so many other theologians, God _becomes_
forgiving and gracious on account of Christ's merit and righteousness
and thus no longer imputes sin to us. Because of what Christ did, God
now beholds us with an attitude of mercy, grace, and forgiveness, and,
on condition of our faith, imputes to us the righteousness of Christ.
Salvation is, thus, a plan by which we escape from the God of justice
and wrath and have our dealings with a God who has become merciful
because our sin has been balanced off by somebody else's merit and
righteousness.
Not only did Luther continue this medieval fiction of God's nature and
character, he had also always in mind a fictitious and constructed
"man." Man for him is a being devoid of "merit," a creature whose
personal {12} goodness in and of itself is of no value. Even Faith
itself, by which salvation is received, is not an attitude or function
of man's own will or reason. It is, like everything else connected
with salvation, something divinely given, supernaturally initiated, a
work of God, an _opus operatum_--"Mit unserer Macht ist nichts
gethan"--and therefore "faith" and "reason" belong in totally different
compartments of the human being. Nor, furthermore, when he is absorbed
with his system, is salvation ever synonymous for him with an
inwardly-transformed and spiritually-renewed self. Salvation means for
him _certainty of divine favour_. It does not inherently carry with it
and involve in its intrinsic meaning a new life, a joyous adjustment of
will to the Will of God. If man is to attain to a moral transformation
of life, he must receive an added gift of supernatural grace, that is,
the power of sanctification through the Holy Spirit. This conception
made it impossible for him to look for the coming of a divine kingdom
by slow processes now at work in the world.
Luther did not intend to make the "Word of God" synonymous with the
Scriptures, and in his great Prefaces to St. Paul's _Epistles_ he does
not identify the two. The Word of God is, as we have seen, the
revelation, the message, the gospel, of Grace through Christ Jesus,
wherever expressed, enunciated, or preached. But the pledged Word of
God found in the Scriptures seemed to him the main miracle of the ages,
and as, in his contests with Zwickau "Prophets," "Anabaptists," and
"Spiritualists," he found himself forced to produce a fixed touchstone
of faith and a solid authority to take the place left vacant by the Old
Church, he swung naturally toward the dogma of the absolute authority
of Scripture, and he laid, without wishing to do so, the foundation for
the view of the second generation of Protestantism, that the infallible
Scripture is God's final communication to helpless man, and is the
ultimate and only basis of authority in religion.
His conception of the sacraments in like manner, {13} because of his
crude supernaturalism and his inadequate intellectual and spiritual
penetration, drifted to a semi-medieval view. He intended to transform
these ceremonies and to have them fit "the pure Word of God." In his
primary _intention_ they were to be no longer objective works of grace,
but were to have a subjective value only, a faith-significance. They
were to be conceived as pictorial, symbolic ways of learning the one
important truth of salvation--God's grace and forgiveness; for God
deigns, he said, to speak to his immature creatures by signs and
pictures. But the imperial sway of the past powerfully moved him; his
own conservative disposition carried him along paths which an
enlightened reason would not have taken, and the heat of the
controversy often blinded him to some of the precious truths that had
seemed clear to him in the creative period of Faith. In the bitter
controversy with the "spiritual prophets" on the question of
sacraments, he wrote words which seem strangely out of harmony with his
earlier views and with his own experience: "External things in religion
must precede internal experiences which come through [_i.e._ are
mediated by] external things, for God has resolved to give nobody the
internal gifts except through the external things. He will give nobody
the Spirit and Faith without the use of external word and sign."[15]
Without meaning to surrender the precious jewel of a religion
spiritually grounded, he once more introduced "the awful mystery" of
the sacraments, and opened the door for the conception of the rite as
an _opus operatum_--a grace of God objectively real. He retained
infant baptism as _an efficacious act_, and, obsessed as he was by the
literal words, _Hoc est corpus_--"this is my body"--he went back into
the abandoned path of scholasticism,[16] and restored the mysterious
and miraculous real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.[17] It is
true, as Loofs has said, that {14} "Luther re-discovered Christianity
as religion," but it is also unfortunately true as well that he lacked
the insight, faith, and boldness of spirit to trust the people of his
age and of the future with "Christianity as religion," and instead gave
them a Christianity theologically constructed, deeply marred with
residual superstitions and mysteries, and heavily laden with the
inheritances of dark and medieval ages.
III
There are two types of religious genius, both of which play great roles
in history. There is first the genius who, inspired by the ideal of
some earlier prophet, or made wise because he has himself discovered
the trend of celestial currents, sees through the complex and tangle of
his time, and forecasts a truth which all men in a happier coming age
will recognize. When he has once seen it, this vision transforms all
his ideas and aims, and spoils forever for him all meaner gains, all
half truths, all goods which must be won through surrender of a
possible better. He will be obedient to that vision regardless of all
cost. He will bear witness to the full light which he has seen even
though he can compel nobody else in the heedless world of his
generation to see it. He may only cry in the wilderness, but at all
events he will _cry_, and he will cry of that highest thing his heart
knows.
There is, on the other hand, the genius who understands his own age
like an open book. He is almost hypersensitive to the movings of his
time. He feels the silent yearnings and strivings of the dumb
multitudes about him; he anticipates in his thought what the rest are
incipiently thinking--he is the clear voice and oracle of the spirit of
his age. He knows to a nicety how far his contemporaries will allow
themselves to be carried. {15} He will not over-hurry, he will not
outrun their possible speed, and he will sacrifice everything to carry
his epoch with him toward the goal which he sees. He is contented to
keep his roots deep in the past, and he tempers all his creative
insights with a judicious mixture of the experience of the past and the
ideas which time has made sacred. He will not satisfy the idealist who
wants leaps, and he will not please the radical in any period; but if
he is brave, wise, and sincere, and, withal, possessed of rare gifts of
interpretation and unusual powers of leadership, he may be able to
shape the course of history no less effectively, perhaps more surely,
than the genius who insists upon an immediate march straight across
country to Canaan the moment he glimpses it from his Pisgah.
Luther was a reformer of this second type. He was beset by very real
limitations. Dr. McGiffert does not overstate the facts when he says:
"He cared little for clearness and consistency of thought. A
satisfactory and adequate world-view was not of his concern. Of
intellectual curiosity he had scarcely any; of interest in truth for
truth's sake none at all. . . . He remained entirely without
intellectual difficulties, finding no trouble with the most extreme
supernaturalism."[18] In many respects, as Harnack has insisted, his
Christianity was a "medieval phenomenon."[19] Only in one thing was he
supremely the master of his age and the hero of a new time--in his
discovery of a way of Faith which makes a man "intrepid" even in the
wreck of worlds and "in a thousand deaths." On the lower levels of
life, where most of his work was done, he was strangely under the sway
of the past, a distruster of reason, a restorer of ancient doctrine, a
conservative in thought and action, a friend of rulers, a guardian, as
far as he could be, of the _status quo_--a leader who anathematized
radicals and enthusiasts and who staved off and postponed for nearly
four hundred years the truly liberating and thoroughly {16} adequate
reformation. He was determined to be the repairer of the "Old Church,"
not the builder of a "New Church," and he was resolved not to travel
farther nor faster than the substantial men of his time considered safe
and wise.
But less was perhaps more. There will at least always be those who
think that the sinuous way of progress is the most certain way of
advance. The slow incline, the gradual spiral, each wind of the curve
"ever not quite" the old level--that is the most approved method of
leaving an outworn past and of moving forward into a new stage of
history. It may be so. It certainly is true that through Luther's
_insight_ new reliance upon God came to men, new energy of faith was
won, and by his work of repair, conservative and cautious though it
was, in the long sweep of time a liberated Christianity has come, a
vital social gospel has become effective, and great vistas of progress
are opening out before the Church of Christ. But it is impossible to
forget that other group--those men of the other type--who even in
Luther's day saw the way straight across into Canaan, the men who saw
their vision fade away unrealized, and who failed to behold the fruit
of their spiritual travail largely because Luther misunderstood them,
refused to give them aid and comfort, and finally helped to marshal the
forces which submerged them and postponed their victory. We may not
blame him, but it is not fair to these heroic souls that they should
longer lie submerged in the oblivion of their defeat. I shall try in
these pages to bring up into the light the principles and ideas which
they proclaimed to Europe, perhaps ahead of their time.
[1] In the South the movement showed a tendency to drift back into a
refined paganism. In the North, however, it was deeply Christian in
interest, in feeling, and in its moral aspirations. Erasmus was by far
the greatest figure and the most influential person in the group of
Humanists of this latter type.
[2] Epistle CCVII.
[3] Epistle DLXXXVII.
[4] 1401-1464.
[5] Nicholas belonged to one of these circles. "The Brethren of the
Common Life" are treated in my _Studies in Mystical Religion_, chap.
xiv.
[6] Letter to the Elector Frederick, March 5, 1522.
[7] The story that Luther, climbing the _Scala Santa_ in 1510, suddenly
was impressed by the words, "The just shall live by faith," is based on
a reminiscence of Luther's son Paul. Luther's own reference to the
ascent of the _Scala Santa_ makes no allusion to any such experience.
He merely says that when he reached the top of the stairs, which he
climbed in the hope of getting the soul of an ancestor out of
Purgatory, he thought to himself, "Who knows whether this prayer will
avail?" Luther began his lectures on _Romans_ in 1515, and his dynamic
experience probably belongs near this date.
[8] Preface to the _Magnificat_ written in 1521.
[9] First given as Lectures in 1516-17, and published in 1519.
[10] A _Commentary on St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians_.
[11] Dilthey says in _Archiv fuer Geschichte der Philosophie_, Bd. v.
Heft 3, p. 358: "The Justification of which the medieval man had inward
experience was the descending stream of objective forces upon the
believer from the transcendental world, through the Incarnation, in the
channels of the ecclesiastical institutions, priestly consecration,
sacraments, confession, and works. It was something which took place
in connection with a super-sensible regime. The Justification by faith
of which Luther was inwardly aware was the personal experience of the
believer standing in the continuous line of Christian fellowship, by
whom assurance of the Grace of God is experienced in response to
personal faith, an experience derived from the appropriation of the
work of Christ."
[12] _Saemmtliche Werke_ (Erlangen edition), xxii. p. 20.
[13] On Christian Liberty, _Primary Works_, p. 106.
[14] See his Preface to _The Epistle to the Romans_.
[15] _Wider die himlichen Propheten vom Sacrament_, ii. Anno 1525.
[16] See P. Loofs, _Dogmengeschichte_ (Vierte Auflage, 1906), pp.
752-755.
[17] In his instructions to Melanchthon for the Cassel Conference with
Butzer in 1534, Luther said, "In and with the bread, the body of Christ
is truly partaken of, accordingly all that takes place actively and
passively in the bread takes place actively and passively in the body
of Christ and the latter is distributed, eaten and masticated with the
teeth."
[18] McGiffert, _Protestant Thought before Kant_ (1911), p. 20. See
also the same view in Troeltsch, _Protestantisches Christentum und
Kirche in der Neuzeit_ (2nd Auflage), p. 481.
[19] _History of Dogma_, vii. p. 169.
{17}
CHAPTER II
HANS DENCK AND THE INWARD WORD[1]
Hans Denck has generally been enrolled among the Anabaptists, and it is
possible to use that name of scorn with such a latitude and looseness
that it includes not only Denck but all the sixteenth-century exponents
of a free, inward religion. Anabaptism has often been treated as a
sort of broad banyan-tree which flourished exuberantly and shot out
far-reaching branches of very varied characters, but which held in one
organic unity all the branches that found soil and took root. A name
of such looseness and covering capacity is, however, of little worth,
and it would promote historical accuracy if we should confine the term
to those who opposed infant baptism and who insisted instead upon adult
baptism, not as a means of Grace, but as a visible sign of the covenant
of man with God. The further characteristic marks which may be
selected to differentiate Anabaptism from other movements of the period
are:
1. The treatment of the Gospel as a new law to be literally followed
and obeyed by all who are to have the right to be called "saints."
2. The true Church is a _visible_ Church, the community of the saints,
founded by covenant, with adult baptism as its sign, formed exactly on
the pattern of the apostolic {18} Church and preserved in strict purity
by rigorous church discipline; and
3. The denial to magistrates of all power to persecute men for their
faith and doctrine on the ground that the Gospel gives them no such
authority--its great commandment being love.[2]
Hans Denck, though in his early period of activity closely identified
with this movement and regarded as one of its chief leaders in Germany,
does not properly belong, however, to the banyan-tree of Anabaptism.
His writings reveal ideas and tendencies of such enlarged scope that it
appears clear that he had discovered and was teaching another type of
Christianity altogether.[3] He is the earliest exponent in the
sixteenth century of a fresh and unique type of religion, deeply
influenced by the mystics of a former time, but even more profoundly
moulded by the new humanistic conceptions of man's real nature.
There are few biographical details of Denck's life available. He was,
most probably, a native of Bavaria,[4] and he was born about the year
1495. He studied in the University of Ingolstadt, where he was
admitted among the baccalaureates in 1517.[5] In the year 1520 we
catch a glimpse of him in close association with the Humanists of
Augsburg.[6] In 1522 he was at work in Basle as proof-reader for the
famous publisher, Valentin Curio, and was living in intimate fellowship
with the great scholar OEcolampadius, whose lectures on the Prophet
Isaiah he heard.[7] In the autumn of the same year, on the
recommendation of OEcolampadius, he was appointed Director of St.
Sebald's School in Nuremberg, which was then the foremost seat of
learning in that city, {19} a great centre of classical humanistic
studies. During the first period of his life in Nuremberg he was
closely identified with the Lutheran movement, but he soon shifted his
sympathies, and aligned himself with the radical tendencies which at
this period were championed in Nuremberg by Thomas Muenzer, who, in
spite of his misguided leadership and fanatical traits, had discovered
a genuine religious principle that was destined to become significant
in safer hands.[8] Muenzer read Tauler's sermons from his youth up; in
his own copy of these sermons, preserved in the library at Gera, a
marginal note says that he read them almost continually, and that here
he learned of a divine interior Teaching. It was Muenzer's teaching of
the living Voice of God in the soul, his testimony to the reality of
the inner heavenly Word, which God Himself speaks in the deeps of man's
heart, that won the Humanist and teacher of St. Sebald's School to the
new and perilous cause. He also formed a close friendship with Ludwig
Hetzer, who, like Muenzer, taught that the saving Word of God must be
inward, and that the Scriptures can be understood only by those who
belong to the School of Christ. Having once caught the _idea_ from
these impassioned leaders, Denck proceeded directly to work it out and
to develop its implications in his own fashion. He was himself sane,
clear-minded, modest, sincere, far-removed from fanaticism, and eager
only to find a form of religion which would fit the eternal nature of
things on the one hand, and the true nature of man on the other--man, I
mean, as the Humanist conceived him.[9]
Already in this Nuremberg period, Denck became fully convinced that
Luther's doctrine of sin and justification was an artificial
construction--_Einbildung_--and that his conception of Scripture and
the Sacraments was destined to clamp the new-found faith in iron bonds,
tie it to outworn tradition, and make it incapable of a progressive
{20} and vital unfolding. He declared in his testimony or "confession"
to the city council of Nuremberg in 1524, that although he had not yet
a full experience of the inward, powerful Word of God, he distinctly
felt its life as an inner witness which God had planted within him, a
spark of the Divine Light breaking into his own soul, and in the
strength of this direct experience he denied the value of external
ceremonies, and declared that even the Bible itself cannot bring men to
God without the assistance of this inner Light and Spirit.[10]
As a result of this change of attitude, the schoolmaster of St.
Sebald's was banished from the city of Nuremberg, January 21, 1525, and
from this time until his early death he was homeless and a wanderer.
He spent some months--between September 1525 and October 1526--in
Augsburg endeavouring to organize and direct the rapidly expanding
forces of the liberal movement. He was during these months, and
especially during the period of the great Anabaptist synod which was
held at this time in Augsburg, endeavouring to give the chaotic
movement of Anabaptism a definite direction, with the main emphasis on
the mystical aspect of religion. He hoped to call a halt to the vague
socialistic dreams and the fanatical tendencies that put the movement
in constant jeopardy and peril, and he was striving to call his
brotherhood to an inner religion, grounded on the inherent nature of
the soul, and guided by the inner Word rather than on "a new law" set
forth in the written word. There were, however, too many eddies and
currents to be mastered by one mind, too many varieties of faith to be
unified under one principle, and Denck's own view was too intangible,
inward, and spiritual, to satisfy the enthusiasm either of the seething
masses or of {21} the leaders who saw a new Jerusalem just ready to
come down out of heaven from God.[11]
After the Augsburg period, Denck spent some time in Strasbourg, where
he gained many followers. Capito bears testimony at this time to the
purity of Denck's life, to his moderation and goodwill, and to the
impressive effect of his preaching and teaching upon the people of the
city.[12] Vadian, the Humanist and reformer of St. Gall, too, in spite
of his disapproval of some of Denck's ideas, speaking of him in
retrospect after his death, called him "a most gifted youth, possessed
of all excellencies." But his teaching was too strange and unusual to
be allowed currency even in free Strasbourg. After being granted a
public discussion he was ordered to leave the city forthwith. During a
short stay in Worms, following the Strasbourg period, in collaboration
with Ludwig Hetzer, they brought to a successful conclusion a German
translation of the Prophets from the Hebrew, a work which Hetzer had
begun. This important piece of scholarly work was published under the
title, _Alle Propheten nach hebraeischer Sprache verteutscht_, in Worms,
April 3, 1527, and had a wide circulation and use, its main demerit
being that it had been done by "Anabaptists."
Pursued on every hand, hunted from place to place, he finally sought
peace and shelter with his old friend, the teacher who had first
inspired him in his youth, OEcolampadius, and here in Basle in a quiet
retreat, he died of the plague in November 1527, hardly more than
thirty-two years of age.[13]
We must now turn to the little books of this persecuted and homeless
Humanist to see what his religious teaching really was, and to discover
the foundation principle which lay at the root of all the endeavours of
this period to launch a Christianity grounded primarily on the {22}
fundamental nature of man.[14] Denck writes like a man with a
message--straight to the mark, lucid, vivid, and intense. He believes
what he says and he wants others to see it and believe it. His
writings are entirely free from the controversial temper, and they
breathe throughout the spirit of tolerance and charity. He knows when
to stop, and brings his books to an end as soon as he has made his
points clear. The fundamental fact of man's nature for Denck is
personal _freedom_. Starting with no theological presuppositions he is
under no obligation to make the primary assumption common to all
Augustinian systems that man is devoid of any native capacities which
have to do with spiritual salvation. He begins instead with man as he
knows him--a sadly marred and hampered being, but still possessed of a
potentially Divine nature, and capable of co-operating, by inward
choices and decisions, with the ceaseless effort of God to win him
completely to Himself. His little book, _What does it mean when the
Scripture says God does and works Good and Evil_, is throughout a
protest against the idea of "election," which, he says, involves "a
limitation of the Love of God," and it is a penetrating account of the
way in which man by his free choices makes his eternal destiny.[15]
"God compels nobody, for He will have no one saved by compulsion."[16]
"God has given freewill to men that they may choose for themselves,
either the good or the bad. Christ said to His disciples, 'Will ye
{23} go away?' as though He would say, 'You are under no
compulsion.'"[17] "God," he says again in the _Widerruf_, "forces no
one, for love cannot compel, and God's service is, therefore, a thing
of complete freedom."[18]
It is freedom, too, which explains the fact of sin. God is in no way
the author of sin; He is wholly good; He can do nothing but what is
good; He ordains no one to sin; He is the instigator of no evil at all.
All the sin and moral evil of the world have come from our own evil
choices and purposes. "The thing which hinders and has always hindered
is that our wills are different from God's will. God never seeks
Himself in His willing--we do. There is no other way to blessedness
than to lose one's self-will."[19] "He who surrenders his
selfishness," he says in another treatise, "and uses the freedom which
God has given him, and fights the spiritual battle as God wills that
such battles are to be fought and as Christ fought His, can in his
measure be like Christ."[20] The whole problem of salvation for him
is, as we shall see, to bring about such a transformation in man that
sin ceases, and the least thing thought, said, or done out of harmony
with the will of God becomes bitter and painful to the soul.[21] "To
be a Christian," he once wrote, "is to be in measure like Christ, and
to be ready to be offered as He gave Himself to be offered. I do not
say that we _are_ perfect as Christ was, but I say rather that we are
to seek the perfection which Christ never lost. Christ calls Himself
the Light of the world, but He also tells His disciples that _they_ too
are the light of the world. All Christians in whom the Holy Ghost
lives--that is all real Christians--are one with Christ in God and are
like Christ. They will therefore have similar experiences, and what
Christ did they will also do."[22]
Not only is there a power of free choice in the soul; there is as well
an elemental hunger in man which pushes him Godward. "God," he often
says, "can give only {24} to those who hunger." In a very great
passage which reminds one of Pascal he says: "The kingdom of God is in
you and he who searches for it outside himself will never find it, for
_apart from God no one can either seek or find God, for he who seeks
God, already in truth has Him_."[23] He says nearly the same thing
again in the little book, _Vom Gesetz Gottes_: "He who does not know
God from God Himself does not ever know Him." This central insight of
Denck's religious faith that God and man are not completely sundered,
but meet, as he says,[24] in the deeps of ourselves, is grounded upon
the fact of experience that there is within us a supra-individual
Reality which becomes revealed to us sometimes as a Light, sometimes as
a Word, sometimes as a Presence or environing Spirit. This testimony
is Denck's main contribution, and we must next see how he sets it
forth. There is, he says, a witness in every man. He who does not
listen to it blinds himself, although God has given him originally a
good inward eyesight. If a man will keep still and listen he will hear
what the Spirit witnesses within him. Not only in _us_ but in the
heathen and in Jews this witness is given, and men might be preached to
outwardly forever without perceiving, if they did not have this witness
in their own hearts.[25] The Light shines, the invisible Word of God
is uttered in the hearts of all men who come into the world, and this
Light gives all men freedom and power to become children of God.[26]
There is both an inward principle of revelation which he calls _das
innere Wort_, and a principle of active power which he calls _die Kraft
des Allerhoechsten_ (the power of the Highest), not two things, but one
reality under two aspects and two names, and he insists that he who
turns to this Divine, spiritual reality, which is one with God, and
obeys it and loves its leading has already found God and has come to
himself. "Oh, who will give me a voice," he writes, "that I may cry
aloud to the whole world that God, the all highest, is in the deepest
abyss {25} within us and is waiting for us to return to Him. Oh, my
God, how does it happen in this poor old world, that Thou art so great
and yet nobody finds Thee, that Thou callest so loudly and nobody hears
Thee, that Thou art so near and nobody feels Thee, that Thou givest
Thyself to everybody and nobody knows Thy name! Men flee from Thee and
say they cannot find Thee; they turn their backs and say they cannot
see Thee; they stop their ears and say they cannot hear Thee!"[27]
This self-giving nature of God is everywhere taken for granted--it is
just _that_ which he feels that Christ has once for all made sun-clear,
and it is because He is essentially self-giving that God pours out His
life and love upon us as He does His sunshine upon the grass and
flowers. "The Word of God is with thee before thou seekest; He gives
before thou hast asked; He opens to thee before thou hast knocked." God
like a Father deals with His wayward children. "Oh, blessed is the
man," he writes, "who in his need finds the love of God and comes to
Him for forgiveness!"[28] No one of us who has been washed from his
sins, he beautifully says, ought to eat a piece of bread without
considering how God loves him and how he ought to love God, who in
Jesus Christ His Son laid aside His right to Divinity that His love
might appear complete.[29] "It has pleased the eternal Love," he
writes, "that that Person in whom Love was shown in the highest degree
should be called the Saviour of His people. Not that it would be
possible for human nature to make anybody saved, but God was so
completely identified in Love with Him that all the Will of God was the
will of this Person, and the sufferings of this Person were and counted
as the sufferings of God Himself."[30]
Christ is for him the complete manifestation of life and the perfect
exhibition or unveiling of God's love, and he who appreciates this
love, feels its attraction, and lives a life which corresponds to his
soul's insight, becomes {26} himself Christlike, forsakes sin and self,
and enters upon a life of salvation. "All who are saved," he says,
"are of one spirit with God, and he who is the foremost in love is the
foremost of those who are saved."[31] "He who gets weary of God has
never found Him," while the person who has found Him in this love-way
will be ready and willing to give up even his own salvation and accept
damnation for the love of God, since he knows in his heart that "God is
so wholly good that He can give to such a man only what is highest and
best, and that is Himself!"[32] That is to say, he who is willing to
be damned for the love of God never will be damned!
But salvation must never be conceived as something which is the result
of a transaction. It is from beginning to end a life-process and can
in no way be separated from character and personal attitude of will.
"He who depends on the merit of Christ," he says, "and yet continues in
a fleshly, wicked life, regards Christ precisely as in former times the
heathen held their gods. He who really believes that Christ has saved
him can no longer be a servant of sin, for no one believes rightly
until he leaves his old life."[33] "It is not enough," he elsewhere
writes, "that God is in thee; thou must also be in God, that is,
partake of the life of God. It does not help to have God if thou dost
not honour Him. It is no avail to call thyself His child _if thou dost
not behave thyself like a child_!"[34] He insists that no one can be
"called righteous" or be "counted righteous" until he actually _is_
righteous. Nothing can be "imputed" to a man which is not ethically
and morally present as a living feature of his character and conduct.
No one, he truly says, can know _Christ as a means of salvation_ unless
he follows Him in his life. He who does not witness to Christ in his
daily walk grows into a different person from the one he is called to
be.[35] The person who lives on in sin does not really know God, and,
{27} to use his fine figure; is like a man who has lost his home and
gone astray, and does not even know that he is _at home_, when his
Father has found him and has welcomed him back, but still goes on
hunting for home and for Father, since he does not recognize his home
or his Father when he has found them![36]
Salvation, then, for Hans Denck is wholly an inward process, initiated
from above through the Divine Word, the Christ, whom we know outwardly
as the historical Person of the Gospel, and whom we know inwardly as
the Revealer of Light and Love, the Witness in us against sin, the
Voice of the Father to our hearts, calling us home, the Goal of our
spiritual quest, the Alpha and the Omega of all religious truth and all
spiritual experience. The Way to God, he says, is Christ inwardly and
spiritually known.[37] But however audible the inner Word may be;
however vivid the illumination; however drawing the Love, there is
never compulsion. The soul itself must hear and see and feel; must say
yes to the appeal of Love, and must co-operate by a continuous
adjustment of the personal will to the Will of God and "learn to behave
as a child of God."
Having reached the insight that salvation is entirely an affair of the
spirit, an inward matter, Denck loosened his hold upon the external
things which had through long centuries of history come to be
considered essential to Christianity. Sacraments and ceremonies
dropped to a lower level for him as things of no importance. With his
characteristic breadth and sweetness, he does not smite them as an
iconoclast would have done; he does not cry out against those who
continue to use them. He merely considered them of no spiritual
significance. "Ceremonies," he writes in his dying confession, "in
themselves are not sin, but whoever supposes that he can attain to life
either by baptism or by partaking of bread, is still in
superstition."[38] "If all ceremonies," he adds, "were lost, little
harm would come of it."[39] {28} He appeals to Christians to stop
quarrelling over these outward and secondary matters, and to make
religion consist in love to neighbour rather than in zeal for outward
ceremonies. He laid down this great principle: "All externals must
yield to love, for they are for the sake of love, and not love for
their sake."[40]
He was, consistently with his fundamental ideas, profoundly opposed to
every tendency to make Christianity a legal religion. His friends, the
Anabaptists, were inclined to turn the Gospel of Christ into "a new
law," and to make religion consist largely in scrupulous obedience to
this perfect law of life. To all this he was radically alien, for it
was, he thought, only another road back to a religion of the letter,
while Christ came to call us to a religion of the spirit. "He who has
not the Spirit," he wrote, "and who fails to find Him in the
Scriptures, seeks life and finds death; seeks light and finds darkness,
whether it be in the Old or in the New Testament."[41] "He who thinks
that he can be _made truly righteous_ by means of a Book is ascribing
to the dead letter what belongs to the Spirit."[42] He does not
belittle or undervalue the Scriptures--he knew them almost by heart and
took the precious time out of his brief life to help to translate the
Prophets into German--but he wants to make the fact forever plain that
men are saved or lost as they say _yes_ or _no_ to a Light and Word
within themselves. "The Holy Scriptures," he writes in his dying
testimony, "I consider above every human treasure, but not so high as
the Word of God which is living, powerful, and eternal, for it is God
Himself, Spirit and no letter, written without pen or paper so that it
can never be destroyed. For that reason, salvation is not bound up
with the Scriptures, however necessary and good they may be for their
purpose, because it is impossible for the Scriptures to make good a bad
heart, even though it may be a learned one. A good heart, however,
with a Divine Spark in it is improved by everything, and to such the
Scriptures will bring blessedness {29} and goodness."[43] The
Scriptures--the external Word--as he many times, in fact somewhat
tediously, declares, are witnesses and pointers to the real and
momentous thing, the Word which is very near to all souls and is
written in the heart, and which increases in clearness and power as the
will swings into parallelism with the will of God, and as the life
grows in likeness to the Divine image revealed in Christ. This inward
life and spiritual appreciation do not give any ground for relaxing the
moral obligations of life. No fulfilling of the law by Christ, no
vanishing of the outward and temporal, furnish any excuse to us for
slacking a jot or tittle of anything which belongs to the inherent
nature of moral goodness. "Christ," he says, "fulfilled the law, not
to relieve us of it, but to show us how to keep it in truth. The
member must partake of what the Head partakes."[44] _To love God alone
and to hate everything that hinders love_ is a principle which, Denck
believes, will fulfil all law, ancient or modern.[45]
Such were the ideas which this young radical reformer, dreamer perhaps,
tried to teach his age. The time was not ripe for him, and there was
no environment ready for his message. He spoke to minds busy with
theological systems, and to men whose battles were over the meaning of
inherited medieval dogma. He thought and spoke as a child of another
world, and he talked in a language which he had learned from his heart
and not from books or from the schools. It is "the key of David," he
says, that is, an inward experience, which unlocks all the solid doors
of truth, but there were so few about him who really had this "key"!
His task, which was destined to be hard and painful, which was in his
lifetime doomed to failure, was not self-chosen. "I opened my mouth,"
he says, "against my will and I am speaking to the world because God
impels me so that I cannot keep silent. God has called me out and
stationed me at my post, and He knows whether good will come of it or
not."[46]
{30}
It is not often that a man living in the atmosphere of seething
enthusiasm, pitilessly pricked and goaded by brutal and unfeeling
persecutors, compelled to hear his precious truth persistently called
error and pestilent heresy, keeps so calm and sane and sure that all
will be well with him and with his truth as does Denck. "I am heartily
well content," is his dying testimony, "that all shame and disgrace
should fall on my face, if it is for the truth. It was when I began to
love God that I got the disfavour of men."[47] He confesses that he
has found it difficult to "keep a gentle and a humble heart" through
all his work among men, to "temper his zeal with understanding," and to
"make his lips say always what his heart meant,"[48] but he did, at
least, succeed in loving God and in hating everything that hindered
love. In an epoch in which the doctrine was new and revolutionary, he
succeeded in presenting the principle of the Inward Word as the basis
of religion without giving any encouragement to libertinism or moral
laxity, for he found the way of freedom to be a life of growing
likeness to Christ, he held the fulfilling of the law to be possible
only for those who accept the burdens and sacrifices of love, and he
insisted that the privileges of blessedness belong only to those who
_behave like sons_.
[1] The best studies on Denck are Heberle's articles in _Theol. Studien
und Kritiken_ (1851), Erstes Heft, and (1855) Viertes Heft. Gustave
Roehrich's _Essai sur la vie, les ecrits et la doctrine de Jean Denk_
(Strasbourg, 1853). Ludwig Keller's _Ein Apostel der Wiedertaeufer_
(Leipzig, 1882). The last two books must, however, be followed with
much caution.
[2] One branch of the Anabaptists held that the "saints" may, however,
rightly use the sword to execute the purposes of God upon the godless,
and to hasten the coming of the Thousand Years' Reign of the Kingdom.
[3] I have included him, in my _Studies in Mystical Religion_ (1908),
among the Anabaptists, but he can be called one only by such a loose
use of the word that it ceases to have any _definite_ significance.
[4] See J. Kessler's _Sabbata_ (1902), p. 150.
[5] L. Keller, _Johann von Staupitz_, p. 207.
[6] _Ibid._ p. 208.
[7] OEcolampadius' Letter to Pirkheimer, April 25, 1525.
[8] Georg Theodor Strobel, _Leben, Schriften und Lehren Muenzers_
(Nuernberg, 1795); J. R. Seidemann, _Thomas Muenzer_ (Dresden, 1842).
[9] A contemporary chronicle calls Denck a scholar, eloquent, modest
and, withal, learned in Hebrew.--Kessler's _Sabbata_, p. 150.
[10] This "Confession" is in the archives of Nuremberg, and has been
extensively used in Keller's _Ein Apostel der Wiedertaeufer_, see
especially pp. 49-62. See also Th. Kolde, _Kirchengeschichtliche
Studien_ (1888), p. 231 f. In this connection much interest attaches
to a passage in a letter which Luther wrote to Johann Brismann,
February 4, 1525. He says: "Satan has carried it so far that in
Nuremberg some persons are denying that Christ is anything, that the
Word of God is anything, that the Eucharist is anything, that
Magistracy is anything. They say that only God is."
[11] See Nicoladoni's _Johannes Buenderlin von Linz_ (Berlin, 1893), p.
114.
[12] Letter of Capita to Zwingli, December 26, 1526.
[13] Kessler says that OEcolampadius in a Christian spirit was with him
at his death. _Op. cit._ p. 151.
[14] The little books of Denck from which I shall extract his teaching
are: (1) _Vom Gesetz Gottes_ ("On the Law of God"), printed without
place or date, but probably published in 1526. I have used the copy in
the Koenigliche Bibliothek in Berlin, sig. Co. 2152. (2) _Was geredet
sey doss die Schrift sagt Gott thue und mache guts und boeses_ ("What
does it mean when the Scripture says God does and works Good and
Evil"), 1526. Copies of this are to be found in the University Library
of Marburg, also in the Koenigliche Bibliothek of Dresden. (3)
_Widerruf_ ("Confession "), 1527. I have used the copy in the
Koenigliche Bibliothek in Dresden sig. Theol. Cathol. 817 (4) _Ordnung
Gottes und der Creaturen Werck_ ("The Divine Plan and the Work of the
Creature"), 1527, in the above library in Dresden. (5) _Wer die
Warheif warlich lieb hat_, etc., no date ("Whoever really loves the
Truth," etc.), and (6) _Von der wahren Liebe_ ("On the True Love"),
1527. This last tract has been republished in America by the
Mennonitische Verlagshandlung, Elkhart, Indiana, 1888.
[15] "To hear the Word of God," he elsewhere says, "means life; to hear
it not means death."--_Ordnung Gottes_, p. 17.
[16] _Was geredet sey_, p. C. (The paging is by letters.)
[17] _Was geredet sey_, B. 3.
[18] _Widerruf_, sec. iv.
[19] _Was geredet sey_, B.
[20] _Ibid._ B. 5.
[21] _Venn Gesetz Gottes_, p. 15.
[22] _Was geredet sey_, B. 6.
[23] _Was geredet sey_, B. 2.
[24] _Ibid._ B. 5.
[25] _Ibid._ B. 1 and 2.
[26] _Ordnung Gottes_, p. 7.
[27] _Vom Gesetz Gottes_, p. 27.
[28] _Was geredet sey_, D. 1 and 2.
[29] _Vom Gesetz Gottes_, p. 33.
[30] _Van der wahren Liebe_ (Elkhart reprint), p. 7.
[31] _Van der wahren Liebe_ (Elkhart reprint), p. 8.
[32] _Vom Gesetz Gottes_, p. 19.
[33] _Widerruf_, ii.
[34] _Was geredet sey_, B. 1.
[35] _Ibid._ D.
[36] _Was geredet sey_, A. 4 and 5.
[37] _Ibid_. B. 3.
[38] _Widerruf_, vii.
[39] _Ibid._ vii.
[40] _Vom Gesetz Gottes_, p. 33.
[41] _Ibid._ p. 22.
[42] _Ibid._ p. 21.
[43] _Widerruf_, i.
[44] _Vom Gesetz Gottes_, p. 9.
[45] _Ibid._ p. 12.
[46] _Was geredet sey_, Preface.
[47] _Widerruf_, Preface.
[48] _Ibid._, Preface.
{31}
CHAPTER III
TWO PROPHETS OF THE INWARD WORD: BUNDERLIN AND ENTFELDER
I
The study of Denck in the previous chapter has furnished the main
outlines of the type of Christianity which a little group of men,
sometimes called "Enthusiasts," and sometimes called "Spirituals," but
in reality sixteenth-century Quakers, proclaimed and faithfully
practised in the opening period of the Reformation. They differed
fundamentally from Luther in their conception of salvation and in their
basis of authority, although they owed their first awakening to him;
and they were not truly Anabaptists, though they allied themselves at
first with this movement, and earnestly laboured to check the ominous
signs of Ranterism and Fanaticism, and the misguided "return" to
millennial hopes and expectations, to which many of the Anabaptist
leaders were prone.
The inner circle of "Spirituals" which we are now engaged in
investigating was never numerically large or impressive, nor was it in
the public mind well differentiated within the larger circle of
seething ideas and revolutionary propaganda. The men themselves,
however, who composed it had a very sure grasp of a few definite,
central truths to which they were dedicated, and they never lost sight,
in the hurly-burly of contention and in the storm of persecution, of
the goal toward which they were bending their steps. They did not
endeavour {32} to found a Church, to organize a sect, or to gain a
personal following, because it was a deeply settled idea with them all
that the true Church is invisible. It is a communion of saints,
including those of all centuries, past and present, who have heard and
obeyed the divine inner Word, and through co-operation with God's
inward revelation and transforming Presence have risen to a mystical
union of heart and life with Him. Their apostolic mission--for they
fully believed that they were "called" and "sent"--was to bear witness
to this eternal Word within the soul, to extend the fellowship of this
invisible Zion, and to gather out of all lands and peoples and visible
folds of the Church those who were ready for membership in the one
family and brotherhood of the Spirit of God. They made the mistake,
which has been very often made before and since, of undervaluing
external helps and of failing to appreciate how important is the
visible fellowship, the social group, working at common tasks and
problems, the temporal Church witnessing to its tested faith and
proclaiming its message to the ears of the world; but they did
nevertheless perform a very great service in their generation, and they
are the unrecognized forerunners of much which we highly prize in the
spiritual heritage of the modern world.
The two men whose spiritual views we are about to study are, I am
afraid, hardly even "names" to the world of to-day. They were not on
the popular and winning side and they have fallen into oblivion, and
the busy world has gone on and left them and their little books to lie
buried in a forgotten past. They are surely worthy of a resurrection,
and those who take the pains will discover that the ideas which they
promulgated never really died, but were quick and powerful in the
formation of the inner life of the religious societies of the English
Commonwealth, and so of many things which have touched our inner world
to-day.
Johann Buenderlin, like his inspirer Denck, was a scholar of no mean
rank. He understood Hebrew; he knew the Church Fathers both in Greek
and Latin; he {33} makes frequent reference to Greek literature for
illustration, and he was well versed in the dialectic of the schools,
though he disapproved of it as a religious method.[1] He was enrolled
as a student in the University of Vienna in 1515, under the name of
Johann Wunderl aus Linz, Linz being a town of Upper Austria. After
four years of study he left the University in 1519, being compelled to
forgo his Bachelor's degree because he was too poor to pay the required
fee.[2] The next five years of his life are submerged beyond recovery,
but we hear of him in 1526 as a preacher in the service of Bartholomaeus
von Starhemberg, a prominent nobleman of Upper Austria, and he was at
this time a devout adherent of the Lutheran faith. He was in Augsburg
this same year, 1526, at the time of the great gathering of
Anabaptists, and here he probably met Hans Denck, at any rate he
testified in 1529 before the investigating Judge in Strasbourg that he
received adult baptism in Augsburg three years before. He seems to
have gone from Augsburg to Nikolsburg, where he was present at a public
Discussion in which a definite differentiation appeared between the
moderate and the radical, the right and left, wings of the Anabaptists.
Buenderlin took part in this Discussion on the "moderate" side. He
remained for some time--perhaps two years--in Nikolsburg and faced the
persecution which prevailed in that city during the winter of
1527-1528. The next year he comes to notice in Strasbourg where, for a
long time, a much larger freedom of thought was allowed than in any
other German city of the period. The great tragedy which he had to
experience was the frustration of the work of his life by the growth
and spread of the Ranter influence in the Anabaptist circles, through
the leadership of Melchior Hoffman and others of a similar spirit. He
loved freedom, and here he saw it degenerating into license. He was
devoted to a religion of experience and of inner authority, and now
{34} he saw the wild extremes to which such a religion was exposed. He
was dedicated to a spiritual Christianity, and now he was compelled to
learn the bitter lesson that there are many types and varieties of
"spiritual religion," and that the masses are inclined to go with those
who supply them with a variety which is spectacular and which produces
emotional thrills. Our last definite information concerning Buenderlin
shows him to have been in Constance in 1530, from which city he was
expelled as a result of information against the "soundness" of his
doctrine, furnished in a letter from OEcolampadius. From this time he
drops completely out of notice, and we are left only with conjectures.
One possible reference to him occurs in a letter from Julius Pflug, the
Humanist, to Erasmus in 1533. Pflug says that a person has newly
arrived in Litium (probably Luetzen) who teaches that there are no words
of Christ as a warrant for the celebration of the Sacrament of the
Supper, and that it is to be partaken of only in a spiritual way. He
adds that God had intervened to protect the people from such heresy and
that the heretic had been imprisoned. The usual penalty for such
heresy was probably imposed. This description would well fit Johann
Buenderlin, but we can only guess that he was the opponent of the
visible Sacrament mentioned in the letter which Erasmus received in
1533.[3]
Buenderlin's religious contribution is preserved in three little books
which are now extremely rare, the central ideas of which I shall give
in condensed form and largely in my own words, though I have faithfully
endeavoured to render him fairly.[4] His style is difficult, {35}
mainly because he abounds in repetition and has not learned to write in
an orderly way. I am inclined to believe that he sometimes wrote, as
he would no doubt preach, in a prophetic, rapturous, spontaneous
fashion, hardly steering his train of thought by his intellect, but
letting it go along lines of least resistance and in a rhythmic flood
of words; his central ideas of course all the time holding the
predominant place in his utterance. He is essentially a mystic both in
experience and in the ground and basis of his conception of God and
man. This mystical feature is especially prominent in his second book
on why God became incarnate in Christ, and I shall begin my exposition
with that aspect of his thought.
God, he says, who is the eternal and only goodness, has always been
going out of Himself into forms of self-expression. His highest
expression is made in a heavenly and purely spiritual order of angelic
beings. Through these spiritual beings He objectifies Himself, mirrors
Himself, knows Himself, and becomes revealed.[5] He has also poured
Himself out in a lower order of manifestation in the visible creation
where spirit often finds itself in opposition and contrast to that
which is not spirit. The highest being in this second order is man,
who in inward essence is made in the image and likeness of God, but
binds together in one personal life both sensuous elements and divine
and spiritual elements which are always in collision and warfare with
each other. Man has full freedom of choice and can swing his will over
to either side--he can live upward toward the divine goodness, or he
can live downward toward the poor, thin, limiting isolation of
individual selfhood. But {36} through the shifting drama of our human
destiny God never leaves us. He is always within us, as near to the
heart of our being as the Light is to the eye. Conscience is the
witness of His continued Presence; the drawing which we feel toward
higher things is born in the unlost image of God which is planted in
our nature "like the tree of Life in Eden." He pleads in our hearts by
His inner Word; He reveals the goodness of Himself in His vocal
opposition to all that would harm and spoil us, and He labours
unceasingly to be born in us and to bring forth His love and His
spiritual kingdom in the domain of our own spirits. The way of life is
to die to the flesh and to the narrow will of the self, and to become
alive to the Spirit and Word of God in the soul, to enter into and
participate in that eternal love with which God loves us. This central
idea of the double nature of man--an upper self indissolubly linked
with God and a lower self rooted in fleshly and selfish desires--runs
through all his writings, and in his view all the processes of
revelation are to further the liberation and development of the higher
and to weaken the gravitation of the lower self.
His first book deals with God's twofold revelation of
Himself--primarily as a living Word in the soul of man, and secondarily
through external signs and events, in an historical word, and in a
temporal incarnation. With a wealth and variety of expression and
illustration he insists and reiterates that only through the
citadel--or better the sanctuary--of his inner self can man be
spiritually reached, and won, and saved. Nobody can be saved until he
knows himself at one with God; until he finds his will at peace and in
harmony with God's will; until his inward spirit is conscious of unity
with the eternal Spirit; in short, until love sets him free with the
freedom and joy of sons of God. Priests may absolve men if they will,
and ministers may pronounce them saved, but all _that_ counts for
nothing until the inward transformation is a fact and the will has
found its goal in the will of God: "Love must bloom and the spirit {37}
of the man must follow the will of God written in his heart."[6]
All external means in religion have one purpose and one function; they
are to awaken the mind and to direct it to the inward Word. The most
startling miracle, the most momentous event in the sphere of temporal
sequences, the most appealing account of historical occurrences can do
nothing more than give in parable-fashion hints and suggestions of the
real nature of that God who is eternally present within human spirits,
and who is working endlessly to conform all lives to His perfect type
and pattern. In the infant period of the race, both among the Hebrews
and the Gentile peoples, God has used, like a wise Teacher, the symbol
and picture-book method. He has disciplined them with external laws
and with ceremonies which would move their child-minded imaginations;
but all this method was used only because they were not ripe and ready
for the true and higher form of goodness. "They used the face of Moses
until they could come to the full Light of the truth and righteousness
of God, for which all the time their spirits really hungered and
thirsted."[7] The supreme instance of the divine pictorial method was
the sending of Christ to reveal God visibly. Before seeing God in
Christ men falsely thought of Him as hostile, stern, and wrathful; now
they may see Him in this unveiling of Himself as He actually is,
eternally loving, patiently forgiving, and seeking only to draw the
world into His love and peace: "When the Abba-crying spirit of Christ
awakens in our hearts we commune with God in peace and love."[8] But
no one must content himself with Christ after the flesh, Christ
historically known. That is to make an idol of Him. We can be saved
through Him only when by His help we discover the essential nature of
God and when He moves us to go to living in the spirit and power as
Christ Himself lived. His death as an outward, historical fact does
not save us; it is the supreme expression of His limitless love and the
complete dedication {38} of His spirit in self-giving, and it is
effective for our salvation only when it draws us into a similar way of
living, unites us in spirit with Him and makes us in reality partakers
of His blood spiritually apprehended. Christ is our Mediator in that
He reveals the love of God towards us and moves our will to appreciate
it.[9]
Every step of human progress and of spiritual advance is marked by a
passage from the dominion of the external to the sway and power of
inward experience. God is training us for a time when images, figures,
and picture-book methods will be no longer needed, but all men will
live by the inward Word and have the witness--"the Abba-crying
voice"--in their own hearts. But this process from outward to inward,
from virtue impelled by fear and mediated by law to goodness generated
by love, gives no place for license. Buenderlin has no fellowship with
antinomianism, and is opposed to any tendency which gives rein to the
flesh. The outward law, the external restraint, the discipline of fear
and punishment are to be used so long as they are needed, and the
written word and the pictorial image will always serve as a norm and
standard, but the true spiritual goal of life is the formation of a
rightly fashioned will, the creation of a controlling personal love,
the experience of a guiding inward Spirit, which keep the awakened soul
steadily approximating the perfect Life which Christ has revealed.
The true Church is for Buenderlin as for Denck, the communion and
fellowship of spiritual persons--an invisible congregation;
ever-enlarging with the process of the ages and with the expanding
light of the Spirit. He blames Luther for having stopped short of a
real reformation, of having "mixed with the Midianites instead of going
on into the promised Canaan," and of having failed to dig down to the
fundamental basis of spiritual religion.[10]
In his final treatise[11] he goes to the full length of the implication
of his principle. He recounts with luminous {39} simplicity the
mystical _unity_ of the spiritual Universe and tells of the divine
purpose to draw all our finite and divided wills into moral harmony
with the Central Will. Once more religion is presented as wholly a
matter of the inward spirit, a thing of insight, of obedience to a
living Word, of love for an infinite Lover, the bubbling of living
streams of water in the heart of man. He declares that the period of
signs and symbols and of "the scholastic way of truth" is passing away,
and the religion of the New Testament, the religion of life and spirit,
is coming in place of the old. As fast as the new comes ceremonies and
sacraments vanish and fall away. They do not belong to a religion of
the Spirit; they are for the infant race and for those who have not
outgrown the picture-book. Christ's baptism is with power from above,
and He cleanses from sin not with water but with the Holy Ghost and the
burning fire of love. As soon as the spiritual man possesses "the key
of David," and has entered upon "the true Sabbath of his soul," he
holds lightly all forms and ceremonies which are outward and which can
be gone through with in a mechanical fashion without creating the
essential attitude of worship and of inner harmony of will with God:
"When the Kingdom of God with its joy and love has come in us we do not
much care for those things which can only happen outside us."[12]
II
Christian Entfelder held almost precisely the same views as those which
we have found in the teaching of Buenderlin. He has become even more
submerged than has Buenderlin, and one hunts almost in vain for the
events of his life. Hagen does not mention him. Gruetzmacher in his
_Wort und Geist_ never refers to him. The great _Realencyklopaedie fur
protestantische Theologie und Kirche_ has no article on him. Gottfried
Arnold in his {40} _Kirchenund Ketzer-Historien_ merely mentions him in
his list of "Witnesses to the Truth." The only article I have ever
found on him is one by Professor Veesenmeyer in Gabler's _N. theol.
Journal_ (1800), iv. 4, pp. 309-334.
He first appears in the group of Balthasar Huebmaier's followers and at
this period he had evidently allied himself with the Anabaptist
movement, which gathered into itself many young men of the time who
were eager for a new and more spiritual type of Christianity. Huebmaier
mentions Entfelder in 1527 as pastor at Ewanzig, a small town in
Moravia, where, as he himself later says, he diligently taught his
little flock the things which concerned their inner life. In the
eventful years of 1520-1530 he was in Strasbourg in company with
Buenderlin,[13] and in this latter year he published his first book,
with the title: _Von den manigfaltigen in Glauben Zerspaltungen dise
jar erstanden_. ("On the many Separations which have this year arisen
in Belief.") A second book, which is also dated 1530, bears the title:
Von waren Gotseligkayt, etc. ("On true Salvation.") He wrote also a
third book, which appeared in 1533 under the title: _Von Gottes und
Christi Jesu unseres Herren Erkandtnuss_, etc. ("On the Knowledge of
God and Jesus Christ our Lord.")
His style is simpler than that of Buenderlin. He appears more as a man
of the people; he is fond of vigorous, graphic figures of speech taken
from the life of the common people, much in the manner of Luther, and
he breathes forth in all three books a spirit of deep and saintly life.
His fundamental idea of the Universe is like that of Buenderlin. The
visible and invisible creation, in all its degrees and stages, is the
outgoing and unfolding of God, who in His Essence and Godhead is one,
indivisible and incomprehensible. But as He is essentially and
eternally Good, He _expresses_ Himself in revelation, and goes out of
Unity into differentiation and multiplicity; but the entire spiritual
movement of the universe is back again toward the fundamental Unity,
for Divine Unity is both the Alpha and the Omega of the {41} deeper
inner world. His main interest is, however, not philosophical and
speculative; his mind focuses always on the practical matters of a true
and saintly life. Like his teacher, Buenderlin, his whole view of life
and salvation is mystical; everything which concerns religion occurs in
the realm of the soul and is the outcome of direct relations between
the human spirit and the Divine Spirit. In every age, and in every
land, the inner Word of God, the Voice of the Spirit speaking within,
clarifying the mind and training the spiritual perceptions by a
progressive experience, has made for itself a chosen people and has
gathered out of the world a little inner circle of those who know the
Truth because it was formed within themselves. This "inner circle of
those who know" is the true Church: "The Church is a chosen, saved,
purified, sanctified group in whom God dwells, upon whom the Holy Ghost
was poured out His gifts and with whom Christ the Lord shares His
offices and His mission."[14]
There is however, through the ages a steady ripening of the Divine
Harvest, a gradual and progressive onward movement of the spiritual
process, ever within the lives of men: "Time brings roses. He who
thinks that he has all the fruit when strawberries are ripe forgets
that grapes are still to come. We should always be eagerly looking for
something better."[15] There are, he says, three well-marked stages of
revelation: (1) The stage of the law, when God, the Father, was making
Himself known through His external creation and by outward forms of
training and discipline; (2) the stage of self-revelation through the
Son, that men might see in Him and His personal activity the actual
character and heart of God; and (3) the stage of the Holy Spirit which
fills all deeps and heights, flows into all lives, and is the One God
revealed in His essential nature of active Goodness--Goodness at work
in the world. Externals of every type--law, ceremonies, rewards and
punishments, {42} historical happenings, written Scriptures, even the
historical doings and sufferings of Christ--are only pointers and
suggestion-material to bring the soul to the living Word within, "to
the Lord Himself who is never absent," and who will be spiritually born
within man. "God," he says, "has once become flesh in Christ and has
revealed thus the hidden God and, as happened in a fleshly way in Mary,
even so Christ must be spiritually born in us." So, too, everything
which Christ experienced and endured in His earthly mission must be
re-lived and reproduced in the life of His true disciples. There is no
salvation possible without the new birth of Christ in us, without
self-surrender and the losing of oneself, without being buried with
Christ in a death to self-will and without rising with Him in joy and
peace and victory.[16] He who rightly loves his Christ will speak no
word, will eat no bit of bread, nor taste of water, nor put a stitch of
clothes upon his body without thinking of the Beloved of his
soul. . . . In this state he can rid himself of all pictures and
symbols, renounce everything which he possesses, take up his cross with
Christ, join Him in an inward, dying life, allow himself, like grain,
to be threshed, winnowed, ground, bolted, and baked that he may become
spiritual food as Christ has done for us. Then there comes a state in
which poverty and riches, pain and joy, life and death are alike, when
the soul has found its sabbath-peace in the Origin and Fount of all
Love.[17] His first book closes with a beautiful account of the return
of the prodigal to His Father and to His Father's love, and then he
breaks into a joyous cry, as if it all came out of his own experience:
"Who then can separate us from the Love of God?"
Those who rightly understand religion and have had this birth and this
Sabbath-peace within themselves will stop contending over outward,
external things, which make separations but do not minister to the
spirit; they will give up the Babel-habit of constructing theological
{43} systems,[18] they will pass upward from elements to the essence,
they will stop building the city-walls of the Church out of baptism and
the supper, which furnish "only clay-plastered walls" at best, and they
will found the Church instead upon the true sacramental power of the
inward Spirit of God.[19] The true goal of the spiritual life is such
a oneness with God that He is in us and we in Him, so that the inner
joy and power take our outer life captive and draw us away from the
world and its "pictures," and make it a heartfelt delight to do all His
commandments and to suffer anything for Him.[20]
Here, then, in the third decade of the sixteenth century, when the
leaders of the Reformation were using all their powers of dialectic to
formulate in new scholastic phrase the sound creed for Protestant
Christendom, and while the fierce and decisive battle was being waged
over the new form in which the Eucharist must be celebrated, there
appeared a little group of men who proposed that Christianity should be
conceived and practised as _a way of living_--nothing more nor less.
They rejected theological language and terminology root and branch.
They are as innocent of scholastic subtlety and forensic conceptions as
though they had been born in this generation. They seem to have wiped
their slate clean of the long line of Augustinian contributions, and to
have begun afresh with the life and message of Jesus Christ, coloured,
if at all, by local and temporal backgrounds, by the experience of the
earlier German mystics who helped them to interpret their own simple
and sincere experiences. They are as naive and artless as little
children, and they expect, as all enthusiasts do in their youth, that
they have only to announce their wonderful truths and to proclaim their
"openings" in order to bring the world to the light! They go to the
full length of the implications of their {44} fresh insight without
ever dreaming that all the theological world will unite, across the
yawning chasms of difference, to stamp out their "pestilent heresy,"
and to rid the earth of persons who dare to question the traditions and
the practices of the centuries.
Instead of beginning with the presupposition of original sin, they
quietly assert that the soul of man is inherently bound up in the Life
and Nature of God, and that goodness is at least as "original" as
badness. They fly in the face of the age-long view that the doctrine
of Grace makes freewill impossible and reduces salvation wholly to a
work of God, and they assert as the ineradicable testimony of their own
consciousness that human choices between Light and Darkness, the
personal response to the character of God as He reveals Himself, the
co-operation of the will of man with the processes of a living and
spiritual God are the things which save a man--and this salvation is
possible in a pagan, in a Jew, in a Turk even, as well as in a man who
ranges himself under Christian rubrics and who says paternosters. They
reject all the scholastic accounts of Christ's metaphysical nature,
they will not use the term Trinity, nor will they admit that it is
right to employ any words which imply that God is divided into
multiform personalities; but nevertheless they hold, with all the
fervour of their earnest spirits, that Christ is God historically and
humanly revealed, and that to see Christ is to see the true and only
God, and to love Christ is to love the Eternal Love.
In an age which settled back upon the Scriptures as the only basis of
authority in religious faith and practice, they boldly challenged that
course as a dangerous return to a lower form of religion than that to
which Christ had called men and as only legalism and scribism in a new
dress. They insisted that the Eternal Spirit, who had been educating
the race from its birth, bringing all things up to better, and who had
used now one symbol and now another to fit the growing spiritual
perception of men, is a real Presence in the deeps of men's {45}
consciousness, and is ceaselessly voicing Himself there as a living
Word whom it is life to obey and death to disregard and slight. Having
found this present, immanent Spirit and being deeply convinced that all
that really matters happens in the dread region of the human heart,
they turned away from all ceremonies and sacraments and tried to form a
Church which should be purely and simply a Communion of saints--a
brotherhood of believers living in the joy of an inward experience of
God, and bound together in common love to Christ and in common service
to all who are potential sons of God.
[1] See Veesenmeyer's article on Buenderlin in _N. lit. Anzeiger_ for
August 1807, P. 535.
[2] The details of his life here given have been gathered mainly from
the excellent monograph on _Johannes Buenderlin_ by Dr. Alexander
Nicoladoni. (Berlin, 1893.)
[3] This incident is given in Dr. Carl Hagen's _Deutschlands
literarischt und religioese Verhaeltnisse im Reformalionszeitalter_,
1868, iii. p. 310.
[4] The books are:--
(1) _Ein gemayne Berechnung ueber der Heiligen Schrift Inhalt_, etc.
("A General Consideration of the Contents of Holy Scripture.") Printed
in Strasbourg in 1529.
(2) _Aus was Ursach sich Gott in die nyder gelassen und in Christo
vermenschet ist_, etc., 1529. ("For what cause God has descended here
below and has become incarnate in Christ.")
(3) _Erklaerung durch Vergleichung der biblischen Geschrift, doss der
Wassertauf sammt andern aeusserlichen Gebraeuchen in der apostolischen
Kirchen geubet, on Gottes Befelch und Zeugniss der Geschrift, von
etlichen dieser Zeit wider efert wird_, etc., 1530. ("Declaration by
comparison of the Biblical Writings that Baptism with Water, together
with other External Customs practised in the Apostolic Church, have
been reinstated by some at this time without the Command of God or the
Witness of the Scriptures.")
These three books can be found bound in one volume, with writings of
Denck and others, in the Koenigliche Bibliothek in Dresden. There is
also a copy of his third book in Utrecht. Besides using the books
themselves I have also used the monograph by Nicoladoni and the study
of Buenderlin in Hagen, _op. cit._ iii. pp. 295-310.
[5] This idea is reproduced and greatly expanded in the writings of the
famous Silesian Mystic, Jacob Boehme.
[6] _Ein gemayne Berechnung_, p. 57.
[7] _Ibid._ p. 14.
[8] _Ibid._ p. 221.
[9] _Ein gemayne Berechnung_, pp. 218-221, freely rendered.
[10] _Ibid_. pp. 30-34.
[11] _Erklaerung durch Vergleichung._
[12] _Aus was Ursach_, p. 33. These phrases, "Key of David" and
"Sabbath Rest for the Soul," occur in the writings of all the spiritual
reformers.
[13] See _N. lit. Anzeiger_ (1807), p. 515.
[14] Entfelder to his brethren at the end of his first book: _Von
Zerspaltungen_.
[15] Vorrede to _Von Zerspaltungen_.
[16] _Von waren Gotseligkayt_, pp. 18-21.
[17] See especially _Von Zerspaltungen_, pp. 6-8.
[18] This "Babel-habit of constructing theological systems" is
constantly referred to by Jacob Boehme, as we shall see. I believe
that Boehme had read both Buenderlin and Entfelder.
[19] See _Von Zerspaltungen_, passim, especially p. 17.
[20] _Von waren Gotseligkayt_, p. 13.
{46}
CHAPTER IV
SEBASTIAN FRANCK: AN APOSTLE OF INWARD RELIGION
Sebastian Franck is one of the most interesting figures in the group of
German Reformers, a man of heroic spirit and a path-breaking genius,
though for many reasons his influence upon his epoch was in no degree
comparable with that of many of his great contemporaries. No person,
however great a genius he may be, can get wholly free from the
intellectual climate and the social ideals of his period, but
occasionally a man appears who has the skill and vision to hit upon
nascent aspirations and tendencies which are big with futurity, and who
thereby seems to be far ahead of his age and not explicable by any
lineage or pedigree. Sebastian Franck was a man of this sort. He was
extraordinarily unfettered by medieval inheritance, and he would be able
to adjust himself with perfect ease to the spirit and ideas of the modern
world if he could be dropped forward into it.
He is especially interesting and important as an exponent and interpreter
of a religion based on inward authority because he unites, in an unusual
manner, the intellectual ideals of the Humanist with the experience and
attitude of the Mystic. In him we have a Christian thinker who is able
to detach himself from the theological formulations of his own and of
earlier times, and who could draw, with breadth of mind and depth of
insight, from the wells of the great original thinkers of all ages, and
who, besides, in his own deep and serious soul could feel the inner flow
of central realities. He was no doubt {47} too much detached to be a
successful Reformer of the historical Church, and he was too little
interested in external organisations to be the leader of a new sect; but
he was, what he aspired to be, a sincere and unselfish contributor to the
spread of the Kingdom of God, and a significant apostle of the invisible
Church.[1]
Sebastian Franck was born in 1499 at Donauwuerth in Schwabia. He began
his higher education in the University of Ingolstadt, which he entered
March 26, 1515. He went from Ingolstadt to Heidelberg, where he
continued his studies in the Dominican College which was incorporated
with the University. Here he was associated in the friendly fellowship
of student life with two of his later opponents, Martin Frecht and Martin
Bucer, and here he came under the influence of Humanism which in the
scholarly circles in Heidelberg was beginning to take a place along with
the current Scholasticism of the period. While a student in Heidelberg
he first heard Martin Luther speak on the insufficiency of works and on
faith as the way of salvation, and though he must have felt the power of
this great personality and the freshness of the message, he was not yet
ripe for a radical change of front.[2] He seems to have felt through
these student years that a new age was in process of birth, but though he
was following the great events he remained to the end of his University
period an adherent of the ancient Church and was ordained a priest about
the year 1524; but very soon after he went over to the party of Reform,
and was settled as a reforming preacher in the little church at
Gustenfelden near Nuremberg. During this period he came into close and
intimate relation with the powerful humanistic spirit of that important
city. Hans Sachs was already a person of fame and influence in
Nuremberg, and here he became acquainted with the writings of the most
famous humanists of the day--Erasmus, Hutten, Reuchlin, Pirkheimer, {48}
Althamer and others. In 1528 he married Ottilie Behaim, a woman of rare
gifts, whose brothers were pupils of Albrecht Duerer, and who were
themselves in sympathy with the freer tendencies of the time as expressed
by the Anabaptists. Franck, however, though sympathizing with the
aspirations of the Anabaptists for a new age, did not feel confidence in
their views or their methods. His first literary work was a translation
into German of Althamer's _Diallage_, which contained an attack from the
Lutheran point of view upon the various Enthusiasts of the period,
especially the Anabaptists. In his original preface to this work Franck,
though still in most respects a Lutheran, already reveals unmistakable
signs of variation from the Wittenberg type, and he is plainly moving in
the direction of a religion of the spiritual and mystical type freed from
the limitations of sect and party. Even in this formative stage he
insists that the Spirit, and not commentaries, is the true guide for the
interpretation of Scripture; he already contrasts Spirit and letter,
outer man and inner man, and he here lays down the radical principle,
which he himself soon put into practice, that a minister of the Gospel
should resign his charge as soon as he discovers that his preaching is
not bearing spiritual fruit in the transformation of the lives of his
congregation.[3]
Sometime before 1530 Franck had come into intimate connection with Denck,
Buenderlin, Schwenckfeld, and other contemporary leaders of the
"Spiritual" movement, and their influence upon him was profound and
lasting, because their message fitted the aspirations which, though not
yet well defined, were surging subconsciously in him.[4] There are
throughout his writings very clear marks of Schwenckfeld's influence upon
him, but Buenderlin especially spoke to his condition and helped him
discover the road which his feet were seeking. In an important letter
which Franck wrote to Johann Campanus in 1531, he calls Buenderlin a
scholar, a {49} wonderfully reverent man, dead to the world, powerful in
the Scriptures, and mightily gifted with an enlightened reason; and this
letter shows that he himself has been moving rapidly in the direction in
which Buenderlin and Denck were travelling, though neither now nor at any
time was Franck a mere copier of other men's ideas.[5] "We must
unlearn," he writes, "all that we have learned from our youth up from the
papists, and we must change everything we have got from the Pope or from
Luther and Zwingli." He predicts that the external Church will never be
set up again, "for the inward enlightenment by the Spirit of God is
sufficient."
In his _Tuerkenchronik_, or "Chronicle and Description of Turkey,"
published in 1530, he had already declared his dissatisfaction with
ceremonies and outward forms of any sort, his refusal to be identified
with any existing, empirical Church, his solemn dedication to the
invisible Church, and his determination to be an apostle of the Spirit.
"There already are in our times," he writes, "three distinct Faiths,
which have a large following, the Lutheran, Zwinglian and Anabaptist; and
a _fourth_ is well on the way to birth, which will dispense with external
preaching, ceremonies, sacraments, bann and office as unnecessary, and
which seeks solely to gather among all peoples an invisible, spiritual
Church in the unity of the Spirit and of faith, to be governed wholly by
the eternal, invisible Word of God, without external means, as the
apostolic Church was governed before its apostasy, which occurred after
the death of the apostles."[6]
The year that dates his autobiographical letter to Campanus saw the
publication in Strasbourg of Franck's best-known literary work:
_Chronica, Zeitbuch und Geschichtsbibel_ ("A Universal Chronicle of the
World's History from the Earliest Times to the Present").[7] It has {50}
often been pointed out that much of the material of this great Chronicle
is taken over from earlier Chroniclers, especially from the Nuremberger
Schedel, and it is furthermore true that Franck's _Book of the Ages_
contains large tracts of unhistorical narrative, set forth after the
manner of Chroniclers without much critical insight, but the book,
nevertheless, has a unique value. It abounds in Franck's peculiar irony
and paradox, and it unfolds his conception of the spiritual history of
the race, under the tuition of the Divine Word. At the beginning are
patriarchs living in the dawn of the world under the guidance of inward
vision, and at the end are saints and heretics, whom Franck finds among
all races, bravely following the same inward Light, now after the ages
grown clearer and more luminous, and sufficient for those who will
patiently and faithfully heed it, while the real "heretics" for him are
"heretics of the letter." "We ought to act carefully before God"--this
is Franck's constant testimony--"hold to God alone and look upon Him as
the cause of all things, and we ought always in all matters to notice
what God says in us, to pay attention to the witness of our hearts, and
never to think, or act, against our conscience. For everything does not
hang upon the bare letter of Scripture; everything hangs, rather, on the
spirit of Scripture and on a spiritual understanding of the inner meaning
of what God has said. If we weigh every matter carefully we shall find
its true meaning in the depth of our spiritual understanding and by the
mind of Christ. Otherwise, the dead letter of Scripture would make us
all heretics and fools, for everything can be bedecked and defended with
texts, therefore let nobody confound himself and confuse himself with
Scripture, but let every one weigh and test Scripture to see how it fits
his own heart. If it is against his conscience and the Word within his
own soul, then be sure he has not reached the right meaning, according to
the mind of the Spirit, for the Scriptures must give witness to the
Spirit, never against it."[8]
{51}
The _Chronica_ naturally aroused a storm of opposition against this bold
advocate of the inner Way. Even Erasmus, who had been canonized in
Franck's list of heretics, joined in the outcry against the chronicler of
the world's spiritual development. His book was confiscated, he was
temporarily imprisoned, and for the years immediately following he was
never secure in any city where he endeavoured to pursue his labours. He
supported himself and his family, now by the humble occupation of a
soap-boiler, now by working in a printing-house, sometimes in Strasbourg,
sometimes in Esslingen, and sometimes in Ulm, only asking that he "might
not be forced to bury the talent which God had given him, but might be
allowed to use it for the good of the people of God."
In 1534 his _Weltbuch_ appeared from a press in Tuebingen, and the same
year he published his famous _Paradoxa_, which contains the most clear
and consistent exposition of his mystical and spiritual religion. Other
significant books from his pen are his translation of Erasmus' _Moriae
Encomion_ ("Praise of Folly"), with very important additions; _Von der
Eitelkeit aller menschlichen Kunst und Weisheit_ ("The Vanity of Arts and
Sciences"), following the treatise by Agrippa von Nettesheim; _Von dem
Baum des Wissens Gutes und Boeses ("Of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good
and Evil");[9] the _Germaniae Chronicon_ ("Chronicle of Germany"), 1538;
_Die guldin Arch_ ("Golden Arch"), 1538; and _Das verbuetschiert mit 7
Siegeln verschlossene Buch ("The Seven-sealed Book"), 1539.
The closing years of his life were passed in Basle, where he peacefully
worked at his books and at type-setting, while the theologians fired
their paper guns against him, and here in Basle he "went forth with God"
on his last journey to find a safe and quiet "city with foundations,"
probably about the end of the year 1542. Three years before his {52}
death he had written in his "Seven-sealed Book" of the soul's journey
toward God in these words: "The longer one travels toward the city he
seeks the nearer and nearer he comes to the goal of his journey; exactly
so is it with the soul that is seeking God. If he will travel away from
himself and away from the world and seek only God as the precious pearl
of his soul, he will come steadily nearer to God, until he becomes one
spirit with God the Spirit; but let him not be afraid of mountains and
valleys on the way, and let him not give up because he is tired and
weary, _for he who seeks finds_."[10] "The Sealed Book" contains an
"apology" by Franck which is one of the most touching and one of the most
noble documents from any opponent of the course which the German
Reformation was taking. "I want my writings accepted," he declares,
"only in so far as they fit the spirit of Scripture, the teaching of the
prophets, and only so far as the anointing of the Word of God, Christ the
inward Life and Light of men, gives witness to them. . . . Nobody is the
master of my faith, and I desire to be the master of the faith of no one.
I love any man whom I can help, and I call him brother whether he be Jew
or Samaritan. . . . I cannot belong to any separate sect, but I believe
in a holy, Christlike Church, a fellowship of saints, and I hold as my
brother, my neighbour, my flesh and blood, all men who belong to Christ
among all sects, faiths, and peoples scattered throughout the whole
world--only I allow nobody to have dominion over the one place which I am
pledged to the Lord to keep as pure virgin, namely my heart and my
conscience. If you try to bind my conscience, to rule over my faith, or
to be master of my heart, then I must leave you. Except _that_,
everything I am or have is thine, whoever thou art or whatever thou
mayest believe."[11]
It was Franck's primary idea--the principle to which he was dedicated and
for which he was content to suffer, {53} in the faith that men in future
times would come to see as he did[12]--that man's soul possesses a native
capacity to hear the inward Word of God. He often calls Plato and
Plotinus and "Hermes Trismegistus" his teachers, who "had spoken to him
more clearly than Moses did"[13] and, like
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