Jan 2005 Christian Spirituality      Continued from previous issue By George A Lane SJ

Continue from ...... RELIGIOUS CLIMATE OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES This second type of prayer flourished among the Rhineland mystics in the fourteenth century, the great mystic and teacher Meister Eckhart and his three disciples, John Tauler, Blessed Henry Suso, and Blessed Jan van Ruysbroeck. In this second great period of mysticism in the Church (the first being the third and fourth century Eastern monastic period), people again appear who write and talk freely about their mystical experiences. These Rhineland mystics are basically in the Pseudo-Dionysian tradition and use his vocabulary, the abandonment of all creatures for union with God, Eckhart, for example, says "One should pray with such energy that he would wish all his limbs, and all his strength, his eyes, ears, mouth, heart, and all his senses were straining within him. He should not cease until he seems to have become one with Him who is present and to whom he prays." Eckhart was condemned for "patheism" because it seemed in his effort to articulate his experience that the self merged into God and was lost. When trying to understand these mystics, we must realize that it is very difficult for people to express mystical experiences in writing. They were struggling for some way to express what was a genuine gift of God, and human language is quite inadequate to the task. Misunderstanding due to the limitations of language is almost inevitable. Eckhart explains that when one has achieved a state of union with God, he is in "the abyss without mode and without form of the silent and waste divinity." The fruition of bliss says Ruysbroeck, "is so immense that God himself is as swallowed up with all the blessed in an absence of self." This idea of knowledge of God which is above all knowing is characteristic of this school of mysticism. In the final stage of mystical union, Eckhart teaches, the soul is "buried in the Godhead" and "is God Himself" enjoying all things, disposing all things as God Himself does. There was another group of mystics who continued the Dionysian and Rhineland tradition in England. There was Richard Rolle, a sort of free-lance hermit who wrote a great deal about the advantages of the contemplative and mystical life (although it seems that he was not a mystic himself). There was Walter Hilton who wrote The Scale of Perfection for anchoresses. Another mystic of this period whose name is unknown wrote two books, The Cloud of Unknowing and The Epistle of Privy Counsel.

- To Be Continued -