As we find in his writings so few allusions to outside influences—save to that of Occamism—it does not appear worth while to philosophise as to whether he had, or had not, been touched by the Gallicanism which was in the air. It is very doubtful whether he, in the comparative seclusion of his little world of Erfurt and Wittenberg, came to any extent under this influence, especially as his studies were so cursory and brief and confined within such narrow limits. The Gallican tendencies did not find in Germany anything like so fruitful a soil as in France. It is true that Luther soon after his change of opinions was capable of rivalling any Paris professor of Gallican sympathies in his depreciation of the Holy See. Hence though no immediate influence on Luther can be allowed to Gallicanism, yet the fact remains that the prevalent anti-Roman tendencies greatly contributed to the wide acceptance of the Lutheran schism in Germany, and even beyond its borders. Again, that Luther, as has been asserted, after having tasted the food provided by Nominalism, was so disgusted as to rush to the opposite extreme in Scholasticism, making his own the very worst elements of realism, both philosophical and theological, seems to rest on fancy rather than on facts. We may likewise refuse to see in Wiclifism, with which Luther was acquainted only through the Constance Theses, any element of inspiration, and also shake our heads when some Protestants, at the other extreme, try to show that the Doctors of the Church, St. Augustine and St. Bernard, were really the parties responsible for Luther’s turning his back on the doctrines of the Church. On the other hand, the influence of mysticism, with which we have now to deal, deserves much more attention. It cannot be denied that a very considerable part in the development of his new ideas was played by mysticism; already at an early date the mystic spirit which Augustine’s works owed to their writer’s Platonic studies, had attracted Luther without, however, making him a Neo-Platonist.[407] During the time of his mental growth he was likewise warmly attached to German mysticism. Yet, here again, it is an exaggeration, as we can already see, to state as some non-Catholics do that Luther, “as the theologian of the Reformation,” was merely “a disciple of Tauler and the Frankfort author of the German Theology,” or that “it was only through meeting with the Frankfort theologian that he was changed from a despairing swimmer struggling in the billows of a gloomy sea into a great reformer.” CHAPTER V THE ROCKS OF FALSE MYSTICISM 1. Tauler and Luther