Mystics of the Renaissance and their relation to modern thought, including Meister Eckhart, Tauler, Paracelsus, Jacob Boehme, Giordano Bruno, and others — John Shaqi
Mystics of the Renaissance and their relation to modern thought, including Meister Eckhart, Tauler, Paracelsus, Jacob Boehme, Giordano Bruno, and othersSteiner, Rudolf
Religion
Mystics of the Renaissance and their relation to modern thought, including Meister Eckhart, Tauler, Paracelsus, Jacob Boehme, Giordano Bruno, and others
Steiner, Rudolf
Mysticism
As Tauler directs his gaze mainly upon the natural man, he is
comparatively less concerned to tell us what happens when the higher
man enters into the natural man, than to discover the paths which
the lower forces of the personality must follow if they are to be
transmuted into the higher life. As a devotee of the moral life, he
desires to show to men the roads to the All-Being. He has unconditional
faith and trust that the All-Being shines forth in man, if man will
so order his life that there shall be in him a shrine for the Divine.
But this All-Being can never shine forth while man shuts himself up
in his mere natural separated personality. Such a man, separated off
in himself, is merely one member of the world: a single creature, in
Tauler’s language. The more man shuts himself off within this his being
as a member of the world, so much the less can the All-Being find place
in him. “If man is in reality to become one with God, then all energies
and powers even of the inner man must die and become silent. The will
must turn away even from the Good and from all willing, and become void
of willing.” “Man must escape from all his senses and turn inwards all
his powers, and come into a forgetting of all things and of himself.”
“For the true and eternal Word of God is uttered only in the desert,
when the man hath gone out from himself and from all things and is
quite untrammelled, desolate and alone.”
When Tauler stood at his zenith, the problem which occupied the central
point of his mental life was: How can man overcome and kill out in
himself his separated existence, so as to live in perfect unison
with the All-life? For one in this position, all feelings towards
the All-Being concentrate themselves into this one thing: Awe before
the All-Being as that which is inexhaustible, endless. He says to
himself: whatever level thou hast reached, there remain still higher
perspectives, still more exalted possibilities. Thus clear and defined
as is to him the direction in which he has to turn his steps, it is
equally clear to him that he can never speak of a goal: for a new
goal is only the beginning of a new path. Through such a new goal man
reaches a certain level of evolution: but evolution itself continues
illimitably. And what that evolution may attain upon some more distant
level, it can never know upon its present stage. There is no _knowing_
the final goal: only a _trusting_ in the path, in evolution itself.
There is knowing for everything which man has already attained. It
consists in the penetration of an already present object by the powers
of our spirit. For the higher life of man’s inner being, there is no
such knowing. Here the powers of our spirit must first transfer the
object itself into the realm of the existent; they must first create
for it an existence, constituted as is natural existence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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