wonderful chain of proof in Spinoza's 'Ethics,' the straining after
demonstration by Spinoza gives me the impression that this acute
thinker could not have believed in his own doctrines with his whole
heart, and that he therefore felt the necessity of fastening every mesh
of his net with the utmost care. "Still," I continued, "I must
acknowledge I do not share this great admiration for the 'German
Theology,' although I owe the book many a doubt. To me there is a lack
of the human and the poetical in it, and of warm feeling and reverence
for reality altogether. The entire mysticism of the fourteenth century
is wholesome as a preparative, but it first reaches solution in the
divinely holy and divinely courageous return to real life, as was
exemplified by Luther. Man must at some time in his life recognize his
nothingness. He must feel that he is nothing of himself, that his
existence, his beginning, his everlasting life are rooted in the
superearthly and incomprehensible. That is the returning to God which
in reality is never concluded on earth but yet leaves behind in the
soul a divine home sickness, which never again ceases. But man cannot
ignore the creation as the Mystics would. Although created out of
nothing, that is, through and out of God, he cannot of his own power
resolve himself back into this nothingness. The self-annihilation of
which Tauler so often speaks is scarcely better than the sinking away
of the human soul in Nirvana, as the Buddhists have it. Thus Tauler
says: 'That if he by greater reverence and love could reach the highest
existence in non-existence, he would willingly sink from his height
into the deepest abyss.' But this annihilation of the creature was not
the purpose of the Creator since he made it. 'God is transformed in
man,' says Augustine, 'not man in God.' Thus mysticism should be only
a fire-trial which steels the soul but does not evaporate it like
boiling water in a kettle. He who has recognized the nothingness of
self ought to recognize this self as a reflection of the actual divine.