MY DEAR FRIEND,
YOUR Letter and the proof-sheets of your Translation of the Theologia
Germanica, with Kingsley's Preface and your Introduction, were delivered to
me yesterday, as I was leaving Carlton Terrace to breathe once more, for a few
days, the refreshing air of this quiet, lovely place. You told me, at the time,
that you had been led to study Tauler and the Theologia Germanica by
some conversations which we had on their subjects in 1851, and you now wish me
to state to your readers, in a few lines, what place I conceive this school of
Germanic theology to hold in the general development of Christian thought, and
what appears to me to be the bearing of this work in particular upon the
present dangers and prospects of Christianity, as well as upon the eternal
interests of religion in the heart of every man and
woman.
In complying willingly with your
request, I may begin by saying that, with Luther, I rank this short treatise
next to the Bible, but, unlike him, should place it before rather than after
St. Augustine. That school of pious, learned, and profound men of which this
book is, as it were, the popular catechism, was the Germanic counterpart of
Romanic scholasticism, and more than the revival of that Latin theology which
produced so many eminent thinkers, from Augustine, its father, to Thomas
Aquinas, its last great genius, whose death did not take place until after the
birth of Dante, who again was the contemporary of the Socrates of the Rhenish
school, -- Meister Eckart, the Dominican.
The theology of this school was the first protest
of the Germanic mind against the Judaism and formalism of the Byzantine and
mediaeval Churches, -- the hollowness of science to which scholasticism had
led, and the rottenness of society which a pompous hierarchy strove in vain to
conceal, but had not the power nor the will to correct. Eckart and Tauler, his
pupil, brought religion home from fruitless speculation, and reasonings upon
imaginary or impossible suppositions, to man's own heart and to the
understanding of the common people, as Socrates did the Greek philosophy. There
is both a remarkable analogy and a striking contrast between the great Athenian
and those Dominican friars. Socrates did full justice to the deep ethical ideas
embodied in the established religion of his country and its venerated
mysteries, which he far preferred to the shallow philosophy of the sophists;
but he dissuaded his pupils from seeking an initiation into the mysteries, or
at least from resting their convictions and hopes upon them, exhorting them to
rely, not upon the oracles of Delphi, but upon the oracle in their own bosom.
The "Friends of God," on the other hand, believing (like Dante) most profoundly
in the truth of the Christian religion, on which the established Church of
their age, notwithstanding its corruptions, was essentially founded,
recommended submission to the ordinances of the church as a wholesome
preparatory discipline for many minds. Like the saint of Athens, however, they
spoke plain truth to the people. To their disciples, and those who came to them
for instruction, they exhibited the whole depth of that real Christian
philosophy, which opens to the mind after all scholastic conventionalism has
been thrown away, and the soul listens to the response which Christ's Gospel
and God's creation find in a sincere heart and a self-sacrificing life; -- a
philosophy which, considered merely as a speculation, is far more profound than
any scholastic system. But, in a style that was intelligible to all, they
preached that no fulfilment of rites and ceremonies, nor of so-called religious
duties, -- in fact, no outward works, however meritorious, can either give
peace to man's conscience, nor yet give him strength to bear up against the
temptations of prosperity and the trials of adversity.
In following this course they brought the people
back from hollow profession and real despair, to the blessings of gospel
religion, while they opened to philosophic minds a new career of thought. By
teaching that man is justified by ' faith, and by faith alone, they prepared
the popular intellectual element of the Reformation; by teaching that this
faith has its philosophy, as fully able to carry conviction to the
understanding, as faith is to give peace to the troubled conscience, they paved
the way for that spiritual philosophy of the mind, of which Kant laid the
foundation. But they were not controversialists, as the Reformers of the
sixteenth century were driven to be by their position, and not men of science
exclusively, as the masters of modern philosophy in Germany were and are.
Although most of them friars, or laymen connected with the religious orders of
the time, they were men of the people and men of action. They preached the
saving faith to the people in churches, in hospitals, in the streets and public
places. In the strength of this faith, Tauler, when he had been already for
years the universal object of admiration as a theologian and preacher through
all the free cities on the Rhine, from Basle to Cologne, humbled himself, and
remained silent for the space of two years, after the mysterious layman had
shown him the insufficiency of his scholastic learning and preaching. In the
strength of this faith, he braved the Pope's Interdict, and gave the
consolations of religion to the people of Strasburg, during the dreadful plague
which depopulated that flourishing city. For this faith, Eckart suffered with
patience slander and persecution, as formerly he had borne with meekness,
honours and praise. For this faith, Nicolaus of Basle, who sat down as a humble
stranger at Tauler's feet to become the instrument of his real enlightenment,
died a martyr in the flames. In this sense, the "Friends of God" were, like the
Apostles, men of the people and practical Christians, while as men of thought,
their ideas contributed powerfully to the great efforts of the European nations
in the sixteenth century.
Let me, therefore, my dear friend, lay aside all
philosophical and theological terms, and state the principle of the golden book
which you are just presenting to the English public, in what I consider, with
Luther, the best Theological exponent, in plain Teutonic, thus: --
Sin is
selfishness:
Godliness is unselfishness:
A godly life is the steadfast working out of inward freeness from self:
To become thus Godlike is the bringing back of man's first
nature.
On this last point, -- man's divine dignity and
destiny, -- Tauler speaks as strongly as our author, and almost as strongly as
the Bible. Man is indeed to him God's own image. "As a sculptor," he says
somewhere, with a striking range of mind for a monk of the fourteenth century,
"is said to have exclaimed indignantly on seeing a rude block of marble, 'what
a godlike beauty thou hidest!' thus God looks upon man in whom God's own image
is hidden." "We may begin," he says in a kindred passage, "by loving God in
hope of reward, we may express ourselves concerning Him in symbols (Bilder),
but we must throw them all away, and much more we must scorn all idea of
reward, that we may love God only because He is the Supreme Good, and
contemplate His eternal nature as the real substance of our own soul."
But let no one imagine that these men, although
doomed to passiveness in many respects, thought a contemplative or monkish life
a condition of spiritual Christianity, and not rather a danger to it. "If a man
truly loves God," says Tauler, "and has no will but to do God's will, the whole
force of the river Rhine may run at him and will not disturb him or break his
peace; if we find outward things a danger and disturbance, it comes from our
appropriating to ourselves what is God's." But Tauler, as well as our Author,
uses the strongest language to express his horror of Sin, man's own creation,
and their view on this subject forms their great contrast to the philosophers
of the Spinozistic school. Among the Reformers, Luther stands nearest to them,
with respect to the great fundamental points of theological teaching, but their
intense dread of Sin as a rebellion against God, is shared both by Luther and
Calvin. Among later theologians, Julius Muller, in his profound Essay on Sin,
and Richard Rothe, in his great work on Christian Ethics, come nearest to them
in depth of thought and ethical earnestness, and the first of these eminent
writers carries out, as it appears to me, most consistently that fundamental
truth of the Theologia Germanica that there is no sin but Selfishness,
and that all Selfishness is sin.
Such appear to me to be the characteristics of
our book and of Tauler. I may be allowed to add, that this small but golden
Treatise has been now for almost forty years an unspeakable comfort to me and
to many Christian friends (most of whom have already departed in peace), to
whom I had the happiness of introducing it. May it in your admirably faithful
and lucid translation become a real "book for the million" in England, a
privilege which it already shares in Germany with Tauler's matchless Sermons,
of which I rejoice to hear that you are making a selection for publication. May
it become a blessing to many a longing Christian heart in that dear country of
yours, which I am on the point of leaving, after many happy years of residence,
but on which I can never look as a strange land to me, any more than I shall
ever consider myself as a stranger in that home of old Teutonic liberty and
energy, which I have found to be also the home of practical Christianity and of
warm and faithful affection.
Bunsen.