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.
The 'German Theology' says:

["Was nu us geflossen ist, das ist nicht war wesen, und hat kein wesen
anders dan in dem volkomen, sunder es ist ein zufal oder ein glast und
ein schin, der nicht wesen ist oder nicht wesen hat anders, dan in dem
sewer, da der glast us flusset, als in der sunnen oder in einem
liechte."]

"What has flown out is not real substance and has no other reality
except in the perfect; but it is an incident or a glare or a shimmer,
which is no substance, and has no other reality, except in the fire
from which a glare proceeds, as in the sun or