rd forgot all about love, and did not hesitate to stir up
unpleasantness whenever he could do so. So he wrote to Pope Innocent
II.: "Peter Abelard is striving to destroy the Christian faith, and
imagines that his human intellect can penetrate the depths of the divine
mind.... Nothing is hidden from him, neither in the earth below, nor in
the heavens above; his intellectual pride exceeds all limits; he attacks
the doctrines of faith, and ponders problems far above his intellectual
capacity; he is an inventor of heresies ...," etc. Thanks to his
machinations, Abelard was compelled to recant at the Council of Sens,
and was condemned by the Pope to eternal silence. Berengar of Poitier
took Abelard's part, and in a satirical treatise ventured to criticise
St. Bernard's conduct: "Thus philosophise the old women at the looms. Of
course, when Bernard tells us that we must love God, he speaks a true
and venerable word; but he need not have opened his lips to do so, for
it is a self-evident truth." As a matter of fact, these words branded
and contradicted the merely subjective emotional mysticism; to the
emotional mystic salvation lies in the "absorption in God," in
shapeless, thoughtless contemplation. Richard of St. Victor, founding
his theories on St. Bernard, established six stages of meditation. The
Franciscan monk, Bonaventura, the famous author of the _Biblia
Pauperum_, added a seventh, a complete rest in God--"like the Sabbath
after the six days of labour." To Bonaventura, as later on to Dante, the
world was a ladder leading up to God.

If we turn from these thinkers of the Neo-Latin race, who in spite of
their undeniable mysticism were completely under the dominion of the
Church--to German mysticism, we find above and beyond mysticism, we find
above and beyond love, a new principle: The soul of man is the
starting-point of religious consciousness and the content of the
religious consciousness is the soul's road to God. The nativity of
Christ ceased to be regarded as a historical event, and became the birth
of the divine principle in the soul of man. In passing I will mention a
German nun, Mechthild of Magdeburg (1212-1277), who anticipated some of
the great thoughts of Eckhart, although she was incapable of grasping
their mutual connection. "The Holy Trinity and everything in heaven and
earth must be subject to me" (the soul), were words in the true spirit
of Eckhart, leaving St. Bernard far behind. Mechthild found metaph