added this as a supreme stage in a progression of knowledge, and Bonaventure
built a metaphysical system around it. Neoplatonic philosophy, from Eriugena
to Albertus Magnus, was essentially a hierarchical metaphysics with mystical
experience as the category from which all other levels emanate. Thus mystical
elements could be integrated into either conventional scripture and ritual or a
purely intellectual system; in neither case was there any necessary emphasis on
the practice of direct personal experience, on rejecting official doctrines, or on
moving outside the conventional organization of the church.
After 1300, mysticism emerged in a stronger sense, becoming anti-philo-
sophical as well as organizationally independent. Such mysticism tends to take
itself out of the orbit of philosophy. We notice it here because there was a
creative high point just when the transition occurred, for it is by the tools of
philosophy that philosophy effaces itself. Meister Eckhart, from the lineage of
Albert the Great and his pupil Dietrich of Freiberg, was active at Paris and
Cologne at the time of Scotus. Eckhart took the opposite line from Duns:
existence does not apply to God as to creatures; rather God is pure essence,
virtually above being. Just as Aristotle had said that the faculty of vision is
without color in order that it may see all colors, Eckhart put it that God has
no Being, in order to cause all being (Gilson, 1944: 696). This highest essence,
like the Platonic idea of the One, must be pure unity, which Eckhart regards
as the pure intelligere, Intellect. This is far above immaterial things or Forms,
since these are multiple rather than one, and above material things, since they
are composites of matter and form. But there is an inner connection from the
creature to God. God is so high, so transcendent, that one can say nothing
about his divine unity; a creature is so low that it is also nothing, so to speak,
nothing in itself. Thus the citadel of the soul contains a divine “spark,”
whereby the human being is no longer distinguished from God. From this spark
there is a Plotinus-like flow backwards from the creature to God, a return into
the One.
Eckhart does not seem to have been a meditative mystic, but he argued
himself into a mystical position by the logic of oppositions within the intellec-
tual field. As we have seen in the origins of Buddhism, meditative experience
in itself is susceptible to interpretation in all sorts of ways; the specifically
mystical interpretation always depends on a heritage of philosophical ideas.
Thus it is not surprising that the real meditative mystics of the later Middle
Ages began directly from this network. Tauler and Suso, although they were
preachers and not professors, were pupils (certain or likely) of Eckhart and of
the other followers of Albert at Cologne (210 and 211 in Figure 9.6). But the
mysticism now established as a tradition broke free from the universities. These
were not academic theologians, and indeed they tended to come into conflict
with official theology because of their independence. Structurally as well as
Academic Expansion: Medieval Christendom^ •^495