Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/36

 MEISTER ECKEHART, THE MYSTIC. 25 the same time active creation) and so are not substances like the angels. Such an intelligence is the active reason (pp. 146-7). As proof that this particular intelligence is no substance, but its existence is its activity, Averroes's com- mentary on De Anima iii. is quoted as authority. The potential reason is filled with images (bilde) which are for it externality and temporality. So soon as by the grace of God the potential reason is freed from these images, it is supplanted or moulded by the active reason. Whereas the potential reason takes things only from the senses as they appear to exist, the active reason goes to the origin of things and sees them as they are in reality that is, in God. But our writer is again hampered by the current theological conceptions, although he twists them to his own theories : if the active reason is ever present ready to be united to the potential reason, when once it is freed of the images, must it not also be present in hell ? The answer must necessarily be affirmative ; but hell in truth is not what the vulgar (grobe Ivte) believe it fire ; the agony of hell consists in the sufferer's unconsciousness of his own reason (irre aigen vernunft) ; that is, he cannot contemplate himself as he appears to the active reason, or as he exists in the divine mind. This spiritual pain is the greatest of all pains. Hell is thus identified with the absence of the higher insight. Finally we may note that the author of the tractate seems uncertain whether the potential reason can ever arrive at perfect union with the active reason before it is separated from all material things. Distorted as are the ideas of Averroes in this work, we cannot doubt that it is those ideas which are influencing its author. A far more complete attempt to reconcile Averroism with Christian theology is to be found in the system of Eckehart, to which we now proceed. Many difficulties and obscurities will arise, but some elucidation they will un- doubtedly receive from a brief examination of the re- lationship of Averroes to medieval mysticism. We shall be the better able to enter into Meister Ecke- hart's system, if we first note a few leading characteristics of his intellectual standpoint. Running throughout his writings two strangely different theosophical currents may be discerned two currents which he fails entirely to harmonise, and which account, for the most part, for those inconsistencies wherein he abounds. On the one hand, his mental predilection is towards a pantheistic idealism ; on the other, his heart makes him a gospel, his education a Scholastic, Christian. He speaks of God almost in the