THE HIGH MIDDLE AGES

Revival
Eventually the Europeans got a reprieve from further invasions. In part it was because they had absorbed so much of the energies of former invaders, such as the Normans. In part it was because their enemies, in particular Islam, were having organizational problems of their own that absorbed their energies. In any case, once Europe came out from under the threat of more invaders, it amazingly quickly began to show signs of life. By around 1050 AD the tide was turning in favor of Europe. Now Europe would move from the defensive to the offensive--one which would not cease until the twentieth century!
By the 1100s Europe was clearly undergoing a cultural revival of major proportions. Cities were growing up all around Western Europe, a sign of the revival of commerce and shipping. Learning centers were growing up--especially around the cathedrals of Europe's bishops. These were the early foundations of the universities that would be so vital to the redevelopment of the European intellect.

The Crusades
The principal impetus was in the shifting balance of power between Western Christianity and Eastern Islam. The conquering urges of the Germanic princes and Viking warriors had never been stopped--but only tamed. Now around 1100 AD they were unleashed, with Christian moral authorization, upon the whole of Islam. With great religious zeal German and Norman crusaders pillaged the East, bringing the wealth of plunder back to Western Europe, the part anyway that did not end up in Italy where enterprising shippers got rich ferrying North-Western crusaders back and forth to the East.
This was not destined to last, for Islam got its act together and eventually threw these Christians out of their feudal holdings in the Holy Lands. However--the Muslims did not at this point shut out the Christians from the Holy Lands, but invited them to come peacefully, as pilgrims. They did, they came--but not just to Palestine in the East but also the Spain in the South, where the Muslims opened up to them a new world of scientific knowledge and material culture. Here the best of Greco-Roman material culture had been preserved by the Muslims, who had noticed no particular contradiction between their religious faith and the material legacy of Greece and Rome. It was an eye-opening experience for the Westerner.

Intellectual-Spiritual Stirrings--and Heresies
By the mid 1100s a new spirit of energy seemed to be flowing through European culture. This was a period of rapid growth of European learning (and, somewhat to the distress of the church, a new spirit of "free-thinking"). Contact with the Byzantine and Muslim East brought not only a new wealth in goods--but also a new wealth in ideas.
To the horror of the church, however, some of these new ideas seemed to give very serious challenge to the foundations of Medieval Christendom. These were, as the church saw it, serious "heresies."

Some of these developments became quite bizarre--though honest in their endeavor to aspire to a higher life. For instance, the Albigensians in the south of France were coming together in new communities focused on what were distinctly "Eastern" impulses (or Persian mysticism). The church was ruthless in its suppression of these heretical instincts. But mostly these developments simply produced a demand for Christian instruction, even the privilege of being able to read Christian scripture--such as among the Waldensians. Though it was a very orthodox Christianity that the Waldensians gathered to study, they did so outside of the precincts of the church hierarchy. Thus they too were put under the sword by the Church as "heretics."

So the church waged war on these expansive impulses--with the same vigor it pursued the crusades against Islam. In the process of exterminating the Albigensians, they succeeding in the process in crushing the newly blooming flower of Latin culture in Southern France and made very nervous those with any instincts for reforming the church. [The Waldensians took to the mountain fastness of the Alps--and held out there until they became joined to the Protestant movement a few centuries later.]

The New Teaching Orders
But the urge to learn could not be suppressed among the people. Eventually new teaching orders, the Dominicans and the Franciscans emerged to meet this hunger for learning among the common people. The Dominicans taught with an eye to enhancing Christian orthodoxy among the people. But the Franciscans had more of a "spiritual" learning to bring to the people. In either case, both new orders were signs of the intellectual emergence of the West.
Aquinas and Scholasticism
Soon this hunger for learning was pushing some of the teachers into ever deeper intellectual inquiry. As ancient works of Aristotle were reintroduced to the West from the Muslim East, scholars began to gather at the new "universities" which were growing up out of the cathedral schools. Here language, logic and science came under rigorous study.
Scholars such as Thomas Aquinas were gathering at these universities to rediscover the full array of Aristotle's and Plato's writings--and other "pagan" or pre-Christian writers. Slowly their insights into life were not only broadening--but being refined by the tough intellectual disciplines of logic, mathematics, law, medicine, and astronomy. This all eventually became disciplined into the intellectual movement known as "scholasticism."

Early Humanist Stirrings
But this epoch marks not only a flowering of the mind--but also of the heart. The natural inquisitiveness that peace and prosperity brought was met as much by an new exploration of the private world of faith and spirit as it was by the new exploration of human reason.
Musicians and poets touched the hearts of Europe with a new love for the world which God had placed them in. Thus the artist Giotto, though commissioned to paint religious art, designed his people to look real, very human and quite alive--not just formalized human icons who possess only symbolic existence. Petrarch, Boccaccio, Dante, Chaucer wrote poetry and prose that also focused on human life as it is actually lived by real people around us--objects of interest (though not yet quite objects of reverence) in a world that had heretofore been focused more on the life beyond this earthly existence.

Mysticism
Yet at the same time, the hearts of these people still continued to seek, perhaps even more devotedly, a deeper, more vital personal relationship with God. Religious mystics, such as Meister Eckhart, Jan van Ruysbroek, Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich, and Catherine of Siena, plumbed the depths of the soul and its relationship to God--and left records of those journeys for others to consider. Thus Christian mysticism flourished richly right alongside a growing humanism during these times.
The "Close" of the Middle Ages
The Middle Ages did not actually close at all--but moved on seamlessly into the Renaissance as the realm of human curiosity about the world around them expanded into a realm that had little or no religious significance.
It's important to note the strength of the intellectual foundations laid out during the "close" of the Middle Ages. Because of the rapid rise of the cities and the concentration of human populations in these urban centers, disease became a greatly augmented problem. When the Black Death swept through Europe in the mid 1300s it wiped out huge portions of the European population. Yet urban culture bounced back quickly. The spirit of the times might have been devastated by this massive tragedy. But it wasn't.

This spirit was too strong to put down. It was a spirit which would continue to ferment in Europe--moving this small corner of the world forward to an ever greater destiny, even through more plagues and nasty wars. Eventually it would lead us right into modern times.

Princes and Bishops Consolidate Their Power
After the mid-1000s the West began to stir from its entrenchment. It got enough of a reprieve from invasions that it was able to see some order return to life.
Princely rule was organizing itself into stronger political units. The previous invaders themselves added strong blood to the ruling lines of Europe--especially the adventuresome Normans. Princely rulers, such as the "Emperors" Frederick I [Barbarossa] (1152-1190) and Frederick II (1194-1250), gained enough of a hold over larger territories that they were able to offer some degree of peace and prosperity to the land in Germany, in France and in England.

At the same time the church, which was still the main cultural underpinning for all of Western society, began to regain strength under powerful popes. Notable in this regard were Leo IX (pope: 1049-1054) and Gregory VII [Hildebrand] (pope: 1073-1085). They tightened the governing structure of the church and restored some degree of discipline within the priesthood.

But the most notable of all was Innocent III (pope: 1198-1216). Innocent wielded power greater than even the emperors themselves and used his power to marshall crusades to reshape the political landscape not only of Western Europe but also Christian Byzantium in the East.

However the simultaneous strengthening of secular and religious authority produced some of its own new tensions. Powerful popes found themselves in contention with powerful princes, in particular with the Holy Roman Emperor. Princes felt that it was their privilege to make appointments of bishops to the church within their lands--a source of major political influence for them. The popes however felt that this power belonged only to Rome. A fierce "investiture" controversy thus broke out between church and state all through Western Europe.

New Intellectual Stirrings
In the meantime learning or scholarship, especially within some of the monasteries, began to stir mightily. The late 1000s/early 1100s produced such learned figures as Berengar (flourished late 1000s), Anselm (1033-1109), Hugh of St. Victor (early 1100s), Peter Abelard (1079-1142) Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) and Peter Lombard (1100-1160).
Anselm was a theological writer of the first order; Abelard was given more to an exploration of the earthly life; Bernard was a powerful organizer of the monastic system and Lombard put together a great devotional guide, Sentences.

The Albigensians (or Cathars)
The 1100s was also accompanied by an evangelical "awakening" among the people--often which had as its object the reform of the corrupt institutional church. This in turn brought Papal condemnation--for mere disobedience and the embarrassment it caused Rome, as much as for doctrinal errors.
One of the principal heretical movements, brought back from the East during the crusades, was the Cathars (from Catharos, a Greek word meaning "Pure One.")--also known as Albigensians from Albi, a town in southern France where they were numerous (also, northern Italy and Germany). The Cathars were dualists: believing that historical events were the product of the struggle of two forces, even gods--one good, one evil. Evil had dominion over the visible world; but through good works of extreme asceticism (including the avoidance of all sexual intercourse and the dissolution of marriages), the souls of individuals were restored to the Good God. Membership into the elect required such good works.

Being elect assured one of eternal salvation; but those who died without being saved were merely reborn into life (the living hell) and given another chance to try to achieve eternal salvation. There was no eternal hell to which the damned went. Christ did not truly have a human body--for that would have placed him under Satan's dominion; neither did Christ experience true bodily death or bodily resurrection.

These elements of doctrine were reserved for the elect anyway so that the common people who followed the Cathar teachings did so for the moral or ethical elements of the faith--not the doctrinal, of which they remained largely ignorant.

In strong contrast to the times, women were admitted to the caste of "chosen" and could perform priestly rites--since sex was seen as a distinction only of the devil anyway--though usually only the men became evangelists and teachers out in the open world.

The Cathars were exemplary people in their personal lives of piety and charity--in obvious contrast to the average run of Christian priests--and well loved in their communities. In the south of France they may have even become a majority of the population--though most of these Cathar followers would have remained good Christians and would have continued their observance of regular Christian worship.

The Waldensians
Another heresy of the times was the Waldensians, named after their founder Valdes, a wealthy merchant of Lyons who, around 1175 gave up his wealth and took up the way of an itinerant preacher of the gospel. He taught that only scripture should be the ground of faith and anything that has no scriptural warrant should be rejected. Though he gathered supporters he drew the opposition of the local bishop for preaching (which was restricted to clergy); an appeal to Rome in 1179 resulted in refusal. For a time the Waldensians observed the restriction--but then returned to evangelical preaching--resulting in their excommunication in 1184 (along with the Cathars--with whom they had nothing in common).
Excommunication seemed only to draw more support--principally in northern Italy and southern France as well as along the French and German Rhine. They also had adherents in northern Spain, in Bohemia and in Austria.

Theologically, the Waldensians remained completely orthodox--on all points to which Scripture gave warrant. They even held out hope of being reunited with the church.

But eventually, the more rigorous branch of the Waldensians in northern Italy began to select their own ministers to dispense the sacraments--putting a strain within the movement which wanted to avoid offending the church as much as possible.

The Crusade against the Heresies
But early in the 1200s, Pope Innocent III began in earnest the stamping out of these heresies, Waldensians as well as Cathars.
In France, a crusade against the Cathars was announced in 1209 by Innocent III and northern barons took this opportunity to invade the south of France in the quest of new lands; as a result, over the next 20 years southern France's cities and countryside were laid waste and her culture shattered. In 1243 the last bastion of Catharism in southern France was destroyed.

At the same time, the Waldensian movement was destroyed or driven underground. Only in the removed heights of southern Switzerland did the movement hold out in any strength--until it was integrated into the Protestant reformation 300 years later.

The Dominicans
Dominic de Guzman (1172-1221).
In the early 1200s, the Spanish Augustinian canon, Dominic de Guzman urged the local monks in Southern France to fight Waldensianism and Catharism by emulating the apostolic poverty of the heretics--thereby winning back the support of the people. As the Albigensian crusade swirled around him Dominic began to organize such a new evangelical teaching movement, finally receiving papal recognition in 1217 as the Order of Preaching Brothers--though the term "Dominican" became the popular designation of this new order.

This evangelical and service organization spread rapidly throughout all Europe, reaching by 1230 from England and Spain to Denmark, Poland, Greece and the Holy Land.

In short order also, the Dominicans were given chief responsibility in administering the Inquisition (which was in direct violation of Dominic's original understanding of their mission); and they also sought and obtained professorships in the new universities, becoming highly influential within the life of the institutional church.

The Franciscans
Francis (Giovanni Bernardone) (1181-1226).
Of a different order of things was the movement started by Giovanni Bernardone, known as the "Frenchman" or Francesco (Francis). Francis had no ambition to do anything other than to try to live his own life as he understood Christ would have; the fact that others soon joined him was to him merely incidental. In fact, he resisted as long as he could the creation of a formal "order," fearing that the institutionalizing of his movement would destroy its original spirit.

In 1206 or 1207 he had a vision calling him to rebuild God's church--which he did with some of his father's money. This got him in trouble with his father and local authorities, and he determined to shed himself of all earthy connections to pursue this vision. He had no plan, no long-range goal except to live and serve as Christ had done, rebuilding churches and aiding the poor and sick.

He succeeded where Valdes failed--in gaining papal support, though he came close himself to being declared one of the heretics bothering the institutional church in those days.

In 1215, his movement was recognized as the Friars Minor (lesser brothers). But the Franciscans became organized effectively only with the help of cardinal Hugolino. Francis himself retreated more and more from the responsibilities of leadership, having little heart in seeing his movement institutionalized. When he died in 1226, he died as a very simple monk.

But his movement, based on his charismatic example, spread rapidly throughout Europe--in parallel with the Dominicans.

The Dominican and Franciscan scholars vied with each other for intellectual leadership of Europe, with the Franciscans a bit more mystical (Platonic-Augustinian) and the Dominicans a bit more naturalist (Aristotelian).

The Roots of Scholasticism
In the second half of the 1100s the rediscovery of Aristotle strongly reshaped the intellectual development of Europe. Aristotle was brought to the West through the works of the Muslims, Avicenna (early 1000s) and Averroes (mid-1100s). This intellectual import owned nothing to Christianity but relied purely on secular reason; in consequence Christian learning among scholars moved away from Platonic-Augustinian theory and into "natural" theory.
Avicenna (ibn Sina) (980-1037) Persian Muslim

Averroës (ibn Rushd) (1126-1198) Spanish Muslim

Maimonides (Rabbi Moses ben Maimon) (1135-1204) Spanish Jewish philosopher

Albertus Magnus (ca. 1200-1280) a Dominican teacher in Cologne (briefly also in Paris). He stressed the importance of the study of secular, even pagan, empirical science (Aristotle)--along with Christian theology. For Albertus, there is only one Truth. Thus theology should not fear philosophy/science.

Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274)
The most famous of the Dominican teachers was Thomas Aquinas, who taught in Paris and in Italy.
He was deeply influenced by Aristotle's empiricism (taught by Albertus Magnus). He attempted to couple it with the Platonic foundations of Christian philosophy of his times.

Aristotelianism. But being instinctively Aristotelian rather than Platonic (or Augustinian), Aquinas felt that knowledge came principally through the rational ordering of what our senses revealed to us about the natural order. The world around us was the reality that we truly had to deal with in the here and now. And this world was not in itself evil, not something to be dismissed, as did the Platonist-Augustinian mindset still strong in his times.

True, following up on Albertus' views, he constantly affirmed the primacy of "higher" revelation knowledge which alone gives us understanding of the divine mysteries of faith. But for Aquinas, such revelation knowledge meant only the logical revelation of Scripture--as interpreted traditionally by the Church Fathers.

Aquinas opposed Platonic-Augustinian mysticism with its emphasis upon truth derived from Spirit-inspired insight. To Aquinas, mystically derived wisdom seemed too dubious a source of knowledge. Mysticism was, to his way of thinking, terribly liable to abuse by milk-maids and overly imaginative cowherds.

Thus Aquinas downplayed the role in knowledge of the Holy Spirit and replaced it with the power of the Church and its wide range of sacraments in dispensing God's grace.

Further he explained works (of love) as the means by which faith is formed and the individual is justified before God and thus saved--although these works are possible only through the enabling power of God's Church-dispensed grace (through the sacraments).

[However, ironically enough, he himself had a powerful mystical experience of his own shortly before his death. At this point he himself commented on his life-long work of scholastic thought as being "mere straw"--a personal insight carefully ignored by those who continue to hold his scholasticism in worshipful regard!]

The Human Intellect. To Aquinas (the scholastic!) the physical and spiritual--body and soul--are not independent phenomenon but of one substance (in distinction to the dualism of the Platonist-Augustinians), though he acknowledged that the soul alone survives death, where it rests while it waits to be reunited with the body at the Last Day.

Aquinas took the view that the human mind was essentially a blank slate at birth. Gradually in its own development, the senses begin to organize physical perceptions in the mind, slowly bringing us to the awareness of reality (physical reality) as fact or data. At the same time, the active intellect (nous) focuses on this data and organizes it into useful information--or ideas or truths.

The source of this organizational power of the mind comes as a gift of God, who has placed an element of His own divine light within us--so that we might recognize forms or ideas.

God. God's essence is in the way all existence is summed up in Him--not just in certain Ideas or Forms (as an architect's blueprint does not sum up the architect himself). Further, God is existence--not just a part of it. God is the very force giving rise to all life or existence within creation (working according to specific Ideas or Forms to be sure--but transcending the function of being merely a prototype of all things).

God draws all things from potentiality to actuality. It is God Himself who draws us ever-forward in our thoughts, helping us to realize our humanity, in order to approach fulfillment of His Divine Plan. Indeed, its is God's design that man's purpose in life is to come to know fully all things--as the sum of all things gives testimony to the essence of God.

But--God does not impart knowledge by impressing every human thought with His thought (Platonism), but by fully endowed man at birth with his own potential, through his own human reason, to come to the knowledge of all things.

By expanding his own mind, man is making an intellectual journey toward God, is being conformed to God, is participating in God--a matter of great pleasure for God.

And by "expanding his own mind," Aquinas meant rational inquiry, empirical investigation of reality, the pursuit of science. Thus to Aquinas the pursuit of empirical knowledge was the way of mystical union with God.

The On-Going Development of Scholasticism
The spirit of wide-ranging and intense study of the world around us continued to move forward--guided by ever tighter rules of logical inquiry built on Aristotelianism, giving both discipline to the endeavor, and a certain rigidity to it at the same time.
Siger of Brabant (ca. 1240-1284). Siger was what might be termed a "secular Averroist"--one who believes in the autonomy of human reason.

Siger felt that we lived in a "double-truth" universe where theology and natural science were quite capable of being contradictory in their "truths" He undermined Aquinas' idea of the interdependence of science and theology. In turn, he focused on the study of physical science for its own sake--ordered by its own rules of logic--quite unrelated to theology. The spirit of secularism was being born!

Marsilio of Padua (1290-1343)

Anti-Scholastic Skepticism
Duns Scotus (1265-1308). Scotus was an anti-Thomist Franciscan. He felt that the study of creation neither was the pathway to an understanding of God nor an affirmation of the basic harmony of life. Each thing in the universe had a distinctness about its own existence. This was the foundation of reality: the world is made up of a multitude of separate things which have their existence quite independently of the existence of their defining "forms." It is this separateness between particular things and common forms that calls forth human thought--forcing the human mind to make the connection between form and particulars. This exertion of the human mind, however, is what gives dignity to human life and is reflective of God's own determining influence on nature.
God, in all his sovereignty, is not limited to the rules of human reason in the way he operates. God is not under any constraint to work within the logic of "forms" or "universals"--but can create anything as he particularly sees fit. Plato's (and Aristotle's) "universals" are not compelling as the starting point of knowledge.

Further, there is no way that we can use science or the study of the physical world to reflect back to the nature of God. The physical world we see around us is the product of free choice of God--who is able to make this world any way he wants to. His choices reveal no necessary qualities about God.

With this last idea, Scotus began undermining the confidence of medieval scholars who felt that human reason was going to be able to bring all reality--including divine reality--under human scrutiny (and ultimately control). To Scotus, the exercise of human reason was good--even necessary, even dignifying of the individual. But it was not going to usher in some great age of human management of life through human reason.

William of Ockham (1285-1349). In a way, Ockham was even more hard-hitting than Scotus in his critique of the optimistic rationalism of the scholasticism of his times. This English Franciscan living in Paris was an ardent nominalist, claiming that what was truly "real," that is, open to human understanding through direct observation and reason, were the individual or particular things belonging to the physical world. However, the mind naturally reached beyond this reality to create broad mental categories or universals (names for things, thus "nominalism") of closely related particulars. Thus the mind created for its own logical use the category of "dog"--a broad class of all animals that we recognize individually as dogs. In this the human mind was abstracting from the particular to the universals (Plato's "forms").

But these abstractions or universals had no reality in themselves. "Universals" were only mental constructs, nothing more--useful, of course, in helping us come to some kind of appreciation of reality, though by no means 100% reliable as a tool for establishing the truth of things.

From this observation resulted "Ockham's Razor": we must be very careful not to become too abstract in our rational handling of particulars--lest we leave reality behind in the process. Ockham was thus a skeptic with respect to the claims made for human reason (anticipating David Hume by centuries).

With respect to religion, Ockham (echoing Scotus) pointed out that we cannot move in our reasoning from our observations about the particular aspects of creation to produce general conclusions about the Creator. God is not constrained to work according to the rules of human logic. Logic, in fact, can tell us nothing about the nature of God or of ultimate things in creation. God can be known only by faith--a quite different enterprise than using logic. Only faith, not human logic, can touch God's absolute sovereignty and freedom.

Ockham, in an effort to rescue faith from Scholastic rationalism, acted to sever the relationship between religion and secular science, a unity which Aquinas had worked carefully to develop. To Ockham, reason was a useful tool for observing the natural world. But it was useless in probing the realm of God. Only Divine revelation, received through human faith, would bring us knowledge of that higher realm.

Ockham's nominalism had the effect of freeing secular science from theology. Science no longer had to serve as the handmaiden of theology--or be justified by its theological value.

The Decline of Scholasticism
Thus in the 14th century the via moderna was thus born--rising to challenge the via antiqua of Aquinas. Thirteenth century scholasticism, built on the rationalism of Plato and Aristotle, came under challenge. So did the world view of the Christian Middle Ages--and all of its certainties.
The contradicting positions of Aquinas, Scotus and Ockham not only undermined the unity of scholastic thought--they produced on-going schools of thought which deepened the divide.

Further, scholarly thinking lost its freshness as scholars seemed more focused on carrying on these old debates to the point of total tedium. As the freshness died, so did the vitality of the scholastic enterprise at the universities.

Finally, the Black Death of the mid 1300s and the too obvious politicization of the church (at about the same time) put the finishing touches on the collapse of the rational certainties of medieval scholasticism.

Europe was ready for new lines of thinking.

Early Mystics (1100 to 1300)
Hildegarde of Bingen (1098-1179)
An amazingly prolific writer, artist, musician, poet, doctor and herbalist who was also the abbess of a dual male/female monastery. Much of her work survives to this day. The Rhineland mystics were strongly influenced by her works two centuries later.

Joachim of Fiore (1132-1202)

Allegorized human history into three periods: the Father (patriarchal times of the Old Testament), the Son (the priestly or clerical times of the New Testament the church), and the Holy Spirit (a new age of individualistic spiritualism about to burst forth fully into human history).

Harmony of the Old and New Testaments
Exposition of the Book of Revelation
Psalterium of Ten Strings Everlasting Gospel
Bonaventura (Giovanni di Fidanza) (1217-1274)
A Franciscan of Augustinian bent. Franciscan spiritualist and mystic: knowledge through meditation and prayer--aided by divine grace--which raises our gaze above the mundane to the divine where the soul reaches God and finds ecstatic peace and love. Opposed to the wealth and worldly ways of formal Christianity--seeing the example of Christ and Francis as the true way of the Christian. He was fervently opposed to the Aristotelians at Paris (Aquinas).

Journey into the Soul of God (1259)
Disputed Questions Concerning Christ's Knowledge
Life of St. Francis (1263)
On the Incarnation (American U)
Mechtild of Magdeburg (1210-1280)
A Beguine (non-ordained lay worker), who late in life became a Dominican nun. She strove to reform the corruption within church--which often forced her to move from town to town.

The Flowing Light of the Godhead A journal which she kept about her reflections on events in her life
The Church and the Mystical Impulse
The end of the 13th century and the beginning of the 14th century began to produce a new religious or philosophical mood: a sense of personal piety through direct spiritual contact with God. This piety tended to distance itself from religious formalism (the outward observance of religious rites and ceremonies) and to focus instead on the process of spiritual conversion (inner reform of the heart). Others pushed even further in their quest for "unity" with God, seeking true "mystical" experience.
The "experiential" impulse within Christianity, despite domestic crusades and despite the orthodox teaching of the Dominican monks and the regular clergy, was always hard to contain by hierarchical authorities. The masses always stood ready to be swept up by any new wave of spiritual revival--a constant source of threat to the political position of the church, for such spiritualism was always privatistic and by-passed the official church with its energy.

The church hierarchy watched these developments rather nervously, fearing that they might produce among the faithful a tendency to seek one's own way to God apart from the administration of the graces and sacraments of the church.

Also, new mystical orders grew up almost spontaneously around Europe--much to the chagrin of the church. Combined with the rapid spread of the teaching orders (principally Franciscans and Dominicans), the priestly church hierarchy was losing its grip on the scheme of things. The "church" was coming more and more to be understood as being within the hearts and minds of the faithful.

Particularly problematic to the church were the Spiritual Franciscans--a small group of followers of St. Francis who insisted on pursuing diligently his program of poverty and charity. They split from the main order after it was "sanitized" by Bonaventura in an effort to bring the Franciscans more in line with papal thinking. The Spiritual Franciscans refused to accept Bonaventura's "reforms" and were eventually condemned by the church (Pope John XXII).

The German or Rhineland Mystics (1300 to 1350)
In preaching (using the German vernacular) to the Beguines and Dominican nuns under their care, these particular mystics touched their feminine piety with their Dominican theology, with its stress on the care of souls and the importance of spiritual self-sacrifice (rather than physical or outward renunciation).
Johannes "Meister" Eckhart (1260-1328?)

A prominent German Dominican, studying, teaching and preaching in Paris, Strassburg and Cologne. Eckhart viewed the human soul as containing a "divine spark" and thus being truly of the nature of God's. To Eckhart, the human soul was not just a mere reflection of God's soul, created in his image. The spark of the human soul contained in its very "ground" the same elements as God's soul--having existed at a point before creation in complete unity with the soul of God.

Eckhart urged the faithful to retreat from the world to search for this divine spark in the ground of their own souls, to discover there the nascent Word of God, and to become mystically reunited, not just with God but with "Godness" itself: to become one with Divinity once again.

In his later life, as he came under suspicion of heresy as a neo-platonist or even pantheist, Eckhart admitted to having been guilty of "exaggeration" and in the last years of his life backed into a more orthodox Thomist position. Nonetheless, shortly after his death (1329) parts of his writings were condemned by Pope John XXII.

Johannes Tauler (1300-1361)

A Dominican and disciple of Eckhart, preaching and teaching in Strasbourg and Basel. Tauler taught a more orthodox view that God gifts his people with a spiritual "ground" crafted in his own divine image. This is conferred as a matter of divine grace; it is not (as per Eckhart) "self- discovered" as a matter of natural property of the human being. To Tauler, the return to "oneness" with God is a matter of having our human wills united with God's--not a matter of absorbing our human nature into God's divine nature.

Tauler's example and sermons (the only surviving part of his writings) had a great influence on the Rhineland school of mystics, and after them on Luther, because of his stress on suffering and self-denial (experienced poignantly during the Black Death) and on the reliance on grace as the center-pieces of Christian faith.

Heinrich Suso (1295-1360)

A Dominican who studied at Cologne and was greatly influenced by Eckhart (whom he defended after the 1329 condemnation); he preached in his native Constance and at Ulm. Like Tauler, he spoke of the human union of wills--rather than substance--with God, and insisted on the great and eternal difference between created and uncreated being.

The Little Book of Truth (a widely popular meditation on Christ's passion)
Theologica Germanica (c. 1340)
An anonymous work characterized by Eckhartian thought. Luther, who wrote the preface to its first printed edition, attributed it to Tauler.

The English Mystics (1300 to 1400)
English mysticism grew up around the same time as Rhineland mysticism--although it tended to be more secluded (even as hermits)--i.e., less involved in social outreach--than Rhineland mysticism.
Richard Rolle (1300?-1349)

English hermit--who however ended life as a spiritual director of Cistercian nuns at Hampole.

Fire of Love
Walter Hilton (?-1396)
English hermit--who eventually became an Augustinian canon.

Treatise Written to a Devout Man (Wheaton: ccel)
The Scale of Perfection
[Unknown Author] The Cloud of Unknowing (later 1300s)
Julian of Norwich (1342-1415)

Anchoress attached to St. Julian's Church. Wrote of the Motherhood of God and Christ; stressed the goodness of God and creation (despite the ravages of the Black Death).

The Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love (Wheaton: ccel)
Flemish/Dutch Mystics and Pietists (1300 to 1400)
Jan van Ruysbroeck (1293-1381)
Flemish priest in Brussels; retired to Groenendael where in 1349 he and friends established a contemplative community of Augustinian canons.

Spiritual Expousals an early work which drew the criticism from Jean de Gerson of being pantheistic
Adornment (Wheaton: ccel)
Supreme Truth (Wheaton: ccel)
Sparkling Stone (Wheaton: ccel)
(a later work in which he stresses the continuing "created" nature of the mystic, even in union with God. Also: such joyous union is designed to lead to greater inspiration for the "common life" of good works, not retreat from the common life.)
Gerard Groote (1340-1384)
Founder (1370s-1380s) in the eastern Netherlands (centering in Deventer) of what eventually became known as the "Modern Devotion" movement (Devotio moderna). Strongly influenced by the Rhineland mystics and his friend, van Ruysbroek.

He took ordination as a deacon, and lived within both monastic and parish worlds, actively serving as a spiritual and practical reformer (which got him in trouble in 1383). He established in his own home in Deventer a community of laywomen devoted to serving God and society: the Sisters of the Common Life.

Florentius Radewijns (1350-1400)

A parish priest and disciple of Groote's who established in Deventer the Brothers of the Common Life. These laymen lived on the income of their book copying, permitting them to also teach young men of humbler circumstances who demonstrated a potential for full-time religious life.

Eventually these lay communities moved closer to the monastic traditions, some even taking the rule of St. Augustine and becoming fully encloistered.

Other Mystics (1300 to 1400)
Catherine of Siena (1347-1380)
Dominican tertiary. A strong proponent of the Pope's return to Rome from Avignon. Her theology combined the personal elements of mystical rapture with an active Christian mission to the sick and the poor.

Dialogue (Wheaton: ccel)