Greco-Christian stream·Rhineland Mystics·Heinrich Suso·Prologue and Chapters I–IV (philosophical core)

Prologue and Chapters I–IV (philosophical core)

By Heinrich Suso (Henry Suso), c. 1295–1366. Translated by the anthroposophy.ai project from the Middle High German of Bihlmeyer's 1907 critical edition, with Diepenbrock's 1854 modern German modernization as a cross-check. The Latin epigraph, the dialogic figures of the disciple (der junger) and the Eternal Truth (die ewige warheit), the scholastic apparatus inherited from Thomas Aquinas, Dionysius the Areopagite, John of Damascus, and Meister Eckhart, and the technical vocabulary of Eckhartian apophasis (Gelassenheit, Wesen, Gottheit, einikeit, anderheit, usbruch, entwerden, istigkeit) are preserved as load-bearing terms; their first occurrences are flagged and anchored against the project's Rhineland-mystics glossary v1.

Suso composed the Book of Truth as the first of three vernacular "little books" that together would become the Exemplar (the Vita, the Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit, the Büchlein der Wahrheit, the Briefbüchlein). The polemical occasion is the 1320s controversy over Eckhart's preaching — the Beghards and Brethren of the Free Spirit had appropriated Eckhart's language of "Gottheit beyond God" to justify an "ungeordnete friheit" ("disordered freedom") that dispensed with moral order and church discipline. Suso, Eckhart's Dominican confrere and youngest defender, sets out here to show that Eckhart's apophatic theology, rightly read, demands the strictest moral discipline and the most rigorous distinction between Creator and creature, even — and especially — at the apex of mystical union.

The format is the quaestio disputata in vernacular: a disciple puts questions to the Eternal Truth (the personified figure of doctrinal verity, parallel to the Eternal Wisdom of the second book), and the Truth answers with the precision of scholastic argument rendered into Middle High German. Suso's vernacular philosophical prose is a small revolution in itself: this is German learning to think in Eckhartian categories.

Prologue

Here begins the third book — on inner detachment, and on the good discernment that is to be had in the intellect.

"Ecce enim veritatem dilexisti: incerta et occulta sapientiae tuae manifestasti mihi." (Ps. 50:8 Vulgate / Ps. 51:6) — "Behold, thou hast loved truth: the uncertain and hidden things of thy wisdom thou hast made manifest unto me."

There was a person in Christ¹ who had, in his younger days, exercised himself in the outer man in all the practices that beginners are accustomed to exercise themselves in. But the inner man remained unexercised in the nearest, simplest Gelassenheit² — and he sensed plainly that something was wanting to him, though he did not know what. He carried on in this way for a long time, for many years. Then it happened one day that there came upon him an inkêr³ — an inward-turning — in which he was driven back into himself; and it was spoken within him: "You shall know that inward Gelassenheit brings a person to the nearest truth."

Now this noble word was still strange and unknown to him, but he had much love for it; and he was driven, firmly, in this and in the like, that before his death he might once come so far as to know that very thing nakedly and to attain it at its ground.⁴ And so it came about that he was warned and shown that, hidden in the inner figure of that thing, there lay a false ground of disordered freedom, and concealed there lay great injury to holy Christendom. From this he took fright, and for a time lost the inner call within himself.

And one day there came upon him a powerful inblick into himself, and it was lit up within him by godly truth that he should take no rebuff from this; for it has ever been the case and must ever be that the evil hides itself behind the good, and that one shall not therefore reject the good on account of the evil. It was meant — he saw — as it was in the old covenant, when God through Moses worked his true signs, and the magicians cast their false signs against them; and when Christ the true Messiah came, others came too and falsely showed themselves to be the same. So it is universally in all things. Therefore the good is not to be thrown out with the evil, but to be drawn out from it with good discernment, as the divine mouth does.

And so it was meant that good intellectual images⁵ were not to be rejected, where they hold their clear intellect submissively under the meaning of holy Christendom; nor were intellectual senses, which bear within them the good truth of right-conducted life, to be shunned; for they refine⁶ a person, and show him his nobility and the over-eminence of the divine essence and the nothingness of all other things — which by right impels a person above all things to true Gelassenheit.

And so he came back upon that earlier impulse, by which he had been admonished to a true detachment. Now he begged of the Eternal Truth that she would give him good discernment, so far as was possible, between those persons who aim at ordered simplicity and those others who aim — as is said — at disordered freedom, and would show him therein which were a right Gelassenheit, the one he sought to come to. And so it was answered him, in a light-bearing way, that all this should be done after the manner of a quaestio disputata⁷ — as if the disciple should ask and the Truth should answer. And he was first directed to the kernel of holy scripture, in which the Eternal Truth speaks, that he should there seek and read what the most learned and most living, to whom God has opened his hidden wisdom — as the matter stands in Latin — had said of it, or what holy Christendom held thereof, that he might rest upon sure truth. And from this it was kindled within him, as follows.

I. How a detached person begins and ends in oneness

To all persons who are to be led back in,⁸ it is first of all necessary to know their own and all things' first beginning — for in that same is also their last ending. Hereby one should know that all those who have ever spoken of truth come together in this: that there is something that is the first of all and the most simple, and before which there is nothing. Now this groundless essence⁹ Dionysius¹⁰ has gazed at in its bareness, and he says — and other masters say with him — that the simple, of which the discourse is, remains altogether unnamed by all names; for, as the art of Logic teaches, the name ought to express the nature and ratio^10a of the named thing. Now it is plainly known that the nature of the foresaid simple essence is endless and unmeasured and unencompassed by all creaturely intellect. And so it is known to all well-taught clerics that the wisdomless essence is also nameless.¹¹ And therefore Dionysius says, in his book On the Divine Names, that God is a not-being or a nothing¹² — and this is to be understood according to all the being and the istigkeit¹³ that we are able to lay upon him in a creaturely way. For whatever one lays upon him in such a way is in some way false, and the negation of it is true. From this one might say of him an eternal nothing. But yet, when one would speak of a thing, however over-transcendent and over-conceivable it is, one must coin some name for it.

This still simplicity's¹⁴ essence is its life, and its life is its essence. It is a living, essencing, istig intellect¹⁵ that understands itself, and is and lives itself in itself, and is the very same.

Now I cannot bring it further out into speech than this. And this I call the Eternal uncreated Truth, for all things are in it as in their newness and their first, and their eternal beginning. And here begins and ends a detached person in ordered indwelling — as shall hereafter be shown.

II. Whether in highest oneness any otherness can stand

The disciple asked, and spoke thus: It seems wonderful to me, since it is so, that this one is so altogether simple — whence then comes the manifoldness that one lays upon it? One clothes it with wisdom and speaks to it the wisdom; one with goodness, one with righteousness, and the like; and so the clergy speak according to the creed of the divine threefoldness. Why does one not let it abide in a simplicity that is what itself is? It seems to me, in everything, that this single one has too much working in it, and too much otherness — or else, how can it be a so altogether bare one, where there is so much manyness?

The Truth answered and said: This manyness is all one simple oneness with the ground and in the bottom.

The disciple said: What do you call the ground and the spring — or do you not call it the ground?

The answer of the Truth: I call the ground the spring and the source^15a out of which the out-flowings spring forth.

The disciple: Lord, what is that?

The Truth: That is the nature and the essence of the Godhead; and in this groundless abyss¹⁶ the threefoldness of the Persons sinks into its oneness, and all manyness is there divested of its own self in a certain way. There is also, in this manner of taking, no foreign working — only a still indwelling darkness.¹⁷

The disciple said: Ah, dear lord, tell me, what is it then that gives the first outbreak in this very one toward working, and most of all toward its own work, which is begetting?

The Truth said: That comes from its powerful might.

The disciple: Lord, what is that?

The Truth: That is godly nature in the Father. And in that same glance, it is pregnant with fertility and with work; for there has, in the taking of our intellect, the Godhead swung itself out into God.¹⁸

The disciple: Dear lord, is this not one?

The Truth said: Yes, Godhead and God are one — and yet Godhead neither works nor begets, while God begets and works. And this comes solely from the otherness that is in the designating, according to the naming of the intellect. Yet it is one in the ground; for in the divine nature there is nothing other than essence and the relational properties.¹⁹ And these add nothing to the essence in any way, however they hold otherness toward the opposite, that is, toward their counterpart. For the divine nature, taken according to the same ground, is no simpler in itself than the Father taken in the same nature, or any other Person. You are mistaken only in the in-imaging, when you look at it in the manner in which it is in-borne into the creature. In itself it is one and bare.

The disciple spoke: I mark well that I have come upon the ground of the nearest simplicity, beyond which no one can come who wishes to lead with truth.

III. How man and all creatures have eternally stood in God, and of their procession-into-becoming²⁰

The disciple: Eternal Truth, how then have the creatures eternally stood in God?

The answer: They have been there as in the eternal Exemplar.²¹

The disciple: What is the Exemplar?

The Truth: It is his eternal essence in the taking²² in which it gives itself communicatively to the creature to be partaken of. And mark, that all creatures eternally in God are God, and have there no grounded difference, save as has been said. They are the same life, essence, and might, in so far as they are in God; and they are the same one and no less. But after the out-stroke,²³ when they take their own essence, then each has its own essence separately, with its own form, which gives it natural being; for form gives being, distinct and separated, both from the divine essence and from all others — as the natural form of the stone gives it that it has its own essence. And this is not God's essence, for the stone is not God, nor is God the stone, however he and all creatures are from him, that they are. And in this out-flowing all creatures have won their God; for where the creature finds itself creature, there it acknowledges its createdness and its God.

The disciple: Dear lord — is the essence of the creature nobler in that it is in God, or in that it is in itself?

The Truth: The essence of the creature in God is not creature, but the kreatürlichkeit²⁴ — the creatureliness — of any creature is nobler to it, and more usable and more enjoyable to it, than the essence that it has in God. For what is it the more to the stone, or to the man, or to any creature, in their creaturely being, that they eternally in God were God? God has these things well and rightly ordered, for every creature has a turning back to its first origin in an under-separating way.^24a

The disciple: Ah lord, whence then comes sin, or wickedness, or hell, or purgatory, or the devil and the like?

The answer: Where the intellectual creature should have a sinking-out, a flowing-in-again into the one, and it stays turned-out with an un-right adopted property²⁵ upon its self-hood — from there comes devil and all wickedness.

IV. Of the true entering-in that a detached person must take through the only-begotten Son

The disciple: Of the creatures' procession-into-becoming I have well understood the truth. I would now gladly hear of the breaking-through²⁶ — how a person, through Christ, is to come back in and attain his blessedness.

The Truth: It is to be known that Christ, God's Son, had something common with all persons, and had something proper before other persons. That which is common to him with all persons is human nature — that he too was a true human being. He took to himself human nature and not person; and this is to be taken in the manner that Christ took human nature to himself in an undividedness of the matter, which the master Damascene²⁷ calls in atomo — in an individual unit — and so to the assumed common human nature there answered the pure blood-droplet in the blessed Mary's body,^27a from which he bodily was born.

And therefore human nature in itself has taken no such right — for it was Christ who took it on, and not person — that every person could and might in the same way be God and man. He is the one alone to whom this unfollowable dignity belongs, that he took the nature upon himself in such purity that nothing followed in him of original sin, nor of any other sin. And therefore he was the one alone who could redeem the indebted human kind.

The second: All other persons' meritorious works, which they do in right detachment of themselves, order the person properly to the blessedness that is the reward of virtue. And blessedness consists in the full divine fruition,²⁸ where all means and otherness are laid aside. But the oneness of the incarnation of Christ — that he is one in a personal being — surpasses this and is higher than the oneness of the soul's gemüt²⁹ with God. For from the first beginning, when the man was conceived, he was truly God's Son, so that he had no other subsistence than as God's Son. But all other persons have their natural subsistence in their natural essence — and however completely a person enters out of himself, or however purely they let themselves go in truth, this does not happen, that they are ever transposed into the divine Person's subsistence and lose their own.

The third: This man Christ had this too for all persons — that he is a head of Christendom, after the analogy of the head of the body of a man, as it stands written, that all those whom he has foreseen, he has prepared, that they should be conformed to the image of the Son of God, so that he might be the firstborn among many. And therefore, whoever wishes to have a right re-entering-in and to become a son in Christ, let him turn with right detachment to him from himself — and so he comes where he should.

The disciple: Lord, what is true detachment?

The Truth: Take a noteworthy distinction between these two words that say sich lazsen — "to let one's self go." And if you can rightly weigh and prove these two words at their utmost point, and look at them with right discernment, then you will quickly be brought to the truth.

Now take first the first word, that says sich — "self" or "me" — and consider what this is. And it is to be known that every person has a fivefold sich. The first sich he has in common with the stone, and that is being. Another with the herb, and that is growing. The third with the beasts, and that is sense-perception.^29a The fourth with all humans — that is, that he has a common human nature, in which the other four are all one. The fifth, which belongs to him in a proper way, is his personal man, both after nobility and after accident.³⁰

Now what is it that hinders the person and robs him of blessedness? It is — alone — the last sich, where the person takes the out-step from God upon himself, where he should turn back in; and where he establishes for himself, after accident, a proper sich: that is, that from blindness he claims for himself what is God's, and stays there, and loses himself with time in faults.

But he who wishes to let his self go in an ordered way must perform three inblickes³¹ — three inward gazes. The first thus: that with a sinking inward gaze he turn upon the nothingness of his own sich, beholding that this sich — and every creature's sich — is a nothing, let out of and shut out from the Icht³² — that single working might. The second inward gaze is that one should not overlook that, in the same nearest letting-go, his own bare sich nevertheless remains upon its own proper istig existence²² after the out-stroke, and is not altogether annihilated. The third inward gaze occurs with a sinking-down and a free giving-up of one's self in everything to which he ever betook himself in proper assumed creatureliness, in unfree manyness against the godly truth — be it in sorrow, in doing, or in letting be — so that with a rich might he passes himself by in a wiseloseklich manner,³³ and to himself, unreclaimably, entwirt³⁴ — un-becomes — and with Christ becomes one in oneness, so that he, out of this, in accordance with an in-yielding,³⁵ works at every time, takes every thing, and in this simplicity sees all things. And this released self becomes a Christ-formed I — of which the scripture speaks from Paul, who says: "I live, no longer I, Christ lives in me."³⁶ And that I call a well-weighed sich.

Now we take the other word forward, that he says: lazsen — to let go. He means by it to give up or to disdain — not in such a way that one might let it go, that it should altogether be brought to nothing, but only in the appearing,³⁷ and then it is right for him.

The disciple: Praised be the Truth! Dear lord, tell me: is there left to a blessed detached person an Ihtet³⁸ — an aught, an any-thing-at-all?

The Truth: It happens without doubt, when the good and faithful servant is led into the joy of his lord, that he is made drunk with the immeasurable overflowing of the divine house;³⁹ for it happens to him in an unspeakable way as to a drunken man who forgets himself, that he is not himself, that he is entworden to himself altogether, and is altogether vergangen — passed-over — into God, and has become one spirit with him in every way, as a little water-droplet poured into much wine. For as the droplet un-becomes itself, and draws on and into itself the taste and the color, so it happens to those who are in full possession of blessedness: that all human desires in an unspeakable way slip away from them, and they sink out of themselves and altogether sink into the divine will. Otherwise the scripture would not be true that says God is to become all things in all things, were it that something of the person remained in the person which was not altogether poured out of him. His being remains, but in another form, in another glory, in another might. And all this comes from his own groundless Gelassenheit.

And he speaks then upon the foregoing sense thus: that if any person in this life is so detached that he completely has comprehended that he never looks upon his self-hood in love or in sorrow, but rather altogether minds and loves himself for God after the most complete comprehension — of this, says he, I cannot understand whether it is. Let those step forward who have lived it; for, according to my understanding, it seems to me unlikely.

Out of all this discourse you may mark an answer to this question: that a right Gelassenheit of so noble a person in time is shaped and conformed after the Gelassenheit of the blessed, of whom the scripture speaks, more and less in measure as the persons have been more and less united or made one. And mark particularly that he says that they are there divested of their self-hood and transposed into another form and into another godly fruition and into another power. What now is the other form, except the godly nature and the divine essence into which they, and they into themselves, flow over, being the same? What is then another glory, except to be glorified and made godlike in the istig light that has no flowing-away? What is then another power, except that, from the self-hood and the same oneness, there is given to the person a divine power and a divine ability in doing and in letting be of all that belongs to his blessedness? And so the person is entmenschet⁴⁰ — un-humaned — as has been said.

The disciple: Lord, is this possible in time?

The Truth: The blessedness of which has been spoken can be attained in two ways. The one way is according to the most complete grade, which is above all possibility, and that cannot be in this time; for to the person's nature belongs the body, whose manifold press contradicts this. But the blessedness to be taken according to participated communicability — so it is possible, and yet to many a person it seems impossible. And this is not without reason; for hither no sense nor intellect may reach. Well, says a scripture, one finds a certain kind of human being — set-apart and lived people⁴¹ — that they are so altogether cleared-up and godly-formed in their gemüt that the virtues stand in them according to godly likeness; for they are entbildet and überbildet⁴² out of the first Exemplar's oneness, and come into a full forgetting of transitory and temporal life, and are transformed into the divine image, and are one with him. But it stands therewith that this belongs only to those who have possessed this blessedness in its highest, or to a few persons, the most pious, who yet go with the body in time.

Translator's notes

The Middle High German text is taken from Karl Bihlmeyer's 1907 critical edition (Heinrich Seuse: Deutsche Schriften, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer), pp. 326–337, corresponding to the Prologue and Chapters I–IV (Bihlmeyer's numbering; Diepenbrock's 1854 modernization counts the Prologue as Chapter I and so numbers the same material as I–V). Restorations of OCR-corrupt readings follow the consensus of Bihlmeyer's manuscript apparatus (sigla A, K, S, B, C, N) and are noted below only where the OCR damage materially shapes a reading. The Latin scholastic citations in Bihlmeyer's footnotes — to Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae and Sententiarum, Dionysius the Areopagite's De divinis nominibus and De caelesti hierarchia, John of Damascus's De fide orthodoxa, Augustine's De trinitate, Bernard of Clairvaux's De diligendo Deo, and Eckhart's Latin and German sermons — are preserved as references where they are textually load-bearing in Suso's argument.

¹ Ein mensche in Cristo — "a person in Christ," Suso's standing third-person self-designation throughout his works. He is the diener der ewigen wisheit, "the servant of Eternal Wisdom," in the Vita and the Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit; in the Büchlein der Wahrheit, simply der junger — "the disciple" — once the dialogue begins. The third-person framing is doctrinal, not autobiographical: the speaker is a type of the seeking Christian, not a private individual.

² Gelassenheit (MHG gelâzenheit) is the master-term of the Rhineland mystical vocabulary, inherited from Eckhart and made pastoral by Tauler and Suso. The English "detachment" is the standard scholarly rendering. The German verb gelâzen (Modern German gelassen) means literally "to let go," "to release"; the noun Gelassenheit is the state of having let go. The Eckhartian register requires that this be heard not as passive resignation but as the active, athletic letting-go of created multiplicity, which alone clears space for the divine Geburt (birth) in the ground of the soul. On first occurrence the German is preserved in italics to flag the term's load-bearing weight; thereafter "detachment" carries it.

³ Inkêr — "in-turning," Tauler's word, taken from Eckhart, denoting the soul's reflexive turn back upon its own ground. Rendered as "inward-turning" rather than the more usual "introspection," because Suso's MHG carries a directional sense (an event of being driven in) that "introspection" loses.

⁴ Ze grunde ervolgti — "attain at its ground." Grund ("ground") is the second master-term of the Rhineland vocabulary, after Gelassenheit. It denotes the soul's deepest interior — Eckhart's grunt der sele, the place where the eternal birth occurs — and, by reciprocity, the divine ground in which the soul's ground rests.

⁵ Vernünftigü bilde — "intellectual images." Bihlmeyer's apparatus notes that this is Suso's defense of Eckhart's image-language against the Beghards' rejection of mediation. The point is that images held under the discipline of the intellect, conformed to the meaning of the Church, remain pedagogical and lead the person upward; only images held outside that discipline become idols.

⁶ Entgrobent — "refine," literally "un-coarsen." MHG entgroben survives only in this register.

⁷ Usgeleiten biscbafi (Bihlmeyer reads usgeleitten bischaft) — "an extended (or set-out) exposition," referring to the scholastic disputed-question form. Bihlmeyer's marginal note ad loc. cites Bonaventure and Thomas as Suso's formal model.

⁸ Wider in gefüret — "led back in." The double prefix wider-in- names the reditus — the return-movement of the creature into God — that completes the exitus (procession) of Chapter III. The whole Book of Truth is structured by this exitus/reditus arc.

⁹ Grundeloz wesen — "groundless essence." Grundlos in MHG carries the double force of "without bottom" (abyssal) and "without ground" (without prior cause). Either reading is doctrinally apt: the divine essence is bottomless to the creature's intellect, and is its own ground.

¹⁰ Dionysius — Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (c. 500 CE), the foundational author of Christian apophatic theology. Bihlmeyer's footnote cites the relevant De divinis nominibus I, 4–5 and De mystica theologia.

¹⁰ᵃ Ratio — MHG redelicheit, the vernacular for Lat. rationabilitas / ratio (intelligibility, conceptual content). The principle being cited from the ars Logica — that the name should express the nature and ratio of the named thing — is scholastic: Bihlmeyer's apparatus chains it through Aristotle, Metaphysics IV.7 (1012a 24, ratio quam significat nomen est conceptio intellectus de re significata per nomen) and Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I q. 13 a. 4. Preserved here as ratio with the MHG flag, rather than the more natural English "intelligibility," to keep the scholastic register audible.

¹¹ Daz wiselos vresen och nameloz ist — "the wisdomless essence is also nameless." Bihlmeyer's footnote chains the citation through Justin, Gregory of Nazianzen, John of Damascus, Augustine, Thomas, and Eckhart — the standard medieval apophatic pedigree from the Greek Fathers forward.

¹² Ein niht — "a nothing." The Dionysian non-being (non-ens), here in Eckhart's vernacular. The term is not nihilistic; it names God's transcendence of all creaturely categories of being. Bihlmeyer cross-references the Vita 167,5; 184,22; 187,12 for parallel uses.

¹³ Istigkeit — Eckhart's coined abstract noun from ist ("is"), rendered into the scholarly English as "is-ness." Bihlmeyer's footnote (citing Denifle) distinguishes istigkeit (Sein, esse) from wesen (Wesenheit, essentia) and complains that Lexer's MHG dictionary conflates them. The project preserves the distinction: istigkeit = is-ness / existence as such; wesen = essence / determinate beingness. Both are technical Eckhartian terms that Suso inherits.

¹⁴ Stiller einveltikeit wesen — "the still simplicity's essence." Stilness and simplicity in MHG mystical writing always denote the unmoved unity in which all manifoldness rests.

¹⁵ Lebendü, wesendü, istigü vernunftikeit — "a living, essencing, istig intellect." This whole formula is a near-direct quotation from Eckhart 106,29 — and is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that Suso means his Book of Truth as a defense of his teacher.

¹⁵ᵃ The ground the spring and the source — Bihlmeyer's text shows what appears to be a printer-/OCR-level dittography of ursprung (the line reads den urspmng und den ursprung), with marginal MS variants giving only one ursprung. The English distinguishes "spring" and "source" to render the doubling without flat redundancy; the semantic distinction is the translator's, the doubling is the editor's.

¹⁶ Grundelosem abgrunde — "groundless abyss." Eckhart's signature locution. The Godhead is the "abyss" beneath the Persons of the Trinity, the unmoved unity into which all manifoldness sinks.

¹⁷ Stillü inswebende dunsterheit — "a still indwelling darkness." Suso's vernacular rendering of the Dionysian caligo — the divine darkness that is also light beyond light. Inswebende — "in-hovering," "indwelling" — carries the Johannine resonance of the Spirit hovering over the deep.

¹⁸ In der nemunge unserre vernunft gotheit zü gotte geswungen — "in the taking of our intellect, the Godhead has swung itself out into God." The verb swingen names the dynamic out-leap from the unmoved Godhead into the working God who creates and begets. This is the Eckhartian distinction Gottheit / Gott in its most compressed form. Bihlmeyer cross-references Eckhart's German Sermon 56: got wirket, diu gotheit wirket nit; sí enhât niht ze wirkenne ("God works, the Godhead does not work; she has nothing to work").

¹⁹ Wesen und die widertragenden eigenschefte — "essence and the relational properties." The Thomist analysis of the Trinity: in God there is only the divine essence and the relationes oppositae (Father–Son, Active–Passive Spiration), and the relations are identical with the essence. Bihlmeyer cites Summa Theologiae I q. 29 a. 4 and q. 38 a. 3.

²⁰ Gewordenlich usbruch — "procession-into-becoming." Suso's vernacular for the Latin processio. Gewordenlich (lit. "in-the-manner-of-having-become") names the modality of finite procession, as distinct from the eternal procession of Son from Father, which is not "becoming" but the eternal generation.

²¹ Exemplar — the Augustinian/Bonaventurean term for the eternal idea of the creature in the divine intellect. Preserved untranslated as a scholastic term-of-art.

²² In der nemunge — "in the taking." MHG nemung names the receiving / apprehending of a content by the intellect; Bihlmeyer notes this is technical scholastic vocabulary for the mode in which the divine essence is grasped as exemplar of the creatures. The phrase recurs in Suso for the modality under which something is conceived.

²³ Nach dem usschlage — "after the out-stroke." MHG usschlac names the moment of formal emergence into individual being — the creature's coming-out-of-God as itself, with its own form. The term is dynamic: a striking-forth.

²⁴ Kreatürlichkeit — "creatureliness." Suso's point is paradoxical and theologically careful: the creature's being-in-God is divine, but the creature's being-as-creature is its own proper good, given by God. Reading the Book of Truth as a defense of Eckhart against the Free Spirit reading: where the Beghards held that the soul's being in God is its true being and the creaturely being mere illusion to be dissolved, Suso holds (with Aquinas, with Eckhart rightly read) that the creaturely being is positively good, ordered to God, and to be inhabited fully.

²⁴ᵃ Under-separating way — MHG underwürflicher wise, more precisely "under-subjecting" or "subordinated" way. The creature's reditus (turning back to its first origin) is subordinated to its own creaturely mode — it does not become God, it returns to God as creature. The English calque "under-separating" preserves the prefix-structure but obscures the subordination sense.

²⁵ Unrehter angesehener eigenschaft — "an un-right adopted property." Sin is not the soul's being-creature, but the soul's mistaken claim to its creatureliness as its own absolute self-hood — refusing to flow back into the divine ground.

²⁶ Durchbruch — "breaking-through." Eckhart's term for the soul's penetrating beyond the Persons of the Trinity into the Godhead. Suso reframes Eckhart's durchbruch through the door of Christ's incarnation: the breaking-through is not over against Christ but through him.

²⁷ Damascenus — John of Damascus (c. 675–749), De fide orthodoxa III, 11. The Damascene's distinction natura / hypostasis — that Christ took on universal human nature, not an individual hypostatic personhood — is the structural pivot of Suso's Christology in this chapter.

²⁷ᵃ Blessed Mary's body — MHG gesegneten Marien lib. Gesegnet = "blessed / consecrated" (not gnädig = "gracious"); the Marian-purity register is the same one Eckhart names in his Commentarius in Ecclesiasticum (Archiv II, 663, line 240) — Christus secundum hominem ex purissimis Virginis sanguinibus est formatus. Bihlmeyer's apparatus cross-references the Latin purissimis with Suso's MHG gesegneten.

²⁸ Voller götlicher gebruchunge — "the full divine fruition." MHG gebruchung / Latin fruitio — the beatific enjoyment of God, the goal of human destiny in scholastic theology.

²⁹ Gemüt — "gemüt." Often rendered "mind" or "spirit" in English; here closer to "the affective-intellective core of the soul." MHG gemüete is broader than modern German Gemüt and ranges from intellect to feeling-disposition. Preserved as a transliteration where the technical sense is foregrounded.

²⁹ᵃ Sense-perception — MHG enphinden, Lat. sentire / sensus: the third operation of the Aristotelian sensitive soul (anima sensitiva), common to humans and animals, distinct from anima vegetativa's growing and anima rationalis's thinking. "Feeling" in modern English skews toward affect; the scholastic register requires the perceptual sense.

³⁰ Nach dem adel und och nach dem zuoval — "after nobility and after accident." Scholastic distinction: the person's substantive core (its adel, its "noble" essence) and its accidents (its accidental properties). The point of the fivefold sich is that the first four belong to common nature, but the fifth — the individual personal man — is where the soul falls into self-claim and so loses the way back in.

³¹ Inblick — literally "in-gaze," "in-look." Bihlmeyer reads this as Suso's technical term for a contemplative intuitus — a single beholding act of the inner eye. The threefold inblick of detachment is the practical pedagogy at the heart of the Book of Truth: a meditation method, not just a theory.

³² Icht — MHG abstract noun from ist, parallel to istigkeit: "is-ness," but here used as the divine name in the contrast Icht / Niht (Is / Not). Bihlmeyer notes the parallel in Eckhart 384,12 and 151,9.

³³ Wiseloseklich — "in a way-less way," "without taking account of this or that." MHG wîselôs — without manner, without specific determination. Eckhart's "way without way," echoed by Suso here.

³⁴ Unwiderneniklich entwerde — "unreclaimably un-becomes." Entwerden — "un-becoming" — is the dynamic counter-term to werden (becoming), and names the soul's letting itself sink out of its own subsistent self into the divine ground. Standard scholarly rendering "un-becoming" is preserved.

³⁵ Inblickend injehenne — "an in-yielding." The third inblick's affective character: a yielding-into rather than a gripping-of.

³⁶ Galatians 2:20.

³⁷ In der vermihtunge — "in the appearing" / "in the seeming." The Pauline distinction between dying-to-self as actual annihilation (impossible for the embodied creature in time) and dying-to-self as a seeming annihilation (real, but in time and under the conditions of finitude). The detached person genuinely lets go, but his being is not made nothing.

³⁸ Ihtet — the indefinite-noun form of iht / icht ("aught," "something," "any is-thing"), parallel to Niht ("naught") in Eckhart's Icht / Niht pair, and distinct from the verb ist. The disciple is asking whether anything-at-all remains of the blessed detached person, not whether is-ness (istigkeit) remains. The Truth's reply turns on precisely this: in the unspeakable way as to a drunken man, the person's being (sin Wesen) remains, but in another form, glory, and might — so an Ihtet does remain, though transposed.

³⁹ Echo of Psalm 35:9 (Vulgate 36:9) — inebriabuntur ab ubertate domus tuae — "they shall be inebriated with the plenty of thy house." Bihlmeyer notes that this whole passage is a near-quotation of Bernard of Clairvaux, De diligendo Deo c. 10 and 15. The image of the drop-in-wine for the soul-in-God is Bernardine; Suso adopts it precisely to inoculate his Eckhartianism against the charge of pantheism. Bernard, the most orthodox of the twelfth-century mystics, used the same image — therefore the figure does not entail substantial dissolution of the soul, only its perfect conformity.

⁴⁰ Entmenschet — "un-humaned." Parallel to entworden in the apophatic register. The point is not that the person ceases to be human, but that the human is so transformed that its operations are now performed by God in him — vivit in me Christus.

⁴¹ Geleptü menschen — "lived (out) people." MHG geleben names the achieved state of one who has actually lived through the discipline. Not "people who have lived" generically, but those who have completed the spiritual path that the Book of Truth lays out.

⁴² Entbildet und überbildet — "un-imaged and over-imaged." Eckhart's three-step formula for the soul's journey is gebildet, entbildet, überbildet — formed (by sense and creature-images), un-formed (in detachment), over-formed (into the divine image). Suso here names two of the three steps; the full triadic motto appears in Eckhart's German Sermon 40 and elsewhere. Preserving the prefix-structure in English ("un-imaged / over-imaged") is awkward but necessary to keep the technical force.

Source citation

Karl Bihlmeyer (ed.), Heinrich Seuse: Deutsche Schriften im Auftrag der Württembergischen Kommission für Landesgeschichte (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1907), pp. 326–337 (Prologue and Chapters I–IV of the Büchlein der Wahrheit). Public-domain critical edition; archive.org identifier bub_gb_htUMAAAAIAAJ.

Cross-checked against: Melchior Diepenbrock (ed.), Heinrich Suso's Leben und Schriften (Augsburg: K. Kollmann, 1854), pp. 260–268 (Diepenbrock's modern German modernization, with preface by Joseph Görres). Archive.org identifier lebenundschrift01grgoog.

Manuscript witnesses by Bihlmeyer's sigla: A (Strasbourg, 14th c.; the foundational Exemplar manuscript, destroyed in the 1870 bombardment but extensively transcribed by Bihlmeyer's predecessors); K (Einsiedeln 710, 15th c.); S (Stuttgart HB I 195, 15th c.); B (Berlin mgo 191, 15th c.); C (Colmar 256, 15th c.); N (Nürnberg, 15th c.).

Project English: see /about/translations/ for methodology and license. Dedicated to the public domain (CC0 1.0 Universal).

JSON: /api/sources/rhineland-mystics/suso/vol-2-01-prologue-and-chapters-i-iv.json