III. What is Mysticism?

We can come nearest to present-day concepts if we start with the still fairly recent forms of mysticism found among the German mystics from Meister Eckhart[^2] onwards, during the 13th and 14th centuries, up to their culmination in that incomparable mystic, Angelus Silesius.[^3] If we examine their mysticism, we find that it sought to reach a true knowledge of the deepest foundations of the world by a purely inward soul-experience; above all, by the liberation of the soul from all external impressions and perceptions, so that the soul would draw back from the outer world and try to plunge into the depths of its own inward life. In other words, a mystic of this type believes that by this means he can find the divine ground of the world, which he would not be able to do if he attempted to analyse natural phenomena, however intensively, and to grasp them with his intellect. His view is that outward sense-impressions form a kind of veil through which human cognition cannot penetrate in its search for the divine foundations of the world. The inward experiences of the soul, however, form a much thinner veil, and it is possible to penetrate through this to the divine ground, which also lies at the foundation of external appearances. This is the mystical way of Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler[^4] and Suso[^5] and other mystics of that century, leading to Angelus Silesius.