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HISTORY OF THE ROSICRUCIANS.
translation was largely circulated and held in the
highest repute, more especially in Germany, where the
Areopagite was appealed to as an authority by Eckhart at
the beginning of the fourteenth century. At this time
Germany was a stronghold of mysticism, which, according
1 to Ueberweg, was at first chiefly developed in sermons by
its aim was to advance
monks of the Dominican Order;
Christianity by edifying speculation,
and to render it com-
" The
prehensible by the transcendent use of the reason.
author and perfecter of this entire development was Master
Eckhart," who taught that the creature apart from the
Absolute, that is, from God, was nothing, that " time, space,
and the plurality which depends on them," are also nothing
in themselves, and that " the duty of man as a moral being
is to rise beyond this nothingness of the creature, and by
direct intuition to place himself in immediate union with
the Absolute." 2
Eckhart was followed by Tauler, a great light of German
mysticism, and one profoundly versed in the mysteries of
the spiritual and interior life. A century later, with the
revival of Platonism, came the Cardinal Nicolas Cusanus,
"a man of rare sagacity, and an able mathematician, who
arranged and republished the Pythagorean ideas, to which
he was much inclined, in a very original manner, by the
aid of his mathematical knowledge." This representative
of the mysticism of Eckhart provided Giordano Bruno
with the fundamental principles of his sublime and poetical
conceptions. Bruno " renewed the theory of numbers, and
gave a detailed explanation of the decadal system. With
him, God is the great unity which is developed in the
1 "Hist, of Phil. Trans.," Morris, i., p. 468.
2
Ibid., p. 469. Tenneman, p. 257.