through himself.”  Still he speaks, like Dionysius and Eckhart, of the “Divine darkness,” “the nameless, formless nothing,” “the wild waste,” and so forth; and says of God that He is “the Unity in which all multiplicity is transcended,” and that in Him are gathered up both becoming and being, eternal rest and eternal motion.  In this deepest ground, he says, the Three Persons are implicit, not explicit.  The Son is the Form of all forms, to which the “eternal, reasonable form created after God’s image” (the Idea of mankind) longs to be conformed.

The creation of the world, according to Tauler, is rather consonant with than necessary to the nature of God.  The world, before it became actual, existed in its Idea in God, and this ideal world was set forth by means of the Trinity.  It is in the Son that the Ideas exist “from all eternity.”  The Ideas are said to be “living,” that is, they work as forms, and after the creation of matter act as universals above and in things.  Tauler is careful to show that he is not a pantheist.  “God is the Being of all beings,” he says; “but He is none of all things.”  God is all, but all is not God; He far transcends the universe in which He is immanent.

We look in vain to Tauler for an explanation of the obscurest point in Eckhart’s philosophy, as to the relations of the phenomenal to the real.  We want clearer evidence that temporal existence is not regarded as something illusory or accidental, an error which may be inconsistent with the theory of immanence as taught by the school of Eckhart, but which is too closely allied with other parts of their scheme.

The indwelling of God in the soul is the real centre of Tauler’s doctrine, but his psychology is rather intricate and difficult.  He speaks of three phases of personal life, the sensuous nature, the reason, and the “third man”—­the spiritual life or pure substance of the soul.  He speaks also of an “uncreated ground,” which is the abyss of the Godhead, but yet “in us,” and of a “created ground,” which he uses in a double sense, now of the empirical self, which is imperfect and must be purified, and now of the ideal man, as God intended him to be.  This latter is “the third man,” and is also represented by the “spark” at the “apex of the soul,” which is to transform the rest of the soul into its own likeness.  The “uncreated ground,” in Tauler, works upon us through the medium of the “created ground,” and not as in Eckhart, immediately.  The “created ground,” in this sense, he calls “the Image,” which is identical with Eckhart’s “spark.”  It is a creative principle as well as created, like the “Ideas” of Erigena.