The time was ripe and the consummators came:  Dante in the south, Eckhart in the countries north of the Alps.  With regard to Dante, I will say one thing only; he gathered together all the achievements of the new art and transcended them in a work which has never been surpassed.  The profoundly symbolical words, “The new life is beginning,” are written at the commencement of his Vita Nuova, and with his Divine Comedy the art of Europe had attained perfection.

It is necessary to give a more detailed account of Eckhart.  He had been almost forgotten in favour of his pupils, Tauler and Suso, and the unknown author of the Theologica Germanica (to which Luther wrote a preface), but to-day a faint idea of the great importance of this man is beginning to dawn upon the world.  Eckhart was the greatest creative religious genius since Jesus, and I believe that in time his writings will be considered equal to the Gospel of St. John.  He grasped the spirit of religion with unparalleled depth; everything produced by the highly religious later mediaeval era pales before his illumination.  Compared to him, St. Augustine, St. Bernard, and even St. Francis dwindle into insignificance; all the later reformers are small beside the greatness of his soul.  Every one of his sermons contains profound passages, such as “God must become I and I must become God.”  “The soul as a separate entity must be so completely annihilated that nothing remains except God, yea, that it becomes more glorious than God, as the sun is more glorious than the moon.”  “The Scriptures were written and God created the world solely that He may be born in the soul and the soul again in Him.”  “The essence of all grain is wheat, of all metal gold, and of all creatures man.  Thus spoke a great man:  ’There is no beast, but it is in some way a semblance of man.’” “The least faculty of my soul is more infinite than the boundless heavens.”  “Again we understand by the kingdom of God the soul; for the soul and the Deity are one.”  “The soul is the universe and the kingdom of God.”  “God dwells so much within the soul that all His divinity depends on it.”  “Man shall be free and master of all his deeds, undestroyed and unsubdued.”

Eckhart was the first man who thought consecutively in the German vernacular, and who made this philosophically still virginal language a medium for expressing profound thought.  In addition he wrote Latin treatises which were discovered a short time ago; I have not read them, but I have no doubt that his profoundest convictions were expressed in the German tongue.  The Latin language has at all times fettered the spirit far more successfully than the still untainted and living German.