those who died before the event), was a stumbling-block to many thoughtful minds.  The patriarchs of the Old Testament were looked upon as saved—­to some extent—­by the fact of their being the ancestors or prophets of Christ; but pagans and Greeks, including Aristotle, were condemned even by the great Dante.  At the conclusion of his Divine Comedy Dante proved himself a truly inspired mystic, for he gave to us the profoundest vision of the divinity which has ever been vouchsafed to man.  But his genius was directed and restricted by the dogmas of the Church; his religious standpoint was the standpoint of the early Middle Ages and dogmatic Catholicism.  As poet and lover he was the inaugurator of a new world; here he represents the culmination and conclusion of the condemned world-system.  He was the iron landmark of the ages—­Eckhart, the creator of eternal values.

The foremost of the precursors of Eckhart was Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153).  He was the exponent of the love of God which he placed above knowledge; in one of his letters he calls love “the existence of God Himself,” basing his definition on the passage in the Gospel of St. John, “God is Love.”  “Love is the eternal law which created and preserves the universe; the whole world is governed by love; but although love is the law to which all creation is subject, it is not itself without law, but it is a law unto itself.  Serfs and mercenaries are ruled by laws which are not from God, but which they made themselves; some because they do not love God, others because they love the things of this world better than God....  They made their own laws and subordinated the universal and eternal laws to their own will.  But those (who live righteously) are in the world as God is:  neither serfs nor mercenaries, but the children of God and, like God Himself, they live only by the law of love.”  “His greatest happiness is complete absorption in the vision of the divine and forgetfulness of self.”  “All love is an emanation of that one love.  It is the eternally creative and governing law of the universe.”  “To be penetrated by such emotion is to become deified.  As a drop of water in a cup of wine is completely dissolved and takes the taste and colour of the wine, so also, in an indescribable manner, is the human will absorbed in the divine will, and transformed into the will of God.  For how could God become all in all if anything human were left in man?” “They are completely immersed (the martyrs) in the infinite ocean of eternal light, in radiant eternity....”  The entranced soul “shall lose all knowledge of itself and become completely absorbed in God; it shall become unlike itself in the measure as it has received the gift of becoming divine.”  Sensuous metaphors from the Song of Songs and the Psalms are again and again intermingled with these lofty thoughts.  But in spite of his divine emotion, in spite of his anticipations of the German mystics, Bernard took the standpoint of ecclesiastical orthodoxy whenever