Emotional mysticism was the prevailing form of mysticism in those days; even Eckhart’s pupil, Suso, belonged to this class of mystics.  This vague sentimentalism saved many a mind from the rigid dogmas of the Church, and as its vagueness could be interpreted in more than one way, it caused very little offence; but these visions and ecstasies, which are so often mistaken for true mysticism, have done much to bring the latter into contempt with the seriously minded.  Eckhart did not acknowledge it as genuine mysticism and directly condemned it in many of his writings; and as he rejected mystic sentimentalism, clearly divining its pathological cause, so he also rejected asceticism and all religious ceremonies.  The evangelical poverty of the Franciscan monks was an object of loathing to him.  St. Francis (and thirty years before him Peter Valdez) had naively interpreted the imitation of Christ as a life of absolute poverty, and had been relentless in his denunciation of worldly wealth, which every monk of his order had to renounce.  He himself never touched money, seeing in it the source of all evil.  His transcendent treasure was “Holy Poverty”; Jacopone wrote an ardent hymn to “Queen Poverty,” and even Thomas, the representative of Dominican erudition, theoretically took up the cudgels on its behalf.  But even in the primitive Church the principle of worldly and spiritual poverty was widely spread and encouraged.  In the defence of poverty, which was practically nearly always synonymous with idleness and begging, and therefore roused much hostility among the people, Bonaventura pointed out (in his treatise, De Paupertate Christi) that Jesus Himself had never done any manual work.  The universal preference for a contemplative life encouraged the tendency, and the extreme charitableness of the Middle Ages made its realisation possible.  Work was frequently looked upon as a punishment—­a view which could easily be upheld by reference to Adam’s expulsion from Paradise—­and inflicted upon the monks for offences against the rules.  Dante’s friend, Guido Cavalcanti, expressed the natural sentiment that poverty is a distressing condition, in a canzone which bristles with insults hurled at the Queen of the Franciscans: 

     Yea, rightly art thou hated worse than death,
     For he, at length, is longed for in the breast.

But not with thee, wild beast,
Was ever aught found beautiful or good;
For life is all that man can lose by death,
Not fame and the fair summits of applause;
His glory shall not pause
But live in men’s perpetual gratitude. 
While he who on thy naked sill has stood
He shall be counted low, etc.

D.G.  ROSSETTI.