Note 470 — Chapter IX · CHRISTENDOM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

The principal German figure of the period is Master Eckhart (d. 1329), who, finding religious beliefs excluded from the sphere of reason by the freer philosophy of his day, undertook to show that they were all matters of reason. He was, in fact, a mystically reasoning preacher, and he taught in the interests of popular religion. Naturally, as he philosophized on old bases, he did not really subject his beliefs to any skeptical scrutiny, but took them for granted and proceeded speculatively upon them. This sufficed to bring him before the Inquisition at Cologne, where he recanted conditionally on an appeal to the Pope. Dying soon after, he escaped the papal bull condemning twenty-eight of his doctrines. His school later divided into a heretical and a Church party, of which the former, called the “false free spirits,” seems to have either joined or resembled the antinomian Brethren of the Free Spirit, then numerous in Germany. The other section became known as the “Friends of God,” a species of mystics who were “faithful to the whole medieval imaginative creed, Transubstantiation, worship of the Virgin and Saints, Purgatory.”470 Through Tauler and others, Eckhart’s pietistic doctrine gave a lead to later Protestant evangelicalism; but the system as a whole can never have been held by any popular body.471