# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1894_S11
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1894. 11

dom, study, temptation, pressed-out stripping. Münzer was acquainted with writings of the mystics. He says himself that he had read Joachim of Floris, Suso, Tauler. With him everything is still more confused and blurred than with his teachers who fell furthest into mysticism. What he calls study is, with his teachers, meditation, a still cognitive reflection on God and divine things. What he calls boredom is the contemplation of the mystics, where there is no sober thinking but a rapt gazing upon God. But the highest degree is what Luther called the complete emptying, Münzer the pressed-out stripping, the mystics the inner mortification, Molinos inner abstraction, where one refrains from all thoughtful penetration into God and from all consciously practical longing for God — the complete suppression of the self, etc. — where one waits in an unconscious staring at God, according to Ruysbroeck's description. Here God meets him without means. From God's unity a simple light streams to him, as the Hesychasts already taught, which presents itself as darkness, nakedness, nothingness. In the darkness man loses all mode and drifts as if wandering. In nakedness (Münzer's stripping) man loses all contemplation and all distinction. In all mystics and enthusiasts the exuberance of feeling goes together with sober thinking. All enthusiasms are serpents, where one shimmers more beautifully than another, but poisonous serpents they all are, and in the end they agree in the false doctrine: God not without me, I not without God. One cannot bring the dark oracular utterances of the enthusiasts to clear definitions either; one can only repeat their fancies and roughly determine the sense. Above all, a sound Christian who, thank God, has not fallen into that mystical fog, nor stood in boredom as Carlstadt boasted of himself, can form no idea of these fancies. In keeping with what has been said, Luther describes boredom: "A sectarian spirit runs into a corner, shuts its mouth, must not read nor hear, but waits until our Lord God speaks with it, and waits for the Spirit and says: 'Oh, this is taught by God.'" (IX, 590.) And again: "Against this are the enthusiasts when they hear it said here: 'Unless the Father draws you, you cannot come to me.' These then despise the external Word, want to take it away altogether and let it go, and bring it about that one is not to heed the Word which Christ himself spoke with his own mouth; but one is to creep into a corner, take the head in the hands, speculate, and inquire about God, so that they might be drawn before the Word and without the Word." (IX, 587.)

Contrary to all enthusiasm is Luther's principle: Spirit only through Scripture. "Do you see there the devil, the enemy of divine order? How he gapes at you with the words Spirit, Spirit, Spirit! and yet there-