Eckhart is followed, in the fourteenth century, by John Tauler, and Nicolas of Basel, "the Friend of God in the Oberland." From these sprang up the Society of the Friends of God, true mystics and followers of the old tradition. Mead remarks that Thomas Aquinas, Tauler, and Eckhart followed the Pseudo-Dionysius, who followed Plotinus, Iamblichus, and Proclus, who in turn followed Plato and Pythagoras.[155] So linked together are the followers of the Wisdom in all ages. It was probably a "Friend" who was the author of _Die Deutsche Theologie_, a book of mystical devotion, which had the curious fortune of being approved by Staupitz, the Vicar-General of the Augustinian Order, who recommended it to Luther, and by Luther himself, who published it A.D. 1516, as a book which should rank immediately after the _Bible_ and the writings of S. Augustine of Hippo. Another "Friend" was Ruysbroeck, to whose influence with Groot was due the founding of the Brethren of the Common Lot or Common Life--a Society that must remain ever memorable, as it numbered among its members that prince of mystics, Thomas à Kempis (A.D. 1380-1471), the author of the immortal _Imitation of Christ_.
In the fifteenth century the more purely intellectual side of mysticism comes out more strongly than the exstatic--so dominant in these societies of the fourteenth--and we have Cardinal Nicolas of Cusa, with Giordano Bruno, the martyred knight-errant of philosophy, and Paracelsus, the much slandered scientist, who drew his knowledge directly from the original eastern fountain, instead of through Greek channels.
The sixteenth century saw the birth of Jacob Böhme (A.D. 1575-1624), the "inspired cobbler," an Initiate in obscuration truly, sorely persecuted by unenlightened men; and then too came S. Teresa, the much-oppressed and suffering Spanish mystic; and S. John of the Cross, a burning flame of intense devotion; and S. Francois de Sales. Wise was Rome in canonising these, wiser than the Reformation that persecuted Böhme, but the spirit of the Reformation was ever intensely anti-mystical, and wherever its breath hath passed the fair flowers of mysticism have withered as under the sirocco.
Rome, however, who, though she canonised Teresa dead, had sorely harried her while living--did ill with Mme. de Guyon (A.D. 1648-1717), a true mystic, and with Miguel de Molinos (1627-1696), worthy to sit near S. John of the Cross, who carried on in the seventeenth century the high devotion of the mystic, turned into a peculiarly passive form--the Quietist.