Theologia Germanica

Susanna Winkworth (T), Charles Kingsley · Higher Ethics and Devotion Series · 75 pages

The Theologia Germanica in Susanna Winkworth's translation, seventy-five pages, with a foreword by the series editor, a preface by Charles Kingsley, Winkworth's own historical introduction, and a letter from Chevalier Bunsen to the translator. An abstract and train of thoughts at the front lists all fifty-four chapters with their headings.

The apparatus at the front is substantial because the book's authorship is unknown — a point the contents page states plainly, with a section headed “About the Unknown Author.” The treatise itself is a work of fourteenth-century German mysticism, and its fifty-four short chapters are given with their original chapter headings, which read as propositions in themselves. The first concerns that which is perfect and that which is in part, and how the partial is done away when the perfect is come. The second defines sin, and holds that we must not take any good thing unto ourselves, since it belongs to the true Good alone. The third argues that man's fall and going astray must be amended as Adam's fall was, and the fourth that a man claiming any good thing as his own falls and touches God in His honour. The fifth takes up the hard saying that we must come to be without will, wisdom, love, desire and knowledge, and explains in what sense it is meant. The sixth holds that what is best and noblest should be loved above all things merely because it is best — the disinterested formula that the rest of the treatise develops.

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