After the death of the great Sanskrit scholar Hendrik Kern in 1917, Huizinga wrote a brief but incisive obituary in De Gids on the man to whom he owed such a great debt. He concluded the piece on a mild point of criticism. Huizinga shared Kern's preference for the Brahmins’ strict teachings on life rather than the Buddhists’ renunciation of worldly affairs. But he took a more nuanced view. Kern loathed those ‘sanctimonious monks’, as he called them, and freely ventilated his enlightened aversion to their religion's penchant for system. Yet behind all that superficiality and gloom, wrote Huizinga, Buddhist teachings contained a wisdom that Kern was unable to fathom: ‘for that, Kern perhaps lacked that deeper irrationality, and that melancholy, that foster susceptibility to mysticism.’ Susceptibility to mysticism was certainly a quality that Kern did not possess. What about Huizinga?

TWO KINDS OF MYSTICISM

When Huizinga produced this portrait of Kern, he was just putting the final touches to his The Waning of the Middle Ages. That book dwells at length on mysticism. Chapter 16 on ‘Realism and the surrender of the imagination to mysticism’ distinguishes two forms: intensive and extensive, negative and positive, drunk and sober, mysticism en gros and mysticism en détail. The former was linked to the great names of Dionysius the Carthusian and Meister Eckhart, Heinrich Suso and Jan van Ruusbroec, while the latter flourished in the friaries and monasteries of the Windesheimers and gave Thomas à Kempis's Imitatio Christi its enduring fame.

The first variant was marked by the same contempt for the world that Huizinga had encountered in Buddhism and displayed the same signs of decadence. It sought to quantify God and salvation, and hence became enmeshed in an enumeration of immeasurable and unquantifiable properties that achieved the opposite of what was intended. The Holy Trinity was super-substantial, supremely to be worshipped, supremely good, God was ‘supremely merciful, supremely compassionate, supremely praiseworthy, supremely benign, supremely glorious, supremely omnipotent, supremely wise’. And none of this helped. The effect of all these superlatives was merely to reduce the infinite to the finite. They actually attenuated and externalized the sense of eternity.