THEODOR DAMIAN

The Concept of God;  Eckhart’s apophatism

In the Latin and German works, God is most often referred to as beyond description.  In Latin, Eckhart uses the words innominabilis, indicibilis, innarrabilis, incomprehensibilis.[vii]  As Vl. Lossky remarks, for Eckhart, the highest name of God is the One and this is nomen super omne nomen, this is esse innominabile.[viii]  This understanding of God as above name and above nature[ix] reminds one of Anselm’s “definition” and that of St. Bernard for whom God is “that than which nothing better can be thought.”[x]  Therefore, God is simply God,[xi] as Eckhart himself declares.  God is the simple Good, an unspoken Word, (Sermon 53):[xii]  “Who can speak this Word?  Nobody except him who is this Word.  God is a Word that speaks itself;”[xiii]  “God is spoken and unspoken.”[xiv]  In the Sermon 21 of Quint’s edition of Eckhart’s works, the Dominican mystic describes God as the “negation of negation.”[xv]  Thus, reminding us strongly of Pseudo Dionysius’ Mystical Theology Ch. V, Eckhart writes:  “God is not Good, not a person, not Trinity, not Father, Son or Holy Spirit, not even God…Therefore, I pray to God that he may rid me of God.”[xvi]  This apophatism remains a characteristic mark in all of Eckhart’s mystical theology, even in places where he speaks about God more positively.

God as the Hidden Desert

One of Meister Eckhart’s original ways of speaking about God is related to God’s indistinction in himself and is expressed through the image of the abyss or desert and other similar images.  Through this imagery he speaks of God’s trans-personal essence and being, when there were no personal distinctions in the Godhead.  This desert is the abyss of God or God beyond Trinity:  it is the “silent darkness into which no distinction or image ever peeped,” the “trackless wasteland, the hidden desert”[xvii] where even God “unbecomes.”[xviii]  But this desert is not to be understood like an empty box;  it is an effervescent, boiling, fecund, dynamic reality which, through the so-called act of bullitio, the first “breakout,” the Godhead, which Eckhart identifies with the Father, “liquifies” into the two other Trinitarian persons.[xix]  Thus, through bullitio, the undifferentiation of the Godhead, the divine indistinction generates distinction in the bosom of God and then, this bullitio which represents also the divine super-abundance of life, power, goodness and beauty becomes ebullitio.  This is, as Bonaventure would say–and here Eckhart comes close to Bonaventure’s mysticism–the expansiveness of God into creation or the self-diffusion of God as fontalis plenitudo, in creation.[xx]

This doctrine of the fullness of God’s hidden desert is consistent also with what Eckhart says when he speaks about the inexhaustibility of God.  Explaining the text from the Ecclesiast 24:29, Eckhart writes that eating God means to yet hunger of God.[xxi]  This idea can easily echo the mystical union with God in St. Gregory of Nyssa’s understanding for whom this union is based on continual progress and this is the definition itself of perfection:  to desire God endlessly, in which case, every accomplishment is a starting point for a new desire.

Eckhart’s understanding of God as innominabile, as esse and as beyond being, as intellect and as hidden desert, designates God’s transcendence, God as the totally Other.  However, there is a coincidentia oppositorum in Eckhart’s thought, like in another way in Bonaventure,[xxii] because as radical as this divine transcendence can be, for Meister Eckhart, it implies also the divine immanence.  In Sermon 52 he writes:  “God is neither being nor rational…he does not know this or that;  therefore, God is free from all things”  and in that, “he is all things.”[xxiii]  This is another reference to the idea that only God is real and everything else that exists is real only in the measure in which God is present there.  Here, Eckhart expresses God’s total transcendence, his esse innominabile, but at the same time, his total immanence, and in this case, he is omninominabile.[xxiv]

This concept of God’s immanence is the ground for the second aspect of Eckhart’s God mysticism, namely the mystical union of the soul with God.

The Soul and its Mystical Union with God: The Equality of Ground

Meister Eckhart puts a strong emphasis on the doctrine of the equality of ground between God and the human soul.  In order to understand this doctrine correctly, one has to have in mind Eckhart’s monism which for him is the ground of coincidentia oppositorum, as, for instance, is visible when he says that “outside God, there is nothing but nothing.”[xxv]  For the same purpose, one has also to keep in mind Eckhart’s specification that “if man is to become equal with God,” it is “insofar as a creature can have equality with God;”[xxvi] thus, this equality does not eliminate God’s transcendence.  God’s totally otherness is all the more important to be remembered when Eckhart speaks in very radical terms, not only of the equality between God and the soul but even of their identity, because, as M. de Gandillac notices, in Eckhart’s thought the mystical union is not based on participation but on identity of grounds.[xxvii]  Stressing the conviction that the essential hidden ground of the soul is identical with God’s ground,[xxviii] Eckhart can write that “we are sons and daughters of God by having the same essence that the Son has,”[xxix] that “we have divine blood within us”[xxx] and even that “to be in God is to be God!”[xxxi]  In other words, “God does not first need to enter the person who is already free of all otherness…because he is already there.”[xxxii]  Because of such an identity in which “God’s being is my life…and God’s is-ness is my is-ness, neither less nor more,”[xxxiii] man can take part even in the life of the Trinity and in the divine bullitio itself, as B. McGinn explains Eckhart on this point.[xxxiv]

The concept of the mystical union on the basis of the equality of grounds indicates the beleif that the mystic’s actions are really God’s actions[xxxv] and culminates overwhelmingly in assertions like that made in the Sermon 6:  “He gives me birth, me, his Son and the same Son.  I say more:  He gives birth not only to me his Son but he gives birth to me as himself and himself as me and to me as his being and nature!”[xxxvi]  In the virtue of his monism, Eckhart can affirm that this equality of grounds goes even beyond the divine bullitio and in this sense, man can say that he is, together with God, his own cause;  thus, man has an eternal existence and therefore, he can never die.[xxxvii]  This idea is pushed to its unapproachable extreme when Eckhart writes:  “If I would not exist, ‘God’ would also not exist.  That God is ‘God,’ of that I am a cause;  if I did not exist, God, too, would not be God.”  And after such a striking and unusual affirmation, and in general, after such “problematic expressions” when it comes to the intersection between man and God,[xxxviii] Eckhart adds in the most innocent simplicity:  “But there is not need to understand this!”[xxxix]

“There is a Power in Us…”

As X. de Hornstein remarks, Eckhart’s mystical union with God is based especially on the intellect through which man has connaturality with God and thus, the mystical union is immediate and unmediated.[xl]  The intellect which unites us with God’s pure being[xli] is the divine element in the soul, “cet être caché de l’homme intérieur” as B. Barzel puts it.[xlii]  In the sermon, Deus unus est, Eckhart makes it clear that God is intellect and wherever in creation there is intellect, there is one-ness with God.[xliii]  Now, as R.B. Blakney explains, in Eckhart’s thought, the difference between God and man, in respect to intellect, is that God is intellect while man has intellect and what is cannot be lost or diminished, whereas, what has, what represents a possession can be lost.[xliv]  Vl. Lossky explains further the problem of the intellect, distinguishing in Eckhart a difference between intellect which is created in man’s case and intelligere which is uncreated even in man’s case.  Intelligere is increabile, although even here, man’s intelligere is different from God’s.  However, the intellection has no being, and in this, it is deiform, it has a deifying role for man and helps man to achieve his self-transcendence.[xlv]  Only through this self-transcendence which is ipsum intelligere can the soul achieve absolute unity with “He who is.”[xlvi]  With the power of the intellect, the soul can “work in non-being” as God does himself.[xlvii]  In accordance with X. de Hornstein,[xlviii] however, Lossky explains that Eckhart does not exclude the role of grace in the process of deification of the soul through the intellect,[xlix] just as the role of love in the mystical union cannot be excluded.[l]

In Eckhart’s mystical thinking, the intellect is thus, the divine element in the soul–a dangerous doctrine, according to B. McGinn[li]–sometimes called divine light or divine spark, sometimes called the fortress of the soul[lii] or power:  “I have spoken of a power in the soul,” writes Eckhart, “which penetrates further to the ground of God, and then further still, until it grasps God in his unity and his desert;  it grasps God in the wilderness of his own ground.”[liii]  This is a kind of power that even the angels do not have[liv] and on the basis of this power, R. Schürmann explains Eckhart’s thought, man is divine being.[lv]

In the framework of the doctrine of the equality of grounds and of the divine element in the soul,[lvi] Eckhart develops his understanding about the birth of the Son or of God in the soul, which is one of his favorite themes.  This is an idea already present in the mystical theology of Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, as O. Davies shows.[lvii]  The equality of grounds not only makes possible that God brings his Son to birth in the human soul, as Eckhart says in his Sermon 56,[lviii] but it also makes possible the double “going out” or ecstasis, that of God in man and that of man in God:  “Go completely out of yourself for God’s love, and God comes completely out of himself for love of you.  And when these two have gone out, what remains there is a simplified One.”[lix]  Lossky explains that in Eckhart’s understanding, the ecstasis is also an enstasis in the sense that the going out of man to meet God is, in fact, a descent into the depth of man’s soul, in the ultimate ground of the soul where God is.[lx]  In this case, the going out of the soul does not mean diminishment or loss of its own identity;  on the contrary, the more one goes out of oneself, Eckhart says in Sermon 53, the more one goes into oneself and thus, there takes place an enrichment by detachment and emptiness.  The emptiness of oneself is a dereification, a process of becoming nothing, in the sense of no-thing;  thus, unhindered by anything, the soul can discover its theandric identity and achieve directly its union with God[lxi] without medium, as we find emphasized in other Sermons, too (#40, 69, 70). This total emptying of the soul that makes room for the divine inhabitation is called by McGinn the gravitational model according to which the water has to flow downhill and it can only flow into what is empty.[lxii]

Conclusions

In reading and especially in trying to understand Eckhart’s mystical theology, it becomes easy to understand why he is considered a “key-figure” in the history of Western mysticism.[lxiii]  Indeed,as M. Fox writes, his influence extended from his close disciples, J. Tauler and H. Suso to Luther and Boehme, to the author of the Cloud of Unknowing and especially to Julian of Norwich.[lxiv]

One of the distinguishing marks of Eckhart’s thinking is the fact that while, in other theologians or mystics of the Church, most often the theological and the mystical discourses are separated from each other, in Eckhart’s writings, they come together.  That is why O. Davies calls him a “mystical theologian.”[lxv]  The whole of Eckhart’s teaching presents a dignifying doctrine of man.  The continuity between God’s transcendence and his immanence is a basis for Eckhart’s understanding of man as a royal person who stays in the highest possible degree of communion with God.

NOTES

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[i].  Meister Eckhart, The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treateses and Defence,  Trans. and Introd. by E. Colledge and B. McGinn, Preface by H. Smith, Paulist Press, New York, 1981, p. XVII.  (Further references to Eckhart in this book will be given under the abbreviation LW for Latin Works, and GW for German Works.)

[ii].  Ibidem.

[iii].  Matthew Fox, Breakthrough:  Meister Eckhart’s Creation Spirituality, in New Translation, Doubleday and Co., Inc., Garden City, New York, 1980, p. 24.

[iv].  John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio, 1978, p. 101.

[v].  Xavier de Hornstein, Les Grands Mystiques Allemands du XIV e Siècle, Eckhart, Tauler, Susa, Raeber and Co. Ed., Lucerne, 1922, p. 145.

[vi].  Raymond Bernard Blakney, Meister Eckhart, a Modern Translation, Harper and Row, New York, 1941, p. XIII.

[vii].  Frank Tobin, Meister Eckhart, Thought and Language, Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1986, p. 66.

[viii].  Vl. Lossky, Théologie négative et connaissance de Dieu chez Maître Eckhart, Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, Paris, 1960, p. 22.

[ix].  Eckhart, GW, p. 204.

[x].  Meister Eckhart Teacher…, p. 223.

[xi].  Meister Eckhart, The Essential…, p. 61.

[xii].  Ibidem, p. 203.

[xiii].  Ibid., p. 204.

[xiv].  Ibid., p. 202.

[xv].  Meister Eckhart Teacher…, p. 9.

[xvi].  Cyprian Smith, The Way of the Paradox, Spiritual Life as taught by Meister Eckhart, Paulist Press, New York, 1987, p. 40.

 

[xvii].  Richard  Woods, Eckhart’s Way, Wilmington, Delaware, Ed. Michel Glazier, 1986, p. 209.

[xviii].  Ibidem, p. 89.

[xix].  Ibid., pp. 89-90.

[xx].  Bonaventure:  The Soul’s Journey to God, The Tree of Life, The Life of St. Francis, Trans. and Introd. by E. Cousins, Preface by J. Brady, Paulist Press, New York, 1978, pp. 103, 171.

[xxi].  Meister Eckhart Teacher…, p. 5.

[xxii].  see E. Cousins, Bonaventure and the Coincidence of Opposites, Franciscan Herald Press, Chicago, 1977.

[xxiii].  GW, p. 201.

[xxiv].  Tobin, op. cit., p. 68.

[xxv].  Fox, op. cit., p. 180.

[xxvi].  GW, p. 288.

[xxvii].  Barzel, op. cit., p. 83.

[xxviii].  Meister Eckhart, The Essential…, p. 43.

[xxix].  Fox, op. cit., p. 332.

[xxx].  Ibidem, p. 46.

[xxxi].  Ibid., p. 332.

[xxxii].  Blakney, op. cit., p. 217.

[xxxiii].  GW, p. 187.

[xxxiv].  Meister Eckhart, The Essential…, p. 51. 

[xxxv].      Bernard McGinn, “Evil-Sounding, Rash and Suspect of Heresy: Tensions between Mysticism and Magisterium in the History of the Church”, in The Catholic Historical Review, 90, Nr. 2, April 2004, p. 212.

[xxxvi].  GW, p. 187.

[xxxvii].  Ibidem, p. 202.

[xxxviii].Keith J. Egan, “McGinn Bernard, The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing” in The Merton Annual, 15/2002, p. 273.

[xxxix].  GW, p. 203.

 

[xl].  De Hornstein, op. cit., pp. 137-138.

[xli].  Mesiter Eckhart, Teacher…, p. 9.

[xlii].  Barzel, op. cit., p. 60.

[xliii].  Meister Eckhart, Selected Treateses…, p. 212.

[xliv].  Blakney, op. cit., p. 142.

[xlv].  Lossky, op. cit., pp. 245-247.

[xlvi].  Ibidem, p. 173.

[xlvii].  Meister Eckhart, The Essential…, p. 42.

[xlviii].  De Hornstein, op. cit., p. 139.

[xlix].  Lossky, op. cit., p. 182.

[l].              Thomas D. DeVries, “Bernard McGinn: The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing”, in Cistercian Studies Quarterly, 37, Nr. 3, 2002, p. 242.

[li].  Meister Eckhart, The Essential…, p. 42.

[lii].  GW, p. 177.

[liii].  O. Davies, op. cit., p. 33.

[liv].  Ibidem, p. 31.

[lv].  Meister Eckhart Mystic and Philosopher, translation with Commentary by Reiner Schürmann, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1978, p. 167.

[lvi].  GW, p. 183.

[lvii].  Davies, op. cit., p. 4.

[lviii].  GW, p. 104.

[lix].  Ibidem.

[lx].  Lossky, op. cit., p. 17.

[lxi].  GW, p. 204.

[lxii].         Sara Miller, “Lost in God”, in The Christian Century, 120, Nr. 6, March 22, 2003, p. 27.

[lxiii].  Meister Eckhart, The Essential…, p. XVII.

[lxiv].  Fox, op. cit., p. 1.

 

[lxv].  Davies, op. cit., p. 7.