Introducing Meister Eckhart

Joseph Milne

Perhaps the best way to get to know Eckhart is through his sermons. It is in these that he says the most profound things in the most direct way. His way of saying them often surprises us. And yet he says what lies at the heart of Christianity. His focus is on the Incarnation, which he understands historically, metaphysically and mystically. These three levels of meaning of the Scriptures are foundational to the Christian tradition, going right back to the earliest Church Fathers.

Eckhart was a Dominican monk and also twice held the Chair for Theology at Paris University. So he was at once a scholar and a preacher, and at a time of great Christian scholarship, with Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure all living in the same era. But we can also say that he comes at the end of the high Middle Ages when the great medieval synthesis of learning and spirituality began to fall apart. And this meant that the understanding of the relation between God and the Creation collapsed. The great insight of the Middle Ages lay in seeing how the presence of God was manifest in everything. The world of nature was the ‘speech of God’, and each created thing a word of God. It was called the ‘second book of revelation’, with the Scriptures being the first.

This meant that all the branches of knowledge were regarded as paths to God, because they were disciplines that enabled one to discern the truths manifest in nature. It was for this reason that the scholars could learn from Aristotle and Plato. Insofar as any philosopher touched upon truth in some way, it was the divine light of God that showed that truth. For the theologian that ‘light’ was the Second Person of the Divine Trinity. This was the special revelation of the Incarnation. Right at the heart of everything dwelled the Logos, giving each thing its true being.

It is this Incarnation that most interested Meister Eckhart. He was not so interested in sin or wickedness. These were simply things that missed the Divine at the heart of everything, misjudgements about reality. For Eckhart, being concerned about one’s virtues or vices was to cling to those things instead of to God. He often says God is absent from us simply because we are occupied with something else than God, and so God cannot be there along with those things. In the story in Matthew of the cleansing of the temple, Eckhart says that the merchants and money-changers are those who want to bargain with God through good works. Mystically the temple is the soul, and so long as such a merchandising manner of thinking goes on in the temple of the soul, God cannot come in – even though the soul is the natural dwelling-place of God.

Perhaps you have read that Eckhart often says we should leave created things behind. But what he means by this is their ‘createdness’ as distinct from what they are in the Mind of God. The real existence of things is their eternal existence within God, where God’s act of knowing them is their existence.

Here we come upon a very important ‘metaphysical’ as well as ‘theological’ point in Eckhart. Just as the Logos shines through all created things, at the heart of their being, so also all created things have an ‘uncreated’ existence within God. They come forth from God through the Logos, yet they also dwell eternally in God before and after coming forth. Just as God’s act of Being and Knowing are the same within Him, so that His knowing is His Being, and His Being is His Knowing, so it is also with all He has created. By knowing them, they have come into being. If we might put it this way, God does not have knowledge about things. Rather His knowledge is the things. So the distinction Eckhart wants to make between ‘created’ and ‘uncreated’ is the distinction between the ‘temporal’ existence of things and their ‘eternal’ existence. Eckhart says that we do not properly know anything unless we know it in eternity. This is the same with our own selves or with a stone. It is hard for us to grasp that things are not temporal for God. He does not do one thing today and another tomorrow, but has done all things ‘from everlasting’, to use the biblical phrase.

I think we can see that this ‘metaphysical’ way of thinking gives us a symbol for speaking of things as they exist in their divine and eternal being. Eckhart wants us to be good scholars as well as mystics. For Eckhart there is nothing nobler than to consider these things, even though they elude us. The understanding of them will not come by our effort, but by the truth coming into our souls of its own accord. Indeed, Eckhart goes so far as to say, that if we attend entirely to the highest spiritual truth, then God has no choice but to send His Son into the soul. God cannot be absent from where He belongs. But we can seem to be absent from our own ground in God because we attend elsewhere.

There is one more thing worth saying about this mystical way Eckhart puts things. This is that to know God – to mystically be with God – means that the act of ‘knowing’ God is God’s act in the soul. That is to say, as a separate being we cannot know God, because that would make God an object. So the only way for the soul to know God is for the soul to participate in God’s own knowing of Himself. To put this in a slightly different way, only truth can be with truth. Truth cannot be taken away from itself and made into property.

This brings us to a final point I would like to make. Eckhart often speaks of poverty, of becoming absolutely nothing. As the Gospels say, we must give up all our possessions and follow Christ. By this he means laying aside all concerns for temporal things, for right and wrong, for merit or blame, of all judgement or opinion, even for fasting or prayer. So long as there is attachment to these things, God is kept away.

Possessions are really a false relationship with things. Here Eckhart is close to Plato, where ‘false opinions’ obscure the truth. But false opinions can only be removed by what is true, and the true does this by itself. For example, when we have an insight we suddenly ‘see’ what is so. It shows itself to us as a gift. It is this receptivity that is the poverty that makes way for God to show Himself as always present everywhere. The soul must become like a perfectly clean window. Then it is truth itself that takes the initiative and does the work. As Eckhart puts it in Sermon 52:“God performs his own work, and the man is in this way suffering God to work, and God is his own place to work in, and so God is his own worker in himself.”