The timeless teachings of the great thirteenth century German mystic and scholar Meister Eckhart

"He spoke to you from the point of view of eternity, but you understood him from the point of view of time."

John Tauler, student of Meister Eckhart

Meister Eckhart lived between 1260 and 1327. He was a Dominican scholar, a popular preacher, and a teacher in Paris, Strasbourg and Cologne. Today, he is one of the most powerful influences on the cutting edge of Christian mysticism and a key link between Eastern and Western insights into the evolution of human consciousness. The Church excommunicated this German Master even though he claimed to be its loyal son to the end of his days. But his experience of God soared so high that it transcended the need for priests and sacraments. Everything he wrote concerning the encounter with the Divine was based on immediate, personal experience and that is why he is as vital a guide at the end of the twentieth century as he was at the beginning of the fourteenth.

In 1980, at the General Chapter of Walberberg, representatives of the Order of Preachers gathered to consider the Papal bull of 1329 which condemned as heretical fifteen articles or statements expressed by Meister Eckhart. At issue was their concern that a terrible injustice had been done to the great teacher. For those who are familiar with the luminous mystic's words, it is no surprise that the dogmatically-bound bishops of the Church were shocked, even scandalized by his teachings. The following was condemned in article 8 of the bull known as "In Agro Dominico": "Those who are not desiring possessions, or honors, or gain, or internal devotion, or holiness, or reward or the kingdom of heaven, but who have renounced all this, even what is theirs, these people pay honor to God."

The times in which he spoke such radical and original words were very much like our own. A great spiritual upheaval was taking place. There was a movement called "Liberty of Spirit," ancestor to our New Age approach to awakening; a new "enlightenment" brought by the discovery of Arabic, Hebrew and Greek thought was causing people to found their beliefs on reason rather than on the heart; at the same time, universities were packed with pedantic, hair-splitting academics utterly insulated from the life-giving depths of the Faith; the Church itself had lost prestige as the Pope's authority was called into question and the selling of indulgences made grotesquely clear the financial lusts of the institution. Finally, a great many lay movements were arising in reaction to the sterile teachings of Rome. Men and women who were seeking the living waters of spiritual consciousness came together to create loosely connected groups such as "the Friends of God" and magnificent works like "The Imitation of Christ," "Theologia Germanica," and Mechtild of Magdeburg's "The Light of the Godhead."

The visionaries born from the religious turmoil of the fourteenth century, Jacob Boheme, John Ruysbroeck, Julian of Norwich, were all influenced by the mighty spiritual light of Meister Eckhart. Eckhart's legacy includes spiritual treatises such as THE BOOK OF DIVINE CONSOLATION, THE TALKS ON INSTRUCTION and ON DETACHMENT, along with his eighty-six sermons, each of which is a window onto the inexpressible. The flight of his thought was so lofty that, in modern times, parallels have been drawn between his insights and those of Zen Buddhism. Even a cursory review of Eckhart's sermons and writings will reveal this unique connection. He says of the Godhead for example: "He is He because He is not He. This contradiction can be comprehended by the inner man, and not by the outer man." Eckhart is referring here to his view that at the heart of God's "identity" is the fact that He must go out of Himself. This is the very essence of Love and students of Neoplatonism will also recognize in this concept Plato's idea of the "overflow of the One."

In considering the reasons for his condemnation, it is essential to understand that Meister Eckhart spoke to a variety of audiences, and most especially to the Dominican nuns who were highly educated and deeply mystically inclined. It is true that the "sublime teacher" spoke words and used images which were often difficult to grasp by those unfamiliar with the inner experience he was attempting to describe. His treatise ON JOHN'S GOSPEL is generally considered his most mature work. He also left behind an unfinished outline for what would have been the culmination of his life's work. This massive undertaking which he had called THE OPUS TRIPARTITUM, the "Three-Part Work," was to organize and clarify his mystical theology and might have possibly convinced his detractors that he was indeed a "loyal son of the Church." It has been recorded that, on his deathbed, he did reject any of his statements which might have seemed heretical, but this is misleading. As he stepped into eternity, the old master was steadfast in holding to his extraordinary views. He was, above all, a lover of God.

Eckhart had an extraordinarily modern understanding of the nature of being and of human psychology. He saw us as fragmented and separated from our source of origin with an "irrepressible orientation" toward our spiritual unity. But he provided no dogma as signposts on the way. He considered it better to say what God is not rather than what God is. He believed that each had to find his or her own path to the Godhead within and that this search could take place anywhere. In simplest terms, he believed that God is immediately present to us and that through the abandonment of our lower selves and their world of multiplicity, we can be filled with the eternal illumination of the umediated, inexpressible Godhead. In one of his best known sermons, "The Kingdom of God is at Hand," Meister Eckhart states that "man's blessedness depends on his awareness and recognition of the highest good: God Himself." This fundamental thesis of Eckhart's thought reveals a number of underlying presuppositions. The term "highest good" is taken directly from Neoplatonic mysticism inherited from Plotinus, Augustine, and the Pseudo-Dionysius. We can infer from this appropriation that Eckhart uses another major Platonic idea--the theme of the soul's return to the One.

He hints at this view of reality when he states that God "expects the soul to progress to that point where it may receive much." Progress is therefore equated with knowing, a knowing which is not based on empirical observation or rational comprehension, but rather on an inner, higher level of conciousness which transcends the material world. Meister Eckhart considers the intellect as the element in us which opens onto higher spiritual spheres. This perception makes of it far more than the workings of the reasoning mind. The intellect is the "agent" within the soul which is "perfectly sensitive to God" because it is of God's order and not made from nature. Awareness of reality comes through the development or transformation of this agent "into God". The consciousness of the nearness of God reveals for Eckhart that all reality depends on the invisible and immanent reality of the Divine: "my being depends on God's intimate presence."

The material, historical dimension of reality is seen as the lowest level from which the soul must become detached. This most important idea of detachment assumes that time and space are "fragments" and that unity (the highest good and truth) is found only in God. As heaven is therefore outside of time and space so the soul must be "equidistant from every earthly thing." The soul's knowledge of God is hindered by time and space because their multiplicity veils the unity from which everything comes. "If I am to know true being, I mut know it where it is being itself, and that is in God and not where it is divided among creatures." Knowing God outside of time and space means knowing God in His fullness, in His purity.

For Eckhart, this is the Kingdom of God, the state of being in which all creation is known in its essence, the origin and home of the soul. The ascent of the soul to the Kingdom of God is an inward journey: "God is within; we are without." The outer physical realm can only distract the soul in a way that is best expressed by Augustine's two loves, i.e. the mistaken preference of love of the creation over love of the Creator.

Eckhart asserts that if sticks and stones knew God in His immanent presence, they would be "as blessed as the angels." He suggests that the only true difference between a stick and a human being is precisely in this matter of knowing God's nearness. This consciousness is not a matter of instruction but of inner experience or "recognition." "When the Kingdom appears to the soul and it is recognized, there is no further need for preaching or instruction." This capacity to live in the Kingdom now, or outside of time while still in time, is possible for humanity. The key is the annihilation of the will with its blindness and misconceptions through detachment and surrender. Such a life is only possible through a stripping away of all differences between the center of the inner man and its source, the Godhead. "You must be empty so that you may be filled." This is not some outdated asceticism, but the peeling away of all that is artificial in us and keeps us from true wholeness and fulfillment.

Eckhart reveals here the danger of mysticism for the Church as an institution and power structure in the world when he insists that God is "equally near" to everything and every place, and that a person knows Him only when they know how to see Him under all circumstances. "To sit in church and recognize Him" is due to man's defective nature. Eckhart's mysticism is radically immanent and centered on an unmediated relationship to reality. Detachment from temporality requires that the soul be "so firm and steady in God that nothing can penetrate it," an idea found in the Stoics as well as in other mystics. This renunciation of the material world does not come from a Gnostic concept of evil inherent in matter, but from a view of true being as outside of time and infinitely superior and removed from corporeal things and the illusions arising out of this fragment of reality. Nothing from without must penetrate the spiritually ascending soul, including itself.

The consciousness of God excludes the consciousness of oneself until one finds oneself again in God. Here Eckhart is suggesting a merger with the divine where no medium separates the soul from the Godhead. The intellect must have no existence of its own in order to be filled with the only true existence.

This union is accomplished in the moment when the receptive intellect is transformed into God's fullness. Becoming one with the spirit of God is the way to unity, rest, and true freedom. For Eckhart, God is always near to us and we are far from him to the extent that we are lost in the passions, in the senses, and in the fragmentation which we take to be ourselves. The transformations which Christians undergo recreate them into the indistinct Oneness of the Creator. Grace conforms them to Christ in a way that leaves no separation between the Word and the creature. The dwelling among us of the Word made flesh is the entrance of the uncreated into the emptied created, of eternity into time. Eckhart avoids what Church dogma would consider heresy by distinguishing between the Only-Begotten, the "natural" Son of God, and those begotten from a rebirth that leads to conformity with this divine nature. The difference makes us "sons" by adoption, though Eckhart insists that our natures are fused with the divine nature.

He further clarifies this point by stating that Christ is the Father's image whereas we are made in the image of the Trinity. In other words, Christ is the likeness of the hidden Godhead, while we are the likeness of the first emanation. There is no trace here of a univocal identification between the witnesses and the witnessed. Eckhart underscores the continuity between nature and the Eternal. The properties of the things of nature do in fact teach that which is found in the Holy Scriptures. As the soul is united to the flesh in order to form a human being, so too does the Word dwell in every work of nature. The same act of existence, the Father's begetting, is found in all that lives.

This oneness suggests an integration between body and soul which leaves no separation within the hierarchy of being. Eckhart carries this Aristotelian principle into Plato's pre-existent Ideas above creation: The artist's idea of his particular piece of work constitutes the full existence of that yet unnamed object. Therefore, as an iron bar heated by fire becomes at least as hot as the fire, so does the soul born from the Spirit become capable of performing works of the Spirit.

This insight assumes an absorption of the lower into the higher in which the lower is utterly consumed. The lower actually becomes the higher. When the Word made flesh dwells within us, we become directly present to the glory of the Unbegotten, we see His glory, and therefore we are His glory. This is how Eckhart understands the fullness of our joy. As with wood and fire, we too can enter into a higher form and "glow" with the very glow of holiness itself. This is the birth of the Son in the soul, the unmediated first emanation of the Godhead in an individual. Eckhart takes the Neoplatonic return theme and carries it beyond rest in God or vision of God into an actual oneness in which there is no distinction whatsoever. He presupposes that everything is divine in its ground, that the soul has a spark of uncreated light at its core, and that the total emptying or abandonment of the self results in the soul's penetration into the naked Godhead Itself, the source of all being.

Multiplicity, restlessness, changeability cease only when there is no more becoming. As with the pain of physical birth, there is initially a "painful unlikeness that resits change."

When birth takes place, or when the wood has received the form of fire, the generation raises the lower substance into the begetting realm which transcends time and creation. The birth within, which forms Christ in the soul, makes us "sons of God" because "every unlikeness has been cast off." Then we are no longer troubled by many things, like Martha the sister of Lazarus, but we will have chosen, like Mary the other contemplative sister, the best part which will not be taken away from us. This choice, which is actually a receptivity created by detachment and humility, allows us to ask "in the Son's name," which is a state of experiencing the divine in an inward silence where there is nothing more to ask.

To achieve such a mystical union, Eckhart has assumed that God is the author of all truth, wherever that truth may be found. He assumes that all statements on truth can be harmonized into one which is available to reason.

Spiritual truths therefore do not transcend the powers of reason. Reason is then for Eckhart that which constitutes the image of God. Even the divine mysteries can be penetrated by reason. More importantly perhaps is the Meister's assertion that the soul and God share the same ground. Everything in its essence is divine. The "divine darkness" of the hidden Godhead, source of all things, has now become accessible. This becomes understandable if one considers Eckhart's presupposition that only the highest reality is the truly real. In the illustration of the wood and the fire, the wood's becoming fire is possible because the fire is more real than the wood. Since human existence is only a partial existence, the implication is that it can flow back into absolute existence. As with cause and effect, we are precontained in that which supremely Is. Since multiplicity is evil, or lower and therefore a defect, the Christian's task is to leave this realm through a monastic-like humility which completely rejects the will of the small self and searches out the one Desire behind all desire.

To achieve union with God, which is actually to receive God, there can be no medium between the soul and the Godhead. The intellect therefore must have no existence of its own in order to be filled with the only true existence. Meister Eckhart believes that when this emptying is achieved, the soul is lifted up to God and established in an eternal turning away from all sin. God's presence then shines through this emptiness and reveals Him in all that the Christian sees and does. "You ought to sink down out of all your your-ness, and flow into his his-ness, and your "yours" and his "his" ought to become one "mine," so completely that you with him perceive forever his uncreated is-ness, and his nothingness, for which there is no name."