Chapter 5
Meister Eckhart: From Analogy to Silence

If Aquinas believed approaching theology through metaphysics is fruitful so long as one becomes highly skilled at using language non-contrastively, such a metaphysical interpretation for Eckhart becomes a dangerous, but promising, adventure: dangerous because of the inherent temptation to render and then cling to always inadequate formulations of God and of the Creator–creature relationship; promising, because the metaphysical vocabulary, especially of the Neoplatonists, gives the believer another way to fathom the journey of faith complementing the Hebrew/Christian scriptural narrative of creation–sanctification–redemption. It is, finally, an adventure, because the end destination is unknown and in some sense is unknowable at the beginning of the journey as well as all along the way.

Since the early Church, Christianity has been concerned with articulating the saving encounter of God into theological formulations so that it may be faithfully transmitted to future generations. However, the desire to preserve and transfer the divine–human encounter in this manner, while seemingly efficient, is compromised by the human proclivity to adhere to formulation without delving into the implications of its content. The heart of the Christian message is God’s revelation through Jesus, necessarily leading to a profound conversion within the believer; a transformation so personal it cannot be captured in any formulation. Immediately following the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, followers passed on their faith experience, not through formulas, but through reliving and retelling the Jesus event, preserving it in writings only after many decades had passed. These accounts do not merely reflect a historical biography (or biographies) of an important person, but the collective theological reflections on the God of Scripture, now reinterpreted in light of the person, Jesus.

As the first century closed with the Gospel of John’s highly symbolic theology, the concern began to shift to protecting the Christian message from heretical interpretations, specifically those denying God’s immanence or the fullness and interrelatedness of the divine and human natures of Jesus. Early councils attempted first and foremost to retrieve the Scriptural notion of God from various forms of Gnosticism, formulating in the first article of the Nicene-Constantinople Creed, God as the one who creates all things—seen and unseen (corporeal and incorporeal)—directly without the mediation of any demigod or angelic creature. This assertion counters the notion that the Divine rests in an unreachable transcendent realm. God’s transcendence necessarily implies God’s immanence and sustaining presence to the world. Divine transcendence-in-immanence inheres in the Trinitarian formula, further drawn out in the Creed’s second and third articles. As Son, the second Person is articulated as “one in being with the Father” sharing without separation or distinction of any kind in the Father’s divine nature. Together with the Holy Spirit, the Father and Son share in the divine act of creation, each in their own immediate, and intimate manner, thus establishing their identities as three unique Persons.

Unfortunately, the many reiterations in the opening of the Creed’s second article regarding Jesus’ oneness with the Father—“eternally begotten,” “God from God,” “light from light,” “true God from true God,” “begotten, not made,” “one in being with the Father”—leads to the equally heretical tendency to overshadow the narrative of Jesus’ humanity, a problem taken up by the Council of Chalcedon in 451. The Chalcedon formula, or “hypostatic union,” although not incorporated into the Creed, intends to counter this contrastive tendency, while at the same time preserving the transcendence-in-immanence of this unique person: Jesus is “one in being with the Father regarding his Godhead,” and “one in being with us regarding his humanity,” “unconfusedly, immutably, indivisibly, inseparably [united].”1 However, the formula more often than not is understood contrastively such that divine and human natures exist in opposition within Jesus, rather than in interrelation to each other.

Religious formulas such as the Trinity and the hypostatic union were never meant to become the end-all and be-all of theological reflection, but rather the beginning of reflection on how God’s revelation relates to the life of the believer. Since more is required of faith than formulas, those in charge of helping believers forward in their journey towards God must learn how to inspire them beyond the structure of a doctrine—that is, from formula to encounter, ultimately pushing them out of their comfort zones towards conversion.

For his diverse audiences—many of whom were someday to engage in vocations where they would be responsible for expounding intelligently on the Church’s doctrines—Eckhart created novel “universes of discourse,” to use Tanner’s phrase,2 drawing students, readers, and listeners beyond familiar formulas towards deeper awareness of God’s radical presence, an awareness that can only develop with the realization of the Creator’s unique distinction from creation. Further, Christian audiences would be familiar with the stories of Scripture, which move from the divine act of creation to the saving event of Jesus Christ. Eckhart took his cue from Aquinas, who, observing the congruence between the Christian journey and the Neoplatonic cycle of exitus/reditus, implicitly arranged his Summa according to this cycle and adopted the vocabulary of the Neoplatonist philosophers (especially pseudo-Dionysius and Aristotle). This vocabulary, carefully modified, allowed Aquinas to highlight divine features found in Scripture—Eternal, Infinite, Perfect, One—easily misused by those who might be tempted to conceive God in opposition to creatures.

Neoplatonism also had much to offer Eckhart in his attempt to direct students and congregations away from conventional understandings and towards a deeper appropriation of their faith. First, because emanation correlates with the divine act of creation depicted in Scripture, but especially because the second part of the cycle, return to the Source, can be re-visioned in scriptural terms to emphasize salvation as deification, the believer’s radical and dynamic self-identification with God. In the scriptural narrative there is a necessary middle act connecting emanation with return to God: redemption from the circumstance named “sin” that provokes the human creature’s alienation from its Creator.

Salvation in its more profound sense goes beyond achieving an interminable status of perfection to realizing a relationship of identification with God, or deification. In Neoplatonic terms, reditus is a total and complete return to the One from whence creation came. There is no longer any separation between Creator and creature, but as in the beginning, before creation, one existence in the Creator, now a dynamic unity of love—a unity so profound, Eckhart asserts, that it cannot even be conceived or uttered in conventional terms;3 as in the case of other such terms, “love” must be understood non-contrastively if it is to be used at all to refer to the Divine.

For Christians, through his incarnation, death, and resurrection Jesus provides the link between emanation and return by freeing humanity from the alienation of sin and rejoining the human and the divine, allowing believers to be reunited with God. As part of the exitus/reditus cycle, sanctification must be more than God’s continual pardoning of the incapacitated believer from sinful act to sinful act; it must include transformation, a movement of identification with and manifestation of the Divine. In traditional Christian terms this is achieved through the “imitation of Christ.” This language is used to articulate that the movement from the condition of sin to embodying Christ is “adoption”: what Jesus was by nature (the divine Son), those who die having lived as he lived become, through adoption, sons and daughters of God. This “adoption” language presents a formula designed to show the intimacy existing between God and the beatified, while maintaining the strict distinction of the Creator from creature.

Eckhart employs the adoption formula many times throughout his works, but finds that, in and of itself, it fails to express the dynamic identification of creature with Creator, so he uses the exitus/reditus cycle as well as his own linguistic devices to force the audience beyond a conventional understanding of adoption (even to the point of abandoning this term altogether in some instances), giving us novel approaches to the “imitation of Christ,” reaching towards the Eastern Christian notion of deification. Eckhart uses similar strategies with formulations of the Trinity as it pertains to the immanent Trinity—the divine interrelations—and the economic Trinity—the roles and relations of the divine Persons within creation, and with regard to the human creature in particular. In every instance, Eckhart intends to teach us to use these doctrines, not as formulas or descriptions of divine reality, but as entrances onto paths leading towards identification with God.

Eckhart clearly discerns the tendency to substitute one set of formulas for another, thus perpetuating the attachment to God-words rather than to God-encounter; however, he perceives the same danger in employing philosophical language. While Aquinas’ use of Neoplatonists and the metaphysical language of Aristotle does provide an excellent exercise in detachment through deconstructing and reversing presumptions about divine perfections, this skill in non-contrastive language use can be acquired only through much labor and—at least in terms of the philosophical vocabulary employed—by a select few trained academically, despite Aquinas’ assertion that ordinary Christians can, and do, make the distinction between proper and improper uses of God-language.4 As a preacher especially, Eckhart cannot presume such rigorous linguistic exercises, nor would they be appropriate for every audience. So Eckhart appropriates Aquinas’ lessons, but incorporates his own dramatic methods to make the congruence between the exitus/reditus cycle and the Christian journey more explicit, and the believer’s relationship to the transcendent-yet-immanent Creator more immediate.

For instance, Eckhart deters his students from becoming attached to Neoplatonic principles through inclusion and dialectical use of the term “nothing” which is a prime example of Eckhart’s dynamic analogy in action. The problem with the Neoplatonic schema of exitus/reditus is in blurring the distinction between Creator and creature and, further, lacking the intimately personal dimension of the God proclaimed in Scripture. In academic works such as his Latin scriptural exegeses, Eckhart uses the terminology of “nothing” to underscore the Creator’s unique distinction from creatures, thus preserving God as the prime analogate, the one distinct cause bringing everything into existence out of nothing. In many of his German works, however, Eckhart makes this distinction less obvious, choosing instead to emphasize the believer’s return to God as well as how immeasurably the human creature images its Creator. In God the creature is nothing, for there is no separation between Creator and created; they are identical. The “nothingness” of the creature in either case is not meant to denigrate its ontological status compared to God, nor its efforts to reach God, but to highlight its potential to be one with God in a way radically different than anything creaturely-conceived.5

There is hardly any contradiction between his academic works, stressing God’s distinction, and his sermons and German works, stressing the human creature’s dynamic relation to the Creator, however, since because Eckhart is speaking to very different audiences he appeals to different “universes of discourse.” Eckhart’s students, destined to become teachers or doctrinally sound and soteriologically moving preachers, must learn to preserve God’s distinct transcendence-in-immanence in their own work before they can be considered experts in religious language-use. On the other hand, as the master preacher speaking to religious and lay communities seeking to deepen their spirituality, Eckhart wants to bring hearts and minds to full awareness of God’s presence and the possibilities of absolute union with God. The diverse use of “nothing”—as well as Eckhart’s other linguistic strategies—keep each audience from clinging to any one conceptualization of God or Creator–creature relationship; his ultimate goal is moving believers beyond concepts altogether: for God is not found in formulas, but in our encounter of God’s immediate presence, wherein all utterances cease.

This chapter examines how Eckhart works to move audiences and readers from religious formulas to “detached intellection,” where all God-words, those about God as well as those directed to God, give way simply to knowing God—or, rather, “un-knowing”—to avoid an ordinary contrastive interpretation. This “unknowing,” for Eckhart, is the divine Silence that discloses God through the experience of creation and through the experience of self-presence.

The first formula to be considered is the Creator–creature “analogy.” Like Aquinas, Eckhart modifies the conventional understanding of analogy to preserve the Creator’s distinction from creation while creating a linguistic space for the human creature’s return to its Source. His revised notion of analogy allows for a great deal of flexibility and innovation in extending language to the divine and exploring dimensions unique to the creature–Creator relationship. Eckhart’s novel and dynamic approach, based on non-contrastive language-use, must be examined with regard to traditional Trinitarian and Christological formulas which, laid bare and stripped of superficial interpretations, have remained controversial to magisterium, academics, and believers up to this day.

However, his most dangerous reflections attract many scholars to Eckhart as well as everyday believers seeking to deepen their spirituality by way of apophasis, which has gained popularity due to its compatibility with other world religions such as Buddhism. Indeed, Eckhart is considered to be the apophatic theologian extraordinaire. By penetrating the depths of religious formulas and showing us how to use them, Eckhart bridges the gap between speaking about and knowing God, revealing the divine Silence that lies at the heart of the Word.

A. Analogy in Action

“They that eat me, shall yet hunger.” With this unusual scriptural passage from the book of Sirach,6 Eckhart begins his exegesis on the analogical relationship between Creator and creature. In true scholastic fashion, however, Eckhart moves immediately from the scriptural to the philosophical. Incorporating references from Aquinas, Eckhart notes

that these three are to be distinguished: “the univocal, the equivocal and the analogous. Equivocals are divided according to different things that are signified, univocals according to various differences of the [same] thing.” Analogous things are not distinguished according to things, nor through the differences, but “according to the modes [of being]” of one and the same simple thing. For example, the one and the same health that is in an animal is that (and no other) which is in the diet and the urine [of the animal] in such a way that there is no more of health as health in the diet and urine than there is in a stone. … Being or existence and every perfection, especially general ones such as existence, oneness, truth, goodness, light, justice, and so forth, are used to describe God and creatures in an analogical way.7

From his own interpretation, Eckhart concludes:

It follows from this that goodness and justice and the like [in creatures] have their goodness totally from something outside to which they are analogically ordered [Latin: analogantur], namely, God. … Analogates have nothing of the form according to which they are analogically ordered rooted in positive fashion in themselves. But every created being is analogically ordered to God in existence, truth, and goodness. Therefore every created being radically and positively possesses existence, life, and wisdom from and in God, not in itself as a created being.8

Eckhart’s construal of the Creator–creature relationship in this passage has been called “extrinsic analogy” or the “analogy of formal opposition,” because everything the creature possesses, even existence, comes from a source outside of itself.9 Similarly, in some passages Eckhart submits that the creature’s existence is “borrowed” rather than possessed,10 and in other passages he maintains the creature is nothing in itself11—although this is only one of many ways that he employs the term “nothing”; for example, at times he dialectically asserts that from the creaturely perspective, God is nothing (no-thing), a linguistic strategy leading some scholars to call Eckhart’s analogy dialectical or reverse analogy.12

As Chapter 1 of this book observed, scholars tend to contrast Eckhart’s so-called extrinsic analogy with Aquinas’ so-called analogy of proportion, especially as formulated in Question 13, precisely because Aquinas seems to give more autonomy to the creature than Eckhart. This is probably partially due to the (mistaken) impression of Aquinas’ analogy of positive attribution as opposed to Eckhart, who is seen primarily as a negative theologian.”.13 But closer examination of Aquinas’ development of analogy reveals it not to be positive theology but apophatic, rejecting both positive and negative attribution; moreover it transforms attribution altogether. By reading further on in Eckhart’s exegesis of Sirach, we discover he too reverses this negation, by showing that only by being totally “outside” of the creature can the Creator be completely immanent to it and draw it towards its final end. Eckhart continues:

“They that eat me, shall yet hunger” is perfectly fitted to signify the truth of the analogy of all things to God himself. They eat because they are; they hunger because they are from another. … God is inside all things in that he is existence, and thus every being feeds on him. He is also on the outside because he is above all and thus outside all. Therefore, all things feed on him, because he is totally within; they hunger for him, because he is totally without.14

As often in other works,15 here Eckhart moves in one direction, then suddenly works in reverse, indicating he is using language in a transformed manner. In the opening of his exegesis on Sirach 24:20, Eckhart advances God’s transcendence by declaring the Creator totally outside of the creature. However, in the next passage he reverses himself by beginning with God’s immanence—the Creator’s being “within” the creature—but then again reverts to God’s transcendence, the Creator’s being totally “without” the creature. This dialectical movement between the Creator’s being within all things and the Creator’s being without all things reverses the negation set up earlier in his exposition and signals that Eckhart means for his Creator–creature analogy to be read non-contrastively. The relationship between the Creator and creature can be neither contrasted (that is, opposed) nor compared; therefore, the analogy is neither negative nor positive.

Eckhart first secures God’s unique distinction here by demonstrating that the Creator must be wholly transcendent in order to be, simultaneously, wholly immanent to the creature. Recall that, according to Tanner, this is a first requirement for the God of Scripture and tradition, who creates ex nihilo and who is the supremely personal God of faith.16 The Creator’s transcendence and immanence are inseparable as Eckhart’s dialectical rhetoric, proposing a negation of negation, clearly establishes. Therefore, to call Eckhart’s analogy “extrinsic” or one of “formal opposition” only captures one half of his articulation of the Creator–creature relationship: God’s transcendence. For Eckhart, articulating God’s immanence is equally—if not more—critical to expressing the Creator.

Eckhart does not stop with securing God’s distinction and providing a lesson in non-contrastive language use. For this Dominican, the God of Scripture is not only the Creator, but the personal Creator who draws the creature back towards itself, a reunion that for the human creature in particular constitutes a process of deification:

This is what is said, “They that eat me, shall yet hunger.” … In spiritual and divine things it is different on both ends. First, because every act first causes a separation from its bitter opposite. Here there is nothing prior and posterior; each and every act is first for this reason. Forward progress then is not to leave the First [that is, God], but to draw near to it, so that the Last is the First. The reason is progress brings one nearer the end, and the End in the Godhead is the Beginning. … Therefore, an approach toward the end is always joined with its beginning if it is God and the pure divine that is eaten and drunk.17

Here Eckhart appropriates the Neoplatonic exitus/reditus schema to further explain the dynamic nature of the Creator–creature relationship. The divine act of creation causes a distinction between Creator and creature, but this “opposition” must be understood metaphorically (and non-contrastively), because the creature cannot exist apart from its Creator without falling back again into non-existence. Thus the distinction between Creator and creature cannot be understood like any other distinction in the world. The creature is, however, fashioned with an inbuilt telos. Although it never leaves its Source in any ordinary manner experienced in the world, as created, the human creature now shares a dynamic relationship with its Creator in which its completion is, metaphorically speaking, consummation or reunion with the Divine so profound no separation of any kind exists between them.

Because the Creator–creature relationship is dynamic and transforming, more is required than articulating a balance between God’s transcendence and immanence. By dialectically moving between the Creator’s being within and outside of the creature and by incorporating Neoplatonic elements into his narrative, Eckhart goes beyond dialectical or reverse analogy and creates a linguistic space for expressing the creature’s return to its Source, wherein its own completion is achieved. It is not merely the creature’s autonomy (or lack thereof) vis-à-vis the Creator that is at stake, but more pointedly, the creature’s actualization, the mode of which depends on the creature’s particular telos as determined by its place in the order of creation. For the human creature, its telos is deification—identification with the divine—and its mode of actualization is its intellect, achieved through wisdom or “detached intellection”; this is the way in which the human creature images its Creator.

Scholars who contrast Eckhart and Aquinas often miss the deeper significance they place on the analogical relationship between creature and its Creator, doubtless born out of their shared background as Dominicans concerned with saving souls, as explained in Chapter 2 of this book. For both Aquinas and Eckhart, it is the saving God of Scripture and faith, not the god of philosophy that must be professed. Aquinas should be recognized for laying the foundation for Eckhart’s remarkable ability to negotiate around the limitations of religious language, since it is precisely Aquinas’ exercises in non-contrastive language-use that allow for analogy to go beyond itself in referring to the divine without violating either God’s transcendence or immanence, while—more importantly—giving voice to the creature’s imaging of its Creator and return to its one and the same Source.

It is important to see how Aquinas lays out this foundation before moving on to Eckhart. Recall that Aquinas’ analogy of proportion holds the most promise for divine attribution, as well as for articulating the Creator–creature relationship. However, since there can be no proportion between any creature and the Creator, Aquinas has to make some essential qualifications, the full implications of which can hardly be perceived unless the reader has carefully worked through the preceding questions on the manner of God’s existence as One, Infinite and Eternal. These perfections secure God’s unique distinction of transcendence-in-immanence. Although on the surface they appear to highlight God’s transcendence from the world, attentive reading of the first thirteen questions as a unit reveals Aquinas’ intention to underscore God’s immanence.

In accordance with the requirements of Christian orthodoxy, Aquinas insists there can be no proportion between creature and Creator because, obviously, there is nothing bodily by which the Creator can be measured;18 if there were, God would be another type of creature. In fact, Aquinas goes on to assert that the Creator does not even share any type of form with the creature,19 a point which becomes crucial to understanding how Eckhart puts Aquinas’ lessons on analogical language-use into practice. Undeterred by the problems presented by employing “proportion,” Aquinas introduces another, most extraordinary, strategy whereby the biblical assertion that the human creature is made in the image of God is united with the Neoplatonic notion of participation.

In Question 4, Aquinas considers the creature’s likeness to the Creator, based on the Genesis passage: “Let us make humankind to our image and likeness,” explaining that “likeness of creatures to God is not affirmed on account of agreement in form … but solely according to analogy, inasmuch as God is essential being, whereas other things are beings by participation.”20 Rather than denying that the creature can be like the Creator, he insists the human creature images the Creator more profoundly that any form can apprehend. Since analogical language-use cannot presume any shared form between Creator and creature, it instead suggests the way in which the creature participates in the divine existence.

Later Aquinas tells us what this “participation” signifies, reminding us again that there can be no proportion between creature and Creator in the ordinary sense of the word, as a measure of one thing compared to another. But proportion also carries the broader sense of “relation,” something not resting on measure or, for that matter, shared form. In the case of the Creator–creature relationship, the creature is related to the Creator “as potentiality to its act”; the creature’s relation is determined by its place in the order of creation and reaches its full actuality—its full relatedness—to the Creator when it realizes its inbuilt potential: for the human creature, one who truly knows God.21

Knowing God is ultimately the beatified “seeing God face to face.” Seeing God, however, is a metaphor for attaining or possessing God, as Aquinas goes on to explain, and this is extremely important to understanding how Eckhart moves into identification, or “deification,” language:

because they see Him, and in seeing him, possess Him as present, having the power to see Him always; and possessing Him, they enjoy Him as the ultimate fulfilment of desire.22

For Aquinas the blessed’s knowing God and possessing God are essentially the same. Both are signified by the metaphor of “seeing”: in the first sense, comprehending something, and in the second, beholding an object of great import. But even knowing and possessing must be interpreted metaphorically, for in God there is strictly no-thing to know or to possess. God is not a thing of any kind.

Aquinas takes his readers through several levels of language-transformation, in which Eckhart was no doubt very well trained as a Dominican student. First, seeing is a metaphor for both knowing and possessing, which shows the flexibility with which Aquinas expects his students to become familiar. Knowing and possessing become, then, further metaphors for presence: possessing God is the believer’s total presence to God and God’s total presence to the believer. Finally, the most subtle move: the “power to see always” is transformed into fulfilled existence.

In his earlier lessons on God’s infinity and God’s eternity, “always” has a non-contrastive meaning when used in reference to the divine. Aquinas divorces divine Infinity and Eternity from their quantitative presumptions and connects them instead to immutability, which in God is not a static or unending existence but rather one of pure act. Eternity must be understood differently than being “a really, really long time”; this would contrast or measure created time against divine time. Eternity is, non-contrastively speaking, the source, the center, and the fulfillment of time. Therefore, living the eternal life implies more than never dying; it means living a fully actualized existence, to be alive all-ways, that is, in every way: the divine way.

Since the human belongs in the created order of intellect, fully actualizing existence means attaining to the divine intellect—Wisdom—which in God is the same as Existence; this is so because God’s essence and God’s existence are one, and Wisdom belongs to the perfection of God’s essence. Therefore, to take Aquinas’ process of transforming metaphors to its logical conclusion, the beatified know God in God’s-self and in so doing themselves become deified; their knowledge is now divine knowledge. In God there is no separation between knowing and possessing or possessing and presence, and thus the beholder (beatified) and beheld (the Divine) are one. Far from any formal sense—there is no form to share, but only pure presence. This brings Aquinas much closer to the notion of deification than might be easily recognized.23

Aquinas’ above lessons are in no way lost on Eckhart. All of the vital elements Aquinas develops in his exercises are dramatically present throughout Eckhart’s works, notably in his commentary on the Book of Sirach with his own explication on analogy. For Eckhart, as with Aquinas, creatures do not share a formal likeness to the Creator, but—in Eckhart’s own words—a much more “radical … and positive” possession, especially in “existence, life and wisdom,” the three levels distinguishing creatures in the created order.24 Far from articulating an extrinsic relationship and unbridgeable gap between them, Creator and creature have the capacity and desire to be fully open to each other; in fact, the creature’s potential existence—its “nothingness”—is not a disadvantage to its fulfillment, but a potency, its greatest strength and way to God.

Eckhart returns time and again to the human creature’s potency as intellect, laboring to detach his readers from narrow and misguided notions about the intellect as well as how it relates to divine Wisdom and, ultimately, to knowing God. In fact, the human intellect plays a determining role in Eckhart’s examination of the doctrine of the economic Trinity, and, Christologically formulated, of the adoption of believers as heirs (sons) of God, derived from the scriptural writings of Paul. Again, Eckhart relies on Aquinas’ non-contrastive treatment of the human–divine relationship to achieve this. For Aquinas, intellect is not limited to the rational faculty, which cannot know God because it relies on worldly data attained through the bodily senses and processed according to the laws of discursive logic. Any reality existing outside of this mode of intellection is therefore unattainable; thus, knowledge of God is not possible unless it is divinely revealed. However, as we saw in the previous chapters, Aquinas subtly redirects more advanced students around this epistemological barrier to a deeper level of linguistic discrimination, first by qualifying the type of knowledge we should be looking for (personal, not factual) and second by expanding the definition of intellect to include the graced capacity given the human creature to fulfill its divine telos. This capacity is the openness to receive God’s personal self-communication as well as the ability to respond to that revelation by imaging God. The relationship between nature (human intellect) and grace (divine Knowledge) is not one of opposition but is rather non-contrastive. Divine revelation is not merely information about God that cannot be acquired in any natural manner, but it is in-formation, intended to guide the believer towards personal transformation by imbuing knowledge reached through the rational faculty with existential significance, thereby actively relating creatures to their Creator. Wisdom, as we discover in Question 1 of the Summa orders all natural knowledge towards its divine end.25

Eckhart’s portrayal of the human intellect as an appetite for God’s Wisdom in his commentary on Sirach captures Aquinas’ lesson on using language non-contrastively brilliantly. This inbuilt appetite as telos must be met with the possibility of fulfillment; otherwise it would be extraneous to the creature and, furthermore, contrary to divine Wisdom, which is such precisely because every divine act of creation is directed by the Creator’s free will and intent to draw all things back to their Source. To put it boldly, if God is Wise, then creatures must be able to know their Creator, each in their own way:

Thirst and hunger, desire and appetite are taken in a double way. “In one way as meaning the appetite for something not possessed; in another way as meaning the exclusion of disgust.”26 Beware of thinking that the latter sense, that is, the exclusion of disgust is the principal or first meaning. Many do this and thus crudely explain our text, “They that eat me, shall yet hunger,” as though they eat without saiety. This seems to give too little to divine Wisdom, that is, to God, especially speaking of himself, teaching about himself, and recommending his excellence.27

For Eckhart, God’s Wisdom is inseparable from God’s self-revelation, which in turn is inseparable from the creature’s return to its Creator. God’s Wisdom, furthermore, is inseparable from God’s existence: God’s existence as the Creator is to exist as self-revealing. If the human creature is proportioned to the Creator through its intellect, then the fulfillment of human existence must also lie in self-revelation, that is, in total presence to self, to God, and to other creatures. This presence requires detachment from all things as they appear to the rational faculty, with an intellectual openness to all things as they are in themselves—an openness which ultimately transforms, because the self-present intellect takes on the same perspective as the divine intellect, wherein every creature is known as it is in itself and in its own existence, rather than through a form. Since the analogical relationship between creature and Creator stems from divine Wisdom, ordering of all things back to God and in God, the analogical relationship between human creature and its Creator relies on God’s self-revelation and the believer’s self-transforming response to that personal disclosure.

In fact, the text in Sirach, Chapter 24, part of the scriptural canon of Wisdom literature, corresponds perfectly to Eckhart’s intent of following Aquinas in exploring analogy to express the creature’s participation in the divine Intellect. The connection between divine Wisdom and the return of the creature to its Creator is portrayed throughout Chapter 24, though a superficial reading may lead to quite the opposite conclusion. Verse 20 (he who eats … shall hunger yet) is framed by verse 18, which seems to echo the Song of Songs wherein the lover calls to his beloved. In Sirach, the poet summons, “come to me, all you that yearn for me, and be filled with my fruits.” On the other hand, however, verse 26 reminds us, “[t]he first man never finished comprehending wisdom, nor will the last succeed in fathoming her.”

While this latter verse seems to support the interpretation rejected by Eckhart that the creature hungers for the Creator without satiety, the scriptural passage continues on to suggest quite the contrary:

Now I, like a rivulet from her stream, channeling the waters into a garden, said to myself, “I will water my plants, my flower bed I will drench”; and suddenly this rivulet of mine became a river, then this stream of mine, a sea. Thus do I send my teachings forth shining like the dawn, to become known afar off.

Verse 26 makes it is clear that the human creature cannot comprehend its Creator. From the perspective of negative theology, the human’s inability to fathom its Creator expresses the supremely unknown God who remains hidden even while close at hand. Further, it suggests the human creature’s natural incapacity to know its Creator and the necessity of supernatural knowledge or Revelation to raise it above its intellectual limitations.

However, this interpretation does not conform to the Scriptural narrative, as any good Dominican in line with Aquinas should quickly perceive, for it neglects the pivotal detail that the human being is made in the image of God in a way more profound than any form can capture. Indeed, Sirach is replete with symbolisms derived from the Creation story. Recounting Genesis, the Creator God is the nourisher, feeding God’s-very-self to creation as water to creation. This divine self-knowledge grows from a small stream into a vast ocean encompassing everything within it and saturating all creation with its very being. This is what Revelation is, not external knowledge entering from the outside, but something that penetrates from the outside-in and the inside-out, until all things are utterly drenched. And further: this “water” of knowledge is not alien but the very substance of the life it enters, necessary for survival and for reaching full growth. The water in the garden does not merely surround the plants, but is absorbed into every fiber of the plant, until it becomes the plant and the plant becomes the place and life of the water.

That even the last human will not fathom divine Wisdom does not, therefore, reflect God’s incomprehensibility as unintelligible by human standards; on the contrary, God’s incomprehensibility is the source of inexhaustible intelligibility within creation itself. It does not declare the weakness of the creature to know its Creator naturally, but rather, the potency of the creature to know its Creator personally, at the depth of its own being. The human creature becomes the knowledge it absorbs. It drinks because it has a taste for it; and its appetite only increases with each drink until consumer and consumed become the self-same—the creature itself becomes a source of divine revelation.

This is why Eckhart must reject the negative way: it does not express the God of Scripture or the depth of the creature’s imaging of and participation in its Source. Eckhart concludes his exegesis of Sirach 24:20 with another reversal: his famous “negation of negation”:

Furthermore, nothing is truly taught by negation, and negation posits nothing, but is fixed and made firm in affirmation, having no perfection in itself. That is why negation has no place at all in God himself; he is “Who is” and “He is one,” which is the negation of negation. Therefore, hunger as the exclusion of satiety is not to be accepted in divine matters.28

Here Eckhart ties the creature’s telos, its inbuilt appetite for its Creator, with God’s divine existence: to be. Negation is rejected because the end to the creature’s search is not a hidden, God, but the self-present God. Speaking of the creature’s appetite in terms of a capacity to possess—to be one with—God, Eckhart re-emphasizes that this telos is fulfilled by an imaging beyond any creaturely form:

Again, when hunger is taken as “the appetite for something not possessed,” formally speaking, hunger or appetite is not defined on the basis of the thing that is not possessed. This is only a negation or privation and is something material.29

The reader must adopt a non-contrastive approach in wending through Eckhart’s many negations. Understanding the human appetite for God negatively, as something un-possessed and un-possess-able, begins at the wrong end—with the creaturely perspective. When hunger and appetite are taken in their ordinary sense, as lacking something needed to bolster life, the perception is that relief must come externally. Recall, however, in earlier paragraphs Eckhart speaks of God as both with-out and with-in, revealing the total dependence of the creature on its Creator, but more importantly the proportioning of the creature to its Creator. The Creator, not the creature or any created form, is the prime analogate, and as such the one and only source as well as fulfillment for the creature. Nothing but God can satisfy. The appetite is not given to the creature to belittle its existence, but to orient it towards the Divine, to render meaning to the creature’s efforts to reach it, and to endow the creature with the possibility of becoming one with its Source. In other words, as prime analogate, the Creator defines the creature’s existence; the creature’s worldly experience—or rejection of it—does not define the Creator, or the creature–Creator relationship.

Thus, any notion of beatification conceived over against the creature’s experience in its earthly life is misguided. For example, a person hoping for material riches in the next life based on reading Scripture has an impoverished faith and a misguided notion of justice. As Aquinas points out, such images of heaven must be taken metaphorically, as a way to expand the horizon of faith and probe the deeper implications of the seemingly ordinary.30 Scripture’s metaphorical language reveals God’s closeness and personalness and is meant to lead the believer into a more intimate relationship with God by drawing a connection between earthly experience and its divine Source.

As he does elsewhere, Eckhart asserts that the negation of negation is the most positive affirmation, because it is rooted in the existence of God.31 But this does not refer to “positive” as opposed to “negative” theology. The non-contrastive (analogical) way represents a negation of a positive or conventional interpretation of divine attribution as well as a negation of the opposite of that same attribution. Rather, as we shall see, the way of analogy is truly apophatic, referring to the negation of both positive and negative attribution, and more significantly, to the transformation of the creature and its end in possessing God. It is not the creaturely method of making divine attribution, but the creature’s appetite, Eckhart interprets to be positive. Human language never adequately articulates God’s essence, but theological language discloses and informs us of what it means to be a creature in relation to its Creator. The creature’s nothingness in itself refers not primarily to the creature’s total dependence on its Creator but to its total potentiality, its very possibility of overcoming the “thing-ness” keeping it from being one with God. Eckhart closes his exegesis of Sirach 24:20:

the essence of hunger is formally an affirmative appetite, the root and cause for the exclusion of saiety which accompanies it. As such it belongs to something possessed and is a thing in some way positive. …

Each and every one of these explanations is based on some of the supreme attributes of the godhead, such as infinity, simplicity, purity, priority, and so forth. They teach … the nothingness … of creatures in themselves in relation to God.32

The hunger to know the Creator and to become one with the Source belongs first and foremost (and essentially) to God’s existence, and this appetite creates and arranges the very way in which the human fulfills this divine directive and participates in the divine Existence. In this sense, we possess God by allowing ourselves to be defined by the Divine. The supreme attributes, being distinct from any creaturely category and thus divorced from created forms, allow us to know God more intimately and immediately than anything in our ordinary experience, because they are not limited to knowledge attained through the process of rational intellection. That is why Eckhart says these divine features “teach” us about our own nothingness: in becoming detached from all creaturely forms by which the believer defined itself—even religious terms such as “Christian”—the believer enters into its own nothingness and becomes conformed to the divine life.

B. Doctrine as Analogy

Christian doctrines are designed to maintain God’s unique distinction of transcendence-in-immanence, safeguarding the Creator God of Scripture. Yet for Eckhart, the true value of such formulations lies in their potential to aid the believer in detaching from common misuses of religious language (including Christian rhetoric) and move towards union with God. This catechetical endeavor must be undertaken non-contrastively, or the consequences could be devastating to the journey of faith. Even well-intentioned believers tend to interpret doctrines “literally,” creating the illusion that the reality of the doctrine is contained within the words articulating it. Divorced from the context establishing its symbolic meaning, we tend to cling to doctrine’s formulation rather than exploring how it allows us to reach into our own nothingness and so be defined by our Divine Source.

It is crucial to Eckhart that any metaphysics involved in religious doctrine be understood metaphorically. Recalling Aquinas, metaphor is not contrasted with literal, or plain, meaning but is integral in conveying literal truth when the divine reality to be communicated is rooted in Scripture. Metaphor is particularly suited to God-talk because of its multidimensionality, thus allowing the speaker to communicate many perspectives and a multitude of possibilities in a single utterance. While still bound by the restrictions of human thought, which processes ideas consecutively rather than simultaneously, the use of metaphors, in a sense, imitates the divine perspective, “seeing all with one glance” (figuratively speaking). Sensitivity to metaphor allows us to better detach from formula, which in itself inevitably fails to capture the divine Reality because human concepts are bound to creaturely forms.

Eckhart is very intentional about the metaphorical nature of the metaphysics he intertwines throughout his Scriptural exegeses and homilies, and there is no exception regarding expounding doctrine, his primary agenda as a Dominican preacher. Eckhart scholars such as Susanne Köbele, Alois Haas, and Bernard McGinn,33 have noted that Eckhart employs what has been variously termed “master,” “exploding,” or “absolute” metaphors, which function in the believer’s detachment and journey towards mystical encounter. For example, the nothingness of God, and as it is similarly employed, the divine grunt, offer the primary examples of such metaphors.34 According to McGinn, the metaphor of grunt is explosive because

it breaks through previous categories of mystical speech to create new ways of presenting a direct encounter with God. When Eckhart says, as he frequently does, “God’s ground and my ground is the same ground,” he announces a new form of mysticism. … [T]heir function is … to transform, or overturn, ordinary limited forms of consciousness through the process of making the inner meaning of the metaphor one’s own in everyday life.35

As Aquinas taught, ordinary metaphors—while necessary and fitting—cannot stand on their own in articulating God’s existence or the Creator–creature relationship. In fact, we tend to mis-communicate when using noble figures to refer to God, because it is too easy to convey God as a great creature against whom other, much lesser, creatures must be measured. That is why it is less misleading to call God a rock than a king, although, of course kingly images of God are abundant in Scripture.36 Ordinary metaphors relate a sense of God’s closeness and familiarity and allow believers to feel connected to God through creation as well as through human social structures and relations; however, they fail to convey God’s unique transcendence-in-immanence and may give the wrong impression that “God is like us” rather than the other way around, to follow Scripture: we are made in God’s image, and in a way unlike any resemblance between creatures. Unless we are aware that such metaphors are being used improperly, they inadvertently impose creaturely forms onto the Divine.

Master metaphors work to reverse this ordering; they become analogical because they express, not any essential attribute in God, but the dynamic relationship between the Creator and creature. With a master metaphor, creaturely attributes are reflexively extended to the divine, meaning that divine significance is reflected back on creaturely traits and perfections.37 Consequently, master metaphors lead the believer forward in faith by moving away from comparing, contrasting, or otherwise measuring Creator and creatures, and moving towards a non-contrastive awareness of the Creator’s unique distinction and, especially, the creature’s end in its Source. They explode through the presumptions of conventional religious language to make it fresh and alive, forcing believers out of their comfort zone and into the dynamism of deeper faith. This, for Eckhart and his Dominican predecessors, is the true intent of doctrines, which are formulated to draw attention to God’s uniqueness while conveying God’s relevance to the world and to the human creature’s redemption.

Unlike ordinary metaphors which draw from familiar figures, master or exploding metaphors attribute to God the unusual—even the seemingly absurd and most removed from the status of divinity, yet that which is attached to no particular creaturely form. This follows Aquinas’ warning (via Dionysus) to avoid attributing lofty things to God which are inevitably bound to creaturely forms. Recall, for Aquinas, metaphor is necessary but improper use of religious language. Perfection terms are more appropriately used of God, because while lofty they are abstracted from physical form. Yet, they too must be rendered free from certain creaturely presumptions before they can be used properly, for they tend to impose our human expectations of perfection on God. So Aquinas goes to considerable length to show that God’s perfection is received only through certain unique features38 which preserve the Creator’s distinction and define God as the Source and End of every creature. Eckhart’s master metaphors take a short cut through Aquinas’ process by attributing to the Creator terms that simply defy the kind of categorization that allows us to impose any creaturely form, yet are an intrinsic part of the experience of existence itself.

“Nothingness” and “Ground” are terms that are imbedded in existence, but lack any specific sense of creaturely form. In fact, these terms are so basic that they cannot properly be called features, as can divine perfections, which from the creaturely perspective may be designated by this perfection or that perfection. Unhindered by the limitation of being “this” and not “that,” to which all created things are bound, these master metaphors create a non-contrastive way of directing talk of divine perfection, as well as of the creature’s participation in divine existence: nothingness does not allow for comparison or contrast because there is no “thing,” or no form, by which or against which to measure; the idea of the absolute ground goes a step beyond this to establish the source of thing-ness, because the ground—itself having no particular form—is that out of which things are formed.

Since they do not adhere to any creaturely form, master metaphors are able to express God’s unique distinction from the world. Furthermore, they refer to the Divine in a literal—meaning “proper”—way by securing God as the prime analogate from which all else flows, without, however, falling prey to the illusion of a one-to-one correspondence, or to the misconception inherent to ordinary metaphors and perfection terms which convey creaturely forms along with the idea of imaging the Divine. Master metaphors work to reverse ordinary metaphors. While ordinary metaphors are taken from creaturely experiences that can be explained through their forms, master metaphors are taken from those experiences that, while common to every creature, lack defining features.

Applied primarily to the Creator, and then extended reflexively to creatures, the master metaphor confers divine significance to even the most ordinary object or mundane experience, because existential meaning is derived from being created and informed by the ground of being, which in itself is no-thing. When the most mundane experience is interpreted as an encounter with the Divine, the order of the universe is completely turned around. Thus the comfortable God, safely tucked away from the rational intellect in a shroud of “mystery”—who doles out just enough information about the divine Self to set the believer on the righteous path—becomes the demanding and disquieting God, whose disclosure through routine and traumatic experiences alike forces the believer to re-evaluate every experience and creature—even the seemingly unholy or unorthodox—as possible bearers of the Divine. The believer must reach into the no-thingness of the creature, into the source of its incomprehensible intelligibility, and encounter God there.

For the religious master, this radical method of reversal has its roots in Scripture, beginning where the Creator imparts the divine image to the creature, thus merging two apparent opposites and, consequently, breaking through conventional ideas of what it means to be divine, for example wholly transcendent, supremely unknowable, and untouchable. This theme of reversal is continually carried out through the scriptural narrative: a nation arises out of slavery, a king arises from among the poor, and in the final movement, victory over alienation from God comes by the shameful death of an innocent person. In each instance, God is revealed, not in the lofty as would befit a powerful being, but in the most unlikely of places and with the most surprising results. The divine king does not lord over his subjects, but serves them by completely identifying with them. The lesson: God is not what is expected, nor is the believer’s road to salvation. Redemption comes not by adhering to moral and religious codes, but by imaging God in extraordinary and unconventional ways. Accordingly, theological and religious articulations must draw attention to the strangeness of God and, at the same time, maintain the relevance of that strangeness to the faith journey. To accomplish this, language must explode through our presumptions and agendas.

The following section draws out Eckhart’s analogical exploration of doctrine: first, on the Trinity as it pertains to the Creator–creature relationship in general; and second, on the human creature’s adoption to divine Sonship through the imitation of Christ—or, in Eckhart’s more evocative language, through the “birth of the Word in the soul.” For Eckhart, religious doctrines provide entry into the Christian faith journey, involving a process of detached intellection. In his explications of doctrine, Eckhart employs the Neoplatonic structure of exit and return, but modifies it through the use of “master metaphors,” to keep his audiences from becoming attached to this philosophy as well as to emphasize how profoundly creatures image the Creator. In effect, his dynamic speech leads reflectively to Christian forms of life, whether it be living as the “Just Man,” or seeing all things in themselves as they are in God; the result of which, in any case, is being aware of the “inner meaning” of everyday life—“direct encounter with the Divine.”39

1. Trinity as Analogy

The divine act of creation, in Christian theology, is Trinitarian: each divine Person has a proper and distinct role in bringing all things into being and sustaining them, transforming them, and bringing them back to their divine Source. Indeed, creation is imprinted with this Trinitarian structure according to its own designated end,40 and for human creatures, the intellect is especially conformed to the second Person, who is the Word of God. Through conformity to the divine Word, the believer is actualized and reunited with God. While Eckhart discusses the immanent Trinity (the interrelations among the divine Persons), he invariably moves his rhetoric to the economic Trinity, the divine Persons’ intimate involvement with creation and especially with the human creature’s existence in and return to God. Eckhart is concerned with the analogical relationship between Creator and creature, not the divine essence.

Of course, for Eckhart, Trinitarian language remains metaphorical regardless of its reference to some incomprehensible reality. Among his most controversial assertions is “everything said or written about the Holy Trinity is in no way really so or true.”41 All things originate from the Ground, beyond differentiation and beyond conception. But, since all things derive their intelligibility from God, all concepts must have a basis in divine reality, however inadequately it can be verbalized, and Eckhart is careful to maintain that “[i]t is true, of course, that there is something in God corresponding to the Trinity we speak of and other similar things.”42

In his German works, when Eckhart speaks of the Trinity or of creation, he speaks of their source in the divine grunt. The grunt acts as a master metaphor because, as source for both Trinity and creation, it creates a linguistic space for discussing the distinction between the origination of persons in the Trinity from that of creatures, while simultaneously—and more fundamentally—emphasizing the immediate connection between Trinity and creation and the potential identity of creature with Creator through participation in the divine existence. However, in Latin there is no corollary to “grunt” as it is used in his German works.43 Rather, Eckhart employs another master metaphor in his Latin works to achieve the same objective: indistinction.

In Latin Sermon IV on the Feast of the Holy Trinity, Eckhart considers the familiar expression taken from Romans 11:36, “all things are from him, and through him and in him.” He points out the common Trinitarian explication: “from him” the Father, “through him,” the Son, “in him,” the Holy Spirit. Borrowing from the philosophical categories of material, efficient, and final causality, Eckhart clarifies,

“All things” are “from” the maker, “through” the form, and “in” the end. Therefore, God is the “from whom” of all, that is, the maker of all; the “through whom” of all, that is, the form of all or what forms all; and the “in whom” of all, because [he is] the end of all things.44

The creature’s exit and return is implied within the Trinitarian structure; however, Eckhart weaves his master metaphor of indistinction within this conventional explanation, thus stretching the boundaries of the exitus/reditus paradigm in order to emphasize the depth of the Creator’s immediacy and presence to the creature as well as the creature’s identification with its Creator.

God is totally indistinct in himself according to his nature in that he is truly and most properly one and completely distinct from other things; so too man in God is indistinct from everything which is in God, and at the same time completely distinct from everything else.45

The Creator’s essential indistinction, linked to the divine feature of Oneness, secures God’s differentiation from creation. Eckhart reinforces this point: “no being can be counted alongside God.” This should be obvious, because “existence is from God alone, and he alone is existence: ‘I am who am’… If there were anything outside him or not in him, he would not be existence and consequently not God.”46

In contrast to the Creator’s existence, the creature is nothing—it has no being of its own, a tenet that finds its roots in the Christian doctrine of creation, “creatio ex nihilo.” “This is what John 1 says,” Eckhart quotes, “‘without him’ (that is, not in him), ‘what was made is nothing.’”47 He clarifies, “every being, every maker, every form, every end that is conceived of outside or beyond existence or that is numbered along with existence is nothing—it is neither a being, nor a maker, nor a form, nor an end.”48 Like his Latin commentaries on Wisdom and Exodus,49 the creature’s nothingness draws attention to the Creator’s distinction, and specifically to the Creator’s unique power to bring all things into being without pre-existing matter, as well as the Creator’s necessary sustenance in keeping creatures from falling back into non-existence.

Because it is employed to support the Creator’s distinction, the term “nothing” does not operate as a master metaphor, as it does in some of Eckhart’s German works, where it is closely connected to the grunt. However, led by the master metaphor of indistinction, the nothingness of creatures conveys yet another—although implicit—significance. To understand how the term “nothing” can function in a dual way, we must return to the scriptural story of creation. In Genesis 1, God does not, in fact, bring the world to being out of “thin air” so to speak, like a magician, but rather creates all things out of a formless wasteland. God does create out of “nothing,” but in a more artistic sense: where there was no particular thing—no-thing, a formless wasteland that served no particular purpose—now there are specific things (formed) that have specific purposes (informed). The story of creation is, therefore, not really about God’s power over creation, but about God’s wisdom in forming and arranging creation, and, as the story continues, arranging so that the divine is imaged by and manifest within creation, especially by the human creature, the culmination of God’s creative activity. By this divine ordering the creature participates in the divine existence. Derived from Scripture, tradition holds two senses of creation from nothing: one securing God’s distinction from and power over the world; the other, emphasizing the creature’s manifestation of and designated end in its Creator.

The first sense is clearly present in John’s Gospel. In response to Jn. 1:3, Eckhart declares (note the implicit Trinitarian structure), “How might there be or might something be that is beyond existence, or without existence, or not in existence?”50 God alone is the author of existence, and God alone is existence. This seems to indicate the Creator’s transcendent power over and distinction from creation. However, Eckhart is not content to present the doctrine of creation without plumbing its depths; nor is he afraid of the controversy this dangerous exploration will inevitably cause for his audiences—in fact he counts on it. Eckhart prefaces his above reply to John, first asserting that “‘[a]ll things are in him’ in such a way that if there is anything not in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit is not God;” and then, continuing:

If there were anything outside him or not in him, he would not be existence and consequently not God. … “All things are in him” in such a way that nothing is in the Father, nothing in the Son, except because the Father and the Son are what the Holy Spirit is.51

Statements like this—appearing throughout Eckhart’s work in a variety of formulations—that “God would not be God,” sound more controversial than they really are. Above, the underlying tenet, wholly in conformity with tradition, is that the three divine Persons’ nature is essentially identical. Existence is proper to God alone, and in the Trinity this existence is essentially indistinct—being neither this nor that mode of existence, but pure existence. Significantly, however, Eckhart does not discuss the divine nature separately from the creature’s existence.

Eckhart had earlier indicated that, because everything exists in God in a general way, the three terms (from, through, and in) are, in actuality, the same. Within the scriptural context of creation, which provides the interior content for the doctrine of the Trinity, the creatures’ existence in God (before being created in the world) is formless existence. This manner of existence is also indistinct.

Through the master metaphor of indistinction, Eckhart takes an analogical turn by reflexively extending the divine mode of existence to creatures:

when we say that all things are in God [that means that] just as he is indistinct in his nature and nevertheless most distinct from all things, so in him all things in a most distinct way are also at the same time indistinct. … Further, just as God is ineffable and incomprehensible, so all things are in him in an ineffable way.52

Like the German grunt, indistinction is free from creaturely form while conveying the idea of identity: two things that are identical are indistinct, because there is nothing, no single feature, by which to distinguish one from the other. Eckhart’s dialectical attribution of distinct and indistinct existence seems to be an example of what Zum Brunn calls the dual status of the creature: in the world (borrowed existence) and in God (liberated existence).53 In the world, the creature is separated from other creatures and from the Creator by virtue of its form; but in God, the creature is one with other creatures and with the Creator by virtue of its indistinction with the divine existence.54

This dual mode of existence creates a linguistic space for articulating God’s transcendence as well as the creature’s total dependence on the Creator, while at the same time expressing God’s immanence and the creature’s freedom from the constrictions of its created form—language-use Zum Brum calls “dialectical analogy.” However, led by indistinction as master metaphor, the dual ontology of the creature (distinct and indistinct) passes beyond dialectically balancing God’s transcendence and immanence, or the creature’s borrowed and liberated existence vis-à-vis the Creator: indistinction expresses a non-contrastive relationship where the creature shares a radical identity with the Creator more profound than any likeness between creatures, and furthermore, creatures share a radical identity with each other not perceived through ordinary awareness, but only through a transformed awareness. Eckhart is careful to note that creatures are indistinct with each other and with the Creator in a distinct and unique manner. Distinct and indistinct existence are not really dialectical, because they are not opposed to each other, but rather non-contrastive. Yet this indistinction, this radical identity in creation, is everywhere present, just as God is everywhere present, since it is an inextricable part of common existence. Through their existence, which at its core is indistinct, creatures carry within themselves God’s inexhaustible intelligibility; thus, ordinary creatures manifest the Divine in the world.

Moreover, indistinction for the human creature is soteriologically significant. Like other creatures, the human bears within itself divine intelligibility (incomprehensibility), and in addition was made to image its divine Creator. However, as the scriptural narrative unfolds, unlike the rest of creation the human creature was given the freedom—and made the choice—to turn away from its divine image and cling to created images, which are nothing more than fleeting forms. In religious terms, our stubborn attachment to forms is sinful, because awareness of our indistinction with God is obscured, hindering us from fully manifesting our divine image and, consequently, keeping us from fulfilling our divine telos.

Redemption is freedom from this sinful state of alienation from realizing our indistinction, or total union with God. Liberated existence is one of identification with the divine ground; therefore, to be saved is to become deified—realizing and actualizing divine indistinction. In Christian terms, deification takes form (to use this term improperly) particularly in the second Person of the Trinity, who as incarnate provides the interconnection between human and divine: one in nature with the divine Father and Spirit and one in nature with humanity—like us in all things except sin, that is, except attachment to forms. Jesus Christ, as Word incarnate, is the divine image because through his life, death, and resurrection he manifests the complete human identification with the divine. As exemplar, Jesus remained detached from the fleeting concerns of created forms, thereby providing a living model, and revelation, of divine imaging for others to follow.

2. Adopted Sonship as Analogy

Surprisingly, Eckhart does not exploit the language of the hypostatic union. The doctrine of the hypostatic union protects God’s distinction by positioning Jesus as the absolutely unique human example of divine transcendence-in-immanence. Often, the hypostatic formula is understood contrastively, where as divine, Jesus wholly transcends creation and as human is wholly immanent to creation, especially to other human beings. However, this assumes that to be divine is the opposite of being human, and this would not do justice to the profound intimacy God has to humanity through the incarnation.

In his German works, Eckhart employs exitus/reditus language in his explication of the birth of the Word in the soul, a development earning him official condemnation for seeming to blur the distinction between Creator and creature. In his Latin works, however—notably his commentary on John’s Gospel—Eckhart appeals to the Pauline notion that, through Jesus Christ believers become adopted heirs of God. For Eckhart, the hypostatic formula does not provide as much linguistic space for articulating the return of the believer to God as the language of “adoption.” Subtly directed by the master metaphor of indistinction, the doctrine that through Christ believers become adopted heirs of God passes from traditional formula to dynamic analogy.

In his Latin Commentary on John’s Gospel, Eckhart quotes: “‘The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us,’” continuing: “the first fruit of the Incarnation of the Word, who is the natural Son of God, is that we should be God’s sons through adoption.” Eckhart borrows Paul’s adoption language from Galatians and Romans, where Paul writes, “‘you have received the spirit of adoption of the sons of God.’ … ‘If we are sons, we are heirs also: Heirs indeed of God and joint heirs with Christ.’”55 Eckhart explains, “it would be of little value for me that ‘the Word was made flesh’ for man in Christ as a person distinct from me unless he was also made flesh in me personally so that I too might be God’s son.”56

Eckhart maintains Christ’s unique distinction from creatures, because he alone naturally exists both as human and divine (divine here understood as “immanent-yet-transcendent”). Additionally, adoption language shows that the believer, returned to the Creator, exists divinely through adoption; therefore, adoption language yields more than does that of hypostatic union. However, Eckhart’s use of “adoption” goes beyond conventional understanding, which distinguishes natural sonship from adoption in a way that opposes human and divine. Conventionally understood, the idea that believers become by adoption—or through grace—what Jesus was by nature, God’s son, preserves Jesus’ unique status as both fully human and divine and preserves Jesus’ unique status as uncreated, unlike any other human person. Although we can become heirs of God, we can never be both human and divine in the same sense Jesus was; we can become sons of God, but not THE Son of God. Eckhart, however, is not satisfied with this discrimination because it presumes an unbridgeable separation between human and divine, and does not convey the intimacy between Creator and human creature made in the divine image.

Rather, for Eckhart, adoption must be extended beyond its ordinary meaning, becoming a dynamic analogy. To become adopted means Jesus is made flesh in the believer personally, indicating a profound transformation—or con-formation—within the human creature. He goes on to draw this out more explicitly:

“The Word was made flesh” in Christ who is outside us. He does not make us perfect by being outside us; but afterwards, through the fact that “he dwelt among us,” he gives us his name and perfects us “so that we are called and truly are God’s son.” (1 Jn.3:1)57 For then the Son of God, “The Word made flesh,” dwells in us, that is, in our very selves—behold God’s dwelling with man … [Isaiah] says, “He dwelt among use,” that is, he made man his dwelling.58 Again, “He dwelt among us” because we have him in us. … “We are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as through the Spirit of the Lord.” We should not falsely suppose that it is by one son or image that Christ is the Son of God and by some other that the just and godlike man is a son of God, for he says, “We are being transformed into the same image.”59

Statements like this mark one of the most controversial aspects of Eckhart’s work, because it appears that, in identifying the believer with Jesus Christ, Eckhart erases the line between divine and human—and between nature and grace—effectively the only thing setting Jesus apart from other humans.60 His German works articulate this even more boldly, for example his sermon on the Book of Wisdom 5:16, where Eckhart asserts, “The Father gives birth to the Son without ceasing, and I say more: he gives me birth, me, his son and the same son.”61

In his Johannine commentary, as in some Latin sermons,62 the believer’s adoption as God’s son through conformity to Jesus Christ relies on Eckhart’s understanding of “image.” Driven by the master metaphor of indistinction, conformity to Christ dynamically analogizes Christ’s imaging of the Father as the Word of God. In his Commentary on John, “The Word was with God, and the Word was God,” Eckhart explains how Jesus Christ is the image of the Father:

the image and that of which it is an image, insofar as they are such, are one. “The Father and I are one” (Jn 10:30). He says “we are” insofar as there is an exemplar that is expressive and begets and an image that is expressed or begotten; he says “one” insofar as the whole existence of the one is in the other and there is nothing alien to it there. … The image and the exemplar are coeval, and this is what is said here, that “the Word,” that is, the image, “was in the beginning with God” in such a way that the exemplar cannot be understood without the image and vice versa. “He who sees me also sees my Father” (Jn 14:9).63

The imaging between Son and Father is so profound that it goes beyond any shared form to their existence; in God, image is an expression of identity rather than likeness, and therefore the Son’s imaging of the Father indicates indistinction with regard to divine existence. Furthermore, since “[t]he principles of knowing and of existence are the same,”64 knowing and existence in God are also indistinct, for “nothing is known through what is alien to it.” Borrowing from Matthew’s Gospel, Eckhart concludes, “[n]o one knows the Son except the Father, nor does anyone know the Father except the Son.”65

So far, image understood as indistinction is limited to the Divine Persons; however, true to form, Eckhart quickly turns from immanent Trinity to economic Trinity. The relationship between indistinction and image has profound soteriological implications for human creatures. Indistinction does not appear often in Eckhart’s commentary on John, but operates tacitly throughout the text as he continues to develop the notion of adoption, moving from how the Word images the Father to how, as believers become conformed to the Word incarnate, they too image God and consequently become deified heirs.

“[I]ndistinct existence is proper to God, and he is distinguished by his indistinction alone, while distinct existence is proper to a creature,”66 asserts Eckhart, maintaining the orthodox position of the Creator’s unique distinction from creature. More importantly, though, he sets the stage for the formula of adoption to become a dynamic analogy expressing the human creature’s reunion and identification with its Source. Even early in the commentary Eckhart begins to extend God’s indistinction to human beings, following Augustine that “we are made to the image of the whole Trinity.”67 Humanity’s creation in the image of the Trinity is significant to Eckhart because, according to Christian tradition, the God of Scripture is the triune God proclaimed by the Church. Therefore it is the Trinity’s role in creation that concerns Eckhart—particularly, in his Johannine commentary, of the second Person’s role in the creation of humanity. The human creature has a special relatedness to the second Divine Person because it is endowed with intellect, which directs it back to its Source through the Word’s incarnation.

Explaining John’s opening declaration, “in the beginning was the Word,” Eckhart borrows from Augustine on the various meanings of the Greek Logos.

The Greek Logos means the same as the Latin “idea” and “word.” In this passage we translate it more correctly as “Word” to signify not only the relation to the Father, but also the relation to the things that are made through the Word by means of operative power. “Idea” is a term rightly used even if nothing is made through it.68

Eckhart discerns that even from the beginning of the gospel, John’s focus is soteriological rather than speculative, and concrete rather than abstract. He takes John’s highly symbolic language as an opportunity to extend divine existence to redeemed humanity: through God’s revelation in Jesus Christ, believers are able to realize their indistinct existence through imitation.

Becoming “heirs” or “adopted sons” means revealing God just as Jesus Christ reveals the Father. He was able to reveal the Father by virtue of his divine nature, which is indistinct from the Father. Human creatures are capable of revealing God insofar as they image Jesus, who, as exemplar (Word or Logos) has a proper role bringing creatures into existence from nothing. Although distinct among themselves, creatures are indistinct in God because all they possess comes from God and from nothing else, and continued existence depends on God. “The image is in its exemplar, for there it receives its whole existence. On the other hand, the exemplar insofar as it is an exemplar is in its image because the image has the whole existence of the exemplar in itself.”69 Indistinction extends to creatures because, as Eckhart continues, “the Word itself, the exemplar of created things, is not something outside God towards which he looks … but the Word is in the Father himself.” Since the Word is in the Father, and the Word is the exemplar of creatures, creatures are in God and are indistinct.

Indistinction operates here as master metaphor, albeit tacitly. The term “image” indicates indistinction, because it goes beyond formal definition. The Son does not image the Father through any particular form or feature, divine or otherwise, but through existence. Jesus Christ manifested his divine (fully actualized) existence by living in such a way that he did not cling to created forms, but treated everything as it was in itself and in God. As Eckhart puts it, he lived “without a why,”70 foregoing self-interest for the sake of others, especially those who—by all outward appearances, or in other words, through their created forms—did not seem to merit such attention. Likewise, insofar as we become detached from created forms and live “without a why,” we manifest the divine existence by becoming conformed to the formless image of Jesus Christ, and are transformed into one and the same Son.

The capacity to be transformed into the Son is inbuilt into the human creature’s telos by virtue of its intellect. Eckhart begins establishing the association between human intellect and divine Intellect—just as he does everything else—with the Creator as prime analogate. The human intellect is not discussed until divine Intellect is considered, thereby preserving proper linguistic order of Creator to creature. Eckhart toggles back and forth between divine Knowledge and human knowledge of God throughout the Johannine commentary. Speaking first of John’s text, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” Eckhart explains, whatever is produced from something is “universally its word.” By “word,” Eckhart means that it “speaks, announces and discloses whence it comes.”71 The Word reveals the divine Source. Creation manifests the divine because it reflects its Creator, and especially the Word, through whom creatures are brought into being. The purpose of the incarnation is to make God known to creatures through the highest worldly creation, humanity, who images its Creator’s existence through being, through life, and most specifically, through intellect.

The question of why the Word’s incarnation was necessary and appropriate is answered in terms of redemption: drawing the believer back to its source—for the end of all creatures is in their divine Source—especially the human creature, made in God’s image but manifesting its Source like a reflection in a dark glass, because it tends to attach itself to created forms. “[T]he intellect, which begins in the senses, is clouded by the [created] images through which and in which it knows.”72 Because of this weakness, we need an exemplar to which we can cling and which we can imitate who images God purely. Jesus Christ as Word incarnate is divine exemplar and pure image of God. Because he existed corporeally, he communicated the divine physically, and related himself to others through the senses.

However, in becoming conformed, believers must also become detached from the human image of Jesus Christ, for even clinging to the Word incarnate will keep the believer from wholly identifying with and knowing God. “[T]ake good heed of Christ’s words, when he spoke about his human nature and said to his disciples ‘It is expedient for you that I go from you, for if I do not go, the Holy Spirit cannot come to you,’” Eckhart quotes from John’s Gospel in his German work On Detachment: “This is just as if he were to say, ‘you have taken too much delight in my present image, so that the perfect delight of the Holy Spirit cannot be yours.’”73 The faithful must come to know everything, including Jesus Christ, as indistinct from God—and not through the forms that define them. Eckhart often calls this transformed way of knowing, which images the divine Intellect, “unknowing” or “detached intellection,” because to know something by seeing through its created form to its indistinct existence—knowing personally—is different than our ordinary way of obtaining knowledge; it is, therefore, preferable not to use the same designation as for ordinary knowledge in speaking about divine knowledge, lest it is taken in the ordinary sense obtained through created forms.

In order to guide audiences non-contrastively in detaching from “formal” knowledge towards appreciating the depth, immediacy, and intimacy of things as they are in themselves and in God, Eckhart develops the analogical implications of the Creator–creature relationship, which he does here first by securing the Word’s equality and identity with the Principle of creation, as well as the Word’s distinction from creatures:

In things that are analogical what is produced is always … less perfect and unequal to its source. In things that are univocal what is produced is always equal to the source. It does not just participate in the same nature, but it receives the total nature from its source in a simple, whole and equal manner. … [W]hat proceeds is the son of its source. A son is one who is other in person but not other in nature.74

The Son as Word of God is equal to the Principle (the Father) and distinct from creatures. Whatever is produced in terms of being created derives from the source and as such is “beneath” it (metaphorically speaking). However, without delay Eckhart moves in reverse, extending the Son’s indistinct existence with the Father to creatures:

Still, insofar as it is in the principle, it is not other in nature or other in supposit. A chest in its maker’s mind is not a chest, but is the life and understanding of the maker, his living conception. On this account I would say that what it says here about the procession of the divine Persons holds true and is found in the procession and production of every being of nature and art.75

Assuming a dialectical mode, Eckhart qualifies the indistinction of creatures in God and reaffirms the equality of the Word with God, but now includes the Word’s proper role in the divine act of creation:

note that it is proper to the intellect to receive its object, that is, the intelligible, not in itself, insofar as it is complete, perfect and good, but to receive it in its principles. This is what is meant here: “In the principle was the Word.” And again, “This Word was in the principle with God. … [T]he word, that is, the mind’s concept … is that through which the maker makes all that he does and without which he does nothing as a maker. Hence there follows: “All things were made through him, and without him nothing was made.”76

Created things are indistinct by virtue of their pure potency to become a particular thing solely from the artistry of the triune Creator. Thus, Creator and creature are distinctly indistinct: creatures are indistinct because of their no-thingness, while the Word is indistinct because of its existence as pure act, by which it derives its divine creative power to inform all things.

The creature’s indistinction, neither univocal nor equivocal with the Word’s indistinction, lends the creature the capacity to manifest the Word, insofar as its “idea” is conveyed by the creature—the idea constituting its particular place in the order of creation: being, living, or intellect. “[I]n the case of created things, only their ideas shine,” Eckhart deduces from Aristotle, for “[t]he idea of a thing which the name signifies is its definition,” and, at least from the creaturely perspective, in defining something knowledge about it is revealed.

Explicating John’s text, “the light shines in the darkness,” however, Eckhart reverses Aristotle’s tenet, that knowledge of something is revealed through the ideas—that is, through the forms—by which is it defined, concluding, nothing shines in creatures except their idea, which, although distinct with regard to the order of creation, is indistinct in God since its origin is the divine Word. “Shining” is a metaphor for the disclosure of divine knowledge. To distinguish the creature’s divinely originated idea, one must paradoxically move beyond the apparent or created forms of the creature—that which defines it outwardly, but which tends to obscure its inward reality—to the formless image within, its divine idea, which “remains immobile and intact, even if the creature is changed, moved, or destroyed.” Insofar as the “idea” of a creature shines forth through its created forms, it reveals and manifests the Creator. To know a creature truly, what-it-is in itself, is to perceive it indistinctly in God, consequently to know the Creator: personally, immediately, and intimately. There is no distance between Creator and creature in personal knowing, and no distinction between the human creature’s knowing and its existence in God. Instead of being defined by their created forms, creatures as they are in themselves are therefore defined by how they reflect and reveal the Creator.

Humanity has the special capacity to know and disclose God personally through its intellect, suggesting the potency for transformation and identification with the divine Intellect. Of course, by intellect, Eckhart means more than rational faculty. Certainly, though, reason is not disregarded. “Corporeal nature as such does not distinguish between the thing and the idea, because it does not know the idea, which only a rational and intellectual nature grasps and knows.”77 The power of reason allows us to organize thoughts, prioritize experiences, and most significantly, to derive the idea of something apart from its existence as a particular “what it is.” But intellect goes beyond reason in its capacity to transform the human being, which it does by perceiving things in themselves as well as their indistinction in the divine Source. Consequently, the human creature is able to pass beyond its own assumed identity to recognize its indistinction in God and its potency for manifesting its divine image through detachment—or, scripturally speaking, through disinterested piety.

According to John, the Word incarnate was life, and “the life was the light of men.” For Eckhart, John’s use of “light,” synonymous with “idea,” is symbolic of divine self-knowledge revealed to the human intellect, ordered to God as a capacity to receive and to respond to divine communication. God’s revelation through the incarnation of the Word is an appropriate expression of divine self-communication because of the correlation between divine knowledge and existence:

The intellect’s effect in itself is … word and idea … The Idea in the proper sense is certainly in the First intellect. It is also “with God” in every neighboring intellectual being that is its image, or made according to its image as “God’s offspring.” Furthermore, reality and intellect are the same in [God].78

From the divine perspective, the Word, or Logos, is the divine Idea, deriving its power to inform creation by virtue of its indistinct existence as pure act; from the creaturely perspective, intellect—which allows the human creature to discern the existence of something apart from its form, and thus respond to it as it is actually—is the highest form of creaturely existence. Humanity, endowed not only with reason but with its whole intellect as its telos guiding it to full existence (full actualization) in its Source, is thus ordered to the divine Intellect. It is therefore fitting for the Word of God to assume human nature, so that humanity could assume divine nature. Eckhart begins with the formula of adoption and draws his readers to its redemptive implications, of which the ultimate end is deification.

“The Father gives birth to his Son in eternity, equal to himself,” Eckhart reminds his readers in his German Sermon on Wisdom 5:16, where he refers again to John’s opening passage, “The Word was with God, and God was the Word.” He reasons, “it was the same in the same nature.” But here in this German work, Eckhart abandons adoption language, and moves his identification between the Word and the human creature further than in his Latin works:

Yet I say more: He has given birth to him in my soul. Not only is the soul with him, and he equal with it, but he is in it, and the Father gives his Son birth in the soul in the same way as he gives him birth in eternity, and not otherwise. … The Father gives birth to his Son without ceasing; and I say more: He gives me birth, me, his Son and the same Son.79

Eckhart breaks his audiences out of their comfort zone to extend the birth in the soul to the divine nature itself:

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. In the innermost source, there I spring out in the Holy Spirit, where there is one life and one being and one work. Everything God performs is one; therefore he gives me, his Son, birth without any distinction [underscheit].80

Not only does Eckhart seemingly blur the Son and human creature’s distinction, but he clarifies that, in giving birth to the Son unceasingly, the Son’s divine nature and the human creature’s nature are one and the same. Arguing from Second Corinthians, Eckhart declares: “We shall be completely transformed and changed into God.”

While Eckhart seems to drift dangerously close to—if not actually into the terrain of—the heretical, we must investigate the analogical, and therefore metaphorical, dimensions of this language. In speaking of the identity between human creature and Creator, Eckhart employs the “soul” throughout his German works, without, however, giving it a single consistent definition or description. This should come as no surprise, for to give a fixed interpretation might allow audiences to cling to the concept of the soul without exploring its metaphorical depths. The metaphor of “soul” is driven by the master metaphor of grunt, the “place” (metaphorically speaking, of course) where indistinction, and therefore identity, between Creator and creature may be found.

The birth of the Word in the soul, understood through the master metaphor of ground, develops a non-contrastive interpretation falling well within the confines of Christian orthodoxy, because it protects the Creator’s uniqueness while expressing the total dependence and potency of the human creature. Indeed, Eckhart’s “birth” motif should be considered radically orthodox, because it is more likely to succeed where conventional Christian formulas, such as hypostatic union, are less likely to: first, in detaching believers from superficial identification as individual creatures privileged by virtue of their God-given superior rational nature—set apart and above other creatures—and second, in revealing to believers their potential identities as divine creatures accountable to God and to other creatures by virtue of their union and indistinction with them.

In Christian terms, Jesus exemplified this in sacrificing his life, thereby identifying completely with the human condition. Jesus was able to identify completely with humanity because he lived a life of disinterested piety, allowing him to see others as they were in themselves indistinct from God. His self-sacrifice on the cross is considered an act of God’s love for humanity. In actuality, detached intellection and love are one and the same, because to know something in itself is to identify completely with it, and to identify completely with something is to give yourself completely to it. In giving birth to the Son in the soul, God identifies so completely with the human creature that any distinction is extinguished. Eckhart does, therefore, dissolve the distinction between Creator and creature; however it is well justified by the Christian imperative of love and is in this sense radically orthodox.

While Eckhart is daring enough in his German works to risk conflation between the human soul and the divine nature in order to pull his congregations out of their doctrinal complacency, it is important to note he was no less intent on detaching his Dominican students from reliance on formulaic interpretations of doctrine, since they were someday to preach to their own congregations and to teach their own students. In his Latin works, Eckhart’s use of insofar, deemed the “inquantum principle” by scholars like Tobin,81 allows Eckhart to remain within the confines of orthodoxy while carrying audiences beyond conventional (mis)understandings of the Creator–creature relationship, which might blur the divine and the created. The indistinction of the Creator, existing always everywhere in fully actualized existence, establishes the unique distinction between Creator and creature, whose existence is indistinct because it totally depends on the Creator. No comparison or contrast between Creator and creature is possible, because there is no other existence, and no other source of existence, with which such a correlation or differentiation could be made. The creature is, strictly speaking, no-thing by its own power. But since God is the source of its being any-thing at all, insofar as it has existence, or insofar as it imitates the Word incarnate, or insofar as it acts justly, and so forth, it is in God and indistinct from God and is God. The inquantum principle establishes the Creator–creature relationship as dynamically analogical, because it speaks not of the creature’s formal resemblance or dissimilarity to the Creator, but rather of its potency to identify with its Creator who is its source of existence.

The “birth of the Word in the soul” presents Eckhart’s German audiences with the same linguistic possibility, but with a more personal and evocative articulation from which to draw their spiritual reflections and direct their moral actions. “As truly as the Father in his simple nature gives his Son birth naturally, so truly does he give him birth in the most inward part of the soul, and that is the inner world,” Eckhart writes in his German Sermon on 1 John 4:9, “In this God’s love for us has been revealed and has appeared to us, because God has sent his Only-Begotten Son into the world, so that we live with the Son and in the Son and through the Son.” Eckhart continues, invoking his master metaphor of ground to explain the immediacy and intimacy between the believer and God:

Where the Father gives birth to his Son in the innermost ground, there this nature is suspended [or hovers – German: însweben]. This nature is one and simple. … Here God’s ground is my ground, and my ground is God’s ground. Here I live from what is my own, as God lives from what is his own. … Whoever seeks for God without ways will find him as he is in himself, and that man will live with the Son, and he is life itself.82

Eckhart’s identification of the “most inward part of the soul” and God’s ground has elicited much controversy because it seems to give something “uncreated” to the human creature, obscuring the essential distinction between Creator and creature.83 But Eckhart is intent on preserving the correct analogical order between the two: the soul receives the uncreated because it is ordered to it, not because it is of itself uncreated; the human creature must have the capacity to receive, respond to, and identify with the divine if it is to manifest it rather than just reflect it like an image in a mirror. “Uncreated” and “created” are not in opposition, but are non-contrastive. The identification of the soul with the divine ground bespeaks of its pure potency, and in this sense it should be called uncreated: “All things are created from nothing; therefore their true origin is nothing,” Eckhart exhorts, in a cunning word-play suggesting several simultaneous levels of interpretation: the creature’s being brought forth out of nothing, or the not-yet-something specific, or the not-yet-created; the creature’s being created by and from the one who is no-thing and uncreated, the Creator who is distinct from creation by virtue of its indistinction, divine no-thingness. Even nothingness is not outside of God. Therefore the creature’s true origin and end is as no-thing, or, as in God, uncreated.

When Eckhart declares there is no distinction whatever between the soul giving birth to the Word and the divine nature, he means no distinction exists between God and the soul which can be compared to any kind of distinction found among creatures. This dynamic moment, uncreated and indistinct, conveys a relation between Creator and human creature that is singularly unique or, more personally, a love so strong that Lover and beloved are one and the same in a complete mutual self-presence drawing all things into itself:

The man who has God essentially present to him grasps God divinely, and to him God shines in all things, for everything tastes to him of God, and God forms himself for the man out of all things. God always shines out in him, in him there is a detachment and a turning away, and a forming of his God whom he loves and who is present to him. … Truly, wherever he is, whomever he is with, whatever he may undertake, whatever he does, what he so loves never passes from his mind, and he finds the image of what he loves in everything and it is the more present to him the more his love grows and grows.84

This person, detached from the distinction of created forms, just as the Jesus Christ was detached from such distractions, “does not seek rest,” Eckhart affirms, “because no unrest hinders him.” He has passed beyond affirmations, beyond negations, and beyond comparisons and contrasts—to silence.

C. Analogy as Silence

“‘[The light] shines in the darkness,’ that is, in a silence and stillness apart from the commotion of creatures,” Eckhart concludes his exegesis of John’s fifth verse. Drawing from Augustine’s Confessions, he queries, “‘What is similar to your Word … if the commotion of the flesh is silent to a person, images are silent … and the soul is silent to itself and passes beyond itself by not thinking on itself?”85 And, meditating on Wisdom (18:14), he pauses, as if his thoughts drift off and evaporate: “When a deep silence held all things.”

Eckhart reflects more extensively on the meaning of silence in his earlier commentary on Wisdom, considering this same verse, and from his meditations there the interconnection between speaking of and knowing God may be derived. As he does in his later work, Eckhart turns to Augustine for inspiration: “‘Be not foolish, my soul, and make not the ear of your heart deaf with the turmoil of your folly. Hear the Word itself; there is the place of imperturbable rest.’”86 He concludes by quoting from Book 9: ‘“if the soul be silent to itself and by not thinking of itself transcend itself … he may speak alone through himself in order that we may hear his Word.”87

God speaks to the silent soul immediately, without a medium, suggesting both knowing and identification. But this is not supernatural revelation bypassing human thought. Rather, it is an immediate “opening up” of thought, or a bursting through thought—Eckhart sometimes uses the language of a “spark” in the soul—causing a transformed awareness of God manifest in all things. “[T]he very idea of a medium [must] be removed, given up, be silent and at rest so that the soul can rest in God. … [J]ust as many things and all things are one in the One and in God … ‘[w]e have all things in you, the One,’ and … ‘God will be one in all.’”88 The metaphor of “silence” in these passages does not refer to the cessation of thought or speech—as it does for the beatified in their union with God after death—but to an awareness of the silence permeating and lying at the center of each word, each thought, and each creature.

This silence, unrecognized, lies hidden beneath the veil of the created image, whether a fellow creature, a work of art, a rock, or a word; and because hidden, it causes the soul to be restless after its purpose and meaning. Once perceived, however, the Source—the Word of God—speaks so loudly through the creature or work of art, or rock, or word, you can barely distinguish where the word ends and your ear begins. This is the apophatic way: to perceive things as they are in themselves indistinct from God is to be dramatically transformed: the Word and the hearer are one.89 This indicates that the value of apophasis, or the “negation of negation” in Eckhart’s terms, does not lie in the cessation of speech, but in the fulfillment of its soteriological purpose. The hearer who is transformed becomes the Word who bears divine silence through itself, just as Jesus the incarnate Word did during his human life—in every facet of his human life, word, and deed. Human discourse about and to God bearing the divine Silence within transforms other hearers—“who have ears to hear,” Scripture qualifies—and unites the speaker, the listener, and the Word as one in God. Those who are transformed and bear the Silence within themselves are not rendered mute, but on the contrary, are compelled to speak of God all the more, so that others may be gathered into God. This is the Preacher’s soteriological calling, to gather believers into Christ. Eckhart, through practical exercise of Aquinas’ analogy, lends a new and dynamic meaning to Augustine’s repose of the restless heart. The heart at rest in God is a silent heart, but not a speechless one, until it has completed its last earthly beat.

1 See Marthaler, The Creed, 116-20.

2 Tanner, God and Creation, 45-6.

3 See, for example, German Sermon 83: “You should love God … as he is a non-God, a nonspirit, a nonperson, a nonimage” (Colledge and McGinn, Essential Sermons) and On Detachment, “And when this detachment ascends to the highest place, it knows nothing of knowing, it loves nothing of loving, and from light it becomes dark” (Colledge and McGinn, Essential Sermons).

4 STh, I.13.2.

5 See, for example, German Sermon 1, on Mt 21:12 (McGinn, Tobin, and Borgstadt, Teacher and Preacher) and Counsel 6, “Of Detachment and of the Possession of God,” in Counsels on Discernment (Colledge and McGinn, Essential Sermons).

6 Sir 24:20.

7 Commentary on Ecclesiasticus (hereafter Comm. Ecc.), n. 52 (McGinn, Tobin, and Borgstadt, Teacher and Preacher). Quoted text from Aquinas appears to be from In I Sent. D. 22, q. 1, a.3, ad. 2.

8 Comm. Ecc., n. 52.

9 De Libera, Le problème de l’être chez Maîter Eckhart, 6; Colledge and McGinn, Essential Sermons, 32-3.

10 See, for example, Commentary on John (hereafter Comm. Jn.), nn. 24, 107 (Colledge and McGinn, Essential Sermons).

11 For example, Commentary on Wisdom (hereafter Comm. Wis.) (1:14), n. 34 (McGinn, Tobin, and Borgstadt, Teacher and Preacher); German Sermon 71 (McGinn, Tobin, and Borgstadt, Teacher and Preacher).

12 For example, German Sermon 71 (“When he saw nothing, he saw God”) and 83 (“you with him perceive forever his uncreated is-ness, and his nothingness, for which there is no name”). See Colledge and McGinn, Essential Sermons, 33 (dialectical analogy) and Kelley, Meister Eckhart on Divine Knowledge, 31 (reverse analogy).

13 See Commentary on Exodus (hereafter Comm. Ex.), nn. 143-74; the introduction to Colledge and McGinn, Essential Sermons, 15-30.

14 Comm. Ex., nn. 143-74.

15 See, for example, Latin Sermon IV on the Feast of the Holy Trinity (McGinn, Tobin, and Borgstadt, Teacher and Preacher).

16 Tanner, God and Creation, 45-6.

17 Comm. Ecc., n. 56.

18 STh, I.3.5, especially reply obj. 2.

19 STh, I.4, reply obj. 3.

20 STh, I.4, reply obj. 3.

21 STh, I.12.4.

22 STh, I.12.7.

23 For more on deification in the Summa, see A.N. Williams, The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), especially ch. 2.

24 Comm. Ecc. on Sir 24:20. This use of “formal” is distinguished from God as formal cause, which belongs to God’s oneness in Formal, Efficient, Material, and Final cause.

25 STh, I.1.6.

26 Eckhart is citing from Aquinas, STh, Ia.IIae.33.2.

27 Comm. Ecc., n. 60. The accompanying footnotes in McGinn, Tobin, and Borgstadt, Teacher and Preacher suggest Eckhart includes Aquinas in his attack here.

28 Comm. Ecc., n. 60.

29 Ibid.

30 STh, I.1.9-10.

31 See, for example, Comm. Ex., n. 556.

32 Comm. Ecc., n. 61.

33 See McGinn, Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart, 37-9 and 210 (fn. 12).

34 The “nothingness” of God is Haas’s use; Grunt is McGinn’s. See ibid.

35 Ibid., 38.

36 See STh, I.1.9, reply obj. 3.

37 Soskice distinguishes analogy from metaphor by placing analogy into literal speech (Metaphor and Religious Language, 64-6).

38 The term “formal features” is not used here to avoid confusion with the kinds of forms to which creatures are bound.

39 McGinn, Mystical Thought, 39.

40 See, for example, Eckhart’s Comm. Jn., 1.122.

41 Latin Sermon IV, n. 30.

42 Ibid.

43 See McGinn, Mystical Thought, 38-44.

44 Latin Sermon IV, n. 29.

45 Ibid., n. 28.

46 Ibid., n. 23.

47 Ibid., n. 22.

48 Ibid., n. 29.

49 See, for example, Comm. Wis. (1:14), n. 34, and Comm. Ex., nn. 102-6.

50 Latin Sermon IV, n. 23.

51 Ibid., n. 24.

52 Ibid., n. 28.

53 See Zum Brunn and de Libera, Maître Eckhart, 90.

54 See Tobin, Meister Eckhart, 92-3.

55 Gal 4:7 and Rom 8:15-17.

56 Comm. Jn., n. 117.

57 Emphasis mine.

58 Eckhart’s wordplay between habitavit and habituavit cannot be conveyed in English. See Colledge and McGinn, Essential Sermons, fn. 217.

59 Eckhart borrows from 2 Cor. 3:18. Comm. Jn., n. 118.

60 For more on Eckhart’s notion of grace, see McGinn, Mystical Thought, 127-31.

61 German Sermon 6 (Colledge and McGinn, Essential Sermons). Three excerpts relating to the birth of the Son in the soul were included in the bull “In agro dominico.” See Colledge and McGinn, Essential Sermons, fn. 218.

62 For example, Latin Sermons XXV and XLIX (McGinn, Tobin, and Borgstadt, Teacher and Preacher).

63 Comm. Jn., n. 24.

64 Comm. Jn., n. 26.

65 Mt 11:27.

66 Comm. Jn., n. 99.

67 Ibid., n. 123, following Augustine, Trin. 7.6.12.

68 Ibid., n. 28, quoting Augustine’s Book of Eighty-Three Questions.

69 Ibid., n. 20.

70 See, for example, German Sermons 5b, 6, 52 (Colledge and McGinn, Essential Sermons).

71 Comm. Jn., n. 4.

72 Ibid., n. 83.

73 Jn 16:7.

74 Comm. Jn., n. 5.

75 Ibid.

76 Ibid., n. 9.

77 Ibid., n. 1:31.

78 Ibid., n. 37.

79 German Sermon 6.

80 Ibid.

81 See Tobin, Meister Eckhart, 49-61, 90-94.

82 German Sermon 5b. See Peter Reiter, Der Seele Grund: Meister Eckhart und die Tradition der Seelenlehre (Würzburg: Verlag Königshausen and Neumann, 1993) for more on Eckhart’s relationship between the soul and the divine ground.

83 See, for example, McGinn and Colledge, Essential Sermons, pertaining to Eckhart’s condemnation, 12-15, and Tobin, Meister Eckhart, 132.

84 Counsels on Discernment. Counsel 6, “Of Detachment and of the Possession of God.”

85 Comm. Jn., n. 80.

86 Augustine, Confessions, 4.9.

87 Ibid., Book 9.

88 Comm. Wis. (18:1), 285, quoting from Tb 10:5 and 1 Cor 15:28, respectively.

89 See J.P. Williams, Denying Divinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 4-5; Louis Dupré, “Eckhart: From Silence to Speech,” International Catholic Review: Communio 11 (1984): 28-34.