PATH TWO: LETTING GO AND LETTING BE

Eckhart says that the way to God is not a burden but a blessing. “The path is beautiful and pleasant and joyful and familiar.”¹ And so, from our experience in Path One with the blessing that creation is as it flows out but remains within the Creator, that is the case. As an act of faith purely made, this is the case: all creation praises God. However, Eckhart is not naïve about the brokenness of the way we perceive creation and interact with it. “Every angel is with his whole joy and his whole bliss inside me and God himself with his whole bliss. Yet I do not perceive this.”²

In Path Two, then, Eckhart deals with how we heal our broken ways of seeing and loving the world. “We love everything according to our own goodness,” he declares.³ If we could heal our own goodness we would begin to heal the beings we love. In the first path, that of creation, we have traveled the via positiva toward the cataphatic God or the God of light, of being, of life, of creation. In this path we will travel the via negativa toward an apophatic God, the unnameable, hidden, dark God of nothingness. Neither way to God is a way of fear, however. For this path too is a path that is “beautiful and pleasant and joyful and familiar.”