Anam Cara

Meister Eckhart is for me one of the most fascinating minds of the Western tradition—a mind that had its flowering in the early part of the millennium. He was a priest, a mystic—and officially a heretic!

Several people had recommended Eckhart to me over the years, and while looking around for mystical reading I stumbled on his sermons in a London bookshop. When I finished my doctorate on Hegel, my professor in Tübingen University suggested a post-doctorate dissertation on Eckhart. In the little town I was living in at the time, there was an antiquarian bookshop run by a cranky little man, a very conservative type. I happened to ask him one morning if he had anything on Eckhart. He disappeared upstairs and came back with seventeen dust-covered volumes which he had had for years. It seemed providential, so I set to work on Meister Eckhart.

A PEN PICTURE

Eckhart was born around 1260 in the village of Hochheim, near Erfurt in Germany. He became a novice at the Dominican house in Erfurt around 1277. In the 1270s he studied arts in Paris. He also studied in Cologne under Albert the Great, who had taught Thomas Aquinas. From 1293 to 1294 he lectured in Paris on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. In 1294 he became prior of the Dominican house in Erfurt and also vicar of the Dominican house in Thuringia. In 1302 he was called to the chair of theology in Paris, which was recognition in his time and among his peers that he was indeed a brilliant mind. From 1303 to 1311 he was the provincial of the Dominican order in Germany, and he set about reforming that province. He was back in Paris in 1311 as professor of theology. At that time too he was very active in spiritual direction around Germany. From 1322 to 1326 the first censure of his teachings took place and he made his first defense in Cologne. In 1327 he appealed to the pope, alleging delays in his trial. He went into the pulpit in Avignon (where the papacy resided) to defend himself. At that time another man, who would have no sympathy with Eckhart’s teaching, William of Occam, was also defending himself. Eckhart died in 1328 and after his death the papal document In Agro Dominico, condemning him as a heretic, was published. What is remarkable about Eckhart is the balance in his life between the most intricate, profound intellectual work—which is particularly evident in his Latin sermons—and his very fluent and caring and involved pastoral approach. He traveled and preached widely, when travel was particularly difficult. He came after the great flowering of Greek philosophy, particularly neo-Platonist philosophy. Thomas Aquinas preceded him, so he was heir to a fascinatingly complex philosophical system.

THE IDEA OF GOD

There was a fair amount of turbulence in his time—the popes had moved to Avignon, for example. If you look at the history of thought and art, it is usually out of restless, turbulent times that great novelty and light emerge. Every great thinker is haunted by one major idea, and the delight and danger of Eckhart’s mind was that his major obsession was the idea of God. That is what fired his thinking, and it ultimately brought him into conflict with the authorities at the time. To put it succinctly, Eckhart’s idea of God was that there is nothing closer to us than God. That is what made the Church suspicious of him—that he brought God too much down to earth—but in fact if you go carefully through his thought, you can see the other polarities too, that is, the incredible distance of God.

Eckhart is fascinating for us now too in that we live at a time when, I would argue, there is an unprecedented spiritual hunger. So there is an ongoing retrieval of ancient sources which have great nourishment and light in them and Eckhart is one of those sources. He believed that the identity of the human person was very intimately connected with our ability to think, so thought wasn’t just a lens through which we see things, but it was our very existence and presence. He considered that God was really present in our thinking, so that when you thought of God you were not thinking about God or a distant object but you were awakening in some way the divine presence within you. When you immerse yourself in Eckhart’s work and you allow your consciousness to be schooled in the cloister of his thinking, what begins to happen is that his thought, rather than being a target of your own understanding, begins to take the form of an icon which looks back at you. So the more you gaze at Eckhart’s thinking, the more you feel that it actually begins to read to you. Eckhart tries to think within the divine mind, so his thought is a participation in God’s presence.

A WILD GOD

The God that Eckhart believed in is an incredibly “wild” kind of God! For instance, he believed that everything had its origin in the mind of God—an old neo-Platonist idea. In every culture there are basic questions—the what question (what is a thing made of?), the how question (the process of making a thing), the when question (when does a thing happen?) and the luminous who question (who is the identity of a person?)—but one of the most fascinating questions of all concerns origins: where did things come from? The German word for this is beautiful—woher? Where does a thing come out of? The German word for origin is Ursprung—from ur, meaning “primal,” and springen, “to leap,” giving the idea of a primal well out of which everything sprang. For Eckhart, that place is God. When you look around and see people, landscapes, oceans, stars, birds, stones, flowers—none of them are here by accident, but each of them was born within the mind of God. In one of his beautiful Latin sermons, Eckhart says that “in the first glance of God, everything that is in the world was born.” It is a very artistic notion of the divine imagination. An awful lot of theology and spirituality goes badly to ground in an excessive concentration on the will of God—poor humans trying to beat their lovely complex minds into the direction of that will—whereas Meister Eckhart tries to awaken you to the divine imagination and to help you realize that that is where you have come from, that is what holds you together in the world, that is where your ultimate destination is.

“Wild” is something you cannot tame—and I suppose one of the things institutional religion does is to have a few “official tamers” on hand in case the divine thing wakens up in too wild a way. But the beauty of mysticism is that the mystic is someone who falls in love with God and who has a sense of the pulsing presence of God which no thought, feeling or category can ever come near. The mystic keeps the God question clean of all our unworthy and inferior answers. Eckhart is “wilder” in his thinking about God than even the best atheists. What you find in him about the wilderness and absence of God is so much more profound than the kind of vacancy you find in atheistic ideas. He says that God is that wilderness in which everyone is alone. God is only our word for it, and the nearer you get to the presence the more God ceases to be God and is allowed to become completely himself. So the spiritual life is about the liberation of God from our images of him.

THE DIVINE PRESENCE

So many people get totally hooked on a certain image of God and that is where they stay. It may be a negative image of a judge who is watching you, a parental superfigure that keeps your life crippled. For Eckhart, God isn’t like that at all. He is the ultimate welcome and hospitality to everything that is alive within you, so if you really live your life to the full, you are activating the presence of God within you. Eckhart also has this fascinating idea of the nothingness of everything. He talks of the umbra nihili, the shadow of nothingness under which all of creation stands so that there is a lonely edge to our lives which can only be filled by God. He develops the notion of the sisterhood of God and emptiness. In his wonderful teachings on detachment, he continually says that in order to come into the presence of God, you must free yourself from the grip of all external things—let things go and become completely detached. No prayer is more powerful than the prayer of the free mind, so we must unclutter our lives of all the false things which pretend to satisfy our spiritual hunger but can never actually do so. Eckhart would see our human destiny as that of awakening the presence of God within us, but also freeing ourselves of everything that is not God. He sees the soul as the place in which God is alive within us. This is very relevant for our time, as in much of contemporary American thought the soul is making something of a comeback. At school we were taught that the soul is somewhere in the body, and when the body died, the soul departed. Eckhart comes at it the other way and sees the body as being in the soul, so the soul presence both suffuses you and is all around you as well. There is a place in the soul—what Eckhart calls “the uncreated place within you”—that no darkness, shadow, suffering or separation can ever touch. If, therefore, you want to bring God alive within you, it is to that place that you must begin to journey.

Eckhart speaks beautifully of the birth of God in the soul. The incarnation of God in Jesus will make no difference to anyone if each person does not allow that birthing to happen within themselves. In an age which is very conscious of gender, it is so lovely to note that birthing is not a feminine prerogative. Both men and women can give birth to the divine within themselves. And you don’t need to go anywhere to awaken to the divine presence. So many people reach outside themselves for God—to institutions, pilgrimages, statues. Eckhart claims that all this externality is governed by the world of image. The image place is the famine field, whereas if you want real nourishment you must withdraw and come into the temple of your own soul. It is there that you will awaken what is eternal within you. Eckhart talks of “coming home to your soul, to the house that you never left…” I often think that the spiritual journey is about the conversion of a tiny splinter of our minds. Most of our mind knows that we are eternal, but there is one small splinter which is haunted by distance and exile. If we can bring that splinter home, we can be one in God again. And once we taste the God presence, nothing else will ever satisfy.

RHYTHM

Coming back home to the place in the soul where you are completely in rhythm with yourself, with everyone else and with God, is a very difficult journey. If you get hooked on the journey and its various stages, you will probably never get home. The journey will become the goal. Eckhart very radically states that there is no such thing as a spiritual journey. It is more a question of rhythm, rather than traversing a long landscape towards the divine. When you are in rhythm with yourself, you are untouchable. You are balanced and poised. Eckhart recommends a recovery of our ancient belonging and our ancient rhythm. In most people’s lives, the moment of “awakening” (as Eckhart calls it) is one of the most powerful moments that bring them back home again, out of the winter of exile where their minds would have been foraging for nourishment in the famine-fields of image. Eckhart’s mysticism is a very intellectual mysticism. It believes in the power of thought as a great light and as a power that can open the doorway to your own heart. If I may recommend a book to those interested in Eckhart, it is The Way of Paradox by Cyprian Smith, a Benedictine from Ampleforth College. He shows wonderfully how Eckhart’s thinking can answer so many of our modern hungers.

ECKHART FOR TODAY

I love the imagination and I love thought. It is thought that makes the world intimate and takes the anonymity out of it. In the engagement with Meister Eckhart, one’s thought becomes so refined and much of the dross is cleaned off. He has a lovely saying: “Thoughts are our inner senses.” Just as when an external sense like sight is impaired and we cannot see properly, so if our thoughts are weak or negative or impoverished we will never see anything in ourselves. It follows that one of our great duties as humans is to develop our own thoughts, thoughts that are adequate to us and worthy of the possibilities that sleep in our souls. One of the greatest tragedies of our times is that everyone is ripping off secondhand thinking from other people, thinking that is dead and does not fit them at all. We can liberate ourselves by trusting our own instinct and finding the thought-lenses which show us our world in the way we need to see it, that can calm us and bring us home and also challenge us where we are limited or deficient or where we don’t actually want to see.

Eckhart’s distrust of the world of image is truly relevant and profound. The Internet, for example, is a great facility, but as a friend said to me recently, “The fact that we have this amazing technological capability doesn’t mean that good work will actually be done.” I see the Internet as somewhat like Plato’s allegory of the cave. All it is, ultimately, is images. It is questionable whether such abstract images ever bring the complexity and depth of people to real encounter and intimacy. Likewise, the world of public relations is like the ancient art of sophistry. Socrates fought against this notion of making the weak argument look strong—that is what public relations is about. We have created an image world and it requires someone like Eckhart, with his fire and his clarity, to break through that false wall.

Our age is also very functional. There are goals and purposes and programs for everything. The lovely thing about Eckhart is his absolute suspicion of the program. People got hooked on a program which became an end in itself. Our world today is haunted and obsessed by functional thinking which sees everything in terms of a process. Eckhart keeps God and the mystical way totally free of that thinking. He says that God is God and without a why: non habet quare; Ipsum est quare omnium et omnibus—He is the why of everything and to everything. A later follower of Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, wrote a beautiful short mystical poem called “Ohne Warum” (Without Why):

The rose is without why

She blooms because she blooms

She does not care for herself

Asks not if she is seen

One of the beautiful things in Eckhart is the idea of letting things be. So many people wonder what they should do, how they should work. For Eckhart, none of this matters. The most important thing to focus on is how you should be. That is really mindfulness of presence. All intimacy, love, belonging, creativity is not when the grubby little hands of our functional minds get into the mystery, but when we stand back and let the mystery be, become enveloped in it so that it extends us and deepens us.

Finally, Eckhart has the lovely idea of Gelassenheit. Gelassen is the German for “calmness.” Even when things go against you and the rhythm in your life takes you to awkward and lonely places, you can still maintain a stillness which is in your soul and will connect you and give you an inviolable belonging and togetherness. You won’t get that from a program but you can awaken it in your own heart.

For Presence

Awaken to the mystery of being here

and enter the quiet immensity of your own presence.

Have joy and peace in the temple of your senses.

Receive encouragement when new frontiers beckon.

Respond to the call of your gift and the courage to follow its path.

Let the flame of anger free you of all falsity.

May warmth of heart keep your presence aflame.

May anxiety never linger about you.

May your outer dignity mirror an inner dignity of soul.

Take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention.

Be consoled in the secret symmetry of your soul.

May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder.

From To Bless the Space Between Us