A Medieval Unconscious: Meister Eckhart and the Unknown Soul

This paper will trace Eckhart’s conception of a divided soul in order to elucidate the ways in which his theory enters into dialogue with a modern psychoanalytic conception of the conscious and unconscious self. It will be shown that it is Meister Eckhart’s dedication to avoiding the dangers of idolatry that inspires him to trace an idolatrous understanding of God back to an idolatrous self, a soul that sees God according to its own image and measure. Idolizing God, for Meister Eckhart, is the result of idolizing the self, and to reach the God beyond idolatry one must therefore escape from the confines of a volitional, idolatrous self.

In order to stop using God to achieve “this” or “that,” the soul must understand God as beyond the scope of its will, and thus stop willing. In this sense, Eckhart can be understood as describing the soul as divided between a possessive, idolatrous self, and an unnamable soul that he describes using metaphors or else qualifies with several adjectives to set it apart from the first (“innermost soul,” “ground of the soul,” “spark,” “castle,” “virgin wife,” “sprout,” “silent middle”, “quiet desert”…). These two souls cannot cohabit the same site, and Eckhart’s sermons set out to help the seeker to relinquish the former in order to uncover the latter. In other words, the “innermost soul” becomes the center of man only when he has emptied himself of all notions of selfhood. Instead of identifying itself with the idolatrous will or volo, the soul must abandon its autonomy and become nothing. Eckhart tirelessly tells his listener: “go completely out of yourself.” Though he uses many metaphors for this desertion, they all portray this single movement of departure, evasion, in order to leave the soul utterly empty.

If the goal is to become one with God, what Eckhart calls the “breaking through” (durchbrechen), it can be achieved only by renouncing all goals, all will, all seeking. It is thus through seeking nothing in utter passivity that the soul can be found by God. Eckhart most famously calls this passivity detachment (abgeschiedenheit), and it is when this has been achieved that the soul finally overcomes idolatry. Because detachment renounces all effort, even that of love, it achieves the unity and immovability that Eckhart associates with God. Thus, if the “breaking through,” (durchbrechen) can be understood in terms of the reditus or Neoplatonic return, this return is not that of the soul to its ground, but rather the return of God tothe very ground that itself is the soul. In other words, the volitional soul must be understood as the self that flows out thereby exposing the innermost soul that is revealed in its absence as just this absence. Or rather, as Nicolas of Cusa has shown, it is only as other that God can be experienced. There can therefore be no “experience” of God in detachment, for there is no one to do the experiencing. The true soul is thus not a self of consciousness, volition, will or even love for Eckhart. Only once it has fled itself as cogito, can the human soul find itself in an immovable originary stasis that lacks nothing, for it is a plenary nothingness. Thus, for Eckhart, the soul must recognize its truth as residing where the self or ego cannot go, in an alterity marked by unknowing. By means of detachment, the soul must itself become nothing, in what Eckhart calls a negatio negationis. Detachment is thus the means for the soul to recreate itself, to return to an anarchic state before it was soul, where one finds oneself in an absolute alterity that is one’s only true identity.

The question thus becomes, how exactly are we to achieve this detachment, to recreate our “selves,” if every effort to do so further mires us in attachments that replace nothingness with a self and passivity with active ways of seeking God? Can the soul be free of all desire, even that of detachment? Can there be such a thing as “detached desire”? If there can be a “detached desire” that allows Eckhart’s mystic somehow to desire detachment, we must then determine who does the desiring and how it escapes functioning as the kataphatic infilling that Eckhart sees as contrary to detachment.

If it is the case that the subject can desire from his created or from his uncreated soul, then Eckhart can be understood as positing a doubling of subjectivity. That is, if the ground of the soul represents this unknown alterity within the self, Eckhart can be seen as describing a split subject, one whose res cogitans can never think its own “silent middle,” yet who recognizes itself as that part of itself that does not belong to itself. The ground of the soul, that is, can never be ‘mine,’ appropriated by an identity with which the possessive self could identify. If it is the nothingness of the ground of the soul that does the desiring, it desires as other, as God. Detachment, then, cannot be worked at or toward and understanding it necessarily entails not having achieved it. In this sense, just as Eckhart’s idolatrous self shares certain characteristics with the modern ego, the innermost soul can be understood as representing a medieval unconscious. For Eckhart as for Lacan, it is the desire of the Other that constitutes the “I” and thus the subject. For Lacan, the ‘I’ and the ‘am’ that make up the subject can never meet; for Eckhart they can meet only once the I has achieved identity with God’s being. For both, this meeting is that of a present absence, a missed encounter in that the thinking self must be annihilated in order to “be.”

To put this in other words, Eckhart’s subject realizes that its very identity resides in the unknown ground of the soul when it has abandoned this site to make room for God. So long as the soul identifies itself with a “me” or “mine” as an autonomous entity, capable of self-consciousness and representation, the soul will remain alienated from its true nature. The breaking through allows the soul to recognize the desire of the other as its own. Once alienation is overcome through letting go (gelassenheit) of all “knowing,” all “possessiveness,” God can finally say “I am” within the soul as the soul. In this light, if the ground of the soul can be understood as a medieval unconscious, the “breaking through” can be seen as a mystico-analytic cure.

James Filler

University of Georgia, United States of America