The Ascent into Darkness: Dialectic and Union with God in Meister Eckhart

Meister Eckhart’s writings present many difficulties for the serious reader. As one begins to follow individual thematic strands, concepts that appear distinct and somewhat straightforward, if deeply enigmatic, lead one into an intricate web where the more one tries to disentangle the different ideas from each other, the more one finds oneself wrapped in a skein of thought in which ideas flow back and forth into each other until finally one discovers he is in a dark abyss of philosophically unified thought. McGinn states the situation much more succinctly: “His writings display a coherent, if at times obscure, system, and hence no key issue can be fully understood in isolation from the whole”. (McGinn, Bernard. 1981. "The God Beyond God: Theology and Mysticism in the Thought of Meister Eckhart." The Journal of Religion no. 61 (1):1-19. p. 3)

One primary source of this difficulty is the dialectical nature of Meister Eckhart’s thought. Eckhart’s writings are always striving toward one objective: union with God. With this as his goal, he must find a way to speak about God which will draw the listener into such union. Given the fundamentally ineffable nature of God, this presents serious difficulties. How can one speak about union with such a God, if one cannot speak about such a God? Eckhart’s dialectic is an attempt at such a way of speaking about the ineffable. However, it would be a mistake to see Eckhart’s dialectic as primarily a mode of speaking. It goes far deeper. Ineffability is not merely about speech, as if the difficulty were only in speaking. Ineffability relates to the nature of thought itself, and it is here the fundamental difficulty lies.

For Eckhart, however, the ineffability of God is grounded in God’s absolute simplicity. He is absolutely One. It is because God is radically one and free from all distinction that thought and speech cannot adequately grasp God. This also presents difficulties for one who emphasizes union with such a God. How can a being, who is fundamentally distinct, attain union with One who is free from all distinction? It is only by freeing oneself from all distinction that such union is possible. This gives rise to Eckhart’s teaching on detachment as the means to find union with God. Thus, we have already begun to discuss three fundamental themes in Eckhart’s thought: dialectic, detachment, and union with God. However, as noted above, these three themes flow into each other. Eckhart’s dialectic is intended to bring one to detachment. Detachment entails freeing oneself from all particularity. One cannot be truly detached if one clings to one’s intellectual understanding, and this is what Eckhart’s dialectic strives to free us from. Through dialectic, Eckhart is attempting to bring us to full and complete detachment, where we detach from all that is ours, ultimately even our intellect.

By adopting a mode of thought in which everything becomes paradoxical, Eckhart is able to draw us progressively towards pure detachment. Thus, the dialectic becomes more pronounced the closer we get to God and the further away we move from that which is distinct from God. This occurs most profoundly when we examine Eckhart’s teaching on the powers of the soul. We start with the sensitive faculties, where there is little that is dialectical, move up to the lower intellectual faculties which become dialectical in their activities. Then we arrive at the highest faculties in man, which are inherently dialectical in themselves, only to find that ultimately we must either be trapped in paradox or rise beyond even these highest rational faculties. Thus, I hope to show that Eckhart’s dialectic is not a means to bring the transcendent to speech; rather it is a way to draw us into the transcendent.

Thus, in my paper, I hope to explore the nature of Eckhart’s dialectic, how it draws us to detachment, and how this detachment ultimately can lead us into union with God. This will be accomplished by examining various passages in which Eckhart discusses the nature of God and His ineffability and indistinctness. We will further examine the nature of creation, and more precisely man, as essentially distinction, and we will go on to see that in his essential unity with God, man is not only distinct, but through the powers of the soul, man can rise above his distinctness into union with the absolutely One, God. My paper, therefore, consists of four sections: Section I in which I discuss the nature of Eckhart’s dialectic; Section II in which I discuss detachment; Section III in which I discuss the intellect, since Eckhart talks of union with God as “knowing” God; and Section IV in which I discuss what this union of God can be and how it can be understood.

In some sense this last section can be misleading, because, I argue, in order to attain union with God we must leave our own intellect and rationality behind completely. As long as we are speaking of “knowing” or “understanding” we are still mired in our distinction and unable to attain pure detachment and so unable to find union with God. It is only in complete detachment from even our reasoning and intellect, when all attempt to “know” are abandoned, that we find the absolute Unity which lies in our own hearts and is, ultimately God.

Florina-Rodica Hariga

“Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iaşi, Romania

The concept of vünkelin or scintilla animae in Meister Eckhart’s thought: rethinking the union between man and God

This paper emphasizes an aspect concerning Meister Eckhart’s theory about the intellect in order to define the concept of vünkelin or scintilla animae (the spark of the soul) as a certain “place” in the soul where the union between man and God is possible or as the intellect itself (intellectus quantum intellectus) or as the essence of the soul (essentia animae) in the way that Eckhart understands that there is a difference between the essence and the faculties of the soul. The aim of the paper is to determine whether the concept of vünkelin is identical to the concept of synderesis as it was defined by the scholastic literature along with Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas or Bonaventure or whether Meister Eckhart is absolutely original when discussing the problem of the spark of the soul as the unique manner in which man and God may become One.

When one argues the definition of synderesis it is well known that the concept’s origin is to be found in Jerome’s Commentary on the book of Ezekiel where he interprets the vision of Ezekiel as an allegory in this manner: the human face of the beast is the rational part of the human soul; the lion’s face is the emotional or the irrational one and the calf’s face represents the passionate part according to the division of the human soul made by Plato. The last one, the fourth part represented by an eagle is synderesis or the spark of conscience, a faculty that is not extinct even in the soul of the damned ones, the voice of conscience that tells the agent that he acts against moral rules[3].

The medieval debate on the problem of defining the concept of synderesis is to be observed from two different points of view: the first perspective is that of the psychological voluntarism[4] argued by Augustine, Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure and the second one is that of the theory of intellectualism, a rational approach of the medieval ethics argued by Thomas Aquinas.

In this context, a problem occurs when one tries to define the concept of vünkelin used by Meister Eckhart in describing a “place” or a faculty of the soul. It is clear that he does not understand the spark of the soul as a faculty of the will as the Augustinian perspective does, but neither he defines it exactly as Aquinas does, namely as a faculty of the intellect or ratio practica.

For Meister Eckhart, vünkelin seems to be a “place”, the unique “place” of the union between man and God, as far as it concerns the spontaneity of the unity Being-One. The soul tends to be united with God by contemplating the One beyond the difference between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The true union asserts God’s Image as an initial point, always available for the human being to find and return to it, but never just to remain caught into a simple Image; the soul has to transcend the Image in order to discover that the Divine Essence and the essence of the soul are One. Meister Eckhart understands one of the main issues of Neo-Platonism, the unity in One, through the heritage of the Rhineland tradition rethought by the theology of the hypostatical union that he proposes: a connexion between a Christological metaphysics and a negative theology.

Therefore the union between man and God is possible, only if the soul and the body are one complete being in Christ’s Personal Being, as Christ is one in essence with the essential being of the Deity. This is what defines the Incarnational Theology, the need for both body and soul to be completed and saved through a process that begins here in this world (in via) and continues in the after world (in patria). This process may also be named beatitude and the central point of this doctrine is the doctrine of the intellect, because they both imply the notion of knowledge: man knows and understands God only through the intellect and only there, in that “place” sometimes defined as vünkelin and sometimes as the essence of the soul one may speak of a union between them.