Tag: Meister Eckhart

Eckhart's teachings bear a remarkable similarity to India's Advaita.

The mysticism of Eckhart tries to define the relationship of God as a creator and a sustainer. The God of Eckhart in its purity and all by itself remains free from creation. Nevertheless, it is omnipotent and omnipresent in itself that it is, as it were, full to the brim and spills something over. It emanates its power, its intelligence and its beauty into creation, because it cannot do otherwise. God must create itself but at itself it stays apart from creation. It is forever One and changeless.

Eckhart repeats this again and again: God is to be found deep in the heart of man not outside or above in the sky. The metaphor he uses is one of light and of fire, a familiar image within the history of mysticism: he calls the part of the human soul where the god is prominent and alive and where god can be known the Divine Spark (Funk). The task of man therefore is not to go outside if he searches for happiness but to dive inside where this Spark lives. In a way, Eckhart asks seekers to leave their senses behind and go towards the Divine Stillness, the source of all goodness and happiness which is within.

But for Eckhart's Christianity, God and the soul are not all together identical as they are in Vedanta, for example. In the abyss of the soul God and the Divine Spark rest within each other, they fuse into each other, but they are never completely identical. Here Eckhart speaks as the true Christian he was: it would in his days have been blasphemy (and very dangerous indeed!) to call man God. But we can also see his point: there is no complete identification between the Gotheit and the soul, simply because the Gotheit is wholly transcendent and stays apart from creation. It is only as a deduction that God is known in the soul, but never in its own Gotlichkeit.