Three Strands in the Thought of Eckhart, The Scholastic Theologian

TL;DR: Eckhart as discussed by the authors argued that the universe is an image of the Word of God, and that the creation of the world is an internal process of the Spirit of Unifying Love.

Abstract: ion from the Divine Persons because, as a concrete reality,. it is identical with the Father who is the One. Yet the Father in his absolute unity is Thought, a plenitude of Being which possesses itself by the procession of the Word and the spiration of the Spirit of Unifying Love. This interior life of God is externally continued in creation, but only in an analogical way. In the mystical ascent neither creation nor the Divine Persons are exposed as illusory. What is overcome are the human images and concepts by which we think (a) of creatures as having a being independent of God, (b). of \" God\" as if he is adequately revealed in his creation, and (c) of the Divine Persons as having any nature except the Godhead as it is given by the Father to the Son and mutually enjoyed by Father and Son in the Spirit.25 Eckhart, as theologian, explained the mystical experience of \" oneness \" as a purification of our intelligence of every notion which obscures the ultimate truth that inrwardly the One is the identity of the Persons with the Godhead in whom the Godhead exists only in its processional plentitude from the Father. For Eckhart, any notion of Unity which would obliterate the Per:sons would be the imposition of an inadequate human concept on the unnameable Godhead. The Poverty of Creatures Since the Triune Life of God is wholly interior to the One, it is not an exterior descent into plmality as in Neo-Platonism. Consequently Eckhart did not have to understand creation ar1 a necessary emanation of the world from God, as Plotinus did. God does not create because his nature demands it, but because he freely wills to do so. Yet this freely created universe is an imaging of God. Just as a mirror has no light but what it reflects, so for Eckhart the created universe has no being of its own.26 Its being, goodness, and beauty are nothing more 25 Lossky, op. cit., pp. 841 f., 859-865. ••\"All creatures are pure nothing; I do not say they have a little or some being but that they are pure nothing, since no creature has ease,\" Defense (Thery) article 15, p. 184 with the response on p. 205. 234 BENEDICT M. ASHLEY than God's own Being, Goodness, and Beauty reflected more or less dimly. While this is very close to the Platonic doctrine that the universe is an imitation of the Divine, it differs radically because this reflection is not due to necessity but to the free act of God. It is grace, and Eckhart does not hesitate to call creation as well as redemption acts of grace.27 Yet the reality of this gift is the Light of God-God Himself freely shining in the mirror of creatures. The universe achieves its perfection by this reflection or \" return to God,\" by assimilation to the creative ideas of things which exist eternally in God the Creator. It is in this sense that Eckhart daringly asserted that \"creation is eternal.\" ~8 He meant that the creature exists eternally in God both in the divine idea from which it came and to which it must return by God's free predestination. Thus the creation itself is not outside God, except in the sense that creatures reflect the Divine Image imperfectly, either by reason of their finitude or their sin, but the universe with such reality as is proper to it exists inside God.29 It seems that in this way Eckhart found his own way of overcoming the growing nominalist tendency in the first half of the 14th century to atomize the universe into autonomous monads linked only by the Sovereign Will of God.3° For him, just as the Word is spoken within God, so the universe is created within God, although in a finite manner which makes it exterior to God as compared to the perfect interiority of the Divine Word. Eckhart, therefore, is no pantheist. From this it follows that it is possible for us to say paradoxically that God is Nothing (Non-Being), because he is not simply Being but Thought which is the cause of Being yet beyond it; and we can also say that the creature is nothing, because the being it has is a pure gift which is never inde27 See Lossky, pp. 18~ ff. 98 See Defense (Daniels), IX, answer to the ~7th article, p. 44. 29 See Bernard J. Muller-Thym, The Establishment of the University of Being in the Doctrine of Meis.ter Eckhart of Hochheim (New York: Sheed and Ward,