Meister Eckhart
The 13th-14th Century German mystic Meister Eckhart has been described as ‘the man from whom God hid nothing.’ The Rev’d John Stewart, Co-Director of the Living Well Centre for Christian Spirituality* in Melbourne, Australia, explores how Eckhart’s fourfold path of spirituality can lead to God continually being reborn in us so that we can carry on God’s work of re-creation.
A computer search for references to Meister Eckhart reveals more than 294,000 – such is the interest in him and his writing. In recent years there has been a growing desire to explore his writings and to allow them to speak into our own time and context.
Let’s begin by finding out something about the man and his time and context. Johannes Eckhart von Hocheim was born about 1260 in north-eastern Germany. Virtually nothing is known of his family, birth or childhood. At about the age of 15 he entered the Dominican novitiate at Erfurt. He gave himself to study, was ordained priest and went to Paris – lecturing and studying for the coveted title Master of Theology. After nine years of study it was granted to him, the highest academic honour of the age and the reason he became known as Meister or Master Eckhart – the only medieval person still known by that title. He was 43. He held various leadership positions in the Dominican Order and undertook extensive reform of the communities across Europe. He was a highly regarded teacher, preacher and spiritual director.
Then at the age of 66 he was summoned before the inquisition of the Archbishop of Cologne under suspicion of heresy. The inquiry went on for over a year and he was convicted in spite of his vigorous defence. He appealed to the pope, John 22nd. Eckhart died before the process was completed but the original decision was upheld. He was condemned by papal decree, his teachings were suppressed, his memory tainted, most of his writings were destroyed and his gravesite has never been discovered.
But condemnation has not dispelled the memory of his work and over the centuries much of his writing has been discovered. Thanks to scholarship of the last 150 years there is a growing consensus of opinion that Eckhart did not deserve to be condemned at all, but that he was a victim of ignorance, politics and jealousy. In 1992 the Dominican Order formally requested that the Bull of Condemnation against him be revoked.
Eckhart has been described as the man from whom God hid nothing.
During the twentieth century another member of the Dominican Order rose to prominence through his writings which captured the imagination and interest of many around the world. That was Matthew Fox whose story is in some respects similar to Eckhart’s. Fox is a formidable scholar and teacher who has contributed to the development of Creation Spirituality. He found its origins in the writings of Eckhart and others. He was in controversy with the Vatican, in 1993 was expelled from the Dominican Order for ‘disobedience’, and the following year was received into the Episcopal Church. He enunciates a very helpful approach to Eckhart’s writing, with a fourfold pathway of spirituality.
For Eckhart our first spiritual pathway is to experience the love of God for us in creation and especially in our own creation. This is how he describes his own creation: When I flowed out of God, then all creatures proclaimed ‘Here is God’. For him all creation is grace, an experience of the creator who is profoundly present in creation. He observes that God is in all things by essence, by virtue and by power… all creatures are like the footprint of God. All that is is holy for Eckhart – stars and caterpillars, stones and flowers, you and me. He calls us to an awareness of the holy all about us as our Creator is present and active. Then God takes pleasure in all creation; as Genesis insists, creation is good.
Next God is to be found especially in human beings. God is in all things, but so far as God is divine and so far as he is rational, God is nowhere so properly as in the soul – in the innermost of the soul. When it comes to the creation of people, God did more than create, he made an exact image and then God fell in love with this special creation.
The second spiritual pathway is about letting go and letting be. Eckhart describes his ‘way’ as ‘a pathless way’. For you to know God in God’s way, your knowing must become a pure unknowing, and a forgetting of yourself and all creatures. It is a radical return to bare being and simple presence: to here and now. You must give up yourself, altogether give up self he said. This is the way of detachment – one of Eckhart’s great images. The German word he uses has its roots in the verb‘to cut’ – calling to our minds the image from John chapter 15 of the pruning of the vine so that it might bear more fruit.
Consequent on letting go, there occurs a deepening experience of reverence for all things – God, self, others, creation. It is a process of LETTING BE. The biggest gift that awaits us is the realization of God. There where the creature ends, God begins to be. God does not ask anything of you other than you go out of yourself according to your mode as creature and that you let God be God in you. It is for this reason that we abandon even the names we have given to God.
The third pathway is when we have reached a point of stillness and tend to the birth within us. He says that there is nothing we can do to get God to love us any more than he already does, because he loves us unconditionally. Our behaviour does not influence his love for us. For Eckhart the process of letting go reaches a climax at the point of stillness. Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness. The best and noblest of all that one can come to in this life is to be silent and let God work and let God speak. Stillness is so holy because it is in stillness that birth is allowed to happen. Silence is active and pregnant for Eckhart. In the grace of stillness a new word is born – THE WORD. The birth of the Son of God in us is one of his themes. He takes quite literally the words of John 4.4 that we are children of God. This begetting was our creation and this is the purpose of Christ’s coming into human history. God became human through and through, in order that he might beget you as his only-begotten Son.
And for Eckhart we are not only children of God but parents also. Let yourself give birth to the Son of God. We become, by grace, generators of God in history, for the Son of God is always being born. God depends upon us to give birth to God. For Eckhart this is what it means for us to be Christ-like. To become like Christ means that the Father is birthing his Son in the soul and the soul as the Son.It is in the very process of giving birth that God and ourselves become one. God expects only one thing of you, that you come out of yourself insofar as you are a created being and let God be God in you… We have the seed of God in us… to be emptied of everything is to be filled with God.
The fourth path is to return from the experience of God to seeing and acting differently in creation. Eckhart insists on our returning to the world to make a difference in it. He says, spirituality is not be learned by world-flight, running away from things, turning solitary, and going apart from the world. Rather, one must learn an inner solitude, wherever or with whomsoever he may be. He must learn to penetrate things and find God there. It’s worth remembering that Eckhart was not a monk who retreated from the world; he was a Dominican friar whose vocation was to serve the world from within the world. A person should apprehend God in all things. That person is highly praised by God who perceives all things as divine – more noble than they are of themselves. Now effort and love and a careful attention to the inner person are needed for this and a vigorous, honest, reflective, active knowledge of all one’s attitudes toward people and things.
God depends on people to carry on the work of re-creation. He says, Just as little as I can do anything without him, he cannot really accomplish anything apart from me. Without the participation and hard work of humanity God is not continually reborn and therefore God dies. We slay God. For Eckhart paths 1 to 3 are meant for the sake of others. In birthing the Son, by an immense exertion, the dormant spark of the soul is roused to energy and action. The soul rests in God but not in inaction. Whatever gifts we have or lack, they are to be used for the glory of God. If eternal life has already begun, then the world becomes a stage for re-creation and creation becomes a new name for heaven.
As I have considered the insights and wisdom of Meister Eckhart, I constantly find new implications for my life and ministry, as well as new connections to the questions I ponder. Here are some examples of what I mean:
Interruptions are not interruptions – they are the next step. So often we set out following our own plans and get cranky when something thwarts us. Yet this way invites us to see that God is at work in whatever is happening and we need to take the time it takes for God’s work to be completed before we move on.
We can’t change the script of past experience, but grace can change its present impact on us. Most of us have memories of hurtful, damaging experiences in our past – memories which influence us in the present. The way of letting go invites us to let go of the present impact of these experiences and allow God’s grace and healing to bring us to a new sense of freedom from the bondage of the past.
Active and contemplative life belong together. We see this rhythm in Jesus himself. The gospel accounts regularly refer to Jesus’ practice of withdrawing for silence, prayer and communion with God. Then he appears in public for his teaching and preaching ministry. He shows us the necessity of developing both modes of being. Our experience teaches us that we are much impoverished if we neglect one at the expense of the other.
Compassion is our response to the suffering of the world. Eckhart says Were a person in so great a rapture as St Paul once experienced, and he learned of a sick person who needed a cup of soup from him, I consider it far better that you leave your rapture out of love and serve the needy person with what is a bigger love by far. With much human suffering in the world of our day we are always being challenged to respond out of compassion for suffering humanity. Justice and compassion belong together according to Eckhart. Whilst we must reach out to those in need, we must always seek to address the causes of suffering and work to establish God’s reign of justice and peace for all humanity.
This brings us back to where I began with Eckhart. This way without will and without images is a radical return to bare being and simple presence, to the here and now. Eckhart says you must give up yourself, altogether give up self.
In the next posting on Living Water, John Stewart will explore how Meister Eckhart’s wisdom can be applied in the fields of ecumenism, ecology, economics and education.
This is a slightly edited version of an article which first appeared in The Melbourne Anglican and was later published in Heroes of the Faith – 55 men and women whose lives have proclaimed Christ and inspired the faith of others, Edited by Roland Ashby (Garratt Publishing). Copies are available from Kathryn Gillespie at kathryngillespie@bigpond.com or through St Peter’s Bookroom: www.bookroom.stpeters.org.au
*For more information about The Living Well Centre for Christian Spirituality, see: www.livingwellcentre.org.au