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The First German Movement In Its European Setting (1270-1350)
Page 8
The very idea of expressing scholastic terms in German was revolutionary. It anticipated the way in which the second German movement (from Hegel to Nietzsche) was to borrow from gnosticism and secularized Protestantism. The whole systematic intellectual achievement of Western political humanitas had been based upon clear-cut distinctions and static proportions. The language Eckhart spoke - and it became the language of German thought - took no account of the polis, the civitas (Dei et hominum), the ecclesia, the imperium, nor of those fruitful dualities and oppositions within which independence and freedom were assured to God and man. "The new context of all speech was the soul seeking God and straining towards God" [14]. "Flow", "pour into", "unite", "transform", "mould", "animate", "activate" and, again and again, "make Godlike" and "annihilate" were the Orphic mainsprings of this vocabulary. Man was no longer separate from God, because the soul itself brought forth and commanded him. This terrifying process within the will unleashed cosmic storms of hatred and love in the Godhead and in the soul. The old doctrine of the indwelling of God in the soul was the basis of Eckhart's thought. The soul had a dwelling, which he called a "ground"; "something"; "spark"; "spirit"; "reason"; "fortress"; "light"; "fire"; "torch"; "power"; the "essence"; "highest part"; "husband in the soul"; "tabernacle" or, in Latin, aliquid, essentia animae, apex mentis, scintilla, synteresis. There are whole catalogues of these names [15]. Out of this divine depth the "reason" (the soul's own reason) rises "above the distinctions of the three Divine Persons and out into the undifferentiated abyss of the Godhead, into that still, silent desert where nothing stirs" [16].
The elaborate scholastic definition of the Trinity had been swept away. Nothing was left but a scheme of relationships between God and the soul [l7]. Eckhart wiped out divine transcendence, and tore down the barricades between East and West which a thousand years of thought had erected. The tremendous struggle to think of God as both three-fold and one, was dismissed. Eckhart's Trinity was no more than the way God comes to self-knowledge. The primeval, nameless one slumbers eternally beyond the Trinity [l8]. God is not spirit nor person nor image. Like Dionysius, Eckhart rejected the concepts and the notions of proportion which Roman religio had devoted to the consideration of God. "God is measureless in giving, and the soul measureless in taking and receiving" [19]. At the centre of his conception of things, political, intellectual and religious aspirations were one. In political terms, neither the empire, nor the old Church, but the soul was the Kingdom of God: [20] "There is no difference between the only-begotten Son and the soul" [21]. The soul was in its essence like the Son; it joined in the play of the vital process within the Godhead. In intellectual terms, both God and the soul were intelligible light. The noble intellect of man could force its way into the very depth of the Godhead and immerse itself in the Father himself, origin; kernel; marrow; root; blood-stream; of the Godhead. Man's blessedness was his intellect [22].
Cf. Meister Eckhart von Friedrich Heer ||| Mail: Heer, Tauler & nazism
