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A review of Simon Parke's book, "Conversations with Meister Eckhart"
Cf. S. Parke's Conversations with Meister Eckhart - at Amazon
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Page 3
Now, let’s read the second saying of Eckhart’s:
“It is true that here below, in this life, that power by which we know and understand that we see, is nobler and better than that power by which we see, since nature begins her work at the weakest point while God begins his at the point of perfection. Nature makes a man and a woman from a child, and a chicken from an egg, while God makes the man or woman before the child and the chicken before the egg. Nature first makes the wood warm and then hot, and only then does she generate fire, while God first gives all creatures being and only later, within time and yet timelessly and individually, he gives them all that belong to being.”
Having to link the two sayings, we see that to our question about what is the most satisfactory knowledge for the soul, the second saying does not explain much. Of course, the answer is affirmative, since Eckhart emphasizes that type or degree of knowledge, but he does not elaborate. We see, instead, that the second saying regards the second of our questions, on the existence of a superior and an inferior mode of being, referring perfection to simplicity, and an inferior perfection to composition. We would expect, then, from Parker to ask something about levels of being or degrees of perfection, in order to connect the two sayings of Eckhart in a natural and effective way, but Parker chooses a way that I would describe as awkward and irrelevant:
“Everyone has to start somewhere, though; with things they can understand and know. You do tend to demand the impossible.”
Even if such an answer can stand as a reply to the first saying, meaning that to most people simple knowledge of God seems just impossible, even then, it can not explain the answer of Eckhart’s that follows. After this remark, Eckhart should explain why such a knowledge is not impossible — yet he doesn’t do that, on the contrary!, what was first limited as a soul’s choice and inclination, it now expands to express God’s perfection as opposed to the perfection of nature in this life, this way even confirming Parke’s remark that such a knowledge is at least improper, not to say impossible, in this life. Thus Eckhart himself renders absurd all of his emphasis to the simple knowledge of God.
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Having to link so many of Eckhart’s sayings in a supposed ‘dialogue’, is not an easy task, and I don’t want to diminish Parke’s work in any way, on other occasions being more careful and effective. I used one of his less successful choices, in order precisely to show the difficulties of the task and express my wish that such a book should be even better, dealing with the most important subjects, in a thinking that springs from one of the most significant philosophers and theologians of Christianity.
Beyond this, one can be grateful that Conversations with Meister Eckhart offers a great selection of Eckhart’s sayings, interconnecting them in a manner, that, even if it is not helpful in analyzing Eckhart’s thought, at least makes it more accessible to an analysis that would come from the readers themselves. It is a book useful to new-comers as well as to scholars, since it manages to gather in just a hundred pages the most significant thoughts we can find in Eckhart’s sermons.-
