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By Dan Sherven
“The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me,” so writes Meister Eckhart. Eckhart was a German priest and Dominican friar in the 14th century, preaching sermons which often sound more like Eastern philosophy than Catholicism. He was tried as a heretic during the Inquisition. Some of his statements were condemned as heretical, and he died during the trial, but he was not condemned as a heretic. He died in communion.
In understanding Eckhart, one must drop a lot of their ideas about God. Many of his statements are like Zen Buddhist koans. Something designed to wake a person up to Reality. The statements produce a sudden insight. As Eckhart was called, ‘the man from whom God hid nothing.’
“I pray God to rid me of God,” writes Eckhart. “For my essential being is above God insofar as we conceive of God as the beginning of creatures.” Also: “God is nearer to me than I am to myself.” Eckhart has a great focus on detachment, dissolution of the ego, and participation in God. “You should love God as he is: not God, not spirit, not person, not image, but as sheer, pure One, separated from all duality.” And Eckhart views going for a walk as a potentially holy act. “Whoever has God in his soul has God everywhere, in the street and among people as much as in church or solitude.”
To unpack some of these ideas, Eckhart does not believe in pantheism, the view that everything, including the material world, is God. But Eckhart does see the created world as filled with God’s presence. God is both completely present and transcendent to all creation. When Eckhart speaks of praying to God to get rid of God, Eckhart means crucifying any idea of God to enter into the direct experience of God. That is where Eckhart is strikingly similar to Eastern philosophies like Zen and Daoism, which insist on divine unknowability and flowing in the present moment. Jesus also places a great emphasis on not worrying about future anxieties—living a holy life now.
Eckhart’s statements are phenomenological. Meaning, philosophy rooted in experience. We tend to read his ideas as ontological or metaphysical. Which is to say, we view “the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me,” as an identity statement where man is identical in terms of being with God. But that is not exactly what is meant. Eckhart often uses metaphor and poetry to speak about what the experience feels like, the experience of participating in God.
There are other Church Fathers who have tried to put this mystery into words. Maximus the Confessor wrote about how the person doing the will of God has entered into participation with God, “as much as is possible” for a creature to do so. The creature becomes “by grace what God is by nature.” There is still an identity separation, even though Maximus also affirms that the creature is participating in God.
In the Eastern Catholic and Orthodox traditions, Gregory Palamas says that God remains completely unknowable in his essence, while God’s energies act in the world and are how one receives grace. Yet Palamas maintains that God remains One. There is no division between the essence and the energies. And in the West, Thomas Aquinas writes that God uses ‘created grace’ to prepare the soul for ‘uncreated grace.’
All four of these Church Fathers are trying to express the same reality. Somehow, we remain creatures who are distinct from God, but though God’s grace, we are deified and participate in God—participate in God’s uncreatedness. There is always some kind of logical contradiction in these explanations. Yet that does not mean the ideas are false. Or maybe it does mean the ideas are false, but the Reality remains.
The Chalcedonian definition of Christ’s two natures might help. Christ is fully God and fully man: “In two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.” Some other kind of similar mystery is going on when man becomes God. As Christ says: “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I said, you are gods’?” And in the Gospel of Luke, Christ says to the Pharisees: “the Kingdom of God is within you (or among you/in your midst).” Additionally, Athanasius wrote that “God became man for man to become God.” This is the central experience Eckhart is feeling and pointing to.
Eckhart said that “nothing resembles God so much as stillness.” Further, “in silence the Word is born.” Eckhart believed that mystically, the Son is born within the ground of the soul. The ground being what remains when the ego, will, and personality are gone. Truly us. Eckhart believed in getting close to God through subtraction. In a radical emptiness and open availability to God.
Within the ground of the soul, Eckhart believed that God is eternally acting. Because God is pure act, as Catholicism teaches. God does not change, but has an eternal dynamism. He is always creating. Eternally, outside of time and space. Because he is pure action. (This also might be a logical contradiction, but when talking of God, logic cannot hold God. Reason needs to make a leap of faith. We are finite and trying to understand the infinite.)
Perhaps we could use the phrase “the image of God” to talk about the ground of the soul. The image of God is both a creation in time and space—man is a created creature—but the image of God is also the pure action of God. Therefore, man can be God. In a sense, man always is God. That is man’s natural state, grace. Sin is our disease, not our healthy being. Man can have union with God without confusion, at the deepest level of man’s being, although man also remains entirely ‘separate’ and distinct from God.
This was the balancing act which got Eckhart in trouble with the Church. Like other writers who try to explain how man becomes God, Eckhart both affirms completely different identities—man is created, and God is infinite—while Eckhart also allows self-emptying man to participate in the uncreated reality of God. Christ descended as a man to show us how to rise as God.
“If there is anything in what I have said or written that could be contrary to the faith, I revoke it entirely, and I wish it never to have been said.” — Meister Eckhart
Dan Sherven is the author of four books, including the number-one bestseller Classified: Off the Beat ‘N Path and Uncreated Light. Sherven is also an award-winning journalist, writing for several publications. Find Sherven’s work.
