Robert K.C. Forman, Meister Eckhart: The Mystic as Theologian, Element, Rockport, MA, 1991.
Meister Eckhart lived from approximately 1260-1327 and was a Dominican prior as well as a professor of theology in Paris and Cologne. By the late 13th and early 14th centuries, medieval Germany had a long heritage known as the “Rhineland Mystical Tradition”. Hildegard of Bingen, 1098- 1179, had been among the region’s influential spiritual figures. During the 13th century, the Beguines burgeoned in the valley of the Rhine. By Eckhart’s time, Forman notes, in western Germany “fascination with mysticism was ‘in the air’”. In his writings, Eckhart set out what he viewed as the steps on the mystical path.
In the first stage, the aspirant “lives according to the example of good and holy people.” In the second stage, he or she “runs and hastens to hear the doctrine and counsel of God and of divine wisdom.” In the third stage:
“He or she escapes care, throws off fear- so that even if he or she were able to do wrong and evil without giving offense to anyone- he would nevertheless have no desire to do so, for he is so zealously bound with love to God until God…leads him to joy and sweetness and bliss in a place where all is repugnant to him which is unlike or alien to Him.”
In the fourth stage, “one becomes rooted in love and in God, in such a way that one is prepared to face all temptations, trials, and distress and to suffer pain willingly and gladly, cheerfully and joyfully.” In the fifth stage, the aspirant finally arrives at the inner state of the true mystic and “lives in peace with himself or herself in all respects, resting quietly in the richness and fullness of the highest ineffable wisdom.”
The sixth stage is the highest, the fulfillment of all that has come before:
“The sixth stage is when man or woman is transformed and conformed by God’s eternity and has reached full and complete forgetfulness of this transient and temporal life, and is drawn and transformed into the divine image and has become a child of God. There is no stage beyond this or higher, and here there is eternal rest and bliss, for the end of the inner human being and of the new man or woman is life eternal.”
Eckhart reminds us of St. Paul’s belief in the human potential to be “wholly transformed into God and changed.” The aspirant moves, Eckhart writes, step by step away from being a mere “creature.” At the culmination of this process, the soul “reigns with God in eternity…what he or she then does, one does in God.”
Holding men and women back from this progression is attachment to the self and endless pursuit of “my” worldly gain, “my” wealth, and “my” pleasures. The soul becomes “constricted” by its own attachments and by all the things of the sensory world these attachments have attracted.” As long as you want more and more,” Eckhart writes, “God cannot dwell or work in you.” The aspirant must struggle with and ultimately still their “storm of inward thoughts.” Anger, to Eckhart, is a sure sign of attachments. If any things anger a man or woman, he observes, “he or she is not yet perfected.”
Freeing oneself from such habits and tendencies, Eckhart writes, is not easy. The soul needed to “labor” to break out from its old shell and give birth to its new existence. Only the actual inner presence of God could achieve this “annihilation of the self.” On the far side of this transformation, the seeker becomes, in Forman’s words, “blank, yet open and alert, awake, simply present.”
The innermost dimension of the human being, Eckhart wrote, is “like an inner sanctum, a holy of holies.” The things of the profane world have no place there. There is no time in this innermost place or even form. For most however, with thoughts bubbling incessantly and obsessed with his or her own “needs”, this deepest sanctuary within is “obscured from us like a mist over the sun.” This innermost chamber, Eckhart informed his readers, is “where God is found.” The adept needed to “learn to think, speak, walk, and work” without losing their interior silence, their inner connection with the divine.” He noted too that, “To the soul that has received the infusion of divine grace and tasted divine perfection, all that it not God has a bitter, nauseous savour.”
For the soul who has advanced on this path, even the ordinary restraints and boundaries of time and space can seem to disappear. “The seed of divine nature,” Eckhart assures his readers, “is never destroyed in us, but only covered over. The transformation he describes, he affirms, is within the reach of all. When Eckhart went even further, however, and declared there to be no underlying difference between the fully enlightened human being and God, the Inquisition, late in his life, hauled him in on charges of heresy.
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