Light, Life, and Love | Page 4

or better or best: I speak ill when I call God good; it is as if I
called white black."[8] The bull declares all the propositions above
quoted to be heretical, with the exception of the three which I have
numbered 8-10, and these "have an ill sound" and are "very rash," even
if they might be so supplemented and explained as to bear an orthodox
sense.
This condemnation led to a long neglect of Eckhart's writings. He was

almost forgotten till Franz Pfeiffer in 1857 collected and edited his
scattered treatises and endeavoured to distinguish those which were
genuine from those which were spurious. Since Pfeiffer's edition fresh
discoveries have been made, notably in 1880, when Denifle found at
Erfurt several important fragments in Latin, which in his opinion show
a closer dependence on the scholastic theology, and particularly on St
Thomas Aquinas, than Protestant scholars, such as Preger, had been
willing to allow. But the attempt to prove Eckhart a mere scholastic is a
failure; the audacities of his German discourses cannot be explained as
an accommodation to the tastes of a peculiar audience. For good or evil
Eckhart is an original and independent thinker, whose theology is
confined by no trammels of authority.
Sect. 3. ECKHART'S RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY
The Godhead, according to Eckhart, is the universal and eternal Unity
comprehending and transcending all diversity. "The Divine nature is
Rest," he says in one of the German discourses; and in the Latin
fragments we find: "God rests in Himself, and makes all things rest in
Him." The three Persons of the Trinity, however, are not mere modes
or accidents,[9] but represent a real distinction within the Godhead.
God is unchangeable, and at the same time an "everlasting process."
The creatures are "absolutely nothing"; but at the same time "God
without them would not be God," for God is love, and must objectify
Himself; He is goodness, and must impart Himself. As the picture in
the mind of the painter, as the poem in the mind of the poet, so was all
creation in the mind of God from all eternity, in uncreated simplicity.
The ideal world was not created in time; "the Father spake Himself and
all the creatures in His Son"; "they exist in the eternal Now"[10]--"a
becoming without a becoming, change without change." "The Word of
God the Father is the substance of all that exists, the life of all that lives,
the principle and cause of life." Of creation he says: "We must not
falsely imagine that God stood waiting for something to happen, that
He might create the world. For so soon as He was God, so soon as He
begat His coeternal and coequal Son, He created the world." So
Spinoza says: "God has always been before the creatures, without even
existing before them. He precedes them not by an interval of time, but

by a fixed eternity." This is not the same as saying that the world of
sense had no beginning; it is possible that Eckhart did not mean to go
further than the orthodox scholastic mystic, Albertus Magnus, who says:
"God created things from eternity, but the things were not created from
eternity." St Augustine (Conf. xi. 30) bids objectors to "understand that
there can be no time without creatures, and cease to talk nonsense."
Eckhart also tries to distinguish between the "interior" and the
"exterior" action of God. God, he says, is in all things, not as Nature,
not as Person, but as Being. He is everywhere, undivided; yet the
creatures participate in Him according to their measure.[11] The three
Persons of the Trinity have impressed their image upon the creatures,
yet it is only their "nothingness" that keeps them separate creatures.
Most of this comes from the Neoplatonists, and much of it through the
pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, a Platonising Christian of the fifth
century, whose writings were believed in the Middle Ages to proceed
from St Paul's Athenian convert. It would, however, be easy to find
parallels in St Augustine's writings to most of the phases quoted in this
paragraph. The practical consequences will be considered presently.
The creatures are a way from God; they are also a way to Him. "In
Christ," he says, "all the creatures are one man, and that man is God."
Grace, which is a real self-unfolding of God in the soul, can make us
"what God is by Nature"--one of Eckhart's audacious phrases, which
are not really so unorthodox as they sound. The following prayer,
which appears in one of his discourses, may perhaps be defended as
asking no more than our Lord prayed for (John xvii.) for His disciples,
but it lays him open to the charge, which the Pope's bull did not fail to
urge against him, that he made the servant