Light, Life, and Love | Page 5

equal to his Lord. "Grant
that I, by Thy grace, may be united to Thy Nature, as Thy Son is
eternally one in Thy Nature, and that grace may become my nature."
The ethical aim is to be rid of "creatureliness," and so to be united to
God. In Eckhart's system, as in that of Plotinus, speculation is never
divorced from ethics. On our side the process is a negative one. All our
knowledge must be reduced to not-knowledge; our reason and will, as
well as our lower faculties, must transcend themselves, must die to live.
We must detach ourselves absolutely "even from God," he says. This

state of spiritual nudity he calls "poverty." Then, when our house is
empty of all else, God can dwell there: "He begets His Son in us." This
last phrase has always been a favourite with the mystics. St Paul uses
very similar language, and the Epistle to Diognetus, written in the
second century, speaks of Christ as, "being ever born anew in the hearts
of the saints." Very characteristic, too, is the doctrine that complete
detachment from the creatures is the way to union with God. Jacob
Bšhme has arrived independently at the same conclusion as Eckhart.
"The scholar said to his master: How may I come to the supersensual
life, that I may see God and hear Him speak? The master said: When
thou canst throw thyself but for a moment into that place where no
creature dwelleth, then thou hearest what God speaketh. The scholar
asked: Is that near or far off? The master replied: It is in thee, and if
thou canst for a while cease from all thy thinking and willing, thou
shalt hear unspeakable words of God. The scholar said: How can I hear,
when I stand still from thinking and willing? The master answered:
When thou standest still from the thinking and willing of self, the
eternal hearing, seeing, and speaking will be revealed to thee, and so
God heareth and seeth through thee."
In St Thomas Aquinas it is "the will enlightened by reason" which
unites us to God. But there are two sorts of reason. The passive reason
is the faculty which rises through discursive thinking to knowledge.
The active reason is a much higher faculty, which exists by
participation in the divine mind, "as the air is light by participation in
the sunshine." When this active reason is regarded as the standard of
moral action, it is called by Aquinas synteresis.[12] Eckhart was at first
content with this teaching of St Thomas, whom he always cites with
great reverence; but the whole tendency of his thinking was to leave the
unprofitable classification of faculties in which the Victorine School
almost revelled, and to concentrate his attention on the union of the
soul with God. And therefore in his more developed teaching,[13] the
"spark" which is the point of contact between the soul and its Maker is
something higher than the faculties, being "uncreated." He seems to
waver about identifying the "spark" with the "active reason," but
inclines on the whole to regard it as something even higher still. "There
is something in the soul," he says, "which is so akin to God that it is

one with Him and not merely united with Him." And again: "There is a
force in the soul; and not only a force, but something more, a being;
and not only a being, but something more; it is so pure and high and
noble in itself that no creature can come there, and God alone can dwelt
there. Yea, verily, and even God cannot come there with a form; He
can only come with His simple divine nature." And in the startling
passage often quoted against him, a passage which illustrates admirably
his affinity to one side of Hegelianism, we read: "The eye with which I
see God is the same eye with which He sees me. Mine eye and God's
eye are one eye and one sight and one knowledge and one love."
I do not defend these passages as orthodox; but before exclaiming
"rank Pantheism!" we ought to recollect that for Eckhart the being of
God is quite different from His personality. Eckhart never taught that
the Persons of the Holy Trinity become, after the mystical Union, the
"Form" of the human soul. It is the impersonal light of the divine nature
which transforms our nature; human personality is neither lost nor
converted into divine personality. Moreover, the divine spark at the
centre of the soul is not the soul nor the personality. "The soul," he says
in one place, using a figure which recurs in the "Theologia Germanica,"
"has two faces. One is turned towards this world and towards the body,
the other towards God." The complete dominion