"So that they may be one..."

One of the perennial philosophical questions is the relationship of the One and the Many, God and the World. Although the question is inexhaustible, it comes down in the end to God and myself – for I am both one in myself and other than God: does that make God and myself part of a "many" that includes us both, or is this an illusion of separateness to be dispelled by mystical experience?

The mystics tell us that rest and happiness, for the soul and for the creature, "is to be found nowhere but in the one, indivisible unity that is God.... When all that goes to make up a man’s being has become lovingly one with God, then all the soul’s cries are hushed, and the unrest of longing and of acting has ceased" (John Tauler, cited in Magnificat, 8 June 2011). But self-forgetfulness in God is one thing. Does it really mean that the self ceases to "exist" at all – or even that it never existed? That would appear to be the message of Advaita Vedanta and the great sufi Ibn Arabi, and even at times the Dominican Meister Eckhart. But it is a misleading oversimplification, certainly in the case of Eckhart, maybe in the other cases too (see article).

Is Christianity "dualistic"? Philosophers such as Arthur Lovejoy and Robert Bolton would say so, though not in the sense either of extreme Cartesianism (mind-body) or Manichaeism (good vs evil). Christianity is dualistic in that it teaches that God created the world, and that the world is other than God, possessing (received) being of its own. The infinity of the divine Principle means it can create lesser realities without any diminution of or addition to its own substance – and those lesser realities are indeed real: they may be infinitely less than the infinite, but they are infinitely more than nothing. The being of creatures is freely willed in the groundless abyss of the Godhead. That "abyss" or ungrund where the Son is eternally begotten (and us with him in the "ground of the soul") is the source of all freedom, even man's.

This post has been by way of a footnote to the second chapter of All Things Made New. The image, from Wikimedia Commons, shows the Eckhart Portal of the Erfurt church.

Meister Eckhart

The German mystic Meister Eckhart is often viewed with suspicion by orthodox Catholics, and cited with approval by those who think he overcame the limitations of Christian dogma and made common cause with his fellow mystics in other religions.

The reason why Eckhart often reads like a heretic is that he was concerned to express not our own knowledge as individual creatures, but the divine knowledge itself, basing himself in the “ground” of the soul. As he says, “only in the ground of the soul is God known as he is,” for there “the intellect knows as it were within the Trinity and without otherness”. This possibility of knowing God “as God knows God” is opened to man by the Hypostatic Union of divine and human natures in Christ. C.F. Kelley’s Meister Eckhart on Divine Knowledge (Yale University Press, 1977) is a masterly study of exactly this point. As Kelley explains:

“A genuine understanding of the principial mode, which is constituted as it were within Godhead, is an understanding of truth that is beyond the potentiality of human cognition, restricted as that cognition is to individuality. Insight into this truth is a possibility only by way of transcendent act, never by way of potentiality. Yet the revelation of the Word is that transcendent act as assented to by the intellect when moved by the detached will to know.” 

When the perennialist Alvin Moore Jr reviewed Kelley’s book some years ago in Studies in Comparative Religion, he noted with stern disapproval the fact that Kelley (in Eckhart’s name) “equates the Godhead with the Trinity, sachchidananda with nirguna Brahman.” This goes to the heart of the matter. Kelley refuses, in his interpretation of Eckhart, to follow Schuon’s distinction between Being and Beyond-Being (that is, between the “relatively” Absolute and the “absolute” Absolute, thus relegating the Trinity to a subordinate status), or the related distinction between form and substance in the religions which underpins The Transcendent Unity of Religions.

Kelley’s exposition hinges instead on esse or Being, which he translates as isness, the “act or isness of pure knowledge itself, or Godhead”, the “all-inclusive Reality” (p. 42). He even cites Dionysius in support of Eckhart: “We apply the titles of ‘Trinity’ and ‘Unity’ to that which is beyond all titles, designating under the form of Being that which is beyond Being” (p. 30). Kelley means by all this that the Trinity is not, as Schuon would say, simply the “prefiguration of Manifestation in the Principle”, or the relatively Absolute which stands at the summit of Maya, but is itself the unconditioned Absolute about which “nothing can be said” – save what God authorizes us to say. I have written further about this in "Trinity and Creation: An Eckhartian Perspective".

Also recommended is Cyprian Smith OSB, The Way of Paradox (DLT) and Commentaries on Meister Eckhart Sermons by Sylvester Houedard OSB.