The Bible and Western Culture - Meister Eckhart: From Whom God Hid Nothing

[Music] meister eckhart is probably the most important mystic in the tradition of western religion and he was described by his contemporaries as the man from whom god hid nothing meister eckhart it was a dominican friar and he was a theologian and a teacher but he's most widely remembered and most explicitly remembered for his sermons which were transcripts or copies or articulations of meister eckhart's mystical religious experiences and the collection of sermons that meister eckhart left us it's one of the most important legacies in the tradition of western mysticism and western mysticism has always had an uneasy status an uneasy state in western religion because of the difficulties in articulating the content of mystical religious experience it seems that mysticism resists linguistic formulation those of us who have ever had a religious experience who have had a conversion experience or had some illumination about the world are often frustrated in our attempts to explain it to other people meister eckhart met those problems and to some extent surmounted them it is for that reason that the legacy of sermons that he leaves us is one of the most important treasures of the western religious tradition as close as anyone has ever come to putting mystical experience into words that's what maestro card is important for he is the greatest figure in non-scholastic theology in other words he lives between 1260 and 1328 and this is the high point or one of the you know scholasticism is still a mainstream of western thought meister eckhart while he understands the tradition of western scholarship particularly he understands scholasticism he's read the great scholastics has decided to take his own road a different road he's decided that logic chopping as we see in scholasticism is not sufficient for an understanding of or an apprehension of god's grace and majesty and so he's decided to take a road that is lonely because he's traveling this this road on his own and he's going to do his best to explain to us what this journey is like but in the long run i think he's unable to because of the fact that mystical experience is intrinsically private it is not public it is not like a lectern or a piece of paper or something out in the world of space and time that we can point to and gesture at and easily reach some sort of agreement about what meister eckhart does is gesture at something that no one can talk about and what is extraordinary about the collection of his sermons is that they are perhaps the most effective set of gestures that we have in the tradition of western religion so if you are willing to read him in a charitable way rather than a strictly logic chopping fashion i believe that you will get a great deal more out of meister eckhart's anti-systematic theology and i think that you will find it rewarding particularly if you yourself have had religious intuitions or experiences and run up against the glass prison of language have found that you were unable to articulate the things that you wanted to say about your religious experience meister eckhart offers us a series of images a palette of metaphors that we can use borrow to talk about our own internal religious experience and i think that's his greatest achievement all right now one of the things that is most striking about meister eckhart is that he often writes and speaks from god's perspective in other words he describes the world as it appears to god not as it appears to meister eckhart now this may be purely a thought experiment on his part it may be an overweening hubris or it may actually be the closest you're going to get to finding out what the world looks like from god's perspective you will have to look at his sermons but when he says no do um as he often does do not look at the world from the perspective you happen to have now stuck mired within space and time as saint augustine says he says step out of space and time think about the world as it appears to god when you do that your perplexities will be eliminated and your doubts will be satisfied so he says although i cannot tell you god's name although i cannot perfectly articulate god's vision i can gesture in that direction and give you some inkling as to what liberation from the bounds of space and time would be like it is because meister eckhart characteristically speaks from the perspective of god that he was given the title the general term he from whom god hid nothing that is an extraordinary and deep title for any man to be given now what he does is gesture towards god because he runs up against the limitations of what language can do and i would tend to argue that he is one of the greatest prose poets in the tradition of western religion because necessarily when someone tries to to reach for the core of their being to reach inward to the soul and then from the soul to an area a domain outside of space and time towards heaven and hell necessarily one has to have recourse to poetry physics strictly liberal speech will not carry you across that the only possible bridge is the bridge of poetry and metaphor so meister eckhart although i think he would probably have resisted being termed such is one of the great religious poets in the western tradition the fact that he himself was a cleric and that he might have thought poetry profane should not interrupt our appreciation of his deep and very moving religious poetry now there are a number of things of characteristic techniques that we see in meister eckhart the first is the use of surprise after talking at some length about god's love and god's will a whole series of deep theological speculations along those lines he finishes up one of his discussions of god's love and god's will by saying you yourself should try and make your own will consistent with the will of god and you and yourself should try and incorporate god's love into your life but you should keep in the in in mind the fact that you will not be able to do this through any process of rationality as meister eckhart says most surprisingly and quite deeply says love has no why is that a beautiful and poetic line love has no why it takes a mystic and a poet someone that has been meditating on religious issues to generate fine paradoxes compressed within the domain of one mere sentence which causes at least me to think at some length about the problem that he's gesturing at i don't have a very clear idea of what love has no why means on the other hand at least for me when i was reading a sermon i put the book down and sat around thought about that for a while it stayed with me for the next day and i kept thinking about that what could that possibly mean at this point in my life i have no clear knowledge of what that might possibly mean i have a number of ideas of suggestions that it's moved me towards and i think that's the great advantage of meister eckhart he will give you an aphorism but it won't be pointed and jagged and painful the way the afrisms of say friedrich nietzsche are his aphorisms are exactly in the opposite direction they move you towards spirituality towards celestial concerns and he does it in a way which is slightly baffling and slightly perplexing not threatening but one gets the sense that there's tremendous depth there this is saying that still waters run deep one gets the sense that he meister eckhart is the man from good from whom god hid nothing in addition to surprises in his sermons we're also going to find odd paradoxes and i think was kierkegaard that once said a paradox is that which which refreshes men most completely or that's the one that most reconciles human beings to this world well paradox is the the stuff of meister eckhart's sermons he says things like god's will when we are finally good will be the same thing as our will we will identify and unify our will with god but he says an interesting thing you will go seeking god you will try and unify your will with his you will not unify your will with god until you completely empty yourself until you completely eliminate all your mundane prosaic this worldly concerns until you get to the point that saint augustine had when he had his conversion experience where he's willing to hold nothing back then and only then will your will be consistent with the will of god so the end of all your longings will be in some respects to abolish the self all right to leave out all your earthly concerns and direct your soul entirely towards god this abolition of self is very deep and it's remarkable the way in which my eckhart phrases it he says if you get to the point where god's will and your will are united amazingly enough at that point you will ask nothing from god isn't that remarkable the point at which you manage to hook up with god will you make some sort of connection to god when the end of all your longings is realized it turns out that at the end at that point you no longer long for anything and you no longer have anything left left to ask god for in other words there's a sort of paradox here we wish the good things that god can offer us we wish to make some sort of connection with god but if we ever do make that connection should god's grace ever appear appear within our soul the result will be that will be released from all our other cares and concerns and we'll have nothing to ask god for it'll be pure adoration without any mixture of what kant would call heteronomy without any desire for stuff here in this world you're not going to ask god for a raise you're not going to ask god for promotion you're not going to ask god for anything here in this world because if you were actually to connect with god you would no longer want that stuff quite a remarkable turnabout his paradoxes are deep and very moving and they're quite provocative i often don't know exactly what they mean but in almost every case when he coins a beautiful phrase i have to sit and ask myself what is going on here and this is where theology begins to merge with poetry and the results are quite enigmatic but at the same time quite stimulating most important in the works work of meister eckhart is metaphor there are plenty of paradoxes plenty of surprises and strange formulations but metaphor is meister eckhart's stock in trade there's i mean if you are inclined to explain biblical religion to someone you couldn't start better than by reading meister eckhart not because it's the most accessible but rather because it's the most stimulating and when he coins a good phrase there is no one better than meister eckhart he says to those that are searching for god that are still spiritual seekers he makes all kinds of interesting internal jokes he says something at one point he says that god is on sale at very reasonable prices in other words whatever it is you have to give up in order to get god it's a bargain and the idea that god is on sale at very reasonable prices suggested i mean by itself would make a lovely sermon even though it appeared in one of his sermons because there's so much that you can extrapolate from that it's such a deep and powerful thought that i can't help but admire that and i can't help but think that if there is such thing as inspiration this is it highly inspired beautifully compact and complete ideas stuck into one sentence and meister eckhart makes it appear effortless i might be tempted to say that for the world's great artists they take something that is very difficult to do and they make it look easy try after reading scripture sometime to coin as good a phrase as you'll find every other page in meister eckhart you will find that without that inspiration you just can't do it so he makes inspired prose poetry of a religious nature look easy or perhaps it's god that makes it look easy but it comes through meister eckhart and whoever it is is making it look easy it looks easy and it's really not so heaven is on sale at affordable prices and he says that the doctrine of works those of you who think that you can say a lot of prayers and give a lot of charity and do a lot of good things and that will get you to heaven he says no that's not going to work because what you're trying to do is bargain away these good works you've done for the sins you did in other words you're trying to get over on god as if god couldn't figure out which were bigger your sins are your good works he says don't try and make a deal with god particularly don't try and cheat god as though you're going to put one over on him do not try and be like a merchant trying to sell low and buy high he says don't sell anything your good works will not make you sanctified in the sight of god if you want to be sanctified in the sight of god then stop trying to get over on them stop asking for anything if you really were blessed in god's sight you wouldn't have any of these prosaic concerns with which to irritate him there's a great there's a sort of light that shines out of of meister eckhart and although of course no one has ever we never see him you get from the sense from his books that he must have been an enormously charismatic figure he must have had that sort of magnetism which some religious men have and as a speaker i can only assume that these were the most moving possible sermons because it is very clear that he is generating these ideas from some well some spring inside him he's not borrowing from a tradition he's inventing a tradition he's creating a path it's unique to him but he says that all paths of apprehension of god will have certain connections to the path that he himself chose now a third thing or a final thing we should think about in meister eckhart is the fact that he is involved in word magic we found when we looked at the bible that there's a great deal of magic connected not just to numbers but also to words when we examine scripture for example if you think of esau and and jacob when they're deciding who it is that's going to inherit from their father once isaac gives the blessing to jacob even though he's the wrong son the blessing is said and the word magic has been done you cannot undo a blessing or a curse think about that sort of word magic held over from the bible well something along those lines is operative in meister eckhart he is doing something very much like magic with words and the magic he engages in is in some ways again an empty use of words it is a gesture at something it is not meant to be taken literally and yet there is a kernel of meaning in it which is somehow independent of the literal phrasing consider the following proposition meister eckhart tells us first of all that the divine nature has no name hmm it is obvious that meister eckhart is not an atheist surely we can't draw that inference what he is trying to gesture at is the fact that human language is not big enough to accommodate god so rather than try and create literal speech about god he says no your linguistic capacities are insufficient here he will use metaphor in particular because metaphor is a particularly paradoxical kind of communication which comes as close as you can to speaking about god and he says since god has no name metaphor is particularly advantageous to the kind of thinking that he wants to do not only does he say that god has no name but in addition he says in another sermon that uh god is a word which speaks itself hmm it's a mysterious kind of an idea god is a word that speaks itself and at the same time it seems that god has no name if we were trying to do scholastic logic chopping we would never be able to accept both sentences they are obviously contradictory but mysticism is not afraid of contradiction that is the great strong point and the great weak point of mysticism they are not bound by the usual rules of logic it might be perfectly appropriate as meister eckhart gestures that something that can't be said it might be perfectly proper for him to say god has no name we cannot encapsulate him in language it might also be proper to say that god is the word which speaks itself and somehow the god is the self-generating reality right that generates all the small w words here in this world and all the things to which they gesture so if you read it in a spirit of charity if you read it with an openness to the message and you are not impeded by the strict literal incoherence i believe you will find meister eckhart to be an extraordinarily valuable religious thinker you have to approach it with a certain degree of openness and you have to allow for the fact that you're not going to absorb it all the first time through but it will give you many stimuli which will move you in the direction of intense and serious religious appreciation and that i think is my strength's great advantage and that's what he's trying to do we find out from him that the divine nature has no name that god is a word that speaks itself and in addition to that we find out that although god has no name all words come from the word many resonances from saint augustine here the connection between the word and words maestro card himself while he is a mystic is a master of the entire tradition of western theology certainly knows augustine but he wants to go beyond what you can put in a book he wants to go beyond the tradition of western theology and say instead of that we have to work out a personal connection to god and this personal connection to god while it may be difficult to put into words is the most important thing that a soul can do and the most important thing that anyone can do with language is to push people in that direction you may not be able to give them a perfect sense of what the location of divine grace is but you can say it's that way rather than this way you can gesture without speaking directly i would be tempted to say that if aquinas is the greatest systematic theologian of catholicism i would be tempted to say uh be tempted to say that uh meister eckhart is the greatest unsystematic theologian of catholicism and he glories in his unsystematic theology insofar as you can say things about god aquinas does a very fine job but insofar as you can't say things about god i'm tempted to think that maestro eckhart does a better job right and it's it's funny in some ways because although god is ineffable god is very hard to to characterize or to communicate about at the same time we feel a longing to talk about it and we feel a longing to communicate with people about our deepest religious intuitions so the problem is how do we do that the strictly logical way insofar as possible is the way of aquinas in scholastics but as meister eckhart would be proud to tell us there's more to religion than logic perhaps a certain set of images will alter our consciousness and alter our psyche in such a way so that we will be liberated from mere logic meister eckhart then shows us the way out of the labyrinth of words he says look i'll talk to you about this matter but i'm only talking to you because i can't think of anything better to do all right if it were up to me i would just give it to you wholesale but only god can do that as the next best thing let me tell you about the images and metaphors and ideas that god has inspired me with perhaps it will also inspire you to this day i find meister eckhardt inspiring and i think that most people that read him in any century we'll find him so i don't think meister eckhart is restricted to catholicism or even to christianity there is a certain stance towards the divine a certain withdrawal from profane and mundane experience that i think is characteristic of mystics in every religion and meister eckhart is certainly that in spades for christianity let me see if i can explain to you some of the details of his unsystematic theology in a systematic way as it allows for and perhaps able to tease out some of the main ideas hidden there meister eckhart fundamentally makes a distinction between god and the godhead in german it's got and god height in uh and what it means is is that there's a distinction between god it conceives of as the creator the source of all the world around us that we can almost kind of talk about in a way that's where aquinas's doctrine of analogies will start to take to take effect and be useful we can talk about god that god in in my car eckhart's strictly distinguished way is your avenue or your your introduction to the god head and the godhead is very different got height in german the the godhead is the divine essence which cannot be spoken about it is ineffable and which is totally undynamic and static in other words we see if i can explain this because it's not it's not very clear within meister eckhart and it's not a very clear distinction this is one of the difficulties that we're going to find with mysticism meister eckhart distinguishes between god who is the creator of the world and about whom we can talk in a rough and ready uncertain way that god is dynamic he starts the world and then it undergoes all the changes that it undergoes um that god we are is revealed to us directly in scripture the godhead on the other hand is totally ineffable and somehow a grounding or a foundation of the god who's disclosed in creation the godhead is as he puts it as far the godhead is as far apart from god as heaven is from earth the idea is something along these lines god the first stage in our understanding of divinity is thought of as the source of the the world or the universe for example we can say that about him god is creative god is holy god is loving there are a number of predicates we can attach to god that from meister eckhart is the first step towards an understanding of the god head which is somehow bigger not bigger in the sense in the spatiotemporal sense of course but bigger in the sense that it is more more foundational more how can i put it more transcendent more non-human than god as he is revealed in creation now i know this is a fuzzy and difficult distinction there's lots of nebulous stuff here and i know that someone like hume for example would just take apart the decision to say there's nothing there i think that's the uncharitable reading give it a little bit of space allow for the possibility that one's apprehension of god changes and that one's initial access to divine ideas is going to be found from your experience here in this world if that's the case then provisionally we might want to work through meister eckhart's distinction between god and the godhead godhead is static god is dynamic the godhead is transcendent whereas god seems to be simultaneously imminent and transcended because we see his works here in this world the godhead is unspeakable we can't say anything about the godhead whereas god while you can't exactly talk about him we can use conventional names like yahweh right which don't really tell us anything about god but he has allowed us to use that sort of a phrase in referring to him the idea then is something along these lines what people think god is is only the entrance way to god's awesome vastness and it would appear from this discussion that meister eckhart is very at home in this ocean of godheadness or whatever it is he's encountered out there now the problem is that our language breaks down when meister eckhart goes out into that uncharted territory he would like to tell us what it is that he's doing and where he is and we're not talking about a spatialization but psychically or spiritually where he is and the difficulty is that our language just isn't big enough to encompass this so the uncharitable reading would be that maestro card is talking nonsense and that's an uncharitable reading of mysticism in general the charitable reading is that he's trying to gesture at something transcendent something that is bigger than human language and bigger than our experience if that is the case then whatever he can tell us about this domain is about is is about is all we're likely to see at any time soon because it would seem that mr eckhart is one of those few friends of god that to whom god has disclosed his inmost nature he's going to do his best to explain this to us now it turns out that there's a an enlightening analogy that meister eckhart makes to the difference between god and godhead and he says it's the difference between between within your soul between what he calls the grund in german that's the ground or foundation and the faculties think about your soul all right about your psyche or your consciousness it's not an easy thing to talk about if someone asks you what is it well you might be perplexed it's very hard to say exactly what your consciousness is i mean it's hard to find a good word for it particularly because your experience of yourself i think of say descartes thinking about thinking about himself one's experience of oneself is entirely internal is entirely private it's not out here in the world of space and time so it is hard to gesture at your soul or your psyche or your consciousness because it's not out here for us to point to it is an internal psychic fact like our experience of god that's why the the analogy is illuminating so what meister eckhardt says is this think of the difference between that ineffable spark that is you that thing that is your soul and now think about the various faculties into which we find your soul split for example the faculty of memory the faculty of reason the faculty of emotion if you were to list all the things that your soul can do reason emotion memory after you listed all the faculties you would have the parts of your soul that you can talk about but you would not have eliminated that ineffable spark that you are unable to talk about maestro card says fine you know what that ineffable spark is that scintilla that is the deity within so there's a little fragment of this inside you and not inside you in this in the spatial sense but inside your soul in the spiritual sense it is unspeakable because it is your connection to the godhead and it is it is on the one hand unspeakable and we can't do logical proofs about it on the other hand because it is the you that makes you that that makes you that is more foundational to yourself than any of the other things you can do it's more fun it's more you than your memories it's more you than your reasoning it's more you than your feelings the reason why we can't talk about that is that it's god's ineffable spark and while it's true that we can't prove such things exist meister eckhart would make or what i think make the argument or make the assertion i don't think it is an argument would make the assertion that while we can't prove it we also can't doubt it because it's the you that does the doubting yeah this is the ghost of cartesianism the embryo of cartesianism is built right into this all right so the idea is something along these lines that meister eckhart unlike so many other scholastics doesn't bother with proofs of god's existence he says you couldn't you couldn't figure out how to doubt it right and not only couldn't you figure out how to doubt it if you did you wouldn't even know what you were doubting so the best you can do is to accept god's grace and god's illumination as it comes and if god doesn't illuminate you directly now meister eckhart will do the best he can to move you in the right path by giving you not the answer but certain suggestive hints about where you might find the answer within yourself somewhere in scripture it says the kingdom of god is within you meister eckhart emphasizes that our that statement in spades now in addition to this distinction between the grund of the soul and the faculties which is analogous to the distinction between the godhead and the things we can say about god he has a very interesting psychology of conversion he says that grace that grace which is the birth of god in the soul and of course for him that means he can go back to the nativity narratives and the gospels right and view this as being the scintilla of god being born into the soul of the world all right he could do all kinds of allegorical readings of the gospel on this on this basis he says that at that point when you get grace the divine spark that was within you bursts into flame now again don't read this uncharitably he's not trying to say that you're on fire he's trying to say that your soul has changed we see that soul change in saint augustine's confessions you will see it in any of the lives of the saints what maester eckhart is doing us is doing is giving us a set of image images with which to talk about something you can't talk about and that's why the idea of the soul the spark bursting into flame is not only useful quite suggestive and it's not ever likely to be superseded now there are certain problems that we're going to come into when we try and talk about this soul bursting into flame kind of stuff the first problem is this mysticism seems to break down not just our thinking but also the grammar of our language and for that reason we don't know how to talk about these primary intuitions if they exist at all because it's hard to demonstrate such things think about it this way mysticism breaks down the distinction between subject and object which is central to grammatical construction think about what it would be like if you make subjects and objects the same thing in your grammar you will be unable to construct sentences your speech will turn into gibberish right the question is how can we account for and articulate experiences in which subject and object the knower and the known when that breaks down what will happen to our grammar when we try and do that since it seems that we can't maintain the grammar either of english or of german or of latin or of any language while the subject in object distinction breaks down the best we can do is search for these metaphors these images and metaphors is stock and trade one of my favorites is this is directly from one of his sermons he says god is green and flowering in his spiritual power let's think about that for a while god is green and flowering does it make any literal logical sense to describe god as being green how would one go about finding out what color god is god is green and flowering well clearly we're not to inten to take that as that's the color of god but rather green is connected with our experience of life and regeneration and it's not a statement about the color of god even though it literally says god is green and flowering what it is is a statement that makes an analogy between something you have experienced and something you have not and says it is it participates in that's in some nebulous and uncertain way that's what's important about meister eckhart he's making gestures not giving you literal speech now think about metaphor because that's why metaphor is meister eckhart's stock in trade and it's not just true of meister eckhart it's true of all mystics let's just think briefly about how metaphor works and make your life a little bit easier and thinking about this i want to talk about three kinds of sentence the first sentence will be my eye is my eye i hope that's not controversial my eye is indeed my eye because it's an identity what else would my eye be but my eye there's no doubt about that now consider a simile my eye is like a window we have a window there and there's a sense in which my eye is like a window right it gives me access to the outside world i can see things through it there are lots of analogies that i might make but the point is that we use like or as in that simile right and it makes literal sense it tells me that my eye and the window share some common property some common predicate now let's move to a third sentence and this is what's important about this let's consider how metaphor works let's consider the statement that my eye is a window now my eye is a window is a very different statement from my eye is like a window this is why they taught you the difference in fourth grade between similes and metaphors while it didn't seem to be important to you at the time it is of great logical significance because similes make logical sense my eye and my wind and the window share a certain property that's intelligible do you say that my eye is a window if you take that literally is nonsense i mean i don't have a window in the front of my head and there's not an eye on the side of this building on the other hand although it is literally speaking strictly speaking nonsensical to say that my eye has a window my point is that this is meaningful nonsense that's what's important about metaphor metaphor by virtue of its very logical structure because it doesn't use like or as always attributes identity to two things that have the property of not being identical that's what makes a metaphor a metaphor that's why your teacher in fourth grade told you the difference key thing here is that if you wanted to be strictly logical you have to use similes as soon as you move from similarly to metaphor and you drop out that as you are literally speaking nonsense the point is that mystics being the brave men they are are not afraid of speaking nonsense if it is meaningful communicative nonsense and this of course is the night is the nightmare of the logicians right the fact that nonsensical utterances like my eye as a window should communicate stuff to people right this is going to have logicians forever after tearing out their hair all right this is why poetry and theology will never ultimately be logical or one of the reasons why they'll never ultimately be logical because metaphors built right into them all right so the idea here is that metaphor is always communicative nonsense and that the tradition of western religion is built around certain key metaphors all right and although strictly speaking these metaphorical utterances do not make logical sense they communicate something and they communicate something what they communicate i would say is polyvocal what i mean by that is that i say like two plus two that only indicates one thing to you i'll call that univocal it's two plus two is four tells you what that addition problem amounts to metaphors speak with more than one tongue they speak with more than one voice they are polyvocal they move you in various intellectual directions without giving you one and only one answer mathematics is univocal the world of metaphor is polyvocal that is why this is so profound that is why this is still so moving and so stirring the polyvocal metaphors keep talking to us from different perspectives in different voices all saying in some ways the same thing the problem is we strain to hear what they're saying and we can almost figure it out but not quite the point at which you completely make the metaphors fit together is the point at which you receive divine grace and at that point you realize that metaphors like other words can't quite do the job now if we take these ideas about metaphor from here i want to move to some of meister eckhart's metaphors and just look at them in detail um i like the the metaphor of god being green and flowering but how about this one and this also harks back to what i said in the beginning of the lecture that meister eckhart often speaks from god's perspective which is a remarkable trick if you can do it he said the i with which i see with which i see god is exactly the same eye with which god sees me my eye and god's eye are one and the same one seeing one knowledge and one love that's deep that's profound i am not entirely certain literally what it means i mean if you consider the fact that well god doesn't have a body one assumes so he doesn't have an eye one assumes so how could meister eckhart's eye and god's eye be the same thing literally doesn't make sense on the other hand if we look at it symbolically or metaphorically it suggests that it is possible for human beings to abandon the constraints of the body to forsake the limitations of space and time and adopt a divine perspective in other words what meister eckhart is doing is gesturing at what it would be like to vacate our soul of small petty unreligious concerns when he says that i view the world with the same eye that god views the world what he's saying is that he has emptied his soul of other things so that divinity could be poured into him all right now there's another metaphor exactly divinity didn't get poured into him because divinity is not a liquid but if you understand what i'm talking about then you're starting to catch on to why metaphor is so important to religious discourse and in particular so important to meister eckhart we are trying to talk about something that doesn't fit into language the best we can do is not i mean perhaps just remain silent that is one possible alternative but insofar as we want to communicate with other people about our religious intuitions or about our experience of divinity the best we're going to get is these inspired metaphors and i'd be tempted to say that you know the lion by his claw i look at these wonderful metaphors and i can't help but believe that there is something going on here which is outside the domain of a superficial understanding he certainly has the appearance of being an inspired man now it would seem that metaphor for meister eckhart is in some ways like what irony was for socrates socrates always described his method as being maudic he described himself as not having any knowledge himself but rather being like a like a midwife he helps other people give birth to intellectual children may i suggest that the metaphors that maestro eckhart offers us are also meutic they are intended to help with the birth of god in the soul and in that sense he is a sort of spiritual midwife he does not cause you to get god's grace or to get god's illumination but he helps the birth of god in the soul he helps fan that spark of divinity into the flame of religious illumination and of course it's not a flame right again all i can all i can do is have recourse to metaphors about meister eckhart's metaphors and what they're supposed to do to you but that tends to prove my point as well i'm trying to gesture at something that doesn't fit nicely into language i'm trying to talk about the experience of divinity and i think like all speakers that want to communicate religious ideas it is going to be necessary for us to have recourse to metaphor and also to be willing to accept metaphor for what it is in other words don't say ah flame i don't want to know about flame i want to know really literally what's going on my car would just throw up his hands and say look i can't do that it's not a problem of my religious understanding it's a problem of the nature of language itself language was invented to talk about tables and chairs and stuff god is not like tables and chairs and you will find that the closest we can come are these suggestive and provocative metaphors it is meiotic it helps you give birth to a spiritual child it does not father the spiritual child that comes from god's direct intervention in god's direct grace now i'd like to conclude my discussion of meister eckhart with some of the with some considerations of the problems of mysticism and this in some ways perhaps helps account for why meister eckhart is not read as widely as someone like thomas aquinas today even though perhaps thomas aquinas isn't read widely those who want to say discover the history or or tradition of western religion might be more likely to gravitate to aquinas into eckhart eckhart doesn't have quite the following part of that it comes just from the nebulousness the fuzziness of metaphors all mystics have the same problem in every religion in every case you can't quite figure out what they're talking about if you ask them they'll give you some beautiful poetic metaphor if you're willing to accept that okay then you have a beautiful poetic metaphor if you're not willing to accept that they can't tell you anything those of us who are intellectually tough minded like logic chopping and who like strictly linear analysis are going to find this unsuccessful it is certainly tempting to be unchar uncharitable and go behaviorist about this and say look whatever you're talking about if it's an internal special psychic experience that no one can utter stop buttering it to me because i don't understand what you're talking about that's what i would call a kind of flat-headed unmetaphorical unpoetic reading of meister eckhart and i can see how that would be tempting because it is hard to figure out exactly what he's gesturing at what exactly is the difference between god and the godhead i myself don't know and i've read this book a lot of times i have some ideas about what it might be connected to but if you ask me literally in a sense to tell you what the difference is i can't i don't think meister eckhart can either i don't know that that is necessarily a problem it depends on what you expect from religion and what you expect from religious discourse if what you want to do is to force all of language and all of thinking into some procrustan mold some preconceived idea of what would count as meaningful speech meister eckhart and the metaphors he offers us and the entire tradition of religious mysticism is going to be unacceptable under those circumstances you're not going to get anything out of it on the other hand i might be tempted to say that i have never found any religious writer that was so illuminating and so provocative and interesting as meister eckhart what i like best about him in some ways this is sort of an apology for someone that i happen to like what i like best about him is the fact that he makes me think about things that i would never have thought about myself and he has such a gift of poetic metaphor that i don't see how anybody can remain immune to the attractions and the beauty of this i the first big breakthrough i made with meister eckhart the first time that i really felt like he had told me something i tried to explain it to my students back at princeton and it fell flat because i didn't have the words let me just take my meister eckhart's words and see if you understand what he's driving at see if you see the attraction of this mice jacquard said in one of his sermons that i've never had god speak to me and i guess that's in some ways kind of reassuring right that god never talked to him directly i mean prophecy is i mean let's restrict that to the old testament i mean i i feel better that someone should believe in god but not have direct intervention that would make me a little nervous but he said although god has never spoken to me i have occasionally heard god clear his throat like someone announcing his presence in a room without uttering anything that is a remarkably deep image that just knocked me over i closed the book for the day i spent all day thinking about god clearing his throat and the more i thought about it the more i thought that that is the best image i have ever heard for everyday people experiencing god somehow in the world and insofar as i've ever had any religious understanding it has come very close to that and there's if i ever tell you that god talks to me lock me up right because i'm pretty far out there but if i say that i've had some sort of intuition about the world where i sensed some sort of divine presence as though it were being announced but not with words with the clearing of a throat that is a remarkably deep and pretty and powerful image and if you get nothing else out of meister eckhart go back and look at those metaphors because they're they are illuminating in a way that no scholastic logic chopping could ever hope to be a thousand books of logic are never going to tell you about god clearing his throne i can't imagine anything that would be if not more persuasive or convincing because what are you being persuaded of i don't know what are you being convinced of i don't know but i do know that it makes me think about divine matters it makes me think about the various ways in which god might make himself manifest and as i understand it that is meister eckhart's point so if i would if i could ask you to read meister eckhart in a charitable state of mind in other words do not do scholastic logic chopping do not insist on a positivistic conception of language when you read this because you'll find it worthless but if you are willing to give to this text if you are willing to break through ritual and formalism towards some sort of direct apprehension of god well it's i think that's the best you can possibly expect out of something like this this text it is uh not to everyone's taste because of its metaphorical and poetic and mystical tendencies but on the other hand for those of you that find it valuable i think you will find it one of the most valuable texts in the western tradition now i'll just close with this observation it should not be surprising that before he died meister eckhart was accused of heresy not at all surprising because anyone who has direct religious illumination who claims to be able to dispense with ceremonies and rituals and have direct apprehension of gods even god's clearing his throat is quite a remarkable achievement well he's accused of heresy and he defends himself vigorously he says no i am in fact god's faithful servant that i meant nothing heretical you just don't understand what it is i've been saying and that's actually probably the most plausible reading of this imagine strict logic chopping theologians trying to turn this into orthodox catholicism it'll be very hard to do but meister eckhart defended himself vigorously against the charge of heroism and he emphasized that and i'll close with this quote because it encapsulates meister eckhart's stance very nicely he said you should not confine yourself to just one matter of devotion since god is to be found in no particular way that is why they do him wrong who take god in just one particular way they take the way rather than god

Channel: Michael Sugrue

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Keywords: Michael Sugrue, Dr. Michael Sugrue, Lecture, History, Philosophy, Western Culture, Western Intellectual Tradition, Bible, Meister, Eckhart, God Hid Nothing

Id: q1Rp1OiFCK0

Length: 44min 17sec (2657 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 25 2020