The letting go of images and objects does not represent a withdrawal in order to cultivate a particular experience. It is a sign, rather, of an equanimity that remains open and receptive, irrespective of one‘s experience. Regardless of the external situation, there can be a ‗breaking through‘ (durchbrechen) to serene acceptance of whatever, at any given moment, is the case. But the context of such openness, within Eckhart‘s view, is the givenness of our incorporation into the kingdom of God. In commenting that the church is always deconstructible (but that the kingdom of God is not) John Caputo writes of surrender to the unbounded immediacy of the kingdom.
This letting-be (Gelâzenheit) … is essentially a letting go of human self- sufficiency … which would deny the very meaning of the time of the kingdom as the time of God‘s rule, not ours. In the kingdom, time can be experienced authentically only by taking time as God‘s gift and trusting ourselves to time‘s granting, which is God‘s giving. … By letting go of our own self-possession, by opening ourselves to God‘s rule, we release the day from its chains. … The temporality of the kingdom … is free, open, unbound, unchained, a day or time that is savoured one day at a time, experienced, lived for itself, in its own upsurge, instant by instant, day by day.172
Caputo understands Eckhart‘s God to be involved in human affairs, although this God is unknowable in essential ways and cannot be described. Eckhart is viewed by Caputo (and
myself) as pastorally concerned for community cohesion and for the shared practices of Christian life. Reading him, we might have the impression of a warm-hearted ascetic not over- concerned with personal belief as such. He might have preached against today‘s spiritual narcissism, whereby we are encouraged to feel elevated thoughts within the parameters of a self-preoccupation unchallenged by social and environmental responsibility.173
Eckhart advocates that all activities be attended by Gelâzenheit. I am exhorted, not to look for divine remunerations, but to face up to the illusory quality of my separate, small-s self. The letting-be of releasement will be painful to the extent that I have attached myself to unreality; in particular, to the unreality represented by my isolated and isolating ego. Using older forms of words, Eckhart, Julian and Traherne are agreed in their broad attempt to partially collapse the dualisms of creator/created, subject/object and spirit/matter. It cannot be assumed that they share precisely the same type of non-dualism; neither of them is concerned with definitions here. In the poem below, I try to express a moderate non-dualism which is indebted, in part, to an excerpt from the anonymous fourth century spiritual writer Pseudo-Macarius.174
173
Ruth Burrows writes: ‗Only too easily we substitute the ‗spiritual life‘ or the ‗contemplative life‘ for God. Without realizing it we are intent on a self-culture.‘ Quotation from: Burrows, R., To Believe in Jesus, Sheed and Ward, London, 1978, p.94. Elsewhere, Burrows writes: ‗By faith we die. It means renouncing myself as my own base, my own centre, my own end. It means … death to the ego.‘ Quotation from her Guidelines for Mystical Prayer, Sheed and Ward, London, 1976, p.59.
174
‗For the soul that is privileged to be in communion with the Spirit becomes all light, all face, all eye, and there is no part of her that is not full of the spiritual eyes of light. As fire, the very light of fire, is alike all over, having in it no first or last, or greater or less, so also the soul that is perfectly irradiated by the unspeakable beauty of the light of Christ, becomes all eye, all light, all face, all glory, all spirit, being made so by Christ, who drives and guides and carries and bears her, and graces her thus with spiritual beauty.‘ Quotation from: "Homily I" (of Pseudo-Macarius) in An Anthology of Christian Mysticism (Egan, H., ed.) The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, MN, 1996, pp. 83f.
One Light, Many Lamps
Caught short by nightfall in a forest;
chancing upon fungi, luminescent.
Intense bluish- white shards
would in the morning be as cold as crockery. Peaked strata, suspended like tiered cave-homes in Cappadocia, where in silence a countenance was seen and known, and known to be seeing back. Just so, the wilderness sees those who see it on a late summer night with stars,
a night to be brought to sense by sight of the earthly. This fungus: a hardening of light.
Beyond its bluish glow, tiny beings call their complement. Each of them, a lamp; each lamp the embodiment of one light.
Separation from ‗the One light‘ is what Eckhart and Traherne seem to understand by ‗the Fall‘. Neither writer is concerned with elaborating a dualism of good/evil. They view human identity as a unity; it is beyond the zone of opposites. It is participatory, as expressed in 2 Pet. 1:4. The follower of Christ, according to that verse, has ‗… come to share in the very being of God‘ (REB). There is an identity to humankind which is more immediate, or more subtle, than the process of thought and of thinking itself.
Beyond metaphysics, creeds and institutions, Eckhart (likewise Julian and Traherne) implies understanding and compassion will be harmonized in direct personal experience. We are drawn
by Love to a kind of crisis point. Once there, we might glimpse the difficult truth that our separate ego is merely an illusion.
Go entirely out of yourself for God‘s sake, and God will go entirely out of himself for your sake. When these both depart, what remains is a simple One. In this One the Father gives birth to his Son in the innermost source.175
Obviously, Eckhart does not use the word ‗ego‘ but mit Eigenschaft (‗with attachment to self‘) which holds clear connotations of individual possessiveness. This attachment prevents the experience of Love and of Reality, through which the illusory aspect of separate existence is transcended. To countermand Eigenschaft, Eckhart puts forward the interior activity of ‗cutting loose‘, abegescheidenheit, which literally conveys the idea of decease, as in dying. An interior activity characterizes Gelâzenheit; there are implications of a peaceful, trusting surrender that seemingly requires nothing from God and asks for nothing. Although Eckhart told his congregations that a prayer of petition could have a legitimate side, he himself seems uncomfortable with the idea of petitioning the divine.176 Rather, he teaches an emptying out of personal desire. This is a reflection of his central idea, namely, that God can fully enter the human subject, so that the subject can be said to disappear and merge with the divine object. In other words, ‗the birth of God in the soul‘, to which I will need to return.
175
cited in Walshe, op.cit., p.118.
176
Reading Eckhart, Julian and Traherne closely, I have the impression that neither writer is particularly interested in petitionary prayer, with the clear exception of Julian‘s requests to God that she might enter into something of the suffering love of Christ. I feel that each of these three writers accepts that prayer functions, not to change the divine will, but to release divine qualities and purposes into human consciousness. But my feeling could be a projection on my part.
What is the means by which the human subject may disappear and merge with God? Part of the means is has to do with the metaphors ‗spark‘ (MHG: Vűnkelîn) and ‗small castle‘ (MHG: Bürgelîn) both of which convey in Eckhart the soul‘s highest/deepest part. Each soul possesses such a ‗spark‘ (or ‗castle‘); which is God-given and remains connected to God. Being the soul‘s highest/deepest part, the Vűnkelîn has the capacity to disentangle the soul from the absorption in created things which obscures the understanding and experience of God. Through grace and through many choices to loosen our attachments, we can (through the Vűnkelîn) expand ‗into the divine‘. Here Eckhart is drawing together a classic Western dualism. Here, in Eckhart‘s theo-philosophy, is the equivalent of the Vedāntin teaching of Tat tvam asi.
Union with God, however, does not imply that we are transformed into God. But the question arises: does our ‗expansion into divinity‘ occur at the expense of individual personality? There is no ready agreement on this question; interpreters of Christian ‗mystics‘ will continue to differ on the question of the demise of personality. Eckhart repeatedly says that we are ‗nothing‘ in and of ourselves (MHG: niht, or nihil in the L sermons). By this he underlines our status as contingent creatures. At the same time, we are unique expressions or projections of God. Humanity, according to Eckhart, is uniquely created for union with God. On this non- dual basis, therefore, he insists firstly on our nothingness, and secondly on our status as daughters and sons of the divine.