Meister Eckhart - there is nothing but Truth
Eckhart von Hochheim was a 14
thc CE was a German theologian, born to a noble family. The ’Meister’ designation was given when he passed some academic theological exams in Paris. He was hauld up before the Inquisition during the reign of yet another
bad Pope - this time Pope John XXII. This was the last that was heard from him - he was either killed, fled, or died awaiting the Pope’s verdict - history has no record of what actually occurred. Although considering the times and the massive corrupton in the Roman Church of the day, he may well have been killed before an official verdict was passed. His fundamental sin (despite what other academics write about him vis-a-vis Avignon’ John XXII vs. Louis IV) was IMHO his teaching that man and God were one (albeit that he implied this - it was too dangerous to say it directly).
Even today the
Catholic Church has refused to raise its
prohibition of Mester Echhart’s works. And so it should, because if the flock read and understood his works, they would never set foot in a church again. Well, be that as it may, here are some things he wrote, which I particularly like:
God is infinite in his simplicity and simple in his infinity. Therefore he is everywhere and is everywhere complete. He is everywhere on account of his infinity, and is everywhere complete on account of his simplicity. Only God flows into all things, their very essences. Nothing else flows into something else. God is in the innermost part of each and every thing, only inits innermost part.
When the soul enters the light that is pure, she falls so far from her own created somethingness into her nothingness that in this nothingness she can no longer return to that created somethingness by her own power.
Blessedness consists primarily in the fact that the soul sees God in herself . Only in God’s knowledge does she become wholly still. There she knows nothing but essence and God. Between that person and God there is no distinction, and they are one. . . Their knowing is one with God’s knowing, their activity with God’s activity and their understanding with God’s understanding.
I have occasionally spoken of a light in the soul which is uncreated and uncreatable. . . . This light is not satisfied with the simple, still and divine being which neither gives nor takes, but rather it desires to know from where this being comes. It wants to penetrate to the simple ground, to the still desert, into which distinction never peeped, neither Father, Son nor Holy Spirit. There, in that most inward place, where everyone is a stranger, the light is satisfied, and there it is more inward than it is in itself, for this ground is a simple stillness which is immovable in itself. But all things are moved by this immovability and all the forms of life are conceived by it which, possessing the light of reason, live of themselves.
Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.
