Inspring quotes from the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart

"Man never desires anything so earnestly as God desires to bring a man to Himself, that he may know Him."

"God is always ready, but we are very unready; God is near to us, but we are far from Him"

"God is within, but we are without; God is at home, but we are strangers... "

'The eye by which I see God is the same eye by which God sees me. My eye and God's eye are one and the same, one in seeing, one in knowing"

Meister Eckhart

Meister Eckhart (c. 1260 - 1327/8) is one of the great Christian mystics. He was born near Erfurt in Thuringia and in his distinguished career became a Parisian Professor of Theology and took a leading pastoral and organizational role in the Dominican Order.

In the language of the Christian tradition Eckhart expounds the eternal mysteries in a  that is fresh and original in the best sense. Through the vividness of his use of imagery (alluding to the mysteries of the spark of the soul, the Abyss, the desert, the birth of the Word in the heart, etc.) Eckhart paradoxically directs us to that which lies beyond image.

The depth and universality of Eckhart's teaching has drawn seekers of truth Christian and non-Christian alike. His radical and penetrating insight makes him a natural point of reference for a genuinely ecumenical understanding.

Opps..was intended to the Christian's page.. for those who find it not inspiring, just move on. Thanks.

"When I came out from God, that is, into multiplicity, then all proclaimed, 'There is a God' (i.e., the personal God, Creator of all things). Now this cannot make me blessed, for hereby I realize myself as creature. But in the breaking through (i.e. through all limitations), I am more than all creatures, I am neither God nor creature; I am that which I was and shall remain evermore. There I receive a thrust which carries me above all angels. By this sudden touch I am become so rich that God (i.e., God as opposed to the Godhead) is not sufficient for me, so far as he is only God and in all his divine works. For in this breaking through I perceive what God and I are in common. There I am what I was. There I neither increase nor decrease. For there I am the immovable which moves all things. Here man has won again what he is eternally (i.e., in his essential being) and ever shall be. Here God (i.e., the Godhead) is received into the soul."

"No idea represents or signifies itself. It always points to something else, of which it is a symbol. And since man has no ideas, except those abstracted from external things through the sense, he cannot be blessed by an idea."

"The mind never rests but must go on expecting and preparing for what is yet known and what is still concealed. Meanwhile, man cannot know what God is, even though he be ever so well of what God is not; and an intelligent person will reject that. As long as it has no reference point, the mind can only wait as matter waits for him. And matter can never find rest except in form; so, too, the mind can never find rest except in the essential truth which is locked up in it--the truth about everything. Essence alone satisfied and God keeps on withdrawing, farther and farther away, to arouse the mind's zeal and lure it to follow and finally grasp the true good that has no cause. Thus, contented with nothing, the mind clamors for the highest good of all."

"You could not do better than to go where it is dark, that is, unconsciousness."

"To seek God by rituals is to get the ritual and lose God in the process, for he hides behind it. On the other hand, to seek God without artifice, is to take him as he is, and so doing, a person 'lives by the Son,' and is the Life itself."

"The course of heaven is outside time--and yet time comes from its movements. Nothing hinders the soul's knowledge of God as much as time and space, for time and space are fragments, whereas God is one! And therefore, if the soul is to know God, it must know him above time and outside of space; for God is neither this nor that, as are these manifold things. God is one!"

"...where the soul is informed with the primal purity, stamped with the seal of pure being, where it tastes God himself as he was before he ever took upon himself the forms of truth and knowledge, where everything that can be named is sloughed off--there the soul knows with its purest knowledge and takes on Being in its most perfect similitude."

"God does not seek his own. In all his acts, he is innocent and free and acts only out of true love. That is why the person who is united to God acts that way--he, too, will be innocent and free, whatever he does, and will act out of love and without asking why, solely for the glory of God, seeking his own advantage in nothing--for God is at work in him."

"God's being is my life, but if it is so, then what is God's must be mine and what is mine God's. God's is-ness is my is-ness, and neither more nor less. The just live eternally with God, on a par with God, neither deeper nor higher. All their work is done by God and God's by them."

"God...does not constrain the will. Rather, he sets it free, so that it may choose him, that is to say, freedom. The spirit of man may not will otherwise than what God wills, but that is no lack of freedom. It is true freedom itself."

"Man's last and highest parting occurs when, for God's sake, he takes leave of God."

"The eye by which I see God is the same as the eye by which God sees me. My eye and God's eye are one and the same--one in seeing, one is knowing, and one in loving."

"God becomes as phenomena express him."

Eckhart writes:

"So I say that the aristocrat is one who derives his being, his life, and his happiness from God alone, with God and in God and not at all from his knowledge, perception, or love of God, or any such thing....This much is certain: when a man is happy, happy to the core and root of beatitude, he is no longer conscious of himself or anything else. He is conscious only of God...To be conscious of knowing God is to know about God and self. As I have just been explaining, the agent of the soul which enables one to see is one thing and the agent by which one knows that he sees is another."

Here Eckhart foreshadows the phenomenological understanding (i.e. Merleau-Ponty) that our lived world is lived in a pre-reflective manner (what Husserl called the "natural attitude). And this pre-reflective or implicit understanding is different from the "knowing" which is reflective understanding. For Eckhart, these two modes of engagement with the world are mutually exclusive.

Further, Eckhart has a profound understanding of the human being as a being-in-the-world. Faith cannot be something which points toward something other than the world. The human being, after all, lives, and he can know nothing other than life as a being-in-the-world -- or, as Merleau-Ponty would say, that finite horizon in which I find myself as I move through the world. Eckhart's faith is not the faith which Nietzsche denounces. Eckhart does not urge the faithful to be life-denying nor to follow the church like pathetic sheep. Eckhart writes:

"For if Life were questioned a thousand years and asked: 'Why live?' and if there were an answer, it could be no more than this: 'I live only to live!' And that is because Life is its own reason for being, springs from its own Source, and goes on and on, without ever asking why - just because it is life. Thus, if you ask a genuine person, that is, one who acts (uncalculatingly) from his heart: 'Why are you doing that?' - he will reply in the only possible way: 'I do it because I do it!'"

Eckhart, like Kierkegaard would assert centuries later, distrusted the artifice of ritual and church dogma (thus, his charge of heresy). He writes:

"To seek God by rituals is to get the ritual and lose God in the process, for he hides behind it. On the other hand, to seek God without artifice, is to take him as he is, and so doing, a person 'lives by the Son,' and is the Life itself."

Eckhart's approach to theology is known as negative theology, since it is an attempt to negate what is not the Godhead, since such ideas are necessary limiting and finite; thus, Eckhart asserts that "for God's sake," we must "take leave of God." Eckhart's mysticism, in this sense, is again similar, though not identical with Heidegger's ontological phenomenology. Of this mystical element in Heidegger, Zimmerman writes that Heidegger's concept of "inauthenticity is an intensification of everyday egoism; authenticity is a dimunition of it." More centrally, however, is the similarity of Heidegger's 'ontological difference" between Being and beings: "Being is not the product of thinking; it is more likely that essential thinking is an event (Ereignis) of Being."

While the similarities and differences between Eckhart's negative theology and ontological phenomenology are still very much under debate, it is clear that Eckhart's mysticism is, without a doubt, a valuable contribution to contemporary thinking.