Master Eckhart’s Mystical Thought
The main point of Eckhart’s mystic is “union of identity” between God and human. Union of identity means identity of human fused to God, or vice versa. God and human becomes one in which cannot be separated each other. Eckhart describes that situation in the word: “God’s ground and the soul’s ground is one ground.” There is no far different between God and human because both of them are the one in essence.
Because of his very strong argument of the “ground concept” his thought called as “mystical on the ground.” Actually there are many names to call Eckhart’s order as Mc. Ginn mentioned in his book “the mystical thought of Miester Eckhart,” For instance, German Mysticism, Rhineland Mysticism, Mysticism of German Dominican, and speculative mysticism. The concept of the ground is very fundamental because it is not only to differenciate Eckhart’s mystic to amorist order, but also to explain the highest relationship of God and Human. Ground is not soul as like in Agustinus teaching, but the essence of God and human.
The idea of union of identity in the ground is not easy to understand without understanding the sense of vernacular Germany language where the word originally derived. Mc. Ginn’s Book used half of chapter three to explain the symbolic meaning and aim of using the word “ground” trough semantic and hermeneutic analysis. As I know, Eckhart used many philosophical and theological propositions and terms in supporting the idea of union of identity, like grunt, Godhead, emanation, birth of Christ, essence, intellect, in which it all cannot be understood without proper understanding of the meaning.
Additionally, he also used many metaphors such as dessert and ocean to figure out the mystical union. Mc. Ginn asserts that the symbol or metaphor dessert –the vast and empty terrains of human experience that suggest the infinity of divine nature in which soul may sink and vanish-- is to express the experience of disorientation and terror in the face unknown. Eckhart maybe had such motif of mind in employing the dessert to refer to both limitless of the soul and to unfathomable expanse of hidden divinity. The important of metaphor is to break trough previous categories of mystical speech to create new ways of presenting a direct encounter with God. Pragmatically the concept is to “transform” ordinary limited form of “consciousness” trough the process of making the inner meaning of metaphor one’s own in everyday life.
Ground or Grunt, in German language, is actually new creation which its significance can only be appreciated by exploring its context and meaning within the vernacular sermon and treatises of Eckhart himself. “Grunt” refers to concrete and abstract object. Grunt can be understood as earth or hell in concrete meaning. Moreover, it is also employed to indicate the origin, cause, principium, reason, proof of something, and finally is employed as what in inmost, hidden, and essence in abstract meaning. In Eckhart views grunt have deeper meaning as “union of God and human or name for unknowable divine and human soul.” The word also used to show how God becomes “one” with human. Eckhart aim is to achieve centrality as way to presenting mystical consciousness.
Eckhart statement in his book “God’s ground and my ground is the same ground” implicitly said that the formation of the world is “univocal causality” because between God and human there is a close relationship between uncreated and the created in one analogy. Insofar as Eckhart takes up the theme of absolute being in its identity with God, he likewise gives expression to relationships of analogical causality, teaching that being as such, or absolute being, is what becomes restricted to determinate being, while determinate being is what brings it about that a this or a that actually exist
The concept of ground relates to Latin word deitas, essentia, and principium. However, Eckhart never used grunt in the sense of cause, because God as grunt lies at the deeper level than God as efficient cause of the universe. Deitas and essentia word cannot completely describe the dynamic of Germany vernacular mystic. Whereas, principium used by Eckhart to explain “formal emanation” of the three person of trinity to express the active of nature of divine emanation and to point out the pure potentiality of the hidden divine mystery. Emanation means someone or something come from the same source. In Christian theology, Christ is God because principally he emanates from Godfather. In wider sense if all human beings are son of God, indeed they also are emanated from the Godhead.
The argument of emanation or inner present of God is argument of justice and just man. Justice is in the just man, and the just man is in justice. The just man is his just action, and this just action is likewise justice. Between the just man and justice, there is difference on account of the opposition between them, but because of their relation which reciprocally include each other. What is just for Eckhart what is just of justice and therewith justice itself.
However, although grunt includes the mysticism of divine birth, but at least in some sense, goes beyond it. Mc. Ginn says “God becomes in the flowing of creation, and the God unbecomes when the mystic is not content to return to the God who acts, but breaking trough to silent unmoving Godhead, one that bring all creature back into hidden source trough their union.
The becoming and unbecoming concept leads us to the conversation of the concept of God in Eckhart views. Eckhart defines God is simple word, unspoken word, (Sermon 53). Only God can speak that world, everyone beside him cannot. Additionally he also used “negation of negation (sermon 21) or distinct indistinct. “Just as God is totally indistinct in himself according to his nature in that he is truly and most properly one and completely distinct from all things, so too man in God is indistinct from everything which is in God. it means God is not Good, not a person, not Trinity, not Father, Son or Holy Spirit, not even God. God is innominabile, as essence and as beyond being, as unmoving intellect and as hidden desert, designates God’s transcendence, God as the totally Other.
Furthermore, Eckhart distinguishes between “God” and “Godhead”. He says “as long as he was in the ground, the ground, the depth, the flood and all source of the Godhead,” no one asked him anything, because while God acts, the Godhead does not. Godhead is the deepest level of grunt while human and God completely unite while God is human creation. God become God in creation process, and he is Godhead before have anything to be created. Human moving to ground or grunt means move to Godhead where all identity is lost.
In this sense, Godhead is not being. He should be deeper than being. Eckhart contends that the absolute principle (or the absolute cause: God) is pure intellect and not being. According to this view, being (esse) is always caused and thus presupposes intellect, itself without being, as the cause of being. Eckhart holds that being is, in intellect, no other than intellect and, therefore, not simply being, but instead being that has been elevated to intellect. If someone should nonetheless object that in God knowing or anything else might be described as ‘being’, the proper response for Eckhart is that this ‘being’ still presupposes the knowing of intellect. As the absolute cause, intellect is thought of as absolutely unlimited only if it is thought of as wholly without being. As such, intellect becomes the principle for absolute as well as contingent being. Thus, Eckhart’s thesis that knowing is presupposed in every case of being.
Although human and God having the sameness in this sense, Eckhart’s word of “unum” can be used to express both the divine and the human poles of fused identity in contrasting between “oneness of Godhead” with all form of “likeness.” Like God insofar as God bears in his “like” in me, and all form of likeness arise love which is the Holy Spirit. But God as motionless source moving all things from within ad “returning” them to himself is beyond likeness. Other difference between God and man, in respect to intellect, is that God is intellect while man has intellect.
If any one wishes to come to God’s ground and his innermost, he must first come into his own ground and innermost, for no one can know God who does not know himself. Eckhart often speaks of God “penetrating” and “being in” the soul of the ground, as analogical relationship between two realities. But, in the deeper realities, or fused identity, there is no different because just there is only one univocal grunt.
God live in the soul: first by charity, then by his image, trough which we come to share in the life of Christianity. The place of this contact “ is the essential understanding of God, of which the pure and naked power is “intelectus,” which the term of master receptive. But turn to higher form of union.[]
