Now I come to another movement which also was an end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of many new things, namely the movement which is called German Mysticism.
Its most important representative, Meister Eckhardt, also belongs to the 13th century. What did these mystics do? They tried to interpret the Thomistic system for practical purposes. It is not so that they were speculative monks, sitting beside the world, but they wanted to give the people, and themselves, the possibility of experiencing what was expressed in the Scholastic systems. This refers to all fundamental problems. And so it happened that this mysticism of Meister Eckhardt unites the most abstract Scholastic concepts – especially that of being – with a burning soul, with the warmth of religious feeling and the love-power of religious acting. He says: “Nothing is so near to the beings, so intimate to them, than being- itself. But God is being-itself.” And from this the identity of God and being is stated. “Esse est deus” — being-itself is God. But it is not a static being. I often have been attacked ,when I use the word “being,” of making God static. Not even of the medieval mysticism of that of Meister Eckhardt is this true. Being is a continuous f lux and return, as he calls it – Fluss und Wiederf luss – a stream and a counterstream. It always moves away from and back to itself. Being is life. It has dynamic character.
In order to make this clearer, he distinguishes between the Divinity and God. The Divinity is the Ground of Being, in which everything moves and counter-moves.
God is essentia, is the principle of the good and the true. From this he can even develop the Trinitarian thought. The first is the being which is neither born nor giving birth; the second is the process of self-objectivation – the Logos, the Son; the third is the self-generation, the Spirit, which creates all individual things. For the Divinity he uses the terms of negative theology. He calls it the simple ground, the quiet desert. It is the nature of the Divinity not to have any nature. It is beyond every special nature. The Trinity is based on God’s going out and returning back to himself, He recognizes Himself, He re-sees Himself, and this makes the Logos. The world is in God in an archetypical sense – “archetype” is a word which is renewed today by Jung; it is the Latin translation of the Platonic “idea.” The essences, the archetypes of everything, are in the depths of the Divine. They are the Divine verbum, the Divine Word. Therefore the generation of the Son and the eternal creation of the world in God Himself. are one and the same thing. Creaturely being is receiving being. The creature doesn’t give being to itself – God does. But the creature receives being from God. But it is a Divine form of being. The creature, including man, has reality only in union with the eternal reality. The creature has nothing in separation from God. And the point in which the creature returns to God is the soul. Through the soul, what is separated from God returns to Him. The depths of the soul in which this happens9 is called by Meister Eckhardt the “spark,” or also the innermost center of the soul, the heart of the soul, or the castle of the soul. It is the point which transcends the difference of the function of the soul; it is the uncreated light in man. Therefore the Son is born in every soul. This general event is more important than the special birth of Jesus, But all this is in the realm of possibility. Now it must come into the realm of actuality. God must be born in the soul. Therefore the soul must separate itself from its finitude. Something must happen – which he calls entwerden.. the opposite of becoming, going away from oneself. losing oneself; that man gets rid of himself and of all things, is the process of salvation. as he says.
