Eckhart Review

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Science and Mysticism in the Middle Ages: Meister

Eckhart's Synthesis

Robert Dobie

To cite this article: Robert Dobie (2010) Science and Mysticism in the Middle Ages: Meister
Eckhart's Synthesis, Eckhart Review, 19:1, 15-34

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/mmt.v19.15

Published online: 21 Apr 2015.

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 Science and Mysticism in the Middle
Ages: Meister Eckhart’s Synthesis
Robert J. Dobie

What is the truth of Holy Scripture? For Eckhart, this truth is clear and
simple: Christ. Christ is the inner truth of all Scripture. But how are we to
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understand Christ? How are we to make the truth that is Christ our own?
I think this is the main task that Eckhart sets himself. Christ, of course,
reveals himself in the texts of the Gospels; but the Gospels talk about a
distant time and place. How then, are we to invite Christ into the innermost
part of our souls? Eckhart puts this very forcefully in his vernacular sermon,
Praedica Verbum:

‘Speak the word, speak it externally, speak it forth, bring it forth, give birth to the Word!’
‘Speak it externally’. That something is spoken from the outside is a common thing. This,
however, is spoken within. ‘Speak it externally!’ This means: Be aware that this is within
you. The prophet says, ‘God spoke one thing, and I heard two’ (Ps. 61:12). This is true.
God has only ever spoken one thing. His speech is only one. In this one speaking he
speaks his Son and, together with Him, the Holy Spirit and all creatures; and there is only
one speaking in God. But the prophet says, ‘I heard two’, that is, I understood God and
creatures. Where God speaks it, it is God; but here it is creature. People imagine that God
only became man there [in Palestine]. This is not true. God has just as much become man
here [in the soul] as there, and he has become man so that he might give birth to you, his
only-begotten Son, and nothing less. (Pr. 30/TP, p. 293)1

For Eckhart, we must understand that Christ is not just an historical

individual but also the living inner, yet transcendent principle of all things.
Christ unites in himself both historical individual and the eternal principle
by which all things were created, the divine Word or Logos, who is born
no less than three times: once in Bethlehem some two thousand years ago,
eternally in the Godhead where he is born continually from the Father,
and a third time in ourselves, in the ground of our souls, where the eternal
birth of the Son in the Godhead intersects with our concrete, historical
individuality. This insight, as we shall see, is crucial to Eckhart’s own
understanding of the relation of science to religion, of reason to faith and
revelation.
As ground of the soul and also transcendent creative principle, Christ is
both an historical, incarnate being and an eternal metaphysical principle, the
Word of God, who proceeds and is spoken eternally in the Godhead. It is as
pure or first intellect or Word that Christ is both the innermost ground of

Eckhart Review No 19 15
 the soul and the eternal and transcendent principle of all metaphysics and
natural philosophy. All natural philosophy, Eckhart argues, resolves into
metaphysics and all metaphysics resolves, ultimately, into that purely formal
emanation that the philosophers call ‘intellect’. Here, of course, Eckhart
shows his strongly Neoplatonic orientation, inherited through Albert the
Great, Augustine, and Dionysius, but also through the Islamic tradition
of Avicenna and Averroes. Metaphysics as such, Eckhart says, studies the
formal causes of things and these alone. Nevertheless, formal causes exist
in their purity only insofar as they are thought by a pure intellect. This pure
intellect can be nothing but a pure emanation from God, pure in that this
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emanation is equal to God and subsists in God. This pure formal emanation
is no one other than Christ, who as the Logos or self-subsistent Word of all
creation is also the ground and perfection of the human intellect. Insofar
as we purify our intellect, our intellect rises to Christ and Christ emanates
within the intellect. Indeed, this is what revelation for Eckhart truly is: the
formal emanation of the intellect, i.e., Christ, into the innermost ground
of the soul so that the soul may come to participate in the inner life of the
Godhead. In this way the inner truth of revelation reveals at the same time
the inner truth of all metaphysics and natural philosophy. But how does our
intellect become pure? It becomes pure by the grace of detachment, a virtue
that realizes the utter nothingness of the soul as intellect, so that it may
become made over into the image of God.

Christ as First Principle

There is no work of Eckhart where these themes converge more thickly and
clearly than in his commentary on the Gospel of John. This should become
obvious to all who know the opening verse of John, ‘In the beginning was
the Word (Logos)’. Here John specifically links the cosmic principle with the
Person of Christ and one can say that Eckhart’s entire mystical project is
to make this linkage even fuller and more explicit, using all the conceptual
tools of scholastic theology and philosophy at his disposal. This, he makes
clear in the prologue to the commentary:

In interpreting this Word and everything else that follows my intention is the same as in
all my works – to explain what the holy Christian faith and the two Testaments maintain
through the help of the natural arguments of the philosophers. ‘God’s invisible attributes
are seen and understood from the creation of the world in the things that he has made,
as well as his everlasting power (that is, the Son), and his divinity (that is, the Holy Spirit)’,
as the Gloss on Romans, chapter one, says… Moreover, it is the intention of this work to
show how the truths of natural principles, conclusions and properties are well intimated
for him ‘who has ears to hear’ (Mt. 13:43) in the very words of sacred scripture, which are
interpreted through these natural truths. (In Ioh., n.2/EE, pp. 122–123)

16 Eckhart Review No 19
 Eckhart here announces his intention to use the ‘natural arguments’ (rationes
naturales) of the philosophers to explain and interpret Scripture. He appeals
for justification to the very well known passage from Paul’s letter to the
Romans whereby the Apostle remarks that creation reflects the knowledge
and power of God and that, therefore, we can gain some knowledge of God
by examining the things He has made. But most important, I believe, is the
last part of the passage I just cited where Eckhart intimates that this process
of interpretation using ‘natural arguments’ is two-way or dialectical: while
the natural arguments help reveal the true, inner meaning of Scripture, it
is also the case that Scripture reveals or intimates the true, inner meaning
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of the natural arguments themselves. Of course, these truths are evident

only to those who have ‘ears to hear’. By this, I think, Eckhart indicates that
this sort of inner meaning or truth is accessible only to the soul that has
prepared itself morally and ascetically.
What this dialectical reading of Scripture reveals, for Eckhart, is that it
is in and through the pure intellect that God creates and through which
creatures return to God. Thus, Eckhart begins by linking the first verse
from John, ‘In the beginning was the Word’, to the first verses of the Old
Testament, ‘And God said, “Let there be light”, and light was made; and
God saw the light was good, and he divided the light from the darkness’
(Gn. 1:3–4). Here Eckhart links the Word of God with light, which refers,
analogically at least, to the light of the intellect. The Word or Intellect is first
and foremost, then, creative. It is that through which all beings have their
forms and essences and thus any determinate being at all. In this way, the
Word of God, or the Intellect, is the principle of all the sciences.
Indeed, Eckhart translates the Vulgate version of the first phrase of both
Genesis and John, ‘In principio’, not, as is usual, ‘In the beginning’, but as,
‘In the principle’. ‘In the principle was the Word.’ Here Eckhart is playing
with the temporal and a-temporal senses of the Latin word principium: either
as a ‘beginning’ in time or as a scientific-logical principle, an ambiguity that
is also in the Greek word, arche, used by the author of John. Eckhart makes
note of this fact: ‘This is the Greek: ‘In the principle was the Word’, that is,
the Logos, which in Latin is Word and Idea’ (In Ioh., n.4/EE, p. 123). Thus,
the Word of God is not just what gets all of creation going – the ‘thing’ that
‘pushes’ creatures into existence (what Aristotle would call the efficient
cause) – but it is also the principle or idea in which all creatures are pre-
contained, like the cathedral in the mind of the master builder before it is
built. In other words, the divine Word is pre-eminently the formal cause
of all creation. Pre-contained in the Word are the forms and essences of all
things. Thus, while the Old Testament reveals to us God and God’s Word
as the efficient or ‘moving’ cause of all things, Christ, through the Gospel of
John, reveals God and God’s Word as the formal cause of all things. As such,

Eckhart Review No 19 17
 the Old Testament conceals within itself the first principles of physics, the
science of motion and its ultimate cause, while the Gospel conceals within
itself the first principles of metaphysics, the science of being qua being, i.e.,
the science of pure form in which the knower, insofar as he or she is pure
intellect, is transformed into what is known.2 In this way, again, we can see
how Eckhart is trying to connect the temporal to the eternal and timeless
truth to lived experience.
I think this is also why Eckhart emphasizes that the Word or First
Principle of things is not an abstract idea but the concrete life of the divine.
As he puts it in the following example:
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A chest in its maker’s mind is not a chest, but is the life and understanding of the maker,
his living conception. On this account I would say that what it says here about the
procession of the divine Persons holds true and is found in the procession and production
of every being of nature and art. (In Ioh., n.6/EE, p. 124)

Eckhart is making a remarkable claim here: the inner truth of all production
and art, be it natural or man-made, is the inner and eternal procession of
the Persons of the Trinity. This is because the procession of the idea as the
perfect and complete image of the Maker Himself both emanates as the
formal reality of its exemplar, yet remains wholly within as one life and
substance with its exemplar. That is why the Word is ‘with God’. As Eckhart
explains,

The phrase ‘with God’ bespeaks a kind of equality. In things that are analogical what is
produced is always inferior, of lower grade, less perfect and unequal to its source. In
things that are univocal what is produced is always equal to the source. It does not just
participate in the same nature, but it receives the total nature from its source in a simple,
whole and equal manner. Thus … what proceeds is the son of its source. A son is one
who is other in person but not other in nature. (In Ioh., n.5/EE, p. 124)

There are several things to note in this passage. One is the difference
between the analogical and the univocal, terms that are staples of Thomist
discourse. As Eckhart explains here, an analogical relation is one in which
the effect falls short in some way one from its source or exemplar. Thus,
vision of the eyes is analogous to mental vision because, while we can say
that both the eye and the mind ‘see’ their object, corporeal vision falls short
of the perfect intelligibility that occurs in the contemplation of an idea. In
the contemplation of an idea we have a univocal relationship, because here
the form and the one thinking the form are one and identical, unlike in
corporeal vision where the thing seen is other than the sensible form in the
eye. But this example already indicates to us, I think, what Eckhart is trying
to get across: that true identity between knower and know can only occur

18 Eckhart Review No 19
 at the level of the pure intellect and that this pure intellect is none other
than the divine Word made flesh, i.e., Christ. For, as Eckhart concludes
this particular point, an idea or principle that is one in nature but other in
person to its source is generated and not produced. That is, it or he is a true
and living son of the source, who is a true and living father. In the union of
the intellect with the intelligible, we have an analogue of the union of the
Persons of the Trinity, who are one in essence but distinct as self-subsistent
relations.
Eckhart furthers this point by expanding the example we have just seen
him give of the chest and the idea of the chest in its maker:
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The chest in the mind or in the art itself is neither a chest nor something already made, but
it is art itself, is life, the vital concept of the maker. This is what follows: ‘What was made in
him was life’… The word, as idea, belongs to the rational faculty, which is proper to man.
For man is a rational animal, and ‘The human race lives by art and reason’, as the first
book of the Metaphysics says. Therefore, the word is not only life, but the life is the light of
men. Hence there follows: ‘And the life was the light of men’. (In Ioh., n.10/EE, p. 125)

To be an idea in the mind of the Maker, then, is not to be an abstraction

but to be that Maker’s very life and activity. In short, what is known exists
in a ‘higher’ way or mode in the intellect than it does in itself, because as
known it exists as life and intellect. Indeed, I think when Eckhart here talks
about the ‘vital concept’ in the Maker, he is talking about nothing other
than the intellect as such. Moreover, because of our rational nature, human
beings can share in God’s creative Idea or Word. For just as the point is the
principle of the line, although it has no length, so is the divine Word or
Logos the principle of reason, although it does not move discursively from
thought to thought. That is why, for Eckhart and all the medievals, the
principle of reason is not irrational but super-rational. In this sense, it is not
only inanimate things or irrational animals that exist in a higher mode in
intellect, but also rational creatures like human beings who, insofar as they
are thought and known by God, exist in a higher mode, i.e., with greater
life, than they do simply in themselves as creatures.
For Eckhart, it is necessary for the formal causes of things to be in some
sense eternal for there to be science at all. A Platonist in this regard, Eckhart
considers that knowledge is always of what is unchanging and eternal, i.e.,
the form, although Aristotle also agrees with his teacher Plato insofar as he
argues that all knowledge is knowledge of the formal cause of a thing. Even
physics, which deals with substances in matter and therefore in motion, qua
science, deals only with the species and forms of things. That is, as Eckhart
puts it, it deals with the logoi of all creatures, which, in turn, have their logos
or formal cause in and through the divine Word or Intellect:

Eckhart Review No 19 19
 The word, Logos or idea of things exists in such a way and so completely in each of
them [i.e., creatures] that it nevertheless exists entire outside of each. It is entirely within
and entirely without. This is evident in living creatures, both in any species and also in
any particular example of the species. For this reason when things are moved, changed
or destroyed, their entire idea remains immobile and intact. Nothing is as eternal and
unchangeable as the idea of a destructible circle. How can that which is totally outside
the destructible circle be destroyed when it is? The idea then is ‘the light in the darkness’
of created beings that is not confined, intermingled or comprehended. This is why when
John said, ‘The light shines in the darkness’, he added, ‘and the darkness did not
comprehend it’. In the Book of Causes it says: ‘The First Cause rules all things without
being intermingled with them’. The First Cause of every being is the Idea, the Logos, the
‘Word in the principle’. (In Ioh., n.12/EE, p. 126)
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Here Eckhart associates matter or material existence with ‘darkness’ that is

‘illuminated’ by the formal principle. As he says above, this formal principle
is both totally within the creature and totally without. It is totally within
insofar as it makes the creature what it is; it could not receive existence at
all without the limiting principle of its formal essence. But this principle is
also totally without insofar as it cannot be destroyed by the destruction of
the individual creature. The formal essence of circularity exists independent
of any finite, material circle. In this sense, the formal cause or principle of
something makes a thing what it is without being ‘intermingled’ with it.

Two Examples: Justice and the Just Man, the Nature of the Image
Again, all this is very abstract. What does this mean to the existing person,
to the living Christian? How does the Idea, Word, or Logos of all things
relate to him or her? I think Eckhart was aware of this question and tried to
answer it by bringing in two images: the relation of the just man to justice
and the relation of the image to its exemplar. Turning to the notion of the
relation of the just man to justice, we read in Eckhart’s commentary:

If you consider the just man insofar as he is just in the justice that gives birth to him you
will have an example of all that has been said and much else that we shall often mention.
First, it is obvious that the just man as such exists in justice itself. How could he be just if
he were outside of justice, if he were to stand on the outside separated from it? Second,
the just man pre-exists in justice itself, just as a concrete thing does in an abstract one and
that which participates in what it participates it. (In Ioh., n.14/EE, p. 126)

In fact, so important is this image for Eckhart that elsewhere he remarks

that whoever understands what he says about justice and the just man,
understands everything that he says.3 Why is this the case? I think it is
precisely because it helps explain the living relation of the individual
particular to its formal cause or principle in a way that is grounded in

20 Eckhart Review No 19
 concrete, lived experience. The particular, the just man, is just insofar as
he lives in and out of his formal principle, justice itself, who is God. Just
as a material circle cannot exist outside of its formal cause of circularity, so
the just man cannot exist outside of justice. Furthermore, just as the formal
cause of the chest always pre-exists in the living thought of the artisan who
makes the chest, so the just man pre-exists in his formal cause, justice itself,
which is a living or vital concept as identical with the divine intellect.
But why does Eckhart choose to focus on the virtue of justice in
particular and not that of temperance or fortitude? As Alois Dempf (1960)
remarked in his book on Eckhart, the most probable reason is that justice
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is a virtue that is completely oriented to what is other: it is giving the other

his or her due. While temperance and fortitude perfect us with regard to
how we feel pleasure or fear, justice perfects us in our relations with others.
In this sense, justice can justly be called an ‘ontological virtue’ in that it
perfects the agent not with regard to his or her finite, created essence but
with regard to his or her very existence, which he or she receives directly
from God and relates him or her to God.4 In this context, Eckhart has
in mind the relation of the finite, rational creature to his or her formal
principle, the divine Word. Thus, the truly just man, insofar as he is just,
lives completely in and out of his formal principle, which is justice. To
do this, he or she must live out of that which is in them that is beyond or
outside what can change or be destroyed. In other words, he or she must
live outside of whatever falls under efficient or final causality, and live and
act out of what acts formally and only formally.
We can thus understand the several other points that Eckhart makes
about justice and the just man. ‘The just man is the word of justice, that
by which justice expresses and manifests itself ’ (In Ioh., n.15/EE, p. 126).
In other words, the relation of the just man to justice is the same as that
of the divine Word to God, being that through which God communicates
his being to creatures.5 For the human being to live wholly and completely
in his or her First Principle, i.e., be just, that person must be generated by
justice, but in a manner that is outside of time and place. For as Eckhart
asserts here, any principle as principle must be eternal and unchanging. It
follows that the generation of the just man by justice must be an eternal
generation. This, of course, perfectly describes the eternal procession of
Persons in the Trinity. Eckhart makes this association explicit: ‘If the Father
and the Son, justice and the just man, are one and same in nature, it follows
… that the just man is equal to justice, not less than it, nor is the Son less
than the Father’ (In Ioh., n.17/EE, p. 127). So while there is a ‘birth’ that
leads to the most intimate personal union possible, that between father and
son, this is a ‘birth’ and union rooted in formal metaphysical principles of
the pure intellect, which we share in through regeneration in Christ. As

Eckhart Review No 19 21
 Eckhart further remarks: ‘It is clear that justice and the just man as such are
no more subject to movement and time than life or light are’ (In Ioh., n.18/
EE, p. 127). So here Eckhart finds what he is looking for: a principle that
is eternal and thus eminently scientific and metaphysical while at the same
time an inner principle of life, intellectual illumination, and transformation
for the individual Christian.
Eckhart also employs another example to illustrate the relationship of
the believer to Christ as the archetype of the relationship of the creature to
its first principle. In this second example, Eckhart appeals to the nature of
the image to understand this relationship.
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An image insofar as it is an image receives nothing of its own from the subject in which
it exists, but receives its whole existence from the object it images. Second, it receives
its existence only from the object, and third, it receives the whole existence of the object
according to everything by which it is an exemplar. For if the image were to receive
anything from another source or did not receive something that was in its exemplar, it
would not be an image of that thing but of something else. (In Ioh., n.23/EE, p. 129)

Think here of an image in a mirror: the image as image receives nothing

from the mirror itself, its glass and backing. As image its entire essence and
existence come from that which it images. Thus, the image qua image is
utterly identical with its exemplar and yet, at the same time, utterly other
than it. In the image as image, we have the pure communication of oneself
to another. This is, of course, the unity or identity that Eckhart sees as
subsisting among the three Persons of the Trinity. While one in being and
nature, each Person is also distinct insofar as there is a communication of
being and existence, and this notion of communication at the heart of the
Trinity – and hence, at the heart of being or existence in itself – is the divine
Word or Logos, called ‘word’ because its essence is self-communication.
Eckhart tries to give an explanation of this in his vernacular sermon ‘Ein
meister sprichet’:

As I was coming here today I was wondering how I should preach to you so that it would
make sense and you would understand it. Then I thought of a comparison: If you could
understand that, you would understand my meaning and the basis of all my thinking in
everything I have ever preached. The comparison concerns my eyes and a piece of wood.
If my eye is open, it is an eye; if it is closed, it is the same eye. It is not the wood that
comes and goes, but it is my vision of it. Now pay good heed to me! If it happens that my
eye is in itself one and simple (Mt. 6:22), and it is opened and casts its glance upon the
piece of wood, the eye and the wood remain what they are, and yet in the act of vision they
become as one, so that we can truly say that my eye is the wood and the wood is my eye.
But if the wood were immaterial, purely spiritual as is the sight of my eye, then one could
truly say that in the act of vision the wood and my eye subsisted in one being. If this is true
of physical objects, it is far truer of spiritual objects. You should know that my eye has far
more in common with the eye of a sheep which is on the other side of the sea and which

22 Eckhart Review No 19
 I never saw, than it has in common with my ears, with which, however, it shares its being;
and this is because the action of the sheep’s eye is also that of my eye. And so I attribute
to both more in common in their action than I do to my eyes and my ears, because their
actions are different. (Pr. 48/EE, pp. 197–198)

I have cited Eckhart here in some length, because I believe he makes a

very important point in this passage, to which Eckhart himself adverts. In
vision, that which sees and that which is seen is united in one act of vision,
yet they remain materially two different things. But if you take away the
matter, what you are left with is one activity only, and that activity is purely
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formal or intellectual, since it is devoid of all material differentiation or

individuation. Thus, Eckhart can say that, as potentially intellectual beings,
we have more in common with the intellect in its purity, who is Christ,
than we do with any other creature, just as our eye has more in common
with the eye of a sheep than it does with the ear, since their function and
activity are the same, even if other in substance. And just as the actuality
of the sheep’s eye is the same in kind as the actuality of my eye, so is,
ultimately, the actuality of Christ, as Logos or pure intellect, the same in
kind as the actuality (or actualization) of my intellect.
But even more important from Eckhart’s standpoint, I think, is the
language he uses to describe this process or precession. In his Commentary
on John, he says how the exemplar is ‘expressive’ and in its self-expression
‘begets an image’ that is, however, one with its exemplar. ‘Such an
expression’, Eckhart continues, ‘or begetting of the image is a kind of formal
emanation’ (In Ioh., n.25/EE, p. 129). That is, the procession of the Word
from the Godhead is an expression of the entire essence or being of the
Godhead in all its fullness, including its own self-subsistent existence. The
divine Word is not a ‘thing’ that is produced ‘outside’ of God; it, therefore,
does not fall within the domain of efficient or final causality. The human
soul, however, insofar as it is the form of the human body, is a creature
and thus a discrete, finite thing, produced and governed by efficient and
final causes. But, and this is the crucial thing, insofar as the human soul is
rational and can know the first, formal principles of things, it can participate,
even if imperfectly, in the formal emanation of the Godhead into itself. In
other words, the human soul, by its very nature, is capable of participating
in the life of the Trinity and living a new life in and through Christ.

Christ and Science

As the formal emanation from the Godhead that, yet, is equal to God and
a full expression of God’s essence and existence, Christ is the principle of
all logic and all science. The syllogism, for example, is in some way a sort

Eckhart Review No 19 23
 of formal emanation of concepts deduced from one another. In human
cognition, too, there are ideas that are abstracted from sensible particulars,
but there are ideas that are ‘prior to things, the cause of things’ and these are
the intrinsic principles of creatures that the intellect grasps when it knows
the definition of something. Thus, Eckhart quotes Averroes commenting
on Aristotle’s Metaphysics that ‘the early philosophers always wanted to
know the “what-it-is” of things because knowing this, they would know
the cause of all, that is, of all that is in the thing itself ’ (In Ioh., n.32/EE,
p. 132). That is why, for Eckhart, the Word or Intellect is the principle of
all natural philosophy as well: ‘On this basis you should realize that every
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agent, whether in nature or in art, makes what is like itself and for that
reason always has within itself that upon which it models its effect’ (In
Ioh., n.30/EE, p. 131). Thus, the architect has the form of the house he
intends to build in his mind first, so as in art also in nature: ‘Heat is the
principle by which fire gives warmth, and is the word by which it declares,
speaks and manifests itself insofar as it is hot’ (Ibid.). For Eckhart, all
being communicates itself to another; this is a universal principle. To be
is to act, to communicate. And to communicate is always to communicate
something, a form or essence, that is, something intelligible. Thus, the act of
existence is an act of self-communication. Corporeal beings, however, are
not self-aware – they do not know what they communicate. Insofar as a
being is intellectual, however, and is not limited in genus or species, it is
more or less aware of what it communicates and, hence, to that degree,
is what it communicates. Hence, Eckhart says, ‘The Idea that begets its
own understanding is God himself ’ (In Ioh., n.31/EE, p. 132). God’s self-
communication is completely known to himself in and through his Word,
who is his only-begotten Son. This self-communication is so complete that
God also communicates existence to his Word, meaning that the Word is a
real Person between whom and His origin is a real relation:

Reality and intellect are the same in him. Therefore, ‘the relations which accompany the
activity of the intellect’ in the Godhead are real. And so ‘the Word’, that is, the Son, ‘who
proceeds in an intellectual way’ from the Father ‘is not a relation of reason alone, but a
real relation, because intellect itself and idea’ are realities, or ‘are a single reality’. (In Ioh.,
n.34/EE, p. 133)

Here, Eckhart draws a striking contrast between rational activity and

intellectual activity. Far from what we moderns might immediately assume,
these activities are quite different. As Eckhart noted above, rational activity
abstracts from sensible particulars; as a result, the rational faculty of the soul
is indeed one with the form of the thing, but only in a secondary way, since
the thing known as such remains materially separate and distinct from the

24 Eckhart Review No 19
 knower. As such, the rational thinker relates to the form of the thing known
not as a really existent thing but as a being of reason, a mere concept. But
the situation for intellectual activity is quite different: intellectual activity is
prior to the things themselves; it produces them in their formal being and,
as such, is their very being and essence. In intellection, the knower fully is
what he or she knows and what is known fully is the knower.
That is why for Eckhart, the first principle of things is pure intellect. In
citing again the beginning of the first verse of John, ‘In the principle was the
Word’, he remarks that ‘the principle itself is always pure intellect in which
there is no kind of existence save the understanding that has nothing in
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common with anything, as the citation from Anaxagoras in the third book
of On the Soul says’ (In Ioh., n.38/EE, p. 135). The purely formal production
of things in their primal formal cause, or ideal essence, can only come about
in purely intellectual activity.
Now, of course, there is more to reality than purely corporeal creatures
and pure intellect, which is God. Between the pure corporeality of
terrestrial creatures and God’s pure intellectuality there are rational or
intelligent creatures, most notably human beings and angels. Like corporeal
creatures, human beings, at least, communicate their being to others
through procreation or generation and also, in a higher sense, through
artistic activity. But the main point here is that, as rational creatures, human
beings also have some awareness of what they communicate – especially if
it is artistic activity or, even more, the act of teaching or exercising virtue.
Insofar as this activity is embedded in matter, however, it falls short of
God’s perfectly intellectual self-communication; but insofar as it rises above
matter and attachment to created things, it shares or participates in this
perfectly intellectual divine self-communication. Thus the more inward
and immaterial the rational activity, the more it rises to the level of intellect
and thereby participates in the life of the Trinity:

Here it is better to remember than an exemplar that is beheld from without is never the
principle of the artist’s work unless it comes with the idea of the inhering form. Otherwise,
a dabbler could make a picture as well as an artist, since both can see the external
exemplar equally well. The work that is ‘with’, ‘outside’ and ‘above’ the artist must become
his work ‘within’, by informing him so that he can make a work of art, as it says in Luke
chapter one: ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you’ (Lk. 1:35), that is, so that the ‘upon’ may
become ‘within’. This is signified by ‘was in the principle’ and the following statement, ‘and
the Word was with God’. The first clause stands for the formal cause as it is in the Father;
the second for the form or exemplary cause as it is with the Father. (In Ioh., n.41/EE, p.
136)

As Eckhart remarks just before this passage, ‘the exemplar of created things
is not something outside God towards which he looks … but the Word is

Eckhart Review No 19 25
 in the Father himself ’. As pure intellectual activity, the exemplar for God’s
creative activity is within God himself. But so it is for every creative activity,
divine or human: that activity is intellectual insofar as it works from within,
by subsisting in and through the divine Word, who is the purely formal
emanation of God the Father. As such, the formal emanation of the Word
or Son in the Godhead is also the formal or ideal principle of all creative
activity, i.e., activity that is a self-aware self-communication. The very act
of intellectual ‘conception’ is also a conception or ‘birth’ in the fullest
sense, because, in the divine intellect at least, the Word that is expressive
of the entire substance of God is co-equal to that substance formally and
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substantially.6 Thus, insofar as the soul is intellectual, that is, it lets go of

all created things and the attachments that they create, to that degree the
soul allows itself to be made over or re-formed and in-formed by Christ.
For then there is a true birth, because, when united to God intellectually,
the soul comes to exist, as a substance, on a higher level than it does in its
created being. This is nothing less than the new life in grace.
The implications, theological, metaphysical, and practical, of this last
point Eckhart sums up and expresses with particular force in his exegesis of
the verse, ‘He came into his own’ (Jn. 1:11). Eckhart begins by explaining
that we can understand this passage as meaning that God, as pure existence
and, therefore, the cause of all existent things, comes into all things as their
creator. But Eckhart also gives another, more detailed and complicated
interpretation of this verse:

The things that are his own into which God came are Existence or Being, The One, the True
and the Good. These four things are God’s own, for he is ‘the First which is rich through
itself’. He possesses these because he is ‘rich’; he possesses them as his own because
he exists ‘through himself’. In the case of everything that is below the First these four
things are ‘guest and strangers’ (Ep. 2:19); with God they are ‘members of the household’.
Therefore, we teach first that God exists and works in all things and comes to all men and
all things insofar as they exist, insofar as they are one, and insofar as they are true and
good. Second, we teach that through his coming and presence God immediately and
with no other agent causes being, unity, truth and goodness in all things in an analogical
fashion. (In Ioh., n.97/EE, p. 159)

Here we again encounter the four transcendentals, existence, oneness,

truth, and goodness. Insofar as creatures have these – existence, oneness,
truth, and goodness – God comes into his own by creating and sustaining
them. But, properly speaking, these transcendental properties belong to
God alone, because only God has them fully and has them through himself
and not through another. As we saw above, no creature can communicate
existence – or unity, truth, or goodness – to another; only God can. All that
the creature can communicate is its proper essence or formal cause. That

26 Eckhart Review No 19
 is why, according to Eckhart, the same verse in John continues, ‘His own
received him not’. This is to say, ‘Neither things that exist nor things that
are one, true or good possess their being, unity, truth and goodness from
themselves’ (Ibid.). Creatures as such cannot contribute anything to the
communication of existence itself. Thus, Eckhart quotes Augustine to the
effect that even prime matter’s own receptive capacity comes from God.
Another reason why ‘His own received him not’ is that ‘what is received
does not take root in them, as we discussed above in the case of light’. That
is, just as light permeates air but does not stay rooted in it (say, for example,
as does heat), but disappears as soon as its source is removed, so it is with
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existence and creatures.

Yet, there is one creature who can receive God and allow God to ‘come
into his own’, not because of his or her created nature, but because of the
capacity of this nature to become fully intellectual. As Eckhart notes: ‘In
nature the form of what is generated by means of the generation as received
“comes to its own”, that is, to its proper matter. The acts of active agents are
in the recipient that is prepared for them, and in nature there is a proper
passive recipient corresponding to every agent’ (In Ioh., n.100/EE, p. 160). It
follows from this principle, that, as Aristotle remarked well before Eckhart
or Thomas, the form of a thing limits what its matter may receive, which
is why stone, wood, or metal cannot receive the living form or soul of a
human being (or any other animal), because its form limits its receptivity.
Only prime matter is receptive to all forms, but prime matter, as Aristotle
also noted, does not and cannot exist as such, because anything that exists
must be a something, i.e., a formed substance.
In the realm of the intellect, however, things are both quite similar
and quite different. As in material substances, the formal species within
the intellect can obstruct or limit the reception of intelligible forms. But,
in itself, the intellect, as intellect, is receptive to all intelligible forms. As
Thomas Aquinas points out in his De ente et essentia, the human intellect
occupies the same rank in the hierarchy of intellects as prime matter does in
the hierarchy of material substances, because its very essence is constituted
by a pure receptivity to form. Eckhart makes this point in his commentary
on John, using an example that is common in both his Latin and vernacular
writings:

If the eye possesses some color or something pertaining to color, it will see neither that
color nor any other. Yet further: If the sense of sight is informed by any act whatsoever,
even its own act, it is not as such capable of receiving what is visible insofar as it is visible.
What is active as such cannot be passive, and inversely what is passive as such can in
no way be active. Therefore, the intellect has no actual existence of its own so that it can
understand all things. It understands itself the way it understands other things. Therefore,
it has nothing of itself, nothing of its own, before it understands. Understanding is a

Eckhart Review No 19 27
 reception. The formal property of what receives something is to be naked. This is all clear
from the third book of On the Soul and is the way it is with matter and substantial form
in nature. Matter itself, in which there is nothing distinct, as the Philosopher says, is the
foundation of nature. Every act creates a distinction. (In Ioh., n.100/EE, pp. 160–161)

For something to be received in its fullness, what receives must be empty of

any formal cause or distinction. It must be pure potency to reception.
That is why, for Eckhart, the pure potency of the human intellect is
actually the source of its supreme perfection, and not an imperfection, as
Thomas implies. For Thomas, the pure potency of the human intellect
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necessitates that it resorts to sense perception and abstraction from sensible

objects in order to know anything, unlike the angels, into whose intellects
the various species and genera of things are infused by God. Eckhart, I
think, does not dispute this; for him too, all our knowledge begins with
sense perception. Yet, the very purity of the human intellect’s potency
makes it all the more capable of receiving God under the aspect of Word or
Intellect. Unlike in the angels, there is nothing in the human intellect, qua
purely potential intellect, that may obstruct being actualized by God’s Word.
In this sense, the human being is potentially above the angels ontologically
and is, therefore, the most fitting creature in whom God could become
incarnate. In a reversal truly reminiscent of the Gospel, only the lowliest in
the hierarchy of intellects can become fully united with God precisely due
to its nature as pure potency. Eckhart explains as much in his exegesis of
verses 12–13: ‘As many as received him he gave the power of becoming sons
of God; to those who believe in his name, who were born not from blood,
nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God’:

The passive or receptive power through its being a power naturally and in every case
receives its whole existence from the object alone, and no more from its subject than it
does from any other subject foreign to it. Insofar as it is a power, it receives the same act
of existence as that of the object. (In Ioh., n.107/EE, p. 162)

This sort of unity between the passive and active power applies most
properly and fully to the activity of the intellect, because in the intellect
the intelligible species by which we know sensible particulars derives its
being not from the subject in which it inheres but from the object which it
knows, but it has being and life through the soul that knows it. Eckhart also
notes how this sort of unity is true for corporeal beings as well: the motion
by which an object is moved is the same motion as that of the mover. ‘To
see and to be seen are one and the same thing, that is, they begin at the
same time, and continue, cease and revive – originate and die – all at the
same time’.
We must make a distinction here, however. Although the intelligible

28 Eckhart Review No 19
 species, in human understanding, derives its being from its object and not
from the subject, it nevertheless exists in a higher mode in the human soul
than it does in the thing itself. But when it is a matter of the human soul
knowing what is above it, the divine Word, it is the human soul itself that
comes to exist in a higher mode through the intelligible species, which is,
in this case, the divine Word. It becomes, in a sense, an intelligible species
in the divine intellect. In this case, the human soul rises to the level of pure
intellect and its being is no longer a finite created being, an ‘existence-for-
himself ’, but it comes to subsist in God in an ‘existence-for-God’: ‘Since
man, as said above, receives his total existence entirely from God as from
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an object, existence for him is not “existence-for-himself ” but “existence-

for-God”’ (In Ioh., n.107/EE, p. 163). In the interior reception of the divine
Word, the human being comes to realize that his or her existence is not and
cannot be from themselves but only from God.
All this, however, may sound too abstract, overly ‘intellectual’. Does not
the next verse of John say, ‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us’?
Orthodox Christians, as did no doubt some of the theologians in Cologne
and Avignon, may legitimately ask whether Eckhart concentrates on the
intellect to the exclusion of the Incarnation and Christ’s earthly role and
ministry. This is a legitimate concern and one that I do not think Eckhart
answers as clearly and fully as he could have or should have. Nevertheless,
I do see in Eckhart’s commentary some resources for an answer, for,
after all, his whole project is, as I noted at the beginning, to connect the
eternally present procession of the Trinity with the temporal here and
now of corporeal humanity. So, Eckhart starts his commentary on verse
fourteen, ‘The Word became flesh…’ by noting that the Evangelist wants
to emphasize that, in Christ, God became united to the whole human being,
and not just to the nobler part, the soul. But more subtly and profoundly,
it is by taking on flesh and all that it is ‘heir to’ save sin, that Christ enters
into our lives most fully and thereby makes us sons of God by adoption:
‘It would be of little value for me that “the Word was made flesh” for man
in Christ as a person distinct from me unless he was also made flesh in
me personally so that I too might be God’s son’ (In Ioh., n.117/EE, p. 167).
Eckhart continues:

‘The Word was made flesh’ in Christ who is outside us. He does not make us perfect by
being outside us; but afterwards, through the fact that ‘he dwelt among us’, he gives us his
name and perfects us ‘so that we are called and truly are God’s sons’ (1 Jn. 3:1). For then
the Son of God, ‘The Word made flesh’, dwells in us, that is, in our very selves – ‘Behold
God’s dwelling with man, and he will dwell with them… and God himself will be with them
as their God’ (Rv. 21:3). (In Ioh., n.118/EE, p. 168)

Here Eckhart describes a dialectical process similar to that of the passivity

Eckhart Review No 19 29
 of the human intellect: by becoming flesh, God became a distinct Person
outside of us; but precisely by doing so, God also came into the human
condition and dwelt and still dwells within us. By taking on flesh, Christ
took on the entire human condition and all that is potentially within it, save
sin. To actualize and be fully united with the human intellect, the divine
Word must actualize all that is potential within the human intellect; and
this necessarily implies flesh or corporeality, since the human intellect as
pure potentiality for knowing cannot know anything save through the body,
as Aquinas made clear. The only potentiality that the divine Word cannot
actualise is sin, for the reason that sin, according to Eckhart, is precisely
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potentiality for nothingness.

Divine and Secular Science as One Science: Science of the Intellect

For Eckhart, then, we can see philosophy and theology, rational science
and revelation, resolving themselves into one science: the science of the
intellect. All rational science resolves itself into a science of the eternal,
formal causes of things, in abstraction from efficient and final causes. As
such, these formal causes subsist in their fullness only in the intellect qua
intellect:

Note that an image properly speaking is a simple formal emanation that transmits the
whole pure naked essence. The metaphysician considers it in abstraction from efficient
and final causes according to which natural scientists investigate things. The image then
is an emanation from the depths of silence, excluding everything that comes from without.
It is a form of life, as if you were to imagine something swelling up from itself and in itself
and then inwardly boiling without any ‘boiling over’ yet understood. (Sermo XLIX, n.511/TP,
p. 236)

All science ultimately has the intellect as such as its formal subject matter
and goal. But how are we to know the intellect in its purity? We can only
know the intellect in its purity by becoming intellect ourselves, by uniting
ourselves to it. How do we do this? – By allowing the Intellect, Christ,
to unite Itself to us. As Eckhart hints above, we do so by entering into
the ‘depths of silence, excluding everything that comes from without’.
By silencing all images and ideas, the soul allows the intellect to emanate
formally within itself, in its innermost ground. But, Eckhart also adds
that this formal emanation is a ‘form of life’, a living presence, a self-
communicating Word. This self-communicating Word is no one other
than Christ. Its biblical warrant is, of course, that we are made according
to the image of God (ad imaginem dei). But also, this inner emanation of
the intellect, far from being a product of abstract thought, is a ‘form of
life’, a principle of utter concreteness and individuality that is the basis and

30 Eckhart Review No 19
 precondition for all genuine thought.
Thus, for Eckhart, Christ and his birth or emanation into the empty
soul is the fulfilment of metaphysics and, as such, the fulfilment of all
science. By allowing Christ to be born into the soul, the soul allows itself to
be in-formed by pure intellect, who is Christ, the Word of God. The result
is that the interpretation of Scripture is not alien to metaphysics, philosophy
or natural science. On the contrary, it is only in using rationes naturales in the
interpretation of Scripture that the Word, Christ, is revealed as pure intellect
and, in turn, reason is raised to intellect and the true inner meaning or truth
of all the science, sacred and secular, is revealed. As Eckhart says in his book
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on the Parables of Genesis:

No one can be thought to understand the scriptures who does not know how to find its
hidden marrow – Christ, the Truth. Hidden under the parables we are speaking of are very
many of the properties that belong to God alone, the First Principle, and that point to his
nature. Enclosed there are to be found the virtues and the principles of the sciences, the
keys to metaphysics, physics, and ethics, as well as universal rules. Also there we find the
most sacred emanation of the divine Persons. (In Gen. II, n.3/EE, p. 94)

It is interesting here that Eckhart mentions the Trinity in the same breath as
he mentions how Scripture contains the first principles of all the sciences.
If Christ is the First Principle of all intellectual activity, then to be united
with Christ in one’s innermost ground is the necessary precondition of
all science and its necessary end or goal. To grasp the first and eternal
principles and causes of all things in intellection is the goal of all rational
activity. Actually to live in the Truth, to participate in the life of the Trinity,
is the goal of all intellectual activity. That is why Eckhart argues that the
sciences literally come to life only in their use to interpret Scripture and to
help us live in and through Christ.
In his vernacular works, Eckhart develops this notion of the intellect
under the teaching of detachment. By being detached from all created or
finite things, including spiritual things, Eckhart argues that we become
purely receptive to the emanation of God’s Son, the First Intellect, into
the soul. In his little vernacular treatise, On Detachment, Eckhart uses the
analogy, drawn from Aristotle, of the wax tablet: unless the tablet is empty
of all writing one cannot write on it. So it is with the soul: unless it be
empty of all created things, God’s Word cannot write itself on the soul.
Detachment, in short, activates a power in the soul that makes it one with
Christ, because it activates the soul insofar as it is intellectual and Christ is
the intellectual principle of the Godhead:

There is a power in the soul, of which I have spoken before. If the whole soul were like it,
she would be uncreated and uncreatable, but this is not so. In its other part it has regard

Eckhart Review No 19 31
 and a dependence on time, and there it touches on creation and is created. To this power,
the intellect, nothing is distant or external. What is beyond the sea or a thousand miles
away is as truly known and present to it as this place where I am standing. This power
is a virgin, and follows the lamb wherever he goes. This power seizes God naked in His
essential being. It is one in unity, not like in likeness. May God help us to come to this
experience. Amen. (Pr. 13/Walshe, pp. 190–191)

Here we have, I think, the essence of Eckhart’s thought as a theoretical and

practical science of the intellect. Insofar as the soul is empty of attachment
to all that is created, it comes to share in the pure intellect of the Godhead.
Insofar as, is of course, a crucial qualification, one that Eckhart emphasized
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in his defence at Cologne. The human being as such is a finite creature who
lives and thinks by means of his or her created soul. But as a rational being,
the human being also shares, to a finite and limited extent, in the divine
intellect. To the degree, therefore, that the soul is intellectual, to that degree it
shares in the divine life. Nevertheless, as Eckhart emphasizes at the end of
the sermon above, the human being, as creature, cannot rise to intellect by
its own power but only by the power of Christ, who breaks through the
finitude of the rational soul and raises it to the level of intellect. Thus, to
exist is to communicate: this is done most perfectly by the Persons of the
Holy Trinity, whose entire being is to communicate existence and hence
also oneness, truth, and goodness. Here we find a perfect and self-subsistent
self-communication. But also, through the Person of the Son, the Godhead
communicates his being to creatures as incarnate intellect and, as such,
draws all creatures back to himself by being reborn in the depths of every
human being that is receptive to him.
For Eckhart, then, the great mystery of the Incarnation is that it
brings together all things that would otherwise be opposites: not only
God and creature, the infinite and the finite, the eternal and temporal,
the transcendent and the immanent. It also brings God and me together.
As the eternal intellectual principle of all things, God is constantly being
born in all things, but as the incarnate Christ who came to dwell among us
that eternal intellectual principle is also constantly being born in me in this
flesh and these bones. As Eckhart says in the passage that I just cited above,
to the intellect ‘nothing is distant or external’. By the very virtue of my
creaturely nothingness and, even more so, by virtue of my realization, as a
rational being, of my intellectual nothingness, I, in my concrete corporeal
individuality, am also the most fitting ‘place’ in which God may be born.
As such, Christianity, as Eckhart understands it, is not about abstract ideas
or vague ‘feelings’ of absolute dependence and suchlike. Rather it is the life
of the intellect properly understood as the loving self-communication of
God’s life and Word in and through Christ.

32 Eckhart Review No 19
 Notes
1. See also: ‘For God is present in this power [the ground of the soul] as he is in the eternal
now. If the spirit were always united with God in this power, the man could never grow old; for
that now in which God made the first man, and the now in which the last man will have his end,
and the now in which I am talking, they are all the same in God, and there is not more than the
one now. Now you can see that this man lives in one light with God, and therefore there is not
in him either suffering or the passage of time, but an unchanging eternity’. Pr. 2/EE, 179. All
citations from Eckhart’s works are taken from three different translations: Meister Eckhart: The
Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defense or ‘EE’ or ‘Essential Eckhart’ for short; Meister
Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher or ‘TP’ for ‘Teacher and Preacher’; and Meister Eckhart: Sermons and
Treatises, Vol. 1; ‘Pr’. Refers to ‘Predigt’ or one of Eckhart’s German language sermons; ‘Sermo’
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refers to a Latin sermon; ‘In Ioh.’, refers to Eckhart’s commentary on the gospel of John while
‘In Gen. II’ refers to his ‘Book of the Parables of Genesis’; ‘n.’ refers to the paragraph number in
the volumes containing Eckhart’s Latin works or ‘LW’ for Die Lateinischen Werke.
2. Later on his commentary on John (In Ioh., n.444/LW, p. 380), Eckhart develops this notion
even further, asserting that the Old Testament, insofar as it teaches that God is the creator, i.e.,
efficient cause of creation, hides within itself the principles of physics. The New Testament,
however, since it teaches Christ as the Word of God, hides within itself the entire science of
being qua being, metaphysics, because it treats of God as the formal or intellectual cause of
all things. And as Eckhart constantly states, metaphysics, properly speaking, looks only to the
formal, i.e., intellectual, cause of things.
3. See Pr. 6, ‘Anyone who has discernment in justice and in just men, understands everything
I am saying’.
4. In this sense, justice is a virtue parallel to what Eckhart in his vernacular works terms
detachment (abgeschiedenheit).
5. ‘The just man proceeds from and is begotten by justice and by that very fact is distinguished
from it. Nothing can beget itself. Nonetheless, the just man is not different in nature from
justice, both because ‘just’ signifies only justice, just as ‘white’ signifies only the quality of
whiteness, and because justice would make no one just if its nature changed from one place to
another, just as whiteness does not make a man black or grammar make him musical. From this
it is clear … that the just man is the offspring and son of justice’. (In Ioh., n.16/EE, p. 127)
6. ‘Whoever denies that the Son is the principle of every action does not understand what
he is saying, as the first book of On Generation and Corruption remarks of Anaxagoras. Again, he
who denies time affirms it, because it is impossible to deny time without an act of speaking that
occurs in time. It is the same in the aforementioned case. He who denies that every action takes
place through the Son and in the Son affirms that action takes place in the Son. For he cannot
utter a denial without a “son”, offspring or species of his utterance having been begotten in him,
that is, without some preconception of what he is to say. He cannot even be understood by a
listener without an offspring, species or ‘son’ begotten in the listener by the speaker himself ’.
(In Ioh., n.59/EE, p. 143)

References
Dempf, Alois (1960) Meister Eckhart. Freiburg: Herder.
Eckhart, Meister (1936–) Die Lateinischen Werke (edited by Josef Koch and Georg Steer)
Stuttgart: Kollhammer.
Eckhart, Meister (1981) The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense (translated with

Eckhart Review No 19 33
 an introduction by Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGuinn). New York: Paulist Press.
Eckhart, Meister (1986) Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher (translated and edited by Bernard
McGinn) New York: Paulist Press.
Eckhart, Meister (1987) Meister Eckhart: Sermons and Treatises, Vol. 1 (translated and edited by M.
O’C. Walshe). Shaftesbury: Element Books.
Eckhart, Meister (2010) The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart (translated by M. O’C.
Walshe with an introduction by Bernard McGinn). New York: Crossroad Publishing.

Robert J. Dobie is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the School of Arts

and Sciences, La Salle University, Philadelphia. His specialised interests
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are Medieval Christian, Jewish, and Islamic philosophy, comparative

philosophy and metaphysics. In 2009 he published Logos and Revelation: Ibn
‘Arabi, Meister Eckhart and Mystical Hermeneutics (Washington DC: Catholic
University of America Press).

34 Eckhart Review No 19