ECKHART AND THE QUESTION OF
HUMAN NATURE
Joseph Milne
Paper given at the Eckhart Society
Conference, Oxford 1998
The most interesting studies of Eckhart always
focus on God as their ultimate object, so why have I decided to talk
about Eckhart and the question of human nature? Why should we be
interested in human nature? Was Eckhart concerned with our human
nature? Does he not constantly call us to abandon our creaturely
nature, along with all other creatures, and abide in union with God?
Well, I believe there are several very
important reasons why we should explore this question. These may be
grouped under three main categories. First, because we live in an age
in which our general conceptions of human nature are very different
to those of Meister Eckhart and the Middle Ages generally. Second,
unless we reflect specifically on the question of human nature, we
unconsciously project our modern conceptions into our reading of
Eckhart. Third, because religion - all religion - is founded upon the
possibility of a radical transformation of our human nature. Eckhart
is certainly no exception to this. Many of his most difficult sayings
are difficult because they belong to a mode of understanding which
transcends our everyday objective mode of knowledge, and so they
presuppose a kind of knowing which is founded on a different manner
of being to the everyday kind of being and a different kind of
relationship of all things to one another than our ordinary notions
of things as separate and discrete entities.
Consider for a moment the first of these
reasons. What is the modern conception of human nature? There is no
consistent notion of man in our time but rather a collection of
different and contradictory notions. We have those which come from
psychology in which human nature is seen as split between our
ordinary conscious lives and hidden or unconscious forces which
struggle to rise to the surface. We have the many sociological
conceptions of man which try to portray human nature as collective
mechanisms. We have scientific notions of man which conceive human
nature as essentially the product of instinct and of predetermined
biological patterns. We have numerous philosophical conceptions of
man which either attempt to pin human nature down to will or to
reason, or which declare that there is no essential human nature at all.
However, there are two features common to all
these different notions. The first is that human nature stands
outside man or our ordinary experience of ourselves and existence.
This is an odd conception but a very important one for our present
discussion. It arises from the attempt to make the human subject into
an "object" seen as though from outside itself. This is the
case even in psychology, where the human subject stands outside his
own essence as the passive receptacle or victim of hidden powers and
a history greater than himself. Thus we get the double conception of
"ego" or "personal self" and our actual "true
self" which forever remains unknown. But this
"double-self" is also assumed in the sociological and
scientific conceptions of man. Whether our essential human nature
lies in the unconscious or in genetic mechanisms or in sociological
history and conditioning, what we are and what we do is understood to
be governed by forces and conditions over which we have no power.
Thus the question of our human identity is fraught with a thousand
problems. We are called to locate our self-hood outside ourselves and
as the product of something other than ourselves. The second feature
common to all these notions of human nature is the assumption that
our essence is separate from God and from all created things. Thus
"God" is held to be either something wholly discontinuous
with our selfhood or else merely as a conception without meaning.
Likewise, the world and the whole created order is taken to be that
which we stand over against, again either as the passive and
insignificant observer or as a being who attempts to
"conquer" objective reality. And, more recently, this
understanding of man as separate from the created order has found its
way into ecological thought where the human species is often regarded
as an impostor into the natural order. Or again, in the field of
social struggle, vast numbers of people are called upon to identify
themselves as "victims" of human history - of slavery, of
racism or other types of difference and so on.
A simple observation follows from this: however
we conceive our selfhood, so we see the world. It is a very simple
principle. And however we conceive our selfhood, so we conceive God.
Whatever we take ourselves to be determines what we take truth to be.
It is obvious, therefore, that if we do not
reflect on these modern conceptions of human nature and at least call
them into question, that we will project them onto our readings of
Meister Eckhart, just as we would on any other reading. Here I would
suggest that many things that Eckhart says about either the created
order or about God strike us as strange or difficult precisely
because they break or clash with our modern presuppositions about
human nature. And this is not confined only to our readings of
Eckhart. We hear Christian leaders within the Church saying that they
have problems with certain fundamental words in the Christian
tradition, one of them being the word "God". I would
suggest that their difficulty is not actually with the word
"God", but with God as such because they hold a conception
of human nature which clashes with the metaphysical and symbolic ways
of speaking of God and relating to God. A limited view of human
nature finds God incomprehensible in precisely those features that
indicate God as
God and God alone. So this is why I say we need to seriously reflect
upon our conceptions of human nature in our studies of Eckhart.
This brings me to my third reason, which is
really the most fundamental. I said that all religion is founded upon
the possibility of a radical transformation of human nature. I have
deliberately phrased this forcefully because in whatever way religion
calls us it carries an implicit demand to transform our manner of
being right at its foundations. We are called upon to exist
differently, to leave behind completely our whole manner of existing
in the ordinary sense. We are called upon to enter a completely
different relationship with everything without any exception. We are
called to transcend the world in all its everyday attachments, its
joys and sorrows, to exist in a new way, and yet to return
to our originary being. In this call we are not merely required to
adopt a different explanation of things or to believe a different
conception of reality, but rather to exist in a new mode and on a new
ground which is wholly discontinuous with our present mode of
existence and ground of thought and action. This new mode of being is
expressed in religious language just as subtle and symbolic as the
language about God. This is very evident in the New Testament, not
only in such terms as "new man" or to be "born
again", but also in the parables about the Kingdom of heaven
where their sharpness lies in a complete break with or even reversal
of the ordinary understanding of human action, human motive,
morality, justice, goodness, grace and so on. They are always
blatantly contrasted with "this world" and with
"worldly wisdom", and it is in these discontinuities that
their radical call lies.
So likewise in Meister Eckhart. His teaching
about the breakthrough, about abandoning everything of creatures,
about understanding, and even about the performance of ordinary
actions, calls upon a new mode of being which leaves behind
completely our ordinary mode of being and he speaks of this in
language which runs counter to our normal grasping of existence. We
are very often perplexed by his language about God - about the
Nothing for example - and a lot of attention has rightly been given
to this by scholars of Eckhart. Yet, if I may put it so, implicit in
all these perplexing sayings about God is a whole anthropology about
which less has been said. To put that more forcefully, Eckhart calls
upon us to be
in a different manner in order to grasp what he says about God -
because talk of God is unlike talk of any other thing and because for
man to speak of God meaningfully requires that man exists in a
completely new manner. Thus all ordinary talk about God is not talk
about God at all. It is talk about a second-hand concept, a mere
notion ungrounded in God Himself. And in such speaking it is not
really a self that speaks but only a conceiving mind. If I may put it
strongly, the only right speaking of God is a speaking which arises
within God and is God Himself speaking. There is no talk of God from outside.
To rephrase Tillich, God is not an entity among other entities, a
thing among things, an idea among ideas. And so the manner of knowing
God is not similar to the manner of knowing any other thing. This is
a given of every religion. What is unique to Christianity is that God
has spoken Himself through His Son and His Son, His Word, is Himself.
Thus for man to be born in Christ is for man to unite in God's own
saying of Himself.
What stands in sharp relief in Eckhart is that
for man to be born in Christ is also a breakthrough of man into
himself, to his own true being. In Sermon 46 in the Walshe
translation Eckhart says "whoever would enter God's ground, His
inmost part, must first enter his own ground, his inmost part, for
none can know God who does not first know himself".
This short passage is worth reflecting on. It
bears the stamp of an ontology or an understanding of being quite
different to that of our time, and therefore we must beware of
translating it into what we might suppose is equivalent. The key is
in the word "ground". To know oneself is to "enter
one's own ground", which is "inmost". This inmost
ground is not a psychological place. It is not in the mind. Rather it
is the region of being and so lies beneath everything and is that out
of which everything comes forth, including the world and the mind and
all its psychological events. It is very helpful to try to grasp
something of the ontological tradition of which Eckhart is here an
heir. In our time there is a confusion of "being" with
"existence". We ask, for example, "Does God
exist?" The answer, strictly speaking, is "No, because God
pre-exists". That is to say, God is the origin and source of
existence, and this is because for something to exist means that it
stands forth from being is a specific form. Whatever exists has form.
Existence therefore refers to what Eckhart calls the creatures, which
are distinguished by measure: "whatever enters the soul is ruled
by measure" (Walshe, Sermon 45). Existence is the realm of
difference and distinction. Being, on the other hand, has no
distinctions and is that out of which all distinctions stand forth.
An analogy of the difference between being and existence would be
space and objects in space. Without pure space no object would have a
where to stand out. Yet space is not changed by any objects which
stand forth within it. At the same time "pure space" is
virtually inconceivable because the mind grasps only distinctions or
measures. So likewise as "existences" or as distinct
persons we cannot grasp being or what Eckhart calls our inmost
ground. Our inmost ground is our whence or origin out of which all
that makes us particular or distinct stands forth. However, whatever
makes us particular or distinct is ontologically later than our
ground and is subject to change. In short, in Eckhart's language it
is "the creature".
Because of this confusion of existence with
being in our time we have turned ontology upside down. We take that
which stands forth in existence as first
and try to consider essence or being as an effect or quality of
existences. Thus "pre-existence" means for us simply
"non-existence" and "non-being". Therefore we
think of our selfhood as an attribute or quality which follows on
from our existence. Or we think of things as "self-evident"
which actually belong to the realm of changeable existence. In short,
we try to get at being and essence by inference from existences. And
in our own interior lives we try to get at our selfhood by inference
from our characteristics and qualities, and so, for example, in
psychology our selfhood is regarded as the product of our
experiential history. But this is all upside-down when compared to
Medieval ontology. Then - and this is very evident in Eckhart - pure
or primary being was understood to be first and that alone which was
self-evident. Being was understood as that which alone stood in
unmediated presence to itself, for it was pure presence as such. And
this is the reason why God is so often equated with pure being until
the close of the Middle Ages. Being was not regarded as an object
among objects, nor a subject among subjects, but that alone which
stood forever in complete knowledge of itself as the very act of
being itself. This is very evident in Eckhart's understanding of the
Divine Trinity, and it is precisely because we do not conceive the
primacy of pure being as disclosed to itself as its very essence that
we find Eckhart's discussion of the Divine Trinity so difficult. The
unity or singularity of being is no longer part of our theological or
philosophical vocabulary, and so we think of everything
as qualified, plural and relative - including God.
And so likewise when we come to think of our
selfhood or human nature. We commence from the opposite end of the
chain of existence to that of Eckhart, turning it upside-down in the
process. We suppose that we are first
conditioned, first
mortal, first
bound by our history and so on. Consequently we regard the agencies
of our minds as our selfhood and our experiences as the ground of our
actions and manner of existing. And so it happens that it can be
asked "Do we have souls?" The soul, or our being, is
thought about as though it were an optional extra added on to what we
take to be our "real existence". We suppose, quite wrongly,
that this "real existence" is patently self-evident, and
that supposition prevents us turning our gaze backward to what
Eckhart calls our inmost ground. And it follows from this, that we
cannot direct our gaze yet further back to that which underlies our
own inmost ground, which is God. For modern man, God is somewhere
"out there" or just before the history of the cosmos. And
so, instead of God being that which is nearest to us - so near that
Bonaventure declares that he will know himself better in God than in
himself - God is now generally thought of as that which is furthest
from us, as the most remote thing possible.
An interesting way in which we can see this
reversal is also shown in the idea of God being in the unconscious,
where the unconscious is understood to have replaced the metaphysical
realm. The fall of the heavens and the symbolic meaning of the
visible world into the unconscious represents very clearly the loss
of the immediate presence of being or the likeness of God in the
creation. According to Eckhart, however, God is neither within us nor
outside us. He says that God's wisdom enters the soul, and this is
God's work in the soul, but God does not enter the soul to unite with
it. Rather the soul must go into God to unite with God, and this is
because this work of God is performed within God Himself. Thus
Eckhart says
"Here God is acting above the power of the soul, not as in the soul, but divinely as in God. Here the soul is plunged into God and baptised in the divine nature, receiving the divine life therein and taking upon herself the divine order, so that she is ordered according to God." (Sermon 45, Walshe)
Since, in Eckhart's understanding, and that of
the Middle Ages generally, the union of the soul with God is a return
of the soul to itself and to its ground,
it makes no sense to talk of that ground coming into the soul, for
how could the origin and source come into that which arises from it
and exists by virtue of going out from it? How could space enter into
a form when space is the pre-existent ground of every form and that
upon which the existence of all forms wholly depends? To put that
another way, the absence
of union with God consists exclusively of the soul's moving out of
its ground, or forgetting its essence, in identifying itself with
what is creaturely, in attachment to the things of sense perception,
in attributing being to existence and so on. Eckhart tells us that
the return of the soul to God consists in it stripping itself naked
of every creaturely or existent thing, of everything that makes it
"something", and of every kind of relationship. For in
being "something" it stands over against God. Only when it
becomes "nothing" by itself does it return to the ground of
being, and when it returns to this state of nothing, of having no
attribute, it then becomes similar to God and thus enters into God
and becomes conformed to God. So how can attributeless being enter
into the changeable and restless soul? To suppose that God can enter
the soul is to suppose that God is an entity alongside other
entities. It is to reduce God to an object, to a thing, to an agent.
But also, and more to the point in our present enquiry, it is to
identify the soul itself with its creaturely existence, which in
Christian terms is to identify it with its fallen state, as though
that were its true essence. And this is yet another consequence of
turning ontology upside-down.
For Eckhart the key to God is also the key to
human nature. As the ground, the meaning and the end of all things,
God is what all things seek, for all things seek rest in the fullness
of being. In Sermon 45 (Walshe) Eckhart says:
In the first place let us note and observe how the divine nature makes all the soul's desires mad and crazy for Him, so as to draw her to him. For the divine nature tastes so well to God and pleases him so much - that is: rest - that He has projected it out of Himself to stir up and draw into Himself the natural desires of all creatures. Not only does the Creator seek his own rest by projecting it and informing all creatures with it, but He seeks to draw all creatures back with Him into their first beginning, which is rest. Also, God loves Himself in all creatures. Thus as He seeks His own love in all creatures, so He seeks His own rest.
Here Eckhart locates the source of all desires
in God. It is therefore contrary to Eckhart's understanding of human
desire to locate its source in something other than God, or as
seeking some object other than God. In our everyday thinking we
locate desire in our own minds or hearts or instincts and so we never
review the universal ground of desire as such. But Eckhart
understands all desire as seeking rest, and rest lies only in God who
has never moved from rest in Himself, because that is His nature, and
since God loves His own rest abundantly He desires that no creature
be apart from that rest, and so all natural desires have rest in God
as their true end. All desires, then, are informed by a knowledge of
rest and are, so to speak, moved by rest. Thus the rest that all
creatures seek is fullness of being. In so far as we have a
difficulty with this understanding, that difficulty must lie
somewhere in the notion that our being is separate from pure being
and exclusive to ourselves. This notion stands in opposition to
Eckhart saying here "God loves Himself in all creatures. Thus as
He seeks His own love in all creatures, so He seeks His own rest."
The idea of God loving Himself, both in Himself
and in all creatures, obviously runs counter to any worldly idea of
self-love. But when we move into the realm of Eckhart's ontology it
makes perfect sense for pure being to hold absolutely to itself. In
the realm of absolutes every principle holds to itself because there
is nothing other than itself to hold to. Thus truth holds absolutely
to truth, goodness to goodness, justice to justice, rest to rest, and
unity to unity. It is only separate being that would be false in
holding to itself or loving itself in its separation from being as
such. Or again, how could love not love itself? If love did not love
itself it would depart from its nature, it would desire to become
something else. It is inconceivable to imagine God desiring to become
other than Himself, and if He did, then we could conceive of a higher
God who had no deficiency of any kind and who therefore sought
nothing other than Himself. So, in God, self-love is the principle of
unity - unity already completely fulfilled.
But on the human side, so to speak, desire and
love appear to seek something other. But Eckhart says that "a
man could never feel love or desire for any creature, unless God's
likeness were in it" (Sermon 45, Walshe). Thus the attraction of
love and desire has its origin in the likeness of God in creatures.
This understanding of the nature of love and its true object can
obviously be traced back to Plato's understanding of love seeking
absolute Beauty in the Symposium.
However, Eckhart places a slightly different emphasis in his
understanding of God as the ground of being in which every creature
has its existence. While Plato represents the ascent of love through
a series of more universal forms of beauty, until it arrives at
absolute beauty itself, Eckhart represents the movement towards God
as a retreat backwards into the ground of our own inmost being. For
Plato the ascent of the soul is represented in the form of more
refined perceptions of beauty, through a series of higher and higher
visions, while for Eckhart it is represented in the form of a
stripping off of all differences
from God, of everything that makes the soul discrete from God, so
that, the less it is something, the nearer it comes to God, so that
finally it has nothing to distinguish itself from God, and so it can
only be conformed to God. The two ways of describing the journey of
the soul are not incompatible, but in Eckhart the emphasis is
ontological while in Plato it is visionary. In both, however, it is a
journey to that which truly is
away from that which only partly is
and which is always in the flux of becoming but never in being. In
Plato's Symposium
beauty is selected as that which shines in all things and which draws
us to them but which is actually beyond them and whose true nature is
finally known through unmediated union, while in Eckhart the likeness
of God is selected as that which is the true selfhood of every
creature. For Eckhart, God is selfhood as such, or selfhood absolute.
And so for Eckhart this journey is a journey back into the ground and
origin of every creature into its true selfhood, which is God.
If we say that the true selfhood of every
creature is God, does this not amount to a form of pantheism? And is
this not the very thing which Eckhart was accused of by the
Inquisition? Well, I think the word "pantheism" introduces
a confusion into Eckhart's real ontology. To put that more boldly,
pantheism is a muddled idea put forward by a form of thinking which
does not grasp the real meaning of being as articulated in the
Western tradition, or rather does not grasp the problem of the
distinction between Being and beings, and beings and existence. There
have always been Christian thinkers who cannot conceive the
ontological relationship between God and His creation and who can
only think of them as wholly separate from one another. This is not
so surprising since the attempt to understand the ontological
relations between God and creatures involves an abandonment of the
everyday notions of relations between creatures. Eckhart, however,
never confuses God with the creation. Quite the contrary. He insists
frequently that we leave behind all that is creaturely. Yet at the
same time he insists that our inmost ground, should we be so bold as
to return to it, involves ceasing to be a creature and thus, by
becoming no distinct thing, approaching the likeness of God. And when
every distinction is removed the word "I" becomes said out
of God. Or, more boldly, there is no "God" over against "I".
Here we must tread very carefully. This is not
pantheism, nor is it hubris or a conflation of man into God. It is
the language of mystical union - which I said earlier employs of
human nature a language as symbolic as the language about God. We are
in the region of primal language itself and are really called upon to
abandon all ordinary notions of language in which it is regarded as
an artificial invention of man. But that is perhaps a topic for
another discussion altogether. Leaving that on one side, I would like
to present us with a question which comes at this problem of the
separation of creatures from God in another way. The question is a
rhetorical one and so I ask you to simply take it that way. If God is
infinitely good, infinitely abundant and infinitely loving, when He
created the world do we suppose He would give all creatures less than
He might give to them? Did God hold back something just for Himself?
Did God think to Himself "I will keep for myself just one thing
which will keep me distinct from all I have made and thus show to all
my creatures that I am better than all of them and also that I am the
big boss of the universe?" Now if God thought like this, could
we still regard Him as infinitely good? Or would we say there was a
bit of meanness there? Consider further, what is the one thing He
would most likely hold back for Himself if He thought such a thing?
What is the one thing that he could deny to creatures which would
make them less than they might be? One thing might be immortality,
but I think there is something even more fundamental than that and
that is absolute selfhood or pure being. Or, to put it another way,
Himself. Suppose that God gave to creatures every possible thing but
kept Himself back for Himself. Suppose that God gave to creatures a
certain finite measure of being and autonomy but not all of it. What
would a fragment of pure being or a fragment of autonomy amount to? I
suggest it would amount to nothing at all. It would be a fraudulent
being and a false autonomy, a mere illusion of either. There can be
no such thing as a fragment of being any more than there can be a
fragment of a Euclidean point. Now I can think of no reason at all
for God to think and do this, apart from just being stingy.
Such is the rhetorical question. I realise it
verges on blasphemy and mean no offence. But it makes us ponder
because we know perfectly well that God could not possibly have held
back something to Himself which out of infinite love He would have
given to the creation. It drives us to consider what it says of God
to hold that the creation is less than God might have made it, for if
we say the creation is imperfect or impoverished we imply an
imperfect and impoverished creator. If we speak dismissively of the
created order, then we speak dismissively of the works of God. So it
is very provocative to assume just for a moment the ontological
position of the Middle Ages where God is taken as the first and most
self-evident reality, or pure being is taken as the starting-point of
thought about the created order. We are driven to consider anew the
question of the difference between God and creation.
Let us grant then that God held nothing back
from His creation. This is Eckhart's position. Nevertheless the
creation, as it stands forth as distinct in itself, is in no sense
identical to God. And likewise with man. Insofar as he stands
distinct as an existent being he is a creature just like all
creatures. Yet God has withheld nothing of Himself from either man or
creation, not even His selfhood. So how is this? The answer lies in
the fact that, in creating all things, God has not become different
in Himself or other than His original self. If God became created,
then He would have suffered a modification of His selfhood. But also,
if creation came forth after a time or condition in which it was not,
then it must necessarily be distinct from God and be deficient in
being and in autonomy. So where lies the resolution to this?
According to Eckhart it is this. The true being of the creation and
of man lies not in their created distinctions but as totally
indistinct in God. Eckhart says:
Here note that when we say that all things are in God [that means that] just as he is indistinct in his nature and nevertheless most distinct from all things, so in him all things in a most distinct way are also at the same time indistinct. The first reason is because man in God is God. Therefore, just as God is indistinct and completely distinct from a lion, so too man in God is indistinct and completely distinct from a lion, and likewise with other things. Second, because everything that is in something else is in it according to the nature of that in which it is. Third, because 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 other things, so too man in God is indistinct from everything which is in God ("All things are in him"), and at the same time completely distinct from everything else. Fourth, according to what has been said note that all things are in God as spirit without position and without boundary. Further, just as God is ineffable and incomprehensible, so all things are in him in an ineffable way. Again, every effect is always in the cause in a causal way and not otherwise.
It may help if we put this in the ontological
terms we discussed earlier. If we think of the
"indistinctness" of God as pure or absolute being, then God
is distinct from every existent thing - for to exist is to stand
forth distinct as a particular nature and distinct from pure or
absolute being. But since God in his pure being has never commenced
any action so all things stand eternally within God and indistinct
from pure being. Thus what we normally regard as the created order
amounts to the coming forth into distinction all those things which
are eternally indistinct within pure being or God. So we may infer a
difference between the "created" existence of man and the
"eternal being" of man within God. It is to this eternal
being of man within God that Eckhart calls us when he speaks of him
entering or returning to his inmost ground. His path back to God is
through his own self-knowledge in the sense that his true
self-knowledge is in his indistinct being in God. His knowledge of
his creaturely nature is not, strictly speaking, self-knowledge but
only creaturely knowledge or knowledge of his distinctness. This
creaturely knowledge is not knowledge of selfhood. So the error of
man, in considering his nature, lies in identifying his selfhood with
his creatureliness, with his separateness from himself in God. And so
man is not deprived of anything which God might have given to him,
for he exists indistinct from God within God. According to Eckhart's
understanding of man, God has already from eternity wholly given
Himself to man.
Thus, if we assume when we begin an enquiry
into Eckhart's understanding of human nature that our selfhood
consists in a foundational separateness from God, or that it is
finite or conditioned, or the product of material history, then we
find that we are not really thinking of selfhood itself but of
something else to which we would be erroneously attributing the word
self. There is a kind of unspoken custom that supposes that religion
reveals to us things of the spiritual realm and that the secular
branches of knowledge inform us of the created realm, but we have
seen in this brief enquiry into human nature that this custom is
misguided, and that religious knowledge does not stand in a
complimentary relation to natural knowledge but fundamentally
challenges its presuppositions about the true ground of reality. One
of the reasons for this, as I suggested earlier, is that religion -
at least in the hands of a great mystic such as Meister Eckhart -
holds the ontological order of things the opposite way up to natural
knowledge. Thus, for example, in natural philosophy the One or the
principle of unity remains a merely speculative concept, whilst for
mystical theology it is the point of departure for all thought and
wisdom and that to which all natural processes ultimately tend. For
the Medieval mystics the One, or pure being, was not regarded as
something far off, but rather as that which is so close and so
immediate that it was hidden from view only so long as the soul
remained distracted by outward objects and concerns.
It is perhaps a curious thing that, living in
an age in which so much is said and written about human nature, in
which we have new disciplines such as social anthropology and
psychology, we know so little of what is most fundamental about
selfhood. But all these disciplines seek only knowledge of man as an
object, as an entity to be defined and measured in various ways. The
immediacy of selfhood, its simple presence in itself, is put aside
and dismissed as "merely subjective", meaning by that
phrase that it is arbitrary and ephemeral. The objective and the
measurable alone is worthy of study. But for
whom is all this objective
knowledge of such value? Who is this being who seeks to know and
understand everything that comes into sight? Such a question is not
asked, or at least rarely asked. And so our minds never come to rest
simply in that which we are and explore our own presence to
ourselves, that which we each can know only for and within ourselves
because no outside agency can disclose our own being to us. But
Eckhart says "none can know God who does not first know
himself", and this self knowledge is not a theoretical,
inferential or conceptual knowledge but the action of "entering
his own ground". According to Eckhart, entering this realm is
the gate to the presence of God, and so the human capacity to reflect
back upon ourselves is the key to man's spiritual potential, and
where that capacity is pursued so also is the spiritual life.
Therefore the question of human nature as we find it presented in the
Christian mystics offers us a path towards a fuller understanding of
many of the more difficult and subtle insights they have into God and
the relation of the human essence to the pure being of God. By
commencing here we have the advantage of beginning from that which is
already closest to God.