Meister Eckhart’s theology knows a “Godhead” of which no qualities, except unity and being, can be predicated; it “is becoming,” it is not yet Lord of itself, and it represents an absolute coincidence of opposites: “But its simple nature is of forms formless; of becoming becomingless; of beings beingless; of things thingless,” etc.
Union of opposites is equivalent to unconsciousness, so far as human logic goes, for consciousness presupposes a differentiation into subject and object and a relation between them.
Where there is no “other,” or it does not yet exist, all possibility of consciousness ceases.
Only the Father, the God “welling” out of the Godhead, “notices himself,” becomes “beknown to himself,” and “confronts himself as a Person.”
So, from the Father, comes the Son, as the Father’s thought of his own being.
In his original unity “he knows nothing” except the “suprareal” One which he is.
As the Godhead is essentially unconscious, 29 so too is the man who lives in God.
In his sermon on “The Poor in Spirit” (Matt. 5 : 3), the Meister says: “The man who has this poverty has everything he was when he lived not in any wise, neither in himself, nor in truth, nor in God.
He is so quit and empty of all knowing that no knowledge of God is alive in him; for while he stood in the eternal nature of God, there lived in him not another: what lived there was himself.
And so we say this man is as empty of his own knowledge as he was when he was not anything; he lets God work what he will, and he stands empty as when he came from God.”
Therefore he should love God in the following way: “Love him as he is: a not-God, a not-spirit, a not-person, a not-image; as a sheer, pure, clear One, which he is, sundered from all secondness; and in this One let us sink eternally, from nothing to nothing.
So help us God. Amen.”
The world-embracing spirit of Meister Eckhart knew, without discursive knowledge, the primordial mystical experience of India as well as of the Gnostics, and was itself the finest flower on the tree of the “Free Spirit” that flourished at the beginning of the eleventh century.
Well might the writings of this Master lie buried for six hundred years, for “his time was not yet come.”
Only in the nineteenth century did he find a public at all capable of appreciating the grandeur of his mind.
These utterances on the nature of the Deity express transformations of the God-image which run parallel with changes in human consciousness, though one would be at a loss to say which is the cause of the other.
The God-image is not something invented, it is an experience that conies upon man spontaneously as anyone can see for himself unless he is blinded to the truth by theories and prejudices.
The unconscious God-image can therefore alter the state of consciousness, just as the latter can modify the God-image once it has become conscious.
This, obviously, has nothing to do with the “prime truth,” the unknown God at least, nothing that could be verified.
Psychologically, however, the idea of God’s ayvwcria, or of the avewoijTo* 0eos, is of the utmost importance, because it identifies the Deity with the numinosity of the unconscious. The atman-purusha philosophy of the East and, as we have seen, Meister Eckhart in the West both bear witness to this. ~Carl Jung; Aion; Pages 193-194; Para 301-303.
