The Rudolf Steiner Archive

1. Meister Eckhart

[ 1 ] The world of ideas of Master Eckhart is completely glowing with the feeling that things are reborn as higher beings in the spirit of man. He belonged to the Dominican order, like the greatest Christian theologian of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas, who lived from 1225 to 1274. Eckhart was an unconditional admirer of Thomas. This must seem quite understandable if one considers the whole way of thinking of the master Eckhart. He believed himself to be in harmony with the teachings of the Christian Church, just as he assumed such harmony for Thomas. Eckhart did not want to take anything away from the content of Christianity, nor did he want to add anything to it. But he wanted to bring out this content anew in his own way. It is not in the spiritual needs of a personality such as he was to substitute new truths of this or that kind for old ones. He was completely wedded to the content he had received. But he wanted to give this content a new form, a new life. He wanted, without a doubt, to remain an orthodox Christian. The Christian truths were his own. He just wanted to look at them in a different way than Thomas Aquinas, for example, had done. He accepted two sources of knowledge: revelation in faith and reason in research. Reason recognizes the laws of things, i.e. the spiritual in nature. It can also rise above nature and grasp in spirit the divine essence underlying all nature from one side. But in this way it does not reach an immersion in the full essence of God. A higher truth content must meet it. It is given in the Holy Scriptures. It reveals what man cannot achieve through himself. The truth content of Scripture must be accepted by man; reason can defend it, it can want to understand it as well as possible through its powers of cognition; but it can never produce it itself out of the human spirit. It is not what the spirit sees that is highest truth, but a certain content of knowledge that has come to the spirit from outside. St. Augustine declares himself unable to find the source within himself for what he should believe. He says: "I would not believe the Gospel if I were not moved to do so by the authority of the Catholic Church." This is in the spirit of the evangelist, who refers to the external testimony: "What we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we ourselves have seen, what our hands have touched of the word of life... what we have seen and heard we report to you, so that you may have fellowship with us." But the Master Eckhart wants to impress Christ's words on people: "It is profitable for you that I depart from you; for if I do not depart from you, the Holy Spirit cannot become you." And he explains these words by saying: "Just as if he said: you have put too much joy in my present image, therefore the perfect joy of the Holy Spirit cannot come to you." Eckhart means to speak of no other God than the one of whom Augustine, the Evangelist and Thomas speak; and yet their testimony of God is not his testimony. "Some people want to look at God with their eyes as they look at a cow, and want to love God as they love a cow. So they love God for outward riches and inward comfort; but these people do not really love God... Simple-minded people think they should look at God as if he were standing there and they here. It is not so. God and I are one in knowledge." Eckhart's confessions are based on nothing other than the experience of the inner sense. And this experience shows him things in a higher light. He therefore believes that he does not need an external light in order to arrive at the highest insights: "A master says: God has become man, from this the whole human race is exalted and honored. Let us rejoice in this, that Christ is our brother, having gone forth by his own power above all the choirs of angels, and is seated at the right hand of the Father. This Master has spoken well; but truly, I do not care much for it. What good would it do me if I had a brother who was a rich man and I was a poor man? What good would it do me if I had a brother who was a wise man and I was a fool? The heavenly Father begets his only begotten Son in himself and in me. Why in himself and in me? I am one with him; and he cannot exclude me. In the same work the Holy Spirit receives his essence and becomes of me as of God. Why? I am in God, and if the Holy Spirit does not take his essence from me, he does not take it from God either. I am in no way excluded." When Eckhart recalls the words of St. Paul: "Put on Jesus Christ", he wants to give this word the meaning: immerse yourselves in yourselves, dive down into self-contemplation: and from the depths of your being God will shine out towards you; he outshines all things; you have found him in yourselves; you have become one with God's being. "God became man that I might become God." In his treatise "On Seclusion", Eckhart speaks about the relationship between outer and inner perception: "Here you should know that the masters say that there are two kinds of man in every man: one is called the outer man, that is sensuality; five senses serve man, and yet he works through the power of the soul. The other man is called the inner man, that is man's inner being. Now you should know that every man who loves God uses the powers of the soul in the outer man no more than the five senses require for need; and the inner man does not turn to the five senses except in so far as it is the wise man and guide of the five senses and guards them so that they do not indulge in their pursuit of animality." Whoever speaks in this way about the inner man can no longer direct his eye to a sensual being outside of him. For he is aware that this being cannot confront him from any kind of sensual external world. One could object to him: what business is it of the things in the external world what you add to them from your spirit. Rely on your senses. They alone give you information about the outside world. Do not falsify by a spiritual addition what the senses give you in purity, without addition, as a picture of the outer world. Your eye tells you what the color is like; what your mind recognizes about the color, there is nothing of that in the color. From the point of view of Master Eckhart, one would have to answer: The senses are physical apparatuses. Their communications about things can therefore only concern the physical in things. And this physical in things communicates itself to me in such a way that a physical process is aroused in me. Color as a physical process in the outside world stimulates a physical process in my eye and in my brain. This is how I perceive the color. In this way, however, I can only perceive what is physical, sensual about the color. Sensual perception eliminates everything non-sensual from things. Through it, things are stripped of everything that is non-sensual about them. If I then proceed to the spiritual, the ideal content, I only restore that which sensory perception has erased from things. Thus, sensory perception does not show me the deepest essence of things; rather, it separates me from this essence. Spiritual, ideal perception, however, reconnects me with this essence. It shows me that the things within are of exactly the same spiritual essence as I am. The boundary between me and the outside world disappears through the spiritual perception of the world. I am separated from the outside world insofar as I am a sensual thing among sensual things. My eye and color are two different entities. My brain and the plant are two different things. But the ideal content of the plant and the color belong to a unified ideal entity together with the ideal content of my brain and the eye. - This view must not be confused with the widespread anthropomorphizing (humanizing) view of the world, which believes it can grasp the things of the outside world by attributing to them properties of a psychic nature that are supposed to be similar to the properties of the human soul. This view says: we only perceive sensual characteristics in another person when we meet him externally. I cannot look inside my fellow human being. From what I see and hear of him, I draw conclusions about his inner being, his soul. The soul is therefore never something that I perceive directly. I only perceive a soul within myself. No one sees my thoughts, my fantasies, my feelings. Just as I have such an inner life in addition to what can be perceived externally, so must all other beings have one. So concludes anyone who stands on the standpoint of the anthropomorphizing (humanizing) world view. What I perceive externally in the plant must likewise only be the outside of an inside, a soul, which I must direct towards what I perceive. And since there is only one inner world for me, namely my own, I can only imagine the inner world of other beings to be similar to my inner world. This leads to a kind of all-souledness of all nature (panpsychism). This view is based on a misjudgment of what the developed inner sense really presents. The spiritual content of an external thing that comes to me in my inner being is not something added to the external perception. It is no more so than the spirit of another person. I perceive this spiritual content through my inner sense just as I perceive the physical content through my outer senses. And what I call my inner life in the above sense is not, in a higher sense, my spirit. This inner life is only the result of purely sensory processes, belongs to me only as a completely individual personality, which is nothing but the result of its physical organization. When I transfer this inner life to external things, I am actually thinking into the blue. My personal soul life, my thoughts, memories and feelings are within me because I am a natural being organized in such and such a way, with a very specific sensory apparatus, with a very specific nervous system. I am not allowed to transfer this human soul of mine to things. I would only be allowed to do so if I found a similarly organized nervous system somewhere. But my individual soul is not the highest spiritual in me. This highest spiritual must first be awakened in me through the inner sense. And this awakened spiritual in me is at the same time one and the same with the spiritual in all things. Before this spirituality the plant appears directly in its own spirituality. I do not need to give it a spirituality that is similar to my own. For this world view, all talk about the unknown "thing in itself" loses all meaning. For it is precisely the "thing in itself" that reveals itself to the inner sense. All talk about the unknown "thing in itself" only stems from the fact that those who talk like this are unable to recognize the "things in themselves" in the spiritual contents of their inner being. They believe to recognize insubstantial shadows and schemes, "mere concepts and ideas" of things within themselves. But since they do have a sense of the "thing in itself", they believe that this "thing in itself" is hidden and that there are limits to human cognition. One cannot prove to those who are caught up in this belief that they must grasp the "thing in itself" within themselves, for they would never acknowledge this "thing in itself" if it were shown to them. But it is about this recognition. - Everything that Meister Eckhart says is permeated by this recognition. "Take a parable of this. A door opens and closes in a hinge. If I now compare the outer board on the door with the outer man, I compare the hinge with the inner man. Now when the door opens and closes, the outer board moves back and forth, while the hinge remains constantly immobile and is in no way changed. It is the same here." As an individual sensory being I can explore things in all directions - the door opens and closes -; if I do not allow the perceptions of the senses to arise spiritually within me, then I know nothing of their essence - the hinge does not move. According to Eckhart, the enlightenment mediated by the inner sense is the entry of God into the soul. He calls the light of knowledge that flickers through this entry the "little spark of the soul". The place in the human interior where this "little spark" lights up is "so pure, and so high, and so noble in itself, that no creature can be in it, but only God alone dwells in it with his mere divine nature". Whoever has allowed this "little spark" to be absorbed in himself no longer sees merely as man sees with the external senses and with the logical mind, which orders and classifies the impressions of the senses, but he sees how things are in themselves. The external senses and the organizing mind separate the individual human being from other things; they make him an individual in space and time who also perceives other things in space and time. The person enlightened by the "little spark" ceases to be an individual being. He destroys his separation. Everything that causes the difference between him and things ceases. The fact that it is he, as an individual being, who perceives, no longer comes into consideration. The things and he are no longer separate. The things and thus also God see themselves in him. "This little spark, that is God, so that it is a unified One, and bears within itself the image of all creatures, image without image, and image above image." Eckhart expresses the annihilation of the individual being in the most glorious words: "It is therefore to know that the one thing after all things is to know God and to be known by God. In this we recognize God and see that he makes us seeing and recognizing. And just as the air, which illuminates, is nothing other than what it illuminates; for from this it shines that it is illuminated: so we recognize that we are recognized and that he makes us recognizing."

[ 2 ] Master Eckhart builds his relationship with God on this basis. It is a purely spiritual one and cannot be formed according to an image borrowed from human, individual life. God cannot love his creation in the same way that one person loves another; God cannot have created the world in the same way that a master builder builds a house. All such thoughts vanish before the inner vision. It is part of the being of God that he loves the world. A God who could love and also not love is made in the image of the individual human being. "I speak with good truth and with eternal truth and with everlasting truth, that God must pour himself into every man who has let himself down, according to all his ability, so completely that he retains nothing in his life and in his being, in his nature and in his divinity; he must pour it all out in a fruitful way." And inner enlightenment is something that the soul necessarily has to find when it delves into the reason. This alone shows that God's communication to humanity must not be presented in the image of the revelation of one person to another. This communication can also be omitted. One person can close himself off from the other. God must, according to his nature, communicate himself. "It is a certain truth that God therefore needs to seek us, just as if all his divinity depended on it. God may be as little without us as we are without him. If we may turn away from God, God may never turn away from us." Consequently, man's relationship to God cannot be understood in such a way that it contains something figurative, something taken from the individual human. Eckhart is aware that it is part of the perfection of the primordial being of the world to be found in the human soul. This primordial being would be incomplete, indeed unfinished, if it lacked the component of its formation that comes to light in the human soul. What happens in the human being belongs to the original being; and if it did not happen, the original being would only be a part of itself. In this sense, man may feel himself to be a necessary member of the world being. Eckhart expresses this by describing his feelings towards God thus: "I do not thank God that he loves me, for he may not let it go; whether he wants it or not, his nature compels him... Therefore I will not ask God to give me anything, nor will I praise him for what he has given me..."

[ 3 ] But this relationship of the human soul to the primordial being is not to be understood as if the soul in its individual essence were declared to be one and the same with this primordial being. The soul, which is entangled in the world of the senses and thus in finiteness, as such does not already have the content of the primordial being within itself. It must first develop it within itself. It must destroy itself as an individual being. Master Eckhart aptly characterizes this annihilation as "development". "When I come to the bottom of the Godhead, no one asks me where I come from and where I have been, and no one misses me, for here is a development." The sentence also speaks clearly about this relationship: "I take a basin of water and put a mirror in it and place it under the wheel of the sun. The sun casts its bright light into the mirror and yet does not fade away. The reflection of the mirror in the sun is the sun in the sun, and the mirror is what it is. So it is with God. God is in the soul with his nature and in his essence and his divinity, and yet he is not the soul. The reflection of the soul in God is God in God, and yet the soul is what it is."

[ 4 ] The soul that surrenders to inner enlightenment does not merely recognize in itself that which it was before enlightenment; rather, it recognizes that which it only becomes through this enlightenment. "We are to be united with God essentially; we are to be united with God unanimously; we are to be united with God wholly. How are we to be essentially united with God? This is to be done by sight and not by essence. His essence may not become our essence, but should be our life." Not an already existing life - an essence - is to be recognized in the logical sense; but the higher recognition - the vision - is to become life itself; the spiritual, the ideal is to be felt by the seeing human being in the same way as ordinary, everyday life is felt by the individual human nature.

[ 5 ] From such starting points, Meister Eckhart also arrives at a pure concept of freedom. The soul is not free in ordinary life. For it is caught up in the realm of lower causes. It accomplishes what it is compelled to do by these lower causes. Through "vision" it is lifted out of the realm of these causes. It no longer acts as an individual soul. The primordial being is uncovered in it, which can no longer be caused by anything other than itself. "God does not force the will, but rather sets it free, so that it wants nothing other than what God Himself wants. And the spirit may want nothing else than what God wants: and that is not its lack of freedom; it is its actual freedom. For freedom is that we are not bound, that we are therefore free and pure and thus unalloyed, as we were in our first outflow, and as we were freed in the Holy Spirit. "The enlightened man may be said to be the entity that determines good and evil from within himself. He cannot help but accomplish the good. For he does not serve the good, but the good lives itself out in him. "The righteous man serves neither God nor creatures, for he is free, and the closer he is to righteousness, the more he is freedom itself." What then, for Meister Eckhart, can only be evil? It can only be the action under the influence of the subordinate way of looking at things; the action of a soul that has not gone through the state of development. Such a soul is selfish in the sense that it only wants itself. It could only outwardly harmonize its will with moral ideals. The seeing soul cannot be selfish in this sense. Even if it wanted itself, it still wanted the rule of the ideal; for it has made itself into this ideal. It can no longer want the goals of the lower nature, for it no longer has anything in common with this lower nature. For the seeing soul it means no compulsion, no deprivation, to act in the sense of moral ideals. "The man who stands in God's will and in God's love, it is his pleasure to do all the good things that God wills and to refrain from all the evil things that are against God. And it is impossible for him to leave a thing that God wants to have done. Rightly so, it would be impossible for him to walk whose legs are bound, just as it would be impossible for a man to do an evil thing that is in God's will." Eckhart expressly rejects the idea that this view of his gives license to do whatever the individual wants. It is precisely by this that one recognizes the seer, that he no longer wants anything as an individual. "Some people say: If I have God and God's freedom, I may well do anything I want. They understand this word wrongly. Because you can do any thing that is against God and his commandment, you do not have God's love; you may well deceive the world as if you had it." Eckhart is convinced that the soul that delves to the bottom of itself will also find perfect morality shining on this bottom, that all logical understanding and all action in the ordinary sense will cease and a completely new order of human life will enter. "For everything that the understanding may comprehend and everything that the encounter desires is not God. Where understanding and desire end, there it is dark, there God shines. There that power opens up in the soul which is wider than the vast heavens... The blessedness of the righteous and the blessedness of God is one blessedness; for there the righteous is blessed, because God is blessed."