Sean Pidgeon
TRS 650A
Reflection Paper #2
October 27, 2004

Meister Eckhart

Blessedness opened its mouth to wisdom and said: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs" (Mt 5:3).
All angels and saints and all who were ever born must keep silent when the Wisdom of the Father speaks, for all the Wisdom of the angels and of all created beings is mere folly before the unfathomable Wisdom of God. It has said that the poor are blessed.1

Meister Eckhart was a 13th and 14th century mystic in the Dominican Order whose writings, while fascinating, at times have been seen as troubling or differentiating from what is commonly understood as orthodox Christian spirituality. The challenging nature of his thought can be seen clearly in Sermon Fifty-Two, where he comments on Jesus’ call in the Beatitudes to be poor in spirit., and what exactly being poor in spirit consists of.

Most readers of the Gospel are able to grasp that when Jesus speaks of being poor in spirit, he is not speaking of physical poverty. While a life of living the gospel and preaching the gospel through physical poverty can be a laudable way of life for a Christian, with St. Francis of Assisi as a prime example, poverty of spirit is something different. As Eckhart says, "there are two kinds of poverty. There is an external poverty, which is good and is greatly esteemed in a man who voluntarily practices it for the love of our Lord Jesus Christ...But there is a different poverty, an inward poverty, and it is of this that we must understand that our Lord is speaking: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit.’"2

This ‘poverty of spirit’ that Jesus speaks of is often interpreted to be humility. Yet, for Eckhart, it goes much deeper than that. One who is poor in spirit "wants nothing, and knows nothing, and has nothing."3 One who "wants to fulfill God’s dearest will, he has not the poverty of which we want to talk."4 That is, Eckhart is saying that even if we get rid of all of our own desires, and only wish to do God’s will, yet still, we desire to do God’s will, we have not yet reached poverty of spirit. It is not enough to get rid of one’s own will. A person must not even seek God’s will, because to seek God’s will is to seek something and want something. One must want nothing in order to be poor in spirit. Eckhart’s call is so radical, that he calls us to "pray to God that we may be free of ‘God’" so that we may "desire as little as little as [we] wanted and desired when [we] did not exist."5 We should desire as if we did not exist, for before we came into existence we did not have any desires, even the desire to do God’s will.

Beyond not even wanting God’s will, one must, for Eckhart, one must not want to know nothing, such that he is "so free of all knowing that he does not know or experience or grasp that God lives in him."6 We must not only eliminate all desires, even the desire to serve God, but also eliminate the knowledge inside us of God’s will, for knowing God’s will may encourage us to seek God’s will. Yet, even not desiring God’s will and not knowing God’s will is still not enough. For one to truly have poverty of spirit, Eckhart says, he must "keep so free of God and of all his works that if God wishes to work in the soul, he himself is the place in which he wants to work."7 Poverty of spirit means not even leaving room for God to work in your soul.

This teaching of Eckhart appears very troubling. The traditional Christian understanding of poverty of spirit is transforming our desires so that they mirror God’s will. But, Eckhart is asking us to go beyond that, and eliminate all desire, all will. This is very similar Buddhist teaching. For Buddhists, desire is the cause of suffering, and the way to end suffering is to end desire. Is Eckhart really calling us to embrace a philosophy that–while rightly seeing our own desires devoid from God as inadequate–tells us all desire, even desiring God’s will, is an impediment to poverty of spirit?

We could easily dismiss Eckhart as an ‘Eastern or Buddhist mystic’ wolf hiding in ‘Catholic Dominican Order’ sheep’s clothing. We could call him a covert "heretic" teaching under the guise of authentic faith, with the intention of subliminally poisoning and corrupting the faithful into believing what is not church teaching to be true. That would be a bit haste, though. For, I do not believe that Eckhart need be seen as a subversive, or as one who stretched the limits. We just need to look deeper to recognize what Eckhart is truly telling us.

Christianity does teach that poverty of spirit is achieved through a transformation of our desires to fit God’s will. Yet, Eckhart is right to criticize an unexamined acceptance of this. For, none of us have a "God’s-eye-view." No one sees things as God sees things, as they truly are. Each person sees from his own perspective. I am not promoting subjectivism or relativism or the idea that each person creates his own truth. There is objective truth. I am just saying that only God sees truth entirely as it is; we all see things from a personal perspective and not from God’s objective perspective. When we shed our personal desires and "put on Christ", or will what God wills, there is a danger that in trying to will God’s will, we will only be willing our skewed interpretation of God’s will. Eckhart wisely sees this danger. He calls us to let go of all of this, even of desiring God’s will. This is important, I believe, because each of us, in our lives, go through spiritual ‘highs’ and spiritual ‘lows’. We have times when we strongly feel God’s presence and it is easy to do God’s will. There is a danger here, though, for people to "become obsessed with their own goodness and pursuit of perfection" and to ask God "‘Why cannot others be holy like me?’"8 During these times, we can be like the Pharisees and, when we seek to impose God’s will, we are only imposing our own will on others. Conversely, we have times when no matter how hard we pray or seek God, God does not seem to be there and we do not feel his presence. From "the darkness of [our] soul [we] cry out god. But he still seems not to listen."9 It is during this ‘dark night of the soul’ that we see if we truly have faith; that is if we have faith even when it is not easy or does not feel good. By living "as if [we do] not even know or experience or grasp that God lives within [us]"10 during the ‘high’ spiritual times when we easily feel God’s presence, we prepare ourselves to be able to experience God’s grace even during our ‘dark night of the soul.’

Eckhart shows us a unique way to look at Jesus’ call to live in spiritual poverty. By letting go of our desires, even our desire to seek, know, and have God’s will–a desire that is skewed by our flawed understanding of God’s will–we are thus able to ‘let go, and let God.’

Sean Pidgeon
TRS 650A
First Reflection Paper
September 27, 2004

Augustine


Through Augustine’s ‘Trinity of the Mind’ in On the Trinity and the three kinds of vision that he speaks of in The Literal Meaning of Genesis, we can come to an understanding of how Augustine believes we can achieve the highest contemplation of God. The ‘Trinity of the Mind’ is “the mind remembering itself, understanding itself, loving itself...a trinity...of the mind [that] is the image of God, not because the mind remembers, understands, and loves itself, but because it also has the power to remember, understand, and love its Maker.” (Dupre & Wiseman, 64, 65) It is with the power of the mind that Augustine says we are able to gain the greatest comprehension of God, and come into the greatest presence of God. For, of the three kinds of vision, “one through the eyes...a second through the spirit....and a third through an intuition of mind” (71), it is the third that is the greatest.

For Augustine, as he says in his Confessions, “the greatest pleasures of the bodily senses, in the brightest corporeal light whatsoever, seemed to us not worthy of comparison with the joy of that eternal life, unworthy of even being mentioned” (59). The joys of the body, or the pleasures of the flesh, were lower goods, if not even somewhat evil, because they could not bring one to unity with God like the contemplative life could. The mind is of a higher status than the body because, for Augustine, it is the image of God. That is, when the mind performs its threefold task of remembering, understanding, and loving itself, it is reflecting God, the One who never forgets us, is always there for us, and forever loves us.

Christianity has always valued the sometimes diverging issues of concern for the whole of the Christian community and the greater good of the Christian community along with the concern for the individual and the individual soul. Much of Augustine’s focus was on the individual soul and how the individual soul could reach salvation. We often hear of how we should focus our energy on others, especially through the two commandments of Jesus to love your god with all your heart and to love your neighbor as yourself. But, Augustine focuses in on the as yourself part of this teaching. We must, through the ‘Trinity of Mind’, remember, understand, and love ourselves. We cannot truly love God and neighbor if we do not love ourselves. As we must love our neighbors as ourselves, we must love ourselves as God loves us. As for getting our minds to “perceive a trinity” (64), Augustine’s exposition of the three types of vision in The Literal Meaning of Genesis offers guidance.

The first kind of vision or way of seeing is through the eyes and with our physical senses. When we see a dog, or a tree, or another person, or the sky, we see with our senses. The second kind of vision is spirit, where we think of those things that we have seen with the first kind of vision, but which are not present at the moment. When we think of a dog or of a tree that we have seen in the past, or when we think of the picnic we went on in the summer, we are seeing with the second kind of vision. The third kind of vision, for Augustine, is the greatest of all. It is through this way of seeing that we can understand love by embracing “those objects which have no images resembling them which are not identical with them” (71-72). That is, when we take on the third way of seeing, when we see through the eyes of love, we see things as they truly are, and not just as an image of their true selves, like with the second way of seeing.

Our ways of seeing God and knowing God, here on earth, are imperfect when not seen with the ‘Trinity of the Mind’ through the third way of seeing. The first kind of vision, the “symbolic or corporeal vision” of God, “as it was seen on Mount Sinai”, and the second kind of vision, the “spiritual vision such as Isaiah saw and John saw in the Apocalypse,” are only small tastes and dim foreshadows of the third type of vision, “a direct vision and not through a dark image, as far as the human mind elevated by the grace of God can receive it” (74).

While I would agree with Augustine that it is the highest good to come to “see and understand love itself” (71) as he sees coming to fruition through the third way of seeing, I wonder if he has gone to far in calling each of us to undertake “the labor of restraining his desires” (74). He puts forth the idea that the body is a burdensome load that must get past in order to truly know God. Augustine was influenced by Neo-Platonism, and he was right to look for some guidance from it, because Neo-Platonism has a lot to offer. However, he goes too far in accepting some of the mind-body dualism that Neo-Platonism exposits. For, in a Christian understanding, creation is good, and our bodies, as part of creation, are good. That which is a good, and which is a gift from God, should not be seen as an impediment to growing closer to God. If God wished for us to simply reach higher contemplation through the mind, then He would not have created us with bodies. We can recognize the failings that we have created for ourselves through sin, without denying the goodness of the created order and God’s wish for us to come to know him through His creation.