Meister Eckhart: Philosopher of Christianity by Kurt Flasch
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A Theology of Language

Eckhart’s work is a sort of Christian Kabbalah or Sufism, an attempt to overcome the limitations and distortions of language through language itself. As Flasch is keen to point out, his work is often categorised, like Kabbalah and Sufism, as ‘mystical,’ a term originated as one of condemnation by critics of each movement. But Flasch’s re-categorisation of Eckhart as a philosopher, particularly as a philosopher of Christianity, seems to me anachronistic. And unlike Thomas Aquinas, for example, Eckhart is not trying to reconcile Classical Greek philosophy with contemporary Christian doctrine. Rather, I think, Eckhart was plowing a new intellectual field altogether, one more properly called the Theology of Language.

By a theology of language, I mean the relativisation language itself to that which is not language. For convenience I will refer to that which is not language as ‘beyond’ or ‘outside’ language or as, simply, ‘reality.’ In Christianity as well as its sister-religions, God is the ultimate reality, the source and sustainer of being itself. And while God ‘is,’ God is not a being. This paradox is the central linguistic difficulty of all theological discussion in Christianity, Islam and Judaism, which share the concept of divine transcendence. Each of these ‘religions of the book’ deal with the issue of their dependence on language in a distinctive way: Islam in Sufism, Judaism in Kabbalah, and Christianity in the type of idiosyncratic theology represented by Eckhart. All of these are considered marginal, often heretical, by ‘mainstream’ believers.*

Although different in important detail, all these approaches to the problem share a common theme: the possibility of a personal experience of a relationship with the divine which is non-linguistic. None of these approaches rejects language. On the contrary, all treat language in a hyperbolic way, as if it were the only thing in existence. In Sufism this means considering Signs, that is to say, language, only in relation to the Signifier, that is to say, God. In Kabbalah it means considering literally every letter, every ‘jot and tittle’ of sacred text as containing unlimited meaning. And in Christianity, it means an almost 20th century meditative deconstruction of core theological concepts.

The methodological core of these approaches is consistent: to squeeze language itself until it breaks, to exhaust language by the unrestrained interpretation of its meaning, indeed through the undermining of the foundations of dogma itself. Language is tortured in order to provoke its confession of inadequacy when dealing with the divine, that is to say, reality. To call this prison-break from language ‘mysticism’ is to denigrate its very sophisticated intellectual foundation. Not until philosophers of the 20th century like Wittgenstein and Heidegger (an admirer of Eckhart) articulated their aims could the linguistic genius of these medieval philosophies be recognised.

Many of Flash’s quotations from Eckhart’s sermons make my point explicitly. For example:

“As a morning star in the middle of the mist. I am concerned here with the small word ‘quasi,’ which means ‘as.’ Schoolchildren call this a by-word [an adverb]. That is what I am concerned with in all of my sermons. The most proper terms that one can use for God are ‘Word’ and ‘Truth.’ God named himself a ‘word.’”

Human beings as adverbs of God - what a marvellously poetic idea! Eckhart then goes on to qualify this idea of adverbial mankind when he says:

“Whenever I preach, I habitually speak of detachment, and that man should become free from himself and all things. Second, that he should be reshaped into the unitary Good, which is God. And third, that he should think of the great nobility that God has placed in the soul so that man might thereby come to God in a marvelous way. Fourth, I speak of the purity of God’s nature—the glory that belongs to the divine nature is ineffable. God is a word, an unpronounced word.”

That is, the Word, unlike our mere words, is not part of language. We therefore must be wary of our words, particularly sacred words. This is a re-statement of ancient Jewish prohibitions about verbalising the divine Tetragrammaton of YHWH. It is also a remarkable anticipation of the theology of Karl Barth in which words, even scriptural words, cannot in any way approximate the Word if God.

Eckhart makes this wariness about language explicit as an ethical principle. We must detach ourselves from language even more decisively than from material things in order to be able to hear the divine Word:

“I have already said it several times, and a great master says it as well: man is supposed to be detached in such a way from all things and all works, both internal and external ones, that he becomes God’s own site in which God could act.”

This goes beyond mere negative theology. It involves a kenosis , a complete emptying of the intellect, even of what-God-is-not vocabulary of establishment theologians. But it is still decidedly theological , not philosophical. If anything, it is a theology which includes a subservient philosophy, not the reverse.

As Eckhart makes clear elsewhere, the intellect (or soul, they are the same for Eckhart as our connection to God) is composed of ‘reason’ by which he means the faculty for giving meaning to the world, that is to say, language. His instruction is therefore radical: the intellect must not be abandoned but stripped of that which appears to constitute it. This is the enemy within, the words which live inside us and prevent us from allowing God to inhabit us. As in Kabbalah and Sufism, the way to achieve this state is not by starving the intellect of language but by over feeding it, by stuffing it like a Christmas goose until it regurgitates its entire contents - including, one presumes, all the increasingly codified doctrinal formulations of the Church.

It turns out, therefore, that Pope John XXII was absolutely correct in the 14th century when he called Eckhart “the Devil’s seed” and had him tried as a heretic. Anyone who messes with language and its character messes with the foundations of the religions of the book. Once language is recognised for what it is, a reality which masks a larger reality, official doctrines move from the realm of literal interpretation, to suggestive allegory, to quaint myth, and finally to the cultural junk pile of irrelevant legend. The pope’s anathema of Eckhart is still in effect, a tribute to the Church’s obstinacy as well as its continuing inability to cope with the subject of language.

One of the great ironies of religious history is that today’s evangelical Baptists and Pentecostalists don’t recognise their direct descent from Eckhart in their attempts to escape doctrine. They choose instead to clothe themselves in fundamentalist rhetoric and perpetrate the precise linguistic idolatry they had been formed to combat.

* It is also interesting to note that all of these attempts to deal with the problem of language-based beliefs developed in parallel during what Europeans call the Middle Ages. In a very important sense, the linguistic issue is what binds all three religions together into a single culture. In other words, it is not various monotheisms about which the three contend, but the issue of linguistic power. All three aim at an interpretive dominance within the shared culture. The religious content of that dominance is of marginal significance.

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