the mystical theology of valentin weigel - DataSpace at Princeton ...

one-of-a-kind thing, or the best kind of thing. For Eckhart, this indistinctness is how God
is absolutely One; to put it another way, “God’s esse is to be ‘neither this nor that,’” or
yet another way, God is “nothing in particular.” 262 Over and over, Eckhart admonishes
his listeners and readers to do away with distinctions. Names, images, concepts, identity,
time, and ultimately even the distinction between distinction and similarity—all of these
must be rejected as the soul returns to God. Indeed, as we will see later in this chapter,
the abandoning of distinctions is the subject of the Eckhart sermon (Sermon 52) to which
Weigel devoted a careful and close reading.
The flip side of Eckhart’s surprising definition of God’s unity (God is One
because God is indistinct) is an equally surprising understanding of the union of God and
soul, which is the overwhelming emphasis of Eckhart’s work. The basis of this union is
Eckhart’s definition of intellect. Just as the existence of created objects was determined
by their distinctness from each other, so too is the intellect’s knowledge of them. When
the intellect considers, for instance, a square object, it perceives its squareness only by
contrast with non-square things. Moreover, Eckhart (following Aristotle) argues that to
know an object is to become it, 263 and so in order for the intellect to continue perceiving a
are in God, and thus God alone is in truth...God is unseparated from all things, for God is in all things and
is more inwardly in them than they are in themselves. That is how God is unseparated from all things.” This
English translation is from Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, ed. Maurice
O'C. Walshe and Bernard McGinn [New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2009].) We know that
this is the case from Eckhart’s theory of analogy. In things related by analogy, what is in one of the
analogates is not formally in the other, which in plain(er) English means that “if something is affirmed
about God, it must be denied of creatures” and vice versa. McGinn, Harvest, 137. Or, as Eckhart writes in
Sermon 9: “Ein ieglich dinc würket in wesene, kein dinc enmac würken über sîn wesen. Daz viur enmac
niht würken dan in dem holze. Got würket über wesene in der wîte, dâ er sich geregen mac, er würket in
unwesene; ê denne wesen wære, dô worhte got; er worhte wesen, dô niht wesen enwas.” (“Everything
works in being; nothing works above its being. Fire cannot work except in wood. God works above being
in vastness, where he can roam. He works in nonbeing. Before being was, God worked. He worked being
when there was no being.” Eckhart, Teacher and Preacher, 256.) Werke, Vol. 1, 106:15-20.
262 Turner, Darkness, 165.
263 Eckhart imagines an eye looking at a piece of wood: “Geschihet aber daz, daz mîn ouge ein und
einvaltic ist in im selben und ûfgetan wirt und ûf daz holz geworfen wirt mit einer angesiht, sô blîbet ein
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