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Transcript
The relation of negative theology to the mystical experience in Maimonides and Eckhart's writings. The development of the mystical subjectivity on its way to the cancellation of its self. The aim of this conference consists in thinking, through the relationships between God and creatures, the notions of union and unity in an absolute truth which can be realized existentially, namely, the pure being of the Godhead. And we can get to this life of union with God by the dynamic of negativity i.e. by successive intellectual openings which are experiences of detachment. Thus, Eckhart’s teachings can be understood since a mutual birth, or a reciprocal generating on which the unity has grounds. The genuine spiritual man has to go beyond God, to the Absolute, and to find the divine part within his soul by openings to live the union, to the original Principle. This mystical experience has its foundation in negative theology and especially in the way that Maimonides and Eckhart understand it. We know that Eckhart has read a Latin translation of the Guide of the Perplexed whose title is Dux neutrorum. Several commentators have brought up the influence of Rabby Moses (1138-1204) in Meister Eckhart’s works1: Kurt Flasch, Emilie Zum-Brunn, Alois Maria Haas: at first, the program of philosophical explanation of the Bible, and secondly, Eckhart’s strict conception of negative theology2. But if they have seen the influence of Maimonides in Eckhart’s negative theology and in his philosophical teachings, they did not go deeper into the link between this Jewish source and the conception of the intellect in Meister Eckhart’s German sermons which were written during his stay in Strasbourg (1313-1323)3, particularly if we think that this particular point makes problems during Eckhart’s proceedings (Avignon and Cologne 1326-1327). And this is this point that will be interest us because of its importance into the mystical experience of the subject in Eckhart’s thought. Eckhart held that union with God takes place in the soul insofar as it is intellective, a position he shared with Maimonides – “In the essence of the soul, as intellective, it is joined to what is higher than it, God, as Rabbi Moses has it: And thus it is ‘offspring of God’4 Eckhart refers to Maimonides seventy times in his sermons. Eckhart, In Exod., n. 45-61 (LW II, 50-66). Trad. Pierre Gire, p. 38 sqq. 3 And this is during this stay that Meister Eckhart has relationships with Jewish community from Strasbourg. 4 OS XI, n. 115 1 2 The human reason is helpless to know God apart from revelation. This does not mean that Eckhart’s thought is a species of irrational enthusiasm: quite to the contrary, Eckhart leaves human reason an essential role in coming to any knowledge of God. However, for Eckhart reason can operate effectively and according to its inner nature only under the tutelage of Scripture. The goal of any talk about God is not to describe God or to give us speculative knowledge about God, for all such talk is ultimately futile. It is rather to lead the believer to a new mode of existing in God, one that is, paradoxically, possible only when the human intellect has been stripped of any and all preconceptions about the nature of God, so that there is a new basis for knowing God not as this or that object of reason but as the very basis of all of its knowledge. For Eckhart, the ultimate goal of interpreting Scripture is to find Christ, both within the text and within the soul: Christ is born in the soul when that soul encounters Christ in the deepest meaning of Scripture. God is both the objective or transcendent being or existence on whom our existence absolutely depends and the inner or immanent principle of our existence. God as the transcendent cause of creation also corresponds to the immanent ground of the soul. As Eckhart argues in the Commentary on Wisdom, God’s transcendence is defined by his very immanence in all things, most of all in the soul5. It is in the soul that God comes to understanding and hence is received in his essential nature, which is transcendent to all created being. Or, as Eckhart puts it in Sermon 30: “God is in all things. The more he is in things, the more he is outside things; the more within, the more outside; the more outside, the more within.” In other words, God is the inner principle of our existence precisely because he is the absolute existence on which our own existence and knowledge of him depend. The more we turn our attention inward the more we come to know God in both his immanence and his transcendence. This again means that we cannot know God except by revelation, precisely because our existence depends absolutely on God and we therefore know him not as an object but as the ground of our existence. Isabelle Raviolo CRFJ. Eté 2013 5 In Sap., n. 144-57.