Meister Eckhart’s God

Abstract

Eckhart maintains a constructive tension between belief in God and an intellectual relationship with him. The cooperation starts with insight from a revelation of God, followed by an intellectual reconstruction of God’s presence and working without reserve. God’s presence can also be disclosed by natural knowledge which delivers “parables” for a deeper understanding of the “nature” of God. Eckhart takes God to include in himself all important notions of values and virtue in the status of “being”, not in the status of empirical facts which for Eckhart have a lower reality. Grace is God’s nature. The unity of grace is available from the transcendent origin, before time and space are created, in the heart of the Godhead. Moreover, Eckhart’s new “philosophy of Christianity” (Kurt Flasch) relates to his Christology of Incarnation. Incarnation means the descent of God and the elevation of man, to the point that humanity and the Divine cannot be separated and are “two in one,” as Eckhart says.