The universal metaphysics on which Eckhart based his parabolic interpreta-tion of scripture was meninterpreta-tioned in the context of Rebecca’s body. It is a Platonism of two ways of being that Eckhart, along with Augustine, thought of as Platonic: according to it, there is an intelligible and a sensible world.
The sensible world is not devoid of truth. It is similar to that which is true, but it is the world of opinions. The intelligible world is the world of knowl-edge and of the true virtues (Liber parab. n. 67, 533.11–534.2; citations in this section are to this text). As is usual among Platonists, the ethical observation is integrated into the ontological. Eckhart puts a special emphasis on the the-ory that the essentiality of a thing, its essentia, is not determined from the outside and is not ab alio. It is an idea made sensory, the ratio of the thing (n. 68, 534.3–7). This is Avicenna’s theory, as Eckhart himself remarks; but he also invokes Augustine’s statement that nothing is as eternal as the defini-tion of the circle. That is where the primacy of the universal over the indi-vidual lies, in scholastic terms: of the universal natura over the suppositum.
Eckhart thought of the universal as realized. In this sense, only all individual
humans taken together are “man.”17 The doctrine of the primary determina-tions is less prominent, but it is still there: the Good, insofar as it is the Good, is termed “uncreatable.” Eckhart is concerned with the creation of the world;
and thus he enlarges upon his theory of the causes (causae) and causing (causare). He could not continue replacing the term causa with ratio. Causa was a high- level term, not least because of the Liber de causis. And it was not necessary to eliminate the term for good. He had expelled efficient and final causality from metaphysics, and therefore causa—except when referring to the observation of nature—had the meaning of ideational ratio and forma anyway (n. 121, 586.9–11). Much as in the Commentary on John, Eckhart here interprets every acting as speaking (n. 47, 514.3–9). Eckhart’s philosophy consists of universal verbalizing; even nature appears as something that speaks. The essential causes (causae essentiales) especially are disclosures of themselves; they disclose themselves wholly, undivided.18 This proves ad-vantageous for the philosophical version of the concept of God: God is the highest, bodiless ground of things, causa prima (n. 42, 509.1–5). In his Liber parabolarum Genesis, Eckhart carves out two moments above all others:
God’s creation of the world must not be imagined as an e- ficere, as a placing- outside- of- himself. The rejection of this idea is his first point. God is Being;
he does not act outwardly, because there is nothing outside of Being.19 This immanentism is simply the logical conclusion of infinitism and of the identi-fication of God with Being. The second point of clariidenti-fication renders many a discussion about God’s beinglessness superfluous. Eckhart explains: God is Being, and it remains that way. He is, as Eckhart specifies, the “true, the only real, the original” Being. But above all we must remember that he is intellect and that this consideration is the higher one (n. 214, 690.3–6). This was also the teaching of the first two Parisian questions; Eckhart is simply summariz-ing them once more here, this time in connection with universal verbaliza-tion: God is the speaker who, in speaking, wholly discloses himself.
If someone says that God commands, then his commanding is to be in-terpreted in light of his intellectual nature: his is not an external command-ing. He is not ordering about. His ordering consists in providing things with their form, dando rebus formas et naturas (n. 93, 559.5–6). But does Genesis not report that God ordered Adam not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge?
Indeed, but it has to be understood correctly: the prohibition of eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil means: God called attention to the fact that man should not seek his purpose in a place where good and evil
exist together. Man should not let himself be captured by sensuous pleasure;
he should not live according to his sensuous side, but rather according to reason and intellect. He should not stop permanently at anything created (nn. 98–99, 563.8–565.99). God’s ban on eating thus means: man is supposed to live according to the determination of his essence, his ratio and his intellect, and to want the pure good.
The intellect defines man (n. 113, 579.6). It makes him into the likeness of God and, indeed, as stated before, into God’s naked substance, whereas all other creatures represent God according to a specific perspective. The intellect is man’s connection to God; he does not receive his likeness of God from the outside; it is not granted to him retroactively. He is God- shaped according to his essence and does not seek God only via external nature (n. 194, 666.9–12).
The intellect is the highest in the soul, the supremum in anima (n. 139, 606.1).
Eckhart calls it the “root of life of the mind- soul,” radix vitae animae rationalis (n. 82, 543.13)—something that has a precise sense for readers of Dietrich of Freiberg: the intellect is more than one of the three mental faculties of the soul. Those grow out of the intellect. It is their substantially active root.20 A heart that does not beat constantly would no longer be a heart.
The intellect has priority over the will by virtue of the will’s indetermi-nacy (n. 83, 544–45). As the lowest in the order of intellects, it needs sensory experience in man (n. 113, 579.6–10; n. 138, 604–5). Eckhart praises the intel-lect hymnically: “Its habitus of the principles, which are naturally known to all, is the seed of the sciences. Through them, man is authorized and enabled to judge truth and falsity with his speculative intellect, and with his practical intellect he determines what is good and what is evil. The light of reason within us lets us share in the highest, divine light. It is the seed both of the virtues and of the sciences” (n. 200, 672.9–673.1).21 God wants us to know.
Eckhart praises knowledge, like Dante’s Odysseus, seated in hell (n. 113, 579.6–580.6). What Plato described as anamnesis, man recovers from the hidden part of his mind, from the abditum mentis, as it is called in Augustine (n. 217, 694.10–11). Relying on Aristotle and Averroës, Eckhart describes the intellect as unity of the knower and the known (n. 56, 524.8–11; n. 147, 616.4–617.5). It is his central subject—in the Commentary on John, in German sermon 48, and elsewhere.
The intellect is the root of freedom. In complete contrast to Luther, Eckhart emphasizes the power of man not to be defeated by temptation: in hominis potestate et libertate est non vinci in temptatione (n. 176, 647.3–4). The
goal of acting freely is to become a deified man, homo divinus (n. 27, 497.1–3, and many other places). Within the deified man, the just man and justice are one (n. 91, 555). For him, the Good itself is the goal and in itself is its own reward (n. 171, 641.9–14). He does not look for external reward (n. 131, 596.11–15; n. 171, 641.1–4). Punishments, too, are intrinsic to acting (n. 105, 571). The good life consists of a consequent inner orientation, of inner be-ing, not of doing. Action implements the way to being and life. God does not order any external act (n. 165, 634.11–12). This became one of the charges in the trial. And Eckhart knew anyway that he had critics. He declares that many people will oppose him, multi luctabuntur (n. 58, 526.4). These “many people” are other theologians, not simply his denouncers in Cologne, who emerged only later. Eckhart knew it and was outspoken about it: he was a philosopher of Christianity against his time, against the prevailing theology, from whose notice Eckhart’s otherness did not escape.
In Genesis, Eckhart found his philosophical theology, his theory of the intellect, and his ethics. He did not want to prove them with the Bible (n. 4, 454.6–10). He also used it to verify his conception of nature, of the first matter, and of the composition of the universe in the four stages that Proclus de-scribed: Deus, mens, anima, caelum (n. 212, 689:4–5; nn. 209–10, 684–85).