Eckhart and the Word[1]

Joseph Milne

In Sermon 6 Eckhart asks, what does Jesus say when he enters the soul? The answer is “He says what he is. What is he, then? He is a Word of the Father. In this same Word the father speaks Himself, all the divine nature and all that God is, just as He knows it, and he knows it as it is.”[2]

Eckhart is saying that Jesus is the Word of God speaking Himself. God utters Himself and that utterance is the Word, the Christ. This speaking Himself in the soul is the birth of Christ in the soul. The Word of God is not a message or a teaching, it is God uttering Himself as He is in Himself and to Himself, as He knows Himself. This is what the Word is.

Now, to our modern ears this sounds like a mystical metaphor, a simile. And because we might suppose it is a metaphor we unwittingly want to translate it, or try to get to what the metaphor is meaning to convey. Such a move, I wish to suggest, will move away from the meaning and not towards it. I suggest that Eckhart is not using a metaphor or simile, but speaking plainly. The Word is God uttering Himself as He is in Himself. He is not speaking about Himself, but speaking Himself. When the soul has left all images, all merchandising, and recedes to her inmost ground, becoming nothing, then the Word that is God is uttered there. That is what Eckhart is saying.

The question I wish to pursue is: What does this mean if taken completely literally? If I may be permitted an odd expression, what does this mean if we take it literally mystically? After all, for Eckhart the mystical is that which actually and really is.

I suggest, then, that those who heard Eckhart saying these things about the Word did not think he spoke metaphorically. The Word was not for them something that stood for something else, or represented something else. For Eckhart and for Christians till his time, the Word had a different ontological status than we suppose it has in our age. Then, speaking and being were one and the same.

Let me try to make this as clear as possible. In our time the “word” is taken to be a sign, an arbitrary representation standing for something else. As many of us will know, there is a huge literature based upon this notion of the word, including a philosophical literature. So it is now generally taken as self-evident that the word is merely a sign, and that signs are arbitrary and could easily be changed for other signs. Hence there is assumed to be no real connection between the word and the thing spoken in the word. There are scholars and philosophers who are quite aware that this is not the ancient or traditional understanding of the word, but they assume the ancient way of understanding the word was naive. I wish to suggest the exact opposite to this. It is the modern notion of the word that is naïve, and this despite the enormously clever ways in which it is elaborated.

Our difficulty is that it has become such a strong habit of thinking to assume the word is merely an arbitrary sign that we cannot easily connect with the ancient way of understanding it. Indeed, it may look naïve to us because of our habit of thought. This is because we do not see what lies behind it which was taken for granted by the ancients. There is a fundamental difference between ancient and modern thinking that lies right at the root of all this. This is so fundamental that it really needs to be given a great deal of attention by those of us who are drawn to the mysticism of Eckhart, or to mysticism generally. This difference is at once very simple and yet very, very subtle. It is this: the modern mind conceives reality in the opposite way to that of the ancients. By this I mean that for the ancient mind – that is to say the biblical mind and the Presocratic mind right through till after the Renaissance – realty was seen as grounded in the ineffable, in God, in the One, in the Absolute, in the eternally Real, in the uncreated, the infinite, the transcendent. Further, this ineffable was understood to be the real presence or essence of all the created order, and that which is created was thereby “less real” than the ground of its existence. In other words, the created order is the appearance, transitory in nature, and the ineffable the truly real. This is precisely the reverse of our modern way of thinking. The modern conception of reality is materialist, meaning that the sensory and empirical realm is taken as the real. Consequently the subtler realms, such as mind, consciousness, being, essence, spirit and even God, are taken to appendages or accidents to the real. How often do we hear it said that even human consciousness is an epiphenomenona? Or that “thought” is just chemical activity? Hence God is reduced to a mere concept that we may optionally believe in, but for which there is no empirical evidence. How can the ground of our being be an object of inference? This is absurd. Nevertheless it is the prevailing way of thinking. It is the way of thinking which follows from what I term the ontological inversion which took place in Western thought in the 17th and 18th centuries – articulated through Descartes and Kant, but already received in the fabric of thinking.

Essentially, what I am saying, and what I mean by the ontological inversion, is that modern thinking has turned the hierarchy of reality on its head. This turning over of the structure of reality takes as real that which the ancients regarded as appearance, and as appearance that which the ancients regarded as real. It takes as the sign that which is the thing, and as the thing that which is the sign. A further consequence follows upon this. There can be no communion with the real, or what is falsely taken to be the real. That is to say, with the turning over of the structure of reality there follows an almost complete alienation from the actual presence of all that is. Hence there arises, for the first time, a dualism between Creator and created, which is the mark of our age.

This is a state of affairs, not a doctrine. The problem is not one of belief or conviction, but of our orientation to all that is. It is our actual manner or being disposed to reality we are talking about here, not a theory about it. The difficulty here is that we are actually disposed toward reality in one way, but the whole edifice of modern thinking conceals it in a wrong notion. To put that in a less radical way, we intuitively know we are connected to all that is, united with the real, but cannot think it. We have no discourse that can articulate it. Such a discourse is precluded in advance by the hidden supposition that reality is present in a manner it is not present. To put that back into radical terms again – my preferred terms – we think non-religiously about reality, and in so doing contradict our own human nature. Instead of communing with all that is by essence to essence, which is what Aquinas understands as knowing things, we displace that act of being with an abstraction of reality, with what the Gospels call “bearing false witness”. The implication of this is that the truly religious manner of thinking is completely discontinuous with this modern mode of thinking, because in the religious mode of thinking God or the ineffable is the first presence, the primary presence that presences all else. It presences the soul to itself and everything to everything. The poets and mystics all think that way and try to communicate this to us, not as a concept to be adopted or discarded, but as an invitation to come to it, to enter into the immediacy of God who is the immediacy of our own very being. Or, as Eckhart puts it in this same sermon, “Then God is known by God in the soul; with this Wisdom she knows herself and all things, and this same Wisdom knows her with itself.”[3] This Wisdom that Eckhart is speaking of is the Word. This is what the Word is.

It is clear that this coming into the unmediated presence of God, and thus to the essence of the soul made wholly present to itself, cannot be some kind of event added on to reality like an appendage. That relegates the ground of being to a place outside reality. Eckhart is speaking about what is inmost to reality, not what lies above it or below it in some abstracted region which we may imagine exists or not. It is the non-religious mode of thought that conceives the ground of being in that way. Nevertheless, the manner in which we are generally educated to think entices us to convert into a concept this unmediated presencing of being instead of going towards it as an act of being. We may devise a most beautiful definition of wisdom, but what use is that if we remain unwise? Or as Plato says in the Republic finally, only the just man knows the nature of justice. Again, as Eckhart says in his Commentary on John “Thus justice is known to itself alone and to the just man who has been taken up by justice.”[4] Wisdom and Justice are instances of unmediated presence. They are not derived from some other thing, but either present as acts or absent. No concept of Wisdom or Justice is adequate to them. So likewise, no concept of God is adequate to God. This is not due to a limit of our conceiving minds, but rather to looking for a conceptual image instead of turning to the actual presence which ontologically precedes the mind, to that which brings mind into being, to its own ground in the Creator. That which reveals the mind or the soul to itself is what Eckhart calls the Word, for the Word is the self-disclosing, the utterance, of all that is as it is in itself. Hence, when Jesus enters the soul he speaks what he is. The Word first and primarily says itself. The Word is not a sign. But a conceptual image is precisely a sign rather than presence.

There is nothing new or novel in what Eckhart is saying in this sermon about the Word. His understanding of the Word goes all the way back to the Gospels, obviously, but also further back to the Greek meaning of logos. The Greek logos is the intelligence of all that is disclosed. It is the saying of things, the uncovering of essence, and our human speech is understood to arise directly from this as the articulation of reality. The word is the act of disclosing saying. It is not the noise of the voice or letters of the alphabet. These are but the outer appearance, the semiotic or audible, from which nothing of the origin of utterance can be derived. The word or logos is not in the dictionary, because the listing in a dictionary is not the speaking or utterance of words, only their sediments.

Once again, we have to watch for the ontological inversion. Human language comes from the Word, not the other way about. This is the Greek and Medieval understanding of language. The notion of human language is not metaphorically projected onto Christ the Word. The Word is prior to symbol or metaphor because the Word is the same as itself, while the symbol or metaphor is derivative and not identical to that which it represents. To come to the question of human language we have to follow the Greek understanding of the logos as that which comes into saying. What calls our speaking into being? What is it that prompts us to speak at all? What is the aim of all our human speaking? The ancient philosophical answer is that it is the truth of things that calls to be spoken, and the speaking of the truth of things is the logos, the disclosure of essence. Our speaking at any moment is our disposition toward truth. This is what logos is. Our speaking reveals our disposition towards truth whether or not we know it. Our speaking springs straight from our condition of being and embodies that. This is why sophistry and lying and bearing false witness or breaking one’s word are such offences, for each of these bring being and speaking into a false relation, or indeed falsifies them both. We cannot lie or break our word without being false to ourselves and false to the world. This is something we all know perfectly well, yet our modern theories of language do not touch on it but take account only of the outer sediment of language, divorcing it from being. Unless we ask concerning the arising of all speaking we do not touch upon the question of language or the Word at all. Just as the knowledge of justice exists only in justice itself, so likewise the knowledge of language is only in language itself. So the question of human language is addressed only when we are taken up in speaking what the word itself speaks.

It is often said that we can say nothing true of God because language is limited. This idea runs quite counter to the ancient and theological understanding of language. In the Gospels Jesus never asserts there are things he cannot say, but often he asserts there are things those he is addressing cannot hear – “they have ears, but hear not”. Our relation to the Word is grounded in our capacity to hear, in listening, prior to our saying. And what we can say likewise is grounded in what we can hear. We all know that the original desert fathers, the predecessors of our monasteries, contemplated the words of the Gospels, often just a single verse and sometimes that verse for many months. This contemplation is a waiting to hear. We also know that the great poets heard their verses from the Muses in an inspired state, a state Plato calls divine frenzy in which the poet knows things which he does not know in the ordinary state or when he returns to the ordinary state. Or again there are the Prophets who spoke words at the command of the spirit. The words of the poets and the prophets have shaped civilisation. In all of this there is no limitation of language but rather a call to a higher order of hearing, an order of hearing that hears the word and so can speak it. These poets and prophets are those who answer the call to speak in the highest human sense.

When the theologians say that no description or appellation of God is adequate to God as He is, they are not saying this because they hold language to be limited. They are saying it because such talk is talk about God, and because it is only talk about God, it does not bring God to presence. It is what Eckhart calls analogy, which is representation of something which derives from that thing but does not participate in it. This is hardly surprising, since talk about anything at all does not bring it to presence. There can be no adequate description of anything at all, not even of this room, let alone of the Divine or the ineffable. Such talk cannot bring to presence because it is not intending to do so. It intends to describe or to define, which is not to make present. No description or definition of anything at all discloses its essence. This has always been understood in Western philosophy and theology. The problem we run into arises only in supposing that description and definition are the same as knowing. But to know means to be in communion with essence. That is the traditional understanding of the meaning of knowing or gnosis which we find from the earliest Greek thinkers to the Renaissance. In this sermon of Eckhart he says that “to know and to be known by God are the same”.

Aquinas says that the act of knowing is receiving the form of the thing known into the mind. Receiving the form is the act of knowing. The form is the created essence in the mind of God. God forms all that is, and the mind is informed by the forms, indeed “formed” by them. This is the meaning of the word “inform” and its derivative “information”. Thus human knowing, traditionally understood, is a participation in God’s knowing, for God’s knowing is the actual existence of the thing in itself. This is very far from modern theories of epistemology which are based upon inference from appearances and hold, since Kant, that we cannot know the essences of things. This view is a consequence of the ontological inversion I mentioned before. It works fine for empirical investigation but cannot be applied to metaphysics or theology, and even less to the knowledge of God. God is not an empirical object. But neither, of course, are being or essence or truth or goodness or love. It is therefore naïve to suppose that because these things cannot be the objects of empirical enquiry that they cannot be known or even that they do not exist. For whatever is available to empirical enquiry is necessarily held outside being, as an object over against an observer. We cannot place the ground of our being out there as an empirical object any more than we can gaze into our own eyes.

Empirical knowing is never ontological knowing, never the reception of the essence of that which is known. It is absolutely foundational to the Medieval theory of knowledge, or epistemology, that God is immediately present to the soul, and the soul is immediately present to itself. There cannot be mediated knowledge of the ground of the soul’s presence to itself, for its self-presence is its being, and its being is God’s act of knowing it into being. Thus the question “Do you believe we have souls?” is an absurd question. It comes, once again, from the ontological inversion and its dualism of observer/object, and the consequent assumption that essence is just an idea. What does the person who asks this absurd question suppose they are addressing if not the capacity to know? They might just as well ask “Do you believe we have ears?” And what do they suppose asks the question?

This kind of displacement of that which is revealed to itself in itself is very common in our modern thinking and follows as a consequence of turning over the traditional understanding of the order of reality. It alienates everything from its ground in our thinking about things and misdirects where we turn our gaze to enquire about their natures. Instead of knowledge arising through reception of the forms of things into the intellect, we suppose thought imposes its structures upon things. Hence the proliferation of new theories and paradigms. Let me tell you of an incident which illustrates this. We were talking with a student of economics and he proposed a new theory about the market. None of us were convinced and demanded some evidence to support his theory. The student drew a diagram of his theory and said “there you are.” To our astonishment he actually took his diagrammatic representation to be a proof of his theory. This kind of failure to distinguish between illustration and proof is not so uncommon – well, at least among economists who appear to have a special aptitude for it! But consider, this sort of dislocation between theory and reality is precisely the same as the present notion of the dislocation between the Word and reality and, I would suggest, has its root precisely there. We may formulate this into a principle: the way in which we each dispose ourselves towards language is the ground of how we dispose ourselves to reality. The two dispositions are parallel. We are, literally, “sentenced” by our sentences. Our word is our bond. If we consider language to be nothing more than invented arbitrary signs and imagine we can manipulate these at our will, then we shall consider reality in the same way. If we consider the names of things merely as semiotic abstractions, then we shall consider the knowledge of things to be merely abstractions. It sounds extraordinary when brought to our notice like this, but it is common. The person who thinks the sun has no name of its own is the same person who says the sun is just energy. To think of the sun as nameless and as nothing more than the play of immense forces of energy is to think with no communion with the sun at all. This is alienation. It takes no account of the sun disclosing itself. It offers no honour to the sun, and so the sun can be considered a place to dump nuclear waste. Thus the ancient Greeks who saw in the sun a manifestation of Apollo, the god of law, music and medicine, seems nonsense to such a manner of thinking and naming.

Consider, what does the Psalmist mean when he looks at the heavens and says, “O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth”? (Psalm 8) He sees the creation as disclosing the name of God. What order of seeing is this? And to whom is it addressed? The Psalmist speaks to God. What moves him to speak thus? It is the wonder at what the creation discloses. This wonder rises to communion with the creation and with the creator Who’s name shines forth in all things. This is to see the logos, the Word, the name, and out of that seeing comes a hymn in response. This manner of seeing and speaking could not be further from that in which says the sun is just energy. The orientation towards reality is totally different and the speaking is likewise totally different. In one the whole of reality is living and the language also living and adoratory, while in the other both the sun and the language are dead and dishonouring. In one the speech is addressed to the creator, in the other there really is no addressee. Where language falls into alienated abstraction it speaks to nobody, or to some listener that is just an abstraction too. It is in every way non-communion.

It would be quite wrong, however, to suppose that only one of these ways of seeing and speaking seeks the truth of things. The mind of man is naturally in quest of truth. The problem lies in the manner in which the seeker orients the mind towards truth. In one case the mind seeks out an abstraction, in the other the essence. But the mind that seeks out an abstraction supposes, in a certain sense, that the abstraction is an essence. It is supposed that the distillation of the sun down to energy is to locate what is essential of the sun. But actually the energy of the sun is only a property of the sun, and a property which really conveys very little about the sun, and nothing at all about the relation of the sun to all that is. It is a false reduction. The essence of a thing, on the other hand, is its word or principle or reason or Idea which is itself in itself. This is what the mind actually seeks to know, and this is what the mind is receptive to by nature. In his commentary on Genesis Eckhart says:

. . . the reason of things is a principle in such a way that it does not have to look to an exterior cause, but which looks within to essence alone. Therefore, the metaphysician who considers the entity of things proves nothing through exterior causes, that is, efficient and final causes. This is the principle, namely the ideal reason, in which God created all things, without looking to anything outside himself.[5]

What is it, then, that can know essence in this manner? Can something inferior to essence know essence? Clearly not. What has equality, then, in human nature with essence? It must be human essence itself. What, then, in human essence itself is receptive to the essence of things? The traditional answer is the Intellect, which in its highest sense is sometimes called Angelic Mind by Aquinas. The Intellect is that principle in man which is receptive to all that is in its essence, and this is because, as Eckhart says, Intellect is the principle of the whole of nature.[6] In other words, intellect is universal and that in which the essence of all things dwell. Intellect is the realm, so to speak, of the reality of all that is. Primordially it is the mind of God in which all things are generated, and secondarily it is the mind of humanity in which all that is generated is received. It is this receptivity of the human Intellect which is called in man the Image of God. Therefore the intellectual act of knowing is a participation in God’s knowing. Thus, to know things in their essence is not only to know them essentially, but also to know them as God knows them.[7] This act of God’s knowing is the Word, the logos, the Christ, through whom all things come into being and dwell in their essential being, and in dwelling in their essential being they dwell in full communion with themselves and with God.

This is the metaphysical manner of knowing as understood by Eckhart and by the philosophers until it was lost in the Enlightenment. It is only in the light of this manner of knowing that the famous saying of Heraclitus “being and thought are the same” makes sense. Likewise, it is only in the light of this manner of knowing that Plato’s Ideas or Ideal Forms makes sense. And again, it is only in the light of this manner of knowing that Philo’s understanding of the logos as the reason or principle of all things makes sense. And yet again, it is only in the light of this manner of knowing that the Greek understanding of gnosis as union with the known makes sense. It is but a small step to see all this disclosed in the Christ the Word. Metaphysically – if not even mystically – the coming of Christ to save the world is the saving act that brings all things back to the knowledge of their essences in the mind of God.

It is a great stumbling block in our time to see that the knowledge of created things and the knowledge of God belong together. Practically all the terms of metaphysics, like being, essence, truth, intellect, word, principle, knowledge, thought and so on, have degenerated into remote shadows of their real meanings, and the result is that there is no discourse of knowledge which is present only through communion with reality, that is, no epistemology of communion. This degeneration of the such words is reinforced by the notion that words themselves have no essence in the nature of things. All this is due to what I have called the ontological inversion, in which the “real” is falsely attributed to reductive abstraction of matter rather than to essence. And so it follows inevitably that language itself becomes thought of as mere abstract labelling of abstractions. We relate to language in precisely the same way as we relate to essence. And if we do not relate to essence, neither do we hear language, because language is the intellects disclosing of the essence of things. The word and the thing are the same. The word belongs to the thing as its very essence. Thus in Genesis when God brought Adam before all the creatures to name them he was giving to Adam, which is to say to mankind, the knowledge of the essences of all created things, literally and mystically.

It is often said that we employ language and words to express our thoughts, and that thought is prior to language. This is a good example of the ontological inversion. The ancient philosophers and the Schoolmen hold that the reverse is true. In a rather obscure passage in Sermon 67 Eckhart says:

There is one uttered word: That is the angel, man and the creatures. There is another word, thought but unuttered, through which it can come that I imagine something. There is yet another word, unuttered and unthought, which never comes forth but is rather eternally in Him [God the Father] who speaks it: it is evermore in conception in the Father who speaks it, remaining within.[8]

It is clear from this passage that the originary word is the word eternally unuttered in the Father and which never comes forth but abides eternally in itself, as spoken only within the Father. It is the completely spiritual word or the word in itself. After this there is the word in the intellect by which a concept is made present to the mind and can be looked upon inwardly but remains unuttered, such as when the mind considers a principle or truth and know something of that word. And lastly there is the uttered word which is all the creatures, the created word. In each of these three it is clear that Eckhart understands the word as the essence, prior to thought and prior to utterance. The unthought and unuttered word in the Father is Christ, the word in the intellect is that which comes forth as thought, and finally the word uttered which manifests in all the creatures.

It is clear from this that we moderns think of language the other way about and suppose that our words derive from out of our thoughts and try to replicate our thoughts in signs. Apart from the obvious inversion, it is also clear that we suppose our thoughts arise out of themselves, or are prompted by perceptions, and are translated into words. And so we think of the uttered words as language. That is the whole difficulty. This is the presupposition of most linguistic theory, which takes the sediments of the uttered words and cannot discern the connection between them and the things they speak. But to attempt to understand the nature of the word from its outer utterance is as absurd as to try to find the whence and where a man is travelling by examining his feet. The supposition that the nature of language can be understood by the outer signs of itself has led to the notion that language is merely the outer signs of itself. Thus the threefold unity between word, thought and utterance is broken.

The ancient philosophers and mystics understood that the question of language is a metaphysical question. That is to say, the most primal presence of the word is the presence of truth to itself, truth in knowledge of itself, knowledge in knowledge of itself, the word which Eckhart says is spoken only within the Father. At this level the word is the Father being present to Himself utterly, so utterly that His presence to Himself is Himself. The coming forth of this Word is the Son, who is called the Word because He is the Father now uttering Himself. And so, Eckhart says, when Christ speaks in the soul that has become free of every image or relation, He speaks Himself. At this moment the soul becomes at once a son of God and born to itself, born to itself in the sense that becomes itself and knows itself as it is. Thus the Word is most primordially the act of self-knowing, the act in which the knowing and the being are identical, for being, in the most absolute sense, is the same as knowing being. Being is being known to being. This is its “isness”, so to speak. Thus the metaphysical principle: that which lies furthest from self-knowing lies furthest from being. It has the least capacity to speak itself, which is to say, the least capacity to generate itself.

So the Word, Being and self-knowing belong all together. In God they are identical. But they are the source and ground of all our human knowing. Man, it has often been said, is that being who desires the knowledge of things. To put that another way, man is that being who reflects on all that is. This capacity to reflect is rooted in the capacity first to self-reflect. This capacity to self-reflect is the act of the word, the capacity of man to utter himself within himself. This is an aspect of man made in the image of God. And because man has this capacity to utter himself within himself, so he has the capacity to reflect upon all things and discern their word and name all the creatures before God. God, through the Word, utters all the creatures into being, and man, through his receptive intellect, hears all the creatures uttered into being. This hearing the creatures uttered into being is knowing their Idea, their word, in the mind of God.

Thus presence, self-presencing and being-present-before are all acts of the Word, and therefore the origin of all saying and speaking. This is the metaphysical and mystical key to language. Individually each of us may hear the word of things limitedly, and therefore speak inadequately, but this limit is not a limit of the Word or of language. So we must be very wary when it is said that the truth about God is unutterable. All that is, including our language, is the utterance of God or comes into being through the utterance of God. To put this in completely mystical terms, there is no knowing of anything separately from God. That is why the question of knowledge, of epistemology, is ultimately a religious question. If we want to ask it non-religiously, then we never really attain to asking it at all.

I wanted in this talk to touch on the question of negative theology, but there is not time. I will therefore say only this in closing. When we struggle to find adequate descriptions of God we finally have to renounce them not because language has no power to speak the truth of God, but because this effort to describe God is really an attempt to give to God another name than His own being. God is only truthfully uttered by Himself, and this utterance is the Son, the Word Himself speaking Himself.

[1] The theme of this paper arose through a discussion with Peter Talbot Willcox at the previous Eckhart conference in 2000. I therefore dedicate it to his memory.

[2] M. O’C Walshe, Meister Eckhart: Sermons & Treatises, Vol. I, Longmead 1989, p. 59.

[3] M. O’C Walshe, Meister Eckhart: Sermons & Treatises, Vol. I, Longmead 1989, p. 61.

[4] E. Colledge & B. McGinn, Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defence, London 1981, p. 127.

[5] E. Colledge & B. McGinn, Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defence, London 1981, p. 83.

[6] Ibid. p. 84.

[7] When speaking of our human knowing of the essence of things we do not mean exhaustive knowing, we mean coming into the proximity of essence or communing with essence. Exhaustive knowing would be finite knowing, knowing with a limit. According to Aquinas all things are oriented toward a knowing mind, toward being known fully, but it is only the mind of God that knows them fully as He knows them into being. The human Intellect, which knows them by receptivity but not by creating, knows finitely or distinctly at any moment and so never exhausts what is potentially knowable of essence. This is not so much due to a limit of Intellect as to the inexhaustibility of being and essence. Eckhart seems to take a step beyond Aquinas in his understanding of the soul being taken up through the Word into God’s knowing, for it is only God’s knowing that is knowing as such. This indicates that the primordial orientation of the mind is towards the knowledge of God, not towards created things, and only when the mind rests finally in the knowledge of God may it truly know itself and all things, but then as God knows them. Thus the mind seeks first what is ultimate and secondarily what is created, not the other way around. To put that another way, mystical knowledge is the measure of knowing as such. Hence there is no step from empirical or inferential knowledge to knowledge of essence. On the contrary, it is only because the mind has a pre-intuition of essence that it can infer from the attributes and qualities of created or finite things among themselves. Finite knowing is dependent upon infinite knowing, not the reverse, since finitude is itself derivative of the infinite.

[8] M. O’C Walshe, Meister Eckhart: Sermons & Treatises, Vol. II, Longmead 1989, p. 155.