13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Study of Eckhart, January 26, 2009
This is a difficult book about a profound and difficult thinker who is more talked about, loosely, than closely read. Meister Eckhart (1260 -- 1327)was a Dominican theolgian widely regarded as one of the greatest Christian mystics. He was accused of heresy, and portions of his works were condemned after Eckhart's death by Pope John XXII in 1328. Eckhart wrote theological commentaries and treatises in Latin and gave sermons in the German vernacular which were transcribed by nuns and other groups of medieval religious women. Scholars have labored to determine the authenticity of the German sermons.
Eckhart's teachings are notoriously difficult to understand due to,of course,his subject matter, and to the paradoxical, obscure manner in which he expressed himself. In part Eckhart wrote in a provocative way to get his readers and hearers to think for themselves. His work has been used by people of highly diverse spiritual tendencies, including those influenced by Buddhism or other forms of Eastern thought, existentialism, idealism as well as, increasingly, traditional Catholicism. Unfortunately, it is much easier to refer to this revered thinker for a variety of doctrines than it is to read and understand him.
C.F. Kelley (1914 --2008) was a Benedictine monk at Downside Abbey in the United Kingdom who became a professor of philosophy at the University of California Berkeley. He began to study Eckhart in the 1930's and returned to him in earnest in the 1950s. In the early 1960s, Josef Quint, the scholar who prepared the standard edition of Eckhart's texts, together with the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain and Aldous Huxley asked Kelley to write a book on his understanding of Eckhart. Kelley's work, "Meister Eckhart on Divine Knowledge" was published in 1976 and reissued in 2008 in this edition by Dharma Cafe books with an introduction by its publisher, William Stranger.
Kelley's book is not an introduction or a watered-down study. Indeed, Kelley stresses the difficulty of Eckhart's thought and the difficulties that stand in the way of its understanding by the modern reader. Kelley finds philosophical understanding in the contemporary world increasingly externalized or abstracted. By this he means that it is focused on the human understanding or on the study of things, scientific or otherwise, separated from an understanding of God. The study is of things that are seemingly temporal, relative, and individual seen from the outside.
In studying Eckhart, for Kelley, a total redirection of effort must take place. Eckhart studies the divine and transcendent -- God in his "isness" which includes everything that temporally exists as individuals under the outlook of eternity. A difficult thought indeed. More, in approaching divine knowledge, one does not look in from the outside because divine knowledge is all-inclusive. Divine knowledge unlike human knowledge is nondual. There is no distinction between subject and object and no separation between God on the outside and a human being trying to think about God. The human mind approaching God becomes part of God although the converse claim (that God becomes part of man) is false. Kelley denies the attribution of "mystic" commonly given to Eckhart because a mystic attempts, as an initial matter to bridge the separation between God and himself through contemplation. For Kelley, Eckhart is a metaphysician who attempts to study Divine Knowlege principially, through intellection and the highest use of reason.
In Part I of his book, called "Preparatory Considerations", Kelley explains the difficulties surrounding the study of Eckhart, stressing that the study is not for the dilletante or for the philsophically uninformed. Kelley argues that Eckhart's thought is unsystematic but remains closer than ordinarily realized to the teachings of Aquinas. Kelley himself was a traditional Catholic thinker and he so sees Eckhart, arguing that the condemnation of 1329 was ill-founded and mistaken. Part II of the Book, "the Doctrine" consists of Kelley's exposition of six themes in Eckhart all of which stress the need to redirect one's perspective from individual things to transcendence to understand Eckhart and to understand life. Kelley explores the relationship between God and the human self, the word, the primal distinction between isness and thatness, which leads to the teaching of nonduality, the inversion (from individual things to God), the five veils of God, and finally Eckhart's teachings on detachment, which often are compared to Buddhist teachings.
Kelley's exposition is difficult in the extreme but rewarding and worth the effort. The teaching of nonduality is important to many current approaches to spirituality, and Kelley shows how this teaching fits in a Christian context. Kelley's Eckhart is nothing if not traditionally Catholic. Yet much can be learned by the reader not sharing Kelley's strong Catholic commitment.
Besides its inherent difficulty, there are some problems with Kelley's study. The first is in its polemically dogmatic character. Kelley is dismissive of views of Eckhart that differ from his own perspective. He is also unduly hostile to other forms of thought, whether secular thought or other forms of religious thought, and is all-too-eager to brush them aside as ill-informed or as showing no knowledge of philosophy. This dogmatism is troubling and casts some doubt on the narrowness of his reading of Eckhart.
The second problem with the book is probably also in part
Eckhart's. The spirituality of this book is deep and sincere, but it is also dizzying and abstract. Eckhart spoke and wrote, at a minimum, to move his listeners beyond platitude and convention. Following the spiritual path set out in Kelley's book, at any rate, is something for the very few. There is a passion for God and for ultimates that people may share in varying degrees, with those with a secular orientation feeling it very little.
Eckhart was criticized during his lifetime for making spirituality too difficult and too much beyond the ken of ordinary people. Whether or not that is a fair criticism of Eckhart, I think it is a fair criticism of Kelley. Many people attempt simple, good, and informed human lives, religious or secular, without striving for the confusingly clouded heights set out in this study.
Most people find the writers who can best speak to them. Those readers interested in exploring Eckhart for themselves may want to read the two-volume set in the "Classics of Western Spirituality" series published by Paulist Press or the studies by Bernard McGinn. Readers who want to know Eckhart yet more deeply may then turn to this important book by Kelley.
Robin Friedman
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Major Study of Eckhart Back in print!, January 6, 2009
DharmaCafé Books is a new imprint that has just done the world of mystical inquiry an enormous service: It has reprinted a much too scarce masterful study: C.F. Kelley's Meister Eckhart on Divine Knowledge, an astute, indispensable reenvisioning of how to approach one of the greatest and perpetually most controversial of Christian mystics, Meister Eckhart. Anyone interested becoming familiar with Christian non-dualism within its own theological and philosophical context must read this book.
Meister Eckhart is controversially one of the most challenging of Christian mystics. He was born at Hochheim in Thringen, Germany, in 1260, and entered the Dominican order when he was 15. Later he occupied several high ecclesial and administrative posts in the order in Germany. Eckhart also taught theology at the Universities of Paris and Cologne, when they were the intellectual centers of Western Christendom.
In 1326 Eckhart was formally charged with heresy by the archbishop of Cologne, Heinrich von Virneburg - who also prosecuted the Brethren of the Free Spirit in Cologne around this same time. The charge was never vetted in a hearing because of the Meister's death en route to the Vatican. The charges remained, some considered them proven. However Eckhart claimed that he may have erred in understanding which is reached by the intellect, but he was not a heretic which is an act of the will.
Probably his eminence would have protected him from formal condemnation, if he had lived to give a defense of his views, for others who put forward similar views were indeed burned along with their works. In 1329, shortly after Eckhart's death, Pope John XXII published a bull condemning 28 propositions from Eckhart's works. This bull has meant that his teachings have not been properly studied until they were made available in modern editions.
By the standards of medieval Christianity, Eckhart does push the understanding of the contemplative unity and presence of God in ways that tortures rhetoric and strains dogma. Eckhart stresses the unity of God: "God is pure oneness, being free of any accretive multiplicity of distinction even at a conceptual level." For Eckhart God is one to the degree that "There is neither distinction in God nor in the Persons of the Trinity according to the unity of their nature. The divine nature is one, and each Person is both One and the same One as God's nature." Furthermore "God is infinite in his simplicity and simple in his infinity. Therefore he is everywhere and is everywhere complete. He is everywhere on account of his infinity, and is everywhere complete on account of his simplicity. Only God flows into all things, their very essences. Nothing else flows into something else." So indeed one can say that God is in everything.
This pervasive divine presence endows our individual soul with the capacity to realize this truth. "God is in the innermost part of each and every thing, only in its innermost part." [Sermon LW XXIX] He said that the human soul was superior to the angels. And he spoke of passing beyond God to a `simple ground,' a `still desert,' without any distinctions, out of which all things are ever then and now created. "God . . . is the being of all beings. The One descends into everything and into each single thing, yet remaining the One that unites what is distinct. [Sermon LW XXIX]
Kelley's magnum opus, Meister Eckhart on Divine Knowledge gives an argumentative razor's edge to the open secret of mysticism: that divine knowledge is unique, total, universal, and completely without otherness in its simple oneness. Kelly's study profoundly reorients the way scholars and theologians read Eckhart. This reading cuts away deliberate misunderstandings of the preacher to offer illuminating insight to any student of Eckhart. This effect of Kelley's work is well witnessed in the perceptive new foreword to the work by William Stranger where he explains how reading this study helped him integrate the nondual teachings of his own guru, Adi Da Samaraj. Stranger also gives some valuable information about Kelley's monastic career and the seminal works by and about Eckhart that have appeared sense this work's first appearance in 1977. Stranger is the editor of DharmaCafe.com, an Internet magazine that that sponsors this important reprint as the inaugural volume in the DharmaCafe series. Meister Eckhart on Divine Knowledge deserves to be read by a new generation because of the clarity and authentic fidelity it gives to modern readers of the preacher. I also feel that Kelley's metaphysical writing style shows a disciplined and consistent clarity worth reading in its own right. Frankly there is no better guide to how to approach and begin to understand Eckhart. Meister Eckhart on Divine Knowledge has been too long out of print and for any mystic this work is worthy of close and repeated readings in its own right.
Kelley's attention to divine unity and simplicity as the linchpin of divine knowledge is too often dulled by contemporary discussions of mysticism. Kelley manages to demonstrate a shrewd understanding of principle knowledge by exploring the careful theological distinctions drawn by Meister Eckhart. "The sixth [and highest] stage comes when we are stripped of our own form and are transformed by God's eternity, becoming wholly oblivious to all transient and temporal life, drawn into and changed into an image of the divine, and have become God's son."
"Nothing is as opposed to God as time. . . There is no process of becoming in God, but only a present moment, that is a becoming without a becoming, a becoming-new without renewal. . . All that is in God is an eternal present- time without renewal." [Sermon DW 50]
"God alone truly is, and . . he is intellect or thought, and . . he is thought alone to which no other being is added." [Sermon LW XXIX]. Our modern drift would take thought as consciousness, which Kelly shows the classical underpinnings for this return to Augustine and Plotinus.
By putting the German mystic's aspirations within an Augustinian framework, Kelley alerts contemplative readers to better understand and accept deeper levels of divine mystery revealed in Divine knowledge. Without immediately quibbling over his bold and provocative phrasing meant to shock us out of our too comfortable theological sleep.
"Blessedness consists primarily in the fact that the soul sees God in herself . . . Only in God's knowledge does she become wholly still. There she knows nothing but essence and God." Eckhart talks at times of God being in all things, Eckhart does not strike the modern conceit about glorifying creation --- modern theologians who cite him as a precursor of `creation spirituality' misrepresent his intension. "When the soul enters the light that is pure, she falls so far from her own created somethingness into her nothingness that in this nothingness she can no longer return to that created somethingness by her own power." [Sermon DW1]
Kelley attempts no modernizations of the Meister, recognizing that Eckhart distinguishes the traditional necessity to detach oneself from all sensible things, from all creatures and from the self, before the inmost soul discovers the divine unity. The God that is in all things has little to do with created matter: it is soul and thought. "All creatures are the utterance of God. If my mouth speaks and declares God, so too does the being of a stone." [Sermon DW 53]
"Therefore it is in Oneness that God is found and they who would find God must themselves become One. . . And truly, if you are properly One, then you shall remain One in the midst of distinction, and the multifold will be One for you and shall not be able to impeded you in any way."
"All creatures are one with God. All things are contained in the One, by virtue of the fact that it is one, for all multiplicity is one, and is one thing, and is in and through the One. . . The One is not distinct from all things. Therefore all things in the fullness of being are in the One by virtue of its indistinction and unity. [Sermon LW XXIX]
"Between that person and God there is no distinction, and they are one. . . Their knowing is one with God's knowing, their activity with God's activity and their understanding with God's understanding." [Sermon DW 40]
When we know creatures in God, then that is called `a morning knowledge,' and in this way we see creatures without any distinctions, stripped of images and likeness in the Oneness that God God's self is. "When the soul is united with God, then it perfectly possesses in him all that is something. The soul forgets itself there, as it is in itself, and all things, knowing itself in God as divine, in so far as God is in it." [Sermon DW 58].
"When we turn away from ourselves and from all created things, to that extent we are united and sanctified in the soul's spark, which is untouched by either space or time. This spark is opposed to all creatures and desires nothing but God." [Sermon DW 48]
"If we are to dwell in him . . . we should take leave of ourselves and of all things and be attached to nothing external which acts upon the senses within." [Sermon DW 40]
Meister Eckhart on Divine Knowledge contributes toward a profound orthodox reconciliation of the Dominican's works. It also reforms mysticism by returning to the sources of revelation that is Divine Knowledge. The excitement this work generates by its precise and generous insights is only eclipsed by the unfathomable serenity of Divine knowledge itself.
Meister Eckhart on Divine Knowledge
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