' Meister Eckhart '...

The best-attested German work of this middle part of his life is the Book of Divine Consolation, dedicated to the Queen of Hungary. The other two treatises were The Nobleman and On Detachment.. The teachings of the mature Eckhart describe four stages of the union between the soul and God: dissimilarity, similarity, identity, breakthrough. At the outset, God is all, the creature is nothing; at the ultimate stage, “the soul is above God.”.. The driving power of this process is detachment. ............................................ 1. Dissimilarity: “All creatures are pure nothingness.. I do not say they are small or petty: they are pure nothingness.”.. Whereas God inherently possesses being, creatures do not possess being but receive it derivatively.. Outside God, there is pure nothingness.. “The being (of things) is God.” ..The “noble man” moves among things in detachment, knowing that they are nothing in themselves and yet aware that they are full of God—their being. ............................................... 2. Similarity: Man thus detached from the singular (individual things) and attached to the universal (Being) discovers himself to be an image of God.. Divine resemblance, an assimilation, then emerges: the Son, image of the Father, engenders himself within the detached soul.. As an image, “thou must be in Him and for Him, and not in thee and for thee.”.. ............................................. 3. Identity: Eckhart’s numerous statements on identity between God and the soul can be easily misunderstood.. He never has substantial identity in mind, but God’s operation and man’s becoming are considered as one.. God is no longer outside man, but he is perfectly interiorized.. Hence such statements: “The being and the nature of God are mine; Jesus enters the castle of the soul; the spark in the soul is beyond time and space; the soul’s light is uncreated and cannot be created, it takes possession of God with no mediation; the core of the soul and the core of God are one.”