It took more than three hundred years for the name of Christ to mean anything to the peoples of the Mediterranean. It took about a thousand years for the whole West to be permeated by it. When Confucius died, only a few people mourned. His cult began three hundred years after his death. Five hundred years passed before the first temple was built in his honor. Today, prayers are addressed to Confucius as the “perfect holy man.” It also took six hundred years over the grave of the Master Eckhart before the European soul could understand him. But today, a revelation seems to be spreading among people like the light of dawn, as if the time had come for him too, the apostle of European Christianity, the holy and blessed teacher.
Every creature pursues a goal in its life, even if it is unknown to it. The human soul also has a destiny, namely to reach a pure knowledge of itself and a consciousness of God. But this soul is scattered and spread out in the world of the senses, space and time. The senses are active in it and weaken – initially – the power of spiritual concentration. Therefore, the prerequisite of the inner functions is the withdrawal of all external forces, the elimination of all images and allegories.
These inner functions have as their goal the attraction of heaven near man, as our Lord Jesus Christ is said to have declared and demanded of the strong of the soul. Thus this effort of the divine mystic requires the exclusion of the world as an idea, in order to become, where possible, conscious, as a pure subject of the metaphysical essence that lives within us. Since this is not entirely possible, the idea of God is created as a new object of this soul, in order that it may finally announce the identical value of soul and God.
However, this act is possible only under the condition of spiritual freedom from all dogmas, churches, Patriarchs and Popes. Master Eckart, the modest Dominican priest, does not hesitate to proclaim joyfully and openly this fundamental dogma of the truly Indo-European nature. During a long life, he speaks of the light of the soul as unoriginate and uncreated, and preaches that God has placed the soul in free self-determination, so that he desires nothing from it beyond its free will, nor expects from it what it does not desire. He continues, opposing the doctrine of conventional faith, by declaring that there are three things that prove the nobility of the soul. The first relates to the glory of creation (heaven), the second to its powerful power, and the third to the fruitfulness of its works. Before every going out into the world, the soul must be conscious of its own beauty. However, the inner work of acquiring the kingdom of heaven can only be perfected through freedom.
“The soul will not bear fruit until you have completed your work, and neither God nor you yourselves will abandon it if you have brought it purely yours into the world. Otherwise, you will have no peace and will not taste fruit. And even then, the situation is still quite disturbing because it is born of a soul that is connected to the outside world, that is, a soul whose missions and duties are controlled by external factors, not of a soul born in freedom.”
If the question arises as to why God became man, then the “heretic” Eckhart answers: So that we miserable sinners could record a surplus of good works. He also says:
“I answer, then, that this is so because God can be born in the human soul, ……in which follows a joyful belief: The soul in which God is to be born must have abandoned time, and time having abandoned it, must fly upward and stand completely strong in the kingdom of God. This is neither wide nor broad, but it is the Width and the Latitude. There the soul recognizes all things and recognizes them in their fullness. Whatever the teachers write about how wide heaven is, I say on the contrary that the smallest power that exists in my soul is wider than all the expenses of heaven!”
The current version of mysticism repeatedly emphasizes only the abandonment of self, the rejection of self by surrendering it to God, and sees in this abandonment the essence of mystical experience. This view is understandable when one knows that it comes from the late mysticism adulterated by papal Rome and that it stems from the apparently indissoluble assumption that the self and God are different in their essence. But anyone who has understood Eckhart will have no difficulty in seeing that his abandonment is in reality the highest self-consciousness, which, however, cannot be recognized in this world except through a contrast in time and space. The doctrine of the freedom of the soul is a doctrine of freedom from God. The doctrine of dissociation marks the absolute rejection of the Old Testament and its ideas, together with the sickly sweet pseudo-mysticism of later times.
These words about the soul’s capacity for unlimited expansion are indeed a true mystical experience. At the same time, they signify the philosophical recognition of the ideality of space, time, and causality, which Eckhart also supports in other passages, demonstrating and teaching in even more lucid and attractive language than Immanuel Kant was able to do four hundred years later (who was heavily burdened with the natural sciences and philosophical scholasticism).
The sky is pure and with unperturbed clarity. It is touched neither by time nor by space. Nothing material has its place in it, and it is also not included in time. Its transformation occurs with incredible speed. Its course is timeless itself, but from its course comes time. Nothing prevents the soul from knowing God so much as time and space. Thus, if the soul is to perceive God at all, then it perceives Him beyond and above space. If the eye is to seek and recognize by observing a particular color, then it must first be freed from all colors. If the soul is to see God, then it must have nothing in common with non-existence. God, as the positive expression of religious man, is in philosophical terms “being in itself.” He is conceived by the deepest contemplation, not merely as something separate from impulse and image (as a result of which all the symbolism of nature is destroyed).
The mystic is increasingly freed from the bonds of the material world. He recognizes that the impulsive aspects of our existence, such as pleasure and power or even so-called good works, are not necessary for the well-being of the soul. The more he transcends earthly bonds, the greater, richer, and more divine he feels himself to be inwardly. He discovers a purely spiritual power and feels that his soul represents a center of power with which nothing can be compared. This freedom and peace of the soul in the face of everything, even before God, reveals the deepest depths to which we can follow the Indo-European concepts of Honor and Freedom. It is this powerful fortress of the soul, this spark of which Master Eckhart speaks again and again with awe and admiration, and it represents the innermost, the most sensitive and yet the strongest essence of our race and culture. Master Eckhart does not give a name to this innermost essence, since the pure subject of perception and will must be anonymous, without substance and separate from all forms of time and space. However, today we can dare to describe this spark as a metaphysical allegory of the ideas of Honor and Freedom. After all, Honor and Freedom are not external qualities but spiritual substances, independent of time and space, which form the fortress from which true will and reason emerge and make their forays into the world.
From the unerring consciousness of the freedom of a noble man and a noble soul, arises the condemnation of the so-called “theoretical” “good works.” These are not magic tricks such as those taught by Catholic Rome, nor credit bestowed upon us by Yahweh, but simply a means of binding the impulsive world of the senses. A bridle, as Master Eckhart teaches, must be put on the external man to prevent him from escaping from himself! A man must perform pious exercises, not merely to do something good for himself, but because thus he honors the truth. If a man finds himself given over to true inwardness, preaches the German missionary, then he boldly lets all externality fall, even if it is exercises to which he could bind himself by oath, from which neither Pope nor Bishop could grant absolution! For no one can take away an oath that has been given to God. As far as we know, this is the only passage in which Master Eckart speaks openly and aggressively against the Pope. But in this way he shows the complete discredit and self-willed rejection of the fundamental laws of the Roman Catholic Church.
This human greatness, which elevates everything, finds its hostile counterpart in priestly arrogance. Characteristically indicative of this era of Western Christianity is the attitude of one of the greatest religious orators of the 13th century, the lay preacher Brother Berthold von Regensburg, (who was in other respects a very interesting, learned, modest and merciful man). He taught that if he saw the Virgin Mary next to the heavenly hosts and a priest also present, then he would give honor to the latter rather than to the former. “If a priest were to come to where our Beloved Lady, the Virgin Mary and all the heavenly host were sitting, we would all stand up straight before the priest.” And he continues: “Whoever truly receives the consecration as a priest has a power that reaches so far that the Emperor and the King never had such great power. Whoever submits to the authority of the priest—even if he has committed a great sin—then the priest has the power to immediately close hell for him and open heaven for him.”
What else does the well-intentioned but deluded devoted preacher firmly believe and foolishly transmit, other than the most absolute Middle Eastern superstitious and demonological magic, by which the majority of religiously inclined “unresearching” and ultimately unthinking contemporary believers have unfortunately been surrounded?
According to Master Eckhart, the noble soul of a person who turns towards the eternal is the representative of God on earth and not the Church, the Bishop or the Pope. “No one here on earth has the right to bind me or to set me free – let alone the right to do this as the alleged representative of God.” These words, which any pious Indo-European could proclaim as his own creed, are naturally born of a completely different essence from the philosophy of the “doctor of the soul” that Rome has invented for its own, materialistic, speculative and authoritarian use. The doctrines of the Roman Catholic church all pursue only one goal: to subordinate humanity to the caste of Roman priests and to eradicate all true nobility of soul.
In his sermon on the first epistle of John (IV,9 “If I did not love, I would not know God; because God is love”), one of the seven catholic epistles of the New Testament [which are included in the “Canon of the New Testament” (the collection of sacred and inspired books) and are called “catholic” because they are addressed not to a specific person or circle of recipients but because their content refers to the entire Church as a whole (catholic=all)], Master Eckart says: “I declare categorically that as long as you do your works for the sake of heaven, God, or for your own blessing, that is, externally, then you are not truly on the right path. Whoever imagines that by contemplation, devotion, ecstatic feelings and gross flattery he has more contact with God than in the hearth or in the cowshed, does the same thing as one who takes God as an image, wraps a cloak around his head and pushes him under a bench. If someone were to ask an honest man who is working on solid foundations: Why do you perform your works? Then if he were speaking correctly, he would simply say: I perform them to get results!
The teaching about the “virtue of works,” about the proper “godly works,” is considered by the Master Eckart as a real whisper from the devil in man’s ear, and, regarding prayer, he makes a popular appeal: “My people often say: Pray to God for us! Then I think: Why do you go out? Why don’t you stay with yourself and search in your own treasure? In reality, you carry all reality within you according to your nature. So, we must remain in ourselves – as the creatures we really are – and possess all our own reality, without mediation and distraction from the real blessing, and may God help us to do this.”
Eckart is therefore a priest who would like to see the priesthood abolished; who would like to adapt his entire activity exclusively to the liberation of the path for the man who seeks. Who is considered by him as essentially equal and of equal origin; who will not enslave the soul by convincing it into eternal dependence on the Pope and the Church, but who wishes to bring to consciousness its dormant beauty, its nobility and freedom, that is, he wishes to awaken the awareness of honor. For, in the final analysis, honor is nothing other than the free, beautiful and noble soul.
This same effort to elevate man is perceived when Eckart rejects the doctrine of human weakness: “Therefore, every man can certainly imitate our Lord, according to the measure of his weakness and needs, and indeed, he may not believe that he cannot achieve this.”
Once again, man is exalted and not devalued, while Master Eckart mockingly rejects those who claim to be justified by their works: “And, in particular, avoid all peculiarities, whether in dress, or in food, or in speech, or in the use of impressive words, or in exaggerated gestures, by which nothing creative is really achieved.”
