James McFadden sees the spirituality of Meister Eckhart in terms of detachment, of letting go of everything and living without a why.
Johannes Eckhart von Hocheim, the medieval Dominican friar and respected theologian and philosopher, was above all a mystic whose writings and sermons are all centered on God and detachment from all that is not God. He plumbed the depths of his ‘spirituality of subtraction’ to the point that he wrote in his discourse About Disinterest: ‘Keep in mind: to be full of things is to be empty of God, while to be empty of things is to be full of God.’ (1)
Letting go of everything
Eckhart’s spirituality of detachment involves taking away, losing, relinquishing, abandoning, and letting go of everything. One simply dwells within God’s being, and our behaviour flows from that Stillpoint. For Eckhart, one does not even act in order to save one’s soul, to pile up graces, or to become a pious, holy person. Recognizing that the avaricious, consummatory self may be alive and well in the religious and interior life, Eckhart took his basic premise to its inevitable conclusion that one should, indeed, ‘live without a why.’ (2)
Live without a why! Not to do anything for a purpose or an agenda? Not to order our life in such a way that we realize our secular and religious ambitions? What can this man possibly mean? Can his radical spirituality of letting go say anything to us in the twenty-first century?
Culture clash
Eckhart’s spirituality of detachment seems so out of whack with our cultural and historical time and place, because our culture is so based on the gathering of wealth, the attainment of status and achievement, and the acquisition of power. The acquisitive and purposeful orientation of our secular Euro-American culture has permeated our spiritual life as well. We approach life from the primacy of our will which is about making things happen, doing things with a game-plan, and committing oneself to aims which are realized through attainable objectives. Once we’ve set this teleological stage, we then go about forcing, mastering, managing, ordering, and bringing plans to fruition.
For most of us, we would not know what to do if we did not push and make life happen according to our agenda. To want nothing is simply incomprehensible in a culture which wants more, expects more, and demands more. We simply would not know how to get up in the morning and get our juices going without having this drive to acquire, to achieve, and to be control. We wouldn’t know how to behave if there was not someone to overcome, some goal to be achieved, something to be earned, or some prize to win in order to feel validated to our neighbour and God.
Spiritual attachment
But if we act in this manner in the name of God, isn’t it then acceptable? But to pray and act piously with the intention of bring about a desired result is simply practicing attachment at the spiritual level. Such an orientation is a transactional spirituality: if we do this, then God will do that. And, if we do enough good deeds or pray the right way, then God will really love us, bless us accordingly, and help us achieve our spiritual goals. This approach sees the spiritual path as one of accretion. God and his grace become just other consumer possessions which we gather to ourselves but don’t let go. Such a spiritual orientation leaves the Ego and the False Self largely untouched as we are still in control and still enthroned with God doing our bidding. Even the desire to be holy or to be charitable is nothing but Ego.
Because the only world we know even on a spiritual plane may be exactly the opposite, to live without a why is not only a proposition that we would reject as being woefully impractical and simply false, but also one that most of us don’t have the vaguest notion of what it means. For Eckhart, the path does not involve the traditional forms of prayer and good works, because they do not affect God. In a passage that would be misunderstood by his Inquisitors, Eckhart states, ‘All the prayers a man may offer and the good works he may do will affect the disinterest of God as little as if there were neither prayers nor works, nor will God be any more compassionate or stoop down to man any more because of his prayers and works than if they were omitted.’ (3)
I believe what Eckhart means by these startling and provocative statements is that there is nothing we can do to get God to love us any more than he already does, because he loves us unconditionally! Our behaviour does not affect his tireless love for us.
Acting like God
Are we then to forsake prayer and good works? Since Jesus challenges us to pray always and to love our neighbour, how does the detached person pray and act? We act like God. Since God is not contingent for his being on something outside of himself, God simply is: He ‘exists and acts solely from the effortless joy and spontaneity of his own being.’ (4) Since human beings are made in the image of God and carry the spark of the divine within them, then they also should pray and act in similar fashion. The person who has attained awareness of his True Self – that is, I am who I am in relationship to God – demonstrates this awareness in his behavior. As Eckhart so eloquently puts it: ‘He who lives in the goodness of his nature, lives in God’s love; and love has no why.’ (5)
When a person lives without a why and simply lives out of the ground of his being and acts out of God’s will, such a person is able to find God in all things and situations. Since God is the fullness of being, when the Word of God became Incarnate, he entered into human history fully-drawing all things unto himself. So, there is no time and place where the Risen Christ is not present. Christ is with us, for us, and in us. When one prays and acts in detached fashion, one is doing so in Christ. While prayer and pious works cannot affect God, they are an appropriate expression of our intimate union with God. Writing in The Counsel of Discernment, the Meister insists that’ …it is not what we do that makes us holy, but we ought to make holy what we do’ (6)
In order for God to enter our lives, we must embrace a radical inner journey of detachment advocated by Meister Eckhart. Unless we’re challenged to go to that place of Inner Quiet where one lives out of an ‘I-Thou’ relationship with the Lord in which the Father’s will is done, then what we will settle for is comfortable religion rather than genuine faith. Those who have the courage to follow Eckhart’s challenge are free to let go of their willfulness, to say let it be, and to live without a why. Such people have found their center in Christ Jesus where union with God is the only thing that matters.
Notes
1. Meister Eckhart, Raymond Bernard Blakney, New York, Harper & Row, 1941, p. 85
2. An Introduction to the Medieval Mystics of Europe, Paul E. Szarmach, ed. Albany, State University of New York Press, 1984, p. 253
3. Blakney, p. 85. Our behaviour does not affect his tireless love for us.
4. Szarmach, p. 253
5. ibid
6. ibid
This article first appeared in Spirituality (May-June 2003), a publication of the Irish Dominicans.
