I.I. Evlampiev

Saint Petersburg State University [email protected]

MEISTER ECKHART AND NON-CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY

The teachings of Meister Eckhart can be seen as the first example of the philosophical development of the tradition of Gnostic Christianity, which in history opposed ecclesiastical Christianity. Eckhart describes the relationship between God and man in such a way that man is the highest metaphysical principle that sets all possible meanings of being. This trend became the basis of non-classical philosophy of the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger); Eckhart can be considered a distant predecessor of this philosophical tradition.

Key words: gnosticism, true Christianity, man as a metaphysical principle.

Meister Eckhart and Non-Classical Philosophy

Meister Eckhart's doctrine can be regarded as the first example of the development of philosophical traditions of Gnostic Christianity, which opposed to Church Christianity in the history. Eckhart describes the relationship between God and man in such a way that man is the highest metaphysical principle defining all possible meanings of being.This trend has become the basis of non-classical philosophy in the second half of XIX - early XX century (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger);

Keywords: Gnosticism, true Christianity, man as metaphysical principle.

Non-classical philosophy arose in the middle of the 19th century and, in the person of its most prominent representatives - A. Schopenhauer and F. Nietzsche, sharply declared that it was breaking with all previous philosophy and its "classical" traditions. It seems that it is really impossible to find any direct connection between the ideas of non-classical thinkers and the various strands of previous philosophy. This seems all the more obvious when one considers the almost universal belief that a characteristic feature of non-classical philosophy is a direct denial of the Christian foundations of European culture. At the same time, the vast majority of European thinkers up to the beginning of the 19th century (including representatives of German classical philosophy) can be called religious and Christian thinkers, since the Christian faith seemed to them an indispensable condition for a meaningful philosophy.

However, this belief is the result of straightforward stereotypes, which are easily refuted as a result of a fairly careful analysis. In fact, the most famous representatives of non-classical philosophy, including Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, were not opposed to Christians.

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as such, but against the false form of Christianity, the bearer of which was the historical church (in all its three confessions). At the same time, they, just like the great thinkers of previous eras, understood the impossibility of the existence of culture as a whole and philosophy as the most important part of culture without a religious dimension. After all, a person is only then a true creator of culture, when he realizes his potential infinity and absoluteness, he realizes these hidden qualities through culture; accordingly, philosophy must show the presence of these qualities in man and explain how they can be developed and made effective in life. But these qualities mean that a person is connected with everything that exists, with everything that exists in the world, just like with the source of everything that exists, with the Absolute, God. Thus, any sound philosophy must necessarily have a religious dimension. Only if a philosopher proceeds from the fact that a person is a fundamentally finite being, he can build a system where God is not necessary, and religion is completely excluded from philosophical discourse. An example of this is given by representatives of the philosophy of the Enlightenment - Holbach, Helvetius, La Mettrie (the latter wrote the book “Man-machine”, a landmark for this entire trend). This includes almost all positivism (empiricism), especially in its most primitive modern versions, which include postmodernism.

Outstanding thinkers of the non-classical era not only realized the ineradicable vices of traditional Christianity, but also tried to understand what form of religiosity is true and necessary to overcome the developing crisis of European culture. The most striking thing is that, having expressed, as a result of a long search, the meaning of genuine, fruitful religiosity, they ultimately recognized that this genuine religiosity was not their invention at all, that they were simply restoring that great religious truth that was born by Christianity, but was lost in history due to the dominance of false forms of this religion.

Both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche - these most famous critics of historical Christianity - at the end of their work, thought about the question of what tradition their already well-defined philosophical views belong to, and unequivocally recognized that they belonged to the Christian tradition - but only cleansed of false layers and distortions and expressing the true, original teaching of Jesus Christ, which does not coincide with his church version. This return to the origins of Christianity looks especially paradoxical in the case of Nietzsche, since we find the corresponding recognition in what would seem to be the most “anti-Christian” work of the German philosopher. But the fact of the matter is that Nietzsche's "Antichrist" was written not so much to pronounce a "curse" on traditional Christianity, but to correctly understand true Christianity - which, according to Nietzsche, is relevant in our day in exactly the same way. like two thousand years ago. Here is how Nietzsche formulates this task in the rough drafts for the treatise: “Our nineteenth century has finally found a prerequisite for comprehending what for nineteen centuries was understood, in fact, incorrectly - Christianity ... / People were inexpressibly far from this friendly and good-

known neutrality - imbued with sympathy and discipline of the spirit - in all church epochs people were in the most shameful way blindly selfish, intrusive, insolent - and always under the guise of humble reverence.

In the treatise itself, the main thing is the description of the most important point of the true teaching of Jesus Christ, rejected by the church, - the direct experience of one's indissoluble unity with God. At the same time, God, in the understanding of Nietzsche, is not an “external” transcendent being, but a certain mysterious inner depth in a person. It is this practice of revealing in oneself the absolute foundation, absolute life, that is the main and only postulate of the teachings of Jesus Christ, it is this practice and only it that is true Christianity. In relation to her, all ideas about sin, about redemption and salvation turn out to be lies and distortion, just like the whole concept of the church as a “saving” agency that provides a “link” between the mythical God and the weak man. “In the whole psychology of the Gospel there is no concept of guilt and punishment; as well as the concept of reward. “Sin”, everything that determines the distance between God and man, has been destroyed - this is the “gospel”. Bliss is not promised, it is not associated with any conditions: it is the only reality; the rest is a symbol to talk about it ...<...>Not “repentance”, not “prayer for forgiveness” is the essence of the path to God: one gospel practice leads to God, it is “God”! - What the Gospel ended with was Judaism in terms of "sin", "forgiveness of sin", "faith", "salvation through faith", - all the Jewish teaching of the church was denied by the "gospel"" 288.

Nietzsche not only contrasts the "practice" of Jesus with the "Christian faith" of the church, but recognizes the former as always significant - also significant for the understanding of his own philosophy. “To the point of nonsense, it is false to see in “faith” the sign of a Christian, even though it be faith in salvation through Christ; only Christian practice can be Christian, that is, such a life as he lived who died on the cross. Even now such a life is possible, even necessary for famous people: true, original Christianity is possible at all times. And a similar thought in the rough drafts for the treatise: “Our era is in a certain sense mature<...>Therefore, a Christian attitude is possible outside of absurd dogmas.

Exactly the same distinction between false and true Christianity is characteristic of the late Schopenhauer, he writes about this on the last pages of his main work, as if summing up the development of his system and placing it in a single tradition of true mystical religiosity for all mankind, based on the principle of the identity of God. and the individual human being. Denoting milestones in the development of this true religiosity in European culture, Schopenhauer calls Plotinus, the Gnostics, John Scotus Eriugena, Jacob Boehme, the Angel Silesius and even Schelling, whom he at the beginning of his work (separated by the time of writing by a quarter

287 Nietzsche F. Drafts and sketches 1887-1889. // Nietzsche F. Waves. coll. op. in 13 vols. T. 13. M, 2006. S. 147.

288 Nietzsche F. Antichrist // Nietzsche F. Op. In 2 vols. T. 2. M., 1990. S. 658-659.

289 Ibid. S. 663.

290 Nietzsche F. Drafts and sketches 1887-1889. S. 152.

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century) ranked among the "philosophical charlatans". But in this context, Schopenhauer pays the most attention to Meister Eckhart, whom he respectfully calls the “father of German mysticism”: “Theism, calculated on the perception of the masses, places the source of existence outside of us, as an object; mysticism, as well as Sufism, gradually introduces it back into us as a subject at various stages of initiation, and the adept learns with surprise and joy in the end that this source is himself. We find this process common to all mystics in Meister Eckhart, the father of German mysticism, expressed not only in the form of a prescription for the perfect ascetic - “not to seek God outside oneself”<...>- but also in a naive story about how Eckhart's spiritual daughter, feeling this transformation, rushed to him with a joyful exclamation: “Sir, share my joy, I have become God!”291

The point of view formulated (with very slight discrepancies) by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is quite consistent with the work that was done by impartial (“non-confessional”) historians of early Christianity in the late 19th and 20th centuries: in fact, in history there was not one, but two Christianity, or two versions of Christianity - ecclesiastical, dogmatic and gnostic, mystical, and it is the second, recognized by the church as heresy and persecuted in history, that is just true, ascending to the genuine, but forgotten and distorted teachings of Jesus Christ. This teaching is expressed in two monuments of early Christianity - in the Gospel of Thomas (found only in 1945, it is apparently the oldest text that has come down to us that has preserved the original words of Jesus) and in the Gospel of John, although the latter has been significantly edited ( i.e. distorted) in the church tradition. The rest of the texts recognized by the church as “authentic” and “ancient” were in fact either written no earlier than the middle of the 2nd century (the Synoptic Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles), or distorted beyond recognition (the Epistles of the Apostle Paul)292.

Methodically destroyed by the church in the sphere of religious practice, where it appeared under various heretical guises (Marcionites, Paulicians, Bogomils, Cathars, Albigensians, etc.), true Christianity continued to live and develop in the form of mystical philosophical systems. Its earliest manifestations were the systems of Eriugena and Joachim of Florence, but its truly consistent and clear philosophical formulation was carried out by Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa.

Eckhart's works are not as strict and philosophically consistent as the works of some of his successors in the line of gno-

291 Schopenhauer A. World as will and representation. T. II. M., 1993. S. 599.

292 This idea was first expressed by I.G. Fichte (he, of course, did not know the Gospel of Thomas): “In our opinion, there are two extremely different forms of Christianity: the Christianity of the Gospel of John and the Christianity of the Apostle Paul, to whose like-minded people belong the rest of the evangelists, especially Luke” (Fichte I.G. The main features of the modern era / Fichte IG Facts of Consciousness, Appointment of Man, Science Teaching, Minsk, 2000, p. 102).

mystical mysticism (Nicholas of Cusa, Boehme, Leibniz, Fichte), but he expresses the key ideas of this entire tradition in the sharpest form, which made them a constant object of attention for all who sought the meaning of undistorted Christianity.

The initial principle of Eckhart's religious concept is the possibility for a person to come into direct unity-identity with God, and more than once he directly emphasizes that this unity is of an essential nature, i.e., rejects the half-hearted and contradictory solution to this problem, which became the basis of Byzantine hesychasm . “Whoever is righteous truly has God with him. Whoever truly has God, he has Him in all places, on the street and among other people with the same success as in a church or a desert or in a cell. After all, if someone possesses Him and only Him, then nothing can interfere with such a person.<...>he possesses only God and thinks only of God, and all things for him become one and the same God. Such a person carries God in all his deeds and in all places, and all the actions of this person are performed exclusively by God. After all, who predetermines the act, the act belongs to him - more authentic and real than the one who performs the act. So if we have before our eyes one and only one God, then verily He must do our deeds; in all His actions, no one is able to interfere with Him, no crowd and no place.

Eckhart deliberately contrasts the possession of a “thinkable” God and God in essence, anticipating for many centuries the well-known “criticism of abstract principles” in the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Vl. Solovyov: “A person should neither possess nor allow himself to be satisfied with the conceivable God, because when the thought dries up, then God will also disappear. It is necessary to possess the essential God, who is highly exalted above the thoughts of people and all creation.

In the same way, he contrasts the possession of God in the sense of his knowledge - which is still an external and secondary "union" with God as known - and in the sense of essential identification with him. Speaking about the essence of the highest bliss available to man, Eckhart says that to some it appears as a state "when the spirit realizes that he comprehends God", but in fact this is not true; “Bliss is hidden, however, not in this; for the first thing in which blessedness is hidden is that the soul in purity looks to God. Here she takes her whole essence and her life and creates all that she is from the foundation of God and is ignorant of knowledge, love and nothing at all. She finds rest only and solely in the essence of God; it does not realize that the essence and God are here. But if she knew and understood that she sees, contemplates and loves God, then this, in accordance with the natural order of things, would be a removal, and [then] a return to the original.

Eckhart describes the path of a person to union-fusion with God in such a way that at first glance it looks very similar to the practice of hesychasm, but if you look at this description more carefully, it is easy to see a significant difference associated with the fundamental difference that for

294 Ibid. S. 19.

295 Ibid. S. 207.

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Hesychast God is present in the world only by his energies, which do not “merge” with created things, while for Eckhart, the presence of God in the world directly in essence means that he is merged with every thing. Eckhart bases such a pantheistic view on the position that God is being, that is, the being of every created thing in itself, without additional evidence, testifies to the presence of God in the world and in every thing (more precisely, the world and every thing - in God): “... the being of all things proceeds directly from the first cause and the universal cause of all things.<...>everything is from being in itself and through it and in it, while being itself is not from something else.<...>the being of all things, insofar as it is being, has its measure in eternity, by no means in time.

For hesychasts, the perception of divine energies is possible only on the path of detachment from the world of all its affairs and worries, on the path of monastic isolation in oneself. Eckhart describes the path to God in a similar way, but in his teaching the end point of perfection, “deification” of a person turns out to be the opposite: after finding, “acquiring” God, a person must return to the world, and only God will now be revealed to him in every thing. It is fundamental here that after renouncing himself and all his worldly affairs, a person acquires an essential, and not conceivable God, and God will appear to him through every thing: “Whoever possesses God in this way, in essence, perceives God Divinely, and for that He shines in everything, for all things are given to him by God, and of all things God appears to him. Moreover, Eckhart clearly contrasts two different ways of finding God: one is associated with "escape" from the world, with "solitude" (in the spirit of hesychast practices), and the second - with the transformation of one's perception of things, without completely moving away from them; he considers only the second way to be true: “People cannot learn this through flight, when they run away from things and retire outwardly; they must learn inner solitude, wherever and with whomever they may be. They need to learn how to break through things and find their God in this and be able to imprint Him firmly, in a significant way”298.

In full accordance with the logic of Gnostic Christianity, Eckhart from his initial position on the possibility for a person to come into unity with God deduces the denial of the key postulate of church Christianity about the fall and the ineradicable sinfulness of people. Of course, Eckhart does not deny the existence of sin in man, but he recognizes sin as easily overcome and, in essence, does not require such a radical procedure of "atonement" as the Calvary sacrifice of Christ. He states that for a person who wants to ascend to God (along the path described above), “the highest step to which one can ascend is this: to be without sin through Divine repentance”299. Moreover, he goes so far as to recognize the totality of sins possible for a person that does not have any significant meaning for the specified person:

296 Ibid. pp. 55-56.

297 Ibid. S. 19.

298 Ibid. pp. 19-20.

299 Ibid. S. 30.

man completely and completely renounced everything that is not God and the Divine in himself and in every creature<...>. The more of this, the truer repentance and the more it will banish sins and even the punishment itself. Yes, soon you would be able, in righteous disgust, to quickly and powerfully move away from all sins and aspire to God with such force that, if you did at least all the sins that have been committed since the time of Adam and will continue to be committed, this is coupled with punishment you will be completely forgiven and, if you died now, you would be raised before the face of God.

The incompatibility of this provision with dogmatic teaching is not in doubt; it is no coincidence that the corresponding thesis attracted the special attention of the inquisitors who investigated the degree of heresy of the views of the German philosopher, and he entered the 28 main provisions incriminated to Eckhart in the accusatory bull of Pope John XXII (at number 15) 301.

On the basis of the denial of the essentiality of sin, the idea of ​​the divine perfection of man, of entering the Kingdom of Heaven is quite naturally transformed: if in dogmatic Christianity such perfection and such entry is possible only after death, with the help of a radical transformation of the earthly existence of a person by the will of God, then in Eckhart’s Gnostic Christianity this the possibility is present in every moment of earthly life and can be realized by the forces of the personality itself, discovering God in itself. “That person who, for the sake of God, would be able to renounce all things, whether God gives them or does not give them, would possess the true Kingdom of Heaven”302.

Describing the stages of perfection of the inner, or “heavenly” man in each of us in the treatise “On a man of a high kind”, Eckhart characterizes the last of these stages as follows: forgetfulness of transient and temporal life and was raised and transformed into a Divine image, became God's son. Beyond and above there are no steps; and there is eternal rest and bliss, for the completion of the hidden man and the new man is eternal life. It turns out that at every moment of earthly time, a person can directly “go out” into eternity and into divine existence, where he will receive absolute perfection.

In this context, the strange, at first glance, the thesis that all the actions of a truly believing person is performed by God becomes understandable, and Eckhart brings this statement to a natural consequence that for a person, as for God, nothing is impossible in this state, t i.e. he is able to become an omnipotent being. “But what you desire strongly and with all your will, you have, and neither God nor all creatures can take it away from you, if [your] will is not other than the will entirely and truly Divine and directed to the present. So, not "I would like it soon", because it will only take place in the future, but "I want it to be so now." Listen! Be

300 Ibid. S. 32.

301 Ibid. S. 316.

302 Ibid. S. 50.

303 Ibid. S. 204.

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something a thousand miles away, and if I want to have it, I rather possess it than what I have on my knees, but I do not want to have.

Here again it is worth returning to the thesis about the indirect connection of Eckhart’s religious teachings with non-classical philosophy: the principle of the essential identity of God and man leads him not only to the idea of ​​the complete “disappearance” of the personality in God, which, of course, is very far from the anthropological trend of philosophy of the second half of the 19th century. - the beginning of the twentieth century, but also to giving a person, in her earthly life, such qualities of God as omnipotence, absolute creativity, the ability to go beyond space and time. Here one can see a distant anticipation of the central concept of Nietzsche's philosophy - the idea of ​​the birth in history of the superman from the modern imperfect man.

The tendency towards a complete “equalization” of God and man, and even to the positioning of man in a metaphysical sense as a “higher” instance than God, is the most mysterious and at the same time the most important trend in Eckhart’s philosophy, which deserves special mention, since in it, he most decisively departed from the stereotypes of church Christianity and scholastic theology and most clearly anticipated the search for the latest European philosophy. In Eckhart's theoretical treatises, which we have considered so far, this theme is not expressed very clearly, although it can still be found here - for example, in the strange statement that a person commits "violence and injustice" against God when he turns out to be internally unprepared. to accept in himself his gifts and deeds. Much more clearly and unambiguously it manifests itself in the sermons that Eckhart addressed to his flock.

An examination of Eckhart's sermons forces us to mention a methodological problem that is very important for modern studies of his work. According to the generally accepted view, the sermons were improvisations by the Master and were recorded from memory by his listeners, which makes them not quite "author's" works. That is why Eckhart had the opportunity to refuse the authorship of those theses from the sermons that were presented to him by the inquisitors as heretical. In this regard, very many of those who analyze Eckhart's religious-philosophical views tend to consider the ideas expressed in the sermons as secondary to those that he expounds in his Latin and German treatises.

It seems to us that such a position is completely unfounded, it leads us away from understanding the essence of the views of the great German thinker and from a correct assessment of the influence of his heritage on the philosophy of subsequent eras (up to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Heidegger). Those who adhere to such a position have a very definite goal - to belittle the "heretics" of Eckhart's views and show that his religious-philosophical teaching is in full agreement with the dogmatic teaching of the church.

304 Ibid. S. 23.

305 Ibid. S. 43.

This position is much less justified than that of the fourteenth-century inquisitors. The latter accurately identified the main thing in Eckhart's work and quite rightly stated the impossibility of reconciling this main thing with the teachings of the Catholic Church. Modern scholars, in order to prove the thesis of the thinker's ecclesiastical "reliability", do the opposite: they distort Eckhart's ideas, bringing to the fore obviously secondary ideas of his treatises. Here, for example, is how M.Yu. Reutin: “Preaching to the laity, beguines and nuns, Eckhart sought to church their religious experience of a pantheistic persuasion. He tried to describe this experience through correct ecclesiastical formulations and to present it in a newly recreated (renamed) form of his audience, standing with one foot in heresy”306. Recognizing, further, that in his sermons Eckhart follows the logic of anthropocentrism in the understanding of God to the very end, M.Yu. Here again Reutin “neutralizes” this recognition by concluding that the Master thought of the corresponding conclusions “as one of the possible assumptions (!) about God”307.

As the most important component of Eckhart's philosophy, M.Yu. Reutin suggests the method of "analogous symbolization", thanks to which all the thinker's statements about the coincidence and likeness of God and creatures turn out to be exclusively judgments of formal analogy, but not of real essential unity. Thanks to the promotion of this principle to the fore, it becomes possible, in addition, to talk about the closeness of Eckhart's ideas about the connection of God with the world and man to the ideas of G. Palamas and the entire Byzantine hesychasm; Eckhart's "analogies" turn out to be completely similar in their role to the "energies" of the Hesychasts. As already mentioned, in fact, hesychasm is an obvious palliative, a contradictory and inconsistent attempt to renew and make more alive the church doctrine, which in the late Middle Ages both in the West and in the East fell into obvious decline and no longer satisfied the religious needs of people. The indicated convergence of Eckhart's ideas with hesychasm leads to the fact that his religious and philosophical teaching also turns into a half-hearted and unsuccessful attempt to renew the traditional "scholastic" faith with the help of semi-heretical ideas. It is characteristic that the arguments for such a rapprochement are taken precisely from Eckhart's Latin treatises closest to traditional scholasticism.

It must be stated with regret that in modern approaches to the study of the views of Eckhart and other great Christian thinkers (for example, Nicholas of Cusa), there is still an ideological “preset”, which is the result of the dominance in the historical consciousness of straightforward stereotypes created by the first church “fighters against heresies." According to these stereotypes, there was only one "God-inspired" religion in history, which steadily fought against malicious heretical deviations and, having defeated them, became even more fertile and fruitful.

call Reutin M.Yu. The Mystical Theology of Meister Eckhart. M., 2011. S. 21.

307 Ibid. S. 23.

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creative. In reality, everything was much more complicated and even more tragic. Starting from the 2nd century, the Christian church, which was strengthening its influence, went on a significant “modification” of the teachings of Jesus Christ - it synthesized it with Judaism in order to introduce into the dogma the idea of ​​​​the ineradicable sinfulness of man, which separates him from God, and the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe law to which every believer must be subject. All this was done in order to achieve the strengthening of the church in the conditions of “mass evangelization” as a powerful organization, similar to the state and capable of leading the millions of people308.

Further in history, there were two Christianity, and the true, ascending to the teachings of Christ, was preserved only in the forms of various heretical (gnostic) movements and teachings. Until the 13th-14th centuries, the church managed to suppress its manifestations (although the scope of the Cathar and Albigensian movements shows that it continued to live in the widest sections of Christians), but in this era the crisis of the church reached such an extent that it was unable to fully control the situation, and this eventually led to the fact that for some time the genuine Christian doctrine became the dominant worldview that determined the behavior and life of European mankind, and it dramatically changed European culture for two centuries. This is the key to the phenomenon of the Renaissance - an era that revived not pagan antiquity, but true, original Christianity309.

Meister Eckhart occupies a unique place in this process of revealing true Christianity, he was the first to try to give it a clear philosophical expression using concepts developed both in ancient and early Christian philosophy (primarily in the teachings of Dionysius the Areopagite). To try to make of Eckhart a faithful heir to medieval scholasticism means to deal with his legacy no better than the inquisitors who persecuted him. The most important thing in his work is precisely the completely non-canonical doctrine of the identity of God and man, reviving the true teaching of Jesus Christ and opposing the dogmatic teaching of the church. Of course, in his treatises addressed to university theologians, brought up on the ideas of Thomas Aquinas, Eckhart could not express his most important ideas, here he was forced to “adjust” to the general style and pretend that he strictly adheres to dogmatic teaching. But in the sermons addressed to the "unlearned" flock, who, moreover, sympathized with the

308 In the Russian philosophical tradition, the sad consequences of such a distortion of the Christian faith, which ultimately led to the complete “collapse” of Christianity and the degradation of all European culture, have been written more than once; for the first time this theme is heard in the works of A.I. Herzen (apparently under the influence of Fichte), then in the religious concepts of F.M. Dostoevsky and L.N. Tolstoy. A vivid example of criticism of church tradition from this point of view is given by Vladimir Solovyov's work "On the Decline of the Medieval Worldview" (1891); at the end of the twentieth century, this topic became the most important for V.V. Bibikhin (see the chapter "Undermining Christianity" in his book "The New Renaissance").

309 This is how V.V. Bibikhin in the book "New Renaissance" (for more details, see: Evlampiev I.I. Philosophy of Vladimir Bibikhin: the problem of the human personality and the crisis of modern civilization // Bulletin of the Leningrad State University named after A.S. Pushkin. 2013. Volume 2. No. 1. pp. 7-15).

to the promoters of heretical movements, he spoke much more sincerely and formulated his most cherished ideas. Therefore, there is no “polyphony” invented by V. Lossky in the work of the German mystic, but there is a natural antinomy between the forced adherence to the scholastic tradition and free creativity, based on a deep understanding of the falsity of the church faith and the need to restore the great teaching of the founder of Christianity.

In our opinion, Eckhart consciously went to oppose his true religious views, expressed in sermons, to the teachings of the church; his own teaching is a talented development of the Gnostic tradition, which carries in itself all the basic truths proclaimed by Christ. In Eckhart's sermons, all the key provisions of Gnostic Christianity are easily found, forming a coherent system, at the center of which is the principle of the identity of God and man. Repeatedly explaining this principle, Eckhart specifically emphasizes the impossibility of interpreting it through the concept of similarity and analogy; he seems to deliberately "disavow" the form of interpretation of this principle that he develops in his "scholastic" treatises.

Considering in the treatise "The Book of Divine Comfort" how fire burns a piece of wood, Eckhart emphasizes that in this process the fire tries to transform the whole piece of wood into itself, to eliminate roughness, cold, heaviness and wateriness from it, and it does not calm down until the piece of wood not turn completely into fire. This metaphor describes the relationship of man to God, in which, in the same way, similarity is only external, and identity is internal and most important: wholeness, which in him and only for its own sake loves<...>. That is why I said that the soul in identity hates likeness and loves it, not in itself, and not because of it; but she loves him for the sake of the One hidden in him, which is the true "Father"<...>»310. Eckhart's sermons speak of this even more frankly: “God does not need an image at all and does not have it in Himself. God acts in the soul without any means, image or likeness. He operates at a base where no image has ever reached except Himself, except His own very essence. At the same time, it turns out that cognition understood in a special way, without likeness and image, leads to absolute merging with God (in essence) (this removes the contradiction with Eckhart's earlier statement that ordinary cognition does not give an internal connection with God; for cognition in The name “gnosis” is quite suitable for the sense now considered): “You must know Him without the help of an image, without mediation, without likening. “But if I know Him without mediation, I will become completely He, and He - I!” This is exactly what I understood. God must become “I”, and “I” - God, so completely one, so that this He and this “I” become One and so remain - as pure being - so that they can create a single work in eternity!

311 Meister Eckhart. Spiritual sermons and reasoning. M., 1991. S. 14.

312 Ibid. pp. 148-149.

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One of the main ideas of Eckhart, which is undoubtedly of Gnostic origin, is the idea of ​​the presence in the human soul of a “fortress”, or “spark”, in which it (and therefore the person as a whole) is inextricably linked with the deepest essence of God. According to the central mythologem of Gnosticism, God the Father (the highest divine principle of the world, which does not coincide with God the Father of dogmatic Christianity) does not create the world himself, but gives rise to the “second” God, the Demiurge, who carries out the act of creation. But if God the Father is a good and perfect God, then the Demiurge, due to an unpredictable “accident” that intervened in the act of his generation, turns out to be a god of evil, so he creates an evil world full of evil beings (archons) created to help him. Man turns out to be the last in the chain of these assistants of the Demiurge, however, at the moment of his creation, God the Father once again leaves his plenitude (pleroma) and saves man once and for all, putting a particle of his own essence into him. As a result, a person turns out to be a deeply antinomic being, combining absolute evil and absolute good, but at the same time the most “highest” and most powerful being in the world, since only he carries the essence of God the Father. Deceived by the Demiurge, who proves that he is the highest God, the creator of this world, man does not know about the existence of the true source of everything that exists, God the Father, just as he does not know about his potential power and that in fact he infinitely higher than the Demiurge. Nevertheless, God the Father sends prophets who gradually help man to know himself and his identity with God the Father; this knowledge (gnosis) differs sharply from ordinary knowledge, it has a mystical character, since it refers to the highest God, incomprehensible in the concepts of our world. The most important of these prophets is Jesus Christ, who in Gnostic Christianity appears as a great Teacher, revealing the truth about the divine perfection of man, and not at all a redeemer of human sins.

Eckhart expresses this system of ideas in a strict philosophical form, so many mythologically significant details disappear or become insignificant in him, but it is easy to see that all the most important ideas of this worldview are present in his teaching in the original refraction. And the most important, of course, is the presence of a “spark” in the soul, which connects a person not with the “lower” God, the creator of the world, but with the Deity, the self-identical, inactive, mysterious and incomprehensible abyss of the divine essence. God the Creator in Eckhart's concept is the traditional Christian God-Trinity, therefore the human soul, possessing the indicated "spark", turns out to be higher than all the persons of the Trinity and seeks itself in the abyss of the Divine. In the sermon "On the Unity of Things", Eckhart encourages a person to find this "spark" in himself by renouncing everything created. “Because you do this, you will achieve unity and bliss in that spark of the soul, which neither time nor space has ever touched. This spark resists all creatures and wants only God, pure, as He is in Himself. She will not be satisfied with the Father, or the Son, or the Holy Spirit, or with all the Three Persons, as long as each remains in His own being. Yes! I affirm: it is not enough for this light that the divine nature, creative and fertile, is born

lounging in it. / And now, what seems even more surprising: I affirm that this light is not content with a simple, at rest divine essence, which does not give and does not receive: it wants to go into the very depths, one, into a quiet desert, where it has never penetrated nothing isolated, neither the Father, nor the Son, nor the Holy Spirit; in the depths of the depths, where everyone is a stranger, only there is this light satisfied and there it is more in itself than in itself. / For this depth is one undivided silence, which rests immovably in itself.

Eckhart essentially transforms the Gnostic mythology described above, giving it an even greater anthropocentric sound. For him, the soul of a person who has discovered a “spark” in himself, that is, who has become a true believer, turns out to be the sphere in which the “second” God is first born, then creates the world - the Christian God-Trinity. This idea is already present in the above quotation. In his sermons, Eckhart repeatedly repeats this thesis about the birth and action of God in the human soul. Man finds himself in unity with the highest God-Deity and that is why he is above God-Trinity, as if responsible for the birth of this second God. “When I was still in my first principle, I had no God: I belonged to myself. I did not want anything, did not seek anything, for I was then a being without a goal - and I was knowing myself in divine truth. Then I wanted myself and nothing else: what I wanted, that was me, and what I was, that I wanted! And here I was without God and outside of all things. / When I renounced this free will of mine and received my created being, then God also became with me; for before there were creatures, even God was not God: He was what he was!”314

If the soul is uniquely primary in relation to the creative God-Trinity, then its relationship with the highest God-Deity is described both as an absolute identity and as a dialectical conditionality. The latter takes place when the Deity (and the soul) is considered in its “realization”, leading to the birth of God the Trinity and the created world: “Everything was through Him,” says<...>saint john. By this we must understand the soul, for the soul is everything. She is everything, because she is the likeness of God. As such it is also the Kingdom of God. And just as God exists in Himself without beginning, so in the realm of the soul He exists without end. Therefore, God is in the soul, says one teacher, that all of His divine existence rests on it. This is the highest state when God is in the soul, higher than when the soul is in God: that it is in God, from this it is not yet blessed, but blessed because God is in it. Believe: God Himself is blessed in the soul!”315

But taken in its pure essence (in the “type”) and outside of any action, God the Deity turns out to be identical with the soul: “For God, with all His Beatitude and in the fullness of His Divinity, dwells in this type. But it is hidden from the soul.<...>This is the treasure of the Kingdom of God, it was hidden by time, and diversity, and the soul's own deeds - in a word, its creation. But as the soul, advancing forward, parted with all this diversity, the Kingdom of God opens in it.<...>And then she enjoys all things and rules them like God! Here the soul no longer receives anything either from God or from creatures. For it is itself what it contains, and takes everything only from its own

313 Ibid. pp. 38-39.

314 Ibid. S. 129.

315 Ibid. pp. 160-161.

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natural. Here Soul and God are one. Here at last she found that she herself is the Kingdom of God!”316

In these and in many other similar fragments, Eckhart expresses the self-awareness of a person who has made a disclosure in himself of his deep, non-creature essence and discovers that in merging with the deepest essence of God (the One), he still retains himself. This turns out to be the most interesting and important thing in Eckhart’s teaching: God here is completely “anthropologised” in the sense that no God (in any possible sense) can be imagined or described outside of a person, a person is an absolute field for positing any possible meanings. . Metaphorically speaking, we can say that the concept of "God" here turns out to be particular in relation to the concept of "man", although, of course, these concepts themselves must be taken not in a finite, logical sense, but in the sense of infinite intuitions that give being itself without division into subject and object ("without the aid of an image," as Eckhart himself says). Understood in this way, the philosophy of the German mystic turns out to be an anticipation of the most radical tendencies of non-classical philosophy, up to the phenomenology of E. Husserl and the “fundamental ontology” of M. Heidegger, in which the most general (ontological) description of being is possible only through the phenomenological description of man in his basic “ex -potentials".

One could point to many more motives in Eckhart's sermons, which clearly testify to his belonging to the line of Gnostic (genuine) Christianity. A full analysis of these motives would require major research. In conclusion, let us pay attention only to two points that seem rather minor, but are important as a demonstration of the fact that Eckhart deliberately opposed his true Christian teaching to traditional (ecclesiastical) Christianity, which he apparently considered a distortion of the Revelation that Jesus Christ brought.

In his sermon "On Detachment", which expounds one of Eckhart's most important themes, he argues that detachment is the highest virtue, and the person who chooses the path of this virtue will be so concentrated in himself that nothing in the world can excite him and distract him from oneself and oneness with God. “A person who is completely detached is so caught up into eternity that nothing transient can make him feel carnal excitement; then he is dead to the earth, because nothing earthly tells him anything. But then he reflects on a question that leads him into a clear confrontation with dogmatic tradition: “Next, one might ask: “Did Jesus Christ also have an immovable detachment when he said:“ My soul is grieving to death? And Mary, when she stood at the cross? And there is a lot of talk about Her complaint. How is all this compatible with immovable detachment?”318 One can marvel at the courage of Eckhart, who does not smooth out the sharpness of the contradiction between his position and one of the central provisions of the dogmatic teaching (he very skillfully carries out this kind of “smoothing” in many of his treatises).

316 Ibid. pp. 173-174.

317 Ibid. S. 57.

318 Ibid. S. 60.

max), but on the contrary, sharpens this contradiction to the limit. After all, we are talking about the fact that the significance of the suffering of Christ on Calvary is called into question! And Eckhart quite logically answers the question posed: the suffering of Christ on Calvary is that very “external” that has no meaning for the life of a true, internal person! “Know: the outer man can be immersed in activity, while the inner man remains free and motionless. / Similarly, in Christ there was an external and internal man, and in the Mother of God, and everything that they expressed in relation to external things, they did on behalf of the external person, and the internal person was at that time in motionless detachment.

Here, a well-known concept is unambiguously expressed, which is called docetism and is the most characteristic quality of Gnostic Christology, according to which the fact of Golgotha ​​has no essential significance for the realization of the true purpose of Jesus Christ - to be a teacher of people, to reveal to them the Path to their perfection. This concept was most clearly expressed in the famous apocryphal "Acts of John", where Christ is literally "split in two": his "ghost" is present on the cross without any suffering, and the essence ("inner man" in Eckhart's text) continues to expound his teaching to John . The docetic tendency, as is well known, is also present in the canonical Gospel of John (the Gnostic Gospel itself, according to many scholars). It must be remembered that quotations from this gospel are most often found in Eckhart's sermons and treatises.

We also note that simultaneously with the statement about the “little significance” of Golgotha ​​for God in its detachment, it is directly stated that in comparison with the mystical, internal path to true faith described by the Master, the external path of prayers and deeds is not significant. “Yes, I affirm: all the prayers and all the good deeds that a person performs in time touch God’s detachment so little, as if nothing of the kind had been done, and therefore God is not at all more favorable to a person than if he did not perform a prayer. , no good deed. I will say more: when the Son in the Godhead wanted to become a man, and became, and endured torment, this touched the motionless detachment of God just as little as if He had never been a man.

The second point is the gnostic esotericism clearly manifested in Eckhart's sermons, the belief in the essential superiority of a few true believers (mystical believers) over the mass of "standard" believers, contemptuously called by the Master "cattle". Considering in the same sermon “On Detachment” the difference between the inner and the outer man and stating that most people live by their outer man, Eckhart states: “Know that a person who loves God does not use more spiritual forces on the outer man than is required five senses: the inner man turns to the outer only because he is a guide and guide who will not let them use their powers in a bestial way, as they do

319 Ibid. S. 62.

320 Ibid. S. 58.

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many people who live for carnal lust are like foolish cattle; these people are actually more worthy of the name of cattle than of people.

In the same way, he certifies people in the sermon "On Ignorance." Arguing that a person is called to reach the highest knowledge, which coincides with the "divine ignorance", i.e. once again opposing ordinary knowledge and higher, divine, mystical knowledge (which may well be called "gnosis", since its essence is in to know one's identity with God), Eckhart again recognizes those who stand outside such mystical knowledge as "cattle": "God created man for knowledge; thus spoke the prophet: “Lord, make them wise!” Where there is ignorance, there is denial and emptiness. Man is truly a beast, an ape, a madman, as long as he remains stagnant in ignorance! / Here it is necessary to rise to the highest kind of knowledge, and this ignorance should not come from ignorance, but from knowledge should come to ignorance. / There we will become prophetic divine ignorance, there our ignorance will be ennobled and adorned with supernatural knowledge!

All that has been said, it seems, is enough to assert that a correct understanding of the teachings of the great German thinker can be achieved only on the path of recognizing his conscious "heretics", or rather, his conscious opposition to the dogmatic teaching of the Church as false in its basis, distorting the true Christian Revelation, which, by virtue of paradoxical and tragic vicissitudes of history lived under the guise of "gnostic heresy".

321 Ibid. S. 61.

John Scotus Eriugena

Question 3. Philosophical and ethical thought of the Middle Ages

(subjectivist ethical teachings)

2. Pierre Abelard

3. Seeger of Brabant

1. John Scotus Eriugena (810 - 877) stated:

The inseparability of human virtue and them salvation;

The right of free moral choice of a person.

2. Pierre Abelard (1079 -1142) in his writings also defended the freedom of man within the framework of the Christian religion. He claimed:

Man has the right of free moral choice;

Man is responsible for his actions;

A person's actions can only be judged on the basis of his intentions, them awareness and his conscience;

The freedom of choice given to man is evidence of the wisdom of the Creator.

Abelard also believed that the logical proof of the dogmas of Christianity does not contradict faith.

The official church condemned the views of Pierre Abelard. His writings ("Yes and No", "Ethics", etc.) were banned.

3. Seager of Brabant (c. 1235 - 1282) was a follower of P. Abelard. Seeger's teaching was at odds with official theology. He justified morality only by human nature and believed that:

The world is uncreated and eternal;

The human soul is made up of sensual, individual souls and reasonable souls;

The man of deaths, the individual soul dies with his body;

The rational soul is immortal, carries out its activities in living individuals;

Moral conduct is conduct in accordance with common sense;

Common sense corresponds to the good of mankind;

To give a moral assessment of a person's activity, it is necessary to take into account his relationship with society.

4. Meister Eckhart (1260 - 1327) interpreted ethical problems based on personal mystical experience. The main provisions of the teachings of Meister Eckhart.

* Absolute (Absolute) has two sides:

* manifested - God;

* unmanifested - Deity, abyss, Divine Nothing.

* Manifested God:

* is infinite mercy and love;

* one with the world;

* makes the world complete.

* Divine mercy and love underlie the world.

* Man is what he loves (loves God - there is God).

* Blessed man:

* one with God, identical with God;

* wants what God wants;

* his soul is a particle of God, a "spark of God".

* One can comprehend God with the help of mystical intuition. A person can make a "turn towards the divine", penetrate into the Divine Nothing, the abyss. To do this, a person must:-

* to know nothing (not to think that he has known the truth);

* to desire nothing (to give up empirical passions);

* have nothing (not be attached to anything, not even to God).

* An important virtue necessary for merging with the Divine is value, that is:

* detachment from the world;

* indifference to everything except God;

* the desire to become nothing, to merge with the Divine.

* The shortest path to detachment is through suffering. Earthly joys distract from the great goal, bind to the world.

· Virtue is perfect if it is selfless and manifests itself naturally, without demonstration.

Eckhart introduced the concepts:

* "outer man" - bodily, subject to passions, egocentric;

"inner man" - denial of the earthly, bodily. Divine origin.

Meister Eckhart asserted the priority of the "inner" man, the spark of God. The "inner" man is primordial in personality. The contradiction between the "external" and "internal" man is overcome by a conscious, voluntary, free rejection of his limited "I".

In his teaching, Eckhart proclaimed the moral independence of man, the importance of individual moral choice, the possibility of coming to God without the mediation of the Church.

The author of sermons and treatises, which have been preserved mainly in the notes of the students. The main theme of his reflections: Deity - the impersonal absolute, standing behind God. The divinity is incomprehensible and inexpressible, it is "the complete purity of the divine essence", where there is no movement. Through its self-knowledge, the Deity becomes God. God is eternal being and eternal life.

According to Eckhart's concept, a person is able to know God, because in the human soul there is a "divine spark", a particle of the Divine. Man, having muted his will, must passively surrender to God. Then the soul detached from everything. will ascend to the Divine and in mystical ecstasy, breaking with the earthly, will merge with the divine. Bliss depends on the inner self-activity of a person.

Books (2)

About detachment

The book contains the main Middle High German and Latin treatises of the great mystic of the Middle Ages, Meister Eckhart.

The supplementary part includes all currently known materials on the inquisitorial trial against Eckhart, including the bull of Pope John XXII "In agro Dominico", as well as Eckhart's posthumous apology written by his student, a 14th-century Dominican of Constance. Heinrich Suso.

All translations, with the exception of one, are made for the first time without any abbreviations. The book is intended for philosophers, theologians, literary critics, medieval historians and all readers interested in the history of European culture.

Reader Comments

Andriy/ 03/04/2018 Sergius, read as it is written, for such interpreters as you have perverted the Christian teaching.

Sergius/ 2.04.2017 Are you "Shifted Water" - out of order? ;)
Thank you for a new book for me!
and I would in the Description - would correct the phrase: "A person, having muffled his will, must passively surrender to God." to this one:
"Man, having buried his will, must become humbly obedient to God - like a little child." and one more thing - the German word "Meister" - is translated into Russian ... - like a Master! :)

Shearwater/ 20.01.2016 Meister Eckhart's treatises are a must read!

Guest/ 3.10.2015 Janna ya soglasen svami. Obshee ne tolko Sufiyami esho obshee s advayta-vedanta

Guest/ 07/08/2015 I, Tamara, personally want to receive such a book and read it in full. Please help. Thank you in advance, and if you can, then three books. I am a nun

Jeanne/ 20.05.2011 Meister has something in common with Sufi sages and agnostics of early Christianity. Living words born from the Source. Even if I had to stay up all night to finish reading this book, I would!

Alex/ 04.09.2010 An essential teacher for followers of any confession up to our time and, I am sure, especially for future generations.

History of faith and religious ideas. Volume 3. From Mohammed to the Reformation by Eliade Mircea

§ 298. Meister Eckhart: God and deity

Eckhart was born in 1260 and was educated by the Dominicans in Cologne and Paris. Then he acted as a teacher, preacher and administrator in Paris (1311-1313), Strasbourg (1313-1323), Cologne (1323-1327). In the last two cities, his sermon resonated with both Catholic nuns and beguines. Unfortunately, the most significant of Eckhart's many writings is the Commentary on maxims" Peter of Lombard and the fundamental theological code "Opus Tripartitum" - survived only in fragments. But the works of Eckhart, composed in German, survived, including the Spiritual Instructions, most of the treatises and many sermons.

Meister Eckhart is a peculiar, deep and "dark" theologian. No wonder he is considered the greatest European mystic. Eckhart not only continued the tradition, but also marked the beginning of a new era in the history of Christian mysticism. Recall that from the 4th to the 12th centuries. mystical practice involved a departure from the world, that is, a monastic way of life. It was believed that to get closer to God, to feel His presence, is possible only in the desert or in a monastery cell. Aspiring to God, the mystic almost found the lost Paradise, returned to the state in which Adam was before the fall.

The description by the Apostle Paul of an ecstatic ascent, apparently his own, to the third heaven can be considered the source of Christian mysticism: words that a man cannot speak" (2 Corinthians 12:3-4). Thus, the founders of Christianity were already nostalgic for the lost Paradise. Believers prayed to the east, where Eden was located. The arrangement of churches and monastery gardens symbolizes Paradise. The founders of monasticism (like later Francis of Assisi) tamed wild animals; but the main sign of paradise life is the power of man over animals.

The mystical theologian Evagrius of Pontus (4th century) saw the monk as the ideal Christian, as a person who managed to return to a state of paradise. The ultimate goal of prayer solitude is merging with God. For, says St. Bernard, - "God and man are separated. Each has its own will and substance. Their fusion will be the reunion of wills and unity in love."

Understanding unio mystica as almost a marriage union - not uncommon in the history of mysticism, and not only Christian. We note right away that it is completely alien to the teachings of Meister Eckhart. Even more distinguishing Eckhart from the early mystical theologians is that his sermon is addressed not only to monks and nuns, but also to the laity. In the XIII century. striving for spiritual perfection no longer required indispensable monastic solitude. One can speak of the "democratization" and "secularization" of mystical experience, characteristic of the period from 1200 to 1600. Meister Eckhart was the herald of this new stage in the history of Christian mysticism; he proclaimed and theologically substantiated the possibility of restoring ontological unity with God while remaining in the world. And for him, too, mystical experience meant a "return to the origins" - but to a state that preceded Adam and the creation of the world.

Meister Eckhart bases his innovative theology on the distinction between God and deity. The word "God" (gott) he called God the Creator, and the concept of "deity" (Gottheit) defined divine essence. In the "god" he saw grund, the foundation and "matrix" of God. Of course, it was not a question of precedence in time or of an ontological modification that took place in time, following the act of creation. However, due to the fuzziness and limitations of human language, such a distinction could lead to unfortunate misunderstandings. In one of his sermons, Eckhart states: “God and deity are as different as heaven and earth […]. God creates, deity does not create because it has no object […] God and deity distinguish between action and inaction.” Dionysius the Areopagite (see § 257) defined God as "pure nothing". Eckhart developed and sharpened this negative theology: “God has no name, because no one can understand Him or say anything about Him [...] So if I say that God is good, it will not be true; I am good, but God is not good [...] Even if I say that God is wise, and it will not be true, I am wiser than he. If, moreover, I say that God is a being, and it will not be true; he is a being above being and the negation of everything ".

On the other hand, Eckhart insists that man is "the offspring of God" and encourages believers to aspire to the deity. (Gottheit) bypassing the Holy Trinity, since the human soul in its foundation (Grund) consubstantial with the deity and capable of directly knowing God in all His fullness, without needing intermediaries. Unlike St. Bernard and other great mystics, Eckhart sees in the experience of contemplation not unio mystique, and the return of man to the primary unity with the unmanifested deity (Gottheit) through the realization of one's ontological identity with the divine basis (Grund)."In my beginning, I did not know God, but was only myself […] I was pure being, and I knew myself in divine truth […] I was my own first cause - both of my eternal existence and temporal […] Because I eternally born, I am immortal […] I was the cause of myself and everything else.”

According to Eckhart, this primary state, preceding the act of creation, will be identical to the final one, and the goal of mystical experience is the complete dissolution of the human soul in a single deity. However, his teaching is different from pantheism or Vedantic monism. Eckhart likened union with God to a drop that fell into the ocean: it merges with the ocean, but the ocean does not become a drop. "In the same way, the human soul is identified with the deity, but God is not identified with the soul." Having achieved mystical unity, "the soul exists in God, just as God exists in himself."

Fully recognizing the difference between God and the human soul, Eckhart sought to prove that it could be overcome. For Eckhart, the duty and destiny of man is being in God, and not existing in the world as God's creature. Insofar as true a person - that is, his soul - is eternal, then the only way to salvation is victory over time. Eckhart constantly calls for "disengagement" (Abgescheidenheit) as a necessary condition for finding God. According to his teaching, salvation is the process of knowing the truth. A person is close to salvation to the extent that he knows his true being, which first requires the knowledge of God, the cause of all that exists. The highest religious experience that provides salvation is the birth of the Logos in the soul of the believer. Since God the Father begets the Son in eternity, and the foundation (Grund) The Father and the human soul are consubstantial, God gives birth to the Son at the very foundation of the human soul. Moreover: "he begets me, his son, [who is] the same Son." "He not only gives birth to me, his Son, but gives birth as Himself [the Father], but Himself as me."

Eckhart's opponents were most outraged by his thesis about the birth of the Son in the soul of the believer, which presupposes the identity of the "virtuous and pious" Christian with Christ. Admittedly, Eckhart sometimes used rather risky metaphors. He ends Sermon 6 with a discourse on a man fully incarnated in Christ, just as bread is transubstantiated into the body of the Lord. "I changed so profoundly in Him that He gave birth to His being in me, moreover, the same being, and not its likeness." However, in his "Defensive Word" Eckhart claims that he was talking only about the "analogy" (in quantum), and not about the actual bodily incarnation.

Some theologians believed that the crucial importance that Eckhart attached to renunciation in religious practice (Abgescheidenheit) from everything that is not a deity (Gottheit) that is, the underestimation of human activity in time reduces the relevance and effectiveness of his mystical teachings. Eckhart has been unjustly accused of being indifferent to church rites and Salvation history. Indeed, Eckhart's teaching left aside the activity of God in history and the Incarnation of the Savior. However, he welcomed those who interrupt their contemplation to feed the sick, and never tire of repeating that meeting with God is equally likely both in the temple and outside it. On the other hand, according to the teachings of Eckhart, the ultimate goal of contemplation, that is, complete merging with the deity, achieved outside of personal spiritual experience, cannot satisfy the believer. True bliss, according to Eckhart, is not raptus[breakthrough of exaltation], but intellectual union with God found in contemplation.

In 1321, Meister Eckhart was accused of heresy, and in the last years of his life he was forced to defend his views. In 1329 (a year or two after his death), Pope John XXII declared 17 of Eckhart's 28 teachings to be heretical, and the rest "biased, very audacious, and bordering on heresy." It may have been the complexity of his exposition and the personal envy of some theologians that contributed to the condemnation of Eckhart's teaching, but it had fatal consequences. Despite the efforts of Heinrich Suso and Johann Tauler, students of Eckhart (see § 300), and the popularity of the doctrine among the Dominicans, the writings of Meister Eckhart were withdrawn from use for several centuries. Western Christian theology and metaphysics passed by his brilliant insights and interpretations. The influence of Eckhart's ideas was limited to German-speaking countries. The ban on his writings contributed to the rise of the Apocrypha. At the same time, Meister Eckhart's bold thought continued to inspire some creative minds, among the most prominent of which was Nicholas of Cusa.

§ 32. Deity of the Father. In the Divinity of the first Person of the Holy Trinity, no one ever doubted, even among the heretics themselves, who rejected the divinity of the other two Persons. And this is very natural: a) because a person cannot not recognize anyone as God, without first completely renouncing

I. 1–2. The Divinity of the Logos The first is the idea of ​​the Divine dignity of the Logos (vv. 1-2). In the very first words, the pretemporal being is assimilated to the Logos: He was "in the beginning" (v. 1a). As such, He is above and above all created things. But not only was He in the beginning. He was???? ??? ????. Here

§ 27. Deity of the Father God the Father is the true God. No one ever doubted this truth, even among the most heretics who rejected the divinity of the Son and the Holy Spirit. ? almost every page of Scripture testifies to the deity of the Father. What expressions did you use? Nem the Son of God or His

Deity This verse from the Bible speaks not only of the eternal power of God, but also of "His Deity." Theologians correlate the meaning of this term with the concept of triunity. It is believed that the Deity is the revelation of God as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit (one God in three persons, or hypostases).

Chapter 2. Deity God is one. Father, Son and Holy Spirit - the unity of three mutually eternal Persons. God is immortal, omnipotent, omniscient, above all and omnipresent. He is infinite and beyond human comprehension, yet cognizable through His revelations of Himself. He is forever

Sleeping deity "On the sacred Mount Kailash, among the eternal snows, the great god Shiva, the patron of Nepal, rests from the worries and worries of the world." In this phrase, taken from a medieval manuscript, an inseparable triad is captured, without which no one can do

13 A DISTANT DEITY One person falls dead while another dances. One lies lifeless, and the other jumps in a whirlwind of unbridled dance. The dead man is Uzza, the priest. And King David is dancing. Readers of 2 Samuel do not know how to understand this. To understand all this

I. DIVINITY AND DIVINITY The universe of universes is a phenomenon of divine activity on various levels of cosmic realities, intellectual meanings and spiritual values, but all these manifestations - personal or otherwise - are divine.

ECKHART (Eckhart) Johann (Meister Eckhart), Hierom. (c.1260–1327), German. Catholic theologian and mystic. Genus. in Thuringia in a knightly family. In his teenage years he became a monk of the Dominican order. Received a versatile scholastic. education. He lectured at the Paris University; occupied

Introductory article to the book by M. Eckhart "SERMONS AND REASONS" by M.V. Sabashnikov / Love for God means / that the desire to expand to accept the World Soul into oneself should be unlimited in us - so that our limited closed “I” is torn from it "…I

1. The divinity of the Father Christ glorifies the Father, "the Lord of heaven and earth," who revealed His secrets to the mild-mannered simpletons - the Apostles (Matt. 11:25). He teaches about the Father, Who so loved the world that He gave His Only Begotten Son (John 3:16); prays that the disciples will know the One True

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