Theology for God

In the previous post, we wondered what Christianity says about reality -- both what it explicitly asserts and what it implicitly presumes. 

In pursuit of this question I innocently picked up a book about Meister Eckhart and ended up getting turned turned upside down and inside out. The book is so relentlessly paradoxical that I can't say I recommend it. It did give me something to think about, though. Or unthink about, rather.  

When I say "turned upside down and inside out," what I mean is this: while I was hoping to find some insights into reality, what I had been calling reality turned out to be nothing but appearances, or even the appearance of nothing: Eckhart's perspective 

is constituted as it were from within God in his Godhead and not externally in terms of approach toward God.... the doctrine he expounds must always be considered from that in divinas standpoint.  

In other words, from inside the Godhead out, not from the outside in. Is this even possible? How can we think about God except insofar as being in relation to, or in terms of, us and of creation more generally? What is God without us?

Well, with us out of the way, "the doctrine [Eckhart] expounds will never cease to be contemporary and always accessible to those who, naturally unsatisfied with mere living, desire to know how to live, regardless of time or place." 

It seems that the one knowledge that will always be true leaves us out of the loop. Or at least "It is meant, rather, for those who are dissatisfied with any teaching restricted by the mental horizon of mere human thought," and for those "who are disturbed by the closed systematizations" of various off-the-shelf human theologies. 

Theology for God?

I don't know, but whatever it is, it is "an abiding ground beneath the quicksand of relative values." Absolute absolutism, I guess.

The problem with theology from and for man is that it is external to the object it is supposed to be about; it "is at best only an approximation to unconditioned Godhead." We are always reflections of this principial reality, but is there some way to get inside the looking glass? Absent a heroic dose of LSD?

Speaking of which, I can see why Eckhart made a big comeback in the '60s and was popular among the hippie crowd. But this goes way beyond such new age diversions. Rather, this is really, really irritating. It is not inside you or me or anyone else, but "supraindividual, supranature, beyond distinctions, and situated as it were within the all-inclusive Principle." 

It transcends "all experience, all abstractions or conceptual graspings of the mind and, indeed, all individual manifestation.... it can in no way be enclosed in any experience, mystical or otherwise, or in any system whatsoever."

Well what then? It seems Eckhart is trying to provide a "springboard primarily designed to facilitate an openness to the uncreated grace requisite for a sustained insight into the unmanifested and unrestricted knowledge which God is."

In the book I just called it O → (n), and let the reader fill in the experiential blanks. 

None of this sounds very orthodox to me, and yet, the very next paragraph claims that "this precisely is the significance of the Word considered as God's unique communication to man." 

Moreover, the Gospel of John "ranks as supreme" because "it pre-eminently sets forth in direct manner the very Divine Knowledge with which Eckhart is above all concerned." It "constitutes, in figures of speech and thought, pure knowledge in principle," and "beyond all humanistic dimensions." 

Again, it is not man that enters God, but rather, "God intervenes in time, the infinite shatters the finite whereby the Word becomes known to man.... the unique possibility is granted man to understand all things in principle from the standpoint as it were of the unconditioned Godhead." 

So again, we apparently have things upside down, since this isn't our testimony of God but God's testimony of himself. And "no person can attain it save by his own unlimited will to know effected and sustained by the grace of the Word" -- or something like (↑) and (↓), only on steroids or something.

Not to be continued. I think I'll move on to something a little more accessible.