God According to Meister Eckhart and the Perennial Philosophy

Why dost thou prate of God?
Whatever thou sayest of Him is untrue.

—Meister Eckhart

It is a characteristic trait of enlightened teachers that their words are rigorous. If we are not aware of this, or fail to take it into account, then we may miss much of their meaning and most of their significance.

This remark of Eckhart’s might be read as a general dismissal of arguments about God on the common-sense grounds that nobody knows what they are talking about. If, however, it were possible to accidently say something true of God then his words would not be rigorous. This cannot be what he meant, therefore, or not quite all that he meant. 

If we assume Eckhart’s words are rigorous, then they state that it would be impossible to say anything true about God. Eckhart thus places God beyond the limits of subject-predicate language and beyond the subject-object world. His remark now becomes a highly significant philosophical statement with vast consequences. It reveals that he endorsed the nondual doctrine of the Perennial philosophy, that of the pagans he so admires, for which the nature of reality outruns the inescapable dualism of language and thought. Just as did Kant, but for experiential rather than logical reasons, he places the Ultimate beyond the conceptual categories required for language, thought, ideation and idolatry.    

If we read Eckhart in this way then we are immediately led to make the connection with Lao Tzu’s statement, ‘The Tao that is eternal cannot be spoken’. Tao would lie beyond the subject-object world and out of reach of subject-predicate language. As a consequence, a positive statement about Tao would be untrue. It would not necessarily be false, for it may state a partial truth, but inevitably it would be unrigorous.  

This might seem to give theology and metaphysics a problem, since in order to investigate these issues with our intellect we must think and speak about what cannot be thought or spoken. This problem will never go away, but for most practical purposes it can be overcome. Lao Tzu gives us a way to do it when he writes, ‘True words seem paradoxical’. If so, then we can speak truly just as long as we speak in a manner that seems paradoxical. We might say, for instance, ‘God exists and exists-not’. This is the seemingly paradoxical nondual language of mysticism. In his book, God: A Guide for the Perplexed, Keith Ward explains that this is exactly what Classical Christianity says about God. The Source of All would not exist in the way usually define the word ‘exist’, but in a far stronger sense of the word. This seemingly contradictory statement cannot be said to be strictly true or false, but it is rigorous. It indicates that the truth lies beyond the contradictions and opposites of ordinary thought and language, or ‘beyond the coincidence of contradictories’ as Nicolas De Cusa puts it in his Vision of God.

This explains Buddhism’s language of ‘Two Truths’, and more generally the seemingly contradictory language of the Perennial philosophy. The Ultimate would be unthinkable and unsayable, but we may think and speak of it as having contradictory aspects that are partial but complementary truths. The doctrine of two truths, aspects, worlds or levels of analysis was first formally explained by the Buddhist master Nagarjuna in the second century in various texts that include his Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way. These contradictory and complementary aspects of the world-as-a-whole he calls the ‘Conventional’ and the ‘Ultimate’. There is no suggestion that reality is divided into two, but conceptually dividing it into two gives us a way of thinking and speaking about it.    

For a conventional analysis the manifest world of subjects and objects would be just as it appears to be, and we can say that it exists just as it appears to do. For an ultimate analysis, however, it would not exist. Having only a dependent existence it is reducible to nothing, Nagarjuna tells us, (some would say logically proves), that nothing really exists or ever really happens. There are always two aspects to take into account, so the qualifying word ‘really’ is strictly necessary for the rigour of these words. The final truth would be unsayable.      

This is a profound topic and justice cannot be done to it here. The point here is a simple one. If we assume the literature of the Perennial philosophy is strictly rigorous then we will be more likely to see its full meaning than if we assume it is woolly or casual. If we take Eckhart at his word then his brief comment about God has vast consequences for metaphysics, analytical philosophy and far beyond, and it reveals that one can be a committed Christian without having to disagree about God with the pagans, Buddhists and Taoists.   

Anyone setting out to study the plausibility of the Perennial philosophy as a systematic ‘theory of everything’ will find that a highly efficient method is to make a sustained and strenuous attempt to prove it is a load of nonsense. Its claims and teachings do not contradict the empirical and experiential evidence, so the only way to do this is by the use of logic and reason. This approach forces one to become a metaphysician, ever alert for statements that, if we assume they are rigorous, contradict logic and reason.

If we take this approach, then, as we see from this analysis of Eckhart’s words, when we come across statements that at first glance appear to be unrigorous or false we will set to work trying to prove they are, and will be far more likely to recognise their full meaning and metaphysical significance.  

Other Thoughts

Eckhart’s brief statement about God is an example of the via negative of apophatic theology. This negative method allows us to speak about God while avoiding having to speak seemingly paradoxically, as we would have to do when making positive statements. As a rigorous speaker he uses the word ‘untrue’ and not ‘false’, for it would be impossible to say anything strictly true or false about God. Like Lao Tzu before him, Eckhart says nothing positive about God yet by implication, with just a handful of words, says almost as much as can be said. When we assume the words of the great teachers are metaphysically rigorous they become highly explosive, and a brief remark may serve as an axiom for a complete metaphysical theory. Whenever we see a seemingly contradictory metaphysical statement, the statement of Heraclitus, ‘We both are and are-not’ would be a typical example, it immediately implies the entire doctrine of the Perennial philosophy, since to interpret it in any other way would mean questioning the sanity of the speaker.

There is a complication, of course, for there always is. Teachers will often speak as appropriate to their audience, and this may sometimes entail speaking less than rigorously. The Buddha, for instance, spoke at three different levels, producing what are known as the ‘Three Turnings of the Wheel’. This is a manageable complication as long as we are aware of it.

This explains why the language of mysticism so often seems contradictory. It is not actually contradictory, as some philosophers assume, but to see this would require a study of dialectic logic and an acquaintance with the principle of nonduality.

Endnote

I believe that an acquaintance with the principle of nonduality is strictly necessary to an understanding of metaphysics and is almost the same thing, and that this explains why so many philosophers conclude that metaphysics is incomprehensible, leading most people to believe it is not worth studying. This is the high price of studying metaphysics while ignoring mysticism. The outcome can only be a proliferation of complexity and confusion. If we avoid this error, however, which is really the same error that the builders of the ancient Tower of Babel made, then we can expect to avoid most of the trouble.