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187 6 Deus est intelligere” Detachment, Intellect, and the Emanation of the Word in Meister Eckhart In one of his sermons, Meister Eckhart makes the remarkable claim that “the same knowledge in which God knows himself is the knowledge of every detached spirit and nothing else. The soul receives its being immediately from God. For this reason God is nearer to the soul than it is to itself, and God is in the ground of the soul with all of his divinity.”1 What does Eckhart here mean by a “detached spirit”? What is so special about it that “God is the ground” of such a soul “with all of his divinity”? The answer to these questions will take us into Eckhart’s notion of how we come to know God in an intellectuality that is as much practical as it is speculative and as much rooted in the revealed text as it is in the powers of the soul. Indeed, I intend to explore here how the practical or ethical dimension of intellect is essential to its speculative function and how the revealed text is a necessary precondition for the full awakening and unfolding of the intellectual nature of the soul. “Detachment” is, of course, the common translation for the German term Abgeschiedenheit, and it usually means a simple nonattachment to all things and equanimity in the face of life’s vicis1 . Pr. 10; DW I, 162/TP, 261. “ 188 Intellect situdes.2 It, therefore, has primarily an ethical or practical meaning. But detachment has, in Eckhart’s thought, a deeper speculative dimension that makes it integral to his concept of metaphysics and its ultimate end, which is knowledge of God.3 It is significant that “detachment” translates the Latin words abstractus and separatio that Eckhart uses in his more 2. “Detachment” is the usual English translation of the German Abgeschiedenheit (or the Middle High German abegescheidenheit). Other alternatives, however, have been suggested: Raymond Blakney, Meister Eckhart: A Modern Translation (New York: Harper and Row, 1941), translates it “disinterest,” while Schürmann translates it as “releasement.” The former translation is an unfortunate choice insofar as it reinforces in the modern reader the notion that detachment is a sort of aloofness or disengagement from the world, which, as will be clear from our presentation , it is not. Schürmann’s “releasement” is better, insofar as it implies that detachment “releases” things from their use in human projects and “lets them be” as they truly are in God. But this term is Schürmann’s own coinage and seems too intertwined with his own insightful, but heavily Heideggerian, interpretation of Eckhart to be employed for use here. Closely related to Abgeschiedenheit is the word Gelassenheit (or the Middle High German gelâzenheit) that appears frequently in Eckhart’s writings as often interchangeable with “detachment.” As Reiner Schürmann notes, this word has, at first glance, primarily a moral sense: one of “resignation” or “serenity” in the face of difficulties. But it also has the meaning of “letting be” or simply “to let” (Schürmann, Wandering Joy, 16). It thus has an affirmative quality that is essentially related to the activity of the intellect when it knows things in their truth: it simply “lets things be.” Finally, Eckhart often discusses “detachment” in connection with the word lûterkeit and its adjectival forms, lûter, ledic, and blôz. These terms are usually translated as “purity, emptiness” and as “pure, empty, bare, naked.” As Bernard McGinn remarks: “This complex of terms is very frequent in Eckhart; it signifies both the primal purity of the divine nature and the purity and emptiness that the soul must achieve through detachment in order to be united with God” (TP, 402). 3. The intimate relationship between detachment and divine knowledge in Eckhart’s thought has not gone unnoticed. Bernard Welte remarks that “this is because detachment lets all things be what they are in truth, and by doing so becomes one with the Truth itself.” See: Welte, Meister Eckhart: Gedanken zu seinen Gedanken, 55. Alain de Libera sees Eckhart’s thought in this respect as a synthesis between the Aristotelian notion (as mediated through the Arabs) of “abstraction” and Dionysian “aphairesis” or “stripping away” of predicates from the “super-essential” (God). Eckhart thus seems to identify the “detached soul” with the Aristotelian “separated” or “abstracted soul,” in this way trying to show how a Christian spiritual praxis is also essentially noetic in character . In essence, Eckhart renders...

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