ABSTRACT

This chapter examines how Meister Eckhart works to move audiences and readers from religious formulas to 'detached intellection', where all God-words, those about God as well as those directed to God, give way simply to knowing Godor, rather, 'un-knowing' to avoid an ordinary contrastive interpretation. This 'unknowing', for Eckhart, is the divine Silence that discloses God through the experience of creation and through the experience of self-presence. The first formula considered is the creature 'analogy'. Like Aquinas, Eckhart modifies the conventional understanding of analogy to preserve the creator's distinction from creation while creating a linguistic space for the human creature's return to its source. His revised notion of analogy allows for a great deal of flexibility and innovation in extending language to the divine and exploring dimensions unique to the creature relationship. Christian doctrines are designed to maintain God's unique distinction of transcendence-in-immanence, safeguarding the Creator God of Scripture.