ABSTRACT

This chapter proposes that Meister Eckhart's thought was centered precisely on the articulation of immanence, a fact rendered invisible by the narratives of secularization that imagine a historical movement of transition, however complex and theoretical, from a pious middle ages to a liberated modernity. Eckhart's sermons repeatedly thematize the questions of self-annihilation, detachment, poverty, and self-dispossession. In Eckhart, the articulation of immanence as divine self-differentiation does not render that immanence a property of a divine subject, ascribable to a transcendent locus. Rather it makes immanence itself absolute. The strict division between a theological upholding of transcendence and analogy and the philosophical construction of immanence and univocity renders invisible the fact that no single discourse or discipline has primacy or monopoly in articulating the immanence of the real, and that historically theological or mystical discourses have succeeded at this no less powerfully and imaginatively than the philosophical one.