ABSTRACT
While reflecting on Meister Eckhart’s writings alongside Baader, Hegel was supposed to have remarked: “Yes! There we have it. There we have what we want.” While there are competing theories about which passage spurred Hegel to say this, he eventually quoted the following line: “The eye by which God sees me is the same eye by which I see God: my eye and God’s eye are the same.” Yet Hegel’s quotations of Eckhart are often composites and seldom contextually specified. This raises the question of whether Eckhart’s “eye” meant what Hegel wanted it to mean. In order to theologically contextualise this question, Chapter 4 draws Nicholas of Cusa into the conversation. Cusanus, like Eckhart, emphasised the identity of our eyes with God’s. In De visione Dei, he made his point with a painting of Jesus which had “all-seeing eyes.” Cusanus’ account is reminiscent of Eckhart’s, but it places greater stress on the infinity of divine vision and the receptivity of human vision. Juxtaposing Cusanus to the idealist reading of the mystical eye allows us to better adjudicate the plausibility of Hegel’s citation of Eckhart.
