COMMENT Eckhart 'Paradox versus Dialectics'

The sheep that belong to me
listen to my voice,
there will be only one flock
and one shepherd.

Shepherd House Lammermuir Hills -
a drive for family visitors.

Dear William,

A great challenge, thank you!
You have primed hosing down library shelves. I am thrilled to find the massive resources on Meister Eckhart - not least half a dozen Issues of the Oxford Eckhart Review 1999-2004.

But we do not have @The Rhineland Mystics' and so delighted by your enlightening Email, so Posted on Blog.  

Yours 

fr. Donald   

PS. COMMENT of further "Paradox versus Dialectics" refernces. D.  

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: William W- - -
To: Donald - - -
Sent: Sunday, 29 July 2012, 0:10
Subject: Re: [Blog] Meister Eckhart's 'paradox style'

Dear Father Donald,

 Thank you! ....

 You know my fascination with seeking to 'uncover' Eckhart's mysticism for myself! Just very recently I have been reading a book 'The Rhineland Mystics', by Oliver Davies, and in his introduction, he summarises the 'style' of Eckhart so very succinctly - it seems rather long as I type it out in order to delight in sharing it with you, but it is gripping stuff:

 

Meister Eckhart's entire system ... can be summed up as the attempt to expound in terms of an advanced metaphysics the profoundly God-centred experience of the highest mystical union. Eckhart is, and never ceases to be, a mystical theologian... Whereas other famous mystics proclaim their 'nothingness' in the face of the Creator, Meister Eckhart constucts an entire ontology, or philosophy of Being, around the principle that all that exists lacks substantial essence: 'God alone truly exists' and the creature is 'pure nothingness'. A second element emerges at this stage, which is also a result of his experiential grounding: the dynamic character of his thinking.This leads to apparent inconsistencies which, in reality, are simply the deepening of his thought, its gathering momentum, as Eckhart's mind penetrates further into the realities he is exploring.

 

Oliver Davies continues with a fine analysis:

 

Thus the original starting point for his ontology was the view that we possess Being whereas God is Being. From this, as we have seen, he progressed to the view that only God truly exists, and the final stage is reached when Eckhart defines God as puritas essendi, the 'purity' or 'essence' of Being. If God is the cause of Being, Eckhart argues, then he cannot be Being itself; rather he must transcend Being. And so the true nature of God finally becomes intelligere ('to think', 'to know', or 'to understand'), for understanding or knowledge, with the unity that this implies, is the ultimate primacy.The nature of God then for Eckhart is rationality in the sense of self-understanding and self-knowing...

 

His analysis then becomes an explanation:

 

 But what of man, made in God's image? If the nature of God is rationality, then rationality, too, is our own essential nature, since we were created in his image. And this is what Eckhart believes. Our rational nature is not only God-given; it is an immediate reflection of the Divine Nature itself. It participates mysteriously and essentially in the self-reflexive activity of the Godhead. Of course, when Eckhart speaks of 'intellect', he does not mean that faculty which allows us to work out sums or read difficult books; he means rather our own self-reflexive nature as conscious beings, our capacity to understand, to be aware: consciousness itself.

 

Oliver Davies takes us further into Eckhart's system:

 

The root, or source, of that consciousness Eckhart calls the 'ground of the soul', and it is to that innermost space that we must retreat from the world and its images. There human consciousness transcends itself and participates directly in the activity of the Divine Intellect, a unitive process which Eckhart calls the 'the birth of God in the soul'. This potentiality for self-transcendence and union with the Divine Mind which resides within human consciousness Eckhart calls the 'spark of the soul', and it becomes the point of orientation for the spiritual journey which is both a journey within, into our innermost essence, and a journey into the Other, who is God.The manner of this journey in terms of our daily living is 'detachment'. By this Eckhart means a self-freeing from all that is created, not only from the appetites which bind us to created things, but also from the images of created things, as we approach the point of our own self-transcendence where the world, our created and temporal selves fall away to reveal our own bare essence, united to and unified with the Divine essence to the point of its virtual extinction.

 

Oliver Davies hints at the difficulties such a system might have created: "While Eckhart's belief in the immediacy of our union with God is one of his most attractive features as a mystical theologian, the immense weight which he lays upon the absorption of the self into God in the unitive experience was one major reason for the difficulties he experienced with the Church authorities, Christian orthodoxy requiring that a distinction always be preserved between the Creator and the created, even within the context of mystical union".

When I first read this sleep-dispelling explanation, I could only nod at my reflection in the dark window pane but as dawn broke, I began very gadually to be able to see through the glass, albeit darkly! This synopsis is helping me to draw a circle of understanding with the two points of paradox of Eckhart's compass.

 

With my love in Our Lord,

William

 

 COMMENT from Donald     

Excerpt from: http://www.reviewsinculture.com/index.php

The Meaning of Christ and the Meaning of Hegel: Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank’s (A)symmetrical Response to Capitalist Nihilism

by MITCHELL M. HARRIS

 November 15, 2011

... John Milbank’s response to Žižek, “The Double Glory, or Paradox Versus Dialectics: On Not Quite Agreeing with Slavoj Žižek,” directly addresses what he determines to be one of the key components (and flaws) of Žižek’s materialist theology. “My case is that there is a different, latent Žižek,” he argues, “a Žižek who does not see Chesterton as sub-Hegel, but Hegel as sub-Chesterton. A Žižek therefore who has remained with paradox, or rather moved back into paradox from dialectic” (113). Such a Žižek, he claims, would be “able fully to endorse a transcendent God” (113). In order to make this case, however, Milbank necessarily must reject the metanarrative that Žižek embraces regarding the inevitable and undeniable movement of Christianity from Orthodoxy to Catholicism to (ultimately) Protestantism. In rejecting this metanarrative, Milbank realizes the possibility of another modernity that would “persist with the alternative dynamism of paradox and not pass over into the hypocritical sterility of dialectics” (116). ...

. . . For example, at one point, Milbank suggests that Kierkegaard, like Meister Eckhart and G. K. Chesterton (the theologians Žižek most frequently cites in the first chapter), was “radically orthodox” in that he tended to highlight the “aporetic features” of the overall logic of Christian belief “and come to terms with” those features “by suggesting that this overall logic is a paradoxical logic” (177). While the line of reasoning is intelligible in its own right, there can be no doubt that comparing Kierkegaard to Eckhart and Chesterton would give pause even to some of the most conservative theologians and philosophers who, like Milbank, would openly reject altogether Žižek’s metanarrative that sees Hegel as the telos of the Orthodox-Catholic-Protestant trajectory. In short, it is hard to believe that Kierkegaard finds equal company amongst Eckhart and Chesterton. Moreover, Milbank’s reading of Eckhart pushes Western Catholicism to its farthest ends. Yes, one can claim that in Eckhart one finds something that is characteristically Thomistic in nature, but the consistent apologies Milbank must make in aligning Eckhart with Aquinas seems to reveal a special sort of pleading that draws attention to itself.

Despite these criticisms of Milbank’s efforts to call Žižek back to the land of paradox, it is undeniable that Milbank probes, challenges, and provokes Žižek’s “materialist theology” in ways that have not been accomplished before. This is to say that in Milbank, Žižek has clearly met his intellectual match. Nowhere is this more discernable than in Žižek’s response to Milbank, “Dialectical Clarity Versus the Misty Conceit of Paradox.” Here one must note the asymmetry of the collection: Žižek is given the benefit of the last word. And one is tempted to suggest that the asymmetry is unfair. Žižek is given ample opportunity to rebut Milbank, but, here, the asymmetry breaks down. Despite the opportunity for rebuttal, we realize that Žižek is merely shadowboxing, which, in a way, proves Davis’s point that the Žižek/Milbank debate might just be the only debate truly capable of moving beyond the deadlock that prevents the discursive intercourse of rationalism and fideism (7). For after Žižek outlines his points of rebuttal, he quickly leaves them behind, turning instead to a matter “more dark and awful,” quoting Chesterton. Here, Žižek reveals that his philosophical and theological opponent(s) is not Milbank, but rather figures like Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, John Caputo, and Gianni Vattimo. Perhaps no statement is more telling of this true opposition than one he makes while discussing Caputo’s On Religion. “Caputo professes his love for Kierkegaard—but where here,” he asks, “is the central insight of Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments, his insistence on the central paradox of Christianity: eternity is accessible only through time, through the belief in Christ’s Incarnation as a temporal event?” (258; my emphasis). ...

QUOTE
If you pray ONE 'Holy Mary' in the true spirit,
you may say a hundred Psalters to little avail.
Meister Eckhart - remember from Browse