To Be and Become the God-Beyond-God: Deification in the Thought of Meister Eckhart

Abstract

ABSTRACT The past few decades have enjoyed concurrent surges of interest both in the thought of Meister Eckhart and in theologies of deification. Curiously, though, these two lines of scholarship often run parallel. Yet, Meister Eckhart was as much a systematician and theologian of deification as he was a preacher of mystical union, and his corpus is rendered uniquely cogent when framed in those terms. In this paper, I delineate the theo-logic substantiating the successive stages of Eckhart's account of the human person's journey towards divinizing union with God. By tracking this spiritual itinerary from creation to the soul's uncreated spark and divine ground, and from there to the Word's eternal birth and the breakthrough to the Godhead-beyond-God, I elucidate the ways in which Eckhart navigates and manipulates deification's understandably hazardous semantic field, the result of which arguably represents the apotheosis of deification theology in the Western Christian tradition.