Dante and Eckhart on Creation and Participation*

ABSTRACT The concept of creation (along with the related idea of participation) is the foundation of Christian understanding. Coming at the culmination of a millennial spiritual/philosophical tradition, Dante and Eckhart have a closely analogous understanding of creation (and thus of the human relation to the divine), an understanding which can seem quite radical to us, because its philosophical underpinning has been lost. For both Dante and Eckhart, the world has no being apart from God (from what we would call ‘consciousness’ or conscious being), it is intrinsically sacramental or Christic, and the human – every human being – has the potential to come to know itself as Christ, as (not other than) God. The path to this awakening of the divine to itself in/as the human is the same for Dante and Eckhart: Eckhart calls it ‘detachment’, Dante ‘poverty’ (renunciation).