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Jean Bedard Master Eckhart Jean Bedard [email protected] Master Eckhart Translation by Richard Clark 2003 1 2 3 PREAMBLE We are in the year of grace I345, in the month of the first tulips. The sun is shining and I am preparing to leave for Bruges. I have finally decided to pull the stone from the wall of my cell, the stone which has hidden for I5 years those strange notes I compiled. I don't have the courage to reread them. I will simply add to them this short preamble and a brief conclusion, and put them back in their hiding place. Really, though, I ought to destroy them. When it was all over, and the Superior General asked me to turn in those notes he himself had ordered me to take, I did in fact hand them over, but not before I had made a copy. Just as I had predicted, the Superior General burned the pages without even so much as a glance. I don't know why I saved this copy, it's the only real disobedience I've ever been guilty of, and it is unlikely, given my age, that I will commit any others. Many times I thought of pulling out the stone, sometimes to reread my notes, sometimes to destroy them. Finally, I did neither of these two things. Today I have been assigned my final mission to Bruges, so I am leaving our monastery in Cologne for good. Not being able either to bring these parchments with me or destroy them, I will quickly add a beginning and an end, and return them to their casket of stone. If they remain there eternally, my disobedience will never be imputed to me, but if by some misfortune someone finds and reads them, he will make my sin a reality, and for it I may fall to Hell from Purgatory. Because I didn't immediately carry out the General's order, a line runs out from this account all the way to me, to my eternal loss if the finder reads it; to my salvation if he destroys it. However, I must confess that I don't really know if this line binds me solely because of my disobedience, or because it relates the thoughts and actions of a possible heretic, thoughts which can twist the spirit and imprison it in a fatal labyrinth. In any case, if the Master is not a heretic, he is certainly a saint. Does this line really tie me, then, to Hell? This I can't affirm beyond a doubt! It could be that someday someone will discover that this man was not wrong because of what he said, but simply because he said it too soon. If that is the case, it could be that the reader will promote me to Heaven by the good deed that I will accomplish in him, and through him, in his century and those that follow. Through the reader, my copy will have sent the word of the Master to the age where it should be understood. My manuscript will have served as a bridge for a man who was not born at the moment when he should have been. It may be then that my disobedience will not be accounted as evil, but as good! You alone know, you who decide whether to continue reading or to throw these pages away. If you close them again a better person, I will contemplate Heaven; but if you get caught in the snares of evil, I will writhe in Hell. Be that as it may, you will join me, wherever I 4 may be! We are bound one to another because the order of the Superior General has made me eternally responsible for this story. All my life, I have never been able to be certain of a single one of my choices, so I decided to walk with one foot on one side, one foot on the other, telling myself that, if one of the two mountains crumbled, the other would remain. Yet I doubt even this choice, because it could well be I have done no more than set my feet in the void which separates these two sides of existence. Eckhart showed one side, the rest of the world showed the other, and I have not been able to choose. If someone ever gets to look at this text, I hope that he will make the right decision, that he will know what to do: destroy it or donate it, incinerate a wasp’s nest or resurrect a Word. Even though I am lost in doubt, I really ought to praise it. I have lived through moments where judgement was suspended to the point where suddenly every possibility seemed equally likely. This leads me back inevitably to one of the key events of my existence. I must have been about twelve when one Sunday, as I was going to church alone, I came upon a pack of wolves who were just as taken aback as I was. It was as if time had stopped and I perceived the equal probability of two series of events. In the first I was eaten alive, and in the second the pack ran away. It was up to the wolves to decide! The leader of the pack hesitated just as I did, as I could tell from the set of his chops, by turns enraged and fearful. These two possibilities were so exactly equal that neither he nor I budged, nor even felt anything in particular, for fear of activating one of the possibilities and destroying the other. The indeterminate reigned in this strange fragment of eternity, when suddenly a man from the village, arriving unexpectedly, accidentally struck his foot against a stone. At this sound, the wolves fled. Time resumed its course in such a way that my whole body began to tremble. Strangely enough, I experienced relief and terror simultaneously, and not one after the other. The emotion was so extreme that it squeezed up into my consciousness all of my life, making it suddenly infinitely precious to me. I fled at once the frivolities of the world, wishing to make sure of my future through a secluded life. My father consented and I entered the monastery. But there is no retreat in this world and all futures remain possible. Doubt is so constituted that it equalizes possibilities and returns us to the indeterminate, where it is as if new beginnings were pouring out continuously, in which the past no longer decides the future and where Providence uses any means available. For one moment, all futures are revealed to be free, the future itself is set free. However, it will exercise that freedom only in the second when it plunges from the possible into the real. Plato said the origin of the universe was a Good which contained, as ideas, all that will exist. For him, the future could only be the manifestation of what already exists in eternity. Eternity decides the future. Aristotle contradicted him by observing that effects follow causes and that, consequently, it is the past that decides the future. "Man," the Master observed, "is so afraid of the indeterminate that he consecrates all his efforts to stopping the future: science subjugates him to 5 the past, philosophy subjugates him to being, and ethics reduces him to the consequences of his actions. A future which holds no surprises is no future," the Master continued. "It is simply the projection of the present and the consequence of the past. Because men fear the future, they also fear women. Isn’t every woman a new origin in which a thousand possible stories arise equally? Just as man seeks to tame the future, he seeks to dominate woman. Intelligence resembles a woman: it is a dynamic in which the future keeps itself constantly alive. If there is intelligence in God, then the future exists and science is no longer the act of subduing it, but a state of dialogue; philosophy is no longer a technique for reducing it, but the art of waiting for it; ethics no longer consists in vainly trying to suppress it, but aims instead at participating in it." He said this, but I didn't understand. Today I realize that, among other things, his plan consisted of an attempt to revive the future. If Plato was correct and forms preexist, and if Aristotle told the truth and the future ensues in a linear fashion from the past, there would be no intelligence in the universe; only being and memory would exist, only imitators and machines. The Master, for his part, said that the First Cause was not swallowed up in being and that, because of this, becoming retains an infinity of possibilities. In short, the universe is not a moving object, but a flexible intelligence. God doesn't create objects - He is incapable of this; He creates intelligence, creativity, and persons, because nothing can enclose Him. That is what woman symbolises, woman sole carrier of the Word. God has no name because He refuses to hold still: He has, on the contrary, a Word which moves Him, a Word which can only be born of a woman. Eckhart believed in a Word which multiplies its modes, which is perpetually inventing expressions, which pursues and desires itself without ever letting itself be contained. He believed in the resurrection of the Word, which dogma tries to kill just as it does the future. That is why he consecrated his life to saving those futures which in time to come will multiply into others.
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