Читать книгу The End of the Middle Ages - A. Mary F. Robinson - Страница 26

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“But how” (we can imagine one of Eckhart’s audience exclaiming), “how can the absolutely simple be the manifold? God, you say, is the Simple and the One; and yet you say that every soul descends from God. If God is absolutely simple and single, He cannot divide Himself into many souls.” Eckhart here, we may be sure, would smile and praise the discretion of his assailant; for this objection brings us to the central theory of Speculative Mysticism, the dearest dogma of Plotinus, of Dionysius, of Scotus Erigena, as of Master Eckhart.

Spirit is everywhere one. Spirit is in the Godhead and indivisible. The Godhead exists, our Mystics tell us, above and beyond all Divine theophanies; the Godhead exists as a vast and unfathomable ocean, rolling its seas of emptiness and silence from pole to pole. But everywhere the ocean is bordered by the land; and its waters, in the circle of their tides, wash over a hundred shores, and fill a thousand bays and creeks and little rocky pools. Even as the deep sea sends its shallower waters over the sands, and then withdraws them into its eternal and unfathomable fulness, so the waters of God flow into every soul. And when the sea withdraws its tide, it withdraws not merely the contents of this pool and yonder creek, but the sea itself, eternally undivided, though for the space of a tide it filled the limits and the hollows of the shore.

But not all the strand, is washed by the sea; above a certain line the sands grow their rank, stiff grass, and grey-green thistles; the sands are almost land. And not the whole of the soul is visited by the Divine simplicity; only the water-line, the arid depth of the soul, is swept over and filled by the infinite being of God. “There is something in the soul,” taught Meister Eckhart, “uncreated and uncreatable; there is something in the soul which is beyond the soul, Divine, simple, an utter nothingness; there is a place in the soul where God inhabits, and this base of the soul is one with the base of God. And to reach this obscure retreat of the Eternal and Divine, where the unconscious Godhead dwells—this is the supreme and final goal of all created things.”