The thesis The role of detachment in the mystical thought of Meister Eckhart focuses on Eckhart's understanding of detachment in his doctrine, which, while combining Thomistic and Neo-Platonic philosophical premises, posits detachment as an essential theological-philosophical paradigm, based on his understanding of analogy, cognition and the relationship between being and essence in God and created beings. Detachment as a cognitive and existential attitude and mode of being derives primarily from the dispossession of God's nature, and man, as a being called to participate in God's nature, enters in a created way into a relationship with his ideational pre-existence in God, where in the event of God's birth in the ground of the soul man becomes one with God by virtue of the principle in quantum, according to his birth. Eckhart's attitude to creation, temporality and materiality is not simply neoplatonic in its rejection, but he sees in it a dimension of life that is in need of transformation, an entry into eternity, which detachment makes possible, an act of inward turning away from one's fundamental self-affirming attitude towards God and the world, which enables one for the grace-devouring influx of God. To understand detachment properly, it is necessary to understand Eckhart's philosophical starting points, since his formulation often interweaves philosophical (most often ontological) reflection expressed in theological-symbolic images and apparent paradoxes that seek to make possible a different, apophatic kind of knowing and being with God, one that truly allows God to be what He is, in His indeterminate and naked being. For Eckhart, this is the true ground of all created being, and human being is called to unite with it completely through detachment.
|