God and the Godhead
The Teaching
Meister Eckhart drew a distinction that the institutional Church found dangerous enough to condemn: the difference between ‘God’ and the ‘Godhead.’
‘God’ is the divine as we encounter it in religion — the creator, the judge, the father, the lawgiver. This is the God who hears prayers, who made the world, who has a name. This God is already a kind of veil: a form the formless takes so that human minds can relate to it.
Behind this God is the Godhead — ‘Gottheit’ in Eckhart’s German. The Godhead is not a being. It has no attributes. It cannot be named, pictured, or addressed. Eckhart called it ‘the silent desert’ and ‘the ground of being.’ He wrote: ‘God and the Godhead are as different as heaven and earth.’
And further: ‘I pray God to rid me of God.’
This was not atheism. It was the claim that the God of religion — however real — is not the deepest thing. The mystic who pushes past the personal God does not fall into nothing. They fall into the ground from which God arises.
Commentary
Eckhart was a Dominican friar, a theologian, a preacher to laypeople. He was posthumously condemned by Pope John XXII in 1329 on charges of heresy, seventeen propositions from his sermons declared erroneous or dangerous. The condemnation came after his death, so he could not defend himself. The Church correctly understood that the God/Godhead distinction was structurally subversive to institutional religion: if the personal God is a veil over the formless Godhead, then the priest and the ritual are already one step removed from the real thing.
Every mystical tradition arrives at this same structure. The Kabbalistic Ein Sof, ‘without end’, is the infinite ground behind the personal God of the Torah. The Gnostic Monad is the real divine behind the Demiurge who fashions the world. Plotinus’s One is beyond being itself, beyond the Nous and the World-Soul. The Upanishadic Nirguna Brahman, Brahman without qualities, is behind all the gods of the Hindu pantheon. The Tao that cannot be named is behind all the named things.
What Eckhart contributed was saying this directly, in the Christian context, in the vernacular, to ordinary laypeople who came to hear him preach. He did not reserve the Godhead for an esoteric elite. He insisted the ground of being was available to anyone willing to let go of their image of God.
The phrase ‘I pray God to rid me of God’ is one of the most startling sentences in the history of Western spirituality. It is not a rejection of the divine. It is a request to be taken past the personal to the ground.
Themes
Connections 10
Travelled
Christianity reached Gnosticism by 100 CE. The same milieu. Irenaeus wrote against the Gnostics (c. 180); the Gospel of Thomas, whose Gnostic character is itself disputed, shares sayings with the Gospels.
Travelled
Judaism reached Christianity by 30 CE. Christianity began as a movement within Judaism.
Travelled
Neoplatonism reached Christianity by 355 CE. Marius Victorinus used Plotinus (c. 355–362), Augustine read ‘the books of the Platonists’ (c. 386; Confessions VII), and Dionysius (c. 500) built on Proclus.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Christianity and Taoism while these teachings took shape. The Church of the East reached Chang’an in 635 and described itself in Taoist and Buddhist terms (Xi’an Stele, 781), long after both took shape.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Hinduism and Christianity while these teachings took shape. Christians lived in Kerala from early centuries, but exchange of ideas begins only with the Jesuits: Akbar’s court debates (from 1580), Roberto de Nobili writing on Hindu doctrine in Tamil (from 1606), then Wilkins’s English Gita (1785), the Upanishads in Latin (1801–02) and Vivekananda (1893). All long after either’s formative teachings.
Travelled
Judaism reached Christianity by 30 CE. Christianity began as a movement within Judaism.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Hinduism and Christianity while these teachings took shape. Christians lived in Kerala from early centuries, but exchange of ideas begins only with the Jesuits: Akbar’s court debates (from 1580), Roberto de Nobili writing on Hindu doctrine in Tamil (from 1606), then Wilkins’s English Gita (1785), the Upanishads in Latin (1801–02) and Vivekananda (1893). All long after either’s formative teachings.
Travelled
Judaism reached Christianity by 30 CE. Christianity began as a movement within Judaism.