God’s Nothingness: On the Persistence of the Negative in Meister Eckhart

Abstract The belief that ‘Life is meaningless’ may at first seem incompatible with a theistic point of view. However, Meister Eckhart, a mystic member of the Dominican order, showed already in the 13th-14th Century that the innermost divine essence follows a “logic” that prescinds from the logic of “whys” – whereby everything needs an explanation (causal or otherwise) – and eludes any representation, thus leading to nothingness . God does not correspond, then, to the holder of an absolute meaning that is inaccessible to humanity. Eckhart’s thought, marked by a fundamental negativity, does not only involve the divine side: nothingness, in fact, also concerns creatures and their living. Godhead, that is God’s purest essence, consists precisely of this originary nothingness. Although divine nothingness is unrelated, it follows a dialectical movement: this paper will show how the divine essence (conceived as a “double negation”) is gained by negating creatures, to which the ‘nothingness’ of single negation corresponds. ‘Nothingness’ thus works on several levels and is never overcome by an ontological positivity represented by God – though this does not exclude the God of manifestation, the creator which “carries” attributes.