Patriarchy and the Motherhood of God in Zoharic Kabbalah and Meister Eckhart

Elliot R. Wolf son

U bi die qu o d nihil tarn fo ed u m quam nihil ipsum est. (Eckhart, Sermo 6.2)

By all accounts the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were a period of an impressive proliferation of mystical speculation in both Jewish and Christian fraternities on the European continent. One of the dominant forms that this activity took was the recasting of Scripture through the prism of mystical teaching appropriate to each Hturgical community. Two outstanding examples of this phenomenon are the homilies of the anonymous Spanish kabbalists - mostly in Castile and Aragon - that were eventually anthologized through a long period of redaction in the compilation known as Sefer ha-20har, printed for the first time in Mantua and Cremona (15561558), and the sermons and commentaries of the German theologian and philosopher, Eckhart von Hochheim (1260- 1328). A number of scholars have noted similarities between Meister Eckhart and medieval kabbalists, especially Abraham Abulafia,^ but as of yet there is no systematic, let alone comprehensive, analysis of this topic. In this essay, I will contribute to this
^G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (N ew York: Schocken, 1956), 126; Scholem, The Kabbalah o f Sefer ha-Temunah and Abraham Abulafia [Hebrew], ed. J. Ben-Shlomo (Jerusalem: Akadamon, 1987), 123; M. Idel, Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah (Albany: State University of N ew York Press, 1988), 17 and 30 n. 112; Y. Schwartz, To Thee is Silence Praise: Meister Eckh art's Reading in Maimonides' Guide o f the Perplexed [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2002), 163-64, 180 nn. 296, 323, 331, 333. For discussion of Eckharts scriptural hermeneutics against the backdrop of Abulafia, see also B. McGinn, Selective Affinities: Reflections on Jewish and Christian Mystical Exegesis, in Creation and Re-Creation in Jewish Thought: Festschrift in Honor o f Joseph Dan on the Occasion o f his Seventieth Birthday, ed. R. Elior and P. Schafer (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 98-100. On the comparison of the pietistic ideal of equanimity in Jewish mysticism and Eckhart, see Scholem, Major Trends, 372 n. 59, and Idel, Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah, 157-58 n. 90. See also Idel, Kabbalah: N ew Perspectives (N ew Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 70, where the kabbalistic notion of devequt is compared to Eckharts Gelassenheit. See my own reflections on this matter in E. R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (N ew York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 42 and 426 n. 310. G. Scholem, Origins o f the Kabbalah, ed. R .J.2. Werblowsky, trans. A. Arkush (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 129, compared the symbol

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discussion by examining the image of the mother in the theosophic symbolism that may be extracted from the Zohar and in the mystical theology of Eckhart.^ Needless to say, given the extensive size of these corpora, I will only be able to provide here a sampling of textual evidence. The investigation of this subject will afford me the opportunity not only to reconsider the construction of gender operative in the kabbaUstic sources but to use that as a lens to assess some affinities and incongruities between Jewish and Christian mysticism in the High Middle Ages. Before beginning a detailed textual analysis, a brief methodological note is in order. Instead of framing the matter in terms of historical synchronicity, as we find in several studies arguing that the amplified interest on the part of kabbalists in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the feminization of the Shekhinah coincides with the increased devotion and veneration of Mary in Christian communities at roughly the same time,^ my exploration proceeds from a different viewpoint, one that eschews the reductive proximism of causal impact (A influences B or B influences A) and the more nuanced possibility of mutual exchange (A and B reciprocally influence one another)."^
of the temple in a passage from Sefer ha-Bahir to Eckharts use of that symbol to name the rational capacity {Vernunftlichkeit) of the soul. ^ In preparation of this study I have consulted the critical edition of Eckharts works: J. Quint et al., eds., Meister Eckhart: D ie deutschen und lateinischen Werke herausgegehen im Auftrage der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1936-). References to the German compositions will henceforth be cited as D W and to the Latin as LW. ^The two most elaborate attempts in this direction are A. Green, Shekhinah, the Virgin Mary, and the Song of Songs: Reflections on a Kabbalistic Symbol in Its Historical Context, AJS R eview 26 (2002): 1-52, and P. Schafer, Mirror o f His Beauty: Feminine Im ages o f G od from the Bible to the Early Kabbalah (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). For a critique of the position taken by Green and Schafer, see M. Idel, Kabbalah and Eros (N ew Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 46-47, 268 n. 143. In my own work on Sefer ha-Bahir, I have proposed an alternative model concerning the polemical subversion of the image of Mary, related particularly to the dogma of the virginal conception of Jesus, in the shaping of the kabbalistic symbol of the divine mother. See E.R. Wolfson, Along the Path: Studies in Kabbalistic Hermeneutics, Myth, and Symbolism (Albany: State University of N ew York Press, 1995), 84-86; Wolfson, A le f Mem, Tau: Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 145-46. Regarding the influence of Marian imagery on the zoharic kabbalah, see also Wolfson, Venturing Beyond: Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 93, 106; D. Abrams, The Virgin Mary as the M oon that Lacks the Sun: A Zoharic Polemic Against the Veneration of Mary, Kabbalah: Journal fo r the Study o f Jewish Mystical Texts 21 (2010): 7-56; E. Haskell, Metaphor and Symbolic Representation: The Image of God as SuckHng Mother in Thirteenth Century Kabbalah (PhD diss.. University of Chicago, 2005), 270-78; Haskell, The Death of Rachel and the Kingdom of Heaven: Jewish Engagement with Christian Themes in Sefer ha-Zohar, Journal o f M edieval Religious Cultures 38 (2012): 1-31, esp. 20-23. ^ For a criticism of the simplistic understanding of cultural / historical influence between Judaism and Christianity as a unilateral pattern of cause and effect and the affirmation of a more complex theory of mutual exchange, see Schafer, Mirror o f His Beauty^

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The hermeneutical model I avow presumes an ideational convergence of divergent spiritual agenda that have independently gestured toward a more fluid conception of gender.^ As I will set out to demonstrate, in the case of both the zoharic homilies and the Eckhartian sermons, this volatility stems expressly from the construal of the hyperessential reality as the meontological ground wherein the personhood of God is transcended.^ Some of the similarities between the Dominican monk and the Spanish kabbalists on the matter of the via negativa/ can be attributed to the fact that both were strongly influenced by Greek and Arabic Neoplatonic sources that
229-35. In the main, I concur with Schafers dynamic approach, but the comparative analysis of the zoharic and Eckhartian material in this study does not even presume this more sophisticated sense of influence. For an articulation more congenial with, albeit not identical to, the perspective adopted by Schafer, see the discussion of the fluid demarcation of inside and outside in E. R. Wolfson, Hebraic and Hellenic Conceptions of Wisdom in Sefer ha-B ahir Poetics Today 19 (1998): 172-73, and in more detail in Wolfson, Textual Flesh, Incarnation, and the Imaginal Body: Abraham Abulafias Polemic with Christianity, in Studies in M edieval Jewish Intellectual and Social History: Festschrift in Honor o f Robert Chazan, ed. D. Engel, L .H . Schiffman, and E.R. Wolfson (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 189-226, esp. 190-94. ^ Another example of the fluidity of gender is attested in the augmented use of maternal images on the part of Christian authors to depict Jesus. See C. Walker Bynum, as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality o f the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 110-69; Walker Bynum, H oly Feast and H oly Fast: The Religious Significance o f Food to M edieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 260-69; J. Leclercq, Women and St Bernard o f Clairvaux, trans. Marie-Bernard Said OSB (Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1989), 109-14; S. McNamer, The Exploratory Image: God as Mother in Julian of N orw ichs Revelations of Divine Love, Mystics Quarterly 15 (1989): 21-28; D .N . Bdker, Julian o f Norwich's Showings: From Vision to Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 108, 112-13, 118-20, 124, 128-134, 166; F.C. Bauerschmidt, Julian o f Norwich and the Mystical Body Politic o f Christ (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), 59, 76, 89-95, 110-11, 155-56, 160; G. ]dintztn, Julian o f Norwich: Mystic and Theologian (new ed.; N ew York: Paulist, 2000), 104, 111, 115-24, 143, 158; B. Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the M iddle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 222-34, 290, 302, 312. ^ On the apophatic implications of the kabbalistic conception of the infinite that is beyond the theistic demarcation of the scriptural and rabbinic portrayals of God, see Scholem, Origins o f the Kabbalah, 265-70; I. Tishby, The Wisdom o f the Zohar: An Anthology o f Texts, trans. D . Goldstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 229-55; S. Valabregue-Perry, Concealed and Revealed: 'Ein Sop in Theosophic Kabbalah [Hebrew] (Los Angeles: Cherub, 2010), 49-118. The bibliography on Eckharts notion of the ground is quite extensive. For some representative studies, see B. McGinn, The Mystical Thought o f Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom G od H id Nothing (N ew York: Crossroad, 2001), 35-52; McGinn, The Presence o f God: A History o f Western Christian Mysticism, vol. 4: The H arvest o f Mysticism in M edieval German (1300-1500) (N ew York: Crossroad, 2005), 118-24; C. Altmeyer, Grund und Erkennen in deutschen Predigten von Meister Eckhart (Wurzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 2005). ^ The similarity of Eckharts reflections on the divine nothingness and the speculation of the kabbalists is noted briefly by D . C. Matt, Ayin: The Concept of Nothingness in Jewish Mysticism, in The Problem o f Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy, ed. R. K. C. Forman (N ew York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 122, 126. Matt expands his

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circulated in Hebrew and Latin translations, as well as by the philosophical thought of Maimonides.^ The ensuing study, therefore, provides an example of the larger hermeneutical position: parallels in Jewish and Christian mystical thinkers can be accounted for by a shared intellectual heritage without necessitating any direct or even indirect interaction.^

Image of the Engendering Mother in the Zohar

As is well known, the theosophic ruminations of the medieval kabbalists are saturated with anthropomorphic and anthropopathic imagery. One of the more striking illustrations of the imagistic thinking is the representation of the second, third, sixth, and tenth sefirotic emanations - Hokhmah, Binah, Tiferet, and M alkhut - in the respective figures of the father, mother, son.

comparative analysis of Eckharts Nichts and the kabbalistic ayin in Varieties of Mystical Nothingness: Jewish, Christian and Buddhist, Studia Philonica Annual 9 (1997): 322-26. ^ For example, see Expositio libri Exodi, n. 37-39, LW 2:43-45, and n. 171-84, LW 2:148-58; English translation in B. McGinn, ed., Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, with the collaboration of R Tobin and E. Borgstadt, preface by K. Northcott (N ew York: Paulist, 1986), 54-55, 97-102. For the influence of Maimonidean negative theology on the kabbalists, see E.R. Wolfson, Vw N egativa in Maimonides and Its Impact on Thirteenth-Century Kabbalah, Maimonidean Studies 5 (2008): 393-442, and for the impact on Eckhart, see Schwartz, 7 b Thee is Silence P raise 201-37; F. Tobin, Meister Eckhart: Thought and Language (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 68-69. On Eckharts engagement with Maimonides, see also J. Koch, Meister Eckhart und die jiidische Religionsphilosophie des y\m e[dhQ rs Jahreshericht der Schlesischen Gesellschaft fiir vaterlandische Cultur 101 (1928): 138-48, reprinted in Koch, Kleine Schriften (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1973), 1:349-65; H. Liebeschiitz, Meister Eckhart und Moses Maimonides, Archiv fiir Kulturgeschichte 54 (1972): 64-96; K. Ruh, Neuplatonische Quellen Meister Eckharts, in Contemplata aliis trader: Studien zum Verhdltnis von Literatur und Spiritualitdt, ed. C. Brinker et al. (Bern: Peter Lang, 1995), 340-50; A .H . Friedlander, Maitre Eckhart et la tradition juive: Maimonide et Paul Celan, in Void Maitre Eckhart: Textes et etudes reunis par Emilie Zum Brunn (Grenoble: Jerome Millon, 1998), 385-400; G.K. Hasselhoff, Self-definition, Apology, and the Jew Moses Maimonides: Thomas Aquinas, Raymundus Martini, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Lyra, in Religious Apologetics - Philosophical Argumentation, ed. Y. Schwartz and V. Krech (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 301-14. And note as well the studies of W. Kluxen, Maimonides und die Hochscholastik, Philosophisches Jahrhuch 63 (1955): 151-65; Kluxen, Die Geschichte Maimonides im lateinischen Abendland als Beispiel einer christlichjiidischen Begegnung, in ]udentum im Mittelalter: Beitr 'dge zum christlich-jiidischen Gesprdch, ed. P. Wilpert (BerHn: de Gruyter, 1966), 146-66; Kluxen, Maimonides and Latin Philosophy, in Maimonides and Philosophy, ed. S. Pines and Y. Yovel (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986), 224-32; K. Flasch, Meister Eckhart: D ie Gehurt der ""Deutschen M ystik aus dem Geist der arabischen Philosophie (Munich: C. Beck, 2006), 139-49. For the Neoplatonic heritage in Eckharts thought, see also R.J. Woods, Meister Eckhart: Master o f Mystics (N ew York: Continuum, 2011), 29-47. ^ My view is in accord with the conclusion reached by Matt, Varieties, 325.

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and daughter.^^ This strategy became most pronounced in various strata of zoharic literature and developed into even more graphic detail in the speculation on the divine constellations (parsufim) in sixteenth-century Lurianic kabbalah Ima, Ze'eir Anpin, and Nuqba. For the purposes of this analysis, I will cite the following passage from a homily wherein R. Eleazar asks his father, Simeon ben Yohai, to help him understand an interpretation he has received regarding the celebrated name divulged by God to Moses at the epiphany of the burning bush, ehyeh asher ehyeh^ 1 shall be as I shall be (Exod 3:14):
H e said to him, Eleazar m y son, it has been established by the comrades. And now, everything is bound together in one thing, and the m ystery of the matter is as follows: Ehyeh - this is the principle o f everything [da khelala de-khola]. W hen the paths are hidden and not differentiated but contained in one place, then it is called ehyeh, the principle o f everything, concealed [satim] and not revealed [itgalya]. After the beginning [sheruta] emerges from it, and the river is impregnated to beget everything [it^abar le'am shekha khola], it is called asher ehyeh, that is to say, therefore I shall be - ehyeh, sum m oned to beget and to produce everything [zam m in le'am shekha u-le^olada khola]. Ehyeh, that is, n ow I am the principle o f everything [ana hu khelal kola], the principle o f every particular [khelala d e-k h o lp era tin ], asher ehyeh, the M other is impregnated [d e-ifa h b e ra ima] and she is sum m oned [zam m inat] to issue all the particulars and to disclose the supernal name. ... C om e and see: the y o d at the beginning, the principle o f everything, concealed from all sides, the paths are not open, the containm ent of male and female [kelala di-d ek h a rw e-n u q h a ]; the tittle o f the y o d above alludes to the N o th in g [rem iza le-ayin]. Afterwards the y o d brings forth the river that flow s forth and emerges from it, and is impregnated by it, and this is the he. ... The y o d produces three, and everything is com prised in the three. The y o d produces before it that river and tw o offspring w hom the m other suckles, for she conceived them and bore them. Then w e have he in this manner: he and the tw o offspring that are below the father and the mother. W hen [the he] had borne, she produced a son and placed him before her, and thus it is necessary to write a w a w . A nd this one inherited the patrim ony of the father and the mother, inheriting tw o portions, and from him the daughter is nourished, and thus it is necessary to write afterward w a w -h e as one. Just as the first he [is written] yo d -h e as one and they should not be separated, so the w a w -h e are one and they should not be separated.

According to the zoharic explanation, the name of God that Moses received alludes esoterically to the pleroma of the ten divine gradations. Keter, the
There are zoharic passages where maternal images are applied to the Shekhinah, the last of the ten sefirotic emanations, for she assumes the role of mother in relation to the entities in the lower worlds just as Binah is a mother in relation to the lower seven potencies of the divine pleroma. See, for instance, Zohar 2:22a. In this essay, I will not be concerned with this phenomenon nor will I discuss the conjunction of the two females, the unification of mother and daughter. Regarding the gender implications of this theme, see E. R. Wolfson, Luminal Darkness: Imaginal Gleanings from Zoharic Literature (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007), 228-57, esp. 230-40. Zohar 3:65a-b.

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first of the sefirot, is designated by ehyeh, the first person singular imperfect, I shall be, since it is the principle of everything, that is, the nothing that contains everything in a nondifferentiated unity.'^ The biblical name signifies that this emanation is summoned to beget and to produce everything {zammin le'amshekha u-le^olada khola). From the fact that the Aramaic zammin and the Hebrew zeman derive from the same etymological root, we can surmise that the comportment of temporality is to be ascertained from the vantage point of ehyeh, the apex of the pleromatic void, as it were, where absolute necessity is indistinguishable from pure possibility.'^ Differentiation is more clearly discernible in Hokhmah, the second sefirah, which is called paradoxically the beginning {shemta), and represented anthropomorphically as the father that comprises masculine and feminine as one (kelala di-dekhar we-nuqha). Theoretically, the coincidentia oppositorum, which is most typically situated in Keter, would signify the transcendence of gender dimorphism in the positing of an androgyny wherein there is no discernible difference between male and female. Indeed, in my assessment, the most conceptually coherent outcome of the kabbalistic symbolism is to discern that the unity of indifference {ahdut ha-shaweh), sometimes simply referred to as indifference {hashwa'ah), at the summit of the sefirotic ladder is a unity that can be comprehended only from the standpoint of a logic that challenges the law of noncontradiction. The principle of identity A = A is supplanted by the assumption that A - A and not-A, and hence A and notA are the same in virtue of being different. If we follow the course of this (il)logic, contemplation would culminate in the interruption of the very binaries that are vital to the socio-cultural, temporal-spatial, and gender divisions that orient one in the world: male and female, day and night, right and left, Jew and nonJew. For some kabbalists this is the only suitable way to characterize Keter, and surely Ein Sof, which is occasionally labeled as that which is neither something nor nothing {10 yesh we-lo ayin)} ^
1:15a, 3:11a. For an elaboration of this theme, see E.R. Wolfson, A D ream Interpreted within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism o f Imagination (N ew York: Zone, 2011), 244 48. ^ G. Scholem, The Traditions of R. Jacob and R. Isaac ben R. Jacob ha-Kohen [Hebrew], M addaei ha-Yahadut 2 (1927): in, D .S. Ariel, Shem Tob Ibn Shetn Tobs Kabbalistic Critique of Jewish Philosophy in the Commentary on the Sefirot: Study and Text (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 1982), 42; Meir Ibn Gabbai, Derekh Emunah, in M. Schatz, Ma'yan Moshe (Jerusalem: Moses Metz, 2011), 117, 122. Compare the anonymous text cited in E.R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in M edieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 289. On the use of this expression by Bahya ben Asher, see E. Gottlieb, The Kabbalah in the Writings o f R. Bahya ben Asher Ibn H alawa [Hebrew] Qerusalem: Kiryat Seter, 1970), 229, noted as well'by Matt, Ayin, 134, and Wolfson, D ream Interpreted Within a Dreamy 247.

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A telling example is found in one of the few documents purportedly penned by the sixteenth-century master, Isaac Luria. Commenting on the highest aspect of the divine, which is called on the basis of a passage in the Idra Zuta stratum of zoharic literature the head that is not known {reisha de-lo ityeda)^'^ Luria wrote that it is not warranted to [apply to it] male or female, any name, any word, or any epithet.^^ The radical apophaticism calls for the eradication of all linguistic and conceptual demarcations of the divine persona, including the binary of the masculine potency to overflow (hesed) and the feminine capacity to delimit (din or gevurah). The gender dyad would derive from but also be surpassed in the transgendered oneness that is the nothingness of infinity. It must be noted, however, that other kabbalists were not only willing to speak of Ein 50/in kataphatic language^^ but also in terms that suggest a male person, the most daring example being the description of Ein S'o/bemusing himself prior to the emanation, a graphic representation of the originary divine creativity as an autoerotic exploit, a kind of noetic jouissance {sha'ashu^a)}^ Obviously, a formulation such as this is not to be taken literally, but it is still telling that the supposedly neutered divine essence is portrayed in decidedly masculine terms as the impulse to spread forth boundlessly. The highest gradation in the sefirotic realm, Keter^ is anthropomorphized as the male in which the female is contained. Accordingly, the facet of indifference associated with it does not denote the erasure of sexual difference there is neither male nor female because there is both male and female - but rather the abolition of that difference in the male androgyne - there is neither male nor female because the female is comprised in the male. The masculine nature of the androgyny is attested in the fact that the feminine Binah is constructed from the masculine Hokhmah^ or, in the overtly sexual symboUsm of the zoharic author, the point {nequddah), which is the beZohar 3:288a-b. In that passage, the three heads are enumerated in the uppermost aspect of the divine in the following ascending order: the concealed wisdom {hokhmata setima'ah), the holy ancient one {attiqa qaddisha), the concealed of all that are concealed setima de-khol setimin, and the head of every head {reisha de-khol reisha\ which is also designated the head that is no head {reisha de-law reisha), whose content is not known {10 yada w e-10 ityeda). On the three heads connected to the three knots of the letter yod, which correspond respectively to Keter, Hokhmah, and Binah, see Zohar 3:10b. Isaac Luria, Perush Sefer Yesirah, in H ayyim / Vital, Sha'ar Ma^amerei Rashhi u-Ma'amerei R azal (Jerusalem, 1898), 23a. For an alternative version of the text, see Hayyim Vital, Sefer ha-Derushim, ed. E. Panzeiri Jerusalem: Ahavat Shalom, 1996), 240-41. M. Idel, Jewish Kabbalah and Platonism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, in Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought, ed. L. E. Goodman (Albany: State University of N ew York Press, 1992), 325-31. E. R. Wolfson, Circle in the Square: Studies in the Use o f Gender in Kahhalistic Symholism (Albany: State University of N ew York Press, 1995), 69-72; Wolfson, LanguaQe, Eros, Being, 271-87.

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ginning {re"shit\ creates out of itself the palace {heikhala) into which it is inserted and circumscribed.^^ Expressed in a different terminological register, the letter yod perpetually produces and is concealed in the letter he^ a mystery encoded in the name yah assigned to Hokhmah?^ The theosophic assumption is grounded exegetically in the narrative about the creation of woman {ishshah) from man {ish) in the second chapter of Genesis, which kabbalists (following earHer rabbinic precedent^^) have read as a midrashic explication of the statement in the first chapter that Adam was created male and female.^^ From this reading we can infer that woman is a corollary vis-a-vis man, since she is constructed corporally from him. The biblical myth imparted to Jewish exegetes the androcentric belief that woman is the female o f man and not the more neutral belief, as Emmanuel Levinas argued,^^ that she was created from a universal and nongendered humanity. I see no textual rationale for proposing a human essence that is prior to the division into masculine and feminine. Even according to the account in the first chapter of Genesis, Adam was said to be created male and female. The androcentrism is enhanced by the fact that some kabbalists adopted the archaic perspective that all offspring are originally male when contained in the semen in the brain of the father and only afterward evolve into the stronger male or the weaker female.^"^ Be that as it may, there is little room to doubt that the zoharic passage cited above indicates that the principle of androgyny is determined from the angle of the male - Hokhmah, personified as the father, consists of the mas2 0 W 1:15a. 20 2 0 W 3:11a. Compare the interpretations of Gen 2:22 in Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 61a, attributed to Rav and Samuel according to which the rib or side of man whence the woman was created is identified either as a face or a tail. The opinion that it was a face, at least according to the talmudic redactors, seems to accord with the previously mentioned opinion attributed to Jeremiah ben Eleazar that God created the first man with two faces, an idea anchored exegetically in Ps 139:5. 22 Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, 72-73, 108-10,147-49,170-71, 373. 2^ E. Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. and intro. A. Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 173. For a criticism of Levinas, see J. Derrida and C. V. McDonald, Choreographies, Diacritics 12 (1982): 73; Derrida, At This Very Moment in This Work Here I A m , in Re-Reading Levinas, ed. R. Bernasconi and S. Critchley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 41; S. Sandford, The Metaphysics o f Love: Gender and Transcendence in Levinas (London: Athlone, 2000), 33 63; S.E. Shapiro, And God Created Woman: Reading the Bible Otherwise, in Levinas and Biblical Studies, ed. T. Cohn Eskenazi, G. A. Phillips, and D. Jobling (Adanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), 159-95, esp. 171; E.R. Wolfson, Secrecy, Modesty, and the Feminine: Kabbalistic Traces in the Thought of Levinas, in The Exorbitant: Emmanuel Levinas Between Jews and Christians, ed. K. Hart and M. A. Signer (N ew York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 61. 2^ Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, 185-86, citing Hayyim Vital, Sha^ar ha-Pesuqim (Jerusalem, 1912), 5a.

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culine and the feminine, the third sefirah, Binah, which is the configuration of the mother. It follows, therefore, that the delineation in the aforecited zoharic passage of Hokhmah as kelala di-dekhar we-nuqba implies that initially there is one gender that comprises both male and female, or, according to the language of another passage, Hokhmah, the elevation of thought {seliqu de-mahashavah), and Binah, the world to come {alma de-atei\ form one mystery without separation {raza hada velo piruda)P This is not to deny that each of the two attributes is itself androgynous - Hokhmah is masculine in relation to Binah and feminine in relation to Keter, whereas Binah is feminine in relation to Hokhmah and masculine in relation to the seven emanations that emerge from her - but this only bolsters the legitimacy of speaking of the principal gender construct in kabbalistic theosophy as the male androgyny. By utilizing this terminology I have never intended to suggest that the kabbalists are unaware of a feminine persona - displayed on both the pneumatic and the bodily planes - that complements the masculine. My point rather is that according to the complex symbolic economy of the kabbalists masculinity and femininity are determined from the perspective of the former, and thus I have written about the containment of the female in the male. References to the anatomy of a woman in the kabbalistic sources do not undermine the hierarchy nor do the efforts on the part of some scholars to show that the qualities of constriction, delimitation, and receptivity, associated with the feminine, do not disallow an autonomous sense of agency and power. Subversion of the hegemony is well attested in the textual landscape of the sources - 1 myself have dubbed this phenomenon as the crossing of gender boundaries - but this only consolidates the authority of the ascendant paradigm whereby the female is subordinate to the male. The relevance of this dynamic to the image of motherhood may be elucidated further if we attend more carefully to the zoharic exegesis of ehyeh asher ehyeh. The ascription of the second occurrence of ehyeh to Binah underscores that in emulation of Keter, to which the first ehyeh is ascribed, the divine mother embodies the directive to procreate, which, as we have seen, instantiates the essential feature of time as the coming forth into disclosure from a state of concealment. The theme is enunciated in a second zoharic passage:
The first [of the ten names] is ehyeh, the supernal concealed one [setim a illa^ah\ as it is said I am w hat I am \ana ma^n da-ana\, but it is not know n what it is \w e-lo ityeda ma^n hu\. Subsequently, asher ehyeh, I am that w hich is sum m oned to be revealed [ana de-zam m in leHtgalyd] in those crowns, for at first he was hidden, and afterward he began to be revealed until he reaches the disclosure o f the h oly name. Zahar 2:98a.

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Thus it is written w ith respect to M oses, at first ehyeh, the m ost concealed [setimu de-khola]y I am w hat I am, and afterward asher ehyeh, I am the one sum m oned to be revealed, and afterward the last ehyeh, and this is w hen the mother is impregnated but he is still concealed.^^

The reiteration of ehyeh signifies that the demiurgic begetting is applied to both Keter and Binah but with an important divergence: whereas the first occurrence denotes the containment of all things in a general or nondifferentiated manner, the second denotes the containment of all things in a particular or differentiated manner. The engendering quality of Binah is symbolized figuratively by the dual image of the mother that is impregnated and nourishes her offspring. Elsewhere I have argued that these two tasks can be understood in light of the kabbalistic understanding of androgyny: the capacity to be impregnated is the feminine aspect of the mother, and the capacity to suckle - often linked more specifically to breastfeeding^^ - is the masculine aspect of the mother. In virtue of the latter, Binah is demarcated as the river that issues from Eden to irrigate the garden (Gen 2:10),^^ or as the world of the masculine {alma di-dekhura) as opposed to Shekhinah, which is identified as the world of the feminine {alma de-nuqha)P Even if one were to reject the application of the psychoanalytic category phallic mother to this kabbalistic s y m b o l,o n e would be hard pressed to dispute
Zohar 3:11a. Part of the text is previously translated and analyzed in Wolfson, Dream Interpreted Within a Dream, 245-46. For a fuller analysis of this motif in the kabbalah of Isaac the Blind, Ezra of Gerona, and zoharic literature, see Haskell, Metaphor and Symbolic Representation, 166-270. The attribution of this verse to Binah occurs frequendy in zoharic literature. For instance, see Zohar 3:11a, 58a. Wolfson, Circle in the Square, 98-106,109-10, 218-19 n. 125. My interpretation has been criticized by Haskell, Metaphor and Symbolic Representation,280-82 . I cannot respond here exhaustively to Haskells remarks, but I will briefly note three things that render her evaluation of my work questionable. First, none of the kabbalistic sources cited by her support the claim that the image of suckling from the breasts as utilized by male medieval kabbalists denotes a nurturing sign of tenderness between parent and child without sexual innuendo; second, my understanding of sexual is not as reductive as she assumes and hence it can encompass the other dimensions of the phenomenon that she delineates; third, her contention that I have been misled by assuming that the Shekhinah is characterized as pure passivity is simply inaccurate. The description of the feminine primarily as a vessel to receive the seminal discharge of the male is not my own invention; it runs deep in rabbinic sources that assuredly influenced the kabbalists. More importantly, I do not deny, as Haskell assumes, that passivity is an active force. It is correct that I have emphasized that kabbalists consistently classify the feminine as the capacity to receive and the masculine as the potency to overflow, but I have also noted repeatedly that the female is associated with the quality of judgment or the force 01 delimitation, which are surely not passive. I have often called attention to the fact that for the kabbalists creativity entails both masculine projection and feminine constriction, ana I have acknowledged that the latter, too, should be considered a dynamic energy. Haskells statement - presumably disparaging me - that the act of suckling a child is not a purely passive experience, but involves an aspect of active transmission282) ), demonstrates the

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that, insofar as Binah is contained in Hokhmah, maternity must be viewed as an expression of paternal fecundity; indeed, all three personifications of the divine - mother, son, and daughter - are described as being contained in the yod of the name, and consequently, everything can be indexed as a manifestation of the father. The primary image of maternity that interested the zoharic kabbalists is a patriarchal appropriation of maternal filiation, a reaffirmation of the counter-intuitive and contra-empirical assumption that the feminine is ontically derivative of the masculine.^^

Birthing the Son and the Maternal Nature of the Father

Let me turn now to the mystical speculations of Meister Eckhart. Any discussion of Eckharts religious philosophy must begin with the apophatic dimension of his thinking. As is well known, in his mystical lexicon, the hidden Godhead {gotheit), which lies beyond the trinitarian God (got), is the primordial ground {grunt) or preoriginary origin {ursprincy^ with regard to
crux of her misrepresentation of my view. I recognize that suckling is not passive; indeed, this is the basis for my assertion that this activity is valorized as a phallic potency in the kabbalistic lore. One may disagree with that interpretation but it is reasonable to expect that it be presented accurately. Let me emphasize one more time that I do not celebrate this dimension of the traditional kabbalah; quite the contrary, I see my work in this domain as a feminist critique of a phallocentrism that I personally find offensive. I understand well why I have been the target of so much condemnation, but this does not mean that the criticisms have presented my position correctly, no matter how many times they are repeated in print. By stating that sucking from the breasts is equivalent to cleaving to the corona of the phallus, I did not mean to suggest that the kabbalists engaged in some form of homosexual fantasy; on the contrary, my point has always been that the phallocentrism is predicated on a symbolic transmutation of the corporeal images, which is dependent on an ascetic renunciation of carnal eros that facilitates the experience of a spiritual-noetic eros. This is what empowered male kabbalists to appropriate qualities that are linked to the female anatomy and to interpret them phallically. Finally, let me note that on hermeneutical grounds I accept Haskells appeal to multiple readings, but it is unfortunate that it is offered as a theoretical excuse to jettison or minimize my own interpretive stance. A more scrupulous sense of multivocality would necessitate accepting the credibility of my position as well. Unfortunately, I have found that the invocation of differance is too often a means to renounce a view that does not fit an agenda deemed politically correct by the current ethical and socio-political demand to depict the feminine in a more positive and constructive light, a tendency that I myself affirm existentially even though I have not been able to interpret the kabbalistic texts in this light. A similar argument has been made with respect to the symbol of maternity in the thought of Levinas. See Sandford, Metaphysics o f Love, 64-109; Sanford, Masculine Mothers? Maternity in Levinas and Plato, in Feminist Interpretations o f Emmanuel Levinas, ed. T. Chanter (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 180-202, especially 192-99. R. Schiirmann, trans. and comm., Meister Eckhart: Mystic and Philosopher (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 120.

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which there is nothing to be said, since all distinct entities become indistinct {indistinctum) in the One {unum) whose existence is distinguished by its in d istin c tio n ,a unity so absolute^"^ that even God unbecomes {entwirt)?^
LW 4:27-28 (Sermo 4.1, n. 28): Ubi notandum quod cum dicimus omnia esse in deo, sicut ipse est indistinctus in sui natura et tamen distinctissimus ah omnibus, sic in ipso sunt omnia distinctissime simul et indistincta. English translation in McGinn, Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, 209: Here note that when we say that all things are in God [that means that] just as he is indistinct in his nature and nevertheless more distinct from all things, so in him all things in a most distinct way are also at the same time indistinct. Compare Expositio sancti evangelii secundum lohannem, n. 99, LW 3:85: Quarto, quia deiproprium est esse indistinctum et ipse sola sua indistinctione distinguitur, creaturae vero proprium est esse distinctum. Distinctum autem proprie non recipit indistinctum. English translation in E. Colledge OSA and B. McGinn, trans. and intro., Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, preface by H. Smith (N ew York: Paulist, 1981), 160: and fourth, because indistinct existence is proper to God and he is distinguished by his indistinction alone, while distinct existence is proper to a creature. It does not belong to what is distinct to receive what is indistinct. See also Expositio libri Sapientiae, n. 144-45, LW 2:482-83: Est igitur sciendum quod li unum idem est quod indistinctum . ... Rursus de natura dei est indistinctio, tum quia infinitus, tum quia non determinatus ad terminos et limites alicuius generum sive entium. ... deum esse unum, quod est indistinaum, significat divinam summam perfectionem, qua sine ipso et ab ipso distinctum nihil est aut esse potest. English translation in McGinn, Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, 166: We must understand that the term one is the same as indistinct. ... Furthermore, there is an indistinction that concerns G ods nature, both because he is infinite, and also because he is not determined by the confines or limits of any genera or b eings.... God is one who is indistinct. This signifies the highest divine perfection by which nothing exists or is able to exist without him or distinct from him. And Expositio libri Sapientiae, n. 154, LW 2:489-90: Sed de natura dei est indistinctio, de natura et ratione creati distinctio .... Igitur deus est distinctissimus ah omni et quolibet creato. ... Deus autem indistinctum quoddam est quod sua indistinctione distinguitur. English translation in McGinn, Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, 169: But indistinction belongs to G ods nature; distinction to the created things nature and idea .... Therefore, God is most distinct from each and every created thing. ... But God is something indistinct which is distinguished by his indistinction. In that context, Eckhart cites Aquinas, Summa Theologia la q. 7 art. 1. For discussions of Eckharts notion of Gods oneness and the paradox of the distinctiveness of indistinction, see McGinn, The God beyond God: Theology and Mysticism in the Thought of Meister Eckhart, o f Religion 61 (1981): 6-7; McGinn, Mystical Thought, 93-100; McGinn, H arvest o f Mysticism, 129-30; M. A. Sells, Mystical Languages o f Unsaying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 149-50; R. J. Dobie, Logos and Revelation: Ibn ^Arabi, Meister Eckhart, and Mystical Hermeneutics (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 129-34 (as the author remarks in n. 12, ad loc, Eckharts characterization of the One as indistinct may have been inspired both by Pseudo-Dionysius and Aquinas). B. McGinn, Meister Eckhart on God as Absolute Unity, in Neoplatonism and Christian Thought, ed. D. O Meara (Albany: State University of N ew York Press, 1982), 128-39. DW4:77?> (Pr. 109); M. O C. Walshe, trans.. The Complete Mystical Works o f Meister Eckhart, rev. with foreword by B. McGinn (N ew York: Herder & Herder, 2009), 294 (hereafter cited as CMW). See McGinn, Mystical Thought, 90-100, 223 n. 60; B. Milem, The Unspoken Word: N egative Theology in Meister Eckhart's German Sermons (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2002), 22-49; R. Schiirmann, Broken

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The true light {war lieht) shines in the darkness, and hence to see it one must be bHnd and must strip from God all that is something. ... When the soul is unified and enters into total self-abnegation \luter verworfenheit ir selber\ then she finds God as in Nothing.^^ The mandate is to know God without image [ane bilde], without means [ane mittet], and without semblance [ane glichnis] But to know God in this way calls for one to shed the garb of the self, so that one can utter, I must really become He and He I. ... God must really become I and I must really become God, so fully one that this he and F become and are one is, and in that self-identity [istikeit ewiklich]... this he and this I - that is, God and the soul - are very fruitful. Theosis, the assimilation of the self into God, facilitates the obliteration of both self and God. Eckhart thus admonishes his listeners to love God as He is: a non-God [nit-got], a non-spirit [nit-geist], a non-person [nit-persone], a non-image [ntit-bilde]; rather, as He is a sheer pure limpid One [ein Inter pur clar E in \ detached from all duality [gesvndert von aller zweiheite]. And in that One may we eternally sink from nothingness to nothingness [von nite z v nvteY'^^ The crossing of the abyss requires the dissolution of the atomistic self on both the anthropological and theological planes - in no uncertain terms, God and soul are said to be indivisibly one - through knowledge of the ground, which is actually the ignorance {unwizzen) and unknowing {unbekantheit) that lures and attracts one away from all understood things and from oneself, for he who does not abandon creaturely externals can be neither conceived nor born in this divine birth [gotliche geburt ]. ... And in very truth I believe, nay I am sure, that the man who is established in this cannot in any way be separated from G od.^^ Some scholars have even proposed that the conception of nothingness proffered by Eckhart can be compared profitably to the Mahayana Buddhist notion of the indiscriminate emptiness {sunyatd) that is the discriminate thusness (tathdtd) of all that exists. The emptiness of all things, on this score, does not connote their negation but rather the affirmation of their nonbeing in the nothingness that is the substratum out of which all differentiated beings arise and in which their mutual relationality is grounded.^
Hegemonies, trans. R. Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 307; Woods, Meister Eckhart, 137-55. D W 3:223-24 (Pr. 71); CMW, 140. D W 3:447 (Pr. 83); CMW, 464. On the term istikeit as the designation of the formless being or the non-being of the Godhead, see Schiirmann, Meister Eckhart: Mystic and Philosopher, 187-89, 221-22. D W 3:448 (Pr. 83); CM W , 465. DW 4:366-67 (Pr. 101); CM W , 36. Here I offer a modest sample of some of the comparative studies of Eckhart and Eastern thought, especially Mahayana Buddhism: D.T. Suzuki, Mysticism: Christian and

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The oneness of the ground, accordingly, is not calculated mathematically as an abstract whole but rather as the concrete aggregate that is constantly wrought from the incommensurable manifoldness of discrete individuals. This is the import of Eckharts embracing the paradox that, on one hand, nothing is as dissimilar as the Creator and any creature, and on the other, nothing is as similar as the Creator and any creature, from which emerges the even more paradoxical assertion, nothing is as equally dissimilar and similar to anything else as God and the creature are dissimilar and similar to the same degree. Underlying this syllogism is the belief that has been called the heart of Eckharts dialectical theology: The very unity and unique oneness of God necessarily implies G ods immanence in all things.'* ^ This would buttress the observation of Reiner Schiirmann that Eckharts Godhead presupposes that G ods being is distilled in my singularization ... which is to say that the ineffable extensivity of being is identical to the equally ineffable insensitivity of the singular. We recall the poignant expression of this venturing beyond the theistic and psychologistic representations of identity in EckBuddhist (N ew York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), 3-35; J. Politella, Meister Eckhart and Eastern W isdom, Philosophy East and West 15 (1965): 117-33; S. Ueda, D ie Gottesgeburt in der Seele und der Durchhmch zu r Gottheity Meister Eckhart und der Zen Buddhismus (Giitersloh: G. Mohn, 1965); Ueda, Nothingness in Meister Eckhart and Zen Buddhism With Particular Reference to the Borderlands of Philosophy and Theology, in The Buddha Eye: An Anthology o f the Kyoto School and Its Contemporaries, ed. E Franck (Bloomington: World Wisdom, 2004), 157-69; R. Schiirmann, Trois penseurs du delaissement: Maitre Eckhart, Heidegger, Suzuki: Part O n t Journal o f the History o f Philosophy 12 (1974): 455-77; and Schiirmann, Trois penseurs du delaissement: Maitre Eckhart, Heidegger, Suzuki: Part H w o Journal o f the History o f Philosophy 13 (1975): 56-60, EngHsh translation of the second part of this essay was published as the appendix in Schiirmann, Meister Eckhart: Mystic and Philosopher, 221-26; R. Schiirmann, The Loss of Origin in Soto Zen and in Meister Eckhart, The Thomist 42 (1978): 281-312; J.D . Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1978), 203-17; J. Steffney, Compassion in Mahayana Buddhism and Meister Eckhart, o f Religious Thought 31 (1974-1975): (yA-77; R.E. Carter, God and Nothingness, Philosophy East and West 59 (2009): 1-21; C. Radler, Losing the Self: Detachment in Meister Eckhart and Its Significance for Buddhist-Christian Dialogue, Buddhist-Christian Studies 26 (2006): 111-17; H.-S. Keel, Meister Eckhart: An Asian Perspective (Louvain: Peeters, 2007). See below, n. 58. A brief critique of the effort to compare Eckhart to Eastern traditions appears in C .E Kelley, Meister Eckhart on D ivine Knowledge (N ew Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 50. Eckhart, Expositio lihri Exodi, n. 112, LW 2:110; McGinn, Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, Dobie, Logos and Revelation, 129. The author duly notes the similarity of Eckhart*s mystical theology to the worldview of Ibn Arabi, but this is a topic beyond the concerns of this study. In addition to the monograph of Dobie, see G. Kakaie, The Extroversive U nity of Existence from Ibn 'Arabics and Meister Eckharts Viewpoints, Topoi 26 (2007): 177-89. Schiirmann, Broken Hegemonies, 288.

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harts invocation, Therefore I pray to God to make me free of God, for my essential being is above God, taking God as the origin of creatures [begin der creaturen]. For in that essence of God in which God is above being and distinction, there I was myself and knew myself so as to make this man.'^ '^ In the Godhead that is beyond differentiation, both divine and human subjectivities dissolve, or in Eckharts language, they are unborn {ungehorn\ which is to say, the essential being {wesenlich wesen) of the self, like the essence of God (wesene gotes), is born eternally and not temporally. Unbirth is Eckharts provocative way of marking the continual birth that occurs in the light of the soul where time and place have never entered, the virginal birth that must repeatedly occur beyond time, in eternity (iiber lit in ewicheit)^^ From that vantage point, he could boldly proclaim, If I were not, God would not be either. I am the cause of G ods being God: if I were not, then God would not be God [enwcere ich nihty so enw^ere got niht ,got"\ But you do not need to know this." ^ ^ The concluding admonition strikes me as profoundly ironic, since, as a matter of fact, this syllogism encapsulates the essential wisdom that one needs to know, or perhaps to unknow, in order to attain the supreme perfection. The sermon concludes with Eckhart emphasizing that the naked truth {unbedahtiu warheit) enunciated therein came to him directly from the heart of G od {herzen gotes) and hence it cannot be understood by one not equal to this truth {niht gltch enist dirre warheit)^^ The caveat notwithstanding, the spiritual goal he preached consists of the soul attaining the condition of inner poverty (inwendigiu armouty^ - to become, as Eckhart frequently expressed it, the virgin^ or the widow^^ - by willing and desiring nothing to the point of releasement {gelazenheit) or detachment (abegescheidenheit),^^ the kenotic state of letting go so that one is free of God and all things. ... For before
D W 2:502 (Pr. 52); CM W , 424. See Sells, Mystical Languages, 187-92. CMWy 576. For the German original, see K. Ruh, Fragment einer unbekannten Predigt von Meister Eckhart aus dem friihen 14. Jahrhundert, Zeitschrift fiir deutsches A ltertH m X n (1982): 219. D W 1:166 (Pr. 10); CMW, 336. DW 2:504 (Pr. 52); CMW, 424. Z)W 2:506 (Pr. 52); CM W , 425. See D. E. Linge, Mysticism, Poverty and Reason in the Thought of Meister Eckh^n, JAAR 46 (1978): 465-88. See also Kelley, Meister Eckhart, 222-27; Tobin, Meister Eckhart, 140-46. D W 1:24-30 (Pr. 2); CMW, 77-1%. See Schiirmann, Meister Eckhart: Mystic and Philosopher, 9-14, 17-19; A. H ollyw ood, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild o f Magdehurg. Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 145-55; Milem, Unspoken Word, 51-65; M. Vinzent, The A rt o f Detachment (Leuven: Peeters, 2011), 192-98. D W 2:317-19 (Pr.43); CM W , 394. Schiirmann, Meister Eckhart: Mystic and Philosopher, 111-21; Kelley, Meister Eckhart, 215 45; Caputo, Mystical Element, 118-27; Woods, Meister Eckhart, 85-96.

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there were creatures, God was not G od [do enwas got niht ,gof\. He was That which He was.^^ In the brief treatise On Detachment, which was probably composed by Eckhart, the nothingness (jiihte) reahzed by detachment is allocated a level superior to perfect humility {demueticheit)^ a virtue that is consequent to the annihilation of self {vernihten sin selbes). As the ground ontologically is neither this nor that, so detachment is a state in which the heart does not wish for this or that, wanting nothing, not even the desire not to want. Through the immovable detachment {unbewegelichiu abegescheidenheit) one achieves the greatest equality {grceste glicheit) with God.^^ And if the heart is to be willing for that highest place, it must repose in a naked nothingness \bl6zen nihte]; and in this there is the greatest potentiality that can be. And when the heart that has detachment attains to the highest place, that must be nothingness, for in this is the greatest receptivity.^^ The apophasis of p o ssessivenesspreached by Eckhart is so extreme that he even urges his coreligionists to detach themselves from the image of Christ so that they might unite with the formless being (formeldsem wesene) that is beyond iconic representation.^^ When the most exalted aspect of the soul the intellect that does not seek, which is pure light in itself^^ - is detached from all material things, it receives nothing but the naked Godhead [Inter gotheit] but this transpires only when God, too, is stripped of all additions, that is, only when our notion of God is divested of all kataphatic attribution - when we grasp the paradox of God as mode without mode
D W 2:492-93, 502 (Pr. 52); CM W , 421 and 424. See McGinn, Mystical Thought, 133-39. D W 5:404-5, 412; Colledge and McGinn, Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, 286-88. Compare Z)W2:256 (Pr. 39); CMW, 305-6: It is the property of creatures to make something from something, but it belongs to God to make something from nothing: therefore if God is to make anything in you or with you, you must first be reduced to nothing. D W 5:425; Colledge and McGinn, Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, 292. The expression is used to describe Eckharts ideal of detachment by McGinn, Harvest o f Mysticism, 169. D W 5:431; Colledge and McGinn, Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, 293. On the subtleties of Eckharts image mysticism, see E. Brient, The Immanence o f the Infinite: Hans Blumenherg and the Threshold to Modernity (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2002), 158-76. 58 DW 3:217 (Pr. 71); CMW, 138. Compare D W 1:152 (Pr. 9); CM W , 344, where the intellect (Verniinfticheit) is identified as the aspect of the soul through which God is stripped of goodness and being and of all names. In this matter, Eckhart is beholden to the apophasis of the Neoplatonic tradition according to which the surpassing of reason is through reason. The intellect, accordingly, is not the inferior faculty of discursive reason but rather the superior faculty by which the mind through contemplation can realize its oneness with the Godhead. With regard to this matter, Eckharts position has been compared to Zen Buddhism by R. J. Woods, Eckhart^s Way (Dublin: Veritas, 2009), 50. O n the detached intellectuality, see Kelley, Meister Eckhart, 77-93.

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[wise ane w ise\ and essence without essence \wesen dne wesen]^'^ - do we apprehend the true meaning of divine o n e n e ss ,th e nothingness whose "shadow is perceived in all created beings.^^ The power of the soul that is the intellect can see God, the invisible Hkeness in all things visible, only when it is entirely stripped and denuded of all means {alzemdle entbloezet und entdecket von allem mittel) and thus becomes nothing as God, who is like nothing {als got nihte glich enist, als enist ouch disiu kraft nihte glich),^^ Since it is God s nature not to be like anyone, we have to come to the state of being nothing [daz wir niht sin\ in order to enter into the same nature that He is. So, when I am able to establish myself in Nothing and Nothing in myself \daz ich mich gehilde in niht und niht engebilde in mich\ ... then I can pass into the naked being of God [daz bloze wesen gotes] ... All that smacks of likeness [glicheit] must be ousted that I may be transplanted into God and become one with Him: one substance, one being, one nature, and the Son of G od.^^ The soul united with the divine substance by becoming nothing is accorded the title Israel, the God-seeing man {ein sehender man g o t\ according to the ancient etymology ish ra^ah el, the man who has seen G od, for the soul deprived of all images sees that no image can reveal the essence of the Godhead.^"^ Based on Eckharts interpretation of the verse Saul arose from the ground, and when his eyes were opened, he could see nothing (Acts 9:8), we can deduce that there are four levels of envisioning nothingness: to see that God is nothing {niht was got); to see that there is nothing but G od
DW 3:231 (Pr. 71); CMW, 142. ^ 0 D W 1:361 (Pr. 21); CM W , 467. Eckhart, Expositio sancti evangelii secundum lohannem, n. 20, LW 3:17: Res enim omnis creata sapit umhram nihili, rendered into German as Denn an allem Geschaffenen spurt man den Schatten des Nichts. English translation in Colledge and McGinn, Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, 128: Every created being smacks of the shadow of nothingness. I would modify the translation to In all created beings one can discern the shadow of nothingness. The view expressed in this dictum should be contrasted with the more negative assessment of nothingness in LW 4:57 (Sermo 6.2, n. 57): Omne enim creatum ratione nihili foedum est et dividit a deo, sicut nox a die, tenehrae a luce, nihil ah esse. English translation in McGinn, Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, 214: Everything created is stained with nothingness and set apart from God, like night from day, darkness from light, nothingness from existence. On the status of the nothing in Eckharts thought, see Caputo, Mystical Element, 134-37; B.J. Lanzetta, Three Categories of Nothingness in Eckhart, o f Religion 72 (1992): 248-68; A. Charles-Saget, N on-etre et neant chez Maitre Eckhart, in Void Maitre Eckhart, 301-18; U. Kern, ""Gottes Sein ist Mein Leben'': Philosophische Brocken hei Meister Eckhart (BerHn: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), 137-211. D W 3:165-71 (Pr. 69); CM W , 234-35. D W 3:322 (Pr. 76), CM W , 74 (emphasis in original). See Schiirmann, Meister Eckhart: Mystic and Philosopher, 134,167-68. ^ D W 3:322-23 (Pr. 76), CM W , 74. On the presumed etym ology of Israel as ish ra'ah el, see Wolfson, Through a Speculum, 50 and sources cited there in nn. 158-62.

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{niht wan got)'^ to see in all things ... nothing but G od {in alien dingen ... niht wan got)y and to see God by seeing all things as nothing {alliu dincals ein niht).^^ True vision is transposed into bhndness, for only by not seeing anything does one see the nothingness in relation to which all creatures are judged to be nothing.^^ Although Eckhart at times speaks of silence or the cessation of all Ianguage as commensurate to the ultimate state of abandonment through which one enters into the simple ground {einvaltigen grunt)^ the silent desert {stillen wiieste) beyond the distinction of the Father, the Son, and the H oly Ghost, the impartible stillness {einvaltic stille) and immobility (unhewegelicheit) through which all things are moved,^^ his position is more nuanced with respect to the interplay of kataphasis and apophasis, the way of eminence (via eminentiae) and the way of negation {via negationist^ - indeed, it is fair to say that, theologically speaking, the via
^ 5 DW 3:211-12 (Pr. 71); CMW, 137. D W 3:225-28 (Pr. 71); CM W , 140-41. In Sermon 4, Eckhart expresses this idea in a more pantheistic idiom. See D W 1:69-70 (Pr. 4); CMW, 226: All creatures are pure nothmg \luter niht]. ... All creatures have no being, for their being consists in the presence of God [gegenwerticheit gotes]. If God turned away for an instant from all creatures, they would perish. This remark served as the basis for the twenty-sixth of the twenty-eight Eckhartian articles condemned in the bull of Pope John XII (In agro dominico) issued on March 27, 1329. See Colledge and McGinn, Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons^ 80, and Schiirmann, Meister Eckhart: Mystic and Philosopher^ 85-87. On the nothingness of all creatures in themselves in relation to God, see Eckhart, Sermones et Lectiones super Ecclesiastici, n. 61, LW 2:290; English translation in McGinn, Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, 181. 67 DW 2:420-21 (Pr. 48); CMW, 311. See also DW 2:189 (Pr. 36a); CMW, 219. Alluding to Augustines statement in the fifth chapter of his Sermon 117 (PL 38:665) that God is ineffable (Ineffahilis est autem Deus), Eckhart maintains that the namelessness (ungenant) of God entails a silence {swigen) that is even greater than saying of God that he is unspoken {ungesprochen), since the latter still implies some sense of speech (sprechen). In the same context (D W 2:190-91; CMW, 219), Eckhart cites from chapter thirty-two of book twenty of Gregory the Greats Magna Moralia (PL 76:174) to substantiate the claim that we cannot truly speak of G od. For Eckhart, this silence is the fitting way to speak - or perhaps not to speak - about the ground from which the soul proceeds. Compare D W 2:203-4 (Pr. 36b); CMW, 223; K. Harries, Infinity and Perspective (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001), 175-76; Brient, Immanence o f the Infinite, 182-83. 6^ On the dialectic of kataphatism and apophatism in Eckhart, see the succinct formulation in the introduction of McGinn, Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, 33-34: Eckharts teaching about God really needed a way of speaking about the divine nature that would combine the negative (i. e., transcendent) and the positive (i. e., immanent) moments, or the simultaneous thinking of contradictory determinations, into some higher positive unity. This way of speaking forms Eckharts dialectic, a language he learned, or perhaps better re-created, from Neoplatonism. See also Schiirmanns comments in Schiirmann, Meister Eckhart: Mystic and Philosopher, 110; Sells, Mystical Languages, 150. For a lucid discussion of transcendence and immanence in Eckharts dialectical theism, see S. Sikka, Forms o f Transcendence: Heidegger and M edieval Mystical Theology (Albany: State University of N ew York Press, 1997), 109-41. On Eckhart*s positive affirm ation

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negativa presumes a prior via positiva even as the latter is invalidated by the former. Following on the heels of Dionysius the Areopagite, Eckhart declares that nothing can be attributed suitably to God, and thus to speak of God in any likeness {glichnisse) is to speak impurely, whereas to speak correctly is to speak of God with nothing {bi nihte von gote redet), that is, speakingnot as opposed to not speaking.^^ Every saying is an unsaying. This is the import of Eckharts observation, God is a word, an unspoken word [ein ungesprochen wort]. ... God is spoken and unspoken [Got ist gesprochen und ist ungesprochen] that is, in the very act of being spoken God remains unspoken. Rendered more technically, through the Son, who is the Word, the ineffable is uttered, but in such a way that the unspeakable persists in the verbal gesticulation: "Thus the Father speaks the Son unspoken, and he remains w i t h i n . J u s t as with respect to God the outgoing {uzganc) is the ingoing {inganc), so, too, the spoken and the unspoken should not be viewed dualistically but rather as coalescing paradoxically in the coincidence of their opposition. God is essentially a concealed being {esse ahsconditum) and therefore unnameable {innominabilis)J^ but precisely because this is so, the divine can be called by all names {omninominabilis)7^ Against this background, we can understand Eckharts speaking kataphatically of the generative power of the Godhead {berunge der gotheit)P which is beyond all images, by ascribing to it both the image of fatherhood, whence emerge the personal properties of the Father and the Son as distinct hypostases, and the image of maternity. In Sermon 75, interpreting the verse A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another (John 13:34), Eckhart enumerates three kinds of divine love. In describing the first kind of love, Eckhart notes that the divine goodness compelled God, the simple, pure, essential truth {einvaltigiu, luteriu, wesenlichiu warheit), to create all

of the alchemical power of language, linked to the esoteric names of God in the Jewish tradition, see Y. Schwartz, Magic, Philosophy and Kabbalah: the Mystical and Magical Interpretation of Maimonides in the Later Middle Ages [Hebrew], D aat 64-66 (2009): 99-132, esp. 118-30. DW 3:223-24 (Pr. 71); CM W , 140. D W 2:529-30 (Pr. 53); CM W , 152. See McGinn, H arvest o f Mysticism^ 134. Eckhart, Expositio libri Genesis, n. 299-300, LW 1:95-96. Compare D W 3:441 (Pr. 83): G ot ist namloZy wan von ime kan niemant nit gesprechen noch verstan. English translation in CMW, 463: God is nameless because none can say or understand anything about H im . Tobin, Meister Eckhart, 78-79. Compare Expositio libri Exodi, n. 166, LW 2:146: id, quod est super omne nomen, nullum nomen exludit, sed omne nomen generaliter includit et aequaliter indistincte. D W 1:407 (Pr. 23); CM W , 288.

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creatures, with which He was eternally pregnant in His ideal prevision. The containment of all things in the divine providence {viirsihticheit) is cast in gender terms as G ods pregnancy. The imagery is reiterated in the discussion about the third love: we learn how God has ever been begetting His only-begotten Son and is giving birth to him now and eternally: and thus he Hes in childbed like a woman who has given birth, in every good, outdrawn, and indwelling soul. This birth is His understanding, eternally welling forth from His paternal heart, in which lies all His joy.^^ Significantly, the engendering of the Son on the part of the Father is portrayed in the maternal language of childbirth. Eckhart renders the activity metaphorically: there is no physical birth but rather an act of mental conceiving, the understanding {Erkenntnis) that wells forth from the paternal heart (veterlichen herzen) of the divine. That the divine understanding exceeds human reason is evident from Eckhart s statement earlier in the sermon that the only way he could get closer to the essential point (wesenliche punct) of God in the center, equally far from and near to all creatures, was through displacing his natural intellect (natiurlichiu vernunft) by the light of the divine love that surpasses it.^^ Apophatically, even this figurative depiction would be inadequate, since every word we use to speak of the absolute nothingness {nihtes nihtY^ of the Godhead - the indistinct One {indistinctus) whose full positivity is signified by the double negative, negation of negation {negatio negationis in Latin^^ and versagen

D W 3:293 (Pr. 75); CMW, 427. 75 D W 3:299 (Pr. 75); CMW, 429. 76 D W 3:298 (Pr. 75); CMW, 428. 77D W l:14(Pr. 1 ) ; C W ,6 9 . 7 ^ The expression is derived from Aquinas and other philosophical sources including the Comm entary on Parmenides by Proclus. See references cited in D W 1:362 n. 4; and compare Colledge and McGinn, Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons^ 34 and 302 n. 60; McGinn, Mystical Thought, 84, 94, 231-32 nn. 141-42; B. Mojsisch, Meister Eckhart: Analogy, Univocity, and Unity, trans. with a preface and an appendix by O .E Summerell (Amsterdam: B.R. Griiner, 2001), 95-97. For Eckhart, the phrase negatio negationis is linked exegetically to the divine name ego sum qui sum (Exod 3:14). Compare Expositio lihri Exodi, n. 74, LW 2:77: Nulla ergo negatio, nihil negativum deo competit, nisi negatio negationis, quam significat unum negative dictum: 'deus unus est,' Deut. 6; G al 3. Negatio vero negationis purissima etplenissima est affirmatio: 'ego sum qui su m ' English translation in McGinn, Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, 68: Therefore, no negation, nothing negative, belongs to God, except for the negation of negation which is what the One signifies when expressed negatively. G od is one (Dt. 6:4; Ga. 3:20). The negation of negation is the purest and fullest affirmation - I am who am. See texts cited below at n. 156, and compare Kelley, Meister Eckhart, 106-13; McGinn, The God beyond G od, 7-8; Gharles-Saget, Non-etre et neant chez Maitre Eckhart, 312; H ollyw ood, Soul as Virgin Wife, 130-31; Tobin, Meister Eckhart, 74-78; Dobie, Logos and Revelation, 138-49.

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des versagennes in Middle High German^^) - is, in Eckharts own formulation, "more a denial of what God is not than a declaration of what He To ascribe to the Godhead the activity of birthing mentally is no less a falsehood than ascribing to it the activity of giving birth through physical labor. But one should not lose sight of the gender hierarchy at play here. I grant that the interpretation of generative knowledge figuratively as a maternal trait is a reversal of the more typical correlation of femininity and the physical act of parturition; it is rooted nevertheless in the paternal heart. This figure of speech is a colloquial way of communicating the theological dogma that within the Godhead the Son cannot be differentiated ontologically from the Father, since both Father and Son are mutual correlatives, two different modes of one divine essence^^ - two Persons but one life and one being undivided {zwo persdnen und ein leben und ein wesen ungeteiletY^ - since the image and that of which it is an image are indistinguishable.^^ Commenting on the scriptural depiction of Christ as the image of G od (2 Cor 4:4; Col 1:15), Eckhart writes:
A n image insofar as it is an image receives nothing o f its ow n from the subject in w hich it exists, but receives its w h ole existence from the object it images. ... Therefore in the Godhead the Son is one and is o f one alone, namely, the Father. ... It follow s that the image and that o f w hich it is an image, insofar as they are such, are
one.84

Consequent to the separation of the Father and the Son, the love of the former for the latter is identified as the Holy Spirit {heilige geist) that biosD W 1:361 (Pr. 21); CMW, 467. In that context, the characterization of the One as the negation of negation is offered by Eckhart as a saying of the master, who has been identified as St. Thomas Aquinas. See previous note. D W 2:203-4 (Pr. 36b); CMW, 223. Compare DW 4:595 (Pr. 104); CM W , 50: Thus there is no way man can know what God is. But one thing he does know: what God is not (emphasis in original). On apophasis and the problem of naming God in Eckharts thinking, see fi. Z. Brunn and A. de Libera, Maitre Eckhart: Metaphysique du verhe et theologie negative^ preface by M .-D. Chenu (Paris: Beauchesne Editeur, 1984); Sells, Mystical Langtiages^ 146-205; H ollyw ood, Soul as Virgin Wife, 23-24; N . Largier, Reprasentation und Negativitat: Meister Eckharts Kritik als Dekonstruktion, in Contemplata aliis trader, 371-90; McGinn, Mystical Thought, 99-100; V. Lossky, Theologie negative et connaissance de Dieu chez Maitre Eckhart (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1998); Tobin, Meister Eckhart, 67-74; Milem, Unspoken Word. Vinzent, A rt o f Detachment, 6. 82 DW 2:436 (Pr. 49); CMW, 435. D. E Duclow, Masters o f Learned Ignorance: Eriugena, Eckhart, Cusanus (BurUngton: Ashgate, 2006), 175-86. Colledge and McGinn, Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, 129; Expositio sancti evangelii secundum I oh annem, n. 23-24, LW 3:19-20: Imago enim, in quantum imago est, nihil sui accipit a subiecto in quo est, sed totum suum esse accipit ab obiecto, cuius est imago. ... Propter quod in divinis unicus est filius et unius solius, patris scilicet. ... sequitur quod imago et cuius est imago, in quantum huiusmodi, unum sunt.

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soms forth in the eternal birth {ewigen geburt) of the Son in each soul.*^ God begets his Son in a perfect soul and is brought to bed there so that she may bear Him forth again in all her works. ... Thus we, by the love of the H oly Ghost, being unified into His Son, shall know the Father with the Son and love ourselves in Him and Him in ourselves with their mutual love.*^ The motherly love of the Son on the part of the Father is to be emulated in the soul. In Sermon 43, Eckhart elaborates this point by noting that G ods work, which occurs in the eternal now {nu in ewicheit), consists of the necessity of bringing forth the Son all the time {alle zit)?^ The moment, wherein the soul gives birth to God eternally, is called by Eckhart in Sermon 38, based on the language of Galatians 4:4 interpreted by Augustine, the fullness of time (viillede der zit; plenitudo temporis), a term that is indicative of the transcendence of time within time, which is not the sheer negation of time, but rather the convergence of creation and incarnation that occasions the presence of the eternal within the temporal through detachment or departure from the world.** For God to be born in the soul, all time must be gone ... for there is nothing that hinders this birth so much as tim e.... For God to be born in the soul, all time must have dropped away from her, or she must have dropped away from time with will or desire.* The time of the eternally occurring birth, the event of G ods self-bi rth, i s one present N ow [gegenwertigen nu\. ... There, in a moment, the souls day arises; and in her natural light, in which all things are, that is a complete

For a study of this motif in both the Middle High German and Latin texts, see K. G. Kertz, Meister Eckharts Teaching on the Birth of the Divine Word in the Soul, Traditio 15 (1959): 327-63. See also R .K .C . Forman, Meister Eckhart: Mystic as Theologian (Rockport: Element, 1991), 126-66. D W 3:301 (Pr. 75); CMW, 429. On the ascent of the soul to the ground through the H oly Ghost, see D W 1:394-95 (Pr. 23); CMW, 285. 87 D W 2:319-20 (Pr. 43); CMW, 394-95. Compare D W 1:34-35 (Pr. 2); CMW, 79. On Eckharts notion of temporality and eternity, see A.M . Haas, Meister Eckharts Auffassung von Zeit und Ewigkeit, Freihurger Zeitschrift fu r Philosophic und Theologie 27 (1980): 325-55; S. Kunz, Zeit und Ewigkeit bei Meister Eckhart (PhD diss., Tubingen 1985); N . Largier, Zeit, Zeitlichkeit, Ewigkeit: Ein Aufrifi des Zeitproblems bei Dietrich von Freiberg und Meister Eckhart (Bern: Peter Lang, 1989), 72-194; Largier, Time and Temporality in the German Dominican SchooP: Outlines of a Philosophical Debate between Nicolaus of Strasbourg, Dietrich of Freiberg, Eckhart of Hoheim, and loannes Tauler, in The M edieval Concept o f Time: Studies on the Scholastic D ebate and Its Reception in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. P. Porro (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 221-53, esp. 240-53. 88 Largier, Time and Temporality,250-52 . See also Schiirmann, Meister Eckhart: Mystic and Philosopher, 14-15, 32-33, 60; Largier, Zeit, Zeitlichkeit, Ewigkeit, 129-47; U. Kern, Eckharts Aufhebung der Zeit in der T iille der Zeit, Freiburger Zeitschrift fiir Philosophic und Theologie 44 (1997): 297-316; Kern, "Gottes Sein ist Mein L e b e n 117-36; Harries, Infinity and Perspective, 162-63. 89 DW 2:230-31 (Pr. 38); CM W , 177-78. Compare DW 2:261-62 (Pr. 39); CMW,20G-7. Sells, Mystical Languages, 148-50.

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day [ganzer tac]: there day and night are one [da ist tac und naht And there is Gods day, in which the soul stands in the day of eternity \tage der ewicheit] in an essential N ow [wesenlichen nu\: and there the Father bears His only-begotten Son in a present Now, and the soul is born again back into God.92 The philosophical import of these comments is illumined by Eckhart s statement in the commentary on Exodus that the act of begetting that confers existence is nontemporal [generatio dans esse est in non tempore\ It is the goal of time, because it is not the motion that is measured by t i m e . T h e nontemporal begetting is the effect of the identity of essence and existence exclusive to God, a principle of Thomistic metaphysics that can be traced to the Avicennian definition of the divine as the necessary existent {wdjib al-wujud)P^ Commenting on the name I am that I am {ego sum qui sum) disclosed to Moses (Exod 3:14), Eckhart writes that it signifies that pure naked existence [nudum esse^ is in the subject, from the subject, and is the subject itself, that is, the essence of the subject. It also signifies that essence and existence are the same [idem scilicet essentiam et esse\ which belongs to God alone whose whatitis [quiditas] is his thatit-is [anitas\ as Avicenna says,^^ and who has no V hat-it-is [quiditatem']
It is noteworthy that even though the eternal now is beyond the diurnal-nocturnal division, the former is still privileged, and thus it is referred to as a complete day in which day and night are one. A similar approach is attested in kabbaHstic sources. See Wolfson, Alefy Mem, Tau, 94-95; Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, 208-9. (Pr. 10); CM W , 336. Eckhart, Expositio libri Exodi, n. 159, LW 2:141; McGinn, Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, 94. P. Morewedge, The Metaphysica o f Avicenna (ihn Sind): A critical translation-commentary and analysis o f the fundam ental arguments in Avicenna's Metaphysica in the Danish N dm a-i ^ald'i (The Book o f Scientific Knowledge) (N ew York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 48-78, 206-49; Avicenna, The Metaphysics o f The Healing: A Parallel English-Arahic Text, trans., intro., and annotated by M.E. Marmura (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2005), 1.6-7, pp. 29-38; 8.4-8, pp. 273-98. See A.-M. Goichon, La distinction de Vessence et de Vexistence d'apres Ihn Sina (Avicenne) (Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1937); G. Hourani, Ibn Sina on Necessary and Possible Existence, PhilosophicalForum 4 (1972): 74-86; R. Wisnovsky, Avicenna's Metaphysics in Context (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 200,204-5,219-25,239-43,245-49; M. Fakhry, A History o f Islamic Philosophy (3d ed.; N ew York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 156-59; R. Wisnovsky, Avicenna and the Avicennian Tradition, in The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, ed. P. Adamson and R.C. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 92-136, esp. 105-15. Eckhart seems to be referring particularly to Avicenna, Metaphysics 8:4.3. See Avicenna. Metaphysics o f The Healing, 274: The First has no quiddity other than His individual existence. For discussion of the terms al-mdhiyya and al-inniyya Ianniyya, see Metaphysic o f The Healing, 383 n. 1, and the comprehensive philological analysis in M.T. dAlverny, Anniyya-Anitas, in Melanges offerts a Etienne Gilson, de VAcademie frangaise (Paris: Librarie philosophique J. Vrin, 1959), 59-91. On Eckhart and Avicenna, see Flasch, Meister Eckhart: Die Geburt der *"Deutschen M ystik, 122-38, and esp. 130-31,

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beyond the thatitis [anitatem] alone which signifies existence [quam esse significaty ^^'Furthermore, Eckhart mentions the opinion of Maimonides that the expression ehyeh asher ehyeh is related to the Tetragrammaton, the one nonderivative name that conveys the negation of attributes, since it points unequivocally to the absolute existence of the divine essence.^^ I will cite the key passage from The Guide o f the Perplexed in full:
A ccordingly G od made know n to [M oses] the know ledge that he was to convey to them and through w hich they w ou ld acquire a true notion o f the existence o f G od, this know ledge being: I am th a t I am . This is a name deriving from the verb to be \h a y a h \ w hich signifies existence, for hayah indicates the notion: he was. A nd in H ebrew, there is no distinction betw een your saying: he was, and he existed. The w hole secret consists in the repetition in a predicative position o f the very w ord indicative of existence. For the w ord th at [in the phrase I am that I am ] requires the m ention of an attribute im m ediately connected w ith it. For it is a deficient w ord requiring a connection w ith som ething else .... A ccordingly the first w ord is I am considered as a term to w hich a predicate is attached; the second w ord that is predicated o f the first is also I am, that is, identical w ith the first. A ccordingly Scripture makes, as it were, a clear statement that the subject is identical w ith the predicate. This makes it clear that H e is existent not through existence ... the existent that is the existent, or the necessarily existent.^^

Following the exegesis of Maimonides verbatim, Eckhart notes that the first occurrence of the word sum signifies the things essence and is the subject or what is denominated, and the second occurrence signifies existence and is the predicate of denominator and denomination.^^ From the rhetorical duplication the following conclusions are adduced: the subject I am is
where the Avicennian notion of God as the necessary existent {necesse esse) and the consequent identity of essence (quiditas) and existence (anitas) are discussed. For a comprehensive expHcation of the dialectical theology that emerges from Eckharts dictum esse est Dens (God is existence), see Dobie, Logos and Revelation, 123-57. Eckhart, Expositio lihri Exodi, n. 15, LW 2:21; McGinn, Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, 45-46. Compare Eckhart, Quaestiones Parisienses cum Quaestione Magistri Consalvi, LW 5:48; Master Eckhart, Parisian Questions and Prologues, trans., intro., and notes by A. A. Maurer, CSB (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1974), 50. See also Eckhart, Prologus in opus propositionum, LW 1:42; Eckhart, Parisian Questions, 94-95; IW 4:24 (Sermo 4.1, n. 23); McGinn, Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, 208; Sells, Mystical Languages, 151-53; Mojsisch, Meister Eckhart, 51-54; Tobin, Meister Eckhart, 35-52; K. Flasch, Meister Eckhart: Philosoph des Christentums (Munich: G .H . Beck, 2010), 173-75. Moses Maimonides, The Guide o f the Perplexed, trans., intro., and notes by S. Pmes, with an introductory essay by L. Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 1.61, pp. 147-48; and see 1.62, p. 152. Maimonides, Guide o f the Perplexed, 1.63, pp. 154-55 (emphasis in original). The influence of Maimonides on Eckharts interpretation of Exod 3 has been noted by Hasselhoff, Self-definition, 311-14. Eckhart, Expositio lihri Exodi, n. 19, LW 2:25; McGinn, Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, 47.

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identical to the predicate I am; the denominator is what is denominated; the essence is the existence; there is no discrepancy between the what-itis and the that-it-is; and the essence is self-sufficient.This sufficiency is most proper to God, since the latter is Existence itself {ipsum esse), that is, according to the aforementioned terminology of Avicenna adopted by Maimonides^^ and Eckhart, the being whose essence it is to exist, the necessary existence {necesse esse)}^^ Eckhart follows Aquinas in applying this metaphysical truism to explain the generation of the first two persons of the Trinity:
In every begetting, therefore, that is the pow er o f begetting in w hich the begotten is like the begetter. N o w the Son o f G od is like the Father, w h o begets H im , in the divine nature. W herefore the divine nature in the Father is in H im the pow er o f begetting. ... Since, therefore, the divine generation is m ost perfect, that by w hich the Begetter begets, is com m on to B egotten and Begetter by a com m unity o f identity, and not on ly of species, as in things created. Therefore, from the fact that w e say that the divine essence is the principle by w hich the Begetter begets, it does not follow that the divine essence is distinct (from the Begotten): w hich w ould fo llo w if w e were to say that the divine essence begets.

Eckhart likewise maintains that insofar as Father and Son are one in the indivisible essence, begetter and begotten cannot be substantively differentiated in the act of begetting. Indeed, he goes so far as to say that begetting and begotten are one in reahty, although they are opposites and distinct in their relation {gignens et genitum unum sunt in re, opposita tamen et distincta r e l a t i o n e ) Eckhart resorts to paradoxical language in the effort to convey the principle of generativity {generatio, geburt) - or what he also
Eckhart, Expositio lihri Exodi, n. 20, LW 2:26; McGinn, Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, 47. See S. Pines, Translators Introduction, in Guide o f the Perplexed, xciv-cii; A. Altmann, Studies in Religious Philosophy and Mysticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), 108-20. Eckhart, Expositio lihri Exodi, n. 161-64, LW 2:142-44; McGinn, Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, 95-96. Compare Eckhart, Quaestiones Parisienses cum Quaestione Magistri Consalvi, LW 5:38: quia in deo non est accidens, et in deoper consequens est idem esse et essentia. English translation in Eckhart, Parisian Questions, 43. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, la q. 41 art. 5: Illud ergo est potentia generativa in aliquo generante, in quo genitum similatur generanti. Filius autem D ei similatur patri gignenti in natura divina. Unde natura divina in patre, est potentia generandi in ipso. ... Unde, cum divina generatio sit perfectissima, id quo generans generat, est commune genito et generanti, et idem numero, non solum specie, sicut in rebus creatis. Per hoc ergo quod dicimus quod essentia divina estprincipium quo generans generat, non sequitur quod essentia divina distinguatur; sicut sequeretur, si diceretur quod essentia divina generat. Eckhart, Responsio ad articulos sibi impositos de scriptis et dictis suis /, n. 85, LW 5:279. Compare Eckhart, Expositio sancti evangelii secundum lohannem , n. 343, LW 3:291-92: E t propter hoc iterum inform ali emanatione producens etproductum sunt unum in substantia simpliciter, in esse, vivere et intelligere et operari.

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calls the inner boiling {bullito) that results in the boiUng over {ebullito) and the final state of creating {creatioy^^ - by which the other comes to be in the absence of any alterity: God bears Himself out of Himself into Himself, and bears Himself again back into Himself {Wan got gebirt sich uz im selben in sich selben und gebirt sich wider in sich). Insofar as God is wholly one {alzemale ein)^ he can know nothing but himself alone, but in knowing himself, he gives birth to the Son through which all things are spoken. In the same manner that God gives birth to himself out of himself and returns to himself, so the soul bears herself in herself, and bears herself out of herself and back into herself {diu sele gebirt sich selben in sich selben und gebirt sich uz ir und gebirt sich wider in sich). Moreover, in giving birth spiritually {geistliche gebirt) - the birth that is eternal and thus occurs at every moment (ieglichen ougenblickeY^^ - the soul brings forth from herself God out of God into God [uzer ir got uz got in got]: she bears Him truly out of herself [si gebirt in rehte uzer ir\. she does this by bearing God there, where she is Godlike [gotvar ]'. there she is an image of God \bilde gotes].*'^^^ Here again we confront the paradox that emerges from the need to explain the materialization of difference within the undifferentiated ground, a uroboric state communicated by the description of the soul bringing forth God out of God into G od. To be sure, Eckhart stipulates that the soul gives birth to God out of or from herself (u zerir\ but he also maintains that the soul is the image of God, and as such it cannot be separated from that which it images.^^ The true union (rehtiu einunge) of the soul and God, therefore, precludes the possibility of an otherness that is not circumscribed in the identity of the same, no outside that is not an aspect of the inside. In Eckhart s jargon, the breakthrough {durchbruch) of the soul to the ground where the disparity between Father and Son is transcended and the birth of the Son in the soul where the chasm separating human and divine is overcome are two aspects of the selfsame phenomenon related in a hermeneutical circle of reciprocity: as there can be no text without interpretation, and no interpretation without text, so there can be no word of birth without
105 Porman, Meister Eckhart, 66-67; McGinn, Mystical Thought, 72-90; McGinn, Harvest o f Mysticism, 125-28, 142-45; Sells, Mystical Languages, 149, 151-53; Dobie, Logos and Revelation, 206-12. 10^ DW 2:320-21 (Pr. 43); CMW, 395. See Tobin, Meister Eckhart, 180-81. 107 D W 2:319 (Pr. 43); CM W , 394. 108 2:328-29 (Pr. 43); CM W , 3 9 6 .1 have modified the translation in accord with the modern German rendering in J. Quint, text and trans., Meister Eckhart: Werke I, commentary by N . Largier (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker, 1993), 465: D ie Seele gebiert aus sich <heraus> G ott aus G ott in Gott; sie gehiert ihn recht aus sich; das tut sie damit, dafl sie G ott in demy worin sie gottformig ist, aus sich gebiert: da ist sie ein Bild Gottes. 109 2:329 (Pr. 43); CM W , 396-97. O n the theological and mystical implications of humanity as the image of God in Eckharts teaching, see McGinn, H arvest o f Mysticism, 145-51.

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the silence of the breakthrough, and no silence of the breakthrough without the word of birth.^^ Philosophically, we shift from analogical relationality, which is marked by the unbridgeable gap separating the absolute and the contingency of the natural realm, to univocal correlationality, wherein the creator-creature antinomy is disrupted by the homology of the human soul to the divine in the intellectual realm.^^^ The feminine is the location of difference within the indifference; in giving birth to God, she becomes the image, which cannot be set apart from that of which it is an image; indeed, in its ground the soul is restored to its highest and noblest aspect, and there it is nothing but an image {da enist ez niht wan ein bilde)}^^ Insofar as that image is the Son, the soul is the by-word {biwort) - the adverb - in relation to the Word,^^^ and any difference between them is obUterated: Thus too an image is imageless \bilde ane bilde], in that it is not seen in another image. The eternal Word is the medium and the image itself (which is without means or image), so that the soul may grasp God in the eternal Word [in dem ewigen worte got begrifet], and know Him immediately and without image [bekennet ane m ittelundane bilde]. ... Image and image are so fully one and joined [bilde und bilde ist so gar ein und mit einander\ that no difference can be discerned. Insofar as the soul is both the mirror in which the image is beheld and that very image, it follows that that the female must be seen as an iteration of the male.

Apophasis and the Undoing of Paternal Motherhood

It is incumbent upon me to repeat that from the vantage point of negative theology, strictly speaking, there is no reason to privilege the masculine over the feminine in characterizing the Godhead. As Eckhart states in Sermon 51, the scriptural images that we apprehend from our terrestrial perspective are not the way it is in G od, but they are the likenesses {gleychnussen) through which we can form images of the unimaginable Father.^H ow ever, to discover nature unveiled, to expose the truth of the kernel, the shell must be broken {die schal m uz zerbrechen) and all likenesses must be shatDuclow, Masters o f Learned Ignorance, 148-49. See also Forman, Meister Eckhart, 167-92, and the useful summary of the discussion of this theme in several other scholars in Keel, Meister Eckhart, 40-47. Brunn and de Libera, Maitre Eckhart, 84-87; Sells, Mystical Languages, 153-57; Mojsisch, Meister Eckhart, 67-75. 112 3 .2 2 5 (Pr. 7 1 ); CM W , 140 (emphasis in original). )y7 1:154-55 (Pr. 9); CM W , 344-45. See the comments of Schiirmann in Meister Eckhart: Mystic and Philosopher, 96-98; McGinn, H arvest o f Mysticism, 134. 3:168-77 (Pr. 69); CMW, 235-36. 115 DW 2:467-68 (Pr. 51); CM W , 408.

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tered {die gleychnufi alle zerhrechenn). The soul gets closer to the essence, the One in which there is no discrimination, in proportion to depriving itself of these images."^ But if this is the case, there is no justification to continue to speak of it in gendered terms, let alone to accord priority to one gender over the other. The textual evidence amply demonstrates that Eckhart could not free himself entirely from the philosophical-theological bias of his day according to which the principle of efficient causality on the part of the divine, which is understood as self-intellection or the unrestricted and all-inclusive knowability, the knowledge-in-itself that entails the threefold unity of knower, known, and knowing,"^ was associated with masculinity. In Eckharts own words, the Father knows nothing but the Son, the object of his joy, affection, pleasure, and great delight, and his only need is to give birth to his perfect likeness and perfect image. Notably, Eckhart asserts, If the Father is to beget His only-begotten Son, He must beget His own image, abiding in Himself in the ground [ergeberen sein bild bleibende in im selber in dem grund]. The image, as it has eternally been in Him (formae illius), that is His immanent form.''* The precise language deployed by Eckhart reflects a struggle to articulate the inarticulable: the Father begets the Son that is his own image and, in doing so, he begets himself and thereby abides in the very ground where the Father is identical with the Son."^ Aware of the inadequacy of words to express the full complexity of this autogenesis or self-diffusion - the central tenet of the Christian faith encapsulated in the statement that Christ is born of the Father in perfect equality with the Father {Kristum geborn von dem vater in voller glicheit des vatersy^ - Eckhart emphasizes again that the way of nature is for human beings to point to God by way of likeness, even though God is, in truth, neither this nor that.*^ Pushing deeper into the paradox, Eckhart asserts that the Father is not satisfied till He has withdrawn into the first source [erstekeit], to the innermost Yinnerste<s>\ to the ground \grund\ and core of fatherliness {kemen der vetterlicheit\ where He has been eternally in Himself in His fatherhood [vatterschafft], where He takes pleasure in Himself [da er gebraucht sein selbs in dem] - the Father as the Father of Himself
D W 2:473 (Pr. 51); CM W , 409. Kelley, Meister Eckhart, 58,60-61,173-76. "* D W 2:469 (Pr. 51); CM W , 408. Compare DW 2:434 (Pr. 49); CMW, 434: In this same Word the Father hears, the Father knows, the Father gives birth to Himself [gebirt der vater sich selben], and ^ is very Word and all things, and His Godhead in its very depth \s1 ne gotheit al 2e gru n de\ H e bears Himself according to His nature and this Word with the same nature in another Person. 120 D W 2:42s (Pr. 49); CMW, 432. Kelley, Meister Eckhart, 69-72.

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in unique oneness [der vatter als der vatter sein selbs in dem einigen ein\P^ Here all blades of grass, wood, stones, and all things are one.^^^ Inasmuch as the ground is specified as the place where things are no longer specified in their existential specificity, presumably it should be beyond gender difference, but Eckhart explicitly juxtaposes the innermost dimension or origin of the ground and the core of fatherliness, leaving the impression that the former betrays the comportment of the latter.^^^ Eckhart is led, therefore, to assert that the Father has been forever in his fatherhood. Near the conclusion of this sermon Eckhart adamantly insists that the hidden darkness of the invisible light of the eternal Godhead [verborgen fynsternufi des vngesichtigen liechtes der ewigen gotheyt] is unknown and never shall be k n o w n , a n d yet, he describes this luminal darkness by the graphic image of the Father delighting in himself in his unique oneness, an image that calls to mind the previously discussed trope of noetic-erotic jouissance used by some kabbalists to describe the primal activity of Ein Sof. The affinity to the kabbalistic conception is strengthened by Eckharts instruction that to abide with God, one must take God not as being good or just, which are merely external garments, but rather apprehend Him in the pure and naked substance [luterriy blozen substancie] where He is nakedly apprehending Himself [dd er sich selben bloz nemende ist]. ... Therefore, strip God of all His clothing - seize Him naked in his robbing room \kleithuse\ where He is uncovered and bare in Himself [dd er entdecket und bloz in im ist]^^^ The robbing room is a metaphorical way of depicting the formless ground, which is beyond description, and the image

The German of this part of the passage is somewhat elusive. Quint {Meister Eckhart: Werke /, 543) translated it as der Vater als Vater sich selhst im einzigen Sohn. I can understand contextually w hy the word Sohn was added, since Eckhart had previously discussed the Father's begetting of the Son in his own image, but it is not in the original at this point of the sermon, and it seems to me that this insertion obfuscates the point of the text, which is to emphasize that the Father takes delight in himself in his unique oneness, which is the core of fatherliness (kernen der vetterlicheit) in the ground. O C. Walshe {CM W , 409) rendered the text: as father of Flimself in unique oneness. I thank Virginia Burrus and Niklaus Largier for their useful suggestions in helping me decipher this particularly difficult text. 123 DW 2:470 (Pr. 51); CM W , 408-9 (translation modified). In spite of his assertion that thinking about God as mother is an effort to get beyond gender (see below, n. 135), McGinn, H arvest o f Mysticism^ 132, reached a conclusion that is closer to my own: The Father as primordial fullness - the ultimate active source and therefore also in one respect the goal of the return - is so important for Eckhart that he sometimes identifies the Father with the supra-personal and potential g r u n t In the continuation, McGinn refers to the language of Sermon 51 as an especially unusual example where the line separating the ground and the primordiality of the Father is blurred. 125 DW 2:476-77 (Pr. 51); CMW, 411 (translation modified). 126 DW 2:274 (Pr. 40); CM W , 318-19.

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of God apprehending himself nakedly is a variant formulation of the notion of his self-gratification. One might counter that in Eckharts thought the notion of fatherhood is to be distinguished from the persona of the Father. To substantiate this claim, let me mention a passage in the commentary of Exodus where the statement of Aquinas, the power of begetting signifies the divine nature directly, but the relation i n d i r e c t l y , i s glossed by Eckhart: "the power of begetting in the Father is in the essence rather than in Paternity \potentia generandi inpatre est essentia potius quam paternitas\ and this is why the Father begets God the Son but does not beget himself the Father.^^^ The same point is made in Eckharts commentary on John: So too the power of generating in the Godhead directly and more principally belongs to the essence rather than to the relation that is paternity {Sic iterum potentia generandi in divinis in recto etprincipalius convenit essentiae quam relationi, quae est paternitas)}^"^ By situating the generative potency in the essence rather than in paternity, Eckhart ostensibly deviates from Aquinas, who argued, "As in God, the power of begetting is the same as the act of begetting, so the divine essence is the same in reality as the act of begetting or paternity; although there is a distinction of reason.^^ Aquinas concedes that there is a logical basis to distinguish the divine essence {essentia divina) and the act of begetting {generatione) or paternity (paternitate), but he effectively erases that distinction by saying that they are in effect the same thing {est idem re), Prima facie, Eckhart tried to uphold this distinction by deeming fatherhood and sonship, in the words of Markus Vinzent, transcendental potentialities of the generative power of the one divine essence, which is the transcendental principle that enables the Father and the Son to be, and to be what they are, and it is the divine principle that generates the Holy Spirit and even the creatures. The divine essence, therefore, and not fatherhood is regarded as the potential for both generating
Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1 q. 41 art. 5: Et ideo potentia generandi significat in recto naturam divinam, sed in ohliquo relationem. Expositio libri Exodi, n. 28, LW 2:34; McGinn, Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, 50. Compare Expositio libri Exodi, n. 126, LW 2:117: fw divinis, ubi eadem essentia et idem esse, quod est paternitas, est filiatio, pater est <et> filius; et tamen pater ipse non is quijilius nec paternitas est filiatio, sed magis opponuntur. English translation in McGinn, Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, 84: in the Godhead where the same essence and the same act of existence which is the paternity is the Sonship: The Father is what the Son is. Nevertheless, the Father himself is not the Person who is the Son, nor is the Paternity the Sonship, but they are rather opposed [as relative terms]. Eckhart, Expositio sancti evangelii secundum lohannem, n. 43, LW 3:36; Colledge and McGinn, Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, 137. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1 q. 41 art. 5: A d secundum dicendum quod sic est idem in divinis potentia generandi cum generatione, sicut essentia divina cum generatione et patem itate est idem re, sed non ratione.

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and for being ge ne r a t e d. Al t e r na t i ve l y expressed, it is G ods nature that is the principle of generating, paternity is only a property of that essence. But, as we have seen, Eckhart also maintained that fatherhood, or the fatherly potential for generating (potentia generandi inpatre) as opposed to paternity (paternitas) is found in the essence. The nondifferentiated divine essence precedes the personal properties of the Father and the Son, but there is nonetheless an intrinsic link between that essence and the notion of fatherhood, even as it is the case that on occasion in his vernacular sermons Eckhart refers to the pure potentiality of the transcendental essence as mother. By disentangling the property of fatherhood from the personal attribute Father, Eckhart was able to describe the former in maternal imagery. Indeed, motherhood is the most fitting name to signify the transcendentality of the divine essence, the potency of the ground to beget fatherliness, sonship, spiritness, and c r e a t i o n . I n this sense, we can think of the divine essence as the matrix whence the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and world are generated. Without denying the innovative and subversive elements that may be culled from Eckharts teachings, it seems to me on balance that the idiomatic weight of the standard Christological symbolism prompted Eckhart to envisage the generative power of the divine essence as the paternal mother, that is, motherliness is expressive of the primordial fatherliness, a dimension of the Godhead that Eckhart enigmatically describes as the withdrawal of the Father to the unborn origin in which he takes pleasure in himself. Thus, in Sermon 22 Eckhart described the final end impUed in the phrase in principio^ which begins both Genesis and the Gospel of John: It is the hidden darkness of the eternal Godhead [verborgen vinsternisse der ewigen gotheit], which is unknown and never has been known and never shall be known. God abides there unknown in Himself, and the light of the eternal Father [daz lieht des ewigen vaters] has ever shone there, and the darkness does not comprehend the light. Just as the light of the eternal Father is viewed as a facet of the hidden darkness of the Godhead, so the motherly potential of the indistinct essence must be judged in the end to be a feature of the paternal necessity to beget the Son, who in turn begets (emulating the Father) the Holy Spirit. As audacious as his thought was, Eckhart falls short of completely overturning the hierarchy of the system of philosophical theology that he inherited. Additional support for this contention may be elicited from a sermon that was most likely penned by one of Eckhart s pupils but which is consistent
Vinzent, A rt o f Detachment, 7. Vinzent, A rt o f Detachment, 19-20. D ^ 1:389 (Pr. 22); CM W , 283.

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with his authentic teachings. The "eternal W ord is said to originate in the essential mind wherein the Father understands Himself in His characteristic nature. The language of "eternal birth is thus applied to the natural understanding of the Father by which he understands his own Father-nature. This birthing of the Son through the self-contemplation of the Father - an expression of the pure potentiality of the natural power {ndtmrlichen Kraft) for generation as opposed to the primordial fullness of the personal power (personlichen Kraft) - is considered the maternal w ork that allows us to ascribe a maternal name {mueterlich name) to the Father. Where the personal nature keeps to the unity of its nature and combines with it, there Fatherhood has a maternal name and is doing mothers work, for it is properly a mothers work to conceive. But there, where the eternal Word arises, in the essential mind, there M otherhood has a paternal name and performs paternal w ork.^ ^ " ^ The maternity of the Father is thus a figurative way of delineating the begetting of the Son from the essential mind of the Father as the image by which the latter conceives Himself in his capacity as P e r s o n . T h e language here concurs with Eckharts observation in Sermon 40: Wisdom is a motherly name [wisheit ist ein miieterlich nam e\ for a maternal name has the property of passivity \lidennes\ and in God we posit both activity [wurken] and passivity [Men]: for the Father is active and the Son is passive, this being the characteristic of being born.^^^ The maternal name is correlated with the Son, since the maternal is characterized as passivity and the quality of being born epitomizes that trait, whereas the Father symbolizes activity. In Sermon 75, as I noted above, Eckhart describes Gods love as the divine goodness constraining God to create all creatures, with which He was eternally pregnant [ewicliche swanger] in His ideal prevision [in dem bilde siner vursihticheit]^^^ - a remarkable similarity to the kabbalistic sensibility
CMW, 442. CMW, 443. The conclusion I draw from the use of maternal imagery in this sermon should be contrasted with the remarks of McGinn, Mystical Theology, 85: This suggests that the grunt is better spoken of in maternal rather than paternal language. In my judgment, this does not take into account that maternity is portrayed by Eckhart as an expression of paternity. See also McGinn, H arvest o f Mysticism, 132; Woods, Eckhart's Way, 81; and the views of H ollyw ood and Sells cited below at nn. 147,158, and 160. D W 2:27S-79 (Pr. 40); CMW, 329. The portrayal of wisdom as mother is a theme that is well attested in older sources, and especially relevant is the Wisdom of Solomon 7:12, where wisdom (0 1 (()0 'a) is described as the mother (yeveTiv) of all good things. See Eckhart, Expositio libri Sapientiae, n. 121, LW 2:458: N otandum ergo quod ait: bonorum omnium mater; not ait pater, quamvis et hoc verum esset, sed praeelegit dicere mater. Proles einim quamvis sita pa tre active, est tamen in matre receptive, contentive et conservative usque in decimum mensem .... Vult ergo dicere sapiens quod bona omnia, sed et res omnes creatae non solum a deo creante active, sed etiam sunt in deo contentive et conservative. DW 3:293 (Pr. 75); CMW, 427.

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that the potency of mascuUne mercy expands through the dehmiting force of feminine judgment. The essentially male nature of the divine quality of giving is formulated lucidly in the interpretation of the classification of God as the Father of Hghts (James 1:17) offered by Eckhart in Sermon 4:
The w ord father implies a filial relationship [sunlicheit]. The w ord father implies pure begetting [Inter gehern] and means the life o f all things [lehen aller dinge]. The Father begets H is Son in the eternal intellect [ewigen versta n tn isse\ and thus the Father begets H is Son in the soul just as H e does in H is ow n nature, and begets him in the soul as her ow n, and H is being depends on H is bringing H is Son to birth in the soul ... H e w h o understands the truth know s w ell that the w ord father connotes pure generation and the having of sons [Inter gehern und sune ze habenne]. Therefore, in this w e are sons and are the same Son.^^^

I do not quibble with the argument that there is ample evidence to demonstrate that in his sermons, which not only reflect a debt to Beguine reHgiosity but which were meant to provide spiritual instruction to women of socio-economic n o b i l i t y , Ec k h a r t subverted misogynistic stereotypes, not least of which by referring to the soul predominantly as female.^"^^ But in this case, rather than undermining, we have a revalorization of the androcentrism: the maternity - the act of begetting - is rooted in and expressive of the paternal implantation of the seed {samen\ which is the Word or the Son, in the soul.^"^^ Analogous to the zoharic material discussed above, the primary source of vitality is located in the father, who is the life of all things, identified as the eternal i n t e l l e c t , w h i c h I suggest corresponds functionally to the
138 DW 1:72-73 (Pr. 4); CM W , 227. Compare D W 2:263 (Pr. 39); CM W , 307: The Father is begetting [gehirt ] His Son, and in the begetting the Father finds such peace and joy that His entire nature is expended in it. For all that is in God moves Him to beget: His whole ground [grunde]. His essence [wesunge\ and His being [wesene^ move the Father to generation \jgeherne\ H ollywood, Soul as Virgin Wife, 5,52-56; H ollyw ood, Preaching as Social Practice in Meister Eckhart, in Mysticism and Social Transformation, ed. J. K. Ruffing, with a foreword by R.J. Egan (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 76-90. See also Harries, Infinity and Perspective, 167. Hollyw ood, Soul as Virgin Wife, 122-27, esp. 124. G. M. Jantzen, Eckhart and Women, Eckhart Review 3 (1994): 31-47, has pointed out that Eckhart depicts the higher aspect of the soul, which corresponds to the image of God, as masculine and the lower aspect as feminine. See, for example, Expositio libri Exodi, n. 218-19, LW 2:182-83. CMW, 576; Ruh, Fragment einer unbekannten Predigt, 219. Compare the identification of the intellect (verniinfticheit) as G ods temple in D W 1:150 (Pr. 9); CM W , 343. Eckhart utiHzes the image of God dwelling in his temple, which is the intellect, to depict figuratively the philosophical ideal of divine self-knowledge, a knowledge so perfect that knower and known cannot be differentiated. On the identification of God as the pure understanding {purum intelligere) in which reality and intellect are the same {quidem idem est res et intellectus), see Eckhart, Expositio sancti evangelii secundum lohannem, n. 34, LW 3:27; English translation in Colledge and McGinn, Meister

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kabbalistic symbol of Hokhmah. As Eckhart put it in the Latin homily on the Feast of the Holy Trinity, which is allied scripturally to the threefold enunciation in the verse All things are from him, and through him, and in him (Rom 11:36), It is contrary to the property of the Father, that is, the constitutive relation which is Paternity, to exist in another or in something else. Paternity alone is the from which {ex quo] - From which all fatherhood in heaven and earth is named (Eph 3:15).^ '^ '^The prepositional from which insinuates that the notion of father is meaningful only in relation to what comes forth from it, but it also highHghts that the paternal is the most valid reproductive force. As he stated in the homily on Ephesians 3:13-21, Everything is from the father, from whom as the first, or as the first, from whom'' (Totum estapatre, ex (\uoprimo siveprimo ex quo).^"^^ It is worth considering in this light Eckharts comment in Sermon 71, It appeared to a man as in a dream - it was a waking dream - that he became pregnant with Nothing like a woman with child, and in that Nothing God was born; He was the fruit of nothing. God was born in the N othing.^^^ The soul that gives birth to God from the nothing, which is God, is portrayed as the waking dream of a man. Thus, while I agree with Amy Hollywoods observation that the mascuHne depictions of God as Father and Son are primarily important in their relational aspect, I am hesitant to accept her further suggestion that they are surpassed by the breakthrough to the more neutral ground in which the soul becomes the divine mother of the Son.^ "^ ^True neutrality would necessitate discarding even the feminine representation of the soul as virgin, and surely one that is explicitly identified as the maternal issuing from the paternal heart. The noblest power of the soul, the intellect, which Eckhart calls in Sermon 2 the citadel {biirgelin), is, like the One itself, simple and lacks all mode and property. In expUcating the essential indistinctiveness of the soul, Eckhart notes that even God must rid himself of all attribution if he is to gaze into the soul:
A nd therefore, for G od to see inside it w ould cost H im all H is divine names [gdtlkh e namen] and personal properties {persdnliche eigenschaft\: all these H e must leave outside, should H e ever look in there. But on ly insofar as H e is an indivisible one [einvaltic ein], w ith ou t m ode or properties (can H e do this): in that sense H e is neither Father, Son, nor H o ly G host, and yet is a Som ething [ein w a z] w hich is neither Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, 133. For a slightly different specification, see D W 3:44647 (Pr. 83), CAfW, 464. In that context, the Trinity is aligned with psychic faculties in the following manner: the retentive power {memoria) corresponds to the Father, understanding (intellectus) to the Son, and the will {voluntas) to the H oly Spirit. 144 4-25 (Sermo 4.1, n. 24); McGinn, Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, 208. LW 4:309 (Sermo 35, n. 358). The passage is cited and analyzed in Vinzent, A rt of Detachment, 22. D W 3:224-25 (Pr. 71); CM W , 140. H ollyw ood, Soul as Virgin Wife, 126.

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this nor that [daz enist noch d iz noch daz]. See, as H e is thus one and simple, so H e can enter that O ne that I here call the citadel o f the soul, but in no other m ode can H e get in: on ly thus does H e enter and dwell therein. In this part the soul is the same as G od and not otherw ise [M it dem teile ist din sele gate glich und unders niht\^^^

Here it is apposite to recall that in Sermon 23, Eckhart explained the miracle of the virgin conception of Mary in similar terms:
W hen the Godhead gave itself totally into the mind [unser vrou w en vernunft] of our Lady, because she was bare and pure, then she conceived God: and from the superabundance o f the Godhead there broke forth and flow ed over into our Ladys body and was form ed a b od y in our Ladys w om b from the H o ly G host. A nd if she had not borne the Godhead in her mind, she could never have conceived him physically.

Eckhart does not allegorize the immaculate conception of Jesus on the part of Mary, but he does allege that she could not have borne him somatically had she not first borne the Godhead mentally, an idea rooted in Eckharts acceptance of the view of Aquinas that the Son proceeds in an intellectual way from the Father, which is a "real relation and not merely a "relation of reason, since in God intellect and reality are the same.^^ It is reasonable to assume that the implication of the passage concerning Mary is that the body of the feminine had to have been transfigured by the masculine before it could assume the role of progenitor. Collaboration for this conjecture may be adduced from the continuation where Eckhart asserts, building on Augustines assertion that the intellect, which is the highest part of the soul, can ascend upward in ever-increasing degrees of clarity, that the soul is "transported by the Holy Ghost into the image [bilde] and united therewith. And with the image and with the Holy Ghost it is carried through and inborne into the ground [durchgevueret und ingevueret in den grunt]. There, where the Son is in-formed \1ngebildet\ the soul too will be i n - f o r m e d . I n giving birth to God, the soul both emulates the virginity of
148 !. 43_44 ^Pj. 2); CMW, 81 (emphasis in original). I have slightly modified the translation. See analyses of Schiirmann in Meister Eckhart: Mystic and Philosopher, 42-47, and Milem, Unspoken Word, 71-79. On intellect as the spark of the soul, see also Tobin, Meister Eckhart, 126-40. D W 1:397-98 (Pr. 23); CMW, 286. ^ 50 Eckhart, Expositio sancti evangelii secundum lohannem, n. 34, IW 3:27-28; English translation in Colledge and McGinn, Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, 133. The passage from Aquinas that serves as the basis for Eckhart is found in the Summa Theologia la q. 28 art. 1 ad 4. | 1:398-99 1 ( Pr. 23); CM W , 286. The gender transformation is made explicit in Eckharts comments in Expositio lihri Exodi, n. 220, LW 2:183-84, that the literal meaning of Isaiah 11 refers to Christs subjecting his sensitive appetite, depicted as feminine, to the masculine reason, an idea supported exegetically by the apocalyptic images of the woman encircling the man (Jer 31:21) and the woman clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet (Rev 12:1).

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Mary and becomes itself the image that is the Word. I thus concur with the conclusion of Prudence Allen concerning Eckharts use of maternal imagery to depict the birth of God in the soul:
This theory affirms w om ans experience and identity as a mother. O nce again, Eckhart appears to take into him self an aspect of w om ans id en tity H ow ever, what appears initially as a positive incorporation o f an aspect o f w om an s identity turns out instead to be a description o f the ideal m others identity as com pletely passive and even annihilated. Thus, Eckhart loses the original m om entum towards supporting a positive evaluation of w om ans identity b y proposing that men should becom e m others in their soul as w om en are m others in body, but then concluding that mothering is a passive function in w hich the identity o f the mother is devalued as nothing.

The seeds for overcoming the paternal usurpation of maternity are sown by Eckhart himself in another passage from this sermon where he emphasizes that God is the unconditional nothing {nihtes niht) about whom all we can say is that he is neither this nor that {er enist weder diz noch daz). The soul that is informed {ingebildet) in the unity (einicheit) oi that primal purity {erste luterkeit) cannot grasp the truth, since in that impress of pure beingness {indruk der lutem weselicheit), which is nothingness, there is no truth to be grasped.' In the ground, pure being and pure nothing cannot be differentiated, and thus to say that God is beyond being is not to refute his beingness but only to fortify it:
Masters o f littie subtiety say G od is pure being. H e is as high above being as the highest angel is above a midge. I w ou ld be w rong to call G od a being as if I w ere to call the sun pale or black. G od is neither this nor that. ... But w hen I have said that G od is n ot a being and is above being, I have not thereby denied H im being: rather I have exalted it in

Nothingness is still a something, albeit not one thing to the exclusion of another thing only insofar as the divine cannot be identified as any particular being is it identified as the source of all being.*^^ Conversely, as I intimated above, Eckharts designation of God as negatio negationis does not signal a repudiation of the apophatic but rather the definitive expression thereof, as is attested by the exegetical linking of this locution to the divine name ego sum qui sum: The One itself is the negation of negation - of the negation ... which every multitude that is opposed to the One includes. The negation of negation is the core, the purity, and the repetition of the affirmation of

'52 R Allen, The Concept o f Woman, vol. 2, part 1: The Early Humanist Reformation, 1250-1 iOO (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 352. '53 D W 1:402 (Pr. 23); CM W , 287. '5 *D W 1:145-46 (Pr. 9); CM W , 342. '55 Eckhart, Expositio sanai evangelii secundum lohannem, n. 238, LW 3:199: u eu s autem esse, et ah ipso immediate omne esse est.

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existence. I am who am (Exod 3:14).1 5 6 S e r m o n 83, Eckhart similarly preached,

But when all images are detached from the soul and she sees nothing but the One alone, then the naked essence of the soul finds the naked, formless essence of divine unity, which is superessential being [vherw esende w e se n \ passive, reposing in itself. ... So too if I say God is a being, that is not true: He is a transcendent being \vb e r sw ehende w e se n \ a superessential nothingness [vb er w esende nitheit]}^^

Logically, there is no rationalization to characterize the unutterable nothingness as father, mother, son, or daughter. For Eckhart, as for the zoharic kabbalists, it is not the motherly bearing of offspring that destabilizes the regnant gender structure. Rather, the nontheistic - or perhaps atheistic - implications of their respective apophatic worldviews culminate in the postulation of the double negative, the being of nonbeing that yields the nonbeing of being. The portrayal of the paternal God in the likeness of maternity does not imply an unambiguous overturning of the dominant patriarchical framework as was suggested, for example, by Michael Sells: The introduction of the female metaphor of birth into the Trinity will be the foundation upon which Eckhart s language will unsay the essentialized and gender-monotonic H eGod.^58 Taking a position similar to McGinn^^^ and Hollywood, Sells is of the opinion that Eckharts placement of a birth metaphor within the context of trinitarian procession destabilizes traditional trinitarian gender configurations. The traditional language of begetting or proceeding and emanating fits in well with mascuHne metaphor, but the language of
Eckhart, Expositio sancti evangelii secundum lohannem, n. 556, LW 3:485; McGinn, Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, 185. Compare n. 207, LW3:175: Unde deus non est pars aliqua universi, sed aliquid extra aut potius prius et superius universo. Et propter hoc ipsi nulla privatio aut negatio convenit, sed propria est sihi, et sihi soli, negatio negationis, quae est medulla et apex purissimae affirmationis, secundum illud: ego sum qui sum," Exodi3. See also Quaestiones Parisienses cum Quaestione Magistri Consalvi, LW5:48: deus omnia praehabet in puritate, plenitudine, perfectione, amplius et latius, exsistens radix et causa omnium. Et hoc voluit dicere, cum dixit: ego sum qui sum. English translation in Eckhart, Parisian (Questions, 50: God precontains everything in purity, fullness, and perlection, more abundantly and extensively, because he is the ground and cause of all things. And this IS what he intended to say when he declared I am who am. See above, n. 78. 157 DW 3:437-38, 442 (Pr. 83); CM W , 462-63. 158 Pseudo-Woman and the Meister: Unsaying and EssentiaHsm, in Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics: Hadewijch o f Brabant, Mechthild o f Magdeburg and Marguerite Porete, ed. B. McGinn (N ew York: Continuum, 1994), 135. Mysticism, 132: In discussing the First Person of the Trinity, Eckhart recognized that the source of bullito Hes beyond all gender language, so the term Father needs to be complemented by thinking of God as Mother. See also S.J. McGrath, The Early Heidegger and M edieval Philosophy: Phenomenology fo r the Godforsaken (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 129: Eckhart expresses the super-fecundity of the divine with the metaphor of the maternity of G od.

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birth, even in its paradoxical form as self-birth, cannot help but raise the issue of a mother.'^ I do not quarrel with the supposition that the last step on Eckharts mystical path - the beholding of the imagelessness of the absolute symbolized by sundry images including Jacobs resting in the nameless place [ungenante stat^ that is the divine essence [gotlich or Moses entry into the cloud of darkness*^^ - should be characterized as the dissolution of the identities of both the individuated human self and the theistic God in the henological desert of n o n d u a lity .H o w e v e r, it does not seem to me that this unsaying is attained by the symbol of motherhood for either the kabbalists or Eckhart. Quite the contrary, this symbol, which encompasses impregnation, birthing, and nursing, may very well represent a co-opting on the part of male mystics of a distinctive feature of female sexuality, and thus what appears to be an empowerment of women or a revolt against a monogendered deity'^'* is in fact a reinforcement of the prevailing masculine supremacy. The basis for undoing gender essentialism lies in the eternal abyss of G ods being {ewigen abgrunt gotUches wesens),'^^^ the groundless ground {den grunt, der gruntlos ist),^^ to which we cannot even attribute the quality of oneness, since it is the one that is more truly one than that which is unified {wan ein daz ist eigenlicher ein, dan daz da geeinet The nonground {ungrunt) is beyond all opposition, including the feminine/
Sells, Mystical Languages^ 148. DW 2:204 (Pr. 36b); CMW, 223. Eckhart, Expositio sancti evangelii secundum lohannem, n. 73, LW 3:61; English translation in McGinn, Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, 149. Compare DW 2^476 (Pr. 51), CM W , 410: Moses went into the cloud and ascended the mountain, and there he saw the divine light. Truly, it is in the darkness that one finds this light, so when we are in sorrow and distress, then this Hght is nearest of all to us. R. Schiirmann, Neoplatonic H enology as an Overcoming of Metaphysics, Research in Phenomenology 13 (1983): 25-41, esp. 17-1^. Sells, Mystical Languages, 205. '65 Z)W 2:493 (Pr. 52); CM W , 422. '*"DW 2:309 (Pr. 42); Cyl/W, 400. LW 1:401 (Pr. 23); CM W , 287. See V. Pekta, Mystique et philosophte: Grunt, at>grunt et Ungrund chez Mattre Eckhart et Jacob Bohme (Amsterdam: B.R. Griiner, 2006), 111-25. Eckhart may have been drawing here on the statement of Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 1.57, 132: N o w to ascribe to Him - whose existence is necessary, w ho is truly simple, to whom composition cannot attach in any way - the accident of oneness is just as absurd as to ascribe to Him the accident of multiplicity. I mean to say that oneness is not a notion that is superadded to His essence, but that H e is one not through oneness. Concerning this passage and the Neoplatonic source upon which it may have been based, see Wolfson, Via N egativa, 406. It is also possible that Eckhart was informed on the point by other sources. See, for example, the citation from Boethius, D e Trmttate,ch. 2, in LW 4:31 (Sermo 4.2, n. 30): vere unum est, in quo nullus numerus\ McGinn, Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, 211: That is truly one in which there is no number.

Patriarchy and the Motherhood o f G od

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masculine dichotomy, and thus beyond the theopoetic depiction of transcendence in either paternal or maternal images.'** In Sermon 6, Eckhart draws an analogy between the identity of the Son and the Father implied in the verse The Word was with G od Qohn 1:1) and the equality of man and woman elicited surprisingly from the account of creation in the second chapter of Genesis: When God made man, he made the woman from the mans side, so that she should be like him [dar umbe daz si glich wxre]. He did not make her from the head or feet, so that she would be neither woman nor man to him, but that she would be the same [sunder daz si glich In this manner, the just soul is equal to God (gerehte sHe glich hi gote sin) when it becomes like the nothing {niht glich) that is the divine being {gdtlich wesen) in which there is neither image nor form {noch bilde noch form e)P^ All differences disappear in the imageless and formless nothingness that is the Godhead, and hence even the attribution of maternity to the feminine must be effaced, since there is no more distinction between men and women.^ * As morally understandable as the feminist reclamation of apophasis may be, to speak of that which is neither male nor female should give rise to a complete collapse of the discursive space of difference - indeed, detachment brings about the elimination of the dialogical distance between human and divine that makes prayer itself possible*^^ - and not simply to a redressing of the androcentric bias by positing something akin to a chiasmically bisexual being. I see no philosophical pretext to gender the excess of infinitude, the otherwise-than-being, as feminine. I well comprehend the logic of assuming that what resists integration into the totalizing symbolic

Pekta, Mystique et philosophie, 231-41. 1:106-7 (Pr. 6); CMW, 330 (translation modified). D W 1:107 (Pr. 6); CMW, 330. Allen, Concept o f Woman, 354. Eckhart, Von abegescheidenheit, D W 5: 426-28; English translation in Colledge and McGinn, Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, 292: I say that purity in detachmem does not know how to pray [abegescheideniu luterkeit enkan niht h eten \ because if someone prays he asks God to get something for him, or he asks God to take something away from him. But a heart in detachment asks for nothing, nor has it anything of which It v^^uld gladly be free. So it is free of all prayer \ez ledic alles gehetes], and its prayer is nothing else than for uniformity with God [einfdrmic sin m it gote]. ... And as the soul attains this, it loses its name and it draws God into itself, so that in itself it becomes nothing \Maz si an ir sep>er ze nihte wirt], as the sun draws up the red dawn into itself so that it becomes nothing. N othing else will bring man to this except pure detachment. A similar overcoming of prayer, conceived theistically, is found in kabbalistic and Hasidic sources. See Wolfson, Dream Interpreted Within a Dream, 209-13, 229-35. pjjg locution is used by J. Llewelyn, The M iddle Voice o f Ecological Conscience. A QhMsmic Reading o f Responsibility in the Neighbourhood o f Levinas, Heidegger and (N ew York: St. Martins, 1991), 220. 169

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order of the phallic signifier, the not-All, would assume such a character. Derrida, perhaps reflecting his ongoing fascination with Eckhart, well expressed the point: If God is (probably) a man in speculative dialectics, the godness of God - the irony that divides him and makes him come off his hinges - the infinite disquiet of his essence is (if possible) woman(ly).^^^ In the final analysis, however, to ascribe femininity to the infinite disquiet of the divine essence, the surplus that is the nihilating nonground, the insubstantiahty that is neither being nor nonbeing - the Ein Sof for the kabbalists or the Godhead (gotheit) for Eckhart - is as problematic in theory as ascribing to it masculinity. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that imagining infinity beyond totality as mother is to be reinscribed in the very system of signification from which one desires to escape. The utmost detachment of the mind should consist of discarding both maternal and paternal representations of the inessential essence that is the nonmanifest nothingness of all things manifest. By way of conclusion, we can say that the surmounting of gender essentialism embedded in the homilies of the Zohar and in the sermons of Eckhart is not a consequence of their respective employment of maternal symbolism to depict a facet of divine paternity. It is rather the logical implication of the apophatic overcoming of language common to them both due to the impact of Neoplatonic thought and especially Maimonidean negative theology, but this would entail the relinquishing of the very theism that helped give shape to each of these respective mystical discourses - the atheism of the divine death {gotlich tot), in Eckhart s words - wherein the soul finds its own uncreatedness {ungeschaffenheit) through assimilation into G ods uncreated image {ungeschaffen bild)}^^ While it is surely reasonable to read the Zohar and Eckhart in this fashion, one cannot lose sight of the fact that in both instances the atheistic emerges from, and remains dialectically intertwined with, the theistic such that the unraveling of the latter would necessarily bring about the nullification of the former. To free God from God, in other words, is to liberate the God beyond God as well from this very taxonomy, indeed from any delineation that is not subject to an uncompromising denegation.

See discussion and citation of relevant sources in Wolfson, Languagey Eros, Being, 130-31. J. Derrida, Glas, trans. J. P. Leavey, Jr., and R. Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 188a. McGinn, Mystical Thought, 145.

Envisioning Judaism
Studies in Honor o f Peter Schafer on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday
Edited by

Ra'anan S. Boustan, Klaus Herrmann, Reimund Leicht, Annette Yosliiko Reed, and Giuseppe Veltri
with the collaboration of

Alex Ramos Volume 2

Mohr Siebeck

ISBN 978-3-16-152227-7 Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographic; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at h ttp://dn b.dn b.de.

2013 by Mohr Siebeck, Tubingen, Germany, www.mohr.de This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that permitted by copyright law) without the pubHshers written permission. This applies particularly to reproductions, translations, microfilms and storage and processing in electronic systems. The book was typeset by Martin Fischer in Tubingen, printed by Gulde-Druck in Tiibingen on non-aging paper and bound by Buchbinderei Spinner in Ottersweier. Printed in Germany.