It’s not hard to see why the Catholic Church condemned Meister Eckhart for heresy. One of his teachings, in particular, is shocking even today: the good or blessed man, properly “poor in spirit”, is
so much of one will with God that he wills everything that God wills, and in the fashion in which God wills it. And therefore, because in some way or another it is God’s will that I should have sinned, I should not want not to have done so, for in this way God’s will is done “on earth,” that is, in misdeeds, “as it is in heaven,” that is, in good deeds. (Book of Benedictus section 2, pp. 216-17 in Meister Eckhart)
Or, as Eckhart’s accusers put it in the papal bull accusing him of heresy, “A good man ought to so conform his will to the divine will that he should will whatever God wills. Since God in some way wills for me to have sinned, I should not will that I had not committed sins; and this is true penitence.” (p. 77)
That’s a pretty extraordinary thing to be saying: it sounds like Eckhart is saying it’s good to be doing evil. That idea is as alarming to us as it would have been to the medieval Church.
Still, if you look closely at either version of Eckhart’s claim, it’s not as strong as that. He’s not saying that you should sin in the future. Even his accusers don’t accuse him of saying that. Elsewhere he is clear enough that you should not do so. What he is saying is something a little more complicated. Namely, that when you do sin – when, not if, since we all do sometimes and we all know that we do – once the sin has been committed, you should not want to not have done it. It is in the past, it is unchangeable, and therefore you should move on.
And in this, I think Eckhart is on to something ethically and psychologically important! The key is, the past is past – and thus, in a key sense, the past is God’s will in a way that the future is not. The future is undetermined, at least some of it is up to us in a meaningful sense. What I will do is at least partially under my control. But what I have done no longer is! It was once, but it isn’t anymore.
The lesson here is close to the Buddhist critique of shame. It is at least as close to another valuable Christian lesson: namely the Serenity Prayer. We must accept things that we can’t change – and what we have done in the past, we cannot change! Not anymore, anyway – and now and in the future, the “not anymore” is what matters. To accept what we have done, we must also accept the consequences of what we have done. But we still must accept! You can’t go back and undo what you did in the past, no matter what it is. You can fix some of your past mistakes, you can get rid of their bad consequences, but you can’t change the fact that you made the mistake. What is done there is done. It is wisdom to know that it is done, that you cannot change the fact that you did it – and that therefore you must not try to change it, but to accept it!
The negative consequences of a past bad decision can be awful – but so can many other things in life. The negative consequences of your bad decisions for yourself – you can learn from them for related actions in the future, but other than that, they are awfulness that you just have to deal with, like diseases. The same is true even of negative consequences for others: there, too, you cannot change the fact that you hurt them, you have to accept that and its consequences.
Now what does that acceptance, acceptance of the past wrongdoing that you can no longer change, imply? It doesn’t necessarily imply that you should feel no guilt or shame at your bad action. Guilt and shame, I think, do serve an important signalling function, a visceral recognition that what you did was bad – which is important in striving not to do similar things again. But too often they can also cripple us, actually make it harder to be better in the future. They serve us best as transition emotions. That is: as Martha Nussbaum notes, anger can serve the beneficial function of showing us that something is wrong with someone else’s behaviour, but after that benefit of the initial arising, one needs to transition “off the terrain of anger toward more productive forward-looking thoughts”. It seem to me that guilt and shame are exactly parallel to anger in this way: they show you something was wrong with your own behaviour, but once you’ve received that signal, you need to transition off the terrain of guilt toward more productive forward-looking thoughts.
I am quite prone to fixate on my past mistakes, small and large, telling myself “I should have…” It has been greatly helpful for me to repeatedly tell myself: oh well, I didn’t. If there’s a lesson to be learned on how to avoid similar mistakes in the future, by all means learn that lesson. But don’t get wrapped up in the past mistake.
And that is where Eckhart’s advice is valuable. Try not to sin – but don’t get lost in wishing you hadn’t. Your striving to do less wrong should be directed at the future, not the past.
In my first comment on the previous post, I quoted Alexander Berzin on the Tibetan Buddhist “four powers” (Wyl. bshags pa’i stobs bzhi), guidelines for responding to one’s own wrongdoing in a skillful way. The way that Berzin spoke about regret (which is one of the four powers) corresponds to some degree with the theme of this latest post; he said:
Berzin’s key words in the present context are “the wish that we did not have to commit the act” (emphasis added). Notice that Berzin didn’t just say “the wish that we did not commit the act”. We could see the latter wish as what Eckhart said we should not wish, but that’s not exactly what Berzin said. The proposition that we have to commit it is an acknowledgement that the act stands as a determined fact (as if by a will of God in Eckhart’s tradition): that’s the sense in which we did have to do it. In Berzin’s account, but not in Eckhart’s as quoted, that already-determined fact that we did have to do it is held in mind together with the counterfactual wish that we didn’t have to do it.
The next three of the four powers are present- and future-focused, not past-focused like the factual part of regret. In contrast, we err when we fall into an irrational obsession with the counterfactual and don’t engage in the kind of rational response exemplified by the four powers. In the four powers, we acknowledge the factual past and use the counterfactual wish of regret as a springboard to present- and future-focused problem-solving. In that way, I think the Buddhist four powers are more complex, subtle, and helpful than Eckhart’s teaching.
Thomas Merton’s book The Wisdom of the Desert (New Directions, 1960), a selection of translations from the sayings of the desert fathers, 5th-century Christian hermit-monks in Egypt, begins with this:
Perhaps the Catholic functionaries who condemned Eckhart didn’t have access to these sayings of the desert fathers, so they overlooked how similar Eckhart’s view was to the early Christians before him?
Perhaps one other aspect of the Berzin quote above is worth mentioning, although it may be obvious: If what caused us to have to commit the wrongdoing is some aspect of our mind that we can now change, then the wish that we did not have to commit it is also a wish to change our mind, which provides the plausibility for the next power, which is “promising to try our best not to repeat the mistake” (and then enacting that attempt through the practices in the other two powers). As I said before, I find this considerably more complex, subtle, and helpful than Eckhart’s preaching of submission to the divine will.
Well, since I’m a Buddhist and not a Christian, I’m more inclined to sympathize with a Buddhist take too (like the points last week about kukkucca). But I appreciated Eckhart as giving similar advice from very different premises – in a way that appears first shocking and then profound.
Thanks for drawing attention to Eckhart. I actually have Matthew Fox’s translation of Meister Eckhart on my bookshelves (Breakthrough: Meister Eckhart’s Creation Spirituality in New Translation, Image Books, 1980), but I’ve never read it, and this blog post reminds me why: coming from my naturalistic orientation it’s very difficult for me to stomach traditional Christian theology that seems so anthropomorphizing. Flipping through the book now, I came across a paragraph in Fox’s introduction that corroborates what I said above when I asked, “Perhaps the Catholic functionaries who condemned Eckhart overlooked how similar Eckhart’s view was to the early Christians before him?” In Fox’s account, Eckhart really was a traditionalist (p. 23):
I have to admit, though: there is a nontheistic parallel to Eckhart’s “will of God” in some Buddhist texts that I like. An example that comes to mind at the moment is Zen teacher Tenshin Reb Anderson’s commentary on the Saṃdhinirmocana-sūtra, specifically on the second of the three characteristics (trisvabhāva) of things, the other-dependent or other-powered (paratantra) character of things. He said:
Yogācāra Buddhism doesn’t say that God is the other who is giving us (or willing) our actions, but the perspective-shift and use of metaphor is similar.
Obviously I’m no Eckhart expert, but I do question the point about his orthodoxy. His Latin works do indeed hew closely to traditional Catholic views… but his vernacular German works are another matter, and those are the more interesting ones to me. It is pretty hard to resist the hypothesis that he put out his real views when he didn’t think the papal hierarchy was looking.
One of the things that appeals to me about those German works is that God often appears in less anthropomorphic form: more of a primal, nondual ground of being (which he usually calls the “Godhead”, and implies this is more fundamental than any anthropomorphic god).
Putting things in perspective, I think I get this piece of history. One must walk-the-walk like he talks-the-talk.
Can you say what you mean by that?