The Absent Threshold: The Paradox of Divine Knowing in Meister Eckhart

Within the whole Western philosophical tradition there is no voice like the voice of Meister Eckhart. He constructed an utterly unique thought-world. He pushed thinking to its furthest boundaries, made it descend to the depths where the origin is opaque and ascend to the high summits where there is nothing but light. He put his eye to the earth at an amazing angle. What he glimpsed and managed to bring to word still fascinates us with its vitali~ severity and beautiful danger. His texts are real presences. To make their acquaintance is to begin a subversive and transforming thought-adventure. Mter a time the texts cease to be mere objects of analysis or understanding. They begin to assume their own autonomy and, indeed, subjectivi~ Often you feel the texts are actually reading you or at other times that they have become wilderness-guides luring you away from every domesticated domain of belief and thought. These are wilderness-texts for any mind that has become in the least haunted by the Divine. In The Timaeus, Plato claims that all thought begins in the recognition that something is out of place. The rupture between Being and Consciousness arises in human subjectivity. Philosophical thought is the conceptual theatre where this primal conversation between Being and Consciousness unfolds and thematizes itsel£ Subjectivity is the place where Being becomes articulate. Subjectivity is eternally restless because it is the intimate threshold where duality awakens. Indeed, experience could be characterized as the arena where duality unfolds and engages itsel£ Subjectivity is that threshold between known and unknown, light and darkness, past and future, memory and possibili~ language and silence, here and there, this and that, before and after, time and etemi~ human and divine. The ongoing and creative tension between these oppositions is what animates experience and awakens the philosophical quest and question. Eckhart's thought is fascinating in the ways in which he thinks the threshold. He offers a dynamic of transfiguration where the threshold is subsumed in a more inclusive actuality. The concept of Threshold belongs to a family of concepts that name and