Gelassenheit

Gelassenheit mean "releasement" or "letting go." The term is an old
one in German intellectual history, from the theologizing of Meister
Eckhart (1260-1327) to the religious thought of Reform Anabaptists and
early modern mystics, to its 20th-century revival in the philosophy of
Martin Heidegger.

Heidegger acknowledged that his use of Gelassenheit was inspired by
Eckhart. Threads back to Eckhart's themes of will and detachment are
discernable in Heidegger's later thought, culminating in his own
concept of Gelassenheit. Further, these themes have special relevance
in Eastern thought as well, where interest in both Eckhart and
phenomenology is keen. The following essay explores Meister Eckhart's
concept of Gelassenheit in his mystical thought.

The Will in Eckhart

The status of the human will has been an important psychological and
theological concern for Christianity since its inception, usually
contrasted with identification of (and with) the will of God, from
Paul to Augustine. In both his scholastic (Latin) and vernacular
(German) works, Meister Eckhart emphasizes this conformity of human
will to God's will. "A good man ought so to conform his will to the
divine will that he should will whatever God wills," he typically
states.

For God's will is necessarily good, and we must necessarily accept and
be ready for everything that is God's will, Eckhart maintains. Quoting
Seneca, Eckhart writes: "The good man, insofar as he is good, becomes
possessed of all the properties of goodness itself."

This state of will is the poverty of spirit in the Gospel (Mt. 5, 23),
Eckhart says, essentially a poverty of will.

If a man is to become poor in his will, he must want and desire as
little as he wanted and desired when he did not exist. And in this way
a man is poor who wants nothing. ... So long as a man has this as his
will, that he wants to fulfill God's dearest will, he has not the
poverty about which we want to talk.

This necessary conformity to God's will pushes theology to new
conceptualizations in Eckhart. Thus he says that if God wills that we
sin or that we suffer, we should not will that we had not committed
sin or had not suffered. Rather, our will must be no will at all. "The
just have no will at all," he states. "What God wills is all the same
to them, however great distress that may be."

In the context of identifying with God's will, Eckhart almost defines
virtues as external to and prior to God insofar as for the just or
virtuous:

The pursuit of justice is so imperative that if God were not just,
they [the just] would not give a fig for God.

This justice is more important than life itself. But, asks Eckhart:
"What is life? God's being is my life. If my life is God's being, then
God's existence must be my existence and God's is-ness [Isticheit] is
my is-ness, neither less nor more."

This latter sentence was among the statements held against Eckhart by
the ecclesiastical authorities at Cologne. However provocative, the
passage was translated into a meaning not maintained by Eckhart, who
is here speaking of identity with God's being and not divinization of
the human being. Nevertheless, the momentum of Eckhart's thought is
clear: he intends to explore the ramifications of an absolute
identification with God's will and its practical effects on diurnal
life. Out of this comes releasement or Gelassenheit.

Releasement as non-willing

Initially, releasement for Eckhart signifies a notion of will, a
not-willing, which detaches or cuts off the individual from the
worldly will. While the quietism of not-willing attracted many
Christian thinkers and Reform spiritual figures, the concept became a
second stage of the will, called by Heidegger "deferred-willing,"
where the concept remained a negation. Some Reform figures embraced a
notion of will that including acceptance of suffering and martyrdom, a
trajectory that waned, however, with passing centuries.

"Deferred-willing" is a passive acquiescence or active subordination
of will to that of another. In historical Christianity, this
subordination is to God. But to Eckhart it was not to God, as
popularly understood, as will be seen.

A third stage of the will is called "covert-willing" by Heidegger.
Covert-willing involves a feigned negation, a pragmatic deference for
the sake of survival and the preservation of thought and expression,
concealing the full expression of the will from authorities and even
(psychologically) from the self. This may have been the pragmatism of
some medieval mystics and thinkers couching their ideas in abstruse
language or obscure analogies and images.

Eckhart never clearly wrote as covert-willing, convinced of the
defensibility of his writing. "I can be in error," he once declared,
"but I cannot be a heretic, because the first belongs to the
intellect, the second to the will."

Eckhart explored the fullest sense of non-willing, the sense of either
grudging or content obedience as insufficient for grasping the content
of God's will. Rather, there must be cessation of self-will, what
Eckhart calls an "empty spirit."

An empty spirit is one that is confused by nothing, attached to
nothing, has not attached its best to nay fixed way o acting, and has
no concern whatever in anything for its own gain, for it is sunk deep
down into God's dearest will and has forsaken its own. A man can never
perform any work, however humble, without it gaining strength and
power from this.

Eckhart refutes the idea that releasement involves impractical
external changes. Objections will be made, he says, such as,

"I wish that it were so with me!" Or, "I should like to be poor," or
else, "Things will never go right for me till I am in this place or
that, or until I act one way or another." "I must go and live in a
strange land or in a hermitage, or in a cloister." In fact, this is
all about yourself, and nothing else at all. This is just self-will,
only you do not know it or it does not seem so to you ...

He goes on to advise how to begin working on the will.

Make a start with yourself, and abandon yourself. Truly, if you do not
begin by getting away from yourself, wherever you run to , you will
find obstacles and trouble wherever it may be. People who seek peace
in external things -- be it in places or ways of life or people or
activities or solitude or poverty or degradation -- however great such
a thing may be or whatever it may be, still it is all nothing and
gives no peace.

Eckhart paraphrases Gregory the Great:

If anyone willingly gives up something little, that is not all which
he has given up, but he has forsaken everything which worldly men can
gain and what they can even long for. Whoever has renounced his own
will and has himself renounced everything, as truly as if he had
possessed it as his own, to dispose of as he would.

Eckhart reasserts the initial status of poverty of spirit equaling
poverty of will or negation of will. He adds to this formula the terms
of practice, citing the Gospel injunction of Jesus: "Whoever wishes to
come after me, let him deny himself." Adds Eckhart, one should take
that injunction "as a beginning. Everything depends on that. Take a
look at yourself, and wherever you find yourself, deny yourself. That
is best of all."

Meister Eckhart outlines the benefits of "self-abandonment," arguing
that people tend to identify themselves by doing rather than being,
and that this attitude extends to religious practices. With
releasement of will, however, all works can be holy, even sleeping and
eating, for example, as well as keeping vigil (and, presumably, the
pious actions long defined as holy). "Take good heed," he asserts. "We
ought to do everything we can to be good; it does not matter so much
what we may do, or what kinds of works ours may be. What matters is
the ground on which the works are built." This sentiment recalls the
famous dictum of the Platonist St. Augustine: "Love God and do what
you will."

The ground referred to here by Eckhart is the basis of his mature
theologizing, wherein releasement is no longer just a precondition to
deference or even to union with God's will but is the approach to the
very nature of divinity, to the Godhead which is behind God. This is
the meaning behind the otherwise merely controversial paradoxes about
God permitting us to sin or God as being identical to our human will.
The following passages from Sermon 52 set the stage for the self to
break through the facade of what we conceive of as God.

So I say that one should be so poor [in spirit, that is, in will] that
he should not be or have any place in which God could work. When one
clings to place, he clings to distinction. Therefore I pray God that
he may make me free of "God," for my real being is above God if we
take "God" to be the beginning of created things.

Here is the first paradox concerning God: that our willing should be
such a non-willing that there is no place for the conventional
projection of God as satisfying our selfish desires, however lofty we
imagine them to be. We must get "above God."

Eckhart continues:

For in the same being of God where God is above being and above
distinction, there I myself was, there I willed myself and committed
myself to create this being who I am. Therefore I am the cause of
myself in the order of my being, which is eternal and not in the order
of my becoming, which is temporal. And therefore I am unborn, and in
the manner in which I am unborn I can never die. In my unborn manner I
have been eternally, and am now, and shall eternally remain.

Eckhart states that we, as much as God, originate from this great
ground transcending being and distinction. We are co-creators of our
selves with God in terms of that which is eternal, though not in terms
of that which is mortal and destined to die. Eckhart's reference to an
unborn is uncannily echoed by the Zen Buddhist commentator Bankei in
17th century Japan.

The assertion by Eckhart that we are created in the same fullness of
God's emanation of the divine substance as the Son and Spirit -- thus
concluding the identity of human and divine in substance, even in this
narrow regard -- is widely restated in the works of Eckhart and the
basis of his view of the Son being born in the human soul. These
notions were roundly condemned as suspect of heresy by ecclesiastical
authorities of his day. Yet Eckhart was not finished with the
ramifications of his idea when he goes further to state that "God's
breaking through is nobler than his flowing out."

Breaking-through

Flowing out is emanation. To Christian Platonism, as far back as
Origen, emanation equals creation. Creation is less "noble" insofar as
it constitutes a secondary emanation, the first being the Son and
Spirit from the Father. Creation is less noble also insofar as it
makes a self-referential point for grounding God, literally trapping
God in time and space, in a specific functionality. Thus God's
emanation becomes as important as his being. Human beings, as part of
this emanation, share intimately in this revealing of God, to the
degree, says Eckhart, that God (not Godhead) depends on us for his
existence.

If I did not exist, "God" would also not exist. That God is "God," of
that I am a cause; if I did not exist, God, too, would not be "God."

But the breaking through is our return to God, the potential of which
is revealed by the Logos and the Spirit. This revealing gives the
human soul the invitation to reverse the outward flow and penetrate
through God to the Godhead.

Hence, the cessation of will (poverty of will) discards self and
conventional understanding, for we no longer cling to anything, even
to conventional understandings of God. For the ground of being is the
trajectory of Eckhart's mysticism. Here individual acts such as
humility or love are not sufficient for the detachment necessary, a
thorough detachment from creatures and creation. The will must be both
empty and free. It must be empty in the sense of detachment and
receptivity to breaking through. It must be free in the sense of being
free from the God of creation, then free to reintegrate itself for the
breaking-through to Godhead.

In the breaking-through, when I come to be free of will, of myself and
of God's will and of all his works and of God himself, then I am above
all created things, and I am neither God nor creature, but I am what I
was and what I shall remain, now and eternally. Then I receive an
impulse, I receive such riches that God, as he is "God," and as he
performs all his divine works, cannot suffice for me; for in this
breaking-through I perceive that God and I are one. Then I am what I
was, and then I neither diminish nor increase, for I am then an
immovable cause that moves all things. Here God finds no place in man,
for with this poverty man achieves what he has been eternally and will
evermore remain. Here God is one with the spirit, and that is the most
intimate poverty one can find.

An important aspect of mysticism, Christian or otherwise, is the
realization that once the self is within the ground of being, within
originary nothingness, then activities of this world require no
justification or external rationale. They are the product of
releasement from things. Return from the breaking-through is
releasement towards things (but not returning for things). Genuine
mysticism begins in detachment and releasement, and culminates in
ecstatic communion, but then returns as or becomes enlightened
activity, activity informed by a dynamic nothingness rather than an
artificially static tolerance for living.

Detachment

This "return" identifies detachment as the greatest virtue:

I find no other virtue better than a pure detachment from all things,
because all other virtues have some regard for created things, but
detachment is free from all created things.

Eckhart includes love, humility, and mercy below the status of
detachment as virtues. Detachment transcends horizontal relations to
objects and people and reaches to God. Yet detachment is subtle:
"There is nothing so subtle that it can be apprehended by detachment,
except God alone." And detachment can apprehend nothing except God.
Eckhart sees nothing between detachment and God or even between
detachment and nothingness. Then what exactly is detachment? Eckhart
elaborates:

True detachment is nothing else than for the spirit to stand as
immovable against whatever may chance to it of joy and sorrow, honor,
shame and disgrace, as a mountain of lead stands before a little
breath of wind.

Eckhart states that God is what he is because of his immovable
detachment, and from detachment derives his purity, simplicity, and
unchangeability. Yet detachment brings a person into "the greatest
equality with God." Detachment does so insofar as one can approach
God. For only detachment engenders the same three virtues of purity,
simplicity, and unchangeability in a human being. "To be empty of all
created things is to be full of God, and to be full of created things
is to be empty of God."

God enters the self to the degree that the self has released the will,
and releasement makes detachment pure, as Eckhart explains:

Detachment is the best of all [virtues], for it purifies the soul and
cleanses the conscience and enkindles the heart and awakens the spirit
and stimulates our longing and shows us where God is and separates us
from created things and unites us with God.

Ultimately, daily living in the ground of being becomes sufficient for
our diurnal existence and works. Eckhart recognizes this in his
radical reinterpretation of the Gospel story of Martha and Mary. Where
usually Martha is portrayed as the active and Mary as the
contemplative, Eckhart sees Martha as being at the stage of trying to
negate the will but yet "troubled by many things." Mary, on the other
hand, is attempting the deferred willing that gives birth to divinity
in the soul. However, what will Martha's labors look like after the
breaking-through, after the transgression of the domain of the will?
It will look like nothing less than the same as the active stage in
external appearance -- but with a subtle difference. Now all of
Martha's work will be fixed in the purity and simplicity of the
Godhead, and Mary will be the one left working futilely to approximate
the conventional God but not the Godhead.

Observes Eckhart:

If anyone were to ask a truthful man who works out of his own ground:
"Why are you performing your works?" and if he were to give a straight
answer, he would say nothing else than: "I work, therefore I work."

Or, we can quote, with Heidegger, the celebrated aphorism of Angelus
Silesius: "The rose is without why, it blooms because it blooms ..."

Conclusion

Gelessenheit in Meister Eckhart is intimately bound with the concept
of will and detachment. These virtues work to break through the
conventions of theology and go behind and beyond to the Godhead. While
most mysticisms through the world project this trajectory, Meister
Eckhart's control of theology and a philosophical method for defining
the techniques of virtues employed in the mystic ascent rightly make
him the most important mystic figure of the Western world.

¶

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

Among the English translations of Meister Eckhart, the most reliable are:
Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and
Defense. Translation and introduction by Edmund Colledge and Bernard
McGinn, preface by Huston Smith. New York: Paulist Press, c1981 and
Meister Eckhart: Selections From His Essential Writings. Edited by
Emilie Griffin, foreword by John O'Donohue, translation by Edmund
Colledge and Bernard McGinn. San Francisco : HarperSanFrancisco, 2005.
Forthcoming is
The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart. Translated by M.O'C.
Walshe, with an introduction by Bernard McGinn. New York: Crossroad /
Herder and Herder, 2008.

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