Meister Eckhart’s Notion of Detachment as A New Way of Life in the Transformative Union with God

초록

This essay is going to discuss Eckhart’s notion of detachment and its crucial role in union with God. He is a well-known and important late Medieval theologian, philosopher, and mystic. His radical thoughts were often under suspicion and regarded as heretical. In particular, his idea of detachment was very controversial on the grounds that he denied everything in humanity and identified such a negated self with the essence of God. In other words, Eckhart appears to seek a union with God through his radical notion of detachment. Accordingly, detachment is neither rejection of human person nor the denial of all that we know and possess of both God and ourselves. It is an opening of a space for a new way of life in the transformative union with God. In order to show that, this essay will explore the various aspects of detachment as self-will, God, mankind, the birth of the Word, language, and the unity between the created and uncreated.

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