Credits

Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine. He is also the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute.

What could be more intriguing than asking one of today’s leading thinkers from secular Europe to contemplate the oldest question of philosophy: What is God?

This was the challenge taken up by German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk earlier this year when he was invited by the Venice Biennale and the Berggruen Institute Europe to explore the meditations of the late-Medieval Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart, on the Gospel of John. Sloterdijk delivered his lecture at the Institute’s Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice. It will be published in book form by the Berggruen Press in the fall.

True to his provocative manner of thought, Sloterdijk sets the context for contemplating Eckhart’s “holy Christian faith” by citing an “obscure classic” by unnamed pagan masters titled “Book of the 24 Philosophers.” In this document, each contributor declared in a single sentence or aphorism their definition of God. Though published in the 12th century, some of the texts were thought to have originated in the 3rd and 4th centuries.

The Center Is Everywhere

The second sentence of the book reads: “God is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” For Sloterdijk, the importance of this notion of God is that it escapes all human sensibility. “The break with imaginative thinking could not be more radical. With this, every form of spatial imagination is subverted. …God is neither contained in anything that contains him, nor is there anything outside him … he has no beyond, no outside. If the center is everywhere, it is everywhere whole.”

A Single Glowing Breath

The first sentence of the book impresses the German philosopher as an even more radical departure from the way we normally think about the separate identities of imaginable entities: “God is the monad that begets a monad and bends back upon itself in a single glowing breath.” In other words, three indissoluble movements take place. The first engenders “an outpouring of abundance;” second, what is poured out “regathers” from experience in the world; and, third, that outflow and regathering from the one through the second loops back and is sublimated into one unity.

If all this brings to mind the elusive Christian doctrine of the Trinity, Hegel’s dialectics of the movement of history or the entangled properties of quantum mechanics, then you are following the path this brief essay is taking.

God As Pure Thought

As Sloterdijk reads him, Meister Eckhart’s meditations around 1300 could place him as the 25th contributor to the Book of Philosophy because he, too, saw “God as disbarred from human imaginability because God is ‘intellectual purus,’ or pure thought.”

Eckhart’s theological point of departure is the concept of Logos: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.” As he saw it, the incarnation of the divine spirit in man — the Son — takes place through our human participation in the unfolding Logos of the Word, making us part of and conjoining with the mind of God; co-essences, so to speak.

It is here that the notion of the Holy Trinity echoes the pagan Book of 24. Father, Son and Holy Spirit appear as three movements in one: the emanation or outpouring of the Father, the incarnation of the divine in man through consummation and constitutive participation in the mind of God, and the loop back without any loss into the one unity of the Holy Spirit.

“We are fundamental to creating the reality we observe.”

In this understanding, the real Church is not a hallowed marble institution but, through “Sonship,” the medium of “coessential propagation.” “To think is to give birth to God.”

Thus, the title of Sloterdijk’s lecture: “The Midwife of the Intellect: Meister Eckart and Divine Man.”

Sloterdijk puts it this way:* “If God is spirit and if spirit means life-as-thought and thought-as-life, then his incarnation in Christ is not just an eminent episode in*‘illo tempore,’* which we ritually commemorate in the Mass.*

We can and should participate in the incarnation of the Logos by releasing the activity of the ‘intellectus purus’ within ourselves. This presupposes shedding the ballast of the imagination with respect to self and world. When I have emptied myself to such an extent that I no longer stand in the way of the One, I perceive that I belong to him, not autogenously, but in full participation. It was from this position of self-awareness, that Jesus could say: “The Father and I are one” (John 10:30). If this utterance from the mouth of Jesus was not blasphemy, then the awakening of a Christ-like spark in the noetic soul of humanity should not be blasphemous either – even if it does sound perilous. I am at the same high stature as the Father, but I do not forget that he was before me.

But the relationship of pure thought (Father) to the Logos (Son) is not an unrepeatable event located in mythical remoteness; it happens continuously. So the “birth of God in the soul,” that is, the sharpening of absolute intellect into a first coessential thought, is by no means restricted to what happened at the time in Bethlehem. It can just as easily be repeated in Paris, in Erfurt, in the convents of the Order, and anywhere else — one has only to assume the existence of human beings who overcome the meddlesomeness of their imaginations and the breadth of their egos and so do not refuse passage to God. As soon as obstructions to the birth of God in the human intellect are removed, the work of God can freely take place. Omne opus dei est novum. In other words, the Son, like everything else, emerges continually anew.”

The Hinge Of History

For Sloterdijk, the relevance of this excursion through medieval mysticism is to recover what he calls the “abandonment of symbiosis” — the understanding that all reality is constituted relationally, not unlike the Christian Trinity seen through the lens of Eckhart. To understand the relationality of being is to be self-aware; we are a co-essence with other contingencies that together make a whole, not self-contained individuals or entities. That comprehension of reality is meaningful to every aspect of life, from the solidarity of community in democracy to ecology in the Anthropocene.

By way of a correspondence of ideas, the philosopher of religion, Mark C. Taylor, makes a further link between the Christian Trinity, Logos and Hegel’s dialectic in the final passages of his just-published book, “After The Human: A Philosophy For the Future.”

“In the ‘Science of Logic’,” he writes, “Hegel lays bare the radically relational structure of identity-in-difference and difference-in-identity that is the structural foundation of both nature (object) and mind (subject). This Logic formulates a Logos of reality, which is always incarnate in space (nature) and time (history). This dialectical logic is the conceptual articulation of truth represented in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Neither monistic nor dualistic, the Christian God is one-in-three and three-in-one. This is not a static structure that is fixed in advance, but temporally unfolds. This is why Hegel describes the synchronic and diachronic Trinity as ‘the hinge upon which history swings.’” That is, the unity of what is and what has been conjoined as one essence that is both continuous and new.

Quantum Being

Taylor goes further, tying Hegel’s “Logic” and the unfolding Logos of the doctrine of the Trinity to quantum science: “The unity of thinking and Be-ing is not merely a product of philosophical speculation but is the sober conclusion of quantum mechanics as well as symbiotic biology. …This is a journey of the mind into God. Not to God, but in God.”

We are fundamental to creating the reality we observe. As the Nobel poet Czeslaw Milosz once put it in an essay titled “The Fate of the Religious Imagination,” “The theory of quanta … restores the mind to the role of co-creator of the fabric of reality. This favors a shift from belittling man as an insignificant speck in the immensity of galaxies to regarding him again as a main actor in the universal drama.”

The quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli has often underscored this apprehension of reality as symbiotic relationality. For him, the best account of matter we have is quantum mechanics, which tells us that the physical world is defined by “deep relationality” and that things only make sense in reference to something else.

Rovelli also sees relational reality as constant change that is both continuously anew yet inclusive of everything that has been. “Reality is a momentary get together on the sand,” he has written. But that moment itself is made whole by that from which it emerges and becomes. “Every moment of our existence is linked by a peculiar triple thread to our past — the most recent and the most distant—by memory. Our present swarms with traces of our past. We are histories of ourselves.”

Late Faustian Civilization

Sloterdijk doesn’t let his reflections go without one of his trademark taunts against established and conventional ways of thinking.

“Oswald Spengler,” he writes, “once remarked somewhat sarcastically on the spiritual needs of people whose existence falls into the late phase of what he called Faustian civilization, saying that they bore the traits of an inevitably inauthentic, contrived ‘second religiosity.’ It is anyone’s guess whether and how a bridge could be built between the later fabrications and the earlier structures. In any case, the ‘heretical imperative,’ which favors a mystical boom, has long been hovering over both religiosities.”

Sloterdijk closes with a pious nod by the religious philosopher Martin Buber to the wonder of the interconnection of all things:

“We listen to our inmost selves — and do not know which sea we hear murmuring.”