In reading Ernst Cassirer’s Language and Myth I found the below quote from Meister Eckhart that I’d like the full context for:
Here the cycle of mythico-religious thinking is completed. But the beginning and the end do not resemble each other; for we have progressed from a realm of mere indeterminateness to the realm of true generality. The Divine, instead of entering in the the welter of properties and proper names, the gay kaleidoscope of phenomena, is set off against this world as something without attributes. For every mere “attribute” would limit its pure essence; omnis determinatio est negatio. It is especially the cult of mysticism, in all ages and among all peoples, that grapples again and again with this intellectual double problem – the task of comprehending the Divine in its totality, in its highest inward reality, and yet avoiding any particularity of name or image. Thus all mysticism is directed toward a world beyond language, a world of silence. As Meister Eckhardt has written, God is “the simple ground, the still desert, the simple silence” (der einveltige grunt, die stille wueste, die einveltic stille”); for “that is his nature, that he is one nature.”
Cassirer includes a reference to pg 160 of Fr. Pfeiffer’s 1857 Deutsche Mystiker des vierzehnten Jahrhunderts, bd. 2: Meister Eckhardt – which is conveniently available on Google books but unfortunately does not include the first quote, only the second (“Daz ist sin nature, daz er ane nature si”). I don’t know if the issue is simply citation – or if the deeper problem is I’m reading an English translation of a German translation of Eckhart’s original Latin. If the phrase were from one of his (possibly apocryphal) vernacular works it seems Google would’ve pegged it in something other than this Cassirer book.
Extracts 