The following is an excerpt from Meister Eckhart and C.G. Jung by Steven Herrmann. It’s a featured Speakeasy selection, and there are still limited review copies available for qualified reviewers.
When I look back at my dream journals, I’m amazed at the sense of timelessness that exists in the historical unconscious. Jung spoke in his Collected Works about prospective dreams that contain portraits of the ways in which future actions will later be taken up as works in the world in a meaningfully symbolic pattern that provides hints of our destiny. Therefore, I hold all my eight dreams about Meister Eckhart recorded in this book to be sacred. I have always protected them, owing to their personal quality, yet they may be of objective value as imprints of experience to support my hypotheses about the trans-dual nature of the human psyche and the centrality of vocational archetypes. We simply cannot know where our calling will lead us to when we are young, what impact our vocations might have upon the career world, but it is our ethical responsibility to work with such images and be true to them, as best we can—first, by remembering them, and second, by living out their general structural designs as an architect might construct a house from a blueprint. Calling dreams are data for verification and development of theoretical structures. Therefore, as a Jungian analyst, I have to show my feelings as well as express my ideas in order to arrive at an overall theory of vocation during the process of authoring this book.
My personal story illustrates how even as a child of four I had experienced God beyond God as an infinite abyss. When I read Eckhart for the first time, I remembered my recurrent dreams. The abyss, void, or Nothing is what we come out of, Eckhart taught, and what we must return to in order to be born again—without any images, ideas, or names of God, as democratic citizens of the world. Only when our souls have died in God can we awaken to our true destiny. The images of God are in each of us, regardless of our faith, ethnicity, gender, color, or nationality. We are all born out of the Godhead and God is in us and outside of us, everywhere, if we will only open our eyes to see God irrationally.
Jung taught that the best way to bring about a state of peace in the soul or psyche is by conscientiously living out a meaningful symbolic life through the opening of the inner eye via dream work and active imagination. This is where Eckhart has a great deal to teach us about the true meaning of Christianity, for he was essentially a visionary and an intuitive seer.
Eckhart’s theology is first and foremost experiential. Reading Eckhart is about awakening; it’s about experiencing equality with God insofar as God can ever be experienced through a process of continuous witnessing, seeing, and birthing God from a standpoint in eternal time. Eckhart put forth a unitary type of theology that he practiced, taught, and preached for most of his career that strongly appealed to Jung. By unitary theology, I mean Eckhart’s vocation was to lead people into unitive states of mind—transformations of consciousness that could change his audiences and also us as postmodern readers today. The same birth of God is happening eternally throughout the whole Cosmos, and this miracle of creativity is taking place inside and outside of ourselves now, whether we are aware of it or not.
Christ has not come until He or She comes in You! This was Eckhart’s essential teaching. Like Jung, he placed a greater accent on the Third Person of the Trinity (the Paraclete) than the Second, the Son. Jung said: “There is an extraordinary relationship between eastern ideas, and the ideas of Meister Eckhart, which is yet to be fathomed.” Indeed there is. Jung was zeroing in on the fact that Eckhart was the only bridge in European Christendom between East and West to the Self. Jung was developing a scientific hypothesis here that holds great empirical validity and theological weight, and it may be proven to be correct through careful textual analysis.
Eckhart broke conventional bounds in his verses by embodying a fourth way, or path of earthly and spiritual knowing and experiencing life and being moved in the light by the Trinity in relationship to his whole Self. This included the feminine figure of the Self, which was inclusive of instinctive power (Snake) and the eternal Wisdom of the higher masculine-feminine totality. Wisdom was for Eckhart, as it was for Jung and the alchemists he studied, including St. Albert, equivalent with the archetype of the Self because She was an active, living part of the Jewish and Catholic anima structures within Western culture and civilization. This Self-figure, Sophia, included the chthonic dimensions of the earth, the five senses, and the human body and spirit. In Eckhart’s theology of the birth of the Word, the Trinity was said to emanate from the Ground. What made Eckhart’s theology so unique among his contemporaries is that he provided the Church with a potentially useful psychological method for raising the contents of the collective unconscious into consciousness and showed by way of metaphorical exegesis how an understanding of the chthonic powers (Serpent and Eve) could be raised through the integrative powers of a contemplative and active life into the soul’s higher Wisdom.
The three main qualities attributed to the Paraclete, according to Jung, are procreative, fructifying, and inseminating potentials that aim toward bringing forth “works of divine parentage.” We are all destined to bring forth works through our divine parentage, by virtue of the goodness of our vocations. This means if we are to receive the Holy Spirit into our psyches, we have to accept our own individual life-patterns, by which I mean our calling archetypes, as Christ accepted his. Moreover, the Paraclete “is the identical breath of God and His Son in a new incarnation.” Jung wrote further: “Thus, Mother of God can, therefore, be regarded as a symbol of mankind’s essential participation in the Trinity.”
We have seen how much Jung was influenced by Eckhart, and I am attempting here as an analyst and Jungian dream researcher to provide verification for not only his ideas about God, Christ, or the Self, but Eckhart’s and mine as well. Many of my most original thoughts have arisen from my dreams and only after sitting with them for many years am I attempting to interpret them in theoretical terms so that the reader can see for herself why Eckhart is so very important to the evolution of Christianity.
We are in dire need of Eckhart’s medicine today. I see Eckhart during his time in Strasbourg and Cologne as returning to the humble role that he had originally assumed during his inception at Erfurt in the Order of Preachers. Assuming the mantle of a preacher-shaman, a physician of souls, he offers us the superessential bread and wine of the Holy Spirit that we need as daily food in the Age of Aquarius.
Eckhart was a physician of Christian and non-Christian souls. He provided a cure for an illness in the Catholic Church, which is still ailing terribly. As an administrator of his Dominican Order, he administered an antidote to an overly patriarchal view of scripture and opened a doorway for women and men to embrace their humility as human beings who are all created equally in God’s Light.
Praise for Meister Eckhart and C.G. Jung
“Meister Eckhart and C.G. Jung: On the Vocation of the Self by Jungian analyst Steven Herrmann represents an important contribution to the literature on the intersection of spirituality and psychology. Blending poetry and scholarship, the book provides in-depth analysis of Meister Eckhart’s mystical theology and its influence on the work of Carl Jung. Examining this material from the perspective of spiritual vocation, Herrmann articulates a psychological theology that is relevant to contemporary individuals while remaining faithful to the conceptual complexity of these two seminal figures. The author’s account of his own spiritual journey, which is deeply rooted in the natural world and his work as a practicing analyst, grounds the discussion in lived experience. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in this pivotal but challenging Dominican teacher and preacher and his influence on Jung’s life and thought.”
—John Ensign, Ph.D., Jungian analyst and author of Depth Calls to Depth: Jungian Psychology and Spiritual Direction in Dialogue
About the Author
Steven Herrmann, Ph.D. MFT is a certified Jungian analyst with a private practice in Oakland, California. He is the author of seven well-received books, including William James and C.G. Jung: Doorways to the Self. You can check him out online here.
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