ist Gott,” he says once.  This view was adopted by Ruysbroek, Suso, and (with modifications by) Tauler, and became one of their chief tenets.[247] This spark is the organ by which our personality holds communion with God and knows Him.  It is with reference to it that Eckhart uses the phrase which has so often been quoted to convict him of blasphemous self-deification—­“the eye with which I see God is the same as that with which He sees me.[248]” The “uncreated spark” is really the same as the grace of God, which raises us into a Godlike state.  But this grace, according to Eckhart (at least in his later period), is God Himself acting like a human faculty in the soul, and transforming it so that “man himself becomes grace.”

The following is perhaps the most instructive passage:  “There is in the soul something which is above the soul, Divine, simple, a pure nothing; rather nameless than named, rather unknown than known.  Of this I am accustomed to speak in my discourses.  Sometimes I have called it a power, sometimes an uncreated light, and sometimes a Divine spark.  It is absolute and free from all names and all forms, just as God is free and absolute in Himself.  It is higher than knowledge, higher than love, higher than grace.  For in all these there is still distinction.  In this power God doth blossom and flourish with all His Godhead, and the Spirit flourisheth in God.  In this power the Father bringeth forth His only-begotten Son, as essentially as in Himself; and in this light ariseth the Holy Ghost.  This spark rejecteth all creatures, and will have only God, simply as He is in Himself.  It rests satisfied neither with the Father, nor with the Son, nor with the Holy Ghost, nor with the three Persons, so far as each existeth in its particular attribute.  It is satisfied only with the superessential essence.  It is determined to enter into the simple Ground, the still Waste, the Unity where no man dwelleth.  Then it is satisfied in the light; then it is one:  it is one in itself, as this Ground is a simple stillness, and in itself immovable; and yet by this immobility are all things moved.”

It is God that worketh in us both to will and to do of His good pleasure; but our own nature and personality remain intact.  It is plain that we could not see God unless our personality remained distinct from the personality of God.  Complete fusion is as destructive of the possibility of love and knowledge as complete separation[249].

Eckhart gives to “the highest reason[250]” the primacy among our faculties, and in his earlier period identifies it with “the spark.”  He asserts the absolute supremacy of reason more strongly than anyone since Erigena.  His language on this subject resembles that of the Cambridge Platonists.  “Reasonable knowledge is eternal life,” he says.  “How can any external revelation help me,” he asks, “unless it be verified by inner experience?  The last appeal must always be to the deepest part of my own being, and that is my reason.”  “The reason,” he says, “presses ever upwards.  It cannot rest content with goodness or wisdom, nor even with God Himself; it must penetrate to the Ground from whence all goodness and wisdom spring.”