Eckhart

Meister Eckhart was a contemporary of Marguerite Porete, read her book and may have met her, and was also accused of heresy, though he died before things got too bad (but the Church has never officially rehabilitated him). Eckhart rehearses the typical mystical (that is, oceanic) themes of universal unity with God, of emanation (in fact, an emanation that cannot be contained, and would have caused God to burst if he had not found an adequate recipient in a Son that is also God), and of the impossibility of saying anything positive about him. But on an important issue he brings additional complexity to the working out of oceanic logic. On the one hand Eckhart says that God resembles nothing (which is another way of expressing its ineffability: he cannot be compared with anything, hence no predicate that applies in principle to several things can be applied to him), and on the other (in agreement with the Scriptures) that humans resemble God—and God even enjoys this resemblance. As he himself explains, this apparent contradiction must be resolved by distinguishing between a first-order resemblance, by which, say, an apple resembles another apple or it resembles the image of an apple, and a second-order resemblance, whereby humans resemble God precisely in not resembling anything. This distinction lets us get clearer about all cases of a sorites. Take the spectrum of colors, where red merges with orange and we cannot say where one ends and the other begins. The main point made there is not the specific (first-level) resemblance between red and orange, but the general (second-level) resemblance among all parts of the spectrum, in that they all so resemble (at the first level) what is next to them that no clear distinction can be made between any of them.