Conceptual Experimentation with the Divine

This chapter shifts from Eckhart’s sermons to his Biblical commentaries to show how his theorization of univocity and immanence has a concrete theological and exegetical basis. It argues that for Eckhart, God is not a name for a pious barrier to thought or action, but the site of the most fruitful conceptual experimentation. Through speculative exegesis of key Christian theological topics, Eckhart subverts the theological and cosmological hierarchies in order to make room for a dispossessed, univocal life of radical equality “with God.” By showing how Eckhart employs the divine in order to theoretically articulate absolute immanence, this chapter acts as a provocation to the standard discursive distributions—between philosophy and theology, between medieval and modern, between religious and secular—and the assumptions that underwrite them. It articulates a figure unacceptable to common secularization narratives—a religious figure that prayed to God to be free of God in order to become free of one’s self as a possession, and yet in so doing was not espousing a covertly atheist position, but an exegetically-grounded formulation of life free not only from the regime of disciplinary practices, but also from all transcendent grounding.