the words, "A master saith." The "master" is
nearly always Thomas Aquinas, to whom Eckhart was no doubt greatly
indebted, though it would be a great mistake to say, as some have done,
that all Eckhart can be found in the _Summa_. For instance, he sets
himself in opposition to Thomas about the "spark," which Thomas regarded
as a faculty of the soul, while Eckhart, in his later writings, says
that it is uncreated.[236] His double object leads him into some
inconsistencies. Intellectually, he is drawn towards a semi-pantheistic
idealism; his heart makes him an Evangelical Christian. But though it is
possible to find contradictions in his writings, his transparent
intellectual honesty and his great powers of thought, combined with deep
devoutness and childlike purity of soul, make him one of the most
interesting figures in the history of Christian philosophy.

Eckhart wrote in German; that is to say, he wrote for the public, and
not for the learned only. His desire to be intelligible to the general
reader led him to adopt an epigrammatic antithetic style, and to omit
qualifying phrases. This is one reason why he laid himself open to so
many accusations of heresy.[237]

Eckhart distinguishes between "the Godhead" and "God." The Godhead is
the abiding potentiality of Being, containing within Himself all
distinctions, as yet undeveloped. He therefore cannot be the object of
knowledge, nor of worship, being "Darkness" and "Formlessness.[238]"
The Triune God is evolved from the Godhead. The Son is the Word of
the Father, His uttered thought; and the Holy Ghost is "the Flower of
the Divine Tree," the mutual love which unites the Father and the Son.
Eckhart quotes the words which St. Augustine makes Christ say of
Himself: "I am come as a Word from the heart, as a ray from the sun,
as heat from the fire, as fragrance from the flower, as a stream from
a perennial fountain." He insists that the generation of the Son is a
continual process.

The universe is the expression of the whole thought of the Father; it
is the language of the Word. Eckhart loves startling phrases, and says
boldly, "Nature is the lower part of the Godhead," and "Before
creation, God was not God." These statements are not so crudely
pantheistic as they sound. He argues that without the Son the Father
would not be God, but only undeveloped potentiality of being. The
three Persons are not merely accidents and modes of the Divine
Substance, but are inherent in t