The fol­low­ing selec­ted extracts from Meister Eckhart’s extremely fecund Exposi­tio sancti Evan­gelii secun­dum Iohan­nem have been picked because, while ostens­ibly work­ing through the dif­fer­ence between justice and the just, they do so using the­or­et­ical tools of addi­tional interest — not­ably ideas of uni­vo­city and equi­vo­c­ity, of the causal rela­tion of prin­cipals to beings-​in-​act in the nat­ural sub­strate, and, inter­est­ingly, the expos­i­tion of the Spirit as a ‘fold’ which will be of interest to schol­ars of Heide­g­ger and Deleuze.

The broad thrust of the selec­ted parts of the expos­i­tion of John’s Gos­pel is the work­ing through of the formal and effi­cient caus­al­ity of justice in rela­tion to par­tic­u­lar instances of the just qua indi­vidu­als. It might be help­ful to bear in mind a more mundane example Eck­hart gave, that of the build­ing of a house and its rela­tion to the per­fect House. If an archi­tect is inspired to build a house, and forms an idea of this house from which he works to con­struct it, and this house is built, then Eck­hart notes we have have three moments of the house as (form­ally) gen­er­ated by the House. The House gen­er­ates the house inso­far as the archi­tect is inspired to build a house; the House gen­er­ates the form or idea of the house which the archi­tect con­ceives as plan; and the House gen­er­ates the actual house built (and thereby its per­sist­ing ‘house­ness’). Each of these moments has a nat­ural, effi­cent cause which brings about the events in the house’s con­struc­tion, but for Eck­hart these serve simply to obscure the per­fec­tion of the House at each instant. Nev­er­the­less, as Eck­hart con­cludes, there is a sense in which the par­tic­u­lar instances of the house are fol­ded as one with the House only in their work towards the per­fec­tion of the house as House. 

The trans­la­tion is some­what free, and par­tic­u­larly trouble­some has been the ren­der­ing of Eckhart’s read­ing of the Gos­pel of John into the Eng­lish bib­lical equi­val­ents, start­ing with the sig­ni­fic­ant dis­tinc­tion between Eckhardt’s ‘Verb’ [Verbum] and the usual Eng­lish ‘Word’. Thus the trans­la­tion should be treated with great care. Num­bers refer to para­graphs. Foot­notes indic­ate the pas­sage of John’s gos­pel explic­ated by the Mas­ter of Hochheim.

[14] Yet there is an example of all that has been often said and of sev­eral other words, if one notices the just in the justice which gives birth to it, inso­far as it is just.¹

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Fur­ther, in second place: the just is prior in being [praeest] in justice itself, as the con­crete in the abstract and the par­ti­cipant in the participated.

[15] In the third place: the just is the verb of justice, by which justice is said and is mani­fes­ted itself. If, in fact, justice were not jus­ti­fied, no one would know it and it would be known to it alone, accord­ing to this:  No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is him­self God and is in closest rela­tion­ship with the Father, has made him known,² later in John 1; And no one knows the Father other than through the Son, Mat.11; and no one knows save he that receives, Ap.2. In a uni­ver­sal man­ner, in fact, no one knows a divine per­fec­tion save he that receives, that is, justice is known through itself alone and through the just who is assumed by justice itself. This is what the author­ity says: the Trin­ity, God, is known by it alone and the assumed man. Hence in the psalm: happy the one you have elec­ted and assumed.³

[16] In the fifth place: the just which pro­ceeds from justice and is gen­er­ated by it is dis­tin­guished by that from justice. Noth­ing can in fact gen­er­ate itself. How­ever, the just is noth­ing other in nature than justice, either because just sig­ni­fies only justice, as white sig­ni­fies only that qual­ity, or because justice renders no one just if it is in the one and the other of another nature, just as white­ness does not render black or musical notation.

Hence it is mani­fest, in the sixth place, that the just is the issue and the son of justice. That which is and is called son, in fact, is that which is made other in per­son but not other in nature, John 10: the Father and I are one: we are dis­tinct in per­son, since no one gen­er­ates him­self but one in nature because oth­er­wise justice would not engender the just, nor the Father the Son, which is made other, and gen­er­a­tion would no longer be uni­vocal. It is what is said here: The Verb [Word] was God.⁴

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[18] In the tenth place: the just as such holds [mani­fests] that it is wholly and every­where that it is of justice itself and is in justice. It is what is said: In the begin­ning [prin­cipal] was the Verb [Word]. Yet the just, inso­far as just, neither knows any­thing nor knows itself save in justice itself. How in fact does the just know itself out­side of justice itself? Justice is the prin­cipal of the just. And it is the prop­erty of rational man to know things by their principals.

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[20] In thir­teenth place: the just in justice, its prin­cipal, by that even by which it is gen­er­ated – the prin­cipal of the prin­cipal – is life; is light. Every cog­ni­tion is through its own prin­cipals and in its own prin­cipals, and until it is led back to these prin­cipals it is always obscure, shad­owy and opaque, in the fear of the other. Yet the demon­stra­tion, that is the syl­lo­gism, which makes known without fear or opin­ion, comes from its own prin­cipals. This is what is said here: The life is the light of man­kind. Yet it says of man­kind, per­haps because man­kind receives its know­ledge from pos­terior things and pro­ceeds towards the prin­cipals by reas­on­ing. It is not so with a higher rational creature. It is per­haps what fol­lows: the light shines in the dark­ness. Every cre­ated thing has, in fact, the char­ac­ter of the shadow of noth­ing­ness. God alone is light and there are no shad­ows in him. Hence the light in the dark­ness is know­ledge in and through phant­as­mata.

[21] Or, put another way, the prin­cipal is in a uni­ver­sal man­ner the light of which it is the prin­cipal and that which is super­ior is the light for that which is inferior to it. On the con­trary, that which has a prin­cipal and is inferior, by that very pos­ter­i­or­ity and inferi­or­ity, because it holds its being from another, in it are to be found the shad­ows of priva­tion and neg­a­tion: of priva­tion in the cor­rupt­ible body; of neg­a­tion in the spir­itual beings-​in-​act. That is what is said: the light shines in the dark­ness. But because the inferior never equates to its super­ior, it fol­lows: and the dark­ness has not over­come. ⁵

[22] The just, in fact, of which we presently speak by way of example, accord­ing to itself, accord­ing to what it is in itself, is not the light. Hence it fol­lows with respect to the sub­ject of John the Baptist, the just:  he was not the light. That’s why, in four­teenth place, the just man, or the just, shad­owy in itself, does not shine. But, in justice itself, its prin­cipal, on the con­trary, it shines and justice itself shines in the just. But the just, as inferior, does not under­stand it.

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[187] In the first place, every divine being, for example the just, is rendered per­fect on three con­di­tions. The first: that it be gen­er­ated by justice itself and be the born son of it; the second: that it be gen­er­ated by noth­ing other than justice itself and by it uniquely, and these two con­di­tions are indic­ated by the term: the one and only Son. The third: it is required not only that it be gen­er­ated and unique, but that it remain in justice itself in order to be able to make known and teach or mani­fest justice. And this is what is said here: the one whois in closest rela­tion­ship with the Father, has made him known.⁶

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[192] What is more, the just, that is to say the son of justice, knows him­self as him­self in the same way that every ‘just’ in justice itself, in the heart of the Father, i.e. in the heart of justice. ⁷

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[438] Finally, in view of the, how you say, exem­plary evid­ence of the premises, it must be remarked that in speak­ing so as to be able to say, on the sub­ject of the just, the Son, and of justice, his father, that they are one, that they wit­ness one thing alone, do the same work…we say and have the cus­tom of say­ing: the just inso­far as just is justice itself; it accom­plishes the work of justice and other like things. Yet inso­far as is the re-​duplication, but the re-​duplication, as this noun indic­ates, speaks of the knot and the order of the two. By say­ing re–duplic­a­tion, in fact, we are say­ing fold­ing in two, the fold, the knot of two. Thus the Spirit, third Per­son of the Trin­ity, is the knot of the two, of the Father and of the Son. And that is what we want to say, that in every nature, every verb and every wit­ness­ing is held in the mouth of two or three wit­nesses. …

Tomorrow’s selec­tion: Cus­anus on the just at the limit