hidden treasures of His wisdom and love, is still not foreign to His own infinite life, but one with it.  In the knowledge of the minds that know Him, in the self-surrender of the hearts that love Him, it is no paradox to affirm that He knows and loves Himself.  As He is the origin and inspiration of every true thought and pure affection, of every experience in which we forget and rise above ourselves, so is He also of all these the end.  If in one point of view religion is the work of man, in another it is the work of God.  Its true significance is not apprehended till we pass beyond its origin in time and in the experience of a finite spirit, to see in it the revelation of the mind of God Himself.  In the language of Scripture, ’It is God that worketh in us to will and to do of His good pleasure:  all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to Himself.’”]

[Footnote 249:  Eckhart sees this (cf.  Preger, vol. i. p. 421):  “Personality in Eckhart is neither the faculties, nor the form (Bild), nor the essence, nor the nature of the Godhead, but it is rather the spirit which rises out of the essence, and is born by the irradiation of the form in the essence, which mingles itself with our nature and works by its means.”  The obscurity of this conception is not made any less by the distinction which Eckhart draws between the outer and inner consciousness in the personality.  The outer consciousness is bound up with the earthly life; to it all images must come through sense; but in this way it can have no image of itself.  But the higher consciousness is supra-temporal.  The potential ground of the soul is and remains sinless; but the personality is also united to the bodily nature; its guilt is that it inclines to its sinful nature instead of to God.]

[Footnote 250:  Eckhart distinguishes the intellectus agens (diu wirkende Vernunft) from the passive (lidende) intellect.  The office of the former is to present perceptions to the latter, set out under the forms of time and space.  In his Strassburg period, the spark or Ganster, the intellectus agens, diu oberste Vernunft, and synteresis, seem to be identical; but later he says, “The active intellect cannot give what it has not got.  It cannot see two ideas together, but only one after another.  But if God works in the place of the active intellect, He begets (in the mind) many ideas in one point.”  Thus the “spark” becomes supra-rational and uncreated—­the Divine essence itself.]

[Footnote 251:  The following sentence, for instance, is in the worst manner of Dionysius:  “Thou shalt love God as He is, a non-God, a non-Spirit, a non-Person, a non-Form:  He is absolute bare Unity.”  This is Eckhart’s theory of the Absolute ("the Godhead”) as distinguished from God.  In these moods he wishes, like the Asiatic mystics, to sink in the bottomless sea of the Infinite.  He also aspires to absolute [Greek:  apatheia] (Abgeschiedenheit).  “Is he sick?  He is as fain to be sick as well.  If a friend should die—­in the name of God.  If an eye should be knocked out—­in the name of God.”  The soul has returned to its pre-natal condition, having rid itself of all “creatureliness.”]