Well I've got the book and just perused it over my lunchtime sandwich...
And I have to say, in reading Section One I, that Suzuki makes certain fundamental misconceptions regarding Christianity that, in light of the fact he does not understand Christianity, I hold little doubt of him grasping the nature and meaning of Eckhart beyond the superficial similarities to Zen.
I think Suzuki seeks to interpret Christianity, to read it through Zen, rather than contemplate it on its own terms — that he approaches with presuppositions cannot be denied. (It's a bit like a Christian misrepresenting the Amida Buddha as a necessary figure of Christ because without it, Buddhism is left wanting.)
I found
this essay enlightening!
+++
Having said the above, I would further say that Eckhart speaks from the standpoint of the
Gottheit, the
Urgrund, of The Divine Nature as Itself, and thus he transcends the forms of Divine Manifestation in the Oikonomia ('plan') of Salvation, and furthermore the figures and tropes deployed in both cataphatic and apophatic theology — Eckhart writes of what the Fathers called the Arche Anarchos, the 'Principle without Principle' — and his writing might be referred to as a pure metaphysic, or perhaps metaontology.
What is crucial to understand is that Eckhart's language is understood (by those with the eyes to see) on the one hand and appropriated on the other precisely because it speaks of universals and is thus common to all authentic metaphysical systems, or should we say once the metaphysic speaks beyond the bounds of its own context than the universal becomes apparent as 'co-incidence' — Eckhart is no more Zen than one's Zen master is Christian. Or Sufi or Brahmin, for that matter.
But what should never be (but is so often and so readily) forgotten or misconstrued is that Eckhart speaks from within the Christian Tradition. The idea that he thinks 'outside the box' or has 'transcended' Biblical Revelation is a nonsense. For him, without the Incarnate Christ the Incarnate Word in the soul simply would not be. Jesus of Nazareth is, for Eckhart, the Principle without Principle made manifest as man to man is that Principle realised in the world that the word might realise the Principle (to paraphrase the fathers). The Divine Oikonomia is the expedient means (an upaya if you will) of his salvation. And without it, man would remain lost in darkness and mired in the sin of his individual self-reflective becoming.
I still say a break rather than leaving.
