Through the ages, the Trinity has been viewed through many lenses and interpreted many different ways, and those ways include those penned down by the mystics Meister Eckhart and John van Ruusbroec. Eckhart and Ruusbroec, actually inspired by Eckhart, both view the Trinity in the unique sense in which to them, God is eternally present to us in a more intimate way, involving us in his processions/missions and his expressions.
Both mystics put an emphasis on involving us in the eternal generation/begetting of the Second Person of the Trinity God the Son, and both also put an emphasis on God’s process of creation in which he speaks through the Word (God the Son). However, Ruusbroec was considered much more orthodox than Eckhart, and Eckhart for his ideas was condemned for heresy right before he died. Meister Eckhart within his passages does not frequently speak of the entire Trinity; he speaks of God, and frequently he speaks of the Father and the Son but not so much the Holy Spirit.
What makes Eckhart unique in speaking about the Persons of the Trinity is how he particularly writes about God in creating, that once God begot the Son, he also begot the world within the divine processions. He views these two things that he speaks of as “the emanation (procession) of the Persons and the creation of the world, “[God] speaks” them both ‘once and for all'” (CP3 25).
Scholar Bernard McGinn also comments on the connection between the processions and creation, and states that Eckhart “found a parabolical message that illuminated the inner relation between the two modes of production,” that for Eckhart the utterance of the Word to him meant that “two things are simultaneously heard[:] the emanation of the divine Persons in the Trinity and the creation of the whole universe” (CP3 Appendix 5).
This relates into another important point within Meister Eckhart’s writing where he ties together humanity and God as one-ness, and Arthur McGiffert, a scholar who commented on Eckhart and his writings stated that Eckhart aimed to “promote the Christian’s union with God” (Appendix 1) and even commented that Eckhart took it literally, that Eckhart viewed it as “not simply communion of God, or oneness of will and affection with him, but a complete fusion of man’s nature with the nature of God” (McGiffert Appendix 1).
In Sermon 15, Eckhart’s writings proclaiming that man and God are one, not two, that if one wishes or acts, so the other wishes and acts, as man and God are one being, and if by some chance, Eckhart writes that “if man were in hell, God would have to come down to him in hell, and hell would have to be for him the kingdom of heaven” (CP3 26), relying on Incarnational Union soteriology, connecting with his theme of one-ness. However, what is most unique about Eckhart is the way that he portrayed the procession of and creation through God the Son.
He writes as having God generate the Son eternally within our soul, that we are generated like the Son, and that we also generate God the Son ourselves in our soul. In Sermon 29, Eckhart connects the generation to the Incarnation, God becoming man, to what he is: Being; he describes that from what God has and is, “the abyss of the divine being and divine nature,” he brings forth this divine being and nature into his only begotten Son, and from what the Son hears from the Father, “[he reveals] to us that we are this same Son.
All that the Son has he has from the Father: being and nature, so that we might be this same only-begotten Son” (CP3 27). Later, Eckhart, in relation to the one-ness, frequently describes God being in all things, this including us, his creation, and that as he is in the innermost of the soul, he the Father “gives birth to his Son in the innermost of the soul and gives birth to [us] with his onlybegotten Son, not less” (CP3 27), putting us, not literally, on the same level of begottenness as God the Son.
While McGiffert primarily points out Eckhart’s theme of the generation of the Son and the generation of us, McGinn helps us to understand another point within Meister Eckhart’s writings, which is the belief from Eckhart that God creates things by speaking through the Son, Logos. As McGinn explains, for Eckhart, “just as the Word exists as Logos, Idea, and Image in the mind of the Father who is his Principle, so too that Logos serves as the exemplary cause by which God creates all that he creates” (CP3 Appendix 5).
This reminds the reader of the orthodox teaching of the Son/Word being generated by the Father in his image of himself, and through the Word, the Father creates creations through an expression of love — love being what God is inspired by to create. As Eckhart puts it in Sermon 53, he explains that the “Father speaks the Son always, in unity, and pours out him all created things” (CP3 27), also tying in the idea that the Son being poured out is the son being generated within us as we are also generated as Eckhart believes.
John von Ruusbroec follows a similar trend like Eckhart when dicussing the Trinity by putting an emphasis on the eternal generation/begetting of the Son. He states that we are also “eternally generated” although not in the sense of the soul; rather, he speaks of God always having known us eternally, that through the eternal birth (i. e. The generation of the Son), He “has [put] forth [all creatures] eternally before their creation in time, [so] God has thus seen and known them in himself — as distinct in his living ideas and as different from himself” (CP3 32), putting God intimately within ourselves and within our lives.
Ruusbroec goes about defining the processions of the Trinity in unique terms and how that spills over into the creation of us. Firstly, he describes the eternal generation and birth of the word as “See,” as through the darkness where the spirits have died to themselves, God’s revelation, God the Son, the Word, “[is born] in whom a person becomes able to see and to contemplate eternal life” (CP3 32). Through seeing and knowing the eternal birth/generation of the Son.
The Word, to Ruusbroec, goes forth as God the Son, as a different Person in the Trinity, through which, as stated above, simultaneously puts the utterance of the Word and the knowing of creation together at the same point in “time. ” Through this “knowing,” Ruusbroec states that God “[seeing] himself and all things in a single act of seeing” (CP3 32) is how we are created by the Holy Trinity by knowing themselves and by knowing us.
Comparable to Eckhart, Ruusbroec states that our end goal is returning to God and sharing a “one-ness” with God, speaking of us as “all one, united in our eternal image, which is the image of God and the source of us all — of all our life and all our becoming” (CP3 33). The three attributes of the soul — essential bareness devoid of images, the soul’s higher image, and the spark of the soul — are what give us what Ruusbroec calls “the likeness and the union [that] are in all of us by nature” (CP3 34), even though we are covered in the “coarseness” of sin.