ON THE NAMES OF GODIn the kind I imagined, full-fronts me, and God is seen God
In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the clod.^10Now if God is present ‘‘in the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the clod,’’ it
is clear that mystical experience does not lead to an actualseparationfrom things and
daily pursuits but, on the contrary, to a special way of joining them, so that we see in any
of them a manifestation of God’s presence. According to Eckhart:
Those who are rightly disposed truly have God with them. And whoever truly pos-
sesses God in the right way, possesses him in all places: on the street, in any company,
as well as in a church or a remote place or in their cell. No one can obstruct this
person, for they intend and seek nothing but God and take their pleasure only in
him, who is united with them in all their aims. And so, just as no multiplicity can
divide God, in the same way nothing can scatter this person or divide them for they
are one in the One in whom all multiplicity is one and is non-multiplicity.... This
experience of daily involvement as one in which multiplicity is not denied but is lived
as the variegated expression of a transcendent unity is the distinctive mark of the
‘‘unitive life’’ required by mystical consciousness.^11Eckhart gives two metaphoric examples of what it is to live multiplicity in unity. The
first is the case of somebody who is thirsty: their thirst will accompany all the activities in
which they are engaged, irrespective of their variety. The other refers to somebody who is
in love: that person’s feeling will taint the multifarious pursuits of his or her daily life.
A last important aspect to be considered is mysticaldetachment, whose inner struc-
ture is most revealing for our purposes. The detachment in question cannot be that of an
anchorite, who lives a segregated existence, for the mystic is not refusing involvement in
daily life. The mystic should be fully engaged and, at the same time, strictly detached from
the world. How is this possible? As we know, actually existing worldly things—Browning’s
star, stone, flesh, soul, and clod, Julian’s small thing like a hazelnut—can he considered
from two perspectives: either in their isolated particularity, in which each of them lives a
separate existence, or in their equivalent connection, in which each of them manifests the
divine essence. Thus, the mystic has to love each instance of his worldly experience as
something through which the divinity shows itself; however, because it is not the particu-
lar experience in its own naked particularity that shows God but instead its equivalential
connection with everything else, only by the latter connection, the contingency of the fact
that it isthisexperience rather than any other than the one that I am having at the
moment, do I approach the divinity. Essential detachment and actual involvement are
two sides of the same coin. It is like the formation of the revolutionary will of a subordi-
nated class: each participation in a strike, in an election, in a demonstration counts less
as the particular event concerned than as a contingent instance in a process that tran-
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