The great mystical theologians — Pseudo-Dionysius, Eriugena, the Victorines — had spoken of God as beyond being. Eckhart inherits this tradition and radicalises it. God is not a being among beings, not even the highest being. God is the ground of being — what makes it possible for there to be anything at all — and therefore cannot be grasped by any concept that applies to things that exist. To predicate being of God in the ordinary sense is already to have missed God.
Apophatic theology proceeds by negation: God is not finite, not limited, not created, not comprehensible. Each negation is more informative than any positive attribution, because positive attributes confine their object within a category. The series of negations does not produce despair but wonder: the more we subtract from God, the more we approach the reality that no subtraction can reach, because it was never within the grasp of any concept. Eckhart calls this reality the Godhead (Gottheit), distinguished from the personal God of ordinary religion.
Beyond the Trinity — beyond Father, Son, and Spirit, beyond the personal relations that characterise Christian theology — Eckhart gestures toward a ground that he calls the desert of the Godhead: a silent, undifferentiated abyss prior to all distinction. This is not a place the soul visits but a depth it discovers in itself, for the ground of the soul and the ground of God are, in the end, the same ground. The journey inward and the journey to God converge at this point, which is neither here nor there but everywhere that being is simplest.
Eckhart's apophatic theology draws directly on Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Proclus, both of whom he cites. His distinction between the personal God and the impersonal Godhead (Gottheit) is one of the most original and contested moves in Western mysticism.
