Caputo (MEHT:123-124) – Deus é vida e ser...

Thus God   is our own life and our own being. We live through Him:

What is my life? That which is moved from within out of itself. That does not live which is moved from without. If we live with Him [God], then we must also co-work with Him from within. so that we do not work from without. Rather, we should be moved by that out of which we live, that means, through Him. Now we must and we can work from within out of our own. If we then live in Him or through Him. then He must be our own and we must work out of our own. Thus as God works all things through Himself and on His own, so must we work on our own, which He is in us. (Q, 176,7-17/Serm., 235)

Thus the soul   is able to attain the plentitude and sufficiency of God’s life because it becomes one with the divine life. The soul has become so dispossessed of its own will that God takes up residence in the soul and becomes the source of its life. “I live now not I,” said St. Paul, “but Christ   lives in me.” This has become quite literally true for Eckhart  . God and the soul are one life welling up from one “ground” (Q, 180,5-10/B1., 126).

Thus the soul no longer acts “for the sake of” God, as if it would, by such and such an action, take a step towards attaining union with God. Rather it acts out of God’s indwelling presence. It does not act for God, but from out of the God within it. Its life becomes free and unfettered; it is “released”to use a term from the Heidegger   translatorsfrom the “calculating” mentality which weighs up whether a certain course of action will produce eternal rewards. It acts for the sake of the action itself, for the sake of itself. Hence Angelus Silesius   had captured something essential when he said of the rose that ‘’it blossoms because it blossoms.” We find in Eckhart a comparable expression:

If someone asked life for a thousand years, “why do you live?” then if it could answer, it would say nothing other than “I live because I live” (Ich lebe darum, dass ich lebe). This is so because life lives out of its own grounds and wells up of itself. Consequently it lives without why by the fact that it lives for itself. If someone asked a truthful man who works out of his own ground, “why do you work?” then if he answers rightly, he would say nothing other than, “I work because I work” (Ich wirke darum, dass ich wirke). (Q, 180,23-31/B1., 127; cf. Q, 384,6-19)

The just man, the detached man, acts because he acts, like Silesius’s rose. He can savor an action for itself, and he need not subordinate it to an external purpose. I can love my friend because of what loving a friend is, not because it produces eternal rewards (Q, 299,19-26/B1., 188). This is so because the act of loving my friend is an act that wells up (quillt: Q, 180,27/B1., 127) from the life of God within me. It needs no further “rationale” (no “why”) than that. The act is “justified” of itself. It does not need to be given a teleological explanation.

Thus Eckhart had already before Silesius discovered the realm outside the sphere of influence of the Principle of Ground. He discovered the realm in which the soul may act without giving an account of itself. These acts are not “without ground” (ohne Grund  ), because they spring up out of their own grounds, which is the innermost ground of the soul, where the ground of the soul and the ground of God are one. But they are “without why”i.e., they do not need to be explained and justified in terms of some external purpose or ground. A ground need not be rendered for these acts (e.g., such acts lead to God), because they already rest in their own ground (the God with which the soul is already united).