Eckhart and Hopelessness: ‘When God has Gone Away’

Contrary to Modern strategies for finding hope, Meister Eckhart enters into the liminality of hopelessness as the source of true hope. He offers a kenotic understanding of hope that reduces our desperation to apophatic awareness of the abiding presence of God. While lacking in our contemporary sense of palliative management and patient autonomy, Eckhart offers us divine consolation that is found in our union with the uncreated source of existence itself. While he recognizes the limited comfort of created things, our true hope is found in the mystical One beyond all created things. It is in the desperate hours when God seems absent that we come to hope beyond hope.