Eckhart and the theology of image
The theology of restoring the divine image in the soul, as it appears in the Eckhartian speculation, is apophatic founded in an exit of the soul from its ontological definition. It goes out from to be for itself and enters in to be for Another, reaching the true resemblance, its identification with the essence of Godness. According to Eckhart, it is an absorption like a death, but the soul does not die as a subject of the view, but rather in its quality of a place of the visible. Its “absence” does not reflect any more the being of the image; the soul is the being of the image, depending no more on the model or the prototype it represents. It is the model, the image or the Logos as such. So that in the relation between the image (of the soul) and the Image (of God), the first one does not exist by itself. As for the second one, it is an essential Image, an absolute transparence, the no-evident or an image hidden in the secret Background (Grund) of the soul. Here the soul is at home, lightened from the interior. It is now a simple soul that meets God and loves Him, melts with Him in the Image which absorbs it to the transparence. Indeed, God loved in Its truth is a transparent God; He must be loved as a No-Image. As for the features of the image, it has neither an ontic autonomy, nor an objective reality: it is the Being, but it does not create a being. It receives its being in its very resemblance with the light of God Who passes through it.