Rachel Smith

Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius bequeathed to their medieval heirs a notion of omnipresence that secured the ubiquity of divine presence while allowing the soul its psychological struggles with divine absence. Their metaphysical intuitions about the being of God would prove foundational for mystical theologians bent on exploring the paradoxical intimacy of eternal and finite life. Such theologians, here represented by Mechthild of Magdeburg (d. 1282) and Meister Eckhart (d. 1324), radicalized omnipresence and used the radicalized notion to combat the temptation, often subtle, to frame omnipresence as the perfection of a psychological state. Mechthild and Eckhart and their theological kin attempted to think through omnipresence apart from a hierarchy that puts God at the height of being and confuses divine presence with the overcoming of a humanly felt absence.