"There exists only the present instant... a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence"
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Eckhart’s “Now” isn’t a motivational poster about living in the moment; it’s a metaphysical provocation aimed at snapping his audience out of spiritual bookkeeping. In medieval Christian Europe, salvation was often narrated as a timeline: sin in the past, penance in the present, reward or punishment in the future. Eckhart slices through that narrative with a single blade: time, as we experience it, is a psychological and linguistic habit, not the axis on which God turns. The only “instant” that exists is the one in which consciousness actually meets reality.
The line “always and without end is itself new” is doing double duty. “Always” sounds like duration, but Eckhart uses it to abolish duration: eternity isn’t endless time, it’s the quality of immediacy. The subtext is quietly radical for a Dominican preacher operating under suspicion of heresy: access to the divine is not deferred. You don’t climb toward God through accumulating merits or rehearsing regrets. You wake up to what is already here.
His rhetorical trick is to make the statement feel like common sense, then let its implications detonate. “No yesterday nor any tomorrow” doesn’t deny history; it denies history’s power to mediate your relationship to truth. A thousand years ago and a thousand years hence collapse into the same spiritual address: Now. That collapse is the point. It relocates authority from institutions and narratives to direct apprehension, turning time into the last idol to be dismantled.
The line “always and without end is itself new” is doing double duty. “Always” sounds like duration, but Eckhart uses it to abolish duration: eternity isn’t endless time, it’s the quality of immediacy. The subtext is quietly radical for a Dominican preacher operating under suspicion of heresy: access to the divine is not deferred. You don’t climb toward God through accumulating merits or rehearsing regrets. You wake up to what is already here.
His rhetorical trick is to make the statement feel like common sense, then let its implications detonate. “No yesterday nor any tomorrow” doesn’t deny history; it denies history’s power to mediate your relationship to truth. A thousand years ago and a thousand years hence collapse into the same spiritual address: Now. That collapse is the point. It relocates authority from institutions and narratives to direct apprehension, turning time into the last idol to be dismantled.
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| Topic | Live in the Moment |
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