. . . God has really no place to work in but
the ground where all has been annihilated. . . . Then when all forms
have ceased, in the twinkling of an eye, the man is transformed. . . .
Thou must sink into the unknown and unnamed abyss, and above all ways,
images, forms, and above all powers, {xxvii} lose thyself, deny
thyself, and even unform thyself."[14] The moment the will focusses
upon any concrete aim as its goal, it must thereby miss that Good which
is above and beyond all particular "things" that can be conceived or
named.

But the _negative way_ winds up farther still. It ends in the
absolutely negative Silent Desert of Godhead "where no one is at home."
Its way up is the way of abstraction and withdrawal from everything
finite. He whom the soul seeks cannot be found in anything "here" or
"now"; He must be "yonder." "It is by no means permitted," says one of
the great experts in negation, "to speak or even to think anything
concerning the super-essential and hidden Deity. . . . It is a Unity
above mind, a One above conception and inconceivable to all
conceptions, a Good unutterable by word."[15] "Thou must love God,"
Eckhart says, "as not-God, not-Spirit, not-person, not-image, but as He
is, a sheer, pure, absolute One, sundered from all two-ness and in whom
we must eternally sink from nothingness to nothingness."[16] God, the
Godhead, is thus the absolute "Dark," "the nameless Nothing," an empty
God, a characterless Infinite. "Why dost thou prate of God," Eckhart
says, "whatever thou sayest of Him is untrue!" The rapt soul at the
end of his road, at the top of the hill, only knows that every finite
account is false and that the only adequate word is an everlasting Nay.

Whatever idea your mind comes at,
I tell you flat
God is _not_ that.[17]

The great mystics have always saved themselves by neglecting to be
consistent with this rigorous negation and abstraction. In their
practice they have cut through their theory and gone on living the rich
concrete life. {xxviii} But the theory itself is a false theory of
life, and it leads only to a God of abstraction, not to the God of
spiritual religion. The false trail, however, is to be charged, as I
have said, not so much to mystical experience as to the metaphysics
through which the mystics, not only of Christian communions, but of
other faiths, were compelled to do their thinking. There was no other
way of thinking known to them except thi