Eckhart, pantheist?

No, says Milbank.  But then he often sounds pantheistic, to his contemporaries as well as to us.  How does Milbank defend him?  Here’s what I think I’ve figured out:

1) God is transcendent, and this means (in Milbank’s Cusan theology) that He transcends oppositions; there is a “coincidence of opposites” in God.

2) Specifically, it means He transcends the opposition of difference/identity.  If God were simply different from creatures, He would be another being on the same plane as other beings.  To put it in quasi-Hegelian terms, if He were simply bounded by other beings, He would not be infinite but finite.  So, we cannot simply say that God distinguishable from other creatures without taking away from His transcendence.

3) On the other hand, He is not simply “indistinct” or “identical” either.  That would also rob Him of transcendence.  As I understand Milbank’s deliberately paradoxical formulation, He is distinguishable precisely by being indistinguishable, different precisely in the fact that we cannot simply differentiate Him from creation.  We can’t draw a line, point to one side and say, “here is God,” then point to the other side and say, “and here is not-God.”  We can do that with finite, immanent creatures; not with the infinite transcendent God.