Primacy of the intellect

When Reformed thinkers reject the “primacy of the intellect” that is often endorsed by the Reformed tradition, they are rejecting the primacy of discursive reason and the “laws” of logic.  That is not what John means when he announces the eternal Logos.

But what if intellect meant, instead, something closer to the medieval notion.  For Eckhart, “the intellect as such is open to become all things and not this or that specifically determined being.”  Because the intellect can be indwelt by anything, to talk about the primacy of the intellect is (as Reiner Schurmann expresses it in Wandering Joy: Meister Eckhart’s Mystical Philosophy ) is to talk about humanity’s “boundless openness to all that there is.  He is godlike because his mind is all forms.”  Most importantly, intellect is the capacity of man to receive God; to speak of the primacy of the intellect is to say that we are capax divinae essentiae .  This, for Eckhart, is the image of God: Intellectual nature resembles God in that it is capable of “containing” all that the Creator has made, and the uncreated Creator Himself.

That’s a much more interesting intellect to contemplate, one that might even be accorded something like primacy.