Mestre Eckhart

Meister Eckhart (c.1260–1327/8)

More than any other medieval thinker, Eckhart has received widely divergent interpretations. The controversies stem from the fact that his writings fall into two distinct groups, works written in the vernacular and works written in Latin. The German writings, which were intended for a wide audience, established Eckhart’s long-standing fame as a mystic. Another, more academic Eckhart emerged when his Latin work was rediscovered in 1886. The study of Eckhart’s thought today centres on the unity of the scholastic (Latin) and the popular (German) work.

Eckhart was born about 1260 at Hochheim, Germany, and died in 1327 (or early 1328), probably at Avignon. After entering the Dominican Order, he studied theology at the studium generale of the Order in Cologne. In 1302–3 he was Master of Theology at the University of Paris. In the next years he held executive functions within his Order in Germany. A token of the high esteem Eckhart enjoyed is that in 1311 he occupied the Dominican chair of theology at Paris for a second time (an honour that also fell to Thomas Aquinas). Thereafter he was the spiritual master of religious communities and a teacher in Cologne. In 1326 the archbishop of that city started an inquiry into his doctrines on suspicion of heresy. Eckhart appealed directly to the pope in Avignon, but died before the conclusion of the trial. In the bull In agro dominico of 27 March 27 1329, Pope John XXII condemned twenty-eight propositions taken from his works and sermons.

Eckhart’s main Latin work is the Opus tripartitum. As the title indicates, it was intended to consist of three parts: the Opus propositionum (Work of Propositions) in which a thousand propositions were to be explained; the Opus quaestionum (Work of Questions), consisting of questions arranged according to the order of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa theologiae; and the Opus expositionum (Book of Expositions), containing commentaries on scripture and sermons. It is unknown whether Eckhart ever completed this grand project. Only fragments of it have come down to us: the General Prologue and the prologue to the Opus propositionum, five questions disputed at Paris, and several commentaries on scripture (Genesis, Exodus, the Book of Wisdom and the Gospel according to John) that were certainly intended to be part of theOpus propositionum.

An important clue to Eckhart’s self-understanding is to be found in the prologue of his commentary on the Gospel according to John. There he states that in all his works his intention is to expound the doctrines taught by the Christian faith by means of the natural arguments (rationes naturales) of the philosophers. This intention is clarified at the beginning of the General Prologue of the Opus tripartitum by some preliminary remarks, which Eckhart apparently considers basic to the interpretation of the whole work. According to one of these remarks, the second and third work of the work are so dependent on the Opus propositionum that without it they are of little use. He illustrates his method by stating the first proposition (‘Being is God’), the first question (‘Does God exist?’) and the first commentary on a text (‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth’), and by showing how the proposition provides the answer to the question and elucidates the text. Eckhart’s procedure implicitly criticizes the method of scholastic science. Aquinas’ Summa theologiae, for instance, consists of thousands of concrete quaestiones, whose solution is founded on general principles, which are, however, not explained but presupposed (see Aquinas, T.). In Eckhart’s view, the scholastic method requires an axiomatic metaphysics.

A specification of this metaphysics is given in Eckhart’s first remark in the General Prologue. The most general terms (termini generales), such as ‘being’, ‘one’, ‘true’ and ‘good’, should by no means be thought of as accidents. ‘Being’ and the terms convertible with it are not added to things as though posterior to them; on the contrary, they precede everything and are primary in things. The first four treatises of the Opus propositionum would deal with these most general terms, which are called transcendentia in the Middle Ages. They provide the philosophical foundation of the Opus tripartitum. Eckhart identifies the transcendentals with the divine; God alone is properly being, one, true and good. Every other thing is specified through its form to this or that being.

One of the problems in studying Eckhart is how the identification of God and esse in the Opus tripartitum can be reconciled with his criticism of ontotheology in the Quaestiones Parisienses (the questions disputed at Paris). In the latter, he argues that God is not being (esse), but understanding (intelligere). He observes ironically that the Evangelist John did not say ‘In the beginning was being, and God was being’, but ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God’. Being belongs to the domain of the finite, the created.

Eckhart’s German writings comprise numerous sermons and several spiritual treatises: Reden der Unterweisung (Talks of Instruction), Vom edlen Menschen (The Nobleman) and Das Buch der göttlichen Tröstung (The Book of Divine Consolation). In one of his sermons (53), Eckhart remarks that he usually preaches about just a few themes. His favourite theme is Abgeschiedenheit (detachment), and to it he devoted a separate treatise (Vom Abgeschiedenheit), which describes it as the highest virtue, higher even than love. The human person must empty itself and strip off the creaturely conditions of this or that being. It is by the virtue of detachment that a human being can be most closely united with God. The second theme is the birth of the Son or the Word in the soul. The unity of God the Father and God the Son is for Eckhart the model of the union of the soul with God (see Trinity). The third theme is the ‘nobility’ that God placed in the ‘innermost’ part of the soul. Eckhart calls it the ‘spark of the soul’, which consists in the intellect. ‘If the soul were entirely of this nature, it would be wholly uncreated and uncreatable.’ This proposition was one of those condemned in the trial of Eckhart, but in his apology he denied wiping out the boundaries between God and creature. He wrote that he had never taught that there is something in the soul which is uncreated, ‘because then the soul would be composed of created and uncreated’. A human being is not pure intellect (see Soul, nature and immortality of the).