CHAPTER 1
Meister Eckhart Lesemeister and Lebemeister
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Ez sprichet meister Eckehart: wêger wêre ein lebemeister denne tûsent lesemeister; aber lesen und leben ê got, dem mac nieman zuo komen.
Thus says Meister Eckhart: "Better one master of life than a thousand masters of learning; but no one learns and lives before God does."
Perhaps no mystic in the history of Christianity has been more influential and more controversial than the Dominican Meister Eckhart. Few, if any, mystics have been as challenging to modern readers and as resistant to agreed-upon interpretation. In his own day Eckhart commanded respect as a famous Paris magister (i.e., lesemeister), a high official in his order, and a popular preacher and spiritual guide (lebemeister). But the shock of his trial for heresy (Eckhart was the only medieval theologian tried before the Inquisition as a heretic) and the subsequent (1329) condemnation of excerpts from his works by Pope John XXII cast a shadow over his reputation that has lasted to our own time. Despite the papal censure, Eckhart, at least in his vernacular works, was widely read in the later Middle Ages. During the sixteenth century, however, the split in Christendom and the struggle over orthodoxy led to Eckhart's gradual fading from the scene, although mystics such as Angelus Silesius (1627–1677) still show the impact of his thought. In the nineteenth century, interest in Eckhart was revived by German Romantics and Idealist philosophers. The appearance of Franz Pfeiffer's edition of the Meister's sermons and treatises in 1857 marked the beginning of the modern study of Eckhart, a broad stream of research that has grown unabated for a century and a half. The great critical edition of the Dominican's Latin and German works, begun in 1936 and now nearing completion, has provided a sound textual basis for scholarship without, of course, eliminating the conflict of interpretations. The growing host of new translations and studies of Eckhart over the past two decades indicates that the medieval Dominican, for all the controversy surrounding him and the difficulty of understanding his powerful message, continues to be a resource for all who seek deeper consciousness of God's presence.
Who was Meister Eckhart? Why were his preaching and teaching so powerful and so controversial? What was the relation between Eckhart the lesemeister and Eckhart the lebemeister, and between the learned Latin writings that give us access to the former and the more than one hundred sermons and handful of treatises that allow us to overhear Eckhart the preacher and "soul friend"? This work will try to answer these questions in six chapters: (1) an introduction to the Meister's life and writings; (2) a consideration of some of the problems and issues involved in interpreting Eckhart; (3) an attempt at a general characterization of Eckhart's mysticism as the "mysticism of the ground"; and (4) a consideration of Eckhart the preacher through an analysis of a "sermon cycle" unique in his oeuvre; and (5) and (6) two chapters presenting the main themes of Eckhart's teaching on how all things flow out from and return to the divine grunt (ground).
Eckhart's Life and Works
Eckhart was born not long before 1260, probably at Tambach near Gotha in Saxony, from a family of the lower aristocracy. (In some notices he is called "Eckhart of Hochheim," a designation used as a family name, not to indicate his birthplace.) We know little of his early life before April 18, 1294, when as a junior professor he preached the Easter Sermon at the Dominican convent of St. Jacques in Paris. We can, however, surmise the following.
Eckhart probably entered the Dominican order about the age of eighteen, presumably in the mid to late 1270s. At one point in the Easter Sermon he says, "Albert often used to say: 'This I know, as we know things, for we all know very little.'" This reference to a saying of Albert the Great, whom Eckhart frequently cited with respect, suggests that the young friar did part of his early studies of philosophy and theology at Cologne before Albert's death in 1280. At some time he was sent on to Paris for higher theological studies, and he was eventually promoted to baccalaureus, that is, lecturer on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, in the fall of 1293.
Eckhart's period of study at Paris was a time of turmoil in the world of medieval philosophy and theology. The condemnation of 219 propositions by Stephen Tempier, archbishop of Paris, in 1277, had not only placed Thomas Aquinas's teaching under a cloud (about twenty of the condemned propositions could be found in Thomas), but had also led to a great debate over the relation of philosophy to theology. Traditional disputes between Dominican and Franciscan theologians, such as the priority of intellect or will in final beatitude, were now exacerbated by a more fundamental disagreement over the legitimacy of using any natural philosophy at all (save for logic) in the work of theology. The opposition of many Franciscans to the thought of Aristotle and his Arab followers was encouraged by the growth among the philosophers in the arts faculty of a naturalistic theory of human nature and knowing. Throughout his life, Eckhart resolutely championed the Dominican position that philosophy and theology did not contradict each other and that philosophy was a necessary tool for Chris tian theology. Both his historical situation and his own convictions, however, led Eckhart beyond Albert and Thomas Aquinas: not only was there no contradiction between philosophy and theology, but, as he wrote in his Commentary on the Gospel of John:
What the philosophers have written about the natures and properties of things agree with it [the Bible], especially since everything that is true, whether in being or in knowing, in scripture or in nature, proceeds from one source and one root of truth. ... Therefore, Moses, Christ, and the Philosopher [i.e., Aristotle] teach the same thing, differing only in the way they teach, namely as worthy of belief, as probable and likely, and as truth.
This conviction is already evident in Eckhart's first works as a baccalaureus theologiae.
In the fall of 1294 Eckhart was called back to his Saxon homeland and made prior of his home convent at Erfurt and vicar of Thuringia (i.e., the local representative of the provincial). During the next few years he must have had considerable contact with Dietrich of Freiburg, who was the provincial of Teutonia between 1293 and 1296. Although claims for Dietrich's influence on Eckhart are often exaggerated, there is no question that, for all their differences, Eckhart learned much from his distinguished confrere.
Eckhart's earliest vernacular work, The Talks of Instruction (Die rede der underscheidunge) date from this time (c. 1295–1298). This popular work (fifty-one manuscripts are known), modeled on Cassian's Collations, is a series of talks delivered to Dominican novices, but probably also intended for a wider audience, given its composition in the vernacular. It consists of twenty-three chapters that fall into three parts: chapters 1–8 deal primarily with denial of self through obedience; chapters 9–17 with various practices of the Christian life; and chapters 18–23 with a series of questions concluding with a long treatment of exterior and interior work. Against former views of the Talks as an uninteresting "youthful" work (Eckhart would have been close to forty at the time of its composition), recently scholars such as Kurt Ruh and Loris Sturlese have rightly seen the collection as important for understanding Eckhart's development. In emphasizing the metaphysical basis of Christian ethical practice, Eckhart sounds a note that will be constant in his subsequent preaching and teaching. In eschewing all external practices of asceticism in favor of the internal self-denial of radical obedience understood as abegescheidenheit (detachment, or better, the "cutting away" of all things), the Dominican spiritual guide introduces one of his most characteristic themes. Finally, in identifying the intellect as the power in which the human being is informed by God, he announces the centrality of intelligere/vernünfticheit in his later mystical thought. The emphasis on intellect, of course, had been important to the German Dominicans since the time of Albert. Eckhart's preoccupation with it was to bear mature fruit in the first decade of the new century.
In 1302 Eckhart was called to return to Paris to take up the external Dominican chair of theology as magister actu regens: the acme of academic success. As was customary, his time in this position was brief, but the short Parisian Questions that survive from this academic year (1302–1303) demonstrate that his thinking on divine and human intelligere had already led him to a position beyond those held by Albert, Thomas, or Dietrich of Freiburg. When Eckhart says, "It does not now seem to me that God understands because he exists, but rather that he exists because he understands," he has stood Thomas on his head in the service of a different form of metaphysics. Eckhart's criticism of "ontotheology," that is, a metaphysic centering on being, or esse, marks an important stage in his intellectual development. His teaching is rooted, in part at least, in his distinctive doctrine of analogy, which appears here for the first time. "In the things that are said according to analogy, what is in one of the analogates is not formally in the other. ... Therefore, since all caused things are formally beings, God will not be a being in the formal sense." Since esse here is being treated as "the first of created things," it cannot as such be in God. What is there is the puritas essendi, which Eckhart identifies with intelligere. In the scholastic quaestiones, however, Eckhart does not develop a central theme of his subsequent teaching and preaching, namely, that it is in the human intellect understood as the ground that we find a relation to God that surpasses analogy.
During this first Paris mastership Eckhart also presented his teaching on intelligere in a public disputation with the Franciscan Master Gonsalvo of Spain on the question of the priority of intellect or will in the beatitude of heaven. Eckhart's side of the disputation does not survive, but in Gonsalvo's quaestio there is a summary of eleven arguments (rationes) of Eckhart "to show that the intellect, its act and habit are more excellent than the will, its act and habit." Alain de Libera has shown how a careful analysis of these rationes sets out the main themes of the Dominican's understanding of the role of intelligere and its relation to the views of Thomas and Dietrich.
The implications of this understanding of intelligere for the divine–human relation became evident in Eckhart's vernacular preaching after autumn 1303, when he was called back to Germany to take up the important position of provincial for the newly created province of Saxonia, consisting of forty-seven convents in eastern and northern Germany and the Low Countries. A number of sermons from the period of Eckhart's service as provincial (1303–1311) can be found in the collection known as the Paradise of the Intelligent Soul (Paradisus anime intelligentis), which was probably put together around 1340 at Erfurt, Eckhart's own convent and the base for his activities as provincial. The main purpose of this collection of sixty-four sermons was to serve as a handbook for learned preachers in their defense of Dominican views, especially of the priority of intellect over will, against the Franciscans. In this collection, as Kurt Ruh puts it: "Latin and German meet each other in a vernacular work."
The thirty-two Eckhart sermons found in the collection set the tone for a daring message about the relation between the human intellect and God. In the key piece, Eckhart's Pr. 9 (= Par.an. no. 33), the master once again insists that God is above being and goodness. He then goes on to exegete the "temple of God" referred to in Ecclesiasticus 50:7 as the intellect (vernünfticheit). "Nowhere does God dwell more properly," he says, "than in his temple, in intellect, ... remaining in himself alone where nothing ever touches him; for he alone is there in his stillness." Although Pr. 9 does not consider the relation between the intellect and the ground of the soul, another sermon in the collection, Pr. 98 (= Par.an. no. 55), shows that Eckhart was already employing the language of the ground in his vernacular preaching. In speaking of the soul's birth within the Trinity, Eckhart says:
There she is so purely one that she has no other being than the same being that is his — that is, the soul-being. This being is a beginning of all the work that God works in heaven and on earth. It is an origin and a ground of all his divine work. The soul loses her nature and her being and her life and is born in the Godhead. ... She is so much one there that there is no distinction save that he remains God and she soul.
Thus, the major themes of Eckhart's preaching had clearly emerged in the first years of the fourteenth century.
It is difficult to know how many of Eckhart's surviving vernacular sermons date from this time. Along with the pieces found in the Paradise of the Intelligent Soul, Georg Steer has argued that the important Christmas cycle of four "Sermons on the Eternal Birth," to be treated below in chapter 4, can be dated to between 1298 and 1305. We do know that some of Eckhart's most important Latin works come from his years as provincial, notably the Sermons and Readings on the Book of Ecclesiasticus he delivered to the friars at chapter meetings. This work, which Loris Sturlese has characterized as "a little summa of Eckhart's metaphysics," is important for showing how the Dominican's metaphysics was already being presented in a perspectival — or, better, dialectical — way.
The Parisian Questions had denied that esse understood as something creatable could be applied to God. In the Sermons and Readings Eckhart, using the same doctrine of "reversing" analogy (i.e., what is predicated of God cannot be formally in creatures, and vice versa), ascribes transcendental esse to God in order to explore the "loaned" character of created esse. As he puts it in commenting on Ecclesiasticus 24:29 ("They that eat me shall yet hunger"): "Every created being radically and positively possesses existence, truth, and goodness from and in God, not in itself as a created being. And thus it always 'eats' as something produced and created, but it always 'hungers' because it is always from another and not from itself." Toward the end of this comment Eckhart moves into explicitly dialectical language. If hungering and eating are really the same, "He who eats gets hungry by eating, because he consumes hunger; the more he eats the more hungry he gets. ... By eating he gets hungry and by getting hungry he eats, and he hungers to get hungry for hunger." It is no accident that in this work we also find, perhaps for the first time in his writings, another keynote of Eckhart's thought, the identification of God as the "negation of negation" (n.60).
On the basis of the manuscript discoveries and research of Loris Sturlese, scholars have now abandoned the older view that the surviving parts of Eckhart's great attempt at a new and original form of summa, what he called The Three-Part Work (Opus tripartitum), belonged to his second period as magister at Paris (1311–1313). Large portions of what survives of the project must be dated to the first decade of the fourteenth century. Here is how Eckhart describes the work in the "General Prologue" he wrote to introduce it:
The whole work itself is divided into three principal parts. The first is The Work of General Propositions, the second The Work of Questions, the third The Work of Expositions. The first work contains a thousand or more propositions divided into fourteen treatises corresponding to the number of terms of which the propositions are formed. ... The second work, that of questions, is divided according to the content of the questions, treating them according to the order they have in the Summa of the noted doctor, the venerable friar Thomas of Aquino. ... The third work, that of expositions, ... is subdivided by the number and order of the books of the Old and New Testaments whose texts are expounded in it.
