The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart E-Book

Bernard McGinn

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 767

Beschreibung

Centuries after his work as a preacher, philosopher, and spiritual guide, Meister Eckhart remains one of the most widely-read mystics of the Western tradition. Yet as he has come to be studied more closely in recent decades, a number of different Eckharts have emerged. This volume reviews and synthesizes the diverging views of Eckhart that have been presented in recent past. For the first time, Bernard McGinn, the greatest living scholar of Western Christian mysticism, brings together in one volume the fruition of decades of reflection on these questions, offering a view of Eckhart that unites his reflections as preacher, philosopher, and theologian.

Leseprobe

THE MYSTICAL THOUGHT OF MEISTER ECKHART

THE EDWARD CADBURY LECTURES

2000–2001

The Crossroad Publishing Company

www.crossroadpublishing.com

Copyright © 2001 by Bernard McGinn

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of The Crossroad Publishing Company.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McGinn, Bernard, 1937–

The mystical thought of Meister Eckhart : the man from whom God hid nothing / Bernard McGinn.

p. cm.

“A Herder and Herder book.”

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8245-0157-0; 0-8245-1996-5 (pbk.)

1. Eckhart, Meister, d. 1327. I. Title

BV5095.E3 M33 2001

230'.2'092—dc21

2001001533

Dedicated

to dear friends

who have made me feel at home

in Chicago

for more than thirty years:

Bob and Peggy Grant

Michael Murrin

and

Kenneth Northcott

Contents

PREFACE

ABBREVIATIONS

  CHAPTER1 Meister Eckhart: Lesemeister and Lebemeister

  CHAPTER2 Approaching Eckhart: Controversies and Perspectives

  CHAPTER3 Eckhart and the Mysticism of the Ground

  CHAPTER4 The Preacher in Action: Eckhart on the Eternal Birth

  CHAPTER5 The Metaphysics of Flow

  CHAPTER6 Going without a Way: The Return to the Ground

APPENDIX: ECKHART’S SOURCES

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Preface

IBEGAN READING MEISTER ECKHART almost fifty years ago in the translation of Raymond Bernard Blakeney first published in 1941. For a young student still struggling to learn Latin and modern German (let alone Middle High German), Blakeney’s version was an eye-opening introduction to a mystical teacher and preacher who has fascinated me ever since. Though the Blakeney translation has its problems and has been superseded by more accurate versions, it should be hailed for the role that it had in making Eckhart available to the Anglo-American audience. Eckhart has a way of getting through to readers, despite the difficulty and frequent obscurity of both his original Latin and Middle High German texts, and the translations that sometimes betray him.

Over four decades I have lived with Eckhart. Since the late 1970s I have also tried to make his mystical thought available to others, through two volumes of translations published by Paulist Press in the Classics of Western Spirituality series, as well as in a number of articles and studies devoted to the German Dominican. The present monograph is the result of an unforeseen accident, since I had not conceived that I would ever get the chance to write an independent volume on Eckhart.

During the academic year 1999–2000, a time I spent in the academic Elysian fields of the National Humanities Institute in North Carolina, I plunged into the research and writing of volume 4 of my ongoing history of Western Christian mysticism, The Presence of God (three volumes have been published between 1991 and 1998).1 The fourth volume, to be called The Harvest of Mysticism: 1300–1500, was to begin with Eckhart and those who formed his world, both as teachers and as his students and followers. In the course of writing up the materials relating to Eckhart, I eventually realized that my account had grown far beyond the bounds of anything that could form even a substantial chapter or two in the larger volume. A full presentation of Eckhart’s mysticism, however, seemed to me a real desideratum. Despite several fine studies available in English and the new wealth of excellent works in German, I felt that there was more to say—as, indeed, with Eckhart there always will be. Hence, after consultation with the publishers and editors at Crossroad, especially Gwendolin Herder and Michael Parker, I decided to publish The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing (a contemporary characterization of Eckhart) in its full form.2 At a later date, suitably revised and shortened parts of this monograph will make up part of what I hope to say about the great Dominican in The Harvest of Mysticism.

In closing this brief explanation of how the present volume came to be, I wish to thank the National Humanities Center and its excellent staff for their unfailing kindness and helpfulness during the months when the manuscript was being prepared. My gratitude is also due to the Department of Theology of the University of Birmingham, where much of the book formed the basis for the Edward Cadbury Lectures of 2000–2001. My wife, Patricia, oversaw much of its gestation and has read and helped me edit many sections of the volume. My research assistant, Scott Johnson, also read the manuscript and helped catch a number of errors and typos. Over the years, I have had the opportunity to learn much from many Eckhart scholars—the list would be too long to give here. However, I do want to say a special word of thanks to my friends and colleagues Frank Tobin and Donald F. Duclow, who read the entire manuscript and made many helpful suggestions for clarification and enrichment.

It is my fervent hope that this volume will serve, at least in some way, to assist others to pursue the wisdom of unknowing that is the heart of Meister Eckhart’s message.

BERNARD MCGINN

August 6, 2000

Feast of the Transfiguration

Abbreviations

EDITIONS

The critical edition of Meister Eckhart’s works is:

Meister Eckhart: Die deutschen und lateinischen Werke herausgegeben im Auftrag der deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (Stuttgart/Berlin: Kohlhammer, 1936–).

The Latin works (hereafter LW) will comprise six volumes, of which four are complete. The Middle High German (hereafter MHG) works (hereafter DW) will be in five volumes, of which four are complete. Texts will be cited by volume and page number, as well as line numbers for direct quotations. The numbering of subsections introduced by the editors of the LW will also be employed (e.g., n. and nn.). The following standard abbreviations for the various works will be used:

Latin Works

Acta

Acta Echardiana (LW 5:149–240 thus far)

In Eccli.

Sermones et Lectiones super Ecclesiastici c. 24:23–31 (LW 2:29–300)

In Ex.

Expositio Libri Exodi (LW 2:1–227)

In Gen.I

Expositio Libri Genesis (LW 1:185–444)

In Gen.II

Liber Parabolorum Genesis (LW 1:447–702)

In Ioh.

Expositio sancti Evangelii secundum Iohannem (LW 3)

In Sap.

Expositio Libri Sapientiae (LW 2:301–643)

Proc.Col.I

Processus Coloniensis I (= Acta n.46: LW 5:197–226)

Proc.Col.II

Processus Coloniensis II (= Acta n.47: LW 5:227–)

Prol.gen.

Prologus generalis in Opus tripartitum (LW 1:148–65)

Prol.op.expos.

Prologus in Opus expositionum (LW 1:183–84)

Prol.op.prop.

Prologus in Opus propositionum (LW 1:166–82)

Qu.Par.

Quaestiones Parisienses (LW 1:27–83)

S. and SS.

Sermo and Sermones with Latin numeration (LW 4)

Théry

Gabriel Théry, “Edition critique des pièces relatives au procès d’Eckhart contenues dans le manuscrit 33b de la bibliothèque de Soest,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 1 (1926–27): 129–268.

German Works

BgT

Daz buoch der goetlîchen troestunge (DW 5:1–105)

Par.an.

Paradisus anime intelligentis (Paradis der fornunftigen sele), ed. Philip Strauch, Deutsche Texte des Mittel alters 30 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1919).

Pfeiffer

Franz Pfeiffer, Meister Eckhart (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1924). Photomechanischer Neudruck der Ausgabe von 1857.

Pr. and Prr.

Predigt and Predigten (DW 1–4)

RdU

Die rede der underscheidunge (DW 5:137–376)

Vab

Vom abegescheidenheit (DW 5:400–434)

VeM

Von dem edeln menschen (DW 5:106–36)

TRANSLATIONS

Essential Eckhart

Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, translation and introduction by Edmund Colledge, O.S.A., and Bernard McGinn (New York: Paulist Press, 1981).

Teacher and Preacher

Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, ed. Bernard McGinn with the collaboration of Frank Tobin and Elvira Borgstadt (New York: Paulist Press, 1986).

Largier

Niklaus Largier, Meister Eckhart Werke, 2 vols. (Frankfurt: Deutsche Klassiker Verlag, 1993).

Lectura Eckhardi

LECTURA ECKHARDI: Predigten Meister Eckharts von Fachgelehrten gelesen und gedeutet, ed. Georg Steer and Loris Sturlese (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1998).

Walshe

M. O’C. Walshe, Meister Eckhart: Sermons and Treatises. 3 vols. (London/Dulverton: Watkins & Element Books, 1979–87).

N.B. All translations from Eckhart’s Latin writings in this volume are my own. With regard to the more difficult task of rendering the Meister’s MHG texts into English, I have compared the translations that have been produced in the past two decades and have been happy to cite from those versions in most cases. In a number of places, however, I found that no version quite captured what seems to me to be Eckhart’s point, so I have elected to produce my own translation. All MHG translations note the version being used.

OTHER ABBREVIATIONS

DS

Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique doctrine et histoire, ed. Marcel Viller et al., 16 vols. (Paris: Beauchesne, 1937–94).

PG

Patrologiae cursus completus: Series Graeca, ed. J.-P. Migne, 161 vols. (Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1857–66).

PL

Patrologiae cursus completus: Series Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, 221 vols. (Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1844–55).

SC

Sources chrétiennes, ed. Jean Daniélou et al. (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1940–).

STh

Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae

Vg

Vulgate Bible. See Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, ed. Robert Weber et al. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1983).

VL

Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters Verfasserlexikon, 2nd ed., ed. Kurt Ruh et al., 10 vols. (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1978–).

CHAPTER 1

Meister Eckhart Lesemeister and Lebemeister

            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.”1

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.2 Despite the papal censure, Eckhart, at least in his vernacular works, was widely read in the later Middle Ages.3 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.4 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.5

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).6

ECKHART’S LIFE AND WORKS7

Eckhart was born not long before 1260, probably at Tambach near Gotha in Saxony, from a family of the lower aristocracy.8 (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.9 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.’”10 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 1293.11

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),12 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.13 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.14

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).15 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.16 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,17 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.18 When Eckhart says, “It does not now seem to me that God understands because he exists, but rather that he exists because he understands,”19 he has stood Thomas on his head in the service of a different form of metaphysics.20 Eckhart’s criticism of “ontotheology,” that is, a metaphysic centering on being, or esse, marks an important stage in his intellectual development.21 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.”22 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.23 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.”24 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.25

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.26 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.”27

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.”28Although 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.29

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 1305.30 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.31 This work, which Loris Sturlese has characterized as “a little summa of Eckhart’s metaphysics,”32 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.”33 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.”34 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,35 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).35 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.36

Whether or not Eckhart had already conceived of the project during his first period as master at Paris, it seems likely that it was during his service as provincial that he wrote the following: the “Prologue” to The Book of Propositions treating the basic term “Existence is God” (esse est deus);37 the first, or literal, Commentary on Genesis;38 and the Commentary on the Book of Wisdom, whose dialectical interests reflect the Sermons and Lectures on Ecclesiasticus.39 It is difficult to know when the other surviving parts of The Work of Expositions were written. These include the Commentary on Exodus, with its important discussion of God as esse (see Exod. 3:14) and on the names of God,40 and the great Commentary on the Gospel of John, Eckhart’s longest work.41 At some stage the second part of The Work of Expositions, called The Work of Sermons, was also compiled.42 This was meant to provide model sermons in Latin, showing young friars how to use scriptural texts for preaching. The fact that many of the pieces contained in it are no more than sermon sketches indicates that the work is unfinished.43

Eckhart says that he began the composition of The Three-Part Work “to satisfy as far as possible the desires of some of the diligent friars who already for a long time with pressing requests had often asked and compelled me to put in writing what they used to hear from me in lectures and other school activities, and also in preaching and daily conversations.”44 It is important to remember that Eckhart intended this work for these fratres studiosi, that is, only for those who were eager and able to absorb it.45 He was well aware that “at first glance some of the following propositions, questions, and expositions will seem monstrous, doubtful, or false.” But, as he went on to say, “it will be otherwise if they are considered cleverly and more diligently.”46 Eckhart also insisted that it was only on the basis of the philosophical truths demonstrated in The Book of Propositions that the subsequent solutions to disputed questions and the “rare new things” (nova et rara) found in his scriptural commentaries could be understood (n.11).47 His conviction concerning the conformity between reason and revelation, and philosophy and theology, already noted, was the grounding insight of the project. At the beginning of the Commentary on John he put it this way: “In interpreting this Word [i.e., In principio erat Verbum] and everything else that follows my intention is the same as in all my works—to explain what the holy Christian faith and the two Testaments maintain through the help of the natural arguments of the philosophers.”48 Some would have it that texts such as this show that Eckhart was a philosopher, not really a theologian, and certainly not a mystic whose writings must run counter to rationality. Eckhart’s life and thought, however, demonstrate that it is possible to be all three at one and the same time.

The way in which Eckhart’s teaching and learned preaching in the vernacular came to maturity in the years between 1303 and 1311 may cast light on the MHG poem in the form of a liturgical sequence called the “Granum sinapis” (“The Mustard Seed”) and the Latin commentary that exegetes it—a sign of the two-way conversation between Latin and the vernacular in the new mysticism of the later Middle Ages.49 In recent years noted Eckhart scholars, such as Kurt Ruh and Alois M. Haas, have argued for the authenticity of this sequence—a profound poetic expression of the main themes of the Dominican’s mysticism.50 The linguistic virtuosity displayed in Eckhart’s sermons here takes poetic wing. The Latin commentary, while deeply learned, displays some decidedly un-Eckhartian themes, especially in its emphasis on the superiority of the “height of affection” (apex affectus), a term taken from Thomas Gallus, an author rarely used by Eckhart himself.51 It is likely to have been composed by a friar within his circle, but one whose mystical stance was rather different from Eckhart’s own. We have no direct evidence for when the poem was written, but a likely time would have been during Eckhart’s tenure as provincial. During this period he was making a special effort to instruct his confreres about the relation between the unknown God and the soul—a union to be realized through intellect (vorstentlichkeit in the poem). Furthermore, both the Latin and the German works from this period demonstrate a new level of synthesis in Eckhart’s thought, and the “Granum sinapis” is one of the best summaries of Eckhartian mysticism.

Eckhart’s career as provincial was a successful one. He founded three convents for women and was elected vicar of Bohemia in 1307, as well as provincial of the other German Dominican province, Teutonia, in 1310 (he was ordered to decline this second honor by the Dominican Master General). On May 14, 1311, the General Chapter held at Naples posted him back to Paris for a second stint as magister—a rare privilege, hitherto granted only to Thomas Aquinas. Eckhart spent two academic years at Paris (autumn 1311 to summer 1313). Here he lived in the same house as the Dominican inquisitor, William of Paris, who had been responsible for the execution of the beguine Marguerite Porete on June 1, 1310. Eckhart’s use of Porete’s mystical themes (sometimes even close to her actual words) show that he took a view of the daring beguine very different from that of his Dominican confrere.52 The stimulus of reading Porete, and later the encounter with the beguines in Strasbourg and Cologne, were probably influential on Eckhart’s turn toward more intensive vernacular preaching in the final decade and a half of his life.53

This is not to say that Eckhart’s reaction to the mystical currents of his time, especially those pioneered by women, was uncritical.54 His attitude toward many of the ideas put forth by beguines and others, especially their emphasis on visionary experience, was designed to serve as what might be called a critical correlation for some of the exaggerations he noted in contemporary mysticism. In addition, some of his later vernacular sermons can be viewed as critiques of the tendencies condemned by the Council of Vienne in 1311 as evidence of the secta libertatis spiritus.55 But Eckhart learned much from the women mystics, especially from Porete and probably also from Mechthild of Magdeburg, the German beguine whose visionary collection The Flowing Light of the Godhead was composed with the assistance of her Dominican confessor, Henry of Halle.56 Furthermore, even when he was in disagreement with these mystics, Eckhart was far from an inquisitor. The purpose of his preaching was not to recriminate and condemn but to invite believers, even those who might be in error, to come to a deeper and more authentic realization of their inner union with God. Just as Thomas Aquinas a generation before had tried to mediate (without success) between radical Aristotelians who affirmed that Aristotle was “rationally” correct (however much his views conflicted with faith) and traditionalist theologians who believed that Aristotelian philosophy was a danger to theology, so too Eckhart’s attempt to harmonize the aspirations of those who sought indistinct union with God with the rigidifying doctrinal and moral positions of the fourteenth-century church was doomed to failure.

We do not know why Eckhart left Paris, probably in the summer of 1313. Well over fifty at this time, he did not return to Erfurt and his own province, but rather was called to Strasbourg in the Alsatian Rhineland to function as a special vicar for the Dominican Master General, first Berengar of Landora and then Hervaeus Natalis.57 Strasbourg was an important center of female piety, not only because of its seven convents of Dominican nuns, but also because of the many beguine houses found in the city and its environs. It was also a flashpoint for the debates over mysticism that were growing in the aftermath of the condemnation of the beguines and the secta spiritus libertatis at the Council of Vienne and the subsequent publication of a modified version of this decree in the Clementina canonical collection of 1317.58 The bishop of the city, John I of Zurich (1306–1328), was a fierce opponent of heresy and of all suspect religious groups.59

In Strasbourg Eckhart plunged into the life of a lebemeister, preaching and giving spiritual counsel more fully than he had been able to do during his tenure as university professor and official of his order. Although only a few of Eckhart’s sermons can be explicitly tied to the cura monialium, there is no reason to doubt that the intense interest in mystical piety found among late medieval women was a significant inspiration for Eckhart during the last decade of his preaching and teaching. Evidence exists concerning his visits to the Dominican convents of Katharinental and Ötenbach in the upper Rhine area during the time of his stay in Strasbourg.60 He also visited the nearby convent of Unterlinden in Colmar.

A considerable number of Eckhart’s surviving MHG sermons (totalling 114 in the projected critical edition) appear to come from his time in Strasbourg and the last years in Cologne.61 This fact reflects not only Eckhart’s devotion to the care of souls but also a conscious effort to create a new vernacular theology that would, in the words of Thomas Aquinas, “hand on things understood through contemplation to others” (contemplata aliis tradere).62 Marie-Anne Vannier has argued that the theme of the “nobleman,” that is, the person who has attained divine sonship through the birth of the Word in the soul, emerges as central in the sermons that can be tied to Strasbourg.63 She contends that such sermons as Pr. 71, a meditation on the “Nothingness” of God, in which the preacher ties the birth motif to a profound meditation on the divine niht, date from this time.64

In one of the sermons that appears to come from the last decade of his life, Eckhart summarized the message of his preaching under four themes:

When I preach, I am accustomed to speak about detachment, and that a man should be free of himself and of all things; second, that a man should be formed again into that simple good which is God; third, that he should reflect on the great nobility with which God has endowed his soul, . . . ; fourth, about the purity of the divine nature, for the brightness of the divine nature is beyond words. God is a word, a word unspoken.65

In another sermon, Pr. 6 on the text “The just will live forever” (Wis. 5:16), he put his message even more succinctly: “Whoever understands the difference between Justice and the just person, understands everything I say.”66 In his earlier Pr. 9, discussed above, Eckhart was even more parsimonious about the essence of his preaching. Speaking about the nature of the word quasi as a bîwort, or ad-verb, he says: “I would now like to focus on the little word quasi which means ‘as’ . . . . This is what I focus on in all my sermons.”67 Thus (to take him at his word), the essence of all Eckhart’s preaching can be reduced to understanding that the intellect is nothing but an ad-verbum, that is, something that has no existence apart from its inherence in the Word, in the same way that the “just person” (iustus) inheres in divine “Justice.”

The emphasis in the Strasbourg sermons on the “noble man” (edler mensch), “Justice and the just person” (gerechticheit und gerehte), the one in whom the birth of the Word has been achieved, suggests that Vannier’s contention that the Commentary on John was written during Eckhart’s time in Alsace may well be correct.68 At the beginning of his long treatment of the Prologue to the Gospel, Eckhart once again takes up the issue of analogy. Although “in analogical relations what is produced derives from the source . . . [and] is of another nature and thus not the principle itself; still, as it is in the principle, it is not other in nature or supposit.”69 On the basis of this metaphysical axiom, the Dominican engages in an extended exploration of the relationship between Unbegotten and Begotten Justice in the Trinity, as well as a further consideration of Divine Justice and the “just person.” (These treatments are close to those seen in Pr. 6.) Speaking formally, that is, from the perspective of the just or noble man, insofar as he preexists in Divine Justice, Eckhart can say, “The just man in justice itself is not yet begotten nor Begotten Justice, but is Unbegotten Justice itself”: that is, he is identical with God the Father.70 Again and again, more than twenty-five times in the course of the commentary, Eckhart returns to the exploration of the relations between divine Iustitia and iustus, the just person.71

Loris Sturlese has suggested that Eckhart’s move to Strasbourg marked a decisive “turn” in his Latin writing career. On the basis of the evidence of the new “Prologue” to The Work of Expositions in which Eckhart lays out his “parabolic” theory of exegesis, as well as the second Genesis commentary (The Book of the Parables of Genesis, probably composed during this time),72 Sturlese claims that Eckhart abandoned the unfinished Three-Part Work to concentrate on a new project, The Book of the Parables of Natural Things.73 Other students of Eckhart do not think the evidence supports any total abandonment of the Three-Part Work.74 One can, nevertheless, agree with Niklaus Largier that there was a “hermeneutical turn” in Eckhart’s Latin works during the second decade of the fourteenth century (whether it was begun in the second Paris period or at Strasbourg), one in which Eckhart’s exegesis began to concentrate more and more on bringing out the parabolical riches of the biblical text to serve as the foundation for his intensified vernacular preaching.75

Eckhart’s new vernacular theology also led to the composition of further treatises in German. The most noted of these is the so-called Blessed Book (Liber Benedictus), consisting of the Book of Divine Consolation (BgT) and a sermon “On the Nobleman” (VeM),76 the only vernacular sermon for which we can say in secure fashion that Eckhart himself expressed full responsibility.77 The Book of Divine Consolation tapped into a long tradition of consolatory literature in the Middle Ages, dating back to Boethius’s sixth-century Consolation of Philosophy. A manuscript witness in Eckhart’s subsequent investigation for heresy connects the book with Queen Agnes of Hungary (c. 1280–1364), and many scholars have seen it as a consolatory piece sent to the queen in a time of need. (Others have argued that it may have been part of a collection of suspect texts put together at the monarch’s request and later forwarded to Eckhart’s accusers.) In any case, there is nothing to tie the book specifically to Queen Agnes. As Kurt Ruh says, “Eckhart’s consolation is the consolation meant for anyone who wants to leave the world behind.”78

There is good reason to think that the book was written about 1318. As a vernacular expression of some of the most daring aspects of the Dominican’s teaching, it played a prominent role in the accusations soon to be brought against him. Like the Talks of Instruction, the Book is divided into three sections. The first deals with “various true sayings” designed to “find complete comfort for all sorrows.” The long second part details “thirty topics or precepts” for gaining great consolation, while the third part provides examples of what “wise men” have done and said in the midst of suffering.79

This Book of Divine Consolation provides valuable evidence concerning Eckhart’s teaching in the vernacular and the opposition it was beginning to elicit in an era rife with fears of heresy. At the conclusion of the Book, the Dominican addresses possible complaints against his putting forth such deep matters to a general audience. First of all, he defends himself (citing Augustine) against those who have already misunderstood him and attacked him. “It is enough for me,” says Eckhart, “that what I say and write be true in me and in God.”80 Then he goes on to answer those who might argue that such lofty things should not be presented to a general audience. Eckhart’s response encapsulates his claim for the importance of the new vernacular theology:

And we shall be told that one ought not to talk about or write such teachings to the untaught. But to this I say that if we are not to teach people who have not been taught, no one will ever be taught, and no one will ever be able to teach and write. For that is why we teach the untaught, so that they may be changed from uninstructed into instructed.81

Eckhart was soon to have direct experience of those who misunderstood him—and who also had the power to act on it.

The Blessed Book raises the question about the other vernacular treatises ascribed to Meister Eckhart. In his 1857 edition Pfeiffer included no fewer than seventeen of these, but with the exceptions of the Talks of Instruction (= Pfeiffer treatise XVII) and the Book of Divine Consolation (= Pfeiffer treatise V), the rest have been judged inauthentic, however much they resonate with Eckhartian language and themes. Debate still continues about the short tractate On Detachment (Von abegescheidenheit) (= Pfeiffer treatise IX). Although Josef Quint, the major editor of Eckhart’s MHG works, included this penetrating investigation of one of his major themes in the critical edition of the vernacular works,82 recent scholarship, such as that of Kurt Ruh, has been generally negative toward the authenticity of the treatise.83

In late 1323 or early 1324 Eckhart left Strasbourg for the Dominican house at Cologne with its noted studium generale, the intellectual home of the order of preachers in Germany. It has often been said that Eckhart went there to head the studium, but, as Walter Senner has shown, the evidence for this is not strong.84 We do not really know why Eckhart removed to Cologne. The city was a center of beguine piety, and therefore also of fears about dangerous and heretical mysticism; but it goes too far to suggest that Eckhart was specifically sent there to preach against heresy.85 In any case, despite the Meister’s advancing years (he was nearing seventy), his status as a great lesemeister must have brought renewed fame to the Cologne studium, and his reputation as a great preacher and lebemeister was doubtless of advantage to the whole population of this bustling Rhineland city.

Eckhart’s time in Cologne was brief, but filled with activity and controversy. A number of his surviving sermons can be ascribed to the three years between his arrival (possibly early 1324) and the spring of 1327 when he left the city for the papal court at Avignon, the last way station of his life.86 The drama of his trial for heresy, partly reconstructable through the documentation that remains to us, has always been a subject of interest and dispute. The critical edition of the acta relating to these events is still in process, but recent work has clarified a number of points.87

Older suppositions that Eckhart’s trial was a result of tensions between the Dominicans and Franciscans have long been put to rest. The accusations against Eckhart make sense only within the context of fears concerning the “Heresy of the Free Spirit” that had been increasing since the turn of the century. Henry II of Virneburg, the powerful archbishop of Cologne (1304–1332), was a noted opponent of heresy and a strong ally of Pope John XXII in his struggle against Emperor Lewis of Bavaria.88 Some of Eckhart’s enemies within the Dominican order played a role in the accusations against him (two “renegades” are mentioned in the sources—Hermann of Summo and William of Nideggen), but Archbishop Henry would not have needed prompting to pursue heresy wherever he scented it.

It appears that some of the Dominican authorities already had suspicions about Eckhart’s preaching. The Dominican General Chapter held in Venice in the spring of 1325 had spoken out against “friars in Teutonia who say things in their sermons that can easily lead simple and uneducated people into error.”89 In light of these growing clouds, it appears that the friars of the Teutonia province tried to forestall a move against Eckhart by conducting their own investigation. On August 1, 1325, John XXII appointed Nicholas of Strasbourg and Benedict of Como as visitors of the province (Acta n.44). Nicholas presented a list of suspect passages from the Book of Consolation to Eckhart, who responded sometime between August of 1325 and January of 1326 with a lost treatise “Requisitus,” which satisfied his immediate superiors of his orthodoxy. During 1326, however, Archbishop Henry was preparing his case. A list drawn up by the two renegade Dominicans consisting of seventy-four excerpts from Eckhart’s Latin and German works was presented to the archbishop sometime during that year.90 A second list of passages taken from the vernacular sermons was also prepared sometime before September of 1326.91 On September 26, 1326, Eckhart appeared before the diocesan inquisitorial commission consisting of Reiner Friso and Peter of Estate to defend himself against the charge of heresy. Theologians had often been investigated for censure of erroneous views in the Middle Ages, but Eckhart’s trial for heresy before the inquisition was unprecedented.

Eckhart’s “Defense” (“Verteidigungsschrift,” or “Rechtfertigungsschrift” in German) gives us an important insight not only into late medieval heresy trials but also into the Meister’s self-understanding.92 Eckhart’s September rebuttal did not—and probably could not—satisfy the inquisitors. Sometime later that fall a third list, now lost, of extracts from his Commentary on John was also compiled (references will be noted in the forthcoming Acta n.49). There may also have been other lists. Throughout the attack on his reputation and orthodoxy, Eckhart insisted on several essential premises underlying his case. The first is that he could not be a heretic: “I am able to be in error, but I cannot be a heretic, for the first belongs to the intellect, the second to the will.”93 Thus, he always proclaimed himself willing to renounce publicly anything found erroneous in his writing or preaching—he did, indeed, admit that some of the articles were erronea et falsa, but never heretica. Second, Eckhart said that the often “rare and subtle” passages (rara et subtilia) in his works had to be explained in light of his good intentions and within the context of the preaching genre. For instance, in responding to a series of extracts relating to the birth of the Word in the soul, he says: “The whole of what was said is false and absurd according to the imagination of opponents, but it is true according to true understanding. . . .”94 Eckhart often appealed to his good intentions in presenting his hyperbolical preaching. For example, in defending a daring statement from Pr. 6 (“God’s being is my life; since my life is God’s being, God’s essence is my essence”), he responds: “It must be said that this is false and an error, as it sounds. But it is true, devout, and moral of the just person, insofar as he is just, that his entire existence is from God’s existence, though analogically.”95 The phrase “insofar as he is just” (inquantum iustus) used here is crucial, both for understanding Eckhart’s defense, and for the proper interpretation of his preaching and teaching.

As a trained scholastic theologian, Eckhart was well aware of the distinction between speaking of the relation between two things on a material, or actual, level (i.e., insofar as they are different things), and on a formal level (i.e., insofar as they possess the same quality). The foundation of his many discussions of the relation of iustitia (Divine Justice, or “Rightfulness”) and the iustus (the “rightly-directed person”) rests on this language of “formal-speaking,” as is evident in the Commentary on John. The just person precisely insofar as he is just (not in his total existential reality) must have everything that Divine Justice possesses. However, when Eckhart presented his teaching about the meaning of formal predication in the vernacular, the technical Latin qualifications of the formaliter/actualiter distinction were often less clear (though he does use the phrase “insofar as” in his German preaching from time to time). In his vernacular theology, Eckhart was not as concerned with such distinctions precisely because of his recognition of the difference between the role of the lebemeister and that of the lesemeister. Nevertheless, when taken to task, he tried to show his accusers that the message of his MHG preaching was not different from what could be found in his scholastic writings. (This was one thing upon which he and his inquisitors were in agreement, since they condemned passages from both Latin and vernacular texts.) Hence, it comes as no surprise that the first principle he invoked in introducing his Cologne defense was that of formal predication. As he put it: “To clarify the objections brought against me, three things must be kept in mind. The first is that the words ‘insofar as,’ that is, a reduplication, exclude from the term in question everything that is other or foreign to it, even according to reason.”96 This shows that not to understand the inquantum principle is not to understand Eckhart.

Apart from the intellectual resources Eckhart called upon to counter his critics, there were also institutional and canonical ones. He boldly announced at the beginning of the Cologne process, “. . . according to the exemption and privileges of my order, I am not held to appear before you or to answer charges.”97 The Dominicans, after all, were a canonically exempt order, that is, free of episcopal control and directly under the pope. Eckhart rightly claimed that only the pope, or the University of Paris as his delegate, had the power to investigate a magister theologiae for heresy.98 To the pope he had appealed, and to the pope he would go.

Throughout the trying months of late 1326 Eckhart had the full support of the local Dominican authorities, as can be seen by Nicholas of Strasbourg’s three official protests against the actions of the inquisitors in January of 1327 (Acta nn.50–52). However, the evidence of the warnings against dangerous preaching given by the General Chapters of 1325 and 1328 indicate that the international leaders of the order had distanced themselves from Eckhart without attacking him personally.99 Both Nicholas and Eckhart asked for “dimissory” letters allowing the case to be forwarded to the papal court at Avignon. On February 13, 1327, Eckhart also preached a sermon in the Dominican church at Cologne. At the end, he had his secretary read out a public protestation in Latin of his innocence and willingness to retract any errors. Eckhart himself translated the text into German, so that his audience, the vernacular public whom he had served so well, could understand it.100 This was an important act. By publicly proclaiming himself willing to retract any and all error, Eckhart had effectively forestalled any attempt to try him as a heretic. Sometime in the spring of that year, when the roads became passable, Eckhart, accompanied by other ranking members of the Teutonia province, began his journey to Avignon.

Our knowledge of the last year of Eckhart’s life is fragmentary. We know that Pope John XXII appointed two commissions, one of theologians and the other of cardinals, to investigate the charges against the Dominican master. We have the names of the commissioners, including Cardinal William Peter de Godino, who was probably a former student of the Meister. We also know that the commissions reduced the unwieldy body of some 150 suspect articles down to a more modest twenty-eight. The important document known as the Votum Avenionense gives us, in scholastic fashion, these articles, the reasons why they are judged heretical, Eckhart’s defense of each, and the rebuttal of the commissioners. Although it is a summary of his case, rather than his own production, this document (probably dating from late 1327) allows us a final opportunity to hear Eckhart still sounding the major themes of his preaching and teaching.

Eckhart’s Avignon defense summarizes many themes that had been part of his preaching for more than three decades. For example, with regard to what became article 13 of the subsequent bull of condemnation (“Whatever is proper to the divine nature, all that is proper to the just and divine man”), the Votum says:

He verifies this article, because Christ is the head and we the members; when we speak, he speaks in us. Also, in Christ there was so great a union of the Word with flesh that he communicated his own properties to it, so that God may be said to suffer and a man is the creator of heaven. To Christ himself it properly belongs to be called “a just person insofar as he is just,” for the term “insofar as” is a reduplication that excludes everything alien from the term [being employed]. In Christ there is no other hypostasis save that of the Word; but in other humans this is verified more or less.101

The Votum makes clear that in the case of each of the twenty-eight articles still under investigation, the commission was not convinced by the Dominican’s explanations. However, it also confirms that a basic shift had taken place in Eckhart’s case—he was no longer on trial as a heretic, but was being investigated for the possible censure of various articles he had once taught, which, if judged heretical, he had promised to renounce.

Even after the recommendations of the joint commissions, John XXII still sought further input in the delicate matter of condemning a Paris master. At some stage in the proceedings he asked Jacques Fournier, the future Pope Benedict XII, to look at the dossier and to give his opinion (Acta n.58 forthcoming). Fournier’s response does not survive. The next secure date in the process comes on April 30, 1328, when the pope wrote to Bishop Henry of Cologne to assure him that the case against Eckhart was moving ahead, although the accused was dead. It was long thought that the actual date of Eckhart’s death was lost. But Walter Senner discovered that a seventeenth-century Dominican source noted that Eckhart was remembered in German convents on January 28,102 so we can surmise that he died on that day in 1328—the same day on which the Catholic calender now celebrates the feast of his illustrious predecessor Thomas Aquinas.

On March 27, 1329, Pope John issued the bull “In agro dominico,” an unusual step, since Eckhart was already dead and he was not being personally condemned as a heretic.103 Doubtless the pope’s fear of growing mystical heresy and pressure from his ally Henry II had convinced him to bring the case to a definitive conclusion. It has often been said that John XXII tempered the condemnation of Eckhart’s articles by restricting the circulation of the bull to the province of Cologne, but Robert E. Lerner has shown that this is not the case—a copy of the document was also sent to Mainz, and there is evidence of a vernacular version from Strasbourg.104 Pope John obviously meant to quash Eckhart’s influence decisively, as the personally defamatory language used in the preface to the text clearly shows.

The bull witnesses to papal fears of Eckhart’s vernacular theology by expressly noting that his errors were “put forth especially before the uneducated crowd in his sermons.” Strangely enough, although the Avignon Votum treated all twenty-eight articles as heretical, “In agro dominico” divides the list into three groups: the first fifteen containing “the error or stain of heresy as much from the tenor of their words as from the sequence of their thoughts”; a second group of eleven, which are judged “evil-sounding and very rash and suspect of heresy, though with many explanations and additions they might take on or possess a catholic meaning”; and two appended articles, which Eckhart had denied saying (though they certainly reflect passages in his works), which are also judged heretical. We do not know if this confusing distinction between the heretical and the merely dangerous articles was introduced by the pope himself, or at some other stage in the process. Finally, at the end of the bull the pope absolves Eckhart himself of heresy, noting that on the basis of a public document, “the aforesaid Eckhart . . . professed the catholic faith at the end of his life and revoked and also deplored the twenty-six articles, which he admitted that he had preached, . . . insofar as they could generate in the minds of the faithful a heretical opinion, or one erroneous and hostile to the faith.” So Eckhart, even at the end of his life, maintained his integrity through the invocation of an inquantum that the pope either let pass or did not catch.

CHAPTER 2

Approaching Eckhart Controversies and Perspectives

THE CONDEMNATION OF ECKHART is the most powerful but by no means the only reason he has proven controversial down through the centuries. At the present time, when even Pope John Paul II has quoted the Dominican theologian with approval,1