INTRODUCTION: Meister Eckhart’s Influence/The Purpose and Nature of This Book/Eckhart’s Times and Our Own/Eckhart’s Life/Theological Influences on Eckhart’s Spirituality/Principal Themes in Eckhart’s Spirituality/How to Read This Book/Acknowledgments

Meister Eckhart of Hochheim (c. 1260–c. 1329) is a spiritual theologian whose time has come. Condemned posthumously by a papal decree issued on March 27, 1329, his profoundly this-worldly spirituality went underground where it fed many of the most significant movements of Western cultural and intellectual history.

Meister Eckhart’s Influence

In Germany, his disciples and brother Dominicans Henry Suso and John Tauler drew extensively from his thinking even after his condemnation. Nicholas of Cusa in the fifteenth century commented on Meister Eckhart’s works and Martin Luther in the sixteenth drew heavily from Eckhart by way of John Tauler, whom, as Hoffman points out,¹ Luther admired unwaveringly from his youth to his final days. Lutheran mystic Jakob Boehme (1575–1629) owed much to Eckhart, as did the radical mystic-politician Thomas Munzer, who was born in the same German province as both Eckhart and Luther. In England, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing as well as Walter Hilton and especially Julian of Norwich demonstrate a significant debt to Meister Eckhart. The work of seventeenth-century Polish mystic-poet Angelus Silesius has been called a “seventeenth-century edition of Eckhart” and the fourteenth-century Flemish mystic Jan van Ruysbroeck was influenced by him. “We can be sure,” says scholar Jeanne Ancelet-Hustache, “that through the intermediary of the Flemish mystics, Eckhart’s thought had anonymously found its way even to Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross” since the Spanish dominated the Netherlands and the exchange of ideas was a regular one between the two countries. Ignatius of Loyola is recognized to have known Eckhart’s theology² and his brother Jesuit Peter Canisius, who edited John Tauler’s works in 1543, also was indebted to Eckhart. Saint Paul of the Cross, founder of the Passionist Order in the eighteenth century, owed much to Eckhart’s spirituality. Modern philosophy, as represented by the nineteenth-century romantic idealist Friedrich Schelling and the philosopher of evolving spirit, Hegel, admits an indebtedness to Eckhart. Likewise Marxist scholars like Erich Fromm and Ernst Bloch invoke Eckhart as a forerunner of the spirit of Karl Marx.³ Twentieth-century philosopher Martin Heidegger not only calls Eckhart a “master of letter and life” but took one of the words Eckhart invented, Gelassenheit (“letting be”), as a title for an address delivered in his homeland in 1955. Asian scholars like Dr. D. T. Suzuki speak of the “closeness of Meister Eckhart’s way of thinking to that of Mahayana Buddhism, especially of Zen Buddhism” and Professor S. Ueda in Kyoto, Japan, says that Eckhart breaks “the sound barrier of the normal intellectual world of Christianity and thereby enters into the world of Zen.” Catholic monk Thomas Merton agrees, saying that “whatever Zen may be, however you define it, it is somehow there in Eckhart.” Merton confesses to having been “entranced” by Meister Eckhart, and it can be documented that his conversion from being a romantic, dualistic, and Augustinian-minded monk in the fifties to being a prophetic Christian in the sixties occurred while he was studying Zen and Meister Eckhart.⁴ Hindu scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy compares Eckhart to Vedantist traditions. Quaker mystic Rufus Jones acknowledges a debt to Eckhart as well he should, for Quaker founder George Fox is in many ways Eckhartian-influenced (for example, his notion of the “spark of the soul” seems more than coincidentally like Fox’s “inner light”). Josiah Royce and Rudolf Otto also revived Eck-hartian studies outside of Christian theological circles. Psychologist C. G. Jung confessed that Eckhart offered him the “key” to opening the way to grasp what liberation means in a psychological context. Wrote Jung:

The art of letting things happen, action through non-action, letting go of oneself, as taught by Meister Eckhart, became for me the key opening the door to the way. We must be able to let things happen in the psyche. For us, this actually is an art of which few people know anything. Consciousness is forever interfering . . .⁵

In twentieth-century American letters, writers Saul Bellow, John Updike, and Annie Dillard, as well as spiritual seekers such as Anne Monow Lindbergh, Alan Watts, and Intensive Journal guru Ira Progoff, have made extensive use of Meister Eckhart.

Who is this person who has attracted monks and Marxists, philosophers and psychologists, Zen thinkers and Hindu scholars, Polish poets and American novelists? Why this universalist appeal in Meister Eckhart? Is Meister Eckhart’s a spirituality that is uniquely suited for an age of the global village and of ecumenism of all world religions? I harbor my own answers to these questions, but the purpose of this book is to allow students of Meister Eckhart to answer these questions for themselves.

Up to now this has not been possible for English-speaking persons since the publications of Eckhart’s works have been either unreliable or unavailable to most English-speaking readers. I speak of course of the only American edition still in circulation, that by Raymond Blakney (Harper Torchbooks) which was translated from uncritical German editions in 1941 and which contains three sermons that are not Eckhart’s at all, along with numerous non-Eckhartian sentences. Anyone who has tried to teach a course on Eckhart would surely be frustrated, as I have been, by having to work with this, the only edition of Eckhart’s writings available to English-speaking readers. Other translations in English, those of Field, of Evans, of Clark, and of Clark and Skinner, are out of print and have been for some time. Furthermore, the reliability of all but Clark and Clark/Skinner is seriously in doubt as the Gennan critical editions of Eckhart’s works were not available until recent years. The first critical text of Eckhart’s German works appeared under the careful editing of Franz Pfeiffer in 1857; his Latin works (which comprise half of Eckhart’s writings and which were entirely ignored by the papal court that tried Eckhart) were not published until 1886 by the Dominican scholar Henry Suso Denifle. In our times the critical works of the Latin and German writings have been steadily emerging, beginning in Rome in 1934 and continuing in Stuttgart in 1936. Four volumes in each language are now available, leaving only one volume to go in each language. The principal editors of this task have been Joseph Koch and Josef Quint, until their recent deaths.

Purpose and Nature of This Book

The purpose of this volume, then, is to bring to English readers a reliable and readable text of Eckhart’s sermons and writings. It is by no means a complete collection—that would take several volumes. I have not picked sermons at random, however. For I, as a spiritual theologian, have another purpose in presenting this work to an English-speaking audience. It is to link Eckhart once again, and ourselves as well, to the mainstream of biblical spirituality. As brief as they are, my commentaries, I believe, offer a start along this important path. For I am absolutely convinced that the real victim in Eckhart’s condemnation has not been Eckhart—he had lived a full, biblical, prophetic life and, in fact, died before his official condemnation—but the history of Christian spirituality. Creation-centered spirituality, the spiritual tradition that is the most Jewish, the most biblical, the most prophetic, and the most like the kind Jesus of Nazareth preached and lived, has been almost lost in the West since Eckhart’s condemnation. In place of this spirituality of blessing and of passing on a blessing to others by way of justice and compassion, we have often been fed introverted, anti-artistic, anti-intellectual, apolitical, sentimental, dualistic, ascetic, and in many ways masochistic spirituality parading as Christian spirituality. As Professor Thomas F. O’Meara points out in his excellent article on the influence of Meister Eckhart, the very questions we have asked of spirituality and even of Eckhart have been strictly questions of a “post-Ignatian kind of spirituality of meditation.” This is evident in P. Pourrat’s history of spirituality and in the “outdated and unscholarly narrowness” of the article on Eckhart for English-speaking readers in the New Catholic Encyclopedia. The devotio moderna as represented, for example, by Thomas à Kempis, is profoundly sentimental and thus utterly unlike Eckhart, who is as different from the devotio moderna as justice is from righteousness, as true compassion is from sentimentalism, as passion is from repression, as dialectic is from dualism, as celebration and harmonious living are from ascetic dualisms, as creativity is from puny-minded control, as art is from religious entertainment. Yes, the condemnation of Eckhart left Christian spirituality so bereft of its sound rooting in Scripture that commentators on Eckhart, when there have been any at all, have in great measure missed the point of Eckhart’s life and works. Many of them, being deprived of a theological grounding that included Scripture, have argued incessantly over whether Eckhart is an Aristotelian or a Platonist. He is neither. He is a biblical theologian, a biblical preacher, a biblical spiritual thinker. True, he is not narrow in his understanding of what biblical means—”every creature is a word of God” he declares—and so he is indeed steeped in the philosophical traditions of the West as we shall see. Primarily, however, he is a biblical theologian and this fact has been either missed or skirted over by even the best of commentators on Eckhart. Scholar Jeanne Ancelet-Hustache warns that Eckhart is “even more misunderstood than actually unknown” in the West⁶ and she is correct The main reason for this misunderstanding has been Christian spirituality’s ignoring of its biblically rooted tradition of creation-centered spirituality. With this ignorance, much in Eckhart has been misunderstood or even forgotten; for example, his social consciousness and the prominent place he gives compassion in his understanding of the spiritual journey (see Path Four). In place of Eckhart’s creation spirituality, the West has had at times an anti-creation spirituality, as, for example, in this statement by the immensely influential Thomas à Kempis: “If you look at creation the Creator withdraws from you.”⁷

The second dimension and purpose to this book, then, in addition to laying out Eckhart’s writings in a reliable translation, is found in the commentaries. These commentaries, though they represent only an introduction to Eckhart’s spiritual theology, nevertheless represent an introduction that has been sorely absent in an appreciation of Eckhart. One reason for this lacuna has been the condemnation of Eckhart by church authorities, which in effect left Eckhart to be studied and kept alive either by the philosophical tradition of the West (thank you, philosophers!), or by the more radical spiritual movers who often found themselves ostracized from the mainstream of Christianity (thank you, George Fox, Thomas Munzer, et al.!). Another reason for this lacuna has been the sorry state of theology and spiritual theology which has been called, believe it or not, “ascetic theology” from the seventeenth century to today in some circles—Eckhart would be outraged at such a term (see Path Two). A spiritual theology that divorces itself from Scripture will never understand Eckhart, will never grasp how it is that compassion is more important to his spiritual way than contemplation, will never appreciate his love of life, of nature, of animals, of the body, of music, of art, or of justice. There is no room for sentimentalism in true biblical thinking nor in Eckhart’s theology; sentimentalists must leave their fears of intellect, of passion, of body, of art, of body politic, of the feminine side of God, of the earth, of this life, of death if they want to enter into Eckhart’s spiritual vision—a vision so biblical that the Christian West barely understands it as spirituality. Thus the commentaries in this volume represent a link between Eckhart’s sermons and the biblical and theological basis behind his thought. Probably eighty per cent of the commentaries is either Eckhart’s words gathered from other sermons or writings or biblical texts that Eckhart himself points to as basic to his thinking. I genuinely believe that you will look long and hard in contemporary spirituality and in the past six centuries of Christian spirituality to find any writer who has so profoundly integrated biblical theology and spirituality, prophecy and mysticism, faith and reason, art and life. That is my opinion; I invite the reader to judge for herself or himself.

In this important matter of recovering the biblical in Eckhart’s thought, I have my own tale to tell. For years I resisted reading Eckhart because numerous commentators on Eckhart had told me that he was basically a Neoplatonic mystic. From my own experience, coming of age in the sixties in the midst of the moral and spiritual decadence of Western civilization as represented, for example, by the Vietnam War, and from my studies at the Institut catholique in Paris where Thomas Merton urged me to go in my pursuit of an overview of the history of Western spirituality, I became absolutely convinced that more Neoplatonism was the last thing the West needed. More dualisms of soul vs body, of male vs. female, of intellect vs. creativity, of mysticism vs. politics, were the last categories with which to renew spirituality. It was the biblical tradition as represented by creation theology of the Hebrew Bible, by the prophets and by Jesus, that I was looking for and that I believed many in our times were looking for. This conviction underlay all the publishing I did and all the developing of my spiritual theology since, beginning with the publication of my doctoral thesis on culture and spirituality, Religion U.S.A. It found expression in my study of an adult and critical understanding of prayer, On Becoming a Musical, Mystical Bear; and then in my study on the everyday experience of mysticism in a prophetic context, WHEE! We, wee All the Way Home. It was after publishing that book that I discovered Eckhart for myself.

One winter evening during a break in semesters, I sat down with Coomaraswamy’s book Art and Spirituality and started to read his chapter on Meister Eckhart. I was dumbfounded—in fact scared—when I read whole sentences in Eckhart that I had published in WHEE! and in an article on sacred space and sacred time that I had recently completed. So unnerved was I that I returned Coomaraswamy’s book to the shelf unfinished. Three months later I returned to finish the Eckhart essay. On doing so I found still more lines in Eckhart that I had published myself over the years in my search for an authentic, biblical, and prophetic spirituality. Here, I realized, was not just one more Neoplatonist; here was a brother not only in the sense of a Dominican brother but in the wider sense of a companion for myself and as many others of our time who wanted to take a biblical spiritual journey. In my most recent book, A Spirituality Named Compassion, Eckhart plays a prominent and explicit part, for among all theologians the Christian West has produced, he is among the few for whom “compassion” is an operative, indeed crucial, category. This may be seen in Path Four of the present book.

And so, the second purpose of this volume is to introduce the Eckhartian scholar to Eckhart’s biblical presuppositions. It is also to introduce students and livers of Christian spirituality to these same biblical roots in Eckhart and, hopefully, in one’s own journey. One reason that Eckhart’s biblical genius has been so easily glossed over is that biblical thinking is so taken for granted by him. He was a preacher, after all, and his sermons, both Latin and German, take biblical texts and comment on them. Furthermore, he integrates texts in a thoroughly nonproof-like manner into all of his talks and sermons. Above all, he has a theology—a creation-centered theology—as we shall see later, that is profoundly biblical and that constantly feeds him as he nourishes his listeners on it at the same time. I attempt an introduction to Eckhart’s biblical theology in my commentaries which accompany each sermon. The result, I believe, offers to the reader a process of experiencing Eckhart in his sermon, analyzing his thought in the commentary, and, I hope, returning to the sermon to reexperience Eckhart at a deeper level. His spirituality took for granted a thorough rootedness in the Scriptures and biblical theology. This same presupposition, I am sorry to say, cannot be taken for granted by the majority of spiritual writers or commentators since Eckhart’s time. We must make an explicit effort to regain the integration of Scripture and spirituality that Eckhart could take for granted. This is as much a demand on contemporary exegetes, who so often get lost in a forest of language studies and minutiae, never coming up for the light of day that surrounds the rest of us, as it is a demand on spiritual journeyers who imagine they can root themselves solely in their own private experiences, oblivious of the tradition that the Bible represents. Eckhart, being the artist he was and the theologian he was, could not have imagined the dualisms that so occupy church people today: dualisms between academic exegetes, for example, and the everyday believer; or between members of what Father William Callahan calls “the religious multi-nationals,” who alone can afford such extravagances as thirty-day retreats or daily liturgies, and the lay believer. Eckhart, in contrast, insists that God and humans are already joined; they are already in intimate contact. The only obstacle is on the human side. Our consciousness and our language and our institutions remain too dualistic to realize this very Good News, however

I should emphasize the essential modesty of this book. Entire books, such as Reiner Schürmann’s Meister Eckhart: Mystic and Philosopher, have been written as a commentary on only four of Eckhart’s sermons. In this volume there are thirty-seven sermons with thirty-seven commentaries! Clearly, the commentaries presented are by no means the last word. It is comforting to this author, however, to realize that there will never be a last word spoken on Eckhart any more than there will be on Mozart. So thoroughly an artist is Eckhart, so profound a poet as well as a thinker, that we can only point to some directions and then urge readers to make their own journeys. This I try to do in the commentaries, and for this reason I reemphasize that this book is a process. I believe that at this stage of spiritual consciousness in the West and at this stage of Eckhartian scholarship, a book that offers a process approach to Eckhart represents an appropriate methodology to pursue. Furthermore, I believe Eckhart, who was himself primarily a preacher, would heartily approve of a process approach to his very experientially based thinking and theology. There is something unnerving about inhaling too much of academic approaches to a poet-preacher like Eckhart. Too much analysis, too much dissecting, too much of the left side of the brain can kill this holistic and experiential lover of life and depth, who himself waged war all his life against bigness, impersonalness, and structures, whether internal or external, which interfered with the expansion of the person. Norman O. Brown has commented that the only authentic way to criticize poetry is with poetry; in an analogous way, the way to respond to a true mystic is with mysticism. Since Eckhart is a poet and a mystic, I hope that the reader of Eckhart will respond with art and mysticism—dance, for example, or music—and I hope that my simple commentaries may in some way inspire such responses. I think Eckhart would be eager to join such a dance.

In order to facilitate the process that reading Eckhart must necessarily be, I have structured this book and the sermons chosen for it in a very deliberate manner. The fourfold path of Eckhart’s spiritual journey forms the structure around which I have chosen sermons and ordered them. As far as I know, this is the first time that a structure has been followed in collecting Eckhart’s sermons. We will never know their chronological ordering but we can, I believe, by a careful analysis of his spiritual theology detect the path of spiritual journeying that is his. It is not a journey up a ladder but a spiral of expanding consciousness that has no limits. I have published in a recent article⁸ the basis for my coming to the naming of this fourfold path in Meister Eckhart’s journey and that article forms the structure for this book. Briefly, the paths are as follows:

One: The experience of God in creation.

Two: The experience of God by letting go and letting be.

Three: The experience of God in breakthrough and giving birth to Self and God.

Four: The experience of God by way of compassion and social justice.

These four paths along Eckhart’s spiritual way are taken from Eckhart’s own language and theology. They comprise the divisions of this book. I have chosen from the wealth of Eckhart’s sermons and commentaries and treatises those which most seemed to enunciate his insights about these ways. The arranging of the sequence of the sermons is also deliberate on my part. The titles I have given the sermons and the subtitles I have given the commentaries shed light on the gradual process of growth in Eckhartian language and experience that this book is about. There is a precedent in Blakney for my renaming Eckhart’s sermons, although I feel he did a singularly bad job of it. My titles and subtitles are taken wherever possible directly from Eckhart’s words themselves, and where this is not possible because of the evolution of language, they are taken directly from his spiritual theology. Since I am the first Christian spiritual theologian since the fifteenth century to comment on Eckhart, I do not apologize for the directions I invite the reader to take by way of my titling his sermons and commentaries. They are, as it were, signposts along the journey. For I honestly do believe that the person who has made this journey with Eckhart and myself will experience not only Eckhart but the creation spirituality tradition that he so richly represents. The indices—the Index of Scriptural References and the Index of Spirituality Themes—are meant to assist the serious student in making once again a biblically based and creation-centered spiritual journey.

Eckhart’s Times and Ours

One of the most significant and telling dimensions to reading Meister Eckhart is appreciating the turbulent times in which he lived and from which he refused to escape Indeed, it was his throwing his lot in with the oppressed of his day—with lower-class women in the Beguine movement, with the peasants to whom he insisted on preaching in their own vernacular tongue, with the movements of church and social reform—that eventually got him condemned. The times in which Eckhart lived, times of institutional decadence and corruption of language and church and of a widening rift between haves and have-nots, have been described in a recent and best-selling study by Barbara Tuchman, entitled A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. Her thesis in that book is found in the title, A Distant Mirror, for Tuchman believes that the fourteenth century with its apocalyptic upheavals, its blatant social sins, and its potential for creativity does indeed mirror our own times. If Tuchman’s analysis is correct, then the study of the finest mind and the most profound artist of that century may well shed light on the needs of our own time, for all spirituality is culturally influenced. Following are four aspects that marked the cultural setting of Eckhart’s adult years. The reader can judge for himself or herself whether a certain “distant mirror” is set up apropos of the cultural revolution we know so well in our time.

1. A population explosion. Especially in the Rhineland area where Eckhart was established in Strassburg and then in Cologne, there was a population boom.⁹ The economics of these areas had expanded in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries but were now contracting as the population expanded. Bad crops and a weather change caused the period to be known as the “Little Ice Age” (the Baltic Sea froze both in 1303 and in 1306–7) and forced a considerable reduction in the growing season. Notes Tuchman: “This meant disaster, for population increase in the last century had already reached a delicate balance with agricultural techniques . . . the clearing of productive land had already been pushed to its limits.”¹⁰ Floods from torrential rains in 1315 also forced crop failures and widespread famine. A consequence of an increase in population with a decrease in economic necessities and especially of food and shelter in a worsening climate was predictable: the few rich got richer and the many poor got poorer and increased in numbers. The nobles were driven to marrying non-nobles and were often thrown into bankruptcy.¹¹ Tuchman characterizes the situation as follows:

Division of rich and poor became increasingly sharp. With control of the raw materials and tools of production, the owners were able to reduce wages in classic exploitation. The poor . . . felt a sense of injustice that, finding no remedy, grew into a spirit of revolt.

The “spirit of revolt” was aggravated by the need for more room and more space that a burgeoning population began to feel. As Tuchman puts it, the “size of population affects studies of everything else—taxes, life expectancy, commerce and agriculture, famine or plenty.”¹² Some persons found the limits to physical expansion a matrix for spiritual or consciousness expansion so that the most burgeoning area of population increase, the Rhineland area, was itself the womb for the mystical movement that found so articulate a spokesman in Meister Eckhart.¹³ This fact suggests a tantalizing lesson: that physical limits can produce spiritual unlimits. The reduction of physical frontiers and their contraction can either give birth to the expansion of consciousness frontiers or produce still more violence, or both.

2. Corruption in high places. A second evident movement that characterized these troubled times was the rapid demise of credibility of the institutions of the day. An example that Tuchman develops is that of knighthood. Once considered the protectors of the people, the defenders of the weak, knights were now part of the problems and not the solutions of the time. “In practice, they [the knights] were themselves the oppressors, and by the fourteenth century the violence and lawlessness of the sword had become a major agency of disorder. When the gap between the ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.” This breakdown of the system was in evidence in every institution because, as Tuchman observes, “the presiding values of chivalry did not change, but the system was in its decadence.”¹⁴ The church was by no means exempt from this decadence. Institutional greed, apathy, and corruption abounded there as elsewhere. Fourteenth-century saints like Catherine of Siena and Birgitta are notorious for their lamentations at ecclesial decadence. As Birgitta put it, “fear of God is thrown away and in its place is a bottomless bag of money.” The Ten Commandments were now reduced to one: “Bring hither the money.” From 1309 to well beyond Eckhart’s death the papacy settled in Avignon. Tuchman describes the central headquarters of Christendom at that time:

Avignon became a virtual temporal state of sumptuous pomp, of great cultural attraction, and of unlimited simony—that is, the selling of offices. Diminished by its removal from the Holy See of Rome and by being generally regarded as a tool of France, the papacy sought to make up prestige and power in temporal terms . . . Everything the Church had or was, from cardinal’s hat to pilgrim’s relic, was for sale . . . To obtain a conferred benefice, a bishop or abbot greased the palms of the Curia for his nomination . . . Money could buy any kind of dispensation: to legitimize children, of which the majority were those of priests and prelates . . . Younger sons of noble families were repeatedly appointed to archbishoprics at eighteen, twenty, or twenty-two. Tenures were short because each preferment brought in another payment.¹⁵

Priests often could not read or write and made no effort to educate themselves; a Spanish Curia official reported seeing money brokers and clergy in the papal palace “engaged in reckoning money which lay in heaps before them.” Pope John XXII, who was to condemn Eckhart, bought for his own use forty pieces of gold cloth from Damascus for 1,276 gold florins and had a personal wardrobe worth 7,500 florins annually, which included among other items his own ermine-trimmed pillow. The century was to end with there being not one but two and then three popes (1378–1409).

The secular government was not much healthier. For nineteen years—from 1254 to 1273—Germany’s empire had no emperor. This interregnum period marked the beginning of the end of the imperial idea and the rise of particularism in Germany. In 1282, on Easter Monday, the “Sicilian Vespers” occurred in Sicily. French men, women, and children were massacred there and national passions were aroused by this event as never before all over Europe. Church-State confrontations reached a new high in ferocity, a new low in morality during the reign of Philip IV. Philip IV of France, who reigned from 1285 to 1313 (this covers the years Eckhart was in Paris), challenged the papacy in rather direct terms: he had one pope killed, another poisoned, and a third completely cowed. He expelled Jews, destroyed the Knights Templar, confiscating their riches.¹⁶ Clearly, society’s governing institutions were a far cry from those of the saintly Louis IX of France (1214–1270), who was canonized in 1297. Less than ten years after Eckhart’s death the One Hundred Years’ War between England and France would break out. And in less than twenty years the Black Death would swipe its way through society, leveling a good thirty-five per cent of the population.

Academia was not in such good straits either, depending as it did on both papal support and government nonintervention. Scholasticism, which in its time had been an awakening and enlightening influence, a movement imported to Christian theology from Islamic tradition and a method for critical thinking about faith, was, like so much else in the culture, on the decline. Gone were the great minds of spirited thinkers of courage and daring such as Albert the Great (d. 1280), Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), Bonaventure (d. 1274). Gone was much of the creative thinking that had made the age of Scholasticism an exciting time to live through. What was left was very often stark method, rehearsed answers to rehearsed questions, boredom and dullness and a rising anti-intellectualism. Even the language for thought, Latin, was on the decline and the newer images and creative ideas were being birthed in the new languages of Dante’s Italian, Sister Mechtild of Magdeburg’s German, and, in the latter half of the fourteenth century, Chaucer’s English. There was a need, indeed a demand, for a new language that would be freer of the structural suppositions behind the decadent language of the schools that prevailed. Eckhart did not shirk this responsibility to contribute to a new language, as is clear from the fact that half of his extant works are in the German peasant vernacular of his day. Nor was he oblivious of the political ramifications of opting for the new language and the new social classes of poor who sought self-expression. Indeed, he could not be oblivious of this social dimension even if he tried, for he was three times accused, twice at his trial and once beforehand, of confusing the “simple people” by preaching in their own tongue in preference to the Latin tongue of entrenched academic privilege. Indeed, the fact that Eckhart gravitated more toward preaching and counseling than toward teaching might be taken as a subtle rebuke of academia in favor of new ways to educate. Henry Suso, a young disciple of Eckhart, observed that most students of theology entered academia in order to make more money. Eckhart was first and foremost a preacher—that is, an artist Here lies the key to his language, his ambiguity, and his genius. He lived in a time of the end of a culture and, as Charles Fair has pointed out, at such a time language is lost and the very meaning of “soul” is lost. Eckhart sought all his life for new images, new names for “soul.” At one time he says that the soul, like God, is “ineffable” and cannot be named. At another time he says that soul is the space where God works compassion (see Sermons Six, Seven, Ten, Thirteen, and Thirty-one).

Eckhart’s thinking is dialectical and so, of course, his language is paradoxical, even shocking at times. As Norman O. Brown indicates, “dialectical language always includes paradox” and “paradox is shocking.”¹⁷ Eckhart’s problem as an artist-teacher was this: How do you talk about eternal life having already begun? What language do you choose for the really Good News? How do you announce the end of the collective and individual quest for immortality and the beginning of resurrected life? He turned to the music of symbols and poetry to express his deeply felt experiences. His inquisitors, the literalists of yesterday as well as the rationalists of today, will not be able to hear his music, eager as they are to judge and not to listen. Did they have a better language? I doubt it, for such persons have not learned to be open enough (to “let go” in Eckhart’s terminology) to experience the depths from which authentic language is born. Jesus the preacher spoke like Eckhart the preacher when he said: “Let those who have ears to hear, hear, and eyes to see, see” Like the artist that he was, and gifted with a sense of poetry, Eckhart sought in his German sermons to give birth to the God beyond God, the values beyond culture’s forgotten values, thinking beyond academia, images beyond what the world had to give. It was not for nothing that he prayed, “I pray God to rid me of God.”

3. Radical movements. In such a period of cultural upheaval and social disintegration many persons who cared became disillusioned with the structures that were failing so many and with institutional leaders who nevertheless clung to their own privilege and power. Some of the movements that emerged as groupings of these disillusioned yet caring persons were the Pastoureaux, the Beguines and Beghards, witches, mystical sects, and, toward the end of the century, the religious reformers John Wycliffe in England (d. 1384) and Jan Hus in Bohemia (d. 1415). The Pastoureaux rebellion began as a movement of rural persons and shepherds, as Tuchman explains:

In 1320 the misery of the rural poor in the wake of the famines burst out in a strange hysterical mass movement called the Pastoureaux, for the shepherds who started it . . . The Pastoureaux spread the fear of insurrection that freezes the blood of the privileged in any era when the mob appears.¹⁸

These persons, like the Beguines and Beghards who were working-class women and men who sought a religious life in common while working for their living with their hands, were excommunicated by John XXII, who was also to condemn Eckhart. We will discuss the Beguines in greater detail below in considering the influences on Eckhart’s thinking. John XXII equated sorcerers with heretics and ordered their books burned, but it was King Philip IV’s use of the charge of black magic and black arts against the Knights Templar that raised the art of torturing accused witches to a new level of sadism. By the end of the century witchcraft would become one more refuge for the growing numbers of disenfranchised persons, especially elderly women. In spite of papal condemnations, mystical sects like the Spiritual Franciscans, inspired by Joachim of Floris, and the Brethren of the Free Spirit flourished from the end of the thirteenth century right up to the Black Death calamity in the middle of the fourteenth century. Indeed, the year 1260, the year of Eckhart’s birth, saw the burgeoning of visionaries following the prophecy of Joachim, who preached penance all over southern France, and hordes of flagellants flowed through Italy, Southern Germany, and Bohemia, lacerating their bodies in a spirit of self-abuse and remorse.

4. A spirit of despair, guilt, and the end times. A sense of frustration grew into a sense of hopelessness and despair that began to take over much of the human spirit at this time of “eschatological heave” (to borrow Norman Mailer’s expression for America in the late sixties). A world was indeed coming to an end—the world of papal and temporal power equitably balanced; a world of intellectual integrity and creativity; a world of economic solidarity and development; a world of institutional credibility; a world of common values mythologized in knighthood, religious life, or law; a world of a common, shared language. A certain death wish accompanied by guilt feelings was abroad. Barbara Tuchman says: “The sense of a vanishing future created a kind of dementia of despair.” Granted, the Black Death two decades after Eckhart’s death would add considerably to this guilt-ridden spirit and this feeling of hopelessness. But the seeds for this profound spiritual frustration were already sown during the events of Eckhart’s own lifetime. Married people questioned whether they wanted to bring children into such a world at all, animals lay dead all around, the work force was decimated. “Only a profound materialism and cynicism could have permitted the placing of Robert of Geneva in the chair of Saint Peter” as the Antipope Clement VII, Tuchman comments, since Robert of Geneva, known as the “butcher of Cesena,” had allowed his troops to slaughter between 2,500 and 5,000 citizens of that town over a period of three days and three nights.¹⁹ Saint Catherine of Siena’s response to this election was to cry out that “the poison of selfishness destroys the world.” Apocalyptic plays abounded no less than apocalyptic movies in our own times, for they seemed to image the doom and emptiness that society and psychic instability were bent on foreseeing. At least one observer of these times blamed the guilt on the social conditions that spawned such destitution. Giovanni Villani of Florence lay the reasons for the Black Death at the feet of human inhumanity to humanity. These sins were “the sins of avarice and usury that oppressed the poor. Pity and anger about the condition of the poor, especially victimization of the peasantry in war, was often expressed by writers of the time and was certainly on the conscience of the century.”²⁰

These four movements were pillars of the ravaged period through which Eckhart lived and which he tried to influence. No monk he, Eckhart lived in the midst of all this upheaval, a student in France, a preacher in Germany, a vicar general in Bohemia. Tuchman summarizes the spirit of those times. It was, she says, a “violent, tormented, bewildered, suffering and disintegrating age, a time, as many thought, of Satan triumphant.” And she draws her own parallel with today: “If our last decade or two of collapsing assumptions has been a period of unusual discomfort, it is reassuring to know that the human species has lived through worse before.” Reiner Schürmann has summarized Eckhart’s vocation as preacher in the midst of societal upheaval. Preaching is:

the literary form chosen by Meister Eckhart. It is not accidental that he was a preacher . . . His preaching urges our freedom to commit itself upon a path which, from the being of provenance or from the creatures’ nothingness, leads to the being of imminence or to the Godhead’s nothingness. Being as coming forth is encountered first of all in the preached word itself.²¹

Such were the times that formed Eckhart and that he influenced as he could. The readers can judge for themselves if, as Tuchman believes, there are some noteworthy parallels to our own day.

Eckhart’s Life

How was Eckhart prepared for his destiny with socio-spiritual upheaval? The basic facts of Eckhart’s life as we have come to ascertain them are as follows. He was born about 1260 in the province of Thuringia, the home province of Saint Elizabeth (1207–1231), who did so much for the poor there, and the Beguine mystic Mechtild of Magdeburg (1210–1297). It was also the home province of Martin Luther, who would follow two centuries later. As a young man, Eckhart joined the Dominican Order at Erfurt, near his native village of Hochheim. Today both Hochheim and Erfurt are in East Germany. Since Eckhart’s family was one of knights, it is worthwhile to speculate if one of the important sources of Eckhart’s radicalization was not the awareness of the corruption in this once-proud institution. From this awareness there grew within him a freedom and courage to question even the skeletons in his own background. He never lost this capacity for radical criticism, which means criticism of one’s own institutions and not just others’. Indeed, he incorporates such an attitude as an integral dimension to the spiritual journey (see Path Two).

Eckhart went through the ordinary training for a Dominican preacher of the times, which included a year’s novitiate, two years of studying the Divine Office and the Constitutions of the Order, five years of philosophy and three years of theology—the first year given over to biblical studies and the next two to Peter Lombard’s Sentences. Showing more promise for intellectual aptitude than the average recruit, Eckhart was sent to the studium generate located in Cologne for his advanced studies. This school had been founded in 1248 by none other than the great master, Albert. His spirit must have been richly present when Eckhart arrived apparently just a few months before Master Albert’s death in 1280. In 1293 Eckhart was sent to Paris for the first of three sojourns there. In a university sermon preached at Easter, 1294, he refers to Albert the Great in a manner that suggests he had studied directly under him for a brief period before his death. After returning to Germany in 1294 he was elected prior at Erfurt and appointed vicar of the province of Thuringia. Around the turn of the century he returned to Paris, where in 1302 he accepted the same chair of theology that Thomas Aquinas had occupied, namely, that reserved for a non-Frenchman. Professor at Saint Jacques and teacher at the University of Paris, he was henceforth to be known as “Master [German: Meister] Eckhart.” What did Eckhart find in the University of Paris at the turn of the century?

Jeanne Ancelet-Hustache describes the meaning of Paris in Eckhart’s day: “Rome had the Pope, Germany the empire; but in the heritage of Charlemagne, France was no less favored, having been accorded this other, intellectual sovereignty.”²² The Dominicans had planted themselves in Paris and at the hub of intellectual activity within a year of their official organization as an Order. Since September 1217, they had lived there, settling near the Porte Saint Jacques at the south end of the city. The priory where Eckhart lived had also been home to Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great before him, and Saint Dominic, the founder of this movement of preachers in touch with the intellectual currents of their day, had stayed there in his Parisian visit of 1219. The principal conflict of Eckhart’s time, like that of the preceding half century at the University of Paris, was that between the Augustinian spiritual philosophy and that of the Aristotelians. Augustine’s Neoplatonism had dominated Christian theology in the West for centuries. Aristotle’s more in-the-world, nature-based, moderate realism was considered avant-garde, an upstart, a dangerous incursion of reason into faith by many of the guardians of the status quo ever since Abélard introduced Aristotelian dialectical methodology in the twelfth century. Thomas Aquinas’ last act in Paris had been to defend the use of Aristotle as a tool for faith against a secularist Aristotelian, Siger of Brabant. Those theologians who like Aquinas found the “modern” Aristotle insightful and useful even for theological issues were thus fighting a two-front battle: against a dualistically oriented Augustinianism on the one hand, and against secularists who wanted only Aristotle and no faith on the other. On March 7, 1277, the Bishop of Paris, Stephen Tempier, condemned two hundred and nineteen Aristotelian theses, several of which were critical to Thomas Aquinas’ philosophical and theological thought. This was the first of three such condemnations of Aquinas’ theology that were to be delivered in Paris or at Oxford during Eckhart’s adult lifetime. This fact must never be lost sight of: that Eckhart’s intellectual career was spent under a constant cloud of condemnations of his brother Aquinas and these condemnations gave impetus to Augustinianism at both universities—for example, to Henry of Ghent, who held a theological chair at Paris from 1276 to 1292, and to Duns Scotus, professor at the University of Oxford (1300–2 and 1303–4), and Paris (1302–3 and 1304).

After a brief sojourn in Paris, Eckhart was recalled to Germany once again to assume administrative responsibilities. This time he was elected the first provincial of the newly formed Province of Saxony, a territory that covered an area from the Netherlands in the north to Prague in the east and which contained fifty convents of friars and nine houses of nuns. Since the Netherlands was the birthplace of the Beguine movement (there is still a house extant in Holland today), there is every likelihood that Eckhart’s association with this lay-oriented women’s movement dates from this period. In 1307, Eckhart was nominated vicar general of Bohemia. Bohemia, which in sixty-five years would produce the church reformer Jan Hus, was also an area of profound social and spiritual conflict and creativity. Eckhart did not spend his years as administrator as a bureaucrat sitting behind a desk; not only did he have to hike the long distances from country to country but he was constantly being educated while on the road to the various responses then emerging to the ills of his time. Eckhart did not opt for a sheltered life-style or a sheltered, exclusively academic, education. Indeed, he himself declared that life is the best teacher there is (see Sermon Thirty-four).

After this decade of education in international movements and social-spiritual and feminist spiritualities, Eckhart returned to Paris for a third time in the academic years 1311–13. At this time Eckhart conceived of a major intellectual project, that of a Work in Three Parts, the Opus Tripartitum. Most likely he never completed it. We possess today only the General Prologue and the Prologue to the first part (Opus Propositionum) and the third part, the Opus Expositionum.

A turning point in Eckhart’s career occurred upon his return to Germany in 1314. In that year he was made prior, professor, and preacher at Strassburg. That city, together with Cologne, was to occupy Eckhart’s life and work until his death. Both cities were hotbeds of the spiritual renewal movement that we know as “Rhineland mysticism.” It was here, in the midst of popular spiritual ferment, that Eckhart discovered his vocation as a preacher and a spiritual counselor. He became a popular, indeed a famous, preacher, the most renowned of his century in a century that turned to preachers more than to academicians or administrators for spiritual insight in a changing time. By 1323 Eckhart had moved to Cologne, the trade center for eastern and southern Europe and another hotbed of spiritual, economic, and political agitation. His duties included preaching and directing the Dominican studium generate where he had once studied. Within three years of Eckhart’s arrival and of the canonization of Aquinas, the Franciscan Archbishop of Cologne succumbed to rumors and envies that surfaced in the form of heretical charges against Eckhart. Eckhart appealed in this trial of 1326 to his right to be tried by a papal court. He was granted this opportunity and went to Avignon to defend himself there. As it turned out, Eckhart died after that appearance and before the papal bull In Argo Dominico of John XXII was delivered on March 27, 1329, which condemned seventeen of his propositions and labeled nine others capable of being construed as heretical. (Two articles of which he was accused were dropped when Eckhart said he had never preached them at all.) He died in good graces with the church since before his death he put in writing that he submitted his ideas to the faith of the church. The bull itself says that Eckhart

at the end of his life, confessing the Catholic faith, recanted and rejected the twenty-six Articles . . . as well as anything he had written or taught in the schools as well as in his sermons, that could produce in the minds of the faithful an heretical or erroneous sense opposed to the true faith.²³

We do not know the date of his death nor the place of it; nor do we know where he is buried. It has been speculated that he died on the way home from Avignon. Some have suggested that he died of a broken heart, knowing he was to be condemned by a church that he had served so generously for sixty-seven tumultuous years in so many demanding tasks. But the transcripts of the trial, recovered in our century by F. Pelster, suggest a different scenario altogether. They suggest a person well aware of the political dimension to his trial—a person who twice reminds his accusers that they were the types who had three times condemned Thomas Aquinas and then canonized him just three years previous. Eckhart also compared his troubles with those his fellow Dominican Master Albert had undergone. Eckhart was angry and he named envy as a key factor in his trial when he said: “I condemn and detest those errors which envious men neither can nor should impute to me . . .” He also accused his accusers of ignorance: “They regard as error whatever they fail to understand and also regard all error as heresy, whereas only obstinate addiction to error constitutes both heresy and the heretic.”²⁴ Thomas Merton has written of Eckhart’s trial:

He was a great man who was pulled down by a lot of little men who thought they could destroy him: who thought they could drag him to Avignon and have him utterly discredited. And indeed he was ruined, after his death in twenty-eight propositions which might doubtless be found somewhere in him, but which had none of his joy, his energy, his freedom . . . Eckhart did not have the kind of mind that wasted time being cautious about every comma: he trusted men to recognize that what he saw was worth seeing because it brought obvious fruits of life and joy. For him, that was what mattered.²⁵

Eckhart’s theology of letting go (see Path Two) included, in almost a psychic way, the need to let go even of one’s own condemnation. In Sermon Twenty-four, he said: “Even if God should ordain one’s condemnation so that one’s existence would not be violated, even then the person should let God take over as if it did not matter, as if one did not exist.” I wonder if Eckhart did not decide to let go of life, having lived so full a one. And whether he decided that they would—quite literally—condemn him over his own dead body. Since laughter is surely as profound an expression of letting go as there is, then Eckhart probably died laughing. We know for a fact that his sense of humor was very well developed and devoid of the sadism that most likely characterized any sense of humor his accusers possessed. For we know that Eckhart was free enough to be able to laugh at himself (see Sermon Three).

Today it is universally agreed among scholars that Eckhart was unjustly condemned. Says M. D. Knowles, “Of his radical traditionalism and orthodoxy there is no longer any doubt.”²⁶ If his accusers had bothered to read his Latin works and if they had known the history of spirituality half as thoroughly as Eckhart, they would have known this and not allowed politics to take over their judgment of the greatest spiritual theologian the West had produced up to their time. For it was not Eckhart who was the loser in this condemnation; it was the Christian church, which to this day still seeks as holistic a spiritual vision as Eckhart once had.

Theological Influences on Meister Eckhart’s Spirituality

Because Eckhart was condemned by church authorities, he has rarely been examined by spiritual theologians. Now that he is coming out of the heretical closet, however, we need to take a more critical theological look at Eckhart since by far the majority of studies on Eckhart have been undertaken by philosophers or philologists. Because Eckhart was first and foremost a theologian, it is very likely that we will never enter into his thought until we study his theology. And first this means considering the influences on his thinking, with special attention paid to the theological influences.

Eckhart was an extremely well-read person, a man hungry and passionate for ideas as his brother Dominican Thomas Aquinas had been and of whom it was said that when he was shown the Cathedral of Notre Dame for the first time by a proud and awed Parisian host, he responded simply: “I would give it all for one copy of Chrysostom’s Manuscript.” Eckhart knew what every true intellectual knows: the immense importance of ideas for peoples’ freedom, integrity, courage, and ecstasy. Eckhart knew the traditions and schools of the past He was ecumenical in his thought. His works are heavily annotated with references to Greek, Arab, and Jewish philosophers as well as the Greek and Latin Church Fathers. The three authors he cites most often are Augustine, Albert, and Thomas Aquinas. But not all these authors were of equal importance in forming Eckhart’s spirituality. Eckhart was himself an original and creative thinker and not merely an eclectic browser in the history of ideas. He was too logical to believe that all ideas are compatible or of equal merit. I believe that the following list represents in descending order the most important influences on Eckhart’s thought for understanding his spirituality.

1. The Bible and Jewish thinking. Eckhart is absolutely steeped in biblical modes of thinking and in biblical themes of spirituality. His is a theology of blessing, of the blessing that creation is. One reason that his inquisitors had so much difficulty in understanding his thought is that they were overly saturated in Scholasticism and Augustinianism and while Eckhart knew both well, he also knew their inherent weaknesses. This is one reason why he preferred to begin and end his theological thought with authentic biblical categories. An example would be his putting compassion (see Path Four) ahead of contemplation as the basic goal of spiritual journeying. Such biblical thinking has not been seen much in Christian circles since Eckhart’s time. Yet it is profoundly Jewish, profoundly biblical.²⁷

Eckhart is the finest and surest witness to his own dependence on Scripture in his spirituality. He says: “I believe more in Scripture than I do in myself.”²⁸ Again, he confesses that “the holy Scriptures make me wonder, they are so full.” The Holy Scripture is like the sea, it is so deep, says Eckhart. “No one is so wise that if he wished to probe it, he would not find something more and deeper in it.”²⁹ That Eckhart depends on the Scriptures is evident simply from reading his German sermons, which are based on scriptural texts or from studying his Latin works. One author counted over twenty scriptural texts taken from ten books of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament in just one brief exegesis of 2 Corinthians 13:11.³⁰ But Eckhart’s dependence and indeed saturation with Scripture goes far deeper than numbers of texts cited. It goes to the themes he wrestles with in the name of spirituality. It goes to the questions he asks, the questions he doesn’t ask, to the language he develops and the categories he employs. All this we will consider in the following section when we discuss the principal theological themes in Eckhart’s writings. We shall see how before all else Eckhart’s dependence on Scripture is evident in the theological themes that most occupy him—themes that form the basis of the biblical, creation-centered spiritual tradition. This tradition is light years away from that of Augustine or Thomas à Kempis. Eckhart states explicitly that his method in his preaching is to select scriptural passages and then consider them in detail and in their relation with one another (see Sermon Twenty-four). I am personally convinced that Eckhart’s insight into Scripture is that of a genius so far ahead of his time that contemporary scriptural exegetes will find much in Eckhart that they have struggled long years to discover for themselves.³¹ Indeed, Eckhart is more of a poet with the Scriptures, making connections that others have not seen, and more of a prophet with them, urging persons on to action and creativity, than a number of comfortably ensconced biblical academicians of our time.

What most influences Eckhart’s spirituality from the Hebrew Bible is the writings in the wisdom literature, including Psalms, Wisdom, Proverbs, Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), and the prophets, especially Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos. The “royal person” literature from the tenth century in ancient Israel also attracted his attention, including Genesis (12–26), 1 Kings, 2 Samuel. In the New Testament he is most indebted to Pauline doctrine of our graced sonship and divinization (cf. Rm. 8:14–29) and Johannine theology’s emphasis on the creative Word, on our divinization and our rebirth as sons of God (cf. 1 Jn. 3:1f.). There is simply no grasping of Eckhart’s message without a return to the scriptural sources and themes which nourished him so deeply. And this means a return to creation-centered spirituality, as we shall see in the following section of this introduction. Eckhart’s affinity with Jewish thinking is not restricted to the Bible, however. He calls Christ the “Great Reminder,” and it was the founder of the Jewish mystical movement of Hasidism, Baal Shem-Tov, who once said: “In remembrance resides the secret of rédemption.” There is much more to be learned by a critical study of Hasidic and other Jewish traditions in Eckhart’s writings. For example, Eckhart’s famous term “spark of the soul” has antecedents in, among other places, the medieval Jewish philosophers Isaac Ben Solomon Israeli (855–955) and Judah Halevi (1095–1145).³²

2. Thomas Aquinas and the Dominican spiritual movement. Eckhart, who joined the Dominican Order between fifteen and seventeen years of age and remained a steadfast member of it through fifty-three years of hard work, able administration, and controversial times, was imbued with Dominican spirituality. What most characterized Dominican spirituality is that it was a way of life for friars actively involved in the world—the world of the universities, towns and cities, in particular. Like his contemporary Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Dominic (1170–1221) saw the terrible spiritual malaise of his time. He attributed much of this spiritual malaise to a monastic system and spirituality that offered solace if you were a rural person and refuge from the world if you had a monastic vocation but which left the ever-increasing numbers of persons fleeing from countryside to the cities and towns, to the trade centers and to the universities, untouched. It was in this spirit of an in-the-world spirituality that the second-generation Dominican Thomas Aquinas developed a theological vision that was based not on Augustinian Neoplatonism with its suppositions about this world vs. another world and body at war with soul, but on Aristotle’s nature-centered philosophy. In many ways this option of Aquinas’ for joining the new kind of spiritual movement called the Order of Preachers was a political option—as he learned as a young man when he was put in prison by his family for choosing this upstart Order. Aquinas was a man of immense talent and of proper noble blood and his family had intended that one day he would be abbot of Monte Casino. For him to join the Dominican Order instead of the well-established Benedictines was tantamount to running away and marrying a gypsy, G. K. Chesterton has commented. When in his mature years Aquinas stood side by side with the learned Franciscan, Bonaventure, to do battle on behalf of the mendicant spiritual movement against strong and organized opposition in Paris, Aquinas surely knew once again the political implications of his choices.

In Germany the Dominican spirit was incarnated in the bigger-than-life figure of Albert the Great, who survived his most famous pupil, Thomas Aquinas, by six years and who, when Aquinas was under fire at the time of his first condemnation, hastened to Paris in a futile effort to fend off the condemnation of his brother Dominican. Albert was more partial to Platonist philosophy than was Aquinas, though in his methodology—he was an experimenter in botany and biology and in many ways a natural scientist by vocation—he was much closer to the naturalist Aristotle than the idealist Plato. Between Eckhart and Albert there stood Thomas Aquinas’ classmate at Cologne, Ulrich of Strassburg. Interestingly enough, this latter Dominican spoke of an “esse divinum per similitudinem” (“a divine isness by way of likeness”) in his Liber de Summo Bono (Book on the Highest Good). This phrase would seem to be a key one to Eckhart’s philosophy and spirituality (see Sermon Four). The Platonist language of the school of Albert combined with the mystical tradition of the Rhineland (see point 3 below) challenged Eckhart’s capacities toward mystical experience and poetic expression.

Eckhart did not use his poetic genius to pass on Neoplatonist flight-from-the-world spirituality, however. What it meant intellectually to be a Dominican in his day was to follow the in-the-world spirituality of his famous—indeed notorious—brother Thomas Aquinas. And this Eckhart, who inherited Aquinas’ chair at Paris, did. On all the major issues in spirituality—the issue of trust in human nature, of the equality and dignity of women, on the harmony of soul and body, on the role of anger and moral outrage, on injustice as a sin, on the basic goodness of creation, on the potential of human nature to develop, on the holiness of being, on the reconcilability of mysticism and prophecy—Eckhart was not only loyal to his brother Aquinas in preference to Augustinian Neoplatonism, he actually surpassed him in boldness of expression and often in depth of insight. Eckhart is an Aquinas with imagination, an Aquinas freed of too tightly woven Scholastic language, an Aquinas in poetry. Eckhart’s loyalty to Aquinas is all the more striking when one considers the constant cloud that Aquinas was under during Eckhart’s entire adulthood and life as a Dominican right up to Aquinas’ canonization three years before Eckhart’s own trial. Eckhart was fourteen years old when Aquinas died, seventeen and a Dominican when he was condemned for the first and second times, twenty-four years old when he was condemned for the third time. Yet this cloud of heavy suspicion over Aquinas did not daunt Eckhart in the least from invoking him often in his writings and talks and above all from incorporating his ideas into his own spiritual vision. It was safe and expected that one would invoke Augustine as an authority and this Eckhart does often. But it was suspect to invoke Aquinas as an authority and this Eckhart does even more convincingly. It must never, never be forgotten that Eckhart invokes his brother Aquinas in spite of the political-religious hegemony of Augus-tinian and Neoplatonist spirituality.

Areas in which Eckhart follows Aquinas would be the following. Being is radically relational. Aquinas expresses the internal relationship of all being in terms of act and potency; Eckhart does so in his spirituality by breakthrough and birth (see Path Three). On the external relationship of all being, Aquinas speaks of the unity of the cosmos, of universitas or the universal harmony of all things. Eckhart says that “all things are connected” (see Sermon Thirty-one) and also urges a cosmic vision, a cosmic trust. Eckhart follows or improves on Aquinas’ creation-centered spirituality on the subjects of the cosmos, women, nature, being, justice, creation, ecstasy, joy, consubstantiality of soul and body, ecumenism, extrovert meditation, creativity, compassion. Furthermore, a very strong case could be made for Eckhart’s learning a deep element of his spiritual teaching from his meditations on the last year of Aquinas’ life. During that year Aquinas was, as it were, struck dumb. He was unable to write, to work, and was barely able to speak. The year began with an experience in which he understood that all his work was as straw. It was a year of radical letting go for Aquinas that climaxed only with a letting go of this life, for he died on the way to the Council of Lyon never having recovered from this vision of nothingness. Surely Eckhart and his young Dominican confreres must have conversed often on this strange final year in the life of their most famous brother, only two to three years dead when Eckhart entered the Dominican Order. Did this spiritual experience of Aquinas play a large role in Eckhart’s development of his Second Path, letting go and letting be (see Path Two)? Did Aquinas—whose voice was heard all over Christendom with such authority and daring—bequeath to Eckhart in his last year of enforced dumbness a never-to-be-forgotten lesson in the primacy of silence? I rather think so.

While Eckhart depended a lot on Aquinas, it should also be emphasized that he was himself an original thinker living in a very different time from his famous and somewhat notorious predecessor. Thus there are differences between the two thinkers as well, of which the major ones influencing spirituality appear to be as follows. Their primary vocations and style differed greatly. Aquinas was a teacher dedicated to precision and exactness that under the methodology of high Scholasticism reached a level of art. Eckhart, on the other hand, while he taught a lot (and Aquinas also preached), reached his stride and indeed the peak of his influence as a preacher, not a teacher. As a preacher he sought to move people, to motivate people, even to disturb people. For this puipose he found the Scholasticism of his day far too confining and he reached out to poetic and paradoxical expression and indeed became one of the creators of the German language, helping to shape and mold it from the variety of peasant dialects that it was in his day to a unified expression of soulful urgency. He was indeed an artist—he urged others to be—he practical what he preached (see Sermons Eighteen, Twenty, Twenty-nine). We should also remember the vast differences between the cultural periods in which each man operated. Aquinas’ period was basically one of optimism, of expansion economically, intellectually, politically, while Eckhart’s time was ripe with pessimism, with the awareness of limits of all kinds, economic, political, and intellectual. What is all the more striking about Eckhart, however, is that in the midst of this mood of contraction he preached a spirituality of joyful expansionism and optimism that was as thoroughly non-Augustinian and as wholly that of Aquinas as anything Aquinas ever wrote or taught.

While Aquinas’ spirituality is creation-centered and his trust and love of creation permeates his theology, Eckhart goes him one better. Eckhart calls creation a “grace” (see Sermon Five), something that Aquinas never did. Eckhart is more exclusively a spiritual theologian than is Aquinas, who, in his academic career, always sought balance and breadth in relating philosophy and theology. Eckhart probes more deeply themes that are present in Aquinas but in a less intense, less developed manner—themes such as panentheism, realized eschatology, the divinization of the human race, the marriage of being and consciousness resulting in compassion as the culmination of spiritual experience, dialectical consciousness, our multiple experiences of nothingness, creativity. In this respect Eckhart might be called in today’s parlance more of a psychologist than Aquinas.

In underscoring Eckhart’s relationship to Aquinas, I deliberately avoid using the term “Thomist.” Very few Thomists I have ever met knew enough about biblical spirituality or the history of spirituality to know the creation-centered spirituality tradition which Aquinas himself knew well but which Eckhart knew even better. Eckhart is not a Thomist—he is a biblical theologian.

3. The Celtic mystical tradition and Eastern Christianity. A significant influence on Eckhart flows from his roots in the Celtic tradition of spirituality. It appears that the Celts in their European variety originated around 1900 B.C. in the very area where Eckhart was to preach and develop his spirituality the most—in southwestern Germany and the Strassburg area. From there the Celts fanned out into what we know as France, Spain, Italy, and the British Isles. It is likely that the earliest Celtic origins were in India, and Celtic scholars Alwyn and Brinley Rees make several interesting comparisons between the Bhagavad-Gita and Celtic myths—a connection that might explain some of Hindu philosopher Coomaraswamy’s interest in Eckhart. The Celtic people were profoundly nature-oriented in their religion. “The Celts found divinity in nature all around them, for they revered it in the sky, mountains, stones, trees, lakes, rivers, springs, the sea, and every kind of animal.”³³ Mother goddesses and feminine deities as well as feminine animals played a large role in their faith. Indeed, there are hints in Eckhart—as when he talks of God as a “great underground river”—of the chthonic and more matriarchal period of consciousness when spiritual experiences were bound to the soil and were localized there with “deities dwelling in the interior of the earth.”³⁴ Eckhart is not convinced that God dwells on high, Olympian style, as Hellenism taught. Transcendence for him is not necessarily up. The Celts in the British Isles were Christianized by the third century at the latest. The Celtic spiritual tradition of northern Europe was a bastard child in Christian spirituality in the West ever since Pelagius, who was a Celt and from England, lost his fight with Saint Augustine, who was a devoted son of the Roman Empire. It is useful to recall that two of Augustine’s and Jerome’s most ferocious charges against Pelagius were his circulating freely with women and his admitting that he learned a lot from them. Jerome called the women with whom Pelagius associated “Amazons.” The Celts were far more at home in their sexual identities than Augustine or Jerome. They had a long tradition of male/female monasteries and in their tribal decision-making women were on a par with men, and in religious ritual often had privileges denied the men. They were close to the earth and had to earn their livelihood there from an intimate relationship of harmony with earth and animals. They did not champion, as Mediterranean Gnosticism did, a dualism between the human race and nature’s other creations. Saint Patrick’s creed was not redemption-oriented, as was that of Nicaea, but was creation-centered.³⁵ For Pelagius, as for Eckhart, creation is itself a grace and asceticism is uncalled for. The Celts did not treat art dualistically—storytelling lay at the heart of the tribe’s spiritual and physical survival. Nor were art and politics separated—indeed, that tradition linked the blessings of fertility and justice,³⁶ as Jewish, biblical spirituality does and as Meister Eckhart would do. The chief lawgiver of the Celtic tradition was the poet of the tribe, and it was taken for granted that all members could participate in common folk celebrations and creativity. This Celtic tradition, which strongly influenced Francis of Assisi and Abélard, and which gave the West William Blake and W. B. Yeats, identified salvation with being an artist, a healer, and whole-maker. William Blake has said as much: “A Poet, a Painter, a Musician, an Architect: The Man or Woman who is not one of these is not a Christian.”³⁷ And Meister Eckhart says the same (see Sermon Twenty-nine). The Celtic tradition, it has been pointed out, “is particularly rich in coimperta (tales of conception and birth).”³⁸ So, too, is Eckhart’s entire spirituality. His is a spirituality of birth and fertility that borrows both from the biblical images of fertility as a blessing and of fruit-bearing vines and from the Celtic insistence on birthing as a spirituality (see Path Three). The Celtic tradition, unlike the Augustinian, does not reduce the term justitia to a kind of personal “righteousness.”³⁹ Justice is the moral norm of Celtic society and it is presumed among these people, as it was among the prophets of ancient Israel, that people could only survive by doing justice to one another. Justice as justice and not as personal righteousness is a basic category in Eckhart’s spirituality of birthing, as we will see (Sermons Thirty, Thirty-three). Interestingly enough, the creator and artist-leader of the Celtic people was to be, before all else, a justice-maker. This is the lesson from Eckhart as well. Salvation for Eckhart is creativity plus justice, or creativity at justice-making. Celtic scholars Alwyn and Brinley Rees comment on the role of the poet as prophet in the Celtic tradition:

The poet’s praises confirmed and sustained the king in his kingship, while his satire could blast both the king and his kingdom. There was a tradition that the learned poets (filid) of Ireland were once judges. They were certainly the experts on the prerogatives and duties of the kings, and a master-poet (ollam) was himself equal to a king before the law. Such priestly functions as divination and prophecy also came within the province of these early Irish poets who, it may be added, wore cloaks of bird-feathers as do the shamans of Siberia when, through ritual and trance, they conduct their audiences on journeys to another world.⁴⁰

Over the centuries the hegemony of southern European theology has obliterated for many students of Christian history the fact that it was the Celtic and Irish traditions that evangelized much of northern Europe, even as far south as central Italy. Over two hundred and twenty parish churches and hundreds of smaller churches, chapels, and shrines in Italy are dedicated to Irish saints to this day.⁴¹ The most important Irish monastic foundation outside of Ireland was founded in 1090 in Ratisbon (now Regens-burg), in an area of Germany over which Eckhart was himself a vicar general. So Irish was the church of Eckhart’s Germany that whole abbeys in Nuremberg and Vienna were exclusively Irish right up to 1418. Dominicans had important foundations in both Ratisbon and Nuremberg which Eckhart surely frequented. The Dominican presence in the Celtic atmosphere of Ratisbon was a very early one, as Albert the Great lived and lectured there as a young Dominican. Franciscan scholar Edward Armstrong has argued convincingly that Francis of Assisi was strongly influenced by Celtic currents of spirituality and has characterized the Celtic Christian tradition as being conspicuous for its “complete dedication to Christ, blithe acceptance of poverty, loose organization, adventurous missionary enterprise, and love of nature.”⁴² In addition, Celts were well known for their wandering spirit as Irish peregrine, along with their love of poetry, music, and song. Saint Columban composed songs and Francis sang them. The Celts loved animals as did Francis and Eckhart. And they held scholarship in high esteem. Armstrong’s thesis is a new one, since the southern Mediterranean influence has been dominant, up to now, in looking at Christian history. Much research remains to be done.

As convincing as Armstrong’s thesis is regarding Francis’ link to the Celtic tradition, I believe that Eckhart’s link is even more evident. Not only because the Celts imbued much of Eckhart’s Germany with their Christianity, but also because they settled widely along the Rhine where Eckhart’s most active years as poet/preacher were played out to their untimely end. It was a Celt, John Scotus Erigena, who was born in Ireland c. 810, who first translated Pseudo-Dionysius’ works for Westerners. Although he was condemned in a strange trial held three centuries after his death, John the Scot left a heritage that Eckhart did not ignore: namely, an alternative to the domination of Western Christian spirituality by Augustine—“in almost every case he [John] sides with the Greeks” against the Latin theologians, Erigenan scholar Jean Potter comments.⁴³ John the Scot built his division of all of reality on the basis of a four-part understanding of creation and creativity. Creativity for John is the essence of being human; all of creation is a theophany. God is called Nonbeing or Nothing, as with Pseudo-Dionysius, and deification more than sinfulness is what holds John’s attention, as it did Gregory of Nyssa. Celtic Christianity was far more dependent on Eastern than on Western spiritual theology, and in many respects—in his emphasis on creation and creativity, on divinization, on his downplaying of original sin, in his sense of cosmic grace, in his facility with the via negativa—Eckhart follows this same Eastern Christian spiritual tradition, as did his predecessors in creation spirituality in the West such as Irenaeus (who was born in the East but theologized in the West), Benedict, Cassian, and John the Scot. Indeed, the most substantial work published on Eckhart’s theology until now has been that by a theologian of the Eastern church, Vladimir Lossky.

Because of his truthfulness to the creation-centered tradition of spirituality that is so biblical and so Celtic at once, Eckhart, in my opinion, qualifies as quite possibly the most Franciscan spiritual theologian of the church. Armstrong demonstrates that the second-generation Franciscan hagiographers of Francis, Thomas of Celano and Bonaventure, projected onto Francis’ very nature-centered spirituality a lot of Platonic dualisms as regards body and soul, matter and spirit, women and men, imagination and prayer, politics and mysticism that Francis himself never succumbed to and that in the long run rendered a lot of so-called Franciscan spirituality dualistic.⁴⁴ Reading Francis and reading Eckhart is a very harmonious experience. They are, as Francis and Dominic were, brothers in spirituality. Eckhart can be read by any Franciscan eager to regain a critical understanding of Francis’ compassionate spirituality and willing to let go of the sentimental lore that has more often than not reduced that great saint’s hagiography to maudlin pietisms. While much research remains to be done about the linkage between Eckhart and the Celtic tradition, there can be no doubt that the connection is strong and constant. This bond between Eckhart and the Celtic tradition ought to be of particular significance to English-speaking readers of Eckhart. His creation-centered spirituality is an expression of their own deepest spiritual roots. Jansenism, a seventeenth-century latecomer to Irish spirituality, is a betrayal of those roots. Today’s Irish church, then, in its search for its religious heritage, ought to consider the study of Eckhart as one valuable means to get back to its more holistic origins. And Dominicans might meditate on whether Dominic himself—that redheaded Spaniard—was not of Celtic stock.

4. The Beguine movement. Another movement that strongly influenced Eckhart and which he influenced in turn was that of the Beguines. Eckhart spent his most mature years circulating between Holland and Bohemia as administrator or preaching along the Rhineland from Strassburg to Cologne. This was the very area where the Beguines most flourished—indeed, they began in Holland. Alexian scholar Christopher J. Kauffman points out the similarities between Beguine theologian Hadewijch of Antwerp, who died around the late thirteenth century, and Meister Eckhart. He comments that: “Meister Eckhart preached to Beguines and apparently learned as much from them as they learned from him.”⁴⁵ Eckhart admits, as we have seen, that life itself is the best teacher. This means that we must look to the influences in Eckhart’s life, and not only to manuscripts that academic experts are so well trained in deciphering, to grasp the fullness of Eckhart’s education. He reached his maturity not in academia but in his activity along the Rhine preaching in convents and churches and counseling and listening to lay women who were known as Beguines. If much of Eckhart’s spiritual vision is profoundly feminist—and it is—that is because he listened and read what women had to say about the spiritual journey. And they listened to him as well, for it is from women—both Beguines and nuns—who took down his sermons that we have the German texts of his preaching. Eckhart was in many respects explicitly anticlerical, as is clear in Sermon Twenty-five, and sensitive to male chauvinism. “I am surprised at many priests who are very learned and would like to be important priests,” he comments, “because they allow themselves to be so easily satisfied and made fools of.”⁴⁶ Frequently he alludes to the ignorance of the clergy in his sermons, and at his trial he was particularly caustic about those who held powerful positions but were ignorant people. His was a critical mind, critical of his culture, of his sex, and of his church. “The Lord’s words have been wrongly understood,” he states simply at one point.⁴⁷ He was a critic of the institutions of his day, as every prophet must be. It is inconceivable that strong and educated women, many of whom banded together as Beguines and who were also critical of the institutions of their society and church, would not influence this sensitive and honest preacher. Influence him they did.

The Beguines were one chapter in a distinguished history of women mystics in northern Europe. Eckhart is a son—not a father—of that history, as Ancelet points out: “German mysticism has earlier representatives [than Eckhart], the greatest of them being women.”⁴⁸ The first mystic to write in German was the great Mechtild of Magdeburg. Magdeburg was a town only 140 miles from Eckhart’s hometown and novitiate in Erfurt. For fifty-two years of her life she was a Beguine and her spiritual directors were Dominicans. Her book, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, is famous for its mystical bridal poetry after the style of the Song of Songs, but the language and theology of its title are particularly significant. Eckhart also made important use of the term “Godhead” in his spiritual theology (see Sermon Three). Mechtild employs many images in common with Eckhart. Among them are the images of sinking, of dancing, of God’s delight, of growth, of awakening, of letting go, of compassion, of God as a flowing stream, of the dialectic between isness and nothingness. Her work deeply influenced German mysticism and Eckhart in particular. Eckhart and the Dominican Order were involved in counseling and preaching to many women’s groups along the Rhine, both nuns and Beguines. There was a great influx of women into these alternative life-styles in the latter half of the thirteenth century, perhaps because there seems to have been a precipitous decline in the male population and perhaps, too, for economic reasons, for as the population grew and the economy declined neither marriage nor living singly was always so viable an option. In 1277 there were forty convents of Dominican nuns in Germany and ten years later there were seventy. By 1303 the city of Strassburg alone had seven houses of Dominican nuns. Each of these houses might comprise eighty to a hundred women. They were often very well educated persons. By the year 1267 this new ministry of preaching to women in the convents was felt so strongly by church administrators that Clement IV officially charged the Dominicans to direct these nuns. By the time Eckhart appeared on the scene it was a foregone conclusion that interaction with religious women was an important dimension to Dominican ministry.

The Beguines were not nuns. They could not be. For to become a nun meant you had to be of noble class and pay a dowry. They were groups of women who banded together to live a life of dedication to spiritual development and to ministering to others but who were not recognized officially as “religious” or nuns. They did not take formal vows and thus were free of church authorities—a freedom that, one can imagine, was not always relished by those same authorities. They made their living by their own hands, working as artisans and craftspeople. In an important study on the Beguines in Medieval Strassburg, Dayton Phillips concludes that while some wealthy women distributed their money and joined the Beguines, “it is obvious . . . that the beguine condition found its greatest following among the lower classes.”⁴⁹ He also observes that it was these women, who might be called the forerunners of the active Orders of religious women and who lived and worked and ministered in the world and not in cloistered convents, who “seem to have been almost a sister status of the friars. Living in the midst of the world, Beguines, rather than nuns, were the true feminine parallel of the friars . . . The friars were the chief influence in the spread of the movement.”⁵⁰ No wonder the Dominicans like Eckhart had so much in common with them and vice versa. Their life-styles were basically the same.

The first Beguines in Cologne appeared in 1223 in the person of two sisters, Elizabeth and Sophie, who sold properties they inherited on the banks of the Rhine. In 1260 there were eight Beguine houses in the city and by 1320 there were ninety-seven.⁵¹ Dominicans were closely associated with the Beguines of Cologne and its environs. For example, the prior at Cologne, Henry de Sincere, visited the mystic Beguine Christine of Stommeln (1242–1312), Stommeln being a town northwest of Cologne. Her biography, drawn up by a Swedish Dominican friar, Peter of Dacia, gives evidence of how powerful the mystical current among women who were not nuns was at this time. She drew around her an entire house of Beguines in Cologne. These houses often served as something of a refuge for peasants who were moving to the city for the first time, guaranteeing them safety, companionship, shelter, and economic support Very often, as is evident in Phillips’ study, the houses tie Beguines bought were leased to them at cheap rates by the Dominican or Franciscan friars. And very often they were in close physical proximity to Dominican priories. Over two thirds of the Beguine houses in Strassburg were located within a three-block radius of Dominican or Franciscan houses.

The relationship of the Beguines to church authority was a spotty affair. Pope Gregory IX extended official recognition and placed them under his protection in 1233, and in 1236 the Bishop of Cambrai was actively promoting them in his diocese. By 1311, however, the mystical movements all over Germany had multiplied to such an extent with Flagellants, Brethren of the Free Spirit, and numerous other groups of apocalyptic spirituals, that the Beguines were lumped together with them in a blanket condemnation promulgated by Pope John XXII, the same Pope who would condemn Meister Eckhart eighteen years later. In his Bull of Condemnation he said:

There are certain women, commonly called Beguines who, although they promise no one obedience and neither renounce property nor live in accordance with an approved rule, and consequently can in no wise be considered regulars, nevertheless wear a so-called Beguine habit, and cling to certain religious to whom they are drawn by special preference. It has been repeatedly and reliably reported to us that some of them, as if possessed with madness, dispute and preach about the Highest Trinity and divine essence . . . Therefore . . . we must prohibit forever their status and abolish them completely from the church of God. We must forbid these and all other women, on pain of excommunication which we wish to impose forthwith on the recalcitrants, to retain in any way in future this status which they have long assumed or to be allowed to accept it again in any form. Moreover, the aforesaid regulars who are said to promote these women in the status of the Beguinage or induce them to assume this status are strictly forbidden, on pain of like excommunication which they shall immediately incur if they oppose prescribed rules, to admit any women who long ago adopted the status in question or perhaps wish to adopt it. . .⁵²

Such strong measures indicate a strong movement. So strong was it that this bull, promulgated by the Council of Vienna, was modified in a second bull that was issued later that same year. In this second bull, admission is made that there are faithful women who live lives of penance and service though they have not taken a vow of chastity and who are called Beguines. Such conflicting attitudes from church authorities confused bishops and clergy and revealed an ambivalence toward noncloistered women that has not entirely disappeared up to our own time. The Beguines continued to flourish. In 1317 Bishop Johannes Durbheim of Strass-burg wrote that there were over two hundred thousand Beguines in Germany. In Strassburg, a city of twenty thousand in Eckhart’s day, there were over three hundred Beguines. Phillips rightly comments that such a group would have represented a “considerable phenomenon in the spiritual life of the town.” One effect of the decrees against the Beguines was to swell the ranks of Third Order Dominicans and Franciscans. By 1318 Rome made the distinction between heretical and orthodox Beguines on the basis of their being transients or being connected with a house. The transient Beguines were considered the heretical ones.⁵³

Joan Evans has observed that “the women of the Middle Ages tended to be anonymous, but they were not soft or sheltered.”⁵⁴ These strong and imaginative women known as Beguines, who sought a place in the world apart from the institution of marriage and a place in the church apart from the institution of the enclosed cloister, were a powerful force on Eckhart’s own spiritual imagination. Furthermore, they and Eckhart have shared a similar fate in death as they did in life. Not only were they condemned by the same pope but the great majority of male historians—for example, Ronald Knox and Norman Cohn—have dismissed both the Beguines and Eckhart as rank kooks or here-tics. In fact, they were persons seeking personal and collective renewal in a period of institutional decadence. Their common vision and courage challenges us to do the same.

5. Neoplatonism via Augustine. As I have hinted elsewhere in this introduction, the influence of Augustine on Eckhart’s spirituality has been grossly exaggerated. And this exaggeration has in turn led to a distortion of Eckhart’s spiritual theology by persons who have been ignorant of creation-centered theology and have projected onto Eckhart their own Augustinian biases. A glaring example of such distortion can be found in the work by the former Benedictine, C. F. Kelley, who ends his study on Eckhart with stage two of Eckhart’s spiritual Path and who actually says that Eckhart “cannot be counted with those among the faithful who insist that they must before all else be agents for healing social injustice.”⁵⁵ As is typical of Augustinian projections onto creation spirituality, Kelley talks at length of “contemplation” in Eckhart but does not even list the word “compassion” in his index. Thus he has utterly missed both the term and the meaning of the fullness of spiritual experience for Eckhart, and he and other would-be distorters of Eckhart ought to take a good, long look at Path Four in this book. For as Reiner Schürmann has rightly understood, Eckhart’s is not a spirituality of contemplation but of compassion.⁵⁶ And compassion to Eckhart means both cosmic consciousness and social justice (see Sermons Thirty, Thirty-one, Thirty-three).

The fact is that on every important issue in spirituality—on humanity’s deification, on women, on nature, on grace, on beauty, on creation, on creativity, on consubstantiality of soul and body, on justice and injustice, on realized eschatology, on dialectical consciousness, Eckhart, like his brother Thomas Aquinas, refuses to follow Augustine. It is true that he cites Augustine often—as did Aquinas—and knew him well. But like Aquinas his use of Augustine is extremely circumspect. It had to be, for Augustine was still the chief authority of Eckhart’s day in Western theology and political-intellectual circumstances dictated that theologians invoke him. Especially is this the case considering how Aquinas and Aristotle were under the cloud of condemnations they were during Eckhart’s lifetime. But Eckhart—in direct contradiction to Augustine—refuses to build a spirituality around dualisms and preoccupations with original sin that so characterized Augustine’s Neoplatonic quest to leave the world, leave the earth and the body behind. Nor does Eckhart share Augustine’s misogyny. In his commentary on the creation of Eve in Genesis, Augustine remarks that “man but not woman is made in the image and likeness of God”; in contrast, Eckhart says that the reason Eve was said to be created from Adam’s side was to demonstrate the absolute equality of woman to man. Eckhart and Augustine are as unlike in their spiritual theologies as are the creation-centered spiritual tradition which Eckhart so heartily represents and the fall/redemption tradition of which Augustine is the chief spokesperson in the West.

One area where Eckhart does demonstrate an indebtedness to Neoplatonism is in the area of mystical and poetic language. Schürmann comments that Meister Eckhart

turns toward Neoplatonism in his quest for a language that would suit his intuition of identity. From this shift in vocabulary he expects a language that would overcome the exteriority of man “before” God and would allow us to see man introduced “into” God. However, Eckhart by no means rejects Aristotle out of hand . . . The Neoplatonic vocabulary permits Eckhart to go further in his search for identity [with God].⁵⁷

There can be no question that Neoplatonism lends itself more to mystical poetic expression than did Scholasticism of either Eck-hart’s or Aquinas’ day. Nor can there be any question that Augustine himself was well endowed with artistic and rhetorical talent in his often poetic prose. Eckhart, like Augustine, chose a rhetorical mode—the art of preaching in the former’s case, the art of autobiographical writing in the latter’s—to express much of his spiritual theology. In that respect he is more like Augustine than Aquinas, who, as it were, wrote poetry as an avocation but whose principal theological contribution was made within the formalized strucutre of Scholastic methodology. This structure Eckhart, in his spiritual and ministerial maturity, found overly confining. Another interesting parallel between Augustine and Eckhart is to consider how both theologian-preachers were living in immensely pessimistic times from a cultural point of view. Augustine wrote as the Roman Empire was literally collapsing all around him and Eckhart as the unity of Western Christendom was doing the same. Given this common cultural milieu, it is all the more striking that their spiritualities differ so utterly. Augustine’s betrays the pessimism he felt toward human nature and the world that humanity makes, while Eckhart chose a far more hopeful and grace-centered response, emphasizing the divine potential humanity possesses for creativity, compassion, and deification itself. Eckhart, like his brother Aquinas, is an incurably joyful optimist, though he is without illusions about human potential for dualism or sin (see Sermon Thirty-two).

Anyone who continues to suggest that Eckhart is Augustinian in his spiritual theology has understood neither Eckhart, Augustine, nor the history of spirituality. The Platonically influenced theologian who has most penetrated Eckhart’s theology is in fact Pseudo-Dionysius, as we have seen, and not Augustine.

Principal Theological Themes in Eckhart

It may assist the reader and student of Meister Eckhart to summarize very briefly the key theological categories which mark Eckhart’s spirituality. This outline is especially needed, given the fact of the Augustinian projections onto Eckhart and other creation-centered spiritual theologians by so many Neoplatonically trained spiritualists over the centuries. It is also mandated by the hegemony of the southern Mediterranean spirituality over the northern, Celtic variety in Western Christianity ever since the condemnation of Pelagius in the fifth century. Eckhart—much more than Augustine—is a biblically rooted spiritual theologian. This means that his is a creation-centered and not a fall/redemption-centered spiritual theology. There are themes in this spiritual tradition that are basic to Eckhart’s way of seeing the world and humanity and God and which are not emphasized in the fall/redemption tradition, whose basic categories might be understood as original sin, cleansing from original sin, sin (pride and lust in particular), heaven, hell, body vs. soul, asceticism, prayer as a lifting up of mind and heart to God, woman as temptress, action vs. contemplation, introvert meditation, climbing Jacob’s ladder as a model for spiritual contemplation, and a basic unwillingness to leave a world of private mystical experience with God to criticize or create alternatives to economic, political, or religious systems of injustice and oppression. Professor O’Meara has described what I have called a one-sided theological projection onto Eckhart in the following manner: “Eckhart’s fate in the earlier part of this century coincided with a prevailing narrow interpretation of theological expression joined to a rigid view of the role of the church in doctrinal discussion.” I would add that no area of theology has been more narrowly interpreted for centuries than that area called “spirituality” and which some theology schools and seminaries still refer to exclusively as “ascetic theology”—a term that was never even invoked until the seventeenth century! How could such distorted language ever allow one to reexperience Meister Eckhart? O’Meara is hopeful, however. “Theological developments of recent decades, and especially since Vatican Council II, have freed Eckhart from that destiny of rejection.”⁵⁸ We shall see.

The creation-centered spiritual tradition which has been so often condemned and for so long repressed and forgotten in the West in favor of ascetic and tactical exercises, is that tradition on which Eckhart fed so plentifully and which he in turn nourished by his own unique genius for spiritual experience and expression. There are certain themes in particular which play a prominent role in that spirituality and the reader is encouraged to look out for them in reading Eckhart. For Eckhart, unlike the vast majority of spiritual writers since his time, is primarily a spiritual theologian who knows his Scripture and the biblical roots of Christian faith. He is not an apologist for Jansenist dualisms, ascetic disciplines, Cartesian rationalisms, capitalist economic systems, male chauvinism, introverted journeys away from politics and conflicts in the world, academic ivory tower privileges or emotional sentimentalism. Indeed, his is one of the last antisentimental spiritualities in the West. What follows are the principal themes in Eckhart’s spirituality. To list these themes is to make a veritable outline of what constitutes a creation-centered spiritual theology. These themes, played over and over throughout Eckhart’s sermons, include the following:

l. The creative word of God (Dabhar). In many respects Eckhart’s is an entire theology of the creative word of God—the word that gives birth to the blessing that creation is. (See Sermons One and Two in particular.) Because of the goodness of God, God’s word—which is creation—is also good (Sermon Three). Eckhart’s theology of the goodness of creation, of God’s word that “flows out but remains within,” is representative of the cataphatic (yes) dimension to his spirituality.

2. Blessing. Eckhart’s is a spirituality of blessing as so much of the spirituality of the Hebrew Bible is also. For example, we read in the prophet Jeremiah:

They will come and shout for joy on Mount Sion,

they will stream to the blessings of the Lord,

to the flocks of sheep and the herbs.

Their life will be like a watered garden.

They will never be weary again. ( Jr. 31:12) ^a

For Eckhart, all of creation is a divine blessing, the holy “isness” permeates all things (Sermon Four) and renders all things equal at the level of being (Sermon Five). And a new definition of humanity is suggested: a human being is a blessing destined to bless other beings in a conscious way by way of creativity and compassion. Other creatures on this earth bless the rest of us unconsciously (see Path One and Sermon Ten in particular). For Eckhart, as for the Yahwist theologian of the Hebrew Bible, “life is blessing and blessing is life.”⁵⁹ The purpose of living is not to flee the earth or run from its pleasures but to return the blessings one has received by blessing other creatures and other human generations as well (cf. Gn. 1–4).

3. Panentheism. For Eckhart it is basically wrong to think of God as a Person “out there” or even of God as wholly Other “out there.” God is in us and we are in God. This is the theology of inness and of panentheism which forms the basis of Eckhart’s God talk and God consciousness (see especially Sermon Two). This theology emphasizes the transparency of God, who is omnipresent.

4. Realized eschatology. An equally false consciousness is established, Eckhart believes, by imagining that heaven is something that begins after this life. Eternal life is now for Eckhart, and if heaven has not already begun for us it is our dualistic way of envisioning our lives that is the major obstacle. For if we are already in God, what prevents our experience of the full time in this present life time? (See especially Sermons Eight, Twenty-three, Twenty-seven.) The king/queendom of God is already among us (Sermon Nine).

5. Celebration of all beings in Gods blessing-filled cosmos. If all of creation is a blessing, if it all flows out from God but remains within God in a panentheistic ocean of divine pleasure, then what would prevent these beings from rejoicing at this fullness of time already begun? Eckhart’s spirituality is a cosmic one, not an introverted one. His search for soul takes him into the entire universe in which we are so fully immersed and which is in us and outside of us. The key words to this universe are rejoicing and celebration (see Sermons Four, Seven, Twenty-eight, Thirty-seven in particular).

6. Letting go, and letting creation be the holy blessing that it is. That which most prevents our rejoicing and celebrating with creation is our tendency to grab, to control, to dictate, to possess, to cling. Therefore Eckhart’s advice on spiritual method is profoundly simple, though radical and by no means easy. Simply learn to let go and let be, he counsels. By letting go of clinging to things we learn what true reverence and appreciation can be. When we let go even of our fear of nothingness we can “sink” into the blessing and grace that all creation is about, and into its Creator and even more deeply into the God beyond the Creator God who is the Godhead (see Path Two in particular).

7. The unknown, unnameable God who is a non-God. Eckhart develops an apophatic (no) as well as a cataphatic (yes) spirituality, a via negativa as well as a via positiva. But his experience of nothingness is not accomplished by a putdown of self but by a letting go of self and of culture’s images for self and even for God. This is why he “prays God to rid me of God,” in order to sink deeply into the ineffable depths of the unfathomable ocean that is God (see especially Sermons Eleven, Twelve, Thirty-one).

8. The divinization and deification of humanity. Eckhart says that there are some mysteries that only faith and revelation can tell us about. Psychologists, philosophers, and philologists cannot bring us to these truths. Such knowledge requires a breakthrough in our consciousness, a resurrection, a second birth, an awakening to a deeper truth (see Sermons Seventeen, Twenty-one). One such truth is the fact that we are sons and daughters of God and therefore have divine blood within us. We need to let go of our limiting perspectives and let this truth wash over us with its implications that we, like God, can create and be compassionate (see Sermons Twenty-two, Twenty-five, Twenty-nine, Thirty in particular).

9. Spirituality is a growth process. For Eckhart, spirituality is a constant expansion of the divine potential in us all. “If people lived a thousand years or even longer,” he insists, “they might still gain in love.”⁶⁰ There are no limits to the growth we can undergo, he is saying, no limits to our own divinity, for there are no limits to the divine. Spiritual growth is not a matter of climbing Jacob’s ladder in a competitive and compulsive way but is spiral-like, an ever-expanding bigness that touches the ends of the cosmos itself and returns us to our primal origins refreshed. Expansion and contraction, in and out, form the basic dynamics for the spiritual journey as conceived by Eckhart. He rejects up/down as proper categories for such a journey (see Sermons Six, Seven, Eight, Seventeen).

10. Creativity is the work of God in us. If we are divine and subject to growth in our divinity, then we are also creators. God is the Creator and we, the images of God, follow in God’s footsteps. Indeed, creative or artistic work is the only work worthy of the human person, it is the only work that satisfies, for it is the only work that works as God works. In such work a Trinity gives birth: the Trinity in us of being, knowing, and doing. Doing alone is activism; knowing alone is quietism and rationalism; but knowing and doing that are born from being and return to being—this is divine work, for it is what true creativity is all about (see Sermons Eighteen, Twenty, Twenty-nine, Thirty-three, Thirty-four in particular). Eckhart does not get trapped in the contemplation vs. action dualistic dilemma because his is truly a trinitarian theology. The prominence he gives creativity in his spirituality means that he also endorses extrovert meditation, which is centering by way of giving birth. It is the flowing out that all creative people must discipline themselves to do in order that beauty and blessing be shared. In this birthing we are born again and God is born in human history again. We are to give birth to the Son of God in us and in our culture (see Path Three).

11. Compassion, the fullness of spiritual maturity. Only God is compassionate and so to touch our own divine roots is to make contact with compassion. Compassion for Eckhart entails two dimensions—one of consciousness of the interdependence of all beings that swim together in this divinely panentheistic sea called creation—and the other concerns justice. The first side to compassion is mystical; the second is prophetic. Creating justice or compassion constitutes the ultimate act of birthing and creativity since injustice is the ultimate act of violence and dualism. But to create justice one must have experienced oneness and mystical compassion. This oneness is the basis of the creation of all things, for all things were born in compassion and want to return there (see Path Four in particular).

12. Everyone a royd person. Eckhart draws heavily from the biblical tradition of the royal person, who is noble and dignified but also responsible for creating justice and compassion. Indeed, Eckhart insists that all persons are called to such nobility (see Sermons Four, Nine, Thirty-six).

13. Jesus Christ as reminder of what it means to be God’s child. If we are all royal persons, then it helps considerably to be reminded that such a birth is possible. Jesus Christ is first and foremost such a reminder. He is the Word of God calling us to be words of God. He is the Son of God calling us to be children of God. He is a creative and compassionate person, in touch with his divine origins and his divine destiny (see Sermon Twenty-four). He is a royal person, a king, reminding all persons that we are to be as responsible as was he in returning blessing for blessing. And not only all persons but “all of creation” is to hear this Good News from us (see Sermon Five). Jesus on leaving this earth sent his Spirit to vivify us and render us other Christs (see Sermon Twenty-six). Psychologist C. G. Jung utilizes Eckhart’s redemption as reminding motif. He writes:

Despite the word “be transformed” in the Greek text [of Romans 12:2] the “renewal” of the mind is not meant as an actual alteration of consciousness, but rather as the restoration of an original condition, an apocatastasis. This is in exact agreement with the empirical findings of psychology, that there is an ever-present archetype of wholeness which may easily disappear from the purview of consciousness or may never be perceived at all until a consciousness illuminated by conversion recognizes it in the figure of Christ. As a result of this “anamnesis” the original state of oneness with the God-image is restored.⁶¹

14. Laughter, newness, and joy. For Eckhart, God is the eternally new, the eternally young. To receive the Spirit of God sent when Jesus left the earth is to open ourselves up to the gifts of newness and youthfulness. Letting go means letting joy be—the divine joy that creates the universe continually and that calls it back to its joyful, ever-new origins (Sermon Eighteen) where true repose lies (Sermon Twenty-seven). Compassion also constitutes our first and primary origins—all things were born in compassion and proceed from compassion (Sermon Thirty-one). Pleasure is an integral part of spiritual experience. Rather than fleeing pleasure, we are to penetrate it to find God there and we are to struggle to share it. (See Sermons Three, Ten, Nineteen, Twenty-seven, Twenty-eight, Thirty.) Laughter may well be the ultimate act of letting go and letting be: the music of the divine cosmos. For in the core of the Trinity laughing and birthing go on all day long. Eckhart warns us, therefore, never to trust a so-called spiritual person for whom laughter does not lie at the center of his or her spirituality. (See Sermons Three, Six, Nine, Ten, Twenty-seven, Thirty-seven.)

From this brief summary of Eckhartian themes it is evident how central to all his thought the theme of creation is. “To give birth is the very root of God’s divinity,” he asserts, and he urges us to be birthers as well: “What help is it to me that the Father gives birth to his Son unless I too give birth to him?” (see Sermons Twenty-two and Twenty-three). Eckhart begins and completes his theology with the theme of creation—for we are born of the creative Word of God and we are to birth the new creation which is the compassion of God. In naming the spiritual journey as a journey from creation to new creation, Eckhart remains true to the creation-centered spiritual tradition of both the Celtic and the biblical heritage. About the latter, biblical scholar Claude Tresmontant has written: ‘The Hebrews showed a passionate attention to the process of fecundity, the maturing process.”⁶² So does Eckhart. One of the synonyms Eckhart invokes for birthing is a word he invented, namely, “breakthrough,” or Durchbrueh in his language. Eckhart’s spirituality itself represents a new birth or a “breakthrough,” which constitutes a fitting title for this book because Eckhart’s spirituality does indeed represent a breakthrough for us Westerners. While the fourteen themes I have listed constitute an outline of Eckhart’s spirituality, they also constitute an outline of creation spirituality in general. Eckhart assists us to break through and to break out of and to break beyond the one-sided spirituality of fall/redemption that has occupied the West overly much in the past centuries. To break through into a more biblically based, creation-centered, and more blessedly and joyfully and justice-oriented spiritual vision. But as Eckhart warns us, it takes courage to break through. “Only those who have dared to let go can dare to reenter.” To reenter God we need to let go of dualism and all dualistic spiritualities. Then we can break through and break beyond the hegemony of fall/redemption spiritualities that have hung like an albatross around the neck of the mystical body of Christ in the West for centuries. For something was lost in Western spirituality when Eckhart was condemned. Something ceased. What was it? It was prophecy with mysticism, that is, a compassionately oriented spirituality that included social justice along with deep growth in consciousness; it was a deep reverence for the artist in us and among us in our midst; it was laughter and joy as core elements of spirituality; it was simplicity instead of fanciful spiritual methods; it was the conviction that lay persons can be mystics and not just professional religious. In short, what had been lost was creation-centered spirituality. Eckhart invites us back to this rich and wholesome, indeed holistic, tradition.

How to Read This Book

This book is meant to be a process, a process that is designed to take the reader on a spiritual journey of ever greater expansion into spiritual experience. This is the way a presentation of Eckhart ought to be, for Eckhart was before all else a preacher bent on inviting his hearers from their experience to new experiences and ever deeper ones. As Schürmann rightly puts it, Eckhart’s is “not a theoretical doctrine but a practical guide.”⁶³ So too with this book—it too is a practical guide. I believe that reading Eckhart is more than a process—it is also a trip in the sense in which that word has become common today. One can—and indeed ought—to get high on a line from Eckhart, an idea from Eckhart, or a passage from Eckhart. It does not hurt to rest with that thought, mull it over, let it envelop you, and thus to utilize this book as a meditation book. For this is a meditation book that is meant for savoring. Like a book of poetry, it requires a disciplining of that much-neglected right side of the brain: the intuitive, mystical, and communion-making side. I can guarantee—for I have seen it happen so often—that the language in which Eckhart expresses his faith, when savored to the full, will create energy and creativity for the reader’s spiritual life. That is why Eckhart moved so many persons six and a half centuries ago and why he possesses still a unique power to move. Eckhart deserves to be read with the heart as well as with the head, for he himself, like any authentic mystic, experienced life that way and thinks on his experience in that way. I especially encourage readers to read Eckhart’s sermons out loud with a friend or friends. They are oral works, spoken verbally by Eckhart and destined for ears and not only eyes. Indeed, there is a considerable degree of oral rhetoric in them, as one gets in any good preacher in our day. One reader of these sermons has commented how they are often similar in rhetorical style to that mode of preaching developed in black religion in America. There are repetitions, music-like refrains, and there is clearly rapport with the audience. At times Eckhart apparently had his listeners howling with laughter, as he is forced to tell them to be quiet and pay attention to what he is about to say. Humor is absolutely essential for reading and grasping Meister Eckhart, a requirement no doubt that his inquisitors lacked. No wonder they misunderstood so much of his thought.

I believe that there are three steps to reading Eckhart or indeed any mystic. They are as follows:

1. Enjoy—savor

2. Analyze

3. Enjoy—savor

Pleasure is the goal of reading Meister Eckhart and this book. He said so himself: “People do all their deeds for the sake of these two thing?: repose and pleasure. I have also said that people can never feel joy or pleasure in any creature if God’s likeness is not within it” (Sermon Twenty-seven). The analysis that is sandwiched between our two stages of enjoying Eckhart is meant, of course, to enhance the pleasure, to deepen the making of connections within Eckhart and to our lives and those elements in spirituality that have influenced Eckhart’s own theology. The first step in reading Eckhart, then, should be letting go and letting Eckhart speak to us from his vantage point of six hundred and fifty years ago. If we find a line or a paragraph that doesn’t immediately strike us or that has a certain opaqueness to it, let go of that and do not let it hinder what has gone before or what is coming up. Eckhart is indeed capable of what Schürmann calls a “malleability of expression”⁶⁴—even that can delight us and add to our pleasure. The commentaries, brief as they are, are meant to be an integral part of the process of deepening one’s journey with Eckhart. Words from Eckhart’s sermon are italicized within the Commentary on that sermon. As the title of this book indicates, these commentaries will center around his creation spirituality and are not intended in any way to bog down the reader with esoteric jargon. The great percentage of the commentary is either from scriptural allusions Eckhart makes in the sermon or a bringing together of his thought from other works of Eckhart to form some sort of cohesive unity.

A chart is presented on pages vi and vii that cross-references the thirty-seven sermons of this volume with the critical German and Latin works plus the four best-known English translations of Eckhart’s works. This chart should assist the reader and scholar alike who has met Eckhart in other versions or translations. The Index of Scriptural References and the Index of Spirituality Themes are meant to assist the student seriously bent on deepening his or her grasp of the theology behind Eckhart’s thinking. Titles and subtitles have been drawn as much as possible from the very words of Eckhart himself. If the commentaries allow the reader to enjoy Eckhart more fully, then they have accomplished their purpose. And if this book as a whole allows us to enjoy life more fully and to struggle more imaginatively and courageously to share its gifts by way of compassion, celebration, and justice, then its purpose has been accomplished. And Eckhart, who spoke often of how the entire communion of saints and beings rejoices when we rejoice, will rejoice with us at our accomplishment.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to many persons for assisting me with the germination and completion of this work. My thanks to three Eckhartian scholars whose scholarship has assisted me in this study, namely, Thomas Aquinas O’Meara, Reiner Schürmann, and John D. Caputo. A special thanks to Thomas Aquinas O’Meara for his encouragement and advice on the sermons I have chosen to reproduce and to the translators of these sermons: Ron Miller, for his translations of Sermons 1, 4, 6, 11, 22, 30, 35; Robert Cunningham, for his translations of Sermons 3, 5, 8, 9, 10, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 32, 36; Sister Elizabeth Heptner, SAC, for her translations of Sermons 7 and 24; and to Thomas O’Meara for Sermon 2. Remaining sermons I have translated myself. All translations are from the critical German or Latin texts (abbreviated DW or LW respectively on the opening page of each sermon) or, in the case of Sermons 3, 17, 18, 20, from Quint (abbreviated Q), because these sermons are not yet published in the DW edition. Fuller references to these editions are given on page 546. What I call for neatness’ sake “Sermons” in numbers 30, 35, and 36 are not that, strictly speaking. Numbers 30 and 35 were originally scriptural commentaries and number 36 was a treatise. Thanks for the insights about Eckhart and Scripture to Dr. Helen Kenik of the Jesuit School of Theology, Chicago, and to Sister Mary Anne Shea, whose brilliant study on the royal person in Meister Eckhart demonstrated Eckhart’s immersion in biblical thinking. Also to Marv Anderson for his excellent study on “The Ethic of Being in Meister Eckhart” and who, being a farmer, grasped so intuitively the earthiness of Eckhart’s language and imagery and who has put together the indices for this volume. Thanks to the typists of this manuscript, Mary Cunningham, Mary Hunt, Judy and Tim Rowan. Finally, thanks to Brendan Doyle whose musical way of conceiving reality comes so close to Eckhart’s own symphonic sermons; and to Tristan who has been a constant companion during my long hours of work with Meister Eckhart and who has demonstrated the wisdom of Eckhart’s advice that those who write big books ought to have a dog with them with which to share the equality of being (see Sermon Five, page 99).

December 1979, the six hundred and
fiftieth anniversary of Meister Eckhart’s
death and condemnation