The Dominican theologian and preacher whose Latin Scholastic works integrated Aristotle, Aquinas, and Neoplatonism into a speculative metaphysics of the divine ground, and whose German vernacular sermons — some posthumously condemned — articulated the mystical theology that shaped Tauler, Suso, the Theologia Germanica, and the entire Rhineland mystical tradition.
eckhart
German Dominican theologian, master of the University of Paris, and preacher (c. 1260–1328) whose Latin Tripartite Work attempted a comprehensive Scholastic synthesis and whose German sermons on the soul's union with God in the divine ground founded the Rhineland mystical tradition and were partially condemned by Pope John XXII in 1329.
Life
Eckhart of Hochheim was born around 1260 in Thuringia, probably at Tambach or Hochheim near Gotha, into the lower nobility. The biographical record is patchy: a single autograph signature has survived, dated 1294. He entered the Dominican order at Erfurt as a young man, was sent to Paris for advanced studies (probably in the 1280s and again in the 1290s), and became prior of the Dominican house at Erfurt and vicar of Thuringia by 1294.
The Paris career advanced through two stints as magister actu regens in theology — the chair held first by Aquinas a half-century earlier, then by Eckhart in 1302–03 and again in 1311–13. The double tenure (held by very few medieval Dominicans) testifies to Eckhart's institutional standing in his order. Between the two Paris stints he served as the first provincial of the newly created Dominican province of Saxonia (1303–11), a vast jurisdiction covering northern Germany, the Netherlands, and the Baltic, with administrative responsibility for over forty Dominican houses.
The years from 1313 saw Eckhart move between teaching at Strasbourg and Cologne, and active preaching in the vernacular German. The Cologne studium generale at which he taught and preached in his last years was the Dominican order's most important German house of advanced study — the house at which Albert the Great had taught and where Aquinas had begun his theological formation. The vernacular preaching addressed not only Dominican brethren but the audiences of beguines, devout laypeople, and other Dominican-affiliated women's communities that had multiplied in the Rhineland in the late thirteenth century.
In September 1326 the Archbishop of Cologne, Heinrich von Virneburg, opened an inquisitorial proceeding against Eckhart on charges of heresy drawn from his German sermons and Latin commentaries. Eckhart's Defense (his written response to the charges) and his sermons protesting the proceeding survive in part. He appealed to the papal court at Avignon and traveled there in early 1327. He died at Avignon, before the proceedings concluded, probably in early 1328 — the exact date and circumstances are unknown.
The papal bull In Agro Dominico of 27 March 1329, issued by John XXII, condemned twenty-eight Eckhartian propositions — fifteen as heretical, eleven as suspect, and two as outside Eckhart's actual position but listed for the record. The bull was promulgated in Cologne but not in other Dominican provinces; Eckhart's Latin works continued to be copied and studied in Dominican houses for centuries. The vernacular sermons circulated in manuscript among the beguines and the Dominican women's houses, where the German mystical tradition continued to develop through Tauler, Suso, and their successors.
The Latin Works
Eckhart's planned magnum opus, the Opus Tripartitum (Three-Part Work), was conceived as a systematic Scholastic synthesis. The three parts were to be: a Book of Propositions (containing over a thousand metaphysical propositions, of which only the prologues and a few specimens survive), a Book of Questions (academic disputed questions, largely lost), and a Book of Expositions (commentaries on Scripture, of which portions survive on Genesis, Exodus, Wisdom, the prologue of John, and other texts).
The surviving Latin works — the Quaestiones Parisienses (the Parisian academic disputations), the commentaries on Genesis (in two versions), Exodus, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, and the prologue of John — reveal a Scholastic philosopher of major ambition. Eckhart works within the framework Aquinas established a half-century earlier but pushes the metaphysics of being further toward the Neoplatonist tradition Aquinas had assimilated more cautiously. The first Parisian question — Whether being and understanding are the same in God — develops the position that in God being and understanding are identical, and that the divine intellect is prior to and the source of being.
The metaphysics of the Gottesgrund — the divine ground from which the persons of the Trinity emerge and to which the soul can return — is the most distinctive Eckhartian doctrine. The ground is one and undifferentiated, the source from which divine self-knowledge produces the eternal Word and from which all created reality proceeds. In creatures, the grunt (ground) of the soul — the deepest point of the human spirit — is identical with the divine ground; the soul's highest possibility is to return to that identity, becoming "one with the One" in a mode that the apophatic vocabulary can gesture at but never fully articulate.
The standard scholarly edition is the Deutsche Werke and Lateinische Werke of the Kohlhammer Eckhart edition (begun 1936, now complete in 11 volumes). The German Maurer-Quint edition of the German works (Reclam) is the more accessible scholarly German text. English translations include the Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defense (Paulist, 1981), McGinn's Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher (Paulist, 1986), and the various translations of Oliver Davies, Maurice O'C. Walshe, and Reiner Schurmann.
The German Sermons and Treatises
Eckhart's German preaching is the body of work for which he is best known — some 120 sermons survive in various German redactions, alongside the short treatises On Detachment, The Talks of Instruction (early), and The Book of Divine Consolation (composed for Queen Agnes of Hungary, c. 1308).
The characteristic Eckhartian themes:
The birth of the Son in the soul. The Father eternally generates the Son in the divine ground; in the prepared soul, the Father similarly generates the Son in the soul's ground. Each soul that has fully detached from all creaturely attachments becomes the place of this eternal divine birth. The doctrine is biblical (drawing on the Pauline metaphor of being conformed to Christ) and patristic (drawing on the Greek theology of theosis); Eckhart pushes it further than the prior Latin tradition had done.
Detachment (Abgeschiedenheit). The fundamental virtue that opens the soul to the divine birth. To be detached is to be free of all attachment to created things — not merely to refuse them but to be inwardly indifferent to their presence or absence. The detached person is so empty of all creaturely demand that God must enter; the soul that has nothing creaturely in it becomes the receptacle of God's own self-presence.
The spark of the soul (vünkelin, funke). The point in the soul at which it is identical with God — the divine ground in the soul. Above understanding and will, above any creaturely faculty, the spark is unborn, uncreated, and uncreatable. "There is a power in the soul," Eckhart preaches in Sermon 13, "and if all of God were in it, there would still be no room for anything else."
These doctrines, in the vernacular German, were what generated the inquisitorial proceedings of 1326. The phrases that were extracted as heretical in In Agro Dominico are recognizable from the sermons — the assertion that something in the soul is uncreated, that the just person operates the same works God operates, that all creatures are pure nothing. Eckhart's defense, in the surviving papers, was that the phrases must be read in their preaching context, that what sounds heterodox when extracted as a proposition is orthodox when read with the surrounding qualifications.
Reception
The immediate inheritance was the Rhineland mystical tradition. Johannes Tauler (d. 1361), Eckhart's Dominican confrere and student, preached in the same vernacular German style but with more ascetic and less metaphysically daring vocabulary. Henry Suso (d. 1366), another Eckhart student, integrated Eckhartian theology with the personal devotional tradition; his Little Book of Eternal Wisdom became one of the most-read German devotional works of the late middle ages. The anonymous Theologia Germanica (composed late fourteenth century, edited by Luther in 1516 and 1518) drew on the broader Eckhartian-Taulerian tradition and helped transmit it to the early Reformation.
Nicholas of Cusa (d. 1464) owned and annotated a manuscript collection of Eckhart's Latin works (now Cusanus 21 at the Bernkastel-Kues hospital library) and integrated Eckhartian themes into his speculative theology. Hegel, in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, treated Eckhart as a forerunner of speculative philosophy. Schopenhauer cited him as one of the very few European thinkers whose insight matched the Indian Upaniṣadic tradition. Heidegger absorbed Eckhart at depth: the concept of Gelassenheit (releasement) that Heidegger develops in his late work is Eckhart's German term, with the theological resonance largely retained.
The modern Catholic rehabilitation of Eckhart accelerated through the twentieth century. The major scholars — Joseph Quint, Bernard McGinn, Alois Haas, Burkhard Mojsisch (Meister Eckhart: Analogy, Univocity, and Unity, Grun, 2001), Niklaus Largier, Yossef Schwartz, Markus Vīnzent — have largely defended Eckhart against the 1329 condemnation, arguing that the condemnations rested on misreadings out of context. The Vatican confirmed Eckhart's good standing in the church in a 1992 statement, though without formally rescinding the 1329 bull.
Significance
Eckhart's significance is dual. As Scholastic theologian, he pushed the metaphysics of being and the doctrine of God further into Neoplatonic territory than Aquinas had been willing to go, producing a speculative theology of the divine ground that anticipated and partly enabled later German speculative theology and philosophy. As vernacular preacher, he created the technical theological vocabulary of German mysticism — Gelassenheit, Abgeschiedenheit, Gottesgrund, Seelengrund, vünkelin — and shaped a contemplative tradition that runs through Tauler and Suso, the Theologia Germanica, Cusa, the German Idealists, and Heidegger. The 1329 condemnation could limit but not extinguish the influence; the texts continued to circulate, the tradition continued to develop, and the recovery of Eckhart in the twentieth century has restored him to the rank of major figure in medieval thought.