ECKHART, JOHANNES

ECKHART, JOHANNES (c. 1260–1327?), called Meister Eckhart; German theologian and mystic. Eckhart was born at Hochheim in Thuringia (now Germany). After entering the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) at Erfurt, he began theological studies in Cologne about 1280, possibly being among the last students of Albertus Magnus. In 1293 Eckhart was in Paris as a young lecturer and in 1302 he held the chair once held by Thomas Aquinas. A versatile personality, Eckhart was chosen in 1303 and in 1307 to be the religious superior of a province of numerous Dominican houses and institutions. During his second teaching period in Paris, after 1311, Eckhart laid the foundations for what he intended to be his great work, the Opus tripartitum, a synthesis of commentaries on the Bible, philosophical-theological treatises, and sermons on the Christian life.

In 1314 Eckhart was active in Strassburg, a city rich in theological schools and centers of preaching and mystical prayer. Eckhart, without neglecting his theological teaching (among his students were the famous mystical writers Johannes Tauler and Heinrich Süse), traveled widely to Dominican and Cistercian houses as preacher and spiritual director. By 1322 this demanding apostolate had been transferred up the Rhine to Cologne.

By 1326 Eckhart was under attack for his theology by the archbishop of Cologne. Rivalry between Franciscans and Dominicans; the heated atmosphere of the excesses in piety, as well as the genius of Rhenish mysticism; Eckhart's preaching about God and human personality in a vivid, colloquial German—all contributed to Eckhart's difficulties. Mindful of the accusations leveled previously against Thomas Aquinas, and insulted by a local inquisition presuming to evaluate the Dominicans who stood under papal protection, Eckhart appealed to the papacy, then at Avignon. He spent the remaining months of his life traveling the roads to and from southern France, appealing his case before the papal Curia. In 1329 John XXII concluded formally that seventeen of the articles ascribed to Eckhart (only a sample of the longer list) were to be construed as heretical or supportive of heresy, but the papal document observed that Eckhart, prior to his death, had rejected error. Eckhart's place and time of death remain unknown.

Eckhart's professorial works in Latin together with his popular German sermons develop a single system that is a religious metaphysics of spirit-in-process. Spirit here has a twofold significance. In a daring appropriation of apophatic mysticism, Eckhart defends the otherness of the divine being, that "wilderness" that to us is nothing. For Eckhart, the Trinity exists only on the surface of the absolute, for the three persons display activity. The ultimate reality of the absolute is "the silent godhead" from which in love enormous processes come forth from transcendent peace. The second manifestation of spirit is human personality. Eckhart, whom some have called the greatest depth psychologist before Freud, describes human life both theoretically and practically as a birth. The true self that is being born in each person is a word of God, just as Jesus, the divine Logos, is a word of God. This birth happens in the midst of a metaphysics of psychological praxis: only by letting the world of finite being and desires be can the individual prepare for the birth at the center of his or her personality (in the "spark" of the psyche) of that new self that is the fulfillment of God's personalized love and of our individualized personality.

Eckhart exercised an extraordinary influence not only upon Tauler and Süse and other Rhenish mystics but also upon Nicholas of Cusa. Martin Luther too admired these and other mystics of the German school from the fourteenth century, but, because of the papal condemnation, he knew them only from anonymous collections. After 1800 the German thinker Franz von Baader rehabilitated a number of mystics, including Eckhart, who then influenced Hegel and, more extensively, Schelling. In the twentieth century, scholarship discovered more writings of Eckhart, employed critical methods to verify and comprehend them, and filled in the picture of a genius of extraordinary depth. Martin Heidegger, both Jungian and Freudian psychologists, and Asian scholars found Eckhart to be an inescapable voice in philosophy, theology, and personal life. Since 1965 a significant renaissance of interest in Eckhart's work has been taking place in Europe, North America, and Asia.

Bibliography

Texts of Eckhart's works, in Latin and medieval German, are available in Die lateinischen Werke (Stuttgart, 1956–1964) and Die deutschen Werke (Stuttgart, 1958–). On Eckhart's life, see Josef Koch's "Kritische Studien zum Leben Meister Eckharts," Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 29 (1959): 5–15. A bibliography of writings on Eckhart is available in my "An Eckhart Bibliography," The Thomist 42 (April 1978): 313–336. There are three new, worthwhile collections of Eckhart in English: Matthew Fox's Breakthrough: Meister Eckhart's Creation Spirituality (New York, 1980) offers numerous sermons with commentary and bibliography; Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn's Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defense (New York, 1981) offers selections from the Latin and German works, with bibliography; Maurice O. Walshe, in Sermons and Treatises, 3 vols. (London, 1980–), presents particularly fine translations. See also Master Eckhart: Parisian Questions and Prologues, translated by Alfred A. Maurer (Toronto, 1974).

Thomas F. O'Meara (1987)