Meister Eckhart

1
Meister Eckhart

• The Man From Whom God Hid
• Nothing
• (with apologies to Bernard McGinn)

2
A Most Unusual Man

• The lesemeister A reading master was a scholar
  who had memorized an impressed number of
  quotations and arguments.
• The lebemeister A Master of Love (later liebe),
  a term applied to such noted spiritual directors
  as Eckhart, Tauler, and their successors.

3
Life Course

• 1260-1329
• Sent as a teenager to Paris to study.
• He received the degree of Master there which led
  to his title.
• Served many positions in the Dominican Order,
  including as a teacher at Paris.

4
The Preacher

• Eckhart, even while serving as a professor,
  fulfilled the Dominican commission by being a
  preacher.
• Was one of only a handful of noted Dominicans to
  serve two terms as a Professor at Paris. Thomas
  Aquinas the other.

5
A Side Light

• Although Eckhart knew the Dominican Inquisitor,
  William of Paris, who condemned Marguerite
  Porete, he cited the Mirror of Simple Souls in
  his own work.
• He seems to have known the beguines of
  Strassbourg and at Cologne.
• He founded a number of womens houses.

6
Tried For Heresy

• September 26, 1326 at Cologne
• He appealed to the Pope. Dominicans were
  canonically independent of the local bishops.
• March 27, 1329 the papal degree was handed down
  by John XXII.

• Although tradition blamed the rival Franciscans,
  the evidence is that the charges were made by two
  members of his own Dominican order.

7
The Papal Decree

• Interestingly, given the vigor of his
  condemnation, the degree did not touch his
  person
• the aforesaid Eckhart. . .professed the Catholic
  faith at the end of his life and revoked and
  deplored the twenty-six articles, which he
  admitted that he had preached. . .insofar as they
  could generate in the minds of the faithful a
  heretical opinion, or one erroneous and hostile
  to the faith. (McGinn, p. 19)

8
Eckhartian themesThe Ground or Grunt

• One of the richest terms in Medieval German
• The bottom or lower side
• The origin or cause
• The abgrunt or abyssus
• The essence or real being of something
• Often tied to such metaphors as the spark, the
  castle, the nobleman, the highest point, the
  seed, etc.

9
Indestinction

• Together with such mystics as Mechthild of
  Madgeburg, Hadewijch, and Porete, Eckhart
  believed that a unio indistinctionis was the goal
  of religion.
• A indistinctable union was one where the soul and
  the ground were so united that one could not
  point to what now separated them.

10
Christological Model

• Like Origen, Eckharts model for mystical life
  was the union of God and Humanity in Christ.
• So since God-Christ eternally dwells within the
  Fathers ground and I in Him, one ground and the
  same Christ, a substrata of my humanity. It is
  as much mine as His in the one substratum of
  Eternal Being, so that the double being of body
  and soul will be perfected in the one Christone
  God and one Son.

11
The Dynamics of Being

• For Eckhart, God flows out and then the flow
  returns.
• Although it is a bad metaphor, God catches the
  wave of Gods Spirit.
• Gods going out is Gods going in.

12
Eckhartian themesEternal Birth

• Eckhart frequently speaks of the Birth of the
  Word in the soul.
• Like the female mystics that he knew, he
  developed his teaching in reference to the
  nativity stories.

13
Two Favored Images

• Darkness
• the Abyss
• The theology of negation. (via negativa).

14
Spiritual Director

• Eckhart was one of the most eager sought out
  spiritual directors of his time. The following
  slides, drawn from his sermons, express some of
  the Eckhartian wisdom that has been part of his
  popularity through the years.

15
Quotes

• "People should not worry as much about what they
  do but rather about what they are
• "It is a fair trade and an equal exchange to the
  extent that you depart from things, thus far, no
  more and no less, God enters into you with all
  that is his, as far as you have stripped yourself
  of yourself in all things.

16
Quotes II

• Self-free is self-controlled, and
  self-controlled is self-possessed, and
  self-possession is God-possession and possession
  of everything that God ever made.
• I give no thanks to God for loving me because he
  cannot help it, it is his nature to what I do
  thank him for is that he cannot of his goodness
  leave off loving me.

17
Quotes III

• What could be sweeter than to have a friend with
  whom, as with yourself, you can discuss all that
  is in your heart?
• All creatures are the utterance of God. If my
  mouth speaks and declares God, so too does the
  being of a stone.
• When the soul is united with God, then it
  perfectly possesses in him all that is something.
  The soul forgets itself there, as it is in
  itself, and all things, knowing itself in God as
  divine, in so far as God is in it.

18
Quotes IV

• When we turn away from ourselves and from all
  created things, to that extent we are united and
  sanctified in the soul's spark, which is
  untouched by either space or time. This spark is
  opposed to all creatures and desires nothing but
  God.

19
Quotes V

• There were a certain man and wife the woman by
  accident lost an eye, and was sorely troubled
  thereat. Her husband then said to her, "Wife, why
  are you troubled? "She answered, "It is not the
  loss of my eye that troubles me, but the thought
  that you may love me less on account of that
  loss." He said, "I love you all the same." Not
  long after he put one of his own eyes out, and
  came to his wife and said, "Wife, that you may
  believe I love you, I have made myself like you
  I, too, now, have only one eye." So men could
  hardly believe that God loved them till God put
  one of His eyes out, that is took upon Himself
  human nature, and was made man.

20
Quotes VI

• Fire converts wood into its own likeness, and
  the stronger the wind blows, the greater grows
  the fire. Now by the fire understand love, and by
  the wind the Holy Spirit. The stronger the
  influence of the Holy Spirit, the brighter grows
  the fire of love but not all at once, rather
  gradually as the soul grows. Light causes flowers
  and plants to grow and bear fruit in animals it
  produces life, but in men blessedness.

21
Quotes VII

• God expects but one thing of you, and that is
  that you should come out of yourself in so far as
  you are a created being and let God be God in
  you.
• All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.
• God is at home, it's we who have gone out for a
  walk.
• If the only prayer you said in your whole life
  was, "thank you," that would suffice.
• Jesus might have said, "I became man for you. If
  you do not become God for me, you wrong me.

22
Quotes VIII

• To be full of things is to be empty of God. To
  be empty of things is to be full of God.
• You may call God love, you may call God
  goodness. But the best name for God is
  compassion.
• For however devoted you are to (God), you may be
  sure that he is immeasurably more devoted to
  you... .