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The medieval mystic Johannes Eckhart was born at Hochheim in Thuringia, central Germany. As a young man, he entered the Dominican monastery at nearby Erfurt, where he began his studies for the priesthood. Over the next several years, he studied in Cologne and Paris. He received the degree of Master in Sacred Theology (hence the title "Meister") and taught at the University of Paris. From 1294, Eckhart held a number of administrative positions within the Dominican Order, eventually becoming Provincial of Saxony and Vicar of Bohemia. These administrative positions required numerous meetings, extensive travel, and voluminous correspondence. Despite his workload, Eckhart found time to write a book of advice, Counsels on Discernment; several speculative volumes, such as the Book of Divine Comfort; and a major theological work, Opus Tripartitum, most of which has been lost. Eckhart was also a popular preacher, delivering a number of sermons as he traveled through Germany. Many of these sermons were preached in German rather than Latin. According to some scholars, by presenting his ideas in the vernacular, Eckhart did for German what Dante did for Italian: He gave the vernacular stature and prestige. In his most famous German sermon, reprinted here in the Raymond Bernard Blakney translation, Eckhart describes union with God in the core of the human soul. According to Eckhart, this core of the soul is the source of the soul's "agents": the intellect, the memory, and the will. Because they are only agents of the soul and not the soul itself, neither the intellect nor the will can adequately present God to us. Neither ideas about God nor willingness to accept God can bring union with God. Instead, we must withdraw from all agents and prepare a place of silence for God to enter. Once God has entered the core of the soul, human beings are divinized. Whereas talk of "communion" with God is orthodox in Christian theology, teaching "union" with God has sometimes been considered to be immodest. Traditional Christian theology wants to maintain a respectful distinction between Creator and creation. Talk of union with God violates this tact. A later work (falsely) attributed to Eckhart indicates what the church feared: "Sir, rejoice with me, I have become God!" Eckhart's sermons eventually led to trouble with church authorities. Eckhart himself admitted that some of the ideas in his vernacular sermons were ill-expressed and that in translating theological ideas from Latin to German he may have made errors. But the Archbishop of Cologne believed the problem was deeper than mistranslation: Eckhart was a heretic. Eckhart's last years were spent fighting heresy charges. As Eckhart succinctly put it, "I am able to be in error, but I cannot be a heretic, for the first [i.e., error] belongs to the intellect, the second [i.e., heresy] to the will." Though he protested innocence until his death (around 1328), in 1329 Pope John XXII declared eleven of Eckhart's teachings suspect and seventeen heretical. Despite this papal condemnation, Eckhart's thought and writings continued to be influential in the later Middle Ages and are still consulted today. By Forrest Baird © 2000 by Prentice Hall from Philosophic Classics, Volume II |