“Magister in Theologia: Meister Eckhart”
I have to admit that I have thoroughly enjoyed putting this month’s column together. Working on Little Pots of Honey is always a labor of love, but this column was especially enjoyable in that I had the opportunity to research a theologian which I didn’t know extremely well. And the more I have read the more intrigued I have become.
I was introduced to Meister Eckhart early in my theological studies at Duke Divinity School over 35 years ago, but it was a brief and hurried conversation, at best. Working on this month’s column has allowed the two of us to get to know one another far better, and it is a relationship that I definitely want to continue to explore.
Johann Eckhart, better known as Meister (Master) Eckhart, was a Dominican preacher, theologian, philosopher and a profound mystic. But, he was also a man heavily engaged in the world. One of the most influential Christian Neo-Platonist of his day, he was also known as one of the most illustrious spiritual instructors of his era. He taught and wrote on both metaphysics and spiritual psychology.
Meister Eckhart was born in the mountain village of Tambach in the east-central Thuringia region of Germany around 1260. He came into prominence during the decadent Avignon Papacy, a time also known for the increased tensions between the Franciscans and Eckhart’s own Dominican Order.
In his later years, he was unjustly brought up on charges before the Franciscan-led Inquisition. (In 1329, a year after Eckhart’s death in 1328, Pope John XXII issued a bull characterizing some of Eckhart’s statements as heretical, although at the close it states that Eckhart recanted everything he had falsely taught before his death.)
Master Eckhart was a distinguished professor and taught at a number of universities including Paris, Strasburg and Cologne. Clearly a man of great personal piety, his theological position was one of radical panenthesism (all in God, God in all), and he communicated this with a beautifully powerful style which made him known as an excellent preacher.
In fact, Eckhart’s best remembered works are his sermons. They are highly unusual for the time in that they were delivered in the vernacular High Middle German rather than in Latin. By 1322 Master Eckhart was the most famous preacher of his day. His sermons were filled with chivalrous courtly love talk and riveting aphorisms.
The central theme of Master Eckhart’s sermons is the presence of God in the individual soul, and the dignity of the soul of a just man. Eckhart was attempting to provide practical sermons to guide those under him during a time of great tension and turmoil both within and outside of the Church. His primary interest seems to have been to invite his listeners into a profound state of God-realization in their lifetime.
A large part of Eckhart’ difficulties was that while his mystic teachings were already suspect to many in the Church who heard his words out of context, Eckhart seemed to go out of his way to shock those listening to him.
One writer, Woods, put it this way:
He seems to have delighted in shocking his listeners into attention to the divine presence within and in the world outside by outrageous comparisons, puns, and comic examples…. By adopting the role of trickster, Eckhart irritated the official guardians of pious sobriety and cautious expression…. Eckhart’s playful but profound assaults on conventional God-talk [were thought by some to be] mad and dangerous.
In Eckhart’s understanding, God’s supremely glorious nature is both fully transcendent and fully immanent. God is completely beyond all, yet is also completely within all. For Eckhart, God is the One who alone IS, pure spirit, the Essence of all.
Meister Eckhart taught, in true Neo-Platonic fashion, that whatever is real in all things is the divine. He taught that in the soul of man is a true spark of God, and that is the true reality in all humanity.
For Eckhart, the true struggle for all of us is to have God born in our soul, that is, to enter into full communion with and come under the control of the indwelling God. When God dominant in the soul, one is filled with love and righteousness. Christ is the perfect example of this. The all important issue is that the soul enters into its full privilege of union with God.
Eckhart’s writings come across with the authority of one who speaks with true personal experience of mystical union. His favorite themes are the Divine essence, the relationship between God and man, the faculties and gifts of the human soul, and the return of all things to God. A good example is
“I AM can be spoken by no creature,
but by God alone.
I must become God and
God must become me, so completely that
we share the same “I” eternally.
Our truest “I” is God.
Master Eckhart is best known today for his mysticism. Many consider this Dominican preacher and theologian to be the greatest of all the German mystics. And all agree that he is the father of German mysticism.
What I find especially interesting is that a number of prominent theologians and philosophers have made comparisons between Eckhart’s views and the teachings of other Indian, Christian and Islamic mystics.
The 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote in Volume II of The World As Will and Representation that:
If we turn from the forms, produced by external circumstances, and go to the root of things, we shall find that Sakyamuni and Eckhart teach the same thing; only that the former dared to express his ideas plainly and positively, whereas Eckhart is obliged to clothe them in the garment of the Christian myth, and to adapt his expression thereto.
Other writers have found parallels and close similarities between Eckhart’s teachings and those in Zen Buddhism. Although there is no unaminity to these views, which is to be expected, even that the debate is taking place is fascinating.
Modern writers which have been influenced by the theology and mystical writings of Master Eckhart include Matthew Fox and the noted psychoanalyst and philosopher, Eric Fromm. Dag Hammarskjold’s understanding of spiritual growth through selfless service to others which he elaborates in Markings was also greatly influenced by Eckhart.
As David Ladinsky so clearly points out in his brief introduction to the poems of Meister Eckhart which follow, it was life itself about which Meister Eckhart loved to talk and write. The wonders of the human heart and soul united with God filled his thoughts.
But, it is also understandable how many of the pious could be scandalized by a Dominican preacher who preached:
“Is this not a holy trinity: the firmaments, the earth, our bodies. And is it not an
act of worship to hold a child, and till the soil and lift a cup. And communion, first seek that from your lover’s soul before anything offered by a priest.”
The following poems of Meister Eckhart are all from Ladinsky’s powerful book, Love Poems from God.
Meister Eckhart’s Poetry
God is always ready
God is always ready,
but we are very unready;
God is near to us,
but we are far from Him;
God is within, but we are without;
God is at home, but we are strangers.
I BET GOD
If He
let go of my hand, I would
weep so loudly,
I would petition with all my might, I would cause
so much trouble
that I bet God would come to His senses
and never do that
again.
Man
Man never desires anything so earnestly
as God desires to bring a man to Himself,
that he may know Him.
Expands His Being
All beings
are words of God,
His music, His
art.
Sacred books we are, for the infinite camps
in our
souls.
Every act reveals God and expands His being.
I know that may be hard
to comprehend.
All creatures are doing their best
to help God in His birth
of Himself.
Enough talk for the night.
He is laboring in me;
I need to be silent
for a while,
worlds are forming
in my heart.
Practice
Meister Eckhart says,
Practice is better than precept;
but the practice and precept of eternal God is a counsel of perfection.
If I wanted a teacher of theology, I should go for one to Paris,
to its learned university.
However, if I came to ask about the perfect life,
why then he could not tell me.
Where then am I to turn?
To pure and abstract nature, nowhere else:
that can solve your anxious questions.
Why, good people, search among dead bones?
Why not seek the living part that is directly connected with creation and that gives eternal life?
The dead neither give nor take.
An angel seeking God as God would not anywhere for him except in a quiet, solitary creature.
The essence of perfection lies in bearing poverty, misery, scorn, adversity and every hardship that befalls, willingly, gladly, freely, eagerly, calm and unmoved and persisting until death without a why.
The Prophet said
The prophet said:
God guides the redeemed through a narrow way
into the broad road,
so that they come into the wide and broad place;
that is to say, into true freedom of the spirit,
when one has become a spirit with God.
The Hope of Loving
What keeps us alive, what allows us to endure?
I think it is the hope of loving,
or being loved.
I heard a fable once about the sun going on a journey
to find its source, and how the moon wept
without her lover’s
warm gaze.
We weep when light does not reach our hearts. We wither
like fields if someone close
does not rain their
kindness
upon
us.