Meister Eckhardt. Die Geburt der “Deutschen Mystik” aus dem Geist der arabischen Philosophie by Kurt Flasch (review)

The question of the relationship between mysticism and philosophy in the medieval period has received much attention in recent decades. Here, in this “little Eckhart book” (150), whose title seems to invoke Nietzsche, Kurt Flasch argues that Eckhart was influenced by the teachings of Averroës, which were transmitted to him through Albert the Great and Dietrich of Freiberg.

Flasch’s reading redefines the way in which the term ‘mystic’ is applied to Eckhart, arguing against the notion that Eckhart’s mysticism, if one must call it that, was in some sense specifically German. Focusing on his Latin works, Flasch’s Eckhart is very much a philosopher whose scriptural commentaries are founded on the principles of Aristotelian philosophy (21) and whose central teachings are derived, albeit indirectly, from Averroës. “We don’t find the ecstatic visions in Eckhart,” he writes, “and we never hear him speak of the experience of God’s presence in his life . . . he writes just as scholastically as others among his contemporaries” (17).

Flasch finds in Eckhart a rationalist alternative to the nascent Thomism of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. This is in contrast to recent work, e.g. by Robert Dobie, who in his Logos and Revelation (CUA Press, 2010) compares Eckhart as a Christian mystic to Ibn ‘Arabi as a Sufi mystic using a sort of “mystical hermeneutics.” For Flasch, however, it is Averroës who is the proper forerunner of the arts masters of late thirteenth-century Paris (chapter 2). With great clarity and force of argumentation, Flasch asks his readers to reject the many clichés that have characterized Eckhart’s writings, and to follow along as he traces out the constellation of figures influencing his Latin works: not just Averroës, Dietrich, and Albert, but also Maimonides and Avicenna (chapters 6 and 7).

First, however, Flasch examines Albert’s engagement with Averroës (chapter 3), rejecting the idea that Albert’s teachings, along with those of Thomas Aquinas, form any kind of alberto–thomistic unity. Albert’s proximity to the arts masters is for Flasch evidenced by the number of views he held that were later condemned in 1277 (85). Among those condemned, Flasch finds in Albert the following: 30, 43, 44, 70, 73, 84, and 95 (the numbering here is that of Mandonnet, in Siger de Brabant et l’averroïsme latin au XIIIe siècle). These articles, he says, “deal with the cosmological schema and its metaphysical genesis sympathetically presented by Albert” (85), for example, Article 43: “[T]hat, because intelligences do not have matter, God is unable to make many of the same species” (Mandonnet, 179). Second, Flasch argues that Dietrich of Freiberg followed suit, criticizing his Thomist contemporaries using arguments derived from Averröes via Albert (chapter 4). In particular, Flasch claims that Dietrich opposed the Thomists on the question of spiritual knowledge and the beatitude of the soul precisely because the influence of Albert who in turn was influenced by Averroes. (111).

Flasch reaches his core thesis—that there is a relationship between Meister Eckhart and Averroës—in chapter 5. Although the connection between Eckhart and Dietrich has been demonstrated by Loris Sturlese, no one has yet made use of his argumentation in connecting Eckhart with Averroës (120), whom Flasch finds in Eckhart’s Commentary on the Gospel of John (In Ioann., LW 3:436). As Flasch notes further about Eckhart, “Plato, Aristotle, the Gospel of John, Augustine’s metaphysics of mind (mens), Averroës, Albert, Dietrich—this chain of influence describes the intellectual heritage of the so-called ‘father of German speculation.’” He adds, “[Eckhart], to be sure, came from Cologne, but behind him one finds Athens, Hippo, Paris, and, last but not least, Córdoba. The so-called ‘German mysticism’ is born from the spirit of the greco–arabic philosophy in the . . . interpretation of Dietrich of Freiberg” (121).

Flasch...