The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing by Bernard McGinn (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 333 The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing. By BERNARD MCGINN. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2001. Pp. 292. $45.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-8245-1914-0. Over fifty years ago a young man began to read the works of Meister Eckhart in English translation. He grappled with the complexity of the writings, the paradoxes of the teachings, the seemingly outrageous unorthodox statements contained in the works of the Dominican theologian. In this present book Bernard McGinn shares with the academic community his mature understanding of the Master's mystical thought after so many years of reading the texts, pondering their message, wondering about their meaning, and being inspired by their author. This study McGinn planned to form part of volume 4 of his comprehensive series The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism. He found the material and his own interest in this extraordinary Dominican teacher to be too comprehensive and discovered that he had to write a separate book. As the focus of the book McGinn poses several questions: "Who was Meister Eckhart? Whywere his teaching and preaching so powerful and so controversial? What was the relation between Eckhart ·the lesemeister and Eckhart the lebemeister, and between the learned Latin writings that give us access to the former and the more than one hundred sermons and handful of treatises that allow us to overhear Eckhart the preacher and 'soul friend'?" (2). He gives answers to these questions in six chapters: the first, providing an introduction to Eckhart's life and works; the second, dealing with problems ofinterpretation; th~ third, arguing for a characterization of Eckhart's mysticism as being the "mysticismofthe ground"; the fourth, analyzing the preacher's sermons; and the final two chapters, presenting the main themes of Eckhart's teaching on how all things flow out from and return to the divine grunt (ground). Eckhart can be investigated as lesemeister or lebemeister. Scholars study the works of Eckhart, the master of theology (lesemeister), the teacher of doctrine, the formulator of new modes of thinking about the Godhead, God, the Trinity, Jesus Christ, and the human person. One can also study Eckhart the spiritual master (lebemeister) ofthe Christian life, who reflects theologically on the implications of his written works on the lives of Christian believers, be they Dominican friars, novices, nuns, or lay folk. In the first chapter, McGinn rehearses Eckhart's personal background and education, considers the wide spectrum of Eckhart's Latin and German works, and reminds the reader of Eckhart's call to trial for heresy and his own defense against the charges. This functions as background for a reconsideration of the controversy over Eckhart's teachings. In this second chapter, McGinn surveys earlier scholars such as Fischer, Flasch, Kelley, and Mojsisch, pitting them against recent critics such as Ruh, Haas, and Largier, on the interpretation of Eckhart as mystic or teacher of the mystical life. McGinn shows the unique character of Eckhart's "mystical hermeneutics"-"unique," despite his use of sources from Christian tradition, such as Augustine, and from non-Christianwriters, such as Maimonides. McGinn 334 BOOK REVIEWS adamantly asserts that the Bible, as the source of truth about the Truth, is the first principle of Eckhart's hermeneutics. Eckhart "dehistoricizes and decontextualizes the text .into sentences, fragments, or even individual words that he then recombines with other biblical passages in a dense web of intertextuality through a system of cross-referencing that is one of the main characteristics of his hermeneutics" (27). Eckhart is concerned "with the basic opposition between inner and outer" (ibid.) in his exegesis. Precisely as biblical preacher Eckhart endeavors to "break through" or "explode" the text for its hidden meaning in order to benefit the hearer of his word, but "his word" must always be the "Word of God, which is 'God's Power and God's Wisdom' (1 Cor 1:34)" (29). McGinn concludes: "Eckhart's place in the history of Western mysticism is primarily rooted in the German preaching ofthe lebemeister, but his vernacular message cannot be understood apart from the Latin learning of the lesemeister who had absorbed and recast the spiritual wisdom of...