Meister Eckhart, Mystic and Philosopher by Reiner Schürmann (review)

BOOK REVIEWS sos Meister Eckhart, Mystic and Phuosopher. By REINER ScHUID>i£ANN. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1978. Pp. 9l69. $17.50. Have there been five books published in English on Meister Eckhart in this century? The past eighteen months alone have brought us three: C. F. Kelley, Meister Eckhart on Divine Knowledge (Yale, 1977); a symposium on Eckhart printed in The Thornist (April, 1978); and finally this volume by the professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research . Although this book is a translation of a French edition, it owns a fine English style, bright and succinct. Schlirmann recently published in France a book of autobiographical reflections, Origines, which attracted wide attention as a first view of life after World War II by a young German. So the author's literary talents enhance this study of Eckhart, for it is aesthetically as well as intellectually captivating. Schlirmann wants not to explain everything about Eckhart but to unlock the central spark of the mystic: the unavoidably and permanently dynamic Eckhart. "As long as Eckhart's readers attempt to grasp his thought in relations among entities, isolating different philosophical currents like musical motifs, the simple source from which everything springs remains hidden. Eckhart's thinking is such that probably any list of 'theses' drawn from his works will provoke objections and rejectien for diverse reasons " (p. 164). The format of this book is novel and avoids the labored structure, inspired by dissertations, of a superfluity of quotations and references culled from all the great man's writings. Instead, Schlirmann has carefully chosen three sermons which through exposition and hermeneutic allow the Meister's word to emerge and to impress. Each of the sermons contains central motifs of Eckhart's philosophico-theological view of the world and the self: detachment and birth; the quaternity of dissimilarity, similarity, identity and dehiscence; the concluding juxaposition of ontic nothingness opening to the nothingness of the Godhead; and being-born in the being of the Son of God. Schlirmann points out that these moments are " intensities " for every or for any moment of a person's life; they are not stages in a methodology of prayer or interior ascent. For each of the three chapters exegeting one sermon newly translated, the author provides a second sermon: an expansion upon, an illustration of the teaching in that particular chapter. The professor at the New School expresses lucidly an approach which has been on the tip of the tongue of other, European scholars. He observes that to remain with a metaphysics of substances is inevitably to be incapable of expressing what Eckhart, as mystic and writer, wants to say. Eckhart, no more than any other speculative mystic, thinks of God and the mind as united by some kind of fusion of entities into a common substance; rather, 306 BOOK REVIEWS Got entwird: in the disappearance of the God-Person and of the man-person, in detachment and the great forgetfulness of self, being accomplishes itself. Only this process "is." Breakthrough, on the one hand, birth on the other, are reconciled in the itinerancy of the detached man. (p. 164) The critical apparatus of the book is sparse, but this should not delude readers and scholars into the opinion that the volume ignores the intellectual sources and milieu of Eckhart. Schilrmann knows medieval thought very well, and his uncovering of Eckhart's words and ideas in Albert or Aquinas is thorough. He unravels and intertwines in a sophisticated way the interplay of Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism in Eckhart. He makes a good case in the final sections for showing that Eckhart finds the different kinds of theories of analogy inadequate for his thought. Schilrmann explains how Eckhart saw true prayer and mystical insight attaining the Godhead beyond God. This "breakthrough" (the word is Eckhart's own creation) to the Godhead-through radical detachment and Zen-like focus upon the present existent-must mean that the philosophical categories which were at hand for the Thuringian Dominican appeared inadequate: not false but inadequate. "The authentic core of Meister Eckhart's thinking is releasement . In the history of ideas, each epoch has its own language, and perhaps releasement precedes its own...