The Presence of Meister Eckhart

INTRODUCTION THE PRESENCE OF MEISTER ECKHART TO BECOME ACQUAINTED with the writing of Eckhart of Hochheim, a master of our inner atmosphere, is to be surprised. Looking hack at him and his thought from the perspective of seven centuries, we see in Eckhart not one intellectual world but several, and each is still present in our own time. There is the methodology of scholastic philosophy as well as the theology and the commentaries on the _Fathers and the Scriptures; there are the booklets for the life of the spirit, and especially, the brief but potent sermons. As a Dominican he was devoted to his brothers, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, hut the dominant philosophical framework of his thought is not that of Aristote1ianism (new to the West) but that of the NeoPlatonism preserved in the mystics of the Greek Church. Eckhart is a Catholic spiritual director; yet, his ideas resemble at times those of the German idealists while his language can be existentialist. Eckhart was a medieVial scholastic as well as a mystic. A university professor at home in the intellectual world of the thirteenth century, he was nonetheless a preacher and counselor concerning the inner spaces where communion with God touches possibility. M agister at the centers of academic life, Cologne and Paris, nevertheless he is famous because of his preaching to monasteries of cloistered nuns who were part of the movement towards a new spirituality. Meister Eckhart was an innovator in the desert of mystical prayer, as he called it (and for his original phraseology he was condemned by episcopal and papal authorities), but he was also a church 171 172 THOMAS F. o'MEARA administrator, a prior and a provincial of large and needy territories of the Dominican Order. If we are surprised at the variety of the activity of the Lesemeister (as the Magister in theolor}ia was called in medieval Germany), no less astonishing is his influence which lasted not merely for generations but endured from epoch to epoch pasSJing through Luther, Schopenhauer and Heidegger. From his first generation of students, somewhat bewildered and intimidated by the papal condemnation, two became famous mentors of spiritual theology: Tauler and Suso. Through the writings of Tauler (some of which held not only the ideas but the text of Eckhart) and the Theolog'ia deutsoh Luther (a Thuringian like Eckhart) gained strength and insight for pursuing his new pastoral and national approach to the Word of Christianity. In some sense Luther's reformation was not only biblical and ecclesial-political but mystical; it grew from an experience of God's sovereign word of existential forgiveness in Christ. It preferred over against the ossified Hellenism and scholasticism of the late Middle Ages not only the Scriptural Word but that Word as received in the open and yearning soul. When Schelling and Hegel were shown the writings of Eckhart by that extraordinary seminal thinker of the early nineteenth century, Franz von Baader, they were astonished that here was someone who had anticipated their own ideas on the nature of the absolute. Hegel praised Eckhart as exceeding all the mystics upon whom idealism could draw, while Schelling recognized that Eckhart was not only a religious genius. but a creator of speculative terminology.1 It is really with the German Romantics that the modern rediscovery of Eckhart, which is still continuing, began.2 1 Heidegger writes of Schelling's Essay on Freedom: "Here the entire daring of Schelling's thought enters...the realization of an intellectual position which emerges with Meister Eckhart and which finds in Jacob Boehme a unique deV'elopment." Schelling/! Abhandlung Uber das Wesen der memchlichen Freiheit (1809) (Tiibingen, 1971), p. 140. •See I. Degenhardt, Studien zum Wandel des Eckhartbildes (Leiden, 1967). THE PRESENCE OF MEISTER ECKHART 178 It is no coincidence that one of the important philosophical meditations of Martin Heidegger, Gelassenheit, derives its title from Eckhart. Reiner Schiirmann's and John Caputo's writings have shown the similarity in language and intent between the two thinkers, certainly a similarity modified by the different worlds they inhabited. There are different objects and goals for their paths of detachment but Heidegger cherished his reading of Eckhart. " The breadth of...