Meister Eckhart: Philosopher of Christianity by Kurt Flasch (review)

This important intellectual biography of Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1328?) represents the culmination of Kurt Flasch’s sixty-year involvement with Eckhart’s thought. Comprehensive, richly learned, and trenchantly argued, it is also highly polemical. Flasch, an eminent historian of medieval thought, settles accounts with various nineteenth- and twentieth-century Eckhart scholars. Special targets are those who think the Meister a mystic, or—worse—see in his work some “unrestrained Faustian-Nordic drive for depth” (p. 164).

All wrong, Flasch argues. The basis for reading Eckhart correctly has been available since the publication of his more difficult Latin works, rediscovered well after the more famous/notorious vernacular writings. These, as Flasch makes clear, provide the necessary intellectual framework for understanding the German texts. With considerable textual support Flasch argues that Eckhart’s project is the attempt to provide a “philosophy of Christianity” (p. 14). The Meister wrote in the preface of his commentary on John, “[My] intention is the same as in all [my] works—to explain what the holy Christian faith and the two Testaments maintain through the help of the natural arguments of the philosophers” (Lateinische Werke 3, p. 4). The resulting teachings were so strikingly different from what the Roman Church had become accustomed to that the papal condemnation of twenty-eight of Eckhart’s propositions in 1329 was, according to Flasch, inevitable (chapter 20).

Flasch sees “the source of Eckhart’s thinking” (p. 38) in a metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical thesis involving intentionality, the epistemic image. Following Aristotle, as well as Christian, neo-Platonic, Arabic, and Jewish sources, Eckhart asserts the identity of knower and known. Further, as Flasch notes, for Eckhart “the soul becomes that in which it places its life-goal” (p. 210). Thus the soul of the just person “becomes Justice. The soul exists more in Justice than in the human body” (ibid.). And in becoming just, one becomes deiform, a homo divinus.

Eckhart’s rationale for identifying Justice with God lies in his unusual doctrine of the transcendental and spiritual perfections: Being, Oneness, Truth, Goodness, Justice, Wisdom, none of which are creatable. To create Being, for example, is already to exist; to create Justice is already to be just. This in turn, as Flasch shows, is connected with Eckhart’s understanding of analogy: these perfections are shared with the created, but at the same time remain entirely and substantially only in the Source. “Creatures,” as Eckhart says, “are a pure nothing” (Deutsche Werke 1, p. 69).

The human being differs, however, from the rest of nature in being made (in the intellect) in God’s image. As image, for Eckhart, “there is no distinction between him and his exemplar,” that of which he is an image (Flasch, p. 39) He is “offspring of Justice” (Lateinische Werke 3, p. 14). Although humans are creatures and thus per se nothing, we are thanks to the (highest part of the) soul more than creatures, with the capacity to “become by grace what God is by nature”—that is, God’s Son (Deutsche Werke 5, p. 401).

Yale University Press and the translators should be commended for making this 2010 German classic available in English. The translation is generally accurate, although unfortunately, as in the original, three works by Flasch referred to in the text only by date are not listed in the bibliography. Nonetheless, this learned and beautifully written volume joins Bernard McGinn’s The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart (New York, 2001) as the best general introduction in English to a revolutionary thinker.