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123 4 Unum est indistinctum” Meister Eckhart’s Dialectical Theology Eckhart combined seamlessly in himself two roles which we have come to think of as entirely antithetical: on the one hand, he was a spiritual master or “mystic”; on the other, he was an academic theologian, teaching at the best universities of his day. It is often the case, therefore, that his existential insights rest on a very elaborate and subtle scholastic scaffolding. The current theme of our chapter is no exception: the realization of the primal identity of subject and object, of the coincidence of the divine transcendence of the universe and the divine immanence in the soul, is a realization gained through a lived union of the soul with God. Eckhart argues, however, that such a realization must transform the way we think about the basic principles of philosophy, just as these transformed principles must, in turn, transform the way we read, understand, interpret, and, ultimately, live Scripture. This is one way of understanding why Eckhart undertook to write what was planned to be a vast work of scholastic theology and philosophy, called the Opus tripartitum or “The Tripartite Work.”1 This work was to be composed, as its title states, of three parts: (1) an opus propositionum, or “work of propositions” in which 1. The dating of the writing of the prologues to Opus tripartitum is a matter of some debate. Until recently, it was argued that the prologues date from relatively late in Eckhart ’s career (i.e., sometime after 1314) and that, therefore, they might possibly repre- “ 124 Existence Eckhart would lay out, in an axiomatic form similar to Proclus’s Elements of Theology, the basic principles of theology; (2) an opus quaestionum, or “work of questions” in which he would give, in the manner of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, responses to some one thousand disputed questions in theology; and finally, there was to be (3) an opus expositionum, or “work of commentaries” in which he would, using the framework of the previous two works, draw out the inner meaning of Scripture by commenting on all the books of the Bible as well as collect sermons on specific scriptural passages. Thus, following the proposition that Eckhart puts forward first, Esse est Deus or “to be is God,” he then puts forward the question in his second part, Ut Deus sit? or “Does God exist?” This proposition and question then form the basis for his third discussion, interpreting the beginning of Genesis, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” The exegete is now prepared to uncover the inner, hidden meaning of this passage as containing the first proposition, Esse est Deus, Being is God. According to Eckhart, the Lebemeister, the principle Esse est Deus becomes a truth for us, that is to say, a lived truth to be appropriated by the soul in its union with God, only when that principle is in turn applied to the interpretation of a specific scriptural passage. Eckhart says that it was his students who urged him to undertake the Opus tripartitum, and, we can see, Eckhart conceived it on a massive scale sent a new and even fundamentally different approach than that found in the Parisian Questions and some of the scriptural commentaries. This is the view of Maurer (1974); Kurt Ruh, Meister Eckhart: Theologe, Prediger, Mystiker (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1993), 29; and Alain de Libera and Edouard Wéber, Maitre Eckhart à Paris: Une critique médiévale de l’ontothéologie—Les Questions parisiennes no. 1 et no. 2 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1984). Loris Sturlese, however, in his important article “Meister Eckhart in der Biblioteca Amploniana: Neues zur Datierung des ‘Opus tripartitum,’” in Die Biblioteca Amploniana, ed. Andreas Speer, 434–96 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995), has convincingly shown that the prologues must date from relatively early in Eckhart’s career (i.e., the first decade of the fourteenth century) and are more or less contemporaneous with the Parisian Questions. It is thus questionable, at best, to make much of any contrast between “the doctrine of the Opus” and “the doctrine of the Parisian Questions.” That said, it is evident that Eckhart’s thought underwent many modifications and revisions over the years and in places (i.e., Sermo XXIX and in his Expositio Libri Sapientiae, 7:27) he seems to base his arguments more on those of the Parisian Questions than on those of the prologues to the Opus tripartitum. But...

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