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

The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing. By Bernard McGinn. [The Edward Cadbury Lectures, 2000-2001.] (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company. 2001. Pp. xiii, 305. $45.00.)

Over 650 years after his death, Meister Eckhart's mysticism of intimacy and indistinction is as relevant today as it was in the fourteenth century. The essential elements of his theology, those elements that make his texts glisten with the jewels of an unbounded freedom, call the spiritual person to a new hope and to a new openness. What Eckhart fueled with a rich linguistic brilliance and evocative precision was the burning embers of classical apophatic thought. He took a language alternately weighed down by a certain intellectual lifelessness and pious devotionalism and linked it back to the experience of openness from which it firstemanated. His Godhead of Gelassenheit, of "letting-go" and "letting-be" was a God for all people; and in his birth of the Son in the soul was a Christian participation in the divine life that was unpretentiously free from exclusiveness and ultimacy.

It is Eckhart's liberating insight of divine-human intimacy that Bernard McGinn captures like light reflected on a still pool in his new book, The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing. Drawing from a vast compedium of sources, McGinn offers a new approach to the Meister's thought that does not repeat prior scholarship but illuminates it in a new way. His deep association with the Latin and German texts puts McGinn in the position of discovery and integration of some of Eckhart's most difficult passages. It is this depth of scholarship, wedded to a highly readable style, which allows the specialist and general reader to glean new meaning from Eckhart's brilliant thought.

Critical to the study is McGinn's focus on Eckhart's usage of the term grunt—ground—to depict the place in which the soul and God are mystically united. McGinn understands grunt to be a "master metaphor that is also an explosive metaphor that breaks through old categories, inviting the hearer to perform the same breakthrough in life." Performing a linguistic repetition of this primary mystical event, Eckhart underscores the paradoxical nature of the fused unity of God and human in the ground of the Godhead, and employs new terminology to speak to the simplicity, purity, and emptiness of the soul's original nature.

McGinn not only uncovers hidden depths of Eckhart's thought; he also provides a luminescent spirituality by which the general reader may come to "pursue the wisdom of unkowning that is the heart of Meister Eckhart's message." An original challenge in Eckhart's thought was his deconstructive turn away from a theology centered on being and his breaking through the shell of traditional exegesis to touch the unlimited silence in the play of words. To keep the dynamism going—to keep uncovering the fruit beneath the shell of text, to explode the boundary between text and interpretation—is to be true to an infinite unknowing that is itself the promise and freedom of the naked soul.

Most striking is McGinn's ability to weave a whole cloth that celebrates Eckhart's radical thought and situates it in its theological and historical context. This intellectual balance is testimony to years of scholarly precision, and to a familial understanding of Eckhart the man who was at once an innovator and a "loyal son" of the Church.