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Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 2.2 (2002) 250-252



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Book Review

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


The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing. By Bernard McGinn. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2001. Xiii +305 pp. $45.00.

Every once in a while a book comes along which is the product of a life-time's study. This is just such a book. Bernard McGinn has written extensively on Meister Eckhart over a period of many years. He has contributed two volumes on Eckhart to the Classics of Western Spirituality series (one with the late Edmund Colledge) and has published a range of seminal articles on the fundamental principles of Eckhart's thought. He is therefore well-placed to attempt what few Eckhart scholars before him have essayed: a systematic and unified presentation of the meaning and structure of the great Dominican's theology.

There are considerable obstacles to the successful outcome of such a venture. From the perspective of the sources themselves, few medieval bodies of texts present the kind of difficulties with which Eckhart's editors must wrestle. Following his condemnation, much of Eckhart's work went underground and questions of ascription remain testing. Relatively few texts, particularly German sermons, can be accurately dated, causing problems reconstructing their sequence and the development of his thought. Eckhart also addressed widely differing audiences, in different registers, and so reconciling the Latin works, produced in the main in a Parisian scholastic milieu, and the German sermons, many of which were delivered in the churches and convents of the Rhineland, is a task every commentator must face. A particular difficulty here lies in the way that Eckhart freely moved between expressive modalities of language and more conventionally descriptive or analytic ones. This was grounded in his conviction of the unity of truth, whether presented theologically, philosophically or morally, on the one hand, and the enormously high status he accorded language as a participation in the formal emanation of the Word on the other. Neither may be shared by the contemporary scholar, who might have to make distinctions between modalities of language where Eckhart himself saw none.

In addition to the problems of the body of Eckhart's work as membra disjecta is that of the theology itself. The use of wide-ranging sources, together with the conviction that all truth is unified, lend a particular nuance to Eckhart's thought which militates against synthesis. Many years ago Etienne Gilson wrote that wherever we may discern an underlying unity within Eckhart's thought, we are troubled by the sense that other unities could be identified that would be equally convincing. And yet the determination to find a central structure to Eckhart's thought is a persistent and natural result of the desire to explain how the system works. The thesis of McGinn's book is that it is the motif of the grund, or "ground," which provides just such a hermeneutical key.

In the first chapter McGinn advances the view that grund is a Sprengmetapher, or "explosive metaphor," drawing upon the theory of Hans Blumenberg and its development with respect to Eckhart by Köbele and Haas. Its function is "pragmatic," and it is "meant to transform, or overturn, ordinary limited forms of consciousness through the process of making the inner meaning of the metaphor one's own in everyday life" (38). Mysticism of the ground is a theme that is characteristic of the Rhineland tradition as a whole. Following this analysis of the uses of "ground" as designating the generative depths of God and of humanity alike, "the groundless ground" is seen to be a metaphor for the interconnectedness of the divine and humanity within an emanationist cosmological framework. [End Page 250]

Chapter Four surveys Eckhart on the eternal birth through a study of a cycle of sermons that develop this theme in the context of the feast of Christmas. Characteristically, the Dominican interprets the liturgical readings as advocating...

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