The Wisdom of Meister Eckhart

From the Introduction by Arthur Versluis

Meister Eckhart (1260-1327) is quite arguably the greatest Christian mystic of all time. Of course, the word “mysticism” is vague and usually connotes visionary experiences, of which there is little trace in Eckhart. Still, with the possible exception of Dionysius the Areopagite, Eckhart is certainly the greatest exponent of the via negativa, or path of negation. The path of negation is that of absolute imageless transcendence, and this is at the heart of Eckhart’s mysticism. But Eckhart expresses this path of negation in the most colorful and daring ways of anyone in the history of Christianity. In this collection of his work, we offer selections from his sermons that reveal just how extraordinary he was, and that are meant to offer a way into the tradition that he more than anyone else exemplifies.
Eckhart was born, probably to nobility, in Thuringia near Erfurt in about 1260. He probably joined the Dominican priory at Erfurt in 1275, and it is quite possible that before 1280 he studied at Cologne, where Albertus Magnus was still teaching. By 1293, we know that Eckhart took part in disputations in Paris, and that by 1298 he was known as Prior of Erfurt and Vicar of Thuringia. By 1302, he had received the title “Meister,” or Master, for his theological knowledge. And in 1303, he was elected to the position of Provincial of Saxony (including much of Northern Germany and Holland). In 1307, he became Vicar-General of Bohemia, and in 1310, Provincial of the Southern German province of Alemannia. By 1314, he was in charge of a convent at Strassburg, while carrying out his other official duties. In 1322 came the greatest honor of all, when he was called to Cologne to assume the chair once held by none other than Albertus Magnus himself.
But the Archbishop of Cologne at the time, Heinrich von Virneburg, was a sour Franciscan who was bitterly opposed to anything that resembled “mysticism,” which he associated with heresy. In 1326, the archbishop instituted proceedings against Eckhart before the Inquisition for spreading dangerous doctrines among common folk. Because of his fame and reputation, Eckhart probably was not in danger of being burnt at the stake, but it became a nasty battle for him nonetheless. Several lists of supposedly incriminating statements were drawn up against him, which he refuted chiefly by showing that they were indeed orthodox and that his accusers simply didn’t understand what they were impugning. On 13 February, 1327, Eckhart publicly declared that he was not a heretic, that what was attributed to him as heresy had been distorted or misunderstood, and that anything inadvertently heretical he had said he now retracted. The case continued, but Eckhart died before 1328. In 1329, some of Eckhart’s work was denounced in a papal bull as heretical, ironically enough by a pope who had accumulated great wealth and who was himself denounced by a subsquent pope as heretical!
This ill-considered and confused condemnation kept Eckhart from being more widely known for centuries to come, though he was influential for such subsequent figures as Heinrich Suso, Johannes Tauler, Nicholas of Cusa, the Theologia Germanica, and Angelus Silesius, and was rediscovered in the nineteenth century by Franz von Baader, the great theosopher in the tradition of Jacob Böhme (d. 1624). But Eckhart came into his own in the twentieth century, for as the West came into genuine contact with Asian religious traditions, notably Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism, Eckhart’s genius for apophatic or negative theology suddenly could be seen in a new light. If in the fourteenth century, he could be portrayed as heretical, by the twentieth century his daring insistence on the transcendent nature of the Godhead and of the spiritual awakening of the individual could be seen in a world context as the European parallel to Buddhist metaphysics.
The parallels between Meister Eckhart’s thought and Mahayana Buddhism became more widely known with the publication of a book entitled Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist by D. T. Suzuki in 1957, and by Shizuteru Ueda in his book Die Gottesgeburt in der Seele, published in 1965. Suzuki in particular was keen to show “the closeness of Meister Eckhart’s way of thinking to that of Mahayana Buddhism, especially of Zen Buddhism” (3). Suzuki spent the beginning of his study considering Eckhart’s teachings concerning detachment and the “pure Nothing,” because these and related concepts are very much akin to the concept of emptiness, or shunyata, in Buddhism. And without doubt, there are many other parallels between Eckhart’s work and Zen Buddhism, so many that to this day Eckhart remains the subject of ever more comparisons between Christian mysticism and Buddhism, particularly in Japanese scholarship.
What is it in Eckhart’s work that makes him so amenable to comparison with Buddhism or Vedanta? We may begin by considering the way Eckhart begins our selection entitled “The Secret Word”: “Here in time we celebrate because the eternal birth that God the Father bears unceasingly in eternity is born now, in time and human nature. According to St. Augustine, this birth is always happening. But what does it profit me if it does not happen in me?” From the outset, it is clear that Eckhart has little to do with what we may call an historicist Christianity—that is, with a Christianity that emphasizes faith or belief without any inner process of regeneration or awakening. It is not enough only to believe this or that, according to Eckhart: we must realize what Eckhart here calls the “eternal birth” for ourselves.
In other words, Eckhart insists above all that we directly experience spiritual illumination for ourselves, and that “the highest attainment in this life is to remain still and let God act and speak in us.” He calls us to enter into the soul’s hidden ground and to be reborn.
This process of rebirth takes place through the path known as apophatic, or negation, but could also be termed the path of transcendence. This path of transcendence is one that goes beyond the intellect; it is one in which the soul’s spark, or synteresis, that inner transcendent faculty, perceives the divine within one in a way that can best be termed “unknowing.” Eckhart explains that “There is more in this unknowing knowledge than in any ordinary understanding, for this unknowing lures you away from all understood things and from yourself. This is what Christ meant when he said: ‘Whoever does not deny himself and leave father and mother and is not estranged from all these, is not worthy of me.’ That is as though to say: whoever does not abandon creaturely externals can neither be conceived or born in this divine birth.” Entering into this unknowing might also be called a kind of gnosis, or inner spiritual knowledge, though as Eckhart has it, “the height of gnosis is to know in agnosia.” In agnosia, or unknowing, one realizes direct spiritual understanding for oneself.
The Christian path of transcendence takes its origin from Dionysius the Areopagite (ca. fifth century A.D.), whose treatises on the via negativa remain a cornerstone of Christian mysticism to this day. Eckhart explicitly draws upon Dionysius with some frequency, particularly concerning the divine Nothingness. Thus when Eckhart writes that “In unknowing knowing we know God, in forgetfulness of ourselves and all things up to the naked essence of the Godhead,” it is in a passage that both begins and ends with references to Dionsyius. Yet let it not be thought that this unknowing knowing is without signs. Eckhart writes of this new birth that in it “God pours into the soul in such abundance of light, that it floods the soul’s ground, running into her powers and into the outward man as well. So it befell Paul when upon his journey God touched him with his light and spoke to him: the reflection of this light showed outwardly so that his companions saw it surrounding Paul like the saints.” According to Eckhart, this unknowing knowing is the soul’s becoming acclimated to God, and being filled with spiritual knowledge that is simultaneously love and joy. In all of this, Eckhart’s work is very much in the lineage of Dionysius.
Yet Eckhart is also extraordinary for his inventiveness and daringness of expression; he is not by any means a derivative author, but rather clearly writes directly from his own experience. Who can doubt that when he writes “God enjoys himself in all things,” such an observation comes from Eckhart’s own experience? But he also speaks explicitly of himself, as when he remarks that “My outer man enjoys creatures as creatures, like wine and bread and meat. But my inner man enjoys things not as creatures, but as the gift of God. And my inmost man enjoys them not as God’s gift, but as eternity.” This inner experience of God gives rise to Eckhart’s understanding of the profound relation between creatures and God, for the contemplative realizes this relation directly for himself. Hence Eckhart observes that “Things perceived by my soul from without contain an outside element. But my perception of creatures in God contains God alone, for in God there is nothing but God. When I see all creatures in God I see nothing.” It is as daring today as it was in his own time for Eckhart to speak openly of seeing all creatures in God, or of realizing God as the divine Nothing.