Eckhart’s Latin exposition of the Prologue of John and the birth of the Word in the soul
What the Work Is
The Commentary on the Gospel of John is one of Meister Eckhart’s Latin works — the body of writing he prepared carefully for publication, as distinct from the vernacular German sermons for which he is best remembered. It belongs to his output as an academic theologian schooled in medieval scholasticism, a Dominican who studied and taught at Paris and who was conversant with Aristotelianism, Augustinianism, and the Neoplatonism of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The sources describe his Latin treatises as essential to a full understanding of his thought, precisely because he prepared them for publication with care, and note that there is no dispute about the genuine character of the Latin texts presented in the critical edition of his works.
What the Book Is About
The work is an exposition of the Gospel of John, and its central concern is the same theme that runs through Eckhart’s preaching: the presence of God in the individual soul and the dignity of the soul of the just man. In Eckhart’s vision, God is primarily fecund — out of an overabundance of love the fertile God gives birth to the Son, the Word, in all of us. This idea is rooted in the Neoplatonic notion of the One that “boils over,” unable to hold back its abundance of being, though Eckhart framed creation not as a compulsory overflowing but as the free act of will of the triune nature of Deity. The Gospel of John, which opens with the Word and its relation to God and to creation, provides the scriptural ground on which Eckhart develops this account of the divine life and its communication to the soul.
Key Ideas and Themes
The most distinctive idea associated with Eckhart’s theology, and one that his Latin work develops, is the distinction between God and the Godhead — Gottheit in German, meaning Godhood or Godhead, the state of being God. This notion had antecedents in Pseudo-Dionysius and in John the Scot’s De divisione naturae, but Eckhart reshaped the germinal metaphors into images of polarity between the Unmanifest and the Manifest Absolute. The Trinity, in this scheme, is the revealed God, while the mysterious origin of the Trinity is the Godhead, the absolute God — a source and fountain of all the divine that neither generates nor is generated.
A second theme is the birth of the Son, the Word, in the soul. Because God is fecund and gives the Word in all of us, the divine life is not merely an external fact to be believed but an inward event. This connects to Eckhart’s teaching on detachment: in one sermon he summarized his message as speaking first of detachment, that a man should be empty of self and all things; second, that he should be reconstructed in the simple good that God is; third, that he should consider the great aristocracy God has set up in the soul, by which man may wonderfully attain to God; and fourth, of the purity of the divine nature. The same concerns with detachment and the soul’s ground run through his Latin exposition.
Eckhart also taught that it is not in God to destroy anything which has being, but that God perfects all things — a claim that has led some scholars to conclude he may have held to some form of universal salvation. His thought was bold enough that several authors have identified him as a pantheist, though interpretations are not unanimous: Hans Lassen Martensen affirmed the idea, while Hegel disputed it, and John Dourley has argued that current scholarship holds it likely Eckhart’s philosophy was close to a Platonic or Plotinian pantheism which he sincerely tried to reconcile with his Christianity, with ambiguous success.
Structure and Approach
The work is a commentary — a Latin exposition of a scriptural text — and it belongs to the genre of academic theology rather than to the vernacular preaching for which Eckhart is best known. His Latin treatises were prepared for publication deliberately, and scholars such as Henry Denifle and others have proposed that these Latin writings were essential to a full understanding of Eckhart, in part because the vernacular works survive in over two hundred manuscripts while the Latin writings are found only in a handful. The commentary form allowed Eckhart to bring the resources of scholastic and Neoplatonic thought to bear on the Gospel text, developing his speculative theology in a disciplined, text-anchored way.
Significance and Influence
The Commentary on the Gospel of John belongs to the body of Eckhart’s Latin work that has been central to the modern recovery and reassessment of his thought. Interest in Eckhart was revived in the early nineteenth century, especially by German Romantics and Idealist philosophers; Franz Pfeiffer’s 1857 publication of the German sermons and treatises greatly increased this interest, and Henry Denifle was the first to recover Eckhart’s Latin works, from 1886 onwards. Since the mid-nineteenth century scholars have debated which pieces attributed to Eckhart are genuine and whether greater weight should be given to the vernacular or the Latin works — a debate in which the Latin treatises, carefully prepared by Eckhart himself, have played a decisive role.
Eckhart’s standing has been bound up with the controversy that surrounded him. In later life he was accused of heresy, brought before the Franciscan-led Inquisition, and tried by Pope John XXII, whose bull In Agro Dominico of 1329 characterized a series of statements from Eckhart as heretical or suspected of heresy. The papal commissions reduced some 150 suspect articles to 28, and the document known as the Votum Avenionense gives, in scholastic fashion, the twenty-eight articles, Eckhart’s defence of each, and the rebuttal of the commissioners. Winfried Trusen later observed in a defence of Eckhart that only 28 propositions were censured, but that they were taken out of context and impossible to verify, since there were no manuscripts in Avignon. In the last decade of the twentieth century the Dominican Order pressed for Eckhart’s full rehabilitation and confirmation of his theological orthodoxy; Pope John Paul II voiced a favorable opinion, and a 1992 Vatican letter, revealed in 2010, indicated that there was no need to lift a censure since Eckhart had never been condemned by name — only some propositions he was supposed to have held — leaving Dominicans free to call him a good and orthodox theologian.
Beyond the question of orthodoxy, Eckhart’s Latin thought has proved unusually fertile for later readers. Nicholas of Cusa, in the fifteenth century, engaged in extensive study of Eckhart and assembled and annotated a surviving collection of his Latin works. In modern philosophy, Martin Heidegger developed his concept of Gelassenheit, or releasement, from Eckhart, consulting him repeatedly throughout his career; Jacques Derrida distinguished Eckhart’s negative theology from his own concept of différance, and John D. Caputo emphasized the importance of that tradition for Derrida’s thought. Eckhart’s work has also been drawn into comparative and cross-traditional readings — compared by Rudolf Otto to Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta, by D. T. Suzuki to Zen Buddhism, and cited by thinkers within neopaganism and Buddhism as a point of contact between those traditions and Christian mysticism. The Commentary on the Gospel of John stands within this Latin corpus as one of the works through which Eckhart’s speculative theology — his account of the fecund God, the birth of the Word in the soul, and the distinction between God and the Godhead — has continued to be studied and debated.
Eckhart was born around 1260 in the village of Tambach, near Gotha, in the Landgraviate of Thuringia. It was previously asserted that he was born to a noble family of landowners, but this originated in a misinterpretation of the archives of the period; in reality, little is known about his family and early life. There is no basis for giving him the Christian name of Johannes, which sometimes appears in biographical sketches: his Christian name was Eckhart, and his surname was von Hochheim.
Probably around 1275, when he was about fifteen, Eckhart joined the Dominican convent at Erfurt. It is assumed he studied at Cologne before 1280, and he may also have studied at the University of Paris, either before or after his time in Cologne. The first solid evidence for his life is dated 18 April 1294, when, as a baccalaureus (lecturer) on the Sentences of Peter Lombard — a post to which he had presumably been appointed in 1293, and by which time he had been ordained to the priesthood — he preached the Easter Sermon (Sermo Paschalis) at the Dominican convent of St. Jacques in Paris. In late 1294 he was made Prior at Erfurt and Vicar of Thuringia. His earliest vernacular work, Reden der Unterweisung (The Talks of Instructions / Counsels on Discernment), a series of talks delivered to Dominican novices, dates from this time (c. 1295–1298). In 1302 he was sent to Paris to take up the external Dominican chair of theology, remaining there until 1303; the short Parisian Questions date from this time.
In late 1303 Eckhart returned to Erfurt and was given the position of Provincial superior for Saxony, a province which reached at that time from the Netherlands to Livonia, giving him responsibility for forty-seven convents in the region. Complaints made against the Provincial superior of Teutonia and him at the Dominican general chapter held in Strasbourg in 1306, concerning irregularities among the ternaries, must have been trivial, because the general, Aymeric of Piacenza, appointed him in the following year as his vicar-general for Bohemia with full power to set the demoralised monasteries there in order. Eckhart was Provincial for Saxony until 1311, during which time he founded three convents for women there.
On 14 May 1311 Eckhart was appointed by the general chapter held at Naples as teacher at Paris. To be invited back to Paris for a second stint as magister was a rare privilege, previously granted only to Thomas Aquinas. Eckhart stayed in Paris for two academic years, until the summer of 1313, living in the same house as inquisitor William of Paris. After that follows a long period of which it is known only that Eckhart spent part of the time at Strasbourg; it is unclear what specific office he held there, though he seems chiefly to have been concerned with spiritual direction and with preaching in convents of Dominicans. A passage in a chronicle of the year 1320, extant in manuscript, speaks of a prior Eckhart at Frankfurt who was suspected of heresy, and some historians have linked this to Meister Eckhart.
The Path to Cologne and the Inquisition
In late 1323 or early 1324, Eckhart left Strasbourg for the Dominican house at Cologne. It is not clear exactly what he did there, though part of his time may have been spent teaching at the prestigious Studium in the city. Eckhart also continued to preach, addressing his sermons during a time of disarray among the clergy and monastic orders, rapid growth of numerous pious lay groups, and the Inquisition’s continuing concerns over heretical movements throughout Europe.
It appears that some of the Dominican authorities already had concerns about Eckhart’s teaching. The Dominican General Chapter held in Venice in the spring of 1325 had spoken out against “friars in Teutonia who say things in their sermons that can easily lead simple and uneducated people into error”. This concern — or perhaps concerns held by the archbishop of Cologne, Henry of Virneburg — may have been why Nicholas of Strasburg, to whom the Pope had given the temporary charge of the Dominican convents in Germany in 1325, conducted an investigation into Eckhart’s orthodoxy. Nicholas presented a list of suspect passages from the Book of Consolation to Eckhart, who responded sometime between August 1325 and January 1326 with the treatise Requisitus, now lost, which convinced his immediate superiors of his orthodoxy. Despite this assurance, however, the archbishop in 1326 ordered an inquisitorial trial. At this point Eckhart issued a Vindicatory Document, providing chapter and verse of what he had been taught.
Throughout the difficult months of late 1326, Eckhart had the full support of the local Dominican authorities, as evident in Nicholas of Strasbourg’s three official protests against the actions of the inquisitors in January 1327. On 13 February 1327, before the archbishop’s inquisitors pronounced their sentence on Eckhart, Eckhart preached a sermon in the Dominican church at Cologne, and then had his secretary read out a public protestation of his innocence. He stated in his protest that he had always detested everything wrong, and should anything of the kind be found in his writings, he now retracts. Eckhart himself translated the text into German, so that his audience, the vernacular public, could understand it. The verdict then seems to have gone against Eckhart. Eckhart denied competence and authority to the inquisitors and the archbishop, and appealed to the Pope against the verdict. He then, in the spring of 1327, set off for Avignon.
In Avignon, Pope John XXII seems to have set up two tribunals to inquire into the case, one of theologians and the other of cardinals. Evidence of this process is thin. However, it is known that the commissions reduced the 150 suspect articles down to 28; the document known as the Votum Avenionense gives, in scholastic fashion, the twenty-eight articles, Eckhart’s defence of each, and the rebuttal of the commissioners. On 30 April 1328, the pope wrote to Archbishop Henry of Virneburg that the case against Eckhart was moving ahead, but added that Eckhart had already died (modern scholarship suggests he may have died on 28 January 1328). The papal commission eventually confirmed, albeit in modified form, the decision of the Cologne commission against Eckhart.
Pope John XXII issued the bull In agro dominico on 27 March 1329, in which a series of statements from Eckhart is characterized as heretical, another as suspected of heresy. At the close, it is stated that Eckhart recanted before his death everything which he had falsely taught, by subjecting himself and his writing to the decision of the Apostolic see. It is possible that the Pope’s unusual decision to issue the bull, despite the death of Eckhart — and the fact that Eckhart was not being personally condemned as a heretic — was due to the pope’s fear of the growing problem of mystical heresy, and pressure from his ally Henry of Virneburg to bring the case to a definite conclusion.
Sermons and Teaching
Although he was an accomplished academic theologian, Eckhart’s best-remembered works are his highly unusual sermons in the vernacular German language rather than in the usual Latin. As a preaching friar he attempted to guide his flock, as well as monks and nuns under his jurisdiction, with practical sermons on spiritual and psychological transformation and New Testament metaphorical content related to the creative power inherent in disinterest — dispassion or detachment. The central theme of his German sermons is the presence of God in the individual soul and the dignity of the soul of the just man; although he elaborated on this theme, he rarely departed from it. As Eckhart said in his trial defence, his sermons were meant to inspire in listeners the desire above all to do some good. In this he frequently used unusual language or seemed to stray from the path of orthodoxy, which made him suspect to the Church during the tense years of the Avignon Papacy.
John Orme Mills notes that Eckhart did not “leave us a guide to the spiritual life like St Bonaventure’s Itinerarium — the Journey of the Soul,” but that his ideas on this have to be condensed from his “couple of very short books on suffering and detachment” and sermons. According to Mills, Eckhart’s comments on prayer are only about contemplative prayer and “detachment.” According to Reiner Schürmann, four stages can be discerned in Eckhart’s understanding of mystical development: dissimilarity, similarity, identity, breakthrough.
Transmission and Later Reception
Eckhart was one of the most influential Christian Neoplatonists in his day, and remained widely read in the later Middle Ages. Some early twentieth-century writers believed that his work was forgotten by his fellow Dominicans soon after his death. In 1960, however, a manuscript (“in agro dominico”) was discovered containing six hundred excerpts from Eckhart, clearly deriving from an original made in the Cologne Dominican convent after the promulgation of the bull condemning Eckhart’s writings, as notations from the bull are inserted into the manuscript. The manuscript came into the possession of the Carthusians in Basel, demonstrating that some Dominicans and Carthusians had continued to read Eckhart’s work. As Eckhart was one of very few medieval theologians tried before the Inquisition as a heretic, the subsequent 1329 condemnation of excerpts from his works cast a shadow over his reputation for some, but followers of Eckhart in the lay group Friends of God existed in communities across the region and carried on his ideas under the leadership of such priests as John Tauler and Henry Suso.
Eckhart is considered by some to have been the inspirational “layman” referred to in Johannes Tauler’s and Rulman Merswin’s later writings in Strasbourg, where he is known to have spent time — although it is doubtful that he authored the simplistic Book of the Nine Rocks published by Merswin and attributed to The Friend of God from the Oberland. On the other hand, most scholars consider The Friend of God from the Oberland to be a pure fiction invented by Merswin to hide his authorship because of the intimidating tactics of the Inquisition at the time.
It has been suspected that Eckhart’s practical communication of the mystical path is behind the influential fourteenth-century “anonymous” Theologia Germanica, which was disseminated after his disappearance. According to the medieval introduction of the document, its author was an unnamed member of the Teutonic Order of Knights living in Frankfurt. The lack of imprimatur from the Church and the anonymity of the author did not lessen its influence for the next two centuries — including Martin Luther at the peak of public and clerical resistance to Catholic indulgences — and it was viewed by some historians of the early twentieth century as pivotal in provoking Luther’s actions and the subsequent Protestant Reformation. The Theologia Germanica depicts the conflict between worldly and ecclesiastical affairs in these terms: “The two eyes of the soul of man cannot both perform their work at once: but if the soul shall see with the right eye into eternity, then the left eye must close itself and refrain from working, and be as though it were dead. For if the left eye be fulfilling its office toward outward things, that is holding converse with time and the creatures; then must the right eye be hindered in its working; that is, in its contemplation. Therefore, whosoever will have the one must let the other go; for ‘no man can serve two masters’.”
Eckhart was largely forgotten from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, barring occasional interest from thinkers such as Angelus Silesius (1624–1677). For centuries his writings were known only from a number of sermons found in old editions of Johann Tauler’s sermons, published by Kachelouen (Leipzig, 1498) and by Adam Petri (Basel, 1521 and 1522). During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, much Catholic interest in Eckhart was concerned with the consistency of his thought in relation to Neoscholastic thought — in other words, to see whether Eckhart’s thought could be seen to be essentially in conformity with orthodoxy as represented by his fellow Dominican Thomas Aquinas.
In 1923, Eckhart’s Defense (also known as the Rechtsfertigung, or “vindicatory document”) was published. The Defense recorded Eckhart’s responses against two of the Inquisitional proceedings brought against him at Cologne, and details of the circumstances of Eckhart’s trial. The excerpts in the Defense from vernacular sermons and treatises described by Eckhart as his own served to authenticate a number of the vernacular works. Although questions remain about the authenticity of some vernacular works, there is no dispute about the genuine character of the Latin texts presented in the critical edition.
Debates over Eckhart as a Mystic
Since the 1960s scholars have debated whether Eckhart should be called a “mystic”. The philosopher Karl Albert had already argued that Eckhart had to be placed in the tradition of philosophical mysticism of Parmenides and Plato and the neo-Platonist thinkers Plotinus, Porphyry and Proclus. Heribert Fischer argued in the 1960s that Eckhart was a mediaeval theologian. More recently, Clint Johnson agreed with D. T. Suzuki and argued on the basis of Eckhart’s appeals to experience that he is a mystic in the tradition of Augustine and Dionysius the Areopagite. Passages like the following, Johnson contends, point to experience beyond intellectual speculation and philosophizing: “Those who have never been familiar with inward things do not know what God is. Like a man who has wine in his cellar but has never tasted it, he does not know that it is good” (Sermon 10, DW I 164.5–8); and “Whoever does not understand what I say, let him not burden his heart with it. For as long as a man is not like this truth, he will not understand what I say. For this is a truth beyond thought that comes immediately from the heart of God” (Sermon 52, DW II 506.1–3).
Kurt Flasch, a member of the so-called Bochum-school of mediaeval philosophy, strongly reacted against the influence of New Age mysticism and “all kinds of emotional subjective mysticism”, arguing for the need to free Eckhart from “the Mystical Flood”. He sees Eckhart strictly as a philosopher, and argues that the opposition between “mystic” and “scholastic” is not relevant because this mysticism, in Eckhart’s context, is penetrated by the spirit of the university in which it occurred. According to Hackett, Eckhart is to be understood as an “original hermeneutical thinker in the Latin tradition”; to understand Eckhart, he has to be properly placed within the western philosophical tradition of which he was a part.
Josiah Royce, an objective idealist, saw Eckhart as a representative example of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Catholic mystics “on the verge of pronounced heresy” but without original philosophical opinions. Royce attributes Eckhart’s reputation for originality to the fact that he translated scholastic philosophy from Latin into German, and that Eckhart wrote about his speculations in German instead of Latin. Eckhart generally followed Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of the Trinity, but exaggerated the scholastic distinction between the divine essence and the divine persons. The very heart of Eckhart’s speculative mysticism, according to Royce, is that if, through what is called in Christian terminology the procession of the Son, the divine omniscience gets a complete expression in eternal terms, still there is even at the centre of this omniscience the necessary mystery of the divine essence itself, which neither generates nor is generated, and which is yet the source and fountain of all the divine. The Trinity is, for Eckhart, the revealed God, and the mysterious origin of the Trinity is the Godhead, the absolute God.
Modern Popularisation and Comparative Readings
Matthew Fox (born 1940), an American theologian and formerly a priest and member of the Dominican Order within the Roman Catholic Church, was an early and influential exponent of a movement that came to be known as Creation Spirituality. The movement draws inspiration from the wisdom traditions of Christian scriptures and from the philosophies of such medieval Catholic visionaries as Hildegard of Bingen, Thomas Aquinas, Francis of Assisi, Julian of Norwich, Dante Alighieri, Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa, among others. Fox has written a number of articles on Eckhart and a book titled Breakthrough: Meister Eckhart’s Creation Spirituality in New Translation.
In “Conversation on a Country Path,” Martin Heidegger develops his concept of Gelassenheit, or releasement, from Meister Eckhart; Ian Moore argues “that Heidegger consulted Eckhart again and again throughout his career to develop or support his own thought”. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida distinguishes Eckhart’s Negative Theology from his own concept of différance, although John D. Caputo in his influential The Tears and Prayers of Jacques Derrida emphasises the importance of that tradition for this thought.
Meister Eckhart has become one of the timeless heroes of modern spirituality, which, to historian of religion Wouter Hanegraaff, thrives on an all-inclusive syncretism. This syncretism started with the colonisation of Asia, and the search for similarities between Eastern and Western religions. Western monotheism was projected onto Eastern religiosity by Western orientalists, trying to accommodate Eastern religiosity to a Western understanding, whereafter Asian intellectuals used these projections as a starting point to propose the superiority of those Eastern religions. Early on, the figure of Meister Eckhart played a role in these developments and exchanges. Renewed academic attention to Eckhart has attracted favorable attention to his work from contemporary non-Christian mystics. Eckhart’s most famous single quote, “The Eye with which I see God is the same Eye with which God sees me”, is commonly cited by thinkers within neopaganism and ultimatist Buddhism as a point of contact between these traditions and Christian mysticism.
The first European translation of the Upanishads appeared in two parts in 1801 and 1802. The nineteenth-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was influenced by the early translations of the Upanishads, which he called “the consolation of my life”. Schopenhauer compared Eckhart’s views to the teachings of Indian, Christian and Islamic mystics and ascetics: “If we turn from the forms, produced by external circumstances, and go to the root of things, we shall find that Sakyamuni and Meister Eckhart teach the same thing; only that the former dared to express his ideas plainly and positively, whereas Eckhart is obliged to clothe them in the garment of the Christian myth, and to adapt his expressions thereto.” Schopenhauer also stated: “Buddha, Eckhart, and I all teach essentially the same.”
A major force in the mutual influence of Eastern and Western ideas and religiosity was the Theosophical Society, which also incorporated Eckhart in its notion of Theosophy. It searched for ancient wisdom in the East, spreading Eastern religious ideas in the West. One of its salient features was the belief in “Masters of Wisdom”, “beings, human or once human, who have transcended the normal frontiers of knowledge, and who make their wisdom available to others”. The Theosophical Society also spread Western ideas in the East, aiding a modernisation of Eastern traditions, and contributing to a growing nationalism in the Asian colonies.
The Theosophical Society had a major influence on Hindu reform movements. A major proponent of this “neo-Hinduism”, also called “neo-Vedanta”, was Vivekananda (1863–1902), who popularised his modernised interpretation of Advaita Vedanta in the nineteenth and early twentieth century in both India and the West, emphasising anubhava (“personal experience”) over scriptural authority. Vivekananda’s teachings have been compared to Eckhart’s teachings. In the twentieth century, Eckhart’s thoughts were also compared to Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta by Rudolf Otto in his Mysticism East and West. According to Richard King, the aim of this work was to redeem Eckhart’s mysticism in Protestant circles, attempting “to establish the superiority of the German mysticism of Eckhart over the Indian mysticism of Sankara”.
The Theosophical Society also had a major influence on Buddhist modernism, and the spread of this modernised Buddhism in the West. Along with Henry Steel Olcott and Anagarika Dharmapala, Helena Blavatsky was instrumental in the Western transmission and revival of Theravada Buddhism. In 1891, Karl Eugen Neumann, who translated large parts of the Tripitaka, found parallels between Eckhart and Buddhism, which he published in Zwei buddhistische Suttas und ein Traktat Meister Eckharts (Two Buddhist Suttas and a treatise of Meister Eckhart). D. T. Suzuki, who joined the Theosophical Society Adyar and was an active Theosophist, discerned parallels between Eckhart’s teachings and Zen Buddhism in his Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist, drawing similarities between Eckhart’s “pure nothingness” (ein bloss nicht) and sunyata. Shizuteru Ueda, a third generation Kyoto School philosopher and scholar in medieval philosophy, showed similarities between Eckhart’s soteriology and Zen Buddhism in an article. Reiner Schürmann, a professor
