Eckhart von Hochheim (born Johannes Eckhart; – ), commonly known as Meister Eckhart (), was a German Catholic priest, theologian, philosopher and mystic. He was born near Gotha in the Landgraviate of Thuringia in the Holy Roman Empire. He was a member of the Dominican Order.
Eckhart came into prominence during the Avignon Papacy at a time of increased tensions between monastic orders, diocesan clergy, the Franciscans, and the Dominicans. In later life, he was accused of heresy, brought up before the local Franciscan-led Inquisition and tried as a heretic by Pope John XXII with the bull In Agro Dominico of March 27, 1329. In the trial, excerpts of his Book of Divine Consolation were used against Eckhart. He seems to have died before his verdict was received.
Eckhart was well known for his work with pious lay groups such as the Friends of God and was succeeded by his more circumspect disciples Johannes Tauler and Henry Suso, the latter of whom was beatified. Since the 19th century, Eckhart has received renewed attention. He has acquired a status as a great mystic within contemporary new age spirituality, as well as considerable interest from scholars situating him within the medieval scholastic and philosophical tradition.
Early life Eckhart was likely born around 1260 in the village of Tambach, near Gotha, in the Landgraviate of Thuringia.Bernard McGinn, The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart, (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2001), p. 2, points out that previous scholarship which had placed Eckhart's birth in Hochheim is incorrect: Hochheim is used in the sources to indicate Eckhart's family name, not his birthplace.Walter Senner, 'Meister Eckhart’s Life, Training, Career, and Trial' in Jeremiah Hackett (ed.), A Companion to Meister Eckhart (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 7–84. 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.Meister Eckhart, The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defense, trans. and ed. by Bernard McGinn and Edmund Colledge, New York: Paulist Press, 1981, p. 5. 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; his surname was von Hochheim.
Career
Probably around 1278, Eckhart joined the Dominican convent at Erfurt, when he was about eighteen. It is assumed he studied at Cologne before 1280.This supposition is founded on Eckhart’s frequent citation, with respect, of Albert the Great, who had taught at Cologne until his death in 1280, and more particularly, his statement in his 1294 Easter Sermon that "Albert often used to say: 'This I know, as we know things, for we all know very little. (Bernard McGinn, The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2001), p. 2.) He may have also studied at the University of Paris, either before or after his time in Cologne.The evidence for Eckhart's studies in Cologne is similarly circumstantial as recounted in Meister Eckhart, The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defense, trans. and ed. by Bernard McGinn and Edmund Colledge, New York: Paulist Press, 1981, p. 7.
The first solid evidence we have for his life is when on 18 April 1294, as a baccalaureus (lecturer) on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, a post to which he had presumably been appointed in 1293 (he had been ordained to the priesthood by that time), he preached the Easter Sermon (the Sermo Paschalis) at the Dominican convent of St. Jacques in Paris. In late 1294, Eckhart was made Prior at Erfurt and Dominican Provincial of Thuringia in Germany. 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).McGinn, Eckhart, p. 4 In 1302, he was sent to Paris to take up the external Dominican chair of theology. He remained there until 1303. The short Parisian Questions date from this time.The Parisian Questions were first discovered in 1927. They are translated with an introduction in Armand Maurer, ed., Master Eckhart: Parisian Questions and Prologues, (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1974).
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. Thereby, he had 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 Paris 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 the possible dating of the works written in this period, see McGinn, Eckhart, pp. 5–9.
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.McGinn, Eckhart, p. 9 Eckhart stayed in Paris for two academic years, until the summer of 1313, living in the same house as inquistor William of Paris. After that follows a long period of which it is known only that Eckhart spent part of the time at Strasbourg.cf. Urkundenbuch der Stadt Strassburg, iii. 236. It is unclear what specific office he held there: he seems chiefly to have been concerned with spiritual direction and with preaching in convents of Dominicans.Meister Eckhart, The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defense, trans. and ed. by Bernard McGinn and Edmund Colledge, New York: Paulist Press, 1981, p. 10.
A passage in a chronicle of the year 1320, extant in manuscript (cf. Wilhelm Preger, i. 352–399), speaks of a prior Eckhart at Frankfurt who was suspected of heresy, and some historians have linked this to Meister Eckhart.
Accusation of heresy
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".McGinn, Eckhart, (2001), p. 14 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.cf. the document in Preger, i. 471; more accurately in ALKG, ii. 627 sqq. At this point Eckhart issued a Vindicatory Document, providing chapter and verse of what he had been taught.In the early twentieth century, the suspicion of Eckhart was often attributed to tensions between Dominicans and Franciscans. This narrative, however, has been replaced by one which emphasizes the broader context of fears concerning the Heresy of the Free Spirit. See Bernard McGinn, The Harvest of Mysticism, (2005), p. 103.
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.McGinn, Eckhart (2001), p. 17 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 general assumption in modern scholarship on Eckhart has been that the date of Eckhart's death is lost. McGinn, Eckhart (2001), p. 17, however, trusts the argument of Walter Senner that a seventeenth-century Dominican source noted that Eckhart was remembered in German convents on 28 January suggesting this day in 1328 was the date of his death. Some early twentieth-century writers suggested Eckhart may have not in fact died, but continued his ministry in anonymity, but there is no single medieval source that supports this suspicion. The papal commission eventually confirmed (albeit in modified form) the decision of the Cologne commission against Eckhart.
Pope John XXII issued a bull (In agro dominico), 27 March 1329, in which a series of statements from Eckhart is characterized as heretical, another as suspected of heresy.The bull is given complete in ALKG, ii. 636–640). 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.McGinn, Eckhart, (2001), p. 18.
Rehabilitation
Eckhart's status in the contemporary Catholic Church has been uncertain. The Dominican Order pressed in the last decade of the 20th century for his full rehabilitation and confirmation of his theological orthodoxy. Pope John Paul II voiced favorable opinion on this initiative, even going as far as quoting from Eckhart's writings, but the outcome was confined to the corridors of the Vatican. In the spring of 2010, it was revealed that there had been a response from the Vatican in a letter dated 1992. Timothy Radcliffe, then Master of the Dominicans and recipient of the letter, summarized the contents as follows: