Meister Eckhart (c. 1260 – c. 1328): key ideas and works

Eckhart was born around 1260, probably near Erfurt in Thuringia, and probably joined the Dominicans there in his late teens. He studied theology in Paris, and in 1302 held the Dominican chair of theology there, the height of an academic career; in 1311 he was called back for a second term, an honour previously given only to Thomas Aquinas. Between his academic posts he ran the order’s new province of Saxony, overseeing dozens of houses, and from 1313 he worked in Strasbourg, where he was in close contact with convents of nuns and communities of Beguines and preached increasingly in German.

In Cologne in the 1320s he faced accusations of heresy. He answered that an intellectual error is not heresy, which is a matter of the will, and he appealed to the pope in Avignon. He probably died in January 1328; in 1329 a papal bull condemned 28 propositions drawn from his works. Eckhart was a product of the Dominican school of Albert the Great and Aquinas, combining Augustinian and Neoplatonic thought with university Aristotelianism, and apart from Aristotle no author appears more often in his Latin works than Maimonides. Long remembered chiefly as a mystic, he is now also read as a philosopher.

Key ideas

God boiling over

God is pure, naked existence, without qualities, “boiling” within himself and then “boiling over” into creation. Eckhart drew these images from scholastic writers and from contemplatives such as Bernard of Clairvaux and Marguerite Porete.

God as nothing

God is also a “desert”, an “abyss”, “the divine nothing”. The intellect, which becomes what it knows, must itself be no thing in order to know everything, and in this emptiness the human intellect most resembles God’s.

The birth of the Word in the soul

When the soul is emptied of every alien image and attachment, like a virgin who is also a wife, God cannot help pouring into it, as the sun must shine through clear air. The Word is then born in the ground of the soul, where the soul and God are one.

Detachment and letting go

Attachment to anything other than God, even to prayer, fasting or other pious practices, keeps the soul from freedom. Eckhart’s virtues of detachment and “letting-go-ness” free the self from its possessiveness so that God can act in it.

Scripture and philosophy agree

All truth, in Scripture or in nature, comes from one root, so the Bible can be read to agree with what philosophers say about the natures of things. Moses, Christ and Aristotle teach the same, differing only in how they teach it.

Influences

Where these links come from

Meister Eckhart drew on Augustine. Source: Amber L. Griffioen, Meister Eckhart, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Meister Eckhart drew on Proclus. Source: Amber L. Griffioen, Meister Eckhart, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Meister Eckhart drew on John Scottus Eriugena. Source: Dermot Moran and Adrian Guiu, John Scottus Eriugena, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Meister Eckhart drew on Averroes. Source: Amber L. Griffioen, Meister Eckhart, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Meister Eckhart drew on Maimonides. Source: Amber L. Griffioen, Meister Eckhart, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Meister Eckhart drew on Thomas Aquinas. Source: Amber L. Griffioen, Meister Eckhart, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Meister Eckhart

Key ideas

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