Mystic · Medieval
Meister Eckhart
c. 1260–1328 · Rhineland mysticism (Dominican)
Twenty-eight propositions from his works were condemned by John XXII in the bull In Agro Dominico (1329), seventeen as heretical, eleven as ill-sounding; he had submitted in advance to the Church's judgment and died before the verdict.
Dominican master at Paris and preacher in Strasbourg and Cologne, Eckhart taught in Latin treatises and German sermons that the soul must become “detached” (gelassen) and empty so that the Word may be born in its ground, where it is one with God “without distinction.” He spoke of God as pure being and as beyond being, of creatures as “pure nothing” in themselves, and of the just man as one with Justice itself.
Why he matters: He is the father of the German mystics (Tauler, Suso, the Theologia Germanica) and a daring witness to the soul's union with God; his condemnation marks the line between deification and the dissolving of the creature into God.
Where to be careful
In Agro Dominico condemned among others: that the world is eternal; that the soul's ground is uncreated; that we are transformed wholly into God “as bread into Christ's body”; that external works add nothing to goodness. Read him with Tauler as corrective, and with the 1329 bull to hand; the Dominican Order's 1992 request for rehabilitation of his person was answered that he had never been personally condemned.
Reading
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The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and DefenseMeister Eckhart (ed. Colledge and McGinn) · Includes the full text of In Agro Dominico.
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The Mystical Thought of Meister EckhartBernard McGinn · The standard study; scrupulously fair on the condemnation.
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SermonsJohannes Tauler · Eckhart's disciple, read for centuries as the safe form of his teaching.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each dispute the test covers.