Meister Eckhart

Eckhart held the Paris chair reserved for foreign Dominicans twice, an honour otherwise given only to Thomas Aquinas, and wrote the Latin works of a professional scholastic. What he is read for is the other half: sermons preached in Middle High German to nuns and lay people, in a language with no technical theological vocabulary, which forced him to invent one.

Their recurring content is a movement of subtraction. He tells his hearers to become poor, and defines the poverty he means with unusual severity: a poor person wants nothing, knows nothing and has nothing, and that includes wanting to do God's will, since even that is still a will of one's own. What he calls detachment is the condition left when all of it has gone. Into that emptiness, he says, the Word is born, not once historically but now, in the ground of the soul, which is a place he describes as prior to the faculties and where God and the soul are not two.

He is also a startling reader of scripture. Preaching on Martha and Mary, he reverses the standard reading and prefers Martha, the busy one, on the ground that Mary is still enjoying something and Martha has got past needing to. The technique throughout is to push a familiar formula until it breaks and something is visible through the crack, and it is what makes the sermons dangerous to summarise.

In 1326 the archbishop of Cologne opened an inquisitorial process against Eckhart, on the basis of lists of propositions drawn from his sermons and writings. He was a senior Dominican with a reputation across the order, and the proceeding was unusual enough that his defence has survived: he replied that some of the propositions were misquoted, that others were true if properly understood, and that he might err but could not be a heretic, since error belongs to the intellect and heresy to the will. He appealed to the pope at Avignon and travelled there.

He died before judgement, in 1328. The following year the bull In agro dominico condemned seventeen propositions as heretical and declared eleven more ill sounding and suspect, while recording that Eckhart had submitted himself to the judgement of the Holy See before his death. The condemnation was published in Cologne, and it kept his name out of open citation for centuries even as his material continued to circulate.

His readers did not stop. Tauler and Suso carried the teaching in a safer register, the anonymous Theologia Germanica passed it to Luther, and the whole Rhineland tradition rests on him. In the twentieth century he became one of the standard points of comparison with Zen and with Vedanta, and the Dominican order has petitioned Rome to state that the condemnation of 1329 no longer stands in the way of reading him.