Life and times of the 14th century German spiritual leader Meister Eckhart, whose theory of a personal path to the divine inspired thinkers from Jean Paul Sartre to Thomas Merton, and most recently, Eckhart Tolle Meister Eckhart was a medieval Christian mystic whose wisdom powerfully appeals to seekers seven centuries after his death. In the modern era, Eckhart's writings have struck a chord with thinkers as diverse as Heidegger, Merton, Sartre, John Paul II, and the current Dalai Lama. He is the inspiration for the ...
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Life and times of the 14th century German spiritual leader Meister Eckhart, whose theory of a personal path to the divine inspired thinkers from Jean Paul Sartre to Thomas Merton, and most recently, Eckhart Tolle Meister Eckhart was a medieval Christian mystic whose wisdom powerfully appeals to seekers seven centuries after his death. In the modern era, Eckhart's writings have struck a chord with thinkers as diverse as Heidegger, Merton, Sartre, John Paul II, and the current Dalai Lama. He is the inspiration for the bestselling New Age author Eckhart Tolle's pen name, and his fourteenth-century quotes have become an online sensation. Today a variety of Christians, as well as many Zen Buddhists, Sufi Muslims, Jewish Cabbalists, and various spiritual seekers, all claim Eckhart as their own. Meister Eckhart preached a personal, internal path to God at a time when the Church could not have been more hierarchical and ritualistic. Then and now, Eckhart's revolutionary method of direct access to ultimate reality offers a profoundly subjective approach that is at once intuitive and pragmatic, philosophical yet non-rational, and, above all, universally accessible. This "dangerous mystic's" teachings challenge the very nature of religion, yet the man himself never directly challenged the Church. Eckhart was one of the most learned theologians of his day, but he was also a man of the world who had worked as an administrator for his religious order and taught for years at the University of Paris. His personal path from conventional friar to professor to lay preacher culminated in a spiritual philosophy that combined the teachings of an array of pagan and Christian writers, as well as Muslim and Jewish philosophers. His revolutionary decision to take his approach to the common people garnered him many enthusiastic followers as well as powerful enemies. After Eckhart's death and papal censure, many religious women and clerical supporters, known as the Friends of God, kept his legacy alive through the centuries, albeit underground until the master's dramatic rediscovery by modern Protestants and Catholics. Dangerous Mystic grounds Meister Eckhart in a world that is simultaneously familiar and alien. In the midst of this medieval society, a few decades before the Black Death, Eckhart boldly preached to captivated crowds a timeless method, a "wayless way," of directly experiencing the divine.
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For centuries after his death the teachings of the medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart (1260 -- 1328) fell into obscurity. Beginning in the mid-19th century, Eckhart's writings were rediscovered and made widely available. Today many people of widely varying backgrounds and religious dispositions draw inspiration from Eckhart. He has been celebrated in the music of John Adams, for example, and his been a source for popular spiritual works as well as for scholarly study and reflection. I have explored Eckhart at various times of my life for years and have learned from him.
Joel Harrington's recent book, "Dangerous Mystic:Meister Eckhart's Path to the God Within" (2018) shows the author is a person who has thought deeply and learned from Eckhart. His book will be valuable both to scholars and to those readers newly approaching Eckhart. Neither a philosopher nor a theologian, Harrington is Centennial Professor of History at Vanderbilt University who has written about German history in the early modern era of the sixteenth century. In his study of Eckhart, Harrington puts his formidable skills as a historian to use.
Many fine books are available about Eckhart's thought and a still larger number are available about Medieval history. But there are few studies which have integrated the two and considered Eckhart within the context of his times. Harrington does so brilliantly and in the process helped me understand both Eckhart's teachings and his life.
The book consists of four parts each of which works to elucidate part of Eckhart's fundamental teaching of letting go. The first part, "Letting Go of the World" talks about the young Eckhart by discussing the world into which he was born. Harrington describes a culture moving towards a monetary, commercialized economy and the impact of this movement on religious belief. He describes the literature of courtly love and of spiritual search in the context of an increasingly commercial society and explores how this literature doubtlessly influenced the young nobleman and, more importantly, is reflected in Eckhart's writings and in his spiritual search. This part of the book takes Eckhart's biography through his early years as a Dominican friar at Erfurt, his home for most of his life.
The second part of the book "Letting Go of God" explores Eckhart's long period of study of scholastic philosophy in Paris where he ultimately earned the title of "Master" or "Meister" for his extensive learning (roughly equivalent to the modern-day PhD). Harrington gives background on the nature of scholastic life and of the scholastic approach to philosophy and religion. His approach places Eckhart squarely within and, indeed, a master of the scholastic philosophy of his day. Eckhart gradually became attracted to a Neoplatonic approach to philosophy rather than the Aristotelian approach more common in the schools. Eckhart questioned the ability of reason and logic to provide an approach to God and developed an approach relying more on intuition and personal experience. He conceived the project of writing his own "Summa" to rival and correct that of Aquinas. This project was never realized.
In the third part of the book "Letting Go of the Self" Harrington explores Eckart's life after leaving Paris and the academy for reasons which remain uncertain. Eckhart became a skilled administrator in the Dominican order and a preacher. He took his highly developed thought and presented it to the people, especially to religious women, rather than to fellow scholars and students. Importantly he spoke in German rather than in Latin. Harrington describes Eckhart's life as an administrator and he explores Eckhart's relationship to the movement of women's spirituality expressed by the community of beguines, including figures such as Marguerite Porete, who was burned at the stake for heresy. There is a great deal of mutual influence between Eckhart's teachings and the teachings of the beguines. In this part of the book, Harrington offers an exposition of Eckhart's basic and difficult teachings and of his frequently paradoxical style of writing. Eckhart was aware both of the limitations of human speech and of the necessity of speech for finite beings to approach understanding.
The final part of the book "Holding on to Religion" addresses both holding on and letting go. Harrington discusses the inquisition into Eckhart's thought which ultimately led to the papal condemnation of some of his writing after Eckhart's death. The condemnation was based on the alleged antinomian character of Eckhart's work, its possible radical individualism, and its alleged break from institutional Catholicism. Eckhart's reputation went into eclipse for centuries, and Harrington traces the course of the history of Eckhart's reception in the final sections of his book. With the revival of interest in Eckhart, the tension in understanding his work that began at the outset has revived: some of those who learn from Eckhart place him within the boundaries of orthodox Christian teaching while others see Eckhart as breaking away towards a new form of spirituality outside the bounds of any particular religion.
In placing Eckhart thoroughly within the context of his times and in his insightful discussions of Eckhart's teachings, Harrington's sympathies lie clearly with seeing Eckhart within the context of Christian teachings. Harrington is properly skeptical of relativistic, anything goes understandings of Eckhart. Still, Harrington recognizes that Eckhart's words and teachings in some ways break through traditional Christianity and have allowed those people influenced by Eastern religions, as well as those with a mystical bent in the Moslem and Jewish traditions, and those not professing any particular religion and in some cases not being religious at all to learn from Eckhart. Eckhart's teachings are, in their depth, broader than Christian; and yet in Harrington's account , also stress the value of adherence to a particular religious body, in Eckhart's case Christian. In an Epilogue explaining what Harrington sees as the sources of Eckhart's continued importance, Harrington concludes:
"Meister Eckhart's wayless way deliberately remained general and nonprescriptive, allowing for countless subjective variations. It would be ahistorical and presumptuous to predict his opinion of either religious exclusivism or perennialism. But based on his long life of service, we can conclude with conviction that nothing would have pleased the master more than to be considered still useful to his fellow seekers' journey to the God within."
Harrington's book has helped deepen my own understanding and appreciation of Meister Eckhart.
