44 Facts About Meister Eckhart

Meister Eckhart seems to have died before his verdict was received.

Meister 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 John Tauler and Henry Suso who was later beatified.

Meister Eckhart has acquired a status as a great mystic within contemporary popular spirituality, as well as considerable interest from scholars situating him within the medieval scholastic and philosophical tradition.

Meister Eckhart was probably born around 1260 in the village of Tambach, near Gotha, in the Landgraviate of Thuringia, perhaps between 1250 and 1260.

Probably around 1278 Meister Eckhart joined the Dominican convent at Erfurt, when he was about eighteen.

In late 1294, Meister Eckhart was made Prior at Erfurt and Dominican Provincial of Thuringia.

In late 1303, Meister 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.

Meister Eckhart was Provincial for Saxony until 1311, during which time he founded three convents for women there.

Meister Eckhart stayed in Paris for two academic years, until the summer of 1313, living in the same house as William of Paris.

In late 1323 or early 1324, Meister Eckhart left Strasbourg for the Dominican house at Cologne.

Meister Eckhart 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.

At this point Meister Eckhart issued a Vindicatory Document, providing chapter and verse of what he had been taught.

Meister Eckhart 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.

Meister Eckhart himself translated the text into German, so that his audience, the vernacular public, could understand it.

Meister Eckhart denied competence and authority to the inquisitors and the archbishop, and appealed to the Pope against the verdict.

At the close, it is stated that Meister Eckhart recanted before his death everything which he had falsely taught, by subjecting himself and his writing to the decision of the Apostolic See.

In one sermon, Meister Eckhart gives the following summary of his message:.

Meister Eckhart had imagined the creation not as a "compulsory" overflowing, but as the free act of will of the triune nature of Deity.

Meister Eckhart was one of the most influential 13th-century Christian Neoplatonists in his day, and remained widely read in the later Middle Ages.

Some early twentieth-century writers believed that Meister Eckhart's work was forgotten by his fellow Dominicans soon after his death.

In 1960 a manuscript was discovered containing six hundred excerpts from Meister Eckhart, clearly deriving from an original made in the Cologne Dominican convent after the promulgation of the bull condemning Meister Eckhart's writings, as notations from the bull are inserted into the manuscript.

Meister Eckhart assembled, and carefully annotated, a surviving collection of Eckhart's Latin works.

Meister Eckhart is considered by some to have been the inspirational "layman" referred to in Johannes Tauler's and Rulman Merswin's later writings in Strasbourg where he is known to have spent time.

Meister Eckhart was largely forgotten from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, barring occasional interest from thinkers such as Angelus Silesius.

Interest in Meister Eckhart's works was revived in the early nineteenth century, especially by German Romantics and Idealist philosophers.

Since the mid-nineteenth century scholars have questioned which of the many pieces attributed to Meister Eckhart should be considered genuine, and whether greater weight should be given to works written in the vernacular, or Latin.

Denifle and others have proposed that the Latin treatises, which Meister Eckhart prepared for publication very carefully, were essential to a full understanding of Meister Eckhart.

Since the 1960s debate has been going on in Germany whether Meister Eckhart should be called a "mystic".

The philosopher Karl Albert had already argued that Meister Eckhart had to be placed in the tradition of philosophical mysticism of Parmenides, Plato, Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus and other neo-Platonistic thinkers.

Heribert Fischer argued in the 1960s that Meister Eckhart was a mediaeval theologian.

Meister Eckhart generally followed Thomas Aquinas's doctrine of the Trinity, but Meister Eckhart exaggerated the scholastic distinction between the divine essence and the divine persons.

The Trinity is, for Meister Eckhart, the revealed God and the mysterious origin of the Trinity is the Godhead, the absolute God.

Meister Eckhart has become one of the timeless heroes of modern spirituality, which, to historian of religion Wouter Hanegraaff, thrives on an all-inclusive syncretism.

Early on, the figure of Meister Eckhart has played a role in these developments and exchanges.

Reiner Schurmann, a professor of philosophy, while agreeing with Daisetz T Suzuki that there exist certain similarities between Zen Buddhism and Meister Eckhart's teaching, disputed Suzuki's contention that the ideas expounded in Eckhart's sermons closely approach Buddhist thought, "so closely indeed, that one could stamp them almost definitely as coming out of Buddhist speculations".

The notable humanistic psychoanalyst and philosopher Erich Fromm was another scholar who brought renewed attention in the West to Meister Eckhart's writings, drawing upon many of the latter's themes in his large corpus of work.

Meister Eckhart was a significant influence in developing United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold's conception of spiritual growth through selfless service to humanity, as detailed in his book of contemplations called Vagmarken.

Meister Eckhart is so quit and empty of all knowing that no knowledge of God is alive in him; for while he stood in the eternal nature of god, there lived in him not another: what lived there was himself.

The world-embracing spirit of Meister Eckhart knew, without discursive knowledge, the primordial mystical experience of India as well as of the Gnostics, and was itself the finest flower on the tree of the "Free Spirit" that flourished at the beginning of the eleventh century.

In Z213: Exit, by Dimitris Lyacos the same quote, attributed to Meister Eckhart, appears in a slightly different wording:.

Meister Eckhart describes his plans to write a vast Opus Tripartitum.

The third part, the Work of Commentaries, is the major surviving Latin work by Meister Eckhart, consisting of a Prologue, six commentaries, and fifty-six sermons.

Questions concerning the authenticity of the Middle High German texts attributed to Meister Eckhart are much greater than for the Latin texts.

Meister Eckhart's sermons are versions written down by others from memory or from notes, meaning that the possibility for error was much greater than for the carefully written Latin treatises.