|
|
|
|
 |
Meister Eckhart Home / Works by Meister Eckhart - Quotes / Inspired by Eckhart / Studies / The Papal Condemnation / Mail & Announcements / Links / Books |
The First German Movement In Its European Setting (1270-1350)
Page 7
In defending Thomas, Eckhart confronted Scotus's rigid division of the cosmos, and his spiritualism which rejected the notion of the Sacraments as physical instruments containing a supernatural power (virtus supernaturalis). This inevitably pushed Eckhart to question the relation between God and man and to think about the Sacraments of the Church. According to Scotus, God was not committed to the mediation of the Sacraments because his personal will acts directly upon each human person [10]. Hence the Sacrament could only be an outward sign; God can bring any predestined soul directly to blessedness, without the Incarnation of Christ, or the Redemption without grace, the Church or the Sacraments [11]. The historical Christ was thrust into the realms of the purely spiritual, a mere symbol of cosmic ordinances [12]. Since Eckhart was essentially an eclectic, he happily borrowed ideas from both Scotus and Thomas to support his theme. Armed with these two central propositions, he began to preach on God and the soul. This was always Eckhart's main preoccupation, as it had been Augustine's, but there was a crucial difference. Augustine actually lived in the community of the civitas Dei, the Church, and within the political humanism of the Roman Empire. Eckhart was a product of the intellectual resistance movements of Stoicism, Origen and the Hellenic East.
Eckhart's doctrine of the soul as a "spark" went back to the Stoic theory of the nature of fire, which Seneca had metaphorically applied to the conscience. Origen christianized Seneca's metaphor and Proclus had refined it to refer only to the very core or "fine point of the soul". Dionysius and William of Moerbeke, who translated Proclus, introduced the idea of scholasticism where it became part of the concept of the synteresis, the ground of consciousness; the later concept of the scintilla animae was unknown to scholasticism [13]. Thomas built the indestructibility of the synteresis into the permanent foundation of Western humanism. Not even in Hell could this core of our nature, as established by God, be destroyed. Eckhart transformed it into an anarchical mystical solipsism, in which the divinely established soul-ego engulfed both God and the world. This imperialism of the heart burst out in his German preaching.
Cf. Meister Eckhart von Friedrich Heer ||| Mail: Heer, Tauler & nazism
