Source:
W. R. Inge, Light, life and love - Selections from the German
Mystics of the Middle Ages, 1904
Page 3
2.
MEISTER ECKHART
It was in 1260, when Mechthild of Magdeburg
was at the height of her activity, that Meister Eckhart, next to Plotinus the
greatest philosopher-mystic, was born at Hocheim in Thuringia. It seems that his
family was in a good position, but nothing is known of his early years. He
entered the Dominican Order as a youth, perhaps at sixteen, the earliest age at
which novices were admitted into that Order. The course of instruction among the
Dominicans was as follows:--After two years, during which the novice laid the
foundations of a good general education, he devoted the next two years to
grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, and then the same amount of time to what was
called the Quadrivium, which consisted of "arithmetic, mathematics,
astronomy, and music." Theology, the queen of the sciences, occupied three
years; and at the end of the course, at the age of twenty-five, the brothers
were ordained priests. We find Eckhart, towards the end of the century, Prior of
Erfurt and Vicar of Thuringia, then Lector Biblicus at Paris, then Provincial
Prior of Saxony. In 1307 the master of the Order appointed him Vicar-General for
Bohemia, and in 1311 he returned to Paris. We find him next preaching busily at
Strassburg,[iv]
and after a few more years, at Cologne, where the persecution of the Brethren of
the Free Spirit was just then at its height. At Strassburg there were no less
than seven convents of Dominican nuns, for since 1267 the Order had resumed the
supervision of female convents, which it had renounced a short time after its
foundation. Many of Eckhart's discourses were addressed to these congregations
of devout women, who indeed were to a large extent the backbone of the mystical
movement, and it is impossible not to see that the devotional treatises of the
school are strongly coloured by feminine sentiment. A curious poem, written by a
Dominican nun of this period, celebrates the merits of three preachers, the
third of whom is a Master Eckhart, "who speaks to us about Nothingness. He
who understands him not, in him has never shone the light divine." These
nuns seem to have been fed with the strong meat of Eckhart's mystical
philosophy; in the more popular sermons he tried to be intelligible to all. It
was not very long after he took up his residence at Cologne that he was himself
attacked for heresy. In 1327 he read before his own Order a retractation of
"any errors which might be found" (si quid errorum repertum fuerit)
in his writings, but withdrew nothing that he had actually said, and protested
that he believed himself to be orthodox. He died a few months later, and it was
not till 1329 that a Papal bull was issued, enumerating seventeen heretical and
eleven objectionable doctrines in his writings.
