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and others, were frequently at pains to emphasize Eckhart’s profundity, his originality, as well as his role as founder of German philosophy (with alternating emphasis on his ideas and his Germanness). 242 While many scholars have made more measured assessments of Eckhart, the temptation to hyperbolic praise has certainly not disappeared. 243 For Oliver Davies, the editor and translator of the English Penguin Classics edition (published in 1994), Eckhart not only “stands out as one of the most exciting and radical thinkers of his own, or indeed of any age” and is “the father of a distinguished German philosophical and theological tradition which extends to the present day,” but also inspired 242 To cite only a few: Blakney, in the introduction to his 1941 translation of Eckhart’s writings, writes: “It was in his doctrines of God that he went beyond the tolerance of his time and perhaps beyond the capacity of ours….Certainly he lifted Christianity above any parochial conception and revealed its inner relation to the great, universal spiritual movements which have found expression in many forms. He lived on that high level, on the same highlands of the spirit that were disclosed in the Upanishads and Sufi classics. To go where Eckhart went is to come close to Lao Tzu and Buddha, and certainly to Jesus Christ” (Blakney, xiv). Franz Pfeiffer calls Eckhart “eines der tiefsten denker aller zeiten” Franz Pfeiffer, ed., Deutsche Mystiker des vierzehnten Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: G.J. Göschen, 1857), vii. Kurt Ruh’s assessment of Eckhart in his thorough and authoritative Geschichte der abendländischen Mystik acknowledges that modern scholarship grows and changes in its assessment of Eckhart, but emphasizes Eckhart’s persistent relevance and timeliness: “seit ihn neuzeitliche Wissenschaft zurückgewonnen und den Lesern bereitgestellt hat, von ununterbrochener, wenn auch immer wieder anders ausgerichteter Aktualität”. Kurt Ruh, Geschichte der abendländischen Mystik, Band 3 (München: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1990), 220. Recently, see also Lisa Cerami, “Ineffable Histories: German Mysticism at the Jahrhundertwende,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton University, 2010. 243 Heinrich Denifle emphasized that Eckhart did not create his ideas ex nihilo but rather was firmly a part of the tradition of Scholasticism (Kindlers, “Meister Eckhart”). Otto Karrer agrees, writing that Meister Eckhart was a great thinker (“a true king”) but that he was also “the typical child of his time”: “In reality there is literally nothing in his philosophy of theology which he could call his own; everything is rooted in the tradition of the old teachers. In this respect he is the true scholastic.” Otto Karrer, “Introduction,” in Meister Eckhart, Meister Eckehart Speaks: a collection of the teachings of the famous German mystic, trans. Elizabeth Strakosch, (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957), 9. See also Meister Eckhart, Deutsche Predigten und Traktate, ed., trans. Josef Quint, (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1955). More recent scholarship has emphasized the continuity of Eckhart’s “scholastic theology” and his “popular piety,” arguing that distinguishing between so-called high and low religion does not actually reflect the reality of religious life in the Middle Ages. Amy Hollywood, for instance, has argued that Eckhart should not be seen as the one who corrected and theologized (so to speak) the ideas of female mystics. Instead, Hollywood “attempt[s] to show how Eckhart situated himself in relation to his two predecessors [Mechthild of Magdeburg and Marguerite Porete], how his thought was significantly shaped by the mystical concerns and theologies of the women’s movement, and how he might have come to his distinctive resolution of their tensions.” Amy Hollywood, The Soul As Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2001). Bernard McGinn has likewise been interested in showing not what Eckhart “may have learned from the Beguine authors” but rather “what Eckhart shared with them,” investigating “the community of discourse and joint concerns in which his thought and theirs developed and enriched each other.” Bernard McGinn, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (1300-1500), Vol. IV (New York: The Crossroads Publishing Company, 2005), 4. 90
philosophers from Hegel and Schopenhauer through to Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida—an impressive feat for a single thinker. 244 Eckhart’s supposed immediacy and timelessness has also made him a prominent locus for ecumenical and inter-faith dialogues, extending his sphere of influence even beyond the entire modern philosophical tradition to eastern religions (Buddhism and Hinduism) as well as Islam. 245 Perhaps the persistent interest in affirming Eckhart’s importance has to do precisely with his perceived absence in the centuries following his death, which makes his his modern resurgence seem more spectacular. Bernard McGinn, for instance, writes in the preface to his monograph on Eckhart (The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing) that “Eckhart has a way of getting through to readers, despite the difficulty and frequent obscurity of both his original Latin and Middle High German texts, and the translations that sometimes betray him.” 246 Presumably unlike other medieval writings that are not classics, McGinn imagines that Eckhart communicates without any medium at all, or rather in spite of an opaque medium. Eckhart’s puzzling disappearance in the early modern period, in other words, is overcome by the immediacy of Eckhart’s voice, such that Eckhart can take on his foundational role 244 Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings, trans. Oliver Davies, (London: Penguin Books, 1994), xxxvii. 245 For a comparative study with Islamic thinkers, see Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994). For comparative studies with Buddhism, see for instance Ha Poong Kim, To See God, to See the Buddha: An Exploration of Seeing Spirituality with Meister Eckhart, Nagarjuna and Huang Bo, (Eastbourne: Sussex University Press, 2010); Alois M. Haas, "Das Ereignis des Wortes: Sprachliche Verfahren bei Meister Eckhart und im Zen-Buddhismus," Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 58, no. 4 (December 1984): 527-569. Denys Turner dismisses these comparative studies as fundamentally misguided, since they tear Eckhart out of his (proper) medieval context, and amount to nothing more than a modern misunderstanding. He asks: “What is the contemporary reader going to make of Eckhart’s radical doctrines of detachment...if they are ripped up from their roots in Neoplatonic apophaticism, except some ‘mere’ metaphors, no doubt satisfyingly redolent of Buddhism?” Turner’s study could be considered, in this context, the most concerted attempt to deny Eckhart the very modernity that, for instance, Bernard McGinn attributes to Eckhart, and to win him back, so to speak, as distinctively medieval. Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 266. 246 Bernard McGinn, The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing, (New York: The Crossroads Publishing Company, 2001), ix. 91
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MYSTICISM & CONFESSIONAL CONFLICT I
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ABSTRACT This dissertation investig
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INTRODUCTION • ES IST DIR NICHT B
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mostly undisturbed by his Lutheran
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yet have signalled his assent with
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in a context where action is expect
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Protestant Mysticism: Not a Contrad
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interest, 31 and praised the Theolo
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one can observe the texture of the
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discourse and reasoned debate, or t
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with fragments of Eckhart and Taule
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Dionysius and Eckhart (for differen
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movement, but also profound shifts
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schools, as well as universities wh
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allowed them to cooperate effective
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made clear, would result in dismiss
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and in these external dealings, the
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same laws of physics, but while the
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Tertullian’s De Fuga in Persecuti
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as a martyr. Moreover, Holy Scriptu
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Alternatively, the so-called four-f
Page 43 and 44: tzeyger und unterrichter ist ynn di
Page 45 and 46: fellow Lutherans in studying books
Page 47 and 48: provoked into action unnecessarily,
Page 49 and 50: masses for the dead (for instance)
Page 51 and 52: traditional proof texts about the o
Page 53 and 54: positive understandings of indiffer
Page 55 and 56: insofar as their imperfection is ra
Page 57 and 58: Of these forms of indifference, I f
Page 59 and 60: to Dionysius’ authority. Two grou
Page 61 and 62: PART I • VALENTIN WEIGEL AND MEIS
Page 63 and 64: investigating his early modern read
Page 65 and 66: was a devilish heretic to others (
Page 67 and 68: his neglect of Eckhart. 158 For ins
Page 69 and 70: “unheilvolle Kompliziertheit”).
Page 71 and 72: and Jerome (wearing what looks like
Page 73 and 74: title page, as mentioned above, des
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Page 79 and 80: church that Luther, Melanchthon and
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Page 83 and 84: soul become convinced that nothing
Page 85 and 86: that salvation can be attained thro
Page 87 and 88: more importantly, a theology that a
Page 89 and 90: Mit Recht der Meister genannt: Mode
Page 91 and 92: These role-reversal dialogues were
Page 93: As this chapter has shown, Eckhart
Page 97 and 98: CHAPTER 2 • GELASSENE GELASSENHEI
Page 99 and 100: the relationship between Tauler and
Page 101 and 102: e “as it was when it was not.”
Page 103 and 104: Eckhart agree that spiritual povert
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Page 107 and 108: einvaltig stille), an uncreated lig
Page 109 and 110: e as free of willing and desiring a
Page 111 and 112: nestling inside the soul, but rathe
Page 113 and 114: Gelassenheit, das ist, das er nicht
Page 115 and 116: (necessarily inferior) knowledge pr
Page 117 and 118: context is that he picks up on Eckh
Page 119 and 120: he begins to steer the discussion a
Page 121 and 122: further proof for Weigel’s theory
Page 123 and 124: understood that the mind cannot pos
Page 125 and 126: wait in stiller Gelassenheit, recei
Page 127 and 128: truth as an educated theologian or
Page 129 and 130: ungewisser”) and finds that his f
Page 131 and 132: die Blinden an ein ander gehetzett,
Page 133 and 134: gesagett das ist er selber und ist
Page 135 and 136: Gelassenheit for the Bible, which i
Page 137 and 138: that the kind of Gelassenheit Weige
Page 139 and 140: indifference that allows Weigel to
Page 141 and 142: teacher. 366 However, the turning p
Page 143 and 144: Weigel gives the passage an unexpec
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Murren”)—and they do this “in
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and all the more so since he saw li
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the strength of the intellectual re
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CHAPTER 3 • DIONYSIUS, WHOEVER HE
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demonstrated for Eckhart, I will de
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destroyer that Dionysius is most of
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ears good news to the church.” 39
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points out, with a purification, a
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served as cornerstones in defences
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(Acts 17: 15-34), one of the skepti
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to make the interpretation of these
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Outside the universities, Dionysius
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defiled the “sacred things” by
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other leaders of the Protestant Ref
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valorization of hierarchy per se in
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as well as the with the arguments u
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freedom, but rather obedience. 468
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The primary piece in the compilatio
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It is hardly surprising that Cochla
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it does during the Council of Trent
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for a hierarchical church, seizing
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the ancient teaching”) that “be
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Dionysiacum. For Lefèvre d’Étap
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Aristotle would have been glad to h
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enlightens all great thinkers in ev
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offered Dionysius to the Gelehrtenr
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nine distinct editions of Dionysius
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editions of Greek and Latin classic
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(Turin), and is a reprint of Lefèv
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presses in Spain (his first publica
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growing body of evidence suggesting
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Weigel concludes that, precisely be
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apart, he suggested that true Chris
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and so did not dwell on the fact th
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Names, as the title suggests, is ba
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animals, through plants and non-liv
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of being.” 580 As we will see lat
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(“God is a rock”) or even a neg
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This is admittedly a nonsensical as
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compositions, most likely dating to
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Dionysius to show that, just as God
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efer to Greek and Hebrew, the bibli
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argues that there cannot be more th
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dicitur una.” 616 The stress that
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Weigel suggests will allow the soul
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saving sacraments by means of which
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Melanchthon’s Defence of the Augs
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alternative—namely prayer. 643 We
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Dionysius writes that the summit of
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leibet er illimitatus.” 658 Weige
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work, Weigel had written explicitly
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Luther did not ever use the exact p
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as opposed to an office-holder, an
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writing. By calling his Layman der
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Others are loyal to mere men (the P
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zuerzeigen einen rechtschaffen vnd
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and ceremonial ones at that. 694 Th
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himself returning gloriously from H
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all being. In relinquishing any cre
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improve appearances but, because it
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than resolve it, because the proble
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parcels God, who by rights is supre
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Appendix • The Works of Valentin
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BIBLIOGRAPHY Abad, J. M. (1999). Th
Page 273 and 274:
Chenu O.P., M.-D. (1968). In M.-D.
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Eckhart, M. (1993). Werke I (Vol. 1
Page 277 and 278:
Israel, A. (1888). M. Valentin Weig
Page 279 and 280:
MacCulloch, D. (2010). Christianity
Page 281 and 282:
Payne, R. J. (Ed.). (1981). Meister
Page 283 and 284:
Schindling, A., & Ziegler, W. (1990
Page 285 and 286:
Verkamp, B. J. (1975). The Limits u
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