Anam Cara

Eckhart was born around 1260 in the village of Hochheim, near Erfurt in Germany. He became a novice at the Dominican house in Erfurt around 1277. In the 1270s he studied arts in Paris. He also studied in Cologne under Albert the Great, who had taught Thomas Aquinas. From 1293 to 1294 he lectured in Paris on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. In 1294 he became prior of the Dominican house in Erfurt and also vicar of the Dominican house in Thuringia. In 1302 he was called to the chair of theology in Paris, which was recognition in his time and among his peers that he was indeed a brilliant mind. From 1303 to 1311 he was the provincial of the Dominican order in Germany, and he set about reforming that province. He was back in Paris in 1311 as professor of theology. At that time too he was very active in spiritual direction around Germany. From 1322 to 1326 the first censure of his teachings took place and he made his first defense in Cologne. In 1327 he appealed to the pope, alleging delays in his trial. He went into the pulpit in Avignon (where the papacy resided) to defend himself. At that time another man, who would have no sympathy with Eckhart’s teaching, William of Occam, was also defending himself. Eckhart died in 1328 and after his death the papal document In Agro Dominico, condemning him as a heretic, was published. What is remarkable about Eckhart is the balance in his life between the most intricate, profound intellectual work—which is particularly evident in his Latin sermons—and his very fluent and caring and involved pastoral approach. He traveled and preached widely, when travel was particularly difficult. He came after the great flowering of Greek philosophy, particularly neo-Platonist philosophy. Thomas Aquinas preceded him, so he was heir to a fascinatingly complex philosophical system.

THE IDEA OF GOD

There was a fair amount of turbulence in his time—the popes had moved to Avignon, for example. If you look at the history of thought and art, it is usually out of restless, turbulent times that great novelty and light emerge. Every great thinker is haunted by one major idea, and the delight and danger of Eckhart’s mind was that his major obsession was the idea of God. That is what fired his thinking, and it ultimately brought him into conflict with the authorities at the time. To put it succinctly, Eckhart’s idea of God was that there is nothing closer to us than God. That is what made the Church suspicious of him—that he brought God too much down to earth—but in fact if you go carefully through his thought, you can see the other polarities too, that is, the incredible distance of God.

Eckhart is fascinating for us now too in that we live at a time when, I would argue, there is an unprecedented spiritual hunger. So there is an ongoing retrieval of ancient sources which have great nourishment and light in them and Eckhart is one of those sources. He believed that the identity of the human person was very intimately connected with our ability to think, so thought wasn’t just a lens through which we see things, but it was our very existence and presence. He considered that God was really present in our thinking, so that when you thought of God you were not thinking about God or a distant object but you were awakening in some way the divine presence within you. When you immerse yourself in Eckhart’s work and you allow your consciousness to be schooled in the cloister of his thinking, what begins to happen is that his thought, rather than being a target of your own understanding, begins to take the form of an icon which looks back at you. So the more you gaze at Eckhart’s thinking, the more you feel that it actually begins to read to you. Eckhart tries to think within the divine mind, so his thought is a participation in God’s presence.

A WILD GOD