Eckhart as a mystic
Since the 1960s debate has been going on in Germany whether Eckhart should be called a "mystic".[43] The philosopher Karl Albert had already argued that Eckhart had to be placed in the tradition of philosophical mysticism of Parmenides, Plato, Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus and other neo-Platonistic thinkers.[44] Heribert Fischer argued in the 1960s that Eckhart was a mediaeval theologian.[44]
Kurt Flasch, a member of the so-called Bochum-school of mediaeval philosophy,[44] strongly reacted against the influence of New Age mysticism and "all kinds of emotional subjective mysticism", arguing for the need to free Eckhart from "the Mystical Flood".[44] He sees Eckhart strictly as a philosopher. Flasch argues that the opposition between "mystic" and "scholastic" is not relevant because this mysticism (in Eckhart's context) is penetrated by the spirit of the University, in which it occurred.[citation needed]
According to Hackett, Eckhart is to be understood as an "original hermeneutical thinker in the Latin tradition".[44] To understand Eckhart, he has to be properly placed within the western philosophical tradition of which he was a part. [45]
Josiah Royce, an objective idealist, saw Eckhart as a representative example of 13th and 14th century Catholic mystics "on the verge of pronounced heresy" but without original philosophical opinions. Royce attributes Eckhart's reputation for originality to the fact that he translated scholastic philosophy from Latin into German, and that Eckhart wrote about his speculations in German instead of Latin.[46](pp262, 265–266) Eckhart generally followed Thomas Aquinas's doctrine of the Trinity, but Eckhart exaggerated the scholastic distinction between the divine essence and the divine persons. The very heart of Eckhart's speculative mysticism, according to Royce, is that if, through what is called in Christian terminology the procession of the Son, the divine omniscience gets a complete expression in eternal terms, still there is even at the centre of this omniscience the necessary mystery of the divine essence itself, which neither generates nor is generated, and which is yet the source and fountain of all the divine. The Trinity is, for Eckhart, the revealed God and the mysterious origin of the Trinity is the Godhead, the absolute God.[46](pp279–282)
Modern popularisation
Theology
Matthew Fox
Matthew Fox (born 1940) is an American theologian.[47] Formerly a priest and a member of the Dominican Order within the Roman Catholic Church, Fox was an early and influential exponent of a movement that came to be known as Creation Spirituality. The movement draws inspiration from the wisdom traditions of Christian scriptures and from the philosophies of such medieval Catholic visionaries as Hildegard of Bingen, Thomas Aquinas, Saint Francis of Assisi, Julian of Norwich, Dante Alighieri, Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa, and others. Fox has written a number of articles on Eckhart[citation needed] and a book titled Breakthrough: Meister Eckhart's Creation Spirituality in New Translation.[48]
Modern philosophy
The French philosopher Jacques Derrida distinguishes Eckhart's Negative Theology from his own concept of différance although John D. Caputo in his influential The Tears and Prayers of Jacques Derrida emphasises the importance of that tradition for this thought.[49]
Modern spirituality
See also: Nondualism
Meister Eckhart has become one of the timeless heroes of modern spirituality, which thrives on an all-inclusive syncretism.[50] This syncretism started with the colonisation of Asia, and the search of similarities between Eastern and Western religions.[51] Western monotheism was projected onto Eastern religiosity by Western orientalists, trying to accommodate Eastern religiosity to a Western understanding, whereafter Asian intellectuals used these projections as a starting point to propose the superiority of those Eastern religions.[51] Early on, the figure of Meister Eckhart has played a role in these developments and exchanges.[51]
Renewed academic attention to Eckhart has attracted favorable attention to his work from contemporary non-Christian mystics. Eckhart's most famous single quote, "The Eye with which I see God is the same Eye with which God sees me", is commonly cited by thinkers within neopaganism and ultimatist Buddhism as a point of contact between these traditions and Christian mysticism.
Schopenhauer
The first translation of Upanishads appeared in two parts in 1801 and 1802.[51] The 19th-century philosopher Schopenhauer was influenced by the early translations of the Upanishads, which he called "the consolation of my life".[52][g] Schopenhauer compared Eckhart's views to the teachings of Indian, Christian and Islamic mystics and ascetics:
If we turn from the forms, produced by external circumstances, and go to the root of things, we shall find that Sakyamuni and Meister Eckhart teach the same thing; only that the former dared to express his ideas plainly and positively, whereas Eckhart is obliged to clothe them in the garment of the Christian myth, and to adapt his expressions thereto.[53]
Schopenhauer also stated:
Buddha, Eckhart, and I all teach essentially the same.[54]
Theosophical Society
A major force in the mutual influence of Eastern and Western ideas and religiosity was the Theosophical Society,[55][56] which also incorporated Eckhart in its notion of Theosophy.[57] It searched for ancient wisdom in the East, spreading Eastern religious ideas in the West.[58] One of its salient features was the belief in "Masters of Wisdom",[59][h] "beings, human or once human, who have transcended the normal frontiers of knowledge, and who make their wisdom available to others".[59] The Theosophical Society also spread Western ideas in the East, aiding a modernisation of Eastern traditions, and contributing to a growing nationalism in the Asian colonies.[60]
Neo-Vedanta
Main article: Neo-Vedanta
The Theosophical Society had a major influence on Hindu reform movements.[56][i] A major proponent of this "neo-Hinduism", also called "neo-Vedanta",[62] was Vivekananda[63][64] (1863–1902) who popularised his modernised interpretation[65] of Advaita Vedanta in the 19th and early 20th century in both India and the West,[64] emphasising anubhava ("personal experience"[66]) over scriptural authority.[66] Vivekananda's teachings have been compared to Eckhart's teachings.[67][68]
In the 20th century, Eckhart's thoughts were also compared to Shankara's Advaita Vedanta by Rudolf Otto in his Mysticism East and West.[69] According to King, the aim of this work was to redeem Eckhart's mysticism in Protestant circles,[70] attempting "to establish the superiority of the German mysticism of Eckhart over the Indian mysticism of Sankara".[54]
Buddhist modernism
Main article: Buddhist modernism
The Theosophical Society also had a major influence on Buddhist modernism,[60] and the spread of this modernised Buddhism in the West.[60] Along with H. S. Olcott and Anagarika Dharmapala, Helena P. Blavatsky was instrumental in the Western transmission and revival of Theravada Buddhism.[71][72][73]
In 1891, Karl Eugen Neumann, who translated large parts of the Tripitaka, found parallels between Eckhart and Buddhism,[74] which he published in Zwei buddhistische Suttas und ein Traktat Meister Eckharts (Two Buddhist Suttas and a treatise of Meister Eckhart). D.T. Suzuki, who joined the Theosophical Society Adyar and was an active Theosophist,[75][76][77] discerned parallels between Eckhart's teachings and Zen Buddhism in his Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist,[78] drawing similarities between Eckhart's "pure nothingness" (ein bloss nicht) and sunyata.[79] Shizuteru Ueda, a third generation Kyoto School philosopher and scholar in medieval philosophy showed similarities between Eckhart's soteriology and Zen Buddhism in an article.[80]
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, also 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".[78] Schurmann's several clarifications included:
On the question of "Time" and Eckhart's view (claimed as parallel to Buddhism in reducing awakening to instantaneity) that the birth of the Word in the ground of the mind must accomplish itself in an instant, in "the eternal now", that in fact Eckhart in this respect is rooted directly in the catechisis of the Fathers of the Church rather than merely derived from Buddhism;[78]
On the question of "Isness" and Suzuki's contention that the "Christian experiences are not after all different from those of the Buddhist; terminology is all that divides us", that in Eckhart "the Godhead's istigkeit [translated as "isness" by Suzuki] is a negation of all quiddities; it says that God, rather than non-being, is at the heart of all things" thereby demonstrating with Eckhart's theocentrism that "the istigkeit of the Godhead and the isness of a thing then refer to two opposite experiences in Meister Eckhart and Suzuki: in the former, to God, and in the latter, to `our ordinary state of the mind'" and Buddhism's attempts to think "pure nothingness";[81]
On the question of "Emptiness" and Eckhart's view (claimed as parallel to Buddhist emphasis "on the emptiness of all 'composite things'") that only a perfectly released person, devoid of all, comprehends, "seizes", God, that the Buddhist "emptiness" seems to concern man's relation to things while Eckhart's concern is with what is "at the end of the road opened by detachment [which is] the mind espouses the very movement of the divine dehiscence; it does what the Godhead does: it lets all things be; not only must God also abandon all of his own – names and attributes if he is to reach into the ground of the mind (this is already a step beyond the recognition of the emptiness of all composite things), but God's essential being – releasement – becomes the being of a released man."[82]
Psychology and psychoanalysis
Erich Fromm
The notable humanistic psychoanalyst and philosopher Erich Fromm was another scholar who brought renewed attention in the West to Eckhart's writings, drawing upon many of the latter's themes in his large corpus of work. Eckhart was a significant influence in developing United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld's conception of spiritual growth through selfless service to humanity, as detailed in his book of contemplations called Vägmärken ("Markings").[j]
Carl G. Jung
In Aion, Researches Into the Phenomenology of Self[83] Carl G. Jung cites Eckhart approvingly in his discussion of Christ as a symbol of the archetypal self. Jung sees Eckhart as a Christian Gnostic:
Meister Eckhart's theology knows a "Godhead" of which no qualities, except unity and being, can be predicated; it "is becoming," it is not yet Lord of itself, and it represents an absolute coincidence of opposites: "But its simple nature is of forms formless; of becoming becomingless; of beings beingless; of things thingless," etc. Union of opposites is equivalent to unconsciousness, so far as human logic goes, for consciousness presupposes a differentiation into subject and object and a relation between them. (Page 193.)
As the Godhead is essentially unconscious, so too is the man who lives in God. In his sermon on "The Poor in Spirit" (Matt. 5 : 3), the Meister says: "The man who has this poverty has everything he was when he lived not in any wise, neither in himself, nor in truth, nor in God. He 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. And so we say this man is as empty of his own knowledge as he was when he was not anything; he lets God work with what he will, and he stands empty as when he came from God." Therefore he should love God in the following way: "Love him as he is; a not-God, a not-spirit, a not-person, a not-image; as a sheer, pure, clear One, which he is, sundered from all secondness; and in this One let us sink eternally, from nothing to nothing. So help us God. Amen." (Page 193.)
Jung summed up his view of Eckhart saying:
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. Well might the writings of this Master be buried for six hundred years, for "his time was not yet come." Only in the nineteenth century did he find a public at all capable of appreciating the grandeur of his mind. (Page 194.)
