Eckhart von Hochheim OP (c. 1260 – c. 1328), commonly known as Meister Eckhart or Eckehart, was a German theologian, philosopher and mystic, born near Gotha in the Landgraviate of Thuringia (now central Germany) in the Holy Roman Empire.
Eckhart von Hochheim OP (c. 1260 – c. 1328), commonly known as Meister Eckhart or Eckehart, was a German theologian, philosopher and mystic, born near Gotha in the Landgraviate of Thuringia (now central Germany) in the Holy Roman Empire.
Eckhart came into emphasis during the Avignon Papacy at a epoch of increased tensions in the middle of monastic orders, diocesan clergy, the Franciscan Order, and Eckhart’s Dominican Order of Preachers. In far ahead life, he was accused of heresy and brought up before the local Franciscan-led Inquisition, and tried as a heretic by Pope John XXII. He seems to have died in the past his verdict was received.
He was competently known for his act out with pious lay groups such as the Friends of God and was succeeded by his more circumspect disciples John Tauler and Henry Suso.[citation needed] Since the 19th century, he has traditional renewed attention. He has acquired a status as a good mystic within contemporary popular spirituality, as capably as considerable interest from scholars situating him within the medieval educational and philosophical tradition.
Eckhart was probably born in the village of Tambach, near Gotha, in the Landgraviate of Thuringia, perhaps amongst 1250 and 1260. It was since asserted that he was born to a noble relations of landowners, but this originated in a misinterpretation of the archives of the period. In reality, little is known virtually his family and beforehand life. There is no authority for giving him the Christian publish of Johannes, which sometimes appears in biographical sketches: his Christian publicize was Eckhart; his surname was von Hochheim.
Eckhart allied the Dominicans at Erfurt, probably when he was roughly eighteen, and it is assumed he studied at Cologne. He may have in addition to studied at the University of Paris, either back or after his become old in Cologne.
The first sound evidence we have for his liveliness is when on 18 April 1294, as a baccalaureus (lecturer) on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, a say to which he had presumably been appointed in 1293, he preached the Easter Sermon (the Sermo Paschalis) at the Dominican convent of St. Jacques in Paris. In late 1294, Eckhart was made Prior at Erfurt and Dominican Provincial of Thuringia. His primeval vernacular work, Reden der Unterweisung (The Talks of Instructions/Counsels upon Discernment), a series of talks delivered to Dominican novices, dates from this time (c. 1295–1298). In 1302, he was sent to Paris to accept up the outside Dominican seat of theology. He remained there until 1303. The short Parisian Questions date from this time.
In late 1303 Eckhart returned to Erfurt, and was made Provincial for Saxony, a province which reached at that era from the Netherlands to Livonia. He for that reason had responsibility for forty-seven convents in this region. Complaints made next to him and the provincial of Teutonia at the Dominican general chapter held in Paris in 1306, concerning irregularities in the midst of the ternaries, must have been trivial, because the general, Aymeric of Piacenza, appointed him in the subsequent to year his vicar-general for Bohemia gone full faculty to set the demoralized monasteries there in order. Eckhart was Provincial for Saxony until 1311, during which mature he founded three convents for women there.
On 14 May 1311 Eckhart was appointed by the general chapter held at Naples as bookish at Paris. To be invited help to Paris for a second stint as magister was a scarce privilege, previously granted only to Thomas Aquinas. Eckhart stayed in Paris for two academic years, until the summer of 1313, living in the same home as William of Paris.
Then follows a long grow old of which it is known only that he spent share of the era at Strasbourg. It is vague what specific office he held there: he seems chiefly to have been concerned in imitation of spiritual direction and like preaching in convents of Dominicans.
A lane in a chronicle of the year 1320, extant in manuscript (cf. Wilhelm Preger, i. 352–399), speaks of a prior Eckhart at Frankfurt who was suspected of heresy, and some have referred this to Meister Eckhart. It is peculiar that a man below suspicion of heresy would have been appointed bookish in one of the most well-known schools of the order, but Eckhart’s distinctive expository style could with ease have already been below scrutiny by his Franciscan detractors.
In late 1323 or to the lead 1324, Eckhart left Strasbourg for the Dominican house at Cologne. It is not sure exactly what he did here, though allocation of his times may have been spent teaching at the prestigious Studium in the city. Eckhart moreover continued to preach, addressing his sermons during a mature of disarray in the course of the clergy and monastic orders, rapid growth of numerous pious lay groups, and the Inquisition’s continuing concerns higher than heretical movements throughout Europe.
It appears that some of the Dominican authorities already had concerns about Eckhart’s teaching. The Dominican General Chapter held in Venice in the spring of 1325 had spoken out against “friars in Teutonia who tell things in their sermons that can easily lead simple and uneducated people into error”. This concern (or perhaps concerns held by the archbishop of Cologne, Henry of Virneburg) may have been why Nicholas of Strasbourg, to whom the pope had in 1325 conclusive the temporary charge of the Dominican friaries in Germany, conducted an breakdown of Eckhart’s orthodoxy. Nicholas presented a list of suspect passages from the Book of Consolation to Eckhart, who responded sometime amid August 1325 and January 1326 as soon as a floating treatise Requisitus, which satisfied his immediate superiors of his orthodoxy. Despite this assurance, however, the archbishop in 1326 ordered an inquisitorial process. At this dwindling Eckhart issued a Vindicatory Document, providing chapter and verse of what he had been taught.
Throughout the hard months of late 1326, Eckhart had the full sustain of the local Dominican authorities, as evident in Nicholas of Strasbourg’s three approved protests adjacent to the comings and goings of the inquisitors in January 1327. On 13 February 1327, before the archbishop’s inquisitors pronounced their sentence on Eckhart, Eckhart preached a sermon in the Dominican church at Cologne, and later had his secretary retrieve out a public protestation of his innocence. He declared in his to-do that he had always detested anything wrong, and should anything of the nice be found in his writings, he now retracts. Eckhart himself translated the text into German, so that his audience, the vernacular public, could comprehend it. The verdict after that seems to have gone against Eckhart. Eckhart denied competence and authority to the inquisitors and the archbishop, and appealed to the Pope against the verdict. He then, in the spring of 1327, set off for Avignon.
In Avignon, Pope John XXII seems to have set going on two tribunals to inquire into the case, one of theologians and the extra of cardinals. Evidence of this process is thin. However, it is known that the commissions reduced the 150 suspect articles alongside to 28; the document known as the Votum Avenionense gives, in studious fashion, the twenty-eight articles, Eckhart’s defence of each, and the rebuttal of the commissioners. On 30 April 1328, the pope wrote to Archbishop Henry of Virneburg that the case adjacent to Eckhart was touching ahead, but other that Eckhart had already died (modern scholarship suggests he may have died upon 28 January 1328). The papal commission eventually confirmed (albeit in modified form) the decision of the Cologne commission against Eckhart.
Pope John XXII issued a bull (In agro dominico), 27 March 1329, in which a series of statements from Eckhart is characterized as heretical, another as suspected of heresy. At the close, it is acknowledged that Eckhart recanted in the past his death whatever which he had falsely taught, by subjecting himself and his writing to the decision of the Apostolic See. It is attainable that the Pope’s odd decision to issue the bull, despite the death of Eckhart (and the fact that Eckhart was not innate personally condemned as a heretic), was due to the pope’s distress of the growing burden of mystical heresy, and pressure from his ally Henry of Virneburg to bring the combat to a perfect conclusion.
Eckhart’s status in the contemporary Catholic Church has been uncertain. The Dominican Order pressed in the last decade of the 20th century for his full rehabilitation and sworn statement of his theological orthodoxy. Pope John Paul II voiced sympathetic opinion upon this initiative, even going as far as quoting from Eckhart’s writings, but the outcome was confined to the corridors of the Vatican. In the spring of 2010, it was revealed that there had been a confession from the Vatican in a letter outmoded 1992. Timothy Radcliffe, then Master of the Dominicans and recipient of the letter, summarized the contents as follows:
Professor Winfried Trusen of Würzburg, a correspondent of Radcliffe, wrote in a defence of Eckhart to Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), stating: