Meister Eckhart: Mystic and Philosopher

by Reiner Schürmann (Commentator, translator), Meister Eckhart

Translations with Commentary

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, Spirituality, Theology, Nonfiction

268 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Reiner Schürmann, O.P. was a German philosopher. From 1976 to his death, he was Professor in the department of philosophy of the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York City. He wrote all his major published work in French.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though this book ostensibly explained Eckhart's sermons, the explanations were more confusing than the sermons themselves; Schürmann's writing fell in an unreachable valley, only explicating the sermons for people who are already premodern philosophy experts, and thus leaving it solidly out of reach of anyone who isn't. His analysis didn't start simpler or big-picture, but started already too zoomed in to be helpful to the average theologically or literarily interested reader. Oh well.


Eckhart began every sermon with an idiosyncratic translation of a single sentence from scripture. From there, he preached on some key word or two, but always in a different direction than expected. For example, the first sermon, about Luke 10:38, includes a translation which oddly renders "woman" as "virgin", "Martha" as "wife", and "village" as "castle." This takes an ordinary and otherwise forgettable verse and makes it ripe for esoteric elaboration. I refuse to say explanation or exposition, since he does neither of those. Rather, we hear about how "'Virgin' designates a human being who is devoid of all foreign images, and who is as void as he was when he was not yet."

This single sentence made me yearn for a time before media (as evoked by the word 'image') was so entrenched in our lives. Now, we live utterly mediated by screens, and connection of the old sort is almost always precluded. As the classic observation goes, virgins wish to lose their virginity just as much as those who have lost it wish for it back. Already in this sermon we've had some gender bending (virgin in premodern times too often applied just to women), but this comes to a head in paragraph 4:

[4] Now pay attention and look! If a human were to remain a virgin forever, he would never bear fruit. If he is to become fruitful, he must necessarily be a wife. "Wife," here, is the noblest name that can be given to the mind, and it is indeed more noble than "virgin." That man should receive God in himself is good, and by this reception he is a virgin. But that God should become fruitful in him is better; for the fruitfulness of a gift is the only gratitude for the gift. The spirit is wife when in gratitude it gives birth in return and bears Jesus back into God's fatherly heart.


That second sentence, about how "he must necessarily be a wife" made me giggle. Of course, this is the sort of thing liberal and progressive and radical theologians slurp up, and of course he didn't mean it in a 21st century queer theory way. But I think it acts rather as a shibboleth: in other words, do you A) call it queer representation because that's the trend today, B) get hung up on it and call it heresy, or C) do you patiently read on, hoping for some more clarity later? I tried out C, and I realized that Eckhart is talking through these mystical metaphors as a means to elucidate his ideas on certain old philosophical categories. Ultimately, the details of what he is claiming on that front are much less interesting to me than the strange garb he dresses them up in. Why does he feel the need to combine mystical strangeness while simultaneously arguing the specifics of philosophical categories? I have no clue of an answer, but I enjoy it. In addition to these, Eckhart manages to write on yet another level, that is advice for living (since this is, after all, a sermon). For example, the start of paragraph 7 is good ascetic/mystical advice: "A virgin who is a wife, free and disengaged from attachment, is at all times equally close to God and to herself."

The more we ponder the paradox of a fruitful virgin wife, we think also of Mary the mother of God, and even the Church, as typified as Christ's bride. Here is an extension of the God-believer marriage described throughout scripture (esp. Ezekiel, the Gospels, and Eckhart's favorite, Song of Songs), one where God and the believer become one in a mystical, intimate way. It obviously isn't a straightforward sexual way, but one that transcends the bodily into the categorical and metaphysical. The final sentences of the sermon ring true in a way that's perfectly orthodox: "May we so be a little castle in which Jesus ascends and is received and abides eternally with us the way that I have said: may God help us in this. Amen."

But things eventually go sideways as we explore the rest of the sermons. In the second one, he oddly translates the verse "He who hates his soul in this world preserves it for eternal life," but he manages to salvage it a bit in the following paragraph:

There are three reasons why the soul should hate itself. First, inasmuch as it is mine, I shall hate it. Inasmuch as it is mine, indeed, it is not God's. The second [reason] is that my soul is not totally established, planted, and reshaped in God. Augustine says: He who wishes that God belong to him must first of all belong to God. This is necessarily so. The third reason is: if the soul finds a liking for itself insofar as it is a soul, and if it finds a liking for God together with the soul, that is improper. It should savor God for himself, for he is totally above it. For this reason Christ says: "He who loves his soul loses it."


It's via this circuitous logic that Eckhart consistently uses the texts in tangential and ultimately self-serving ways. I don't recall a single instance of him learning from the text; rather, the texts he chooses are so minute that he can't help but elaborate (still the only word I can find) on what wasn't written there. Thus, he weaves a strange tapestry in the air, like a spiritual spider. His musings aren't isolated, of course; he often responds to theological and especially philosophical opinions rattling around in his head. He also regularly appeals to and quotes various church fathers (or, as he most commonly and vaguely terms them, "Masters"):

A master says: The soul has the possibility of receiving the images of all things imprinted in itself. Another one says: The soul will never attain [the state of] its pure nature without also finding the images of all things formed in itself, [that is to say] in the intelligible world which is incomprehensible. No thought reaches to it. Gregory says: When we speak of divine things, we have to stammer, because we have to express them in words.


In the first quotation, we have a return to the first sermon (images, imprinting, virginity, etc.); in the second, an elaboration on the first; in the final, an admission that language isn't ever quite enough to convey the esoteric ideas he has. I think that despite all that, he does do a great job; spirituality is the realm of poetry and paradox, and he has plenty of both in his writing.

The third sermon focuses on two main themes: seeking God, and eternity versus time. Throughout, he emphasizes the pastoral concern for hearers who want to seek God out of selfish hope of gain, or who want to seek God along with other things: "He who seeks God while seeking other things will never find God." God, being outside of Time, allows us, once we reach him, to enjoy the eternal present of his presence. Even before we reach him, we get glints of his perfection in truth, justice, and goodness, which, Eckhart argues, once you've experienced, you can never relinquish (and thus, the concomitant of seeking after God).

So much, so orthodox, or so it seems. The fourth sermon speaks of the properties of images, using a brief mention from Sirach as a metaphor for Augustine and the saints. I didn't get nearly as much from that one as from the next, based on the verse "Paul rose from the ground and with open eyes he saw nothing." This was by far my favorite, because in it Eckhart interpreted the "nothing" as God (in a way that seemed to me to echo Ecclesiastes). He interpreted the verse four ways:

First, when he rose up from the ground, with his eyes open he saw nothing, and this nothingness was God. Indeed he saw God, and that is what he calls a nothingness. Second, when he rose up, he saw nothing but God. Third, in all things, he saw nothing but God. Fourth, when he saw God, he saw all things as nothingness.


Many people find fault with the silence of God, but the mystics hear something special in that silence, just as Eckhart here finds God in the "nothing" of blindness. Paul opened his eyes and, instead of seeing the distractions and false idols of this world, he saw nothing, that is, he had no more barriers left. When God knocked him senseless, he suddenly was able to see beyond, to see without seeing, to see that which cannot be seen. This is the ultimate in negative theology, which I would agree is an important way to think and talk about God. But it's also in this sermon that we start flirting with the heretical ideas which crop up more toward the end. Thus, when Eckhart writes "God is nothingness, and yet God is a something," we might initially balk, but we get what he's saying. But in the next sermon, Eckhart dives headfirst into the oneness language, insisting over and over that we don't merely become an adopted child of God, we become "the Son of God." Not 'a', but 'the.' He goes so far as to write "Notice by what we are the Son of God: by having that same being that the Son has."

He lets his Platonism slip a bit more in the next sermon, claiming that "Insofar as God is divine, and insofar as he is intelligible, he is nowhere more appropriately than in the mind." However, he does wisely make the distinction I've made plenty of times, that "if [God] were [totally] comprehensible and believable [by human reason] something would be wrong." In other words, if we could totally understand God, he wouldn't be God, we would. Despite this, Eckhart seems to praise the mind and its capacity to understand God, or at least to house him, which seems to contradict his earlier claims, especially the ones in the "nothing" sermon.

The conflation of philosophy and theology which leads to heresy is perhaps most flagrant in the final sermon, which claims that "Indeed, in God's own being, where God is raised above all being and all distinctions, I was myself, I willed myself, and I knew myself to create this man [that I am]. Therefore I am cause of myself according to my being which is eternal..." He goes this route partially in following Origen (who followed certain philosophers, especially Plato, too far), and it leaves a bad taste in our mouth. As Eckhart coyly distinguished during his Heresy trial: "I may be in error, but I cannot be heretical, for error is a matter of the intellect, but heresy is a matter of will." I say coyly, because there's no way that a man this intelligent "didn't know what he was saying." He knew full well, and I'm surprised he didn't care. He got into the swing of things, mixing esotericism, mysticism, life advice, Derridian polysemy, and Platonic philosophy all in one package, and he couldn't ever separate the different threads. Ironically, the author of this book also seemed to be unable to do the same, given that the Appendix at the end discusses the connection between Eckhart and Zen Buddhism, an interesting though out of nowhere and unnecessary ending to the book. The ironic thing is that the author wrote with such certainty about the "meaning" of Eckhart using certain terms (and ultimately denied the link between him and Buddhism), despite admitting in the introduction that there are as many Eckharts as there are readers, all seeming to apply their pet interests to him and getting what they want out of him. I likewise did the same, but I'm not claiming to give an explanation of the sermons, since they're too multifaceted to do so. That's what makes them strong, the mystery, the strangeness, the fact that almost a thousand years later we're still scratching our heads. Well here's to scratching a bit more.

[Gary · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up from the library. While I am very interested in exactly what Meister Eckhart taught, this book made his already quite difficult to grasp truths even harder to comprehend. This is because the author was an intelligent philosophical thinker; he used advanced vocabulary to no benefit to the reader unless the reader's vocabulary and knowledge of philosophy is at par to his own. If you like to delve into philosophical ideation then this book might be advantageous to you. But if you want to get to the nitty gritty unaltered and unconditioned truth to what Eckhart was saying, I suggest you go directly to the source (ie, his sermons, writings, etc.). Reading this book made me even more confused, and confusion is what veils our reality. Confusion jumpstarts the mind and for some people they will like this, but it will make them leave the Truth of their Being instead of the reading TAKING THE READER CLOSER TO THE TRUTH. Of course Schurmann's writing has golden nuggets of the truth in it, but what good are they if they are buried under mounds and mounds of verbiage! I wish you all the best...the Truth that Eckhart tries to convey. Amen.

[Sam Eccleston · Rating 3 out of 5]

While the exposition of Eckhart’s ideas is of course valuable, it is also somewhat rambling and repetitive, and replete with opaque sentences which obscure as much as they reveal. The verbal mystique affected by the author owes much, seemingly, and one must say unfortunately, to Heidegger, and it is such an eye to Eckhart’s influence on Heidegger and others that Schurmann is writing, so this is perhaps unsurprising. Worth reading, but could be one third of the length with clearer exposition without any loss of content.

[Johannes Bertus · Rating 2 out of 5]

Illegible

[Phil Calandra · Rating 1 out of 5]

I got up to the first chapter of this book and decided it was counter-productive to go any further. I hardly was able to understand anything. I would not recommend purchasing this book. If you are able to obtain it in the library perhaps you will get more out of it than I did.

[Katarina]

Nije bas ta knjiga nego nas prevod njegovih dela- jaka kao smrt je ljubav. *****

[Wayne Halford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read on mystical traditions of early Christianity.