On Reading Meister Eckhart

Abstract

Like many in this hall, I feel I have a long history of reading Meister Eckhart. For me that history began, if I remember correctly, when I plucked a copy of the old Clark and Skinner translation of the German works from my mother's shelves. I was a quite young teenager then and keen to discover something of what I thought of then as 'mysticism'. Five or six years later, when I was a student of Modem Languages at Oxford and was spending my year abroad, in Germany, I bought a copy of Quint's modern German translation of the sermons. My particular memory of this purchase was that when I asked about the book in the shop where I had ordered the copy, the exact cost of the purchase was something like 78 marks and 75 pf. Not expecting the book to have arrived yet, I had not brought my wallet, and I had to scrabble in my pockets for the money. Notes appeared from here and there, and coins, until finally I was only 5 Pf. short. Mercifully a hard object at the bottom of my last tom pocket turned out to be a 5 Pf. piece. It seemed that 78 marks and 75 Pf. was the exact sum of money I had on me, and I remember wondering if this meant anything. I leave you to judge that, but quite soon after my return to Oxford I became friendly with Cheslyn Jones, then Principal of Pusey House, who invited me to contribute to a volume on Christian Spirituality which he was editing for SPCK. For the first time I engaged professionally with Rhineland mystics (writing mainly on Tauler, Seuse and Ruusbroec). From that there followed God Within, a study of the Rhineland tradition which included at least a section on Meister Eckhart. Very soon after, I wrote Meister Eckhart: Mystical Theologian, a fulllength study of his life and work. Apart from one fortuitous discovery with regard to documentation concerning the background to his condemnation, one of the chief questions I pursued in that book was the disjunction between the ways we read Eckhart today, or at least over the last one hundred and fifty years or so, and the ways in which his contemporaries either did read him or would have been likely to read him in his own day. I was particularly struck by the way in which recent German scholarship on what has come to be known as the German Dominican School was laying bare a Meister Eckhart who was very much more a creature of his own tunes than had hitherto been understood. This was an Eckhart steeped in neoPlatonic sources but whose intention, rather like that of his celebrated confrere Thomas Aquinas, was to construct a synthesis between classical philosophy and Christian doctrine. Whether we approve of that synthesis or not, it seemed imperative to me,