Eckhart Johannes, called Meister (c.1260–1328), German mystic, theologian, and preacher. Eckhart entered the Dominican order early and began an academic circuit that took him several times to Paris as a student and master of theology and that initiated him into ways of thinking much influenced by Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. At Paris, Eckhart wrote the required commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard and finished for publication at least three formal disputations. But he had already held office within the Dominicans, and he continued to alternate work as administrator and as teacher. Eckhart preached throughout these years, and he continued to write spiritual treatises in the vernacular, of which the most important is the Book of Divine Consolation (1313/1322). Only about a third of Eckhart’s main project in Latin, the Opus tripartitum, seems ever to have been completed.
Beginning in the early 1320s, questions were raised about Eckhart’s orthodoxy. The questions centered on what was characteristic of his teaching, namely the emphasis on the soul’s attaining ’emptiness’ so as to ‘give birth to God.’ The soul is ennobled by its emptying, and it can begin to ‘labor’ with God to deliver a spark that enacts the miraculous union-and-difference of their love. After being acquitted of heresy once, Eckhart was condemned on 108 propositions drawn from his writings by a commission at Cologne. The condemnation was appealed to the Holy See, but in 1329 Eckhart was there judged ‘probably heretical’ on 17 of 28 propositions drawn from both his academic and popular works. The condemnation clearly limited Eckhart’s explicit influence in theology, though he was deeply appropriated not only by mystics such as Johannes Tauler and Henry Suso, but by church figures such as Nicholas of Cusa and Martin Luther. He has since been taken up by thinkers as different as Hegel, Fichte, and Heidegger.
See also ALBERTUS MAGNUS, AQUINAS , PETER LOMBAR. M.D.J.