Thoughts on Meister Eckhart? I feel like he really hits at God, while mainstream Catholicism really hits on the Logos of God (Jesus Christ). Both are necessary to recognize in my view.
Recommend books by or about Meister Eckhart?
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No one?
He was pagang(platonist), Church wqs right about him, he was a heretic(based).
How exactly was he heretical? The specific language he used was wrong, but the concepts of his ideas do not seem to be heretical. He was just inarticulate. It is very easy to rehab him and it has, in fact, been done.
And he was never actually deemed a heretic as far as I know.
This anon thinks he’s smarter than Eckhart. Kek
Church deemed him heterodox, and his works were to be destroyed. Only reason why his works survived was because common people wrote his sermons down, and later church needed mystics for its counter reformation.
I think he's in good standing now.
The very nature of Eckhart's subjects and the untechnicality of his language were calculated to cause him to be misunderstood, not only by the ordinary hearers of his sermons, but also by the Schoolmen who listened to him or read his treatises. And it must be admitted that some of the sentences in his sermons and treatises were Beghardic, quietistic, or pantheistic. But although he occasionally allowed harmful sentences to proceed from his lips or his pen, he not unfrequently gave an antidote in the same sermons and treatises. And the general tenor of his teaching shows that he was not a Beghard, nor a quietist, nor a pantheist. While at Strasbourg, although he had no relations with the Beghards, he was suspected of holding their mystical pantheism. Later, at Frankfort suspicion was cast upon his moral conduct, but it was evidently groundless; for, after an investigation ordered by the Dominican general, he was appointed to a prominent position at Cologne. Finally the charge was made at a general chapter of his order, held at Venice in 1325, that some of the German brethren were disseminating dangerous doctrine. Father Nicholas, O.P., of Strasburg, having been ordered by Pope John XXII to make investigation, declared in the following year that the works of Eckhart were orthodox. In January, 1327, Archbishop Heinrich of Cologne undertook an independent inquiry, whereupon Eckhart and Father Nicholas appealed to Rome against his action and authority in the matter. But the next month, from the pulpit of the Dominican church in Cologne, Eckhart repudiated the unorthodox sense in which some of his utterances could be interpreted, retracted all possible errors, and submitted to the Holy See. His profession of faith, repudiation of error, and submission to the Holy See were declared by Pope John XXII in the Bull "Dolentes referimus" (27 March, 1329), by which the pontiff condemned seventeen of Eckhart's propositions as heretical, and eleven as ill-sounding, rash, and suspected of heresy (Denzinger, Enchiridion, no. 428 sqq.; Hartzheim, Conc. Germ., IV, 631).
Eckhart was the subject of an attempt at rehabilitation in the 90s, headed by Dominicans and the lay Eckhart Society. The internal affairs regarding the matter remain mostly sealed to the Vatican but the head of the Dominican Order wrote a letter to the head of the Society at one point, which essentially said that he was told there was no need to rehabilitate Eckhart as he had never been formally declared a heretic.
>Eckhart as he had never been formally declared a heretic
Most likely becuse his works were ordered to be destroyed, and he died before his hearing. Eckhart was a heretic that never was declared as such because of the circumstances.
Eckhart's writings are great, but with the church you are a heretic one day, and a saint on the next. Which one is useful label at the moment.
He influenced Henry Suso who is one of the most underrated German writers out there.
He's lame. His work amounts to Buddhism and you have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to pretend it's not heretical. Read him if you want to be a life-hating annihilationist.
Explain more please
What mental gymnastics?
>christer using life-hating as an insult
I think you should read a lot of theology to get how profond he is. I recommend at least Pseud-Dyonisius.
Thanks for the chart anon! I love St Dionysus and Meister Eckhart and I take every chance I can to bring them into my discussions with my other catholic friends, who tend to be Thomists.
Did you make this? Incredible infographic. Thanks. I wonder who was so into Eckhart that they made this.
What's the deal with St Dionysus? Never heard of him.
> What's the deal with St Dionysus?
Hugely influential Neoplatonist church father who wrote on apophatic theology. Even reading Aquinas you’ll find loads of references to him. He is traditionally associated with Dionysus the Areopagite in the New Testament, but modern scholars contest his authenticity. To my mind it’s not really important how “authentic” his writings are, since they have such obvious spiritual merit. Regardless, the claims of inauthenticity seem dubious to me, being based on the idea that, since Dionysus's letters contain ideas otherwise first attested in Plotinus, he couldnt have lived in the first century, ignoring the obvious fact that platonist and neoplatonist teaching was transmitted as an oral tradition for centuries (we wouldnt even know what plotinus thought in the first place if it werent for porphyry).
If Pseudo-Dionysus was really Dionysus the ante-Nicene Church Fathers would have cited him authoritatively and there was a decent chance his writings would have been included in the New Testament canon. There is no actual citation of them until basically the end of antiquity when they are dated.
The intro essays in the Classics of Western Spirituality edition of Pseudo-Dionysius have good discussions of his dating. But yeah it doesn't really matter. I recommend Steiner's Christianity as Mystical Fact for a higher view of the synthesis of Greek and Christian thought.
This is a really good chart but Eckhart still sucks. Someone like Ibn Arabi is more fun.
There's a book called Paths to Transcendence by Reza Shah-Kazemi that compares Shankara, Ibn Arabi, and Meister Eckhart.
Yeah it's a shitty book too. He tries to make Ibn Arabi into a Buddhist, which he is not. At least Shah-Kazemi admits that every single Ibn Arabi scholar before him has said that Ibn Arabi isn't a Buddhist.