Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 287 - Down to the Ground - Meister Eckhart.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Down to the Ground, Meister Eckhart. As we saw a few episodes back, Mark Twain was distinctly unimpressed by what he called the awful German language. His essay of that title concludes with proposals for reform and, failing that, the suggestion that German, ought to be gently and reverently set aside among the dead languages for only the dead have time to learn it. If you've ever tried to render the different pronunciations of the verbs push and print in German, drücken and drücken, while a native speaker repeatedly tells you that you're doing it wrong, you will probably sympathize with Twain. In comparison, Latin is a beautifully logical and rational language whose structures map on perfectly to the nature of reality itself, at least according to the medieval speculative grammarians. Yet, it was still a major advance when philosophers who were rough contemporaries of those grammarians began writing in German. Among them, the most famous is Meister Eckhart. Of course, Eckhart is not our first encounter with medieval philosophy in vernacular languages. We know that Marguerite Porret wrote in French and Dante in Italian at the beginning of the 14th century, and earlier still, there were the contributions of the so-called Beguine mystics with Mechtild of Magdeburg already writing in German. Yet, no other figure represents the interaction of Latin and vernacular culture as well as Eckhart. Unlike Dante, Mechtild and Marguerite Porret, Eckhart was no outsider to scholasticism. This is captured even in the title by which he is still known today. Meister means master in the awful German language, and calling him Meister Eckhart is an allusion to the fact that he became a master of theology in Paris in 1302. He was a member of the Dominican order and moved back and forth between the university setting at Paris and provincial postings, working for the order in Erfurt, Strasbourg, and Cologne. His literary output is similarly double, having been written with these two contexts in mind. The scholastic side of his thought is represented by Biblical and theological commentaries in Latin, while the pastoral and provincial side is captured in a series of powerful sermons and works of instruction composed in German. That makes it sound as if Eckhart is going to give us two fingers for the price of one. But in fact, modern-day Eckhart scholars debate the relationship between his Latin and German writings. Do we have two significantly distinct bodies of work here, or do all his writings put forth a single set of themes in two different languages? Probably the right answer lies somewhere in the middle. His choice to write in German may have been in part a matter of audience, but even this is not so simple. It's been stressed by some scholars that he preached to non-Latin speaking female audiences, namely the nuns of convents incorporated into the Dominican order, yet he also wrote in German for male Dominican colleagues who would have known Latin. Certainly, his German works develop a rich and idiosyncratic vocabulary for capturing his ideas. But those ideas can frequently be found in his Latin treatises too. A good example is his insistence that God's creatures are in themselves nothing, something he explores by engaging with the scholastic theory of the transcendentals, as we'll see shortly. In fact, a look at the German works shows that even within them, Eckhart combines more popular and pastoral themes with the challenging metaphysics for which he is best known. A nice example is his Book of Consolation, a short treatise about how to cope with suffering. This includes some advice that wouldn't be out of place in a modern-day advice column. If you have 100 gold marks and lose 40, just remember that plenty of people would do anything to own the 60 marks you still possess. Of course, I don't mean to denigrate the potential usefulness of such advice. Eckhart is here working on a register like that of Boethius, that other great exponent of philosophical consolation, and like Boethius is following in the footsteps of the Roman Stoics. Eckhart even quotes Seneca by name. Yet there are also ideas here that you might more expect to find in a scholastic theological treatise, such as that the soul is in itself outside time and space, or that the good person is uncreated insofar as that person is good because the word good refers to nothing but pure goodness, namely God Himself. Eckhart warns his listeners that such statements may be easily misunderstood, saying, I declare by eternal wisdom that if you do not yourself become the same as that wisdom of which we wish to speak, then my words will mean nothing to you. He was right to worry. Two fellow Dominicans, who were themselves under suspicion for bad behavior, brought an accusation of heresy against Eckhart. We have a document prepared by Eckhart for his defense in 1326, and he later declared his innocence in a public forum in 1327. The eventual upshot was a condemnation by Pope John XXII, who declared 28 of Eckhart's statements either heretical or suspect in 1329. By that time though, Eckhart was already dead, having passed away in early 1328. Among the theses he discussed in his public defense is the one I just mentioned, namely that the soul is in some sense uncreated. While stressing that he was ready, even eager, to give up any beliefs he may hold that are in fact contrary to the faith, Eckhart saw himself as the victim of just the sort of misreading he warned against in his sermons. Of course the soul is created, but there is also a sense in which it is uncreated insofar as the just or good soul participates in eternal, uncreated justice and goodness. Here, as promised, we get back to the idea of the transcendentals, which as you'll recall are properties thought to belong to all existing things including God. The standard list would include goodness, being, oneness and truth. A prologue to Eckhart's ambitious Latin treatise, The Unfortunately Incomplete Three-Part Work, adds wisdom to these four transcendentals and explains that they are not accidental properties but prior to all else and things. Created things, as we might expect, receive being and the other transcendental properties from God, who is identical to being itself. For Eckhart, this is the meaning of the famous biblical passage Exodus 3.14 where God says of himself, I am who am. Now, so far what Eckhart is saying sounds a lot like what we found in Thomas Aquinas. According to Aquinas' theory of analogy, God is pure being and thus the primary referent of the word being with all other things receiving being from Him by a kind of participation. Eckhart is indeed indebted to his fellow Dominican on this score and even speaks explicitly of analogy but he puts the idea to a more radical use. In the prologue to his Three-Part Work, Eckhart observes that if God is being, then created things, insofar as they are distinct from God, are nothing at all. Equally, insofar as they do have being or the other transcendentals, they are nothing other than God and are eternal in Him. In other words, where Aquinas recognized that creatures have a limited or reduced form of being and goodness, which they receive from God, Eckhart's theory makes them quite literally all or nothing. Insofar as they are in God, creatures share in His perfection and timelessness. Insofar as they are outside Him, they have no being or goodness whatsoever. In one of his biblical commentaries, Eckhart explains what he has in mind using an illustration that may sound familiar from our discussions of philosophy of language in the 14th century. We saw William of Ockham discussing a barrel hoop which conveys the welcome message that wine is on sale in the building where the hoop hangs. Eckhart gives the same example, though with a wreath of leaves instead of a barrel hoop. He wants it to illustrate the relationship between creatures and God with regard to being and the other transcendentals. Again, his point would seem to be that creatures are merely signs or representations of God's wine but have no being in themselves just as a wreath signifies that wine is for sale but is not in itself wine. Eckhart also appealed to the analogy theory when he defended himself against the charge of heresy. His more daring pronouncements, which seem to suggest that the human soul is identical with God, are only one half of a double approach to creatures, which as he warned his listeners could easily be misunderstood. According to this two-fold understanding, creatures are true beings in God but nothing in themselves because they only borrow their being from Him. This is a nice example of the continuity between Eckhart's Latin and German works. The passages I've just been quoting are from Latin sources, but in his pastoral sermons he frequently advises his listeners to take leave of nothingness and grasp perfect being. More startlingly, he insists that our souls are eternal and uncreated, or even their own indicators, With this we have arrived at one of Eckhart's most characteristic teachings, which centers on an example of the special terminology he developed in his German writings, the term ground, or in German, grundt. His idea is that the soul's ultimate origin is the most foundational aspect of God, the ground of all divinity, which is in some sense prior even to God, as identical to the transcendentals, to the Trinitarian persons, and to God when understood as the creator of the universe. This ultimate ground is the same for both soul and God, and it is at this level that the soul and God are one. Eckhart thus writes that in our quest, the soul is We were just saying that according to Eckhart, God is being and creatures are nothing. But now that Eckhart has pushed forward to the ultimate ground of the divine, he describes God and our souls insofar as they are in God as nothing, or as naked. Whereas his theory of analogy and the transcendentals made God the true referent of words like being and goodness, in the passages on God as ground, he embraces negative theology. For this, Eckhart is indebted to two previous masters of the negative approach to God, both of whom he explicitly cites in his works. The anonymous late ancient Christian Platonist we call the Pseudo-Dionysius and the 12th century Jewish thinker Maimonides. Thus he quotes Dionysius for the idea that There seems to be a contradiction here. First, God is said to be pure being, now he is said to be nothing. But in a way, these two aspects of Eckhart's thought go together perfectly. For if God is at his ground, ultimately nothingness, a wasteland or desert, as Eckhart sometimes says, then it is precisely in admitting, and even embracing our own nothingness as creatures, that we achieve unity with God. Eckhart has a further array of metaphors to capture this realization, describing it rather neoplatonically as a flowing back into the source from which we first flowed forth, when God boiled over and poured out the rest of things. The soul in seeking union is raised up by God or, alternatively, sinks down to meet God's nothingness. As he puts it in a typically characteristic paradox, Another analogy Eckhart uses a lot is one we already saw briefly with his reference to the soul in God as naked being. He frequently speaks of the soul's needing to strip itself bare, seeking to possess nothing other than God. This gives him an original approach to a topic we've seen repeatedly in past episodes, the voluntary poverty of the Dominicans and other mendicants. His sermons usually expound a biblical passage, and one of them is devoted to the famous biblical passage Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Eckhart of course encourages us to embrace poverty, but not in the merely literal sense of owning no physical possessions. Rather our goal is to will nothing at all, not even to have knowledge or to carry out God's will. True poverty is, Again, the idea of taking the soul back to its ground at the stage of uncreatedness. As radical poverty is union with God, who is likewise free of all things, which is why he is all things. That might sound like just another paradox, but it is actually a further clue to resolving the puzzle as to why Eckhart would both identify God with being and say that he is nothing. To some extent, we already have the answer. God as the negatively understood ground is distinct from God as being, as good as creator, and so forth. But even without delving into the most negative depths of Eckhart's theology, we can make sense of his idea that God is both all things and none of them. Eckhart occasionally says that God is being of a very special kind, which he calls indistinct. Since God is timeless, he, and the soul when unified with him, exists in an eternal unchanging now, which includes all things simultaneously. They are contained in him as virtual being, not in the sense we use that word to refer to 3D video games, but with its original Latin meaning. To be contained in the power, the virtus, of something, in this case God. All of this may seem rather abstract and metaphysical. But as so often in medieval philosophy, the abstract and metaphysical has implications for how we live our lives. We've already seen that Eckhart's Book of Consolation touches fleetingly on his more radical teachings in order to explain why we shouldn't mourn the loss of things that only serve to divide us from God. These same teachings are at the core of an equally radical ethical theory which ironically, given how different they are as thinkers, echoes ideas we saw a while back in Peter Abelard and later in Ockham. For Eckhart, as for both Abelard and Ockham, it is the interior activity or state of the person that matters and not so much the exterior action we perform. External virtue is not to be condemned, of course, but it is really the good or just person who partakes in God's goodness and even is, as we saw earlier, identical with God insofar as he or she is good. Eckhart's bracingly irreverent approach to what we might call exterior ethics extends to the monastic life itself. In almost mocking terms, he dismisses as misguided the impulse to withdraw from society and seek seclusion, reminding us that if we possess God, we have him wherever we go. This idea that we might be able to transcend practical virtue is one of several that connect Meister Eckhart to one of the aforementioned champions of vernacular thought, his somewhat earlier contemporary Marguerite Poet. Was Eckhart aware of her mirror of simple souls, or her ideas more generally? Some have deemed this possible on the basis that records about Marguerite should have been available to him in Paris. Certainly, the parallels are striking. Apart from the point about virtue, Marguerite also demands of us that we abandon our will and speaks of God as a kind of abyss, which sounds quite a bit like Eckhart's notion of ground. And of course, both Marguerite and Eckhart were ultimately deemed too daring by the church of their time. While the link between the two remains somewhat uncertain and obscure, we can at the very least say that both figures represent a broader wave of philosophical mysticism in the vernacular in the 14th century. But there is another way to contextualize Eckhart. He was not a unique renegade scholastic who set down some shocking ideas in both Latin and German. Well, maybe he was that actually, but he was also only one German Dominican of the late medieval period who made a name for himself. Next time, we'll be looking at the Neoplatonist revival staged by Dietrich of Freiberg and Berthold of Mosburg and we'll be discussing the phenomenon that has been called Rhineland mysticism as we continue to consider awfully interesting philosophy in the German language here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.