Eckhart, MEISTER, one of the profoundest speculative thinkers among the German mystics. Of his personal history very little is known. He was born in either Strasburg or Saxony towards the end of the 13th century; entered the Dominican order; studied and afterwards taught in Paris; acted as prior at Erfurt, and as vicar of his order for Thuringia, before 1298; filled the office of provincial for the Dominicans in Saxony for eight years from 1303, and in 1307 was also appointed vicar-general of Bohemia; some years later he preached at Strasburg and Frankfort, and from 1325 until 1327, the year of his death, at Cologne. Living in an age when the religious consciousness was very sensitive and alert, when the writings of such thinkers as Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, Augustine, Amalrich of Bena, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas were being eagerly studied, and the religious fervour of men's hearts was being kept aglow by the practical self-denying lives of the Beghards and Beguines, and the Brethren of the Free Spirit, Eckhart, from the first a religiously inclined nature, easily became inspired, under these almost irresistible educative influences, with the spirit of mystic speculation. But his genius led him beyond the position of his immediate forerunners, and brought him to what was virtually an independent standpoint. Instead of using his speculations as vehicles for the exposition of the orthodox theology of the church, he broke through its traditions and dogmas to the fundamental, permanent realities underlying them. His teaching begins with an explanation of the nature of God, and passes on to the consideration of man and of man's relations to God.
Being (Wesen) in its ultimate and most abstract form is without personality, and without differential characteristics; nevertheless, it contains within itself potentially the differentiae of all existence. It is the unknown, the nothing, the negative of concrete being; the only fact known about it is that it is pure self-contained unity. This ultimate incomprehensible being is the godhead, in which God himself exists as absolute personality, but in a state of potential being, as the real selfhood of abstract being not yet personalised. Absolute personality, however, become actual self-conscious personality constitutes God the Father. The Father gives origin to the Son in the very act and moment of thus becoming conscious of himself; and the Holy Spirit is the love and will that are common to both Father and Son—that is to say, the blossoming of the process of God's revelation of his own nature to himself. But this process does not take place under any law of temporal succession; it is a single act enduring eternally. Nor are Father, Son, and Holy Spirit three separate personalities, but one and the same quintessential personality of being. And it is precisely because the abstract potential personality in the godhead does penetrate to the comprehension of its own being, and just in this very act of self-fathoming, that it is God. In this process of God's self-revelation the world is likewise contemporaneously created; for all things exist in God ideally from eternity. In the eternal now of God's conception all things belong to the unity of the divine nature. Hence all creatures are God, and the world and God are one, the original selfhood of all things partaking of the being of God. In like manner, I too am God. For the soul of man is an outflow from God's essence, and it exists in man without God's essence thereby in any way suffering diminution. In the soul of every individual therefore there exists a part which is in essence of the divine nature; this is the spark (Funkeln), which always yearns to return unto God, in order to find in him that perfect tranquillity and rest from energising which characterise the godhead. In the moment when the soul becomes thoroughly conscious of its essential selfhood, then is it divine, and enters into God's nature, and becomes united with him. But it does not become wholly absorbed in God's nature, for in the consciousness of itself it has permanent ground and warranty for its own personality and creatureship. Man, in order to achieve his ethical consummation, must therefore annihilate within himself all that appertains to self, must, in fact, expurgate all that is not of the essence of God, until his soul becomes filled with nothing but God; then does he understand God, and is indeed God, and his love is God's love. Thus the nullification of all self-regarding, all egoistic desire, an imperturbable serenity of spirit, not so much the doing of virtuous acts as the being virtue itself, the which is love, this is the supreme practical moment in the perfection of personal righteousness, the reality of life in its highest potency. This sanctification attained, all a man's acts are right and good.
Eckhart, however, in spite of the abstruse nature of his speculative teaching, was not neglectful of the practical precepts of pure Christianity, as is proved by many a passage in his sermons, and especially by his tractate Schwester Katrei. Nor did he lend any countenance to fastings, vigils, ecstatic visions, and similar over-devotional exercises, to which mystically inclined natures were in those days so prone. His power, both as thinker and as preacher, is attested by the commanding influence he won over his contemporaries and the best among his successors. Probably the deepest and most original thinker of his time, bold and paradoxical in the utterance of his opinions, gifted with a keen intuitive apprehension of truth that penetrated to the very heart and root-essence of things, with a mind that was essentially scientific, that refused to be satisfied with anything short of the surest realities and verities of religion, and with a heart that regarded inner discipline, the moral perfecting of man's nature, as supreme above the punctilious observance of churchly ordinances, Eckhart, by preaching the sufficiency of the individual soul to attain of itself unto immediate communion with God, struck a dangerous blow at the hierarchical pretensions of the clergy and the church. Nor did he escape the destiny that overtook original moral reformers in ante-reformation days. He was arraigned by the Archbishop of Cologne, in 1325, for having preached and taught heresy; but the accensation could not be sustained in face of Eckhart's self-justification; at all events it fell to the ground, at least for a time, but only to be revived again two years after his death, when his writings were condemned as heretical by a papal bull of John XXII. His works consist of Latin and German sermons and treatises. The German works are printed in Pfeiffer's Deutsche Mystiker des 15ten Jahrhunderts (1857). Compare also Preger, Deutsche Mystik (1874), Lasson's monograph (Berlin, 1868), and Jostes' Meister Eckhart (1895).