Works

An Easter sermon in Latin (Sermo Pasqualis: LW V, 136-148) and the Collatio in Libros Sententiarum (LW V, 17-26), which depends in some ways on the Collatio of the Franciscan Richard Rufus of Cornwall, are all that remain of Eckhart’s early teaching activity as Bachelor of the Sentences in Paris (1293-1294). Both texts are noteworthy for the large number of references to philosophical and scientific literature: Avicenna’s De animalibus and De anima, the pseudo-Hermetic Liber XXIV philosophorum, Ptolemy’s Almagestus, al-Farjganl’s

Rudimenta astronomica, Maimonides’ Dux neutrorum, Aristotle’s Physica, Boethius’ Philosophiae consolatio, etc., are quoted, either implicitly or explicitly. The use of al-Farjgan! and Maimonides is very unusual in the context of a Collatio, a lecture serving as a prologue to Eckhart’s commentary upon Lombard’s Sentences.

Even this early in his career, Eckhart showed himself fully aware of the exegetical value of philosophical authorities and also persuaded that there is substantial harmony between the Holy Scriptures and the Fathers, on the one hand, and philosophical learning, on the other.

The Talks (Die Rede, DW V, 185-309; the more common title Die rede der underscheidunge is not original), are the result of table-talks given by Eckhart to the novices of the convent at Erfurt. They are the earliest evidence of

Eckhart’s literary activity in German, dating from when he served as prior in Erfurt (1294-1298).

Formerly these were often disregarded as examples of devotional literature without speculative ambitions, but recently The Talks have been given increasing scholarly attention. Eckhart offered a new and philosophically based interpretation of the traditional monastic virtues. Obedience, the foremost virtue, does not mean only subordination to the superior, but implies an existential breakthrough which consists of forsaking oneself, annihilating oneself’s will, giving up what is one’s own; in a word, detachment (abegescheidenheit). The denial of self is strictly related to the possibility of establishing a more intimate relationship with God because a man able to reach detachment will necessarily enjoy the presence of God in himself and will be transformed by it. So portrayed, obedience looks like an attitude of openness towards God rather than to other men, an attitude whose adoption requires considerable and continued hard effort.

The Talks also present a few other points on which Eckhart was later to expand further: the ethics of intention (the idea that sanctity does not lie in works but in the perfect and righteous will of human agents); the related conviction that what counts for Christian life is inner selfdenial rather than external practices of asceticism; the view that to the human intellect God is by nature very close and present.

Very little is still extant from the period of Eckhart’s theological mastership in Paris: three disputations plus a sermon on St. Augustine date probably from his first period as theology professor (1302-1303), and another two disputations probably from the second period (1311-1313). The first two disputations focus on the relationship between intellect and being, in God as well as in angels, and provide valuable insights into Eckhart’s teaching on intellect.

In the first disputation (Utrum in deo sit idem esse et intelligere, LW V, 37-48) - actually, it postdates the second one - Eckhart departs radically from Aquinas’ doctrine. After having reported Aquinas’ arguments in favor of the identity of intellect and being in God, Eckhart claims that God exists because He understands, and not the converse - that He understands because He exists. Such a claim is tantamount to saying that God is intellect and understanding and that understanding is superior to being. Being qualifies the mode of existence of creatures, which are all formally (formaliter) beings, and therefore does not apply to God the creator. Yet, though not formally, being is in God as in its cause (sicut in causa), for God causes with his science everything. In other words, God is puritas essendi since He, as intellect, pre-contains everything in purity, plenitude, and perfection.

The otherness of intellect from being is clearly established in the second disputation (Utrum intelligere angeli, ut dicit actionem, sitsuum esse, LW V, 49-54), where Eckhart expands further on the concept of intellect as intellect (intellectus, in quantum intellectus), on which Albert the Great and Dietrich of Freiberg had already worked. Being pertains to those substances which exist in space and time and are determined according to genus and species. Intellect can also be taken as a being, namely as a natural power of the soul which is a principle eliciting single acts of intellection. However, if considered in its proper nature, intellect is something which escapes any kind of determination, whether by time or by space or by genus and species, and is therefore radically different from all other substances which are given a being localized in space and time and restricted to one genus and species.

Probably around 1304, or even earlier, Eckhart started working on an original theological summa, the Opus tripartitum (the Three-Part Work), which, however, he left unfinished. According to the original project, the work would have had three parts: the Work of General Propositions (Opus generalium propositionum), the Work of Questions (Opus quaestionum), and the Work of Expositions (Opus expositionum). The first part would have contained a thousand or more propositions concerning the transcendental terms (Being, Unity, Truth, and Goodness) and other metaphysical concepts. The Work ofQues-tions was to solve some of the questions discussed in the Summa theologiae of Aquinas. The Work of Expositions was subdivided into two parts, one consisting of an exegetical commentary on the authorities (auctoritates) contained in the books of the two Testaments, and the other of a series of sermons (Opus sermonum).

To Eckhart’s mind, the general propositions were clearly to provide the fundamental philosophical principles according to which a theologian should both solve disputed questions and interpret Sacred Scriptures. In the General Prologue (LW I, 148-165) Eckhart offers a concrete example of his way of proceeding in the Opus tripartitum: he first formulates the general proposition ‘‘Being is God’’ (Esse est Deus); then, on this basis, he goes on to answer the question ‘‘Whether God is’’ (Utrum Deus sit) and elucidate the meaning of Genesis 1,1 (In principio creavit deus caelum et terram).

Of the original project Eckhart accomplished, besides the prologues (a General Prologue, a prologue to the Opus propositionum, and two different prologues to the Opus expositionum), only some of the third part (Work of Expositions): commentaries on a few books of the Bible (two on

Genesis, one on Exodus, on Wisdom, on Canticle - of which only a fragment is preserved - and on the Gospel of St. John), two lectures, two sermons on Chapter 24 of the Book of Sirach, and some 50 model Latin sermons.

Eckhart worked on the Three-Part Work for several years and at least three different redactional stages are documented in the manuscript tradition. This means that the surviving parts were composed at different times.

The two lectures and two sermons on Chapter 24 of the Book of Sirach (LW II, 231-300), for example, date more or less from the same time of the first three Parisian questions. These texts seem to have had a programmatic value because Eckhart gave the lectures and the sermons in front of the German intellectual elite of the order on the occasions of two provincial chapters.

The second lecture is one of the places where Eckhart sets forth his original teaching on analogy. Analogates, Eckhart maintains, have nothing positively rooted in themselves of the form according to which they are in a relation of analogy. Being and all other general perfections (One, True, Good, Light, Justice, etc.) are predicated in an analogical way of God and creatures. Therefore, each creature has its being, its being true, its being good, etc. not in itself, but in and from God alone. Eckhart goes so far as to say that all creatures, insofar as they are outside God, are nothing in themselves, for God only is Being. Eckhart’s doctrine of analogy serves thus to show that creatures stand in a relationship of total dependence on God.

Apparently the doctrine of analogy, to which Eckhart was to keep throughout the course of his life, runs counter to the views he had put forward shortly before in the first two Parisian questions, where he had maintained that creatures are beings, while God is not being but intellect. As a matter of fact, the contradiction can be explained away as a shift from a ‘‘physical’’ to a ‘‘metaphysical’’ perspective: in both the disputations and the lecture on the Book of Sirach Eckhart is concerned with stressing the radical difference between God and creatures, but whereas in the disputations by ‘‘being’’ Eckhart means the imperfect mode of existence of creatures (which are localized in space and time and determined according to genus and species), in the lectures on Sirach he takes Being as one of the general perfections which properly belong only to God but are participated in also by creatures.

In the Commentary on the Gospel of St. John (LW III), one of the latest sections of the Opus, Eckhart expresses in a programmatic fashion how he conceives of his exegetical work by pointing out that in his scriptural commentaries his purpose is to explain on the basis of the natural reasons of the philosophers what Christian Faith and the Bible teach. Such a view of exegesis was the obvious result of the conviction about the unity of Truth: Moses, Christ, and Aristotle, Eckhart maintains, teach the very same things, the only difference being in the way they do it.

The second commentary on Genesis (one of the last parts, if not the very last, of the Opus tripartitum to have been written) marks a substantial change in the original project of the Opus because, unlike the first commentary, it focuses only on the explanation of the parables - hence the title Liberparabolarum Genesis (LW I,1,447-702). One scholar has claimed that the commentary could be the first book of an entirely new project: the Liber de parabolis rerum naturalium (The Book of the Parables of Natural Things) (see Sturlese 2007).

The Liber Benedictus, consisting of the Book ofDivine Consolation (Daz buoch der gotlichen troestunge, DW V, 861) and a sermon On the Nobleman (Von dem edeln Menschen, DW V, 109-119), is generally dated after 1318.

It is more difficult to date the German sermons, because Eckhart had always with him a ‘‘book’’ of his sermons, composed at different times, on which he continually kept working by adding, revising, etc. Some of them seem to have been composed quite early (e. g., those forming the so-called Gottesgeburt cycle [sermons 101104] seem to date back to the time of the Rede [12941298]). Those belonging to the Paradisus animae intelligentis collection may date from the time of his provincialate (1303-1311).

It is generally assumed that Eckhart’s vernacular preaching should be seen in light of the movement of female piety and Beguine spirituality flourishing at that time in Germany; Eckhart’s sermons, in other words, would have been an attempt to face the challenge represented by various forms of Beguine mysticism and to reconcile them with the orthodoxy. Whatever may be the nature of his relationship with the Beguine movement, it is certain that in his German treatises and sermons Eckhart discusses and analyses the same contents and motifs as in his Latin scholastic writings. From what Pope John XXII states in the bull ‘‘In agro dominico’’ it can be argued that one of the chief reasons for Eckhart’s legal misfortunes was that he had preached highly speculative concepts in front of an audience of simple people, thereby confounding the true faith in their hearts. Even before the proceedings took place, Eckhart seems to have been reproached for writing or preaching such ideas to the untaught. At the end of the Book of Divine Consolation, he replied that the untaught were exactly the people needing instruction with a view to making them become learned, and that he could not worry about being misunderstood because he was aware that what he had said or written was true. Given these reactions, it is no surprise that the two lists on which the accusation against Eckhart was based contained many excerpts from the Liher Benedictus and from the German sermons.

Among other doctrines censored is that of the spiritual perfections (Goodness, Justice, Wisdom, etc.), a doctrine which is dealt with in great detail in the Liher Benedictus. Between Goodness and the good man exists a relationship of univocal causality, or reciprocal relationality: Goodness, which is neither created nor made nor begotten, begets the good man, who is neither created nor made but is the son born and begotten of Goodness. Goodness and the good man, in other words, are identical and the action of begetting of the former is one with the latter’s being begotten, the only difference between them being that the former begets and the latter is begotten. Whatever pertains to the good man, he has in and from Goodness. This doctrine is a radical transformation of Aristotelian metaphysics: it is not a quality (goodness) that lies in and is supported by an underlying subject (i. e., the good man), but the subject that is in the spiritual perfection. Insofar as he is good, namely, insofar as he abandons the dimension of creatureliness, the good man is nothing but pure and simple Goodness.

The two most characteristic and interrelated issues of the vernacular sermons are detachment and the birth of the Word or Son in the soul. Detachment, as has been said, is the way man has to go in order to recover consciousness of his inner union with God. The origin of this crucial concePt of Eckhart’s thought has been traced back to the philosophical tradition, notably to the Anaxagorean-Aristotelian view of the intellect as something separable, pure from all admixture, simple, having nothing in common with anything else.

The birth of the Word in the soul is an idea which Eckhart could find in the Christian tradition, but which he modified in an original fashion. Indeed, he conceived of the generation of the Word in the soul as a timeless process: the Father is always bearing the Son in the soul, provided the soul realizes that its ground is identical with God’s ground.

See also: > Albert the Great > Dietrich of Freiberg > Peter Lombard > Richard Rufus of Cornwall > Thomas Aquinas