Justified True Belief

(●) The Dominican master who told ordinary Germans that God is born in the soul, and died on the road to answer for saying it. + Most medieval theologians wrote for other theologians, in Latin, about questions that only a university could raise. Eckhart did that too, and did it well enough to hold the Dominican chair at Paris twice, an honour the order had granted before him only to Thomas Aquinas. Then he went home to Germany and did something far riskier. He climbed into pulpits in Strasbourg and Cologne and said the same things in German, to nuns, to laywomen living in ordinary houses on ordinary streets, to whoever came in out of the rain. What he said to them was that God is not far off, that the eternal Word is born in the soul of anyone who will make room for it, and that the making of room matters more than anything a person could add. He said it in short, startling sentences designed to jolt a listener awake, which is exactly how a preacher talks and exactly how a heresy hunter reads. In 1326 the archbishop of Cologne opened a trial. Eckhart answered the charges in writing, protested his innocence from his own pulpit, appealed to the pope, and set off for Avignon. He died somewhere along the way, probably in January 1328, before any verdict came. Here is the fact a reader will want to keep hold of. Fourteen months after he died, a papal bull came down on his teaching. A bull is the most formal letter a pope can send, and it takes its name from the bulla, the disc of lead that hung from the bottom of the parchment on a cord and made the document unmistakable when it arrived. This one condemned twenty-eight propositions drawn from his books, and it did not condemn him. It recorded instead that he had submitted himself and his writings to the judgment of the Apostolic See, which is to say of Rome, before he died. No pope has ever declared Meister Eckhart a heretic, and when his own order went to Rome in the last century to ask for the censure to be lifted, the answer that came back was that there was nothing personal to lift.

(●) c. 1260 AD: Born in Thuringia, in a forest country of small villages, and given to the Dominicans as a boy. + The birth year is an estimate, worked backward from the age at which a friar could begin the studies he is known to have begun, and the birthplace is genuinely contested. Older books place him at Hochheim, on the strength of a family name; recent scholarship prefers Tambach, a village near Gotha, in the Landgraviate of Thuringia, a landgraviate being a county whose ruler held his land from the emperor directly, with no duke standing in between. Both are within a day’s walk of Erfurt, and beyond that the record does not go. Every date in the first thirty years of his life carries a "c." for the same reason: he becomes visible only when the order’s paperwork starts mentioning him. He entered the Dominican priory at Erfurt in his teens. A priory is simply the house a community of friars shared, run by a prior, one of their own brothers elected to the job, and the word is worth holding on to, because being made prior of that same house is the next fixed point in his life. The Dominicans, founded two generations earlier, were the order of preachers: friars who took vows of poverty but lived in towns rather than in remote abbeys, and whose whole purpose was to be trained well enough to preach and argue in public. That training was long. A Dominican boy was put through years of grammar, logic and philosophy before he was let anywhere near theology, and the brightest were sent on to Cologne, where Albert the Great had built the order’s German house of studies. Eckhart very probably studied there, though whether he ever sat under Albert himself, who died in 1280, is one more thing nobody can prove.

(●) 1294 AD: Made prior of Erfurt, and his first book was plain advice for beginners. + Everything before this is reconstruction. Then comes 18 April 1294, when he preached the Easter sermon at the Dominican house of Saint-Jacques in Paris, and for the first time there is a day in his life that can be written down without a "c." in front of it. Later that year the order sent him home, to run the priory at Erfurt and to serve as vicar of Thuringia, its deputy for the region, which handed him a houseful of other men’s souls and other men’s quarrels at the same moment. Out of those years, roughly 1294 to 1298, came the Reden der Unterweisung, the Talks of Instruction: twenty-three short chapters of counsel given to young friars who had just arrived and were finding the life harder than they expected. It is the least exotic thing he ever wrote and one of the best. Should a beginner take on extra fasting and extra vigils? Not particularly, he says; take on obedience instead, because giving up your own will gets at the root of the trouble in a way that giving up bread does not. Should you look for God in the quiet of the chapel? Look for him in the work you are already doing, because a person who has God truly has him in every place and in the street as much as in the church. More manuscripts of it survive than of anything else he wrote in German, which for a book of spiritual advice in the vernacular is a remarkable number, and everything he became famous for later is already in it, said quietly.

(●) 1302 AD: Paris made him a Master of Theology, and the title stuck to him as a name. + In 1302 the order sent him back to Paris to hold the external Dominican chair in theology, the seat reserved for a friar from outside France. Holding it meant taking the degree of magister, master, the medieval university’s licence to teach anywhere in Christendom. Germans rendered the Latin word as Meister, and it fastened itself to him so firmly that seven centuries later hardly anyone calls him Eckhart of Hochheim, or Eckhart von Hochheim, or anything else. He is Meister Eckhart, the way a man might end up known as Doc for the rest of his life. The Paris of 1302 was a hard room. Aquinas had been dead less than thirty years and his reading of Aristotle was still fought over; the Franciscans and the Dominicans disagreed publicly about almost everything. From this stay come the Quaestiones Parisienses, the Parisian Questions, a handful of formal disputations in which Eckhart argues a position that would shape everything after it: in God, being and understanding are not two things, and if we have to choose which comes first, it is understanding. That can sound like a quarrel about words until you see what hangs on it. Say that God is first of all being, sheer existence, and you have said that he is the one thing that simply is while the stones and the stars and the people borrow their existence from him by the second. Say that God is first of all understanding, mind, knowing, and you have said something a stone can never share in at all, and at the same stroke you have made the thinking part of a human being the one place in creation shaped to receive him. Aquinas had started from being. Eckhart starts from mind, and the whole architecture of his later preaching, God as intellect, the soul as the place where intellect meets intellect, is already being laid.

(●) 1303 AD: For eight years he governed the order’s new northern province, at least forty-seven houses of it. + The German province had grown too large for one man to keep in view, so in 1303 the Dominicans split it in two, and the new northern half, Saxonia, ran from the Netherlands across to Livonia on the Baltic. Eckhart was elected its first provincial, the friar answerable for every house in it, and he held the post until 1311. Four years into the job, in 1307, they added the vicariate of Bohemia on top of it. This is the part of his life that gets skipped, and it should not be. A provincial is an administrator. He rode circuit through at least forty-seven priories in weather that comes off the North Sea, settled quarrels between friars who had been sharing a dormitory for twenty years, approved building accounts, and founded three new houses for women. Whatever else the man who preached about detachment was, he was not someone who had avoided the world’s friction. He had spent the better part of a decade in it, on horseback. In 1311 the order did something it had done only once before, for Aquinas: it called him back to Paris for a second term in the master’s chair. He held it for the two academic years 1311 to 1313. Around this period he also began the vast Latin project he never finished, the Opus tripartitum, the Three-Part Work, which was to have opened with a thousand propositions and ended with commentaries on the whole of Scripture. He got a fraction of it done, and that fraction is most of the Latin Eckhart anyone can read today.

(●) 1313 AD: Sent to Strasbourg, he began preaching in German to women who had no Latin at all. + In the summer of 1313 Eckhart left Paris for Strasbourg as a special vicar of the Dominican Master General, charged with the care of the order’s convents of nuns in the Rhineland and with the beguines. A beguine was a laywoman who lived in a community of other laywomen, prayed, supported herself by weaving or nursing or lacework, and took no permanent vows; the arrangement had spread through the Rhine cities and made the authorities nervous precisely because it fell outside the ordinary categories. Nobody governed it, and the women in it read. So Eckhart, who could have spent his life lecturing in Latin to men who were paid to follow him, stood up instead in front of audiences with no university training and preached the highest theology he had in the language they actually spoke. He had to invent vocabulary to do it. German had no words for a great deal of what he wanted to say, and some of the words it now has, Istigkeit for what a thing simply is, Abgeschiedenheit for detachment, Gelassenheit for the letting-be that follows it, are his coinages or nearly so. It is one of the reasons he matters to Germans who care nothing for theology: a good deal of the philosophical German that Kant and Hegel would later write in was first hammered out by a friar trying to explain the Trinity to weavers. The timing was dangerous and he must have known it. The Council of Vienne had just closed, in 1312, and among its decrees was Ad nostrum, which condemned a list of errors said to be circulating among beguines and beghards, the beghards being the men who lived that same half-monastic life without vows, in the same towns and on the same terms: that a soul could reach a state of perfection in this life in which it no longer needed to practice the virtues, no longer owed obedience, could not sin. Eckhart was sent to preach to exactly the audience that decree was aimed at, and he preached to them about the soul’s union with God. Around 1323 or 1324 he moved on to Cologne, to teach at the order’s German house of studies, and kept preaching.

(●) 1326 AD: The archbishop of Cologne tried him for heresy, and he answered first in writing, then from his own pulpit. + The trouble began inside the order, which is worth noticing before anything else. The general chapter, the assembly of delegates that governed the Dominicans as a whole, met at Venice in the spring of 1325 and complained about friars in Germany preaching things that confused simple people, and a Dominican named Nicholas of Strasbourg was told to look into Eckhart. He looked, and cleared him. That should have ended it. It did not, because Henry of Virneburg, archbishop of Cologne, opened a proceeding of his own in 1326 and drew up lists of suspect articles from Eckhart’s German sermons and from the Book of Divine Consolation. Eckhart appeared before the commission on 26 September 1326 and handed in a written defence, the document scholars call the Rechtfertigungsschrift. Two things in it are worth knowing. He objected to the procedure itself, on the ground that a master of theology of his standing should not be answering to a diocesan inquisitor at all, an inquisitor of that kind being a churchman commissioned by the archbishop of the place rather than by the order or by Rome. And he drew a distinction that has outlived the whole affair: he could be in error, he said, but he could not be a heretic, because error is a matter of the intellect and heresy is a matter of the will. A man who is mistaken and willing to be corrected is not the same animal as a man who knows and refuses. On 13 February 1327, in the Dominican church at Cologne, he had a public protestation read out from the pulpit. A protestation is a formal declaration made in front of witnesses, and this one was read out in Latin, which is what makes the next detail worth having: he translated it into German himself, there and then, so that the people in front of him would know what he had just said. He had never taught error, he said; if anything he had written or preached should be found erroneous, he revoked it now. Read one way that is capitulation. Read in the light of his own distinction it is something else: a man refusing the accusation and refusing obstinacy in the same breath. He had already appealed over the archbishop’s head to Pope John XXII, in January 1327, and in the spring he left for Avignon.

(●) 1328 AD: He died before the verdict came, and the verdict, when it came, condemned articles rather than the man. + The Avignon commission ground through the charges and cut a hundred and fifty suspect articles down to twenty-eight. An article, in a proceeding like this one, is a single sentence lifted out of a man’s books and set down on a list on its own, without the paragraph that led up to it and without the paragraph that qualified it afterwards. A preacher who reaches for the startling sentence fares badly under that treatment, and Eckhart reached for it more than most. Whatever the list was going to say, he did not live to hear it. On 30 April 1328 the pope wrote that he was already dead; the best modern estimate puts the death on 28 January 1328. Where he was buried is unknown. For a man whose whole teaching was about letting go of everything a person might hold on to, there is a bleak fittingness in it, and it would be dishonest to pretend he chose it. On 27 March 1329 John XXII issued the bull In agro dominico. Seventeen of the twenty-eight articles were condemned as heretical, the other eleven as rash and suspect of heresy. Among them: that there is something in the soul that is uncreated and uncreatable, that whatever holy Scripture says of Christ is true of every good and divine man, that God is neither good nor better nor best. Then the bull says the thing everyone forgets. It records that Eckhart, before his death, had professed the Catholic faith and revoked and deplored whatever he had taught that could generate an unorthodox meaning in the minds of the faithful, submitting himself and his writings to the judgment of the Apostolic See. The censure fell on propositions extracted from his books. It did not fall on him.

What He Taught

(T1) God is nearer to you than you are to yourself, and no place is nearer to him than any other. + Think of someone who prays better on holiday. The retreat house is quiet, the chapel smells of beeswax, the phone is in a drawer, and for four days God seems close in a way he never does in a kitchen at half past six. Then they go home and the closeness evaporates, and they conclude that the problem is the kitchen. Eckhart’s answer is blunt and consoling at once. The problem is not the kitchen. God is exactly as present in the kitchen as in the chapel, because God is not near things the way one object is near another object. He is the reason anything exists at all, which means he is closer to a person than that person’s own thoughts are. What changes on holiday is not God’s nearness but our awareness of it, and Eckhart says so in a sentence that would have stung the pious listeners in front of him: if a man is more aware of God because he is in a quiet place, that is the man’s own deficiency and not God’s doing. This is not a private theory. Paul says the same thing to the Athenians, that God "is actually not far from each one of us" (Acts 17:27), and the psalmist has already tried every direction and found no exit (Psalm 139:7–8). Where Eckhart pushes further than most preachers is in refusing to let his hearers treat a wooden pew as spiritual equipment. A piece of wood, he says, has God just as near to it as an archangel does; the archangel is happier only because it knows. Happiness, on this account, is not God arriving. It is us noticing.

(Q) "I am as sure as I live that nothing is so near to me as God. God is nearer to me than I am to myself; my existence depends on the nearness and presence of God." + Source: Meister Eckhart, sermon on Luke 21:31, "The Nearness of the Kingdom" (Claud Field translation, 1909). Eckhart is preaching on the words "Know that the Kingdom of God is near," and he has just argued that a man who was king and did not know it would not really be a king. The nearness is not in question. The knowing is (T1).

(T2) The eternal Word is born in the soul, and that birth is what the whole Christian life is for. + Somebody says every December that Christmas is not only a date on the calendar, and most people hear it as a request to feel something warmer than they are feeling. Eckhart said it too, and he did not mean it as a request at all. He meant that something is happening, now, in the person hearing him, and that it is not a smaller and more sentimental version of the birth the church sings about but the very same one. Christian theology had always said that the Father eternally begets the Son: not that there was a time when the Son began, but that the relation of Father to Son is what God eternally is, the way a fire is always throwing light. Eckhart takes that and says something startling. The same begetting happens in the ground of a human soul. God does not have two ways of bringing forth his Word, one inside himself and a lesser one for us. He has one, and where the soul is empty enough, that one birth happens there. He calls it the Gottesgeburt, the birth of God in the soul. Notice what this does to the spiritual life as his hearers understood it. A beguine in Strasbourg who had been taught to want visions, revelations and consolations is being told that none of that is the point, and that the point is something happening in her that she may not feel at all. Eckhart says it happens whether she likes it or not, whether she sleeps or wakes; what is up to her is whether she is awake to it. He is also, and this is the pastoral heart of it, telling a woman with no Latin and no office in the church that what mattered most in the history of the world is available in her own soul without a single qualification she lacks. Scripture is behind him here, and it is worth seeing how far. John says that to those who received him, God gave "the right to become children of God" (John 1:12), and Paul says the Spirit of the Son has been sent into our hearts so that we cry Abba (Galatians 4:4–6). The New Testament calls this adoption, and adoption is a legal act of sheer grace that makes a real relation: the adopted child is genuinely the father’s child and was genuinely not before. Eckhart, pressing for the strongest thing he could say, sometimes spoke as though the soul’s sonship were the same sonship as the eternal Son’s, and that is precisely where his censors dug in. The distinction the church has insisted on is not fussiness. Christ is Son by nature; we are sons by adoption and by grace, which is the whole reason it is good news.

(Q) "I affirm that had the Virgin not first borne God spiritually He would never have been born from her in bodily fashion." + Source: Meister Eckhart, sermon on Luke 1:28, "The Angel’s Greeting" (Claud Field translation, 1909). Preaching on the angel’s words to Mary, Eckhart turns immediately from her body to her faith, and then from her to everyone listening: it is more worthy of God, he says, to be born spiritually of every pure soul than to be born of Mary. He is leaning on Christ’s own correction of the woman who called Mary’s womb blessed, "Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it" (Luke 11:28), which is a good deal less shocking than the sentence he builds on it (T2).

(T3) There is a ground in the soul that is kin to God, and everything else has to be cleared out of it. + Eckhart had several names for it. The ground (grunt), the castle, the little spark, the something in the soul. What he means is the innermost point of a person, deeper than thinking and deeper than wanting, where God touches the soul with nothing in between: no image, no concept, no feeling, not even a mental picture of God. An analogy from his own century helps. A great house has public rooms where anyone may be received, and it has one small chamber where the owner goes alone. Eckhart says the soul is built like that, and that God will come into the small chamber and nowhere else. The reason is not that God is fastidious. It is that the small chamber is the only place in us that is not already full of something. Fill it with an idea of God and you have a furnished room, not an empty one, and what you meet there is your idea. Here the honest difficulty has to be stated rather than smoothed over. Reaching, as he always did, for language strong enough, Eckhart said in a sermon that there is something in the soul that is uncreated and uncreatable, and that if the whole soul were like it, it would be uncreated. It is not hard to hear what a nervous listener heard. Read plainly, that makes a part of a creature to be God, and that is a line no Christian can cross: the creature is not the Creator (Romans 1:25), and "my glory I give to no other" (Isaiah 42:8). It was condemned as article twenty-seven of the bull, and on the plain reading it deserved to be. Eckhart himself, in his written defence, said flatly that he had not meant it that way. What he meant, he said, was that this ground is not a created faculty like memory or will, the ordinary working parts of a person that anyone can catch in the act, but the point at which God’s own act touches us, which is God’s and not ours. And it should be said that Scripture holds out something nearly as bold, when it promises that we "may become partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4). The difference, and everything turns on it, is that partaking is a gift given to a creature who remains a creature.

(Q) "There is a somewhat in the soul that is, as it were, a blood-relative of God." + Source: Meister Eckhart, sermon on Ecclesiasticus 24:30, "True Hearing" (Claud Field translation, 1909). Ecclesiasticus, the book he is preaching from, is the wisdom book also called Sirach, written a couple of centuries before Christ and read as Scripture all through the Middle Ages; Protestants later placed it among the Apocrypha, and it sits outside the Hebrew canon, which is why a modern reader may not recognise the name. The sentence that follows in the same breath is the safeguard people forget to quote: it is one, he says, and everything created is nothing beside it. Eckhart is not flattering the soul. He is saying that the one thing in us worth anything is the thing that is not our own doing (T3).

(T4) Detachment is the highest of the virtues, and he ranked it above love. + Detachment, Abgeschiedenheit, is Eckhart’s signature word, and it is regularly misheard as coldness. It is not indifference to people. It is the condition of a heart that wants God and not the things it can get out of God, and a familiar test will show what he is after. A man prays for his wife’s recovery and she recovers, and he thanks God warmly. She does not recover, and something in his devotion goes out like a pilot light. Eckhart would say, gently, that what he loved was the recovery. Detachment is the state in which the same man would still have God either way. Reading a translation, watch for the word: Claud Field renders Abgeschiedenheit as "sanctification," which is not what modern English means by that word at all, and later translators say "detachment." Then he does something that ought to make a Christian reader sit up. In the treatise On Detachment he explicitly ranks this virtue above love, and above humility, and above mercy. His argument is precise, and it is worth following slowly, because the three comparisons all turn on the same hinge. Love makes me go to God, which is a movement of mine toward him; detachment, by emptying the soul of everything else, leaves God no other place to settle, and so, Eckhart says, it compels God to come to me. Love makes me willing to suffer anything for God, and that willingness still keeps my eye on the one who is asking the suffering of me; detachment has no eye on any creature at all. Humility stoops below every creature, and stooping, however far down it goes, is still a motion outward. Detachment does not move. Every comparison lands in the same place: whatever the rival virtue does, detachment is the one that does nothing, and doing nothing, for Eckhart, is the highest thing a soul can manage. It is a real and beautiful insight about motive, pushed to a place the New Testament will not follow. Paul was asked to rank the virtues too, and gave the opposite answer: "So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love." (1 Corinthians 13:13) That is a real disagreement, not a difference of emphasis, and it does not dissolve by calling Eckhart a mystic and moving on. One caution belongs here too: the authorship of On Detachment is disputed, and some scholars hold it to be a compilation by a disciple rather than Eckhart’s own composition. The ranking is of a piece with what he says elsewhere, but a reader should know the ground is softer here than under the sermons.

(Q) "Real sanctification consists in this that the spirit remain as immovable and unaffected by all impact of love or hate, joy or sorrow, honour or shame, as a huge mountain is unstirred by a gentle breeze." + Source: the treatise On Detachment, translated by Claud Field under the title "Sanctification" (1909), where it is headed with Luke 10:42, "One thing is needful." Field’s "sanctification" is his rendering of Abgeschiedenheit, detachment. The mountain and the breeze are Eckhart’s own image, and the treatise’s authorship is debated (T4). A few lines further on in the same paragraph he tells his hearers that to be empty of the love of creatures is to be full of God, and to be full of the love of creatures is to be empty of God.

(Q) "The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love." + Source: Meister Eckhart, sermon on Ecclesiasticus 24:30, "True Hearing" (Claud Field translation, 1909). Probably the most quoted sentence he ever preached, and the one his defenders and his accusers have been fighting over ever since. Taken as a claim that the soul and God are the same thing, it is indefensible. Taken as the point he had just been making, that a person who has let go of self no longer has a private angle on God but sees by the very light God gives, it is the New Testament’s "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Galatians 2:20) said by a man who could not stop reaching for the strongest form of a sentence. Which of those he meant is the argument that follows him through the next seven centuries.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) His hearers wrote him down, and the line ran through Tauler and Suso to a small book that changed Luther. + Eckhart’s German sermons survive because people in the pews took them down, in a hurry, in shorthand, and copied them out afterwards. More than a hundred manuscripts of them exist. It is the reason the text is sometimes rough and the reason he is so easy to quote out of context: a good deal of what we have is a listener’s record of a preacher in full flight, not an author’s considered page. Two of those hearers became teachers in their own right. Johannes Tauler, a Dominican of Strasbourg, took Eckhart’s ground of the soul and preached it with the speculative edges filed off and the pastoral use brought forward, and his sermons were read devotionally for centuries without anyone raising an eyebrow. Henry Suso, who had known Eckhart at Cologne, defended his old master in the Little Book of Truth, taking the propositions that had drawn the censure and showing how each could be read in an orthodox sense, and distinguishing carefully between what Eckhart meant and what the loose talk of the Free Spirit made of him. The Free Spirit was the label that had attached itself to the errors the Council of Vienne condemned, the claim that a soul perfected in this life is past the virtues and past obedience and past sin, and anyone preaching about union with God in those years had to be heard over the noise of it. Through Tauler and Suso the teaching passed into the circles known as the Friends of God, a loose network of clergy and laypeople in the Rhine cities and Switzerland who wrote to one another about the inner life and lent one another books, and out of those circles came an anonymous fourteenth-century treatise, the Theologia Germanica. That little book reached Martin Luther, who published a partial edition of it in 1516 and a complete one in 1518, and wrote in his preface that no book except the Bible and Augustine had taught him more about God, Christ, man and all things. Luther almost certainly did not know whose great-grandchild the book was. The line from a censured Dominican to the Reformer’s desk is nonetheless real, and it runs through the German that Eckhart had to invent in order to preach at all.

(†) Nicholas of Cusa read him with the trial papers in hand, and judged him orthodox and dangerous at once. + A century after the bull, the cardinal and philosopher Nicholas of Cusa quietly assembled the best Eckhart collection in Europe. In 1444 he had the Latin works copied out into one great volume, then read it with a pen in his hand and left his notes running down the margins. It still sits in his library at Kues as Codex Cusanus 21, and a good part of the Latin Eckhart survives only because he had it made. He had every reason to be careful, because when his own On Learned Ignorance appeared, a Heidelberg theologian named Johannes Wenck attacked it as heresy and made the charge stick by association: this is Eckhart again, this is pantheism, the claim that God and the world are one thing. Cusanus answered in 1449 in the Apologia doctae ignorantiae, the Defence of Learned Ignorance, and his answer is the most interesting verdict anyone in the Middle Ages passed on Eckhart. He had read him closely, he said, and had never found him saying that the creature is the Creator; he praised the man’s gift and his hard work. The charge of pantheism was false. And yet, having said that, he wished the books taken out of public circulation. Eckhart mixes in a great deal that runs past the usual way of the other doctors, he wrote, and ordinary people are not fitted for it, though a trained reader finds much in it that is subtle and useful. He was not asking for a condemnation. He was asking for a locked cupboard. Orthodox and dangerous at the same time is an awkward verdict, and it is probably the right one. It is also, allowing for the different vocabulary, close to what the Avignon commission concluded when it separated the articles it called heretical from the eleven it called merely rash and capable of a Catholic sense when explained.

(†) The bull condemned propositions and never the man, and six centuries later that distinction settled the question. + Eckhart went quiet for a long time. The German sermons circulated without his name on them, or under other names, which is how a good deal of him ended up attributed to Tauler and how a good deal that is not his ended up attributed to him. He was recovered in the nineteenth century, first by Franz Pfeiffer, whose 1857 edition mixed genuine sermons with a considerable quantity of other people’s work, and then properly by the critical edition of the German and Latin works, begun in 1936 and finished in 2022. Eighty-six years, with a world war in the middle of them, which is a fair measure of how tangled the manuscripts were; and at the end of it, for the first time since he died, it is possible to know what Eckhart actually wrote. In the last quarter of the twentieth century his own order went to Rome and asked for a formal declaration of his orthodoxy. The accounts differ about the year the request went in and the year the answer came back, which is a small untidiness worth admitting rather than papering over, but they agree on the answer itself and on who reported it. Timothy Radcliffe, Master of the Order, wrote to the Eckhart Society that they had tried to have the censure lifted and were told there was really no need, since Eckhart had never been condemned by name, only some propositions he was supposed to have held, and so they were perfectly free to say that he is a good and orthodox theologian. That is a modest outcome and it is the honest one. It does not make the twenty-eight articles harmless, and it does not pretend he was misread in every instance. What it recognises is the difference his own defence turned on: the difference between a mistaken sentence and a hardened man. The bull itself had already conceded the point when it recorded that he submitted to correction before he died.

(†) Where his own record will not bear him out: a virtue ranked above love, and a sentence pressed past what a hearer could carry. + The criticism that belongs on his own ledger is not the pantheism his enemies charged him with, which he denied in writing and which Cusanus, reading him line by line in his own annotated copy, could not find. It is narrower than that, and it comes from what he himself wrote. - He put detachment above love. The reasoning in On Detachment is careful and the conclusion is still wrong, and it is wrong in a way Scripture settles rather than debates. Paul ranks the abiding virtues and puts love last in the list and first in worth: "So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love." (1 Corinthians 13:13) Jesus, asked for the greatest commandment, gives two and both are love (Matthew 22:37–39). Eckhart’s objection, that love still leaves the soul reaching outward toward a creature, only bites if reaching outward is a defect, and in the Christian account it is not: God himself is love before anything was made to love, and "We love because he first loved us." (1 John 4:19) The insight he was chasing, that a heart wanting God’s gifts is not yet wanting God, is worth keeping. The ranking is not. The authorship of that treatise is disputed, which softens the charge without removing it, since the same preference for the empty over the outgoing runs through sermons nobody disputes. - He preached to untrained hearers in a register that needed training to survive. This is the fault Cusanus named and the one Eckhart came closest to conceding. "There is something in the soul that is uncreated and uncreatable" is a sentence a doctor of theology can unpack and a weaver cannot, and he was preaching it to weavers in a decade when the Council of Vienne had just condemned people for claiming that a perfected soul was beyond the virtues and beyond obedience. A preacher is answerable for what a sentence will do in the room he says it in. His Cologne protestation of 1327 half admits it: he revoked whatever in his preaching could generate an unorthodox meaning in the minds of the faithful, which concedes the effect while denying the intent. Neither of these makes him what his accusers said. They are the faults of a man who could not stop reaching for the strongest form of a true thing, which is a real fault and a recognisable one, and no reason to stop reading him. The plainest correction of both came from a source he would have accepted without argument. The life he was describing is the one Paul describes, and Paul locates it exactly: "For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God." (Colossians 3:3) Hidden in Christ, not identical with him.