Meister Eckhart´s Early Parisian Questions in Context

Meister Eckhart (ca. 12601328) is one of the outstanding figures of the Middle Ages. He is best known for his German sermons, which are considered as gems of a movement called German mysticism. It is, however, disputed if and in what sense he can be called a mystic. For he was also a very distinguished scholar who was honoured with a chair at the University of Paris not just once, but twice, an honour which before him only Thomas Aquinas was granted. He wrote Latin works typically scholastic in style dealing with philosophical problems that were discussed in cutting-edge scientific debates. Eckharts Parisian Questions stand out among his works as highly innovative, if not provocative, in that they challenge the tradition of philosophical philosophy in which God as the source of all being is said do be pure being. Eckhart, however, emphasises that God, being pure spirit, should rather be considered as intellect above all being. In so arguing he answers debates that were actually going on in his environment at Paris. Unfortunately, we do not know much about the positions of many of his contemporaries. This makes it difficult to reconstruct even Eckharts own position especially because the arguments in those Questions are often abbreviated. We are lucky, however, that physical testimonies of these debates have survived in the form of manuscripts containing compilations in which texts are brought together under specific aspects. So we find that some of the texts answer each others arguments. This, then, mirrors a real debate. My project proposes to investigate what conclusions can be drawn from the manuscript context of the three early Parisian Questions, which are transmitted in codex 1071 at Avignon. I will combine the information that can be extracted from the relevant texts in this compilation with citations that are explicitly and implicitly in the texts of the Parisian Questions themselves and present them in a comprehensive commentary and a new translation. Furthermore, I will examine how these early texts of Eckhart relate to his later Latin and German works. For there are in fact discrepancies which can be interpreted as proving a development in Eckharts thoughts or as being due to different contexts of discussion. In summary, my research will not only yield new insights into the Parisian context of Eckharts Questions, but my edition, translation, and commentary will bring all available information together for the first time and present it to a wider audience by choosing English as the language of publication. For the results will be relevant not only for the Eckhart specialist but for the historian of ideas in general.

Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1328) was not only a mystic, but above all a highly progressive thinker who had to face the inquisition even at old age because of his bold teachings. From a philosophical perspective, his thesis from the year 1302/03, when he was professor in Paris, is particularly noteworthy: God is thinking, and not being. With this statement Eckhart positioned himself against all scholastic theology. However, in his later works he seems to have returned to the classic doctrine that God is being. On the other hand, Eckhart distinguishes strictly between God and Godhead, the latter being the grounding unity of God. I have shown that the Godhead, which figures in this strict sense only in Eckharts German works, is the continuation of the primacy of thinking, i.e. intellect, over being and that therefore the radical Parisian thesis was never abandoned. Moreover, my research opened an even more surprising perspective: In the wake of Aristotle, Eckhart distinguishes between an active and a passive intellect in the human soul. But unlike all other thinkers, especially Dietrich of Freiberg, he places the passive intellect higher than the active one and identifies it with the ground of the soul, i.e. the spark of the soul. Since, however, the ground of the soul is, for Eckhart, identical with the ground of God, even in God intellectual potentiality must be above actuality and therefore the Godhead must be passive intellect and thus absolute intellectual potency. This new discovery constitutes a paradigm shift because it offers a new perspective not only on the theosophy of Jakob Böhme and the speculative philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa, but also on the later reception of Eckhartian mysticism in Schelling, Buber, and Rosenzweig, to mention only those thinkers whom I dealt with. Schelling, for instance, in the first draft of his "Ages of the World", conceives the absolute as pure potency and gives it the Eckhartian name of purity (Lauterkeit). The second focus of my project is concerned with the manuscript tradition of the Parisian Questions 13. The special characteristic of the two Gothic codices in Avignon and Troyes lies in the fact that they represent collections of texts that mirror the intellectual debates at the University of Paris at the beginning of the 14th century, in which context Eckharts Questions have to be understood. The first-time edition of some of these texts offers a vivid image of Eckhart in his intellectual environment at Paris. The study of the manuscripts will still yield many interesting results in the future, but my new edition of Eckharts early Parisian Questions with an English translation and commentary as well as an appendix with hitherto unpublished texts makes an important contribution.