Meister Eckhart is an ardent preacher, an excellent orator, the author of daring paradoxes and bold, unexpected formulations that did not leave indifferent the flock, but thrilled the authorities. He himself believed that his teaching was in accordance with the Christian, but now it becomes clear the similarity with Eastern teachings, for example, with Zen Buddhism. A scholastic and an administrator ahead of his time.
Like almost all the mystics of the European Middle Ages, Meister Eckhart came to the Russian reader rather late. There are several reasons. Including the lack of adequate translations. Protopope Habakkuk is almost impossible to convey in another language other than the patristic. But it is not just the absence of a congenial contemporary to translate the poetry of Juan de la Cruz or the sermons of Meister Eckhart. At the beginning of the 14th century, Russia was still under the Horde yoke, and even with a talented translator, readers would hardly have been found.
Eckhart von Hochheim, better known as Meister Eckhart, was born in Thuringia in 1260. It happened either in the village of Hochheim, now they say Hochheim, or in Tambach. Perhaps he belonged to a fairly well-known family of Hochheims, from which his father the knight Eckhart came, whose death on May 19, 1305 is reported in one of the documents. Chivalry left its mark on all the work of Meister Eckhart and on the imagery of his language. “The good knight does not complain about his wounds, looking at the king who is wounded with him,” he says about how to endure suffering, sharing it with Christ.
It is possible that in 1275, when the young man was 15-16 years old, he joined the Dominican Order in Erfurt. After two preparatory years, he studied studium logicale (grammar, rhetoric and dialectics) for three years, then studium naturale (arithmetic, mathematics, astronomy and music) for two years. After that, the study of theology began, which lasted three years. The first year was devoted to studium biblicum, the last two to dogmatics - studium provinciale. In Germany at that time there was one such school in Strasbourg. Eckhart moved there.
The greatest minds of that era, such as Albertus Magnus, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Duns Scott and others, belonged to one of two orders - the Dominicans or the Franciscans. In most of Germany, and in Thuringia in particular, it was the Dominicans who enjoyed great prestige. If in the Romanesque countries the Dominicans became famous primarily as fighters against heretics, in the south of France they led the inquisitorial processes over the Cathars after the end of the Albigensian Wars, in the Germanic lands their zeal was directed towards a sacred feat. By the irony of history, the creators of the nascent mysticism and profound Christian teaching will soon be recognized as heretics themselves.
After Strasbourg, the promising young man was sent to one of the best high schools of the Dominican order, the so-called Studium generale. After the Paris school, this was considered a school in Cologne, and Eckhart stayed there for three years, falling under the strong influence of the ideas of Albertus Magnus, who died in 1280, although Eckhart could well have found him still alive.
In the last decade of the 13th century, Eckhart made his ecclesiastical career, holding the positions of Prior of Erfurt and Vicar of the Dominicans of Thuringia. Throughout his life, this remarkable mystic invariably occupies positions of responsibility in church administration. The mystic Eckhart is not an armchair scientist divorced from life, akin to those who are called a "botanist" in modern language. He is a practitioner with a clear view of reality.
In 1300-1302, Eckhart taught at the University of Paris - the spiritual center of Western Europe at that time. As a lector biblicum, he wrote commentaries on Petrus Lombardus's Sentences that have not survived to this day, which served as the basis for teaching dogma. After receiving the title of Master of Theology, Eckhart leaves the French capital.
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The equivalent of the Latin title "master" - teacher - is its German synonym Meister. From this moment in the annals of history, Meister Eckhart appears, who immediately after returning to his homeland is appointed head of the "Saxon province", where his power for eight years stretches from Thuringia to the North Sea (then it was called the German Sea) and from the Netherlands in the West to Livonia in the East. There are 51 male and 9 female monasteries under this administrator.
In 1306, Eckhart was accused of encouraging the heresy of the "free spirit" (the movement of the Beguards and Beguards), although at a general meeting in Strasbourg, he probably succeeds in acquitting himself, because already this year he was appointed vicar-general in Bohemia. In 1215, at the IV Lateran Cathedral, the creation of Beguard and Beguard communities was prohibited. It is known that Meister Eckhart read sermons to these sincerely seeking the Lord young people, and even in the popular German language, in which a clear terminology was not settled, and for this reason he interpreted Latin definitions quite freely.
In 1311, the Vienne cathedral once again condemned and banned the Beguard and Beguard societies. Archbishop and Elector of Cologne Heinrich II von Virneburg began to persecute Meister Eckhart in 1325, but, as the translator of the Master's spiritual sermons into Russian M. V. Sabashnikova writes, “Eckhart's moral character was so pure that all his efforts his enemies to collect any evidence against his personal life were in vain. The bishop of Cologne, extremely hostile to the Dominicans, with the support of the Franciscans (in Rhine Germany, they were inquisitors) appealed to Pope John XXII and made sure that on January 14, 1328, a formal trial began against Meister Eckhart.
On January 4, Eckhart with witnesses appears before the inquisitors and refuses to answer before the Cologne Inquisition Court. Let us quote the researcher MV Sabashnikova: “He (Eckhart - Ed.) Believes that unworthy behavior with eavesdropping, slander and tricks is complete arbitrariness that insults the entire Order. He considers it beneath his dignity to answer them to their accusations and invites them on May 4 with him to Avignon, where he, Eckhart, before the Pope and the whole church, will prove the purity of his teaching, which was simply misunderstood by them. Recall that from 1309 to 1378, the residence of the head of the Catholic Church was not in Rome, but in French Avignon, which is why it was named in history the Avignon Captivity of Popes.
On February 13, Eckhart delivered his defense speech at the Dominican Church in Cologne. In this Apology, written in Latin, which he himself translated into German, Meister Eckhart tried to show that he had been misunderstood. On April 30, 1328, the elderly Meister Eckhart died in Avignon without waiting for a decision on his case. On March 27, 1329, the papal bull In agro dominico - "On the Dominican arable land" was published, which listed 28 heretical theses of Meister Eckhart and spoke of his renunciation of this doctrine.
Booker Igor