Meister Eckhart

The Preparation of Renaissance: Dietrich of Freiberg, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa

“…The epistemological core of Eckhart's problem has been encapsulated by Eckhart himself in the seemingly antagonistic formulations of deus in the first part of Quaestiones Parisienses and in the general prologue of Opus tripartitum. In the background of this dilemma a question has been revealed about the analogical and univocal belongingness that had been pondered by Duns Scotus dominantly under the horizon of being but was given a different slant by Eckhart with his introduction of intellect as a source of univocal light (Mojsisch 1983:57 ff., Ruh 1989. 15 Eckhart's definition of God as intellect invokes quite manifestly the context of his deliberations: the polemics with the Franciscans and the reliance on Dietrich.…”

“…The collision of different viewpoints in Eckhart has thus been said to result from the shift of perspective Eckhart applies to God in his explicative enterprise: as a Christian he should conceive God as being, but as the 14th century German Dominican he wishes to contrive a model for postulating a unitive contact -and for invalidating the real distinction -between creator and creation on the basis of an intellectual (universal) property, and not that of volition. The engagement with being opens for Eckhart a realm of analogical kinship (as a hypertextual model for speaking about God); the elevation of the aspect of intellect, sometimes in the form of cancelling the being, pinpoints the act of knowing itself without any homological intermediary agency (see Mojsisch 1983:136, Imbach 1976. In any event, it is not Eckhart's idiosyncrasy of combining analogy with univocity that interests us here the most, but rather his very striking way -which, by the way, also made of him the great heretic -of uniting the transcendent and the immediate, that is, of affording the most universal (i.e.…”