Writing Worth Reading
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Writing Worth Reading
Meister Eckhart was a Dominican priest in the 14th century. His sermons are very philosophical and focus on this idea of the now versus forever. What he comes up with is this idea that ended up with him being accused of pantheism. He believed that at the core of every human being there’s a spark of the divine, linked to eternity.
Your last book is Meister Eckhart’s From Whom God Hid Nothing: Sermons, Writings and Sayings.
Meister Eckhart was a Dominican priest in the 14th century. He spent most of his time in Germany, especially in Cologne. We are told that he was an immensely popular preacher which I find hard to believe. His sermons are incredibly difficult and they are very philosophical and focused on this idea of the now versus forever. What he comes up with is an idea that led to him being accused of pantheism. He had this idea that inside every human being there’s a spark of the divine. We all participate in God’s existence. And at the core is what he called Fünklein, the little spark of the soul in which God is fully present. If you are able to get there by divine practice itself, and by praying and meditating, you actually get to God’s state of existence which is eternal.
So you get to the eternal now moment.
It almost sounds Buddhist, doesn’t it?
It does and there are quite a few people who have tried to compare Eckhart to concepts of eternity in Buddhism. There is this sense that in the eternal realm we are beyond time. One of his sermons is entitled ‘Get Beyond Time’.
Of all these books, which is the one which most chimes with your views about time and eternity?
I would like to say Eckhart. Of the five, who do I hope is really right? Eckhart! The problem is he doesn’t tell you how to get to the eternal now moment. He just speaks about it. There is this passage where he says: ‘When God created the world all creatures floated through me.’ Eckhart also speaks of the birth of the Son in the soul, by which he means to say that when one gets to that eternal now moment, one can experience the begetting of the Son in the Trinity. Eckhart fills his sermons with such radical talk, where God and creation merge. He has a beautiful passage in one sermon where he says: ‘Whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not, all creatures seek God.’ As Eckhart saw it, all living beings are linked to the divine, and in search of consciousness of this fact. So he is saying there is no difference between an ant and a human being. All creatures are sacred.
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Professor Eire, who received his PhD from Yale in 1979, specialises in the social, intellectual, religious, and cultural history of late medieval and early modern Europe, with a focus on the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, the history of popular piety, and the history of death. He is currently writing a survey history of the Reformation and researching attitudes toward miracles in the 16th and 17th centuries.
