Meister Eckhart may sound
like a Wagnerian creation, but he was a real man, admittedly made less real by
an admixture of intense mysticism into his philosophical contemplation, which
easily brought him into an unpleasant conflict with the Church, with very
serious charges of heresy brought against him at the end of his life. (He died
before the verdict was pronounced, and what actually happened then, is forever
shrouded in mystery.)
***
Meister Eckhart, or Eckhart
von Hochheim (1260-1327), was a highly unorthodox (ergo, original!) German
philosopher- theologian, but, above all, a great mystic. The anonymous,
posthumously published Theologia Germanica, unequivocally attributed to
him, was to exercise a tremendous influence on Martin Luther, who called it the
greatest book after the Bible and after St. Augustine. An incomplete set of his
famous sermons has reached us as well, testifying to his intellectual and
literary talents. Envisaging Luther, his sermons are in simple, but beautiful
German, whereas his professional writings are in the customary Latin.
Meister Eckhart’s mystical
metaphysics, (such as his attribution of fertility to God, his
distinction between Gott and Gottheit, etc.) is
characteristically difficult to fathom; his proverbial dicta, on the other hand,
are a pleasure to read (“God is at home; it is us
who are out on a walk; The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which
God sees me; The more we have, the less we own; The price of not acting is much
higher than the cost of making a mistake; The knower and the known are one; God
and I are one, in knowledge,” etc.).
At a later time I intend to delve into Meister Eckhart’s mysteries in a
thorough manner, because there are some things there which are of considerable
interest to me. But now is not that time.
It is very curious and revealing
of the academic psychology of the Middle Ages, that even Eckhart’s
good-wishers, while admiring his works, were opposed to their publication on
the grounds that, while they should benefit the most astute and discerning
readers, they would do too much harm to the majority, who would be unable to
understand, and likely to misinterpret them to a dangerous extent.
Among later philosophers (we have
already mentioned Luther) Schopenhauer must have had a high level of appreciation
for Eckhart, which he expressed in the following excerpt from his magnum opus:
“If we
turn from the forms produced by external circumstances, and go to the root of
things, we’ll find that Sakyamuni (the Buddha) and Meister Eckhart ! teach the same thing; only that the former dared to express
his ideas plainly and positively, whereas Eckhart is obliged to clothe them in
the garment of the Christian myth, and to adapt his expressions thereto.” (Schopenhauer’s
Die Welt, Vol. II, Ch. XLVIII.)
In his essay Schopenhauer as
an Educator, Nietzsche says the following:
“The Schopenhauerian man voluntarily takes upon
himself the suffering involved in being truthful, and this suffering serves to destroy his own willfulness
and to prepare that complete overturning and conversion of his being, which it
is the real meaning of life to lead up to. All that exists that can be denied
deserves to be denied; and being truthful means to believe in an existence that
cannot be denied, and which is itself true and without falsehood. That is why
the truthful man feels that the meaning of his activity is metaphysical,
explicable through the laws of another and higher life, and in the profoundest
sense affirmative: however much all that he does may appear to be destructive
of the laws of this life and a crime against them. So it is that all his acts
must become an uninterrupted suffering, but he knows what Meister Eckhart also
knows: ‘The beast that bears you fastest to perfection is suffering.’” (Nietzsche’s
Schopenhauer as Educator.)
…The reader must have noticed
that I have put this last phrase in the title of this entry. It definitely
rings a bell for the Russian ‘inner’ ear, and for this reason alone (another
good reason is Eckhart’s religious mysticism, which Russia has written a whole
large library about), Meister Eckhart ought to have been a kindred spirit for
those Russians who are able to appreciate him, and their number is many.
(Unfortunately, for reasons of religious incompatibility, the Russians became familiar
with Eckhart--- and then, rather cursorily--- only in the later part of the
nineteenth century.)
No comments:
Post a Comment