Meister Eckhart by Flasch Kurt Vanides Aaron Schindel Anne

Author:Flasch, Kurt,Vanides, Aaron,Schindel, Anne
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300216370
Publisher: Yale University Press

13. Eckhart’s Intention: Commentary on John, Part 1

The Gospel of John and Philosophy

Eckhart developed a new metaphysics, a new philosophy of nature, and a new ethics as the foundation for providing a new interpretation of the Bible and of medieval Christian self-understanding. He was suspected of heresy, as he wrote, only secondarily because of his success with the people, and with “both genders,” but first of all because of his fervor for justice. His work was supposed to make a new, true, and just life possible. He conceived of this new life in less individualistic terms than is commonly assumed. Eckhart clearly said what he was looking for: the truth of life, of justice, and of a Christian self-perception: veritas vitae, iustitiae et doctrinae (In Ioh., LW 3, n. 184, 153.12).

To that end, he needed to read the Bible anew, especially Genesis and the Gospel of John. Of the four gospels, John’s is the most philosophical. It prompted the greatest number of philosophical commentaries, and among its interpreters we find not only Augustine, John Eriugena, and Thomas Aquinas, but also Johann Gottlieb Fichte in his The Way towards the Blessed Life (Berlin, 1806). According to Fichte, the Gospel of John provided a new understanding of the world and a new self-understanding of man and his fortune; it contained the model for a new philosophical paradigm. It asked its readers to abandon their superstitious idea of an orienting world of existing things and to think of the human world as a dynamism of mental processes from which ideas about the world first proceeded. It overcame the idea of the primacy of things to which properties adhere. It comprehended man and human thinking in their performance, “but by no means [as] a thinking substance, a dead body in which thought inheres.”1 I am not claiming that Fichte offers the key to Meister Eckhart, but there is no harm in thinking about his conception of man and mind before beginning to speak about Eckhart. Studying Eckhart is not rendered more historically correct simply by ignoring Fichte’s critique of man’s reified self-consciousness and continuing to fall prey to the idea that the “I” is a thing of a soul to which thinking and wanting adhere. The Gospel of John in particular links this critique with the motif of divine filiation: the logos is God and illuminates every person who comes into this world, not only those who believe in Christ. It provides the power for us to become children of God; it takes up the ancient motif of divine filiation; it speaks of new birth and divine life (John 3:5). The farewell discourses in John provide a new concept of reality and unity: “I and the Father are one,” and humans are asked to enter into this oneness. They are supposed to become as one as Jesus is one with the Father (John 17:21). The Gospel of John contains the sentence “I no longer call you slaves, but rather friends” (15:15). All that was

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