In this Lecture we are following the line of speculative Mysticism, and we have now to consider the greatest of all speculative mystics, Meister Eckhart, who was born soon after the middle of the thirteenth century.[234] He was a Dominican monk, prior of Erfurt and vicar of Thuringen, and afterwards vicar-general for Bohemia.  He preached a great deal at Cologne about 1325; and before this period had come into close relations with the Beghards and Brethren of the Free Spirit—­societies of men and women who, by their implicit faith in the inner light, resembled the Quakers, though many of them, as has been said, were accused of immoral theories and practices.  His teaching soon attracted the attention of the Inquisition, and some of his doctrines were formally condemned by the Pope in 1329, immediately after his death.

The aim of Eckhart’s religious philosophy is to find a speculative basis for the doctrines of the Church, which shall at the same time satisfy the claims of spiritual religion.  His aims are purely constructive, and he shows a distaste for polemical controversy.  The writers whom he chiefly cites by name are Dionysius, Augustine, Gregory, and Boethius; but he must have read Erigena, and probably Averroes, writers to whom a Catholic could hardly confess his obligations.[235] He also frequently introduces quotations with the words, “A master saith.”  The “master” is nearly always Thomas Aquinas, to whom Eckhart was no doubt greatly indebted, though it would be a great mistake to say, as some have done, that all Eckhart can be found in the Summa.  For instance, he sets himself in opposition to Thomas about the “spark,” which Thomas regarded as a faculty of the soul, while Eckhart, in his later writings, says that it is uncreated.[236] His double object leads him into some inconsistencies.  Intellectually, he is drawn towards a semi-pantheistic idealism; his heart makes him an Evangelical Christian.  But though it is possible to find contradictions in his writings, his transparent intellectual honesty and his great powers of thought, combined with deep devoutness and childlike purity of soul, make him one of the most interesting figures in the history of Christian philosophy.

Eckhart wrote in German; that is to say, he wrote for the public, and not for the learned only.  His desire to be intelligible to the general reader led him to adopt an epigrammatic antithetic style, and to omit qualifying phrases.  This is one reason why he laid himself open to so many accusations of heresy.[237]

Eckhart distinguishes between “the Godhead” and “God.”  The Godhead is the abiding potentiality of Being, containing within Himself all distinctions, as yet undeveloped.  He therefore cannot be the object of knowledge, nor of worship, being “Darkness” and “Formlessness.[238]” The Triune God is evolved from the Godhead.  The Son is the Word of the Father, His uttered thought; and the Holy Ghost is “the Flower of the Divine Tree,” the mutual love which unites the Father and the Son.  Eckhart quotes the words which St. Augustine makes Christ say of Himself:  “I am come as a Word from the heart, as a ray from the sun, as heat from the fire, as fragrance from the flower, as a stream from a perennial fountain.”  He insists that the generation of the Son is a continual process.