I’ve been plowing through the Penguin classics edition of Meister Eckhart’s writings for my medieval history class. It isn’t my first exposure to 13th century Christian philosopher-theologians; I have Aquinas to thank for that introduction. However, I have never read anything so scattered as Eckhart and it has taken me quite some time to even moderately digest his thoughts.

One could of course complain that as a self-proclaimed orthodox Dominican priest, his views on using ordinary men for confessors and de-emphasizing the role of sacraments is doctrinally unsound. However it is was his inability to construct consistent philosophical arguments over the period of his life that I probably find most frustrating. For in one sermon he will proclaim that God is a spark in the soul and then in another tell you to ignore that. He is in a sense, doctrinally unfaithful even to himself.

It is no wonder that he landed himself in so much trouble with the Church. As a prominent theologian at the infantile University of Paris he was influencing future generations of clerics. As a leading cleric at places like Erfurt and a preacher to the Beguines he was an influential guide to the spiritual and mystical side of Christianity. However he was so inconsistent in his teachings to the point of being confusing that the uneducated, while finding him mystically attractive, would have most likely been led into divergent means of practice. Insert heresy.

When approaching subjects like this I try to think what would the historian’s view would be if this source were our only record of a subject (it helps me keep perspective for those subjects where we do only have one source - to understand that nothing is so simple as one person's writings make it seem). If Eckhart were our only insight into Christianity we might consider it to be a philosophy that focused on the individual path to becoming God and we might try to compare it to Zen Buddhism for its transcendental qualities. We’d have no record of the church itself and no real concept of the bureaucracy of piety the papacy had created. Just to give an idea of how unorthodox his guidance is: we would probably identify its mystical qualities as descendants of the Germanic pagan religions as opposed to a descendant of the Roman and Judaic ones.