Light, Life, and Love | Page 3

general
education, he devoted the next two years to grammar, rhetoric, and

dialectic, and then the same amount of time to what was called the
Quadrivium, which consisted of "arithmetic, mathematics, astronomy,
and music." Theology, the queen of the sciences, occupied three years;
and at the end of the course, at the age of twenty-five, the brothers were
ordained priests. We find Eckhart, towards the end of the century, Prior
of Erfurt and Vicar of Thuringia, then Lector Biblicus at Paris, then
Provincial Prior of Saxony. In 1307 the master of the Order appointed
him Vicar-General for Bohemia, and in 1311 he returned to Paris. We
find him next preaching busily at Strassburg,[4] and after a few more
years, at Cologne, where the persecution of the Brethren of the Free
Spirit was just then at its height. At Strassburg there were no less than
seven convents of Dominican nuns, for since 1267 the Order had
resumed the supervision of female convents, which it had renounced a
short time after its foundation. Many of Eckhart's discourses were
addressed to these congregations of devout women, who indeed were to
a large extent the backbone of the mystical movement, and it is
impossible not to see that the devotional treatises of the school are
strongly coloured by feminine sentiment. A curious poem, written by a
Dominican nun of this period, celebrates the merits of three preachers,
the third of whom is a Master Eckhart, "who speaks to us about
Nothingness. He who understands him not, in him has never shone the
light divine." These nuns seem to have been fed with the strong meat of
Eckhart's mystical philosophy; in the more popular sermons he tried to
be intelligible to all. It was not very long after he took up his residence
at Cologne that he was himself attacked for heresy. In 1327 he read
before his own Order a retractation of "any errors which might be
found" (si quid errorum repertum fuerit) in his writings, but withdrew
nothing that he had actually said, and protested that he believed himself
to be orthodox. He died a few months later, and it was not till 1329 that
a Papal bull was issued, enumerating seventeen heretical and eleven
objectionable doctrines in his writings.
This bull is interesting as showing what were the points in Eckhart's
teaching which in the fourteenth century were considered dangerous.
They also indicate very accurately what are the real errors into which
speculative mysticism is liable to fall, and how thinkers of this school
may most plausibly be misrepresented by those who differ from them.

After expressing his sorrow that "a certain Teuton named Ekardus,
doctor, ut fertur, sacrae paginae, has wished to know more than he
should," and has sown tares and thistles and other weeds in the field of
the Church, the Pope specifies the following erroneous statements as
appearing in Eckhart's writings[5]:--1. "God created the world as soon
as God was. 2. In every work, bad as well as good, the glory of God is
equally manifested. 3. A man who prays for any particular thing prays
for an evil and prays ill, for he prays for the negation of good and the
negation of God, and that God may be denied to him.[6] 4. God is
honoured in those who have renounced everything, even holiness and
the kingdom of heaven. 5. We are transformed totally into God, even as
in the Sacrament the bread is converted into the Body of Christ. Unum,
non simile. 6. Whatever God the Father gave to His only-begotten Son
in His human nature, He has given it all to me. 7. Whatever the Holy
Scripture says about Christ is verified in every good and godlike man. 8.
External action is not, properly speaking, good nor divine; God,
properly speaking, only works in us internal actions. 9. God is one, in
every way and according to every reason, so that it is not possible to
find any plurality in Him, either in the intellect or outside it; for he who
sees two, or sees any distinction, does not see God; for God is one,
outside number and above number, for one cannot be put with anything
else, but follows it; therefore in God Himself no distinction can be or
be understood. 10. All the creatures are absolutely nothing: I say not
that they are small or something, but that they are absolutely nothing."
All these statements are declared to have been found in his writings. It
is also "objected against the said Ekardus" that he taught the following
two articles in these words:--1. "There is something in the soul, which
is uncreated and uncreatable: if the whole soul were such, it would be
uncreated and uncreatable: and this is the intelligence.[7] 2. God is not
good