Soul ground
Seelengrund is a term from late medieval philosophy and spirituality that also occurs in early modern spiritual literature. The expression coined by Meister Eckhart († 1327/1328) denotes in a figurative sense a “place” in the human soul where, according to spiritual teachings, God or the deity is present and a union of the deity with the soul can come about.
Even in antiquity , philosophers and theologians presented theses that later became prerequisites and components of the medieval doctrine of the soul base. The relevant medieval terminology also goes back to terms used by these thinkers. Ancient Stoic and Neoplatonic philosophers were convinced that there was a controlling authority in the human soul that was analogous to or of the same nature as the divine power that directs the universe. This established the possibility of a bond between mortal and error-prone people with the realm of the eternal, divine and absolutely true. Church writers took up philosophical concepts of the relationship between God and the soul and reshaped them in a Christian sense. The church father Augustine assumed that in the depths of the human spirit there was a realm, the abditum mentis , in which a hidden a priori knowledge lay.
In the 12th century, concepts were developed according to which a contemplation of God is possible in the innermost area of the soul, but it was not until the late Middle Ages that a developed doctrine of the unity of the soul with the deity in the soul's ground emerged. Its originator was Meister Eckhart, who referred to Augustine, but primarily proclaimed his own unconventional, for the time offensive doctrine of the divine in the human soul. He claimed that there is an innermost part of the soul of divine quality which he called "reason". The soul ground does not belong to creation, but stands above everything created by God. It is absolutely simple and free from all restrictive regulations and does not differ from the “deity”, the super-personal aspect of the divine. Everything created is void and has no access to God; In the uncreated, timeless soul ground, on the other hand, an experience of God is possible, because there the Godhead is always present. Eckhart described this experience as a “birth of God” in the soul's base. The prerequisite for this is "seclusion": the soul must detach itself with the utmost consistency from everything that distracts it from the divine simplicity and undifferentiatedness in its innermost being.
Eckhart's doctrine of the soul reason was condemned as heretical by the church soon after his death , but its content was partly approved in a modified form by late medieval seekers of God. In modern times it has often been viewed as an expression of mystical irrationalism . More recent philosophical historians emphasize, however, that Eckhart in no way devalued reason, but wanted to convince with a philosophical argument and understood the soul ground as intellect .
In the early modern period the concept of the soul ground or soul center lived on as a place of experience of God in spiritual literature. It was picked up by both Catholic authors and Protestant Pietism . Enlightenment thinkers gave the expression "ground of the soul" a different meaning . They denoted the place of a "dark" knowledge from which the clear one emerges.
prehistory
Antiquity
In antiquity, pagan and Christian authors developed theories of the soul with which they anticipated elements of Meister Eckhart's model. It was about a part of the soul that was regarded as divine or god-shaped or about a divine entity in it.
Early approaches
The pre-Socratic Heraklit († around 460 BC) wrote that one could not find the limits of the soul, even if one treads every path; so deep is her “ Logos ”. Heraclitus regarded the soul as a representative part of the cosmic fire, the power which, according to his teaching, constitutes all things and on which the processes in the universe depend. He also called the soul a spark from the substance of the stars.
Plato († 348/347 BC) designed a model of the soul in which he ascribed a three-part, hierarchically ordered structure to it. According to his theory, the lowest of the three parts of the soul is controlled by sensual desires and is passionate and reckless in nature. Opposed to this realm in every respect is the highest part, the realm of reason. The middle part, the “courageous”, stands between reason and desire; it falls to the task of putting into practice what reason has found to be correct. Since reason is the source of wisdom, it is naturally of the highest rank. According to the natural order, this part of the soul deserves control over the other parts and the body, because only reason can judge what is beneficial to the whole and, thanks to this insight, is capable of correct guidance. The rational part of the soul has divine properties. He is related, similar or similar to the divine, the eternal and the unchangeable; like this, he has not become and immortal. His pursuit is directed towards knowledge. The goal is not just knowledge gained through a discursive process; rather, it is primarily a matter of special experience-based knowledge of the highest order that everyone can strive for only for himself. To what extent such knowledge is actually achievable, Plato leaves open. The empirical knowledge that he means results from a kind of vision that has an intuitive and religious character and relates to a transcendent , divine area. The object of such a vision is something that does not enter into language and concept. It is "unspeakable" (árrhēton) because such an experience cannot be substantiated or communicated; it cannot be objectified and cannot be right or wrong, but is only either given to the subject or not.
The stoic idea of the soul
The Stoics took up conventional ideas - including the Platonic model - and modified them. They considered the primordial fire to be the divine power which unfolded and shaped the universe from itself and which penetrated, animated, moved and sustained it in being. They viewed human beings as a “microcosm”, as a “small world” in which the order of the “ macrocosm ” is reflected. In doing so, they assigned the human soul the role of the invigorating fire in the microcosm; they saw in her an image of the deity who controls the cosmos. This gave rise to the metaphor of the “soul spark”; the individual soul appeared as a spark ( apóspasma , torn off part) of the divine primordial fire. In the center of the soul, the Stoics assumed a guiding and coordinating authority, the hēgemonikón , which they mostly located in the heart. According to the Stoic doctrine, this soul center sets the partial functions - especially imagining, thinking and willing - in motion according to a uniform plan and arranges them towards a goal, the preservation of the whole. The hegemonicon in the heart is the ordering principle - the logos - of the human being, just as the primordial fire, which is located in the sun, plays the role of the ordering and structuring principle in the cosmos. The Logos in man agrees with the World Logo, the nature of the macrocosm and the microcosm are one and the same.
The theory of the soul of the Greek Stoics found its way into the world of the educated Romans, the relevant terms were translated into Latin and incorporated into the terminology of Roman philosophical literature. Later the Greek and Latin expressions found their way into the vocabulary of the Church Fathers. The word hegemonikon was translated or circumscribed differently: principale cordis ("main authority of the heart") in Seneca , Hieronymus , Rufinus ; principatus (“guiding principle”, “basic force”) in Cicero ; regalis pars animi ("the royal part of the spirit") in Apuleius . The well-known Roman stoic Seneca († 65) believed that the soul of the wise man, who does not allow himself to be shaken by anything, has superhuman strength; a divine power has descended into him. The greater part of this soul remained where the smaller, descended part came from. Following the Stoic tradition, Seneca used the image of the “spark” (scintilla) to illustrate the divine origin of the spirit principle in humans: star sparks, as it were, fell on earth and remained in this remote place. The Roman Emperor Mark Aurel († 180), who also professed the Stoic doctrine and wrote in Greek, claimed that the hegemonicon was invincible “if it is satisfied with itself, withdrawn”, because it does nothing that it does not wool. He compared it to a castle; whoever seeks refuge there becomes invincible.
Neo-Platonic soul concepts
The concept of a divine authority in the soul plays a central role in Plotinus († 270), the founder of Neoplatonism . According to his teaching, the immortal soul comes from an immaterial, purely spiritual world in which it is at home and enjoys bliss. But she has the possibility of descending into the body world and there temporarily connecting with a body, which she then directs and uses as a tool. This is how earthly life comes about. However, the soul does not bind itself in its entirety, but only partially to the body. “Something of her”, her highest “part”, always remains in the spiritual world. It should be noted that the term “part” is used here in a figurative sense, not in the sense of spatial division or real divisibility; the soul forms an indissoluble unity. The highest part of the soul is of divine quality, its bliss is never interrupted. Through him the soul thus has a permanent share in the whole fullness of the spiritual world, even if its embodied part gets into confusion and suffers disaster. However, this state of affairs usually remains hidden from human consciousness, because it is so stressed and overwhelmed by the sensory impressions that it is unable to grasp what the uppermost part of the soul perceives. The soul experiences the manifold needs and inadequacies of earthly existence, but the affects ( emotions ) that arise only seem to affect it. They are based on illusions, because the soul is actually - with regard to its highest and by far most important part - free from suffering. This part is permanently focused on the universal spirit ( nous ), that is to say on its content, the " platonic ideas ", which he is delighted to see. The lower parts or layers of the soul, on the other hand, are more or less turned towards the realm of the material and sensible and are therefore exposed to many evils. But if you lead a philosophical life, you can also orientate yourself towards the spiritual. Then in the ideal case a correspondence of the parts is achieved; their different functions are harmonized, the whole soul is aligned uniformly.
With his doctrine of an unassailable uppermost part of the soul, withdrawn from all earthly evils, Plotinus anticipated central elements of the medieval concept of the soul base. In the words of his pupil Porphyrios , his goal was to “raise the divine in the individual souls to the divine in space”. He had a very high conception of the dignity of the soul, which he derived from its divine aspect. His programmatic saying that he does not take part in the service is well known, because "those (the gods) have to come to me, not me to them". With the assumption that there is something divine in the soul, he created the theoretical basis for his thesis that a union of the individual with the absolutely transcendent highest principle, the one , is possible and worth striving for. He even claimed that the unity with the One, in which all being has its origin, can already be experienced during earthly life. The term hénōsis (union, becoming one) has become commonplace for such a unity experience . According to Porphyrios' statements, Plotinus claimed Henosis as a repeated act for himself. Porphyry mentioned that his teacher had had the unity experience about four times in the five years they spent together. Plotinus emphasized that the experience was sudden.
Plotin's description of Henosis agrees in essential respects with the medieval representations of the experience in the soul base. This includes the dedifferentiation associated with henosis, the transition to the formlessness of the undifferentiated, absolutely unified One; this corresponds to Master Eckhart's demand to become “wise-free”, just as God is “without wise” (undetermined). The concept of "seclusion", which is central to Eckhart's teaching, is already echoed in Plotinus, for example in his statement that the "life of the gods and divine, blessed people" is a "separation" (apallagḗ) from everything earthly ("from everything else, what is here ”), a“ flight of the one to the one ”or“ flight of the lonely to the lonely ”. According to Plotinus, one enters the seclusion in a "calm and divine fullness", in a state of immobility in which nothing distracts. He compared this to entering a sanctuary (ádyton) , the innermost chamber of a temple. This “separation” involves a highly individual self-identification with the origin, the one to whom everything that is owes its existence according to the Neoplatonic philosophy. The prerequisite for this in Plotinus, as in late medieval spirituality, is a radical separation of consciousness from everything that is not the origin. The identification with the pure, non-exclusive unity requires that one does not cling to anything that belongs to the world of the particular, of duality and diversity. A direct influence of medieval authors through Plotin's writings is impossible, since his works were unknown in Western and Central Europe at that time.
The thesis, the highest part of the soul always remain in the spiritual world, met with Iamblichos († around 320/325) and following it late antique Neoplatonists on resolute opposition. They said that the soul descends completely when it connects with a body. One of the arguments of the Iamblichus was that the assumption of a permanent communion of a soul part with the divine realm was inconsistent, because such a connection of the person could not be unconscious; rather, if there were such a community, all human beings would have to be ceaselessly happy. Also Proklos († 485), one of the most influential Neoplatonics late antiquity, Plotinus handle in position. He considered the thesis that “something of our soul stays up” to be contradictory. He argued, on the other hand, that what, according to such a model, always remains on top, can never combine with what goes down, for there must be a gulf of a principle between them. Furthermore, one should not assume that the essence of souls and that of the spiritual world and the gods are the same. Rather, the soul naturally occupies a subordinate position in the hierarchical order of the entities , because it is not a component of the spiritual world, but something that is produced by it. To the neo-Platonists of late antiquity, Plotin's optimistic assessment of the relationship of the incarnated soul (living in the body world) to higher levels appeared to be unrealistic and presumptuous. But they shared his conviction that the spiritual world of the incarnated soul is not closed and that it is absolutely desirable to connect with it. Proclus also considered an ascent to the transcendent One to be feasible. According to his teaching, the possibility of meeting the one is based on the fact that there is “the one in us”, “the one in the soul” that the Demiurge , the creator of the world, implanted there. This individual one, which is also referred to as the “blossom of the soul”, is “the most divine of that which is in us”, the “most unique” and “most unified” in man, the principle that creates his unity and diversity in unites him. It is not the same as the transcendent One, but it is analogous; it is its “image” or “seed”. Because of this similarity structure, the transcendent One is recognizable and attainable. It is necessary to become aware of the “one in us”. Proclus demanded that one should awaken the "one in us" and kindle it in glow and through it connect the soul with the transcendent one; then one should drop anchor there, as it were. For this ascent movement of the soul one needs the "deifying momentum".
Reception in ancient Christianity
The church writer Origen , a contemporary of Plotinus, took up the considerations of the pagan philosophers on the relationship between soul and deity. He transformed conventional ideas into a Christian sense by depicting the innermost realm of the human spirit as the place of God's presence in man and the meeting point of the human with the divine. There there is a direct contact with the divine in the form of a knowledge that is fundamentally different from the normal knowledge of external objects. Thus Origen introduced a distinction between normal, rational knowledge by means of the mind and knowledge of God based on a special ability of the soul that is only intended for this. In doing so, he deviated from the Platonic tradition, which did not juxtapose “natural” knowledge with “supernatural”, but traced all acts of knowledge back to the same principle, which only develops on different levels. The Platonists assumed a continuity through all forms of knowledge. Origen countered this view with the consequential separation in intellectual history between rational and irrational or supra-rational knowledge.
The extraordinarily influential church father Augustine († 430) adhered to the Platonic view, which does not differentiate between different types of knowledge of the human spirit. In his work De trinitate Augustine coined the term abditum mentis ("hiding place of the spirit" or "the secret of the spirit"). He described an area in the depths of the human spirit to which he ascribed an a priori knowledge, which he regarded as the basis of thought and knowledge. According to his theory, this knowledge is always present there, but hidden and therefore unconscious; however, it can be brought to consciousness through thought. The "more hidden depth of our memory" is the place where people find content that does not come from their stored memories, but that they think for the first time. There the “innermost word” is generated, which does not belong to any language. An insight appears in the mind that comes from an insight that was there before but was hidden in hiding.
Augustine's considerations on abditum mentis , influenced by Neo-Platonic ideas, were taken up in the Middle Ages and used for the discourse on the soul ground. However, it is unclear whether Augustine actually understood, as medieval authors believed, a specific authority and a guiding principle of the entire soul life.
High Middle Ages
In the 12th century the question of the prerequisites and the nature of the relationship between God and the soul gained new relevance. The prevailing ideas of the soul at that time were largely shaped by the Augustinian tradition. The most influential of the spiritually oriented writers were the “ Victorians ”, theologians of the Saint-Victor canon in Paris, and monks of the Cistercian order . In these circles, the possibility of knowledge of God was traced back to a “ faculty of the soul” (potentia animae) that served this purpose . This meant a special force (vis) or ability present in the human soul . The terminology originally introduced by Aristotle and later translated into Latin was used, in which the individual activities of the soul such as perceiving, thinking and moving were assigned to certain capacities, the “faculties”. These were arranged hierarchically according to the rank of their objects. The highest soul faculty, activated in the experience of God, was designated as "intellect" (intellectus) and distinguished from ratio , the faculty responsible for conceptual thinking. Some authors have described it metaphorically as an organ of the soul. So taught Hugh of St. Victor , the soul has three "eyes". With the first, the eye of the flesh, it contemplates the physical world; with the second, the eye of ratio , it contemplates itself and that which is in it. With the third eye, the eye of contemplation , let it perceive God and that which is in God, namely within itself (intra se) , for it carries God within itself. However, this eye was extinguished as a result of the original sin and now sees nothing. Therefore man can no longer perceive God directly, but is dependent on faith. Only in the promised future bliss will the ability to directly perceive God be restored.
Hugo's concept of the three eyes of the soul had a considerable impact in medieval spiritual literature. There was also the idea of a certain area or place in the soul or in the human spirit (men) where the knowledge of God came about. This area, to which the most important function was reserved, could only be the core of the soul, its innermost being, and the highest level in it. It was considered to be the actual seat of man's image in the image of God . In this sense, Richard von St. Viktor , taking up a thought of Augustine, stated that in the human spirit "without a doubt the highest is at the same time the innermost and the innermost at the same time the highest". Richard thought it possible to ascend to the "highest and innermost womb of the spirit", to grasp and hold it and to contemplate the invisible divine there. However, he pointed out that this perception cannot be brought about willingly and that it is only granted to a few. It is carried out with the spiritual sense (sensus intellectualis) , which is to be distinguished from the rational sense (sensus rationalis) . With the sense of reason man perceive his own invisible. The divine realm in the human mind is separated by a thick curtain of oblivion. Whoever goes there forgets not only everything outside, but also everything that is in himself. Even when returning to the familiar world, the curtain brings about a forgetting, but not a complete one; therefore one can later remember what has been experienced, but only in an inadequate way, no longer in the original truth and clarity.
In the first half of the 13th century, the Dutch Begine Hadewijch , who probably lived near Antwerp, described the relationship of the soul to God in a way that anticipated elements of the basic teachings of the soul in the late Middle Ages in terms of content and terminology. Hadewijch already uses the terms “ground” ( Middle Dutch gront ), “abyss” (afgront) and “bottomlessness” (grondeloesheit) . Such expressions served her to describe the mutual penetration of God and the human soul united with him. The “bottomlessness” is reminiscent of Master Eckhart's designation of the deity as “groundless reason”, but there is no evidence that he knew the writings of the Beguins. Hadewijch did not develop a theological or philosophical system, but relied on her own ecstatic experiences, which she tried to put into words. In her 18th letter she described the soul as "a bottomlessness in which God is sufficient for himself". Find his own self-sufficiency in her and she in turn in him. God is a way on which the soul comes out into its freedom, namely into the divine ground, which cannot be touched without the depth of the soul. Hadewijch presented the unity (enecheit) of God with the soul in a way that shows that she meant a deep becoming one, in which the two merge in such a way that they are really indistinguishable at least on one level.
The late medieval soul ground concepts
The starting point for the coining of the term Seelengrund was probably the use of language in Middle High German court poetry . There was talk of the "bottom of the heart" when it came to deep, intimate feelings. The metaphor of the reason for denoting something internal and deep has been carried over into the realm of spiritual literature. After the middle of the 13th century, Mechthild von Magdeburg wrote that the heart of the Mother of God Mary had "before all people the deepest basis of divine knowledge".
Elaborated theological-philosophical concepts of the soul ground did not emerge until the late Middle Ages. Their authors and main representatives have in common that they were German members of the Dominican Order ( Order of Preachers) and that they spread their basic soul teachings in German. In England, in late medieval spiritual literature, the term “reason” (grounde) was used for the nature or substance of man or soul; it is particularly common with Juliana of Norwich . There are parallels between the English and German uses of the term, but core elements of German teachings were missing in England or were only rudimentary there.
Master Eckhart
The link to tradition
Master Eckhart († 1327/1328) introduced the term “reason of the soul” into the medieval spiritual discourse. In doing so, he referred to Augustine's remarks about the "hiddenness of the spirit", which he interpreted in the sense of his theory of the soul. He often quoted the words in abdito mentis from Augustine's De trinitate . He translated them into Middle High German using the most hidden of the sêle and similar expressions . He equated the “hidden matter of the spirit” dealt with in De trinitate with what he called the soul ground. In doing so, however, he gave the ancient expression a new meaning, because his thinking went in a direction that led him far away from the concept of Augustine. The ancient church father had meant by the "hiding place" the seat of unconscious ideas (notitiae) , which concern certain contents of thought and emerge in the act of thinking into the field of consciousness (conspectus mentis) . So it was about concepts, about a latent knowledge related to individual things, which he located in the abditum mentis . Eckhart, on the other hand, understood the “bottom of the soul” to be an area from which all imagining and conceptual thinking is in principle excluded. His connection to the thought and formulation of Augustine was thus more external than content.
The distinction between God and Deity
Fundamental to Eckhart's understanding of the relationship between the soul and the divine is his distinction between “God” (in the narrower sense) and “Godhead”. In his teaching, these two expressions designate two separate levels of the reality of the divine or God in the broader sense. According to his representation, God (in the narrower sense) and deity are as different from one another as heaven and earth. On the lower level there is God in the narrower sense, that is, God in his capacity as Creator, who as such confronts his creatures. There “God” is the opposite of everything created; God has a cause and effect relationship to everything that exists outside of him. The higher level “above God”, on the other hand, is the place of the divine as “deity” or as “one-fold one”, which has no relation whatsoever to anything outside of itself. Eckhart's deity does nothing; it is not an authority that creates and thus forms a contrast to what has been created. Since it is absolute unity, it is also not the triune God in the sense of the doctrine of the Trinity, who appears in three persons, and not the Father who begat the Son Jesus Christ . Rather, it is the supra-personal, absolutely uniform aspect of the divine total reality. God, on the other hand, is personal; he maintains an I-Thou relationship with his creatures and also develops an inner-trinitarian life and relationship events within himself. The deity does not produce anything, it does not convey itself in a procreative or generating way: “God works, the deity does not work. (...) God and deity are differentiated by working and not working. "
However, in Eckhart's linguistic usage, the distinction between "God" and "Godhead" is not consistently carried out throughout. Sometimes he used the word “God” in the narrower sense only to designate the Creator, in other places in a broader sense with the inclusion of the supra-personal “deity” or with specific reference to it. What is meant can be seen from the context. The idea of “two Gods” - the God who is differentiated in himself - seems to be present even where there is no particular terminological expression.
Nothing definite can be said about Eckhart's deity, since it is beyond any differentiation. It is “wiseless”, that is, without properties by which it could be defined; it is a “groundless ground” and a “silent desert”, a “simple silence”. Just like the Neoplatonic One, it cannot have any characteristics, for every characteristic would at the same time be a limitation and as such would be incompatible with the undifferentiated character of the deity. Therefore, all qualities that characterize God, such as goodness, power or wisdom, must be denied. Not even being belongs to it, because being is also a determination and as such is to be kept away from the uncertain. Thus the statement that the deity “is” is incorrect; rather, it is about "an over-being and an over-being nothingness". With the consistent rejection of all positive statements about the deity, Eckhart followed the tradition of " negative theology ", in particular the teaching of the ancient thinker Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita .
The level on which God exists as a person with personal characteristics is separate from and subordinate to that of the Godhead. Since it is impossible to carry a determination into the undetermined, God, like everything else determinate, has no access to the impersonal aspect of the divine - unless he would divest himself of its properties and leave aside everything that constitutes its particularity. Eckhart remarked: “This is easy to see, because this one one is without manner and without peculiarity. And so: If God is ever to look into there, it must cost him all his divine names and his personal peculiarity; He has to leave that outside all the time if he should ever look inside. "
The soul and its reason
Eckhart called the soul ground the divine core area of the soul, its hidden "innermost being", which according to his teaching is timeless and space-free and in which there is complete calm. He also used a number of other names for it. Among other things, he spoke of the "spark", "light" or "Bürglein", of the "highest", "purest" or "head" of the soul. But he also emphasized that the soul base, like the deity, is actually nameless. According to Eckhart's doctrine, the outer areas in which the activities of the soul take place are to be distinguished from this unchangeable core area, which is deprived of any kind of change and remote from any activity. There it affects its environment and is in turn influenced by the environment; there her will and her desire are expressed in words and deeds, while at the same time she stores in her memory what she experiences as external influences. With its various functions, which are described in the relevant writings of Aristotle, which were authoritative in the late Middle Ages, the soul fulfills its tasks. She has to use her abilities to meet the requirements of her connection with the body and to ensure the survival of humans. In doing so she comes into contact with created and perishable things. That means incessant change, a constant becoming and passing away. The soul ground is separated from this sphere; the manifold impressions that stream in from the world of sensory perception do not reach him.
As a supra-spatial and supra-temporal fact that does not influence anything and cannot be influenced by anything, the soul ground shows agreement with Eckhart's deity. He is also similar to her in another respect: he is completely undifferentiated. In contrast to the outer areas of the soul, it has no distinguishable contents or functions that exist side by side. In the soul-ground the soul has no conceptions, neither of itself nor of anything created or of God. There she has “neither work nor understanding”. All distinctions are abolished. Just as the absolutely undifferentiated deity, detached from all beings, differs from the sphere of being and determinations, so in the soul the undifferentiated ground differs from the totality of its other areas, where inner-soul interactions take place and impressions from outside are received.
By conceiving of the soul ground as lacking in time, space and attributes, Eckhart attributed to it a divine quality that is lacking in created things. This resulted in an important, but problematic consequence for medieval theologians: the core area of the soul is not only immortal, but also uncreated. The soul is not only - as was generally assumed in the Middle Ages - immortal, but there has never been a time when its innermost part did not yet exist. In a sermon Eckhart said: "I have sometimes spoken of a light that is in the soul, that is uncreated and inexhaustible." Accordingly, the soul ground is not part of the creation created by God in time from nothing and is therefore subordinate to him; rather it is eternal and unified like the deity itself. Eckhart spoke explicitly of a “part” of the soul, the “citizen”; She is only “godlike” with this part “and not otherwise”. He vouches for the truth of this statement, for which he pledges his soul. According to his understanding, the divine in the soul is fundamentally different in nature from everything in it that is created and affects its interaction with the outside world. Since the soul base has no spatial expansion, it is obvious that expressions such as “part” or “inner” are not to be understood spatially and the terms must not be “reified” in the interpretation. Eckhart emphasized that the soul ground has nothing in common with any "things". In contrast to Augustine's abditum mentis , Eckhart's timeless and placeless soul ground is not a “thing”, he does not count as a thing, cannot be classified in Aristotle's system of categories and is therefore withdrawn from discursive thinking, just like the deity. Eckhart later distanced himself from the idea that the soul is composed of a created and an uncreated part. That is a wrong, malicious interpretation of his teaching. He did not mean that the uncreated in the soul was part of it.
For Eckhart, as a monotheistic medieval theologian, there could only be one deity, and from a philosophical point of view it was impossible to put something else next to the absolutely transcendent one. In the context of his concept of a strictly uniform deity, the “godlike” soul ground could therefore not be understood as an independent being, but had to be equated with the deity. Accordingly, the deity itself is always present in the very heart of man's soul, and this presence is what is meant when Eckhart speaks of the soul's ground. This gives the relationship between man and the divine a new basis and quality. In his capacity as a creature, man cannot reach God, his Creator. Eckhart is convinced that the gap between the eternal God and the ephemeral created is so deep that nothing created can find access to God. But since there is an uncreated area in the soul which differs in nothing from the divinity, there and only there the abyss between the Creator and his work does not exist. In the soul ground there is the perfect and indissoluble unity of the divinity with itself. From the "inner world", the "innermost of the spirit" applies: "Here God's ground is my ground and my ground God's ground." One should not consider God outside of to grasp and look at oneself, but as "my own" and as that which is in one. God is "at the bottom of the soul with all its divinity". The only task left for humans is to become aware of this fact and to draw the conclusions from it.
From the unity of the soul ground with the deity, Eckhart derived far-reaching conclusions regarding the unique rank of the human soul. He emphasized her high nobility and claimed that she was above all creatures and even above angels, she was nobler than heaven and far above it. The creatures are only traces of God and it is unworthy of him that he works in them, but the soul ground is equal to him. In the “first touch”, in which God touched and touched the uncreated and inexhaustible soul, there it was “in God's touch as noble as God himself”. According to Eckhart's teaching, a further consequence of the imperfect nature of the soul base is human freedom. Everything created is unfree. Only the human being is free who is orientated towards the soul base and is thereby “gripped” by divine justice. Such a person is no longer a servant, he serves neither God nor the creatures, because that would be incompatible with the freedom that he does not have but "is". The hierarchical relationship that exists between God and creatures is canceled here.
The breakthrough to deity in the soul base
Eckhart demands that one should not stop with God, but rather "break through" to divinity. This means that one should transcend the level of the personal, triune God in order to advance to the “single” deity. This breakthrough is a process that can only be called "knowledge" to a limited extent - at least not in the usual sense. The deity cannot be an object of knowledge, neither for itself nor for others, because where a knowing subject is separated from a known object, there is no absolute unity, and therefore the realm of the deity remains closed. In addition, the soul can only recognize something if it has a picture of it, but all pictures come from outside, i.e. not from the deity. Thus, knowledge in the normal sense cannot take place on the level of the undifferentiated deity; it is only possible in the area of the provisions and images. As an object that is sought by a subject, the deity is in principle inaccessible, although its existence is recognizable as such. Eckhart remarks: "The hidden darkness of the invisible light of the eternal deity is unrecognized and will never be recognized." Although Eckhart spoke of knowledge of God, as was customary at the time, when it comes to the divinity, only one thing can be used improper sense of "knowing" can be spoken, because there is no knower who confronts what has been known.
Eckhart assigns the “breakthrough” a central role in his teaching. He calls it - taking up a topos from the time of the Church Fathers - the birth of God in the soul. What is meant is that the soul perceives the divinity of its own nature and thus discovers the deity in its innermost being. As a result, it does not become something that it was not before, but only grasps what it is inwardly beyond time. The birth of God proceeds from the soul of the individual and grasps the soul in its entirety. For Eckhart, this is the meaning and purpose of creation. Only through the birth of God in the soul does the birth of Christ through Mary gain meaning for man. In addition, the historical birth of Christ presupposes the birth of God in Mary's soul. The birth of God in the soul is not a punctual event that comes to an end, but a never-ending process, the time of which is the “present now” in which the soul “stands”. The emphasis on the process-like nature of the event is a special feature of Eckhart's concept. He understands the birth of God as the return of the soul to the deity - its own ground and origin. The man who is closest to God can by divine grace become what God is by nature; then he is in the greatest agreement with the "image that he was in God, in which there was no difference between him and God before God created the creatures".
When the soul is seized, which is fundamentally grasped by divine influence, its receptivity and passivity are shown; she receives God. Therefore Eckhart claims that human bliss does not lie in the work, but in the “suffering” of God (to which we got lîden) . He explains: “As almighty as God is in his work, so is the soul in suffering; and that is why it is transformed with God and in God. "
The birth of God is brought about by God, who works in the soul, but man has to create the conditions for it. According to Eckhart's conviction, divine work is never arbitrary, but always lawful: it is a necessary consequence of the interaction of God's unchangeable nature with the respective circumstances. Hence the birth of God inevitably happens in the soul if the conditions for it are met. It is then a natural necessity. God, who makes it possible, could not act otherwise without giving up himself: “He must do it, be it dear to him or sorry”; “God's nature, his being and his deity depend on the fact that he has to work in the soul.” Eckhart compares God's must, in order to illustrate its involuntary nature, with what is later called the physical “horror vacui”, the disgust for emptiness was ascribed to nature. It was considered a property of nature that it does not tolerate an empty space, but prevents the creation of a vacuum everywhere. Analogously to this, according to Eckhart's presentation, the self-emptying of the person who realizes the seclusion "forces" God to seek out the secluded soul and to pour himself into it so that no "vacuum" arises in it.
Although the breakthrough to divinity abolishes all contradictions and differences and thus transcends discursive thinking, which operates with determinations, it is not an irrational process from Eckhart's point of view. Reason is not left behind. Rather, it accompanies people constantly, according to Eckhart's demand: "And people should use their reason attentively in all their works and in all things and have a reasonable awareness of themselves and their inwardness in everything." The following applies to the birth of God: "Knowledge and reason unite the soul with God. Reason penetrates pure being, knowledge proceeds; it runs ahead and breaks through. ”Eckhart assigns reason a central role in the breakthrough and an unparalleled dignity because he regards God as a pure intellect. He considers being to be the “forecourt” of God, reason for his temple: “Nowhere does God actually live more than in his temple, in reason.” Eckhart speaks of “intellect” in two ways: In some places it works about intellect in the sense of understanding as one of the faculties of the soul, that is to say about the ability of discursive knowledge that exists outside the soul ground; in another context it is the intellect which is in the soul ground and which is ultimately identical with it; that is the reason that enables man to have non-discursive, direct access to the divine. This is the only possible approach: "The soul has nothing into which God could speak except rationality."
Eckhart goes into detail about the prerequisites that must be fulfilled for the birth of God to be possible. Since it is a matter of entering into unity, everything that stands in the way of unity must be eliminated. Obstacles are not just sins and vices in the traditional sense, but simply everything ungodly and therefore impermanent. This includes in particular the “images” of the sensory objects that have been recorded, because they bind and hinder people. Eckhart emphatically contradicts the objection raised by the Aristotelians and Thomists that in the soul there are only pictures by nature and that it corresponds to their nature to be recorded through the senses and in pictures, and therefore the removal of all pictures is contrary to nature. He replies that he who thinks this way has not grasped the nobility of the soul. He explains that nothing prevents the soul from knowing God as much as time and space. Time and space are "pieces", but God is one and can only be known above them. Therefore knowledge of God is impossible as long as the soul is aware of time or space.
Eckhart explains in detail how this preparatory purification of the soul is to be achieved. Turning to the divine is incompatible with wanting and desire directed towards the world. Therefore the first task is to free oneself from all such endeavors, to consistently detach oneself from the earthly inwardly, without neglecting the fulfillment of worldly tasks. Eckhart calls the result of such a separation from the world “isolation”. The soul base is always isolated by nature. But it is important to also completely separate the other areas of the soul from “all things” so that man becomes completely empty and God can enter this emptiness. Then God can fill the whole soul. Man "should grasp God in all things and should accustom his mind to having God always present". Such an attitude ultimately leads to complete deification: “I am completely transformed into him that he affects me as his being, <namely> as one, not as the same; With the living God it is true that there is no difference whatsoever. ”Eckhart also assures that it is about nothing less than a real unity of man and God with the words:“ Some simple-minded people think they should see God as if he were standing there and she was here. It is not so. God and I, we are one. ”This demand for unity is so radical that the idea that God should find a place to work in people must be rejected. From Eckhart's point of view, behind the idea of the place of work is the concept of a certain spiritual content and a relationship between two entities that is incompatible with seclusion. Rather, what is required is that man "stands so single from God and all his works" that God, if he wants to work in the soul, does not find a place there, but nothing at all; then he must be the place where he wants to work.
A central element of the doctrine of the birth of God in the soul's ground is the thesis that it takes place directly, without any mediation: “This must happen without means,” says Eckhart; “Any kind of mediation is alien to God.” In a certain way, however, according to Eckhart's understanding, one can still speak of “mediation” in the soul's ground if one regards “silence”, the freedom from images, as the “mediating” that it of the soul enables one to find rest in God.
Eckhart vividly describes the emotional side of turning to God in the soul. He emphasizes the "great joy" and "immeasurable bliss" associated with it. To those who receive this, all human suffering appears to be comparatively insignificant. There is a “power” in the soul in which God is “constantly glowing and burning with all his riches, with all his sweetness and with all his bliss”. However, Eckhart distinguishes the experience of such bliss from a breakthrough. He thinks that like all other forces, this power has no access to the divinity in the soul base, because its absolute simplicity does not allow any outside access.
The lifeguard anchored in the soul
With his remarks Eckhart first wanted to give his listeners or readers an insight into the truth of his philosophical-theological teaching that could be obtained discursively. For him, however, such understanding was not what helps man to be born of God. Rather, he considered the life practice to be decisive in realizing seclusion. It all depends on the implementation. To make this clear, he used a play on words to point out the difference between a "reading master" and a "living master". In the Dominican order to which Eckhart belonged, a scientifically trained monk who was responsible for the training of his confreres in the educational system of the order was referred to as " reading master " . The reading master (lecturer) gave lectures and taught his students traditional material. Eckhart probably performed this function himself in Cologne. He contrasted such a purely theoretical transfer of knowledge with the work of a “master of life” who implements what the theory demands in his own life and can thus serve as a model. A saying attributed to Eckhart is that one master craftsman is more necessary than a thousand master readers. With the play on words, he drew attention to the difference between the intellectual comprehension and the internalization of a truth: what is thought can be given up or forgotten, what is internalized remains. In this sense he warned: “Man should not have an imaginary God and be satisfied with it; for when the thought passes, God also passes. One should rather have an essential God who is far above the thoughts of man and all creatures. "
According to Eckhart's judgment, the life of the human being who is oriented towards the soul base is fundamentally transformed; This gives it a meaning and value that it would otherwise never have. The birth of God gives extraordinary importance to all actions of such a person. Thanks to her, even his smallest deeds are raised far above everything that people do who have not made the breakthrough to Godhead. When someone who has grasped God steps on a stone, it is a more divine work than receiving the Eucharist without such an attitude . Anyone who has ever "peeked" (looked) into the bottom of the soul for a moment is worth a thousand gold marks as much as a false penny . Anyone who treats himself or his trusted friend better than someone who lives on the other side of the sea and whom he has never seen has “never peeked into this simple ground for a moment”.
This raises the question of the nature of the difference between a good person or life master and a sinner who does not care about God. Since the birth of God occurs in the indeterminate and the deity cannot even be called “good” because of its indeterminacy, the soul ground is beyond all moral evaluations. According to Eckhart's teaching, the soul of the good person is in no way different from that of the sinner. The entity in the soul of a person that is receptive to God is by its nature unchangeable and has no relation to his works. The moral value of human deeds does not play a role for the divine work in the soul being. Even to those who are in Hell, the nobility of nature endures forever. The difference between them and the good people consists exclusively in the fact that with these the divine light radiates from the soul base into the "outer" areas of the soul, where the soul faculties are active, and with the bad ones not. The bad person lacks the receptivity of the soul's faculties for the divine light. Eckhart adhered to the principle that the deity does nothing, i.e. does not love either, but by teaching that love flows out of her in the sense of an emanation , he postulated a relationship between her and the area in which there is love and ethical distinctions exist.
As a preacher, Eckhart attached great importance to conveying to his audience that the status of the righteous or the life master was not a privilege of a particularly qualified elite, but was accessible to everyone. The joy associated with complete isolation is not a distant goal, but within reach. None of the listeners was so coarse or so small in comprehension or so far removed from solitude that he could not find this joy “as it is truthful” “before you come out of this church today, yes, before I finish my sermon today ”.
The condemnation of the basic soul doctrine
Towards the end of his life Eckhart was denounced and charged with heresy (false doctrine, deviation from orthodoxy). An inquisition trial initiated against him in Cologne was reopened at the papal court in Avignon and brought to an end after his death. Pope John XXII. condemned some of his statements as false doctrine and banned the circulation of the works containing them. In the bull In agro dominico of March 27, 1329, seventeen theses originating from Eckhart or attributed to him were classified as erroneous or heretical and eleven others were classified as suspicious. The concept of the soul ground with its various aspects and consequences played a central role in the attacks on his teaching.
The prosecutors and the papal court found the statement that there is something uncreated in the human soul as particularly offensive. The prosecution interpreted this as an assertion that the soul is composed of the created and the uncreated and the uncreated, the divine, is one of its "forces", a soul faculty. With such an interpretation, the doctrine of the presence of the deity in the soul appeared as a degradation of God. This point was mentioned several times in the papal list of errors. The unrestricted deification during the spiritual birth of God was judged to be blasphemous because it seemed to lead to the identification of a person with God. The critics also saw this as a threat to Christ's special position as the only God-man. The Pope condemned the defendant's theses so interpreted. Eckhart, who no longer lived to see the condemnation, had defended himself against the attacks and accused his opponents of ignorance and malicious misinterpretation of his teaching.
The Franciscan Wilhelm von Ockham († 1347), a staunch opponent of the Pope, raised against John XXII. the accusation that he had failed to condemn Eckhart's absurd and fantastic theses as false doctrines. Apparently Ockham knew nothing about the convicting bull. He regarded as absurd assumptions in particular, which are connected with the concept of the uncreated soul ground and the absolute undifferentiatedness of the deity. Ockham called the assertions assumed by Eckhart that there is no distinction (distinctio) in the realm of the divine (in divinis) and that any righteous person is transformed into the divine being (essentia) , as in the case of the Eucharist the bread is transformed into the body of Christ.
Johannes Tauler
The Dominican Johannes Tauler († 1361) was one of the most well-known spiritual teachers of the late Middle Ages in German-speaking countries . He valued Eckhart's teaching and owed her significant impulses. One of the concepts he tied to was the soul ground, which, like Eckhart, he equated with the Augustinian “hiding place of the spirit”. He gave the expression abditum mentis in Middle High German with hidden appetgrunde ("hidden abyss"). He liked to characterize the innermost part of the soul as an abyss. He was referring to the passage from the Bible, Ps 42.8 EU , where the version of the Latin Bible, the Vulgate , speaks of an abyss that "calls" an abyss (invocat) . By this Tauler understood the mutual turning of the divine abyss and the abyss of the human soul. In his sermons he often went into the soul. He called it the purest, most intimate and noble, “the innermost ground where there is unity”. There God could in truth “go in” when the “mind” - the human spirit - was carried up. This reason has nothing to do with earthly circumstances; it is high above the realm of psychic powers or faculties that give life and movement to the body. He is so noble that, like God, no name can actually be given to him; Designations such as "soil" are inadequate.
Nevertheless, Tauler used different names for the soul reason, including in addition to the main expression "reason" also "spark" and "the highest person". According to his anthropology, man is made up of three people: the "beastly" person who lives according to the senses, the rational person and the "supreme, inner" person who is "god-shaped, god-formed". When the soul enters into itself, into its ground, then it becomes divine and lives a divine life.
In a sermon Tauler proclaimed that God was working in the “innermost, most hidden, deepest foundation of the soul”; from there he can just as little be separated as from himself. The soul ground possesses by God's grace everything that God possesses by nature. Tauler referred to the “pagan master” Proklos, whom he quoted in detail. Proklos had already recognized that one could never get into the ground as long as one was concerned with images and with the multiplicity instead of focusing one's attention only on the one. It is a shame that a pagan came up with it and understood it, while “we”, the Christians, stand far from this truth. The truth formulated by Proclus is the same as that proclaimed in the Gospel with the words: “The kingdom of God is in you” ( Lk 17:21 EU ); This means that the kingdom of God is only inwardly, in the ground, above all the effects of the soul forces. Tauler emphasized that there is a very pure, undisguised and reliable recognition and awareness of the “inner ground” where the kingdom of God is. However, this could not be done by means of natural reason, rather a special grace was required for it. According to Tauler's teaching, the grace required for this is not granted to a person who is sufficiently qualified for it by an arbitrary decision of God, but must inevitably be granted to him as soon as he meets all the requirements. God then has to become the active principle in man out of his own necessity of being. The need for self-release is the nature of God immanent .
Just like Eckhart, Tauler taught that the unification in the soul ground requires the elimination of all peculiarities of the human being, since these stand in the way of unity with God. Man must first withdraw into himself, overcome diversity and make his mind simple, come to spiritual unity through concentration and concentration, so that union with the simple God becomes possible. In a sermon Tauler stated that the human spirit then sinks into the divine abyss and gets lost in it, so that it does not know anything about itself; it lacks its own knowledge and effectiveness. Then he "sunk" himself and lost himself in God like a drop of water in the deep sea. Like Eckhart, Tauler understood the retreat into the soul's ground as a return that made man aware that he had been in God from eternity before he was created as a creature: “When he was in him, there was man God in God."
A fundamental difference to Eckhart's view is that Tauler viewed the soul ground as created. He considered it to be the place where God “works” in the soul or where, as he put it, the soul “has” God, but he did not take over the identification of the reason with the deity. Rather, he taught that when the uncreated divine abyss meets the created human abyss, one abyss flows into the other; then "the created nothing sinks into the uncreated nothing". By emphasizing the creaturality of the soul's ground, Tauler carefully distanced himself from possible interpretations of his statements that could have brought his spirituality close to Eckhart's theses, which were condemned as heretical by the church. In addition, in contrast to Eckhart, he did not see the reason as incorruptible; on the contrary, he warned of the harmful influences of the created, which could lead to an entanglement of the ground in bad things. He demanded that one should work the bottom of the soul with great diligence, like a farmer his field, and destroy the weeds.
In contrast to Eckhart, Tauler dealt directly with his personal experience in one of his sermons. He asserted that if man had come to the bottom of his soul in the right way and stayed there, he was a heaven of God because God dwelt in him. Such godlikeness, however, overwhelms the human body, which can hardly endure it. He himself did not get to that point in his own experience. It is true that no teacher should actually speak of something that he has not experienced himself, but if necessary it is sufficient that he love it and have it in mind and that it does not cause an obstacle.
Heinrich Seuse
The Dominican Heinrich Seuse († 1366), a student of Master Eckhart, took over the basics of his soul-base concept. However, he rarely used the word “reason” to denote the soul reason. He often spoke of the "bottom of the heart", but with which he - at least in some places - only emphatically described the heart. In his little book of truth he explained that the whole variety of properties and designations that one ascribes to God, including “Trinity”, is basically and in the “soil” (the deity) a “single unity”. The reason is the nature and essence of the deity; he is a "quiet floating darkness". His “own work” is giving birth; in the process - if one wanted to express it in the way of human reason - "deity swung himself to God". When asked whether it was not the same, Seuse replied that God and deity are indeed one, but the deity does not work and does not give birth, only God does that. This is how one has to imagine it, since human reason requires such an “otherness” in order to be able to understand. In doing so, however, one is “cheated in the imagination”, because one regards the divine as it corresponds to the way a creature understands it, and that is not appropriate to divine truth. In reality, it is something absolutely uniform.
Although Seuse thus pointed to a limit in the comprehension of reason, he emphasized in the Eckhart tradition the "high nobility" of "reasonableness" and praised the "god-shaped" reason of man. According to his teaching, the supreme, “supreme” spirit has ennobled man by shining into him from his eternal deity, and therefore God's image is “in the rational mind, which is also eternal”. The “quiet simplicity” of the nameless and “wiseless” deity is a living rationality “that understands itself”. Seuse described the "reason", taking up a paradoxical formulation by Eckhart, as "without reason". By that he meant an “abyssalness” that seems to have no bottom. But in this regard, too, he maintained that divine reality was different from human perception: what appears to the creature as an unfathomably deep abyss is itself “fathomable” (greenish) .
What Eckhart calls the breakthrough is, for Seuse, “the powerful, divesting impact” into the divine “nothingness” that eradicates all differences “in the ground” - but not in terms of being, but only in terms of human perception (according to nemunge únser half) . So it is only from the limited point of view of man, only in his consciousness, an act of union that cancels the difference between God and man; from the point of view of real being nothing changes. The prerequisite for the "impact" is the taming of the soul's forces as an achievement of the relaxed person. According to Seuse, in the ideal case, if this taming were to be completely successful, the whole universe would have to be revealed to the person who would then look into himself. The union of the soul with the Godhead requires a special grace, it does not come naturally.
Nikolaus von Kues
In the 1440s, the old conflict over Eckhart's doctrine of the imperfection of the bottom of the soul was fought again. The philosopher and theologian Nikolaus von Kues (Cusanus) presented views in 1440 in his work De docta ignorantia (On learned ignorance) , which were sharply opposed by the Heidelberg theology professor Johannes Wenck . Wenck published a combat pamphlet in 1442/43 with the title De ignota litteratura (On the unknown erudition) , in which he accused Nicholas of pantheistic heresy and irrationalism . In 1449, the attacked responded with the counter-written Apologia doctae ignorantiae (defense of learned ignorance) . Wenck fought in mainly De docta ignorantia put forward doctrine of the coincidence of opposites ( coincidentia oppositorum ) in the infinity of the One in the simple unity of God. He said that this would destroy all scientific thinking because the rules of logic would be overridden. The central idea of Cusanus came from Eckhart. Among other things, Wenck cited Eckhart's thesis - known to him only from a Latin translation - that there is “a certain castle” in the soul, which is also called “sparkle” and is so simple that even God only then consider this simplicity if he gets rid of his names and qualities. For Wenck, the doctrine of the soul ground was a damnable equation of the creator with the creature. Cusanus defended himself and Eckhart, whom he praised and quoted, but without questioning the justification of the papal intervention. He considered Eckhart to be a capable thinker who had correct views, but whose demanding statements were incomprehensible to the uneducated and small minds (like Wenck) and could easily be misunderstood. Therefore, his works are unsuitable for the public; they should be kept under lock and key.
Modern times
16th and 17th centuries
In the 16th and 17th centuries, expressions relating to the bottom of the soul were common in spiritual literature. Occasionally, such terminology was used with express reference to Tauler, as in the case of the Benedictine Louis de Blois (1506–1566) and the Jesuit Maximilian van der Sandt (Sandaeus, 1578–1656). The Carmelite Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) wrote El castillo interior (The Inner Castle) , a basic work of her spirituality. There she described the place of the soul, where the union with God takes place, as the "deepest core", the "abyss" and the "essential" of the soul, where the soul forces have nothing to do with. In its quiet center, the soul enjoys the deepest peace, while at the same time outside of this innermost realm it can experience toil and suffering. Teresa's statements are very similar to Tauler's.
John of the Cross († 1591), who also belonged to the Carmelite Order, used the term “soul ground” (fondo del alma) for the “center of the soul” . In his work Llama de amor viva (Living Love Flame) he described the contact and union of the soul with God, its bridegroom. There is talk of the “awakening” of God “in the middle and in the bottom” of the soul. The basis of the soul is "its pure and innermost being" (la pura e intima sustancia de ella) . God lives there secretly as her sole Lord, closely united with her (estrechamente unido) , and embrace her when she has freed herself from the ungodly. He dwell not only with those who love him, but in the bottom of all souls; if it weren't for that, they couldn't exist. The type of his presence is very different, it depends on the respective attitude of the person. In souls in which there are no images and forms and no inclinations towards anything created, may God dwell as in his own house; in the other, worldly oriented, he dwelt like a stranger in a strange house. His presence in the bottom of the soul is hidden because neither the devil nor the human mind, which wants to explore it, can penetrate there. People who have not yet been united with God are usually unaware of His presence in their souls.
The nun Marie de l'Incarnation (1599–1672) placed particular emphasis on experiencing the presence of God in the soul. She called the soul ground, among other things, the seat of God, the uppermost part of the soul and the innermost part of the soul. When describing her spiritual experiences, she chose formulations such as “I was strongly drawn into the bottom of my soul” or “completely withdrawn into the bottom of my soul”. She also used the term "center of the soul". She called the soul center God's dwelling place, sometimes even equating it with the God present in the soul.
18th century
In the 18th century, expressions like "soul reason" and "heart reason" were common in pietistic circles. Partly, in the sense of medieval linguistic usage, there was talk of the “ground” as the “place” of a union of man with God, especially with Gerhard Tersteegen , partly the expressions were given a strongly modified or even the opposite meaning: One now spoke of an “evil one Reason “of the heart that is corrupt and remote from God. The terms were increasingly secularized . This development was already being prepared in pietistic literature and was then fully expressed in the current of sensitivity . The base of the soul or the heart in a worldly sense is the seat of strong, deep and authentic feelings, for example in the sense of "soul friendship". Sometimes a religious connotation was still present to varying degrees, sometimes the Christian background faded and completely disappeared.
Regardless of this, a completely different, philosophical use of the term arose in Enlightenment circles in the 18th century : The bottom of the soul was understood as a place of "dark" knowledge - in contrast to the clear, distinct and therefore correct knowledge demanded by René Descartes . A cognition based only on simple sensory perception without the cognitive object as a whole having been determined on the basis of its characteristic features was considered dark. In 1739, the Enlightenmentist Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten introduced the Latin expression fundus animae ("reason of the soul") to denote the spiritual realm in which there are "dark perceptions". Baumgarten excluded this area as an object of aesthetic analysis, but tended to evaluate the darkness positively; he saw a possible enrichment in the soul base, since it contained “perfections of sensual knowledge”. According to his understanding, the dark and the clear knowledge penetrate and profile one another; the dark is involved in every human knowledge of non-simple things and facts. In contrast to ignorance, which Baumgarten judged in a purely negative way, he accorded a considerable value to the dark knowledge that emerges from the soul's ground. Baumgarten's pupil Georg Friedrich Meier found in 1752 that dark knowledge was the chaos in the soul, which was worked on by its creative power and from which it gradually put together all clear knowledge. Johann Georg Sulzer saw in the "dark ideas" the unconscious causes of behavior patterns that are difficult to explain. In 1758 he stated that it was the "matters hidden in the innermost part of the soul" that caused man to act and speak in an inappropriate way and against his own intention.
Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) made the soul ground the cornerstone of his anthropology . In his examination of Baumgarten's aesthetics , he put forward the thesis that “our strength as a person consists in the bottom of the soul”. Herder regarded the “dark abyss of the human soul” as the place where “the sensations of the animal become the sensations of a person and, as it were, mix with the soul from afar”. There is also the abyss of dark thoughts, "from which instincts and affects, and pleasure and displeasure arise afterwards." Herder imagined the soul as something composed, in which the dark proportionally predominated. He understood the dark as the origin to which all human development was bound; human existence is determined by the coexistence of dark and light. He remarked: “The whole basis of our soul are dark ideas, the most vivid, most of them, the measures [ie: mass] from which the soul prepares its finer, the strongest mainspring of our life, the greatest contribution to our happiness and misfortune . ”Herder assessed this finding in the context of his concept of the development of the individual quite positively, because he believed that everything clear, every human idea emerges from the dark ground of the soul. In 1778 he wrote that the knowing, willing soul is the image of the deity; she endeavors to shape this image on everything that surrounds her. You step back into yourself, rest on yourself, as it were, and can "turn and overcome a universe". She performed her deeds with the high feeling of being the daughter of God. At the same time, she looks into herself and perceives the basis of her skills and achievements in her dark ground. Every higher degree of ability, attention and detachment, arbitrariness and freedom lie “in this dark foundation of the most intimate charm and awareness of yourself, your strength, your inner life”.
19th and early 20th centuries
Around the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, interest in medieval spirituality increased considerably, first among romantically minded laypeople, then also among scholars. In 19th century research, as in the general public at the time, the assessment of late medieval spiritual literature was strongly influenced by catchphrases and ideas that have been criticized as problematic and in some cases misleading in recent studies. The Eckhart reception was particularly affected. The thesis that the innermost core of the human soul was uncreated and godlike, and the demand for the deification of man, were often classified as pantheistic or tending towards pantheism, but there was also opposition to this. Some statements in the pantheism controversy were associated with evaluations that were influenced by the person making the judgment; Confessional perspectives asserted themselves. In addition, the doctrine of the absolute undifferentiation of the deity and its equation with the innermost part of the human soul was considered "mystical" in the sense of a contrast to the rational way of thinking and argumentation of the scholastic scholars of the late Middle Ages.
The research of the Dominican Heinrich Denifle (1844–1905) initiated a turning point . Denifle showed Eckhart's roots in the scholastic tradition. However, from a Thomistic point of view, he strongly criticized him as an incompetent scholastic who had partly only adopted older ideas and partly represented confused, "pathological" views. To the extent that it was original, his theology was untenable, and its ecclesiastical condemnation was entirely justified. Cusanus had wrongly defended him against Wenck's criticism. Eckhart was not a real pantheist, but he did put forward individual pantheistic theses. Denifle polemicized against all previous research and accused Protestant scholars of denominational bias. His pointed statement met with disagreement in the professional world, but had a strong and lasting influence on research. The influential Thomist Martin Grabmann (1875–1949), a student of Denifle, stood up for the interpretation of his teacher and shared his value judgment. He brought Eckhart's conception of God close to Averroism , the medieval doctrine of the unity of the intellect, which for the Averroists is only one and the same in all people, which excludes an individual immortality of the soul. Distinguished representatives of the contrary opinion were Otto Karrer (1888–1976) and Alois Dempf (1891–1982). They considered Eckhart's position, including the basic doctrine of the soul, to be consistent and defensible within the framework of Catholicism.
In public, the conventional image of Eckhart's extra-rational mysticism lived on and intensified in the first half of the 20th century. This was often associated with the idea that his understanding of God and souls was an expression of a typically German sentiment and had an anti-church thrust. Herman Büttner's translation of Middle High German works into modern German contributed significantly to the formation and popularization of an anti-Catholic Eckhartbild. It was published by Eugen Diederichs from 1903 to 1909 and achieved an extraordinarily wide impact. Büttner translated very freely, incorporating his own interpretations. His core idea was that when a person descends into his soul base, there also experiences the world base, the “one eternal base”. Bliss lies in the experience of essential unity with God. Those who have experienced God in their inner being no longer need an external mediator and redeemer, the church is then recognized as superfluous. Well-known intellectuals such as Julius Hart (1859–1930), Arthur Drews (1865–1935) and Leopold Ziegler (1881–1958) followed Büttner's view or took similar views.
The doctrine of the soul found enthusiastic approval from the neo-Kantian Paul Natorp (1854–1924), who, like many of his contemporaries, saw in it the foundation of a “peculiarly German worldview”. Natorp found that Eckhart's language was definitely that of the discoverer, who uttered “never heard of” and was not bound by any dogma or any written or spoken word. For Eckhart, only binding was what he was able to affirm “from his own innermost godly life”. He started out from the exclusive opposite of God and soul. The becoming one of the soul with God is the eternal becoming of God and at the same time the becoming of man. The “leaving” of everything created and even of God himself as a prerequisite for the birth of God in the human soul does not mean, according to Natorp's understanding, “a throwing away, but, at first logically speaking, a radical abstraction that intends nothing other than to go back to the last inner point just like everyone and every division, so even the ultimate counterpart of God and soul understands itself ”. This results in the liberation from the mediation of the church and any mediating authority as well as from the consciousness of sin, the "worst tormentor of the soul of medieval people". From the basic doctrine of the soul it follows “an exaltation of the human spirit as it has never been expressed before and which could not be surpassed by anything later”.
Recent research
The role of the intellect
An often discussed topic of soul ground research and debate is the role of intellect or reason, which is heavily weighted in much of the recent research literature. Kurt Flasch emphasizes in his Eckhart monograph, published in 2010, that the doctrine of the birth of God, "which sounds simple and pious at first, entangles the reader in philosophical premises". Eckhart did not regard the birth of God in the soul as a “supernatural additional gift” from God, but as an accomplishment in the nature of the soul. Flasch asserts that Eckhart equated the nature of the soul with the intellect and thus answered the question of what is highest in the soul philosophically. He had not the slightest doubt that the intellect could recognize the soul ground, "that is, itself". This approach has often been disregarded, which has led to misinterpretations. In particular, Flasch criticizes the point of view of the well-known Germanist Josef Quint (1898–1976), who critically edited Eckhart's sermons and translated them into modern German. Until the 1970s, Quint dominated the field through text editions and interpretations, thereby encouraging a misguided, irrationalist interpretation. In reality, Eckhart, as a philosopher, placed particular emphasis on his claim that he spoke in the light of natural reason, i.e. that he did not presuppose any beliefs in his argumentation. Even in his vernacular sermons about the birth of God, he wanted to convince with rational justifications, not with reference to the Bible.
Otto Langer puts forward a completely different interpretation. He claims that trying to understand the doctrine of the soul ground from an intellectual theory is misleading. Rather, the correct understanding can be obtained from ethical practice. Eckhart taught that right self-love as love for one's own "humanity" coincides with right neighborly love as love for "humanity" in others; the man who lives according to his nature, his "humanity", is one with God. In the love of neighbor man realize the possibility to be one with God in the soul-ground.
The question of personal experience
The question of whether there is a personal experience behind Eckhart's statements about the birth of God in the soul ground and in what sense such is to be interpreted, is answered differently. From the fact that he never commented on it, it was inferred in older research that a “spiritual mysticism” was presented in his works that was not based on the author's own experience. Kurt Ruh turned against this hypothesis . He came to the conclusion that both what Eckhart preached about the soul ground and the way in which he expressed himself “in an emphatic-charismatic manner of speaking” presupposed personal experience. In addition, Eckhart had made a veiled commitment to such an experience. His declarations of truth are to be understood in this sense. Shizuteru Ueda and Peter Reiter made similar statements .
Alois M. Haas examined this question from a different perspective . He said that one was wrong to speak of "a mystical experience that Eckhart is said to have been part of". It is overlooked that such an expression does not do justice to Eckhart's understanding of the relationship between eternity and time. For him, “the category of the new has been removed from the field of experience”. The “breakthrough” is misunderstood if it is translated into the categorical of the human world of experience. Eckhart was not concerned with isolated individual experiences of God or experiences of union with God. Rather, the breakthrough consists in the fact that man's being one with God is revealed as a fundamental human constitution. Eckhart's approach is characterized by “lack of interest in all forms of psychological concretization”. For him, isolated, punctual experience as the perception of an object or a mental event as a present falls under the category of “quality”, so it belongs to the things whose elimination is the prerequisite for the birth of God. Nevertheless, it is legitimate to call the breakthrough an “experience” if one does not misunderstand the term psychologically.
Erwin Waldschütz's position is similar . He assumed that Eckhart himself - expressed metaphorically - had "looked into" the ground, which should not be understood as a gaze of God in the sense of an esoteric act, but as a "basic experience". It was not about experience in the sense of individual experiences of a sensual or psychological kind, but about experience in the sense of basic experience. This is "a completely independent mode of human self-fulfillment", which can be clearly distinguished from recognizing, wanting, feeling and perceiving and is able to justify the other modes of self-fulfillment. The fundamentals of the basic experience are concern and demands, indivisible immediacy, wisdom, openness for the whole and every person, commitment and the urge to interpret and communicate.
Bernard McGinn found that for Eckhart, constant oneness with God was not an “experience” in any ordinary sense of the term and not an act of knowing “something”, but a new way of knowing and acting. It is what happens when someone tries to relate all of his actions to the fused identity of the ground.
The question of individuality and subjectivity
The question of what role the individual and the individual can play in his philosophy in view of the absolute undifferentiation of Eckhart's deity and soul ground is controversial in recent research. A direction to which Kurt Flasch, Burkhard Mojsisch , Loris Sturlese and Saskia Wendel belong, interprets the soul ground doctrine as an expression of a subject's thought . With such interpretations, Eckhart is sometimes ascribed an understanding of subjectivity that makes his concept appear as a forerunner of modern transcendental philosophy. Other researchers (Alois Haas, Otto Langer, Niklaus Largier) speak out emphatically against the subject-theoretical interpretation and consider it completely wrong.
Burkhard Mojsisch formulates his subject-theoretical interpretation pointedly. He wants to correct the conventional opinion that a philosophical theory of the self was alien to the theorists of the Middle Ages, making Eckhart a key witness. This speaks to the I as such, that is to say to man insofar as he is nothing other than I, free from any commonality with others, including God, which determines the I as I. The object of Eckhart's theory is the self-development of a transcendental ego free of any presuppositions , which justifies itself and is constituted by the freedom of its self-determination. The I, which exists in the concreteness of individuality, only knows and wants to be itself as I. It is identical with the soul ground. Saskia Wendel largely adopts Mojsisch's results. She thinks that Eckhart's demand for a reflexive self-knowledge as a gathering inside and sinking into the bottom of the soul presupposes what modern philosophy thinks as a subject. His knowledge of the absolute can be described as an intellectual view in the sense of the idealistic philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte . For Fichte, intellectual intuition is nothing other than knowledge of the absolute self. It is inevitably linked to the subject thought not only in Fichte, but already in Eckhart. The basic soul doctrine does not result in the dissolution of the individual, but in his or her independence and uniqueness. This is preserved because the human ego is the condition of the possibility of the uniqueness and particularity of the individual. Thus the salvation of individuality depends on the subjectivity of the individual, which is expressed in the "I".
Mojsisch's interpretation is met with vehement criticism from Otto Langer and Alois Haas. Langer thinks that Eckhart doesn't even have an ego theory. He does not use the word "I" in the sense of an intellectual theory, but quite functionally. The soul ground must not be interpreted as I. For Alois Haas, the definition of the I as transcendental being is a “grotesque overinterpretation” of Eckhart's statements. The individuality is not a topic of his thinking, but as a presupposed fact an obstacle that he wants to remove. He operates the annihilation of the ego in a systematic way. For him, human autonomy is only conceivable under the conditions of being one with God. It is not permissible to reinterpret such a divine autonomy as a human one, as is often done in more recent Eckhart research. Haas considers Eckhart's conception of the soul ground or soul spark to be a radical conception of the creature's absolute dependence on God, "which hardly gives the creature any chance of ontological independence". Precisely because Eckhart upholds the idea of an ultimate equality between man and God and illuminates it from all possible perspectives, he is a normative figure of spiritual life. Erwin Waldschütz also rejects the intellectual-theoretical interpretation of the "reason". He refuses to “degrade” the birth of God to the condition of the possibility of the ego; it should not be interpreted as the constitution of an ego. Eckhart wanted to overcome even the most subtle insistence on one self. Between the basic being of God and that of man or the soul he did not assume an identity in terms of being; the reason cannot be grasped in terms of being. Rather, being basic is a being-in-relationship and establishing a relationship. The identity turns out to be the equality of the relationship, which only ever exists in one event.
Karl Heinz Witte states that Eckhart did not regard the individual as something accidental and trivial. The birth of God always takes place in a certain individual. For Eckhart, salvation or “justice” is not an objective fact, but something that one appropriates individually. It always depends on "me". What is meant by this is “no whatness I have or am predictive”, no empirical self with its personal characteristics and its history; Rather, for Eckhart, this counts to the created and thus to nothing. Rather, it is about “I” as “my pure, unqualified eternal being, better my is”, about a not ontologically understood “is” or “I”.
literature
Overview representations
- Peter Heidrich : Soul reason . In: Historical Dictionary of Philosophy , Volume 9, Schwabe, Basel 1995, Sp. 93–94
- Héribert Fischer, Fernand Jetté : Fond de l'âme. In: Dictionnaire de Spiritualité , Volume 5, Beauchesne, Paris 1964, Sp. 650–666
General examinations
- Bernard McGinn : The Mysticism of the Occident . Volume 4, Herder, Freiburg et al. 2008, ISBN 978-3-451-23384-5 , pp. 148–166 (general), 208–220, 265–267, 290–330 (Eckhart), 395–407 (Seuse) , 427-452 (Tauler)
- Peter Reiter: The reason for the soul. Meister Eckhart and the tradition of the theory of the soul. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1993, ISBN 3-88479-807-3
- Saskia Wendel : Affective and incarnated. Approaches to German mysticism as a subject-theoretical challenge. Pustet, Regensburg 2002, ISBN 3-7917-1824-X , pp. 132–228
Investigations into the soul base with Meister Eckhart
- Bernward Dietsche: The soul reason after the German and Latin sermons . In: Udo M. Nix, Raphael Öchslin (ed.): Meister Eckhart the preacher. Festschrift for the Eckhart commemorative year. Herder, Freiburg 1960, pp. 200-258
- Rodrigo Guerizoli: The internalization of the divine. A study of the cycle of God's birth and the sermon of Master Eckhart's poverty. Brill, Leiden / Boston 2006, ISBN 978-90-04-15000-3
- Shizuteru Ueda : The birth of God in the soul and the breakthrough to deity. Gütersloh publishing house Gerd Mohn, Gütersloh 1965
- Erwin Waldschütz : Thinking and experiencing the reason. On the philosophical interpretation of Meister Eckhart. Herder, Vienna et al. 1989, ISBN 3-210-24927-X
Investigations into the soul ground with other authors
- Markus Enders : Serenity and Seclusion - Studies on German Mysticism. Kovač, Hamburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-8300-3636-4 , pp. 247-271 (on Seuse)
- Gösta Wrede: Unio mystica. Problems of the experience with Johannes Tauler. Almqvist & Wiksell, Uppsala 1974, ISBN 91-554-0238-0
- Paul Wyser: The soul reason in Tauler's sermons . In: Living Middle Ages. Festival ceremony for Wolfgang Stammler . Universitätsverlag, Freiburg (Switzerland) 1958, pp. 204-311
Remarks
- ↑ Heraklit, fragment DK 22 B 45. For interpretation see Martina Stemich Huber: Heraklit. The wise man's career , Amsterdam 1996, pp. 107–117.
- ↑ Heraklit DK 22 A 15. See Geoffrey S. Kirk et al .: Die vorsokratischen Philosophen , Stuttgart / Weimar 2001, pp. 218, 224.
- ↑ Christina Schefer: Plato's untold experience. Another approach to Platon , Basel 2001, pp. 25–49, 223–225. On Plato's doctrine of the parts of the soul, see Michael Erler : Platon , Basel 2007, pp. 383–386; Wolfram Brinker: Soul . In: Christian Schäfer (Ed.): Platon-Lexikon , Darmstadt 2007, pp. 253-258.
- ↑ Endre von Ivánka : The 'apex mentis' . In: Werner Beierwaltes (Ed.): Platonism in the Philosophy of the Middle Ages , Darmstadt 1969, pp. 121–146, here: 123–128; Heinrich Ebeling: Meister Eckharts Mystik , Stuttgart 1941, pp. 212-218.
- ↑ Evidence is compiled by Endre von Ivánka: The 'apex mentis' . In: Werner Beierwaltes (Ed.): Platonism in the Philosophy of the Middle Ages , Darmstadt 1969, pp. 121–146, here: p. 133 and note 27.
- ↑ Seneca, Epistulae morales 41.5.
- ↑ Seneca, De otio 5.
- ^ Marcus Aurelius, Paths to oneself, 8:48. On the approaches in the Roman Empire, see Heinrich Ebeling: Meister Eckharts Mystik , Stuttgart 1941, pp. 218–224.
- ↑ Plotin, Enneades III 4.3; IV 8.8.
- ↑ See on this teaching Thomas Alexander Szlezák : Plato and Aristoteles in the Nuslehre Plotins , Basel 1979, pp. 167–205; Carlos G. Steel: The Changing Self , Brussels 1978, pp. 34-38.
- ^ Dietrich Roloff: Plotin: Die Großschrift III, 8 - V, 8 - V, 5 - II, 9 , Berlin 1970, p. 159 f.
- ^ Porphyrios, Vita Plotini 2.
- ^ Porphyrios, Vita Plotini 10.
- ↑ Porphyrios, Vita Plotini 23. See Werner Beierwaltes: Thinking of One , Frankfurt a. M. 1985, pp. 123-147.
- ↑ Pieter A. Meijer: Plotinus on the Good or the One (Enneads VI, 9) , Amsterdam 1992, p. 304 and note 859.
- ↑ Plotinus, Enneades VI 9:11.
- ↑ See on this and on the parallels in Eckhart Werner Beierwaltes: Thinking of the One , Frankfurt a. M. 1985, p. 145 note 59; Peter Reiter: Der Seele Grund , Würzburg 1993, pp. 142–153, 157 f.
- ↑ On the argumentation of Iamblichus see Carlos G. Steel: The Changing Self , Brussels 1978, pp. 38–45.
- ↑ Werner Beierwaltes: Thinking of One , Frankfurt am Main 1985, pp. 174-182; Carlos G. Steel: The Changing Self , Brussels 1978, pp. 45–51.
- ↑ See Werner Beierwaltes: Thinking of One , Frankfurt am Main 1985, pp. 178–180; Werner Beierwaltes: Proklos , 2nd, revised edition, Frankfurt a. M. 1979, pp. 289, 368-378.
- ↑ Endre von Ivánka: The 'apex mentis' . In: Werner Beierwaltes (Ed.): Platonism in the Philosophy of the Middle Ages , Darmstadt 1969, pp. 121–146, here: 132–138.
- ↑ Endre von Ivánka: The 'apex mentis' . In: Werner Beierwaltes (Ed.): Platonism in the Philosophy of the Middle Ages , Darmstadt 1969, pp. 121–146, here: 135.
- ↑ Augustine, De trinitate 14,7,9.
- ↑ Augustine, De trinitate 15:21, 40.
- ↑ Andreas Speer : mentis Abditum . In: Alessandra Beccarisi et al. (Ed.): Per perscrutationem philosophicam , Hamburg 2008, pp. 447–474, here: 447–457. Cf. Saskia Wendel: Affektiv und incarniert , Regensburg 2002, pp. 136–140; Rodrigo Guerizoli: The internalization of the divine , suffering 2006, p. 13 f .; Burkhard Mojsisch: The theory of the intellect in Dietrich von Freiberg , Hamburg 1977, p. 42 f .; Alain de Libera: Introduction à la mystique rhénane , Paris 1984, p. 44 f.
- ^ Hugo von St. Viktor, De sacramentis Christianae fidei 1,10.
- ^ Richard von St. Viktor, Beniamin maior 4,23. See Marc-Aeilko Aris : Contemplatio , Frankfurt 1996, pp. 120-123.
- ↑ See Bernard McGinn: Die Mystik im Abendland , Vol. 3, Freiburg 1999, pp. 385–387 (p. 386 text and translation of the letter) and Vol. 4, Freiburg 2008, p. 155 f.
- ↑ Udo Nix: Master Eckhart's mystical vocabulary in the light of energetic consideration of language , Düsseldorf 1963, pp. 73, 104 f .; Hermann Kunisch : The word "reason" in the language of German mysticism of the 14th and 15th centuries , Osnabrück 1929, pp. 3-15.
- ↑ Mechthild von Magdeburg, The flowing light of the divinity 5:23.
- ↑ Wolfgang Riehle : Studies on the English mysticism of the Middle Ages with special consideration of their metaphor , Heidelberg 1977, pp. 211–226.
- ↑ Michael Egerding offers a compilation of passages in Eckhart's works where he uses the metaphor “reason” or expressions derived from this word: Die Metaphorik der Latemedalterlichen Mystik , Vol. 2, Paderborn 1997, pp. 283–289.
- ^ Documents from Andreas Speer: Abditum mentis . In: Alessandra Beccarisi et al. (Ed.): Per perscrutationem philosophicam , Hamburg 2008, pp. 447–474, here: p. 460 note 45.
- ^ Saskia Wendel: Affective and incarnated , Regensburg 2002, pp. 189 f .; Andreas Speer: Abditum mentis . In: Alessandra Beccarisi et al. (Ed.): Per perscrutationem philosophicam , Hamburg 2008, pp. 447–474, here: 453, 460–474; Karl Heinz Witte: Meister Eckhart: Life from the bottom of life , Freiburg / Munich 2013, p. 347 f.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 109, The German Works , Vol. 4/2, Delivery 1/2, ed. by Georg Steer, Stuttgart 2003, p. 772 f. For this concept see Mauritius Wilde: Das neue Bild vom Gottesbild , Freiburg (Switzerland) 2000, pp. 217–222; Michel Henry : The inner structure of immanence and the problem of its understanding as revelation: Meister Eckhart. In: Rolf Kühn , Sébastien Laoureux (Ed.): Meister Eckhart - Knowledge and Mysticism of Life , Freiburg 2008, pp. 13–33, here: 27 f .; Till Beckmann: Studies on the determination of life in Meister Eckhart's German sermons , Frankfurt am Main 1982, pp. 134–144; Shizuteru Ueda: The birth of God in the soul and the breakthrough to deity , Gütersloh 1965, pp. 99–115.
- ↑ See Mauritius Wilde: Das neue Bild vom Gottesbild , Freiburg (Switzerland) 2000, pp. 220–222.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermons 42 and 48, The German Works , Vol. 2, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1971, pp. 309, 420 f .; Sermon 2, The German Works , Vol. 1, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1958, p. 43 f. For the terms "desert" and "wasteland" in this context see Till Beckmann: Studies for the determination of life in Meister Eckhart's German sermons , Frankfurt am Main 1982, pp. 122–125.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 21, The German Works , Vol. 1, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1958, pp. 361–364. See Mauritius Wilde: Das neue Bild vom Gottesbild , Freiburg (Switzerland) 2000, pp. 224–226.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 83, The German Works , Vol. 3, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1976, p. 441 f.
- ↑ On deity as “nothing” or “nothingness” see Burkhard Mojsisch: Meister Eckhart , Hamburg 1983, p. 106 f .; Shizuteru Ueda: The birth of God in the soul and the breakthrough to deity , Gütersloh 1965, pp. 115–119.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 2, The German Works , Vol. 1, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1958, p. 43.
- ↑ See on this metaphor Alois M. Haas: Mystische Denkbilder , Freiburg 2014, pp. 239–248.
- ↑ See also Karl Heinz Witte: Meister Eckhart: Leben aus demgrund des Lebens , Freiburg / Munich 2013, p. 188 f.
- ↑ For the definition of terms and terminology, see Peter Reiter: Der Seele Grund , Würzburg 1993, pp. 92–99, 406–421; Benno Schmoldt : The German conceptual language Meister Eckharts , Heidelberg 1954, pp. 49–62; Susanne Köbele: Pictures of the Untold Truth , Tübingen / Basel 1993, pp. 173–180.
- ↑ Bernward Dietsche: The soul reason after the German and Latin sermons . In: Udo M. Nix, Raphael Öchslin (eds.): Meister Eckhart der Prediger , Freiburg 1960, pp. 200–258, here: 204–207; Shizuteru Ueda: The birth of God in the soul and the breakthrough to deity , Gütersloh 1965, pp. 62–66.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 101, The German Works , Vol. 4/1, ed. by Georg Steer, Stuttgart 2003, p. 343 f.
- ↑ Eckhart's model of the soul is described in detail using the relevant passages in Peter Reiter: Der Seele Grund , Würzburg 1993, pp. 283-405. Cf. Bernward Dietsche: The soul reason after the German and Latin sermons . In: Udo M. Nix, Raphael Öchslin (ed.): Meister Eckhart der Prediger , Freiburg 1960, pp. 200–258, here: 202–208.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 48, The German Works , Vol. 2, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1971, p. 418.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 2, The German Works , Vol. 1, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1958, p. 44 line 5 f.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 46, The German Works , Vol. 2, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1971, p. 382 line 9.
- ↑ Saskia Wendel: Affective and incarnated , Regensburg 2002, pp. 188–190, 195 f.
- ↑ Kurt Flasch: Meister Eckhart , Munich 2010, p. 303.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 5b, The German Works , Vol. 1, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1958, p. 90 line 8. Further relevant passages are compiled by Peter Reiter: Der Seele Grund , Würzburg 1993, p. 486–488.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 6, The German Works , Vol. 1, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1958, p. 113 line 2 f.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 10, The German Works , Vol. 1, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1958, p. 162 line 5 f.
- ^ See on the unity of the soul ground and the ground of God Erwin Waldschütz: Thinking and experiencing the ground , Vienna 1989, pp. 134-143.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 10, The German Works , Vol. 1, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1958, p. 172 lines 6-8. Relevant passages are compiled by Peter Reiter: Der Seele Grund , Würzburg 1993, pp. 294–301.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 28, The German Works , Vol. 2, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1971, p. 62 f. See on Eckhart's term “justice” Kurt Flasch: Meister Eckhart , Munich 2010, pp. 52–55.
- ↑ Jörg Gabriel: Return to God , Würzburg 2013, p. 208 f.
- ↑ See Shizuteru Ueda: The God Birth in the Soul and the Breakthrough to Godhead , Gütersloh 1965, pp. 125–129.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 51, The German Works , Vol. 2, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1971, p. 476 f.
- ↑ See on the knowledge of God Karl Albert : Meister Eckhart and the philosophy of the Middle Ages , Dettelbach 1999, pp. 341–358; Norbert Winkler: Meister Eckhart for an introduction , Hamburg 1997, pp. 97–99, 111–113; Rodrigo Guerizoli: The internalization of the divine , Leiden 2006, pp. 104–111.
- ^ Saskia Wendel: Affective and incarnated , Regensburg 2002, pp. 133-136; Peter Reiter: Der Seele Grund , Würzburg 1993, pp. 202-218.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 38, The German Works , Vol. 2, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1971, p. 227 line 6 - p. 228 line 3.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 10, The German Works , Vol. 1, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1958, p. 171 line 8 f.
- ↑ Rodrigo Guerizoli: The internalization of the divine , suffering 2006, p. 53 f .; Kurt Flasch: Meister Eckhart , Munich 2010, pp. 82 f., 86; Jörg Gabriel: Return to God , Würzburg 2013, pp. 218–221, 224; Hans Hof: Scintilla animae , Lund / Bonn 1952, pp. 177-179. On Eckhart's understanding of time, cf. Karl Albert: Meister Eckhart and the philosophy of the Middle Ages , Dettelbach 1999, pp. 304-314.
- ↑ See Shizuteru Ueda: The God Birth in the Soul and the Breakthrough to Godhead , Gütersloh 1965, pp. 121–125.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Tract 3, The German Works , Vol. 5, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1963, p. 400 f.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 102, The German Works , Vol. 4/1, ed. by Georg Steer, Stuttgart 2003, pp. 422-425. See Kurt Flasch: Meister Eckhart , Munich 2010, pp. 92–94; Shizuteru Ueda: The birth of God in the soul and the breakthrough to deity , Gütersloh 1965, pp. 87 f., 131.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 6, The German Works , Vol. 1, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1958, p. 109, line 6 f.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 109, The German Works , Vol. 4/2, Delivery 1/2, ed. by Georg Steer, Stuttgart 2003, p. 764 f .; see. Sermon 4, The German Works , Vol. 1, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1958, p. 72 lines 8-11. See Mauritius Wilde: Das neue Bild vom Gottesbild , Freiburg (Switzerland) 2000, pp. 264–269.
- ↑ See Shizuteru Ueda: About Master Eckhart's usage of language: "God must ..." . In: Gerhard Müller , Winfried Zeller (eds.): Glaube, Geist, Geschichte , Leiden 1967, pp. 266–277, here: 266–271; Rodrigo Guerizoli: The internalization of the divine , suffering 2006, pp. 147–149.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Tract 2, The German Works , Vol. 5, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1963, p. 210 lines 1-3.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 3, The German Works , Vol. 1, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1958, p. 48 line 8 - p. 49 line 2. See Kurt Flasch: Meister Eckhart , Munich 2010, p. 50 f.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 9, The German Works , Vol. 1, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1958, p. 150 lines 1-4. See on Eckhart's intellectual doctrine Karl Albert: Meister Eckhart and the philosophy of the Middle Ages , Dettelbach 1999, pp. 342–356; on the ground of God as pure intellect Peter Reiter: Der Seele Grund , Würzburg 1993, pp. 469–484.
- ↑ Udo Kern: “God's being is my life” , Berlin 2003, p. 29 f .; Saskia Wendel: Affective and incarnated , Regensburg 2002, pp. 183-190; Peter Reiter: Der Seele Grund , Würzburg 1993, pp. 426–443; Bernard McGinn: Die Mystik im Abendland , Vol. 4, Freiburg 2008, pp. 265–267.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 43, The German Works , Vol. 2, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1971, p. 322 line 7 - p. 323 line 1.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 2, The German Works , Vol. 1, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1958, pp. 24-26. See Mauritius Wilde: Das neue Bild vom Gottesbild , Freiburg (Switzerland) 2000, pp. 12–15.
- ↑ See Rodrigo Guerizoli: The internalization of the divine , Leiden 2006, pp. 80–83; Peter Reiter: Der Seele Grund , Würzburg 1993, p. 340.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 68, The German Works , Vol. 3, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1976, p. 148.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Tract 2, The German Works , Vol. 5, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1963, p. 203 lines 1-2. Cf. Shizuteru Ueda: The Birth of God in the Soul and the Breakthrough to Godhead , Gütersloh 1965, pp. 66–81, 135–139.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 6, The German Works , Vol. 1, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1958, p. 111, line 6 f. (For text corruption see there note 1 and the translation into modern German p. 455).
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 6, The German Works , Vol. 1, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1958, p. 113, line 6 f.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 52, The German Works , Vol. 2, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1971, p. 500 f. See Burkhard Mojsisch: Meister Eckhart , Hamburg 1983, p. 138; Rodrigo Guerizoli: The internalization of the divine , Leiden 2006, pp. 198–204; Andreas Speer: In the secret of the spirit: "abditum mentis" with Augustine and Meister Eckhart . In: Markus Pfeifer, Smail Rapic (ed.): Das Selbst und seine Anderes , Freiburg / Munich 2009, pp. 56–80, here: 77–80.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 71, The German Works , Vol. 3, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1976, p. 227 line 3; Tract 1, The German Works , Vol. 5, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1963, p. 114 line 21. See Michael Egerding: Got confess , Frankfurt a. M. 1984, pp. 123-130, 157 f .; Rodrigo Guerizoli: The internalization of the divine , Leiden 2006, pp. 68–73.
- ↑ Rodrigo Guerizoli: The internalization of the divine , suffering 2006, pp. 88-90.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 2, The German Works , Vol. 1, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1958, pp. 32-36, 42 f.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Tract 2, The German Works , Vol. 5, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1963, p. 205 lines 5-9; "Essential" for those who were Middle High German .
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Tract 2, The German Works , Vol. 5, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1963, p. 199 f.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 5b, The German Works , Vol. 1, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1958, p. 90 lines 9-11. Shizuteru Ueda mentions other relevant passages: The birth of God in the soul and the breakthrough to deity , Gütersloh 1965, p. 86 f.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 5b, The German Works , Vol. 1, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1958, p. 87 f.
- ↑ Rodrigo Guerizoli: The internalization of the divine , suffering 2006, pp. 122–127.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 52, The German Works , Vol. 2, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1971, p. 496.
- ↑ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 83, The German Works , Vol. 3, ed. by Josef Quint, Stuttgart 1976, p. 113. See Bernard McGinn: Die Mystik im Abendland , Vol. 4, Freiburg 2008, p. 324 f.
- ↑ See Tiziana Suárez-Nani: Philosophy and theology -historical interpretation of the sentences censored in the Bull of Avignon . In: Heinrich Stirnimann (ed.): Eckardus Theutonicus, homo doctus et sanctus , Freiburg (Switzerland) 1992, pp. 31-96, here: 59-71, 78-80, 90 f.
- ↑ Kurt Flasch: Meister Eckhart , Munich 2010, pp. 283–288, 291–293, 303.
- ↑ See Ingeborg Degenhardt: Studies on the change of the Eckhart picture , Leiden 1967, p. 47 f.
- ↑ Ferdinand Vetter (Ed.): Tauler's sermons , Dublin / Zurich 1968, p. 101, line 30.
- ↑ Michael Egerding offers a compilation of passages where Tauler uses the metaphor "reason" or related or similar expressions: Die Metaphorik der Latemedalterlichen Mystik , Vol. 2, Paderborn 1997, pp. 289-302.
- ^ Ferdinand Vetter (ed.): Tauler's sermons , Dublin / Zurich 1968, p. 101 lines 27-29.
- ^ Louise Gnädinger: Johannes Tauler. Lifeworld and mystical teaching , Munich 1993, pp. 181–191, 241–244.
- ↑ Ferdinand Vetter (Ed.): Tauler's sermons , Dublin / Zurich 1968, p. 262, lines 11-15.
- ↑ Paul Wyser: The soul reason in Tauler's sermons . In: Lebendiges Mittelalter , Freiburg (Switzerland) 1958, pp. 204–311, here: 235–248.
- ^ Ferdinand Vetter (ed.): Tauler's sermons , Dublin / Zurich 1968, p. 300 f. On the Proklos reception, see Louise Gnädinger: Johannes Tauler. Lifeworld and mystical teaching , Munich 1993, pp. 390–394.
- ↑ Ferdinand Vetter (Ed.): Tauler's sermons , Dublin / Zurich 1968, p. 317 lines 12-16.
- ↑ See Saskia Wendel: Affektiv und incarniert , Regensburg 2002, p. 227.
- ^ Markus Enders: Serenity and Seclusion - Studies on German Mysticism , Hamburg 2008, p. 287 f.
- ↑ Gösta Wrede: Unio mystica , Uppsala 1974, p. 84 f.
- ↑ Ferdinand Vetter (ed.): Tauler's sermons , Dublin / Zurich 1968, p. 251. See Gösta Wrede: Unio mystica , Uppsala 1974, p. 84.
- ↑ Ferdinand Vetter (ed.): Tauler's sermons , Dublin / Zurich 1968, p. 331. Cf. Jörg Gabriel: Return to God , Würzburg 2013, p. 361, 400 f.
- ↑ Ferdinand Vetter (Ed.): Tauler's sermons , Dublin / Zurich 1968, p. 175 f .; see. P. 331 f. See Markus Enders: Serenity and Seclusion - Studies on German Mysticism , Hamburg 2008, pp. 289–295.
- ^ Gösta Wrede: Unio mystica , Uppsala 1974, pp. 193, 234, 236 f .; Paul Wyser: The soul reason in Tauler's sermons . In: Lebendiges Mittelalter , Freiburg (Switzerland) 1958, pp. 204–311, here: 267 f., 277 f.
- ↑ Ferdinand Vetter (Ed.): Tauler's sermons , Dublin / Zurich 1968, p. 97. Cf. Gösta Wrede: Unio mystica , Uppsala 1974, p. 196 f.
- ↑ Ferdinand Vetter (Ed.): Tauler's sermons , Dublin / Zurich 1968, p. 174 f. See Gösta Wrede: Unio mystica , Uppsala 1974, p. 270.
- ^ See on Seuse's terminology Uta Joeressen: Die Terminologie der Innerlichkeit in the German works of Heinrich Seuse , Frankfurt am Main 1983, pp. 15-20; Markus Enders: Serenity and Seclusion - Studies on German Mysticism , Hamburg 2008, pp. 247–249; Michael Egerding: The Metaphorics of Late Medieval Mysticism , Vol. 2, Paderborn 1997, pp. 302–308.
- ↑ Heinrich Seuse, Book of Truth 2. Cf. Bernard McGinn: Die Mystik im Abendland , Vol. 4, Freiburg 2008, p. 396.
- ↑ Heinrich Seuse, Seuses Leben 53. For the interpretation of “eternal” in this context, see Markus Enders: Calmness and Isolation - Studies on German Mysticism , Hamburg 2008, pp. 268–271.
- ↑ Heinrich Seuse, Book of Truth 1. See Markus Enders: Calmness and Isolation - Studies on German Mysticism , Hamburg 2008, pp. 250–253.
- ↑ Heinrich Seuse, Seuses Leben 52. See Uta Joeressen: Die Terminologie der Innerlichkeit in the German works of Heinrich Seuse , Frankfurt am Main 1983, p. 19.
- ↑ Heinrich Seuse, Book of Truth 5.
- ↑ See Markus Enders: Gelassenheit und Isolation - Studien zur Deutschen Mystik , Hamburg 2008, p. 261; Bernard McGinn: Die Mystik im Abendland , Vol. 4, Freiburg 2008, pp. 396–398.
- ^ Heinrich Seuse, Seuses Leben 49.
- ↑ Bernard McGinn: Die Mystik im Abendland , Vol. 4, Freiburg 2008, pp. 398 f., 406.
- ↑ See also Ingeborg Degenhardt: Studies on the change of the Eckhartbildes , Leiden 1967, pp. 50–63; Walter Andreas Euler: Highlights on the attitude of Nikolaus von Kues to Meister Eckhart . In: Harald Schwaetzer, Georg Steer (eds.): Meister Eckhart and Nikolaus von Kues , Stuttgart 2011, pp. 19–34, here: 26–34.
- ↑ Héribert Fischer: Fond de l'âme. I. Chez Eckhart. In: Dictionnaire de Spiritualité , Vol. 5, Paris 1964, Sp. 650–661, here: 660 f.
- ↑ Paul Wyser: The soul reason in Tauler's sermons . In: Lebendiges Mittelalter , Freiburg (Switzerland) 1958, pp. 204–311, here: 306 f.
- ↑ References in Juan Luis Astigarraga et al. (Ed.): Concordancias de los escritos de san Juan de la Cruz , Rome 1990, p. 854.
- ↑ John of the Cross, Llama de amor viva , Second Version, canción 4,3-16, edition: José Vicente Rodríguez, Federico Ruiz Salvador (ed.): San Juan de la Cruz: Obras completas , 5th edition, Madrid 1993, Pp. 863-869.
- ↑ Fernand Jetté: Fond de l'âme. II. Marie de l'Incarnation. In: Dictionnaire de Spiritualité , Vol. 5, Paris 1964, Col. 661-666.
- ^ August Langen: The vocabulary of German Pietism , 2nd, supplemented edition, Tübingen 1968, pp. 162-169.
- ↑ See for the Enlightenment use of the term Hans Adler: Fundus Animae - the reason of the soul. On the gnoseology of the dark in the Enlightenment . In: Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 62, 1988, pp. 197–220, here: 204–213, 218.
- ↑ Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten: Metaphysica , Halle 1739, § 511.
- ↑ Hans Adler: Die Prägnanz des Dunklen , Hamburg 1990, pp. 39–42.
- ^ Georg Friedrich Meier: Theory of Reason , Halle 1752, p. 195.
- ↑ Johann Georg Sulzer: Dissection of the concept of reason . In: Sulzer: Vermischte philosophische Schriften , Part 1, Leipzig 1773, pp. 244–281, here: 261.
- ^ Johann Gottfried Herder: Plan for an Aesthetic . In: Herder: Works in ten volumes , Vol. 1: Early writings 1764–1772 , ed. by Ulrich Gaier, Frankfurt 1985, pp. 659-676, here: 665.
- ^ Johann Gottfried Herder: Baumgarten's monument. In: Herder: Works in ten volumes , Vol. 1: Early writings 1764–1772 , ed. by Ulrich Gaier, Frankfurt 1985, pp. 681-694, here: 685.
- ↑ Johann Gottfried Herder: On the recognition and feeling of the human soul. In: Herder: Complete Works , ed. by Bernhard Suphan , Vol. 8, Berlin 1892, pp. 165–333, here: 194 f. For Herder's concept, see Hans Adler: Die Prägnanz des Dunklen , Hamburg 1990, pp. 64–67.
- ↑ An overview is provided by Ingeborg Degenhardt: Studien zum Wandel des Eckhartbildes , Leiden 1967, pp. 105–155. Cf. Peter Reiter: Der Seele Grund , Würzburg 1993, pp. 63–78.
- ↑ On these controversies, see Ingeborg Degenhardt: Studies on the change of the Eckhart picture, Leiden 1967, pp. 166–191, 281–287. See Peter Reiter: Der Seele Grund , Würzburg 1993, pp. 99-104.
- ^ Herman Büttner: Meister Eckeharts writings and sermons , Vol. 1, Jena 1903, pp. XIV, XIX, XLII – XLIV.
- ^ Ingeborg Degenhardt: Studies on the change of the Eckhart picture, Leiden 1967, pp. 226–238, 250–261.
- ↑ Paul Natorp: Deutscher Weltberuf , Vol. 2: The soul of the German , Jena 1918, p. 70.
- ↑ Paul Natorp: Deutscher Weltberuf , Vol. 2: The soul of the German , Jena 1918, p. 71 f.
- ↑ Paul Natorp: German Occupation World , Vol. 2: The soul of the German , Jena 1918, p.73.
- ↑ Paul Natorp: German Occupation World , Vol. 2: The soul of the German , Jena 1918, pp 74-82.
- ↑ Kurt Flasch: Meister Eckhart , Munich 2010, pp. 83, 86 f., 195–198, 322 f. Cf. Rodrigo Guerizoli: The internalization of the divine , Leiden 2006, pp. 56–59.
- ↑ Otto Langer: Master Eckhart's doctrine of the soul reason . In: Margot Schmidt (Ed.): Basic questions of Christian mysticism , Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 1987, pp. 173–191, here: 187 f., 190 f.
- ↑ Kurt Ruh: Meister Eckhart , Munich 1985, pp. 188–190.
- ↑ Shizuteru Ueda: The Birth of God in the Soul and the Breakthrough to Godhead , Gütersloh 1965, pp. 23-25.
- ↑ Peter Reiter: Der Seele Grund , Würzburg 1993, p. 63.
- ↑ Alois M. Haas: Mystic as a statement , Frankfurt am Main 1996, pp. 343–345.
- ↑ Alois M. Haas: Sermo mysticus , Freiburg (Switzerland) 1979, pp. 152-163.
- ↑ Erwin Waldschütz: Thinking and Experiencing the Ground , Vienna 1989, pp. 140 f., 299–302, 324–326.
- ↑ Bernard McGinn: Die Mystik im Abendland , Vol. 4, Freiburg 2008, p. 324.
- ↑ See the overview in Saskia Wendel: Affektiv und incarniert , Regensburg 2002, p. 174, note 485, p. 209 f. Note 702.
- ↑ Burkhard Mojsisch: The theory of the self in its self- and world-justification with Meister Eckhart . In: Christian Wenin (ed.): L'homme et son univers au moyen âge , Vol. 1, Louvain-la-Neuve 1986, pp. 267-272; Burkhard Mojsisch: 'This I': Master Eckhart's I-conception . In: Kurt Flasch, Udo Reinhold Jeck (ed.): The light of reason , Munich 1997, pp. 100–109.
- ↑ Saskia Wendel: Affektiv und incarniert , Regensburg 2002, pp. 177-180, 209-216.
- ↑ Otto Langer: Master Eckhart's doctrine of the soul reason . In: Margot Schmidt (ed.): Basic questions of Christian mysticism , Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 1987, pp. 173–191, here: 187 f.
- ↑ Alois M. Haas: Mystic as a statement , Frankfurt am Main 1996, pp. 334, 346.
- ↑ Alois M. Haas: Meister Eckhart as a normative figure of spiritual life , Einsiedeln 1979, pp. 52, 97 f.
- ↑ Erwin Waldschütz: Thinking and Experiencing the Reason , Vienna 1989, pp. 307-312.
- ↑ Erwin Waldschütz: Thinking and Experiencing the Ground , Vienna 1989, p. 201.
- ↑ Karl Heinz Witte: Meister Eckhart: Leben aus dem Grund des Leben , Freiburg / Munich 2013, pp. 223 f., 230, 235 f.
