Abstract
This contribution aims at presenting Eckhart’s cultural project of an interpretation
of the Sacred Scriptures per rationes naturales philosophorum,
Eckhart’s project impacts his conception of spirituality, summarized by
the term «divine man» (homo divinus) or «noble man» (homo nobilis).
The first part will therefore be devoted to showing the relationship between
philosophy and Sacred Scripture according to Meister Eckhart. The
second part describes the experience of the inward and outward man
from the perspective of Eckhartian theories.
Eckhart lived between the years 1260 and 1328, in a time characterised
by the formation of a strong urban culture. He lived and
worked in the most important cities in Germany. He belonged to a religious
order of recent formation and typically urban features, the order
of Dominicans, who were devoted to poverty and study. Many Dominicans
were university professors. In this order, deeply rooted in the new
city culture, a democratic rotation of leadership positions was customary,
so that Eckhart found himself for many years taking on at varying
times the functions not only of professor and teacher, but also of conventual
prior and provincial. This fact should not be underestimated,
because it helps to outline a constitutive trait of his personality: he
taught only three times at the University of Paris, but governed for
about a decade one of the most important Dominican convents, located
in an economic center in Germany, Erfurt. He was also vicar for the entire
region of Thuringia, appointed by another philosopher-politician,
Dietrich of Freiberg; from 1304 to 1310, for seven long years, he was
prior provincial of a Dominican province, Saxonia, which stretched
from the Baltics to the Bavarian Alps. He had a territorial jurisdiction
that was comparable to that of an archbishop; he dealt with imperial
princes, founded new convents, and defended the privileges of the
order. He exercised his mandate with such ability that, at the end of it,
he was immediately elected prior provincial of the Dominican province
of western Germany, Teutonia. He will not be able to exercise his mandate
because he was sent by the general direction of the order to Paris,
to teach in the most important theology chair in Europe.
In addition to (and perhaps because of) his work as administrator,
Eckhart carried out a cultural project of significant interest to the historian
of philosophy.
As a theologian he discussed theological and philosophical questions
in the vernacular, addressing a German-speaking public that did not
understand Latin or read Latin only reluctantly and with difficulty.
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