In June 1310 the Church burned Marguerite Porete, a French mystic, in Paris for a book about the soul's union with God. The book's offence was partly what it said and partly what it was: written in French, for readers with no Latin. Two years later the Council of Vienne, a general council of the Church, condemned the Free Spirit — the teaching that a soul perfected in God has passed beyond the virtues and beyond the law. A boundary was being drawn, and it ran along a language as much as a doctrine. What could be disputed in a Latin lecture hall turned dangerous the moment it was said in the vernacular, because the vernacular reached convents, Beguine houses — communities of lay religious women — and lay listeners the hierarchy could not supervise.
The Dominican who walked straight across that line was, by every institutional measure, the establishment. He held the regent master's chair at Paris twice, in 1302 and again in 1311, a distinction his order had previously granted only to Thomas Aquinas. He ran the province of Saxony and its forty-seven convents for eight years, served as vicar general of Bohemia, and returned to Paris the year after Porete died there. Then, from about 1313, he went to Strasbourg and preached to exactly the audiences the condemnations were about, in Middle High German, a language that had no words for most of what he wanted to say. He made them up. Some eighty-six of those sermons survive.
He did not soften the content for the crossing. In his Paris disputations he had reversed the standard order of the divine attributes: God does not understand because he exists, he exists because he understands — intellect first, being second. From that he drew the harder consequence, that creatures considered in themselves possess no being at all, only being on loan. In German it became something a listener could act on. There is a ground in the soul, uncreated and uncreatable, where God gives birth to his Word continually; the work of a life is Abgeschiedenheit, detachment, the stripping away of images and purposes until nothing stands between the soul and God. Live without why: do the thing for no reason beyond itself.
Two brothers of his own order, Hermann of Summo and William of Nideggen, drew up the charges. Archbishop Henry II of Virneburg opened an inquisitorial process at Cologne in 1326 — a secular archbishop trying a Dominican master, which had almost no precedent. Eckhart's defence rested on a distinction rather than a denial: he might have erred, but error is not heresy, since heresy requires the will to hold to it. He appealed to the pope on 24 January 1327, and on 13 February, in the Dominican church at Cologne, he publicly withdrew anything in his teaching that could be shown to be wrong. Then he travelled to Avignon, where the papacy then sat, and died before the verdict came, at some point before the end of April 1328.
The verdict was a bull, In agro dominico, a formal papal decree dated 27 March 1329. It condemned seventeen of his propositions as heretical and eleven more as rash and suspect, recorded his submission, stopped short of calling him a heretic, and was ordered published in the province of Cologne alone.
The containment failed: his German works circulated in more than two hundred manuscripts, his students Johannes Tauler and Henry Suso carried the teaching forward, and Nicholas of Cusa, the German cardinal and philosopher, read and annotated him a century later. The Swiss scholar Franz Pfeiffer's edition of 1857 put the German writings back into print, where they have stayed, and the German idealist philosophers claimed him at once as the father of German speculative thought. Rudolf Otto, the German theologian, set him beside Shankara, the medieval Hindu philosopher, in 1926, opening a comparative reading scholars still argue over — much as they argue whether the recovered Latin works show a mystic or a scholastic long misfiled as one. The bull has never been revoked.