Deutsche Predigten

Most medieval theology was written in Latin for other clerics. Eckhart did that too, but he also climbed into pulpits in Strasbourg and Cologne and preached to Dominican nuns, Beguines and ordinary lay people in their own Middle High German — and it is those sermons, taken down and copied by his listeners, that make up the Deutsche Predigten, the "German Sermons." He was inventing philosophical vocabulary as he went, forcing a spoken language that had no words for these things to carry them. What it carries is startling for a pulpit. There is a ground of the soul, he says, uncreated and nameless, "neither this nor that," where the soul touches the bare Godhead behind God; there, eternally, God is being born, and a person's whole task is to become the empty place where that birth can happen. So one must live âne warumbe — without a why — doing good not for heaven or reward but for nothing at all, because attachment even to salvation is still attachment. Preached to unlearned hearers, in the vernacular, these claims travelled fast and alarmed the authorities. The year after his death, in 1329, the papal bull In agro dominico condemned twenty-eight propositions drawn from his work, seventeen as heretical — the only medieval Dominican theologian so condemned. Friars of his own order at Erfurt gathered sixty-four sermons, about half of them his, into the Paradisus anime intelligentis, the "paradise of the knowing soul", to argue that the soul reaches God through the intellect and not, as the Franciscans taught, through the will. In those sermons Mary Magdalene stays at the tomb after the apostles have fled because, having lost her Lord, she has nothing left to lose, and the soul must die like the grain of wheat until it keeps neither shape nor colour, only the capacity to receive. The sermons went half-underground and were read for centuries mostly by people who did not advertise it. Then the nineteenth century found them, the Romantics first and Schopenhauer after them. In the twentieth the anarchist writer Gustav Landauer put a selection into modern German, and Heidegger and Fromm took this preacher for one of the boldest minds Europe had produced.