Meister Eckhart

Johannes Eckhart, known as Meister Eckhart, was a Dominican friar, theologian, and mystic born in Thuringia around 1260 who became one of the most original and controversial thinkers of the medieval Latin West. He studied and taught at the University of Paris — earning the title "Meister" (Master) — and served as Prior of Erfurt and Vicar of Thuringia before rising to positions of administrative leadership within the Dominican order, including Provincial of Saxony (1303–1311) and Vicar-General for Bohemia (1307). His vernacular German sermons introduced a radical vocabulary of the divine ground (Grunt), the spark of the soul (Fünklein), and the eternal birth of the Word in the soul, pressing scholastic Neoplatonism into the service of popular mystical preaching. His Latin treatises, including the unfinished Opus Tripartitum, show the same ideas in rigorous scholastic form. Near the end of his life he was summoned before the Inquisition in Cologne; he appealed to the Pope and traveled to Avignon in early 1327 to defend himself, dying there around January 28, 1328, before the proceedings concluded. In 1329 Pope John XXII issued the bull In agro dominico, condemning seventeen propositions from his works as heretical and eleven as suspect of heresy; the bull noted that Eckhart had already submitted to the Church's judgment, and his personal orthodoxy has been a matter of ongoing scholarly rehabilitation.