Growing the Fields of Historical-Philological Understanding by Kurt Flasch

 

Meister Eckhart and His Students; This Transfiguration is the last painting by Raffael commissioned by Cardinal Giulo de Medici, conceived as an alterpiece for the  Narbonne Catherdral in France (1520)

 

When the anarchical socialist Gustav Landauer (1870-1919) insulted Emperor Wilhelm II and was sent to prison in Berlin-Tegel for lese-majeste, he spent his time translating parts of Meister Eckhart’s Middle High German works. He did not get to see them in print; he was a member of the Munich Soviet Republic and was kicked to death in prison after its suppression. In 1920, Martin Buber published them in Berlin as Meister Eckharts Mystische Schriften: In usere Sprache ubertragen von Gustav Landauer. In the first sentence of his preface, Landauer declares, ‘ I will leave out everything that does not make sense to us. Meister Eckhart is too precious for historical evaluation; he has to been resurrected as a living human being.’

Many interpreters of Eckhart have thought similarly, but not many were able to couch their anti-historicism in such grand terms: Eckhart – ‘to precious’ for historical evaluation – to be ‘resurrected’ as a living human being. I take these flashy expressions as a starting point for thinking about the preconditions of historical knowledge. For someone who decides that certain parts of Eckhart’s works ‘do not make sense to us’ lays claim to historical knowledge, even if he calls it something else and even if he does not consider his work on Eckhart ‘historical.’ What matters here are not disciplinary affiliations but the fact that Eckhart died in 1328 and that mediation between his texts and us is unavoidable.

 

Everyone who speaks about Eckhart produces just such historical knowledge in his present and under present conditions. Eckhart does not simply spill over into the present from ‘sources’ in the past. He is identified, constructed, and evaluated under the conditions of the present. No one simply crosses over into the past. The epistemological capabilities, interests, and constraints of the present shape the image of Eckhart that we create for ourselves. Some authors attempt to draw Eckhart directly into their present. They aim to ‘resurrect him,’ but that seems to go beyond human capabilities – at least my own. Eckhart is dead and thus is an object of historical knowledge. Someone who speaks and writes about him is well advised to let us know who is determining the criteria according to which something ‘makes sense’ to ‘us’.  Only then will he think about how much his present predetermines the nature of his historical knowledge, and if his interest in Eckhart is genuine, he will want to use all his available options for acquiring knowledge.

Much of our present, of course, can distract us from Eckhart or obscure him. Yet one of the advantages of the present is the speed with which new source material that expands our image of the constellation of intellectual life around 1300 is made available. Today, we have a better understanding of the conditions of study within the Dominican order and the intellectual debates at Paris than we did fifty years ago – for example, through the continual editions of the works of influential teachers such as Albertus Magnus of Cologne and Henry of Ghent. An account of Eckhart’s thinking must not be limited to identificatory paraphrases of individual ideas and motifs. It requires a focus on Eckhart’s ideas, but at the same time, every reader of Eckhart who really wants t get to know him has first go out into the wide, growing field of historical-philological details.

Within the past decades, four initiatives have improved our understanding of Eckhart’s thoughts:

First, the edition and analysis of sermon cycle of German sermons by Georg Steer. Steer made the unity and previously contested authenticity of these sermons plausible.

Second, Loris Sturlese discovery of the Eckhart manuscript at Oxford has improved the quality of important texts among Eckhart’s Latin works. Sturlese also rewrote the chronology of Eckhart’s Latin works on the basis of a painstaking examination of the Eckhart manuscripts at Erfurt.

Third, Loris Sturlese edition and analysis of Eckhart’s trial records shed new light on  this last phase of Eckhart’s life and thought.

Fourth, the editors of the Corpus Philosophorum Teuonicorum  Medii Aevi made Eckhart’s intellectual milieu accessible. It used to be fashionable to cloak Eckhart in the pathos of lofty solitude; nowadays, we can prove that he had connections to others. We find both similarities and stark contrasts between Eckhart and his contemporaries or his Dominican teachers. Studies of his theoretical position within the German order’s province have received new impetus in the past decades. New texts are constantly being published. A unified picture of the debates will be possible only after a series of specialized studies. There were German followers and adversaries of both Dietrich and Eckhart.

We could argue that someone who has drunk the living juice of the intellectual and linguistic power of an Eckhart or Plato or Kant need not bother with the odds and ends of historical and philosophical detail. But we should remind ourselves that what is considered essential, the poetic-philosophical substrate of Plato’s texts, or Eckhart’s or Kant’s, is controversial and continually being reinterpreted. Not fixed, it is in continual motion, and seemingly small details –dates, manuscript finds, and new biographical data – can all cause significant ripples.

 

Our knowledge or ignorance of certain facts can change our understanding of the basic tenets of earlier philosophers. A failed or successful incorporation of new facts into our commonly held assumptions corrects or conserves certain schools of thought. Without them, subjective appropriations will never experience a corrective; the confident pathos of having captured the essence once and for all remains intact; speech that shuns facts trickles away, vague and imprecise. What previous readings of Eckhart often lack are linguistic discipline, semantic specification, and a philological basis . . .

Evens small advances within philology and history have consequences. All texts even the Bible and even Eckhart’s, are situated within a specific historical context and have to be read and analyzed carefully within that context. Such a proper historical reading by itself is not enough, but it is the only way to avoid wild speculation, mere subjective appropriations, exploitation of the author in behalf of the church or in anti-ecclesiastical contexts, all of which abound within scholarly interpretations of Eckhart.