Meister Eckhart
German Dominican friar, theologian and mystic (c. 1260–c. 1328), born in Thuringia, educated in Paris, where he attained the prestigious title of 'Master of Theology' (hence his byname 'Meister'), and who successively held several positions of great responsibility within the Dominican order, including provincial vicar responsible for the spiritual life of numerous German women's convents, a role that likely shaped his pastoral interest in practical mysticism accessible to laypeople and non-Latinate religious. Eckhart developed a mystical theology of a speculative radicalism seldom equalled within the Christian tradition, often preached directly in vernacular German rather than academic Latin, centred on the doctrine of the 'spark of the soul' (Seelenfünklein), an uncreated, uncreatable point at the innermost core of the human soul that, according to Eckhart, is identical to divinity itself and allows a direct, unmediated mystical union between the soul and God. His most controversial notion, that of 'detachment' (Gelassenheit or Abgeschiedenheit), demands a radical relinquishment not only of material goods but of all self-will, all image of God, and even the desire for personal salvation, going so far as to formulate the provocative paradox that one must 'pray to God to be rid of God' — that is, of God conceived as an external object of representation — to attain mystical union with an ineffable divinity beyond all concept. These extreme formulations, often close to pantheism in their literal expression though Eckhart always insisted on defending their orthodoxy, led to the opening of an inquisitorial process against him shortly before his death, and in 1329, a year after his probably natural death, Pope John XXII formally condemned seventeen of his teachings as heretical or suspect in the bull In agro dominico. Despite this posthumous condemnation, Eckhart's work, rediscovered and intellectually rehabilitated from the nineteenth century onward, today exerts profound influence on comparative mysticism, religious phenomenology, and even interreligious dialogue with Zen Buddhism, owing to striking affinities between his notion of detachment and the Buddhist concepts of emptiness and non-self.