This Reading raises up the glorious encounter with Eckhart's paradoxes. It is an immense pasture waiting for harvesting.
There are several translations but fortunately the editing of this Reading seems the clearest.
Biographical Sketch
Meister Eckhart ‘Divine Comfort’
A Word in Season, Readings for the
Liturgy of the Hours,
Augustine Press 1999
Augustine Press 1999
Meister Eckhart (c.1260-c.1327), the Dominican master of theology, used
daring paradox to make people aware of the limitations of the human mind, and
thus receptive to a higher kind of knowledge without sense impressions, images,
or ideas. Though misunderstanding resulted in his dying under a cloud, Eckhart's reputation was saved by Tauler and Suso.
Scholarly opinion now vindicates his orthodoxy, and
Pope John Paul II has quoted him approvingly. His
mystical insights appeal to members of other faiths. Eckhart acquired his
mystical knowledge while living a busy, practical life during a period of unrest and violence: he can speak to our age.
Google; paradoxes
of Meister About 34.200.000 results.
www.eckhartsociety.org/.../meister-eckhart-and-prayer-setting-scene
In one of his
German sermons we hear Meister Eckhart telling his listeners:
If .....heretical, not always realising that they were abstracting
halves of paradoxes.
Excerpt (from Attachment)
 |
| The Meister Eckhart portal of the Erfurt Church OP |
Now, this will not be the last time today that we will be coming across this feature
of Eckhart’s thinking, the fact that it is full of paradox, but I’m mentioning it now because it’s woven through his
thought, woven through his language. His language is full of paradox, it is (to use the jargon)
‘dialectical’. It is this that bewildered the inquisitors who tried him at the
end of his life. They abstracted statements from his writings, statements which
on their own sounded heretical, not always realising that they were abstracting
halves of paradoxes. And, for
precisely the same reason, modem readers get bewildered by some of the things
they read in Eckhart’s sermons. All the time we read Eckhart we have to be on
the watch for what he’s really setting out to convey – for the meaning behind
the seemingly conflicting meanings, for the meaning generated through the
tension between what is said and what is unsaid (Ibid., p. 12).
I said that I would try to clarify one thing which can on first acquaintance seem very strange to us – ‘Eckhart’s own special way of putting over ideas to people’. You may feel that my clarification has only deepened your bewilderment, but as the day goes on I hope the bewilderment will steadily dwindle.
I said that I would try to clarify one thing which can on first acquaintance seem very strange to us – ‘Eckhart’s own special way of putting over ideas to people’. You may feel that my clarification has only deepened your bewilderment, but as the day goes on I hope the bewilderment will steadily dwindle.
