Breakthrough: Meister Eckhart's Creation Spirituality in New Transition [Paperback]

Matthew Fox (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 3, 1980

A new translation of thirty-seven of the sermons of Meister Eckhart, the fourteenth-century priest and mystic.  Best-selling author Matthew Fox brilliantly interprets Eckhart's themes and creates a spiritual path for the nineties.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Latin

From the Publisher

A new translation of thirty-seven of the sermons of Meister Eckhart, the fourteenth-century priest and mystic. Best-selling author Matthew Fox brilliantly interprets Eckhart's themes and creates a spiritual path for the nineties.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 580 pages
• Publisher: Image (September 3, 1980)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385170343
• ISBN-13: 978-0385170345
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #293,308 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Eckhart misconstrued., July 8, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Breakthrough: Meister Eckhart's Creation Spirituality in New Transition (Paperback)

Matthew Fox finds a Meister Eckhart that other scholars have difficulty obtaining. There seem to be three reasons for this: (1) Fox translates some sermons of Eckhart that are not generally accepted as being authentic, (2) Fox uses modern terms for some of Eckhart's Middle High German that distort what Eckhart is saying, and (3) Fox draws the wrong conclusions from some of Eckhart's teachings. The result is that Fox assembles a notion that Eckhart is a champion of creation spirituality, where compassion and justice challenge the economic and social structures of the day. All of this is nonsense. Eckhart does not emphasize creation but God, or more precisely, the godhead. He talks about mercy, but specifically rules out that this means mercy of one person towards another. Mercy, for Eckhart, is a deep activity of the godhead. By justice, Eckhart does not mean social or economic relations, but righteous or virtuous living. Justice, for Eckhart, is also an activity of the godhead. It is work that is conducted with why. Eckhart is not concerned with social structures, in and of themselves. And Eckhart, who lived in the fourteenth century, does not use the inclusive language that Fox bestows on him. A student with a serious interest in Meister Eckhart, would be better to read, Meister Eckhart: Sermons and Treatises, Volumes I to III, translated and edited by M.O'C. Walshe.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars inspiring, July 2, 2001

By 

jo (toronto. canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Breakthrough: Meister Eckhart's Creation Spirituality in New Transition (Paperback)

Whether this is the 'authentic' voice of Eckhart or not, it is an excellent book about spirituality and the approach to God. it makes God accessible. Rather than treat God as only worthy of being worshipped from afar, it brings the creation in intimate contact with the creator. One with Him. And the new way of looking at the Bible and Religion from an intimate perspective, branded Eckhart as a heretic. Of course, often in Religion you were burned or considered a heretic if you got too close to God. I loved this book and thought Matthew Fox did a wonderful job of bringing these ideas to modern english language.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Brilliant Book, April 4, 2010

By 

Steven Herrmann (California, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Breakthrough, Meister Eckhart's creation spirituality, in new translation (Hardcover)

Steven B. Herrmann, PhD, MFT
Author of "William Everson: The Shaman's Call."

As a Jungian psychotherapist and a poet, I love this book because I wrote my senior thesis on Meister Eckhart at U. C. Santa Cruz and Eckhart was a favorite spiritual writer of C. G. Jung's, whose essay I read as a young man while I was under the tutelage of the poet in residence, William Everson. Along with Jung, Matthew Fox is helping to bring Meister Eckhart rising out of the mists of obscurity. Fox does a great job bringing out the earthiness of Eckhart's spirituality in his translations and commentaries. He enables the depth-psychologist to better understand what Jung meant by the term "psychoid" later in life, which connects us not only with the depths of the psyche, but with Nature. I don't think Fox could have achieved what he did without his deep feeling for the shamanic influences in indigenous America. There is something about panentheism in the beginning of his book that speaks to this correlation. When one reads of the panentheism inherent in Eckhart's writings, one gets a sense of the presence of Thoreau, Whitman, Jeffers, or Muir, in this kind of mysticism; something of the shaman's presence shines through. In Eckhart's works the involution to the Godhead, as Matthew Fox says, becomes the vehicle for the "new birth." This happens through a shamanic movement, away from convention, from traditional ideas or images of God. "Indeed," writes Fox, "there are hints in Eckhart as when he talks of God as a 'great underground river' of the chthonic and more matriarchal period of consciousness when spiritual experiences were bound to the soil and were localized there with 'deities dwelling in the interior of the earth." I think there is a strong correlation between these two notions: Eckhart's Godhead and Jung's psychoid. As Fox points out, in the first of the four sections of his book, Creation Spirituality is steeped in panentheism. The whole concept of the "Ground," the "soil," the "riverbed" of the Godhead: all of these are metaphors that point to panentheism, as a way to describe what the psychoid is. A brilliant Introduction, brilliant commentaries, and a truly great translation, which is sure to make this book a classic of its kind.