Customer Reviews

The Sermons And Collations of Meister Eckhart

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This Kessinger Reprint must be the ugliest book I've ever bought, perhaps the ugliest I've ever seen. Like a huge stack of oversized glossy photocopies held together by a yellow cover. It's like my mental image of the phone book for Mumbai or Shanghai.

These translations were first published in 1924. Eckhart's ebullient, darting mediaeval German has become pompous old-fashioned English with frequent archaisms, "ghostly" for spiritual, "self-naughting" for abolishing the ego.

So how come it gets five stars?

Meister Eckhart is the greatest spiritual teacher Western Christianity ever produced. St. Thomas Aquinas, near the end of his life, underwent a spiritual experience that made him to abandon his masterwork the Summa Theologica, which now appeared "nothing but straw". Eckhart must have undergone a similar experience earlier on, and spent the rest of his life trying to explain.

He seldom bothers with peripheral subjects. Every word goes straight to the heart of things. This book contains all his sermons, essays and fragmentary sayings; all but the Latin works that he wrote as a theologian for his fellow theologians.

It's a mistake to think of Eckhart as a Zen Master in disguise, deftly dodging the obstacles and pitfalls of theology so as to look like a Christian. He was a mediaeval Catholic through and through: he thinks entirely in those terms. Yet you constantly catch echoes of the Sufis, Vedanta or Buddhism: all, of course, unknown to him.

Which tends to support the "different paths up the same mountain" hypothesis: and those nearest to the top are the closest together. Zen is often mentioned because when Eckhart is puzzling no amount of thinking helps: an unprovoked shift of mental perspective occurs and you suddenly "get it".

If you want to dip into Eckhart, try the little book "Meister Eckhart, From Whom God Hid Nothing". Avoid Raymond Blakney's "Meister Eckhart: A Modern Translation" (see my review of that for more detail.)If you want to go deeper, this is the best source of Eckhart's precious words until some benefactor of mankind brings out a readable modern translation of the vernacular sermons.

English translations of Eckhart's sermons, tracts and related documents are not that rare today, thank heavens. Various serious and critical editions have been published in the last thirty years or so. Notwithstanding, any significant contribution in this line is of course welcome, especially when new material - otherwise unavailable to an English-speaking audience - is offered. This massive book is certainly one of them.

When I called this book 'massive' I meant just that. It is large in size and in volume. Certainly not your standard pocket copy. Nevertheless, the content makes up for the sheer size, for it includes very rare works of Eckhart which almost certainly cannot be found in any other publication.

This volume, in fact, is two books in one. Pfeiffer's collection form the first part, which more than 104 sermons and collations, 19 tracts, 79 sayings, and the rare "Liber Positionum". The second part includes some further works from the Pfeiffer collection but also Sievers' Oxford collection and additional texts from Prof. Carl Schmidt's collection. This second part has 23 collations, the singular "Book of Benedictus", and 51 sermons.

Throughout the whole volume the reader is regaled with a mass of other critical, documentary and historical material which makes the whole publication a treasure in itself. Understandably, the scientific worth of this book is excellent, and anyone who would want to approach Eckhart is more than a popular way cannot do without it.