Monday, December 03, 2007

• I get by with a little help from my friends?

  The long-talked about paper on Meister Eckhart is really in the works.  The final product is supposed to be 10-12 pages long, but tonight I am to present a 15 minute version of the thing, which the professor estimated to be about 7.5 pages, typed and double-spaced.  I submit this sad creation to you now and ask that you
  a) not laugh... I haven't written a paper of substance in three years
  b) keep in mind that some of the transitions are simplistic so I can relay them orally; also, I need to add a lot more citations, but the prof won't see this draft; this is just what I'll be reading
  c) offer me advice on how to fix anything for tonight and for the final version due next Monday
  d) feel free to ask questions/let me know where you think I need to expand, what interests you, etc.  keep in mind that the topic i'm now locked into is about Eckhart's Birth Metaphor as Feminist
  or
  e) ignore it all, wish me luck, and look at the Picard gif from my last entry
  
  

  “The Birth of the Word in the Soul”
  Meister Eckhart as Feminist Mystic

  “The Father gives birth to his Son in eternity, equal to himself.  […] He has given birth to him in my soul.”  These are the words of Meister Eckhart, 13^th century Dominican mystic, in a sermon given in the vernacular German of his parishioners (Eckhart 187).  His statement is a bold one for any Catholic, especially of his time period.  There is much scholarship on Meister Eckhart with regards to his particularly pantheistic type of mysticism.  The repetition of that theme within his work, combined with the complexity of argument for or against his orthodoxy, has kept pantheism at the forefront of most of the scholarship done on Eckhart.  Pantheism refers to any belief which equates God with the universe, in essence making all things God.  The “he has given birth to him in my soul” is one of many instances in which Eckhart spoke or wrote of himself as being a part of God, or even as being one with Him.  Less has been written about the first part of this phrase by Eckhart, the part about “giving birth.”  Just as Eckhart refused to preach the rigid and orthodox idea of God being separate from humanity, so too he refused to abide by proscribed gender roles within his teachings.  Eckhart believed not only that God and man may be one and the same but, perhaps more controversially for his time, that man and woman, though different, are equal.  Meister Eckhart was a feminist; he believed that women and men were both part of God and represented by God’s nature.  Eckhart’s teachings, especially sermons on the birth of God’s son, Jesus, in the souls of individual humans, prove this.

  First, let me describe to you who Eckhart was in the context of his time in history and philosophical thought.  Eckhart was probably born Johann von Eckhart in a small German town near a Dominican monastery around the year 1260.  He grew up versed in Latin and became a novice in the Dominican order.  The Dominicans are a subset of Catholic religious men who are part of the Order of Preachers.  While all Catholic orders follow the basic teachings of the Church, each order feels called to act upon a different gift from God.  In the Dominicans’ case, they feel called to preach the Gospel.  The Order, which now includes not only religious men but women and members of the laity (or people who have not taken sacred vows), was new in Eckhart’s time.  Like all religious activity at the time, the Order was very strict about the inclusion of and participation by women.  Then as now, women were not allowed to be priests.  They could attend mass, but the masses were said in Latin and not in their vernacular tongue.  Women were not encouraged to read, and they were sometimes expressly forbidden from doing so.  Women who wanted to become involved in a life of service to God were basically told to obey their husbands and to serve God by procreating children in His image. 

  Eckhart’s time was also the time of the Crusades.  Women who would otherwise have been at home with their husbands were now left alone while their men fought in the name of God and the Church.  Several small groups of relatively independent women began to form in the men’s absence.  At first they led lives of prayer and good works, but as many of them saw the corruption in the ways of the Church, these women as well as some fringe religious men came to rely less on the structure of Catholicism and more on what their hearts told them.  This inner contemplation is one of the main characteristics of what scholars and theologians now call mysticism.  Linguistically, the word “mystic” derives from the Greek word for “initiate.”  Mystics are initiated into a direct communion or identity with the divine or with a spiritual truth. 

  One such group of growing mystics was the Beguines.  Eckhart moved up in esteem and moved to Paris to study theology further and to earn the academic honorary title of Meister, or master.  While in Paris, he lived with a fellow Dominican who was an active Inquisitor.  This Inquisitor was responsible for the condemnation and eventual death of a group of Beguines (MT 9).  In this era of his life, Eckhart wrote a lot of treatises in the orthodox Latin and was greatly involved in academia and the trappings of the Church.  There is some disconnect in scholarly history on Eckhart at this time, but sometime between getting his master’s degree and learning of the Inquisition’s condemnation of Beguines and other fringe religious groups was when Eckhart felt his true calling.  He began preaching outside of the big cities more often. 

  It was around this time that Eckhart showed how important he felt it was to use all of God’s gifts, including the faculty to reason.  He was not satisfied using the same sermons and lessons every Scripture cycle.  Instead of using the proscribed lesson plans, he started invoking the “help of the natural philosophers” (MMT 8).  Meister Eckhart felt that his intention “in interpreting this Word [of God]” was to explain what “the holy Christian faith and two Testaments maintain” by supplementing it with philosophy and reason.  Eckhart felt that God reveals himself constantly through creation, as reflected in the teachings of the Church, but humans were given minds to consider Him, too.  In his Latin treatises especially, Eckhart stressed the marriage of theology with philosophy. 

  In his increasing vernacular sermons, Eckhart used different tactics.  He used the language of the people to make them feel valued, important, and closer to God.  He did not feel the need to preach to those in the upper echelons of the Church.  Those people had the means to read Scripture for themselves.  Bernard McGinn, a life long scholar of mysticism and Eckhart in particular, claimed that the purpose of Eckhart’s preaching at this time and throughout the rest of his life was to “invite believers, even those who might be in error, to come to a deeper and more authentic realization of their inner union with God” (MT 9-10).  Many of his congregants at this time were women, so he began to employ language that he thought would make sense to them.  He employed hyperbole and metaphor, often contradicting himself to get his point across.  To Eckhart, all words were metaphors anyway.  No language could effectively communicate the essence of God.  To Eckhart, God is beyond ideas of masculine and feminine.  As such, God is inclusive of both.  Here is where the birth metaphor comes in.

  In a way no elite member of the Catholic Church would consider, Meister Eckhart chose to describe God in both masculine and feminine terms.  Metaphorically, Eckhart claimed that the first person of the Holy Trinity, the Father, acts as only a woman can, and gives birth to the Son, the second person in the Trinity.  For the Church to consider the traditionally male God engaging in a distinctly feminine act is anathema.  Eckhart’s point is that God is both male and female, both and neither at the same time.  This birth metaphor is only the beginning, and it is upon this metaphor that much of his Eckhart’s other metaphoric gender language is built. 

  Another example can be found in another of Eckhart’s sermons.  He shared a vision of his in which a man’s (masculine) soul (described as “she”) “became pregnant with Nothing like a woman with child, and in that Nothing God was born.”  The man had to be receptive, stereotypically feminine, to receive the Nothingness of God.  He, or she, had to empty the self of everything to let the Nothingness flow in (MT 58). 

  Eckhart taught that it is God’s nature to pour God’s self into pure and empty things.  These are both virtues stereotypically ascribed to women.  Some feminists today might balk at the stereotype, but at the time, this was the language that made sense to Eckhart and his followers.  He was not trying to pigeonhole women into the role of chaste, open, receptive virgins; instead, he was describing the soul in historically feminine terms to women in a way he thought the might understand, to make them feel involved with God in a real way.  Eckhart said that God’s essence boils over and flows out into any open space, any pure heart, male and female.  It was not only men who were able to receive God’s grace and gifts.  If it were not enough for God to flow into both men and women, Eckhart said explicitly in another service that the source of God’s bullitio, or overflowing, “lies beyond all gender language” (Harvest of Mysticism 132).  God does not need to be seen just in terms of the male Father and Son but of a more abstract Holy Spirit, which is neither male nor female.  When this concept was too ethereal and new for some congregants, Eckhart continued.  He said that just as the Father-God flows into man, so must the Mother give birth to God’s Word (MMT 84).  Both the male and female are part of the Godhead.  God, Eckhart claimed, is “eternally pregnant in his foreknowledge of Creation.”  Because of the convention at the time, Eckhart still referred to God as “he” but said that he is “eternally pregnant” at the same time.  He explained how this union is possible:  “Where the personal nature keeps to the unity of its nature and combines with it, there Fatherhood has a maternal name and is doing a mother’s work, for it is proper for a mother to conceive” (MMT 85).  In Eckhart’s terms, “proper” is not a value judgment; it is the physical reality of his time.  Here, fatherhood and motherhood are one.  Likewise, “where the eternal Word [Christ] arises in the eternal mind [the Father], there Motherhood has a paternal name and performs maternal work.”  Not only does Fatherhood have a maternal name, but Motherhood has a paternal name.  The metaphor goes both ways, showing that neither one nor the other is the dominant one.  Eckhart was trying not merely to placate his largely female audiences but to establish a radical equality of identity with God.
  
  Meister Eckhart shared his ideas among the peasant women of the Low Countries of Germany, but his preaching did not stop there.  Eckhart showed himself to be a true feminist by sending his ideas elsewhere and sharing them with members of society who had more authority.  It has been suggested that one of Eckhart’s written works which first included the birth metaphor in print was sent to Queen Agnes of Hungary “in a time of need” (MT 12).  That he chose to share such a radical idea of equality with so prominent a figure, and for him to recognize his words as fulfilling some sort of social “need,” is further indicative of Eckhart’s feminism. 
  
  Eckhart’s birth metaphor is the most obvious and telling example of his feminism, but there are other pieces of evidence from his body of work that attest to his belief in the spiritual equality of men and women.  One more subtle way Eckhart included women was in his basic belief on humanity’s role or duty on earth.  While many Christians of his time and ours claim that people’s role is to glorify God, to go out and be active, Eckhart took a less traditional and more feminine stance.  Eckhart claims the same thing but from a different perspective.  To him, human destiny is “to hear and respond to God’s speech in creation and thus draw all things back to their ultimate source” (MT 107).  The emphasis here is not on activity but on passively letting God speak.  An empty, passive soul will hear the Word and respond accordingly.  A soul cannot start acting without impetus; it needs direction from God.  In this case, the feminine must precede the masculine.  Again, modern feminists may think it unfair to say that Eckhart is feminist just because he invokes inaccurate generalizing stereotypes, but it is important to remember the spirit in which Eckhart was preaching at the time. 
  
  Despite the patriarchy inherent in the Catholic Church and rampant especially during the Crusades and the Inquisition, Meister Eckhart offered a refreshing perspective on how God could be viewed and who was allowed to be in communion with Him.  Eckhart spoke using the colored gender language of his time, but he used this traditional language to subvert the system and create a feminist mysticism and theology for his congregants in the 13^th century and for his many fans and followers today.
  

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