Bonus: Meister Eckhart's Life and Influence feat. Rev. Matthew Fox

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:07)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley.

Kirsten Oates (0:11)

And I'm Kirsten Oates.

James Finley (0:13)

Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Kirsten Oates (0:23)

Welcome, everyone, to Turning to the Mystics Season 7, where we've been turning to Meister Eckhart. And I'm so excited to be here with Jim Finley and Matthew Fox today to talk about Meister Eckhart, his life and his influence on their teaching. So welcome, Jim.

And a special welcome to you, Matthew. Thank you for joining us. Good to be with you. So I wanted to start with a quote from Matthew's book that's called Meister Eckhart, A Mystic Warrior for Our Times.

And Matthew writes, It is a great privilege to be presenting Meister Eckhart. Eckhart is a man for our times, a mystic warrior for our age. And I am keen to see him better known and more deeply understood. And you and Jim seem to have that in common. And that's why we're excited to have you on the podcast today. But Matthew, can you share a little bit more about that quote and why you feel that way?

Matthew Fox (1:23)

Oh, sure. And it explains why I'm happy to be with you because I'm glad that Jim and you have been sharing Meister Eckhart all these weeks. And I've listened in on some of the broadcasts. And Eckhart is one of the great spiritual geniuses of the West, no question about it. Because he was condemned by the church a week after he died, he was, what should I say, ignored in theology and I, for example, being a Dominican, which he was also in 14 years of training, never heard his name once. So, you know, when you get condemned, you pay a price for it. But that doesn't mean others did not pick up on him. Carl Jung says that Eckhart gave him the key to the unconscious.

Berns Blac, a Marxist philosopher says that Eckhart was a deep influence on Karl Marx because he was so involved in social justice issues of his day. And he developed a philosophy and a mysticism that did not turn us back on society.

But and that's where the prophetic, the warrior dimension of Eckhart really comes through, you see. And that's where he got condemned because he was supporting the women's movement of his day, the Baguines, which the Pope at that time, John XXII, condemned 17 different times, which suggests it wasn't working too well. And when the time that Pope died, there were over 250,000 Baguines living just in Northern Europe alone. So and Eckhart supported the peasants too. In fact, he preached to them in their language, which at that time was the early German dialect. And Eckhart actually helped to invent the German language today, but he was the first intellectual to preach and therefore write in German. You know, and that's why to this day, the German language is as mystical as it is.

So Eckhart has so much to give us today. He was also a feminist. He just was, it's clear. He talks about God as mother, and of course, Julian Norwich picks up on him and develops that theme even further.

But he had this marvellous balance of the intuitive and creative along with the theological. And so I just think he's, you know, I use the phrase mystic warrior or mystic prophet, and others use the term contemplation and action. They're parallel terms. Eckhart's influence has been vast, but now that we can bring him with Jim's help and others more into the mainstream, I think we all can deepen our vocations as mystics and prophets or contemplative activists.

James Finley (4:09)

Yeah, just to echo all of that, how significant he is, and also that he plays such an important part in the Turning to the Mystic series, really. He's just one of these great mysticism of the masters, and he's among those masters. And on both the depth mystical dimension and how it incarnates itself in daily life, like what the implications are when we put it into action.

Kirsten Oates (4:37)

Beautiful.

So Matthew, you mentioned you were a Dominican, but you weren't introduced to Eckhart during your time in the Order. So how were you introduced to him?

Matthew Fox (4:48)

Well, actually I was reading Kumar Swami's book. Kumar Swami is a Hindu, and he wrote a book in the 30s called The Transformation of Nature in Art. And there's a whole chapter in there on Eckhart.

And I picked that up one day and I started to read it, and it scared me because I had just published an article that year on Fakered Space and Sacred Time, and there were whole sentences in Eckhart whom I had not read that were in my article. And I said, oh, this scared me. I really did. I put the book, I didn't finish the article. I put it on the shelf for three months, then I tiptoed back to it, and I started to read it. And then I had another response. I said, this is thrilling. I have a brother. I'm not alone. I'm not crazy. And he's a Dominican brother, too. So then I really dove into him more.