§ 114.1. =Meister Eckhart.=--One of the profoundest thinkers of all the Christian centuries was the Dominican Meister Eckhart, the true father of German speculative mysticism. Born in Strassburg about A.D. 1260, he studied at Cologne under Albert the Great, but took his master’s degree at Paris in A.D. 1303. He had already been for some years prior at Erfurt and provincial vicar of Thuringia. In A.D. 1304 he was made provincial of Saxony, and in A.D. 1307 vicar-general of Bohemia. In both positions he did much for the reform of the cloisters of his order. In A.D. 1311 we find him teacher in Paris; then for some years teaching and preaching in Strassburg; afterwards officiating as prior at Frankfort; and finally as private teacher at Cologne, where he died in A.D. 1327. While at Frankfort in A.D. 1320 he was suspected of heresy because of alleged intercourse with Beghards (§ 98, 12) and Brothers of the Free Spirit (§ 116, 5). In A.D. 1325 the archbishop of Cologne renewed these charges, but Eckhart succeeded in vindicating himself. The archbishop now set up an inquisition of his own, but from its sentence Eckhart appealed to the pope, lodged a protest, and then of his own accord in the Dominican church of Cologne, before the assembled congregation, solemnly declared that the charge against him rested upon misrepresentation and misunderstanding, but that he was then and always ready to withdraw anything that might be erroneous. The papal judgment, given two years after Eckhart’s death, pronounced twenty-eight of his propositions to be pantheistic in their tendency, seventeen being heretical and eleven dangerous. He was therefore declared to be suspected of heresy. The bull, contrary to reason and truth, went on to say that Eckhart at the end of his life had retracted and submitted all his writings and doctrines to the judgment of the Holy See. But Eckhart had indignantly protested against the charge of pantheism, and certainly in his doctrine of God and the creature, of the high nobility of the human soul, of retirement and absorption into God, he has always kept within the limits of Christian knowledge and life. Attaching himself to the Platonic and Neoplatonic doctrines, which are met with also in Albert and Thomas, and appealing to the acknowledged authorities of the Church, especially the Areopagite, Augustine, and Aquinas, Eckhart with great originality composed a singularly comprehensive and profound system of religious knowledge. Although in all his writings aiming primarily at quickening and edification, he always grounds his endeavours on a theoretical investigation of the nature of the thing. But knowledge is for him essentially union of the knowing subject with the object to be known, and the highest stage of knowledge is the intuition where all finite things sink into the substance of Deity.[336]