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II: Justice, Peace and Dominicans 1216–1999 The Medieval Rhineland: Eckhart and Popular Theological Preaching

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

John Orme Mills OP
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Thirty years ago the very idea of including the Rhineland mystics in a series of articles on the role of the Dominicans in the promotion of peace and social justice would have been seen as intolerably bizarre. At that time it was still widely taken for granted that mysticism and dedication to the promotion of social justice were irreconcilable: that they belonged to profoundly different ways of understanding the world and understanding the teaching of Jesus Christ. There were, of course, some remarkable people who seemed to be able to keep a foot in both the camps, but lesser mortals who attempted this were in danger of not being taken seriously by the occupants of either.

In spite of the massive changes which have taken place since then in politics, the culture and the Church, even today the presence of the Dominican Rhineland mystics in this series demands some explanation. By ‘the Dominican Rhineland mystics’ we mean, first and foremost, three friars of the Dominican Province of Teutonia: the brilliant but controversial Meister Eckhart (c.1260-c.1328) and two of his disciples, Johannes Tauler (c.1300-1361) and Henry Suso (1295-1366). At first sight the only things which these men seem to share in common with, for instance, the French Dominican worker-priests of the 1950s or the Brazilian Dominican liberation theologians of the 1970s are membership of the same religious order and considerable strength of character.

After all, Frank Tobin has said that Eckhart’s sermons ‘center so exclusively on what is within and are so utterly devoid of any comments that might be used as references to time and place that they might just as well have been delivered on the moon as in turbulent fourteenth-century Strasburg or Cologne.’

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 79 , Issue 929-930 , July 1998 , pp. 307 - 318
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Introduction to Henry Suso: The Exemplar, with two German sermons, Paulist Press, New York 1989, p.15Google Scholar.

2 nn. 139,146. Augustine discussed the relation of the good to order in The Nature of the Good 3qq., and Thomas in e.g. ST 2a2ae.81,2. Eckhart's direct source for die notion of the concatenation of all reality into the great chain of being appears to be the Pseudo-Augustinian The Spirit and the Soul.

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5 New Blackfriars Vol 79 No. 927 May 1998, Justice, Peace and Dominicans 1216-1999:I-Early Voices for Justice p.215.

6 See, for example, the loving respect he shows in sermon H47 for cobblers and ploughmen, his statement in sermon H40 that an uncouth peasant will be a thousand times more welcome at the heavenly banquet man vain worldlings, and his criticisms in sermons H23 and H27 of great lovers of themselves who will rob one another of their rights by injustice, fraud and violence and dominate their neighbour.

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17 op. cit. p.219.

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27 See Davies, Oliver: Meister Eckhart: Mystical Theologian, SPCK London 1991Google Scholar, ch.3: Meister Eckhart and the Religious Women of the Age.

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