Howard Thurman and Meister Eckhart: Brothers in the Struggle for Social Justice

Howard Thurman is known as the spiritual genius behind the civil rights movement.  His book, Jesus and the Disinherited, deeply influenced MLK, Jr.   

Thurman talks about the “inwardness of religion” and the “outwardness of religion.”  I understand the former to be Paths One and Two, the Via Positiva and the Via Negativa; and the latter to be Paths Three and Four, the Via Creativa and the Via Transformativa. 

For Thurman, the imagination in humans is in fact the Image of God in us, “and those unto whom it is given shall see God.”  To follow our religious imagination is to “operate from a new center,” one that is derived from our experience of the Divine. 

Thus the Via Creativa leads to the Via Transfomativa for Thurman.  He puts this explicitly when he says

…the place where the imagination shows its greatest powers as the angelos, the messenger, of God is in the miracle which it creates when one man, standing in his place, is able, while remaining there, to put himself in another man’s place.  To send his imagination forth to establish a beachhead in another man’s spirit, and from that vantage point so to blend with the other’s landscape that what he sees and feels is authentic–this is the great adventure in human relations. 

Here Thurman is defining beautifully the truth of compassion.  And here lies salvation, for “to be to another human being what is needed at the time that the need is most urgent and most acutely felt, this is to participate in the precise act of redemption.”

The prophet works from imagination.  That is why art as meditation is called “the way of the prophets.”  Moral imagination sees beyond the boundaries of a particular time and social structure to see alternatives.  The civil rights movement saw beyond segregation and Jim Crow—but it also developed a strategy (non- violent civil disobedience) to make that beyond happen.

Just as Howard Thurman was fully engaged in the struggle for justice and civil rights in his day, so was Meister Eckhart in his.  He strongly supported the women’s movement (the Beguines) and the peasant movement of his day.  This did not sit well with the powers that be in church and society and contributed to his condemnation which occurred a week after he died following a trial in the papal headquarters of Avignon (the same pope who condemned the Beguines seventeen times also condemned Eckhart).

Eckhart declares that justice lies at the heart of spirituality, “the person who understands what I say about justice and the just person understands everything I have to say.”  He, like Jesus and the Buddha, calls us to compassion, and declares: “compassion is the same as justice.” Eckhart did not pursue spirituality from an armchair or a safe and comfortable position of tenure in an academic ivory tower. He spoke in the language of the oppressed (German peasant dialect) and abandoned academia in Paris to work among the people in Germany.

Adapted from Matthew Fox, Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior for Our Times, pp. 248, 221f.

Banner Image: “Justice for All/World Peace” Photo by RODNAE Productions from Pexels

Do you recognize both the inward and outward movement of religion/spirituality in your spirituality—with or without religion as a motivator?

Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior For Our Time

While Matthew Fox recognizes that Meister Eckhart has influenced thinkers throughout history, he also wants to introduce Eckhart to today’s activists addressing contemporary crises. Toward that end, Fox creates dialogues between Eckhart and Carl Jung, Thich Nhat Hanh, Rabbi Heschel, Black Elk, Karl Marx, Rumi, Adrienne Rich, Dorothee Soelle, David Korten, Anita Roddick, Lily Yeh, M.C. Richards, and many others.
“Matthew Fox is perhaps the greatest writer on Meister Eckhart that has ever existed. (He) has successfully bridged a gap between Eckhart as a shamanistic personality and Eckhart as a post-modern mentor to the Inter-faith movement, to reveal just how cosmic Eckhart really is, and how remarkably relevant to today’s religious crisis! ” — Steven Herrmann, Author of Spiritual Democracy: The Wisdom of Early American Visionaries for the Journey Forward