About Eckhart’s influence on Karl Marx, Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch says: One thing is certain: Eckhart’s sermon does not intend to snuff man out for the sake of an Otherworld beyond him…A subject who thought himself to be in personal union with the Lord of Lords provided, when things got serious, a very poor example indeed of serfhood.
Eckhart proposed three actions for resisting injustice and spreading justice. The first is to reject the “merchant mentality.” The second is to hold up humanity’s nobility. The third is to struggle for justice.
In a sermon based on Jesus’ ejecting moneylenders from the temple, Eckhart dismisses the “merchant mentality” as an attitude that infiltrates the deepest levels of a person and drives God out. For Eckhart, the primary temple is not a building, but our true selves. The temple in which God wants to rule in power according to His will, is the soul of a person which He formed and created just like Himself…God wants to have this temple empty, so that He alone may dwell in it.
A merchant mentality of buying and selling, poisons even good people and religion itself. If people do good works in order to “get something in return” from God—that is a merchant mentality. “As long as we perform our works for the sake of salvation or of going to heaven, we are on the wrong track.” Therefore we should work without a “why or wherefore.” We are to love for the sake of love and do justice for the sake of justice.
Eckhart teaches that “compassion means justice” and justice is integral to spirituality. Since God is justice, you must embrace justice as it is in itself, as it is in God. Consequently, where justice is at work, you are at work, because you could not but do the work of justice. Yes, even if hell would interfere with the course of justice, you would still do the works of justice, and hell itself would not constitute any pain; hell would be joy.
Our works of justice, says Eckhart, make God “dance with joy.” With each deed, however trifling, done out of virtue and justice, and resulting in justice, God is made glad–glad through and through—so that there is nothing in the core of the Godhead that does not dance for joy.
How central is justice to Eckhart’s mysticism? “The person who understands what I say about justice and the just person understands everything I have to say.”* Has any mystic ever spoken so bluntly about the relationship of spirituality to justice as Eckhart has?
His observations were not just theoretical–they cost him a great deal and brought about his condemnation.
Eckhart wrote an entire treatise on how everyone is noble or an aristocrat. Preaching about that in the splendid half-completed Cologne Cathedral with bankers, bishops and aristocrats in the front rows, did not sit well with the aristocrats of the day. Indeed, the Franciscan archbishop, himself an aristocrat, was the first to call a trial against him. He won that trial, but lost the second one in Avignon before the Pope.
His working with the Beguines, the women’s movement of his day, also alienated him from power brokers. Pope John XXII, the same pope who oversaw Eckhart’s trial in Avignon and condemned him a week after he died, had condemned the Beguines seventeen different times! That very corrupt pope loved gold and dressing in ermine and sleeping on ermine pillowcases.
Eckhart preached to the peasants in their own dialect that they were all aristocrats. At his trial, he was told to cease preaching to them in their own language and confusing them about their nobility. Ten years later, the peasant wars broke out in Germany. Eckhart had seen that coming.
To be continued.
* Matthew Fox, Wrestling with the Prophets: Essays on Creation Spirituality and Everyday Life, pp. 166-168, 183.
Banner Image: Revolting peasants encircle a knight, 1539. Author unknown. Wikimedia Commons.
Queries for Contemplation
Do you agree with Eckhart’s three-fold strategy for taking on injustice? How do you apply it in today’s world of numerous injustices?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
Passion for Creation: The Earth-Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart, pp. 417-545.
Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior For Our Times.
Meditations with Meister Eckhart, pp. 89-131.
A Way To God: Thomas Merton’s Creation Spirituality Journey.
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality.
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth.
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice.
Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet.
Charles Burack, ed., Matthew Fox: Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality.
Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox, Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation.
5 thoughts on “Karl Marx and Meister Eckhart, “Mystic of the Left,” continued”
The use of names and words condemns every attempt to explain Eckhart’s theology (like the excellent video “The Forbidden Mystic Who Redefined God”) to some contradictions or compromises. For instance, the expression “union with God” seems to imply that there is an entity called God over there, and another called I or he/she/it over here, and that both entities somehow unite like one plus one. When Eckhart invites us to “pray God to be freed from God,” and to “have nothing, know nothing and will nothing,” he rather evokes a zero plus zero sum. We can also pray God to be free from the I/he/she/it who is praying. Eckhart applies to the Divine the first few lines of the Daodejing: “The Divine that can be spoken of is not the eternal Divine. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. That which is without-name is the source of heaven and earth.” When the fog of I/he/she/it is lifted, sunshine prevails. In today’s language, I/he/she/it are algorithms programmed by billions of years of evolution. So to speak, because the role of an algorithm is to solve a problem, whereas the algorithms that we are usually cause more problems than they solve. . .
YES! On our spiritual journeys as humanity, most of us have trouble with the first step/strategy which is letting go of our limited ego self consciousness. We are all so conditioned since birth by family, society, education, historically, and our institutions to accept our personal limited individualities that separate us from awareness of our deeper Sacredness and Oneness of Our True Selves/Eternal Souls with-in Our Source Co-Creator which is the second step/strategy of transformation experienced and taught by mystics such as Meister Eckhart. After this second spiritual transformation step of Oneness with Our Source Co-Creator We would be uniquely led on the third step/strategy of the Divine Flow of Compassionate/Loving Living of Wholeness with All Planetary and Cosmic Co-Creation Evolving Life, including All sacred physical/nonphysical dimensions/Beings, in the Sacred Process of the Eternal Present Moment….
Interesting question. Eckhart’s three actions for resisting injustice and spreading justice are “to reject the ‘merchant mentality.’ The second is to hold up humanity’s nobility. The third is to struggle for justice.” I can’t fully digest the meaning of this, but the first challenges me because just this morning an influential friend is asking me if interested people can purchase the movie we just made of one of my plays. I’d already decided to offer it free on Vimeo. Selling DVDs of it could generate money for my next production. But that is a merchant mentality! Shall I cover my costs for burning and mailing a DVD to potential buyers? Shall I charge a bit extra for my time and talent in writing the play? Shall I charge a small fee for a Vimeo watch instead of offering it for free? I find it extremely serendipitous that this is what you are writing about this very morning. And even if I decide against adopting the merchant mentality, how do I employ the second and third actions? These are very personal and immediate questions to me, as in a capitalistic society they probably are to everyone. I have no answer yet. Prayers please.
The Merchant mentality is what has evolved into a religion itself in much of the western world. It has a name today – Neoliberalism.
It’s largely difficult to escape, it is so prevalent in most facets of life in the USA. This was, is not an accident. Founded and practiced in injustice most
accept without question. Eckhart is right, all these years later.
Awareness at least is the beginning of the possibility of change. Yes Pray.
Thank you Matthew.
Society needs a merchant mentality – not for the sake or purpose of greed but for mutual cooperation. Humanity has the potential for nobility but it is lost when we create an aristocracy. When we have greed and a class system, then the struggle for justice sets in. It seems to be a perennial problem though I’m far from sure that Karl Marx offered the solution.