Meister Eckhart on Divine Knowledge
“The most engaging and illuminating study of a ‘mystical thinker’ I have read. Those who read it carefully will find the most sympathetic and sophisticated treatment of Eckhart in English.”—Steven E. Ozment, author ofMysticism and Dissent: Religious Ideology and Social Protest in the Sixteenth CenturyandFlesh and Spirit: A Study of Private Life in Early Modern Germany“C. F. Kelley’sMeister Eckhart on Divine Knowledge, first published in 1977, is a true classic of modern research on Eckhart. The first major study of the German Dominican in English, it effected an important shift in understanding Eckhart by demonstrating that he teaches and preaches primarily from a ‘principial’ perspective—that is, from God’s viewpoint as the source and principle of all things. Eckhart’s principial knowledge, as Kelley shows, ‘starts within God and then proceeds to understand all things from the standpoint of divine instasis.’ Once one grasps this fundamental, if startling, insight, many of the seeming contradictions and conundrums of Eckhart’s thought fall away to reveal the true profundity of his teaching about the relation of God and human. This reissue of Kelley’s book will be welcomed by all students of Eckhart.”—Bernard McGinn, author ofThe Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid NothingandThe Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany“In my view, no other study of Meister Eckhart has so well penetrated to the marrow of the great Dominican teacher and preacher’s philosophical and theological achievement. In the process of exploring what he has called the ‘axial theme’ in Eckhart’s teaching, Kelley has also managed to produce the greatest philosophical and theological exegesis on non-dualism to come out of the Christian tradition.”—William Stranger, DharmaCafé.com