Eckhart and the Quaker Tradition

Abstract

Meister Eckhart’s life and writings are of interest to a wide range of people today: theologians, philosophers, historians, literary scholars, linguists, mystics and people exploring the spiritual life, to name simply the most obvious. Though Eckhart was a man of his own time, the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century, and expressed himself in the modes of that time, in Latin for his academic theological and philosophical works and in German for his sermons and spiritual discourses, his writings have proved fascinating to religious minds from the period of his rediscovery in the mid-nineteenth century to the present time. It is my task in this paper to examine how and to what extent Eckhart made an impact on Quakerism. First of all, then, I need to say a few words about Quakers. The Religious Society of Friends, known also as Quakers (a term used originally as a derogatory nickname), arose in England in the midseventeenth century as part of what has since been called ‘the Radical Reformation’. It was just one of several reactions against the Established Church, along with groups such as the Seekers, Diggers, Muggletonians, Ranters, Fifth Monarchy Men and so on. Like many similar leaders in this period, George Fox (1624–1691) was not a highly educated man; indeed, in his Journal he declared that he ‘received an opening from the Lord that to be bred at Oxford or Cambridge was not sufficient to fit a man to be a minister of Christ’. After he had his crucial experience that ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition’, he wrote: