After Eckhart

Abstract

What I am going to try to do in this paper is reflect on what, in past Eckhart Society conferences, lecturers have contributed to the debate which was the focus of the 2005 conference – the debate over how far, if at all, Eckhart influenced thinking beyond the Roman Catholic Church and how far he himself was influenced by thinkers of other religions or belonging to other parts of the Christian world. So I am actually writing very little history here. What I am attempting to do is to let the thoughts of twenty-two personalities (most of them quite remarkable personalities) be briefly heard. In 1909 the Quaker scholar whom David Blamires discusses in his paper in this issue, Rufus M. Jones, called Meister Eckhart ‘one of those great watershed personalities, to be found in epoch periods, who gather up into himself the influence of preceding centuries and give new direction to the spiritual currents of succeeding generations’. This may not be absolutely correct, but clearly the extent to which Eckhart influenced others and was influenced by others outside his immediate world, and continues to do so, is a topic which has long interested quite a lot of scholars. Some forty years ago the Jesuit scholar Father William Johnston, who spent so much of his life in Japan studying Zen Buddhism, was already writing: