The Bible in Western culture, Meister Eckhart, from whom God hid mystic in the tradition of Western religion,

and he was described by his contemporaries as the man from whom God hid nothing.

Meister Eckhart was a Dominican friar, and he was a theologian and a teacher,

but he's most widely remembered and most explicitly remembered for his sermons,

which were transcripts or copies or articulations of

Meister Eckhart's mystical religious experiences.

And the collection of sermons that Meister Eckhart left us is one of the most important

legacies in the tradition of Western mysticism.

And Western mysticism has always had an

uneasy status, an uneasy state in Western religion because of the difficulties in articulating

the content of mystical religious experience. It seems that mysticism resists linguistic formulation.

Those of us who have ever had a religious experience,

who have had a conversion experience, or had some illumination about the world,

are often frustrated in our attempts to explain it to other people.

Meister Eckhart met those problems and to some extent surmounted them.

It is for that reason that the legacy of

sermons that he leaves us is one of the most important treasures of the Western religious

tradition. As close as anyone has ever come to putting mystical experience into words,

that's what Mr. Eckhart is important for. He is the greatest figure in non-scholastic theology.

In other words, he lives between 1260 and 1328, and this is the high point, or one of the, you know,

scholasticism is still a mainstream of Western thought. Meister Eckhart, while he understands

the tradition of Western scholarship, particularly he understands scholastism, he's read the great scholastics, has decided to take his own road, a different road. He's decided that logic chopping, as we see in scholasticism, is not sufficient for an understanding of or an apprehension of God's grace and majesty. And so he's decided to take a road that is lonely because he's traveling this road on his own.

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