The works and ideas of influential thinkers, because of their rich complexity, seem different to every historical age; they oscillate, unconcerned with how we categorize them. But anyone who starts to work historically looks for or-der; he needs labels, and so he clings to disciplinary affiliations, intellectual currents, titles. Historical thinking thrives on rebelling against this initial manner of categorizing, classifying, and designating, especially in philoso-phy, where certain labels—like idealism, realism, and so forth—are almost never used without doing injustice. They drown the individual thinker in
“currents.”
Our task here is to try to grasp Eckhart’s intellectual world, the private world of a misfit, through his writings; other labels we may bring to the text are dismissible and of no real value, except perhaps for their preparatory and didactic nature as aids to a first approach. Nothing can be inferred from them about Eckhart. At best, they are heuristic tools.
The utility of any such label must be proved through a close and thor-ough reading of Eckhart’s texts, and I propose—only hypothetically for now—to try out the phrase “Eckhart as philosopher of Christianity” instead of the label “mystic.” Perhaps this phrase may lead us closer to Eckhart’s way of thinking than does “mystic,” a term that has no grand origin and can-not, after all, invoke Dionysius the Areopagite as its source. I am asking the reader to forget about Eckhart the “mystic” for now and to attempt instead
to read Eckhart as a “philosopher of Christianity.” Let me provide a prelim-inary explanation of the phrase here; whether this designation indeed fits his writings better, only a close reading of Eckhart’s works can show.
The following facts may provide cause for revision: the label “mystical theology” existed long before Eckhart, and yet, as the next chapter will show, he never said in any of his self- portrayals or defenses: you will only under-stand me once you recognize that I am engaging in a “mystical theology.”
There is nothing authentic about the label “mystic” in Eckhart’s case. It began to circulate before anyone could have been familiar with Eckhart’s Latin writings and when scholars were under the impression that they had detected a second school of thought, a medieval corollary to “scholasti-cism,” namely, “mysticism.”
The phrase “philosophy of Christianity” sounds strange today, or is associated with Hegel. It reeks of philosophical idealism and of anachro-nism. It sounds as if ideas from the early nineteenth century are being applied to an earlier period.
In a philosophy of Christianity, Christian beliefs would be explained via a strict methodology, through pure reason. A philosophy of Christianity would mean an attempt to prove Christian ideas rationally in such a way that believers and unbelievers alike would come to recognize them as true, and not merely as culturally contingent constructs of Christian communities of faith. Someone developing such proofs could be a believer, but need not be;
either way, he would be creating a new methodological realm in which cer-tain universal premises of humanity would replace the creed as the basis of proof. Let us assume that such a philosopher of Christianity was praying for enlightenment while he was constructing and putting forth such proofs. No matter how fierce his prayers, or how seriously he took them, he would eval-uate them like a mathematician praying to the Holy Spirit for inspiration in attempting to solve a complex mathematical problem. The prayer in this sce-nario would not enter into the argument, an argument that would have to be entirely mathematical, or the prayer would have been in vain.
A philosopher of Christianity would subscribe to a similarly strict method of proving his arguments. The article of Christian faith to be proved would vary according to place and time. It has a history, and we must not im-agine it as a stable given existing outside time. Even an author saying that he is proving the main tenets of the Bible may mean different things, and we must ask ourselves which ones they are. Sacra Scriptura, Holy Scripture, was
simply another word for theology in the Middle Ages, and hence meant not just the Bible. The creeds of Christianity developed late and only after im-mense struggles. They lack some of the most important tenets, such as the justification. They were interpreted in various ways. They were the cause of much strife. Do purgatory and confirmation, for example, belong to the doc-trinal teachings of Christianity?
So, too, “purely rational proofs” were not always the same everywhere.
Reason itself was not always the same. Even the strictest standards of proof could not always prevent contingency, which was due to group affiliations and contemporary trends, the books one had read, what else one knew about science or the world, and the mission that one subscribed to.
Therefore, to practice a philosophy of Christianity can mean only this: a thinker attempts to prove those theses generally considered essential tenets of Christian thought with what he considers to be a purely rational method. And yet he could not do so unless he started from the philosophical status quo, even if he wanted to improve it. He developed a method that he was able to plausibly defend against authorities of the time as a purely rational procedure; he made use of the concepts of reason and the rules of knowledge creation that were relatively uncontested in his intellectual mi-lieu and that were known for their methodological separability from mere beliefs.
As is immediately recognizable, such a procedure was threatened by objections from two sides: Christians protested that what was squeezed into a rational mold was not the real and true Christianity, and philosophers ob-jected that what was claimed to be purely rational was in reality highly illog-ical and philosophillog-ically untenable.
Philosophers of Christianity were constantly faced with this war on two fronts. But they could console themselves; their opponents did not pos-sess the definite and successful form of philosophy either.
I take the label “philosophy of Christianity” to be programmatic. It does not have to carry this designation. There were authors who understood theology in emphatically scientific or philosophical terms. They claimed that they were practicing the true, the speculative theology; others may have called it “philosophical dogmatics.” The terms we use and our departmental affiliations do not matter; what matters is the strict adherence to a specific methodology.