Meister Eckhart

The heresy trial and the bull In agro dominico

In the last years of his life Eckhart faced the one episode that has shaped his reputation more than any sermon: a heresy trial opened in Cologne in 1326, an appeal to the pope at Avignon, and a death that came before any verdict was reached. Two years later a papal bull condemned twenty eight sentences drawn from his German and Latin works. None of this settles what he actually meant by them. It does explain why his name carried a shadow for centuries, and why the Dominican Order itself asked Rome, in 1980, to take a fresh look at the case.

This page sets out what is reasonably well documented: how the accusations began, what happened at the Cologne hearing, what Eckhart said in his own defence, what the bull actually says, and how his own order and later scholars have read the case since. For the rest of his career, see his life.

How the accusations began

By the early 1320s Eckhart was a senior and popular figure in the Dominican order, teaching and preaching in Cologne after stretches in Paris, Erfurt and Strasbourg. The trouble started inside his own order before it ever reached the archbishop. The first list of suspect passages, handed to him by his superior Nicholas of Strasbourg, drew on the Book of Divine Consolation and had been compiled by two Dominicans.

The first list, presented to him in 1325 by Nicholas of Strasbourg (who was otherwise generally supportive of Eckhart's preaching), likely contained passages from the Book of Divine Consolation drawn up by two "renegade" Dominicans, Hermann of Summo and William of Nideggen, who only accused Eckhart of heresy after themselves being accused of corruption. Eckhart answered with a treatise, now lost, and for a time his superiors were satisfied.Despite this assurance, however, the archbishop in 1326 ordered an inquisitorial trial.

By the time the archbishop's commission convened, the dossier against him had grown considerably.In 1326 they presented the Archbishop of Cologne Henry II of Virneburg, who was significantly less sympathetic to Eckhart's cause than Nicholas, with their list of 74 purportedly heretical propositions from Eckhart's Latin and German works.

The Cologne hearing and Eckhart's defence

On September 26, 1326, Eckhart appeared before the diocesan inquisitorial commission to speak to the charges of heresy in a trial that, as Bernard McGinn notes, was "without precedent" for the late middle ages. A Dominican of his standing, a former master of theology at Paris, was simply not the kind of figure such proceedings were built for.

In his defense at these proceedings, Eckhart cleverly appealed to the distinction between intellect and will central to the debates between the Franciscans and the Dominicans.Even if he were in error regarding certain theological statements, he maintained, this was merely an intellectual failure and could not by itself amount to his having committed heresy, since the latter is, properly understood, a volitional matter. He is reported to have put the point bluntly:"I may err but I am not a heretic", because error belongs to the mind and heresy to the will.

He was not left to fight alone.Throughout the difficult months of late 1326, Eckhart had the full support of the local Dominican authorities, as evident in Nicholas of Strasbourg's three official protests against the actions of the inquisitors in January 1327.

The appeal to Avignon and his death

Eckhart did not accept the Cologne commission as competent to try him, a Dominican, and took the case over its head.On 24 January 1327 Eckhart appealed to the holy see. On 13 February he made a declaration of orthodoxy in the Dominican church of Cologne, and on 22 February the commissioners of the inquisition rebutted his appeal. In the spring and summer of 1327 the trial moved to the papal see at Avignon.

At Avignon the matter changed shape.The pope set up a commission of theologians to examine the lists from the Cologne hearings.By this point, the concern was no longer whether Eckhart was a heretic but rather to determine the orthodoxy of the propositions themselves. The question had shifted from the man to his sentences.

Eckhart did not live to hear the outcome.Eckhart did not live to see his condemnation; he died sometime before April 30, 1328, probably on January 28, 1328, possibly in Avignon.

The bull and its 28 articles

More than a year after Eckhart's death, on 27 March 1329, Pope John XXII issued the bull In agro dominico.This ended the inquisition proceedings against Eckhart, who had died before the bull was published.

The bull followed the commission's recommendation in condemning all 28 articles, but ordered them according to various levels of severity, eleven of them being merely claimed to be "likely misunderstood." In practice this meant the first fifteen articles, plus the last two, were declared outright heretical, while the middle eleven were marked asevil sounding, bold and smacking of heresy, language short of a direct charge of heresy.

The articles themselves run from the metaphysical to the provocative. One reads, in translation, thatit can be granted that the world existed from eternity. Another has Eckhart explaining that Godwas not able to create the world first, because He cannot take things before He is. Several of the condemned sentences touch on themes still central to his sermons: the soul's ground, the birth of God within it, and the idea that the just man needs nothing because he already has everything in God. You can read the ideas themselves, apart from the condemnation, in the pages on the ground of the soul and the birth of God in the soul.

What the bull does not do is name Eckhart himself a heretic.Nowhere in the bull or its accompanying documents, however, was Meister Eckhart himself ever declared a heretic. Bernard McGinn reads the document the same way: the pope absolved Eckhart of conscious heresy while still faulting him forthings which he put forth especially before the uneducated crowds in his sermons, the worry being less abstract theology than what plain listeners might make of it.

How the Dominicans and scholars have looked at the case since

Eckhart's own circle did not accept the condemnation quietly. His younger confrere Henry Suso, who had studied under him at Cologne, wrote a short treatise in Eckhart's defence not long after the bull appeared, andis also notable for defending Meister Eckhart's legacy after Eckhart was posthumously condemned for heresy in 1329. For centuries after that his name carried enough risk that copyists and readers handled his German sermons with some caution.

The turn came in the twentieth century.In 1980 the Dominican General Chapter at Walberberg decided to initiate proceedings for a reexamination of Eckhart's case. That decision followed, and fed, a broader shift in scholarship.This interest is the result of both the "rehabilitation" of Eckhart by the theological fraternity, the greater part of which is now convinced of his fundamental orthodoxy, and of the extraordinary character of the condemnation itself.

Part of what makes the case unusual is simply how rare it was.It was the first and only occasion when the full machinery of the Inquisition was used against a member of the Dominican Order, and it was similarly the first and only time in which a theologian of the first rank was charged with the inquisitio haereticae pravitatis, the most serious accusation the Inquisition had at its disposal. Winfried Trusen's archival study of the trial records found that the proceedings, for all that,remained fundamentally within the bounds of legality, even as it uncoveredthe malevolence of his detractors and their determination to inflict maximum damage upon Eckhart within the strict letter of the law.

Not every scholar reads the motive the same way. Some, following the historian Josef Koch, think the real dispute was not primarily doctrinal at all but tied toa political nature and to do with the role of the Dominican Order in the conflict between the Papacy and the Emperor, a reading others have questioned in turn. The matter is still argued over, which is itself a sign that nobody treats the 1329 bull as the last word on what Eckhart meant.

We take the same approach on this site: the bull tells you what worried fourteenth century Cologne, not what the sermons say when you read them on their own terms. For that, start with how to read Eckhart or browse the library itself.