The Creation Spirituality Lineage Calling All Social and Environmental Activists, Mystic Explorers, Justice Makers, Cosmic Thinkers, Earth Keepers Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox |
Eckhart on Our Nobility,
continued 11/07/2023 |
As I shared in my video accompanying yesterday’s Daily Meditation, Meister Eckhart devotes a lengthy treatise to the topic of our royal personhood applying it to the power politics of his time. So much so that Marxist scholar Ernst
Bloch credits Eckhart with inspiring Karl Marx’s criticism of social and class injustice. Eckhart also says this: |
What our Lord calls a nobleperson, the prophet calls a great eagle. Who then is nobler than he who is born, on the one hand of the highest and the best that the creature has, and on the other hand, from the inmost ground of the divine nature and of his desert? Eckhart was speaking in German—which is itself a political act because German in his day was a series of dialects of the peasants. He is speaking to the peasants in their own language about how they are all aristocrats born of the inmost ground of Divinity. |
The eagle of medieval nobility: Henry VI, 12th-century King of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor with the original heraldic single-headed eagle (Hadlaub, Codex Manesse, about 1300). Wikimedia Commons |
This did not endear him to certain powerbrokers–including religious ones–of his culture. Indeed, at his trial in Avignon, he was accused of “confusing the simple people” by
preaching to them in their own language and telling them they were aristocrats. |
Lakota holy man Chief Frank Fools Crow, in his ceremonial regalia and eagle-feather war bonnet. Wikimedia Commons, from the cover of the book Fools Crow, by Thomas Mails. | Eckhart plays with two German words–the word eagle (Adler) and the word edler which means “more noble.” Adler and edler, we are eagles and “more noble.” The eagle in indigenous cultures is considered a great conduit between earth and heaven, the divine and humans, because they soar so high. Remember that before the invention of the airplane, which is to say during the vast amount of time of indigenous peoples’ culture, the eagle was the highest-flying object one could observe from earth. |
Eckhart is also connecting the New Testament (nobleperson) to the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew Bible (eagle). A noble
person is a prophetic person, and a prophetic person is a noble person. To be continued. |
Adapted from Matthew Fox, “Meister Eckhart and Karl Marx: The Mystic as Political Theologian,” in Fox, Wrestling with the Prophets, pp. 165-198.
Banner Image: Bald eagle flying over Coquihalla Highway, Yale, Canada. Photo by Rachel McDermott on Unsplash
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Queries for Contemplation Do you soar like an eagle? Are you a noble person because you are born of the highest and the best that the creature has, and also from the inmost ground of the divine nature and its desert? How are you assisting others to do and be and feel the same? |
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Wrestling with the Prophets: Essays on Creation Spirituality and Everyday Life
In one of his foundational works, Fox engages with some of history’s greatest
mystics, philosophers, and prophets in profound and hard-hitting essays on such varied topics as Eco-Spirituality, AIDS, homosexuality, spiritual feminism, environmental revolution, Native American spirituality, Christian mysticism, Art and Spirituality, Art as Meditation, Interfaith or Deep Ecumenism and more. |
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