Grounding Community: On the Reception of Eckhartian Mysticism in Reformist and Revolutionary Texts From the Late Middle Ages to the Fin de Siècle.

Abstract

This project examines how texts in the tradition of Meister Eckhart became productive in the conceptualization, imagination, and creation of new communities. It explores the influence of mystical thought on reformist, revolutionary, or utopian thinking and its use in the justification of new community projects. A focus lies on the analysis of promoting a pastoral relationship between a spiritual leader and a less advanced person as the ideal mode of communal organization. Spanning a period of about six hundred years, the project explores different text corpora vis-à-vis their intertextual relation to texts attributed to Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, and others, and to anonymous mystical treatises such as the Theologia Deutsch. The first chapter focuses on a group of codices originating from the Grüne Wörth monastery in Strasburg, founded in the fourteenth century by Rulman Merswin. It examines how mystical themes, compilation practices, and the invention of a mythical founder of the monastery, the Friend of god in the land above, serve to promote its unique social organization. The second chapter examines Thomas Müntzer’s theology of direct experience of god and his project of establishing a new apostolic church and their relation to Eckhartian mystical texts. The third chapter traces Johann Arndt’s reception primarily of Tauler’s sermons and the Theologia Deutsch in his Vier Bücher vom Wahren Christentum. On this basis, it elucidates the ways in which Johann Valentin Andreae’s Rosicrucian and theological fictions are inspired by Arndt and thus indirectly by vernacular mysticism. The fourth chapter discusses Gustav Landauer’s interpretation of Meister Eckhart’s vernacular writings towards an anarchist-socialist community ideal.