In August 2022, I was interviewed about Meister Eckhart for AJ Langley’s MyFavouriteMystic podcast. You can give the episode a listen by clicking right here.
The episode touches upon the challenging ideas Eckhart put forward so daringly in his vernacular Middle High German sermons, from kenosis and birthing to self-annihilation and the ‘soul-spark.’ We also discuss the tortuous history of the modern German-language reception of Eckhart: his ‘rediscovery’ by the off-kilter mining magnate Franz Xaver von Baader (who saw him as a proto-Böhme and ‘spiritual alchemist’); Baader’s recommendation of Eckhart to Schelling and Hegel (the latter of whom recognized in Eckhart some kind of precursor to his own ‘system’); the professionalism of Eckhart-scholarship via Franz Pfeiffer & Josef Quint; and the threat that Eckhart’s legacy might be swallowed up by a Heideggerian or even more neo-Fascist form of appropriation.
Looming large in the background here is Mysticism and Materialism in the Wake of German Idealism (Routledge, 2022), the book I co-authored with W. Ezekiel Goggin, who was also interviewed by AJ Langley in Episode 41 of MyFavouriteMystic (on Georges Bataille). You can learn more about our book by clicking right here.
