Hermeneutik des Lebens

Meister Eckhart is rightly considered one of the most speculative medieval thinkers. His extensive use of philosophical sources is balanced, however, by an equally thorough biblical foundation of his theology. While staunchly upholding the perfect concordance between natural reason and revelation, Eckhart never proclaims the ‘sublation’ of Sacred Scripture into the philosophical concept but develops his theological approach from within the biblical text in its ineliminable positivity. At the same time, he does not consider the Bible as a radically different source of knowledge whose principles are at odds with the natural world and human reality. Eckhart’s philosophical and theological speculation goes hand in hand with a hermeneutical effort that seeks to decipher the inexhaustible richness of meaning of both the biblical text and human existence and to point out their profound interconnectedness. Ultimately, his exegesis presents itself as a hermeneutics of life, where Sacred Scripture and concrete lived experience mutually elucidate each other in order to reveal the whole of reality as a fabric of meaning.
The articles contained in this volume were initially presented at a colloquium on 18-19 October 2016, in Vienna. The different contributions examine Eckhart’s hermeneutical approach from a wide range of perspectives, including philosophy, theology, history, philology, exegesis, and spiritual practice.