Vragen voor Eckhart : de Dialoog tussen Eckhart en de leek als kritische zoektocht naar een veertiende-eeuwse lekenspiritualiteit

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the Middle Dutch text the ‘Dialogue between Eckhart and the Layman’, an enigmatic spiritual piece of writing from the mid-fourteenth century. A layman and a master converse about a broad range of religious and social subjects. The student remains anonymous, as the title suggests, and the master is named after Meister Eckhart, the famous German theologian and mystic.

In this book I argue that the Dialogue can be considered as a text which sits neatly atop the fault line between the world and its monasteries and convents, between a worldly and a religious experience of faith. The text may well be our most important witness to the beginnings of a process of socioreligious changes, in which ordinary laymen, too, wanted to expand the spirituality they had previously internalized.

I provide a reconstruction of the original text, an analysis of the dialectical interplay between the two protagonists and between the different levels of high and low, contemplative and practical theology and a contextualization of this dialogue within the broader intellectual culture of the Low Countries. In particular, I show how the text can be connected to the ideas of Jan van Ruusbroec and Jan van Leeuwen.