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German literature
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Origins and Middle Ages
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"The
Nibelungenlied"
(PART
I,
PART
II,
PART
III,
PART
IV)
"The Ring of the Nibelung" illustrations by Arthur
Rackham
Joseph
Bédier "The Romance of Tristan and Iseult"
illustrations
Mac Harshberger
from "Tristan and Iseult" by Joseph
Bedier
Gertrude
Hall "The Wagnerian Romances"
H.A. GUERBER "STORIES OF THE WAGNER OPERA"
Reinmar von
Hagenau
Heinrich von Morungen
Walther von der
Vogelweide
Heinrich
von Veldeke
Hartmann
von Aue
Wolfram von Eschenbach
Gottfried von Strassburg
Rudolf von Ems
Konrad von
Wurzburg
Saint Albertus Magnus
Meister Eckhart
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German literature comprises the written works of
the German-speaking peoples of central Europe. It
has shared the fate of German politics and history:
fragmentation and discontinuity. Germany did not
become a modern nation-state until 1871, and the
prior history of the various German states is marked
by warfare, religious turmoil, and periods of
economic decline. This fragmented development sets
German literature apart from the national
literatures of France and England, for instance,
which enjoyed uninterrupted brilliance from the
Middle Ages to the modern era. Nevertheless, German
literature has experienced three periods of
established greatness: the high Middle Ages (c.
1160–c. 1230), the turn of the 18th to the 19th
century (the “age of Goethe”), and the turn of the
19th to the 20th.
This article provides a concise historical survey
of German literature. Its major periods, movements,
works, and themes are discussed and set into their
political and cultural context. The aim is to
characterize major and representative works and
ideas and not to attempt a complete or even thorough
survey of authors and the literary scene.
Origins and Middle Ages
Pre-Christian and early Christian periods
The
Germanic tribes immigrating to mainland Europe from
Scandinavia from the 1st century bc onward brought
with them a rich culture. Since its language-related
heritage was orally transmitted and its recipients
saw no need to replace the physical presence of the
singer of tales with written texts, most of it is
lost. The rich mythology and epic-heroic poetry are
partly recoverable from later written sources, all
from the 13th century and beyond—the Old Norse Eddic
poems, the German
Nibelungenlied, and various poems
about the hero Dietrich von Bern/Theodoric. Only
broken bits of this culture remain: runic
inscriptions, mythological motifs on gold amulets, a
few magic incantations (the “Merseburger
Zaubersprüche” [“Merseburg charms”], preserved in
the Merseburg library, which reveal pre-Christian
origins), and a 67-line fragment of a heroic song
depicting a tragic clash between the warrior
Hildebrand and his own son (Hildebrandslied [c. 800;
“Hildebrand’s Song,” Eng. trans. The
Hildebrandslied]). The imagination of this nomadic
warrior culture envisioned human destiny as being
inescapably tragic. In Norse mythology, even the
gods themselves fall prey to malice and revenge and
are swallowed up in the cataclysm known as Ragnarok,
the “Doom of the Gods.”
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Dietrich von Bern/Theodoric
heroic figure of Germanic legend,
apparently derived from Theodoric the
Great, an Ostrogothic king of Italy who
reigned from c. 493 to 526 ad.
Dietrich’s exploits are related in a
number of south German songs preserved
in Das Heldenbuch (“The Heroes
Book”)—including Dietrichs Flucht
(“Dietrich’s Flight”), Die Rabenschlacht
(“The Battle of Ravenna”), Alpharts Tod
(“Alphart’s Death”), and a number of
additional stories—and, more fully, in
the 13th-century Icelandic prose
Thidriks saga. This legend also has a
connection with the Middle High German
epic Nibelungenlied. Driven by Ermenrich (Ermanaric) from
his kingdom of Bern (Verona), Dietrich
lives for many years at the court of
Etzel (Attila), until he returns with a
Hunnish army to defeat Ermenrich at
Ravenna. Etzel’s two sons fall in the
fight, and Dietrich returns to Etzel to
answer for their deaths. Later he has
his revenge by slaying Ermenrich.
Dietrich’s long stay with Etzel
represents Theodoric’s youth spent at
the Byzantine court. The exile is
adorned with amazing exploits, most of
which have no connection with the cycle.
Dietrich typifies the wise and just
ruler as opposed to the tyrannical
Ermenrich. Many of the incidents told
about him have no basis in the story of
Theodoric, although some could be
related to the experiences of
Theodoric’s father, Theodemir. Other
figures in the Dietrich cycle are his
weapons master, Hildebrand, with his
nephews Alphart and Wolfhart; Wittich
and Heime, Dietrich’s traitorous
vassals; and Biterolf and Dietleib, the
king of Toledo and his son, who join
Dietrich in battle at Worms.
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Hildebrandslied
English Song of Hildebrand
Old High German alliterative heroic
poem on the fatalistic theme of a duel
of honour between a father and a son.
The fragment, dating from c. 800, is the
sole surviving record of Old High German
heroic poetry. Its hero, Hildebrand,
appears in Germanic legend as an elder
warrior, a magician, and an adviser and
weapons master to Dietrich von Bern, the
poetic incarnation of the Ostrogothic
king Theodoric the Great. In the Song of
Hildebrand the hero is forced into a
duel by the aggressions of a young
warrior, Hadubrand, who does not know
that Hildebrand is his father. The
fragment leaves no doubt that Hildebrand
kills his son.
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Ragnarok
(Old Norse: “Doom of the Gods”), in
Scandinavian mythology, the end of the
world of gods and men. The Ragnarök is
fully described only in the Icelandic
poem Völuspá (“Sibyl’s Prophecy”),
probably of the late 10th century, and
in the 13th-century Prose Edda of Snorri
Sturluson (d. 1241), which largely
follows the Völuspá. According to those
two sources, the Ragnarök will be
preceded by cruel winters and moral
chaos. Giants and demons approaching
from all points of the compass will
attack the gods, who will meet them and
face death like heroes. The sun will be
darkened, the stars will vanish, and the
earth will sink into the sea. Afterward,
the earth will rise again, the innocent
Balder will return from the dead, and
the hosts of the just will live in a
hall roofed with gold.
Disjointed allusions to the Ragnarök,
found in many other sources, show that
conceptions of it varied. According to
one poem two human beings, Lif and
Lifthrasir (“Life” and “Vitality”), will
emerge from the world tree (which was
not destroyed) and repeople the earth.
The title of Richard Wagner’s opera
Götterdämmerung is a German equivalent
of Ragnarök meaning “twilight of the
gods.”
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The society’s heroic pessimism and inability to
free itself from revenge cycles made it ripe for a
religion of reconciliation and atonement. The
conversion of the Germans to Christianity (largely
accomplished by the end of the 5th century) thus
presented a great challenge: that of reeducating an
entire people and of adapting and translating the
literature of Christianity into a language that had
no written tradition. The earliest known effort to
this end is the remarkable late-4th-century Gothic
Bible translation of Bishop Ulfilas. (In order to
execute it, Ulfilas seems to have developed the
Gothic alphabet.) Educational reforms instituted in
the age of Charlemagne (768–814) brought scattered
religious texts in one or another of the dialects of
Old High German (for instance, Otfried of
Weissenberg’s Evangelienbuch [c. 870, “Gospel
Book”], a rhymed version of the Gospels). In the
late 11th and throughout the 12th century, religious
literature in early Middle High German proliferated.
These works warn of the sinfulness and perils of
earthly life, painting it as an illusion and a net
of the Devil to trap unwary fools. Their texts,
which have no literary significance, dwell on the
theme memento mori: think only of death and dying
and live life as a preparation for its end. They
arose out of conflict between church and state, the
so-called Investiture Controversy (a power struggle
between the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire), and
they served the interests of reactionary, ascetic
movements toward monastic and church reform. They
aimed at providing religious instruction for the
laity—and were therefore written in the
vernacular—but they were also a kind of propaganda
rejecting the worldliness of secular rule and the
subordination of the church to the state that
occurred increasingly in the course of various
imperial dynasties: Carolingian (750–887), Ottonian
(936–1002), and Salian (1024–1125). It is a peculiar
feature of German literary history that the first
abundant texts in the German language reflect not
mainstream culture and its secular manifestations
but the conservative religious reaction against it.
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Nibelungenlied
The other major epic from this remarkable decade,
1200–10, takes the reader into a social and ethical
world designed as the antithesis to that of the
civilized, refined courtesy of the romance. The
Nibelungenlied (“Song of the Nibelungs”) is a return
to a more primitive, pre-courtly, Germanic heroic
world. The hero, Siegfried, arouses envy and
suspicion by marrying Kriemhild, sister of King
Gunther of the Burgundians. Her family, led by the
dark assassin Hagen, murders him treacherously and
steals the fabulous Nibelung treasure. Years later
she remarries, lures her family to visit, and exacts
her revenge in a disastrous battle that leaves
thousands on both sides dead, including all the
protagonists.
Parzival progresses from an unthinking brutality
to a sensitive, compassionate humanity. Kriemhild
goes in the opposite direction; she reverts from
courtly modesty to mayhem and raving. Deceit,
assassination, and gruesome revenge are the major
elements of this work, and they unfold against the
background of a thin veneer of politeness, courtesy,
and courtly restraint overlying the characters’
behaviour. The work is a reactionary rejection of
the civilizing trends advocated by courtly
literature. It returns to the heroic Germanic past
to construct a doomed world where the tragic demise
of whole peoples was inevitable and glorious at the
same time, courteousness was stupidity, and trust
and love were childishly naive.
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Nibelungenlied
"The
Nibelungenlied"
(PART
I,
PART
II,
PART
III,
PART
IV)
"The Ring of the Nibelung" illustrations by Arthur
Rackham
German epic poem
(German: “Song of the Nibelungs”)
Middle High German epic poem written about 1200 by an unknown Austrian from
the Danube region. It is preserved in
three main 13th-century manuscripts, A
(now in Munich), B (St. Gall), and C (Donaueschingen);
modern scholarship regards B as the most
trustworthy. An early Middle High German
title of the work is Der Nibelunge Not
(“The Nibelung Distress”), from the last
line of the poem. The superscription on
one of the manuscripts from the early
14th century is “The Book of Kriemhild.”
The story has a long history and, as
a result, contains a number of disparate
elements. For example, the word Nibelung
itself presents difficulties. In the
first part of the poem, it appears as
the name of Siegfried’s lands and
peoples and his treasure, but,
throughout the second, it is an
alternate name for the Burgundians.
The poem’s content falls into two parts.
It begins with two cantos (aventiuren)
that introduce, respectively, Kriemhild,
a Burgundian princess of Worms, and
Siegfried, a prince from the lower
Rhine. Siegfried is determined to woo
Kriemhild despite his parents’ warning.
When he arrives in Worms, he is
identified by Hagen, a henchman of
Kriemhild’s brother King Gunther. Hagen
then recounts Siegfried’s former heroic
deeds, including the acquisition of a
treasure. When war is declared by the
Danes and Saxons, Siegfried offers to
lead the Burgundians and distinguishes
himself in battle. Upon his return, he
meets Kriemhild for the first time, and
their affections develop during his
residence at court.
At this point a new element is
introduced. News reaches the court that
a queen of outstanding strength and
beauty may be won only by a man capable
of matching her athletic prowess.
Gunther decides to woo Brunhild with the
aid of Siegfried, to whom he promises
the hand of Kriemhild if successful.
Siegfried leads the expedition to
Brunhild’s abode, where he presents
himself as Gunther’s vassal. In the
ensuing contests, Gunther goes through
the motions of deeds actually performed
by Siegfried in a cloak of invisibility.
When Brunhild is defeated, she accepts
Gunther as her husband. Siegfried and
Kriemhild are then married as promised,
but Brunhild remains suspicious and
dissatisfied. Soon the two queens
quarrel; Brunhild ridicules Kriemhild
for marrying a vassal, and Kriemhild
reveals Siegfried’s and Gunther’s
deception.
Now Hagen becomes a prominent figure as
he sides with Brunhild and takes the
initiative in plotting vengeance. He
wins Kriemhild’s confidence and learns
Siegfried’s one vulnerable spot and then
strikes the fatal blow.
During these events, Brunhild drops
almost unnoticed out of the story, and
the death of Siegfried does not appear
to be so much vengeance on her part as
an execution by Hagen, who is suspicious
of Siegfried’s growing power.
Siegfried’s funeral is conducted with
great ceremony, and the grief-stricken
Kriemhild remains at Worms, though for a
long time estranged from Gunther and
Hagen. Later they are reconciled in
order to make use of Siegfried’s
treasure, which is brought to Worms.
Kriemhild begins to distribute it, but
Hagen, fearing that her influence will
grow, sinks the treasure in the Rhine.
The second part of the poem is much
simpler in structure and deals basically
with the conflict between Hagen and
Kriemhild and her vengeance against the
Burgundians. Etzel (Attila), king of the
Huns, asks the hand of Kriemhild, who
accepts, seeing the possibilities of
vengeance in such a union. After many
years, she persuades Etzel to invite her
brothers and Hagen to his court. Though
Hagen is wary, they all go to Etzel’s
court, where general combat and complete
carnage ensues. Kriemhild has Gunther
killed and then, with Siegfried’s sword,
she slays the bound and defenseless
Hagen, who to the last has refused to
reveal where Siegfried’s treasure is
hidden. Kriemhild in turn is slain by a
knight named Hildebrand, who is outraged
at the atrocities that she has just
committed.
In the Nibelungenlied some elements of
great antiquity are discernible. The
story of Brunhild appears in Old Norse
literature. The brief references to the
heroic deeds of Siegfried allude to
several ancient stories, many of which
are preserved in the Scandinavian Poetic
Edda (see Edda), Vǫlsunga saga, and
Thidriks saga, in which Siegfried is
called Sigurd. The entire second part of
the story, the fall of the Burgundians,
appears in an older Eddaic poem,
Atlakvida (“Lay of Atli”; see Atli, Lay
of). Yet the Nibelungenlied does not
appear to be a mere joining of
individual stories but, rather, an
integration of component elements into a
meaningful whole.
It is the second part of the poem that
suggests the title “The Book of
Kriemhild.” The destruction of the
Burgundians (Nibelungen) is her
deliberate purpose. The climax of the
first part, the death of her husband,
Siegfried, prepares the ground for the
story of her vengeance. Furthermore,
Kriemhild is the first person introduced
in the story, which ends with her death;
and all through the story predominating
attention is paid to Hagen. This
concentration on Kriemhild and on the
enmity between her and Hagen would seem
to suggest that it was the poet’s
intention to stress the theme of
Kriemhild’s vengeance.
The Nibelungenlied was written at a time
in medieval German literature when the
current emphasis was on the “courtly”
virtues of moderation and refinement of
taste and behaviour. The Nibelungenlied,
with its displays of violent emotion and
its uncompromising emphasis on vengeance
and honour, by contrast looks back to an
earlier period and bears the mark of a
different origin—the heroic literature
of the Teutonic peoples at the time of
their great migrations. The poem’s basic
subject matter also goes back to that
period, for it is probable that the
story of the destruction of the
Burgundians was originally inspired by
the overthrow of the Burgundian kingdom
at Worms by the Huns in ad 437, and the
story of Brunhild and Siegfried may have
been inspired by events in the history
of the Merovingian dynasty of the Franks
in about ad 600. Much of the heroic
quality of the original stories has
remained in the poem, particularly in
the author’s conception of Hagen as the
relentless protector of King Gunther’s
honour.
Probably no literary work has given more
to Germanic arts than the Nibelungenlied.
Many variations and adaptations appeared
in later centuries. The most significant
modern adaptation is Richard Wagner’s
famous opera cycle Der Ring des
Nibelungen (1853–74).
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"The Death of Tristan"
illustrations
Mac Harshberger
from "Tristan and Iseult"
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Joseph
Bédier "The Romance of Tristan and Iseult"
illustrations
Mac Harshberger
from "Tristan and Iseult"
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Gertrude
Hall "The Wagnerian Romances"
H.A. GUERBER
"STORIES OF THE WAGNER OPERA"
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High courtly literature: Middle High German
Classicism
Cultural trends and mores unquestionably
emanated from the German empire and the
royal-imperial court, which from the 8th to the 13th
century developed a rich and influential culture.
Its literature was almost exclusively in the Latin
language. The humanistic imperial culture and its
politics were nourished from the idea of Classical
revival. The motto renovatio imperii Romanorum
(“renewal of the Roman Empire”) appears on German
royal seals from the reign of Otto III on. The
legitimacy of German rule rested on its derivation
from Roman rule. Ideals of dress, behaviour, and
speech were adapted from the Roman Empire’s ideals
of the statesman and orator.
The values of the imperial courts were eagerly
adopted by courts of dukes and counts. Beginning in
the 12th century, these lesser feudal courts, first
in France and Norman England, then in Germany,
together produced one of the most brilliant bodies
of literature in the West.
The literature of courtly society documents a
civilizing process. It both represents and creates
one of the most significant transformations of
ethics and values experienced in the post-Roman
West: the transformation from the rough-cut, brutal
warrior values of early medieval Europe to courtly
society’s ideals of restraint, humanity, elegance,
and refined love.
The lyric poetry of courtly love
In a period of some 20 years, about 1160 to 1180,
German emerged as a literary language. It was a
remarkable transformation. By the end of the
Classical period, c. 1230, courtly society had
produced a radiant literary flowering where
apparently nothing (at least nothing written) had
existed before.
“Courtly love” (the Provençal troubadours’
fin’amors, the Middle High German hôhe minne) is the
central theme of aristocratic lyric poetry from the
12th century to the end of the Middle Ages. A common
stance of the courtly lover is long-suffering
endurance of the coldness of an unapproachable,
unyielding high noble lady whom he serves in the
vain hope of some day winning her love. Love is
suffering, sickness, and a magic spell that imposes
patience and endurance on the lover. Hôhe minne is
less an erotic experience than a process of ethical
formation and of courtly education. The lover, held
at bay by his lady, is made to polish his speech,
his manners, and his virtues to a high standard of
courtly excellence. He is denied her love until he
passes her tests.
This typical posture of the courtly lover is
found, for instance, in the verse of Reinmar von
Hagenau and Heinrich von Morungen. The idea of
yoking the erotic to a program of education is
foreign to modern sensibilities but consistent with
a long tradition (Greek and Roman) of the
disciplining of desire to create self-control and a
mature, civil character.
But the 12th century, the great divide between
the ancient and the modern world, also raised
individual experience of love to the level of an
ideal for the first time in the West, and tensions
between the artifice of love pedagogy and the
experience of passion are everywhere evident in
courtly literature. Walther von der Vogelweide, the
greatest of the German courtly poets, commemorated,
in his poem Unter der Linden (“Under the Linden
Tree”), a love meeting that was mutual, intense, and
passionate, in which the woman delights in
uninhibitedly yielding to her lover. The poem is a
challenge to the poetry of hôhe minne, high courtly
love, and its chaste eroticism. It represents a kind
of love that Walther called playfully “low love”
(niedere minne) but valued the more highly for its
naturalness and spontaneity. This conception was
probably favoured by the philosopher-teacher
Peter
Abelard and his learned student and lover,
Héloïse,
in their tragic relationship.
Reinmar von
Hagenau
Reinmar der Alte in the Codex Manesse
(14th century).
byname Reinmar the Elder, German
Reinmar der Alte
died c. 1205
German poet whose delicate and subtle
verses constitute the ultimate
refinement of the classical, or “pure,”
Minnesang (Middle High German love
lyric).
A native of Alsace, Reinmar became
court poet of the Babenberg dukes in
Vienna. Among his pupils was Walther von
der Vogelweide, who later became his
rival. The purity of Reinmar’s rhymes,
the evenness of his rhythms, and the
fastidious taste that rejected any
phrase or emotion that might offend
courtly sensibilities made him idolized
by his contemporaries as the
“nightingale” of his day. His constant
theme was unrequited love. Of the
numerous songs attributed to him, only
30 are now considered authentic.
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Heinrich von Morungen
Codex Manesse. Heinrich von Morungen
died 1222, near Leipzig
German minnesinger, one of the few
notable courtly poets from east-central
Germany.
A native of Thuringia, he spent much
of his later life in the service of Duke
Dietrich of Meissen. His poems, of which
some 33 are to be found in the
Heidelberg manuscript, are all devoted
to the fashionable cult of love. His
poems show more originality and
spontaneity than those of his
contemporaries because of his vivid
imagination and the intensity of his
emotion. As a result his poems appeal to
the modern reader more than those of any
other minnesinger with the exception of
Walther von der Vogelweide.
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Walther von der Vogelweide
Portrait of Walther von der
Vogelweide. From the Codex Manesse
(Folio 124r).
born c. 1170
died c. 1230, Würzburg? [Germany]
greatest German lyric poet of the Middle
Ages, whose poetry emphasizes the
virtues of a balanced life, in the
social as in the personal sphere, and
reflects his disapproval of those
individuals, actions, and beliefs that
disturbed this harmony. He was no
respecter of persons: whoever came
between him and his ideals, even the
pope himself, received the full force of
his anger.
The place of Walther’s birth has
never been satisfactorily identified,
though the title hêr, which he is given
by other poets, indicates that he was of
knightly birth. It is clear from his
poetry that he received a formal
education at a monastery school. He
learned the techniques of his art at the
Viennese court of Leopold V, duke of
Austria; but, when one of the latter’s
successors, Leopold VI, took up
residence in Vienna, Walther failed to
win his favour (for reasons perhaps
connected with his rivalry with Reinmar
von Hagenau, the most sophisticated of
the earlier minnesingers, who was
resident at the Viennese court).
Instead, he gained the patronage of the
Hohenstaufen Philip of Swabia, by
writing in support of the Hohenstaufen
cause against the Welf faction during
their struggle for the kingship
following the emperor Henry VI’s death
in 1197. Pope Innocent III came out on
behalf of the Welfs, and from this time
dates the antipapal feeling that runs
through much of Walther’s political
poetry.
Disappointed with Philip’s treatment
of him, however, Walther then served
several masters until, in 1212, he once
more entered the political arena—this
time in support of the Welf emperor Otto
IV against Innocent III. Again he was
not treated with the generosity he
expected, and, in the same year, when
Frederick II reclaimed the throne for
the house of Hohenstaufen, Walther
turned to welcome the new ruler, who was
crowned in 1215. From him he received a
small fief, symbol of the security he
had so long desired. Two 14th-century
records suggest that it was in the see
of Würzburg, and it is likely that he
spent the rest of his life there.
Rather more than half of the 200 or
so of Walther’s poems that are extant
are political, moral, or religious; the
rest are love poems. In his religious
poems he preached the need for man
actively to meet the claims of his
Creator by, for instance, going on
pilgrimage or on crusade; in his
moral-didactic poems he praises such
human virtues as faithfulness,
sincerity, charity, and
self-discipline—virtues that were not
especially prominent in his own life. As
a love poet he developed a fresh and
original treatment of the situations of
courtly love and, ultimately, in such
poems as the popular “Unter der Linden,”
achieved a free, uninhibited style in
which the poses of court society gave
way before the natural affections of
village folk.
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Courtly romance
Courtly romance, a new narrative form in the 12th
century, was the major vehicle for Middle High
German Classicism. The earliest courtly narratives
were “romances of antiquity.” They show Achilles,
Hector, Ulysses, and Aeneas behaving like
12th-century chivalric knights, fighting boldly but
with noble restraint on horseback with lances,
wondering in long inner monologues whether they can
win the love of their ladies, and writing them love
letters and poems. The northern German poet Heinrich
von Veldeke produced the Eneide (c. 1170; written in
an intermediate dialect that contained elements of
both Low and High German), a “modern” version of
Virgil’s Aeneid adapted from the anonymous Old
French Roman d’Énéas. It turns on the two loves of
Aeneas—one passionate and destructive (Dido); the
other chaste, courtly, and the foundation of family
and empire (Lavinia). The Trojan War was another
popular theme from antiquity.
But the tales received from the ancient world
paled before the wild popularity of the figure of
King Arthur and his knights (Arthurian legend).
Arthurian romance in the wake of its great inventor,
the French poet Chrétien de Troyes, overwhelmed
other contenders for dominance of narrative poetry.
Heinrich
von Veldeke
Codex Manesse. Heinrich von Veldeke
born c. 1140–50, near Maastricht,
Lower Lorraine [now in the Netherlands]
died c. 1190
Middle High German poet of noble birth
whose Eneit, telling the story of
Aeneas, was the first German court epic
to attain an artistic mastery worthy of
its elevated subject matter.
While at the court of the landgrave
Hermann of Thuringia, Heinrich completed
the Eneit, modeled on the French Roman
d’Eneas rather than directly on Virgil’s
Aeneid. Eneit was written not in
Heinrich’s native Flemish but in the
Franconian literary language of such
works as Eilhart von Oberg’s Tristrant
und Isalde. Following its French
example, Eneit greatly expands the
episode of Aeneas and Dido and
transforms Virgil’s epic into a courtly
romance that minutely analyzes the
psychology of love. The epic poets
Gottfried von Strassburg and Wolfram von
Eschenbach both testified to the value
of the Eneit as a model. The language of
the poem is simple and direct, if
somewhat pedantic and conventional, and
the verse flows smoothly.
Heinrich also wrote a religious epic,
Servatius (c. 1170), on the life and
miracles of the patron saint of
Maastricht, and a number of lyric poems.
In these, as in his epics, he appears as
the ideal transmitter to Germany of the
new courtly literary fashions introduced
in Romance models. Because of his
borderland dialect, he is also claimed
by the Dutch as the earliest known poet
in their literature.
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Hartmann von Aue
A Swabian knight, poet, theoretician of love, and
writer of Minnesang (courtly love lyrics), Hartmann
von Aue was the first to bring the new tales of King
Arthur to Germany. He adapted and translated into
elegant Middle High German verses two of Chrétien’s
romances: Erec (c. 1180–85), from Érec et Énide, and
Iwein (c. 1200), from Yvain; ou, le chevalier au
lion. These works created a new structure for
narrative and with it a new conception of the
destiny of the hero: his education and gradual
achievement of ethical perfection through making
amends for shameful conduct, expunging guilt,
resisting temptation, and avoiding behaviour
conducive to tragic failure. Erec is the tale of a
knight’s quest to repair his reputation, damaged
when he neglects his duties as knight to spend all
his time with his bride. In Iwein a great knight
falls from grace by disregarding a seemingly trivial
deadline. Denounced before King Arthur’s court by
his wife, Iwein loses his mind and is reduced to
living naked and wild in the forest. Restored by a
magic salve and accompanied by a lion whom he has
helped fight a dragon, he sets out on a series of
grand chivalric undertakings, rescuing the helpless
and those unjustly accused. Eventually, his acts of
justice and compassion bring about a reconciliation
with his wife.
The obsession with guilt expunged and shame
overcome found its most poignant expression in
Hartmann’s two “chivalric legends,” Gregorius (c.
1185–95) and Der arme Heinrich (c. 1195; “Poor
Henry”). Gregorius is a chivalric-Christian
adaptation of the Oedipus story, a tale of double
incest in which the tragic hero, born from an
incestuous union and later wed to his own mother, is
raised to the position of pope after 17 years of
suicidal penance for his sins as knight and lover.
“Poor Henry,” a wealthy, virtuous, and famous
knight, is stricken with leprosy and loses his
possessions and standing. The only medicine that can
cure his disease is the blood of a virgin willing to
sacrifice herself for him. The youngest daughter of
the family that takes him in at once offers herself
and refuses to take no for an answer. Ultimately her
sacrifice is rejected and the will accepted in place
of the deed. Miraculously cured, the grand lord
marries the young peasant girl.
Hartmann’s elegant simplicity and his gentle,
noble sentimentality were greatly admired both in
his own time and since. (Selections from his works
can be found in English translation in The Narrative
Works of Hartmann von Aue, 1983.) His younger
contemporary, Gottfried von Strassburg, crowned him
with the laurel wreath and praised him
extravagantly. No less an author than
Thomas Mann
admired Hartmann’s legends of great sin and profound
forgiveness; his late novel Der Erwählte (1951; The
Holy Sinner) adapts Hartmann’s Gregorius.
Hartmann
von Aue
Portrait of Hartmann von Aue from the
Codex Manesse (folio 184v).
born c. 1160
died c. 1210
Middle High German poet, one of the
masters of the courtly epic.
Hartmann’s works suggest that he
received a learned education at a
monastery school, that he was a
ministerialis at a Swabian court, and
that he may have taken part in the Third
Crusade (1189–92) or the ill-fated
Crusade of the Holy Roman emperor Henry
VI in 1197. Hartmann’s extant works
consist of four extended narrative poems
(Erec, Gregorius, Der arme Heinrich,
Iwein), two shorter allegorical love
poems (Büchlein I and II), and 16 lyrics
(13 love songs and three Crusading
songs). The lyrical poems and the two
Büchlein appear to have been written
first, followed by the narrative
poems—his most important works—in the
above order. Gregorius and Der arme
Heinrich are religious works with an
openly didactic purpose. The latter,
Hartmann’s finest poem, tells the story
of a leper who is healed by the
readiness of a pure young girl to
sacrifice her life for him. The two
secular epics Erec and Iwein, both based
on works by Chrétien de Troyes and
belonging to the Arthurian cycle,
enshrine Hartmann’s ethical ideal of
restraint and moderation in human
conduct, and are complementary in that
they depict the return to grace of
wayward knights.
Hartmann regarded his works as
instruments of a moral purpose. Edifying
content mattered more than elegance of
style, for his narratives are
characterized by clarity and directness
and by the avoidance of rhetorical
devices and displays of poetic
virtuosity.
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Wolfram von Eschenbach
The high point of Classical Middle High German
literature is the work of the two great literary
rivals Wolfram von Eschenbach and Gottfried von
Strassburg. Wolfram presents himself as an
unlearned, rough-cut genius:
I am Wolfram von Eschenbach, and I know a thing
or two about poetry.…I was born to knighthood, and
any woman who lovesme for my writing instead of my
boldness must be weak in her wits.…I don’t know a
single letter of the alphabet.
Gottfried, the elegant, highly educated
humanist-courtier poet, classified Wolfram as a
teller of wild stories persuasive to “dull minds.”
Wolfram’s style is eccentric and brilliant. His
works, with a high ethical seriousness at their
core, are full of a robust humour that can shade
into the grotesque.
Wolfram adapted his major work,
Parzival, from
Chrétien de Troyes’s unfinished Perceval; ou, le
conte du graal (Perceval: The Tale of the Grail) and
completed it about 1205. He also wrote a long
fragment of a heroic legend (chanson de geste, or
“song of heroic deeds”), Willehalm, and two short
fragments called Titurel, a spin-off from the Grail
story begun in Parzival. (Wolfram probably stopped
working on Willehalm and Titurel at some time after
1217.) In addition to these works, he composed a
number of lyric poems.
Parzival has been compared with
Dante’s
Divine
Comedy and
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s
Faust.
It is a kind of summation of the human condition in
its 12th-century embodiment: the sinful knight
questing to reconcile the demands of God with those
of life in the world. Parzival is the simpleton with a grand
destiny. He becomes king of the Grail castle and
overcomes his youthful sins by steadfastly loving
his wife, by learning discipline, compassion, and
courtesy, and by remaining loyal to his own human
destiny as knight and fighter. In fact, Parzival
seems to reiterate the parable of the prodigal son:
the good man who has sinned and fallen into doubt of
God (zwîvel) is the candidate for grace. Parzival
shares with
Goethe’s Faust the idea that the very
effort to perfect flawed human nature has redemptive
power. The work contains a grand symbol of this
obligation to maintain life and destiny, raised to
the level of a religious symbol: the Holy Grail.
Parzival becomes king of the Grail by remaining a
knight and loyal husband. In this he is an answer to
Hartmann’s Gregorius, who could find redemption only
in complete renunciation of his human identity.
Wolfram’s Parzival is a rejection of ascetic
Christian values and a grand confirmation of the
worth of life in this world.
Wolfram von Eschenbach
Portrait of Wolfram from the Codex
Manesse.
born c. 1170
died c. 1220
German poet whose epic Parzival,
distinguished alike by its moral
elevation and its imaginative power, is
one of the most profound literary works
of the Middle Ages.
An impoverished Bavarian knight,
Wolfram apparently served a succession
of Franconian lords: Abensberg,
Wildenberg, and Wertheim are among the
places he names in his work. He also
knew the court of the landgrave Hermann
I of Thuringia, where he met the great
medieval lyric poet Walther von der
Vogelweide. Though a self-styled
illiterate, Wolfram shows an extensive
acquaintance with French and German
literature, and it is probable that he
knew how to read, if not how to write.
Wolfram’s surviving literary works,
all bearing the stamp of his unusually
original personality, consist of eight
lyric poems, chiefly Tagelieder (“Dawn
Songs,” describing the parting of lovers
at morning); the epic Parzival; the
unfinished epic Willehalm, telling the
history of the crusader Guillaume
d’Orange; and short fragments of a
further epic, the so-called Titurel,
which elaborates the tragic love story
of Sigune from book 3 of Parzival.
Parzival, probably written between
1200 and 1210, is a poem of 25,000 lines
in 16 books. Likely based on an
unfinished romance of Chrétien de
Troyes, Perceval, ou Le Conte du Graal,
it introduced the theme of the Holy
Grail into German literature. Its
beginning and end are new material,
probably of Wolfram’s own invention,
although he attributes it to an
unidentified and probably fictitious
Provençal poet, Guiot. The story of the
ignorant and naive Parzival, who sets
out on his adventures without even
knowing his own name, employs the
classic fairy-tale motif of “the
guileless fool” who, through innocence
and artlessness, reaches a goal denied
to wiser men.
Wolfram uses Parzival’s dramatic
progress from folk-tale dunce to wise
and responsible keeper of the Grail to
present a subtle allegory of man’s
spiritual education and development.
Parzival also figures as the hero of
Richard Wagner’s last opera, Parsifal
(1882). The complexity of Wolfram’s
theme is matched by his eccentric style,
which is characterized by rhetorical
flourishes, ambiguous syntax, and the
free use of dialect.
Wolfram’s influence on later poets
was profound, and he is a member, with
Hartmann von Aue and Gottfried von
Strassburg, of the great triumvirate of
Middle High German epic poets.
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Gottfried von Strassburg
Gottfried’s Tristan und Isolde is an unfinished
masterpiece of some 19,000 lines. Its source was the
Roman de Tristan by the Anglo-Norman poet Thomas.
Gottfried died about 1210 without completing it. In
almost every point it is the opposite of Wolfram’s
work. It is a tragedy of adulterous love whose hero
is fatally bound by a love potion to Isolde, the
wife of King Marke of England. The work is
revolutionary in many ways. It rejects a strong
tendency in tales and lyrics of “courtly love” to
make the woman into the man’s educator and an
administrator of courtliness and virtue. The concept
of love in Tristan crosses the aforementioned great
divide between the ancient world (in which love was
regarded as an ennobling, educating force) and the
modern world (which perceived love as obsessive, a
lofty but destructive passion). The tragedy of
Tristan and Isolde contradicts the love pedagogy
that had shaped Érec and Énite, Iwein, and Parzival
into models of marital fidelity and courtly
humanity. Tragic love is still ennobling, but it
ennobles by glorifying suffering, melancholy, death,
and the fusing of joy and sorrow in love. Gottfried
dedicates his work to the elite of “noble hearts”
who can appreciate the exquisite benefits of tragic
passion.
The work is also revolutionary in its style and
form. It is poetry of the highest order. The
language of secular narrative poetry in Germany was
a newborn, so to speak; at least it was no more than
half a generation old. But in Tristan und Isolde the
German language achieves a high point of elegance,
allusiveness, and sophistication that it would not
reach again until the late 18th and 19th centuries.
Gottfried studied in the humanistic Latin schools of
France or in those of Germany, and he brought a
wealth of Classical knowledge to his composition. In
Tristan the traditions of Classical Latin literature
inform, deepen, and strengthen German poetry.
The hero is no longer a chivalric knight earning
fame and love by combat but rather a courtier and an
artist who makes his way in the life of a royal
court by eloquence and talent, by his skill in music
and the hunt. As in any court novel, deceit loses
some of its negative moral charge and becomes a
skill parallel to art and learning. Tristan and
Isolde become tricksters and illusion makers in
order to conceal their affair from her husband and
his uncle, the cuckold King Marke.
In the work there is an idyllic “adventure” when
the lovers, banished from the court, live in a
magical “cave of lovers.” Their cathedral-like love
temple is interpreted by the poet as an allegory of
the virtues of love.
Gottfried von Strassburg
Portrait of Gottfried von
Strassburg from the Codex Manesse (Folio
364r).
died c. 1210
one of the greatest medieval German
poets, whose courtly epic Tristan und
Isolde is the classic version of this
famous love story.
The dates of his birth and death are
unknown, and the only information about
him consists of references to him in the
work of other poets and inferences from
his own work. The breadth of learning
displayed in Tristan und Isolde reveals
that he must have enjoyed the fullest
education offered by the cathedral and
monastery schools of the Middle Ages.
Together with the authoritative tone of
his writing, this background indicates
that, although not himself of noble
birth, he spent his life in the society
of the wellborn. Tristan was probably
written about 1210. Gottfried is thus a
literary contemporary of Hartmann von
Aue, Walther von der Vogelweide, and
Wolfram von Eschenbach.
The Celtic legend of Tristan and
Iseult (German: Isolde) reached Germany
through French sources. The first German
version is that of Eilhart von Oberg (c.
1170), but Gottfried, although he
probably knew Eilhart’s poem, based his
own work on the Anglo-Norman version of
Thomas of Brittany (1160–70).
Gottfried’s moral purpose, as he
states it in the prologue, is to present
to courtiers an ideal of love. The core
of this ideal, which derives from the
romantic cult of woman in medieval
courtly society, is that love (minne)
ennobles through the suffering with
which it is inseparably linked. This
ideal Gottfried enshrines in a story in
which actions are motivated and
justified not by a standard ethic but by
the conventions of courtly love. Thus,
the love potion, instead of being the
direct cause of the tragedy as in
primitive versions of the Tristan story,
is sophisticatedly treated as a mere
outward symbol of the nature of the
lovers’ passion—tragic because
adulterous but justified by the “courts
of love” because of its spontaneity, its
exclusiveness, and its completeness.
Although unfinished, Gottfried’s is
the finest of the medieval versions of
the Tristan legend and one of the most
perfect creations of the medieval
courtly spirit, distinguished alike by
the refinement and elevated tone of its
content and by the elaborate skill of
its poetic technique. It was the
inspiration for Richard Wagner’s opera
Tristan und Isolde (1859).
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Post-Classical Middle High German literature
The
flowering of Middle High German courtly literature
lasted about 60 years. In its wake literature did
not subside; it mushroomed. But these latecomer
authors, interesting as their works can be, are
imitators, and, in the shadow of a Classical period,
they sensed their own mediocrity. The major figures
of this post-Classical era are Heinrich von dem
Türlîn, who wrote an obscure and lengthy baroque
romance of Sir Gawain called Die Krône (c. 1220–30;
The Crown); Rudolf von Ems, who authored various
longer epics and a chronicle of world history; and
Konrad von Würzburg, a versatile stylist who
continued the Classical style of Gottfried in a
variety of narrative works—Partonopier und Meliur (“Partonopier
and Meliur”), Der Schwanritter (“The Knight of the
Swan”), and Engelhard. His magnum opus is Der
Trojanerkrieg, a courtly retelling of the Trojan War
in an epic poem of more than 40,000 lines (Parzival
was long at about 25,000 lines).
The autumn of courtly forms corresponded to a
decline in the political position of Germany brought
about by the victory of the papacy in the
Investiture Controversy and the consequent weakening
of central political authority. The “Holy Roman
Empire” proclaimed by the propaganda of the emperor
Frederick Barbarossa existed mostly in name and
ceremonial form. The last great emperor of the
Hohenstaufen dynasty, Frederick II (1220–50), moved
the imperial residence to Sicily. This period set
loose on Germany the plagues that ravaged the
political life of that country until its
reunification in 1989–90: political fragmentation,
provincialism, dependence on Italian and French
culture, and a lack of confidence in its own culture
that alternated with convulsive attempts to
establish German culture and national identity.
Rudolf von Ems
From the Weltchronik: King David with
scribe and musicians
(illumination from a manuscript in the
Zentralbibliothek Zürich).
born c. 1200, Hohenems, Swabia [now
in Austria]
died c. 1254, Italy
prolific and versatile Middle High
German poet. Between about 1220 and 1254
he wrote five epic poems, totaling more
than 93,000 lines.
Though the influence of earlier
masters of the courtly epic is evident
in his work—his style is modeled on
Gottfried von Strassburg, while his
moral outlook derives from Hartmann von
Aue—Rudolf’s poems show considerable
originality in subject matter. His
earliest preserved poem, Der guote
Gerhart (“Gerhard the Good”), is the
story of a Cologne merchant who, despite
his unaristocratic calling, has all the
courtly qualities of an Arthurian
knight. His charity and humility result
in his being offered the crown of
England, which he rejects. The charm and
realism of this poem were not equaled in
Rudolf’s other works: Barlaam und
Josaphat, a Christian version of the
legend of Buddha; and the three
historical epics, Alexander, Willehalm
von Orlens, and Weltchronik, an
ambitious, uncompleted world chronicle
that ends with the death of Solomon. The
popularity of Rudolf’s writings can be
gauged by the fact that there are more
than 80 extant manuscripts and
manuscript fragments of the Weltchronik
alone.
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Konrad von Würzburg
Portrait of Konrad von Würzburg from
the Codex Manesse
born c. 1225, Würzburg, Würzburg
died Aug. 31, 1287, Basel, Switz.
Middle High German poet who, during
the decline of chivalry, sought to
preserve the ideals of courtly life.
Of humble origin, he served a
succession of patrons as a professional
poet and eventually settled in Basel.
His works range from love lyrics and
short didactic poems (Sprüche) to
full-scale epics, such as Partonopier
und Meliur, on the fairy-lover theme,
and Der Trojanerkrieg (The Trojan War),
an account of the Trojan War. He is at
his best in his shorter narrative poems,
the secular romances Engelhart, Dasz
Herzmaere (The Heart’s Tidings), and
Keiser Otte mit dem Barte (Kaiser Otte
with the Beard) and the religious
legends Silvester, Alexius, and
Pantaleon.
Konrad’s originality is one of form
rather than content. Taking Gottfried
von Strassburg, one of the masters of
the epic of courtly life, as his model,
he developed Gottfried’s stylized
techniques often to the point of
exaggeration. In one of his poems every
syllable rhymes. The complexity and the
explicitly didactic character of his
poetry earned for him the esteem of his
contemporaries. A century later the
rising generation of artisan-poets known
as Meistersingers named him as one of
the “12 old masters” of medieval poetry
from whom they claimed descent.
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APPENIX
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Saint Albertus Magnus
German theologian, scientist, and philosopher
English Saint Albert The Great, German Sankt Albert Der
Grosse, byname Albert Of Cologne, or Of Lauingen, or Doctor
Universalis (Latin: “Universal Doctor”)
born c. 1200, Lauingen an der Donau, Swabia [Germany]
died November 15, 1280, Cologne; canonized Dec. 16, 1931;
feast day November 15
Main
Dominican bishop and philosopher best known as a teacher of
St. Thomas Aquinas and as a proponent of Aristotelianism at
the University of Paris. He established the study of nature
as a legitimate science within the Christian tradition. By
papal decree in 1941, he was declared the patron saint of
all who cultivate the natural sciences. He was the most
prolific writer of his century and was the only scholar of
his age to be called “the Great”; this title was used even
before his death.
Albertus was the eldest son of a wealthy German lord.
After his early schooling, he went to the University of
Padua, where he studied the liberal arts. He joined the
Dominican order at Padua in 1223. He continued his studies
at Padua and Bologna and in Germany and then taught theology
at several convents throughout Germany, lastly at Cologne.
Sometime before 1245 he was sent to the Dominican convent
of Saint-Jacques at the University of Paris, where he came
into contact with the works of Aristotle, newly translated
from Greek and Arabic, and with the commentaries on
Aristotle’s works by Averroës, a 12th-century
Spanish-Arabian philosopher. At Saint-Jacques he lectured on
the Bible for two years and then for another two years on
Peter Lombard’s Sentences, the theological textbook of the
medieval universities. In 1245 he was graduated master in
the theological faculty and obtained the Dominican chair
“for foreigners.”
It was probably at Paris that Albertus began working on a
monumental presentation of the entire body of knowledge of
his time. He wrote commentaries on the Bible and on the
Sentences; he alone among medieval scholars made
commentaries on all the known works of Aristotle, both
genuine and spurious, paraphrasing the originals but
frequently adding “digressions” in which he expressed his
own observations, “experiments,” and speculations. The term
experiment for Albertus indicates a careful process of
observing, describing, and classifying. His speculations
were open to Neoplatonic thought. Apparently in response to
a request that he explain Aristotle’s Physics, Albertus
undertook—as he states at the beginning of his Physica—“to
make . . . intelligible to the Latins” all the branches of
natural science, logic, rhetoric, mathematics, astronomy,
ethics, economics, politics, and metaphysics. While he was
working on this project, which took about 20 years to
complete, he probably had among his disciples Thomas
Aquinas, who arrived at Paris late in 1245.
Albertus distinguished the way to knowledge by revelation
and faith from the way of philosophy and of science; the
latter follows the authorities of the past according to
their competence, but it also makes use of observation and
proceeds by means of reason and intellect to the highest
degrees of abstraction. For Albertus these two ways are not
opposed; there is no “double truth”—one truth for faith and
a contradictory truth for reason. All that is really true is
joined in harmony. Although there are mysteries accessible
only to faith, other points of Christian doctrine are
recognizable both by faith and by reason—e.g., the doctrine
of the immortality of the individual soul. He defended this
doctrine in several works against the teaching of the
Averroists (Latin followers of Averroës), who held that only
one intellect, which is common to all human beings, remains
after the death of man.
Albertus’ lectures and publications gained him great
renown. He came to be quoted as readily as the Arabian
philosophers Avicenna and Averroës and even Aristotle
himself. Roger Bacon, a contemporary English scholar who was
by no means friendly toward Albertus, spoke of him as “the
most noted of Christian scholars.”
In the summer of 1248, Albertus was sent to Cologne to
organize the first Dominican studium generale (“general
house of studies”) in Germany. He presided over the house
until 1254 and devoted himself to a full schedule of
studying, teaching, and writing. During this period his
chief disciple was Thomas Aquinas, who returned to Paris in
1252. The two men maintained a close relationship even
though doctrinal differences began to appear. From 1254 to
1257 Albertus was provincial of “Teutonia,” the German
province of the Dominicans. Although burdened with added
administrative duties, he continued his writing and
scientific observation and research.
Albertus resigned the office of provincial in 1257 and
resumed teaching in Cologne. In 1259 he was appointed by the
pope to succeed the bishop of Regensburg, and he was
installed as bishop in January 1260. After Alexander IV died
in 1261, Albertus was able to resign his episcopal see. He
then returned to his order and to teaching at Cologne. From
1263 to 1264 he was legate of Pope Urban IV, preaching the
crusade throughout Germany and Bohemia; subsequently, he
lectured at Würzburg and at Strasbourg. In 1270 he settled
definitively at Cologne, where, as he had done in 1252 and
in 1258, he made peace between the archbishop and his city.
During his final years he made two long journeys from
Cologne. In 1274 he attended the second Council of Lyon,
France, and spoke in favour of acknowledging Rudolf of
Habsburg as German king. In 1277 he traveled to Paris to
uphold the recently condemned good name and writings of
Thomas Aquinas, who had died a few years before, and to
defend certain Aristotelian doctrines that both he and
Thomas held to be true.
Albertus’ works represent the entire body of European
knowledge of his time not only in theology but also in
philosophy and the natural sciences. His importance for
medieval science essentially consists in his bringing
Aristotelianism to the fore against reactionary tendencies
in contemporary theology. On the other hand, without feeling
any discrepancy in it, he also gave the widest latitude to
Neoplatonic speculation, which was continued by Ulrich of
Strasbourg and by the German mystics of the 14th century. It
was by his writings on the natural sciences, however, that
he exercised the greatest influence. Albertus must be
regarded as unique in his time for having made accessible
and available the Aristotelian knowledge of nature and for
having enriched it by his own observations in all branches
of the natural sciences. A preeminent place in the history
of science is accorded to him because of this achievement.
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Meister Eckhart
German mystic
English Master Eckhart, original name Johannes Eckhart, also
called Eckhart von Hochheim, Eckhart also spelled Eckehart
born c. 1260, Hochheim?, Thuringia [now in Germany]
died 1327/28?, Avignon, France
Main
Dominican theologian and writer who was the greatest German
speculative mystic. In the transcripts of his sermons in
German and Latin, he charts the course of union between the
individual soul and God.
Johannes Eckhart entered the Dominican order when he was
15 and studied in Cologne, perhaps under the Scholastic
philosopher Albert the Great. The intellectual background
there was influenced by the great Dominican theologian
Thomas Aquinas, who had recently died. In his mid-30s,
Eckhart was nominated vicar (the main Dominican official) of
Thuringia. Before and after this assignment he taught
theology at Saint-Jacques’s priory in Paris. It was also in
Paris that he received a master’s degree (1302) and
consequently was known as Meister Eckhart.
Eckhart wrote four works in German that are usually
called “treatises.” At about the age of 40 he wrote the
Talks of Instruction, on self-denial, the nobility of will
and intellect, and obedience to God. In the same period, he
faced the Franciscans in some famous disputations on
theological issues. In 1303 he became provincial (leader) of
the Dominicans in Saxony, and three years later vicar of
Bohemia. His main activity, especially from 1314, was
preaching to the contemplative nuns established throughout
the Rhine River valley. He resided in Strasbourg as a prior.
The best-attested German work of this middle part of his
life is the Book of Divine Consolation, dedicated to the
Queen of Hungary. The other two treatises were The Nobleman
and On Detachment. The teachings of the mature Eckhart
describe four stages of the union between the soul and God:
dissimilarity, similarity, identity, breakthrough. At the
outset, God is all, the creature is nothing; at the ultimate
stage, “the soul is above God.” The driving power of this
process is detachment.
1. Dissimilarity: “All creatures are pure nothingness. I
do not say they are small or petty: they are pure
nothingness.” Whereas God inherently possesses being,
creatures do not possess being but receive it derivatively.
Outside God, there is pure nothingness. “The being (of
things) is God.” The “noble man” moves among things in
detachment, knowing that they are nothing in themselves and
yet aware that they are full of God—their being.
2. Similarity: Man thus detached from the singular
(individual things) and attached to the universal (Being)
discovers himself to be an image of God. Divine resemblance,
an assimilation, then emerges: the Son, image of the Father,
engenders himself within the detached soul. As an image,
“thou must be in Him and for Him, and not in thee and for
thee.”
3. Identity: Eckhart’s numerous statements on identity
between God and the soul can be easily misunderstood. He
never has substantial identity in mind, but God’s operation
and man’s becoming are considered as one. God is no longer
outside man, but he is perfectly interiorized. Hence such
statements: “The being and the nature of God are mine; Jesus
enters the castle of the soul; the spark in the soul is
beyond time and space; the soul’s light is uncreated and
cannot be created, it takes possession of God with no
mediation; the core of the soul and the core of God are
one.”
4. Breakthrough: To Meister Eckhart, identity with God is
still not enough; to abandon all things without abandoning
God is still not abandoning anything. Man must live “without
why.” He must seek nothing, not even God. Such a thought
leads man into the desert, anterior to God. For Meister
Eckhart, God exists as “God” only when the creature invokes
him. Eckhart calls “Godhead” the origin of all things that
is beyond God (God conceived as Creator). “God and the
Godhead are as distinct as heaven and earth.” The soul is no
longer the Son. The soul is now the Father: it engenders God
as a divine person. “If I were not, God would not be God.”
Detachment thus reaches its conclusion in the breakthrough
beyond God. If properly understood, this idea is genuinely
Christian: it retraces, for the believer, the way of the
Cross of Christ.
These teachings are to be found in his Latin works too.
But the Latin Sermons, Commentaries on the Bible, and
Fragments are more Scholastic and do not reveal the
originality of his thought. Nevertheless, Eckhart enjoyed
much respect even among scholars. In his 60th year he was
called to a professorship at Cologne. Heinrich von Virneburg—a
Franciscan, unfavourable to Dominicans, anyway—was the
archbishop there, and it was before his court that the now
immensely popular Meister Eckhart was first formally charged
with heresy. To a list of errors, he replied by publishing a
Latin Defense and then asked to be transferred to the pope’s
court in Avignon. When ordered to justify a new series of
propositions drawn from his writings, he declared: “I may
err but I am not a heretic, for the first has to do with the
mind and the second with the will!” Before judges who had no
comparable mystical experience of their own, Eckhart
referred to his inner certainty: “What I have taught is the
naked truth.” The bull of Pope John XXII, dated March 27,
1329, condemns 28 propositions extracted from the two lists.
Since it speaks of Meister Eckhart as already dead, it is
inferred that Eckhart died some time before, perhaps in 1327
or 1328. It also says that Eckhart had retracted the errors
as charged.
Although Eckhart’s philosophy amalgamates Greek,
Neoplatonic, Arabic, and Scholastic elements, it is unique.
His doctrine, sometimes abstruse, always arises from one
simple, personal mystical experience to which he gives a
number of names. By doing so, he was also an innovator of
the German language, contributing many abstract terms. In
the second half of the 20th century, there was great
interest in Eckhart among some Marxist theorists and Zen
Buddhists.
Reiner Schürmann
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