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Two thinkers, side by side

Life

c. 815 CE – c. 877 CE

MedievalMystic

Born Dublin

The lone genius of the dark centuries, who read Greek when almost no one in the West could, and dared to fold God and creation into a single nature.

Meister Eckhart

c. 1260 CE – c. 1328 CE

MysticMedieval

The Dominican mystic who preached that the ground of the soul and the ground of God are one, and that the deepest prayer is to want nothing.

Connection

John Scotus Eriugena mystical tradition Meister Eckhart — The Neoplatonic mysticism Eriugena carried into the Latin West flows toward the speculative mysticism of Eckhart.

Shared Ideas

Being

Shared Places

Paris

Ideas

Nature Being

Grace & Free Will Being

Words

“We do not know what God is. God himself does not know what he is, because he is not any thing.”
— John Scotus Eriugena

“The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.”
— Meister Eckhart

Key Moments

c. 815 CE

Born in Ireland

c. 845 CE

At the Carolingian Court

c. 860 CE

Translating Dionysius

c. 867 CE

The Periphyseon

c. 1260 CE

Born in Thuringia

c. 1310 CE

German Sermons

c. 1320 CE

Detachment and the Godhead

1326 CE

Tried for Heresy

Works

Periphyseon

The German Sermons