Old Time Religion

Meister Eckhart claimed that we creatures are “purum nihil”, i.e., pure nothing. It is a little difficult to understand how he could be right, since, in order to say so Eckhart himself would have to be something. That, at least, would be my tactful, prudent twenty-first century reply, were anyone to ask me what I thought about it. But would it be tactful and prudent enough? Just to be sure I had given no possible ground for offence, in the mushy-minded, mealy-mouthed way of my academic guild, I would probably also hasten to acknowledge that mystics, like poets, are not held to the same standards of sense-making as the rest of us.

I want you to know, however, that there beats another more virile heart within my breast, one that secretly delights in the words with which Pope John XXII “damned and reproved” Eckhart’s teaching in 1329. According to that pope, what Eckhart said was “heretical, indiscreet and ugly”.

What pleases me about these words is not so much their truth, about which I am still undecided. It is their self-assurance, that hits you like a snort of vodka at a Baptist picnic. Even our previous and current pope, who stand above their age like giants, even they might learn a thing or two from such medieval predecessors.

Name your issue: be it women’s ordination, sex outside of marriage, rock music for worship. Name your teaching: that Jesus was gay or married, that Mary was not a virgin, that the Trinity is not biblical. Would it not be exhilarating to hear some exalted church leader dismiss them as “heretical, indiscreet and ugly”?

How arrogant!, you say. But why? Would you deny that there are theological propositions and practices too outlandish to be dignified with debate? Could there be better words for them than “heretical, indiscreet and ugly”? To call them so is to call their bluff: they are provocations masquerading as propositions.

Unmasking them does Christians a double service. It not only helps preserve the faithful from contamination, but it draws attention to something easily forgotten: what I might call the bounds of catholic discourse, the pale of orthodox thought, within which one must operate in order to merit being taken seriously.

Ah, but the pale is always shifting you say. You say: my twenty-first century reader, my academic guild-mate, mon semblable, mon frère.