Meister Eckhart and the Controversial Corrections of Aquinas

Abstract

In December the skies over Paris turn cold and gray with an icy rain that chills the bones and presses down upon the human spirit. It is in such contrast to summer when the sun makes the days long and the air warm. This was no less true in the winter of 1270 when Etienne Tempier, the Bishop of Paris issued an edict condemning 13 Aristotelian and Averroist propositions. What is more is that this edict excommunicated, cast out of the Church those who continued to support these heresies. It was an attack born of fear, fear that these new ideas which had sprouted up at the great university were corrupting the Christian faith. Implicated in these allegations, among others, was the up-and-coming Dominican thinker named Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas was already well respected by his Order and his teacher Albert the Great held him in high regard. Thomas did not allow this wintry wind of fear to kill the shoots of truth rising green, so he risked the condemnation, risked the despairing winter of ignorance for the promising Sun of Truth, the very icon of the man. Over the next two years Aquinas sought to counteract this fear that had chilled the warm ways of learning, and he did this as he knew best, by pursuing the truth of the matter. Thomas conducted a series of disputations that were meant to demonstrate the integrity of Aristotle in doing the task of theology. Without going into details, people feared that this heretical influence placed the human intellect in too high an order, seeming to deny the will's obedience to faith alone. Thomas's lectures or disputations focused on the virtues, this question of human moral excellence. First he treated virtues in general in De virtutibus in communi, next he looked at the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance in De virtutibus cardinalibus and finally, but most importantly he examined the virtue of hope in De spe. It was this stress on the human person who thinks and wills that unsettled the Voluntarists.When Aquinas left Paris to return to his home province of Naples, no one thought that he would be dead in just two year's time. So after his tragic death in 1274, one of the Dominican Order's greatest minds could no longer argue his case for Aristotle. The Bishop of C