ARTICOLI / 5 / Alessandra Beccarisi /
God and Nature. Ecstasy as inner vision in the thought of Meister Eckhart
Recent studies on Meister Eckhart’s sources have shown that Eckhart’s so-called ‘speculative mysticism’ moves within a constant dialogue between pagan philosophy and Holy Scripture, between natural philosophy and theology. This is a consequence of the conviction, expressed several times by the Dominican master, of a close correspondence between naturalia and divina, between Nature and God. This is the reason why the final outcome of ecstasy is not an elevation beyond the natural possibilities of human faculties, but an ‘emptying’, an annihilation of the soul and its determinations, which ‘forces’ God to take its place in the depth of the soul itself. The aim of my contribution will be to show that the so-called mystical contemplation is not an exceptional state for exceptional men and women, but a state of nature that occurs, like any natural phenomenon, under certain conditions, which Meister Eckhart described with coherence both in his German and Latin works.
