Eckhart’s Islamic and Jewish Sources: Avicenna, Avicebron, And Averroes

Islamic and Jewish authors are part of the rich and diverse array of Meister Eckhart’s sources. Compared to
other Latin authors, however, Eckhart was quite selective in using Arabic and Hebrew works which had been
made available to Latin readers during the 12th and 13th centuries. Apart from a few references to Algazel’s
Metaphysica (two), Alhazen’s Optica (two), Alfraganus’s Rudimenta astronomica (one), Haly’s commentary
on Pseudo-Ptolemy’s Centiloquium (one), Alkindi’s De radiis (one), and Isaac Israeli’s Liber de
diffinitionibus (one), Eckhart’s contact with Muslim and Jewish learning was limited to essentially four
thinkers: Maimonides, Avicenna, Averroes, and Avicebron. These authors were all, although to different
degrees, major resources for the Dominican Master in inspiring crucial themes and supporting key aspects of
his thought. A reflection on how these sources were used by Eckhart and how they contributed an influence
on his teaching is thus necessary for a better understanding of his thought.
Yet so far, only the Maimonides–Eckhart relationship has received the assiduous scholarly attention that it
deserves: several studies have examined the numerous issues and fields in which Maimonides—after
Aristotle, Eckhart’s most cited non-Christian authority—influenced Eckhart. Furthermore, a significant
agreement in the project of a philosophical interpretation of the Old Testament has been noted between the
two thinkers. The impact on Eckhart of the three remaining sources (Avicenna, Averroes, and Avicebron)
has been much less studied.
This chapter, which follows in the wake of another study of mine on the presence of Avicenna in Eckhart’s
work, is intended to contribute to our understanding of Eckhart’s use of Avicenna, Avicebron, and Averroes.
How did Eckhart approach and work on the texts of these thinkers? What were the doctrines that he
approved of and what were those, if any, which he criticized? How were these doctrines absorbed into his
thinking, and how have they shaped his thought? These are some of the questions I will try to answer. To do
this, I have made a thorough analysis of the texts in which Eckhart quotes these sources. In particular, I have
considered both quotations that explicitly mention the author’s name and/or the title of the work, and
German texts in which Eckhart refers to these sources anonymously as “meister”—indeed, in the German
writings, Eckhart’s quotation technique changes and, except for a unique case, he does not cite any of these
sources by name. The results of this investigation are presented here in three sections, one devoted to each of
the three sources studied. In each section some statistics on Eckhart’s use of these sources (number of
quotations, their distribution throughout Eckhart’s writings, faithfulness to the original texts, identifcation of
these texts, use of intermediary sources) are provided and commented on; then an overview of the themes
and the teachings in relation to which these sources are cited by Eckhart is given, and some specific cases are
discussed in greater detail.
I am fully aware that a study such as this does not address all the problems involved in the complex issue of
Eckhart’s Islamic and Jewish sources, for it leaves other ways of quoting (indefinite quidam quotations,
implicit citations, tacit use of terminology or concepts) as well as more general questions not related to
textual dependence (e.g. possible conceptual and doctrinal affinities, the following of similar lines of
reasoning, Eckhart’s recourse to these sources examined in relation to the way other scholastics used and
read them, etc.) unexplored. Yet I am firmly convinced that a textual study of this kind is the necessary first
step in further broadening and deepening the investigation. In addition, such a study has at least two
advantages. First, nominal citations and secure meister quotations supply a dossier of texts in which Eckhart
expresses “on the record” his views on Avicennian, Gabirolian, and Averroean teachings; as a consequence,
it is this body of texts that one first has to turn to in order to reconstruct the Dominican’s attitude towards
these sources objectively. Some of the implicit or quidam quotations registered by the editors of Meister
Eckhart’s Opera omnia or suggested by other scholars are, by contrast, far from certain. Therefore, using
them as a starting point for our research might have resulted in a conjectural and distorted picture of
Eckhart’s approach to these authors.
Second, in light of Eckhart’s actual quotations, it is possible to fully appreciate how particular his
interpretations of Avicenna, Avicebron, and Averroes were, and how different his sense of what these
sources had taught was from other scholastics’ perceptions and modern historiographical reconstructions.
Indeed, while some of the most burning issues of the 13th and 14th centuries that were derived from, or
somehow associated with, Avicenna, Avicebron, and Averroes—such as the doctrine of four intellects,
hylomorphism, and monopsychism—are scarcely or even never witnessed to by Eckhart’s quotations, less
usual motifs and topics occur with a surprisingly high frequency (such as the Avicennian concept of the soul
as an intelligible world; the Gabirolian idea that, by communicating itself to matter, form obeys the First
Maker, who is originator of the universal flow of form; and Averroes’s distinction between the bath in the
mind of the craftsman and in matter in external reality).