The Trial, and In Agro Dominico

In 1326 the archbishop of Cologne opened an inquisitorial process against Eckhart, on the basis of lists of propositions drawn from his sermons and writings. He was a senior Dominican with a reputation across the order, and the proceeding was unusual enough that his defence has survived: he replied that some of the propositions were misquoted, that others were true if properly understood, and that he might err but could not be a heretic, since error belongs to the intellect and heresy to the will. He appealed to the pope at Avignon and travelled there.

He died before judgement, in 1328. The following year the bull In agro dominico condemned seventeen propositions as heretical and declared eleven more ill sounding and suspect, while recording that Eckhart had submitted himself to the judgement of the Holy See before his death. The condemnation was published in Cologne, and it kept his name out of open citation for centuries even as his material continued to circulate.

His readers did not stop. Tauler and Suso carried the teaching in a safer register, the anonymous Theologia Germanica passed it to Luther, and the whole Rhineland tradition rests on him. In the twentieth century he became one of the standard points of comparison with Zen and with Vedanta, and the Dominican order has petitioned Rome to state that the condemnation of 1329 no longer stands in the way of reading him.