Fourteenth century

The fourteenth century appears in the book as a period when mystical teaching moved through informal networks of preachers, spiritual directors, and seekers while Church authorities grew increasingly alert to heresy. The era’s spiritual vitality and institutional anxiety meet most sharply in Meister Eckhart’s ministry and trial: he sought to make mystical transformation accessible, but ideas about the soul’s union with God could be misunderstood or condemned.

Mystical Networks and Practice

The book describes an intense fourteenth-century mystical movement known as the Friends of God. It had no formal organization or structure, but its members corresponded with one another. Among the movement’s prominent figures were Henry Suso, John of Ruusbroec, and Meister Eckhart; Eckhart is regarded by some as its father. His title, “Master” Eckhart, reflected his standing within this broader spiritual current.

The movement’s influence was carried not only through correspondence but through direct ministry. Eckhart preached to friars, nuns, beguines, and ordinary people across Germany and parts of Switzerland. Many came seeking a deeper transformation in God. As a vernacular preacher and spiritual director, he encouraged detachment and mystical union with God, bringing teachings about inward spiritual life to audiences beyond the learned clergy.

An Unsettled Religious Landscape

The period’s spiritual experimentation unfolded amid uncertainty within the Church. The papacy had moved from Rome to Avignon, and the book notes the presence of movements including the Franciscan Spirituals, Beghards, and reborn Waldensians, alongside heated disputes, war, and plague. Against this unsettled background, the hermitage at Groenendaal offered a rural setting for a deeper spiritual life. Its founders believed that the city’s materialistic values and the noise of continuing construction at St. Gudula’s hindered contemplation. Others joined them, and Groenendaal became a place of pilgrimage.

This background also helps explain why mystical claims attracted suspicion. The book describes fears that some groups, including the Brethren of the Free Spirit, taught that mystical encounters with God freed people from moral teachings. That belief intensified concern about mysticism and made unusual religious ideas especially vulnerable to charges of heresy. Church authorities also feared that uneducated listeners might misunderstand a mystic’s teaching and be led astray.

Eckhart’s Trial and Posthumous Judgment

Eckhart’s final years show how these pressures could converge on a popular preacher. After moving from Strasbourg to Cologne in late 1323 or early 1324, he spent three years amid controversy. In 1326 he appeared before a diocesan commission on a charge of heresy. He distinguished intellectual error from heresy, which he regarded as a matter of the will, and said he could be in error without being a heretic.

In 1327, Eckhart was at the papal court in Avignon, prepared to retract any error. The investigation reduced 150 articles to twenty-eight; he denied having preached two of them. Some modern historians, as the book reports, have noted that ideas later condemned could also be found in the writings of Church Fathers, including Eckhart’s teaching on the birth of the Word in the soul. He was near the end of his life and died the following year.

A papal bull issued afterward listed the twenty-eight articles: seventeen were judged heretical and the rest marked by heresy. Since Eckhart was dead, the controversy continued without him; his followers believed the authorities had misunderstood his teaching. The pope ultimately absolved him of heresy, stating that at the end of his life he had professed the orthodox faith and revoked and deplored twenty-six articles. The episode captures the century’s central tension in the book: mystical teaching could inspire a broad public ministry while remaining exposed to institutional scrutiny.