Abstract

This thesis identifies and explicates the key textual references to love in the Latin and vernacular works of Meister Eckhart and argues that love is operative as an integral element in Eckhart's thought. Exposing the roots of Eckhart's ideas on love within the German Dominican School tradition, the conceptual categories of medieval Christian Neoplatonism are shown to be manifest in an overarching paradigm of 'Love and its Opposite,' a moral parallel to the more explicit metaphysical paradigm of 'Esse and Nothing.' The nexus between ontology and ethics is further established as the proposition Esse est Deus is seen coexisting alongside the Johannine formulation of divine identity, Deus est Caritas, in the recognition of love as divine ontology. God's nature as pure simplicity prompts the conception of love as indivisible . The model ideal for love is fatherly-filial love, a Trinitarian-based union of identity and equality. ;Concomitantly, abegescheidenheit is observed operative in Eckhart's kenotic anthropology as love's condition of possibility; via detachment, an abdication of human love allows for the overcoming of its inherent demarcations and thus love reappears in the intellectus redefined in divine terms. Finally, Eckhart's approach to beatitude is shown undermining both the 'way of knowledge' and the 'way of love' in a move that yet reveals the noetic receptivity and volitional passivity required for the realization of mystical unity and perfect love. ;The texts manifest Eckhart's efforts to anchor the notion of love not in moral law or precarious emotion or the human will but in the very depths of God, leaving an inspiring salvific vision in which man is called upon to love---not merely in the same ways that God does---but for love to become in man what it is in God, His very Being. Throughout, the traditional ordo caritatis is subverted by Eckhart's mystical unum and radical vision of infinite, indivisible love