The Expositio libri Genesis is Meister Eckhart's Latin commentary on Genesis, composed during his second regency in the Dominican chair for foreign masters at Paris — an appointment previously held by Thomas Aquinas. It belongs to the Opus expositionum, one branch of the vast and never-completed Opus tripartitum that Eckhart designed to run from a book of general propositions through disputed questions to scriptural exposition, each part illuminating the others. He wrote it, as his general prologue says, for studious brethren who wanted the truth of things stated briefly. Genesis was the natural place to begin: the first words of scripture are about beginning, and Eckhart wanted to say what a beginning is.
The commentary's governing move is to read "In the beginning God created heaven and earth" as a statement about the eternal now rather than a remote past. The principium is the Word, and creation happens in that principle, which means it is not an event finished long ago but the continuous giving of being. From this follows Eckhart's most characteristic and most dangerous claim: being is God, and the creature considered in itself, apart from the influx of being it receives, is nothing at all. Justice is in the just man not as a quality he owns but as the whole justice present in what it makes just. The image doctrine of Genesis 1:26 becomes the hinge of the whole anthropology — the image has nothing of its own and exists entirely from and toward that of which it is the image. Eckhart argues by piling up alternative readings, offering a second and third and fourth sense of the same verse without retracting the first, on Augustine's principle that scripture is fertile with true meanings. He draws heavily on Maimonides, especially for the reading of Adam, Eve and the serpent as intellect, sense appetite and the movement between them, and works constantly with Aristotle, Avicenna and Augustine.
The Latin works were little read for centuries and their recovery in the nineteenth century transformed Eckhart scholarship, replacing the image of a freelance visionary with that of a trained scholastic master whose German sermons rest on worked-out metaphysics. Read alongside those sermons, the Genesis commentary shows where the detachment preaching comes from: it is exegesis before it is spirituality. Several propositions traceable to this material surfaced in the Cologne proceedings against him.
Who should read this: readers who already know the German sermons and want to see the argument underneath them, and students of medieval metaphysics and biblical interpretation. It demands patience with scholastic vocabulary and repays it slowly. It is not devotional reading, not a first encounter with Eckhart, and no help at all to anyone wanting to preach the Genesis narratives as story.
Commentary on Genesis
by Meister Eckhart
The Expositio libri Genesis is Meister Eckhart's Latin commentary on Genesis, composed during his second regency in the Dominican chair for foreign masters at Paris — an appointment previously held by Thomas Aquinas. It belongs to the Opus expositionum, one branch of the vast and never-completed Opus tripartitum that Eckhart designed to run from a book of general propositions through disputed questions to scriptural exposition, each part illuminating the others. He wrote it, as his general prologue says, for studious brethren who wanted the truth of things stated briefly. Genesis was the natural place to begin: the first words of scripture are about beginning, and Eckhart wanted to say what a beginning is.
The commentary's governing move is to read "In the beginning God created heaven and earth" as a statement about the eternal now rather than a remote past. The principium is the Word, and creation happens in that principle, which means it is not an event finished long ago but the continuous giving of being. From this follows Eckhart's most characteristic and most dangerous claim: being is God, and the creature considered in itself, apart from the influx of being it receives, is nothing at all. Justice is in the just man not as a quality he owns but as the whole justice present in what it makes just. The image doctrine of Genesis 1:26 becomes the hinge of the whole anthropology — the image has nothing of its own and exists entirely from and toward that of which it is the image. Eckhart argues by piling up alternative readings, offering a second and third and fourth sense of the same verse without retracting the first, on Augustine's principle that scripture is fertile with true meanings. He draws heavily on Maimonides, especially for the reading of Adam, Eve and the serpent as intellect, sense appetite and the movement between them, and works constantly with Aristotle, Avicenna and Augustine.
The Latin works were little read for centuries and their recovery in the nineteenth century transformed Eckhart scholarship, replacing the image of a freelance visionary with that of a trained scholastic master whose German sermons rest on worked-out metaphysics. Read alongside those sermons, the Genesis commentary shows where the detachment preaching comes from: it is exegesis before it is spirituality. Several propositions traceable to this material surfaced in the Cologne proceedings against him.
Who should read this: readers who already know the German sermons and want to see the argument underneath them, and students of medieval metaphysics and biblical interpretation. It demands patience with scholastic vocabulary and repays it slowly. It is not devotional reading, not a first encounter with Eckhart, and no help at all to anyone wanting to preach the Genesis narratives as story.