Zusammenfassung / Summary
There is hardly any Christian mystic who has been more critical towards the classical forms of medieval sacramental piety than Meister Eckhart. Nevertheless, his conception of the immediate “generation“ of God in the intellectual soul of every human being does not aim to abolish the sacraments altogether but to correct their classical interpretation as instruments of “mediate” salvation. Without ever putting into question the Real Presence as such, Eckhart does not follow the strategy of most contemporary Scholastics who try to explain the Eucharistic transubstantiation according to the substance/accident schema of Aristotelian physics. Instead, he adopts a speculative approach that considers the Eucharist as the paradigmatic place of immediate self-recognition of the absolute substance, i.e. the divine intellect, in all created beings.
The present article intends to examine the systematic premises as well as the theological implications of Eckhart’s particular conception of the Sacrament of the Altar and to situate it in the context of the 13th / 14th century debate on Eucharistic theology.