In later life, he was accused of heresy and brought up before the local Franciscan-led Inquisition, and tried as a heretic by Pope John XXII with the bull In Agro Dominico of March 27, 1329.

He has acquired a status as a great mystic within contemporary popular spirituality, as well as considerable interest from scholars situating him within the medieval scholastic and philosophical tradition.

[16] The first solid evidence we have for his life is when on 18 April 1294, as a baccalaureus (lecturer) on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, a post to which he had presumably been appointed in 1293 (he had been ordained to the priesthood by that time), he preached the Easter Sermon (the Sermo Paschalis) at the Dominican convent of St. Jacques in Paris.

The Dominican General Chapter held in Venice in the spring of 1325 had spoken out against "friars in Teutonia who say things in their sermons that can easily lead simple and uneducated people into error".

Nicholas presented a list of suspect passages from the Book of Consolation to Eckhart, who responded sometime between August 1325 and January 1326 with the treatise Requisitus, now lost, which convinced his immediate superiors of his orthodoxy.

[25] Throughout the difficult months of late 1326, Eckhart had the full support of the local Dominican authorities, as evident in Nicholas of Strasbourg's three official protests against the actions of the inquisitors in January 1327.

[22] Pope John XXII issued a bull (In agro dominico), 27 March 1329, in which a series of statements from Eckhart is characterized as heretical, another as suspected of heresy.

Pope John Paul II voiced favorable opinion on this initiative, even going as far as quoting from Eckhart's writings, but the outcome was confined to the corridors of the Vatican.

Timothy Radcliffe, then Master of the Dominicans and recipient of the letter, summarized the contents as follows: We tried to have the censure lifted on Eckhart[30] ... and were told that there was really no need since he had never been condemned by name, just some propositions which he was supposed to have held, and so we are perfectly free to say that he is a good and orthodox theologian.

[31]Professor Winfried Trusen of Würzburg, a correspondent of Radcliffe, wrote in a defence of Eckhart to Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), stating: Only 28 propositions were censured, but they were taken out of their context and impossible to verify, since there were no manuscripts in Avignon.

Eckhart as a preaching friar attempted to guide his flock, as well as monks and nuns under his jurisdiction, with practical sermons on spiritual/psychological transformation and New Testament metaphorical content related to the creative power inherent in disinterest (dispassion or detachment).

[citation needed] In this, he frequently used unusual language or seemed to stray from the path of orthodoxy, which made him suspect to the Church during the tense years of the Avignon Papacy.

Eckhart had imagined the creation not as a "compulsory" overflowing (a metaphor based on a common hydrodynamic picture), but as the free act of will of the triune nature of Deity (refer Trinitarianism).

These notions had been present in Pseudo-Dionysius's writings and John the Scot's De divisione naturae, but Eckhart, with characteristic vigor and audacity, reshaped the germinal metaphors into profound images of polarity between the Unmanifest and Manifest Absolute.

[34] John Orme Mills notes that Eckhart did not "leave us a guide to the spiritual life like St Bonaventure’s Itinerarium – the Journey of the Soul," but that his ideas on this have to be condensed from his "couple of very short books on suffering and detachment" and sermons.

On the other hand, most scholars consider The Friend of God from the Oberland to be a pure fiction invented by Merswin to hide his authorship because of the intimidating tactics of the Inquisition at the time.

[52] Most recently, Clint Johnson agreed with D. T. Suzuki and argued on the basis of Eckhart's appeals to experience that he is a mystic in the tradition of Augustine and Dionysius.

[56] Josiah Royce, an objective idealist, saw Eckhart as a representative example of 13th and 14th century Catholic mystics "on the verge of pronounced heresy" but without original philosophical opinions.

[58] Formerly a priest and a member of the Dominican Order within the Roman Catholic Church, Fox was an early and influential exponent of a movement that came to be known as Creation Spirituality.

The movement draws inspiration from the wisdom traditions of Christian scriptures and from the philosophies of such medieval Catholic visionaries as Hildegard of Bingen, Thomas Aquinas, Francis of Assisi, Julian of Norwich, Dante Alighieri, Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa, and others.

[68]A major force in the mutual influence of Eastern and Western ideas and religiosity was the Theosophical Society,[69][70] which also incorporated Eckhart in its notion of Theosophy.

[73] The Theosophical Society also spread Western ideas in the East, aiding a modernisation of Eastern traditions, and contributing to a growing nationalism in the Asian colonies.

[70][h] A major proponent of this "neo-Hinduism", also called "neo-Vedanta",[76] was Vivekananda[77][78] (1863–1902) who popularised his modernised interpretation[79] of Advaita Vedanta in the 19th and early 20th century in both India and the West,[78] emphasising anubhava ("personal experience"[80]) over scriptural authority.

[93] Shizuteru Ueda, a third generation Kyoto School philosopher and scholar in medieval philosophy showed similarities between Eckhart's soteriology and Zen Buddhism in an article.

[92] Schurmann's several clarifications included: With Joseph Ratzinger as Prefect, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1989 published a Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on some aspects of Christian meditation which opposed those who[97] propose abandoning [...] the very idea of the One and Triune God, who is Love, in favor of an immersion "in the indeterminate abyss of the divinity.

Sermo "Ave Gratia Plena" in fine (J. Quint, Deutsche Predigten und Traktate, Hanser 1955, 261).The notable humanistic psychoanalyst and philosopher Erich Fromm was another scholar who brought renewed attention in the West to Eckhart's writings, drawing upon many of the latter's themes in his large corpus of work.

Eckhart was a significant influence in developing United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld's conception of spiritual growth through selfless service to humanity, as detailed in his book of contemplations called Vägmärken ("Markings").

[99][citation needed]In Z213: Exit, by Dimitris Lyacos the same quote, attributed to Eckhart, appears in a slightly different wording: Your own are burning and your memories and you don't want to leave them.

The problems involve not only whether a particular sermon or treatise is to be judged authentic or pseudonymous, but also, given the large number of manuscripts and the fragmentary condition of many of them, whether it is even possible to establish the text for some of the pieces accepted as genuine.

The critical edition of Eckhart's works traditionally accepted 86 sermons as genuine, based on the research done by its editor Josef Quint (1898–1976)[123] during the 20th century.