Meister Eckhart

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German theologian

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/meister-eckhart/ - Although rather unlikely to make many philosophers’ “top-five” list of medieval Christian thinkers (and even less likely to be found on a history of philosophy syllabus), few medieval thinkers are as wildly popular today in non-academic circles (and even more widely quoted out of context—both in his day and in ours) than Meister Eckhart. Both the scholarly philosophical neglect and the popular spiritual embrace of Eckhart have, in no small part, to do with his contemporary recasting as a “mystic”—a designation which has led present-day scholars to downplay his intellectual importance and spiritual seekers to up-play his esotericism. Even the German title Meister (“master”) is often mistakenly assumed to reflect Eckhart’s status as a spiritual “guru” of sorts, when in reality it derives from the Latin honorific magister, a title granted only to the most learned of university-trained scholars of his day.