Eckhart on Divine Prescience and Human Foreknowledge: Prophecy, Visions and Divination, in: Prophecy and Prophets in the Middle Ages, ed. by Alessandro Palazzo, Anna Rodolfi, FIRENZE SISMEL - EDIZIONI DEL GALLUZZO, 2020 (Micrologus Library, 103), 189-214 (original) (raw)

Traditionally regarded as a treatment of prophecy, Eckhart’s exegesis of Jn. 1,48 («Priusquam te Philippus vocaret, cum esses sub ficu, vidi te») in the Commentary on the Gospel of John does not have much in common with the many quaestiones and treatises de prophetia that were written in the 13th and 14th centuries. Eckhart is interested not in prophecy per se, but as one of the modes of foreknowledge. His analysis has a prominent metaphysical character, as it focuses on prescience, understood as that perfection which is proper to the First Cause and which is participated by created beings in unequal and varied ways. Prescience is communicated to the inferior beings by the First Cause, which pre-contains in Itself all perfections in a simple and perfect way. Every created being participates in God’s science according to its own ontological rank and cognitive ability. In this way, Eckhart explains human foreknowledge and other creatures’ ability to foreshadow the future thorugh the Neoplatonic model of the emanation. As a consequence, he deliberately ignores the distinction between divinely inspired prophecy and natural precognition, a distinction which had been clearly established by some of his famous Dominican brethren (Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Ulrich of Strasbourg). By contrast, according to Eckhart, biblical prophecy, visions and dreams, natural prophecy, divinatory disciplines, and presages are all different instances of one and the same kind of foreknowledge. Another remarkable consequence of Eckhart’s approach is the great importance he attaches to divination. In his view, divinatory disciplines are legitimate forms of foreknowledge, modes of the manifestation of the divine prescience.