Carl Franklin Kelley received his formal education in Germany at
the University of Berlin and the Grabmann Institute of Medieval
Studies at the University of Munich. He became a Benedictine monk
at Downside Abbey and left the order to become professor of
philosophy at the University of Califonia.
Kelley was encouraged to write "Meister Eckhart on Divine
Knowledge" by three great twentieth-century thinkers, Josef Quint,
Jacques Maritain, and Aldous Huxley. Quint is one of the world's
most prominent Eckhart scholars and is principally responsible for
the critical edition of the latters's work. Maritain is considered
the greatest neo-Thomist thinker of modern times. And Huxley of
course popularized the term "the perennial philosophy" with his
anthology of the same name.
“The most engaging and illuminating study of a ‘mystical thinker’ I
have read. Those who read it carefully will find the most
sympathetic and sophisticated treatment of Eckhart in English.”
—Steven E. Ozment, author of Mysticism and Dissent: Religious
Ideology and Social Protest in the Sixteenth Century and Flesh and
Spirit: A Study of Private Life in Early Modern Germany
“C. F. Kelley’s Meister Eckhart on Divine Knowledge, first
published in 1977, is a true classic of modern research on Eckhart.
The first major study of the German Dominican in English, it
effected an important shift in understanding Eckhart by
demonstrating that he teaches and preaches primarily from a
‘principial’ perspective—that is, from God’s viewpoint as the
source and principle of all things. Eckhart’s principial knowledge,
as Kelley shows, ‘starts within God and then proceeds to understand
all things from the standpoint of divine instasis.’ Once one grasps
this fundamental, if startling, insight, many of the seeming
contradictions and conundrums of Eckhart’s thought fall away to
reveal the true profundity of his teaching about the relation of
God and human. This reissue of Kelley’s book will be welcomed by
all students of Eckhart.”
—Bernard McGinn, author of The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart:
The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing and The Harvest of Mysticism in
Medieval Germany
“In my view, no other study of Meister Eckhart has so well
penetrated to the marrow of the great Dominican teacher and
preacher’s philosophical and theological achievement. In the
process of exploring what he has called the ‘axial theme’ in
Eckhart’s teaching, Kelley has also managed to produce the greatest
philosophical and theological exegesis on non-dualism to come out
of the Christian tradition.”
—William Stranger, DharmaCafé.com
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