Eckhart von Hochheim OP c. Eckhart came into prominence during the Avignon Papacy at a time of increased tensions between monastic orders, diocesan clergy, the Franciscan Order, and Eckhart's Dominican Order. He was well known for his work with pious lay groups such as the Friends of God and was succeeded by his more circumspect disciples Johannes Tauler and Henry Suso , the latter of whom was later beatified.
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. Eckhart was probably born around in the village of Tambach , near Gotha , in the Landgraviate of Thuringia , [ 10 ] perhaps between and There is no basis for giving him the Christian name of Johannes , which sometimes appears in biographical sketches: [ 13 ] his Christian name was Eckhart ; his surname was von Hochheim.
Probably around , Eckhart joined the Dominican convent at Erfurt , when he was about eighteen. It is assumed he studied at Cologne before The first solid evidence we have for his life is when on 18 April , as a baccalaureus lecturer on the Sentences of Peter Lombard , a post to which he had presumably been appointed in 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. He remained there until The short Parisian Questions date from this time. In late , Eckhart returned to Erfurt and was given the position of Provincial superior for Saxony , a province which reached at that time from the Netherlands to Livonia.
Thereby, he had responsibility for forty-seven convents in the region. Complaints made against the Provincial superior of Teutonia and him at the Dominican general chapter held in Paris in , concerning irregularities among the ternaries, must have been trivial, because the general, Aymeric of Piacenza , appointed him in the following year as his vicar-general for Bohemia with full power to set the demoralised monasteries there in order.
