Meister Eckhart and questions of linguistic philosophy of language

In Russian linguistics, there is almost no research on the language of scholasticism and mysticism. The available rare publications are devoted to questions of word-formation models in the lexicon of this direction, general questions of theosophy of scholasticism and mysticism, and separate lexemes of mystical texts. At the same time, the study of texts of representatives of German mysticism, which were the product of oral creativity, formed as a result of complex interaction with the Latin language of Western scholasticism, is of particular interest in the aspect of linguistic and philosophical understanding of language realities and their influence on the linguistic and philosophical concepts of modern times. The article discusses the arguments of the Dominican Master Eckhart, a representative of the Rhenish mystical schools about the nature of language, the autonomy of language, language as an inexhaustible richness of being, language as the birth of the word in the soul, the relation between the material of the sound of language and words as it references the relationship of cognition and language, things, and views, values, and sound of the language element. The article notes that the language of mystics, in contrast to the modern idea of it, can not be an autonomous entity. He does not create a “purely linguistic” meaning by himself, but only discovers and knows the form of a thing created by God, and in this way translates (expresses) the received knowledge to the outside. The linguistic meaning for Eckhart, even in its weakest and most simplified form, as an external word, still appears as a reflection of the original divine idea, although it may be in a rather veiled form. For Eckhart, the speech created by God means the introduction of spiritual forms into dead matter and thus the creation of an ordered world of different forms of real things. In this case, the main function of the divine language is seen in the distinctive role (rerum distinctio) or, in other words, in creating the order of the Universe (or the ordered world). In the works of the mystic Eckhart, in his understanding of the essence of language and its components, the traditions of medieval scholasticism are continued in General, and the language of mysticism itself stands apart, where non-sounding speech plays an important role.