ABSTRACT
The Arabic translation of some stretches of the treatise on metaphysics "Elementatio Theologiae" of Proclus, known under the name "Liber de Causis" and wrongfully attributed to Aristotle, influenced three great Middle Age Dominican thinkers: Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas and Meister Eckhart. Composed by thirty-one propositions, it advocates on the thesis of existence of a root cause that gives the being all things existing, with no exception. Scholars are unanimous in acknowledging that this pseudoepigraphic book has a relevant weight in the central topics of the Eckhartean works, on both the Latin and the German ones. Particularly, the Thuringian scholar makes use of the "Liber de Causis’s" auctoritas to hold that the simultaneous immanence-transcendence of the root cause regarding the creatures, the doctrine of the hierarchy of beings, the conception of the being as a ratio prima of creatureness, God’s ineffability. Besides those ontological aspects, the present work also presents the specifically anthropologic aspect of the emptying of all beings as conditio sine qua non for the union with the One Being (einic ein), an unmistakable trait of the presence of Liber de Causis in Meister Eckhart’s work.
Keywords
"Liber de Causis"; Meister Eckhart; Bereavement