« Die tugent hat vierley grad »: Meister Eckhart on Macrobius’ four degrees of the cardinal virtues

An interesting chapter in the history of the assimilation of the neo-Platonic heritage into the Latin Middle Ages was the dissemination of the Plotinian doctrine of the four degrees of the cardinal virtues — the political virtues, the purifying virtues, the virtues of the mind already purified and the exemplar virtues —, whose actual creator was Porphyry, but whose popularizer all over the Latin Middle Ages was Macrobius. The paper sheds light on a hitherto neglected episode in the story of this theory in the late Middle Ages: its appropriation and interpretation by Meister Eckhart. The frequent references made to the theory throughout his writings attest to how perfectly assimilated it was into Eckhart’s own conceptual framework and demonstrates that the label of Platonism, which is often applied to his thought in general, proves appropriate in the ethical sphere. Macrobius’ virtues theory appears in several key doctrinal clusters: the theory of the transcendentals, the conception of detachment, the notion of being in God without mediation and the dialectic of the superior-inferior relationship, etc. A significant point to emerge from the analysis is that Thomas’ Summa is the only source for Eckhart and all quotations concerning the theory of the four degrees of virtue are taken from there. Finally, compared with other medieval authors’, Eckhart’s approach to the doctrine appears distinctive, for he focuses on aspects generally neglected by others.