81: All Things Mysticism with Volker Leppin

Host: Brandon Nappi 

Guest: Volker Leppin

Instagram: @theleadersway.podcast 

berkeleydivinity.yale.edu/podcast

Welcome to the Leaders Way podcast. I am really, really excited about this conversation because we’ll be chatting about something that’s near and dear to my heart, and that is, mysticism. Specifically, Christian mysticism, specifically one of the great mystics of the Christian tradition, Meister Eckhart. I spilled more than a little ink in my doctoral dissertation, examining Meister Eckhart’s sermons, his thinking as it pertains to the contemplative life, and especially as his thinking and some of the themes that he returns to over and over in his work align with themes in Zen Buddhism. And interestingly enough, teachings from Zen that originated exactly the same time period, but in a completely different cultural context in Japan.

Anyway, I’ve long wanted to go even deeper and spend more time studying Meister Eckhart, and I was so thankful to remember that we have on faculty here at Yale Divinity School a wonderful scholar of Eckhart, who is Volker Leppin. And I’m conscious as we start this conversation that the word mysticism is so elastic in our culture. And for folks who are interested in mysticism or use the word mysticism, the word gets used in a variety of different ways. And it’s one of those great words in the Christian tradition that we use, but we often use imprecisely, or we use without even a real fair grasp of what we’re referring to. So I’d love to tell you a little bit about our wonderful guest, Professor Volker Leppin.

              As the Horace Tracy Pitkin Professor of Historical Theology, Professor Leppin’s scholarship is particularly interested in medieval and Reformation studies. He argues that the Reformation should be understood as a transformation of the medieval world rather than a stark rupture. His work also focuses on the history of spirituality, mainly in mysticism. He’s been educated at the University of Marburg, Heidelberg University, and he received a chair in church history at the University of Vienna in 2000. 10 years later, he moved to the University of Tübingen in Southern Germany, where he held the chair in Church History and directed the Institute for Late Middle Ages and Reformation from 2010 to 2021. He’s a member of the Academies of Sciences at Heidelberg, as well as the Saxonian Academy of Sciences. His most recent book, among many, many that he’s written, is Francis of Assisi, the Life of a Restless Saint. I’m so, so thankful for this conversation and I hope you enjoy our exploration of mysticism, Meister Eckhart, Francis of Assisi, Martin Luther, and so much more.

Welcome to the Leaders Way podcast, a show for people who are not ready to give up on the world. We convene sacred conversations with luminaries, scholars, and spiritual leaders who explore the creative vision needed to lead change in our aching world. I’m Dr. Brandon Nappi, lecturer at Yale Divinity School and executive director of the Office of Transforming Leaders at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. I’m so glad you’re here.

Professor Volker Leppin, welcome to the Leaders Way podcast. It’s so wonderful to have you here. I would love you to begin by telling your story. How did you find your way here to Yale Divinity School as a scholar and an academic? 

Volker:          So of course it started in Germany. It started from me to being a pastor’s son, which is very traditional in Germany. So many theologians will come out of the Deutschefraus being trained in religion, being trained in a lot of education.

At high school I had many kind of Marxist friends, atheist friends. We came into discussions, we agreed about many things, ethical things, but we disagreed about metaphysics and faith. That brought me to study theology. I wanted to know deeper. Then throughout my studies I found some authors I found fascinating like William of Ockham, about whom I wrote my dissertation. After writing my dissertation I thought it’s fun to stay in academics. So as we Germans do, I wrote a second book, the so-called habilitation, to be qualified for a professor. That was more about the Lutherans in the 16th century. That was my start. 

Then I came to a very interesting university in Eastern Germany around 2000. So that was 11 years after the fall of the wall. Still you had this transformative atmosphere in Jena in Eastern Germany. I made my way to being in a very traditional, very well-esteemed faculty in Germany. In my mid-50s I thought, “Oh, why the world’s all right … But there’s still something in my career, in my life, and yeah, it came up. It was …  another place to learn and to go then. Fortunately, Yale wanted me to come in, so I agreed. 

B:         Oh, we’re very grateful you did. Can I hear about what it was like growing up in a divided Germany and what that moment was like when the wall came down? 

V:         That’s a very good question. Growing up in this divided Germany really meant Germany ended for me at this Iron Wall. I still remember when I was 16 or so, I said Paris is closer to me than Leipzig. I saw that in Eastern Germany and of course Paris, they speak French. The guys there in Leipzig, they speak German. My grandmother, she had studied in Leipzig. I was surprised as a 16-year to hear this. There was a map in my mind that was the divided Germany. Honestly, when this division of Germany ended, I didn’t find this natural or normal. My father then said, all right, it’s back to normality. I said no, it’s very unnormal. I found it was a right punishment for Germany to be divided. That was my mindset. It took only one week or so. 

After a while, I said, All right, it is becoming natural. I was in Heidelberg in southern Germany. When first someone from GDR with this special kind of cars, the Trabi, came to Heidelberg, I noticed that we can talk together. They are happy people. They are great people. Very quickly, I understand, that’s the time for us to come together. It would be wrong to say that I was always expecting. It would be wrong to say, I hoped for this. It was a process of learning. 

B:         Wow. Over time, you came to study mysticism. This is, of course, the reason that I invited you to the Leaders’ Way podcast. I’m so excited for this. I’ve been interested in mysticism for so long. I’m always curious when I hear people within church contexts, outside of church contexts, talk about mysticism. And so I’d love for you to share just a little bit today about your academic study of mysticism. But before we even venture into this territory, I always feel like a definition of terms is necessary. This is one of these especially slippery words. Help us navigate what this word means, what it might not mean, or maybe even the polyvalence. I suspect it means many things. 

V:         Thank you for broadening. You said a definition is necessary. If you mean an exact definition is necessary, we should end up our conversation. I couldn’t deliver. It’s more like I try to approach mysticism by a set of criteria, a set of moments. The most important moment to me is, all mystics think in a certain way about being close to God, being personally close to God. You have the experience in the sacrament of God coming close to you. Mysticism doesn’t need anything that mediates in this way as the sacrament does. So that’s very much in the center. 

Then mysticism mostly is about God being somehow spiritual, immaterial. God can materialize within mysticism in a very bodily way. But the first approach is God is very immaterial. A third moment would be to come close to this immaterial God. Something has to happen in me. I have to lose what binds me to any material surrounding of me. If I describe it in a kind of churchy way, that’s penance, that brings me to my inner … that lets me detach from my sinful attachment to the material world. So going through penance, going into me, that brings me closer to God, which now as a fourth item would mean I find God more in my interior than outside of me. 

I think that’s pretty much a sampler. I could add some more items, but that’s the kernel of it. 

B:         What in your own life led you to make this the object of your scholarly pursuits? Was there a moment, a text that opened this door that you’ve walked through?

V:         It was a number of texts. It was actually Meister Eckhart. In the time when I studied, I got an offer for a summer school, which was about Meister Eckhart led by historians of literature who were very much interested in this kind of texts, right? Metaphors you find in Meister Eckhart. And there I thought these texts …  eye opening, heart opening. And I say this as someone who really loves the intellectual debates. 

As I said, I started with scholasticism, the William of Ockham, and I love this. But mysticism gives another approach to searching for words about God and in the same way of searching for words, also disclosing that your words are not enough. And that very much resonates with my own experience. 

B:         Yes. If you’re enjoying the Leaders Way podcast, you might like to join us in person as a Leaders Way Fellow. The Leaders Way at Yale is a certificate program exploring spiritual innovation for faith leaders. The Leaders Way at Yale combines the best of divinity school, retreat, and pilgrimage. Fellows meet in person at Yale for a week over the summer, then continue their learnings and mentor groups online. You can also take an online course or workshop with us here at Yale. Our learning space for faith leaders is hopeful, practical, and imaginative. Learn more on our website at berkeleydivinity.yale.edu. Clergy and leaders from every country, denomination, and seminary background are warmly welcome to join us for all of our programs. Now, back to the show.

So let’s dive into our beloved Meister Eckhart. For those who maybe have only heard the name or know the slightest bit, this might be an opportunity to go a little bit deeper than usual. You’ve just finished teaching, of course, on Meister Eckhart here at Yale Divinity School. What would you like us to know and remember about Meister Eckhart, namely the things that we might tend to forget or not hear when we quote him quickly?

V:         So what we very often forget is that he was one of the leading scholastics of his time. He taught twice at Paris and he wrote Latin texts, countries to the Bible, to the Gospel of John, to the Genesis, on a very high level of neo-platonic philosophy. That’s something mostly we don’t have in mind when talking about him. We have in mind, and that’s great that we have this in mind, his German sermons, which are not easy to identify. So there is a good number of sermons which were delivered under his name and some Germans which were not delivered under his name, but research says they are written by him nevertheless. But now I think we have a good number of around 100 sermons which center around this idea of detachment, the German word “gelassenheit”. That’s quite an interesting thing in Meister Eckhart, that he coined some German terms like this “gelassenheit”, like “bildung”. I think “bildung” even is a word in the English speaking world about something of education, but also shaping a personality. That’s what “bildung” means. This German word was invented by Meister Eckhart as far as we can tell. So he was very creative in using German language. He was creative in using images, in using uncommon thoughts about God. And still nowadays when you read Meister Eckhart, you can just be surprised by what he is thinking and saying.

B:         That was my experience reading him for the first time, I guess as an undergraduate, thinking it was quite shocking, some of the metaphors, and surprising. Who would he have been preaching to, most of the sermons that we have? 

V:         An obvious audience. These are his Dominican brothers. 

B:         His Dominican community. 

V:         And there is another number of sermons; we do not know how many of those sermons which are directed to spiritual women. And that makes it so interesting. He was committed by his order to care for those spiritual women who had been outside the orders, the Beguines, who had their self-organized life. And now were integrated into the Dominican order. He was the one to lead them spiritually. And in leading them, he also learned from them. And that makes it fascinating to read. You see what biblical figures he talks about. He talks about Martha and Mary, the sisters who received Jesus. But this famous story in the Bible, in the Gospel of Luke, Mary is just listening to Jesus, just sitting at his feet. And Martha, her sister, is working behind her as a good host, working for the guest. And then when Martha asks Mary, “Please help me, please help me,” Jesus says, “No need of this. She has chosen the better part.” 

Which is me for Mary. So I don’t want to be Martha here. And this story was read by many women in the sense of, “Oh, you just have to listen. You just have to be a visionary.” Meister Eckhardt corrects them slightly, saying, “No, if you want to have this visionary life, this life for auditing Jesus Christ, you also have to go through a time in your life where you are Martha. You also have to work in this world.” This is so counterintuitive to what we think about a mystic. We wouldn’t think a mystic sends you into the world. He sends you into working. He says, “Mary, before becoming the right Mary, she worked for the apostles.” He even says, like the tradition says, “She preached.” Which is a great acknowledgement that she was the one who taught the gospel to the apostles. And that’s everything about working, doing something. And he says, “That’s part of your spiritual reality.” 

B:         And he lived, as I understand it, a form of this kind of integration. As you mentioned, the theologian teaching at Paris at times, known most as a mystic, but did he also have administrative responsibilities within his own Dominican order that I’m tracking? 

V:         He was the leader of a province, he even had to lead a province. So he was really one of the most active Dominicans of his time. If you look at him, you don’t know how he could do all of this in his life. But he did, he managed to do so, and he still managed to provoke thoughts by others.

B:         When you think about some of the great themes of Meister Eckhart, are there a handful of themes that you find him returning to again and again? 

V:         He even says himself, in one of his sermons, “Whenever I preach, I preach about abgeschiedenheit.” This is kind of reclusion. It’s almost difficult to translate it into English. Honestly, it is strange for me, you mentioned the classic …  it is strange for me to read him in English. So I always wonder how this translation is made. But we have very good translations into English. So however, he speaks about this reclusion, which is a parallel to detachment and gelassenheit. So that’s, as he himself says, that’s his main theme, just getting rid of all your ties to this earth. And then he says, “I speak about God who comes close to me, as I said in the Mythic Convictions, God comes close to us in a way that draws us into God themself.” 

B:         Many moons ago, when I was preparing a doctoral dissertation, I wrote a chapter on Meister Eckhart and Zen, and this idea of detachment. And many of our contemporary Zen teachers prefer the word “non-attachment” in their own teaching, because it’s less dualistic. And I wonder if that’s a fair companion word to use. So whenever I’m teaching about detachment, I find myself often also using the word “non-attachment.” So this is kind of a part one of the question. And part two of the question is, detachment for the sake of what? I presume that detachment might be linked to something else, to another principle. Is it love? Is it compassion? Is it faith? How does Meister Eckhart understand that? 

V:         In my living between two cultures, linguistically, between German and American culture, I usually learn … we Germans tend to have a very nominalistic style, while the American style is more active using verbs. And now in this sense, detachment is more American than non-attachment is. The German word gelassenheit has the word “lassen” for “leave,” which means there is a relation. I leave it behind, I leave it back somewhere. While non-attachment would, at least to my mind, be more static. In a sense, it is nowhere, there is no relation to it. For Meister Eckhart, there is a relation, there is a process of leaving it behind. So that’s why I would prefer detachment, if not taught otherwise. 

And the second question about how does it lead to, in a certain sense, it doesn’t lead to anything. It leads to the nothing. That’s what Meister Eckhart would call the “nicht”, the nothing. And of course, in this nothing, then there’s everything, there’s God. But first it has to go to the nothing. One of those terms, both Meister Eckhart and John Tauler would use to describe it is the biblical word of the abyss. So you go into this abyss and then the true abyss, God themselves, will be there.

B:         Yes, and this is what has been fascinating to track. And I don’t know the extent to which you’ve tracked this conversation between some members in the Zen community trying to engage Meister Eckhart around this notion of nothingness. And there’s a camp that says, gosh, they’re actually sort of articulating the same thing. And others say, well, simply because they’re saying nothing or nothingness doesn’t mean they’re actually pointing to the same quality of nothingness. And so I spent a chapter opining and probably getting it really wrong on this. But I wonder if this is in any way related to what the author of The Cloud of Unknowing is trying to point to in the sense of un- … is it a kind of release, releasing of notions, ideas? Is this the same kind of ballpark? 

V:         It is so. The author is later than Meister Eckhart. I cannot say if he draws from him or from Tauler, but actually it is the same thought of getting detached from everything here. 

B:         And yet, as we’ve just talked about, Meister Eckhart is quite engaged in the world. So the detachment, can you say more about this? Is it a detachment from ideas, detachment from worldly identity while still being in the world? Is he preserving a kind of paradox here? He’s not, it seems, he’s not living a purely monastic life, right? He’s a Dominican, so, you know, engaged as a mendicant. So how is he thinking about detachment?

V:         Very short answer, he would say it’s detachment of myself. So that’s what I say in the center; more elaborated, I would say it is a mental thing. He has one passage not only in the sermon, but in the treatise, where he thinks about, Can I be rich and detached and poor at the same moment? And he says yes. So if you are rich, but you don’t care about this, then you are poor in your mind, which is not easy to handle, I think, but that’s the idea, of course. But it’s also an idea that might help people to arrange themselves for the world and saying, yeah, yeah, I’m detached, and I’m rich. And I don’t care about my money, just go back to my big mansion and live there. That’s not how he means it. He means really in this sense of … that hasn’t to count in any sense for you. And this mental detachment that goes so far, that he stresses, you must not have any kind of will in you. And this not having any kind of will goes so far, but he says, even when you want to perform the will of God, still you have a will in you. And that’s too much.

So that’s, biblically, that’s what happens to Jesus in Gethsemane. Not my will, but your will. 

B:         Yes. What do you think we get most wrong about Meister Eckhart? I mean, he’s in the air these days and folks are quoting him in sermons. You can Google Meister Eckhart and come up with 25 quotes on Goodreads or something. And I think I’m quite sure he didn’t say this. 

V:         Yes many quotes are wrong, I think. 

B:         Yeah, so when this bubbles up in popular culture, how do you handle it? And what do you think we typically get wrong?

V:         Typically, we understand him too simple. We don’t take this whole philosophical background into all thoughts about him. But as you say, how do I deal with it? I wouldn’t say too quickly, you understand him wrong, but more in the sense of, Oh, great that you have an understanding and let’s go deeper. 

I love it that people love Meister Eckhart and that’s a great chance for us as theologians to come into touch with people who might not have an understanding of religion in a churchy sense, who feel estranged from the church. And maybe that’s a second point which many people misrepresent Meister Eckhart; they think, Oh, he’s somewhere in the air beyond the church. He was very much involved in the church. Even if this church in the end condemned him, he was always found to be a good Catholic in his time. And so coming into talk with people who take him into a more esoteric understanding and tell them, All right, he also could talk about Jesus Christ. He could talk deeply about the incarnation and there is some relation to this. 

B:         We were just having this same kind of conversation last week with Omid Safi. I don’t know if you know his work. He’s a scholar at Duke who translates Rumi, and he bumps into this same kind of problem. When we extract someone like Rumi or someone like Meister Eckhart out of their context, typically what happens is we tend to make them very non-religious and almost therapeutic. And he was describing a cartoon that he saw. Of course, Rumi writes prolifically about love. He’s often talking about divine love. He’s sometimes talking about human love too. But the cartoon said–it was a caption of Rumi, and the caption read, “I’m not talking about your girlfriend.” (Laughter) “I’m talking about God here.” So I wonder if we need a similar kind of a cartoon when it comes to… Meister Eckhart.

Tell us about the end of his life and how things transpired and sort of where Meister Eckhart sits now. Maybe you could speak sort of largely in terms of how the Christian tradition writ large embraces him, but also maybe how the Roman Catholic Church at the current moment sees Eckhart.

V:         Yes, I think with the end of his life, he ran into trouble when he was in Cologne. There were some local conflicts, obviously. Some debates with his brothers, including that they were suspicious about him talking about speculative things to the broader public. And he answered it in a great way. He said, “If you don’t talk to the uneducated, never ever anyone will be educated.” Which totally makes sense. But it didn’t make sense to his adversaries. So they continued to pursue him. He applied to the court, to the papal court, which at that time was situated in Avignon because the papier had removed from Rome. And he went there. We know quite well about the process that was made against him. It ended up that he was released from Avignon and in a number of sentences was condemned. 

And this bull says, I know not how but he understood that these sentences were wrong. He would not repeat them. Which meant if he had not died on his way, he could have continued teaching in a certain way. But now he died. And there was this condemnation which made it very difficult to transmit his sermons. That’s why, as I mentioned before, so many sermons of him are transmitted under no name or another name. Many of them were transmitted under the name of John Tauler because John Tauler was not condemned as a heretic. And that brought it with it that over centuries John Tauler was much better known than Meister Eckhart was. So you have those prints of John Tauler in the 15th and 16th century. You have no print under the name of Meister Eckhart. And then you can see that the name was known. There was this German thinker, Meister Eckhart. He was mentioned in some texts, but people didn’t know what he actually had written. 

That only started in the 19th century in the circle around the philosopher Hegel where people re-detected Meister Eckhart and then his sermons were published. And that also brought some Catholic thinkers into connection with him. So that through the 19th and 20th century, I would say more and more Catholic thinkers would say there is something inspirational in Meister Eckhart’s thought. I know, for example, that someone who wrote his dissertation about Meister Eckhart now is a bishop in Germany so that that is possible, but you appreciate Meister Eckhart. He is one of the intellectual interlocutors for Catholic theology nowadays. 

And I would not have been surprised if Pope Francis had acknowledged him somehow and I won’t be surprised if Pope Leo will do because he also can appreciate this strong intellectual tradition. 

B:         I’m wondering if we could go back in time. Maybe I should have started with my Saint Francis question. We could have gone more linearly. But you’ve also written on Francis and the mysticism that in some ways I presume has an overlap in the Venn diagram with Meister Eckhart, but it’s very distinct and different. So what prompted your writing and scholarship on this beloved Saint Francis?

V:         There’s one route tracing back, very far back into my youth and another more recent route that brought me to Francis. What goes so deeply back is growing up in a pastor’s house. My father was a pastor in Marburg in Germany in Saint Elizabeth’s Church, which is a church built in the 13th century for Elizabeth of Hungary. And Elizabeth of Hungary was one of the first in Germany to propagate the ideas of Saint Francis. So when I was a young boy, I was sitting in this old church and I saw stained windows on one of them. There was a strange figure in a blue coat that was Saint Francis. So very early in my youth encountered Saint Francis. That’s very back in my youth. 

And more recent, you know, in another part of my life, it’s being a research on Martin Luther. And that means I had a lot to do in the year 2017, which was the Reformation Ghibli. I think I had 80 talks around the world day in this year. I don’t know how I imagine this. In that year, it all was about Luther. And Luther is a great guy, but there was a moment of being exhausted of Martin Luther. And when I flew back from my last travel for talks that was on time in October, November 2017, I took the Francis works with me, and I just read them on the plane and I was excited about this. That was the starting point for my Francis book. 

B:         Oh my goodness. So I studied in Italy when I was sent an undergrad and our first three days in Italy, we went right from the airport to a three day retreat in Assissi. And I thought, I want to give my whole life to Francis and to Jesus. And so I picked up the Omnibus, which for folks who don’t know is this great honking book of all things Francis-related, and poured through it and wrote at least a dozen papers on Francis of Assissi and entered. And I’ll spare you the details. I didn’t end up as a Franciscan, but his way of life continues to inspire, to activate something in the imagination of people worldwide. And for, I don’t know, for folks who might only know the Reader’s Digest version, only know that the shortest version of the story. Can you share just a little bit about the narrative of Francis and then this mystical dimension, the stigmata, and his embracing of lepers, I presume features really prominently in any research. 

V:         So the basic story is a young son of a merchant who comes to understand that his father might be a Christian or his parents might be Christians in a certain sense, but he feels a tension between this way of living Christianity to what he becomes to understand from the gospel. But by the help of a priest, by the way, who explains him something, but also by his own resonating about what Jesus wants from us. That is a symbolic story in his life that makes clear how different he was to his parents very early. This is when he thought about the sick, those who suffered from lepra. They lived outside the city and usually a rich man like his father would send someone to them, to give them money or some food or also, being a Christian who gives a donation, but also being very distant. 

What did Saint Francis, he went to them, he embraced them, and he kissed them. I would say maybe nothing to imitate. We know how dangerous kissing might be. We went through a pandemic, but given this, that this is not a medical advice, it is very impressive because he didn’t say … I have to donate, but he saw this person is in need of love. And I see he later says in his testimony, indeed, the starting point for his life, for his conversion, was going to the sick, going to the lepers. 

So he started it and then the conflict with his father rose, and he gathered a group around him who wanted to live this life of penance. After a while, this group became so big that he felt overwhelmed. He withdrew himself from the leading of this group. He returned to a life as a hermit. 

And that’s why maybe or not, I would say, perhaps not, he received the stigmata. So my understanding is that the stories say about the stigmata, the wounds of Jesus Christ in his body, only came up after his death. And they gave expression to maybe even a visionary experience. This one was really the second Jesus Christ. And if I believe that this was true physically or not, that doesn’t matter. I think the theological message, that is very much right, that there’s someone lived so radically following Jesus Christ, not caring of himself. He was so sick in his last years, only caring for the others. That is a message of Jesus Christ in this world. And so this speech about the Aetachristus, the second Christ which came up 100 years after his death, that is very true. 

B:         If I’m remembering my history correctly, Francis, maybe like Ignatius of Loyola, had dreams of fighting in the army, certainly Ignatius of Loyola did. I don’t know, did Francis fight or … he had chivalric aspirations to fight and win noble glories, right? And that gets transposed into a very dramatic kind of sense of discipleship. Am I remembering my history? 

V:         It is actually like Ignatius, he fought in a war between Assissi, his mother town in Perugia. He was even in prison, war prison for a year, in his youth, which was somehow dramatic and which formed his mindset to a certain degree. And then he had this dream about a room full of weapons. And he learned more and more, it is about the spiritual weapons, so the fight you fight is not between Perugia and Assissi or whatsoever, but it is the fight against your own wills. And that’s your interest, Francis, as being somewhat close to Meister Eckhart. 

Let’s say, we can say that it’s close to Meister Eckhart, into mysticism in general, but he said, it is not about my own will, my own desires. It is all about God, whom I experience in my neighbor and in creation. 

B:         As you teach Francis, I mean, what connections are you making between Francis and sort of the urgent needs of the world? What are some of the themes that you hope your students and your readers take away as they engage in someone who lived and, you know, and died 800 years ago now? 

V:         Yeah, so there is an obvious connection, which also Pope Francis makes very much clear. Saint Francis was someone who understood that nature is something we should not use for ourselves, which we should read as a mirror of God. That’s how he approached nature. Of course, he had no understanding as we have about the ecological structure. Of course, he couldn’t know that our behavior is destroying nature, is destroying the filaments of life. He couldn’t know that. But he saw this nature is made by God, in this nature, you will still find traces of God. So when he sounds like someone who very much appreciates nature, that has always to do with God and Jesus Christ. 

Just to take one example, there is a story that he was picking up a worm from the soil and protecting this worm that no one would come with their feet on the worm. And this is explained by Psalm 22, where a worm is mentioned. And in Christian tradition, this one is Jesus Christ. So the worm he’s protecting, that’s a symbol of Jesus Christ. And if we approach nature this way to see that there is God present in a certain way, there’s Jesus Christ present in a certain way, not ontologically, but in the way that all these are signs leading us to God, then we will protect nature. 

B:         And do I understand, and is this more apocryphal or is this a history that Francis is responsible for the first nativity? 

V:         That is likely historical. So he had this celebration with all ingredients of say a nativity. It was not like a nativity, another Christmas tree, but it was a scenery of the nativity in which he celebrated the Eucharist. Of course, he was not a priest, so he was not presiding it, but he read the Bible there like a deacon. I think he never was an ordained deacon. So he crossed a little bit of the border. That was something he arranged indeed. 

B:         You know, as you mentioned, you know, in Francis’ own lifetime, he was inundated with followers, and those followers continued to grow after his death. And soon after, there were lots of disagreements, and maybe even his own lifetime, around what did it mean to really emulate Francis properly, and what did Francis really mean when he said “poor,” and how many things can we own? Is it just the sandals, and they have it? Can you talk about maybe the end of his life and early Franciscan movements, maybe even before we segue to Martin Luther, to hear about Francis’ legacy? 

V:         In the end of his life, he was afraid, that people would call themselves poor without living in a cruel way. That’s why he wrote his Testament. His last words that just wanted to encourage people really to have no luxurious clothes, not rich buildings. So that was this appeal to live in a cruel style. But then after his death, the Pope decided that’s only from the Testament. So binding is the rule, and with the rule written by lawyers, you can compromise to a certain degree, and that’s what many Franciscans did in the following century, while others stick to the Testament, and said that’s what our founder, Saren, our now saint-founder, he was canonized two years after his death. That’s where all those cords came from, which is strangely, and so far, he never wanted to have any cords. He was not agonistic in any sense, but he was used for those cords. 

B:         And there are different sorts of questions that need to be asked when you have thousands of followers who need to live in a place, who need food, who need some form of education. So in a sense, I suppose the Franciscan movement was a victim of its own success. It needed to entertain questions that Francis, probably in his early days, didn’t quite need to entertain. 

V:         The success, as some of them saw it, was, included that they were the spearheads of the end of the times. So they saw, in St. Francis, the one would all open the way to the coming of Jesus Christ. That also was part of success, but of course, that was part of the problems. 

B:         Yes, yes. So let’s fast forward in the few moments that we have left, and I’d love to hear you reflect a little bit about Martin Luther. As a cradle Catholic, I certainly never connected the dots between Luther and mysticism. Of course, now that I begin to read you more and more, it makes perfect sense about the kind of directness of encounter that certainly is not without the sacraments and the need for the church. But as I begin to widen my frame, I’m heartened to hear of the mystical dimensions of Luther’s life and his teachings. But can you sort of fill in the gaps for a Catholic-educated, but eager student of Martin Luther? 

V:         So for the Catholic-educated, the first thing would be, we talked about two mendicants, a Dominican, Meister Eckhardt, Franciscan, Saint Francis. Now we talk about the third mendicant, Martin Luther was an Augustinian. So that’s a common role they came into. And then we see Martin Luther was a reader of John Tauler. And now that’s what excites a historian so much, what we have are his marginal notes to John Tauler. So when you write a letter, you want someone to see you as you want to be seen. So that’s how you write a letter, how you write a book, or how you go to a podcast. So it’s always, you present yourself somehow. You don’t do this when you write marginal notes. The marginal notes are only for you. So we really see Martin Luther working on this. And in these marginal notes, he developed his understanding, particularly of penance. So he read in John Tauler, that John Tauler says, “Even if you fall into sin 70 times the day, still return to God intensely. And don’t go with this to your confessor, but go directly to God.” And then Martin Luther just wrote a few words, nota bene. So note this very well. Or the second one he wrote, utilisumum consilium, very useful counsel. And if you then look at his 95 theses, which with which he came into public in 1517, the first two theses say, first, our entire life should be penance. So think about 70 times the day, you return to God. That’s this one. The second theses says, that’s not what is called sacramental penance, but shortly, sadly, it is only about your remorse. And there you are very close to this, what John Tauler said, don’t go to the confessor. So this this total reading shows up in Martin Luther’s 95 theses, that was something which I suddenly, suddenly noticed. After reading John Tauler, I read again, Martin Luther said, well, I heard about this. And I compared them. 

And then I found this letter of Martin Luther in early 1518, when he wrote to his confessor, surprised about all the uproar he has instigated with his thesis, I only wanted to say what John Tauler said. He didn’t want to say more. Of course, he said a bit more over the years. But at this moment, he just thought the steps of late medieval mysticism. And we can see this throughout his life, we can see that when he framed justification, that was very close to his mystical reading, even again, looking into his marginal notes, there is a note where he says, what remains is Nura Fides Indel, the naked faith into God. If we understand justification in Luther’s terms, it is justification, sola fida, by faith alone, naked faith, by faith alone, that’s very close together. 

So what he means is like we had it before in Meister Eckhart, you detach from everything that is your own and Luther would very much say that is sin, that is original sin. And what remains is our relation to God. Of course, he uses more the words of St. Paul and St. Augustine, just speaking about faith. But that’s his tradition. And later on, he would develop his understanding of the Eucharist in a mystical way; we become one cake with Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. We come very close to it.

B:         Let me ask you the same question about Martin Luther that I asked about Meister Eckhart, and that is, let’s take sort of your teaching here at Yale Divinity School. What do you find your students most get wrong about Martin Luther? What preconceptions do they bring that you may need to subtly, graciously disabuse them off? 

V:         So first of all, my students never do anything wrong. Second, I think if they come to class with kind of cultural memory of Martin Luther, they would reduce Martin Luther to his writing against the Jews, which are unbearable, which are violent, which writings, I would have wished him that he never had written them. And they are part of the German history of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. So we have to talk about them, and I always do in classes, but it is not the only thing in Martin Luther. And so it is great to go with my students on a journey to understand Martin Luther from the beginning throughout his life, including then those sites like his violent anti-Judaism.

B:         And finally, what are the questions you’re still asking as a scholar, as a theologian? What are the projects that you’re eager to explore? I mean, if you did nothing else, you’d still be prolific over a dozen books and many, many articles and teaching new courses all the time when, you know, a lot of scholars are just sort of teaching the old favorites and we’d love you if you did nothing more than that. But what are the things that are still sort of driving your curiosity? 

V:         So it is not like I’m feeling I’m in retirement now. Throughout my life, I learned more and more about gender conceptions in Christianity. And my next project will be a book about Mary Magdalene and the conception of her as a saint and a sinner. What comes together in the mind of people thinking this together. It is again, it’s a very Lutheran approach to think about a penitent, but I think about a saint penitent. So that’s my all-Christian approach.

B:         Professor Leppin, thank you so much for your scholarship, for your faith and for being on the Leaders Way podcast. 

V:         Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thank you very much for inviting me.

B:         Thank you for joining us today on the Leaders Way podcast, a show for people who are not ready to give up on the world. We hope you found the episode expansive and nourishing. If you enjoyed the episode, please be sure to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on your favorite platform. Your support helps us to continue bringing you sacred conversations with luminaries, scholars, and spiritual leaders who are dedicated to transforming our world. 

For more information about our guests and to catch up on past episodes, visit our website at berkeleydivinity.yale.edu. Follow the show on Instagram at theleadersway.podcast to stay updated on future episodes and events. Until next time, I’m Dr. Brandon Nappi, walking with you as you lead with courage, wisdom, and compassion.