Erich Fromm on Psychoanalysis and Ethics

MEISTER ECKHART WHOM ERICH FROMM CHOSE to provide an epigraph for Chapter III of his book Man for Himself, was a Dominican monk from Thuringia, who lived from about 1260 to about 1329. He studied in Paris, among other places, was strongly influenced by the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, and has been principally known for his sermons in German and Latin, in which a profoundly mystical version of Christianity appears. He presided after 1307 over the Dominican province that extended from the Netherlands to Prague, governing fifty monasteries of friars and nine houses of nuns. His writings are charged with the intense spirituality of his period, during which mystical teachers and preachers of the church abounded. Many of the hierarchy were disturbed by seemingly pantheistic implications latent in his sermons, certain passages of which were officially condemned. That he was ever anything but an orthodox Christian and a devoted priest and pastor to his immense flock was never claimed, nor is it evident from his writings. The passage Fromm quotes is characteristic of Eckhart's challenging expression, but he cannot be included among those who are convinced that man must "acknowledge his fundamental aloneness and solitude in a universe indifferent to his fate, [and] recognize that there is no power transcending him." Quite the contrary, Eckhart's constant appeal is that we recognize God-within-us, the God of the Bible and of Catholic Christian doctrine. He is no agnostic humanist.

The point of these references is not academic or historical. Agnostic or atheist humanism has been taken for granted as the spiritual position of the heirs of the Enlightenment, including us of the Freudian tradition. Humanistic reflections on religion and ethics normally depart from a position, supposed to be demonstrable if not self-evident, of interpreting religious beliefs as comforting or otherwise functional illusions, assembled in rival ideologies all of which make untenable claims t