Abstract

The study is aimed at clarifying Meister Eckhart's theory of relations, which involves all fields of his philosophy: gnoseological, theological, ontological. Its general features (concerning the ontological status of relations and relatives, the nature of the fundamentum relationis, and the origin ab altero proper to the relation) seem to denote a realist position, in opposition to the Nominalism. Yet, when he applies the theory to particular problems, it is evident that his position cannot be simply qualified as a realist one. In Eckhart's view, the objectivity of knowledge is not guaranteed by the correspondence between the extra-mental entities and their images in the mind, but by the close relationship between the subject and the object of knowledge. This same dynamic relationship (a sort of inclusion) holds between the Father and the Son and between God and the creatures: the Son is the image of the Father, who is inside him, like the creature is the image of God, who is the inner ontological foundation of the creature.