  Education and culture were the two driving forces behind European urban development in the 13th and 14th centuries. Among the mendicant orders that had settled in the cities were the Dominicans (ordo fratrum praedicatorum), dedicated to promoting in their teaching, way of life, and preaching the ideal of man’s self-discovery—self-cultivation—as a singular cultural value. The dynamics of this self-discovery can be said to be two-fold. For, on one hand, man discovers himself by liberating himself from himself and therewith finding—in himself—what transcends him. On the other hand, what man finds in himself displays its own movement as all that remains when his self-discovery has reached its end. In this developmental context, Meister Eckhart directed his theoretical analysis towards elucidating the self-movement of intellect as such, in its differentiation, as a movement representing in practical terms the only possible form of life. Indeed, in this era of radical social upheaval, Eckhart put forward the dynamics of intellect (reason, rationality) as the genuine wealth possessed by those who are poor in spirit. His philosophical formulations and theological statements served, in their reciprocal convergence, to unfold in theoretical terms the dynamics of intellect with a view to recommending the practice of processive reason as the exemplary form of life.  Eckhart explained these dynamics mostly on the basis of texts from the Holy Scriptures, whose philosophical content he set out through philosophical arguments—something he was able to do because he regarded the Holy Scriptures as a work of philosophy (cf. Echardus, In Ioh. n. 444; LW III, 380, 12–14: “evangelium contemplatur ens in quantum ens”: “the Gospel treats of being insofar as it is being”—Aristotle, as was well known, having defined the object of metaphysics in precisely this manner). Yet Eckhart’s explanations of these dynamics were also based on philosophical theses closely linked to notions from the Holy Scriptures. In both cases, he claimed to give unreserved expression to the new and rare (nova et rara) in propagating what was for him the only possible form of life: that of processive reason or of processes directed by reason. In so doing, Meister Eckhart dedicated his life to philosophy: as a philosopher holding a chair of theology at the University of Paris, as a philosopher leading the Dominican Order, and as a philosopher occupying the preacher’s pulpit.