  In the initial stage of his career, Meister Eckhart composed some not very exciting table-talks for his confratres and, in his lost Commentary on the Sentences (Goris/Pikavé, 2001), most likely advocated doctrines based on the theology of Thomas Aquinas. Once back in Paris, however, Eckhart inaugurated his teaching with a bombshell. With a new thesis directed against Thomas Aquinas, as well as against his own Thomistic thinking prior to 1302, Eckhart contends that the absolute principle (or the absolute cause: God) is pure intellect and not being. According to this view, being (esse) is always caused and thus presupposes intellect, itself without being, as the cause of being. In line with Neoplatonic modes of thinking (cf. Liber de causis, cap. XI; Fidora/Niederberger, 2001, 76: “Causatum ergo in causa est per modum causae …”: “What is caused is in the cause in the mode of the cause …”), Eckhart holds that being is, in intellect, nothing other than intellect and, therefore, not simply being, but instead being that has been elevated to intellect. If someone should nonetheless object that in God knowing or anything else might be described as ‘being’, the proper response for Eckhart is that this ‘being’ still presupposes the knowing of intellect (“Et si tu intelligere velis vocare esse, placet mihi.  Dico nihilominus, quod, si in deo est aliquid, quod velis vocare esse, sibi competit per intelligere”: “And if you wish to call intelligizing being, that is all right with me. Nonetheless, I say that if there is something in God that you wish to call being, it suits him through intelligizing”; cf. Echardus de Hochheim, Utrum in deo sit idem esse et intelligere n. 24, ed. Mojsisch, 1999, 192, 103–105). As the absolute cause, intellect is thought of as absolutely unlimited only if it is thought of as wholly without being. As such, intellect becomes the principle for absolute as well as contingent being. The alternative view—that knowing is simply identical with being (a position advanced by Sturlese, 1993a and von Perger, 1997 and again, with new argumentation, by Grotz, 2002)—disregards the more sweeping contention in Eckhart’s thesis that knowing is presupposed in every case of being. (Later, Nicholas of Cusa maintains accordingly that the maximum is without being, yet can be contracted to being; cf. Nicholas of Cusa, De docta ignorantia I, 6, ed. Hoffmann/Klibansky, 1932a, p. 14, 1: “Praeterea, contrahamus maximum ad esse et dicamus …”: “Besides, we might contract the maximum to being and say …”) Scholars such as Klibansky, however, as well as Imbach, 1976 have drawn attention to parallel passages in the German sermons that make it clear that for Eckhart absolute knowing is without being, indeed, that intellection is prior to being.