Marco Vannini — Mysticism as Philosophy, Meister Eckhart, and the Ground of the Soul (b. 1948)

Marco Vannini is an Italian philosopher, historian of mysticism, and translator — born in 1948 in Florence, where he has spent his career, educated in philosophy at Florence — writing his doctoral thesis on Wittgenstein — before devoting the subsequent fifty years almost entirely to the study, translation, and philosophical interpretation of the Christian mystical tradition. He is the foremost Italian authority on Meister Eckhart and one of the most important European scholars of mysticism in any language. He has produced critical Italian editions of all of Eckhart's German and Latin works — a labor of nearly four decades — as well as editions of Johannes Tauler, Marguerite Porete, Jean Gerson, Angelus Silesius, Sebastian Franck, Valentin Weigel, Daniel von Czepko, and a range of other figures in the Rhenish-Flemish and related traditions. Massimo Cacciari wrote that Italian philosophy and theology owed Vannini a substantial debt for making this tradition available with scholarly rigor for the first time in Italian.

His major original works include "Dialettica della fede" (1983), "Mistica e filosofia" (1996, with a preface by Massimo Cacciari), "Il volto del Dio nascosto: L'esperienza mistica dall'Iliade a Simone Weil" (1999), "La morte dell'anima: Dalla mistica alla psicologia" (2003), "Prego Dio che mi liberi da Dio" (2010), "Lessico mistico" (2013), and numerous subsequent studies on Eckhart, Augustine, and the philosophy of religion. His work has been translated into Portuguese and is cited across European philosophical theology.

His central concern, pursued across fifty years: that mysticism is not an exotic or marginal phenomenon at the edge of religion and philosophy but their common origin and truest expression — that the experience of union with the Absolute "without mediation" that the great mystics described is what philosophy, in its original Platonic sense of "exercise toward death," has always been seeking.

Mysticism as True Philosophy — Against the Institutional Reduction

Vannini's most fundamental thesis is that mysticism is not a special religious experience alongside philosophy but the continuation of philosophy itself — specifically, of classical philosophy in its authentic sense. Pierre Hadot had argued that ancient philosophy was not primarily a set of doctrines but a way of life, a set of spiritual exercises aimed at transformation of the self. Vannini extends this: mysticism, particularly the speculative German mysticism of Eckhart and his circle, is the true heir of this tradition — the form in which philosophy's original aspiration to wisdom, to knowledge of the soul, to union with the divine survived into the Christian Middle Ages and beyond.

Against this, Vannini is consistently critical of what he sees as the reduction of mysticism to the merely psychological — to visions, feelings, altered states, extraordinary experiences. These belong to what he calls "the death of the soul": the replacement of genuine interior transformation by the psychological and therapeutic frameworks of modernity, which claim to address the same human needs but without the rigorous metaphysical foundation that gives the mystical tradition its depth. What the mystics called the "ground of the soul" (Seelengrund) — the deepest, most intimate dimension of the self, where the soul is identical with God — cannot be reached through psychology, because psychology is essentially about the empirical self, the self that mysticism seeks to transcend.

"La mistica è la vera erede e continuatrice della filosofia classica, nel suo senso originario e autentico di ricerca della saggezza — esercizio di vita ed esercizio di morte, secondo la definizione di Platone."

— Vannini, Lessico mistico (2013) ["Mysticism is the true heir and continuation of classical philosophy, in its original and authentic sense of the search for wisdom — an exercise in living and an exercise in dying, in Plato's definition."]

Meister Eckhart — The Ground of the Soul

The center of Vannini's scholarly and philosophical life is Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1328) — the German Dominican friar whose sermons and treatises constitute what Vannini considers the highest expression of Western mystical philosophy. Eckhart's central teaching was the "ground of the soul" (Seelengrund or Seelenfünklein): the inmost dimension of the human person where the soul is not created but eternal — where it is, in Eckhart's most radical formulation, identical with the ground of God. "The soul and God are one thing" — not in a pantheistic sense that eliminates distinction, but in the sense that at the deepest level of interiority, the soul discovers not itself but the divine ground from which it has never been separated.

For Vannini, this teaching is not a pious speculation but a rigorous philosophical claim about the nature of consciousness: that the self, pursued to its ultimate depth, opens onto something that exceeds it — not a psychological unconscious but an ontological ground. Eckhart's formula "I pray God to free me from God" — which Vannini cites as encapsulating the entire mystical tradition — captures the distinction between the God of religious representation (the personal, named, anthropomorphic God of popular piety) and the Godhead (Gottheit) beyond all predication, which cannot be characterized positively and which the soul reaches only by stripping away everything it has attached to the concept of God.

"Prego Dio che mi liberi da Dio" — ["I pray God to free me from God"] — Eckhart's formulation as read by Vannini: the God of representation must be dissolved so that the Godhead beyond all representation can be encountered. Faith is not belief but the movement of intelligence toward the Absolute, stripping away every relative — until the soul discovers that it carries pure light within it, or rather, that it is that light.

The Death of the Soul — Mysticism Against Psychology

Vannini's "La morte dell'anima" (2003) articulates a critique that runs through all his work: that modernity has witnessed the death of the soul in a double sense. The first death was the genuine mystic's "death to self" — the annihilation (Vernichtigung) of the ego that the tradition from Eckhart through Marguerite Porete to Fénelon described as the necessary condition of union with God. The self that needed to die was the self constituted by its attachments, its self-will, its desire for its own perfection and consolation — even, at the extreme, its desire for God as an object of its own piety. This death was life's fullest possibility.

The second death — the one Vannini mourns — was the replacement of this metaphysical death-to-self by the psychological frameworks of the modern therapeutic tradition. Psychology offered to address the same human depths that mysticism addressed — the unconscious, the shadow, the deeper self — but without the ontological commitment, without the claim that what lay at the bottom of the soul was anything other than more psychology. The result was not liberation but a more sophisticated form of the same captivity — the self studying itself instead of being freed from itself.

"Ciò che chiamo mistica non è come scegliere un settore di ricerca intellettuale, ma il terreno ove cercare la risposta alla domanda: come conoscere l'anima e Dio. Non credo, perciò, che si possa essere 'studiosi di mistica' senza una profonda esigenza religiosa."

— Vannini, interview ["What I call mysticism is not like choosing a field of intellectual research, but the terrain where one seeks the answer to the question: how to know the soul and God. I do not think, therefore, that one can be a 'scholar of mysticism' without a profound religious need."]

From the Iliad to Simone Weil — Mysticism Across Traditions

Vannini's "Il volto del Dio nascosto: L'esperienza mistica dall'Iliade a Simone Weil" (1999) — literally "The Face of the Hidden God: The Mystical Experience from the Iliad to Simone Weil" — is his most ambitious historical work, tracing the mystical impulse from Greek antiquity through the Christian tradition to the twentieth century. His starting point in the Iliad is drawn from Simone Weil's reading of the Homeric poem as a text about force and the soul's response to force — the beginnings of the kind of attention and self-emptying that the mystical tradition would later make explicit. From there he traces a continuous thread through Plato and Plotinus (whom he regards as foundational), the Christian tradition (Augustine, Eckhart, the Rhineland school, the Spanish mystics of the Golden Age, Fénelon), and culminating in Simone Weil — whom he treats as a mystical thinker of the first rank whose philosophy of affliction and attention continues the deepest thread of the tradition into the modern period.

"Scendere nel nulla che costituisce il 'fondo dell'anima' è possibile solo con la fede che anche quel nulla possa essere Dio — e solo in e per quella fede il nulla si converte nell'essere, le tenebre in luce, il fondo dell'anima nel fondo stesso di Dio."

— Vannini ["To descend into the nothingness that constitutes the 'ground of the soul' is possible only with the faith that even that nothingness may be God — and only in and through that faith does nothingness convert into being, darkness into light, the ground of the soul into the very ground of God."]

The Mystical as Universal — Against Confessional Restriction

One of Vannini's consistent themes is that the mystical experience — the encounter with the Absolute at the ground of the soul — is not the exclusive property of any particular religion or tradition. Eckhart himself had written that "pagan masters knew the truth before the Christian faith." Vannini extends this: the mystical impulse is universal, present across Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, expressed in different conceptual vocabularies but pointing toward the same fundamental reality. This universalism puts him at odds with confessional theology that claims exclusive access to truth — and it is one reason the mystical tradition has always been "suspect," as he puts it, to institutional religion: the mystic who turns directly to the Absolute without mediation implicitly relativizes the mediating institutions — church, scripture, clergy, sacrament — that constitute organized religion's claim to necessity.

"La mistica è sempre sospetta, giacché è, per sua essenza, esperienza di unione umano-divina 'senza mediazione', come incessantemente ripete Eckhart, e perciò invisa a ogni dogmatismo confessionale."

— Vannini ["Mysticism is always suspect, because it is, by its very nature, the experience of human-divine union 'without mediation,' as Eckhart ceaselessly repeats, and therefore hated by every confessional dogmatism."]

Legacy — The Rhenish Tradition Restored to Italian Thought

Vannini's most concrete legacy is institutional: the Rhenish mystical tradition — Eckhart, Tauler, Suso, Marguerite Porete, Angelus Silesius, and their circle — was substantially inaccessible to Italian philosophical culture before his systematic translation work began in the 1970s. He has spent fifty years making it available, with the scholarly apparatus needed for serious study. Cacciari, De Monticelli, and Reale have all acknowledged that Italian philosophy owes him a debt it has not fully repaid.

"La fede non è una credenza, bensì il muoversi dell'intelligenza verso l'Assoluto, e perciò toglier via ogni relativo. Non dà nessuna conoscenza, ma toglie via ogni pretesa conoscenza, facendo il vuoto nell'anima, finché l'anima stessa non scopre di avere in sé la pura luce — anzi, di esserla."

— Vannini ["Faith is not a belief, but the movement of intelligence toward the Absolute, and therefore the stripping away of every relative thing. It gives no knowledge, but removes every pretension to knowledge, emptying the soul, until the soul itself discovers that it carries pure light within it — indeed, that it is that light."]