Abstract
At the beginning of the 14th century, religious poverty constituted a central topic of theological controversy. Endorsed as a practical ideal especially by the Franciscan order it soon fostered a conflict with the papacy that revealed severe contradictions in such concepts of external poverty. This article argues that the Dominican Meister Eckhart surpassed these problems by construing poverty as an intellectual and hence internal posture. Such a notion of spiritual poverty leads to the idea of a ›life without a why‹ which abandons even the striving for god and thus transgresses the practice of religion itself: following that concept, it becomes impossible to use oneʼs actions to reach religious perfection.
© 2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
