ABSTRACT
In Chapter 5, we explore the intersection of the contemplative and active lives in Meister Eckhart and Catherine of Siena, especially as their work relates to Marx’s notion of the emancipatory transformation of labour. This combination of mysticism with dialectical materialism is not as surprising as it might at first seem. Eckhart and Catherine both applied their mystical accounts of self-annihilation to the immanent world of work and politics, while Marx himself could be categorised (as he was by Erich Fromm) as an “atheistic mystic.” All three speak to the possibility of a transformation in how we think about property and appropriation, which would in turn allow human beings to re-engage with their material environment in a new way, even as they perform the same kinds of tasks they had been performing previously. What Eckhart and Catherine attribute to the supernatural grace of God, then, Marx attributes to the natural grace embedded in social relations. This is what we would provisionally term “social grace.”
