Cultivating care-ful(l) everyday gestures: in-formations into a greater love in Meister Eckhart and the film Of Gods and Men

This paper explores the mystical structure of formation as images-in-movement in medieval theologian and Dominican Meister Eckhart’s work and the 2010 French film Of Gods and Men (Des Hommes et Des Dieux). With the aim to give the reader a sense of the tone of the drama and set the scene for my discussion of education as image-formation, the paper starts with a short scene description. After providing some background information on the film-making and the real life of the group of Cistercian monks depicted, I look – in my first step - at the mystical structure of formation that resides in liberal notions of education when derived from the German Bildung tradition. In my second step, I further explore the intellectual heritage of this mystical structure of formation in Bildung. Drawing on Dominican medieval theologian Meister Eckhart, I elaborate three features pivotal to his concept of formation of the imago Dei (image of God) in the human soul/action: 1. divine grace, 2. human cultivation and 3. the harmonisation of both in ‘careful gestures’. In my concluding third step, I map this mystical structure of Eckhartian Bildung – with a particular focus on the emergence of ‘careful gestures’ - onto the motion picture Des Hommes et Des Dieux. Here, I also show how the art of the moving image (aka film) can induct us, as viewers, into a mode of attending to education as an existential relationship: in-between images of aesthetic embodiment in the material here-and-now and the images of the Good they point us to (or move us towards).