Meister Eckhart

Meister Eckhart was born in Thuringia around 1260, joined the Dominicans as a young man, studied and taught in Paris (twice holding the chair the order also gave to Aquinas), and spent the second half of his life as a preacher and administrator in the Rhineland — Erfurt, Strasbourg, Cologne. He died around 1328 while his theological case was pending in Avignon. The next year, Pope John XXII condemned twenty-eight propositions drawn from his work, some “heretical,” some “evil-sounding.” His name nearly disappeared from the official tradition for five centuries.

What he actually preached, as it has been recovered in the modern critical editions, is one of the most concentrated articulations of [[apophatic-theology|apophatic theology]] in the West.

The teaching, briefly

Eckhart distinguishes between Gott (God, the named God of theology) and Gottheit (Godhead, the divine ground beyond all names). The Godhead is “groundless ground” — ein lauter Stillesein, pure stillness. To approach it the soul must release every image, every attachment, every project, including its attachments to spiritual experiences. The posture is Gelassenheit: releasement, letting-be, non-grasping serenity. In the grunt (ground) of the soul, Eckhart says, God and the soul are not two; the soul’s deepest center is the divine spark.

Among his most-quoted lines, all from the German sermons:

• The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.
• If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is “thank you,” it will be enough. (popularly attributed; the spirit is his.)
• God is at home; it is we who have gone out for a walk.

Why he was condemned

The condemnations are themselves instructive. Eckhart pushed against three institutional anxieties at once: he preached vernacular theology to lay audiences (especially women, the Beguines and Dominican nuns of the Rhineland); he made statements that, taken without the dialectical context he set them in, sounded like the soul was God; and he was caught up in the political crossfire between the Dominicans and the Franciscans at Avignon. Modern scholarship — Bernard McGinn’s volumes, the work of Cyprian Smith, Oliver Davies, and Bruce Milem — reads him as orthodox in his deeper structure, even where his language is deliberately destabilizing.

Influence

Through the Theologia Germanica, the Rhineland Dominicans, and Tauler and Suso (his students), Eckhart’s teaching survived underground; Luther read and praised the Theologia Germanica. Nicholas of Cusa carried elements forward into the early Renaissance. In the 19th and 20th centuries he was rediscovered: Hegel cited him; Heidegger took Gelassenheit as a central term; [[dt-suzuki|D.T. Suzuki]] saw deep parallels with Zen and corresponded extensively with [[thomas-merton]] about him; the modern Christian contemplative renewal (Centering Prayer, Bourgeault, Rohr) reads him as a touchstone.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Subset of: [[christian-mysticism]]
• Shares approach with: [[spirituality]]
• Member of: [[person]]

Sources

1. Bernard McGinn. The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing. Crossroad, 2001. Source class: book / definitive scholarly study.
2. Meister Eckhart. The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense. Trans. Edmund Colledge & Bernard McGinn. Paulist Press (Classics of Western Spirituality), 1981. Source class: primary works.
3. Oliver Davies. Meister Eckhart: Mystical Theologian. SPCK, 1991. Source class: book / scholarly study.
4. Cyprian Smith. [[daoism|The Way]] of Paradox: Spiritual Life as Taught by Meister Eckhart. Darton, Longman & Todd, 1987. Source class: book / accessible introduction.

Lenses still to grow

• His relationship to the Beguine movement (especially Marguerite Porete, executed shortly before his case) deserves its own development; the two are intertwined.
• The Eckhart–Suzuki correspondence and the broader Christian–Buddhist reading of the apophatic ground.
• Tauler and Suso as the channel through which Eckhart’s teaching survived its condemnation.
• The Theologia Germanica as the anonymous distillation that carried the teaching to Luther and beyond.